Allergies SUCK and spaghetti

It's been awhile since I posted anything here and I even thought about deleting it but I re-read my enteries and I think they're worth keeping.

Anyways, Little Dude is now 15 months old and has ALL THE ALLERGIES. Seriously. At the moment, the working list is eggs, dairy, soy, beef, peanuts, onions, garlic, beans,  tomatoes, pineapple(?), coconut(?), and kiwi(?). My only saving grace is that he seems fine with wheat and corn.

I've been angsty about it lately and I walked into the kitchen from doing laundry and saw Little Cutie and Little Dude on the floor of the kitchen with a container of ice cream between them. She was using a fork to free the pieces and he was gleefully stuffing them in his mouth where the rash was already forming. I said to her, "You can't give Baby Brother ice cream, it makes him sick."

She replies in a way that only a four year old can. "I'm not making him sick, I'm making him happy."

And that was enough to make me cry.

I guess I'm just throwing myself a pity party about all of the things I used to take for granted. I could go on about many of the things that suck about having a baby with allergies. But I'm not. Instead, I am going to give you the recipe I cam up with for Spaghetti and red sauce with meatballs after LC requested it. Not that she has eaten any but she has asked for it twice so here's hoping!

Mock Marinara Sauce
1 zucchini, cut into chunks
1 stalk of celery, cut into chunks
8 oz sliced mushroom
1 red pepper, cored and in chunks
~1 cup baby carrot or one big carrot peeled and cut into chunks
1T olive oil
1 jar roasted red peppers (16 oz), drained
1 cup chicken broth (or water)
1T sugar 
2T balsamic vinegar (or more to taste)
1/2 t salt
1T freeze-dried basil
1t crushed red pepper or to taste

In batches, process the vegetables in the food processor until they are a fine mince. (If you can do onions and garlic feel free to add them too!) Put in a big pan over medium-high heat with the olive oil and cook until the veggies begin to soften. Meanwhile, process the roasted red peppers until smooth. Pour the puree over the veggie mince. Add the rest of the ingredients. Adjust seasoning to taste. Let simmer over meduim low for 45 min to an hour.

I serve this over a pound of pasta with meatballs inspired by Speedbump Kitchen, modified to our needs. I used 1 pound ground chicken, 12 oz italian pork sausage, 1 cup of soy-free panko, 1//4 cup rice milk, 2 teaspoons of olive oil, salt, pepper and parsley and followed her method.

Little Cutie as I said, bare touched it  but Little Dude loved it and it met all the requirements of a baby and spaghetti down to i being on his head and that orange mark it leaves on the high chair tray.

Enjoy!

Target owns my soul.

Yesterday I spent about 4.5 hours at Target. Yup, you read that right. Let me break it down for you.

• Go to Target at about 1pm.
• Enquire about a portrait session. They have an opening at three. Make appointment.
• Take three tries to make an eye appointment because you forget about things like Valentines and your hubbies birthday.
• Go get lunch.... Watch as three year old insists on ICEE and Mac n cheese and trashes shirt.
  
• Go look for new shirt and decide on beach cover up.
  
• Browse and pick up a few things as you do not have time to do full shopping. Do not but toy kitchen toddler desperately wants but do buy on sale talking tea set because that's whats going to get you all through the session.
• Browse some more. Check out.
  
• Take everyone to the bathroom with the cart to change diapers, change ruined shirt and make yourself presentable.
  
• Open tea set while you wait.
  
• Feed baby.
  
• Realize you need to pee and take the whole thing back into the bathroom.
  
• Have sitting with stubborn toddler and fussy baby. Consider putting photographer in for sainthood.
  
• Manage to not look like a whale.
• Order pictures.
  
• Have a coffee and toddler has a water.
  
• Go home.
• Do home stuff.
  
• Get kicked out by hubby.
  
• Go to matresss store and JoAnn.
  
• Go back to Target.
  
• Buy groceries.
  
• Buy furniture and stuff for toddlers room.
  
• Buy tequila.
  
• Check out.
  
• Smile as cashier makes a comment about having your mail forwarded.
• Go to bookstore.
  
• Buy stuff.
  
• Have coffee and cheesecake for dinner even though it's not 9:30.
  
• Realize you forgot that one thing your husband sent you out for.
  
• Go back to Target.
  
• Buy thing.
  
• Go home realize you forgot that thing for the baby which was really the start of why you needed to go to Target.
• Make a margarita.

And today I will go again for the eye appointment and for all the stuff I forgot yesterday.

Moving on

I've decided that I have GOT to get Little Cutie out of our bed. She flips, she kicks, she clings and I've given her three years but it's time for her to stay in her bed all night. I'm thinking that moving her from a toddler bed to a big girl bed may do the trick. So not wanting to do much today, I started shopping around for the bits needed for this project:
Hardware-conversion rails and mattress (her bed is crib to college model which seems to have been a good investment)
Software- bedding including more pillows and mattress pads, ect
Peripherals- other things to go with her new room theme.

I'm a little saddened by all of this. It's another baby thing to let go and with the new bed, new bedding and a revamp of the room seems to be in order. I think we're going with Tinkerbell bedding and accessories and art in line with Peter Pan's Tinkerbell as opposed to the newer fairy stuff like this lamp:


It will all look great with what's on her walls and her curtains and whatnot and when we move, I can paint her walls in a different theme that still works or do the same walls for the third time. lol.

The part that makes me sad is what to do with the Winnie the Pooh stuff. Some things like the snowglobe will probably stay. The antique book and the mohair Pooh are more mine and will probably go in the library. The wall art is my brother's from when he was a child and will be returned to him.

Really, it's the bedding and the lamp that makes me sad. When she was born it was so chaotic and I felt so unprepared (LC was induced at 35 weeks, 2 weeks before Christmas. We thought we had until the end of January and were putting things off until after the holidays.) And I don't know if I have ever felt so loved then when I came home and everything was waiting for us under the tree. All of the bedding. Seven sets of sheets. All of the plush toys. Every time I look at her room, I am reminded of all of that love.

So what do I do? Sell it? I could garage sale it, eBay it or go to Once Upon a Child, but that feels like putting a price tag on all of those feelings. Leave it in the attic? I suppose I can save it and see if someone else having a baby wants it all and I can give it to them.

I don't know, it's a lot of attachment to crib sheets but it's time for me to move on and for her to grow up just a little more.

needs a little salt

Little Dude has a rather annoying case of Cradle Cap. His sister never got it but he's proving to be an all together kind of baby. Mostly, I don't worry too much about it but it seems to itch and he has ripped the top of his head all apart no matter how often I clip his nails.

This has lead to the search for a solution from my doctor and no end of advise from well-meaning friends and I finally found a combo that works.

For daily care, I slather his head in a thick layer of lotion and then put a hat on him. Well hydrated skin is harder to tear, right? And that's what they say to do for nice hands. He does have the softest head I've ever kissed.

To get rid of the scales, we use an oil a few hours before bathtime to soften and then we shampoo it out. There are a lot of things you could use but I don't like putting mineral oil on him and he's very sensitive so we went with something natural that we already had: olive oil. The only problem is that every time I do it, I think to myself "time to marinate the baby." I'm pretty sure that's wrong.

Help! Help! I'm damp!

It's 2:30 in the morning and I just spent the last 20 minutes with my nearly-asleep son on my lap praying that he wasn't going to pee and soak us both and we'd have to start all over with the falling asleep thing.

Why, you may ask, was your child not wearing a diaper if you were trying to get him to fall asleep? This seems like rather poor planning on your part. Here's the part where we have to backstory...

*twinkle fade*

Until recently, Little Cutie (my just-turned three year old daughter) could be wet and poopy for seven days and seven nights and really wouldn't care as long as it didn't leak on to her Tinkerbell jammies. To say that Little Dude does not like to be wet, on the other hand, is an understatement. He has this cry that says"HELP! HELP! I'M DAMP! I'M REALLY REALLY DAMP! THREE DROPS OF PEE-PEE CAME OUT OF MY WEE-WEE AND NOW I'M DAMP!!! IF SOMETHING ISN'T DONE ABOUT THIS SOON, THERE IS GOING TO BE CHAFING AND OMG I AM STILL DAMP!!!!!!!"

Seriously.

The kid has never had a diaper rash, yet sometimes I can't even tell that his diaper is wet at all, but still he is screaming and as soon as I take the diaper off, he's quiet. It's like magic. If it were up to him, he just wouldn't wear a diaper and would spend all day kicking himself, um, yeah... that may be a different post.

Now when he's sleeping, there's this little whimper that lets me know that he's wet himself and not happy with the dampness and as long as I can get that nasty diaper off before he full-out cries, then he will stay asleep through the whole process.

And that's where we were this evening when he was just about asleep and started in on the whimper. And I knew if I got up to change him, he would wake up. But if I left him in the wet diaper he'd wake up. So I removed the diaper and prayed for dryness. Luckily, our story has a happy ending and I even get to go to sleep before 3 am.

Out of the mouths of babes.

Tonight, I was putting the last of the Christmas decorations and was feeling a little sad about how empty and plain the house was looking. I took the last of the boxes up to the attic and came back down and was putting the last of the furniture back into place. Little Cutie looks at me and says "Good job putting away your things, Mama."

Guess what skill we've been working on.