Socks!

I caught her pulling all the socks off the laundry rack and trying to put them on her foot. I had to sneak up on her to catch a glimpse before she came charging at me for the phone.

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OMG! I'm Late! ... Oh Wait, It's The Weekend

You know those mornings where you find yourself leaping up out of bed at 8:30 in the morning, run half way to the bathroom before realizing it's a Saturday only to crawl back into bed to go back to sleep? You working folks know exactly what I'm talking about. The Jellybean totally had one of those moments today. She went to bed around her usual time and I was just laying there with her fiddling with my phone when suddenly she leaps up out of her sleep to waddle over to the door like she was missing something. She stares at the light creeping under the door for a moment, looks back to where I'm laying down and crawls back to where I am, flops on top of me and promptly falls back to sleep. It was so totally one of those "Holy Crud, I'm Late!" reactions. I mean, what could she possibly have been thinking or dreaming about? "Oh no! What if there's no more milk left in the morning for me!?!". I'm still laughing about it. Hahaha. Funny kid.

Cleaner

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Happy Birthday, Hunter!

I think we are done with first birthdays for a while. It has been a crazy, crazy period of about a year. Baby boom galore. It was shower after shower. Then when the kiddies started coming along, birthdays after birthdays. 

A truly big, big thank you to Corina. I am still sucking on those lolli-cakes you brought me. MMMMM~



And the birthday boy, happy as ever. Happy Birthday, Hunter! Sorry, Phil. Your head got cut off here... But then, it was Hunter's day after all. Not Hunter's DAD'S day, ya know?



She looks a tad frumpy here, but really, she was just being nosy. She wanted to see what was going on past daddy's camera

My little Trooper


All in all, it was a great time, but I have to say - these parties can be draining. The little Jellybean goes to noone. That leaves mommy on patrol from the moment we leave the house right up until the moment we return. She won't sit still, but she won't let anyone else hold her - EVER - anymore. On the flip side, while she gets a bit clingy, I can't complain too much because it can be so much worse and it seldom gets to that point. Despite the fact that she was exhausted and we didn't get home until well past her bedtime, she was truly a great sport. Good job, Jellybean. Great party, Kang-er Family!

Just Two More

We had a house full of kids, and I realized, this...

and, this...

and, this...

is what it must be like in a household with triplets except it would be one adult against three energy balls. Odds not so good, me thinks. I'm sure it's a little different with children of different ages, but the three that took over this home today are all about the same age. In fact, Brian was born only a half a day before Squirmy, and Ryan is about 17 months (a rounded guess). Wow! What a tornado!

Every time we have a playdate with other boys, I realize just how different my girl is from the boys. The boys throw, snatch things away from eachother, fight for the toy the other one is playing with while my girl - she picks up the ball and hands it over. If something gets snatched from her, she moves on over to something else with hardly a care. She also spends more time obsessively inspecting bags or cleaning the floor.

 How...

(a tad out of focus there)

...interesting~

OOOH! P.S. She pee pee-d in the potty! I've never been so excited about pee before. In. My. Life.

What Does Motherhood Mean?

It means:



having to wash 52 rainbow squares and letters each week



washing bottles and sippy cups and binkies all day



buying every sippy cup available on the market until you find one your kid finally takes



spending the wee hours of the night cutting slits into all the binkies in hopes of weaning your kid off of them and hiding the ones you're keeping "just in case"



having to wear these to sleep as a temporary fix for all the blisters you end up with on your fingers from prolonged water exposure



To all the mommies out there, a big kudos because mommies need praise too and a good pat on the back every now and again. The bars are set high for a lot of moms out there. Too high sometimes. I can't speak for anyone else, but with all that I feel I do now, there are many more things I feel I "should" be doing that I just can't get around to. The days lack the amount of hours I need to get everything I want done. I also think society in whole sets the bar too high that we feel we should be that "super mom" and so what we do manage to get done is hardly "good enough". It is true that not all women are, or choose to be, homemakers anymore. More women now than ever before stand tall in highly respectable positions, have high powered jobs and social stasuses. However, once she has a baby, (I think) it is still expected of them (a subconscious expectation even - of themselves and others alike) to not only hold their positions in their social and publicly known status, but also remain capable of running in perfection with everything from home made dinners, a perfectly behaved kid, a spotless home and never have a hair out of place. That may be an extreme example, but I personally don't think it's that far fetched. I stay home with my daughter and sporadically do some work from home, and most days I'm still disheveled, barely conscious, constantly cleaning, feeding, changing, running after her, and it's far from easy. It's worth it, but it's not without cost. So - Kudos mommies!

Water Funness

These are one of my favorite times a day. Bathtime! It's pretty safe to assume that it's probably the best 20-30 minutes of every day for Squirmy too. Maybe it's because I took her swimming very early - a week shy of her 6th month mark. I only waited that long because the classes didn't allow babies younger than 6 months. Maybe she was born with a love for water, but whatever the case, bathtime is one of the best parts of any given day for the both of us.

Baby Processer

You ever wonder what your baby is trying to say when they're babbling "gah" "bah bah" "mumumum". I mean, they must mean something, yes? Squirmy will point to an object and enthusiastically say "bah bah bah bwwah!" and seem disappointed somehow when I am staring back at her with a blank look on my face so I try to quickly recover and smile, but by then, the moment has passed. This is one of the many reasons why I thought to teach her sign language - to understand some of this indecipherable language. I want to know what she is talking about! Anyway, until only a week ago, she was mimicking signs rather well, but it was pretty clear that she didn't really know what she was signing all of the time. She was limited to "more, milk, and all done" which she got right away, but signed a lot of other things at random times. For instance, she would throw the ball across the room, sign potty and start clapping super excitedly; or, eat a cracker and sign hat. Then when I least expected, as I was showing her a picture of my friend's new daughter and said "Look Leah, Baby!", she looks over at me in that moment and signs "baby". Now the words, the signs and its meanings are coming together in her little brain, and it's so exciting to watch. Babies are pretty amazing creatures and I am all the more convinced that they know so much more than we big people give them credit for.



Snow Bunny!

Doesn't she look so determined?



Bad?

Am I the only Mommy failure that was not aware that carseats and basically any baby gear has expiration dates? Stickers on some of the baby gear actually read "Do Not Use After xx/xx/xxxx". Huh.

Cheater

This was taken forever ago so I suppose you can call it cheating, but she doesn't look much different today than a month ago so I think it counts as a new post photo.

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Baby Donations

Baby items, that is. No, please do not drop off any of your babies for donation. All items must be in good and current (enough) condition. It's not much, but you MAY get 25% in cash of the cost of the item if you're too cheap to donate for free. Clothes, gadgets, toys, blankets, baby gear - carriers, strollers and the like. They can be dropped off here or if you're not too far out of the way, picked up by yours truly - so do email me. It's for a good cause. For those of you who do not have kids, ignore me. For those of you who do have kids, but just don't feel like it, get off your lazy a$$es and do something good this winter. Thanks bunches! No photos. I haven't gotten off my own lazy arse to do any of the photo taking and loading. I'm working on it!

One Step Back

We made progress. We did. She was off the bottle for a good part of the day. I would give her one or two of the 4 bottles and replaced the others with a straw sippy. She was fine. All of a sudden, the whole milk thing happened and a) she no likey whole milk so much and b) she no likey her sippy anymore either. I caved because she wouldn't eat and gave her a bottle. Drats! Once she was completely off the bottle, I intended to wean her of the binky. Looks like we took a step back. Ah well. The thing is, it secretly makes me happy and not so happy at the same time. It's work trying to get your kid ready for the next steps of her milestone stage. Taking away of the bottles and binky really ends the "baby" stage, and I'm not ready for that toddle being stage yet, except that she's already there. She's gotten so big in what seems like such a short amount of time, and I don't really know where exactly it all went, and a part of me misses it. I love the right now of where Squirmy is. She's active, she communicates, the girly girl side of her is so, sooo endearing and she's at a very fun stage, albeit rather exhausting. But every so often, -- okay, everyday really, I look down at her sleeping form and wonder where the time went from being baby to such a big little girl.

Got Milk?

We are officially on whole milk. Squirmy is a tad lactose intolerant so I wanted to start her off with Soy Milk and gradually mix in the whole milk. Upon reading some reviews, I got hit with, "Soy milk is not actually milk. Soy [beans] do not have nipples - it's a marketing ploy". But then, coconuts don't have nipples either, and I haven't heard anyone debate coconut milk being called coconut milk as opposed to what, coconut juice? coconut water? coconut spit? Fascinating... Also, I'm watching Squirmy babble speak in her sleep. Awesome. Totally useless post today.

Perfection

Of the thousands of baby items used (not including apparel), sampled, bought, returned within the one year that Little has been alive, there have only been 3 4 things I have purchased for her that I did not regret buying. The snap n go, the ventaire bottles and her carseat (add to that the joovy room2. It's the thing that holds Squirmy so that I can shower most mornings). Everything else, I've used or kept because there was nothing else to replace it with that was better. The folks that make the majority of baby things must not be moms. Strollers and diaper bag designs are my biggest complaints.

Let's start with the diaper bags. My jujube weighs in at 4-pounds. EMPTY. Add a few diapers, a change of clothes, her toys, food, snack and bottles, some spoons, bibs, and burp cloths, a small blanket and my wallet, there's 7-pounds for ya. This is what I have to carry around with me while toting a 20 pound kid and an 18 pound stroller. What the hell are you people thinking when you're making this stuff??? Pockets are great! Thermal bottle holders are fantastic! All pretty damn useless if you can't use the bag, though. That's a complaint of only one of the thousands of diaper bags that exist, that I have bought returned, bought returned, bought returned.

Now, on to the stroller rant. Moms carry a ton of crap. Make the basket fit all the things the mommies need to carry. Oh, wait, they exist don't they? But the strollers that come with decent storage weighs more than my kid! So I get a lightweight stroller that fits nothing and have to buy a crap ton of accessories to hang off the stroller to make everything fit because while there is a basket, it doesn't fit half the stuff I need and what I can shove into what they call a basket, it is impossible to get out because what I need is almost always stuck at the bottom of all the other stuff (although, to be fair to the non-mommy stroller/diaper bag manufacturers out there, this was less of a complaint during the past warmer months as I didn't have as much luggage. That, and my baby weighed half of what she weighs today and wore less clothes). Maybe Yes, I'm neurotic, but I don't think my personal issues are the problem here. The mechanics of this stuff is just all wrong. Dammit.

K, Vent over.

Happy New Year

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