What the boy & I did today: 2/24/09

I've decided to start posting what my son and I do on a daily basis. It will help me to update this on a more regular basis and I think it'll serve to bring a little amusement to folks around too. So, here is the first installment.

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The morning was a bit busy from the word 'go'. The boy was up at the crack of dawn and playing in his crib with his toys. Usually, I get him and bring him down for breakfast at 8:30. Today, because I was up at 6:30, I went and got him shortly after he was up. So breakfast was an hour early today. He absolutely enjoyed the bananas we had this morning and completely ignored his cereal 'O's.

He played on the floor with his stuffed dog toy that sings and his big blue fuzzy bear while I finished up some writing in my journal. When I was done, we read a few stories. He has several favorites but right now the one that is top of his list for when we're downstairs is 'Bumpy Tractor'. Most days we alternate between that one and the other in the box set, 'Speedy Firetruck' but for the last three days now he has been all about 'Bumpy Tractor'.

I hope that he decides to go back to alternating between his favorites because I'm starting to have dreams about reading that story! At least they're not nightmares of the endless 'Speedy Firetruck'. That was a result of reading it at least a dozen times over one week! I was ready to go hide that thing!

After reading 'Bumpy Tractor' two times and reading a second hand copy of 'If I had a Little Train', we listened to the news on the TV and to the boy's 'Spin 'n' Grin Snail' play Camptown Races. The boy was rather entertained by the weather man giving his report of what we should expect over the next few days. I don't claim to understand it, but the boy will stop what he is doing and just stare at the TV when ever some one is giving a weather report. I think he gets it from my side of the family. After all, I have a grandfather, a father, an uncle, and two brothers who watch the Weather Channel constantly.

I turned off the TV before I got out the coloring book and his big crayons. We sat on the floor with my lap desk and first he watched as I colored a picture of a ship. Then he and I worked together on a picture of art supplies, with him picking the colors I used and finally coloring some himself. He colored some on a picture of a tractor with an apple tree. This was after I had colored in the apples on the tree purple because he pointed at them and handed me the purple crayon.

When it was time to pick up for the morning snack... Well, we had a melt down. The boy wanted to keep his crayons and we had to put them away. I'm glad that he didn't try to crawl away with the three he had in his hands. That could have made things a bit difficult. Instead, he just sat and fussed at me. Once I put his snack in front of him, however, all fussing stopped. It's amazing what a few cookies and a cup of juice will do. :)

Then came the barrage of songs. I sing alot with my son. He can't quite manage to sing but he'll coo at me or babble along with the songs at times. He has started to do what he can for the hand gestures to accompany 'Itsy Bitsy Spider'. He's been doing his best to keep up with 'Baby Bumble Bee' and '5 Little Ducks.' A bout a day or so ago, the boy has started to point at his head at the beginning of 'Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes' and he started to clap to 'If You're Happy and You Know It.'

I'll post up a list of lyrics for these in case anyone reading this doesn't know what I'm talking about. I'll also note the hand gestures. My young neices absolutely love it when I do these songs with them too. :) I suppose working at a daycare did me some good after all. :)

The boy started to fuss and rub his eyes a little bit at about 11. So, I asked him if he wanted a nap. Usually, nap time is about 12:30 or 1 pm (right after lunch). I wasn't horribly surprised when he said yes in answer to my question. So, he went down for a nap and I did too. I woke up almost an hour before him. My little man slept for a long nap today! He fell asleep at about 11:15 and woke up at almost 2:30 in the afternoon (when he usually wakes up from his nap).

Lunch time went well. He ate up his sandwich and didn't really pull it apart too much. I was surprised, actually, how well he did with his lunch. I figured he was going to play with it some but he didn't. He poked at his fruit a little before eating it but on the whole he ate very, very well. I'm hoping this good behavior streak with his food is going to carry on into dinner tonight.

After lunch, we played with blocks some and then played with his trucks. I'm proud of the boy because he stacked one block on top of the other on purpose a few times this afternoon. We piled up the blocks, using his trucks. Instead of the expected temper-tantrum when I started to put the blocks away, he sat down in the corner with all of his books and started 'reading'. This means pulling out all of his downstairs board books and sitting in the middle of the pile as he looks at the pictures.

I then began composing this entry as the boy has been playing independently with various stuffed toys and noise making toys. He is fussing a little now, but I think part of it is because his sippy cup was out of reach until just a moment ago and it is starting to get towards dinner time. We're also close to the evening fussing because Daddy is not home from work yet.

As I sit here and think about this entry, I'm debating possibly posting up the 'menu' that we do each day. I'm sure some folks would freak out over some of the stuff I feed the boy, but he does good with it and generally enjoys it considerably. The pediatrician has no complaints either, beyond the fact that he thinks we started him a little to early on solid food. When the child is smacking his lips and screaming because he is not getting any of your sandwhich, that's a rather impossible to ignore sign that the child is probably ready for the infant cereal. No harm has come from it, so we're not worried over it.

Well, I feel... crushed.

My dreams of a house to move into kinda went poof in the last 15 minutes. I spoke to the mortgage guy who was recommended to us by the Realtor who is a friend of the family. We might have qualified if we didn't have the issue with the student loans and we did things in my husband's name. My problems with the damn credit card company has made me ... well... definately not a candidate in any fashion at all for a mortgage, even one of these nifty ones that the government has set up for people with low credit ratings and such.

The fact that our student loans are in forbearance... Well, that pretty much was the kiss of death. We're welcome to get a hold of the mortgage guy after we get our student loans out of forbearance and paid on for a year. The mortgage guy told me that it would be a functionally insurmountable strike against us on applying.

I want to cry right now. 90% of the places listed for rent and roughly the size we need we can't afford. I don't know what to do. We can't stay in this place that we're living in right now. We can't afford the new rent they're going to charge us. We simply can't afford that.

I don't know if I should plan on going back to work or not right now. I don't know if we're going to afford to feed ourselves after this new baby is born. I... I thought we were going to be able to do so. But now... Now I don't know. If we have to move into a place that we have to pay rent that is 100 to 200 dollars more a month then what we are paying now, that makes finances really difficult. Adding my son into the picture added roughly two hundred dollars a month in expenses to our bills before he was born. I figure the new baby is going to do about the same thing.

I just want to cry. I'm so psychologically fucked up with other shit that I can't manage to get my head screwed on right to work from home. I'm barely managing to keep things running relatively smoothly here. I'm scared and feeling a little ... a little desperate. I don't know what to do.

My little man is walking! WALKING!

So, the boy is walking now. Yep, he walked across the living room entirely on his own today. He's done it about four times today. He's having a ball. I'm excited for him but I'm also a little apprehensive now. What on Earth are my husband and I going to do about things like my boxes of fabric that he's definately going to be getting into now? I suppose it's no different from when he was just crawling yesterday, when I think about it, but I still have that mild bit of apprehension.

[10 min later...]

My little man had interrupted my posting here for some play time. This child loves to be turned upside down. So, I was picking him up and doing so. He started laughing quite a bit with that infectious giggle of his. It's wonderful that it is so easy to make him laugh at times. There are other times when I think it'd be easier to stop sunrise then to make him laugh. I've been told that I was just like him as a young child.

This means that he'll be fine. After all, I have a sense of humor it's just different from most people. I generally don't find slap-stick that funny but witty sarcasm can have me in stitches. It'll be interesting to see how his sense of humor develops as time goes on.

Ah, musical toys. How I love and yet hate them! My boy has a favorite toy from his cousins on his father's side of the family that he is currently playing with. He loves hitting the 'piano keys' on it and making it play little songs. It is one of the absolute favorites and it's adorable to watch him play with it. And then there is the musical toy that my maternal grandmother sent him for Christmas.

I swear, if I have to listen to that thing one more time, I'm going to scream. There's a reason why it's put into the music toy box and comes out once a week with the other really noisy music toys. I don't know why, but this is his absolute favorite of the music toys (with the exception of his drum). It may be as my sister-in-law is right and the children in our lives gravitate to the toys that are the most obnoxiously irritating to us for their favorites, especially when they're toddlers.

On one hand, I'm glad that my son loves music. I'm glad that he's fascinated by his toys that are of a musical nature. He enjoys them as much as he does his trucks. Just recently, the boy has figured out how to say the word 'tuba' thanks to the Baby Einstein video that we were given for Christmas by my brother-in-law and his wife.

A quick aside, I have to say, the more I see with these Baby Einstein toys, the more I love them. The toys are educational, fun (for the grown-ups and the kids), and just beautiful to look at. It's hard to say just what I think is the best about them. I was first introduced to them when I was working at the daycare. I decided that I wanted to get some of them for my children when I had them. I was impressed by how these toys engaged the children when they were playing with them.

Toddlers have a relatively short attention span. When they come back to toys its because they're favorites. It was rather awesome to see how quickly the Baby Einstein toys became preferred ones. The DVDs are just gorgeous. The 'Meet the Orchestra' one is a favorite of the boy's as is the 'Language Nursery' one. We own the orchestra one but we borrow the language one from the library. We definately need to purchase that one at some point. He loves the language one even more then the orchestra one. For some reason, my son loves listening to people count in different languages and he absolutely *loves* listening to nursery rhymes in German.

We listen to a lot of music. We have some music that includes songs in foregin languages. He really enjoys the ones in Spanish. Between the lively beat and the rapid language, I think he really delights in the tones and syncopation of the songs. We now have a story book that includes the number one to ten in Spanish. I think I need to re-learn Spanish and learn German. It's my opinion that if I raise my children with a basic grasp of another language it'll help them in the future. But, I'll talk about it later.

Right now, I must run and work on dinner for the apple of my eye. :)

I'm bemused by the internet.

So, when I first heard about Twitter, I thought it sounded kinda nifty. It rather exploded with popularity of late and a vast majority of mutual friends of my husband and I use it. I've been reluctant because I don't think that 'Tweeting' about stuff that my boy does here and my random thoughts around the home are going to be of much interest to the world at large.

At the same time, I've been contemplating using it and the other big and popular thing, Facebook. We've got alot of friends who use those programs and it might be good for staying in contact with them. It's something that I'm consider like using that photo sharing site called Flickr.

So, somebody out there is saying 'Well, what's stopping you?'

Part of it is fear.

I've got some crazy people in my past that I'm afraid are going to use my increased visibility on the internet to cause me problems. Part of it is because I've heard horror stories involving identity theft and I'm concerned that it's going to be a problem for me. And then there is the general fear of social interaction and such that I have hanging around me from childhood.

The other part is I'm honestly not sure where to begin. But I've wandered away from my original intent of this post. Twitter is having an awards celebration right now. It made me giggle. Why did it make me giggle? It made me giggle because of the fact that it's in the international news right now. I honestly believe that if it hadn't gotten the visibility boost from the President's use of the service, it wouldn't be in the news right now.

That, however, is my suspicion. Who knows, perhaps I'm just horribly, horribly wrong.

Thoughts on kids rooms & furniture stuff.

I woke up a little early today. I got some time to sit and write in one of my journals that I have been neglecting almost as badly as I have been neglecting this blog. :P As I did so, I started writing about some of the things we're going to need to consider moving forward after the new baby is born.

The two kids are probably going to need their own rooms. Doug is going to be *alot* more active then the infant for a while. I'm realizing this as he sits at his high chair and gleefully munches on his cheddar-chicken nuggets. (Oh, to any other parents out there wondering what on Earth they should feed their children, I've got to say we're having amazing success with chicken nuggets. Specifically, the baked ones that you do at home. The fried commercial ones get a lukewarm reception, unless they're Burger King's chicken fries. Those Doug just about inhales!)

It once happened that Doug would sit still and focus quite seriously on the task of eating. Now, he plays and eats at the same time. So, putting him in the same room as an infant isn't going to work very well. And Doug should get some time to play in his room during the day. Naptime is going to become challeging. I can just feel it. As of right now (roughly 10 minutes after the comment about how wonderful chicken nuggets are) he is eating his last chicken nugget and discovered the wonder of cheese sticks as thrown projectiles. To say the least, before I laydown for my afternoon nap I'm going to be cleaning food off of the floor. And a sippy cup, which just hit the ground.

Well, I'd add more but Doug has decided he's finished eating and is now fussing to be set free from his prison... erm, high chair. :P