Good morning, good morning construction site.

So what is the most exciting thing a two year old boy can find outside his back door?

A digger!

We had a water main break behind our house a few weeks ago and there has been a small crew working to lay down some new pipes.  With snow and cold weather, the work has been on and off.  Mainly, I had only ever seen this one guy pushing a big pile of rocks back and forth.

But with the nicer weather the project is picking up.  It was fun to wake up and see the digger parked right there outside our house today.

It just so happens that AW is really into construction vehicle books right now so this is pretty much a big deal for him.

Anytime he hears the "beep, beep, beep" of the vehicles he goes running to the window to catch a glimpse of the them in action.

Even when the shades are drawn he likes to take a peek!  

And this afternoon we got another surprise - cement mixer came for a quick cameo appearance! 

Who would have figured we'd be so happy to have construction going on right outside our home?  

Life with this little guy changes so many things.  

The last box.

We've had a bit of an odd year. We PCS'ed ("permanent change of station'ed" aka "moved") twice in one year.  The Army usually has a rule about staying at a duty station one full year before a PCS, but they made an exception this time and so after moving from Washington State to Louisiana in the spring, six months later we were packing it all back up to come to Kansas.

There we are leaving Washington:

And arriving in Louisiana:

 We put in a lot of work painting and getting the place perfect since we knew we'd be around a while...

...and then we got orders.  All that work for nothing!  (By the way, painting in 100 degree heat when you are seven months pregnant is not happy for anyone.)

We got rid of a lot of furniture and other stuff in order to lighten our load before both moves...and then we added in a baby. So it all evened out.

Random cute family photo.

Moving around so much, plus a new baby, equals a little bit of chaos. Our very first move was so carefully planned and organized, there were lists and photos and color coding... I think I give up a little each subsequent time. I don't even have any pictures of the Kansas move! For shame. Here's just one of the new digs:

Well, we have been in our new house roughly two full months now. We are pretty settled in, fairly organized, pictures on the walls and all.

But there are so many items that I am now realizing I have no idea where I put them when I unpacked them...and then I try to remember where they could be...and then I realize I don't remember even where they were in our house in LA and the last time I really had a set place for the item was in our house in WA. So trying to figure out which drawer or closet it is now shoved in is near impossible.

Then there are things that just magically vanished into thin air.  A chef's knife disappeared (watch out people of Fort Polk for a pampered-chef-knife-wielding employee of the local moving company) and a rug.  I mean, where did an entire floor rug go?  Has no one reported an extra rug around the moving van?  Or did the same person who absconded with the knife take the rug too?  Hmmm...knife and rug combo is kind of shady if you think about it.  I really hope my things are not part of some unsolved mystery.  I do not want to see them appear on an episode of Dateline one day.

And then there is the "last box." We usually have all the boxes unpacked by the movers the day they unload the truck so they can haul away the materials before they leave (they really love this part of their job, trust me).  But there is always a box or two that doesn't get unpacked for some reason...and then it gets shoved in the corner of the room, and then it gets shoved in a closet, and then you start throwing stuff on it...and it just remains there...the last box...until you move again.

Missing something.

A few days ago we went to one of those large inflatable bounce house places they have where kids can jump around and be crazy.  I was meeting a few other moms there and in classic AW fashion he was needy, whiny, and in a general distemper the first hour and a half we were there (there was this preposterous chicken nugget-related meltdown incident in which the child became completely unhinged that I care not to relive on this blog as it already haunts my nightmares).  And then magically something in the universe shifted and he was having the time of his life - a half an hour before we had to leave.  He had so much fun he passed right out during Paw Patrol when we got home.

Bounce house success.

And then two days later you are washing hands at the sink and realize that the wristband for the bounce place is still on your child...

and you really have no excuse as to why this has gone unnoticed until now.

MVGC strikes again.

She vomits a lot;  this is normal.

This is what I wrote under "Pets - Millie (Cat)" in our babysitter instructions.

And this is what happened the other night as I was trying to put the boys to sleep:

HW was busy that night so I was on my own. DW was really overtired so I was hoping to get him to sleep first, but it's hard when your toddler keeps coming into the room and "whispering" things to you.

So there I was sitting in the glider chair in DW's room in the dark trying to get him to fall asleep and the door pushes open. MVGC pokes her head in. She stares at me. She steps into the room. She pukes on the floor.  She stares at me. She exits. End scene.

A few moments later AW pokes his head into the room. I say in my loudest whisper (because DW is so close to falling asleep at this moment). "Don't come in, Millie..." and that is when AW enters the room. He steps in the cat puke. He begins shouting and hopping around because stepping in cat puke is gross.

You are my list, Millie. Watch yourself.

And no, you can't watch Paw Patrol. Put the remote down.

Paw Patrol.

I like Paw Patrol.  I do.  Adorable puppies driving rescue vehicles.  What more could a toddler boy want from a television program? Pure genius. It is a much, much, much more tolerable show than some of the others AW has been hooked on in the past. But this show MUST have some kind of hypnotic subliminal messaging in it. I am convinced. AW always wants more Paw Patrol.  More Paw Patrol.  More Paw Patrol.  Even when he is watching more Paw Patrol he wants more Paw Patrol. Even when I am sure he is not even paying attention to the TV anymore, as soon as an episode ends he says, "More 'taw 'tol?"

He just can't seem to resist the siren song of Paw Patrol.  And now that I'm thinking about it, if HW and I can't stop singing the theme songs in our heads all day long, just what is this doing to our under-developed toddler's brain?  Hmmm....

I really try not to be the mom who has the TV on all day.  But when little brother is teething, it's -2 degrees out and we have been at zero chocolate status for two days...I give in.  He's safe and happy and his mind is being taken over by the hidden messaging of the executives at Nick JR.  It's all good.

Sorry, carrots.

DW has his first tooth! I guess this could be in part why the little guy was in such misery the past few days. I guess I owe carrots a little bit of an apology.  I am still mad at them, but perhaps they were not all to blame. I tried getting a picture of his new little tooth bud but he kept sticking his tongue out.

He has been a much happier boy today and did great sleeping. And he's already chewing on some cookie dough!

Yum.  AW is preparing eggs with maple syrup for his little bro.

He is very serious about his cooking.  It's been a long weekend at Ft. Nonsense and now I'm just looking forward to a quiet evening of blood sucking zombie killing on The Walking Dead.  Yes, I'm aware it's also Oscar night, but face it, I'm a mom with no babysitter and I haven't seen the inside of a movie theater since 2012 so I have no business caring who is going to win best picture.

Carrots are the devil.

We have been starting first foods with DW this week.  I am really "lucky" to live in an era of child-rearing where there are lots of differing opinions on how to go about this.  I won't bore you with all the details of baby food theory, but around here we have no hard and fast rules about food.  We just go with what seems to work.

Most experts do agree though that you should start one food at a time and space them a few days apart, so if an allergic or adverse reaction were to occur you would know which food was the culprit.

Our first food was avocado and I mostly let him play with it instead of trying to get him to take it off the spoon.  Here is is mashing it around:

Adorable.

We did avocado for a few days and next up we tried pureed carrots.  As I spoon fed him the carrots, he was unsure of them.  He made some confused faces, he swallowed a bit, choked on some, and the rest dribbled down his chin.

In the evening he was fussy going to bed. He's like that sometimes, so I thought it was no big deal. I actually thought, maybe he's not getting enough to eat and perhaps we need to work in more food before bedtime. Oh, me. I am so silly.

Now that we seemed to be going full steam ahead on solids, I decided to hit up Target to get some more supplies. While we were there I began to notice that DW was very flatulent, but I just chalked it up to normal baby stuff and bought some mum mums and oatmeal and went on my way.  Here we are cruising the aisles of Target:

That night I thought, hey, let's get crazy and do some oatmeal for dinner. So I mixed up a very small amount of watery oatmeal and fed it to him at dinner.

Here's AW eating some mum mums.

He spit them out afterward.

That night turned into pure hell.  The gassiness escalated and my poor baby was just so gassy he could not sleep unless I was holding him, and then still, he was in pain and discomfort. We spent most of the night rocking in the glider chair as he whimpered helplessly in my arms.

And what is the most self-defeating thing that could happen at 3 am after you just rocked your sick baby to sleep for hours and FINALLY successfully transferred him still asleep to the crib?  You step on that god-awful Laugh and Learn Puppy and he starts happily singing you a love song.  And once you beat him back into silence and stick him back on the shelf, he senses you still may want to play and utters "HUG ME!" as loud as he possibly can.  You are now on my hit list, puppy.  Watch yourself.

Needless to say, DW and I were up all night long and we were both quite unhappy about it.  Even HW had to step in for a few hours to hold him while I got some sleep.  And all day today he was still having a bad reaction, including a rash. I am really hoping the worst is over for now.  It has been a rough 24 hours to say the least.

Now, I don't know for sure if it was the carrots, the oatmeal, just solid food in general, a virus going around or something else entirely, but I'm putting the blame on carrots here.  They suck.  Stupid carrots.  The solid food train has derailed, and we are not hopping back on anytime soon.