Sunday, January 8, 2012

29 months

29 months.....unbelievable, how did he get to be 29 months, and how the hell is he STILL not walking!!

He starts school in 3 weeks. I guess he'll have to crawl his way through it.

He's been having PT every week for a month now.  His therapist is named Amy and she's a very tiny Japanese lady, so now every small Asian woman we see he yells "There's my Amy!"  She makes him bend and push and stoop, and try to walk.
Today she worked with him for almost 2 hours. He walks fine when he's distracted and not thinking about what he's doing.  The hard part is distracting him enough that he forgets he "can't" walk. As soon as he realizes he's walking (or standing without leaning on something) he falls down.  It's so frustrating to watch, knowing he can do it, if he'd try.
Amy thinks that because he's so smart that he knows he's not good at walking and doesn't have the confidence in it, so he chooses not to do it.  Who chooses not to walk when they physically can?  What two year old BOY chooses not to walk? We are all baffled.  All we can do is keep pushing him and making him do it.  We no longer carry him anywhere, we hold his hands and walk and stop every other second so he can find his balance, we move very very slowly. 
In all other aspects he pretty dang smart, and pretty adorable.  Tonight we had this conversation
Me: What kind of music do you like?
Erik: Punk, I'm easy Dude!
Me: Anything else?
Erik: Rock and Roll! I TOTALLY ROCK!
Me: What about barbershop?
Erik: Oh, No thank you.

He keeps me in stitches. 
He freaks Mike out with his interesting requests, lately he wants a purse and a doll house.  Luckily a little friend of his gave him a doll house that I was saving in the garage, I brought it in and he puts all his animals in it and the zoo keeper on the toilet.  He also has a purse, a little leather pouch that he looks for when it's time to leave the house.  There is nothing in it, but he's copying Mommy.
I bought him a doll about a year ago.  I don't care what any Dad says, all little boys need a doll.  It teaches them a thousand things, but the one I like best is they learn how to be daddies.  Mike has always doubted that, until I captured this tonight. 
The other day at the zoo I saw a father with two young boys (maybe 3-5) and one little boy had a doll, in a front carrier and was giving it a bottle....and his father and brother were so very OK with it that I wanted to thank them for allowing this boy to have a doll!
Boys need a doll.................and girls need some cars!
Blogger's not letting me embed video's anymore, so here's a link to my YouTube channel.
http://youtu.be/8UkkghqJ-bE

Latest Obsession

     My latest obsession (beyond Pinterest and Pioneer Woman) is Couponing.  A little on the verge of extreme.  When we were in Oklahoma in October we watched an Extreme Coupon marathon and the more I watched it the more I realized I could do that!!
    I found the Krazy Coupon website which I use EVERY DAY to tell me where the deals are and I've been doing it for about 9 weeks now and at the beginning I didn't see any difference in my groceries at all...but just this month I realized that I have cut our grocery bill..IN HALF!!  This is huge for us.  I'm not getting $500.00 worth of groceries for $20.00 like on the show, because California does not double coupons (dang).   
     It takes some work....no it takes a lot of work, it's like a part time job and I won't lie and say it only takes a few minutes...it takes me a total of about 8 hours a week to do it.  That includes shopping, clipping and organizing time.  It saves us about 3-400 dollars a month (which I can use to pay other things) and my stockpile is beginning to grow.  I now have enough (and all name brand thank you, there are no coupons for store brands) food each week to cover what we eat, as well as add to our overage.  In 9 weeks I have added all this (the freezer was almost empty when I started)....I know it needs to be defrosted...how do I defrost it when there's stuff in it?  I think it may never get defrosted!

Here's our 13 boxes of cereal (Mike's the only one who eats it, that should last a while!) I think we have enough toothpaste for a couple years, as well as laundry detergent and dish soap. I don't need 400 hand soaps, but 20 (they are in the back) should hold us for a while.
 And here's all my soups and canned goods, and toilet paper.  See that toilet paper?  I got it today, I paid $6.45 for 6 12 packs of toilet paper......that my friends, was the deal of the day and should last us a good long time! I hope to get my grocery bill down from 600.00 a month to about 200.00 a month (I include diapers in that - that's a big chuck of our bill). I'm getting closer, soon I should just have to buy perishables and we can live off our stockpile.  The downside, you can't plan your menu by what you want, you have to plan it by what you have.

Once I got things organized into a binder it didn't take me long to figure out how to plan my purchases.  I buy 10 newspapers each Sunday, from an old guy named Johnnie who always gives me 15.  The hardest part is separating the inserts and cutting all the coupons, sometimes I can get Mom to help me and that makes it really nice.  We cut all the coupons and then put them into this binder.  It weighs about 13 pounds.  When people see me with it in the store they either tell me they wish they had the time to do it, or they ask me where stuff is because they think I work in the store and am taking inventory.
                                         Here's my binder

Here's the table of contents, all title pages are downloaded from Krazy Coupon Lady....they seriously do all the work for you!

Here's a page with coupons, it's the pages you collect baseball cards in, so most coupons will fit in the little pockets.

So here's to couponing! I'm calling it my part time job!