Another Fantastic Craigslist Acquisition

The play yard has again become useful in our house. There was a while we weren't using it, especially in this apartment, and it has been folded up, taking up space in the boys' closet just about ever since we moved it. But today it came out and has proven its worth. It continues to protect our precious belongings from the antics of a young boy, namely, our oldest son. Though he never really liked being contained within it, we found that if we fenced off the forbidden fruit and left Z on the outside, we could achieve the same protection without hindering his freedom. Fortunately, it turns out that our younger son does not have the same aversion to containment, and so the play yard provides protection for Daniel against his well-meaning but sometimes careless older brother.

A Puzzling Day

Another announcement: NOT ONLY is Daniel sleeping 10-12 hours at night, but he is now taking naps and sleeping in his crib (not in the pack-n-play) in the boys' room (no longer in the office)!!

It was such a relief to move him out of our room and into the office because we no longer had to creep around as we got ready for bed. Now we're excited to be able to use the office during naptimes and in the evenings again. You don't realize how often you use a room until there's a sleeping baby in it!!

We weren't sure how it would go, putting the two boys in the same room at night, but so far (2 nights) it's been going well. Daniel goes to bed significantly earlier than Zachary, so he's usually out cold by the time we're getting Z into bed. D still wakes up at night once in a while and needs a little comfort, but so far Z has been able to sleep through it. The morning is a different story: D wakes up early and has been waking Z up too. Z does not do well being woken up early. If it continues I think I'll just insist Z go back to bed for another 10 minutes or so.

With Daniel napping in the bedroom, I decided to remove the temptation Z might have to bug him and possibly wake him up, so I moved all the toys and books out of the bedroom and into the living room:
(Do you think we have enough books? What if I told you there are TWO BOXES FULL OF BOOKS in the boys' closet? Hey, does anybody have a bookcase or two they'd like to give us?)

I had to move the futon mattress that we're stubbornly holding onto; it's now in our bedroom, where a stack of plastic storage bins used to live. They are now in the office, where the pack-n-play used to be. It is now folded up and put away (or should be by the time you're reading this...). It's like a puzzle!! Fun!! Just another joy of living with too much stuff in an apartment. I SO can't wait till we can move into our house...

Daniel Update: Solid Foods

Daniel started solid foods earlier this month :-)
He's a good nurser, but has been less than enthusiastic about rice cereal. He prefers it mixed with breastmilk or formula; if I mix it with water I'm lucky to get 3 spoonfuls in before he completely refuses! Over the next few weeks we'll be starting veggies and fruits and trying some other types of cereal.

Yesterday was his 6 month birthday. Hard to believe 6 months can fly by that fast! He had his checkup and got his 6-month shots. He's doing great, right on track developmentally, and he hardly cried when he got his shots. Overall a very good appointment. And I even remembered to have the dr. fill out the sheet the church needs before Zachary can start Mother's Day Out in the fall. The only thing that went wrong was Z left his sticker in the waiting room.

Bread Ingredients

We've been making homemade bread for sandwiches recently. The loaf disappears pretty quickly - our loaves aren't as long as store-bought loaves so there aren't as many slices. It's easy to forget to make a new loaf before running out. So over the weekend, I tried to make my life a little easier: after getting the ingredients in the machine, I measured out the dry ingredients for the next loaf and put them in a plastic bag with the rest of the ingredients written on the outside. I put the bag in the freezer so it'll be all ready to go when this next loaf runs out! I felt very clever. The silly part is that there are many more wet ingredients than dry ingredients, so maybe I didn't really save myself any time at all!

New House Update

A progress report on our house. They have not yet broken ground on the construction. We suspect that they're waiting until a couple of other houses in the neighborhood close. There are four houses (including ours) in our neighborhood on the books for starting this month. Very exciting! Following are some images and pictures I've been meaning to share (in no particular order).

This is the plat of our lot. It's oriented correctly for North, and you can see the size of the lot and the location of the house on it. We had them put the house as close to the street as allowable so as to have as much backyard as possible.
An artist's rendering of the front elevation. We chose different colors for the bricks, fieldstone (the bottom of the columns), the shutters, and the shakes (the part above the garage and above the windows on the left), so ours will look a little different.



And our floorplan. It's 2500 square feet: 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths. We had them put French doors on the study and another window in the master bedroom. Oh and a service door from the garage to the side yard. Otherwise ours will look just like this.

This is our lot from the street to the back - Curtis is standing on the back corner to try to give some perspective. The house is our neighbor to the back.


The view from the back of our lot to the street. That's our black car there (the one that Curtis drives most of the time.) Sure feels like a big space, doesn't it?? We have almost a 1/3 acre and we're pretty excited about all the fruits and veggies we'll be able to grow.

Yep, we're pretty excited! We find ourselves driving by almost every day to see if there's any progress. You can be sure that there will be plenty of pictures for you throughout its construction :-)

A Mobility Mystery...

Well, the long blog posts have got to go. As much as I enjoy them, I am not making the time to finish them - they sit in my drafts folder until the subject material is obsolete. So, now that I've freed myself of that burden, hopefully I'll be on here a little more often. What I can't do in quality I'll just have to make up for in quantity, right?

Today's post: an announcement! Daniel is mobile!! ...I think. The evidence:

I had left Daniel on the blanket (and on his back, if I remember correctly); when I looked again, he was not only on his tummy, facing a different direction, he was also completely off the blanket. Now, I don't know if he had help. There is evidence that Big Brother was lurking: the cowboy boots had also appeared since I last appraised the scene. (And as I was getting the camera out, Z was trying to put them on D's feet.) But I have yet to catch him in the act of actually moving from one location to another, so whether he is actually mobile remains to be seen.

Not just another Thursday

I've been playing housewife today. It's kinda fun, you know, a nice change of pace. I've been putting things away, vacuuming, washing dishes, even chopping onions and potatoes for dinner! (It's my night to do dinner b/c C is working late. Once a week. This may be only the second week out of, I don't know, 10? that I'm actually making dinner instead of leaving for him when he gets back or heating up leftovers, which never counts as making dinner.) So, yeah, the living areas of our little apartment are actually bearable to be in! I'd kinda given up on this place because it's so small feeling, there doesn't seem to be "a place for everything" (as the adage goes), and I found I'd rather spend my time with the boys. Or reading. But that's another post. Or maybe just later in this post.

But I was on a mission this week: Z has a couple friends coming over in about 20 minutes and there was no way I was going to let them play in our pig sty. I feel so very accomplished! Like maybe I can actually keep it this way! It would be nice to live in a place that's a little bit welcoming to come home to. Recently I've been avoiding coming home from errands or an activity with the boys because the clutter was getting to me. I knew it was bothering me, but I couldn't seem to find the motivation to do anything about it. Like I said, there isn't a place for everything, which made it seem like a losing battle, and knowing the battle is lost before it's begun is really disheartening. Now that things are picked up though, maybe it won't be so hard to keep it this way. I have two techniques to use: 1) always do something to make the room a little bit better than it was, even just taking something out that doesn't belong. 2) If something catches my attention, take care of just that item w/o trying to clean every lampshade in the house, for example.

The other motivating factor this week was a book. I have fallen in love with the Twilight Saga. We watched the movies about 2 weeks ago, and then I took the boys to the library and couldn't resist checking out the first book. And then I was hooked. I spent an entire Friday reading Twilight and Midnight Sun. When I finished I was rather conflicted. I loved reading, but I felt really icky with myself for neglecting everything all day long. All I did was read. Then I checked out the 2nd book (New Moon) and spent Saturday afternoon, evening, until 2am reading. My theory was to finish it and then I'd be free to focus on other things. That worked for Sunday, but then Sunday night BOTH boys were up several times and I didn't get much sleep. I was so nauseous from lack of sleep by Monday morning I couldn't even drink my coffee. That's REALLY nauseous. Not much got done on Monday. I was kindof a zombie. Then Tuesday I was catching up on emails etc. from Monday (why is it that the day I'm out of it, everyone emails me??). Which left me with Wednesday and today to get things straightened up. And because I had this deadline today of friends coming over to get my house clean, I couldn't afford to check out the 3rd book (Eclipse). C promised to bring it home for me after work tomorrow. I cleared my calendar for the weekend so I can read it without guilt. And let me tell you, knowing that I have that book to look forward to made the house cleaning so much easier!! All I need now is a constant stream of books to look forward to and I bet I'll never suffer from lack of get-up-and-go again.

....

Our friends aren't here yet, so I wanted to tell you about potty training. It's still incredible to me and I'm not sure it's sunk in yet, but Z is potty trained! Nighttime, daytime, wet, messy - all trained! All it took was 6 months of indulging him when he was interested but refusing to put my heart in it because I was too exhausted and then 1 week cold-turkey from diapers to underpants, and it's done! We only had 2 nighttime accidents (both only wet), a handful of wet accidents, and a smaller handful of messy accidents. I feel like I got off really easy and it blows my mind. I still pack a change of clothes for him when we go somewhere, but he's so aware, I don't think he'll have any more accidents if they can be at all helped. The funny thing is that I wasn't planning on starting the training until after all our activities had ended (as they will next month) so we'd be home and could focus on the training. But one Friday morning he decided he didn't want diapers back on. Since we were going to be home all weekend, I figured we could give it a go. And we haven't looked back. At one point he was having trouble with going BM and I offered that he could use a diaper. He took it as a threat and became even more determined to use the potty!! Not the reaction I was expecting! So waiting until he insisted on underpants was definitely a good thing, even though I wasn't sure about the timing.

My little alarm clock is going off (why doesn't that child just NAP ALREADY???) and our friends will be here soon, so I'll talk to you again later when I get another chance :-)