Snow

I woke up yesterday to it snowing. I hurried and got the kids dressed, all excited to see Marcus' eyes light up to the falling white stuff only to be disappointed to find it had stopped snowing by the time we got out there. There wasn't much snow at all, just a light frosting and it quickly melted when the sun came up. I, of course, took some pics of Jamie's first snow. We were out at like 8 in the morning so it was around 30*.




On another note, I think Marcus is finally starting to get to that point where he forgets what it was like before Jamesen was around. I've been told it takes about 6 months for that to happen. He's finally starting to interact with Jamesen a bit more. He'll climb into the pack n play and "play" [aka, steal all his toys] with him. He brought his doodle pad over so Jamesen could see him draw. I turned on Nemo and he pushed the pack n play, with Jamesen in it, nearer to the tv and then climbed in there with him.

I've got a friend who's little boy is a couple weeks older than Marcus and her little girl is about a month older than Jamesen. I follow her blog and she's constantly putting up pictures of her little man snuggling the baby and it makes me jealous that Marcus doesn't do the same thing, lol! I know I get some cute pics and things, but most of the time it's me forcing Marcus to sit still and trying desperately to get him to quite screaming just for one pic before his crying makes Jamie start crying. Oi!

I can't wait till they're a bit older and best friends. It'll be so cute.

Temptations

So last night I wrapped our mountain of presents. We got all of our nieces and nephews presents this year because we have the money, unlike every other Christmas we've been together. In total we have 12 nieces and nephew with 3 foster nieces. LOTS of presents! I also got some for my neighbors girls and another friend's little girl.

Marcus of course HAD to help me. It was actually really cute. I would hand him the tape and point where I wanted him to put it. He would then point to where I pointed and blabber some nonsensical thing and then very carefully place the tape right where I told him to. I would then fill out the to and from sticker and hand it to him and he'd carefully place it on the present followed by the bow.

He got ahead of me one time and pulled the entire sticky thing off the bow. I don't think he realized that when I was pulling something off the bow, it was the cover to the sticky part so he just ripped the entire thing off. Maybe he did know, I'm not sure, because I was busy cutting and heard this rip.

Oh and before I forget, as we speak Marcus is trying to stick Jamesen's stocking onto his foot! heehee

Anyways, so in the middle of wrapping was bath time and off he went to bed. This morning you should have seen his face when he saw all the presents! Of course he went straight for them and I had to yell angrily at him as he reached for one, ready to rip the thing to shreds. My friend came over and I gave her Becca's present. She put it on the floor with Becca's coat over top of it. Of course Marcus found it and of course he ripped it open. *rolls eyes*

I can't wait for Christmas though. It's going to be so much fun spending it with Frank and Dorothy [and of course Kahlan]. I'll make sure to take tons of pics! :)

What are the odds?

Honestly, what are the odds of having two very active kids in a row as your first two kids? If you know Marcus, you know he's very active. The kid can literally climb anything he sets his mind to and never stops moving. Even if he's into a movie or a tv show or something he's constantly changing positions on the couch. The only time he just sits and chills is when he's tired and that rarely happens now days.

When Jamesen was in utero, he kicked ten times more often than Marcus. I saw that as a sign but tried to ignore it seeing as how I desperately wanted the opposite to be true. When Jamesen started sitting right on cue with how Marcus did I saw it as a sign but chose to ignore it then too.

I can not ignore it any longer. Jamesen has been doing push ups for about a month now, about 2 months earlier than Marcus started. He's starting to get up on his hands and knees. Again, 2ish month earlier than Marcus. Today he fell over and wasn't quite laying all the way down as the pack n play wall caught him. He pulled himself back up into a sitting position for being almost in a laying down position. I don't remember when Marcus started being able to get himself into a sitting position on his own but I KNOW it wasn't this early.

I'm trying really hard not to be scared at this point. Marcus is a HUGE handful. I'm constantly pulling dangerous stuff away from him, pulling him down from things he's climbed on, etc. How am I going to do it with two? What if I'm so busy paying attention to one that I don't realize the other is doing something and they get seriously injured?

Sabe and his brothers were constantly getting injured growing up for that reason right there. To be honest, I'm really unhappy about Jamesen moving so fast. At this point, I would rather have a kid that doesn't sit until they're 9 months, walk until they're 18 mo, etc. If I go by the 2ish month ahead of Marcus pattern, Jamesen will be walking by 8 and a half months. All I can do is pray that he's strong, but calm [unlike Marcus who is very NOT calm, lol].

*sigh*

Marcus is giving up his naps and it's depressing me. He's not quite at the point where he can go a whole day without napping even though he thinks he can, so he gets super cranky and irritable and cries at you looking at him wrong by the end of the day. It's really quite tiring. It's ok for now since Sabe is home, but come January when Sabe picks up a new cycle, I won't be too happy with that.

He's being really trying lately because of it. As I've stated before, when he doesn't sleep, he doesn't sleep. So this whole not napping thing is taking a toll on his overnight sleeping making him irritable to begin with. Dealing with a cranky toddler who keeps waking up the baby and making him tired and irritable isn't a fun situation. I have to keep reminding myself that yes, Marcus is extremely irritating right now and I wish this stage would hurry and he'd grow up faster so I can move past this, but once he DOES grow up I'm going to look back and wish he hadn't grown so fast. Instead of looking at the irritating things Marcus does, I've been trying to look at the cute things he's doing at this age and cherishing it. It's been making my patience level higher and it drains less now.

Though, my house is trashed. I've seriously gotten to the point where I think to myself "Sit and relax or... spend the next half hour to an hour cleaning up all of his toys only to have him trash it in MAX ten minutes when he wakes up. ... Sit and relax it is!"

I started a new photography blog if you guys wanna follow my journey to professional photographer on there. It's http://adriennelabarephotography.blogspot.com/

Follow up on the spider bite and such

We switched pedis. First off, Jamesen has a bump on his head where his soft spot is and when I took him in for his 4 month they didn't look in his ears, check and make sure he followed stuff with his eyes or even touch his head. And then the dr in the ER being a complete idiot... Yeah we switched.

My neighbor suggested Dr. Saifullah so off we went to him. The biggest thing that impressed me with Dr. S. is that he was so patient with Marcus who was climbing ALL over him. He didn't act like he was in a hurry to rush me out of there and get to the next kid and he listened to me. Reminded me of Marcus' pedi back in Utah.

The spider bite is looking good. The redness and swelling has gone down considerably so we're good on that aspect. The main reason for the visit was the bump on Jamesen's head. THANK GOODNESS it wasn't what I thought it was. I thought his soft spot was closing early and he was going to need surgery. Dr. S. said his soft spot looks just fine. It's on the small side, but plenty of kids have soft spots that size and it perfectly normal.

He did make a "WTHeck?" face when he saw the bump on Jamesen's head though. He's referring us to a neurologist to make sure nothings wrong. He says it's a vein running over top of it and doesn't think we should worry but wants to make sure since it's raised and "in a weird spot".

A funny though, 3 months ago at Marcus' 2 year appointment he weight 26 lbs. He now weighs almost 28. A month ago at Jamsen's 4 month appointment he weighed just over 16 lbs. Today he was close to 18 and a half lbs! Marcus was 18 lbs when he was like 10 months! It's crazy how kids can be so different even when they come from the same family!

I HATE spiders!!

So we got up this morning and Sabe asks me if I had seen the thing on Marcus' thumb. I had no idea what he was talking about so he brought Marcus over to me and there's a bite on his thumb. It looks exactly like how my bite started out. We took him to the hospital to get some antibiotics in hopes that they'll help even though they didn't help me. We had our visiting teachers come and give him a blessing too. It seriously makes me sick thinking about him going through what I went through. I'm praying my heart out that his gets better without any incident.

The Dr. that saw him at the hospital was a real piece of work. This is how the conversation went:

"I got a bite a month ago and the scab only just fell off yesterday so when we saw this on his thumb we really didn't want to take any chances and wait to come in. It looks just like my bite did at the beginning."

"Are you sure it was a bite?"

"Yeah it was a bite with a staff infection on top of it. They thought it was just the staff but then when it started to heal it did what spiders bite do when they heal."

"Have you seen any spiders?"

"Yeah we've had one brown recluse and a bunch of other large spiders."

"But nobody else has been bitten right?"

"Ummm... other than me?"

"Well it's probably just a staff infection. It's VERY rare, like on in a million, that you have to come back and have a surgeon cut it open."

"Well that's what they had to do to me!"

"Are you sure yours was a spider bite?"

I wanted to bang my head against the wall. I knew they wouldn't do anything but give us antibiotics but I'll do anything to keep Marcus from having to go through what I did! If you're the praying type please pray for him!

Family Pictures

Do you know how frustrating it is to take family pics with a tripod? You're very limited with how you pose and then you have to hope that everyone is not only looking, but looking nicely when the camera flashes. Luckily, Marcus thought the flashing red light was funny and there was long enough time in between flashes for Marcus to clap and say, "Yayyyyyy!!!" Well, you can see in these consecutive pics:






All the good ones have someone cut off! SO so so frustrating! So I spent the next hour and a half fixing the last one. I pieced a couple of the other pics together to kind of shift it over to the right a bit.