the runs...still...and water?

yesterday, hannah woke up with a messy diaper. she's never had that before! it had also leaked out the side a bit. yuk! so she got a morning bath.

both this morning and yesterday morning, we were at our neighbor's across the street in the cul-de-sac. they have 2 daughters (m & l) and hannah really enjoys playing with them. both days, she brought me socks and her shoes and stood at the door, wanting to go out. she went out and headed towards the m's house. she knocked on their door...and i eventually held her up so she could ring the doorbell. hannah liked playing over there. they have a great princess playroom, lots of toys, and dress up clothes. their grandma cookie was there both days and we talked.

unbeknownst to me yesterday, hannah still had some GI issues. i thought she was done after waking up with a messy diaper, so i had her in a cloth diaper under a cloth cover for potty training purposes. since i was just letting her go outside for a bit, and i didn't plan on playing at the neighbor's, i didn't have her in pants and i didn't have anything with me. hannah just headed over to their house in her cloth diaper and cover/panties. we ended up staying for awhile. and well, she ended up having another BM and had a huge runny mess! it was soooo gross!!! i had to bathe her at the neighbor's (bath#2) and put her clothes in a plastic bag.

then in the afternoon, after her nap, she had more messy diaper! so in the evening she had bath #3.

this morning, we went to the neighbor's b/c hannah headed over there again. but today we had on a disposable. about the same time as yesterday, she had the runs AGAIN! so i took her home and bathed her.

she was fussy and tired, so i put her down for an early nap. i think she's sick. the runs can't just be from allergies. i think she must have a virus or something.

anyways...so this afternoon, i'm getting ready to clean, do laundry, wash dishes etc...
well, they've been working on a pipe/plumbing problem in the cul-de-sac by the m's house for months. i knew they were going to turn off the water for the m's house today. well. it turns out they turned off the water for the whole area...b/c just as i was in the middle of laundry preparations and washing/cleaning in the kitchen - there was no more water! i turn on the faucet and nothing. whereas a few seconds previously, there was still water.

i go outside and ask, "did you turn off the water for the neighborhood?" and they say yes. and i ask, "how long?" and they reply for TWO HOURS. ACK! UGH! ICK! I'm SOOO ANNOYED!!! IT WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE IF THEY'D INFORMED US. TOLD US. LEFT A NOTE. ANYTHING!!!

so the kitchen, dishes and laundry are just sitting there... good thing I hadn't STARTED the washer yet. I was just about to start it too. I wanted to wash my hands, and I couldn't. I can't FLUSH the toilet. Good thing we have water in the Brita and bottled water so I can drink.

and hannah's "rinsed of poop" clothes are in the washer, sitting. begging to be washed. yesterday i had run home, donned disposable gloves, rinsed the nasty mess in the toilet, flushed multiple times, and put the diaper&panty in oxyclean and let it soak till this afternoon. i had removed them from the oxyclean and given them a few more rinses...and thrown them in the washer... but hadn't pressed the start button. thank goodness.

but it doesn't help that i'm still ANNOYED at those workers out there. i dunno if they're city people or Hogan homes plumbing people.
GAG. how inconvenient!

allergies & dancing

For lunch yesterday, Vicki brought over some quiche. I really do love quiche. Alas, Hannah wanted some quiche, and I gave in and let her have some - thinking, "It'll be fine." She ate some of the crust and a little bit of the quiche filling. Then she was done with the quiche, so I gave her some peas.

Well...our allergy baby (wheat & eggs) reacted to the quiche. (She hasn't reacted to pizza. She reacts to some breads and not others - so I haven't figured out the wheat element yet.) She definitely reacted to the eggs. She didn't swell up, but she had the runs all last night till this morning. She barely ate food yesterday, barely any dinner, only some white rice. And today her appetite didn't return till late afternoon.

So...No More Direct Feeding of Eggs. She's had stuff with eggs in it and not reacted that badly...but it's a learning process...

On a lighter note.

Her clean clothes pulled out of the dryer were on the couch for folding. She went, found an elasticized top, and proceeded to put them on her legs as pants. It was super cute. Her legs were stuck through the arm & neck openings. The top hung down as a skirt and she was dancing around the living room to music. She's started to do this thing with her arms that looks like she's "vogue-ing" and of course there's always the spinning, turning round and round. She was laughing and smiling and having a great time. She certainly likes dancing.

17-month photos

So Hannah LOVES balls. She always says, "ball. ball. ball." I think she's drawn to the color red. Therefore, this is one of her favorite balls - red, sorta see-through, texturized, inflated, just her size, perfect for gripping. Of course we can't forget some new clothes for a photo shoot: an 18-month outfit she got for her 1-year birthday, but is finally now wearing. These are just a few...of many I could have posted...

Hannah in mommy's shoes

Hannah got into her diaper bag and ate a whole bag of raisins that was in there. That was yesterday morning. Needless to say, this morning, all the raisins came out the other end (probably TMI for lots of you).

Some of her favorite things to do are to scribble, play with the flashlight, and her "play tools" that are plastic battery powered versions of power tools. She'll drill her nose, staple the floor, you know...things that kids do. She's also started to scribble on walls this past week.

Here you can see the magnetic board (generic MagnaDoodle) that she draws on daily. Most recently, she insists on real writing utensils to scribble on real paper. I've been trying to keep her away from pens and instead, satisfy her desires with pencils...alas she took the pencil and scribbled on the wall. So pencils are now limited also. We have to carefully supervise her when she is wielding a scribble tool because soon every reachable surface will be her canvas.



After entertaining herself with pulling everything out of the many compartments of the uber-nifty "Essentials" diaper bag, she proceeded to move onto more entertainment for herself. Namely in the form of wearing mommy's shoes. She pulled apart the velcro and everything. (funny since she can easily slip into them without having to undo anything).






And of course, here is Hannah in action. I have video...but I still think these photos show the briskness of her walk (or plopping around with big shoes) through the blur.

Chaos.

I can't remember if I've already posted about what she did to my glasses (I meant to)...but here's a quick post:

Hannah has been causing chaos in our house recently. She's now reaching that toddler stage - almost 1-1/2 yrs old - asserting her independence and ever so curious, curious, curious.

Before scribbling on walls, she 1st tried scribbling on herself. The first of the month, I decided to give in and let her have a real pen (instead of the "fake pen" where I take out the middle - the ink - and give her an empty plastic shell). I gave her some paper also, and she did really well drawing ON the paper. So I went about my business. I looked back at her only a few minutes later, and she'd turned the pen onto herself.






Oh she absolutely LOVED it! She thought it was just the greatest thing to be able to draw all over her legs. She didn't want to stop!


She also absolutely loves climbing around on this stepstool. A few months ago, she was content to just sit there or climb-up-and-down. She has now discovered its mobility and portability. She pushes it around the kitchen and can gain access to whatever she wants - from pressing the buttons on the water cooler, reaching things on the counters & table, getting into drawers, to all sorts of other stuff she couldn't see or get to before.


Oh...and we MUST NOT forget what Hannah did to my glasses. They're not supposed to look like this:




One fateful morning last week, I went to her room, and she was standing up on the bed, screaming, desperately gripping my glasses - which had become a twisted, bent, and convoluted piece of plastic & metal. I had to pry the frail pieces of wire from her strong, upset hands.

It was inevitable that my glasses would meet this fate. She had been grabbing at them for many weeks before. She'd grab them off of my face. She'd head butt me and knock the glasses off. She'd try to put them on. She'd grab them if I ever left them lying around at all, anywhere.

Ever so curious, and ever so persistent. She finally got her chance to explore everything about those glasses. They had fallen off of my face one night when I fell asleep in her bed putting her down. The glasses were unknowingly left behind in Hannah's bed when daddy came to rescue a sleeping mommy in the middle of the night. And those photos represent what I found in her little hands the next morning. One little toddler hand gripped on each end - pulling.

Self-Shoe-ing

She just put her shoes on all by herself!!! Yay!
Daddy just took a photo of her for me too.

She's been slipping on my Sketchers and flopping with them around the house since yesterday. It's quite cute. I took some video and photo of it yesterday (intending to post). And this morning she's been tromping around the house in them - again. So I'm writing about it today...and hopefully it'll be posted (before she's 2 years old! lol!!!)

Oh...yes...daddy's home. It totally scared both me & Hannah when there were noises at the front door and someone was messing with the door knob this morning. But lo and behold, daddy burst through the door. They let him out of work early today b/c of "stuff going on" - I know - vague...but it is a public blog.

So now we're going to see a movie! and hopefully I'll get back and post more.

Is this true?

I think we should all support her instead of the current candidates!

Happy 17 months

So these month milestones come and go and most of the time I intend to post, but don't get around to it.

This morning she woke up, and after the usual routine (nursing etc) I let her play in her room, and I fell asleep in her bed (a lil catnap). I woke up to her little cute noises and diaper rash cream all over her face. She loves "lotion" bottles & tubes - anything that looks like a lotion bottle or tube, she'll open and dab her lil cute fingers in and delicately "apply" to her face. So I woke up to evenly smeared and applied Desitin diaper rash cream on her right cheek. I knew I should have taken a photo, but I wiped it off 1st.

I did take photos - a mini-session...with two interruptions (Hannah needing to go to the bathroom to poo)...

-----

And she did a lot of stuff which I can't remember now...

And of course this post which I started and didn't press "post" until later...

House stuff. Hannah & Hollering

AHHH I just wrote a whole post then IE decided to freeze up on me & crash!!! So now I have to start all over b/c it didn't auto save. ARGH! I usually use Firefox, but I had IE up from earlier today. ick!

What a day! We did lot...

Our house is finally starting to come together, though we still have a lot more to do - it seems to never end. A few months ago, we finally had the garage all cleaned out so we could park a car inside, and now it's all full of stuff and works-in-progress so we can't park inside again.

You'd think a new home would come with less work, but there's still a ton of work to do on it!

Ize mowed the lawn this morning with our newly acquired gas mower (I got it last weekend or the one before for $50 at a garage sale - we had been using an electric one we bought off of Craigslist for $30). Ize says we have to sell the gas one b/c he prefers electric....sigh...cost of gas. Oh but I do love the garage sales around here.

We finished our "dressing" our common area windows with curtains finally! This past week & the week before, we've been finishing up our uber-long floor-to-ceiling "custom curtains" in the living room (or Isaac's been diligently working on them & I've been working on photos). It's a project that started a many moons ago it seems. But they look great! Ize did a GREAT job! And we both decided that since the 1st curtain project took so long, we'd buy the kitchen ones. So last Friday, we got these grommet-top "Milano" panels from BB&B in blue. We both saw them and really liked them. We even went for the blue with dark brown strips and were going for some color. We got home, hung them up, and stepped back to take them all in. But something was just not quite right. We sat on it for a week, and today we exchanged them for the dark chocolate ones. The blue didn't go with the long curtains and were too trendy of a color combo. We hung them up immediately. We LOVE the way the curtains look now! We'll have to take photos and post them.

We've also been working on another "extended project" of mine - a dresser ($10 from a garage sale a few months ago) that I wanted to put in foyer as an entryway table. We had bought some black spray paint from WalMart and painted it awhile back, but it didn't look very classy. Isaac sanded the dresser down this past week, and Thursday we bought a gallon of super gloss enamel latex dark brown paint from Lowe's. Today we put on the 1st coat and it looks really nice! I think it's funny b/c the gallon of paint was like $25 even with a $5 mail-in rebate...and the spray paint was like $7 b/c it was $1/can and we used 7 cans to cover the old dresser color (which had been painted various colors). Anyways...the paint cost way more than the original dresser! lol!

Hannah was up and about, and into everything. She put her hands in the paint this morning, so we had to remove her from the scene.

We also replaced the tires on the Honda today. It got a flat this past week, and Ize took the opportunity to just replace them all since the treads were worn anyways. Yay for Discount Tire.

So many chain retail stores in this post, you'd think I was doing an ad/commercial or something...

Hannah sorta dozed off in the car, but we decided to keep her up and just put her to bed early. Well, she played and stayed up okay, and even went down early (around 5/6pm) BUT then around 8pm she woke up screaming and screaming. and didn't really calm down. Our ears have been permanently damaged by her screaming! It is truly ear-piercing. I have actual hearing loss!

Anyways...I tried to nurse her back down and calm her, but to no avail, so we got her up and took her to Best Buy since I wanted to go. I didn't know that Ize had a coupon in his inbox, and I've been pondering over this one particular lens for a long time. And on Amazon the prices went up, but with the 12% off at BestBuy, even with tax, it came out cheaper than the old lower Amazon price. It was between the Tamron or the Canon 17mm-40mm f/4L. Not the Canon EF-S 17-55mm f2.8IS b/c of price & reviews. Anyways... we got the Tamron lens since it has the 2.8 fixed aperture for a lot less...and definitely beats the price tag on the Canon 16-35mm 2.8L, which I'll eventually get, but not right now. I know that the Tamron is for cropped sensors, and L-series lenses are a much better investment (which I'll slowly acquire), but the cheaper lens works for my camera now. And YAY! I'm excited about my new lens.

Okay..that had nothing to do with Hannah, except that when we were at Best Buy she threw a HUGE fit - screaming, crying, the works. Never before had she thrown such a fit in public. She finally was only okay when we took her over to the Apple display and let her play with the iMACs (which is something else I really really want - yummy 24" screen). We (I, mommy) really appreciate daddy letting us go...or letting mommy go...and letting us drag Hannah along. Thanks daddy!

Okay...nuff stuff about me...not nuff stuff bout Hannah... this post really should go in my musings but it's here...

Finally, I was able to put her back down tonight. (actually i let her CIO a bit). She was super wiggly - all over the bed, all over me. AND she really doesn't need to nurse anymore, she just likes to. The past 2 nights, daddy's been putting her down w/o nursing and she's been fine. My supply has been dwindling... She's also been a finicky and picky eater. I don't feel like she's eating that much at all, though she still downs those Cheerios.

Okay... I still have my lesson to prep for tomorrow. It totally slipped my mind I'm in charge of sharing time for Primary this month...and it IS July now. Wow, where'd the time go?!?

Happy 4th of July!

It's Independence Day for the US of A today...and we are grateful for the freedoms that we have and for those that have sacrificed to preserve our freedoms!

It rained last year for us here in South Texas on the 4th (where there weren't even any fireworks) and it's rainy again this year - though it's not currently rainING and so we think there'll be fireworks. We want to go!

On a side note...it's been raining just the past day or two...and the mosquitoes are OUT! Hannah got bit like 2 days ago by one or two that got in the house. They got her on her face, above & below her left eye, and a nasty one on her right arm that's totally swelled up and is nasty. She's been scratching at it and has gouged out portions of skin. I've been putting hydrocortisone on them, and we gave her Benadryl today. The stuff is still inflamed.

There's lots of stuff I've been meaning to post... I need to catch up. Sorry for our loyal blog readers that have been checking in, but not gotten any updates. I got an email last night wondering about "where's the posts?" Yes I've been busy, but posting doesn't need to take forever, and I could just write snippets. The whole daily blogging thing is not yet a goal...but will become one soon enough.

I've been taking lots of fun photos of Hannah...and wanted to get those up with the posts. Like this past week, she drew all over herself. anyways...we're going out now...family bike ride on the 4th. YAY! And to burn off all the calories we just consumed at the Chinese Buffet for lunch. It was sooo yummy! We really like going to the new Chinese Buffet that recently opened up here our little town.