Foto Friday

It's not easy being two.

Three Things

Our tricks to help us survive flying with little kiddos:

1) Get on the plane VERY LAST so that the kids spend the least amount of time on the plane as possible. I always wait until the stewardess tells me that I have to board the plane because they are closing the cabin door. Tim gets on the plane with his usual "elite" crowd and gets everything set up (car seat, toys, games, snacks, sticky pads etc) and claims overhead space. However, even when I've traveled by myself with the kids, I still waited until the last minute. I then ask the stewardess to help me get set up (I find that they are very very helpful....I even went to the bathroom and they held Olivia so that I didn't have to deal with her in that small area).

(Olivia walking down the jet-way to get on the plane...we were the last people on)

2) Bring a car seat with Travel Companion and sit in the bulkhead row. THIS WAS A LIFE SAVIOR this last trip!!! Having Olivia in a car seat was a HUGE help. It was worth every penny and effort it took to travel with the car seat. . Olivia knows the routine in her car seat and even though at one point she did get upset, she calmed down because she knew she couldn't get up. And this little travel companion thing I'm talking about...whoever invented this IS A GENIUS! It costs $14, but probably took $2 to make (and I would have spent $50 because of how awesome it is). If you are traveling with a toddler and bringing the car seat...buy it or borrow ours :) The bulkhead row is also wonderful. There is usually more leg room and with Olivia in the car seat, we were worried about her kicking the seat in front of us...but not in that row. Definitely call ahead to the airline and request that row. Tell them you have kids and they usually will work to help you. Oh, and if you have a really young child, on some planes (long trips only) you can request a bassinet for the child to sleep in. This is what we did when Olivia flew to London at 5 months old.

(every parent with a toddler in the airport was starring at us)

(BRILLIANT!)

3) Have games, snacks, activities, and comfort items (silky, blankets, stuffed animals). Joyful sent Olivia an organizer and we had crayons, stickers, sticky pads, and paper all together in one place for her. Sticky pads are great. The kids can draw on them or when Olivia was younger, she would just take the sticky pad paper off and items that I stuck it too (like the window)....easy easy entertainment. There is also this wonderful thing called Crayola Color Wonder. It's special markers that only make marks on the "special" paper. Then there were the snacks: lollipops are a HUGE hit right now, and last a long time. We also had Cheerios and other dry snacks along with Olivia's normal sippy cup filled with water. And the ipad to play movies... We used every single one of these things to help survive our travel. If we were going longer than 3 hours, I don't know what we would have done.

Phew - who wants to travel with a 2 year old and 4 month old now???

CIO

CIO = Cry It Out

Oh Mason.  I love you lots and I've been spoiling you...or letting you take advantage of me.

When we went to the doctor on the 16th, I mentioned how you were not sleeping through the night.  In fact, you were NO WHERE close to it.  We were consistently still feeding every three hours (if not even sooner).  She took one look at you and said that you were playing games with me :)  I asked, what if you were hungry and she asked me a couple more questions and said that most likely that was not the issue.  The night feedings were very short and you would fall back asleep while nursing.  Dr. basically said that it was time for some tough love and that you needed to be broken of this habit.

Check.  We did CIO with Olivia and we can do it again.  The difference with Olivia, was that she cried when we put her down to sleep....and then slept through the night.  You go down to bed just fine, but wake up multiple times throughout the night.

So we put you down and said you needed to go five hours between ONE feeding.  We've seen you do it before,  you've taken naps where you've gone five hours.  We know this is possible.  Fed you at 11pm, and you woke, up at 1am...SCREAMING.  You cried for a very long time :(  I went in an patted your back, gave you the pacifier, but you continued to be mad.  Finally you fell back asleep (after almost an hour of crying) and you slept until 3:30am at which point I caved and fed you.  Three hours later, fed you again.

And we repeated this pattern.  You cried a lot and I would end up being awake longer during the night listening to you cry.  It's frustrating because I know if I just fed you, I could be back in bed and asleep in 10 minutes.

Finally by day 4 of doing this, you FINALLY were crying less, using your hands to help calm yourself and rolling to your side.  And then comes day 6 and we leave to travel back East where you and your sister would be sharing a room with us.  Which means, we wouldn't be able to just let you cry or you would wake up Olivia..

VACATION SLEEP was BAD!!!  Awful.  Horrible.  Exhausting.  You woke up EVERY two hours and by the end of the trip it was EVERY HOUR.

Seriously????  Now, I'm feeding and crying in the middle of the night.  I'm beyond exhausted and extremely frustrated. There was nothing I could do.  We can't do CIO at another person's house or while sharing a room with a toddler or in a hotel room.  So I just fed you, put you back to bed, caught a 50-90 minute nap and repeated.

Not. A. Happy. Momma.

Then comes the night of the 28th, we are home.  I put you in your crib, turn on your sound machine, turn your sisters sound machine on even louder, turn the bathroom fan on....and told you that you were sleeping, that I'm sorry and that I love you. I turned off the monitor (our house is small enough that we really don't need a monitor to hear you) and went to sleep.  And for the first time in 7 days, slept for 4 hours.  You cried, I actually don't know how much because I fell asleep.  I do feel a little guilty about that...but in the morning you woke up and had a smile on your face.  

This story will have a happy ending, where we are all getting a good nights sleep, I'm confident of that.  To be continued...

Last Day

 

Funny story - Erin and I were taking some quick photos.  Just us :)  Logan was sitting on the floor.  Sitting.  All the sudden something happened and he toppled over...  Don't worry, we still were smiling for the photo :)

Miss you...

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And then comes the trip home.  Again, traveling with small children is NOT easy.  Trip home did not go as smoothly, but thankfully the plane was loud (an older plane?) and the engines hopefully muffled some of the screams.  Olivia was tired.  VERY tired.  Mason was tired.  VERY tired.   And Mommy and Daddy were DONE.  Both babies required a lot of attention and distraction for most of the flight.  Then, 15 minutes before we were to land, during final descent, they both fell asleep.  haha.  go figure.  So we waited to be the last passengers off the plane to wake them.  They were not happy.  We were THAT family walking through the airport.  Both children screaming their heads off.  S.C.R.E.A.M.I.N.G.  The airport was crowded due to the New England snow closures and everyone was staring at us.  I would have stared at us.  I asked Tim if I looked as crazy as I felt...he said no (maybe only because it was my birthday???).  

oh.  happy birthday to me.

More Pictures

haha...we attempted some photos today.  If there is one thing that I have learned this trip, it's that photos with young babies are NOT easy...but this age is absolutely priceless and something that we'll all want to remember in the future.

Olivia hanging out with Grandma and Grandpa

Mason and his Aunt Erin (check out his sweet hand resting on hers. love.)

Oh...and I just want to point out that Aunt Erin is 19 weeks PREGNANT!!! Seriously???  She looks UH-maz-ING!

And Logan.

Good News/Bad News

Bad News:

ut oh!  a little girl woke up this morning....sick, sick, sick!!  like getting VERY sick.

This is definitely the first time we had to deal with a child getting sick and PHEW it's not easy or pleasant :(  And, it was a little worse because we were not in our own house and we were supposed to be spending our time visiting with family (Tim's family, Kevin's family and mine were all together today).  We felt really bad about missing out on some of the fun.  The night before she didn't eat much for dinner and (thankfully) we didn't push it.  This morning she woke up angry and nothing was making her happy.  And then she got sick :(  And all she would say is "hurt".  She looked sick and all we could do was cuddle her and give her lots of love.

Great News:

Olivia was only really sick for about five hours in the morning and then took two great naps.  Later that night she woke up and was a brand new girl.  AND SUDDENLY she knows how to communicate!!!  It's like she figured out, in this world, you can tell people what you are thinking or doing.  She was saying, "Hi Mama" and "I'll be right back".  She has been repeating words that we are saying after only hearing them one time.  She is using expressions correctly like "Oh boy" "enough" "cool".   And she is differentiating ownership "daddy's train" "my train" "logan's juice".  It's amazing and VERY VERY fun.  Tim and I find ourselves just looking at each other and laughing after she says something.  

Even though we were dealing with a sick baby...of course we managed to take some cute pictures :)  

Can those two little boys get any cuter?  This is probably my one of my new all time favorite photos.  We kept joking about how Mason looks bigger than Logan (Logan is 7 months older than Mason).  Erin wisely stated that Mason is just "laying wider" than Logan.  lol.  

Christmas 2010

Merry Merry Merry!!!

Phew.  We left Virginia late Christmas Eve and drove to West Virginia to spend Christmas with my family.

Christmas morning we decided to grab a couple of photos of the two babies celebrating their 1st Christmas.  Mason and his cousin Logan.  

Ah yes, Logan checkin' out his newest cousin, Mason...
but it looks like he is looking in a mirror :)

And then we decided to add in the special 2 year old, Olivia.  

She had other opinions about sitting next to Logan...  

Oh Olivia.

It was a lovely morning, filled with more gifts, secret santas and lots of fun.  

The guys all decided to wear their musical Christmas ties.

And we enjoyed an absolutely delicious dinner!

Afterwards it was bath time.  Scrub-a-dub two cute babies in a tub!!

And the day ended with a bedtime story.  

 Sweet dreams sleepy babies

Christmas Eve

Merry Christmas Eve!!!!  

Today we had a Christmas with Tim's family!!!  Olivia started off LOVING her stocking with some new markers and c-o-u-l-d-n'-t move past them.  She screamed and cried a big old Olivia fit that looked a little like this:

However she eventually got over it and we had a lovely morning opening gifts.  We all received many wonderful presents!!!  We must have been very very good this year to be so incredibly spoiled by Santa.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!!!

Love the Christmas spirit with children.  It's contagious and it's magical.  Things are suddenly even more Merry and Bright.

Of course I took a ton of photos...but as I'm just now going through them I'm realizing how many pictures I didn't take :(  However, below are a few of my favorites.  

Family Time

Loooove spending time just relaxing with family.  Grana and Grampa were absolutely soaking up every second with Olivia and Mason....and the newest baby, Graham!!  He's soooo sweet AND TINY!

And a couple more cuties :)

Oh and have I mentioned how much fun Grampa is?!? 

Flying East

Today we boarded a plane at 7am to fly back East for the Holiday.  The plan is to spend a couple days with Tim's family and the rest with mine.

We are learning that traveling with two small children is no easy task.  It takes planning, a lot of "stuff" (two large suitcases, one infant car seat, one convertible car seat, one carry-on suitcase, one backpack, and one diaper bag), and even more patience.  Families with more than two kiddos are just laughing at me right now...I can't even begin to imagine flying with more than two.  WoW!

Thankfully we did have a few tricks up our sleeve to help us through our adventure (I'll share those later in  a Three Things)

Since Olivia is now 2, she needed to have her own seat.  We brought her car seat and got her buckled in the bulkhead row of the plane.  We had tons of snacks, games, coloring, stickers, and the ipad.  Of course, she was very active and wanted to do a different activity every two minutes.  Tim was the go-to guy getting his ladies everything they demanded.  At one point Olivia did start to scream, but we just looked at her with pathetic eyes and told her that she had to stay in her seat.

Mason did incredible for his first flight.  I nursed him taking off and he then fell asleep for the first 90 minutes and was very pleasant for the remaining 90 minutes :)

A flying family!

We landed at National, got all our stuff, piled the kids into the car, and they passed out!!  Happy to be on the ground and looking forward to visiting with family :)

What Do You Do....

...when it's 82 degrees on the first day of winter in H-Town?

Three Things

Friend Natalie has been writing Three Things for Thursday.  Well, I recognize that this is not Thursday, but I really wanted to tell everyone my Three Things that are related to this holiday season :)  

1).  wishpot - Oh...if you don't have a wishpot account, I think you should get one.  It's so easy to add items too, you can make it public, private just for your own eyes, or you can share your list with only selected people.  You can reserve other people's gifts and they won't know you bought it for them, but other people will see that it's been purchased and not get you that item (sooo...next time you see us, don't tell me what's been reserved, I don't know).   We use it to keep track of things we want for ourselves, our children, and gifts that we want to get other people.  If you download the "wishpot" button, with one click, you can add almost anything to your wishpot list.  This is definitely probably my number one favorite thing during the gift giving season :)  If you become a wishpot member, let me know and we can become friends!!!

2.)  amazon - especially amazon prime.  I'm a amazon prime member and I never want to go back!!!  You can become a prime member if you are a mom (or caregiver) and/or student.  Definitely google amazon mom or amazon student and you can find out more information on it.  We did almost all our shopping on amazon this year and are having a majority of our gifts shipped.  IT'S GLORIOUS!  So quick and easy.  I love it.  (TWSS...lol)

3.)  secret santa - amen!!!  no longer buying tons of gifts, especially since there are kiddos to buy for.  My mom organized a secret santa among all the adults this year.  We are still buying for the kids, but this free service organizes everything for us.  It sends us emails and gives us our "secret santa".  You can provide a list of things you would like OR just give them your wishpot url (see how awesome wishpot is???).  I wonder who my secret santa is !??!?

Do you have Three Things?  Please share!

Olivia 2 Year well-check

Olivia also had her well-check on the same day at Mason.  She is doing well and GROWING!  She got one vaccine and didn't even cry!!!  BIG GIRL :)

Stats:

height - 33.5 inches - 40%

weight - 28 lb 12 oz - 75%

Goodness!!  We've jumped on the weight.  I discussed with the doctor about how Olivia wants to eat all the time.  She mentioned to just watch portions and really push the fruits and veggies, especially as snacks and if she wants more.  We also discussed the...ugh...terrible twos.  The Dr had a great word for it.  Tolerance.  Olivia can't tolerate much of anything right now.  Being hungry, tired, hot/cold, waiting, sharing, etc.  I like the word tolerant.  It helps me when Olivia is completely losing it and licking the store floor to say to myself, "It's okay Andrea, she can't tolerate standing in line and not throwing the glass ornament into the bucket like a basketball goes into a hoop."

:) love her lots :)

DADDY!!!

So I leave to go to the store, and Tim tells me that he is putting Mason down for a nap.  I come back from the store and Tim is telling me how proud he is of Mason.  He has been sleeping the whole time and hasn't heard a peep from him.  He mentioned that he put him down with his hat on because he thought he was cold...and that it must have been true because he's been sound asleep. I look at the video monitor and this is what I see:

Lol.  Mason-Man probably tried to open his eyes multiple times...but couldn't!  The interesting news is that it really does work.  Later I couldn't get him to calm down and so I pulled his hat over his eyes...and three minutes later, sound asleep.  NOW, I do recognize that this is a safety hazard.  I do not recommend this or encourage it...and we did pull the hat off after we realized it could have covered his nose.  He does look really comfy though :)

Foto Friday

It's a Fever Friday for Olivia :(

link yours and check out other Fotos

4 MONTHS!

Happy 4 Months Mr. Mason-Man

Today Mason had his four month well-check, nothing like getting four vaccines to celebrate the 4th month of life!!!  He was a trooper and Dr said that he is doing really well.  

Stats:

length - 25.75 inches - 80%

weight - 15 lb 5.5 ounces - 61%

head - 17 inches - 76%

Tidbits:

*does not like clothes to be taken off over his head

*wearing size 3 diapers (Olivia was 9 months old before that happened!)

*wearing 6-9 month clothes (I'm only buying 9 month stuff now!)

*wearing 6-12 month size socks

*discovered his toes

*makes really high pitched squealing sounds

*rolls from his back to his side ... sometimes sleeps on his side.  

*really enjoys standing

*uses the bumbo, activity center and jumper

*will take a bottle

*giggles (but only if you are really funny!)

*follows his crazy sister EVERYWHERE (with his eyes)

*drools (it was this age that we said Olivia was teething, she didn't get her first tooth until 13 months)

*just started some CIO at bedtime.  This Momma needs some SLEEP! (more on this later)

*has some BM on his own...

*can fit both hands in his mouth.  Sucks on two fingers a lot....

*will sometimes use a pacifier

*does not like to be put in the car seat

*likes when the car is moving at a fast constant speed (none of the driving slow, start and stopping to look at Christmas lights stuff)

*takes 3-4 naps a day.  Some naps are shorter...we usually try to get at least two good naps

*nurses...a lot.

*sleeps only in his crib (and maybe sometimes in Mommy's arms if she is craving extra cuddles)

*generally happy, but when he's mad....watch out!

choo-choo

this girl LOVES the trains!!

The Human Capsule...RETURNS.

Oh yes, it's now "winter" in H-Town.  The human capsule is making an appearance...although it's a little "form fitting" on our man :)  Notice, he doesn't put his hands down while wearing it.  Silly Man.

 Here is a picture of Olivia wearing the human capsule at 2 months and 5 months. 

Happy 2nd Birthday Olivia!

Happy 2nd Birthday Olivia!!!! 

WOW, 2 year old birthdays are SOOOO much fun :)  Everyone is finally in bed and I'm not far behind.  First, a very sincere apology to everyone who called or emailed today and we didn't reply.    We were busy, but will return calls tomorrow.

 For her birthday, Olivia got a NEW BIKE from Mommy and Daddy.  So, needless to say, we spent the first half of our day outside riding.  Then we took naps, while Mommy made carrot cake (of course) and Daddy got stuff ready for dinner.  After naps, Olivia met some friends at the park and played!!!  The Johnsons and Outtens joined us for dinner and cake....and then the lucky lucky girl opened all her presents.  Thank you SOOOO much friends and family.  Olivia was completely spoiled and loves all her gifts.  She actually didn't know what to play with or how to handle all her new toys (Christmas is going to be a BLAST!).  Currently she is sleeping with various pieces of three different presents :)  Sweet girl is absolutely exhausted, guess that's what happens when you ride a bike all day.  

(even though her eyes are closed, maybe you can see how much fun she was having!)

Also, every year, I hope to make a little video slideshow showing growth through the months.  Her 1st year video was OVER one hour (I got a little carried away).  This one is a bit shorter :)

It starts with her last birthday, and goes until just before her 2nd.

Here are Olivia's 2 Year Old Tidbits:

*she beeps when she walks backwards (think school bus backing up)

*starting to cuddle more

*looooves to drink milk

*in the past two months, got four more teeth

*really really loves her brother

*likes to count two objects

*knows her numbers and colors but doesn't always show what she knows

*says cheers at the table 

*uses a fork and spoon
*likes routines and consistency (she always sits in the same place for storytime and does the craft at the same table)

*really enjoys playing in water

*knows "bathroom" words and what we do in the bathroom, but not showing much interest except to flush the toliet

*brushes her teeth

*is learning new words everyday!!!  FINALLY :)

*started some two and three word sentences :)

*can follow 2, sometimes 3, step directions

*likes to help us do things around the house

*loves to dip her food (ketchup, ranch, cheese, syrup, etc)

*has to be given limits on eating or will eat all day

*knows what it means to share, and chooses not too

*imitates our actions and words

*knows the 8 basic colors

*appreciates music with a good beat

*practices splits on a daily basis

*when she says "biiiiiiiig" she arches her back for added emphasis

*if she gets really excited, she jumps

*loves to color

*wears a size 4 diaper, size 6 shoe, 2T clothes

Olivia 13-24 Months 

wow...there are sooooo many pictures from today, click here to see more :)

Gingerbread House (step by step)

Mommy - Olivia go get the gingerbread house, we are going to build a house!

Olivia - Okay Mommy, but first I need to finish pumping my milk

Olivia looks at the box and I'm sure she's thinking we are going to build something AMAZING like what's pictured.

First line the trays.

And then taste the icing.

Continue icing the tray.

Then add icing the the edges of the house.

All the edges...

Don't forget to taste the icing again.

Jerry was wondering when he would get to "taste" the icing.

WOAH!  Stand up the walls.








And get a quick taste of icing...

Last goes the roof.

Use your finger to create an "icing" seam.

And then, of course, taste the icing.







Add decorations!!!

Daddy is getting in the way helping

Concentration.

Phew...icing break






Back to work.








Final Product!!!!