Rocking horses a come-from-behind hit

Last xmas Max received two rocking horses -- one from gramma and grampa and one from Don and Mel.  (Imagine that.  It was like that stereotypical conundrum wherein two women show up at a party inadvertently wearing the exact same lavish dress.)  Both horses collected dust for a while and we feared that they'd be duds.  It turns out, however, that Max was just too young for the rocking horses at that time.  Now he loves them.  We keep one at gramma and grampas and the other at our house.  Here are some terrible pictures of Max on his horse this morning.

"Thanks, Don and Mel!"  This would have been a good picture if I'd been closer to Max, if I'd managed not to catch the flash reflecting in the window, and if the rack full of drying diapers were not so close to Max's head.  Other than that, I think it's an award-winner.

Max decided to dismount during my attempt to correct two of the aforementioned photographic blunders. 

Sorry no pictures on this post....please come back and look again.

So I came up stairs the other evening to my husband glaring at me over top of the telephone.  "The phone is off the hook!" he declared.  Gus is extremely power conscious and even goes to the effort of turning all power to the phone off when we are not using it (such as overnight), so this was a really serious offense.  To be honest, I'm not really sure it uses more power when it is off the hook...but I digress. 

At any rate, Gus was not impressed.  "How long has the phone been off the hook?" he inquired.

I was puzzled...usually these things are my fault, but I couldn't remember even using the phone.  "I don't know, I don't think it was me...."

"Well it wasn't me!"

The conversation continued down a similar accusatory vein until our son walked into the room.  He passed casually by our argument, quietly chanting to himself  "please hang up and call again.... please hang up and call again".

Max Reorganizes

So yesterday evening I wandered into the bathroom after we had finally put Max to sleep to discover this:

With my fatigue encumbered mind, all I could think was 'why would Gus put all of Max's bath toys in his dump truck?'  Sometimes I really wish I could get a translation of what is going on in Max's head.....

The new sleep solution

Disclaimer:  This is actually quite an old post.  I wrote it more than a month ago, but I wanted to add a picture, so I didn't post it.  I'm finally posting it with one mediocre picture.  Enjoy!  Good news...I added a second sleeping picture.

As an update on Gus's earlier post, we have now resolved the death trap that was Max's bed.  Our first attempt involved simply placing the mattress from his play pen on the floor.  Although quick and easy, this had a few downsides.  For one thing, I felt like I was sleeping my kid on the floor in the corner.  The play pen mattress is not really thick and doesn't provide the feeling of a bed.  Max also seemed to be missing having a closed in space to sleep in.  He would wake up fussing regularly in the night and need Gus and I to help him back to sleep.  

Lying awake after just such an occasion, I recalled that my sister once mentioned the benefits of sleeping children in tents.  Conveniently, this same sister had recently purchased Max a series of kid tents.  Max had played in them a few times, but got easily bored with them, so we hadn't used them much.  This tent, I decided at 3:00am, was the perfect solution to our problem.

So the next morning I set up the tent in Max's room and put his wimpy play pen mattress inside it, with all his stuffed toys and blankets.  What a transformation!  First, I felt like a better parent now that my child had more of a "bed like" structure.  Second, Max absolutely LOVED it.  His past apathy towards the tent was completely transformed.  Somehow tent + bed is MUCH cooler than tent plus other random toys.  It has been three days since we put his bed in the tent and he still can't get enough of it.  He practically lives in that thing.  He rearranges all his stuffed animals, hides under his blankets and just stares lovingly at the tent walls.  Best of all, he sleeps well in it and doesn't really try to get out of bed.  Thanks Wen!

Grandma Gutoski has a night light that plays music and displays a light show on the ceiling.  Normally it doesn't work very well (you can barely see the lights on the ceiling), but in the tent it is quite a spectacular show.  Max was so impressed that he sat in there just staring at the lights and laughing for a full half hour.  Unfortunately, our digital camera has had some recent issues, so we didn't get any good videos.

Horsey for Halloween

Initially, we had no intention of taking Max out for Halloween -- too much work, and he won't know what's going on anyway.  We changed our minds under mild pressure from family, and I'm glad we did.

Greta picked up an adorable little horsey costume from Value Village.  They gave it to her for only $4 -- a deal due in no small part to the big doe eyes and smiley face looking up at the store manager when Greta inquired about the costume's unmarked price.  Max was disgustingly adorable in his horsey costume.  (See photos below.)

He was a star.  One lady answered her door, took one look at Max and immediately said, "Oh my god.  Robert, you need to come see this!"  Another, elderly lady insisted that Max come in her house and sit on her lap.  She showered him with kisses.  (And yes, we caught it on camera.  See below.)

We taught him to say "trick or treat", though he could never summon the courage to say it to a real live neighbour on his or her doorstep.  He did, however, bust out a couple enthusiastic thank-yous when given candy.  This gratitude was very well received.

That's all I can think of for now.  I'll update this post if I recall any more interesting details.  Unfortunately, all of our photos are terrible.  Enjoy them anyway.

Max brushed his teeth before trick-or-treating.  Pretty cute.

"Light!"

Our elderly neighbour forcibly pinned Max on her lap and showered him with kisses.  She gave him enough candy to feed a whole village for a month.

Breaking News - It's probably a girl

My 20 week ultrasound for baby number 2 was today and it looks like we are having a little girl.  Our new baby was not particularly accommodating so the technician told us she was relatively sure that we were having a girl, but due to a less than optimal view, she was uncertain.   She told us to keep our receipts.... I think we had better choose a boy name too, just in case.

Max falls out of his playpen for the first time

We need a new place for Max to sleep.  Fast.

Max was unusually fussy last night.  He awoke several times for extended periods.  We gave him acetaminophen (tylenol) but it didn't seem to help.  Greta and I lay awake in our bed listening to him cry over the intercom.  Finally, at about 4am, the crying was punctuated by a loud thump, followed by more ferocious crying.

Half asleep, I assumed that he was just banging his playpen against the wall again.  Half asleep, Greta did a standard vault-out-of-the-bed-in-a-mad-panic.  Turns out her panic was justified.  She found Max screaming on the floor in his room, outside his playpen.  Fortunately he was uninjured.

He wasn't injured, but he was wide awake.  We were in a bind.  We needed to put him back to bed so we could get some sleep for ourselves.  But with him so wide awake and with his new found propensity to do swan dives out of his playpen, we were out of options.

So we took him into bed with us for the rest of the night, paranoid that we'd screw up his excellent track record for sleeping through the night alone in his room.  Naturally, he passed out immediately and slept soundly until 8am, making up for lost sleep during the night and throwing off his whole schedule. (And ours.)

He successfully napped in his playpen today without diving out of it.  We'll try him in the playpen tonight, mostly because we haven't yet found the time to set up a new bed.

In other news:

• I finally got a new chain for our bike today.  I also fixed up another one of our bikes.  We're finally back up to a full compliment of bikes.
• The renovations in Heather's bedroom are now complete.  Heather's pretty busy with school and won't have the time to move back in for a while yet.
• Our renovations are mostly complete.  It remains to finish drywalling our new railing-wall and to fancy-up our stairs.  Rob will be back to help us again.
• After an exhausting battle, the fleas in our house are finally on the defensive.  Every once in a while we'll find one at a random location in the house and I can often find one on the dogs after a few minutes of careful searching.  I'm hoping that our newly reduced carpet area will allow us to eradicate them entirely with another blitz of carpet spray, flea shampoo, and internal flea treatment for the dogs.
• Sorry mother, but I still haven't gotten around to replacing the windshield wipers on the van.