babyDsitting

Went very well today, if I do say so myself.

He walked around, I followed him. I do need to get a baby gate.

He ate solid food, without choking. Yes, I am a worrier, and always will be after raising a kid with an over-active gag reflex who choked on everything, even pudding.

He slept, for longer than 15 minutes! I am soooo excited about that since I could never get him to take a nap before! He slept for two and a half hours!

Okay, so yeah...my back is screaming with pain tonight, my arm is throbbing and I am so tired at 8pm that I am ready for bed, but that's okay. A small price to pay to get to see this macaroni filled smiling face.

How do you know when your daughter is texting too much?

When you get a phone bill that looks like this.



The thing was so thick they couldn't even fold it and use a normal size envelope. 144 pages, printed on both sides. The stack on the left, all 7 pages, belongs to Hubby, Andy, DIL2B and me. The rest of the bill is a list of R's texts.

All 6,890 of them.

six THOUSAND. In one month.

I had about 600, Andy 400, DIL2B had 200, Hubby...7.

Maybe this is normal for a teenager and I am sure there are others out there, A-Boo Boo, I'm sure, who have many, many more but it's the biggest phone bill we ever received. I weighed it. It was a half of a pound.

For some reason, the kids don't "talk" on the phone, they text everything.

BabyDsitting

Starting tomorrow, I get to see this face every day.



During the summer, DIL was home, so sometimes we would go a few days without seeing him. School started for her yesterday and Oldest Son goes back to work tomorrow.

I will be spending my day today baby proofing the house. Not that we haven't already but its one thing to pick up things when he comes to visit, its entirely another when he is going to be here all day.

This time around its going to be totally different. He is walking now. He is eating a lot of different foods and not so much of the baby food in a jar. He doesn't take a bottle anymore. He throws 1-year old temper tantrums, which actually are the funniest thing you have ever seen.

He also has serious, SERIOUS, separation issues, which I thought would get better as he got older but have gotten worse. DIL says its so bad now that she cant even leave the room without him coming after her crying and clinging to her leg. If they are here at the house and she walks out of the room, not even Gma or Gpa will fill the void, it has to be Mommy. Sometimes not even Daddy will do, which makes Oldest Son feel really bad.

We used to have a morning routine. DIL would bring him in the house, I would take him out of his car seat and then he and I would stand at the door and wave bye to Mommy as she got in the car and left. No fuss, no muss.

We'll see what happens tomorrow morning.

We have purchased an arsenal of toys over the summer so hopefully I will have enough to keep him busy. And there is always the Tupperware cabinet if all else fails. He loves pulling every single thing out of there, putting it back and pulling it out again.

I'm happy that I will get to see my baby almost every day again but I am already tired just thinking about what tomorrow and the following months will bring. That boy wears me out, for sure, and that was even before he was walking. Hopefully, I will lose the 8 pounds I gained over the summer and continue losing again. I highly recommend The Babysitters Diet. The easiest way I have found to lose weight. You are so busy chasing after the kid you don't have the time or the inclination to even think about food.

Wish me luck!

Where the heck have I been?

Right here...not blogging. I had a bit of a writers block. A blog block? I just wasn't feeling it. And its not like I didn't have anything to blog about, for pete sake! My Baby D had his first birthday, we went camping, I had a pipe burst under my house, school started, Andy was at one of the fires raging in the state. On and on, my life was happening but I was too lazy to write about it. I blame Farm Town.

So, I'll keep it short and sweet.

Baby D turned 1

We had a party at Granny R's house. Celebrated the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse themed birthday party with what else but...HOT DOGS!




Baby D, eating his birthday cupcake


Feeding Gma frosting

The 3rd Annual Family Camping Fiasco

What can I say? It wasn't just me that was miserable this time. Due to reasons I wont go into here, Cough-cough, The Psychic, everyone pretty much wanted to go home after the first day. Oldest son fell twice and got hurt pretty bad both times. J fell and ended up with a massive bruise on her leg. Hubby fell on our tent, don't even ask because I still don't know how, and broke the poles in two places. We ended up putting it in the dumpster before we left. Thank goodness, Baby D was a dream. If he had been fussy or hard to handle, I would have packed him up and left. The idiots are already making plans for next year.


Our great big happy camping family


My expression says it all, "GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!!!"

Baby D is walking

He was a little unsteady a few weeks ago but now he walks all over the house, usually with both hands up in the air for some reason. I start babyDsitting again this Monday and I know he is going to run me ragged.



There's a hole in my wall

Cost of renting a saw to cut out the old pipe - $23
New pipe and fittings - $38
Price that the plumber was going to charge me - $130 per hour
Having a brother in law who did the work for free - PRICELESS

We only discovered the mess, a broken waste water pipe, when BIL was going down into the cellar to get tools to fix the garage door opener that Andy somehow pulled all the wires out of when he was moving stuff around in the garage and found the cellar to be flooded. Yeah, we still have a hole in the wall from where he had to bust in to get the old pipe out and the new one in but as soon as the whole mess dries out, he is going to fix that too. It was either go through the wall or take out the kitchen cabinets. Wall, easier to repair. He spent quite a bit of time underneath the house too. I felt bad about that, especially when he wasn't feeling well for a few days after, I suspect from the muck he was rolling around in and what ever he was breathing into his lungs. And yes, he rewired the garage door opener too!! Have I mentioned how much I love my BIL?




My hero, SUPER PLUMBER!

School has started

She is a Junior this year and it makes me sad to realize that there is only one more year after this one and she will graduate. On the flip side of that, she is an upperclassman now and she feels free to be herself finally, hence the Jonas Brothers T-shirt, Jonas Brothers binder and tennis shoes that say things like "Girls Rule" all over them.


The annual "first day of school" pic in front of the tree


The only other news I have is that I get to go to Seattle for my birthday this year. Hubby's new company is having their show in September and of course, its the week of my bday. We had been going back and forth about whether I would go with him this time. I always went to shows with him in the past but everyone knew me and was used to seeing me at these shows. New job, new people, didn't want to make him look bad by having the wife tag along. I had pretty much made up my mind I was going to stay home until I saw his travel plans. Flying home, connecting flight in Seattle, on my birthday. That's when I suggested that I go along, he change his travel plans to spend and extra night in Seattle. I am really excited. Not real crazy about spending three days in a hotel room in Spokane but hey, its a nice hotel, its free, I can deal. Our plans for Seattle include Pikes Place Market, home of the very first Starbucks. Be still my heart! Dinner at Space Needle most likely. Checking out the docks and hopefully spotting either the Northwestern or one of the other Deadliest Catch boats that call Seattle home. I am afraid I am going to be a couple of weeks late on that one though, being they might already be on their way up to Alaska by then. If anyone has any other suggestions, please send them along!


So, that's pretty much it, in a nutshell. Have to go check on my farm now...see ya