A wanna be crafter.

My mother is great but she is no Martha Stewart. There is a reason that it is a cruel irony that she gave birth to four girls. She is craft impaired, which is a name she calls her self. As kids we never had our hair neatly arranged and were never dressed in matching dresses for church. So imagine my surprise when I opened my Christmas present and potpourri came scattering out all over the carpet. My mother had tried to make her own gift basket filled with nice smelling bath things and with the potpourri as a filling. The funny thing is that it never occurred to her that the filling would come out because it would be tossed around in the mail.

It is a good thing that her daughters did not inherit her lack of craftiness. Each of us has our specialty with me, as the eldest, being more of a generalist. My youngest sister is a great sewer and loves to make costumes for things like Halloween and the premiers of Harry Potter movies. The next one up is a great crocheter, she loves to make afghans and things like that. The one up from that is a bit of a crocheter too but she really excels at knitting. She loves to make hats for my kids and makes sure that they match the coats that they are wearing for the winter.

I am a scrapbooker, cross stitcher, knitter, and like to do the general crafts. I actually took an art class in Jr High called arts and crafts where we made things with random things. It was fun and challenging which is where I think I get my general love of crafts from. I like being able to take something and make something decrotative from it. Scrapbooking speaks to me because it is a fun way to organize my pictures. I make them tell a story instead of them being a random collection of pictures.

Where did the day go?

How is it that I only managed to do a few things today and yet I was crazy busy all day? This seems to be how my life is now that I have kids. I wake up manage to get breakfast done and a little play time for Evan. Then it is time for snack and errands. Once we get back from the errands it is lunch and nap time. After nap time it is time for a snack and more play time. Daddy comes home and then it is time to start dinner. After dinner is bath time and and a little more play time if Evan is not too cranky then it is time for bed. This is a quiet day for us.

Today I had an appointment for a weight check for Harry. The pediatrician was worried that he was not gaining fast enough. I think Harry heard that and decided to get on it because he had gained eight ounces five days where before he was gaining about an ounce a day. My husband had the day off so I did not have to drag Evan with me thank heavens.

It was pouring down rain all day. I have a feeling that I should start building an ark or something. This is supposed to be going on all week too so the flooding is going to be getting worse.

Insomnia

I hate it when I fall asleep early in the evening and then wake up to go up to bed but can't fall back asleep. I conked out around 9:30ish and woke to the faint sound of Evan's feed pump going off which is what I was trying to stay up for in the first place. It had been going off for a good 45 min by the time I heard it. Luckily it did not wake Evan. Just as I was drifting off in my comfy bed Harry woke up for a bottle. He has not been eating as well as I would have liked because his nose is stuffy but after giving him some saline up the nose he ate a good four ounces. These last few days he has been falling asleep pretty deeply the second the bottle touches his mouth. I manage to keep him up enough to eat but it takes some patience. Which of course means that I am the one that has to feed him all the time because my husband is not nearly as patient as I am.

Christmas was pretty fun and busy. Church was nice. Evan was actually pretty good and only had to be take out once. He had bonked his head on the pew ahead of us and was crying really loudly. We kept him pretty busy by stuffing him with fruit snacks and playing with his beloved cars. Present opening was interesting too. Once Evan got one present open he was more interested in playing with that than opening other presents. He was also not really into the whole tearing of the wrapping paper thing either. Harry was doing his whole sleep eating thing in the middle of the present opening so I ended up opening mine one handed for the most part. My husband got a butt load of DVD's so we spent the afternoon glutting ourselves on them.

We are both huge fans of TV shows on DVD. I love the no commercial thing and it is great to watch them when I want and being able to go back and watch a part that I may miss due to a loud child. I also like that we will be able to share these shows with our kids when they get older and the shows are long off the air. I think that eventually if things keep going the way they are we may just give up TV all together and just watch the things we have on DVD.

Merry Christmas!

I love the evenings after everyone (including my husband) is in bed. I tend to stay up way too late just because I enjoy not having someone demanding something of me. I get to relax and do what pleases me with out fear of being interrupted by a shrieking child. Here I sit typing this message on a quiet Christmas Eve. Evan went to bed early despite having opened an interesting toy. Harry stayed up later probably due to his cold. My husband stayed up the latest of all because of his bloody nose which was started by roughhousing with Evan but continued because my husband the Eagle Scout forgot that when trying to stop bleeding you must keep the pressure on the spot for an extended period of time. He is also taking sudafed for a cold which I am sure did not help one bit.

I am excited for tomorrow. We will be going to church in the morning with the boys all dressed up in their matching outfits. Then comes the present opening. After all that we will be starting the nice Christmas dinner with a small ham. For our Christmas Eve celebration we had the traditional junk food dinner. Then we started the "gingerbread" house and Evan ate way more candy than was good for him. After bath time and all that we opened a present each. I cheated a bit and let Evan open another one just because he opened a sippy cup instead of a toy. All in all it was a nice evening and it goes to show that now that we have kids we do not need to travel somewhere to have a decent Christmas. We are just fine with out own which is good because a career in the military means that we may not have the chance to travel some years.

Obsession

I am a woman that is obsessed with eating. Having given birth to a child that has medical issues which include eating issues I have become very conscious of how much he eats and when. This obsession spilling over to my perfectly healthy baby. He is not growing as fast as the pediatrician thinks he should be so now I am starting to obsess over his eating too.

I have a private theory that my kids are just slow growers like my husband and I were as kids. Of course neither of us were giant at birth but who says that giant babies have to grow into giant toddlers?

My husband's current obsession is this smell that he says is in our fridge. I think it is funny that a man that claims to have no sense of smell and will not smell poopy diapers even if the child is sitting on his face is being so bothered by an odor. I really can't smell anything outside of normal fridge smells. This has caused him to clean the fridge out so there is a big upside to this obsession. We now do not have any funky food in the fridge and it is sparkling clean with new boxes of baking soda in it.

Evan's current obsession is with his leap pad alphabet ball. It plays songs and will say the sounds of letters along with saying the name of the letter depending on the mode it is set with. He loves pushing buttons and the fact that it lights up when playing a song it an added bonus. He laughs hysterically when he hears some of the letter sounds, X especially cracks him up.

Harry is obsessed with his stomach and making sure it is full which is why I am trying not to worry too much about his eating. The kid is like a clock, wanting food every two hours. His appetite is a bit off because he does have a stuffy nose but if I suck it out he will breath much better and suck down a four ounce bottle in no time flat. Pretty good for a one month old.

Contradictions

I am very much a person that is pro breastfeeding yet my son is formula fed. I know all the wonderful and magical things that come when you nurse your child and yet I mix bottles of formula for my son.

Nursing for us was pretty much a doomed prospect. When Harry was hours old the nurses were giving him formula because his blood sugar was low (Ha! So much for their assumption that because he was a giant child at birth that I must have had gestational diabetes). He was also tongue tied and having rapid breathing issues (which sent him to the NICU) so nursing was really hard.

Once he got clipped and got rid of the excess fluid in his lungs which was causing the rapid breathing he was very much into the instant gratification of the bottle. I could have pumped for him. I could have even tried using a nipple shield but I just did not have it in me. I pumped for 14 months for Evan but then he was my only child and more medically frail than Harry in the first place so it was more imperative that I get him the breastmilk.

After dealing with a child that has eating issues where every feeding was a struggle I was quite frankly happy that he was eating. If I was a better mother I may have decided to fight harder to keep the nursing going but the reality is that Harry is my second child. I have to feed Evan and him every two hours and adding pumping into the mix would have just meant that I would never be able to leave the house. I was going nuts doing it and I had my mother and husband at home to help with the kids. I felt like that all I was doing was feeding and pumping.

Selfishly I also wanted my body back. I have been pregnant and nursing for over two years. That takes a lot out of a person especially when you have large babies and also have to deal with the health issues of one of the kids. It is so nice that I can leave the house and not have to rush back to be in time for the next feeding. I can go to a girl's night out and not have to bring the baby.

So while I know all the wonders of breast milk I am not crying over not nursing (well not too hard any way). I know that my Harry will survive this decision and that it is very likely that he will grow up to be just as bright as his elder brother.

It is over!

I am now a much lighter person as I have recently given birth to a giant child. I was having a bit of euphoria because of the birth. Harry was sleeping well and so was I. This had changed recently, the little stinker decided that he did not want to sleep at night. Now I am in the hell of sleep deprivation. I swear that this kid would be great for torture. Maybe I could sell him to the Department of Defense for use in interrogation of terrorists.

Harry for the last few nights has started fussing every time that I put him in his bassinet. He does not cry right away. He waits until you are back in bed and just about to drift off into a blissfull sleep. That is when the grumbling starts. If you ignore it, he will then start with the howls of protest loud enough to wake the dead. This process went on all last night with out stop. He would sleep just fine downstairs, but the instant you wanted to go to a soft bed and sleep he would have his little beady eyes wide open.

I am so going to take a nice long nap today(thanks to my mother in law who will watch the kids for me). I feel bad for my poor husband who does not have that luxury. Hopefully this will be a short term thing because I really need my sleep or I go psychotic.