Christmas Morning

Our attempts to put the gifts under a tree...
From Mommy and Daddy: Sheriff Woody and...

... Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger (two of Jack's favorites.)
Ellie's gift...big brother can't help himself from helping.
Just not sure what to do...

Little People farm

Stroller and baby from Grandma and Papa.


Getting to know Mr. Lightyear.

Ooooh...Jack's big present: Brio train set from both grandparents. We orderd a huge used set on Ebay; he was THRILLED and has played with it every day since. So have we.

I started using my new camera lens here.

Yummy breakfast...

Not a big fan of the cinnamon rolls, believe it or not.

What Mommy and Daddy did during naptime.

Playing with Ellie's toys

One very happy little boy.

Up to no good...

This pretty much sums up Ellie these days. (That's syrup in her hair above) She is into everything. And by everything, I mean every single thing she could possibly get into around the house--things I would never think to protect her from. Like, the other day I was washing dishes but couldn't see her anymore in the other room, and when I checked on her, she had removed a SHELF from our bookshelf and was pulling out the little rods that the shelf sits on. As I put that one back in I looked over and she had run over to the other, identical bookshelf, and was quickly trying to figure out if that shelf would come out, too. (The bottom two shelves are empty because Miss You-Know-Who was constantly pulling all the books off and I got tired of picking them up again and again and again.)

She also seems to be entering a defiant stage (please, Lord, let this be a stage!) that is driving me bonkers. She wants to do everything that I tell her she can't do, like get into the oven or the dishwasher, or eat things out of the trash (I mean, seriously, girl. How gross is that?). Tonight she and I battled over the trash can for a full five minutes, with her repeatedly coming back to the trash and trying to open it. I don't know what to do...it reminds me of Jack's phase when he would put his bowls of food on his head at every meal...remember that? When I wasn't sure whether to ignore the behavior or scold the behavior to get it to stop? Well, at least then it wasn't necessarily harmful to him, so if I ignored it he wasn't in any danger (other than my frustration at having to clean him in a bath after every meal). But this oven and trash fascination of hers must be watched diligently lest she learn her lesson the very, very hard way, including food poisoning and awful burns.

When either of them want to go outside in the snow without shoes and they start to throw a tantrum, I say, "Okay. Fine. Go ahead. I'll wait for you right here." Only takes them a few steps into the snow with bare feet to realize Mommy is only looking out for their good (at least that's what I like to think they are thinking) and they come running back for shoes. I know there will come a time when part of our "discipline" will be allowing them to learn things from experience and from making the wrong decisions, and that I won't always be able to step in and protect them from these mistakes. But at this point in their lives, being so little, one of my main duties as their parent is to protect them from dangers they can't yet understand while teaching them about those dangers, and at the same time the importance and reasons for obeying Mommy and Daddy. No small feat, right?

We find ourselves so often saying to Jack, "I just wish you would obey Mommy and Daddy; we don't like to give you spankings." In other words, wouldn't life be so much more pleasant for you and me if you would trust my reasons and intentions and obey me up front? Haven't you learned your lesson yet, that obeying Mommy and Daddy always turns out well, and disobeying always makes your bottom sore?

But teaching Ellie to obey is not as straight-forward these days, at her age. She thinks everything is a game, something to be won or conquered. The whole time we were battling it out over the trash she was laughing uproariously. I even went so far as to "remove her from the situation" as all the books say, and I took her all the way back to her room, plopped her on Jack's bed with a ton of books, and then I had to RUN back to the kitchen...she was only seconds behind me, heading straight for the trash.

She loves to do things that get a big reaction from me, so I'm having to learn to keep my reactions fairly mild, although there are times she needs to be startled into listening. But it's so hard to find a good balance, it seems. The other day she had climbed up onto something and was leaning far over the side trying to reach the TV buttons; Eric and I realized at the same time that the bin she was standing on was about to tip over and Eric suddenly yelled, "ELLIE!" Instead of stopping her from leaning further over it startled her so much that she ended up falling anyway.

Today was particularly rough for some reason; I'm finding myself short on patience these days. My back gets tired and achy from bending down so much as I pick up toys and kids. The physical side of pregnancy is starting to get me now, with a growing belly and kicking resident inside...not to mention how tired I am almost all the time. I could pretty much fall asleep anytime I sit down if I could (how I wish I could!). So I'm sure that this lack of energy doesn't help my patience level as I'm faced with curious, persistent, and stubborn personalities all day.

Jack has been wonderful this week, and I am so thankful. Last night laying in bed I thought to myself, "This is the kind of day I should write posts about, when he is so sweet and funny and cute and just a delight the whole day. When I feel like I have a little buddy, when he says things to me like, "Good, Mommy!" when I pour him his milk and when he comes up and hugs me for no reason. Those make for good days."

So HE hasn't been the one making me take long, deep breaths and shooting prayers for patience...no, it's the little one. I also probably set myself up for disaster today because I wanted to get the whole house cleaned up so that it would be a nice place for Eric to come home to, especially since he had something at church tonight and so would only be home a short while for dinner. I realize that it probably gets to him, too, when the house goes for days without a good pickup, when I skip a day of showering, when he comes home every night and my first words are, "HELP ME!!!! Oh, hi. I love you." So I just wanted to do something nice for him.

So between scrubbing the toilet and the bathroom floors (and even washing the floor rugs!) and scrubbing moutain-loads of dishes (we ran out of soap yesterday so there was a big pile-up) and sweeping multiple times during the day and picking up toys again and again and doing laundry and making dinner for him/me and for the kids...I was pretty pooped when he finally got here tonight. Add to my "pooped-ness" the child hanging on my pant leg crying for food, but then rejecting EVERY SINGLE THING I offer her; this same child who managed to somehow get her little hands up onto the counter (I HATE this phase, when they first discover they can reach things on the counter!!) and pulled down the basket of silverware that I had just stocked for the dishwasher...forks, knives, spoons, spatulas, all came down right on her head...which meant more delay for comforts and kisses...then picking up all the knives and forks off the floor before she got to them (she was way more concerned with trying to confiscate a fork than she was having me comfort her, even though she had a big welt on her forhead).

Add to this the trash can episodes, and the climbing onto tables she needed rescuing from...and then the fact that Eric was only able to be here about twenty minutes before he had to leave, so I'm not sure he even had time to notice one speck of cleaning I had done, which is really discouraging (I know, I'm such a WIFE). And after he left, the trash can battle started again with Ellie--while I was trying to finally get a bite to eat (ended up eating my taco cold later on). And then while I was giving them a bath later, she refused to sit down and kept falling, so I finally took her out. I had been trying to fold laundry while they played in the bath, and when I took her out of the tub you know what she did? Pushed over my basket of folded laundry on her naked way out the bathroom door! Grrrrr. As I was picking that up...she dumped out all the bath toys. Not becasue she wanted to play with them. She just likes to dump things out. (Another fun phase...)

So all of this venting (I'm doing this a lot lately, aren't I?) to say that she's one handful right now, and I'm one worn out mama! Cute-as-a-button to be sure, but BOY is she giving me a run. I'm actually feeling some very mild cramping right now and I think I'd better go lay down...instead of trying to make the kitchen, bathroom, and living room look as they did a few hours ago, you know, before bathtime and more dumped out toys and dinner messes...oh, good Lord, I just remembered. I forgot to feed Jack dinner. Is that a horrible thing to admit on our family blog? Well, there it is. Poor kid. Ellie was such a handful at dinner (she figured out how to climb out of her high chair, so we've started to use the high chair straps, and now she's figured out how to get out of the straps) that I totally forgot to feed him. Please tell me someone else has done that before?? Well, that's embarrassing (and don't laugh Rob and Janet--this is only the second time I've done that).

I just hope, hope, hope that facing all these tricky and frustrating stages now means that she'll be an angel when this baby comes. Hey--just let me hope! She does adore babies and loves to coo and talk to them and touch their heads and hands...so that's a good sign, I think. People keep telling me that these first few years will be hard, with the kids all being so close in age, but that if we can just endure, we'll come out fine in a few years. So that's what I'm trying to do here...to endure, with God's strength. Boy, it's tough.

Well, I'm off to rest the uterus. Hopefully my next post won't come close to resembling any kind of venting session about my kids. But no promises.

All in a Day

Here is a list of things that happened in our family today:

Jack screamed the entire car ride to church. Not because it was only 0 degrees and he was freezing cold, but because his “buttons” (aka mittens) had come off and he couldn’t get them back on.

It was 0 degrees today, and yes, we took the kids out.

While I was getting ready for church (Eric had to go early) Jack climbed up onto the piano bench and ripped up some music that I needed for an accompanying job in February. After tending to that issue, I returned to fine Ellie pulling things from the trash and sticking them in her mouth.

Much to Jack’s great delight, Papa bought him a treat from the Youth Group bake sale at church today. Yum. (The truth of the matter is that Mommy and Daddy had no money and Mommy had to go ask HER Daddy for a little change. I guess some things never change.)

I hit a great sale at Old Navy this afternoon and clothed our kids for life. Well, not really. But it sure felt like it.

During his “nap” today, Jack managed to dump out both his and Ellie’s baskets of diapers, as well as a few bags of diapers from the recently-purchased (thanks Dad!) jumbo box of diapers from Costco. Eric went in to find the floor COVERED in a lovely mix of size 4, 5, and 6 Huggies. Guess what? They’re still sitting there.

While Eric was trying to start cleaning up the diapers Jack opened the door to our room, where Ellie had been napping, and woke her up. (Hence the phone call to me at Old Navy, “When will you be home?”)

Jack threw—yes, threw—his bowl of rice over and behind his head at dinner when he was “all done,” except that he wasn’t all done, and so the carpet got a nice splattering of rice. And if you know anything about cleaning up rice from the floor you know that you can’t sweep it up right away because it gets all stuck in the brush of the broom. You have to wait until it dries and is crispy and easy to sweep up. But this was on carpet, so I couldn’t exactly sweep, and unfortunately my vacuum was without a bag, so the discarded rice had to wait longer than the preferred “crisping” time. It’s okay; it sprayed nicely over the exact same spot where Jack peed—through his big boy underwear, right after sitting on the potty—yesterday. Time to get out the old wet vac…after all, it has been two weeks since we used it last.

Eric and I ate guacamole, hot spinach artichoke dip, and chips for dinner. Go Packers.

Ellie choked on a chip and for a good couple minutes we had trouble getting it out…kinda scary.

Before the choking episode, we had attempted to feed Ellie dinner. I say attempted because this is the child who will eat anything you give her; we end up having to cut her off at a certain point because we fear she would just eat and eat and eat. Today, however, she has rejected pretty much everything with a goofy grin and a violent shake of her head. She refused to eat anything we offered her at Boston Market at lunchtime. Tonight we gave her rice, peas, and leftover hamburger for dinner. She rejected the rice, flung the peas all over with her hands, smooshing them and squealing gleefully as they went flying in every direction, and the hamburger she would only eat after we took her out of her chair and let her walk around with a handful. (Eric tried to get Jack to eat the hamburger by telling him it was a meat cookie, as it was round, but Jack didn’t fall for it. He did, however, continue to call it “cookie” whenever he saw Ellie walk by eating her bites.)

Ellie peed on the couch this evening. Eric took off her diaper and she twisted away from him and was able to stand up, run back and forth on the couch a few times, and then suddenly she stopped and we heard the tell-tale splashing sound. The worst—and funniest—part was that the instant that Eric whisked her away, Jack came barreling down the hallway and face-planted into the couch—right into the pee puddle! He actually got it on his face! He wiped his forehead with his hand going, “Yucky.” I couldn’t stop laughing.

While Jack was watching his Thomas the Tank Engine DVD on our computer tonight, Ellie figured out how to climb ONTO the computer desk. We came in to find her sitting up here, unplugging multiple ports and smashing the new microphone into the keyboard. No matter how many times we told her “no” it was all she wanted to do, all night. You would have thought it was the end of the world by the way she cried when we shut her out of the bedroom.

And this one was actually a couple nights ago, but have to mention it: we woke up to Jack crying, “Daddy! Help (which sounds like “hup”)!” As we stumbled into the darkened room I heard Eric say to me, “Did you put pajamas on him?” I’m thinking, “Of course I put pajamas on him. It’s freezing outside—why would I not put pajamas on him? I’m a good mom!” But sure enough, there he was, lying in bed, wearing nothing but a diaper. For the life of us we could not find his pj’s anywhere. I had to go dig in my dirty laundry pile to get him something to wear because we didn’t have any more clean pairs of kids pajamas. The next morning our mystery was solved: he had apparently removed his pj’s and, in the dark, put them back in his dresser drawer. Strange, I tell you.

Some days, well, some days are just full. But when they end with sweet, soft kisses on the cheek and “Covers, Mommy!” and “Eye-you, Mommy!” (I love you)…well, it makes getting up to do it again tomorrow worth all the trouble that was packed into today. Enjoy your day off tomorrow, wherever you are.

Late night mom-thoughts

I've been trying for days to get some of our Christmas morning pictures posted but for some reason I've been encountering "unexplainable" problems. I'm starting to feel very backed up. I've taken numerous pictures since then with my new camera lens and it's been so much fun--I'm finally able to get better pictures of the kids indoors (which is mostly what I'm able to get right now, with the crummy winter weather) without having to pop up the 'ole flash. Hopefully I can get this figured out soon and play a little catch up.

I'm officially 23 weeks along now. I can't believe we're heading towards the end already. This baby started moving like crazy in the last few weeks; Eric felt the baby move for the first time while we were laying in bed late at night, around 12:05 am January 1st. Happy New Year, honey.

We had our ultrasound over the holidays; all vital organs are in there (including fingers and toes!), thankfully. We (well, I) were torn about being so close to finding out the sex, but we decided to wait until the birth, which now I'm excited about. There's so much more motivation to push when you have waited so long to find out who is joining your family. We've also decided to keep names to ourselves, for those of you who are wondering. I'm too influenced by other people's opinions so I'm going to try to be a big girl and decide for myself what I like. I remember when I was pregnant with Ellie, before we knew she was a girl, sharing some of our boy name options with a friend at church and afterwards she literally shrugged went, "Ehh." Doesn't make you feel too great about your choices! So if you don't like what we choose, it will be too late to weigh in your opinion--ha!

Jack has started to occasionally rub my belly and say "baby." I don't think he really understands it much, but we're working on it. His vocabulary is growing leaps and bounds. His latest phrases are: "I'm okay!" (whenever he falls down) "Way to go, Daddy!" "One Doh-rah, please" (one episode of Dora) "Gate, bridge, mountain" (or some version of this, from Dora. We'll be driving along and you can hear him chanting in the background some order of places, anything from "lake" or "ocean" to "rainbow" to "Koki's island." It sounds strange, but it is actually really cute to hear). He's also getting more and more interested in potty training, pulling off his diaper and bringing us his "big boy underwear"; I guess we're going to have to make the plunge one of these days...

Ellie is also beginning to talk! She says "mama" and "dada" and "baba" (usually for bottle) pretty regularly. She definitely babbles with imitated expression. There's a Dora episode that Jack loves called "Bugga bugga" and all through the episode they ask you to repeat "Bugga bugga!" and we always hear Ellie saying, "buh buh buh buh" and bouncing up and down. The strange thing is that she doesn't really watch the video that much; she kind of putters around looking at toys and books and climbing--oh, the climbing...more on that in a second--things she shouldn't, all the while listening to the music and chattering to herself. She's also getting VERY independent-minded, wanting to feed herself with a spoon now and do pretty much everything that Jack does, including drink from HIS sippy cup, rather than her own. If Jack is playing with trains, Ellie wants to play with the exact same train Jack is currently playing with. If Jack is running around the house then she starts to run after him. If he is reading books on his bed, then she climbs up with him and wants to sit and hold the book. It's really sweet the way they are starting to interact. They giggle a lot--especially in the bathtub, when the splash each other and play games--which is one of the best sounds to the human ear. I love the age she's at--well, I've really loved the last four months (I think it's the 10-14 month stages). It's just cute, cute, cute, and she's still that tiny little body that can fit in your arms perfectly for a good snuggle. Sometimes I just find myself watching her, running around with her sweet chubby legs and big belly (sometimes we call her "Big Belly Ellie" after she eats), or when I pick her up and she lays her head on my shoulder I just press my face into her hair and take a deep breath...I love her baby smell.

So on to the climbing...that's a new discovery as of this week. She has begun climbing anything and everything she can--piano bench, toy bins, chairs, stools, bathtub (she usually just falls in headfirst). I recently caught her up on Jack's little table (having climbed onto his little chair and then on up) with one leg on the ledge of the window, trying to climb up there, while simultaneously trying to pull a flower out of the vase on the window sill. I ran over to her, rescuing her, the flower, and my freshly shampooed carpet (from stinky flower juice), and as I turned around I saw that Jack was drawing all over the kitchen counters with magic marker. I quickly put Ellie down, ran to him and grabbed the markers, then ran around to the sink to get a rag. As I was scrubbing the marker and explaining to him yet AGAIN why we don't draw on the counter (I know, I know, I need that "magic" paper and markers that only draw on magic paper. We had some but it ran out.), I suddenly looked up and realized that Ellie was in the kitchen, at the oven, opening the oven...the 425 degree oven that was cooking our dinner. She threw her head back, eyes squeezed shut, as the wave of heat hit her face.

Talk about a bad 45 seconds for Mommy. And this was about five minutes after Eric called to tell me he'd be home late that night.

But, I guess it's just another day-in-the-life of being a mom. Although this mom is starting to feel very round in the front, and bending down to pick up toys and food thrown from high chairs is becoming increasingly difficult. Even as I type I can hardly lean forward as I used to, without being terribly uncomfortable and attacked by baby ninja kicks. Being aware of this baby so much more often has caused me to have many thoughts on what life with three will be like...for example, what if, while Ellie was getting into the oven and Jack was drawing on things with markers I had a third child that was, I don't know, into some other kind of trouble...and what if some day I have another child, and then I've got four troublemakers--good Lord, I can't even go there!

One day at a time, I guess. And this one's about over. Looks like picture-posting efforts will have to wait until tomorrow. Assuming we make it through tomorrow. I'll let you know.