Sometimes....

Sometimes both of your kids are in the bedroom and they're really quiet. And you know you should care about what's going on or getting ruined, but instead all you care about is that they keep it out of the living room. And stay quiet. That's today for me.

I often catch myself thinking that in seven weeks life will get easier. Then I have to stop myself and change my thinking to, "In seven weeks it will be easier to move, and the trade-off will be that life will be a LOT harder."

I remember when I thought I wasn't going to be able to go grocery shopping with two kids. I was such an amateur.

Kellan Embarasses Me...Again

As we were leaving my doctor's office today, we saw an older man in a wheel chair with his head leaning back and his jaw slack. Kellan shouted, "Mom, that man's dead!"

Let me just say, for having just seen a supposed dead man, he was pretty calm about it. You'd think he saw dead people every day. Or maybe he is just used to having to try to wake me up so I can help him go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Also, the other day I gave the boys gum after we took the sacrament. I caught Kellan just as he was cocking his arm back to throw his wadded-up gum wrapper at the bishopric. We were in the second row, so he probably would've at least made it up in the pulpit. I hope he was aiming for Jesse, but deep inside, I know he has no compunction against throwing trash at anyone.

P.S.: Every time we walk into the chapel at church, regardless of if we're sitting down before the meeting or re-entering  after a trip to the bathroom, Kellan gallops up the aisle. He manages to evade me grasp every single time.

Today I Got Stuck In The Couch

At first I panicked. Then I had Kellan bring me the phone, I called Jesse, and I couldn't stop laughing. Here's what happened:

Kellan and I were doing fun educational things. Noelle came to join us and she pushed one of the magnetic letters we were using through the cushions of the couch. This couch is going to start sounding really weird, so I should explain it's a reclining couch, so it has parts that move and gaps and stuff.

Anyways, it ended up falling on the floor underneath the couch and was sitting on top of the frame. Moving the couch wasn't going to do any good to get it out, and if I tried, the cartilage in my hips would probably tear. My solution was to recline the footrest, recline the seat back, lay on my side, scoot under the footrest, and jam my arm over a bar and through a triangle of metal. Since I still couldn't reach the letter I scooted closer. Still couldn't reach the letter. I decided it was a bad job and tried to pull my hand out, but it was firmly stuck. Like, I knew that even if I could reach my hand with my other hand, which I couldn't, lotion would in no way help. The only thing that would help would be to chop off  my hand. No doubt I would've tried it during my panic stage, but I couldn't reach it. I tried to recline the seat back more, but it wouldn't budge.

I couldn't figure out why it was so stuck when it seemed to go in fine, but then I started to freak out and try to use a lot of force and sheer panic to get it out. No luck. I called Jesse and asked him to come home and help me. (Kellan brought me a phone. He was so helpful. No doubt he'll talk about it in Primary on Sunday and make me look crazy.) After I hung up and calmed down, I realized that I had scooted forward and possibly changed the angle of my hand, so I scooted back and tried yanking it out again. Didn't work. Then I tried reclining the seat back from that angle. Yeah. Wish I had tried that before I called Jesse and scraped up my hand.

The moral of the story? Grease up your hands before jamming them into small triangles of metal.

A Connoisseur, of Sorts

Jesse and I are going to have a baby. In 12 weeks. We don't know the gender. It's a surprise. I haven't really posted about it because I'm exhausted from some deficiency of something or other. Hopefully I'll get my energy back just in time to get exhausted from newborn care.

This pregnancy I have had a lot of reservations about going places. I never thought about why that was until Jesse and I went somewhere and I was getting really crabby about something. After some quick but deep introspection I realized I was cranky because there were no comfortable chairs anywhere. The seats were too deep, the chairs too high off the floor, the seats not padded....For whatever reason, no chair even approached comfortable. I realized that this had been a problem for not only this whole pregnancy, but for every single pregnancy I have had.

The frozen yogurt place we went to this last weekend had horrible chairs: the choices were wood, or a wall bench that had a seat that wasn't deep enough to even reach my mid-thigh. That made me really angry. I can see all the chairs being too big, because I'm short. But if a chair is too small for my 5'3" frame, SOMETHING is wrong.

Honestly, I wouldn't be able to make myself to go church if I didn't, you know, have a testimony. Chairs at church are horrible. You either sit in the really deep couches in the foyer (and have your legs stick straight out in front of you because you want your back to touch the back of the couch, or you have your feet on the floor, but have to slouch and subsequently squish your belly.), or you sit in a folding chair of the hard variety, (in which case your butt slowly slides out from under you until you're folding into your belly), or you sit on the padded ones (and have to arch your lumbar area which feels like DEATH, again, to keep from folding into your belly). Why doesn't anyone respect lumbar support?

I realize not everyone has this problem. Probably if I were taller and fit more chairs it wouldn't be such an issue for me. But, because nearly every single chair I sit in feels horrible, I feel like this is some kind of conspiracy or experiment to see if anyone actually goes insane from feeling beyond miserable.

Now that I've realized why I never want to leave the house (in part--the other reason being that I never want to put on real pants), it just makes me even more unmotivated to leave. Honestly, why would I choose misery?

To Celebrate

To celebrate Jesse's being on Winter Break for a little over a week, I'm going to share what Kellan did a few weeks ago.

I was folding laundry in my room and Kellan came downstairs. He climbed up on Jesse's desk chair and started fiddling around, so I told him to get down. He said, "But, Mom, I'm doing my homework." Then he put his head in his hands and said, "This is SO HARD! I HATE THIS!"

Jesse thinks Kellan is repeating what I say when I work. I think Kellan is repeating what Jesse says when he's doing his chemistry.

Fun Times

I saw my good friend from high school today. She had a baby six months ago, and she looks great. Her baby is cute. Unfortunately Kellan has higher standards, because he told my friend that her baby was ugly, and he asked her if she was going to have another baby, because she had a "big belly."

Kellan

I'm not sure if I've mentioned how Kellan says embarrassing things in stores, but here are some of the things he's said recently:

"Mom! Look at that creepy person!" as the "creepy person" walked right next to us.

"Mom, that's a gross man!" as a woman walked by.

"Mom, wow! That man is really OLD!" The guy was probably 60 or 65.

And while he was accompanying me visiting teaching, "Mom, they do NOT pick up their clothes in the bathroom!", and at a different house, "Mom, this house is so dirty!" Both times, the people I VT heard. You would think that our house is immaculate, to hear him talk. Obviously, from the pictures below, I don't fight the losing battle that cleaning my windows is.

You can't really tell from the pic when it's small, but they have matching forehead bruises. They totally ran into each other. It was pretty funny.

And Noelle loves our cats. She will go and sit right next to them--sometimes on them--and pet them/manhandle them. They'll put up with it for a second, and then move. She'll follow right behind them, and sit next to them again. It's really cute to watch.

A deer was in the backyard eating our crabapples. The kids were thrilled to watch it.

Finally, Ian loves kindergarten. He loves his teacher, and draws pictures of her. They're not very flattering. Here's an example of  a person Ian drew. I think it's folded because he wanted to send it to Grandma Karen, but then changed his mind. She's probably sleeping better at night without it in her house.

Kellan and Ian are obsessed with finding "clubs", "knives", and "spears" when they play outside. They're always sticks. Sometimes I'll recognize what had before been a "knife" being used as a "spear." They get upset when I won't let them keep them inside.

Ian saw the jack outside and decided his Fisher Price car needed a tuneup.

First day of school!

Tour of the fire station. They LOVED it. I never knew that you could just call up and they would let you do a tour.