Mostly-Mommy

Soooooooo… today is Zoey’s second birthday. Happy Birthday Zo, woo!

Yeah, the Baby Daddy and I totally forgot all about it. It wasn’t until Grandpa Bob showed up to wish her a Happy Birthday that we were like “Wow. Best. Parents. EVER.”

Good thing he showed up early so we could get a little excitement going and I still had time to make a cake (and it was AWESOME BTW).

Plus we already had plans to grill out for Memorial Day so it was like a real party! A BIRTHDAY PARTY even! Okay in our defense we had a joint party for her and Nick last Saturday so it wasn’t like we didn’t celebrate at all. Plus she is TWO so she just doesn’t care all that much yet. We’ll try to get it together by the time she’s 16 (painful childhood memory alert: I’m looking at YOU mom).

And also Mike and I had a big weekend which I will write about tomorrow, so really they’re just lucky we even remembered we had children at all. It was a GOOD weekend.

Nick turned four last week. FOUR! Yee-haw! I can’t tell you how much we have been eagerly awaiting Four and it’s awesomely awesome awesomeness. At least compared to Three. And to commerate this special occasion I did… nothing. At least his dad wrote something nice.

A couple days after the fact we did have a lovely birthday party for him and Zoey who turns two next week. We had some BBQ and I provided the obligatory sugar high with these beauties:

Some of them turned out to be Cyclops Cookie Monsters because apparently I have some mad math skillz.

The kids had a great time eating their Blue Dye #40 and playing with bubbles out in the yard. After the party was over we headed back home for Zoey’s nap. She refused to sleep but Nick crashed out pretty hard… then woke up with a raging fever and started barfing, but who’s counting.

My cousin Rosie made the kids this totally cool book called “ABC’s of the Craft Closet.”

One of my favorite pages, Oogly-Eyes and Pipe Cleaners. Notice how Zoey’s hand just can’t keep itself out of the picture.

She has a Children’s English Literature (I think?) class in college where she got to make this book for extra credit. How cool is that? I love multitasking! Dang if that girl isn’t crafty. Hmmm… now who does she remind me of?

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So here we are on Tuesday. After taking Nick to Preschool this morning Zoey and I went to Target and she was SOOOOOOOOOOO well behaved! I just couldn’t believe how easy going she was. She fell asleep on the way home — let me know if you can see where this is going — and woke up with a raging fever.

She is actually is asleep in this picture. She just keeled over and passed out.

And that is why I’ve had plenty of time to sit here in the middle of the day and blog, the kid will not let me put her down. She also will not stop yelling at me but as you can see I have an amazing ability to tune that out. It’s a gift.

I’m a mother again, sigh.

Today while Nick was at school Zoey and I were doing some work in the yard. While pulling some weeds in the driveway we found a tiny featherless, blind baby bird below the downspout of one of the gutters. Let me tell you I TRIED HARD to find that nest. I got out the ladder but I only made it halfway up the side of the house. Then I climbed out on the roof but wasn’t tall enough to see inside the upper gutters. The last thing I wanted was to have to care for another little being right now, but alas no luck. The baby is here to stay.

On the up side the kids are fascinated by all the many, MANY bird feedings. This bald alien creature whips it’s head around so much it makes me dizzy, poops in my hand, and unfortunately attracts the attention of our two cats. During one of today’s feedings Griffin (our hunter) darted in and grabbed him before I could even see it coming, but he knew that wasn’t going to fly with me and dropped him right away. Poor little thing.

I don’t expect him to make it through the night but what was the alternative? Mike told me to kill him. I told Mike HE could kill him. The baby is here to stay.

(*Well I guess that baby wasn’t here to stay very long. He died during the night.)

This was some kind of weekend! First of all let me say Happy Mother’s Day to all us mamas out there, we rock! Okay now I’m going to move onto an itemized list since lately I can’t be trusted to make sense, let alone string together two coherent sentences. Anyhoo…

1. Rough week with the childrens. Nick is doing some serious challenging and Zo is going through her terrible two-year sleep regression nastiness. Ugh. She climbs out of her crib so we converted it into a toddler bed, which she hates. Also, if we forget to feed her cereal before bed… well, it is really just something that we should never forget to do. It gets ugly, real ugly.

2. Saturday we went to the Spirit of Mission Days. Nick won a cherry tomato plant, woo-hoo! Mike was, uh, a little less excited about the win. Uncle Karsen took Nick and a friend of his on some carnival rides including a gigantic slide and the Scrambler!

The look on those boy’s faces was priceless! Totally worth this:

It’s the glasses line that really completes the look.

3. Later on my mom came over and rescued us from our demented children for the night. Woo-hoo again! My lovely husband and I headed down South to eat some sushi and go to the Home Depot. Do we know how to party or what? Then we came home and watched Death Race. I guess the answer was “or what.”

(On a side note we also stopped into Imagery, a store that used to be located in Westport and then mysteriously vanished some time ago. Through a convoluted string of events I found that it had shut down, changed hands and moved. We met the new owner and she was incredibly nice plus they have all the awesome things in the new location that they did before. Yay cool jewelry!)

4. Mother’s Day: celebrated by the Exchanging of Gifts and the Stuffing of Our Faces Until We Want To Vomit, aka brunch at Avenues Bistro. It was great! Kids were well behaved, food was delicious and resonably priced. We noticed a few people stealing looks at Bob which was probably because of this. How cool is that? I’m related to a freakin’ celebrity! Go Chef Bob!

5. My mom gave me some lovely earrings and an orchid for Mother’s Day. As we left the restaurant I did not realize Mike had set them on top of the car (wha?) so they went for a little flight on the way home. Amazingly Mike was able to retrace his drive and find them, only to try to “fix” the bent metal (shell) earring. Good intentions that one.

6. Another trip to the Home Depot. Again, “or what.”

7. A little drink this afternoon with my girls, dinner at Chez Bob, and home for the evening. Too bad Zo wouldn’t go to sleep until 9:45pm but who’s counting. Guess I better be done because I hear Nick waking up. Dang.

8. Just one more thing, new pictures are up at Karrmedia. For March and April because that’s just how I roll.

Remember theorems from high school algebra? I really hated them, however in this case I totally think I’m right. For months I’ve been telling Mike it rains EVERY Thursday and today he finally started to believe me. In fact he woke me up this morning by saying, “Good morning! It’s raining so it must be Thursday.”

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Zoey climbs out of her crib now. It makes me crack up when I put her in there in a time out and then I catch her coming out of her room. I start to yell and she beelines back into her room and vaults her tiny little self back up in there. I can’t help but laugh which really doesn’t help me seem very convincing that she’s in trouble.

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At Wal-Mart this morning I heard some higher-ups very seriously discussing the “Rollback” of Macaroni & Cheese from $0.50 to $0.49.

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I got the bazillionth call from one of those “This is the second notice that your car warranty is expiring” scammers so we waited until we could get a real person on the line and then screamed our fool heads off. It was fun for me and Nicholas but it made Zoey cry. She’s a delicate flower.

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This morning for breakfast I ate Quaker Cinnamon Oatmeal Squares, which if you haven’t tried them may possibly be the most delicious breakfast cereal ever created. Let me just warn you though that if you somehow manage to snort a partially chewed bite back up into your nasal passages — well, let’s just say don’t do that. Trust me on this one.