beanski

twenty-one months

It took Renee three and a half months to even attempt to utter her brother’s name. When we’d ask her to say Cameron or Cam she’d say BABY and then she’d laugh, like she was saying “There is absolutely no way I’m going to acknowledge that thing has a name.” It was worth the wait because one day this month she looked at me and said “Hammon’s shoes” and I just about died laughing.

She also decided this month that Hammon being big enough to play with things is totally not acceptable to her. He can’t so much as look at a toy, a block, a shoe and she rips it out of his hands or moves it far enough away from him that’s she’s certain he can’t reach it. "MINE!" Is currently her favorite word. SIGH. I guess it had to happen some time but I have to admit that there was this part of me that thought my superior parenting skills had instilled such wonderful morals in my daughter that she understood the importance of sharing at the ripe age of sixteen months. For the first three months of his life she would give him whatever I asked her to give him. Now what one giveth, one taketh away. Forcefully.

She’s still sweet about half the time though. The other day I told her to "watch her brother" while I ran to change the laundry and as soon as the words came out of my mouth I thought, "Are you MAD, woman, she's going to kill him." But, I did it anyways because she looked pleased with me asking and when I came back up she was laying on her belly on the floor next to him saying "Hi Hammon" and kissing his round little cheeks. She can try to tell me she doesn't love him but I'm not fooled.
 
She came home from daycare one day saying "Oopadaisy" and honestly I don’t think there is anything cuter in the world than when she rams her shopping cart into the couch, looks at me, laughs this little evil laugh and says, “Oopadaisy.” Then, she puts her chin down and bats her little eyelashes at me like she just KNOWS she’s cute.

She has also mastered her glare; the glare that I am certain will be shot at me at least once per minute when she is a teenager. She looks at me like I smell, like there is nothing more vile in the world than her mother who didn’t jump the minute she snapped her little fingers.
 
She can count from one to five but won’t do so unless I ask her, “What comes after One?” She says “TWO!” And “What comes after Two, Renee?” She giggles and says “TWEE!”

It drove me bat crazy mad that for the longest time she called every W she came across an M. Well, she finally got it right the other day and I reinjured my back jumping up and down screaming “Yeah Renee!” in celebration.

I am physically incapable of cutting her hair, her mullet of ringlets growing longer and more absurd by the day. I just can't do it, the curls are too blessed cute and I guess there is a part of me that feels like once I start cutting and styling her hair she won't be a baby anymore. Once in a while I trim her bangs and we call it good. She probably gets teased by the other kids at school but whatevs, my mom put a bowl on my head and gave me a mushroom cut for my first day of kindergarten and I lived to tell the tale.

She gives me big barrel hugs and wet, sloppy kisses before bed at night before snuggling in to read the Elmo Lift and Flap book for the seven thousandth time.

She loves water boots and insists on putting them on and watching the episode of Jack’s Big Music Show where Laurie Berkner wears B-O-O-T-S and dances around in them. And for a kid that cries when she comes in to contact with snow, she apparently loves rain and water. She walks through and splashes in each and every puddle on her way in from the garage. Then she flips the frick out because I didn't get her wet shoes and socks off fast enough.

She has sort of fallen out of love with The Jonas Brothers, preferring Laurie Berkner and Neko Case instead. She still loves music of any kind though. I think the phrase I hear most often around the house or in the van right now is “More musit, peas mama.”

She struggles with the hard C or K sounds, milk is still "milt" and music is still "musit." I think I will probably shed a tear or two the first time I hear her get them right because those two words sort of define her toddler hood to me.
 
She talks in sentences for the most part and says “Mama, big blue late [lake]” when we are driving home. She loves watching for school buses and city buses and the mail man when we are driving and she counts “One sool bus, two sool bus.”
 
Is it possible that this is the same baby that just yesterday was vomiting all over my shoulder every seventeen seconds and crying for hours on end? The transformation is astonishing, it is like black magic, in the blink of an eye she went from helpless to fairly self-sufficient, from crying every time we left the room to shutting herself in her room and refusing to let us in. I imagine I’ll get to blink once or twice more and she’ll be off getting married and having her own kids. I have to admit there is half of me that is sad by that proposition of half of me that secretly can't wait. Because when you're the grandma you actually get to sit down once in a while.

the one where ski bowled a 299

It was two weeks ago now that we were up at my mom & dad's visiting with them and with Jen and her crew. I finally got my big, fat butt off of the couch and got some new pictures of Charlie and I'm so happy because it has been a while since I have updated him on my picture wall. Renee went sledding for the first time (no tears...it's a MIRACLE!) and Michael bowled a 299 on the Wii. He seriously missed ONE pin in the tenth frame. How cool is it that my parents have a Wii and they have more games and play more often than we do? My mom can kick my butt at pretty much any game. 

I think Renee's eyes are going to match my mom's, a beautiful hazel green. How beautiful is my mom?

This one is totally Charlie to me. He has the hazel eyes too.

And this one totally Sarah. 

And this one totally Cameron. HAHAHAHA.

My sister and her little Mama's boy :) I'm still a little pissed that I didn't get the right exposure on this one but it is cute anyways.
  
Another one of Charlie because he's CUTE. And he's going to be FOUR in a couple of weeks. Sniff, sniff. 

And Renee sledding with Ski. He looks terrified and well, so does she!
 
  
Just think maybe next year we'll get her to WALK in the snow without weeping! 

i think i have finally dialed in on the worst part

I do a lot of complaining about motherhood, about marriage, about pretty much anything. Here and elsewhere, oftentimes to anyone that will listen. 

I bitch and moan about how she throws her food on the floor and how she wouldn’t throw her food on the floor if I wasn’t feeding the baby and her dad wasn’t sitting at the table eating his down dinner, reading his own magazine ignoring her requests for UP DADDY! All done! She knows if she starts throwing her food on the floor he’ll get her cleaned up and out of her chair but her sweet, innocent asking politely requests will go ignored. Cause and effect, it is simple and she gets it, I try to tell her dad. It's too bad he doesn’t get it.

But that’s not the worst part.

I bitch about breastfeeding and about how my son doesn’t sleep through the blessed night and about how he poops out of every single blessed diaper I put on him resulting in mounds and mounds and MOUNDS of stained laundry.

That’s not the worst part either.

I bitch about how the girl threw a tantrum of epic proportions the other day in the driveway at daycare with everyone watching because she wanted to go for a walk right then and there and couldn’t wait the ten second drive until we got her home. I swooped her up and went to wrestle her flailing body in to her car seat when I heard something snap in my back. And it still fricking hurts. No amount of Advil touches the pain. It throbs and aches and I can’t even lift my baby out of his own bed.

SIGH. Nope, not it. It's not the worst part.

The worst part is sending your kid to daycare when you KNOW they’re sick. You know the diarrhea that went on all day yesterday and through half of the night isn’t done. You essentially turn a blind eye and tell yourself that maybe she’ll feel better after she wakes up and gets something in her belly. You send her with diaper rash so bad that she says OWIE! and cries and moans every single time you so much as mention changing her diaper. You send her knowing full well that she’ll come home and it will be worse. You send her because the mom has a bum back and can’t lift her and the dad is already seventy hours negative on vacation time. You send her because you really don’t have a choice.

Yep, for me that’s the worst part about being a mom.

What's the worst part for you?

TFT: finding the right balance

The van was loaded to the gills with swimsuits and packed lunches, two pack n plays and lots and lots of diapers. The diapers I almost forgot in the midst of trying to pack the rest of the paraphernalia needed to spend one night in a hotel with two children under two.

The DVD player was armed with the familiar shows so that when the toddler demanded “more musit” we could quickly and easily comply. Anything to keep her from getting bored, from realizing that most kids her age don’t spend so much time in the car.

There was an extra glass of milk tucked neatly next to me in the case of a melt-down emergency. Because the milk has magic powers and is always successful at getting her to shut up for at least five minutes. And when you’re trapped in a van with two screaming children, sometimes one of them shutting up for five minutes is all you need to retain a shred of your sanity.

The aroma from the clothes soiled with spilled baby poop wafted up from the back, reminding me of the piles and PILES of laundry awaiting me when we finally returned home. The clothes that needed to be soaked and scrubbed and pre-treated because those breast milk poops? They stain. And those outfits? They’re borrowed.

When we’re coming home, having spent the two days prior to the trip packing and writing lists and organizing, the 24 hours we’re there putting out fires and trying to get the kids to just please be quiet and well-behaved, and the two days on the return end playing catch-up, I can’t help but wonder why we do it. I can’t help but wonder if it is worth it.

I bought a new momAgenda and I sighed a heavy sigh when I looked through what is going to be our next six months. I couldn’t help but feel guilty when I realized that at least every other weekend will be spent on the road, our family time spent with the children buckled in to their car seats, mom and dad hoping and praying from the front seat that this trip will go better than the last.

I want my children to know their cousins, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles. I want that. I want to be the kind of aunt that was always there for her nieces’ and nephew’s birthday parties. My sisters are my best friends; surely I want nothing more than to spend as much time as humanly possible with them. And don’t get me started on the grandparents because one of my biggest fears in life is my children not being able to remember their grandparents. We choose to live where we do, at least a hundred miles from any of our relatives and most of our friends and I know that. I take responsibility for that choice and this lifestyle is one of the consequences of that choice.

That is why we spend more weekends on the road than we spend at home; to build those memories, those moments, those relationships between my kids and their cousins, between my kids and their grandparents. And three trips out of four, or at least half of the trips, I come home feeling like all of the organizing and packing and distracting was worth it.

But I have to admit, there are days, especially after a particularly bad car ride followed by two nights where neither child slept all.night.long when I wonder why we do it. I wonder if we are doing our children a disservice by refusing to make a life here, in the town where we live. Everything we have scheduled is stuff I want to do but I can't help but wonder if they could make the choices about what we do this weekend, what would they chose? I wish I could ask them.

How often do you travel? Do you spend holidays at home or on the road? Do you have thoughts on how to find a perfect balance?

four months

To celebrate his four month birthday Cameron rolled over. Both ways. Over and over and OVER again. Everytime I bent down and smiled at him to congratulate him on his brand new trick, he laughed. Like he was saying, 'You just wait lady. You think you're tired now...you JUST WAIT.' And then he gave me this amused little sheepish grin that he does and my head exploded from the cuteness.
 
His primary nickname other than Cam is Buster Boo. I'm fairly sure that is the one that is going to stick because I even have Ski calling him that. When I got the dad started on calling Renee Mu Shu Chicken, it was all downhill.

I feel like when I sit down to write about Cameron all that comes to mind is how incredibly sweet he is. He’s a snuggler, a mommy’s boy, my quiet little content baby that is comfortable in his own skin. He’s finally down to eating every three hours instead of every two (THANK YOU JESUS) and naps for about an hour three to four times a day. Except for sometimes, mostly on the weekends when we are trying to get things done around the house, and then he refuses to sleep at all. Come to think of it he really sort of sucks at sleeping in general. Who me?

Like, for instance, he is STILL NOT SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT. It is the bane of my existence, the thorn in my side. He goes down easily at around 8PM but he wakes easily, fidgeting and grunting and lately crying until I pick him up and hold him. At 10PM, 2AM and then again at 4AM, at which point I usually feed him and bring him back to bed with me because by then I’m to the point where I’m panicked knowing that I have precisely one hour before the stupid alarm clock tries to will me back out of bed. I miss sleeping.   

He takes the biggest poops of any baby I have ever seen and not a day goes by that we don’t end up with at least one wardrobe change. I’m talking full wardrobe here, the kid ends up with poop on his socks and in his hair at least once every SINGLE day. My girl never pooped out of her clothes once but this boy, OH MY GOD, every single outfit he has is stained. I blame the, ahem, boy parts for this.   

He is such a tough little guy and is already big enough for the exersaucer. He sure likes it when the big, bossy sister allows him to play in it. It's only once or twice a week but hey, it's something. He doesn't complain.

He's pretty coordinated about getting his thumb into his mouth and I wouldn't be surprised if he's a thumb sucker once he doesn't need to be swaddled anymore. I won't even go in to detail about how incredibly TERRIFIED I am of the day when I need to quit swaddling him (like probably soon here) because I am certain that he'll sleep even worse than he already does. IF THAT'S EVEN POSSIBLE. I tried it for exactly one night and it was about midnight when I finally got annoyed and swaddled him up and put him to bed. Google is not my friend on this one telling me that I am going to stunt the development of his motor skills by swaddling him. Riddle me this: Is him having a crazy, even-more-sleep-deprived-than-she-already-is mother better or worse than his motor skills being a bit behind? The jury is still out on this one.

He loves it when I lay him down in his crib and then lean over him and talk to him when he’s winding down for the night. He coos and carries on, telling me all about his day and about how his sister threw a toy at him and hit him in the face. He’s not lying when he tells me these things; his sister is pretty keen on trying to injure him. My sweet baby, he doesn’t hold grudges, his whole face still lights up every time he sees her. Something tells me some lucky lady is going to win the jackpot when she finds him as he’s already going to know all about being bossed around by women. Come to think of it, I should probably go call Aunt Jill and tell her thanks for breaking Ski in...those older sisters, they aren't all bad.
 
   

thoughts for thursday: does he hear him?

At 3AM nothing pisses me off more than the rhythmic sound of my husband snoring from the other room. NOTHING. While I’m rocking the baby, having gotten in to and out of bed no fewer than fifteen times between the hours 1AM and 3AM, I actually create these mad scenarios in my head that involve me taking the kids, running away to Mexico and leaving him for good. Because during those brief moments of sleep-deprived insanity, I hate him more than anyone has ever hated another human being in the history of the world.

By morning I’m over it, having forgotten that the bastard didn’t even bother try to help me with the baby who picks one or two nights out of the month to refuse to sleep all. Some mornings I actually buy in to his mantra that he didn’t even hear him. 

But does he?

I bought his story whole-heartedly back when we only had one kid. I believed that maybe he was just a sound sleeper.

But now he hears her. She makes the slightest little whine for Daddy and he bolts in there to her beck and call. Is it possible that his natural human instincts have somehow programmed his brain to only hear one of his children? Can he actually tune out the whimpers of his son subconsciously because he knows that the little boy is going to want his mama anyways? Or is it a conscious decision to roll over and always make the wife handle the baby?

Tell me, people, what do you think? Do your husbands do this? And, do you think it is grounds for divorce?

This morning it feels like it should be.

mo zoo! mo zoo!

We made the maiden voyage to the Minnesota Zoo last weekend with Ski's family. Renee has been wandering around the house clutching her stuffed tiger saying Big Fish! Monkey! Banana! Tiger! Mo zoo! Mo zoo! for the last week and a half. It is safe to say she liked it. A lot. She thought it might be the coolest thing. Like maybe EVER.

Cam took it all in from the back seat of the Phil and Ted's, which converted so awesomely from single stroller to double stroller that I feel the need to constantly pat myself on the back for having the foresight to spend a small fortune on that stroller when Renee was born. It was worth it. BACK ON SUBJECT. Oh yeah, Cameron at the zoo. I didn't take even one picture of him. NOT ONE. Chalk up one more big fat COLLOSSAL FAILURE for me. It must be mentioned, however, that the kid took a MONSTER DUMP forcing Aunt Jill and I to strip off each and every article of his clothing including his socks on a bench right in the middle of the Tropics Trail. I'm just glad I actually thought to bring a change of clothes. GOOD LORD THAT KID CAN POOP.

Sorry about the not-so-sweet quality of these pictures...somedays a girl needs to throw the point-and-shoot on auto and live her life.
 
 
  
  
  
  
  
Wait a second, you see that little tan thing on the bottom left corner of this picture? THAT'S CAMERON'S FOOT! I did get a picture of him afterall. 

twenty months

Oh, Miss Renee, she never runs out of things for me to say about her. She's always coming up with something over-the-top to make me laugh or to make me bite my tongue to stop myself from yelling at her. She’s a special girl.

She is very particular about everything. Everything in our house has its assigned place, and moving something as small as a toy from one side of the living room to the other has her pointing and directing and demanding that we move it back. It clearly disturbs her. If her bedtime routine is altered in ANY way, down to what order her dad takes off his glasses and turns off the light, she loses her shit. She gets angry at me if I do something that her dad usually does and demands 'Daddy DO' even if he is gone and won’t be home for several hours. I would love to say that I have no idea where she gets this behavior from but I can’t. She didn’t stand a chance. BOTH of her parents are creatures of habit and love routine. By day four of a seven day vacation we are both generally ready to go home, to the familiar, to the comfortable and she feels the same way. HOMEBODIES, the lot of us. Maybe Cameron stands a chance of being adventurous and free-spirited but I'm not holding my breath.

I made the mistake of giving her a 'special treat' after her shots at eighteen months. The treat came in the form of a product called YoBits which is really fruit-flavored corn syrup coated with some sort of fake yogurt-like product that I had purchased during a somewhat vulnerable moment while walking through Target in a sleep-deprived stupor shortly after Cameron was born. You would think I was giving her molten chocolate cake with fresh whipped crème and caramel ice cream because she walks around the house demanding 'TWEATS!' all of the time now.

I think Becky must be giving her a bit of juice at daycare because she says 'Apple deece' the minute we open the fridge. Rather than fight her on it I would put about an ounce of juice in with five ounces of water and give it to her and she would be all proud walking around with her 'deece.' Then, last week I realized that if I give her straight water in the cup that she thinks juice comes in she doesn’t seem to notice. I am smarter than you, Renee, always remember that.

She’s obsessed with comparing things and gets especially excited when there is two of something. When she sees her toy guitar she runs over and points at her dad’s guitar and says 'two ditars or 'two whammy.' I love that she knows what a whammy bar is.

She loves to get the mail and starts talking about it the instant I pick her up from daycare. She got a new toy house thingy for Christmas that we just put together last weekend and it has a mailbox and fake mail and you would not believe how many hours of peace and quiet we have gotten out of it. That toy is worth its weight in gold. She’ll sit there all day and put the mail in and take it out and ring the doorbell and play the radio. It cracks me up every single time she goes to the door and says 'Knot, knot'…whether it is on the bathroom door when one of us is in there or on her toy house door.

She's mimicking everything we say and absolutely loves music of any kind. She loves to put her rain boots on and dance around to Laurie Berkner. Even the annoying, electronic music on Cameron's exesaucer can get her shaking her little booty. She wants to read books that aren't in the correct holiday. Her favorite books right now are her Christmas and Halloween books.

She learned her colors this month and is sure to tell us what color EVERYTHING is. I love how green is gween and blue is boo. She loves to have tea parties and is very particular about what color cup everyone gets. Ski’s is always red, mine is always pink and Yadi’s is always green. I love how she sets 'Yadi’s pup' right next to her when she’s napping like the cat is going to wake up, grow thumbs and suddenly learn how to drink from a cup. The other day I found the green cup in the cat’s food dish. I love how she runs, not walks, from the living room to her play kitchen to fill the cups up before delivering them to their rightful owner. I love how proud she is of herself and how she says 'Yeah Nae!' when she’s done something she knows we’ll get excited about.

She woke up one day this month and decided that she wanted to sleep with a pillow and a stuffed animal in addition to her beloved green blankies so now in addition to a blanket corner in each hand she lays on a pillow with her doggie under her arm when she sleeps. It cracks me up every night when I go in to check on her on my way to bed, all snuggled in with her lovies.

When she’s not sick or teething she’s an awesome eater actually asking me the other day for 'mo bok-li' (more broccoli) and 'mo skash (more squash).' I think she probably put on at least a couple of pounds in the last couple of weeks, devouring everything we put on her plate like she was catching up from fasting for two months while she was sick and getting molars. She loves carrots and peas and chicken and pork and demands that she has some sort of dipping sauce for her meat. I love how she says 'mo sauce, pees (more sauce, please).' I have taken to giving her mashed up avocado or pureed squash as a "sauce” and she is totally cool with that. She has never taken a bite of any sort of beef product that she hasn’t spit out, whether it is a cheeseburger or a taco or in some form of casserole. She is a fruit and cheese kind of girl (a girl after my own heart) and often leaves most of her starch on her plate, be it rice or noodles or bread. The insane amounts of fruit are good for her but it makes the thought of ever potty training a daunting thought. She still poops 2-3 times a day at odd times and it is mushy. I’m sorry but cleaning mushy poop out of one of those little potties (or GOD FORBID out of her underwear) pushes my gag reflexes to the limit. I think I’ll have kids in diapers for the next five or six years, thank-you-very-much.

She still absolutely LOVES milk and whines when she finishes what's in her glass and says 'Mo milt.' I love how milk has a T instead of a K at the end. I love how she puts it off to the side of her mouth and literally chugs every last drop the instant you give it to her.
 
All of the pictures I have of her recently have her missing some article of clothing because she HATES pants and socks and boots and hats and well, shirts. She’d prefer to be in just her diaper at all times. She has her boots, socks and hat off within seconds of being strapped in to her car seat and requests 'pants OFF' when we are changing her diaper. She’s going to be one of those adults that hangs out at nudist colonies, I swear it. It drives both Ski and I absolutely insane, it is not like we are dressing her in lacey, itchy clothes; I am talking sweats and a cotton shirt here, people. I just don’t understand the problem.

She gives the sweetest hugs and kisses and has started running over and giving me a huge squeeze and a nice, wet kiss on the lips when I’m leaving to go somewhere. I think she is trying to say “I love you” with something that sounds like “I ahhoo” and it MELTS the very heart out of my chest. Because the love I have for that kid, it could move mountains. There are days when I look at her and I feel the emotion rising up out of my chest in an almost painful way and I realize that because of her I know what it is truly like to love someone so much it hurts.