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It seems like every man, at one point or another, has the desire to grow some facial hair. Unfortunately for me, Mr. Handsome has decided to express himself by growing a mustache. I have asked him to please have it gone before the new baby is born because I do not want that thing in the baby pictures. I adore his usual 5 o’clock shadow, but the mustache has just been too much. What do you all think of the new look?
From Mr. Handsome:
For the most part, Little Buddy is very good about sharing with his younger brother. The two of them enjoy playing together, and we have loved watching their relationship grow. Recently, however, there was an incident where Little Buddy chose not to share something, so I sat down with him and had a conversation about the issue.
I started out by asking Little Buddy what he thought the most important thing in life was. I was ecstatic when he replied, “The most important thing is God.” Apparently he has been listening in Sunday school.
“Good job, Little Buddy!” I proudly proclaimed. “Now what is the second most important thing?”
“Toys!” he shouted excitedly.
I realized I still had some work to do, so I calmly asked, “Little Buddy, if we walked into the woods with your toys and your little brother, which one would you be more sad about losing?” He thought about it for a minute and conceded that he would be more sad about losing his brother. I then explained that God is most important, followed by family, and because family is more important than toys, we should be willing to share our toys with our little brother. “Okay, Daddy” Little Buddy sighed.
I felt like I had really done some fantastic parenting and decided to celebrate by pulling out my phone and checking up on the daily news (my favorite time waster). As I was scrolling through the latest political scandal, Little Buddy piped up, “Daddy, I have a question.”
“Of course, son. What’s on your mind?”
“Daddy, is family more important, or are phones?” At that moment, I realized my five-year-old had just outsmarted me.
“Well of course family is more important than phones,” I replied.
“Well, Daddy, could you put down your phone and play with me?”
Of course I put down my phone and played with him. I also took a moment to realize that keeping priorities straight can be just as hard for adults as it is for kids.
From Mr. Handsome…
Traveling has become much more challenging with children. This was particularly obvious when we took a trip to Florida this spring and the drive took five hours longer than it should have. We had planned to leave first thing in the morning and get to the beach by early afternoon, but things didn’t quite go that way.
We knew it would be a long day when we got on the road one hour later than we had initially hoped. We decided to cook a big, healthy breakfast so we wouldn’t have to stop for two meals on the road. But the problem with cooking a big breakfast is that you have to clean up from a big breakfast, which takes a lot of time, especially with two children vying for your attention.
When we finally got on the road, we made it about 90 minutes before we had to stop for gas and a bathroom break. If we had been traveling without children, this would have been no big deal. But unfortunately, Littlest Buddy had been asleep and woke up immediately when we turned off the engine. So we took both kids out of their car seats and walked around inside the gas station for a few minutes to burn a little energy.
We got back on the road again, but after another hour it was lunchtime, and our stomachs started growling. Apparently the big breakfast was not enough. It seems like no matter what you do, you are always hungry when driving. I think it’s because you have nothing else with which to occupy your mind, so all you can think about is food.
When I traveled as a kid, lunch was quick and easy. We would pull our 15-passenger into a McDonalds drive-thru, order McDoubles, fries, and waters for everyone, and eat on the road. But we try to eat a little healthier these days, and a one-year-old and four-year-old plus ketchup doesn’t work well in the car…unless you like stained seats.
After enjoying Chipotle, we continued on our journey. I’ll spare you the boring details, but we had to stop multiple more times for diaper changes and snacks and to console crying children and stretch our legs. Then when we were finally about one hour away, we ran into unavoidable traffic that added an additional hour and forced us to stop for an unexpected dinner. We ended rolling into Florida at about 9:00pm.
Have any of you had challenges driving long distances with children? Do you have any tips or tricks to help the ride go more smoothly?
The other day, Mr. Handsome decided to return to a hobby that he picked up a couple years ago, and I realized that I never shared the original masterpiece that he created.
When we had a few trees cut down a while back, we of course ended up with a lot of wood. While Mr. Handsome was outside chopping one day, I looked out the window and discovered that he had moved onto a new task. He had a big tree stump in front of him and was using his chainsaw to carve it. Within just a few hours, it had turned into a bear! I was amazed by his skill, especially when he had never done anything like that. This weekend, he started his second chainsaw carving. I’ll share a photo of that when it’s done.
I am writing this post as an intervention so my readers can help with my husband’s new obsession. Mr. Handsome has really gotten into cooking with cast iron over the last few years. I must agree that nothing beats the durability of cast iron, and you don’t have to worry about any of the chemicals that are found in conventional pots and pans. But when we visited the Lodge Museum of Cast Iron and Factory Store, all the cast iron cookware awakened a spending spree I have never seen in Mr. Handsome before.
In all fairness, I was pretty excited about the cast iron store as well. You would not believe the amount of cookware available in cast iron. From skillets to griddles, bread pans to Dutch ovens, and muffin tins to woks, the options seem endless. The best part was that since it was a factory outlet store, they have a large section of “seconds”–cookware sold at highly discount prices because of small cosmetic defects that do not affect the functionality.
We ended up filling the bottom of a cart with cast iron “seconds” to add to Mr. Handsome’s already impressive supply of cast iron (see picture above). At this point, we only have a few pots that aren’t cast iron. In addition to the functionality and durability of cast iron, I love how easy they are to clean and maintain. All you have to do is scrape the food off with a plastic scraper, clean the entire pan with water and sponge, towel dry immediately to prevent rust, and rub with a thin layer of oil.
At the museum, we learned about several serious cast iron collectors who put our inventory of 8-10 pieces to shame. One of the collectors managed to amass more than 13,000 cast iron pieces from around the world!
What are your thoughts on cast iron? Do any of you collect cookware and have advice for poor Mr. Handsome?
From Mr. Handsome…
After reading the title of this post, I’m sure all of you are thinking to yourselves, “No kidding–thank you for sharing this, Mr. Handsome Genius.” But unfortunately, Ellie just doesn’t understand that sometimes you have to be willing to spend a little extra money for the children. Let me recount a recent conversation at the breakfast table that illustrates my point.
“Ellie, I’m thinking we should be more prepared for emergencies now that we have two children,” I said between bites of oatmeal.
“I think that’s a great idea,” she replied. “What did you have in mind?”
“Well I should have plenty of tools around in case the baby crib breaks,” I explained. “It would really be awful if we had a crib emergency in the middle of the night. I was thinking a new drill, table saw, planer, jointer, and chainsaw would sort of be the bare bones emergency tools.”
Ellie put down her cup of coffee and laughed. “Jointer, planer, chainsaw? Are you planning on cutting down a tree and building a new crib from scratch?”
“One can never be too prepared,” I said. The one thing I didn’t think through was that at the time of this conversation, Littlest Buddy was sleeping in a pack n play in our room. Ellie intelligently reminded me that my tools wouldn’t be useful.
“And aren’t those the exact tools that have been on your wish list since we got married?” she asked, furrowing her brow.
I leaned back and sighed. “Yes, and I’ll admit that they were once wishes, but now they are essentials.”
Ellie rolled her eyes. “How about we compromise with a new hammer and some nails? Maybe a screwdriver too.”
As I’m sure you readers can see, Ellie just doesn’t understand that having kids is expensive and that you have to be willing to spend the necessary money to raise them. I decided to bring up a few more items that we needed.
“A healthy diet is essential for growing children,” I stated, playing to her love for healthy food. “We need to order a bigger blender so we can make our own baby food.” She matter-of-factly informed me that our current blender is the perfect size for making baby food. Then she accused me of wanting a bigger blender to make bigger milkshakes.
I shrugged. “Well now that you mention it, that would be another perk,” I replied. Ellie rolled her eyes again.
“And what about new leather seat covers for the front seat of my truck? Babies are messy, and we need to protect the seats.”
“Honey, the children sit in the back. And you wouldn’t possibly be talking about the fancy leather seat covers I saw you googling yesterday, would you? The ones that cost almost as much as the truck itself?”
“Spit-up travels far, and you can’t put a price on peace of mind,” I said. Ellie rolled her eyes a third time and got up to walk out of the room.
“One more thing,” I called after her. “I was thinking that a pool table would be a great activity for Little Buddy and I to do together”
“Little Buddy isn’t even tall enough to see over a pool table,” Ellie called back.
“I don’t suppose now is a good time to discuss a new big screen TV? You know, so the children can watch their educational videos more clearly?”
I could hear Ellie groaning in the next room. “I think the best thing ‘for the children’ is for us to end this conversation before you spend every penny of our savings.”
Hopefully you readers you are with me on this. Ellie just doesn’t understand how expensive raising children is.
At the end of summer, Mr. Handsome took part in the Terrain Race here in Nashville. Little Buddy, Littlest Buddy, and I–along with my sister-in-law–watched Daddy and his brother run a 5K and complete about 20 obstacles.
In addition to basic ladders, ropes, and walls to climb, some of the obstacles involved trekking through mud. But the most epic one of all was the mud pit. Participants got down on their bellies and crawled through a pool of mud that was about a foot deep. There were ropes directly overhead that you had to stay below, so if you did it right, you ended up covered in mud from head to toe.
Most of the obstacles were set up in the woods, where spectators weren’t able to go. The mud pit was off in the distance, so I didn’t get any good pictures. Hopefully the description paints a nice picture in your mind.
Have you ever participated in any sort of race with obstacles? Would you crawl through a mud pit?
It’s been a while since we’ve had a humorous post from Mr. Handsome, so here goes…
For those of you who haven’t spent a lot of time around babies, this question will sound absurd and barbaric. In fact, if you had asked me such a question before we had children, I would have recoiled at the disgustingness of it. But hey, here we are.
No matter how careful you are, there is simply nothing you can do to prevent getting spit-up on your clothes when you have a baby. You can use burp cloths, towels, or bibs, but there is just no way to catch the mess 100% of the time. More often than not, your baby will choose the most inopportune time to spit up…right onto your favorite article of clothing.
With the first child, you start off changing clothes every time you get gunk on them, but then you have to do laundry twice as often. So one day at 2am, you wake up to feed the baby and he spits up on you, and you say, “Well it’s just a little bit. I’ll wipe it off and deal with it tomorrow.” This of course starts the rapid descent into spit-up covered clothes.
So now I have to ask, what is an acceptable level of spit-up to have on your clothes and still consider yourself to be a functioning human?
From Mr. Handsome:
Little Buddy is right in the middle of a “Can I help? Let me do it!” stage. No matter what kind of project Mommy and Daddy are doing, he wants to be right in the middle of it. It is really quite sweet that he is so eager to help, but it makes it virtually impossible to get anything done.
There is no job too small. He wants to cook, clean, paint, drill, hammer, shovel, and just about anything else he sees us doing. I used to be able to give him a different task to do alongside me, such as bang his plastic hammer against a random board, but he is quickly becoming too smart for that. He wants to do big people tasks.
I try to let him do as many things as he safely can, but there are still so many jobs that are too dangerous. I just love his helpful spirit, and it always makes me sad to tell him that he can’t help with something. It’s an unfortunate paradox that a child’s motivation to help is highest when the amount of tasks they are able to help with is lowest. I’m really hoping that as his ability to help increases, his interest in helping will not decrease. However, it’s a sad truth that teenagers, who are old enough to do many of the household tasks that adults can, are often very much not interested in working alongside Mom and Dad.
Does anyone else feel the same way?
From Mr. Handsome…
How many of you, in your teenage years, saw adults do something you thought was lame and said to yourself “I will NEVER do that”? I would like to take a minute to apologize to my 16-year-old self. I think he would be very ashamed of the older version of me.
It all happened last week, when our friends were nice enough to babysit Little Buddy for the evening. We kept the baby, but he is pretty chill and does well when we take him out and about. So in theory, we could have gone to see friends, had dinner at a restaurant, shopped at the mall, or gone bowling. The world was our oyster.
But you know what we ended up doing? We stayed home, watched Netflix, and took a nap.
When you have small children, all you really want to do is sleep. Sometimes even when you get a full night of sleep, you still feel tired. So staying in and relaxing was the best thing we could think of doing.
We greatly enjoyed our wild night of relaxation. We decided to liven things by having not one, but two, scoops of ice cream with homemade maple syrup drizzled on top. Take that, 16-year-old self!
Is there anything you do that your teenage self would be ashamed of?