Picture this:
What you hear: *splat* *crash* *wahhhhh*
What you smell: chocolate
What you see: 2 year old who has vomited the m&m’s he stole this morning (splat), stepped in it, slipped and fallen into it (crash, wahh), rolled over and is trying to navigate out of the vomit (which he is now covered in head to toe) while crying hysterically.
What you realize: the washing machine is beeping because it is *again* malfunctioning.
We have survived another lovely year of Summer League Baseball, and it really didn’t even get all that hot (at least for me – sitting and watching in the shade) until the last couple of games. Friday night was closing ceremonies and is also Adoration at our parish, so after eating our (unimpressive) hot dogs, I walked over to the Adoration Chapel with Max and Tessa.
The Adoration Chapel at our parish is nice because the wall from the vestibule into the chapel is glass, so I can sit right outside of it with the kids and not disturb anyone. So we sat down outside the glass and I had Max sit in my lap. I pointed at the monstrance and told him about how that was Jesus. Before I could get another word out, he jumped up out of my lap, ran to the glass wall and started banging on it!
I pulled him back into my lap but he wriggled away as fast as he could and started trying to open the door!
So, to allow those who were actually able to pray a little peace and quiet, we made our exit. We’ll have to go back soon when it is not so crowded. 🙂
No, not me… poor little Max has a stomach virus.
Last night I had trouble going to sleep, good thing too. At about 11:30 I heard Max cough once or twice and figured that he was chugging his water too fast. But after a few minutes, even though he was VERY quiet, I could tell he was awake and standing up in his crib. (Because you know, the crib just sounds different when they are standing. I don’t know how I knew, I just knew he was standing up.)
So I went in to him and there he was standing at the end of his bed, very quietly and patiently. I said, “Time to lay down now.” and he (pacifier in mouth) just pointed to his pillow. At first I thought it was a wet spot and his sippy had come open (wouldn’t be the first time!) and then I saw his sippy, nicely closed, sitting right at the side where I had put it before he fell asleep. Then he started to retch again and I realized what it was. Ugh.
I caught the remainder of the puke with his blanket and set him on the floor so I could strip his bed. Of COURSE we only have one crib sheet and mattress pad! I ran it downstairs, pillow and all and, by the grace of God, I had actually left the washing machine, not only empty, but standing OPEN when I finished the laundry last night. I shoved the stuff in (pillow and all – if washing didn’t ruin it the puke had so I figured why not?)
We got the boy settled on a blanket on our floor for the rest of the night. You could tell he felt so yucky but he never complained or whined once. He threw up two more times but then slept nice and late.
Hopefully that was enough to get it out of his system! (But I am not holding my breath!) I just feel so bad for the little guys who just don’t know WHY this is happening to them!
Day three with no car. The only thing good about that is that DH took the need for Air Conditioning very seriously and got it right in to get fixed. But I am stuck still.
We got the security system last night and installed it. Ahhhh, I cannot tell you the relief. Now I just have to figure out how to use it.
Max is being really cute right now. He is pushing his step stool up to each light switch and turning them on and off. Then he turns it off and moves on to the next one. He won’t let me change his diaper (not that I am trying very hard) because he doesn’t want me to take his feet pajamas off. He cries and throws a fit every day when I take those off him to get him dressed.
Yesterday was Tessa’s birthday, we gave her a princess bike and a princess helmet. I would have taken a nice picture of her yesterday but I never got around to brushing her hair.
I feel nauseated. It toned down quite a bit for a week or so but I am having a bit of a relapse. What really stinks is that my body can’t tell when I just need to burp, it thinks I am going to throw up. So I get this HUGE wave of nausea that has me dizzy and sweating, when all I need to do it release a tiny little burp and then I am fine.
So today I will just sit tight here in the house, maybe I will feel good enough to tackle the laundry a bit, and the kitchen. And if we get the car back (Please, God!) then we will go to the church soup supper and I won’t have to make dinner.
Away in a Groft house the littles are in bed.
The family’s all home and the kitten’s been fed.
The older kids fight over internet time
But all must be turned off by the ten o’clock chime.
Jay loves to sing and can be seen on TV,
Cantoring masses for homebound to see.
Testing underground tanks, he works hard outside,
We think he’s the best dad to be found worldwide!
Jenni makes rosaries and sells them online
Check out her website when you have the time!
She drives back and forth, lots of time in the van,
But she’ll snuggle down with a book when she can.
Paisley’s a junior and now she can drive
We pray every day that she gets home alive.
She’s super involved both at church and at school
She directs a kids’ choir, they all think she’s a jewel!
James is a freshman and doing so well,
Always wants to arrive long before the first bell.
He works on his music most every day,
Piano bass and guitar he is learning to play.
Posy’s in sixth grade; she’s getting so tall,
Childcare and housework – she helps with it all!
She loves shopping and movies and fashion and crafts,
Her quick wit and smile always bring us all laughs.
Ben is in third and he’s always outside
He walks and he skates or goes for a bike ride.
He likes to play game boy but still loves to read,
His mind and his body are growing like weeds!
Tessa is four and she sings in the choir,
She loves to dress up in her princess attire.
She talks all the time or at least so it seems,
She fills up our days with her bright, warm sunbeams.
Max will turn two on this Christmas Eve
‘tween tempers and climbing he may not see three.
His blue eyes, they twinkle, his pink cheeks, they shine,
Climbs in bed with a passy with nary a whine.
Our hope is that Christmas brings with it much cheer,
Our prayer is for good health and happiness next year.
Remember the season’s about Jesus’ birth,
And we are the reason he came down to earth.
When Jay put Max down on the floor, he just meant to let him fuss for a moment and show him we-do-not-kick-daddy. I was too sleep deprived to understand that at 3am.
Max is doing better. A little. He is waking one to three times a night and taking a regular nap. I just need to figure out how to lengthen his naps and periods of night time sleep. Oh and I need to move that mountain while I am at it.
…so desperate that I will give up sleep for a few days to see if I can improve on things around here.
Max has been going to sleep pretty well. We have the bedtime routine down pat. Teeth, Book, Nurse, Bed. Then I sit by the Pack and Play while he goes to sleep. If he gets up or goofs off, I leave the room and he gets all mad, but when I come back after a couple minutes, he is ready to lay down and go to sleep. It usually takes very little time, and I can sit by the door and read by the light of the hallway lamp. It even works at naptime!
But staying asleep is another story. UGH!!! Once he wakes up from the first stretch of sleep, anytime between 11pm and 1am, he will nurse, kick, toss, turn, and generally make it impossible for anyone to sleep besides him. And his sleep isn’t all that restful. I am so done.
So last night he went to bed like a dream. He stayed asleep until about the time I was dozing off at 11:20pm (yes, I stayed up too late, shame on me – but Good Eats was on.) and then he woke up.
I nursed him in the rocking chair, then put him back in bed. He was not appreciative.
So I started the bedtime thing. If he was laying down, I stayed right by the bed, when he got up, I went out and let him fuss. Sometime around 12:45, I began to get really tired of this.
Thankfully Ben was sleeping in the girls’ room, so I crawled into Ben’s bed and Max fussed on and off with my trying to get him to lay down, occasionally getting up to pat his back, get his pacifier when he threw it, etc. He began to doze on and off around 1:30 (!!!!) but didn’t get fully to sleep until about 2. (Yawn.) So I crashed in Ben’s bed. Finally. Sleep.
Max woke up, sincerely unhappy that he was still in his bed at 4:44am. Oh good grief. I was so delirious with sleep deprivation by this time, I just took him into our bed and tried to lay down and get back to sleep while nursing him. Max had a quick snack and decided he would much rather wrestle, which resulted in my getting the head-butt-of-love directly to the mouth. Grrr… now I was getting grouchy. I have had precisely 164 minutes of sleep so far and now I am injured as well. Talk about adding injury to insult.
I roll Max over to Jay’s side of the bed, in hopes that, in his sleep, he has somehow known about my hellish night and can pin Max down and get him to sleep. Nope. Max kicks Jay. Jay puts Max down on the floor and rolls over to go back to sleep.
Should I let my crabby one year old wander the house unsupervised at night? Nah, didn’t think so. So I get up and start the whole bedtime thing again. Only now it is 5am and the sun is starting to come up. We may have room darkening shades, but any dummy can see around the edges. My chances are slim. Max lays down, I lay down in Ben’s bed. Can I grab a few more minutes of sleep? No. Max freaks out since he can’t see me. (Even though I am whispering calming things to him the whole time, things like, “Mommy’s right here,” “Hush, it’s okay,” and “Go to sleep or I will throw you out the window.”) So I move the pillow and blanket and lay down right next to the pack and play on the floor. Max is still freaking out unless I hold my arm in a really awkward possition to that my hand is on the mesh and he can put his hand on it.
His hand slowly droops down. Dare I hope he is asleep? I take a peek.
He is sitting up playing. Sigh. Yawn.
I guess that 164 minutes was it for me. Max is up for the day. He should be ready to take a nap around 9am, just about the time my day has plunged into full-speed-ahead mode.
I’m going to bed at 7 tonight.
I didn’t think it could ever happen. It seemed too remote and unreal.
Max slept through the night.
Ahhhh. I feel so good! I put him to bed at 9pm last night, way overtired. We heard him crying (in Ben’s room where he has been starting the nights) at 4:50am. So I got unbroken sleep from 10:30pm to 4:50am. That is almost 6.5 hours in a row!!!!
Ben is reacting to Amoxicillin. The kids told me on the way to school that he was covered with a rash. So I took him in to the nurse who wasn’t there. I decided to take him home since he might be uncomfortable and I wanted to get some benadryl into him.
I got home, called the Dr office who told me NOT to give him the benadryl just yet, but to bring him in and let them check the rash. No point in putting him down as having a allergy if it is something else, right? Still, that makes for an 18 mile round trip (yes, I counted it out!) at $3.15 per gallon (in our gas guzzling, 11 mile-per-gallon van) for them to tell me what I already know: penicillin allergy. And poor Ben. He has to miss Buck-a-Jean-Day for this. (He doesn’t seem terribly distraught; he settled right down into watching Dragon Tales without a lick of complaint.)
Max, that precious, happy, jabbering, baby-signing toddler, is standing on my last nerve when it comes to night time and sleep. Last night he resumed his Head-Butt-of-Love routine, giving me a bloody lip in the middle of the night. I think he blasted Jay too, but I am not sure since I was trying REALLY hard to pretend to be asleep so Jay could deal with him for a bit. (Not that he ever shirks that duty, he shares it pretty equally. But hey, I was injured, right? Don’t I get to sit on the bench for a little while for an injury?) So I consider again the idea of sleep training. But to be honest with myself, I can’t give up the rocking and nursing to sleep. It is such a peaceful, cozy, cuddly time. Except when it’s not and Max decides that even though he is drop dead tired he will fend off sleep until either his last drop of energy is spent or mine is. Then it is not so fun.
Paisley has decided that barring any formal, planned family activity, she has no use for being home, except maybe to do her laundry and dump some papers on the table. Is it really in the Teenager’s Bill of Rights that they should be allowed to go out any time there is not special family time planned? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Some kind of limit needs to be set. Especially since the rides are still coming from us. Jay and I will have to discuss this one. I think we might have some time to sit down and do that in August. Maybe. In the mean time, surly, fit-throwing teenagers don’t get rides anywhere. At least not until their attitude changes and they do some chores. Lots of chores.
James was offended that he didn’t get TWO full days off of chores and school work for his birthday. When I informed him that he was luck he got ONE full day off he exclaimed that I just didn’t understand. You betcha I don’t. I don’t claim to understand any of this anymore. Was I really this difficult? (Oh yes and then some!) But he has cleaned up his attitude a bit since then. Removing all privileges does that to a kid. Then add in the carrot of getting to spend the day with Nana (who will probably buy you lunch) and it’s all good again.
Let’s see, who have I not updated on yet? Tessa and Posy! Tessa is so very FOUR and spends all her time playing doll house and begging me to play it with her. But when I play doll house with her it is really just me playing doll house for her entertainment. I have to do all the talking and figure out what the characters are doing. She just sets up the scenes and tells me when it is morning and night. I worry that I am misshaping her idea of play by my doing this, but what is a mom to do? Never play? There is just always some way to worry about them and some new way to wreck their lives and send them into permanent therapy later.
Posy is busy and getting more grown up every day. She is 11 now, and if I remember correctly it will be sometime this year that I will look at her and she will have changed from a little girl to a young lady overnight. For now, I just cherish these last few moments of being smarter than she is and of her being willing to play and do childlike things. The hourglass is running out on childhood for her.
Me, I have just been trying to get enough done around the house to justify sitting down to some scrapbooking or rosary making. neither has happened in forever. This past week has been a gathering up of all my homeschool books and getting ready to sell them. I have no idea where the funding for catholic school will come from for next year, but even if that doesn’t work out I don’t think I am going to homeschool any more. It just became too much for me and I wasn’t doing a good job. I am NOT of the mindset that poor homeschooling is better than public schools. Homeschooling was good for our family while it lasted and then it just wasn’t going to work any more. Selling the books is my way of letting go. Mostly I feel good about it but there is still that panicky feeling of burning that bridge behind me.
Poor, hard working Jay. Summer has set in here with our first official 100 degree day. Since he works outside the first couple of weeks are always the hardest for him. 100 degrees doesn’t actually describe the conditions he works in, since the official temps are taken in the shade over grass. Jay actually works in the sun over concrete or asphalt. It is so much hotter for him. We have stocked up on Power Ade during that last sale but that is small comfort to him, I’m sure. But still he will suffer outside every single day so that our family can eat and live in comfort. Thank God for his sacrifice!
So what am I supposed to do when it finally rains and it is such a rare sight that my 15 month old is afraid of the windshield wipers?