Category: Living the Life

As Time Goes By

Published by dee on April 22, 2008

I need more time.

Those are about the only words I can manage to sputter out of my mouth these days. I need more time for this. I need more time for that. I think time is the one thing you can really never have enough of.

Evie is five weeks old today, which means I am on my very last week of maternity leave. Want to know how fast time can really fly by? Take six weeks off from your job and do the one thing that you spend your days and nights dreaming about and see just how fast it goes. For me, that one thing is being a stay-at-home mom and these last 5 weeks have been so wonderful. I may complain that I spend 90% of my day breastfeeding my daughter, but I swear if I could spend my days at home teaching, loving, and playing with my children I would be a very happy girl.

I still have a list of things I want to accomplish this week while I’m at home. There are so many things I wanted to get done that my normal life just doesn’t leave time for. Unfortunately, taking care of a newborn doesn’t leave much time for them either I’ve found out. One of the very important things I have yet to do is to pay bills and take another good look at the family budget and see where else we can make cuts. I’ve gotten a good start, but we still have a long ways to go to make things work.

Once I have the budgeting done, I have a ton of photos to frame and hang (I’m about a year behind on this), laundry to fold, cleaning and organizing to do, closets and dresser drawers to clean out, and several sewing/craft projects that I really wanted to finish. Unfortunately, all of these things are rather difficult to do while holding a baby so they probably won’t get done. Oh, and I also need to write Evie’s one month update which I’m already several days late on. Second child syndrome already?

Evie is sleeping peacefully (in her crib!) right now, which is why I’m furiously multi-tasking. At the moment I’m eating lunch, blogging, trying to upload the gazillion photos I took this weekend (and am getting angry with my Flickr uploader), and contemplating whether to dig into the five baskets of laundry that need folded or the stack of bills that is threatening to fall over if I don’t sort them soon.

And now, instead of doing all those things I need to be doing, I’m off to battle an infestation of flying ants that refuse to die because they are suddenly swarming right behind the couch I am sitting on. But first, here’s a pictures of my beautiful girl who is actually sleeping in her crib.

I almost forgot to mention, I finally updated my recipe site and will have new recipes popping up all week so be sure to check them out!

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A Little Sunshine Goes A Long Way

Published by dee on March 4, 2008

**For some reason comment notifications are not coming through to my e-mail all of a sudden. Since that is where I normally reply, I just wanted to let you all know I’m not ignoring you! I just didn’t know I was getting comments. Hopefully I’ll get that fixed soon.**

This weekend we finally had a little reprieve from the cold temperatures and dreary days. The sun was shining and it was beautiful out. My only complaint was the wind that just would not seem to die down. Knowing it was supposed to be warm, I told Hubby Friday night that I wanted to get outside Saturday and at least take Zach to the park to enjoy the sunshine a bit. I was also dying to get my new camera out and play with it a bit since I hadn’t had the chance to do any outdoor shots yet.

I thought it would be fun to have a picnic at the park, then give Zach some time to play and head home just in time for a nap. Since we didn’t really have any easy picnic-type food at home, we decided to stop at Sonic and just pick something up on the way. While we were waiting for our food, I was noticing just how windy it really was. We went ahead with our picnic idea though, and headed to the park. That proved to be an unfortunate decision as a big gust of wind ended up blowing Zach’s corn dog and fries all over the ground. It was quite a tragic experience, but as soon as we got him calmed down he insisted that we pick his food up off the ground so he could eat it anyway. Daddy’s replacement fries simply would not do. He wanted his! At least they had landed mostly on the concrete slab under the picnic table instead of in the mud and grass a few short feet away.

Once we were done eating, it was time for the fun stuff. Zach ran to the playground as I pulled my camera out to get a few shots. The wind was a little chilly, but the warm sun shining down helped a lot. Zach had a blast climbing and sliding while Hubby and I discussed the fact that this may be the last chance we have to do something like this with just one child.

Soon, other people started showing up to enjoy the sunshine. There was the quiet couple with the 2-year-old boy who seemed to prefer walking around in the grass to the slide. Then there was the couple with three kids and another on the way. The wife and I started chatting immediately as tends to happen when you get two pregnant women together. It turns out that she is due just a few days before me and we ended up talking for quite a while. It wasn’t long before the husbands started talking as well. Hubby and I were really enjoying their company and were very disappointed to find out that they were visiting from Minnesota. It is so rare that we meet other couples that we click so easily with. We were really hoping they lived nearby. We chatted a bit longer, switched cameras to shoot some family photos for each other, then said our good-byes and headed our separate ways.

When we got home from our little outing, Zach and I were both rather exhausted. He curled up on the couch for a nap while I flipped through the pictures I had taken at the park. I managed to get some great shots, but apparently had the camera settings all wrong because all of the pictures are rather fuzzy when you look at them larger. As long as I keep them small they look ok, but I’m afraid they won’t print well at all. I was pretty disappointed by that, but I guess there’s nothing I can do about it now but learn to do it better next time.

After looking through the photos, I realized that this may very well be the last photo of our little family as it exists now. Soon we will be a foursome, and while that is a wonderful, exciting thing, it also makes me just a little sad to say good-bye to this phase of our family’s life.

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All the Whine Without the Tantrum

Published by dee on February 27, 2008

Things that are making me want to whine like a two-year-old today:

I’m super bored with my blog theme and desperately want to change it but don’t have the energy or the time to mess with it right now. I’m really digging Kerflop’s new theme and am thinking of simplifying things a bit around here…when I can think straight again.
I’m very nearly 36 weeks pregnant and hurt every time I move more than a 1/4 of an inch. I’m guessing this isn’t going to get any better until I manage to birth this baby.
I’ve now gained 39 pounds since the start of this pregnancy. That’s one pound away from doubling my pregnancy weight-gain goal and I CAN NOT STOP eating.
I’ve been awake since about 4:30 a.m. After laying there awake for an hour and a half I finally got out of bed at 6:00 a.m., an entire hour earlier than normal. I am tired and wish I was in my bed taking a nap.
Even after getting Zach up extra early this morning it took me over an hour to get him dressed and out of the house. Tantrums, threats, spankings, and many tears (his and mine) happened in that hour and I still want to cry over it now. I never even managed to get his ear drops in his infected ear. Tonight he is going to bed in his clothes and I’ll be accepting my mother-of-the-year award.
My in-laws headed home this morning and while I will enjoy having my house to myself again, I will desperately miss all of the help that I was getting while they were here.
Did I mention how tired I am?
It is only Wednesday and I already feel like this week has lasted an eternity. I am so ready for it to end.
I really want a nice warm sunny day so I can go outside and play with my camera. Of course that would also require me to be able to walk more than two steps without wincing in pain.

Somehow I thought that would make me feel better, but nope, it didn’t. I think I need to go curl up somewhere and just sleep until tomorrow morning.

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Consider the Other Ball Dropped

Published by dee on February 22, 2008

So the title of my Wednesday night post became eerily appropriate just a few hours later. I awoke Thursday morning to my phone ringing. On the other end was my dad’s wife saying that they were at the hospital and that my dad had a mild heart attack that morning. By that time he was stable and doing fine, but there were lots of tests yet to be run on him.

As the day went on and more reports came in, it was determined that he did not actually have a heart attack, but that he did have some inflammation and infection around his heart that was causing part of it not to work properly. I’m not really sure what all of that means, but it most definitely sounds better than a heart attack at his age.

My first reaction when I got the news was to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. Then I looked outside and realized that wasn’t going to be possible. The roads were covered in ice and according to the news and radio reports no one was getting anywhere very quickly in the city. On top of that, Zachary was still sick so I decided to stay home and wait by my phone instead of jumping in the car.

As it turns out, I made the right choice because by evening I wasn’t feeling so well myself. Apparently Zach’s illness was finally passed on to me after a week of him coughing and sneezing in my face.

On top of feeling quite crappy myself, Zach got extremely clingy and whiny last night. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him other than knowing that he didn’t get a nap so I was quite frustrated with all the whining. Nothing seemed to make him happy. He wanted a drink, then he didn’t want a drink. He wanted his blanket, then he didn’t want his blanket. He wanted to be held, then he didn’t want to be held. Rinse, repeat, all night long. By about 3:00 a.m. he was whining and moaning so much that I finally just got up with him.

I finally ended up propping myself up on a pile of pillows and sitting up in the bed for the rest of the night with him lying on my shoulder. Shortly after that I figured out what the problem was. He had finally calmed down enough to talk to me and told me that there was water in his ear. Suddenly it all made sense. The boy now has an ear infection. I think he finally relaxed and fell back asleep around 5:00 and I followed shortly after. When my alarm went off at 6:20 I wanted to kill it. I let myself hit the snooze button for about another hour before getting out of bed. When I finally made it up and to the bathroom the first thing I noticed was a bunch of icky ear drainage on the shoulder of my shirt where Zach had been sleeping.

I was dialing the doctor’s office as soon as they opened at 8:30 and was able to get Zach an appointment to see the nurse practitioner. The consensus was that he most likely has the flu, although it is too late in the cycle now to medicate it so they didn’t bother with the flu test. I guess I should have pushed a bit harder for them to test him on Monday when they told me it was most likely just a virus that would pass in a few days. All of the congestion apparently pushed the crud into his ears and caused the nasty ear infection. Fortunately, it is only one ear (for now) and the other one was still completely clear. At least I know that the tubes are working because there is all kinds of stuff draining from the infected ear.

After the doctor’s office, I took Zach home, gave him some Motrin for the pain and the first dose of his antibiotic ear drops, and had to leave him with Granny and Papa so I could get to work. I’ve hardly worked at all this week and I’m feeling terrible about that. At least I was fairly caught up at the end of last week so I’m not really behind at all. I just didn’t get ahead of things like I had planned on doing this week.

At this point, I am just so done with this week. I want it to end so I can move on to better times. We have no big plans for the weekend other than to enjoy visiting with the in-laws. Personally, I plan to sleep in as long as possible for the next two days and try to make up for all of the sleep that I’ve missed out on all week.

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34 Weeks

Published by dee on February 15, 2008

I’m going to attempt to take a break from the computer this weekend basically because I’m going to have pretty much no free time at all. I have two baby showers this weekend, one thrown by a friend, and another by my Sunday School class at church. I’m looking forward to both of them. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited about getting wee little baby things in the form of presents! Who doesn’t like presents?

In between the two baby showers, I’ll be cleaning my house like a mad woman because my in-laws are coming up next week. Let’s just say house cleaning hasn’t exactly been on my priority list for the last couple of months so there’s a LOT of work to do. Fortunately, hubby is more than willing to help out and do the heavy work that I can’t do right now. I just have to figure out how to keep Zach from trashing it as we clean!

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Love Notes

Published by dee on February 14, 2008

(scrapbook layout from Girl Talk’s Love Struck Valentine’s Album)

Dear Hubby,

On this Valentine’s Day, I just want to thank you for putting up with me. I know I’m not always the best wife or the easiest person to get along with (especially when I’m pregnant). You have shown a lot of patience lately and for that I’m very grateful. I know I gripe and complain a lot, but regardless of what you think, I do actually appreciate you. I know you don’t think I show it enough but I really do love you and need you. I couldn’t make it through this world without you by my side.

Love,
Me

p.s. If you could have dinner ready when I get home, that would be great!

Dear Zachary,

You are without a doubt the light of my life. Before you came along, I had no idea that I could love anyone as much as I love you. There are days when you frustrate me to no end with your tantrums and stubbornness, but in the end all it takes is a hug to make me melt into a puddle and forgive you. You are growing up so very fast that I can barely keep up. You are quite the companion these days and I’m really going to miss all of the time we spend together after your baby sister arrives. I guess that will make it even more special when we have a few quiet moments together, just the two of us. I just hope you will always remember that you are my special boy and no one can take your place.

Love,
Mommy

p.s. Please go to bed on time tonight. Your daddy deserves a little snuggling too and I would really like to watch Lost uninterrupted. Thank you in advance.

Dear BabyG,

We have just about six weeks left on this little journey together. Soon you will join your daddy, big brother, and I in the outside world. Each day that goes by I feel a stronger and stronger bond with you. As you move around and push on my belly I feel a connection with you that I just cannot explain. When I place my hand on my belly, you often push back as if you are trying to reach out to me too. Each time it happens feelings of love just wash over me. You are the little girl that I have dreamed of my entire life and I can’t believe that my dream is finally becoming a reality. You are already so very loved by so many people. We absolutely cannot wait to meet you.

Love,
Mommy

p.s. Feel free to start knocking on that door a couple weeks early if you are ready. I would love to have you here by Easter if at all possible.

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