The Mayfly 2007

I’ve made submissions in the past. I think it was 2003 and 2004, but forgot to do it the last couple of years. It’s fun trying to think of just 24 words to sum up a whole year.

Here’s my submission to Mayfly 2007.

“Pregnant. Little girl’s a teenager now. Baby’s a boy! Postpartum’d SAHM. So much love. Visited the fam. Learned to knit. He’s growing so fast! “

That’s my 2007 in a nutshell! Looking at it next to some of the other entries, it’s not all that clever or exciting. I think that’s because there aren’t enough words to describe the complexities of new motherhood (even if I’m not technically a new mom).

MeWii CWiistmas

Wii got some nice things this year…most have something to do with home improvements, like a stove, dishwasher, new bathroom amenities…things like that. Even with all of that going on, Wii managed to get a little something for the people on our lists. I got what might as well be the knitting encyclopedia, as well as another knitting book that looks good, a couple of fun cookbooks…and you may have guessed by now that Wii may have gotten a certain very hard to find game console. It was a gift for all of us from all of us…sort of a “family gift”. It’s so much fun! And it’s exercise at the same time! I’ve never really cared for console games because consoles are static…they only do one thing (well most of them), whereas a PC can do lots of stuff. I know xbox and ps3 are starting to change all of that but I’d rather keep the $$$ it costs for those for now and play the Wii.

So that’s basically what’s been happening for the last few days. I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get new underwear, but I suppose there’s always my birthday coming up.

In knitting news, I finished a hat for Travis a couple of weeks ago. It turned out really cute.

I also started on my first pair of socks. I am using size 2 DPN’s and Trekking XXL sock yarn. I have about 2 inches of the cuff done. The going is slow because this yarn is more like a thick thread than yarn, but I’ll get them done eventually and hopefully learn a lot in the process!

Impacted wisdom teeth…GONE!

I had mine taken out this morning. I was soooo nervous going in that I was shaking. The doctor and the nurses were so nice and understanding. They put all kinds of pulse monitors and stuff on me and then gave me an IV in my hand. It was about 2 minutes after that that I was looking to the nurse on my left and she smiled at me. That’s the last thing I remember until I was home. I don’t remember being wheeled out on a wheelchair. I don’t remember asking my husband repeatedly if they had in fact taken them out…since it seemed like only about 5 minutes. I don’t remember asking him over and over why there was a loaf of bread on the dashboard of the car (there was nothing on the dash…). I took my percocet when I got home and crashed for several hours. I never understood what all the fuss about pain killers is. They always make me go to sleep. Right now, it’s between pain med doses so I’m feeling fine, just a little tender on my lower jaw. I’ve managed to eat applesauce, pureed pears, pureed peaces, and I think I may have a smoothy for dinner. I’m pleasantly surprised by the experience, wlthough I had no idea what to expect going in.
So anyone out there who’s going the conscience sedation route with wisdom teeth extraction…I highly recommend it.I didn’t want to remember anything from the procedure and I don’t! It’s great.
The funny thing is, I mangaged to have a baby without pain meds, but on this I was a total wuss. Different kind of pain I guess.

See more progress on: have my wisdom teeth out

Lately

Not much new has been going on. I’ve been battling Travis about naps. He doesn’t seem to want to take them. I know I personally would love to take a nap…I don’t know what the problem is. This week we started Travis on peas. So far he’s eaten brown rice, acorn squash, sweet potatoes, and bananas. He seemed to really like the peas so that was promising. I don’t know why anyone would want to start their baby on solids sooner than now. It’s so much easier just to pop the boob in and be done with it. I’m enjoying making the food for him though so that’s kind of fun and I guess it’s sort of fun to see his reaction to different foods. I’ve started giving him baby food puffs as well. He gums away on them. They’re pretty tasty! I would eat these as a snack myself.

We bought a new laptop last night. The hard drive on our old one finally bit the dust after threatening to for about a month. This new one will be good enough for us to play our games on. This will be good when I get my wisdom teeth out in a couple of weeks. Here’s a piece of advice for you…get your wisdom teeth out as soon as your dentist tells you to. Even if, like me, your dentist doesn’t tell you to, do it anyway. The oral surgeon (yikes…scary saying that) says there’s a 30% chance that I will have permanent nerve damage in my jaw from getting my wisdom teeth out at my age (all of 32!). That plus the insurance company has to have special proof that you “really” need your teeth out and then they take their sweet time in approving it…blah blah blah. I should have had this procedure done back in August, but I couldn’t because of the stupid insurance company.

In other news, I’m learning how to be a gramma…
…by teaching myself how to knit! I figure why shell out close to $100 for a pair of wool pants for my baby boy, when I’m perfectly capable of making them myself with a little a lot of practice? Plus my family will have a life time supply of hats and scarfs when I’m done.

It’s so not gramma-like though! There’s a ton of people “my age” that are doing this sort of thing. It’s actually fun. I found myself thinking about knitting while I was playing LOTRO earlier this evening….weird huh? The web site I was looking at to figure all of this out was instrumental in my pseudo success.

Here are a few pics…

Wool (100% merino)

First cast-on (double cast-on)

I’m now working on a washcloth (it’s not quite finished…yeah I’m that slow) and after that I’m going to make a scarf for Elyse. It might be done by the time the weather gets warm again…we’ll see.

My husband was playing around with our pictures the other day and this is the result.

Don’t they look like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?

It’s late, but…

I made another one of those montage thingys!

Elyse was feeling left out…

Happy Fluff Day to me!

Yesterday I received a bunch of packages in the mail bearing the fruits of my online shopping labor. It was a bit like Christmas in September.

Here’s what I got:

Dyed Prefolds

Tie Dye set

I’m going to paint something on these, but I’m not sure what exactly yet.

From Gramma Paula, a M&M shirt in our favorite color!

And today I got the Babylegs that I ordered.

Quite dashing aren’t they?

Poo ’splosion

Travis had an appointment to get his 6 month picture taken today. I dressed him up in a really cute outfit that my friend’s mom got for him. Jeff checked his diaper before we went. It was a prefold so it’s always easy to tell if he’s wet or not. He was dry so we hopped in the car and battled the traffic to make our 4pm appointment. When I got Travis out of the car there was poo coming out of his shorts so I investigated a little further. Unfortunately Jeff still has a hard time getting the prefolds really snug around the legs. The poo was EVERYWHERE. I’ll spare you the graphic details, but it took about 6 wipes and 2 wet cloth wipes (good thing I happened to have some in the diaper bag…) to get all of it cleaned up. We were a little late so we rescheduled our appointment for 6pm to give me time to hunt for another outfit for him.

I have to say I am thoroughly disgusted with the selection of boy’s clothing at most stores. If it doesn’t have sports logos and stupid crap like “LiL Slugger” plastered all over the front, it’s covered with camouflage or something hideous like that.  This is not to mention that the amount and variety of girl’s clothing available is easily twice, if not three times to what is offered for boys.  I looked at the girl stuff and there’s little dresses and skirt outfits and cute tops with shorts and pants. All of the boy clothing was the equivalent of what I would call “comfy clothes” like sweat suits, hoodies, graphic t shirts, drawstring pants. All of the overalls and pants they did have were covered with camouflage print. There was nothing there even close to what I want my son’s picture taken in! I was a little ticked, but decided to head out to a different store in search of some suitable picture worthy clothing. We checked Dillards, GapKids, The Children’s Place, Gymboree, and Macy’s before finally deciding to reschedule the damn picture appointment so I could come home and wash all of his clothes. I was very disappointed.

We’re going back tomorrow afternoon to try again. This time I’m not dressing him until we get there!

Thinking about Christmas

Since I live on the other side of the country from practically everyone I know it’s a big pain every year deciding what I want to give. I’m starting to think about what I want to send everyone for Christmas this year. Last year we sent a bunch of homemade truffles. They were ok, but I got reports that they were a little messy by the time they reached their destination.
This year I’m hoping to do something along the lines of food again since I like baking and that sort of thing. Cookies, candy,  homemade hot cocoa mix,  caramel corn, vanilla sugar for baking, maybe some flavored roasted nuts or some other kind of snack-y items are what I’m thinking of for this year.

Merry Christmas! You just gained 5 lbs! Enjoy!

I also found a site, Ladybug Digital Scrapbooking (scroll to about the middle and they’re called “5×7 Photo Cards and Mats”) that had free templates to make your own Christmas photo cards (along with a bunch of other free digi scrapbooking stuff! Yay!

zzz…Huh?

Last night I was up until almost 3am making a layout. I’ve never made one before so I was very excited about it (well, as excited as I could get that late at night). There is no real reason why I “had” to do this. I really should have gone to bed because Travis did not have a good night last night. We think he has some sort of tummy bug. It only seems to bother him at night when we are putting him to sleep. Finally Jeff drove him around for about 15 minutes and he crashed. He was up early this morning, like every morning and I knew that would happen and I stayed up anyway.

Anyway, I was really dragging this morning so I decided to do something I never do, which is have a cup of coffee. I normally don’t need it. The coffee I have in the house is always leftover from when someone comes to visit and our coffee maker makes only 2 cups. That’s just enough though. I mixed it with some hot cocoa mix because we’re out of milk. It’s pretty tasty actually.

I changed the theme to something called “Sunburn”. I really don’t like the dark colors, but I think it’s more appropriate than the “Banana Smoothie” that was on here before. The one I really want will have to wait until I can afford to upgrade and get a Custom CSS.

Hello there

Gawd does everyone have a blog now?

I’ve decided to take up the fine art of blogging again. Who knows if I will be successful…I’m running an experiment to see which blogware (blog site? blog software? I don’t know what you call it) I want to use. It’s a tossup between this and my old friend Blogger…so far I already like this better, but I haven’t made a new post to the old one yet so I can’t be sure.

A little about me…

I’m 32 and I live in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia with my husband, Jeff, my two kids Elyse (13) and Travis (6 months), and my cats, Callie and Vader. I work part time as a Wilton Method Instructor, which is just a fancy way of saying that I teach cake decorating. I lean slightly to the left (unless I’ve had my V8), I cloth diaper, breastfeed, babywear, I follow some (but not all) of the “tenants” of Attachment Parenting, and I think I overuse parentheses (but I really don’t know for sure).

Now I’m off to find a pretty orange templete…be back later, maybe.