And now, what you've all been waiting for...

An update on the weaning process!

We're done. She's weaned. I'm FREEEEEE!!! She nursed for the last time last Wednesday, and it's kind of been a rough process. I'm not sure if it would have been better to just do it cold turkey. Because she went through withdrawals every time I dropped a nursing. And now that she's done I can tell she's still a little miffed at me. She hasn't forgotten about it quite yet. I remember the intense feeling of relief and freedom I felt when Caleb was weaned. I felt like a huge burden had been lifted off my shoulders. And now that Grace is done...

I'm sad.

I miss it.

I know...looking back at this post, and this post, you would not think that I would be the least bit sad, but I am. I think the reason for this is that Caleb had no problem drinking formula, and then later milk. Grace still thinks that milk is "death juice." She just does not care for it at all. So the relief that I should be feeling is overshadowed with worry that she's not getting enough nutrients or calories. So, all I can do now is keep feeding her cheese and yogurt, and hope that she'll warm up to the milk once she forgets what breast milk tastes like.

I am, however, highly enjoying eating whatever the heck I want to!! Within reason, of course...


(yes, I know she's holding a toilet plunger)

And now that we've made it through weaning Grace, we now have to think about weaning Caleb....from this:



Yes, Caleb still has a binky. But, in my defense, he only has it for naps and bedtime. But still. He's almost three and a half years old. I have a feeling that when Glen is with the kids while I'm gone next weekend, the binky is going to mysteriously disappear. I'm just happy that I won't be around for that. May the Force be with you, Glen.

Camping

In the almost 6 years that Glen and I have been married, we have only been camping once. One time. And it was before the kids were born. Sometimes we wonder why we don't camp more. And then we watched this:



Oh yeah, that's why.

(No offense to those who love to camp. I'm positive we will still camp at some point in the future, and we may even enjoy it. Maybe...)

Family Adventure Day!

Glen and I had a conversation a few weeks ago about how our house has been consuming our lives since we moved in, and we never have any family fun. So we have declared one Saturday a month to be an official Family Adventure Day (or FAD, kind of a lame abbreviation, I know)!

Our first adventure was a couple of weeks ago. There is a community center in a city north of us that has an awesome indoor pool with a water slide, lazy river, and little kids play area. We realized immediately how sheltered and unadventurized (yes I made that up) our kids are, because, no joke, it took us 45 minutes to get Caleb to step a foot in the pool. 45 minutes.

This is where he sat for those 45 minutes:



Then, Glen picked him up and tried to get him to have fun on this delightful looking contraption:



The boy. went. nuts. We're talking full out Tasmanian devil thrashing, folks. He ran down the steps so fast he ended up slipping like three times, scraping his knee and getting all kinds of bruises.





Somehow, Glen was able to coax Caleb into putting his feet in the water. And then he sat down in the shallow part and actually enjoyed splashing, but he would not let Glen move from this position:




And that's where Caleb played for 8 minutes before family swim was over and it was time to go home. All things considered, we had a good time, and hopefully it won't take Caleb more than 30 minutes to get in the pool next time.

Grace was a little nervous about the water at first. Mostly, I think, because it was a bit chilly. But she warmed up to it and had a good time. Here are some pictures of her in all her cute Gracieness.

He's on a roll

Caleb provides a lot of comic relief around here. He seriously just says the darnedest things!

He's had a thing lately with calling Glen and me by names other than "Daddy" and "Mommy." Here are just a few:

We had all just come home from someplace, and as I was getting Caleb out of his car seat, he randomly said, "I want Glen to get me out."

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Also Glen and I rarely call each other by our first names, and Caleb picks this up too. The other day after Glen left for work, Caleb looks around and asks, "Where's Honey? Where did Honey go?"

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This one is my favorite - We all have our usual seats at the table, but sometimes Glen and I will change seats so he can constantly put pieces of food on Grace's tray and pick them up when she throws them off. The other morning at breakfast, Caleb was having a hard time with the fact that we weren't in our usual seats. He said to Glen, "Hey that's Sister Thomas's chair, Daddy. You're in Sister Thomas's chair!"

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A few more Calebisms for your (but mostly my) enjoyment:

Me: "Caleb, are you my little cutey guy?"
Caleb: "No, I'm a penguin."

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Glen: "Caleb, tomorrow we're going to go swimming in the swimming pool!"
Caleb: "No, I don't get my hair wet. I need to keep it clean."

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Sometimes I sing wierd little songs to Caleb and Grace. Today, I was singing a little diddy that went like this, "I love Caleb, yes I do. He's my little coochy-coochy-coo."
Caleb: "No, I'm not a little coochy-coochy-coo."
Me: "Oh, you're not? Well what are you?"
Caleb: "I'm a big coochy-coochy-coo!"



P.S. I know you're all dying to know how weaning Grace is going. It's going...I'll post about it soon...

Joe the Plumber

Well we had another fun round of house projects a few weeks ago. It's a good thing I let the dust settle (literally) for a couple of weeks before posting because, seriously, this one was a doo-hoo-hoooozy. It involved tearing out old plumbing and putting in new plumbing for the entire house (I'll let your imagination run wild for a moment...)

I'm going to give you list of random things/places and I'll let you guess what they all have in common:

-friend's house
-neighbor's house
-church
-local grocery store
-Best Western motel
-bucket

Have you guessed?








**TMI Alert**








Yes, that's right. Those are all places I went to the bathroom over the course of about 30 hours during this project. Now onto the good stuff...

So the day started out fine. I took the kids and ran errands all morning while Glen and our neighbor across the street went to work. In my extreme naivete, I believed (probably more like hoped) that by the time we came home around 1:00 they would be close to finishing. Mmmmm, no. When I came through the door, the kitchen looked like this (the kitchen sink is moving to where the big hole in the wall is):



The bathroom sink was here:



And the toilet was here:



That's right, no running water, and no toilet in the house. I said a little prayer of thanks that Caleb is not potty-trained, and also that I had decided to use my friend's bathroom before I left her house to come home. So at this point I decided to attempt to put the kids down for a nap and hope that they sleep through all the sawing, banging, and grinding. Not likely, I thought, but what could it hurt? Miracle of miracles, they both slept for like 2 hours!

I was amazed because (totally unrelated side note) we seriously CANNOT sneak into these kids' rooms at night when they are sleeping, because they wake up. Every time. Without fail. We live in a very old house, and the floors and doors make all kinds of loud cracking noises. This has always upset me because, is there anything more precious than watching your children sleep? I think not. And I wish I could do it, but alas, creaky doors do not sleeping children make. It's like that scene from What About Bob? when Dr. Marvin tries unsuccessfully to wake up Bob by yelling and shaking him and jumping on his bed. But then his little alarm clock goes off and Bob wakes right up. It's like that. I digress...

So Glen and neighbor are working for the rest of the afternoon and neighbor goes home at around 5:00 p.m. Glen continues to install plumbing for the rest of the evening. At around 9:59 p.m. (Saturday night), an extremely panicked Glen runs upstairs, grabs the phone and frantically dials the phone number to Lowe's. Turns out there was one little bag of small parts that Glen needed more of to seal off the pipes. Lowe's closes at 10:00 p.m. (along with all other hardware stores) They would not sympathize with our situation (didn't really expect them to, just hoped), and we were stuck. No running water. No toilet. Tomorrow is Sunday. Meetings for Glen at 6:30 a.m. Church at 9 a.m. No showers yet that day.

So at 11 p.m. I drove over to the Best Western motel down the street and rented a room so we could at least shower and get ready for bed. Glen finished up whatever he could do without those parts, then took his turn at the motel and checked out. We both got to sleep around 3 a.m. Alarm went off at 5:40 a.m.

So after church Glen's doing tithing and the Bishop says to him, "Why aren't you home getting that ox out of the mire?" Glen comes home, makes a trip to Lowe's (no judging, please) and by about 5 p.m. on Sunday, we had running water and a toilet!

Here is a picture of Glen with his Dad on the cell phone talking Glen through how to install the toilet:


Well we survived that one, but the projects are far from over. Here are some before and afters (note- the afters are not finals)




Before (the toilet was on the opposite wall behind the door):












After (or better, "in progress"):

(that's a $300 pedastal sink we got on Craigslist for $75!)







Here's sort of a "current" (I'm going to stop saying "after") picture of the kitchen. The sink is now in front of the window instead of in the corner like in the picture at the top. The cabinet and dishwasher have actually switched places since this picture was taken. We like playing "musical cabinets" around here. In the end, we will have new cabinets, flooring and windows, but this is where we are right now.


If you actually made it through this entire post, I'm very impressed.