Beautiful Eyes

Our baby boy has some really pretty eyes - I know this because I, of course, think they're beautiful, but other people also always tell him that he has pretty eyes.

So, I like looking at his eyes and at baby girl's eyes. We do "noses" where we rub our noses together and I look into their eyes. Quite often, I think about the fact that they are going to grow up and someone else will eventually be looking into their eyes. I hope that person will love them just as much as I do, but deep down I know that's just not possible because nobody can ever love someone as much as a mother loves her child.

Loquaciousness!

I'm not sure that's actually a word, but it is fitting for baby girl these days. She's talking up a storm!! Ok, most of it is "Dikah, dikah, dikah, dikah" (think of Dr. Evil doing the macarena and you've got the correct inflection) or "Budtha, budtha, budtha, budtha" or some other completely random things that sound like they should be words, but they're just not quite there.

However, the other night, when she wanted something, she just came out and said, clear as day, "Please!" and then right after that, she clearly said our nanny's name, and we were expecting her to just turn to us and start speaking in full sentences! It was so strange!

For about a week or so, if we ask her where something is, she'll shrug her shoulders, turn her hands up, and walk around like she's looking for something. Last night, she started adding the word(s), "I-oh-know" to this behavior. Pretty cool - she's really becoming a little person!!

People always say that you're so excited when your child first starts talking and then later, you can't shut them up. At 2.5, baby boy hasn't quite hit the stage where we want to shut him up. In fact, we love to hear him talk about things because we just never know what he's going to say.

Last night, he was telling me that he played on some bicycles at his friend's house and then that morphed into some kind of description of sleeping and waking up over and over. I have no idea what it was supposed to mean, but I'm sure it made perfect sense to him.

Woops, time to get back to work!

The weekend

I spent the weekend with the reddest right eye you've ever seen! It looked kind of evil, so I kept on trying to not look at people for very long, for fear of them freaking out, screaming, and running away from me. It was yucky! Both eyes seem to be a little better today, but they still hurt and my nose is still congested, my throat still hurts, and I'm keeping a bottle of Immodium AD at the ready, just in case. (too much information?!)

Enough of my complaining, let me relay to you a funny anecdote from this weekend:

Saturday afternoon we had a real chance at getting baby boy to take a nap (we always time it wrong or something on the weekend, so it's always hit-or-miss - and when we miss, it's a really bad thing!). So, we took him upstairs and put him in his bed and told him night-night and left him up there. He screamed and cried at us for about 5 minutes, but then we could hear him calming down a little bit and just start whining about things. One of the things he's whining about is his shirt, "No like it this shirt." Both my husband and I know this means he's getting ready to take off his shirt and it's questionable as to whether or not he's going to be able to get it back on.

So, I turned up the heater to make sure he wouldn't be too cold and waited until he was quiet, thinking that I would go up and check on him and cover him up if he actually fell asleep with his shirt off. When I went up to check on him, he was still awake, and after peeking around the corner at him a couple times, I was able to tell that not only did he have his shirt off, but he had also taken off his pants. (luckily, he was still wearing his diaper!) I stood outside his doorway for awhile, then, looking in on him occasionally and keeping track of his progress.

He eventually got his shirt back on and unsuccessfully tried to put his pants back on. So, after failing with the pants, he settled down to take his nap. But, before he laid down, he stuck his baby doll up his shirt so that her head was sticking out of the neck-hole. This never ceases to make me laugh! He does this more often than you might think - we think he's kind of trying to use his shirt like a Baby Bjorn or something.

Anyway, I managed to keep myself from laughing out loud and waited until he fell asleep to go in and cover up his legs with a blanket.

Second (somewhat) amusing anecdote from the weekend, also involving baby boy:

As you know from a previous post, baby boy wants a bicycle from Santa Claus this year. So we were playing around with a Santa Claus doll and I asked him to tell Santa what he wants for Christmas.
Baby boy: "Santa Claus, I want a bike!! A blue bike!"
Me: (uh-oh!) "Uh, I think the elves made a lot of red bikes this year. What about a red bike?"
Baby boy: "Santa can give mommy and daddy red bikes."

Santa has to go exchange a bicycle now...

sick again

So, in the effort to post more often, I'm now forced to tell you the only thing I can think about today - I'm sick!

Last week, the kids got sick with runny, goopy eyes. I didn't get it until Sunday night and I thought I was getting better by Wednesday, so I decided to go ahead and wear my contacts on Wednesday. That was a mistake! When I wore my contacts again yesterday, I guess I infected the eye that wasn't originally infected and now I look horrible!! My right eye is so red! And when I got up this morning, it was stuck shut. Nice.

But, of course, I'm at work. I have things that need to be done - other people are waiting on my drawings so that they can work on them, so I can't skip it today. Uhg.

Well, sorry for the boring post, but now I'm going to get back to work. Maybe something else exciting will happen today...

(I got a big cup of coffee this morning - you never know, maybe I'll spill it on my desk again!)

I need to post more often

I really do need to post more often. I find it annoying to go to other people's blogs and find that they haven't updated them in several days (or in my brother's case, weeks!). I just never can come up with anything to say once I actually have the time to post something.

Ok, here's an annoying thing that I've been meaning to post about: cellphone ring tones. I think it should be mandatory to put your cellphone on "vibrate mode" when you're at work. There's a couple of people at my office who have their ringtones set to cute little tunes, but the problem is that once that cute little tune is in my head, I end up singing it to myself ALL DAY LONG. It's so dang annoying!!!!!

And speaking of annoying things (I know I'm going to end up hating myself for bringing this one up) the other day I was thinking about a South Park episode where John Stamos's older brother Richard will be singing "Loving You" during the half-time program of one of their football games and ended up singing that horrible, horrible.....

crap!! just as I was writing this the ringtone came on across the hallway. (I'm not kidding!) Ding, ding-ding-doo-doo-doo-doo, daaaah, daaaah, daaaaah, daaaaah..... AAAARRRRGGGG!!!!

Ok, as I was saying, I ended up singing that horrible, horrible song "Loving You" in my head all day long. It turned out OK, though, I infected my husband with it when I got home that night and made him sing it in his head for the rest of the night. :)

Anyway, that's my current pet peeve - the ring tones. It annoys me when people aren't considerate of other people's "space" - including listening space!

I am a wimp!

Yes, I have really become a wimp! My husband and I have noticed lately that we've become fair-weather people. After living in Houston for 12 years now, we both get really, really cold whenever we go somewhere that actually has seasons. Yet, we both loathe the suffocating heat of Houston that envelopes the city for 8 months of the year. We're just never happy, I guess.

It got fairly cold here over the past week. I think last night it might have even gotten below freezing. And my new favorite friend? The heated seats in my car!! This is something I thought was ridiculous to have in Houston when we bought the car, but my nice, toasty butt thanks me every day when I'm driving to work and driving home from work. I even went out to Walmart today at lunchtime just so I could warm up my butt! (not really, but it was a nice side-effect of having to go to Walmart)

Heated seats are something I would have scoffed at when I was a thick-skinned northerner, too. (are you a northerner if you're from Nebraska?) I would have thought it was ridiculous to pamper yourself that way. I was so wrong. It's liberating to admit that you're a wimp and just keep dialing that heated seat up hotter and hotter... :)

Inherent good or inherent evil?...

My boss has a really annoying way of finding things he thinks are mistakes and then coming to tell me about them with an evil "I caught you" kind of smile thing. It's as if he takes great pleasure in pointing out a mistake I have made.

Today he did the same thing, with a fun prelude to the final "gotcha", asking me questions he knew I would answer "Yes" in order to prove how wrong I was when I originally did the work.

Ha! But I got HIM! I was correct and could back up my work when he finally got around to trying to use the "gotcha" on me.

Still, it leaves me with a kind of sick, deflated feeling to know that someone could try to take such joy in making me re-do something. He only does this every once in awhile, which is really good because I wouldn't be able to take it on a daily basis, but having this happen to me today has left me in a bit of a depressed state. Makes me wonder about whether there is actually inherent good in people, or is it really inherent evil?

Santa, you bring me a bicycle, right?! Please, right?!

Several months ago, we went to a sports store in town to exchange something we bought but couldn't use and while we were there, baby boy "rode" around on one of the kid-sized bikes they have there. About a month ago, he started talking about how his bike is at the store. At first we didn't really know what he was talking about, but then remembered that he had ridden that bike at the store and he now thinks of it as his bike! (we were surprised that he actually remembered about that bike!)

So, on Saturday morning, we decided to go look at the bikes and see what size he might need. We told him that he should ask Santa for the bicycle and if he was a really good boy, Santa Claus might bring it to him for Christmas.

When we asked him what he wanted to say to Santa, he said, "Santa, you bring me a bicycle, right?! Please, right?!" We may need to work on his manners just a little bit more - although, he did finally say "please"...