Busybody

I don't know what prompted me to look up the definition of this word, but I did and it means "a meddling or prying person". For the sake of this post, pretend it means something along the lines of "one that never sits still". Literally, busy body. Because that's Ashton. Except if Mickey is on. But most of the time, I have to stay a step ahead of him and keep him entertained. If I don't, he'll do it himself, and a lot of the things that he finds fun I do not find fun (like picking up a hundred matchbox cars because he has just dumped them out for the 17th time (you know, for the crashing noise). Last weekend Jason did not have his typical day off (and was home after bedtime both nights), thus I was on mostly on my own and dubbed this free time "Operation Occupy Ashton". It had three parts.

The Alpha Initiative: Friday night. We went to the Inside Playground in Watertown. This is a giant warehouse type place with bouncy houses, ride-on toys and everything in between. Kids can run around and they have good chairs set up for bored parents. To visit a place like this is to play roulette with your child's health. Same goes for any indoor play space where drooly kids share toys and germs. But to stay home is to play roulette with your sanity which is also tremendously valuable. Ultimately, my mental well-being won out and off we went for about an hour and a half.

He had a great time and I only spent a couple minutes on the Bored Parents bench. In this environment, 5 minutes can feel like 30. Take it from someone who knows. And in case you are wondering, yes, Ashton came down with a cough two days later. Hard to pin it on the Inside Playground though. Too late anyway, I already bought a pass. Mom: 1, Germs: 1.

The Beta Initiative: Saturday morning. We hit Mucky Kids, which is a children's art studio in Cambridge that has drop-in from 10-5. This has been on my list of places to try for awhile now and I'm so glad we did. There were tables set up with all kinds of activities and Ashton's favorite was by far the "fake snow" table. He spent the majority of the time scooping the snow and hoarding all the trays, which was fine because almost no one else was there.

Then we did some painting:

How the painting station worked is you smeared some paint in a tray and laid down a piece of paper or felt across the top. Once you peeled it off, you were left with a print that you got to take home. Now, I'm still at the stage where if Ashton sticks a sticker on a piece of paper, I call it art, date the back of it and make arrangements to save it forever. So I brought his print home, stuck it in a little frame for our photo wall and then! Gasp! Do you see it? The bird?

It's like, a Phoenix or something! I always thought Ashton's artwork was special, but, WHOA. The symbolism was not lost on me. I would win this weekend!

Where was I. Oh, and after painting was Ashton's favorite station, "tools":

I have to admit, I left here a little inspired by the things she had set up. Pinterest can get way too overwhelming with all the activity ideas but seeing certain kinds in action (i.e. using tees as nails and cardboard instead of wood) make them seem really doable.

The Gamma Initiative: Sunday. I knew I wouldn't find fake snow, but we went shopping and I got all kinds of things at the dollar store for a rice sensory box. You can use beans or lentils also, but basically, buy a bunch of arbitrary things, throw them in a bin, give your kid a scooping device and you'd be surprised at how much time it buys you!

Like, really surprised. And I only had to vacuum for about an hour after he was done. Rice is pesky when it gets in your carpet. But. so. worth. it.

Overall, I gave myself several pats on the back for this weekend. Naturally I told Jason all about it and last night I smugly got out the rice box to show him what a miracle it was.  

Well. If you are not familiar with "the law of diminishing returns" perhaps another definition is in order for this post: "The tendency for a continuing application of effort or skill towards a particular project or goal to decline in effectiveness after a certain level of result has been achieved." In other words, this was not the hit it was on Sunday. There was significantly less interest and in a matter of minutes Ashton flung rice all over the place and ran off to dump his cars. *Sigh*. So this means Occupy Ashton remains in active status and I'm still deployed. Mission not accomplished. Over and out.

27 months (or, 2.3 years old, or whatever)

Ashton hit the ripe old age of 27 months earlier in November. But truthfully, we've graduated from counting in months. We are now at the point where we begin with decimals. So 2.3 means 2 years, 3 months, 2.4 means 2 years, 4 months and so on. This could easily lead to mix-ups because even though he is "technically" 2 and a quarter, you'd write it as 2.3, not 2.25. Similarly, 2.5 looks like it means "two and a half" but really, he's one month shy. So this is just a little public service announcement; DON'T LET THE TODDLER AGING SYSTEM CONFUSE YOU.

I know I've mentioned here and there what has been up with our little blog star lately, but I wanted to do an official post on his milestones and all that so I have it to look back on some day. Without further ado, an "Ashton State of the Union":

Speech: Coming along every day. We met with our new speech therapist this week and I can tell she is going to be fantastic. She has two young boys and I absolutely think is going to connect really well with our family. Allison mentioned that she is quite happy with Ashton's noun vocabulary and we are now going to focus on verbs. For instance, if he points and says, "Ball!" or "Bird!" we are going to say, "Yes! Balls BOUNCE" or "Birds FLY". This will help his sentences to grow. Right now his longest one to date is "One more cracker please" but usually they are "Mommy up!", "Ashton do it", "Come sit", "Oven hot!", and the ever-popular: "No." Pretty basic sentences but he is good at getting his point across one way or the other. His new thing is saying "Ja" for "Yes" (I guess he IS part German) so I am working on correcting that. Also, counting. Earlier this week he counted: "Onnnne, twoooo...six, seven, eight....six!" and then clapped. I kissed him and told him that was exactly right :) He knows all of his animals, lots of foods and almost every day surprises me with another word. We were reading "Biscuit Gives a Gift" last night and the last page is a christmassy scene by the fireplace. I pointed to the fireplace and said, "This is a..." and he said "Fire! Hot! and then above that on the mantle I said, "What are these?" expecting to answer the question for him but before I could, he said "Stockings!" It always surprises me even though we read the same books over and over, I point out the same things in the pictures and say the same words every time, I guess it shouldn't. But it's always such a treat when my "teaching" pays off and he learns to say things on his own.

Size: At the ENT a couple weeks ago, he weighed 35 pounds and was 3 feet, 2 inches tall. He is now in a size 4T for pajamas! In shirts and pants he is either 2T or 3T (usually 3T) but depends on the brand. He's just super tall for his age. Helps with his basketball. Shoes are an 8.5W.

Food: His next food allergy appointment will be when he is roughly 2.6. Referring to my explanation above you should conclude that this is age "two and a half". He is mostly a good eater, dinnertime can be a little dicey though. I let him choose what he wants and he helps to "cook" it, but often times when I get him in his highchair he has changed his mind completely and refuses what he originally picked. "No!" is heard very frequently during this time. Anyway, what I am always hopeful he will eat is veggies and some protein. What he ends up eating most nights is Kix. Can't win'em all. Fridays nights are pizza and that is usually successful.

Potty training: HAHAHA. No.

Other age-appropriate (more like inappropriate) things: This is tough to admit... butashtonstillgetsan8ozbottleofmilkbeforebed. AHHHH I know, I know. It's just part of our routine after tubby and he drinks it while I am doing his lotions and pajamas before storytime. My goal is to get rid of it on January 1. He also has a very intense relationship with his pacifiers. We are mostly successful in limiting them to when he's in his crib, but if you were to look in there you'd see about six. At bedtime he reaches through the slats and tries them all out before picking the one he wants to go to bed with (they are all EXACTLY the same, by the way) but it's like his Goldilocks routine. The thought of getting rid of those pacis is downright terrifying. I have no idea how we are going to do so and therefore I'm ignoring it.

Toys and entertainment: What does Ashton do for fun? Usually things that I don't want him to do. He loves to climb up on the coffee table and launch himself onto the couch into the pillows. These are called "the slams". He'll do this repeatedly and after each one will laugh, say "One more slam!" and start all over. The slams only happen with close supervision. Playing with his trains is much easier to manage, which he also enjoys. Lastly, he adores "cooking". Both Chera and his daycare have play kitchens and Santa is planning to bring one so he can have his own.

Sleeping: He's usually up between 7:30 and 8 am, goes down for one afternoon nap, usually 1:30-3:30/4 pm and bedtime is at 8 pm.

Are the two's really terrible? No, of course not. They are terrible. One of the things I'm working on is getting Ashton to listen to me. I know he understands but he's an attention seeker and when the tantrums hit, look out. He starts screaming for fruit snacks. He wants the top for his untoasted english muffin. He wants a time out. He doesn't want a time out. He is desperate for his paci. He dumps his toy bucket. He throws himself on the floor. It's not pretty in so, so many ways. I find especially after his daycare days, we come home and he will just sit in the middle of the kitchen and cry. So I hug him and tell him it is so hard to be two and it's okay. I turn on Mickey Mouse and that usually helps to cheer him up - Mickey is his favorite. Which brings me to...

Screentime: Now that Ashton is of TV-watching age, he usually gets one episode (maybe two) of Mickey every day. He also knows how to use the iPad and my iPhone, which is quite scary. But apps are limited usually to weekend mornings when we take him out of his crib and bring him into bed with us so we can keep our eyes shut a little longer.

That about covers it for now. I could write a lot of little one-off stories but I was mainly interested in documenting the highlights (if you can call them that haha). If Ashton were a weather forecast, I guess he'd be "mostly sunny with an outside chance of hail, high winds and short, violent thunderstorms in the early evening".

Which means that overall, it's a pleasant day :)

p.s. I'm so mad that the picture on the right is blurry. I had high hopes I could salvage it for my Christmas card but nope. That's a whole other story...

Before and After: Kitchen Updates

This was a very big weekend for our kitchen, a very big weekend indeed! My sister Kari and her husband Ben came down from VT (where they now live! Much closer than CO! Woo!) and boy did they hook us up. Ben is even more handy than Jason is (sorry honey) and between the two of them they put up my much awaited backsplash and pendant lights over the new peninsula.

But as they say, begin from the beginning. I guess you could describe our kitchen as galley style. You walk in from the living room and there is one long row of cabinetry/appliances on left:

Straight forward faces double doors out to the deck:

And the right side has another little area, fridge, dining room access and then a half bath:

Other direction:

When we first moved, we immediately took care of two big things: appliances and lighting. After the new fridge and range were in, our electrician installed both under and over cabinet lights, which made an incredible difference in warmth and ambiance. And then I said, "You know, I feel like our cabinets would do much better with, like, bronze knobs instead of silver." A quick trip to Lowe's and we were in business. I don't have any real before and afters of this but trust me, it was genius at work.

So those changes held us for awhile but we always struggled with the big blank wall on the right that seemed to be such a waste of space. Well besides the nice comfy home it made for Ashton's highchair.

Surely we could find some way to get a couple stools and extra counter and cabinet space, but there was no doubt that our kitchen was too narrow for an island. So, we constructed a fake peninsula out of a wardrobe box and Ikea countertop to make sure it functioned well and didn't block the entrance to the bathroom because this was not going to be a small expense. We lived with that for awhile, decided we were 100% sure and then...

We went for it. Ordered the cabinets and granite, scheduled the install, and voila!

Now, enter Ben and Kari this past weekend. I'm getting to my point I promise. The project still was not finished. The lighting was now really off-balance being mainly on the left side and I have been wanting needing pendant lights. Short story: I ordered some and Ben hung them for me this weekend! Afterwards, my little DIY project went up on the wall (I found some cute dish towels at HomeGoods that I cut up and framed) and here is the finished product :)

There's still a little hole in the wall near the ceiling we need to fix. Ben opened it up to do the wiring and discovered that the contractor who refinished our kitchen simply put more drywall up over the old stuff. UNEARTHED: This lovely wallpaper of yore.

Drumroll please...My favorite part about the new peninsula:

Double bins for trash and recycling! This little baby is also known as my anniversary gift haha. It was an add-in that I couldn't live without so I invoked the nearest occasion Jason owed me a present for. I'm nothing if not resourceful.

Oh, but we are only half done my friends. Let's turn our heads to the other side of the kitchen to the wall that so desperately needed a backsplash. I picked a mid-sized subway tile in natural stone. Neutral. Non-threatening. No fancy patterns or inserts. But, um, tile that turned out to need monstrous amounts of grout due to beveled edges and to be more porous than coral. I was not Jason's favorite person during the grouting process, not at all. 14 pounds of it went on and then about 13.5 pounds had to come right back off in scraping. Whoops.

But what's really the most important thing here? Jason's tired arms or cracked fingertips? No. It is how beautiful it came out :) Little right side area next to fridge:

Left side:

Oooooo! Ahhhhhhh!!

Here's the down and dirty with what happened in between all the befores and afters:

In between all this they cut down a fallen tree from our back yard using rope and chainsaws and also switched out our old gold grimy firebox for a new sleek black one (part of the upcoming fireplace makeover). They made quite the team :)

So this is officially our new kitchen (minus my dish towel frames).

 I am IN LOVE! A huge thank you to Ben and Kari for coming down and making this all happen. I can't wait to return the favor once you move in to your new house in a couple weeks xoxox! Oh and thanks of course to my husband who always asks me what I want and (almost) never tells me no ;)

Mishmash

It occurs to me that it's been a couple weeks since I updated this blog. Even though I've had it for a couple of years now, every post I put up feels like a big task so once I hit "Publish", I tend to rest on the laurels of my accomplishment for a few days. Is that even a saying? Well in this case it's been a couple of weeks so I'll fill you in on the mishmash that has happened since Halloween.

First, Ashton had his first appointment with a pediatric ENT. He has always been a drooly kid and as he has gotten older and more active, things are just very wet all the time. Oh to have a picture of him without a bib or a saliva-soaked shirt! Besides that (and really the impetus behind his appointment) is the fact that he is in speech therapy and having difficulty making proper sounds. I wondered if perhaps his perpetual inability to breathe through his nose might have something to do with it. Just to rule out any larger medical issue (like adenoids), I made an appointment and off we went. The doctor was really nice and used an endoscope to take a peek up Ashton's nose. It was very thin with a little light on the end.

I really should have known.

It took three people to hold him down - he was petrified. I don't blame his little 2 year old self one bit. It turns out his adenoids are quite large, which was both good and bad to hear. Good in the sense that I was right to bring him in, bad in that he has had legitimate trouble breathing :( He also has rhinitis, which, given his allergic nature, definitely factors in as well. So the plan is to have him on Flonase for 4 weeks, see if it helps with the inflammation/breathing and if not, adenoids will come out. The Flonase does seem to be working so I'll have another update on that in a month or so.

Back to speech therapy. We have Early Intervention on Wednesdays at 8 am with Fran who we LOVE, and we started speech therapy with Shelby on Tuesdays about 2 months ago on Fran's recommendation. Shelby didn't quite hit it off with Ashton in terms of being able to fully engage him/control him, and Jason and I were worried that we weren't making much progress. We had asked if maybe Shelby and Fran could come together so Fran could teach Shelby some tricks to be more effective at winning Ashton's attention. But we recently found out that Shelby is no longer with the group (we don't know what happened) so we are starting with a new speech therapist next week. I hope it's a better fit!

What else. Oh, we took a long weekend last weekend for Veteran's Day and traveled to NY to visit Jason's parents and hit the Giants game on Sunday! This has become a yearly tradition whereby Grandma and Grandpa get to watch Ashton allllll day while Mommy and Daddy tailgate with their friends :) It's about a 2-2.5 hour trip from their house in Hampton Bays to MetLife Stadium so it makes for a long but super fun day. We met up with Jason's best friend Evan and Kaelyn and also Chera and Eric, who you guys all know. Evan and Kaelyn are recently engaged and Chera just found out she's having a baby GIRL (due 3 weeks after me, April 1) so we were all in great spirits!

The next day we attempted to get a christmas card picture of Ashton and my nephew Owen. It did not go so well.

A preview of what was to come. We traveled home on Monday and rolled in around 6 pm. I wasn't feeling great and went to bed early, which proved to make no difference because that famous 24 hour bug had bitten me. I was up all night and woke up Tuesday, November 12, my 33rd birthday, feeling terrible. I had already called out from work and expected to sleep in peace all day when we went in to get Ashton up and lo and behold, he had gotten the bug too :( Poor baby needed a bath and all his bedding, pajamas and his rug... it all needed to be cleaned and scrubbed. I felt so awful I hadn't noticed he had been getting sick too. But he hadn't made a peep! :( Anyway, my planned day of rest went into the wash with everything else. We spent Tuesday at home together in our sweats and watched an ungodly number of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episodes. We have seen finer times, him and I. Jason came home around 5:30 pm and made me french onion soup for my birthday dinner, which I didn't want any part of, which sucked. What I DID want a part of was my present which was the new iPhone 5s! Woo! Jason used his upgrade with AT&T to get me this very coveted life-altering device :) I told him that was true sacrifice and a sure sign that he must love me very much. I went to bed happy and things have been on the up and up for the past couple of days.

And that's about it since Halloween - although speaking of Halloween, Chera has a blog (link above) and I stole this picture she posted because Ashton and Owen were just that cute together :) Be back soon!

Halloween: Part 2

I feel pretty far removed from Halloween at this point but wanted to make sure to get it on the books, er, blog, before marching on. As far as the schedule events go, it was remarkably similar to Halloween 2012. Trick or treating at the local businesses in Cushing Square, home for dinner, and then back out into the neighborhood. So let's begin! I picked Ashton up right after work and we raced home to begin the great transformation into the king of beasts. It was a traumatic process and I learned that sometimes, lions just need their pacis.

But then Jason got home and we were out the door, up to Cushing Square to scare the local businesses.

Everything was going great until Ashton encountered one of his own. BEHOLD! Another ferocious lion!

Did Ashton roar and snarl? Did he stand to defend his territory and show no fear??

Not exactly. This lion is a lover not a fighter.

Speaking of fighters, then we met up with Owen SUPER OWIE! And of course Super Owie's mom Chera. These boys were the cutest thing you could possibly imagine :)

I wish I had more pictures of them together but they ran around like professionals getting candy and pretty much every shot I have is blurry (thanks to my big girl camera having zero battery, I had to use my iPhone. My OLD iPhone that, as Jason well knows, performs at a level so far below the new 5s that it's like carrying around an antique! *cough*UPGRADE*cough*)

So after Cushing Square we went home for a quick dinner. Because lions are such messy eaters, mine turned back into Ashton for some pizza.

And then we hit the neighborhood! Originally we were going to drive back over to see Super Owie (and in fact, for the first couple houses Ashton kept saying, "Owen come! Owen come!") but we ended up staying around our house to keep an eye on our candy bowl and to meet some more of our neighbors.

Okay you get it. Back at the house, Jason and Ashton went through his loot. I love this picture:

Ashton picked out a Dumdum, which is a lollipop the size of a pencil eraser that somehow took him nearly 25 minutes to eat. Perhaps because he was trying to eat the stick as well. Lions like sticks. Anyway, this resulted in a huge syrupy mess of spit and drool and it's the last lollipop he will have until next year. 

Happy Halloween from the Nills! ROAR! :)