Are you considering having children?

This is an e mail forward, but I thought it was funny. Especially the part about the grocery store.
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Are you considering having children? To determine whether you are truly prepared for the experience, we suggest you take this set of simple tests...

MESS TEST:
Smear peanut butter on the sofa and curtains. Now rub your hands in the wet flower bed and rub on the walls. Cover the stains with crayons. Place a fish stick behind the couch and leave it there all summer.

TOY TEST:
Obtain a 55-gallon box of Legos. (If Legos are not available, you may substitute roofing tacks or broken bottles.) Have a friend spread them all over the house. Put on a blindfold. Try to walk to the bathroom or kitchen. Do not scream (this could wake a child at night).

GROCERY STORE TEST:
Borrow one or two small animals (goats are best) and take them with you as you shop at the grocery store. Always keep them in sight and pay for anything they eat or damage.

DRESSING TEST:
Obtain one large, unhappy, live octopus. Stuff into a small net bag making sure that all arms stay inside.

FEEDING TEST:
Obtain a large plastic milk jug. Fill halfway with water. Suspend from the ceiling with a stout cord. Start the jug swinging. Try to insert spoonfuls of soggy cereal (such as Fruit Loops or Cheerios) into the mouth of the jug while pretending to be an airplane. Now dump the contents of the jug on the floor.

NIGHT TEST:
Prepare by obtaining a small cloth bag and fill it with 8 to 12 pounds of sand. Soak it thoroughly in water. At 8:00 PM begin to waltz and hum with the bag until 9:00 PM. Lay down your bag and set your alarm for 10:00 PM. Get up, pick up your bag, and sing every song you have ever heard. Make up about a dozen more and sing these too until 4:00 AM. Set alarm for 5:00 AM. Get up and make breakfast. Keep this up for five years. Look cheerful.

PHYSICAL TEST (WOMEN)
Obtain a large beanbag chair and attach it to the front of your clothes. Leave it there for 9 months. Now remove 10% of the beans.

PHYSICAL TEST (MEN):
Go to the nearest drug store. Set your wallet on the counter. Ask the clerk to help himself. Now proceed to the nearest food store. Go to the head office and arrange for your paycheck to be directly deposited to the store. Purchase a newspaper. Go home and read it quietly for the last time.

FINAL ASSIGNMENT:
Find a couple who already have a small child. Lecture them on how they can improve their discipline, patience, tolerance, toilet training, and child's table manners. Suggest many ways they can improve. Emphasize to them that they should never allow their children to run riot. Enjoy this experience. It will be the last time you will have all the answers.

Guess what else isn't childproof!

John was the last to get the sickness that is still going around in our house. Noses still run and coughing still takes our breath away. However, John took it to a whole new level by adding a special dose of strep throat and ear infection to the yuckiness. Antibiotics were started today and the strep test results required medical phone call #2 of the day regarding William. Seeing as William can't tell me if his throat is hurting, I was worried he might also have strep. This possibility puts me in the running for the Worst Mother of the Year (WMOTY) Award as William was the first in our house to get sick at the end of last week. If he in fact did have strep throat, he would have had it untreated for close to a week. It is great to think about our son being in pain and us ignoring it for an entire week. Luckily, my award is already in the mail for what happened earlier today and I don't have to worry about any further events. A quick call to the pediatrician's office revealed that most kids under the age of 2 don't get strep throat even when they are directly exposed to it by family members in close proximity. The strep throat exposure isn't concerning to them. However, the news that William still has a runny nose/cough after 7 days was something the nurse was concerned about. I have instructions to call back for an appointment if he is any worse tomorrow or simply "not better" on Monday to rule out the possibility of a bacterial infection, ear infections or sinus infections. Now that I know I have the
WMOTY Award in the bag, I will go ahead and follow through with these instructions. How did I came to win such a prestigious award in the first place? Well, let me tell you...

As I've said before, we're changing the routine up here from two naps a day to one nap a day. The switcheroo is requiring a lot of little changes including the time of our lunch. Lunch is occurring earlier in order to get him down for a nap earlier to prevent the complete and total "Meltdown Mode". When all goes exactly according to plan, we are making it to the crib somewhat peacefully about 40% of the time. The rest of the time includes, but is not limited to all out sobbing, a limp torso and extreme flailing of limbs by all involved as well as a pounding headache by the time all is said and done. When we get a little behind schedule it doesn't go as smoothly and we are left with the above situation before lunch starts. This presents an interesting parenting dilemma: Feed the kid or pick up the pieces and put them all in the crib and try again later.

Today I was trying to prep lunch so I could put it on the table and feed him before the projected meltdown time. William was supposed to be occupying himself in the living room with his bucket of blocks, but instead followed me into the kitchen. Somehow in his freakish tallness, he was able to reach up and grab this off of the counter:

This is a bottle of infants vitamins with a child resistant cap. Ordinarily this is not something I would let William play with, but time was short and my hands were full. Not two full minutes later, I walked out of the kitchen to find he had outsmarted the child resistant cap and had the lid off. A small amount of the vitamin liquid was smeared on his face and a large amount spread across his brand new T Shirt (with a race car on the front). This is the moment I was awarded the WMOTY Award, I am fairly certain. I grabbed both lid and bottle from him and was relieved to find approximately the same amount of fluid inside the bottle as before. However, I couldn't be certain he hadn't swallowed some and he already had his Recommended Daily Amount of vitamins for the day. A phone call was made to Poison Control (FYI: Really nice people those Poison Control people. Very calm, even when talking to the WMOTY). The good news is that he could drink the entire bottle and not suffer from any type of permanent damage - which I have no intention of letting him do. They recommended giving him several ounces of milk along with some lunch and keeping an eye on him for the next hour. Believe me, I don't plan on taking either eye off of him for more than a second after today.

So, people who have medication in child resistant bottles at their houses within reach (which means it isn't under several heavy duty sets of locks on the very top shelf that cannot be reached without the use of a tall ladder), it may be time to childproof. I'm not asking you put away the knives. But the prescriptives: yes.

And just for fun: a riddle! What is more fun than potatoes? Potatoes in a bag in a box! HAHAH!

PS Video clips and audio clips will be coming shortly as well as pictures taken by other people!

William Houdini

William's new trick from today. Well, those things were useful for about 2 weeks...

P.S. New picture in an entry below...

It might work now

It works! Here are pictures from the last week or so...

A picture from last week. It was time to clean out the refrigerator and guess who wanted to help? Please note: when all the shelves and stuff is in the fridge, he doesn't actually fit where he is standing now. I promise.

Still climbing every chance we get! Here he is trying to get a boost up by stepping into the colander. He got frustrated pretty quickly when this didn't work!

Last weekend we finally picked up a carseat for John's car. We were looking for a convertible car seat that had a higher weight limit while still being reasonably priced. We weren't able to find anything we liked, so we ended up with this forward facing carseat. Although he meets all the requirements for forward facing, we were hoping to keep him rear facing for a while longer as it is supposed to be safer for him that way. Now we're just hoping he doesn't mind staying rear facing in my car...


Although I wish he was rear facing, it is still kind of fun to turn around and see this when we're going somewhere! In his other carseat, all we saw was his kicking feet and sometimes a waving hand. Now I know exactly what he is doing back there!


I'm not sure how exciting this is to anyone else, but William is starting to stack up the blocks by himself. Here he is practicing.


Another tower. Please note one of his favorite toys in front of him: shoes. He loves to carry his shoes around the house and play with them. I've started hiding his shoes because we were almost half of an hour late because we were running around trying to find a missing shoe. Another interesting fact: we measured his feet this weekend and found he is between sizes 5 and 6. No wonder those 4.5's were getting tough to put on!


So proud of himself!

Another favorite toy: Mama's phone. Please note the cute new shirt from Great Grandma Gerry and Great Grandpa Tom! He was pretty excited to have a fire truck on his shirt. He was running around and playing and would have to stop every one in awhile to point to the "Brrrmmmm" on his shirt.

By the end of the day Saturday, we weren't feeling so hot. This is what we all felt like by the time William went to bed.

Childproof? I don't think so! These childproof latches were installed less than a month ago!

We're hoping this new skill doesn't translate to other cabinet doors...somehow I'm going to have to keep an even closer eye on him now!

Well, you'll have to wait

I tried to upload pictures here tonight. No luck. I'll try again tomorrow night. We also have some words on audio files to post. But, not tonight. Blogger isn't cooperating with me and I don't have the energy to fight it.

So flu/cold/yucky stuff has landed at our house courtesy of the short one who licks things that have germs and doesn't wash his hands (good thing he is cute). William and I are both feverish and yucky feeling with a side dish of runny nose. Ick. William by far is the most pitiful of the two with the rivers of snot he wipes on my shirt at every turn.

We started the weekend with renewed energy to getting the basement done. Our goal was to have the basement ready to be taped by the end of the weekend. This whole basement project is quickly approaching the two year mark and we actually got a reasonable bid for taping the basement walls. So, on Friday night we started with the cleaning and rearranging to finish up the last small details that need to be done before someone ELSE can finish this leg of the project. The yuckiness has intervened and we are not ready for the taper to come and do his thing. Oh well.

I'm off to bed because the shortest one went to bed an hour early and that may mean he'll be up an hour early also.

Boo hoo, Boo Hoo

William's grandparents wrote:

wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wahhhhhhh,, sniffle sniffle wah wah.

blog blog blog blog blog blog blog

wah wah

???????

My Response:

I fear that this will continue for at least the next week or so. We finally decided to give up the morning nap time. The afternoon nap has been going wonderfully...sometimes. The first trial day produced a 2.75 hour nap! Heaven! But, I kept thinking he would wake up any minute, so I wasted the time doing stupid stuff. The next three days produced a 2.5 hour nap combined total. So, now I am down to a small amount of time to: clean, pay bills, make phone calls, make Big plans, meet with drywall guys, eat bon bons, write e mails to my grandparents, cook dinner, paint my toenails, etc. I am a busy girl. In the evenings we've been hitting the Y to train for our upcoming 5 K (maybe at the end of March?) and trying to prep the basement for the eventual drywall taping. I think I might post this exact e mail to the blog now...

The Next Big Thing

Today was the first step to working on the Next Big Thing for me. It really isn't a secret, but I'm not sure what direction I'm going in yet. Still considering my options. But, I want a marker here because I've taken the leap. It's off into the unknown for me (so what else is new?)!

PS When/If I ever decide on anything, I will certainly share.