standing tall

this weekend it is finally spring and we are out tending to the yard that will no doubt eat this former city girl alive. sticks aside, we are in trouble. i now see the importance of a thorough fall clean-up and fully intend on hiring the next door neighbor's son and his brother to come over with their big vacuum truck and take care of all of the helicopter things, evil chestnut pods, leaves and anything else they might find this fall. pine needles, can't forget those miserable things.

the funniest part of today was andrew standing. he's never really stood alone before for more than a few seconds. enter grass. apparently he was not at all interested in letting anything other than the soles of his shoes touch this strange stuff because we would put him down and he would stand. for minutes at a time with his little hands in the air and a very funny look on his face. scrunched up little nose face. he honestly didn't know what to do so he just stood there smiling. when he got tired he'd crouch down just enough to remember that he'd have to touch that crazy green stuff and up he'd go. it was really very cute.

and i'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that big sister bridget was off with her nana and boppa for the day not knocking him down. poor little guy.

minor head injury wednesday

today didn't start off so well. since andrew has taken to waking up at 5:00 or so - which i might add is a HUGE improvement from 4 AM, his old standard - i will go and get him and sit him in our bed to play around while i take 5 minutes to get myself used to the idea of being awake. maybe 10. this process usually entails andrew kicking the crap out of me while i try to keep him on the bed. well, this morning i failed. i swear he was in the middle of the bed and i had my arm loosely draped around his middle but somehow he cleared half of the bed and about a foot next to the bed and leapt off. i still don't know how it happened it was all so fast. so he cried. i apologized. he forgave me and off we went downstairs to safer ground.

then at about 8 AM after i finished changing his diaper - on the floor because the changing table is just too miserable a place to contain him - he starts to crawl away. nothing out of the ordinary here except that he forgets to use his arms and face plants on the floor - the floor with no rug. i could tell he smashed his nose because he almost bounced up a little. so i pick him up and he is SCREAMING. then i look at his little nose and there is blood coming out of it. and there is a purplish line across the bridge of it. oh crap, i think, its broken. so i call the doctor's office - which isn't open until 8:30. then i call my mother to walk over to the pediatrics dept where she works and ask someone. then i call michael who tells me that he'd still be crying if it were broken. oh yeah, i forgot that i immediately gave him a bottle and he spit up a little. eek! then i go online. nothing much on babycenter for babies and broken noses - just call your doctor. gee thanks.

my mother calls back and tells me that even if it is broken, they can't do anything. so i decide to try and make sure that its straight and i pinch it a little. he doesn't even flinch so i'm pretty sure its not broken. but the line is still there.

time for a nap buddy before we really do some damage.

marathon monday

we went downstairs today to find a 2 inch hole in our basement ceiling - on the finished side. its a dingy old dropped ceiling that we were going to get around to replacing eventually. e-v-e-n-t-u-a-l-l-y. but now there's a hole. dear liza a hole.

so the hole is annoying; but the real trouble is what caused the hole. some sort of animal, definitely. what kind of animal? don't know. did the animal actually fall in or have an indiana jones "that was a close one!" moment in which it was able to scramble to safety via its handy whip? michael spent his rainy patriots day off hunting - and cleaning (tee hee) - the entire basement trying to answer that very question. nothing doing though. no mouse. no chipmunk. no red squirrel (please god no). LOTS of very disgusting random things that have been here since around when the house was built. LOTS of dust animals - bunnies seem too innocent a term to cover the magnitude of these. it was so gross that i asked him to go and buy a shop-vac so as not to violate our lovable dyson. i think she will never love us like she used to. i don't blame her either.

on top of this, we are missing our first marathon in many many years. i am slightly depressed. we are out of the city for under a year and can't even manage to get in to the marathon. i love the marathon. i think i may have blathered on about it last year so i will spare you (good bloggers go back and find the old post and link to it here) i'm not sure if we would have gone to it this year even if we lived in boston because the weather was so horrible. but someone has to go cheer those crazy bastards on.

and the hole is still there. and we still don't know if we have a new family member living down there. now all we can do is plug it up, call an exterminator and hope that we don't wake to find 3 new holes.

but like agpie's mom said - country mice are nice. not like city mice.

let's hope so.

badooga

the only person we know who is happy about the weather these days

buster

my stair climbing, wipe stealing menace

well fed and alive

i need someone to watch 2 wonderful children one day a week. it doesn't seem like such a tall order, does it? no. well, it is. most places have a two day a week minimum apparently. nannies don't want to work just one day a week - although truthfully, i haven't looked into this option all that much yet, but if i were a nanny, i wouldn't want such a gig.

when i finally found a place that had an opening on tuesdays, i really really wanted to love it. really really really. i even brought their immunization books to get the ball rolling as soon as possible. so in we went, the 4 of us. at first everything seemed normal enough. no screaming kids. no screaming adults. so far its better than home! we start on the tour - which is being led by a nice young - they were all young - girl who told me that the head honcho had to go because something came up. ok, whatever.

in the first room (b's room) there is a nice little circle of kids who are sitting around learning some thing important like what month this is and the teacher/whatever gets pissed at a kid. so she starts talking to him in this tone which could best be described as me at 5PM at my wits end arguing with a 2 year old for 5 minutes about how i will be the one to wipe her bottom after she goes to the potty. suffice to say, it was a really nasty tone and we'll leave it at that. but hello, we're pretty obviously on a tour here and this dimwit can't tell joshua to sit his ass down calmly through a clenched teeth smile?

a's room is next. infants through 2.5. is that normal? personally i don't want my little bruiser drewser ass-kicking cruiser in there with a sweet defenseless infant. they had a cage of sorts, to keep him in or out i don't know but if he had a partner in crime, that gate would be history. aside from this logistical nightmare, everything in the room was tired. i could spend $20 on a saturday morning at yard sales and get some better sh!te than the crapola they had in there. i think i'll be donating our old stuff to this place whether my kids go there or not.

i'll spare you the tales of snotty noses, needy children of employees getting the lions share of the attention, meeting some genuinely nice "teachers" and finally the owner and skip right to the straw that broke this camel's back (not that it would take much but, like i said, i REALLY wanted to love this place.) we are just about through when bridget tells me she has to go to the bathroom. do we want the big one or little one? so i say, we'll take the little one that she'd be using and get walked to a bleach-scented bathroom in the back of what would be her room. not bad, little cubbies with alternate outfits, little posters about cleaning your hands, a diaper-genie shitcan (i might hate those) and oh yeah, pee all over the seat. oh and what's that in the unflushed toilet? pee and toilet paper, thank god i suppose. but it was still there. so i clean up the toilet, bridget goes and then we go. michael is out there talking "yeah, we're looking to get them going as soon as we can...blah blah blah..." and i'm practically twitching to get his attention to make him STOP talking to the owner. finally its over and we leave.

back to square one.

ATTENTION PEEKAY THE PESTERER, I'VE POSTED!!!!

oddly enough, when i have the most to blog about, i have no time to blog. or actually, i just don't feel like doing it. this defeats my purpose here since i am working on some sort of record for my kids. i realize this. i even waste my time feeling guilty about it when i know i have the time but not the energy. i need some voice recognition software so i can just say it and it is written. michael used to sell this software but the company died. where is virtuallyspeaking when i need it? although, it probably wouldn't work since it would have to filter out 3 voices. yes, i'm lazy.

so, let's see. the day after michael's birthday we bought a second car - FINALLY! - and i got a call from my old boss asking if i wanted to come back - for a 3rd tour of duty - part-time. it was a busy day.

with our new-found debt and 2 let's-just-call-them-energetic kids in hand, i agree to come in and talk about it. but i want to do it already. it was the gig they laughed at me for wanting when miss b was born. one day in the office. one day at home. 2.5 years ago it wasn't done, at this company anyway. it would come down to how much they were going to pay me for this weekly mini-vacation vs. how much it would cost to drive an hour each way once a week, how much it would cost to have someone watch the kids, how much my sanity was worth, etc. michael was expecting low numbers, so i was nervous. but somehow i knew that my old boss - who was my hands down favorite old boss - wouldn't waste my time. so we hash out the new position and then comes the money part - "so i took what you used to make, added in 2 merit increases and cut it in half." did i mention he was my favorite? sold.

all of a sudden, i'm envisioning all of the house/yard projects that we were doing ourselves being done by professionals. WOO HOO, we might have a finished patio by this summer! aah. i'm pretty sure that i've spent my first 2 paychecks at this point.

i started on march 26th and worked monday/wed/friday. i know, i know, what happened to 1 day a week? i had to train with the kid who was leaving. although at quarter end and the first week of a new quarter, i need to work more often.

now i just need to find someone to watch b and a, which is turning out to be more difficult than i thought.

happy birthday daddio!

happy birthday to our favorite new 36 year old! he doesn't seem to like this age as he mentioned it at least 5 times over the course of the day. what is it? the backside of our 30s is upon us? i feel like 37, 38 might be harder. then we are officially no longer mid-30s and must start preparing for the big 4-O.

although i don't really care about an age - at least not yet - mostly because i still consider myself anywhere from 18 to 25 most of the time. (i'm sorry but high school could have been yesterday in my crazy head. i could still probably remember my schedule if i had to.) what i do care about - and despise - is the change that age brings to things like your metabolism - but that is a post for a darker day. especially since today was beautiful.

we went outside and picked up twigs for hours. or i should say I picked up twigs for hours. andrew was napping and bridget found a nice rock to sit on and eat her snack. let me tell you, i knew about the obvious maintenance a tree requires and planned on a lifetime of leaf raking misery. what i had no idea about were the twigs. the millions of little twigs that end up on the ground after every windy day, ice storm, snow storm, rain storm and "its just too f'ing cold to hang onto the tree anymore" day. they are everywhere. i can go out today for a few hours and they will still be everywhere. ah, but we have a yard now and we didn't when someone was 35. so i think 36 is pretty good.

woo hoo. happy birthday love!