fine motor skills

i had my proudest parenting moment thus far today. we had gone to the local montessori to check it out and while i was there i was scoping out all of the little things that the kids were doing. while we were talking bridget was semi-obsessed with these 2 little bowls of beads with a scoop in one. so the teacher tells her that you use the scoop to move the beads from one bowl to the other. then she tells us that it helps them with fine motor skills.

so we get home and i figure that i am seriously lacking in the educational activities at home so i bust out 2 little bowls filled with split peas and a scoop and give them to her to play with. wonderful. she can practice her fine motor skills and i can unload the dishwasher. or something.

i'm watching my budding little montessorian as she takes the scoop and fills it up twice and transfers the peas to the empty bowl. yay, fine motor skills! then she looks over at me as if to say "are you f'ing kidding me?", picks up the full bowl and dumps the whole thing into the emptier bowl and says - faster.

sorry montessori, we'll need to attend the school for the future type a, always rushing, impatient and anal. oh yeah, that's what i'm running here. oops. tomorrow, flower smelling!

tea leaves say - BIG PARTY

today was going to be quite a day for us. 2 parties. a princess party in the AM and an adults only party in the PM. actually, that sounds a little more exciting than it is. but not really, it was that exciting for this aspiring adult.

long story short on the princess party - we don't go because of the potential germ warfare that we are capable of these days. the A number one princess' daddy is a pediatrician so i call and give him a rundown of the week and we agree that it just isn't a good idea. i'm pretty sad since i had been looking forward to my first princess party for some time now. it will have to wait. not to mention, A number 2 princess is one of my DC buddies and i won't get to see her. although, since we managed to infect her a month ago i'm sure she is happy to give us the heisman.

onto the adult party. all day long i was giddy. waiting. i was so excited , you would have thought that i was going to a princess party myself. grill 23. happy birthday to o and lo's dad. o and lo's mom got us a limo so we could drink and ride in together. it was decadent. it was great. i had the best time. i can't even explain how it felt to be out in the city with ADULTS having such a delicious meal. sorry posterity, its true. i love you, very much. i also love feeling like i used to. i didn't realize it at first. i thought i was just seriously missing boston. it took me a while to realize that it wasn't boston i missed, it was going out and relaxing. we used to do this all the time.

lucky for you, i love you more. but, i saw the future, and i am excited. actually, i saw what can be now with a little planning. now that we can trusted the little A with a sitter, we can go out NOW. woo. hoo.

i almost forgot, we finished off the night back at the birthday boy's house with a game of pictionary. i love that game. i had forgotten how much. i don't think i've played it since we used to have "games night" back when everyone lived in belmont. matter of time.

birth control...

...is imagining having more than 4 of us to get demo'd by a stomach flu.

happy valentines day...

...BLAAAH!

i've had it all day. michael has it right now.

i love you valentine.

PS - 8 party-goers have been stricken down to date...that we know of. i am surely not calling around to take a poll at this point.

black monday

so after our scorcese inspired weekend, i figured the stressful events were behind us. not so. everything was actually going pretty well. i woke up, bought some thank you notes that i would start in the afternoon, a very productive morning for me.

until.

about an hour into her 2 hour minimum nap, the badooga is crying - or frying and frying as she says. so i go up to find her lunch on her pillow. as if it were never inside her. so i told her to put it back. ha! just kidding, that is gross. anyway, she proceeds to "muke" 4 times in the next hour and a half. we get pretty efficient at getting it into the bucket by the 3rd time.

enter boy. crying way too early in his nap. uh daddy, can you take this one? as i'm handling an excellent little puker i can hear that we have 2 of them on our hands. apparently, mister a is standing in a small pool of his own lunch with very wet socks.

so now we start the tag team and i've got my girl and he's got his boy. its all going well until the people at the garage call. oh yeah, did i forget to mention that our routine OIL CHANGE turned into a $1300 visit? happy monday suckers. so i tell michael to go get the car and i just sit down on the floor with both of them. yes, the floor might be a strange choice but at this point its the easiest thing to clean.

so there we sit, bridget falls asleep hugging my leg like a panda and wakes every 15 minutes to puke, or at this point, dry heave. andrew is draped over my opposite shoulder and periodically barfs and has terrible gas. terrible. it smells. very. bad.

michael finally walks in the door and i say - hey, i think andrew may have gone to the bathroom and leaked a bit. he looks down and says, uh yeah, he did. so off he goes to swap out some laundry or something, i don't even remember. i remain trapped on the floor for another excrutiating 10 minutes. he finally walks in again armed with paper towels, a diaper, clothes and wipes and removes andrew and i get a look at the "leak".

let's just say there was WAY more poop on my now hot, wet pants than in the diaper. let's also just say that it was the first time in my 2.5 parenting years that i almost gagged. bleck!

after the babes - and me! - are cleaned up, they both seem to fall asleep on our respective laps. we decide that we may as well put them in bed, fully expecting it not to work. so down they go, and down they stay. empty little babies.

it was madness.

finally...

...the boy has been christened. whew! almost 10 months of feeling slightly stressed about it and its over. boy did we pick a weekend. we had my grandfather's funeral on saturday. and a big party on sunday. it felt very strange to throw a party, but everyone in my mother's family insisted. insisted. so we stayed the course, as my uncle put it, and i'm glad.


it was a great day. andrew did not follow in his sister's footsteps and was a good boy during the actual baptism. he had lots of fun at his first big party as the guest of honor. i've decided that its nicer to have the christening when they are older, then they can enjoy the party and the food. here's some pics of my little holy man...

poppa: 3/31/14 - 9/7/07

my sister's eulogy...

He would have been 93 years old next month. So that's 93 years of life we are here celebrating today. And I am sure he is looking down with a big smile. Maybe even winking and pushing out his dentures for a giggle from his grandchildren..

Sixty years ago, Poppa left Ireland. And there's no doubt in my mind, he left Ireland with a heavy heart. He loved Ireland. But he came here anyway. He came here for a "better life." Maybe not for him, but for his ever growing family.

As long as I knew my grandfather, he spoke of the "Old Country", he'd listen to Irish music, and sometimes appeared wishful for the "old days."

But did he regret coming here? I don't think so.

Look around. His entire family, down to his great grandchildren, enjoy things in life that he only dreamed of.

And he knew it. He was so proud.

When he looked at us or spoke to us - you could feel his pride. "Did you get yourself a car yet?" And he'd look out the window to see what we drove up in. "Do you like it?" Or he'd ask "How's New York? You got an apartment there? What's it like?"

Remember the sparkle in his eye when he dancved at Mary and Ellens' weddings or when he escorted Abbey as the Holyoke Colleen. Boy, was he proud.

And deservedly so. He came here, he worked hard and saved his money (often in the most unconventional ways - like toothpick sized rolls of dollar bills.)

He watched his children grow, have families, and enjoy the luxuries his sacrifice afforded them. Whether it was the purchase of a house or a golf game, or the birth of a new great grandchild. He would smile knowingly.

Look at what he gave us. Look at all we could enjoy because of his hard work.

And he never stopped. He did not rest. It was not long ago that I stopped by to visit and he was on top of a ladder, cleaning the gutters. Why? I'd ask. But I knew. A proud man dresses himself everyday - to the nines - a proud man keeps his yard free of leaves, keeps his hedges trimmed perfectly - and he was proud.

So, as we sit here today, I hope that we remember Poppa for his hard work, his sacrifice, and most of all, for the joy that he took in his accomplishments and ours. We should be proud of him and ourselves and go forward continuing to make him proud. Because he'll be watching. And when we meet him again, he'll certainly want to know - "How's that car run? You like it?"

canine self-esteem

michael's mother has been after him once again to get his crap out of her basement and this time he's actually doing it. i thought it had been done already, but no. no, no, no. so he shows me the Parade magazine from 12/29/96 which covered the "best and worst of everything" that year to point out madonna and carlos leon, ted kaczynski, the yankees first world series win in many, many years featuring the rookie derek jeter who received 200 fan letters a week (i wonder how many he gets now?)

so i'm looking through the best and worst of everything and i come across the "best canine self-improvement" category. its true, this is a category, or at least it was in 1996. the winner was "neuticles" - cosmetic canine genitals designed to make dogs and dog owners feel better about this life change. no joke. so i think this is hilarious and laugh about the existence of these implants back in 96 assuming that they don't exist in 2007. but i was wrong - neuticles are going strong.

i couldn't resist the sizing and pricing guide, which contains pictures i might add. the most fascinating part to me was the equine & bulls option. is that so rodeo dudes can make it beyond luke perry's 8 seconds? do the fake balls hurt when strung up by a rope that is twisted up and over their body? disturbing yes, but i smell a rat.

maybe even more disturbing is the fact that you can order these little orbs on the website. who is installing them? ok, i watch gray's anatomy too - who is implanting them? oy! check out "surgical procedures" and it could be you. wow.

word to the wise

do not ever drop a baby food jar on tile - or anything hard enough to smash it. it will explode. at least mine did. it was crazy. there was glass EVERYwhere. one little earth's best jar. receycled too many times? i don't know.

it has always driven me nuts when either of my parents, and now my husband, would warn me to be careful while picking up glass that has broken. uh, yeah. i mean, are you kidding me? anyway, i've seen them all have a go at it and no one has any special technique. in fact, now that i am mentioning it, i'd venture to guess that everyone does it the same way. big pieces first, then put the little pieces into the big ones, yeah? yeah.

so this little jar breaks and there are very few big pieces. i grab them all and start to work on the little ones and i am holding the small shards in my hand. loosely, which i assume i don't need to mention. but despite holding them loosely, when i dumped them i had 3 separate little slices in the palm of my hand. which actually hurt considering their size. i started to get nervous about missing tiny little bits of glass that would make their way into, and ultimately move through, my hand because somewhere along the line, i was told that it is important to make sure you never miss a piece of glass that is stuck in your skin because glass never works its way out, it just travels inward. i don't know if this is true, but i believe it, and spent the next 5 minutes with my face in my hand carefully examining it from every angle. let's not talk about the quadruple cleaning the floor got for fear my new crawler would be cut.

so my point is, you can go ahead and pick up shattered wine glasses, broken mirrors and picture frames any old way you feel like, but if you break one of those tiny little jars, you had better be careful.

here's a somewhat related two-for-one word to the wise for you - don't ever put in or buy a house with any shade of white tile floor in the kitchen. every microscopic drop of water that you didn't see when you thought you wiped the floor will turn into a dirty spot. AND you can't see broken glass very well on it either.

gettin' nothing but static

as of today, i have officially upgraded my laundry repertoire. yes, it is sad, this is blogworthy. i've decided that since i can shock my children before touching them and bridget shouts "boo-boo!" more often then not when i touch her, i need to do something about the growing static problem in this house. so, i decided to try those little dryer sheets that have been around for, oh, a million years. and guess what? they work! i have to say, i'm a little shocked. i don't know why i really didn't expect them to work, but i didn't.

i may be more shocked with myself though. i honestly don't understand what goes on in my brain that allows me to buy whatever little non-necessity i want but when it comes to a $6 box of static killers, oh no, too steep! what a freak.

i also broke down and bought a tub of oxiclean - it was a wild time in good old stop and shop.

of course, i am my mother's daughter and used the same sheet twice. 3 times is too many, in case you were wondering.