blake eating

Blake was so tired. He hadn't had a nap and it was past noon. He ended up sleeping in his chair for his one nap of the day.

My Buddy

Blake is almost a year old and it has been, without a doubt, the hardest year of my life. He just came at a hard time and was also a hard baby. He screamed and cried all the time. But then, come 2011, he finally changed. New year, New Blake. He was just happier for some reason. I don't know why but he was happier. And it was wonderful. He laughed, he smiled, I finally was enjoying this baby.

Then last week Blake crawled off the porch step, falling a bit, not much at all, but enough that he cried. Then he continued crying every time I picked him up. Then came his fever that all my kids had. He cried and cried for three days. His fever passed and he was better when I picked him except that he arched his back a funny way. He continued to cry and cry all day and I thought "please Blake, please! I can't do this again with all your crying. I can't handle it if you become a hard baby again. I just can't do this!" I felt desperate to avoid the Blake of 2010. Finally I decided to take him to doctor because I didn't want his back-arching to turn into some weird muscle-imbalance where he would have to go through physical therapy to learn how to correctly use his back muscle or something like that. Turns out he broke his collar bone ten days ago and this whole time has just been in pain! A broken bone?!?!?! Way to go, Mom! Way to let your baby cry in pain with a broken bone and not even realize it. I felt pretty dumb with the doctor and pretty worried about how Ben would react since he told me to take him the day it happened.

But the good news was that there is little you can do for the collar bone except to give tylenol and make sure you don't touch (like when you are picking him up). And the other great news is that he is completely finished with being sick and back to being happy! He was been wonderful these last two days (broken bone and all). He's back to playing with me, smiling, laughing, and overall just being cute. He and I both got hair cuts. The funny thing is that I cut them both the exact same way! It is fun having a boy.

Slowly Going Crazy

In the 2nd grade Mrs. Jones taught me a song that I sing to myself almost every day. It goes like this:

I am slowly going crazy

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Switch!

Crazy going slowly am I

6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Switch.

That's how I feel a lot of the time. And I sing it to myself so that I can work through whatever problem we're facing and so that my kids know it's time to help mom because she's slowly going crazy.

Lately I've felt that I'm falling into a bit of a pit. My house is not up to par. I'm always behind on the cleaning. I still need to spend more time playing with my kids. My kids watch too much TV and they need to stop. I haven't worked out in a week and my pants are letting me know. I haven't been eating as healthy and for the first time in a LONG time I've felt bloated from eating wrong. And the worst thing is that it's been 10 days since I read my scriptures. That has been the worst part. I can almost physically feel the difference it is making on me.

So I'm tired of slowly going crazy. My first change is that I'm switching my goals around. I need a quantifiable goal regarding the Book of Mormon. It needs to be challenging so I'm going to read it twice this year.

Next I'm cutting out the bad food again and eating smaller portions. Partner that up with my exercising and my pants should be loose again in no time.

And finally I want to cut out the extra distractions. So you really, truly may not see me often.

Daisy is potty training and it has been absolutely awful and I can't help but think that I'm too busy with other things. With Heidi I had all the time in the world to devote to making sure she was on the toilet. But with Daisy I'm so busy getting other things done that all the sudden she has peed on the floor and I now have one more mess to take care of. However, if I quit doing something like blogging, words free, talking on the phone or other little things I could get needful things done in that same amount of time and free myself up to take better care of my kids. I just want to be a mom right now. And I really want Daisy to poop in the toilet. I'll blog after everything else is finished first.