Skeeved Out

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The boys got us all colds for the holidays.

What began as a tingling in my nose quickly developed into a sore throat followed by a full blown head cold!

This is only the second cold the boys have ever had. But this one was a champion mucus producer!

I had no idea that this much snot could come out of someone so small!

One year olds don't know how to blow their noses.

They do it once in a while, usually without a tissue in front of them and produce phenomenal snot bubbles, but rarely can you get them to blow into the tissue. Typically they just want to rip it to shreds and/or chew on it.

Colds aside, Christmas was fantastic!

Christmas eve was wonderful. My sister and her family, plus a few friends, came for lunch. They got to spend time spoiling the boys and exchanging gifts. I love spending time with family and now that we have the boys, it's becoming more and more important to me. My niece and her friends even helped me decorate the sugar cookies that we would be bringing with us to the in-laws house on Christmas day.

For my entire life Christmas day has always been the same: Wake up, do stockings, eat breakfast and then open gifts. This Christmas was the first one I can remember not doing breakfast in between stockings and gifts. In order to keep the kids entertained we went right into gifts from stockings and then enjoyed a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon.

Mmmmmm bacon! Best. Food. Ever!

The rest of the morning was pretty laid back. My mom, who had spent the night, headed home to get ready for Christmas dinner - and catch a nap- can you say jealous?! We played with the kids' new toys, showered and headed to my in-laws house.

I love my in-laws. I know, I know, I'm supposed to have some level of dislike for the in-laws and call them out-laws or something but that's just not the case.

They are wonderful people who are fun to be with.

My mother-in-law is a great cook and meals are always delicious. Also, she never lets me help with anything aside from clearing the table so it's like a little vacation when we are there!

Even though their colds were full-blown the boys were good for the evening. Of course a little dimetapp to control the congestion and an additional dozen or so people to entertain them didn't hurt either!

The ride home was mostly uneventful except for this sudden, gag-inducing odor that emanated from the backseat!

Ugh! It was so disgusting!!!

We pulled into the first gas station we could find (which was closed because of the holiday) emptied out the back of the Explorer to make room to change a diaper and unloaded the engineer expecting a blow-out of epic proportions. We pulled him from the carseat, laid him on the deck, unzipped his pajamas only to discover that he was clean and mostly dry.

Hubby got busy unbuckling the stuntman as I reassembled the, now screaming and seriously pissed off engineer and got him buckled back in. I rushed back to the stuntman unzipped his pajamas and discovered the same thing. Clean and mostly dry.

O! M! G! Do you know what that means?!

That was one serious fart!

How something so small could produce and odor like that is beyond me. I need to figure out what I fed him that would cause that odor and never feed it to him again!

We reassembled baby number two, got him buckled in and the car repacked and continued down the road. It took about two miles before they both settled down, stopped screaming and passed out.

Hubby took the next couple of days off from work. It was great having him here...sort of.

I love spending time with him but sometimes - and this was one of them - his presence more of a burden than any sort of help at all.

Hubby is so overwhelmed by the amount of clutter - translation: toys - that he has decided that building the playroom in the basement can't wait. As a result, he spent the bulk of the weekend working on wiring and sub-flooring.

He keeps his tools in our garage. He tried to grab everything he needed so that he could just stay downstairs and work but there were times that he needed additional tools.

As long as daddy was out of sight, the kids were fine.

Every time he would emerge from the basement they would toddle over to him exclaiming, "Da da da da!" They were so excited that the 'fun guy" was home!

He'd play with them for a minute then head into the garage to find whatever tool brought him up from the basement in the first place and the kids would begin screaming because he had left them. Like puppies with no concept of time, they would get all excited when he came back in from the garage greeting him with another chorus of, "Da da da da!"

He'd play with them again - not like he had any choice, they were on his legs like velcro - and then head into the basement to get back to work leaving me with two screaming toddlers.

Each time he came up for air, I had to stop what I was doing and distract the kids long enough to forget that the "fun guy" was behind that door!

When not consoling distraught 13-month olds, I kept myself busy by making more cookies to take to a party and steam cleaning the kitchen floor.

I'm pretty far from being a neat-nick but I do try to keep things relatively clean especially since the kids like to eat things that they find on the floor. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that the stuntman throws his Cheerios on the floor just so he can eat them later.

After I was finished with the steam cleaner I emptied the fresh water tank and asked hubby to take it to the basement for me.

He carried it down the steps and put it on "my side" of the basement, (You know? The side with the washer and dryer :), came upstairs to get something and when he had returned discovered that the cleaner had begun to leak on the cement floor.

He completely freaked out.

Evidently I had not seated the tank properly and the cleaning solution was leaking out onto the CEMENT floor.

The most amazing part of this whole scenario is that he works with pools and high tech pool equipment for a living! You'd think, based on his reaction, that he'd never seen water before.

I grabbed a couple of dirty towels off the floor of "my side," dried up the mess and reseated the tank. Problem solved - I'm a hero! Ha.

I will never understand his instinct to panic. I guess each person is different that way.

I might panic over things like...oh a spider for instance, but have something catastrophic happen in front of me and I'm calm as a cucumber.

I hate spiders!

For Christmas the boys' cousins gave them two packs of these really cool small square foam pieces that have letters and numbers in the middle of them and dovetail sides so that they can be connected to make blocks or a mat for the floor.  Trying to contain the clutter, I grabbed an empty bin from the basement (that hubby couldn't seem to find) to put them in when the boys are not playing with them.

After bringing the bin upstairs and putting the foam pieces into it, I was sitting on the floor of the playroom with the boys when a huge spider ran across the rug in an attempt to escape. Evidently I had transported him upstairs with the bin.

Lovely!

I can't even begin to verbalize the noise that emanated from my throat but it brought both my mom and the hubby into the room. I managed to squish the spider but knocked the stuntman onto his butt in the process. He was nonplussed but I was completely skeeved out and had an overwhelming urge to change my clothes less any other arachnids had ventured onto my clothing.

I can deal with most bugs. I may not like them but they don't skeeve me out like spiders do. I've gotten better over the years and have even been known to kill a spider barehanded but the big ones just send me over the edge!

The playroom is coming along nicely! The wiring is completed, lights are installed and dividing wall between the playroom and man-cave are finished. There is now a huge stack of drywall on the floor and hubby is chomping at the bit to get back to it.

For now though, he is at work, the boys are napping and I have my peace and quiet back.