December (pictures caught up!)

Here we go, December, minus Christmas.

We decorated for Christmas, had the pre-school Christmas program (where Gramps was Santa Claus again this year), wrote Jacey’s first-ever letter to Santa, and went to Bonham on my birthday for family Christmas where Santa Claus himself showed up with presents for all the kids.

Jacey was proud of the present she wrapped for me. And- you can see our homemade countdown calendar behind us!

The best present under the tree! We have a similar shot of Jacey from just last year!

She had to lay down to get the ornaments on the bottom branches. I’m not really sure why.

All done with the tree and showing off.

Rylan, not too sure about this Santa Claus…

Thinking maybe he’s okay…

Hey, I know you! Okay, you’re awesome.

When I went back to help her write her letter to Santa, this is how I found her. Ready!

I wrote, she drew. Rylan “helped.”

Doesn’t it look like he’s really writing?

Bad hair day!

Decorating cookies at Nunu’s house

Family

One little boy, one big mess of presents. (They all started out under the tree.)

The kids, Kellen, and Uncle Bill went on a “quilt ride,” because it was just more comfy than a hay ride!

Ryan Kate, Kellen’s cousin, who was my didn’t-make-it-down-the-aisle flower girl!

Uncle Bill and the boys

Cousin Jennifer holding a sleepy boy! He didn’t make it to the end of the quilt ride.

Utter surprise that he was there

Jacey got her present… but she was a little nervous. This is the best smile she could give us!

Look at the complete shock on his face that Daddy is giving him to this man.

Aaaand crying. He was wailing, but this is the best picture I got.

Jacey loved the Pillow Pet she got from the aunts and uncles and cousins so much that she plopped right down on the concrete floor with it.

And Rylan loved his piano, too!

Chick-fil-OUCH

All right. So I know two trips to Chick-fil-A in one week (remember this?) is a lot, but the first one was because I’m so tired because Rylan has been waking up twice every night (slept straight through til 5 am last night, though!) that I couldn’t entertain my children without naptime and Jacey has been phasing out naps, and then today we went because I’m going to start baby-sitting next week (more about that later) and I wanted to make the most of only having two kids and being able to get out and about.

[Insert huge breath in here.] That was quite the run-on sentence. Moving on.

On Fridays, the Chick-fil-A near my grandparents’ house has a preschool play-house thing where, from 9:30 to 11, they have crafts and songs and stories and Play-Doh playtime for little kids. So, after speech today, we headed off to do that. Jacey painted pictures (the paint glows when light shines through it, so we’ll be taping the one we kept on our window) and made a bracelet out of “beads” made by cutting colored straws into small pieces. She had some breakfast, then she went to play.

You know what’s so un-funny about this? I was part of a conversation just two days ago on Facebook about those annoying moms who don’t sit in the play area and watch their kids at Chick-fil-A and McDonalds, where I told the people, “Hey, guess what, I’m one of those moms. I check on her every few minutes, but I don’t sit there and watch her the entire time she plays, and she’s fine!”

Haha, Universe. Very funny.

I checked on Jacey, then went back to sipping my sweet tea and watching Rylan eat. Two minutes later, I glanced back again–and saw Jacey standing up, her hands going to her mouth, and wailing. Clearly, screaming and crying. Two other moms in the play area were on their way to her.

I ran. I left Rylan at the table and ran to the play place.

I saw the blood before I even picked her up.

She had face-planted on the lowest step of the play structure. The first thing I could tell was that her top gums were bleeding.

I went back to the table and mopped up what blood I could with napkins, occasionally having her spit. I touched her teeth… one wiggled. Clearly, I needed to take her to the bathroom to help her rinse her mouth out, but I couldn’t manage to take her and Rylan together, and there was nobody in the restaurant that I knew to watch Rylan.

But thank goodness my grandparents were close. I called them, and they headed up immediately. In the meantime, some nice strangers got us a bag of ice and I made several calls to Kellen.

And I discovered that some of the “dried” blood I was wiping off Jacey’s lip… kept coming back.

One of her teeth actually punctured her bottom lip.

Poor baby!

So here’s the damage: her top, front, left tooth is a little bit loose. Her gums are pretty purple. Her top lip is a little bit swollen. Her bottom lip is really swollen on the right side. There’s a small line where her tooth went all the way through her lip. The inside of her bottom lip has at least three cuts from separate teeth.

Daddy came home from work to help me figure out what we needed to do. After calls to the doctor, multiple dentists (apparently some dentists don’t work on Fridays?), friends for referrals (if you missed a call from me… I was wondering who your pediatric dentist is!), and my sister-the-almost-doctor, we decided to just keep an eye on her. The cut on her lip is so small and she’s so young that we figure it’ll heal pretty well by itself and shouldn’t scar. Her tooth, the dentist said to just keep an eye on and come in if it gets gray.

She looks pitiful, and she’ll be sore for a while–I ran to the store for yogurt, pudding, and applesauce to help her get through meals for the next few days–but she’s okay. She was really brave, letting us touch her mouth to check her out and holding the ice on her lip.

And I’m pretty proud of how I handled it. Within three minutes of it happening, I got a call from Jenny, a friend of mine from high school. She just had a baby and we’d been playing phone tag. I answered because I didn’t want to miss her again, and anyway I had literally just picked up the phone to call Kellen. When we actually got to talk later in the day, Jenny said she was surprised at how calm I sounded. “Well, yeah,” I said. “I had to stay calm for Jacey, or she’d get scared.”

“Talking to you, I thought it was no big deal, but your voice didn’t match up with the words you were saying,” she told me. “Something didn’t jive.”

Whew. I’m glad I sounded calm. I was a little shaky later, but I knew, at the moment, that I had to stay calm and just handle the situation.

I know, having a boy, I can expect to spend lots of time at the emergency room, and learn when bumps and cuts look doctor-worthy and when they’re no big deal. But when my oldest is just three, and she’s a careful little girl, seeing that much blood is scary!

Anyway, we’re okay. We made it through our first frightening-injury-in-public situation.

And now you have an explanation for Jacey’s fat lip(s) next time you see her.

November (picture catch-up 10)

In November, Jacey Dae got her first hair cut. Rylan got his hair cut the same day… well, a little bit. The hair that never fell out when he was a newborn was down into his eyes, so he had two long bits of bangs that they cut for us. Jacey was excited but nervous about the hair cut. She asked if it would hurt, and then she wanted to hold my hand. She was very solemn–but she was so excited when it was over! She loved showing it off to everyone else.

Rylan got really mobile that month. It was the beginning of the go-everywhere-get-into-everything phase–especially because he realized he could pull up.

We went to Bonham for Thanksgiving and started off the Christmas season the next day. On our way home, we met my family at Santa’s Wonderland in College Station, where they’ve got Santa Claus and his village and millions of Christmas lights you can drive through (boring) or take a hay ride to see (fun!).

So here you go…

Look how long her hair was!

Ready to go!

She was so nervous!

Holding Mama’s hand

Rylan crawled into the laundry basket all by himself. He was very pleased with himself.

See the stuff on the floor? Evidence of the new pull-up ability!

Happy with Papaw

Beginning a new tradition! The Elf on the Shelf.

Jacey, happy to push her brother in her swing.

At Santa’s Wonderland

On the hay ride

Jacey LOVED the lights.

Like father, like daughter

She is loved!

October (picture catch-up 9)

Aren’t you proud of me for keeping up with this picture catch-up thing? I am.

Along with the pictures of Jacey’s birthday, pictures from September are nowhere to be found. (Not true. I’ve only looked on my own computer. They could very well be on Kellen’s computer or the external hard drive. I’m just too lazy to check there.) So here are pictures from October, which translates to: Halloween pictures.

As long as I have control over my kids’ Halloween costumes, they’ll go together. So this year, I let Jacey pick a costume from a book of patterns, and she chose Little Bo Peep. Rylan was going to be a lamb, either with blue insides of his ears, or as a black sheep–but Daddy vetoed that idea. Apparently sheep, even black ones, aren’t manly enough. So instead, we used the same costume and laboriously convinced Jacey that it could be for Little Miss Muffett instead, and Rylan was a spider. SO CUTE!!

Jacey got to dress up for her preschool Halloween party (she used a spider candy bucket), and she and Rylan both dressed up for Zoo Boo and trick-or-treating (I made her a candy bucket that looked like a bowl of curds and whey). We did Zoo Boo with a family from church–Ben is a year younger than Jacey–and we trick-or-treated with a bunch of families from church. I think there were 30 kids there. Jacey was a little slow following the big kids around, so that she sometimes had to skip houses and have her daddy pick her up and run her after the other kids, but she still had a great time.

Ready to go to preschool!

I made his costume. The extra legs are men’s socks!

I decorated the stroller. Rylan’s part was a spider web; Jacey’s was a tuffet.

The candy bucket. The curds were q-tip heads.

Decorating the little pumpkin at the pumpkin patch in the zoo.

Don’t know what this face was about, but it was cute!

It got too chilly for his spider costume, so we put on his Spiderman hoodie. Still on theme!

It’s out of focus, but I love the expression on her face!

I love that toothy grin!

Look at that spider crawling across the floor!

All done with trick-or-treating!

Mama bear

I have been very blessed in my life as a mother. My kids are easy to take care of and easy to discipline. They have been healthy and un-injured, never in pain beyond what a round of antibiotics or a Band-aid could cure. So I know I’m looking at this from a pretty limited point of view, but I have no hesitation when I say–the hardest part of parenting I’ve found so far, is watching your child not be accepted for who she is.

We went to Chick-fil-A today for Jacey to play while Rylan watched and screamed at her through the window and I drank tea. At 1:00 on a school day, the play place is pretty empty. There were only two other girls there. They were probably five or so–I heard their moms say something about “they’ll never want to go to school if they know this is what we do during the day!”– and they were clearly good friends.

From the outside, I suppose it’s easy to understand why those girls wouldn’t want to play with Jacey Dae. They were having a good time together, and then here comes this little girl who they don’t know, who is obviously younger than they are, who talks funny.

But. As Jacey’s mama, it’s hard to watch her want so desperately to play, and watch them reject her. I sat out there and watched her follow them around the play place, trying to play with them, talking to them, trying to do what they did. As girls do, the big girls joined together to display a united front against the new kid. They stood together, facing Jacey, not letting her into their group. They climbed up on the window sill and didn’t leave room for Jacey to get up there with them. (Never mind that I would’ve told her to get down, and those girls did get in trouble from their moms later for getting up there.) They climbed up on top of the slide, where there was barely room for one, much less two, and definitely not three.

I wanted so badly to get in there and make those girls be nice to my girl. To go tell them that they were being mean and they needed to play with the little girl. It’s what I would tell my daughter if there were some other little girl in there. I even thought about pointing out the situation to their moms.

I know, though, that Jacey needs to learn how to deal with these things herself. She needs to know how to handle mean girls and rejection. I can’t always jump in and protect her from everybody, everywhere, always.

But it was heartbreaking when she came out and told me, “Those girls won’t play with me because they said I’m a stranger. I wanted to play with them!”

And later, when she came out and said, “The girl in the pink dress is mean, but the girl with the purple flowers is nice.” And then to watch the “nice” girl tell Jacey she didn’t want to play with her.

Of course, I looked to use this as one of those ever-present teachable moments. I told Jacey that it’s not nice to call one of the girls mean. And also, I said, we should be nice to everyone, even people who we think are mean.

Later, when I went into the play place to let Rylan crawl around, one of the girls was in there, and Jacey told me, “That’s the mean one.” I told her again that it wasn’t nice to call her mean,  and Jacey said, “But I don’t know her name!” With a prompt, she asked the girl her name. And she answered. Then her friend came back in.

“What’s your name?” Jacey asked her.

“I’m not going to tell you,” she said. Then, to her friend, “Don’t tell her.” This is the “nice” one, remember.

Finally, since I was right there, I intervened. “That’s not very nice,” I told her.

“But I don’t know her name,” she told me.

“She’d tell you if you asked,” I replied. (Incidentally, Jacey wasn’t really hurt by all this, just confused. At that point, she told me, “I’m Jacey, but she doesn’t know that.”)

The girl paused, thinking of another excuse. Finally, she said what I think was the main reason the girls weren’t being very welcoming of Jacey Dae. “She kind of talks English.”

And I was really mad at this girl. Even though I think she was too young to know how hurtful that could be.

“She has some problems with talking,” I told her. “She has to go to speech class to learn how to talk well.”

And Jacey said, “But I did learn how to talk!” and then, to that girl, she said, “I can talk well,” which is said just with a funny little accent and with a “d” for the “c” in “can.” It was totally understandable, though.

The girl just looked at us like we were aliens.

We left shortly after that, and had a Jacey-initiated conversation on the way home about what it is to be mean and why we should be nice to people who are mean. And the whole time I was telling her how to be nice, I knew that I desperately wanted to be mean to those little girls for being mean to my girl.

I was irrationally mad at those five-year-olds for shutting out my child, and I was mad at the moms for sitting there and talking and not even noticing that their girls were rejecting another girl. And for not teaching them to be nice to other kids to start with (even though they very well may have; it just takes a while for lessons like that to become second nature to kids).

I wanted to jump in and do anything I could to protect my baby. That mama bear instinct is a hard one to tame.

While I have realized in the past that Jacey didn’t make friends as easily as she could thanks to her speech, today was the first time I actually saw her speech impediment as a real disability and what can go along with that.

It hurts to see.

I’m so thankful that she has some friends at church who are beginning to be able to understand her, and that those kids are much more understanding of her speech issues. So thank you, church mamas, for teaching your kids how to be nice–for real.

And watch out, world, for this mama bear.

August (picture catch-up 8)

This is where some pictures have gotten misplaced, because this is August–the month my girl turned 3, and we had a big party–and I have no birthday pictures.

Oh, well. Here are the ones I DO have.

She picked out all her clothes and accessories by herself.

Story time at bedtime. Rylan loves to join in!

Naptime.

When he saw Mama- the “grin-and-duck.”

Playing in Mimi and Gramps’ back yard

Spraying the spectators on the patio!

Gramps was making it rain!

Rylan watching big sister playing… he wants to join!

July (picture catch-up 7)

In July, we went to Bonham for the Fourth. Jacey was a little scared of the fireworks, but also excited. When Rylan was about 4 1/2 months old, he started eating “solids,” which was baby cereal mixed with breastmilk. He was a fan.

Independence!

A spark got too close, and then she only wanted to do the sparklers with help. I love this picture of us!

Daddy’s turn

Outgrowing his cradle!

Jacey sharing her Busy Bible with Rylan.

Rylan learned to sit up!

Baby’s first cereal

This is what he looked like when he finished the bowl.

It’s messy work, learning how to eat!

I don’t even know what to title this.

There are things that every mother goes through with their kids. And by things, I mean mistakes the kids make and the mother has to clean up. Like, pooping in the bathtub. (Been there, done that.) And throwing up in bed. (Likewise.) And cutting a doll’s hair. Or their sibling’s hair. Or their own hair. (Please let me skip this one.)

I’m okay with going through these things. They are to be expected. They are not the end of the world.

But to go through two of them in less than 24 hours? I think that’s just a bit much.

On Monday, I took the rest of a gift card I’d gotten at Christmas and went to Mardel’s to buy a new Bible. Kellen stayed home with a sleeping Rylan and a happily coloring Jacey Dae. I took my time, knowing the kids were happy, and then I got this text message: “She colored on the wall…” And that was it. What?!

Jacey has a little table that sits in the dining room. She was coloring in a coloring book on it. With markers. There were three different colors of marker on the wall next to the table. We can’t figure out for sure if it was on purpose or not… she told Kellen she knew she did it, and she got a time out, but she told me the next day it was an accident. We’re confused, because it was a lot of coloring to have been an accident, but it didn’t really seem purposeful, either…

Anyway, I worked on cleaning that off yesterday. (Turns out, two of the colors are a lot harder to get off than the third. Sigh.) Then, after naptime, I decided to paint Jacey’s fingernails with the real nail polish she got in her stocking from Nunu. She headed back to the “play area” (the portion of our living room that is blocked off behind a couch since we don’t have a real play room) so Rylan couldn’t get her nail polish. I headed to my bathroom to get the nail polish remover to take off her red-for-Christmas polish. As I went through the living room with it in my hand, on the way to the other side of the house for the cotton balls, I heard panic in Jacey’s voice. “Mama, I spilled a little bit of nail polish.”

My heart stopped. “What?” Surely, surely I misunderstood her.

She was clearly on the edge of hysterics, freaking out about the mess and scared of getting in trouble. “I spilled a little bit.”

Aaaaahhhhh! Okay, okay, calm. This is fine. No big deal. She said “a little bit.”

“On the carpet?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice getting more and more pinched with everything she said.

“Okay, don’t move. You’re not in trouble, honey, it’s okay” because if she panics I can’t do anything about it and I need her calm enough to stay still, and also I didn’t tell her specifically not to open the nail polish because I THOUGHT SHE KNEW THAT, I mean, this isn’t the first time she’s painted her nails and she surely knew better “just don’t move and don’t touch anything.”

“Okay,” she said. Calmer. Good.

And then I got back there and looked over her shoulder and saw. The whole bottle was upside down in both of her hands. She was trying to cup all the spilling polish in her hands. The lid was still partially on. Two-thirds of the polish was on the bottle, on her hands, on her pants, and on the carpet.

“Oh, no! Oh, honey! Why did you open that? Okay, don’t move!” I said, taking the bottle from her. And that started her panic again, because she could hear in my voice how big a mess it was.

“My hands are sticky!” she was worried again. Getting worked up.

“Okay, you’re fine.” Stay calm, mama! “I know it’s sticky. Don’t touch anything. Let me go put this down.”

I don’t think I can accurately describe the rest of this story. Let me try… but remember, I have a 10-month-old crawling around the living room and a panicky three-year-old covered in nail polish. So everything that comes next is done with an eye on the baby and telling the big kid over and over to “stay still, don’t touch anything, it’s okay, don’t move!”

I went to the kitchen, looking for anything to set the bottle on. A piece of plastic wrap lay on our butcher-block island. Yes! Put down nail polish. So much polish everywhere that it runs. No! Grab cloth and nail polish remover, move nail polish and plastic wrap somewhere safer, clean butcher block with nail polish remover. Whew. Back to the living room.

So then I had half a bottle of nail polish remover to clean a kid, pants, and the carpet. And I didn’t know if it could even be used on the carpet. I called my mom’s work; she didn’t pick up. Called her house; my dad answered. As I found out my mom was on her way home, Rylan finally decided he was just too interested to stay away, and climbed OVER the Christmas tree box which was blocking off the play area and fell on his head on the other side. He whimpered, then headed straight for me, Jacey, and the open bottle of nail polish remover. I got off the phone with my dad amid lots of, “Oh! Rylan! Oh! No! What are you–! No!”

My hands were covered in nail polish, too, I might add.

I managed to grab the baby more or less with my wrists and put him in the activity table, so he was stuck. I got hold of my mom, and she could hear the panic in my voice, so she headed for my house.

From there, it was all just clean-up. By the time my mom got here, I realized I was about to suffocate from the fumes. When Kellen walked in two minutes later, he said he could smell the nail polish remover when he was on the front porch. And the door was still closed.

My mom cleaned up Jacey and the nail polish bottle; I worked on the carpet. I’m not even sure what happened to the pants. Kellen took care of Rylan and vacuumed for me so I could get out the carpet cleaner and clean the nail polish remover out of the carpet. The chicken I was thawing for dinner went back in the fridge, because there’s no way we could stay here with the fumes. My mom took Jacey to her house while Kellen took Rylan to the library and I finished with the carpet cleaner, then I sat on the porch and waited for them to come pick me up and take me to my parents’ house for dinner.

Because nail polish remover + Spot Shot carpet cleaner + Bissell machine carpet cleaner + wet carpet smell is… potent. To put it mildly.

And my carpet is STILL pink.

Dinner at my parents’ house was steak and baked potatoes. I spilled my Coke. On my plate.

It was a rough day.

But at least we got those things-the-kids-must-go-through out of the way all at once, in one day. Surely that means the next few days will be easier, right?

On second thought, somebody hide the scissors. We don’t want Jacey to get any ideas.

June (picture catch-up 6)

June was a pretty uneventful month for us. Well, Kellen and I were working on our kitchen (the ceiling in our kitchen was less the 7 feet high–I could easily reach it without standing on tiptoes. It was dropped for the sole purpose of installing a really, really ugly recessed fluorescent light. It made our kitchen feel tiny and ugly and hot. So we raised it to normal ceiling height. My dad and grandad helped us figure it out. It was messy and hard but it made such a huge difference. Someday, maybe I’ll post pictures of it… if we ever get around to painting behind the fridge and refinishing the cabinets, so that it ALL looks nice), but other than that it was basically a hang-out-at-home month. Which was nice.

Thumb-sucking on Gramps’ shoulder

He’s a grandaddy’s boy

Taking a bath in the kitchen

My kids hang out semi-naked a lot in the summer. I figure, let ‘em do it while they can.

Three “babies.”

Graduated to bathtime in a tub. Because the kitchen was completely inaccessible.

Dress-up time! So stylish.

Uncle’s graduation (picture catch-up 5)

After we left San Antonio, we drove to Lubbock. It was a long drive. And there were tons of deer. And windmills. We finally, finally made it to Uncle Jared and Aunt Danielle’s house. Up there, we had lots of good time with Kellen’s family, and three of Rylan’s five great-grandparents got to meet him for the first time. Two of my cousins who were at school at Texas Tech got to come meet him, too. We saw Uncle Jared graduate from SIBI and had fun with Cousin Haden. We weren’t in Lubbock very long, but it was a good ending to Rylan’s first vacation!

Rylan was thrilled to be at Uncle Jared’s graduation.

Meeting Cousin Monica

And Cousin Melina

One of the proud great-grandmas

Aunt Danielle and the cousins, the day we left