My kids have teeny tiny butts which, unfortunately, they do not inherit from me. However my kids were all fat fat fat babies. Very very fat. 20 lbs at 3 months old fat. Noah was over 10 lbs at birth. So while they are babies, they aren’t teeny. It isn’t until around age 5 that the real problems start but the advent of the adjustable waist and it’s subsequent popularity allow me to buy clothes for my boys without spending a fortune or forcing them to wear floods.
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Not so with Miss Addy-Mai whose gene pool includes no butt from birth. Sometime around, say, December I started buying size 12 months clothing for her and bought her entire summer wardrobe in a 12-18 month size. Well it is now July which means like 5 months into summer here in Texas and I am just now realizing that we have a problem. Dresses? Fine. Shirts? Must be 12-18m, 18-24m is even better. Shorts? Um, no. I am slowly working my way back in sizes, one new purchase at a time. Today Addy wore a new bathing suit that we bought her last year for Vietnam and never got around to using. It’s a 3-6 month and it fits her perfectly. Finally, a size she fits into! Too bad they don’t sell baby separates the way they do for women’s swimsuits! So while everyone else is buying up for their kids, I’m slowly replacing Addison’s wardrobe with smaller and smaller sizes. Very strange. What will I do next summer when I can’t shop at all becuase everything from this summer still fits?? I guess that’s what accessorizing is for?
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My tiny baby butt has discovered the usefulness and portability of chairs. She can not figure out how to adequately move around her little chairs by herself - they are about the same size as her - not big enough to push, too big to carry. So she spends great deals of time during the day trying to convince one of us to move her chair to a specific location so she can climb very high. Like over to her play kitchen so she can climb on top of it. Or over to the baby gate so she can try to scale it. It’s a good thing we finally found a great deal on an outdoor climber on Craigslist last week - now if only we could get rid of the mosquitoes…..
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The mosquitoes are taking over our life! It is mosquito-hell here ordinarily but after a month of straight rain, it is way worse. Add in some negative aspects our yard apparently has and we are a nasty nasty haven for blood-suckers. Addy and Teegan are both super sensitive to mosquito bites and swell up like balloons. And Addy is extremely susceptible to bites - getting many many times what anyone else in the house gets. And Dengue Fever….it’s coming (Texan) people!!!! Did I mention I’m totally terrified of DEET & Permethrin and think Picaridin (Cutter Advance) is useless (and toxic)? But I have fantasies of buying a mosquito mister and toxifying the hell out of my yard so we can use it. Then I think of the dragonfly deaths on my conscience and I can’t do it. Then today I remembered this Mosquito Barrier. Although I dread the manual labor, I’m getting it. I already use his recipe for homemade mosquito spray and it works AMAZINGLY!! We had Addy outside for 5 minutes the other day and she was covered in bites. We sprayed her down and she didn’t get a single new bite even after about 15 more minutes outside. But the spray is not enough. I want ‘em dead. So we are getting the Mosquito Barrier and going to town. They’ve had good press. I can’t wait to see if it works or not.
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Because if one more mosquito sneaks into our house and bites my baby up while she’s asleep, I’ll be forced to buy mosquito netting. How lame. Speaking of sleep (do you love my segues?!)…Addy is weaning from her bottles slowly but surely all on her own. She takes no bottles most days now with an occasional naptime bottle thrown in about once a week. She still has a bedtime bottle which will likely be the last to go. And now she is down to only having about 1 bottle in the night. If we try to give her more, because old habits die hard for parents too, she will push it away or reject it. This is definitely good progress!

You’d think, like I did, that without the bottles to entice her she would be sleeping solid at night but HAHA! No. She still wakes up several times starting at about 9:30pm. At 11:30 pm she needs her bottle and then she tends to wake up another time in the night. Sometimes she has really rough nights were she just does not want to be put down. But she also won’t sleep in our bed. Poor Tony, who still does night duty like a champ. And poor me who can’t figure out how to sleep through it all!! That said, I am actually dreading moving Addison to her own room. I will miss her presence too much and I think it will be really hard on Tony to go up and down the stairs so many times at night to tend to her. We may have to set up a “nest” on the floor next to our bed, just in case I can’t handle the transition well
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This weather is bringing out all the creepy crawlers. Thank goodness for my cats who chase flies all day and alert me if a rogue cock roach is in the house and eat up any other creepy crawlers that find their way in. However if I find my cats chasing a lizard I may freak the hell out. Bugs, yes. Reptiles, no. But I think it is a forgone conclusion based on the way my cats treat the dogs. They are ruthless obnoxious dog-predators. I am grateful, though, for the apparent lack of rodents. I have not seen or heard of any rodent problems in our area at all. But if we get ‘em, my cats are ready. Just as long as we don’t get anything like this article that says, in part:

Beijing (Agencies) - An estimated 2 billion field mice are chomping their way hungrily through crops in 22 counties (discricts) around the Dongting Lake in central China’s Hunan province after their homes on islands in the lake were flooded.

Local authorities are rushing to build walls and dig ditches to keep the mice away from flood-control dikes and cropland.

In less than three weeks, local people have killed more than 2.25 million mice, making a pile equivalent to 90 tonnes of rodents, but haven’t made a dent in the rodent invasion.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Milestones, Nature, Parenting, Photos & Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.