All About Meme: Excuses

So this week's challenge - excuses! A note excusing myself from participation. Here goes:

Please excuse My Baby Sweetness from participation this week as she is working on that cold fusion thing (oh no, that's next week...)

As she is cultivating her creative genius (only true if that comes from chocolate - and even then, it's what I WANT to be true for my morning).

She's recovering from a near death experience. (hmm, not totally true, but truer than I'd like it to be this morning as I stepped on the wet floor in my office kitchen this morning and went FLYING. Only gymnasts should start their Monday morning doing the splits.)

She is sleep deprived. (Sadly way truer than I want it to be. Decided to try some tough love with some crying it out last night and so we were all up from 2 to 3.)

Because it's MONDAY and no one should have to think on Monday!!! Yup, that one
works!


Lots of bloggy love!

Quote of the day

As said to my husband by a woman he works with –

“I love your daughter. She is just so F___ING cute!”

Making friends

We went over to visit some friends of ours this weekend who have a 2 year old daughter. Their daughter has just gotten over her biting phase, so on every previous visit she has been pretty well sequestered from our munchkin. The second she would come within 3 feet of her, her Mom would fly over to jump in between them or grab her daughter. The little girl still isn’t exactly ‘gentle’ (I mean, she’s 2!), but she tries to be gentle. And she’s enthralled with this little person who’s come to her house. She’s even reasonably good about sharing her toys and puts up with some flailing baby arms and grabbing – I’m amazed.

Well, with the munchkin’s new found “kissing” ability (big open mouthed drool on you) and the little girl’s new found gentle love of the baby – we got some cute pics of them making friends – or the munchkin trying to eat her face while she leaned in to kiss her (po-tay-to, po-tah-to).

Butterfly kisses are a bit droolier than I thought…

The munchkin has learned to kiss! Hmm – OK, that is actually a total overstatement. It suggests that we say kiss and she puckers and daintily puts her lips to our cheeks. This is not at all the case. More accurately I should say, she has learned the concept of showing affection by pressing her mouth to you, but has made it her own. What she actually does when you ask for a kiss (and other times when she goes for spontaneous affection – something we love as this kid is NOT a cuddler!) is she opens her mouth wide and puts it against your face, slobbering drool all over you. We think it’s very cute (even when it seems to involve some licking) – but I’m pretty sure that most of my friends (particularly those without kids) think it’s very disgusting. I can’t say I exactly blame them (but how can they not see the cuteness!?). Hmm, so maybe I should say that she learned to french kiss… Or learned to kiss from the dog?

Top teeth

I can usually pinpoint the moment her teeth break through to within about an 1 hour. When she sobs and cries and fusses and tosses uncontrollably– to the point where you wonder whether you should call the doctor, social services or an exorcist – for about an hour, you can usually look in after and see a bit of white poking at the gum.

I’ve been lucky enough to miss most of these – the first time, we were at a wedding and she was with a friend of my Mom’s. The next two, my mother in law had her. But I think I was home for the last one – though I’m not sure I totally see the tooth coming through… This may be an extension of the joy of tooth #3. Which means there’s more!

Of course, you might argue that there are, in fact, 16 more. But my mother in law has told me that a lady at Safeway told her that only the first 4 are a problem. She’s decided to go with this – not to seek a second opinion from another person or to start polling shoppers at any other store. Because we like this news. This suggests that we are almost done. We are therefore going with it. Please don’t burst my bubble.

Can’t sleep – and this time it’s only me!

I’ve had such insomnia several days this week as closing fast approaches. I’ve tried staying up reading to tire myself out – easier on nights my husband isn’t home and I don’t have to worry about waking him. The other night he was home and I kept going downstairs to read, thinking I was tired enough, coming back up, only to turn around 20 minutes later to repeat the process. It’s so infuriating when the baby is actually sleeping and I could actually get some decent rest, but my body has decided to be against it! She’s actually slept through the night for several days in a row now, but I haven’t. In fact, it may be enough days to call it a pattern – heck, a schedule! She’s been going to bed between 7:30 and 8 and waking up between (as early as the ongodly) 6:15 and 7:30.

As her restlessness / waking up seemed to coincide with our move, I’m wondering if she’s just finally getting settled and can sleep here better. That would totally make sense as we’re moving out soon and will therefore have to repeat this pattern… Ugh.

All about Meme: Thankful

So I'm having a Monday and am super dense and can't seem to get the link in here right, but I'm going to participate anyway! SupahMommy and MommyBrain have sent the request what FOUR things are you thankful 'FOUR?' - in celebration of Thanksgiving. So here goes -

#1 is my little family. I'm so grateful for this baby who it seemed we waited so long for and had so many difficulties along the way.

#2 I'm thankful for our extended family - our parents, cousins, aunts and uncles (yes, my in-laws too - they are really wonderful people)

#3 I'm thankful that my in-laws have been so kind to let us live with them while we've had so many hiccups in the home buying arena and I'm thankful that it worked out well, but more than that...

#4 I'm thankful that it is finally almost over and we will soon be in our little home!

Now is the time in life when we deal with people’s butts

The other morning I was trying to sleep in a little after having had some insomnia (as did the baby!) over night. The baby hadn’t cried too much, but she’d been making noise and chattering away over the monitor on and off between 2 and 6 am. Shortly after that, I heard some belly noises. I tried to convince myself that it was NOT the dog – whose butt was positioned right around my pillow (this is not the game of Russian roulette you want to play on belly noises!) – but instead the baby. Yeah, like I wouldn’t have had to clean up a mess if THOSE noises (note the volume of noises directly next to my head v. over the monitor) were coming from the baby. Anyway, I finally dragged myself up to take him out at about 6:30 and bemoaned my lack of sleep.

I explained this all to my husband when he got home (he’d worked 24 and got home around 8), noting that when I heard the noises I knew I was going to have to clean someone’s butt – be it the dog or the baby. He looked at me and said – “Babe, this is the time in our lives when we deal with people’s butts. I am not a firefighter. You are not a Finance Manager. We are the butt cleaners. This is what we do. This is purpose right now.”

Well, as long as I have a purpose.

Eczemic reaction

We started to notice a small area of dry spots on the munchkin just before we went on vacation. Nothing we figured we needed to worry about – maybe some eczema or something. She’s had dry spots before and apparently they are pretty common in babies. Well, this little spot seemed to grow on our trip to more and more dry red areas on her back and arms until my husband told me that she had hives. I looked at him and said – that’s what hives look like? He looked at my like I was positively nuts (or possibly the dumbest person on the planet) and said – how do you not know what hives look like? I did my shoulder shrug of “dunno” and said – I guess I never had them. I thought they were more like circles – maybe raised (I was thinking of boils – maybe those drawings of bubonic plague victims...). He told me that they could be circles, but didn’t have to be.

So we called the pediatrician and the nurse helpline assured us that if they weren’t effecting her breathing or bothering her, they were really no big deal and should go away. Only the next day, they didn’t seem to be going away, but instead getting worse. So on the way to the airport we started calling the doctor. Nothing. We tried a few times, but couldn’t stay on through the airport and eventually gave up when we had to turn off our electronic devices. We tried again when we landed – this time trying any variety of the extensions – the nurse advice line, the receptionist, billing, the line for doctors and hospitals calling, etc. We waited on hold with each for 15 minutes and decided the phones were clearly broken. Finally my husband left a message (the first opportunity to do so) at the billing office explaining our problem and explaining that their phones must be broken. We got a call back a bit later. Their phones aren’t broken. The swine flu freak out is in full swing. Every mother in the greater metropolitan area is calling to say that her child possibly has swine flu and needs an appointment so that all 15 phone lines are busy all day long. They were very nice then though and gave us an appointment for 8:15 that evening (when crankiness has REALLY set in because the sweetness should be asleep, but still we wanted to get her checked out).

The doctor came in to our appointment almost rubbing his hands with glee at seeing “something different!” No snotty noses. No fever, chills, coughing, sore throat! Who cares what I’m looking at, it’s not a flu test! He took a look at the baby and told us that she had “an eczemic reaction” (so, um, that’s eczema, right?). He explained that maybe she was allergic to something – had we changed detergents or anything? I explained that we’d been on vacation and changed EVERYTHING this week! But it was not a big deal at the moment. We needed to put hydrocortisone cream on it twice a day and pat rather than rub her dry after a bath and she’d be fine.

And speaking of baths – she had one in her future after stopping by that petrie dish of kids with the flu! Which only had her up later. Which made her SO happy… God help us…

I feel like someone put Xanax in my Cornflakes

It’s Xanax, I mean, right? I feel all jittery and displaced and unsettled? I have no idea why. OK, the lack of sleep last night didn’t help – but then again, I didn’t sleep because I felt all jittery – so I’m thinking it’s more a symptom than a cause. What’s even weirder about my title – I had Cheerios for breakfast…

Anyway, in my complete brilliance, I was sitting at the office this morning, feeling all jittery and decided that I needed something. Something. I don’t know what – something. I probably just needed to do something with my hands… Anyway, I decided I really wanted a cup of coffee. Before you jump to conclusions, it was my intention to brew up some decaf. There is never decaf in the breakroom (and I feel like a complete tool brewing a whole pot of it thereby taking up a valuable pot, i.e. caffeine source, from others in the office), so I’ve got a little personal brewer on my desk. But I was out of coffee pods for my personal brewer. So I decided to grab a bag of decaf from the breakroom and use that instead (yes, the coffee pot does have a grounds option rather than a pods – this is not the stupid part yet). Except there was no decaf in the breakroom! None. Nowhere to be found. We’re all meant to be hyped up on caffeine all day! I find this strange as there was some last time I checked (it might have been awhile ago). And no one ever uses it. So where did it go? It got lonely and a complex because no one wants it and it ran anyway?

This left me with no decaf options. So I figured a little regular won’t kill me, right? I mean, I really want some coffee. I’ll just do about a third of a cup coffee, mostly hot water and then creamer (I had some French vanilla creamer in the fridge that was calling to me). Except I think my ratios were off. It’s about a third coffee, a third creamer and a third hot water.

So I felt off and unsettled and odd and jittery and therefore decided to introduce caffeine (keep in mind I stopped drinking regular coffee about a year and a half ago when the doctor suggested that caffeine was associated with early miscarriage) and a whole bunch of sugar. Oh hell yes!

The only potential bright side to this bit of great thinking is that both those things should lead to a HUGE ASS crash after they wear off. So maybe, just maybe if I can ever get over the jittery feeling, I’ll move on to zombie-ish. I’m thinking this will probably happen during a meeting with my boss… But that might be better than my current state in a meeting with my boss as I’m barely able to sit still. Always the sign of a good employee –totally on the go and always moving shows I’m working hard, right? Yeah, that won’t look like total ADD at my desk job. Hmm… I’ve heard of adult onset ADD – I just never really figured the onset was quite so quick – like overnight I go from able to focus to walking along, mid-thought and – SQUIRREL! I haven’t actually seen Up yet, but that part was in the preview – where the dog has a device that is able to translate his thoughts into words. He’s explaining this and mid-sentence his head flashes to the side, he yells SQUIRREL! And then comes back to the conversation. That’s what I’m feeling like. Like my Labrador-beagle. Only possibly less focused. (Usually I only feel like him in my desire to sleep 18 hours a day.)

Maybe I’ve got my drugs wrong and what I should have said is I feel like someone should have put Xanax in my Cornflakes. But, of course, I ate the Cheerios, so I’d still be screwed.

Daytime outings

I mentioned the change in our evening plans, but it reminded me of the recent changes in our daytime plans as well. A few weeks ago I decided to meet a friend for lunch in Georgetown. It was a beautiful day (and it was getting to the point in the season where we were starting to run short on beautiful days), so we thought it would be nice to get out and enjoy it. I fought traffic and somehow managed to get rock star parking (not sure how that happened). But then I started fighting the crowds on the streets to meet my friend with the stroller in tow.

As it was one of the last nice days, it seemed that EVERYONE had decided to take advantage of it. The streets were packed. It would have been painful to try to get around in that many people without the stroller – with it, I was feeling homicidal. I decided to “pull over” into Barnes and Nobles to wait for my friend there – only to discover there are 2 steps up to get anywhere besides the magazines – the racks for which are very close together and not stroller friendly. I was starting to feel downright whiney when I noticed a woman passing with a double stroller for her twins – who did not look at all whiney. In fact, it looked like this walk was purely for exercise! That one shut me up (and made me wonder if I could get whatever meds she was getting…). Well, it shut me up for a little while.

I finally met my friend and we found a spot with an inside patio for lunch where we could relax. But somewhere in there I started to wonder – when did I get this old and boring? Shouldn’t I want a good outside patio spot near the street to not only enjoy the weather but get to people watch!? Shouldn’t I want to sidewalk shop after lunch – rather than only wanting to rush back to my car to get the heck out of Dodge! Sure, I have no money, so that does reduce my shopping instinct (well, sort of…). Oh man – I’ve gotten old!

Mom’s Saturday night

I recently read a blog on ‘things I’d being doing on a Saturday night if I weren’t a Mom.’ (http://troutie.blogspot.com/2009/10/things-i-might-be-doing-on-saturday.html) It got me thinking… Years ago (way back when), I used to go out quite a bit. There was a time when I sat down on my couch to watch tv one day and wondered why that felt so odd – it was then that I realized I hadn’t actually done that in about a month as I’d been out every day (ok, so sometimes I was in class at night, but that’s not the point!). There were days when watching the sunrise was a late night activity rather than an early morning one.

But I admit that I settled down quite a bit when I met my husband. At the beginning we still went out a bit, but not nearly as much or as late. We saw far fewer sunrises. Then his schedule got crazy with work – he’s a fire fighter and works 24 hours shifts every three days. So you have to figure – he’s generally either working overnight on Friday or Saturday or he’s got to get up at 5 to work Sunday. It makes it hard to plan to stay out till 5 any night. But usually after several nights of weekends spent watching movies on the couch, I’d start to complain that I actually wanted to go out – and be out past 9! It would take some time and planning, but we’d make it out on occasion – or I’d plan to be out late on the night he worked (then we could both sleep in exhausted when he came home from work!).

Now that we have a baby, we don’t really have the argument about not going out much anymore. There’s still that part of me that longs to actually make it out! But that part is often over shouted in my head by the part that is desperate for more sleep! It’s not just that I’m tired at night when I’d normally be going out. It’s also that I know that it doesn’t matter how late I stay out – I’m still going to have to get up when the baby does in the morning (if I’m lucky, we can make it till 8, but some mornings, like today, she started grumbled before 7. This doesn’t account for the fact that I’ll also need to get up in the night sometimes too.).

But while that ‘discussion’ is over, I have now replaced it. I used to exact promises from my husband that we would go out on the town sometime in the next, say, month. Now I exact promises that he’ll give me a good backrub in the next month. How times have changed… For the record, that deadline is currently set to expire on Friday…

All about MEme: Shopping Spree

So today's question is what 5 items would I buy on a shopping spree if someone else was paying. Good timing as my birthday is coming up and Christmas is just around the corner and I've been trying to answer the "what do you want" question for weeks now. The problem I'm finding is that there are so many things we seem to "need" (big quotes) for the house (we move in a two weeks - yeah!) and the munchkin that I haven't gotten to "want" yet. Of course generally what we "need" is too expensive for anyone to get me anyway! So let's knock of those "needs" (maybe I should call them high priorities wants) and see what's left. On the first list - the things I have to spend my money on before I can spend on me...

1. Movers! Oh dear lord! Good, bonded, responsible, reasonably priced movers who give you a quote and stick to it and don't add on 7 things after and claim that's in the contract you agreed to, though you didn't sign it yet. Movers who don't involve a trip to small claims court!

2. Someone to refinish the floors. The house has these awesome civil war era wood floors (the house is not civil war era. It's 20 years old. The floors were repurposed here.) and then some nice rugs to cover and protect them.

3. Painters and new carpets! My husband will be doing a lot of DIY repairs as we move in, but carpets just may not hit our initial budget - and there's no way painters will, though he hates painting. It would be nice to just take that off the list...

4. A healthy injection to the munchkin's 529. I feel like we've been saving on the house and trying to get our finances in order forever for it that I've held off putting money anywhere else that we can't immediately get it - just in case. I know we need to do this - and do it regularly. But being a grown up stinks.

So if I took care of all that, I'd only have one left for me? Sort of defeats the purpose and the fun of the game! I'm going to add a few personal wishes!

1. OK, since someone else is paying and I get to go nuts, I'm going with diamond earrings. What? Was I starting to sound selfless up top? No way! Just guilt ridden... ;)

2. A really well tailored outfit for hanging out - casual, but almost doesn't look it because it looks so good on. We're talking expensive, designer jeans (I have never actually bought these for myself - was too excited to find the Old Navy ones for $28 a couple of years ago), cool shoes (but I've turned into an old lady and they have to be comfortable too!), a well cut jacket - things that hide the post pregnancy body I can't quite get back to where it should be. Hmm, and on that note...

3. A personal trainer! I've basically lost the pregnancy weight, but I still can't seem to find my pre-pregnancy body. If you see it anywhere, let me know...

4. A vacation! Wanderlust is hitting again - and at the worst possible time for my finances. I want to travel the world! But still get to bed at a reasonable hour...

5. OK, Ok, I'll put down the flat screen TV for my husband. Then we could move that monstrostity of an anchor holding down our house to the basement (you know, with those movers I mentioned above...) and we could be done with it.


Guess I'm off to buy a lottery ticket...

Top 40 under 40

So the other day I noticed an article online of the Top 40 people under 40 – which listed the most successful “young” people. And as I was reading – I felt like such a loser! Seriously – OK, a lot of people on the list are 38 or 39 (just making the cut off), so they are technically still a bit older than me. But there are also people in their 20s. And anyway, I’m not about to make the list in the next 5 years. I told me husband this and he told me that I was being silly. He reminded me that we’re actually probably ahead of the curve – buying a house and a car this year despite the economic downturn. We decided that we need to have a “bottom 40 under 40” list – that way I could feel better. He joked that it might go something like – this is Marvin. He lives with his parents and… oh damn…

Note – if you haven’t read my prior posts, we are currently living with my husband’s parents due to issues with buying our house. We were supposed to stay with them for a week or two because we were renting our condo out and wanted the lease to start in September. A week or two has turned into 3 months (by the time we finally move) – which is more than just a stopover we don’t even have to mention, but an actual large chunk of time.

Signs our child might be spoiled

Grammie was watching the munchkin yesterday and she got fussy while being changed. They were downstairs and Grammie thought – well, let me give her a book to settle her and stop the squirming. Now the fact that she grabbed the books from a toy she bought for her friend’s grandchild (but hadn’t sent yet) would point to our baby being a little bit spoiled. The fact that she bought the toys for that kid because the munchkin really liked because Grammie already bought them for her, so that now she has two sets? We’re in trouble!

Pulling the goalie

We watched Marley and Me the other day. Well, more to the point, we watched ¾ of Marley and Me the other day. Once they moved and Marley started to seem to have trouble with the stairs we decided we didn’t want to watch anymore. I actually liked (and probably related to) the story a lot more than I expected to. I thought it was just going to be a cute dog story and didn’t realize how much it was about life. Anyway, one really funny comment from the move stuck out. When they decide that they might want kids, they say – rather than “try” for a baby, what if we stop “trying not to” have a baby. He tells his boss that, who asks – “Look, are you having sex?” (well, yes.) “Did you pull the goalie?” (yup) “Then you’re trying!”

I had to laugh – because, of course, when we first started “trying,” we weren’t “trying.” We just weren’t preventing. We’d let nature take its course. We hadn’t been married very long and knew we wanted kids. Ideally we thought we might wait longer, but we knew it could take awhile, so we thought – let’s see what happens. Yeah, right. The second we “pulled the goalie,” we started thinking about it and wondering. I started getting disappointed when I got my period. It was no time before we were wondering about times of the month and temperatures and all that… I didn’t go in for temperatures right away (that would be trying!), but I was doing a vague home spun method of the reverse of the rhythm – I couldn’t help but do that! I mean, I knew how long my cycles were. I knew when my last period was. And about halfway through – well, duh.

I was talking to another friend several months ago who was thinking about kids. He told me that they weren’t trying, but they’d stopped trying not to. I want to call him now and quote the goalie line!

Purell and paper cuts

… don’t mix well.

Do they have a sense about people?

We pulled up to our in laws the other day and the neighbor my husband doesn’t care for was talking to them. We introduced the munchkin and she cried and turned away. We explained it as she was tired and is at that age… The next day my mother in law took her outside with her to get the mail and ran into the same neighbor as well as the guy on the other side who they like better. She liked the “good” neighbor, but cried again at the one they don’t like! My mother in law says it’s because the “good” neighbor made her noises back to her (she looked at Grammie as if to say – hey, this guy speaks my language!), but maybe she just has a sense about people. Or she came preprogrammed (from the factory) with our biases.

Daylight Savings Time

Daylight Savings Time. The munchkin finds that it is unnecessary. She's choosing not to observe. If one more person says, well that extra hour of sleep this weekend was nice.... ; )

Everybody cut Footloose!

The other day was a kind of long day where the hubby and I looked at each other and said – let’s try to get the baby to bed early so we can go to bed immediately after! But she was having none of it. I went upstairs with her around 7:30, but her schedule was a bit off (she’d been up too late the night before and napped too late that afternoon) so she was vehemently opposed to sleep. Or maybe it was all the commotion…

Being upstairs with her, I missed most of the commotion (because I am that attentive), but was sort of aware of some yelling. Here’s what seems to have happened…

The dog started getting sick, so my husband got into gear to take him outside / take care of him. He eventually decided to take him to the basement – as there’s no carpeting there and easy access to an exit, if needed. His Mom thought he was outside and sometime after that heard loud banging / cracks. She thought they were gunshots (I heard them, but just don’t generally assume gunshots. Where I’m from, that’s almost always a car backfiring or kids playing with fire crackers. But I guess the deer are a real problem near them and she thought someone was shooting at them.). She got very nervous that her son and the dog were outside, so she called her husband to go find them. Apparently he went out after them, but she didn’t realize that. So when she found her son and the dog in the basement and then noticed the front door was unlocked, she locked it (as one would with people shooting outside!). Her husband came back a few minutes later to find himself locked out (so now he’s the one locked out at the O-kay coral!).

I came back down (with the very awake baby) a little bit later to hear this story. My husband was nowhere to be seen. About half an hour later, I convinced the baby that she WAS, in fact, tired and wanted to go to bed. So I decided to go look for my husband.

I knew he was very overtired and a sick dog was the last thing he wanted to be dealing with, so I wasn’t sure what mood I’d find him in. In the past when I’ve tried to help when the dog is busy throwing up at 3 am (and he’s got to get up in 2 hours), he’s been known to be… somewhat testy. So I was a little apprehensive about what I’d find. What I did find was that he’d found a working tv in the basement and he and the, now fairly healthy, dog were watching Footloose! It was just coming up to that scene were Kevin Bacon has just had it with the small town and therefore works out all his frustration and energy the way any normal young teenager would – by dancing around an old empty warehouse. I’ll have to remind my husband of that solution next time he gets frustrated with work. (Clearly watching it was enough to help all that night! The dog was perfectly healthy after that!)