Life with Silas

I know this little guy gets way too much blog time but can you blame me? Just look at him. He loves his new kittie and our Border Collie that we are dogsitting for the winter. He loves animals, no fear of them at all...the vacuum is a different story though.

Each of my kids have spent time baking with mom, its kind of a right of passage in my house. They spend much of their preschool days counting out cups of flour and stirring batter. Its a little messier with a one year old but he loves it. Actually of all my kids he is the only one who actually doesn't like messes or to be messy. He makes it a real issue if he has something on his fingers, playdough, marker, boogers whatever. He is very insistant that I wash it off. He walks around pointing out "mess" in our house. I have my fingers crossed for a neat freak. so far I'm surrounded by slobs. He is such a polar opposite of his brother...although they both like to make lego guns.

Being a toddler he is little mr independant right now. If its not his idea he's not interested. Our interaction goes something like this. "Silas do you want a cookie?"
He emphatically replies "NO!"
"Ok then I'll just set it on the table".....he glares at it and maybe even dramatically pushes it away...and then as if he just discovered a cookie decides he'd like to eat it.

His talking right now is SO cute. He is like a little parrot copying everything we say in an almost intelligable way. He is starting to put words together into simple sentences like " mom help please get food" of course it sounds more like "mom how pee dit foo" but fortunately I'm fluent in toddler.

He has to have a stick and be walking by himself , he rarely will hold my hand (we live in a rural area so its safe) and insists "my hand" .

I was up with him way too much last night...thanks to new eye teeth trying to pop through. We actually watched a bit of Dora at 3am...good times. That's enough to make you want to pop that big head of hers . He usually sleeps better than this and we have never watched tv in the middle of the night before...well not since our long nights of screaming colic watching the 'late late show'. He makes it known though if he's got a sore mouth, itchy eczema or an ear ache in the night , and crappy sleep is my first clue that somethings bugging him. After he finally settled back into sleep I laid awake fretting and worrying about the reality of leaving him for a week this winter.

We are taking a group of 17 people down to work at an orphanage in Mexico (the same place we lived for 6 months 3 yrs ago) . We will only be there a week this time and we are not taking the kids. I have tried not to think about it too much and am hoping that I will be able to farm them out to various unsuspecting friends and family. I'm not so worried about the older ones, they will love a week away at someone elses house, and they sleep all night every night. Silas on the other hand is much harder to leave. He has no idea if I will ever come back for him and after last night I don't know that anyone would want him. I'm starting to have major mothers guilt , and I know its only going to get worse the closer we get to the big drop off.

Part of me wishes we could take the kids , but I know I would be so busy just being a mom that I wouldn't be able to appreciate the experience and really be involved in the work there. I'm sure all the Mexican staff asking where Roman and Aili are.

We are planning on going back to Baja next winter , this time with our whole crew. A year from now we will be packing up our camping trailer heading south for another family adventure. It will be wierd to pull the kids out of school and home school them for the winter ...actually it will be more like trailer schooling, or outside on a picnic table schooling , or sitting under a palm tree schooling. Actually that doesn't sound so bad.