This Week Might Break Me

Tomorrow's Thanksgiving. I have my latest load of sick laundry clean and unfolded on the coffee table, toys are everywhere, dishes are piled high in the kitchen.

It has been the kind of week that other parents don't tell you about when you first have kids. Or else they joke about it and make it seem trivial.  We've been dealing with a Sickness around here.

It started Friday, but I was so certain that it was just a reaction from the flu shots the kids got on Thursday. And then the coughing started. And along with it the cough-barfing.  My kids are BLACK BELTS in cough-barfing. You know, how you cough so hard that you accidently throw up? Yeah, that.  And then the Night Coughing (and cough-barfing, pajama changing, sheet changing, etc.) prevents sleeping, and that makes everybody feel so much worse.  So Sunday, I felt sick too, and you know that a household doesn't run when the Mama's not feeling well.  But I was feeling human by Sunday night, so I figured that Lucy's cough was just the remnants of some bug she worked through over the weekend.

Tuesday Lucy had her preschool Thanksgiving performance. It was so cute! Except that my Star Performer refused to even move much less participate.

See her? In the white shirt and blue/purple jumper behind those other participating children? Wishing she were anywhere but there? Sad. I knew something was still up and that we should probably get things checked out before the holiday.

We spent the afternoon yesterday at the pediatrician's office and at the hospital getting chest x-rays for my poor girl. The doctor thought she sounded all lung-crunchy on one side so off to Swedish Ballard we went. The medical imaging place was the same place we went to get our last ultrasound the day before John was born.  But back to the point: it's not pneumonia.  We just have to suffer through.

It was the first time I've had to deal with all that doctor stuff on my own. I didn't want to bother the Bubba with it since he's already taking off Friday and Monday and his work is just insane. And it didn't seem like such a big deal that I needed to drive all over town trying to find someone to watch John. But that meant I was schlepping two kids all over Seattle dealing with the stress of medical stuff on my own. Which I didn't realize was a big deal until I got home and wanted to just sit and cry.

All this to say that I am less than prepared for Holiday-ing.  My house looks like a rat's nest. I need at least three more days to get myself, my kids, and my house up to an acceptable level of presentation.

Luckily we decided to just do Thanksgiving with the four of us, super low key. So at least the pressure's off  there and we can spend all day in our jammies eating cereal if we want to! (And after this weekend/the beginning of this week we might.)

Seven

Seven months is so big!

John is crazy active these days. We call him our Speedy Centipede because it sure does seem like he has a hundred feet under him propelling him along at top speeds.  He doesn't crawl with his belly off the floor, but he's gotten so good and fast at army crawling that he doesn't really need to experiment with other ways to get around. He just started sitting up. He never liked trying before because if he's SITTING he can't be MOVING so no, thank you.  He's still not the stablest, but he's good until he dives onto his head trying to go straight from sitting to flying. He's not really a Sit Still kind of kid!

Well, that is until it's cuddle time. I am so lucky to have a cuddly baby. Every mommy should have one for sure. Lucy NEVER cuddled. Not since she could help it. She wanted to be on her own and Stop touching me, Mom! Even now when I idly touch her hair when we're in line at a store or if I sit too close to her on the couch, she'll move away and ask me to stop touching her. It's hard on a Mama whose love language is physical contact! (Good thing she makes up for it in other ways. Like being awesome putting on dance routines and building stable yet very tall towers!) But John, he's a snuggler. He likes to just root right in here and find a comfy place under my neck and grab on to the shoulders of my shirt for dear life. He's a master of the drooly open mouth kisses and will often accompany them with an "AAAaaaaauuuuh!" So violently he loves.

He knows the sign for "milk" now and uses it to mean "milk", but also "food" and "Mama." You know, because I'm just a cuddly milk bag. Although, I'm pretty sure he made the sign for "food" yesterday when he was whining for more cereal and fruit. He did it twice which makes me think it might have been intentional and not just shoving hand by mouth baby MO.

The kids are sharing a room now, which is working out just ok.  I mean, as long as I don't wait too long to put Lucy down and she's already turned into the overtired Monster Lucy that does whatever she can to wake up her brother. And then wake him up again and again every time he falls back asleep. John goes down around 7 and Lucy goes to bed around 8, and unfortunately John's kind of a light sleeper, so we have to go in there and quiet them down once or twice a night on average. But it's ok for now. And we have a basement bedroom for when it just isn't working at all and Lucy needs somewhere else to be. So, yeah. Ok. Not awesome. But ok.

John's sleeping is a little better these days, but nothing to brag about. Most nights I get 6-7 hours of sleep now, though, which is HUGE. 6 months of sleep deprivation does really funny things to a person. When Lucy's at school he'll sleep for at least 2 hours in the morning. When she's here with us? 40 minutes. It's like he has this internal alarm that wakes him up as soon as she and I are doing something fun together.

The bigger John gets, the more the kids can interact in some sort of meaningful way. Lucy's still the best at making him laugh, and she's getting good at figuring out how to manipulate him to be close to her and watch her play and yet not get her toys. It's a fine line. Now that he's pretty fast getting around, they play chase too, which is hilarious. Lucy will go on her ride-on truck or her balance bike around our circular floor plan and Johnny will just army crawl after her as fast as his little arms will take him. Peals of laughter ensue. Both of them think it's pretty much the funniest thing EVER.  Well, and really, so do I.

Two kids just keeps getting better.

Photo Update: Fall

I need to throw some pictures up here for posterity's sake!

Pumpkin patch:

 Pumpkin carving:

Creative juices flowing

Halloween!

John as a scary cute skeleton:

Lucy's three costumes!

 Lucy's always been more of a
dump truck kind of girl, so when she
was excited about a princess dress,
so was I!

 This is the Crayon costume MY mommy

 made for me when *I* was 3. 

She wore it to her preschool party.

(Trick-or-treating at Daddy's office)

The house from "UP" This was all Lucy's idea. The house took me about two nap/rest times and one evening to finish. I wish I had taken a close-up of it, because it's pretty awesome if I do say so myself!