If It Ain't Broke....

I'd love to know who coined the phrase "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Never have I come across a time in my life where I should have listened to those 7 little words more than when we moved Grey to his new bed. WTF were we thinking? We had a 2 1/2 year old confined to baby jail and he LOVED it. You don't let a convict out of his cell because you think he'll do better in one without bars. Yet, stupid us did just that. Minus the convict part. And we really don't think of his crib as baby jail. Mostly we thought of it was a safe place for Greyden to sleep. Ummmm.....anyway. 

Now that we've been in the big boy bed for about a month, you're probably wondering how he's doing, right? Well, let's just say that not a morning goes by that I don't threaten to put his crib back up. Yeah, it's that good. Apparently the Lightning McQueen bed comes with an alarm that goes off at 6:00 am on the nose every morning. I have gone over that thing with a fine toothed comb and I have yet to find it, but I can assure you it's there. How do I know this? Well, the toddler in my room every morning at 6:00 (give or take 5 minutes - no I'm not exaggerating) is a pretty dead giveaway. The first morning that he braved coming downstairs by himself (I believe it was day 3) we woke up to Grey standing on our bed yelling at the top of his lungs "THERE'S A KITTY IN THE BED!" Ho. Ly. $hit. Apparently Grey thought is was strange that the cat was sleeping up there, but totally normal that he was also standing up there. Never mind the fact that we can't figure out how he actually got up there. We pretty much realized that we need to nip this in the bud proto, before we both end up with heart attacks.

Our grand solution? "Greyden, you can't leave your bed in the morning. When you wake up you need to call for mommy and daddy and we'll come up and get you." Cue the blank toddler look. Somewhere in that little speech, the lines of communication apparently got crossed because now we have a toddler screaming and crying from his bed (he got half the message) every. single. morning. At 6:00 am. I freaking kid you not. Back in the good old, pre-toddler bed days (was it really only a month ago?) he would usually wake up early, but roll around in his bed for up to an hour before calling for us. Not anymore. Now when he's up, we're up and that's it. At least I think that's it. It's kind of hard to remember in this lack of sleep-induced haze I've been in for the last few weeks.

Oh, and not only that, we're regressing. He's decided that he needs to be rocked to sleep now. The whole point of the big boy bed was so that we could put him in bed, tuck him in, and walk out the door. Somewhere along the line we screwed that up. So far the only thing we've been able to accomplish is breaking the pacifier habit by telling him he's a "big boy" now. And I'm not even sure how much of an "accomplishment" that is. I think the only thing we managed to do is break him of wanting to be a "big boy", because now every time we try to get him to do something and bust out the "you're a big boy now" phrase, he informs us that no, he's not a big boy. I think we've just kissed the possibility of potty training any time soon goodbye....

Merry Christmas! - Part 1: The Decorating

I have always loved Christmas. Everything about it. And now that we have kids, I love it even more. It's so much fun to talk about Santa and show Greyden the ropes. This year he was actually old enough to understand the "Santa" concept. Or, he at least understood that there was a guy coming to our house and bringing him presents. He really didn't care much beyond that. Oh, and the whole "be good because Santa is watching" thing? Yeah, that's pretty sweet too.
 
It's always been a pain in the ass for me to convince Kevin that he we had to decorate the outside of our house when we lived in nice, warm Texas, so convincing him that it had to be done in freezing cold Michigan took some finesse. Meaning I finally had to whip out the guilt card and remind him that this was Emerson's first Christmas and the first Christmas that Greyden was old enough to take part in. That finally did it, although it didn't cut back on the amount of grumbling.
 
The first step was the house. Unfortunately this is the only picture I got of this step. I somehow missed the part where Kevin was hanging over the edge of the roof to get to the high peak. Probably because I was covering my eyes.
 

 

 

Grey was pretty impressed with the whole decorating thing.

 

After the house was done, Kevin got the genius idea to decorate the pine tree out front. 

 

Because nothing could possibly go wrong here....

 

 
He eventually gave up on that idea (thank god) and resorted to decorating our weeping pine on the other side of the front yard instead.
 

 

 

While Kevin was busy working on the outside of the house, I was on tree decorating duty. We had gotten our tree a few days earlier. Of course the day we took the kids to the Christmas Tree farm was probably the coldest day we had had so far that year. Or at least it felt like that to Kevin and me. It was a far cry from going to a U-Cut place in Texas and "cutting" the tree from a bucket of water in the ground, all while wearing our sunglasses and flip flops. Yeah, they don't exactly grow them around there.

 

 

On the hayride to the Christmas Tree field

Why does she always look so concerned???

Looking for the perfect tree.

 

Found it!

First he tried this side.

 

 

Then, after much cussing, tried this side.



 

Grey finally realized that Daddy wouldn't be able to do it alone, so he decided he needed to help.

 

 

Finally got it. Grey is obviously THRILLED!
 

Yeah, so it was a lot bigger once we got it up and in the house. I'd say at least 9 feet.

Greyden got to help with the decorating.

He lost interest shortly after this ornament (his first and last).

One More Milestone!

We are on a roll in the Hockenberry household lately. Greyden just hit another milestone last night and used the potty for the first time! I have no pictures, but really, do you want to see proof? It was just pee, but still. Kind of weird. Anyway, it was kind of a fluke because we were trying to get him to go poopy. While we didn't get that, we did get a stream of urine shooting across the room. Not ideal, but being as we've been trying to get him to use the potty for almost a year now, we'll take what we can get. After this, I think he'll be more willing to use it in the future as well since his little trick earned him 2 M&Ms and about 10 minutes of screaming and running around the house cheering and high fiving.....which he thought was hilarious. He even joined in after a few minutes.

The Big Boy Bed

We've finally taken the plunge and put our little baby Greyden into a big boy bed. That's right. Up until this point he's been in his crib. Talk about guilt. Part of me hated putting him into the crib every night. I mean, the kid is almost 2 1/2. However there was a bigger part of me (a much, much bigger part) that loved the fact that when we put him in his crib at night, the following morning he was still exactly where we'd left him. I was having a hard time with the concept of letting go of that convenience.

We decided to buy a toddler bed off Craigslist for him. Yes, his super expensive crib converts to a toddler bed, but it doesn't convert to THIS:

Awesome, right? Well worth the $150 investment for the bed, new stickers, and new bedding. Especially if it makes the transition easier on us him.

We set it up while he was at daycare, then took him upstairs when he got home. He didn't even see it at first. Just pointed to the extra Disney Cars sheet we left sitting on his changing pad and asked "what's that?" After we rolled our eyes over the fact that the kid missed a ginormous race car sitting in the middle of his already small bedroom and turned him around to see it, I think it's safe to say he was shocked. He immediately asked where the steering wheel was (it's a bed, it doesn't have one) and told us to take it downstairs so he could drive it (it's a bed, we can't). After we'd gotten those two disappointments out of the way, he was thrilled. He climbed up it, in it, over it.....requested that Sissy get "tied up" too (that's apparently 2 year old speak for "tucked in", since that's what he requests every time he lays down in it) and generally had a blast. (Getting him downstairs for dinner a few minutes later? Not so much a blast.)

It's hard to tell who loves the new bed more.

 

 

 

Bedtime. I don't think he's ever smiled like this when we told him it was time to go to bed before.

 

Of course the big test wasn't whether or not he'd like it. We knew we'd secured those points with the purchase of the bed in the first place. The big test was how he'd react to it once we put him in it for the night. Were we doomed to have a toddler visiting our room 54 times? I could see it happening. In fact, one of the reasons we kept him in his crib for so long was because of my paranoia of him navigating the stairs at night and wandering the house. So, in an attempt to head off any late night visits, when we tucked him in (tied him up? I hope he doesn't tell daycare that), I told him that if he needed anything to say "Mommy, Daddy, I need you please" and we'd be listening and come help him. He seemed fine with that and only requested that Daddy stay and watch him for a little bit (like he does every night).

Night one + no late night visits to our room = success! Well, except for the part where he fell out of bed. He somehow worked himself perpendicular to the mattress and rolled off the nose of the car. He started crying because he couldn't get back in so Kevin went up, put him back in bed, walked out, and Greyden went right back to sleep. Definitely didn't think it would be that easy.  

The next morning I heard him waking up so I was watching in the camera monitor to see what he'd do. Turns out I didn't need to worry about him wandering around. He woke up and sat up in bed. Looked around for a bit. Went over to his dresser to see if his paci was there. Got back in bed. Hung out for a while. Pretty soon he stood up in the middle of his bed and announced "I'm pooping!" A few seconds later (and louder) "I'M POOPING!" About a minute after that he said "Mommydaddy need you please." After I got over my shock that he'd actually remembered what I told him the previous night, I got on the monitor microphone and told him that I was getting dressed and would be up in a minute. By the time I got up there he was standing patiently at the top of the stairs waiting for me.

Last night (night 2) was the night I was really dreading. Kevin was out of town so I was on my own. And there was a thunderstorm going on. Of course. I have to say he did great again though.  He was even the one to tell me that it was time to go to bed. Once we were there I had to endure about 30-40 minutes of him asking "what's that about?" (his all time favorite phrase right now) every time he heard the thunder or saw the lightning, followed by "why?" (his second favorite phrase right now) after I answered him. I'm at least grateful that he wasn't scared of it. Probably because I told him that the lightning was Lightning McQueen and that the thunder was race cars.

This is how we spent the evening after he got home from daycare the following day. And it's probably how we'll spend this evening as well. And most likely the next.

And, since the Hockenberrys are never ones to take the easy road (seriously, we HAVE to do something about that), we also decided to take his pacifier away from him when he got the big boy bed. We'd been putting off breaking him of it because of his major attachment to it even though he only used it for naps and bedtime. It turned out to be a million times easier that I could have ever imagined it being. When he asked for his paci the first night, we told him that he was a big boy now with a big boy bed and big boys didn't need pacis. He was fine with it (after the requisite 27 "whys?") and went right to sleep. Last night he cried a little, but after I reminded him that he was a big boy now he was fine. This morning he only asked where it was. When I reminded him that it went bye-bye, he just looked at me as seriously as can be and said "Daddy took it." Since it was a statement and not a question, I agreed that yes, Daddy probably took it. (I just couldn't bring myself to tell him he was wrong and potentially shatter his self-confidence forever. Therapy is expensive!) Sooooo.........good luck tonight Daddy! My job here is done.

Happy Halloween!

I just realized that I had written half of this Halloween post and then forgot to finish it. That makes me sad. I have way too much catching up to do. Stay tuned for Christmas and Easter. 

Let me start by saying that the closest I've been to a Halloween pumpkin in years is the 12 oz bottles of Pumpkin Ale that I start scavenging the second Fall hits. But, being as we're parents now, we have to put on our big kid (i.e. non-lazy) pants and try to channel our childhoods enough to remember exactly what we're supposed to do.  

I haven't carved a pumpkin in YEARS, so I was pretty excited to dust off my Mad Skillz. I thought Grey would have a ball digging through the pumpkin guts. I thought wrong. He wanted nothing to do with them. Booooring.

This is about as close as he was willing to get to the pumpkin gutting.
  

After Daddy finished the pumpkin prep, Mommy got to go to town making them into Jack O' Lanterns. Which was REALLY easy with a toddler "helping" on my lap. I can't think of a safer scenario than having a toddler on my lap while wielding a knife.

The final result of Mommy's Mad Skillz.

 

Emerson is obviously impressed.

 

The Trick or Treating part almost didn't happen for us this year. With Hurricane Sandy having hit the east coast just a few days prior, we were still getting weather from her. That meant that even though Halloween is normally cold in Michigan, this year it was really cold. And windy. And rainy. It was definitely not a Texas-style Halloween (meaning Kevin and I weren't sitting out on our front lawn in our shorts with a bucket of beer candy between us).
 


My little monkey. Fitting.

 

My tiny ballerina.

 



I had to sneak in a picture of my adorable niece Addie!
 
 

In order to maximize our Greyden's candy gathering potential, we decided that we should do a practice run before hitting the big leagues (meaning the houses passing out candy that I didn't buy). Kevin walked him out the garage door and around the front of the house where I was armed with a bowl of candy (and my camera). When he rung the doorbell, I opened up the door and he looked at me with a very, very confused look on his face. We prompted him to say trick or treat so that I could put a piece of candy in his Thomas the Train candy bucket. Instead, he looked at the candy, looked at the bucket, held it out to me, and said "just put it in there." I could pretty much see our Grey's candy potential going down the tubes. Fortunately once we did hit the road with him he didn't tell anyone that, but he also didn't tell anyone Trick or Treat. Or please or thank you for that matter. I guess his cuteness must have won out over his manners because he came home with more candy than any 2 year old would ever need. Especially since Evil Mommy still thinks he's a little too young for candy. 

 

The practice run.

Poor, confused kid.

Heading up the walk to Aunt Libby and Uncle Ry-Ry's house!

As we schlepped our freezing asses around the subdivision for an hour, Greyden rode along in style. The kid didn't know how good he had it.

If Greyden looked this exhausted, you can only imagine how bad Kevin and I looked. Notice there are no "after" pictures of us.