Hairmoans

You know that thick, lovely hair that is achieved during pregnancy? Well, about three months later, it all falls out. Well, not all, but enough that you can make a pretty good sized hair ball by the end of a shower or find your way out of a thick, wooded area by following the trail of hair back out. Then, just when you are beginning to adjust to your new, thinner-haired look, a hair-raising situation arises. Literally. The hair that just fell out in droves, now grows back. A nice new layer of short baby hairs that stick straight up in a postpartum halo dash any and all hopes of good hair days in the months to come. When I was little, my sister brought home a paper doll she'd make with a fro-of-sorts that she named Delightsocket. I am that doll.

And speaking of dolls, check out these two rolling around together this morning. She rocks the baby hair much better than I!

Which One of These Doesn't Belong?

While eating lunch with Lawson, he was happily chattering away. Soon he was doing a show-and-tell of the items near us that he could name. Eventually, he got to what was on his plate.

Pizza!!!!

Cheese!!!!

POOP!!!!! (said with arm thrusting up as high as possible and topped with a pointed finger)


Two of these items go together, one of them doesn't belong. Can you tell which one?

Perspective

This picture was only taken two months ago, but it already feels like an old picture. They've changed so much since then. Especially Miss Num Num! It's strange how children make time feel different. A photo of myself taken two months ago would be considered recent, but this photo is already outdated. It puts things into perspective for me.


I woke up a few mornings ago with a strong sensation that moments are fleeting. This time spent at my mom's house is half over already and the holidays will be but a memory sooner than I'd like. This time next year we will have been in Texas up to eight months already! That blows my mind. I know I sound like a broken record going on and on constantly about how quickly time is going, but it never ceases to amaze me. I also find myself being reminded, in so many ways, to slow down and enjoy the kids while they are little. To enjoy this time of staying with my mom, even with Dustin away. To enjoy the process. It isn't a race to the finish or to the next step. This is life and it doesn't slow down and wait for you. Days happen, events happen. If I am not prepared to take it all in, then I miss out. And it isn't just me that misses out. The kids miss out, as well, if I'm too caught up in my mind to enjoy their little triumphs each day.

The quote I put below the picture is so fitting for them. They adore each other. They like to play and snuggle and laugh together. They even like to cry together. Lawson wants to go "nigh nigh" as soon as he wakes up in the morning just so he can hang out under the covers with Num Num. They are each others' world. But, I am also their world. Especially when Dustin is away. And that truly puts it into perspective. We may not be home as a whole family, but we are family and because we are together, we are home.

And I Quote

If I Had a Crystal Ball...

...I'd throw it away! Trying to peek into the future only leads to sleepless nights. Being that I was awake until after 3am last night dreaming about the future, I'm an expert on this, so trust me. The excitement of what is to come when Dustin gets back as we prepare to move to Texas left my mind spinning and my eyes wide open staring into the darkness that I hoped would be my crystal ball. That whole idea of being in the moment is a big one for me. When I exist only for what is happening around me, not only do I live happier, but I sleep happier, too. "Like a baby", they would say. After I had kids, I wondered what in the world the person that thought up that phrase was smoking. Babies wake up constantly! But now I know what it means. Babies are in the now, they are not mulling over the latest happenings and over analyzing what is to come. They are laying in their fluffy bed with their eyes closed peacefully and sleeping. Until they wake up 5 minutes later... but that is in the future and not of concern to them as they fall into sleep.

No, I don't need a crystal ball. I need to remember that the future holds more wonderful memories for further on down the road and now is the time to make them. So, I'm off to enjoy being cooped up in the house and experience some beautiful memories for later.

Ready to Fly the Croup

It's a farm full of yuck-germs around here this week. It started out with a very unwelcome swine and is ending with a barrel of antsy monkeys trying to fly the croup! Lawson got sick all at once on Monday night and by Tuesday was in urgent care, having not had a drop to drink in nearly 24 hours and a fever of 103.3. They didn't test him and didn't seem worried but said that he had the swine flu and should take an anti-viral. So, home again, home again, jiggity jig, with Rx in hand we went. He had a cocktail of the anti-viral, Motrin, gelsemium semp. 30 and oscillococcinum and seemed to get better almost immediately. Tuesday was spent running around playing and coughing and saying "no!" as much as always. The pig seemed to be on it's way off the farm and we were glad!

Eight o'clock rolled around and he went to sleep seeming almost back to normal. Well, two hours later, I found a very different boy in his bed. A barking seal had joined us at the farm and Lawson was not pleased. I didn't like the sound of his cough and wasn't about to risk letting him go all night for this to develop into pneumonia or bronchitis. Off we went to the E.R. to have him checked out. By the time we arrived, his cough was markedly better and had me feeling a little on the silly side for having brought him in. I stuck to my guns though and in we marched. Lawson rode in his stroller and Naomi hung out in my favorite baby carrier, the Balboa Baby. The nurses were laughing that I had babies everywhere, that some people accessorize with jewelry and I accessorized with babies. This had us all laughing, which was nice since Lawson was feeling more than a little uneasy with his "dinosaur mask" on to keep from spreading his germs. The nurse checked him out and thought he sounded fine, then the respiratory specialist checked him over and said the same thing. Then, a seasoned and sassy doctor walked in to give him the once-over before they sent us home. Lawson started crying the second he came in because he knew he was about to be prodded and poked again. Well, the doctor heard him inhale once and said, "he has croup." Which made me feel a little less like an overbearing worry-wart of a mom for bringing him into the E.R. Apparently, the cold and damp air outside on the way to the hospital was a therapy of sorts. The gave him some meds to take down the swelling in his esophagus and we were on our way with a much happier boy.

So, we're not sure if he ever had the swine flu or not now. He may have been misdiagnosed in the first place, or he could have had it and it turned into croup. I'm kind of hoping we got swine flu out of the way and have immunity now! This is starting to sound a bit like Survivor: Sick Farm. Luckily, the barking seal and pig have been voted off the farm and hopefully won't be coming back for the rest of us (though my mom may very well have stolen that barking seal off the farm for herself.) In the mean time, I'm going a little stir-crazy and wish I could fly the croup for a while! Until then, we've got elephant trains and walking lady bugs to keep us company as the rest of the sanitized toys hide out until the coast is clear! And when it is, I'm jumping on that train to chug-a-chug-a-choo-choo my way off the farm to start in on some Holiday shopping!!!

Poodini

Heard from down the hall:


Lawson, did you poo poo? Should you tell Mama that you need a new diaper?

Yeah, poo poo.

Kim!

...yes, I know.

No, you don't. It's coming out the bottom of his pant leg.

Um, what?


So, off I went to meet Lawson and Mima at the bathtub to take over this sure-to-be-stinky clean-up job. I started to pull his pants down and realized there was no diaper covering his buns. I patted down his legs and realized his diaper had gone completely missing and he had poop down in between his toes. Yuck. Actually, double yuck. So, where the heck was this diaper and how nasty was this going to get?! Thanks to the high powered shower head, I was able to power wash the poo right out from between his cheeks and his toes then scrub away all residual residue. Not that you care, but I was pretty thrilled not to scrub that off by hand.

I soon I found myself behind his little behind going on a diaper hunt, hoping he'd lead me to it's hiding place. We searched in the front coat closet, all the drawers and even under the pillows on the couch. No diaper. It was a major Poodini. It certainly isn't laying around with steaming poo smell or we'd have surely discovered it! It made me SO glad we've not had to deal with diapers being torn off and rubbed around all over the place. That would be a very...poopy... situation. For now, it's only elusive, dissapearing, Poodini diapers!

Sunishine in a Vase

During lunch today, a rogue vehicle turned into my drive and left me guessing what the deal was. What day is it? Am I expecting anyone or anything? The more I wondered, the more curious I was. Finally, the driver got out of her car and got something out of her backseat. I was holding my breath, wondering what it could be. She turned around and it was flowers! My sweet, thoughtful husband sent me a gorgeous vase full of beautiful flowers just. because. JUST BECAUSE! I feel like the luckiest girl in the world right now. Not because I got flowers, but because he was thoughtful enough to have a sweet thought about me on the other side of the world, and send it to me in a vase for me to smile at every time I see it. That is happiness. Thank you, Dustin. I love you, too.

In Your Frog?

For those of you with a blog, you probably know what BlogFrog is. If you don't, you should check it out by clicking on the blogfrog widget in the right column of my page. This widget shows you who has visited your blog (to some degree). So, yesterday, I was checking out blogs and noticed that a certain person had just visited my blog. So I said to my mom:

Oh! So and so just checked out my blog!

Really? How can you tell?

Because they showed up in my BlogFrog.

In Your Blog Frog? What the heck is that?

It's a widget that shows you when other people with blog frog or blogger check your page.

ummm.... oh. (pause, then said seriously) How do you get your blog in the frog???

.....


It was at that point that I realized that until you are pretty deep into blogging, you don't realize how ridiculous it all sounds until it is said aloud to you by someone uninvolved in blogging.

Such as the time I was at my sisters and was, as always, checking out blogs. It was an ordinary day in the blog community and I scrolled down my page to find a handful of new posts to read. Well, soon enough, I reached the bottom of my blog lists and got to the BlogFrog widget. It should be noted, that in blogging, there are blogs and then there are BLOGS. The big blogs that millions of people love, such as MckMama's blog, My Charming Kids or Pioneer Woman. That's when I saw that MckMama had checked my blog at the same time as I'd been checking hers. I had a mild sense of being in the presence of a celebrity. Okay, major. I was ecstatic! My sister stared at me as I got way too excited, repeating, "oh, my gosh! MckMama just checked my blog! MckMama!" To her, I'm sure it sounded like insane babble, not knowing who the heck MckMama was and why I'd want someone, let alone, be excited over some person called MckMama checking in on my blog. I'm not proud to admit it, but I was seriously stoked that she saw my blog! Which, I know, screams "dork". As does being in a position where you find yourself explaining widgets and being asked how you put your blog in the frog, which I still don't know how to explain. I'll be that dork, though, because as silly as it all sounds sometimes, blogging is all sorts of cool and totally puts the frog in my blog. Or the blog in the frog...

My Heart in My Hands

Fort Hood

Unspeakable. What happened at Fort Hood today is unspeakable. A soldier shooting up his very own army's base is like someone shooting their own family. It is sick and wrong and disturbing on every level. He robbed families of their loved ones, who've made it to Iraq and back only to be killed be one of their own. He also robbed military families the comfort of feeling safe in their on base housing and going about their business while on post. Someone's daddy went off to work today and didn't return home because some loser turned on himself, his comrades and his country.

This country has been divided by war. Should we have gone? Should we have moved on and let a it go? I don't have the answers, but I do know that our troops did not need to have any more people discouraged from supporting them. I'm saddened and horrified and my heart goes out to the families of those who were killed, those who were wounded and those who witnessed this horrible act. If you pray, send one out for them. If you don't pray, keep them in your thoughts. That could have been Dustin that didn't come home from work and the thought makes me want to say some pretty mean things about that man. I hope he has to sit in a cell in a military prison for the rest of his life.

Bright and Buddhaful

So Fresh and So Clean

Is there anything more fresh and clean than a just-bathed baby? Soft, squishy, smiley and due to spit up at any moment. But, at least for two seconds, that little head smells as sweet as, well, a freshly bathed baby!

Out of All the Pumpkins in the Patch, He Chose a Rock

I'm barely able to comprehend that November has arrived already! But, Halloween has come and gone and all that's left are some pumpkins by the front door. Before I can fully move on to November, I've got to give a proper finish to October.

The day before Halloween, we found ourselves in the midst of a gorgeous, warm fall day and headed down the road to the pumpkin patch for a hayride. Lawson would have been happy to sit in the tractor by the parking lot all day long, but we finally made it to the hay ride that left us out in the country aside a sea of orange. We walked all around the pumpkins, but Lawson had his eye on other things. He snatched up a pumpkin-shaped rock, which Lawson calls a "gee-ock," and it was clear that there would not be any pumpkins coming home with us that day. He even had a little whirlwind romance when he found himself in the middle of the patch with a cute little girl who offered to help him with his gee-ock. They soon realized that not only did they have eyes for each other, but their boots did, too. They admired the eyes on their respective frog and bee boots and giggled with each other until the tractor started up to take us out of the pumpkin patch. I caught them making eyes a few more times as they passed each other around the farm, though. I'm going to have my hands full with this little Casanova!


















Halloween day rolled around and the fear of swine flu kept us home. I'm normally not a germ-a-phobe, but with Naomi still being so young, I'm avoiding the flu like the plague. Visions of snot-nosed children digging through bowls of candy only to eventually be eaten by a soon-to-be sick little kid swam through my mind all morning. So, that night, I dressed Lawson in a bear costume, walked him out the garage, around to the front door and he had a ball ringing the doorbell and trick-or-treating at mima's house over and over! He also thought it was great fun have the doorbell ring and see all sorts of kids show up to get their pillowcases filled!











And so our October ended with a fluffy little bear running gleefully around the house, sucking on his loot (two dum-dums) and yelling "ALOOWEEN!!!" It also come rolling to a close as Naomi figured out that she can get from point A to point B by rolling over and over and over. The look of glory in her face when she realized she got to where she wanted to be all by herself was pretty awesome. Luckily, I don't have to roll around on the floor to get where I want to be. I'm there already.

CLICKIN' MOMS GIVEAWAY WINNER!!!

Thank you to all of you who participated in the Clickin' Moms membership giveaway!!! The lucky winner, drawn at random by my mom (who had no idea why she was picking a number) is Melissa! Congratulations!!! Melissa, you should be getting an e-mail from Clickin' Moms to start you off with your free year subscription! For the rest of you, I really encourage you to sign up with them! Even if it's just for a month to start with, you could pay for it with the change in your couch and see a drastic improvement in your photos! Although, a word of warning, you will not want to stop your subscription once you start!!! Thanks to everyone who entered! Hopefully I can do another giveaway soon! It was so much fun to see your photos!

Snow Princess

Once upon a time....

There lived a tiny little girl, with so many blank pages in her story and such a gleam in her eye that it was clear that hers would be a fairy tale. And though her story had yet to be written, she knew that the possibilities were endless and that it would end with "happily ever after."