My Baby is ONE

Ok, ok, so I'm a few days late...But my sweet little baby is one whole year old now! It is really hard to believe it has been a whole year already, it feels like just yesterday he was born. It is pretty likely that we wont have any more kids, so I'm trying so hard to cherish everything since it will probably be the last time we go through each baby stage. Sawyer is 21 lbs and 31 inches tall, which, considering his size at birth, is actually not that huge. Anyway...here's Sawyer's first birthday letter. (pictures to come when I get them from my mom since I used her camera for bday pictures and not mine)

My Sweet Sawyer,

You're one now. A whole year old, even though it feels like that can't be possible. You do so many amazing things! You're probably going to give me a heart attack one of these days because you pretty much have no fear at all and climb on everything and if I thought I couldn't take my eyes off of your brother for a second at this age, I think it about triple for you. You love to watch your brother and play together. You like story time and you love when we blow bubbles out on the deck. You say Mama and you can sign for milk, more, and all done. You love when I sing itsy bitsy spider, you even do the hand motions (sort of), and you clap your hands and stomp your feet when we sing if you're happy and you know it. You love anything you can get into and make a mess of. You're in full on throw everything just to see what happens stage.

You're so smart! You figure things out so quickly and I usually only have to show you how to do something once or twice before you can do it on your own. I can't wait to see how much more you learn and grow this year. You're very opinionated for someone who doesn't know a whole lot of words yet, and you sure know how to get your point across. You've got the fire in your personality to match your hair. You love to dance and clap and laugh. You haven't quite figured out the whole sleeping through the night thing yet, I think we should work on that...just sayin'. I love you to pieces, and so do your daddy and your brother.

Oh...Hello, Internet!

Dear 3 or 4 people who actually read my blog,

I am back! I have internet again! After virtually no time spent on the computer in the past 5 months, and what little time was spent was generally paying bills and other not so exciting stuff, you have no idea how it feels to type on my very well loved macbook keyboard. The way the smooth, perfectly placed, not annoyingly not-flat, too close together keys of Bryan's PC, feel under my fingertips, it is like the computer is practically begging me to type and never stop [I don't think my kids would appreciate that, however]

Anyway, I now have real life computer internet, not stupid, crappy, doesn't-like-to-work-with-blogger internet on my phone. I'm so excited!

Anyway....I thought the 3 or you would like to know :D

Holy oh my goodness Batman, I have a THREE year old!

I plan to write a letter to my kids on their birthdays each year and hope for them to read them when they're older...maybe when they have babies of their own.

To my sweet little Carson,

Today you are three, THREE!?! I can't even believe that it has been that long since you were born, it feels like yesterday. You are such a sweet little boy. Your favorite things to do are read and write, or really anything having to do with the alphabet or words, you like to color, blow bubbles and run around. You love cars and trucks and books, lots of books. You tell us constantly that Sawyer is your favorite, which is one the most special things to me. I hope you and your baby brother will continue to be great friends as you grow us, he certainly adores you just as much as you love him.

You are one of the smartest kids ever, and I'm not even saying that because I'm your mama. You are just turning three and you already know every letter of the alphabet, both upper and lowercase, and can write them all legibly. You are starting to read a bit and you can spell aloud and write a lot of words without help such as: Carson, Mommy, Daddy (except sometimes you forget and spell it Doddy), Brother, Alligator, Iguana, Goose, and lots more. You can count to twenty, and by tens all the way to 100, when you see a number bigger than 20, like 26, you say it "six-twenty" because in your sweet little head it makes sense that is 16 is "six-teen" then 26 would be "six-twenty" Every day you learn more and more and its almost like I can see the connections being made. You're amazing. You have so much potential to do so many amazing things with your life, but the biggest thing in the whole world that I want for you is that you grow up to be happy.

You have an amazing little personality. You are happy and sweet and full of so much energy and life. You're also stubborn and strong willed and want everything to happen the way you think it should...you probably got that from me. You're interested in everything, you want to know what it is and how it works and why, why, why. Sometimes being your mama is hard because you're three, one day when you have a three year old of your own you'll know why, but even at its toughest, being your mama is nothing short of amazing and wonderful and more than I could every have asked for or expected from being a mom.

You love to play with your friend Riley and your cousin Isabelle. Your favorite book is Chica Chica Boom Boom. Your favorite toys are your magna doodle and your cars. You just got your very own library card. You love the children's museum. You don't have a favorite color, if someone asks you what your favorite color is you look at your shirt and say its whatever color your shirt is because it matches and you like to match. You love going to the park, and jumping in puddles with your boots on.

Happy Birthday Bug!

the problem with me making promises I can't keep...

See, I keep promising to blog more often, and I personally think I was doing a super awesome freaking job for like...a couple of weeks...but then this or that happens and I fail miserably at keeping said blog-updating promise.

So...due to router incompatability with my computer (apparently certain models of linksys routers are NOT compatible with certain models of mac computers) I am living without the ability to connect my computer to the internet. It is super lame.

While I'm all about new experiences and doing thing spontaneously and all of that, I have a serious aversion to change when it comes to my computer...well, certain changes anyway. I love my mac, I especially love the keyboard on my mac. I am currently posting this from Bryan's computer (which is NOT a mac...hence the internet connecting capabilities) which has a different keyboard. I'm not a happy camper. Anyway due to less available time on the internet (read: when Bryan is at work I have children to care for rather than goof around on here and when he's home..uh he likes to use his computer occasionally too...) I'll be blogging as I get the chance. This may or may not come in the form of infrequent posting, serial posting when I actually get a chance on the computer and/or spending what time I do get on the computer goofing off and getting distracted and not actually blogging.

Just thought I'd put that all out there in case anyone thought that maybe I died.

The Children's Museum

Yesterday I took the boys to the children's museum with my friend Jessie and three of her kids. Carson had SO much fun! I remember going to the children's museum when I was little, and while they've definitely made some awesome improvements, there are a few things that are almost just like I remember them. It was so fun to see Carson play and do things that I remember doing there when I was little. We didn't even get a chance to do all of the exhibits because we were having such a blast and it got too late to stay any longer, but we will definitely be going back! It is so awesome to go somewhere that you have such a good time that you don't even end up seeing it all!

Playing in the bubbles out front! He was thrilled with the bubble machines. 



Playing trains!


'Uhm, Mom, why are there kids I don't know playing with things I want to play with?'...Because it is called 'sharing' that's why! I don't think he liked my answer.


Water Room!!








'Grocery shopping'



this was about when Sawyer conked out in the Beco





And this...is where my camera died.

Thankfully Jessie also had her camera (and is a *much* better photgrapher than me!) so I'll get her photos of the rest of the trip...which included the mini rock wall/slide, fishies in a fish tank, and the theatre room!

Why I parent the way I do.

Lots of people like to tell me what I should do with my kids. Or what I shouldn't do. I'm not a fan. So let me explain why I parent how I do and why I'm not even remotely interested in some of the 'suggestions' people have.

Why we don't 'cry-it-out' (CIO)


I often get told to just 'let them cry' this is not something that I do. Now, I could list research articles that indicate the negative neurological effects of repeated and/or prolonged crying in infants. Such as:


M R Rao, et al; Long Term Cognitive Development in Children with Prolonged Crying, National Institutes of Health, Archives of Disease in Childhood 2004; 89:989-992

Wolke, D, et al, Persistent Infant Crying and Hyperactivity Problems in Middle Childhood, Pediatrics, 2002; 109:1054-1060.


Stifter and Spinrad, The Effect of Excessive Crying on the Development of Emotion Regulation, Infancy, 2002; 3(2), 133-152

Yea, I could list all of those, and trust me, there are plenty more where that came from. I could explain to you how letting small children CIO can cause emotional problems, attachment issues, psychological problems...I could list all of those things.

But the bottom line? I don't CIO with my kids because it goes against pretty much every biological/maternal instinct that I have. When my baby cries, my entire central nervous system says "go make the crying stop!" So yes, sometimes I am going to carry my baby around because he is crying for attention, he is a baby and it hardwired to want and need and crave attention.

And the biggest reason of all that I don't let my kids cry? Because I just don't want to, it just does not feel right to me at all.

Why we talk to our kids like their real people instead of tiny little non-understanding creatures.

Ok, so sometimes they are tiny little non-understanding creatures, but the fact is, if we talk to them like their real people, they learn to speak to other people respectfully. Don't get me wrong, sometimes the age-appropriate answer is "because I said so" but a lot of the time they really do deserve and explanation and not just to be told 'no' all the time.

But mostly, that is how I want to talk to them. And I puked for 9 months to grow those little people and I labored and let people cut me open and endured weeks and weeks of painful recovery to have them and I've nursed them and they are mine and all mine, and no one else's (except for my husband's) and what I say goes.


Why my kids are rear facing in the car.

Well, Sawyer is rear-facing because well, he's new and its the law and he would be regardless of my opinions...But Carson remains rear-facing because it is the safest way for him to be. Because I could list a million scholarly articles that say so. Because the AAP and the NHTSA say so.

But mostly? Because it is what I want and they are my kids.

Did you see a theme here? Because the theme is that they are my children, and unless you were there when they were conceived, you just flat out do not get a say in how I parent them.

So the next time you feel like telling me to just put the kid down and let him cry, or question the way he faces in the car, or otherwise feel like telling me all of the things I doing wrong with them. Take note; I parent my kids the way I want to and the way I see fit. Unless something I'm doing is actual abuse (which I can guarantee it isn't, nor is it even close) then shut the f up. Because I'm done being told all of the things that I'm doing wrong. I have many flaws. They are innumerable. But even on my worst day, nobody has any right to tell me that I'm parenting the wrong way. It may not be your way, but that doesn't make it wrong.

So really, get over yourself. If you want a say in how a kid is parented, then go have some [more] or your own. Because these are mine, and you just don't get to have an opinion.

the couch from hell

So when Bryan and i got married 5 years ago we were a little short on cash as I'm sure you can imagine being that we were 18 and 21 years old so we didn't have much in the way of furniture or money with which to purchase anything nice. The only piece of furniture that we bought new was our mattress and box spring and even that is only as nice as it is because I happened to work at Macy's at the time and it was discontinued so it was marked down and I bought it during extra employee discount day so we got an awesome deal. The rest of our furniture was either hand me downs or stuff we'd both already owned from childhood (ok that is still mostly the case)

anyway...

we ended up buying a couch from my old neighbors for pretty cheap and it was in ok condition considering the fact that it was older than I am. It lasted us through our first couple of years of marriage but when Carson was a little over a year old he grabbed onto a part of it and pulled and it came apart exposing the sharp part of the upholstery staples...so buh-bye went the now dangerous couch...didn't want anyone putting an eye out or anything.

As a replacement we bought a couch off of craigslist for like $40, it seemed really nice at first glance, was plenty comfortable, however they left out one very important detail, they had cats, and I'm pretty sure those cats lived on that couch, however since they'd vacuumed it (I assume that's what they did anyway) it didn't look like it when we got it...but after sitting on it for a bit, and after falling asleep on it...I was in super hive mode, and upon further inspection of the undersides of the cushions, it had quite a bit of cat hair. I'm allergic to cats.

So then we got yet another couch on craigslist. For FREE, and cat-free (I asked if they'd ever so much as owned cats in the time they'd owned the couch, they had not). It isn't terribly horrible looking, though it is quite threadbare, however it had a pretty big flaw...the edge where your knees bend is wood covered in fabric, so when you sit there with your knees bent over a 2x4, they tend to go numb, its not so comfy. But we lived with it, we didn't exactly have money to buy a new one or anything. And then this week we were moving, and I said to my husband that I did not want to bring this couch with us, that I want to be a real adult with a couch that is not a piece of crap and even if it meant we didn't have a couch at all until we could save up for a nicer one, I was not moving with something that was uncomfortable and ugly and I was just done with crappy couches.

Then life happened and before we moved I did not get a chance to list it for free on craigslist (where we lived anything marked free goes in a matter of hours) so we decided we would just load it in the moving truck and drop in off at goodwill on the way to return the uhaul. Except we get to goodwill and they tell us that they don't take hide a bed couches...but salvation army does. So we go to Salvation Army, and they tell us that they only take couches in like new condition, ours was not horrible, but certainly not new...so they tell us we can take it to this other place, except when we get there they tell us that it will cost $40 to give it to them.

We seriously could not get rid of the couch.

It is now sitting on my in-laws driveway awaiting a new home...I have it listed on craigslist for free and everything.

I just want it to GO AWAY!!