Hug Twice

CJ is finally learning about taking turns. Which is light years ahead of his understanding sharing. His idea of sharing is to yell “Share!” at his sister and grab things away from her. Not quite what we are aiming for.

But turns he is beginning to grasp as a concept. Except, in true three-year-old fashion, he must still control the show. How he takes turns is he assigns you a number. “I One, You Two.” Then he tells you whose turn it is by screeching a number as loud as he can.

ONE! ONE! ONE! TWO! Hey mommy, I say two. You two. TWO!

Then sometimes he throws in a three just to confuse me. And then he laughs and laughs and laughs….

It’s good to be three. It’s good to be mommy to a three, too.

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I hate morning.

I am not by any means of the imagination a morning person, and CJ takes after me in this respect. When I get him up for school, no matter how early he went to bed the night before, he is groggy and unhappy. He is excited about going to school, but he also just wants to go back to sleep. I cajole, I prod, I get him moving, and he proceeds to try and nap at the breakfast table, on the couch, and anywhere else he can find (today was the reading nook in the playroom) until the bus comes and I get him out the door.

This past week, we had two two-hour school delays due to icy weather, two days in a row. Since instead of 8:20, the bus arrives at ~10:20 when there is a two hour delay, I let CJ sleep in until he woke up (around 9:15-9:30 both days.) CJ got up in a great mood, ate his breakfast, snuggled a bit on the couch with me, and went off to school happy and content.

The first day there was a two hour delay, I was pretty cranky at how our routine was all out of whack and a little bit frustrated with the whole thing, but by the second day, I was actually looking forward to it. We all got to sleep a little later and we all seemed a little better off for it. Why is the world created for morning people? Some of us just don’t function that well too early.

I liked the two hour delay. I’m looking forward to another. Not so much looking forward to the ice that causes them though.

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On Saturday, the cable company came to our house to fix our malfunctioning On-Demand service. Well, that’s what we thought they were doing. In fact, they recently changed the On-Demand so that if you don’t subscribe to that channel, you don’t get the channel On-Demand either. Which, I will admit, is fair. Except they took away our Disney channel On-Demand and we do, in fact, subscribe to a package that includes the Disney channel. I called them originally when I couldn’t get “Little Einsteins” On-Demand to work, and I guess they couldn’t figure out over the phone that they had without telling us blocked our access to it. So they came to the house. Too bad for them. I understand that since we don’t subscribe to Noggin, we can’t get it On-Demand, but I’m still not happy about the whole Disney thing.

But they’re not budging, so oh well. I will miss On-Demand, it was the simplest way to control the amount of TV that CJ watches and avoid commercials. But, I digress.

Since they left, we succeeded in losing the remote to the cable box. We were pretty sure we had it after they left, but as time went on, we became less and less sure. Could they have taken it with them accidentally? I didn’t want to call them and look foolish but at the same time… maybe. The last clear memory I had of seeing the remote was Alexa crawling across the family room with it while I was in the kitchen making dinner (the rooms are connected). Ever since CJ figured out how to order pay-per-view movies we have kept the remote out of reach on the refrigerator, but I didn’t feel like listening to Alexa scream right that second when I took it away and my hands were dirty so I told myself I’d take it later and let her make off with it. I think that was Saturday, but I guess it could have been Friday.

I don’t remember rescuing it, so I became convinced that she hid it. Matt remained convinced that maybe the cable repairman took it out of spite for his useless service call.

To try and find it, I thoroughly cleaned the entire family room. I even arranged all the shoes on their rack and hung up all the coats in the front closet that somehow pile themselves on a chair throughout the week. Alexa crawled around my feet as I was working, and as I hung the last coat in the closet, I heard Matt say “Hey! Where’d you get that?”

And there was Alexa, sitting next to the shoe rack, chewing on the remote to the cable box.

All I can figure is that she stuck it in a shoe on Saturday while I was making dinner so she could play with it later. I knew she knew where it was.

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Yesterday we woke up to a blanket of white covering the ground. Snow! The first real snow!

And my mom-brain’s first thought was “Crud. We haven’t been boot shopping yet.”

I checked the school delays and closings and although the school district to the north of us was closed, our own was not, and we had a 2-hour delay. A snow day! Almost. CJ only goes to school in the morning, so I wasn’t sure he even had school, but the last time we had a (scheduled) two hour delay, he did indeed have school for an hour. So I let CJ sleep in, and called the school about an hour before his bus would presumably arrive, and discovered indeed, he had school for an hour and the bus would come get him. So ready we got, Matt went out to shovel (he worked from home this morning to avoid driving in the weather), and I steadfastly avoided CJ seeing the snow.

For CJ *loves* snow. He loves snow more than anyone could imagine. If he sees it, he wants to be outside touching it, playing with it, rolling in it… and he has no boots. Just sneakers that do not keep out the snow. So I wanted the bus to distract him from the snow. And it worked, for the first time CJ saw the new snow, the bus was here, and other than stepping in a snowbank to get to it, the snow was avoided.

But when he got home, it was a different story. I went out with Alexa in her snowsuit to meet the bus (Matt had long since left for work), the bus driver kindly lifted CJ over the snowbank on the curb to the sidewalk, and we headed inside. But CJ wanted to touch the snow. And play with the snow. And Alexa wanted to protest being out in the cold. Loudly and with great fervor.

So I had an idea. We could bring the snow inside! I told CJ to come inside and we would get a bowl to catch some snow. He agreed, and inside we went. I fetched a mixing bowl, and we went out on the porch and scooped up some of the snow from our front garden and brought it inside. I gave him another mixing bowl, and he got out one of his sand shovels and started moving the snow back and forth between the bowls. Alexa poked her fingers in a few times, and CJ shoveled and shoveled, back and forth. Eventually, all the snow melted, and we moved on to playing with blocks.

And later that night when he got home from work, Matt had to bring in more snow.

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Alexa came down with a nasty cold the day after she turned one year old. Being that I seem to always be a day late and a dollar short with these types of things, I hadn’t scheduled her one year old portraits until a few days after she turned one, so I cancelled them to wait out the cold. Well, one thing led to another, and I didn’t reschedule them until weeks later, and they were scheduled for today.

Of course yesterday, she started coughing and sneezing and generally leaking gallons of snot. Sigh.

But if I didn’t do them now, who knows when they would get done. So, after monitoring her this morning and deciding she was up for the jaunt, we bundled up and headed out to do her pictures. We got there and found they were running 45 minutes behind, so I buckled her into a cart (it was Walmart we went to, after all) and we strolled the aisles for a while, played some games of peek-a-boo, and purchased some baby wipes.

When it was her turn, she was radiant. She smiled, she giggled, she posed, she acted adorable and bubbly and everything one could wish for a 13 month old child dressed in a puffy red velvet christmas dress and stockings with a frilly handmade headband on her head. Walmart however had a few tricks up their sleeve for me. When I had in the past had CJ’s portraits done there, I was able to buy a CD with the proofs of the pictures on it. No more. They don’t make that available, and so I cannot email proofs to the grandparents. And I only buy the cheap “advertised special” package, so I only get copies of the very first picture. Last year we had real professional portraits done of both kids (not in the budget this year… maybe next year) so I hadn’t been to Walmart for a while and didn’t know about the changes in policy. What do I expect though - it’s Walmart. Ugh. I get what I pay for.

Oh well. Maybe we’ll find some room in the budget to order a few more once these come in. I don’t know. I do know she was adorable.

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