A Week in the Life - Monday, February 11, 2013

7:25am:  Today I started out behind the curve.  Lily is cutting two new teeth and had woken up at 3:40am in need of some snuggles and medicine.  After getting her soothed back to sleep, I was awake for about another hour or so reading my book in the dim light of my book light using fading batteries.  So, when Joe woke me up to tell me he was leaving for work, it felt like I had literally just fallen back to sleep.  Lily was just beginning to stir herself, so regardless of how I felt, I knew it was time to start the day.  Joe got Lily changed into a dry diaper and got her settled in with her books for her little morning reading time while I got up and got ready.

7:50am: After getting some milk for Lily and returning upstairs, this is what I walked into...Lily was finished reading and was running laps around her crib with great joy (and energy)!

I love this smile that greets me every morning...

7:55am: We snuggle in for some milk and morning book reading.

Lily's favorite jammies by far right now are her dog jammies.  She would wear them every night and all day long if we would let her!

For quite awhile now, Lily has been doing some signing, and one of her very first ones she learned was the sign for "book."  She now says "book" when she wants to read, but every once in awhile as an added bonus, she will still do the sign.  I wanted to capture it here, so I would always remember her sweet little hands showing us that she wants to read.

One of Lily's favorite things to do while reading is to give the various characters sips of her milk.  While we try to be careful, it is very sweet until milk gets on the pages and they stick together!

Richard Scarry books are THE books to read in our house these days.  Lily loves them and so do we.  There is so much to look at, talk about, read about and study in his pictures.  This particular book is Lily's favorite one right now.  It is actually my brother's book that he got for Christmas in 1979 (there is an inscription)!  No lie!  It is loved just as much today as it was then....

I think the reason Lily loves it so much is because on every page Goldbug is hiding somewhere and she LOVES to hunt for him and all hidden things for that matter... it is a lot of fun!  For instance here's Goldbug now!

8:20am:  For breakfast today, I served some mini-muffins.  These particular muffins are not the healthiest- sure they have some healthy things in them, but there are also a few chocolate chips in there too.  Needless to say, Lily loved the special treat of having these for breakfast- all because I forgot to make her cereal the night before!  

8:35am:  Lily's hair is a bit wild these days.  Long enough to be in her face but not so long that it is easily pulled back into pig tails yet.  So we have been working on getting some of it pulled back a little bit.  I have found that it is easiest to accomplish this feat while she is still strapped into her high chair in the morning.  Some days she loves it, other days she hates having her hair pulled back.  You just never know what kind of hair day it will be!  So far so good, today!

8:40am- Off to the playroom while I grab some breakfast of my own, clean up Lily's breakfast and I try to get all of our stuff together to head off for our morning activity.

Lily is not quite to the independent play stage.  I know when she runs into her playroom, I have about a 45 second-1 minute window before she is back and wanting me to play with her.  Today, she came racing in with her baby and baby stroller and proceeded to run some laps around our kitchen and dining room.... she is getting really fast!

9:05am:  Shoes on?  Check.  Coats on?  Check.  Everyone and everything loaded into the car?  Check.  Phone in hand for personal calls while traveling?  Check. Bunny for snuggling? Check.  Cuteness?  Check-check!

9:30-11:30am:  On Monday mornings, Lily and I attend a group called Hand Works at a local church.  We are blessed to live in this community as this church has a HUGE ministry for moms and kiddos that is available for a reasonable fee and is open to the public.  We have been participating since September and we both LOVE it.  There are many programs to choose from within this ministry.  Hand Works is a time for moms to bring in any projects or things they are needing time to work on that may be difficult to complete at home with little ones around.  Some moms pay bills, prepare their Christmas cards, some flip through magazines, others sew, some scrapbook, others craft, but there is a lot of conversation, idea sharing and community building that takes place as well during that time.  I have really enjoyed it and I actually almost have Lily's baby book completed! (Now that she's almost 2!)

While I'm in the room with the other moms, Lily goes to her child care room.  This is the room where Lily plays for two hours and she LOVES it.  Her favorite feature is the giant tomato house.

...as seen here...  she just bolted into the room and straight into it and peeked out.  So cute!  The photo is kind of blurry because I did not want to look suspicious taking all of these photos and was also trying not to capture any pics with other kiddos in them, so...hence, its a little bit blurry.  Sorry!

Here is a glimpse of where I am during this time...in this photo I'm trying to blog while enjoying some yummy coffee too!

Here is another covert photo taken of the room where I am...there are usually about 8 women in this room with me and there are about 10 others who are signed up for the group but choose to spend their time in other parts of the church where it is quieter.

11:45am: We are back home and it's lunch time.  On Monday's our lunch time is always a few minutes later than normal because we have to drive back home.  It is usually a pretty quiet lunch because Lily is usually pretty pooped out from all of her fun playing.  Today was no exception.

12:15pm: Lily is in her crib still quietly chatting to herself.  I'm a little bit worried because usually when she is as tired as she was before her nap, she just konks right out and there are no peeps from her room.  Today I take the first part of nap time to prepare some homemade pizza dough.  The KU/KSU basketball game is on tonight and so in honor of the big game, we are having some homemade pizza for dinner.

12:30pm: Just as I was sitting down for my own lunch, the front door quietly opened and in walked Joe with some early, surprise Valentine's Day flowers for me!  So sweet!  We put them in a vase and listened to Lily begin to cry a little bit on the monitor.  Not a good sign at all...

12:40pm: Joe left and headed back to work.  I sit down to eat my lunch quickly as I can hear Lily's tears escalating upstairs.  Crying during nap time is super rare for her, so I have a feeling that I will not be getting much of a break today.  So while eating, because I am crazy and just cannot help myself, I watch about 10 minutes of the West Wing (again for about the 15th time now) which is streaming on Netflix.  I just adore that show!

12:55pm:  All hope of a nap has gone out the window and the tears upstairs are really getting loud along with the fact that I can hear her banging her window blinds against the window so loudly that it sounds like they are being pulled out of the wall!  So upstairs I go...

12:56pm:  I find this super sad girl in her bed.  I can tell she is exhausted and very frustrated that she could not sleep- and that it took me so long to come up and rescue her! Poor pumpkin!  Her shirt is soaked from crying, so we change into a second outfit and snuggle for awhile in her room in effort to calm down a bit and then head on back down stairs.  I cannot figure out why she was not able to nap and as we sat snuggling in her room, I was mentally going through the (long) list of things I needed to get done today during her nap that were now not going to be done at all...

1:20pm:  One of our favorite features of Apple TV is their screen saver feature.  It can be hooked up to your phone's photo stream and basically all of the photos on your phone just rotate through for an hour as a screen saver on your TV.  Most of the photos we take are of Lily or our family, so we have it all hooked up and we call it Lily TV.  She LOVES to watch herself on TV (the photos) and it is very soothing for her.  So we snuggled up and watched some Lily TV when we came downstairs.  At first it was calming and relaxing as she just wanted to be snuggled up close.  Any attempt by me to readjust or do anything else was met with a flood of exasperated tears so we snuggled for awhile.

some Lily TV with bunnies

...but eventually she got up and continued watching from a closer vantage point.  I however, was not so lucky in that I was not "allowed" to get up and do anything without lots of tears, meltdowns and tantrums...

...It really is cute how much she likes watching Lily TV.  She remembers the photos when they rotate through and will "talk" about Santa, snow, sledding, different people in the photos, Luna (my brother's dog...)  it is like a living photo album! For so many reasons, I heart Netflix and Apple TV.  :)

1:55pm:  The afternoon is off to a rocky start.  As mentioned, there were TONS of tears, meltdowns, tantrums and frustrations.  All to be expected from an exhausted little gal who has not napped...but still. It. was. a. rough. one. for. everyone. involved.

2:15pm:  In an effort to distract Lily from whatever was bothering her at the moment, I got out some Sesame Street flash cards that I had gotten at the dollar store.  I had been saving them for just such a "rainy day".  Sesame Street peeps are VERY popular around here these days and these provided a decent distraction/activity to do together that lasted more than a minute.  Lily loved looking at them and although she is doing well with learning her numbers, she is not really into counting things yet.  But today was not really about the numbers, it was more about the friendly faces on the cards.

2:25pm:  Eventually it all ended up looking like this...which is relatively minor all things considered.

2:35pm:  We head down to the basement.  Our basement is unfinished, so we typically do not spend much time down there.  Not only is it cold, but it is still rather unorganized.  I'm still working on this, but right now, there are different areas stacked with different things- like baby things, former work things, home decor things, random things, craft things...you get the idea.  One of the main things I wanted to do during Lily's nap today was to find something I thought I remembered packing in a box filled with some of my stuff from when I used to work outside the home.  It was an invoice that I needed to turn in, so I knew it would require some digging....not easy to do with little hands helping.  While I was doing that, Lily discovered a tub full of her old baby toys.  She had a great time and stayed busy dumping that out everywhere which was a small price to pay in order to have a few minutes of uninterrupted time to quickly look through some boxes.  I eventually found the invoice (thankfully!), so we picked up and headed back upstairs.

2:50pm: Playing in the play room.  Still very tearful and only wanting to do things for about 30 seconds at a time.  Lily was starting to get frustrated with me trying to document everything with my phone.  Honestly, all of this documenting was probably what was keeping me sane at this point!

3:40pm: After lots of tears downstairs, I attempted to "change the channel" and move us upstairs.  Usually this works well for Lily when she is in this kind of state.  She LOVES to play on our bed.  We have Pandora through our TV in our bedroom and she loves to listen to Sesame Street music and play on our bed.  So we loaded up our arms and headed up.  I had some little projects I wanted to try and accomplish while sitting on the bed with her, but those did not actually get done due to protests from Lily wanting my full attention.  At this point, I was game for whatever would help keep the peace, but also a little bit frustrated at not being able to do anything "productive."  She was getting super annoyed that I kept trying to "play" with my phone (aka document the day)...

trying to make me stop "playing" with my phone

A moment of protest on the floor

Me documenting the scene on the bed (and yes, one of my "projects" was to try and read a 2 month old edition of People Magazine!)" Notice in the span of me getting up and snapping a photo, Lily has crawled off the scene and is now trying to grab my full glass of water on the bedside table!

4pm:  In effort to keep things "fun" I decide it is time to tackle my little project in Lily's bathroom that I have been wanting to do since we moved in.  It is not an "urgent" project by any means, just something that has been crossing my mind from time to time.  I have no plan in place for the next phase of the project, but desperate to feel like I accomplish something today, I remove the towel rack and begin unscrewing the 4 screws that are in the walls.  See, not a big deal, the screws were not in tight or anything like that.  In my mind, it would just look better and be more functional for Lily if there were hooks and not a towel rack.  (In my desperation to start and "finish" something, I ended up using the baby screwdriver that was handy since I did not want to haul Lily down to the garage to hunt for a real screwdriver at this point in the day).

4:07pm:  In the seven (yes, seven) minutes it took me to unscrew 4 screws and remove a towel rack, this scene appeared next to where I was standing... my laundry basket from our closet brought in (which meant my dirty laundry was dumped out back in my closet or somewhere in between), toilet paper unrolled, drawer emptied, laundry spread about in the background, and the decorative jug that props our bedroom door open was brought in.  One step forward, about twenty-five steps back...

4:20pm:  After picking up a little bit of the chaos that had taken over the upstairs, we played a little game of chase/hide/peek a boo.  Lily loves this game and loves to hide in our guest room between the wall and the bed...it was nice to finally hear a giggle from my girl after an afternoon of whines and tears.

4:30pm:  We went back down stairs, played and watched some more Lily TV.  Lily began doing stunts like this one, which I continually discouraged and after zero response from her to my redirections, I decided we had to find something new to do...again.

climbing from the chair onto the end table...

4:45pm:  So we tried to pick things up a little bit around the house and basically that involved me picking things up and Lily getting them right back out.  Some items I had to put up out of reach- ie the kitchen counters because they were being thrown across the room.  I then decided that it was close enough to dinner time that we could start working on making our pizza.  Lily loves to help cook, so this was a great activity for us to do at this point in the day when the last wheel was getting ready to fall off our wagon...  We browned some hamburger, chopped some red onion, laid out the pepperoni, rolled out some pizza dough, heated up the oven, made some sauce and added some spices and stirred it while it simmered and then assembled the pizza.  Since I'm holding Lily for about 99% of these activities, there are no photos to document our cooking....but here is the finished product before cooking....

5:25pm:  Ready for the oven!

My helper wanting to be picked up again...

5:30pm: While the pizza cooks, we head back into the playroom to pick up and to wait for Daddy to come home.  He had recently texted and said he was on his way which is always a highlight of the day for both of us!

6:10pm:  I completely forgot to document our finished pizza (it was delicious) and dinner together as a family!  But here is a glimpse of Lily's tray afterwards!  She enjoyed her pizza, not so much her green beans and ate every bite of her pineapple (her favorite food).

6:40pm:  With bath time over, (again forgot to document!) Lily is all cozy and clean in her jammies.  She is ready for bed and reads some books with Daddy while drinking the rest of her milk.  Such a sweet, sweet time of day for everyone.

6:40pm:  Meanwhile, I return back downstairs to begin cleaning up and just wanted to share a "before" picture.  This glimpse perfectly captures the craziness of our day... Ugh!

7:15pm:  Order is restored!  Dishes done, counters cleaned, floor swept...Ahhhhh!  Mama is off duty!

8pm:  KU vs. KSU Men's Basketball game!  A perfect way to end this crazy, wild, frustrating, exhausting day!  I was super tired as I watched this game and turned in for the night shortly after the final buzzer.  P.S.  The Jayhawks won, snapping a rare 3 game losing streak.  Whew!

and the best part...this!

*** Special note:  Two days after I documented this day, I took Lily to the doctor because she was not napping again (which is really rare for her and tends to indicate something is wrong when she cannot tell me) aaaannnd she was diagnosed as having a double ear infection!  Poor little gal!  No wonder she could not sleep!  I felt horrible!