Before I forget...

Although today is my son's birthday, I wanted to blog that my daughter learned how to read last week and tonight her bottom teeth seem loose and her gums swollen! I think she is going to get her adult teeth pretty soon! It's been a big month of changes as the kids are both growing quickly this month and they are taller then their peers. In fact, as of yesterday my little guy was 2, and I had to buy him 5t shirts to fit over his big head! My girl is 4 and a half and she seems to be moving into a size 7! How is that possible? I think it might be all the fruit and vegetables we've been feeding them. Or it might be genetics. At any rate, they are precious to me and I am so glad to be their mom.  

My Little Man and His Big Thoughts

To My Dear Son,

You were born today 3 years ago just a few blocks from our house. It was in the morning and you were eager to get out and I was eager to meet you! You were surprisingly blond haired and you slept quite a bit. I was so surprised about those two things since you were so opposite of Sarah! Or maybe I had changed a lot in the 22 months between you. 

These last 6 months have been a whirlwind of change my little man! Your language development surprises everyone and just a little while ago you called across the Birthday party to say, "Mom! Look, I'm ranging!" I think you meant "arranging" and I was amazed you knew what the word meant! You were trying to tell me you knew how to work with the tools and I giggled with Ms. Codi about it. You just delight me little man. You talk all the time these days and when Sarah holds the conversation for too long you just get louder and louder! It's funny now, but I don't know about it in a year. My favorite things from the last few months are:

1.) Naming your very first imaginary animal friend - a cat named Roodles. Although you say "magination". So cute. 

2.) Making connections about things you see and telling us all out loud. It is so great to hear your mind working and identifying one thing and remembering you've seen the same thing somewhere else.

3.) Saying to me in a cross voice, "Mom, I love you." Sort of like it's a statement like "I don't like peas." It's so funny and endearing to me to hear you say it like that. It's like you want to tell me, but not in a sweet and girly way. It's so like you to do it on your own. In your own way.

4.) You are really starting to like stories read to you. Before you liked me to make up songs to you before bed, but now you actually sit up and look at the pages of the book as I read aloud. It's so, precious to be the deliverer of stories and information for you. I feel like I have a honored position, to be the steward of your stories! 

5.) Your prayer every time we pray, "Dear Jesus, fank you for my Mom an my Dad an Sarah an Amen." Sometime you add Ali and Jack too.

6.) You crawl all over me all the time! I know it won't last so I try to let you crawl on me as much as I can handle it. You are a total wiggle worm, but you are sweet and like to be with me. I'll take that in a heart beat!

7.) You laugh lights up my heart. You sort of giggle, but when your Daddy gets to tickling you under your chin- you are a crack up! It's so great! You also laugh a lot when you are surprised. It's so awesome!

8.) You went tinkle in the potty this week! Last Monday you did the deed and you've been really trying ever since. It's so great to see this milestone and a tiny bit sad since this is the last vestige of your baby-ness. I will miss it, but I know you need to grow.

9.) You eat bananas every day. I think it's because you can get up to the counter and get one yourself. But it's great and you are awfully cute about it all .Plus you eat just about every fruit I put in front of you- except peaches! We gave you one this week and it came right back out of your mouth! I think you don't prefer the texture. It was funny to see your face when you realized you didn't like it. It cracked me up and I relented. I mean, no one can like every fruit, right?

10.) You act like a baby kitty all the time. All. The. Time. It's the first sound I hear when I wake up and the sound I hear all the time. I give you an instruction and and I hear, "Meow, meow, Ok Mom." Why you love cats, I don't know. I should get you on camera being a cat. That will crack your wife up some day. Think I'll do that tomorrow.

Little man, you had a big birthday today. You had a car cake and balloons and party hats and chicken nuggets (or as we call them mom-ugnets ). You played with your friends and had a great party. And you even shared your Orange-y gum with all the guests at the party. Good job growing up little man. I love almost every minute of it. I cannot imagine our lives without you my son. What joy and delight we would have missed. Thank you Lord for such a happy and delightful little boy.  I love you with all I have little man. 

Love, Your Mom. 

 

Forgetting to Blog

Yikes! It's been over a month! So sorry to my one reader! And my children who will someday read this and then laugh at me. It's been a crazy month around here. My girl finishes her first year of preschool tomorrow. Then we are doing "Manners School" for a while. It seems the children I know (ahem, I mean that I parent) have reverted back to animals lately. So we are going back to the basics of manners and expectations. I'll let you know how it goes...

We're working on the yard a lot this spring. It's more the final 10% that needs to be done like the last of the bark, weeding here and there. Not many capital changes, save the last piece of fence to go in on the side yard. When that goes in and I get a locking door on the shed my life will be SO MUCH EASIER. I won't sweat it when my kids are in the yard and my back is turned. Like today when I turned away to pull a weed and my little guy took a swing seat to the cheekbone. He's fine over all, but it turned into a major event. My girl has a way of making everything about her and needs some work on self control in times like that. At this point it annoys me and I had a hard time drumming up the calm and cheerful demeanor to help her through her grief that her disobedience caused such injury to her brother. Sheesh. Hope he forgets this or else they are going to be in therapy for a loooooonnng time.

Oh, I have been reading another blog called Afterthoughts. The author Brandy reads a lot of Wendell Berry and she writes about how the earth wants to be covered. Our desire to keep it barren is against it's nature. So they are experimenting with groundcover gardening. It's where there is always something planted in the beds, and when you want a vegetable to grow there you simply cut out a small part of the ground cover and put in the plant. The cover acts as a weed barrier, a natural water retention program and a pest control with nitrogen in the soil from the roots. Very smart if you ask me...

That's all I have for now. Enjoy this photo of my little man. He's such a star (if I can ever get this to load up...).

I love a good pressure cooker

We are down to the last 8 packages of beef in our freezer. This is a good thing since the meat was butchered over 15 months ago and it seems to have suffered some freezer burn. The ground beef has been fine but the steaks have a bizarre taste- almost like fish. Yet it's only the fat on the meat. The muscle tastes fine when I cut off all the fat completely. So I take out a hunk of beef and thaw it. Then I spend a lot of time trimming it and then trying to come up with a recipe that will mask any lingering weird taste. So far we've had good luck with a curry and pot roast. That's where the pressure cooker comes in. If I sear the meat in the pressure cooker before I put the lid on then all I add is spices and water and lock the top. Then I put it on the stove and let it heat up to the proper pressure and then cook it until perfection. I cool down the whole cooker in my sink with ice water until the pressure is at zero and I can open the top.

My cooker is also a canner and I can use it to can meats and highly acidic foods that cannot be water bath processed. Oh how I love that thing. I got it on super sale at Fred Meyers and it was less then 40% of it's regular price. It's awesome to pop in food and watch it cook in about 35% of the time it would otherwise. I suspect I saved about 6 hours using it yesterday. That piece of meat was huge and it would have been in the crock pot or oven for 8 hours or more.

I highly suggest everyone get a canner/pressure cooker for their kitchen. They are great to use and save time and energy. I'm all for that.

My Favorite Time of the Year

This is the picture looking up at my favorite tree during the spring. I think it's a fruitless cherry and it is in my neighbors yard. For a few days in the spring it is an explosion of white snowy blossoms that seems to fill the sky. I took this picture looking up in the late afternoon and also a close up so you can see what I love. My kids and I call it, "The Snowball Tree". When the petals fall it's like a snowy day with the little white snowflake petals swirling to the ground. It's magical.

Bit by Bit

Our church is gearing up for their yearly garage sale which is actually held in the Barn. Maybe we should rename it. At any rate I've had a pile of things downstairs for about a month and I finally had to cover it with a sheet to keep the kids from getting into it. I took quite a few boxes over a few days ago and then I took a big box to the kid resale store as well. Hopefully I will get some store credit I can use! Since it was mostly toys we took over, I think I will let them choose some new toys in the summer when they get bored and need some new and shiny.

With all the shedding and sorting and loading OUT of the house...somehow I feel much lighter already! I also promised the last of my maternity clothes to a lady at my eye Doctor's office and I still have a bag of nice size 10 shoes to do something with. Tis the season to shed the stuff.

I've found that it's so much easier to function when we have less. I cleaned out the pantry yesterday and sorted and threw away what was old. It looks great and it is much easier to find things. I tried to get the whole kitchen cleaned...but with the ants taking up residence I battled them instead. Since my girl is home with a fever I think I might get to the kitchen counters today as well. It's bit by bit around here.

My son is having atmospheric tantrums as of late. You know the ones where you think, "I'm not sure Dr. Dobson ever met one like this...." It's crazy. I realized that I won't be able to out-man him for much longer. He is a very strong kid and VERY DETERMINED. Ahem. He's just like his father like that. When he decides his mind...there is no outside force that can change it. He might relent in action, but his mind will not change lest he decide to do so. Since my son is 2 we've been trying to find more ways for him to "do it myself" as he says. So I am trying to chill out about him taking things off the counters, and allow him to use pencils to draw, dress himself (if I have the hour) and help around the house in general. At other times he just wants to be babied. He wants to be carried and he wants to play pretend baby puppy or kitty. He wants to snuggle with me and be held a lot. So he seems to be straddling toddlerhood and babyhood. He seems torn on the inside about what he wants. And oh man...is that struggle unfun for me! He just rages at times during timeouts and when he loses his chance at things. It's hard for him to understand that an opportunity doesn't last forever. 10 minutes is just that. Then it's time to move on. We cannot wait on him. It's hard to decide to do a thing AFTER your mother has declared the consequence and then believe it's the same as you having done the thing before the consequence. Like changing your mind is the same thing as doing the action when it was asked. As a man once told me, "Delayed obedience IS disobedience." So it's hard to be 2 around here and thankfully I have a lot of experienced moms around me to coach me through this season. I know from my first child that the season of baby kitties and snuggles and being held by mommy does not last forever. Right now he just came in the kitchen singing "I going to color" and then proceeded to get out the crayons and get into a chair and start coloring. He's so big. And yet he's so small! Sigh. Is this what we are like before the Lord? Resisting our growth and throwing tantrums before God? I wonder...I really wonder.

Some days are like this:

You run out of coffee and then you forget the littlest one's sweatshirt. Then your contacts get all cloudy and dry right after you put them in. Then when you are taking a 96 second bathroom break your daughter comes in and announces, "Mom, I killed all the ants dead for you." and you forget to congratulate her on her bravery because you get sidetracked on where the ants are. So then you spend half an hour with the vacuum downstairs getting all the little ants on the carpet that were seeking out the dirty car seat parked in the middle of the room and you have to spray Raid into the nozzle of the vacuum just to make sure those suckers are dead. Then you make a nice dinner with some zucchini and decide to make your kids eat one single bite before dinner was over. Your 2 year old son holds it in his mouth for about 10 minutes as you try to entice him to swallow the bite. So then you take out the chocolate covered raisins and tell him he can't have any until he swallows the vegetable. You try to say it nonchalantly as he is coughing with his mouth closed. He then throws up on his dinner plate and says, " Canna have chocolate raisins now?" and you just pick up the plate and hand over the raisins.

Sickness and Churchless

My little guy is on the tail end of a 4 day run of fevers and runny nose. It's like a faucet is turned on up in there. He is in a good mood most of the time, cries a lot when he is feeling the temp go up and is sacked out like a light when he has some Motrin and a comfy pillow. Last night he was a riot around 8:45 pm when he came downstairs to tell me he was hungry. So I gave him some milk and some pretzels (for the salt loss) and he just talked a mile a minute. The motrin had brought his fever back down to normal and he was just a delight to sit with while he ate. He is so sweet!

My darling daughter is at church as we speak, since my sister in law came and picked her up since I can't take the little guy to church. She is so very sweet and she loves to learn about the Lord and to be with her friends from her class. She got her bangs cut yesterday (she is growing her hair out to look like Arial from the Little Mermaid) and she asked me if she looked like she was 4 or if she was 5. I told her she looked more like she was 5 lately. Her little heart is more like 4, but her mind and height is more like 5. Oh how I love that girl!

I wish I had something profound to post, but I do not. This is just a "in the trenches" post about our little daily lives. Thankfully my husband comes home tonight from his trip. I really look forward to that...I need a work out. Oh, and tomorrow is Spring Break which means I have the week off of work. WOOHOO!

Coolest T Shirt Ever.

My husband goes on a trip with his family every year to Reno. They always make mixed cd's for the trip with various themes. This year it was "Guilty Pleasures" where each guy had to submit 3 songs they like but would be mortified if any other guy knew. We joked about the "Mortification Tour" a few months ago and that's when the lightbulb went off and I knew it had to be a t-shirt. My friend Cody (who is seriously cool) designed the logo lettering and we had a winner. I was the one who got to mix the set of embarrassing songs and can I just say there were 3 George Michaels songs? One Miley Cyrus, one Hanson, one Aha and two, count em' TWO New Kids On the Block Songs. I actually had to buy one from Amazon. A complete waste of 99 cents I am sure. Image is copywrited. Just so you know.