I got an idea!

So the other day I went to Wal Mart with Alaina and Ryker. I didn't have much to get and I didn't have anything else to do that day, so we took a spin through the toy section. We meandered through, taking our time and playing with the toys. I let Ryker touch anything he wanted and take all the time he wanted. We played for at least 30 minutes, but at some point, I was over it. So I gave Ryker a two-minute heads-up that we would be moving on. After two minutes I called to him and told him to come on. He ignored me. I didn't want to spoil our good time, so I employed some less than exemplary parenting tactics and I stood tight where I was and continued to call his name every couple seconds while he continued to pretend he couldn't hear me. Eventually, I said in an excited tone, "Hey, Ryker, come look at this!" That did it. So we looked at whatever arbitrary thing I'd been standing next to for a second and went on our way. You'd think that after being SUCH a nice mommy to let my boy play for SO long with the toys that I'd get somthing in return, right? WRONG! I said, "Let's go get dog food and then we'll go." Ryker's response: "Nooooooo. I don't want to get dog fooooooood. I hate getting dog foooooood. Waaaaaa." (No, seriously, he's been actually saying waaaaa lately!) Well, we headed that way anyway and when we got there I let go of the cart to grab the bag and Ryker promptly started slamming the cart into the shelves! So I grabbed the cart to prevent that, but he was still pushing and fighting me with the cart. Well, I certainly can't maneuver a 50 pound bag of dog food into the cart with one hand while keeping Ryker from slamming it into things with the other. All children instinctively understand these sorts of things and know just what to do to make it utterly impossible for parents to get the job done. So I had to figure out what to do with Ryker first. This sort of behavior has been typical of Ryker while shopping lately and I decided recently that I need to recommit myself to teaching him and put shopping and my busy schedule on a back burner until we get this behavior issue under control. So I decided that he needed a time out. However, trying to get a 4-year-old to take a time out at a store where he knows you really have much less leverage than you do at home is a bit of a nightmare. So I sat on him. Okay, not really. Well, sort of. I sat next to him on the ground and pinned him to the ground with my legs. Child abuse, you say? Oh no. What was happening at the store that day was parent abuse and it's about time people realize just how real this type of abuse is! This is mostly for my own protection against him hitting or kicking me, but also to prevent him from running away (kids also know that running away from you when there are more than one of them for you to take care of is a great way to get Mom's goat). So we sat. He cried and squirmed and fussed. I asked him if he was ready to help our family run smooth and he said no. So we continued to sit. An employee came by and saw Alaina's cute, happy, angelic little self sitting in the cart and started talking to her and telling her how cute she was. Then she saw me and Ryker on the floor and gave me a quizzical look. I said, "We're taking a time out." A look of understanding replaced the quizzical one and she continued her work. When Ryker decided he was ready to help our family run smooth, I let him up and the employee told him she hoped he had a better day from now on. The rest of the way to the check out stand, Ryker complained about how looooong it had taken to get dog food. Gee, I wonder why?

So my great idea is this: the next time Ryker causes trouble in the store (and trust me, it will happen again), we will be heading to the car seat isle. I can't wait to see the look on the employee's faces when I strap my trouble-making child into one of their display seats to serve his time out! I mean, it's the law that my child ride in a car seat, right? And I want to be darn sure he can't get out of it by himself because that could be dangerous! So I have to test it before I buy it. And this way, I can't get in trouble for sitting on my child. I'll just let him sit on a shelf at the store strapped into a car seat until he stops thrashing and flailing and is ready to help our family run smooth. Sounds like a lot less of a struggle for me!

First Words

Well, we'll see if this works. I can't get this video to play on my computer, but maybe it will still upload to the internet so you can watch it. It's so cute! I went to take a video of Alaina walking but she heard my phone beep when it started recording and she started saying "huwoe" which is baby-ese for hello. Other words in her miniature repertoire include "uh-oh," "ow," "dada," "mama" (rarely), "hi," "out," and "up" which usually sounds more like "ub." She also makes lots of animal noises and mimics a ton of the funny sounds we make (like roaring sounds or bird calls or Brice's infamous raptor noise--must get that on video!). My favorite is her "squeak squeak" mousie noise which sounds like "qweegk qweegk." She got a stuffed mouse for Christmas and now she thinks all stuffed animals say "qweegk qweegk," hence the excited "qweegking" when she opened a stuffed puppy on her birthday. Though, she does know how to bark like a dog...

Computer troubles

So, our lousy computer is at the end of its life. It will never see Windows again and I now have to learn a new operating system to do anything with this contraption. We tried desperately to save it, but, alas, to no avail. It contracted the mother of all viruses (thanks to us watching Lost via some shady websites Brice found) and it infiltrated the system until the hard drive was no longer readable or writable using Windows. We tried to partition a section of the hard drive with another operating system so that we could find and kill that evil virus, but we lost the battle. So we had to dump Windows and load Linux as our only operating system. We still have the internet, but the word processing system will be touch and go as far as compatibility. We'll see how this goes. Fortunately, we didn't have very many pictures or documents that weren't backed up. A few, but we'll live. The big loss was the hours I had just spent on our music files sorting, organizing, deleting duplicates, and converting it all to MP3's. Oh well. Just don't expect any pictures here on the blog for a while until I figure out how to do pictures with the new system. Bummer, because Alaina's first birthday was yesterday and she had a great time. And her monkey cake was really cute. Today she had a Dr.'s appointment and she is maintaining her fallen-off-the-bottom-of-the-growth-chart weight curve. She weighs 16 lbs 9 oz. I estimated that she would be in her rear-facing car seat for 6 more months and the doctor, looking at her chart, said I was probably right. I love her littleness! It's so cute and endearing. Okay, that's all for now. I really need to be finding a care provider for this pregnancy seeing as how I'm probably at least 15 weeks along and haven't seen a dr. and I don't have an official due date. Do any of you locals have a suggestion/recommendation for a midwife? I think we're going to go for a home birth with this one.

Excuses, Excuses

I know. I always have an excuse for slacking on my blog, but this time I have a really good one:

Yup. We're having another one! This one was a bit of a surprise (a happy one...besides the pregnancy part. Baby--yay! Pregnant--boo) so I don't know when I'm due. I'm guessing sometime around June or July, which will make Alaina and Baby #4 about 18 months apart. Raelin and Ryker are 20 months apart and it was really hard when they were little but so much fun now. They are such good buddies (but also mortal enemies on occasion). I haven't been quite as sick this time as I was with the other kids, but I've been TIRED! For a while there I was going to bed at 8:30 or 9:00. So between sleeping, feeling sick (but not puking, for the most part), and getting Christmas gifts made, the blog has fallen by the wayside. Also, still no camera to speak of (camera phones don't count when you're trying to get pictures of wiggly kids--they're not fast enough to make it worth it), which makes blogging a bit boring to me. I do have a few pictures though....The kids in their new clothes

And Alaina is officially a biped, walking more than crawling and it's adorable because she is just so tiny!

...but she has a hard time walking in her new shoes. I haven't had shoes for her for a long time so she's not used to the hard soles. She stands there apprehensively until she just falls over like her feet are laden with blocks of lead. She started getting the hang of it yesterday and she laughed and laughed!

Oh, I should tell how we announced our news to family because it was fun. Brice's family did a white elephant gift exchange for Christmas this year instead of traditional gifts and it had to be in a quart jar. So I put the pregnancy test in a jar with a tag on it that said, "Announcing a new member of the family. Guess who!" and I wrapped it in shiny gold foil. It was so bright and pretty that it was the first gift picked. It took a minute for the family to figure it out because everyone in the family had a reason to be an unlikely candidate; us, because our baby wasn't even a year old yet (her birthday is on Sunday! How the time flies!). So that was a fun guessing game. Then for Gina and Toby's gift I made them a little wooden box (more about that in a future post) and labeled it "the oven." Then I put two small dolls inside, one labeled "Gina's bun" and the other labeled "Morgan's bun." Boy, was she surprised!

And another interesting side note; my grandma will be having 6!!!! great-grandbabies in 2010! My aunt Tori is having 4 grandbabies and my mom is having 2! Any more upcoming arrivals I should know about? C'mon, cousins, there are 5 more of you that are married and not expecting. You guys should jump on the bandwagon! Oh, and I just had a new baby cousin born right after Christmas (Congrats, Jon and Ange!). Babies, babies everywhere!

Anyway, I hope you all had a great Christmas; ours was miraculous and wonderful! We made it to California after Christmas to visit Brice's family and had a great time (and were blessed that our car didn't break down even though we had a seized up pulley! Brice fixed it when we got home, but our trip was amazingly unaffected). We are truly blessed to have wonderful friends and family who made this holiday season particularly special for us. Thank you!