Just a weekend picture of all of my boys....

It is 10:30 and I am off to bed. We had a fun weekend.....I was going to go into detail, but instead I will just post a cute picture! Yesterday Grant was watching......take a guess.....Lightning McQueen! We let him watch it up in our bedroom that morning because we started working on removing wallpaper from our bathroom walls. I hate wallpaper!! We're making very slow progress....but hopefully we're figuring out a good method that will make it go faster as we go. Anyway, I took this picture of all of my guys and I thought it was really cute. Grant loves to hold earlobes (his own or Dean's, especially) when he's tired or stressed out. Here Dean and Grant are engrossed in the movie, but Drew is still all about Mommy!! In another year, I'm sure all three of them will be staring at the screen if I try to take a similar picture!!

My little smiley man

Here are a few pictures of my smiley little guy. I love this stage.....Drew's not old enough to really complain about things yet (unless he's tired and doesn't want Mommy to put him down or hand him to someone else!), and he's usually cheerful and playful. If he's playing on the floor and decides he wants to be in my lap, he'll just crawl right up! He also loves to laugh when I make silly faces or sounds, and of course he's always instigating play time with Grant. I look at his sweet little face and I am so thankful for my little sugar bear.....
This is a typical laugh/smile for Drew.....he scrunches up his eyes and nose and makes a little "heh, heh" sound....it's hard to explain but very funny!

He's also constantly chewing on his lips.....
And here he's probably saying "da da da da".......
Also....these springy doorstops are Drew's new favorite toys. He'll crawl up to them and pull them over and over. We need to finish taking the white caps off of them, though.....they seem secure but I'd hate for him to get one in his mouth.....
Oops!! Normally I don't post spit-up pictures but I thought this one was especially cute!

Sleep

Why, oh why, does sleep have to be SO difficult in our house??!! That is BY FAR the hardest issue we've dealt with, now with both boys. Sleeping through the night is not the hard part.....at least right now. Grant woke up a lot from 7 to 11 months, and Drew has sporadically woken up at random times.....but for the past week he's been sleeping straight through.

With Grant, I got in the habit of nursing or rocking him to sleep as a baby. This was fine until he started waking up in the middle of the night (at 7 months), and couldn't settle himself back to sleep. So finally at 11 months, I got so sick of it and just let him cry it out for a few nights. And it worked! So this time, I vowed to not rock or nurse Drew to sleep every night, because I didn't want the same thing to happen. And......for a while, I did well.....I'd let him fall asleep in my arms sometimes, but then I'd also just lay him in his crib awake other times. But then I gradually got lazy......after all, it is much easier (in the short term) to lay him down when he's asleep (not having to worry about him crying and waking Grant up, and also just being able to immediately get to work on whatever I want to do during his nap!).

So, in the past week I've really been trying to institute a bedtime/naptime routine (which apparently you're supposed to start at 4-5 months, and he's 7 months old now!). This is SO hard for me. I am not a routine-driven person myself......I love just going with the flow, which I know is not good for little kids! And.....Drew isn't really keen about the idea of having a naptime/bedtime routine, either.....he doesn't care about books or singing songs at this point. He just wants to be nursed to sleep like he's been doing for the past month! So usually he screams and cries until I come back in, and this goes on for a while before he finally gives up. But I am still inconsistent.....I know the sleep training could be over in two days (like with Grant), but sometimes I'll feel so sorry for him if he's been screaming for 15 minutes, so I'll pick him up and let him fall asleep in my arms. As a mom, you just feel so torn about these things....

So anyway, I would love to be one of those moms who puts her kids down for naps and leaves the room, knowing they will go straight to sleep and wake up 2 hours later. As I sat down to write this, both boys were screaming in their rooms (we went to Katy today so they're taking really late naps). Now they have both gone to sleep.....thank you, God!

More tomorrow on our trip to Katy.....blogging every day is more difficult than I expected!

A new favorite

These days, I spend pretty much every minute from 5:45am (yes, that is the time Grant and Drew have been waking up lately) until 7:30 or 8pm with my boys. I love them more than I can describe, but some moments I just feel so bored, and I yearn for things that aren't baby/child related.

A while back (I think it was while I was sleeping on the couch when Drew was a newborn), I came across the TLC show called "Say Yes to the Dress." It's about a wedding dress shop in NYC called Kleinfelds. Every episode, they pick two or three girls to follow around as they try on wedding dresses. I LOVE IT! A lot of the dresses at Kleinfelds are ridiculously expensive, but most of the girls they show are everyday, normal girls (despite the fact that they have $5,000 wedding dress budgets!). It is so fun to watch.....Dean will probably not be happy that I am writing this, but even he doesn't mind it too much!! I record the episodes (they come on back-to-back on Friday nights at 9pm), then watch them whenever I get a chance.

It's hard to describe, and I know I'm not the only one......when you have little kids, you can easily start feeling like you're not the same person you used to be (mostly just because you don't have much time anymore for things that interest you personally). So it's fun to watch girly shows like this that take me away from mommy thoughts for just a few minutes!

Conversations

It's been a long, hard couple of days, so I feel completely out of energy. A couple of funny things Grant has said over the past two days:

- Today he found a basket with some CDs and emptied them by the time I found him. I was irritated and asked him why he gets into things he's not supposed to have. He said, "it's okay, mommy! I'm just, like, so frustrated!" He's said "I'm just frustrated" before, but has never thrown the "like" in there before! I guess I say both of these things more than I should!

- Yesterday he sat at the computer and said he was checking his email (he does this a lot now). He said, "I'm typing email Aunt Corie. Hi Corie. Are you still at your house? I'll be there in a minute."