The Party is Almost Over...

I have 2 (weekdays) until I go back to work.

I don't officially start until Tuesday, August 28, but I'm going in on Monday because, let's face it, 3 days to get my act together is not long enough. (I'm supposed to work 'contract' days, August 28, 29, 30. And it is supposed to be sufficient to get everything ready. Yeah, right!)

It is always this time of year that I feel like a deflated balloon. I look back at my summer and wonder if I got the 'most' out of it; I wonder if my kids had the best of me, and enjoyed our time together. I know it isn't possible to do 'everything,' but I certainly try.

There's definitely a list of stuff I didn't get taken care of that I'd hoped to do over this summer. For instance, yard work-- I had hoped to get my yard into better shape--trim the 2 gigantic hedges in my back yard, plant more annuals for some color, and, at the least, get some fresh bark-o-mulch down in the front yard. I'd also hoped to get Chubb's baby book finally completed (let's face that one for what it is--I didn't even so much as look at the pictures/scrapbook stuff). He's two, now, I should at least have slapped the pictures into the book (I've given up on cutesy, artistic pages), but I haven't. Sigh. Maybe by the time he hits high-school I'll have it done (forget about remembering what the pictures are about!!!). I'd also hoped to de-clutter my house a bit more. I managed to clean out my dresser of clothes that are too big/that I don't wear. So, at least that counts for something.

It is strange, I have a friend in the same line of work as me who feels this depressed sensation after the end of the year, about a week after she's on vacation. I haven't felt that. She misses the action and the routine and feels a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities of summer. After about a week, though, she feels great. I feel deflated because the time goes by so quickly. I will have to put my kids back in daycare, and be back to the 'daily grind.' I miss my kids when I'm at work. I count myself lucky, though, since I get summers and holidays with my kids. I know it is a lot more than most people get with their kids. And, I know I'll be fine after the first two weeks. I always am. It is just tough to wind through the last two days of summer before I'm back to busy, busy, busy.

I'm trying to decide what I want to do with the kiddos today. Yesterday we played 'Bob the Builder' and drew pictures all morning, followed with two separate trips to the Park. They had a blast (I did, too). I would like to take the kids to the nearby theme park, or to the children's museum, here in town, the only problem is a significant lack of funds. Sometimes, I need to throw caution to the wind and just 'go for it'.

Today may be one of those days.

We can't preserve today and use it for tomorrow. Once today is passed, we can never get it back again. There's a great sticker that I often see on the helmets of Harley riders, it says: 'Ride it like you stole it.' Isn't that great? Sort of live life to the fullest, full-throttle. I want to start to live more of my days that way.

Care to join me? Let's live, full-throttle.

He's Officially a NOT a Baby, but a Toddler

Recipe to Celebrate Chub's Second Year of Life

Ingredients:

1 (or 2) Birthday Kid(s)

A cake

People to celebrate

A gift or two

A song

Lots of Fun

Endless Love

Make a wish, little one, all your dreams will come true.

Cake is fun, candles shine bright, you have your whole life to live, and live it right.

Happy 2nd Birthday to you, my beautiful little boy. We love you.

May the future hold more joys than sorrows, and may your heart always be light.

Here's to 2 years on this Earth.

What a wild and wonderful two years they have been.

I can hardly believe the time has gone by so quickly. Tears rush to my eyes to think that you're no longer a baby, and again a baby you'll never be.

Soon, my boy, soon, you'll be a full grown man.

The Good Lord grant me that I raise you well, and teach you right.

How true it is that we do today, echoes in eternity.

Cake Decorating, part deux

Still not great.

But better than the 'green' disaster.

I tried out a new cake recipe; I tried to go all 'healthy' and use unbleached whole-wheat flour, etc., etc., etc. Let me tell you, it just don't work. If you're gonna make cake (junk food) ya gotta use the conventional white-flour. Othewise, it winds up tasting like this cake: cornbread with lard icing. MMMmmm. Yummy. Doesn't that just totally make you want to gobble up a piece?

Heh.

Yeah, right.

Busy, tired, ugh

I feel like I'm flying around here like a loony-toon. I have about 2 weeks left until I go back to work, and as usual, the time starts to go by fast. Like, someone hit the x32 fast-forward button. Like I'm in the movie 'Click.' It is going by even faster due to Chub-chub and his new bed.



Chubbers is out of his crib and into a toddler bed (or the floor)--on a good day. He can't seem to handle the freedom of not being in a 'cage' (crib). It is kind of like parents who haven't had a day to themselves in months, and they're so excited, nervous, scared, elated that they just run around in circles bumping into objects and walls not knowing what to do with themselves, or how to handle it. Chubbers is the same way. Just without a crib.



Last night B.J. was putting him down to bed (that's his job) and I left the house for some much needed retail therapy. When I got home I found out that Chub-o had been his typical nightmare self. He didn't want to go to bed, so he popped up and screamed, alternately, for about an hour before conking out. Then, he decided that mommy really did need to experience the joy of an angry, over-tired toddler, and woke up screaming at 11pm, 2am, and 3:45am, finally waking at 5:45am.



Oh, what joy. I feel like I have a newborn again. I think I got, maybe, 2 solid hours of sleep last night. At 5:45am I decided, blearily, when it was clear that my offspring wasn't going to sleep, that I'd lay in bed and the boy could crawl into bed with me (which he did, and then proceeded to poke me in the face and randomly on my torso, just for giggles and grins--ANNOYING!!) or run amok in the house tearing things from the shelves, walls, and whipping out a can of Krylon for some preschool art--I DIDN'T CARE!! Let me sleep, please! This system of apathy and loving neglect worked until 6:15am, when the automatic coffee pot began brewing and I finally gave up trying to sleep and succumbed to the draw of my caffeine addiction.



When will it end? This is what I get for having a daughter, whom when we put her int a big-girl bed (directly into a 'Full', not a toddler bed) she laid down for bed, popped up only one time, and thereafter slept peacefully through the night. Oh, sweet Lord, when will the boy simply lay down and sleep peacefully, like a little angel, again?



Thank goodness my coffee maker decided to work this morning. I don't know if I could have faced the world if it hadn't.

Cake Decorating & Other Forms of Torture

I'm becoming so domestic these days.

Times were, many moons ago, that I was a young independent woman who worked a simple little job and lived alone in her own house, and rarely touched a pot or pan. In fact, my friends from 'once upon a time' used to complain when they came over and tried to raid the 'fridge only to find no real food to speak of. I had been accused of having a 'bachelor's refrigerator' and I'd heard many refrains of: 'you have every condiment known to human kind in here but no food. That's messed-up!" (One of my co-workers, if she reads this, is going to throw up at that particular phrase--sorry! Just tellin' it like it is)

These days, I often cook. In fact, some months I cook nearly every night except "left-overs" night. Don't get confused, I still have those weeks where I still have every condiment known to human kind and no food, and well, we simply go out to eat. Yes. It is expensive, wasteful, and causes my waistline to creep further and further out latitudinally. However, for the most part, I cook. Healthy-ish meals, from scratch. I hate boxed 'convenience' food--it all tastes the same to me (bad) and let's face it, anything with a 3 year shelf-life shouldn't go into our bodies (note: I conveniently forget this piece of rhetoric as I order our dinner at the golden arches.)

So, along the lines of my newly donned domesticity, I have decided to take a cake decorating class with my friend, J. J. and I go out for walks on average of 2x a week. We're getting in shape--something other than round, preferably. And on one of our walks J. asked me if I'd be interested. Sure. Why not? Sounds fun. So I have officially signed up and attended my first Wilton Cake Decorating I class.

The tuition was $30.00. Not bad. Especially compared to some of my Grad School classes. On the syllabus it says that an additional $25-50 dollars in supplies may be needed. No biggie. Well, after the first class I purchased the 'essentials' and to date my total investment (not including gas for transportation) is around $90.00. Pretty spendy for a hobby. Or, I'm just a cheap-o.


The first class was great. Friendly people (around 15 of us in all), and a nice instructor. The instructor made everything look like, well, a piece of cake. At the end of the class she gave us our supply list, and our first assignment: bake a cake, frost it using the recipe for butter creme frosting Wilton requires, and bring in frosting for decoration in a differing color than what you use to frost the cake. Easy, right? Well, this is me we're talking about. Heh heh heh.

So, comes the day after class. I'm bored and decided to root around to find all the ingredients I need to make butter creme frosting. Turns out, I have it all on hand, and the Peanut and I whip up a batch of the icing. Super fast, really easy, everything is cleaned up and taken care of in 10 minutes. My kind of project. However, I tried to make blue (we're going to make a 'Rainbow cake' at our second class), since I liked how the blue looked in the demo. picture. I found out that if you use 'butter' flavored Crisco (hint: it is yellow-Hell-o!!) what would have been blue icing is actually...you're gonna love this...preschoolers know how to use the color wheel...GREEN!!! Hahahah. Moral of the story? Use white Crisco, that is unless, you like actually want to have off-colored icing. Anyway, I figured I'd still be able to work with my green-not-blue-icing. I'm resourceful, like that.

Now, today (Friday), I'm stressed because the nearly-two-year-old is being fussy and doesn't want to cooperate (will he ever want to cooperate, at any time during the rest of his life? Magic 8 Ball says: Signs point to no.) so I decided we all need a project to entertain us. We'll bake a cake! I thumbed through my 1940's era McCall's Cookbook (only the world's best cookbook, ever. It was my mom's, so I'm very sentimental about it) looking for a good cake recipe. There's a bunch of them, too bad I was feeling lazy. I stuck a post-it note in the cookbook, and proceeded to get out a red-velvet cake mix (the box kind, yes, I know I'm totally contradicting myself, here) and we slap that together, and bake it.

At class the teacher said that we could use a box cake-mix, but it would be harder to frost because of the crumbs. The teacher is right, box cakes make LOTS of crumbs. Frosting a cake using the decorating tools the right way is much harder than it looks. I did my best to frost my cake. That doesn't mean I'm gonna take home a blue ribbon at the county fair.

I'm glad I 'practiced' tonight. I'd hate to have brought my FUGLY green frosting red-carpet-cake with red crumbs in the frosting lopsided cake to class. How embarrassing! But, it was a good learning experience.

Peanut will wake up tomorrow and see a hideous crumbs-in-the-green-should-be-blue-icing and she will squeal with joy, because, this cake will be her 'birthday' cake that she's been asking for since Thursday, when we made the icing. So, even though it is ugly, and not at all professional looking, it is worth it because I know it will make a certain 4 year-old some one's day.

Once I finished admiring my abstract art and thinking of how much Peanut will like it I was really good. I cleaned up my mess right away, rather than wait until the morning and hope the magic husband fairy would come along and clean it up (never happens, but I can hope, right?). Holy cow! Butter creme frosting is a pain to clean; in fact, it is just plain icky. Let's just say, if you ever want to stop eating sweets, make a batch of butter creme icing, wash your utensils by hand, and look at the residue left in the sink. I now know exactly what the insides of my thighs look like--it ain't pretty. Yech!!! A good thing, though, 'cuz now I won't eat frosting.

If I'm not caffeinated and I have a gun, no one is safe

Coffee.

The sound of the word 'coffee' just rolls off my tongue and drips happiness. Truly. I can walk by a coffee shop (be it a gourmet or greasy spoon) and the aroma of freshly brewed beans crawls up my nose, into my sinuses, and I feel the euphoric 'lift' that the magical South American fruit produces.

Scientifically, if you're feeling 'down' if you walk past a coffee shop (or go inside and shove your snout into a bin and huff it like you're about to 'lose it', if you're me) it will perk you up; science has proved that coffee is a 'natural' mood lifter. Isn't that great? I remember that from a $40,000 public university education, from one of my Psy 400 classes. Seems, if not for anything else, that the information about coffee made the whole 3 years worth it (yes, we know I'm a geek, now you also know my dirty little secret, I finished University early). I can also remember a lot about something called "substance dependant learning." Substance dependant learning, in a nutshell, means that if you're cramming for an exam, and you chug, for instance, a 40 oz. keg of coffee, you'll learn the facts with that 'substance' in your brain and in order to have maximum recall when you take said exam, you'll need that same quantity of coffee in your system at the time of the test. Hmm. That could be one of the reasons why I had my I.V. (a HUGE portable coffee mug) with me at all times when I was in school...or could also be because I am hugely addicted to the substance.

Can't you just meet our Maker, in peace, now, that you have that useless piece of trivia to add to the vast quantities arcana that I can fill you with?

I love coffee. My mother told me that I get my love of the warm, brown, aromatic beverage from my grandmother. I'll never forget my mom telling me about a time when Grandma went to England (can you hear "God Save the Queen" playing, yet?) and how she couldn't get a cup o'joe to satisfy her. When she returned home from her trip all she could do was complain about the fact that the British can't brew a decent cup of coffee (after my own visit across the 'pond' I'm inclined to agree with her). Well, I suppose that makes sense, they drink Tea. Tea doesn't have nearly the caffeine that coffee does. The average cup of steeped tea (think 3 mins.) has between 12 and 20 mg. of caffeine; the Brits, perhaps, are a bit more sedate due to their caffeine consumption. We Americans, loud and obnoxious sorts, chug an average of 2 cups of coffee in the morning to the tune of a super-charged 50 mg. caffeine per cup. That's just regular joe, we ain't even gotten into Espresso, here. No wonder we're as hyper and high-strung as we are. But, then again, could we do it 'all' on less? For me the answer is a resounding "NO!"

I tried (successfully) to kick the caffeine habit exactly two times in my life: Peanut and Chub-chub. I quit coffee when I was pregnant. After all, a responsible mommy-to-be follows a stringent regimen of diet, sans coffee/caffeine. With Peanut it was easy. My favored elixir of life made me ill. Just the smell of it was enough to send me to the toilet retching violently. What a horrible association it was for me coffee-nausea. Now, with the Chubber, coffee didn't make me ill. In fact, quite contrary to my pregnancy with his sister, I craved coffee. I couldn't sniff it enough. In the end, at about 8 mos, I did have an occasional cup (I can hear the authors of What to Expect When You're Expecting rage at this injustice I did to my son).

Coffee, especially in the morning, is great. On the rare occasion where I can't have my coffee, to quote a former professor of mine, Ms. Mary Roe, 'life isn't good;' in fact, life is terrible. The only times I am without coffee in the morning is if: a. There has been a power outage, and my automatic coffee-maker doesn't start because the time is flashing "12:00" over and over again, ever so belligerently, or b. I have had a psychotic break with reality and forgotten to set my coffee-maker. I do not do well when caffeine deprived. In fact, you might say I can be a bit of a b*tch.

Really. I'm sure you could never, ever see me as anything other than sunshine and roses (you can quit laughing, now).

Coffee is the only real 'vice' I have left, these days. I quit drinking and partying; I don't do drugs; I don't buy shoes compulsively anymore; and I haven't smoked since my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer (that was tough for two reasons- 1. mom was diagnosed when she was already at stage IV cancer (terminal), which made me stressed and want to smoke even more, and, 2. because it was already a 10 year old habit). I feel like if I'm going to have any 'vices' coffee is a fairly safe bet. I even heard in the news, a couple weeks ago, coffee is good for you because if somehow contains antioxidants and is a source of fiber. Whoo-hoo!

What can I say? I just love coffee.

8-10-07: Edited to add my favorite 'coffee' graphic--when I originally posted this, my computer refused to let me have access to my pictures/uploads.

Chopitty-chop-chop-chop!

I finally did it!! I have been saying I'm going to chop off my hair for what seems like forever. It is Go-one.

It feels great.

Anyone who has known me for any long length of time knows that (This is for B.J.'s Foster Sister, if she's reading...) my hair style, length, and color changes about as often as the seasons. If you look at photographs of me that are in my home, say in my living room, you'll notice that my hair has been many different shades found in nature (and the rainbow). I have had short (as in shoulder length and a little shorter) hair, and I have had long (down to my bra-strap) hair. I have been blond, brunette, red, and at one point in time a favorite purplish color (I found out the hard way, pumpkin orange, is, truly, for fruits and veggies only).


About the only thing that has stayed consistent over the years is the fact that my hair is fine (yag-I hate it) and that the longer it gets the curlier/kinkier it gets (and, no, it's not meant to be a pun). Curly hair is--great if that is what you want. However, like all people with one hair-type or another, you always want the texture/type that the good Lord didn't see fit to give you--so, in my case, I've always wished for thick, stick-straight hair. It has never happened, and after all these years I've resigned myself to the fact that it may only be able to accomplish straight for approximately 2.3 minutes, or until I walk out my front door and the humidity hits it. *Sigh* Such is life.

So, after about three weeks of serious contemplation (and seriously resisting the urge to purchase a set of Whal clippers) I decided to take the plunge and CHOP IT OFF! I have hated my hairstyle for a while now--I sometimes like it, on "good hair days" but those are too far and few between. [B.J. informs me I always love my hair for a few weeks after I get it cut/styled, then inevitably I decide I hate it. I think he's on to something there...] I decided I wanted the type of hair style that I can shampoo and shake my head and be done. The ultimate 'wash and wear' style. I think I have achieved it:



It is short, baby! Really, really short. And, true to what B.J. says, I love it. I love it so much because I can get up, shower, shampoo, fix my hair, and make-up and be dressed and ready to go in a whopping Fifteen Minutes!!! That just rocks. I am beginning to understand and appreciate just how easy guys have had it all these years. I think I'm going to like super-short hair. It is so incredibly liberating to just have hacked it all off (well, not me personally, my stylist--whom has watched me chop it shorter and shorter each time until I have finally reached this length, or the lack there-of!).

It is funny, how right the writers at Allure magazine got it, when they wrote about cutting off your hair, and the catharsis that you feel. It is like, at the risk of cheezy-ness, being remade, new, all over again. And, I definitely feel new.