bossy boots

bossy boots is what my 5 year old cousin used to call me sometimes when i was her full-time nanny that summer i was 18. i have continued to use the term bossy boots for the last 12 years and now, i've started calling my kid a bossy boots. what's with kids wanting their friends to do the exact same things as them? is it just the age (2.5yrs)? or is it the personality?

when friends come over, ben is constantly asking them, "want to play _______ with me?" soccer, golf, colouring, etc. if they say no, he's up in arms! he starts trying to pull them towards his activity which usually doesn't go over so well. at a birthday party last weekend, after the birthday boy opened a soccer ball as a gift, ben went off with the ball to play soccer. after a couple minutes, he was back, inturrupting the birthday boy's gift opening saying, "want to play soccer with me?" i had to drag him away from the birthday opening. when we have friends over, i feel like i'm constantly saying, "it's okay if your friend doesn't want to play the same thing as you!" he doesn't get it.

and it's not just friends - it's me. it's tim. it's grandparents. all day long - "want to play _______ with me?" when does independent play begin? i've tried all the independent play time strategies out there (yes - it's a thing that people write articles about). and some days are great - i can get him started and he WILL play. and usually those days, activities last 30 - 45min. those are great days. but it seems like the days where he runs from activity to activity and they sometimes only last 1 minute - these days are the whiny "play with me!" days. what is that about? you know i play plenty with him, right? is your toddler/preschooler ever like this? ben even said to me the other day, "i have nothing to play." WHAT? you're TWO! you're not allowed to say that! haha.

anyways, it's a bit rant-y but as i type this, i'm listening to ben ask tim to play with him and the fact that they've played 5 different things in the span of an hour makes me beg, "please tell me it's not just my kid and that they grow out of it!" and my mantra on these days is "soon, he won't want to play anything with you - enjoy this while you can." that usually keeps me sane. ;)

tire! tire!

it's rare that a few hours might go by during the day without ben yelling, "tire! hurry! get the tire trucks!" yes. he's a budding firefighter who can't say the letter f. over the last month, the evolution of fighting pretend fires has gone from simply spraying a fire with water to rescuing a boy and girl from a fire and taking people who have been hurt to the hospital in the ambulance. firefighter, paramedic, if it has a siren, he's in. what's ironic is that ben hates loud noises. haha.

at canadian tire, some of the shopping carts are little fire trucks. the other day, it took us about half an hour to go in for light bulbs because every 10 feet, ben would jump out, pretend to get the ladder off the truck, pretend to climb the ladder, spray the fire with water, put the ladder back on the truck and then tim could keep pushing the cart. it was pretty funny to watch and we had no where to be so we let him do it over and over.

anyways, ben is usually afraid of the hose when tim is washing the truck but this saturday, tim suggested that the truck was on fire and ben needed to spray the truck with the hose. it started with ben holding the hose with tim and ended up ben doing it all on his own. now we can't walk outside without him running around the side of the house to grab the hose and pretend to shoot it. a whole new dimension of pretend tiretire. (firefighter)

(if your kid also loves pretending to be a firefighter, i stumbled across this awesome book at the library: The Firefighters By Sue Whiting. it's 3 kids pretending to be firefighters and then their teacher has a real firefighter come to their class. we read this at least 3-4 times a day while we had it out of the library.)

6 months is a game changer

avery was 6 months on the 18th. avery rolled from back to front for the first time on march 6th - five and a half months. other than this, however, i really had nothing new to say since she turned 5 months! and i put off posting about avery turning 6 months.

then, all of a sudden, avery seemed older. she started laughing outloud more often. it's like a little old man's hoarse chuckle and over the last few days, it's happening all the time! it is the greatest. avery has been practicing sitting up and in the last few days has been able to balance so much better - she's on her way to sitting! she started moving around more in her jolly jumper. she started playing more with the toys on the exersaucer. she has become much harder to swaddle. ALL SINCE 6 MONTHS! so interesting that so many things could happen over a period of a few days.

i'm currently turning my blog from june 2009 - june 2010 into a book so that i can keep ben's first year as a hard copy. as i've been editing and playing around with the book online before getting it printed, i'm re-reading these posts about ben's first year and i was such a regular blogger. i was posting almost daily. it really made me see how i've fallen off that wagon this year. it's fun to go back and see what was going on on an almost day-to-day basis. hopefully, i'm capturing more of that in my Project Life album but it's still my goal to get some more regular posting going again and documenting these things for friends and family far away to see.

avery LOVING the ball pit. a new favourite activity.

bean "sensory bin" -

one of ben's latest fav activities and now he has to share with avery.

but i don't think he minded - and avery LOVED it almost as much as the ball pit.

conversation

at dinner last night, ben says, "turn light on, mommy?"

me - "sure."

ben gets down, turns on the overhead lights in the kitchen and comes back to the table.

ben - "energy."

tim and i nod.

ben - "you know where energy comes from? water."

hahaha. i loved that he asked it in the form of a question then answered it himself. he's sounding so old. apparently, tim told him this when ben wanted all the lights on and tim was trying to turn the lights off, spouting about saving energy. that kid has quite a memory.

break day

thursday pj day

sickie

after three days of sick kids hacking up lungs around here, two of the days being confined to the house with no car and rainy weather - i was going a little crazy. thursday and friday, tim wasn't even home for dinner/bedtime so they felt like the longest days ever.

yesterday, i went to a tupperware day-long conference and left tim on his own with the kids. while i would have loved to be spending the day away from the kids doing something more fun than sitting through training and such, i never would have willingly left them just for fun. but i'd paid for the conference so i went. what a difference in my mood when i got home at 6pm. i didn't think i was that grumpy or anything but after being gone for 9 hours, i was so happy to see them, felt much more patient and happy to play. it's amazing what a difference getting a little break away can make. but i'm happy to be getting a family day in today. :)

FONT! AUGH!

i don't know if you've noticed the change of font throughout the past couple blog posts. it seems that when i add pics then post around them, the font does not stay consistent. i just spent forever posting and reposting a blog post about pinterest and it is so frustrating once you start trying to keep one font. i should just not care but it looks so much nicer when you have just the one font. but reading my blog posts in this font, the punctuation doesn't always show up clearly which can make for some jumbled sentences and run-ons. anyways, work in progress. i'll play around with it some more and hopefully find something that works.

speak up, girl!

avery is the quietest little girl ever. even when her playmat collapsed on her, she didn't make but a peep. it's a good thing i noticed or she could have been under there for awhile wiggling around in silence. the other day, she slid off her bouncy chair and when i turned around, she was sitting on the floor with her head still on the chair...silent. and then she smiled at me when she saw i was looking. oh, avery.

play camping

the great thing about pinterest is that sometimes all you need is a kick in the imagination to get you thinking. this week, a pin i saw was going camping in your backyard. "hey yeah! great idea!" i think when i see these things that i should have come up with on my own. and the next day when ben said, "i have nothing to play," (words that should never be coming out of a 2.75 yr old's mouth in the first place) i got our little play tent out and we went to work setting up camping in our living room.

i asked ben what he thought we needed to take with us camping and he set out on a mad scramble through house collecting every single thing he saw. to get some inspiration, we checked out a couple of our camping books:

Curious George Goes Camping

and my personal favourite, Just Me and My Dad

after reading these two books, i threw some of the junk out of the tent that we didn't "need" and focused on the things we saw in the book: a fishing rod, a frying pan for cooking dinner, gathering firewood (in our case, train tracks) etc.

neither book mentioned bringing your guitar for singing around the camp fire but ben took my word for it.

my sleeping bag was a big hit.

fishing on the lake.

lunch in a tent is always tastier.

since ben's current version of playing pretend so far only includes fighting fires and being a doctor, it was fun to introduce a whole pretend environment that lent itself to an entire day of play. camping out in the backyard is just around the corner.

the night swaddle

i posted about swaddling awhile back and what i never told you was that we gave in immediately after posting that and started swaddling avery when we put her down for the night. except for the odd time that she might wiggle out of the blanket in the night and i have to get up and re-wrap her, she's sleeping so much better. i feel like she's getting a much better quality sleep.

here's a picture i took of her the other night before i went to bed. we are the "do not do" poster at the hospital where they teach you to put nothing in your baby's bed with them. the pillow helps keep her blanket tucked so she doesn't wiggle out in the night though it kind of takes away from the cute bedding (that you're ALSO not supposed to have in the bed with an infant...)

project life update

you may have been wondering if i'm keeping up with my project life since i've written nothing about it since the first week of the year. the answer is yes...and no. i was doing a pretty good job at getting photos printed on the saturday or sunday of the end of a week and then working on it over the next couple days. the problem was that i had all my supplies and papers etc etc spread out on our dining room table all the time for most of the month of january. near the end of january, i cleaned it up and piled it on my desk never to look at it again for a month. i still managed to print off a couple weeks of photos at one point but they just got added to the pile. it seems that if it's not in my face, spread out all over the table, i tend to forget about it...or i think about it but am daunted by the task. the farther i get behind, the harder it is to motivate myself to get going again. also, not having a printer DOES make it a little bit more difficult as there are always things i'd like to be printing off the internet to add to the pages to fill them out and i can't. i just hate printers and all the issues they bring.

BUT, today, i pulled all my stuff out and set it up on the dining room table again. (hopefully for a shorter time than previously) ben sat across from me and played playdough for an amazingly long time and avery sat for awhile in her bumbo and watched us before moving to her playmat. i am currently working on the first week of february (sigh) but have some lovely new papers to use that i bought a couple weeks ago AND i also took photos of the layouts that i have finished so that i can post them here for you to see.

week 3

i tried to get a little more creative with the stapling the letters to the first picture and the little circles on the journaling card/photo here but it's just not anything like what i see online. i just need to focus on getting the info down and pics in the pockets - that's all that will matter to me 10 years down the road, right? :)

week 4

i find that i'm trying to fit in so many pictures, there's barely any space for the journaling even though the journaling is something that i enjoy.
i took my camera card to walmart and used the machine to print a "collage" of 2 3x4 pics onto one 4x6 which is how i got the before and after photos together - discovering that i can do this will make a big difference in future photo taking/project life-ing.

week 5

i had more room here for some paraphanalia because i didn't take many photos this week. i have my week's grocery list stuck in there and the big white rectangle at the bottom is a picture that ben drew. he just started turning his circles into little faces this week - cool that i'll have that documented, right? i love this.
it's hard to force myself to use different page designs. the above one just has 6 4x6s and i've put some smaller pics on journaling cards (or journaling cards on larger pics) to break it up. it works for those weeks that i take no vertical photos. but i almost need to think of my layouts BEFORE the week starts and then consciously take either more vertical or horizontal pics depending on my page design. haha. way too much thinking. maybe that's why i've been procrastinating.

so there you have it. i'm part way through week 6 as of today and hopefully by the end of the weekend, i'll be all caught up. i'm facing a week with barely any photos but lots of valentines day ones and then following that is a week with all my victoria photos. but loving that despite my totally poor memory, i'm going to have a book that reminds me of all these otherwise forgettable moments. my favourite quote from last week that i'm definitely writing in: after ben accidentally spilled a lot of paint on the floor and carpet, he says, "thanks for cleaning up my mess, mommy." and then gave me a kiss on my forehead. oh ben, you have me wrapped around your finger. ;)