Shakes fist at sky

Today was a glorious day. Mid-sixties, sunny, wonderful. I joyously flung open all the windows, saying "It'll be nice to air out the stuffy winterness...and we'll save on heat!" I enjoyed the lovely day.

Then, as I was reading Oh The Places You'll Go to Emily before bed, I heard what sounded like rain outside. "Funny" I thought, "I remember the weather people mentioning wind, but not rain. It must just be that the wind kicked up because no way is it raining hard enough to make a roar like that."

But alas, it was. And the rain was pouring right in through all my open windows.

So I hurriedly put Emily in the crib, blew some quick kisses and ran out of the room. And when I looked out the front window, rain was POURING down in sheets.

What the hell? When it rains in January here, it's just a wimpy depressing drizzle. I have NEVER seen a summer-quality downpour like this in the winter. Sure, it was unseasonably warm today, but it's not unheard of to have nice days here and there sprinkled throughout the winter to keep our skin from falling completely off from the cold and dryness. They've never come complete with authentic summer monsoon before though.

My house has a lot of windows, and stupid panicked me, the first ones I closed were the ones that open onto the front porch. The ones with the least chance of the rain reaching in. Oh well.

The damage is minimal. But I'm still so confused. My windowsills and wood floor and Emily's toddler-sized chair and table set were pretty soaked, but all of those are hard surfaces I easily dried off. The problem was in the dining room, where it rained all over the carpet and an upholstered chair. I'm not sure what to do about that. I feel like pressing a towel onto it will absorb some moisture, but will probably also mash water deeper into the under-layers. I guess the best thing to do would be to get a fan set up and open the windows and let the moisture evaporate that way, but now it's all humid outside and it's supposed to get cold again.

And of course, it only rained for like, 5 minutes and then stopped. It just had to teach me a lesson for trying to enjoy the rare gift of a warm day in February.

Also I just had to go running upstairs to pull my daughter's leg back out from between the crib slats. Last night she awoke at 11 screaming and confused and when I rushed in to see what was the matter I found that she had thrust her foot out of the crib in her sleep, then rolled over, wedging and painfully twisting her foot. Luckily tonight she made a noise when she poked her leg out in her sleep so I checked the video monitor and was able to avert another leg-twisting incident. Thank goodness that girl inherited her mother's ability to never ever bruise, In the last 4 days alone she's taken a face dive from the breakfast area down into our sunken family room (on the wood floor), smashed her face while she was crawling around under the dining room table and fell on the leg of a chair, bonked her head spectacularly when she slipped on a blanket on the family room floor and then pinched and twisted her foot last night in her sleep. If she bruised easily the gym daycare would be reporting me to child services. And I wanted to take her crib bumper off yesterday. Without it she'd probably be wedging her entire torso through the side of the crib in her sleep.

At least it seems I made the right decision there. About the windows though? Not so much.

Preschool!?!?!?!

We were out to lunch on Saturday with my in-laws and Will's old boss and his wife (at Volt! Yum! But their lunch-sized wine pairing is much much smaller than its dinner counterpart. Boo.) and my mother-in-law mentioned preschools. She has this way of mentioning things that I should be used to by now but I'm not. She'll say "I was talking to my friend at church last Sunday, and she asked me "So when are Will and Sara going to pick a college/So when are Will and Sara going to have a baby/So when are Will and Sara going to have another baby/So are Will and Sara all moved into their new house yet/What preschool is Emily going to because you know there are 2 year waiting lists for some of them" and I said "Oh they have plenty of time/Oh they have plenty of time/Oh they have plenty of time/Oh they have plenty of time/Oh they have plenty of time"."

I'll start a new paragraph here because I'm sure your head is spinning from all the ""quotations within quotations"".".

Then she waits for me to respond. And there are only two ways to respond. #1 is to tell her what our plans actually are, which is what she's really asking in a roundabout way by telling these little "stories", and #2 is to just smile and nod. And I usually do #2.

So this method takes the focus off the actual question, and puts the focus on figuring out what she really means and finding a nebulous answer, if needed. In my mind I'm trying to figure out if this "concerned friend" was a complete fabrication invented to bring up the subject, or if the conversation actually did happen, with very fortuitous timing.

So that is why I had this conversation last weekend, but it was only today that I actually thought about it and realized "2 year waiting lists?!?!?! I have to start calling preschools, like, today".

But I have some issues, and they are:

-Emily is still my teeny tiny baby and will always be this way and surely won't be leaving me to go to school for another 10 years at least so it's silly to even think about preschool in the first place.
-I have to pick my child's preschool? Where in the manual do they tell you how to do that?
-How do I even find out what preschools I have to choose from?

I started, as usual, with my beloved internet. A quick google search brings up some yahoo listings, but how do I know whether that's an exhaustive list or not? Maybe it's just the preschools who paid to be listed on yahoo. Do I (gasp!) have to look in the yellow pages? I always tease my mom for turning first to the yellow pages, but do I even remember how to use them myself? Am I going to have to actually call people? On the phone? And some of these preschools actually look like they are daycare, so what's the difference between a preschool program and daycare?

I tried to sign up for a community of local moms online so that I can figure out my area's "preschool hierarchy of desirability", but they take up to 48 hours to process your joining request. Don't they know I need advice NOW? The waiting lists could be approaching 3 years by the time I'm approved!

In the meantime, I'm trying to think of the preschools I already know about. There's the Lucy School, which is a picturesque little barn-turned-school where I took Emily for Sing and Sign class last fall. It's all very outdoorsy and granola with a focus on music and art, and the kids have an organic garden. But lord is it pricey. Also, they do preschool through 2nd grade there, and it's not very close to our school district. So if I send Emily to preschool there, will I be the meanest mommy ever if I pull her away from her friends to put her into public school or a different private school for Kindergarten? If I send her there all the way through 2nd grade, then she and her friends will have to split up anyway at that point, but she'll be joining a class at a different school in 3rd grade...a class that has probably been at the same school together since Kindergarten, so will she be the new kid coming to the party 3 years too late, doomed to be an outsider for all eternity? And music and art are good and all, but hopefully there's science and math aplenty too? Lucy School just makes my head spin.

Then there's the preschool Will and I went to, which is at my mother-in-law's church. I liked it there well enough, and I don't really recall getting any religious lessons with my preschool, but doesn't it seem weird to go to preschool at a church, especially if it's not YOUR church? A lot of the preschools I saw online have "philosophies" and "teaching methods"...a preschool at a church might have a loose cirriculum, but is it really school or just like glorified daycare? All I can really remember of my own preschool days was playing with dinosaur toys and finger painting with paint that the teachers were foolish enough to mention was edible. Yum.

Then there's the school downtown that my mom enrolled Krista (my middle sister) in at the last minute when she was 3 because she was going to wait to put her into preschool until she was 4 (another dilema! Enroll at 3 or wait until 4?) but Mom decided she'd like to have some time at home alone with my youngest sister (since Krista did and still kinda does demand attention, usually loudly). So she enrolled Krista in the last place that had spaces left. Damn, that's harsh. Compared to places with 2 year waiting lists, I'm thinking no.

And which are the places with 2 year waiting lists? Do they even exist? If I call KinderKare and ask for a tour because I'm scouting preschools for my 21 month old daughter, are they going to laugh at me and tell me to come back in 2 years when she's actually old enough to go to school?

And the big question in the back of my mind the whole time...does which preschool Emily goes to really matter that much? I barely remember my own preschool experience, but even if you don't remember it, isn't the point of it to lay the groundwork for the rest of your school career? That sounds pretty important. But is it?

I don't think I'm ready for this yet. Maybe I'll bury my head in the sand and just keep nodding at my mother-in-law for another year.

Random thoughts

Today, as Will and I came inside from our jog/walk (respectively), I took off my shoes and put them on the shoe rack where Will usually puts his. It was the closest spot to the door, and it was open. A little while ago I walked by the shoe rack and noticed that he moved my shoes to the middle rack, and put his shoes in the "good" spot. I wonder why I am not allowed to put my shoes there?

My child is the total opposite of other children when it comes to eating. While most other moms are pureeing spinach to put in their childrens' dinners, I am pureeing meat to hide in her vegetables because I know she'll eat the vegetables.

I should've walked to the grocery store today instead of driving, because it is very nice outside. I knew this, and yet I still drove 1/2 a mile to go there. Habit, I suppose.

Even though my frozen veggie coupon expired January 10th, it was accepted at Giant today, and it doubled, resulting in a free bag of frozen veggies. Awesome.

Not doing Body Pump for 2 weeks + doing Body Pump again = ouch.

I have a weird thing that may be a burn on my outer forearm. I have no clue how I got it. The problem is, it's about the same size as my birthmark, which is located approximately 2 inches below it, so now that I have 2 similarly-sized skin abnormalities near each other it looks kind of like I am developing a skin disease on my arm, and will probably be ostracized as a leper before too long.

Flesh-colored, skintight thermal pants are not acceptable gym attire on anyone, especially not on the lady who wore them tonight. She totally reminded me of that butt-thing that dances around at the end of Pink Floyd's The Wall, and that movies scares the ever-loving crap out of me.

I need a babysitter to make me go to bed. Will has been working crazy hours for the past 2 weeks, and he is my structure. Without him here at night, and with Emily asleep, I aimlessly read my book, do some internetting, and just basically waste time until 1 when I am exhausted and crawl to bed. I SHOULD just go to bed as soon as he leaves and get a fabulous 11 hours of sleep in before Emily starts cooing good morning, but I never do.

Maybe I should make tonight the night. I guess that means this post is finished.

Love that super-rapidity

Why on earth does the regular cycle on my bread machine exist?  I've always assumed that the regular 4 hour bread cycle gave better results, and that you should only use the super rapid cycle if you find yourself in a bread emergency and need a loaf right now.  Well I was in just such an emergency tonight, and let me tell you, my results using the super-rapid cycle were far superior to the results I get with the regular cycle!  None of this top-of-the-loaf-falling-down-into-a-sad-little-concave-puddle business that I've been battling with...when I opened the lid this evening I was treated to the sight of a glorious loaf of bread, standing tall and proud.

So in my opinion, the super-rapid cycle should just be the regular cycle, and the regular cycle should be called "the cycle you use if you want to wait a long time and still end up with crappy bread".

This post would be better with pictures, but my droopy loaves of bread are just too sad-looking to photograph, and my super-rapid success tonight was also consumed super-rapidly so you just get yammerings with no pictures.  Sorry.

Dogged

Finally, a reason to keep the dogs.

Whenever I leave the house, I close the dogs in the laundry room so they can't wreak havoc on my house while I'm gone.  They don't especially like this, but they're mostly resigned to it at this point.

Recently, Mingus has started expressing his frustration at being closed in the laundry room by asserting his dominance over Remy.  This means, the last thing I see as I close the door and walk out to my car is Mingus, frantically speed-humping Remy.  He always has a crazed gleam in his eye, as if to say "I don't know if we'll ever make it back out of this room, and I am NOT going to die a virgin!".

I always leave the house sniggering and hoping that Mingus will've calmed down by the time Emily is old enough to notice and question such things.  If he doesn't, there's a good chance her first sex talk might be about how sometimes male dogs hump each other to show that one is better than the other, and I shudder to think how her impressionable young mind might apply such knowledge to males of other species.  "Oh yeah?  Well MY dad can hump YOUR dad!"

That could make for some uncomfortable silences.

Our newest additions

Because of Emily's obsession with the words "fish" (pronounced fwish) and "fishy" (pronounced fish-EEEEEEE), I decided it would be fun to get her a little fish for Valentine's Day. Something simple that can live in an unheated, unfiltered bowl because I don't want to fall into the trap of having an aquarium again. I've decided twice before to take a foray into the rewarding field of tropical fish ownership, and twice before I have ended up just wishing the things would die already. I was sick of dealing with fish getting sucked up into the filter, heaters on the fritz, algea overgrowth, skyrocketing ammonia levels, sucker catfish getting gigantic, tiger barbs eating each other, dalmation mollies having babies, and even once my freshly flea-powdered cat falling into the aquarium and poisoning all of my fish. I always knew fish and cats didn't get along, but who would've ever guessed poison would've been the cat's chosen method of dispatch? Also, Will is no longer my brand-new boyfriend trying to impress me and my parents, so I don't think he'd consent to helping me clean out a 10-gallon aquarium again for fear of getting another splash of dirty green fish water to the face.

So where was I? Oh yes. A fish, but a simple one.

Bettas seemed a good bet. And as is usually the case with me, once I got the idea in my head I just got more and more excited about it, so instead of 1 Betta for Valentine's Day, we now have 2 Bettas for 10 days before Valentine's Day.

Meet Emily's Betta, Dasha:
and my Betta Jasper:

Please forgive the crappy pictures, my photography skills do not extend to taking excellent pictures of tiny moving targets who are underwater and inside a convex reflective container.

I chose Jasper because he matched my kitchen decor (:-P) and he's named after a vampire in Twilight whose name I liked but would not use on one of my own children. I chose Dasha because Emily had no interest in chosing a fish so I grabbed a pretty one so we could get out of there before anyone noticed that Emily had knocked over several test tubes of aquarium water. Boy that girl has a reach, even when she's buckled into a stroller. Emily chose his name.

After doing extensive internet research, I have realized that Bettas can survive in stagnant water down to 60-ish degrees and don't need a whole lot of room to swim around, but that somehow I am a horrible, sadistic person for keeping a Betta in a goldfish bowl (so named because it is apparently far too small for a golfish too...hmmm) without a heater and a filter. Grrr. Apparently Bettas can survive harsh conditions but they don't necessarily like them, and I'm an idiot for thinking "Hey, at least it's better than the little cups they live in at the pet store". And here I thought fwish didn't have enough room in their mushy little brains to have many preferences one way or the other.

So now I've gotten tiny little heaters to tuck into each bowl, and I've ordered Jasper a fetching little rectangular vase that will hold over a gallon of water but fit nicely on the shelf so he can still be my decorative buddy while I'm washing dishes. Things have gotten more complicated, as they always tend to do, but Emily freakin' loves the fish-EEEEEEEs and I like the little guys too. And if they're too much of a pain, at least we can only expect them to live a couple years, right?

There's no place like home

I just took a quiz about my preferences in climate, activities, geography etc. to find out where in the US I would enjoy living the most.  #4 on my top 24 results?  Where I'm living right now.

Guess we won't be moving anytime soon!  Although it says we get 21" of snow per year and I don't think we've gotten 21" the past 5 years put together.

If you have the time, take the quiz.  It's fun.  And if you're so inclined, let me know where your perfect spots are.  I'm interested.

The beans were good, but dinner kinda sucked

Well, the casserole turned out pretty well last night. It certainly didn't look much better once it was finished:


but it did taste good. It was actually pretty amazing how much flavor there was, considering the short and simple ingredient list.

However getting a chance to eat it was another matter entirely. Our gym schedule causes us to have pretty late dinners, and usually Emily can't wait that long. She gets hungry while I'm still making dinner, so I have to scrape something together to feed her while I'm finishing dinner. This means that by the time Will and I sit down to a lovely meal, Emily is already fueled up and ready to go. As we try to sit and eat and have a conversation, Emily is walking around whining about one thing or another, periodically pausing near me to raise her arms up and say "Uh-ee?", which translates to "Up, please?". Some nights I give in and just hold her in my lap while I eat one-handed. After a long day, neither Will nor I are in the mood to listen to all the whining. Last night, Emily's issue was her shoes. She wanted me to take them off, and fool that I am, I obliged. The problem with taking any article of clothing off of Emily at night is that she will then demand to have the rest of her clothes taken off, all the way down to her necklace and even her hairbow. When night falls, it's naked time, and while it sometimes slips her mind, all it takes is the removal of a shoe or jacket to remind her.

It's good for kids to have naked time, and I absolutely love watching her dance around naked every night, but I do not love cleaning up her pee. We usually have about 15-30 min of pee-free naked time, so we try to have a diaper back on before our time is up. Last night though, almost as soon as I had removed her clothes for her and turned back to my dinner, she had peed on the floor, and by the time I got over to her, she had walked through it. As I cleaned up the puddle and footprints, Emily was busily unrolling the entire toilet paper roll in the powder room.

Once I had gotten all of that fixed, I returned to my dinner again, only to hear "Uh-ee?". I lifted her into my lap, and got in a few more bites before she peed all over me. Nasty. So then I went around and closed the blinds so that I could toss my urine-soaked pants into the washer and complete my meal partially clothed. I realized when I was putting leftovers in the fridge and I saw headlights sitting in front of the house across the street that I had forgotten to close the blinds on the other side of the house. I'm not used to having people close enough to see in my back windows, and I'm not used to having any windows at all on the sides of my house, and for that, I apologize to my neighbors.

Then it was time to give Emily her bath, but over the last week she has gone from a bath-loving kinda girl to a girl who runs from a bath like a rabid animal. Showers are fine though for some reason, even eagerly anticipated, so these days I have to shower while holding her. Let me tell you my friends, trying to shower while holding a soapy, slippery toddler is incredibly difficult.

SO. I had cleaned up a puddle of pee, re-rolled an entire roll of toilet paper, cleaned up the fallout from the pee bomb that went off in my lap, gave my neighbors a show, made it through a shower without dropping the slippery wiggling Emily, and we were both dried, moisturized, and pajama-ed. It was time to read a story, tuck her in, and be relieved of my parental duties for the night.

Of course that's when she threw up.

The Bean Solution

Well, I've joined the world of "couponing"*, and there's no turning back.  I admit, I get a kick out of figuring out ways to buy a $4.50 box of cereal for less than $1.00.  I was seen yesterday glaring at a Safeway clerk because she didn't want to give me a raincheck for the incredible soda deal that had already left the drinks aisle barren.  But I've spent most of the day feeling sorry for myself about it.  You see, around here, sugar and refined carbs are unacceptable.  Fats have to be "good", calories have to be low, and everything has to have nutritional value (except for diet sodas, which I don't drink very often and only buy if they're super-cheap).  I prefer to buy organic food for Emily, too.  These are all good things, but they make getting good deals on food extremely difficult.  If we ate nothing but frozen meatballs and Pillsbury rolls, I could feed us on next to nothing.  But we eat only real food, and unfortunately there are rarely coupons for flank steaks or broccoli in the newspaper.  It hurts when I have to pass up $0.17 boxes of pasta because they are not 100% whole wheat.  

I've been wandering around online today, searching for inspiration from blogs, trying to find others who share my plight, and it's quite difficult.  That's a lot of food-related restrictions to try to balance.  But after extensive research, the answer, it seems, is beans.  

They're cheap (even organic), they're healthy, and even better, Emily will eat them (the girl won't touch most meat...at least that means I can buy the $1.59/pound chicken breasts instead of the $8.99/pound organic chicken breasts).  I always feel like I should incorporate them into my cooking more, but the problem is that they take planning.  You have to soak them overnight, and cook them all day.  I could always buy canned beans, and I sometimes do, but they're more expensive, don't taste as good, and are not as good for you.  

So today, motivated by a blog I came across where the writer ate mostly organic for a month on a food stamp budget, I am trying a lima bean cassserole (Fassoulia Fourno) for dinner.  This is what it looks like right now:

Mmmmm....nothing like pasty, scummy beans to whet the appetite.

It's supposed to be really tasty once it's finished, so I am cautiously optimistic.  I am not against trying vegetarian meals, but it just seems wrong that I haven't put any meat in it.  

I'll let you know how it turns out.



*No, I do not use this term in day to day conversation, and yes, I hate the way it sounds too.

Penetration in the Tight End

Yeesh, if I hear the name Roethlisberger one more time, I think I'm going to barf.  And something else that really nauseates me is the fact that he's younger than I am.  Oh boy.  Better start using the wrinkle cream in earnest, there are people younger than me who have won two Superbowls.  I'm ancient.

I'm not a huge football fan; as much as I have tried to sit through an entire football game I usually just spend the first two quarters giggling about football double entendres and then wander away to go do something else.  This was a good game though.  Even though I live closer to Pittsburgh than Arizona, and even though I own my very own Terrible Towel (the result of spending most recent Superbowls in the company of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association) I was rooting for the Cardinals, and boy was that a heartbreaker.

The best part was the fact that I actually got to watch the commercials this year!  Last year I didn't get much of a chance to sit and watch as I had a 9 month old baby and was also hosting a party with very little seating.  Before that, as I've mentioned, I was always out of the country at the PNA yearly meeting so I always saw the game, but the commercials were usually in Spanish as they were broadcast out of Puerto Rico.  I would've been in St. Croix this year...I'll bet they would've had commercials in English.  I won't think about that though.  The temperature here climbed into the 60's today, that's just as good isn't it?!?!?!

It was actually more of an ordeal to be able to watch the commercials than one would think, since we don't have cable.  Will made it his mission to find it online for me though, so when kickoff started, I settled in to watch.  I quickly noticed though that while there were commercials, they were for the Royal Bank of Montreal, and Ice Hockey featured prominently.  The kicker was the recruitment commercial for the Canadian Forces.  We were watching the Superbowl being broadcast out of Canada.  Will finally found another feed, and I was finally able to watch the commercials, although there were an awful lot of commercials that seemed pretty specific to Connecticut.  Did anyone else see commercials for the Connecticut Lottery and elementary schools?

Meh, I saw Clydesdales.  That means we're getting closer.  Maybe next year we'll get cable for the month of February.

When it comes to family, at least there's one person you get to choose

So due to the snow and ice we got this week, I was able to blast through the remaining Twilight books.  My sister was trapped here for awhile, since she spends the night with us when bad weather is forecasted.  We live half an hour, one mountain range and 1000 vertical feet closer to her work than my parents do (plus our driveway is a reasonable 20 ft. long and not a terror-inducing quarter mile long icy plunge that skirts along clifftops and weaves through boulders and trees) so we usually are not quite as trapped as they are when it snows, but sometimes it hits us hard too.  Anyway, since she was trapped here, so was the 3rd book so we traded back and forth (sometimes with more goodwill than other times) and I got through the last two books in time for her to take them along on her trip to Florida today.  Now I'm really missing Edward and Bella, of course.  I love to read book series...the author can devote much more time to character development and I feel like you really get to know and love the characters, but it makes it that much harder when the story's over.  Oh well.  I thought I'd never survive after I finished the 7th Harry Potter book and yet I've found other books to obsess over, so I'm sure there's something else out there for me.

So yesterday since I had nothing to read, Emily and I spent the day visiting.  We visited Daddy at work (which we don't do NEARLY enough, considering he works 5 minutes away), we visited my mom to say goodbye before she goes to Florida with my sister for the week, and unfortunately we visited my drug-addict Aunt who was up from Atlanta to spend some time with her granddaughters.  Her story is far too long and horrific to relay here, suffice to say she was a teenager in the 60's and has spent most of her time since then staggering drunk and high on painkillers.  Her brain is absolutely fried, which makes talking to her similar to talking to a  drunk toddler, only she's even more self-centered.  She had never met Emily and was begging to do so, so I figured I might as well go quickly introduce them while she was in the area and seemed to be doing well enough that she wouldn't try to steal anything from me while I was there.  Isn't it crazy what you'll put yourself through for family?

So we drove over, and Emily played with her twin second cousins while I sat and listened to my Aunt's stories, mostly about how horrible all her health problems are (but how she's also holding up better than any patient any of her doctors have ever seen) and how every toy that either of the twins showed any preference for was of course bought by her.  Then she decided to give me the Elizabeth ring, a ring that has been passed down through the generations in my family from oldest daughter to oldest daughter, along with the middle name Elizabeth.  Aunt Diane didn't have any daughters (although she did unfortunately have a son who's even more of a mess than she is), so the ring and the name go to her sister's oldest daughter, me.  I was pleased to get the ring, both because of the history attached to it and because I worried that the longer Aunt Diane kept it, the more likely she would be to pawn it or lose it.  She told me that the tradition was to pass down the ring and to tell the story of it when the ring went to the next generation...too bad she was the one who gave it to me because all I got from her were incoherent half-sentences with very few names.  I knew the story of the ring already, but I still don't know who it was made for originally or how old it is.  She assured me it's made of gold, although just looking at it you can see that it's actually copper or something similarly colored.  I guess I'll have to take it in to a jeweler to find out any details about it.

Then she sat way too close to me, and stared at me for way too long with eyes brimming and lower lip trembling.  Right when I was about to decide I couldn't take it anymore, she whispered "I love you" in a gooey, tremulous voice and slowly leaned over to cup my face in her hands and plant a lengthy, disgustingly wet kiss on my cheek.  It was only by using up every shred of self control I had left that I was able to hold back the vomit.   I don't mind emotion, but when people are overly-emotional just to add drama it drives me insane.

So at least that unpleasantness is over with, and hopefully we can avoid her having contact with Emily for at least another 2 years.  I'm torn between keeping Emily away from her once she's old enough to remember anything that might be said and using her as a cautionary tale to show Emily what happens when you abuse drugs. 

But on a much more positive note, today is the 11 year anniversary of Will's and my first date.  11 years ago today he picked me up at Middletown High after my all-county chorus practice, we drove in his '79 Volvo station wagon to dinner at Ruby Tuesday, then went to the nice new movie theater to see Phantoms.  Today the car is long dead, Will would rather die than eat at Ruby Tuesday, and the movie theater is creepy and ghetto.  But he still gives me butterflies, and I still feel lucky and amazed that he seems to enjoy being around me too.

I'm so glad all that practice doodling "Sara Randall" in my notebook in 7th grade Algebra didn't go to waste :-)

I love you bunches, my inseparable partner for the last 11 years and most loyal blog reader!

It got me

I didn't go looking for it.  We don't even have TV, so I had no idea until a month or two ago what Twilight even was.  When I saw the books, I realized I'd been seeing them in the front windows of bookstores for the past few years.  When my mom and sisters decided we'd all get the Twilight books for each other for Christmas and then we could all take turns reading them, I said why not.  I always like to read, and I was intrigued at that point.  When Kathleen decided to offer up the first book, I declined because I was in the middle of a book series I was enjoying already.  But when I did read the first book, I enjoyed it quite a bit.  Mom brought over the second book on Wednesday when she took Emily for me so I could do errands.  I was feeling under the weather that day though, so I spent most of my time reading the book and I finished it yesterday.  Now I have a problem.  Twilight has got me.

I am the proud owner of the 4th book in the series, and I have read the first two books in the series, but the third books is currently being read by my sister, the slowest reader on the planet.  Not only is she the slowest reader on the planet, but between her long work days and her 3 hour commute every day she has very little time to read in the first place.  That poses a problem.

I could just buy the stinkin' book, but books are such a good thing to put on birthday and Christmas lists, and why buy it when I know I can get someone else to buy it for me if I'm patient?  I looked at my library's website, and was encouraged to see that the wait for Eclipse is only 2 days.  But then when I went to place a hold on it, it seems that there are actually 49 people on the waiting list.  Where do they get 2 days from?  It can't be 2 days per person, so I have no clue why it said that on the first page.  Then I noticed they had it on ebook, and it said there was 1 available.  I called the library to see how I could go about acquiring this ebook, and she told me that there are 15 people on the waitlist for it.  When I pointed out that it said there was 1 copy available, she said "Yes, that means we OWN 1 copy, and we can only send it to 5 people at a time".  Library-speak must be very different from the language I speak, because to me "1 available" means there is 1 ebook available for me to have right now.

I even eyed the Amazon Kindle, a pretty slick piece of technology that is also (in my opinion) a colossal waste of money, except for the fact that when you're reading a series and you have to know what happens next, you just click to download the next book and you're reading it within minutes.  Too bad Kindles are back-ordered for the next 5-7 weeks.  Oh, and they cost $359 to boot.  Poo.

Then I called my sister to beg.  Her boyfriend is coming up this weekend, and I was hoping that she wouldn't be doing much reading.  If I could just have the book for 2-3 days, I could finish it and give it back to her, then I'd be home free since the 4th book is already in my possession, sitting on my bookshelf taunting me.  She said she'll probably read it a bit this weekend, but that she'll give it to me on Monday because it makes her stay up too late anyway when she tries to read it during the week.  Last night she and my mom and I all went to go see the Twilight movie that is in the cheap theaters now.  That didn't help.  Nor did it help that Krista kept saying "The third book is so much better than the first two".  I told her to hush, because in 5 days I'll be in a position to tell her how it ends.

Even though I will have the book in just a few days though, I'm going nuts.  I'm considering buying the hardback version at Barnes and Noble and returning it when I'm finished.  I've done it before when I was a poor college student...but I know if I tried it now Emily would choose that book to color in/tear to pieces/shove under the couch so I can't find it etc.  I'm contemplating how long Borders (and Emily) would let me just sit there in one of their chairs reading the same book.  I just need a little!  I'm like a junkie looking for a fix.

Really, it's a good thing that I don't have the book right now.  It's fun to have something to look forward to instead of blasting through all the books at once and then wishing there was more to read.  I've honestly tried to read more slowly, it just irritates me and feels unnatural.  And I had a nice day today so far.  Emily and I went to Little Gym, and then we spent almost 2 hours playing outside.  It's 50 degrees today, and it felt SO nice to get out of our germy, closed-up house, and now instead of reading I can clean up the kitchen during Emily's naptime.  

They're not even the best books in the world, to be perfectly honest.  I won't sit here and list their shortcomings just to make myself look smarter...they're written to entertain, and they do that well in my opinion.  They're fun and they're quick and they're compelling.  

And addictive.

The best-laid plans...

8PM yesterday found me standing in a wrecked kitchen, peering into a pressure cooker that was still inexplicably filled with uncooked beans.  My back ached from vacuuming for hours (yes, hours!) and shoveling the driveway and the sidewalk.  Being a corner lot, we have A LOT of sidewalk.  My daughter still had nothing to wear out to play in the snow, despite a last-minute trip to Target to procure such items, and my husband DID have lactose-free milk, although the carton looked like a pack of wolves had tried to rip into it.  Despite my best efforts, yesterday kicked my ass.

I decided to do detail-cleaning of the floors yesterday, so I set about to scrubbing, vacuuming, mopping, and all of that fun stuff.  Shortly before noon, our friend Eddie called to see if it was ok for him to come over and finish the cabinet installation.  I said yes, since he's leaving on another mission on Wednesday and I would REALLY like to have it finished.  I TOTALLY appreciate him doing this in exchange for the van, it was just unfortunate that I had chosen that day to clean the floors, because a spotless floor + cabinet installation = a filthy floor.  Oh well.

By then it was snowing in earnest, and I realized that Emily didn't even own any sneakers, let alone snow boots.  It hasn't snowed appreciably around here for the past 4 years or so, so it seems like a waste to buy snow gear for a child who probably won't get to use it this year and who will DEFINITELY have outgrown it by next year.  The problem then is that when it DOES snow and you want to take your daughter out in the first snow she's old enough to enjoy playing in, you have nothing to dress her in.  So during Emily's nap, I shoveled the driveway and focused on cleaning the basement, and when she woke up we headed to Target.  They did not have a SINGLE toddler-sized boot, nor did they have any snow pants.  I did find one pair of slippers in a toddler 7/8, and although Emily wears a 6 I got them anyway since they were less than $2 and I hate how cold her feet get.  She won't wear them anyway, but maybe by the time they fit she will have made friends with them.  I also did not find any canned beans for the soup, and as I mentioned, the milk I got for Will turned out to have been severely tampered with.  By the time I realized though, I had walked all the way across the store to the checkout and waited through a surprisingly long line with a toddler who was close to losing it.  It hadn't actually been opened per se, so I just bought it anyway.

Since Target had no beans, I had to use dried beans, and since I had no soaked dried beans, I had to use the pressure cooker.  For some reason the beans didn't cook on the first try, and on the second try I didn't get the lid shut so the pressure never built up, and at that point I gave up and we had frozen grilled chicken strips I had made, peas and some frozen papusas we dug out of the back of the freezer.  So despite all my work yesterday, I still felt like an utter failure as I finally got a defrosted dinner on the sawdust-covered table at 8:15.

To avoid that mess, I decided to just get out of the house today.  Emily and I ended up happening upon a 12-24month storytime at the library, so we grabbed a ticket and walked in.  It was really nice, with all sorts of songs, signing, props, and activities, a good number of kids, and nice moms.  Pretty similar to the Sing and Sign class we took last semester at the Lucy School, except free!  And close to our house.  I think we'll make that a regular activity around here.

Emily also starts back into Little Gym this Friday.  I'm excited about that, since we really enjoyed it last spring, and Emily is older now so she'll be able to do even more fun physical stuff.  Emily's big thing nowadays is throwing things, so we're trying to teach her that you only throw balls, you don't throw toys.  We've gotten her a couple balls and we try to substitute those for hard toys when she's in a throwing mood, although balls can do damage too.  They don't hurt people though, so that's a start.  She also enjoys showing things to her stuffed animal friends, especially Elmo, Kitty and Bitty Bear.  She'll carry them around and hold them up to one thing after another, showing them her favorite things around the house.  She has named her first stuffed animal...a little pink bunny finger puppet she calls "Hoppy".  She spends a great deal of time making him hop along furniture, into her breakfast, basically on anything she can reach while chanting "Ho-PPY! Ho-PPY!"  Whenever I set up her tea set, she immediately runs over and just smashes everything all over the place until most of it is under the couch, in the cushions, behind the TV, anywhere it's hard to find.  Will says she has the most violent tea parties ever, at least since the Boston Tea Party.

She has also started talking like crazy since we got back from San Diego.  I still think she's a little bit behind for her age, but she's definitely making improvements and she's significantly more willing to attempt to say words.  Her favorite word is "Fish", and she shouts it joyously whenever the urge strikes her.  Most excitingly, she is starting to remember to say "more" (which she over-enunciates into a 5-second long word and also signs at the same time in case we don't get the picture) and "please" instead of just shrieking when she wants something.  THAT is big.

The other day, as Mingus rushed by Emily and sent her stumbling, I said "Uh-oh, Mingus almost  knocked you over!".  Emily looked at me, and started knocking on the door, the wall, the floor.  There was another instance, earlier in the day when I said a word and Emily showed that she understood the word but not the particular meaning.  It just goes to show how amazing a toddler's mind is...how much they have to learn and with what enthusiasm they set about learning it.  

She remains unhealthily obsessed with TV, although the only things she gets to watch are Baby Einstein and Sesame Street.  I try to tell myself it's not too terrible for her, since she dances around like crazy while she's watching it and after all, it's not a DVD, it's a digital board book for goodness sake!  But I know it's still TV, and I shouldn't let her watch it 3X a day.

And while I'm listing Emily's accomplishments, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Emily is a little tap dancing prodigy.  She already knows shuffles, taps, and flaps.  I can't wait to get this girl into a pair of tap shoes.  Don't tell her father.

Not-so-smart Cookie

So far so good.  I haven't collapsed into a miserable heap of human yet.  I'm still trying to get and keep the house as straight as possible though...never a bad idea, right?

One of the things I was trying to do is to read through my growing pile of magazines so that I don't have to look at them laying around anymore.  I get all sorts of magazines, none of which I actually pay for, some of which I have no idea HOW I came to have a subscription to.  I guess taking pre-baby classes automatically subscribes you to a long list of parenting publications.

One that I did choose myself (because it was free) was Cookie Magazine (all the best for your family).  Sounds good, right?  Well, I pretty quickly figured out that I was not the target audience of Cookie Magazine.  I do not consider a $300 floor-length sundress with a train "backyard barbecue-wear".  I do not plan to ever take a family trip to Monaco.  I do not consider Prince Charles' second cousin my social peer, and I sure don't sigh "Awwwwww" when she talks about how she has nannies and housekeepers so that she can make sure she has time to spend focusing 100% on her kids every day.  

But an article I was reading last night really perplexed me.  It was called Admit You Need It, and the blurb under the title explains "Her time and money are stretched to the limit, yet the date-night line on her family budget is non-negotiable..."

The very next page shows an outfit that makes it easy to "...transform from working mom into work-it wife", so that you can go straight from your office to date night.  Let's take a look at the cost of this outfit:

Jeans - $176

Blouse - $88

Jacket - $118

Earrings - $185

Undies - $26

Work bag - $45

Evening clutch - $295

Work flats - $98

Evening heels - $298

Total - $1329

Yowza.

Now, as I said, I know I am not the target audience for this magazine.  And to give them credit, the daytime bag was from Target.  But it seems to me that there are probably not enough people who #1 live in the US, #2 are moms, #3 work outside the home, #4 are wealthy enough to drop half a mortgage payment on an outfit, albeit a versatile one, to make much of a readership for this magazine.  So that leads me to believe that many of the people who read this magazine do so to sigh and wish they could drop $200 on a onesie.  I just think it's kinda crappy to run an article on fitting date night into your tight budget, then propose wearing an outfit like this.  Maybe I'm way off base, or maybe I really am NOT spending enough money on my date-night outfits.  Oh well.  My marriage doesn't seem to be suffering as a result, so I guess I'll just continue to shake my head in bemusement every month when my new issue of Cookie shows up.

Round two....fight!

Will's flat on his back with a stomach flu.  It seems pretty virulent, I think Will got it from his dad and he wasn't around him ALL that much.  Time to get everything I can taken care of...by my count I have about 5 days (or less) until I get sick.

I guess a week with no travel, holidays, or sickness is too much to expect right now.