Friday, August 30, 2013

My extremely sophisticated homemade toys - part 2

Part one of my "sophisticated" toys is my most-visited post. You can check it out here. Also check out part three here.

Ever since I discovered Pinterest, I've been saving (and insisting that Dan save) every single bottle, box, toilet paper roll, container and jar that comes into our home, because I'm sure that I will need them all for a project at some point. If you come to my house and a few of the rooms are filled with garbage, don't judge. All of the toys in both this post and my first toy post are made from things that you probably already have lying around your house, assuming that you're a garbage hoarder like I am. Keep reading for some easy DIY toys for your baby or toddler.

Straws in a puffs container
Lucas loves puffs, and when I asked Dan not to throw out the puffs containers, he laughed and asked if it was because of Pinterest. I actually didn't have a project in mind yet, but once again, Pinterest did not disappoint. The original idea I saw used a Pringles can, but I already had the puffs container on hand (and we never buy Pringles.) This toy can be completed in about two minutes. For me, it took at least half an hour, but that's because I couldn't find our hole punch and spent 28 minutes hunting for it.

Here's what you'll need:
Hole punch, straws, puff container. (Also, I used scissors. But you probably know what those look like.)

This is what my hand looks like.
Using the hole punch, punch holes in the lid of the container and put the lid back on. Seriously, that's it. That's the only step. You'll kind of have to shove the the lid into the hole punch since the edge of the lid is thicker than the hole punch, but it's easy to do, I promise. I also cut the straws a little shorter so they'd fit into the jar without poking out the top of the lid. The straws I got from Ikea are nice because they're a little thinner than most other straws and easier to fit into your hole-punched holes. You could also use pipe cleaners. Or you could maybe grab a handful of straws from McDonalds, because hey, free straws!

I just gave Lucas this toy for the first time at 15 months, and he became good at it very quickly. The point is just for him to put the straws through the holes and into the container. The container is really light, and I was having to hold it to keep it from falling over while he put the straws in, so before he figured out how to hold it so it didn't fall over, I wedged the bottom of it into a silverware holder to keep it from falling over while he played with it. He also loves just playing with the straws. Obviously.


Flashcards
Ok, so this isn't really a toy, per se, but Lucas loves them. I don't remember exactly how old he was when I made them, but he was less than a year old, and I was amazed (in a way that might only be possible for first-time moms who don't know how quickly babies learn things) at how quickly he was able to point to the right card when I asked him to identify something. I have a bunch of videos of him pointing to various cards while I freak out in the background. I was going to post one here, but I couldn't get it to work, and I already used up my patience quota for the day. So just imagine me squealing way too enthusiastically while Lucas points at a picture of a cat.

I used our own photographs and pictures cut from magazines or printed from the computer for the cards, and I glued them onto card stock and then had them laminated. The card stock that is in the scrapbooking section of a craft store and is cut to be the right size to mount 4x6 photos is perfect. You can see some of the flashcards on the floor in the picture at the top of this blog.

A container and pom poms
This is another embarrassingly simple "toy." it's just the container that his oatmeal comes in and some large pom poms (from the craft store.) That's it. You don't even have to make anything, which is nice if you're not good at making things. Lucas loves to put the pom poms in the top and then dump them back out. Let's all make a pact that when our children grow up, we won't tell them that they primarily played with garbage when they were babies, ok??

I swear my child wears real clothes sometimes. But he looks pretty dang cute in pajamas.



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And don't forget to check out part one here and part three here.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Photo Op

You know those moms who always share these gorgeous, perfect, look-like-they-belong-in-a-magazine candid photos of themselves spending time with their children?


Apparently I'm not one of those moms.


(I laughed at this picture for at least ten minutes.)

Monday, August 26, 2013

The one in which I am not a Japanese television sensation

Almost two years ago, I posted a video on YouTube of me telling my parents and my brother that I was pregnant. As of today, it has over 300,000 views, which sounds impressive unless you've ever spent four hours on YouTube because you were looking for a specific video of a comedian you liked but then somehow spent the next three hours and forty-five minutes watching a few dozen first dance videos from the weddings of people you don't know. People kill a lot of time watching random videos on YouTube.

In order to post the video, I had to create a gmail account. Then a few months ago, I forgot the password (and email address - which turned out to be just my first and last name, making me feel extra stupid for having forgotten it), so later I created yet another gmail account to create this blog and pretended I had never created the other one. So when I wanted to see my own video, I had to search for it using the search feature like everybody else because I couldn't log in to my account. Well I searched for it today, and discovered that somebody else had copied my YouTube video and then reposted it as their own... which is weird and vaguely disconcerting, although I can't really say why. I wanted to contact them to ask them to remove it and also report it to YouTube, but that involved actually being able to log into the account. (Insert long, boring story of how I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to log into an account for which I remembered neither the email address nor the password.)

Anyway, the point of this story (and I swear it has one) is that when I finally figured out how to log in, I realized that I had unread messages in the account. And one of them was asking if they could put my video on a Japanese television show called "Tokudane Toukou Doga." No joke. (I mean, I'm not joking, I have no idea if they were.) According to the email, they wanted to interview me on Skype. I wouldn't be paid, but they would send me a copy of the program (which would include the video that I already own and can watch anytime I want anyway. So, yay?)

I googled the show, and apparently it's real, as evidenced by a lot of people blogging about having their video featured on it. But the email was from May 2012, so there goes my big chance for super-stardom. (And by super-stardom, I obviously mean "having my video on a Japanese television show that may or may not actually be watched by anyone.") I can't promise that I won't let my status as an only-one-year-and-a missed-email-away-from-being-a-minor-celebrity-in-Japan go to my head, but I can promise that I will try.


To be fair, I should probably note that 99% of the comments on the video were girls saying that my brother is hot. So technically, he was the one who was almost a minor celebrity. Way to steal the 
almost-spotlight.

Edited: Ok, since some of my friends asked, here's the video. If you want to see it on YouTube, the link is here. If you want to see a smaller, blurrier version, the person who re-uploaded it still hasn't removed it, so that's nice.




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Sunday, August 25, 2013

I know this is annoying, but...

Could you please, please, pretty please click this:

If you like what you just read please click to send a quick vote for me on Top Mommy Blogs- The best mommy blog directory featuring top mom bloggers

It's a blog ranking website, and I can only assume that if I get ranked highly, I will get cash and a(nother) tiara. Right? RIGHT??

I promise that if I ever become famous, I'll thank you publicly. Pinky swear.

And since I know you were all wondering how often you could click it and help me on my journey to super-stardom, the answer is - you can click it once per day from each computer and/or mobile device. Come on, it's not like there's anything else you'd rather be doing, right?

Saturday, August 24, 2013

The one in which I am bad at emergencies but great at smelling.

A "fun" fact about me is that I'm fairly awful under pressure. If you ever have an emergency, I will be happy to sympathize with you after the fact, but you really, really shouldn't call me for help during the emergency unless you're prepared to give me very detailed step-by-step instructions on what to do. I don't even freak out, necessarily; I just become completely immobile because I literally have no idea what I should do. It's like my brain sees an emergency and decides to take a time-out until the emergency is over. Fortunately, I am married to someone who has chosen "being good at emergencies" as a career THREE times. He worked as an EMT while attending police academy, then he worked as a police officer while attending medical school, and now he works as an emergency physician. So he is professionally good at emergencies, and I am a disaster at them. I have often maintained that Dan is proof that God takes care of me. I know of only one police officer/ER doctor in the world, and I'm married to him.

Anyway, this morning when I woke up, I came out into our living room and smelled a very, very faint smell of natural gas. (Dan hadn't smelled anything when he left for work, but he always tells me I have the nose of a bloodhound, so it's not unusual for me to smell something that he can't.) Since I just told you how bad I am at dealing with emergencies, I will now give you a multiple choice quiz to test your reading comprehension skills.

Question: When I smelled gas in my house this morning, what did I do?
     
     A - Called the gas company.
     B - Called 911.
     C - Ran around screaming.
     D - Stood there sniffing for a while, made a cup of coffee, opened a window, drank a few sips of coffee, sent text messages to various people that said "I just woke up, and I think our house kind of smells like natural gas! What should I do?" And then when my professionally good-at-emergencies husband responded with, "Call the gas company and get out of the house," I promptly forgot the name of our gas company and then was unable to figure out how I could find their phone number, so he had to text it to me. And then I put on eyeliner before I called them. 

Um. The answer is D. D, people! I put on eyeliner before I called the gas company.

The fact that I'm writing this is obviously an indication that I'm not dead, so that's good. The gas company sent someone out, and she walked around with some sort of meter that checked for gas in our house, and she found nothing. And then she went outside and checked our line and our meter, and still found nothing. So of course I felt like an idiot. But at least I was wearing eyeliner.

She left, and I took Lucas upstairs and put him in the pack and play so that I could take a shower now that I had been assured that we weren't going to die, and I sent follow-up texts to the people I had texted initially (and by the way, out of the three people I texted, all three knew to call the gas company before putting on eyeliner...) letting them know that I was just crazy and there was no gas. And then I heard a knocking at the door and then someone open the door and yell, "Hello? Hello?"

It turns out that the gas company sprays something on your gas meter to check for leaks, and at first she hadn't seen anything, but then when she went to rinse it off before she left, there were tons of bubbles all over it, which meant there was a leak in our gas meter. Outside. Far away from where I had smelled the gas. And all of the windows were closed. At least three times, she said "There is no way you could've smelled that from inside." Except that I did. And when I texted Dan to tell him, he responded with "Ha!!! That's because you are a bloodhound."

It was a simple fix, and we weren't ever actually in danger, which is nice, but this is probably an indication that Dan should conduct mandatory disaster drills in our home on a weekly basis so that I don't drown because a water pipe bursts and I spend hours sitting under it while wondering what I should do.

In the meantime, if you can think of a good name for a super hero whose super power is an incredible sense of smell but whose main weakness is an inability to do anything when there's an emergency, please let me know.



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Thursday, August 8, 2013

I'm a failure at sippy cups.

You wouldn't even think that was a thing, but it is. And if anyone could be it, it's me.

Lucas never really took a bottle (I think the most he ever drank from one was half an ounce), so when it was time to introduce him to drinking water, I just skipped over bottles and went straight to sippy cups - the ones with the soft spout. So when our pediatrician said that you were supposed to wean babies off of bottles at age one because of something to do with the way a baby's teeth develop, I zoned out and thought about something more relevant to me - like chocolate - because Lucas never took a bottle anyway. And then a few weeks ago, a friend of mine noticed that I was still giving Lucas a sippy cup with a soft spout, and said that those are a no-no after age one, too. Drat!

The only non-soft sippy cups we had were some that are "designed" so that you can either keep reusing them or just throw them away, which translates to, "nobody really wants to use these cups more than once anyway, because the lids come off super easily and the cup will flood your kitchen floor if your kid so much as taps it, so you might as well just throw them out right after you buy them."

So we went to the store and spent much longer than could possibly be considered normal trying to pick out new sippy cups. And of course by that I mean that I stared at the sippy cups for a really long time while Dan did something else that didn't involve staring at cups, and then finally I asked him to pick between two different kinds, and he picked one, and then I was pretty sure he picked the wrong one.

We brought home two different kinds, both of which claimed to be non-spill. (To be fair, one didn't actually say it was non-spill, but it had a picture of a drop of water on it with a red circle and a line through it, which either means "non-spill" or "don't put any liquids in this cup." In retrospect, it probably meant the second thing.)  One cup had no spout or straw, but was "revolutionary" and "orthodontist recommended" because it was "lip-activated." The idea is that it looks like a regular cup with a lid on top, and then when your child puts his mouth over the rim of the cup, the top presses down and water comes out. Lucas did not figure out how to drink out of it, but it took him all of four seconds to figure out how to turn it upside down and press on the lid so that the water poured onto the floor.

The other kind of cup seemed like a pretty standard sippy cup, so I gave it to him for dinner and then again at bedtime. Sometimes he likes to take his sippy cup to bed with him (he only drinks water from his cup, so there's not a concern about his teeth rotting out of his head if he falls asleep with a cup in his mouth), so when I put him to bed, I let him keep his cup. Since I'm blogging about it, you've probably figured out that this was a bad idea.

Half an hour after I put Lucas to bed, he started crying loudly and calling for me. I went in and picked him up, and... he was drenched. Like, "just fell into the bathtub fully clothed" drenched. As was his bed. So apparently the whole "non-spill" thing was just a cruel hoax played on unsuspecting moms just for laughs. Any mom of a toddler (or former toddler) can tell you that there's no such thing as getting your child out of bed, changing his pajamas and diaper, changing his sheets, and then putting him back to bed and having him actually sleep. He ended up falling asleep a full hour and 45 minutes after his bedtime.

So I'm still in the market for new sippy cups for Lucas. In the meantime, hopefully I'm not screwing his teeth up. Although there's a good chance he'll inherit my teeth that required surgery and three years of braces before they looked semi-presentable, so he might be out of luck anyway.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

A letter to my son, at 17 and a half months.

I wrote this the other day and then didn't get around to posting it because Lucas woke up from his nap a very angry elf. I haven't really edited it, so, you know... grace, please.


8/4/2013

Dear Lucas,

We’ve had our fair share of tears, you and I, and I know there are more to come. I’ve had some moments in the middle of the night that I wouldn’t relive, even if someone paid me. I know it sounds better to say that I’ve loved every minute of motherhood, but the truth is that there have been moments where motherhood didn’t feel so great. Temper tantrums and sleepless nights and cranky days that I’m glad are over.

I wouldn’t rewind time, but there are plenty of moments that I’d love to pause it for an hour or so. Today you have a slight fever: not a legitimate fever that “counts” as far as the thermometer is concerned (99.6), but a fever that your mommy can feel when she touches your forehead and warm tummy. Even your daddy, the ER doctor, pointed out that studies have shown that mommies are almost always right about their children having a fever based on the warmth of their skin alone, and he’s more inclined to believe me than the thermometer. You seem healthy otherwise, besides being slightly more emotional than normal and a bit tired. I put you down for your nap half an hour early because you were too tired to wait any longer – so tired that we skipped the bedtime stories and went straight to rocking in our chair in the darkened room while I sang “Jesus Loves Me.” Your head was on my shoulder, and after tossing and turning, you found a comfortable spot – head on my shoulder against my neck, belly pressed against my chest, legs straddling my waist, arms spread wide, sippy cup still clutched in your hand. I thought you had fallen asleep, but when I finished the third verse and rocked you to the soft whir of the air purifier, your little voice asked “gi?” – your version of “again?” And I sang all three verses again slowly, while your breathing slowed and then turned to soft snores. I rocked you longer than I knew was necessary, and I briefly considered rocking you for your whole nap, but you sleep longer if you’re in your crib, and you need the rest. But as I rocked you, I thought that I would like to just pause the moment for a little longer so that I could savor the feeling of your twenty-four pounds relaxed against me while you slept.

Last night after a full and busy day with some friends, I took you out of the car, dressed in orange striped pajamas, and you asked for your daddy, whom you hadn’t seen all day because of a 12-hour shift at the hospital. He came to hug you, and then I said I would put you to bed, and you pushed against me with one arm while reaching for your daddy with the other and said “no!” So your daddy put you to bed instead, and my heart almost burst at how much I love you both and how much you love each other. I would’ve paused that moment, too. You wanting your daddy, and me watching the two of you walk toward the house with your head on his shoulder.

Although I don’t want to do them over again, I can even look back at the sleepless nights with something approaching fondness. There were a few times that I was so desperate to get every second of sleep I could that after the fourth or fifth or tenth time I got up to nurse you, instead of walking back to the bedroom I share with your daddy, I curled up on the floor of your room on a pile of blankets. I was miserable at the time, but looking back, I can’t help but smile at the exhausted mommy sleeping on the floor. At least once, when you were eight months old and teething, you slept on the floor with me, on top of a blanket and my arm, which had lost all feeling from your weight on top of it, but which didn’t seem worth the risk of waking you in order for it to have sensation below the elbow.

So this letter is me pausing time for just a minute so I can cherish all of your toddler sweetness. You Skype-ing with Aunt Ginny and cousin Jacob today and crying because Jacob (or “Juba,” as you called him) left the screen so you couldn’t see him anymore. You laughing a deep, can’t-breathe belly laugh at some of the things that you currently find hilarious – kisses and tickles and peekaboo and being chased and our little joke that we say at least ten times a day: me saying, “Lucas, I’m going to love you even when you’re big and stinky,” and you responding with an enthusiastic “Pee-YEW!” You kissing books and toys and my feet with a loud “mmmm-MA!”

Keep growing and changing, my baby love. But maybe slow down just a little, please. 

I love you with all my heart and then some.

Love,

Mommy