As Allison continues to amaze us with her growth and the development of her personality, we are in awe of her understanding of what is going on around her.

Her first phrase was, “all done.” She’s been saying it for several weeks, sometimes at the appropriate times and sometimes she says it just to say it. But recently she’s become more aware of just when to use the phrase correctly.

For example a couple weeks ago we were across the street playing with the neighbors. It was getting close to Allison’s afternoon nap time, but she was having a good time so we didn’t push her. All of the sudden she stopped playing and said, “all done,” and turned around and started walking towards our house. I picked her up and asked if she was all done playing. She began to wave bye-bye. So off we went. Once we got home I asked her if she wanted to go rock, (our code for nap time) she proceeded up the stairs. Within about 90 seconds of rocking, she sat up and reached for her crib, so I set her down and off to sleep land she went.

She knew she was tired and it was time for a nap. I happily obliged her request. Nap time is usually such a battle in this house. It’s been so nice now that Allison is starting to recognize her own sleep signs and heading up stairs to the rocking chair when she feels the need to sleep.

Of course she has also figured out that when she is eating something that she doesn’t particularly care for (green beans or carrots), she’ll proclaim, “all done” after a couple bites. Or when momma or daddy is doing something other than paying attention to her, she’ll tug on our leg and say, “all done.” She’s getting to be too smart for her own good!

The FedEx man who came to my house today is lucky that he runs fast. If he’d have been any slower, I just might have caught him and slapped him for being stupid. I’m not picking on FedEx here today, especially since it’s the UPS man who is generally the target of my rage, but today is when it about put me over the edge.

Here’s my disclaimer… Allison is a light sleeper, so am I. I wish that we could both be like my hubby who can literally sleep though anything, but unfortunately we are not.

When Allison is napping during the day, we have a little sign that we hang on the front door that says, “Shh! Sweet Pea Sleepin’” and it has a cute little picture of peas in a pod.
Pretty self explanatory, huh? For most people, yes it is, but for the small percentage of the population who work for FedEx and UPS in the Dayton area, apparently this sign means nothing.

Actually I am starting to think that they do in fact see and understand the sign, but that they don’t care. Instead of complying with my request to be quiet, they ring the door bell, open the storm door, fling whatever package they have between the front door and the storm door, then slam the storm door shut with all the might before bolting for their trucks because they know that I am coming for them.

Seriously, does it take a rocket scientist to figure out that when the sign is up that the baby is sleeping and ringing the doorbell might not be the best option?

The real problem today is that I feel like crap and I too was actually sleeping before the doorbell rang and the dog freaked out barking because some little man was opening the storm door to leave the package. By the time I got down the stairs and opened the door, the man was already revving his engine and I swear smirking at me when I glared at him.

So now I have a special sign on the door addressed to any delivery drivers who approach my door asking the morons to not ring the doorbell.

Think it will work? I’m guessing it won’t, so I’ll go with plan B… Close the front door almost all the way, so that when the delivery man opens the storm door to drop off the package, Max (the 70-pound terrier) is right there waiting for his little delivery hand to enter my house, right about the time the aforementioned hand is within Max’s reach, I’ll call the dog off. Honestly this was an accident the first time it happened, but the mail man now knows to simply leave the box on the front porch, we’ll find it.

I believe it has finally happened. Allison has crossed that fine line between being an infant to being a full-fledged toddler. What makes me think that we’ve crossed over? Could it be that she is walking now? Or that she is learning how to express herself more? Or that she has preferences for toys and activities? No those are not the definitive factors for me; rather it came to me last night while in the darkness of her room I discovered that she has moved on from the innocuous spitting up that babies do to full-fledged grown-up vomit. Yep, chunks of grilled cheese sandwich mixed with carrots are what finally convinced me that my baby is no longer a baby.

We recently returned from 19 fabulous days in San Diego, so getting Allison back on the correct time zone typically takes a day or two. So last night about 30 minutes after I put her down to bed she started fussing. Jason and I figured she just wasn’t ready to sleep so we let her fuss for about 15 minutes when suddenly the fussing grew more agitated. Thinking she might be a little hungry or thirsty, I made a 4 ounce bottle and headed upstairs.

As soon as I opened her bedroom door I knew something was not right. There was an odd sweet smell filling the room. I couldn’t quite place it. So I innocently reach into the crib in the darkness to pick up Allison and soothe her back to sleep. Unfortunately I missed finding Allison and instead found the aforementioned chunks of her dinner all over the crib.

I called down to Jason that I was going to need some back-up and I reached for the light. My poor little pumpkin must have been laying on her tummy when she urped up her dinner. She had chunks of food all over her face, hair, eye lashes, ears and the two pacifiers that she was desperately clinging to. Not to mention it was all over the front of her jammies, the sheet, blanket and crib railing.

I asked Jason if he wanted to re-bathe Allison or change the sheets. Teetering near the bedroom door he sheepishly replied, “I guess I’ll take her.” I could sense that he might lose his dinner too and knowing how spaghetti sauce satins I told him to go start the bath while I stripped Allison naked and brought her to him.

As I changed the sheets and re-made the bed that’s when it hit me that my little pumpkin was growing up. Who knew that barf could be such a sentimental occurrence?

Allison may only be 13 months old but she has already flown across the country four times. Each trip takes two legs, so with round-trip flights, we’ve been through 16 take-offs and landings with this child. That also means we have been through 16 different flight crews for these adventures.

Have you ever heard the old adage that 100 atta-boys can be erased by one complaint? {That’s not exactly how it goes, but I am tired so hopefully you get my point} Well let me tell you my story about this one flight from Dallas to San Diego {American Airlines flight 1821 on June 3 in case your interested}Allison was tired, there is no doubt about it, we were about 2 hours past her bedtime and she was tired. However for those of you who know my child, she doesn’t like to miss a thing, so getting her to sleep on a semi-crowded airplane full of new faces was not going to be an easy task.

Okay so truth be told, Allison was screaming. She was not happy about being on that airplane, neither was I and neither was Jason. But there we were climbing to 30,000 feet and there was not a darn thing any of us could do about it. I was desperately trying to muzzle her screams without suffocating her and Jason was trying to keep me calm as my frustration with the child grew with each second. The passengers around us were giving us dirty looks, sighing out loud and getting agitated themselves. It’s not like we were just letting Allison scream we were rocking, singing, offering snacks and sippy cups, there were new toys being fished out of diaper bags and Tylenol and teething tables being doled out. We were trying and Allison was not cooperating.

The flight crew meandered up the aisle offering beverages to other passengers. As they approached our row, the flight attendant said, “Do you want me to warm a bottle for her?”

Now remember my child is 13 months old, but she only weighs 18 pounds. I realize that to some folks she looks a lot younger than she is, but she is one-year old and we had weaned her from the bottle.

I replied to the flight attendant, “No thank you, she doesn’t take a bottle any more.”

To which the flight attendant looked at me like I have four heads and barked, “Well what do you feed that child then?”

She’s lucky that I had a screaming child in my arms or else I might have stood up and slapped her for her attitude. She doesn’t know me or my child and had no business judging me for how or what I feed my daughter.

With that, I turned my back to her and continued trying to calm my child down. And she proceeded up the aisle without even offering Jason or me a drink. {which trust me, we both needed a good stiff one!}

So as the flight continued, Jason tried walking with Allison to get her to sleep, all to no avail. I got up to rescue Jason from the screaming and miracle upon miracle I was able to sway Allison to sleep. So in an attempt to not bother the other passengers anymore, I slipped into the back row of seats. About three minutes after I gingerly sat down with my sleeping child, my favorite flight attendant informs me that that row of seats had been blocked by the gate attendants and I needed to return to my assigned seat.

Once again she is lucky that I had a child in my arms or I probably would have punched her at this point. So I carefully returned to my assigned seat. By now I was full-on in tears. I was exhausted, frustrated and embarrassed because of the scene that the screaming baby caused {irrational I know, babies cry and people need to accept that!}. Jason asks why I moved so I told him what the flight attendant said to me. Jason turned around to give her the evil eye only to see her sprawled across the entire row of seats, that I was sitting in, with her bare feet propped up on the arm rest reading a magazine. What the hel! Was my only response at that point… Someone please tell me how I can get a job where I get paid to be a rude and then get to prop my stinky feet up and read a magazine, that’s one job that I know I could handle, I am a quick learner!

Needless to say we will be avoiding American Airlines at all costs from here on out.

Oprah is apparently planning a show about baby shower gifts – good and bad – this is what I submitted. {If you gave us stuffed animals, please don’t be offended, they didn’t really go to the dog!}

Baby showers bring out the best and worst of people’s creativity! Why do people insist on giving newborn babies stuffed animals? What in the world is a newborn going to do with 20 stuffed ducks, bears and lambs? They can’t go in the crib because they are a suffocation hazard. Even if moms save them until the child gets older (where are we supposed to store them?) the ones with the plastic eyes and noses become a choking hazard. The best solution for the stuffed animals we received was to give them to the dog as toys.

One other gift that made a huge difference at 2 a.m. is the bottle warmer. Think about it when your child is starving in the middle of the night and you need a bottle sooner versus later who has time to wait for the tap water to warm up? I never wanted to use the microwave to warm a bottle (experts recommend against this practice) so for me waiting and waiting and waiting for the tap water to get to the right temperature was awful. {plus the sound of the running water always makes me have to run to the bathroom!} So with the bottle warmer, it takes approximately two minutes to warm the bottle to the perfect temperature to quench your starving babies hunger!

For some reason, nap time has suddenly become a huge battle in our house. Allison has decided that she no longer needs to nap (or sleep at night for that matter). Our sweet little girl, who started sleeping through the night at just 12 weeks old, has now become a sleep tyrant.

It used to be that when she got that sleepy, droopy eyes, staring off into space look we could simply lay her down in her crib and she’d peacefully drift off to dreamland. In the last week or so she has decided that instead of a peaceful calm approach to sleep that’s it’s better to scream at the top of her lungs until exhausted she collapses in a mound on top of her blanket.

This same scenario plays out each evening as well. We had a great routine of bath, bottle and then bed. We literally would rock her for two to three minutes and then put her down to sleep. She’d sometimes play and babble a little but not for too long before falling into the sleepy bliss.

We’ve tried rocking, humming, singing, walking and even just letting her play until she crashes to no avail. We have once again consulted our favorite sleep book, “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child,” and are following the plan to a tee. Unfortunately that means letting her work out the issues herself. We have to maintain a consistent approach and close the doors so that the screaming doesn’t get to us.

I just don’t understand why she takes such offense to sleeping. Lord knows that if someone would let me curl up on their lap while they sang to me, rocked me and patted my bottom I would happily drift off to dreamland in a matter of seconds!

Allison and I flew back to Ohio from a fabulous week in San Diego. In addition to some sunshine and family bonding, Allison picked up a nasty cold somewhere along the way.

So I went to Target to pick up some stuff including some Tylenol Cough & Cold for Allison’s cough, fever and runny nose. As I scan the cough and cold medicine aisle, I can find just about every elixir under the sun except for the concentrated infant drops. Getting a bit frustrated I scan the shelves one more time and finally find what I am looking for. The only problem is that apparently Target has taken some cues from your favorite video store and only places a façade of the item you want on the shelves. If you want the real thing you take a card up to the pharmacy and can make your purchase.

Now I have not been living under a rock, I am well aware of the new regulations requiring products that contain pseudoephedrine to be placed under lock and key to keep the crazies who make methamphetamine from stocking up. But c’mon how much of the stuff is really in the concentrated infant formula? According to the bottle, there is 7.5 mg of pseudoephedrine in each 0.8mL dose of the medication. Now I am no math genius, but I would be willing to bet that it would take cases upon cases of this stuff to really make any dangerous drugs.

So my poor baby is hacking up a storm at home and spewing snot all over daddy (which I find amusing since it’s a daily occurrence for me) and I am signing my life away at Target for a $4 bottle of Tylenol. The classic is when I took the little card to the pharmacy counter, the gal working asked me if I wanted to purchase the product. I really wanted to ask her if they were giving it away because I was the 100th customer of the day. Of course I want to buy it, why else would I be bringing her the little card with the fancy picture on it?

So she proceeds to tell me in a snotty little tone that I had to pay for it at the pharmacy register and that she would need my driver’s license. So I hand her my license and, I am not kidding she entered everything that is typed on my license into her little computer. After at least 7 minutes, she finally rings me up. I give her the cash and then have to sign a receipt acknowledging that I have received the medication. Holy cow! Who knew that buying some Tylenol for my sick baby was going to turn into a national inquisition?

Have you heard of this phenomenon? There must be something crazy in the dirt here in Ohio. For whatever reason, I cannot get the dirt out of the knees of all of Allison’s pants.

I am a lover of Spray-N-Wash’s stain stick. I honestly think it’s the greatest invention in quite a while. This stuff is amazing. When I slop taco filling with cheese and salsa on my pink shirt, it gets it out. When Jason dribbles some chocolate ice cream on his white shirt stain stick comes to the rescue. So why is it that the dirt the Allison grinds into the knees of all her pants will not come out? Surely there is more grease, gunk and chemicals in some taco seasoning than there is in some backyard mud, yet the stain stick can’t touch the dirt.

Let me interject here, Allison is not crawling around in the mud in the actual backyard, rather she is crawling around the living room and kitchen that the dog has tracked all of the backyard dirt into.

Many of you are thinking – who am I kidding the one person who actually reads this probably doesn’t care about the mud in the backyard – anyway someone might think why don’t you just vacuum and mop once in a while? Well that’s the thing I don’t think it would matter if I vacuumed 10 times a day and mopped 5 times a day it wouldn’t make a single bit of difference. Somehow, someway the dog manages to track dirt in the house no matter what. Seriously this past weekend, Jason vacuumed the living room. Allison, Max and I were on the floor playing. Max never went outside, he just rolled over for some tummy scratching, when he got up there was more dirt on the carpet. It’s like he holds some of it back somehow and releases it after we vacuum.

Anyway, I digress. My dilemma is not how to keep the carpet clean because that it impossible. My dilemma is how in the heck do you get the dirt stains out of the knees of Allison’s pants? Any suggestions?

Just for kicks my hubby and I went to the Cincinnati Auto Show this weekend. We got free tickets and figured it’s a good excuse to get out of the house without spending a lot of cash.

The show was at Cinergy Center downstairs in the main ball room area. We entered the center via the skywalk from the parking garage which put us on the second floor of the center. No big deal we figured, we’ll just find the elevator and head down to the show {Allison was in the stroller}. A fairly competent security officer gave us vague directions to the closest elevator and we headed towards it. Little did we know that the center was crawling with cats, literally. There was some crazy cat show going on for strange people who obviously treat their cats better than their children.

We maneuver our way past the “cat agility course” and the “showplace arena” and end up at the shopping boutique. YIKES! The toys available for cats put Fisher Price to shame. Anyway I digress from my original point of this story.

We finished wandering through the cars and decide it’s time to head home. We didn’t want to zig zag past all the crazy cat people again so we found another elevator on the center’s directory and head that way.

We come to a cordoned off area that appears to be an alternative exit for the car show, so we approach the turnstile and my hubby goes to move the temporary barrier (the same way we got into the car show) when Security Officer Bob (we’ll call him SOB for short since I’m not sure of his real name) confronts us. What transpires next is the honest to goodness truth.

“Sir, what do you think you are doing?” asks SOB.

“We are trying to get to the elevator,” hubby responds.

“What elevator?” asks SOB.

“The one right over there,” replies hubby while pointing to an elevator about 200 yards away. {Shouldn’t SOB know where things like the elevator are located?}

“Okay,” says SOB in a huff.

So we get to the elevator and wait and wait and wait. After several minutes we determine that the elevator is not working so we head back the way we came. SOB is standing in the same place and the following conversation takes place as hubby is again moving the temporary barrier so I can push the stroller out.

“Have a nice day,” says SOB.

“Your elevator there is not working, you should probably let someone know,” says hubby.”

“What? The elevator, oh yeah we know it doesn’t work.” SOB says.

So what I want to know is what part of “we are trying to get to the elevator,” did SOB not understand when we passed him the first time. Did he think we just had some crazy desire to push the button over and over and over again. Did he think I wanted to use the elevator’s silver doors as a mirror to check my hair? Why in the world would he let us go down to the elevator and not let us in on his little secret that the dumb thing wasn’t working?

Oh well, as Bill Engvall would say…. “Here’s your sign.”

Who knew that the simple act of diapering a child could become a full-contact sport? My sweet little peanut has become the Hulk Hogan of the diaper wrestling event. She will contort her body, twist her torso, kick her legs, arch her back and wiggle to get away from the dreaded diaper.

I used to just chuckle when my friends talked about this phenomenon. My sweet little child would never act that way. At nine months we can still use the changing table. But put her on the floor to try and change her and it’s a whole new ballgame.

I seriously think the Olympic Committee should consider diapering the next world class sport. You can have different weight categories as well as competitions between snap-up pants and slip-on pants. And of course you have to distinguish between the wet diaper and the poopy diaper.

There could be training camps set-up to train parents on how best to tackle their child without causing any harm to themselves or the child. The gymnastics coaches can start scouting for their future contortionists at the diaper derby.

She acts as if the mere act of putting a diaper on her is causing great physical pain that must be stopped at all costs. She doesn’t care if she twists away and crawls right over top of the poopy diaper that was just removed. She certainly doesn’t notice when she’s left a trail of poopy knee prints in the carpet. And she couldn’t care less if she happens to have the urge to pee during her escape.

These aforementioned activities thankfully have not happened to me personally, but I am sure that my day is coming.

Any gymnastics coaches out there? I’ve got a kid that you’ve just gotta see.