2003-12-09-10:32 p.m.
I'm back. We were offline for awhile during moving and I've had a ton of work to do and I've been hideously sick. The little fetus is kicking my butt, much like his/her older brother, Ro boy did. I am finally feeling a bit better though over all -- although not today. It's really tiresome to feel like death warmed over every day for months but I'm about to start week 14 and the first trimester officially ends tomorrow so things should continue to improve. I'm showing slightly but it's not affecting my clothes yet really. Although, pants with button closure are starting to feel a bit awkward. I haven't gained any weight yet with all the barfing though.
changes
We're liking our new house. Ro boy had some new house adjustment issues but not ones I expected. Of course, we also transitioned him from a crib to a bed. And, we put up our TV, so no TV for awhile either. He misses TV but not too badly and he loves his big boy bed. He never gets out after I tuck him in and he doesn't get out of it in the morning either. Kind of surprising. I expected him to be running all over the house.

It seems kind of insane to put up the TV in the winter but I've really been struggling to keep his TV watching down to 1.5 to 2 hours per day and I'm tired of the battle. It's not like he really wants to watch more than that but he wants the TV on and wittering away in the background, which I hate. The average toddler watches around 4 hours per day, which I think is insane. After quizzing several toddler mothers I have discovered that it's true. People really do let their kids watch that much TV. Yikes!

I've also been curious if TV has been affecting his speech (or lack thereof) since it's such a passive activity. I only found out recently that you shouldn't even let kids under two watch TV at all, so I've been feeling kind of bad about that. Since having the TV put away for the last two weeks, there's been a significant change in his speech interest but he's really gotten interested in letters. He's already showing the rudiments of reading. He loves looking at letters and watching me write. He walks around saying strings of letters like "Q,S,T" or other random letters. He can go through a pile of black video cassettes and study the lettering on each one until he finds "Toy Story" every time. It kills me. I wouldn't say he could read but he has symbol recognition. He also does this with mail. He'll sift through our mail and pull out stuff from Strong Museum, the local children's museum, even when it's just plain stuff with no bright colors or anything that I would think would particularly attract him. He just knows their logo.

He does say words here and there. Every once in awhile a word strikes him and he repeats it a lot. The latest one has been "X Ray" (ek way), which he's said 20 or 30 times in the past few days. He picked it up from Elmo's Keyboard-o-rama, which is a game on the Sesame Street web site. Very fun for toddlers.

Nature in the city
One thing that's really shocked me about the house is the amount of wildlife in the area. We're in a suburb, but literally only a stone's throw from the city limits. However, we've seen a buck, a doe, a skunk, a groundhog, a rabbit, and lots of squirrels all on our little property. We saw the buck again for the second time on Sunday. He was just standing in our side yard munching the neighbor's hedge border. He isn't scared of people but he's not habituated to them either. It's kind of neat. I hope he doesn't get hit by a car though. I'm thinking he wanders between Highland park and Persimmon Park and our house is on his route or something. It's so funny to see such a huge deer with all the crappy fake deer everyone has in their yard for Christmas decor.

The amount of trees around the perimeter of the property is nutty too. I had no idea how much work raking leaves can be. We probably spent 24 working hours of leaf blowing and raking and still didn't all the leaves up before the snow came. We got Ro boy a little rake to help with raking but he kept running to the raked piles and either jumping in them or spreading them out with his little rake. I could never get him to rake toward a pile at all. However, Ro boy is excellent at picking up sticks and putting them into a pile. He made huge piles of sticks for us, which was super helpful since we had nearly as many sticks as we had leaves.

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