Author: Melissa

This is not the time for anger

Melissa

but I can’t help it.  Toys R Us, sucks 🙁  We ordered a very special gift for our little guy and paid for overnight shipping and it NEVER showed up.  It was the first gift he EVER directly asked for and I cannot tell you how disappointed I am that it did not arrive.

We will have a great day anyway but it’s still pretty crappy to tell people that they’ll have a Christmas gift if they make the cutoff and pay the outrageous shipping charges and then let them down.  Scrooges.

It’s goody day!

Melissa

Every year we put together tins of goodies for friends and family and today is the big day.  We’ve got two pans of fudge cooling so we’ll take a break to have lunch and then take Monkey out in the snow to burn off some of the sugar he has consumed today.  This afternoon we’ll start on the cookies.

On another note, it is still snowing, which is quite exciting.  It reminds me of Christmases years ago when we always had snow on the ground.

Oh, and…Monkey pooped on the potty today. ALL BY HIMSELF!  He was wearing boxers and asked for a diaper.  I told him he was wearing boxers today so if he needed to pee he had to go in the potty.  He asked for a diaper again so I added that if he had to poop he needed to go on the potty as well.  Well.  He dropped his boxers on the kitchen floor, walked to the bathroom and put his stool by the toilet.  He likes to rest his feet on it while he’s sitting on the toilet and he pees standing up so I knew this was a big deal.  I grabbed his potty seat and a book and left the room as instructed.  He jumped off the potty and took off for his bookshelf.  I’d given him the wrong book!  As soon as he located the one he wanted he ran back to the potty and sat until he was ALL DONE!  This is HUGE!  Yay potty training!

Errr, forgot to hit “Publish” lol, two batches of cookie dough are now finished as well.  I should probably do at least two more before bed.

There is magic in the first snowfall.

Melissa

Our neighborhood is friendly but it’s still an urban neighborhood.  We know a handful of the families closest to us but beyond that we hardly even exchange waves.  After a large snowstorm like this one, though, people all come out to start the clean up process the next morning and it’s almost like a block party.

Duhdee and his two friends from next door spent the morning clearing out our two houses as well as the houses of two of our older neighbors.  While they were doing that I pulled Monkey up and down the street in his sled.  Everyone we passed spoke to us with smiles even as they labored to clear the 10 inches of snow from their driveways.  The other kids in the neighborhood were running up and down the street with sleds of their own and staging snowball fights.  It was like a movie set of New England in the winter.

Monkey and I took a break to warm up and had hot chocolate.  He normally won’t drink anything warm but he really enjoyed it.  He also enjoyed the bit of Fluff I put in it, lol.  No marshmellows!  A bit later I looked out and saw that Cupcake was now outside playing as well.  We quickly suited back up and joined her.  She and Monkey shared a sled ride up the street and back.  Cupcake was so excited by the snow she just couldn’t contain herself.  She would laugh and shake her head wildly from side to side.  I jumped up and down clapping which she found very funny.  She tried to copy me but the best she could manage was stomping one foot.  She’s just such a doll.

The afternoon found Monkey drifting off to sleep on the livingroom floor.  He was cuddled with his blankies and a pillow while watching the slide show of pictures on our television.  Duhdee and I took advantage of the time to just sit and watch the pictures ourselves.  We chatted about all sorts of things.  The stress of special needs parenting, how lucky we feel to have such an amazing kid, how exciting all the latest developments with him are, how relieved we are to have a good educational setting for him through May 2010, how much we want another little one and exactly what we think we can handle in that regard.  It was the sort of conversation we had before we were parents actually, back in the days when we could devote hours to talking only to each other.

Sure, we’re no closer to being ready for Christmas that we were yesterday and I should probably be concerned about that but it was just the sort of magical, peaceful day we all needed.

So, we made our first trip to the library!

Melissa

I posted a while ago about wanting to take Monkey to the library but being scared of the outcome. I have been putting off making that first trip since then. There were certainly plenty of other things going on that helped me with my procrastination! Last night, however, Duhdee put an end to the wait.

The weather was so mild after dinner that he suggested we take the dogs on a family walk to the library.  I agreed and we all got ready to go.  Monkey normally has a very hard time deviating from our “normal” walk route and the library was definitely a deviation but he was super excited about it!  I was so surprised by how happy he was, actually.

When we reached the library he was very reluctant to go inside with me but I was able to convince him to join me while Duhdee waited outside with the dogs.  We walked in through the big front doors and he was totally quiet.  He was in observation mode for sure.

I unzipped the backpack and we pulled out the books I was returning.  Monkey dropped them all in the book return slot and then stood quietly in line with me while we waited for our turn to pick up my waiting books.  He handed over my library card and then put it back in my wallet for me.  When the first book was handed over he immediately turned to put it in the book return slot, lol, but I convinced him to put it in the backpack instead.  After all the books were packed up, we left.  He was still very quiet and interested in his surroundings.

Maybe next time I’ll be brave enough to take him to the children’s section to browse.  It was certainly a much better introduction than I expected.