We had a very fun Thanksgiving at the Hatter house. I am a firm believer in the fact that Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that goes best with lots of people. Family is generally best, but I'm pretty sure that we haven't been at either of our homes for Thanksgiving since we joined the military. So we do the next best thing and celebrate with other poor military suckers who can't go home either.

I observed my own personal moment of silence during Thanksgiving preparation and celebration for the Busby family who due to geographical differences were not with us this year. We've co-hosted Thanksgiving with them every year since joining the Air Force and they were greatly missed this year!

This was the first year that I had cooked a turkey though and so I decided to get a nice turkey to at least get me off to a good start. We got a Trader Joe's fresh-never-frozen-no-pesticides-vegetarian-fed-salt-brined turkey at a respectable 16 pounds.

The ...

I am 37 weeks pregnant. This is not hard for me to believe because I'm huge, barely sleeping, and ready to have a baby! I'm still having lots of contractions though nothing that is evidently putting me into labor. While I would dearly love to have this baby out of me I am of course happy for every day that he gets a little bigger and healtheir inside. I'm also still not sure I'm ready to have two! :)

Our house is a lot more ready now though. We powered through most of my to-do list over the course of a weekend and few days. The clothes and blankets have been washed, oohed over, folded and put away. The bassinet is out of the closet (though not yet assembled). The baby carseat is freshly cleaned and the baby bundler is inside of it to keep the tiny little guy warm.

The coming home outfit has arrived although I haven't sent back the first one that was way too big. Our current one is adorable and actually the right size (and since I'm writing this after the fact a ...

Nothing earth shattering today, minus the fact that I'm actually blogging, just a few minor points of interest from our day today.

My goals for the day were to do the weekly cleaning, laundry, and get the guest room to a point where it's not hazardous to visitors. I'm going to consider the day a success, judging by the standards of a mom. Meaning that we got a late start because Ben decided that he needed held more than I needed to get anything done. Then once we were actually started we got a slow start because Ben decided he needed to "be a helper". Charming, but inefficient. So we bumbled our way through a few things, but mostly got no where fast. There was a moving box on our table this morning from where I had Andrew get my sewing machine down for me last night. Ben saw it this morning and asked me, "What's in this big box?"

The high point of the morning was when Ben accidentally peed on the patio. He thought the resulta ...

My Ben is two years old today. I cannot believe. Just to start my blog with a cliche, it's really true it's amazing "how fast they grow up" and "just yesterday he was a baby" and all those other teary-eyed little sayings. (We had his "birthday party" tonight. I'll do a separate birthday party blog, but this blog will probably end up being way too sentimental to include our day's festivities.)

This is not (intentionally) going to be a brag-on-everything-that-he-knows entry. But just to get that out of the way let me say that Benjamin Mark is everything I could want in a toddler. He's hysterical, too smart for my own good, and perfectly bad. But really, my goal here is more of a character sketch of the Ben that I know, see, and love on a daily basis.

He inherited his dad's musical genes/genius as opposed to me faking my way through marching band.... At church on Sunday after each song fast or slow he would cla ...

You may or may not have noticed my absence from my blog in the past month or so...particularly after I said that I was going to try and blog everyday until the baby was born. Clearly that did not happen. This is what happened instead. National Novel Writing Month was/is November.

I used to (pre-child) participate in this event and I really liked it. I completed three novels this way. In 2006, I was pregnant with Ben and though I made a valient effort I didn't finish even though I was pretty much on track until he was born. In 2007 Ben was a year old and that's still a fairly needy phase and then I had surgery that month and was hence derailed. In 2008 I really thought that I was going to be able to do this. Ben can play independently or at least watch TV for some time by himself, he still is napping well most days and is in bed early. I have the time to write a novel this month. Plus, I can pretty much promise that I won't be able to do it next year because I'll have an 11 month o ...

Today's blog is three things that I've said in the last thirty minutes that I never would have thought needed to be said:

"No you can't have more apples because they make you throw up."

"Benjamin! Do NOT put beans in mommy's shoes."

"If you'd eat with your spoon you wouldn't get pineapple in your eye."

It might be shaping up to be one of those days...

Today was not a good day for clothes in the Hatter house. I had two pair of maternity pants arrive in the mail, which *should* have been a good thing. I was very excited. They were from Old Navy and were identical to the pair that I bought when I was pregnant with Ben that just wore out causing me to need new ones. One was a pair of jeans, and one was a pair of cords. Did I mention that they were identical to my old pair? The pair that fit me perfectly, was completely comfortable, and lovely? You know, identical...like the same size, the same cut, the same everything? Hmmm. Well, apprently Old Navy doesn't know about identical because they don't fit me. Very very very very very frustrating. So now I have to send them back and try and find some other ones. Do you know how many pairs of pants I have in the mean time? One. One pair of pants. One pair of pants that do not fit me perfectly, are not completeley comfortable, and not lovely. This does not make me happy.

You know what else ...

Ben's most recent obsession is dipping his food. Not a meal goes by where doesn't ask for "dip, more dip, have some dip?" His dips of choice are ketchup, ranch dressing, honey, and syrup. He also believes that soup is a giant bowl of dip meant for bread, crackers, or even slices of cheese. Dip is an entire food group and can be and often is, eaten separately from the rest of the meal with a spoon.

I've heard that this is a normal toddler phase and doesn't really bother me. He usually eats bigger portions and will try a bigger variety of food when he does have something to dip it in. Yes, it's a little annoying when he starts crying at dinner because he can't have his third "serving" of dip...we usually draw the line at two, but it's hardly a real problem, mostly we just think it's funny.

Our one attempt to dissuade him from eating the dip seperately was to drizzle it over the food so that he didn't actually have to dip it and ...

I'm not having very much luck shopping for used baby clothes online. I think I might be too particular, but I don't really think I'm being unreasonable. These are my issues.

1. While I would like to buy a 20 or 30 piece auction from Ebay the people who list these seem to think that they can take one or maybe two pictures of the entire lot and that should be sufficient. And by sufficient I mean they think they don't even need to write out descriptions for the items. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to bid on that. I understand and am okay with getting an item or two that I might not like, but I'm not going to spend $30ish dollars to win an auction, and then another $15 for shipping and then end up with a bunch of clothes that I don't like because I didn't really know what I was buying.

2. I'm not going to buy from anyone who uses bad grammar and can't spell anything correctly. I can handle a typo here or there (I'm sure there will be one or two in this blog) because ...

Here's my heartbreaking tale of the day.

This morning I was putting on my makeup and Ben was sitting in the bathtub (no water) playing with these little bathtub foamie letters. He wanted to get out and so he started to climb and got himself into the position so that his little bottom was hanging over the edge still in the top, but he had both legs and feet outside the tub and his hands perched on the edge of the tub and he was kind of teetering there trying to get enough momentum to get the rest of the way out.

Obviously, I didn't want him to fall backwards into the tub and hit his head or fall forwards out of the tub and hit his mouth on the toilet so I walked over to him and held my hand out and said, "Here, mom will help you."

Usually his reply would have been something like "Help you", or "mom will help you" and take my hand and I'd pull him out. Not this morning.

...