Waiting...

My mom's horse is due to have a baby tomorrow. We went over there hoping we'd get to see some action, but no dice. It turns out I no longer have patience for these things, having waited so damn long for my own offspring to come into this world, and I gave up on the waiting and came home.

Here are a couple of pictures of Avery hanging around the barn. She didn't really get what was going on and it'd be an understatement to say she didn't want to wait either. Not a 'waiter,' that one. We tried giving her some hay to chew on, but she looked at us like we were giving her hemlock or something and threw it on the ground.



Just a few more...

Trampoline fun

Our good friends have a trampoline and regularly invite us to come jump. This time I brought my camera AND I jumped with the kids. My friend took a few pics of us all jumping together. One of the pictures I took while sitting on the trampoline with Avery and her buddy was this one:


I love how it captures Avery's shadow in its entirety.

My friend snapped this one, which is about the only one of me where I'm not high in the air with some goofy look on my face. Avery and I had so much fun, it makes me want a trampoline too!

One more

Lazy Saturday

Just posting a few pics. We washed the cars today, went downtown to see a little bit of the Bicycle Classic, and then roamed around a few home improvement stores pricing dishwashers and vacuums. I dare say it doesn't get much more domestic than that.

We eat lunch outside quite a bit, but our backyard is currently under construction. So we've relocated the backyard activities to our front courtyard. And incidentally, they started on our backyard yesterday.


Working on my photography skills. This stuff is seriously complicated. This is straight out of the camera.


I don't think I've ever met a 7 month old with such expressive eyebrows.


More photography practice. This was work on composition. My lighting needs help.



And one last one of the child who chews everything:

Demotivators

Enjoy.





Here's more.

Drive by blogging

Just coming back to reality after a weekend away in Santa Barbara. We went to the most gorgeous wedding ever, and of course I have no pictures because I was on a mission to have fun and big bulky cameras and beer don't mix well. I did take a picture of the mission that we could see directly across the street, however. It was so beautiful how they had it lit up at night.


My home business is coming along nicely. I'm still working on the website. I'll post it as soon as it's built.

I also thought I'd add a few pics just for no other reason than to try to be better at blogging. I apologize to my fellow bloggers whose blogs I used to read and reply on often. I am not ditching you, I'm just finding it tough to get the time. I told Jed yesterday that I need to get a job so I can sit and do nothing on the internet all day!

I'll start with the state of our yard. We're redoing the entire thing. Here is how it looked last summer.


Here's how it looks now. The girls enjoyed watching the destruction. We're in negotiations for what happens next right now. We're not quite sure what we're doing, but the plans are geting (somewhat) finalized.




Ainsley started to eat solids recently, so it takes more time for me to feed her. She is THRILLED with the process, as you can clearly see.


Here are just some random pictures...

I am that dish.

You know the one.

The dish that you put in the dishwasher that doesn't get clean, so you leave it in the dishwasher for about 5 or 6 wash cycles until you finally admit defeat to the gods of Palmolive and Jet Dry, take it out, wash it by hand, and put it away.

I am that dish.

I put myself into the shower. Typically this happens once a day, though I've been known to skip a wash cycle now and then. Sometimes I forget to add the detergent. Or maybe I forget to use the detergent on part of myself. Either way, I don't come out as clean as I should.

Sometimes I have some food crusted onto myself, somewhere. Sometimes I forget it's there and it doesn't get washed off. Sometimes I scrub only half of my body. It's not that I don't mean to or want to scrub the other half, it's that before I can finish the process, I hear a baby crying, or a toddler yelling for me to save her from the ghost sitting on her rocking chair.

In the last 6 months, more than once I've only shaved one leg. Let me just tell you how embarrassing this can be when you're sitting somewhere, talking to another adult that completely washes him/herself everyday, and you look down beyond the hem on your capri pants to see that OH NO I DITENT... and you quickly cross your legs the other way to show the shaven one off and hide that you, perhaps, are the missing link between Cro-Magnon man and Homo sapiens.

This is me. I never thought I'd be this scatter-brained. Nor that I'd admit to showering so haphazardly. Nevermind the serious maintenance that needs to be done -- like scrubbing my feet and applying moisturizer. It just ain't happening. I used to look at moms and think "Wow, she's really let herself go." Boy, do I get it now.

So say a little prayer for me that for this wedding I have to go to this weekend, I will manage to shave all the shaveables and wear the right bra and underwear and remember to put in nursing pads, and I can't forget to paint my toenails, oh and I need to loofa the backs of my arms, and, oh no! I am out of razor cartridges, and...

This post is not about...

my Friday morning and how as I ordered myself a coffee, I looked down to watch Avery lean over and puke onto Ainsley, who was peacefully lounging in her carseat.

It's not about how I had to take Ainsley's socks and pants off and wipe her body and carseat clean with a pile of napkins while I sat in the middle of the floor in the middle of my favorite little coffee shop.

It's not about how I had to embarrassingly ask the barista dude to mop up my two-year-old's oatmeal with raisins that she'd eaten for breakfast two hours earlier, and how I had to stuff Ainsley's clothes and her blanket into a bag and carry them out, along with the vomit that covered them. It's not about how red my face must have been because, frankly, who wants to be that mom whose kid just puked all over the floor?

It's not about how Avery has continued to puke for three days and has only kept down a 1/2 a slice of bread since the morning of said oatmeal puking experience. It's not about how I've had to hold back her hair and clean up her vomit again and again and again. It's not about how I've changed her sheets three times in three days because she couldn't even keep a few teaspoons of water down.

It's not about how I have had NO sleep for the same three days because, to top it off, Ainsley MUST be teething and refuses to sleep. As I sit typing this, Jed is in her room trying to stop her from crying. He is going to fail and I am going to have to go in there, AGAIN, and try to handle things. This will be round four in the last 45 minutes.

It's not about how, after Avery puked at the coffee shop, and I derobed Ainsley and left the coffee shop coffeeless with a bag of vomit and dirty laundry in hand, that puke smell in my car wouldn't go away. There was no actual puke in my car, but the smell... oh the smell. I would try to describe it but I fear anyone reading might then puke themselves, and I can't be responsible for people's computers getting barfed upon just for the sake of some incredible usage of adjectives.

This post is not about how I cleaned every item that even might have come into contact with something barfy, and how after I was confident there was no hint of regurgitated oatmeal with raisins anywhere to be found, the barf smell continued on.

It's not about how, even after two full days of trying to let things air out and making sure nothing from the puke experience was within 20 feet of my car , even after it was all washed, my car smelled as though something was rotting and foul. It's not about how I searched over and over for something like a sippy cup full of milk or a partially eaten string cheese stick under my seat or between the cracks of the back seat. I found nothing. The stench continued.

This post is not about any of that.

This post is about something exponentially more disgusting and almost impossible to believe. It's about the moment when I realized what it was that was creating the stench. It's about that moment, when I zeroed in on where the smell was coming from and still didn't know what I was in for. It's about the moment when I pulled the car seat cover off of Avery's car seat and the smell was getting worse and I was gagging and my mouth was getting all full of saliva like it was my turn to vomit. It's about that very specific moment, when I had the padding and the carseat cover pulled to one side, and I looked down into the narrow, deep, compartment in the carseat where, SOMEHOW, separate from all of the vomit-filled experiences I'd been having for three full days, somehow getting puked and shat upon was only the tip of the iceburg in terms of what disgusting things were about to come into my life.

It's about that very succint second of my life, when I realized that sometime in the past, Avery clearly had had milk in her carseat, and she obviously had let it spill into the padding of the carseat without me noticing. It's about how all of that milk collected in this deep, narrow compartment underneath the padding in her carseat, inside of which NOTHING will fit, and begs the question -- WHY IS IT EVEN THERE?

It's about how I took the carseat out of the car, pulled everything off of it, and got a look at what was causing the smell. I have to say I would rather be puked and shat upon by a flu-bugged two-year-old than have to clean up this half solid, half liquid collection of milk that had been 'aging' in the depths of Avery's carseat for --- God only knows how long.

It's about how I had to scrape and dig that shit out of there, and when I realized there was absolutely NO other way than to just use my fingers to get it out, I cried. I cried because I was so fucking tired, and so fucking OVER being a vomit cleaner extraordinaire. Why did THIS have to happen too? I cried because I am the asshole that let her have a sippy cup of milk in her carseat, and I'm the asshole that somehow didn't notice that a lot of it was magically gone, and I'm the asshole that only cleans the carseat cover when it really, really must be done.

I cried because it was milk and it was spilled, and I don't give a rat's patoot that you're not supposed to cry over things so trivial. I sat on my driveway with all this child restraint paraphernalia scattered across the cement and cried like an idiot, and when I was done, I went into the house, mascara running down my face, my children and husband all laying on the floor, being sick together, and the only thing at that moment that made all of the last 30 minutes of my life fade away was when Avery said "Mom, you're crying!" and she started to cry too and wanted to comfort me. She who had been the most lethargic little thing for three whole days, who can't even stand up or walk from one end of the house to the other -- she said "Mom, don't be sad, come sit on my lap" and motioned for me to do just that.

Come sit on my lap -- can you imagine?

So now I'm trying to get the image of all that liquidy, gloppy curdled nastiness out of my head and it's just not working. I cuddled and hugged Avery tight because, even though she's the one that's been puking and shitting on me for three days, and even though she's the one that let milk spill into the padding of her carseat and didn't tell me, and even though she's the one that demands Wonder Pets and Charlie and Lola from the couch while pointing at the TV, she's the one who put her sickness aside and wanted to comfort me and make me feel better.

My advice is, don't let your kids have milk in their carseats. Just look what happened to me!

Adventures in Baby Sitting

So, Ainsley can sit up unassisted now. In fact, she does quite well when she's really interested in a toy or watching Avery imitate a baboon. Unfortunately, Avery imitates a whiny two-year-old much more often, so Ainsley has to resort to entertaining herself.

After doing about 5 of these roll and giggle maneuvers, if I need for her to be contained for a moment, the shopping basket usually does the trick. Oh, and, YES, that's a booger sucker she's chewing on. Call CPS if you must.



Sometimes I think she looks like me. Then she starts to cry and throw a fit and I think she looks more like Jed.

"Squirmy Squirmerson"

What a quaint little nickname, yes?

That's what we call Ainsley. The child NEVER sits still. No wonder she's so thin and eats all of the time. If you try to sit her on your lap, it lasts for a few minutes and then she's off like a prom dress. She can make her way to the floor from my lap in about 3 seconds, and you don't even realize she's gone until she's almost to the floor.

I sit her on the carpet somewhere with a blanket and a pillow to land on in case she topples over, and before I know it, she's 5 feet away chewing on a ______________ (insert some dangerous object that could impale or suffocate her). Baby-proofing with Avery was easy. I have a feeling things are going to be a little trickier this time around.

A show of faith

I'm still here, I'm still taking pictures, and I'm still thinking about what I want to blog about. I just have been crazy lately with too much to do.

Here's a pic as a show of faith that I'm here and alive and haven't abandoned my blog!