Author: admin

Lily 6 Month Update

Toes are the best toys

Stats:
Height: 24.5 in (20%)
Weight: 14lbs, 14oz (25%)
Head 16.5 in (50%)

I can’t believe six months is already here. Lily is doing well, although we have the beginnings of anyone-but-mom-is-the-devil. She still has kind of a needy temperament, but if I carry her a lot she is happy and super sweet.

She smiles all the time and her smiles are changing over the last few days to be more like a regular smile instead of the wide open mouthed baby smile.

She can sit for a couple of minutes on her own and is starting to get up on all fours a bit. She would probably do it more if she ever let us put her down! She is just starting to get the idea that she can move her body to get something she wants, but doesn’t yet know how to coordinate all those movements. She loves the bath and will kick and splash and laugh all the way through it. She loves to give big open mouthed kisses and playing with her toes.

Don’t hate me, but she is back to sleeping almost through the night. I think it is mostly because naps are so hard to come by. She can’t nap if we are out and about unless she is in the car. She really needs to be at home in her own bed or swing to get a decent nap. She still loves to be swaddled for sleeping, but she can sometimes escape the miracle blanket by morning. She doesn’t love the car, but doesn’t hate it anymore and no longer needs to be swaddled for car rides.

She has sampled solids (rice cereal) but for now is happy with just playing with spoons while we eat.

Teenagers and the Pope

As I am cleaning up the house tonight and steaming a little bit on the inside about how stubborn and rude one of my teenagers is, my eyes fall across our new picture of the pope. It occurs to me that he has to put up with a lot of people moaning and whining about the way things are done and what is whose job and so on.

Poor Guy, he definitely needs our prayers.

Random Thoughts on a Monday

After looking at the calendar this weekend I realized there are no free days left at all until after Easter. I need to find it somewhere inside of me to be super-organized.

Posy is one step ahead of me. I was looking at the giant piles of undone laundry last night while prepping the kids for bed. I told Posy to go and round up a uniform skirt (clean or dirty, it didn’t matter) for Tessa, because I knew that Ben had clean uniforms. She informed me that she had made sure there were skirts for Tessa when she put the clothes in the dryer. How many 13 year olds can think ahead like that even for themsleves let alone for someone else.

I made it to the first of four sessions of the parish mission today. Well, I kind of made it. I got there right on time if it was starting at 9:15. But it had started earlier. And it was in the Church instead of St Bridget’s Room like it usually is. SO it probably wasn’t appropriate for Max to be eating his cheez-its and drinking juice. Oh well, I’ll be better prepared tomorrow.

Lily had her first try at playing violin yesterday. She watched all through Tessa and Max’s lesson intently, so Dasha put the violin (Max’s 1/16th size) against her shoulder to see what her response would be. She immediately turned her head and sucked on it. Okay, so maybe she is not a prodigy. Yet.

We introduced Max to Star Wars. C3PO is now known as Seepah-wee-ah-doh. R2D2 is just plain R2D2.

I have dinner planned up to (but not including)Thursday and I even have all the groceries to make the stuff. Go me!

A Friday in March

I am going to grab moments as they hit me today and post what I can think of:

The garage is underway! We have been working on it and slowly but surely it is getting almost un-embarrassing. But you don’t get pictures until it is done.

I found Max a little while after breakfast eating right out of the cereal bag in his sisters’ room.

Thursdays would be a really nice day to have a clone of myself to be in two places at once. Bedtime and picking up Posy from choir (40 minute car trip) happen at the exact same moment. But I really can’t think of a day when it would be BAD to have another one of me around. Like today, one of me could hold the baby while the other one does vast quantities of laundry. Then when the baby goes to sleep, that one of me could mop the (sticky, gross) floor.

Lily likes to suck on her toes. I can’t think of anything cuter than a baby sucking on their own toes.

While I nursed Lily down for her nap, Max found a Sharpie. ‘Nuf said.

I received an email from someone interested in my rosaries!

Just found while cleaning the kitchen: a cup of water with three q-tips soaking in it. It boggles the mind…

Also found: two mostly empty juice boxes put back near-but-not-in where the juice boxes go.

As of 11:30 AM, I have washed two loads of laundry, folded/hung up two loads, tidied the family room, cleaned the kitchen, fed Max lunch, and about a hundred other small jobs not even worth listing. But the list of what I haven’t gotten done is still FAR longer. There, the dryer calls!

Garage, not Junkyard.

The time has come. The time is now.

I MUST stop my house from vomiting into my garage anymore. It’s getting ridiculous.

As the toys and clothes continue to multiply and try to take over every square inch of living space, we gather them up in baskets and throw them into the garage and slam the door before they can sneak back in the house.

But it does. It gets back in.

As the Flylady says, “You can’t organize clutter.”

And how!

So, this is day one. It may take a while, it may take a whole year for all I know. BUt from here on out at least one of Lily’s naptimes per day will need to be dedicated to the garage. And here, for posterity is the proof of what it looks like right now:

First: the view directly from my Laundry room door. This is what I see when I go in there to take something out of the freezer… it’s enough to freeze the blood.

Garage Day 1

Swing your eyes to the left a little, still standing in the doorway and your eyes are greeted with this:

Garage Day 1

Now let your eyes glide to the right from the same spot. I kid you not there really is a ping pong table there. It has stuff under and over it to disguise it. Clever, eh?

Garage Day 1

Finally, if you continue to actually WALK to the right (be careful about where you step!) you will find this, one small swath of real, live garage floor, as yet untainted by our crud.

Garage Day 1

So now you have seen it. You have living proof of what a slob I am. And now I have to either clean it or kill you for having seen it. Hmmmm….. let me think about that one.

I have been slacking off!

I haven’t posted here in a bit… I have been busy sending all my posting energy over to CottonBabies and the blog over there, where I am writing twice a week. In the mean time my own blog has been gathering cobwebs. But since I have a readership of like two people, I figured it wouldn’t make too much a difference. (Hi Tiffany!)

In the mean time we have been going through the Great Illness Influx of 2008. It seems like every 3 or 4 years we have a string of illnesses that seems to stick around for months. There hasn’t been a week yet in 2008 when I didn’t keep at least one kid home from school one day. First there was a nasty stomach virus that took out Max, Posy, Ben, Me, and Jay. Then there was the Real Flu, that awful respiratory stuff that lasted for over a week. That took out Max, James, and finally hit Posy, leaving her with pneumonia. Then last week Max introduced a new one to the household: Hand, Foot, & Mouth Disease. I am still hoping that Lily doesn’t catch it, we are not quite out of the incubation period yet. If we can make it to Sunday with no one else getting it, I think we can emerge from our self-induced quarantine.