Crazy Gym Lady

In my qeust to NOT gain fifty pounds this pregnancy, I've been going to the gym a little more regularly. As in, about once a week (but I'm trying to get better at going). The biggest difficulty with going to the gym is that I have to reserve a spot in the childcare room for Luke, and then hope he wakes up in time for us to get there. And then, we have to deal with the crazy child-care lady.

Last Friday, we reserved from 8-9, but didn't make it in until 8:20. Since I only go for 25 minutes on the elliptical machine, this wasn't a problem. Except everything is a problem for the CGL (Crazy Gym Lady). Immediately as we walked in she said she guessed she would take him, but she left a note for the night people not to have anymore kids on the schedule.

I saw her note. It said "No more children under 1 before 11". Luke is, uh, almost 2, dude. Also, at the early hour that we get there, there is literally no other child in the room. None.

Next, she asked about the video he would want to watch. I said he loved singing and found a video that would have children singing. She insisted on Baby Einstein, which he's no longer very into, and wouldn't be swayed. And, as she has each time I've brought Luke, she asked if I had these videos (Baby Einstein). Uh, yeah, I don't live in a cave.

At least she didn't make me guess her age again. Let's see what kind of stories we get today! Maybe she'll snap at me if I'm 3 minutes early.

Settling In

I've been home for six weeks or so now, and I finally feel like I'm settling in. My days are busy enough that I can't get everything done, and though I've been trying to plan for lunch out with my ex-coworkers, I haven't been able to find a day. Luke and I will go and go for days at a time until all he wants is to stay home and play with his cars by himself, thanks anyway, mom.

I've also picked up a new job, a little 5-10 hour a week thing that involves calling businesses for other businesses that have business to try and do with them. It's telemarketing, but not to your home. I can do it during naps and it pays well enough that if I work 5 hours a week it should cover all Luke and my activities and lunches for the week. Not that we spend a lot of money doing stuff...

Luke continues to turn into a person, and it's looking like we're going to have to have some sort of 'kids' birthday party for him, though I was against it before. Because really, he'll be two! What does he care? Except he does. Luke actually has friends, and he talks about other children - Mah-ye (Molly), Joey, Nic, Isis, I-see (Ellyse), Dy-yan (Dylan), Mat-hew, and PJ. We've been at parties or play dates and Luke will lose the object of his affection for the day and come to me asking "I-c? I-c?" and until I figure out WHO he's talking about and locate that child, it's all he'll say. I have a social butterfly.

The baby, she continues to use my internal organs for kick boxing practice. It scares me how active she is.

Four Ovaries, No Waiting

I don't know if I mentioned it here, but we were able to find out at the ultrasound that C2 is of the female variety. So if I seem EXTRA bitchy, blame it on the double doses of hormones. Even if she only weighs about 12 ounces right now, I'm sure she's got the same amount of hormones as me, right? Crazy.

The thing about women is that we're born with all the eggs we're ever going to have. Men make their little spermies right before use, but stereotypically, women are far more prepared than that. So now I'm walking around with another person in me, AND half of any people she may eventually product. And half of any people I may further produce after her. It's all very weird. For me, most people don't seem to think this kind of thing.

Esposo and I have begun debating on names for little C2. It's not going well. We have no books and only a perchant for the utterly ridiculous in choosing names. All our conversations quickly devolve into 'who can come up with a stupider sounding name' contests. But then, that's what keeps our marriage alive.

You Don't Know Me At All

I have a friend dating back to college days who is... er... socially inept. Okay, I probably have more than one of those, to be honest. But this friend has actually gotten worse with time. Recently, he called a mutual friend and inquired as to how she liked living in Tecumseh*. Except, well, she doesn't live in Tecumseh and never has. He just hadn't paid attention. Excessively.

He then got into a conversation with her in regards to his son, who is three months younger than Luke, and commented as to how he's at the same level as Luke. Which, uh, what? On so many levels this is weird, because 1) don't compare kids like that. It's not nice and it sucks and there's enough competition in this world that we don't need to be competing with 20 and 17 month old children. Let them be. And then 2) he knows nothing about Luke's 'level', and I know nothing about his kid's level, because he's socially inept and doesn't communicate at all (and then somehow expects us to know what the hell he's talking about when he references things we've never heard of).

He left me a message, too. I don't know about calling back, because I definitely don't want to get in a competition conversation with him, or listen to him crow about his kid's achievements without saying anything about Luke because that's a crappy conversation to be stuck in. Argh.

In Luke news, we had a day of Refusal To Nap. There was much screaming and crying and jumping up and down, and then Luke got upset, too. (hee) So around 2:45 I gave up completely and let Luke play, and he was content. He was playing by himself and was not in a terrible face eating whining mood. At 5, I sat him down for dinner and he snarfed roast beef, rejected pears, and requested bread. After he had his first slice of bread he asked for another, which I got for him. I sat at the table next to him and went to reading my magazine. A minute later I looked up and there he was, passing out with a crust of bread dangling from his lips. I never understood how there were always videos of children sleeping in their food on the funny video shows, and here it was, happening in my kitchen. Sadly, I only got one picture, and the bread had fallen before I took that.

Now it's 7, and I guess I wake him up for a couple hours... I'm not sure what to do here and I dread it all...

Surprises

Last night's dreams were rather eclectic - Ellen DeGeneres decided to become a dentist and film it all, and all the mechanics on my previous jobs decided they would try to blow up and/or torture all the engineers. Er... okay.

(Segue) I don't know if you're watching the Nanny911 and Supernanny shows, but I appreciate them for the mirror they hold up to parents. Besides muttering and mocking that people are THAT stupid, the show very clearly shows you that kids get their bad habits from parents. So if you have rotten kids, take a look at yourself! In a pat-myself-on-the-back kind of way, Luke has really surprised me over the past few weeks with his consistent and appropriate use of 'Thank you'. So apparently we're more polite 'round dese here parts than previously noticed... we apparently also scream and run at random, since Luke does a heck of a lot of that, too.

(Segue) I am trying to watch a few new shows this season, and it's been challenging, since most of my shows are hour long drama-esque type things. It's easier to cram in 18 minutes of episodic comedy, but there's not much of that out there. By far, though, my favorite new addition to television is 'Studio 60'.

Windows!

The windows that I *thought* would take 4-6 weeks to make, ship, and schedule for installation are coming in a week and being installed in a week and two days. I am ---very--- much looking forward to not having my house be a seive for heat.

In other news, I had been diligently entering rewards points from Coke products and I chose my prize. That will take 8-10 weeks to arrive. It's a football.

Windows, made to size.

Football, taken off shelf.

2 weeks... 8 weeks...

Just an observation.

Passing Time

We hit the 20 week point in our pregnancy (listen to me, with the 'we' crap) and had The Big Ultrasound. Esposo had predicted it would be a girl, and all signs point to that being true. We have to go in for a Level II ultrasound - The Bigger Ultrasound - to check some things out, so that should be able to 100% confirm rather than 98% confirm about us having a girl. I'm tempering my enthusiasm because every. single. person. has a story about how oh, they THOUGHT it was a girl...

We watched the video of Luke's ultrasound before we went to the doctor's office, and it was amazing to see how he had become a person from a gray-white image on the screen. To be sappy for a second, I don't see how someone can have kids and not see life as a miracle in itself. Sundry just wrote about her feelings on abortion after having a child, and I don't think I could express my thoughts as well as she does, other than to say 'Yeah!'.

We brought in the tape to get both Luke and C2's ultrasounds together, but unfortunately, they don't offer the taping of the ultrasound anymore. She's already getting second-child treatment! Therapy here she comes!

As I sit here this morning, it's almost as if I can hear the seconds of our lives ticking by... oh wait, I can, because the clock I bought for the office to replace the insane battery eating clock ticks INCREDIBLY LOUDLY. It's like living in the Tell Tale Heart, only I didn't kill anyone.

Handing Out Cheap Thrills

As a woman, I have boobs. I was "blessed" with a solid C cup, which grows to a D cup when I gain weight, and then when I get pregnant, they may be double-Ds. They're frightening at this point. I liked my C cups, they were a nice perfect size, I thought. These things that I am currently hauling around? Are not. They are big and they don't fit in shirts and they get in the way. The plastic surgery I'm going to get in the future is going to involve removing some boob and making them perky, because I've never had perky ones.

Maternity clothes are funny, especially when it comes to boobs. There are, apparently, a lot of women out there who are excited by their new curves and bigger boobs when they get pregnant. There are many many many drop neck, V neck, boobilicious maternity shirts, which I mostly shun. And yet, I have two simple black shirts that show cleavage.

Today, I wore a beige sweater. Luke was in his monkey costume for a playgroup and we found out that the monkey costume leaches dye like the dye-leaching whore it is, and my beige sweater was COVERED in brown. So I had to change shirts. I threw on a black boobie shirt.

And then the window guy came over to measure the windows for replacement, which will happen in 2-3 weeks and it makes me giddy to think about not freezing my butt off in the house even though the thermostat is at 70. Which is approximately how old 'Shaw' the window guy was, too.

It's been awhile since Shaw's seen pregnancy-enhanced-boobies, I'd say, since he was pretty involved in conversation with them. Which made me pull at my shirt while he measured windows to try and hide the cleavage. It did not work. I guess old window guys need cheap thrills, too.

*yawn*

It's 8:11 on a Saturday, and as soon as I finish typing this, I'm heading to bed. Yeah, I pregnant, and we also did a damn lot today. There was waking up - at 6:40, of course, because even though the kid didn't go to sleep until 9, he's set on a permanent before-7 wake-up call. To say that I'm "worried" about falling back is an understatement.

Then there was cleaning (me) and going to the store (Esposo) to prepare for today's big project - we tiled one wall of our shower! Only two to go! We followed that up with lawn mowning (Esposo) to pick up the leaves - which took a solid 2.5 hours - and fall clean up of the plant beds (me). I finally woke Luke up at 3:40 and we wandered up the road to the nearby pumpkin farm at 4 or so, where Luke refused to ride the ponies and tried to climb off the truck ride mid-motion.

We rounded out the day with a surprise visit from Nana, and now we're ready for bed. Well, Luke and I are, Esposo went off to a poker game. Crazy crazy man.

Avoidance

There were a lot of things I was looking forward to being able to do when I stayed home. Like taking Luke to playdates, and working on the house, and even some cleaning. By the end of my third week home, I think I'm getting to where I thought I'd be eventually - I do a little cleaning, I do a little home projects, I take Luke some places, it's starting to balance. And my cleaning is getting better - I washed baseboards this morning, and scrubbed bathrooms yesterday. Soon I might not even be embarrassed if people stop by unannounced!

But I'm still avoiding things that I avoided when I worked. Like sorting clothes. I have to sort through all of Luke's clothes for winter (we got SNOW today. Like, SNOW, that accumulated on the ground and covered the grass!) because he shouldn't be wearing shorts anymore, and then I have to bring up my maternity clothes and swap out my unwearable non-maternity clothes, which, honestly, didn't all fit when I wasn't pregnant anyway. (That's one looong sentence... I should write better, or edit, or something. But guess what? I'm going to avoid that, too.)

I should clean up the basement, but really no one ever wants to do that, either. Even though Esposo has sort of been working on the attic and we shuold be able to move more things up there FROM the basement so that we can start working at finishing the basement. Basement basement basement.

And scrubbing the grout off the master bath floor? UUUUGH.

I did, however, spend thousands of dollars yesterday by ordering windows for the entire house. The house is drafty and cold and our windows suck big fat donkey balls, so we knew we'd have to bite this particular bullet soon. It was one of the reasons we were able to get this house, and mentally we budgetted the $30,000 under what we could have afforded towards furnaces and windows and other improvements. But then my cheapness takes over. Of course, I know that windows will save us a LOT of money on heating and cooling because our current windows are CRAP.

What was my point?

Defy Stereotypes

I’ve always said and thought that children should be people, not genders, and to that end, Luke has had dolls and stuffed animals in his room along with trucks. It didn’t make a difference, though, because he was stereotypical ‘All-boy’ from about a year on. Trains, cars, and trucks are his favorite things. He wakes up in the morning asking for the ‘Choo Choo Show’. I’ve frequently lamented that I got such a stereotype of a child.

Until the past few days.

Luke has a stuffed plush duck that’s about 15 inches high. It usually just sits in his crib, but he’s taken to carrying it around a bit, and calls it ‘baby’. Oddly, the monkey stuffed animal is still a monkey, but the duck is a baby. I’ve been encouraging this baby phase, because it’s nice to see him nurture something, and, you know, we’re going to have to deal with a live, screaming, pooping, eating baby in four months.

This morning we were playing in his room, wrapping the ‘baby’ in a blanket, and I asked Luke if we should put the ‘baby’ down for a nap. He said ‘yeah’, grabbed the ‘baby’ by the arm and dragged it out of the room. Thinking he was heading to his bed next door, I followed, only to see him standing in our room, chucking the ‘baby’ into the dog crate and slamming the door.

We may have a bit more nurturing to work on.

Driven Crazy

Esposo and I are fairly anal about the house. We notice little things and they drive us nuts until we finally get around to making them at least slightly better. We're not actually skilled enough to be as anal as we are about the house, so we will always be driven somewhat insane by minor imperfections.

One minor imperfection that annoyed us both was the crappy doorknobs throughout the house. Imperfect painters glopping paint on the edges, silver on one side and gold on the other, and just generally beat to all hell, we both noticed that the doorknobs sucked. Never mind the 1967 push button stove top, replace the doorknobs for God's sake!! We're not thinking that anyone coming to our house would notice these things... and so what if there are two enormous holes in the garage wall/ceiling - THE DOORKNOBS, MAN, THE DOORKNOBS!

So, anywho, today, I replaced all the doorknobs in the house with matching doorknobs. They are shiny and new (and gold, if you care). And now the only rooms that lock are the three bathrooms and our bedroom, which I think of as pre-emptively setting up my kids for search and seizure (though all home doorknobs are incredibly easy to open from the other side). This also means that Luke will only have four rooms to lock himself in rather than seven, and I'll be at less risk of hearing "OPEN! OOOOPPPPEEEENNNN!" from the other side of a door. Only, because my hearing sucks, I don't hear it for awhile, until I wonder what Luke is up to, and by that point he's been locked in a room for five or ten minutes and is hysterical.

I call this better parenting through home improvement.

Dramatic

A group of ten women went away this past weekend to drink (except me) and not have to attend to runny noses, smelly butts, and early morning screams. Within an hour of all of us arriving at Esposo's family lake house, the talk had turned to s&x, s&x, and more s&x. In the realm of topics that came up was our 'Numbers'... as in, number of partners. Our answers ranged from 2 to 30ish, with my personal Number being somewhere between those.

After arriving home, I tried to mentally list my partners, and could only come up with 'Number - 1' names. Knowing I had written it all down in my college journal, I dug that up and flipped through some pages to find the missing name. And of course, encountered my sophomore year in full and glorious detail.

My sophomore year of college was -the- college year for me. I didn't have a boyfriend, could go out to the bars in my college town (one of the few places with a 19 entrance age for bars...), and I really lived it up. With dramatic results, of course. The pages from my sophomore year are filled with poetry and unrequited love, not to mention detailed event descriptions from parties and nights out.

After graduating college, which took five and a half years, I was really done with it. The people, the classes, the bars, it was all old hat for me and I wasn't interested anymore. Some people have said they would go back to college in a heartbeat, but I wasn't one of them. After reading through my sophomore year, though, I would go back. But only to that year, that specific period of time. Before I'd had a serious boyfriend and was really just figuring out who I was. THAT was a good year for me.

Which got me to think about what other periods of my life I would relive for a week if I could... certainly I would choose a time before my father was sick, perhaps the first few months of dating Esposo... and I'm betting that right now will be a time I'd choose in a few years. So, I'm off to live today with my screaming, teething, cranky son!!

Home Improvement

We bought our house with every intention to fix it up ourselves where we could. We've painted and put up crown molding, changed out closet doors and light fixtures, pulled out bushes and laid down sod, and our most ambitious project is our master bath, which is taking approximately 4,000 hours of work, spread out over 17 years. We're going to let Luke shower in there as a high school graduation present.

The biggest jobs, though, we're hoping to farm out a bit. Like the kitchen. And the basement. In anticipation of redoing the basement, Esposo is working in the attic above the garage. First, he's putting in some electrical wiring so that we can plug in more than one thing. Then, we were planning on putting in drop down stairs for easy attic access. In anticipation of this, Esposo stepped through the ceiling last night to provide a new location for the stairs. Er, uh, that wasn't *quite* on the agenda yet.

I have slightly more dexterity than Esposo when it comes to home improvement, but I think his major issue is that he uses force more than finesse. Esposo isn't a large lumbering ox, but sometimes you might think that, especially when he walks. i think that all that truly skilled craftsmen have is the ability to not make really bonehead mistakes like leaving drainpipes open and stepping through drywall ceilings. We're not really skilled craftsmen.

Bravery

This past weekend I took a trip out to Cleveland to see a friend, her husband, her house, and her dogs. It was Luke and I braving a normally 6 hour car trip. Just Luke and I. Me. And a 19 month old toddler who really likes to MOVE. Trapped in a car.

My first stoopid move was to take 90 through the city. Because I left at noon! 90 wouldn't be bad! Horse hockey. It sucked. For no apparent reason, then it got good through the city central, and then sucked down south again. I had to hit the brakes a lot, and poor Luke was sleeping in the car seat through this. With each brake his head would fall forward and he would lift it back into place. Over and over again.

We stopped three times on a trip that should require one, and each time Luke had to run around for awhile, ecstatic to be free from his seat. In Cleveland, we were able to have our own room and Luke disciplined their dogs (No doggie! No Doggie!) and completely wore out my friends. They napped on both Saturday and Sunday after our visit, and sweat through a visit to the Children's Museum.

The return trip on Sunday was more difficult, by the time we hit a last lunch stop around 3 central time, Luke was just sick of the car. He wanted to run, and I begged him to sit and eat his spaghetti and meatballs until a woman from Hardees took pity on me and brought us fries to get Luke to stay seated.

About half an hour from home Luke began saying "All done car. All done car." and I completely agreed!!! But we lived, and Esposo got a full weekend off.