'Nana Bed

I let Liam help me make banana bread.

Well, I started to make banana bread and Liam came running across the kitchen hollering, "I help you?  I help you make 'nana bed in that - wha- wha- wha- what you call that red ting?"

"My mixer.  And yes, you can help."

From that we should take away 2 facts.  

1. Liam is in the phase of verbal development when he stutters.  And it's cute.

2. I deserve a pat on the back because I just quadrupled the time it's going to take to make banana bread.  Maybe pent-tupled.  

But look how happy...

So I got my softened butter into the mixer and realized I was out of sugar.   Since leaving a two-year-old unattended by a mixer and surrounded by baking ingredients is stupid poor parenting, I unplugged it and moved EVERYTHING else out of his reach.  

Because that boy loves to add things to the bowl.   

Like picking up the big salt canister and shaking it over the bowl where a batch of cookies are mixing.  

I will never again grumble when that little salt chute is hard to open.   It's obstinacy saved our cookies.

But I digress.  

I cleared the counter, gave some sort of motherly warning/threat/ultimatum about messing with the mixer and scooted down to the garage.  

Where I found no more sugar.  

Which turned out to be ok, because since Liam couldn't reach any of the baking ingredients, the resourceful boy found crumbs, fuzz and an old, crusty piece of shredded cheddar on the floor which he squished deep into the soft butter.

Gross.

Obviously the whole making banana bread idea needed to be counted as a loss.  I threw away the defiled butter, wrote sugar on the shopping list and looked sadly at my over-ripe bananas.

Now, you could make a case that the moral of this story is that I need to keep a cleaner kitchen floor,  but I'm going to choose to take away from it the eternal truth that you can never trust that a two-year-old will not cause trouble.   

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

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.    

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

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.

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

(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!