So tired.  Too tired for full sentences.  Will update in bullet form.

Avery

• Loves to sleep.  During the day.  At night?  Not even close to being interested.  I remember this from Eirinn.  This part is no fun.
• Loves to eat.  ALL THE TIME.  Is a pig.  But I guess she has the whole “growing infant” thing to use as an excuse for the weight gain.  Feeding her all the time has left me with an insatiable craving for Fudgsicles.  I do not have the “growing infant” thing as an excuse for weight gain anymore.  Luckily Fudgsicles are low in fat and calories.  High on awesome.
• HATES to be naked.  Even diapie changes are reason for complete mental breakdowns.  Oh, and the breakdowns cause her to poop.  So get this vicious cycle.  She poops, so we have to change her, so she screams about it, so she poops, and so on until eternity.  Leaving for the grocery store this morning took an hour and a half and 7 diapers.  I could hear the “cha-ching” with every shriek.
• Is ridiculously cute.  Even when she’s not sleeping, pigging out on my very sore udders, and squeeling for someone to save her from the torture of a clean, dry bum.

Eirinn

• Is coping surprisingly well.  She’s trying to be helpful, although the concept of “gentle” is a little foreign to our little Princess Tomboy.  She’ll catch on.
• Has been spoiled rotten, which probably contributes to the coping.  She has been treated to many Big Sister presents, trips to the trailer, pool parties, popcicles just cause she wants them.  I’m sure if she knew Big Sister-dom came with so many perks, she would have signed up for this gig a long time ago.
• Now seems GIGANTIC.  Last week, she still seemed like our baby girl.  Size 2 clothing was still tiny.  Now she is this enormous, Godzeera of a person who just speaks with a funny accent and still wears diapers to bed at night.

Bosco

• Is feeling terribly neglected and unloved, even though literally nothing has changed for him.  He still has the run of the house, gets a treat every night, and sleeps in our bed.  Not even Avery is allowed to sleep in our bed, so that’s got to mean something, right?

Me

• Incredibly tired from the no sleeping, constantly eating newborn.  But that’s the same story heard from every mother of a newborn, so I’m not looking for any sympathy.
• Except maybe from Anonymous Husband.  It’s very easy to feel bitter at three in the morning, feeding the child, having only been asleep for a grand total of 20 minutes, when the husband is snoring away three feet to my left.  Especially when the snoring is what woke the baby up.
• Feeling, otherwise, great.

* Edited to note: Anonymous Husband has been incredibly helpful this week.  I only feel the resent at night because feeding her is something he can not do to help.  If he could, I’m sure he would.  But he can’t, so I sit on my side of the bed at all hours of the night, baby filling her little tummy, glaring at him through my tired, crusty eyes, wishing he had the boobs in the family.

Thanks for the good luck wishes, but only some of them stuck. 

Eirinn slept well; better than expected.  Getting her to sleep was a chore (a violently loud and tantrum-y chore), but she slept clean through the night with nary a shift in position.  We took turns sleeping with her, so the bed wasn’t a cramped sardine can.

She also didn’t fall over the side of the boat when she went fishing with her Disney Princess fishing pole.  Shelurved riding in the boat.  She has been waiting for weeks to go for a ride and it didn’t disappoint.  She also loved fishing, but that mainly involved her passing the pole to Babba or Papa and letting Mommy take unbearably embarrassing pictures of them fishing with a two foot pink and purple Princess pole.

The baby didn’t fall out.  I’m not even joking when I say that at my doctor’s appointment on Friday afternoon I made him do a physical examination to assure me that baby falling out was an unlikely scenario.  Not that the trailer is in the middle of nowhere, there’s a hospital no more than 15 minutes away, but who wants to have their baby fall out in a boat in the middle of the lake?

The mosquitoes and black flies were certainly hungry, but the buffet was closed, my evil, winged, blood-thirsty nemesis.  We all armed ourselves with a bug patch (I’m not sure if this is the exact brand, but you get the idea), which, in all honesty, is God’s Gift to Northern/Central Ontarians, where we have two seasons - Winter and Bugs (as opposed to the seasons in the GTA, which are Winter and Construction).  There were so many bugs that if we opened our mouths to speak, we would have had to floss them out of our teeth, but none of us got a single bite.  Not one.

BUT.  The rain.  Come on, you guys.  You could have done a little better on the good weather wishes.  Oh, and the cold.  The rain and the cold sucked.  Good thing my parents’ trailer has a plasma tv with satellite or I would have been totally and uncontrollably enraged.

By the way, just a tip to whom it may concern: four dogs is too many at a trailer.  Four is too many for the two hour ride up in a cramped van, filled to capacity with luggage.  Four is too many stuck in a trailer in a rain storm.  Four is too many at night when all of them are used to sleeping in beds.  And four is WAY too many to take on a boat ride with four adults, a toddler, a cooler full of toddler snacks, exactly 26 fishing poles, my suitcase-sized camera bag, and a port-a-potty, even if the boat is an 18 foot pontoon.  Four dogs is too many.  

But at least mine wasn’t the one who still goes pee and poo on puppy pads inside the fully loaded trailer, which are always mysteriously and inconveniently located in the middle of the living room where we can all watch her squat and squeeze (Sophie…). 

And at least mine isn’t the one who snores like a drunk asthmatic trucker (Gizmo…). 

And at least mine isn’t the biggest and toughest and the only one afraid of fire works and shakes and cries and cowers for hours after a single, distant pop (Murphy…). 

However, I will admit without hesitation that mine was the loudest and undoubtedly the most annoying with his high-pitched barking and yipping and squawking. 

Eirinn loves puzzles.  I’ve said it before because it’s true.  She loves puzzles. 

Puzzles have replaced television as her all-time favourite past time.  She doesn’t do those puzzles where the little wooden pieces have the same shape as the little holes on the board.  Oh, no.  She doesn’t even own one of those.  She does the big kid puzzles with the puzzle-shaped pieces that fit together like a puzzle.  Can you tell I’m not a puzzle person?  I have no idea how to describe them.

I know!  Pictures!  Pictures always help the verbally disabled.  Like myself.

She don’t do this kind:

She do this kind:

With great speed and accuracy.  She has a few of them.  They have either 20 or 24 pieces and, oddly enough, they are all scenes of under the sea.  Maybe that’s the universal toddler puzzle picture du jour.  I wouldn’t know, being a non-puzzler and all.

I think this is great.  The puzzles as a whole allow her to practice her hand/eye coordination and the topics of the puzzles (numbers, opposites, and the one in the picture, colours) are very educational.  She has improved her knowledge of colours exponentially.  Improved, not mastered, but it has taught her more than we could any other way.  And we’ve tried.  We started to think she was either colour blind or had a whole in her brain where her colour recognition should have been.  Turns out she’s just stubborn and wanted a puzzle to teach her, not Mommy and Daddy.

She does them non-stop.  First thing in the morning I have to dodge pieces to get her cereal to her mouth (yes, I still feed her her breakfast - geniuses shouldn’t have to feed themselves).  After work she runs to her puzzles and does them over and over again.  “Do puthle ‘gain?”  I think it’s safe to say that she lawbs her puzzles.

***

In other news, my sister got a puppy for Christmas.  Well, it started out a puppy.  A cute, little, black and white, Shih-Tese (say that in your head and I dare you not to laugh).  Sophie is a Shih-Tzu, Maltese cross which, even though we paid for a pure bred Shih Tzu, we’ve always suspected Bosco to be.

I say she “started out” a puppy because in her short three month life, she has morphed into a wee little devil-dog.  If you’re furry and small, she will eat you.  If you even remotely resemble a shoe, slipper, or sock, she will eat you.  If you are my daughter’s pants, she will eat you.  Or at least try, seeing as her teeth are still little pin pricks. 

She absolutely tortures poor Bossy.  She pulls his tail, bites his arse, hangs off his ears.  All this makes him bark, which makes Murphy bark at Bossy, which means Bossy then has an evil midget devil-dog hanging off his butt and a big ol’ meat-head yelling at him to shut up.  Poor guy can’t win for losing.  Whatever that means.

Lucky for Bosco, we got to puppy-sit Sophie this weekend.  We brought the devil into his sanctuary.  Dude was not impressed.

And all Blue Bear had to say was “HALP!”

p.s. Notice Bosco’s incredibly long hippie bangs?  He’s getting his hair did tomorrow.