Wednesdays are Rarely Wordless

I like alliteration. It’s fun and it makes teaching children easier. Like on Yo Gabba Gabba, the story that involves anthropomorphic animals and alliterated names gets kids to associate letters with animals – Gary Gorilla etc. etc. My point is, I think alliteration is great, but I can’t ever seem to be truly wordless on a Wednesday post. Plus, I haven’t had the energy/time/patience to scour through the past months of photos – Christmas, being a big one.

Instead, I’ll tell you that we babysat Baby B today while her parents attended a funeral. Things went like this:

Her mother swooped in at almost 11 a.m. and dumped her on the couch and ran off. I’m guessing things were falling way behind schedule. I immediately switched on the On Demand Preschool channel and found, thankfully, five Yo Gabba Gabba videos (together, move, car and two others I didn’t pay attention to). Don’t mess with that child’s YGG, she knows ‘Gabba’ by sight and will point it out before you have the chance to switch to BBC Kids or Sprout. She was provided with Kix, ice water and an array of toys. She alternated dancing, chasing our terrified Siamese around the house, and screaming at our youngest cat who was lodged firmly beneath the bed. Lunch was a chopped up turkey dog and more ice water. Nap time was had, merrily, by this growing toddler (did I mention she’s TWO now?!) and she was down for more than an hour. There was more YGG after nap time, baked Tuscan herb chips, more toys, more chasing of the cats, more dancing. I settled her for a book – 1 Zany Zoo, which can be found in the Cheerios box – which she yelled at and enjoyed, I think. Her mom appeared at 4 and now the kid is gone.

I think this is where most people are happy that they have the sanity of their home back. I guess I am, because she got a bit disobedient when her mom showed up – the whole time though she was pretty good and agreed to put things up when we said so. But I’m also saddened, because it was nice to spend time with someone, even if they still kind of speak their own language.

Tonight will be W1D2 (week 1, day 2) of C25K (Couch-to-5K Running Plan), followed by a nice relaxing shower and rounding off the day with the classic film noir The Third Man. I’ll be blogging about C25K elsewhere, but I’ll make sure to add anything important over here – trust me, if it’s noteworthy, I’ll note it. (What is noteworthy right now is that the soreness in my legs lasted up until this afternoon, sheesh!)

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The Long Stretch

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This weekend was wonderful… probably because it was the first one in months where we haven’t been scrambling helplessly for money to cover our expenses.

Fil got the refundon Friday. We also got Baby B from Nk’s place (we had her for Friday, Saturday and almost all of Sunday) and went to Wal*mart for all the “needs”.

We spent the majority of the weekend out of the house. Baby B is holed up inside that tiny trailer all day and rarely gets to go on adventures, so against better judgement, we took on a ton of errands. We knew it was best because if we waited we’d run out of everything and then we’d have to take Monster and there is a reason I call him Monster.

All Friday was spent running from place to place buying way too much stuff. Well, it felt like too much. We got incredible deals and had lots of coupons so, that was okay I guess. We got a lot of cleaning, grooming and cat supplies, not to mention a lot of presents for Monster’s up-coming 11th birthday. We bought Baby B a new upright car seat (it was only $40 and we considered it Nk’s present) and a booster seat for when she’s with us, we also got new pants for Monster (his belly is just too big for his old ones!). Filand I got some cool stuff, too. She got Levi’s and rock shirts, I got sunglasses and perfume and we both treated ourselves to the B!ssle Little Green. We still haven’t even broken it out of the box, but I have a feeling that Fil is doing that right now. The best part of the whole day was paying off every one of our bills, including rent. We still have to pay our cable bill, but that’s only because it came in on Saturday.

Friday night was very, very hard. It was Baby B’s adjustment period and she was too over stimulated to even think about going down for the night. I was up with her ’til midnight rocking her, bouncing her, singing to her and laying her back down in her bed so she could drink her baba and get tired already. Every time I would try to slip away she would promptly get to her feet with a flurry of limbs and grip the side of the pack n’ play (we opted not to get her a bed yet, which was a good choice because that child held onto the railing and was able to keep an eye on us without actually following us) and scream for me until I came back in. But she finally passed out from exhaustion around 12:30 a.m. and I slipped away to relax.

Saturday was much the same, although Monster wasn’t with us as Nk and Mt took him for the weekend as that’s what Big B wanted for her birthday. They went off and did their thing while we went shopping, again. This time we got the rest of Monster’s presents (all but one), some new jeans for yours truly and silly things like socks without holes in them, bras without holes in them and a new belt for Monster.

She was much easier to put down that night, with a baba and her favorite classical music (all of the stuff on my iPod is incredibly soothing) and some dark alone time, she was out like a light at 9. So Fil and I rented an on-demand movie and got caught up on laundry. We also decided to get rid of our computers (laptop and desktop) in favor of a brand new computer. So Fil spent a lot of the night (’til 3 a.m.) fixing the older desktop while I cleaned up the laptop. Somewhere during the Property Shop on HGTV I passed out.

Sunday morning was like Saturdays, I woke up with Baby B at around 9 (she did wake up at 8 but I begged her for 45 more minutes, so she flopped back into her bed and played with her toys and yelled at herself until 8:45 on the nose when she popped back up and started yelling at me.) and I fed her some breakfast (toast with bread and honey) with apple juice. We watched Phineas and Ferb on Disney and played with toys until Fil woke up. We didn’t get to sell the computer stuff, so we just bought the new computer and I’m selling the old stuff today.

The new computer is quite nice and fancy with 4 GB of memory, a 500 GB hard drive and a 19″ LCD (energy star) monitor. Filwanted that specific computer because it was a much slimmer design and came with a HUGE 500 GB external hard drive and a free printer. We’re selling the printer on Cragislist since our newestKodak refurb works really well.

The night was very long, as Nk and Mt didn’t bring Monster home ’til 9 p.m. So we were left to feed Baby B dinner, her night snack and her twothree night babas. During her night snack she spilled juice all over herself, her booster seat, the chair it was on and the floor. Girl thought it was hilarious, meanwhile Fil’s scrubbing the floor with  soap and I’m running the drippy sticky baby to the bathroom for a bath. When Monster did get home he barely had any time to do anything but shower and play his game for 20 minutes.

My god it was a busy weekend. Baby B spent most of her time on my left hip or in the stroller. After this weekend I’ve decided that Bj*orn’s are a great invention and are a worthwhile invention. Baby B got so attached to me she would stand next to me, balancing against my side with one hand, while the other one tugged on my shirt or an errant lock of hair.

It was really hard to hand her off Sunday evening, and the entire night I kept glancing at the pack n’ play, thinking that there was a baby needing my attention. I felt like she was so happy, so comfortable that she just fit in and worked like a little cog in our family clock. She and her sister (Big B is sick) are going to be over at our place today, as Nkis getting the birthcontrol thing in her arm, so I’ll get to see both of them this afternoon (Nk is going to wait until later when I get home to unload the stroller in my back seat).

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Day 18: Finally, about the zoo

Friday afternoon, after the tire explosion, we headed over to Nk’s house to pick up the girls. It was directly after 3 p.m. when Monster got home and settled. We were out of Nk’s house by 5:30 p.m. and at Sou*per Salad! a half hour later. We ate, and dealt with an awful woman who insulted us as lesbians and as parents. That was all kinds of drama.

After we got home we bathed the girls and then got them settled to make Kung Fu Panda rice crispie treats (big hit, I might add, albiet very messy) and eventually got to watch Tinkerbell. Such a cute movie.

Bathing Baby B, notice the sweet potato gunk all over her face. Yeah, she just ate. Hence the huge gut.

So, Saturday we woke up early, at 6 a.m. to feed Baby B. She gave us 2 more hours of sleep and woke up starving at 8:48 a.m. (I know this because I set the alarm for 8:45 a.m. and she woke up exactly 3 minutes later). We fed her rice cereal with diced apples mixed in. She proceeded to die from sheer joy as she gummed the chunks of apples.

After we’d gotten the kids properly bundled we drove for what felt like forever to the Austin Zoo. Monster napped, Big B played her DS and Baby B fussed and cried and entertained herself alternately for 45 minutes.

Wow, I haven’t been to the zoo in ages. It was amazing. It was SO cold with the windchill factor and the trees everywhere. But the kids were so good, real troopers. They were alternately cranky, whiney or impatient quite rarely, which made the whole experience wonderful.

Monster made a wonderful lunch for us, he chopped onions for the sandwhices and everything. Not pictured are the tiny kosher dills, fruit snacks, rice kris*pie treats and gigantic water bottles. Oh, and some baby food for the baby.

Cuttin' some onions for our delicious sandwiches

But the zoo was wonderful, aside from the chilly weather and an occasionally fussy baby. We saw turtles, lemurs, a jaguar, cougars, monkeys of all kinds, a sheep, goats, a llama with funky teeth, lots of reptiles, tons of birds, random chickens and peacocks, pigs, lions, tigers and a bear, oh my! The monkeys broke my heart, some of them were giving me big sweet eyes and eeking softly like they wanted me to take them home with me. There were two who were in the rehab cages and they had no tails and mottled fur. Poor little ones.

Sad monkey all curled up alone.

Incredibly heart breaking.

The kids willingly posed for a picture in the trees while I fed Baby B, who was ravenous, of course.

Cute picture of the kiddos.Baby B lost her binkie once and that was traumatizing. She was starting to get very testy and we were stressing something fierce as everyone frantically retraced our steps, we had both kids on binkie watch, they scrambled over rocks and through brush to find that thing. Eventually we found the damn thing, by the jaguar habitat, and all was okay after a serious scrub down by the bathrooms.How Baby B looked during the whole trip, bundled up tightly in as much warmth as possible. After what felt like an eternity of searching, we wound up at the souvenirs, where much joy was had by all parties in picking out THINGS TO BUY. Nothing brings more joy to the heart of exhausted, freezing children than spending money. No.thing.Monster wearing a dog puppet hat. Cutie.

Big B posing with the infamous giant gorilla.

My handsom Fil wearing her adorable hat that has a shark on top and turns into a puppet.

Baby B was quite fussy for the rest of the night, refusing to go down when we told her to, listening to no reasoning and instead insisting on playing with her new toy. She didn’t nap well at the zoo, not until we got out of the wind into the gift shop where she promptly zonked out for the rest of the trip home. Once things finally settled down and we had dinner and everyone got bathed (except for us, of course) she finally got relaxed enough to go to sleep.

Baby B lovin' on her new giraffe.

Baby B fast asleep with a very empty baba.

In all this mess, the kids had two cheapie presents that they fell in love with. These things that when you put them in the water, they grow 400x their original size. They grew alarmingly over the short time the girls were here, and after they left Monster’s pirate continued to grow. We’re not sure of the state of Big B’s pretty pink unicorn.

Big B with her growing unicorn and Monster's pirate.

Finally, I leave you with a video of utter cuteness that is bound to make your heart explode.

Yeah, I dressed her in a rainbow onesie to wear to the zoo. She totally hammed it up for the video. Heehee.

Narrowly

This post gets me out of being a bad blogger, I narrowly avoided the title, horray! It’s only been under a week but it’s felt like a lot longer. A lot has happened since I posted photos of adorable li’l Baby B.

On the top of the list, Fil’s kidney stones turned into something way more terrible. So far we’ve been in the ER two more times. They’ve done a pelvic to eliminate ovarian cysts, another CT to eliminate appendicitis and a series of swabs and smears to make sure nothing harmful is growing in or around her. The recent visit showed a recurrence of her UTI. Her doctor put her on a different antibiotic and sent her home again.

I hope this is the last visit to the ER. She’s been out of work since her first visit and been in unreasonable amounts of pain. Yeah, I’m going a little batty with her here all the time. As a good wife, I want her to get all the rest and attention to she needs to heal, but I need my sanity back. There’s no room for me to study (school’s started) or clean anything like it’s supposed to be. I really want that normalcy of a routine back. Fil at work, Monster at school and myself at home.

I think things will regulate soon.

The next change.

We’ve adopted a new kitten into the family. A squirrely little princess named Isis (we call her Spicy) who lolls around on us and furniture like we’re her own personal mattresses. She’s about three months old and weighs practically nothing, I’d give her 3-4 lbs at the top. There’s been so much drama since we brought her home. Neither of us had ever introduced new kittens into the mix with an incredibly territorial older cat. Nefi was awful. She hissed, she spat, she growled, she sulked and hid. When Isis went into hiding for 12 hours we decided it’d probably be a good idea to separate the girls until Nefi got over herself. That was a good idea. Things are better now. Nefi still hisses occasionally, but indulges Isis’ playful side and lets Isis chase her around for about 20 minutes. As long as Isis stays off of Nefi’s chair and away from Nefi’s cat milk, things are pretty good.

The kitten purchase was mostly to benefit Nefi. She’s lonely and incredibly needy – I do mean needy, she whines for attention even after hours of undivided attention spent on her. We hope that Spicy will alleviate that needyness and maybe help Nefi get over her spoilt princess attitude. All the better if she gets over the “only kitty” syndrome before we have a baby. Nefi was all to clear she did NOT like Baby B when she was over.

Amidst hair cuts and first days of school, I feel like the crumbling wall of my life is picking itself up. Relationship wise, Fil and I are at the highest point we’ve ever been at. Our fights are small, petty and blow over in 5 minutes. We’re way more connected on things and devote more time to ourselves as a couple and as individuals. I feel like things have finally turned back around.

However, Monster is being a bit of a brat. But that’s his normal at school attitude, I suppose. We’ll see how he does on medication for his ADHD.

Now, it’s absurdly late and I have class tomorrow. Hopefully I get just enough sleep to normalise my schedule and make it through the day without collapsing.

A few of my favorite things

Last Friday we kidnapped our nieces and brought them to our place. Baby B is so enormous and rolling around, mumbling ‘mamamamama’ over and over and cracking up. Buddha is so freakin’ big, she sounds like a grown up most of the time.

And yesterday we decided to be spontaneous and we got…

Yeah, we’re that couple.

I Give You…

A picture of my deliciously new little niece… who’s 1 month birthday is in 9 days!! You can almost smell that new baby smell.