Guess that baby!

 Round two!

The rules are easy: guess which baby is which in each group.  Some groups have only two babies.  They are not necessarily exactly the same age in these photos, just roughly the same size so they could fit in the same outfits.  Click to enlarge.

If you can't tell, don't feel bad -- I'm their mother and I don't see any differences either.

Group 1 - stripey shirt

Group 2 - baseball outfits

Group 3 - smashed newborn faces

Group 4 - blue jammies

 Group 5 - robot shirt

May garden pictures

Spring is that magical time of year when we can actually play in the backyard.  It's shady and cool and the bugs haven't arrived yet.  So we have been making mudpies.  Or rather, I have been making mudpies and the kids keep getting in my mud.

What I'm actually trying to do is make clay to make some flowerpots.  If the process is a success, I'll share it here.  But mainly it's consisted of the boys dumping out my buckets and splashing in the puddles.  Which is cool too, you know?

But when we're not there, we're in the front yard gardening.  Or rather I'm gardening, Marko is following me saying, "MY turn!  MY turn!" and Michael is climbing off the porch into the lettuce bed.  He thinks it's hilarious when I come to fetch him out.  I'm almost sure Marko must have been this difficult, but I barely remember it.

So far it promises to be a good year of gardening.  My lettuce is doing great.

The light green stuff is Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, from the packets they sell at the grocery store.  The dark green heads on the top right are Mignonette Bronze, which I saved from last year.  The first year I planted lettuce, I sowed and sowed and sowed and got one plant.  The second year, I sowed a few times and got five plants or so.  I let them go to seed.

But since I'd had such a failure the previous times, I decided to try something different from sowing them the same old way.  Instead of stripping the seed from the heads -- which was incredibly time-consuming anyway -- I just broke up the whole seed heads and stuck them in a bag indoors till fall.  In October, I threw them out on the bed where I wanted to plant them and tossed old leaves over the top for mulch.  The thought was to get the kind of crop that you get when you let them self-seed, but while still being able to rotate the lettuce to a different bed.

I thought they'd wait till spring.  Instead, a few sprouted right away and were looking great in January!  They appeared to freeze a few times, and they were snowed on many times, but they sprang right back and grew huge as soon as the weather got warm.  And then the rest started sprouting, and I've had no end of lettuce.  But I threw down some spinach seed (which mostly hasn't grown) and some Black-Seeded Simpson, just to diversify.  The Mignonette Bronze is heat-tolerant, which is why I bought it, but it gets a bit bitter in the heat and it's not very delicate at the best of times.  So I wanted something else to go in my salads along with it.

Oh, and the giant bush is last year's parsley.

This bed above is my pride and joy.  It's full of stuff I've never successfully grown before.  The garlic I did do last year, and it did well.  It was just grocery-store garlic that I broke into cloves and stuck in the ground in the fall.  It needs no attention at all until it turns brown in midsummer, at which point you pull it up, dry it in the sun for a week, and then store it for the year.  For some reason the garlic I grow is spicier than what I buy, even though they are the same variety -- I guess it's my organic soil.

Just above the garlic is a row of broccoli, then the carrots, which as you see I didn't have the heart to thin as well as I was supposed to.  Then cabbage, which at this point looks no different from the broccoli, and then, almost invisible, are a few beet plants.

I thought my plants were doing pretty well, if a bit scrawny.  But then I looked over the fence and saw my neighbor's broccoli and cabbage are almost ready to start forming heads.  So I guess I'm behind after all.  That's what you get for starting them late, almost killing them several times, and not having enough light indoors.  Then I transplanted them when they weren't really ready to go out (but they'd basically stopped growing indoors because it was so dark).  And then I direct-seeded some, which works best for me for most things, but the seedlings got chomped by something.

Not sure those brassicas are going to be a success for me.  Nothing that needs pampering is a good fit for my garden.  But I do like them so much ... so I had to at least try.

Here are two potato plants that I hadn't planned to grow.  I just had some red potatoes sprout in the cupboard so I stuck them in the ground right after the last snow we had.  Well, they took off, so I may get one meal of potatoes out of them.  Maybe next time I will buy actual seed potatoes of some interesting variety.  Potatoes are too cheap to be economically worth growing, but you can grow a lot more varieties than you can find at Aldi.

Here is my healthiest, biggest tomato plant.  In other words, tomatoes are not doing well.  I did with them what I did with the brassicas: half killed them inside and planted them out before they were ready.  You're supposed to wait till they have true leaves, but I hardly ever do because nothing ever gets true leaves in my house.  They just freeze and only their spindly stem appears to grow.  I worried that their roots were outgrowing their tiny pots, but that wasn't it.  They had hardly any.  It's just the lack of light in here. 

Anyway, I've got a few solutions here, all of which are non-optimal.  I can baby the remaining three plants and call it good.  I usually do eight, so that would be a big loss for me.  I hauled in a bumper crop last year, but I never, ever have trouble finding things to do with them.  I love tomatoes.  And if I can't eat them all fresh, they can, freeze, and pickle easily.  Three plants are just not enough.

Or I can do what I have already done, and try direct planting.  That's never worked for me before, but why not try?  I've heard tomatoes grow taproots if they're direct-sown, and that makes them more drought-tolerant.  I just laid them on the soil and sprinkled a bit of sand on top, which is what worked for finally sprouting my carrots this year.  And of course I'm hovering over them, watering often.  We'll see.

But if that fails, I will probably have to admit defeat and just buy seedlings.  Which is lame.  I'll be stuck with the same old varieties, the pot-bound roots, and the overgrown stems.  But my neighbor was able to get his tomatoes and peppers out in a single weekend by buying his seedlings, and that's also how he managed to get his cabbages and broccoli so far ahead of mine.  

I'm not even including a picture of my pea and bean beds because they're so lame.  Here, the failures were all mine.  First, planting peas too soon and letting them get snowed on.  They never sprouted at all.  And then running out of seeds.  I had eight Kentucky Wonder pole beans and three Thai Long Green bush beans, and so that's what I planted.  To fill in the rest, I just planted chickpeas, even though they didn't do well for me last year.  I'm just going to have to buy more seed this weekend.  As of now, I have three pole bean seedlings with their leaves eaten off, one bush bean seedling that's doing fine, and five chickpea seedlings.

That would have been all, but I added two more beds because I just couldn't deal with how little garden space I had.  Around March I smothered the grass with newspaper, sticks, cut grass, and garden tools to keep the newspaper from blowing away.  (Which, of course, it did anyway, and the grass has been heroically pushing through every gap trying to take back over.)  And just last week I cut some holes in the covering and planted pumpkins and cucumbers.  I'm also plotting to put more pumpkins and also baby watermelons up on the hillside, which if it works will cut down on the weedwhacking we have to do.

I also have some strawberries growing well.  A friend brought them last spring when Michael was born, and I didn't have the energy to do more than turn over a paving stone and stick the plants in the hole.  This spring I cleared away the weeds and found the plants already blooming!  And now they have little greenish-white strawberries all over them, which hopefully I can eat before the birds do.

And the plum tree, as always, is preparing for a bountiful year.  My neighbor says that it has never had a bad year since it was put in.  Certainly last year it gave more than I could pick, despite being a dwarf tree.  It's all covered with marble-sized green fruit.

Next job is to plant some herbs ... and then just watch everything grow!

Our new puppy

John has been dreaming of getting a dog since we got married. In the past, it's been impractical, as we lived in apartments. But now we have a house with a yard, so we've had our eyes out for a puppy for a long time.

It's a puppy, specifically, that he wanted, not an adult dog. He wanted a puppy he could train and teach tricks to. He's been researching dog training and scanning Craigslist, hoping for a chance to get a puppy.

And here we are. Saturday, we finally found a puppy that could be ours. He's a black Lab, at least mostly, and nine weeks old. He's pretty mellow for a puppy, but he still does like to play.


We've named him Gilbert, after G.K. Chesterton. Marko is in love. If you calculate Gil's age in dog years, they're both toddlers. They are both rambunctious, destructive, and demanding. What we were thinking? On the bright side, the puppy is potty trained. I only wish I could say so much for Marko.

The lady we got the dog from explained that we have to watch the puppy to know when he needs to go out. Sounds like elimination communication to me! She said that puppies walk funny when they have to go. Only problem is, he's a puppy. He always walks funny. So I let him out every couple of hours, and he has only ever had one accident.

The only issue with this is that every time the puppy goes out, the baby wants to go too. And neither ever wants to come back in. So we have been spending a lot of time in the yard. They have a lot of fun, and don't get bored, but occasionally they get a little too interested in my green beans or try to get out the gate (the toddler can open it while the puppy makes a run for it!), so I have to drag them in. Generally that means carrying both of them, since neither comes when he's called if it means coming inside.



Marko gets pretty grabby with his puppy friend. At first I drove myself crazy trying to get him to leave the dog alone, but John reminded me that puppies play rough with each other, too, and that he doesn't seem to mind. So I just keep a close eye to keep Marko from, say, sitting on him.

The first night, the puppy slept great in the kitchen. The second night, he whined quite a bit at being shut up by himself. I was very tempted to bring him into our bed (hey, cosleeping solves a lot of problems!) but John said he would soon get used to the kitchen. And he did settle down with a chew toy and a blanket pretty quickly.

The only issue is that he gets up with John in the morning, at five, and then goes out. Which means he does not at all want to go back in the kitchen for another two hours while he waits for Marko and me to get up. This morning, when he started up his whining, I just got him and brought him into bed with me. By the time I got out of bed, I had the puppy, the kitty, and the baby, all in that bed. But I got to sleep till seven, so I'm not complaining.

I'm not going to lie: it is taking some adjustment and some extra effort from me to take care of this dog. But he's already providing some excitement to our life (or at least to Marko's life: the rest of us were plenty excited already), and once he's a little older, it will be easier and more fun.



And, anyway, he's awfully cute.

Washing the baby

Sometimes, I need a wipe to clean the baby. Sometimes, it takes a bath. Sometimes, only a hose will do the job.


Yesterday was a hose day.

Heed those garden warnings!

My kid is a pirate. With underwear on his head. And his shirt on backwards. Yeah, I'm that kind of mom.

I'm not one for following advice. When the gardening books said to double-dig my tomato beds, till in compost, and put bone meal in each hole, I just broke the sod and stuffed the tomatoes in. (With my second set of tomatoes, I added some old stock bones in the holes, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference.)

Here's a bit of advice I read about fall planting. "Fall planting is great," the books said, "but watch out that you don't get heat exhaustion doing all that digging in midsummer."

Oops. So I guess breaking sod at 2 pm on the summer solstice isn't what they meant? I wore long pants because of the mosquitoes, shoes and socks because of the shovel, and a dark shirt and my hair down because I am dumb. It reached 90 degrees that day and the humidity was high. After about 15 minutes, I had a bad headache and my stomach was upset. But I didn't feel hot, so I just kept going until about five minutes later the baby came out of his shady spot and started crying and being clingy. So I figured he was overheated and so I took him inside, where we put ice on our heads and guzzled water and ate salty pretzels.

Apparently that didn't do it, though, because by evening I felt way worse. Maybe it didn't help that I kept thinking it had cooled enough to go back to digging and then being driven inside 10 minutes later feeling yucky again.

I can say, though, that the bed in question is in a great spot! It is seriously NEVER in the shade!

By the time John was home and was kind enough to take over all the toddler duties (and the dinner duties, AND the dish duties -- what a guy) I was a mess. I took a shower to cool down but I still felt lousy. Right before bed I threw up. Blah.

Not quite sure if the heat did ALL that or just set it off, but I've learned my lesson. No gardening in the scorching sun. Not for non-heat-tolerant, northern-European-descended, Seattle-raised me. (P.S. For the record, I'm quite sure I'm not pregnant; we all know you're wondering.)

So here's how much I got done:

Not a whole lot. I planted eight green beans, two near each of those string trellises:



The string was a friend's idea. She said the beans won't be able to climb the fence itself (and I definitely agree). I decided to angle the string from the fence to the middle of the bed, because the ground right up against the fence is steep and filled with gravel from the neighbors' driveway.

In other news, I've got some help with the yard:

Or rather hindrance. I hope he's this in love with the mower when he's big enough to push it.

Poor guy took a faceplant on the sidewalk last night. He was holding a stick and wouldn't let go of it to catch himself, so he scraped his lip on the pavement! Daddy and I both kind of freaked when we saw the blood pouring from his mouth, but a popsicle quickly made it better. (This is our test: if it's not solved by a popsicle, then it's serious.) But the scrapes still remain:

Poor thing. (Those aren't scrapes on his chin, though; they're muffin crumbs.)

You better not mess with Skid-Marks Marko.


I've got some oregano sprouting in a container. Somehow direct-seeding hasn't worked for me so far, so I took the safe course. But the container's outside, because it's much warmer and brighter out there than in here. I also planted some thyme the other day, but it's not up yet.

My beefsteak tomatoes have some yellow and brown patches a few of on the lower leaves. I'm not 100% sure but my gardening book says it might be verticillium wilt. So I turned to "what to do" and got, not in so many words, "Guess ya shoulda planted resistant varieties, sucker!" So, it may be too late for the beefsteaks. However, the Cherokee Purples seem unaffected, and those were the ones I want to do next year anyway.


And a last, unrelated topic -- sewing. Lately (that is, in the past several months), I've done two sewing projects. First, I turned my favorite pair of jeans into a skirt, because they had a hole in the knee.

It's very simple to do this: just rip out the inseam and a bit of the fly seam (so you can overlap it) and stitch in a triangle from the bottom part of the legs. In my case, I used the whole rectangle from the lower legs and pleated it on the top to make it fit -- I wanted a really loose skirt that was good for gardening.

And then there was this, the other day. I call it the Hair-Pull Horse. It was an attempt to give the baby something to pull on besides my hair.


As such, it's a total failure. He is undeterred in pursuit of my hair. He has a serious obsession with the stuff. But he does like playing with the horse and shaking it by its tail, so I guess that's something.

Now, to wait for my green beans to pop up! Actually, two have already ... I'm so excited. Watching plants grow just thrills me to pieces. I can't believe I had to wait till I was 25 to realize I love gardening.

Pretty, happy, funny, real

I decided to try participating in this linkup for once. I'm terrible at linkups because I always forget to do them on the right day. But this has always been one I particularly like.

Pretty:

There's a birds' nest in our fruit (might be plum) tree. Anyone hazard a guess as to what kind of bird this is?


Happy:

Real tomatoes beginning to form, at last!



Funny:

Meredith has been visiting us this week, and Marko seems to enjoy the extra company.


See, the kid has an obsession with hats. And we couldn't find a hat. So he grabbed whatever he could find and started begging "HAT! HAT! HAT!" Can't say no to that ... so we didn't.

Real:

This poor tomato is being attacked by some vicious bugs! Well, I got rid of those bugs, and haven't seen any more of them. Thank goodness.

You can go over to Like Mother, Like Daughter to see more things that are pretty, happy, funny, and real.

10 months

So, the baby turns ten months today. Can you believe it? His first birthday is only two months away! He's practically a toddler!

Sniff.

He's been very curious lately.

His favorite things include looking at himself in the mirror, turning light switches off, opening cabinets (and rooting around inside), cruising around everywhere by holding onto the couch or the wall, really crawling (I mean on hands and knees instead of elbows and stomach) at last, and easily pulling up on things and lowering himself back down again.

Right now he is emptying a box of memorabilia and stationery onto the floor, paper by paper. I could stop him, but I think it's easier to use the time for blogging and clean it up later. After all, if I move the box, he'll just find something else.

I recently got some new diaper covers for him. They're called Proraps and I like them a lot. At about $7 each, they're quite economical, especially compared to more famous brands like the Bummis Whisper Wrap (which they're almost identical to). I bought four of the large size, to see if I liked them, and it turns out that's pretty much all I need. With a polyurethane lining, they don't absorb smells like our vinyl pants do, so I just wash every couple of days when I do a cold load -- or whenever they get anything on the elastic edge. They have a Velcro closing, which I find extremely convenient. And they hold the prefolds in place without pins -- definitely a plus! With how wiggly this guy has gotten, I was getting afraid I'd stab him with a pin sooner or later. These covers have definitely cut my diaper changing time down, and they also leak less than the vinyl pants. In fact, the only leaks I had were out of the leg holes at the beginning, probably because he was only about 20 pounds and the large size are supposed to start at 24 pounds. I just wasn't going to get medium sized covers and use them for one month.

He really lost interest in solid foods for awhile there. I'd put him in his high chair and he'd just shove the food around and shriek, eating a tiny bit here and there, but then wanting out. Just the other day, I made beef stew and it all became clear to me. He'd been holding out for beef. I'd been having a lot of soup and other not-very-meaty dishes, and he wants beef. Pork is also a big hit -- he ate at least a grown-up serving of it today.

I've reintroduced dairy products again in small amounts, this time without problems. I even found some goat's milk yogurt at the store, and it's been a real hit. He'll eat as much cheese as I give him, but I kind of hesitate to give him too much, especially considering he's not a huge vegetable fan.

Sleep is my big obsession right now. I've realized that a lot of his occasional clinginess and grumpiness (okay, more than occasional, if I'm honest) is due to a lack of napping. He's a highly scheduled kid and only naps at certain times. My challenge is to watch for these times and get him to nap then -- while avoiding letting him nap too late (it interferes with bedtime). My obstacle is that we're in the car from six to six-thirty every day picking up John from the train, and an evening car ride is the perfect recipe for an evening nap -- which is something he is not supposed to get!

Ideally, his sleep schedule would go as follows: up at 6:30 (to go to the train station, this one's non-negotiable), nap at 10 (he always falls asleep on the way home from school), up at noon or one (I think one tends to result in less grump), nap from three and a half hours after his last nap ends (so 3:30 or 4:30) until five. Then he HAS to be up for four hours before he will sleep at night, so bed at nine. I used to try put him to bed at eight, but I've been finding lately that he sleeps way worse if he goes to bed at eight. As in, he falls asleep only for 45-minute increments or so, he can't sleep alone, but he can't be still either, he rolls over constantly and wakes himself up, then cries because he's awake, he climbs up on the bars of his crib, rolls into my bed, pulls my hair, and decides to be up for the day at 5:30. No thanks. Nine p.m. bedtime works much better -- he tends to be up about twice, around one and four a.m. And, insanely, I think I'm getting a good night's sleep.

It helps that I nap with him at least once per day, because he sleeps so much better that way. Once we have his schedule really fixed, he sometimes sleeps well without me, but unfortunately we never get to that point because every weekend messes things up. We go to church during his naptime, or he sleeps late, or what-have-you, and the whole schedule is messed up for days. Which means either he won't go down when he needs to, or (most often) he goes down but won't stay down. He sleeps for half an hour, gets wide awake, and then five minutes later realizes he's still tired but can't go back to sleep, so he whines for three hours while waiting for the next sleep cycle. Seriously not fun.

Lately that's been made worse by teething, but he's almost finished with this bout. One of his top two teeth is out, and the other is peeking. I miss his adorable two-toothed smile (and I still miss his adorable gummy smile), but this one's cute too. I can't really get a good picture of the new teeth, though, so you'll have to wait till they're a bit further out.

In other news, we've been continuing our search for a house. Further from the city, the prices are much better, and we've found many promising listings. Problem is, they all get snapped up before we can even go look! Though the housing market is slow in general (or so they say), houses in our price range actually are moving pretty quickly. Yesterday we saw a lovely little white house with green shutters that I'm in love with, and actually were able to put in an offer before it got listed, so hopefully that will work out. It seems almost too good to be true -- on a quiet street with a lot of families with children, within walking distance of the church, and a block away from some people we know! It is tiny, so it won't work forever (unless we added an addition) (that is, assuming we have more kids, which I fervently hope we do), but it has two decent-sized bedrooms, which is all we need for now.

Another two friends of ours have gotten married, bringing us more into a "set" of married friends and less the sole married couple among a bunch of single friends. We still do have single friends, though, and I'm glad for the variety. But it'll be exciting when (hopefully) our friends have kids too and we can have parties that include them.

And ... that's all I can think of for now, but I have more posts in the hopper that I've been planning out and mulling over. Sadly, the more mobile this baby gets, the less computer time I get. I've always got to be keeping him out of things, or else he wants to be on my lap and pushing all the computer keys. If it isn't one thing, it's another. But hopefully I'll get more good blogging time soon.

Christmas with in-laws

I know, sounds like a horror story, doesn't it? In-laws are so stereotypically awful. Luckily, I happen to love mine. Sure, my mother-in-law had her doubts about me when I was just a rumor of some girl John was taking to dances. But ever since I stayed with her for about two weeks before our wedding, we've gotten along swimmingly. Plus, her family is a ton of fun. Like John times eleven.

She LOVED her grandson. I do believe she was better at getting him to sleep than I am.

So, I was every bit as eager to take this Christmas trip as John was. He actually took unpaid time so we could go, which, if you know how little money we have and how eager we are to save what we've got, is a big deal.

Our itinerary:

Tuesday -- From an undisclosed location in the DC area to John's grandparents' house in Chicago: 14 hours.

Wednesday -- I stayed home with John's grandpa while he went out and interviewed family members for a family history he is compiling. (This is a very exciting project to me, and he's getting all kinds of neat information!)

Thursday -- From Chicago to an undisclosed location in central Wisconsin: 5 hours. Then fun with John's siblings. He has nine; one is in a convent in Italy but the other eight were there. I love them all. Lots.

Friday -- More fun with John's family. Midnight Mass for everyone but the three of us -- poor baby's schedule was disrupted enough without trying to figure that out.

Saturday (Christmas) -- Morning mass, presents, stockings, and Christmas dinner with John's family.

Sunday -- Mass, then down again to Chicago to see the grandparents.

Monday -- Chicago to DC again: about 14 hours.

Tuesday -- cranky baby, and catching up on sleep.

Wednesday -- woke up at 4:30 and had the baby barf all over me. Which brings us to today.

I guess it all sounds pretty stressful. And there were parts that were. Driving such a long way with a baby is a bit of a challenge. We planned to be stopping a lot along the way, and we did. Luckily the interstates in the Midwest are well-supplied with rest stops. To minimize stops, we left at 3 a.m. for the biggest trips, putting the baby into his carseat half-asleep, so that he would spend as much of the trip as possible asleep -- and avoid spending the witching hour in the car, which you really don't want to do.

The rest of the way, we mostly kept one of us in the back with him (usually me) to keep him occupied. I'd hand him a toy, he'd play with it for two minutes, he'd fling it off the other side of his carseat, and I'd give him another. Repeat. Then he'd decide he was hungry out of sheer boredom and start saying "na na na" or "mum mum mum." Na-nas being rather difficult to provide in a carseat (though not technically impossible ... probably inadvisable) we relied heavily on the mum-mums, i.e. solid food. He liked being handed piece after piece of turkey or cooked carrot. On the way back, we had no food, so we ended up buying a roast beef sandwich at Panera and giving him most of the roast beef. He liked that fine.

While visiting John's grandparents, we stayed in a hotel. Hotels will provide cribs, but we found that unnecessary -- besides, when they say "crib" they usually mean "Pack 'n' Play" and I can't figure out for the life of me how you're supposed to put a sleeping baby into one of those without waking him. So we put the baby between us in the king-size bed, no trouble at all. Except for how high those beds are. I hate beds you have to climb into; I guess I've been spoiled with my low-to-the-ground IKEA bed. But how are you supposed to climb into a tall bed while holding a sleeping baby? Other than that challenge, we had no trouble sleeping with the baby on the trip. I've been sleeping better and better, and I haven't had much use for his crib since we've gotten back either. It's nice to start him out in, but other than that, why put him someplace else when he's so much more comfy in my arms? It helps that we've pretty much mastered lying-down nursing. Not to mention, he actually needs nursing less if he's in bed with me, because often a "shh" or a back pat does the job just as well, if he doesn't get too wide awake first.

John's grandparents are so sweet and kind. His grandma kept heaping praises on me, about what a great mother I am, and how clearly our baby is so advanced and friendly and independent because we are such loving parents. Personally, I think it's mostly in his temperament, but I don't really mind being appreciated all the same.

John's great-grandfather's fire helmet

Arriving at John's mother's house was an even bigger thrill. The baby was so glad to be out of the carseat, he went straight to playing and entertaining everyone. The whole time, he had no objections to being passed around like a hot potato, provided I stayed close and he could have "ma ma ma" and her "na na na" whenever he wanted. (John's mom would always laugh when he started in on the "na na na" and say, "Sorry, I haven't got that anymore! You'll have to go to Mama!")

And oh, man, the FOOD ... there was lots of it. And it was good. They have cows, chickens, and pigs, as well as a large vegetable garden, so that even though it was winter, there was still plenty of "real" food. Also there was tons of candy ... and I'm not going to lie, I ate that too. But now I feel ready to give it all up for awhile and just eat healthy food.

Again I got a lot of praise for being such a good mother. They seem to think I'm some kind of supermom, just because I'm educated I guess? Also, I seemed pretty mellow and relaxed ... which is no wonder when you realize how much they helped with the baby, and how I took all of his naps with him too. If they could have seen me today, I doubt they would have thought me very relaxed.

There were also a ton of presents. I guess that makes sense with so many people to give and receive them. Marko got so many toys! Though I think he might have liked the wrapping paper best. I got an ice cream maker -- and you better believe I'll be blogging about that once I've tried it out!

The way back seemed even longer than the way out. On the bright side, it counts as "quality time" for John and me. We get so little time even to talk these days.

Then today, baby had a stomach bug. There was some upchucking and some nastiness out the back end too. Not my ideal day when we're all tired from traveling and I had lots of laundry to do already. I still haven't had a chance to restock the groceries. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The whole trip is very tiring, and I know he was exposed to lots of bugs. There's no saying where he could have picked this one up.

I sure hope tomorrow is a restful day. I mean, aside from the mega shopping trip I need to do. The good Lord knows we need it.