Watching a kid wave a fork around in the vicinity of his B:
Mom! He’s going to eat my B!
Seeing that a kid has emptied his bin of cars:
Mom! He messed up all my cars!
Category Archives: Friends & Family
Our last Christmas!
Grauntie Marge sent Christmas gifts so we Skyped tonight to open them. The robotic bugs were a HUGE hit with Owen (and we think they’re cool, too). Here he is, showing them off:
And here we are having fun with them in the kitchen!
Katie’s Gund Peek A Boo Bear
Another cute outfit!
Another cute outfit from Gramma Jean (Christmas) that I had to quick get Katie in because she’s just about out of size 6m already! Yes, we have another Owen on our hands. 🙂
Silly monkey…
Gramma Jean got Owen this talking gorilla bank for Christmas. He was—honestly—a little freaked out by it at first…so we just left it sit on the chair and activated the sound every so often. Well, today he was finally REALLY interested in it, so he moved all of his money from his old bank to this one, having a blast the whole time.
One of Katie’s new outfits…
This was one of the outfits Gramma Jean sent Katie for Christmas…I figured I had better get her in it before she outgrew it! (And, it’s 70 today!)
And my favorite one, where you can see my reflection in her eyes.
Okay, it’s time.
So, Owen loved opening presents, but usually didn’t seem too thrilled with the actual item. But I knew he’d get to them eventually…so it’s fun to see what he’ll bring out of the toy room next.
Just now, he came out with three new packages of Cars cars that he opened from papa and Grannie Lin last night. 🙂
Bedtime light
Thanks papa and grannie!
He wasn’t terribly interested in it when he opened it…got a little interested when he saw it in action…carried it around but refused to put it on…until bedtime when he HAD to have it! Fast forward 15 minutes and he was out of bed so I went in there and he didn’t want it on anymore and HAD to give it to me (versus just putting it on his dresser).
I’m sure it will get lots of use in the future.
Robot Microphone
Thanks Aunt Beth and Uncle Jim—this thing is a riot. We all like it!
Deep-fried turkey dinner party!
It’s been forever and a day since we’ve deep-fried a turkey (we used to do at least 3-4 a year but haven’t done one since probably 2007-2008) so we decided to have a pre-holiday meal with our best friends! It was DEElicious and we had a great time!
Holiday Party
Owen gets new cars
And Katie got some new bibs but she doesn’t make for a good video!
Thank you, Wendy and Toby!
Of course as soon as I stopped recording…
Wow. These are cool. This is the coolest helicopter ever.
Owen: Mom, the white car and blue car are sad.
Me: Why are they sad?
Owen: The red car won the race.
This helicopter is HEAVY. The cars are light.
Tummy time!
Tonight was the first night she lasted more than a few minutes without getting screechy! (The frog was a gift to Owen from Aunt Beth and Uncle Jim—now passed down to Katie!)
Sick kids are no fun.
Owen has been sick for the past few days…basically just running a fever and being cranky.
And on the topic of running a fever, how annoying is it that I can’t get a good reading? I have taken Owen’s temp three different times/places (with the doctor-recommended temporal artery thermometer) and it varied from 101 to 103.5. Seriously? I even tried one with a normal digital thermometer and that didn’t help much, either.
- First temporal artery (forehead) was 103.5.
- Second forehead was 101.5.
- Behind the ear was 101.
- Armpit was 103.5.
- Under the tongue is nearly impossible so I didn’t even try.
WTF?! I guess I could break out the rectal if I was super worried.
So anyway…he wasn’t acting like he had a 103 temp which was the only reason I didn’t really freak out (and my mom friends told me that apparently 104+ is the new temp to worry about with kids these days as long as they’re acting okay and drinking okay—which he was). You’d think that with an almost 4-year-old I’d be well-versed in how to deal with a sick kid…but he’s only been sick like once before!!
The worst thing, I think, is that he HATES to take medicine in ANY form. He starts freaking out and crying at the mere mention of needing to take medicine. And even if you give him the choice of how he wants to take it (meltaway tabs, liquid from a cup, liquid from a syringe), he will still vomit it up every time. Well, most every time, but close enough to every time to say every time. 😐
When we were at UNC we had him try and take a melting tablet (seriously, it’s like a Sweet Tart—super yummy and sweet—that melts in your mouth in about 10 seconds) and he freaked out. Flat refuses to swallow. This time, he held it for like 5 minutes at which point he spit most of it out. Then he continued refusing to swallow until he had to say something. So all he got was about 1/4 of one pill, so 1/16 of the recommended dose. And of course he’s a whining snotty mess the whole time, like we’re sticking him with a hot poker. We did get lots of empathetic glances, though (we were in the children’s wing of UNC).
When we got home I thought I’d be sneaky and crush up a tablet into his yogurt. Ha. That was a laugh. After one bite I had grape juice vomit halfway across my living room. I think he’s just so aware of textures and changes to his regular foods that he just KNOWS.
It’s just SOOOOO frustrating.
Delish dish!
10# potatoes, 3 sticks butter, 1 cup of half and half, 1 cup of sour cream, garlic salt, and pepper, with a sprinkle of cheddar cheese and bacon.
A little big.
We were at our friends house for a get-together and Owen HAD to sit in this car—even though he’s about 30# and 10″ too big. 🙂
Thank you, Grauntie Marge!
And like brother…like sister. Owen was 3m3d and Katie was 4m5d.
Jenny outfit, part 2.
Here is the next outfit from my past that Katie got to wear…though, unfortunately, I waited a bit too long and it was too small for her so she just wore it for a few pictures! (I apparently am a very bad judge of sizes—and it’s a homemade outfit so there is no sizing listed—and of course Gramma Jean has no memory of what age I wore it!)
You can see how Owen likes to interfere with the photo shoot. 🙂
Owen’s Monster
Thank you, Grandma Marsha. He LOVES it.
More Halloween Katie
How could I have forgotten these pictures? The chili pepper was borrowed from friends and I was planning on having her wear it when we went out to trick or treat—except it was a bit too small and it was a challenge just getting her in it for a few pictures!
New drink carrier
We were headed over to our friend’s house to watch the MSU game and Tom needed to put his drinks somewhere.
Kitty Katie
A Halloween onesie for Katie from Grannie Lin…
And with Sophie!
Owen’s walkabout
Skyping with Grandma, Owen is showing her all of his robots.
Then he decided to take Grandma Marsha on a walkabout. It was hilarious, because he doesn’t quite grasp what she can and can’t see and was in his dark playroom showing her a puzzle that makes noise when you turn the lights off.
Should I get dressed more often?
I had a friend’s housewarming to go to (my old boss, actually) so I got dressed (nothing fancy), took my hair out of my daily ponytail, and put on a tiny bit of makeup and perfume. I walk downstairs and Owen says “Wowww! Mama, you’re so pretty!” And sniffed me. 🙂
Gee, you think I should get dressed and put makeup on more often?
Today I was a zen master.
Or maybe I should say a zenpoop master? Or a poopzen master? Whatever you want to call it, I was it.
I was calm.
I was cool.
I was collected.
I promised Owen I wouldn’t yell at him again.
I told him it was okay if he pooped in his underwear (but I’d still like him to try to poop in the potty).
I told him he wouldn’t be in trouble.
You see, in talking about this whole ordeal with my mom friends, I came to the conclusion that the Miralax might actually be making it harder (in a sense) for him to poop successfully—since if it was making the stool too soft, he might not realize he had to poop and then OOPS before you know it, it’s there. And if he really isn’t able to control it, then OHMYGOD do I feel guilty about getting mad at him, you know? As a friend pointed out, he’s still learning what it takes to poop—especially since it’s different than pooping in a diaper, we’re guessing he had constipation and possibly pain issues, and now with the drugs it’s a different feeling/experience yet! Ugh, talk about mom guilt. 😥
Hence the zen master.
Luckily it was a pretty easy day so I wasn’t REALLY tested…but we still went through (I think) five pair of underwear. But there were no HUGE disasters, which I think can be attributed to A) him pooping quite a bit over the past two days and B) decreasing the Miralax dose (I’m hoping to hit on the magic amount that will make pooping easier but not create a holy mess).
Please keep your fingers crossed.
A pooped pup
We took Maggie with us to our friends’ house for the afternoon…so she played hard for hours with Venus (a big lab). This is right after we got home…and she was zonked the rest of the night. 🙂
Now THAT’S a garage sale!
So we finally had our garage sale today—we’ve been wanting to have one ever since we moved back to Jacksonville but just never got around to it. If you remember, our last garage sale was a complete dud and we pretty much vowed to never have another. But we just had SO much good stuff to sell that we decided to take the chance.
And we’re glad we did.
Yes, it was a bit of legwork to get ready for it—and I pretty much ran the whole day by myself as Tom was in taking care of the kids—but it went really well. I didn’t get TOO terribly aggravated with people making deals (because we wanted the stuff GONE!) but I did draw the line a few times—of which these two cases were the most memorable:
- One guy at about 7:15 (we officially opened at 7 but of course had people shopping in the dark at 6:45) pointed to all the stuff he wanted and it totaled $45 and asked if I’d make him a deal. I said sure, $40. He says “How about $30?” Uh, sorry, NO. Not at 7:15am on popular items (like a pack-n-play and space heaters) and certainly not that big of a deal.
- An obviously English-understanding but Spanish-speaking only woman (her young daughter was translating between us most of the time) who drove up in an [Escalade or Excursion or something] and was talking on an iPhone thought that $2 was too much for a two-piece baby outfit—which I had already discounted from $4 (I had all baby clothes marked at $2 per piece). She made a big stink about how that was just TOO. MUCH. MONEY. Really? SERIOUSLY?
But otherwise I was giving out good deals.
It was pretty busy all day but no matter how much stuff people bought, it never looked like the stuff was dwindling! NEVER! (Unfortunately, that just goes to show you just how much stuff we had. And sadly, the garage is still FULL of boxes we have to sort through and reorganize.)
When it was over, I was eager to count our stash and see how well we did. I was excited to see that we made $539—until I looked back at the total for our last garage sale (that I complained was a complete dud) and saw that the difference was only $239. But, it just felt like it went SO much better—and, if you go back and read the old garage sale post, you will see that I said another $200 would have made it better. One shopper even commented that it was a really nice sale! Yay, us! (And I have to give a huge thank you to our friends who loaned us tables and signs!)
So, in the end, we made about $300 for about 18-20 hours of work (prep, sale, clean up) which just sooooo doesn’t seem worth it. I mean, it’s better than working that long for nothing…but had we sold another $200 worth I’d be more amenable to having another garage sale sometime during my lifetime.
So I guess we did okay. Not awesome, but okay.
And everyone who drove by? They actually stopped…even if they didn’t buy anything! 🙂
Like mother, like daughter.
This was one of MY shirts back in the day…homemade by my mom! She held onto it for almost 40 years on the off chance I’d have a girl so she could wear it! Also, be warned, this is the first of many hand-me-down outfits to come… And mom? Now you have to search all the old slides and photos to find a picture of ME in the shirt!
I love the belly button showing! Her first belly shirt! 🙂
You won’t see this very often…
She looks normal and cute, right? So what’s not normal?? If you guessed the bow, you’re right. 🙂 It was a gift—and it is cute—so I took a few pictures. But it’s definitely not a normal thing for us…since I’m just NOT a girly girl when it comes to things like that.
Surprise picture!
We had our friends and their kids over for dinner, and after dinner the two younger kids (Owen and Caroline) were off playing in the other room. Caroline came in to show me the picture she took of Owen—and it was REALLY cute! He was obviously happy to be in his Thor costume! The good thing I noticed was that it took about five other shots to get this one good one!
Owen’s Vacation Photos
I only remembered to give him his camera once while on vacation—and we were at Gramma Jean’s… I only found/remembered them now because I’m finishing the last of the unpacking (yes, you read that right—I hate unpacking).
