It's been a long time coming

It's official. I'm going on a blogger sabbatical. I just need a break. I've reached the point where I'm blogging to keep people happy rather than because I want to. It's not right. It's never what I intended this to be. I honestly haven't enjoyed blogging lately. I'll check in every now and then, but it won't be my homepage when I open up the Internet for the time being. I might post from time to time, but I will feel no obligation to post. For how long? Don't know. We'll just see how long it takes to start missing it.

Until then. . . .

The Christmas Pics

As I've said a few times lately, there's not much to see in the way of pictures. We took mostly video and I have yet to get around to messing with editing that. Honestly, could be a couple of months since it's all new to me.

Don't make me scream . . .

Tori says, "update your darn blog."

Here you go, Tori.

For the second time in less than a weeks time, Nate has had a complete meltdown over the silliest things. I'm not trying to say that things which he finds important are silly, but really neither occasion warranted a meltdown. Both consisted of 30 straight, seriously no break, minutes of crying. Hard. Sobbing. Tearful. Crying. Kleenexes required for cleanup crying. Oh my! The first time he had gotten a hold of a book he's to young for. He had actually ripped it, and I put it up in his closet and shut the door. He reopened it and stood there crying for 30 minutes without moving a millimeter. I think I eventually bribed him with a movie to get him to stop. Today was even more ridiculous. He woke up from his nap, and I put his jeans on him. (He can't wear pants at nap because we go through too many pairs that way due to leaky diapers. Brand of diaper doesn't make a difference either. If my son could attach himself to the faucet and continually drink, he would!) The meltdown began. Here we go again. I really didn't think I should take the pants off. He needed to wear more than a t-shirt especially because it's winter. I stood my ground, and he kept crying. I tried cuddling him; he pushed away. I tried giving him a drink; he'd never refuse that. Wrong. It got chucked across the room; yes, we have attitude when upset. I tried turning on the TV; not interested. A book; no, those are all over the living room floor now. Finally I just walked away for a while. I came back after about 10 minutes with Kleenex in hand and an offer of snack. It worked. Kinda. He's still fussy and still throwing his cup, but at least it's not continually screaming.

Terrible twos here we come?????

rodger that houston

It's amazing how guilty I feel when I don't get around to blogging. I've really been quite busy since getting back in town, and blogging just wasn't at the top of my to do list. Now that the Christmas tree is down and there are just a few lingering decorations, I feel much better about sitting down to blog.



I know I still need to blog about our Christmas, but that's not happening yet. I took very few pictures since we were given a video camera and I still haven't messed with getting it onto the computer to edit. I will get back to it.



I'll go ahead to share about our trip to Houston. The best thing you can do when you're sick of another cold and windy midwest winter is fly to Houston. Although it was 32 when we got there, that was quickly gone. Most of the time we were there it was in the 70s and quite humid. I'll take the humidity if it means warm weather (I grew up in the south, I can handle it). Our first few days were spent at the JW Marriott across from the Galleria. Brad attended a conference and Nate and I enjoyed time together. The Galleria seemed 10x bigger than our Galleria in St. Louis. They had a ton of kids shops I'd never heard of before. It was a good thing Christmas bills were on my mind otherwise, I might have spent a lot of money. We got together with the Lytles each evening when Brad was done. After the conference was over, we stayed a couple of days at their house to enjoy more time with them. We spent an afternoon at Nasa, which was different from how I remembered it as a kid. It was hard to do too much since we were dealing with 3 nap schedules. Our last day there, we drove out to an outlet mall and did some more shopping. I'm sure there was a ton more that Houston had to offer for site seeing, but we really enjoyed getting to catch up with Aaron and Sara. Nate was a trooper, but we realized a day into being there, he was ready for some normalcy of being home.



We have no trips planned for the coming months. It's kind of nice to know we just get to be home.



I took quite a few pictures, but for some reason, most turned out blurry. I'll share a few that I do have:

Did you know Mom will let you jump and rough house as much as you want on a hotel bed?

A bit of friendly competition never hurt anyone.

Nate, Bri, and Zach really enjoyed playing around the inside of the space shuttle. (If only they hadn't covered all the switches and dials.)

Seeing the real shuttle on it's side, is one of the things I remember from being a kid. I was a bit thrown off at first because they did a huge preservation effort and it now has a huge metal building around it. (Still just as impressive though.)

Nate absolutely loved playing with Bri and Zach. I think the best part was watching how he interacted differently with both of them since he was between them age-wise.

Sleepy Head

About 36 hours after getting home from a week in LR, it was off we go again. This time it was to Houston by plane. We got home about 1:00 this morning. Needless to say, I am really tired and ready to crash right now. I will do updates on both our trips along with some pictures, hopefully tomorrow, but don't hold your breath. I will get to it soon though. I have no intention of leaving the house to even get the mail for a few days. I just want to be home!

Here is something to hold you over until I get around to the next post.

Nate has always been the easiest child to put to bed. He has no interest in a long and complicated bedtime routine. We get him dressed in pjs, walk over to the crib, pray, kiss, and lie him down. It so easy. Tonight I told him we were going to pray, and he immediately closed his eyes. We've never asked him to do this, but he must have realized that Brad and I close our eyes when we pray. A friend pointed out that he does it at mealtime prayer also now. (I didn't know this because my eyes are always closed.) Too cute! He also is always so anxious to get to bed, he is usually leaning in to give kisses about halfway through Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. By "amen" he's leaning over the edge of the crib trying to wriggle out of our arms. We never hear a peep from him once we close his door. I hope it stays this easy when we transition him to a regular bed in April for his 2nd birthday.

Happy New Year!

We are just getting settled in after a week with my family in Little Rock. Hopefully I'll have time to post about our trip after getting some work done around the house tomorrow.