And as crazy as they can make me (just yesterday, as they were both screaming simultaneously for no apparent reason, I found myself yelling, "CAN WE PLEASE STOP YELLING!?"), I'm so, so glad I can be home with their crazy selves. Besides, Owen has dropped down to one nap and I don't think anything has improved our quality of life this much since we got a mini van. IT IS LIFE-CHANGING. And deserving of all caps. Because now instead of book-ending Avery's nap with his naps and being a prisoner to the nap schedule, the two kids nap at the same time. It is at least an hour of quiet awesomness, usually an hour and a half, and sometimes more than two hours. I don't get to enjoy mindless TV or anything, but at least I get some work done.
Now that I'm not watching the neighbor twins any more either, it's like summer. We've got free time in the mornings and the afternoons. We can go places because we aren't foaming at the mouth and don't look like sickly beasts. We can go on walks around the block and to the park.
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| Owen veers into the grass a lot. |
Also life-changing? The car cart.
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| Grocery shopping is now an EVENT. |
Thank you to the corporate grocery geniuses who thought, "Hey....if we make kids happy, moms can spend money." Because Avery gets giddy-excited for the car cart, Owen loves it, they're content for at least half an hour, Owen can try to steal candy bars in the checkout lane, and I can actually concentrate on my grocery list rather than speeding around like a contestant on Supermarket Sweep. And though it's a bit unwieldy, I don't think I will ever shop without it again.
Owen, bless his little heart, is getting hilarious with his walking. Or rather, with his refusal. He'll stand on his own a bit, but isn't really interested in showing off his balance. He's taken three or four steps several times, but just isn't that into testing the walking waters. He'll go limp if he's not in the mood to try, so he'll just crumple to his crawl position. He instead scurries like the fastest bug to get everywhere. So when we're at the park, it means a lot of this:
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| Planking. All the cool kids do it. |
It means seriously grubby hands and knees now that we're outside a lot in shorts.
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| You love me even when I'm grubby. |
It means my arms are getting wiped out daily. But even though walking is still in the future, he's gaining in other areas. For instance, he recently learned to identify his nose.
He's also added "car" to his vocab, he'll wave and say hi, bye and night-night. He understands every word I say, I swear. He knows when he's not supposed to do something; he'll look at you as he's doing it with a little grin. And he's so sweet that he usually stops doing it instead of going through with it. This will change. But it's nice at the moment.
Also noteable? Holy freaking cicadas. The 17-year cicadas are coming out right now, and they are thick. They litter the ground under certain trees, and it makes for a lot of side-stepping on the sidewalks. They're not making noise yet, but seeing the numbers already, I'm sure it's going to be deafening as they get going. And as creeped out as I am about bugs, I'm weirdly fascinated with this phenomenon. I mean, I actually saw one as it was molting. Check out this nod from Mother Nature to Alien:
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| I mean, excuse me? This happens? (Enlarge at your own risk.) |
So yes. I'm trying to enjoy a moment of relief. Relief from book, from illnesses, from endless winter. And even if a plague of cicadas has replaced the plague of viruses, it's a small price to pay for all of this:
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| I think Cabbage Patch needs a safety harness. And maybe clothes. |
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| Happy face. |
*Pre-order it! And if you haven't gotten this one by now, what are you waiting for?
**If it hadn't happened to us, I wouldn't believe it was possible for a family to be sick as much as we were. Since January, I've had pink eye twice, three sinus infections, one ear infection, the achy/fever terrible flu, the 24/7 awfulness of stomach flu for three days, bronchitis (undiagnosed but I've had it before and the telltale cough-until-you-practically-puke-all-night-long pretty much had me convinced) and numerous colds in between all of this wonder and delight. How I wrote half a book in this time? I do not know.
