Before I forget…

….I need to write this down!

A few months ago, we went through a bad spell where Gavin was getting up 3 or 4 times at night. He wasn’t sick or having bad dreams, just waking up and wanting to play – or be rocked by Mommy and Daddy. After a few days, David and I both turned into zombies who only managed to function by ingesting large amounts of coffee. One night towards the end of this hellish stretch, I drew the short straw and had night duty. Gavin started yelling for Mommy at about 3 or 4am, I can’t remember exactly. I stumbled into his room still half asleep, and it went like this:

Me: “What’s the matter?”
Gavin: “I want a lollipop!”
Me: “Huh?”
Gavin: “I’m hungry, Mommy. I need a lollipop!”
Me: “ARGH! Gavin! It’s 3 in the morning! Go. to. sleep.”

OK, now that I’m (mostly) sleeping through the night again, it’s a lot funnier than it seemed back then.

Movies of the moment

Finally – we can watch actual movies instead of endless episodes of ‘Elmo’s World’ and ‘Blue’s Clues’! In no particular order:

1. Cinderella
2. The Land Before Time
3. Cars
4. 101 Dalmations
5. Sleeping Beauty
6. Babe
7. Finding Nemo
8. Shark Tale
9. Thumbelina
10. Aristocats
11. Lady and the Tramp

At least he’s polite!

I’m happy to report that Genevieve and Gavin are both very polite for their ages. We’ve worked very hard to make sure they always say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’….at least to others. Asking nicely for something from Mommy or Daddy is still a work in progress at this point.

Example: how Gavin would ask for juice:

Gavin: “I want juice, Mommy. Juice! Juuuuuuuuuice! JUICE MOMMY I WANT JUICE MOMMY!!!
Me: “What do you say?”
Gavin: “Pleeeeease!”

So the other night I’m putting him to bed. I tuck him into his crib with his kitty and assorted cars and trucks and I’m saying good night. It went like this:

Me: “Good night baby, I love you!”
Gavin: (looks at me)
Me: “I said, Mommy loves you, Gavin.”
Gavin: (still looking at me)
Me: “What do you say?”
Gavin: (clearly confused) “…..Please?”

 :)

 

New swimsuit

Or as Genevieve calls it, “My bathingsuit dress!”

Here’s she is primping in front of the mirror:

She saw it at Target when we were out shopping a few weeks ago and it was love at first sight. It’s now a part of the regular “dress” rotation: there’s the pink dress ‘with tape’, the cupcake dress, the ‘new’ dress, and now the ‘bathingsuit dress’..

My favorite picture ever

Genevieve’s playlist

Genevieve has loved music since she was a tiny baby. As she’s gotten older she has developed a definite taste for certain types of music and has lots of favorite songs. She knows all the words and sings along with them (and me! ) in the car. I thought it would be fun to periodically note her faves and burn a CD of them to have when she’s older.

In no particular order:

1. “1234″ by Feist (she loves the video for this song!)
2. “Liar, Liar” by A Fine Frenzy
3. “American Baby” by Dave Matthews Band
4. “Unfold” by Marié Digby (my current fave too!)
5. “Almost Lover” by A Fine Frenzy
6. “The Way I Am” by Ingrid Michaelson
7. “When You Were Young” by The Killers
8. “Hey There Delilah” by Plain White T’s
9. “Breakable” by Ingrid Michaelson

The monkey and the shark

Gavin, bless his little heart, has some pretty strange fears. The ‘monkey’, (i.e. frog) and the ’shark’ (i.e. dolphin) are bath toys that we’ve had since the kids were babies. They were part of the load of toys that got dumped into the tub for entertainment at bathtime every day. The dolphin is a little wind-up toy that swims around, and Gavin used to love it when he was a baby.

Out of the blue, he started to freak during his bath when Genevieve was playing with it. He made us take it out of the tub and hide it behind the bathroom door.  “No shark”, he kept telling us. “Shark will get you!” Shark?? Oops….maybe he wasn’t quite ready to watch ‘Finding Nemo’ and ‘Shark Tale’! Around the time he became afraid of the shark he started getting scared of the frog, which he insists is a monkey even though it says “Ribbit!” when its belly is squeezed.

At first, the monkey and the shark had to be hidden behind the bathroom door. He didn’t want us to take them to the basement (our first inclination) or throw them away. He snuck upstairs several times a day to peek behind the door to make sure they were still there. After a week or so, they moved to the linen closet where he continued to check on them daily. He gradually started to forget them…until I took the pics for this blog. He suddenly decided that the frog is a ‘good monkey’ and has started to carry him around, though if anyone makes the frog ribbit, he screams “Don’t make the sound!” and runs away. The shark is still bad. “That’s a very bad shark, Mommy. He’ll get you and bite you”, he says.

Car shoes

Gavin saw these shoes on a recent trip to Payless to find summer ‘play’ shoes. Mean mommy was going to make him put them back since they were impractical/had no support/expensive(!), but honorary aunt Nicole saved the day and bought them over her objections. For better or for worse, now they don’t leave his feet.

Side note: something about these shoes must appeal to guys in general. I’ve had at least three grown men stop us while out and about and tell me that they thought these shoes were the coolest things ever. Funny!

Big boy!

Gavin is (almost) potty trained! Yay!!

This is a huge milestone for us, folks! Having both kids out of diapers is going to be sweeeeet. We had no intention of trying to potty train Gavin until mid-summer, but he decided on his own that he was ready. In a complete reversal of anything that I’ve ever read on training boys, he is completely trained for #2, but not even close for #1. Genevieve caught on pretty quickly but he just doesn’t realize what he’s doing until, well, he’s done. Last weekend I so felt like I was cleaning up after a puppy, there were puddles everywhere.

*Edited to remove pics since some sicko keeps searching for ‘big boy undies’ and viewing this blog…ewwww. I’ll be more careful in which pictures I post from now on!*

Retro Gavin

Taken at 3 weeks old (re-edited).

 Sweet little guy! He was about three weeks old in this picture, and around that time I was finally feeling up to taking a few snaps of him during naptime, instead of conking out the second both kids were asleep.

The computer that we had when the kids were born crashed about a year ago. It contained EVERY picture I ever took from the time Genevieve was born through December 2006. The computer just shut down one day and would not start up – and I can’t even express the panic I felt when I considered the fact that every picture of my children might be lost. Thankfully, my former brother-in-law managed to fix it (thanks Jason!) and we just recently got it back. Since then, I’ve been busy backing up every single picture and enjoying looking through all of them again. My photography skills have improved since most of them were taken and it’s been fun to re-edit some of the particularly good ones. Expect to see more ‘retro’ pictures here as I rediscover them!