Blessed Beyond Measure: The A Team Week 31: Call It What It Is

I have no desire for these boys to grow up too quickly, but I do love watching their brotherly bond grow and hope that they are great friends looking out for one another someday!

This week can pretty much be summed up by three things:

Avery turned 7 months old!! :)
The boys dealt with nasty colds :(
Gramps and Grandma Migrin came to Kenosha to visit and help us start building our new fence!! :) :)

For the first item on the list, I will make you wait until my next post with Avery's 7 month update.

For the second item on the list, I'll tell you that kids with colds are no fun...They turn from your adorable fun-loving little ones to tired, irritable, snotty, hacking messes...but I guess I do too when I'm sick it's just a little easier to deal with myself than two sick little ones. On Wednesday, it was my day off, but I was getting so stressed out by my growing list of things to do that rather than using the day to play with my boys, I used it to work on cleaning the house while they were in daycare. Late in the afternoon, I went to pick them up and although I was happy to see them, I quickly realized that I had picked a good day to have them in daycare. Asher was a total grump because he was not feeling well, and within about 10 minutes of having him with me, he was driving me crazy! I am not really proud of this, but at one point I even asked him, "Buddy, can you stop talking for a little bit?"

Finally, for the third item on the list, I'll say that Eric and I were blessed with some amazing parents, who are always willing to come and help us out when we need them! This weekend, Eric's parents drove here to help with the kids and work on constructing our new fence. Since we moved in, Eric and I have always wanted to fence in the yard, including a gate across our driveway. Now that Asher is getting older, we decided it was time to build so that he could have a safe place to play without Mommy or Daddy keeping a constant eye out. Therefore, Eric's mom helped me watch the boys while Eric and his Dad (with some help from their little buddy Asher) braved the not-so-cooperative weather to get the fence started. Friday night they stayed out in the rain, with barely-above-freezing temperatures to get all of the posts and footings in the ground, and on Saturday they again braved the cold wind to figure out how to build the gate. They didn't get as far as they had hoped, but still made a lot of progress, and hopefully in the not-so-distant future, we will have a completely enclosed yard!

So, that was our week in a nutshell, but before I get to the pictures to end this post I wanted to quickly update on our (eldest) little boy...

Since Asher is no longer a baby, I don't provide monthly updates on him, like I do with Avery. When he was a baby, it seemed he changed every single day, but now that he is almost 3 (?! Yikes ?!) the changes that he makes are slightly less noticeable. These days the most noticeable difference is his vocabulary and the fact that he now rarely stops talking. There are so many things that he says or has said that make us laugh or wonder where he had every learned that. He picks up on things so quickly now, and Eric and I have gotten in the habit of spelling things around him so that he can't follow (like P-A-R-K, etc), but I'm sure it won't be long before that doesn't work either. So, here is a short list (in no particular order) of some things he's said over the past few months that have not made it into the blog yet and I want to remember...

"I love Christmas lights!" (Back in January, when our lights were still up and he was continually in awe of them.)
"Wow!" (I just thought it was cute that he was so amazed by several seemingly mundane things).
"Cause Why?"(...yes, although it didn't last long, we did go through this typical toddler phase, wanting to know more about EVERYTHING).
"Emma with drasses", "Monkey-oo oo, ah ah", "Utter Monkey" & "Boat!" (These are things that Asher frequently says on our way home from daycare. For several months, he has pointed them out to me over and over again: The cartoon dog with glasses on for the sign of a local pub, the large Donkey Kong painted on the side of another pub (yes there are lots of bars in Kenosha), the random ape statue sitting on top of a local business sign, and the boat...I still haven't figured out what he is looking at here, but it has something to do with the Jockey Headquarters.)
"No one likes you Mommy". (I'm still not entirely sure this is what he said, but by the look on his face, I could see he was trying to get a rise out of me by the twinkle in his eye and the smirk on his face...I'll be honest, it hurt).
Later the same day as above we were headed to church for playgroup when Asher asked if I would play with him there. I said, "don't you want to play with your friends?" He replied, "You my friend."...heart melted, above statement forgotten.
I don't know exactly what he was saying last week, but several times I got yelled at as we pulled into our garage for running over Asher's basketball hope or knocking it down. Note: I did neither, but mommy always get's the blame I guess.
Also last week, Asher randomly was saying, "Mommy bad". Again, random and probably said just to get a rise out of me. I told him it hurt my feelings and he stopped.
Again last week, Asher asked me to help him with something. As I did so he looked at me and said, "You a good helper." :)
Finally, a while back I wrote about the bird house that Asher and Eric built and how excited he was that a birdie had claimed it. Only a couple of days after a bird had seemingly called it home, it took off (probably because it wasn't a fan of begin so close to our back door). When Asher had asked about where the bird had gone, I told him that it had probably gone to Menards to get some supplies for its new house. Almost two weeks went by and still no bird, when Eric asked Asher if he wanted to make a trip to Menards with him. Asher got REALLY excited and asked, "See Birdie at Menards!!??" :) Two items of note: While they were at Menards, they did see birdies in the store and Asher was totally excited and came home and told me all about it. Also, since then we do have a family that has made the house their home and we can't wait to see some little baby birdies poking their little beaks out! :>

Asher also is growing in personality and that means that Eric and I have really had to step up our game in the parenting role to teach him right from wrong, funny from sassy, etc...

On Easter, we had just gotten home from our trip to the UP and were bringing everything from the van into the house, when I noticed Asher hanging back for a moment. When he finally came in the house, I noticed that he had eaten some chocolate (no doubt knowing full well that I wouldn't let him have it if he asked me, so he stayed behind hoping to hide it from me). Later that evening when I was putting his Easter candy away, I found a half-eaten chocolate bar...wrapper and all! He still has a hard time opening up things and my best guess is that he couldn't get it open so rather than asking me (again knowing I'd say that he'd already had enough) he decided to just eat the wrapper with it!
One day I was cleaning out the pantry when I found some very old and stale animal crackers which I threw in the trash. Later that day, Asher found them in the trash (still in the ziplock bag) and really wanted some. I told him that they were no good and that they were already in the trash anyway. He walked away from them and I thought it was over. A little while later, I heard some rustling in the kitchen, and when I went in to see what was going on, I found an open trash can with Asher standing next to it with a mouth full of animal crackers.
I'm noticing a trend as I write these, that many of these moments have to do with food...here's another: One morning after Easter, Asher came upstairs to greet Avery and I. He was chewing something and had chocolate all over his face. I asked him if he had eaten any Whopper eggs (as the evidence was all there already) and he replied, "No."...We had to have another talk about lying and then I asked him if lying was good or bad...response, "Lying Bad." I'd like to say "lesson learned," but know it is more like, "until next time."

One last Asher update and the title of this post is "Call it what it is." I have noticed recently that Asher makes up names for things when he doesn't know what they are called by describing what they do. For example, his night-time music/light penguin is called "Do-Do" because it goes, "do do do do do do do do do" (to the tune of some classical song that I cannot remember the title of). His toy hammers are called, "knockers", and the other day he kept asking me to go get his "Up and Down." I had no idea what he was talking about until he said, "My Up and Down!, for my cars!". Then I realized he was talking about his Fisher Price parking garage, which has an elevator. This all got me thinking about the mind of a toddler and how things are black and white, you say what you mean...kind of makes me wish we held on to that trait as we grew up and didn't give people the run-around. Anyway...my (random) two cents...now here's for this weeks pictures:

Video: Ma Ma

For a while now, Avery has been saying "Ma Ma", but we were not sure if it was just babble or if he knew what he was saying. On Monday though, he was saying it almost the entire night when I was by him, so I'm counting it has his official first word! <3 Side Note: That night he slept terribly and was up several times. When he woke at about 4:30 am and wouldn't go back to sleep I let him cry it out in his crib until he eventually fell back asleep around 6am (right after I got into the shower of course). When he woke back up, he laid in his crib talking for a bit before I went to get him and we could hear him saying "Ma ma ma ma," as if to remind me of how cute he is! ;)

Now that Avery is on the move, he is also constantly looking for things to get him into trouble!

Avery sporting Papa's team!

On my day off (Asher's grumpy day) I thought it'd be fun to make dirt cake with Asher for an Earth Day treat. He was in no mood to cooperate though, refused to help and wouldn't eat his dinner that night so the dirt cake was saved for the next day...it was still delicious and Asher was very excited to find the "lizards" (aka worms).

Avery turned 7 Months old on Friday!

Again, he will move as fast as he possibly can (grunting all the way) to get to anything he shouldn't have...like big boy toy cars (with little parts).

Littlest man had fun with "Grammy" as Asher started calling her this weekend while the men worked outside and Asher and I had a great time alone together for a couple of hours while we went to swimming lessons (because Avery was still sick)...I think Asher was pretty excited to have some exclusive Mommy time and he came home knowing what a knuckle sandwich is.

Avery had fun with Grandma, but was happy when Mommy came home...so happy he had to come over and bit my knee!

Asher "helping" Gramps and Daddy with the fence.

Video: The Yogurt Class

This is one of those videos that really doesn't make a lot of sense to anyone else. We had been talking about Asher's cousin Emmett who mistook his mom's Yoga class for Yogurt Class and found it hilarious when we wondered if we could make Asher think it was equally as funny...We could and we did. This is the result...

Eric & Gramps planning the gate on the garage floor.

The boys working on gate construction.

Emma trying to get Avery to play with her. She kept pushing her toy onto his lap. It is funny because she rarely went near Asher, but seems quite interested in playing with Avery.

The gate is in the works.

Making progress.

After a long day of play inside for the girls and kids and work outside for the men, we enjoyed a nice, easy Culvers dinner together.

On Sunday morning, the boys got to spend some time playing (& resting) with Grandma and Gramps before we went out for breakfast and then they had to leave us.

Asher & Gramps playing at Cracker Barrel.

Grandparents & Kiddos before parting ways

After Sunday breakfast we headed back home for naps and family time to finish out the week...if I "call it what it is", this week was just another week of good old family time!