Good grief little man, we still love you even if you don't know how to giggle

If you have ever read my blog you know that I don't usually lie about my children. I don't pretend that my children are the most perfect things to ever be placed on this earth. I think they are pretty funny, cute, and smart and I'm not going to lie about that either. But, this is not the place to go if you want a false view of what life is like in our home. So...this post is dedicated to giving an accurate view of Eli-Peeli (as termed by Mr. Isaac).

Eli is the only one of our children to be content, and probably prefer, to fall asleep in our arms. He is also the only one of our children to start out cuddly. The other boys will let us cuddle them now but they did not come into our home that way. Eli is very attached to me and Mike. He will generally wig-out if you try to take him away from one of us. He usually wants which ever one of us he hasn't seen recently. The other day he freaked when he saw Mike and then Mike left two seconds later. He cried until Mike came back home and held him. Usually though, he wants me because I'm the one that takes care of him all day. If he wakes up in the middle of the night, Mike will usually go into to him to get him back to sleep because if he sees me and I don't get him out of bed, he gets super angry.

Eli is really hard to hold some times. He wants to move all the time so if you are holding him he will not just sit in your arms very often. He will jump, squirm, turn, etc. Eli has been moving around on the floor since about five months but is officially crawling now. He stands up to everything and will climb things that aren't very high.

Crying is his favorite form of communication. He also babbles all the time. The other day Mike went to get him out of his crib after his hour long crying nap and Eli was so angry he just said, "Da, Da, Da" over and over in an angry voice for like five minutes. Like he was telling Mike just how angry he was that we let him cry in his bed for an hour. Most of the time we have no idea why he is crying.

He has followed his brother's example of not taking naps. He goes in cycles. For a month he will never take a nap and then when I can't handle him anymore and think I just might shake him, Heavenly Father blesses our home with a little peace and Eli will sleep perfectly for a week. His terms of conditions for sleeping is so extensive that I can't possibly figure out all the things required to help him have a satisfying nap. What I do know is that he can't hear his brother's playing outside his door (how dare they play without him), he can't see me leave the room unless he is almost perfectly asleep, he has to have his pacifier, and he can't have any bowel movements. He frequently has a bowel movement after five minutes of sleeping and will not under any conditions go back to sleep.

Eli is far from being a mild-mannered baby. Eli has a one-tract mind. He has attached himself to long skinny things--straws, pens, fake flowers with long stems, toothbrushes. His current favorite is toothbrushes . Last night he had Isaac's toothbrush in his mouth. I told Isaac to nicely take it away, knowing Eli would get mad. Isaac very nicely took it from Eli and Eli screamed bloody murder. He crawled to where Isaac was sitting and tried with everything in him to get the toothbrush back. He would not stop crying until we gave him his own toothbrush and then he immediately stopped crying. Is that normal?! I thought kids were supposed to be content if you took something away as long as you replaced it with something else.

When he smiles he is really cute and when he is happy he is really cute to talk to because he will tell you the longest stories in his funny babbles. He loves to copy people. His favorite game is to scream, have the boys scream back, and then scream again. They do this over and over and over.

Sometimes I feel worried about writing so honestly about my children but the truth is I don't always like my kids. And I don't think that qualifies me for the Worst Mother of the Year Award because I think if you are really honest with yourself you will admit that you don't always like your kids either, which is not to say that you don't always love your kids.

I also know that he won't always be like this (I hope he won't always be like this) and so when he reads this in the future he will know that at one point in his life he was sometimes really awful. Then he might have more sympathy for his poor wife when he is blessed with one of his own that makes his wife go insane while he is away at work. (I don't want to hear the giggles mom and dad! I do not deserve this...)

I know I thought similar things about Will during his colicky months where he made my life a lake of fire and brimstone and I know I thought Isaac was a child of the devil for the first two years of his life until he traded in his horns for a halo (for the most part).

And when I go to put him down to sleep and he lays his head on my shoulder I'll think to myself, "Is there anyone cuter than you in the whole world?" And even if they tried, no one could convince me that anyone is cuter or more perfect than my little red-haired imp.