Viv Update

My sweet babiest girl is 9 months old! After four babies I've decided that I enjoy them a whole lot more after the six month mark, so I'm very glad we're in the funnest stage right now, babies are just so darn cute at this age!

Viv babe. She can babble a whole lot of random gibberish. She can crawl faster than Pippa can walk, she cruises around (very slowly) while holding onto things (hands, the couch, the dog) and she can stand up without assistance for a few seconds, longer if we distract her, thereby causing her to forget that she's standing. Yesterday she actually finished her dinner without falling asleep in it, a first, and she has also mastered patty cake with her siblings. The child sleeps more than all my other children ever have, but that's another post entirely.

Viv calls me Mee and Nick Dee, because Pippa has taken to whining Mummyyy and Daddyyy recently, and Viv picks up on the last syllables. She calls Pippa "Ipp-uh" with the "uh" part just an exhale, but it's an improvement on "Lip", which is what she originally called Pippa after she heard me call Pippa by her whole name. Viv has one two-syllable word down, Theo. She calls Sera "Sra" or just "Ra".

Basically, she's adorable and we are so in love with her.

Recap #70637 of the holidays

You = SO EXCITED.

These are the holidays I need to make the most of, because every child of mine who is old enough to care about Santa Claus, believes in Santa Claus. So we went all out, ashes from the chimney on the floor and all that jazz. They bought it, it was swell.

In the teens of December I went through the kids playroom and bedrooms and organized their toys. A pile for garbage, a pile for goodwill/salvation army, a pile for friends. I was able to kick out about half the toys, and it felt so good.

The kids got 6 gifts each, I believe, 1 from both sets of grandparents, 1 from me, one from Nick, one from Santa, and one from their godparents. Still, with 4 kids, one of whom will not rip her wrapping paper, and another who is 8 months old, it took us awhile to open everything. Surprisingly, no tantrums were thrown.

Nick and I were dog piled at 6am, by children who I suspect were up at 4, and we started opening gifts around 7. With a break for a proper breakfast at 8, we didn't finish unwrapping gifts until noon, at which point I fed the kids some of the test turkey I'd made a few days earlier, and mashed potatoes. Heavy stuff. They were all asleep by 1. I had a few hours to get the house cleaned up and set out the kids outfits, and when they woke up at 3 I was ready to throw them in the shower. Literally, I put the three oldest ones in my shower with the radio on, and I gave the baby a sponge bath. Because I cannot have my children running around on Christmas with turkey in their neck folds.

We put the kids in their Christmas best, threw on their pretty shoes, and put all but Viv in the playroom. Viv got to chill in her highchair for a bit as Nick and I got the dishes ready. And then I blinked and it was 4 and my house had 38 friends and relatives in it and I didn't have to watch my children because everyone else was absolutely enamoured with them.

Viv took a nap at 6, in various persons arms, and woke up at 9 ready to party. She was up until 12:45, when she fell asleep on my sleeping dad. Pippa played until 10, then attached herself to Nick, leaning on him and being affectionate and adorable in general before he gave in and took her upstairs. She fell asleep before he made it to the top step, and didn't wake up while he changed her into her pj's or put her to bed. Sera fell asleep playing Hide&Seek, we thought she was asleep in her bed until we went to turn off the lights and go upstairs after the party ended, and she rolled out from underneath the tree. Surprise! Theo walked around to everyone in the house and gave goodnight wishes before putting himself to bed at 10:20. Good boy.

As for Nick and I, we said goodnight to the last visitor at 2am, and he cleaned until 3 while I showed our overnight guests their rooms and sofas. I'm pretty sure I went to bed at 4. The kids slept until noon, except Viv, who woke up for a bottle at 8 and was entertained by my MIL until she fell asleep at 10.

Basically, Christmas 2010 rocked our socks off. And we are tired.

2011 resolutions, just to get motivated

• Blog here at least once every two weeks.
• Become a regular commenter on blogs I enjoy following.
• Take my running up a few notches. Do a 5k and a 10k.
• Lose those pesky extra pounds by V's birthday.
• Be punctual. This is a major issue.
• Go to sleep at a decent hour, no more staying up late.

On that room full of toys...

Over the holiday seasons past, the kids received a ton of plastic lights/sounds/movement toys, as usual. When someone asked us what gift they should get the kids we always said books or clothes, not toys. They have more than enough toys. But of course we still ended up with a million toys.

After last Christmas, the daughter of a friend of ours, who is the same age as Pippa, almost died and is now permanently disfigured. She was just playing in her playroom. I won't go into specifics, as it's not my story to tell, but I did some research and it ended with me going through every toy we owned and throwing out all of the plastic junk. Which left our playroom pretty bare. We had empty shelves and many books but really, no toys. So I made a new rule that goes something like No Plastic Crap That Annoys The Hell Out Of Me. That's what I told my husband and friends. To the kids this meant Nothing Fun That You Can Get At Target.

We live in an apartment, and technically the playroom is a den, and when we moved in we basically took every single toy we had and threw it in the playroom. We never decorated. But then Nick had to do some work at home once in awhile, and guests had to sleep in the kids room on bunk beds or on a blow up bed, and the kids had to sleep on the trundle bed we bought and put in our room, and it was just a mess. So when we emptied the room of all the toys and broken, or really (lovingly) ruined things, we were left with books and a select few stuffed animals. A clean slate.

The floor was generic apartment carpet, beige and scratchy to little knees and elbows (and faces) and irritating to touch and see. So we tore it out. We weren't sure whether we wanted to put in hardwood (prettier, increases value of apartment, we like it more) or better carpet (also pretty, and won't get scratched or dented like hardwood, can wipe up spills), so we waited awhile to decide on that, but we eventually went with a a dark brown hardwood that seems to be pretty kid-proof. We painted the walls white (from their previous red that came with the apartment) but then we decided to just go for it and we ended up painting the walls a rather light but still bright blue.

A relative of Nick's built us a huge built-in-but-if-we-really-wanted-to-we-could-take-it-elsewhere wallbed/table/storage system. Whew, mouthful. It is white and has three sections, and it stands opposite the door and takes up the entire wall, so when you walk into the room the opposite wall is one huge built-in system.

On one end it opens 90 degrees to reveal a desk for Nick to work from, complete with a huge markerboard for ideas (shhh, don't tell the kids they can draw on it!) and a printer, and a laptop place, and a lamp, and a place for all our papers that we need to have, being adults and all. We discovered that even though it was built for Nick, I can use it too. So it's usually mine, I pay the bills and do all our paperwork there, until Nick brings his work home. Then I go sit on the couch.

In the middle, well, there's a bed. You push a button and pull a handle and a bed folds out of the wall. We decided to go crazy and make it a california king, because sometimes our guests co-sleep with their kids, and we wanted to make it roomy. When the bed is folded up there are two choices of disguise. One is a panel with a design on it to match the rest of the cabinets. That panel usually sits in between the mattress and the bottom of the bed, because we only use it when we have company over. The other option is a neat idea Nick had while we were waiting for the panel to be finished. Nick put drywall over the panel of wood under the bed, the one that is facing the room when the bed is folded up. He painted it with chalkboard paint from floor to ceiling and now the kids can draw all over it and up top I can write rules and little messages. The "good panel" that matched the cabinets, snaps and locks into the frame of the "chalkboard". We had a little dilemma between going with chalkboard paint (dust, crumbles, possible eating by little ones) vs. dry erase paint (no dust, no crumbles, but the kids could eat those markers too, and those markers could be used to draw on other surfaces) but after much weighing of pros and cons we went with chalk because it won't colour other surfaces.

The third part is 9 shelves. The five shelves on the bottom are full of books for the kids to read, the fifth one up holds cute metal boxes of art supplies like paint things and scissors, things the kids only use when I'm in the room. The seventh and eighth shelves each hold two kids photos and two keepsake chests of little things I want them to have when they're older. The top shelf is for baby/kid books. Because I was crazy about the kids baby books and it carried on until they turned 5.

So that's how the playroom is right now. We aren't going to do anything about it over the holidays, and we're hoping to have the finishing touches on it by Valentines Day.

mind blowing, I know

It's really becoming apparent that Pippa is no longer an ickle teensy babe anymore.

I realize everyone else already knows this. Literally, everyone.

She'll be three in 2 months.

As had happened with previous births, I had Viv in April and realized ohmygoodnessholywhatever my baby is a big girl! But she hadn't changed, I had.

Now she's changed. She speaks in full sentences and the girl can argue her point just like I can. She sized up in clothes and now I get her clothes confused with Sera's often. She's potty trained herself, little miss independent, and she's all about "I do it!" "Let Pip do it!" and the, finally, "I did it!". She's stopped running away from me in public all the time, and instead of point blank drop-dead-and-kill-me-now refusing to sit in the stroller? She WANTS to sit in the stroller. Crazy girl. She gets what's going on around her and she would also like to voice her opinion pweese. But she is not interested in picking up her toys or finishing her breakfast momma, notanku.

She's not a little toddler anymore, she's this tiny little BIG GIRL. In big girl panties. She's the polar opposite of Sera, and I'm positive I'm going to have to put them on separate continents when they're teenagers if the world is to survive, but for now, she's almost 3, and she's, all of a sudden, my big girl.

Introducing the newest addition to our family:

Lightning The Hamster

En Francais

Joyeux fete, ma belle. L'amour, Mama, Daddy, Theo, Pippa, et Viv