Wow! October starts tomorrow and it is my absolute favorite month of the year! My husband and I were married in October and this year is our five-year anniversary!

Cooler (relative) weather is supposed to reach Florida tomorrow.  I’m so excited because I am hosting a private art show featuring seven local artists at my house! I’ve been busy preparing for a few weeks.  As this is my first show of anything like this I am anxious to see what happens.

A special thank you to the following women who will be participating in tomorrow’s event.

Tina Adkins
Danean Hoenicke Ermentrout
Kate McKuhen
Joni Rollen
Beth Smith
Elizabeth Sullivan

~Life as Mom

I thought I would be a lot more scheduled and disciplined but I think I expected too much.  The biggest challenge has been to relax and to let go.  To just enjoy being with my son.  Believe it or not that has been a challenge for me.  It is not because of Aden either, he is absolutely wonderful and possibly the easiest kid in the world to get along with.  It has so much more to do with me.  I expect great things from me and I am my own boss now.  Boss wants lots of things done! Yesterday!  Learning to give myself a break has taken some time and I’m still working on it for sure!

Here is our daily routine!

8am Aden wakes me up sweetly by saying, “Moma, I sleep good.  I wake up.”

9am Breakfast and if I’m lucky I can interest Aden in the morning cartoons on PBS so that I can do my 20 minute yoga session. (Happens about twice a week.)

10am Make a point to get my teeth brushed and get dressed!

11am Either stay at home and do housework while Aden plays or watches TV or go to a park or the museum.

12pm Think about getting lunch.

1pm Try to get Aden to take a nap.

2pm Get the TV off and if Aden is sleeping, work on computer.  If he is not sleeping, make a point to go outside and play! Now it is warm enough to swim! Yea!

3:30pm Think about getting dinner ready and straightening up the house.

5-6pm Patiently await the love of my life to come home so I can hand over the kid!

Thank goodness for FRIDAYS! My mom takes him on Fridays and I wait all week for the day to come! Then when it gets here I don’t know what to do with myself! Too many options! Too much freedom!

I am definitely getting into a routine.  I’m not really a routine kind of person.  When I start seeing the routine I get restless, incredibly restless.  So yes, I am getting to that point where all I want to do is plan some trip somewhere.  I always feel like I’m master of my own destiny when I plan a trip somewhere. Plan it out, set it up, and make it happen.  Such a feeling of accomplishment!

I am trying to channel that energy into my photography work now.  Something I feel like there is just never enough time for!

I’ve reopened my Etsy shop and started filling it with my photographs!  Please check it out!

Rollen-Hanson Gifts Etsy Shop

Aden and his Butterfly

Aden rescued a butterfly from the pool with his favorite bug-rescueing net yesterday fulfilling his mission in life and making him like his hero, Diego.  This is why I want to stay at home.  No, we are not doing ABC drills every day, but we are having a good time. 

I let Aden use my camera for a minute and he got some decent shots!  I plan on starting a new page called Aden’s Creations, showcasing his photography and artwork.  I don’t know if he will be a creative genius or not but he is already learning that the camera is terribly important to me.  Especially when his fingers stray towards the lens.

~Life as Mom

Nothing as dramatic as squirrels eating through our vehicle engine wires but we did have a little bit of holiday drama.  All three of us came down with three different illnesses that had to be mended before we could enjoy Christmas!  Thank goodness for antibiotics! One solid week with all three of us basically in bed and after the holiday madness  another week at home recovering from the travels!

Aden enjoyed three lovely days of visiting family and receiving presents! The most memorable moment for me was of Christmas morning when Aden held a conversation with his two new playmates, King and Queen Castlehoff!  Two lovely puppets that Aden loves to talk to and spontaniously hug!  It was lovely!

Aden and his grandfather's train

I was so hopeful Aden would want to use the potty more!  I’m still hopeful as Aden will be moving into the next class at daycare soon and they definitely do the full out potty training in that class.

Kevin is off to the ancestral home this weekend and I’m heading in the opposite direction to visit my friend in Tampa.  It will be interesting to see how Aden fares staying the night in a new location.  Since our spring disaster of trying to stay in a cabin with him we haven’t tried staying anywhere else with him. 

In that instance he kept getting up in the middle of the night and would wind up in weird places.  He sleeps in a very deep crib at home. The first night at the cabin he was stuck under the bed.  The second night he was on a shelf in the kitchen.  I don’t know if he sleep walks or was just looking for something more comfortable but it freaked us out every night!  So this will be a great little test run for our October mountain trip.  I’ll find out how well he travels!

Forget trying to potty train while on the road…I won’t go there, especially by myself.

~Life as Mom

We got our driveway fixed and paved yesterday.  If anyone recalls we had to take down the tree, that housed the squirrel, that ate our cars, that cost us thousands in the house that nature built!

It looks lovely now.  Although you can see the patch, at least there isn’t a huge hole in the middle of our driveway anymore where the tree used to be!

Easter is coming up and I’m looking forward to hiding eggs for Aden.  I just can’t believe how smart he is becoming.  We colored eggs this week.  Martha Stewert I ain’t but it was fun anyways.   I’m am trying to relax about this holiday.  I don’t want to go crazy over a basket or the perfect outfit. It’s about family and hanging out and making memories, ie: laughter!

Aden is quite the parrot now which means I have to curb my language, which is not good; the language I mean.  I need to remember words like, “sugar,” and “fiddlesticks.”  Somehow those things just don’t come to mind when I’m falling over with my son in my arms and his sippy cup just hit the truck tire that I just ran over roadkill with.  Hmm.  Yum.

It wasn’t a rabbit.  At least I don’t think so.

Happy Easter!

~Life as Mom

My other thought with this was how awesome would it be to read tidbits of my parents’ take on things as I grew up. I am hoping that at some point Aden will take the time to read our progress as parents and get a few laughs and hopefully some endearing memories of life with parents. I had the oppurtunity in the last couple of years to peak in the life of my grandfather (Papa); my mother’s dad. My Papa past away before I was born but thanks to the fantastic memory that my grandmother has I have truly felt a connection to a man I never knew.

One story that she shared with me was the relationship that my grandmother had with her sister-in-law. Let’s say the two did not see eye-to-eye at all times. There was one moment when my Papa had gone to boot camp for WWII, this left my Grandmother to live with her sister-in-law.

With a disagreement about house duties and their regularity of completion, granmother’s sister-in-law ended up leaving their shared dwelling and walking the 10-plus miles home to her parents.

I give you all this history because I had to clean out my great-aunt’s house (grandmother’s sister-in-law) when she passed recently. My great-aunt had kept all the letters that my great great grandmother recieved from her children over the years. In this collection was a letter from my Papa while at boot camp telling his mother not to worry about his wife and his sister’s personality conflict. It was a fantastic read and a reinforcement of the story my grandmother had told me about her life.

In all this storytelling I drive home the point of connections.  Connections to family and connections to your childhood. What were my parents thinking as I developed into a person? What could I read about my father’s life to rekindle my memories of my childhood?  What could I realize about my mother? These points are just another reason why we blog about our parenting experiences. It is theraputic for my wife and I, it gives our friends that have not heard from us in a while a reason for understanding our reprieve while going into parenthood and hopefully one day our son can understand us and get a guide into his own parenting experience.

~Life as Dad

Not only do you have to work and carry on your normal routine, but you have to be extra jolly or you are a Scrooge.  You have to be extra giving or you are a Scrooge, damn the budget!  You have to be extra helpful and happy, damn the work and family sickness or you’ll be labeled a Scrooge!  No one wants to be a Scrooge, right?  He wasn’t the richest person in town for nothing you know!  He worked!  He made people pay their bills!  And man oh man, do I hate to pay my bills!

I’ve come up with my own Top Ten version of surviving the holidays.  I hope this is helpful and inspiring!

10.  The month before Christmas spend all the extra money you have on eliminating wire-eating squirrel habitats.  This will help your stress load when it comes to spending money on gifts.

9.  After Thanksgiving, have your child get very sick.  There’s always the extra money for the medicine and the retired mother-in-law will be perfectly willing to come to town to stay with him.  This will build good relations with family and give your child time with his grandmother when he is feeling his worst.

8.  After the retired mother-in-law contracts an unknown illness from your child and is miserable,  rely on her for future help.  This will also build good family relations.

7.  After your child is well and back in daycare, have your husband come down with a horrible illness that the doctor says is highly infectious.  The doctor won’t know what it is, just that it’s horribly infectious.  This will help you after your long days at work with the nightly childcare duties as you have to keep father and son apart.  This will help you sleep at night too.

6.  While your husband is home in bed horribly ill, have your child have a recurrence of his previous sickness, only worse.  Since your mother-in-law is now ill and work is not happy that you’ve been taking time off to take care of your husband, you sick son will have to stay with your sick husband who can barely stand.  Have your sick husband take your sick child to the pediatrician as well.  This will leave you guiltily at work and your sick husband will take on all the responsiblity.  It’ll build his holiday character.

5.  Have your pediatrician forbid your child to go to daycare.  You will now have no option to stay home because your office is tired of you taking off, your husband will have to go back to work because it is a new job and he has a ton of work waiting from being out sick.  Your retired mother-in-law has still not recovered from the bug she caught the last time she was here so that will leave you to think of the only person left, your mother.  Perfect!

4.  Have your mother beg favors from her co-workers and take time off from her work so that the guilt mounting is much greater than normal for using/abusing her free babysitting.  This will build that good morale fiber so necessary to becoming something other than Scrooge!

3.  Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the family getting sick be sure to do all your holiday shopping.  Take lots of time in the two hours you have free each weekend to think what gift would be especially relevant and wonderful for the person you are getting it for.  This will make everyone around you realize that you aren’t Scrooge but a wonderful, creative and talented gift-giver that everyone looks forward to seeing at the holidays.

2.  Exactly one week before Christmas realize that you have had this weird sinus infection for over a month and it isn’t going away.  Contemplate getting sick on your holiday vacation as your body will wind down and everyone else will feel better and want to play. 

1.  One week before Christmas realize that you haven’t properly prepared for the Christmas meal yet.  That will mean more shopping and of course money that wasn’t exactly budgeted for.

*Extra tip:  In the month of December, be sure to read and watch all the daily news as it will inspire and help you to have that wonderful Christmas spirit.  The Scrooge in you will surely be put to rest then.

~Life as Mom

I’d love to hear your holiday Scrooge-fighting tips as well! 

We’ve worked so hard to babyproof the house that Aden has free range to wander.  And now?  He can’t touch the tree and it’s right in his play area! 

The main thought was to have everything put up while Aden was at Grandma’s or something like that, but we had to put it up while he was with us.  That in itself was so cute!  He wanted to help put ornaments on the tree.  Mostly he’s good at taking them off the tree.  I’m so worried he will pull the tree over in his overzealous attempts at removing the “child-safe” ornaments.  He REALLY enjoyed all the boxes!   OH BOY, WERE THOSE FUN!

Our tree looks half done because we only decorated about half-way down, just out of his reach.  You can tell he really enjoys the tree though.  Everytime he sees it he goes “oooahh.”  He gets so excited!

Last night we put up Aden’s special tree in his room.  This is his personal tree that I will let him decorate anyway he wants each year.  Last year and this year was my choice, of course!  Last year I did a baby boy blue them….it was so adorable!  This year I did a toys in Toyland theme with a Nutcracker as the topper!  So cute!  I’ll be dreading the day when he wants an Incredible Hulk theme. Ugh!

~Life as Mom