Dear Grandma,

Thank you for finding my sunglasses! I've missed them very much. I even insisted on wearing them when I took my nap. (My Mom is such a pushover.)

Love,

Landon

A Day in the Life of Landon

Here's a taste of what life around the Swain home is like for our littlest family member.

6:30 am-Landon's awake. A sippy cup of milk and a favorite cartoon buys me 30 minutes of semi-sleep during which Landon repeatedly tries to sit on my face. He thinks that anyone in a lying down position is fair game for a tackle or two (or twelve).

7:15 am-I turn Landon loose in Allie's room. She is very motivated to jump out of bed to protect her possessions from Landon. It works like a charm. In less than 5 minutes Allie has banished Landon from her room and she is in the shower.

7:50 am-Landon has had breakfast, brushed his teeth, had a diaper change, and is well on his way to making messes for me to spend the rest of the day cleaning up. This morning he managed to find a stray crayon to color on the refrigerator with. Thank goodness for Magic Erasers.

8:47 am-Landon stands at the window playing with the kids who are outside waiting for the bus.

8:52 am-Landon is crying because the bus just pulled away.

9:00 am-The crying stops when The Little Einstein music starts playing. Hooray for TV!

9:30 am-The show is over and Landon joins me in the kitchen. When I refuse his request for a "treat" he takes matters into his own hands. I return from a phone call to discover he has managed to move a chair into the kitchen and pull out a bag of pretzels. I let it slide because I have dishes to load into the dishwasher and I hope that it will distract him from closing it on me.

9:37 am-It didn't work. He closed the dishwasher repeatedly while I loaded it up.

9:45 am-It's time to play! Landon does his thing lining all of his animals up along the fireplace, playing with Lego's, and dragging toys around in a basket.

11 am-Time to run a few errands. I load Landon up in the car and off we go. He sure enjoyed the music store for about 5 minutes. It was all downhill from there. After a respectable tantrum in Bert Murdock, I abandon my plans to swing by the pharmacy and into Walgreens. Those errands are just going to have wait until I have backup assistance.

11:35 am-Inspired by the trip to the music store, Landon hammers away on the keyboard. He loves to play music. Really loudly.

12:00 pm-It's lunch time. Landon eats one of his favorite meals, ramen noodles. After lunch it's time to read. We gather a big pile of books and Landon snuggles up for story time.

12:45 pm-Naptime! After a brief protest Landon slumbers quietly for the next 3 hours or so.

3:30 pm-Landon is awake. When he hears me coming to get him up he dives under his blankets and hides from me. He is so funny. He giggles the whole time he is "hidden".

3:55 pm-We load up in the car once again to retrieve Allie from her 4H class. When he sees Allie coming towards the car he yells "sissie" over and over.

4:15 pm-Allie has forgotten her homework at school so she is not allowed to play with friends today. This is good news for Landon who loves to play with his big sister. They play happily until dinner time.

5:30 pm-Landon helps me make dinner. He sits in the drawer below the oven while I maneuver around him to get dinner prepared. It's not annoying at all to have him literally under foot (wink, wink).

6 pm-Dinner. Landon sits in his high chair for a whopping 5 minutes before he climbs out of there and into my lap.

7 pm-After dinner it's time for Family Home Evening. Allie is assigned the lesson tonight and Landon sits in Eric's lap for about 60 seconds of it.

7:15 pm-Following the lesson Eric is in charge of the activity. He chooses to watch Cars. Landon watches a little bit of it and then runs throughout the house for the rest of the movie.

8:45 pm-I ask Landon if he would like to go to bed. He says "yes" and then runs away and hides.

9 pm-I finally corner him and walk him into his room, give him a kiss, and tell him goodnight.

PS...After chronicling Landon's "typical day", I must report on his (thankfully) atypical night. Landon cried off and on from midnight until 2:30 am when he decided he was done sleeping for the night. He kept me entertained while Eric and Allie slumbered peacefully (so not fair!). At about 6:30 he finally started to doze off. Of course, by that time it was time to get Allie up. I am one tired Mom today!

Hats

Landon's Favorite Things

Landon is addicted to TV. It's almost as serious as his morning cup of milk addiction. We're working on it. It might be my fault. Kind of. If he didn't insist on waking up so early I might be more prepared to be a responsible parent. He knows the routine. I greet him with his morning cup of milk and then promptly place him in bed with me to watch a cartoon while I slowly come to terms with the fact that my day is beginning sooner than I had hoped. He LOVES to watch Disney's Little Einsteins. It is his absolute favorite TV show. (Should a one-year-old even have a favorite TV show?)

One item he insists on bringing into bed with us each morning is his blue blanket. He has become rather fond of it. If I forget to bring it with us, it usually means another trip into his room to retrieve it.

Animals. Especially dogs and cats.
Hiding. Especially when we tell him it's time for bed or a diaper change. Thankfully, he has yet to learn to hide well.
Cars. Landon loves anything with a car on it. For Christmas this year Santa gave him a box of fruit snacks that are in the shape of a car. He wanted to eat them all at once.
Lining things up. Landon has a funny habit of lining things up "just so". He will take his animals and line them all up against the bricks near the fireplace. Sometimes he will turn them on their sides all facing the same direction. He loves to build towers of blocks and sometimes he just makes one long line of blocks down the hallway. He likes order.
Cleaning. Landon is a great little cleaner. I can hand him something in any room of the house and ask him to take it to his room and put it away...and he does it. It's amazing. I wish he could teach Allie & Eric how to do it too.
Milk. He would live on milk alone if we let him.
Hats. He doesn't often leave them on very long; but he loves them!
Amber. Landon really, really, really loves his cousin Amber! His face lights right up whenever he sees her. He prefers her to me most of the time.
Closing things. It drives Landon crazy if anything (drawers, the fridge, the dishwasher, a cabinet door, etc) is open. I'm not talking accidentally left open. Just open. He sees it as his personal mission to keep everything closed at all times. It is nearly impossible to load the dishwasher when he is around. If I'm quick, and lucky, I can get one or two items put in before he comes along and slams it shut.
Light switches. Like all toddlers Landon loves to flip the light switches on and off rapidly and for long periods of time. One neighbor recently drove by at night while this was going on and called to ask me if we had installed a strobe light in our dining room.
Wrestling. He is all boy. He loves to wrestle. His favorite target is his unsuspecting sister. Thankfully Allie seems to enjoy it as much as he does. He is kind of rough. I don't suppose it will be too much longer before someone gets hurt and it's not so much fun for Allie anymore.
Shoes. Shoes are not safe at this house. If Landon spies a pair that have been left out he claims them. Grandma lost her shoes when she came to visit us on Christmas day. We had to search to locate them.
Coloring. Landon loves to color. Especially when Allie is helping him.

Concentration

We know that Landon is seriously concentrating on something when he sticks his tongue out. He often does this when he is sorting things, building towers of blocks, and coloring. Tonight for FHE we had a picture for the kids to color. Landon was totally focused on the task at hand!

Allie's look of concentration is a little less intense.

Landon Speaks

And boy is it cute! For some reason every time we ask him to say Dad he says "Mama". It's really funny. We also love his quacking sound. Take a look:

"Car"

Since he is terrible about performing on cue for an audience, I decided that I would try and catch Landon on video saying a few of the words he knows. The only one I could get him to say was "car". He also says: Mama, go, dogs, eye, hair, ear, uh-oh, no, cow, hi, more, and Dad.

It's Been a While

What can I say? We've been busy. First of all, I would like to start by thanking those who have helped my family for the last couple of weeks while I have been recovering from pneumonia. Who gets pneumonia in 90 degree weather anyways?!?

Moving on to more exciting things...Allie has her new glasses thanks to very generous grandparents. Thanks Mom & Dad! She has loved being able to see in class. The best part of all is that she has been very responsible with them.

Landon has become quite a thief in the last little while. While I was sick he would sneak into my bedroom and take things and I was too sick to chase him. Eventually Allie or Eric would intercept him and return the stolen goods to me. Now he thinks it's a fun game. One of his favorite things to steal is shoes which he will either wear or hide in his drawer under the stove. When he gets more creative with where he hides things we could be in real trouble!

When did he get so blond?

Landon has also invented a new game for himself. He likes to take his sippy cups and roll them all over the dining room floor. He will roll and chase a cup for a good 30 minutes. It's pretty funny to watch him in action.

On Labor Day we went to Thanksgiving Point to the Museum of Ancient Life. It was a lot of fun and because we got there as they were opening, it wasn't too crowded. We had a 5-year-old neighbor friend with us while his lucky parents were vacationing in Hawaii. We tried to get a picture with all 3 kids looking at us and failed miserably...

The water table and sand box are always favorites with the kids!

So worth the wait!

I am so happy with the produce that we are harvesting from our garden. It makes the hours of watering and weeding seem like a reasonable price to pay.

I am also pleased to report that after months and months of waiting Landon finally blew kisses for the first time tonight. It was so adorable that it definitely falls in the "so worth the wait" category. I'm just going to go ahead and pretend that it was me he was blowing kisses to--and not the dogs.

The Joys of Feeding a Toddler

Tonight we had spaghetti and corn bread for dinner. Landon kept saying "mmmmmm" over and over and over. By the end of the meal, this is what he looked like.

And, I've decided the pictures just don't do it justice. I took me 30 minutes to clean up Landon, his highchair, and the floor!