In a nutshell

You know how every once in a while you get a photo or a letter from someone and it is just so...them?  Well, here's each of my kids in a nutshell.

Dalton

D almost always has a preface before he speaks.  "I have something to tell you,"  or  "This is an exciting thing!" or "Do you want to know something?"  Then he tells you whatever he wanted to.  Then he usual either sums it up for you again or repeats himself.  I'm sure somewhere there's some writing teacher who teaches these three steps.  Introduce your thesis, State your thesis, Repeat your thesis. 

I got this cute letter from him the other day.  Besides being so adorable it made me want to squeeze him, it is also written in perfect Daltonese. 

Belle vs. Liam

Here are two pictures that tell you a lot about those two. 

1. Belle and Liam in a chair together.

Belle doing her usual crazy dramatics about whatever she finds amusing and Liam staring fixedly at something random, like her hand, wishing he could eat it.


2.  Belle, again with the emotions, this time I believe she just walked backwards into the kitchen table.  Poor sad little face.  But every time one of the other kids starts crying, Liam looks at me and grins.  It's odd, but very predictable.

 

Highs and Lows - One month 'til my birthday edition! (and my Weekly Goal)

Ok, so most people are focusing on how Tuesday is Valentine's Day.  Some of you know that I don't really like Valentine's Day.  Something about the day irks me.  So Medman is always off the hook.  I don't know if people believe him when he says he's not doing anything for Valentine's Day because I don't want him to, but it's true.  If he stops on the way home on Tuesday and buys me flowers for triple the normal price, I'm going to call him an idiot.  If you want to buy me candy, do it on the 15th when it's half off.  And please don't buy it if it has both pink and red on it.  Pink and red should not sit next to each other.  Blech.

Oops-Insensitive Rant Alert...uh...I hope you all have lovely Valentine's Days filled with flowers and pink and red chocolates...

Anyway, I choose to find significance in the fact that February 14th is EXACTLY one month before my birthday.  Thus my title.

And now...Highs and Lows by topic:

SLEEP:

High:
Liam is working his way up to Favorite Child status.  He sleeps through the night, every night.  12-13 hours of uninterrupted sleep.  He goes to bed before 7 pm and gets up between 7-8 am. Sweet, beautiful child.

Low:
Belle has decided she does not want to sleep through the night any more.  Lots of nights it's just issues like a twisted up blanket that she can't straighten, or more often nothing intelligible.  Just needs a hug and to be put back to bed.

But one night earlier this week I woke up to hear her shrieking in her room.  It took a while to understand that she was saying, "My bed is opening!  My bed is opening!"

My response to this was a hazy, sleepy, open-mouthed stare.

I think she had some sort of nightmare about the back of her crib opening up. Not sure what happened once it opened but the result was that she was terrified of her crib.  Her entire little body was shaking.  She kept insisting it needed medicine.  I admit I was at a loss here, and since the only medicine I had in her room was butt paste, I pretended to wipe that on her crib.  But it didn't work, I guess, because the crying continued.

It took 3 hours that night to get her to go back to sleep.  I'd like to say that I handled the whole three hours with grace, patience and creative parenting.  But it was from 1:30 am to 4:30 am.  Let's just say that time period had its ups and downs.  Thankfully I had just made her this little pillow bed thingy that she could sleep on so she didn't have to sleep on the floor.  

Until now she has loved her crib.  Just hangs out in it and sings or talks or whatever.  But no more. 

That was 5 days ago and she still won't go back in her crib.  We'd been planning to get her a big girl bed sometime sooner or later, so I guess we're doing it sooner.

Funny part: The next morning at breakfast she told Dalton the following,
"Dalton, I got to sleep on my pillow bed!  I was very, very scared because my crib was opening and even the butt paste didn't fix it."

He looked at her like she was crazy, and behind her back I twirled my finger around by my temple and rolled my eyes around in the universal sign for craziness. 

NAMES

Low:
I commented here that Belle had started calling us Mom and Dad instead of Mommy and Daddy.  This unfortunately has continued.  And now that they are pretending to be pteranodons, it's just getting worse.  You see, the pteranodons call their parents Mom and Dad.  I'm terribly afraid that Mommy and Daddy are a thing of the past.

sigh.

High:
HOFFENPFEFFER!
Our very favorite TV show is Psych.  Endless hours of fun, there.

The other night we were watching an old episode and a woman yelled "Hoffenpfeffer!" at another character.  She yelled it very fast in an angry German accent.  It's really fun to do.  Try it.  Go ahead.  I'll wait.  One more time, faster and louder.  Good.

I've decided I'm going to start yelling it when the kids are driving me crazy.  It will help me blow off steam without yelling anything that will be emotionally scarring to the little tykes.

Weekly Goal

My friend Erika posts weekly goals on her blog and she's started making it a little party where people can link up their own goals.  Last week I picked a goal and it was really helpful to remember to be intentional about something. 

I decided that it would be good to have some one-on-one time with Dalton.  The biggest change about having three kids is how I never seem to have time for any kid individually.  I'm always juggling two or all three of them.

So I kept Dalton up a little longer at nap time (which was a huge deal for me in and of itself) and we did a little craft that involved melting a crayon over a candle and using the melted wax to make a picture.  It came out cute and we really did have a good time.

So this weeks goal is to spend one-on-one focussed time with each of my oldest two.  It seems like a stay at home mom shouldn't have to be intentional about that, but its very easy to let the busyness of life take over and suck up time that could be spent in better ways.

I'll try to remember to tell whether I met my goal or not next week.



Linking up to

Jen

Cute, Not So Cute 3rd edition

Backseat driver

 
Cute:
It has just been the last couple months that Belle has begun to comment on things going on outside the car while we are driving.  The first time it happened she looked straight out her window to the side of the road and yelled, "Oh no! We're driving on the grass!"

Just yesterday we were driving and she looked ahead of us and quivering with excitement she exclaimed, "We are going up up up that big hill!  THIS IS SO FUN!"

Not So Cute:
She clearly doesn't understand the rules of the road.  Or maybe physics.  Or something.  Because often we will be driving along listening to Dalton chatter about how many points he has for finding Slug Bugs, Mustangs, PT Cruisers or HHR's (You'll only think this is weird if you don't have a little boy obsessed with vehicles..) when Belle will suddenly shriek, "WATCH OUT, MOMMY! THAT TRUCK IS GOING TO BONK US!"

As I look frantically around for this truck that is going to crush us I notice a small pickup truck on the other side of the road driving along calmly in its own lane. 

After I stop shaking I try to explain to Belle that not every car that looks like it's coming toward us is going to hit us. 

She's started to do it a lot.  Sometimes it's just a frantic shout of "MOMMY! BE CAREFUL!" that apparently nothing has triggered.  Sometimes it's "MOMMY!  YOU MUST SLOW DOWN! YOU MUST SLOW DOWN!" when I'm driving 25 miles an hour through the downtown area of our town. 

The big problem with all this shouting is that I don't feel like I can categorically disregard shouts like that from my passengers.  So each and every time I have to look around wildly for the source of the supposed danger before I can rule out that there really isn't a fire truck about to run into us.

And it stresses me out.


Pteranodons

Cute:
Ok, I'm working on what is cute about this next one....Hold on...I'm sure there's something...

I know!  It is cute when my kids pretend to be stuff.   Especially when they pretend to be some other set of siblings and have little pretend adventures together. 

Lately they've been pretending to be pteranodons from Dinosaur Train.

Not So Cute:
Have you ever watched Dinosaur Train?  It's a little show about a pteranodon family (flying dinosaurs) and their adopted son who is a tyrannosaurus rex. 

Fine.  They're a couple little siblings that learn about different types of dinosaurs and have barrels of fun comparing and contrasting things. 

The Not So Cute part is that these pteranodons make a pteranodon noise.  It's like a ear-splitting squawk.  A terrible, dinosaur, ear-splitting squawk.  And my kids have decided that when we are all "TEAM PTERANODON! HOORAY!!!" that it just doesn't feel real unless they squawk before everything they say to each other.  And sometimes after everything they say.

(SQUAWK) Hey Shiney! What are you doing?
(SQUAWK) Playing with trains, Dawn. What you doing? (SQUAWK)
(SQUAWK) Drinking juice
(SQUAWK) Cool.

Hundreds of squawks every day. 

And it's driving me crazy. 

I've even had to make rules. 
NO PTERANODON SQUAWKS IN THE CAR. 
NO PTERANODON SQUAWKS WHEN WE ARE IN THE SMALL BATHROOM TOGETHER.
NO PTERANODON SQUAWKS AT THE TABLE WHILE EATING.


I think I hate pteranodons.   I am glad they are extinct.

Highs and Lows - Late January edition

The usual.  My list of Highs and Lows from the week.

'Cause I know you're all dying to hear about the exotic adventures we had this week...


High: Liam slept thirteen hours straight the other night.  Thirteen.  This blows his previous record of ten hours out of the water.  And he might have gone longer.  I woke him up at thirteen hours.

Low:  Liam didn't nurse for thirteen hours the other night. For you girls who have never nursed - or you boys who never will - let me give you a quick medical lesson:

Mammary glands are full of little milk fairies.  These fairies just love babies and they really want to make babies happy.  They know that babies like milk.  So these milk fairies study the baby closely and get a good feel for how often he wants milk.  Then, when it's about time for him to get milk, even if he's no where to be seen, the milk fairies start getting all in a twitter and start jabbering at each other things like,

"Is it time yet?"
"Has anyone seen the baby?"
"What if he's been kidnapped?"
"Do we make milk yet?"
"Poor thing must be starving!"
"I'm starting some milk!"
"Me too!"
"Me too!"

And so at approximately the time the little fellow would usually wake for a nip to eat, the mammary fairies produce milk.

When junior doesn't appear, the fairies don't think, "Huh, guess we don't need milk."  Instead they get all in a tizzy and start fluttering around in a panic yelling, "More milk!  We need more milk!  If we make it...he will come!!!" 

And as there is only a finite amount of space inside the mammary fairy house, things get crowded.  To the point where the fairy house is about to explode.

Did you know that mammary fairy houses stretch all the way up to the collar bone and around into the armpit?  And the entire house swells painfully if the baby doesn't come drink milk. 

Thus the Low.



Low: Medman had a conference at the end of the week and was gone for a couple days, livin' it up in the big city.  Drinkin' Starbucks, shopping at World Market to see if he could find me some mugs (good man), eating at Chick-fil-a and Red Robin.  And we were here.  Bored.

High:  After the first day of feeling aimless I planned about a thousand projects for the next day so I would stay entertained.  And it turned in to a fun day of doing stuff with the kids that I wouldn't normally do.  We painted sun catchers...

(No the playroom wasn't ransacked by ruffians searching for something very well hidden.  Why do you ask?)

...played in the snow...

Well, they played in the snow.  I stayed warm inside and took pictures.

...and made race car boxes so we could do Family Movie Night and watch Cars.

Yes, I know they are pretty pathetic cars.  Lame little half-wheels, small circle with a number on the side and headlights.  But my kids thought they were cool, so I instantly stopped suggesting improvements.  And may I highly recommend this?  They thought was cool and do you see how contained they are???  It was divine. 

No, I'm not letting my 5 month old watch TV.  The American Academy of Pediatrics tells me this will turn his brain to mush.  Well, maybe that's not what they say, I don't really know.  I just googled it enough to make sure it really was the American Academy of Pediatrics instead of some other arrangement of those same words.  But it's frowned upon.  So, uh, this is the first time Liam's even seen the TV.  Yeah.

Side note High - Liam is big enough for the exersaucer.  (Please, all my friends who have degrees in child development do not tell me it's bad for him.  If he reaches his second birthday and can't walk yet, I'll admit it causes him some problems.  Until then I plan on continuing to use it.)


High-  Liam has learned to suck his thumb!  Once again I do not want to hear any nay-sayers about this. I'm talking to you, Walmart checker-lady who always tells me Belle's teeth are going to grow in three rows one behind the other all from thumbsucking.   Thumbsucking is a gift from God.  It may be the real reason He gave us opposable thumbs.  It's not for grasping tools, people.  It's so babies can self-sooth.

High - Liam started solid foods.  What a big boy!

Low - This picture is proof that his olfactory sense does not work at all.  Because he started solid foods and the stench from this kid's diaper at this moment was unbelievable.  No, I don't know why I decided that was a good time to snap a picture.  I'm surprised it didn't fog up the lens.

Alright, that's all I got.  Super kid-focused and rereading this I can see that I don't seem to want anyone's opinion on my parenting.



Except here are two more cute pictures that I have hanging around and they are whining to be posted.

Dalton proudly displaying Belle's hair which he "made beautiful." And maybe strangling her too.

One of those adorable moments when all three are happy.

How Pinteresting...Highs and Lows by pin

It's been a Pinterest kind of month around here.  Don't know what Pinterest is?  Well, find out at your own risk.

It's an addictive online pinboard where you can pin links to anything you find on the web that you want to be able to find again.  The addictive part is that you can browse gajillions of other pins on any topic imaginable.

But this week, I actually did a bunch of stuff I pinned - with mixed results.  Thus the Highs and Lows.


First I tried some recipes, but they sorta sucked.  Hoped for yummy treats to munch on while the Bronco's let their stress-inducing season fizzle out.  Got boring blah.   Both the food and the Bronco's subpar performance = LOW.  Moving on...


Then I tried to make these cool snow globe things for the kiddos:

Note:  If the recipe calls for water, baby oil, food coloring and glitter.  Don't

• think it will work to substitute Karo syrup for the baby oil and

• forget the food coloring altogether. 

 If you do it ends up pretty lame and your kids keep asking politely, but in a bewildered sort of way, "So...what is this supposed to do?"  Another LOW.

But there were HIGHS:

We did some great stuff in homeschool (click on the picture to get to the link on how to do them):

Do you know what happens if you put a little piece of Ivory soap in the microwave?  Go ahead, let your family make hypothesises.  Hypotheses?  Hypothesi?  Uh, let them guess.  It's pretty cool.  HIGH

 

There was a woman who made a printout for learning about the color wheel 

using water paints and an eyedropper. 

Fun, educational and not very messy.  HIGH.

  

We used tape and finger paints to paint like Monet.

Quick,easy and looks like a masterpiece.  HIGH.  

But the coolest thing that I tried was from a post that said you can IRON FABRIC ONTO YOUR WALL AND IT ACTS LIKE CONTACT PAPER.  Just peels right off when you are done!

Yup,turns out you can iron on paint and it causes no problems at all.  Who knew? 


The lady who gave me this idea (and I think she got the idea here,) wrote her son's name on the wall.

But, never one to let a project be simple, I realized that here was the chance to give Belle that huge wall mural of a tree I've wanted to give her but am too cheap to by the vinyl for!

Well, limited by the quantity of fabric and Hean-n-Bond I had, my grand plan was reduced to a branch with flowers, but I like how it turned out.

Besides the fact the photos were taken inside on a gloomy day, what do ya think?

What's more fun that purple swirly branches with pink and yellow flowers? 

Nothing.

 Nothing at all.

 

(Want a mini tutorial? Click here for one. )

Cool, huh?  If I could redo it I'd smooth out some of the curves (some of them are a little Nightmare Before Christmas-esque), but I'm not going to redo it.  It's for a two-year-old's room.  Two. 



After I finished ironing it onto Belle's wall (which was sort of a weird experience) she said, "Mommy!  I LOVE it!"

Of course at nap time she looked at it and started to cry and said, "I didn't want you to put that picture on my wall!  Take it off."

Nice.  But she's two.  I'm banking on her inherent wishy-washyness.  She'll come back around to liking it.  HIGH.

Cute, Not So Cute volume 2 (and homemade powdered laundry soap)

For about the last three years I've made my own powdered laundry detergent and I know I've chatted with friends who want the recipe (but I honestly can't remember which ones), so I thought I'd post it.  It's stupid-easy to make, works great and is practically free compared to store bought detergent. (Unfortunately, I can't remember where I got it to give credit where credit is due, but the recipe is tangled about here and there in the world wide web...)

But a post about laundry soap?  BO-RING!  So I'm interspersing soap-making instructions with a new volume of "Cute, Not So Cute." (Because we wouldn't want a short post, now would we?)
 

The soap 

I was always irked to finish my grocery shopping by dropping a 

$17 box of detergent into my cart (made extra expensive because it was 

dye/fragrance free for my sensitive-skinned kinfolk - 

why exactly does less ingredients = more expensive?  

Riddle me that.)

I had seen recipes online for DIY laundry soap that is super cheap and works great. Cleans well, keeps colors bright, doesn't irritate anyone's skin, yada yada yada.    

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Cute, Not So Cute

Cute:  Belle does this hilarious stomping thing where she hunches over a bit, sticks her hands out in front of herself, squints up her face funny and takes tiny steps, stomping as hard as her 22 lbs can do with each step.  It's hilarious.  Picture a scene where some American Indian, dressed in traditional garb, is doing a stomping dance around a huge bonfire.  That's what she does.  Like this beautiful girl:

Image credit

And how Belle would love to wear something like that.  She's a smidge Cherokee from her father's side and it shows. 

Not So Cute: The other night I was trying to calm Liam down and get him to sleep (Any of you notice that I only talk about around three topics on this blog?  There's bodily waste products that don't end up where they are supposed to, odd things my kids do and issues arising from getting Liam to sleep.  Perhaps I need to branch out...), he was almost dozing off when suddenly there was this BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM and the floor of his room began to shake.  His eyes snapped open and I expected air raid sirens to start going off. 

I left the now crying Liam in his bed and ran out to find Belle, just inside her room (which is two feet from Liam's room), doing her stomp dance (as though her little legs were commercial grade impact hammers instead of tiny twigs) and singing a chanty sort of version of Away In a Manger.  And I didn't find it cute at all.

*******************************

(back to the soap)

Ingredients

1 cup washing soda (sort of like baking soda but found in the laundry aisle)

1 cup Borax

1 bar of plain, old, regular soap  (I use Ivory)
(NOTE: The recipe calls for Fels-Naptha soap which can be found in the laundry aisle or sometimes with the regular soap, but I find the fragrance of it foul, so we use Ivory...)

*******************************

(back to Cute, Not So Cute)

Cute: My parents came to visit and gave Dalton Connect Four for Christmas.  Then my mom played about a hundred games with him.  There was lots of, "Now wait!  You have to look at both of our pieces!  You might need to block me!"  Or "Now wait! You have to look at both of our pieces!  Is there a way you could win???"  And so Dalton "won" a lot of the games.  

Then D needed a potty break and headed upstairs yelling, "Mommy!  You play with Grandma while I'm upstairs."

Me: "Do you think I can beat her?"

Dalton: "Oh yeah!  She's not really very good at that game!"

And I laughed hard at how cute it was that the thought he was better than her.

Not So Cute: Grandma leaves town and now I'm stuck playing Connect Four.  So I continue the incessant coaching ("You have to look at both of our pieces!").

D: I don't need your help, Mommy.  I am good at this.  I can play you.

Me: Oh, really?  Ok.  All I'll say now is "You have to look at both of our pieces..."

And he continued to play in his devil-may-care sort of way while I literally bit my tongue to keep from nagging helping him and none-too-subtly stacked my yellow pieces into a line. 

Then suddenly his eyes lit up.  "I WIN!" he shouted as he dropped in his little red piece completing a line of 4 right in the middle of the grid which I had not at all noticed, being too busy only watching my own pieces.  

 "Mommy!  You have to watch both our pieces."

Not so cute.

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(back to the soap)

Directions

1.  Shred the bar of soap in the fine section of your cheese grater.  This is as hard as the recipe gets, which isn't hard because soap grates REALLY easily.  So easily, in fact, that you should watch your thumb knuckle and make sure it doesn't hit the cheese grater.  I've heard that really hurts. 

 2. Add one cup Borax and one cup Washing Soda.  Mix together. 

Viola.   That's it.  Oh, and the great part?  It takes ONE TABLESPOON PER LOAD.   

Yup. One tablespoon for a ginormous load of towels or a humongous load of pee-soaked bedding or a monstrous load of poop-filled baby pajamas.  

One Tablespoon.

Some fancy math:

Borax < $4/box

Washing Soda < $4/box

Ivory soap < $0.50/bar

That means a recipe of this costs about $1.50 and I get around 50 loads from each recipe. 

That's 3 cents per load or 

$1.50 for as many loads as a big box of store bought soap. 

Yup, that's how ya stick it to the man!

Hmmmmmm, who is "the man"?  

Proctor? or Gamble? 

PS: This laundry soap doesn't make the water all sudsy.  Don't be alarmed if your water isn't.  It's still cleaning stuff, I promise.

Official Xmas Card 2012

Around October every year I toy with the idea of a Christmas card.  I'd like to think that someday I'll actually get one done.  But not this year.  So, like last year's Official Christmas Card, I'll just post mine here...

And like last year, I do not have any good pictures.  In fact, the whole attempt went exactly like last year.

Except last year I tried.  For probably a half hour.

This time I just snapped off about 6 shots and then gave up in despair.  I'm not even going to edit them except to lighten them up so you can actually see the kids.

Enjoy...

Smile Belle - No! Dalton, don't look at Belle! Keep looking at me!

Belle, no one is trying to steal crazy red-eyed Liam.

Will silly faces help them all smile?  Nope, just help them make silly faces.  FOREVER.

Dalton looks like he's being dragged away by a zombie into the tree.

Belle still blissfully off in her own little world, Dalton bored, Liam  decided to forget pictures and eat the blanket.

This really is the best one.  At least they're all looking.

Merry Christmas everyone! 

Fake Nail and Diaper Goo - the Diaper Part

... part two of the post started yesterday...


We join the story as I am fumbling around the house with my fake nails making my hands feel like my normal fingers have been replaced with useless, painful nubs.




Sabotage #2 - Dalton and Belle

But according to my PLAN, I needed to get laundry done.  And because all of my fingernails were achy (and my middle finger was downright painful since I'd accidentally glued the skin on the tip of my finger to the fake nail which was pulling the skin excruciatingly...) I solved my problem by recruiting help.  I perched Dalton on top of the dryer, held up a laundry basket and he tossed his and Belle's clothes into the washer for me.

And that was how Dalton tried to help me but inadvertently sabotaged me.  The laundry was started in record time and I smiled in blissful ignorance as we headed back up to do some school only an hour behind schedule.

(No, Dalton, I can't help you peel apart the papers you glued together wrong.  I can't use my fingers.)

45 minutes later when we went down to change the load I discovered the problem.  When I opened the washer every single item was covered in gooey gel.  

Belle's contribution to the sabotage was that she had left a pull-up inside one of her pairs of tights which Dalton hadn't noticed.  Do you know what happens when a disposable diaper is submersed in water?  The gooey gel inside expands and expands and expands until it explodes out of the diaper and coats every surface it can find - clothes and washer.

So between

• Googling "PULL-UP WENT THROUGH THE WASH!" (which returns a surprising number of hits...), 
• stopping to feed Liam, 
• brushing off every single small item of clothing that was in the very full washer, 
• stopping to change Liam, 
• cleaning as much goo as I could out of the washer then running a load of old towels in an attempt to clean it completely, 

I wasted most of the rest of the morning.

Yup, no school done, no laundry folded, no floor cleaned and a nap time looming when I KNOW it's going to take me ten times longer to make each necklace that it would have if I had the use of my fingertips.

And these are the times when I drop my head into my hands (ouch - stupid nails) and think longingly of the days of being a cubical drone in an office.   That is until nap time is over and my sleepy girl wants to sit in my lap and read a book and her big brother shows up to help read and the baby wakes up and grins at me.

So I pack up the jewelry stuff, pull the now clean laundry out of the dryer, man up about the finger pain and count my blessings that I have so many interruptions in my day.

"Unhappy" faces

Belle started a new pastime around the house.   She started squinting her eyes and pursing her mouth and saying, "This is Daddy's unhappy face," meaning the face he gives her when she's about to get in trouble. 

Needless to say the game immediately caught on.

Apparently their dad and I have very different unhappy faces.

Belle's "Daddy's unhappy" face:

 

Dalton's  "Daddy's unhappy" face:

Belle's "Mommy's unhappy" face:

 Dalton's "Mommy's unhappy" face:

And of course once the camera came out and Dalton got wound up,

he decided that Mommy's unhappy face really looked more like this:

I wish. That's way more intimidating than the whole wide-eyed thing.