Where the White Things Are

Sunday, January 8, 2012

A Little List

I love lists. They help me organize my thoughts. They remind me of what I’ve DONE. They help me remember what I need to DO. They keep me sane. So here’s a little list of happy things from this week.

1. Rose is such a squishy little cutie.

2. At lunch today, I gave Jay an apple and a spoonful of peanut butter. After a while, he said “this is bee-you-tiful, Mommy.” I asked him what was beautiful and he said “My peanut butter is so beautiful!” That’s my son.

3. This morning, I woke up to the sound of giggling and laughter coming from Jay’s and Rose’s room. That was the best alarm clock ever, even if it did “ring” about 45 minutes too early. Jay and Rose have started playing together more lately. Bed time has turned into party time for these two buddies. I have to go in and turn off the light and break up the fun at least twice each night before they go to sleep, and sometimes they fall asleep with the light on, mid-fiesta. [See picture]

4. Rose is officially a little wean-ee. Don’t tell the American Academy of Pediatrics, but her last mamamilk was yesterday, and she is now drinking COW milk from a CUP full-time! Sweet freedom for both of us. I know it’s a whole month before THEY say she should stop with the b-milk, butttt every baby is different and she kind of self-weaned. For about 2 months, she has barely been drinking anything at all unless it was in a cup. Not enough fluids equals not enough diapers. So over the past few weeks, I gradually dropped mamafeedings and added moomoofeedings. Rose is doing just fine!

5. As for me, it’s been more than 3 years since I’ve been JUST ME, not pregnant or lactating. So I’ll be enjoying this…lull between stormsImeanbabies.

6a. Jay and I have been enjoying his new blocks, cars, and train tracks. One of my goals is to spend more time just playing with my kids, and it’s been great! We’ve built mansions, fences, roadways, race tracks, tunnels, bridges, mountains, towers, and even a zoo. It’s cute when he gets his blocks out and tries to re-build our most recent creation on his own. This picture has our zoo in it.

6b. This is Noah’s mansion. We have this Noah’s Ark set of animals that came with Noah and his wife (Jeff named her Joan—Joan of Ark, get it? My witty husband). So We often build a house for Noah, Joan and all their critters. This one was my masterpiece. I love playing with blocks. And Jay. While we build, I have to use one hand and often both of my legs to defend our buildings from Hurricane Rose, the Rose monster, Rosasaurous, etc.

7. This week I discovered the secret to almost eliminating the drudgery and doom of LAUNDRY DAY: wait till the evening! Since Jeff drives the car to work now that it’s cold, my only vehicle is my beloved double jogging stroller. That thing can do a lot, but it’s just TOO hard to cram all of our laundry into it, (and into a bag and a backpack that I have to carry while pushing the 100lb stroller), and walk over to do laundry at the Whites’ house. It takes all day long. Dante forgot to include eternal laundry in his Inferno. Even though I don’t like putting things off and I’m most productive in the mornings, doing laundry at night after Jeff comes home WORKS.

8. I recently (finally) got the Mo-Tab’s best CD ever, Called to Serve. Why do they even have women in the choir? The songs with only the men are SO GOOD! When I listen to them I feel so joyful and inspired. I love basking in those deep, rich harmonies. And it makes me think of my dear far away brother, Elder Kyle Brown.

9. A few weeks ago, I indulged in a Kindle. So we have a Kindle Fire and a normal Kindle now. Yikes—easy on the electronics! I adore my Kindle reader. It’s easy to read from, it’s small and light, and best of all, books published before 1923 are FREE. Since our local library doesn’t even have a complete set of The Classics, I am particularly stoked about my easy, gratis access to them. I can also play Scrabble on my Kindle. I think I love this little device so much because it makes my somewhat nerdy activities (like Scrabble and the Brontes) so EASY and FUN.

10. So many books to read, so little time! I have a big stack of books by my chair. I intend to read all of them…eventually. I’m afraid the pile is growing faster than I can finish books in it. Bones is partly to blame—a few nights I’ve chosen to WATCH A SHOW rather than read before bed. What has happened to me? The two things I’ll blame for my lack of reading time are: my Kindle and my children. They are both worthy causes, though, so I’ve learned to find joy in just looking at my stack o books. I indulge in a few pages when I can.

January is usually such a flat, long, dull month. We’re doing our best to change that around here, and I think it’s working.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Music to my ears

Happy 2012! We had a pleasant, relaxing last few days of 2011, reading books (Shaina), playing video games (Jeff), watching lots of Netflix episodes (all of us), and eating away at that 4lb bag of peanut butter M&Ms that Santa gave us.

While Jeff rang in the new year in the family room and a movie, Jay, Rose, and I snoozed in the new year in our beds. This year is already SUPER for at least 3 reasons:

Church is now at 9am instead of 1pm (Jay went to nursery all by himself again at last on Sunday!!)
We got a shiny new car stereo unit and it even has a jack for our mp3 player built in! Our musical possibilities on the road have expanded considerably. *see postscript for details
And best of all, Rose sprouted a special new consonant-vowel combo that has me dancing for joy. It may be just babbling, but it may be more. I choose to believe the latter.

Of course, Rose has already been saying Dada for a few weeks now. She can point to each family member when we ask her, “where’s ____?” She also has an opinion about everything, and squeals her disapproval if others don’t share her feelings.

My little baby is suddenly sentient!

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P.S. One of the last things that happened in 2011 made us glad to say adios to that year: on the only night all year that we accidentally left our car unlocked, our 7-year-old car stereo was swiped! They left a gaping hole in its place, and another empty spot where my old CD case lived.

Who steals ancient technology and outdated CDs? It was done out of pure malice. Grumble. If someone steals something valuable, I can convince myself that they really needed the money. But when everything stolen is worth about $25 or less, I just get cranky. I also really don’t like the idea of thieves prowling around our street. The thing I’m actually most sad about is that we had disc 9 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the CD player when it was stolen, so now we’re missing a piece of the story!

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Christmas, part B: The Brown one

Whew, Christmas is intense! In other words, this post is intense. We’re back home again and things are calming down a little bit [2 Bones worth of laundry-folding, cleaned/organized kitchen, toys put away…almost vacuumed floor] so now I can write about it all.

On Thursday, (Dec. 23rd), we drove the 3 hours to my family’s house for Christmas. My sister Mel is the last Brown kid at home, and this was her first holiday without Kyle (mission) so we had to go give her some sibling-ly support and niece-neph love at Christmas. As usual, we have a few pictures of the happy holiday.

Even though it’s not exactly Christmas-ish, let’s start with a picture list of Rose’s personality—she’s got a lot of that lately:

Ahh, asleep. Rose had a hard time adjusting to sleeping in a port-a-crib in an unfamiliar room. She cried and wailed for at least an hour before every sleep for the first 3 days we were at my family’s house. It made me so sad. Often we just gave up on naps and let her stay up and get too tired to protest for long when we did put her to bed. My sweet little homebody.

And for good measure, here’s the boy—asleep on Christmas Eve. He never took a nap while we were there, and he kept waking up confused in the middle of the night. Let’s just say I was supersleepy by the time we left.

Bytheway, after a few too many disgusting experiences, (that word is underlined, bolded, and italicized on purpose), I gave myself an early Christmas present and said adios to potty training Jay. After 6 weeks he was NOT catching on at all. So I decided to wait a few more months. Sigh. Oh well.

On Christmas Eve, my mom (Ramah Meri to Jay, of course) gave Jay and Rose an early present—a pony! He’s blue and bouncy and blowable (inflatable). And he can carry up to 200 lbs…

Double duty!

[I forgot to add that our new pony is tasty too]

Of course, Dad and I had to go on our Christmas Eve RUN too. I missed out on that as a giantprego last year. I love running with my Dad. We sweat. We squelch through mud. We talk and laugh. We shout “FRED!!!!” on a certain part of a certain trail. When we’re done, we wash our shoes in puddles.

Christmas morning came at last. I interviewed Jay right before we went to look in our stockings. I think he was pretty excited—we talked about toys in our stockings all MONTH.

Just so you know how it goes, we Browns like to savor the day on Christmas. First, we open the stocking stuff and play with it. Then, we take turns giving gifts to each other. On your turn you give a gift from you to someone else to open. My parents started that tradition when I was little to accentuate the giving part of Christmas. I love it. Needless to say, it takes us lots of time to open presents on Christmas. Add an hour of Church and an hour of real-time emailing with a missionary and we had an all day event! Oh—and we eat lots of yummy cookies and watch Christmas movies and listen to Christmas music all around that and in there too.

Jay got really good at RIPPING open his presents. He tried to teach Rose to RIP them, but she preferred to gently tear them and then play with the paper scraps.

Rose didn’t last long playing with her stocking—she wanted FOOD! So we parked her little booster chair on the floor so she could see the action while she ate breakfast.

After breakfast, Rose came back in all bare and shared her toy with Jay.

We had a quick intermission with present time to go to church at 11am. Mel gave a very good talk ON CHRISTMAS, and my parents sounded quite melodious in the choir.

Jay adores his wooden train track. He played with it all afternoon on Christmas (predicting this exclusivity, his strategic mama poised it as the last present he opened). It’s so fun when a carefully chosen gift is loved.

Eventually, Jay and I created a whole highway/railroad system with the felt road strips I made for him. I’m so glad that Jay has some toys now that I like to play with too!

Jeff and I did a joint gift to US this year. We got an Amazon Kindle Fire. It’s like a half-sized iPad. Jeff loves it so much that I haven’t had time to really figure out how to use it!

Every year I wonder if I’ll be able to think of gifts to MAKE, and so far I’ve managed to whip up some fun ones without too much difficulty. I was going to do a separate post for the crafts, but I’m on a roll-why stop now? I know this post is getting long, but what did you expect from a Christmas post anyways?

THE HOMEMADE GIFTS:

“Hanging out” bookmarks (I made 4—2 sets, for the grandparents of these cuties)

Mini fleece owls (I made 3)

A fleece kitten for Mel.

I organized an extravaganza of truth and collected all 14 of my family members’ testimonies. Jeff helped me put them into 4x6 photo albums, with a picture of each family member next to his/her testimony. It worked pretty well.

See, I can be serious SOMEtimes!

And last but not least, my most recent pet invention, the Beard Bonnet. Jeff and I have always joked about making some sort of protection for his ever-present rough chin, so I finally refined our idea. I whipped up a little tag and invented a company, all in the name of soft, scratch-free smooches. I gave one to each man in my family.

Brad is the only one I have a picture of in his Beard Bonnet.

Ah, no more morning scruff scratches! Jeff has tried on his orange Beard Bonnet and I have tested it. It’s dreamy. Maybe I should to apply for a patent and found a company or something.

I was the only one taking pictures, so I’m not in any of them, and I never took pictures of MY gifts or anything. Let’s just say that it was Merry Christmas to Shaina’s kitchen this year. I was seriously in Kitchen Nirvana on Christmas. My parents gave me a beautiful set of shiny pots and pans that I’ve been drooling over for a lonnng time. Hello, stainless steel! I’ll never eat teflon chips again.

Ahhhh, yessss. Christmas treats. Since I was a tastebud torn pregnant lady last Christmas, I deeply enjoyed the goodies extra mucho this year. Probably a little too much, in fact. But mmmmm.

Jeff enjoyed making impossibly thick hunk-o-ham-wiches. Yes, that’s a single HUNK of ham on that sandwich (I tried to type piece, but it is so much more than a flimsy old piece of ham).

We walked to the park one day for a little fresh air.

I’m slightly in love with stacking both of my kids together and taking pictures of them. Is it vain to say MY KIDS ARE ADORABLE?

I really wanted to take a nice, Christmasy family picture of all of us in our Christmasy Sunday clothes, but alas. It never happened. So we took a quick shot at the Whites’ house after Christmas.

Here it is—our Merry Christmas from the Whites picture. Imagine it with a personalized note, in an envelope and your name addressed on the front and a festive stamp in the corner. Maybe next year I’ll manage to do Christmas cards?

Merry Christmas!