Sweet Cheeks

Our kitchen toilet is getting quite the work out lately. With the one upstairs bath out of commission, Marissa and Aidan rely upon the kitchen toilet almost exclusively for their BM needs. Joel and I use it quite a bit too. It's a miracle that its only problem is that the flusher hinge thingy is rusting away. We usually have to flush twice. That may not reflect the toilet's inadequacies so much as the horrendous state of our bowels. The purpose of this post is not to give you TMI about our necessary habits. It is to let everyone know that the kitchen toilet will now be given a much needed break. Joel and I finished the upstairs bathroom today enough that Marissa can now use the sink to brush her teeth, the kids can use the tub for their baths and EVERYONE can use the toilet. We still have several to-dos for the bathroom, like stain the baseboards, put up the towel bars and toilet paper holder, strip the old door and window frames, etc. Those other items will take time and will likely never get done.

Ugh. Theo is crying AGAIN. It exhausts me. My children are relentless beasts. I tried to do something nice with Aidan today. We made snickerdoodles. Aidan helped for the first 10 minutes and then became obsessed with trying to beat up Theo. It is apparently too much for Aidan to ignore the baby. He MUST touch him. "See Mama? I'm not hitting baby brother." Translation: "Even when I'm not hitting baby brother, I'm thinking about it." Speaking of translations, Aidan announced today that Theo speaks his own "lang-quich". I asked Aidan to translate, but even Aidan can't decode all those shrieks and babbles. Marissa's pretty good at it though. Much to her chagrin, she's also the only one who can get him to go to sleep anymore. That spoiled baby insists upon falling asleep in an upright position on Marissa's shoulder. Marissa shared with us today that she now has excellent upper arm strength. Theo is weighing in at ~22 lbs! When he gives a really big grin, you can just make out dimples in both cheeks. He is snoozing on my lap right now. I'm going to carefully move him back to his crib....