No Apologies

Now that this race is down to the wire, if you're even considering voting for Obama, you really need to check out what this guy stands for.
Two biggest in my book:

• Socialism.
• Infanticide.

"Spreading the wealth around." My husband will work his butt off, then be taxed to death so those who don't feel like getting up off the couch can still enjoy the same priviledges he does. And don't even get me started about the government being in charge of healthcare in this country.....
And if I knew nothing else about him, the fact that Obama SUPPORTS partial birth abortions would be enough for me to vote against him.
Once again, don't be swayed by the media's portrayal or by his smooth talk. Do your research and make an informed decision.
Now....
GO VOTE!

Eye Doctor Visit

So I thought I'd update you all on the visit we had with the eye doctor last week. In between cleaning up poop from the boy I babysit. I was in the bathroom myself, when the three year old pushes the door open and comes in with nothing on from the waist down. I ask him if he needs to go potty. "Nope." I sit him on the toilet anyways. Two seconds later I walk out to find his underwear, wet with a little turd in them. I dumped the turd out, and made him put the underpants anyways (the wet spot wasn't very big), so he could feel how gross it is to go potty in his underwear. Not 10 minutes later, the phone rang, and Dallas ran to ask me, "Who is it? Who is it?" Again with no underwear. So I went into the dining room and found the underwear on the table, with poop smears on them..... But no poop. I could smell it. Poop smears on the floor.... But no poop. Then I found it.... He had picked the turd up and dropped it over the baby gate onto the stairs. I made him pick it up with a napkin, then clean the floor up with a baby wipe. What else can you do to make him realize how nasty this habit is???? It's obvious he knows he's not supposed to do it in his pants, or else he wouldn't try to hide it.
I think his parents are like, "Just wait 'til you have kids, then you'll realize it's not so easy." And maybe it's true, but..... Still..... Gross.
That was NOT what this post was about.
I get distracted.
We went to the eye doctor last week. They told me to plan on being there a couple hours, but it ended up being just over an hour. They dialated his eyes and the doctor looked into them, made him watch his light go back and forth - several times - then told me his prognosis. He said Nathan has what is called Duane's syndrome. The doctor explained it as the nerve that controls one of the muscles in his left eye never developed in the womb. His vision is fine, but the muscle that makes the left eye look left doesn't work. He said Nathan will (and already does) compensate for this by turning his head a little further to the left when he looks that direction. He said Nathan would not be allowed to be a Navy pilot, but other than that will have no problems or restrictions on what he can do.
Whereas I'm a little sad that he has this small problem, I am SO relieved that we don't have to do glasses. He fights anything being on his head or face, so I was not looking forward to that battle.
Anyways. Back to the current battle - keeping Dallas poop-free for another hour and a half.

Rainy Day Blah

So it's cold and rainy outside. Why does cold weather always have to be ushered in by rain? I would much prefer it if the crisp fall mornings just got brisker and brisker and one day we wake up and wonder how it became winter.
So in light of the rain, I am stuck inside. I should be reclaiming my house from the post-vacation disaster zone it currently is, but I just can't motivate myself to do it.
But I am being industrious! Paul and I picked two buckets full of cherry tomatoes last night. I decided to make tomato sauce out of them, thinking it would be so easy: Wash them, cook them, mash them - poof! Sauce.
Well, the washing took like an hour. Then the cooking another hour. Then the mashing, and now we're cooking it again to thicken it up. The result: A couple pints of sauce. Seriously. Was it even worth it it?
So I thought I'd give you an update on any randomness I could think of. The first thing that comes to my mind is - what else?
Nathan!
He's just over 13 months old now. Where has time gone? Am I forever going to be saying this? Will I look back at my kids' weddings and say "It just seems like yesterday..."
I'm happy to say that Nathan is weaned. Despite my apprehensions, it wasn't as hard as I had assumed it would be. Over two or three weeks, we went to just nursing at naptime and bedtime (yes, it was a get-him-to-go-to-sleep crutch), to nursing only at bedtime, to nursing only in the middle of the night, to no nursing at all! Each step only took about 3 days, and then he didn't even try to nurse! Even when we were in the emergency room, he never acted interested, even though he'd only been completely weaned just a few days.
Even though I totally enjoyed nursing, I totally was ready to be done - not necessarily because I "wanted my body back" but because I had had a year of me being the only one able to get up in the middle of the night to put him back to bed. The lack of sleep got to me finally.
I still am the one to get up the majority of the time... When Paul is working, I don't make him get up - even though I was THISCLOSE to making him anyways this weekend (after the third time up in a span of a couple hours). And I still wake up even if Paul is the one to go upstairs (half the time because Paul doesn't wake up to the sound of crying - I usually have to elbow him to get him to wake up). But not having to actually get out of bed is so nice.
We've been experiencing some sleepless nights lately. Nathan will go to sleep at his usual time with no problem, but will wake up between 2 and 4 AM and be up for anywhere from a half hour to two hours. I know it's the teeth, and if I give him some Tylenol or ibuprofin, he sleeps a lot better, but I don't like doing that - I feel like I'm drugging my son to convenience myself. If I can tell he's miserable, I'll give him some, but I don't dose him "just in case."
But when he actually lets me look in his mouth, it just looks so painful! His gums are all swollen where the molars are coming in. The second one on bottom finally broke through, and I think he's feeling better. I don't know how close we are to getting the molars on top yet - he really resists me poking around in his mouth.
What else? .... He's running, kind of, now. He throws his head back and runs, but then falls flat - because he throws his head back. I guess he doesn that because it's so fun, but it's really messing up his coordination. But he always gets up with a big smile on his face, so I guess it's okay.
He's also really getting into playing games like tag and peekaboo. I live for his giggles - they just make me feel all googly inside. Do any of you other moms just get overwhelmed by how cute your kids are?
For the second year, our garden was not what I hoped it would be. I don't know what we did or didn't do, but we haven't had beans or peas worth a hoot. Granted, we had some weird weather, but still.... Frustrating. We have plans to keep the @#%&* dog from stealing all the corn next year (he probably ate half of the crop this year), so hopefully that will help. It's not a whole lot of money (even though our August water bill is usually 2 or 3 times normal) - it's just putting so much time into it, and so far, not getting much of a return.
I weeded the flower bed at the back of our house for the first time since before I got pregnant with Nathan - which was almost two years ago. It was a mess, but I really had no motivation, since no one sees that bed except me when I'm hanging clothes on the line. I mean, you can see it from the road, but we're not close enough to see that it was chock full of grass. I didn't do a great job, but I was just going for getting the majority of the bulk (and seed heads!) out.
Paul is enjoying his supervisor job. He's been in that position for almost 4 months now, and I really haven't heard him complain. He's had days where all sorts of stuff goes wrong, but doesn't come home angry - he's always been really good about leaving work at work. I'm proud of him, because he mentioned one day when things were crazy that he had been working on the line, packing the glass - which isn't his "job" as a supervisor (it's what his old position was). But I told him that doing that speaks volumes about his character to his shift - that he's not "lording it over" them, that he's not above doing "real work". I still haven't met hardly anyone on his shift, which I regret. His old shift, Paul and I played paintball 2 or 3 times with about ten of them, so whenever I'd meet him at work, there was always someone who knew who I was and would chat with me. I have been totally spoiling them, though, and making home-made goodies for the whole crew whenever they work days on a weekend (at Paul's request). Paul said this last weekend, the cookies I made were completely gone by 9 AM - all he got were crumbs.
Nathan has an eye doctor appointment tomorrow. He has a lazy eye, which I've noticed for a while, but was hoping it was just a "baby thing" that he'd outgrow. No such luck. They called to confirm the appointment, and told me to come 15 minutes early to fill out all the paperwork, and expect to be there a couple hours. They're going to dialate his eyes. I'm not excited about that, or about the procedures they'll have to do to get it to be "un-lazy", but I just want to get started on the process, and get it fixed, so hopefully he won't have to wear glasses all his life.
Anyhow. Is this long enough yet? I'm just rambling. I used to keep a journal, but haven't really since I got married. I think blogging has kind of taken it's place. I really need to get all my entries saved and/or printed out. And yes - I still journal sometimes. There are a FEW things I don't think need to be shared on the internet. :)

Vacation Pictures

So I got a sampling of our vacation photos put up on my other blog. And by sample, I mean there's almost 50.
In case you've been over there and seen them in the last 24 hours: when I originally put them up, I had them captioned and everything, then when I hit "save and close" it closed - but didn't save the captions. So now I've just RE-done them, explaining what you're looking at.
Enjoy.

I Love My Bed

We're back from our vacation!
Did I even mention we were going? Probably not. But we were gone - for a week! That's the reason for not posting. Not laziness. (This time.)

At Horsetooth Reservoir above Fort Collins.

We left at 6 AM last Friday, and spent 12 hours on the road driving to Fort Collins, Colorado. We went out there to visit Paul's grandparents (his dad's parents) for a mini-family reunion. Both of Grandpa and Grandma's kids, and all of their kids and grandkids made it out there at the same time. We all arrived within a few hours of each other on Friday evening, and all departed within a few hours of each other on Tuesday morning.
We had a blast. It was so nice just to hang out and relax, and get to know Paul's family a little better. We were all out there together last summer, but this time I felt like we were more comfortable with each other.
The family is as follows: Grandpa Ted and Grandma Nadine, their daughter Connie and their son Doug (Paul's dad). Connie has two daughers - Amy and Emily. Amy has a 5-year-old son, Boston, and Emily and her hubby Chris have a son named Jack who is 1 1/2. Doug and Janice have Paul (obviously) and Elizabeth, and then there is me and Nathan. So 14 people in all for this family reunion.
I was fascinated by watching Nathan and Jack (who are second-cousins, for those of you who, like me, have trouble with the proper cousin-isms) play together. To me they look so much alike.

Maybe I get distracted by the chubby, chubby cheeks. But there are some pictures that they almost look like twins. Definitely like brothers, or at least something more closely related than second-cousins.

Yeah, that's Nathan on the left, and Jack on the right. Just in case they look like the same kid to you.

After we left his grandparents' house, we headed down to Colorado Springs. Paul's best friend from childhood moved out there this summer, so we wanted to stop by and see him. After a half a day in the area, we decided we'd definitely be coming back next year.... When it's warmer. We got to do a quick hike through Garden of the Gods, see some indian cliff dwellings in Manitou Springs, and tour the Glen Eyrie castle and grounds, which is where Seth works (for Navigators). Since it was only in the 40s, we didn't really get to enjoy the hiking and time outdoors as much as we would have liked.
From Colorado Springs, we headed to Ness City, KS. Where is that, you ask? It's a little town smack in the middle of nowhere. And you realize that as you drive an hour down a two-lane highway and pass no towns, and very few oncoming vehicles the entire way. My little sister got her first teaching job out there, so we wanted to stop by and see the town.
Ironically, Ness City was the vacation destination for my family many summers as I was growing up. There is a little hotel with an indoor pool that we found by chance one summer, and so we ended up coming back year after year. (Because these farm kids love their indoor pools!) Sometimes we'd stay there on our way home from visiting Mom's relatives in Colorado, and sometimes we'd go out there and stay the weekend. Us kids would hang out at the motel, enjoying the cable tv and the pool, and Dad and Mom would go for drives, visiting various farm equipment dealers and some of Dad's distant relatives.
We got a good visit in with Carl that evening before we all turned in. We all got up at 7, and she headed to school, and we headed home.
I figured up on the way home: we'd spent roughly 25 hours on the road. That's a chunk for a one-year old. And believe it or not, when he wasn't asleep (which was more often than I though it would be), this is the face he had most of the time:

And that was with a new arrival that popped out sometime over the weekend at Grandpa and Grandma's. See his new pearly white back there on the right side of that smile? That puppy popped through and I didn't even know it until one night when he was acting off - quiet and cuddly. And it's a molar! The one on the other side is just under the skin, and the in-between teeth are coming in, too. What a champ!
But that does explain the sleepless nights that began the week before we left, and continued the whole vacation (except for one blissful night). He'd wake up at night, and it would be two hours before he'd go back to sleep. He'd fall asleep in your arms, but as soon as you put him back down, he'd start crying, which turned to screaming if you tried to just let him "cry it out."
It made for some interesting sleeping while we were gone. We were in a full size bed at Grandpa and Grandma's. Now, there's only 6 inches difference in width and height than our queen bed here at home, but it makes all the difference when it comes to knees and elbows in the middle of the night. Then add to that a sleepless one-year-old. Nathan's playpen that he was sleeping in is about 2/3 the size of his crib, so when he rolled over in his sleep, he'd run into the side and wake up. Paul would give up after 20 or 30 mintues of rocking and come put him in bed with us. Maybe Paul could sleep with him in there, but I couldn't, and judging by Nathan's restlessness, neither could he. So I usually ended up getting back up with him in an hour or so and rocking him for 20 or 30 minutes more until he was finally completely out. Then when we stayed at the hotel in Co Springs, we had a king size bed, which was plenty of room for all three of us, but Nathan did acrobatics and ended up with his head nestled into my ribs (and I somehow on the edge of the bed), and his feet on Paul. So given that I couldn't roll over, I didn't sleep that well then either. Then at Carl's we were on a futon. Enough said.
So I was SO GLAD to get home to my own bed. I slept like a baby. And so did Nathan, until 7 AM.
Argh.

How to Escape a Blockade

I should have learned a while ago that chairs don't work as baby gates. But our house with it's weird doorways (or lack thereof), traditional baby gates just don't work.
For the last four months, though, they've worked on the stairs. The upside down chairs trick is actually something we used with our dog when he was a puppy - we fed the cat on the stairs and put the chairs up to keep the dog away from the food. Nathan has climbed on them, but not actually shown any interest in going over them.
Until one day last week.....

This is as far as he'd gotten before... Climb up here, bounce a little, then get bored and move on.
(See why a baby gate wouldn't work? There's no wall to attach it to on the left side.)

I swear it only took him like 10 seconds to go from the floor to over the chairs.

I'm outta here!

Paul could probably rig something up with plywood and hinges, but... That would only work until he can reach over the edge and unhook it.

Really, I don't worry about him going up the steps anymore. He's a pro. It's the coming down. Especially since he thinks he can go down like a big boy now (facing forward). He's figured out how to take one step or two holding on to the wall, so he thinks he can do all of them that way. He can't.
Any experienced Mommy advice or tips?

Caterpillar

Wednesday we were taking a stroll through the yard when Paul came across this..... beauty.

Now, maybe some of you don't know about my dislike of worms, slugs, grubs, and general aversion to anything slimy or with more than four legs. But I hate them. So imagine my reaction when Nathan takes an interest in the thing.

Actually, I was a good Mommy, and I didn't react. I told Paul that I will try not to teach our kids my quirks by observation. I will control myself in the presence of worms, frogs, and other nasties.... As long as no one shoves it in my face. Like Paul loves doing. Grr.
But seriously, I was choking back the gag reflex as I took these pictures. Especially when he got a little squeezie with it.

*Shudder.*