Dr. Pompo's Nose

Tuesday is library day at my childrens' school. Last week Matthew brought home several books and a movie. Madison's class did not get to go because they wouldn't be quiet in line (she said).

Going to the library is one of their favorite past-times. I'm not sure if it's the new books or new video. They can check out several books and one video. Luckily, most of the videos are educational.

One of the books Madison brought home today was "Dr. Pompo's Nose." If you haven't read this, I highly encourage you to check it out. Very cute!

The characters are carved pumpkins with their stems as noses. They have eyes carved out and mouths as well. Dr. Pompano finds a "nose" (a pumpkin stem) on the ground and each pumpkin that comes along adds an idea of what the stem actually is. A nose, a horn, a stem, etc.

Madison loved it and it's a funny little story.

Blew through that one

It's a little cool here tonight so I went searching for warm pj's for C. Imagine my surprise when the 3-6 month sleeper was too small!!!!!!!!!! Well I should say too short. She measured 26-1/2" at her 4 month pedes visit this past Monday. That's the 95% percentile and 2" longer than Mia was at the same age. Madison's records are unfindable at this time to compare and Matthew was still in Korea at that age. She's also 13 pounds 7 ounces which is about 50% percentile. Mia was 13 and 5-1/2 at the same age. I could have sworn that C is chubbier than either of the other two girls but apparently not. With a good two inches, she'd be considered slimmer. I pulled out a couple Gymbo sleepers in 3-6 earlier in the week which proved to be too small as well but I just figured they ran small like their leggings. I guess not ! Ach. Anyhow, I'm off to find the box of 6-9 month clothes.

Oh and here are a couple more layouts I've done. The orange layout uses Jessica Sprague's festa papers and my new technique from her class making a hexagon-type photo collage. It's late and I forget what it's called. The other one is where we learned how to use templates which was R*E*A*L*L*Y cool!! Sooooo easy! I was doing it all wrong before. Anyhow that layout is using a Jen Caputo template and paper pack by Janidee Designs. Oh and probably a couple others from the class doing different techniques. Enjoy!

Hair, Hair, Everywhere There's Hair!

They don't tell you about all the weird things that happen to you when you get pregnant, like the dark line down your belly, leaky boobs, skin that stretches in places you never expected, hair that grows where you never expected, and so on. Most I can sort of understand as the body grows and expands and the hormones do their thing so you grow a lovely wee bairn in your belly.

But the strangest of all is the hair growth. I don't quite get this one. While pregnant my hair grows at astronomical rates. It grows faster, thicker and more of it grows until it's very thick. I have thick hair anyhow so this makes it even more. I find it difficult to find a barrette to corral it all.

So, I'm sitting around enjoying all this wonderful, luxurious growth of hair for three whole months after the baby is born. First, I'm sitting around wondering how my baby got to be so big already! Second, one day I wake up to take a shower and find a fistful of hair in my hand! The first time it happened I really freaked out. I had no idea this was a postpartum condition and thought I was ill!

So, it's been over a month and I'm tired of the shedding. I brush my hair before I shower to get out as much as possible and I still pull out a couple handfuls. It's always on my back and arms simulating a buggy feeling. The baby gets strands from time to time. So, if anyone has a clue as to the purpose of this, I'd love to hear it!

And from time to time I grieve that we decided not to have any more babies. I LOVE babies and since Charlotte's a fairly good baby, i.e. sleeping pretty well through the night LOL, I contemplate wishing we could have another.

And then I slap myself.

The old adage "Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it" goes through my head. When dh and I got married we talked about four children. But a while after #3 came along I decided that was enough. Or should I say we decided. Financially it's a struggle and I just felt I didn't have anything left to give after that. We were so busy with school and activities.

Then BAM #4. What a surprise that was. I love the little dear with all my heart; I love each of them enormously. I can't imagine what life would be like without each of them. But dang it's a lot of work. Mentally, I'm spent by about 4:00. Then there's just so many more things to do in a day. I feel so beleagured I almost say I want to go back to work. But I don't really want to do that.

I kind of wonder if I have some bit of depression or PPD? I should probably find out but I'm afraid. I should probably tell DH. I'm just not the happiest person on earth right now even though I have a lot to be happy about. I wish I could go away for a while to regroup or have a whole week at home by myself to just get things accomplished. Maybe if I got everything in order then I'd feel better? That seems silly though. I kind of feel like if the house isn't spic and span all neat and tidy it's going to drive me crazy. I LOVE a clean house of course but it's somewhat cluttered is all. Maybe this is why my grandma's house was always so perfect. Maybe it was the only way she could think clearly.

I'm way overwhelmed right now.

Happy Birthday DH!

Today is DH's birthday. He's 42. Wow, how did we get so old?! We met when I was 20 or so and he was 23/24. Something like that. It was back in 1989! Seems like forever ago! Almost 20 years we've been together. Amazing, isn't it?

I wanted to try and plan a little get-together for him but he made it difficult. First he picked an activity that wasn't exactly geared to a bigger group of people. Then, he decided to work today and do his birthday thing tomorrow. However, tomorrow I have a baby shower to attend. It's from 1-6 or 12-06. Seems like a long time for a shower so I want to check and see what the format is.

That does require a phone call to someone I don't know. Heck the majority of the baby shower will be people I don't know and it scares me to death! Anyhow, enough about me.

So I think we'll do steaks on the grill Sunday. Tonight I'm making tacos but I'm not sure what time he will be home. I will be glad when he actually gets paid for this work instead of paying back work we had done. Not that it was a bad trade at all.

I got dh's pressies last night but got the wrong size on one. So, I will probably give them to him and exchange them later. It was purchased at Wal-Mart and I really have no desire to go there on the weekend.

So, a great big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my wonderful DH. Couldn't ask for better, IMO :)

In the Trenches

Well, I'm deep in the trenches this week!

Potty Training Update:
Continues to go well -- woohooo! I think we used 2-3 pull ups all weekend (and not because we didn't change her LOLOL). Yesterday we went cold turkey after changing from the night-time pull up. A few accidents here or there but she was open to wearing the panties and using the potty in exchange for candy corns.

Last night was panties and plastic pants. Worked great! Mia got up this morning and asked to use the potty! This is breaking news, people!!!!!!!!!!!!! She was slightly wet but managed to make it to the potty. We went to the doctor's for C (another blog), picked up a freecycle item and headed to the grocery store. I decided to forgo the plastic pants and my girl was wearing shorts and panties! No diapers, no plastic pants, no pull ups, yahoo!

I had her use the disgusting public toilets, although the bathrooms at this particular store are relatively clean. She made it home no problem but pooped while I was bringing in the groceries. And other than an accident right after her nap, that's been the only accidents today. In fact, she has actually been telling me herself that she wants to use the toilet which is a huge score in my book. If I have to initiate every potty break, then she's not really using the toilet. Since she's beginning to initiate then I'm really comfortable that she's getting it and is ready to fully train.

I will hope to report by the end of the week that she's done. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but why not set the bar high and if we miss, at least we tired.

The other trench is the never-ending basement project. It's mostly done but it's done to the point where we closed our storage unit yesterday. Two months shy of a complete year. What sucks is they pro-rate going in but not coming out. Part of me wanted to at least keep the lock on until the end of the month so they couldn't re-let it. Bad, I know.

So there's boxes all over and a mess everywhere but we're slowly making progress. We have a freecycle pile going, a yardsale pile started and my verrrrry slowwwwly shrinking live auction and ebay pile. I threw a bunch of stuff up last night. Toys and a couple baby items. I also intend to list dh's old palm and Thundershift 500 (with his permission of course). He's also got an old train but I don't know if it works. Those Thundershifts are going for $20 - $50! My handle is nurturingmom2 if you want to check it out.

Again, by the end of this week or next I hope to have all the boxes sorted out and put away. We only have a small amount of storage space right now so we can't keep every item that's ever been given us no matter how sentimental. DH's motto is "When in Doubt, Throw it Out!" I'm a packrat by genetics so I have a harder time getting rid of things, especially if they have an emotional attachment, like my grandmother's music boxes. She's deceased and the music boxes are probably worthless in monetary value. I used to collect them but haven't even displayed them since Matthew came along.

Anyhow I'm sure this is getting rather long so I'll close for now. Will probably be a bit until I post again due to said basement project. In the meantime, I leave you with my newest digital creation ala Jessica Sprague's Up and Running class.

Adventures in Potty Training

So I decided that my 2-1/2 year old should potty train, potty learn, toilet train, whatever they're calling it these days. Hard to stay up on all the terms that are PC in the world of child rearing. I have enough trouble keeping track of my ownself and what belongs to me LOL!

So, a couple friends have trained or are training their dd's. One is the same age as Mia and just recently trained. The other is 17 months and training. I feel like I'm doing something wrong! But seriously, I know I'm not and Mia is perfectly normal. I am just tired of changing so many dirty diapers and paying so much for diapers. They are so pricey.

I know a lot of it is up the the child so you kind of have to go with the flow. Mia got really interested in the potty just when she turned two. However, in my impregnated state, I was unable to keep up with her interest which petered out at some point. Now she's kind of off and on but I've seen evidence that physically she's ready.

I asked my one friend what she did and they "ran out" of pull ups. I thought that's a great idea. I planned to do that last week, however, the running out of pull ups coincided with a lot of weekend activities out the house. Not a good mix with potty training. I figured we'd have several days of wet clothing. So we opened the last pack of pull ups.

Starting yesterday, Mia began asking for underpants. She wore them last night and also to bed. We put plastic pants on her for sleeping, good thing too! Today I think I put pull ups on her for the LLL meeting and we've been using training pants or panties since. We managed to get one poop and one good pee on the potty and a couple accidents.

The first accident I didn't realize she'd had but I did find a lovely puddle of "water" in the kitchen. Mia was dipping a basting brush in it and painting our front storm door. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out where the water came from. But while talking to daddy she proudly proclaimed she pee'd. That was my lightbulb moment. Ugh! Basting brush went in the trash.

So I'll continue with the underpants and hope that she's mostly trained in a few days. I'm afraid she'll relapse if we don't stick with panties or get confused. My great potty training tip is this. If you use a potty chair, keep a layer or two of tissue in the bottom. This way when they poop, the clean up is much easier. I have a queasy stomach so cleaning out a poopy potty is yucky!

Keep up the good work, Mia Mee.

Total Avoidance

I've been avoiding returning a phone call. This call is from my stepsister and she left a message saying she "has news." Well, why don't people just leave the dag-gone message instead of creating all this mystery? In her case, I can only imagine it's because she wants to trumpet something over me. There's a tad of bad blood there although she chooses to ignore it when it's beneficial to her.

I've been walked over and dismissed by her too many times to even count and so I chose to extricate myself from what I considered a toxic relationship. We even lent her money that was never repaid after twenty-five bazillion promises to do so. And now I think she's conveniently forgotten she owes us $300. That was $300 we didn't have but lent in faith. Moral of that story, never loan to family or friends.

It had gotten to the point where the only time she called was because *she* needed something. My children were born, had birthdays, holidays, etc. no acknowledgement from her. I didn't even bother calling her after Charlotte was born. I figured either my stepdad (her bio dad) would tell her or I'd call her as I did many others after I got out of the hospital. I don't think I actually had her # with me in any event.

She had the nerve to be offended, or pretended to be, that I didn't call her straight away. Well, my daughter was in the NICU you dumbo. Perhaps, when you found out you could have called to see if we needed anything!

Now she met this guy and he's got two kids and she's got one. Every time you talked to her you would think she was mother of the year because she has three freaking kids. Well, okay, they're not really all yours and you don't even always have them all at the same time due to visitation. But you had to endure 20 minutes of how busy she is with three children like she was the only one to ever have three children. So I told my dh that we trumped her now because we had four.

I haven't heard from her in four months. No congratulations card, no nothing for Charlotte. I swear it's like this child doesn't exist to some people. I guess as the numbers grow so does interest LOL I just really feel like she's going to tell me she's pregnant and I really don't want to hear that. I'm sure she'll brag about it was this or it was that and lay it on really thick until I want to explode.

And I don't even know why this even bothers me. We obviously have surmounted infertility to some degree. Did I feel like mom of the year because I was the only one in the family to have four children? Now I won't be the only one? Although, I'd beg to let her have 4 or even 3 all together all the time with no visitations on a regular basis. It doesn't even compare.

I wanted to call and ask her dad some carpet/flooring advice anyhow so perhaps I'll let him tell me and then I'll decide whether or not to call back. Truthfully, I hardly ever call anyone these days because it's so crazy all the time. By the time it settles down enough to think about calling people it's like 9:00 at night LOL! I wish I knew why this upset me so. It just really rankles me for some reason that she might be pregnant. Perhaps it's something completely different. Maybe she got a promotion or is getting married or something. I guess I'll find out sooner or later LOL!