john's mom works

i forgot to mention last week that i published another article on yahoo. this one's actually about john, so you might enjoy reading it. bad mommy: how my 3 year old became an ipad junkie.

my little benefactor counts his dollars. from time to time, when john gets a case of the "i wants" -- you know the drill, "i want to go outside. but i WANT to. i WANT to go outside." -- i have a stock answer for him. i will say, in my most empathetic voice, "my love, mommy wants a million dollars but we can't always get what we want. i'm sorry." this morning's case of i wants wasn't too bad, and it passed with barely a blip in my brain. within moments it was in the past and soon forgotten. or so i thought. when john woke up from his nap, he was in a particularly cuddly mood. nana and jean jean and daddy were all at the store (nana and jean jean drove down from tennessee to visit this weekend) so it was just me and the bug, and we snuggled in his chair for some time. then his eyes lit up. he looked at me with big bright serious baby blues and said, "mommy, you want a million dollars?" i said, smiling, "w...

chocolate face? check. good music? check. sleeeeeeep eyes? check. today was one of those days that just felt like summer vacation. it could be because it was over 90 degrees for probably the first time this year.  but i prefer to think it is because of what an awesome family hanging-out day we had. we were up pretty early, but it was a snuggling kind of morning (my favorite kind) and my husband made us a delicious breakfast. eventually, we made it out to a local produce market that was having a "louisiana food festival" and tasted all sorts of delicious goodies (including the fudge that is smeared all over john's face in the picture above). there was a band playing great music, and john and i just sat and enjoyed it while my husband made our produce purchases. it was hot as blazes, so we stopped for a snowball on the way out. it was john's first-ever snowball, which is no major surprise, but somehow my husband had never had one either. (i know,...

just chillin' on the trike. i wouldn't be a self-respecting mother if i didn't do a little blog entry about mother's day weekend, right? that's what the latest polling shows! so here it is, the requisite mother's day blog. one of the coolest parts of the weekend was that it started so early - and that that's going to be the new normal for me at my new job. leaving the office at 11am on a friday felt like cheating. i felt like i was playing hooky all afternoon. i think i'll get used to the feeling pretty quick, but in the meantime, it's a little odd!  but my husband and i took advantage of the time since he's off by noon on fridays too. we went out for a celebratory new-job lunch and then we took naps. it was wonderful. then we went and got john, who wanted to ride his tricycle in the driveway - or more accurately, to sit on his tricycle in the driveway and talk to mommy and daddy, but that was fun too. after some hard playing ...

i'm a monster, coming to get you, mommy! we're adjusting to a whole new routine at our house -- or, if i'm honest, we're figuring out what the new routine is and then how we're going to adjust it. my new job requires me to start my day at 7am. that means i have to be up at 5 to have time to get ready, eat breakfast, get john up at 6, and drop him at the daycare at 6:30am when they open. (on the plus side, on fridays i am done with work at 11. so i am currently sitting on my couch listening to birds tweet and considering a nap. so the tradeoff is a good one, i think!) what that means for our family, though, is some major adjustments. john will be waking up a full hour earlier than normal. (tho he does often wake up earlier anyway, so hopefully he will be ok!) it might actually be harder for me - i'm truly not a natural morning person, and will probably have to start going to bed earlier to have any hope of being a functioning human being at 5am. th...

how did my first baby get to be this big? you might have seen our "announcement" earlier -- that this baby i'm baking right now is another little boy! we've actually known for a little while. when we got the blood tests back that told us about the blood type, the dna also said it was a boy. but we sort of just wanted a visual confirmation before we made it public ... and this morning, we got that confirmation at the specialist's office. a boy! a little brother for john. two boy puppies chasing us around the house in not to many years. i'll be outnumbered, for sure. even our dog is a boy. but you know what? i couldn't be happier. a house full of boys just makes my day. (not to mention the relief i know my husband feels -- he was sweating the possibility of a daughter to protect!) so my mom-in-law will have two pair: two sweet little girls from my husband's brother and his wife, and two dirty stinky boys from our family. and we'll have ...