anatomy lesson.

hollis has been interested in body parts lately. particularly his nipples, which he is confused about. are they a belly button? a penis? no, something else altogether.

this morning he was walking around naked after poo-pocalypse 2015 and he pointed to his nipples and said "this is nipples!" and i said "that's right!" and then he pointed to his navel and said "this is beebo! where other one beebo?". if you've got two nipples, you need to belly buttons, right?

the chair story: a real conclusion.

you can read the chair story in full here: part 1 & part 2.

so we got the chair back in september, amazingly. aaaannnndddd...it was gross. so we stuck it in the shed and it was stinky and gross in the shed and in the back of my mind. can you say square one?

in december, jb was clearing out the shed for our holiday party and obviously the chair had to go, since it was not fit for humans to sit on. so it came inside, into the laundry room. again, not a solution, but who has time to deal with all these things? so it annoyed me in the laundry room for a few weeks until i asked jb to bring it elsewhere. and then it moved to the back porch, where it hung out for another week or two.

and then my need to complete tasks took over and i decided to handle it. months ago, right when we got it back initially, i had contacted a business called cardenas upholstery near our house. this place has exclusively 5-star yelp reviews, but all the reviews said it was sketchy and weird but to deal with that because they do great work. i figured i had already experienced the sketchiest scenario imaginable, so i emailed them pics of the chair and asked for a quote and how much fabric they would need. they got back to me, but i just dropped the ball - didn't feel like trying to decide on fabric, etc etc.

but. this was the time. so a couple weeks ago, i emailed cardenas's shop back asking if the quote was still good. they said sure. i looked at the entire internet for a few days and then just bit the bullet on a fabric that seemed reasonably priced and like it might look ok on the chair.

friday the 16th i was working from home, so i drove the chair to the shop on my lunch hour. let me pause and describe this place for you. there are no signs. there are not actually doors. it's on a random dead-end and is in the same lot as an auto repair shop (from what i can tell) and there are pieces of machinery and cars and random other stuff everywhere. so weird. i get out of my car and a dude comes out of the tent-like structure to my left. i told him i had a chair. he said "did you call?" and then pulled my chair out of my trunk and brought it inside. i followed him with the fabric and he plops the chair down on a surface. this place is covered in torn-up boat seats and every furniture piece you can imagine. there is foam all over. it's dark. there are some tools and a desk with 800 things on it, most of which probably don't belong on a desk.

so, my confidence isn't super high at this point. dude hands me a spiral notebook that looks like it's come out of a seventh grade boy's backpack at the end of the school year. he tells me to write my name on it, so i put that, my email, cell number and a description of my chair and fabric, figuring at least i can do what i can do...and i leave.

i don't have any indication of how long this process will/should take or when/how i can expect my chair back. but i figure it's been through worse, so...here we go. then yesterday afternoon, my phone rings. i answer and the first words i hear are "what side of the fabric do you want us to use?" i was like...whaaaa? and then i remembered the chair and told him to use the side i preferred. he hung up. men of few words over there. i figured at least it was a good sign that they seemed to be associating my fabric with my phone number, and i assumed it would be another week or so.

oh, no. i got off my 8am conference call this morning and had missed a call on my cell phone. i called back and the dude says "your chair is ready".

boom.

it looks amazing in real life. they did an unbelievable job. they charged half of what any other place in town quoted me. one year later: victory. 

the end!

bikes.

oh, austin. how i love your 72-degree days in january.

jb is out of town this week (left this morning), so we decided to bike the kids to the park after school yesterday.

feeling better.

i still have a voice that sounds like i've been chain smoking for 42 years, and hollis is still a wee bit snotty, but other than that we are basically better. whew. i never get sick and i don't do well with it. i think i've gotten sick more times since i had kids than the entire rest of my life combined.

anyway. this weekend was gorgeous and it was so amazing to be feeling better and not contagious and get out of the house. i stayed home with hollis on friday so we could have one more day to convalesce. i was still fairly sick that day, so since i was sticking close to home anyway, i kept him with me. we did have a hot date to whole foods while our housekeeper was there and that was nice, even if it involved driving around town in the pouring rain.

friday night we took it easy, but saturday morning we had a birthday party for one of our neighbor's kidlets. they had a fun jump and cupcakes, so the kids were in hog heaven. hollis discovered tee-ball and we realized we have not been exposing our kids to enough sports. 

both kids took great naps on saturday since hollis had had a rough night the night before. i used that time to rest a little and straighten up the house. when emme got up, she helped me clean the porch, which is always fun - i love to do projects with my little helper. 

saturday evening we went to one of my co-worker's house. his family has two girls on either side of ek's age, and they also have all the toys, so the kids were in heaven. i always feel like we have way too many toys, then we go to other peoples' houses and i feel like we are depriving our children. sigh. 

sunday morning we woke up and walked around the corner to cate's house (after some quality burrito time, of course). it was marathon day (the half i said i was going to run and then never did distance training for...), and their house is on the route, so we had breakfast and half-watched the runners. the kids are obsessed with cate's house. 

and we ended the weekend with friday night meatballs (on sunday) since i didn't feel like anyone should be exposed to our germy house on friday. emme loved having buddies over - this is her friend oliver, the sweetest boy ever. 

yay for good weather and wellness! 

things i hate about the flu.

3/4 of us got the flu shot this year, and 3/4 of us have the flu right now. it's super fun. emme got the shot and does not have the flu, but our rad pediatrician put her on tamiflu as a prophylactic measure anyway, so i hope she stays safe. hollis and i are plowing through - it's not as bad as it could be, i guess. they said we will likely have a milder and shorter case since we were vaccinated and hooked up the tamiflu in short order. i am not messing around with sickness.

i hate feeling insanely tired and energy-less, and i hate it even more when it's accompanied by an inability to get sound sleep. hollis barfed last night (i think it was from coughing so hard - poor dude) all over his bed, so he came into our bed, jb headed to the couch. sleeping with a toddler is like having a magnetized bowling ball with toenails in your bed. he's an insane person, for real. my jawbone wrist band thing told me i was up at least 6 different times during the night, and i feel like that's a conservative estimate.

i hate when i'm sick too because my need to deal with all the germs by washing all the things falls to me, but i feel crappy and want to just lay on a couch.

i hate the achy body stuff because i know my kidlet is feeling it in his little body and that makes me super sad.

i hate that i'm not "working", but i'm also not doing anything productive.

i hate coughing. hate it.

is this enough whining for today?

icing.

when we woke up a couple days ago, there was frost on the roofs and in the grass in our neighborhood. emme walks justin out when he leaves for work every morning. she ran inside (still in pajamas):
"mommy! mommy! there's icing everywhere! there's a lot of icing on miss faye's house and a little bit of icing on the other house and even some icing in the grass."

how to blurb a blog.

this is a DIY post. what what?! it's mostly for emma, but i thought maybe there are some other people who might want to do this too.

i've been making our blog into a book since 2010, so this year's will be our fifth book. it's awesome. it is totally the best/easiest way for me to record/keep track of our lives (mostly) and have something pretty and nice to show for it. plus, i think it will be a nice thing for the kids to look back on in years to come since, let's face it, it's mostly about them.

so. here's a brief tutorial on what's worked for me. i use blurb's booksmart application and have loved it so much/been so pleased with the results, i haven't tried anything else.

step one:
go to blurb.com and click on booksmart under the "create" tab.

step two:
download booksmart!

step three:
the booksmart app will launch and you should choose "start a new book". one of the best things about this software is that it auto-saves your project so you don't have to freak out if things are buggy. i will say the software can be kind of slow/buggy, but just give it a minute...it's going to space.

step four:
slurp your blog! i use blogger and just enter my email address and pw for that and click continue.

step five:
choose the blog/blogs you're making into a book. i have a second random blog that i don't publish from or talk about, so i de-selected that one and clicked continue.

step six:
select all your entries. this is awesome the first year (select all! yay!) and less awesome in subsequent years. i choose select none and then manually check all my posts for the year i am documenting. click continue!

step seven:
get coffee or tea while photos are importing. this can take a while, especially for a whole year.

step eight (optional):
if you forget a post or posts, you can highlight them in the left tool bar and click "add to book" and it will add them. make sure you have selected where you want to add them (chronologically or whatever) in the book or it will be a pain to move the posts. this year, i started the 2014 book in june and uploaded the first half of the year then and just added the rest of the year. it may help to batch-add posts (highlight 5-10 at a time, then click add, and so on) if you have lots of posts because it is pretty slow during this part.

if you are uploading everything at once, it just takes a while, but you shouldn't have to use the "add to book" feature - you'll just select your template and go from there. i always use the viewfinder template/theme because it's simple and clean and i like it. but there are some other nice ones too.

tips:
you'll get some warnings/heads up stuff from blurb. they'll tell you your book has 9 million pages and you'll need to pare it down. duh, you haven't even started editing yet. just click ok and move on. cool your jets, blurb.

step nine:
edit! you really will need to go page by page. editing is neither quick nor painless, but it's also not awful. the drop downs under each post have the text and pictures separated so you can move them when you pick the layout you want for the post. i use the text layouts for my pages of wordiness and then throw in cute montages from all the picture layouts usually at the end of the word parts of my posts.

possibly the best thing in booksmart is the edit layout piece. it's helpful to start with a layout that looks close to what you're looking for, then edit from there. you can adjust picture sizes, text boxes, etc. then, you can save your layout and use it again and again by going to "my page layouts". this is especially great for stuff like instagram photos which are square and don't fit into the pre-fab photo templates in the existing layouts.

and that's basically it! i usually do my covers last and i delete extra pages as i go. my 780 page book will likely be pared down to about 120-200 pages. at the end, you select what type of pages you want (matte, glossy, etc). i think i've always done matte on standard paper and been totally pleased with it, though i'm sure the premium paper is a lovely upgrade. 

good luck and let me know if you have any questions!

winter.

it's ultra cold here today. for us. 25 this morning, which for my midwestern and new england friends probably isn't anything crazy. but i don't own a winter coat that fits me, so...it's cold.

emme crawled into our bed around 6 or so and i didn't even feel it because i was super sleepy from being up in the night with hollis. "mommy hold you!" at 3am.

anyway. as we were waking up sloooowly (how hard is it to get back into a weekday routine? super super hard.), she said "mommy, you know where we haven't been in a long long time? the splashy pad! we should go there after school!".

two year stats.

just got back from the doc with my dude. all is good. he's a shrimp, which i knew, and super stubborn, which i also knew.

height: 33 inches - 15%
weight: 28 lbs. - ~25%

apparently he was 3% for height at his last appointment (i must have blocked this out), so he's grown a little, but it's slow going. i asked if it was related to food consumption since he's so obstinate about eating, but she said height is really a genetics thing at this point. plus, dude breast-fed until 22 months, so there's got to be something to be said for that.

anyway. i know the percentiles are just numbers - it's a spectrum and it doesn't even really mean anything. he is slight right now but could totally have a growth spurt and shoot up like 6 inches any day now (emme grew 5 inches in 2 months between age 2 and 2.5). and just because he's little now doesn't mean he'll be little forever. etc. etc. and it's a stupid thing to even worry about, of course, but i default to wondering if i'm doing something wrong even if all evidence points to the contrary.

other than that, he was on a talking barrage in the doc's office. she said it was obvious he was showing off and also said we can skip the 2.5 year check-up since he's already hit all the milestones she would be checking for then. so that is amazing.

she also said we should be feeding him what we're eating and trying to cut back on the carby junk food he gets for snack at school. so i'll be working on that. maybe if i serve him veggies 9,000 times, he will eventually try them again. it's just so weird since he ate them until so recently. oh well.

so thankful for healthy, happy kids. even when they can be ornery, picky little monsters :).

look who turned two.

my sweet baby turned two yesterday. two! people freak out about the first year, but the second is what really gets me. suddenly this little human is talking and laughing and full of opinions and just so not nearly a baby anymore. of course, as i tell his big sis all the time, they will always be my babies (sappy sap sap), but still.

hollis has really turned into quite the little lover. he's very much the capricorn that he is - stubborn, somewhat moody, for sure, but also sensitive, smart, and deliberate. he says hilarious things all the time. when someone gives him something, he says "thank you! i welcome!". he uses anything pointy as a sword and says HI-YA! with gusto. when we're putting him to bed at night, he asks for a hug and a kiss, then "'nother hug! 'nother kiss!" several times before he says "i luh (love) you tooooo". my dude.

he adores his sister above anything and everyone else. the rest of his family isn't far behind, but he is all about emme. yesterday morning, he slept until after 9 (the kids went to bed waaaay too late for most of the break), and i went in there to check on him. he's been sleeping in ek's room and he was on his crib mattress on the floor. when he saw me, he waved and said "hi mommy! happy new year!" and then immediately sat up and looked at emme's bed and said "good morning emme!". she wasn't in there but she came stampeding in the room moments later and they gave each other a huge hug. i love their relationship and i hope they can maintain their closeness for the rest of their lives. 

 he also loves trucks and trains and anything that can facilitate locomotion. if there is a way to make a vehicle make noise, he will find it and employ it.

it's hard to say this without knocking on wood, but hollis is turning into one of the easiest toddlers i've ever met. sure, he is intense when you ask him to do something he doesn't want to do (wear socks, go inside, etc.), but really...his independence and ability to self-entertain are miraculous in my world. he will disappear for super long stretches of time and we'll find him reading or playing by himself, perfectly content.

food is a bit of a battle, but we are working on it. his stubborn streak serves him very well in this department - on christmas eve, we were baking cookies for santa. i told him he could have a cookie if he ate a single bite of broccoli. and we're not talking a big bite...this was a dime-sized bite. i just wanted him to try something he used to love and bribery seemed the way to go. well, he was having none of it. so, any advice on getting an extremely headstrong toddler to eat a veggie or some sort of meat would be greatly appreciated...

seriously, we relish this kid. he is a magical and delicious part of our family and we are so lucky to have him.