Things We've Been Doing
A lot of little things happen around here, and it’s hard to keep up. And since my brain is so fragmented anyway, here’s a brain dump of a post. Random things we’ve done or things that are floating around in my head. Enjoy!
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Baby G has this thing he does, where every time we go to lie him down after we’ve been holding him, he gets this terrified look on his face and his arms flail up like he’s afraid we’re going to drop him. He totally does not trust us. Every single time. He is not someone who can hide his expression, and his expression says “Holy cow I’m falling and they’re not going to catch me!”
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E has started to put together sentences, and it’s super fun. Recent ones include “I see a ball!” and “The turkey went away!” Except when he says it, it sounds more like “Dah-dee wah huh-way!“ It takes a large part of my day to interpret all of his words and thoughts. I’m not always right, and if anyone else is around we get a lot of second guessing. Yes, I know that turkey sounds like daddy, but I guarantee you that he’s saying turkey.
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We’ve learned the hard way that breath holding spells can be genetic. Yup, little G likes to hold his breath and turn purple when he’s upset. So. Much. Fun. (Or not). Luckily he hasn’t passed out yet, and luckily E wasn’t this early when his started, otherwise we definitely would have ended up frantic in an ER. Instead you might just see Tom jump out of his car in the Starbucks drive through so he can go frantically blow in G’s face until he starts breathing again.
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I don’t know why, but E is really obsessed with school buses lately. He found the one book we have (that I don’t even remember reading to him in the past year) that has a school bus on exactly one page. He requests the book, specifically that page, over and over. We also have a few school buses that pass our house in the morning. The other day I managed to catch two of them quick enough for E to watch them go by. Unfortunately this leads to him looking out the window at all hours, looking for his bus. And leads Tom and I to be on super watch in the mornings to try and catch them for him.
It reminds me of when I was in elementary school and my mom used to watch out the window in her bedroom for when my bus was coming. She’d see it turn the corner down the road and call out to me, and then I’d run out the house and down the driveway, just making it to the bottom in time to get picked up.
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E has moved on from “uh oh” as his favorite phrase, to “Oh no!” It’s used similarly, but is a bit more dramatic and involves a shocked expression with his hands on his cheeks. Which is especially funny when the thing he’s shocked about is something he did purposefully. (World’s biggest ham here…). I’ve also managed to teach him to say “Alright” like Matthew McConaughey, which causes me to break out giggling every. single. time.
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As for me and Tom? I swear the best thing you can do for a marriage is paternity leave. I’m not talking that 2 week nonsense in the beginning - that’s just basic survival. I’m talking weeks long, solo leave while the other parent is back at work. Because you can never understand the weirdness of sitting at home and realizing that you don’t go to work anymore, and all you do is keep the baby alive, unless you’ve done it. You’ll never understand the unpredictability of your days or hours, or how you can have the most hectic 20 minutes that feel like hours, or the most calm hours that feels like minutes, all in the same day, unless you’ve experienced it. The same goes for how weird it is to be at work like everything is normal, but you have a new person living in your house and you’re not there to watch them. Sure you can talk and explain all you want, but the best way to feel empathy for someone is to experience what they do. It’s only been two weeks, but I already feel like Tom and I are speaking the same language again.