Say what you will about gatorade and all it's flammable chemicals, but yesterday morning my two-year old was vomiting handfuls of blood clots after even so much as a single teaspoon of pedialyte, laying limp in my arms murmuring nonsense, and three hours after starting him on a regimen of 5 mls of gatorade every 10 minutes, he was sitting up, ( Read more... )

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Simon has been a thumbsucker since day one, but for the last two weeks he's literally been sucking it bloody. I thought it was due to weaning, but today, while I was watching him from across the room while he sat on Mark's lap reading a book, a lightbulb went off in my head. He was gnawing voraciously on a product safety registration postcard ( Read more... )

In April, Mark will be taking Simon down to California to spend four nights with family. I will be staying here. I'll pause just a moment to let that sink in. To let you all internalize what that means ( Read more... )

Life with a toddler is at once total chaos, and painfully- no, EXCRUCIATINGLY slow. Earlier today it took Simon and I half an hour to walk from our car into the Mexican restaurant - a distance of less than 500 feet. There were rocks to pick up and examine. There were bushes. Bushes. Bushes! Mama bushes!! Mama, mama, ( Read more... )

Found this message in my email last night. This is why my job rocks.

Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2012 6:53 p.m.
To: Oregonstaff ( Read more... )

My due date was one year ago today. I was certain I would pop at any minute. Little did I know it would be two more weeks before I went into labor, literally minutes before being induced at 42 weeks, 1 day pregnant. I remember feeling very neurotic at that point. My mom was in town and I was going for frequent non-stress tests to check the ( Read more... )

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It only took two days for us to throw out the "donation to charity for every curse word" rule. If we had stuck to that, Mark and I would be living under the burnside bridge right now, and Simon would be a ward of the state. Neither of us have been able to go a whole day without cursing yet. But we are trying ( Read more... )

Simon isn't talking yet, but he definately recognizes and responds to certain words, like Mama, Dada, milk, book, and bath. And he's moved beyond the mamamamas and bababababas, stringing together numerous syllables to form unintelligible baby sentences, which he punctuates with matter-of-fact hand gestures. He also does this strange guttural ( Read more... )