Eli started his first swimming lessons last week and had a blast! He’s taking the class at our gym, and there are three things I love about this setup:
1. I can put Charlie in the gym’s kids club, rather than chasing him around the pool (and trying to keep him out, which if you’ve seen how crazy active he is now, you know it would be impossible). This is the main reason why I decided to do lessons here – there are lots of great swim classes at various locations near our house, but this was KEY!
2. They only have four kids in each class, so Eli gets lots of one-on-one time with the teacher.
3. They have the class in the “therapy pool” – the hospital nearby sometimes does water therapy with patients here in this pool, which is probably 80 degrees or warmer. Eli has no qualms about getting in because it’s so comfortable.
Here’s Eli practicing straight arms -
Trying out the straight arms holding the float bar -
Not-so-straight : )
The teacher showing the kids how to kick -
I think this was Eli’s favorite part -
Attempting the back float : )
His cute class (the two on the right are brother/sister) -
Jumping in and putting his face in the water -
The teacher (Pam) would do “swirly whirlies” every time one of the kids jumped in and get their face in. Basically this was spinning around in the water and Eli loved it.
Eli had a hard time keeping his bum on the step while he was waiting for his turn -
I love the crazy pool hair :)
Jumping off the step toward the teacher -
Eli turned 3 this week!! I am behind with blogging but am hoping to catch up tomorrow or by Monday. It’s been a good (but BUSY) week, which is the theme of the next few weeks… hopefully I can get some blogging in here and there.
It totally makes my day to see my kids interacting happily together, which usually happens in the morning and gets less frequent by the end of the day :)
Take this for example (Eli making Charlie laugh – this is my fav. video – afterward he said, “I’m cracking up my brother!” and seemed pleased with this):
I love hearing Eli sing too – here he is singing songs to Gram over the phone (though Ben and I were laughing after watching this about how similar Eli is to Ben when talking on the phone – sometimes they both just zone out):
This morning Eli said to me, “That’s crafty!” and then immediately asked, “Is that creative?” Funny how he puts those words in context with each other.
And lately he’s been appearing by my side of the bed in the middle of the night for random reasons – I often wake up at 2 a.m. to the whites of his eyes staring at me in the dark. It’s a little spooky. Last night he told me, “The sound machine is making me feel stressed out!” I walked him back into his room, turned the sound machine down and tucked him into bed.
Meanwhile, Charlie is the teething machine and I just realized it today. He has three molars poking through his gums along with a fourth tooth in the bottom middle area. He’s been screaming a lot more lately for no particular reason, so now I can blame all of his crabbiness on the teeth! Poor little guy. I’m amazed he’s been as happy as he has been lately with those teeth pushing through.
You know how much I love to enter (and win!) contests… well I’m excited to say that I’m going to host a giveaway of my own!
Last month I received an email from a rep from CSN Stores, which has more than 200 online stores selling all kinds of great stuff – fabulous tv stands, furniture, toys, home decor, etc. She asked if I would be interested in either doing a product review from one of their stores or hosting a giveaway (or both). I opted to do both and split the gift certificate amount with one of my readers!
So watch in the next week or so for my first official giveaway – you’ll have the chance to win a $25 gift certificate to any of the CSN stores online.
In the meantime, I’m going to order a new stockpot from www.cookware.com (one of the CSN stores) and I’ll post a review after it arrives. I’ve wanted a new stockpot for years, but it’s one of those things that kept getting pushed down the list of things to buy.
Let me know if you have any advice – I’m trying to decide if a 12-quart stockpot is good enough (remember my kitchen storage isn’t exactly spacious) or if I should go for the larger 20-quart stockpot. While it would be great to have a 20-quart, I’m not sure how often I would actually be needing that much volume.
Any thoughts?? And if you have a favorite stockpot, let me know!
FTC Disclosure: Thanks to CSN Stores for contacting me about this great promotional opportunity. I am receiving a $25 gift certificate that I will apply toward the aforementioned stockpot in return for a pre-review and a review.
I’m doing a little catch-up on the blog tonight after a very, very long week. I received an email from my friend Marci, whose 10-day-old nephew passed away unexpectedly in his sleep. I get teary even now, thinking about how difficult that would be to experience as a new mom, with your first baby (or any of your babies, but especially your first). I’ve been praying for this family and hoping they can feel strength and peace during this hard time.
And on a totally different note, another reason it was a long week was because of this:
I FINALLY convinced Ben that we should paint the family room/ceiling. Which was great. I was thrilled to move forward with something that I had wanted to do since we moved in to this house nearly two years ago. It helped that I had scored a free makeover from a local designer, Jodie Shields of Home and Haven Designs. I was at the gym a few weeks ago and saw a sign up on the board advertising for a free room makeover, so I emailed and called her as soon as I got home. Unfortunately, she responded saying she had already filled her free spots. But then a few days later, she emailed saying the third person hadn’t worked out and she wanted to see if I was still interested (which of course I was!!). It has been so fun to work with her and see her ideas for the lovely family room. Remember when I wrote in to the HGTV show, Dear Genavieve?? This is much better :)
SO – I met a handyman two weeks ago that gave me a great quote on painting the family room walls. But over the weekend, I somehow convinced Ben that it would be great to paint the ceiling too. I got a quote (over the phone) for the handyman to do the ceiling too, but then when he and his guys arrived the following Tuesday, he said it would actually be the same price as the walls, it would be a lot of work and time, etc.
RED FLAG should have gone up. But it didn’t.
My experience with this handyman was HORRIBLE. The painting job that was supposed to take one day took three days. And he kept tacking on charges to random stuff. By the third day, I confronted him about the prices he was charging (he was adding on extra $$ to the cost of the paint and other supplies). He towered over me and yelled that I was taking advantage of him, that this was obviously taking a long time and he was going to end up paying the guys working on the project out of his own pocket, etc. (while I was thinking, you gave me a quote and now you’re making me feel bad about it??)
It was a nightmare. Our house was a MESS since they had moved all of the junk in the family room (except for those two bookshelves) out into the office and dining room. The handyman’s guys didn’t speak English, so I attempted to communicate with them with my poor Spanish. It turned out one of them is LDS and goes to one of the city wards. The two workers were great, worked hard, etc. The main guy though, was AWFUL. I felt totally taken advantage of and ripped off by the time it was all over. Which really stunk since Ben has dragged his heels about spending any money on this room to begin with.
BUT… I’m trying not to dwell on it too much. The room is painted and we’ll move forward. Here’s kind of a lousy after shot – the room will look much cuter in a few weeks or months as we work with Jodie.
Another difficult part to the week was on Mother’s Day… Ben’s tradition is to bring breakfast in bed. Yesterday he brought me a plate full of good stuff – lots of fruit, hash browns, bacon, and mango juice. I tried to eat quickly since we had church at 9 a.m.
However, by about 8:30 a.m. I was feeling really queasy and Charlie was super fussy/tired. So we decided that I would stay home and rest and give Charlie a nap too. Ben took Eli with him to church (and sat in the congregation with him, instead of up on the stand – Ben said Eli was BEAMING the whole time and was so good - Ben doesn’t usually get to sit with us). I fell back asleep (feeling queasy still) and woke up to hearing Charlie waking up in the other room a few hours later, around noon.
By that point, I was VERY nauseous and weak and could barely get out of bed to go pick up Charlie from his crib. We slowly headed downstairs and I laid on the family room floor, trying not to cry from the awful stomach pain until Ben and Eli got back home a little while later.
I finally threw up (a few times) around 2:30. Ohhhhhhhh my stomach hurt so much. Ben realized that he had used the wrong bacon and felt horrible that he made me sick on Mother’s Day!!! I had bought a new package of bacon, but hadn’t thrown the old one out for some dumb reason. It wasn’t super obvious that the old bacon was outdated because it was pre-cooked.
I felt a little better after throwing up, but I was still super weak and tired the rest of the day. Gram, Mary Ann, and Davey came over in the evening for Mother’s Day dinner (they had church in the afternoon, so we didn’t have any way of warning them that I was sick), but I wasn’t able to eat anything. Thankfully, I felt a lot better today and I think the bad stuff it out of me now.
Poor Ben. He had good intentions :) It might be a little while before I can eat bacon again though.
I don’t want this post to be all negative, so I’m ending it with a few funny videos of the boys from the last week – the first is Eli playing peek-a-boo with Charlie:
The next is Charlie saying “ELI!” – he says Eli at the end (sounds like “E-I!”). Charlie has become very interactive over the last few weeks and says a lot of words now. It’s fun to hear him copy what we’re saying and to see his excitement when we understand what he is trying to communicate.
