I haven’t blogged in 20 days. Sorry! But, for good reason. I’ll get to that in a minute.

But, yes, literally, the year began with a blowout. We were on the way to church, when the front passenger-side tire (the one right under me; Trinity was driving) of my car blew out on New Year’s Day, Mikey’s 2nd birthday. It was a bit terrifying at the time — I did freeze up a bit, but we were able to get a AAA tow out there to get a donut on, and we continued on to church. Trinity took the car to Wal-Mart, where he got me four new tires (we knew they needed replacing and had been stalling until we had more money…).

Oh, but that wasn’t it. It was Mikey’s birthday of course, so we had plans to take him to Chuck E. Cheese. He was so excited to play, we could barely get him to eat anything. After not having any nap and a full day of hard playing, he looked like this:

Boy was tired. But it was a happy day for everyone involved.

Oh, but that wasn’t the end of Mikey’s birthday festivities. (I’m a big believer in birthday weekends.)

The next day, New Year’s Day observed, we took Michael and Chris to the Santa Barbara Zoo. It’s a nice, small zoo, and its perfect for a day trip.

Here we are on the train. Michael was not too sure what to make of the train, but Chris had a good time regardless.

Mikey had the best time, however, at the kids play area, where kids were repeatedly sliding down this anthill on pieces of cardboard. He thought it was so much fun.

I started back to work two days later. It wasn’t easy, after 4 and a half months, but I think I’m back up to speed at this point, and back in the swing of things.

Christopher, however, has not adjusted as smoothly as I would have hoped. See, Michael, when he was Chris’ age, had bottles every other feeding because he was on a regimen of formula-fortified breastmilk. Christopher was on the same regimen until he hit six pounds, which he probably hit at 2 months, so between then and when I got back to work, he was exclusively breastfed. So when it came time to take bottles at daycare, he wasn’t having it.

It took, let’s see, two days of him refusing bottles at daycare until he started taking them out of sheer hunger. Then, for an entire weekend, I had to simply pump and only give him bottles, to reinforce the bottle. You might think, wouldn’t you want to give him more bottles for more freedom? To me, freedom does not look like a huge tubful of dirty bottles that need to be washed, thanks. But now he’s finally taking bottles regularly (although he’s still giving the daycare lady a hard time), and at night and on the weekends, he breastfeeds.

It seems as though we’re all getting into a routine, albeit one in a house with dirty floors and piles of clean and dirty laundry. Oh, and unwritten blog posts. My blogs are suffering terribly from my lack of time.