Sunday, May 30, 2010

She's Gonna be a Soccer Player!

Baby #2 is proving herself to be the athlete in the family already!  This baby has some serious kicks that make my whole belly move!  I don't remember that with Maddie.  I remember Maddie being a pretty calm baby, my belly would move when she was rolling over (never before 8 months) but never from kicks.  So we'll see just how different they are when she arrives.  I remember Maddie being an extremely strong infant.  At less than a week old, she was lifting her head off of our shoulder trying to look around.  She was able to hold her head up for quite a while...something I didn't expect her to do for at least a month.  Maddie wasn't very physical other than that.  She rolled over at the appropriate times, sat up at the expected age, but it took her until she was 9 1/2 months to crawl.  Then she started walking at 15 months.  However, Maddie has always been ahead of the curve verbally.  She said her first word (dog) around 6 months old.  By 11 months she was trying to repeat everything she heard.  She started speaking in full sentences at 20 months and now, at almost 24 months, she won't stop talking.  She's the smartest child I know (ok, I HAVE to think that because she's mine, but seriously, this kid is smart!) and her imagination is what I would expect of a 3 year old.  Her pediatrician says verbally she's operating at a 3 year old level already.  It's amazing. 

At this point, just based on how much more active baby #2 is, I'm expecting polar opposites.  I'm expecting this baby to meet, or beat, the physical milestones while not talking until she's 2 or older.  This baby is going to challenge me like Maddie never did.  I liked that Maddie was content to hang out in her Exersaucer with me in the kitchen.  This baby probably isn't going to like to be tied down (not literally....) and will want to explore at all times.  She's going to be the one trying to get into all the cabinets, climbing on top of the kitchen table, pushing all the limits.  She'll probably skip crawling all together and start walking by 9 months...just to drive me crazy!  :)

No matter how this baby turns out, I do know she's going to be loved unconditionally by all of us. She'll have even more love than Maddie had because she'll have the luxury of having a big sister love her too!  We're just about 3 months from this new angel joining our family and we're getting more and more excited to meet her every day.  Maddie talks about her baby sister quite a bit.  Today she was coloring and pointed at some of her scribbles and said "like Mommy baby".  The baby is in her mind as much as she's in mine!  I can't wait to share this experience with Maddie!

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Just a few Maddie-isms

1.  We have a globe upstairs and the other day I was showing Maddie where we live in Houston and then made a line across the ocean and showed her where Daddy works in Nigeria.  Then she gave the globe another spin, put her finger down on it and said "And here's Walmart".

2.  Maddie has a little ball that has ABC 123 on it and she always calls it her ABC ball.  Yesterday she told asked me for her ABC ball and when I gave it to her she said "It's Maddie's ABCDEFG ball".

3.  The other morning Maddie was in the bathroom with me while I was doing my hair and she started pushing the buttons on our scale and said "I sending email.  I sending email Grandma".  Did you get it, Grandma?  :)

4.  Maddie absolutely LOVES the library!  I started taking her to infant story time when she was around 4 months old...it seemed too early at the time, but I was desperate for some adult interaction for me!  I'm so glad I started taking her at such a young age.  Now she asks to go to the library and we can go in and look at all the books, sit down and read a few and pick out some to bring home with us.  Saturday we brought home 7 books!  When we were pulling into the parking lot she started clapping, squealing and saying "Yay!  Library!!"  I'm glad we have this free activity that she gets just as excited over as going to SeaWorld (not so free...)

5.   Tonight before bed Maddie came running up to me and said "My boo boos all gone, Mommy.  Thank you, Jesus.".  Such a sweetheart.  We had prayed for Jesus to make her boo boos all better and when she realized they were really gone she thanked Him.  What a good girl I have :)

Monday, May 24, 2010

Groceries

Last week I spent just over $60 on my grocery bill.  This week it was WAY above that and I used the e-mealz.com plan.  I also had some coupons I wanted to use (this always makes me spend more than I thought I would, I should stop clipping coupons) so that didn't help.  Anyway, I just posted a review here if you're interested in reading my opinion on it.

I'll probably post on some of the dinners later in the week too, just to give a review on the quality of the recipes.  I like trying new recipes so that's been the best part of this website so far...

Sunday, May 23, 2010

What a Ride!

I won't go into all the details of the emotional ride Maddie's been taking me on lately...I'll just say that she's lucky she's so darn cute and sweet when she's not being a brat!  :)  I don't know what happened to her being interested in helping to clean up her playroom at night.  Three nights in a row now she has refused to clean up her toys.  Tonight I even put her in timeout a couple of times for not cleaning up but then I was frustrated because the timeout didn't get her to clean...it only made her feel like the clean up time was a negative experience, which is EXACTLY what I didn't want.  She's not interested in getting her stamps anymore for cleaning up so I just told her if she doesn't clean up her toys (and I had already cleaned up 3/4 of them for her already) then she won't get her whole line of stamps and she won't get her special surprise at the end of the week.  She just said "ok Mama" and that was the end of it.  I'm out of "fun" ways to get her to clean up...we've been through 2 different clean up songs, we've run as fast as we could to see how fast she is to clean up, I've "tricked" her by saying things like "I don't think you're big enough to clean this up", Snuggly has "helped" her clean up her toys (she hold snuggly in her hand while picking up each toy...this is REALLY time consuming but it worked for a while).  I've told her to look around and see what needs to be cleaned up then tell Mommy what she wants to clean up first.  I've even told her to tell Mommy what to clean up and what Maddie should clean up.  I've offered her stickers for cleaning up, I've offered her candy (I didn't like doing that one, especially since she cleans up just before bed).  I'm out of ideas...please send your ideas my way :)  I'm trying to stay away from anything negative because I always HATED cleaning my room when I was a kid.  I don't want it to be a bad experience for her, I just want it to be like second nature...it's just what we do when we're done playing.

Ok, enough about the "bad" stuff now...I took Maddie swimming two days in a row now and she is absolutely AMAZING me!!!  She was so trusting with me holding her in the water yesterday.  She was letting me barely hold on to her while she was kicking her feet and putting her head back to try to stay above water by herself.  She put her face in the water, she put her ears in the water, she put the back and sides of her head in the water.  She's fearless!  She has a little float thing we put her in so we don't have to hold her in the water and I showed her how to lean her body forward, hold onto the front of it, and kick her feet to make herself go forward.  She didn't move fast, but she was moving!  Then today I was holding her and I asked her if she wanted Mommy to let go of her and she said "yes".  She turned away from me and was seriously going to try swimming by herself!  I kept my arms under her and told her to "reach and pull and kick and splash" all the way to the part where she could touch.   Then, out of nowhere she wanted to jump into the pool.  Now, keep in mind she has only successfully landed on jump (with both feet off the floor) once...she doesn't get much air so I knew she wasn't going to actually jump into the pool.  But I came to the edge and told her to jump to Mommy. When she said "jump", I reached up and lifted her into the pool and brought her down with enough force that she was getting splashed in the face!  She LOVED it!  So for the next 20 minutes I got a good upper body workout in :)  I let her jump in then helped her swim back to the side.  It was so much fun watching her get more comfortable in the water.  I might need to set aside time every day to take her just to keep up with it!

Well, that's about it for now.  I'm going to get to bed early and get some rest.  We're going to feed the ducks tomorrow so I need my energy for keeping up with Maddie and keeping her out of the lake!  Goodnight :)

Friday, May 21, 2010

Mental Break

I feel like I need a mental break from having a toddler.  Most days we do fine but since Eric left on Wednesday I've been short tempered and don't have the same patience I normally have with Maddie.  Right now we're both crying.  She's crying because she wants to go to the mailbox and Mommy said she has to clean up her playroom first.  I'm crying because anytime I say anything she starts crying.  She's been whining and crying for the past hour (at least) and I've had enough of it.  She fights everything...what she eats, what she wears, when/where I change her diaper.  I know this is "normal" toddler behavior and some moms have it a lot worse with their toddlers so I shouldn't complain...Tonight is one night that I really wish I could check out from being a mom...just to leave the house and not have to think about being a mom.  This doesn't happen often (this is probably only the second time in Maddie's 2 years) so when it hits, it hits hard. 

Anyone have advice?  I think Maddie's going straight to bed tonight with no stamp for cleaning up her playroom (because it's still not cleaned up) then Mommy's going to go take a nice warm bath for about 3 hours...ha!

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

2 Weeks!

Wow...it's been two weeks since my last post and that was only a Wordless Wednesday :)  Yes, we announced we are having another little girl join our family in September!  Woo hoo!!  We're beyond happy to be having a little sister for Maddie but extremely frustrated with how hard it is to come to an agreement on a name for this one.  I'd love to start her a blog of her very own but can't do that until she has a name :)  Oh, and we don't plan on sharing the name with anyone until she's born anyway (sorry Grandmas and Grandpas!) so it looks like we'll have a new blog beginning in September. 
Tomorrow I'll be 24 weeks pregnant and I FINALLY got a picture of me with this pregnancy :)  I feel like I look as big at 24 weeks with this pregnancy as I did at 40 weeks with Maddie...maybe it's just the cookies and other sweets I've been letting myself indulge in.  15 more weeks to enjoy it so I'm not stopping now!  :)

Here's me today (with a new haircut too!)


What else happened in the past two weeks? 
We had a visit with Daddy
We had a visit with Uncle Guy
We flew a kite (first time for Maddie to see a kite in action)
We returned the kite...  :)
We went swimming in the big pool for the first time this summer
We had our first Mother's Day with all three of us at home
We made a ton of money selling things we no longer need (this is money to use for the new nursery and Maddie's "big sister" room when she moves into it)
We had gutters installed on the back of our house (not standard practice down here in Houston)
We had a new back door installed
We had our security system activated (thank God our house was prewired when it was built by a local company so it saved us a TON of money!)
uhhhh.....what else?...Maddie was just generally sweet and did a pretty good job of making Daddy feel guilty for being gone so much.  :) Good girl, Maddie!!  Keep it up :)

Some of Maddie's quotes for making Daddy feel guilty..."Maddie so happy Daddy home"  "Murphy (the dog) so happy Daddy home"  "Daddy go airport TOO much".  There were probably more things she said but these were my favorites.  She kept saying she was so happy for Daddy to be home the first two or three days he was here.  It was so sweet that she realized having Daddy home gave her a happy feeling.  Neither of us told her to say anything like that, she was just saying what she felt.  She's just the sweetest little girl.

Well, I'll try to get back to my usual blogging a few days a week now that we'll be getting back to our "normal" routine again.  Oh, and check out my food blog at http://cookingwithsarahb.blogspot.com/ .  I'm going to post about my 2 nights of dinner for less than $10!!!!  I'm working on getting thrifty (er)...

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Monday, May 3, 2010

H.O.L.Y. C.O.W.

Oh my goodness...I cannot even begin to describe today.  So I'll give you a picture and just let you know it got better from here.

 This was taken AFTER the trip to the doctor where she basically superglued her forehead shut with something called Durabond.  It kind of makes it look gross and oozy.  That's just the glue shining like that...I'm just glad she didn't have to have stitches.  Her doctor told us it was a nice, clean gash and should heal nicely over time.  She even said it might not leave a scar (but I'm wondering if that's just what they tell the moms of little girls who are worried their daughter will have an ugly scar for eternity).  Whether or not it's true, I'm glad she said it because I really did feel better.  I thought she was going to wear bangs for the rest of her life...

Well, we've had a long, exhausting day and Eric's coming home tomorrow. So I'm going to B.E.D.!  Goodnight :)

Sunday, May 2, 2010

FLYbaby

I recently heard about a website called flylady.net.  I had to go check it out because I'm always looking for a way to get/stay organized.  When I first visited the site I felt a little overwhelmed at the amount of information provided yet it said to just do things in baby steps...seemed a little confusing to provide so much detail for me to start out slow :)  One thing struck me in particular when I started looking through the website...get dressed all the way to the shoes in the morning.  Just having shoes on makes you feel like you should be doing something.  She suggests lace-up shoes as opposed to flip flops since you can't just kick them off, but I felt more like my crocs today :)  It's been amazing just the past 3 days of how much less I sit around doing nothing just because I have shoes on!  The one thing that seemed strange to me was that the first thing she instructs you to do is shine your sink.  Weird, right?  Well, I got my sink as sparkly clean as a composite granite sink can get (including rubbing it down with baby oil...) and my kitchen already looked 10 times better!  It makes me wish I had a stainless steel sink to keep shiny :)  Before bed I didn't want to leave anything out on the kitchen counter because it made the kitchen look messy next to my clean sink.  I find it amazing how such a simple thing made me want to keep the entire kitchen clean!

Well, I made my "control journal" and started out with making a bedtime routine and a morning routine.  You just start out by putting three things on each routine, that way you don't overwhelm yourself.  The point is to make those first three things a habit and second nature before you begin adding more items to the routine.  Today I went on to add more to my control journal and jumped in on this week's "Zone".  Each week they focus on one zone of the house, this week it's the entry way, front porch and dining room.  They provide a detailed list of what all should be done in this zone for the week and you just spend 15 minutes a day working on it.  That's it!  The point is that "anyone can do anything for 15 minutes".  I set my 15 minute timer (it makes it more fun when you're working against the clock) and got to work in the foyer. Now, we don't have any clutter in the foyer so it was pretty simple to do but I got sidetracked by an overflowing plant in the dining room (I guess I put too much water in it..AGAIN!) so I didn't quite finish the foyer in the 15 minutes.  But that's ok...I'll pick up where I left off tomorrow.

I've read a lot of testimonials from people who have been following this organization plan and I've seen a lot of before/after pictures and it's absolutely amazing how much you can accomplish in just 15 minutes a day.  I think a lot of times I look around at what all I have to do and I just start to feel overwhelmed.  It seems like it will take so much time and so much energy to accomplish everything so then I'd rather sit and watch tv than to do anything.  I'm trying to let go of the "all or nothing" attitude and just do what I can in 15 minutes a day (plus the morning/afternoon/bedtime routines).  I'm optimistic about how this is going and I'm hopeful that once I get into a really good routine I can stop using a cleaning lady and save us some money!

Let me know if you check out the site!!