Baking Soda + Vinegar = The Bomb Diggity

And not just because dumping the two together brings back fond memories of the 2nd grade experiments that started me down the road to becoming a chemist. I am somewhat "crunchy" when it comes to eating, diapering my daughter, recycling, cleaning etc. The problem with being crunchy about cleaning is that many of the organic/natural cleaning products out there suck compared to my beloved Clorox wipes and Swiffer Wet Jet, and even so they are usually way more expensive.

But as I sadly surveyed my new glass cooktop onto which I had allowed a boiling pot of lima beans to overflow, and my teakettle which bore a layer of scum comprised of every meal I've cooked since I got married 5 years ago (it lives on my stove), I REALLY didn't want to use the bottle of chemicals that the old owners left behind for cleaning the stove. I thought of the residue just sitting there on the stove until I turned on a burner and then volatilizing into the air to be inhaled by me and my nearest and dearest and I was just glad I don't own any canaries. I have an organic stainless steel cleaner that I really like for all my appliances, and I've been using the "Green Goddess" cleaner recipe from Good Housekeeping to clean my floors, small appliances and toilets, but neither of those were cutting it for the cooktop or the teapot.

So that's when I consulted my friend the internet, who advised me to bust out the baking soda and vinegar plus a razor blade for burnt-on ickyness. It has taken me a couple false starts over the years, but now I'm a believer. I should have taken before pictures too, but look at that sparkle! I didn't even need the razor blade.


I then decided to attack our Teavanna tea steeper, as an unappetizing brownish tea coating had built up on the inside of it, prompting one of my recent guests to say: "Wow, it looks like that thing gets a lot of use."

You can see through it again!

The I attacked our bathtubs:




Lovely. Now my daughter and I can sit in clean bathtubs without stewing in leftover chemicals.

I know you're all laughing at me right now for my little infomercial on vinegar and baking soda, but whatever...you know you want to try pickling your house too!

-Sara

What fireplace?

I have always had a problem with family rooms. Most of the time there is a fireplace, which tends to be the dominant feature in the room. The problem is, where do you put the TV, and how do you arrange your furniture when you have a split focal point? Our solution?

With the invention of flatscreen televisions, I thought this problem was solved. If you notice, there is a design in the fireplace tile that looks like a built-in frame, so we went out and bought an LCD TV that would fit in the frame. We were warned that we'd have to be careful that the TV didn't get too hot when we used the fireplace, but as we pretty much only used our old fireplace (with usually disastrous results) on Christmas Eve every year, we figured this wasn't a problem. We were warned that we'd have to get a mounting system that would angle the TV down so that we wouldn't have to crane our necks to see the TV. No problem, we got a mounting system and even paid for professional installation.

Well when the Geek Squad showed up last week to set up our TV, they walked into the family room, and I immediately got "the look". I am SO sick of getting "the look". It's the look that says "Are you insane? There's no possible way this will work". I'd say I've gotten it an average of 1.5 times a week from various workmen since we moved in.

Aparently even with the mounting system that angles the TV, the tile rectangle up there is WAY too high to mount a TV. They offered to mount it lower, but they still cautioned that every tile they drilled into would surely crack, and said we'd never be able to use the fireplace because our TV would get soot in it. Now it would drive me absolutely nuts to have the TV halfway in that tile square and halfway below it, it would look like we mounted it in the wrong place. I also didn't want to irreversibly wreck the tiles. They suggested mounting the TV on the wall perpendicular to the fireplace, but there we were back at the split focal point problem that bothered me so much to begin with that I bought a new TV instead of messing with it. Not to mention the fact that I really wanted to be able to see the TV from the kitchen, and there was also our old TV out in the garage (you know, the one the movers gave me "the look" about when I told them we wanted it in the basement?) which would go against the wall just as well as the new LCD TV would. So I sent the Geek Squad on their way, dragged the TV, the mounting system, and a million reciepts back to Best Buy (where they told me their system said I had already returned the TV) and finally we just hoisted the old TV in. It was late at night and I was already in my pajamas, I shudder to think what the neighbors think of us. After the difficult task was complete, I just exclaimed "Why don't we put the stupid thing in FRONT of the fireplace?!?!?" Turns out it wasn't a terrible idea.

Luckily we have a flat hearth, and our fireplace isn't a traditional design that screams "there's a fireplace back here!". I don't know, maybe it looks really stupid, but I don't care at this point. Now we can use a TV we already had, we don't have to split the focal point (since we in effect got rid of one) and we can still use the fireplace if we roll the TV out of the way. Or we can just get a screensaver that looks like a fireplace. Either way, that's one more thing that should have been simple but wasn't that's finally taken care of.

Emily's new hobby

Emily has taken to walking around the house and collecting everything she can get her hands on, then carrying the items one by one to a place where she arranges them. As you can see, she helps herself to the contents of the plasticware cabinet (which I leave un-childproofed because I love cleaning up lids from all over the house, I mean because I am a good mother and it makes Emily happy) and even the liquor cabinet, which we will shortly be relocating.

And we're back!

Phew. I can't believe it, but it is officially two weeks now since the big moving day. And thanks to my naive belief that the cable company could respond to a new service request in a semi-timely fashion, this is the first day we've had internet. It feels really good to have a link to the outside world again (especially since we have no TVs either right now) but I also know that I've been able to get a lot more done these past two weeks thanks to not having the distraction of the computer.

So everything went pretty well, except that we had to rethink some plans for the basement due to the fact that NOTHING fit down the steps. We have no outside entry to the basement, so the only way to get down there is through a door that is in a narrow hallway. So between the less-than-optimal entry point and the 90 degree turn the stairway takes on the way down, we couldn't fit the treadmill, ping pong table, tv, couch, or refrigerator down there. Will was able to bring over some buddies and disassemble the treadmill and ping pong table to get them down there, but the refrigerator will have to stay in the garage, and we'll have to get rid of the couch and the TV and get skinnier models instead.

But other than that snag we're enjoying the new house immensely. Will is biking to work every day, I am walking to the grocery store, and we're LOVING curbside recycling and twice weekly garbage pickup. Emily's favorite part is the backyard (specifically the swing set), which is a reasonable size to maintain and not the unmanageable wilderness our old yard used to be.

I am amazed at how much stuff we still have to put away though. There are still boxes filling the garage, which we pick away at a couple at a time. But most distressing is the fact that we STILL have some stuff at the old house that we're working on getting over here. I am tempted to just get rid of everything that is still over there (if we've lived without it for 2 weeks we can't REALLY need it, right?) but much of it is paperwork we need to sort through and keep, clothes that are not my current size but that I HOPE to fit into again sometime in the future, and seasonal things that I will eventually want. One or two more couple-hour stints at the old house should see it cleared of our stuff, but it's so difficult to do with a toddler. Emily freaks every time we go back to the old house, and I feel like it'll probably be easier for her to think of our new place as home if we don't take her with us to the old house. It's also been difficult to unpack here because at first we came to the harsh realization that none of our baby gates from the old house fit our wider doorways here, and now that we have that taken care of it's much more difficult to go up and down the stairs with big boxes, not to mention the fury that being left behind inspires in Emily when we try to go out to the garage to grab a box or take something downstairs.

But I am confident that by Halloween we will at least have all of our possessions cleared out of the old house and be 70% of the way to being unpacked here. At least now we've gotten enough stuff taken care of that I can fall asleep at night without spending an hour or two laying in bed making panicky lists of everything that I have left to do.

And in other exciting news, congratulations to Will's cousin Ceci on getting engaged last Wednesday, and to Will's sister Margaret for getting engaged last Saturday! I can't believe that Will's/my college roommate Brad is going to be our brother in law! At any rate, we'll have no shortage of weddings to attend next year!

Almost there...

Ok, definitely regretting scheduling closing the day we leave for Chicago. As is my usual method for getting ready, I am blogging instead of actually doing anything useful. I still need to pack up Emily's clothes and food for her 4-day stay at Grammys. This is complicated by the fact that one of Emily's favorite passtimes is putting clothes into and pulling them out of laundry baskets, especially if I have placed them there in order to collect them neatly in once place before packing them up. Also, every time she sees me trying to cook ahead a little bit and assemble dinners for her she wants to eat them NOW. I am also trying to schedule people to come over and fix our siding and our hot tub, pack things up (starting to get panicky, moving day is next Wednesday, which leaves me about 3 days to finish packing) and getting all the last-minute documents to our mortgage company, which is being frustratingly slow about everything. Locating and faxing documents is relatively easy so I have been doing pretty well keeping on top of that, but new requests keep popping up and I don't appreciate things being left until the final 24 hours when I've been trying my hardest to keep things organized and get them done early. Here we are, the day before closing, and they're still requesting that I send them things. Didn't they know they'd need my 2005 tax return several weeks ago? Why are they just telling me this now? And I'm pretty sure if they need my 2005 they'll want my 2006 also so why haven't they asked for THAT yet? I'm glad it is more difficult to get a mortgage now because, let's face it, they kind of ruined the economy by making it too easy, but I'm not enjoying the results. Especially not all the "What was this deposit back in May for?" questions. I feel like I'm being audited, and while I don't have anything to hide, it still feels like a 3-week nonstop invasion of privacy. Thank God for having organized and responsive accountants and a scanner at home. Otherwise I'd be going even crazier.

I am lapsing into the same mode I used to get into during college when I was having an especially difficult week, or when finals week was approaching; the one where I tell myself "It'll all be over soon, one way or another, and in a little over a week I'll have managed somehow". That mode usually only serves to calm me down enough to enjoy procrastinating a bit more. Instead of reading the entire Harry Potter series to calm my nerves like I used to do instead of studying in college, I'll be heading to Chicago instead of just getting this whole house emptied and us moved out of it.

But the bright note is that by 10:45 tomorrow we should have the keys to our new house, and by the time we get back from Chicago the hot tub should be fixed. That leaves only the packing to do. Oh yeah, and the unpacking. But I have time to do all of that, and as long as we can get the new house baby-proofed and the boxes away from Emily so she won't keep injuring herself at every step, I'll be happy.

Raising the bar

I could never do chinups as a child. Every term we'd have to do that danged president's physical fitness test, and I'd have to walk up in front of the class and demonstrate my weakness once again. And the evil gym teachers didn't just let you say "I can't do a chinup", or even just hang there listlessly. No, they forced you to "try", so you had to wriggle around like a worm on a hook while the class sat indian-style and giggled. I was always inevitably followed by a guy who could do about 40. It's ok though, I always blew the guys away at sit and reach. That's equally impressive, right?

I still can't do chinups, although I am pretty sure I did one once. It was on a bar that was part of a fitness trail at a hotel in St. Thomas and it was too low to the ground to do chinups without bending your knees so there is some question as to whether or not it actually counted (Will being the one questioning) but I'm 98% sure I did a chinup.

And these days, the chinup bar is not the only bar I can't seem to get up to. A couple weeks ago, the bar was set at "Keep your child alive, keep a clean house, and manage to get SOMETHING made for dinner every night". I'm pretty good at the keeping my child alive part, but I can never keep my house clean (probably because there's a living child occupying it) and dinner is usually a pretty frantic affair.

This week, the bar is set at "Keep your child alive, keep a clean house, manage to get SOMETHING made for dinner every night, and make some sort of progress packing every day". Strangely enough, the floor is clean, the dishes are done, and I've already made dinner for tonight. Emily is alive last time I checked, but I can't seem to make myself pack. If this were last week, I'd be pretty impressed with myself. I'd be close enough to the bar for it to count. But since it's this week, and I NEED to pack desperately, I am not impressed with myself. Instead, I am overwhelmed and panicked so I'm doing anything BUT packing.

I seem to be able to always do about 80%, even when that 80% is the same as what would've passed for 100% last week. As long as I'm not getting EVERYTHING done, the nasty little voices in my head are happy because they have something to pick at me about. So maybe it's not just procrastination. Maybe it's low self esteem too!

Either way, I'd better go do something useful or else risk falling below 80% efficiency.

New Goal

When it comes to food, my husband has the willpower of a....something that has an incredible amount of willpower. Once he decided to eat well, he simply wasn't interested in any bad-for-you foods anymore. He happily crunches through piles of raw vegetables, downs fat free plain yogurt without so much as a flinch, and chugs gallons of water every day. He boldly marches into lunch meetings where people are scarfing down cookies and candy and sandwiches with creamy salads and fixes himself a plate consisting of a couple slices of lunchmeat with some lettuce and tomato, or else brings his own food and cheerfully declines any offers of heart-clogging deliciousness.

Then there's me. If the thought of cheesecake, or ice cream, or doughnuts, or pretty much anything I'm not SUPPOSED to eat crosses my mind, it haunts me. I obsess about it until I break down and have it. In the worst times, I try to eat other things to satisfy my cravings first, and then end up eating the thing I'm craving after all. I've tried keeping a list of things I am craving so that after a week of eating virtuously I can reward myself with something from the list, but then an angry little voice inside my head screams "Eat it all right now and just restart tomorrow". The solution, for me, is to just cut out sugar, cut back on the volume of food I eat, and pretty much stick to the straight and narrow for 2-3 miserable days until it becomes much easier and I can continue eating that way for an extended period of time.

Will is a wonderful, supportive guy, who has learned over the years to tread carefully when discussing food with me. He wants to help so much, but it's difficult for a person who doesn't have food issues to understand what motivates someone who does, and it's VERY difficult for me to tell someone else how they can help me when I don't know how to help myself. It has to be very confusing for him to come home one night to a wife who eagerly hops over and says "Guess how many points I have left for the day!?", and then the next night to a trash can full of cookie wrappers and a wife who is sugar-crashing and over-reacts to any food-related comment with a warning flash of the eyes. He has learned to veil any comments about food or dieting, but I can usually tell what he means (mostly because it's in the forefront of my mind because of my guilty conscience).

So this morning, when he casually said "So you reached your goal of getting back to what you weighed right after you delivered Emily, what is your next goal going to be?" I knew that he had been looking at the weight chart I hung in the bathroom where I log my weight every day. What it shows right now is that I did indeed hit that weight goal last week, but I have been steadily gaining since then, and the last day or so I haven't even been able to bring myself to look at my weight so the slots on the chart remain blank. So what he really meant was "I KNOW you want to lose weight and it looks like you're starting to lose control, how do I help?".

Of course, as I always do, I felt a pang of guilt and answered by reciting my ultimate goal of getting back to what I weighed before Emily was born. We had a little conversation, and I was determined to eat well today (as I have been every day this week) and right about lunch time, as soon as the thought of a cookie crossed my mind, I ate one. And not just a little no-harm-done cookie, but a whole 300-some calorie monster (although it WAS 100% whole wheat and has no processed sugars). Emily saw me and recognized the wrapper, and asked for a bite. I gave her a bite, and then realized my goal. I am NOT going to eat any food that I would not want to share with Emily, at a time I would not want Emily to have said food. She is old enough now to realize what I am doing, and I need to stop.

So I can eat those cookies, but only at night after dinner when I wouldn't mind her having cookies. I will give up diet soda, because when she sees me drinking it she wants some. I will eat only things that are 100% whole wheat, and I will only eat things that are good for me. The exceptions will be tea with caffeine, coffee/espresso, and the occasional glass of wine. I won't feed those things to Emily, but I think they're still ok for me to have :-) It's not just about me anymore, I need to set an example for my daughter so she doesn't grow up with the same screwed up food issues that I have.

So three cheers for Will, who did his job and got me re-motivated without offending me. THAT my friends, is incredibly hard to do.

Please forward all correspondence to....

....our new house!

I just found out this morning (as I was standing at the vet with Emily strapped to my chest and 2 wet dogs peeing on the floor as they got their Lyme disease shots) that the sellers accepted our offer without changes! So as long as our land deal goes to settlement on September 15th as scheduled, and as long as nothing horrible turns up at the home inspection next week, and as long as a million other things fall into place, we just bought ourselves a house!

We've already had some major drama happening, but that's what keeps life interesting, right? Let me start at the beginning.

5 years ago, when Will and I were bright-eyed newlyweds, we went to the realtor who had sold my parents' house years before (let's call her Crazy Old Realtor), and told her we were looking for some land to sit on for a couple years and then build a house on. Long story short, we were NOT happy with how we were treated by Crazy Old Realtor, but she was the only person we had had experience with before.

Fast forward 5 years, and our priorities have changed. Rather than wait until we could build our perfect house on the perfect land, we were more interested in finally owning our own house; the place where we would end up raising our already begun family. So I contacted a family friend who recently became a realtor (hereafter referred to as Family Friend Realtor) just to get some info. Well, in hindsight you can see, right there was my mistake. You should never mix friends and business, and things only became more difficult when I found out that he works for the agency owned by Crazy Old realtor :-( We decided to give Family Friend Realtor a chance anyway, more out of guilt than anything else. We were working with him, not the agency anyway right?

I can't really complain. He has been less than perfect about some things, but our land is all but sold right now, so I can't say he didn't do his job. However we knew we wanted to go with someone else when we went to build our new house at Linton. Someone who had been through the new construction process before and who was an exclusive buyers agent so we wouldn't get pushed to the back burner in favor of people listing their homes, holding open houses etc.

We have been blissfully happy with our new buyers agent (New Buyers Agent), and we planned to tell Family Friend Realtor that we would not be requiring his services in finding a new home once our land had closed and the topic was broached. It seemed unnecessarily antagonistic to just come out and say "Oh by the way, we have another agent. I know you didn't ask or anything, but we wanted to go ahead and hurt your feelings so there it is."

Everything was fine, that is until yesterday when New Buyers Agent needed a copy of the contract on the land we're selling. I thought I had a copy of it...I SHOULD have had a copy of it, but like so many other things at Crazy Old Realtor's agency, it seemed to have slipped through the cracks. I tried to get it, but Family Friend Realtor was out of the office all day and most of the next morning. I thought there'd be a copy of it in the office...there SHOULD have been a copy of it in the office, but, well, you get the picture. Their secretary treated me as a burden, and it ended up that New Buyers Agent had to call Family Friend Realtor for some info and that's how he found out about the existence of New Buyers Agent.

So he's being less than helpful, and I also got a hurt and angry email from him yesterday (i.e. day from hell) which I had to take a valuable 30 min. to sit down and answer. Thank God his commission depends on our land deal going through, so even though he's angry our best interests are aligned and we have someone to watch out for us on the other side. Closing will be fun though. You never expect real estate transactions to be easy, but somehow I still always manage to be surprised how not-easy they turn out to be.

But all that aside, we are quite pleased with how things have gone. Nothing like happening upon a house that's the best you've seen and has desperate sellers to boot. Now I just have to get my mom used to the idea that her granddaughter will now be living 26 minutes away instead of 19. You'd think we were moving to Iceland.

And rest assured in the midst of all this strife and as much as I complain, Will and I are still very excited and happy that next month we will be moving to Reykjavik...oops, I mean Frederick.

Be it ever so humble...

With an official date and time scheduled for the closing on our land, Will and I still keep our fingers crossed, but we're cautiously optimistic. We're at least a step further towards selling it than we were last time. It also allows us to make a more desirable offer on a house, as we are now "contingent on closing" vs. "contingent on sale". Come September 15th, with any luck it'll all be taken care of!

We originally thought after closing we'd run straight to Linton and get started designing and building our new house, but it's become a more difficult decision than we had anticipated (doesn't it always). We've been working with our buyer's agent, and while we wait for closing we've been checking out other houses in the area. For the most part, the other neighborhoods were built in the early 90's, and many of the houses show it! I walked into a surprising number of houses that had grey, mauve and aqua brushstroke wallpaper, white tile everywhere, pink countertops, and pickled-looking maple cabinets. Blech. The 90's were not a good decade in terms of home decor. No wonder it's the decade that gave birth to the grunge era...the teenagers were sick of living in their parents stark white and tacky houses.

But I digress. Many of the houses were nice, but we would've had to've gotten different flooring, countertops, cabinets, paint etc. before I could've stood living there.

Then we happened upon THE HOUSE. The one that gave me THE FEELING. You know, the one where you utter a wide-eyed "Wow" and start to feel giddy? It was built in '93, but the owners have updated the countertops, appliances, light fixtures, paint colors, pretty much everything so that it feels very contemporary. It has a very nice backyard surrounded by leyland cypress so it feels very private. It is on a corner, so it has a larger than usual side yard, and no neighbors looking in your window on one side. There's a huge beautiful screened-in porch off the breakfast area, a fully finished basement, a really nice master bathroom, a traditional floorplan with enough interesting angles to modernize it a bit, the people even had an upstairs rubber ducky bathroom so I wouldn't have to paint to use all of my rubber ducky themed bathroom items :-)

It has its problems too, of course. No exit from the basement whatsoever, so the super-convenient dog containment system we enjoy now (i.e. putting them in the basement with a doggie door to the outside) is not an option. There's not much storage space to speak of since the basement is finished, but the closets and such are bigger so that may not end up being a problem. The laundry room/mudroom is tiny, although we can probably do a stackable washer and dryer to make that a little better. And it's certainly not as glitzy as a brand new home in a brand new community, but it's also not as expensive.

So now we're in the extremely difficult phase of deciding what will bother us and what won't. If we build at Linton, will it really bother me in the future to have 1/10 acre vs. the 1/4 acre we'd get with the other house? What about the construction noise for the next 5 years as they finish building the community? Will they actually end up building the community pool before my kids are too old to enjoy it? If we buy the other house, will it be a huge pain in the butt to handle the dogs without a basement exit, or will we end up figuring out something that works just as well? Will I drive by Linton and sigh, regretting the fact that we didn't opt for the bigger, newer, fancier house?

There are pluses and minuses to both. Both are perfectly acceptable options. What it really comes down to is this: is the extra glitz worth the extra cost? My gut says no.

So we'll probably end up putting in an offer on THE HOUSE. Their real estate agent is a blabbermouth, and has basically told us they're desperate to sell, since they have already closed on their new house and will shortly be paying 2 mortgages. He also told us the previous contract (which fell through because the buyers couldn't sell their house) was for $20,000 less than asking price, so I think we could get a great deal on THE HOUSE.

This means we could be putting in an offer quite soon, and closing on a house by mid-September! I'm still in shock over that, since I've always thought we'd build so I'd have 6 months or so to prepare. The prospect of being finished in a month with all this real estate mess is compelling though, because it really does take over your life.

It's definitely time. We've been married 5 years, we have a family now, I want to own my own house and be in the place we plan to raise our kids. THE HOUSE seems as close to perfect as we're going to find, and although it has surprised me how difficult the decision has been (you always seem to prefer what you've seen most recently), I think it's the right one for us. Besides, if we decide we made a huge mistake, property values will most likely go up in the next couple of years and we could always sell and build a house in Linton then.

So here we go! On to the next great adventure of home ownership.

-Sara

Maine-ly terrible

I'll just be honest, and say that our trip to Maine was not the best.  This was mostly because Emily was sick pretty much the whole time.  Not sick enough that we really realized she was sick, but sick enough that she was miserable, and therefore so were we. 

She had a runny nose when we set out, which we thought was due to teething issues since she was also irritable and drool-y.  On the first day of driving, she threw up all over herself in the car, and we had to pull over on the side of I-84 and scrape the barf off her and her carseat.  We chalked it up to carsickness, as she had done the same thing after eating in the car on the trip back from Ocean City.  We turned her carseat around in the hopes that riding facing forward would bother her tummy less (something I wasn't happy about but I saw it as the only option).  Our plan to drive until midnight the first day and then just carry her into the hotel while she remained dead asleep didn't pan out, as she woke up refreshed from her 4 hours of sleep in the car and ready to party.  Ugh, that night was tough.

The next couple days she was really clingy and her nose continued it's interminable flow, but Tylenol seemed to help so we again figured she was just teething.  Then on Wednesday she got a fever and threw up 3 times, once while we were in a bakery, once right after I had gotten her home, changed, bathed, and was giving her a little food again as a test, and once again in that damned carseat.  If you need to know how to take every single piece (including the straps and buckles) of a Britax carseat off, wash it, and put it back on, I have extensive experience.

So the barfing and fever made us finally realize that all the irritability, clingyness, unwillingness to EVER sit quietly and entertain herself etc. was because she was genuinely sick.  Of course we felt terrible :-(  And not just from the horrible lack of sleep.  Since we had to sleep in a squeaky bed in the same room as Emily (who herself is a very loud sleeper), no one got much rest.  Every time one of us rolled over, it would cause Emily to stir and it's difficult to fall back asleep when you're tensely listening to see if your baby is going to wake up.  You start to feel like you really need to roll over, go to the bathroom, do all sorts of loud things.  Emily also likes to shout in her sleep occasionally, I don't think I need to explain why that is disruptive to a good night's sleep.  Come 6:10AM every morning, Emily was awake and crying, except for Wednesday when she decided luxuriating in bed until the hour of 6 was pure decadence, and decided 5:30 was a much more reasonable time to get up.  Trying to wrangle a baby in a house full of sleeping people sucks, since even a happy baby is pretty loud, so I spent my mornings stumbling around Bar Harbor in the morning mist, wasting time until everyone else in the house woke up.  I admit that I did kind of enjoy walking around before it got busy during the day, and Emily and I had some fun throwing pennies in various town fountains, however there wasn't much else to do, as most places didn't open until 8 or later.  I did find some nice coffee shops, but I certainly couldn't find any healthy food at that hour to keep me going on my 1.5-2.5 hour daily trudge so my diet did suffer.  This also made me a bit sick of walking around Bar Harbor, so I didn't do it as much later when the stores were open.  I wish I'd gotten to do a bit more real shopping and less early morning window shopping, but I wish a lot of things about the trip.

Waking up at an ungodly-early hour ensured that we would be freakin' exhausted unless we went to bed at 9:30 when Emily turned in, so that meant we missed out on watching the Olympics with my family, staying up playing board games and drinking wine, going out to the bars etc.  Many of the things that make a vacation with the family fun.  Emily also flat-out refused to wear a helmet, and Will flat-out refused to allow her to ride in a baby seat or a trailer without one, so the bikes we paid to rent all week were used a grand total of twice by us, and the rest of the week my sisters and their boyfriends had fun riding them around.

Emily did allow us 2 nice days, one where we went hiking all day and had tea and popovers at Jordon Pond, and the following day when she hung out with Grammy and Grampy while Will and I dangled off a rock cliff hundreds of feet in the air.  We accidentally hiked a trail rated "Strenuous", much to Will's delight and my terror.  The only way I made it up was because I had heard that there was an alternative way down.  Yikes.  It was an experience though, and a fun day without the kiddo who had made the rest of the week so stressful.  That night I sneaked out, leaving Emily with Will and my sister's boyfriend Christian and went to see Mama Mia at this awesome theater where you can order gourmet pizza and wine (along with other more traditional movie fare) and eat it while watching the movie.  I realized I like quite a few of ABBA's songs, and I really liked the movie, especially the part where I got to drink wine while watching it.

I am glad we went, but I will certainly never be doing anything like this again anytime soon.  I'll stick to places that are closer by and more kid-friendly.  And I know it seems I am blaming Emily for everything, but I truly do feel sorry for her and I know it wasn't her fault.  

I spent a lot of the vacation feeling a little depressed about the responsibilities of parenthood.  It was hard not to, when I was experiencing the hardest part of being a parent of a young child (dealing with a sick kid) while in the other room my sisters and their boyfriends snoozed until 10 then got up to go shopping/biking/out for lunch.  I will admit I felt some jealousy, but then I realized that Will and I had those times too, and very recently (although it doesn't feel that way).  The evil side of me realized that on future vacations I will have fairly self-sufficient pre-teens when my sisters are struggling to eek out 8 hours of sleep and endlessly wiping runny noses and changing barfy clothing.  And as dorky as it sounds, a song from Mama Mia really hit me at the right time.   The song "Slipping Through my Fingers", which is about how kids grow up fast no matter how hard we try to remember each moment, set me bawling and reminded me that even though I was exhausted from holding and entertaining and shushing a sick Emily pretty much every waking minute of my vacation, there will come a time when I can't hold her anymore and she just retreats to her room and doesn't want me to comfort her when she's sick.

So from then on I tried to just enjoy being with her, and kept crying every time I thought of that song :-P  It's mostly because I was hormonal, but I certainly wasn't the only one crying, even though Krista claims that no tears escaped the confines of her eyes, and Kathleen blames her tears on an accidental elbow to the eye from her boyfriend Dylan which necessitated an eye rub with a hand that turned out to have jalapeno residue on it.

So we're back, we survived, and pictures will be up here in a day or so when I get around to uploading them.

-Sara

Post Fragment

Since Emmy is snoozing, clothes and dishes are washing and "Pizzazy Pizza Muffins" are baking, I figured I'd sit down and blog for a bit instead of doing anything else productive.  That doesn't change the fact that I really should be packing, vacuuming, making calls etc., but yeesh, how much can a person do at once?

The next big event on the calendar is our trip to Maine this Friday.  I thought up until yesterday that we were leaving Thursday evening, but it turns out we're leaving Friday evening and that discovery of an extra day to prepare has made me feel like I have all sorts of time to get ready.  I am looking forward to the trip (as Will'll tell you (that's an awkward contraction (sorry to use parentheses inside other parentheses))) but of course there's still all the prep work to do.  Do you remember trips as a kid?  You were so excited you couldn't sleep for weeks beforehand, you'd start packing random things days ahead of time, and then the day of departure would arrive and all of a sudden your suitcase was magically packed with everything you'd need (even though you yourself had only packed a teddy bear and your favorite shirt), there were snacks handed out while you were traveling and sometimes new toys to keep you entertained for the long flight/drive.  You'd arrive and have so much energy leftover that you immediately wanted to do everything.

Well now I'm the one who has to magically get the suitcase packed, prepare and pack the snacks, buy and remember to bring the new toys and do all the other not-so-fun stuff that makes me less excited about trips these days than I used to be.  I still enjoy them, especially once we're there, but I am kind of sad that I will probably never have another trip that happens the way they used to.  

On the other hand, I kind of prefer it this way, because now I can make sure I have exactly the snacks and clothes I want, and I like exhaustively researching my destination and planning all sorts of activities ahead of time.

Sorry this post is about to end abruptly, but I never got around to finishing it, but I figured I might as well post what there is of it.

Everything else

So since we returned from our trip to Rochester, things have thankfully slowed down.  I have spent the past couple months getting ready for someone or another's birthday, going to graduations, packing for or unpacking from trips and generally being busy all the time.  Now I've had a couple-week lull, and it has been sweet.  I found the time to finally get my hair cut short, something I've been contemplating (agonizing over) for months.  I have some of the frizziest, most wildly curly hair ever, and on some days it would just flat-out refuse to behave so I'd pull it back in a ponytail and at least look moderately presentable.  I was worried my hair might try to form a 'fro on humid days if I cut it short, and I was frightened to contemplate what I would do on bad hair days with my limited styling skills and my ponytail option out of the question.  However I was pretty sure that sporting a ponytail almost every day is a sure sign that you need to do something new with your hair, so I got it cut and I love it!  Somehow it seems my hair likes being short, and I can just wash it , run a comb through it and let it air dry and it looks just fine all day.  If I had done that with my hair longer, I would have looked like I had a poufy, curly rat's nest on my head.

However there is one thing I'm not happy about, and that is once my hair was cut it was brought to my attention (by Will) that I have a single grey hair on the top of my head.  This is alarming because I don't like to dye my hair (too much work to keep up with it...although I will probably give in once I get greyer)  and I would like to have long hair at least once before I go too grey for it to look good long, so as much as I like my short hair now, I need to get growing.  I know going for long hair right in the middle of my procreative years will probably only result in me looking disheveled and having tiny fistfuls of hair yanked out on a regular basis, but I am running out of time!  I think if I get it trimmed and shaped every couple months I can keep it looking good while it's growing out.

I debuted my new hair to my friends on Friday, which happened to be my "birthday observed", which is what we called the day Will and I set aside to celebrate my birthday in lieu of trying to celebrate it while traveling.  Will arranged for everyone to go to Frederick Cellars (Maryland's only urban winery) for a tasting, followed by a yummy dinner at Quynn's Attic (one of my favorite restaurants) and then lattes and drinks at Cafe Nola (one of my favorite bars which also happens to be my favorite coffee shop).  Will got a big group together, and it was fun to see some of my out of town friends.  Right in the middle of the evening, we met our realtor right in the middle of downtown Frederick (literally on a street corner) and signed all the documentation for a contract on our land!  The buyers were anxious to get the contract in writing, so instead of waiting until the next morning, our realtor chased us down while we were out so we could sign everything.  I am trying not to get TOO excited because we had a contract on the land in June that fell through, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this one works out.  So with any luck, by September 15th we will have officially sold it (and we can break open the bottle of champagne that is patiently waiting in the fridge downstairs).  Then we can start designing and building our new house!  Exciting stuff.

Even MORE exciting, is that one of the gifts my sweet husband got me for my birthday is an introductory flight lesson!!!!!!!  I'm going to fly an airplane!  And more than that, once I've flown an airplane I am going to take flying lessons so I can get my pilot's license!!!!!!  I've often been known to wonder aloud "Wouldn't it be amazing to be able to fly your own plane?", to which my poor, often airsick husband's reply was usually "Not really".  But all the same, he has started me down the road to being able to do just that, and I am ridiculously excited!  I have to sit down and figure out when a good time to start would be, so that I can get in all the flight time I need in order to earn my license, but for now I'm still just reeling at the thought :-)  

And last before I close, I'll mention that I'm starting to learn Spanish.  I used my birthday money to buy the whole Learning Spanish like Crazy set, (it looks ghetto, but it's supposed to be even better than Rosetta Stone) and I am now eagerly awaiting its arrival.  I took French in high school, mostly because I liked the idea, but now I'm realizing how much more useful it would be to know Spanish.  I've been to several Spanish-speaking countries, and I plan to go to more in the future, plus there are more and more Spanish speakers in Frederick.  Also, if I decide not to go back to work after my kidlets are in school, I could always go the volunteering route and I think Spanish would be helpful for that too.

The main reason though is that I think I am missing using my brain.  Not to the point where I would rather work than stay home playing snuggle bunnies with Emily (that's our game where we wrap up in a soft blanket on the couch and wrestle) but to the point where I'd like to take on a learning project of some sort.  I love languages, I think if I lived forever I would make it my goal to learn every language in the world, so this makes sense.  And I was shocked the other day to realize the new vet at the practice where we take our dogs is about my age (oh yeah, I am now giving Mingus Benadryl twice a day, eyedrops twice a day, ear ointment once a day, skin wash once a day and ear wash every other day...this freakin' dog is only 6 and already a huge pain in the butt.  I can't wait until he's 15).  The point being, if I had stayed in school this whole time instead of the whole getting married, working, reproducing route I took, I could be a doctor by now.  I am immensely glad that I took the route I did, and there's no way I have what it takes to be a doctor, but it's still shocking to realize I am just about old enough to have completed med school.  And I have a grey hair.  Did I mention that?

When you order Learning Spanish like Crazy, they send you the 50-CD set in the mail, but right away they let you download a couple lessons to get you started, one of which is "Insultos vulgares".  So I'm old enough to be a doctor and have grey hair, but learning to say things in Spanish that I shudder to say in English still sends me into fits of giggles, and the thought of learning to fly makes me dance around like Emily upon receiving her morning banana.  They say you're only as old as you feel, and I hope they're right!

-Sara

Rochester, again

Our trip to Rochester ended up going much better than expected, as most things do. The morning of departure found us frantically checking airline websites, calling the pediatrician, calling Will's mom, and googling "flying with a sick baby". Emily had been showing signs of a cold in the days leading up to our trip, and the morning of she emerged from the crib extremely congested and miserable. We were very worried about how the pressure changes would affect her while all stuffed up, but the pediatrician told us to just give her Benadryl, and Grandpa's health was not in so precarious a state that being exposed to a germy toddler would endanger his life, so off we went. I never wanted to be one of those moms who drugs their kids for flights, but I'll admit with the pediatrician's ok and a legitimate reason, I was pretty happy about the possibility of Emily sleeping through the flight.

When the time came to board, I sent Will on to get the carseat strapped in and stow what luggage he could carry and I waited by the gate, figuring that the less time spent aboard the plane, the better. I made our plans known to the agent at the gate, and Will did the same with the stewards/stewardesses on the plane. Even so, a stewardess came running up to the gate and said "Your husband is waiting for you on the plane". "Duh" was my thought. "You'd better board now, we're about to close the doors". When I got on the plane, Will said the steward had loudly pointed and Will and remarked "Well everyone's on board except we're waiting for HIS wife and kid". Thanks for the advance notice guys. It wasn't like I was just standing inches from the gate waiting for the final boarding call or anything.

The flight was quick and easy, although I discovered that despite the shortness of limb, a child in a carseat can easily kick the seat in front of him or her, and does so with reckless abandon unless the child's mother spends the entire flight desperately distracting said child or holding down their legs. I am a bit of a psycho about making sure Emily's ears pop on ascent and descent, so she got all-you-can-drink apple juice during the flight, and I was only irritated a LITTLE bit about the fact that it was not organic, as we were limited to whatever was available after security.

One of the things that made the trip easier (in my opinion...you'd get a different response if you asked Will) was the Sit 'n' Stroll 5 in 1 carseat/stroller that I purchased before our trip.  Emily had fallen asleep the minute we hit the ground, and we were able to get her out of the airplane seat, deploy the wheels, roll her down the airplane aisle, through the airport, and to the car rental desk without waking her.  That is amazing to me!  And now we can use it as a backup carseat, although the way it straps into the car is a bit annoying.

We more or less enjoyed our stay in Rochester.  Since we had Emily with us, we spent more time at the hotel than we usually do.  We tried out the pool and Will and I agreed that the last time we actually stayed IN our hotel long enough to swim in the pool was quite awhile ago.  We ended up with a jacuzzi suite (not as impressive as it sounds) and Emily quite enjoyed mounting the one step up to the jacuzzi and throwing food into it.  

It was nice to see Will's mom's side of the family, especially the cousins that are around our age, although I felt badly for not being able to help out much due to being responsible for a toddler while in a decidedly non-childproofed house.  There also wasn't nearly enough Sara-friendly alcohol to be had...when Will and I went to the liquor store he bought quite a bit of beer (there are tons of microbreweries in upstate NY and I think Will felt it was his duty to sample them all) and I bought another local specialty, icewine.  This showed little forethought though, because icewine is good for sipping after dinner, but a very poor choice for drinking throughout the day at a family get-together.  So while everyone else was enjoying their beers, I was drinking extremely diluted and spaced-out spritzers so that I didn't get sick from drinking too much sweet wine.  A little buzz would have been very welcome while dealing with extensive picture-taking by people who seem to think 14-month-olds enjoy sitting still for long periods of time.

The best part of the weekend though was watching Will's grandparents renew their vows.  His grandfather had a stroke and several other medical issues last year, and while in the hospital they had to cut off his wedding ring.  Being very religious people, he felt that even though they had the ring re-made, he didn't want to wear it until it was blessed by a minister again.  So on the occasion of their 60th anniversary, their minister blessed the ring and they exchanged vows again under a big old tree in their backyard, surrounded by their 4 children, 8 grandchildren, 1 great-grandchild and various spouses and significant others.  The whole trip turned out to be more enjoyable than I thought it would be, but I am very glad I was there to see that because wow!  60 years together and every member of your family there.  That was definitely worth celebrating.

Sleep Therapy

I can't go to sleep tonight. When I try, my mind wanders, and no matter what it wanders to I get angry and worked up. So in an effort to get some things off my chest, I am posting to my blog and hoping that writing things out will let me calm down enough to get some rest.

Reasons I am inordinately angry:

#1 (The biggest one) It's time of the month and I'm hormonal.

#2 I was not able to take my Salsa Aerobics class tonight because it is now limited to 40 students only and you have to sign up ahead of time and I wasn't ever alerted, so I drove to Frederick for no reason today. Apparently my gym has decided that instead of perhaps allowing us to open a door to get some air into the studio they are going to punish their paying members by making us remember to call the day before every time and submit to having our name checked off a list like a kindergartener on a field trip. Yes this caused me to cry for over an hour tonight, but all I can say is see #1.

#3 I had to have a confrontation with Emily's Pediatrician today to keep him from giving her 5 shots at once (9 vaccinations in all). I have discussed with him before that we want to space out Emily's vaccines, so I didn't appreciate the pressure he laid on me to get her vaccinated for EVERYTHING at once. Honestly, Hep A? I don't think Emily has booked a trip to any 3rd world countries without my knowledge, so I think we're safe for a little while there. At least I won that one, and she only had one vaccine today.

#4 I bought some meat from the butcher while I was at the Menonite Market today exchanging a table for my mother, and I apparently paid but left the meat sitting on the counter.

#5 I have to spend all day Sunday shopping for, traveling to, preparing food for and cleaning up after a small gathering for my MIL's birthday. I wouldn't mind this so much, except for the fact that....

#6 I have to spend MY birthday recovering from a flight up to Rochester with Emily and attending an informal family reunion of my MIL's family. Normally I would just resign myself to attending something like this, although I am dreading the flight, but I am selfish about my birthday and this is probably THE single way in the world I would least like to spend it. I know 27 isn't all that momentous, but since I've become a mother I cling to those few days of the year when I can do whatever I want without feeling guilty.


So I guess in order to be therapeutic I should now make a list of reasons I have to be happy.

#1 I have an awesome husband and a fantastic little girl.

#2 My fantastic little girl went to sleep without a fuss tonight, after 3 nights straight of hours-long epic bedtime battles.

#3 My awesome husband is planning a "birthday observed" for me sometime in the near future to make up for the fact that I have to spend my real birthday in less-than-fun pursuits.

#4 Tomorrow will be busy, but it will be spent hanging out with some of my mom friends at a toddler playdate, going to the gym (grrrrrrr...remember Sara, this is the happy list) and attending some sort of dinner/cocktail thingy in the evening, which Emily is invited to!

#5 The things on my angry list right now are forgetting meat, missing an aerobics class and family reunions and not anything that would make me angry while not hormonal like losing my house in a flood (not actually having a house makes this less likely), facing persecution, being the victim of a crime etc.

#6 I'm feeling sleepy now.

Goodnight.

-Sara

Happy Birthday Emily!

Emily can officially turn one on Wednesday. She's had the party with so many people she was totally overwhelmed, she's eaten cake for the first time (yes, I finally decided to just bite the bullet and make her a real cake, which she took 3 bites of and decided she liked her cheerios better, much to Will's delight), and she's gotten the requisite crapload of new toys. All is as it should be.

I have been scarce recently because for the past couple weeks I've been spending quite a bit of time planning the party, looking for things I need for the party, going back to the drawing board when they can't be found, looking for new things, driving to 4 stores to find rubber duckies (seriously, those things are harder to find than you would think) and cleaning/baking cakes/coordinating/setting up for the party. All this for a gathering that lasts about 4 hours. But it WAS a great party, and it was all for Emily even though she won't remember it.

The biggest hit of the party (and something I would advise any mother not to overlook at her child's first birthday party) was the alcohol. I set up a bar with 6 recipes for blue drinks glued to yellow notecards and sat out plastic martini glasses with rubber ducky drink picks and let people make their own blue drinks. I was worried people wouldn't take advantage, but it was enjoyed by all and made for a more fun party.

Today I have been gradually untangling the mess of boxes and wiry twist ties that contain Emily's new toys. The toy packing methods these days must've been thought up by evil geniuses intent on causing as many cardboard cuts as possible to anyone so foolish as to think they might be able to liberate the toy from the box. I'm sure it has cut back on toy theft, but it has made it all the more difficult to get the toy out of the box and into the waiting arms of the frantically excited child jumping around beside you.

But with the big party behind us, all that remains is the party on Thursday for Emily's Little Gym buddies, and I intend for that to be more of a playdate with food than a full-on birthday party, since that seems to be the best way to go with 1-year olds.

In the future I will probably try to have her birthday party elsewhere so that my house isn't repeatedly ripped apart over the course of her birthday week, but for the first birthday I felt like it should be here at the house where she's most comfortable. I believe it went well, but I am really glad we don't have to deal with this again for another year!