Blue Candy

Stuff

2010-08-31T12:09:00.000-05:00

So…..it’s been a long time since I posted anything here, huh? Yeah… There’s a reason and that is that I haven’t really had anything positive to say or anything good to report. Sure, some great things have happened to me, but they have all been overshadowed by the drama that has been playing out in my home. It’s always there in the back of my mind. This has probably been THE worst year of my life, starting from last fall to now. On top of facing turning the big four oh, I figured out that my husband was cheating. The outraged woman in me wanted to toss him out of my life. The mother in me realized that there was more than just my heart to consider here and that it might actually be best for the kids to keep the family unit together because, after all, he’s a really great dad. I know, I know, you should never stay together just for the kids and you should do whatever makes you happy because they’ll adapt, etc. It’s just not that simple. There are many other factors to consider here, namely my ability to provide them with a roof over their heads. I work full time, but I don’t make enough to support the 3 of us, especially after having to purchase another vehicle this summer. Yes, I would get child support, but that would all go towards daycare costs and I still probably wouldn’t be able to make ends meet. See? It’s complicated.

We started marriage counseling early in the year because I figured if we were going to try and stay together, we needed someone impartial to put us back on the right track (and perhaps he would learn a few things in the process). So far it has been disappointing. Don’t get me wrong – we are actually closer now and we are communicating better and he’s really trying to be a good husband, but we have spent an inordinate amount of time discussing MY issues and how they may have contributed to the downfall of the marriage. Not ONCE have we actually talked about what happened. I have been asked to read 3 books and he hasn’t been asked to read anything. When she started telling me she wanted me to confront my dad over issues from my childhood, that’s when I put on the brakes. It seemed like she was telling me that the reason I didn’t like my husband staying out all night with his buds was because I had abandonment issues with my father. I set her straight and told her that my issues with my father had nothing to do with it. I don’t like him staying out all night having fun with his buds and acting like a frat boy because I’m a WIFE and I don’t think ANY husband should do that. I seriously don’t think we’ll be going much longer because I am definitely not getting anything out of the sessions and the only thing my husband is learning is that there are no repercussions for cheating. Sure, the books have been helpful, but the entire process has been unfair to me.

So we’ve been trying to make it work and both putting in tons of effort, but it still feels like a lie. He cried and told me he doesn’t want to lose me and doesn’t want to lose the kids. I am constantly second guessing myself and questioning his motives and wondering if he’s still talking to her. I have no way of verifying it when he says he isn’t (he has his own cell phone account because his job pays the majority of the bill). And there have been some recent developments to this little drama that have left me reeling and even more unsure. He finally owned up to the cheating and not only did he cheat with the girl I knew about, but there was one other as well. And the girl I knew about was a long-term affair, possibly as long as 2 years (he’s not really sure when they met). I also found a profile for her on Pandora internet radio where she professed to the world how much she loved him and how he cherished her and would do anything to keep her safe and content. I have no way of knowing exactly when she wrote that profile so it could be 2 years old, but it really doesn’t matter. There is no trust. Is there still love? Yes. I will always love him. We’ve been together for 24 years and he’s the father of my children. But I’m unsure how to move forward at this point. I have received great advice from my friends and family, but the fact is that nothing I do is going to seem right at this point. Some of my friends are mad because I’m staying with him. Others will be mad if I leave. And if I leave, I will be the bad guy in my kids’ eyes. No matter what I do, I can’t win.

Driving home the other night, I had an epiphany. Every important male figure in my life has cheated. Every. Single. One. I have several friends that I know for a fact have cheated on their wives. I know tons of women who have cheated. I don’t condone what they did, but I don’t judge them either. My point here is that I think most men are going to cheat. There are probably a few who would never consider it, but most men are selfish and they are absolutely going to go for it if they get an opportunity. I don’t think the dating pool out there has anything better to offer me, especially at my age, so am I better off just staying where I’m at? Maybe. Does that mean it’s ok? Hell. No. But it does give me a little different perspective. I found a video online the other day and it was someone interviewing the mistresses of several married men, and they were explaining exactly WHY those men were cheating. They fulfill a need that the wife isn’t providing. It doesn’t matter WHY the wife isn’t providing it. It doesn’t matter if she’s tired after working all day, making dinner, taking care of the kids and the house and doesn’t feel like getting out of bed at 2:00 in the morning to be all June Cleaver-like when he comes strolling in the door. It doesn’t matter that the husband isn’t meeting the wife’s needs either or that he’s being an inconsiderate ass. Our society places more value on men than women. Men are still paid more than women in a lot of fields and it’s all about what men want or need. My counselor proved that, and she’s a self-proclaimed feminist.

I can’t predict the future and I still don’t know what’s going to happen, but as of right now I’m staying with him. It’s my decision and I honestly don’t care who gets upset with me anymore because it’s MY life. However, if I find out he’s seeing that heifer again or anyone else, the kids and I will absolutely leave, and if I have to, I will sell everything we own to provide for them. I’m not a complete doormat. In the meantime, I am working on forgiveness and he is working on earning my trust. Maybe we’ll be able to meet in the middle. Either way, I’m tired of smiling and pretending that everything is ok.

IMPORTANT:
ALSO…..since many of you know me on Facebook, please do not comment about this on there. I am “friends” with many of his family members and I do not want them to know what is going on and risk them saying something to my kids. Besides, I like to keep my mental breakdowns as anonymous as possible. And speaking of anonymous…it was frighteningly easy to find information on that woman. Within an hour, I knew her parents’ names, sibling names, the cities where they live, some husband names, where her dad works, her daughter and granddaughter’s names and where they live, her divorce records, her full name, etc. And there was tons more. People, THAT is scary. There is a website out there where you can put in a person’s email address and it will pull up if you are a member of any social networks, or if you have a blog associated with that email address, and many other things (which is how I found her Pandora account). I put my email address in there and it pulled up pictures of my kids. MY KIDS. And it showed a face picture I had posted on MySpace. This entire situation has made me paranoid about security and I have set everything to either private or friends only. I also deleted my MySpace account. I may delete this blog as well or at least set it to private. The website I’m referring to is www.spokeo.com and if it pulls up anything you don’t want shared, copy the URL for your results page, scroll down to the bottom and click on Privacy and there will be a link to opt out where you paste the URL. I did this for every email account I have. Also, spokeo is not the only website out there that searches for people on social networks. Be aware and be wary, friends.

Discontent

2009-07-28T15:35:00.002-05:00

That’s the pervading theme of my life lately. I can’t really put my finger on the reason why, if there even is a reason. It’s more likely a multitude of reasons all converging at once. All I know is that THIS is not what I had in mind as far as where I should be right now and I’m not happy. I’m pretty good at faking being happy though, which is important. Right? Because Lord knows you don’t want to LOOK unhappy and have well-meaning friends, family members, or daycare teachers asking if you are ok and dissolve into a puddle of tears or scream at them DO I FREAKING LOOK OK? So yeah, that’s where I’m at right now.

Who knows? Maybe this is all just a mid-life crisis because SHIT, I’m turning 40 this year. Maybe this is because I’m married to someone who is never home and on those rare occasions he is home, his mind is somewhere else (there is so much more to it than that, but this is absolutely not the right forum to get into my marital issues). Maybe I’m just tired of doing it all myself - working full time and taking care of the house and the kids - and not getting to have a life of my own. Maybe it’s because I’m disgusted with myself due to my inability to get serious about losing weight. Maybe….hell, I could MAYBE this all day long.

All I know is that this feeling of discontent is starting to affect all aspects of my life now and I’m not entirely sure what to do about it. For me personally, meds are not really an option. I know they are helpful for a lot of people, but I just can’t do them again. Ever. I suppose I could look into therapy but then I just feel silly calling up and making an appointment because I feel discontent. I have started working out and that is making me feel a little bit better, but I’m not really sure what else I need to do in conjunction with that. There are a couple of mini-vacations coming up soon, and they may make a difference, but at this point I’m not very hopeful. It does feel a little cleansing just to get this out of my head and onto my screen, but I’m not going to make a habit of it. So anyway, there you have it. It’s not a very positive update, but it’s honest.

Project

2009-07-10T11:31:00.005-05:00

Last night I went to a class at a local store here called The Paper Crown. I saw the project example in the store and immediately fell in love, but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pull it off. After taking the class, I can’t believe how easy it was. Seriously.

The background is a torn up Simplicity pattern, the skirt is a paper that features French post cards, the top of the dress is a paper with flocked polka dots, and the scallop at the bottom and ribbon across the midriff are a black and white striped paper.

The polka dots on the skirt are pieces of tissue paper. Of course, I added a picture of my girl to personalize it a little bit. It's going to hang in her room, after all.

And then we embellished with buttons, wired a hangar through the canvas, and painted around edges.

Quick and easy. It’s basically just decoupage, and now that I’ve made one, I want to do more. I'm thinking something in camo for my son's room...

Keeping it real

2009-06-09T15:38:00.001-05:00

Last month I learned something about myself. Mother’s Day was approaching and I had some pretty specific ideas about what I would have liked to happen. I wanted breakfast in bed and my inner princess wanted to be pampered all day long. I wanted my kids to be loving, respectful, unselfish, and to use their indoor voices. I wanted my husband to buy me something – ANYTHING, even something incredibly inexpensive - that he lovingly and thoughtfully picked out. I also wanted to spend time with my good friend at the Oklahoma Fiber Rendezvous.

And then reality laughed and smacked me upside the head.

I got strep a couple of days before Mother’s Day. Then my husband informed me that he had to work. The entire weekend. While I was miserable with strep. And the strep sort of made the Fiber Rendezvous a non-issue. Then my kids decided to act like little hooligans and before long I found myself yelling. And then feeling guilty for yelling on Mother’s Day. I didn’t get a card or present from my husband, but I did receive little hand-made cards (the best kind) from my kids courtesy of daycare and school. Then my husband came home and informed me that we were all going out to dinner. I perked up until he said that his parents were going too (thereby killing two birds with one stone). And we were going to a buffet that serves crappy food.

Totally not the Mother’s Day I envisioned.

But I don’t blame my husband. In this economy, a paycheck trumps my inner princess any day. Yes, he could have been thoughtful enough to plan ahead and buy me a card, but that’s just not like him.

I don’t blame my kids. They were just acting like kids. They don’t stop being kids because I’m sick or because it’s Mother’s Day.

I blame myself. I completely set myself up for failure with the ridiculous expectations that I had. And I do this every freaking year. So this year after I had a good self-pity cry, I had an epiphany. I am the solely responsible for my own happiness. If I want something for Mother’s Day, I need to make it happen. My family is not going to do it. I need to lower my expectations and keep it real. As soon as I had my little a-ha, I got online and ordered my own Mother’s Day present and told my husband he was in charge of getting the kids bathed and put to bed. But aside from the whole strep thing going on and my husband having to work, I managed to take responsibility for my own happiness, change my attitude, and somewhat turns things around. But I bet I do the same damn thing next year.

My gift to myself arrived a few days later. It’s a necklace with two miniature charms that look like dog tags. Each one has my child’s name and birth date engraved on it, and their coordinating birth stones are embedded on the little tags. I love it. When I showed it to my son, he said, “That’s really pretty, mom. You should take that to work and show it to the people there. And you know what they’re going to say?” I looked at him hesitantly and asked, “What?” He said, “She probably went to Jared!”

(I didn’t, but let that be a lesson to those who don’t believe in the power of television marketing. Also, perhaps my son watches a little too much TV.)

Keep it real, people.

An update

2009-04-27T13:14:00.003-05:00

Thanks to all of you for the prayers! My mother-in-law's surgery went very well. The doctor removed her kidney and the adjacent adrenal gland. He said that the cancer had definitely spread to the surrounding blood vessels so she is official stage 3 and there will be lots of future follow-up. If anything else starts to grow, they will attack it quickly and aggressively. He also said that chemo is not an option right now because they don't know where in the body the cancer will develop next. So it's basically a wait and see what happens, and we will continue to be hopeful.

And now I have to run so I can take cupcakes to daycare for my girl's 3rd birthday. Sigh... Three already.

Prayer needed

2009-04-06T09:26:00.001-05:00

My mother-in-law, Judy, has had a few health issues here lately, and found out last week that she has a tumor the size of an orange on one of her kidneys. The doctor told her it was invading the surrounding blood vessels and they plan to remove the entire kidney. He is 98-99% sure it is malignant.

The surgery will be on April 17th, and she could use any prayers or good thoughts that anyone can spare. I’ll keep everyone posted on how it goes.

It takes so little to make me happy

2009-04-02T18:42:00.003-05:00

First time EVER. Yay, Kels!

I'm so happy I'm willing to overlook the fact that her teacher spelled the word "potty" wrong.

Another actual conversation

2009-03-30T14:59:00.002-05:00

There is a high school age girl who volunteers in one of the labs where I work. I usually have to unlock the door for her and today as we walked down the hall, this is the conversation we had:

Girl: So is that thing on your desk something you are knitting?

Me: Yes. It's a dress for my daughter's Build-a-Bear.

Girl: It looks really small, like for a baby. I didn't think you had a grandbaby or anything.

Me: No.....but I do have a two year-old.

And then inside my head I called her a bitch and walked back to my desk. I know I'm technically old enough to have a grandchild, but seriously. It almost makes me want to look into Botox.

My belated thoughts on political things

2009-02-27T09:57:00.000-06:00

After the presidential election back in November, I wrote a post about the election results and never published it. Then I sort of forgot about it as I tend to do a lot of things. Good ideas, no follow through - that's me. Anyway, while I am thrilled to pieces over the national election and our new President, I am still disappointed in my state because of the people who were elected locally. For example:

1) Sally Kern, who thinks that gays are an even bigger threat to this nation than terrorism, was RE-ELECTED. Seriously.

2) Jim Roth, a well-respected political figure who was appointed to the position of Corporation Commission and Oklahoma's first openly gay person to hold a state-wide elected office, was defeated by Dana Murphy in his bid for re-election. The television ads Murphy ran were largely anti-homosexual in nature.

3) Jim Inhofe, who stated that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people, was RE-ELECTED. Inhofe ran against Andrew Rice, his television campaign ads telling us that Rice was "too liberal for Oklahoma." Apparently he was right.

4) All 77 counties in the state of Oklahoma were won by McCain in the election. Every. Single. County. In addition, McCain got 65.6 percent of the vote in Oklahoma, the highest state percentage for him in the entire country. I'm not kidding.

So what does all of this mean? I am 99.9% positive that I am the only person in my entire family that feels like the statements above are horrific statements about Oklahoma. And apparently most of the people of this great state are in agreement with my family. Honestly, I don't know how in the world I turned out the way I did. But that's ok, because that's one of the great things about this country. We are all entitled to our different opinions and beliefs.

I believe in this country and I believe in the current President, even though I am related to and surrounded by people who don't want to give him a chance. One thing that no one can refute is that the man has a gift for public speaking. Did anyone catch the state of the union this week? It was beautiful.

Hope

2009-01-22T14:19:00.002-06:00

Finally feeling it after eight long years...

Happy Turkey Day!

2008-11-26T14:55:00.004-06:00

My son's school did a First Grade Turkey Cookbook this year and I have scanned my boy's submission and am posting it here:

Feel free to use this recipe for your family dinners this year. Only please cook the meal longer than 100 seconds if you're not a big fan of salmonella. Oh, and the illustrations are from left to right: a table with cooked bird and 2 chairs, a person, a dog, and a live turkey.

You're welcome.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

October recap

2008-11-12T10:55:00.007-06:00

If there’s anything that could break my recent funk, it was the month of October. October is full of fun events for me: my anniversary, hubby’s birthday, my birthday, and Halloween. It’s pretty awesome. So other than the whole pool incident, October rocked. Let me highlight a few of my favorite things from my favorite month of the year.

Hubby’s Birthday
My hubby turned the big 4 0 this year and I couldn’t let that go by without proper celebration. Two of his friends were my accomplices in helping me plan, spread the word, and then getting him to the party. I booked the upstairs room at Tapwerks in Bricktown, which turned out to be pretty awesome, but I’ll get to that in a minute. A week or so before the party date, my hubby knew something was up and he LIED TO ME and said he had to go to Lawton for work on the night I was planning the party. I called his boss the next day and asked if he could please help me. Boss man went to hubby and asked him why he was going to Lawton and my hubby said, “Who told you I was going to Lawton? You’ve been talking to my wife! I told her I was going to Lawton so she wouldn’t plan anything for my birthday.” So the jig was up but he still didn’t know exactly when or where the party was going to be.

The morning of the party he was still telling me he was going to Lawton that night. I said, “Ok. I’m going to go eat dinner with my girlfriends so Aunt Judy is going to babysit.” Then my accomplice Scott called him up and said his wife was mad at him and he wanted to go out for beers that night, and Brent agreed to go. Of course, we all ended up at the same place. Here are a few pictures:
The birthday boy!

Me and my BFF Tabby

Me and Tabby after drinking a LOT and trying to take our own picture in the bathroom

Good times! Of course, when we got home, he told me that as soon as they got there, he saw my vehicle in the parking lot and knew it was the party. But oh well – we will had fun and that’s all the matters. The rest of the pictures are HERE if you want to see them.

Halloween
The boy told me he wanted to be Darth Vader for Halloween so I immediately started thinking about dressing the girl up in something that would coordinate (because I only have so many years where I can influence what she wears). When I started looking at Star Wars costumes online, I immediately found the perfect one. Yoda. Take a look:
Before Haunting the Zoo

And after

Again, the rest of the pictures are HERE if you want to see all of them.

That’s all for now. I want so much to talk about the election, but that will have to be a post for another day. :-)

Kelsey and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

2008-10-24T13:50:00.003-05:00

Yesterday morning my girl was tired and didn't want to get out of bed. We've all been there, right? No seriously, she REALLY didn't want to get out of bed. We could have left her alone, but we are stupid parents and decided to make her get up because, you know, we have jobs and she wasn't sick, and we couldn't just leave her there by herself. And let me just say that you are so lucky that you don't live at my house (or anywhere near my house) because the volume level when she voiced her displeasure about being awoken at the ungodly hour of 7:00am was eardrum shattering. Think Hiroshima, ok?

When she calmed down, my husband made the mistake of saying, "Let's get dressed," which set off another round of screeching and screaming because she clearly didn't want to get dressed either. But it was cold outside and we thought perhaps clothes would be a little warmer than her pajamas, so we stupidly forced her to get dressed. She continued to scream and fight as we got her dressed and her father and I looked at each other and I said quietly, "Thank you for getting that vasectomy."

My little Damien child didn't want to put her coat on either so I let her walk to the car dragging her coat behind her, thinking that she would be happy because I didn't force her to wear it. But no, of course not. After buckling her into her car seat, she screamed All. The. Way. To. Daycare. I turned up the radio to try and drown her out, but nope - not happening. I would have laughed at the annoyed look on her brother's face, but the truth was I had never heard her scream like that and it was a little unsettling.

At daycare, she went into a full-blown meltdown and followed me up and down the hallway as I went to her classroom and put her diaper bag near her cubby. She didn't want me to hold her, look at her, talk to her, touch her. She just wanted to scream and SCREAM and let me and everyone else at daycare know exactly how unhappy she was. I looked at the teacher sympathetically and told her, "I'm sorry. Here's a dollar. If she will calm down, she can have breakfast from the vending machine." The teacher tried to get her to calm down, but she was wasting her time. As I got in my car and shut the door, I could STILL HEAR HER. She was standing at the glass door of the daycare, pounding on the door, screaming at me. (And in case anyone is wondering, the teacher was right behind her to keep her safe and make sure she didn't escape.)

I actually drove away with tears in my eyes. I haven't cried after leaving my kids in daycare since the very first time I had to leave my son there over 6 years ago. When I got to work, I called to check on her, and they said she screamed for about 15 minutes after I left before finally calming down. I know my child is stubborn (she is a Taurus, after all), but jeez...

When I went to pick her up yesterday afternoon, she gave me a "go to hell" look so I would know she was still mad at me. I just laughed and counted my blessings that she was quiet. The teacher said she hadn't had a very good day, but didn't elaborate and I was perfectly fine not hearing the details. She was quiet on the ride home and I thought to myself, "Yes, I can deal with this. At least she's not screaming!"

When we arrived home, I put the leash on the dog and took her out in the backyard to potty and my girl followed me outside. Socks sniffed all over the yard and just as she found a good spot, I heard a loud splash. I knew what had happened before I even turned around and I sprinted to the edge of the swimming pool to see my submerged child bobbing up to the top of the water. I grabbed her coat and jerked her out of the pool. I will never forget the look of sheer terror on her face before she started screaming again. And you know what? I have never been so happy to hear her scream in my life.

I quickly got her inside, stripped off all her wet clothes, and had her Grammy distract her with hugs and cuddles while I ran a warm bath. After a nice bath and some warm pajamas, she was like a totally new little girl. She was actually happy.

I will never forget how scared I felt when I ran to the edge of the pool or how relieved I was to hear her scream. But you know what really frightens me? I am not usually the person who walks the dog when we get home in the evening. She usually follows her brother outside while he walks the dog, and they play around the trampoline as I start getting dinner ready. What if I hadn't been the one walking the dog yesteray? What if he hadn't heard her fall in? Would he have reacted quick enough? The what ifs nearly kept me awake last night. But I woke up today with a completely new attitude.

Actual conversation

2008-09-30T11:20:00.002-05:00

Friend: So how’s B doing?

Me: Well, he got in trouble at daycare again for fighting, so we grounded him from his Wii for a week.

Friend: His WEED???

Long pause

Me: No, not weed. Wii. As in the Nintendo gaming system.

Friend: Oh.

Me: Are you kidding me? He’s SIX. He doesn’t even know what weed is yet. Hopefully we have a few more years before we have to worry about that.

How I spent my summer

2008-08-20T11:15:00.003-05:00

My son goes back to school tomorrow, so in honor of that, I thought I’d do a little summer update since it has been MONTHS since I last posted. Here’s what’s been going on:

Life
I’ve been in a huge funk for the past few months. I get up, go to work, pick up my kids, go home, rinse, repeat. I’m feeling the need for a life change. I’ve been staying up way too late each night reading after the kids go to bed, and I think that is part of my problem. I love escaping my own world by immersing myself into the books I read and becoming part of the characters’ worlds. Even though I know how very blessed I am, I still manage to find my own life lacking. I’m not even enjoying my usual hobbies. What’s up with that?

Death
I had two deaths to deal with this summer. My 18 year-old cousin, Mandy, in Ohio passed away in June, and then my BFF Kim’s 19 year-old nephew, Chase, passed away just a little over 2 weeks ago. Both of them passed away from infections that came on very suddenly. They were both taken from this world way too soon and left behind a huge number of broken hearts.

Vacation
The one thing I actually wanted to do this summer was take a vacation. It didn’t happen. The closest thing we got to a vacation was the mini-family reunion weekend we had back in May at Greenleaf State Park. By the way, I have pictures HERE if you want to see them. We are now considering going somewhere sans kids in October to celebrate our anniversary and birthdays. Maybe Vegas…

The husband
He got neutered. I’m sure he will greatly appreciate me telling the internet something very private, but hey, how often can you joke about getting your husband neutered? Please, like I’m going to pass up that opportunity. But seriously, a pregnancy scare when you are 37 is no less terrifying than when you are 17, only at 37 you really should know better. We both decided that we are perfectly happy with the children we currently have, and don’t think we could mentally or physically handle any more, hence the neutering. Sorry, I just had to say it one more time.

The kids
Oh, how they like to push my buttons. I have moments where I love them so much my heart aches and I can’t imagine not having them in my life. Then there are the moments where I ask my husband, “Why did we have kids?” Sometimes these moments occur within minutes of each other. The boy got in trouble at daycare last week for fighting, and when his dad asked him what the fight was about, he said, “Noel said that the 5 masters on Kung Fu Panda aren’t really masters.” I had to leave the room so he wouldn’t see me laugh. Then he asked him, “You hit the other kid for THAT?” The boy replied, “OH YEAH!” like it was the greatest thing he had ever done. We are awesome parents.

Also, the novelty of having a little sister has finally worn off for the boy since she lives to pester him. LIVES for it. There is nothing greater to her than making him scream in frustration. I envision lots of calls from the school principal once she starts school. I was putting her pajamas on her one night and she stood up, got right in my face, and with a mean expression asked me, “You want a piece of me?” Of course, both the boy and I just cracked up laughing, which delighted her to no end. I found out later that her daddy taught her to do that, so now I think I’ll let him handle the phone calls from the principal.

My sister
Some of you just read that and said, “HUH?” Yep. I was raised an only child and about 4 years ago, I found out that I had a half sister. She was given up for adoption as an infant and my dad is listed as her birth father on her birth certificate. This actually deserves its own post, and hopefully I will get to that soon. Anyway, we have been talking a lot via email and instant messaging lately, and I spent this past weekend with her and got to meet her husband and kids. They are awesome. At this point, no DNA test has been done to confirm anything, but I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, she’s my sister regardless of what any DNA test says. We have too much in common and I just love her to pieces.

My dad
I’ve been struggling with my dad’s issues here lately. Two years ago he was diagnosed with clinical depression, but actually exhibits what I would call severe social anxiety. He can’t even go to the grocery store because “there are people there.” But he can go to work because he has a lot to do to keep him busy and doesn’t have to interact with anyone much. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but whatever. The part I’ve been struggling with is the fact that he comes to OKC for work ALL THE TIME and he never calls. He used to call me whenever he came to the city and we would go to dinner or if he was tired, we’d just talk on the phone for a few minutes. Now I don’t even get a phone call. My daughter has no idea who he is, and I’m sure my son barely remembers him, and it makes me so sad. I understand that he’s not well, but I really hate this. He’s been on medication for 2 years now and even though he says he feels better, he doesn’t ACT like he’s better. So I’m a little torn now as to what to do. Do I just leave him be and let him initiate contact when he feels better? Or do I continue to call and pester him when he really wants to be left alone? Is there even a right answer?

The dog
We still have our puppy, Socks. I took her to puppy classes, where she tried to play with and be all submissive to the other dogs. I can’t tell you how nice that was. After having a dominant, aggressive dog like Oscar, all I wanted was a dog that was sweet, and she definitely hasn’t disappointed. She is finally crate trained, and now we just have to get our gate fixed so we can take her out in the back yard at night and throw balls and let her burn off some of that puppy energy. I think she’s going to be a great dog once she’s older and not so exuberant.

The weather
WTF is up with the weather in OKC? It’s in the 60’s and 70’s here lately. In AUGUST. It’s usually 90’s and 100’s. At this point, we’re going to have to close the pool early because I don’t think it’s going to warm up enough where we’ll be able to swim before the official end of summer. The kids are going to be very sad about that. And I only bought shorts for the boy for school…

So that’s my summer so far. I hope everyone else is having a good one!

Socks

2008-05-21T16:44:00.016-05:00

I don't think it's a big secret that, for whatever reason, I don't handle stress very well. And if I feel overwhelmed with responsibility, I get a little nutty. So what better way to send me over the edge and into the arms of madness than to bring home a puppy. The primary reason for bringing another dog into the family was the boy - he wanted a dog so badly. Whenever we encountered dogs, he would ask the owner if he could pet their dog and tell them, "Our dog's dead!" Then later he would say to me, "Mom, we need a dog that's not dead." How can you argue with that kind of logic?

Then there is the girl’s irrational fear of dogs, which some people would argue is a good thing for a young child as it will deter her from petting strange dogs and possibly becoming the dog’s next meal. However, as a lifelong dog lover, I simply cannot allow my kids to grow up with a fear of dogs. I believe dogs teach kids a great deal about loyalty, companionship, and unconditional love. Yes, there are some dogs that are aggressive and need to be handled with caution, but our pup doesn’t fit in that category.

So we decided to go ahead and get a dog. In my defense, I wanted to adopt an adult dog, one that was already housebroken and loved kids. My husband wanted to get a puppy because it could “grow up with the kids." A friend of mine told me one day that a friend of hers had some black Lab pups he was giving away for free and I should have run screaming from the table with my hands over my ears, but instead I think I told her, "I want one!"

So the puppy came to our house and the first thing we noticed was that she was big. HUGE. With enormous paws. That's when we found out that one of her parents is a Lab/Great Pyrenees mix. She's going to be a little bigger than the average lab. And really, I'm okay with that. She's mostly calm, fairly gentle with the kids, and very sweet and affectionate. What I'm not okay with are the enormous lakes of urine and mountains of poop on the kitchen floor. Yes, she’s a puppy and will eventually learn to hold her bladder and bowels longer than 30 minutes at a time, but it’s very frustrating right now. My husband keeps saying, “She’s going to be a great dog when she grows up.” So I sigh and keep cleaning up the pee and poop in the house, and giving her treats and lots of praise for doing her business outside.

And let’s talk about the chewing, which I’m surprisingly okay with. So what if she chewed up the phone book. I never use it anyway. So what if she has peeled the wallpaper off the wall in one spot. I wasn’t married to that wallpaper and had secretly dreamed of redoing it – she must have sensed that. And the kitchen table and chairs that now have teeth marks? I have had my eye on a different set for months now so this is remarkably not bothering me. This is not to say that I condone her chewing on my furniture. If I catch her chewing on something she’s not supposed to, I will gently scold her, give her a toy, and then praise her for chewing the toy. But I realize that all puppies chew so I am cutting her some slack.

It took us a while to come up with a name because each one we’d suggest was shot down by the boy, who wanted to name her something bizarre like Spider-Man, Optimus Prime, Bumblebee or Chickee Boo Boo (I’m not even kidding). Finally the hubby said, “Hey, what about Socks because each of her paws has a white spot on it?” The boy liked it, the girl could say it, and I said, “It’s settled then. Her name is Socks.”

Two times the fun

2008-05-19T15:45:00.015-05:00

I have such grand plans for keeping this site updated and posting on a regular basis, and damned if it ever happens. Which is pretty typical for all aspects of my life really…grand plans and no follow through. But I have so much to share! Just to make myself post more frequently, I’ll spread all the things I’m dying to share with you out over several posts instead of making you sit here for a boring eternity.

First and foremost, my baby is now two years old. TWO. Seriously, when did that happen?

She is equal parts sweet angel and demon spawn, wrapped up in an adorable little package. And I mean demon spawn in only the most loving manner possible. Don’t judge me. But seriously, there are times when we are out in public and she is perfecting her tantrum techniques, and I secretly wonder if maybe I was drugged and she was conceived ala Rosemary’s Baby style. Then an hour later she is the sweetest little angel again and I feel ashamed for ever comparing her to Rosemary’s Baby.

In short, her behavior is normal and completely age appropriate. It’s me that has the problem dealing with it. But isn’t that why God invented pharmaceuticals?

Just look at that face. How can you not fall in love with something that cute? There is no shortage of the cuteness in this house.

She absolutely loves her “Bubba,” and he’s crazy about her as well. Lord help her when the boys start calling the house.

(Please don't tell me she needs a haircut. Her daddy is on my case constantly about her hair. He doesn't understand that if we cut it, SOMEONE will have to style it in the mornings. And I'm usually doing good to style my own hair and get the kids dressed, so that leaves him. I know for a fact that he knows even less about styling another person's hair than I do, so he's not going to be a good candidate for that job either. So for now, I pull it back with a bow or a pony on top of the head. It's fast and easy and looks semi-ok-ish. You will note that in the picture above, it's just all loose and hanging in her face, and sometimes that just happens because she won't leave the pony tail or bow alone. Deal with it, daddy.)

Developmentally, she is awesome and able to communicate extremely well. She’s not afraid to wake me up at 2:30 in the morning to ask for a “cup” or “more milk.” If I ignore her, she will even throw in a “please.” Gotta love that! It makes it only slightly less annoying at 2:30am.

Happy birthday, sweet girl. Mommy loves you. (And she’s sorry for calling you demon spawn.)

Next up: Our new puppy

A belated birthday post

2008-04-08T14:29:00.005-05:00

It was recently brought to my attention by my good friend and auntie to my kids, KatyaR, that I neglected to show pictures of the boy’s sixth birthday. We did have a party for him and quite a few of his school classmates came to help celebrate at Incredible Pizza.

Do you have an Incredible Pizza? It’s sort of like a Chuck E. Cheese on steroids, but without the creepy mechanical singing animals. They have pizza (obviously) and all the usual arcade games that you would expect, plus an indoor go kart track, miniature golf, bumper cars, and a little playland just for toddlers. It’s pretty awesome. Along with that much awesomeness comes so much noise and lights and, well, it’s enough stimulation overload to make an adult want to find a dark corner somewhere and curl up in the fetal position. I managed to do ok for the 2 hours we were there, but as soon as my husband said he was ready to go, I may have sprinted to the car not even bothering to look back and see if my family was following. Good times.

Mmmm, cake.

The winner!

There are more pictures HERE if you want to see the rest.

You know what this means?

2008-04-02T16:43:00.004-05:00

That’s right. It’s Spring. This is one of the many Redbud trees outside of my office building, and here are some of the tulips that bloom here every year.

Aren’t they beautiful? And hey, it’s warm and Winter is gone. Woohoo! Of course, with the beautiful signs of Spring also come the dark, scary thunderstorms and tornadoes. Nature’s balance.

In Oklahoma, we don’t just have Spring – we also have an official tornado season which runs April through June. I’ve written before about my tornado experience and how I tend to have a little bit of anxiety during this time of year. However, this past Sunday marked the 2nd time in March that our family made a mad dash for the storm shelter (Thank you, pre-Homeland Security FEMA!) under threat of impending doom, and I am proud to say that my anxiety is about 80% gone. I can even sleep during storms now, confident that my handy-dandy weather radio will wake me up if things get too bad. And on the nights when it does go off 347 times, I still don’t panic. It’s all about personal growth, people. The really interesting thing about those two trips is that my husband was home both times, and both times it was HIM yelling for everyone to get their shoes on RIGHT NOW in a semi-panicked voice. Which then made me panic just a little bit, but it totally doesn’t count because he started it, right?

So far we have come through the storms unscathed, but like I said, tornado season didn’t even officially begin until yesterday so the next three months could be very long and nerve-wrecking. And FYI to the local news teams: it is not even a little bit cool when you pre-empt regularly scheduled programming because a storm is imminent and you cut to your reporter out in western Oklahoma City only to have her say, “Well, the sky is dark and we can see the lightning in the distance, but it’s not raining yet at our location.” It’s a bit Chicken Little-esque when you do that, and it makes me want to scream obscenities at the television in front of my young children. So cut it out, ok? Thanks.

Hold on to your effing hats

2008-03-24T08:56:00.005-05:00

I first saw the video below at Sleeping Mommy a couple of months ago, and I thought it was hysterical. I saw it again this Saturday when I caught part of SNL and thought it was incredibly appropriate this time because it captures exactly how I felt all weekend:

...except for the whole dog lovin' thing. Add to that a wicked bladder infection, a child with a fever, and the fact that I busted out the zipper in my favorite jeans (they weren't even tight jeans, y'all!), and you have yourself a recipe for a kick-ass weekend. I tried to isolate myself from the family as much as I could, but nobody seemed to understand when I said, "Mommy's feeling a little psychotic right now and you need to stay away."

Plus it was Easter weekend and a time for family, fun, and togetherness. I managed to hold my mood in check just long enough to color eggs with the family Saturday night, and that was about all I could handle. I guess it was sort of a blessing that Kelsey got sick and we didn't have to get all dressed up and go to church because dude, I was not feeling the Easter love at all. When my mood improves, I will get the kiddos all dressed up and take some pictures of them so you can see how cute they would have looked.

Until then, Happy Easter.

Ahhhh, Valentine's Day

2008-02-14T10:51:00.005-06:00

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone!

Last night my son and I were doing valentines for him to give out at school and this is one that I rejected:

Maybe it's just me, but doesn't that sound a little dirty to give to kids? I'm thinking my husband would be a more appropriate target audience. I know they wrote "flexible" because she's Elastigirl and all, but still.

Please tell me I'm not the only one whose brain went there...

I'm not a morning person

2008-01-23T11:23:00.000-06:00

If a certain boy doesn’t stop waking me up at 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning, he may not live to see his 6th birthday. It has become a habit of late, even on the weekends, and this morning he visited me twice between 5:00 and 6:00am. It would be a different story if he were sick or something, but he is waking me up to tell me about the dream he just had, or to ask me some inane question that should not be asked at the unholy hour of 5:00am - questions like, “Hey mom, remember that guy on the Star Wars Lego game with the 4 arms and they all had light sabers? He’s so cool!” Yeah, good times.

A long overdue update

2008-01-09T08:32:00.000-06:00

If I had one word to sum up my holidays, it would be AWESOME. Seriously, gloriously awesome. I was starting to get a little freaked out before Christmas because we live about a mile away from one of the biggest malls in OKC, and there seems to be a direct correlation between the holiday season and the level of anxiety and psychosis displayed by people behind the wheel of a vehicle. The entrance to our daycare is across from the entrance to the mall, and it was downright scary just getting home most nights. But we lived through it (this time) and next year we will use more alternate routes to get home to avoid such insanity, even if that means adding another 30+ minutes to our route home.

Christmas was so much fun this year! The kids were so excited and had so much fun unwrapping gifts, and everyone seemed genuinely happy with their gifts. We spent a peaceful day with family having good food and drink. It was truly perfect. The hubby and I were off the entire week of Christmas, and we went ahead and took the kids to daycare Wednesday through Friday and had 8 glorious hours of alone time each day. We haven’t had that much time alone together in nearly six years. And even when the kids were home with us, we were equal parents helping each other out, and THAT was just what I needed to refresh my spirit. Well, that and a lot of sleep!

Before we started our holiday vacation, I had a list of probably 50 things I wanted to accomplish during our time off. Sadly, we completed very little, but one of the things we did do was a biggie. The girl is weaned. Woohoo! I am grateful that I was able to provide nourishment for her the first year of her life. But it was getting to the point where she was only nursing for comfort, and not receiving much milk at all, and I was ready to quit. (I admire those who can do the extended breastfeeding thing, but it just isn’t for me.) Even though she was only nursing at bedtime and first thing in the morning, I dreaded weaning and I wanted to wait until my husband would be home to help. It turned out to be much easier than we anticipated, and only took about 3 days. Now we just have to deal with the rest of the items on the list. Next up, getting her to sleep in her own bed.

And speaking of the girl, she has reached that stage where you have to watch everything she does very closely. She’s one smart cookie and she has learned how to undo most of the childproof locks on our cabinets. We had to call Poison Control the other day because she got into one of the cabinets and sprayed Off Skintastic in her mouth. Luckily she didn’t ingest enough to do any harm. You can’t turn your back on her for a minute. On the other hand, she’s learning new words every day and we’re always amazed that we can understand what she is saying. She finally seems to be putting on some weight, and right before Christmas she finally passed the 20 pound mark so we were able to turn her car seat around to face forward. She loves being able to see what we’re seeing, and I can’t say I blame her.

The boy had a few rough patches at school before the winter break, and we’re hoping he does better this semester. I actually got a call from the principal twice in one week at one point. We started a reward system, and it seems to be working at times, but he just doesn’t seem to be able to stop himself from making bad choices. I suspect he’s probably just a typical 5 year-old boy. He’s still a very sweet boy though.

And finally, I’m not big on making New Year’s resolutions because I always break them. So this year I will just make the following statement: 2008 is going to be a year of change. This is going to be THE year I finally do something about the extra 60-70 pounds I have been carrying around for more years than I’d like to admit. And while working on my physical appearance, I am going to attempt to change my inner self as well. I want to be more patient, more relaxed, more zen-like. And since 2007 ended on such a positive note, I feel like I can really accomplish those goals in 2008.

Hope everyone has a wonderful 2008!

Stress

2007-10-30T15:51:00.000-05:00

So much for keeping my blog updated. I have so many posts swirling around in my head that I don’t even know where to start. I guess I can start with the thing that is most pressing on my mind lately: stress. I am so tired of feeling stressed and irritable. I think it’s a combination of a lot of things, but mostly it’s sleep deprivation and dealing with a toddler.

Sleep deprivation
My daughter is 18 months old and has never slept through the night. Well, maybe “never” is too strong a word because I’m sure there has been the occasional 6-7 hour stretch of sleep, but I’m too tired right now to remember when. I know without a doubt that this is my fault. I have always nursed her to sleep, and I have let her sleep in my bed with me. The parenting experts out there are sort of split on the co-sleeping thing, but I believe most experts would agree that nursing your baby to sleep is not beneficial. I know this yet I continue to do it because it’s EASY and it gets her to sleep at a decent hour so I can have my precious alone time from 8:30-10:30pm. This has become particularly problematic for us for the past few months as I am ready for her to wean already so I can have my body back to myself. She doesn’t want to quit. My husband thinks he is being helpful by telling me, “You need to wean her.” I say, “Yeah? Well, as soon as you can rearrange your schedule so that you are home at night to take care of her, I’ll get right on that!”

Parenting a toddler
Unless you have lived with a toddler, you can’t truly appreciate what a huge pain in the ass this stage of development is. It’s like living with a person who has bipolar disorder and who can’t communicate effectively. Here’s one example: The cute little person approaches and points to something on the kitchen counter and says, “Uh uh uh” (which roughly translates into “I want”) and when you innocently offer some Cheerios, the little person may dissolve into a screaming puddle of toddler on the floor because DUH, she wanted a banana! Don’t you understand what “Uh uh uh” means, dummy? Oh, and then there’s also the frustrating thing where she holds her arms up because she wants to be held. So you pick her up and then she wiggles to get out of your arms. As soon as you safely set her back down on the floor, she cries because you aren’t holding her anymore. So you pick her up again so she won’t freaking cry, and she wiggles to get out of your arms, etc. I freaking GIVE UP. And those are just two very small examples (about 2 minutes worth of time) of what she does All. Day. Long. Twenty four seven.

The maddening thing is that her behavior is completely age appropriate and normal. The problem is me. If I have learned anything about myself through my 5 years of motherhood, it is that I don’t enjoy parenting toddlers. I remember this stage with my son very well because I went to my doctor and begged for meds. I don’t know why I get so stressed out over parenting, but I do. Maybe it’s because I think I should strive to be a perfect June Cleaver type of mom and I am failing miserably.

I know I have much to be thankful for. I have been blessed with two beautiful, healthy children. I have a loving husband. I have friends (both online and in real life) and family that I can turn to. We have the basic necessities to get by (food, roof over our head, clothing, etc.). Yet I still find it hard to be happy. Why?

And just so you don’t think we’re all doom and gloom all the time, I’m posting a picture of the kids from this past weekend when we took them to Haunt the Zoo. My cute little pumpkin and Power Ranger (SPD, he had to be the Red Ranger from SPD). I hope everyone has a very Happy Halloween.

The journey to a pair of socks

2007-10-16T13:53:00.000-05:00

This past Saturday we went to Texas to celebrate the 90th birthday of the hubby’s grandmother (AKA “Mo”). When we first heard about the party several months ago, I knew right away that I wanted to knit her a pair of socks. I figured if she is anything like my own 90 year old grandmother, she has everything she will ever need or want for her house, but she would probably treasure something lovingly hand-knitted to keep her feet warm during the cold winter months. Plus, I felt pretty safe that nobody else was going to bring the same gift. So socks it was.

I let Hubby go through some of my sock yarn (I wasn’t foolish enough to let him see the entire stash) and he picked out the yarn, handpainted Merino from Sunshine Yarns in a colorway called Violets. This yarn was a gift from KatyaR for Christmas a couple of years ago. Oddly enough, the socks I made for my own grandmother were also made from purple gift yarn from KatyaR.

Once hubby chose the yarn, I had to pick a pattern. I let my MIL go through some of my books and we picked a couple of patterns together. And thus began my journey. I experimented with no less than 5 patterns before I finally decided which one to use for the socks. Some of the patterns were started more than once because I realized that the sock was going to be far too big or small, or I just HATED the pattern. I actually lost count of the number of times I ripped and restarted these damn socks. I have never had this much trouble choosing a pattern before! I finally went to Ravelry and did a search to see what everyone else had made with this same yarn, and I found someone who had the exact same colorway I was using, and I loved the pattern she used and how it looked with the yarn. I knew I had to throw originality out the window and copy this woman or I would never actually make the socks and Mo’s feet would stay cold this coming winter.

The pattern? Sheri’s Lace by Sockbug. Here are the results:

(modeled here by my lovely SIL Lisa's skinny legs)

Even though I was happy with the pattern, it still wasn’t a completely painless process, and I found that I had to pay very close attention to the lace portions, or I would have to rip back a row and try again. Also, for reasons I haven’t been able to figure out, my lace eyelets look much smaller and totally uneven compared to Sockbug’s. Anyone out there know why? I welcome any pointers.

Anyway, Happy 90th, Mo! I hope you and your feet are happy for many more years.

Also, here are a couple of pictures I took from Hubby's uncle's back yard (Lake Ray Hubbard, I love you!):

I think I may want to move. I could definitely get used to this view every day.

Fab Four Meme

2007-10-12T14:23:00.000-05:00

Erin tagged me, so here goes…

4 Jobs I’ve Held
Accounts Payable/Receivable Clerk
Commercial Lines Clerk (for an insurance company)
Medical Staff Assistant (for a hospital - HATED that)
Administrative Secretary

4 Films I Could Watch Over and Over
The Princess Bride
Lord of the Rings (any of them)
Harry Potter (any of them)
Pirates of the Caribbean

4 TV Shows I Watch
Lost
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
House
In the summer, I loved USA's Burn Notice

4 Places I’ve Lived
Sorry, I've only got two:
Oklahoma City, OK
Moore, OK

4 Favorite Foods
Mexican food
Pizza
Cheesecake
Ice cream

4 Websites I Visit Everyday
www.bloglines.com
www.ravelry.com
www.cnn.com
www.myspace.com (yes, believe it or not)

4 Favorite Colors
blue
purple
black
pink (only since I had my girl though)

4 Places I Would Love to Be Right Now
The beach
Doing something touristy in Europe
At Disneyworld (sorry, but I am a total Disney whore)
Sitting on the screened in porch of my dream home

4 Names I Love But Would/Could Not Use for my Children
Britney (Is anyone surprised by this?)
Niamh (I think it's actually pronounced "Nev" in Ireland. It's beautiful but the poor child would have to go through life without anyone being able to pronounce her name.)
Mariah (This was actually my great-great grandmother's name and we considered it for our girl, but all I can think of when I see it written is Mariah Carey, and I'm not a big fan.)
Kyle (because of the South Park song)

I'm going to tag KatyaR, Krista, Meira, and Rachel. If you don't want to do it though, no biggie.

Reunions and memories

2007-09-19T08:50:00.000-05:00

In high school I was painfully shy and introverted. We weren’t poor, but my parents weren’t wealthy either, and they weren’t going to go into debt buying the ridiculously expensive clothes that the cool kids wore (and rightfully so). I wasn’t as pretty as the popular girls, wasn’t athletic, and I had a tendency to be on the heavy side of the weight spectrum. When you consider that I also had very little self-confidence, you can imagine what a delightful experience high school was. I’m sure I’m not alone here.

Despite that, I have some great memories of high school, most of them involving band. I played the flute and piccolo and I felt at home among my fellow band geeks. I actually enjoyed showing up early in the morning for marching band practice, even when it was 30 degrees outside and I couldn’t feel my fingers. My band teacher (one of my favorite teachers of all time) would stand up on his scaffolding with his electronic megaphone, stomp his feet, and yell at us, “You guys look like a bunch of Jerry’s kids!” A lot of the other kids found him to be abrasive and mean, but there were a handful of us who loved Mr. P. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I was pretty good at the flute either. I was first chair from freshman through senior years, and he treated his first chairs somewhat as “pets.”

Two of the friends I was closest to in high school I am still close to today. I kissed my first boy in 11th grade, and he became my first official boyfriend. And then I experienced my first heartbreak when he dumped me for another girl, and then took me back, and then dumped me again, and then – you see where this is going? Ah, young love. Anyway, I finally dumped him when I met the boy who would one day become my husband. Best decision I ever made.

This summer was my 20th high school reunion. I wasn’t going to attend because I went to the 10th and it sucked big time. Ten years ago I pulled up to the school, and all my teenage insecurities came flooding back. We went right back to the same cliques we were in when we graduated, and the popular people were still popular and so full of themselves. I felt like I did in high school – like an ugly, unpopular, shy, nerdy, band geek. So I fully expected this year’s reunion to be the same way and I wanted no part of it. But then I got an email and two phone calls from friends strongly encouraging me to attend, and I decided to go at the last minute. And you know what? It was wonderful.

It was completely different from the 10 year in that there were no cliques and everybody talked to everybody. I actually had wonderful conversations with people who wouldn’t have given me the time of day back in high school. It was so much more relaxed and nobody was out to prove anything. Some were fatter and balder, and nobody seemed to care or judge others' looks. It was just wonderful, and if I hadn’t gone I might not have rekindled some old friendships. And guess what? Mr. P showed up for the Friday night festivities at the school! It was great to see him again, and he even remembered me. We got to tour the school and show our families the classes and lockers we used to have. We went to tour the band room and when I opened the door, I was hit by a very strange and familiar smell. It's not a bad smell and I honestly couldn't describe it if you asked me to, but the band room smell EXACTLY the same way it did twenty years ago. It was a little frightening along the tour to see the new metal detectors installed at all the major entrances to the school, and a sad reminder of their necessity.

The weirdest thing about the entire reunion was when one of my old school buds told me that she couldn’t help but snicker when she saw my name tag. She said my married name means “lesbian” in German. I said, “Really? I’ve been married 15 years and nobody has ever told me that.” I honestly don't think she meant it in a mean way at all, but thanks to the lovely Krista, I know that she was mistaken. (Not that it would have been a bad thing if my name did mean lesbian either because, hey, I don't judge.) Oddly enough, my very first memory ever of school had to do with this same girl. It was the first day of first grade, my dad had just dropped me off at the classroom, and I was terrified. The teacher introduced me to the class and Stephanie came over and grabbed my hand and led me to my desk. It was such a nice welcome and it obviously left a lasting impression. But I digress. The entire point of this long post is to say that if it's reunion time for you and you are hesitating, you should really consider going. I took a chance and it was well worth it.

If you want to see any pictures, I have posted some on my Flickr account HERE.

First visit from the Tooth Fairy

2007-08-16T15:35:00.000-05:00

My son had had a loose tooth for almost a month. When we arrived home from daycare on Monday, he said, “Hey mom, watch this.” I watched as he moved it to a 90 degree angle, still attached to his gums. He was delighted by the horrified look on my face, which tells me that is what he intended all along. The little imp.

I told him that if his tooth could withstand being at a 90 degree angle, it would probably come out with little effort. We went to the bathroom and he tried very gently pulling on it. It didn’t budge. Excited by the thought of a visit from the Tooth Fairy, he told me I could pull it. This sort of shocked me because most of the time, he is (how shall I put this nicely?) a wimp. Nevertheless, I grabbed a hold of his tooth and gave a firm tug. And just like that, I had a tiny tooth in my palm. I was almost as excited as the day he got his first tooth.

We had a few tense minutes where he panicked because he saw blood, but when that was over, he grabbed his tooth and ran upstairs to put it in his Tooth Fairy pillow. (I ordered it from THIS Etsy seller, and since they were so reasonably priced, I went ahead and ordered one for the baby too. She’ll need one eventually, right?) He even made sure the pillow was easily accessible to the Tooth Fairy.

When it was time for bed, he was so excited he couldn’t sleep. It was adorable, except that I was trying to stay awake as well so that I could make sure that the, ahem, Tooth Fairy visited. I finally gave up and called my husband who said he would take care of everything. I woke up around 3:00am and heard my husband traipsing around the house, and I knew the Tooth Fairy had been there.

The next morning my son came to see me while I was drying my hair, and he looked worried. I asked, “Did the Tooth Fairy come to see you last night?” He had a hard time looking at me and he said, “Well, he lives a long ways away from my house.” I said, “What? Didn’t he didn’t come to see you?” He said, “Not yet, he lives a long ways away.” I said, “Are you sure? Let me see your pillow.” We went to his room and I showed him that the tooth was gone, and I glanced down and noticed two gold dollar coins that had fallen in between the pillows on his bed. I told him “Your tooth is gone. The Tooth Fairy wouldn’t take your tooth and not leave something for you, so let’s look around and see if maybe something fell out of your tooth pillow, ok?” I moved the pillows on the bed and his eyes grew huge as he yelled, “OOH, MONEEEEEEEY!”

I observed something inspiring from my son that morning. He actually made up an excuse as to why he thought the Tooth Fairy hadn’t come to see him. Even though he was visibly upset, he had used the words “not yet,” which to me meant that he still had hope that the Tooth Fairy would visit. We had told him about the Tooth Fairy before he lost his tooth, but we had no idea if he understood how the process worked. Yet he was ready to give the Tooth Fairy the benefit of the doubt when he thought that s/he didn’t come to get his tooth. We don’t know if this is a learned behavior or if it’s just part of his personality, but we appreciate his optimism. If he can give someone the benefit of the doubt, perhaps we can too.

Being completely ridiculous

2007-08-14T13:09:00.000-05:00

I have been a bad blogger lately. I originally started blogging as a way to keep my out-of-town family and friends in the loop about the happenings in my family, which is great if I actually take the time to write something. And there are TONS of things to write about lately, so I will try to be better about making time to blog.

First and foremost, the girl has tubes. Her ENT doctor said she definitely needed them and wanted to work us in as soon as humanly possible. Being the informed parent that I am due to the obsessive amount of research I did on tubes (or bilateral myringotomy with tubes, if you want to get specific), I worried very little about this. Her daddy, on the other hand, freaked the hell out. He scheduled to take off that day and he was so worried that he was even going to have his parents come sit with us in the waiting room during her surgery. I tried to tell him it's not really a surgery, per se, but more a procedure that must be done under anesthesia. It's also far less risky than the outpatient surgery I had 3 years ago where they removed my gallbladder. Hello! Remember that? I had an entire organ removed and you didn't worry about me the way you are fretting about Kelsey getting tubes. I said, "You know you're being completely ridiculous, right?" "Yes, but you do this kind of thing all the time." "Yeah, but I'm the mom. It's my JOB."

So we took her to the outpatient surgery center on August 6th at 7:00am and did all the pre-op paperwork. We met with various nurses, an anesthesiologist, and her doctor. It was a quick and easy procedure that took all of 10 minutes, and they gave her inhaled gas to put her under instead of an IV. She woke up in recovery about 5 minutes after the procedure was over and was very quiet at first. I mistakenly thought to myself, “Wow, this was easier than I thought it would be.” That’s when she started screaming. And screaming. And screaming some more. The anesthesiologist had warned us that most kids have that reaction so we were prepared. We tried to offer her food, drink, a boob, anything to make her calm down, and our offers to help only seemed to make her angry and she screamed louder. This lasted about 30 minutes until finally the anesthesia wore off a little and I started walking around the recovery area with her. The post-op nurse told us we were free to go, and we were home by 9:00am. She was fine the rest of the day, although she took a few more naps than usual. By mid to late afternoon she was giggling and trying to tackle her brother, so we considered her officially recovered. So far the only setback she has had since her procedure was when one of her ears started draining last Thursday, and y’all, that was gross. I know it’s perfectly common for that to happen and that’s what the tubes are designed for…but still. Gross.

By far the highlight of that day was when I was sitting on the toilet and my son yelled to me, “Mom, there’s a lady on the phone who says the policeman is going to come see us.” I told him to bring me the phone, looked at the readout, and it said 911. Here’s how the conversation went:
Me: Hello?
911: Yes, ma’am. Your child dialed 911.
Me: Oh my God.
911: Do you have an emergency?
Me: No, there’s no emergency. I am so sorry.
911: That’s alright, ma’am. You are sure you have no emergency?
Me: Yes, I’m positive there is no emergency. My son recently learned about 911 at daycare and now I’ll have a talk with him about when it’s appropriate to call. I am VERY sorry.
911: That’s quite alright, ma’am. Have a good day.

While I am supremely happy that he knows how to dial 911 if we need him to, we did sit down and talk about how you ONLY dial it if there is a true emergency. My boy… Of course, then I hurriedly tidied up the house just in case they sent an officer over anyway. Because it's my job to be completely ridiculous.

Random updates

2007-07-03T13:54:00.000-05:00

Things have been busy busy busy here in my little corner of the world. And while I like being busy, I haven’t had much time lately to post. So I present a series of random updates in bullet form:

Boy child: He is driving everyone crazy with the talking. He never stops. Ever. There is no ceasing of the talking, even when you ask him to please be quiet. In fact, that seems to be nothing more than a challenge to him to talk more. My husband is by far the more patient parent of the two of us, and I have noticed lately that even HE is annoyed. We pick him up from daycare and find notes like “Talking a lot and not listening today” in his cubby. I am ashamed to admit that I have even begun using phrases that I’m not fond of, such as “Please, for the love of God, shut up!” I think telling someone to shut up is disrespectful and it’s not something that I want him to repeat to others, but when being polite doesn’t get the desired result, what else is there? And do you know how I know he will repeat it to others? Because he is a little sponge. The two seconds when he does stop talking long enough to hear what is going on around him, he has heard some doozies, which his little sponge brain absorbed and waited for the appropriate time to repeat. For example, on Mother’s Day morning he stubbed his toe on the banister of the stairs and yelled, “Son of a bitch!” Of course, I immediately felt the stabbing pains of maternal guilt because I know without a doubt he heard me say that when I have hurt myself. My people, we are a clumsy bunch. But other than the talking and swearing, he has been an utter delight. He’s also become rather protective of his little sister. We went to a wedding in Arkansas recently and he got to play with a couple of his second cousins. Kelsey went toddling along after them and one of the little boys took her hand and was walking next to her. Braden yelled, “Don’t touch my sister!” The hubby told him to calm down and said, “They can play with her too.” So Braden turned back to the boys and said, “Ok, you can LOOK at her then.” Something tells me she’s going to have big trouble when it comes time to start dating.

Girl child: We have started calling her McScreamy. At 14 months, she can already throw herself down on the floor and have a colossal temper tantrum if something is taken away from her, or if you have the nerve to set her down on the floor while you use the restroom, or cook, or pretty much do anything other than holding her. And y’all, that child is LOUD. She screams and the hubby comes running to see what happened, because with that much screaming, she must have lost a finger. Nope. She’s just unhappy and wants everyone to know it. But in her defense, she has had a lot to be unhappy about lately. She has been on antibiotics 9 times since the beginning of the year, all due to her ears (plus an eye drop antibiotic for conjunctivitis that cost us $60 for 3ml* – WTF???). We FINALLY have an appointment with the ENT specialist later this month to discuss tubes. And I can’t wait. I am so ready for her to start feeling better. And then maybe when she starts feeling better we can work on the whole weaning process. My goal was to breastfeed for a year, but she has a slightly higher number in mind. The only problem is that she nurses mainly for comfort and I turn into a giant pacifier, and she screams when the pacifier goes away. But I think it would be cruel to withhold her beloved pacifiers right now so we’ll work on getting her healthy and then worry about weaning her from the comfort nursing. On the positive side of things, she is just so delightful! She is learning the different facial features, and can point to her nose, as well as everyone else’s. She even tried to say the word “nose” the other day as she was pointing to hers, and it was adorable. She says mama and dada and I think she says ball, although it comes out as “ba.” “Ba” is one of those sounds that could mean just about anything. Oh, and she already has a thing for shoes and purses, which is just unbelievably cute (right now). Here’s a picture of her wearing my insulated lunch tote as a purse:

Work: My boss retired and as of yesterday, I officially have a new boss. So far he seems very nice, but it has been hard to get a feel for his management style in the two meetings we have had in the past month. Old boss had the tendency to be a tactless a-hole at times and I am hoping new boss won’t be that way (and so far I don’t get that impression at all). But still, it’s a change. And we have all been working hard to make sure everything was completed before the old boss left. It coincided with end of the fiscal year, so I have been busier than usual (which is good). Anyway, last Thursday we all went out for drinks after work to celebrate old boss’s last day. At the end of the evening we were all hugging old boss and he was giving us a peck on the cheek. We had this really awkward moment because I didn’t know which way to turn my head so we kept doing that thing – you know that thing that happens when you are trying to go through a door and there’s someone coming the other way and you don’t know who should go first so you both start and then stop and then start, until finally one person just waves the other through? It was sort of like that. And he stopped and said, “Well, I wasn’t going to go there.” He actually thought I was trying to kiss him on the lips and that’s why I kept turning my head! EWWWWW! I just laughed and said, “I wasn’t either!” Then I went to my car and wanted to dry heave. So it’s a good thing he’s gone because now I have that memory forever etched into my brain. Hopefully there will be no awkward hugging with new boss.

Knitting: I have two items that I am finished knitting, but now need some seaming. And I will put that part off as long as I can because I loathe seaming. I’m not sure why exactly, but I freely admit it. So hopefully in the next couple of weeks I can eke out enough time to work on those and get them finished. I also have a surprise to show:
It’s still pretty uneven and has too much twist in places, but it’s the most yarn-like thing I have spun to date. If this keeps up, I will have to get my own wheel…

Politics: Ann Coulter is a bitch. That is all.

*$60 was my copay. The eye drops actually cost $71.99. For 3ml, which is just a little over a 1/2 teaspoon. How can they seriously charge that much for antibiotic eye drops??? And if anyone is curious, the drug is called Vigamox.

Have a safe and happy 4th!

The best kind of friend

2007-06-15T14:05:00.000-05:00

Have you ever met a new friend and immediately just clicked? Or talked to someone and felt as if you knew them all your life? I felt that way when I met my dear friend, KatyaR. We met a few years ago when she started working at the desk across the room from mine, and I liked her instantly. One day she brought in a sock that she was knitting and I was intrigued. She started trying to teach me how to knit but I was too impatient and gave up. About a year went by and she started knitting the cutest little layette set for an expecting coworker. I begged her to teach me again, and thus began my obsession with knitting. She has even been very patient at teaching me how to spin, further enabling my fiber art pursuits.

She has been like the older sister that I always wanted and never had. She’s always supportive, enabling (in a good way), and there when I need her. She was present for the birth of Kelsey and I was extremely honored to share that experience with her. She is wonderful with Braden, and more patient than most people would be around a child of his, ahem, activity level and attention span. He even started calling her Aunt without any prompting from anyone. If my kid loves her enough to include her in the family, she must be a good person!

I also credit Katya with awakening my inner politico. Before I met her I was content to just vote the way my parents always did. I was a sheep, never really giving any thought to what my own beliefs were when it came to choosing someone to run my city, state, or country. Now I have very strong opinions about issues and I vote for the candidate who feels the same way I do, which is usually in opposition of my parents. And now I don’t mind sharing/debating my views with my family and friends. While this is not necessarily something my parents are happy about, I think it’s wonderful.

So why am I telling you about this? Today is Katya’s birthday! And not just any birthday, but a special birthday (translation: a milestone birthday that I will not reveal in fear that she will disown me). Go over to her blog and show her some love!

And to Katya, I love ya, girl! I really couldn’t ask for a better friend.

Birthday girl

2007-05-17T16:34:00.000-05:00

Can you believe it has been a year already? I certainly can’t. Miss Kelsey had a wonderful first birthday. We had a small party for her at our house and she seemed to really have a good time. Of course, I have pictures to show…

The cake pictures are my favorites!

I took pictures with both my film and digital cameras and was shocked to discover that I took 30 pictures of my daughter eating cake. Thirty. Three zero. Of nothing but her eating cake. At first I thought I might have some type of illness, some type of photo OCD, if you will. I think subconsciously I was trying to recreate this picture of my son’s first birthday.

And I got pretty close:

These two pictures are getting framed together and hung up on a wall somewhere in the house.

Kelsey impressed everyone at the party with her mad walking skills, and showed how to wave hello and goodbye. She surprised us by actually playing with the toys and not just the boxes or the tissue from the gift bags. But she really enjoyed the cake.

At her one year checkup she measured in the 25th percentile for height and was only 3rd percentile for weight (she weighed a whopping 17lbs, 5oz). I was a little worried at first because at her past checkups she was 25th percentile and then 10th, and now 3rd, but the doctor assured me she is fine. She still has plenty of fat on her and she doesn’t look too skinny, and as long as she continues to gain weight, we have nothing to worry about. She’s just petite. So when we are out shopping and strangers make comments like, “Oh my, she’s so tiny”, I will resist the urge to yell, “No, she’s PERFECT!”

She is entering a really fun stage and we are enjoying her so much more right now. She mimics us and interacts with us better, and she’s just so cute! One of my favorite things that she does right now is hug her stuffed animals. You can hand one to her and ask “Will you give your bear a hug?” She hugs it with her arms and even leans her head in close. It’s the cutest! She’s very cuddly and loving and I can’t believe I ever hoped she would be a boy.

Happy Birthday, sweet girl. We love you!

Perspective

2007-04-19T11:35:00.000-05:00

When I wrote my last post, I was clearly wallowing in a big steaming pile of self-pity. I was trying to get out of the pile, but I was still there nonetheless. Then a couple of things happened this week and I started feeling a little guilty for feeling so sorry for myself.

The Virginia Tech shootings: People are dead all because of one very sick individual. Some parents lost their only child because of this unfathomable event. Many, many lives have changed and an entire community (entire nation, even) is reeling. Perspective.
My stepfather had to have most of his colon removed in an emergency surgery, and will now live out the rest of his days with a colostomy pouch. While that’s not an impossible thing to live with, and I’m sure many people adjust just fine and remain productive members of society, I’m a little worried about how he is going to adjust to this life changing experience. I’m also worried about my very tired mother driving back and forth from OKC to Muskogee/Eufaula to take care of him, all while trying to keep her new job. They have been very understanding so far, but I know a day will soon come to an end. And then there’s also the fact that she burned up the motor in her car driving to see him before the surgery. Her stress level far exceeds mine at this point. More perspective.

So I’ve realized that no matter how bad I think my problems are (and in the grand scheme of things, they aren’t that bad), things can ALWAYS be worse. There will always be someone out there hurting more than me, more lonely than me, and more stressed than me. So my thinking is a little clearer now and I’m thinking more positively. This was a good lesson for me to learn. But I do appreciate all the comments and emails. You guys are all incredibly sweet and if I ever meet any of you in person, I will smother you in hugs.

My hero

2007-04-10T16:05:00.000-05:00

I’ve been keeping a secret lately. I’m not happy. I am deeply and profoundly unhappy, and it is starting to affect all aspects of my life. It is mostly due to my feelings of inadequacy at being a good mother. I am overwhelmed just trying to keep us all fed and clean, just doing the bare minimum of what needs to be done every night with little to no support from my spouse. In short, I feel as if I’m failing. Not that I am trying to be a perfect mom or anything, but I feel like I’m failing at just squeaking by. Plus I have been irritable, short-tempered, weepy, and have had a tendency to yell around my kids. I have been struggling with whether or not I should make an appointment with my doctor and discuss the possibility of meds. But I think I mentioned once before that I have done the medication route twice in my life and while it helped at the time, the weaning process was not something I ever want to go through again. It was brutal. However, here I am once again considering medication to help me deal with my feelings of inadequacy and guilt, loneliness, and those thoughts of “Exactly what possessed me to decide to have not just one, but two children?” Add to that one heaping helping of separation anxiety, and you have a recipe for depression.

Enter my mom.

My mother and her husband recently decided that the job opportunities in small town Oklahoma were not plentiful enough to sustain their long-term financial goals, and she would have much better luck coming back to Oklahoma City and looking for a job. She found one! Her husband is in the process of fixing up their house and getting it ready to sell, and she is staying with us through the week nights and going home on the weekends. Once they sell their house, they will look for a place to buy here. One benefit of this plan is that she gets to spend a whole lot more time with her grandchildren. The benefit to me is that I have HELP. I have another adult in the house during the week that I can talk to about things other than the Backyardigans or Ninja Turtles. Baby girl has a loving Grammy here to hold her while I do a few dishes or maybe even a load of laundry. I have time to read to my son without baby girl climbing on me and crying because I’m not holding her. But mostly I am just enjoying not feeling lonely. I know that sounds crazy, feeling lonely when you aren’t actually ever alone, but trust me, it’s accurate. You can be surrounded by your kids 24/7 and if you don’t have another adult to converse with, it gets pretty damn lonely.

I love my kids. I really do. I don’t regret having them, and I still consider them my greatest joy in life. But above being a mom, I am still my own person and I think sometimes that identity gets lost. With my mom here, I am able to be a little more Missy and less Mommy. So my mom is my hero. Her being at my house for the past couple of weeks has done wonders for my disposition, and I think I can make it through this latest blue spell without medication. For now, anyway.

It's Spring

2007-03-19T11:15:00.000-05:00

Spring is officially here, no matter what the calendar says.

This is the Bradford pear tree in our front yard in full bloom. It’s one of the things that I love about our house. We’ve lived here for almost 7 ½ years and I learned something new this year – when the tree first starts to bloom, it smells like a rotting corpse. I actually called the hubby and told him that something had died in our front yard and he needed to locate it and dispose of it pronto. He never could find the dead creature. The next day I was at work and walked by the Bradford pears in front of our building and smelled the same odor. Then a coworker commented about the Bradford pears around her back patio and how badly they smelled this year and I finally realized it was the blooms I was smelling, and not a dead animal in the front yard. The funny thing is I don’t remember them smelling this awful before. And now about a week after they started blooming, the smell is almost gone. Weird.

With the tree blooming and flowers blowing down onto the driveway, the boy has been picking a pretty one every day just for me. And he is so excited that he is able to do this. The first day he saw them strewn about, he grabbed a pretty one off the ground and said excitedly, “Look mom! Aren’t they pretty? I’m going to put this in your room so you’ll have sweet, sweet dreams.” (Now, if you read that last sentence and didn’t think, “Awwwww,” then you don’t have a heart.) And sure enough, when I was getting ready to go to bed that night, there it was on the nightstand on my side of the bed.

I overlooked the fact that the bloom smelled horrible because the gesture was so sweet. And one bloom doesn’t really stink up the room anyway. That sweet boy of mine, he’s a keeper!

Five and full of fun

2007-03-09T10:32:00.000-06:00

In case you haven’t noticed by the new tickers I added at the top of this page, SOMEBODY had a 5th birthday recently. Instead of getting into the whole Lets Invite Everyone at Daycare or Let’s Invite Everyone at School (because let’s face it, you either invite the whole class or nobody) and having a potential monster party that we weren’t financially prepared for, we opted for a smallish gathering at home with family and good friends. The theme this year was Pirates of the Caribbean, because our house is all about Disney.

Here is the birthday boy in his Pirates t-shirt.

The cake.

One of his favorite gifts, from his Auntie KatyaR, of course. It's a raincoat!

Oh, and my personal favorite, the Batman outfit for his Build-a-Bear. I don’t think he’s ever going to take this outfit off the bear. Of course, the hubby and I had to crack some jokes later about how the mask resembles something….um…latex-ish and not appropriate for kids (if you get my meaning).

Just for fun, we stuck baby sister in one of the boxes and took a picture of her.

And then, I was able to give him these:

I FINALLY finished knitting these after a year. I think the yarn is Schoeller Stahl Fortissima, but I'm not positive and have since lost all the ball bands. The pattern is based on the sock in Ann Budd's book. The design was purchased on ebay from a lady who takes images and charts them into designs for cross sitch projects. I simply told her how many stitches wide and high I needed, and she easily worked it out for me. This was my first foray into two-color knitting, and honestly, I’m not sure if this actually qualifies as intarsia or fair isle and I’m too lazy to look it up right now. I learned that I need a LOT more practice because I’m not very good at it yet, but I don’t think the boy is going to mind at all. It’s my first finished object in a LONG time, but I’m already at work on some socks for the hubby and I have 2 other projects lined up for the near future, so hopefully I will be finding more time to knit.

Even though it’s only March, it’s already been a challenging year for the boy as far as daycare issues go. He got a new teacher and all the kids had to test her to see how much they could get away with. The room is predominantly males of the extremely active variety. Braden has been routinely getting his name written on the board (which means he was naughty), and he has been disobeying on the bus to school. After every episode we have to have a “talk” and reinforce the rules, which, let’s face it – he’s FIVE! He’s doing good if he can remember to flush the toilet. Oh, and then there was the incident where the daycare forgot to pick him up at school. Bottom line is that if we can just hold off a couple more months, school will be over and we can find a new daycare. Or we could get lucky and win the lottery, in which case I will be staying home with the kids.

Sharing something special

2007-02-27T16:24:00.000-06:00

I’d like to tell you all about one of my most favorite people in the entire world, my grandmother. Maw-Maw is a very crafty person and it is from her that I inherited my love of crafts. She taught me to crochet when I was a little girl, and since I am left-handed and she is right-handed, I learned by sitting across from her and mirroring what her hands were doing. At 90 years old she still sews, crochets, embroiders, and quilts like nobody’s business. The closets in her house are full of beautiful quilts that she has made, however, none of them have as much meaning as the quilt below:

When my Paw-Paw died in 1993, she carefully cut apart his neckties and made a quilt with the pieces. She edged the quilt with a shiny brown and burgundy rayon. Here are some close-ups:

After she sewed the pieces together, she went back over them with zigzag and briar stitches.

I absolutely love it and it brings back many good memories of my Paw-Paw as well. As she and I visited last weekend, she began to show me quilts that she hasn’t finished yet and there was a quilt that was her mother’s that she was repairing. It’s a beautiful quilt with big, embroidered butterflies on it. Like a lot of people her age, she is concerned that she won’t be able to finish everything before her time on this earth ends. She fretted out loud about who would finish her mother’s quilt. I said, “Maw-Maw, if you don’t get it finished, I will learn how to finish it.” She looked at me, smiled, and said, “Yes, you’re about the only one I would trust to finish it.” I was flooded with pride and sadness at the same time. She has been such a huge influence on my life, and I don’t even want to think about her not being around anymore, yet I know that day will come all too soon. But when it does, I will lovingly finish all the projects that she didn’t have time to.

Nine months

2007-02-09T16:54:00.000-06:00

Baby girl is now nine months old. Here are some pictures for your enjoyment:

Do these pictures mean that she sleeps all the time? Oh, how I wish that were so. No, it’s simply easier to take a good picture of her sleeping because she’s not a moving target. I only have a handful of good pictures of her awake right now. Most of them have part of her head cut off or are out of focus like this:

(Side note to hubby: This is why I want a digital SLR camera! So I can take good pictures and not have to deal with the dreaded shutter lag of a regular digital camera. I shoot everything in action mode just to speed it up, but it’s still slow. Also, she anticipates the flash when the infrared autofocus beam goes out, so it’s harder to get a picture of her sweet smile. Kim, back me up here, please.)

So what fun things is she doing now? She is crawling everywhere and pulling up on everything and just busy busy busy. She will also pull up on something and let go and just stand there, and her balance is already better than mine so surely cruising and walking aren’t far behind. She’s not exactly talking, but she will make cute little noises and when she’s really upset she’ll say “ma ma ma ma ma.” She has discovered how to scream and she can do it very loudly, always followed with a big smile, as if she is delighted by the sound. When she sees me cringe, she does it even louder, so I try not to react when that noise starts in the hopes that she will grow bored and stop.

She finally cut two teeth this month and between teething and wanting to be constantly on the move, is fully in the throes of the dreaded nine month sleep regression (go here to read more about sleep regressions). And we won’t even mention the separation anxiety. Good times. But all in all, she’s an absolute delight and I wouldn’t trade her for all the sleeping babies in the world.

Her brother is quite proud of her too. At daycare the other day I had her in the carrier and I set it on the ground while I talked to the teacher. A little boy the same age as Braden came over and started playing with her feet and talking to her. Braden let the boy linger for a few seconds and then said, “Ok, that’s enough.” The little boy ignored him and started playing with Kelsey’s hands, so Braden said more forcefully, “OK, I said that’s enough!” The little boy still ignored him so Braden started to try to push him away and the teacher and I had to intervene. God help her when she starts dating.

Six weird things

2007-02-06T15:53:00.000-06:00

Because Krista tagged me, here are Six Different Things About Me:

1) In the late 80’s, I was sort of a metalhead. My friend was dating a guy who played guitar in a heavy metal band and we went to all their gigs. This usually meant we dressed up in slutty, all black outfits with lots of chain-type accessories, tons of eye makeup and used about a can of hairspray on our ratted, big hair. We were pretty scary looking. I need to look and see if I still have any pictures from that era. I don't really dig that type of music anymore though.

2) I have a strong aversion to loud noises now. And you know those guys with the speakers in the back of their cars that are so loud that the bass from their rap music rattles your chest inside your car even though you are like 2 car-lengths ahead? My secret wish is that I had some type of telekinetic superpower that I could use to blow up their speakers. Ditto for the guys who pull up next to you at the gas station who force you to listen to their music, especially if there is liberal use of the F word while your children are with you in your car.

3) I was a band geek and played the flute and piccolo in Junior High and High School. In fact, I was first chair flute in grades 9-12. Half the year we did marching band and the other half was concert band. Some of my favorite memories of school were of performing during halftime at the football games, and the band trips that we took to Colorado and Florida.

4) I grew up wanting to be a veterinarian but I changed my mind during a Career Day in Junior High when one came to our class to talk about his career. He said that in order to get into veterinary school, you had to meet with a review panel and tell them why you wanted to become a veterinarian, and they didn’t want to hear “because I love animals and I want to help them.” The thought of having to come up with something completely original to tell the review panel paralyzed me with fear. That and the fact that I wasn’t very good in math or science made me decide that perhaps veterinary medicine wasn’t my calling.

5) I have a somewhat overactive imagination and have imagined many horrible ways to die, not in a suicidal way, but more in a “gee I hope that never happens to me” way. This stems from watching too many horror films as a youngster and more recently, too much CSI. I don’t watch horror films anymore, but I still love me some CSI.

6) If I am a guest at someone’s house and need to use the restroom, and they have a shower curtain hanging over the tub in said bathroom, I will look behind it to make sure nobody is lurking there waiting to jump out and scare/harm me. This has never actually happened to me so I don’t know where that particular irrational fear comes from. I actually have many other irrational fears too. Perhaps I need to explore them in therapy.

This was fun! I'm not going to tag anyone, but I would love to read others. Anyone???

It’s that time of year again

2007-01-25T16:53:00.000-06:00

‘Tis the season for sniffles, runny noses, coughs, and fevers. It’s officially germ season. And my kids are infected big time. Baby girl is on her third round of antibiotics since December 29th. When she gets finished with this one, she will have been on antibiotics for 30 of the past 35 days. First it was a single ear infection, then a double ear infection right on the heels of the first, and now strep. She could really use a break. The boy was fortunate to get strep too so now they are both on meds. But between the illnesses and school being closed for a week due to icy roads, you can imagine what a fun month this has been. I started wondering if maybe I was experiencing some sort of delayed PPD, but after a couple of days of crying and feeling sorry for myself, I snapped out of it and started making a conscious effort to be more positive about the things that were going wrong around me. And I started feeling a lot better. But it’s starting to look like things are on the upswing and the kids are starting to feel better and hopefully (knocks on wood, crosses fingers, says prayer) we will all be going back to daycare/school/work tomorrow. Wish us luck!

Also, thank you for all the nice comments regarding my dog. It really means a lot to me and I’m sorry I haven’t responded to everyone. I’m really handling it better than I thought I would, but then I have loads of things to keep me busy so I don’t think about it as much. The hardest part has been explaining the concept of death to my son. He didn’t seem sad at all, but he definitely didn’t seem to understand. He kept asking when Oscar was coming home. We tried all the gentle ways to explain it, but finally I just thought I’d be brutally honest. I told him Oscar was dead and never coming back. He thought about it for a while and then asked, “Who killed him?” I said, “Nobody, honey. He was just old and sick and he died.” Then he asked, “Did a policeman shoot him?” (Apparently we need to monitor the television a little better.) I tried to explain that death was just a part of life, and that sometimes animals (and people) get old and sick and die. And then we took a walk today and passed a woman walking her dog. He told her that her dog was pretty and that our dog was dead. So maybe he gets it now.

Lookie - I made yarn

2007-01-15T15:06:00.000-06:00

Sort of. Because KatyaR was eager to pass on another fiber obsession, she gave me some gorgeous targhee roving at Christmas and brought over her Babe spinning wheel and gave me spinning lessons. And y'all, spinning is hard. My first three attempts are pictured below.

Attempt 1 is greatly overspun, 2 is mostly underspun, and 3 is a nice mixture of the two. She brought over tons of practice fiber so that I can try to get the hang of it before spinning the good stuff she gave me at my birthday or Christmas, but I'm a little afraid that I will blow through the practice fiber and still suck. So stay tuned and we'll see if I can get the hang of it.

In addition to the fiber, she also brought me this:

It's sock yarn that she dyed herself! She calls this colorway Holiday and I can't wait to see how it knits up. I love the label she made for it too. Behind it is a heavy worsted wool hank that she spun herself with my little princess in mind. The colorway is called Muppet Guts (named by the lady who dyed the roving) and there's about 320 yards here, which I think is perfect for the cardigan on the cover of this book.

There were some other gifts as well and I'm extremely embarassed because my gift to her paled greatly in comparison, but my absolute favorite things are these:

They are adorable little clay stitch markers that she bought from this seller on Etsy. (LOVE Etsy!)

I'm telling you, she ROCKS! You know what else rocks? This stuff:

Brought all the way from Houston by my good friend, Kim. Take a cracker and put a little cream cheese and a small dollop of this stuff on it and you have Heaven on a cracker.

Thank you, guys! I love ya!

We've been stuck at home for a few days because of this:

I know it doesn't look like much, but underneath the snow/sleet mixture is an inch of ice. Oklahoma is full of idiot drivers on a good day, so you can imagine what ice does to our city. It pretty much shuts down. I know all over the country, they must be laughing their asses off, but trust me, it's safer if we just all stay home. The kids have been pretty good so far (knock on wood) so I'm getting a little bit of knitting done and have been able to tackle a couple of cleaning/reorganizing projects as well. One of the reorgaizing projects was to get all my yarn into one place. I was astonished at how much yarn I have. So I have decided to join Wendy's Knit From Your Stash this year.

I will follow her rules except I will try to refrain from even buying sock yarn. That shouldn't be too hard seeing as how I have enough sock yarn to keep me going for a couple of years. And that's good because knitting helps me relax and I'm all about relaxing here lately, but that's a post for another day.

Stay warm out there!

Goodbye, old friend

2006-12-27T22:14:00.000-06:00

Back in the spring of 1991, I was engaged but living by myself and eager for canine companionship. A friend of mine told me that a lady she worked with had found a puppy in her neighborhood and wanted to know if I was interested. It was love at first site. He was a cute little black puff ball and the vet estimated he was about 5 weeks old and had some kind of wire-haired terrier in him. He was a feisty little thing and I named him Oscar.

As a young pup he would climb any obstacle that separated him from me or any of the fun, “forbidden” objects in the house, and he would give you a cute little puppy growl if you tried to take anything away from him. In October of that year, the hubby and I married and he moved in. A territory war began between my two guys. Oscar would frequently choose the hubby’s clothes to chew or pee on, and he was often the subject of our early marriage fights. In fact, one night it became so bad that my husband said it was either him or the dog. I chose the dog, but then decided to meet him halfway and try obedience lessons.

From the first lesson I was hooked. I learned so much about dogs and their behavior, body language, and the ways they communicate, and most importantly, I learned how to make my dog behave using positive reinforcement. I also learned the importance of crate training. I can honestly say that dog obedience lessons saved my marriage. We took lessons for several years, and I was encouraged to take up competition training by one of my good friends and teacher. Even though Oscar was a mutt, I found out I could register him with the United Kennel Club (UKC) and show him in obedience as an American Mixed Breed dog. We registered and soon a UKC-sanctioned trial came to our area. We entered and competed against a couple other dogs in his bracket and took first place. Our performance was far from perfect and honestly, I think one of the judges just felt sorry for us, but we got the certificate to say he earned his CDX. It was an awesome feeling.

Even though we earned our certificate in obedience, Oscar was never the type of dog you could really trust around small children or other dogs. He was aggressive and territorial so we retired and only occasionally practiced our old obedience routines. Over the years he became more cantankerous as he got older – a true Oscar the Grouch. When we had our son, we were very careful when he had any interactions with Oscar. Oscar wanted nothing to do with Braden, and Braden learned to leave Oscar alone. By the time Kelsey was born this year, Oscar had already been confined to the dining room as it has a tile floor and he had frequent accidents.

In the days leading up to Christmas, it was apparent that he was becoming more and more confused and when let outside, he would frequently stand staring at the grass as if he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. This was especially troublesome because we have a pool in the backyard and we were afraid that he would fall in and drown. The past 3 mornings we woke up to find him completely unaware that he was lying in his own feces, and we decided that it was time to say goodbye. I took him to the veterinary clinic this morning and the doctor was very kind and talked to me for a long time about this decision. He agreed that Oscar’s quality of life was greatly diminished and it was time. I made peace with my decision, said a tearful goodbye and left him in the vet’s care. I could have held him while the vet administered the euthanasia drugs, but I just didn’t think I’d be able to handle that. All I can do is pray that he had a very peaceful passing.

Goodbye, old friend. You were a good companion to me for 15½ years and I hope to see you again some day, when we cross the Rainbow Bridge together.

Thankful

2006-12-11T14:18:00.000-06:00

No, this is not another late post that should have been written around Thanksgiving telling you what I’m thankful for. (Ok, it sort of is, but play along with me here.) So lately the kiddos have been driving me a little bit batty. I think that’s normal when you have to spend time with anyone 24/7. “But Missy,” you say, “you’re not with your kids 24/7. You work, remember?” Ah yes, and I am thankful for that job because it gives me a break from the crazy. We recently had 2 snow days at home because schools, daycares, and my job were closed, which gave us another 4-day weekend right after the Thanksgiving 4-day weekend, and I came to realize during that time that I’m not really stay-at-home-mom material. I love my kids dearly and would do anything to protect them, but I need some space and a little time to myself each day to just zone out. You can’t really do that when you are snowed in at home with 2 kids and your spouse goes ahead and goes to work because jeez, he’s the boss and what kind of example would that set?

So anyway, I decided in order to keep my sanity I’m just going to embrace the crazy. Instead of dwelling on how much the boy’s incessant chatter grates on my nerves when I long for peace and quiet (because my GOD, the child never shuts up), I will focus on how thankful I am that he is able to express himself through language. Check out some of the gems he has come up with lately:
“Mom, you’re my sweetheart.”
“Mom, thank you for sharing your milk with my sister.”
“Ah, Kelsey girl, it’s ok. Don’t cry.”
To Kelsey: “When the paci falls on the floor, you gotta check for hair because we don’t eat hair.”
“Mom, you’re my best friend.”
“Mom, you and Kelsey are my best friends.”
When I ask if Daddy is his best friend too, he says, “I suppose.”

Instead of dwelling on how smothered I sometimes feel because a certain baby girl wants me to hold her 75% of the day (I’m not kidding – you set her down and she cries. I can’t handle the crying. It rips open my soul.) and I can’t get anything done in the house, I will try to remember that she’s getting older by the minute and soon she won’t want me to hold her anymore. The cleaning can wait. And instead of feeling irritated that she’s whining and fussing and saying “Mamamamamamama” over and over again while she’s in her exersaucer and I’m doing dishes, I will rejoice that she said “Mama” as her first word.

Instead of feeling overwhelmed and sometimes burdened by my parental responsibilities, I will keep in mind how truly blessed I am to have such terrific kids. Instead of feeling sorry for myself because the hubby is never home and helping me, I will remember that he isn’t home because he’s working and being a good provider for his family. And finally, instead of getting stressed this holiday season about all the shopping I need to finish and the cleaning I still need to do, I will relax and remember that I have a lot to be thankful for.

Fibery goodness

2006-11-17T11:38:00.000-06:00

I finally have some knitting content to show. Below is a sweater I made for my cousin’s baby girl, Reilley. It’s the Hooded Sweater from Debbie Bliss Special Knits, knit with Knit Picks Main Line in silver sage. I absolutely LOVE this yarn. It’s 75% pima cotton and 25% merino and it feels very similar to Debbie Bliss’s cashmerino aran. It’s that soft. My cousin picked out the color before she knew she was having a girl, so I embroidered a purple R on the front to make it look a little more girlie.

The R photographed more blue, but it’s actually a deep purple. And here Kelsey is modeling it for everyone:

The next project I’m working on are some hats for this group:

Click on the button to go to the project’s website and read all about it. If you are a knitter, please think about signing up.

And finally I have some fun birthday goodies to show off. These are from my wonderful friend, KatyaR:

Schaefer Anne sock yarn! This stuff feels so great that I just want to sit and pet it. Also, because she wants to bring me over to the dark side make me a more rounded fiber artist, some roving that needs to be spun. The colors in both the yarn and the roving are very much me.

Sorry, I’ve already forgotten what kind of wool it is. I told hubby that now I will have to get a wheel. He has no idea what I mean by this or how much it would cost, but they aren’t cheap. Perhaps I should borrow one first and then see if I this is a skill I am even capable of learning. I have tried spinning with a drop spindle before and it wasn’t great. I know better than to expect perfect results just starting out, but I really wasn’t happy with the rudimentary looking yarn I produced. Plus it took for-freaking-EVER just to spin a few yards. I’m thinking a wheel would definitely be the way to go. You know, because I need more hobbies to fill the void in my life. Lastly, a very cute sheep soap dish.

Thanks, KatyaR! You are a wonderful friend and as usual, you rock.

Feeling patriotic again

2006-11-14T16:13:00.000-06:00

Isn’t this cute? KatyaR says she wants to make this into a t-shirt. Again, I know this is late, but bear with me here – the only blogging time I have lately is at work. So, the election was freakin’ awesome! I’m disappointed in some of the people who live in my district who voted a former legislator, right wing nutjob extraordinaire into district judgeship, and the Rep that I wanted to win so badly lost by only 128 votes, but hey, at least people got out and voted. But big news for Washington, eh? That more than made up for any nausea or disappointment I felt for my district. I have renewed hope for this country.

Six months

2006-11-07T11:19:00.000-06:00

I know it’s a little late, but I have a couple of updates for you. Halloween went exceedingly well and our little Batman brought home an obscene amount of candy.

The real hit was the baby though. We dressed her up in a little ladybug costume and took her with us when the boy went trick-or-treating. People would make comments about how cute she was and offer us candy for her (we said no).

On our way around the block, she fell asleep in her daddy’s arms and one lady commented that she looked like one of the Anne Geddes calendar babies. I agreed with her.

And that brings me to the other update: Kelsey turned 6 months old a few days before Halloween.

She is almost ready to sit without support and she has started eating some baby foods. In this picture she is sitting in her bouncy seat, which is one of her favorite things to do.

She loves to laugh at her brother and she’s very ticklish. She also likes to grab your cup and gum it to death, like she's doing here with her Grammy.

She’s also starting to go through the beginning phases of separation anxiety where she cries if I leave the room, even if her daddy is holding her. She also cries if set her down so I can go to the bathroom, and heaven forbid, if I turn my back on her so I can cook dinner. It’s very frustrating and hard to get anything done because I have to think up new ways to entertain her while I go about doing what I need to do every day. Braden helps to a certain extent, but she seems to be pretty attached to mama so there are times when only mama will do. But that’s all a normal part of development and this too shall pass.

She's a cutie, that's for sure.

PS: DON'T FORGET TO VOTE TODAY!

Growing up and letting go

2006-10-19T16:14:00.000-05:00

One morning earlier this week I was dropping the boy off at daycare. As we got out of the vehicle, these 2 little boys were walking with their teacher to the bus, getting ready to go to school. From the time they exited the daycare to the time they got on the bus, they were screaming across the parking lot, “Stinky Braden! Stinky Braden! Stinky Braden!” and just laughing their little heads off. I have no idea why they were calling him stinky. I thought to myself, “Maybe they are his friends and this is some sort of funny, inside joke.” I look down and he wasn’t smiling. He was frowning and looking at them as if he didn’t understand why they were calling him stinky. I realized that he knew they were making fun of him and it made me angry. Extremely angry. I said, “Oh, that’s REAL nice,” but I’m sure they didn’t understand my sarcasm. I turned to Braden and loudly said, “Gosh, Braden, I hope you don’t say things like that because that’s really naughty.” They were too busy laughing and yelling to even hear what I said. At that point the teacher finally turned his attention to them and his only admonition was, “Boys…” They got on the bus and left and I took Braden to his class and left for work. But I was furious and I stewed about it all day long. I called my husband and he stewed about it. I realize that as we grow up in life, we all get made fun of for one reason or another and it’s not necessarily something I’m trying to protect him from (just as when they are toddlers and you let them fall down and get hurt – not seriously hurt – so that when they are older they don’t completely fall apart at the slightest little pain). Yes, it stings, but it’s something we all have to learn how to handle. However, at the same time, we are trying to raise him to be nice and considerate of others and it would have been nice for him to see that if you DO choose to make fun of others, there will be consequences. All he learned in this case if that you can make fun of someone and get away with it. So when I picked him up from daycare I spoke to the director and got it all off my chest. She said she had a pretty good idea which little boys it was and that she would talk to their mothers and the teacher who drove them to school. That made me feel a little better, but now I have to deal with the fact that I was so angry that I actually WANTED to go kick some little 5 year-old asses. I wouldn’t have done that, obviously, but I so wanted to.

What’s the whole point to this post? I dunno, other than to say that sometimes it’s painful being a parent. It hurts to let go and let them grow. And it hurts to see them hurt, even when you know it’s going to happen sooner or later. But it's still worth it.

Urgent prayer request

2006-10-18T10:38:00.000-05:00

I was browsing one of the regular blogs I read (I'm sorry, but I can't remember which one at the moment or I would link) and I found out about this little guy. Canon is a 4 year-old boy who had a heart transplant on September 16th. He is still in the hospital and not doing so well. As you can probably imagine, he needs a lot of prayers. For those of you who pray, please add him to your prayer list. Don't pray? Good thoughts and well wishes are great too.

Thank you.

Making my own happiness

2006-10-12T11:46:00.000-05:00

I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching the past few weeks and I was inspired by a few phenomenal women whose blogs I read to try and be as happy as I can be. It was more or less a conscious decision that I would try to focus more on the positive in life and less on the negative. I wanted to do this mostly to set a good example for my children, but also because it’s damn depressing to dwell so much on the negativity and craziness of this world. And y’all, it’s working. There’s an incredible amount of crap going on in my life right now and instead of drowning in my tears, I’m reveling in the happiness. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments where I’m down or mad, but I seem to be recovering from them more quickly.

For instance, October 5th was our 15th wedding anniversary. The hubby had 15 of the biggest, most beautiful red roses I’ve ever seen delivered to me at work. Here’s a picture:

And while the actual anniversary day was overshadowed by what I will refer to as my husband’s incessant inability to make good decisions, my response to the bad timing of his decisions astonished me. I forgave him almost instantly. Don’t think for one minute that I didn’t voice my opinion and make my feelings on the matter abundantly clear. But afterwards, I found myself unable to stay mad at him because I was too happy to hold on to the anger. Freakish, no? He did make up for it by taking me to dinner and a movie on the weekend and we had a wonderful time. The in-laws came over to watch the kids and we had our first date in months. It was awesome.

I know we don’t have a perfect marriage and frankly, I’ve never seen anyone that does. And there have been many times when I have wanted to throw the dreaded “D” word around. Something has always stopped me. It’s funny but after we had our son I was determined to make it work no matter what because I thought a boy needs his father. Then after our daughter was born I changed my opinion and thought that it would be better to show her that women are strong and don’t need men to make them happy. We really don’t. But we can choose to be with the person that we love despite their faults and make the best of it. That is what I am doing – making my own happiness.

Unbelievable yet true

2006-09-29T17:03:00.000-05:00

I had a nice post almost finished about happiness and then I read THIS story and my happy post went right out the window. What is wrong with people today? Seriously. What the FUCK is wrong with people? I’m not normally an “eye for an eye” type of person, but I think it’s warranted in this case. And what do you want to bet that this girl eventually gets her kid back?

Now I’m going to go pick up my kids from daycare and hug them like crazy. I'll write about happiness another day.

Has it really been almost a month since my last post?

2006-09-27T11:25:00.000-05:00

Gosh, I don’t even know where to start. So much has been going on since my last post. I added about 50 new blogs to my Bloglines account so whenever I log in I usually have TONS of new posts to read, and I have been super busy both at work and at home so I just haven’t had any time lately to actually sit down and write an update. So I’m making a little time right now and checking in.

Kids
Baby girl got over her ear infection and then the boy got a cold that settled into his chest and we actually had to go have a chest x-ray. It was fine, but he had to use an albuterol inhaler for a few days to help with some wheezing and let me tell you, THAT was fun. If you’ve never dealt with albuterol before, it’s like giving a child speed. In fact, your child may actually be able to climb walls. In our case, he became Supercrackhead for a little while. But the really weird thing is that a couple of times we had to give it to him before bed and we just knew it was going to keep him up all night. It didn’t – he went right to sleep. He’s better now though so hopefully they can both stay healthy for a while. Please, let them stay healthy.

On Sunday, we realized that taking a baby out in public brings out all the whackos. There are the normal people who make comments like “What a cute baby” or ask “How old?” And there are the people who probably mean well but make complete fools of themselves by making funny noises or faces, or talking to her in baby talk. Then there are those people who make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. We ran into two such people on Sunday. One was a waitress at the Cracker Barrel where we had breakfast. As she passed our table several times, she made it a point to stop once and say, “Oh, she is so adorable. I just want to snatch her up and take her home with me!” People, don’t make jokes like that with parents that you don’t know. It’s not cool. I felt pretty safe that she wasn’t going to abduct her right there from our table, but it still wasn’t funny, especially after hearing about that poor mom in Missouri that got her throat slashed and her newborn kidnapped last week. The second whacko was at Walmart. Hubby was holding the baby and this older man approached and started talking to her. I think he may have even grabbed her foot at one point. But he just went on and on talking about kids and his grandkids and I finally went over and started shopping and left the hubby standing there while the guy talked. I can’t even tell you what it was about him that gave me the creeps other than maybe it was the way he looked at her, as if she were a sweet morsel to eat. He may have been a perfectly lovely individual, but he really gave me the creeps and I usually trust my instincts when I have that feeling. After about 10 minutes I walked back to hubby and he told the guy, “Well, we’ve got to be going now.” The guy said, “Oh, ok. Thank you so much for sharing her with me.” Perhaps he was lonely and missing his grandkids, but it just didn’t set well with me. The world’s a messed-up place and you just can’t be too careful.

Work
A funny thing happened at work this week. I was planning a reception for my coworker and this was kind of a big deal as my boss wanted it to be really nice, so I felt like it would be in my best interest to make sure everything was perfect. Plus we were expecting about 50 people including the head honcho of the institution where I work. I had everything all planned out days in advance, and the caterers got there about 15 minutes before the reception to set up. As they took the cake out of the box I said, “Um, that’s not the right cake.” It was supposed to be a half sheet cake with red and white decorations and say “Congratulations Daphne.” The cake they brought was a quarter sheet, decorated with blue roses, and said “Congratulations Najeeb.” I thought my boss was going to have a stroke, and then I selfishly started thinking, “I’ll bet he remembers this when it comes time for my annual evaluation.” Luckily the caterer was able to phone his boss who went and picked up the right cake and they had it set up a couple of minutes before the reception started, so in the end it all worked out. But now whenever Daphne calls me I say, “What’s up, Najeeb?”

And I'm spent...*

2006-08-30T16:21:00.000-05:00

There has been a lot going on in the past week and a half. Baby Girl got her first ear infection last week, along with her first fever and first medicine. While we were at the doctor’s office, she left the room to go write the prescription and left the door open. From down the hall I could hear two of her nurses talking and one was telling the other, “That’s like the fifth baby we’ve seen today with an ear infection. I can’t believe how many little babies are coming in with that today.” I wasn’t surprised by the diagnosis because my son had tons of ear infections, so when I saw how she was acting, I knew that it was her ears. Hopefully she won’t have them as frequently as the boy did, but since she’s in daycare I suspect she will. Just another reason to make me long to stay home. Damn those mortgage payments and utility bills.

Remember the cute little pink sweater I showed off a couple of posts ago? Well, I ran into a little problem. As I was getting ready to sew the side buttons on, I took a good look at the neck opening and realized it looked a little small. I tried to put it on the baby anyway. Believe me, I TRIED and she wasn’t too happy about it. There was no way it was going to fit over her head so I resigned myself to the fact that it is just too small and frogged it. I learned an important lesson about gauge – it does matter in a knitted garment for a baby. Then I swatched with several different size needles and I have started it again using size 10 needles (where the pattern calls for size 6), and get this, I’m exactly on gauge. Gauge…who knew?

I just got a call from the boy’s pre-K teacher (who I adore, by the way) and she wanted to let me know about his day. He was standing on the furniture, very disrespectful to both the teacher and her assistant, and was apparently very liberal with his use of the word “no” today. So instead of going outside to play with the rest of the class, he had to stay inside with the teacher which he didn’t handle very well. He cried and told her he would “be good” and they had a lengthy discussion about appropriate behaviors and making good choices. Bless her, she was consistent with him and hopefully tomorrow he WILL make better choices. I apologized and told her that we were working on some of the same issues at home. She’s aware that there are lots of changes going on right now with the new baby and starting school and losing nap time (which I think is the single biggest contributing factor to his behavior) so we’ll see how it goes. Hopefully he can get adjusted soon.

*Does anyone remember that line and which movie it’s from? I can see Mike Myers saying it, possibly in one of the Austin Powers movies.

Big boy

2006-08-23T19:39:00.000-05:00

The boy officially started school on Monday. He goes to pre-K for 2 ½ hours each day, and so far he really seems to like it. I walked him to school on Monday and I told my husband later, “This is really weird. I don’t even feel like crying. Maybe the whole post-pregnancy hormones are finally back to normal.” Then when I walked over to pick him up, I saw him lined up against the wall with the rest of his class and he looked so grown. I felt the familiar lump in my throat and my eyes started welling up with tears. I looked away quickly and managed to keep myself together long enough to find his teacher and ask how he did. She said, “He did really well. We’re still working on learning the rules and he’s got a lot of energy, but overall it went well.” A lot of energy, huh? I think that’s code for “holy crap, your child needs to be on ADHD meds.” I’m telling you, he has fully earned the nickname Crackhead. His teacher seems really nice though so we’ll see how the year goes. Here are some pictures:

He looks thrilled in this picture, no? I assure you he was excited. He was just annoyed that we had to stop and take a picture. And how cute is he in his uniform? Even though he's attending public school, they have a uniform policy and let me just say that it made school shopping quick and painless, not to mention cheap. I hope he always has to wear a uniform.

And here we are on our way home. Sigh. My boy is growing up…

Need an opinion

2006-08-15T19:21:00.000-05:00

I'm have finished knitting a cute little outfit for the girl and I'm now in the dreaded "finishing" stage where you sew buttons on and weave in all the ends. I'm happy with the top, but I'm not so sure about the diaper cover. The top has a cute little crocheted trim around the edges. Do you think the diaper cover needs some of the same in the variagated pink? I asked the husband last night and he said yes, but I'm sort of torn between adding some crochet edging and leaving it plain. And if I add some edging, would I add it all over or just certain spots? What do you think?

Three months

2006-08-01T20:25:00.000-05:00

I can hardly believe it has been 3 months. Didn’t I just give birth yesterday? Jeez… So anyway, what can I tell you about Miss Kelsey lately? She smiles all the time and has started vocalizing more with the most adorable little noises. She has excellent control of her head and neck and likes to sit up so she can see everything. She also likes for you to hold her upper body while she stands up, and she can actually support her own weight for a little while. She usually only wakes up once a night for a quick feed, and she is a great sleeper. At the risk of jinxing myself, I will go so far as to say she’s an incredibly easy baby. She only poops once every few days and she seems to go more at daycare than at home so the odds of me actually changing a poopy diaper are amazingly low. How awesome is that? Of course, if I do happen to be the lucky one who gets to change her, it more than makes up for all the ones I might miss. But that’s enough about that. I know what you really want to see are the pictures, right? Well, here you go:

An incredibly generous coworker of the husband gave us a wicker laundry basket filled with goodies for the kids. I was blown away by this gift because she had made two quilts and a crocheted afghan. And as if the handmade gifts weren’t enough, she also included a Build-a-Bear for each kid. Kelsey's bear is just a little bit bigger than her right now.

But wait – there’s more. Each bear was wearing an outfit and she sent along an additional outfit for both bears. The boy’s additional outfit was a fireman’s uniform. If there is anything in this world that the boy absolutely loves, it’s firefighters and firetrucks. After asking me to help him change his bear into the fireman’s uniform, he found last year’s Halloween costume and put it on. I can already see us dropping a fortune at the Build-a-Bear stores in the future or, heaven forbid, having a birthday party there. Guess I better start saving now.

I think it’s also safe to assume that he loves his quilt. You probably can't tell in this picture, but this quilt is machine stitched in a fancy swirl pattern.

Here are better pics of Kelsey's quilt and afghan:

It reminds me of little fences or partial train tracks. It's very cool.

And lastly, a couple more Kelsey pictures:
Milk Belly

Aunt KatyaR got her the hat and we just HAD to buy the matching bikini. She seemed to enjoy the water too.

That's all for now. Stay cool out there!

The knitting collective

2006-07-27T16:49:00.000-05:00

In all of my post-Harlot excitement I was talking about Tuesday evening to one of my co-workers when she paid me a most excellent compliment. She asked me to teach her how to knit.

Non-knitters, take heed. We are like the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Yarn Harlot comes to OKC

2006-07-26T13:48:00.000-05:00

I have been in the presence of greatness. The Yarn Harlot was in OKC last night and she rocked! If you enjoy reading her blog, that is exactly how she is in person, only times 10. She is funny and charming and approachable, and just the type of person that you could see yourself sitting in a bar drinking with and telling stories and laughing (and knitting) until the wee hours of the morning. She spoke to a crowd of about 120 people before going over to the reception/book signing. And let me just say that she was hysterical. She could seriously venture into stand-up comedy – she’s THAT funny. My cheeks actually hurt because I hadn’t laughed so much in such a long time. At the end of her speech, she told us that we had to sing her a song and someone immediately broke into the song “Oklahoma.” Before you know it, the entire audience was singing at the top of their lungs. The ladies in front of us were singing too and then one turned to the other and said “Why are we singing this song? We’re not even FROM here!” They turned out to be from Arkansas. Anyway, it was an incredible evening and I can only hope that Stephanie enjoyed visiting us as much as we all enjoyed seeing her. If she comes to your city (or even close to your city), I highly recommend going to see her. You won’t be disappointed.

Go HERE to read Stephanie’s account of the evening and to see all the neat OKC places that the sock visited. And to see more pictures, including a picture of the cute cake, go HERE.

Also, thank you for all the encouraging words last week when it was hotter than hell outside and I had issues with the boy child. After venting on Friday and then getting great sleep Friday night and waking up to MUCH cooler temperatures on Saturday morning, my attitude was greatly improved. Then the husband gave me plenty of sanity time over the weekend, and I’m happy to report that things are much better.

No more wire hangers!

2006-07-21T16:55:00.000-05:00

If mothers were given report cards, right now mine would show a grade of D+.* My son is irritating the piss out of me and I have days where I cannot stand to be around him. I am wracked with guilt about these feelings too. I don’t know if it’s the heat (it was 107 yesterday and forecast to be 110 today) that is making me cranky and impatient or what, but I have got to get some serious distance from him this weekend. In my defense, here are just a few of the things he has done lately:

He fiddled with the controls in the refrigerator and turned the temp on the freezer all the way down to 0 (with 0 being the warmest) and it started defrosting. This is after being told 100 times not to play in the refrigerator. It took me almost a day to realize exactly WHY the freezer was defrosting. Luckily we didn’t lose any frozen breast milk. We may have lost some veggies and possibly some waffles and ice cream that we didn’t need anyway, but I am okay with losing those.
We went to the grocery store and he picked up a penny off the floor. Then I watched in horror as he stuck it IN HIS MOUTH. We’ve had the conversation about what’s appropriate to put in our mouths and what isn’t about a hundred times now, but I honestly thought we were past that stage. I don’t see him putting coins in his mouth at home so why he decided that a filthy grocery store floor was ok, I’ll never know. Perhaps he’s regressing because he’s jealous of the baby (even though he hasn’t been acting as if he’s jealous lately). Who knows?
He ATE part of my mouse pad. He turned the mouse pad over, picked at the foam rubber until pieces came off, and then ATE THEM. I noticed the gouges in the mouse pad and I asked him if he tore it up. “Yes.” What did you do with the pieces that came loose? “I ate them.” Why? “Because I just put them in my mouth.” Right, I got that part. Why did you put them in your mouth? “Because I just ate them.” We’ve already established that. Tell me why you ate them. “Because I just put them in my mouth.” Do you see where I’m going with this? His 4 year-old mind doesn’t even understand what I’m asking which brings me to the next item.
His attention span is about 2 seconds long. When I want to explain something important, I will kneel down and tell him to look at me. When I have his attention I will say, “Now, son, the reason that I…” which is about the time he looks away and I can tell that he has completely shut off the part of the brain that process my voice. He’s hearing “wha wha wha wha wha” (think Charlie Brown’s teacher) and thinking about firetrucks or his Hot Wheels Batmobile or something else. He’s GONE. And to get his attention back, I have to raise my voice. Most of the time simply raising my voice doesn’t work, so I yell. And when yelling doesn’t get his attention, I turn into scary Joan Crawford mommy screaming at him. That’s not helpful at all and makes both of us feel bad. I usually wind up crying and telling him I’m sorry, and he comforts me and tells me “It’s ok. Don’t cry. There’s no monsters.” He doesn’t comprehend why I was even yelling in the first place, and then he has no idea why I’m crying after yelling. It’s all very frustrating and I have zero patience for it right now.

It could be that I am expecting too much out of him. He is, after all, only 4. However, when I compare him to his peers I see a huge difference in speech and language and maturity. He is way behind. I know in my heart that he probably isn’t ready for pre-K next month, but perhaps I’m hoping that his teacher will take notice of the fact that he’s behind and start the ball rolling for us to get him some help. But then realizing that he’s way behind only brings up more guilt because I wonder if perhaps it’s my fault. What if I had read to him more? What if I had encouraged him to color more? What if I was a better parent and didn’t scream at him because he won’t pay attention? I could “what if” the situation to death, but I know that’s counterproductive and we just need to move forward now and deal with it. And the first step will be me getting some space away from him this weekend. I will let his daddy handle things with him while I concentrate on taking care of the sweet baby girl who smiles at everything I say.

*I started with an F and then figured that I at least deserved credit for keeping him clean, fed, and clothed. Hence the D+.

Breath of hell

2006-07-18T16:43:00.000-05:00

Dude, it's freaking hot outside. The current official temp here in OKC is 106. A coworker came back from lunch today and proclaimed "It feels like the breath of hell outside." She's not lying. Here's what my car temp showed yesterday on the drive home:

One hundred nineteen degrees. Breath of hell, indeed. A record-breaking heat wave is happening across the entire nation. Would the Bush Administration kindly like to restate their position on global warming and how it doesn't exist?

Alarming

2006-07-13T09:51:00.000-05:00

At the hospital where I had Kelsey, they gave me a book to take home called Caring for Yourself & Your Baby at Home. It’s a book that they put together at the hospital and it’s filled with loads of wonderful information. There is even a section on abuse and the signs you should look for to know if someone is abusing your child. Here’s where it gets frightening. The book states “an estimated one in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused before their eighteenth birthday.” One in four girls and one in six boys! Is anyone else as alarmed as I am by those figures? A Clinical Social Worker in the hospital’s Case Management Services department was responsible for the data in that section and she doesn’t state where she got her statistics. Can those figures really be that high? If so, that's heartbreaking.

Do you suppose that the freaks in this world who prey on children are becoming more common or their numbers remain the same and we are just more aware of them now? Regardless, let this serve as ample notice to anyone who attempts to sexually abuse my children. I reserve the right to severely injure, maim, or even kill anyone who touches my kids in a sexual manner. And when I’m done with you, my husband who holds black belt rank in several different styles of martial arts will take over.

Actual knitting content plus a Kelsey update

2006-07-07T10:42:00.000-05:00

Last week I ordered the yarn to make a gift for my cousin’s baby, which is due at the end of August, but I had the urge to knit something while waiting for the yarn to arrive. I have 4 different projects at home already on the needles, but did I work on any of those? Of course not. I started this for Kelsey:

It’s the Swing Set from this book (which I LOVE LOVE LOVE). I’m doing it in Berroco’s Cotton Twist in the colors Radish and Uncle John’s Band. It will soon be abandoned so I can do some infant hats to promote breastfeeding awareness and so I can make the sweater for my cousin, but I have a feeling I will be rushing through those projects so I can get back to this one. Oh, and I also made a wonderful discovery: I can actually knit while nursing. This is huge for me because my girl likes to nurse. A lot (mostly more for comfort than actual hunger). So now instead of feeling misplaced guilt over not getting something done around the house while she’s nursing for an hour, I feel like I’m accomplishing something. Awesome!

Kelsey laughed for the first time 2 nights ago right after her bath. I was playing with her while putting her diaper on and she started laughing. Luckily the hubby was home so he could witness it. We started laughing because she was obviously having a good time and then she got even more tickled and started giggling. I ask you, is there anything more precious? And then last night during her bath she farted very loudly and it reverberated off the bottom of the baby bathtub and she chuckled again. She is her father’s daughter.

At her 2 month checkup last week she was up to 9lbs 10oz and 21” long. Plus her head had grown 3” in circumference since she was born (thank God her head was tiny when she was born). Here are some pictures taken that day:

The bandaids on her legs are from the 4 shots she received. Four!!!

But she was still all smiles...

Good causes

2006-06-30T20:23:00.000-05:00

My friend Kim is running in another marathon! I posted on her first marathon here. This time she is flying to San Francisco to participate in a marathon to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Kim teaches kindergarten and her friend and teaching partner was recently diagnosed with lymphoma so this is a cause that is very near and dear to her heart. Please go to Kim's page HERE to read more and, if you wish, to make a contribution.

The Yarn Harlot posted today on a subject that I also feel strongly about: breastfeeding. One of her readers is collecting knitted infant hats to give to new moms in lower income families to help promote breastfeeding. As all the medical evidence suggests, breastfeeding is certainly the most perfect food for a baby, and studies have shown that breast milk even helps babies fight off certain illnesses, as well as reduces the infant mortality rate. Lower income families cannot always afford adequate medical care and sadly, often don't have access to the support needed to breastfeed successfully. If you would like to raise awareness of this problem by donating some knitted hats, please either email the Yarn Harlot (email on the page I linked to above) or feel free to email me.

No use crying over spoiled milk

2006-06-22T11:39:00.000-05:00

I have 2 more things to add to the things that make me NOT so happy list in yesterday’s post:

Eight ounces of expressed breast milk down the drain because I forgot to take the bottles to daycare. Which really wasn’t a problem because I could just put them in the fridge when I got home. Except that I forgot to do that too. I realized at 5:00 this morning and had a nice little cry. I know it’s not going to hurt the baby to have formula today, but I was mad at myself because my freaking brain seems to be switched off.
Ok, this one is more a confession than anything else. But it makes the list because I’m so not happy about it. I watched a good portion of the Dateline Britney Spears interview with Matt Lauer the other evening. I didn’t intend to, it just sort of happened. I had no interest in it, but I walked through the living room and it was on and the next thing I knew I was sitting there watching it and, get this, getting all teary eyed when she started crying and saying, “We’re people…” Now, no disrespect to anyone who likes Britney, but I have never really been a fan. I like some of her music, but I’ve always thought she was a little bit of a tart (to put it nicely). So for me to sit and watch her on TV is a big deal. But to cry along with her? Can I still blame that on hormones or have I crossed over to a dark place?

Despite all the items I have on the NOT so happy list, things really are going pretty well in my little world. I promise.

Just things...

2006-06-21T16:05:00.000-05:00

Things that make me happy:

Baby smiles and coos. Seriously, is there anything else better in the world than having a baby smile at you? Or coo? When she’s really alert, she makes the most adorable faces and pumps her arms excitedly and coos. It totally makes me forget about most of the things on the NOT so happy list below.
My cousin is having a baby in the near future and in looking for a pattern to make for her new arrival, I am feeling inspired to knit again. I love knitting because it helps me go to a very Zen place. Until I make a mistake, but this is the happy list so we won’t go there.
The Yarn Harlot is coming to Oklahoma City in July! KatyaR and I have already RSVP’d for the book signing reception and the husband has already told me he will babysit. Now I just have to decide whether I’ll take a sock in progress that I’ve already started (such as Braden’s Batman socks or the toe-up socks for hubby) or start some new ones. Decisions…

Things that make me NOT so happy:

Two different people yesterday asked me when my baby is due. I guess that’s just the push I needed to make a lifestyle change. It’s about time I finally do something about my weight. And I’m not talking about the 24 pounds of baby weight (of which I only have 7 left). I’m talking about the 60-70 pounds of fat that I have been carrying around for about as long as I can remember. To celebrate my new resolve to lose weight, I ate a package of Grandma’s vanilla sandwich cookies and washed it down with a sugary Sprite.
The boy decided to wait until just recently to show us his jealous side. If you are holding the baby (which you must do frequently – babies like to be held, and let’s not forget about nursing), he will barrage you with “Look at me” or “Mom, look at this” over and over and over until you want to rupture your eardrums with knitting needles. Then he starts acting up and doing things to get in trouble because even negative attention takes attention away from the baby. All I can say is that I hope this stage doesn’t last very long because he’s inches away from my last nerve.
My husband is leaving Sunday for Kansas City to do some training for work. He will be gone almost a week. A WEEK, people! A week by myself with the sweet baby and the jealous crackhead driving me crazy. I hope he sends reinforcements.
At work yesterday I went downstairs to get the mail and when I got back to my desk, my boss was sitting there reading my email inbox. He made comments like, “KatyaR sure is emailing you a lot.” Even though I could feel my blood pressure spike, I was able to restrain myself from saying something that I would dearly regret. Well, actually that’s wrong. I don’t think I would regret SAYING something to him, but I would regret not having the money this job pays.
Two words: sleep deprivation. I’m very lucky in that she only wakes me up once a night and I'm really starting to get used to it, but damn it messes with the brain. Memory? What’s that?

I know there are more things to add to the lists but I have to stop there because I can’t remember what they were now.

Birthday wishes

2006-06-16T19:56:00.000-05:00

My good friend KatyaR had a birthday yesterday. Please join me in wishing her a Happy Belated Birthday!

Back at work

2006-06-14T15:06:00.000-05:00

I went back to work this week. On Monday I was extremely tired and numb feeling, and I think that helped me get through the day without being a weeping puddle of goo. It was hard to go back to work after I had my son, but this time is different. This time it just feels wrong. I feel like I should be home with her and not handing her over to strangers who feed her and hold her and nurture her all day. That should be MY job. On my lunch hour I am going to the daycare and nursing her, but it’s not enough to change the way I feel. I didn’t feel this strongly about staying home with my son and I don’t know why. Although I’m sad, it is getting a little easier each day. And don’t get me wrong – I’m grateful that the ladies at the daycare take good care of her and hold her all day and nurture her. I just wish it was me. So until the hubby gets a huge ass raise or we win the lottery, I’ll be at work and hating every minute of it. But hey, at least now I have time to get caught up on all the blogs I read.

Confession
Remember a couple of months ago when I was talking about a pregnant coworker and how her doctor was concerned because she wasn’t gaining enough weight and he thought her baby was going to be too small? Well, it turns out she had her baby the day before me and her little girl weighed MORE than ours. Not much (4 ounces), but it still counts. And I had gained a very healthy 24 pounds, had a ginormous belly, and my doctor was estimating we were having a seven pounder. Which just goes to show you that sometimes doctors don’t really know what is going on in a pregnant belly. So now out of guilt for being so judgmental I am confessing and driving away all the bad karma.

A recent exchange at my house:
The phone rings and it’s hubby’s work with some bad news. We hear yelling and expletives from the next room.
Me: (thinking) Dude, please. Your son can hear you.
Braden: Oooooohhh, Dad, you said “shit!” You’re not supposed to say “shit.”
Dad: (ignoring him) more yelling at the person on the phone
Braden: Mom, Daddy said “shit!”
Me: I know. I heard him. That wasn’t very nice, was it?
Braden: No, that was naughty!
Me: Yes, it was. You need to tell Daddy that’s not appropriate when he gets off the phone.
Braden: Uh-huh.
Dad hangs up the phone.
Braden: Dad, that was naughty. You’re not supposed to say “shit.”
Dad: You’re right, son. I’m sorry.
Me: Yeah, don’t let us catch you saying that again or you’ll be sitting on the naughty spot.
It was actually much funnier when it happened than as I read it now…

Still here

2006-06-08T10:22:00.001-05:00

So many times lately I’ve wanted to sit down and update the blog, but I’ve only had one hand free, which is a colossal pain in the ass when it comes to typing. I can manage short emails fairly easy, but not typing a long post. And why do I only have one free hand? Because Kelsey thinks she needs to be held. All. Day. Long. And preferably with a boob in her mouth. So although I’m not getting much time to myself, I’m happy to report that she is getting nice and fat. I took her to the Lactation Department at the hospital for a weight check on Tuesday and she was already up to 8lbs 1oz. My girl is a chow hound. So hopefully since she’s gaining weight so well we’ll be able to get on a schedule SOON. And even though I’m extremely sad that this is my last week at home, there’s a part of me that is looking forward to going back to work on Monday because it will give me a much needed break. The husband tries to help out when he’s home (which isn’t often), but she doesn’t want him because he doesn’t have magical boobs.

I’m not quite ready for meds just yet and I’ll explain why. I’m not going all Tom Cruise here or anything because I’ve been down the medication road twice in my life and it was extremely beneficial. However, the weaning off the meds process was unbelievably difficult for me and I’m not sure I’m ready to go there again just yet. It’s almost as if I felt worse trying to slowly wean off the meds than I did before I started taking them in the first place. So I’d like to consider that my last resort when I just can’t stand the way I feel anymore. And even though I may have occasional bad days right now, I’m definitely not to that point. I think right now if I could just get some good quality sleep and a couple of hours to myself to do whatever I wanted, I’d be a new woman.

The boy started a new daycare and the transition went frighteningly well. On the first day he stood just inside the classroom door and kept telling me, “I don’t want to go play.” I said that was fine, he didn’t have to play. The teacher kept asking him if he liked dinosaurs, cars, puzzles, etc. and the answer was always no. Then she said, “You’re just in time for a snack and we’re going to eat outside. Do you like to play outside?” He said yes and then turned to me and said, “Thanks, mom.” The tone of his voice was one of “Thanks, mom, I can take it from here.” So I told the teacher, “I think that’s my cue to leave.” Never would I have imagined it would have gone that smoothly. He really seems to like it there and the teachers there aren’t telling me how horrible he is every day so this is probably just the change he needed.

What else has been happening? Oh yeah, I ordered a couple of nursing bras from BabyCenter.com and I noticed something funny. On each web page they had a box with shipping deadlines for Father’s Day. I’m sure it’s a standard box on every page, but it still cracked me up that it was on the nursing bra pages. Is that really a good idea for a Father’s Day gift? I suppose some nursing bras could be considered sexy, but in our house nothing says “My girls are off limits to you for at least a year” like a nursing bra.

And my free time is almost up so I’ll leave you with some pictures.

The photo we used for her birth announcement:

Braden in his Spider-Man flotation suit and goggles and water-squirting gloves from Auntie Katya:

My new favorite picture:

Updates

2006-05-16T18:45:00.000-05:00

Wow – It’s been a while since I last posted. I honestly think about posting frequently but it always seems like something comes up that needs my attention or the baby starts crying or wants to nurse. So here are a few bullet points to catch everyone up:

Last week we took Kelsey to the doctor and she was up to 6lbs 0.5oz so I would say that nursing is going extremely well. I’m taking the boy for his belated 4 year checkup tomorrow and the doctor said we could weigh Kelsey “just for fun.”
Baby girl wants to be held all the time, even when she’s asleep. While I certainly don’t mind holding her 24/7, I am feeling a little bit of guilt at the dishes and laundry piling up so eventually I succumb to the guilt and let her fuss a little bit. Like today when we ran out of forks. Plus I need the occasional shower. She won’t take a pacifier either – unless you count the breast.
Braden is adjusting nicely at home, but he is being very aggressive and getting in trouble at daycare. Things should really get interesting next month. Since he’ll be starting pre-K in the fall, we have to change daycares to one much closer to our house that will provide transportation to and from school. He starts at the new daycare in 2 weeks.
I cannot describe the extreme guilt I am feeling at the thought of going back to work in 3 weeks. The school where the boy will be going to pre-K is right around the corner from our house and I would love nothing more than to walk him to school every day. We made a budget and it just doesn’t look like it’s possible right now though, even when you consider that after paying for 2 kids in daycare and gas to and from work I’m only contributing about $6,500 a year to the household. I looked into some of the work at home scenarios but they all seem to involve some type of direct marketing situation, and I am definitely not a salesperson.
One word: hormones. I think a certain amount of tears and sleep deprivation-induced irritability is pretty normal after having a baby, but it still sucks. I don’t really feel like I have full-blown PPD yet, but we’ll see how things are going in a couple of months.
The other night my husband was upstairs with both kids while I was trying to get 5 minutes on the computer to respond to a few emails. Apparently the girl got fussy so he sent the boy downstairs to tell me, “Mom, the baby needs a boob!” Nice… I can’t wait for him to say that in public.
Mother’s Day was kind of a bust here at our house. The hubby didn’t get me a card or a gift, and as an afterthought decided to take me out to eat. Which is fine really because it’s not as if I NEED cards or gifts, but at least an acknowledgement of Mother’s Day would have been good. Or not acting like an asshole – that would have been a great gift too. But perhaps I set my standards a bit too high. Oh well, that’s ok. Father’s Day is coming soon.

And that’s really about it. Here are some pics to enjoy:

These last two show the booties that Meira made. Aren't they gorgeous?

We have a baby!

2006-05-02T20:43:00.000-05:00

Miss Kelsey Rene was born on Thursday, April 27th at 7:44pm, weighing 5lbs 9oz and measuring 18 ¾“ long. She’s absolutely perfect and at the risk of jinxing myself, seems to be a very easy baby so far. For those interested in the birth story, keep reading.

I went to my doctor’s appointment at 11:00am on Thursday and my water conveniently broke in the waiting room. It wasn’t a gush or anything, but by the time I got to see the doctor it was getting pretty messy. Her office is in one of the physician buildings that is attached to the hospital so she sent me up to Labor & Delivery. I was only dilated to 3cm and not fully effaced so they decided to give me a small dose of pitocin to get things started and that’s when I made the mistake of asking for an epidural. Actually, it wouldn’t have been a mistake if I had had a decent anesthesiologist, but when it took him 3 sticks in my back to get the thing in place, I had serious misgivings. Then there’s the fact that it numbed everything except the vaginal region, but I’ll get to that later. I am grateful to the nurse who held my hand and tried to comfort me as I cried from the pain since hubby was out in the hallway with our son. I did NOT want the boy to witness anything like that. So anyway, we started the pitocin and discovered that every time the baby’s head would engage, her heart rate would drop dramatically. Pitocin was promptly stopped and there was talk of a possible c-section. I said that was fine – whatever gave us a healthy baby. So we waited for a couple of hours for labor to progress naturally and I stalled at 5cm. My doctor came to check on me around 5:00 and said we would go ahead and give the pitocin one more try. Guess what? It worked! And have I mentioned that I wasn’t numbed in the vaginal region? The nurse checked me at 6:30 and I was still at 5cm. At 7:30 I was in an indescribable amount of pain due to back to back contractions so the anesthesiologist was called again to push more meds that again didn’t work. The nurse checked me again and I was complete and baby was on her way. Thus began 14 minutes of panic and rushing around the room and calling for the doctor, a scrub tech, and a baby advocate. My friend KatyaR was outside the room and said my doctor came running down the hallway. By the time she got there I could feel the baby crowning and I was NOT pushing. I was holding onto my husband’s hand and trying to concentrate on breathing and not totally losing my shit because have I mentioned the pain? The good news is they told me to push and I only had to do it once and she plopped out, and then all of a sudden there was no more pain. But pain or no, if I had to do it all over again I would because she was totally worth it.

I have to brag on my husband now. I couldn’t have done this without him. He stayed with me and held my hand and tried to help me hang in there when I said “I can’t do this anymore.” And now when I watch him holding his tiny daughter and talking to her sweetly and snuggling with her, I fall in love all over again. Our son is not so enamored of his new little sister yet, but he’s making comments like “I like that baby” so I think there is hope he will come around.

We had an appointment this morning with the pediatrician for a weight check and she weighed 5lbs 4oz, but since my milk just came in yesterday and we have to wake her to eat, there hasn’t really been time yet to put more weight on her. However, I nursed her at the doctor’s office today and then they re-weighed her to see how many ounces she was drinking (1.5oz) and the doctor seemed happy with that. We will go back again in a week for another weight check but I expect her to be well above her birth weight by then.

A very special thank you to Meira for the adorable knitted booties. I will try to get a picture of them tomorrow and send it to you. Thank you so much!

Random thoughts while still waiting

2006-04-24T16:57:00.000-05:00

So I think the baby is teasing me. Not quite 2 weeks ago I started feeling tons of pressure in the pelvic region and my bones were aching. I took this as a good sign that things were progressing and that she was headed down into the birth canal. Now, not so much. The pressure and pain sort of come and go now and they are gone most of the time. I still feel her moving around periodically so I know she’s ok, but it’s almost as if she keeps changing her mind or something. Can babies do that – enter the birth canal and leave at will? Is there anything I can do to encourage her to STAY in the birth canal? My son didn’t do this so I have no point of reference here. I can tell you though that with the boy we went 4 days past the due date and I have a feeling we're in for a similar situation now.

On the weekends I have been nesting and trying to stay busy to keep from obsessing over how much I would like this little darlin’ to vacate my body. Apparently the husband has caught the nesting fever as well as he decided yesterday would be the perfect day to clean out the garage. Never mind the fact that I’ve been asking him for 3 weeks to help me vacuum and mop the entire house (I loathe vacuuming and mopping). Now there are 2 things that could happen: a) I get sick of hearing the boy freak out over finding dog hair on his socks and I go ahead and vacuum, or b) the husband vacuums while I’m at the hospital recovering from delivery. Stay tuned…

Still waiting

2006-04-19T16:54:00.000-05:00

I left the doctor’s office today and felt like crying because there has been little progress in effacement and dilation since a week ago. She tried to make me feel better by telling me that with 2nd babies, sometimes they don’t see any progress and then the mom just sort of “goes all at once.” So I don’t know if I should interpret that as it could be any time or what. I guess we will begin utilizing the advice we’ve been given the past few weeks. I’ve been told to walk, eat spicy food, eat pizza, take a ride over bumpy roads, have sex, take castor oil, and get a foot massage. I’m thinking at this moment I could really go for some pizza and a foot massage. And absolutely no way am I taking castor oil. Anyone want to guess which one would be at the top of hubby’s list?

Shower pics
Here’s a picture of all the wonderful gifts that were given:

My good friend KatyaR was there and she brought a SHITLOAD of goodies in a big ass bag, including this adorable little outfit that I love:

But what was my husband the most excited about? This:

I’m not kidding. He was ecstatic over the diapers and wipes. Good thing because he’s going to be using a lot of them.

But the funniest part of the shower was the cake:

Somebody needs to either learn to spell or get out of the cake decorating business. I'm just saying...

Waiting...patiently

2006-04-17T14:31:00.000-05:00

So what’s going on at our house lately? Lots of nesting and lots of waiting. Patiently. 16 days to go and as of last Thursday I was 20% effaced and dilated to 1cm, which means it could still be a while. Over the weekend there was some loss of mucus, lots of pressure on the pelvic bones, and I felt more energized than normal, which are all good signs, but we’ll see what the doctor says when I go back on Wednesday. If there has been no progress, the hubby says we’re going to go walk the mall 5 or 6 times. I told him he’d be lucky if I could walk it once. In the meantime, I’ll continue to wait. Patiently.

Have I been knitting to pass the time while I’m patiently waiting? No. For some reason I am just not motivated to knit wool socks when it’s in the 90’s outside. Even when I’m indoors in the cool A/C, it just seems wrong somehow. So there’s really no telling when I’ll get back to all the partial socks I have started. I have been scrapbooking some, but again I’m not making that much progress. And then there’s the cross stitch birth record that I started for baby girl. I made one for the boy so I feel obligated to make one for the girl. Other than that, I’ll continue to clean and try to get organized and oh yeah, be patient while I wait. I hope to have some news for you soon!

The folks at work had a really nice shower for me and I'll try to share some pics of that tomorrow.

Parenting magazine poll

2006-04-05T15:07:00.000-05:00

I was just catching up on some reading at lunch time and I read a poll in the March 2006 issue of Parenting magazine. They asked readers “Which celeb would you trust most to leave your child with on a playdate? The responses were 76% Jennifer Garner, 18% Katie Holmes, and 6% Britney Spears. It doesn’t say how many people responded, but I’m sort of floored by the fact that 6% of them actually picked Britney.

Things...

2006-03-24T14:31:00.000-06:00

There is a coworker of mine who is pregnant and due around the same time as I am, and she came up to me the other morning laughing and said, “My doctor said the strangest thing to me yesterday.” “What’s that?” I asked. She said, “He said I better gain 5 pounds in the next 2 weeks.” Since she’s barely showing (and she’s a tall, skinny heifer) I asked her how much she’s gained so far. Twelve pounds. I said, “Uh, yeah, you need to seriously start eating more so your baby will gain weight, especially since you’re at the end of your pregnancy.” I told her how my best friend got put on the Braum’s Shake Diet because she didn’t seem to be gaining enough weight. I can so not relate. Since I was already overweight before I got pregnant, I should be the one only gaining 12 pounds, but no, I’ve already gained 20. On the other hand, I am now obviously pregnant enough where complete strangers will ask me when my baby’s due without fear of me telling them I’m not pregnant. I no longer just look like a fat chick – now I look like a pregnant, fat chick. But I digress. The coworker also told me that her doctor said she is measuring small and he’s clearly concerned about how small her baby is. She also said that she doesn’t like to eat meat or sweets and all she likes are fruits and vegetables. I asked her if she likes ANYTHING fattening and she said chips, so I told her that she needs to be eating a bag of chips a day. Towards the end of our conversation, she laughed at the absurdity of her situation and I wanted to shake her. She clearly doesn’t understand and she’s not listening to anyone, so I stopped trying to convince her. I wish I could laugh things off that easily, but no – instead I’m obsessing about the fact that I was Group B strep positive early in the pregnancy and now I’ll have to have IV antibiotics before delivery and there’s still a slight chance the baby can get infected when she’s born. (Note to self: there’s a difference between researching to be informed and obsession. Stop reading scary information on the internet. Just stop. Now.)

I do have some progress to show you on the Batman socks, although it’s not much. My heart just hasn’t been into the knitting for some reason here lately. Too many other things on my mind I guess. But here’s what I’ve done so far:

Shopping

2006-03-15T11:25:00.000-06:00

My good friend KatyaR and I went shopping on Sunday, looking mostly at baby girl items, and I was completely and utterly exhausted by the cuteness overload. Too. Much. Cute. Stuff. I managed to keep myself restrained because we already have a huge sack of hand-me-downs from a very lovely cousin and that should get us through the first 3 months easily. Besides, it’s not like they really need to be dressed all in frilly outfits when they are newborns anyway. We also looked at other general baby supplies and I was trying to take a mental inventory of the items I still have left over from when the boy was an infant (which, by the way, I should just stop trying to remember anything because it’s usually a horrible disaster). So there we were standing there in the aisle at Target and I loudly blurted out “I don’t even know what size nipples I have.” Katya looked at me like I’d lost my mind and I laughed as I realized what I’d just said. I went on to explain that I MEANT to say I wasn’t sure if I had newborn nipples for the milk collection bottles I have at home. She said, “I can’t wait to tell your husband what you just said.”

So many things to be outraged about, so little time

2006-03-07T13:40:00.000-06:00

By now you’ve probably heard about the South Dakota anti-abortion bill that is causing a furor across the country. I knew it wouldn’t take long for someone to start trying to get these types of laws passed once Roberts and Alito were sworn in on the Supreme Court. Anyone taking any bets on whether Roe vs. Wade gets overturned? It’s just sad, especially how the SD bill even bans abortions on women who are victims of rape or incest. WTF??? My own state is trying to get some laws passed that make it more difficult to get abortions, even going so far as trying to pass a law that makes the doctor tell the patient that her fetus will experience pain. For any woman to be in that position, it’s tough enough without adding more stress and guilt. I have always believed that women should have the right to choose for themselves what is best for them. And don’t tell me “Well, she shouldn’t have been messing around then” or “she should have used birth control.” It’s nobody else’s business how the woman in question got pregnant and who are we or anyone else in this country to sit in judgement? Except that under the current regime, the country is slowly turning into a theocracy whereby the prez and his cronies can force their morality on everyone else. I expect this SD law will probably one day go to the Supreme Court (that Bush & Co. made sure was now tipped to the dangerously conservative) and we will see the rights of women set back decades.

And if that isn’t bad enough news, the Oklahoma House just overwhelming passed a law that would allow intelligent design to be taught in Oklahoma classrooms. There are articles about it here and here. As I have said before, Oklahoma is like the buckle of the Bible belt, so I guess it’s only fitting that the complete conversion to theocracy start here. Don’t get me wrong – I actually believe in God, but I also believe that every individual is entitled to their own beliefs. Don’t believe at all? Good for you – that’s absolutely your right too. The fact is intelligent design doesn’t belong in school. It is NOT SCIENCE. It is a faith-based belief that belongs in a faith-based institution, not an academic institution. The science testing scores in this state are abysmal enough without adding further harm by taking away all the scientific evidence of evolution. Me personally, I like to think that perhaps evolution is the process by which God created the Earth. But that’s just ME and how I reconcile it. Teach the kids FACTS in school and let them get the faith-based beliefs at church, and let them make up their own minds.

And then I was pointed to this Salon article when I was recently reading OkieFunk (which is a GREAT blog, by the way). The article gives several valid reasons why Bush should be impeached. There’s actually another article by Garrison Keillor HERE. Kurt with OkieFunk believes that the current political climate in Washington isn’t conducive to impeachment, and sadly, he is probably right. Apparently, right now it’s ok to lie and get us into a war that kills thousands of American troops and costs billions of dollars, and it’s ok to illegally wiretap US citizens, and it’s ok to authorize the torture of “enemy combatants”, not to mention giving a country that has known ties to 9-11 terrorists ties to our ports. But don’t dare have oral sex with an intern in the oval office and then lie about that. I'm just sayin’…

Doom and gloom

2006-03-01T13:30:00.000-06:00

It’s 90 degrees here today. 90, which tops the record 85 set in 1976. Then we are getting a cold front and the rest of the week it will be in the 60’s. 60’s are still higher than normal for this time of year. Yet the current prez and his administration continue to say there is no such thing as global warming. My ass…

And speaking of my ass, I got a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I got out of the shower today, and you know what my first thought was? I look EXACTLY like Gloria the hippo on Madagascar. If you haven’t been lucky enough to see this movie 500 times as I have, here is what she looks like:

Right now I look exactly like her except not as gray and without the happy face. I still have 9 weeks to go with this baby and while that doesn’t sound like a long time, to a hippo-like, miserable, pregnant woman who gets kicked in the bladder all day, it’s a freaking eternity. My sacroiliac joint is doing funky things every time I wake up in the morning or sit for long periods of time, which is pretty much all day long because I don’t have the energy to do anything right now. I’m exhausted. And now the boy has decided to drive me insane by telling me he can’t do anything.
Me: “Honey, please pick up your shoes.”
Him: “I CAN’T!!!!”
Me: “Why can’t you?”
Him: “Because I just CAN’T!”
I don’t know who taught him this “can’t” word, but if I find out, it’s not going to be pretty.

I know it'll be over soon. I just need to buck up and keep my eyes on the goal here, which is a healthy baby. I CAN do this. (But I still reserve the right to bitch about it.)

Knitting update: I have no knitting to show right now because life sort of got in the way of my knitting plans. I’m still working on the Batman and Spiderman socks, but it’s just going to take a little while. I promise I will try to post pictures soon.

Birthday boy

2006-02-22T21:23:00.000-06:00

This morning at 6:49 my baby boy officially turned 4 years old. I can hardly believe it. In honor of his birthday, I will share his birth story.

Most first-time expectant moms will ask their friends or other moms “How will I know I’m really in labor?” The number one answer I received was “Trust me, you’ll just know.” I had my aha moment on the morning of Thursday, February 21, 2002 at 9:00am when I woke up to pains that were decidedly different than the contractions one normally has throughout a pregnancy. I tried to relax and take it easy most of the day, but I did manage to get a few things done around the house. Then I made sure my bag was packed for the hospital, and took a shower and shaved my legs (because really, who wants to show off hairy legs in those stirrups at the hospital?) and waited for my husband to get home from work. He came home early in the afternoon when the contractions were still very manageable, but getting a little harder, so we started keeping a log of how many minutes passed from one contraction to the next. We were told not to go to the hospital until the contractions were 5 minutes apart so we were waiting for that magic number to appear. The only problem was my contractions never regulated that way. We would jump from 5 to 10 to 4 to 8 to 3 minutes apart. Around 10:00pm they were starting to get more intense and painful, but still not regulated, so I called the hospital and spoke to the nurse on duty who told me to take a bath and then try to get some sleep because it would be a while. The bitch… I took a bath and all that did was make them more intense and we saw a few 2 minute intervals interspersed among the 8’s and 6’s and 10’s. When I could absolutely take it no more, I told my husband, “Let’s go. I want some drugs.”

We arrived at the hospital at 1:00am and as soon as the nurse hooked up the monitor around my waist, my water broke. Yes! No way they would send me back home now! She checked me and I believe I was at a 7, so she asked me if I was ready for an epidural. “Absolutely!” Along with the epidural I also received a lovely IV of magnesium sulfate because my blood pressure went sky high. The next 5 ¾ hours were relatively pain free, although my epidural wasn’t quite working the way it was supposed to. I wasn’t in pain, but I could still feel the contractions and I could feel when I needed to pee. I didn’t really mind at all, but the nurse kept calling the anesthesiologist back to my room to push various substances into the epidural IV. Towards the end I was so stoned it’s not even funny (seriously, my aunt took a picture so I could fully appreciate it later). Then there were the scary little episodes where the baby’s heart beat would go way down, and the doctor asked me if our number one goal was a healthy baby (I’m assuming she was preparing me for a c-section). She checked me one more time and said, “I think I feel an ear.” I thought, “That’s good. I want my baby to have ears.” Then she explained that the baby was looking sideways in the birth canal and could not come out that way. She wanted to page one of her colleagues who was excellent at turning babies. No problem – if that would save me from a c-section, by all means try it. He got there at probably 6:45am, did the episiotomy, grabbed the giant salad tongs, pushed my baby backwards, turned him a ¼ turn, and then delivered his head and stepped back and let my doctor do the rest. Oddly enough, I have no memory of this because whatever drug the anesthesiologist had just given me had me completely stoned, but my husband tells me it was extremely quick. I do remember them saying, “It’s a boy” and I remember a nurse telling us his APGAR scores were 9 and 9, but due to being up for almost 24 hours and being stoned, most of the actual delivery is a complete blur. However, I do remember with extreme clarity the moment they put him on my stomach. I would love to say that I had that magical moment where I was weeping and felt an overwhelming love for my newborn, but honestly, all I could think of at the time was “Ewww, he’s all bloody and icky.” Again, I was tired and stoned. After he had a bath and was given back to me (and the medication started wearing off), the love poured out, along with my first healthy dose of mother’s guilt.

My husband was completely wonderful through the entire delivery experience. He took great care of me through the labor and delivery portion, he gave Braden his first bath and weighed him (6 lbs, 3 oz), he changed all the diapers in the hospital and amazed me with how loving and tender he was towards both of us.

And that is Braden’s birth story. Happy birthday, big boy! We love you!!!

Moments that I want to remember forever

2006-02-10T16:34:00.000-06:00

Sweet Moments:
The other morning my son woke me up around 5:30 and said, “Mommy, I want to snuggle.” He does this nearly every morning, but sometimes it is MUCH earlier and sometimes he just silently crawls in bed with us. I made room for him in the middle of the bed and we went back to sleep snuggling. When I finally woke up at 6:30 and got in the shower, I noticed a perfect imprint of his little ear in the skin in the crook of my arm and the sweet feeling it invoked almost made me cry. If I could have preserved that little imprint, I would have. It was just one of those moments that I wanted to capture and keep forever. When he was a baby we co-slept because I nursed him in the middle of the night, but the co-sleeping continued long after he weaned around his first birthday. In fact, he was probably 3 years old before he finally started sleeping in his own bed. And after many months of struggling to get him to sleep in his own bed, you would think that his daily snuggle sessions or his creeping into bed with us would be frustrating or make us feel like failures as parents. But to tell the truth, I actually enjoy snuggling with him. I know the day is coming when he will be too big and won’t want to snuggle anymore, and that will break my heart. So I will hang on to our little morning snuggle moments for as long as I can (especially on weekend mornings when we sleep in late while snuggling). It may be a little challenging once the baby gets here, but we’ll manage. I just hope she likes to snuggle as much as the boy does.

Funny Moments:
Last week we were waiting in line at the drive thru of McDonald’s (I know – don’t judge me) and after I paid for our food, a little voice from the back seat yelled “COME ON, PEOPLE!” Apparently he was hungry. And I need to be really careful what I yell at people in traffic.

Knitting news:
I have finished knitting the Spiderman socks, but there is a problem. My plan was to knit the socks in plain red and blue and then duplicate stitch the spider web pattern. I tried and it looks like crap. Actually it was worse than crappy. So I ripped out the duplicate stitch that I started and tried embroidering. One would think this would be easy for me to do seeing as how I made this:

But no, the embroidery looked craptastic also. My option now is to reknit the socks and actually knit the spider web pattern in a sort of fair isle design. I’ve never done fair isle before and although it doesn’t look like it would be too difficult only using 2 colors on a small sock, I am intimidated. So I have decided to set these aside and start working on the Batman socks. Instead of fair isle, these will have a very small intarsia patch on the sides, which sounds much less intimidating. Wish me luck.

Friends that rock

2006-01-31T12:09:00.000-06:00

I'm a little late in posting about this, but look what my good friend KatyaR gave me for Christmas:

On the left is Socks That Rock in colorway Romancing the Stone, and on the right is Sunshine Yarns in colorway Violets. If I didn't already have a gazillion projects to complete in the next couple of months, I would totally be casting on with one of these right now. The colors are awesome and I love them. Thank you, Katya. You rock!

I can also officially show you the finished socks for my cousin:

Pattern is the Broadripple Socks on Knitty and the yarn is Cascade Fixation in color 9490. I love this yarn. Normally cotton yarns start hurting my hands because they just don't have any "give" but not this stuff. That little bit of elastic (1.7%) makes a huge difference and I would gladly work with this yarn again. I realize because of the angle of the picture, the socks look like they are 2 different sizes, but I promise they are the same.

Now I'm working on 2 pairs of socks for the boy for his birthday in February. One will be Spiderman socks and the other Batman. I'm not at all sure I can pull this off, but I'm going to try. Hopefully I will have some pictures for you soon. And speaking of the boy, he's sick again today with vomiting and diarrhea. Hopefully it's just that 24 hour bug that he managed to miss right after Christmas, but sick seems to be the resounding theme around our house these days. At the very least it's some kind of record for us anyway. I can't wait for this bug season to end.

Random thoughts

2006-01-19T14:22:00.000-06:00

I am seriously sick and tired of being sick. I now have what appears to be the remnants of a wicked head cold and I am not happy about it one bit. I started feeling a little run down and achy on Friday and I spent the majority of my weekend lying on the sofa. I have a lovely, hacking cough, but I am starting to feel a wee bit better. But this is it, you hear me? No more illness, please. I’m done. Three times in less than a month is enough.
I had to rip out the sock I was making for my cousin because I was a fool to think that it would still fit even though I was making it so tightly. But I had PLENTY of time while convalescing this past weekend to start over and get damn near finished with one. I kitchenered the toe last night and then cast on for the other one. Woohoo!
My son is apparently already having some issues with the baby. When I arrived to pick him up from daycare yesterday, his teacher told me she found him sobbing in a corner of the room and when she asked what was wrong he said, “Mommy’s home with the baby.” She misunderstood at first and thought I had already had the baby and when she said, “Your mom had the baby?” he replied, “Yes, mommy’s home with the baby.” Then she realized that it was way too early and she asked, “Wait, is the baby still in mommy’s tummy?” he said, “Yes. And mommy’s home with the baby.” She comforted him and he eventually calmed down and went back to playing, but this really alarmed me. I tried to talk to him about it last night and we spent lots of extra time last night snuggling and spending quality time together so that he will hopefully feel more secure about the whole baby situation. I suspect this is just the first of many issues we will deal with.
I look like I’m 40 weeks pregnant instead of 25.
I’m already having moments of incontinence, especially when I cough or sneeze. And I’m coughing a lot (see #1). At this point there’s no way I could do enough kegel exercises to help. For the first few weeks after I had my son, my body wouldn’t give me any advance warning of the urge to pee. It was like, “Hey, I need to – oh crap, I’m peeing.” I lost track of how many urine puddles/trails my husband cleaned up during that time. And he never complained once. That’s true love right there.
My best friend Kim ran a half marathon! Yea Kim!!! Here's the email she sent out (printed with her permission, of course): "Hello friends and family,

Many of you may have known that I had been training for the Houston Half Marathon since August. But, what you didn't know (and neither did I), is that I could and would actually accomplish that lofty goal! I know what you're thinking... there is no way Kim could run 13.1 miles!? And let me tell you - I wasn't so sure I could do it either. But bit-by-bit and mile-by-mile I kept inching toward that goal until I conquered it. In August, I joined a group of INSANE people that meet on Saturday mornings to train together and support one another. That was great, when they met at 7:00, but the meeting times kept getting earlier and earlier until finally I was getting up at 4:30 in the morning to meet them at 5:00. Running... at 5:00am... on Saturday mornings!!! Can you believe I stuck with that plan?! We ran in the blistering heat (remember...it's hot in Houston even at 5:00 and 6:00 am), the outrageous humidity, and the pouring rain. But, I witnessed some of the most beautiful sunrises, I met some wonderfully encouraging friends, and I discovered something deep inside of myself...strength and determination. I would have to say that completing the half marathon is one of my most treasured experiences. I also believe that my children learned a valuable lesson from the sideline. They watched me set a goal, they saw that it took a lot of hard work and they saw that it was SO WORTH IT!!!! Crossing that finish line (even though I felt like quitting at mile 7, and 9 and definitely at mile 12) sent me through a range of emotions. I just can't help but think how good it would feel to complete a full MARATHON! Maybe I'll write to you next January and let you know. "

Isn't she awesome?

Someone, please fumigate my house

2006-01-11T16:25:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we found out both my husband and son have strep. I did my best to stay away from both of them last night, even so far as sleeping downstairs on the sofa. But unfortunately I couldn’t turn off the maternal mind-set and even though the boy was upstairs, I heard every cough, every time he got out of bed, and I heard him when he cried for me. His dad isn’t blessed with this mind-set and heard nothing. I will give him a break this time since he’s sick too, but he probably wouldn’t hear him under normal circumstances. I went upstairs and tried to wake him and tell him that his child was lying on the floor in the bathroom with his head next to a little pink puke bucket (God bless him, he doesn’t want to make a mess on the floor), but he mumbled something unintelligible and went right back to sleep. So I comforted the little guy and put him back to bed. And now I am tired. No sleep. When I talked to my husband this morning he apologized, but he said I need to stay away from them tonight and get a good night’s sleep. I tried to explain how I can’t NOT respond when my child is sick and crying for me (especially when his father doesn’t even wake up because he’s sick too), but he just doesn’t get it. And I’m just hoping and praying that I don’t get strep too because I can’t stay away. We’re not starting off the year on a very healthy note, are we?

Update on my cousin’s socks: I got the yarn and cast on for the Broadripple Socks on Knitty. I’m using Cascade Fixation in color 9490 Parfait, and it’s much more suited to my cousin. I noticed yesterday that the colors in my sock seem to be pooling, whereas the model in the pattern photo doesn’t. I checked my gauge. Aha, there’s the problem. Gauge is supposed to be 7 stitches per inch and I’m getting 9 because I knit too damn tightly. But despite that, I think the sock will still work because my cousin is so tiny. The pattern says it should fit a woman’s medium foot and I would say my cousin is a woman’s small so I’m just going to keep knitting and not worry about it. If it doesn't work, she can give them to her daughter and I'll eventually knit her another pair. And in the future I will work on relaxing a little bit while I knit and maybe I will actually get the gauge I’m supposed to. And speaking of gauge, I admitted something funny to someone the other day. You know how when you are looking at a pattern and it will give you the number of stitches per 4” or 10cm? Well, even though I’ve been knitting for about a year and a half and I have looked at oodles of patterns, it finally dawned on me that gauge is how much a woman dilates to have a baby. Maybe I came to this realization because I’m pregnant and I’ve had labor and delivery on my brain for a couple of months now, but now every time I read another pattern I’m like, “Holy CRAP! 10cm is NOT VERY BIG!!!” It’s not anywhere NEAR big enough to accommodate a baby’s head! No wonder having a baby is so painful. Thank God for epidurals.

Confession time

2006-01-06T16:28:00.000-06:00

I told a lie the other day. I was on the phone with my cousin and describing the various sock yarn in my stash and giving her color choices for a pair of socks. In my hands I had some nice Koigu that honestly, were the perfect colors for her: pale pastels in pink, purple and blue. But when she asked me if I had anything with pink in it, I suddenly realized how perfect the yarn would be for my baby girl. I could SEE my baby girl wearing something made from this yarn. And doesn’t my baby deserve Koigu? So I lied and said no. Will I go to hell for being a selfish yarn whore? I thought I found something my cousin might like out of the rest of my stash and I started a pair of socks for her, and then I realized today that these colors are just not right. So out of guilt I have decided to break my resolution about only knitting from my stash so I can buy something more suitable for my cousin. And then my buddy KatyaR emails me and tells me she will be going to Guthrie for a funeral and will be stopping by SWAK and wondered if I needed anything. So you see, it was fate. And now I will have 2 socks started and waiting on the needles while I make the pair for my cousin. Plus I want to make the kiddo a couple of pairs of socks for his birthday towards the end of February. This is so typical of me. I make grand plans about the things I want to accomplish and in the end, well, you can imagine how the story usually ends.

Perhaps it was karma, but the same night that I lied to my cousin, my husband said something very stupid to me. I was showing him how swaybacked I look right now with my big belly sticking out in front and showing him how it makes my GIANT ASS stick out even farther. He said “No, babe, your ass has always stuck out like that.” All I could manage was a stunned, “Well, you didn’t have to say it like THAT, you jackass!” Now, I should point out that I interrupted him while he was watching the end of the very exciting Rose Bowl game between Texas and USC, so he wasn’t thinking clearly. But that’s still no excuse. In fact, I’ll have to look but I’m pretty sure that’s in the rule book under the heading Things to Never Say to Your Significant Other (Even if They’re True). And you SURE don’t ever want to say that to someone who’s pregnant and hormonal. But then again, I did point it out to him. Karma...

The holidays are over

2006-01-03T16:08:00.000-06:00

Whew – what a way to wrap up the year. Christmas was wonderful and no family members were harmed, which is a plus. My mom came up from the Eufaula area and gave us, among other things, a stomach bug for Christmas. Even my in-laws got it. Fortunately, it was only a 24 hour bug and amazingly, the kiddo did not get it. But oh my, I haven’t thrown up that much in a LONG time. Not fun. As soon as I started feeling better, I went shopping with KatyaR and we hit a couple of yarn shops and a few wine shops. I miss wine… Then guess what fun thing the hubby and I did to ring in the New Year? We tiled the floor! Woohoo – the fun never stops at our house. Of course, we didn’t finish. We never do. There are just too many projects to do and not enough time to do them. But hey, I can now say that I know how to use a trowel, so that’s something, right?

So anyway, now that 2006 is here, I am making a list of resolutions that I most likely won’t stick to. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Knit projects only from stash yarn. (Unless my LYS or some online store is having an unbelievable sale that I simply can’t pass up.)
2. Become a better, more patient parent.
3. Become a better, more patient spouse.
4. Become more organized in every aspect of my life.
5. Work on my scrapbooks more to preserve those memories that I am so good at forgetting.
6. Try to eat healthier and exercise more.
7. Try to set better examples for my kid(s).
8. Try to remember more birthdays ON TIME this year. (This is a particularly hard one for me.)
9. Try to be a happier person no matter what.
10. Try to be more active and less lazy in every aspect of my life.

No matter what your resolutions are, I wish everyone the very best in 2006. And to KatyaR, you are very much missed here, but I hope you are loving your new job.

'Tis the season to be.....sickly

2005-12-22T14:48:00.000-06:00

One word has dominated my life lately: germs. It started a couple of weeks ago when the boy was sick all weekend with lots of drainage, coughing up a lung, and vomiting. It went away in a couple of days so we figured it was just a quick bug. But no, it came back with a vengeance and this time it got me too. The boy and I have been home sick for 3 days. I just started feeling better and I'm assuming he is too because he is running around in crackhead mode again. But wait - let me tell you about the wonderful day I had yesterday. I woke up feeling miserable and wanting to die, but I had something I needed to take into work because they were having a function that day (and by the way, sorry if I infected anyone). So I took a shower and got dressed and got the boy all dressed and headed out the door. My car wouldn't start. I hijacked the hubby's truck and took care of a few things at work and then went back home. My best friend that lives in Houston just happened to be in the area and stopped by, but to keep from infecting her kids with the crud, I stood outside and we talked by her vehicle. We have several trees in the front and a stupid little bird picked the EXACT spot where I was standing to crap and it hit me right on the head. Clearly it was intentional. So I went back inside and washed my hair for the 2nd time that day while my husband nearly peed himself laughing. I called my doctor's office and convinced them to call me in a prescription, but didn't find out until 7:00pm that the pharmacy hadn't filled it because they show in their computer that I am alergic to that particular drug. I said, "No, I'm not. I'm not allergic to any drugs." And please tell me where pharmacists get off managing my health instead of my doctor. My doctor knows perfectly well what I'm capable of taking and what I'm not. It's bad enough that pharmacies are refusing to fill some scripts because of moral issues, but now they have to play doctor with us as well? Give me a break. But anyway, I'm happy to report that today is going much better and no birds have crapped on me...yet.

I did finally finish the baby sweater that I was making and sent it off to my cousin in Ohio. Here's a picture:

It's the Ribbon Edged Cardigan from Special Knits by Debbie Bliss. Yarn is Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran in dusty pink and I couldn't find a ruffled-edge ribbon that matched so I omitted it and opted for some simple pearl buttons. I think it turned out quite nice if you kindly overlook the holes I made when picking up stitches around the neck. But that's ok because it's a hand-knit garment and therefore, unique.

And since that is done, I am attempting my first toe-up sock. I don't have pictures yet because I JUST started it so there's really not much to see. If it goes well, I'll have picture soon. If not, I may stab someone with my dpn's out of frustration.

I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas or wonderful holiday, whatever you celebrate. I'll have family coming over again. Someone please drink some spiked eggnog for me.

Some updates

2005-12-02T11:41:00.000-06:00

I am happy to report that no family members were harmed during Thanksgiving, nor did I spend the evening locked in the bedroom. I was a little miffed when my husband asked his parents to come over EARLY because he thought I needed help cleaning. First of all, even if I did need help cleaning, I am much too proud to admit it let alone actually delegate cleaning duties to others. If I had felt crappy that day, I would have simply told them to ignore the mess and blame it all on the pregnancy. Even when people offer, I am just not comfortable telling them, “You know, the floor could really stand a good mopping.” I just can’t do it. So instead I try to play the role of superwoman and get it all done myself. The exception is the hubby – I can delegate cleaning chores to him all day long and never feel one pang of guilt or shame. Regardless, the cleaning got mostly done and my portion of the food turned out wonderfully, no frozen pies were produced, and we even had a lovely visit with some unexpected, out of town relatives that we hadn’t seen in a long time. So for those keeping score, that’s one holiday production down, one to go…

And yesterday I had a consult with a Maternal Fetal Medicine Specialist (or high-risk doctor, if you will) because at 36 I am of advanced maternal age. Don’t even get me started on how unbelievably old that makes me feel. Anyway, after extensive ultrasound it was determined that there is a 99% chance the peanut is a girl, she has no markers whatsoever for Downs, and she appears to be healthy in every way. After learning there were no markers for Downs, we opted out of having an amniocentesis done. No, I would NOT like to have a long-ass needle poked through my abdomen into my uterus, thank you very much. So now I guess it’s time to get the name books out again and start picking girl names. To be honest, I was starting to want (in a completely passive aggressive way) to have a boy just because everyone wanted us to have a girl. And obviously it would have been easier if we had another boy because we already have all the boy “stuff” but deep down, it really didn’t matter. We will love her as much as we love Braden, and we welcome the wondrous challenges and differences of raising a little girl.

Thankful

2005-11-23T13:18:00.000-06:00

Despite feeling stressed and tired and a little irritable, there are so many things that I am thankful for this year. Here are a few things in no particular order:
• The boy is FINALLY fully potty trained.
• Friends and family (even the family members that make me insane).
• A husband who respects my opinion even if he doesn’t always agree with me.
• Hugs and snuggles with a cute three year-old.
• My family is healthy, relatively happy, and we have enough food to eat.
• We have a roof over our heads at night.
• We have decent health insurance.
• Only 2 more years with Dubya screwing up this country.
• I didn’t vote for him.
• Key Republican indictments and/or investigations.

I’m sure there are others that I’m just not thinking of right now. Things have been crazy at our house lately. The husband decided to go ahead and bust up the rest of the tile in the kitchen right before Thanksgiving so we’ve had a ton of dust that I was not prepared to deal with as part of my pre-Thanksgiving cleaning regimen. In addition, I’ve been trying to squeeze in a little time to work on finishing up a baby sweater for my cousin. I’m to my favorite part of the sweater: seaming and weaving in ends. And since I loathe seaming and weaving, I keep setting it aside for other things. In addition to stressing over the excess dust in the house, I’m stressing over having the in-laws over for Thanksgiving because they sort of take over when they get here and then there’s a competition thing that we get into that makes me crazy. For example, we’ll talk before hand and decide on the menu and who’s willing to bring which dishes. Among other things, I usually volunteer to do the pumpkin pie because I use my grandmother’s recipe and it’s awesome. And EVERY SINGLE YEAR my mother-in-law brings a frozen, store-bought pumpkin pie when she knows that I’ve already baked two homemade ones. And EVERY SINGLE YEAR, they wind up taking their frozen pie home because nobody eats it. Oh, and we also have to have the same menu every year because that’s the way it’s always been done since the beginning of time. If I want to have a different side dish or if I want to do a fried turkey instead of a roasted one, she will go ahead and do the traditional side dish and roasted turkey anyway because one must never deviate from the menu. I could go on and on, but I will spare you. Anyway, I try to ignore it and bite my tongue or consume mass quantities of wine to make it more bearable because they are my husband’s family and guests in our home, but I feel less willing to do that this year. Maybe it’s the pregnancy (and I can’t drink the wine this year) or maybe it’s the fact that I’m just tired of the games that are always played, but I warned my husband that if I see a frozen pie, I’m going to spend the evening by myself in the bedroom.

But wait, there’s more! Christmas is just a month away and then it will happen AGAIN! Please send prayers or good thoughts this way that I make it through the entire holiday season without seriously injuring someone.

Just to clarify, things haven’t always been this way with the in-laws. They used to be the most wonderful people and I was the one among my friends who lucked out and got the “good” in-laws. But in recent years things have changed for one reason or another, and there’s not even a specific event that I can pinpoint as the cause for the change. It may be simply that we are all growing in a different direction. Regardless, I will try to put aside our differences and endure being around them for the sake of my husband and kids. And if they ever find out about this blog or get internet access at home, this post is totally getting edited…

I hope everyone has a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

No child left behind, my ass

2005-11-10T16:43:00.000-06:00

I’ve had my first dealings with the school system where we live and it wasn’t positive. I know you are probably as shocked as I was (heavy sarcasm), but first let me give you the back story…

About March of this year people from DHS were coming to the daycare to do Denver II Screenings for parents who were interested. Braden’s pediatrician had mentioned that he was a little hard to understand and that I might consider getting him tested in the future so I signed up. He had just turned 3. The results of that screening, based on the 10 minutes they spent with my son, was that he had a serious speech and language delay. They referred me to the Special Services Department of my school district for further evaluation and the form they gave me used words like “intervention” and “global caution,” which are pretty scary words for a parent to read. So I called and immediately had him placed on the school system’s list.

It wasn’t until September that the school system actually tested him, and that was only after I became a total pest with phone calls and emails to the Special Services Department. In my defense, if someone had just communicated with me even a little bit, the whole pest thing wouldn’t have been necessary. So anyway, we went to the school board building and met with 3 ladies: a speech pathologist, a psychologist, and a physical therapist. Within minutes all three were agreeing that he had a “marked delay” in his speech and would probably need some speech therapy. Ok, no big deal. They left me with a ton of paperwork to fill out and took him into the next room for extensive testing. An hour later they came back and went over all his results. Long story short: he’s the lowest side of average a kid can possibly be without failing so he doesn’t qualify for any speech therapy. But wait, there’s more. The physical therapist told me that she had some concerns that he may have some neurological damage because a) he holds a pen with his fist and not his fingers, b) sometimes he walks on his toes, and c) she noticed several facial tics. WTF??? I have NEVER noticed a facial tic and neither have any of his teachers or anyone else that I asked who has regular contact with him. The pen issue we have been working with and yeah, sometimes he walks on his toes, but he does it when he’s goofing off. He knows how to walk normally and he does so on a regular basis. And it gets even better. The psychologist tells me that he doesn’t appear to have a normal response to pain because he hit his head while he was playing and he didn’t cry. He didn’t even acknowledge that he hit his head. I informed her that she was wrong and that he cries ALL THE TIME when he falls down at home. She said, “Well, he hit his head hard and it should have made him cry. You need to talk to your doctor about that.” I wanted to say, “How do you know? Could you FEEL HIS PAIN?” but I could feel myself becoming angry so I said nothing and just signed whatever forms would let me get the hell out of there. I think the thing that made me the most angry is that they are basing all these assumptions on such a limited amount of time, at a time when he was excited and hyper and showing off because he was in new surroundings among new people. They didn’t seem to take any of that into consideration and I would think that would be fairly typical of the kids they encounter. They did say something about him having no attention span and that I might ask my pediatrician about possibly testing for ADHD, and THAT I can see (we don’t him the Crackhead for nothing). But now I know that I’m on my own in getting him any help because the school system is pretty worthless.

So what brought on this rant? I finally received my written report in the mail the other day and it makes no sense. It lists scores without giving me any indication as to what the scores mean (for example, I don’t know what a large muscle score of 105 means), and it doesn’t address ANY of the things that the physical therapist or the psychologist discussed. So now we’re trying to figure out if we will have enough money to send him to a private school or if we can fix up our house and move to another district before he starts kindergarten. Not that it will matter because I suspect that a lot of school districts are this way. Only one thing is for certain – wherever he does go to school, he can count on a mom who will be a pest fighting to get him what he needs.

And with that, I will leave you with a cute picture.

Birthdays rock

2005-10-27T12:18:00.000-05:00

Well, actually I don't really feel that way. Once I hit a certain number of birthdays I sort of wished I could just skip them each year and not be reminded that I'm a year older. That is until last Friday when KatyaR gave me this:

I apologize for the bad picture but you are looking at Nancy Bush's Knitting on the Road, a pair of the coolest Wooleez socks, and 2 skeins of Fortissima Colori sock yarn (the picture lies - the 2 skeins are the same color). Thank you, KatyaR. You rock!

Pregnancy Update

I think I've finally hit the stage where the nausea and dry heaves are fading away, and I'm hoping that my energy level will soon pick up as well. My lower ab fat has morphed into an actual bump which is pushing my stomach fat upwards, so now I have a nice stomach fat roll bump and right below that a baby bump. I'm bumpy. We're talking to the boy all the time about the baby so that he will be completely used to the idea before another little person comes to invade our house, and I think he's starting to grasp the concept. The cutest thing is when you ask him where the baby is and he tells you, "It's in my tummy." Oh son, that is sweet to want to carry the baby for me, but I would never do that to you. The most surprising thing is that he is now telling us it's a girl. He's adamant that he is going to have a sister. I hope he's not disappointed if it turns out to be a boy.

Koigu sock question

2005-10-14T13:41:00.000-05:00

In the comments from Tuesday’s post, I was asked a question about the koigu socks. I’m sorry, Melanie, but I couldn’t find an email address for you, so I’m answering you here. I hope that’s ok. Oh, and thank you for asking about the socks.

M. said...
Hmmm . . . koigu socks are the best thing in the whole world. Well, after babies . . .
Anyway, what are you doing? What size needles (I think I used 2's) and I want to say about 60 stitches? I'll look it up if you need me to. Keep trying-- they'll be worth it.

When I first started the socks, I used this pattern. Same needle size, same number of stitches – just as it’s written. It was way too big so I ripped and started again with fewer stitches (but I don’t remember the exact number). It still seemed a little bit big, but it was livable and I thought I would give it a go. However, when I got to the short row heel everything turned ugly. It was my first time doing a short row heel and well, apparently I’m not supposed to ever knit a short row heel. I stayed up until almost 2:00am trying to make the stupid short row heel work, and I think there might have even been some tears of frustration involved, not to mention that my fingers were sore and my bamboo needles felt like they were on the verge of breaking. But still I muddled through. The next morning I knew I couldn’t live with the heel I knitted and I was much too frustrated with the sock to tink it back to where I could start a normal heel, so I just ripped the whole thing.

So on I went to my next choice of patterns. This one used a size 2 needle opposed to the size 1 on the first pattern, but that was fine. The author says she has a size 8 ½ foot that is narrow to medium in width. Great – me too. And it had a regular heel. So I knit it exactly as written (72 stitches in k2p2 ribbing on size 2’s) and even though it seemed like a lot of stitches, it was less than the previous sock and I knit a bit tight, so again, I went for it. When I tried it on to see how many more rounds I needed before starting the toe decreases, I realized the error of my ways. And that’s when I sat the beautiful koigu down and told it, “I love you, but I think we need a break.”

Now, I would like to again state for the record that both of these patterns are perfectly lovely patterns and one should not use my ineptitude as a guide on whether or not to make socks from them. They just aren’t the right patterns for me. I am determined to actually make these socks though, so if you have any suggestions, I will gladly accept them. I’ll bet I could make them work with 60 stitches with size 2’s… One day I will have koigu socks. And I agree, they will very much be worth it.

Birthday surprise

2005-10-12T19:12:00.000-05:00

Lookie here! Oklahoma finally got a lottery! We have been waiting for this for so long. Our governor's platform was that he wanted to have a lottery where the proceeds go solely to fund education. He was elected, and shortly after the people of Oklahoma voted on the issue. I'm not sure on the exact figures, but I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% in favor of the lottery. And now we finally have the first scratch-off tickets!

And what a coincidence that the day they chose to release the tickets should be the husband's birthday. So the tickets in this picture are part of his birthday present. We'll probably do more stuff at the weekend though. We're all about the weekends in this family. So if you live in Oklahoma (or you live close to Oklahoma and feel like taking a road trip), go buy some scratch-off tickets. Help us stick it in the faces of the legislators who voted against this and are still saying it will never work.

Letter to my sock yarn

2005-10-11T15:13:00.000-05:00

Dear Koigu yarn that I love in color #P859,

Why do you hate me? I have tried several times now to knit you into a beautiful sock, yet you resist me. Why? Have I offended you? Is it because I have not devoted my full time and energy to making you into something beautiful? I have attempted two different sock patterns – which are lovely patterns, by the way – and you simply refuse to conform. And yet I want to keep trying because you are so soft and I long to have beautiful, warm socks on my cold feet this winter. So I will let you decide this time which pattern you want me to use. What kind of sock do you want to be? And until you tell me, I will work on the other project I have started, a baby sweater for my cousin in Ohio. It’s your choice – become a beautiful sock or spend the rest of your life in a plastic bin in my closet…

Sincerely,

Missy

I honestly don't know where I went wrong. It seemed to be going so well and then I actually tried the sock on. It's freaking huge. I don't know if my gauge is off or what, but this just won't do. If I spend hours (or months) lovingly knitting a sock, I want it to fit. Sigh...

Fourteen

2005-10-06T19:49:00.000-05:00

I can hardly believe it, but yesterday was our 14th wedding anniversary. 14 years. Wow. We didn’t do anything special because of the hubby’s crazy working hours, but we did meet for dinner after I picked the kiddo up from daycare (plus my mom is coming to babysit this weekend so we can have a proper date). However, we did talk on the phone for a while earlier that morning and he told me that if he had to do it all over again, he definitely would, which was really nice to hear. We’re not a particularly romantic couple, mostly because that’s just not his nature and I learned a long time ago that you can’t change your spouse or force them to be someone they’re not. But we still hold hands sometimes and he still opens my car door and we still snuggle when we get the chance. We’ve been through a lot, and there have been many times when we did not get along, but we have grown together and (I hope) learned from our mistakes. There are many reasons we have lasted so long, but I like to think that one of the main reasons is that we have a mutual respect for each other as individuals. My husband is a good provider for our family and he’s never been jealous or abusive, and when I tell him that I need a little bit of time to myself, he does whatever he can to give that to me. He’s also a great father. I can’t imagine going through life with any other partner. Babe, I love you deeply and I hope we have many more years together.

The post in which I reveal the depth of my insanity

2005-09-26T15:23:00.000-05:00

It’s no secret that sometimes I struggle with motherhood. And judging from the sheer number of parenting books available, I would say that I am not alone. It’s also no secret that my son sometimes drives me a little crazy, hence the name of this blog. But the funny and sweet things he does far outweigh the things that make me crazy, and overall my husband and I have found parenthood to be very rewarding. So we decided to try for another baby. Are we insane? Probably. I am pleased to announce that after trying for one year, we are finally successful, and I am approximately 8 weeks pregnant. I’ve known for about two weeks and I have hesitated sharing the good news because it was so early and anything could happen (and still could), and also because one of my family members had some really bizarre, unexpectedly negative things to say regarding this pregnancy. Nevertheless, I am sharing the news now. And you want to know the really bizarre twist in all this? My due date is May 3rd. How weird is that? It’s not likely I’ll have the baby on that exact date, but it still gives me some hope that I can replace some bad memories of that day with some happy ones. And even though this pregnancy is likely to bring many more years of blue candy, I say bring it on.

PS: If you have emailed me lately, please be patient in waiting for a reply. I have been feeling a little sick lately, and when I’m not feeling sick, I’m just freaking exhausted. With my son this lasted only the first trimester so I’m hoping the same for this pregnancy and hoping that it doesn’t last the whole 40 weeks. Please God, no.

Coming to a comedy club near you

2005-09-15T20:59:00.000-05:00

The boy's been walking around the house for days saying, "Thank you, PJ!" over and over again. And then finally:

Son: Thank you, PJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ!
Mommy, can you say, "Thank you, PJ?"

Me: Thank you, PJ.

Son: I'm not PJ. I'm Braden!

And then he ran out of the room laughing.

We'll be here all week. Please remember to tip your waiter.

Back from vacation and wishing I was still gone

2005-09-13T22:25:00.000-05:00

I really want to talk about how much fun I had on vacation, but the truth is I feel guilty for even going somewhere in the first place, especially when the chaos and confusion in the Gulf was still ongoing. But we went anyway, if nothing else than to escape the depressing and heart wrenching images on the TV and internet. So I will post about vacation another day.

What I’d like to post about now is how disappointed I am in my government over how this entire Katrina situation has been handled. I have experienced natural disaster first-hand and my experience was NOTHING like what the good people of New Orleans and Mississippi are enduring. When the tornado hit our neighborhood in 1999 it was around 7:00pm. By the next morning (LESS THAN 12 HOURS LATER), National Guardsmen were stationed at every entrance into every ruined neighborhood (and with more than 10,000 homes damaged, that’s a LOT of neighborhoods) and FEMA was on-site and doing a pretty good job coordinating search and rescue efforts. Within two days we were allowed to return to our homes and try to salvage what we could, and they allowed the Red Cross to camp out on our street and cook meals for people who had just lost everything. They also let church groups and charities into the neighborhood who passed out tons of bottled water and food items and work gloves and sunscreen. There was a real sense of hope. So WTF happened in New Orleans and Mississippi?

Now granted, when our disaster happened, it was a different time and under completely different circumstances than the people in the Gulf. We don’t live below sea level or on the coast and we didn’t have all the flooding a hurricane usually brings with people trapped on their rooftops waiting for rescue. And obviously our disaster was on a much smaller scale than the Gulf's. But we were under the Clinton administration, and regardless of anyone’s personal political preferences, he at least had the decency to be concerned about his fellow man in times of crisis. We were also not at war over ficticious WMD's so there was no shortage of National Guard soldiers. We were not experiencing a RECORD DEFICIT so there was no shortage of funding for FEMA, who it is also worth noting, was not under any “Homeland Security” department. FEMA actually seemed to care about us and they responded to our disaster swiftly and coordinated efforts between the county and city governments with ease. You didn’t read in the paper or hear on TV about any squabbling over jurisdiction. The situation was handled and it was handled well, and I am eternally grateful to everyone who was involved. I can only imagine how betrayed the people of New Orleans and Mississippi must feel right now. It makes me angry when I read how FEMA denied the Red Cross access to those still in New Orleans because they wanted to encourage people to leave. How many lives did that cost? In fact, it seems like FEMA denied a lot of resources that could have saved lives. Want to see? Go HERE and check out the links under #2 FEMA. The rest of the page is worth a read as well.

I know all this negatively isn’t helping anything and we need to get past the blame and finger-pointing, but damnit, I’m too angry to do that! I read on CNN today where Bush is saying that he takes responsibility for the government’s failure in how the Katrina disaster has been handled. That’s great – he absolutely should, but it’s a little too late. “Bush said he wants to know what went right and what went wrong so that he can determine whether the United States is prepared for another storm, or an attack.” He’s so far out of the loop that he doesn’t even know what went wrong? Pick up a freaking newspaper or watch the news on TV! You’re supposed to be the leader of this country, for Christ’s sake. Again, regardless of anyone’s personal political affiliation, no one can argue that Bush’s reaction to this entire tragedy has been anything but grossly insensitive*. He was playing golf, eating cake, and doing photo-ops the day after the hurricane came ashore. The levee had just broken, water was rising in New Orleans, and people were stranded on their rooftops, and he was doing happy photo-ops in El Mirage, AZ. He didn’t even PRETEND to be concerned until over two weeks later. Two weeks, people! Two weeks is life or death to those who are without food or water and are sitting waiting for help. Something HAS to be done. We have 3 more years of this crap and God help us if another disaster strikes because we certainly won’t be able to count on our government.

*Edited to add THIS LINK that shows exactly how insensitive he is.

Sad

2005-08-30T22:16:00.000-05:00

I wish I could come up with a happy, positive post but right now I just don't have it in me. And even if I did, it wouldn't be appropriate. I just feel overwhelming sadness at the devastation Hurricane Katrina left behind. My favorite city in the US has been damaged to the point where I don't see how it can possibly recover, or return to its former glory. My husband and I fell in love with New Orleans about 10 years ago and have visited several times. We love the history, the culture, the architecture of the French Quarter, the way you can see every walk of life there, and just the general atmosphere. The city is just so alive and you can see bizarre shops and odd persons there that you would never see anywhere else. New Orleans has such great character, you know? I have such great memories of that city, and now it will never be the same. And then there are cities I've never been to such as Gulport and Biloxi that will probably never be the same either. It's horrific.

Please take a moment and say a prayer or send good thoughts to the people of all the states in the Gulf that have been affected by Katrina. And then please consider donating to one of the following disaster relief agencies (per CNN).

The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists these organizations for those seeking to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina:

Donate cash
American Red Cross (800) HELP NOW (435-7669) English; (800) 257-7575 Spanish

Operation Blessing (800) 436-6348

America's Second Harvest (800) 344-8070

To donate cash or volunteer
Adventist Community Services (800) 381-7171

Catholic Charities, USA (703) 549-1390

Christian Disaster Response (941) 956-5183 or (941) 551-9554

Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (800) 848-5818

Church World Service (800) 297-1516

Convoy of Hope (417) 823-8998

Lutheran Disaster Response (800) 638-3522

Mennonite Disaster Service (717) 859-2210

Nazarene Disaster Response (888) 256-5886

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (800) 872-3283

Salvation Army (800) SAL-ARMY (725-2769)

Southern Baptist Convention -- Disaster Relief (800) 462-8657, ext. 6133

United Methodist Committee on Relief (800) 554-8583

Some fun things to help pass the rainy days

2005-08-23T22:26:00.000-05:00

I'm making good progress on the Mountain Colors socks and will hopefully get those finished by the weekend:

And what did I buy this past weekend? More sock yarn!

The bottom picture is Mountain Colors Barefoot, and the color is Mountain Twilight. I thought the Larkspur color of the current socks above was beautiful until I saw this and I was immediately tempted to cast Larkspur aside and cast on with these beautiful purples. My camera doesn't do it justice. Trust me, the colors are stunning.

I also bought a few more skeins of cashmerino (mmmmmm, cashmerino) and a few knitting tools, but I'm most excited about the new book by Lucinda Guy called Handknits for Kids: 25 Original Designs for Girls and Boys. The patterns are adorable and the designs are displayed very cleverly with illustrations. Take a look:

I plan on making one of those sweaters for the kiddo for Christmas, but I haven't decided which one yet. Aren't they adorable?

And speaking of adorable, here's a picture to remind me of when we had dry, sunny weather.

The really interesting thing to note is that ever since my husband contracted with a roofing company 2 weeks ago to have our roof completely redone, it has rained almost every day. We normally don't get this much rain until the State Fair opens in mid-September, but no - this year it came early. And since it has been raining, we haven't been able to swim either, which is very disappointing to a certain little person pictured above who now likes to jump in and paddle around the pool all by himself, thank you very much (with a life jacket on, of course). Somehow this is all my husband's fault.

Freedom

2005-08-22T12:04:00.000-05:00

I got some good news on Friday. My husband called me and said, “I’ll take the boy off your hands on Saturday.” I said, “Shut UP! Seriously?” He usually teaches a martial arts class on Saturday mornings but they were going to go watch a grappling tournament instead, and he wanted to take the kiddo. Since KatyaR and I were already planning on going to Guthrie Saturday morning to check out the sale at SWAK, well, let’s just say that I was overjoyed. I love my son, but shopping with him? Not so much. It’s as if he becomes obsessed with making my life a living hell and no amount of redirection or threats or bribery in the form of food or toys or anything else sacred to children will change his mind. So as we opened the door and walked into SWAK, I turned to KatyaR and said, “Do you hear that? It’s QUIET.” We were able to shop in PEACE, and really take our time and look at everything and not have to worry about what he was getting into or how he was changing the noise level in the room. It was simply fantastic. And since we didn’t have to be back at any specific hour, we took our time and even visited two other yarn shops. It was a perfect day. And then the stores closed and we had to go home. The end. So a big thank you to my husband for giving me some time to myself this weekend, even though the boy was relatively well behaved (or so he said) at the grappling tournament (perhaps it was the testosterone-laden environment). I guess I was sort of hoping he would behave as he does when he’s out in public with me. Is that wrong?

I’m making good progress on my Mountain Colors socks and I’ll try to post pictures in the next couple of days, as well as show the items I purchased this weekend.

Betcha thought I couldn't do it

2005-08-15T15:07:00.000-05:00

I'd like to present to you my latest finished object:

Pattern: the one from the cover of Debbie Bliss's Special Knits book (sorry, I can't remember the pattern name)
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran (Mmmmm, cashmerino)
Completed: 1pm Saturday, one full hour before the baby shower

Here's another view with the collar turned back:

The pattern said I could have an optional fastening mechanism and I chose not to because a) I ran out of time to find something and b) I felt since it was a sweater for a newborn, it probably shouldn't have something that could actually stick the poor baby. I probably would have been safe using a diaper pin and hot gluing a flower to the head of it, but oh well. The mom-to-be seemed to be thrilled with it so that's all that really matters, right? Oh, and let us not forget that I actually had it done ON TIME. I know it was completed with an hour to spare, but hey, that still counts.