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.

Babies are so funny. We decided that it’s
time to take away the pacifier (poor baby). He has fallen
asleep easily, plug free, for the past three nights. I was
amazed. But today I tried to take it away during naps (I wasn’t
feeling up to it the first two days) and he screamed and
screamed. I held out for almost an hour (again, poor baby), but
finally gave it to him. As soon as he was plugged he fell over
and went right to sleep. He seems to be equally tired during
the day as he is at night, so I think it’s really interesting
that he doesn’t miss it at night. He’s also been sleeping later
in the mornings (6:30 instead of 6:00) these past few days. I
wonder if that’s just coincidence. Babies are funny. I love
him.

Busy weekend. We went down to
MA this weekend to visit friends and Davis
Farmland. We met our friends Ron & Laura and
their kids there. Lots of fun. Lex is a little young I think
and he didn’t fully appreciate the petting-zoo aspect. His
favorite activites were playing in the animals water dishes,
opening and closing the gates (the baby goats liked that too),
and “milking” the fake cow. :) Then we went to see Jim &
Julie and their bunnies. Lex chased him around and loved
it.

Lex was very, very huggy all
weekend. It’s so sweet. He even walked over to Jim, said “up”
and gave him a big hug. On a side note, we went to a playgroup
today and Lex, as usual, ran around the whole time. But every
now and again he would see me from across the room and run
over, give me a big hug, then get right back to the playing.
He’s sooo sweet!

Since Lex was born (15 months ago today!)
I haven’t had any trouble sleeping. My head hits the pillow and
I’m out. Lately, however, all of that has changed. I find
myself wiped out during the day from this 1st trimester stuff,
but then I lay down and night and can’t sleep. It’s driving me
crazy. Then I’m exhausted in the morning, which just makes my
belly feel worse and makes me more tired all day. Some days I
nap, which is good, I guess. But I wake up feeling ill and
can’t sleep that night. Sounds like a lose/lose situation, huh?
Thankfully this all goes away in the 2nd trimester (please,
please, please).

It occured to me the
other day that it’s probably for the best that you don’t
remember much about your first few years of life. During that
time you take a lot of tumbles and those around you make their
learning mistakes. It comforts me to think that Lex will not
find himself later in life looking back and feeling bad that
mommy left him in his crib for an hour or was absolutley no fun
to play with for several months on end. It’s probably best for
all of us that we don’t remember those early years :)

Today we are off to look at the house again
(measurments and photos galore) then we get to visit the doctor
and poor Lex gets more shots. He won’t be a happy boy. Maybe
we’ll both nap after that.

There’s much going
on these days. Sadly I feel highly unmotivated. Lex is slowly
switching to one nap a day and I don’t think I’m ready for
that. Not until this morning (all day) sickness passes at
least. This morning I left him in his crib for an hour (happy,
chattering, bouncing, clearly ok) hoping he would take a nap
and giving myself time to quell the nausea. Blah! He didn’t
nap, and the nausea didn’t pass, so I eventually got him up and
we went for a walk instead.

Anyway, the
good news I promised you all a few days ago is that we are
buying a house! We are leaving this great state and moving to
Vermont to a cute little neighborhood. I’m having trouble
getting really excited (see paragraph above), but the to-do
list is endless. The place was built in 1979 and the interior
hasn’t been touched since then, so we have some remodeling to
do before we move in. Yesterday Lex and I went to Home Depot
and came home with a boatload of free stuff :) It was fun. I’m
trying to get excited about the remodeling at least, but it’s a
little overwhelming because we want to do about twice what we
have the budget for. Soooo… as usual, you gotta prioritize.
But it’s all good. And we will celebrate Christmas this year in
a house we own!!! With a big belly and a toddler. What more
could I ask for?

Lex and I went out for a walk this
evening. We were out for an hour and we made it half way up the
street and back. The only reason we made it back was because
Alan got home and Lex went running down the street to see him.
While we were out Lex did an excellent job of rearranging the
rocks in people’s driveways, banging on mailbox posts and
reflector signs, and throwing rocks every which way. He also
did a lot of waving his hands in the air and hollering. I kept
thinking to myself, “He’s crazy, like a….” and the only way I
could finish that thought was “like a one year old.” Crazy like
a one year old.