Seth is 2 years, 2 months

Okay, this is four days late, but with my birthday this week, the time just kind of slid by and I have been so lazy lately, too.

Seth’s tantrums have really calmed down a lot.  And he is more mellow … uh, sort of.  Actually, living with Seth is kind of like living with a teenager.  What attitude!  Really, I think he is just a bit more grumpy (especially when he wakes up from a nap) and since he has great speech now (everyone comments on it), the stuff he says is just crazy.  The things he says most – “I am so tired of <insert whatever we are supposed to do here”.  For example, I am tired of going to bed, I am tired of going to the store, I am tired of going home.  Others:  “I am going to hit <insert name>.”  “I hate you.”  “I am going to hurt you” or even worse!  And his all-time favorite “Go away”.  He especially gets this certain grumpy look on his face and utters that to poor like 5 year olds at the playground.  I am hoping this is just a phase and he gets some more social skills, soon.  You better believe I do not let him think this is acceptable behavior.

The rough-housing is also getting out of control.  Seth is usually good unless provoked, but then you better watch out!  Throwing and hitting with various weapons is his favorite.  And everything is a weapon with Seth (this was not the case with Andrew at all).  He especially likes his play saw and other play tools and his magic wand, but almost anything will do in a pinch.  He is especially obsessed with good guys and bad guys.  He pretends to be a bad guy a lot.  As soon as he puts on his sunglasses, he gets this big scowl and then runs around telling me he is a bad guy and he is going to kill me.  Every time we read a story, he needs me to point out which ones are the good guys and which ones are the bad guys.

And generally, Seth is just a rough and tumble kind of kid.  He loves to jump off the couch, the table, anything really.  He likes to do kind of these fall somersaults off the couch or futons and do flip like things.  Crazy boy.  He also runs everywhere!  He has never been a huge stroller boy, but now he pretty much runs everywhere.  He is the fastest of all of us – and now that I am getting along in this pregnancy, there is no way that I can keep up with him.  Thankfully, he usually listens and stops when I tell him.  He is a pretty obedient kid, thank heavens.

Seth is still obsessed with all things sports and will spot them instantly anywhere.  He can differentiate between all the major sports – baseball, soccer, basketball, football, tennis.  He always needs to wear sports clothes, day and nights, but thankfully is being a little more liberal in what he considers appropriate wear.  Most fits are still over clothes though – this morning was trying to convince him that wearing a Cardinals baseball cap was not appropriate attire for sacrament meeting.  He plays soccer and basketball every day and wants to play frisbee with Katsu every day, too.  He gets more coordinated by the day and kicks really well and is starting to even catch frisbees, which seems pretty impressive to me.

Seth still loves to read.  He reads to himself and wants me to read to him a minimum of an hour a day, but he spends much more time than that looking at books.  He also loves his puzzles and is getting not too bad at doing jigsaw puzzles.  He likes building things with the Trio blocks, too.

I totally slacked on potty-training this month.  But he is so ready, so I have to do it.  If he has underwear and I set a timer, he will have no accidents.  And there is no lolly-gagging on the potty.  He sits down when I get him to after the timer goes off, does his business, and is done in a minute.  He doesn’t even want me to help him with taking his clothes on and off.  I really need to do it this month.

Fun things this month:

- Hiking at Power Valley.  The boys were so excited to go hiking, it has been awhile, too difficult in the hot, humid weather.  Seth loved it, though he was pretty worn out by the end.

- Getting pictures taken.  They turned out pretty well.  Seth threw an enormous fit right before because he wanted to wear soccer clothes – the only issue was we didn’t have matching ones that were clean, and I was no taking pictures in ones that didn’t match.  I have to have limits at least on picture day!  So, his eyes are a little puffy in the picture, but they look pretty good.

- A few play dates.  Those are always fun.  Yeah!

- A visit to the zoo.  We did almost the whole thing, and even bought a couple bags of animal crackers (I never buy anything there, usually).  We were so tired!

- Riding bikes and having a picnic in Creve Coeur Park.  Seth had a little bit of a hard time because he wanted to ride the bigger bike and I was freaking out because I was sure he would fall off and break his head (besides the whole fact that he can’t pedal).  But it was fun and nice.

- A few Saturday mornings with Dad.  Seth loves being with Dad and doing special things with him.

- A couple trips to the Botanical Gardens.  We were able to see the tree houses before they left and also play in the Children’s garden which is our favorite.  So glad it is not quite so hot anymore.

- Festival of Nations at Tower Grove Park.  We watched a Japanese taiko drum group called Cobu (?).  They were pretty good and we enjoyed it.  We also did some crafts.  We parked pretty far away and walked quite a ways to get there and it was pretty hot so we didn’t stay too long in the end.  We were tired.

Frustrated …

This is a frustrating period in my life, I think.  I always knew I would have a hard time with this whole post-doc period from when I first found out about it, but it’s even less fun than I expected.  So, here’s my venting …

First, this pregnancy is SO frustrating.  I am really starting to feel for people with chronic pain.  Seriously, 3 months of near-constant pelvic pain that shows no signs of abating is awful.  It doesn’t even matter how bad the pain is – I mean, usually it’s more like a 4 or a 5, not so bad, but for it to never go away … sigh.  Who knows if I am going to ever have enough energy to think about having more kids.  I seriously feel like I have been counting down every day of this pregnancy.

Second, we have been really lucky financially because I was always “working” – I mean, that graduate stipend was awesome.  Even though I was really mostly a stay-at-home mom and working every evening and weekend was awful, we never had to really live like students.  Until now, when, ironically, neither of us are students.  It’s hard being a ward and neighborhood with pretty rich people and trying to squeeze 4+ people into a small 2 bedroom apartment.  If we didn’t have a futon, I don’t know if we could do it.  We can barely fit the futons and the crib in our room – in fact, you have to lift up the futons to completely open/shut the door, but it fits.  And our budget is tight … we applied for financial aid at the preschool and with paying for preschool, we have a negative balance every month.  I mean, we have plenty of savings just waiting for the day when we are finally settled and can buy a house, so it’s not really a problem.  But I HATE living like this – just enough money for necessities.  No money for saving for anything, including retirement.  At least it shouldn’t be too much longer ….

And, finally, I still do not like St. Louis.  We like the place itself – lots of festivals, fun free things to do, lots of nice scenery/hiking nearby, etc.  But the people and us are just not a good fit.  We live in a condo at the edge of a neighborhood of pretty rich houses.  I think we have seen like 2-3 kids ever the entire time we have lived here, and we used to go on walks in the neighborhood every day.  The kids usually find someone to play with at the park, but it’s just a one-shot deal, because all of the mothers/fathers/grandparents/nannies are either glued to their smart phones or there with a huge group of other friends and are not up to socialize.  I joined a Washington University association last year in the hopes to make more friends, but mostly it was a whole bunch of Japanese women who did not speak very good English and were so formal it was impossible to get to know them (which is how Japanese people seem to me, in general).  So, that was a fail.  And I can’t really plan the toddler group anymore with a new baby coming, so who knows if I’ll bother going much anymore.

Our ward has also been a very bad fit.  I’ve tried really hard to make friends.  One issue is boundaries – ours are definitely the largest in the metro (ignoring the Spanish ward).  And all the people with preschool children and babies live a good 15-20 minute drive from us, with some a good 30 minute drive away.  It’s frustrating because play dates are hard.  We have done like a handful of playdates the entire time we have lived here.  And I don’t know what is the issue with our ward, but they never have Enrichment.  I think I have gone to like 3 since we moved here – and granted, I didn’t go to many, but still.  I am pretty positive they have had none over the summer, but hard to say, since they don’t make a single announcement in Primary, ever.  Ever.  So, even if there is something, you won’t know until a couple days before when they happen to email it out.  And there is 0 socialization in Primary.  We have separate junior/senior sharing times, so you don’t even seem most of the other Primary teachers either.

So, now, that I am done with my PhD and have more energy (ha ha ha), I decided to run a ward summer play group.  Every week, I picked a park to play at, and purposely picked them all over our ward (which means, most are 15-25 minute drive from us).  The first couple weeks, we had a big showing, but the last 4 weeks or more, we have had only 0-1 people showing.  And the weird thing, I get all these emails/comments saying how wonderful it is I am planning this and trying to fellowship all the young mothers – and all of these people have NEVER come.  I just don’t understand why people are completely uninterested in doing a mom’s group.  I am trying to start up a book club with several other people, so hopefully that has more success.  But, I am really at the point where I give up.  I have never tried to make friends so badly and had so little success.  And I am not a homebody – I really really need social interaction to survive being a stay-at-home mom.  Sigh …

Well, I guess that’s it.

Andrew is 4 years and 3 months old!

Wow.  I am so ready for Andrew to go back to preschool.  I am super-duper worn out this pregnancy and the pelvic pain is just getting worse, so maybe I am being less attentive …. but between the tantrums and the messes.  Yikes.  Andrew has so many tantrums whenever he doesn’t get his way.  It is frustrating.  He pushes things down and just causes havoc.  And the messes!  Today, the boys found my makeup in the short time I was vacuuming – thank heavens it smells so bad or I would have had no idea, but I still couldn’t figure out how to get it off the floor – we had no finger nail polish remover (thankfully, Katsu brought home acetone from work).  And they took an old oatmeal container and filled it with water and put it in a bucket in my bedroom.  Earlier this week, Andrew also took an entire jar of tarragon and dumped it on Seth’s head.  And the boys poured like a half to quarter inch of water on the floor in the bathroom before I discovered it.  Arggghhh!!!!  And this week has been cooler, so we can finally go and play at the park.  The last 3 weeks we have pretty much lived inside.  I hate 105-110 heat indices.

Andrew’s shows just keep evolving and evolving … now, he really works the MCing angle.  This week he starts out like “Hello and welcome.  How is everyone doing today?  Good, good.  Now, how would you feel if <insert weird scenario here, like what if a giant came and picked up your house>?  That would feel bad wouldn’t it.  And you might feel angry too.  Are you ready for the show?”.  I don’t think he really gets stage fright.  He doesn’t mind giving talks at Primary, unlike the other Sunbeams.  He wants to do them off of his board set – so we picked the closest story to his talk topic and then I had him tell the story as I gave him pieces.  He is sure a character.

One of Andrew’s favorite games to play right now is creation.  He says we need to pretend to be Heavenly Father and Jesus and then we reenact the creation, but more like this – first came the cars, then the people, etc. etc.  The game seems to be more like throwing all the toys on the floor to me, but it’s still pretty cute.

Andrew is still loving music.  He sings all the time.  He loves the primary songs and likes to sing along.  But he also loves to sing along to the radio.  He likes Katsu’s radio station choices better than mine, generally.  He especially hates classical music, which he calls “Mommy music”.  His favorite thing to do is listen to Katsu’s techno music and music from America’s got Talent from the internet and dance around to it and do flip shows.

Andrew behaved a little better this week at church.  Maybe my evil eye is helping to do the trick.  Maybe.  We made cinnamon rolls to celebrate.

Andrew still loves reading together.  He is starting to read books to Seth.  I swear, he has almost every book memorized, even the books we get from the library.  I am thinking of starting to teach him to read.  I think it might be a fun thing to do together.

Well, I can’t think of anything else to say about this month.

Fun things this month:

- Very hot summer days, so we have spent lots of time indoors building forts.  And planning music.  And otherwise, driving each other crazy.

- A day at the Science Center.  Andrew loves all the transportation parts and seeing the volcano and tornado and the earthquake.  The boys wanted to build the arches over and over.

- Watching his second movie in the movie theater.  It was so hot, so we went to “How to Train Your Dragon” for free.  Andrew was scared and asked questions seriously every minute or two … “What’s happening, Mom?”  “Is this going to be scary?”  The boys liked pretending to play the arcade games beforehand the best.

- Zoo with Mom and Dad!  Andrew enjoyed petting the sting rays (the main reason we came) and loved playing at the Children’s Zoo.  We even saw a children’s animal show there – the first time we had seen one.  Andrew likes seeing most of the animals – except the butterflies and penguins for some reason (maybe because Seth likes them?).

- Two puppet shows.  One at the library.  And one at the mall in Kansas City on our trip.  Andrew thinks they are so funny – he has the cutest, most infectious laugh.

- Our trip to Kansas City!  Andrew loved swimming the most at the hotel pool/waterpark and requested going so much.  He enjoyed the audio headsets at the Truman museum.  He was pretty non-interested in the church sites, though he thought the lady showing him the organ at the Community of Christ temple was pretty cool.  And he was excited to see Liberty Jail.  It must have impressed him because he saw a picture in a book of Liberty Jail (I don’t even know if I would have recognized it) and he started telling me about it.  He loved the train related stuff we saw at Union Station and especially eating at Fritz and waiting to see when the train would bring our food.  He really liked looking into the trenches at the World War I museum.  He liked stamping his passport anywhere at the Hallmark museum and seeing his bow being made.

- Several play dates, yay!  Probably as many as we have had since we moved here.  He is making friends with some of the new boys in the ward which is great. 

- Hiking at Power Valley.  The boys were so excited to go hiking, it has been awhile, too difficult in the hot, humid weather.  Andrew loved it, until he started complaining about being out of energy about halfway through.  But he was very attentive and saw deer all by himself.

- Getting pictures taken.  They turned out pretty well, even though Andrew spilled water on his shirt just before they were taken.  When I was trying to choose what portraits to get, he started crying when he heard we weren’t going to get the CD.  I was so focused on trying to overcome the pushy sales person, I didn’t even realize until we left that he thought it was a music CD.  Silly boy.