Please forgive me if I don’t give you much chatter to chat about in the next few days.  It’s Christmas and, as most of the wives out there know, that means all sorts of fun…  Cleaning the kitchen every five minutes. Not because of your own children’s messes but from the grownup visitors that can’t seem to dump out their own cups.  Peeling and chopping potatoes missing the fingers by inches.  Preparing for the onslaught of relatives that will ascend in the next couple days with their children in tow ready to smear their virus slimed hands all over my baby’s toys. Gee, I never thought the dog looked good with teething rings around his tail but who knew?  Oh, and lets not forget the wonderful image that comes to mind when your elbow deep in a turkey’s butt.  Yep, FUN!  

Ok, so it’s not that bad.  But I’m tired tonight from a long day of preparing for the coming festivities and feeling a little feisty.  I love to see the family, even the booger monsters.  I can’t wait to give them all the gifts I’ve been hoarding for the last year.  I’m a bargain, store it all year in the back of the closet because I found so and so the BEST GIFT EVER, always looking for the best deal kinda gal.  Dear Hubby likes that about me too.  Not the hand slapping when he gets near something that I might have bought for him but the fact that I save loads of money this way.  The only real problem is finding all the stuff I bought all year. I’m still missing my sister’s gift but I’m just going to give it to her for her birthday.  She won’t mind.   

So that’s where I’ll be for the next few days.  I’ll make sure to check in and say hi soon!

Merry HO HO HO!  And to all a good night!

His personal style is rather easy to maintain. Shorts and tee’s in the summer.  Polo shirts and jeans in the winter.  He’s a nicely fuzzed kind of guy so he’s usually not needing sweaters or anything beyond a long sleeve tee shirt in the winter.  And tennis clothes are easy to mix and match for men.  Simple, not flashy, but looks great on him.  When I met him he usually dressed in very neutral tones and could blend in with the wall color but, as soon as the relationship police would allow, I brightened up his tee shirt selection with some colors.  I never really knew how seriously lacking his knowledge was of style and fashion.  I just assumed he picked his wardrobe out of comfort and not because you can’t mess up tee shirts and jeans. I also now wonder if, before he met me, his closet was also added to by previous girl friends and not really himself.  Now I understand why when I ask him how something looks on me or which shoes he thinks I should wear he gives me some noncommittal answer that only upsets me, and makes me want to change clothes 5 more times.  It’s not because he’s doing the “guy thing” and trying to stay out of trouble.  He really, truly, honestly doesn’t have a clue. 

Where am I going with this you might ask?  Well, we now have a daughter.  A small, beautiful, growing person of the female persuasion.  An American girl and God forbid, one day a grown up woman.  Someone whom I’m looking forward to teaching about makeup and clothes and all those girly things. Oh, and SHOES! Dear Hubby and I have split the duties of when we take care of our little bundle of joy.  I’m more of a night owl so I get bedtime which includes the evening ritual of her last bottle and sometimes waiting and watching while she burns off her extra energy, which can take sometimes several hours.  Dear Hubby has mornings since I usually still have my head stuffed under a pillow when EJ is ready to greet the world for the day.  What that means is she is dressed by Daddy most of the time.  Do you see where I’m going now?  I may have taught Dear Hubby how to match colors ok, except for the day he put her in hot pink pants and a red shirt, but I forgot to teach him about prints.

Dear EJ, I’m so sorry your Daddy is lacking in the genetic tissue to be able to dress you like the rock star that you are.  One day when your all grown up you will appreciate the effort he put into making sure you had warm and comfortable clothes on each day.  Even if the color combinations and the mismatching prints burnt your retinas.  I promise, when you get older and you start to care about your personal style I will make sure I’m the one up in the mornings.  I also promise until that time I will do my best to keep your “bad clothes days” inside our doors.  When we go out in public I will always try to make sure you at least have colors that blend with each other.  I love you darling, and one day you and I both will look back on this and laugh.

EJ is modeling her hot pink striped shirt with her gray pants with pink hearts all over, and her multi-colored zig-zag striped socks.

Lewis and Gilbert from Revenge of the Nerds.

I’m so glad that the only way she will remember this is from pictures.  And I’m so glad Dear Hubby doesn’t complain when I scoot into her nursery, when I hear over the monitor that its time to dress her, to pick out something too cute for her to wear when I know she going to be in public.   That way I can go back to bed knowing that I saved our daughter from another day of potentially getting the nick name of “nerd baby”.

 Hubby usually has a TV, radio or something electronically noisy on.  Sometimes he will have the radio AND the TV on at the same time!  It’s like a symphony of chaos. He’s one of those types that has to have noise around him at all time.  Even when we are going to sleep he wants the TV on.  I’ve teased him about it a lot over the years.  He knows he does it but doesn’t apologize for it.  And I don’t expect him to.  It’s just his way of doing things.  What he does instead to accommodate me is, when the constant noise starts bugging me and I feel like my brain is about to melt and seep out my ear, I’ll tell him I want the TV off to go to sleep he will comply and not complain.  It’s not like he can’t fall asleep with it off, he just doesn’t want to.   And it’s not like the noise gets to me all the time.  I know the compromise is primarily on my part but as long as he doesn’t protest when I do want the noise maker off I’m happy.  Besides, there’s something wild and crazy about falling asleep to the History Channel.  Whoo, hoo.  I’m keepin’ my youth alive baby!   I will however draw the line at military/war shows to fall asleep to.  Listening to artillery explosions and machine guns firing just isn’t good for dream patterns.    

As if my personal space wasn’t already assaulted with multiple sound waves hitting me, now with EJ there is more.  I find myself sometimes, when Hubby’s not in the house, turning off the TV and/or radio hoping to find the silence I used to find before she came along.   Ha, ha!  That’s funny!  What’s even funnier is she will be sitting playing with her toys, all happy as she can be, and I will try to shush her sometimes because she’s making too many loud HAPPY sounds.   Ya right!  Ever try to ask a 6 month old to be quiet?   It’s like telling a volcano not to erupt.   And you would think I would be complaining about when she’s screaming her head off pissed because I took her toy guitar away from her, not when she’s content and happy.  (Stupid plastic guitar that WE gave her out of cereal box.  You would think it was constructed from the same corn syrup and sugar that the cereal was made out of it.  Can’t pry the damn thing out of her mouth sometimes. UGG!) Right now she’s particularly loud.  She’s “finding her voice” and loves to squeal as loud as she can.   Let me tell you, I’ve had lots of other mom’s comment on how high pitched she squeals and how loud she can get.  They can’t believe she can get that much sound of her little body.  Of course their children all were silent screamers.  They would just whimper Mozart when they were hungry or needed a clean butt.  Bath time is a favorite of EJ’s because she can squeal really loud and it echos in the tub.  She finds it funny.  I, however, am not as amused while I’m covering my ears hoping they don’t start bleeding.

So I’m sitting here in silence enjoying the candle I have lit on the coffee table, looking at the lights and smelling our big fat tree and loving the silence.   Forgive me if I cut this short.  The tapping on my keyboard is getting a bit too loud.

“Silent night……Holy Night…..All is calm……..”

Our next step was to get her on Santa’s lap without her tripping out over the big, furry, fat man in more crushed velvet.  As we took her up to Santa he instructed me not to turn her towards him and just place her in his lap with out her getting a good look at him.  It worked!  She snuggled up in his big arm like she belonged there. She even looked up at him a couple times and graced him with a smile.  Christmas miracle number two.  

After we took the pictures he told me why he instructed me put her in his lap backwards and it was so smart.  This is my first experience with the mall Santa thing so I was pretty amazed at this one.  I think I was expecting to have Santa be like some of the characters you see in the movies where the Santa is some creepy drunk guy secretly “coveting” the elves during his breaks.  This Santa was so nice and friendly he had me posing the thought as I looked at him “WOW, if Santa was real this is him”  Maybe this is  like the movies where the mall Santa, that everyone takes for granted, is really the true, flying through the air in a gold rocket led by magical flying reindeer going ho ho ho all the way real SANTA!  His beard was real people!!  And he had the kindest eyes and the nicest voice.  Gave me a good dose of Christmas spirit which I needed this year.  Christmas miracle number three.  

Dear Hubby and I decided before we got there that we wanted pose in the pictures with Santa and EJ.  Hubby kinda stood/squatted next to him on the side that EJ was on and I sat on Santa’s other knee.  Since I didn’t want to squish him, not realizing that he really was big enough to fill out that Santa suit and that I wasn’t going to mush him at all, I kinda sat leaning over towards EJ in some weird hunch.  While I’m very proud of myself and I feel like I’m winning the war against the baby weight I gained, tonight however, the weight won the battle.  As I hunched over all the “extra” hunched over too creating this odd spare tire look that didn’t agree with my shirt.  I did the sit and pose test when I got dressed to make sure all my clothing worked with my body for the picture.  I did all I could but I didn’t assess my outfit for hunching.  When I stand I don’t have this problem, and when I sit normally I don’t either.  All you moms out there know what I’m talking about.  It may look great standing still but the minute you move you break the seal and it all comes loose.  Anyways, after looking at the pictures we took with Santa and EJ I mentioned to Hubby that I looked horrible in the pictures.  He agreed with me.  Normally this would be a profound reason to hit the hormonal ceiling but in this case it was nice that he agreed with me.  That’s when we decided to have EJ take a picture with Santa on her own.  This time she got a good look at him before she was placed on his lap and she did start to freak out a little but then she just suddenly stopped.   She graced us all with BIG grins and great pictures to choose from.  Thinking we would have to pay for another sitting fee we were discussing it with the “picture lady” and she offered to just put the picture on a CD for $10 more instead of charging us again.  This was very nice of her because she didn’t have to do that.  Christmas miracle number four and five.

This first Santa experience has been a wonderful one and I really wanted to share it with all of you.  I tell you what, it’s hard to believe that this man wasn’t Santa.  I think I’m starting to believe again.   Now I guess I need to start thinking about what to ask Santa for.  What would you ask him for if you could?

 First, we took EJ to the doctor yesterday for her 6 month well baby check and her shots.  She was fine last night so we thought we were going to get out of the “I feel icky” screaming that she’s done in the past.   We were wrong.  She was saving it all up for today.  Running a little fever and a whole lot of cranky she was a very hard baby to cope with.   It’s a terribly stressful thing when you know your baby doesn’t feel good and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.  But that wasn’t the only thing that made our day rough. Oh no, there’s more!

Since we are hosting Thanksgiving for our clan I needed to spend some time today getting things ready around the house.  I’ll be pre-cooking on Wednesday so today is cleaning day.  Mission one, mop floors.  Our entire downstairs floor plan is tile.  Beautiful  gray tile with a hint of brown.  It’s a really nice floor but with along with really nice tile comes really horrible grout.  Now I know why linoleum was invented.  All the look of tile and no grout.  I’ve been on a mission lately to get our grout cleaner.  EJ will be crawling soon and the idea of her wiggling around and touching these collection centers and breeding grounds  for every little creepy crawly, bacteria laden, gross little nastiness that you could imagine, makes me sweat.  So a scrubbin’ I went.  Dear Hubby had the cranky baby and I was cleaning the floor.  

I was half way done, and 2 hours and one blister later, I realized that if I didn’t stop to eat I would pass out so I took a break and had some lunch. Once done, and after I finished procrastinating, I persuaded myself to get back to work.  I was looking forward to checking out the now dry areas, that I worked so hard on, and I was expecting to see a nice clean floor.  What I saw was a floor that was covered in some weird dusty film.  When you ran your foot over an area it looked like I was dusting a layer off it.  WTF!?!?   

Up until about two months ago we had a house keeper/professional duster who came over every two weeks to help our household get back to a “normal” state, before we messed it up again.  She didn’t do things like laundry or dishes so it wasn’t as great as it sounds.  But it was a nice luxury to not have to clean my own toilets, I won’t deny.  Ana came with my husband.  When I met him she had already been working for him for a couple years.  I’m sure you’re wanting to throw rocks at me now but let me at least say this much.  While she was a really nice lady, and did a wonderful job on everything else, she sucked at keeping the floor and grout clean.  Ana, if you’re reading this please don’t hate me.  My shower always sparkled bright and you were the best at dog hair removal and that makes up for it all.  Anyways, she would swish the mop water around and that was it.  I never put much thought into it at the time because we never walk around downstairs without shoes on.  We also have little mutant dogs that make it even less bare foot friendly.  But now that we have a baby you know my mind went right to the idea that if my child even touches the floor with her big toe she’s going get the hee-b-gee-bee’s and I’ll be to blame for it.   

This is why I found myself scrubbing the tiles to no avail.  My question to Ana is, how could you ignore the directions on the bottle of tile floor cleaner that said “rinse with water” and the floor looked cleaner than when I scrubbed it with a brush, then a mop, rinsed it and then dried it with a towel?  HuH!!!  Ya!  I went above and beyond the call of duty and my floor should be cleaner then my kitchen counter and it turned out like crap!   UGG!

Ok, breathing…  Lets go back to what started this rehashing of a perfectly terrible day. With my frustrations flaring and Dear Hubbies ears bleeding from EJ crying so much we both finally snapped over the dishwasher and how to load it.  I’m not going to go into details about exactly what we were both saying.  That’s for our own ears, but I will say this, we both needed a good “snap out of it” slap.  

This is when I left him with a crying baby and ran an errand.  Better to flee for a little while and cool off and give him some time too.  On my way home we sent a couple messages to each other:

Hubby:  I’m sorry I said you were “_____”

Me:  Forgiven, I bought you a chicken.

Hubby:  You read my mind.

I won’t interpret what this meant.  Only Dear Hubby and I understand it and that is how it should be.  As I said at the beginning of this rant, couples can be very annoying in their communications with each other. Sometimes couples have a way of communicating that is on a whole different planet.  It’s when Mars and Venus finally combine and create a new world named Marven.  After I got home it was all love and roses again.  EJ suddenly started feeling better so all the demons that made our day kinda sucky crawled back under the rug.  Except for my tile floor.  That’s going to be a battle for a different day.  I just thought I would share with you a little of my awful day…I’m sorry, OUR awful day, and let you have a peek at the sweetness that came about in the end.

Smiles!

The next challenge I faced was when I had the site all ready to start adding content. I discovered writing is the hardest part.  Duh!  Like I thought that part was going to be a breeze.  In the past when I would write in my journals it was hit and miss when I would have something to put on paper.  I’ve always known that the words flow out of me easily.  Ask anyone who’s been around me when I’ve had a glass or two or three of wine.  Yikes!  Even I know I don’t shut up then, but I can’t help it!! “I’m soooooo happy!  Who’s going to be happy with me?  Hey I know, lets all go play tennis in the dark and see if the balls glow.”   So I just assumed it would be the same for the blog.  Surprise to me!   There’s not enough wine in the world to keep the words flowing like that.  

 As I was preparing for the opening day of my website I was also writing things and storing them up for rainy days when I had nothing to say.  And I’ll admit I’ve used a couple of those.  I mean, come on, I’m a mom and moms don’t always have time to sit down and compose great literary works.  There for we cheat and paste pictures on our sites to take up a little space on the days that we don’t have much to say.   But yes, I made the rookie mistake.  I thought writing would be the easiest part because, when I have  the time and inspiration, I could sit down and write all day long. However, that’s not reality.  An example of a real situation in my life is,  I’ll be driving and reciting in my mind what I would like to write down.  That’s about the time EJ will start screaming from the back seat because I took a left turn instead of a right and she didn’t like it, and everything will scramble out of my head.  Hello, Good bye!  Just like that! Poof, gone!  Life just took a left turn with my car and now I have to tend to it.  The subject that I was just reciting in my head  is just gone.  Bummer.  It was probably a Pulitzer prize winner. 

I had to find a way to make it all work out.  That’s when I decided to draw back on the time when I was creating this site and learn from that experience.  So what is the secret to my success you might ask? (At least until life decides to turn left again)  I simply sit down at night after I’ve put EJ and the hubby to bed and I start to tap, tap, tap words onto my screen.  Sometimes they make sense and sometimes they just ramble on like me on vino.   But that’s the way my head works. And since this is a blog about my life and how I function, you my loyal reader will have to learn my moods and go with the flow.  Somedays I will have loads of exciting words to give you.  Words full of meaning and humor.  Words that you can’t help but giggle over.  Other days I’ll have you scratching your heads wondering what in the world made me go there?  That’s the fun of it.  How often have you had a friend or relative in your life that you wondered how their brain works?  What makes them think the way they do?  I can’t say I’m a great example of normal America but I can say I’m a great example of normal human.  One day I’m happy, one day I’m sad, and the next I’ll just be annoyed with something stupid someone did at the stoplight near my house.  And you get to hear about it all.  Aren’t you excited?  I know I am.  

So again, I’d like to thank all of you out there for taking time to read this everyday.   I don’t usually make promises because I’m afraid that the world will change around me and make it impossible to follow up, but in this case I’ll take a chance.  Keep reading and I’ll promise that I’ll keep writing.  The more excited I get about pleasing you the more I’ll be INSPIRED BY YOU.

Smiles!