A Great Reminder...

...to chill the hell out this Christmas season and maybe do something for someone else (aside from buying that $395 talking, walking pony thing for your kid). Maybe it's because we've had a rough year here, or because I will have just had a baby by the time Christmas rolls around, but we are DRASTICALLY cutting back on spending money and running all around the state this year. It will be nice to just sit back and actually enjoy Christmas instead of running ourselves ragged trying to make it "perfect".

They're Lying.

Any stay-at-home-mom who leads you to believe that life at home with kids, be it one kid or twelve, is always fun, constantly interesting, and endlessly stimulating is a lying liar. It's not, always. It's hard work, and it can be mind-numbingly boring when you are acting out the EXACT SAME BARBIE SCENARIO for the 17th day in a row. If I had to type out a list of how my days go, they would look something like this 9 times out of 10: Make breakfast, play, clean the house, make lunch, naptime, scrub some toilets during naptime, sit down for 20 minutes during naptime, wake up the girl, dole out 163 time-outs between now and bedtime, play some more, clean some more, make dinner, drag The Daddy upstairs so he can start bathtime, bedtime for Ella, tv/laundry/dishes/dinner clean-up, in bed at 10pm sharp, The End. Exciting stuff, no? Monotonous, yes, but there's a really great secret hidden in there among all of the boring stuff and chores and time-outs and wiping noses: It's fantastic. I cannot think of any place on earth that I would rather be than right here in my house, day after day, week after week, having the privilege of watching oh-so-closely my daughter grow up. I may complain about the long hours now and then, and I may occasionally wish I got to leave the house and act like an Actual Grownup, with real clothes that do not include a sweatshirt and mismatched socks. But I honestly would not trade my time at home with my kid(s) for all of the money or fame or career-induced glory in the world. There will be plenty of time for that in the years to come, when maybe Ella and Charlie won't WANT me around them as much, and would prefer it if I left them alone. But for now, I will enjoy the 726,399th time that Ballerina Barbie wants to pretend to slide down the banister, and when Ella says, "Mom, will you walk to the park with me because you are my favorite friend?", I will say "Yes, please".

My 4,396th Ultrasound

So I got to have another ultrasound today, thanks to the doctor thinking that Charlie may already weigh more than your average 6 month old. Good news: the ultrasound tech estimated his weight right now to be around 7lbs 12oz, which puts him right on track to be the same weight as Ella (8lbs 14oz), give or take a few ounces. Bad news: I get to KEEP having ultrasounds because I have too much fluid in there, which can be either nothing at all or something potentially bad. So we'll see how it goes. In the meantime, chubby squishy baby cheeks!

When...

did it become socially unacceptable to don a size 24 month Minnie Mouse hoodie, slap a tattoo on your hand, and run around in your underwear all the live long day? Probably my favorite thing about 3-year-olds is their, um, originality (read: weirdness) and complete lack of inhibitions. This way-too-small jacket was the source of much fun for a few days, and I was actually sad when she stopped insisting that we call her Minnie and that I was Mickey and Daddy was Donald and Stu, oh Stu, got to be Daisy Duck. We've moved on to other pretend games (Disney Princesses! Big puppy/little puppy! Names made up for every family member that are complete and utter jibberish!), but the jacket just MADE that whole game.

Ella's 3rd Birthday Extravaganza

Ha! Anyone who saw the inner workings of the birthday party knows that it was anything BUT an extravaganza. It was more like, "Hmmm, let's send out some Evites, since I can do that without getting my pregnant self off of the couch, and then we can run by the party store and let Ella pick between mermaid, princesses, or mermaid princesses for the theme. And by 'theme' I mean the plates." The grandmas made some food, I slapped a cake-mix cake together, and we invited a bunch of family and friends over to celebrate Ella's third birthday. The kids had fun ingesting large amounts of sugar and then running around like mental patients on the loose, and it was a blessedly easy party to throw together, semi-spur-of-the-moment. I'm just glad it's over and done with a full month before her actual birthday and my due date so that I am not laid up in the hospital for her party on the off chance that I go into labor on time.











Umm, next year I am inviting over just a few kids, and giving them candy, cupcakes, and lollipops, then letting them jump from the big chair to the ottoman. This was the big hit of the party. Go figure.





Happy 3rd birthday, sweet Ella. I cannot believe you are already 3 years old, it has gone by excruciatingly fast. We are so proud of you and I have loved (almost) every minute I have spent with you over these last few years.

Ella-isms.

Every day that I am home with Ella is, ummm, interesting, but sometimes things come flying out of her mouth that make me cock my head to the side, look at her for about 30 seconds, and say "What planet are you from?". Some recent favorites.

* When asked who, exactly, told her that she could get all of the fingerpaints out and try to squirt them on the kitchen floor, she replied, "God." Duh, I should have known.

* She got into the habit of saying "Barack Obama is a mean guy", which I didn't think would fly in public, lest someone think I teach my kid to hate other people. So I tried to explain it in a way appropriate for a 3 year old that we don't hate Obama, yadda yadda yadda. At Walmart she walked right up to the (African American) cashier and said "Barack Obama is kind of a nice guy, but we don't want to be friends with him."

* At Walmart (again. I promise we do shop other places) there was a homeless man sitting out in front of the store in a hamper/box/something or other, and he was a tad frightening looking. Ella caught one glimpse of him and YELLED AS LOUDLY as she could, "OH NO! We need to watch out for THAT guy over there!". So in a nutshell, Walmart employees now think that I teach my kid to dislike Obama and the homeless. In Ella's defense, he WAS pretty scary looking. Not like a kindly older homeless guy who just wants you to go buy him a hamburger, this guy looked like the kind of guy who would jump out of his hamper at you with a knife while yelling about the Apocalypse and chickens invading the earth.

* To the Orkin guy at the front door: "You're hair looks REALLY funny today, guy." Nice.

A special kid...I gots one.

"All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go..."

"...and I'm leavin' on a jet plane." Not even sure I care which country, as long as it's not Russia, which is like looking directly into the US's future. Scared, pissed off, and terribly disappointed that our country elected this guy to run it into the ground.



PS: If I hear one more lunatic left-wing nutjob say "Let's all UNITE, let's all come TOGETHER and be one as a country and just SUPPORT Obama", I am going to jam a screwdriver through both of my ears. How ironic that, had McCain won, several states were preparing for "violent protests and riots in the streets". So I guess we are only supposed to "unite" and "come together in support" when the lefties' candidate wins, right? I didn't really hear much about support and unity in 2000 or 2004, but all of the sudden, every conservative American is supposed to just lump it and love everyone? I suppose free speech is limited only to the "give peace a chance" hippies and liberal loons when a conservative is elected into office, and not vice versa. That's all I have to say about that.

Here's to four years of no-one-knows-what's-gonna-happen-God-help-us-AHHHHHHHHHHH.

She's Been Country-fied, God Help Us

So last weekend we drove an hour south to a farm owned by old family friends for their annual Fall party. Even though I knew ahead of time that this was, indeed, a farm, and there would be things like bonfires and four-wheelers and hayrides, I guess I still kind of pictured a regular ol' suburbanish house, complete with paved driveway, smacked in the middle of a little bit of land. Umm, nope. They apparently own over 100 acres of gorgeous land out there, and the only thing that is paved is the front porch on the house. Let's preface this by saying that the closest I really got to nature when I was a kid was our almost-an-acre backyard, and the only "nature" really included in that were grasshoppers and earthworms. So cow dung and barns are a little foreign to me. Mikan, however, was right at home, as he had four-wheelers and lots of land and those kinds of little motorcycles that I'm afraid will kill a small child. Of course he talked Ella into getting on a four wheeler shortly after we arrived, and me, Miss I'll Take My Ten Foot Wide Backyard Over Your Gazillion Acres Of Snakes Thank You Very Much, I had to keep my mouth shut so as not to deprive my child of life experiences just because I am not big on the idea of my three year old racing about on a motorized vehicle. So she went, and I almost had a heart attack at every twist and turn on the path they were riding on, and she had the time of her life. She absolutely would not shut up about it for two days. Mikan said that after a couple of minutes she felt more comfortable on there and she started yelling, "WE NEED MORE POWER!". I stayed on the sidelines and watched, content in knowing that I would be walking away from the party with all of my limbs and no concussion.