Annika - almost 6 months

Annika is getting so old and her personality is really starting to shine through! Here are some of the things we've noticed:

• Annika loves to grab at everything. If she is on my lap at the table or being carried around as I do something , she is wriggling & reaching for everything constantly. She is always making me spill something, or knocking things out of my hand.


• In the same vein - annika is always moving & wriggling, constantly curious to try something new.


• Annika loves being carried in the baby bjorn, facing out & looking around at everything. She kicks her legs around and smiles at everyone.


• We put Annika in her highchair for dinner w/ toys on the tray and she loves to hit with them & throw them over the edge. She usually has the whole tray cleared in just a couple minutes. She concentrates so hard and breathes all funny as she reaches for everything, as if its her mission to get them all off her tray.


• She still looooves to watch Saben & other kids





• Annika had her first bath in the big tub with Saben tonite and loved it. She was grabbing things out of the water, splashing & kicking her feet all over.


• She is just barely learning to sit, but loves being on her belly, pivoting around reaching for her toys. She sometimes rolls over to toys, travelling several feet from where I put her down. She does not seem to prefer any type of toy over any others. No reaction to dolls, stuffed animals, etc, except to put them in her mouth like everything else.


• She has a short attention span in the exer-saucer, but will spend a lot of time on her belly if there's lots of different toys for her to find & explore.


• Annika really likes being flipped around, bouncing & being upside down.


• She is quiet, doesn't make many noises & still isn't laughing a ton. But she smiles easily and will laugh if we really work at tickling her.

New Years Eve

First Food

A little late...we fed Annika rice cereal for the first time on December 30th

Ta Da!!!

Now son you're getting bigger
Oh yes its really true
Soon you'll be ready to do something new
So here is your new potty where you go poo
It's where you sit to do what you gotta doo-doo

It's potty time - now get down low
It's potty time - just let it go!
It's potty time - go with the flow
It's potty time - you can do it, I know!

Never again will I doubt such words of wisdom by saying things like this:

"After watching grown men singing in falsetto about pooping and peeing and hearing one full hour of poop and pee talk Saben decided he wanted to sit on Connor's potty chair and Mommy decided she was never ever watching another Elmo video. "

That's right folks, the seemingly impossible was accomplished yesterday with a little help from Elmo.... Saben figured out how to pee in his potty!!!!!

I have been spastically trying to get Saben potty trained for a few months now. By spastically I mean that I give up everytime because he usually wets his underwear & pants 3 times in just a few minutes, I run out of clean underwear, Annika starts screaming and I give up for another month.

He has been completely non-interested, even rebelious about potty training. He hated his big boy underwear & never wanted to try wearing it and he certainly never asked to sit on the potty or told me when he needed to go.

In moments of desperation I have tried most things - Potty books, big boy underwear, bribery, etc. Tuesday I just happened to see the Potty Elmo DVD in the store and decided to spend yet another $10 to see if that would help.

We watched it Tuesday night & then put underwear on Wednesday morning. He wet his undies just a little & I had him go sit on the potty and....low and behold he went. And then stopped and then started again. And then did it again 8 times yesterday. He just sits down and goes. Absolutely amazing.

We went out to Mallards to celebrate. .

It seems like all of Saben's new tricks go this way.... He resists strongly and makes zero progress and then suddenly it just all falls in to place. And now for a huge knock on wood because I am totally freaked out that he's going to regress now that I wrote this

Christmas Day

After a crazy family Christmas Eve (see post below) we had a wonderful, relaxing Christmas day. We usually travel to one of our parent's houses on Christmas day and I'd been thinking it would be nice to start staying home in a few years...but suddenly going to someone else's house where there are plenty of people to cook, clean & help watch your children seems like such an awesome idea. Why on earth would I want to stay home and do all that by myself???? Here's a few last pics from Christmas with my parents.

Papa spending 1 1/2 hours putting together Saben's new toy kitchen

Great Grandpa, Pumpkin (the cat) and lots of goodies

Stockings

Boys playing with cars. (my brother's old hotwheel sets. I looked for something similar EVERYWHERE and could not find one like it for Saben's Christmas present)

Christmas Resolutions

Note to self: Just because your son is finally old enough to remember/enjoy Christmas does NOT mean you need to squeeze in absolutely every single Christmas tradition you ever remember loving as a kid into one single day.


That pretty much sums it up. This was our (my) to do list on Christmas Eve:

1. Make cinnamon rolls

2. Make homemade gourmet Mac & Cheese for dinner

3. Go to a Christmas Eve service

4. Drive around & look at Christmas lights

5. Finish wrapping a few last gifts

6. Leave cookies out for Santa

It doesn't look that bad, but when you start throwing in temper tantrums (saben didn't like my macaroni & cheese) and missed naps, it starts to get crazy. Plus it was a gorgeous day outside and we were all stuck inside doing what my husband deemed "chores". At the end of the day he ponted out how nice it would have been to pack up the family and go take a nice walk in the sun and suddenly I saw the logic in that.

The night culminated in driving to a retirement neighborhood with tons of lights and getting stuck in the line of cars while Annika reached her end & started wailing in the backseat. It took us another 20 minutes just to make our way out of the neighborhood. Of course it had been my insistence that took us to the neighborhood, Kyle had suggested we head home and I'd said "just one last place....." Now imagine me gamely singing Christmas carols all by myself the whole time, while annika is screaming hoarsly in the back seat. sigh.

So...new years resolution - be flexible next Christmas. Its funny how you can grow up reading, hearing & watching scenarios like this your whole life and you always think, oh, I'll never do that! Then suddenly there you are, the rushed, harried, crazy Christmas Mom who is driving her family nuts and forgetting what Christmas is really about.

Power

Sunday night this is where we had dinner:

Pizza made by headlamp, cooked in a woodfire oven, eaten by candle light. Our power went out at 5pm along with part of downtown. What fun!

Snapshots of Christmas in three parts

December 22nd - Grandma & Grandpa Youngs

Playing some pool - Saben loves playing with Grandma & Grandpa's pool table and finally figured out how to sit on the exercise ball so Grandpa doesn't have to hold him up for hours anymore. G&G Young got him a golf set which he loved, but now we're thinking maybe a pool table would have been even better....

Smile with the presents - Saben has become rebelious about smiling for a camera. I have some great shots of him covering his face & with his eyes closed, but this is his classic "fake" smile.

Mommy & Annika waiting to open gifts.

Family time on Christmas Eve:

Ready for Christmas!!

I'm ready for Christmas too!!!

Christmas morning:

Look mommy, santa left me some candy...what do you mean I can only have two pieces before breakfast?

Post Christmas relaxation:

All I want for Christmas....

Merry Christmas sweet Annika, mommy found your first tooth just barely poking through on Christmas day! Now two days later it is definitely there, nice and sharp when you gnaw on my finger like you love to do.

More on Christmas later....

If my son comes to your house and says things like:
"I am keeping my poop in my butthole"
or
"I have poop on my nuts"

Please blame his father.

Welcome to my home

I have enjoyed getting a glimpse into people's homes & gorgeous decorating styles when they share photos or tours via their blogs so I thought I'd do one of my own. For now I am just going to do the bathroom.

All of our light fixtures are quite vintage, like the one above the mirror here.

For added safety, we have this bar in our shower to keep our guests from falling and suing us.

Our shower curtain rod is clearly labeled to avoid confusion.

There is a nice hole where the shower comes out so you can peek in and check for water damage.

The entrance to the bathroom has a sort of mosaic effect so that you can view the layers of history under the linoleum. Also notice the gray plastic trim piece that normally you would only find in elegant places like public restrooms. Its quite pleasing how the former owners layered it on top of nice fir trimwork.

This window used to have a gorgeous black plastic bag taped up for privacy. Six months later, I grew bored with that, so I taped up some patterned tissue paper. I am quite fond of the effect and its been in place for almost two years now.

Another vintage item, our rusted out sink. The counters, like the floors, are multilayered, with the final layer being this piece of weathered contact paper, with the upper corners of the "backsplash" held in place on the wall by scotch tape.

Sometimes when really special guests come over we like to put on a fresh layer of duct tape to hold the floor down in this corner.

Joking aside, this is the last room on our main level we have left to remodel. We have spent the last 2 1/2 years thinking "oh, we'll just leave that for now because we'll remodel it soon". So its sort of gross. But I am proud to say we did replace the old cushioned toilet seat that used to be there. Using someone elses cushioned seat really grosses me out.

I'm not just whining either, I think the bathroom is hilarious & since we actually do plan to remodel it soon (really!) I thought I'd record it for posterity.

Hero

So yesterday around 5pm I heard this loud loud long crashing sound outside. There's only one thing that makes that sort of noise....car wrecks. I ran out the front door in my slippers, holding Annika, just in time to see this blue mini van creeping into the intersection, dragging pieces behind it.

It turned in front of our house...and suddenly took off! Being the poor thinker that I am, I sprinted down the front walk (in slippers holding a baby, don't forget) and down the sidewalk trying to get a plate number. I got the first three and soon police were everywhere. Luckily no one was hurt, just managed to somehow smash up 3 parked cars right on the side of our house, none of which were ours.

In the 2 1/2 years we've lived here I have run down the sidewalk in my socks or slippers 3 times. This was the shortest jaunt so far, the other times I went almost 3 blocks before coming to my senses.

Once was when our neighbor crashed her car down the hill from us, and once, believe it or not, I was merely chasing the tracks of a tree that had been uprooted from our yard overnight and dragged down the sidewalk. We did find the tree several blocks away. Apparently I tend to act impulsively when adreneline kicks in. Watch out.

Fridge

Today I pulled four baggies of leftover cut up lemon pieces & one baggie of 1/2 a lime out of my fridge. Only 1/2 of the bags had mold though.

Christmas Surprise

The other day I went on a hike with Vale and Kyle took the kids on a walk while I was gone. When we all returned home I asked Saben what they had done.
Saben: "We went on a walk....and went to a store"
Mommy: "Oh, a store? Which one?"
Saben: "Four Stars"

Which is the name of a boutique I really like in Fairhaven. Where Kyle probably (hopefully!) "secretly" did some Christmas shopping. So we learned to be really careful about what you tell him because he spent the next 15 minutes chanting "Four Stars....We went to Four Stars..." Thank goodness he didn't see what Kyle bought. (if anything)

Dedication

Annika got dedicated today in church. We had lots of family there and she wore this cute little handkerchief bonnet that Sandy made that she can use someday in her wedding for "something old". I have it all on video tape, so I won't describe the whole thing in detail. But it was beautiful even though I was a nervous wreck that Annika was going to lose it since she was getting hungry. My Dad said it was "one of the nicest dedications he's ever been too" but he might have been a bit prejuidiced.

Saben spent the whole time up front trying to figure out if he could get away with blowing out the candles in the front of the church. He had so much fun that on the way back to our pew he started skipping, almost fell and then broke out into a little dance right there in the isle. I think he might just do ok in Shauna's wedding in a few months.

Laughter II

For the record, Annika still thinks it is hilarious when saben falls down. (She did her big laugh for him again this afternoon) However, she is not amused when Mommy spins around and then falls down. It did make her grin a lot and I even got a few giggles tonite when I stuck my face on her belly and made "boobeedoo" noises on it after I fell.

I can't really blame her, I also generally laugh pretty hard when people fall down. In soccer I would always laugh first and then realize people were hurt and feel really bad. The worst was the time Amy U. kicked a soccer ball in a guys groin and I laughed really hard and he was in so much pain he had to drive home. Then there was the time she kicked at the ball and fell backwards into a huge mud puddle. That was my very favorite. Sigh. I miss soccer.

Laughter

Tonite Kyle was holding Annika and commented on how much she loves to watch Saben. He was doing his best to entertain her but she just stared doggedly at her big brother. Saben was twirling around singing "Ring around the Rosie" and when he fell down... She suddenly let out the longest laugh ever. He did it several more times and she kept on laughing her head off. She even did it enough times for me to catch it on video tape.

Annika has giggled occaisionally, just little short 2 syllable ones that barely count, when we tickle her and do other funny parent stuff. But this was definitely the first real laughter that went on for several seconds. It made my heart warm and cozy.

Crazy busy (in a good way mostly) but here are a few pics to keep you entertained....

Ode to a Cranberry

Oh my lovely sparkling cranberry.
So round. So very very round.
Washing you is a pleasure
You shine redly in the colander like a bunch of decapitated rudolph noses winking up at me.
Effortlessly, you bejewel sauces, meats and bread with your charms
Later your tart sassiness will fill my mouth with holiday cheer.

Snow & Cookies

Maybe not quite Christmas card material....

Daddy pegging the boy with a snowball (many snowballs actually. till he cried.)

Our first family sugar cookie decorating party. 2nd try's a charm, the first night he had a total meltdown & we postponed.

culinary works of art