A little bragging

My boy is oh so smart. This morning while I was changing his diaper he said, "daddy working". Then I said, "that's right, daddy's at work". Then he said, "Mimi also working". That is his aunt and she was indeed working today! He is also starting to understand the concepts of later and after and attempts to bargain by requesting that he do something "after". Example: "Cake"! "you cannot have cake, you haven't eaten dinner". Cake after dinner"? "We'll see".

Homeschooling

I do not feel supported in my decision to homeschool. Everytime I bring it up in front of most people, I get a face. It's not like I'm going to raise my children to be Nazi sympathizers. I just want control over how my children are educated. I will not keep them from other children, I fully intend for them to participate in sports and music programs. What's the big deal?

Hurt

The toddler is a little master of disaster lately. Yesterday he got his little fingers closed in the door, today he banged his mouth drinking water (don't ask), then he skinned his knees (again), then he skinned his elbow, followed by falling backward in a chair and bonking his head. I can't turn around for a second or he's climbed up to the breakfast bar or is standing on the railing, argh. Poor little guy, but I can't keep a bandaid on him and he NEVER forgets an injury.

I think I may have found it

As you may know, we have been thinking, quite seriously, about finally buying our first home. There are a great deal of hurdles in our way: not having the full 20%, housing prices being out of this world expensive, my hating this area with a passion, etc. I also want to be as close to my parents as possible and have the husband's communte be something managable. We took a road trip on Sunday to a town called Warrenton and I am completely and utterly in love. This town has everything that I am looking for: It is NOT repeat NOT considered northern Virginia, it has great small town appeal, but also has grocery stores and a Walmart (I know I'm a sellout, but their prices are great), beautiful scenery, many outdoor activities very close by. It seems like an absolutely wonderful place to raise a family. The only problem that I have is that it is 45 minutes away from my parents and about a 45 min-an hour commute for hubsters. We will still probably have to buy a foreclosure, but it will be a foreclosure with an acre of land. What to do, what to do?

Surprise: A strong gag reflex is hereditary!

The toddler woke up with a fever this morning. I wasn't too concerned, but it did get a little high (103!) around lunchtime so I called the Dr. for a same day. By the time we went to the appointment his fever was down a degree and a half but he was very lethargic (which is so not him). His ears and throat looked okay but the Dr. checked for strep just in case. He did not like that one bit and started gagging. A few seconds later I'm catching puke in my hands. It's okay because I had my hands out like little bowls, so I was saying, "here are two bowls son, throw up in these". But anyway, the Dr. just kind of stares for a minute, beacause an adult amount of stomach content came out. She finally grabbed one of those bowls, but it was really too late for that. My poor baby was really upset by this time and we were both soaked in it. Did I mention that all he had eaten/drank that day was milk. Oh yeah, picture the stench. WE had to wait for the results of the strep test (only 10 minutes, did I mention that I LOVE his new pediatrician), so we had to sit in our our stink with him screaming his head off waiting for the results. I was sitting in a chair with him in my lap and he kept wanting to switch chairs. So I would sit in one chair and get him settled and then he would point to another chair and say, "lap". The prognosis is good, general baby sickness. They seemed kind of taken aback that I hadn't given him and motrin or tylenol until this point and told me to give him some until the fever broke. So, he's napping now, hopefully he wakes up feeling a little better. My poor little guy, I hate it when he's not feeling good.

Oh, the excitment

The toddler locked himself in the bathroom yesterday afternoon. Once I realized what happened I ran to grab a q-tip to shove into the knob and, oh right it isn't that type of lock. Fighting the urge to kick the door open, and accidentally knock the boy unconcious, I ran for the tool box. As I was unscrewing the knob from the door and fighting the urge to call the fire department, the toddler was gragging the knob and crying to get out. After just a few minutes I was able to remove the knob and get into the bathroom to retrieve my near hysterical little man. The fun never stops when you have a very curious toddler!

The time has come, the walrus said

I've finally weaned the baby. Today was the first day of no nursing and I am incredibly sad. I know that it's silly, the baby isn't a baby at all anymore, he's nearly 18 months. Still, it was the one thing that I could do for him that no one else could, I feel a huge sense of loss here. The baby didn't seem to mind too much, I guess it was time. My body was telling me the same thing, by almost completely cutting off my milk production. Okay body, I got it, happy now?

The baby bug

Well, it was bound to happen one of these days, or was it? After Liam's birth and early months I'm surprised that I'm so eager to do it all again. I also thought that I would want a big space between our kids, but I am so ready to do it all again. I wasn't even thinking about it until the husband brought it up a few weeks ago, now I think about it a whole lot. It doesn't make sense for us to have another one right now, we don't have the space. Hopefully the hubs and I will be able to figure out how to buy a house next year so we can get out of this stupid apartment. I feel too old to be living in an apartment, stupid expensive northern virginia, always bleeding us dry. But back to my point, we love the baby so much and he loves babies so much, it just makes sense. Plus, the baby is never going to have any cousins so we'll have to keep adding until we have a bunch.

Too Lazy

I have commited myself to a 5K on June 6. I have almost exactly 3 months to train and prepare for this, but I have one big problem; I cannot run for more than 4 minutes without having to stop, and possibly puke. Tonight is my first night attempting to train. I've been sick for weeks and haven't exercised at all. I've gained 3 pounds and just ate a bunch of Chinese food. My prediction, this will not go well...

Ugh

The baby is sick AGAIN! This time it's Croup. Lucky for me, my little cousin got this last week so I looked it up, I had no idea what it was. So when I woke up to the sound of my little youngster barking like a seal and gasping, I didn't totally freak and call an ambulance. What is so crazy about Croup is that he is totally fine during the day, energetic and happy. I caught something also, just a plain old cold. I'm not a good sick person to begin with, add taking care of a toddler, and that equals one cranky momma.

I don't really have any friends, let alone friends with babies, so the baby and I have been going to classes and groups in an effort to socialize him a bit. This has been working out great with the exception of one thing, all these other kids are little germ factories. They're all sick and sticking their fingers in each other's noses and mouths, yuck! I try to tell myself that the baby needs to get these sicknesses when he's young so the first year of school isn't a nightmare, but come on! On top of that, he is getting THREE eye teeth at once. He has been waking up at 5am for like, 2 weeks! Needless to say, I am feeling a lot of unecessary pity for myself.

My son, the genius

The baby signed "more" today after eating an apricot fruit strip. The husband and I have kind of half-assed the whole sign thing starting a few weeks ago. We didn't think that we were consistent enough to really make a difference, but he picked right up on it. Now that I see it can work, we're going to start on "drink" and "eat". He is so smart!

Antsy in the pantsy

As a military brat, I became accustomed to moving every two to three years. This ended when I was thirteen and we became permenantly stationed in northern virginia (yay [sarcasm]). Beacuse of this I start to get really antsy in the pantsy every few years to move on to a new place. When I was sixteen I went off to boarding school, when I was ninteen I moved to Colorado, off to South Carolina when I was twenty-one, back to Virginia at twenty-two, Massachusttes at twenty-four, then back to Virginia at twenty-five. So here I am at twenty-seven, wondering what's next. The answer, nothing. We've signed another lease at our current residence, so we're stuck here for another thirteen months, ugh. I love, love, love being so close to my parents, but that's really all this place has going for it. I'd like to move to a small town, with defined borders and no yuppies. I hate yuppies. I know that once Liam becomes school age we'll have to finally settle down, but I'm just so stir-crazy right now.

Erica and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

Ugh, I had the worst day today. I thought the baby was over his sickness so I planned a whole day out, bad idea. I won't go into the specifics, but not good. I thought that he was just generally fussy and not feeling good, but then my Aunt called, and said that she thought it sounded like he was teething. You know what? She was right, those darn eye teeth are such trouble makers. I'm glad that someone 500 miles away and on the phone can figure out what's wrong with my kid while I sit there with a thumb stuck up my butt. I'm going to bed, better luck tomorrow.

Oh Spongebob, I can relate

I have been watching a lot, repeat, a lot of Spongebob lately. One episode I watched yesterday really made me laugh though: Spongebob and Patrick were throwing out the trash in the back of the Krusty Krab and came across some grafiti on the dumpster. It was then that they learned a colorful new adjective. Patrick and Spongebob decided that this new word (I suspect it was the nasty F) was a "sentence enhancer", and would therefore use it as much as possible to seem sophisticated. As you can imagine, hilarity ensued. This got me thinking though, as someone that struggles with having an extremely colorful vocabulary and a toddler that repeats everything you say, is that all that these words are these days, "sentence enhancers"?

Well, I'm here

Everyone is doing this, so I figured that I would jump on the blogging bandwagon. The baby is napping now so I figured I'd write a few things. This is the first time that he has actually been sick. I am so happy that he has made it almost 16 months without getting sick (another bonus of breatfeeding), because man is he miserable. He is a boy that likes to run, run, run and he doesn't like being cooped up in the house all day long. To be honest, I don't either. With the husband gone all day and sometimes until late at night, the baby and I are pretty much just staring at eachother. After playing trucks, legos, kitchen, and reading the same book a gazillion times, I find myself busting out the Spongebob DVD. I feel terrible because I so didn't want him to watch TV until age 3, but I'm running out of ideas here. I don't want him to turn into one of those fat, video game kids but I need a little zoning out time. I guess I'm just venting some TV guilt here because I really do feel bad that I'm using TV as a way of occupying his time instead of teaching him Latin or Algebra or reading him Dickens.