May (in a) day

So let's see.  In the time I took off from blogging, lots of stuff happened.  Let's see if I can get caught up.

WAAAAAAAY back in the beginning of May, Emily's preschool hosted a mother's day tea.  It was adorable.

All the other kids thought their moms were 6, 15, one was even 25.  Me?  I'm 100 years old :-(

The kids did a super-cute presentation...

...then we shared a special dessert they had made for us.

The next day we went to the fairgrounds for the MD Beer Festival!

My husband, as he is most often observed (beer in one hand, iPhone in the other)

Will sprung for the "VIP" tickets which, among other things, allowed us to get in early which was awesome.  Emily got her face painted and the girls got balloon animals before there were lines for those activities.  Then we plunked down near the giant train obstacle course that actually looks like a worm where your kids crawl in its butt and out its mouth, and Will and I took turns making beer runs from our base camp.  It was HOT but fun, and in honor of Mother's day the next day, Will offered to drive home :-)

Fun bus!

It was aptly named

 Sunday was Mother's day, and Will let me sleep in, made me breakfast and gave me a laptop!  Then we went over to my parents' house and had a picnic in their front yard.

Will really did an awesome job of making me feel relaxed and happy all weekend :-)  Which meant he was not at all relaxed and happy, I'm sure.  Now I'm under pressure to make this upcoming weekend just as good for him, eek!

And for no other reason than the sheer hilarity, I have to share these two pictures I took that day of Charlotte eating ice cream.  I call the second one "Brain Freeze".

The following week Emily had her preschool picnic.

And the following weekend was Abigail's 2nd birthday party!

She's SO ready for it to rain!

 After that was a "Fireside Chat with Brad" in honor of HIS birthday (May is getting almost as full of birthdays as June!).

And you know that farm I posted pictures of the other day?  We went there back in mid-May too for my mom's church picnic.

Charlotte was so jealous, but so scared to go out in the boat

She forgave Emmy for going without her though

 We left the church picnic with these guys:

 They're our newest pets, Christopher and Ryan.  They did a whole lot of nothing for a couple days, until OVERNIGHT first Christopher, then a couple days later Ryan turned into frogs.  I realize that this is what tadpoles are supposed to do, but I was expecting it to be a more gradual change, especially after reading the books we got from the library that talk about it taking weeks and weeks for tadpoles to metamorphose into frogs.  Nope.  One day tail, the next day hopping around, leaving me scrambling to find food so our newly carnivorous pets wouldn't starve to death.

And while our tadpoles were turning into frogs, my friend Carolyn's baby was "evolving into a human", as Emily puts it.  I am sad to say that looking back I realized I haven't taken any pictures of the new baby Alice, but trust me, she's cute with the most adorable round baby head :-)
Let's see, what else.

Our strawberries came in like gangbusters at the end of the month.

Picking strawberries gets ones feet very dirty (so does simply being a 5 year old)

 We also FINALLY got that huge ugly TV out of our living room and had the mantle and new TV put up, so we're enjoying lots more space now.

Plus more neck aches if you sit there to watch the TV

 Then Emily went and graduated from preschool.  Remember the preschool that I was freaking out about selecting, oh, a couple days ago?  Turns out that was actually 2.5 years ago and yeah, we're DONE with it now.  Wow.

Soon-to-be-kindergartener

Emily's adoring groupies

I can just see this picture juxtaposed with her high school graduation picture (SOB!)

After-picnic

Then came the fillings.

We decided to go ahead and fill Emily's teeth.  I freaked out about it for awhile, consulted the internet, spoke to a couple different people who were dentists but not in a position to make money off of us and they all pretty much agreed that we should do it.  I honestly felt like the cavities wouldn't turn out to be a big deal if we didn't fill them, but if they DID and she ended up having to have multiple root canals because of our decision I would've felt horrible.

So we shipped Charlotte off to Gemmy's house, stuffed Emily with food and water right before bed, and set our alarms for 4:45AM.  We got up and drove to the hospital down in Shady Grove while I tried to choke down some food and keep up my "This is an adventure!" attitude.  I was at least happy to be going to Shady Grove where they have a major pediatric focus which I hoped would make things easier.  Knowing she'd have nurses who were used to starting IVs in tiny little veins and anesthesiologists who had lots of experience with little kids made me feel better.

Check-in was long, as expected, but it was the first time I've ever checked into a hospital without being in full-blown labor so I focused on how much more pleasant it was this time to not be breathing through contrations while they asked me my social security number :-)  We moved from waiting room to waiting room until we were finally called back to pre-op...too bad I had just taken Emily to the bathroom when that happened.  And too bad they didn't come back out for us until half an hour later.  Bad timing there.

They took her vital signs and gave her some baby Valium, which she kinda hated.  Soon though, she started giggling and trying to poke the characters on the TV, and when we asked her if she had any questions for her dentist she said "Um....um.....um.....I LOVE UNICORNS!"  I kinda wanted to ask for some baby Valium for myself at that point.

I got to suit up and go back to the OR with her, and stay there until she fell asleep but honestly she was so thrilled about getting to ride in a rolling bed (Am I on a TABLE????  HA!) she probably didn't even notice I was there.  Then I was escorted back out to wait.

The procedure was supposed to take 45min-1 hour, so when 1 hour came and went I started to freak out.  Again.  I couldn't concentrate on my book and I kept straining my ears to see if I could hear any alarms or people running, and every time a doctor came out to meet with a family I whipped around in my seat to see if it was our doctor.  Eventually we had our meeting with the doctor, who told us he had given her 7 (!!) fillings, then we went back to get Emily.

When we came in her eyes were going in 2 different directions like a chameleon, she was flopping all over the place and blood was pouring out of her nose :-(  The nurses told us we could hold her, but she was attached to so many monitors and tubes that it was really tough to figure out how they wanted me to do that.  At first she couldn't even speak, but once she could she kept gasping that she couldn't see, which kinda freaked me out.  The nurses kept encouraging me to get her to go back to sleep, but they don't know my daughter.  This girl has NEVER willingly gone to sleep in her whole 5 years of life, and that time was no different.  "They usually have a much easier time coming out of the anesthesia if they can sleep for half an hour or so", they kept telling me.  Then why did you guys wake her up in the first place?!?!?!

The next hour was awful, as she kept bleeding and crying and flopping and doing a whole lot of things that were NOT sleeping.  Before I felt ready to face the world again it was time to go, and the nurse pushed me out of the hospital in a wheelchair holding Emily in my lap, much as a different nurse had pushed me out of a different hospital almost exactly 5 years before.  There was a whole lot more Emily in my lap this time though, and I can't quite recall but I don't THINK she was sucking on an orange popsicle when we brought her home the first time.

She fell asleep JUST as we got home, but then, miracle of miracles, fell back asleep on her own when I laid her down on the couch.  Possibly the first time she's ever gone to sleep without an extensive bedtime routine being performed to perfection first.

Then her nose bled and she felt horrible for 3.5 days :-(

I worried and called nurses, dentists, doctors, and friends whose kids had had surgeries.  Will and I did a lot of freaking out and second (and third and fourth and fifth) guessing our decision to have this done.  We were pretty upset for quite awhile there.  We think, looking back, that she picked up some virus at the hospital, which kept her nose pouring snot for days, and since she was so snotty her nose couldn't dry out and heal up so it kept bleeding.  And she just LOOKED haggard, even though she was in good spirits the whole time, which made it all extra-heartbreaking.

Poor brave little girl

Again, I KNOW that many mothers watch their kids go through much worse, and I don't know where they get the strength.  I was an emotional wreck on the inside over this whole thing even though my kid was technically fine, just a bit sick after a run-of-the-mill procedure, but it was pretty damned scary while we were going through it and we just wanted her to get better.

We were housebound for a large portion of that week, but when things got dire I had to make a stop by a grocery store.  You get some LOOKS from the other shoppers if you stop to peruse the cheese selection while your child slumps in the cart clutching a blood-soaked tissue to her face, let me tell you. 

She finally rallied and her nose slowed the bleeding enough to take her out in public the weekend, so we went to our friends Eric and Heather's barbeque.

That's better!  And yes, she wears this outfit all the time

OM NOM NOM

We really need a golden retriever 

At the barbecue I decided to show Emily how to properly throw a frisbee and hit her smack in the face, busting her lip open :*(  Because she hadn't poured enough blood from her face yet that week.

By recital time, her nose wasn't bleeding anymore, but she still had a fat lip from the frisbee incident.  I was incredibly happy that she was still able to dance in and enjoy her first recital despite all that had happened the week before.  She's a resilient little thing.

Yes, Charlotte wears this dress all the time too

I had to put this picture in for the sole purpose of showing off the PERFECT ballerina bun I put in her hair.  I was quite proud.

Then I think I just kind of shut down for a week or so.  I didn't take a single picture!  I suspect it was PMS (which for me manifests as a day or two of depression and just being angry at everyone) combined with finally being able to breathe a sigh of relief and stop keeping up the front of "everything's fine" while I was eaten up by guilt and worry over what we had inflicted on our daughter.  All this mixed with a dose of "I think my thyroid medication is too low" to really make laying motionless on the couch while sniffling look like the most attractive option for a couple days.  Thank goodness for kids!  They don't allow you to wallow in self-pity, as much as you may want to.

I'm feeling back to my old self now, and I'm trying hard to get back to my old eating habits again too.  The healthy ones that is.  I'll need to be feeling my best to get through this month, which always seems to gallop right over me in an endless string of birthdays and recitals and swim lessons before I even fully realize it's June.

Daddy-Daughter Day

My breakfast

Yep.  This noise again.

I don't know WHY blogging my food works so well for me, but it does, so I'm going to try this again.

I've basically not been paying much attention to what I eat since Emily's birthday a month and a half ago, and  it shows.  I've been really tired lately (although that might just mean I need to have my thyroid meds adjusted...looking into that) and I am looking quite puffy.  As I've said before I almost never maintain my weight; I am always either gaining or losing so this is me trying to wrestle my constant weight change from the positive to the negative direction.  Again.

My morning was spent building forts and then keeping the occupants supplied with toys and beverages.

That is, until a fearsome sentry was posted at the entrance.

I did not end up getting hungry until almost 11, then it took me awhile to figure out what to have for lunch.  We have TONS of fruit and veggies obviously, but we were sorely lacking in the "stuff to help pull said fruits and veggies together into a cohesive meal or snack" category.  I eventually made myself a sadly low-protein sandwich.

  

I thought I'd be hungry again right away, but I guess there was enough protein in the Ezekiel bread to keep me full for a decent amount of time. 

Will decided he'd like some juice, and we had plenty of ingredients laying around, so I started the prep.

Super-mealy pears, a peeled lemon, carrots, assorted greens, some ginger, half a jalapeño

We ended up with tasty (if a little "earthy") technicolor juice, and lots of pulp.

 I drank the juice,

Then finally tried out Pure2Raw's pulp crackers recipe.  They turned out pretty tasty!  I was careful to take out the pulp for the crackers before I juiced the pears and lemon though because I thought that might make them taste a bit weird.  Maybe I'll try to leave them in next time.  I wanted to try them "normal" the first time, but having done that a bit of sweetness and tang would be an interesting addition.

Crackers + a blob of hummus

I always feel kinda guilty making juice.  It spikes your blood sugar to take in all those sugars without any of the insoluble fiber to balance it out!  It takes massive amounts of veggies and reduces them to a single cup of calorie-dense juice that won't keep you full for any time at all!  You have to drink it right away or else you lose all the nutrients!  It makes a GIGANTIC mess!  But there was no way I was going to eat (much less enjoy) all those bitter beet greens or mushy pears otherwise, and my dad was singing the praises of juicing to make nutrients more "available" the last time we were chatting, plus I WAS, after all, planning on eating at least some of the pulp so I figure there are pluses and minuses.  I don't plan to do a juice fast or anything like that so I gave myself permission to not feel guilty about this particular glass of juice.

This afternoon, Will took Emily on a "date" to see Madagascar 3.  I wanted to see it myself, but we gave Emily a choice of which parent would take her, and she chose Daddy.  Daddy was one happy guy, because I think this might possibly be the first time in her life that she has chosen Daddy for something like this.  He was SO happy in fact, that he bought her a second ice cream cone in as many days!  He said it was a date so they had to get ice cream (perhaps this is why I gained so much weight when we started dating).  For such a clean-eating Daddy who is so careful about what he feeds his kids, this was a big deal and it made me smile.  Emily has gotten better about allowing Daddy to help with things and do activities with her, but she's still usually a total Mama's girl.  Will is incredibly happy to be "chosen" to do more things with her nowadays, and I am more than happy to relinquish "only parent allowed to help or do anything EVER" status since she's kinda forced to do things with me during the week whether she chooses to or not anyway.  A break on the weekends is nice, and it warms the cockles of my heart to see their daddy-daughter relationship getting tighter :-)

While they were gone and Charlotte was napping, my toasty warm heart cockles and I did some dinner prep, kitchen cleaning, reading and snacking.

 

Fat-free plain greek yogurt, raspberries (both red and black), 6 chopped-up almonds, and a drizzle of buckwheat honey

Far-flung farms and Little Disney

I know I've been gone for awhile.  I'll do a post in the near future about my excuses and catching up, but for now we had a very bloggable weekend so I'll just jump right back in here like I was never gone.
Friday.  We started out making a trip 10 miles south to pick up our CSA box.  I just LOVE southern Frederick county in June!  It's all beautiful farms surrounded by mountains.

We pass velvety sod fields backed by Sugarloaf Mountain:

Do you think they'd let me roll in their grass?

fields of wheat and corn:

Our mountains are more blue than purple, but we do have amber waves of grain

nurseries, where they grow "teenager trees" (what Emily calls them because they aren't babies but they aren't full-grown trees yet).

And eventually, Thanksgiving Farm!

Charlotte visited the rescued exotic birds (why do nurseries always seem to have these?) and the tadpoles in the pond while I picked up our box, then we headed all the way to the OTHER side of Frederick county to visit our friends' farm.  

On the way I stopped at the little farm market in Myersville.  It's a tiny little place that sells all kinds of esoteric foods for DIRT cheap that you wouldn't expect to find in a tiny town like chia seeds and nutritional yeast.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, I need to make sure to make a monthly trip out there to stock up on the weirdo foods we love.

Growing up, I went to church with a family who owned a farm outside of Myersville.  We used to stop by just about every weekend, and we even occasionally got animals there to raise up at our house (goats, chickens, ducks, one time even a calf).  They have a baby calf there now who is being bottle-fed, and they are more than happy to have people swing by to visit and help feed the baby, so I took the opportunity to share an experience with my girls that I had enjoyed growing up. 

Me, right after the cow stepped on my foot

The girls, right before the cow stepped on Charlotte's foot :-(

 I'm such a city slicker now, I forgot the #1 rule...never wear flip-flops into a barnyard.

After we fed and scared the not-quite-used to people yet baby cow, we explored the farm for a bit.  As a kid I didn't fully appreciate how GORGEOUS it is out there.

The clearest farm pond I've ever seen

Checking out chickens

Bwoooooook bwok bwok?

The same mountains our living room window overlooked when I was a kid

Howdy, sheep and goat

I LOVE LOVE LOVE living in a neighborhood close to the city, but even if I never want to live out there again it's still nice to have roots out in the country, especially for the kids.

After our farm experience, we retired to Gemmy and Dibby's house for lunch.

The girls enjoyed various tomato-based meals

I enjoyed a frickin' amazing carmelized onion, mushroom and stilton gallette  with a chickpea crust that my gourmet cook father made

 After some hide and seek....

This was an especially tough game

...Mom, Emily and I drove to Smithsburg to hit up some of the orchards out there because I had visited plenty of Frederick County farms already and my day of farm touring wouldn't be complete without adding a couple from Washington County as well.  Among other things, I found local "split" Bing cherries for $1.50/pint.  I pretty much bought them all.

Once we got home I attempted Janetha's cauliflower pizza crust that I saw on Lauren's blog.  It was quite time-consuming, since you had to wait for the cauliflower to cool after you heat it up, but it was yummy and the girls liked it better than the whole wheat crust I usually make.  I just need to make sure I start it early and spread it thinner (or cook it longer) next time.

This morning started with a massage for me!  Will and I finally worked out a time when I could cash in the massage gift certificate that he got me for Christmas.  He took the girls to the first part of the Teddy Bear Picnic event downtown while I enjoyed my massage, then we swapped and he got his massage while I hung out with the girls.  My massage was awesome, of course!  Pratically everyone I know goes to this lady and I've heard nothing but good things.  After having her work on me "until she was done" (which ended up being 1 hour and 25 minutes!) I felt great, although since she incorporates a lot of stretching into her massage (including lots of leg stretches), I'm pretty sure she got quite a view of my lady bits once or twice.  Oh well, I left most of my modesty back at the hospital after I had Emily. 

I met up with the girls while they were eating ice cream cones and dancing with some teddy bears, and my friends Carolyn and Christian with their 2 girls (one of whom is very new!) were there as well.  It was a really neat little event, with lots of fun and free things to do.

Soooo sticky

Deathly pale from the Badger natural sunscreen

We covered up some of the paleness with face paint

Charlotte, who was a champion at getting her face painted at Epcot, would only consent to having a hand painted

The 3 moon bounce buddies

The look that means it's probably time to go home and take a nap

On the way home, Emily commented that the Teddy Bear Picnic was a lot like Disney World.  I chuckled, but then realized it kind of was like a brief summary of the girls' favorite parts of our trip to Disney.  The girls got their faces painted in both places.  They shyly asked and were allowed to meet "the princess", as they called her, who was actually Miss Teen Urbana 2012.


Adult-sized person with a crown = princess

Instead of dancing with 2 chipmunks while a guy played the guitar they danced with 2 bears while a guy played the guitar.  They proably even enjoyed dancing with the bears more because the bears didn't have militaristic handlers making sure the kids stayed a safe 5 ft distance away from the characters.

This poor guy was handler-less and fair game for kid hugs

And I appreciated that there was 100% less barfing and diarrhea at the Teddy Bear Picnic than there was at Disney World. 

So thank you Everedy Square for saving me a plane trip and a boatload of money!  My kids think you're just as fun as Disney World.  And I think you're better.

Because we hadn't had quite enough fun yet, as soon as we got home we changed the girls into bathing suits and walked across the street to our neighbor's graduation party.

Jazmin getting hit in the back of the head with a water balloon

Emily running with the high school seniors

Emily doing her strutting Leo

The little girls hosing down the big girls

Then we crashed at home for the remainder of the evening.  Oof.

I'm too tired for anyting else but crawling into bed and reading A Clash of Kings tonight, but stay tuned for an update including (but not limited to) the triumphant conclusion of Emily's preschool career, the triumphant debut of Emily's dance career, and the not-so-triumphant dental "surgery" that kept us house-bound (and questioning our decision) for almost a week.