Bloody Debacle

I'm always perplexed when I run into an adult who claims that they have never really had blood taken before. Blood and its study/donation/taking/mismatch has figured largely in my life. When I was in 5th grade, our teacher assigned a research paper/presentation on a subject of our choosing, as long as it had something to do with the Civil War. I, being a budding scientist and supremely bored with the study of history and specifically the study of the history of wars (what can I say, I think it's subconscious rebellion against my history-teacher mother and Civil War-obsessed extended family) decided to do my paper on blood. My teacher, God bless her, decided to allow it after hearing my argument that quite a bit of blood was lost during the Civil War and that my paper would end with a tidy closing paragraph mentioning that Antietam was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. So while my (chump) classmates wrote papers and did presentations on Gettysburg and Robert E. Lee, I delved into encyclopedia articles about platelets and Rhesus factors.

At the age of 12, I was diagnosed with Hashimodo's thyroiditis and Grave's disease, and thus began my intimate relationship with my own blood. Since then I have had varying amounts of blood taken sometimes as often as every 2 weeks, never less often than every 6 months. At first I never had problems having blood taken, it was a very normal occurance for me. I was good at it too, the only times anyone has ever had a problem getting blood from me were after volleyball practice in high school (when I was dehydrated and had spent the last 2 hours beating the blood out of my arms) and while I was being smashed in the stomach and the back simultaneously with sledgehammers in labor with Emily, so I didn't really even notice or care that it took them 5 tries that time. "I don't understand, this has never happened to me before!" exclaimed the 3rd nurse to give it a shot.

I started to realize I was more like my dad (who did many things involving blood to monkeys in his career as a biologist but passes out at the mere sight of a drop of his own blood) in college. Finding myself in desperate need of extra cash and having previously tried various part-time jobs to the detriment of my GPA, I signed up to be a test subject for an experimental vaccine for Dengue Fever. I know, I know, I've been told by everyone I know how stupid I was, but hey, I got $750 and immunity to Dengue Fever (along with the 104 degree fever, blinding headache and painful rash all over my body for days) so there! As part of the study, they took 14 tubes of blood, and they unfortunately didn't use a butterfly needle. That means that every time they changed tubes, the needle wiggled in and out of my arm a little bit, which totally squinked me out. I told the nurse I felt like I was going to pass out, and as if she had been eagerly waiting for just such an occurance, she immediately whipped out the smelling salts which changed my status from "about to pass out" to "about to barf".

After college, I started donating blood because as an O+ donor I felt it was my duty to help. My blood is only half as awesome as O- donors, but still pretty awesome, and I figured that my extensive experience with blood-giving made me a good candidate. My husband's work runs quarterly blood drives, so it was convenient for me as well. All went just fine until my third donation, after which I stood up, walked over to the recovery table, got into a converstaion with an aquaintance (who was waiting to donate for the first time), then passed out cold. I can remember thinking to myself "Do NOT pass out, you'll scare the crap out of her and it would be incredibly rude to pass out in the middle of a conversation", but my postive self-talk was all for naught. The twinkling stars in my peripheral vision could not be held back, and as they led the blackness in towards the center, I keeled right over. I awoke to people slapping me and shouting my name. I saw my friend Matt running over and I weakly asked him "Did I throw up?" Apparently I was very concerned with the etiquette of fainting. As the phlebotomists laid me down on a cot behind a divider and assigned Matt to watch over me, my first-time donor aquaintance mumbled "I think I need another bag of cookies" and went running for the snack table.

Despite my peformance, I donated again, at which point I had the privledge of watching another person pass out. I was totally embarassed, because BOY did she look awful and I was sincerely hoping I hadn't looked like that when I had passed out.

Then I took a trip to Darkest Peru and was banned from donating blood for a year, during which time I got pregnant and that's a whole other kettle of fish. Doctors love taking pregnant women's blood, they must think since you have such an increase in blood volume you can spare it, but listen buddy, I made that myself for my baby so control yourself. After Emily was born, I learned that even though Will and I are both Rh+, the fact that I have type O blood means any babies I have who do not are at risk for severe jaundice because having Will's type B blood (as Emily does) makes them "Coombs positive". I never knew about this beforehand, but daily pediatrician visits complete with heel sticks, weigh-ins that made me cry as I watched my baby get skinnier and yellower, and the eerie blue glow of bili lights taught me quick.

I am ashamed to say that I have become more fearful of giving blood these days, and had not gone back since having Emily. When I got a call on Wednesday informing me of a blood drive that would be happening right where I would be running errands while Emily was at Grammy's house, I couldn't very well come up with any more excuses. I figured I am now sporting about 15 more pounds than I was last time I passed out (my maternal fat stores, which I selflessly carry in case Emily needs them in the future) so I was bolstered by that thought.

So yesterday I walked into a church to resume my blood donation career. And once again, it was memorable.

After being asked my gender (um, wow, do I really look so androgenous that you can't tell?) and deemed fit to donate, I was handed a big pile of plastic bags into which my blood would shortly be pouring. This was a bit odd to me, shouldn't such things remain in a sterile environment supervised by trained medical personnel until being used? I could have taken the caps off the needles and dragged them across the floor, inadvertantly punctured my bag, detatched a tube or done any number of things to compromise them. I just found this a bit strange.

Then I was escorted to my seat, and the phlebotomist had a very bustle-y, "I have way too much going on" attitude about her, but she still had time to yak for quite awhile with each patient when the topic interested her. I can't complain too much, she hit the vein on the first try, and I have no bruising today or freaky clicking in my inner elbow when I bend my arm like I have had before. She plugged me in, then went over to start on the next guy, who had to go coach a little girls basketball team in half an hour. As she was swabbing him with iodine she looked over at my bag and her eyes got big. She said "You can stop squeezing now, your bag is full!". She yelled for someone to come over and unplug me since she had just disinfected the other guy, but all she got were bovine stares so she scurried over to do it herself. She was telling me how she hadn't expected me to fill the bag in under 4 minutes when I heard her say "Uh oh". I was already feeling a little woozy from the needle removing process, but stupid me, I looked down anyway and was treated to the sight of my blood all over the floor. Luckily it was she and not me who had dropped it there, and even more luckily it was just the blood from the tube that they don't really use anyway and not from the bag that had spilled, but I didn't know all of that at the time. I tried coughing, which I knew from past experiences was supposed to push more blood to your head, but to no avail. She was desperately trying to juggle my bag of blood and cover the gore with paper towels at the same time as the other donors' eyes got bigger and bigger, and that was when my dizziness and nausea were joined by my friends, the twinkling stars and I sighed "I think I'm going to pass out".

Poor lady. Poor other donors who had to watch 3 people rush to my side as my blood splattered the floor. And poor guy I made even later to his girls basketball practice with all my drama.

An ice chip in the eye, a rest in a reclined position and a forced ingestion of a coke and I was feeling just fine again. So fine that they allowed me to eat my apple chips instead of cookies (donating blood is terrible for a diet, but I guess you temporarily lose over a pound in the process so that makes me feel a bit better about it) and I was able to leave a bit later. Apparently I bleed too fast, and my body doesn't take kindly to losing a pint of blood in less than 4 minutes. At least now I know.

So I will continue to donate blood because as bad as it briefly makes me feel, I know I am helping someone who is feeling even worse. I encourage everyone else to donate blood too, but learn from my mistakes and try not to bleed to fast when you do it :-)

-Sara

Chicken and home decor

As anyone who's read my blog for any amount of time knows, it's important to me to feel like I have my life "under control". My standards for "under control" are pretty high, and I can probably count on one hand the number of days I've ever actually felt this way. But it keeps me striving for that goal.

This blog has really inspired me to take control recently. The woman who writes it is the mother of 3 young kids, and she still manages to cook food ahead of time and use coupons! She has made it easy to play the CVS game (where you get all sorts of stuff for free, or even earn money by buying particular products when certain deals are running and you have a coupon). And I spent most of yesterday cooking up 15 pounds of chicken into 2 weeks worth of dinners that are now hanging out in my freezer, waiting to make my life easier on busy nights. And don't worry, I don't plan to serve chicken for 2 weeks in a row.

So yeah, not much else to report except that the old house is officially devoid of stuff we want. Everything we plan to keep is over here now, and we just have to unpack it. Plus pack up the stuff from the old house we want to donate, rent a rolloff and chuck whatever's left and then clean it up, but still, we've completed the most arduous part!

We also have a new window in Emily's room, the cabinets for our kitchen desk area are sitting in the garage, and my couch FINALLY arrived!

The living room still looks a bit sparse though, so I'm thinking I need a lamp or a fake tree or something in the corner. I have also been eyeing this painting for the wall above the couch. It isn't really my style, but it really catches my eye for some reason, plus it's the perfect colors and I really like the idea of having 9 little paintings grouped on the wall vs. the typical one big one. The only problem is that it's really freakin' expensive (not for art in general, but in terms of how much I'm willing to spend on a picture for above the sofa). I found it as a poster on Amazon, so I'm thinking I might buy the poster for $35, cut the individual squares out, then stick them onto canvases (if I can find the right size). I know it's cheating, but it would be getting the same effect for about 90% less money so I might have to just overcome my moral issues with it. On the other side of the living room (behind where I stood to take the picture) I have a console table and I want to put together a little family tree of pictures on the wall above it. I won't draw connecting lines or anything, but I'd like to just kind of group them like a family tree. I have pictures of Will's and my parents on their respective wedding days, and all of our grandparents too so I have a good start. If I go back much further I might have some difficulty finding pictures (if there even are any) but it'll be a fun project and I think our kids will enjoy looking at it.

So that's what I'm focusing on now. There's plenty of other stuff I still need to do, but I haven't really posted any pictures yet and now that the living room looks presentable I wanted to get at least one up!

-Sara

My house is totally classy

I have my very own bathroom attendant.  She accompanies me into the bathroom every time, without fail.  She pulls the toilet paper off the roll and hands it to me.  When I am finished she closes the lid of the toilet, then flushes.  Then she escorts me out and closes the door to the bathroom, and all she requires is a bit of applause when she completes her tasks.

Oh yeah, I also pay for her room and board and devote every waking moment to her upbringing.  But at least I'm starting to get some service out of the deal! 

-Sara

Trick and a Treat

*I wrote most of this post on the evening of Halloween, but started having issues with uploading photos and couldn't finish until today. I am backdating it so that I don't have to go through and change the tenses because I'm lazy like that.

Our dog Mingus has become a fleshbag monster and is exceedingly disgusting to be around these days. He walks around our new house, pausing every 3 seconds for a 60-second long itch fest, then walks a couple steps and starts the routine all over again. Along the way he drops pieces of skin, hair, and blood. He smells wonderful too.


Ha! Told you there was a trick. Doesn't that look like a creature you'd love to share your home with? If so please call me, I will PAY you to take him.

So even though I've already taken him to the vet 4 times, changed his food twice, given him any number of different medications, painstakingly flushed the affected area, and even bought him a new house for God's sake, he is worse than ever. I took him in to a new vet (one that is walking distance from our house, hooray!) and I really like this new guy. He seems to genuinely want to help Mingus instead of just treating his symptoms and having me come back every month when I reach my breaking point and can't stand living with the dog anymore.

So now, Mingus is on a pill regimen that is distributed to him in just 3 easy daily installments and reasonably priced at about $8 per day. Have I mentioned I don't even like this dog anyway?!?!?! Not to mention the fact that he pooped on the way to the vet and since I forgot to bring a bag with me I had to pick it up on the way home. The problem was, they gave me this newfangled fancy bag at the vet with a wire rim and a cardboard part that was supposed to fold over and close it but danged if I could figure it out, so I had to walk home through my neighborhood pushing a stroller and holding onto a dog leash with one hand and holding an open bag of dog poop out away from me and everyone else while enjoying the subtle aroma wafting back at me. I am NOT happy with this dog right now.


Now on to the treat, which was the rest of the day. I don't know about your kids, but Emily is absolutely tearing around the house right now, and she hasn't even eaten any candy! Halloween was a big hit here, both for her and for us.

We set up the candy bowl in the front hall, I dumped in a bunch of candy and I also added some dehydrated apple chips, figuring we might as well give the kids a choice. Will went so far as to put a bowl of whole apples up there too. The only problem was that Emily was totally jazzed about this and ended up taking bites out of many of the apples:

Then we got her dressed, and she was of course the cutest puppy in the universe:



When trick or treaters showed up, Emily would grab handfulls of candy and show the trick or treaters while I offered up the bowl, then she'd pull her candy back and help me close the door. Once the door was closed, she would clap, as if to say "Jolly good, we did an excellent job".

We goofed around on the front porch for awhile:



Then we went trick or treating! I figured we'd do about 4 houses or so, just to show her off a bit and meet our neighbors, but she was loving it so we stayed out for about half an hour. Every time a big group of kids went by, she'd take off after them (especially the little boy dressed as Elmo. What is it with Elmo?) And every time someone would open their door, Emily would just go barging in! I had to chase her down in a couple people's houses, but it let us introduce ourselves and we got invited in a couple times. Will was thrilled that our neighbors across the street invited him to have some beer to take with him. There were people in the neighborhood that really went all-out too! One lady had a Tarot card reading table set up in her front yard, along with horror movies playing on a TV outside. One woman dressed up and set her porch up with a Harry Potter theme. It was lots of fun, and Emily was sad when we came back inside. It was great, exactly what trick or treating should be, and I was thrilled because this was part of the reason we wanted to move to a younger, more active neighborhood.

The other trick or treaters were great too. They started promptly at the appointed time, and we only had 2 small groups show up after the official stop time, and all the kids were so polite! We didn't have any greedy grabbers, we didn't notice anyone coming around twice, and they all said thank you and one even told me I had a lovely house! There were also a couple little girls who offered to trade me candy for water since they were so thirsty, so I let them keep their candy and sent them along with disposable plastic cups of water. Too cute.


After the trick or treating Emily was totally jazzed and she went tearing around the house for awhile. She stopped at the candy bowl, and just flung every piece out of it onto the floor:

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.