cajun in training

The picture shows the family's newest video game addict, helping his Daddy 'drive' a big rig in the video arcade at Wal-Mart. Dennis climbed up there by himself, so David put in a couple of quarters and let Dennis drive the truck around. He thought it was great fun. He played terribly, of course, and didn't finish the game before he was jumping down to go on to the next thing (the next thing being home, as we were finished shopping).

Supper was late tonight, nearly 8:00, and we sure heard about it. He complained and kept up the "eat eat" chant from 6:45 on, and though it was cooking, it wasn't happening fast enough to suit him (or me--I was SO hungry). We gave him chocolate milk as a mood enhancer/stomach empty-soother, and that gave us a few minutes, but he couldn't take it anymore and walked to his bedroom door and beat on it and cried to get out and go to the kitchen. Since it was almost ready, I put him up in the high chair and gave him some bread (12 grain whole wheat by the way, which is what we always buy) while the red beans & rice with smoked sausage was cooling. I don't know if he'd ever had red beans & rice with smoked sausage before, but I think it might have been his favorite meal ever. He was eating it with both hands as fast as he could, and he wanted a couple more helpings. Here's how I know it wasn't because he was starved: I also baked peanut butter cookies which were cooling while we ate, and when he'd emptied his plate the last time, I gave him one. He LOVES cookies and asks for them every day and everywhere but doesn't get them that often. He held the cookie in one hand, took some bites, and then, with his other hand, he turned his plate over and saw more red beans and rice underneath. He PUT THE COOKIE DOWN to eat what was under his plate. He finished that then wiped his high chair tray clean and licked his fingers (he never does this), and THEN he finished the cookie. After the cookie, he picked up any remaining pieces of rice and beans from his bib and ate them after we took away the high chair tray. We had no idea he'd like it that much. He smiled throughout dinner. I wonder how he feels about jambalaya...

growing is hard work

Another sunny sweet day for Dennis, I'm happy to report. He seemed a little more tired today than usual, but he did have a big day yesterday. We didn't do that much, just stayed home until lunch time and then went to Gran's for the afternoon. He played happily in his playroom and we danced with him and chased him around in a big circle around his toys while he giggled. And he visited us at the baby gate from time to time. He learned to pet Lady gently and remembered her name from when he learned it weeks ago. It was so sweet when he walked up to the gate, looked and saw the dog, and waved and said (VERY clearly) "Hi, Lady."

I love hearing him talk. His little voice is so high pitched and sweet sounding, and he is starting to sing to himself a little now. And we are still having long sentences of gibberish stated with all seriousness from him. We treat this very seriously and always respond to him. It seems to make him feel important, because he looks so serious and then he smiles when we agree with him.

He needed his downtime today. During lunch, he picked up two scraps of bread and actually rubbed his eyes with them. I think it was a combination of sleepiness and a desire to play peek-a-boo because Gran and I were talking to each other and not paying him 100% of our attention. He moved the bread and said "peek-boo" and grinned at us with a mouthful of cantaloupe and bread. He finished quickly after that and we let him play with the toys for a while until he picked up his Froggy and said "night night". I put him in the pack and play for a nap, but he didn't take one. He talked for 45 minutes (to himself and Froggy and various other toys) and played with Froggy while lying on his back. I went in to see what was up and discovered a horrible smell that was the source of what was keeping him awake. I changed him and let him play for a while longer, and it wasn't a half hour later that he was clutching his frog and asking to go "night night" again. After exchanging kisses with him, we put him down for a nap again. Side note: he knows how to kiss properly on the cheek now with minimal slobber and maximum sweetness. This time, he played and talked for 20 minutes and then slept for nearly an hour and a half (much of this time with his little rear end in the air for maximum airflow and total cuteness). His Daddy picked him up then and took him home while Mom and I went to the gym, and when I got home he was saying "night night" yet again.

I think he's growing. He looks taller every day and he is requiring much food and much sleep this week. I do have a small supply of clothes in the next size up, and Ellen found some things for him at the consignment sale. Maybe those will last a few months! I never did buy any bigger shorts for him because summer's almost over, but now they are marked down so cheap that I might just have to get him a couple of pairs.


The pictures show him 'helping' us sort the laundry amid much laughter. He thought it was great fun to try on Daddy's shirt.

mad morning, angelic afternoon

I woke up with a migraine this morning and the sound I awakened to hear was screaming from the baby monitor. Dennis woke up an hour earlier than usual in a very bad mood. Not crying but screaming, and he continued through the diaper change and when I gave him his morning sippy cup of milk. He was gnawing on his fingers so I was pretty sure I knew what the problem was. A dose of ibuprofen later, he settled back down. We let him fall asleep to a movie since it was so early and he didn't cry for us again for an hour and a half. Since my headache had worsened, David got up with him and I heard him screaming in the kitchen until he got his breakfast. I feared for a tough day. David played with him until it was time for him to go to work and since Dennis had gotten up so early, this was also time for his morning nap. I napped, too, and by the time he woke up, my headache was all better and I fixed our lunch while he played happily in his room.

After lunch, I mopped macaroni and cheese out of his hair, put his shirt back on, and then we headed to Gran's house for more rearranging and cleaning. When we first got there, we played with Dennis for a few minutes in the playroom. Gran put down a rug on the floor, and Dennis decided that it was just perfect for dancing on. So the three of us kept pushing the button on the musical tunnel so that we'd have music to dance to, and we danced and danced. Gran spun in circles while she danced and Dennis was quick to imitate her, spinning around and around until he got dizzy. Happily enough, Dennis was very content to play with the toys in the playroom while we cleaned the den. He would come and visit us at the baby gate between the rooms every once in a while and say hello, and we would periodically look in on him, but he played sweetly and independently for a few hours. I'm so proud. He was at his sweetest this afternoon, smiling and laughing and coming over to say "hi" to us over the gate.

Tonight we had dinner at the Mexican restaurant with the Gallmans sans Chloe (and we missed her!) and Gran and Pop. Dennis insisted on dipping his chips so I put a little salsa on a plate for him. He sort of forgot himself and grabbed a big handful of salsa with the hand that did not have the chip in it, and I think it was a little spicier than he was prepared for. He made a horrible face, turned red, and coughed, and I gave him his lemonade just in time. After this he only dipped his chips in my sour cream. He nearly ate it all before our food arrived in time to distract him with his quesadilla, but he did leave me a little bit. He acted as if he hadn't eaten in 3 days when in fact he'd had a very nice snack of chicken, graham crackers, and cantaloupe at his Gran's house. Maybe he's growing again...

He was so tired after the meal that he completely conked out in the car. We went down to the lake to help Dave and Ellen move a piece of furniture from Dianne's place. I carried Dennis inside and he never woke up. I laid him down on the loveseat, and he stretched out and slept so hard his pacifier came out of his mouth and he never even knew it. Ellen, Dianne, and I were sitting right next to the sofa, carrying on a conversation and not bothering to lower our voices, and he didn't even stir. He woke up for a few seconds as we were leaving, blinking owlishly around as we walked back to the car, but soon was asleep in the carseat again. He slept through the diaper change and pajama installation (again!) and I don't even know if he's realized he's home in his crib. Maybe his teeth won't be bothering him so badly in the morning. He has 14 now and those bottom incisors are in a fierce competition with each other to see which can break through first. I hope they both win, and soon.

vroom vroom

I noticed today that while Dennis rolls his cars along the floor (or wall or door or whatever), he makes a car noise to accompany their motion. It's like a guttural raspberry sound with some zooms thrown in from time to time plus a high pitch whine for the police car. I have attempted to capture this on video, but bringing out the video camera results in film of him approaching and trying to grab the camera. So far I have not managed to be successful.

I would like to add a line here about how much I hate this computer, because here, where this sentence is, were two entire paragraphs about Dennis that the computer took it upon itself to delete. When I pause in my typing, it moves the cursor back to some point north in the body of this document, and when I resume typing, it highlights whole sections and deletes them. I HATE THIS. I think that I will now start composing in Wordpad or on paper or something. I don't know if it's this website or my stupid touchpad mouse piece of crap or what. It's enough to make me want to quit blogging--it's very frustrating to lose everything. The Blogger site is good at autosaving every few minutes, so the last couple of nights when this happened, I quickly closed the webpage so it wouldn't save the new deletes and the reentered the blog and had only lost a couple of words. Tonight the autosave got it right after it deleted my paragraphs. So I am thinking very bad language right now.

I think I had written about how Dennis rode his bicycle again today, for 3 minutes, and he had remembered how to push down the pedals. Now, he doesn't ride independently by any means, but I am pleased that he remembers to put his feet on the pedals and push. He discovered a new feature on his bicycle that he just loves. While he's straddling the bike, whether to ride or tiptoe it along, he can lean forward and teethe on the foam pad wrapped around the bar between the handlebars. How convenient!

We were at Gran's house today, and he played for a good bit before he napped. I wish we had a pedometer or GPS unit attached to him because I would love to know his actual mileage. As soon as we set him down in the playroom, he covered the whole area and turned two toys on and off, and about 30 seconds had elapsed. He's FAST! He's everywhere all at once, and the places he walks away from bear evidence of his visit. I've said it before: he's like a tornado. He whirls in, causes destruction, and whirls away to decimate order somewhere else.

Successful parenting of a child this age? I'm just trying to keep him from hurting or killing himself and teaching him the occasional word. His talking improves every day. We are beginning to wean from the pacifier (or were until the current round of teething began). Sometimes it goes well, but other times he screams for it. It helps if he can't see it. Today, post nap, he pointed to it (because I hadn't hidden it quickly enough) and I braced myself for war. But he just pointed his finger at it and said, very clearly, "pass-fyer". Of course I let him have it. I mean, how cute is that? And when he was pushing his airplane around, he said "plane" and then repeated after the plane when he pushed the button and it said "here we go". He flew it around the room saying "here we go" over and over again. Pretty soon he'll be talking in sentences. He's trying now. He'll say a word that's real and actual English but will string along several nonsense words (maybe Greek?) before and after it. He's imitating conversation. He does this when he's alone in his room, too. It's so interesting to watch him putting it together. Sometimes it's like he's this awesome science project that we are observing and then interfering with! That's one of the fun parts of parenthood. Others are playing with toys, playing on the playground, giggling, tickling... There are so many!

first bike

We had fully intended for Santa to bring a tricycle for Christmas this year. It was on the list. We found one that we really liked where Dennis can reach the pedals easily, a Radio Flyer that's more of a miniature bike with training wheels. But we started seeing less and less of it and worried that it might get discontinued like the other things we've put off getting for him and then lost out on. So Santa came a little early. Like today.

We reasoned with ourselves, of course. We can get it now and give it to him for Christmas. We could put it up and wait. But what if he's not as easygoing in 3 months? What if it's harder to teach him to ride it then? Hey, it's rated 18 months and up, and he'll be 18 months old on Sunday. What if not giving it to him now puts him behind other tricycle-riding toddlers? And won't it be nicer weather now for him to ride than after Christmas? He saw it in the shopping cart, anyway. He petted it all the way through the store. He knows we have it. We'll have to go ahead and give it to him.

The only good thing about this? The man who got it down from the ceiling rack at the store looked just like Santa Claus. He could have been Santa Claus. So Santa gave Dennis his first ever bicycle today, September 8, 2008, no special occasion whatsoever except for that of a clearance price and eager parents.

I am happy to report that he LOVES it. He scoots it along, climbs on and off, pushes it around his room... And he even pushed the pedals down with his feet a couple of times and made it move. So I guess we shouldn't have waited. He's already learning how to ride. So there. All that justification we went through! Looks like we made the right decision. Maybe he'll learn to ride it soon.

Also today he learned that he can grab Mommy's leg and pick it up and make her walk in the direction of the kitchen. This is especially helpful when he thinks it's mealtime and I don't necessarily agree. But tonight we got supper ready before he was ready to eat it. He was napping and we woke him up and brought him into the kitchen and he was pretty unhappy about it. We set him in the high chair and he cried. David handed him his sippy cup and he threw it down. I handed him a plate of spaghetti and he started to throw it down until he saw what it was. At that point he set it nicely on his high chair tray, stopped crying, and shoved a handful of noodles into his mouth. He was all smiles after that. He had a nice bath, which is nearly always the sequel to a spaghetti meal since orange is not his natural color. We played with the cars and then he went happily to bed. He was in a much better mood today than he was all weekend, so maybe whatever it was that was wrong has passed. Thank goodness!

silly sunday

As I hoped, things went much more smoothly today. Dennis was still as irritable as could be this morning, but I was sick and so poor David had to deal with it. I can't tell if I'm having a fall allergy attack (because a heck of a lot of grass was mowed around here this weekend) or if I'm coming down with a cold. Dennis and I both have itchy eyes and tiredness and he is coughing a tiny bit while I have a sore throat. I have wanted to sleep all day except for when I wanted to eat, and Dennis napped a good bit as well. We realized about 7:30 that his afternoon nap had actually stretched to his bedtime without him waking up, so we got him up and fed him and played with him for a long time before putting him back down. I can hear him walking around in his crib right now.

He was in a sweet sunny mood this afternoon and we played with his cars for hours. He wanted to snuggle a little and we indulged him in that as well. The cutest things he did today were 'helping' us with the laundry (meaning he snatched clean clothes from the pile to play with) and twirling around in circles in his room and then staggering drunkenly until he fell down in a fit of giggles. I don't know why dizziness is such a fun experience for him, but apparently it is. Strange. But very cute.

He doesn't have fever and he seems to feel okay, but I think he's got itchy eyes from the way he's scratching them and he's been swiping at his nose a bit so it must be runny. Very mild, whatever it is, and I'm hoping that's the reason for yesterday's terrible moods. And I'm proud to announce the arrival of tooth #14 (the second upper incisor, so now he has fangs), which might also explain some of the moodiness as well. I have no excuse for my own moodiness and will just have to plead female hormonal-ness.

We are holed up in this house with all our healthy groceries, and we are taking our vitamins and hoping for the best. It's going to be too nice outside this week to be sick. So we won't be. I just know it. We rested all day while David took care of us (such a great Dad and husband he is!) and we'll be rarin' to go in the morning (but not early).

domestic hostility

All week I've been feeling like a successful housewife and mother. Every day I have cleaned and done laundry, played with Dennis, cooked our meals... This domesticity is relatively new to me. Yes, I've been away from work for almost 4 months now, but I have been spending my time at the lake or going shopping or with my mother... I don't know where the time has gone. But now we are settling in to a home routine. We've nearly stopped eating out, which we did WAY too much before, and we've been keeping healthy groceries in the house and a few snack things that aren't so healthy because occasionally we need those, too. And it's been so fulfilling, cleaning out stuff that's been needing it for a long time, rearranging rooms, all during naptime and all while keeping laundry going. I never dreamed of being a housewife and stay-at-home mother, having always pictured myself as a career woman, and I never considered stopping working at all until this year. Granted, I work very hard at raising Dennis, but I never thought I'd be doing this.

There is still much to be done. I have baby stuff to pack away in storage and my closet to go through. We have a junk room that I would much prefer to be a library and intend to start on that when I can. And we're planning the greenhouse garden, which is also a very big project. All in all, I've been very excited about staying home especially now that I'm actually staying home instead of going out somewhere every day.

But today I cracked a little. We were out too late last night grocery shopping and Dennis didn't get to bed until nearly midnight. I paid for it all day. He was cranky and whiny and irritable. I really wanted to reorganize our den and create some play space in there for him so we aren't always in his room. I already have a toy box full of toys in there, random stuff that David and I collected earlier in our marriage. Dennis has a table and chairs in there, so I thought today he could play at the table while I rearranged. He, however, had other ideas. Yes, he was delighted to sit at the table, and he sat there in 4 minute increments. But in between these increments, he was everywhere. He thought that today would be a perfect day to reprogram the stereo and I absolutely could not keep him away from it. All those lights and buttons--irresistible to a toddler! I turned my back and lost him, only to discover him in the bathroom opening the toilet and saying "down". I don't know what went down. I never heard a flush, but I know he was playing in the water. Thank goodness I scrubbed it well this morning! He's contained when he's in his room, but I wanted to start to allow him some freedom. And he certainly wanted the freedom!

I tempted him with toys. He played with the Chevron cars that we collected from the gas station years ago. I had no idea we had so many of the things, but we do. He was very excited when I unboxed some of them today and presented them to him. There's a major traffic jam in the den floor now. And when I was trying to convince him to sit at the table, I let him play with his Fisher Price Nativity set, which he had never seen before today. It isn't a Christmas present but something I bought for him to have to learn about Christmas. It's designed for a 1 year old and is babyproof, and he was very excited about it. He loved the baby Jesus figure, placing it carefully in the stable and saying "baby" over and over. I hadn't intended for him to start playing with the set in September, but he found the box and was intrigued, so I opened it up and let him see ALL the pieces. He played with it a good bit, but it wasn't enough to keep him from wandering the house and getting into mischief. I even brought out David's Green Giant toy 18 wheeler, and I've never seen Dennis so excited about a rolling toy. He kept saying "truck" and rolling it all over the room. He did play a good bit today.

But every minute he wasn't playing, he was fussing at me. He wanted to go outside and help Daddy cut grass and of course I wouldn't let him. He wanted to mess with the stereo all day and I wouldn't let him do that either. When I started cooking, I had to put him in his room for a minute and he was FURIOUS and let me know it. He didn't want to sit in his high chair, he didn't want what I fixed for lunch and threw it down, and he didn't want milk to drink... So much whining and fussing from him is very unusual, but I got it in spades today. Today was the first day I ever wanted to spank him. I didn't, of course, but it was the first day he was deliberately doing what he wasn't supposed to, and it was the first day he knew he was doing it. He KNEW not to touch the stereo but would not stop opening the cabinet and going to it, and each time I picked him up and moved him to something else. The last time I picked him up, he screamed and smacked my arm and then pinched me. I am not obsessed with the stereo, by the way. It's old, and we almost never listen to it in this age of the iPod, but he doesn't need to learn that it's okay to mess with things like this because he might do it at someone else's house and ruin something. I know he wanted to push the buttons. I don't know what a happy compromise would be. He could have pulled the thing over on top of himself the way he was climbing up to push the buttons, and it scared me.

Dennis got tired of me today, too. After I repeatedly denied him the opportunity to do what he wanted, he went to his room. I followed him after a minute, and he pointed to his crib and said "night night". Since he'd just had a nap, I wondered what he was up to. He pointed to his dvd player and said "movie" and then "Elmo", so I put in a Sesame Street dvd and let him have some alone time. He was a bit happier afterward and I got a good bit done while he was on his break!

It was a difficult day. Tonight I cooked supper, put him in the high chair, and when David came into the kitchen and started to fix a plate for Dennis, I just had to get out of there. I had intended to eat with them, really, but I needed a break and escaped to the shower while they ate their supper. I cried a little to let off some steam and then gradually relaxed. When I joined them again, they were happily playing together in the den, but David looked a little harassed as well and admitted to suffering some of the same treatment I'd been getting all day. We put him to bed at 8 despite his protests (he wanted to play in his car some more; we wanted to read the bedtime story and put him to bed--we're bigger, we won) and he went right to sleep. Let's hope he's well rested tomorrow!