Gee, Thanks!

• I'm thankful for a minute to myself the day after Thanksgiving.  Yesterday, my house was infested with 4 children under the age of 5.  It reminded me of my burning desire to double up on birth control.
• I'm thankful for no-nap babies who go to bed an hour early and sleep for 12 hours straight.
• I'm thankful for Woolite rug cleaner with Oxyclean.  This stuff got Jell-o out of my dining room rug.  I am a die hard fan now.
• I'm thankful for good friends who don't take it personally when you grab them, throw them in a headlock and pimp slap them. (We stayed up playing Lunch Money.)
• I'm thankful that the kids managed to not be sick for the holiday. 

For the record, I am most certainly not paid in any fashion to endorse anything.  When I do it, it's because the shit actually works like it's supposed to.  I'll let you know if this changes.

No Bed For You!

I've been trying to sleep in my bed rather than on the couch lately.  So far, this has not been a roaring success.  If it's not LateNapLarry screwing me over by staying up all night, it's PleaseDon'tLeaveMePolly waking up in the middle of the night crying because she's afraid that we're going to leave her behind and not take her to preschool.  We are leaving her behind, but I'm hoping she won't figure that out until we're heading out the door.

We've left instruction for LateNap not to let him sleep after 4:00 in the afternoon.  Day 1 of someone else trying to enforce this caused the babysitter (Grandma) to toss a sleepy crying baby at me as soon as I walked through the door.  Her exact quote was, "I couldn't have kept him awake for much longer."  What I heard was, "His crying was giving me a headache and I was going to ruin your entire night by letting him sleep anyway if you didn't make it home soon."  So .... we've got some work to do there.

PleaseDon'tLeaveMe was up last night at 1:15 begging to go downstairs for water, then she refused to go back to bed.  Spending the night on the couch with a squirmy 3-year old watching Spongebob (the movie) is not the setting for pleasant dreams.  It's the setting for frequent waking as I'm being kicked all night, coupled by the fact that the title sequence played on a loop and that obnoxious Spongebob laugh kept jolting me out of any productive sleep patterns.  I know the obvious solution would be to either turn the movie down or off, but that required way more effort than I was committing to anything.

The "Feel Better" Brigade

When you need to cheer up a sick sister, call in this guy:

 

He will perform invaluable services that are sure to make her feel better, such as:

• yelling in her ear
• bouncing her up and down right after she's puked
• stealing her crackers
• waking her up by knocking over furniture

These, and many more wonderful benefits can be yours for the low, low price of some Goldfish crackers and milk.

Catch Up Time!

Halloween:

The kids had tons of fun this year.  Despite what you see in this picture:

After he got the hood off (.39349 seconds after this picture was shot), he had a great time running around as 'The Bat' or, as ScarySissy called him: SuperBaby!

I think she would have been more excited to have the same costume as her brother.  She picked hers out and was begging us to let her wear it for almost a month.  We finally got it on her and:

Ten minutes later it was on the floor.  The headband was destroyed in about 1/2 an hour.  Those cutesy ribbons just pull right off, by the way.  Later that night she ran around the house with his hood on and his costume around her neck telling us, "I'm the bat!"

Last Saturday was also a big day for us.  It was our 4th year participating in the Making Strides For Breast Cancer 3-mile walk.  We had one excited walker:

And one really mad one (could have a little to do with the fact that he woke up to me shoving him into his car seat at 5:45 in the morning...):

Don't worry, that didn't last long:

I thought that the hike went really well until I realized at the end that MissyPissyPants had, well, pissed her damn pants.

Right before the walk started:

MissyPissyPants, do you have to go potty?

No, Mama.  No potty.

Are you sure you don't have to go peepee?

No, no peepee.

No.  Lots and lots of peepee, little liar girl. 

We Have Temporarily Exorcised The Demon

The flu came to visit us this last month.  Just as I was finally getting some decent sleep, the flu kicked down our door and viciously attacked my kids.  It was a nightmare of 105 degree fevers, vomiting, turning our bathroom into a sauna, humidifiers, and secondary infection.

Before it was over, ChrissyCoughs-A-Lot has gotten: the flu, a double ear infection and a urinary tract infection.  We learned one very important lesson with that: stop waiting for her to display abnormal symptoms or behaviors before calling for a doctor appointment.

We have, until now, operated on the assumption that we could just handle everything at home.  We both agreed that taking her out just put other people at risk for being infected by her.  Also, though, we didn't want her to pick up something worse in a waiting room.

Well, our reasoning got us a kid that was a lot sicker than she needed to be.  Now she's taking an antibiotic (that some idiot, who will remain nameless, let's just say she's normally totally awesome...ahem, left out on the counter overnight so she had to start her dosages over again) and she is doing much better.

The scary part of this story is that she really wasn't acting abnormally.  Even when her fever was leveled off at 103, she still chased her brother around the house and threw the mother of all tantrums when we wouldn't let her play outside.  She was not giving us any reason to suspect that her ears or her....anyway, that anything hurt her.

She's back at school now.  Which only means that we need to stock up on more fever reducer, because I'm sure the flu liked it here and will probably be visiting again soon.