This whole pacifier thing is so much
harder than I’d hoped. Baby falls asleep pretty easily at night
without it, but naps during the day are impossible. He sits in
his crib and cries and cries. Then, between sobs, he starts
asking for his plug. Over the monitor I hear “puh, puh, puh”
(plug) and I know he’s sitting there making the sign and
everything. It breaks my heart. Eventually I give in and give
him the plug. When I do he looks so grateful and puts his head
down and goes right to sleep. I know giving in is probably the
worst thing I can do, but, well…. I’m weak.

I know some of you are
suffering from photo withdrawl (not many here and I’m horrible
at updating the real photo site lately), so here are a few to
tide you over. We went to a farmer’s market yesterday and Lex,
as usual, had a great time. He spent most of the time dancing
to the music or trying to rearrange people’s vegetable
displays. He’s a very helpful boy :) We met the Chad-A-Saurus.
Lex was interested and amused and followed him around for
awhile. We also bought some cornbread muffins (Lex was asking
for a snack) and a bunch of multi-color carrots. I think I’ll
cook them up for dinner tonight. The first pic here is just
from dinner the other night. The boy gets so messy when he
eats, especially when he gets tired and starts rubbing his eyes
and ears.

Lex is such a toddler these days. It’s
adorable, hysterical, and sometimes frusterating. He likes to
get mad at me and storm off into his room. He can slam his
door, but he can’t open it again :) So I have to go rescue him.
Hehehe… Diaper changes are always fun because he uses both
hands and feet to try to prevent me from putting a new diaper
on him. He fights and fights and says “no, no, no, no.” The
game is to figure out a way to get his hands busy as a
distraction. Sometimes I can sing “The itsy, bitsy spider” and
he’ll do the hand motions. Other times we play “big Lex, little
Lex” and he does the signs. Each diaper change requires a new
game. Another toddler-ism, I vacuumed the house today and you
can just watch him waiver between bold and scare. He runs up to
the vacuum and tries to stand on it, but then suddenly runs
away and hides behind the fan (like that will protect him!). Or
he’ll get his little musical roller toy thing (that is supposed
to be like a lawn mower, we think) and “vacuum” with it. When I
turned on the vacuum today he ran and grabbed his toy and
walked around the bedroom in front of me. I told him he was
doing an excellent first pass :) Then, suddenly, he ran away
and hid behind the chair in the living room. His running is
equally funny to watch. He kicks his legs out to the side and
does a sort of hopping run. He’s pretty good at it though and
can make good time. He’s crazy, crazy, crazy and I love
it!

Had another less than satisfying
experience at Home Depot yesterday. Just me and Lex this time,
trying to place an order for the remaining cabinets we need.
Mind you, I have done *all* of the research and work on this
thing. I have a complete list of what I need and laughed at the
website when it said “bring this list to Home Depot and they
will help you finalize your kitchen and place your order.” Not
my Home Depot! The cabinet lady was so rude to me this time
that I actually walked out on her. I grabbed my list and told
her that she is the rudest most unhelpful person I have ever
met and that I would be taking my business elsewhere. Then I
found a manager and told him as well. I’ve never done that
before! It felt good (until I cried on the phone to Alan later
:) ). The manager was very nice and helped me load the few
items I was able to find into the car. He also said he’d like
to set me up with one of the other cabinet sales people (my
luck she’s the only one there everytime I go) and he hoped they
wouldn’t lose our business. Not like they really care, I’m
sure. So now I’m trying to decided if I should let him set up
an appointment with someone else, or if I should just get in
the car and drive for an hour to the next nearest Home Depot.
Only one Home Depot around here… damn country living!
:)

Over the past week or so, Lex’s vocabulary
has gotten great. He started using multiple phonemes and
repeating, or trying to repeat, words we say. He says “house”
and “mouse” and “milk” and “socks” and “snack” (“nack” really),
but his new favorite word, and activity, is “books.” He says
the word perfectly and he’s become quite the avid reader. Well,
listener anyway, as he forces us to read hundreds of books a
day to him. “Baby Donald Goes to Playland” appears to be his
favorite and it’s an absolutely horrible Disney book. But he
loves it, so we read it about 20 times a day. Sometimes he’ll
bring me a book, say “book”, then drop it on the floor so he
can make the sign, then pick it back up and hand it to me :)
Very smart baby. And silly. Today he came up to me, book in
hand, and said “dogs.” I was confused and almost corrected him,
but then I noticed the book he had was “Doggies” by Sandra Boynton. My
favorite is “Hey! Wake Up!” also by Sandra
Boynton. On the page that says “Shout out loud, GOOD MORNING
SUN, HAPPY MORNING EVERYONE” I shout it out loud and Lex laughs
and laughs. He now expects it and as soon as we turn to the
page he whips his head around to look at me :)

Anyway, lots going on these days. We spent
about 5 hours in Home Depot yesterday trying to order cabinets.
It was pretty much a nightmare. We were too disorganzied (the
three of us and Alan’s parents) and didn’t quite know what we
wanted, I had a few false assumptions that I didn’t state
clearly so no one was able to correct, and our sales lady was
less than helpful. So it was long and annoying. But we do owe a
big thanks to Grandpa Don for being such a great babysitter! We
ended up with a quote for $8200 *choke* and went home to
regroup and put the baby to bed. After dinner and some online
research we saw the error in our ways. We were being quoted
full custom cabinetry and that’s not exactly what we had the
budget for. We ended up going back and buying about half of
what we need in prefab cabinets that you can buy right off the
shelf. Lower quality (yes, I’ll admit it), but more inline with
the wallet. So, by 10:00pm (we closed Home Depot!!) we finally
made some progress. Don’t worry, Grandpa was babysitting the
sleeping boy at home. We didn’t keep either of them up that
late! :)

Today we did some online
research at Consumer Reports and went to Sears with a list of
appliances we needed, hoping for a Labor Day sale. Turns out
they don’t have a Labor Day sale (well, they have a standard
sale that lasts for a few weeks, but nothing specific) and,
more importantly, they didn’t have anything we needed! Another
wasted trip! At least Lex had fun climbing on the treadmills,
riding the lawn mowers, and “helping” other customers with
their shopping.

So here we are,
shopping online. Why do we bother leaving the house anyway?
:)

On a bright note, we went to the
house yesterday to do measurements (another aggrivation at Home
Depot) and met the current owners (ok) and one of our
soon-to-be neighbors. He was very nice and has two Golden
Retrievers. Lex was in heaven. I told the guy that it would be
very hard to keep Lex out of his yard. He laughed and said his
boys are both grown and there are no grandkids yet, so he’d
love company from a friendly baby. The dogs even let Lex sit on
them! All will be good once the remodeling is done and we’re
living in our new house.