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Category Archives: Tom

I’m not voting this year.

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Well, turns out I’m not voting this year. 😡

I swear I filled out the necessary stuff online to get the packet because Tom specifically sent me the link. And I didn’t think about it—yes, even with all the political crap and election coverage and primaries—until Tom said he had to mail his ballot in. Wait, what? I didn’t get mine.

So I went back to look to see what exactly I did…and his email was in May, and I went to the website and it looked familiar…except now I see a spot that says “You still need to contact your local voting precinct to register as an absentee voter.” Huh? I definitely don’t remember seeing that. And then I looked at the PDF that I had likely printed—which looked familiar as well—and apparently that had to be sent in somewhere else? Or to my own voting precinct? But then why would I still have to contact them if I mailed this form in? Needless to say I’m still confused.

So the short of it is I didn’t request the ballot and now it’s too late. I should have just called the damn office instead of using the link Tom sent me, because that messed me up. And then Katie came along and my mommy brain got even worse…

I’m bummed.

Owen is still sad.

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Owen seemed to be doing better after his nap and was enjoying playing games with daddy. His temp was still hovering around 100 so we decided to wait and medicate him at bedtime.

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He had a light dinner of toast with peanut butter and yogurt, and things seemed fine. Then it was time for medicine…which is always a bit of a fight. It took some time and cajoling and a bit of mess, but he finally took it. And as Tom was in with him washing his hands (I did say it got messy!) he barfed up everything.

Whether it’s psychological and he hates taking the medicine so he throws up…or whether him fighting us on it riles up his stomach…or whether the medicine itself actually makes him queasy…it’s not the first time it’s happened.

Of course, his response was “I’m sad.” 🙁

After that, however, he seemed perfectly fine and was running around like normal. We did make him take more medicine (since he threw up literally 60 seconds after he finished taking the last dose, he obviously had nothing in his system) and that stayed down.

We’re hoping tomorrow goes better.

Sidenote: We reconfirmed that I deal better with poop and Tom deals better with vomit. We make a good pair. 🙂

Trying to build

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We happened to be at Lowe’s when they were having the kids building clinic, so Tom and Owen attempted to build the creepy crawly monster box.

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Owen doesn’t like loud sounds, so everyone hammering was a bit too much for him…and the project was a little too difficult for attempting in that situation. So when we got home they built it and here’s the finished product.

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Candyland

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First, the board is hideous compared to the one I grew up with. I’m surprised it doesn’t cause seizures it’s so bright and busy.

Second, Owen didn’t catch on NEARLY as fast as I thought he would. Talk about frustrating.

Third, he legitimately won all the games, and every time he won he wanted me to “come to the castle” with him (the end): “WE WON! WE BOTH WON!”

Fourth, he was much more interested in playing with the pieces post-game than he was actually playing the game. The pieces were jumping around (“Boing! Boing!”), they were bad guys, they were family, and they walked all over the living room.

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And playing “treat game” with daddy:

Racing!

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Maggie was running along the fence with the next-door neighbor’s dog (the first time they’ve “met” since the renters moved in about two months ago) and Owen was playing with the pool as Tom was emptying it and dismantling the pump, etc. But then Owen noticed the dogs running (racing!) and had to get involved. If you listen closely you can hear him announce Maggie as the winner.

A little cat nap

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We’ve been letting Owen skip his nap so he’ll fall asleep faster at night—sometimes he’s still up (in his bed, but awake) at 9:30-10:00—and for the most part it’s been fine. But today—especially after playing in the pool, I’m sure—he took a little catnap while watching the State game with daddy. It was soooo cute of course I had to take a picture.

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And it was a true catnap—it couldn’t have been longer than 10 minutes.

Owen playing games

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Owen is a riot when he’s playing his Xbox Lego Indiana Jones game. Tom showed him some basics, but otherwise he learns how to do stuff on his own (trial and error, but still impressive). But what’s funny is listening to him while he plays—if he can’t figure something out, it’s a constant stream of “Dad? Dad? Dad? Dad? I need your help.”

Today we’ve also heard:

I did it! I got the spider!

Watch out, bad guys!

Hey, stop!

Uh oh.

Wow! Did you see that?

Remember? Mom? Remember?

I found coins! Cool!

It’s a gold coin and a blue coin. Amazing!

Look! Orange guys. Go and get them!

Mom, dad…something is happening.

Most of the time Tom and I just look at each other and crack up.

Now THAT’S a garage sale!

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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! 🙂

Dresser climbing, anyone?

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While I was outside running the garage sale and Tom was busy inside with Katie…Owen tried climbing up on his dresser and knocked it over!! Thankfully he wasn’t hurt (there’s not much room for it to fall since its super close to the bed) but still. OMGWTFBBQ!!?!? He’s NEVER tried anything like that—ever—so it was a BIG surprise. Ugh. And of course it had a partially-filled humidifier on it…so everything was drenched. 😐

We missed the terrible twos but apparently are getting the terrible threes instead.

OH. MY. GAWD.

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You know how I have said how huge Owen’s poops have been up until now? That they put US to shame? And how he hasn’t really pooped in over a week now?

Well he just pooped.

And it was honestly THE biggest poop I’ve EVER seen. Anywhere, anytime, anyone. Without having actually measured it, I’d say it was at least 10-12″ long. NO LIE. He was with Tom again (so I didn’t get to see the whole process) but he didn’t seem any worse for the wear—no crying or anything—by the time I got down there (Tom yelled for me to come check it out).

After we got all excited and Owen said “You happy? Mama happy now?” (YES!), I asked, “Don’t you feel better now?” And he said “MY HURT IS GONE!!”

Poor kid. 🙁

I guess we continue with the daily Miralax in hopes it works better now that he’s apparently cleaned out…and we don’t go another seven days without a poop.

Why didn’t we think of this before?

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I have no idea why I didn’t think about doing this before… We desperately need more cupboard space, and we have an empty wall over a storage rack. So…we put in a 36″ upper cabinet this morning!

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We still need knobs and it looks a little strange with empty space on both sides, but I don’t care. Eventually, before we sell/move again, we’ll install a matching base cabinet with a short piece of counter top, and it will hopefully look like it’s always been there.

Happy birthday to me!

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Well, it’s been a long and tedious road, but the day is finally here: my blogs have been migrated, completely revamped with new themes and widgets, and now live at the main website—www.hudson2001.com—instead of a specific blog address (so change your bookmarks!). All of the content is the same, though the Blather and Owen/Katie blogs have been merged! And I’ve even added a lot from the pages that were on the website before (like Tom’s writings and photos from Iraq and our “new” house stories). However, one slight change with content is that the Recipes blog is currently locked. Long story…but they may be going away now that technology will let me compile and access them in a better fashion.

I have to give mad props to my friend, Tori, who basically did all the heavy lifting on this project—and I can honestly say it would NEVER have gotten done if it weren’t for her. Migration sounds easy, but is a total pain in the ass. That said, this blogging platform (WordPress) is a lot more involved and easier to use (behind the scenes—not for you!) so my life just got a lot easier.

Since the blogs were out of commission for about three weeks, I had A LOT of posting to do in the past two days…but I think I got completely caught up. Thanks to Tom for keeping an eye on the kids all day for almost two days so I could knock it out. There is still some tweaking going on behind the scenes, but nothing you should really notice. Let me know if you run across anything really weird or glitchy.

If you want to get emails when new posts are made, you will need to enter your address over there to the right—your old subscriptions from the old blog are no longer valid.

Enjoy!

😀

The end of a long day

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We spent the day with Grandma Marsha in Kalkaska and had a nice picnic get-together with Tom’s friends and family. Owen got to play with a lot of kids his age (though, honestly, he didn’t really play WITH them) and he missed his nap. When we finally got back to Grayling, he crawled up onto the couch with his B…

Earlier, between rain showers, daddy and Owen attempted bubbles (this also averted a meltdown, of which I can’t even remember the problem).

And Grandma with Katie…

Game Day at Grandma’s!

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We spent the day at Grandma Marsha’s place, and it just happened to be MSU game day! We all had our jerserys—and the boys played football and hot potato! I love Owen’s guffaw.

I caught Owen catching the football!

And I got to take a little nap with Maggie…

WE HAVE POOP IN THE POTTY!

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Oh. My. Gawd.

Owen just pooped one of the biggest poops I’ve ever seen. IN THE TOILET! ENTIRELY ON HIS OWN!! (He claimed he did once before but he flushed before we saw it, so we aren’t 100% sure.)

He had pooped in his underwear twice this morning so we kept him naked (on the recommendation of a friend who went through this recently with his son and claimed it worked wonders). So Owen was playing out of sight (naked) while we were watching the MSU/CMU game…then suddenly came running in “Mama! Daddy! I pooped in the toilet! All by myself! C’mon! Come look!”

So I followed him—downstairs!—and I’ll be damned…he did. But it was SO huge I honestly thought it might have been Tom! So of course I called Tom to check it out (it wasn’t). And I took a picture for posterity (no, I won’t be posting it!).

We lavished him with praise. He seemed thrilled.

We said “Wasn’t that easy?” He said yes!

Then he says “You happy now?” We said yes!

Then he picked out his reward and I asked if he was going to keep pooping in the potty…and he says no. 😐

Eight years ago this week…

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With the blog and website renovation, I have been going through all my old pages and pictures. Today I was incorporating Tom’s Iraq pictures into the blog, and realized that eight years ago this week (September 13) Tom was packing to head to Iraq for the first time.

If you ever want to take a look at old Iraq posts, just click on the Iraq Category tag.

Are we really potty training? REALLY?!

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So I was off getting my hair done and Virginia (our good friends’ kid who is now babysitting age! She was three when we met her!) was watching Katie, so Tom decided it was time to see if Owen would use the potty (especially after the success of peeing in the grass last night). I didn’t know this, of course, until I was out of the house, so it was a big surprise to me!

So I got a text and a photo of Owen standing in front of the toilet! The next text was “Success!” and a picture of Owen holding his reward—a new Cars car! The next text was a photo of the near miss (pee on the rug in front of the toilet). Then later a text saying Owen had earned a lot of cars! 88|

I tried not to get too hopeful, thinking it really couldn’t be this easy (though we had hoped that if we just waited long enough, it WOULD be this easy) but I admit to being excited.

When I came home, we celebrated by ordering pizza for dinner. And Owen kept peeing in the potty all night and earned more toys (it’s a good thing I have a backlog of toys ready for this occasion)! Here he is outside, waiting for the “pizza man.”

Of course, poop is going to be the bigger obstacle…but I have BIG (more wanted) toys ready for that—an Iron Man robot, a big school bus, and a bunch of Cars 2 cars—that he’s really excited about. Funny thing—the big toys are too big to set on top of the medicine cabinet, so I was just going to put them in his closet, right? Except he knew they were there and kept opening his closet to look at them. I figured that might not be conducive to him actually sleeping, so I put them in our room, but put one of them (Iron Man) in the bathroom on the top shelf above the toilet—but that didn’t last long as he climbed up on the toilet and reached up to touch it. I could only see that ending badly, so that one got moved as well. Hopefully they are enough incentive to get him to poop on the potty!

The only somewhat big (though minor) mishap was when I was putting Owen to bed. He was in bed, we read a story, and as I was getting up to tuck him in…I saw a poop nugget in the bed, smeared (I had obviously just been sitting on it). So…sometime during the day, he had pooped, and it apparently fell out of his underwear…and he never told us. Yes, poop is going to be the hardest part.

So, it looks like we’re potty training. And sticking close to the toilet all weekend. And watching him like a hawk!

GO OWEN!!