Tiny Humans

,

Catching Up on Videos!

,

I don’t even know who I am anymore - posting two videos in as many weeks? It makes me look like a functioning adult without a million things on her to-do list. Of course that’s not true, just yesterday I managed to bake a breakfast casserole without adding the eggs. My brain is all sorts of mush still, but photo stuff just has a way of creeping to the top of my to do list this time of year.

So while our house may be dirty, E’s bed is half made, and we’re choosing between leftovers or trying my non egg casserole for lunch, you at least benefit from another video.

,

Toddler Speak

,

Our littlest toddler talks, quite a bit actually. You might not know this, because I haven’t posted recent videos, but he often speaks in full sentences now. He’s long had a large vocabulary of words, but now he’s starting to put them together more and more.

A recent favorite is to ask for us to put music on, and then ask the name of ever song that comes on. “What this song? What this song?” Over and over. Even if you just told him. And then he’ll ask the other adult in the room to confirm he gets the same answer. If you’re lucky, he’ll start dancing to it. He’s been unanimously named the best dancer of the house. When he feels a song, boy can he move!

, ,

What Month Is It?

, ,

Oh hello there. Seems that living in a pandemic is not always easy and is certainly exhausting. Whether it’s the extra patenting, the constant fear and anxiety or something else crazy, like zoom fatigue, I’m pretty much always tired these days. By the time the kids are in bed, I can barely keep my eyes open. I barely have enough brain power to watch an actual tv show, let alone do anything fun like document our life here. I have loads of pictures that need to be sorted through, too. Ugh.

,

Pumpkin Month

,

Every single day, E wakes up and asks if we can go trick or treating.

I kind of thought he’d forget about trick or treating after a year, but three year olds have amazing memories. Besides the fact it’s the first week of October and trick or treating is not really an option, I’m not sure there will be trick or treating this year, period. We’ve been debating doing an egg hunt in the yard, or trick or treating just to the neighbor’s house, but either way, we’ll need some distractions for the next few weeks.

,

A Senior Toddler Update

,

I guess I should technically be calling him a preschooler now, but that just seems too old! I’m holding on to every bit of babyness I can at this point, even as he repeatedly tells me that he’s a big kid now. Which he mostly is, but he does still sleep in a crib…

Speaking of which, he doesn’t want to go to bed at night or go down for naps lately, so his crib is filled with books for him to read. He always falls asleep (and usually pretty quick), but I’m not minding raising a kid who reads himself to sleep every night. The other day he had his little trailblazers book and he told me he read the whole thing, but he couldn’t remember the word “trailblazer” so he used “trail mix” instead.

,

Fall Weekend

,

Our new cat is howling and pacing and I’m assuming there are kittens coming, but to distract myself from that let’s recap our weekend! I have a ton of posts in draft trying to explain how we’re feeling lately and what life is like, but I’m having a hard time putting them together. So instead let’s do something easy.

Last weekend we decided to join every other person in New England and go apple picking. Seriously, on my morning team meeting Monday, everyone was eating apple something. My boss had just finished an apple muffin and was talking about dropping an apple pie off at his son’s house, a coworker was debating apple pancakes for breakfast, and I was telling them all about the apple coffee cake and apple chips we’d just made.

,

A Baby Toddler Update

,

These days all blur together and disappear so quickly that I’m worried I’m going to forget everything about them. Besides the fact that my brain doesn’t seem to be working right now, I feel like I haven’t written anything down in a while. So bear with me as I try to put together some semblance of an update on not so baby G.

Currently G is napping, but I just heard “leh-low!” over the baby monitor. I can’t tell if he’s dreaming about his favorite color, or he just woke up and decided to start naming things he loves.

,

Still Summer

,

Sometimes I forget it’s summer. I simultaneously think it’s still March and can’t believe it’s not September yet. Time is an odd thing now.

Of course it doesn’t always feel like summer, either. I’m certainly not doing or experiencing the things that usually mark summer for me. Even silly ones - commuting in the heat in long pants and arriving in the office all sweaty is a thing of the past. No longer am I getting into a hot car and burning my hands on the steering wheel and finding my water too hot to drink. I’m barely getting into the car at all.

,

The Daycare Debate

,

We’ve definitely encountered our fair share of parenting problems that we didn’t expect, and didn’t have answers for. Currently we’re ignoring two splinters in E’s palm, mostly because we don’t know what to do about them. They aren’t really bothering him, and despite trying, we can’t get them out. He definitely doesn’t want us to try again. We’ve tried a few ideas we’ve found online, but none of them worked. So right now we’re ignoring it. Hoping they’ll either come out on our own, or become an obvious enough problem we’ll need to get professional help.

,

Toddler Speak

,

I’m not sure why, but G seems so much older at this age than his brother did. Sure he’s bigger, but I also think his vocabulary is huge. He’s definitely speaking way more than E ever was at this age, and I think more than most kids his age. However, he’s still very much speaking as a toddler. In other words, every time he opens his mouth, it’s the best thing ever.

Every morning, he comes into my “offie” to say good morning and play with whatever he can get his hands on. He’ll often try to convince me to let him play with whatevers on my desk, by holding out his hands and asking me if he can hold it. “Hone? Hone?” If he’s rewarded with something, he’ll clutch it in his arms and ask “myes?” to confirm that it is his.

, ,

A Beach Trip

, ,

We’re trying.

I’ve never really been a water or beach person, but occasionally I find it nice. A lounge chair and a book here, standing in the water up to my waist there. I don’t love it like I see other people love it, but I can enjoy it from time to time. Tom is, of course, the swimmer. Better than all of us, he’s so good at it, you can’t help but expect some of it to rub off on our children.

, ,

Road Trip

, ,

We recently took a long trip in our car (more on that later) and it was the longest that G has ever been in the car in his entire life. I was worried it might not go well, of course. When you’re that young it’s easy to not be hyperbolic when you say something is the worst thing you’ve ever experienced. It literally could be. And it would be easy to see how being trapped in a car for a long period of time, when it had never happened before, being one of those times.

,

Day 119

,

At some point do I just stop counting? Is life so changed that it will never return to the “before" so there’s no point in counting how many days it’s been?

Or is it pointless because some things might get back to something that looks a little bit like normal, while others never will? Our daycare is actually open right now, so does that negate my count, since I started counting days since daycare closed? Or does the fact that we haven’t sent them back to daycare yet mean I keep counting?

,

Let's Watch Some Videos

,

I had some time recently and made some summary videos of our last few months. I don’t do this often enough - especially because it doesn’t take that long, and I’m always excited to have the memory. I definitely have a picture problem, but at least I have a process of deleting ones that aren’t great and I try to organize the ones I keep. Videos, however, just sit in a folder. They take up so much space, and there are a lot that should probably be deleted, but it would be a full time job managing all of these. And there’s only more and more every day I do nothing.

,

Trying to be Normal

,

It’s not easy in this new world. Everything stresses me out or makes me anxious. I’m constantly on edge and judging everyone I can see. I judge them for not wearing a mask, or not wearing it correctly, for getting too close to me or someone else, for touching something - it all stresses me out.

But at the same time, it’s hard to hide at home forever. It’s summer, which means it’s easy to get outside, and we all know that’s safer than being inside. And since I believe we’re going to be fighting this virus for a while, we might as well take advantage of being outside while we can. Otherwise I’m going to regret it when winter hits.

, ,

Goodbye Sun

, ,

I realize that we’ve been in a drought, so maybe I shouldn’t talk about how much I’ve loved the weather lately, but I’ve really loved the weather lately. June was full of sunshine pretty much every single day, and it was amazing.

While we haven’t made much progress on a lot of things on our interior to do list, we’ve managed to make some real improvements to the outside of our house this year. We’ve completed a lot of maintenance stuff that needed to happen - cleaning the gutters, getting the septic pumped, even pressure washing the fence and front porch. But more than that, we’re completing a lot of big projects we’ve been dreaming about for a while. Our shed, while not here yet, has been purchased and the land is prepped, so we’re counting the days. We’ve also finally got our side patio completed, which means we have our gazebo up(!), and it gives us some shade and rain protection on that side of the house. I am fully in love.

,

18 Months

,

Somehow we’re halfway through 1. It’s unimaginable, because just a few days ago was your first birthday, and then we all went into quarantine and suddenly it’s today and the calendar says six months have gone by. At the same time when I think about the fact that you weren’t walking when daycare closed and we all started this home quarantine, that seems forever ago. You running around is the best thing ever. It’s a half gallop, half fall as you move slightly sideways with your belly out and arms pumping.

As we hit one and a half, you’ve picked up a few new tricks, grew some more teeth, and have a slightly better vocabulary. It’s hard to count all your words, because you have a lot that you’ll use randomly, but not often enough for me to remember unless I happen to write them down at the time. There’s a lot of context that comes with your words too. If you’re saying “bee” and looking out the window, you literally want to see a bee. But if you’re walking around saying the same thing with your arms up in the air, you’re looking for some specific object, as in “Where could it be?”