The Mid-January post

I am not going to apologize this time for not posting for over a month. Stuff happened... and I didn't put it on here immediately, so not only are there not going to be such refined details as would have been the case if I did blog once a day or once a week or even twice a month, but also the entries are a little bit mangled and not really in the order they happened... wutayagunado? (That is "what are you going to do" as said with a shrug in slang dismissal , which is how you would hear it if I were actually speaking to you).

***A stroller, a bed and a computer***
What do these three things have in common? They broke on us over the past month... hence one of multiple reasons I didn't update my blog (the broken computer, not the stroller). I won't bore you with the rather boring details because it would bore you... sufficeth to say, all three of these things have been repaired to the point where we could use them once again. Okay, the bed is still really pathetic and of course, it is broken on my side, but hey, that strange Hawaiian disease Lackamulah strikes again, so we're just dealing with it by stuffing a quilt on top of the box spring. I now have falling dreams like every night. Go figure!


***Jam- Good!! Meat- Good!! Wood- Good!!***
That is almost a direct quote from Joey of "Friends". I say this because as some of you know, I chewed the wooden legs of my parents' piano bench when I was a very little baby. Not just once, but to the point where there are significant bite marks up and down the wood of all four legs. Well, it turns out, our adorable son also finds wood fairly appealing, and we have caught him in the act of gnawing our coffee table several times!



***Christmas to Remember***
My wonderful husband did an amazing job of purchasing all of my gifts this Christmas with a limited budget. I got polar bear pajamas and slippers, a snuggie, games, and he even spent several hours at multiple department stores picking out the perfect purse. It turns out I was not so good. We ended up returning bout half of Ammon's gifts since they didn't fit right or weren't exactly what he would want. I wasn't insulted or anything. I want my sweety to be happy, but it just goes to show who knows who better (or who made a more specific Christmas list?) One of the few things Amnmon did keep was this fleece pullover:

**Goodie Disaster Gone Good***

We decided to make a whole bunch of goodies for our neighbors and friends for Christmas. Partially because we had limited funds and partially because I just don't feel like it's Christmas until I've spent a day in the kitchen making Christmas goodies and singing along to Christmas songs. I made a list of four things I wanted to make: banana bread, peanut butter cookies, crazy crunch (like carmel corn) and sugar cookies with frosting. Well, the banana bread and peanut butter cookies went off without a hitch: YUMMY!! Ammon even made the peanut butter cookies all by himself. After a mixup with the crazy crunch that made me delay making it until later, we proceeded to make sugar cookies... well actually it's my mom's "Butter Cookie" recipe that ends up making a slightly dry-er and flatter version of sugar cookies that are REALLY good with frosting. Anyway, Ammon wanted to make the BIGGEST batch, so he got started with NINE cups of flour and THREE cups of butter, etc. After he was done mixing I came over and noticed that the dough looked much more gooey than I was used to. Turned out that due to a miscommunication he had used granulated sugar instead of powdered sugar. We pined over the over-flowing bowl for a few minutes, called a few moms to see if they knew if we could salvage it, even tried to roll it out to cookie-cutter-out a few shapes... it was pathetic. Then, I decided to roll the dough in cinnamon and sugar... I don't like to brag, but they ended up being some of the best dang cookies I have ever tasted. I even made another batch last week and let me tell you, flippin addicting!! Anyway, so we ended up not only averting disaster but 'inventing' some darn good cookies! The recipe is under the picture of our resulting bags of goodies.

Originally I called them Cinnamon Roll Cookies, but my sister Jess and Ammon came up with a better name since they're similar to snickerdoodles, but better!

***Cinnamon Butter-Doodles***

1.5 cups butter/margarine

3 eggs

2.25 cups granulated sugar

4 tsps vanilla

4.5 cups flour

1.5 tsps salt

Roll golf-ball size balls in cinnamon and sugar mixture (1/4 cup sugar and 4 tsps cinnamon); Bake at 350 degrees for 12 minutes. If you want them to be less crumbly, add about a half cup more flour. This recipe makes about three dozen, which doesn't last long.

***A WHOLE LOTTA POPCORN***
Kind of a fun story about Christmas: I had asked for a very specific type of popcorn popper for Christmas. I LOVE popcorn all the time, but when I was pregnant, Ammon's dad made me some popcorn with their family popper and it was so good, I craved it ALL the time after that. It's the Stir Crazy brand apparently. I know this because I ended up getting three of them for Christmas. One from Ammon and one each from two of my very awesome sisters-in-law. It all worked out in the end so that we only had one, but it ended up being a running gag by the end of Christmas day!

***Kaleb's First Christmas***
Of course I have to talk about Kaleb's first Christmas. We got him a cute little outfit and a couple of presents (don't worry I am not putting pictures of all of them on here). It turns out Kaleb is a really good gift unwrapper. Unfortunately, every piece of wrapping he tore off went straight to his mouth.

Ammon's family got Kaleb a bunch of books, which I am so excited about because we only had two or three baby books before Christmas. One book about a fire engine has a button on it to make a siren play. It turns out that Kaleb is obsessed with hitting the button, but starts crying after the third of fourth time. Ammon thinks the siren is baby talk for something very sad.

A kind of begged my mom to get a "Soft Shapes" book for Kaleb (it was on sale at the store I worked at) and it turns out that the little ducks that pop out of it are Kaleb's new favorite thing to chew on.

Another popular toy was a light and sound ball my parents got... a Walmart special... but it was Kaleb's first light-up toy, so now if we ever need to get his attention, we just pop out that toy!

***Sick Kaleb***
Kaleb came down with a really persistent cold on Christmas Eve and had it for almost a month (okay, lets just say he isn't quite over it yet). This later turned into a really nasty cough that possibly could have been RSV and we had to do breathing treatments. This has made him very tired and cuddly, but overall not too different from his usual self... Except maybe he liked to be with dad a little more:

Then while Kaleb still had his cold, he came down with a very stubborn diarrhea, ended up lasting a full week. Needless to say we took extra precautions to make sure he stayed hydrated, including giving him water and pedialyte. It turns out Kaleb REALLY hates the orange "fruit" flavored Pedialyte and the only way we could get him to drink it was by squirting it into his mouth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozpx8mtpeE8

Thankfully he really likes the grape flavor so he was able to get a lot of fluids that way. Unfortunately, now we have to try to convince him to drink plain water again.

We also had to deal with the awful diaper rash that comes with diarrhea, so thankfully my wonderful sister-in-law had some poddy pads from when she was housetraining her dog, so we lined the playpen and let Kaleb 'air out' for a few hours. (Thank you, Kelli)

***A boy and his (dad's) dog***

We've had such wonderful weather lately, we took Kaleb and Bowser to the park the other day. I don't often talk about Bowser, and as much as he is not the type of dog I would choose for myself, he really is a GREAT dog and the perfect playmate for Ammon. We have been relatively cautious with Bowser being around Kaleb, mostly because he's just a big clutzy dog, but also because Bowser, though very gentle overall, hasn't been around kids very much. When we went to the park, I sat Kaleb in the grass and Bowser laid beside him and licked him a couple of times, they just hung out like "little buds". It was so reassuring to finally have them really spend time together.