Friday, April 27, 2012

Harrietisms, Edmundisms, and How to Live in 502 Square Feet

Harriet is cracking me up these days.

At supper
Harriet (handing me her sippy cup):  Here, Mommy.  Drink cup?
Me: No, that's your cup.  See I have my own.
Harriet:  No!  Drink cup!
(I take a sip)
Harriet:  Good job, Mommy.  It's good?

While stalling at bedtime  (click here for the tune)
Harriet:  Timmy, it's Timmy...blah blah blah blah blah LOTS OF FUN!
(a few moments pass)
Donut Man, it's Donut Man...blah blah blah blah blah LOTS OF FUN!
(a few more moments filled with stifled giggles from me)
Diaper, change diaper...blah blah blah blah blah LOTS OF FUN!

In the morning right after waking
Harriet:  Ooooohhhhh, Edmund!  My sweet boy!  (big slobbery kiss on his head)

And there are lots of other funny things that she does, as well as some really naughty things that remind me that a sin nature is inherited and not learned.  But she really is the sweetest girl and I love her to pieces.  The end.

Then we come to Edmund.

Edmund laughs his head off every time I change his diaper.  It's like, "Hooray!  Mommy FINALLY figured out why I was fussing.  GO MOMMY!"

Edmund looks just like Harriet, which means that he looks just like Steve, which is creepy.  Now there are two mini-Steves existing in our home.

Edmund loves Jazzercise.  He sits there on Eleanor's lap with this pleasantly smug expression on his little face for over an hour, as happy as a clam.  I guess a bunch of sun-starved women jumping around to loud music is entertaining?  Or relaxing?  I don't know.

And finally, the house.

We live our lives of eating, sleeping, playing, whatever, in 502 square feet.  It's small, and it gets even smaller when children and their acquisitions keep piling up.  The solution to this phenomenon?  Host a Norwex party  and totally rearrange the entire house.  It's great!  Plus, when your 22-month-old child wakes up the next day and declares, "Where's the mess?" you have the reward of telling her, "Yes, Mommy does pick up...sometimes."

Steve is sitting here fidgeting so I should probably talk to him.  Happy weekend!

Friday, April 20, 2012

Friday, Friday

I have started a blog post about five times this evening.  You see, my children have both been asleep since about 9:15pm and this unexpected "me" time is freaking me out.  I honestly don't know what to do with it!  The house is a disaster.  I have a book I really want to finish reading.  I want to blog.  I need to finish the laundry.  AH!

So I have decided to to a little of all of that.  I did some dishes and got the diapers in the dryer.  I'm going to write a blog post until 10:35 and then I'll read my book for a while.

Do you ever worry about time management?  I feel like I worry about it more than managing our finances well. I'm so paranoid about wasting time, or not seizing the moment, or whatever, that some days I feel plain ol' paralyzed.  I know I'm lazy in some areas, but I also know that I definitely err on the side of being a workaholic.  Last Sunday, after we got home from church/time at the library, I made a menu, went grocery shopping, made granola and bread for the next day, cut my bangs, and read my book.  Steve said, "I just have no clue where Harriet gets her busyness.  Not a clue!"  Okay, I get his point.  I need to stop sometimes and just be.  Just rest!

I was thinking about how I used to spend hours and hours by myself in the quiet.  Sure, I may have been spending hours doing homework, but it was quiet.  No one was demanding anything of me or hanging off of my body or trying to have a conversation over Pingu.  Now?  Quiet time doesn't exist, period.  (Except for rare evenings like this.)

Motherhood has to be one of the top sanctifying experiences.

I bought a jogging stroller today.  I also learned that if you want to get more than one jogging stroller at a garage sale, you have to get there 45 minutes before the garage sale is actually set to begin.  In any case, Clara and I will share this stroller and hopefully be able to do some running on our non-Jazzercise days.  I ran for about a mile and a half this evening with E sleeping in the stroller and it felt a.mazing.  When I'm totally losing my mind in the mess and the noise, the best thing in the world is to get outside for a while.

There's Edmund now, snuffling away in bed...goodbye! Happy weekend!

Thursday, April 12, 2012

This place about to blooo-ooow....

The subject line is in reference to this horrendous song we are doing at Jazzercise, and it gets stuck in my head and I end up singing it for about a week.  Seriously, this inner/outer thigh workout is so extremely painful it's right up there with going through labor.  Even if I don't utilize my Bradley method breathing techniques during labor, at least I can put them to good use at Jazzercise.  Sheesh.  Mom also counted the number of squats we do during that song and it is 208.  Got that?  That means that this week we did a total of 624 squats.  No wonder my legs are sore.

I'm trying to be really serious about sticking with my low-carb diet these days.  The first week of cutting carbs was torture, as it usually is, but I prevailed by the grace of God and did not succumb to eating everything in the house.  Having done the low carb thing for two weeks, I have lost about 4 pounds and am about 8 pounds away from my pre-pregnancy weight goal.  When people say, "I don't know how you look so good after just having a baby!" I want to tell them a) I don't eat crap and b) I exercise my butt off.  Literally.  It's really not rocket science...just a lot of hard work.  I was also thinking about how I wouldn't be able to exercise my butt off without the gracious assistance of my family.  I have ready and willing babysitters three nights a week, and I'm so very grateful for that.  When my brain wanders, I think about how new moms really should be able to exercise but how it is basically impossible to do it when you don't have a place to plop your infant.  I would like to start an exercise facility for new moms that includes babysitting - not for big, snotty-nosed kids, but for the little ones who are especially needy.  Then moms could exercise without having a child hanging off of their body.

I have exercised with a child (that would be Harriet) hanging off of my body.  It was a very sweaty time.

Edmund is eight weeks old today!  He celebrated by being a royal crankpot all day until this evening when he busted out all of the smiles he had been avoiding all day.  His smiles are so contagious!  I splurged and bought him some Flip diaper covers yesterday.  I don't usually fall for the cloth diapering gimmicks of the world (I'm confident in my pre-fold, plastic pants, diaper pin set up), but my friend Sandy kindly gave me a Flip and I had to try it out, of course.  I really like it!  It's soft, functional, non-leaky, and expands so that E can wear it when he's five years old.  Thus, I ordered more.

The weather was pretty darn gross today.  It makes us all really grouchy.  I hope that the rest of the week shapes up to be pleasant so that Harriet and I can get outside and blow off our grouchy stink.  Oh!  We officially ordered the materials for our new privacy fence!  I'm super-duper excited.  We ended up ordering through the local lumber yard, which was surprisingly comparable to the larger chain store an hour away.  The selling point?  The local store will plop our lumber and supplies in our yard, free of charge, on the day we designate.  Awesome possum.  I cannot wait to have the fence up in the back yard.  Then I will release Harriet and Flori into the wild!  And we can have social gatherings, and a garden, and no fear of the littles running into the very busy road.

Toodles.



Thursday, April 5, 2012

Hi, friends!

True confession: I haven't blogged because Harriet lost my camera and I am heartily ashamed to show up on here without pictures of the Wee Folk who live in my home.

Seriously, I do not know where that girl stashes things.  I have looked high and low for the camera - in the trash, in the clothes hampers, in the co-sleeper pockets, under furniture -  but to no avail.  Drat, drat, and more drat.  I'm hoping that she recovers from her amnesia soon and tells me where she put it.  Until then?  Drab posts.

What's up with us these days?  I found the solution to Edmund's irritability/weird poops/constant congestion:  dairy allergy.  It all lines up so perfectly, and as soon as I stopped consuming any dairy whatsoever, his symptoms improved.  Now, some people might think, "Oh my gosh!  I can't live without dairy!"  (I would probably say the same thing about beans, since our almost-vegetarian diet requires a lot of legumes.)  But I'm already into the lactose-free world (we recently became coconut milk consumers), so this isn't that much of a sacrifice.

 I take that back: it wasn't much of a sacrifice until I realized that the dark chocolate chips that I was shoving into my mouth this afternoon contain milkfat.  Charming and delightful...NOT!  Sigh.  Steve says that we will research which chocolate types contain milk products.  Until then, I will marvel at effect that going non-dairy can have on losing that post-partum pudge.

Edmund has turned into a much happier camper lately.  He sleeps fabulously at night, takes long naps during the day, and has started entertaining us with his ridiculous facial expressions.  When he isn't plagued by the results of my eating a bunch of dairy, Edmund is so very relaxed and chill.  I feel like he is serenely surveying his surroundings and making mental notes.  He is serious, like Harriet, but he seems to be serious in a less intense way.  He is adorable and growing like a weed.  We lubs him so very much.

Harriet is crazy and we love her for it.  She can sing all of the Hide Em in Your Heart songs and say all of the introductions to the songs.  She categorizes everything: stickers, toys, writing utensils, you name it - they all have to be sorted into the right categories.  She continues to love to read and is becoming increasingly interested in longer and more involved books.  I can say a line from one of her books and she finds the correct book on the shelf.  Her current favourite is Brown Bear, Brown Bear and we read it five hundred times a day.

This is starting to sound like a Christmas letter.

Merry Maundy Thursday to all, and to all a good night!

(and I really hope I find my camera.)