Garden Planted

We did it, finally! Seeds are all in the ground. I didn't bother starting the seeds early indoors (we're trying to look normal, after all). I also didn't bother trying to plant enough to feed my family a whole year. Funny thing about that, y'know? Once I released myself from the pressure to grow all my own produce (actually, the guilt of NOT growing it), it became a much more manageable task. Even though the following list looks daunting, I did go easy on myself:

Grape tomatoes (NONE for canning)
Peas (shelling variety, only planted enough for fresh eating fun)
Cilantro (volunteers from earlier years)
Pole beans (forgot to buy bush beans instead. Oh well.)
Swiss chard (growing it for pretty, not food. If we eat some, great!)
Red leaf lettuce (again, mostly for pretty, some eating)
Sweet corn (looks fun even if the ears don't fill out properly)
Eggplant (great for periodic baba ganoush or ratatouille)
English cucumbers (seedless, long and skinny)
Marigolds (protective flower that may keep cucumber beetles away)
Dwarf sunflowers (pretty, attract birds)

Why am I growing flowers all of a sudden? Because they happen to serve a purpose in my life this year (and maybe, just maybe, I'm realizing that I kinda like the way some flowers look, maybe). The marigolds are great companion plants and the sunflowers will be fun for Alice to pick. Our neighbor helped us relandscape our front garden beds last fall and it looks like everything is growing beautifully! I can't wait for those purple cone flowers...I've been in love with them since I saw them on the restored prairie our first summer in Illinois. Shirley, our neighbor, also gave us a few bleeding hearts, which I find curiously cool. And then there are those red dahlias I saw growing in my friend's garden...swoon! I'll have to look for those at the garden store this week.

Extra-extro-vert

People energize Robert. He loves new faces, new places, and lots of googly attention from perfect strangers. Usually, it's just cute. This time, however, it saved me much turmoil on the plane ride home.

We had a "late" flight that left SLC at 5pm. Robert was all smiles. He charmed the flight attendants, the Asian family seated behind us, and every person within eye contact range. This boy is something else! Can you believe that midway through the flight one flight attendant actually asked if she could HOLD him? I let her try. The thing about Robert's extroversion is he loves people as long as they don't come between him and his family. Holding him was a bit much, but he didn't cry. Anyway, he was peek-a-booing and cooing and laughing with all these folks for most of the trip. He was supposed to be napping.

The end of the 3.5 hour flight was rough on Robert. We began our shaky descent and the pressure changes were severe. He started to cry, then scream, then flail and kick and wrestle his way out of our arms. Silly boy. The pacifier and special blanket slowed him down, but they still didn't keep him quiet. It was a long descent...30 minutes? He screamed and fought the whole time. Here's where Robert's social nature saved us. Our flight attendants and neighbors were suddenly sympathetic. They offered kind suggestions instead of mean glances, even letting us walk the boy up and down the aisle during less-than-smooth flying. It was a small miracle that meant a whole lot to me personally.

Seconds after we landed, he was asleep in my lap.

Silly, silly, extra-extroverted boy :)

Afraid of thugs

Several changes have come over Alice since being introduced to the Disney version of the Rapunzel fairy tale. She saw the movie 3 times within a week, then purchased a detailed storybook with her portion of a Border's gift card we recently received. She plays out the story sometimes, but most of the time she takes snippets of the movie story and incorporates them into her own Rapunzel games.

Well, we've read the book so many times that the surface story is no longer interesting. She's asking hard questions. Tonight it was, "Is Rapunzel real?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"There aren't any magical flowers that create magical hair. No princesses grow their hair out that long."

"Is Flynn Rider real?"

"No."

"Are thugs real?"

"Um, yes."

"They're real?! WHY?!"

Cue the panic, the tears, and the hour long bedtime story drama that ends with Alice hiding under her covers with Baby Tiger stuffed into her shirt (so the thugs won't take it), a sheet of paper with 9-1-1 written on it (so she doesn't dial the wrong number when, not if,  the thugs crash through her window), and a real live phone on her nightstand (because Mommy and Daddy might not be able to call it themselves in time).

Why couldn't I tell a little lie, just this once?

Even I know I'm being too lenient about this irrational fear, but it's just not my style to say, "You're being silly, go to sleep." If I had been thinking straight, I would have had HER come up with the solutions. Instead,  I'm muddling through with post-vacation shock and an exhausting head cold (I just want to sleep. Please let me sleep.)

Who knows? She might have come up with some magical kid Spanish song that scares thugs away. I'll let her figure that out next time. Sheesh.

This isn't the first potential threat she's taken to the extreme. You should have been there in the car when she freaked out about tornadoes. We were talking about the tornado that shut down the St. Louis airport recently. Unfortunately, St. Louis is a place we visit pretty regularly, so she lost it. Totally freaked, sobbing and kicking in her car seat, "what if a tornado breaks our house down while we're in Utah...far away from windows is the safest place but we only have a hallway...what if the tornado sucks us away...what if it takes Baby Tiger..." on and on and on. Some of the fit must come from sleep deprivation, but the intense fear is definitely a new development.

I welcome any advice/suggestions on this front.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

Well this week seemed to go by very quickly. And I don't think a whole lot happened. I had a lot of things planned, but almost all of it fell through, or someone else went instead of me. So, we spent a lot of time at home in the evening, and we hung out together as a family this week. We also officially put our house on the market, but that was in another blog post, and really wasn't that exciting. All the work to get ready for it was much more exciting then the paperwork to finally get it in.

"Tonight?"

Our Realtor put the "for sale" sign up in our yard last night. Just in time! We have someone coming to see the house this morning. He was pretty sneaky about it, too. I just looked outside at some point during the bedtime routine and there it was! I was surprised and pleased and suddenly really nervous. Alice must have picked up on my mixed feelings. She ran out to see it, then skipped back to her room half-singing, half begging, "Does that mean we're moving TONIGHT?!" I assured her it wouldn't be tonight. "Tomorrow?" Nope. Lots of people are going to see the house before someone wants to buy it, blah blah blah. "Oh. But then we're moving?" Yes. *giggle giggle*

Alice is our biggest cheerleader in this whole moving thing.

Buddy and His Binky

I grew up calling my special blanket my "binky." I moved to Illinois and suddenly all my friends from Utah referred to a pacifier as a "binky" and a special blanket as a "blankie" or "minky" or "silky" or anything else but a "binky." I've tried to change my ways, truly I have, but now that Robert has a special blanket of his own, I'm gonna have to choose once and for all what I'm gonna to call it.  The word "blankie" gets stuck on my tongue and tumbles out in a plop. His blanket of choice isn't exactly minky or silky, it's holey. And you can't call a blanket "holey"unless the kid names it that himself. No, I've decided that I must call it a "binky" and be prepared for periodic confusion in the mom circles.

Binky it is.

I don't think I've shown you his binky in action. It's quite useful, you know.

Good for snuggling in general, sometimes doubling as a pillow on mom's shoulder:

 

Extremely useful for testing boundaries. Tonight, for example: Robert grabs the blinds by the sliding glass door. We tell him "no touching the blinds." He obeys and pulls his hand away. Then he uses his binky to play with the blinds. Hmmmmmmm.

 

My personal favorite is the hiding game. He drapes the blanket over his face, sometimes over his entire head, and run-walks towards the last adult he saw, throwing himself into his/her lap (if he manages to circumnavigate the toy minefield).

He knows his binky by name, too. Here he is retrieving it from across the room and thumping into my lap for a snuggle:

In one of her quieter moments...

Sleeping Beauty Rapunzel

Home for Sale

One home for sale: clean, comfortable, and convenient to campus. Also contains six years of memories and milestones: graduation, the birth and blessing of 2 children, job loss, job renewal, and pretty much everything I've ever learned about being an adult.

Excellent starter home. Start all sorts of things for the first time: garden, motherhood, regular meal preparation, lawn care, and long distance friendships. You'll be amazed at what you are capable of!

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week has felt very crazy, but also very productive. We are getting our house ready, as everyone knows. Well Saturday was the day that we took pictures of the house.

We spent a lot of the week cleaning out all of our clutter, and then Susan did a huge push Saturday morning to clean everything while I worked in the family history library. The house looked great, still does. But it felt very empty afterwards. We were very used to having stuff in the house, and now it is all in the garage, or in the trash.

Robert at 1

What a year! Robert is 1! I must confess that I'm not feeling the slightest bit nostalgic. I like where we are right now and I look forward to what's coming. Robert is a funny little man, and a neat kid to follow. I've enjoyed watching him waddling around, exploring the house, testing boundaries, and suddenly taking an interest in structured communication.

I'm using this blog post to document Robert as the kind of kid he is right now. This second. Unfortunately, my experience as his mother is entirely inextricable from my experience as Alice's mother, but I will do my darndest to describe Robert without comparison to any other sibling or child in my experience :)

Fine motor play:
This kid is drawn to non-toys that he can manipulate with his hands. The other day, I let him hold our digital thermometer for a while. He spent several minutes pulling it out of its plastic case and putting...it...back...in. I couldn't believe it. He was literally holding the very top of the thermometer and directing the 3 mm thermometer tip into the case opening which is only 1 cm wide. He laughed out loud every time he got it in, then he hopped off my lap to go show Daddy. Similar non-toys that grab his attention: pushing pencils through holes in paper, pulling straws in and out of small openings, using a spoon to scoop at Cheerios in a bowl, and deftly picking foam stickers off of Alice's preschool art projects one at a time. He doesn't usually play with cars and trucks like this, but I thought he was so cute in his Sunday duds:

 

Daddy adoration:
Perhaps the most amusing display of Robert's affection for his daddy happened several weeks ago in church. It was our first Sunday sitting solo in the pews while Bobby sat up with the bishopric. Robert was fine until suddenly he saw Bobby way up there. The kid squealed and smiled and tried to scramble over the pew to get to him. He could hardly be contained, lunging and squirming and giggling the first 10 minutes of church. He gave up on my lap and tried to crawl away under the pews. 

Physical Frustration:
Robert doesn't take bad news very well. He's not even 12 months old and he's already thrown himself on the floor several times to have a good fit. If he thinks you put him down a little roughly, or brushed by him too quickly, or served him the incorrect food item, he'll be sure to let you know. And once he's been offended, it takes a couple minutes for him to compose himself. It's almost a pre-programmed length. Whether the offending situation is remedied or not, he still kicks and screams and pushes people away for a minute or two. He's blinded by his rage, and then suddenly it's over. He comes to terms with his disappointment and moves on.

Tender feelings:
We were playing at a friend's house the other day when a 2-year-old got defensive about her toy. Robert moved in for a closer look (probably to attempt a swipe) and the girl reached out to push him. She pushed his chest a couple times, barely jostling his girth (Robert outweighs this 2-year-old, by the way). He looked at her, blinked a bit, then took two steps towards me before bursting into tears and running full speed ahead. I can't tell if it was the pushing or the denial of the toy that offended him more. It was clearly not a physical sort of pain.

Noise making:
He doesn't like sudden noises, and he's even wary of new sounds in his environment, but Robert is clearly a noisemaker. He'll pick up an object, usually a long one, and hit it on anything around him. If he finds a noise he likes, he grunts, looks up with his toothy grin, and makes that noise again and again and again. Here he is running the popcorn popper toy into a stuffed dog that shrieks, "Blue ear!"

Textile Exploration:
If there's a curtain, a hanging blanket, or any kind of fabric barrier within his reach, he crawls through it head first with glee. He gets a real kick out of it, too, with lots of grins, giggles, and peek-a-boos. He has a favorite blanket that he wraps himself in to go to sleep. Lately, he's been taking it out of his crib to play with. He may have inherited a propensity to carry that blankie around until it's stinky, gray, and loved to shreds. Sorry, little mister:

Susan and her blankie (age 2)

Susan and her blankie (age 4)

Bedtime Peace:
This boy is a dream to put to bed: pop in the pacifier, lay him down, and he just rolls onto his side and nestles into his blankie. Sometimes he falls asleep right away and sometimes he lays there quietly snuggling for several minutes before drifting off. He's been like this a long time, even as a teeny baby, and I had nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing. I was determined to let him cry it out at a young age after my experience with putting she-who-must-not-be-named-in-this-blog-post to bed as a baby. We let him cry it out a couple times, and then it wasn't a problem anymore. The boy knows when he's tired and he knows what makes him feel better. Sometimes he'll even close his eyes as I'm laying him in the crib...like one of those creepy dolls with weighted eyelids. ("Awake, dead, awake, dead...")

Put. Me. To. Bed.

Face time:
In your face, face to face, facing your face, it's all good to little Roberto. His preferred love language is definitely physical touch, as long as it involves someone's face. Life got a lot sweeter when I finally figured that one out. He likes to wrap his fingers around my nose.

Culinary Variety:
He's a picky eater. He needs a lot of variety. You can't serve him Cheerios two meals in a row. You can't serve him anything twice in a row, even though likes the food item and will eat it happily the next day. He refuses it, brushing it off his tray, even if he's starving! What a funny kid craving new and different flavors. I like cooking for him.

Social Skills:
This kid likes people. Babies and kids, mostly. He sees a child and he's drawn to that corner of the room.  He's sociable and generally friendly, though sometimes shy. He's a gracious host at home...if you can overlook his tendency to flail and hit things that he's really excited about, including peers. We're working on that. I promise.

Dear Robert

Dear Robert,

I sure love you. I love the way your eyes squinch up when you grin. I love your manly little chuckle. I love how you waddle around the house and run to me with little treasures in your hands.

When you were still in utero, I wondered about you. I tried to imagine what it would be like when you finally joined our family. I prayed for you to be healthy and strong, but one night I felt impressed to add "valiant" to that request. It was a strong impression. So strong, in fact, that I started looking up names that could mean "valiant." Unfortunately, the names Abner, Barack, Jabari, and Valente never made it to the hospital list. Maybe you'll thank me for that.

I couldn't wait for you to arrive. You "missed" your due date by 4 days and I just didn't know what to do with myself. Then suddenly (very suddenly!), you were there in my arms. I was holding you and looking at you, still wondering who you were. All that waiting, and you were still a surprise.

We had a rough start, you and I. I wanted so much to be everything for you. It was a hard day when I finally realized I couldn't be all things to all the people I loved so dearly. It's still hard for me to admit that.

Alice loved you from the first day. She couldn't wait to teach you how to walk and talk. She wanted you to sleep with her in her room. She hugged, kissed, and snuggled you as much as you could bear. She still does, actually.

Today is the day before you turn one year old. I love your grin. I love your curiosity. I love your enthusiasm and courage. You have become so much! I look forward to exploring the world with you, Little Bob.

Love,
Mom

Introducing Hot Spot #5

I've decluttered my closet, my paperwork, kids clothes, and (parts of) the kitchen. The final Project: Simplify Hot Spot Challenge to declutter my life for the better is...is...whatever I want.

Seems kinda like a cop-out.

I could use this opportunity to catch-up on the hemming pile, but now I have an excuse to avoid it :D I choose to declutter the garage. Lots of potential there for a cleansing purge. Besides, I can hem pants by hand (thanks, Michelle, for the excellent pointers! Forget that crazy blind hem!) after hours when I'm too tired to do much of anything else.

Adding to this purge, I have also accepted the Decluttering Challenge put out by Live Renewed which is to get rid of 100 things in the month of April. Some might view this as masochistic, but I see it as creating a framework where I "get credit" for doing something I was going to do anyway. Ta daaaa!

Hot Spot #4 Wrap Up

I didn't do it.

Well, I did go through the pantry in Robert's closet and I pulled out all the expired items. It turns out a year's supply of masa harina for our family is less than one bag. It's also apparent that 2 boxes of unflavored gelatin powder is more than enough for a lifetime. I just don't make gelatin like I used to. The food did not go to waste, however, since Alice pounced on the opportunity to hoard these new ingredients for her culinary "creations":

Scoop powdered cream of mushroom soup:

 

Measure jam pectin:

 

Mix brown rice with oodles of ketchup and taco seasoning. Garnish with corn syrup.

 

The fridge remains as-is. The microwave and freezer are also feeling neglected. That's okay. I will be forced to reckon with those soon enough. Nothing short of force will get me to mess with them :) I wasn't lazy, though, I was busy working on other home prep and declutter projects in other parts of the house. Really. 

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week we have continued to prepare the house. Almost all of the major things are now done. All of the painting, except possible one spot, is done. Even the shed is painted and looks a lot better then it did before. There is still some de-cluttering and general cleaning that needs to be done, but that actually feels manageable. So hopefully this week we will put it on the market.

Robert has had a big week too. He has started communicating a lot better then before. He points now and has taken to pointing to things he wants and places he wants to go. He also can do the sign for more. Which is often used all throughout breakfast, lunch and dinner. We are trying to teach him that throwing food on the floor is not the sign for I want something else to eat, but that is taking a bit more.

Alice and I were able to go the a Rapunzel play. She really liked it. She was so sad going home. She told me that she wanted to stay there all night and all day and watch all the showings of it. It wasn't short either. It was an hour and a half. That night for movie and popcorn we watched Tangled. I was at priesthood session, but she really liked it. That is a lot of Rapunzel for one day.