Spring Break Still

Oh, lazy, lovely spring break. We did a whole lot of nothing today, and I have the pictures to prove it:

Harry and Jack are, as you might imagine, excellent cleaners.

Harry jumped off the jungle gym a million times, and I took a million picures




I like Jack's eyes in this picture

Tomorrow, we have a trip to the gym and Whole Foods on our agenda. Busy, busy day.

Spring Break!

This Sunday, I did the unthinkable. I let the house be a huge mess so that we could go shopping.

Seriously, a mess:




Thank goodness I am home all week to clean because in a couple more days, we could be on Hoarders.

In other news, it is suddenly safe to leave the house without a layer of down and some knee-length Uggs. Finally, we can go outside and play and play and play.




Today while Jack was busy at school, Harry and I went to the park, the zoo, and a coffee shop, just the 2 of us. He's a sensationally chatty companion. He also made me pretend to be Batgirl for 2 hours on the playground.


Jack insists on eating most of his meals outside.

Harry's cool with it.


You know, I didn't know that we really had a Buzz problem this serious until I took this picture. (They were all assembled because Harry was using a TinkerToy pointer to teach Space School)


Jack is really into taking care of his baby, whose name is Bubbles, but whom he calls babeh. Or, my babeh. Or, where my babeh. Or, no Ha-he, my babeh. Or, oh no babeh, ow (after he flings her somewhere or bangs her on something).

He really likes to feed her. At dinner last night, he poured milk in her ears, and today during snack he made a paste of Bunny crumbs and spit and lovingly filled her eyes.

Yes, she sleeps in a Duplo box, but that's because we didn't know she needed a bed until last night when Jack wouldn't go to bed without tucking in his babeh.

It's spring break, so we'll be living dangerously all week.

Bunny Salad

I have been SO INTO SALAD lately. We eat it at least 4 times a week (2 lunches and 2 dinners.) In fact, most of my SAH days include the scared MAKE the SALAD ritual. Which, you lucky, lucky readers, is what I am going to share with you now.

1. Take 3.5 year old to school. While he is a help in the kitchen, his favorite thing to to lately is make his almost-2-year-old nemesis (brother) squeal like a little pig.
2. Worship your Trader Joe's spices and marinade (seriously, this soyaki sauce is to die for)

3. Use the sacred spices and marinade on some organic free-range chicken (which? I'm not totally digging yet. Not only does it cost way more than plump little hormone-filled, factory-farmed chicken , but it tastes a little, um, rangier, too.)

4. Cook your chicken (covered) at this temp for an hour and 20 minutes-ish (I had 2 pounds of chicken-- if you have less, don't cook it as long)

5. Scour your fridge for veggies. I had lettuce, pea pods, peppers, onions, celery, and one lone tomato

6. Find a stray baby to clean your dishes

7. Throw your pea pods in a pot of boiling water for like a minute then throw them in a pot of cold water. Drain. Toss them into your salad bowl.

8. Chop and add your veggies

9. DIdn't take a picture of my lonely tomato, but it did add a nice splash of color.

10. Throw lettuce on top. You can toss the salad later. Hahaha. Toss the salad.


Clearly salad didn't take my whole day, so I was suuuuuuuuper bored by the time Jack woke up from nap. What do I do when I am bored? I shop. Harry and Jack got some Cons like Ben's.

We didn't know that the EASTER BUNNY would be at the mall! That was just an added bonus! Jack freaked the hell out and didn't get his picture taken, but Harry sat there talking to the bunny for a solid 10 minutes and when we left, he was all, "I didn't tell him everything I wanted." Then he asked me how the Easter Bunny makes it to everyone's house and how he makes toys since bunnies have no hands. I said that I was Jewish and he would have to save these somber theological questions for his father.

I think they were looking wistfully at the mall playground. Jack said "play?" and Harry answered sadly, "No. We don' t want swine flu."

Irony, thy name is projectile dinner vomit

I totally rolled my eyes at Jack's speech-language pathologist today when she suggested we put tiny pieces of bubble gum in the back corners of Jack's mouth to encourage him to chew things up. I mean COME ON. Like I am going to give my not-quite 2 year-old gum. Does she get a kick back from a dentist to give that advice?

Then Jack took too big a bite out of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup after dinner and projectile vomited all over the dinner table, and we started thinking about helping him chew.

But no gum. Or gummy worms or Twizzlers or fruit snacks which were her other 3 suggestions. Seriously, she gave some terrible nutritional advice. Like frying all his vegetables. Or encouraging him to dip all his food in ranch dressing. WTF?

The thing is, Jack has to have huge pieces of food (like a whole apple) or teeny little pieces (chopped apple). Medium pieces (apple slices) are hazardous to his health because he shoves them all in at once and sometimes doesn't even chew. He's almost died on orange slices a couple of times (you'd think once would be all it took for us to start cutting up his oranges. And yet.)

The SLP thinks that this might be due to oral motor difficulty-- the same difficulty that delayed his speech (I say delayed in the past tense because he has 75 words now and normal for his age is 50 words, so he's not delayed per se. Still, he has pronunciation problems), so she comes to see us every month to 6 weeks. Today, she wanted to talk about feeding issues, which was annoying because I am determined to make food NOT an issue in our house. We don't make the kids eat anything ever. Our job is to offer healthy choices; their job is to decide what and how much they want to eat. Period. She thinks we need to get Jack to try different textures of food-- and I get that, I do-- but I am not going to ever go down the road of bite negotiation ("just take 5 bites..."). That's just not how we do things, and I don't think she understood my nutrition philosophy.

Jack was playing with this giant red ball with a handle that he loves to hop on but can never go near when Harry's around, and he periodicaly put the handle in his mouth and chewed on it, which I didn't think anything of. She started talking to me about how when I saw him with something non-foodlike in his mouth, I should redirect his oral sensory skills toward food or drink to encourage him to experiment with edible textures. I think this is just crap advice. If he is hungry or thirsty, he'll tell me. With words. So I just sort of smiled and nodded. A couple of minutes later, he chewed on the ball handle again, and she paused and looked at me. I smiled. She stared at me again. I kept smiling. Then she said, "Okay, so this is one of those moments I am talking about where you need to offer him food or drink, something positive for his mouth." As nicely as I could, I explained that he just ate a snack and had some milk and I thought he was okay to chew on the ball. She repeated the "positive in his mouth" bit, and I tried to explain that I don't think that's a healthy habit to teach-- that the only positive things for our mouths are edible. But my 3.5 year old LOVES to chew on the straps of his back pack and frequently walks into school carrying his back pack in his teeth. So maybe I'm weird.

Such the helper

I meant to take a picture of Jack with my vacuum, but he ran away before the camera flashed. I actually really love with picture because this is just how he runs, and he runs wherever he goes.

I am such a style blog fraud

I wore a pair of faded Old Navy Yoga pants, an Obama T-shirt, and a green Northface hoodie to preschool drop off today. As hideous as this ensemble sounds, I grabbed a quick workout before drop off, so my exercise clothes were legit. (Still awful looking, though, especially because they were accompanied by curly bangs-- the horror-- and two frizzy pigtails. And I saw Valerie, who of course looked adorable in a cute little dress and boots). But then Jack and I went home and met with his speech pathologist and then instead of showering, I made dinner and prepped lunch. Then I found myself back at preschool for pick up in the same damn outfit. (am still wearing it, actually) (may still be wearing it when my husband gets home) (shut up. It's not like I have thrown in the fashion towel, but the kids don't care, and I have an evening of paper grading to look forward to).

Harry is studying restaurants at school, so when I picked him up yesterday, I offered him a lunch date anyplace he wanted to go. He chose Potbelly (god love him), so we went happily to the mall food court.

Where Harry ordered his own sandwich and shake

He really, really wanted to sit at the super tall tables, but once he was settled in his chair, he got a bit of vertigo

And we moved to a shorty table, but he remained wary and kept checking how far away the ground was in case he fell

As you can imagine, he was an excellent conversationalist throughout the meal.


Wish me luck-- I'm going to try to shower before Jack's done napping, so the TV babysitter doesn't have to try to pacify BOTH kids.

Ahhhh, weddings.

I love weddings. The pretty dresses, the flowers, the happy people. This wedding was particularly lovable because my parents kept my children 150 miles from me and my husband. Ahhhhh. Our first overnight without the kids since November, and it was lovely. Of course we took a ton of pictures. I put some of us in the reception photo booth up atHarryTimes 365, and I am going to do an All Kinds of Pretty post later because Ben has such a unique suit-buying style.

But for this blog, I took pictures of all the things I love about weddings.

Love the pre-cocktail hour cocktail hour-- it's an essential wedding do.

Love having the opportunity to take family pics. Here's Ben's dad and his brothers. This picture makes me want to have 2 more boys. And if I did, in 50 years, they would all look JUST LIKE THIS.

Love doing silly stuff at the reception. Here are Ben's parents getting ready to step into the super fun photo booth. Good thing Dennis brought his chicken hat, huh?

Cousins!

Awww, the mother-son dance-- love it!

Hi, Julie! I bet you're reading this!

Something else I love about weddings? Wedding booze. Always a teeny bit lighter than regular booze-- a lot like resort booze, actually. You can drink it all night and not black out. Also, you feel like a total rock start because you have been drinking since 6, and you're still going strong. At my own wedding, I drank 15 vodka tonics. In any other circumstance, I'd be dead, but at my wedding? I was just happily drunk enough to scarf half a pizza in the bridal suite before falling asleep with my hoopskirts on. Wait. Maybe that's just a roundabout way of saying blacking out. Which means this whole treatise on wedding booze was bullshit.
But still. I loved this Absolut and tonic.

Shortly after we took this picture, we sneaked upstairs to our hotel room. No. It was so not like that. We passed out at 10 pm and slept until 8. Heaven.

Really, since my milk goes out of date tomorrow, it would have been wasteful to NOT dunk a bunch of Joe Joes

Alternate Title: Totally Random

Harry insisted on green everything yesterday. Green milk. Green eggs. Green ice cream. Green bath water. He also insisted on being outside from the minute he got out of school until bath time, which was more than okay with me. I exhausted my supply of inside activities in, oh, NOVEMBER, so 2 trips to the playground and an extended zoo visit and some yard time were just what the doctor ordered for all of us (and by the doctor, I mean me).

Two minutes after we took this picture, the stroller burst into snot and screams because we stayed at the zoo through naptime. Oops.

Around here, the return of ice cream season is a really big deal. We take it very seriously




Shut up. Wy wouldn't I have a style blog?