Since Christmas

January was a blur, just like every other month. Well, let's back up a little because this post will include Christmas. By way of update, Jameson has two of his 2-year molars. I always blame his temper tantrums on the other two coming in, but let's be honest, the kid's two and emotional meltdowns are par for the course.

The boys are loving each other a little more. They make each other laugh, which is adorable. And then sometimes Jameson repeatedly rams his metal Tonka truck into Blake's head, for which some reason Blake doesn't like.

Yesterday I was getting dinner ready. Blake was napping in his crib, but I wanted him to wake up soon, so the door was open. I heard Jameson laughing, so I went to see what was going on. I sneaked in as stealthily as I could because I suspected I was going to walk in on something that would melt my mommy heart. What I saw kind of alarmed and impressed me. Jameson had used the glider to climb into Blake's crib, and he had somehow brought with him a truck or two. Jameson was jumping and laughing and talking to Blake, and Blake was unharmed and appeared happy. I didn't really want to encourage Jameson climbing on the furniture like that, I mean he could have really gotten hurt if he fell just right, but I was so curious that I asked him to show me how he did it. He tried to repeat it, but kept falling. It was just a lucky moment, I guess!

Jameson has started having play dates with other kids in the neighborhood. It is so cute to watch. He was playing with a neighbor girl at our house on Thursday, and I couldn't believe how well they interacted. They galloped around the house side by side, counting to ten, then stood on the coffee table, jumping around in circles counting to ten, then took turns trying on a hat.

Blake sits up now! He is also starting to get really grabby. He's more interested in toys and reaching for whatever he can get his hands on. He also screams like a pterodactyl. I see his two bottom teeth starting to come in, which could take a couple more months. He is a really happy baby. He still isn't sleeping through the night. Last week, he actually did it three nights in a row, but now he's getting up three times a night again. He sucks his thumb and still likes to snuggle.

"Hiiiii, brother." Wearing the cute matching jammies from my parents.

Both smiling - this is truly a miracle.

Jameson got the Little People Zoo from Santa Claus. It was a hit! Here he holds the androgynous Guatemalan zookeeper. (That sounded racist.)

The day before Christmas Eve, we got the boys' pictures taken at Penney's. It went amazingly well, despite the melancholy that Jameson demonstrates here. And about that thumb sucking...yes...we are working on it.

Blake sits up as of January 28th. He thinks he's hot stuff, and he's right.

Five months old! He loves his monkey. I find him sleeping on his side with his face smashed into the monkey's belly.

"Uh-oh, kisses?" Jameson has learned that a kiss from Mom makes owies feel better, and he takes advantage of it often. Sometimes asking for "another one?" if one kiss didn't help.

I was trying to take a picture of Blake playing in his exersaucer, when...

...Jameson wanted in on the action, so we took a selfie with my phone's super blurry front-cam.

My mom knitted this adorable, soft blanket for Jameson. It came in the mail when J was sleeping, so Blake tried it out. He approves.

"Sit on chair, take picture?" Well, how could I resist?

This is what you get when you try to get the LaRocco boys to take a photo with Santa.

The circa New Years' Day timeframe when I realize, "oh, I should have taken a picture of them in front of the Christmas tree!"

Baker, 4 Months

This little chunk is four months old. He gets fatter every day.

Blake had his first haircut last month. For fear of repeating Jameson's wispy toupee, we cut it early and won't be afraid to do it again when he needs it!

Baker is trying really hard to blow raspberries lately. He is very vocal, squealing, laughing, yelling and cooing and spitting.

He gets ticklish when I change his clothes.

He rolls back to tummy allll the time. He is definitely a middle child already (no that's not an announcement) because though he's been rolling for a couple months, we only saw it actually happen a couple of weeks ago. Sorry, B! Today was the first time (that I know of) that he rolled tummy to back.

His favorite things are kicking around on the ground on a blanket and taking naps on our bed.

I love this little cherub! Muah!

Hello, horsey.

Tolerating the bumbo.

He likes to grab his toes.

Pre haircut.

Post-haircut. His eyes look so sleepy. That haircut must have taken a lot out of the poor kid.

Me and my brother.

I try so hard to blow raspberries!

Where I take my best naps.

Good morning!

So sleepy. I love his chubby little hands here.

My December Baby Turns 2

This kid loves getting sick around his birthday (I mean, so far). Last year, he puked for like a week. This time, it went a little something like this:

Day 1: puke for four hours, then immediately act normal and eat everything in sight.
Days 2-10: mysterious rash, sleepy
Day 11: fever and lethargy
Days 12-16: whines a lot. Asks to take naps

Luckily, by day 17 he was all good.

I have lots of pictures! So here is the past couple months in the life of Jameson, in no particular order.

Super cooperative for pictures, as always. The boy loves juice and demands it, along with "crackers in a bowl" pretty much constantly. I tell him to ask nicely, and he says, in a high pitched vioce, "say please, crackers! say please, juice!"

This is pretty much the only way I get a smiling picture of the Jamer. Laughing because he's running away.

Day 11 fever. I fixed him up a comfy spot on the couch, carefully covering the whole couch surface in case of puke, and he watched Cars in its entirety, three times.

The birthday party. This is pretty much what I saw the entire present opening time. The back of this excited boy's head, surrounded by equally excited cousins!

The cake! Jameson likes cars, a lot! And trucks! Every truck is a "big truck" to him, so I copied this concept from Pinterest and one of my aunts. It was a hit.

On December 3, we got tons of snow. Tons! He asked me to go outside, so I spent about 10 minutes getting him all geared up. As soon as I opened the door and the wind caught that sweet little face, he was too cold and wouldn't go out.

Watching airplanes! We took the boys on their first plan ride to visit my parents in Washington. Jameson was a holy terror on the plane, but was very sweet for this moment. Yes, he is wearing a toddler leash. Judge if you must; we really don't care.

J loves playing with any ball. He is pretty good about knowing the difference between a basketball, soccer ball and football, but every small ball, even Christmas tree ornaments, is a golf ball. Here he is with one of his "golf balls."

"Put on glasses?" "Dinosaur shirt?" 

See how well they tolerate each other? I love this one with their matching outfits!

Recent Jamerisms:

Upon flipping over his coloring page from nursery to reveal several pictures of the Savior, he exclaimed "there it is! Found Jesus!" Already saved at so young an age. ;)

Upon being offered soup for lunch, pointing to the stairs (I keep the soup in the basement storage room) saying, "go get soup. Go get it. Go ahead."

After waking up from a nap and finding the Christmas tree lit up, Jameson told me that the tree was handsome and that I did a good job.

After Mark performed in the ward Christmas Choir, Jameson yelled "good job!" into the after-song silence in church.

A couple times over the past week, he has burst out in song, singing the birthday song.

To him, every cake, muffin and pastry is birthday cake. And he wants "moy" of it.

Jameson loves to count, somewhat out of order, likes doing puzzles, likes big trucks, loves shooting hoops (encouraging himself with things like "almost" and "try again" when he misses), tickling Blake's toes, and telling me what color things are (almost always incorrectly).

Today

Today I noticed that Jameson was playing super intently with his stuffed animals. He took each one from the stuffed animal bin, saying, "nigh night monkey, nigh night doggy, nigh night robot (which is what he calls Iron Man)," etc., laying them on the couch in a row and ordering them to go sleep then whispering "I love you" and walking backwards away from the couch to get another animal. I was pretty amazed. Sometimes he kicks Blake in the head, other times he tucks his robot lovingly into bed.

I'm sure by now you've seen this photo.

And I have heard so many people say, "there's no way a normal person gets that fit eight months after having a baby."

Yeah, I know, they don't. Because she didn't do this in eight months. Fitness for her is clearly a lifelong priority and I doubt she spent her pregnancy watching movies and eating Cheetos. I am sure she was in great shape during her pregnancy, too, so getting to this point was not an impossible stretch.

The other argument is that spending so much time at the gym makes you a bad mom. Well, if Facebook surfing and Netflix binge watching burned calories, a lot of us would look like her. There are lots of things in life that take us away from our kids; some just have more enviable results.

You go, Maria Kang.

(This post was typed as I ate chocolate chips directly from the bag.)

Baby Blake

Blake is now seven weeks old. The time has seriously flown. I can't remember what life was like without him. I can't believe how much you can love a baby that hardly does anything. I can't think of any more cliche, but true, statements about this little boy.

For the past week or so, Blake has really been smiling and cooing. You could catch one here or there by the time he was about four weeks old, but now it's a regular thing. It's so sweet to see. He also has been sleeping for longer stretches at night. He'll usually go down between 9 and 10pm, and not wake up until 2am, 3am, or even 4am. The 4am thing happened for three days in a row (actually one night it was 5am), so I bragged to everyone on Facebook and Instagram, and the next night he woke up at 2:30, Blake's first "Bazinga!" of what i'm sure will be many. You know, just so I remember who's the boss.

He loves his swing, but isn't too into the bouncy seat, which is the opposite of Jameson. We're being more aggressive about getting him to like a binky. So far, his favorite is one that Jared and Chelsey got him that has a huge black mustache on it. Ohhh, baby.

He is an amazingly good nurser. I've been pleasantly surprised  with how easy it's been to feed him, giving me plenty of time to watch trashy TV shows on Netflix and do little else. (What do you people think of Revenge? Intriguing or really, really sad? I had to start another show about rich people being mean to each other once I finished Gossip Girl.) The only way that breastfeeding has cramped my style is that I can't drink caffeine anymore. I've had one Diet Coke since he was born, and the following eight hours turned out to be the screechiest, most sleepless, terrible night of both our lives. Luckily I was able to kick the caffeine habit early on, when the withdrawal headaches just kind of blended in to the hormonal/sleep deprivation/holy-crap-I-have-two-kids-how-the-h-am-I-going-to-survive headaches, and now I'm good.

I think I mentioned that Jameson has slowly taken more interest in Blake. Today, that interest took the form of dousing the poor baby with half a Peach Fresca. Blake was mad at first, but then he realized that the refreshing citrus scent was actually quite delightful.

And now for the pictures:

Blake/Mom selfie. The selfie camera on my phone is not so hot.

I even sleep awesome!

I'm happy, but don't want anyone to know I'm toothless.

Mark's First Blog Post In A Very Long Time

Hi there, it's Mark.  Mark LaRocco.

So, for years now (or at least many months) I've been telling Holly how I miss writing.  Sure, I write a lot for work.  But that's just boring legal stuff.  Memoranda, motions, replies, letters and emails, and things like that. I feel like my creative writing groove is gone, but not unrecoverable.  With more practice writing non-legal stuff, I can get good again.  Or at least acceptable.

I believe I had the idea to just piggyback onto Holly's blog, as a contributor, and Holly had the idea to rename the blog from Holly Lynn Says to LaRoccos' Modern Life.  Brilliant.  So here I am.

Holly is good at keeping everyone updated on our growing little family, what with our two little boys and all. I imagine I will spend some of the time writing about my family.  But I hope to write about other things that interest me such as movies, sports, people, and peanut butter.

The point is, I need a bit of a creative outlet to get my ideas on paper, and then elaborate and expand on them and develop them and see if they mean anything or if they are just fluff.  I found that when I used to write papers for school, sometimes my good ideas actually grew out of my writing, rather than the other way around.  I think my best papers came out of my philosophy classes and some papers I wrote about faith for an Institute class from a Brother Harding. I've gone back and reread some of them, and I can't believe I came up with some of that.  Writing about the paradoxes of faith actually helped me to understand faith better, as if the insights that resulted from the writing would have only sprung forth from the writing itself.

Sometimes, I feel like maybe that is because I'm a slow, deliberative thinker.  Perhaps I overanalyze too much.  This morning I went on a show for KBER 101 with Mick & Allen (The Freak Show) to plug Jolley & Jolley, the fathers' rights law firm I work for.  Mick & Allen, and about three callers, asked questions that I didn't know the exact answers to, but I took some pretty confident shots and stabs at them.  (Why the violent imagery to convey uncertainty?  Shots and stabs?)  As the "expert" on a radio show, I couldn't not know the exact answers.  Confidence was supposed to exude from me.  Using many hedge words, as I did on many a law school exam and the Bar itself, is not what people were looking for.  And I don't think it's what Jolley & Jolley was looking for when they asked me to go on the show.

But my point is, I wish I could have paused for a few minutes after each question, done some legal research, maybe talked to a couple smart lawyers, and given a well-reasoned, well-researched, accurate answer to each question.  But the format of the show doesn't allow for that.

Where was I?  Oh, right, thinking and writing.  I feel like I have good thoughts, and some of them have gone unexplored.  I would like to explore my thoughts.  This, I feel, happens best in two ways: (1) Good conversation, and (2) Writing.  And sometimes, my writing, as annoying as that may be to read, will sound like a conversation between two people.  No, it won't. Yes, it will.

At any rate, I hope to use this blog as a way to express ideas, vent, give opinions, and occasionally be funny. Also, it will act as a sort of journal.  I've been writing in my journal less and less, and I've decided that it is due at least in part to my handwriting getting worse and worse.  A blog should solve that problem.

Well, I was hoping to wrap this up with a neat and tidy point.  But, I guess not.  Like the great work Freakonomics, there may be no grand unifying theme.

Well, see ya later.