Darr Family Blog

This is going to be mostly pictures of our trip to California for Christmas.

We had such a wonderful time and loved every bit of getting to hang out with family. We miss them already!

This week has pretty much flown by. Christmas is quickly approaching, and we’re looking forward to it! Joseph has stronger likes this year, so I think he’s going to love the few things that we got him. 🙂 There’s also another thing we’re super excited about, but I think I’ll save that for my next post. 🙂

Major Milestone: Paul and I were talking about when we last tried cow’s milk with Joseph and decided it was time to try again. We started out with just a little milk in his cup, with mostly soy milk. We did this for a day and didn’t see any adverse effects, so the next day we 50/50ed it for a day. When that was a success, we decided to just give him all milk…and he doesn’t seem to have any problems! We’re still going to go easy on it for a while, but it looks like he might have grown out of his lactose intolerance! Yay!

A Bunch of Sickies: With Joseph getting over strep, I was praying that the rest of us would stay well. Well, at least we didn’t get strep. I guess Joseph had the flu on top of strep (there was one day that he threw up, but I thought it was because of his antibiotic, since one of the side-effects is nausea). Paul and I both ended up with two slightly different variations. I had a fever and was throwing up (along with aches and chills) and Paul was nauseated with chills and aches (no fever and no throwing up…which is good, because he was at work). Joseph seemed to sense that I wasn’t feeling well and he went easy on me that day (luckily it only lasted 24 hours). After getting him up and feeding him, I told him I needed to take a nap, so he needed to play in his room. He said, “Okay.” So I gated him into his room, turned on PBS, made sure the baby monitor was on, and rested until lunch time. He happily played in his room for almost 2 hours! I fed him lunch and put him in for a nap, thinking I’d catch another nap while he slept. He slept for four hours! After we woke up, I was feeling quite a bit better, so I got dinner ready. I was able to sleep all night and felt completely well in the morning (as did Paul). Whew!

Cuteness for the Week: 1) Joseph was watching a show and saw that the kids were wearing boxes decorated like cars. He was really excited about them. I looked around the house and then decided I had the supplies (a diaper box, construction paper, glue, markers, ribbon for straps, and a TP tube) to make him one, too. When I got it done and put it on him, he got super excited and ran around the room saying, “Beep beep!” He’s kind of lost interest in it, but that doesn’t really bother me since it was all free. 🙂 2) One day, Joseph was mumbling to himself and all I caught was “Texas”. So I said, “What about Texas?” and he answered with, “I like it!” I love that kid! 3) At lunch today, I was telling Joseph that he needed to eat another bite of food. He said, “Kay!” This is funny because a lot of the time I will leave the “O” off of “okay” and just say “kay”. He really is a little parrot!

This Week in Pictures:

This past week started out as any other week. We just plugged away at each day. I noticed throughout the week that Joseph was becoming increasingly irritable and wasn’t eating as much as he normally did. He had a bit of a runny nose, so I thought that it might be his molars bugging him (since his 2YO ones are working their way in). Then on Wednesday, he had a pretty high fever. When he still had a fever (higher) on Thursday, I called his doctor and took him in. It turns out that he’s got strep throat…again. So we got him some antibiotics (which can be tricky with his amoxicillan allergy, but we have discovered an antibiotic called cefprozil which is still in the penicillin family, but not closely enough related to cause him to have an allergic reaction) and he’s starting to feel better already. I’m just glad that we discovered it early so that he can be all better before Christmas!

Toot my own horn moment: Today, two other people and I played our flutes in church (a flute trio arrangement of “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful”) and it turned out really great. It was so fun to play again! We’re blessed to be in such a great ward where people are willing to share their talents with us!

Joseph Funnies/Cutenesses for the week:

He has discovered “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. I was afraid that it might be too scary for him, but I had no need to be. He’ll see it pop up on the Roku box and he’ll say, “Halloween-Christmas-song?” He’s seen it a couple times now and he can sing along with some of the songs. It’s pretty great!

One night, as I was rocking him, I asked him what song he wanted me to sing. He asked for the puppy song. It took me a few seconds to realize that he was talking about “Momma Buy Me a Rocking Chair”, which is a song my parents used to sing to me when I was little. It’s a back and forth song between a child and a momma where the child wants a rocking chair (Momma buy me a rocking chair, what will we buy it with?, sell Daddy’s feather bed, where will Daddy sleep?, Daddy sleep in the piggy pen, where will the piggies sleep?, piggies sleep in the washing tub, where will we wash the clothes?, wash them down by the riverside, where will we dry the clothes?, hang them on the puppy‘s tail, what if his tail should break?, mend it back with the mending glue; each line is repeated three times with the words, “do, oh Momma, do” after the third line). I started singing it and he snuggled down on my shoulder and started singing along in snatches. 🙂

I have forgotten up to this point to record the fact that our 2YO LOVES cooked onion. It just seems odd to me that he would like it as much as he does, but when I think about it, I oughtn’t be surprised. He much prefers salty things over sweet things. When I heat up canned veggies, I’ll cook them with butter, garlic salt, and a bit of minced onion. Joseph will eat the veggies and then pick up the bits of minced onion and say, “Mmmm, onion!”

A couple of times this past week, when Joseph has been really tired (including today; Sundays are rough because our meeting time is right during his normal nap time, so he gets little-to-no-nap on Sundays). After I lay him in his crib and get him all settled with stuffed animals and blankies, he’ll look at me and say, “I tired!” a couple of times. I guess he really means it if he says it!

One day he ran up to me and said, “Mom!” I replied, “Yes, Joseph?” He then let lose with a LONG stream of gibberish, to which I just listened without saying anything (never agree to anything you can’t understand, lol). He then said, “Thanks, Mom!” and ran off…yeah…

Highlight of his week: Getting to help me make cookies (pictures to follow).

This week in pictures: