Normal

Did you know that there is town in Alabama called Normal? I found out that bit of info this week. While I wasn't physically there, I felt like today was the only "normal" day I had in July. Instead of frantically working on a huge list of house and yard projects all day, I got to spend the day in my regular routine. Yes, the same routine that I have complained about at times as being boring and redundant, was pure bliss to me today! It reminded me that, at least for me, routine is good and quite comforting. My day went like this: Shower-by myself for the first time in weeks, playing with Av, doing the "normal" cleaning of the hardwoods, vacuuming, lunch with Av {where she requested green beans for lunch-yeah!}, went to the gym for an hour, ran a couple of errands, another shower-this time with Av, enjoyed a couple hours in the kitchen with Av baking cookies from scratch and cooking dinner, played a bit more with Av, put her to bed, read a few medical journals for continuing education, and now I'm having fun blogging. Sorry to throw out a big list of my day, it's just wonderful to see that I did have a few things that had to get done today, but the rest of how my time was spent was by my choosing.

Tomorrow I'm tackling one of those low knowledge and highly self-conscious areas in my life. I'm spending the morning with a gracious friend who happens to be fantastic at sewing, and she has offered to teach me to sew. I'm very excited about it. J says I should be a natural-if I can sew people, surely I should be able to sew fabric :).

I hope you have a wonderful Friday, even if it is just a "normal" day!

Toddler Words

Since she's 2, I never know what is going to come out of Av's mouth. This week we've experienced comments that ranged from entertaining to embarrassing. My mom always says that whatever embarrassment I experience from Av is justice for the craziness that came out of my mouth when I was a child. I'll give the entertaining moments first

Av loves the zoo and she really loves getting to ride the camel, Big Joe, there. A couple months ago my parents took her to the zoo and my mom rode the camel with her, which is pretty impressive (or concerning to me) since after she had cancer she had to have her hip replaced. So that's the back story. This week we were reading an animal book and when we came to the camel page this conversation occurred.
Av: "It's Big Joe! I rode Big Joe with Beba" (my mom)
J: "You did?!?" (Apparently J didn't know mom rode it with Av)
Me: "Yeah, Beba's cool like that."
Av: "Yeah Papa, Beba's cold chillin'"
It was hilarious. How has my 2 year old learned slang?

The embarrassing moment happened in Wal-Mart of all places. So Av's in the cart and to add insult to injury, we're in the feminine products section. Then a lady with hair down to her thighs walked by us. Right as Av noticed she exclaimed "Momma, does she have BIG HAIR?!?" Why couldn't she say it in a nice, quiet voice? Of course, the only really loud part was the "big hair." I tried to make up for it by saying yes, she has long, pretty hair. By the look I got from the lady, I don't think she appreciated any of it. I always knew the day would come when Av would blurt something out before I could stop her. I also suspected that my moment of embarrassment would probably happen in the grocery store, since that's where I normally embarrassed my mom. At least yesterday wasn't too bad, I know it could have been much worse. I think my mom has even had moments where she told people I wasn't her child and that she babysitting for a friend.
What have your kids said to embarrass or entertain you?

A,B,C's

Do those of you with young children watch Sesame Street? We don't really watch much TV and we try to limit what Av watches as well. She occasionally watches The Wiggles, Veggie Tales, or one of her favorite movies like Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music. A friend of mine mentioned how much her daughter loves Sesame Street, so I thought we would try it out, and Av LOVES it! Since I'm a nerd at heart, I love that it's educational. Av can sing her A,B,C's and we recently started working on her being able to recognize individual letters. The show and it's "letter of the day" has been such a help with learning letters. She now knows about 13 letters, so we're halfway there. Very exciting to me. It's amazing to me how quickly young children learn. It really makes me wish I still learned that fast.

We have found a few resources that have really helped with learning A,B,C's. One is a leapfrog fridge phonics. We normally go over 1-3 letters a day, but with animal cracker as a reward, Av learned 5 letters in one day!

We also have wipeable (is that a word?) alphabet placemats. It's another great way to work in the letter/letters of the day. Av now loves her placemat and wants them to be nice and clean to have them at meals.

I was going to add more, but I'm having trouble with the computer. This seems to be a reoccurring theme lately. So happy learning, and please share your ideas. I'm not very creative, so I know you all have great ideas on how to get those little minds working!

Sarcasm and bikinis

For those of you with a sarcastic side, you should go check out despair for a good laugh. They even have a "dark humor" t-shirt about blogging :).

As a side note, Av informed me this morning that she did a good job eating all her bikinis yesterday. I hope she meant zucchini.

Imperfect

I have to admit that feel somewhat disappointed in myself for my blogging laziness lately. This month has been pretty weak. For one thing, life has been so busy I feel that I haven't had time to blog. On the other hand, I have so many thoughts going through my head at once that it's hard to pinpoint anything down to be concise enough for a post.

One thing I have learned, well, not really learned so much as revisited a lesson I should have learned by now. The problem is that I am often frozen by perfectionism. This week's example is window treatments. Putting drapes up in our den is something I've been meaning to do for quite a while now, but I could never make up my mind about them. What style? What color? What pattern? It is at the point that I had to put something up, so in last minute run to Lowe's I spent $40 on 4 drapery panels-and it is such an improvement!! Now I realize that had I just done this months ago, even though they're not perfect, it would have been better than nothing! Why is it so hard for me to make decisions like this? I think it's mainly b/c if I don't feel confident in an area I question myself and my decisions. I enjoy decorating and gardening, but often shy away from it b/c I feel like I don't know enough about it. I'm now reminding myself to go learn about the areas I don't know about, or just go ahead and take action and if it's the wrong decision, learn from it and move on instead of just staying stuck in limbo.

One cute moment of the evening-Allie was lying on the floor and Av decided she should have a pillow and blankets

Then she decided she should just join Allie.

Frazzled

Do any of you feel like your brain doesn't work quite right after extended lack of sleep and exhausting work? Well, I do and after this weekend I know J does as well. I will warn you up front that the following does contain graphic potty contents.

In one of the bathrooms we have the regular toilet and a little training toilet. On Saturday J took Av to the potty and afterwards informed me he was impressed that a 2 year old could be so, um, let's say "productive." Those of you moms know that you can't just dump and rinse- soap and scrubbing need to be involved. Later in the day I took Av into the potty and realized soap and scrubbing were not involved when I noted what we'll call "residue" in her potty and this conversation followed
Me: "Oh gross, J!!!"
J: "What?"
Me: "Av's potty is still dirty from the morning!!"
J: "But I didn't use the little potty!!!!"
Me: "Uh, yeah, I meant when Av used it this morning."
Hysterical laughter ensued from both of us.
In this time of fairly high stress and exhaustion, at least we have moments of laughter and lightheartedness to laugh at ourselves, or at least at Jonathan :).

Done

We made it through the week and I think even my fingernails are tired and sore. I did want to share some of my recent favorite blogs I've found.

Sand in the Gears Great blog that covers politics, economics, society, faith, parenting, family, basically everything. Fantastic writing, entertaining, and thought provoking

6 Year Med Thoughts on medicine and life ranging from hilarious to heart-wrenching. Also great writing.

Testosterhome If you have boys, read this one. This is a witty mom of 5 boys on parenting, faith, and the moments of life.

I have really enjoyed these lately and thought I would share. Happy Blogging!!

It's 1 am right now and I should be in bed, but we've just now finished our work on the house for the day and I promised I would make a post tonight. So instead of easing off into slumber, I'm at the computer :). Here's the moment I keep thinking about from the beach.

The last day of our trip J wanted to get in a great, full day at the beach. Av really enjoyed making sand castles during the week and we knew we would spend some time building in the sand. Shortly after arriving at the beach Av and I started working on making a whale in the sand. We basically had the form of the whale completely when we started "decorating" it with shells and driftwood. At about this time I looked up and noticed Av wasn't with more anymore. I walked around to the front of our chairs to bring her back to our whale and this is what I found

I guess she decided it was time for a break from the heat and sun. According to J she just walked around to the chairs, climbed up, and kicked back without saying a word. Maybe she thought J had the right idea of how to spend time at the beach.
After recharging she joined me for a walk on the beach to look for seashells.

Rehab

I'm starting to think that our long trip to the beach was like blogging rehab for me. Isn't that the idea? Keep the addict away from the crack long enough and the desire for it will go away. Supposedly, but you know what they say...once an addict always an addict :).

We went from relaxing days at the beach where our most difficult decision was "do we go to the pool or the beach?" to incredibly busy. I think J would easily qualify for an upper management slave driver. Today we decided to get up early and start working on the yard before the kiddo was up and before the sun would fry us on the sidewalk. So we rose at 6 am to begin mowing, edging, weeding, planting, laying pinestraw...... It was rough, but well worth it. We finished around 1 pm. I'll have/try to post pics tomorrow. Here's one of my little helper transferring plants with us.

I was planning on sharing a very cute beach story, but you have to see the pics that go along with it and my computer is saying it's having trouble connecting to blogger, so I'll post that tomorrow. Promise. I really need to go to bed anyway. I'm wiped from the last few days. I just needed a blog "hit" before I went to bed.

Beach: Phase 1

Still loving our time at the beach and thought I would post a few pics of the week. When I started downloading pictures today I realized that I have taken hundreds of pics this week. Yikes! It took quite a while to edit them and choose a few favorites. The following pics are from July 4th. Av and her cousins had a great time building a huge sand castle. Here's Av and 2 of her 4 fabulous cousins. Av is the youngest by 4 years, but they are all so wonderful with her. They all look out for her, make her included in activities, and shower her with love and attention. We noticed a theme while at the beach. Great snack bags (read snacks Av doesn't normally get at home) were Av's friend. Since Av was snacking in the above pic we tried to take another pic after we took the snack of the moment away. You'll see the result below.....definitely not happy.

Thankfully, a Capri Sun saved the day :)! These are a new found favorite. I think she can down one of them in under 5 seconds.

I know this isn't the best post out there, but I'm just proud of myself for writing a post while out of town!

Still here

Hello everyone. Just wanted to check in with you. We've been at the beach since last week and basically, I'm terrible about blogging when I'm out of town. I have internet and could blog, but I never get around to it. I have to admit I would much rather spend time at the beach, the pool, eating great fresh seafood, and staying up late with family. We have had a fabulous time. Soon I'll post new pictures of the trip.
Av has loved the beach and the pool. Currently her favorite activity at the pool is jumping into the pool while yelling cannonball. She picked up this trick from one of her cousins. Swimming lessons were a great decision and I'm so thankful that we went ahead with them this year!