a rough night

ugh. very rough night. jason went to bed at 10:30 and so did i, but carly didn’t stay down. she of course stayed up screaming off and on till 1:15. then jonah woke up crying at 2:45 at which point i discovered he’d puked in his bed i got jason up for that one cause i told him “jonah just threw up and that falls outside the realm of cranky baby in the middle of the night. i need your help” and he got up and didn’t complain… well that was until jonah threw up on the bare mattress pad after we had already started the 1st puke laundry load, he was pretty pissed about that, but what can you do… and then once we got him back in bed and had just laid down ourselves, he got out of bed and stood in the window and puked a 3rd time. :-\ so we were back up changing jammies and cleaning up for a 3rd time. as we got back into bed at 4:00, carly started grunting like she was stretching to wake up (probably from all the commotion) so i laid there in our bed listening to her grunt for about 15 minutes, waiting for her to cry cause sometimes she likes to nurse at 4 anyway, but then i drifted off. Then she finally did wake up at 4:30. after she ate she didn’t go straight back down as usual (probably because jason had just asked if she usually did and i said yes. stupid murphy) instead she would drift off and i put her in the crib and got in bed myself only for a few seconds before she was screaming again did that 3 times before i finally lost my temper and just got her and went to go sleep with her in my arms on the couch at 5:30. then jason woke up for work and took her to her crib at 7:00 before he left for work. i kept sleeping on the couch until both kids woke up at 8:00. I haven’t even attempted to try to calculate how little sleep that was last night until now… 4.75 hours!?

sheesh. no wonder i am having a hard time keeping my eyes open.

Easter 2009

Here are the pictures from our trip to the farm from this weekend. We saw horses and cows (which I don’t have pics of unfortunately) and chickens. We played on the trampoline, in the flower bed, and went fishing. We dyed eggs and had all sorts of fun at Granny and Papa’s House. I’ll update this album tomorrow (Sunday) hopefully, with pictures from the rest of our Easter festivities. See More Pictures Here!

chickens

smelling

bouncing

bunnies

touching

watching

smiling

traditions

eggs

basket

goodies

eggs

hunting

friends

cookie

Updated on Monday 4/13/09 – We didn’t get a picture of us all dressed up this year because we were running late before church, and Jonah spilled juice all over his outfit on the way home from church, so it all had to come off then. We did get some pictures of Jonah hunting Easter eggs at the party we went to last night. One of Jason’s co-workers had a Easter potluck dinner that we went to and I was really surprised how well Jonah did looking for the eggs outside (his first outdoors egg hunt) with all the other kids. In all the hub-bub of the day, we really didn’t have a good opportunity to give Jonah his Easter Basket, so we did that today when Jason got home from work.

In the future, I think we’ll give it to him on Easter Saturday morning. I’d rather make a distinct difference in what each of the different parts of Easter are about… like that the typical fun Easter Saturday traditions (dying eggs, eating candy, egg hunts, bunnies, chicks, and what not) are about celebrating the beginning of spring and not try to intertwine it with the religious aspects of Easter Sunday. I want Easter Sunday have its own traditions that are reverent and give thanks to our Savior and what He’s done for us… like dressing in our Sunday best, sharing meals with friends or family, and like how our church does this flower cross thing… where people bring fresh cut flowers to put in the wire mesh cross in the atrium all morning and by the end of the last service, the cross is fully covered in flowers. Jonah even put one in it this year! I feel like trying to make some sort of connection between rabbit handing out colored chicken eggs filled with candy and the crucifixion on the cross is just ridiculous and that the two should be separate from each other. So they happen on the same weekend, yes, but not the same day. I wish there was a good way to separate Christmas like that too. I think the fun family/cultural traditions are good to have, but I think kids need to learn what is “just a fun tradition” and what is “biblically relevant” for the different holidays. Anyway… that just became a really long rambling rant I guess. Congrats if you read this far and aren’t plucking your eyeballs out! hehe

We don’t need no stinkin’ Map!

So I really didn’t expect that Jonah would start recognizing TV characters this early on, but he is. He loves Map… what he really means is that he loves to watch __ the explorer. In her backpack there’s her little friend the Map and I guess he likes the song, but now anytime we see __ anything in the store he screams for MAP!!! I usually take him by to see whatever it is and then tell him “ok, tell Map bye bye” and then we’re on our way. I am really REALLY trying to keep character branded products out of our house as long as possible. I don’t want him to start getting obsessed with certain characters and thinking he NEEDS those products because they have his favorite characters on them.

I guess if I was a nice mom, I’d let him have a __ birthday party this year, so I guess I’m not nice. We’re doing trains. It’s not that he doesn’t like trains cause he does, he really likes all things that go… it’s just that he gets excited when he recognized __ somewhere outside of TV land. hehe I just really don’t want him having a bunch of that stuff around our house and I know if I themed the birthday party around __… everyone would be getting him __ stuff.

__’s not the only show he recognizes though. He likes “wow wows” refering to Wow Wow Wubbzy and I guess technically that was the first show he started recognizing because he’d go around saying “wow wow” for 20-30 minutes after it came on. It’s a cute little show, but luckily for us, there’s very little product placement out there for Wubbzy so far. You have to almost be looking for him intentionally to find any of his toys.

* If you’re wondering why there are __’s in my post, it’s because I am trying to lower the random traffic our family blog gets from strangers that found us by searching for her name (the main character on a very popular preschool cartoon). I hope to not be found as easily if I don’t actually say her name. I get like 5 hits a day on this post. kinda creeps me out since no one ever comments and I don’t know who they all are. I mean, I know a blog is public, but who really expects that many strangers to peek into their lives? I mostly expect to find friends and family visiting here.

So Sorry

Sorry for the lack of blog content lately. As many of you know, Jonah, Jason and myself have taken turns being sick with congestion and with stomach bugs over the past couple of weeks. Nothing real major to report I guess. We’ve been lazy.

We finally took down the christmas decorations this past weekend but they’re still sitting in boxes in our kitchen, waiting to be stuffed back up into the attic.

Since Jonah got sick, he got his way quite a bit (cause I knew he didn’t feel good) and he’s apparently decided that he should ALWAYS get his way, so now we’re fighting off multiple major melt downs a day. He screams “none” or “done” or something like that if he disagrees with what you’ve told him to do or offered him. He runs to another room and will bang his head on the wall or door and reapeat “none” over and over again… or he’ll fall out in the floor and shake his head back and forth violently… arching his back, pulling away from us, all that fun stuff. I guess at 21 months, I should have expected that the “Terrible Two’s” would be cropping up any time now. Oh joy. I’ll have to video tape one of these fits some time, just to document it and share it with you… maybe then you, like Jason, will discover why it is that so many parents seem to just give up on discipline and let the tantrums run rampant… it’s exhausting!

On the baby front, I’m now 28 weeks along and I only gained 1 lb since my visit last month (thanks to that stomach bug no doubt!) I am measuring right on schedule, and hopefully we’ll be setting a c-section date at my next appointment. That’s 4 weeks away, and then she says after that I’ll be on the every 2 weeks schedule and then once a week… that’s how you know when you’re getting close!

With impending baby on the way, I have been trying to do as much as I can, ahead of time, to organize a little birthday party for Jonah with some of his playgroup pals. I’m thinking I’ll mostly invite the boys close to his age, and let their older/younger sibling tag along. We’ve decided to do a Train theme for the party because we’re going to get him the LLABO train set from Ikea, and he likes anything with wheels… so choo-choos are fine by him. I’ve got a lot of cute ideas for the cake, and invitations, party invitations, and a couple of age appropriate train-themed activities for the kids. I think it’ll be a lot of fun. I guess the one thing I fear, about having a train theme party, is that everyone will assume it’s because he’s into Thomas the Train. He’s got no clue who Thomas is, and I’d rather keep it that way. I just really hate character branded kids items… they’re usually cheaply made and overpriced because they have some cartoon character on them, and I’d prefer to just have generic toys as long as we can help it (hence why we’re getting him the ikea train and not a thomas train) but that’s another rant for another day.

Right now it’s time to make dinner and get ready for Jason to get home from class. I’ll leave you with a random picture… Jonah chillin’ in the storage tub that his duplos are supposed to be in:

Silly Boy, Tubs are for Duplos!