Merry Christmas!

May the coming year look a little more like this:

And a little less like this:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

To: Everyone, From: T

We flew to Arizona on Wednesday and T spent the next night throwing up 10 or 11 times. (You can count on one hand the hours of sleep I got that night.)
We're thinking it's because she thought it was a good joke to lick the airplane seats.
And as her Christmas present to everyone, she gave them all her illness - so far 6 out of the 11 of us have gotten sick. I'm still standing, but who knows for how long.
Wish me luck.

Sheets: A Rant

The absolute number one argument in our house by far is how to arrange the sheets on our bed.
BY FAR.

I like them tucked in, straight as a pin, all the top and side edges matching up exactly, and I do not move at night. The sheets (when I'm alone) look exactly the same in the morning save for a slight rise in the blanket where I was laying.

Seth, on the other hand, tosses and turns all night. He has the odd quirk of only rolling in one direction - away from me. Thus I end up with no sheets. He pulls the top sheet out farther than the rest of the blankets and bunches it up over the top. He refuses to have anything tucked in anywhere. And he does most of this because his number one issue with the sheets is that he cannot have any pressure on his toes.
Seriously. The weight of the blanket hanging off the end of the bed is too much for him. So he kicks it all up and ruins everything.

I have been threatening to buy separate sheets - and on my most irritated nights, separate beds - since the day we got married.

Seth just tells me to buy wooden clogs for him to sleep in, but I just know I will get kicked with those things.

I think I have finally found the solution, however, and I'm so excited that such a thing exists I had to write a whole blog post about it.
Check it out:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am about 90% sure I will be buying this.

H: 10.5 Months

On the 25th of every month I plan to sit down and write a few words about H but somehow it never happens. Mostly because I am busy, but also a tiny bit because every time I did try to take some monthly pictures, this happened:

If she ain't moving, she ain't happy.
So here is a way past due update for my poor neglected 2nd child.

She climbs on everything, hates getting dressed, loves to "dance" and is starting to walk more than crawl.
She just learned how to wave and clap her hands and does so with vigor.
She is freakishly strong. Wrestling matches, morning and night, trying to get that kid changed.

She wants to do whatever T is doing.

She does not like having her routine messed up, so if we come to visit you, please know that she is not normally so fussy/whiny/annoying.

She loves being outside, looking out the window, and destroying the blinds if they're not pulled up enough. She will throw a tantrum if you shut the door on her, even if you're just moving her from the car to inside the house.

She is always hungry and will eat pretty much everything, except carrots and potatoes (oddly enough.) If you're in the kitchen, H is in the kitchen too. And fussing for food.

She has 4 teeth and takes 2 naps a day.

Her tongue is hanging out of her mouth 80% of the day. It means she's excited.

If I had to pick one word to describe H it would be: sunshine.

Or spaz. Both sum her up pretty perfectly.
I mean, she eats dirt for crying out loud.

We love her.

Bubble Bath

We broke out the bubbles for bath time the other night.
It's cheap stuff from Walmart so they don't especially create the best or biggest bubbles, but since it was intended for 2 year olds, I really did not care.

Seth, however, did care.
He cared enough to go get an air pump (one he cannibalized from an old air mattress set, the little hoarder), set it all up, and spend several minutes trying to amplify the bubbles to be bigger and better.

So file this under: Ways My Engineering Husband and I Are Complete Opposites.

Play House

Grammy and Pappy brought the girls a present - a play house.

And it is the BOMB.

T loves it so much she asks to sleep in it (a privilege only extended on Friday nights but one she does not forget to remind us of.) Sometimes she'll sneak in there during quiet time to take naps.
H literally goes crazy with excitement when she plays in it. She flings herself around in a frenzy while giggling to herself. And yes, she has hurt herself a few times while doing this.

And of course my third child, Seth, also finds it lots of fun.

Thanks Grammy and Pappy!

Smartphone!

Seth and I finally joined the rest of the civilized world and got smartphones.

(As some of you may know, since I am not smart enough for a smartphone and keep accidentally calling people. Touch screens are hard!)

I've been working on him for a few months now - hoping to get one for Christmas. Luckily for me I found a totally awesome deal and once Seth realized we'd be paying less than we do now for better phones, he was more obsessed than I was.

I can always win if I appeal to his cheapskate tendencies.

Anyway, I mostly was dying for one so that I could actually send and receive picture texts from my family so one of the first things Seth did was test out this feature:

It works beautifully. We're excited!

Toddler Talk #3

After coughing:
T: There's a scary monster in my mouth mommy.
J: A scary monster?
T: Yeah and he's coughing.

T: Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy...
S: Hold your horses!
T: Hold my horses? I can't hold my horses. My horses aren't in my hands.

T: I got a big bum.
J:
T: I got a big bum to scratch.

J: *stomach growls*
S: Here T, lay your head on mommy's stomach and listen.
T: *lays head down*
S: What do you hear?
T: A pig.

This is the cold that never ends

It's been going on and on my friends.
I got sick 2 weeks ago, and I am still coughing.
Seth got sick 1 week ago, and he is still coughing and sneezing and aching.
The girls got sick 4 days ago and they are coughing and sneezing and aching and fussing and sleeping insane amounts.

So we haven't been up to much. I don't want to think about the amount of time we have spent sitting on the couch watching t.v.
I also don't want to think about the state of my house.
And as Thanksgiving approaches, I can tell you that good health will be at the very top of my grateful list, and I really hope I am not still coughing by then.

Happy Halloween!

Because two posts about it are not enough.

I made the mistake of not putting away T's candy after we dumped it all over the table last night and had the following conversation at 7:30 this morning.

T: *gasps* Candy! I want candy!
J: No, we have to eat breakfast first. Do you want pancakes?
T: No.
J: Do you want eggs and toast?
T: No.
J: Cereal? Bread?
T: No.
J: So you don't want to eat anything for breakfast then.
T: No, I want candy.
J: Well you can't have candy for breakfast
T: *fake crying* Mom I'm crying.
J:
T: Because I want candy.
J: Nope. Pancakes?
T: Ok...... I'm going to cry. *more fake crying*

So that was fun.

We had our ward Trunk-or-Treat on October 30th where T got plenty of candy, so I considered my work pretty much done. Unfortunately I didn't convey this attitude to Seth, so he made the mistake of hyping up more trick-or-treating on Halloween morning before he left for work.
T then wore me down by asking all day long if we were "going to the Halloween", so I finally consented to help Seth take her around our neighborhood.

The other reason (besides my laziness) I didn't want to do it is there are very few children in our neighborhood and therefore very few people willing to hand out candy. We were gone for about 45 minutes and in that time only managed to find 4 houses with their lights on that answered our knock. (And each time T would yell "I say trick-or-treat!" Hopefully by next year she'll have learned to omit those first 2 words.)

We did keep our lights on and handed out candy to the 3 or 4 groups that came, but it was only the reject candy we had taken from T's bowl, so...... not really sure if that's better than not handing anything out at all.

I had to put the girl's costumes on again for a 3rd time for their music class this morning and by then I no longer thought dressing them up was adorable.
On to the next holiday!

Pumpkin Carving

We carved our pumpkins the other night.
Well, Seth carved his pumpkin. T and I painted ours because pumpkin innards are gross.

As T now knows.

H kinda liked it though, that crazy kid. Found her chewing on a stray pumpkin seed this morning.

Actually T was waaaay into painting her pumpkin and told me several times today that she needed to paint some more.

We used this method and I think it worked rather well. Except of course we used a paintbrush, not finger paints. Because it's T and she doesn't do messy.

I think they turned out rather well.

Pumpkin Patch

We went up to Richmond last weekend to visit family.
My dad was out refereeing a football game so none of us saw him when we got there late Friday night. Early the next morning when he heard T reading her books in bed he poked his head in to say "Good Morning!" She responded with wide eyes and a panicked whimper and so he quickly departed.

T then spent the rest of the weekend telling us the same exact story over and over again:
"I was in my bed and then Grandad came in and then I said whaaaaa?"
Over and over and over.

In fact she told me that story a few times today as well, so congrats Dad. You officially scared her enough to sear that memory into her brain.

We also went to the pumpkin patch. H loved it because it combined two of her favorite things: being held and being outside.

T mostly liked it. She kept tripping over the vines and then getting dirt all over herself, and because she is a mini-me, I believe she found that very unpleasant.

Her favorite part was taking a hay ride over to the barn to look at the "forseys".

Then we went out for dinner and T showed us all how to correctly use chopsticks. Seth and I were flabbergasted, because at home she can barely get through dinner without dumping half of it on herself and the carpet.

We had a great weekend!

Graham Crackers

My children ate graham crackers for breakfast, lunch and snack yesterday.

But not for dinner!

For dinner I fed them a nice healthy meal of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

So, parenting fail. 

But - toddler win?

Winsor Cousins

Seth's brother Adam and family are moving up to Washington D.C. so we went up to Raleigh to see them this past weekend before they go.
I insisted on getting a picture of T with her cousin A.

And then we also threw their other cousin H in there too because the three of them were all born within five months of each other in 2011. BFF!

The last time we managed to get all three of them in one shot, they looked like this:

We will miss having them so close!

An Unexpected Guest

It was very nice out today, so we decided to leave our backdoor open during dinner to enjoy the weather.
I guess some birds thought it was actually a little nicer inside the house, because two of them flew inside mid-meal.
One immediately flew back out, but the other went into our spare room and Seth and I leaped up in a panic.
Um, I have never had a bird fly into my house before. It was odd.

T went and promptly shut the door afterward so no more birds would get in the house.

Tasty Recipes

I have actually been cooking more often than not and it's probably all thanks to Pinterest.
These are some of the recipes we've tried recently that have merited a spot in my official recipe binder.

Super Simple Spicy Thai Noodles with grilled chicken. Quick, easy, delicious. This recipe is from Melskitchencafe.com, which, if you know the site, you know that every single one of her recipes is gold.
The original recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of red pepper flakes, but we used 1/2 tablespoon and it was just right for our wimpy mouths.

Roasted Cauliflower. Not really a meal, but so delicious I had to post it anyway.
Me before this recipe: Cauliflower hater.
Me after this recipe: Cauliflower obsessed.
Also my toddler gobbles this up (a miracle!).

Tomato Basil Chicken. So tasty. I made this twice in a row because I wanted to just keep eating the stuff forever.

Dal Nirvana. Funny name. Awesome stuff. My children actually ate this up (!). We ate ours with naan bread and jasmine rice and I felt like a world-class cook.

Vegetarian Black Bean and Lentil soup. Originally pinned because I needed another recipe to use up my lentils from the dal nirvana. So good that I will buy lentils just for this recipe now.

Face coloring

Apparently when it comes to coloring, my children just prefer their faces over plain old paper.

That would be dry erase crayon all over her face. I couldn't get her to sit still long enough for a good picture so instead I took some video of the aftermath.

Having to get her hands and face wiped off by me was her punishment - she cried and cried and I did not feel the slightest bit bad because after cleaning her off, I had to spend 20 minutes scrubbing more off the walls and carpet.

The dry erase crayons have permanently been put away.

Creative Punishment

Someone found the markers.

I was looking at an article I pinned called "Creative Consequences" because my gosh, the terrible twos are a real thing people. So very real. And the time-outs are not working. (Me: Stop that! Do you want to go to time out? T: Yeah! Me: Well, then you're not going. T: OK!)
Anyway, I was reminded that I could send T to bed early so when she decided to spend the afternoon coming up with different ways to make her little sister cry I inflicted this punishment on her.

BEST idea ever! She fell asleep in minutes and I have had TWO whole hours to myself tonight.

Bliss.

Labor Day

We went up to Raleigh for Labor Day weekend to spend time with the Winsors. They borrowed a boat and we spent the day at Jordan Lake.

Seth went out later to do some tubing and after a big fall, it was vividly brought to his attention that he is not as young and spry as he used to be.

I did not attempt any tubing. I went on one boat ride and that was more than enough for me.

T went with us and spent most of her time sitting stoically on our laps. She didn't crack a smile once and was content to sit in the shade with me afterwards.

This in contrast to cousin H, who fell asleep during her boat ride.

A little of this, A little of that.

So, my day started out like this:

So I put H down for an early nap and T has been watching TV all morning because seriously, that much crying that early in the morning is not ok.
And FYI, they were upset because it was taking me longer than 2 seconds to get breakfast for them. I know, I'm a terrible mother.

Some other things happening around here:

H is doing this now and it's hilarious.

T was pretending her pretzels were alive the other day. She made me pet them. Many times.
Also, I potty trained her and it was way easier than I expected. (Just don't ask about my first attempt 2 months ago.)

H has learned how to crawl and pull herself up.

T is in the process of giving up her naps (Nnnnnnnnooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!) and H is switching to only 2 naps a day so I no longer have a child-free break during the day and I am going insane. Just completely insane.
What am I supposed to do with her? Because shutting her in her room and listening to her kick the door for an hour is not working out very well.

Beach Trip

We took a quick day trip to the beach to visit some family and it was awesome.

Even T, my previous beach-hater, loved it.
I cannot get her to not do that face when I pull out the camera.

H enjoyed getting her feet wet and eating the fistfuls of sand I wasn't quick enough to stop.

And one day at the beach was entirely too short for us.