Mommy and Sweet Pea

"Rose, do you have a plan?" Average asked, as I began aggressively yanking sheets up plastic up out of our front flower bed. No, I didn't. All I knew was that I didn't want plastic in my way anymore as I tried to plant my three new flowers, and I didn't want to see it poking up out of the ground, or pull chunks of it up as I was trying to weed, as I had been doing all afternoon. I can accept that plastic has many uses, but I don't want my garden to be one of them. Over time it loses its functionality as a weed deterrent, and slowly breaks down but never goes away. I have ranted about this before. By the end, I had filled half of our garbage can with plastic, unearthed a broken section of drainpipe for our gutters, and turned over all of the bark mulch (apparently barkamulch is not a real word) in the area next to our house so it looks like new again! Luckily I married a man who can make a plan, and he brought out a rake and a shovel and helped me ...

I saw a commercial for an absolutely idiotic product the other day. Sorry to the people who invented these, but seriously? Disposable paper towels for your home bathroom? Don't we already use too much paper with our kitchen paper towels, our toilet paper, and our paper napkins? I have been trying to get away from using disposable products, not trying to find ways to bring more into my life. We do still have paper towels in our kitchen, and I use them occasionally for greasy or dirt messes in the kitchen, but I mostly try to use cloth towels, napkins, and cleaning rags. They do just as good or better of a job, don't fall apart in your hands, and don't need to be constantly replaced (costing money and natural resources). Why in the world would you want to add ANOTHER costly disposable product to your bathroom, when most people already have plenty of good hand towels? The commercial shows many people using the towels after not thoroughly washing their hands. OK, that is ki...

A few years ago Average bought a digital camera. He searched for a while to find the most indestructible (least destructible?) one out there. He ended up with an Olympus Stylus 770 SW that is shock and waterproof. It quickly became the main camera we used, even though I already had a nice Nikon film camera, as well as a digital camera. This one was indestructible! And it fit in our pockets! Why would we use something else?! An added, fun benefit of this camera is that Sweet Pea can use it without scaring us too much -- except that one time she started swinging it around her head... So, for your entertainment, here are the artistic photographs of two-year-old self-portrait portrait of mommy portrait of dada Ok, she didn't take this one, obviously, but isn't she cute? That last photo is watching Saturday morning TV, while I do the dishes from the night before that I was too tired to do at the time. Do you ever let your kids use the camera? Interesting result...

I believe this will be a multi-topic post. I don't normally like to do that much but it has been a while and I have a lot to share! First, I'd like to explain the reasons for the long delay between posts (besides me just being lazy and feeling like watching a TV shows on Netflix on demand with Average after Sweet Pea falls asleep at night, rather than blogging). I had bronchitis for A MONTH. It has been awful. I am still coughing a tiny tiny bit but I have gone running twice in the last few days and didn't die or need to use my inhaler so I think I am pretty much better. I used a variety of homeopathic remedies, took vitamins, and ended up also taking antibiotics, Robitussin with codeine, and using my albuterol inhaler multiple times per day. I drank a gallon of elderberry juice. Nothing seemed to really work more than anything else, except the inhaler, which would allow me to breathe, without coughing until I gagged (I even vomited one time), for a while. During this bou...

Cough Cough Cough That's what I sound like all day long right now. This whole week I have only worked 2 days, and when I am at home I am either laying on the couch or in my bed coughing and coughing. I have had THIS cough for over two weeks, following a different cough-cold that lasted nearly a month but was much milder, and I'm going to the doctor tomorrow. I really really hope he has something helpful for me since we have a high deductible heath insurance plan, meaning anything non-preventative comes straight out of my empty pockets. This cough has made me grumpy. Sorry to my family, friends, co-workers, and students. It's not you, it's the cough. In other news, Sweet Pea turned two years old last weekend! I plan to do a whole post about that sometime soon, complete with adorable photos (hopefully - I haven't even looked at what we took yet). Our little angel is two years old: a walking, talking, potty-using, kindly bossy, occasionally screamy, but mostly fun a...

We have never cut Sweet Pea's hair, and it has gotten longer than shoulder length, and is pretty wild with a cowlick in the back and some curls. She doesn't like to spend much time sitting still, so we have always had a hard time getting it pulled back nicely. Luckily, our daycare provider is amazing with hair and so Sweet Pea comes home in the afternoons with such pretty creations as these: Double french braids (pay attention to the hair only, please) Pigtails with zigzag part Ponytail with headband She LOVES having her hair made pretty by her daycare provider, and I have learned a few tricks about how to get the hair smooth, how to not pull, and how to get it to stay in. I still am nowhere near as skilled as I'd like to be someday, but I have gotten better! The tips I've gotten so far are: use a spray bottle to mist the hair as you brush it out; hold the hair above the point where you are combing or removing a hairtie; and use the tight rubber bands.

My daughter amazes me every day. Sweet Pea says complete sentences like: I'm sitting down; I want some milk; Dada eat that. She sings songs, "reads" books, and rocks her babies to sleep. She has strong opinions: "turn it off, Mama" "I need that!" but still says thank you and please most of the time, which makes me so proud. She tells us she's "going running" then takes off down the hall, and spills things and then says "oops, I dropped it!" The rough times lately, that feel like we are entering the 'terrible twos,' are the occasional ten minutes of crying over something as small as not getting a second squirt of toothpaste on her toothbrush, or having a pen taken away that she was about to use to draw on the wall. Most of the time we can avoid this kind of total emotional over-reaction by offering a trade, explaining an alternative, distracting, or making it a game, but sometimes she is just too focused on the thing th...