crawling for Christmas

Its official! Mark is crawling!! I actually lost him yesterday in the living room! I left the room for a minute and when I came back he had crawled into the corner! His favorite place to go is right next to the toy box and the entertainment center! He also frequently ends up near the rock fire place scraping his head on the rocks as he tires to turn over! I now spend a good part of my day rescuing Mark from the precarious places he has slithered to! I am really excited to see him progressing. I have to remind myself that he started life 2 months ahead of schedule and that puts him two months behind the game! He is doing so great! Today, Mark was practicing his escape skills. He was sitting, strapped in, in a bouncer seat. I left the room, once again, and when I returned, Mark was out of the bouncer, it was turned upside down, and he had crawled back on it and was pulling at the bar that is usually the base! I guess he flipped the whole thing over and crawled out! I was surprised that I did not hear any crying in the process! That boy's gonna be trouble!! But isn't he cute?

oh! Christmas tree!

We have had quite a time getting our tree up this year! We started on Tuesday night. We had our holiday music blaring, we had our video camera and still camera ready, we had even put on picture worthy clothing! It's Mark's first tree experience and Mitchell is big enough to start understanding the traditions of Christmas decorating. So here we go! Neil and Mitchell start opening the boxes and sorting the limbs by their colored tags(we have that really nice kind of tree that you get to assemble each year) and I am taking pictures! We got the tree put together and the lights strung on it. Then we had to call it a night because of a tired and fussy Marky, a curious and not really helpful Mitchell, and two fruatrated parents!

Wednesday morning, Mitchell and I tried to decorate the tree and about 20 ornaments into the process the tree fell over! I was able to get the tree back to a standing, but unstable position, and luckily none of the ornaments were broken! Here was the scene: me on my stomach under the tree trying to fix the tree stand, Mitchell standing near my legs asking, "Mommy what you doing?" "WHAT YOU DOING?!!", me saying "Mitchell move away, move away from my legs! Please don't be near the tree! Just stop talking for a minute!" We tried to finish decorating the wobbly tree, but the smallest ornaments were setting it off balance so we just quit!

Wednesday night at about 10:30 after we had all gone to bed, I go downstairs to get something and I find our Christmas tree lying in the middle of the floor of our dark living room with the lights on! You see the plug that the lights are in is loose so I has wiggled it earlier to turn them on but it had wiggled out and turned off and I had just forgotten about it. When the tree fell it pulled the plug into the magical position to make the lights come on! I woke up Neil to see the spectacle! We re-balanced the tree and picked up the ornaments, still none broken! At this point we were about to call it quits on having a tree this year and just wanted to put it back in the box!


Thurday, I buy a new tree stand and Neil puts the tree into it that evening.

Friday, I finally get to finish the tree, but by now there is no joy left in the process! I am just randomly picking ornaments, not even trying to reminise about the sentimental ones. Mitchell is trying to help me but is making more of a mess than being helpful. Finally it is done and we pack up all the extra stuff and clean up the living room! I am not too excited about the tree, but a least we have one, right? I half-heartedly trun on the lights to see if that helps it look any more complete and, surprise of all surprises, it actually looks nice with the lights on! So I like the tree, I really like the super heavy duty new tree stand, and we have a pretty funny story for this year! For a while I felt like the Kranks in Skipping Christmas (or for those of you who saw the movie Christmas with the Kranks)!

Neil even put some Christmas lights around our house! We inherited the lights from Neil's parents, so Neil has had lots of practice with them! Thanks Dave and Eileen! The really neat thing about the lights is that all of them stay lit constantly except for just a few bulbs near the top of the tree that blink!

8 months old

I can hardly believe Mark turned 8 months old last Sunday. It seems so old! He is rolling all over the floor (and off a few beds). He is almost crawling! He gets his knees up under him and rocks a little and then takes a nose dive or does a belly flop! He is experimenting with his voice; we get to hear all sorts of squeals and grunts and yells, even da, ga, tttas, eeda, and heea. He loves to eat handfulls of hair, mine, Neil's, whatever he can find on the floor! He went to the Dr. last week for a cough that two rounds of antibiotics didn't stop. After a chest x-ray and and an oxygen reading and a breathing treatment, we came home with three new prescriptions to clear up his cough and wheezing and ear infections! One of the medicines is a steroid and he is crazy!! Eating every 2 hours through the night. He has been sleeping through the night for the last 5 months so this is a shock to the system! He is also taking an inhaler that caused him have a few shaking episodes for a few seconds yesterday while he nursing. That was kind of scary. Tonight and last night he has cried for about 1 1/2 hours straight. We are so sad that his medicine is making him so miserable! We only have a few days left of the medicine and then I hope we can get our sweet Marky back. The one who hardly cries and loves to laugh and shriek at his brother!

Isaac saw it first

It would not be fair if we did not share this picture of Meredith and Jeremy and Isaac who actually went to see the Chicken Little before we did! Isaac is Ben and Melissa's other favorite nephew! From the story I heard Isaac did better during the movie than Mitchell. I heard he sat in his own seat the whole time eating popcorn and watching in awe! Mitchell sat in a variety of seats, mostly mine and Mom Mom's, and even had to take a trip to the bathroom even though he was wearing a diaper! Well, it is just not fair to compare sometimes! Isaac is 6 months younger than Mitchell. Isn't it cute that they both have glasses! What an odd coincidence!