Today was the final launch of the space shuttle Atlantis and being that I am at home with my three month old son I wanted to watch it with him since there may not be any more shuttle launches to watch in the future.

Unfortunately the shuttle launch came after feeding time and just before nap time which means he fussed and cried through the entire launch and didn’t see any of it. If he was old enough to remember this day he would be kicking himself later down the road. But since he won’t remember anything I will just have to remind him when he is 16 when he is talking about the ancient space shuttles in Science class. Of course by then, we will all have our own personal space shuttles right? That’s what they kept telling us in the 1950’s.

In other news, with my mother visiting us this weekend my wife wanted the house cleaner than ever (as she does with all visitors) so we spent all last night cleaning. The only thing we were missing was air fresheners which she said, “Just take the baby to Wal-Mart tomorrow and get them before your mom gets here.” I like how she picked the one day of the year when we got over 3 inches of rain in just under half a day. I never realized how much effort it takes to get a baby to Wal-Mart in the rain. Trying to carry an umbrella, car seat, diaper bag and lock the car doors is near impossible in the rain.

I also had an item to return but there was no way I could fit anything else into my rain soaked ensemble. So it’s still sitting in the passenger seat for the next trip to Wal-Mart.

I decided today that it’s time the baby starts seeing his bedroom a little more often. You see, the baby sleeps in our room for now in a bassinet and we have been dressing him/changing him downstairs in the playpen for convenience (his bedroom is upstairs). So he rarely ever gets to see his bedroom. So since he sleeps through the night now and we don’t have to get up to change him there is really no need to keep everything downstairs in the living room. This will also help declutter our living room. It’s true what they say, the baby really does take over every part of the house.

I think he likes being in his bedroom. He’s basically looking at all new stuff since he spends so little time in there. Mommy isn’t going to be too happy though. She will see this as a sign he is growing up and we are losing our baby. Yesterday she was talking about how she can’t wait until his Kindergarten graduation but then she gets sad whenever he outgrows an outfit and we have to retire it.

It’s a new month which means it’s time for more Gifts to Grow bonus points from Pampers.

This month, if you hadn’t already figured it out on your own, the code is FacebookMay2010.  Since it’s the same every month I went ahead and tried FacebookJune2010 but it didn’t work. I’m an instant gratification person and I don’t like to wait but Pampers is going to make me wait anyway.

So I’ll see you again on June 1 with the new code!

Interesting side note: By the time I save enough points to buy the single ticket to Sea World, Shamu will have long since retired.

With Mothers Day fast approaching, I received an email from Shutterfly offering 75 free 4×6 photos. Since Mother’s love pictures of their kids, I submit to you this Mother’s Day gift idea that is heavy on love and light on the wallet.

Find your favorite pictures of your children and have them printed up through Shutterfly for free ( just use promo code FREE75) and head down to Hobby Lobby and pick up some great new picture frames that are 50% off this week. Get a nice Mothers Day card (don’t forget the card) and wrap the frames up in some pretty wrapping paper (don’t use leftover Christmas paper). You’ll have a couple of great Mothers Day gifts for less than $10.

For my wife I’m trying to pass off this new washer and dryer we bought as her Mothers Day present. So far it’s not allowed.

But they are red and red is the color of love!

Day #6, started off on the wrong foot and just continued from there. It seems the baby has a bit of a cold so I got him dressed yesterday morning and headed over to the doctor to confirm it was a cold. All he has is a runny nose, one episode of diarrhea and a very slight fever once. Since then he has been fine minus the runny nose. Really all I have to do is suction out his nose (which he used to not mind but now he HATES) every so often and give him some nasal drops. He is much better this evening.

After coming back home from the doctor we just stayed in the house the rest of the day so he could rest.  I suspect we will do the same tomorrow.

::630am:: It was a day like any other….and then the whole thing blew up. We started off as normal. When the baby woke up we played and talked for a little bit, changed a peepee diaper and then had our bottle. Then everything started to fall apart.

::800am:: As I’m getting dressed, I hear grunting coming from the living room. As powerful as a Daddy may be, you cannot control when your child is going to poop. (Despite my best efforts to change his poop time to the evening after Mommy gets home.) Alright, let’s change the poopy diaper. Nothing much out of the ordinary until I thought I had everything cleaned up and I realized that the poop went halfway down his back, skipped a little bit and then continued on up towards his neck. Even though I got everything cleaned with a mountain of wet wipes I felt this was a good time for him to have a bath. So we took a quick bath to wash off the poop residue….or resi-doodoo if you will.

::830am:: A clean, dressed baby = a happy baby, right? Wrong. I realized I still had a poopy diaper folded up and sitting on the counter. Today is trash day so I decided to take it outside and put in an old trash bag so I stop stinking up the house. (Yesterday I put two poopy diapers in the kitchen trash can and the house STILL smells like poop.) Mind you I’m still in my underwear at this point.

::9am:: I managed to squeeze in a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios (ironic since no one was “cheery” this morning) and getting dressed somewhere in between fits and we were off to pick up my sister so we could go visit my aunt. He was alright in the car until we stopped for gas. He doesn’t like stopping.

::930am:: He drank a bottle on the road and by the time we got to my aunt’s house he was still wide awake butt at least happy now. He was excellent during our visit. He smiled and talked the whole time.

::1015am:: Time to head back home. Today seems to be the day of little cat naps. 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there. What happened to the baby that slept for 2-3 hours every 2-3 hours all week??

::11am:: We met Grandpa for lunch at Burger King. He was excellent until I got about halfway through my double cheeseburger. Then he decided it was time to go home. I thought he had pooped so we headed for the house since we live just down the street. Turns out it was just a smelly fart. Drank another bottle and then down for a nap. Just kidding. No nap!

::1230pm:: Finally drifted off to sleep in the swing so it was time to mop the floor! I actually managed to kitchen the entire kitchen and entry way swept and mopped while he slept. My socks are wet now though because I kept forgetting the proper way to mop and end up mopping myself into a corner. Then I have to step on the wet floor to get out.

::130pm:: After a couple of close calls of waking up he dozed off again and is currently sleeping. I’m going to enter in some Pampers Gifts to Grow rewards points and then take a nap myself!

As our pregnancy nears the end, our Friday nights are no longer our usual Friday nights. Friday night has always been (like many couples) a night to go out to dinner and spend the evening around the town as a way to unwind from the work week. Now, at week 37,  we spend our evenings around the house with our (read: my) feet up.

I take my place on the couch, center cushion. Husband takes one of our pillows and puts it on the coffee table and I rest my potato shaped feet on them. He convinced me to let him take a picture of my feet yesterday but after seeing it, I refuse to post it. Imagine your feet, shaped like potatoes, stuffed into a pair of these shoes all day. I think I’ll just wear my slippers to work from here on out.

Here’s the problem I’ve found with putting my feet up on the coffee table. It seems like I have to pee every 30 minutes. So I put my feet up on the coffee table and after 30 minutes the baby moves his head around and all of the sudden I feel like I’m going to pee my pants. In my effort to rush to the bathroom I forget that my knees have locked up and I can’t bend my legs to get them off the coffee table. I scream in pain while laughing at my predicament and usually Husband has to come over and help me slowly bend my legs. It’s only a matter of time before I don’t make it to the bathroom on time I’m afraid.

Tonight, while I had my feet propped up with the computer on my lap, Husband come over to join me on the couch. He brought his laptop with him and when I glanced over at his screen I realized we were both on our site getting ready to write up a blog. I had him snap this picture.

A family that blogs together, stays together. You can see the baby “belly blogging”. Aww, baby’s first blog!

What kind of luck is it that there is only 8 weeks left in our pregnancy and we are just now finding out about this free pregnancy journal. We ended up buying a couple of different journals around week 20 of our pregnancy so we could fill out parts along the way before we forgot the details (it’s almost completed now minus the birth). Never the less, we ordered this little freebie gem because we plan on having another baby some day and it’s a great way to bond as a couple by filling it out together.

My suggestion is to let the person who has the best handwriting fill out the journal, which in my case was Wifey. My handwriting consists of random upper and lower case letters. She says it’s a guy thing.

Click here for your free journal.

Thanks to the good people at Hey, It’s Free for finding this.

Big winner! Big winner! Everybody wins at a carnival! There is a neat blog carnival going on over at hearmumroar.com for people to post and celebrate their best post of 2009. Dig through your archive of 2009 and post a link to your best post to share it with everyone.  While you’re there you can read the best posts from everyone else in the mom blogging community.  Here’s the link!

We chose our To Pee or Not To Pee story (link) but right after submitting thought we should have submitted our Stork Parking (link) post. Ahh the decisions!

As I was cleaning the house today to prepare for some visitors I had a disturbing glimpse into my future while cleaning the bathroom. In just a few months I will be outnumbered in my house. It will be me, my husband and our son.

I’ve often heard from my friends with boys that there is pee everywhere in the bathroom. They even go as far as to say that it’s not just the boys that pee everywhere, it’s also their husband. I’ve always bragged about my husband (and what a weird thing to brag about), that he never misses the toilet. One day I was telling my husband about the conversation I had with my friends and I had told them what a great aim he is. My husband, an honest man who cannot take credit for anything that he is not deserving of, looked at me and said, “What do you mean? I miss the toilet all the time.”

He has tried to explain the concept of peeing to me by comparing it to a squirt gun.

“Say you have a squirt gun and you aim at a target. When you squeeze the trigger you know that water is going to come out and you have aimed in the general direction of your target but sometimes you don’t hit the target on the first shot. Maybe you didn’t squeeze the trigger hard enough. Maybe there was a air bubble in the line. Whatever the reason, you missed and you have to shoot again. Peeing is like that. You aim your “gun” in the general direction of the target (the toilet) but you’re not quite sure EXACTLY where it’s going to go, you just have a idea and most of the time you are spot on. Maybe you really had to go and it comes out with more force than you anticipated so it shoots over the edge of the toilet. You have to re-aim but by then the damage is already done, the pee is on the floor and all over the toilet. Maybe it’s cold and you don’t have quite the “handle on things” you normally do...”

The story goes on and he surprisingly has quite the analogy on why boys miss the toilet. Long story short, it seems that even when boys grow up they still miss the toilet.

“Peeing is not an exact science. It’s a close estimation.” he says.

As I was cleaning the bathroom today I realized the he is right. The toilet was gross. In just a couple of years I will have not one, but two boys peeing all over the bathrooms in the house. In order to combat this I have come up with a several ideas:

1) Designating one bathroom as the boys only bathroom and I will never step foot in it. Ever.

2) Plant more trees in the yard. More trees = more things to pee on outside.

3) Installing kiddie pool sized toilets in each bathroom. Surely they can’t miss a toilet that big.

4) Institute a “No Standing While Peeing” policy for the entire house.

It’s not the potty training I’m worried about. I can teach them how to get to the bathroom when they know they have to go. It’s aiming issue.

Before I become outnumbered in my own household, how do you deal with your boys (husbands included) and how they destroy the bathrooms?

We are now in our six month of pregnancy and as a dual income household it’s time to start figuring out who’s taking off of work when and coming up with a schedule to maximize our family time together. Basically, Mommy will be taking her 6 weeks of leave (obviously since she did all the work) while Daddy will take a couple of weeks vacation when baby is born. After vacation, he will go back to work and various family members will spend a few days with us to help out a bit at the beginning. When Mommy’s six weeks of leave is up she will go back to work while Daddy takes six weeks of unpaid leave under the FMLA act. (Have to start saving money now for six weeks of no paycheck!)

Will all this finagling of sick days, vacation days and FMLA days it got me thinking. Why do companies not have designated days to take when you have a child. When a family member passes away they give you bereavement pay (typically 3-5 days of paid leave that does not count against your vacation or sick day balance), so why not have a some form of new child pay?

Since our baby will be born in February we are essentially using up most of our vacation/sick days for the birth at the beginning of the year. Leaving us little wiggle room for the rest of the year should we need to stay home, go to the doctor, etc. What I’m looking for is companies to allow you 5 days of paid leave when you have a child just like they allow you 5 days of paid leave to cope with the lose of a family member. You have just as many responsibilities/stress when a child is born as you do when a family member passes away so it only makes sense. I really don’t see a family having a child anymore often than they have a family member pass away.

It’s now a world where the bottom line seems to be all that matters in the business world and the moral of the employees rests at the bottom of the list. Your raises are few and far between, your health benefits cost are all screwed up (and getting worse with every 2,000 page health care bill) and a bonus is not a guarantee. This may be a far fetched idea but it’s still worth exploring.

I’m going to continue to research and work on this and make a more formal post in the future. Right now this is more of a “thinking out loud” post. In the mean time, I’m interested to know what your company’s policy is when you have a child? Did you have to use all your sick days or vacation days? Let us know in the comments below. Maybe someday we can make a change for the better.

Here’s to healthy, happy babies!