Stubborn, I mean... Determined!

The boy's birthday is exactly one week after mine and since they both fall in the last part of April, that makes us both "Taurus'". Supposedly, one of the characteristics of people who fall under the Taurus astrological sign is stubbornness. This is definitely true of my son, but not of me - and you'll never convince me differently.

So, we've now got a nearly-three-year-old with a burning desire to express his will in any way possible and a 34-year-old who... well, let's just say, "isn't going to take it", living under the same roof.

This puts my husband in a kind of sticky situation most of the time. On the one hand, you've got me setting silly rules that I then feel obligated to make the boy comply with because "I'm the mommy, that's why!" and the little boy on the other hand throwing screaming temper tantrums, which I have no problem stubbornly ignoring.

Last night was one of those times we came to an impass. We were all upstairs "helping me change clothes" after I got home from work and then it was time to head downstairs to cook and eat dinner. We all headed down the stairs, but wait! The boy decides he's, in fact, not going downstairs. At this point, baby girl has already slithered her way most of the way down the stairs while I spotted her and gave her lots of encouragement about going down the stairs safely and properly.

So, the girls make it downstairs to the kitchen, while the boys are still stuck upstairs. At this point, I think my husband came downstairs for awhile, hoping the lack of company upstairs would force the boy to decide to come downstairs. Of course, this didn't work.

"Mommy, come get me!!!"
"You can come downstairs when you're ready."
"Mommy, I want you!!!"
"We're downstairs, come on down when you're ready."
"Mommy, come get me! Mommy, come get me! Mommy... Mommy.... MOMMMMMYYYYY!!!!!"

After about 5 minutes of this, my husband, sensing a complete standoff and wondering what kind of damage might be wrought by a frustrated 2.5-year-old upstairs by himself, decided it might be best to go up and talk to the boy.

Eventually, several minutes later, the boy comes running down the stairs and bursts into the kitchen yelling, "Surprise!!!" and gives me a big hug.

I exclaimed my delight at him showing up in the kitchen, hugged him back, and marveled at the husband's ability to make this scene play out. I sure hope he survives the both of us.

Table Bed

Well, as of Thursday last week, hubby's company actually owns some working interest in a few oil and gas properties! He's totally stressed out now. I was thinking that he would be all happy and excited about this prospect and now that it's done, he's turning psycho! I guess that's what owning a business does to you. :)

As a part of starting his own company, he's slowly turning our guest bedroom into his office and part of that process involved buying a table bed. The husband has always wanted a murphy bed and I'm now convinced the whole reason he wanted to start his own company was just so that he would have an excuse to convert the downstairs room and get one like this!

Anyway, the table bed showed up (in 7 flat boxes) on Friday, so we spent our free time (naptime and after-bedtime) attempting to put the thing together. There are 17 steps in the assembly of said bed and each step comes with a separate bag of hardware required for the assembly. The instructions actually say to PLEASE follow the directions. "Even if you're the type of person who likes to figure things out on your own, please follow these directions. The assembly is NOT intuitive."

So, armed with the checklist and the 400 pages of instructions, we set about putting it together. It really isn't that bad - it's very well-presented and easy to follow. The problem is that the thing weighs about 56,000 pounds, making the individual pieces of the bed around 3,000 pounds each. And as you can see from the picture, it's also quite a formidable sized piece of furniture, so trying to get all those individual pieces wrestled around in our room has been kind of challenging.

We managed to get the thing about halfway done yesterday - we made it to step number 8, I think.

Best quote of the day came from hubby: "They probably don't really have to be that tight (referring to the set of screws we were working on). I'm sure they're overkill, anyway." and as I started laughing, he added, "I mean, don't you think they probably could have gotten by with 20 screws for this part instead of 26?"

Good logic. We build strong table bed.

Test Results!

Well, if we can trust the pages that we printed on our inkjet printer last night, the boy doesn't seem to be color-deficient. It took him a little while to see one of the "faint brown" shapes, but he seems to have seen them all. So, it's not that he can't see the colors, he just gets them mixed up. I guess that's better. ???

We then spent the rest of the night testing him with different things, too. "What color is the truck?" "Which book is green?" Poor little boy - if he didn't think we were crazy, he surely does now.

Red or Green?

So, I'm worried that baby boy may be red/green color-blind. My husband tells me that the boy doesn't have a problem and that he only messes up those colors when I'm around. But it just continues to happen, so I'm beginning to really wonder.

The other day I was wearing a red shirt and asked him what color it was. "Green!!" Are you sure? "Yes!" Hmmmm.....

So, I found these tests online that I'm going to try to print out tonight and see if he can see the shapes. I hope so, but I just don't know.

I've been reading information about color-deficiencies and it's not really that big of a deal, but right now, if he's actually color deficient, I wonder if he thinks we're just messing with his mind, telling him that the same color has 5 different names!

I wonder what the Christmas tree looked like to him...

The stats

Ok, here are the stats from baby girl's visit to the doctor:

Height: 30.75" (60th percentile)
Weight: 20 lbs, 11 oz (15th percentile)

But husband swears that she's actually a little taller than that - they didn't do a good job of stretching her out. :) (I wasn't able to go to the check-up)

So, it looks like she's still kind of tall and skinny. Although last night she looked like she had the biggest beer belly sticking out over her pants. And when I commented on it to her, she grabbed and rubbed her belly - it was so funny!

She got three vaccinations, including the chicken pox one. I still think that's silly - I think kids should just get the chicken pox and be done with it - but the doctor swears there's a higher and higher incidence of bacterial infections in the sores, including the flesh-eating bacteria, and they don't want to take those risks. Ok, whatever.

In other news about baby girl, she now says several words very clearly. Including "airplane!" And she will always very deliberately put down her fork/spoon and make the sign for "more" when I ask her if she wants more of something she's eating. Now, don't ever try to get her to actually say or do any of this on demand, however. She seems to suffer from acute perfomance anxiety and I don't like to put her through that. :)

Actually, I always feel like I'm trying to convince people we own a talking cat (or similar) whenever we try to get her to do something. "Really, the cat talks - I'm not crazy!!! Just wait a few minutes. She'll do it right when you turn away. There - did you hear that?! No? Wait for it...." And she just sits there with a completely blank stare.

Anyway, it's just about the weekend and it couldn't come any more quickly. Too bad I'm going to have to take work home to do over the weekend. But at least I get paid for it...

Yellow Curry and Naptime

I just ate some yellow curry from Thai Spice for lunch (leftovers), so I estimate that I have about an hour before I get the hated garlic-breath. Anyone want to kiss me real quick before that?... Anyone? Anyone?...

Also, I have never seen (or heard, for that matter) so many people sleeping at their desks as I have in the last 4 months.

That is all.

Fever Update

Luckily, we did not end up (pun intented) attempting to give the boy a suppository for his fever. We finally decided that since he was acting fine and still drinking fluids that maybe it wasn't really necessary to reduce his fever. And it went away on its own. Yesterday there was no fever and he started eating a little bit again. Hopefully today, he'll be hungry again and back to his usual big-portion-eating self.

The nanny called in sick yesterday, so hubby and the kids actually came to my office for lunch and general work-disruption on my floor. After we ate our lunch down in the cafeteria, we came up to my office so that baby boy could help me feed my fish. He was really mad when I came back to work last June and brought one of the fish tanks back with me, so he always asks me about them when I talk about the office. "You have your fish there?" It's very cute.

Anyway, it's always fun to bring the kids up here and cause a little mayhem to break up everyone's workday. Aside from one screaming fit by baby boy when I took away the choking hazard, I mean, hard candy someone gave him, we managed to not cause too much of a scene, and it's always fun then to have everyone tell you how cute your kids are afterwards. :)

Today we have to take baby girl for her 15-month checkup and shots. Should be fun.

Fever

The boy is now sick. He has a fever, but it doesn't seem to be slowing him down much. He obviously felt bad last night at 10:30 when he woke up, but I forced some medicine into him (by holding him down and shoving it into his mouth, making him gag and choke, and causing me to wonder if this proves that I'm a horrible mother for making him do this, or actually a caring mother who only wants to make her little boy feel better...) and then he felt well enough to keep his father in his room with him until 1:00 when he FINALLY gave up the ghost and went to sleep for good.

I've been trying to figure out if I should get some of those children's Tylenol meltaways, but I'm fairly certain he wouldn't allow those to pass through his lips, either. I checked all kinds of medical websites regarding fever and they all say that if the fever is "moderate" (for kids ~102F) - which is what his has been - and it doesn't seem to be bothering the child, then you should just watch it for a couple of days and then go to the doctor if it doesn't go away.

I called our doctor, however, and talked to his nurse and she said, "Oh no - you should try to get his fever down. Go get some fever reducing suppositories. They're over-the-counter."

I'm not so sure I want to find out how those will go over. If we actually decide to attempt that, I'll let you know how it went - that is, if I'm still alive after that struggle...

Two questions

Ok, I've got two questions for you today:

Q1 - What is the most important kitchen appliance to you? The one you just can't do without?

A1 - Allright, you got me - it's the refrigerator. But second and only slightly less important is the microwave. Ours broke on us today. It's amazing to think about all the things you can't do when you don't have a microwave. Like heat up water to warm a bottle, or melt cheese on a sandwich for the kiddos, or heat anything else they might have for lunch or supper.

Can you imagine what it must have been like before the microwave was invented?! I can - when I was growing up, I vividly remember my mother having to re-heat macaroni and cheese in a pot with extra milk in it so that it wouldn't burn to the bottom of the pot. Talk about the dark ages...

I guess we'll get it fixed instead of buying a new microwave, which would then make us have to buy all new appliances because what would be the point of buying a not-in-fashion, non-stainless steel microwave if we were going to buy a new microwave? Then if we had a stainless steel microwave, then we'd need to buy a new oven (they're installed right next to each other, afterall) and then we couldn't have just an oasis of stainless steel in our kitchen, we'd have to re-do the whole thing. So, it makes perfect sense to get the thing fixed for $200 instead of spending thousands to get all new appliances, right? Ugh.

Q2 - Is it worse to get caught a) surfing the internet or b) sleeping when you're supposed to be working?

A2 - I'm not sure, but since I never get caught sleeping at my desk, I'm going to say that's the worse evil. Anyone else have any thoughts?

Cicero was born today in 106 B.C.

According to my Half Price Books 2006 calendar, it's Cicero's birthday today! (and also JRR Tolkein, but I thought that wasn't quite as interesting.)

Finally - my first post of 2006. I'm sure you've all been on the edge of your seat waiting for this!

Well, a lot has happened since the last time I posted anything. Christmas came and went, New Year's came and went, and still everything is pretty much the same. Isn't that depressing every year?...

Anyway, Christmas was a good time. Baby Boy got his blue bike and absolutely loves it. He even rode it about 4 miles on the second day he had it! (On the weekends, we go eat bagels at a local bagel shop, so we let him ride his bike to and from the bagel shop - about 4 miles roundtrip!) Since then, he's gotten a little less adament about eating every meal on it, however. I think it must have been a little too much for him!

During the week between Christmas and New Year's, Baby Girl got sick and we ended up getting antibiotics for her. This is actually the first time either of the kids have had to have antibiotics in their lifetime - it was bound to happen sometime! She got better almost immediately after taking the medicine, so that was pretty cool. I can't imagine what it must have been like for parents before the discovery of antibiotics!

And then my parents came down to celebrate Christmas and New Year's on Wednesday last week. The visit started off with the Huskers winning their game and it just got better from there! We exchanged gifts on Thursday and Baby Boy got a pair of bicycling gloves from grandma and grandpa, which have now become part of his standard clothing every day.

Both the kids loved having their grandma and grandpa there. They finally had enough people around them to give them enough attention that there really wasn't anything to complain about. It was soooo nice. Every morning started off with Baby Boy asking me, "Where's Grandma? Let's go find her!!" He stopped asking about his bicycle each morning after grandma and grandpa arrived. Now that must be love. :)

Grandma and Grandpa left on Sunday, but I still had one more day off from work. The big question was: should we have the nanny come so that we could have a day off to spend cleaning up the house, or should we just hang out with the kids for one more day? Luckily, we came to our senses and decided that we should spend the time with the kids - life is too short to waste it cleaning the house, right?!!

All in all, it was a good vacation. I hope it was good for everyone else, too!!