1 Year Later: My Ordinary Day

I am currently swamped with a backlog of photos and videos and stories about the boys, but as I sat at my computer last night contemplating which to choose to post about I realized I had a perfect post for today already waiting.

It was never my intention to wait an entire year to blog about the perfectly ordinary day we had last year on my birthday, but it's funny how things work out sometimes. Here we are, a year later and this may be a better post than it would have been at the time for the hindsight in it. Also, looking through all the photos was a wonderful way to celebrate my birthday eve.

Without further ado, my ordinary (birth)day one year ago...

I took this picture within minutes of waking up (which was at a very reasonable 7:45 AM). I couldn't have asked for better weather that day.

Of course, beautiful weather couldn't top this: 

Or this:

My boys are still pretty happy guys when they wake up, but back then they were especially full of giggles. 

I got everyone set up in Seth's crib with some toys for a bit of pre-breakfast playtime while I went to start the first of four loads of laundry that needed to get done that day:

In case you're thinking I really let the laundry pile up, four loads is a perfectly ordinary amount of laundry when you have 2 babies.

Really. 

Once I had the machines fired up, I went back to check in on everyone...

... and discovered Seth without pants. At the time this was a pretty spectacular thing, but a year later I can safely say this is also a perfectly ordinary event. 

When one has a perpetual case of the skinny like Seth, pants can be a bit of a challenge after all.

The boys had their morning bottles and it was off for playtime in the living room where the boys raided the bookshelves, wreaked havoc and generally had a good time:

I eventually wrangled everyone back to the nursery without too much incident and we had our morning story time:

Then it was time for lunch:

Yes, we were all still in our pajamas at this point, and yes, this was perfectly ordinary. 

The boys ate four bowls of mushy-mash, which a year later looks sort of funny since they have long since been eating whatever I'm eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but this was then. So mushy-mash it was.

Apparently they ate fork-mashed bananas, carrots that look like ketchup for some reason, sweet potatoes and garden veggies (which was mainly sweet potatoes with some lumpy extras like green beans). We used one spoon per bowl since the boys shared a spoon at the time and I optimistically laid out one cloth for clean-up. Obviously this is a bit of fakery since ordinarily I would have needed at least 6 of those cloths at any given meal. ;)

I made myself a fancy sandwich which was most certainly not ordinary at the time:

What was ordinary however is that I made my lunch after the boys were down for their nap since there was no way to eat while spoon-feeding everyone else back then. 

A side note: Although I always waited until the boys were napping to make my lunch, I used to make really crappy lunches for myself – mostly because I was in a hurry to eat. Something I learned a year ago today:

It really doesn't take much longer to make yourself a nice lunch. A few minutes really.

Having nice lunches became ordinary around here because of my ordinary day. Funny, that.

Also ordinary – cleaning up the lunch mess and a day's worth of bottles: 

After the nap, we headed out for a walk to fetch a cake thanks to the nice weather:

Everyone looked a little suspicious for some reason. 

Suppertime pics which I took between supper and dessert:

Dessert at the time for my babies was Mum-Mum biscuits so bibs weren't really required. 

I, on the other hand, had cake: 

And one of my favorite pics from that day, because I can't look at it without hearing this: 

"Hey Mom – your cake's on fire!"

A quick tidy-up in the kitchen, followed by getting the boys ready for bed, followed by some pre-bed playtime. This time we raided the kitchen bookshelf: 

We also made what I considered at the time to be a "big mess" in the nursery:

I'm so glad I hadn't looked at these photos in almost a year because this one gave me a particularly big laugh. This looks downright orderly compared to the level of destruction we are capable of now, but at the time (even though this was quite ordinary) I really thought it was a big deal. 

I thought I was really going to show you all something.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Lastly we've come to the end of my ordinary day where I was as ordinarily exhausted as I always am at the end of all our ordinary days and as eager as I am on a perfectly ordinary basis to see this: 

My perfectly ordinary bed.

The end.

- L.

PS. There is likely a video coming later. I'll update here if/when it happens. : )

Men With Brooms

– Hi everyone. It's us. In case you wondering what we is doing... 

–... we is launching our first joint business venture. Is very exciting time!

– Is very exciting, but also we is professionals.
– Oh yes. We is all about top-notch service everyone. We clean your floors and bring all our own equipment too.
– And we not know word like "overkill" when it comes to basic maintenance.
– No. 'Dis is word we not know yet so you is safe. 

– We pride ourselves on quality inspection. We make sure job done right.
– Also Mommy give us glowing review. 

– Big or small, we handle it all.
– Got a job for us? Give us a call! 

– I try to wear better fitting pants next time, everyone.
– Shhh. I wave broom around some more. Maybe no one notice.

- L.

If You Have Sandwiches, Now Would Be A Good Time To Send Them

A mommy confession: a few nights before I took pics of the guys in their workout gear, I had put Seth in just a pair of the pants and let him run around the nursery shirtless*. He looked like such a little dude cruising around that evening and after going on and on about it later to my mom I told her I'd take some pics.

Which I did – but we'll get to that in a minute.

The thing is, we all already know Seth is a skinny guy – and for that matter so is Nate. I've been meaning for some time now to post my boys' height/weight stats from their 1 year check-up and this at least seems like a relevant post, so here are the particulars:

Nate: 20.5 lbs. (9.30 kg.) | 30 in. (76 cm.)

Seth: 18.75 lbs. (8.5 kg.) | 30 in. (76 cm.)

This is the biggest disparity in weight they've ever had, but they are once again exactly the same height so Seth was clearly spending his time growing vertically even more than usual. Nate is somewhere over the 25th percentile, but that was about as specific as the pediatrician got, and by the time she was entering Seth's stats into the computer we'd already been there going on two hours and I think we were all pretty weary at that point so I forgot to ask. I have a feeling he may have dipped below the 10th percentile at this point though.

Call it a hunch.

For the record, this is what I see when I look at Seth sans shirt: 

See what I mean? Such a little dude! I think he looks ready to do a few rounds in the ring in this pic.

So I kept clicking. 

This is Skinny standing next to Slim. Hmm... looking a little bony in the shoulders there, but I think the camera/lighting is creating some extra shadows or something. Isn't the camera supposed to add weight?

Here's Nate letting it all hang out – and even at that you can see his ribs pretty clearly – but I bet you didn't even notice because you were too busy getting your eyes poked out from the bones on that poor starving child in the background. At the time, I didn't happen to have a sandwich handy, so I kept on with the clicking.

And then things got... interesting?

I never imagined what Seth might look like if he went out of his way to look as skinny as possible – and you don't have to, because here's what it looks like: 

That's Seth on tippy-toes, sucking in his tummy, trying to figure out if he can reach what his little eyes have spied on top of the cabinet**.

And just when I was about to race out to the kitchen to make an entire tray of sandwiches, he did this and I nearly dropped the camera: 

Oy. So much for my shadows and light theory.

So uhmmm... yeah. Send sandwiches. As many as you can spare. We'll be waiting.

*sigh*

- L.

* Half-nakey (AKA "fakey-nakey") is our compromise to what was formerly known as Nakey Time. I was forced to revisit our nakey policy at The Oddest Prime after an incident that was as epic as it was gross. If you're not sure what I'm getting at, the phrase, "he was molding it like potter's clay" (which were words that actually came out of my mouth after the incident) should be enough to steer you in the right direction.

** What Seth spied were some Goldfish crackers. Just to be clear, that is my starving child you've just witnessed attempting to reach for food as though his life depends on it. If only a serving of mommy-guilt was high in calories, I would have shared it with him. Instead we had crackers. Lots of crackers.