A Traumatic Few Weeks

Sorry for the lack of a recent blog update. We have been busy mourning the death of Michael Jackson. Between the constant CNN watching of the latest drama and crying ourselves to sleep at night, there hasn't been time for blogging.

(Joseph reacts to the death of Michael Jackson as news breaks - he put his hand on the screen and just sobbed "No, Michael, don't leave me.")

We also had Joseph's first trip to the ER in recent days. After falling and smacking the front of his face on our brick step, his face swelled up and we rushed off to the ER. After only an hour's visit and a diagnosis of just a bad bump, we were sent home. Surprisingly, his face looked pretty good the next day and we never got the crazy bruising the doctor thought we would see.

A picture from the next day:

Please focus on the egg and bruise on his forehead and not the food hanging out of his mouth.

The next day he was less swollen but more bruised:

He is actually still slightly bruised, but pretty much over his ordeal. Now the death of Michael Jackson - he is still working through the stages of grief. I think he's finally hit acceptance.

Bluegrass and Bourbon

We just returned from 4 days in the land of bourbon and bluegrass. It was a weekend filled with grilling out, fun with family and of course, bourbon (well, for Richard - not so much for me).

Joseph did surprisingly well on the flight up. It overlapped with his normal afternoon nap schedule and Joseph refuses to sleep anywhere but his crib. Also, when Joseph misses a nap, he's pretty nightmar-ish, so we were pretty much expecting to be THOSE people on the plane. As we bordered the plane in the pre-boarding group, I could feel everyone's eyes on us thinking "Oh please, don't let those people sit next to us." And at the beginning we were THOSE people, Joseph pretty much screamed the first 20 minutes on the plane. But somewhere around 2 minutes before takeoff, this was what my child who never sleeps anywhere but his crib looked like:

Asleep with his ever present Monkey Lovey. It lasted about 30 minutes, but he woke up drowsy enough to quietly watch his "Yo Gabba Gabba" DVD and drink a bottle until we landed. (And yes, we paid for that individual seat you see him in. He is un-restrainable without a car seat or stroller).

Once we got there Joseph was ready for grilling with his Grandma & Grandpa (Cilla & Ricky), Aunt Kipling, Aunt Devon, Uncle Jason & Kairi. He ran around Cilla and Ricky's front lawn with Kairi, ate a popsicle and just enjoyed being outside with his family who loves him:

Joseph has a little nervous around my in-laws dogs, though. Normally he loves dogs - but their dogs are sort of on the big side...like a Great Dane and a mutt who has some St. Bernard in him. The Great Dane is as big as I am (she actually outweighs me by at least 20 pounds).

On Friday, we hung out with Joseph's great grandparents, Grandmommy & Papa Joe. He liked exploring their house and yard and getting loved on by more family he doesn't get to see very often.

That evening Joseph particularly liked getting to know Great Uncle David & Aunt Robin's three dogs. He thought they were about the funniest things he had ever seen. He really loved to feed them his snacks and let them lick his hands and face. He squealed anytime they came near him.


Later that evening, Joseph came down with a mysterious fever of 103.7. After a mild freak out, a call to the pediatrician and a dose of Tylenol, he had a restless night of sleep but woke up with just a low grade fever and ready for action. By the evening there was no fever. We have no idea what got into him.

On 4th of July Joseph got to see even more family members when we drove out to Great Aunt Elaine and Uncle Rick's house. They have a great big house right on a lake. Joseph wasn't necessarily impressed by the great view - but he LOVED all the stairs they had. Stairs up to the 3rd story, stairs down to the basement, a HUGE set of stairs up the deck.....there were stairs everywhere and Joseph climbed all of them many times over. Joseph was also super excited when Great Aunt Marchell gave him a special box of animal crackers she had bought for him. He couldn't stuff his mouth fast enough. This picture was taken with about 6 animal crackers in his mouth:

With all the family around, Mommy & Daddy actually got to relax for a little bit here and there. Daddy got to play cornhole with his cousin Patrick, Aunt Marchell and Jason.

And finally, on our very last morning there, Joseph got a little snuggle time in with Great Uncle David (who needed some cuddling practice because he's got his first grandbaby coming in about 7 1/2 months) and got to try on a pair of old cowboy boots that both Daddy and cousin Patrick wore as little boys. A little bit too big....but maybe in a few years, he'll be ready for them.

On Sunday, we headed home. It almost looked like our departure was going to have to wait until Monday when we got on the highway to go to the airport and were in dead stopped traffic due to a 14 car accident that had the highway shut down. We were pretty sure we were missing our flight. However, Richard in an attempt to piss off the entire state of Kentucky, drove 2 miles on the shoulder. At one point someone moved over in front of us to keep us from going further and Rich got out, banged on their window and told them we had a sick baby (which wasn't a total lie - I mean, he had had a fever the day before). They bought it and we ended up sprinting through the airport and got to the gate a few minutes before it bordered.

It was a fun weekend, but we are glad to be home, back to our normal routine and doing our normal everyday things (although Joseph does miss those dogs!).

Head Stands

Joseph has a new trick...standing on his head. Well, not so much standing on his head, but leaning over and putting his head on the ground. He does it all day long, anytime, anywhere. We have no idea why he does it. A couple pics of his new trick:

Yeah, our kid is weird.

Misc. Mischief

Lately we have been referring to Joseph as "Mischief Maker" or "Captain Crazy". Here are a few reasons why:

After Mommy gets a birthday package ready to send to his buddy (who is also named Joseph) in California, he decided to use the package as a stool to climb onto the chair. Once he pushed it around to get in the right position, he then stood on the chair and attempted to get on the table (unfortunately, no picture of this as I dropped the camera in an attempt to save us from an ER visit).

He attacks ducks. This picture looks tame...it looks like he is just standing there pointing at the ducks. Nope, Joseph was chasing the ducks and attempting to grab their feathers. However, he learned that ducks fight back and wasn't too thrilled with one particularly aggressive duck who liked to hiss at us.

Not only does he like to climb on tables, he likes to hang out underneath them. Lately, he's been obsessed with getting under the table. He likes to crawl under there and then push all the chairs out from underneath. He is not quite short enough to completely stand straight without hitting his head. This does not seem to be a problem as he apparently wants to give himself a concussion - he loves to just stand there and bang the top of his head on the table top. We are completely perplexed as to why he does this.

As mentioned in a previous post, he loves pulling tissues out of the box. A recent episode of this fun game:

And his favorite item to create mischief with....toilet paper!!! Joseph loves toilet paper. Joseph is also into "sharing" lately. He likes to pick up a toy, some half eaten food, his pacifier and give it to you. On this particular occasion, he decided I needed toilet paper. He kept pulling off little pieces and bringing to me in the kitchen, where I was making his lunch. He then decided I needed the WHOLE roll and proudly came walking into the kitchen dragging a huge train of toilet paper.

We have a quite a little monkey on our hands. We love him, but man, does he exhaust us.

First Haircut

Saturday was a big day - Joseph's first haircut. Honestly, I was nervous. I told Rich this on our drive to the kid's salon and he looked at me like I had just told him that I made reservations to go camping (if you know me, you know there is no way in hell I am ever going camping). I am not sure why I was nervous - we expected he might cry, but I knew we could survive that. I was a little worried he might look ridiculous afterwards, but its hair, it will grow back. I guess I was just anticipating a sorta big milestone.


His haircut milestone went surprisingly well. We took him to a kid's salon where the chairs are little airplanes, trains or cars that the kids can sit in. There are toys and balls and various things to keep them entertained. Joseph fussed a little bit when he got in his plane but quickly got over it once we have him a ball and a paci. He fussed a few times while she was cutting his hair, but he pretty much just hung out for the 10 minutes it took to prune him.


Some pictures from throughout his styling:


Quick explanation of the sign - if you have ever seen Good Morning America on Saturday mornings, they do a segment called "Your week in 3 words". People take videos doing various things with signs describing their week's events. We are submitting a short video of his haircut with the "My First Haircut" sign. Hopefully, you'll be seeing us on national TV this weekend!






And when it was all over, he looked like this:


I was happy because he was cleaned up, but not too short. We were also sad about the fact that his haircut most likely was going to mean that we would lose his curls that had been forming in the back. However, it turns out the cut made them even tighter. The hairstylist seemed to think in time we could be dealing with a curly haired child. If we are, that is all from Daddy's side of the family. There isn't a curl to be found in any member of my family.

After his big haircut, we took Joseph next store to a great toy store. It's huge and they have tons of toys around for the kids to actually play with. It was a great way to spend 45 minutes on a 98 degree day.

Joseph had fun trying out this viking hat:


Attempting to get a picture with Mommy - we snapped this one in the 1.5 seconds he was willing to sit in my lap for. As you can see, he was wriggling around the whole time:


And lastly, going shopping:



FYI- I wanted to be creative with the naming of this post and the title "Freshly Shorn" popped into my head. For some reason I typed it into google and the first search results were the following:

1) Freshly shorn scrotums (???? - I have no idea!!!)
2) 30 freshly shorn sheep die in Pendleton after a late freeze
3) Alpacas look funny, especially when freshly shorn.

Therefore, I went with the mundane "First Haircut"]

Vintage Video

This morning I spent some time watching videos of Joseph from last summer. I really didn't intend to spend 30 minutes doing that this morning - it just sort of worked out that way. See, around 6:30 am, I started to hear Joseph's fussing in his crib. This usually means we have about 15-20 minutes before it's full on screaming to be let loose. Since Joseph also insists on taking his milk slightly warm, this also means we get up once the fussing begins to warm his bottle. Well, it is now 7:45 and monkey is still sleeping. Usually, I get back in bed because even an extra 10 minutes is important to me. Of course, the one morning I don't get back in bed he sleeps another hour!!! So I have checked facebook, read all your blog updates and was getting kinda bored with the interwebz...so I started looking at old pictures and videos and came up with the idea of posting a year-old video of Joseph each month.

There weren't too many from June 2008 to choose from, we were new to the video thing at that point (and many of the ones we did have were like 2 minutes - which would take like 6 years to upload). However, we did have this 45 second one of Joseph doing what he did at slightly shy of 2 months - just kinda hanging out during a visit from Grandma and practicing his smiling skillz:



It's sort of hard to believe that only a year later, that same baby is getting into trouble like this:


(A later post to come to fully explain this toilet paper situation).

Disaster Area

Every day Joseph more fully embraces his new toddler status. Lately, this has meant a fixation on tearing stuff out of their appropriate storage places. For instance, tissues don't belong in a box, they belong all over a bathroom floor. Diapers don't belong neatly piled in storage container in the closet, they belong strewn all across his nursery and hallway. Mommy may disagree, but the toddler set is in full agreement with Joseph on these issues.


Most days I feel like I just walk behind the tornado that is Joseph, cleaning up his path of destruction. Let me give you a little glimpse into about an hour of my morning today.


It starts with one of Joseph's favorite places to play, the pantry. He particularly likes the recycling bin items. After being awake about 30 min this morning, I cleaned up this mess:


Joseph particularly enjoyed the iced tea carton.

While I was putting the recyclables back into the bin, Joseph moved on to play in his nursery. I thought this was a good opportunity to get him dressed for the day. Unfortunately, opening his dresser drawer to select an outfit, enticed Joseph to take all of his neatly folded t-shirts out of the drawer and throw them on the floor.

Once he was dressed, he ventured into the kitchen and opened his favorite cupboard - the one where his bottles and sippy cups are stored. In about 30 seconds, my kitchen looked like this:



Joseph likes to carry his empty sippy cups around after he has taken them out and I often find sippy cups in random places like bath tubs and the cat food container.

No sooner did I get all the bottles, sippy cups and misc. parts organized back into the closet, when Joseph made a beeline for his toy cupboard in the den. He loves to just take every toy out of there and literally throw them on the floor as fast as he can. He has no interest in playing with the toys...just throwing them. This is a pretty standard scene around our house at least 3 times a day:

Joseph also decided today that he wanted to get in the cupboard.

So just a reminder....these pictures were all taken in about an hour - from 7 am to 8 am. We repeated this pattern (with small variations - the pots and pans drawer instead of the bottle cupboard, my underwear drawer instead of his t-shirt drawer, our toiletry cabinet in the master bath instead of the recycling in the pantry - basically any drawer/cupboard/closet that is not locked) after the morning nap, before his afternoon nap and after dinner (as we anxiously were watching the clock and driveway for Daddy's arrival home!).


FYI- for those of you who have commented on the length of his hair. I know - we are taking him this weekend to get it cut. Should be interesting. Stay tuned!