The haps...

On Eleanor's birthday, I made cupcakes and we sang to her. ( Her birthday party is now rescheduled for this Sunday evening.  Let's hope, after 2 reschedules, this actually works out.)  Then at 1:00 I went to work and Justin stayed with the kids (kids and Justin both had off for Thanksgiving) and they went to the park (after naps) and met up with the cru.  I got off early and joined them.  As everyone was leaving, I sat on a park bench and fed Eleanor with my friend Sarah, as she was feeding her baby Jane.  I looked at the park and thought about Henry's second birthday party being there, and was glad to still be surrounded by the same people.

About 1:00 AM Eleanor woke up with a fever.  I can't remember if that was the one that was in the 104's.  It's all cloudy now because she ended up having 4 nights in a row of high fever.  She ate almost nothing but frozen blueberries the last several days.  She lost a pound.  She started nursing like a demon; this after almost weaning herself the week before.  Her sleep was very erratic.  She was miserable.  On Thanksgiving, my MIL, Justin and I each took turns holding her while we ate our delicious meal (Thank you Paula!).

Henry spent his first night ever away from us.  He went with grandma back to her hotel room and I believe they stayed up pretty late watching cartoons, playing games, reading books and eating snacks.  The next morning, grandma cut his hair and they went for the continental breakfast, which I'm sure meant Henry ate nothing but bread.

Saturday morning, I took Eleanor to the doctor, while Justin took Henry downtown to the Thanksgiving parade.  We were there two hours and were told to come back again the next morning to try to get another pee sample.  Justin took her and she pee'd and then fell asleep in his arms --which made the hour and 30 min they were there go much faster. The doctor just called and she did not have strep or a UTI.  She must have just had a very nasty virus.

Eleanor is now fever free.  Seems mostly back to her old self.

Happy First Birthday Eleanor!!!

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Thanks for the new wheels, Aunt and Uncle Sligb

Must be somebody's birthday

Cue the flies and stench...

I believe our rat problem is resolved.  Now we have a fly and vomit inducing stench problem, due to the dead rat population underneath our house (or in our walls?).  We used poison and traps and the poison is what did him/them in (I still have not actually seen a rat).  But last night we started noticing very large vulture flies.  The really gigantic slow kind that just sits there looking stupid when you approach with a shoe.  Very easy to kill but gross nonetheless.   I don't like killing anything that has a visible face.

Yesterday we had the gigantic hole in our drywall fixed (the hole the plumber had to create to get to the pipes). After fixing the wall and making a colossal mess, he said, "Mam, I'm not going to lie.  I'm not really prepared for this job.  They pulled me off another job to come to your house and I don't have anything to clean this up.  Can I borrow your broom?"  So after he swept up the large chunks of crumbly sheetrock, he asked me for a mop and I just told him not to worry about it because I needed to go to work.

I got home last night and looked at what needed to be done,  saw there were dollops of hard, dried cement-like goop all over the NEWLY tiled bathroom floor, the baseboards were not sealed to the wall, and goopy hard cementy stuff all over the hardwood floor outside the bathroom, and I decided to wait till this morning to deal with it.  I wheeled E's high chair over to the hallway in front of the bathroom, gave her her breakfast to smash all over her face and toss on the floor, put the TV on for Henry, and got to work with a butter knife and lots of soap and water and rags and it took me almost 40 min to clean up.  I still could not get it all out.  Grrr.  But whatever.  It's my fault for going easy on that guy and not fully checking his work.

Ever since the gas leak and all that's lead to (sickness) and the time change, both of our kids have been waking up at night.  The whole last week E has been waking twice a night.  I'm ready for the dark cloud to move on now.

Yesterday at work, I could tell this teenage client of mine was holding back on something.  I've been seeing her almost a year so I could tell something was up.  She confessed feeling like I was perfect--I had a husband, two children, a house, a career, I went to college, etc. and I looked at her and said, "Yeah, but I have rats."

 

I wanted some privacy...

But wordpress would not cooperate.  I tried adding my closest friends/family and it would not allow some of them but would for others and I'm sick of fighting with it.  The blog was getting hundreds of hits per day (over 300 the week of Halloween) and after I made it private it got about 5 per day--so hardly anyone was able to log on.

The funny thing is I don't mind total random strangers reading this blog.  It's the distance (laziness?) the blog has enabled amongst certain people I care about (why spend time with loved one's when you can just read about them online?).

So, here's my request...  If you want to know how my family is doing, call us, visit us.  The blog is an online baby book and your reading it is wonderful and maybe makes you feel closer to us, but it's a one-way medium and we do not feel closer to you.  I don't mind strangers or acquaintances lurking, just not loved ones.  Don't be lazy--don't abuse the blog.  You know who you are.

New stove...

After talking to a stove repair guy and further internet searching (and upon closer stove inspection) we decided there was no salvaging the stove.  Justin ordered a new one that will be here Saturday--hopefully early Saturday since Eleanor's birthday party is this Saturday and it's a spaghetti dinner for about 20 adults/children.

I called a guy to come check out the giant hole in our wall from the gas repair men.  He'll be here tomorrow.

Next, I'm going to start tossing money from the front porch if you want some.

Continuing saga of suckage...

So, we sealed the holes, cleaned up the rat poop/pee and put out poison, which did get eaten, and we have not seen any more rat(s), however, the rat(s) got into the stove and made a cozy home out of the stove insulation.  We discovered this yesterday after placing pecan pies in the stove (made from our own pecan tree) and then the whole house began to reek of rat pee.  This makes cat pee smell like flowers.  It's so god awful I had to step outside a few times just to breath.

I've done some looking on the internet and it looks like our practically new stove is toast.  Apparently you can't ever get that smell out.  It seems to me all that would need to happen is replacing the insulation and cleaning the surfaces but apparently that's not good enough.  I put in some calls to appliance repair shops to see if this is possible --but I don't have much hope.  I think we'll have to...sigh...buy a new stove.  Because of pee.

Now if only the car engine could go out...or maybe we could have a small kitchen fire?  How about some flooding.

In other news, our kids are awesome and I love them.  Eleanor is a standing up and sitting down genious and loves to walk across rooms with her push toys.  She shakes her head "no" now and does silly faces and waves and claps and is just so sweet.  She loves to rest her little head on our shoulders and laps.

Henry has been a trouper these last few weeks of Ho-Vo hardship.  He did not go to school last week because of illness (thank god for sick leave) and has really had very little fun lately.  But he's doing fine now and will be back with his friends tomorrow.

The longest two weeks...

After 13 days, we got our gas back on last night.

We now have holes everywhere and this attracted a rat.  Hopefully it's just one rat.  Justin says he's very cute.  But he's going to have to die real soon.

My tire is flat.

All four of us got sick.  Very sick.  Stomach bug.  First Henry, then me then Eleanor and then Justin.  And we had no hot water.  A lot of work and school has been missed by all.  After the stomach bug cleared, they both got colds.  Bad colds.  Stay home from school and work colds.  This is what happens when you can't really wash your dishes or hands or laundry.

Kitty got trapped in my car overnight.  Justin discovered this when he was leaving for work and saw that my hazard lights were on.  There is now cat hair everywhere.

I am so uninspired and exhausted.  Bye now.

 

More Henry classroom updates...

We had a fabulous day.  Before going to movement class with Ms. Felicity, we brought out the balance beam to walk across.  Not only did we get to test our balancing skills, but we go to practice taking turns which is a skill we are still working on.  Though we are getting better.  We also started working on our spooky name cards.  This is a fun activity practicing name recognition and letter tracing.  We used a paint brush and glue to trace over the letters in our name.  Then we poured the colored sands over the letters to add texture to our name.  When they dry, we will be able to trace over them with our fingers as another prewriting activity.

Wow, our day just seemed to fly by today.  We've been enjoying playing with "spooky" sand in the sensory table which we made by mixing black, orange, green and white sand.  We had fun pouring,stirring and sifting the sand.  We also practiced making shapes and letters in the sand.    Several of our friends got together to build haunted houses  out of the blocks.  I really enjoyed watching them work together and problem solve as a team.   We took a couple of pictures of their work.  I could tell they were very proud of it.  It really was a great day.

Last week and this we are focusing on real vs. fantasy.  Our goal is to help them differentiate between reality and fantasy.  During the preschool years, children go through several stages of pretend play.  At 3, they "are" the princess or the firefighter - and love to dress and act the part.  As children mature, they begin to "take" the role of the princess or firefighter, adding to the persona with props and costumes.  They are able to understand that they stay themselves even when they have the costume on.  This progression from being the character to acting like the character shows children's process in separating real from pretend.

We have been enjoying exploring with different material both liquid and solid in the sensory table.  Last week we played with rice and beans and tested our fine motor skills as we tried to pick them up with chopsticks.  Was not an easy task.   Yesterday we played with water and measuring cups.  Today, Ms. Laura and the class made clean mud with bars of soap.  They talked about how it felt on their hands.  It was a fun experience.  Later in the week we will make goop.  Have a good evening.

We had a fun busy day.  We started our morning by giving our fingers and toes a workout with bubble wrap.  Some friends played with the clean mud while others read stories and built with the wooden blocks.  We had a fire drill before going outside to the playground.  Everyone remembered to walk quietly and quickly to our meeting stop.

While we were outside we got to show off our creative side by decorating hats with various art materials.  We made princess hats, wizard hats, and witch hats.  This afternoon they made special magic wands.  Tomorrow we will talk about the special powers each of us have.  On Friday we will have a special treat.  We'll have a dress up party and wear our hats.  Mary Jane's mom is bringing cupcakes for us to decorate and take home.  We will also decorate mini pumpkins.  Have a good evening.

We had another fun day.  We finished decorating our hats and magic wands.  We talked about some of the special powers we have inside us like the power to control our body; the power to control our emotions; the power to be brave and try new things;  the power to make good choices; and my personal favorite the power of patience to be able to wait for something we want.  We decorated our wands with special magic stones to help remind us of these powers.  Tomorrow we will have a little dress up party and wear our special hats and sprinkle "magic dust" on our wands to make them work.

What an exciting day!  We really had to test our power of patience to wait for our special dress up party with our magic wands and hats.  We sprinkled magic dust on the wands to remind us of the powers they hold.  Some of our wands are in need of repair and playing with them outside.  We will fix them after rest time.  We will also celebrate Zella's birthday.  We'll decorate her birthday banner and enjoy a treat.  We have several things that can go home today along with the bedding.  There are hats, wands, decorated cupcakes, and decorated pumpkins.  Also, please check the folder for the pictures from our photographer.  She got some really nice shots of the class.  Have a Safe and happy Halloween.

We'll spend the next few weeks focusing on signs of fall and fall harvest time.  We've been talking about the changes in the weather and changes in the environment.  We'll sample different variety of apples and examine different types of gourds.  This is a great time for us to working on our classifying and sorting skills.  Today we sampled a honey crisp apple which is my personal favorite.  Most of the class really like the taste.  You are welcome to send a variety for us to sample and talk about.  We have talked some about the changes in the colors of the leaves.  This afternoon Ms. Laura and Mr. Dillon were going to let the class play with clay and make leaves from cookie cutters.  When the clay dries and hardens, we will paint it the colors of the leaves we've been observing.

Language aquisition...

Amidst all the heckery going on around here, I am excited about Eleanor's new words.  Yesterday I picked up a book and said "Book" and she repeated, "ook", and this morning I read to her again and she said "ook" without me prompting the word.  She also says, "at" for "that".  And she regularly says "up" when she wants someone to pick her up.

So, at 11 months, we got:

Mama, dada, ki-ki (kitty), up, at (that), ook (book), and uh-oh (her first "real" word).

I know for sure she understands:

Food, milk, no, bye bye,  Henry, and her name of course.

I guess I'm surprised by what all she knows because I have made zero effort to teach her anything.  The two times I have were when I told her "book" and when she started pointing to things and I said, "That" and then she said it.  I suppose if I stayed at home full time with her like I did with Henry, she would be saying much more, but this is pretty cool.

The other thing about E is she has the opposite of autism.  She is constantly trying to socially engage others.  She loves to play little games with us and always makes eye contact and loves to laugh and smile.  She displayed coyness the other day when I took her to work and she was being admired by the secretaries and she gave a smile but buried her face in my chest while peeking out.  I'd never seen her do that.  It was cute.  At night when I rock her before placing her in the crib, she stares up at me.  I put my face really close to hers and make a silly sound and she laughs laughs and wants me to keep doing it.  She has a little boyfriend at school named Daniel.  The sleep in a row on mats on the floor and Daniel and E always nap next to each other and D likes to pat E.  They eat their meals together and crawl around together.  They are the oldest of the babies, so they go way back.

Day 6...

The plumber thinks he might be done on Monday, but possibly Tuesday.  That would be 10 days of no hot showers, no laundry doing, no dishwasher, no stove, and no heat.  It's supposed to get into the 30's tonight!  I slept with Eleanor last night because she was so cold.  Henry woke up this morning saying, "I'm tired.  I didn't get enough sleep.  I was cold everywhere."  We have space heaters but they actually get the room too hot unless you stand by them and adjust them all night long, and that's not going to happen.  But tonight it probably will.

Everything I make in the crock pot tastes exactly the same.  Like moosh.

The plumber just ran past me saying, "Can I use your bathroom?  I have an upset stomach."

YES!

Ugh....Ugh...Ugh...

Hammering, drilling, pounding, shouting....all day.  Day after day.  Today they destroyed our new bathroom.  I put E down for her nap about 30 min ago.  Right now the plumber is sawing something right next to her room.  Oh, now he is hammering as hard as he possibly can.  And still...she sleeps.  I have no idea how.  Oh...now he is yelling at the top of his lungs so the elderly guy underneath the house can hear him.

I am so ready for this to be over.

Halloween Polaroids

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More of the same...

Justin boiled water on the grill tonight so the kids could have a bath. I am about to go to the gym to wash my hair (maybe I'll lift a weight or something too, we'll see.)

This afternoon, E and I were playing on the lawn and the plumber crawled out from under the house looking very dismayed. He told me that our water heater is leaking and the wood underneath it is so rotten it looks like the floor may collapse. I'm thinking of a used Volvo... or a trip to Paris. (Funny, when I was a teenager I thought of money only in terms of how many CD's I could buy. As in, "That speeding ticket is costing me like 8 CD's!")

Our plumber is enormously, morbidly obese, and his coworker is elderly. I try to picture those two spending hours in the dark, burrowing tunnels underneath my 60 year old house, while I play with E and H above. This is going to be one long week.

We might have gas again by Friday. I'm going to try crock pot mac and cheese tomorrow.

It gets stupider...

The plumbers are back for another full day of destroying my house. Today they are going to have to drill a giant hole in my hard wood floors and a giant hole in the wall in the bathroom that we just had re-done. So we'll have to get the contractor back to fix that and repaint--or I guess we could probably do it in all our spare time.

I just got Eleanor to sleep and now they are using something that sounds like a jackhammer under the floor in her room. I can feel the vibration from the back of the house. So I guess there will be no napping today.

I'm going to go attempt a freezing cold shower now. Here's some trick or treating pictures for your delightment. (not sure why this word does not exist yet).[slideshow]

Goodbye October...

I hate October. It's been a bad luck month for me for probably two decades and maybe more if I could remember back that far. I thought we'd escaped it unscathed by the return of our Kitty (saving my complicated grief for a later date...probably another October) but wouldn't you know it...discovered on Saturday by my mother in law, we have a gas leak.

I've suspected this for about...six years. The back bathroom has always...always...reeked of a gas-like substance. It did not smell like natural gas though. It smelled like sewer gas or the fumes that might escape from underneath the house. We have an alarm that should tell us if there's a leak and it never did, and it didn't always smell like gas. Only in cold weather and only in that back bathroom, sometimes. I remember it was particularly strong when I was pregnant with Eleanor and sleeping in the back bedroom. I'd have to use the restroom for the fifteen millionth time during the 3rd trimester, which was this time last year, and the gas smell was so strong I would have to immediately open the window so that I would not gag. I complained to Justin about it for years and even recall complaining about it strongly last winter and saying "It's gas, I know it is and our baby is going to come out deformed because I've been breathing it in this whole pregnancy."

Still...neither of us did anything about it. I don't know why. I think we did not want it to be gas so badly. I know you must be thinking what terrible fools we are. I would agree. When gas was confirmed this past weekend and the city took our meter and told us we could not have our gas back until we fixed it, I was so upset I wanted everyone to leave. Justin's best friend was here and my mother in law. I still have not fully accepted that we've all been inhaling low doses of gas for over half a decade.

The plumber came out today to determine where the leak is coming from. He told me they are going to have to dig a tunnel under the house because the crawl space is too low to get to the pipes. This will cost about the same as a used Honda. We have not had hot water since Saturday. My children look dirty to me. Henry wet himself last night. We probably will not have gas again for several more days. I'm trying to think of grilled vegetarian meals.

Feisty...