Milestones

Sophie is on the move...... backwards. So far her only scooting motion is in reverse, meaning once you put her on the floor, in about three minutes she's scooted herself backward into a corner, or under a table, or some other unfortunate resting spot. Oh well, progress is progress.

As I type, Noah is playing the "guess which one" game, where he picks some random toy and "hides" it in his fist. Generally the toy is two to three times the size of his tiny hand. Right now its a matchbox car. So he closes his fist as best he can around the matchbox car, then holds out both fists and says "which...one...izzit?" I, of course, always pick the hand with nothing in it first, so he throws open his empty hand with a delighted smile on his face. Then I'll pick the other hand and he gets even more excited and says "Yyeeesssss!". He's probably starting to think I'm a idiot. I never guess the right hand first.

Today, Travis and I made a frog out of red fleece, pillow stuffing, purple card stock, green pom poms and googly eyes. It was a craft from his National Geographic Kids magazine that we read today, and red fleece was the only kind I had available at the house, and we didn't feel like trekking to the store. So a red frog it is. His name is Tomato. Travis carries him everywhere.

Oh, and my other accomplishment of the day: I managed to delete all our May videos from the computer. Fabulous. I was trying to make a movie of all our spring activities, and accidentally deleted the whole darn batch. I spent about an hour in a state of emotional despair, then finally decided to forgive myself. I told Travis his dad was going to be so mad at me, and he replied "no, he always loves you". To his credit, I think Ben could tell how distraught I was by the whole ordeal (could have been the tearful voice mail message I left him), so he didn't berate me too much. Recovery attempts are still underway, to no avail as of yet. Travis has been consoling me by saying we can do everything over again, and take better videos this time around. What a kid.

La joie de la papier bulle (The Joy of Bubble Wrap)

Seventeen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, ah ah ah

Noah can count to eleven. I'm astounded by this as he's still a good 2 months away from turning two years old and he's been doing this for about a month already. I think one time he made it all the way to twelve, but today he was counting cards (not as in gambling, but as in playing with Elmo Go Fish cards and counting them), and he said "nine, ten, eleven, circle, SEVENTEEN!" I'm pretty sure that was a circle in there, or at least something that sounded remarkably like it. So beyond eleven starts to get a little random.

It's an astonishing difference between Travis and Noah in terms of language skills, because Travis's apraxia meant his ability to express himself was somewhat delayed, and the entire process of learning speech and language has been at least a minor struggle for him, up until recently - I'd say four or five months ago - when it stopped becoming a task for him. From the beginning, this stuff didn't come naturally to him and we had to practice and work on it to get him to the point he's out now. It's amazing to see how far he's come and I'd venture to say he's caught up with others in his age group now. But it's crazy to see the difference in Noah since this stuff does come naturally to him; thus there are so many things he can do easily that it took Travis a long time to learn how to do: speak full sentences, sing songs, stuff like that. Thankfully, Travis's apraxia was truly minor, and it just took a little bit of coaching to get him back on track.

However, now that the speech problem is less of an issue, our next step is a feeding therapist. I've hoped and prayed that Travis's picky eating stage is just a phase that he'd grow out of, but it's becoming apparent that this is not the case. And I truly believe that what he's going through is more than just being a picky eater. He's physically unable to eat certain kinds of foods. I don't know if it is an overactive gag reflex or his own mental psych-out, but whatever it is, we need help in overcoming it. I'm hopeful the feeding therapist can help us out, otherwise I see a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my future.

Oh, and so as not to leave anyone out, news on Sophie: she's close to scooting. Not quite crawling, but she will lift herself up on arms and try to pull herself forward. She's also really getting into the Exersaucer. Today, she was sitting in it, Noah was spinning her around in it and giggling hysterically and she was squealing with delight. It was very sweet.

Well, that's all I got.

Happy Mothers Day, indeed.

So, not to sound cheesy, but I am really the luckiest woman in the world.

I made reference to the mother's day present Ben got me, a gym membership, and with every passing minute I get more excited about it. I went this morning for my first trip, scheduled my fitness assessment and familiarized myself with the facility, worked out a little bit. I'd forgotten how much I really love to work out. I had an awesome time. The best thing is, the gym is in my office building, so I can easily go before or after work, or on lunch break even. My goal is to do before work a couple times a week, and lunch break a couple times a week. Ben offered to drop the kids off on the mornings I want to head in early, or pick them up if I wanted to stay late. I can't imagine I'll do much after work though -- I'm not very energized that time of day, plus that will mean more time away from the kids.

But, the point of this story is that I am so grateful to my wonderful husband for coming up with the idea, not backing down when I tried to protest, and making this happen. I've not always been the easiest person to live with these last few years, as I have been riding the hormonal roller coaster of pregnancy, nursing, general motherhood -- but he does an excellent job of putting up with me and I truly don't deserve him sometimes. (This doesn't make it any better when he leaves his dirty socks in the middle of the floor for the quadrillionth time, I'll still probably nag him about that.)

Just a Normal Day

Watchin' Grey's Anatomy right now, where the intro monologue is about how its the 'normal' days that turn out to be the big ones, the ones that really impact your life.

So I'm trying to think about how today, by all accounts a totally normal day, might end up being a big day.

 - Woke up this a.m.  Realized I'd had a fairly good nights sleep last night.  Hooray.  Took a Vicoprofen last night to help with the horrendous back pain, doc gave me the greenlight even though I'm still nursing. Not sure I believe him, but I also got the go-ahead from some reliable Google sources and my genius pharmacist sister, so I 

went ahead with it.  Wow.  What a difference sleep makes.

 - Dropped the kids off at ya-ya's house.  Nothing too noteworthy here. The boys insist on their regular morning granola bars and milk.

 - Off to work. Spent the morning playing catch up from my day off yesterday, not sure I'll ever get used to Wednesdays off.  Also had some nice conversations with co-workers where I realized it is really nice to work with people that you truly enjoy spending time with.  Let everyone know about Sophie's 4-month checkup yesterday, where she weighed in at a whopping 15 lbs 2 oz, and has moved up to 95th percentile for height. No one cares about this as much as I do, but they pretend well.

 - Picked the kids up.  As per usual, Travis is hiding behind the couch to 'surprise' me when I get there.  Noah is swinging Sophie in the swing and laughing hysterically.  Travis shows me the flowers that they planted today, and then we get loaded up and head home.  Again as per usual, Noah runs three times around the car before I'm finally able to grab him up and deposit him safely into his car seat.

 - We try to look for new and exciting things on the way home.  No success, except Travis sees a weiner dog hiding in a bush.

 - Back at home. I remind Ben about the pre-school art fair we have on the schedule for tonight.  I'm pretty sure he has no idea what I'm talking about, although he pretends to be right there on the same page.  He gets dinner ready for the whole brood, thank goodness.  I feed Sophie and worry about the whole nursing thing, not sure how much longer it will last.  I'm just starting to get emotional about it, but then its time to go.

 - Pre-school Art Fair.  We all load up and head to Travis's pre-school to see the art displays for all the pre-school classes from the year.  

Travis gets excited once we get there and starts showing off all his stuff.  Got a few good pictures, and some video.  Cute pic of Travis and his speech teacher.  Brought the stroller in for Noah, who insisted he wanted to ride in the stroller until six seconds after we get there, when he starts insisting he wants to walk --- meaning we have to push the empty stroller thru the pre-school.  I carry Sophie in my front carrier and get a lot of "cute baby" smiles and comments from other parents.  Overall a very happy trip.

 - Home again.  Play for a little while, and get Sophie to laugh a bit.  Now its time to get the kids to bed.  Ben reads books to the boys. Meanwhile I decide rather snarkily that its Ben's turn to take the kids to bed since I did it last night.  He does so, pretends to be a little begrudging about it but is mostly on board. Primarily his argument is about the dirty diaper, but he's nowhere close to winning that argument based on the pure ratio of dirty diapers I've changed vs him.

 

 - I decide to turn the monitor on to the boys' bedroom - not something I do every night since most nights they'll work it out on their own. Hear Travis complaining about not being able to sleep because Noah's being so loud.  Except I hear that for six straight minutes and meanwhile don't hear a peep out of Noah.  Finally I go upstairs and Travis informs me that his legs hurt, and "this is a big problem".  I tell him I'll rub his legs, he needs this every once a while, and then go straight back downstairs.  Done.

 

 - Ben confesses his Mother's Day present plan to me -- he can't convince himself to buy it without talking to me first.  Its a gym membership to the gym in my office building.  At first I resist and complain that there's no way I'll find time, but I'm pretty sure that's mostly just excuses.  He finally gets me to realize that and, as it turns out I'm pretty excited about it.

 - We watch some Survivor, gee I wish it had been Coach voted off tonight, that guy drives me crazy.   Ben tries to convince me to go the hot tub, for some reason I resist at first.  

 - End of the night.  Turns out I've been convinced, I'll be heading out to the hot tub in just a minute.  

So, there it is, my ordinary day.  Full of a bunch of tiny little big moments. Gotta love it.

I'm sleeping like a baby. Really.

Ben and I went to a derby day party this weekend.  And it just so happens that in two, separate, completely random drawings, we got Mind That Bird as our pick for the winner.  We thought, hey this is a good sign ... then we saw the 50:1 odds on Mind That Bird and we thought, well crap, there goes that.  And then the race happened.  And I watched this horse come out of nowhere and blow everyone away, and it wasn't until after the race ended that I even realized that was our horse. Our winnings amounted to $50 cash and a bottle of Kahlua.. nothing to write home about, but better than a kick in the head, that's for sure. 

Now, I'm not much of a horse racing aficionado, in fact that may have been the first actual race I've watched in my lifetime, but I feel like there has to be a lesson in there somewhere.  Like, don't give up even when the odds seem stacked against you.  Or, it pays to root for the underdog.  Or, there's no problem that fifty bucks and a bottle of liquor can't solve.  Okay, that's probably not it.

As for the rest of our lives, I'm mostly at the point where I'd give just about anything for a few consecutive nights of uninterrupted sleep.  I think its just been too many years, it just seems harder to deal with these days. Could be the three pregnancies in less than five years (technically four, I suppose, but that's a post for another day), it feels like I've not had true dominion of myself for way too long -- and lack of sleep only exacerbates that feeling.  

Last night at about 2 a.m. I was awoken by calls of, "hep me, mommm.. Hep me, mom.. HEP ME MOM!", which was of course, Noah beseeching me to come to his aid.  Which I did, and when I entered his bedroom I encountered a large fleece blanket sitting straight up in bed. Or rather, Noah covered entirely by a large fleece blanket, sitting straight up in bed.  Truthfully, his calls were remarkably calm considering he was essentially trapped inside a soft, fleecy cage. I quickly rescued him, he informed me he wanted to go for a walk, I was luckily able to remind him it was still bedtime, and he rolled over and promptly went back to sleep.  I, of course, am not so lucky when it comes to returning to slumberland, so I tossed and turned for an hour or so until Sophie woke up and begged to eat.  I tried to convince her to go downstairs and fix herself a sandwich, but she had none of it.

Also, I appear to be on the verge of throwing my back out, which makes for more rough sleeping, and generally being slower at just about anything I do.  And since I am nursing, there's nothing I can really take to help with that, so I just lie around and complain a lot.  In fact, I'm close to perfecting that.  It's an art, really.

Spongebob Football

Ahh, a little mom time. Noah and Sophie are both napping. Travis is playing an imaginary football game in our living room.  He stops about every 5 minutes or so to introduce me to a new game of some kind or another that he's just made up in his head.  For instance, just now he brought me over two plastic keys that kind of lock together at the notched end, and we are supposed to play a kind of tug-of-war with them.  He won most of the games, so he dramatically informs me that "you're supposed to use your muscles, mom".  Then he's back to his football game.

Sadly, T-ball was rained out today, but he did get to partake in the opening day parade and spend some time with his favorite mascot, Swoop.  (If you're not a South Bender, that is the Hawk mascot of the South Bend Silverhawks, our local minor league team.)  He's a little disappointed about the rain-out, but mostly I think he's picking up on my anticipation of his disappointment, rather than actually feeling that way.  

And now that he's not all dressed up in his baseball gear, he decided to dress for aforementioned imaginary football game.  Which is an interesting endeavor indeed.  Behold...

Nothing too extraordinary, but its the light blue socks and the spongebob shoes that really pull the whole outfit together.

Roommates

So my boys are officially sharing a room now.  It seems like such a big milestone, moreso than I realized until we actually took that step.  I wonder if, years from now, I'll remember this bittersweet feeling surrounding this otherwise non-newsworthy event.  I love to see the two of them going through this stage: excited about sharing a room, eager to sleep in their 'new' beds, chatting happily with each other before falling asleep.  At the same time, I am somewhat nostalgic to note that my little Noah has outgrown his baby bed, and that this step is just another of many as the two of them grow older.

Speaking of growing older, Travis has his first T-ball game tomorrow.  Its funny, things like that make him seem so big and so little at the same time.  When I see him on the field with the 5 and 6 year olds, he looks so small.  And when I pick him up from pre-school and see him with all the elementary school kids, he looks like such a tiny little boy.  But he also just seems so much more grown-up these days.  I feel so priveleged to be able to watch him grow up and turn into such an amazing little kid.  And now Noah is at the age where he's becoming more of a little boy and less of a toddler every day, its incredible to see his personality really start to blossom.  

As for Sophie, she still pretty much just sits around most of the day.  And drools.  But she's very cute.

Our Parallel Family

So I was on the computer today, and decided to log in to the blog and see how the updates went. I just added photos / slideshow, etc.  and wanted to see how it looked.

Anyway, I opened up the "other" laptop -- not the one I had been using. And since I'd never logged onto this site on that computer, it didn't 'remember' the name of the website like this laptop does.  And, instead of typing in the ".blogspot" portion, I accidentally just typed in www.davidsonfive.com.  And stumbled across what can only be described as an eerily similar family to our own.  For a brief second, I actually almost thought that someone else had set up a family website for us, without our knowledge.

But no -- its another Davidson family of five.  Husband, wife, two boys and a girl. Similar in ages but I think their kids are each about a year older than ours, give or take.  Blonde, fair-skinned kids that could be our kids' cousins -- siblings even if I didn't know better. The husband even works in the computer industry, for pete's sake.  We looked at some of their photos, and Ben would make a comment like, "there's a picture of their Noah standing behind their Travis, did you see that one?"  

We considered telling Ben's parents it was our website, and see how long it took them to realize those weren't our kids.  I'm guessing at least 20 minutes. ('hmmm...who's that strange woman holding Noah?').  Okay, just kidding.  10 minutes, tops.

Third time's a charm

I have to admit, I love being a third-time mom.

I never would have thought it, but each time around has been an entirely different experience.  It's not like just going through the same old thing over again.  I guess I thought that each subsequent edition of motherhood would be essentially a repeat of the first time, just with a little more experience.  But truthfully, its like a whole different ball game.  Or, maybe more like a different inning in the same ball game.  The point is, anything can happen.  What happened earlier doesn't mean a thing.  But, you've learned a little bit, and you're not quite so intimidated.

Kid #1 was an amazing experience.  Everything was new, everything exciting. Learning everything - from what made my kid tick, what stimulated him, how to discipline him, how to love him - all of it was exciting, fulfilling, and truly amazing.  

What struck me about Kid #2 (affectionately referred to as Noah) was how nothing was the same. It wasn't just about expounding upon what I'd learned the first time.  There were a few lessons that translated, but truthfully, I couldn't just rely on what worked the first time around. I had to pay special attention to who this kid was. That may seem like common sense, especially if you haven't gone through it yourself -- I certainly thought so during the "pre" second child phase.  Obviously I knew this kid would be his own person.  But the extent to which it became an entirely different parenting experience was a surprise to me.

So, now comes Kid #3.  And you might think that this time, since I've already had one repeat experience, that I'd be prepared for this one.  But its even more different this time.  I learned my lesson from the first time around.  I knew that parenting this one would be its own unique experience. This time, its not that unique approach that threw me.  It was the ease with which I figured out how this new one would fit into our lifestyle.  And how "un"stressful it was to get her assimilated.  How she became an automatic necessity in our lives.  It seems a little weird as I write it now, but truthfully, it was a big shock to me. 

I once read, I think in one of my Parents magazines, that when you ask any particular family the question as to when is the 'right' timing to have children, almost ANY family will tell you that the way they did is the best way.  I love that.  And you know what?  The way we did it is the best way.

Big Fat Intro

So.

I have decided to create a Davidson family blog to keep record of all the fabulous things our family is doing. 

And here it is.

Now, our family just needs to start doing some fabulous things.  Go ahead, family. 

Start.