Favourite Things at 20 Months - Colouring

Noah and I colour almost everyday.  He asks for it by saying "Colour?" or "Crayons!?"

His favourite colour continues to be orange.  But he loves to name all the colours as we colour with them.

His favourite thing to draw (and to have us draw) is the sun.  If he isn't satisfied with his own version, he'll hand us the yellow and say "Sun!  Yellow."

Concentrating...

“This is broken.  Don’t think I don’t notice.”

Yes, we have several broken crayons.  And Noah informs us that they are broken pretty much every time we colour.

Did you know that Crayola makes Dry Erase Crayons?  They're washable, and you can even buy them along with a little hand held double-sided dry erase board.  One side is white, one side is black.  I ran into them at Toys R Us about a month ago, and of course had to get them (along with the dry erase board).  One of Noah's Christmas presents is a double sided easel that has a white board, but I'm not too keen on him using markers at this point, so I was pretty excited about the Dry Erase Crayons!!

Another thing we use for colouring around here is AquaDoodle!

You just fill the little pens with water, and when you draw on the mat, colour shows up.  When it dries, the colour disappears.

The mat costs close to $30 regular price (we got it $10 off), and there's an accessories pack you might want to get so you have more than one pen - Noah loves the "paint brush."  But it is totally worth the cost, since it never "runs out."  And it's totally mess free!  We have the travel version as well, which is approaching $15 in cost.

If you have any other cool and fun colouring options, let me know!!  We love colouring in this house.

Favourite Things at 20 Months - Stacking Blocks

Noah is just about to turn 20 months old.

Gasp.  Where is time going?  In 4 short months I will have a 2 year old.

I thought I would post about some of his favourite activities and toys at this age.  I was going to put them all in one post, but that would take way too long.  So I'll be splitting them up.

Today's post is about:

Scholastic's Clifford the Big Red Dog Counting and Alphabet Stacking and Nesting Blocks

These are so simple, and frankly, when we received them as a gift when Noah was about 8 months old, I inwardly groaned.  They are made of sturdy cardboard, not plastic, and Noah was still putting everything in his mouth.  I actually had these blocks put away for a long time, because Noah was a very orally fixated baby.  He wasn't like his friends, who would inspect a toy for awhile before finally putting it in their mouths.  Noah immediately put everything in his mouth.  It was the first thing he did with any toy.  So he would have destroyed these cardboard blocks with his saliva.

I don't know when exactly, but sometime after he turned 1 (maybe around 13 or 14 months), Noah stopped putting things in his mouth.  So the blocks came out to stay.  And Noah loves them.  They are definitely one of his favourite toys, and he plays with them every single day.  

He loves to stack all the blocks up into a tower (like in the picture) and then knock the tower over using various parts of his body, my body, or one of his stuffed animal's bodies.  He always names the body part or action while he does it.  "Head!"  "Kick!"  "Feet!"  "Hit!" 

He'll stack them up, come up behind me, and push me forward so that my head knocks them over.  He thinks this is hilarious.  The other day he took Scout, his stuffed puppy we made at Build-A-Bear, and was knocking over the blocks with Scout's feet ("Foot!  Kick!"), Scout's head, and Scout's paws ("Hand!").  The funniest part was when he took Scout's floppy ear, said "Ear!" and then pushed the blocks over using Scout's ear, with a huge smile on his face.

I've been watching Dancing With the Stars while typing this, and I'm pretty excited that Rob Kardashian won the relay Cha-Cha, so I completely lost my writing train of thought.  It'd take too much effort to end this post "gracefully."  So...

The End.

One Year Ago Today

Second post tonight, but since I was digging through old pictures, I couldn't help myself.

This was Noah, exactly one year ago today, November 12, 2010:

I'm actually surprised how similar he looks to his current almost 20 month old self.

Or maybe it's because he's been sleeping for the past hour and a half, so I've forgotten what he looks like.

Expanding the Living Room

Changing light fixtures is hazardous to your marriage.

Seriously, my marriage does not do well during stressful DIY projects that aren't going well.  It all started when our marriage was about 3 or 4 days old (and we had been living together the same amount of time - 3 or 4 days).  We bought a nice entertainment unit to hold the 50 inch TV we got as a wedding present.  It was frustrating.  The instructions were only so helpful, and a lot of things were put together incorrectly, but not for lack of following directions.

I am Type A.  Thankfully, the husband is Type B, or we might actually be divorced by now.  I don't believe in divorce, though, so instead I would be stuck in the world's most unhappy marriage (which my marriage definitely is not).  I get so frustrated at him that he cannot read my mind.  Especially in stressful situations. I will snap so quickly.

Anyway, my new "home improvement" project is to get rid of our stupid dining room, and make the living room larger.  For some perspective, this is a view into the living room/dining room from the kitchen.  The shadowy figure is our crazy realtor, who we nicknamed Conan (since he looks just like Conan O'Brien, and is equally funny), talking on his cell phone:

Obviously these pictures were taken before we moved in.  Here is a view from the front windows, facing the kitchen:

It's bigger than it looks in these pictures.

Anyway, this was the layout we had going on ever since we have lived here:

The room was intended to be half living room, half dining room.  Except, you may have noticed from the second picture that the kitchen has a dining nook (in front of the sliding doors), which is the only place we ever eat.  Therefore, we had two dining tables about 15-20 feet from each other.  And we never ever ate in the 'dining room.'

Did you see how beautifully bare the table is in that picture?  IT NEVER LOOKS LIKE THAT.  I took this picture last winter when we were thinking about listing our house.  Usually the table serves to collect clutter.  Bring something into the house that you don't want to put away?  Put it on the dining room table!  Something you want out of reach from Noah?  Put it on the dining room table!

That dining room table was the bane of my existence.

I'd be thinking for awhile that I would love to be rid of that table.  It was never functional, except as a junk collector.  And it was taking up so much valuable space that we could be using to play!

The problem is that I did like the look of the table when it was bare.  So I didn't want to get rid of it completely.  Not yet, anyway.  Not until I was absolutely sure I'd never want to put it back there.  But we have very little storage space in this house - definitely not any space to store a table and 4 chairs.  So what would I do with it?

Plus, take another look at the lovely chandelier that hangs over top of the dining area:

It hangs too low for my 5'9" self to walk under, never mind my 6'5" husband.  When Noah was 7 months old and pulling up on everything, we shoved the table into the corner for about a month so he would be less likely to pull himself up on the pub height chairs.  He was inclined to do that, but the chairs were the same height as the top of his head at this point, so he'd somehow get standing up with his arms stretched above his head, holding onto the seat of the chair, and he'd start freaking out: "Holy crap, I don't even know how I did this, and I don't know how to get down again!  SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!"

This is Noah at exactly 7 months old.  I'm dying right now.  I forgot how CUTE he was!

At barely 7 months old, this child was not ready for the responsibility of pulling up to stand.  But he did it anyway.

It took him about a week to figure out how to sit back down on his own, but the pub height chairs were still risky because they were just way too tall for his admittedly tall-for-seven-months frame.

I digress.

While the table was pushed in the corner, we had to put the jolly jumper under the lovely chandelier, because we both smacked our heads on it several times.  Ouch.

I need to stop rambling.

This week I decided I was DEFINITELY getting rid of the 'dining room.'  On Friday I moved the dining table and chairs out of the dining room and put a coffee table under the chandelier so we wouldn't smack ourselves on it.  We needed a new light for the old dining room in order to allow us to walk freely through the enlarged living room.

I can't find a light that matched the ceiling light by the closet:

So I bought a different one on sale.  It's almost the exact same as the ones we have in the upstairs hallway, which is off to the right in the above picture (right by my bag on the ground).

I liked the dining room chandelier, so I wanted to put it in the dining nook and get rid of the less attractive light that was already hanging there.  There was nothing wrong with the dining nook light, it just wasn't as pretty as the chandelier.

We took the chandelier down.  Justin was all "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"  I was all "Pfft!  Are you kidding me?  I am my father's daughter.  I can change a tire.  I can change oil.  I'm the one who taught you how the fuse box works and how to refill the washer fluid in your car.  I can take down and hang up a dang light fixture!"

Which I could have.  If the screws were long enough.

Oh heavens, on a scale of 1 to 10, my frustration level was a 13.  We worked on that new stupid fixture for like 45 minutes before we got to the step that revealed that THE SCREWS WEREN'T LONG ENOUGH.  The outlet box in the ceiling is just a little bit too high up.  We needed it to be half a centimeter lower, and we would have been fine.  Stupid house builders.

So now we have a hole in the ceiling, with wires dangling out of it (don't worry, I capped them).

Well, at least we can move the pretty chandelier into the kitchen.  That should be much easier.  I mean, we know it'll fit.  And I just took it down, so I know how to put it back up.

Yeah, not as simple as that.  It took another 45 minutes.  45 minutes where Justin was not reading my mind, and Noah was whining like crazy from his high chair where we had trapped him.  Holy Hannah, my blood pressure is rising just thinking about it.

At least we got that one installed.

10 minutes after all was said and done, Justin left me alone with a cranky 19 month old to go to the stupid girls high school basketball finals.  It was only 5, and Noah goes to bed at like 9, so I was not happy about Justin abandoning us for such a stupid reason.  And of course, he went anyway.

I was seriously at the end of my rope and pretty much wanted to kill Justin.  And I had no patience with cranky Noah, who I'm pretty sure was feeding off of my bad mood.

Thankfully my Mom called, and I complained to her about everything while playing with Noah on the floor (of my newly enlarged living room!), and got off the phone an hour later feeling much better.  And Noah was over his crankies.

That is the end of my story for now.  I bought a new couch for the enlarged living area, but it won't be delivered for awhile.  I'm excited, though.

Now I need to go to bed.  This took way too long to write.

Bubbles, Circles, Colours and Snow

Yesterday it was freezing out, but Noah and I went outside to play, anyway.  It was 4pm and I was trying to kill time until Justin got home at 5:15.

It was sunny right when we went out, so I opened the van door to get my sunglasses out.  Immediately Noah started saying "Bubbles!  Bubbles.  Bubbles.  Bubbles."  Oh crap, I forgot.  Whenever he sees me open that door, he sees the bubbles that have been sitting in the lower water bottle holder since July.  And even though we haven't actually blown bubbles since July, he knows exactly what they are, and always wants to play with them.

I don't know if it's because he actually remembers when we blew bubbles in July, or if he knows what bubbles are from that episode of Sesame Street, and because he is obviously a genius, he somehow knows that that green bottle in the van door is a bottle of bubbles.

Regardless, I decided to stop being a mean Mommy (Don't judge me. The bubble wand drips on your clothes, and your hands get sticky from the bubble solution.) and actually let him play with the bubbles.

To my surprise, it didn't take him long to perfect his bubble blowing technique and actually blow proper bubbles!  I was very impressed.

After playing with bubbles for about 45 minutes, we went on a wagon ride, during which it started to snow.  Gross.  I feel like my whole fall was wasted with being so sick with my colitis flare up, and then Noah breaking his leg and not being allowed to run around.  Then when his leg was better, we got sick again.  And then we got better.  So now we can go outside to play.  You know, now that its 3 degrees outside.

Continuing with the randomness:

Noah is not a big fan of vegetables.  Last night at dinner he put a piece of broccoli in his mouth, said, "Gross," and pulled it back out and put it back on his plate.  I tried suggesting he eat carrots instead.  I had cut his round carrot pieces in half, so they were semi circles.  I put one in his mouth, and he was not thrilled.  I said, "Yummy!  Look, Mommy is eating carrots, too!"  My carrots were not cut up, so they were circular.

After Noah saw me eat the carrot in the shape of a circle, he said "Orange circle," pointing to the carrots on my plate.  And after that he ate tons of carrots, as long as they were in the shape of a circle.  It's not as if he can't say "carrot," but every time he wanted another one from my plate, he pointed to them and said, "Circle."

I am impressed that he knows several shapes in many different contexts without being prompted or reminded.  He is 19 months old and knows all his colours and some of his shapes.  He even can identify colours properly when they're not in the deep bold hues.  The difference between dark purple and pastel purple is pretty huge, but the other day I was wearing a pastel purple shirt (and Noah usually plays with dark purple blocks or crayons, so that's what he learned purple was) and I said "Noah, what colour is my shirt?"  He gazed at it for about 3 seconds, then looked at me and said "Purple?"

Again, I was impressed.

Ok, enough bragging.

Time Change is a Pain

Seriously, I am so on board with the whole "move the time by half an hour and then keep it there" idea.  Changing the time by a whole hour twice a year is brutal for small children everywhere.

I wasn't too stressed about the time changing.  I mean, Noah is 19 months old, and this would be our fourth time change experience, and our second "fall back" time change.  Yes, the fall back time change has the potential to really suck, because it means their normal wake up time becomes a whole hour earlier than normal.  But I had Noah on a pretty late schedule to begin with.  Late to bed, late to wake up.  So I wasn't too worried about him waking up too too early.

However, shortly before the time change he started sleeping straight through the night and waking up around 7:30, instead of sometime after 8.  Ok, not a big deal.  With the time change that would mean he'd get up around 6:30.  He has never been a kid who always woke up at the same time every morning.  He might do that for a few days and then something would change, so his normal wake up time was always fluid.  I planned that I'd put him to bed at his normal time with the time change (around 8:30pm, which would be 9:30pm on the old clock), and within no time at all he would be on the new schedule.  No worries.

Well, isn't this always the way it goes?  If you stress about something, it turns out to be nothing.  And if you think something will be simple, nothing goes right, or the way you thought it would go.

Noah is now going to bed at about 8:45pm, and waking up at 6am.  WHAT?  I'm not getting how this makes any sense, even when I take into account the time change.

So he's getting just a little over 9 hours of sleep at night, and still just a normal 1 hour nap.

I'm a little frustrated, but I'm not going to stress out.  I'm confident it will work itself out.

Actually, maybe I should stress out, considering what I previously stated about "the way it always goes."

I leave you with a picture of my adorable, messy child, who just doesn't seem to need the same kind of sleep as everybody else:

They're Not Just for Water!

Since we got sick last week we have been staying in most days.  I admit, after a brutal year of constantly getting sick, and then the niceness of only getting sick once or twice over the summer, I am now paranoid of taking Noah to play with groups of children in an uncontrolled setting - I dread another winter like we had last year!

I am always on the lookout for fun new activities to do with Noah, but even more so when we're not going out as often.  So here is how we spent a good hour this past week:

This is Noah's water table, which I brought inside and washed up in the tub.  Every time Noah saw it in the house, he kept saying "Water!!  Water??  Please?"  That was not in my plan.

I went to Bulk Barn to buy popcorn kernels.  This is about $10 worth of kernels (I spent $20 total on two different colours of kernels).  Unfortunately, I didn't realize until afterward that I could have gone to one of the many agricultural/feed supply stores around here and bought a 50lb bag of corn feed for about $9.  That would be a much more cost efficient way of doing this!

Along with our bare hands, we also used kitchen spoons and different sizes of measuring cups to play in the corn.  Noah was very careful.  Every time a kernel ended up on the floor we would say "Oh no!"  He would pick it up and say "Got it!" and put it back in the table.  "There!"

After about an hour Noah got a little more rowdy.  After he accidentally-on-purpose poured a scoop of kernels into my lap, we packed the corn away.  An hour of fun was totally worth the money and effort, and we will definitely be repeating this activity many times throughout the winter (using the same corn, of course)!

The empty water table is still sitting in our living room, and Noah keeps walking up to it and saying "Corn!  Corn!!"  instead of  "Water!!"

Halloween 2011

I am not a fan of Halloween.  This seems opposite to every other blog I follow, but I just don't like it.  I just hate the ghosts and goblins and witches and skulls and everything 'scary' about it.  It's too 'dark' for my tastes.

Last year our nephew Josiah was being baptized out of town on Halloween day, and we didn't get home until like 8pm, so Halloween was a non-issue for us.  Noah didn't have a costume, and I didn't care.

This year Noah didn't have a costume again, and again, I didn't care.  I didn't want to go out and spend money on one for him (since I don't even like Halloween in the first place), and no one was donating anything to us.  Plus, I think it is awkward to take young toddlers trick or treating.  I mean, they are super cute in their costumes, and if they say trick or treat themselves and hold out their bags for candy, that is also adorable.  And I have nothing against you if you choose to do it.  I would just feel so awkward taking my 19 month old from door to door asking for candy.  I mean, I won't allow him to eat all that junk at this young age.  So it would just be collecting candy for Justin and I.  And I'm not comfortable with using my kid to score free candy.  A personal hang up.

Basically, I wouldn't even have a Halloween post at all, except that Noah was the cutest little candy-hander-outer I've ever seen!!  He was so proud of himself and his little job.  He sat on the stairs in front of the door, holding the big bowl of candy:

He kept saying “Candy!  Treats!  Prizes!  Kids!  Mama, look!  Prizes!!”  

He absolutely loved handing out candy.  At the beginning he was a little over generous, wanting to hand out multiple pieces to each kid, but then he calmed it down and just handed out two pieces to the pretty little girls (lol).  Everyone else got one piece.

"Here you go, buddy."

I was surprised that the terrifying costumes, like the one he's handing candy to in these two pictures, didn’t even freak him out.  I seriously despise scary costumes.  I would like to put up a sign that this house doesn’t hand out candy to scary costumes.

So, that was our Halloween excitement.  Yes, all of the dressed up toddlers looked far spiffier than Noah (I don't even like that onesie, I don't know why I put it on him that day).  But he was such a little grown up handing out candy.  I just want to squish him!

How I Solved the Nap Strike

I mentioned in Noah's 19 month post that I had "fixed" Noah's nap strike (fixed doesn't seem like the right word, but neither does any other word I can think of).  I said I would explain further, so here it is.

On Thursday October 6, when he was 18.5 months old, Noah began a b-RUTAL nap strike.  He just would not nap.  He would scream in his crib for as long as it would take for me to get him out (up to 3 hours on a couple of occasions).  The nap strike lasted for 15 days.

On the 16th day, it ended.  On day 16 I just plopped him in his crib.  No comforting first.  Just a bum change, telling him it was naptime, and then putting him in the crib.  He cried for half an hour and then slept for 40 minutes.  The next day he cried for 20 minutes and slept for 20 minutes.  And ever since then he has just cried for a couple of minutes and then had a normal nap.

For the 5-7 days before the nap strike ended, I had stopped being so hardcore.  I stopped letting him cry in his crib for so long (it was frying my nerves), and I was no longer forcing him to stay awake in the car if we happened to have to go for a drive to town after a failed nap attempt.  However, Day 16 was the first day I just plopped him in the crib with no comfort first.  I really didn't like the idea of that, because I liked nursing him and rocking him to sleep.  But I had no idea what else to try, so I did it even though it felt wrong to me.

Apparently even though it felt wrong to me, it was the right thing to do, because the nap strike ended.  It just goes to show that all those people who always say, "If it feels wrong to you as a parent, then it is wrong," - they can be wrong about that (I mostly hear this from judgmental people when they're discussing CIO).  CIO feels wrong to almost every parent.  It certainly felt wrong to me.  But after trying everything else to get Noah to sleep, it was the only thing that worked.  Yes, it felt wrong.  But it was right, because none of the other methods got my son the sleep he so desperately needed (even staying on the boob constantly).

Putting Noah in his crib for naptime without any rocking or nursing beforehand felt so weird and wrong.  And it still does (I have to make a conscious decision every single day to not try doing it again).  But obviously it was the right decision, because he is napping again.

By the way, ever since the nap strike began I have been putting Noah in his crib awake at bedtime.  Everyday.  I still nurse him first, but only for about 10 minutes.  Once he's done drinking, he goes in his crib.  And since then, he has been sleeping straight through the night almost every night.  I miss cuddling with my sleeping, nursing baby (ahem, I mean toddler), but at the same time I like nursing for only 10 minutes at night, instead of 20 to 30 minutes.  I have more time with my husband this way.  And that's important, too.

Illness #14

I've been blog slacking, so I am just going to do some dump posts.  I would do bullets, but each of these things deserve their own post (for my own purposes), so that is what they will get.

Noah came down with influenza last Thursday.  Fever of 101.2, cough, runny nose, sore throat, etc etc.  He was feeling very icky and lethargic the first day.  We basically just sat around watching Sesame Street.  In fact, at one point he laid down on his tummy sideways on my bed and stayed in the same position for an entire hour.  He didn't move an inch.  Then he sat up, leaned against my pillows, and pulled the covers over him.  He stayed there without moving for about 20 minutes, then he pushed off the covers and was soaked in sweat.  Poor little thing.

Because Noah is such a kind child, he shared his sickness with me.  Of course.  Also of course is that my husband once again escaped.  In the past 16 months Noah and I have been sick 14 times (always the same virus at the same time), and my husband has been sick once.  That is crazy.  His immune system is insane.

We are doing better now.  Still congested, but that's to be expected.