Kittyboy finds a CAVE!

Since our son is a morning person and we are not, we bring him back to our bed every morning when he wakes up, just to grab a few more minutes horizontal. When he first came home from the hospital, he was all soft and cuddly and would lay very sweetly on top of one of us, like a warm teddy bear. It wasn't long at all (a couple months?) that he decided laying still was boring and became all elbows and knees. By now, he's gotten a little dangerous. We spend most of the time saying, "Ow!" and moving.

But hey, it gets us out of bed faster!

This morning, he discovered that a magical, unexplored realm appears when you lift up the covers. Blankets - they're not just for peekaboo anymore! He had a CAVE! It was a lovely cave, too, all soft and cozy and dark, and after a while he didn't want to come out! There was a little boy-shaped lump sitting up in the middle of our bed, bouncing and "mm!"ing. It was hysterical. We threw back the covers and he was sitting there waving and smiling, then he turned around, grabbed the blankets, and pulled them back over his head. Back to the KatCave!

First appointment with SL

Guess what - there's basically not a thing Speech can do that we're not trying to do already.

AAARRRGGGHH!

He's just going to talk really late, that's all there is to it. You can lead a horse to water, but not make him drink - you can put a toddler in his bed, but not make him sleep - and you can say "ball! ball! buh-buh ball!" 'til the cows come home, and if he's not in a "b" mood, buh-buh-buh will never happen. He knows what a ball is, he likes them very much, throwing and fetching, but he absolutely will not say buh on command. I'm beginning to think he doesn't see the point. He KNOWS the colorful sphere is a ball - why bother to SAY it? The same for kitty, doggie, all that. What silly grownups we are, that we want HIM to tell us what a ball is and what a kitty is.

Our "home assignment" - business as usual!

A big-boy bed!

As I write, Kittyboy is sleeping peacefully in a real bed. We didn't find any used toddler beds in thrift shops, they're highly sought-after items on Freecycle, so for about the price of a cheap new one, we got a day-bed at Salvation Army. It's close enough to twin-size that we can use twin sheets on it, and he can sleep on it well into gradeschool.
He picked it out himself, completely ignoring the ugly brown upholstery to scramble up and bounce while patting the mattress. We took him off and put him next to a different twin bed, and he ran back to the daybed and sat on it with a huge toothy grin. He had chosen!
It still knocks my socks off that he falls asleep semi-autonomously. So imagine how flabbergasted I am that we can tuck the sheet around him, put his weighted blanket over him and Rocky on the pillow next to him, and with occasional fussing, he GOES TO SLEEP, in a bed that isn't even keeping him there. It just blows my mind. A year ago I was dreading the day he'd outgrow his baby swing, because he never, ever slept without motion. He slept in the swing or the carseat with someone's food rocking it, nowhere else. Never. And that wasn't for lack of trying, it was just the only thing that worked. Even a rocking chair wouldn't put him to sleep (and what mommy can't rock her baby to sleep?).
And now he's in a real bed. I tuck him in under real sheets and everything. I'm so happy I'm crying.
God is so good!

A Random Act of Kindness

This morning was not a good one. Kittyboy was very distressed by SOMETHING (I think teething but can't say for sure). He was crying easily, upset at every small transition, he was VERY "off". It culminated in him grabbing two fistfuls of hair and, with grunting and effort, pulling the hair out of his head. I could see the strands between his fingers from across the room, it was that much. And he didn't seem to notice any pain from that whatsoever. Thank God, no scalp was damaged, but it was quite disturbing.

So we needed a change of scenery. I didn't know what to do for him about the hair-pulling, but he's always calmed down outside, and though it was drizzling, I strapped him in his carrier and we went out for a walk. I didn't know where to look for our umbrella, I've not used it in years, I just knew we needed to get out. We'd take the bus to Walmart or something. So we walked, and walked, while it turned from a drizzle to steady rain.

Then a car came towards us and stopped, on the opposite side of the road, just before we got to the bus stop. I thought, "Oh great, someone to tell me my child needs a coat, that my child shouldn't be out in the rain, just great. I don't need this right now." So I was bracing for impact, as a lady jumped out of the car and ran across the road with an umbrella. She just gave me the umbrella!!! I asked if I could return it, and she said no, she had several at home, and she'd just seen us out and wanted us to have an umbrella. I thanked her - had I not been in total shock, I would have tried to get her name or something. And when she got back in her car, she turned around and drove the opposite direction. So it wasn't even that she was driving along and had an umbrella in the car - she had driven home to GET one!

What a wonderful angel!

And as we stood at the bus stop, the skies DID open up, and it was pouring, solid water. We would have been absolutely soaked to the bone without the umbrella.

I'm going to buy an umbrella that folds up tiny, to keep in my backpack (the walking and bus-riding diaper bag), and keep this one in the car. Hopefully we see someone sometime walking in the rain without an umbrella.

Toddler bed transitions...

Typically you wait until a toddler's 2-3 or so to start talking toddler bed, or so I read online. You look for various landmarks, like ease of sleep transitions, a certain level of communication, whatever, every opinion on what matters varies to a certain extent. But every website agrees on one thing. If the kid can escape the crib, he needs a toddler bed, pronto.

Well, Kittyboy now falls into that category. We have no communication as far as the concept of "big-boy bed", he's only 20 months, falling asleep is not always easy, and waking up is often distressing. BUT, he is SO capable of escaping his crib. Standing in his crib, with the mattress on the lowest level and the side raised completely, he can put his foot up to the top of the rail. He just hasn't followed through yet. No doubt, though, he's strong enough that it wouldn't take long!

So, next payday we're getting a toddler bed, if I don't get one through Freecycle first. In the meantime, we're ensuring he doesn't climb out of the crib - the mattress is all the way on the floor! I just don't know what we'll do about keeping him in a bed without sides long enough for him to actually fall asleep!

We'll see how it goes!

Some REAL money-saving tips...

I am a sucker for "how to live cheaper" articles, and Yahoo Finance has many. I've read them all. They don't apply.

We don't have a cable bill to cut. We don't drink Starbucks. We don't go out to movies. We don't eat out but once in a great while. When we want pizza, I get a three-dollar frozen one. So tips such as "A sack lunch at work can save you $35 a week!" ARE USELESS, as are "Brewing your own coffee rather than stopping at Starbucks" and "Renting movies instead of going to the theater".

So here is how WE live cheaper.

Honestly, it starts with Angelfoodministries.com. There's not an application or income level requirement, it's not food stamps (but you can use food stamps to buy it!), it's just very cheap food, great if you don't qualify for food stamps but are tired of beans and pasta. It's almost a month's worth of groceries in one shot. I budget about $50 a month for the regular package and one special, and plan the rest of the month around what's in the freezer and pantry. There's frozen meat, frozen vegetables, some canned stuff, a quart of shelf-stable milk, a dozen eggs, it's a variety of things, all of which keep in the pantry or freezer. The rest of the month, I go to my freezer and pantry first, to see what one or two ingredients I need for a complete dish, and then buy just that.

Shop N Save, or at least the one near us, has a clearance basket up at the front of the store. Whatever is in it that's useful, I buy, whether or NOT I have a use for it right then. Cans with torn labels, boxes that got dented or cut while unloading, bags that sprang a leak. Then later when I'm low on ideas, I have things in the pantry I wouldn't normally buy, but which might prove inspiring.

Getting really, really serious about sales and coupons helps too.

When it comes to cooking, a white sauce made of margarine, flour, and powdered milk stretches a can of cream soup to feed a family (if you have some miscellaneous vegetable or something to add). If you just make a sauce and dump in whatever canned vegetables are in the pantry, presto, dinner's done. It costs pennies, but tastes good, and doesn't FEEL like a cheap meal.

Recycling and composting as much as possible have kept us to one can of trash a week (our hauler charges by the can). This is EVEN WITH a baby still not out of diapers, and we do use disposables (I'm nowhere near organized enough to do cloth just yet).

If you're diligent and have a green thumb, garden - if you start your plants from seeds, your initial investment is almost nil.

Having one car can make schedules inconvenient if the husband needs it for work but I have somewhere I want to go during the day. But, we've found that having a bus pass and walking has cut our gas cost in half. You'd also be surprised how many errands can be put off until the husband's next day off, or at least until he returns from work, when the alternative is an hour round-trip on the bus. And shopping at somewhere like Walmart or the other big stores where things are theoretically cheaper only saves you money if you don't have to drive there. Walking is free!

I'll post more as things come to mind!

Recap of Ethnic Festival

The Ethnic Festival was last weekend! Lots of salsa music, belly-dancing, Indian food, Greek, German, Italian, etc. Lots of fun. And St. Anthony's has three booths, every year, one with gyros, spanakopita, saganaki and such, one with something special like freshly-made loukoumades (like doughnuts, sort of) or baklava sundaes, and one with pastries. I do the pastry booth, every year. It's a woman thing, sort of. :) There are women in the gyros booth, but no men in the pastry tent. Who knows why.
Anyhow, my first shift was Saturday morning. I got there shortly after 10, thinking 10-ish is when we were supposed to set up. Panic moment - everything in packages and boxes, all pastries boxed in the freezer truck, signs not even up, and ME THE ONLY CHICK. In setting up, my job is to fetch, carry, find, arrange, all of it taking orders from one of the women who's done it forever. I've done it enough years I know what's IN everything, I look at the names of the pastries and go, "Oh yeah, that's the one", but I don't do the setting up! And it was just me until about 10:30, dashing about trying to decide what to do first. Then women start showing up - fellow white-bread Americans less experienced than ME, who have never even been at the festival before, and were less familiar than I was with what the pastries were. So guess who ended up giving the orders!!! I pulled in someone from the gyros tent to match up pastries and labels, and we got signs up, labels out, and found at least one tray of everything to have out in case worst-case scenario happened and we were all who'd signed up for the morning. I figured we were going to have to wing our first transactions with the change and singles from our purses, because we didn't know where to look for the cash box. But hey, IF we were it, we at least had stuff out, covered, and bare-bones ready to go.
Then the cavalry swooped in! Annette, wonderful woman, kept apologizing for changing what I'd set up - like I wasn't ready to fall down and kiss her feet for saving me!! Which I totally was!! She's one of the ones I usually take orders from! I'm taking notes this year, to save somewhere for next year, in case I'm on my own again. And then the day actually wasn't that busy - just LONG.