The Kitchen Project - DONE!

I haven't gotten around to posting these - but we've been done for probably six weeks now. We still stand in there and marvel at the fact that all of that storage and counter space is for real.

Puddle Jumping

Reed loves to jump in puddles - I mean, who wouldn't love it, really? Click the photos for a larger view.

And a bonus shot of our house.

Recent Reedisms

The Pacifier -
Reed has slept with a pacifier for-freaking-ever. When we moved to Hutchinson from Austin, his new daycare wouldn't allow him to have it all day long (like he did in Austin) so he tapered off then to just nighttime use (and has used it at night for the past almost-two-years. To me, it wasn't a battle worth fighting - I figured as long as he was only using it at night (and not even all night at that) that he'd eventually decide he was done. I was right.

A few nights ago, I was so tired I was about to die. Reed wanted to come to my bed, so I said fine. He laid down with me, had his elephant and paci, and all of a sudden he says "my paci is broke, Mommy. I need a new one." I told him we didn't have another one and that it was the last paci. He asked me to fix it, and I told him that we can't fix pacifiers. When they break, they're trash.

He went to his room and dug around and found another one, but didn't like it because it didn't have the grooves on it (he was using a Nuk that has the soothing grooves on it for teethers). He threw it at the wall and said he was done. Fell asleep and stayed asleep without it.

The next night, we were getting ready for bed and I asked him if he had his elephant. He said "yes, I have elephant, but no red paci." That was all he said - and he got in bed and went to sleep.

We've had a few nights where he wanted to argue about needing it ("but I loooove my red paci") and have to remind him that it's broken and we don't have any more, but so far, he's been sleeping fine without it.

If only potty training will work out to be that easy...

The Piggies
I have always called Reed's toes "piggies." Somewhere along the line, the piggies have started talking back (kind of like Hand-Hand and Alex). I was trying to get him ready to leave the house for some reason, and trying to get his shoes on him. I said "come here piggies, get in these shoes!" to which the piggies responded "but it's so dark in here!"

I laughed so hard I peed my pants.

The Yeah-Buts
A recent phrase in our house is "yeah but" whenever I'm asking him to do something that he doesn't want to do. Apparently he's doing this at school too, because they started telling him "yeah buts live in the woods." We decided to try that approach at home because honestly, I was so tired of the arguing.

One night last weekend, I was asking him to do something (eat his supper, pick up his toys, who knows what), and he kept cutting me off with "yeah but" and telling me that he didn't want to. After he cut me off the fifteenth time, I said, louder than him, "BUT..." to which he looked at me, pointed his index finger at me and shook it saying, "Mommy, Buts live in the woods."

I'm pretty sure he saw me laugh.

Astute readers might have noticed...

that I made reference to my pregnancy in a previous post. I wasn't holding out on you; I just wanted to see the heartbeat before I shared with the world. Since we saw a strong little heartbeat on an ultrasound last week, I am now ready to announce to the world that Reed is going to be a big brother, sometime in April. My due date is April 14, but I am 99.99% certain that I will go for the scheduled c-section at about 39 weeks, as recommended by my doctor.

Reed has no idea that this is coming; he has no concept of time and would ask me every day between now and April when the baby is coming. I suppose I will tell him when I can no longer hold him on my lap or when he starts asking about my belly. I have such bittersweet feelings about having a baby. I know that I want to give Reed a sibling. It has always been part of the plan. What I didn't think about was how much Reed and I would bond, especially within the past year. I worry that I am not going to have enough time or patience to maintain the closeness that we have now. I know that he will benefit greatly from having someone to share with and play with and even fight with, but I also worry about what he might lose.

Passive-Aggressive behaviors, Facebook, etc.

One of my favorite pages on the web is the Passive-Aggressive Notes page. It's always got something awesome that is cracking me up at any given time. When you combine Facebook *and* PAN, it just gets freaking awesome, as is evidenced here.

While I don't have anything that exciting going on in my Facebook world right now, what I do have is, well, interesting. You see, I have this Ex. And I mean Ex, with the capital E, as in Ex from Hell. None of the details there matter now (this was about ten years ago now - how time flies), but he and I have recently ended up beinging added to the same person's friends list. I have not been in touch with this friend (for simplicity purposes, we'll call him Joe) and I'm relatively certain that Ex hasn't been either, up until now. Joe posted in his status update yesterday that his wife just found out that she is pregnant with #2. I posted congratulations to him/them, and said that I am about nine weeks along with our second as well. Ex posted right after me on Joe's page.

There's nothing illegal about that, and I suppose that I should actually be okay with it. And it's certainly not going to keep me up at night, but dammit, it annoys me. Why does he have to be there, tainting my good wishes for a healthy pregnancy?

When I discovered that we were friends with the same person, I was a little panicky - my sister talked me down, telling me that I have nothing to be ashamed or embarassed of, because he was the one who lost his mind and his character and lied to me for God-only-knows-how-long. And she's right - I did nothing wrong at the end of that relationship (and for the record, I claim responsibility for many other things that went wrong over the course of that relationship, but not for his "dropping-off-the-face-of-the-earth-and-eloping-without-ever-telling-me-act."). But for some reason, it just irritates me that I've managed to not cross paths with him for the past ten years, and now he suddenly appears.