·:[ David and Claire’s Blog ]:·
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Time to take Brynn out to the park, for pretty much the last time she’s an only child…

I’ve lived on the east coast for about 7 years now, and I have finally experienced a real Noreaster. Every year the weather guys would say a big one is coming, and every time it would be nothing more than a little rain. Not this time! Claire and I found out the hard way that our basement is not nearly as water-tight and dry as I thought it was. There was about 6 inches of rain outside, and without the help of my wet-vac, there would have been even more inside the house. Fortunately we got everything in the basement off the floor before the flooding started in earnest. So other than a sore back our damage is minimal.

Claire and I did a mega-shop at Costco recently, and we found a game that both of us like, and Claire is actually better at- Guitar Hero 2. My brother recommended this game to me, and despite the extreme cheese factor it’s actually quite a lot of fun. The game comes with a “guitar” that you “strum” to a bunch of mostly classic rock songs. Rock on man!

David is constantly bugging me to post and he just told me he gave me an account to use to write posts, which had been my excuse for not doing it up until now. I’ll have to start falling back on “exhaustion” which is my catch-all excuse for pretty much everything lately. As mentioned below, we’re expecting a new baby in a few weeks. Should be interesting. We don’t have a name yet, we haven’t even really discussed it, but rest assured that when we do decide, we won’t tell anyone. So everyone can stop asking.

Apart from that, Brynn is fairly horrible. Terrible two’s indeed. We can’t really leave the house anymore because it’s too embarrassing. She’s very nice and sweet when people visit but when we go anywhere she finds something awesome that she cannot be parted from and then it’s only a matter of time before I’m carrying her out to the car while she screams and kicks and hits etc.

Dave just read this over my shoulder and I asked him “Is it bad to describe our daughter as ‘horrible’?” and he said “No, it’s pretty much true.”

She’s got a lot of words but it’s still mostly single words and a few small sentences (e.g. “SIT DOWN, MOMMY!!“). She knows her numbers and can count, with the maddening exception of “7″. What exactly is the problem with seven?? She always skips it and pretty much refuses to acknowledge it’s existence – won’t even repeat it when we say it. So odd. She knows most letters and says the alphabet although she usually skips one big section but, you know, details.

She has stopped eating at home recently which I don’t care about too much. She also stopped napping, which I care deeply about. Dave and I live for her weekend naps. Oh the glorious days when she would nap for 2-3 hours. I shouldn’t really complain too much though because she will actually just hang out in her crib indefinitely, singing and playing with her toys. In the mornings she usually wakes up between 6.30-7am but on weekends we just ignore her and keep sleeping. One of us finally goes to get her around 8.30am. If she’s not complaining then it’s a win-win situation.

Yesterday she woke around 6.30am and was getting pretty cranky by mid-day but it was too bad for her because we had to go to a birthday party at a kid’s gym. She fell asleep in the car right before we got there but perked up when she saw all her friends and ran around non-stop for an hour or so. We got her home around 2.30pm and put her in the crib but around 4pm I gave up because she was still not sleeping. We decided to keep her up until bed time and at 7pm you would never have guessed she’d been up over 12 hours, including an hour at a gym. She was still running around and dancing all over the living room. Crazy girl.

She also likes to adopt other moms. We’ve been to two birthday parties recently and at each one, she decided to play with someone else’s mom rather than me. I don’t take it personally. They are probably more fun than me at the moment. 36 weeks pg does not equal lots of fun times for a toddler. I’m basically exhausted from morning to night, all week long. I’m still working and probably will do so through the end of this month. My job is incredibly stressful right now and that isn’t helping. This poor second baby doesn’t have a name because at night I’m lying awake thinking about work, not about him. I only remember he’s there when I bend over to pick something up and he gets in the way. Or when he kicks me really hard. But it’s almost surreal when I compare this pregnancy to how much time I spent thinking about Brynn before she was born, and how much time was spent in planning, shopping and reading about babies. I haven’t bought anything for this baby. He’s going to be wearing Brynn’s old clothes and he’s going to live in Brynn’s lavender bedroom with her lavender butterfly crib bedding. I don’t even have any baby size diapers so he might be wearing Brynn’s for a while. Poor new baby, already suffering from the neglected second child syndrome and he’s not even here yet.

For anyone who doesn’t know already, Claire is Pregnant!!! She’s due a month from now. It’s going to be a boy, and even if we had a name picked I wouldn’t tell you www. I know you can’t keep a secret. I’ve been perusing the photos of pregnant Claire to prove it to you all, but posting an unauthorized photo of Claire may result in a fate worse than death. So maybe later….