File these under "Things I never realized that I'd say or hear"

"The plunger is not a toy." (You don't want to know the details on this one, trust me.)

And Jamison said this to Will the other day: "Will, where are the rest of the man's legs?" (They were building an airport with Legos, which included a pilot and another driver for the luggage cart and fuel truck. I guess I never realized that even Lego people required assembly.)

Scenes that could be from our life, minus the third baby and gingham dress

[source]

I saw this picture in Real Simple Family a few weeks ago and liked it immediately. After closer inspection, though, I realized that Elliot Erwitt must have somehow included Will in this picture that he took in 1955. The view of the top and back of Will's head is shockingly similar to the little boy in the bottom of the picture. Laura is often in the same position as the little girl who's crying on her mother's hip, crying and all. And I have, on more than one or two (or ten) occasions, put something in or taken something out of a hot oven with Laura on my hip and wondered just how safe what I was doing was. The only things that don't really apply to me are the third baby in the high chair contraption (I kind of wish that I had one of those things for Will) and the dress, as I'm usually in my yoga pants and flip flops.

Happy new week!

Am I really writing about television?

I've probably made my views on television viewing clear before but it's been in relation to my kids and their viewing habits. I know that we're not like a lot of other people in our reluctance to let our kids watch excessive tv and I'm not trying to imply that anyone who lets their kids watch tv is a bad parent. If parenting Will has taught me anything at all, it's that everyone is doing the best they can and it's not for me to judge what may or may not be working for other families and other kids. I only know what I'm comfortable with for our little family and that's most likely different than what others are comfortable with. And it's okay, all of it!

Disclaimers aside, though, my feelings toward television don't stem from some sort of inflated sense of self-importance or the fact that I think television is too lowbrow for me (although, admittedly, a fair bit of it is--I'm talking about you, Two and a Half Morons). We used to watch television. We used to like it. But then we got used to life without it and we've never really looked back. In fact, most days, it doesn't even occur to me that the tv was never on. When a tv is on around me now, I most often find the noise grating, too loud, too much. I much prefer the quiet, especially when "the quiet" is such a tiny portion of my day amid the ever-present din of raising children.

When Will was smaller (much smaller), we decided to abide by the AAP and their recommendation that kids under two not have any sort of screen time. At the time, I found it hard to imagine that Will would benefit somehow from watching tv (still feel the same for that matter) when he could be looking at books or hanging out outside or even going to the grocery store with me, and I feel the same way about Laura as she's getting a little bit older, too. I know there were probably some people who thought we were being a little bit insufferable about it but I'm still glad we did it. If nothing else, Will has never really been regularly exposed to commercials and has no idea what toys he could be wanting or bugging us incessantly about.

Now that Will is older, though, he does get some computer time (we still try to avoid tv time, though) after his afternoon quiet time. He's kind of addicted to PBS Kids and their plethora of games (and the always-appealing Angry Birds, obviously) and I've kind of made peace with the fact that we'll probably never be able to completely avoid him being exposed to computers and/or televisions throughout his early childhood. He also gets one "show" every night before bed via Netflix on my computer. So don't feel too sorry for him, as he does get to do some fun stuff in life.

As I try to navigate the murky, turbulent waters of parenthood, I'm finding that I'm getting more and more comfortable doing our own thing, going against the "norm" without feeling the need to go into long-winded explanations or defenses of our actions (you know, kind of like what you're reading now--hmmm, maybe I need to rethink this last sentence?). I know what's going well for us, and surely what's NOT going well for us.

So no television works for us. Probably not for lots and lots and lots of other people; just for us. I don't like the way things feel when Will watches television. (In fact, I don't like the way our house feels when the tv is on--even in basement, completely out of my line of sight--for Jamison to watch football, like it is right now.) I don't like Will's behavior and completely annoying constant begging to watch more and more and more tv. Other kids can probably watch tv and not display the kinds of annoying behaviors that Will does, which may be one of the reasons I'm so against it for him. Anyway, enough, right?

*****

I've been thinking about television more than usual this week after Coach Taylor won an Emmy (which I, not surprisingly, did not watch). If you don't know the Taylors and the town of Dillon, Texas, get yourself to Netflix and/or the library and get your paws on every episode of Friday Night Lights that you possibly can. I know, after I drone on and on about my distaste for television, I recommend a tv show.

The show, in case you don't know, was tragically canceled after five seasons for which NBC deserves an ass-kicking. It was, and I don't say things like this if I don't really mean them, the best tv show I've ever had the pleasure of watching. I'm certainly no tv critic (well, no "critic" in the having-an-educated-opinion-on-the-finer-points-of-television way) but it's the only show I can ever remember watching and being disappointed, every single solitary episode, when the credits started to roll. It dealt with real, complicated "stuff" and, perhaps one of the main reasons I liked it so much, the high school students in the show were not portrayed as merely attractive, witless characters whose every other word is "like." (It also avoided the opposite extreme a la Dawson's Creek with its characters and their completely ridiculous vocabularies.)

I could go on forever about it but I'll stop here. Just do yourself a favor and watch the show. And then thank me for my excellent taste, of course. Clear eyes, full hearts, etc...right?

(PS. I also used to watch Brothers and Sisters but it was also canceled last season. Me watching a show seems to be the kiss of death, apparently.)

He's funnier when he's not trying to be funny

On the way home from school one day last week, we were listening to the radio when a commercial for the station we were listening to came on. The voice in the commercial said things like, "You know our djs, you know our songs, you know our traffic reporter, etc. etc." As this was going on, my exact thought was, "No, not really."

I didn't even realize that Will was paying attention until he deadpanned from the backseat, "Actually, I don't."

I laughed about it the whole way home.

PS. Totally unrelated to anything important, I'm reasonably sure that I saw Nick Lachey's  brother working with one of the trainers at the gym last week. (I'm too lazy to Google him right now so I'm not sure what his name is.) If it wasn't him, he has an identical twin who is a member of our gym.

Before everyone wakes up for the day

I'm in a race against the clock to write this so it may be short. I really meant to do it yesterday but before I realized it, it was 9 pm and I was ready for bed. Also, there are no pictures.

Will is excited to be back at school and in a new class with new friends. There are only five boys in his class of fourteen, so he apparently has quite a few lady friends. (He came home with an "envelope" that another little girl had made him. He was distraught that she didn't write her address down for him as well. Should I be worried?)

Laura is FINALLY walking. At nearly 18 months old, she finally decided it was time. I really have to say that it's nice that she waited so long because she's a really good walker so far and we have had exactly zero nasty spills. She is becoming the funniest baby and I don't know how to explain exactly how in words so I'm not even going to try. One of her favorite places to be is romping on the couch with Will (which usually lasts all of five minutes as Will's "romping" is a bit more exuberant than hers.)

Jamison just returned from a week out of town. (Actually, he returned a day early and decided it would be nice to surprise me. So Laura and I are in the living room when I hear the door in the kitchen open and my only thought is, "Crap. I don't have a weapon." Not that we have actual weapons in our house, but I could probably make one of our knives suffice if need be. If you ever have the inclination to surprise me, please don't. I don't like surprises. At all.) The new job is not really all that different from the old job, as I woke up at 1 am last night to find that he was still working.

I have been doing some totally boring closet-cleaning-out and reorganizing and trying my damnedest to get Laura back to sleeping past six every morning. She's somehow gotten back on her little baby waking schedule and it's no good for anyone involved, as she falls asleep on the way to get Will at school and then takes a shortened afternoon nap if she takes one at all. But it's 6:13 and she's still sleeping so maybe it was a phase that's already passed.

I've also been doing a little bit of reading before bed but my pace of finishing a book a week or so has slowed. I finished a little book called Hector and the Search for Happiness and I didn't love it. I didn't hate it either but I kind of got irritated with it toward the end because it's supposed to be a parable but it felt kind of like I was being spoken to (via the narrator, obviously) as though I were a first-grader or so.

I also started Julie and Julia and I stopped that one about 100 pages in because I really couldn't stomach much more of Julie. We saw the movie and really liked it so I was expecting to also like the book. (I say "we saw the movie" so casually, like we see so many movies. It's one of exactly three that we've seen since Will was born. So we average less than a movie a year.) My problem with Julie in the book is how she talks about her job as some sort of secretary-ish person who works with some sort of organization that somehow aids the families of victims from September 11. While I'm sure that the job wasn't fun or fulfilling or whatever, she talks about what a huge inconvenience it is to her (or this is how it comes across in her writing, as she doesn't explicitly state as much) to be comforting these people following the first memorial service on the one-year anniversary of the attacks. She's irked by the fact that the men in her workplace seem to be off doing other things and the women seem to be the ones left to comfort the families. And maybe that's not exactly fair but really, Julie? So after reading that bit, I really didn't want to go on. She just seemed spoiled and self-indulgent and immature and in need of a huge dose of perspective. So I moved on.

I really didn't know just how irked I was at Julie and Julia. Sorry for that little diatribe. (Now that I write all of that, I remember wondering why Julia Child didn't want to meet Julie in the movie, but now I know why.)

Anyway, it's nearly 6:30 and the house it will probably still be quiet for the next 15 minutes or so, so I should fold some laundry or complete some other such productive task.

Back to school

Today was Will's first day back to school and he was pretty excited to be back.

His first day of school last year.

And this year. (I know, the outfit is nearly the same. We're nothing if not consistent.) I think he seems old in this picture.

Last year, backpack view.

This year, backpack view.

Big Brother and Baby Sister last year on Will's first day of school.

And this year.

This is the reaction I get when saying anything that involves the word "poopy." He thinks it's the greatest thing ever.

And I think the same thing about him, my big-second-year-in-preschool-boy.

Last but certainly not least, I would be remiss not to mention that two of our special cousins celebrated birthdays last week. Happy belated birthdays, Mac and Reagan! It was Mac's very first birthday (and big sister Reagan's third!) and we had to miss it. Boo...Will was devastated that he couldn't come party to mark the occasion.

RIP Borders

Well, we did it. We made our final trip to Borders. As we were getting in our car last night, Jamison asked me what we were going to do now that we wouldn't be able to go to a bookstore that was having a going out of business sale. Our lives are totally meaningless now, I guess.

This was our third visit to this going out of business sale. The discounts have gotten deeper and deeper and they're really desperate to get rid of everything, including the fixtures and various office and cleaning supplies that they have on hand. There were even attempts made over the loudspeaker to entice book buyers to take home a few of their bargain-priced bookshelves. We left shelfless. But we got a lot of books.

A lot.

Seriously? We saved a shade over $450. I thought it was a misprint.

Jamison's stack. He did get a few that I would've gotten had I seen them first, namely the Raymond Carver and the Salinger biography. Some of his stack, though, I wouldn't have given a second thought. Namely the economics-related ones.

My stack. I tend to prefer fiction. There are two books missing from this thrilling picture. A book of Mary Oliver's poems and a Geraldine Brooks book that I can't remember the title of. (Geraldine Brooks also wrote March, which I finished a month or so ago. It was good so I have high hopes for the new book.)

Will somehow snuck this book into the stroller/shopping cart. He also got a book on the oil spill in the Gulf, which is all kinds of uplifting, as you might imagine, and a book that's about something called "bristlebots" that are little robots made out of toothbrush heads and some sort of robotic something or other that were not included with the book. So it looks like we'll be shelling out the $12 on Amazon to get the complete book and  supplies to assemble the bots (which will calls "whistlebots") since Will was more than a little disappointed.

This stack was mine from Trip #2 (Jamison abstained from buying anything this time, for one reason or another). (Is this boring, seeing stacks of books that I/we picked out and bought? I like seeing what other people read, personally, but that's just me.) My one surprise item here is Committed, by the same woman who wrote Eat, Pray, Love which was one of those books that I thought was just mediocre but that other people raved about. I do have some company in my assessment, though, as I can name at least four or five other people I know who didn't love it, either. I just thought I'd give her another chance. We'll see how it goes.

So now we're stocked up on things to read as cooler weather and shorter days approach. Amazon was also having a $3.99 sale on Kindle books a week or so ago and I bought a few there, too, so I should be good to go for quite some time reading-wise.

The pace of my reading and finishing books has been considerably faster here in the last few weeks, namely because I seem to have gotten better (or just luckier, more likely) at finding books that I actually enjoy and want to read in their entirety. I just finished State of Wonder and as much as I hesitate in recommending books to others, I think it's one that's worth reading. When I read the last page, my very first thought was, "Holy sh*t. Did all of that really just happen?" And then my next thought was, "Crap. I really liked the characters and could've stood to read a few (hundred) more pages." (Never fear, though, because Run was in the midst of the loot we got from RIP Borders/ We Are Vultures Trip the First, so I have me some more Ann Patchett to look forward to at my leisure.)

I've also stayed up way too late (by my standards, anyway) reading The Uncoupling, which I just finished this morning. It's also good and there are some really funny parts that I'm still chuckling to myself about. It's pretty easy to read, which is nice because my brain is mostly full by the time I can read in the evenings before bed.

But enough about Borders and reading.

I walked into the living room earlier this week after finishing up with cleaning the bathroom. Will had decided that we'd have a picnic in the living room floor and had taken it upon himself to find and dump out every available food that comes along with excessive crumbs and mess. (He's not wearing pants, either. I think he's  wearing underwear, but I'm not making any promises.)

Cleaning with these two around is no small feat. It's actually a comedy of errors, especially when we're all three in our tiny bathroom and Laura's trying to climb into the tub and Will's spraying every available surface, including the floor, with cleaning spray and then we're all slipping around everywhere and stepping on each other's toes and losing our patience until I think about how funny this would be if I were watching someone else do the exact same thing. Needless to say, it takes forever and a day to get this small house cleaned. But I do have some pretty cute help, I guess.

Happy Saturday!

Sans rhyme, sans reason

We're on day three of rain and clouds around here so we're all going a little bit crazy. In the meantime, we're on day one thousand (one million?) of construction on the sidewalk and road and pipes and who knows what else directly outside of our house, which results in a beautiful cacophony of scraping, banging and clanging that goes on all day long. Every day, rain or shine. Yesterday, they poured a geyser of cement into a huge gaping hole in the middle of a steady rain, which seemed kind of like a recipe for disaster to me. But what do I know, right?

Laura knows that she is officially over breastfeeding. It's totally 2010 in her opinion. I am not of the same opinion, just for the record.

Will knows that school starts on Monday and he's completely over the moon about it. His teachers visited last week and he showed them his room and also where the carpet used to be in our basement, so he's ready to start the year now that that's out of the way.

I  know that we have developed a Borders problem. It will be an easily-solved problem, though, since I believe they will only be open another week or so. The amount of books and assorted stuff that we've gotten from Borders since their going out of business sale is, like I said before, embarrassing. Not embarrassing enough to keep us away, though, since we're thinking of making one final family trip there to help them along in the seemingly endless process of liquidation.

Here are some other things I know, in no particular order:

1) The spacebar on this computer is killing me. Please excuse any spacing errors that I may not catch.

2) I am in the middle of week six of my putting our gym membership to good use plan. And just like every other time in my life that I resume exercise after a hiatus, I'm shocked to remember how much I actually enjoy it. What I definitely do not  enjoy, though, is the fact that my 32-year-old body is not quite as resilient as my 22-year-old body once was.

(A few other of my gym musings:  Why are the lights turned off for spinning? I have a burning need to know. Also, the whooping and hollering during Zumba. Is it necessary or just a motivational add-on by a really enthusiastic instructor? Finally, is it really possible that some people actually like exercising with others? And conversing the whole time? I don't care if my exercise partner is Oprah or the Dalai Lama, I don't want to hear another person's voice-or my own- during my time at the gym. I get about one hour every other day in which no one needs me, is climbing on me, wants me to read or get something to eat and/or drink, or asking incessant questions about everything under the sun. I'm certainly not going to spend it talking or listening to someone else talk. That probably makes me strange.)

3) Laura has had two music classes so far. She, like her brother before her, is the star of the show, dancing and clapping and generally showing off for everyone. This kind of worries me. How could it be possible that we could have not one, but two, extroverts? I'm telling myself that it's just because she's the oldest one in her class. (Not that there's anything inherently wrong with extroverts, just that her brother is The Ultimate Extrovert.)

4) I have rediscovered my love for (Post) Raisin Bran. Why I ever stopped eating it, I have no idea.

5) For the first time since Laura was born, I have to think about my undergarments, since I've worn a nursing tank every single day since March 28,2010. I never wore one regularly with Will but I also didn't have to do quite as much public feeding with him as I did with Laura.Oddly, I'm kind of nostalgic for them. (I have fed Laura in public in so many places that it's too bad they don't offer some kind of paid certification for it. Feeding Will in public required loads of blankets and props and as much privacy as I could find, in addition to lots of focus and concentration. Feeding Laura in public required merely a free hand and a hungry baby.)

6) I finished one good book last night and started another. More to come on that subject later.

7) If you're looking for a really good lasagna recipe, look no further. This one is delicious and easy. All four members of this family really, really like it and getting everyone's endorsement is really quite a feat. Plus it requires the use of Gruyere, Swiss, cheddar, mozzarella, cream and cottage cheeses. You couldn't possibly go awry with all that cheese, right?

P.S. Sorry for the lack of pictures. I've been a little lax in that area here lately.

We went on a bike ride

To celebrate Labor Day, we went on a bike ride. (13 whole miles! Don't be too impressed though, since it took us almost two hours to complete this feat.) Please excuse the picture quality. They're phone pictures.

Will loves bike rides.

His sister? Not so much. She hates the helmet. Burning hatred. She wasn't a huge fan of her new bike seat and spent a good deal of time either kicking me or pulling up the back of my shirt. The bike trailer with Will beside her wasn't a great option either. Maybe it's something she'll grow to like.

Happy Labor Day!

And then, just like that...

This was right after Laura was born. (Obviously. I don't have any handy little carts on wheels like the one in the picture, although one would definitely come in handy here at home.) Shortly after this, she snuggled up to me, latched on, and ate like she'd been doing it forever. She was so good at it that I think she must've had dreams about it in the womb, which in turn allowed her to visualize what breastfeeding would one day be like.

The day after we brought her home, her enthusiasm hadn't dampened. Mine had, a little bit. If you look at the picture closely, you'll notice that there's milk on her chin and she's in a milk coma. You'll also notice, if you look closely, that there's blood on the tab of her sleeper, right under the snap. I'll let you connect the dots. It wasn't pretty.

But things settled down and there was no more bleeding. There was thrush, and lots of it. We got through that and got into a nice little routine. She loved her nursing sessions, making them as long as possible, languishing in the snuggling and my (mostly) undivided attention.

We went to the river and I fed her on the screened-in porch. We watched it turn daylight out there each morning we were there.

A few months later, Will started school and Laura's 6 am wakeup time came in handy, as her leisurely meals and getting everyone ready and out the door took up a good bit of our mornings. I thought we'd never see the day that she slept past six.

She started solids and did fairly well with them but her "baby milk" was still her main form of nourishment (and comfort).

We went to the river (again) and had more cousin time.

We were up before the sun Thanksgiving morning in WV. I took this while she was nursing. She stopped for a second and looked at me like I was crazy to walk both of us out in the cold. I think it was worth it, though.

The entire video of Will opening his Christmas presents after Santa visited shows shots of Laura doing her favorite thing, breastfeeding. But she'd also added puffs to her repertoire by this point.

Winter marched right along. We got some snow. You could find us on our cozy little couch for our morning meal every morning at six (or sometimes before).

Somewhere in there, Miss Fancy Pants decided she'd like to start sitting up.

She and her brother started to become friends.

And this was still her most favorite time of day.

She had a big birthday but still wouldn't touch a sippy cup. I had reached my own personal goal:  no formula.

She started pulling up.

I watched sunrises at the beach while she nursed.

Miraculously, she decided that a sippy cup of milk wasn't so bad after all sometime shortly after we got home from the beach.

Very slowly, she started replacing some baby milk with milk milk. Then we were down to two nursing sessions: first thing in the morning and last thing at night. She dropped the morning feeding about a month ago but continued with the before bed session.

She's been stuffy for the last few days and was sporadically not wanting to nurse before bed. The last two nights, she's refused. The day the picture in the sink was taken was likely the last time she really nursed. Probably forever. But it was a good one. I even let her go to sleep, which I normally don't do. Maybe deep down I knew that it was coming.

I didn't set out to breastfeed for 17 months (the first 15 of which were a no-bottle-no-sippy-cup-only-straight-from-the-source-zone). I wanted to make it 12. I think it was worth it, though.

I did it to make up for the less-than-stellar experience I had with Will. I did it because I loved snuggling up with her. I did it because she was so easy to breastfeed. She loved it from the get-go. I did it because I loved it. I did it because she was (is!) my baby and it was the most natural, intuitive thing I've ever done. I did it because I want her, someday, as a woman, to see that breastfeeding is such a privilege, that this time with her is one of the sweetest times I have ever had.

I did it because, thirty or so years from now, when a newborn baby latches on to her, she'll think, "Oh. I get it now. So this is how Mom felt about me. But she couldn't possibly have loved me like this."

And she'll be wrong. I loved her more (bleeding nipples and all).

Hiatus

I didn't really intend to take a nearly-month long blogging hiatus but it just kind of happened. In my mind, at the beginning of the summer, I had visions of leisurely days full of baking, long naps for Laura, finger painting and other messy projects outside, doing yardwork together.

Yeah. Summer means having Will home and that generally means not much in the productive housework department gets both started and finished. Oh, well. He starts school in two weeks (he'll go every day this school year!), though, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to accomplish at least a few small things, despite the fact that Laura will be up and at 'em for the duration of Will's school time this year since she only takes a nap in the afternoon now.

We did find some time today to work in a small project. He picked out wooden cars that had to be assembled and then painted and stickered.

(Side note: "U Can't Touch This" is on the radio as I type. I mistakenly typed "You Can't Touch This" until a quick Googling mercilessly exposed my level of uncoolness. "I've toured around the world, from London to the Bay/ It's 'Hammer, go Hammer, MC Hammer, yo, Hammer'/ and the rest can go and play." Pretty deep.)

Some other assorted happenings around here:

Laura getting a bath in the sink. Please ignore the bad backsplash and shoddy caulking in the background. (I happen to be an expert caulk person. I'll let you guess who caulked this area.)

Will's affection is never gentle. You can see that my mom is at the ready in case Laura needs a swift rescue from her big brother's sweet embrace.

These two characters either really like each other or they really don't. There is no in between.

I got a new bike. We went on a bike ride last weekend and took Laura in the trailer. (Will was in WV with Grammie and Papaw for an extended, blessedly quiet weekend.) We live about two seconds from a really nice bike trail so it was high time we try it out. My new gym habit has sparked a few changes around here, I guess.

During this weekend, we went to Borders and bought a whole bunch of stuff.  It was a little bit embarrassing leaving with bags, boxes and a loaded-down stroller but so worth the 50-70% off everything. (We even unintentionally got a "free" Light Wedge out of the deal. We didn't realize we hadn't paid for it until we looked at our mile-long receipt after we got home and saw that we only paid for the smaller one. Yes, we got two. I told you. Totally embarrassing.)

OK, time to wrap this up. I'll be around here more in the coming days and weeks, hopefully. Summer's almost over, you know.