Trying to make it through the day!!!

With Emery's 2nd birthday getting closer, it is very obvious we are at that "terrible two's" stage! Lately he is just completely over-the-top aggressive, disobedient, and screamy. Honestly some days I just wonder how I'm going to make it through! I know it's just a part of toddler-hood but it is really hard to keep my patience with him. The weather has been hot, hot, rainy, rainy, hot. We usually end up outside anyways, but I usually just can't stand it for too long. One day I took Emery to Monkey Joe's. They have the inflatable boucing/sliding toys. Emery loves to jump and run and I was hoping he could go crazy and give me a little time to just sit and relax. But I forgot to mention Emery is also in the stage of needing me by his side almost every waking moment. He draged me with him the whole time and by the time we left I was more exhausted than when we got there. Total Bust!

Oh, and then about 35% of the time he wanted to play on this broken-usually-requiring-a-quarter-to-ride toy. Ug.
One of Emery's obsessions is water. But especially the kitchen sink. He loves to spray the water, scrub in the sink and play. Sounds innocent enough right? Well except he pulls the dirty dishes and silverware out of the other side and puts them in his mouth- Ewe! And sprays the water all over the kitchen. And sticks his foot in the disposal-more ewe, and possibly dangerous! Not to mention that if he all the sudden decided he was done, he'll try to jump off the counter- not safe!
Oh yeah. And then there is our current sleeping situation. Ever since we came home from our load of vacations in June/July he's been out of the crib. We bought him a twin mattress at Ikea and put it in the corner on the floot. But we couldn't get him to stay in there to fall asleep without one of us laying next to him. Sigh... He used to be so good at going to sleep, when he was in his crib. Starting all over sucks!

But then it started getting to the point that even with me in there, he'd try to get up, roll around, scream, etc and basically not try very hard to go to sleep. Plus, he's been getting up in the night (probably because he wakes up and can't get back to sleep with us not there). Last week I decided I couldn't handle it anymore and decided I needed to start getting him used to falling asleep alone. I knew it would be horrible, but I was hoping it would be better in the long run, for both of us.

Night one: he came out of his room 100 times in about 30 minutes (all while screaming and crying) before finally falling asleep. It seemed a lot longer than 30 minutes but I was pretty impressed it worked so fast. Especially considering the few nights before with me in there with him it took over an hour for him to fall asleep! The next day I was not looking forward to doing it for naps too, but lucked out and he fell asleep in the car on the way home from the store. He must have been really pooped because he even stayed asleep as I moved him from the car to his bed. I was bummed when he woke up after only an hour (that's how long he usually sleeps, but I was hoping that his extra late night would make him sleep longer). He was cranky though and clearly still tired. I tured on Winnie-the-Pooh and put him on the couch. I checked back on him 10 minutes later and he'd fallen asleep! Joy! And then the miracle/blessing that I've never had before....he slept for 2 hours on the couch! I was in heaven! So I took some pictures...

He started upright like this

After a yawn (and almost waking up I thought) he fell back asleep before putting his hands back down.

This was right before he woke up, slouched all the way down.

The next night it took more like 40 mintutes but he only came out 50 times in that time. The next few nights averaged about 10-15 minutes. And after about 5-7 minutes he'd stop the crying and just try and sneak out. He hasn't been waking up in the night, which is fabulous! But naps are still hit and miss. Some days he'll fall asleep in the car or while watching Pooh, but then sometimes he does wake up when I move him from the car. And then yesterday he just was so tired, but would not nap at all. Well he did finally about 2 hours after his usual nap time, but I really thought it wasn't going to happen! Last night was a set back though with it taking 40 minutes again. Sigh. I'm just hoping it will get better. Well actually it will probably get worse before better since we are moving on Tuesday Sept. 16th! And the movers will have our stuff moved in at the lastest on Friday! What?! I'm like what are we supposed to do for 2-3 days? But that's another post I suppose.

Here is Em and me out in the rain. It honestly doesn't matter to this kid if it is 95 degrees outside or a tropical storm; he has to be outside!

ps- Sorry for the venting but I think I feel a litte better now :)

Words

Emery has never been one too interested in talking [well, anything that made sense anyways]. He's gradually adding words to his vocabulary though. Some of our newest are HOT (sounds more like "ottt" and HI or "iii" and then BYE or "iii"- sounds the same as hi. This is a big accomplishment because for the longest time he'd wave hi and bye but refused to say it.
His favorite thing to say is "more!" which can be helpful sometimes, but even after I sometimes have to say no he keeps saying: more more more...
He also says ELMO or "ma mow" He loves Winnie the Pooh now too, but still calls it Elmo, which can be confusing/frusterating when I don't know which he really wants to watch! Ah oh well.
He says the usual "ma ma" and "da da" but prefers ma ma and sometimes calls Joel ma ma too. Weird. I'm supprised he hasn't picked up NO yet but I'm sure when he figures it out, I'll wish he hadn't!
Even though Emery doesn't say a whole lot, he really understands a lot. I can ask him to go get things for me, put things away, or ask him if he wants to eat something and he'll shake his head yes or no. Plus there is a lot of nonverbal communication with grunts and pointing etc. I'm sure since I usually know what he means without him using words, it doesn't make him want to try to talk much more. I suppose he'll come around eventually though. What about your kids (especially boys), when did they start saying a lot?

A place to live.. THe SCoop

Monday was a bit of a roller coaster for us. It started out with Emery waking up at 7:15 and crawling into bed with us. He brought a book and started to read it to us. It was so cute, and nice to be able to lay in bed to wake up instead of him demanding one of us get up! But alas it couldn't last. We had to hurry and get ready to go on a little road trip to Greenville, SC to look for apartments and rental houses. Joel and I has stayed up until 1am writing down a list of places to visit. We planned to leave at 8 and were pretty close to that time except... 1. We hadn't eaten breakfast 2. We needed gas and 3. The car tires needed air.

So we swung by McDonalds and got some food. Then drove up to the Shell on Howell Mill to get gas and air for the tires. Joel decided we should check the oil too and found it to be a quart low. So after putting some more oil in and getting on our way it was almost 9am. The drive is about 2 hours and Emery hates the car, but we brought books, toys, snacks, and the portable DVD player with his favorite, Elmo's Kid's Favorite Songs DVD.

About an hour into the trip we decided we should call the first place on our list to let them know we wanted to look at an apartment in about an hour. Except, we realized that we'd left the list of apartments at HOME! UG!! I gotta tell you I was a bit mad. But what are you gonna do? It turned out Joel still had the # of the first place in his phone from when he'd called the other day. So we made the apointment but I was still at a loss of where else we were going to go since we didn't have any other addresses or phone numbers. After that long drive we finally pulled up to the apartment. I was excited because it was a 3 bedroom 2 bath with extra storage, a playground, pool and garages for rent... for about $750. My legs were stiff and I'm sure Emery was ready to play on that playground! (He is such an outside kid, rain or shine, 60 degrees or 95-doesn't matter, he wants to play outside!) Anyways, back to the story. I hadn't even gotten out of the car but as Joel got out and was getting Emery, this guys walks by and is like "come back later, ok". I was like what? Turns out a few minutes before they had been ROBBED! They wanted us to come back in a few hours to have the tour and I was thinking... 1. We are planning on driving back to atlanta in 2 hours and 2. Do I really want to live somewhere that just got robbed? I think not.

So by now I was really mad that we'd driven all that way without our list and now the 1 place we did have was out of the picture. Joel suggested we stop at an Ingles we'd passed and pick up and apartment finder guide. So we got it, and found another place to go look at (that we'd remembered the name of from the night before). This place was ok. It had a pool and playgound but the kitchen in the 2bed 2bath was about a third the size of the one we have now. Fortunately the girl who showed us the place was really nice and suggested a couple other places to check out. One in particular was called Jasmine Cove.

So, off to the next place, and getting hungry for lunch. (in our original plan we'd be to greenville by 10 and leave by noon to be able to get Emery to nap on the way home and be home by 2). By now I think it was already past noon. So we pull up to the place (in Simpsonville, just south of Greenville) and it's a gated community (probably less likely to be robbed, so there's a plus). It looks brand new and I'm starting to get excited about it. The offices are really nice and the pool is sparkling new. There is a new playground and the biggest sandbox I've ever seen (just kidding it was a vollyball net and pit- but I'm still thinking we could use it :) They have 2 or 3 bedrooms and we looked at both. Some of their 3 bedroom apartments have never been lived in! So long story short, we LOVE it and just hope in a month or 2 when we are actually moving it will work out. If you were interested there are some pictures of the apartment HERE.

It isnt' as cheap as the first place we went to but I suppose we couldn't get something this nice (or safe) for that price anyways!

We were so excited and relieved that we'd found a place to live and that the trip wasn't a waste! So, we headed back to Greenville for lunch. I had also wanted to take Emery to the fountains to play in that I'd noticed when we'd visited earlier this year. It was so hot and we ended up going straight for the water and putting off lunch for later. Here are some pictures and video clips. I had brought his swim suit but on the way he'd poured half a bottle of water in his lap and I figured we'd just let him get more wet in those clothes and save his dry suit for the ride home. But we finally just took all his clothes off and that diaper got pretty saggy! ha ha!

I'm thinking he could have stayed for hours! We will be coming back for sure! On the ride home Emery slept for and hour and 45 minutes! We didn't get home until 5 (3 hours past our original plan but at least Emery slept). Yeah, it turned out to be a good day!

Going for a drive...and Hitler

So, while cleaning our incredibly jam packed apartment the other day, Joel put Emery's little car on top of my sewing machine case. Apparently Emery really wanted to play with it (and not the other 2 little cars... I know, we need to get rid of some toys) and proceeded to climb up to it. I was on the computer and all I hear is "honk honk,...uh oh". This is how I found him, I think the uh oh meant, "could you give me a hand mom?" For a while now Emery has enjoyed dipping his chicken or fries etc in ketchup or ranch that Joel and I are eating. He wasn't brave enough to actually eat it, and would try to then feed the dipped food to one of us. Something magical happened the other day and he actually tried the ketchup. And he loves it! It's a bit messy though...here Emery is sporting his ketchup mutache that sort of looks like Hiter! We have a lot of laughs around here!