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Alex, at 4 years old, still sucks his thumb.

Max, at 18 months, still takes a bottle.

I KNOW!  Ok, I KNOW!

I'd hoped to get Alex off the thumb by his fourth birthday. We talked about it constantly for months. "What happens when you turn four?" "I don't suck my thumb!"  He's four years and three months old and I think the thumb sucking is getting worse. We'd whittled it down to early morning and before bed, but lately it's been constant.  It's a comfort thing, something he does when he's anxious or upset or scared or tired... And this is exactly why I haven't wanted to push him to give it up. I want him to be able to self soothe. I think it helps him to be more independant.  But dude, he's FOUR!  And his teeth, well, lets just say we're going to need to start saving for orthodontic work pretty soon. I suspect he's sucking him thumb more often now because it seems the last five months or so have been constant change and upheaval of his life; we moved, he started preschool, Mommy's gone back to work...

Same with Max, he'll drink anything but milk out of a sippy cup, but he insists on a bottle (filled with juice or milk) in the morning when he wakes up, before his afternoon nap and before bed, and since I've gone back to work, it's been "bobboo! BOBBOOO!" all day long.  And because it's his soothing device, we give in.

**As an aside, I never planned on Max really taking a bottle, he was breastfed for 13 months and I thought he'd go from breast to sippy cup.  So I've never bought bottles for him.  What he drinks out of now are three (out of the original 8) 5oz breast milk storage bottles that I used when I went to Mexico last April.  He even still uses a low flow nipple. I keep thinking it's silly to buy bottles when he won't be using them for much longer...here we are SIX MONTHS LATER!**

It is my personal opinion that aside from orthodontic concerns, thumb sucking and bottle drinking aren't hurting anyone here.  And it is also my personal opinion that forcing my children to give up their soothing habits would be worse than letting them hold on to them a little bit longer.  And I won't deny that it is much easier for us to pop a bottle into Max's cry-hole or let Alex fume in timeout with his blankie and thumb than fight about it with them.

I think once life settles down for us we'll try a little harder to encourage the boys to find other ways to self soothe.  Until then, yes, my preschooler is a thumb sucker and my toddler runs around with a bottle in his mouth just like Suri Cruise.

2010 Resolutions

These were my 2009 resolutions:

Loose 50 pounds. 

Scrapbook the boys' first years.

Learn more about photography.   

Find ways to teach my children altruistic values.  

Well, hmmm, I didn't really do any of these.  At least not in the way I'd intended.  I lost 10 pounds not 50.  I didn't scapbook a single DAY of either of my boy's lives (though they are well documented on this blog and on Facebook/Twitter).  I didn't really learn anything about photography other than having a 75-300 mm lens is really awesome.  And I didn't intentionally teach my kids altruistic values.  Anything they may have learned about altruism was purely accidental.

I won't let that deter me from making new goals for 2010 though.  I love the idea of new year resolutions.  I believe that writitng your goals down give you a better chance of reaching them.  So, without further ado, my 2010 resolutions:

Run a 5k race

•  This goal will replace my annual "lose xlbs" resolution.  If I lose weight during the course of training for my race, great, but that will not be my intention.  I simply want to do something I don't think I can do.  I also want to give myself a reason to exercise regularly. I HAVE to run several times a week if I even hope to survive the race.

Get back in the black

•  Living on credit cards has been unavoidable the last few months due to our financial situation.  But now that I have a job, I want to make sure that we are living within our means.  Even if we can't afford to pay off our credit cards this year, I want to make sure that we aren't accumulating any more debt. 

Stay connected with family and friends in Utah and California

• Now that we live in Portland, we will need to work harder to maintain the close relationships we had with our family and friends in Utah and California.  Unfortunately we won't be able to visit as often as we'd like due to our small budget, but that doesn't mean we can't call, do webcam chats, email/facebook, send letters/cards, etc. 
  
• I want to make a "family tree" in the boy's room with pictures of their relatives on the wall.  That way they can see their family every day.

Build a life here

• What this means to me is make connections.  Make friends.  Get better acquainted with John's cousins here.  Build our careers.  Join clubs or organizations to become a part of our community.

Be more active with the boys

•  This will be harder especially since John and I are both working and our schedules don't allow for a whole lot of sleep.  But I want to make sure that even though we're tired and maybe don't feel like doing much other than sitting in front of the TV during our off hours, we still make it a priority to do STUFF with our children.

 Make our marraige a priority

•  John and I now both work and in order to avoid sending the boys to daycare, we work opposite schedules (me mornings, him nights).  We have little to no time together.  I want to make sure that we're still connecting.  Even if it's just a love note stuck to the fridge.  Our family doesn't work if we don't work.  Doing everything for the children is great, but if we let our marraige fall apart, that hurts the children the most.  We have an amazing relationship, and I am determined to keep it that way!

Christmas 2009 Redux

I think we had a great Christmas.  It started when my mom sent presents to the boys, who were so excited about them I let them open them early.  Grandma Babs had made super hero capes for both of them:

I had to work Christmas morning, so we decided to have Santa come Christmas night instead of Christmas Eve so that I could be there to watch the boys open their presents, but John did let the boys open the gifts sent to them by his family while I was at work. (video can be seen on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/johndill17)

 

John's cousins Robin and Alzada invited us to Christmas dinner with their families in La Center and we had a wonderful time.

After the boys went to bed, Santa came of course.

And the final wave of present opening commenced.

Elmo wanted

I'm not sure why, but Max is under the impression that the word "Elmo" means help.

He'll come up to us and say "Elmo! ELMO!" when he wants help opening something or locating a lost toy. We've tried to correct him, but it doesn't seem to stick.  We're at the point that now, "Elmo" does mean help, at least when referring to Max.  Alex will say "I will elmo brother" if he's volunteering to retrieve a dropped toy.  I we're getting ready to go out I will say "Honey, can you elmo Max with his coat?"  If Max is demanding elmo opening up the toy car carrying case, but I'm busy at the moment I'll tell him "I'm sorry Maximus, I can't elmo you right now."

Remembering one and a half

Thumb sucka, originally uploaded by Jmelee.

This is Alex at Max's current age.

He still sucks his thumb. But without the fancy pinkie.

One and a half is a tough age. I don't know why it's so hard, but it was the hardest age (out of his four years so far) when Alex was there too. Sometimes it helps to go back and look at the pictures and remember that we survived 18 month old Alex, and we will survive 18 month old Max.

It helps that they are so damned cute of course :)

Boring post about work and all my feeeeeelings about it

Well, my first week as a working mom of two is over, and really, it wasn't that bad.  I was out the door before the boys woke up and I was home in time for lunch.  There are some little things that still need to be ironed out, like how John and I are going to get enough sleep to manage our family and our jobs, but it seems like the first week went as well as can be expected.

That said though, I'm having very mixed feelings about it.  Which, yea, they don't really matter because I HAVE to work right now, so any "feelings" I'm having about it are irrelevant, yet feelings there are.

On one hand, I like working. I do.  I've always liked working and I can't deny that it felt good to get up, put actual clothes on (instead of staying in my jammies well past lunch) and go do something all adult like.  Plus, all the down time I had at work.  I get BREAKS!  15 whole minutes during which I can do ANYTHING I WANT!  I can go to the bathroom ALONE!  I can buy a bag of chips from the vending machine and eat the whole bag myself and none of the chips had been sucked on by anyone!  Even better, I can buy a candy bar WITH PEANUTS!  I can read a few chapters of a book. And I get TWO breaks! Plus a 30 min lunch!  WHAT WILL I DO WITH ALL THIS ME TIME??? And at work, when I'm not on a break, all I have to do is the job I was hired to do.  In this case, take payments for prepaid phones.  That's all I do.  I don't have to do that and take the dog out to poop. I don't have to take payments and make four separate lunches (all four of us eat different meals, I don't know why, just to be difficult I guess). I don't have to take payments and break up a fight remembering to kiss boo boos and discipline the appropriate child. I don't have to take payments while changing a diaper, stopping a child from coloring on the wall and cleaning up hairballs from the cat.  It's 6 hours of easy livin'. 

Of course, I get home and the house is a mess, the kids are hungry, the dog needs to pee and John can hardly keep his eyes open because he only had 4 hours of sleep and I need to hurry and make lunch AND dinner so John can have something to eat when he's at work. 

One of the biggest challenges I foresee is the fact that with me working mornings and John working nights, there's no marriage time.  I only know my schedule week to week and my days off can vary due to business need, so it's not likely we'll ever have whole days off together like we used to.  He gets home at 1AM and I've already gone to sleep hours before because I have to get up at 3AM.  No more middle of the night nookie when John gets home from work I guess. 

Of course, the most important thing is that our work schedules are such that we don't need to put the kids in daycare.  I don't think daycare is bad, not at all!  In fact Alex would LOVE daycare.  But there are a few reasons I don't want to have to resort to that.  The first of which is money.  Paying for daycare for two children would basically cost the same as what I'm making! So what's the point? I could try to find a cheaper daycare, but ultimately, I would want to send them somewhere I felt comfortable about, these are my CHILDREN of course.  Which leads me to my second reason, which is that I'm nervous about Max's peanut allergy. No one but me will be as careful about the foods that are around him making sure he doesn't so much as LOOK at a peanut.  The third is if the kids get sick, they can't go to daycare, and neither John or I have paid time off, yet we'd probably have to pay for daycare even if thekids are sick and can't go.  And finally, we both work in call centers where we can't have our phones on and wouldn't know there was a problem with the kids (an emergency, or illness, etc.) until we can check our phones on a break/lunch which could be HOURS after the problem came up.  All of these things make daycare a non viable option for me.  The advantage of no daycare is that our kids get to spend lots of time with both their parents and that, I think, is awesome!

When I'm at work, so far I'm enjoying it, and I get all excited about the potential for learning different skills and working in other departments, getting promoted, rebuilding my career....Then I get home and I think about how I don't WANT a career, I want to focus 100% of my energy on my family.  So there's a little bit of conflict going on in my own head.  This will sort itself out though.  Once I've been working for a while, I'm pretty sure I'll know exactly what I want to do whether it be build my career or just work the job for a paycheck.

Last night we had Chinese food and one of our fortune cookies (of course I can't find it now) said something to the effect of "In the next week you will need to work as a team" and it couldn't have been more appropriate.  Our family dynamic is changing drastically. We're going from a 1950's type household of the working bread-winner Dad and the homemaker Mom to a more up to date family model of two working parents sharing the duties of child rearing and earning money equally (well, sort of, John does make more money than me).  We've tried this before (during Alex's first year) and it didn't work for us, and luckily we were in a position that we could do something different. I'm hoping that an extra four years of marriage and parenting under our belts will help us adjust to our new life and be successful this time.  We need to work as a team to make sure all four of us get what we need and are happy.

We're playing "Outer Space" in Alex and Max's room (involving a darkened room and a flashlight and several large balls as planets) and Alex screams "A meat eater! It's a meat eater! It's coming to get me! NOOOO! MEAT EATER!!! AAAGGGGHHHH!" I ty to tell him it's a METEOR "Meet eee or", "That's what I said Mom, A MEAT-EAT-ER IS GOING TO GET US!!"

Hi ho, hi ho, off to work I go...

Since August, it seems our financial situation has steadily gotten worse to the point that we began really wondering how we were going to keep a roof over our heads and food in our kids bellies.  John got his job fairly quickly after we moved, though he's making about half what he used to. I've been applying everywhere since we arrived in Portland and have had virtually zero interest.  To say this was discouraging is a vast understatement. I was crushed. 

I found myself in this strange position where I was no longer qualified to go back into the field I left over three years ago and not quite qualified for anything else either.  I changed my tactics and began applying for entry level office/admin/customer service jobs only to find I had been paid too much in my previous jobs for any new companies to consider me.  This I found to be strange. Every company I talked to seemed so hung up on my salary history, to which I would respond that ok, so I made a lot of money three years ago, but since then I've made NO money, so why is this a problem?  I wasn't expecting to make anywhere near my previous salary.  Hell, what I was expecting was to make roughly what I made when I was 18 years old.  Seriously, ANY salary is a HUGE improvement in our financial situation.

Getting more discouraged by the day, I looked up several local staffing companies and sent them a pathetic email explaining my situation. I've been home raising my kids for the last three years. I want to go back to work. I NEED to go back to work.  I have all this experience in all these things and I KNOW I would do a great job for anyone who would be willing to hire me, but no one seems to be willing to give me a chance. It's like my resume is made of kryptonite or something.  Do you have any temporary opportunities that would allow me to recharge my resume, give me new and current experience? Anything?  Beuller??

One company got back to me. They had me come in to interview and take some tests.  Aside from the horrifying 80 question math test (I can't even calculate a tip I'm so bad at math. This test was pure torture for me) I passed all the tests with flying colors.  I even peed in the cup for the drug test without spilling a single drop.  I found out that I type 85 WPM!  My old boss and my good friend both gave me glowing references.  The next day the staffing company sent me to interview with a call center.  Later that day the call center called me and offered me the job, but they didn't have any open spots for the next training class. But, they said, they didn't want to risk losing me to another assignment, so they wanted me to come in to the training on Monday as a backup. If someone else doesn't show up I can take their spot.

HALLELUJAH!

HALLELUJAH!

HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!

I am SO EXCITED!  Ok, so I'm not really excited about leaving my kids to go back to work. But if I've got to go back to work, this situation is probably the best I could hope for.  I will work in the mornings and always be home in time for John to get to work so the boys don't have to go to daycare.  The office I'd work in is close to home, only 10 min away, so I won't be wasting a lot of time on commuting (like John, who has a 45 min commute).  The job itself should be easy, and I'm definately starting on the bottom, but there are a lot of different departments that I could cross train and promote into, so there is potential for a higher salary and a more interesting job in the future.

To celebrate John and I decided it was time to buy a new car.  Well, new to us. John and I don't buy new cars. It's against our religion (Dave Ramsey-ism). Strictly speaking we didn't NEED a new car. The schedule I should have and the schedule John has work out so that we can each take our one car to work.  But our little van is starting to give us trouble and isn't as reliable as we'd need it to be. Not to mention if both of us are taking it to work, we're putting even more wear and tear on a car that's coughing and sputtering under it's current work load.  Plus, the parent who's home with the boys would be stranded, unable to go to playdates or doctor visits or even take Alex to preschool.  It's too cold to walk anywhere until Spring. Busses don't run early enough to take me to work or bring John home from work (so the at home parent could keep the van).  The kids would be bored out of their minds stuck in our tiny apartment watching endless reruns of WordWorld. We agreed that the cost of a new car would be well worth the happiness it would bring to our lives.

And we found a GREAT car!  It's a 2001 VW Jetta with crazy low miles (54,000).  It's black and sporty with a stick shift.  Drives like it's almost new.  It desn't have all the bells and whistles we're used to in a car.  No CD player and no power windows, but it should do it's job as our commuting vehicle nicely.

So finally, for the first time since August, I feel hopeful about our money situation.  Instead of going backwards, instead of feeling like we're freefalling into this big dark hole with no end in sight, I feel like we've found our ripcords and the parachute is starting to open up, slow our decent and give us reason to believe we can dig ourselves out.

Little Piggies

Alex's version of the Little Piggy game:

Big toe: "This little piggy went to the bacon store"
Toe #2: "This little piggy stayed home" (smart Piggy!)
Toe #3:  "This little piggy ate mushrooms"
Toe #4:  "This little Piggy had none"
Pinkie toe:  "This little Piggy went 'wee wee wee wee' all the way into my nose!"

It'll all work out

I can see clearly where we've made our big financial mistakes.  The first one was not selling the house when I quit my job.  The second one was John taking the promotion for the job he didn't really want.  We had good, well thought out reasons for doing those things at the time, but due to circumstances beyond our control (e.g. The bursting of the real estate bubble and the current state of the job market nationwide) they ended up being HUGE mistakes.  Had we not made those mistakes, we wouldn't be in the financial toilet right now.  We'd probably be living in a small, yet affordable home.  John would still be working for eBay.  I wouldn't be desperately searching for a job and I'd be able to stay home with the boys until they started school.  We'd probably be debt free and still have our savings.

"Yeah" John says, "But we'd still be living in Utah"

I've made A LOT of mistakes in my 32 years. BIG ones. But I always find it very difficult to regret any of them because they've all led me to where I am now. To WHO I am now.  In every way that actually matters, my life is awesome.  Sure we're in the midst of a total financial breakdown. We have nothing, we owe a lot and we're not quite making ends meet. BUT we have a happy, strong marraige.  Two completely awesome boys and, give or take a kidney or two, we have our health.

I find I have to remind myself of these things a lot lately because it is so easy to get discouraged. I'm trying to look at this experience as a character building exercise.  The family who seemingly has everything, has the financial rug pulled out from under them. How do they cope?  Will they come out on top?  I say yes.  I have to keep reminding both myself and John that we have loads of potential to rebuild our financial stability. We'll get there again.  It will take sacrifice and work, but our income, our credit, a home, our savings...all of that can and will be replaced.  It's just a matter of time really. Ok, maybe a long time. 

I know someday we'll look back on this time in our lives and be glad for it.  Already it's teaching us to think creatively, recognize hidden opportunities, work together, appreciate what we do have and let go of the things we don't need.  We've grown closer as a family.  We've done what we've always wanted to do and moved out of Utah and almost unexpectedly found a place we both love. Portland has so quickly and easily become our home, I can hardly believe it's taken us so long to come here.  In only three months, I can't imagine living anywhere else. Once we're able to gain a little financial stability, even John's career crisis, I believe, will turn into a positive. He has to start all over. Which right now, sucks big hairy donkey balls.  But, he wasn't happy before.  Now he has a chance to try again, do over, find a career he's happy in.  Maybe that will be at the company he's working at now, maybe it won't. The point is, now that he's not stuck in a career path he really has the freedom to do whatever he wants to do.  I have to go back to work, but maybe that will be good too. I've always liked working, maybe now that I'm not exactly a "new mom" anymore, it will be easier to find that work/home balance I couldn't find before. 

Everything will work out. I know it will. I have faith in us.