Into the Mouths of Babes

Does Joseph put everything in his reach directly in his mouth?

Is the Pope Catholic?

Do bears poop in the woods?

Yep.

(And check out those thunder thighs!)

I was expecting it, but this kid has taken it to a whole new level.

Of course he has teething rings (or 'chew toys' as James lovingly calls them). He likes them ok, I guess. Those are more suited for being smashed repeatedly on his highchair tray before being violently discarded on the floor. I'm glad we decided not to buy him many toys because he's let us know, in no uncertain terms, what he considers to be a good teething implement.

...and the finalists are...

-Electronics: cell phone, alarm clock, remote control, camera, computer mouse, keyboard, speakers...it's all the same to him.

-Wood: anything made of wood will do, hence the blocks. He'll lunge out of your arms to chew on a door frame or armrest of a chair. He'd love to sink his teeth into the headboard of our bed but he's, so far, been unsuccessful.

-Elastic Hair Bands: He'll entertain himself for half an hour by stuffing it in his mouth, hooking it around his 2 bottom teeth and pulling until it snaps (sending a fine spray of cold drool in all directions). During the past week he's launched at least 5 of them into dark corners I'm yet to discover.

-Coasters: We have a lovely set of bamboo coasters that he loves to chomp. We recently gave our coffee table away (sharp corners) so the coasters are all his.

-Granola Bars: Still in the wrapper, of course. He'll alternate between chewing and banging until the granola bar is reduced to a round blob of oats and melted chocolate in one end of the wrapper.

-Kitchenaid Mixer Attachments: The whisk one is his favorite.

-Spoons: Any spoon'll do, but his favorite is (surprisingly) his flexible plastic baby spoon. (I'm quite sure there should be a hyphen there somewhere, as the spoons are not made of flexible plastic babies.) The trick to feeding Squirt is getting the spoon in and out of his mouth before he clamps down with both jaws, both hands and both teeth. If you're too slow, don't even think about refilling that spoon until he's good and ready.

-Produce: Give that kid a whole lemon, cucumber, bell pepper, apple, you name it. He'll find a way to wrap his little mouth around it. Just don't expect to get it back without several sets of two little holes.

-The Church Chairs: This one was a bit of a surprise for me, since they're metal instead of wood. Still, when he gets tired of looking around over my shoulder, he'll clamp his little jaws around the chair until I pry him loose.

Only recently has he discovered licking. Now he's got two ways to taste his surroundings. He licks his bathwater, his highchair and your collarbone if you let him. I'm not too excited about the little tongue reaching for the handle of the shopping cart, but it's a welcome replacement to the biting while he nurses!

Garden!

Well spring certainly has taken its sweet time getting here this year. It snowed on May 31st. Seriously? Doesn't the weatherman know that's our second engagementaverssary? We were supposed to celebrate with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich picnic in the park, which is how this whole marriage thing started, but we opted to keep our bottoms dry and stayed home. But do we let bipolar weather keep us from finally being able to plant a garden? You bet your compost we don't!

A nice man in my parent's bishopric has an extra plot of land that he's not using. He said it was ours to tear up and plant as we chose. I bet he wasn't expecting us to go dumpster diving and cover his nice green lawn with our trash.

It all started when we found this library book about "Weedless Gardening". Supposedly, if you put down newspaper or cardboard and cover it with compost, it'll kill the grass/weeds and turn them into nice nutritious soil. No tilling, no weeding, just lots of cardboard. So that's what we did. We spent several days gathering and spreading and watering our cardboard farm. Then we shoveled some muck onto the beds and made grass clipping pathways. It turned out to be a lot of work, especially since the only way to transport compost was in garbage bags that had to be thrown over the privacy fence separating the garden plot from my mom's parking lot. We got yelled at by some neighbors who thought we were dumping bag after bag of trash onto someone else's property. (They couldn't see us because of said privacy fence.)

Here's the semi-finished product:

It's nice that Joseph can't crawl yet. He just sits on his cardboard box and watches us...for about 10 minutes and then he's had enough. It will be easier for him to entertain himself when he's mobile, but harder for us to work. There's an empty pool back there that's a disaster waiting to happen. I think we need to invest in a playpen.

Once we finally got our beds covered with compost, we realized that it wasn't deep enough to hold the moisture that we needed to dissolve the cardboard. That meant more shoveling and moving compost. We ended up borrowing a rototiller and tilling up 4 of the beds anyway. I'm not convinced that weedless gardening saved us any time or trouble in the end.

Here we are pilfering rocks from the river. Our cardboard kept blowing away every time there was a storm. We weighed it down with some heavy rocks (which also had to be heaved over that 7 foot over the fence).

These pictures are from over a month ago. Since then we've planted corn, chard, arugula, lettuce, beets, kohlrabi, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, basil, parsley, peas, squash, cucumbers, marigolds and petunias. And then it rained, and blew, and snowed, and hailed, and they cut down a tree and threw all the branches on our lettuce bed. Did I mention that, on the way to cut down that tree, they drove a huge truck over our peas? It'll be a miracle if we get a harvest at all.

Baby and Me

I seriously think about blogging every day. Sometimes I even make it to the website, but then the list of interesting blogs already written by all you interesting folk pulls me in and the next thing I know, the baby's awake.

Here are a few pictures. More to come soon...really.

Being lazy on the couch on a Monday. I love Mondays. James is off and I take that as my permission to do nothing productive all day.
During May Joseph went through a stage where he had his foot in his mouth during most of his waking hours. I feel like I have days like that too sometimes! Now the toe sucking has been mostly replaced with slamming and banging and generally being a little boy.
The days of relaxing in the bouncy seat are over. Now he wants to lean all the way forward and figure out how he vibration thing works

We've discovered his favorite food. I guess it's genetic, because his Grandma Affleck has been known to do the same thing with lemons.

April Fools, solid foods and Italians, oh my!

Oh, I'm just so excited to finally have this up to date! Please, please PLEASE load right! If it doesn't I just might swear off computers forever.

April's been a good, but seriously bipolar month so far. One day it's 70 degrees, the next day it snows. Joey got his first bad cold. It was so sad. If there's one thing he loves in life, it's milk, and a stuffy nose kept him from nursing like he wanted to. The only time I've seen him madder is when I tried to use the booger sucker on him (I'm sure there's a nicer name for it, but I don't know it).

On a brighter note, on the sunny days we've been spending a lot of time outside. Joey loves playing the grass, scratching at the trees and riding in the swing. The 2 year old neighbor girl loves mauling him half to death in her version of affection.

The best news of all I don't have a picture of yet, but I WILL remember the camera today...putting it by the door now...This nice man in my mom's ward has a big garden plot that is used exclusively for growing grass and dandelions. He's letting us use it to tear up and plant as we please. Awesome! We got some library books on gardening and are trying some pretty crazy ideas involving cardboard, bags of compost, and sprouting seeds in wet paper towels on a foot warmer. More to come.

Ok, blah blah blah, here are the pictures.
James and I hatched this great story to tell my parents on April Fools' Day about how a family he home teaches asked us to puppy sit their giant pit bull...but we're really not worried because Ruggles (see, we even named him) is great with kids and only pees outside. We were even going to have a giant water dish on the kitchen floor. And then we forgot to tell them. Oh well. Above is a picture of half my April Fools dinner. I made a meatloaf in two cake pans, layered them and frosted them with mashed potatoes and ketchup. It was awesome. I told James that we were having hamburgers for dessert and cake for dinner, since the hamburgers weren't quite done yet. He got a little shock when he took his first bite of meatloaf cake. True to my word, we had "hamburgers" for dessert. We remembered to take a picture only after the "cake" was gone. I think the hamburger cookies turned out awesome. The ketchup and mustard were a little disconcerning, but they tasted like frosting, honest.

This month Joey had his first experience with solid foods. Here are pictures of the first 3 times he tried rice cereal. As you can tell, his opinion of the stuff has improved.


The only hard thing is getting the spoon free of his death grip to reload. He's also learned to grab the food off of the spoon before we even get it to his mouth. So now dinner is immediately followed by a bath.

I guess you can't tell in this picture, but if you blow it up really big, you can see that he has 2 little toofers! He got one last Wednesday and the second one the next day. Our little punkin is growing up!
April was Italian party month...didn't you know? Elena (my mission trainer) came down with her mom and brother who were visiting from Torino this month. We had nice noisy party where everyone gained at least 3 pounds. Everybody had a good time, except Joey who woke up hopping mad to see all these strangers in his nice quiet house.
Elena and her family came back down for a quick visit the next week. It was her birthday, so we had some (delicious, if I do say so myself) cupcakes. Fun times. I miss Italy.
Now that Joey is basically an adult (eating cereal, sitting up, 2 teeth, how much more grown up can you get?) he let us know in no uncertain terms that he was done with his infant tub. Above is a picture from last week of him, reclining in his little whale tub, chewing happily on his fishy toy.
And here's what he does this week. He won't lean back no matter what we do. You can't see it, but he's got a death grip on the side of his tub, lest we try to make him lay back...that was SO last week!

Oh, and he wants to crawl too, but can't (much to my delight). This is my favorite stage where he can sit for a long time and entertain himself, but he can't get away and destroy the house.
Our little stud muffin turned 6 months old yesterday! No cake for him yet, but I did bake him a yam. My quest is to make him like all the things that his daddy hates (Grandma Affleck calls them the finer things in life): yams, squash, cantaloupe, asparagus...so far I've been successful. He's got his Daddy's good looks and his Mommy's good taste. As it should be.


He liked it! Now we've got another color to wash out of his clothes.

Here's a video that is definitely sideways and possibly won't even work. I tried.

He's still napping...

Much to my surprise, Joey's still asleep, so I guess I'll keep on blogging. I guess he's helping me make up for lost time in March.

.....................................................................................................

He's a mind reader. As soon as I typed that, he cried. Anyway, here are the cliff notes:
My mom had a birthday. She didn't want to let me put 67 candles on her cake...oh fine. The cake was pretty awesome. We used to have this amazing recipe for "The Carrot Cake That Ages Gracefully", but it got lost in a move or something. BUT, thanks to allrecipes.com (where I spend a little too much of my life) I found it! What they don't tell you on there is that you have to make this cake at least 3 days ahead of time and let it age in the fridge. It sounds gross, but it's SO GOOD! Go on, give it a try. I dare ya! http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Grandmas-Carrot-Cake/Detail.aspx
Here I am with my little doodlebug. It's a rare moment when he'll lay on my chest like that. He's gotten so strong and wants nothing to do with cuddling with Mom anymore. Time for a new baby! (Kidding, geesh! Not for at least 9 months.)
Check out those thunder thighs!

2 more naps and I think I'll be up-to-date!

Let's pretend it's March...

I don't know what happened. Nothing happened actually. March came and went...in like a lion, out like a wet, but slightly warmer lion...and I didn't write anything about it. Stuff happened though, and I've got pictures to prove it.

Joey made great strides in entertaining himself for a few minutes. Not so great as his April strides, but you'll just have to wait for the next post. Here he is, wedged in between the pillows on our bed, chomping happily at his bath toy while I fold (gasp) a whole load of laundry with NO patty cake breaks! I love this picture because he's making a total James face. I see this one all the time when James is reading something perplexing.

Ok, for some reason I can't drag my pictures into the order I want them, so we'll just jump around.

We had a bridal shower at our house for Shannon Swiss, one of my mission companions. The shower was only for mission friends, so we pulled out all the stops and talked exclusively about stuff that bores everyone else out of their minds. The pictures turned out a monster step below average, but here's proof it happened.

On the right is Shannon, the bride-to-be. On the left is Amanda McCollough. We were all companions together. It took both me and Amanda to train that wild Sorella Swiss.

James spent hours on photoshopping a Swiss Miss label so that it read "Miss Swiss" and the part that used to say "marshmallow" said bride-to-be. It was awesome. We taped them over the labels on real boxes of Swiss Miss hot cocoa. Yeah hubby!
Melissa and Lindsay made a video with Eric, Shannon's fiancé. So mostly they did all the work and I made the food...as it should be.
Ok, back to Joey. Here he is when he had just woken up from a nap. I love it when he wakes up and just starts playing instead of screaming bloody murder. It happens seldom enough that I still appreciate it.

Ta da! Joey can actually sit up by himself! At this point he could only stay there for a few seconds. As soon as he reached for something he'd bonk on the floor. Never broke his concentration though. Who knows why falling smack on his head doesn't make him cry, having a wet diaper does.

Here are my cute boys. James is Joey's favorite person by far (unless he's hungry--then it's Mom all the way). They love to play together. Aaaaawww cute!

It's All About the Little Guy

Congratulations to me, I blogged TWICE this month! (I totally made it. There's like an hour and 20 minutes of February left.)
I was just looking through our pictures of this month and realized that we ONLY have pictures of Joey. We make casual appearances when one of us happens to be holding him, but it's clear who's in charge at our house. His siblings will be jealous.
We got a surprise visit from Lindsey, our "cousin". She's actually James's cousin's daughter, so it's really complicated how she's related to me (my cousin once removed in law, I suppose). Anyway, she came down for the weekend from school in Rexburg and spent an evening with us. She was a big hit with the little guy.

Joey is big enough for his high chair now! We started putting him in it about a month ago and it's been a lifesaver! He doesn't eat solid food yet, so it's pretty clean. He loves being up high enough to be a part of everything. Since we discovered this miracle chair I can:
--put him in front of the mirror to entertain himself while I shower

--and dry my hair

--do the dishes with BOTH hands
--eat dinner without his hands in my plate

--fold the never-ending laundry

He'll just play happily with his toys/washcloth (his favorite teething toy) for quite a while...and then when he's had enough, he gives us subtle hints like this:

Here's the newest trick! He can sit up!...well, sort of. As you can see, it takes a lot of concentration and a little side support to keep him from tipping over after 5 seconds.

Anything can be a teething toy

Enjoying some delicious fingers together

Happy high chair boy

Baby's first sponge...it's kind of a joke that I want my kids to play with sponges instead of expensive toys. I unwrapped him a brand new sponge and it stank like chemicals...so we took a quick picture and didn't let him chew on it. Oh well.

My March goal is to take pictures of something besides the baby and write about it. He's just so darn cute though!