weekly winners, volume 43


I hope you all had a lovely weekend. We definitely did: spent Saturday hanging out with friends we haven’t seen in nearly a year, and spent today in our pajamas. FTW!

Weekly Winners @ Sarcastic Mom

wii belly
wii belly

curly-headed kid

kisses
kisses

couch potatoes
couch potatoes

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Maggie snippets


You should see how I take notes in order to remember all the crazy, adorable, funny stuff my kid does for these Maggie posts. I have emails in my inbox with phrases like ‘DRY TOWN’ or ‘feet are sweaty’.

What I ever did without my BlackBerry to record these precious moments on my blog, I’ll never know.

So anyway. My kid. She’s the best.

===

I’ve mentioned before about how suddenly she’s taken a liking to music that doesn’t involve animal sounds or animated characters. THIS IS EXCITING. Her favorite is Miranda Lambert, and of course she picks the two songs on the CD in my car that are the least appropriate for a 2 year old: “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” which has like 3 cursewords in it, and “Dry Town”, a song about beer.

That’s not the awesome part, though. The awesome part is that she identifies the songs within like TWO NOTES. Without hesitation, without fail. The first two notes of “Dry Town” come on and she’s jamming in the back seat, yelling “IT’S DRY TOWN! DRY TOWN!” And she sings it while we’re grocery shopping. With the right notes and rhythm and everything.

She clearly did not get her father’s musical talent (which is like, NONE.) She gets it from me. I can sing. Kinda.

I’m just worried she’s gonna break into Crazy Ex-Girlfriend out in public and say the swears. whoops.

===

Maggie is in school Monday, Wednesday, Friday. (we call daycare “school” for whatever reason, I think it started because it was easier for her to say that when she was younger.) She loves school, but pretty much every day now when I go into her room to wake her up, she rolls over and says “We not goin enny-ware today?” and I have to tell her that no, we have to go to work and school. She looks sad.

I know, kid. I wish we could just stay home in our pajamas and ‘hang out’, as she calls it.

But on Wednesdays, I have a card to play: “But it’s PIZZA DAY at school!” and she gasps and says “IT’S WEDNESDAY!!??”

We do this pretty much every Wednesday. It’s like our bit now.

===

Okay the next thing in my Crazy Person Notes reads “not nice kitty bubbles”. I’m not 100% sure what that means, other than one day we were headed to my parents’ house and she was talking about my parents cat is not nice. And she wanted to blow bubbles with PapPap.

Sorry, that’s all I got on that one. I need to take better notes.

===

She is very good at speaking. She can pronounce complicated words perfectly, such as ‘quesadilla’ and ‘ridiculous’. But she says ‘openin’ instead of ‘open’ and I think it’s the freaking cutest thing I’ve ever heard. I have never, ever corrected her. And you can’t make me.

===

She likes to take her socks off and exclaim, “My feet are sweaty!”

===

We were at my parents’ house a few weeks ago and she kept putting her feet on the coffee table. I said “Maggie, please stop putting your feet on the coffee table.”

She said, “Dis not a coffee table. It just a TABLE.”

Well then.

===

She’s bossy. Dan was playing with her one day, and she apparently wanted him to leave her stuff alone, because she yelled at him, “DADDY! Don’t touch ANYTHING… in da wooooorld!”

===

We are in the midst of a massive Toddler-Food-Parent battle. She is very picky about what she’ll eat. Thankfully, she still loves fruit, yogurt, cheese, and peanut butter & jelly. Dinner is usually mac ‘n cheese or some type of noodle. She haaates all vegetables. She gets very little protein that doesn’t come from dairy, and while I don’t want to force meat down her throat, I would like her to at least try it. But we struggle with getting her to eat even the delicious chicken nuggets from Chick-fil-A (I KNOW. How can she NOT LOVE THEM?? They are like little, breaded bits of heaven.)

One night we had Dan’s parents over for dinner, and I made chicken pasta. She had some noodles and I put a small piece of chicken in her bowl (so we could bribe her later to eat at least ONE BITE, OMG) I hadn’t even mentioned the chicken to her, just kind of stuck it in there to see what would happen.

A few minutes into the meal, she held up her fork with a hunk of chicken on the end and proclaimed “I LOVE CHICKEN!”

*headdesk*

Dan’s mom said, ‘WOW! Since when does she eat chicken!?” to which Dan replied, “um… like 10 seconds ago.”

===

More on the Showing Off For The Grandparents Front: we’ve all but given up on the whole potty training thing for now (figured we’d give her a break since she just gave up her pacifier and her crib all in one week- successfully and without much fuss, I might add.) But potty training is still a frustration because lordy, we’ve tried it ALL. Candy bribes, a sticker chart, big girl underwear, pull-ups… please don’t try suggesting anything else because we have TRIED IT. Right now we just have to wait for her to decide she wants to. And she doesn’t want to.

So it’s been a week or so since we’ve really pushed her to sit on the toilet at all. Then on Saturday, my mom stopped by to play with Maggie for a bit, and she wasn’t there TWO MINUTES and Maggie stops eating her lunch, climbs down from her chair, and says “I go sit on da potty, okay?”

*headdesk*

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When we give her goodnight kisses, she sometimes pushes our heads together and says “KISS TOGETHER!” and makes us kiss. It would be cute if kissing Dan didn’t make me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

(I’M KIDDING.)

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painting myself into a corner. then another one. and another one.


OMG THE PAINTING IS DONE.

(Almost. I still have to do the little butler’s pantry area off of the kitchen. But dude. Just humor me.)

Living Room: BEFORE

living room - before

Living Room: AFTER

living room - after

Kitchen: BEFORE

kitchen - before

Kitchen: AFTER

kitchen - after

(Believe it or not, the rooms are the same color. But it looks a lot greener in the kitchen for some reason. But I like it!)

I counted, and since last Saturday (as in, TWO Saturdays ago), I logged about 20 hours of painting. Plus my mom helped for about 6 hours. HOW ON EARTH DOES IT TAKE THAT LONG? I have no idea. But it’s done! And I’m loving it. I didn’t realize how much I dislike the peachy/beige-y color that is all through the house until I started covering it up.

Only like a bajillion more rooms to go! Grab a brush!

(And speaking of new coats of paint, I made some changes to the blog last night. Click through your feed reader to check it out!)

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weekly winners, volume 42


Weekly Winners @ Sarcastic Mom

life is so hard when you’re two.
life is so hard when you're two.

he must be lost.
ladybug

in the sunshine
in the sunshine

watching the airplanes
watching the airplanes

twirly girly
twirly girly

deep in thought?
deep in thought?

sleepy baby (not mine!)
more sleepy Spencer

suspicious baby? (not mine, either!)
Deianira

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$82. and here’s a picture of my kid.


Wow. Thank you all so much for participating in Delurking Day yesterday. It was fun seeing some new emails and names I don’t normally hear from. I hope you all continue to leave notes now and then, just to say hi!

But even more than that, thank you for your willingness to keep me honest about donating money to help the people of Haiti. If I had donated on my own, I may have capped it at $25 or $50. Instead, I just sent $82 through the RedCross website. Because of YOU all pushing me. Thank you.

If we all just give a little bit, it will help.

On a lighter note, IT’S THE WEEKEND. Tonight I’ll be cleaning up our house, tomorrow we’re having some friends over with their kids (I think 12 adults and 10 kids? or something insane like that?) and then Sunday I will probably collapse in an exhausted heap. But we need some fun, right?

goofball

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delurking day!


Today is National De-lurking Day. A day when you’re supposed to come out of the woodwork at your daily blog reads and leave some comment love! (I am a notorious blog lurker. Bad commenter, BAD!)

Yesterday, we all undoubtedly spent time slack-jawed in front of the computer or television, watching the horrific aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. (Related: if anyone in the Burgh can help out these amazing women and the kids at their orphanage, PLEASE DO. The babies need to get home.) I often find myself at a loss with what to do during catastrophic events. I’m just a mom, a wife, living my life here, thousands of miles away, how on earth can I even HELP?

I can donate money. But… how much? No amount seems enough. $20? $100? $200?

So, this year for De-lurking Day, I’m going to do something a little different. YOU, my dear readers, will determine how much I will donate. I’m taking a tip from AndreAnna and I pledge to give $1 for every de-lurking comment I receive on this post to the Red Cross (with a minimum of $25, in case nobody plays along. heh)

So! Leave me a note saying hello! Or telling me what you had for breakfast. Or whatever. Just comment, baby.

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she’s a Big Girl now.


I’m taking a break from All The Painting! and All The Work! to fill you in on the Maggie Goings On in our house.

Maggie is officially pacifier-free. The whole thing was quite uneventful and… anticlimactic. Which in this case was very good, obviously. By night #3, she went to sleep without a single peep. (However, naptime hasn’t been so simple. We’re working on it. My fear is that this may be the end of Consistent Napping and WAAAAAH! I am sad.)

We honestly can’t believe it was so easy. Like, we AGONIZED for months, lamenting the fact that we’d had such a good run of 10-12 hour nights of solid sleep from her for like TEN MONTHS! and now we were going to have to ruin it and she’d never sleep again. Forgetting that she has our genes and those genes? LOVE SLEEP.

I think these milestones are always harder on the parents. And also way worse in anticipation than in the execution.

Anyway. Also on the sleep front: her BIG GIRL BED!

We had been talking it up for a couple of weeks, thinking she’d still have the pacifier and that would help with the transition, then we’d tackle the pacifier after that. But, of course, things happened differently and OMG THE PLANNER IN ME DIED A LITTLE BIT.

So this weekend, Dan got out his manly tools and the conversion was complete. Maggie was STOKED.

big girl bed!

Then of course last night, after Dan put her to bed and I was in the kitchen cleaning up the paint supplies, and he said to me “She’s so tired, I bet you she just passes out.” and I said, “I bet you in five minutes she comes wandering into the kitchen.”… guess what happened?

She came wandering into the kitchen and threw her hands up, like: TA-DA!

It didn’t take much convincing to get her settled back in bed, though, and tonight it was a smooth bedtime. Hooray!

Now if she would just get a job, preferably with a 6-figure salary, we’d be set.

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