The wall

Today's Mommy Monday involved my sister coming over to play. We had plans to make donuts. This did happen but she will not get to sample the fine end product because she slept in. Her fault, oh well! More for me.

Anyway, we decided to go to the mall in search of a particular make up and Ava wanted to go to the Disney Store. She had some small bills burning a hole in her pocket apparently. By the way, taking Ava into a Yankee Candle Store is very amusing. She takes her candle sniffing very seriously. Justin met us there after work and we decided to have dinner out. The hostess decided we would have more room if we just had a big booth and Rhys had a booster. He didn't quite balance right in the booster and had to be held the whole time. He got passed back and forth over the table a few times. The last time, I was attemping to keep his feet from knocking over drinks so I was holding his upper body with one hand and his legs with the other. I then completely forgot that there was a wall behind me and rammed him head first into wall. I had been looking out across the rows of booths and there weren't any walls behind anyone else! He didn't cry at all. It was just a loud thunk that made people look at the horrible mom ramming her child into a wall. I of course laughed quite a bit. So then I got to look like the psycho cruel mom who thinks it is funny to ram her child into the wall.

ravelympics and food

So this weekend I was in someone else's kitchen and looking for ingredients to put some type of food together. It got me thinkingabout what my staple items are. There are some things that I generally always try to have in the house for either regular snacking or I use them in a lot of recipes.

Our standards are:
chicken breasts
ground beef
mac and cheese
milk
stick butter
flour
sugar
yeast
black beans
kidney beans
salsa
frozen veggies
diced tomatoes
spaghetti sauce
pasta
chedder cheese
cheese sticks (ha almost had the typo of cheese stinks!)

What is your standard list?

On to ravelympics.

I am a little behind in my project for the ravelympics. I didn't start until yesterday but as long as my hand doesn't fall off, I should finish before the closing ceremony. I am making my first attempt at a felted handbag. For those who don't know, "felted" refers to the process of shrinking wool. It kind of turns it into...felt. So I am using that cheap, cheap wool I got a while ago to make a bag for Ava. She loves to carry things in bags, so I figure she can take my first attempt. So far it is super easy and going well. Hopefully I don't ruin it when I shrink it. If it all goes well, I want to get some really pretty yarn and make a bag for me.

I am seriously tired of my hand hurting though. It is bad. I have cut out as much of the typing that I can, most mouse activity, and I haven't knit anything in like three weeks. I sleep with a brace on, where something on my hand when I do knit and take a ton of alieve and it still kills me just after one evening of knitting. I am not sure what I am supposed to do about it. I kind of need my hand.

Here is the bag so far, though you can't tell it is a bag yet.

nap time disasters

Yesterday Rhys had a bad run of trying to take his nap. It took over 2 hours and still no nap actually happened. He cried for about 45 minutes off and on and seemed to get more upset so Justin went in to calm him down, make sure he had a pacifier and all that. He discovered that he had a poopy diaper and that was probably part of the problem. So he changed it and apparently left the old diaper on his dresser.

Rhys was quite for a few minutes and then started crying again. After about half an hour it stopped being fake whiney cry and turned into really crying. I mentioned that he was really upset and maybe we should go get him and end this whole nap taking idea. Justin goes in to check on him and I hear, "Oh Bubba. What happened? What did you do?" Rhys had gotten ahold of the poopy diaper. I am so glad that Justin was here for the day that Rhys apparently ate poop. He had poop all over his face and in his hair. He had stepped in it and danced all over his crib. Justin wiped his face and head off first and then gave him to me and I gave him a bath. I could not believe that I was cleaning poop out from under his nails. Justin took care of the crib mess and it has since been thoroughly sanitized.

Shortly after his bath and getting dressed he was still acting tired, so we tried for the nap again. 20 minutes later I hear him start crying again. I was pretty much thinking it wasn't worth it at this point since it was almost dinner time and he would just go to bed early. I go into his room and he had his head stuck in his shirt. I really wish I had taken a picture. He had pulled his head out of the headhole and had the front part of his shirt stretched and stuck on the top of his head. It was hilarious.

So Rhys learned a new word out of this whole experience. This morning I go to get him out of bed. He is standing in his crib, pulls up his shirt and points to his diaper and says, "Poopoo!" He was correct.

Rhys, remember that it has been true at some point when we call you a poop face. And...you probably have eaten poop.

doughnuts!

So I saw a post on Pioneer Woman's blog about her homemade doughnuts. I got inspired and we had a snow day (means that Justin is working from home since we don't have school or anything yet) so obviously that meant that I should make some doughnuts.

It was a family event. Everybody was running the cut out dough over to the tray before it started to rise. Ava stirred up the glaze and dipped some. Rhys and Justin ate them.

I am so often disappointed when I make things for the first time that I love. I have very high expectations. I don't like cakey doughnuts, so I was a little worried. I knew everybody else would eat them but I wasn't sure I would. Can you see them? Can you see the fluff? The were light. They were fluffy. They were amazing! It was like elephant ears mixed with Krispy Kreme doughnuts. They were bliss.

Some of them got a little messed up because they stuck to the wax paper. They tasted fine though. We will bringing some holes to playgroup tomorrow so be ready. We will definitely be making these again.

By the way, Pioneer Woman takes nice pictures of her food. I use Justin's cell phone to take my pictures.

Dropping the kids off at the pool

We braved the storm today and Ava made it to swimming lessons, only five minutes late. There really wasn't much of a storm to brave. The roads were all pretty clear, Ava was just taking her sweet time getting ready. Every week Ava's friend Annika screams through pretty much the entire swimming lesson. It is kind of funny because she does everything she is asked to do. She kicks when she is supposed to. She jumps in when she is supposed to. She just cries the entire time. Last week they moved her to a different group just to see if it helped with the crying because they were afraid she would throw up on herself. Her mom agreed that it was a definite possibility since she gags herself when she cries a lot. So this week we see them all get out of shallow pool and hold hands and start moving to the shallower end of the deep pool. We also see a lifeguard coming over to where they had been with a skimmer and a garbage bag. We were sure Annika had puked in the water when we weren't looking. Then they still had Annika swimming and stuff, which we thought wouldn't have been the case if she had thrown up. Then we were left wondering what else they could be fishing out of the pool. Sure enough, Oscar the swimming instructor, gets out of the pool with the clear garbage bag with one little turd in it. Some kid dropped his own kids off in the pool! I was so afraid it was Ava. Her suit is baggy enough in the butt that if she had pooped, it would have just floated on out. I asked her when she was done and she said she didn't poop in the pool. That is actually a huge relief. Nobody wants to be the parent of the kid who poops in the pool, really.

good bye and hello!

So Sunday we realized that sometime that morning or the night before, the cats had dumped the glass of water next to my bed onto my laptop. It no longer would turn on and was dead. It just so happened that I had a paper to write for school Sunday as did Justin. It made it very clear that we both needed to have access to a computer at any given point, since we are both taking online classes. In two weeks we will both have final projects due and those take hours and hours to write, so it isn't like we can just take turns and expect to be able to finish on time. I had recently transferred almost all of my pictures onto an external hard drive so I am not stressing about the loss of files or anything. Luckily I am getting my tuition reimbursement from work later this week, so that meant that I got to get a new computer! It is much nicer than myold one and runs so much better because it doesn't have Windows Vista. So thanks kitties. You destroy everything, but this time I kind of like the end results. An even better end result: Justin is jealous that I got a new laptop so he has to do something computery cool. He is finally getting around to turning the old desktop into a server and getting the files off that I had wanted!

In other news, Rhys has two new words today. Shoes and book. He pretty much slept most of the day away today after his pretty busy weekend, but when he was awake, he decided to bust out his new words. So at almost 14 months...his words are: hello, hi, bye, eye, Rhys, doggie, caca (food/cracker/popcorn), Papa, baba, bobo, wow, what's that?, Pepe, baby, mommy, daddy, please, more, and thank you. He does the baby signs for food, more, and all done. He is so different than Ava. Maybe it is because he sees her do things, though she always saw older kids at daycare. He just climbs up on things. He can get on and off his riding toys. I don't think Ava figured that out until way over two. He goes up stairs but hasn't figured out how to go down yet. It isn't like even if he figures it out we will let him have free reign on our stairs anyway, but it would be nice at other people's houses who don't have huge staircases.

Just because I'm dumb, doesn't mean my kid is

So today was preschool registration. It seems small, but a big event in Ava's life. She has been talking about going to school for the last year. It is her dream. She actually was willing to get up and get dressed and listen to me for the most part this morning. That means she was serious about going. I read on the website last night that the preschool is in high demand so we might want to come early to get our first choice. Pffft. This is preschool in the suburbs, not Manhattan! So my goal was to try to get there a few minutes before 9. I was not about to line up outside for a couple hours with both of the kids, especially when I was up late.

So I get in the building and see a sign directing me to preschool registration. I get in line. I am the third person in line and feeling pretty good about myself. Other people start coming and getting in line. One person has a little laminated number in her hand...what? what is this??? Someone from the school goes and gets us numbers that were apparently in front of the sign directing me where to go. It is ok, the two moms in front of me didn't have them either, so I am not the only one who missed that. I was a little nervous and then I see that my number is 28. Well that is easy! Most people around me seemed to have the 3 year old form with them (they were color coded) so I didn't have a lot of competition. They then have us sit down in the auditorium and there is a table up front and a dry erase board with a tally of available slots in each class. Total number of 4 year old preschool available: 4. 4!!! Suddenly 28 is not looking so good. They announce that if we can't get in at our desired location, we can register for one of their three other locations. That is good because I was worried that I would then have to pack up and head across town to register at the other school and hope to still find a slot available. We wait and we wait and we wait...really it was only 25 minutes. Anyway, our number is called and I am told there are still slots available for the afternoon class. I hand over my k4 form and check. She tells me my check is for too much, so I write her another check. (I had gone looking and found the starter set of checks from a random checking account, we just transfer money into for bill payments...) The woman handling our registration introduces herself and says that Ava will be in her class. They chat for a while and Ava attempts to wow her with her great knowledge of colors by talking about Rhys' hat. I pack up and head out, because people are still waiting and everyone is a little tense that I am going to take their slot in the class they want.

In the car, I do the math and figure out that she had me write the check for the registration fee for a k3 class. I come home and look online and see that she is also the k3 lead teacher. So I call and leave a message asking them to verify which class Ava is registered for. While I am doing this someone is beeping in on the other line, probably making my message sound very disjointed. It is a co-worker. She is telling me that the school just called there to verify my home number because they had been trying to call me and couldn't get through. I had combined the first half of my home number with the last half of my cell. Excellent. So I go to get the home phone expecting them to call me at any minute and see there is a message on the machine. I listen to it and it is in fact the school calling to say there seemed to have been a mix up. Not only is Ava now registered in a k3 class with the k4 form, the check I wrote had the date in the amount section. I finish the message and go get my cell to call her back and see that I had a missed call on my cell from her. I am leaving her a message and I see the woman from the school is beeping in. I end up saying something really dumb on the message like, "this is you beeping in now so I will stop talking." I explain to her that the woman registering me told me to write a new check and must not have paid attention to the fact that I turned in a k4 form, since pretty much nobody there was registering for 4 year olds. There were 2 more slots available, so Ava got in the correct class. I just have to go drop off a valid check.

So the school's first impression of me: I can't fill out my phone number, I can't read forms (though really their teacher couldn't read, not me) and I can't write out a check correctly...don't worry, Ava knows her colors.