The Beach, The Zoo, The Slide, Oh My

My younger sister and her two year old, K, came to visit over the weekend. We live three hours apart and don't get to spend a lot of time together, so it was nice to have a little visit with them. They arrived late Friday night, and K was quite distraught because "her baby" was already in bed. Once he woke up Saturday morning, she was delighted to get to see him. The jury's still out on exactly how delighted he was. From the look on his face, I would say he seemed less than thrilled.

Once we were all up and moving, we packed a lunch and headed to the beach (the Little Man stayed home with his Daddy). We found a spot beside a tide pool where the girls could play in the water without fear of waves washing them away. They immediately set out to see if they could catch a fish.

Imagine our surprise when they actually caught some!

We ended the day with five fish in a baggy to take home with us. Somehow one escaped into the back seat of my sister's car, but it was 'rescued' and returned to the baggy. Needless to say, the very next morning, all five fish were floating and were given a proper down the toilet burial.

The girls did talk their aunt into taking them into the waves for a bit.

Sweetpea was the only one brave enough to venture off on her own. Once the other three were knocked over by a wave and suffered minor injuries, they decided the tide pool was more their speed.

Sunday morning, we got up, packed another lunch and headed out to the zoo. We have an awesome zoo here, and we are zoo members, so we go there quite often. The Little Man joined us on this trip, and it was H-O-T HOT. The highlights of the day were the shaved ice, the kids' splash zone and the Discovery Center where I sat to feed the Little Man in the air conditioned coolness while the older kids played in the splash zone.

Obviously K and Little Man were beyond impressed with the zoo experience.

Back at home, the three girls spent quite a bit of time on our water slide in the back yard. We were hoping it would wear them out and get them to bed early. Sadly, it seemed to do the opposite.

They were up 'til all hours playing Phase 10 with us and eating Tootsie Pops. Sweetpea managed to end up with this:

Tell me that doesn't look like an elephant! We discussed selling it on Ebay, but she decided to just eat it instead.

It was great to catch up with my sister and K, who kept us laughing the whole time. Yes, she still calls me "Baby's Mama" and refers to Sweetpea and Princess E as "my girls". Apparently she tells people back home that she has two sisters and a baby. K can be a handful because, well, she's two, but she can also be super sweet. Especially when she's looking at my Little Man and saying things like, "AWWWWW look at him's face."

Welcome to My Crazy (Part 1)

First off, I totally theived my title from BooMama.

I seem to store quotes from favorite tv shows away in the back of my mind and pull them out when I'm in a situation where they fit (and I'm not even listing that as part of my crazy). As one of my personal heroes, Julia Sugarbaker once said, "This is the South. And we're proud of our crazy people. We don't hide them up in the attic. We bring 'em right down to the living room and show 'em off. ....... no one in the South ever asks if you have crazy people in your family. They just ask what side they're on." I'm pretty sure both sides of my family are riddled with their fair share of crazy. I'm not going to out anyone else's crazy quite yet, but I will drag a little of mine out to the living room and show it off.

I'll begin with my need to have all the tops to the Little Man's bottles match the bottle on which they are placed. I usually end up making bottles late at night, when I really want to go to bed. One would think I could just reach in, grab a top, pop it on the bottle and be done with it. NOOOOO! I have to stand and dig around in the bowl where we store the bottles, nipples, bottle tops, and various other things my girls throw in there when they empty the dishwasher, until I find the matching pieces. Now, my bff, Pajama Mama staged a late night intervention via IM in an attempt to release me from my madness. She talked me into intentionally unmatching the bottles and tops in an effort to prove to me that the kid really doesn't care if his bottles match. He really will continue to eat and not perish from starvation or failure to thrive if his bottles don't match. Earth will continue to spin on it's axis, and I will not hyperventilate if the bottles don't match. It lasted one night, the next morning, all the bottles looked like this:

I was able to breathe freely, and all was right with the world once again.

And ain't they purty?

Lets move on to eating peanut M&Ms. Just stick your hand in the bag, grab out a handful of candy, stick it in your mouth and chew, right? NOOOOO! Not me. I get out a few M&Ms, then have to decide which color needs to be eaten first. This is a complicated process. I'm not even sure I can explain it to someone who doesn't have the same affliction, which I have discovered in at least two other members of my immediate family. See! We are riddled with crazy. Take this group of candy as an example:

I would have to begin with either a green, yellow or orange because there are two of each of those colors and only one blue and one red. So, lets say I start with green, then yellow, then orange. Now I only have one of each color..problem solved? NOOOOO! Now because I just ate those colors, I HAVE to eat one of the other colors, lets say red. Then blue because I haven't had a blue yet, then I can eat the other colors, but only in the same order I ate them the first time. Madness I tell you. Also, I have to bite the M&M in half first just to make sure the peanut is in there. Oh happy day when I get a solid chocolate M&M that was supposed to have a peanut in it. I don't have these problems with plain M&Ms for some reason. Needless to say, I will never eat peanut M&Ms in bed in the dark.

This is just the tip of the mountain of my crazy. I won't even get started on making a bed or folding towels. Let's just leave it at this:

For now anyway!

I need to add that I have been driven to insanity by the fact that I can't get blogger to post all of my pictures exactly the same size!

Princess-isms

Oh, my beautiful BLOND baby girl.

We have had a can of Strawberry Mist icing in our cabinet for ages. I honestly don't know how or when it got there. I make my own icing, and wouldn't want Strawberry Mist in the first place. The Princess has been begging to eat that icing. She has suggested all sorts of things she could put the icing on, right down to Doritos. So, I had some time alone with her the other day, and we decided we would bake a cake and use the pink icing. She's a very good kitchen helper.

First she saw the tri-colored rotini in the cabinet and decided that would be a great lunch. I usually cook that in chicken broth and add some carrots and broccoli. I told her we don't have all the ingredients for that, to which she responded, "What? We don't have chicken brock?"

Then I asked her to get the butter out for me. She was standing on her tippy toes, reaching with all her might. Then she apparently combined the two sentences running through her sweet little head, and what came out was, "Can we use the I Can't Reach It's Not Butter?"

And finally, when her daddy called home today and she answered the phone, she said, "I can't hear you, you're talking too loud."

I hate to perpetuate the blond stereotype, but...................

My Baby's Mama

Meet K. She's one of my five nieces (I also have five nephews and one great niece). She's almost three years old and is very funny. She's also one of my favorite photography subjects. I mean, just look at those eyes.

When Little Man was very small, and we were visiting at Mama's, K wanted to hold him. I told her he had to eat first, so she took off to the kitchen to find him some lunch. I told her he couldn't eat that kind of food quite yet. I got a blanket, and very discretely started to nurse him. K came over, ripped off the blanket, and started yelling, "No eat ur mommy!" I have to wonder if that wasn't the beginning of his refusal to nurse.

Now K has laid claim to the Little Man. He is her baby. When we were all together over the 4th, she was constantly asking about the welfare of her baby. "Where is my baby? Is my baby hungry? Why is my baby crying? Is my baby sleeping?" Well, he WAS!!

So the other day, my sister called me. She told K who she was talking to, and K said, "I wanna talk to my baby's mama." Now, that's a label I never really expected to have. Especially from a two year old girl.

K and her mama are coming for a visit this weekend. I can't wait to hear what MY baby's mama says next!

Cheese Please

We begged and we pleaded for them all to say cheese,

But only the eldest were aiming to please.

How many more years do you think it will take

'Til all of the cousins cooperate?

The Biscuits

The Princess was craving lemonade, so she went in search of a lemonade recipe and found one in her Strawberry Shortcake cookbook. Sweetpea, not wanting The Princess to get credit for doing anything on her own, joined in the lemonade making endeavor. After the lemonade was ready, Sweetpea kept looking through the cookbook and decided to try her hand at biscuit making. She did almost all the measuring and mixing all by herself, and got them into the oven. When the timer sounded, her Daddy looked at them with her, and together they decided to leave them in a little longer. A little longer turned into about 10 extra minutes. When the Biscuits came out of the oven, well, let's just say they weren't exactly light and fluffy. I was the first to taste a Biscuit, and I got a little choked. When Sweetpea looked offended, I tried to explain that it was just because I had swallowed a "pointy piece". Then I got tickled because what sort of biscuits have pointy pieces anyway?

The Princess decided to try a Biscuit this morning, and when she couldn't bite into it due to the hardness, she decided that in order to not hurt Sweetpea's feelings, she would just hide the hard Biscuit in the Barbie house. Of course, Sweetpea found it and was not pleased. Princess E kept saying, "I mean, I liked it, I just couldn't bite it."

The Biscuits sat on the cookie tray all day. The Daddy got home and said, "Maybe we should throw away The Biscuits." I pointed out that they would make excellent hockey pucks, and he reminded me that we have no immediate plans to actually play any hockey. (Hockey pucks, by the way, are actually made of vulcanized rubber, and the ice on a hockey rink is 3/4 inch thick. Figure skating ice is much thicker, but the thicker the ice, the slower it is, and hockey players want fast ice. This useless knowledge is what is embedded in my brain after two seasons of being avid minor league hockey fans, sitting in section M, row 12, seats 1 & 2 for almost every single home game, having as my pretend boyfriend, #55 Francois LaRue, and developing an attraction to goalies.) At that point, I was cleaning off my computer area in a last ditch desperate search for my fave meatloaf recipe. I put all the papers I no longer need (like I ever did need them), in the trash. When I got up to start the meatloaf (hoping I remembered enough of the recipe to make it not nasty), I went ahead and dumped The Biscuits in the trash on top of the papers, walked to the fridge, and heard Sweetpea from the other room saying, "Mommy, can you hand me a Biscuit?" You can fill in the rest of the story on your own. I'll leave it at I am officially a bad mommy. And if you should happen to show up unexpectedly in my house tonight, take my advice and don't eat a Biscuit from the ziploc on my counter.

Lousy Louses

WE. HAVE. LICE.

It is a royal nightmare that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy (if I had one). It started with Sweetpea. Her head was itchy. She complained for a few days that her head, well, it itched. Being the very attentive mom that I am, I didn't think much of it. Heads sometimes itch. I've never had lice, never been faced with dealing with lice, never for one second thought, "Well, her head itches, maybe she has lice." Nope, I just thought, "Hmmmm Sweetpea's head sure is itchy."

Then the dear sweet child decided, "Maybe I have lice." So, she went to the clinic at her school and had the school nurse check her head. Nurse said, "Nope, no lice, just some dandruff." So, when Sweetpea told me that, I told her to use the Little Man's baby shampoo as it is less drying and to stop taking showers so hot that if we had wallpaper, I'm pretty sure she would have removed it from the wall by now. She gets that from me, so I'll just have to remember to never, ever put wallpaper in her bathroom. Anywho, she continued to itch and scratch and complain. So finally on Monday, April 21, when the poor baby was clawing at her head with all her might, I finally, being the very attentive mom that I am, decided to take a look at the child's head. Lo and behold, there were full grown lice crawling on her head. So, after she, and Princess E, and I all "EEEKed" and squealed and hopped around as girls will, we called her Daddy and asked him to please come home ASAP and bring some of that lice shampoo stuff. He did, and after looking through the Princess' head and changing sheets and putting pillows in the dryer for half an hour and sending the Princess to bed, I sat and "nitpicked" Sweetpea's hair 'til midnight.

Tuesday morning, I let Sweetpea sleep, and I got up to take Princess E to school. I went by the clinic to let the nurse know that Sweetpea did in fact have lice, and to have her re-check Princess E's head. She found what we determined might maybe possibly if you look at it just right and the stars and planets all aligned, might be a nit. So, I brought Princess E back home with me, and got more lice shampoo and treated her hair and nitpicked. Two days later, when I was still finding nits and even found a live bug on one or the other of them, it' s been a nightmare, my facts are fuzzy, I treated them both with olive oil and put them in pink shower caps for the night. I still can't believe I didn't take pictures, they looked like little pink flowers with mad pouty faces. I checked their heads (nitpicking, we call it) every single night!

Flashforward to the next Wednesday, April 30, I get a phone call from the nurse at the school. She sounded very apologetic, but told me the Princess had found a bug ON HER PENCIL, had shown it to the substitute teacher who had sent her to the clinic, and the nurse found one lousy louse on the back of her neck. She said she had searched her whole head and hadn't seen anything else, but that I would have to come get her, and maybe we might want to do the olive oil treatment again. Now that I was actually paying close attention, I picked her up, went to the Walgreens and bought another lice shampoo kit thingy. We came home and washed her hair, then that night, I olive oiled both girls again. They were not happy. Sweetpea said she couldn't sleep with the shower cap on, so instead, I wrapped her head in saran wrap. Then I spent the entire night worrying that she would suffocate when the saran wrap slipped off her head and over her face.

So here we are almost two weeks from the original sighting of the lice, and WE STILL HAVE LICE. I am still spending approximately two hours every night nitpicking, still making my babies sleep in olive oil, and I have yet to have a night when I haven't found a least a nit or two and usually at least one itty bitty obviously just hatched baby louse. I am slowly going insane and probably permanently damaging my eyesight.

And by the way, if I ever have to describe my girls, I will start with, "Well, E's hair is the exact color of an itty bitty obviously just hatched baby louse, and her sister, well, hers is the color of a nit."