Weeeeee on the Wii

Tonight I Wiied for the first time at Rogers' house. I haven't played video games in a long, long time. And, of course, with the live action no sitting down rules... this was a whole new ballgame. 

I beat Rogers at tennis.

She beat me at golf. 

Then she trampled me at bowling.

Then she killed me at baseball.

Then we found the Wii fit option. I managed a 39 (which is only 7 years more than my real age -- which for a first time-ever player, I'm pretty proud of). Rogers (being a highly competitive, serious player of all games and just coming off three huge wins) was dismayed by her 62. 

So I'm pretty sure if we play again in a couple of weeks, she'll be like a 20 year old and kicking my ass in every game.

On a note, if you haven't Wiied before. I recommend not doing it around the toddlers. Perfectly appropriate and correctly used four-letter words just start flying out of your mouth, as a side effect of playing. Plus, when you're punching the daylights out of someone in the middle of a boxing tournament, you're not really watching your child. 

Curious J had been in bed a while, but I realized that I completely lost my "mommy eye" in the back of my head while I was playing. 

Either way, we played for like an hour and 30 minutes. I sweated a bit and left pretty happy to to go back and give it another go.

Seriously

Is there a rule that as soon as I clean a room a cat must throw up a hairball on it?

(You don't really have to answer that question. After 10 years of cat ownership, I know the answer. I just wanted to see if it was just me with this curse or if other pet owners had it, too.)

Riley is not exempt... he's a counter surfer, i.e. he gets up on his hind legs and pulls food off plates from the counter when we're not looking and eats them on the family room carpet. 

The Usual Suspects (They look like trouble, don't they?):

A Warm Breakfast

X-man loves breakfast. He has always loved pancakes and Morning Star veggie sausage. He loves yogurt with granola (or without), Cheerios with bananas or berries, fruit salad, mini omelettes, waffles, bacon and all the other good stuff.

We also used to take him to Le Peep a lot. The wait staff has watched him grow up from a tiny infant into a strapping toddler. We have a rule that on Saturdays and Sundays we have to be at Le Peep by 8:30 or there's no point in going. If you get there by 8:30 a.m., you have little to no wait time. It's before the 9 a.m. rush starts. And X-man can't and won't wait for a table for breakfast. Lunch, not a problem, he's good for 10-15 minutes. At dinner, you can even stretch it to 20-25 minutes... but at breakfast he wants his food and he wants it now. 

Since we're on our weekly budget, we have been eating out less (hooray). But last weekend I used up the last 1 person serving of whole wheat pancake mix and Belgian waffle mix (Mactroll prefers these to the pancakes). And I didn't replace them in this week's grocery trip, so I'll have to put them on the list for next week (with Newman's Light Balsamic Vinegar Dressing MacTroll reminds me). It also takes forever for X-man to eat sometimes. I once watched him take an hour to eat a grilled cheese sandwich in a restaurant. 

Back in January, X-man spent five days with his Aunt Karen and Uncle Mike and their three kids and three cats. Aunt Karen is an awesome cook and an incredible baker. She enjoys cooking and food. She is also a great mom role model. 

She started making something called "egg in a hole" for X-man. And he loves it. You butter a piece of bread, cut a hole in the middle of it with a cookie cutter and then put the bread and the leftover bread shape from the cookie cutter in a pan hot enough to fry an egg. Then you crack the egg in the hole and let it cook. Really easy. When we started making it for X-man, we gave him a hard yolk. Now he prefers over easy, so he can dip his little bread shape into it... and then dip his veggie sausage.

So, here's what I served X-man for breakfast this a.m. It made me feel a bit better about getting him excited to pick blueberries at Pontious Farm today, only to have to cancel due to the ugly weather in the forecast. Ahh, well. The library and his aunt Terry are awesome back-up plans. It also means I get $10 back into my weekly budget. Mmmm.... 

Out of reach

This afternoon MacTroll and I went to Target on a battery run. Well, that and he wanted to use part of his weekly budget money to buy me lunch. :-) It was very nice of him. We went with Mr. Rogers' approach and got me a relatively healthy sandwich followed by something with ice cream. So far it's worked. I've stopped being so snarky.

Anyway, we were shopping for the battery for business, but of course we swung into the Cars aisle just because I wanted to see what they have.

If you're looking for a Red with Stanley, a Guido/Luigi/Tractor set or the new set of Guido and Luigi dressed up in the funny italian race wigs for Doc and Lightning's showdown... you might want to get your butt up to Target. Because due to my budget for the week being planned out through Sunday with $1.75 left to spare. I did not have $9 to buy X-man one of these sets. 

But I figured other people should know (particularly since Red is sooo freaking hard to find) that they're there. There is, however, only ONE of each.

They were on the bottom righthand wrung. 

Hormonal meltdown

I am in a terrible mood. I don't want to do anything. But I have lots to do.

MacTroll waved his hands at me and ran up the stairs to escape. Rogers is bringing Curious J over so we can hang out. Apparently, she's in a mood too. So much so that Mr. Rogers had to run out and get her some ice cream last night so she'd be in a better mood. 

Maybe it's the heat? 

"Summer lovin' had me a blast"

Summers are always so busy and full. The great part is that they're full of fun stuff. This week already we've played at Eisner, Victory and Prairie Fields Parks. We went to see Zydeco music. We went to a birthday party. We went for a walk in Busey Woods and played at the Nature Center. We swam in the pool in the backyard and put X-man in the hot tub for the first time (while running down the rules with him and having him repeat them back to us, which we'll be doing from now until he's 18, I'm sure.). 

Tomorrow is our first day all week we won't be meeting up with friends after pre-school. Instead, I think we're going to head down to the Tolono Library to finally turn in our summer reading card. We started on day one, but due to our busy social schedule haven't had time to run down and check out books to add to our list (the requirement for the TL is that the books he gets credit for have to be checked out from TL -- not any library -- just TL). 

X-man has also become a shrewd negotiator at bedtime. :-) The rule is that after we take a bath and brush our teeth we can watch a show in Mama and Dada's room. But the show has to be one that Mama and Dada want to watch (i.e. no Bob the Builder). 

On Tuesday, X-man pointed to my laptop and said, "Bob!" 

I said I didn't want to watch Bob. He quietly thought about his options for a few minutes and then said, "Doctor! Doctor Who!"

And, I lit up like a Christmas Tree. 

X-man, like his parents, seems to already share an interest in science fiction and fantasy. He loves Doctor Who, Harold and the Purple Crayon (the books and the TV series) and the book Mars Needs Moms. He was a fan of Wall-E instantly too. He thinks rockets are cool. I'm wondering if I started him on the early years of Star Trek: Next Generation if he'd turn instant Trekkie or hold out until the big exposure to Star Wars (or eeghads Buffy!).

Either way, that stuff will have to wait until the winter. As it is, we don't really have time for too much TV. We're too busy running around outside. 

It's supposed to be 91 degrees tomorrow. So after the couple of appointments I have, I'll be out with my paint can trying to finish the east side of the fence. Then I plan on mowing the weeds in the empty lot behind us and then trimming along the south side of the fence... just in time for scattered storms on Saturday. 

I should, however, have a killer tan (i.e. sunburn) if we reach 91 degrees and sunny tomorrow.

Tonight, I got to watch my son fall asleep in my arms. He likes to look out the window as he drifts off (another something special he shares with his Mom and with Harold). He sniffs his blanket and once or twice throws his arms out like he's doing the infant falling instinct. 

Today we visited Slumberland and purchased his mattress. We're waiting for one more piece to his full bed, and then he'll be in big boy land -- except for the potty training. That's a whole challenge for 2009. :-P 

Until then, we're going to keep having fun. 

Update: 11:15 p.m. Um, WTF, there's this HUGE wind at my house right now. Like storm wind, but there's nothing on the forecast -- but it is on the radar. But here comes the rain and what sounds like tiny pieces of hail. Maybe no painting tomorrow afterall!

Shopping Shenanigans

I didn't enter this motherhood thing lightly. It took a long, long time for MacTroll and I to decide we wanted to have a baby. The 13 years prior to the X-era was spent watching people and their children.

I'd stand in line at the Target as some everyday mother tried to negotiate her way through the checkout line with a baby in the cart, a toddler running in circles, an older kid crying for a candy bar and a pre-teen pretending not to know who these people were. My heart felt bad for her. She had a tough job doing an every day thing. And when she raised her voice or grabbed ahold of her toddler's hand and kneeled down and told the kid how it was gonna be -- which lead to the time bomb going off and the kid falling apart, I looked away like I had completely invaded something intimate and personal. 

KTDID and I bit the bullet when I first moved to C-U and drove up to Schaumburg to Ikea. Before we went, we decided what we wanted. We took the box measurements from the web site and decided which car would work better. Ultimately, we decided on her Honda Civic (the choice was between the Honda or my VW Golf). We successfully navigated Ikea on a Saturday without 1) murdering each other, 2) screaming at each other or 3) watching someone's marriage fail in the checkout line. 

We successfully packed up her car with our items, but while we were doing so, we were parked next to a family driving a Suburu Outback. They had two boys around 6-8 years of age and the parents were so livid with each other they were barely talking. The car just kept filling up with bags and boxes of crap. The backseat went down and still the crap piled up against the windows. When the car was full the mother said, "You take this home and unload, the boys and I will go get lunch and wait for you to come back.

The father replied, "If I leave here, I'm NEVER coming back. Get in the car."

So the family drove away with one child sitting on the arm rest area between the two front seats and the smaller child on Mom's lap, with her seat pushed so far forward, her legs were slammed against the dashboard. 

A family member once told me a story about how if her kids threw a tantrum in a store, her husband would just walk away. He was so embarrassed by the people staring at his kid, he would just abandon his wife and leave her to take care of it. 

It feels like eavesdropping, watching these families and hearing their stories. But now that I'm a parent, I realize that when you're in the moment, you do what needs to be done -- whatever the hell that might be. And sometimes when you're pushing your shopping cart out to your car, you're smacking yourself in the forehead for not having more patience or for having manhandled your kid into the cart to get him from tearing apart a display. Most of the time, if you are the primary parent to your kids you know that 10 percent of the time your kid acts crabby, because he's a kid. He gets tired and hungry and irritable. He doesn't talk or deal with logic. He just feels and reacts. 

For example, I used to take X-man grocery shopping with me all the time. He loved it, particularly if we were at Meijer (the deli ladies there give out free cheese to the kids). Now we mostly shop at the Schnuck's because it's 6 miles closer to our house and has better produce.

But the moment we walk in, it's like running through a maze. 

Will he flip out if one of the two carts with little cars at the front aren't available for us? Will he stay in the little car, if we do get a cart? Will he be angry when we stop at the deli counter and the employees don't give out freebies? Will he toss a fit if MacTroll tries to push him in the cart (which is apparently not allowed these days)? Will he throw a fit if MacTroll wanders too far away from the cart to run to get something Looseyfur forgets? If they move the display of Cars cars near the cereal aisle and he sees them -- will he lose his mind because I won't let him look at them or buy them? 

It's so much easier to do the shopping now without him. But sometimes, I look at the cart with the kid seat filled with bread and eggs and delicate fruit instead of my sweet boy's face and I miss him. I remember when he could first sit there at 8 months, and I'd bend over the cart as I walked down the baby food and diaper aisles and kiss his head as he looked around curious about all the people and "stuff."

He'd giggle when I'd open musical cards for him (something he still enjoys now -- he thinks they're books). 

And he'd smile at all the senior citizens and babies as we cruised past.

I'm hoping one day I'll get my little errand running buddy back. After all, my eldest nephew still loves Target at nearly 13... but right now, I'm okay with going it alone to get the job done faster, so we can spend some quality time together as a family doing fun things rather than spending it miserable in a grocery store.