Conversations and Crawling

Jonah is now holding conversations with us! Where did my little baby boy go? Almost 2 weeks ago now, this was the 1st conversation of any real length that he had. I was sleeping in with Carly a little bit, and he and Jason were up getting breakfast in the kitchen before church.

Daddy: Hey Jonah, what do you want for breakfast?

Jonah: (spying the cake carrier full of muffins for our Sunday school class) Oooh! Muffins! Oh, I LOVE muffins Daddy. I can have a muffin, please?

Daddy: No, those are for us to take to church, for our friends.

Jonah: Oh I like go to church too!

Daddy: I know you do. We’re all going to go to church in a little while.

Jonah: (pauses for a second to think) But Mommy’s still sleeping!

I think I mentioned in my last post Jonah coming home from church one day, trying to sing us one of the songs he had learned. About all he could get out was “Stand Rock” and “Faaaaall” I finally got that video uploaded to You Tube, so here ya go!

I’ll try to get a video of him “singing” his 5 Little Pumpkins song sometime soon too. He enjoys the part at the end that says *clap* OUT went the light! hehe He’ll lay in be just repeating that part over and over.

Speaking of bed… we are giving up formal nap time. After several days of struggling with him for 2 hours to get him to go to sleep for nap time, with lots of tears (from both of us!) I decided it’d do us both good to just have a daily “quiet time”. I read him a story, give him a book and a toy and tell him he doesn’t have to go to sleep, but he has to stay in his bed and stay quiet, or I’ll come close his bedroom door (he REALLY wants his door to stay open these days, and last night was the first time I didn’t close it after he fell asleep). Wouldn’t you know it though? The last 3 days that I’ve taken that approach, he’s been fast asleep in 20 minutes or less! Whatever works I guess!

School and work junk has been keeping Jason super busy, but thanks to an extension his professor gave the class on a project they were doing, he was able to take his day off on Friday and spend it with us as a family. We went to Rocket Park, at inside Mc Donald’s for Jonah to play some more, and just generally had a great day! Here’s a little video of Rocket Park. It was a pretty awesome public park!

Carly Sitting in a Buggy for the 1st Time 10/20/09

In Carly news, she had her first taste of butternut squash last night and seems to really enjoy it! A few days ago, she also sat up in a shopping cart without a car seat for the first time! That is all totally overshadowed though, by the news that she is now a crawler! I have 2 videos; the first is kinda long and random with the kids and I hanging around in the playroom. The second one is a couple of days later when she’s really got the hang of it, and it’s much shorter.

Here is a link to the album with our Pumpkin Patch pictures from today, and a few other random fall pics. Enjoy!

Scrapping Anyway

Despite the busy weekend with potty training, I still found some tim (usually w/ Carly in my arms) to work on my 2008 family scrapbook. I skipped over 2007 for now so that I could get caught up on the current stuff while it’s fresh on my mind. I actually got halfway through with the pages I have planned for this book!

Oh no! Elmo, here we come!

As you all know, from a previous post on the subject, I have tried to keep cartoon character infatuation at bay, in order to keep the more expensive/lower quality “licensed character” items out of our house. Well, I’m here to admit that I’m bringing this soon-to-be Elmo infatuation on myself, and I’m even asking for your help to do it!

We’re about to start potty training soon, and as I started reading the library books I checked out on the matter… most techniques seem to encourage the use of a few teaching tools, to help make potty training into a big deal. They say to have a potty weekend where that’s the focus of everyone’s attention, all weekend long… kind of a “coming of age” thing for the trainee. They say to start off by helping your kid “teach” a doll how to potty, then let them read books and watch dvds about pottying. Then start hourly potty-sits and give rewards or stickers on a chart for good tries and even the smallest of sucesses. By the end of the weekend, the kid should pretty well have it down, and to celebrate that, some say you should have a potty party to invite a few friends and family over to congratulate them on their potty success.

So after reading all that, I’m starting to feel a little overwhelmed. I did sit down and start a shopping list of supplies that to get the ball rolling. A potty book, a dvd, a potty doll of some sort, and a progress chart w/ stickers. Once I started researching what was out there, I discovered a major money pitfall… most of the stuff is geared for either a boy or a girl. I have one of each, and I don’t want to have to buy this stuff twice, cause it’s expensive! So, I needed to find something gender neutral.

I first found a pretty cool potty monkey doll that came with a book for the kids and one for the adult. But being that I had already checked the adult book out from the library, I really wished it had come with a dvd instead. Then I found a a wide variety of potty bear items, but no cohesive set, which I feel would make it easier for Jonah to understand the relationship between what the character is doing in the book/dvd and what we’re trying to get the doll to do. Then I stumbled across Elmo. There is a complete line of Elmo potty training products out there, and since Jonah’s never really watched much Sesame Street, Elmo will be new to him.

I was going to put a big Amazon.com order together with everything we’ll need for potty weekend, but then I decided that I might have friends who might have some of the stuff on my shopping list that might be wanting to sell/get rid of it. So let me know if you have any of the following to offer up for borrowing/buying/giving away!

Potty Time Elmo Doll -OR-  A Plain 1-2′ Elmo Plush Doll that we can teach to sit on Jonah’s Potty Chair

Potty Time With Elmo Little Sound Book

Elmo’s Potty Time DVD

Potty Book Coloring & Activities With Elmo (Let me know if you know where I can find this new in stores anywhere… I imagine if you own it, it’s already been colored and the progress chart used up)

Anyone’s leftover Elmo Party Supplies to make a VERY small (like maybe just us if that all we can get) Potty Party with (preferably ones that don’t say happy birthday on them, like the Hooray for Elmo or Elmo Loves You supplies, but beggars can’t be choosers right? hehe)

Got Alot Done

With my mom hanging around and helping out last week, we got WAY more done than any couple with a nearly 2 year old and a 1 week old should! My mom is a major DIY handy-woman, and just couldn’t contain herself when she came to stay. By the end of the 1st day she was just itching to get started on some projects. Who am I to complain?! I knew it’d happen, so that’s why I had already started a list of little projects around the house that needed doing, that just haven’t gotten done, for whatever reason. She actually started working on things while we were still in the hospital!  My to-do list that my mom tackled this week… as you’ll notice, she didn’t leave us much to do after she left! hahaShe got Jason involved in a lot of the projects too, and some of these he actually did on his own.

• Install Handheld Showerhead & Caulk Around the Ring
• Install Blinds in Our Bedroom
• Fix Drippy Master Toilet
• Fix/Oil Master Closet Door Knob
• Fix the Storm Door Alignment so it’ll Actually Close
• Remove the Satellite Dish
• Remove the Antenna
• Put a Piece of Screen Over the Chimney to Keep Birds Out (need to call chimney sweep first to get current nesting birds out)
• Put Hinges on the Sandbox Door
• Re-Configure the Sandbox Lid Boards to Make an Easier To Open Lid
• Dig Out the Rose Bush in the Front Flowerbed
• Dig Out the Bush Stumps in the Front Flowerbed
• Check on the Roof Leak and Seal Where Possible
• Hang the Letters for Carly’s Name in the Nursery
• Fix the Wet Bar Cabinet Door that’s Sagging
• Install Trim Around the Guest Bath Mirror (need to buy trim)
• Change Light Fixtures in the Guest Bath (need to buy light fixtures)
• Install and Overhead Light in the Garage (Bonus! They ended up re-wiring a bunch of stuff and putting in 2 new outlets too!)
• Paint the Nursery Furniture (need a non-muggy day to paint)
• Some Projects she thought of that I hadn’t -
  • Replace the Missing Toe Kick Under the Dishwasher and End Cabinet in the Kitchen & Install Trim
    
  • Fertilize the Yards
  • Replace Missing Pickets on the Fence
  • Replace the Damaged Board Around the Garage Door (We discovered ACTIVE termites there! Yuck! so had to get that treated first, so that project is sitting unfinished right now.)
  • Clean Some Previous-Owner Junk Out of the Attic

It was such a busy week that I’m probably forgetting some of the other stuff that got done, but we always appreciate having my mom come stay for a while! Jonah CERTAINLY enjoyed having his Mamaw around to play with, and to “help. work. hammer. outside. saw. ears. noise. loud.” with!

The Main Reason for Coming

The Other Main Reason for Coming

Jason Helping With the Projects

Jonah Helping With the Projects

This Thursday

This Thursday is going to be some wild crazy fun, I tell ya! I volunteered to host our playgroup’s Easter Egg Hunt Party at my house this Thursday, and so far, from the looks of the RSVPs I’ve gotten on the e-vite, it looks like this may be our biggest turn out for a playgroup yet! Including Jonah and myself, we’re going to have 13 moms and 19 children between 0-3ish years old! Holy moly that’s a lot of people, but I think I can handle it, and I’m really looking forward to it! I’m sure a lot of people think I’m insane for hosting a party of this magnitude at 36 weeks preggo, but this is going to be a blast! I just hope I have enough food and such!

Wanted to post a couple of pictures from the insanity:

Playroom Starting to Fill Up

Getting Ready To Unleash the Egg Hunters

The Mad Dash to Get Eggs

Moms Showing the Younger Ones How

People, Eggs, Bunny Ears, and Cameras Everywhere!

Jonah Wouldnt Wear Them, So I Did

The Pile-o-Diaper Bags

All the Little Booster Chairs Lined Up for Lunch

Jonah and His Friend (And the Car Easter Basket Jonah Stole From Him)

The Start of 2006

I’ve started working on the digital scrapbook for 2006 today. I’m only 3.5 years behind, right? I had intentions of having a family scrapbook for every year. Traditional scrapbooking, with cutting paper and gluing photos is time consuming, not to mention expensive, so I have recently turned to digital scrapbooking. The idea being that maybe I can catch up to where I’m SUPPOSED to be and not have it cost me an arm and a leg!

So I will update with new pages as I finish them, but so far, here are the first two. My title page, new year’s eve party and the first event I have pictures of in 2006… going to “Naughty School Girl Night” at the Lizard Lounge with our friends. Wow… we SO did not fit in there! I felt, though, that the hilarity of us going to something like that needed to be documented anyway. Our kids will get a good laugh out of it one day, I’m sure!

family portrait (front page)

new year

lizard lounge

valentines

girls night

easter

ren faire

england

france

switzerland

germany

stiles wedding

south padre

pregnancy

pea friends

halloween

halloween

christmas

christmas

new car (back page)

birthday party (not printed)

bachelorette party (not printed)

Update – 4/16/09

I finished up the last pages this week and ordered my book to be printed yesterday. I can’t wait to see how it turned out! I ended up having to leave out the bachelorette party page because the file was corrupted for some reason (maybe my computer knew what the content on the page was! haha ) but since it was out, and I needed to take out one more page to make all the other layouts stay in the right order I took out our birthday party page too. Worked out well enough cause that gave me exactly the 20 pages you get with a photobook without having to pay extra to add pages in. I was originally going to do a paper back copy cause it’s $10 cheaper, but I discovered that you can’t have the album title printed on the spine if you do that, and I already have one other hard cover book of the same size from them… so I decided to go ahead and spend the extra $10 to make my book more durable, and easier to find on the shelf.

Here’s a link to the digital preview of my book, or if you have flash, I think this preview thing might work here:

Click here to view this photo book larger

Too Many Bubbles!

Bubbles Gone Wild

We had quite an exciting bathtime adventure this past weekend! Jonah wanted to have a bubble bath, and normally I do too, but for some reason I didn’t really feel like getting a bath with him that night. So I sat on the outside of the tub and started running his bath water. The nice thing about a jetted tub is that you can use just a tiny amount of bubble bath in the water and then turn on the jets for a few seconds and get some great bubbles to play with.

The problem came when I pushed the button to turn on the jets, though… the button got stuck and I couldn’t turn it off!!! I yelled for jason to go flip the GFCI outlet breaker because I was pretty sure that was the one that would kill the power to the jets. I was wrong. The bubbles kept coming and I think Jonah picked up on our panic because he started to freak out and was screaming for “done! bites!” (I think he’s a nervous eater cause anytime he gets scared or upset about something he asks for bites… even if we just finished eating. We avoid letting him indulge that habit, as best as we can, though.) Anyway, the bubbles keep coming, Jonah’s jumping up and down trying to get out of the tub with his hair full of shampoo, while Jason is at the other end of the house in the garage flipping switches on the breaker trying to cut power to the darn thing.  He cut the lights off on us twice, and THAT certainly didn’t make Jonah happy.

He finally got it turned off though, and once we got the lights back on, there was about 8″ of bubbles in the tub! They were all the way up to that ridge in the tub! I dug a hole in the bubbles (to show the depth) and took this picture about 30 minutes after the jets got stopped, but a lot of the bubbles had already popped by then. I had to pull our soapy kid out of the tub and get him rinsed off in the stand up shower in our room, with the shower door standing open making a mess on the floor and getting me soaked, and then try to get him settled down for bed. He was in hysterics the whole time, and his little heart was STILL beating 90 mph by the time we got to reading his bed time story. I was drenched, there was a trial of soapy hand prints on the walls and foot prints on the floor of the hall, water all over the floor in both bathrooms, and I was having a few belly cramps from all the comotion too. I’m still not sure that we know which breaker it was that finally killed the power to the tub, but it was definitely an eventful evening!

Baby Eviction Date Set!

Given the way things went down when I was induced with Jonah (being induced, 1 day after my due date, for 44 hours and dialating to 10cm only to have him not be able to come down because he was too big, and end up with a c-section anyway) my doctor and both are hesitant to give this little girl a chance to get that big and try to come on her own. For that reason, we now have a repeat c-section scheduled about a week before my actual due date. I’m excited that it’s official now, we WILL go into have a baby no later than Monday, April 27th, at 7:30 am (we have to check into the hospital at 5:30 am! yuck!) That’s if she doesn’t decide to come before then. Our hope is that if labor starts before then, she’ll still be small enough to be able to decend without a problem. Our playgroup has a trip to the Dallas Zoo scheduled for April 22nd, so who knows, maybe she’ll decide to come then, while I’m doing all that walking around. Jason is planning on coming with us to the zoo, just in case I need him to drive me back to the hospital in a hurry!

Scared of Bugs?

I have no clue one earth what triggered it, but just in the last two nights, Jonah has started having a real fear of bugs… namely the moths and such that gather around our front porch light at night. He will try to jump out of Jason’s arms, kicking and climbing up him, just to get away from them, and then he winces and ducks away from them as we go in or out of the door. He seems genuinely scared of them for some reason now, and just as genuinely relieved when we get away from them… he tells them “bye bye bug” in a very “good-riddance” kind of tone. Heh, I feel bad for him, but at the same time it’s really cute and funny to watch. We’re trying to show him that they won’t hurt him, but he wants nothing to do with them!

In other “buggy” news, I have recently started trying out some of the ideas on the FLYlady.com website, about how to get your household in order and stay on top of chores because I’m just not very self motivated. They are real touchy feely about some things, and a lot of it seems really corny to me. There are, however, some really good tips that have helped me, in the past week and a half of trying their ideas out, become more motivated and leave me feeling more accomplished at the end of the day. I’m breaking their basic “baby steps” idea into my own categories and am going to try to implement them 1-2 ideas/week to try to ease myself into this new routine and create new habits for myself. So far so good. Here are some of the tips that I am, and will be, doing for myself. I’m currently on week 2.

Week 1: Shine Your Sink & Get Dressed to Shoes Daily
Week 2: Make the Bed & Tidy The Hot Spots Daily
Week 3: Spend 15 Minutes on the Zone of the Day (Weekly Chores)
Week 4: Swish & Swipe the Bathrooms & Spend 15 Minutes on the Zone of the Week (Monthly Chores)

Some of them may seem silly, like “shine your sink” but honestly, it DOES make me feel better to walk into our kitchen and see our stainless steel sink sparkling, free of water spots and dirty grimy dishes. It just takes one really good cleaning, and then the continued diligence to wipe it dry with a hand towel every time you use it so that it stays sparkly. Another that I didn’t have much faith in at first was getting dressed and putting shoes on first thing every morning… but it really makes me feel like less of a lazy slob and I am more motivated to get my morning chores done before I sit down to the computer. I’m also more likely to make it to things like a 10:15 toddler story time at the library with Jonah cause I don’t wait until the last minute to scramble and get ready and then miss it. Making the bed is one that I started in week 1, even though I didn’t plan to until week 2, just because I LOVE the feeling of getting into a made bed. The sheets and blankets being neatly aligned and smoothed out is just such a nice feeling to slip into at night after a long day… kinda like a nice hotel. I am just now starting to work on the “hot spots” (the catch-all places, the dumping ground in your house, that seems to get cluttered daily) which, for us, is our wet bar area. I’ve got plans for next week to start doing basic cleaning in a zone (a room or set of rooms) each weekday and then expanding that idea the next week to do that AND spend a little time each day on one particular zone for the week so that I can tackle some more thourough cleaning and organizing in each zone every month. I’m hoping this will get my “nesting” instincts focused on more useful things and help get our house in order before we bring our little girl home.

Jason’s New Hairdo

I gave Jonah a little trim last night, with the new hair clippers I got for Christmas, because he was starting to get a little shaggy. Jason’s been complaining about needing a haircut again too, but he’s never let anyone near his head with clippers, so I’m not sure what convinced him this time. He let me use the 1″ blade guard on him and by the time we were done, I think there was more hair on the floor than on his head! I don’t think it looks half bad though… definitely shorter than he’s ever had it before. I think it looks more professional for the workplace than the crazy fro does, but I guess if he ends up not liking it, he can always just let it grow back out. If he DOES like it, then I can cut his hair for free from now on! (Sorry for the horrible flash shadows… I didn’t take time to try to make a nice picture!)

Before

After