Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Water or No Water, Bath Time Will Go On!

Carson recently discovered that sitting on his bottom is not the only option during bath time. Daddy taught him how to crawl around on his hands and knees, lay down, and blow bubbles. This has helped a lot because he's been a bit opposed to bath time lately. Last night Carson refused to get out of the tub, even as it ran dry!

What? Time to get out? I don't think so!
Pleeeeease! Just 5 more minutes!
Cold? No I'm not cold! I just want to play more.
Night, night!
Okay, now I'm getting cold!
Jeremy and I spent yesterday cleaning out our barn and found the Jose Cuervo bandanas leftover from Halloween. Carson thought they were pretty cool!
Here he is shouting his favorite new phrase at the top of his lungs over and over and over, "Ta Da!"

Memorial Day Part 2

While we miss Lori and Brian a lot, one of the benefits of them moving to San Ramon is that I get to visit my friends and family more often! Sunday morning we drove over to my grandma's and she got to see her great-grandson! My Aunt Pam made us a yummy lunch and we got to see the newly updated kitchen! Beeautiful!

We timed our two hour drive back to San Ramon with Carson's nap and it was very peaceful! We were lucky enough to sneak in a visit to my California "brothers" home! Ryan and Karen are the proud parents of 2.5 week old Kayla! "Uncle" Brett and the even prouder grandparents, Tom & Louise, all showed off their newest family member! We had a great time catching up and sharing parenting stories!

On the way to Great-Grandma's! Thank God for the DVD player! We went through 4 different shows!
I love my Great-Grandma!
Hugs for you!
Four generations of Kuntz's!
"Mo mo"- translated: I LOVE MOWERS! (We couldn't pry him off this one for 15 minutes)
That was exhausting!
The crew! The Rader's, Brett, & The Lotz's
Watch out Tiger Woods!

Memorable Memorial Day Part 1

We jumped on a plane EARLY Friday morning to visit our new nephew in California! We were so scared to wake Carson up at 4:45 am but he smiley and happy! The plane ride was pretty easy. Just a few screams from a frustrated, active toddler. My trip to the Dollar Store made the ride easier! Carson enjoyed discovering new (disposable since they were only 99 cents!) toys every few minutes or so. The best part was the sticker book! He loved picking out stickers to put on his coloring book pages.

He crashed hard in the car when we landed at 9 am. Unfortunately the one hour car nap was not enough to rejunenate him. He was a crabby mess by his normal naptime and refused to go down. Try after try after try. He finally went down at 4:30! In the meantime, we played with his cousin Thomas! Carson didn't really like it when I would hold Thomas. "Down" - which interpreted means Put The Baby Down Now!!

Lack of Sleep + Toddler + Travel = Recipe for Melt-Down City!! We beat several hasty retreats from Cousin TR's house in order to peel Carson off the floor and get him into his hotel crib. The first night he woke up screaming at 1 am. Not normal for him so we let him finish out the night in our bed. We all had neck pain the next morning from the ridiculously puffy hotel pillows. He woke up a raving lunatic at 5:50 am due to a very empty stomach and low blood sugar. Sent us scrambling in the dark to find food to bring back our normal child.

The second day was much better as he got back on his routine. We played at a park in the morning and he napped for 4 hours. We kicked Lori & Brian out of the house for a much needed solo lunch and shopping trip while Jeremy and I watched baby TR. Note to self: two kids sleeping at the same time is great but how often does that happen when they're both yours!

Here are some fun pics of Baby Thomas, also known as T.R.


Mommy Lori & Aunt Kristin & TR
The Cuz's and TR's Daddy!
Carson doesn't like to share a lap ;-)
Is this a new toy?
Okay- just one kiss for my cousin!
Slides are cool!
Video of the World's Slowest Slide! Turn up the volume because the end is super cute!





This drainage ditch makes a fun but dirty place to play!
Uncle Jeremy & TR
How long do I have to sit here?
When no toys exist, I have to make my own! Who knew chip clips could be so much fun!
Mommy Lori & TR
Diaper changing time!

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Curious George Meet Curious Carson

What happens when a living room is cleared of all furniture and toys for carpet cleaning? Throw in a distracted parent, a pair of keys, and a curious & bored toddler . . . bye, bye keys!!! Carson, stripped of his normal playthings, decided that the sub-woofer was a natural place to store keys. That round dark opening was just too tempting for a nearly two year old.

Hmmm, this cavity looks inviting! Just the size of my hand!
Bye, bye keys!
Mama, why are you so upset? I think I can reach them.
Nope. As hard as he tried, Carson could not rescue the keys. I even turned the thing sideways and tried to shake them out. No luck. Fortunately, they were not important keys. Not important to us anyway. I had put an old key on a key chain and Carson thinks it's the key to the lawn mower. So it is VERY important to him. The only word we hear more than mama, dada, and uh-oh, is "mo-mo" which means mower. He is absolutely infatuated with the ride-on mower. He thinks that the mower sleeps a lot because when we don't have time to take him down to look at it, we always say, "the mower is night-night right now Carson". That usually satisfies him until an hour later when he wants to wake up the mo-mo.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Potty Prep

Carson is getting much more accurate with his "poo-poo" announcements. Sometimes he's even still going as he announces it. So tonight I was very excited when he wanted to take his pants off to try the potty. So excited that while he was sitting "practicing", I told him to wait there while I grabbed the camera. One of my bad habits is taking the memory card out and leaving it in my computer . . . this was one of those times. Cursing myself and laughing at the same time, I rushed around the house gathering all the necessary items.

But Carson wasn't interested in waiting. He decided to carry his potty out to me, hobbling with his pants around his ankles!! Even better!

Mama, my potty is portable!
See! This is how you do it!
Stop taking pictures!!

Monday, May 19, 2008

HOT Weekend!

Part of my daily routine is to check out all my favorite "mommy blogs". Everyone had blogged about the ridiculously hot weekend we had and how much fun they had! So I am hurrying to update ours before Carson wakes up! Speaking of waking up, most of you know our battles as of the last three months of Carson waking up at 5:15. Give him a binkie and he'll go back to sleep until 6. We've been experimenting with shorter naps (he'll nap for 2-4 hours!!) and later bedtimes but nothing is working. Randomly yesterday he slept in until 8:45!! Today 7:30!! Yay!

So our record breaking hot weekend with temps at 95, 98, and 96 was very fun! We worked a lot on the yard. One of my uber-sweet clients gave us four trees and several shrubs as a thank you gift! We promptly planted those . . . why promptly? Because for the first time since we became home-owners in 1998, Jeremy and I decided to kick it up a notch this year. We said no thank you to the back breaking work of battling barrels of barkdust! A necessary evil, barkdust, historically has taken us an entire weekend of shoveling and shuttling, not one, not two, but THREE units of barkdust to the far reaching ends of our landscaping.

Not this year! We called in the heavy artillary, BARKDUSTERS! After taking a shot of vodka to steady my hand to write the check, OUCH, we sat back on our recliners, sipped cold beers, and watched a crew of five sweaty men blow three units of barkdust and transform our winter-worn yard into a fresh new vision! We cheered them and felt only a skosh guilty as they cleaned up behind themselves and left without a trace!

Next year, who ya gonna call? Barkdusters!



And now back to playing with the cheapest toy around! A hose and spray gun!!
Watch out Mommy!
Gotcha! (Those are Mommy's knees I'm spraying!)
Jeremy rented a tow-beind tractor sprayer to rid our field, dare I say, pasture, of weeds this year. The plan was working well until he assembled the sprayer and discovered the last renter had broken it and neglected to admit it to the rental company. The rental company, in a hurry to get it to Jeremy, neglected to check it and now Jeremy is having to work twice as hard to spray the field since only one side of the sprayer works! Oops!
Carson woke up wondering where Dada was. I told him to go look out the window (again not really sure if he understood me). Sure enough, he ran down to the bonus room and I found him perched on the couch trying really hard to get his Dada's attention in the field. It was so darn cute!
Daddy! Daddy! I'm up here!
Please Daddy! I'm waving frantically!

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Mommy's Mother's Day

For my Mother's Day this year, we piled in the car early in the morning Saturday and drove down to Champoeg Park for the Hippie Chick Half Marathon. I ran with friends from my Baby Boot Camp class and the dads and kids all hung out. Nice cool weather and great viewing of the racers since the course is a figure 8 loop that we ran twice.

The ladies pre-race! No, we don't have matching ankle bracelets, those are our timing chips!
Daddy & Carson self-portrait!
Post-race with kiddos!
And the faithful daddies! Can you tell their wives all work out? Nice jogging strollers!


Terrible Two's Already

Being a parent has its ups and downs. Unfortunately for the Rader household this is a "down" week. We have been joking that Carson is bi-polar due to his mood swings from happy and silly, super sweet boy, to raging, screaming, fit-throwing, hitting, little tyrant. But add an illness to the terrible two's (keep in mind we have two months to go until two) and everything is magnified!!!

Carson is battling yet another fever, cough, and cold. The umpteenth one this season and he is absolutely miserable. Which leads to miserable parents. Car rides are horrible, grocery shopping is out of the question, and the tv is on almost constantly to distract all of us from each other. I actually thought Jeremy was going to pull over in Yamhill on the way to Sheridan on Mother's Day. I thought he was going to either jump out of the car and call a taxi to get a ride home, or he was going to kick us out of the car and leave skid marks on his way out of town. It was not pleasant. Happy Mother's Day!

Jeremy invited us to have lunch with him today, but evil Carson was the personality du jour and made it miserable. We didn't even get to pick out lunch in New Seasons because he was causing such a scene. Paid $10 for hot dogs outside the store and left without getting our change because it took two of us just to manage him.

Later at Fred Meyer, he threw a fit and laid on the ground kicking and screaming, so I left the cart and its contents smack dab in the middle of the aisle and said, "That's it, we're going home". Only I didn't think my plan all the way through. On the way out the door, I remembered we didn't have a drop of milk at home so I veered back to the organic section to grab a gallon. Unfortunately, I was also now holding Carson (30+lbs) on my hip. Got the milk and of course, couldn't find a single open cashier. My arm gave out while we were waiting so I set Carson down on the ground to walk. WRONG MOVE! He lost it again and was army crawling around the store and when I tried to get him up to move, he lost it again. Failing, wailing, hitting, writhing, screaming. The guy in front of me turned around and said, "I know what you're going through, I have three." Which is why the Rader's may only have one!!!

The u-scan feature wasn't working, the assistance cashier couldn't get it to work, she had to manually type in the code, and all while Carson was having a fit. I almost left without the milk. Carried the gallon and the kid to the car but my arm gave out again. Set Carson down to walk and he laid down in the middle of the road to have another fit. While we do not spank in our household, it was the closest I've come to wanting to spank him. Instead I hauled him up by his arm and dragged him to the car. Some lady said, "Oh what a cute little boy!" I kindly offered for her to take him home for the night, I would even install the carseat myself!

Please let the happy, silly, fun Carson come home soon!

Friday, May 09, 2008

More Camping Pics- Too cute to not Post!!

Okay, now I'm just a doting mother because these pictures are just soooo cute!!! Borrowed them from Kevin & Kim who took them on our camping trip. Kevin happens to be a paid photographer who has the most amazing eye for photos and a rockin' lens. Jeremy has "lens envy" EVERY time we all hang out. So get ready for some SUPER cute pics!!

I LOVE Bubbles!!!

Blow more mommy!
Finally! Someone my own size!
I meant to do that!
Ummm, chocolate!
Can I get some help over here?
I'm a chick magnet!
I never leave home without my wheelbarrow!Look out! Daddy's on the warpath!
Mommy, why do you always look so mad? Daddy says you need to stop squinting.

I love camping and I love life!

How Old is Carson?

How Old is Keaton?