Conversations from the road

Husband: Was your grandpa a tall man?
Me: No.
H: Why are you and your brother taller than your parents?
Me: ???

H: What exactly is in "non-dairy creamer"?
Me: ???

H: "World's Oldest Buick" ahead!!
Me: :)

H: Ok, here's what we do: We'll move to the farm, take up farming, grow corn, then build an ethanol plant here.
Me: ???!!!

Me: Stop!!! There's a Runza - we have to get one before we get out of Nebraska!
H: (Slams on the brakes, misses the entrance, reverses 100 ft on the shoulder in order to get back to the gas station/Runza entrance - I told you they were good!)

Just a few highlights from the trip. More to come later. (Can you tell who was doing the driving and who was reading her book?)...

Making a list, checking it twice...

I've been making a list for the last 30 minutes, trying to make sure we don't forget anything. We're off on our trip tomorrow! But we haven't packed a thing yet. (I'm making my mom nervous by just typing that...)

But really, if we at least remember the DVD player and the DVD's we'll be fine. If we find that we've forgotten anything, we'll just buy it either on the way, or when we get there.

So, wish us luck, and we'll see you soon, Mom, Dad, and Brother. :)

What is it with the poop?!

So last night, we went out for a walk and when we got home our neighbor was outside. We stayed outside talking to her for a few minutes, during which time, the boy went into the garage and started playing with some of the car washing stuff that we have in there. Then he got suspiciously quiet and still.

My husband asked him what he was doing and he said he was "hiding" - which means he had to go poop. (still wears a diaper, although has ventured into the potty training arena some over the past week)

So, we're standing there talking to the neighbor and all of a sudden, my husband looks over at the boy and says, "HEY!!! Stop it!" and goes over to grab the boy's hands as he's smearing poop on the garage wall. What the?!

Never has the boy done this before. He just stuck his hands down the back of his pants and started playing with it.

Apparently he's picking some things up from the girl now, too. Disgusting!*

*He went around the rest of the night saying everything was "disgusting".

N is for Nowledge

Ok, since when has Wichita, Kansas become so popular?!

We are planning a trip up to visit my parents and brother in Nebraska for Memorial Day Weekend. And we're driving up there.

Crazy? Yes. But, as we were making our flight plans, right before I clicked the button saying "Buy This Fare" (or something like that), we suddenly came to the realization that for $1300 less, we could drive up there and get there at the same time. That's persuasive.

Last year we drove up and drove all night in order to get there at 6am and let my parents take care of the kids while we slept a little. On the way back, we did the same thing and got home in time to let the nanny take care of the kids while we slept. However, that's just painful. So, instead, we're going to break the drive up into two days.

We thought it would be good to make it to Wichita the first day, which would be a long day, and then have a relatively short day the second day. The bonus to this plan also being the fact that we might make it to my hometown in time to have Runza for lunch! (after only 12 years of marriage, I have finally convinced my husband of the virtues of the cheese Runza!)

Imagine our surprise when we called a hotel in Wichita last night only to find that they are completely booked. The only hotel we were able to find was going to be $185 for one night!

This leaves us with a dilemma. Try to push on further to Salina? Too painful. Looks like we're going to try out a small town about an hour south of Wichita. This could seriously jeapordize our chances of having Runza's for every meal during our time in Nebraska, however. (yes, they're that good.)

Every time we try to make this trip to Nebraska, it's the same story. I swear, it's just about the hardest place to get to on earth. We've tried every approach. Driving: That's a 14 hour trip with no stops.

Flying: We can fly to Lincoln, which is only 1 hour away from my hometown, but we have to fly through Minneapolis on the way. Yeah, Minnesota is right on the way to Nebraska from Texas. Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Ohio, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska. Don't you know your geography?! And this trip only takes something like 9 or 10 hours from our house to my parents' house. Not a huge time savings. Plus, they always lose our luggage. It's hard to keep it straight when you have so many states to go through, you know.

We can fly to Omaha, which is 2 hours from my hometown. This actually isn't that bad because we can finally fly straight to Omaha. We used to have to take a flight that made a stop in Kansas City and then fly on to Omaha. Ridiculous.

So, at one point, we started just flying to Kansas City. It's only a 3 hour drive from there to my hometown.

They keep on saying that they're going to add a direct flight from Houston to Lincoln someday. I'll believe it when I see it...

But you know, as difficult as it is to get there, it's totally worth it. I get to see my family, for one, but there's no place I feel more at home.

I love to hear people make jokes about Nebraska. It used to make me mad because I love it so much, but now it just makes me smile because it's like I know a secret that they'll never know or understand. My heart belongs to that farm and prarie land.

Office Fish Tank

Remember when I said this?

Well, my husband got it for me for my birthday and I finally got it set up here at work!


Isn't it cute?! I finally transferred one of my fishies over to the tank yesterday afternoon and was just going to leave one lone fish in there - you know, for the comedic effect: A single poor fish stuck in his little Dilbert world.

But then I felt sorry for him. I put two more with him and he seemed to settle down a little bit. Even I can't subject a fish to my own real-life agony of being alone in a cube all day.

I want to go back in time

Many times lately, I've thought that it would be so nice to go back in time to when our baby boy was a newborn baby. Ok, not for the obvious reason that he's driving me crazy with his tantrums but because now that I know him, I don't feel that I loved him enough when he was a newborn.

Don't get me wrong, I loved him with all my might when he was newborn, but I had no idea what a beautiful little person he was going to be. He was such a little stranger at the time - it was a very odd feeling.

So, when baby girl was born, I think maybe I was starting to recognize how precious she was going to become to me and I was able to realize a little more that even though I loved her as a newborn, I would love her even more the older she gets.

Does this ever end? Can my capacity for love increase even more?

I'm continuously amazed at what this parenting thing involves.

What should we do tonight?

I got home last night at around 5:30. The boy had gotten up from his nap about 30 minutes before that, but the girl was still upstairs. Because the weather was sooooo nice on Monday, we did Family Bike Ride on Monday, thereby screwing up our normal exercise schedule. So, last night, we were pondering what to do. Little did we know that the girl had already made plans for us by that point.

I was surprised that she wasn't awake when I got home and about 15 minutes after I arrived, I finally said, "I bet she's awake, but just not making enough noise." She naps in our bedroom and the monitor that we keep in there is kind of like a really bad speaker phone. It doesn't pick up the noise and transmit it unless there's a sustained LOUD noise. Small noises like playing and mumbling don't come through.

At about that point, the girl finally made enough noise to come through the monitor. She was kind of crying like she usually does when she wakes up, so I thought my hypothesis about her being awake wasn't true.

My husband and the boy went upstairs to get her, while I lagged behind for a couple minutes. However, my lagging was rudely interrupted by my husband yelling, "SARA, GET UP HERE NOW!!!"

I ran up the stairs to see what could possibly be the problem and found the dreaded sight. My husband was standing away from the girl's crib, trying to keep the boy from getting close to her and trying to figure out how he was going to clean up this mess.

And then the smell hit me: Poop. I thought, wow, that must have been some kind of explosive diaper!

And then I got closer and the realization finally hit me: the diaper was no longer on her bottom. Her onesie/bodysuit thing was unsnapped at the bottom and her diaper was sitting in her crib. And there was poop... seemingly everywhere.

She had been awake for quite some time, it seemed. Enough time to remove her overalls, unsnap her onesie, remove her diaper, and begin playing with the poop.

As I looked in horror, my husband gasped, "Oh my God! What's in her ear?!!" Luckily, upon further inspection, it was only the bandaid that had previously been on her leg. It didn't seem to be covered in poop, so that must have been one of the first things she did - wad it up and put it in her ear. Because, really, doesn't that seem like the right place to put a used up bandaid?

And thus began the cleanup: We wiped as much of the poop off of her as we could with wet wipes and then I headed off to the bathtub with her to scrub her down. Twice.

My husband stayed behind to remove all the bedding and clothing and put them in the washing machine to be washed. Twice.

Then he used disinfecting wipes to wipe down every hard surface on or near the crib. Twice. (well, I'm assuming he did it twice - given his phobia of fecal bacteria, I think it's a good assumption.)

After the cleaning spree and the emergency bath which included washing her hands at least four times (but they still smelled like poop!), we were able to calm down a little bit. We finally answered our question of what to do with the evening - we went for a short walk around the block, came home, cooked and ate supper, gave the boy his Tuesday night bath and got the kids to bed.

When I left this morning, the girl was still sleeping. Or at least I think she was...

At least the cucumbers are alive...

It's been awhile since I updated you regarding my little container garden! I know, you've all been wondering about it and just assumed that everything died.

However, that's not actually true! The peas seem to live only until they reach a height of about a foot and then the bottom leaves turn yellow and then the whole thing turns yellow and dies. BUT, not before starting a new, live branch off the bottom of the plant. I have no idea what is going on there, but I'm just curious to see how that will turn out.

I have yet to transplant my basil and what I think might be oregano (I didn't label the little pot-things) to outside, so they're growing into odd shapes on my kitchen windowsill.

And I think something ate most of the other little sprouting flower plants that I had out there.

The cucumbers, though, seem to be doing quite well and have even bloomed, which I think means that they might actually grow some little cucumbers. We shall see. In the meantime, here's a picture of my nice, root-confined cucumber plants. :)

Save me from the M's!!!

I have an odd addiction to peanut M&M's. I suppose it's not that odd - they are soooo nice and sweet and peanuty and tasty that it's hard NOT to have an addiction to them, however, I think it's odd that they're the only thing I cannot force myself to stop eating. When I was in high school, the entire volleyball team loved "male M&M's", as we called them. You know, 'cause they've got nuts. Aren't pubescent girls something you just looovve... to hate?

Anyway, in an attempt to prevent myself from eating even more M's, I'm having a cup of hot tea and blogging. Hopefully this will help.

My weekend was really very nice. I had the day off on Friday, so the husband and I went off to explore a bike trail that everyone keeps raving to us about. We checked out the Terry Hershey Park and it was definitely something we'll go ride again! We rode about 20 miles and were fairly tired afterwards, I'm ashamed to admit. (We used to go riding every weekend and if we didn't ride at least 40 miles, we didn't consider it worth the trip! Ugh.)

Anyway, to reward ourselves for such a long bike ride, we decided it would be nice to eat at Chuy's without the kids tormenting us! And it was actually nice weather outside. No kids, sitting outside, drinking a margarita, and eating chips with their creamy jalepeno dipping sauce (which is actually salad dressing, we found out one time!) - it couldn't get much better.

On Saturday, we took the kids to Hermann Park. The boy rode his bike for awhile and the girl was very excited to ride in the single stroller for awhile. (I think the girl loves the opportunity to ride in the single stroller because most of the time, she has to ride in the double stroller with her big brother. So, getting to ride in the single stroller by herself is a big treat!)

Anyway, of course, the kids soon tired of this parental-friendly arrangement. The boy stopped riding his bike and wouldn't get back on and the girl soon wanted out of the stroller to run - I mean if big brother is running around, then she should be, too, shouldn't she?!! This is where our plan works out somewhat decently, though. You see, we can put the bike on top of the stroller and still be able to do a little child-wrangling. Ah ha! You kids only THINK you can outsmart us!! :)

We rode the little train at the park and by that time, it was almost past naptime and we knew we had missed the window for the boy. The girl still took a nap, but the boy played in his bed for the entire time.

Sunday started off quite nicely, however. My husband decided he was going to get up and get me breakfast, etc. while the kids were still sleeping, so he set his alarm for 6am. And while he was off acquiring breakfast and a plant for me (mother's day gift from the kids), I was able to spend an hour of quiet, uninterrupted time reading my book.

When the kids finally woke up, he got them to come in and give me my present and tell me Happy Mother's Day. It was very cute. And it was still cute when the little girl then started singing Happy Birthday to me. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to burst with the adoration I feel for them...

And then we were off getting ready for my second very special treat of the day: we rode our bikes up to the Sam Houston Park where the start/finish line was located for the Houston Grand Criterium - a bicycle race in Houston! Isn't that what all mother's want to do on Mother's Day? Well, it made me happy. :)

We were able to see just one of the races - the Men's Masters 35+ (which husband is excited he would be able to compete in soon - um, if we were in any kind of shape for that kind of thing!), but it was still fun. The kids really liked seeing the race.

And then we were off to have lunch with Grammy and Papa at the Chinese Restaurant - home of the Lion Dance. (Yep, we still had to convince the boy that there wouldn't be any "lions" there. And we've been there at least 5 times since Chinese New Year!)

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur since the kids, wanting so much to be with me for Mother's Day, both ended up not taking naps and then running amok for the remainder of the day. The good thing about that was that we could put them to bed early and enjoy a nice quiet meal alone. Not a bad way to finish the weekend.

No more Bakalah

In honor of my baby girl turning 19 months old today, I thought I should post something about her!

One thing that I'm very sad about these days is that she has started saying "bike". Oh, you think I should be happy about that? Well, the problem is that she used to say "bakalah" for bicycle and it was just so. darn. cute. It made my heart melt every time she said it. The boy even started saying it. But now it's gone. *sniff*

And instead, she has started speaking in complete sentences. The nerve. She says things like, "I did it!" and "Did you see that?" and "Pfeed me!!!!!" There for awhile, she was saying "Omango" for "Oatmeal", but now she's back to saying, "Oatmeal". I guess she's got to grow up sometime...

She's picking up lots of things from her big brother. Specifically, most of the complete sentences she says. But last night, she started doing this finger-pointing thing. The boy, when he wants to really make a point about something, holds his index finger up and moves his hand to emphasize whatever it is he's saying. And last night, the girl did exactly the same thing. I laughed out loud and I really wish I could remember what she said, because man, it was just too funny!

She's also picked up her brother's love for trucks and cars. She loves to look at them and play with them. She wears his out-grown PJ's to bed these days and she really likes the ones that have the trucks on them. And I decided to recycle his old socks for her - today she's wearing some socks with tow trucks on them. She kept pointing down to her feet during breakfast saying, "Socks. Tow trucks!" I'm sure the Nanny and Grammy are appalled. :)

Her hair has grown over her eyes now and after Grandma 'Braska tried and tried to get her to wear barrettes in her hair a couple of weeks ago, she has finally relented. She'll actually let me put a barrette in her hair and sometimes even leaves it there for more than 2 minutes. Apparently yesterday, though, she pulled her barrette out of her hair and threw it while they were in the park. Looks like we'll be buying lots of packages of barrettes.

In other big developmental news, it seems she can actually jump these days! We witnessed her feet leaving the ground the other day. I think there was maybe even a full inch of air under those little feet. She has tried and tried to jump for months now, but has never left the ground. And every time she would try, I just had to laugh out loud because she looked so cute in her attempts. Plus, it amazed me that she couldn't jump. The boy started jumping - big jumps - almost immediately after he started walking. He was a jumping maniac! And I know you're not supposed to compare your children, but I find the differences between them to be fascinating.

Now, if we could just get her to stop running like such a girly-girl (she holds her hands up by the sides of her chest and "gallops" with her right foot ahead of the left), we'll be in business. :)

"A" little help from my friend

I've had blogger's block for the past day and a half, so when I read Courtney's post, I asked for a letter. She gave me: A.

Comment on this entry and I will give you a letter. Write ten words beginning with that letter, including an explanation of what the word means to you and why.

1. Aunt Annie's Alligator, A, A, A - Yeah, I know that's more than one word, but coming up with A-words that mean anything to me is really turning out to be hard! As anyone who has a child and reads Dr. Seuss books to them will know, this is "what begins with A". And what does it mean to me? It means that I have two wonderful children to love.

2. Straight A Student - bit of a stretch, but I'm telling you, I really have blogger's block, OK?! I was a Straight A Student in high school. I was Valedictorian, even. However, I can't say that without laughing because I still vividly remember when I was in 8th grade, leaving my brother's high school graduation ceremony, I told my parents that I wanted to be "Baccalaureate". "You mean, Valedictorian?" Uh, right!

3. Authority - Question it!! I had this button in high school (during the age of wearing slogan buttons) that said, "Question Authority". I still believe in that. Just because a rule is a rule, doesn't mean it's a good one.

4. Actually - I just say and write this word a lot. Thought I should actually include it in the list.

5. Accepting - I try to be open-minded and accepting of other people's ideas and beliefs. I think I rarely accomplish the task, especially when it comes to ultra-conservative people, but I'm trying to get better.

6. Accompanist - I started playing the piano when I was in 2nd grade and stuck it out through high school. I had the great honor of accompanying my elementary school choir when I was in 5th and 6th grade. I thought it was sooooo cool.

7. Apathetic - Ugh. I'm pretty apathetic about my job these days.

8. Alone - something I rarely get to be! However, the husband is currently out of town, so the past couple of nights, I've found myself alone in the house after the kids go to bed. Wanna know something pathetic? I've spent my alone-time cleaning the house and doing laundry. And I enjoyed it. Holy crap.

9. Ashtray - this word doesn't really mean that much to me - but in Spanish, the word is "cenicera" and it's the first Spanish word I learned. A group of us were out celebrating someone's birthday about 10 years ago, and I pestered the Spanish-speaker of the group to tell me the Spanish word for everything. (I should add "annoying" to this one.) I have always been obsessed with the idea of knowing another language. Now, actually taking the time and effort to really learn another language is another thing.

10. All done. Thank God. This has nearly killed me, as evidenced by the lame A-words that I squeezed out of my feeble head. Lord have mercy on your soul if you request a letter from me. It's a rather difficult task!

How many is too many?

I had to text-message my husband at lunchtime today. I went to Sam's Club down here by my office and found that the really cheap, but good red wine we discovered a couple weeks ago and tried to buy again at the Sam's close to our house, only to find out that they no longer had it stock, was actually in stock down here... wait, in this run-on sentence I seem to have gotten lost.

Yeah, so I found this really cheap, but good red wine at the Sam's down here by my office today. It comes in big 1.5L bottles and you get 2 of those suckers for only $10! That's the equivalent of $2.50 for a regular-sized bottle! And since we've become total addicts to HGTV and a glass of wine each night, we're in a constant search for this type of holy graile of wine deals.

Seeing as how the Sam's close to our house no longer had any of this glorious Texas Red and seeing as how the Sam's down here only had about 20 boxes of it left (you get 6 - 1.5L bottles in a box), I became panicky. Having learned the lesson of "when the last bottle of that vintage of wine is gone, you can NEVER get any more of it" once before (and seriously, isn't that so sad? something that you love could just go away suddenly like that?), I wondered, how many bottles of this stuff should I get?!

I texted my husband, "Found it! Is 18 too much?"

Sensing my urgency, he immediately called me. We discussed and debated. Well, you know, we'll drink it. And really, if we usually try to buy cheap, but good wine for around $8/bottle, then that's more than a $100 savings - even more if we splurge on the wine we love for $14/bottle.

Oh, what to do, what to do...

In the end I got 24!

Open House

We went to an Open House this morning for what is to be the boy's preschool this coming fall. It was so much fun! We had taken a tour of the school in December, but it was so much more fun to see our little boy discovering everything and figuring out how to play with all of it. He absolutely loved it.

I must admit that I wish I was 3 again just so I could play on that playground. I found myself touching and playing with everything and uncontrollably blurting out, "Wow, Cool!!!" "Hey, check this out!" "Hey, come on, it's MY turn!" (ok, I didn't actually say that last one...)

Along with all the standard playground equipment - the fort thing that you climb up and slide down, monkey bars, bouncy horses, swing set, etc. - there are all these additional areas in which the kids can play. There's a water-play area, an old row boat suspended by heavy-duty elastic, a house with a kind of porch behind it with a pass-through to the house, a sandbox, a free-standing clear piece of plastic on which the kids can paint to their heart's content, a wooden fire truck that you can either sit in and drive, or stand up on the seat, turn around, and slide down the back of it to the ground, and a compost tumbler (we do live in the tree-hugger part of town, you know, which works out well for us being kind of tree-huggerish, too, and all). But the pièce de résistance: a boomin' area. It is truly heaven on earth for preschoolers.

The cool thing that we liked about this preschool was that it's a "cooperative preschool" which means that the parents are the ones responsible for pretty much everything. There's a board of directors comprised of only parents and every parent is expected to "work" at the school once every 15 days (or something like that). As I walked around the playground this morning, I realized how evident it was that the parents of all these children had created this interactive learning center for their kids.

I just can't wait until Fall and the beginning of the school year!

Fun with Consumer Relations People

Yesterday, as I was trying to decide whether to chew a piece of my old favorite Trident Original Flavor gum or a piece of the new-to-me Wrigley's Extra Peppermint gum, I finally decided I was going to give those Trident people a piece of my mind.

You see, they changed the formula of the gum base. I used to be able to chew a piece of Trident gum all day long (or at least close - I would chew that piece of gum for almost 8 hours!) and it would never get hard. However, over the last couple of years, every package of Trident I have purchased has made my jaw hurt in less than an hour. The stuff gets hard.

I was hoping against hope that it was just an anomaly every time. You know, like the place where I bought the stuff was a place where Original Flavor Trident gum chewers just don't frequent very much and therefore the gum on their shelves was old. Or maybe when we bought the huge box of it in bulk at Sam's that they were just having a bad quality control day in their plant and we happened to just buy a package that contained the stuff that got through their strenuous quality testing procedures and then we got stuck having to chew this horrible gum for the next 6 months, trying to use the rest of it up!

However, after buying another new pack of it the other day, I have come to realize that they've indeed screwed me over and tried to make my life miserable.

So, I went to their website and filled out their little form and sent it off, knowing that they would never respond to me, but still hoping that somehow my little rant would get through to someone. Here's the ensuing e-mail exchange:

------------------------
Type of Request: General Questions/Feedback
City: Houston
State: TX
Age Group: 35-49 (sidenote: wow, I’m now in the almost-ancient age group!)

Comments: I just want to let you know that I'm so disappointed in the current quality of Trident gum. It seems that about a year ago you may have changed the formula of the gum base. I used to be able to chew a piece of gum for hours without it getting hard. In fact, I don't think it EVER lost its chewability. However, any of the Trident gum I have chewed for the last year (I bought in bulk and thought maybe it was just a bad batch, but have since bought some "fresh" from the store and it's the same) becomes hard and hurts my jaw and teeth after about 30 minutes to an hour.

I understand this may be a marketing ploy to ensure that people will just have to spit out their old piece of gum and get a new piece every 30 minutes and thereby increase the amount they use and the amount they have to buy, however, I'm so, so, so disappointed in this downgrade.

I'm now in search of a new type of chewing gum (after being a loyal daily chewer for more than 15 years to Trident).

------------------------

Thank you for contacting us concerning our Trident brand. We are sorry to hear that you feel is is not retaining it's flavor any longer.

We have forwarded your comments regarding the lack of flavor on to the marketing and quality departments for review.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to share your comments with us.

Sincerely,

Consumer Relations

------------------------

No, no, it's not that it doesn't retain it's flavor - it's that it gets hard and hurts my jaw!! I never
said anything about the flavor.

Geesh.

I'm now pretty convinced there aren't actually real people reading the comments you receive. *sigh* I guess I shouldn't have expected more.

Maybe I should try to write something in binary code so that I'll feel more in touch with my audience:
0100100001100001011101100110010100100000011
00001001000000110011101101111011011110110010
00010000001100100011000010111100100101110

Translation:
Have a good day.
(Seriously!)

------------------------

We apologize for any misunderstanding over your concerns. Quality has been advised that you have contacted us over the texture of the gum.

Thank you for clarifying your concerns.

Consumer Relations

------------------------

Wow, thanks!

(and I hope you were able to find some humor in my previous sarcasm…)

-------End-------------

I'm still waiting to see if they'll reply to my last message to them. Hee, hee...

Here's a Tip

Say your husband has a lot of work to get done before the next morning, so you decide you'll keep him company and hang out with him while he does his work.

Let's say you update your blog, but by midnight, he's still not done. So, you spend some time reading other people's blogs and before you know it, it's almost 1am. Your husband decides he's done enough so you go upstairs, where you both, for some reason, decide it would be a good idea to eat just a teensy little bit of chocolate fudge brownie ice cream before going to bed and end up watching part of the Born With Two Heads documentary about the little girl who was born with a second, pretty much fully-devoloped head whose mouth moved and drooled and everything. (All I can say is, yikes!)

So, say you finally decide to go upstairs, but just can't seem to get yourself into bed until sometime around 2am.

Here's a tip: There's a pretty good chance you're going to oversleep the next morning and wake up with approximately 13 minutes before you're supposed to be at work (and the drive alone takes about 25 minutes) so you're going to have to take a modified shower and not wash your hair (even though you went for a bike ride the night before and got all sweaty - yuk!) and hurry up and rush out of the house, kissing your sweet little boy on the way out.

That frog just stood up and talked!

Ok, so I didn't actually witness the boy saying this, but I still laugh any time a Geico commercial comes on because it makes me think of my little boy saying, "Did you see that?! That frog just stood up and talked!!" What a sweet, naive little boy he is!

I figure it's about time I write something about my baby boy. It's been awhile. I'm not sure if that's because I have a hard time coming up with something nice to say about the boy, or if there's just too much to write.

I'll assume the latter (since I don't really want to admit to the former) and try to write a few of the most current things going on with the boy.

Don't get me wrong, the boy is a very sweet, loving, emotive, and wonderful little boy. He just happens to be 3. And naps are always hit-or-miss these days, so when I get home from work, I never know if I'm going to be met with a sweet little boy or a psychotic, over-tired little monstrosity.

But enough about how incredibly taxing it can be to deal with him when he's tired. What I really wanted to write here is about the funny things he's doing these days.

He has discovered the phrase, "I love you." He uses it continuously - which kind of makes you question his sincerity after the 10th time he's told you, his baby sister, the cat, and his baby doll that he loves them! It can be especially exasperating to respond to him with the standard, "Aw, I love you, too." Only to have him tell you, "Uh, I was talking to baby!" *Dissed!!*

Over the past month or two, he has also taken to verbally expressing all of his baby doll's moods. These days when he's "crying" I always have to check to see if he's cradling his baby doll and comforting her because she's the one who is supposedly crying, or if he's actually upset about something.

I've also begun to wonder if this is some kind of a coping mechanism - like that he feels bad, but instead, he pretends that his baby is feeling bad and he has to comfort her. Who knows?! I do know it's very cute to see him taking such good care of his baby, though.

He generally tries to take good care of his baby sister, too. Although, maybe 50% of the time, he's also trying to kick her and keep her from getting any of the attention he thinks he deserves! You have to take the good with the bad, I guess.

However, I think the cutest thing he has begun to do is his use of larger and more complex words. Some of his favorite things to say these days are:
"In a moment"
"Absolutely" (usually in conjuction with "not" - I wonder where he got that?!)
"Actually"
"In the meantime"
Hmmm. I know there are more. I'm going to have to update this later, I guess...

Where to start?

It seems like so long ago since I've written here, but it was less than a week ago. So many things have happened since then!

My parents were here for the boy's 3rd birthday. We all had a good time and we managed to finally get rid of the big pile of gravel while they were here, too.

Since the forecast was for rain on Friday, we spent Thursday afternoon taking care of most of the gravel by putting it in our neighbor's landscaping (don't worry, we discussed it with her first!). It turned out really well and used up most of the remaining pile. My dad helped us with that chore while my mom was "stuck" with the kids inside. (I don't think she minded it too much) (Well, except that she seems to have a permanent red mark on her knee from playing horsey on our hard wood floors...) And we were able to get rid of the rest of the gravel on Sunday - put another thin layer of gravel on the walkway and then saved some in the wheel barrow for anything that needs to be fixed in the next month or so.

Friday was the boy's birthday - we gave him a sandbox. We soon realized that we should have thought of this and given him the sandbox 3 weeks ago when it would have really come in handy to have the kids occupied while we were working on the walkway. Hindsight, you know.

Saturday was supposed to be the day of his party - we planned to have it at Hermann Park and go ride the little train - but Saturday morning, it poured down rain. We ended up cancelling the party and just having the family at our house, plus one of the little girls that our son plays with every day. We actually got to witness him telling her that he loves her, so that was cute. (Well, he tells everyone that he loves them, but we didn't want to burst her little 2-year-old bubble.)

On Sunday, it was time for the grandparents to head home with their camera full of pictures. The kids were sad to see them go. (and we were, too, of course!)

We had a really good visit. And tiring, too. It's kind of nice to be back at work where I don't have to be planning something, or cleaning up, or doing landscaping. Now it's back to the regular mundane life. :)