Let's see, now where was I?

The kiddos were invited to a birthday party for a pair of sisters at the daycare (one in Lily's class and one in Tyler's class).  It was at the gymnastics center and the kids had never been there before.  They had a GREAT time.  

Tyler is really bad at sleeping.  He just doesn't seem to understand that needs to stay in bed until 6:00am.  We are all over the place with this guy.  Some nights he's up at 1 or 2am and typically screaming for his Daddy, waking up the whole house.  He often yells until Joel comes in to put him back to bed.  Sometimes he lets me.  And then, regardless of whether he gets up in the middle of the night, he also often gets up by 5am.  And then we wrestle again to try to get him to stay in bed until 6am.  Sometimes he complies and sometimes he just throws a ginormous fit.  We do typically hold firm though and don't allow him to watch TV or eat breakfast until 6.  One day, recently, he got up and came out to the living room and then snuggled up on his Daddy's lap and promptly fell back to sleep.

This girl fixed her own hair.  Doesn't she look beautiful?

Sometimes these kiddos are so cute, playing together.  There's been several instances lately where I've found them shut up in the playroom for 20 minutes, playing and laughing together and NOT FIGHTING and it's amazing.  Then other times (most times, if I'm honest), one of them will be playing with something and the other one wants it and then they fight.  In this case, Tyler was "fixing" his train with his tools and Lily wanted to fix it too.  Well she was getting in Tyler's way and Tyler was in her way and it resulted in Tyler karate chopping Lily on the head with a his plastic saw.  And Joel stood back, silently, and caught the whole thing on video which we have since watched multiple times and laughed heartily.  

Reason Number 437.

My husband is so crafty.  He should have a Pinterest page.

This was my Christmas present from him this year.  We had one of those lazy susan style spice ricks sitting on the counter (which he hated - primarily because no matter what it is, if it's on the counter, it's clutter and he hates clutter).  I didn't mind it cluttering the counter; however, it didn't hold half the spices that we regularly use and was (pre) filled with many spices we never use.  So kind of a waste... Those baskets pictured above on the shelf hold the rest of our spices but when you need one, you had to sort through a whole bunch of bottles and it was dumb.  

I guess the maybe some of the industrial engineer / 5S in me rubbed off on Joel and he came up with this idea to put a metal board on the back of the cabinet (painted in chalkboard paint) and use these little 2 oz jelly jars to hold all my spices.  They have a magnet on the lid and just stick up on that board.  Now they are labeled and easy to access (and the "clutter" is removed from the counter).

Pretty sweet, eh?  There are also some strips mounted under the cabinets in case I decide I want some that I use all the time (salt, pepper, etc) to be even MORE handy.  

So, reason number 437 why I have the best husband ever.

Happy (Miserable) New Years Day Bowling Adventure.

Happy New Year!  I can't believe our 16 consecutive days off of work is coming to an end in a few short hours.  Actually, I can.  It's been a long couple weeks and while I've thoroughly enjoyed the time off, I'm very much looking forward to getting back to a routine (which includes going to work).  It must be my OCD that craves routine...

Anyhow, on New Years Day, we wanted to do something fun with the kids.  I scavenged the internet for ideas including hunting for a jumpy house place and checking out the Children's Museum.  Well the nearest jumpy house place is 95 minutes away and the Children's Museum is super expensive (which is fine if you think you're kids will last more than 1.5 hours).  So we settled on bowling.

The kids had such a good time last Fall going with Grams and Uncle Jason (Lily even asked if they were going to come with us) that I thought this would be great fun.

The first great miserable disaster of "fun" for 2015 is more like it.  

Tyler was a total shit.  I mean a total shit.  You look at this face (in his upside down sunglasses) and it's hard to believe, I know, but we have most definitely entered the terrible twos.  Which is unfortunate because I feel like we JUST finished the terrible twos with Lily and she's about to turn four.  

Anyhow, Tyler was hitting, not listening, pushing buttons he was repeatedly told not to push, screaming "I NOT" at the top of his lungs when asked to do something he disagreed with.  Good thing bowling alleys are loud.  He reset the pins mid-turn, throwing Lily's bowling ball backward, nearly back to the beginning, but not quite such that we had to enlist the help of the SUPER GRUMPY OLD MAN who was the bowling alley worker to retrieve it.  You'd have thought we just committed capital murder and asked him to clean up after us or something.

About frame 5, things settled down a little and we all stopped screaming at one another.  That lasted until frame 8 where the yelling resumed.  I never wanted to be done bowling so bad in all my life.  

Despite the constant bickering, we got a few cute pictures.  If I didn't tell on myself in this blog and just posted pictures on Facebook, I'd look like I had the awesomest, most well behaved kids ever who never did anything wrong.  But the reality is, I'll never be one of those moms who gets their dinner paid for by the retired couple sitting at the next table over because they are so impressed with our angelic children.

We sent the kids to daycare each day that they were open last week.  Several times, I felt overwhelmed with guilt for sending them just so I could do whatever I wanted at home.  Like I would start crying and almost go pick them up.  ALMOST.  I had been toying with not sending them on Friday, but after Thursday bowling excursion from hell, there was no longer any question about whether I would be utilizing the daycare on this last day of "freedom."

I'm so glad I did, because on Saturday, Lily got sick.  Again.  So the last two days of vacation were kind of a bust spent trying to figure out how to make her feel better.  It's a different kind of sick than Christmas day though.  I was convinced it was flu and just needed to run its course.  Fever, chills, aches, no appetite.  But then today she started complaining of her eyes burning and she kept wiping them with a cold compress until she looked like this:

And then, green gunk started coming out of her eyes and they got even redder.  So we went to urgent care.  Turns out it's an ear infection and a sinus infection.  So, I'll be working from home tomorrow.  Nothing like being off work for 2 weeks and then having to tell your boss you can't come to work.

Meanwhile, my little shittin' two year is simultaneously the cutest friggin' thing I've ever seen and the most aggravating.

And Then Some Continued.

We got both kids a tablet for Christmas, even though we think Tyler's too little for one, because we really thought that would save our sanity.  We assumed that if Lily had one, Tyler would want one too and all the fighting would drive us crazy.  Well turns out he doesn't really care all that much.  He looks over Lily's shoulder every now again at what she's doing or watches for a minute if she's watching a video.  But for the most part, he couldn't care less.   So for now, Tyler's tablet remains in the box to be opened another day.  Maybe we can recycle it and give it to him for his birthday 9 months from now?  He might forget he already opened it.

I got a wild hair while we've been off work to start exercising.  Well it's not really that wild.  I'm actually signed up for Farrel's Extreme Bodyshaping (more on that later) which starts in another week or so and I thought it might be a good idea to do some exercising ahead of going there - maybe I will ward off a tiny bit of the soreness from the "extreme" workouts.  

Anyhow, the kiddos like to get in on the exercising action.  Which is a great unintentional consequence of me exercising at home.  They see me exercising so it becomes something built into their little baby brains that this is what is normal and maybe they will be better exercisers as they grow up.  Plus it burns off some energy so that's always a good thing.  AND it's really cute when Tyler works out in his underwears.

However, we don't really have a lot of space in our house so just finding a spot to exercise by myself isn't that easy.  Then you add Joel to the mix and it gets really hard.  THEN when the kiddos want to get in on it, we're really pressed for space.  

I don't know what you call these exercises, but the kiddos were really in to it.

We've been having these little picnics in the living room about once a week.  It's funny how much just a slight little change to routine perks the kids up.  Now we have another dinner guest at the table.

Had a few snuggles on the couch with my babes.

We've been to the inside playground several times on this vacation.  It's so much fun to go there now that I don't have to be up the kids' butts the whole time.  One of the trips Lily and Tyler were playing together and it was so fun to watch.  Lily would run and scream (and I mean SCREAM), "TYLER, YOU CAN'T GET ME!"   And then she'd giggle hysterically and take off running.  Tyler would do his best to keep up with her, but she'd lose him.  Then he'd come over to me and ask, "Where Sissy at, Mommy?"  So I'd show him where Lily was and he'd take off and sneak up on her and they'd both squeal with laughter.  This went on for a good 20 minutes and I just grinned ear to ear the whole time.

We always want what we can't have.  For Lily this week, that was curly hair.  We tried to give her some curly, kinky hair and now we've had crazy krimped hair for two days.  I have to say, it's actually pretty cute though the pictures aren't really doing it justice.