Oh, how we look forward to garbage day at my house.  Especially, every other week where the recycling and yard waste trucks come by too.  That means 6 garbage trucks come by the house in one day.  We are sooooo lucky.   Jayden pretty much spends most of the day looking out the window for the garbage trucks to come by.  It’s really one of the only days he doesn’t stand by the window and ask where Royal is and when is he coming home (’dad home, dad no work, dad home’ - what am I chopped liver???).  I went into Jayden’s room to let him out after his nap as he can’t open his door yet, but I had heard him rustling around in there.   This is how I found him.

He climbed up on his changing table all by himself.  Take a closer look….

Welcome to the world of, ‘Yes I CAN knit anything’.  One of Joanna’s friends has been having to wear an eye patch, and why would anybody want to wear one of those boring black ones.  Especially when you can have a designer one!  This one was made out of some left over Ruby River, I might make another, just so I have a matching eye patch to wear with my new sweater.  The only other eye patch I’ve made was for Joanna, because right before she gets a migraine, one of her eyes gets all dialated and it’s freaky to look at, so I knit her up an eye patch so the rest of the world didn’t have to look at an entirely black eye (you’re welcome).  I told Joanna it was so she could have something to apply a little pressure to her sore dialated eye, but really it was because it’s easier to look at a cute yarn eye patch than a freakishly large pupil.

Jayden and I have both had a nasty little cold this week.  This is what Jayden was doing while I knit up the eye patch.  Looks comfy, huh?

The Ruby River experiment is now over.  I have finished my sweater, which at first I was hesitant to start since spring and sunshine were right around the corner.  But, with it snowing like it has the past couple days, it’s obvious that there is still plenty of sweater wearing time left!

 

Maybe one day I’ll be able to post a picture of me wearing it, but right now, it’s just me and Jayden at home, and the pictures he takes tend to be of his toys and turn out with half a finger over the lens.

 

Coming up next…an eye patch…don’t believe me?  Just wait and see…

This is how everyone should cut out sugar cookies and dye Easter eggs.  In your socks, diaper (or underwear…whatever you prefer to wear), and a fire truck apron!  Notice that where we are standing you can see the game on tv, because you can’t cut out bunny cookies during March Madness without knowing whats going on.  Which by the way, if anybody cares for an update, my bracket has been getting crushed by Royal’s in all but the east region.  I guess schools with cool names just aren’t good at basketball this year.

So, the time has come where my Thursday and Friday evenings (because thats when Royal is home) and weekends are filled with the sound of cheering audiences, buzzing noices, annoying broadcasters who repeat the same thing over and over and over (which provides great ammunition for me to make fun of them), and a strange phenomenon happens where 2 mins can really take 30 mins.  That’s right, I’m talking about March Madness.  Never in my life have I ever really cared about college basketball, but now my life is going to revolve around it.  Although, the past few years, I’ve been playing along just to make it a little more interesting for myself.  Royal prints me off a bracket and I fill out what teams I think are going to win, and we have a competition (because it wouldn’t be our marriage if there wasn’t something to compete over) to see who can get the most right.  Royal is an avid sports follower.  He knows who plays for what team, what teams are good, what teams squeeked into the tourny, etc…  Basically, I can read the names of the schools off the paper and recognize most of them, but not because I follow basketball, just because I may have heard the name one time in my life, and that’s about it.  So, last night, Royal hands me my bracket and says, ‘Fill this out in pen’.  What?  Does he take me for a cheater???  A lot of times my strategy for picking teams has been far more successful than all his analyzing.  I choose what teams will win sometimes based on their seed in the tourny, but for the most part if I like the name of the school (like Wake Forest, I always put Wake Forest thru the bracket b/c I think it has a cool name…too bad their not in it this year), or if I like their colors, or sometimes when I can’t decide, I ask Royal what their mascot’s are.  If one is a tiger and one is a bird, well a tiger will always beat a bird, so I will put the school whose mascot is a tiger as the winner of that game.  Genious I know!!!

When Jayden and I got home today, I flipped on the tv to see if any of my teams were winning (so far it’s looking good for me!), and I fixed Jayden lunch.  We were having lunch a little late today, so I thought for sure he would just scarf it down.  He kept fussing and saying he was all done at the table, so I got him down and figured he was just gonna go hungry.  Little did I know how much Royal has been rubbing off on him.  Obviously, Jayden remembers March from last year, because he grabs his sandwich and heads over to his little table in the family room, that he just so happens to be able to see the tv from, and sits down and finishes eating the rest of the lunch while watching a little b-ball.  Guess we’re gonna have to let Jayden fill out a bracket next year.

 

  

Jayden woke up too late for us to make it to our Baby Boot Camp class.  15 minutes is just not enough to shove down breakfast, get dressed, and manage to get out the door.  So, I figured since it wasn’t raining this morning, we’d just take our time and go for a run instead.  Today was not a good day to go running.  I thought it was going to be, so did Jayden, he jumped right in the stroller and immediately pointed down the road and said, ‘other way’ (a.k.a. get going down the road and move on out of the driveway).  However, somebody forgot to inform me that today was the day that a bunch of drivers were going to be too concerned with their own lives to look out for someone else’s.  Someone should really put out a news broadcast or something on days like today.  “Stay off the sidewalks today, I know it’s not raining and you might want to go for a run, but not today.  There’s a lot of bad drivers out there”

Jayden and I were only about a third of a mile into our run, when we encountered our first incident.  We made it down Marvin Rd to The Wave carwash.   This is always a dangerous spot, so I’m usually on high alert when we come to it.  When it’s freezing outside, all the wet cars drip onto the sidewalk and then the sidewalk becomes a sheet of ice, which isn’t good when I don’t have my studded tires on my stroller (that would be all the time for those that might think I have studs for my stroller…i’m not that hard core of a runner…sheesh)  Today, there was no ice, just a clean and shiny silver car with a bad woman driver in it.  She comes screamin’ out of the car wash, she must of stopped by the espresso stand first and her coffee was just kickin’ in or something because she was flying out the carwash to the road, and doesn’t even look to see if maybe there is a pedestrian actually using the sidewalk.  That is why they are there, so people can walk safely down the road.  So, as I almost crash the stroller into the side of her clean car (one of these days I’m just gonna do it, but I guess it would need to be on a day when Jayden wasn’t in the stroller and who goes running with a stroller w/o a kid in it, and it would just mess up my stroller anyways, it’s not like it would total the car of anything, and then what would i do???), anyways, as I was saying, I almost crashed into her car, but luckily stopped short.  My stroller is equipped with this fancy little bell for letting people know you are behind them and that you want to pass (then you get to yell, ‘On your right’ or ‘On your left’, it makes you feel like an olympic racer or something, passing people all the time, it’s great.  really, i hardley ever use my bell except to entertain Jayden), however today my little bell got used more like a horn.  My inner-angry-Seattle-driver came out and I was ringing the bell like a mad-man, until the driver finally looks my way as she’s pulling out into traffic.  I give her an arm gesture (no I didn’t flip her off, last time something like that happened someone beat my car with an umbrella, but that’s a whole different story…yes I was in Seattle and my inner-angry-driver was rearing it’s ugly head) and I glare at her and say, ‘watch where you’re going!’, to which Jayden says, ‘watch it!’ (such a good little kid), and the lady just looks at me and smiles and waves.  I must not have been glaring very good if she just thought I was waving at her.  But whatever, I figured I’d got my close call out of the way for the day.  My close calls with cars often happen near The Wave Carwash.

However, it turns out today was my lucky day.  I wasn’t going to get run over once, I was going to get run over twice.  About a mile and a half down the road, Jayden and I are cruising along and we get to an intersection.  Me, being the rule follower that I am, even though the street lights were green, my walk signal was red, so I stopped running and went over and hit the button.  Viola!  The walk signal says go.  I took a quick look behind me for cars that were turning left, there were none, so we ventured out into the crosswalk.  Obviously, in the time it took me to turn around and start running again, a crazed young guy in a truck decided he was going to turn left.  And that he was in too much of a hurry to wait to see that we had a walk signal, and just couldn’t wait the 5 seconds it would take for us to actually get across the street.  So, he turns in front of 2 lanes of traffic, in front of cars that were too close, which makes all those cars start honking at him, distracting him even further from the fact that he is about to run over a couple people in the crosswalk, and he about nails Jayden and I.  I like to think that the people in the car were honking in my defense.  Probably not the case, but I like to think that I just might be that important.  Luckily I have reflexes like a cat and I am able to jerk the stroller to a stop before he runs us over and my bell ringing finger was practically smoking, ringing away like a mad-man.  It probably was a good thing I was running, so all my muscles were warm, you wouldn’t want to pull a finger muscle.  I say, ‘holy smokes’ (I wanted to say something much worse), to which Jayden says, ’sheesh’.  It was also probably a good thing I was running, so my heart was already pumping good, because almost getting run over by a car is almost enough to make your heart feel like it’s about to blow up.  And luckily from running my heart was already warmed up, so it didn’t pull a muscle when all the adrenaline came shooting through my veins.  Nobody wants a pulled heart muscle, can you imagine pulling a muscle in your heart?  Dang, that would hurt, like all the time, like everytime it beat.  It’s not like your legs that you could just rest for awhile, that darn heart has to keep working.  That would suck majorly.  Lucky for me, that didn’t happen!

Jayden and I made it the rest of our 5 miles without too much incident.  When we got close to the house, a sheriff’s car passed by me and waved.  I was wishing that I had a photographic memory and could memorize all those license plates of the cars that have tried to run me over, because I would so report them.  That’s just the kinda girl I am.  Guess Jayden and I should of just gone to Baby Boot Camp, I think it would of been much safer.

As a reward for graduating as a little Seahorse, his teacher gave him a tattoo, lovely little flowers.  Jayden picked where he wanted to put it, so that’s where we stuck it on.  I thought for sure he’d want it on his tummy, as that is where he always wants stamps and stickers put.  But not his tattoo!  He obviously wants to be like his Aunt Kay-kay and Jojee.

Jayden has successfully completed his first swimming lessons!!!  He learned how to kick on his front and his back.  He learned how to do the ice cream scoop (doggie paddle).  He jumped off the side, went down the slide, and did lots of dunking in the water.  The funny thing is, I am in the class picture with him.   Royal did all the swimming with him, except for one lesson when Royal was in Boston, and of course that is the week they decide to take the picture.  Hopefully, Jayden will get to take more swimming lessons in the spring!  If we’re still around that is, and with the way the housing market is, we probably will be!  However, even though Jayden “graduated”, he will be a little sea horse for awhile, as you have to be 4 to move up to the next level, the Sea Puffer!