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why?????
Current mood:Why do they make toys so freakin' hard to get out of the box? I bought Maddie a little tykes bubble buddy which is basically a battery operated dinosour that has a handle and when you pull the handle his mouth opens up and he blows bubbles. Anyway, not only was the dinosour zip tied to the box in multiple places, he also had a twisty wire around his neck that I had to take the box apart to un-twist, and he was screwed to the bottom of the box with not one but 2 screws. The bottle of bubbles was also zip tied to the box in 2 different places. I seriously don't understand. Why do toys have to be secured like that especially when there aren't any small pieces involved.....I'm sure that it has something to do with safety, but logically it is less safe to have all of those items attached to the toy once you get home. More parts for a baby to choke on. It seriously took me 15 minutes to get the toy out of the box, and another 10 minutes to get the batteries into it. Sheesh. Hopefully she likes it! I can't wait for her to get up from her nap so I can try it out!
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Rough night and rodents
Current mood:I don't know what was going on last night, but Maddie DID NOT want to sleep. It really was an all day thing....she took a 35 minute morning nap and a 25 minute afternoon nap, which was soo not enough sleep for her. We put her to bed a little early at 6:30 and she was up again at 9:00 crying a lot. We brought her into bed with us, but she just thrashed around and cried in her sleep off and on. I was thinking that maybe she wasn't feeling well, but I can't see any other teeth coming through so I don't think it was from teething. I did give her carrots yesterday, and not pureed ones.....I steamed whole baby carrots and cut them up into bite sized pieces.....maybe the pieces are harder to digest? I have no idea, but this morning I am a tired Mama!! Hopefully we will not have an encore performance tonight!
tired
On a creepier note, the mice are back. We haven't found any inside the house because Dan filled all the holes under our house with foam, so hopefully they will stay outside, but last night we opened the front door and I noticed something on our screen.....I thought that it was just a large moth but when Dan turned on the proch light we saw that it was a mouse! It had crawled up our screen door and was perched on the ledge of the t-bar. Gross! Dan had to flick at it through the screen repeatedly to get it to fall off and scurry away. It totally freaked me out. I HATE rodents....they give me the heebe geebes. I know that we live out in the country, and I know that field mice live around us, but why do they have to come to our house? They have plenty to eat out in the wild. I am gonna have Dan set some traps up in the places that they used to get into last year just to be safe. I really hope that we can make it through the season without any mice in our house. If not.....we're moving to the city! lol.
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inevitable boo boos
Current mood:We've reached a stage where boo boos are starting to happen. I wish that I could protect Maddie from getting hurt, but I honestly feel that part of a baby's development and learning about the world include boo boos. So I am straddling the fence on this one......I try my best to catch her from falling but I choose not to constantly hover over her. This morning she pulled on the strap on my camera which sent the camera falling over the edge of the coffee table and right onto her face. The wail that came from my poor baby's mouth was seriously pitiful! I felt so aweful.....I scooped her up and gave her some cuddling and after a minute or two she was fine, but it really does pull at the heart strings when she cries like that. As she is learning to get around the house by scooting and showing more interest in pulling herself up to a standing position there are tumbles, bumping of her head, face plants into the ground and pulling things on top of her. So far nothing has been serious and I hope it stays that way, but everyday I watch her on the hard wood floors propped up on her side balancing between flopping onto her stomach or knocking her head on the floor and it makes me want to jump up and remove her from the situation she is in. Most of the time I restrain myself because it is all a learning process and I want her to feel like she can be independent if she wants to be, but man, it's hard to watch sometimes. I know that we'll get past this stage eventually and then enter into the scary world of walking and the boo boos that come with that, I just hope we make it there all in one piece!
chipper
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Mad mama with a minivan
Current mood:We have officially taken the plundge into suburbia. We bought a 2006 Ford minivan! I have never been totally anti minivan, but generally felt that they were weird looking and unnecessary for my life. Now that we have a child and 2 dogs going anywhere all together is impossible unless we don't bring any belongings with us. We have basically run out of room and with the rising cost of gasoline Dan's truck has become ridiculous to operate. So I am now a mad mama with a minivan and so far I am loving it. I still think they are weird looking, but it doesn't feel like a minivan while driving it and it is super nice. We got leather interior and although we weren't looking for one that had a DVD player this one does have one.....so that should be interesting.
content
We still need to sell Dan's truck which should be easy because it is a REALLY nice truck.....I actually cried at the thought of getting rid of it. So, if you know anyone who would be interested in a 2003 Dodge Ram 1500 Quad Cab pick up truck lemme know.
Cheers to minivans!
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Maddie update
Current mood:I think that it's time for a Maddie update......so here goes! My darling girl is 8 months old. I honestly can not believe how fast time has flown by. Everyone tells you that it does, but until you actually live through it you really have no idea. It's pretty amazing being able to watch life happen from the very second that it starts and see every little change that occurs. I saw Maddie take her first breath, I saw her first smile and laugh, I saw the first time she raised her arms up for me to pick her up. I am so blessed that I get to watch this being live and learn. I am so blessed that I am afforded the opportunity to stay home with her so that I get to be the one who is there for everything and not some day care worker. I couldn't have asked for a better life and I am so thankful that my husband sees the benefits of me staying home and works hard to make it possible! Kudos to Dan.happy
We are right on the verge of crawling but not quite there yet. Maddie gets up on her hands and knees and rocks back and forth and then promptly does a face plant onto the ground. Most of the time she doesn't mind her face hitting the floor, but when she is tired she does wail......that seems to be the case with anything when she is tired. She does know how to scoot backwards and gets around that way pretty effectively. She has scooted backwards from the middle of our living room past the coffee table, through the couch and rocking chair, around the back of the couch and down the hallway!! It was really funny to watch her navigate through that maze! She has gotten stuck under the couch and coffee table a few times and even gets into the book shelf in her room.....I had to change the books around so the baby friendly ones were on the bottom shelf and the ones she could rip apart were higher up. I'm excited by the idea of her crawling but I'm in no hurry because once she can get around effectively I know she will never stop.....that and I'm gonna have to clean the floors a lot more often cause I can not have her crawling around on dirty floors!
The world of food has really opened up in the last few weeks. I am still making baby food but it is all a lot thicker and chunkier. We've branched out to a lot of new foods including pears, peaches, corn, spinach, prunes, avocado and barley cereal. Maddie is also able to feed herself finger foods like graham crackers, flavored puffs and little pieces of bread. It's really cool watching her feed herself and it seems like it happened overnight. One day she couldn't pick the food up and get it into her mouth and the next day she was using her pincer grasp and popping food right in. Her enthusiasm for food is pretty cool too….she will eat anything that I give her and now she even lunges to try and get at our food. We have been working on the transition from bottle to sippy cup and although Maddie hated the sippy cup at first and threw it, she now enjoys it and in the next few weeks I am going to attempt to get rid of the bottles all together.We are teething again! Maddie is getting her two front teeth on the top. I almost missed the fact entirely because her behavior never really changed. I was on the floor playing with her and held her up above me and randomly looked into her mouth and saw swollen gums. The left one has already broken the surface and the right one is well on it's way. The last teething go around was pretty hairy…..Maddie was in pain and cranky, she was waking up at night a lot, but this time it has been really easy. It will be interesting to see what she looks like with a mouth full of teeth and I imagine that she will look like a silly bunny rabbit……but I am thankful that she is getting her two front teeth rather than her eye teeth at this point…..I'll take a bunny rabbit over a vampire any day! Lol.Life has gotten so much easier. I was just talking to Dan about this the other day. It seems like once we hit the 7 month mark everything began to settle. Maddie takes 2 naps a day each for 1 and a half hours and she sleeps in her crib for both of them. We put her down to sleep while she is still awake and she just goes to sleep. At night we do the same thing…..we put her to bed at 7:00, she usually wakes up between 10:00 and 11:00 to eat and then sleeps until around 7:30 in the morning. She is a happy content little girl and hardly ever cries. She has this fantastic belly laugh that shakes her whole body and it's seriously contagious! Life is pretty scripted as far as her daily schedule goes, but we are able to get out of the house and run errands or go to the park and I feel like I know her well enough to anticipate what she can and can not handle with schedule variations. She is also a lot easier in the fact that I am able to distract her with things when she does get fussy. Before when she was really little by the end of the day she would be falling apart and NOTHING would make her happy…..now if she is getting tired I can give her something new like a toilet paper roll and she will be distracted with that for a while, or I encourage her to scoot herself around the floor and I "chase" after her on my knees. Maddie is a joy to be around and I find myself missing her while she is napping and anxious for her to wake up. I don't mind that she still wakes up at 10:00 at night to eat because I get to snuggle with her in bed for a little while, and every morning when I get up and see her smiley excited face it energizes me for my day. I now know why people entertain the idea of having another baby once their first closes is on the first year. We don't have any plans to add to our family just yet, but about 3 weeks ago I went from, "There is no way that I am ever having another baby," to "I could see myself having another one," which is pretty huge for me! My sister in law once said that right after you have a baby the mention of having another one is like a curse word…..totally out of the question. But I think that with time you start to see the fruits of your labor and amnesia starts to set in and the idea isn't so bad. However…..when Maddie has a rough day and is driving me bonkers…..I am reminded that for now, one is enough! Lol.Anyway……life is good. I am really happy and feel very settled. My daughter is the apple of my eye and is thriving. What more could a girl want?
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Na-na is thy name and other random things
Current mood:My daughter says Mama.....well, actually she says Nana but she means Mama and she knows it means me. I am super excited about this. I don't know if I can count it as her first word yet becase she isn't saying the word correctly, but it is an amazing feeling knowing that she is calling for me when she says Nana. She doesn't say it when I am right in front of her, but when she wakes up from her nap and I don't go in right away to get her up, she eventually starts chattering Nana-Nana-Nana. And last night when she woke up around 11:00 and Dan went in to settle her back down she was saying Nana-Nana. When I leave the room that she is in for a minute to grab something or use the restroom she sometimes says Nana-Nana-Nana until I come back and then she gives me a huge smile. It is fantastic that she can verbalize when she wants me.....it's one less thing that I have to guess about. I imagine that every new word she learns is going to feel this great because it's one more thing that she can express instead of getting frusterated. She says Dadadada too and has for about a month now, and Dan thinks that she knows that means Daddy, but I'm not quite so sure. She doesn't use it in any kind of context that would mean Daddy, but if he wants to believe it, I will let him. I'm trying to get her to say doodo instead of Dada for Daddy because I think it would hilarious if she called him Doodo......Dan doesn't think it's funny! lol.
blah
In other news, our fridge is broken and it sucks big time. It has now been about 48 hours since the fridge stopped being cold and all of our food is in a big plastic bin with ice. Dan bought a part yesterday that he thought would fix it, but it did not. He figured out what part he really needed to fix it last night but when he called around today no one had it in stock so it has been ordered but will not be in until after 12:00 tomorrow afternoon. So, we will continue to have all of our food on ice and our fridge will continue to be in the middle of our kitchen and I am hoping and praying that we won't have to throw out a bunch of perfectly good food. The tragic part is that we just went grocery shopping and added a bunch of stuff to our fridge. Bleh.
My house is a disaster! We tried cleaning on Monday and got lot's of stuff done, but getting ready to go camping this weekend has pretty much destroyed our house. We have camping stuff everywhere, groceries for camping all over the kitchen because what is the sense of putting everything away just to get it back out again on Thursday to pack. We have the fridge in the middle of the kitchen and stuff all over our counters. It really seems too overwhelming to try and do anything about it. I cleaned up the baby's room and folded and put her laundry away and I've picked up her toys, but it doesn't seem to be enough to make me feel any better about the disaster area that is our house. I usually use Dan's days off to pick up and clean, but with a work meeting that he had yesterday and the fridge mess, I just haven't had the baby coverage I need, or the time to do so. I hate having this messy of a house, and since we will be gone all weekend nothing is going to get done on Dan's next days off. Oh bother. I'll figure something out.....I just wish a Merry Maid would show up at my door! Haha.
I didn't mention this in my last blog, but on the same day that we constructed the compost bin, we also got gutters for our house. We had called and ordered them a couple weeks ago but the company said that they were running a couple weeks behind and Monday afternoon they just showed up on our doorstep and said they were there to put up our gutters. We are super excited about gutters although I'm not really sure why. I mean I know that not having gutters is a problem with the ground in our back yard and we had a waterfall in the front of our house by the front door and I'm happy that those issues will be taken care of, but I'm not quite sure why getting gutters makes me giddy. I think it's mostly because Dan is really excited to have them, so it makes me excited. It's not like I got a new pair of shoes or some jewlery.......but it does make me happy for some reason. Yeah gutters!
Okay, I think that is it for now. Here's a picture of my darling girl for the road.
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The Schultz Family Farm
Current mood:The Schultz family is going organic. Well kinda. We decided that we are going to start composting.....the goal is to make an organic garden but since it is almost summer the garden is going to have to wait until next spring. Buuuutttt, we are going to start the compost process now so that we have some killer soil waiting for planting next spring. I've wanted to compost for a while but always thought it would be too hard......I saw my sister in laws compost this past weekend and it looked super easy, so thank you to Angela who spurred us on to greatness!content
Our compost bin was created today. Dan got a bunch of wood palletts from his work and we screwed them together and created a door and he also got a heavy duty tarp like material from work that we made a cover out of so that the compost doesn't get soaked in the rain, or dried out from the sun. The only thing we had to actually buy was the hindge to attach the door to the frame. I am super excited to get started and really proud of the fine craftsmanship that went into our compost bin. I'll let ya know how things progress. Wish us luck!
The Schultz Family Farm
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Zoo Day
We went to the North Carolina Zoo this past Wednesday. It was freaking hot (record highs) but it was a lot of fun. The baby didn't get to see much because.....well, she's 7 and a half months, but the animals are hard to see because of all the land there. She did see an ostrich, meercats and a gorilla. That was pretty cool. I don't think she was all that interested in the zoo, but she liked hanging out with her cousin Hailey and Naomi and all the Grandma's. Dan and I enjoyed spending time with the fam and I had fun squirting people with the spray bottle I brought. All in all a lovely day. Here are some pictures:
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
May 2007
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