Grunt 'n' Squeak

Dear Ben

Wow, my little guy.  I can't believe you are already nearing your 8th month.  How fast time flies!!!  You are growing so fast, and becoming such an incredible little person.  You have beautiful blue eyes, and an amazing smile that lights up your whole face.  Well, really you have two smiles.  One is your wide-eyed, laugh-out-loud, couldn't-be-happier smile that takes over a room.  The other is your narrow-lipped, squinty-eyed grin that doubles the size of your cheeks, and reminds me of the cheshire cat, though not quite so toothy. 

Speaking of teeth, you have three of them now, and probably three more on the way.  They are creeping in slowly, and they make you cry sometimes.  You are learning how to use them with skillfull practice on anything you can put in your mouth, including your mama.  It brought as many tears to my eyes as yours the first time you tried out those little chompers while nursing.  I cried not so much because you hurt me, but because I responded so quickly with your first ever firm reprimand and harsh "NO!" that you looked at me like I'd turned into a beast, and began to cry out of fear.  It broke my heart a little that I'd made you feel so scared, when I'm the one you are supposed to trust beyond all others.  For that I'm so sorry.   

Luckily you are still my little mama's boy, despite my occasional growl.  I'm your favorite person in the whole world, and you'd be content to stay in my arm all day long if I'd let you.  You have started becoming wary of strangers, and the little smile you used to flash at everyone is now reserved for your moms, little kids, and your grandma when she calls you on the web cam. 

You learn something new everyday, and I'm always surprised by how far you've come.  Your favorite thing to do is try to feed yourself.  You are a champ at getting Cherios into your mouth, sometimes fistfulls at a time.  You have now moved on to trying to steal the spoon out of my hand when I'm feeding you baby food, and you try to pick up the resulting gloppy drops on your high chair tray like they are cereal too.  When it doesn't quite work, you make beautiful pea and carrot finger paintings that we have to wipe off the tray, your face, the bib, and mama's shirts.  Today you even managed to finger-paint my hair with rice cereal and applesauce. 

You are excellent at blowing raspberries, rolling onto your tummy, grabbing everything you can reach, jabbering non-stop, smiling, splashing in the bathtub, crying when I leave your line of sight, and bouncing in the jump-a-roo. You love your naps, and being rocked in the rocking chair.  You do not yet have any interest in the dogs, crawling, blowing kisses, drinking from a cup (sippy or otherwise) or sleeping all the way through the night without some reassurance that your moms are close by.   

I love you more than I ever thought I could.  I pray that you will learn how fun a little independence can be, though I miss you when you don't wake me up at night.  I love that you still like to lay against my chest, and rest a while, and I hope you will always let me hold your soft little hand in mine, even when it's not so little any more.

Love unconditionally,
Mama

This is Chipping Away....Really

Ok, so if you were looking for Chipping Away, this is the same place....sorta.  I made this my new default blog, mostly due to the advent of Ravelry.  If you stop by my blog for the boys, and life in general, that's still here.  If you wanna see the latest project on my needles, I'm "twinspiration" over on Ravelry.  If you are a knitter who hasn't discovered Ravelry, go check it out.  It's amazing!

See, once we had the boys, I didn't need to blog about trying to have them any more, so Chipping Away became my knitting blog.  However, I've discovered it's far easier to track my knitting projects and log them on the wonderful Ravelry site, so why do it twice.  Frankly since having the twins there are plenty of things I have to do twice, and blogging about knit projects shouldn't be one of them.   

Bye bye dream car

All I have ever wanted to drive is a Subaru Outback.  I know, how Lesbian-ic of me.  Cliche, but true, it was my dream car.  Finally, I'd talked Amy into letting me get it (well, I coerced her into a test drive, where I let the dealer talk me into signing a lot of paper work with words like "interest" and "principle" sprinkled heavily throughout).  And that was it, I owned a modest, pre-owned version of my dream car.  I loved it.

One month after I got it, I inadvertantly kept moving forward in a line of traffic that had suddenly ceased to be moving forward.  I should have known it was a bad sign, but this was my dream car, damn it, and I wasn't going to give it up.  It was a little blemished, but family came to visit eventually and they saw the new car, and the damage from the accident was so minimal on the surface (I'm sure there were hidden problems that I chose to ignore) that they never even knew I had been in a fender bender.

A short time after the first fender bender, I can't remember how long exactly, but I do know that the sting of the first accident was still burning a bit against my love for my car.  We were leaving a parking lot, going really slowly, when a car backed into us, and mangled the back right panel and bumper.  I promptly had that damage fixed, and it was nearly good as new, but I was beginning to believe that my dream car was cursed.

A month to the day of getting my car back from second accident, I was rear-ended at a stop sign.  Damage was minimal, but enough to have the car in the shop for about a week being repaired for a third time.  The writing was on the wall, THIS particular Outback was NOT the car for me...it had been tainted and ruined forever, and I was pretty sure that there was a hex on the thing making me invisible to other drivers on the road, who longed to run into me willy nilly.  There were not only the actual accidents, but countless other incidences when it seemed that other drivers simply had not seen me at all, and if I hadn't learned to drive so defensively after the accidents, I could have been seriously injured.  The scary part was that by the second and third scuffles, I was pregnant with the boys.  My dream car was an inexplicable death magnet.  What's a girl to do? I decided that I hadn't had the car long enough to really find something new, so the sour taste I had in my mouth for it would just have to be swallowed, and I would just have to find a way to make peace with this piece-of-shit car.  Besides, how many accidents could you statistically be in, if they were two-thirds not your fault, and you'd never been in an accident once before this when you were driving?  Odds were the accidents were over, right?  The accidents did seem to be over, but only because I became hyper-vigillant to crazy drivers, something that really only does me good, and everyone should be on the alert for.

Then the boys arrived.  We added two car seats and a double stroller to the standard features of our Outback, and promptly realized that we had far too little automobile real estate.  We had none left to be shared with guests, or even our own legs, and this was just not going to work.  We searched long and hard, and after 7 months of babies and their stuff, and several cramped road trips, we decided enough was enough, and the car had to go.  It simply was not our dream car for the here and now.

We may have gone a little too far in the opposite direction, but we will never complain about wishing we had just gone bigger.  We are now the proud owners of a Mormon Assault Vehicle aka the Chevy Suburban.  Come on over and party, we have room in the car to drive you all home, and we can even watch movies in there.  Stretch out and enjoy the ride!