Shoo...

After being home for a few days I truly have a new respect for stay at home Mamas.  I've always known that it's a hard job.  I've always known that it's exhausting.  But when you are actually doing it, you realize just how hard it is.  You always think, "Oh yeah.  I can get all of that laundry done, folded and put away."  Or, "Oh yeah.  I plan on getting all dolled up and having dinner ready for my husband when he gets home from work."  I say that, but at this very moment it's after 6:00 and dinner is going to be leftovers and I'm still in my pajamas (and no, I'm not ashamed).  Perhaps I would feel bad about this if I did it more often.  But the days of being like this are so few and far between that I like to enjoy them when I can.

Tonight starts the NCAA tournament and I am just so excited.  This is one of my favorite times of year.  In my house it was always a big deal.  My Dad took off work and we always filled brackets out as a family.  Of course, now that has expanded to Nate, Cooper, Lola and Mollie and Lucy.  The winner gets to pick out where we go out to dinner.  Mom won last year thanks to Butler.  Nate has coined himself Nate "Golden Boy" Myers. Nate gets some trash talk going that usually involves calling my Mom some character off of the Golden Girls and then when she beats him he makes the excuse that the only reason that she does good is because she chooses her winners based on whether or not she likes their uniforms or the cities that they're based in.  Tournament time always comes with an abundance of smack talk so it's always pretty fun.  One of these years we're going to get the Hoosiers back in and it will be even more interesting for us IU fans.

Last night we were successful at eating sweet potatoes.  This morning and this evening, not so much.  I partially blame it on our lack of a high chair.  We didn't buy one because we knew that we wouldn't immediately need it.  So we plopped Cooper down in the Bumbo and tried to feed him out of it.  He dislikes it.  I think it's too constricting for him.  He's too much of a mover and a shaker to be sitting in a mint green plastic "chair" on the counter.  For that reason, I ordered his high chair tonight.  Hopefully he will enjoy it and the eating will be easier for us.  We had a long discussion about how he CANNOT be breastfed his entire life.  Hopefully he took it to heart.

Here are some pictures of our time together at home.  He now sits in his bouncer as opposed to laying in it.  He's too strong for his own good!  Also included is a picture of what my boys were doing for the majority of the time that I was writing the blog.  Yip, he's a Daddy's boy!

Routine, routine, routine!

Being a working Mom is hard REALLY HARD.  Basically, you wake up in the morning and hit the ground running.  Now, I'm lucky because I have a husband that is so wonderful and so incredibly helpful.  I don't know what I would do without him, especially because I'm still breastfeeding and the pump eats up so much of my time.  The easiest thing for us to do is to come up with a routine, which we have done.  The first month of being back at work was not easy.  It's hard to go back to work not only because you're leaving your baby but also because time management is just hard.  Luckily we seem to have it all figured out.  But it wasn't easy.  There are people that seem to have it all together and they are able to do a thousand things while having a child.  I've had to accept that I'm just not that person.  I get done what's important and by the end of the day I'm exhausted.  But you know what?  I'm proud of what I get accomplished in a day.  If I can go to bed at night knowing that on that day I was the best Mom, wife, and teacher that I could be then that's enough for me.

I have a new nemisis.  Actually, maybe Cooper has a new nemisis.  Rice cereal.  The kid despises it.  And it's not one of those take the food, spit it out because I don't know how to eat with a spoon types of things.  It's all out hatred for the stuff.  The kid cannot stand it.  Here is Exhibit A:

To me he seems totally ready for solid food because while Mom and I were eating fettucini alfredo the other night he was longing for it.  He couldn't take his eyes off of it.  It consumed him.  Obviously we're just going to have to try something else.  I wanted to try to hold off until 6 months to go with veggies, but it might not be an option anymore.  Updates to come!  And hopefully no more pictures like the one above.  I don't like my boy being unhappy about anything, and especially not food!