School Shopping

I have a *mild* obsession with office supplies. I have no idea what it stems from, but I LOVE to browse and buy anything office related. Paper, Pens, Sticky Pads, Erasers, Markers, Colors, oh my! I love it all.

As a kid, my favorite time of year was back to school shopping. Not getting new clothes and shoes, but getting all the great school supplies to fill my backpack for the first day of school. I love the smell of paper and pencils and erasers. I love to buy brand new, never written in spiral notebooks. I love sitting in class that first day and writing on brand new paper with a new pen. Gosh, I love it!

Anyway. I haven't been able to "legitimately" shop for school supplies since college... until now! Lauren starts Kindergarten this year and I am desperately hoping to pass on my love of all things stationary related to her. Tonight we went and bought her school supplies. I will say her list of what she needed was pretty bland and pretty darn specific (1 orange plastic pocket folder with brads, 1 box of Ziploc brand gallon size bags...) so I didn't get to really enjoy the experience, but it was fun to stand on the aisle and look at all the wonderful things. I think she enjoyed putting the things in the basket, but I didn't see the same gleam in her eye that I had in mine. ;) Oh well. Maybe this one strange trait of mine is better left with me.

What's That?

So Nathan has started to realize that he has boy parts. Not that he has something different than Lauren, but that there is something there at all. When we take off his diaper at night and have him walk into the bathroom for his bath, he walks bow-legged. Like he doesn't want his "parts" to touch his legs. It took me a while to figure out this was what he was doing, but I'm pretty sure that's it.

A couple of nights ago, Brian and the kids were swimming. They came in from the pool and I stripped Nathan down and took off his swim diaper, so he was naked. He started crawling with his bottom lifted in the air and trying to keep his "parts" from touching his legs. I was chuckling and told Brian what I thought he was doing. Then I asked Nathan. "What's that?" and he stopped what he was doing, looked down at it and pointed and said "Don't know." I laughed and laughed.

Attached

So, I know I have mentioned before how attached Nathan is to me. Like glued-to-my-hip attached. Ever since he was born, he has preferred me. I can remember being home on maternity leave and him sitting in his swing and me having to sit on the floor by the swing holding his hand while I ate a salad. If I moved or let go of his hand, he cried. I know I have probably made it worse by not forcing him to be more independent, but I seriously don't have the energy. He starts crying and I just think "Make it stop."

Anyway, this past week of being sick has only made it worse. I didn't think that was possible, but oh I was wrong. I stayed home from work with him Wednesday and Thursday. During that time, he sat on the couch with me the entire day. If I got up for something, he cried and followed me from room to room. By the time Brian got home, he would hide his face and scream "NO" if Brian tried to hold him. I figured, "He's sick, let him be."

But now that he is feeling better, it's the same thing. When we come home from daycare, he insists on being with me the whole night. His first choice is for me to hold him while he watches TV, but he will accept sitting in the kitchen and watching me cook dinner. But heaven forbid Brian try to play with him or distract him while I cook. He screams "No!" and "Mommy!" and latches onto my leg.

I know I will look back when he's a teenager and I'll miss this. (I tell myself that everyday.) But right now, it's sweet and exhausting. :)

One Year Later...

Wow. It's been a year since I posted anything. I don't know what happened. I had such good intentions to keep up a blog and record all the wonderful little things that happened in my day to day life. Fail.

So what's been happening? The main thing I remember from the last year? Nathan has been sick. Constantly. It started shortly after turning 1 last October. He got a little runny nose that seemed to not get better and then one night, I go into his room and see that he is really struggling to breathe. So for the last 9 months we have been to all kinds of doctors and my poor little guy has been on every kind of medicine out there. Verdict? He has Reactive Airway Disease and apparently the worst sinus passages known to man. He got tubes put in back in January and they have helped a lot with the ear infections, but not with the cough, wheezing and runny nose. As of right now, we are doing Nasonex, Singulair and Pulmicourt daily with a little Albuterol mixed in when we need it. It sucks. He is just getting over some sort of monster double ear infection and bronchitis. Yuck. I really hope we are on our way to a healthier Nathan, but I doubt it.

He completed another summer of ISR lessons. Yeah! He remembered how to float and he now has a little swim down. So fun to watch. He LOVES the pool. He will jump in from the side and swim to you. Then he wants you to let him swim to the steps to get out and do it all over again. Love it. I can't wait for next summer. I think he will have a full blown swim by then.

Lauren. Wow. She has grown up so much the last year. She starts Kindergarten this fall. :( I can't believe it. I am super excited and super sad all at the same time. She is pretty excited about it. Her daycare/pre-school did a great job of getting all the kids excited about school. The sang songs (We're going to kindergarten in the fall... set to the tune of she'll be coming 'round the mountain.) They taught them cheers and dances. All the kids are pretty excited about the fall.

She is also quite the entertainer. She has really decided that she is a fantastic singer/dancer/entertainer. She sings constantly. I'm not even kidding. All. The. Time. It would be better if she could carry a tune, but alas she inherited her mother's singing ability. That's to say she has none. She also is quite the dancer. I need to post video of this little talent, but she gets shy every time she sees me try to film her and so all my videos don't capture the true Lauren. ;)

Let's see. Oh yes. Soccer. Lauren "played" soccer this spring. I use the word play pretty loosely. We signed her up (at her insistence) but she refused to play a single game. No joke. She cried, she screamed, she laid on the ground. She made Brian stand on the field with her and hold her hand. It was awful and embarrassing. She announced after the first game: "I didn't even want to play soccer. You signed me up while I took a nap." So not true, drama queen. Anyway. It's over and we will NEVER play soccer again. Right now she wants to take swim lessons. Hmm, I seem to remember the swim debacle of 2008 when we took a Mommy and Me class and she cried through the whole class. Sigh. I'm not sure what to do. She is 2 years older and technically more mature. Maybe we'll do swim.

What else? Oh, I have been dieting since the end of January. Weight Watchers. It's been a big change for me. But, I've lost 25 pounds and 2 pants sizes. I don't know how many inches total because I was a baby at the beginning and refused to take my measurements. I only started measuring in the last 2 months and I have lost 8.5 inches in that time. Super excited. I still have 25 pounds to go, but man, I've done it this long, I can for sure do this a little longer.

SO... that's us in a year. I'm going to try to be better this year. I really want to remember these things and this seems like the best way to do it.

ISR Lessons - Week 1

We enrolled Nathan in ISR lessons last week and this past week was his first week of lessons. ISR is a group that teaches infants and toddlers how to self-rescue if they were to find themselves accidentally in a body of water. For babies under a year, they teach them how to flip onto their backs and float in the water until they can be rescued. http://www.infantswim.com/


With Nathan mobile now, I was getting more worried about him and our pool. He has a big sister that goes in and out of the back door and he could easily get outside without someone knowing. We had talked about a fence or a pool alarm or even a net over the pool, but Brian and I both know that those can easily fail. A fence can get left open, a pool alarm can be turned off and the net could be rolled back. We decided that Nathan needed to know how to save himself if he were to find himself in the pool unexpectedly. This doesn't mean we wouldn't still do one of the other three things, we are still deciding which to do.


We found a great instructor, Lenie Stroh. She works so well with Nathan. He goes Mon - Fri for 10 minute lessons. At the end of his first week, he still cries and fusses through the lesson, but he can float for several seconds by himself. I am so excited at his progress. His main issue right now, is that he kicks his feet so much that he splashes water over his face, which makes him mad. :) This video is just of the first few minutes of his lesson today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkk8EIZ1FRI

Crawling!

So Nathan will be 9 months old in a week and I honestly thought he would never crawl. I know that seems a bit dramatic, but seriously, when he is on his stomach, he screams. I am not kidding. He lays there and throws his arms and legs out and just screams. He just recently started getting up on his hands and knees/feet and rocking. And last night I witnessed him on his hands and feet and he moved his feet towards his hands, but then got stuck and just laid down and cried.

So, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that today he actually attempted to crawl. He moved his hands and feet and actually went forward a bit. He's by no means "mobile" yet, but he can at least get a toy that is out of reach. Which you would think would make him happy, and yet no. Even as I witnessed him attempting to crawl tonight, he cried through the entire procedure. He is seriously unhappy in a horizontal position.

Now, the bittersweet part. While he has finally started to crawl, I didn't see it happen. Yet again, he did a milestone in the presence of a babysitter. (He also rolled over for the first time at daycare.) I can't decide what makes me more sad, that I didn't get to see him crawl for the first time or that I know I didn't get to see him crawl.

When Lauren was a baby, she stayed at a home daycare that had been in this business for a while, so I have no doubt that Ms. Ashley witnessed many, if not all, of Lauren's firsts, but she never told me. So I have always just assumed that I got to see Lauren do everything for the first time. As for Nathan, I have been told in both cases that he preformed a milestone without me seeing it first.

I think for a lot of moms that work, there is a constant struggle with guilt over not being there. So when your baby does something momentous and you miss it, it just makes the guilt worse. I think one of the fun parts of being a parent is teaching your children. It is so fun to teach them to walk or to say their first word, and when someone else steps in and takes over that role, it is a very hard pill to swallow.

So, while I am trilled that Nathan is finally starting to crawl, I am also incredibly sad that I missed it. I hope that I get to see his first steps... or at least that his babysitter will not tell me that she saw it first.

Stress

So, I have a new job. About a month ago a job posting came up in my company for a manager position and I applied and got it. Two weeks ago was my first official day in my new position. I manage a team of web and vb.net developers at my company.

So far I have been so overwhelmed. The area that I moved to supports a bunch of systems that I have never worked with before. So, not only am I trying to get used to managing people, but I also am trying to learn several systems. It's hard. I hate not knowing what I am doing. It is so frustrating to spend my whole day not having any idea what people are talking about. I get emails all day long and most of the time I have no idea what they are talking about. Luckily the other managers on my team are fantastic and are so helpful. They are always willing to stop what they are doing and explain an email, or give advice about who should work on something or point me in the right direction for problem resolutions. My team that I manage is equally helpful. They will explain their systems to me in great detail and help me to understand what they are working on.

My days just fly by. On Tuesday, every time I looked up it was an hour later. I feel like I barely get anything accomplished during the day and I have yet to be able to leave work on time. I will be so glad when I start to settle in to my new role and things start making sense.