We have not had Bad Mommy Monday in a while. I’m guessing because Jasmine and I have both been really excellent mommies for the past weeks and we didn’t want to make anyone feel bad. ; )

But with Halloween having just passed–Halloween, the holiday devoted entirely to eating so much candy you can hardly stand up to answer the door for laggin Trick-or-Treaters–I know that I have some things to confess.

1. It wasn’t me who woke the baby from a nap in order to get her ready early enough to get all the good candy from the neighbors.

2. It wasn’t me who quietly watched as the neighbors put candy in her bowl, pre-emptively assigning which candy I would give to Norah and which I would keep for myself.

3. It wasn’t me who gave out all the Super Bubble and kept the Airheads.

4. It wasn’t me who fed Norah Halloween cookies for breakfast before church and then acted like I had no idea why she was acting like a lunatic during the service.

Anyone else have Halloween confessions?

–Sadie

I am back! And alive! Thanks for all the well wishes and emails.

Leave it to me to make my first blog post after a long sabbatical to be about  guns, masturbation, and nose bogeys. Alas, I am me…

Since Sadie admitted that Norah has pica (I kid) I decided that I should talk about Isaiah’s amazing new (and some old) habits. Vanessa, a good friend of mine, always talks about boys and the things that they instinctively pick up. When Isaiah, who is two years old, started picking up sticks (to destroy monkeys and enemies) and using them as pretend guns, I would gasp, “WHO taught him to be violent! WHO taught him about guns. We don’t let him watch war movies…why is he army crawling!!! ” I am anti-gun. I HATE them… as a result of a traumatic childhood experience. When Isaiah started this I attempted to redirect it. “Isaiah lets hug, not shoot.” My best attempts were thwarted. He just kept pretending to shoot things. Vanessa explained, (loosely translated)” Something about them switches on and they have to hunt and protect and all that jazz.” So now, my precious two year old son runs around the house pointing curling irons screaming, “BLAM BLAM DIE MONKEY!!!” Sometimes I play dead. Other times I snarl, “DO NOT point guns at people- even pretend curling iron guns…GAWWW!” It is like a boyhood involuntary spasm! Something DID just “click” and he decided I was a gatherer and he was a hunter.

Isaiah also went through a stage where he dominated all of his stuffed animals. When I say “dominated” I mean, “Isaiah humped his stuffed animals and the rugs like there was no tomorrow.” No one taught him. Through exploration he just decided, “OH! Mommy has company, I should show them what my body does when I hump this stuffed lamb!” “Ohhhh! Is that high pile carpet? *OFF GOES THE DIAPER*. Let me show you what to do with this…”  Thankfully we have a great set of friends who just laughed off Isaiah’s “habit.”

One other boyhood involuntary spasm that has amazed me has been the action his nose has been getting. How do kids learn to eat their boogers (is that how you spell it?)? I remember the first time Isaiah did the deed. I looked in the rear-view mirror and his knuckle had disappeared into his brain. He gingerly pulled his finger out only to plunge it into his mouth. He clapped and giggled as I tried not to veer off the road from the intense gagging I was doing. “Who taught you that Isaiah?” How did he learn to eat his nose crusty? SICK!! SICK! SIIIIIIICK! Again… something just clicked and he decided he knew how to do this. Since he knew how, he obviously should. Thankfully Dr. Oz  *YES! I learn how to parent from my favorite TV personalities *  says that picking your nose is fine. The only problem is that it can damage the mucus membranes. I think he will survive. Sadly, me and my weak gag reflex might not.

I love these things about kids.  I love that just like a heart beats involuntarily, there are things that little boys and girls do without prompting. It makes me excited to imagine if we have a girl, (the doctor says ultrasound shows 70% girl) what she will do. 

♥ Jasmine

Norah loves stickers.

Her love for stickers may only be surpassed by her love for her blankies. Rusty and I definitely come in third, after the blankies and the stickers, and if she is feeling particularly motherly…we come in fourth, after her babies.

Its cool. I mean, its not like I carried her for nine months, or gave birth to her, or sustained her life for 8 solid months with NOTHING BUT MY BOOBS! (and eventually some rice cereal and avocados,etc). So no, I don’t mind being fourth in the love line, behind fabric and sticky bits of paper and various stuffed animals. Psshhh.

Anyway, she loves stickers. Every morning, after she has had sufficient time to play in her bed after waking up and I have had sufficient time to pretend that its not actually time to leave the nice warm covers, I go into Norah’s room and she greets me with a grin and crazy hair. Then we go into the kitchen to get a drink and just after asking for a drink she starts asking for a sticker. Then she spends the next thirty minutes taking them off her hands and then asking for help putting them back on her hands. Its a super fun game, let me tell you.

But recently she discovered another fun thing to do with stickers. Eat them! Mmm…delicious gluey paper.

Yesterday I found madarin oranges in her diaper and that was cool. I’m guessing tomorrow I’ll find the remnants of about 7 heart stickers.

Before we left for vacation I got this wild idea to put Norah on the potty and see what happened. I fully expected nothing to happen besides her looking cute sitting on the potty like a big girl. I was not disappointed for lo, she did indeed look cute. We were getting ready to take a shower so she was naked, on the potty, giggling and kicking her feet and reaching for the toilet paper. Norah, like most other babies, comes into the bathroom with me every time I go so she has a general idea of what toilet paper is for. By that I mean, she knows how to unroll it and put it on top of my legs. So while she was sitting on the potty she kept reaching for the toilet paper and I kept saying “Norah, you can only have toilet paper if you actually do something.” Relentlessly, she kept reaching. The shower was running so I was about to pick her up when I saw it…The Poop Face. I held my breath, waited a minute, and sure enough SHE POOPED IN THE POTTY!

I ran out to the living room and yelled at Rusty SHE POOPED! SHE POOPED! and then ran back into the bathroom in case Norah decided to play with it or something. I cleaned her up and we showered and then ten minutes later she pooped in her diaper again. Ok, so the potty pooping was probably just a fluke, a case of blind good-timing on my part. But still, the next day I thought I’d try again.

I sat her on the potty and stupidly, this time I gave her some toilet paper before she did anything to earn it. She apparently has a better idea of what it’s for than I earlier thought because before I could stop her she reached down between her legs and starting dipping the toilet paper in the toilet water. So, she has a better idea of what its for, but she’s still not totally clear. And guys, I do not clean my toilets near often enough so basically Norah was playing in dirty bacteria poop water.

I swooped her up off the potty and ran to the sink to wash her hands as fast as I could because I just knew she was going to stick those poop water hands in her eye or her mouth and we’d end up with some kind of terrible disease that only comes from poop ingestion and then my pediatrician would know that I let my baby play with poop and don’t wash her hands, which I DON’T! So I sat her on the sink to clean the germs (on Rusty’s side of the sink, hehehe) and washed her hands until her skin was pink and disease bacteria free and the while she’s going “Gahh! Gahh! Gahh….” looking longingly toward the toilet and her precious pieces of toilet paper. The little sicko.

I picked up my clean handed baby to put a diaper back on her because clearly we are not ready for potty training and then I realized, too late, she’d already peed all over the counter. A bathroom fiasco in line with the time she flung a ball of orange Dorito poop dangerously close to her own head while I changed her diaper at school.

So yeah, maybe we are not ready to potty train. Norah’s interest in the potty seems to extend no further than eating graham crackers while sitting on the pot, repeating “cracker!” like a little naked parrot.

–Sadie

Let me just have a moment to shake the dust off my authorship of this blog. I have been terribly (TERRIBLY) absent and for that, I do apologize. If not to all the readers, then to Jasmine who has a full-time job and is pregnant and has a family and still manages to keep things updated and fresh and funny around these parts. She is a wonderful friend, and a wonderful blogger.

Anyway. There are reasons for my absence.

First, for the past few months I have been stuck in this very boring place of uncreativity. My other blog has suffered even more. And my poor grandma is stuck refreshing a page that never changes, just hoping for a new picture of The Norah. But I’m guessing that I’ll have more to say now that I am free to let the cat out of the bag.

This proverbial cat in the proverbial bag has become increasingly hard to hide, not only from the real world but from the blog world as well and I am sure glad that I can spill.

People…I’m pregnant too. (squee!)

We found out in late August, and for the first two weeks I was all happy and bubbly, eating bratwurst and sauerkraut like there was no tomorrow, boasting about how “Oh I don’t feel sick at all. I don’t feel pregnant in the least. Look at my glowy glowy skin! It must be a result of my super-feminine powers! I’m going to go buy my ovaries a present!” And then it was my birthday and I was suddenly shot down this awful dark tunnel filled with queasiness, scary spotting, and evil trolls who smell like beef broth.

It was somewhere between the constant checking for increased spotting, mind numbing nausea, frequent and un-lady-like burping, and crippling heartburn that had to remind myself why in the Freaking World I wanted to get pregnant again. What was I thinking? Clearly I forgot all this misery somewhere in the piles of precious pink baby clothes and squishy bald baby Norahs.

And then, because I was having such a fun time laying in bed and moaning while my precious and helpful husband took care of Norah for me, we decided we would take a trip to the Alabama Coast. Totally reasonable. So we went, and I will not share all of the trip now because it is another story for another time (however, I did spend the night in a haunted house), but we actually had a great time. Greater than I expected.

As it turns out, the beach is a wonderful cure for all my pregnancy discomfort. If only I had known that sooner. But as I told Jasmine, I’m planning on installing a wave pool and sand bar in my guest bathroom so all is well. The beach was grand and filled me with happy beachy thoughts, but the other times, like when Rusty cooked hotdogs on the stove and  I about vomited off the balcony or when I gagged at the mere thought of a balogna sandwich…those times were not fun. In fact, they were pretty miserable times.

However, in the midst of all that urpy barfy goodness, I take solace in these things:

Rusty is very excited about this baby. That makes my heart happy.
Norah will have a playmate all the days of her life.
Gahhh! I get to paint another room in my house!
OMG. I love Taco Bueno.
I also love elastic waistbands.
I get to share not only this time of pregnancy with Jasmine, but also the absolutely incredible power of labor and newborns and breastfeeding in a way that we did not get to experience with Isaiah and Norah. (I don’t know if that sentence makes sense…but y’all be sure to think happy thoughts for our husbands.)

Today was my first official OB appointment and depending on whether you ask my fetus or the sac I am either 8 weeks exactly, or 8 weeks and three days. We saw a heartbeat, flickering on the screen and even though the nausea is still lurking around and the belches keep on coming, that little heartbeat was such an amazing sight.

Oh, and you can all expect to eventually see a masthead with mine and Jasmine’s big ol’ bellies hanging out in their glory.

1. It wasn’t me who put Norah to bed early so I wouldn’t have to share my burrito with her.

2. It wasn’t me who put Norah to bed early so I could play Mario Party 8 either.

3. It wasn’t me who let Norah dump and entire box of goldfish crackers into the back of my mom’s car.

4. It was definately not me who looked at Norah and laughed when she got ahold of a handful of salsa, ate it, turned bright red, and then proceeded to freak out and fling everything from our table at Taco Bueno onto the floor.

5. Hahahahaha! It was pretty funny though.

–Sadie

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It wasn’t me who gave her son a small cup of coffee this morning, Carmel Macchiato to be exact.

It wasn’t me who was too tired to dress or diaper him all last week, so he played naked all day.

It wasn’t me who told him that  Jolly Rancher candy was medicine, and only for mommy.

(Isaiah talking to our dog, Noelle)

Isaiah: “Hey Nell! Mommy has baby penis.”

Jasmine: “No son, Mommy has a baby in her belly, in my uterus…girls don’t have penis. Well most girls.”

Isaiah: “Zayah penis!”

Jasmine: “Yes! YOU have a penis because you are a boy, women have a vulva and a vagina. The baby is growing in my uterus… can you say vulva?”

Isaiah: (weakly attempts  to pronounce vulva…sounding a lot like “Bulba”.

(Isaiah looks at Noelle and slaps her on the head) Isaiah: “BAD! Bulba!!!”

Isaiah got up this morning acting like his normal bossy self. He ran to fridge and handed me an egg. This not so subtle gesture represented that he wanted breakfast, and this morning he wanted eggs. I sat Isaiah on the counter and gave him a wooden spoon. I allowed him to help stir the eggs as they cooked. It made me giggle when he reached over to the pinch bowl and sprinkled a little salt over the eggs. We served the eggs on Isaiah’s plate and he began to eat.

At this juncture I  need to mention that Isaiah didn’t sleep last night. Our A/C broke and Isaiah, like his mother, couldn’t sleep in an 89 degree house (we are wimps…I know!). Isaiah played in the dark all night he finally collapsed into sleep around 4 this morning….then he woke up, promptly, at 8.

Isaiah ate his eggs. Isaiah looked at his glass of milk. Isaiah screamed like someone was burning him and hurled said glass of milk across the room. The cup had no lid. Isaiah slammed himself down on the floor kicking and screaming and crying. He rubbed his eyes and rolled around.

I took that as a cue that maybe, just maybe, my son was tired and needed to nap. Alas! He is NOW in his room screaming and crying and throwing things and rolling around…. does someone want to translate what THE HELL is wrong with my child?! Too tired to eat, apparently, and too tired to sleep?

♥  Jasmine   TIRED Mommy

Sorry ladies! My life got busy and I totally forgot Bad Mommy Monday! So… we should do it today!

I will start:

1. It wasn’t me who let my son watch 5 hours of TV…because it makes the best babysitter.

2. It wasn’t me who decided that she was going to stop potty training because, DAMN IT! I hate poop and pee.

3. It wasn’t me who decided that telling her son that his toys had died when he wouldn’t stop playing with the annoying things was A GREAT IDEA!

4. It wasn’t me who taught her son to lay a blanket over said “dead” toys to keep him from playing with them, and when he went to touch them— said, “Ewww! Nasty Dead Thing!”

5. It wasn’t me who wondered if I’d like Addison (in utero) better because this pregnancy has been so NICE.