Sitting and onions?

Sooo..my kid smells like onions right now.

Why, you ask?

Well because he insisted he wanted to take a bite out of the onion I had out for dinner. 

Insisted.

So Ryan peeled it while I yelled "wait! I need the camera!"

SO stubborn stinker Aidan (who I tried to talk out of it), took a bite.

And hated it.

Soooooo glad I grabbed the camera hahaha!!

This afternoon we had some relaxing fun...I'm not going to lie.  I broke out the Christmas movies for Aidan today.

I'm hoping it will give him a better idea of Santa and Christmas before Christmas Day is actually here.

Mason is now getting pretty good at supported sitting. He can actually sit up with his butt snuggled inside the boppy for a decent amount of time.

He and Aidan had some quality time today, and it was so cute because as soon as I had Mason sitting up, Aidan exclaimed" I go get you cars Mason!", and came running back with his giant remote controlled Lightning McQueen.

And Mason loved it.

Waffles and Rocking horses

Just a quick memo about our Sunday morning.

Aidan helped me make waffles, so we pulled up a chair and got busy. Once we were done, he insisted he had to eat them with powdered sugar on them, which is how Michele's guys eat theirs. Ok, wish granted.

There was powdered sugar everywhere, because he insisted he had to eat them standing on his chair at the kitchen island. Ah well...pick and choose my battles, right? 

At least he ate breakfast!

After breakfast I got out the wooden rocking horse that was Ryan's that my in-laws brought down to us. I plan on using it for photo sessions, and have a super fun idea for a christmas picture for Aidan. 

But first, poor horsie needs a new tail. I got some yarn this week to fix him up, but today I just didn't have time since I was on my way out the door to do a photo session. 

Well, anyway Aidan hopped right on the horse and has been playing with it ever since. There's a reason classic toys like that are so classic!!

Mason updates

Hmm...where to begin?

With Torticollis. Which is what Mason was born with. It just means that on one side of his neck the muscles didn't develop properly because of how he was hanging out in the womb. This caused one side to be tighter than the other, causing him to have a tendency to "look" to the right whenever he was laying down. We noticed it very shortly after he was born because Aidan had it too.

 I guess we can totally blame my shortness and the fact that these poor kids had no room in the womb to stretch out causing this mess.

With Aidan it was a relatively easy fix. We would stretch his neck to the opposite side and eventually he started looking both ways on his own.

Mason has been a much tougher nut to crack.

The pediatrician had pointed it out at Mason's 1 month visit, long after Ryan and I had already noticed it. It was already starting to cause a flat spot on the back of his head because he was always laying on that side, even though Ryan and I had been proactively turning his head to the left whenever we saw him looking to the right.

She said if we didn't have it under control by the 2 month visit that we could contact Early Intervention and get a physical therapist that would come to the house to work on his neck with us.

Well, like I said Mason is a stubborn kid (Nooooo idea where he gets that from) and would fight us turning his head left at every chance he got. In the summer when we would take nightly walks I would try and jam a receiving blanket next to his head to try and keep him from turning it back to the right. Totally didn't work, he would just smoosh his face into it. I would sneak in while he was sleeping, turn his head, and then check on him 30 mins later and it was right back to the other side.

AAAH frustrating!

So anyway by the time his 2 month visit came, the flat spot on the back of his head was much worse, so we decided to call Early Intervention to get some help. By this time his hair was starting to come in pretty good and you could see that the spot where he always lays has almost no hair compared to the rest of his head.

It took almost 8 weeks just to get them to our house for an evaluation, and another 2 weeks from that point to even get a Physical Therapist to our house to work with us.

Once our therapist started coming she mentioned she was concerned that the pressure on the flat spot on the back of his head had created a slight bulge to form on his forehead. She mentioned he might need a helmet to help correct that but since it was so minimal she wasn't sure. So she called the Orthotist in Allentown and he offered to measure his head, and then measure it in another month to see if it was getting any better.

So we went for our consultation and it turns out that his poor little head is more misshapen that it actually looks. He said we could still wait a month and measure him again, but I could tell he didn't think anything would change. 

SO I decide right then and there that we were going to go forward with the helmet to help Mason have a nice round dome for the rest of his life. 

Sure, people at the grocery store will stare. People will wonder "what's wrong" with him, but I don't care. He'll have a nice round normal head later on in life and hopefully he will thank us for it.

He went on Tuesday to get a mold made of his head with plaster. I wanted to take pictures so Ryan was going to come along and help out, but Aidan spiked a fever that day so Ryan stayed home with him instead.

They put a sock over his head and put the plaster on in 2 pieces, and let it dry. The whole thing took maybe 10-15 minutes total. Not long at all, and Mason did really good, he grunted a lot but didn't actually start crying until about 30 seconds before the guy was done. Not bad considering he said most babies let out blood curdling screams throughout the whole process.

My buddy is a trooper though. :)

SO it will come in the week after Thanksgiving, and he will have to wear it for 3 months. We ordered it in Camo, so he'll be jut a little bit cooler, and hey, maybe we'll let Aidan put some stickers on it for him too.

Stay tuned for Double H's pics coming soon! (Double H stands for Helmet Head hahaha)

"You're going to make me wear what?"

Pumpkin Bread

Since we never got a chance to carve our pumpkins this year, (yes the week before trick or treat night was THAT busy around here) I decided to turn the pumpkins into my favorite homemade pumpkin bread.

I used the recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens cook book, which I refer to as my Cooking Bible.

You need to know anything about anything cooking related? You can find it in this book.

Anyway after nap time I had a very happy Aidan so I decided a project would be fun. He loves to wear his apron and be my helper.

Now that's some HOT pumpkin!

When I got out both my bread loaf pans he was insistent that the one with all the old burnt on stains was to be mine, and that the new clean one would be his.

Since I was making 2 loaves I decided to add chocolate chips to one which proved to be a giant fail.

They all sunk to the bottom and burnt to the pan so when I slid the loaf of bread out of the pan all the chocolate chips stayed behind.

Hah you would never even have known it had chips in it!

Of course you can't have chocolate chips out in front of a 2 yr old without letting them indulge just a bit....

It turned out delicious but I sent the majority of both loaves hunting with Ryan and another chunk with Aidan over to Michele's house. If I hadn't, both loaves would have been gone in 2 days!

Breakfast Cheese?

Aidan is not a breakfast person most days.

SO to replace the food he doesn't eat in the mornings we give him chocolate Pediasure to fill in the gaps.

Make no mistake, "chocolate milk" is the first thing he asks for when he opens his eyes.

Today however I decided to offer him something other than breakfast food for breakfast just for curiosity sake.

He agreed to cheese and crackers and to make it a little more fun, we used our mickey shaped cheese!

It was all worth it when he started eating it and said "thank you for the mickey cheese mommy!"

the F-U-P truck

True Story:

For some reason Aidan keeps referring to the UPS truck as an FUP truck.

(OK, so initially he was calling it the F-U truck, which had Stacy and I giggling on our trip to the Cider Mill when he saw one pull out of the parking lot...)

But I digress.

Aidan also has a basketball themed bedroom furniture set. Basically because it was on sale, and the kid needed a dresser. It's not my favorite style of furniture, but it's cute and does the job. It has a white board and a cork board on the side of the back mirror, and on the side it even has a little locker.

He loves that locker. In fact, he's been known to stuff it full with all his stuffed animals, aaaaand then freak out because he forgot they were in there and he can't find them. 

But, I digress again.

the point of all this information is that Aidan has recently taken to climbing inside the locker on this dresser, telling me he is getting into his F-U-P truck and is going to work.

he is quite content to climb in and out closing the door behind himself for an extended period of time.

Boy, is he easy to entertain!

Cat's Baby Shower

Another boy. 

That's right, we're adding another BOY to the already almost exclusively boy-filled circle of friends that we have.

In fact quite a few of my friends have 2 boys already or are expecting their 2nd boy.

Cat is expecting a little boy in November, and his name will be Jax. I simply can't wait to meet him!!

It's insane.

Poor Kenzie has to deal with all these boys, so I bet she'll grow up to be able to hold her own. Or she'll never be able to get a date because of all her overprotective pseudo big brothers!

Funny as it is that almost all my friends have boys, the shower had all the people who have girls there:  We got to see Kira:

and Ava too!

Aidan and Ava had a great time playing with Aidan's monster trucks and Aidan was a stinker too because he kept saying "her kicked me", in regards to Ava. Now mind you, there's obviously no way she could have kicked him, but he just had to try to get her in trouble anyway.....

Later on we got to see Zack too, and mischief ensued:

Unfortunately the shower ran into what would normally be Aidan's nap time so towards the end he was a little crabby and when I told him it was time to go he said no, shoved me away from him and said "get away from me!"

So I put him in time out in a booth and Cat came over to talk him, and it looked pretty serious so I grabbed the camera and took a shot.

Later at work she filled me in on what the conversation was about. Apparently he wanted to get down and she told him he couldn't yet because Mommy had put him there and since he did the crime he had to do the time. He then looked at her all serious-like and said "but I did my time!"