Two more Cadyisms

Snipper- n long vertical velcro closure

Raper Papper- n the paper that holds a cupcake AKA cupcake wrapper

Christmas and more

Oh the joys of Christmas. Last year was fun but it's nothing compared to this year. As I type this (in between making two cheeseballs, deviled eggs and a pineapple upside down cake) Cady is about ready to burst from the excitement that 1) Santa is coming tonight 2) She gets to go to Emmas later for a visit 3) She gets to open a present tonight 4) She gets to open lots of presents tomorrow. Right now, she is "orzan-gizing" the gifts under the tree for the umpteenth time. Much like her father she can spend mass amounts of time doing this. The gifts need to be in the right place and all of the little tears in the paper need taping. She announced to me about an hour ago, "I have a lot of work to do today mom" and she has been at it ever since.
Speaking of "Orzan-gizing" I have missed way too many opportunities to write down the cute expressions and word substitutions that come out of Cady's mouth. Considering I remember mostly NOTHING these days I'm not sure what made me think I'd be able to recall them at a later date. One night Cady was putting together a puzzle all by herself. The puzzle was of a little girl. Once Cady got the girl's hair together she yelled, "Look mom! I did a hair pile!" Now, anytime she says something cute, Rob and I have the code word "hair pile". This morning she told Rob she knows how to crack an egg. Rob asked her how and she responded, "Well first you get the egg and you go head-to-head..." The dot dot dot is because I have no idea what she said after that as I got stuck on the head-to-head part.

Meeting Santa was a joy this year. Santa is a very soft-spoken man and this was great for Cady who was a little reluctant to visit. Within minutes she was eating out of his hands. I say minutes because he spent a lot of time with her. He showed her his giant golden key that unlocks all of the doors of kids who do not have chimneys. He pulled out a small velvet bag that had a bell inside. Cady was able to ring the bell. He was absolutely magical. Coben, on the other hand, was not a fan. He was fine sitting on Santa's knee. And then there was a long moment of both Santa and Coben getting a good look at each other. The next thing that happened was Coben's little bottom lip came out, his eyebrows scrunched and then the tears came. He's had a little stranger anxiety lately as it is, but I'm sure it was compounded by the large white beard and hat.

So, we try not to use the empty threat of "Santa is watching and if you are naughty..." because 1)it's not a threat we are willing to follow through with 2)I can't tell you how bored of hearing it I was growing up 3) Santa is unconditional love. BUT I found that in desperate times it packs quite a punch. We had a little resistant hair-washing this morning and a big attitude to go along with it. All I had to say was, "Huh, if Santa sees everything then he can see this. I wonder what he would think" and the fight was over. hehe. I think used sparingly it's quite nice. :)

I LOVE watching Coben and Cady play together now. They sit on the floor together and play with toys. The love between them is beautiful. And Cady is our hypervigilant third set of eyes. She is so watchful of everything Coben is doing. She protects him and makes sure he isn't getting into anything that he shouldn't be. And there seems to be a lot of that lately as Cady's favorite toys seem to be non-toys. Little trinkets in boxes. Rocks and buttons and any small thing she can get her hands on. Moving infant and small trinket phase...fun combo let me tell you.
That's about it on the home front. I have Christmas goodies to make and I have a student's mom running some tamales by in a bit (lucky me!) so I should get dressed. Merry Christmas everyone.

Another one for the archives

I should know better than to use certain words. But I spent 18 years growing up in a dog grooming shop and around breeders and dog show people. And then the following ten were spent working in veterinary hospitals. The word "hump" was part of my everyday life so I didn't think twice before using it around Cady. Wall-E loves to hump Cady. It's part of his large personality and there is a constant battle for dominance between him and Cady. So anytime Cady is on the ground, Wall-E runs over and tries to hump her back. We tell Cady constantly, "Do NOT let Wall-E hump you! Get up off of the ground and be bigger than him!" It's getting better but can still be a problem.
One morning a couple of weeks ago, Rob walks up behind Cady and puts his arms around her and gives her a giant bear-hug from behind. What does Cady say?

"Daddy, stop humping me!"

Ay-yi-yi

The last month...

I know, it's been a long time. I can't believe how exhausted I've been. My normal bedtime of 11:00 has been altered. Lately, well, almost every night, I fall asleep around 8:00 on the couch watching tv. I usually get about three, "P, should we turn off the show and watch it laters" from Rob to which I always respond, "No, I want to watch it." After the third time Rob turns off the tv and lets me sleep. He wakes me up to go to bed after a couple of hours. I think this is my body trying to front-load two consecutive hours in order to make it through the night. Coben still wakes up a lot. Having him share a room with Cady is hard because we can't just let him cry for a bit to see if he can turn the corner on his own. Nope. We have to get up and do what we can to keep him quiet. We've learned the hard way. Once Cady has been awoken, the kids just take turns keeping each other (and us) up the rest of the night. So, Coben sleeps until about 2 or 3 and then he's up every hour after that and sometimes he's just up for the day at 4:30. It's so funny to think of the days when Rob and I would sleep in until 9 on the weekends. It makes me wonder if our bodies would even know how to do that anymore given the chance. I'd have to say the worst affect of sleep deprivation is doing dumb stuff. I've already been known to be a tad bit on the spacey side. Add in lack of sleep and I'm a flaming mess!

Rob: "Why did you put a bowl of pomegranate seeds in the cupboard last night?"
Rob: "Seriously? You are staring at the tv screen this whole time but want me to recap everything that happened on Survivor the last five minutes?"
My intern (quite often): "I'm not sure what you were thinking when you did that."
Cady: (several times now): "Mom, why are you putting Coben in MY car seat?"


Anyhow, what's going on in the Keenan house bedsides lack of sleep?



So, it's not a real blog without including Cady-isms. These are recycled from Facebook but my hope one day is to print this off for the kids so all Cady-isms need to make the blog.

The other night I was cooking ravioli. I called Rob earlier in the day to see if we had nutmeg. So as I'm cooking, I open the spice drawer to find nutmeg and I don't see it. I start talking outloud, Where's the nutmeg? I know we have nutmeg because daddy said we have nutmeg." Rob enters the room at which time my assistant chef Cady says, "Daddy, you are a nutbag!"

Every day Cady comes home from school talking about letters that she has learned. She usually gets the order backwards but the letter right. "Mom, C starts with Cookie! I know what Z starts with...Zip!" So she was playing by herself the other morning and brings me a box of peanuts and says, "here's some peanuts for you mom!" Then she stops in her tracks and lights up. "Hey mom, I know what starts with peanuts! Penis! Penis starts with peanuts!!"

Cady is super-excited about Christmas. She circles and cuts out pictures of things that she wants in the catalogues. She is very adamant though about not wanting boy toys. The problem is that there are very few girl toys that she doesn't want! We're going simple this Christmas with the gifts and hope to spend more time making lots of fun memories. I can't wait to make Christmas cookies, sprinkle glitter on the lawn for Santa's reindeer and spend xmas eve Santa-watching. Three is such a magical age and I know that this Holiday season will be a good one.

Coben. He's doing great. He's still not crawling but he can do a mean scoot backwards. He's constantly stuck in corners and trapped underneath furniture. What he really loves to do is stand. He's just recently started creeping along furniture. He's all boy! Cady was so stationary at this age. We could put her somewhere and she'd just stay. If she saw gates she'd realize that it was an off-limits area. I have a strong suspicion that Coben will see gates as something to conquer. He's saying "mama", waving, and clapping. My most favorite thing is the car. Cady ALWAYS holds his hand in the car. And recently, as soon as he gets situated in his car seat next to his big sister (OMG I'm tearing up as I type this), he reaches out his arm for his sister to hold his hand. And no matter how far our destination, they hold hands until we get there.

First Parent Teacher Conference

It went well!
Some of the highlights:
*Cady is one of the most empathetic kids the teacher has ever had in her class. She said she cares about her classmates and is the first to help when they need help with anything.
*Her social skills are spot-on. She hasn't had any problems with any of the kids and plays well with everyone. She has one good friend who wants to play with Cady all the time but isn't always very nice to her. The teacher says that Cady handles it very appropriately by playing with other kids when that friend is acting aggressive. The teachers said that Cady plays with all kids regardless of their race which is not always the case with three year olds when they encounter kids who are different.
*The teacher said she is very smart and would like to start pulling her into the four year old group because she has mastered the three year old curriculum and is not very challenged by it.

I was the happiest to hear about her being so empathetic to her peers. Smart is great and will help her in life but what good is being smart if you don't care for those around you?

The Attitude

Wow are we in for it. The sassiness has gotten really bad around the Keenan house. Cady has learned all kinds of new ways to express herself lately and her attitude is growing by the day. Most of the time we can nip it by giving her a warning, sometimes time-outs are warranted, and other times we are dumbfounded and wonder if anything is going to work. A recent example that it blog-worthy.

This happened yesterday while I was cooking dinner. Cady was in the living room and I was in the kitchen.
I asked Cady to pick up the marbles off the floor and she ignored me. So I peek my head into the living room and ask her again to please pick up her marbles. She says, "Hold on, I'm doing something" which is a new one and one that she tries using ALL the time to avoid doing what she needs to do. There is always "something" to do that doesn't involve cleaning up, brushing her teeth, getting ready for bed, you name it.
Then I say, "Cady" in that "I'm warning you mom voice" and she says, "Paula" in the same voice. Gah!! So I walk into the living room and I say, "Excuse me Cady, what did you just say?" in that "you are past your warning mom voice". And she says... "Sweetie, you need to calm down and wait". Yeah, she really went there.

At this point I head back to the kitchen because I was at a complete loss for words and wanted a half a moment to think the situation through. But wait, Cady then follows me into the kitchen and says, "Sweetie, are you calm yet?"

Unflippingbelievable.

Rob and I are trying to stay one step ahead of Cady but we are afraid that our reality is more like being 1/2 step behind. Just when we think we have something figured out, she switches things up, our jaws drop and we have to get back in the huddle.

Fat girls and yet more wrinkles

It's been a while so I'll just throw in some tidbits.

Overheard Saturday night during dinner time when Emma was staying over.

Cady to Emma: Us girls are going to eat all of our food and we are going to get fat. We're going to be fat girls just like mommy!!

After defending me, Rob used that moment to divulge to me Cady expressed concern on the way to gymnastics that morning, "Mom sure is getting old, isn't she daddy? She has a big wrinkle on her eye"

Brotherly love. The older Coben gets the more enchanted he becomes. If Cady enters the room and he hears her voice he stops whatever he is doing and looks for her. Even if he's in an ultra-serious mood she can make him laugh like we never could. He laughs with us but Cady can get a full-on belly laugh with minimal effort. She talks to him and reassures him. She continues to hold his hand. She LOVES when I give them alone time (or what she thinks is alone time, my mama ears are turned on full-blast and I'm usually lurking). I lay him on the floor and she sits next to him and they have a great time together. It's a beautiful thing and makes me contemplate the absurdity of almost stopping at one.


Coben. Coben Coben Coben. What can I say about him. He's mellow but particular? He doesn't make waves about the small stuff but digs in his heels when it matters. I'm referring to his refusal to take a bottle. It still ain't happenin' and I'm in week three of work. The first couple of weeks I was running home which was fine then but totally unrealistic long-term. I was hoping for some words of wisdom at last weeks' pediatric appointment but was told by Dr. Bacon, "Yeah, you'd think they would eat eventually when they get hungry but some babies just won't do it." So, the solution is to feed him solids when I'm at work but she said breastmilk should still be his primary source of nutrition and that he needs to have between 24-37 oz a day. So that means when I get home she wants me to make up for it by nursing him frequently in the evening. Hopefully in the next few months we can get him on a sippy cup or something or I won't be able to venture off very far.