TAT: Playroom

Toddle Along Tuesday is back! For this week the topic is showing your play areas/rooms in your house.  In our tiny house, we have two play areas.

1. Leland's room.  We play in here first thing in the morning and throughout the day.  I have to switch it up for him or he starts to get bored.  We have two main buckets/holders for toys, both were purchased at Target while on sale.  The mirror is a key element in this room, he loves it.

2. The living room.  This is where all his books are and a small number of toys are kept (really we have too many toys and don't know where to put them all!).  These toys are all stored in a magazine holder that has been around the house for many years, but recently got re-purposed to hold toys.  This is also where Leland has a shoe box full of random things, a post with more details coming soon!  He also now gets to play with the keyboard I fried. 

If these two areas get boring, we also check out mommy and daddy's room and play at the bookshelf there, or we try and get out of the house.  The older he gets the harder it is to entertain him!  We will soon be purchasing Denver Zoo, Children Museum and Botanical Garden memberships to help with this.  We also regularly go to the library and have a weekly play group.  I am looking forward to it being nicer outside so we can go play at the park.

Contest

Do you all remember this photo?  It is hilarious.  Ilana from Mommy Shorts is having a photo contest for the playoffs.  And while the Chiefs did not make the playoffs, Leland's photo is still in the contest!  So please go to the Mommy Shorts Facebook page and vote for Leland by liking the photo.  If he gets the most votes he wins a NFL jersey! How sweet is that!?

So please, pretty please, vote and spread the word.  Leland will thank you all if he wins.

Resolutions

I have many resolution or plans for the new year.  Hopefully I can actually stick to some of them.  

Personal
- stretch: I really need to be better about stretching on a regular basis.
- garden: have a bigger garden and be more proactive with it.
- books: read one book a month, this may be a bit of a challenge with my crazy school semester that is coming up
-photography: continue taking a photo a day of Leland and try to expand my photo subjects beyond Leland.
-be a better mom and wife: improvements can always be made

Food
-try to buy everything organic, local or seasonal: we already buy our produce organic and local when possible.  I need to be better about buying seasonal products.
- eat less meat, chocolate and sugar: we limit ourselves to one meal a week with meat, but I still feel like this is a lot
- be better about making everything from scratch.
-try to freeze and can produce when it is in season for year round use.

Sustainable
- be more conscious about buying products: try to buy used, or items with less packaging, or items that were made locally/sustainably
-try to use the air conditioner as little as possible this summer

Leland's resolutions are to be happy, healthy and eat as much as possible. 

Trip home

Long post and no photos to boot, haven't gotten around to uploading the few photos I took.
 
To sum up the trip back to KC: exhausting

It was good to see family again but it was just too close to our last visit.  I wasn't all that excited to go back like I was when we went back for Thanksgiving.

The first day we were there I was worthless because I felt sick.  I was achy and felt like I was getting strep throat.  I ended up going to bed super early, like 7pm and slept for 12 hours.  Except for the hour of 3am when Leland woke me up vomiting.  It was awesome.  But luckily there was a fresh bed waiting for us in the next room so we didn't have to deal with it too much that night.  And the next morning I felt like a new person.


We crammed in seeing multiple friends, three Christmases, grandparent visits, and an 80th birthday while we were there.
Side note: old people are funny.
We were at my Grandma's on her birthday and her phone rang while Leland was taking a nap in her bedroom. She decided not to answer it since company was over but the answering machine (yeah, she still has one of those) is in her room.  So she answered the phone only to hang up on the person so they couldn't leave a message. She then says," Well I don't know why they are calling today anyway." We all just stare at her, and then she realized they were calling because it is her birthday.

Leland also decided to stop eating solid food while on the trip.  Thankfully he is back to eating solids.  We made kale pesto with mushrooms and he scarfed it down.  Maybe he doesn't like eating crappy too?  He has refined taste buds for an almost 9 month old.

The trip ended with Leland become very clingy to me, I think the mass amounts of new people made stranger anxiety develop quickly.  He also started to teeth like crazy and go through a growth spurt.  The last night there and first night back in Denver he woke up more times then I can remember wanting to eat.  He also wanted to eat every 2 hours during the day, needless to say I am sore.

He started crying after being around people for extended periods of time, he was just ready to be back to our normal routine, and so was I.  If we were in a room with a few people and he was crying, as soon as I would leave the room and go some where quiet, he would be fine.

As I said before, we won't be doing two trips that close together again.  It is just too much.  But I wish the trip would have lasted one day longer because our new baby niece was born the day after we left!  If Laura had gone into labor a few hours earlier I would have stayed around, but we didn't know she was in labor until we arrived back in Denver.

So that was the trip.  Glad to be back home and in my own bed.  (And so is Leland, boy took three naps yesterday!)

Break

Like many other bloggers I have taken a break.  But I will be back next week. 

Got home last night after a week in KC.  It was good but exhausting.  We will never be doing Thanksgiving and Christmas in KC again.  It is too much for all of us. 

Leland kept getting tired of being around people, so he would rub his eyes.  I would take it as him being tired, so I would go to put him down for a nap and he would start laughing.  He also started being extra clingy to me.  But he was a great baby on all the flights.

Happy New Year.  I will post my resolutions next week, I think I have too many.