day 16- a miss, day 17- a recap

Sorry about missing Friday.  We’re in a flurry of activity around here.  Yesterday morning was the Kindergarten Author Share.  Each child in the class writes a book of their own, the teachers have them typed and hard bound, the kids draw in the illustrations, and then read them over a  microphone to the whole class.  Belle’s book, entitled “The Beach”, was fantastic!  Full of details and complex sentences.  I’m very proud of the progress she has made this year.  

 

Then, last night we had the Fun Fair at her school.  There was face painting, spray hair color, tatoos, games, food, a bounce house…which all pretty well explains why I didn’t have the energy to post last night.  It was 10:00 before I got them all in bed and I decided it was best if just crawled in bed myself.  I curled up next to my sweet girl, Belle, who is allowed to sleep in our bed on occasion when J is on nights.  Its a special treat she has to work hard to earn.  

 

Today has been no less full-lots of packing, a trip to the library, and possibly a little strawberry picking-IF I can J to wake up.  He’s off tonight, but continues his crazy schedule tomorrow night and the rest of the week.  It will be so nice to have him next to me in bed tonight…

day 15: Today I…

Today I went in a store for a swim suit.  I came out with a new pair of running shoes.

 

Need I say more?

 

PS: If I don’t post tomorrow, it’s because I can’t lift my arms to the keyboard.

day 14: a little of this and a little of that

Wow life is getting crazy around here.  I guess I never finished telling the wild tale of our upcoming move.  The lease on our current place is up on May 31.  With J’s ridiculous schedule and complete inability to just take a day off, we have to move our stuff out over Memorial Day weekend.  The problem is…our new place isn’t available until mid June.  That leaves us 3-4 weeks with no place to live.  Enter Little Bear’s preschool director.  I mentioned our predicament to her yesterday at pick up and she offered us their 2 bedroom house that they rent out as needed.  I saw it this morning and it is such a blessing.  We thought we were going to have to take everything to a storage area and live in a hotel during that time.  There’s enough basement storage in this house that we might not even need a storage area!  It doesn’t completely remove the sting of having to move twice in one month, but it certainly helps.

 

*******

 

We were listening to this Sharon, Lois and Bram cd last night at dinner.  We got to the song “The Smile Was On The Crocodile” and I tried to relay the story of the song to the kids and how my dad sang that song with us as kids.  

 

She sailed away on a sunny summer day
On the back of a crocodile
“You see,” said she, “he’s as tame as tame can be,
I’ll ride him down the Nile.”

The croc winked his eye as she bade them all goodbye
Wearing a happy smile
At the end of the ride, the lady was inside,
And the smile was on the crocodile!

 

It seems Little Bear misunderstood the story a bit, because a few minutes later he asked me, “Why did Grandad eat that girl?”

 

*******

 

We all have some kind of guilty pleasure, right?  For some it’s Oprah, others it’s American Idol, for me it’s Super Nanny.  Maybe it’s some kind of confidence builder.  Because I may not be perfect, but I’m not as bad as those folks!  And at the end, I always say a prayer that what Jo has taught them will stick.

day 13: rethinking things

I’ve been keeping my eye out for sales, coupons, free shipping codes, etc for booster seats for Little Bear.  He is almost 30 pounds-the lower limit on many boosters, but in truth he is nowhere near the upper limits for his current car seat.  I was doing my usual research-checking out reviews and such-when I ran across this article on About.com.  The whole piece is here, but this sentence alone has convinced me to wait a while longer:

“Any step up in car seats - from rear-facing to forward-facing, from harness to booster - is actually a step down in safety.”

A little convenience for me is absolutely not worth the loss in safety for my little guy.  I love his car seat-it has a great buckling system which, with the tether in place, keeps the seat from budging the tiniest bit even on the leather seats.

 

In other news, he let go of his pull-up fairly easily this morning.  He’d have kept it on if I let him, but he didn’t fight me on it.  He did, however, wake at 2:30 this morning to go potty.  It figures that I decide to put him in a pull-up and NOW he wakes up.  Anyway, the poor guy couldn’t get back to sleep for two hours.  He’d try for a while and then he’d be back at the top of the stairs calling for me.  At 4:30, I gave up and threw him in bed with me.  He fell right asleep, and so did I!

 

I suppose I’ll keep putting the pull-ups on him for a while.  The thought of him lying in a wet bed and pjs for hours until he wakes for the morning us just too much for me to stand.  

 

day 12: regression

So, if you recall, Little Bear potty trained at the beginning of February.  Ultimately, it was a fairly painless experience with few accidents.  That said, in the course of a week he’s had three accidents while sleeping.  I’m growing tired of changing underwear, pajamas, and sheets!  Belle never had bedtime accidents, and when she had daytime ones all it took was the threat of wearing pull-ups if it happened again.  I mean, she was only having the accidents because she didn’t want to stop playing long enough to go to the bathroom.  So, making a threat like that made sense.  

 

With Little Bear, I told him this morning that he would need to wear pull-ups tonight at bedtime.  I’ve not been angry with him about the accidents seeing as he’s sleeping and doesn’t exactly have control over things.  The problem is tonight, when I was putting on his pull-up, he was all too happy to be a “little guy” and wear diapers again.  [He flips back and forth at least 100 times a day between being a little guy and a big boy.  I have to recognize every. single. change. with a response of "OK!".]  Actually, he jumped for joy once it was on.  I’m nervous what tomorrow will bring when it’s time to go back to the underwear.  

 

Anybody have some help for me?  Please!!

day 11: Happy Mother’s Day!

I hope you all have had a wonderful Mother’s Day.  So far, my day has been full of generous gifts from my hubby and children, a delicious breakfast, and LOTS of snuggles on the sofa.  The only bad part is that the sky is gray and it’s raining now.  Well that, and J starts two weeks of a rough schedule tonight working in the ICU with super sick patients.  

day 10: sorry

Sorry I missed out on Saturday.  The WordPress server was apparently having issues.  All it said was “WordPress will be back in a minute”.  Oh well.

 

I spent the day packing our china, crystal, and serving dishes.  What fun!

day 9: it worked!

Thanks ever so much to my smarty pants sister-in-law (technically I guess she J’s SIL since she’s married to his brother, but I still call her my SIL) for the help with the button.  I just knew somebody out there could figure it out!

 

Belle is back at school today.  The phantom tummy ache is gone.  I call it phantom not because I don’t believe that it hurt, I could tell that it really hurt, but because there didn’t seem to be any other real symptoms with it and it seemed to disappear as quickly as it came.  

 

I’m looking forward to tomorrow with J home.  His schedule has been so terrible this week, he hasn’t even seen Little Lamb except to kiss her goodbye in the morning in several days.  The only reason he saw Belle and Little Bear yesterday was because we were all huddled in the bathroom together during a Tornado warning.  (Yes, LL was there too but I had to wake her up and she just sat in my lap in a sleepy haze so I don’t really count it.)  There were, indeed, no tornadoes but we decided rather safe than sorry.  I was really missing our TX meteorologists who show you exactly where the cited rotations are, which cells are likely to cause trouble, exactly who needs to duck and cover, etc.  The neighbor’s tree looks like it might have some damage-the limbs are hanging pretty low to the ground.  It’s not a big tree, but the limbs are covered with many, many leaves making them quite heavy.

day 8: more fun!

I ran across a link I had to share.  I love making stationary for people as gifts and these button cards are a fun idea that would be so easy to do with the kids.  One note, however.  I would use that same Terrifically Tacky glue I linked in my last post or those glue dots instead of the hot glue gun for the aforementioned reasons.  Also, I hate all those annoying stringy things the glue gun leaves behind.

 

I have one more gift idea to share but Little Lamb just woke from her nap.  I’ll try to get back to it tonight.

 

 

day 8: UGH!

I spent the last half hour trying to load the “A Post a Day in May” button and it’s making me crazy.  Here’s what I’ve tried and perhaps one of you more intelligent folks can help me out!  

Here’s the code I’m trying to enter: 

<a href=”http://tinyurl.com/5a7hre”><img src=”http://tinyurl.com/6j9eze”/></a>

 

I go to Design, Widgets, and add a Text thing over on the right.  I click on Edit and then input the code in the box.  I’ve tried typing it in myself as well as copying and pasting from Jenny’s site.  I then click Change which closes the box.  Then, I click Save Changes.  At this point, if I click the Edit button it has taken out part of the code which leads to no image on my blog.  Basically it removes the section from src through 6j9eze/  I’ve tried using a different button (she has several different sizes on her site and I was trying to load the smallest) but it does the exact same thing.  I’d just love it if one of you could solve this issue for me.  I did the same things when I added those ticker things, but they worked just fine.

 

Another ugh, Belle is home from school with a stomach ache.  She says she’s not nauseous, she’s had a tiny bit of “other stomach issues”, but she’s not acting like herself.  I’m beginning to think bubble suits need to be my next creative endeavor.