groundspeed

Just Thinkin' (Yet Another Defiant Peeing Ramble)

Is it possible to rip carpet out and put it back in? Maybe we could professionally clean the carpet in Blue's room, roll it up and put in the attic, and then, when (um, or if) he stops acting like a feral animal for at least like, a year, put it back.

The concrete floor look wouldn't be so bad, would it?

The other plan is to just keep it and let his room continue stinking, but when (alright, IF) he stops peeing, replace the carpet.  

Kinda silly that this carpet is less than a year old, LOOKS fine, but we're already talking about replacing it. 

I'm glad we never got around to putting Blue's college money into a 5/29 or anything like that.  It's easily accessible, so I have renamed the account:  Replace-Stuff-Blue-Trashes. The good news is, there's plenty of money in there for new carpet in his room. Besides, Blue probably won't need the money for college. I'm sure he'll be in jail by then. Do they have education programs in jail? 

So.

When YOU are frustrated with YOUR morning routine I want you to think about OUR morning routine:

Blue comes into our room sometime between 5:30 and 6:30 am.  (He usually reserves the 5:30s for the weekends, sweet guy that he is.)  He hangs out in our room until we get up and going.  I make tea and then Blue and I go to inspect his room. (It's not as though I can just ask him if he peed. He's a kid. He lies.)  

There were four days last week, his room passed room inspection.  (But two of those days he proceeded to pee on something later in the morning.)  EVERY OTHER DAY (including every day this week!) we then proceed to get the pet-strength Resolve and spray his room.  Then I sit over to the side, drinking my tea and updating his behavior log on my lap top while he scrubs.  

The above picture is my Step 2 process that happens during the afternoons he goes to school - baking soda on the floor for a few hours and then vacuum.  Then I Febreze his room.  

Pet-strength Resolve scrubbing, baking soda vacuuming, Febreze, leaving the fan on high, leaving the window open...

His room still stinks. 

When you see me and I'm bald, it's not that I'm trying to be Kevin and it's not cancer/chemo.  I've just pulled all my hair out.

One of these days I'll cut/paste a highlight reel of that behavior journal for a blog post and your continued morning entertainment at my expense. (After that sentence I expect my blog readership to go up 200%)

Time to go sweep some of that hair off the floor...

Cowboy Tee Ball Party

We're nearing the end of Blue's teeball season with four games to go, and we had the team party today at our house following Blue's game.  

Food:
We served lunch: chips, fruit, and I got 200 chicken nuggets from McDonald's (everyone chipped in $5 to cover this).  We had two big coolers outside with drinks. For dessert I made brownies, mini cupcakes (in the team colors!), and bought baseball suckers from Oriental Trading Company.

Here's the team mom.  Believe me, her job is much harder than that of coach's wife/party hostess.  :-)

Mmmmmm. This was my best batch of icing in awhile and I didn't follow a recipe. Figures!



Fun:
I wanted to have Kevin run around in the back yard with a target on his back and give the kids water balloons to practice their aim, but he vetoed this idea.  So. Lame. 

Even so, the kids had plenty of fun just running back and forth between the play area inside and the play set/sand box outside. 

Here's Toby intently watching the big boys play but also keeping a safe distance.

I don't have any pics of my own kids playing in the backyard except for this one with Kaden's back. Here, some of the boys are cooling off in the mister Kevin rigged up next to the play set.  

I'd also bought an inflatable catcher for the kids to pitch into but today when we went to inflate it, it had a tear.  Boo!

Decor: 
The main thing was having everything in orange and black even us since we wore the team colors. Well, except Kaden. I was out buying ice when he got dressed or I would have seen to that! These things are seriously important. :-) It's months into the season and I've never gone out and bought an orange shirt for Blue's games (although I have tried to wear the black and red I already owned to Kaden's games), but when it game party time I had to be in the right colors and bought a new shirt.  What can I say, my priorities are what they are...

Also, I printed up some cowboy faces and had them on all the tables.


And then we had a running slideshow of the kids playing.

One game I stood at the dugout and took a gazillion pictures making sure I had a few of every kid. Luckily only one kid was missing that day and I got a few of him at the next game.  The kids enjoyed seeing themselves and now I've put the pics in a picasa web album so Kevin can email out the link and parents can have the pics if they want them.

We had a 11 out of 12 Cowboys with at least one parent escort each plus a few siblings.

It was a full house but a fun house.

Next up... Toby's birthday in May.  Because we had this one at the house, we'll be at Indian Riverside Park for Toby's.  The pavilion is already booked!

Bathtub Beach

We've hit Stuart's Bathtub Beach a few times but we had a jellyfish problem one of the times or high tide and choppiness other times and I never could figure out what all the hype was about.  Mom, Blue, Toby and I tried it again today and it absolutely lived up to its reputation.

The whole area was shallow enough for Blue to walk everywhere and mostly shallow enough for Toby to walk around. There were a few sandbars. The water was perfectly clear. Totally an incredible beach day.

Also, because it's such a family beach, by 11am even on a Thursday in April it was full of families with little kids. For us, this is a good thing. In fact, Blue completely abandoned us for a boy who was Blue's same size and brought more toys than we did and was just there with his dad. I don't bother to bring books to the beach when I'm there with kids but there was a moment when Blue was off with his preferred family, my mom took off with Toby and there I was, laying out all by myself, wishing I had a book.  Yup, incredible beach day.

Cruisin'

It used to be, as recently as a month ago, that Blue could NOT drive the Jeep without crashing every two seconds and Toby was terrified of it.  (Gee, wonder why?)  Factor in that Kaden is too big for it, and I was thinking it might be time to get rid of the Jeep and free up some space in our garage.  But then all of sudden Blue decided he can drive straight after all and Toby decided it's fun...

Ok, sure, Blue is looking a bit diabolical and Toby is still looking a bit nervous, but that's pretty much how it always is, Jeep or no Jeep.

Midweek Mommy Question - Does your kid have a song?

Let me explain.

I have a song because my name came from a song - Some Velvet Morning by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood.  It's this very trippy song in which Hazelwood sings in a gravely voice, "Some velvet morning when I'm straight / I'm gonna open up your gate / And maybe tell you 'bout Phaedra / And how she gave me life / And how she made it in..." And then Sinatra sings a wispy melody about nature that ends with, "Phaedra is my name."

Wikipedia says this of the song, "As with many psychedelic songs, its overall meaning is somewhat obscure. The lyrics consist of the male part describing a mysterious, powerful woman named Phaedra, who educated the speaker in the ways of love. The male part alternates with the female part, who identifies herself as Phaedra and speaks over ethereal, twinkling music about beautiful nature imagery and about the secrets held by an unknown collective "us"."  

Um, yeah. Whatever.

If I'm remembering correctly, both my parents loved the song, both my parents loved the name, but my dad didn't like the Greek myth about Phaedra, so they changed the spelling. As for me, I was never into the song, but I did go through a phase where I read every version of the Phaedra myth I could get my hands on and for the longest time I swore that if I had a daughter she'd be named Ariadne who seemed the better of the two sisters. I even wrote a short story in grad school titled, Ariadne's Maze. Ok, enough of that digression.

For Toby's first birthday my brother got him an itunes gift card and I made him a play list that still gets played A LOT in our house.  On that play list is Beautiful Boy (the Ben Harper version).  There are lots of songs on that play list but that's the song that makes me think of Toby.  Hear song, think of Toby. Beautiful Boy is Toby's song.  Simple.

Then, a few weeks ago, I decided to make a play list for Blue.  I did this because Blue is always asking to hear "the pirate song" (something I found for his last birthday party) but this song is not on an album or a play list and it always took forever to get to via our remote control (my ipod is our stereo, connected to the tv and its speakers), so I hated putting on "the pirate song" for him. Then I figured I could make him a play list of music he liked.  But I can't make a play list of only kid's music because I listen to these things too and I don't want to end up killing myself over an annoying play list.  That would be silly.  So, for a theme for this play list I decided to go with... the word blue!  Shocking.  I know.  And thanks to some of my own digging and some suggestions from friends via facebook I have some incredible songs with the word blue including one titled, Eyes of Blue, by Paul Carrack which is about as perfect as it gets since Blue has the bluest eyes of anyone I know. This is Blue's song.

I'm gonna have to work on one for Kaden.  He really likes The Killers when I put them on.  Maybe I'll start by looking there...

Am I the only out there who has attached songs to my kids?  Maybe you've gone even further and written an original song for your kid?

Just curious.  Let me know.

Climbing

Yesterday I posted about Toby climbing into the bathtub fully clothed in the middle of the day because that's where he wanted to play.  

This is not Toby's only go at climbing.  He also loves to climb onto the coffee table and stand up there. (Not so good.) And he likes to climb up the steps of Kaden and Blue's bunk bed (definitely not good).  And likes to climb into the van. This is fine when we need to load up into the van.  It's not so great when we've gotten out and he turns back to climb into the closing van door. Often now, when we are going into the house, I'm dragging a screaming Toby because I wouldn't let him crawl back into the van and get squashed in the door like a bug.  So ungrateful.

When he climbs into the van he of course does not stand by his seat or attempt to climb up into his seat.  Oh no. What's the fun in that?  He already wants to be a big boy and it's always back to the big boy bench he goes.

From this morning:

And as much as I'd like to keep typing about Toby he is literally climbing all over me right now, so that's all...

'Lil Extra Tub Play

I was putting groceries away and I thought Toby had gone to his room but the banging noises he was making didn't sound like anything that he could do in his room, so I go to check...  And here's where I find Toby:

Silly guy. Now that he can climb up and over things so well I've got to pay closer attention.

But he was pleased with himself.

Another Saturday at the Ballpark

At some point during Blue's game yesterday it occurred to me that I could leave Toby with the grandparents (three out of four were in attendance) and go play photographer.  I decided to get a bunch of shots of his teammates so I could do a running slideshow when we host the end-of-season party at our house in a few weeks.  But of course, I took a few of Blue too.  Like this one where he's, oh so seriously, standing at first base.  Or this one...

where a ball is rolling right past him.  Or this one, which looks like a sweet, father and son, moment...

but Kevin and I know he's not standing there to be close to Blue; he's forcing Blue to pay attention, so Blue won't get beaned in the back of the head with a ball.
 
My sister-in-law reported yesteday via facebook that our nephew got his first home run and had some great fielding moments all of which earned him the game ball.  And then there was Blue.  Who's getting sillier and worse as the season goes on.  When he's on base he just stands there and talks to the kid covering the base and has to be told to run. (And if he's covering a base has to be told to stop talking and distracting the kid who is about to run.)  

When at bat, he's picked up on all the mannerisms of the other boys who tap their bats or do a slow and precise practice swing before taking aim.  Problem is, he taps, he fake swings, he taps, he fake swings, and EVERY ONE ELSE is dripping sweat under the hot Florida sun while Blue taps and fake swings and NEVER HITS THE FRIGGIN BALL OFF THE TEE.  You can imagine how happy this makes Coach Dad.

None of this bothers me. I get to take cute pictures of little boys in too-big uniforms AND I get to plan another party.  I'm not concerned about his performance on the field during what is still a new sport for him.

I'm concerned about oh, maybe 50,000 other Blue behaviors not the least of which is the continuance of his defiant peeing.  Because when he got home from this ball game, in spite of all the happy attention from visiting grandparents, in spite of the fact that he was so excited that he got to bring the special post-game snack, in spite of the fact that we told him he could keep his uniform on, in spite of every positive thing... at some point he got it into his head to go stand on top of the guest bed and pee right in the middle of it. Yup, THAT'S the behavior I freak out about.  That's the behavior that has gotten us through the doors of a therapist and gotten me reading all sorts of new child development and discipline books, blogs, and then some.

So if the blogging is light in the next few weeks you can blame the pisser at the top of this post.  That, and I have a party to plan.