Category Archives: NaBloPoMo

NaBloPoMo Day 11: errr…

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This is when the whole NaBloPoMo thing gets dull, because Sundays are our lazy day, so I have basically nothing to write about. A few highlights:

* Cate’s ear infection seems to be better, but she keeps doing this weird gesture where she sort of rubs her ear against her upper arm, and I wonder if it’s still bothering her. Her antibiotics run out tomorrow, so I may take her back to the pediatrician for a quick check to see if she’s all better. Meanwhile, her nose is still a little faucet. And man, she hates it when I try to wipe her boogers away. She’ll squirm and try to hide her face anywhere so I can’t reach her. Nice try, kid. Here’s a tip: mama is bigger than you and she can always get to your nose if she tries hard enough.

* My cold is still going strong. I almost lost my voice entirely for a couple of days there. It seems a little better today, but instead I have a really horrible cough. I’m not sure which is worse. (Dave, for the record, seems to be fine, although he keeps talking about his “head cold.” Whatever, dude. I’ve heard nary a sniffle from the man, I think he’s just playing for sympathy.)

* This weekend I’ve watched both “The Good German” and “The Good Shepherd.” I liked them both – or rather, I liked what I saw of them. It’s kind of hard to focus on a movie when you’re also playing with a 9 month-old on the living room floor at the same time. I suppose that’s why I’ve only seen a handful of movies since Cate was born. My concentration is shot. The massive doses of Sudafed probably don’t help, either.

NaBloPoMo Day 10: boring stuff about my house

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I don’t know if I’ve written about the saga of our driveway and how much it torments my very soul. A couple of years ago, Dave and his brother (well, mostly his brother) tore up our existing driveway because they had some grand design scheme in mind, which, sadly, never happened. This seems to be the story of a lot of home improvement projects around here: a great idea is born, the project begins, and then it sits in a half-finished state for the rest of our lives.

So, thanks to Dave and my brother-in-law, a mere few days before our wedding, our driveway became a giant gravel pit. I was very upset about it since we were having our rehearsal dinner at our house, and it didn’t exactly make a grand first impression on our friends and family, most of whom were seeing our house for the first time.

And, that’s how our driveway has been ever since. Only worse, because Dave and I haven’t exactly done a bang-up job of maintaining the gravel, so it has a lot of weeds growing up through it, and it’s become increasingly difficult to determine exactly where the driveway ends and the yard begins. It just looks, well, white trash. (My grandmother would be appalled that I used that expression, since you’re never supposed to refer to people as trash, but I think in this case, since I’m referring to myself, it’s probably ok.)

I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate our driveway. It bothers me every time I turn in and drive over those stupid gravel potholes, and then I have to step over all the weeds… ugh. It hurts me just a tiny bit every time. I’m not sure if Dave is as bothered by it as I am, but it’s been driving me insane for the past 2 1/2 years.

However. Today is the glorious day that my being re-employed has paid off, because our driveway is getting paved! I didn’t even mind that the guys showed up at 7:30 in the morning and woke us all up. Who cares? This is like Christmas in November for me. So far all they’ve done is re-gravel and grade it out so that it’s all flat, and I’m already in love with it. I can’t wait to see how it’ll look when it’s finished. We’re even going to have a sidewalk that goes around the side of the house to our deck. Huzzah!

I know this is probably not interesting to anyone except me, but it’s totally made my weekend. And maybe now I won’t be embarassed to invite people over to our house anymore.

NaBloPoMo Day 9: back to the cute baby pictures

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Thanks, everybody, for your comments and emails. I really appreciate all of the support, and I know that with all of the prayers and good vibes and everything that she has going for her, my mom is going to be in tip-top shape in no time.

And now, to get the mood back on track: who needs a dinky pink breast cancer ribbon when you have a baby in a pink velour track suit?

Eat your heart out, Yoplait!

NaBloPoMo Day 7: waiting for the other shoe to drop

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I don’t really want to be blogging today. I got some news that’s kind of knocked me for a loop, and I’ll write about it as soon as I figure out how to process it and put it to words. Right now I’m just sort of… blank. Maybe that’ll be tomorrow’s post, maybe this weekend, I don’t know.

Moving on: I just realized that it was exactly one year ago today that Dave and I spent the night in a hotel because all roads leading to our town were flooded and we couldn’t get home. Luckily, we’ve had no such weather-related disasters this year, but I’m crossing my fingers because I know we’re coming up on that time of year, so I’m just waiting for something bad to happen. Hopefully this winter we won’t have anything resembling the biblical plagues that we endured last year.

Yeah, that’s all I got today. Sorry. More tomorrow.

NaBloPoMo Day 6: spacey

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Nothing new here – we’re all sick and miserable, although I sent Cate to daycare today anyway, because she’s been on antibiotics since Saturday, so there’s no way she’s contagious. And besides that, I am way behind on work since I got absolutely nothing done yesterday. (Poor kiddo is super-clingy when she’s sick, I could hardly set her down all day.)

This is a post that I started last week and meant to finish, before the Plague settled on our house. Here are just a few of the ways in which I totally spaced out this last week.

* Our nighttime ritual is that I give Cate a bath, and then Dave gives her a bottle and settles her to sleep while I take a shower. (I’m a nighttime showerer. Morning showers are nice, but I prefer feeling like I’m all squeaky clean when I get in bed.) So we did that, I came down and took the baby off of Dave, put her in her crib, then I finished cleaning the kitchen, mixed up a pitcher of formula, all those typical nightly rituals that you do. By the time I headed up to bed, my hair was half-dry, and I noticed that it felt… wrong. Sort of greasy and clumpy. I then realized that I had completely forgotten to shampoo my hair. I had used the conditioner, but no shampoo. I hopped back in the shower and re-washed my hair before I crashed for the night. Brilliant.

* I accidentally shoplifted two cases of soda from the grocery store. The big 24-packs. I actually feel really bad about that one because I like the check-out ladies at my Safeway and I don’t want them to get in trouble. Normally I point it out if I have anything on the bottom of the cart, but I was distracted – Cate was riding in the cart and trying to climb up me, so I was trying to keep her happy while also preventing her from pulling my shirt down and showing the entire store my bra. And I was trying to get all of my other groceries loaded onto the belt, and get my debit card info run through the thingie, blah blah blah. So the checkout lady didn’t notice, and neither did I. I thought about it when I got home, checked the receipt, and nope, no sodas. Whoops. Dave pointed out that we spend enough money there every week that they can spot us a couple of free sodas, and I’m sure that he’s probably right, but I still feel guilty.

* I went to pick Cate up at daycare and forgot her carseat. Twice. Both incidents happened on days when Dave had dropped her off in the morning, so the carseat was still in his car, and I meant to transfer it to mine before I left the house, I just sort of spaced out and forgot. The first time, I realized it when I was almost there, and had to turn around and head back home to retrieve it. The second time, I was still on our street when Dave called my cell phone to remind me. Whoops.

Of course, if anything like that happens this week, I can blame it on the decongestants. Last week I just seemed to have several of those random brain-dead days in a row. Still don’t know why, but hopefully I’ll be back to my normal, semi-coherent self after this cold passes.

NaBloPoMo Day 5: blarrcchhh

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Dave and I both seem to have caught Cate’s cold. I suppose it was inevitable, what with the baby snot flying everywhere all over the house. And my guess is that it isn’t as bad for us, since we’re adults and have some basic comfort measures at our disposal – like, we can blow our own noses, and we’re both pretty comfortable pushing the recommended Sudafed dosage to its absolute limits.

Still, if this is what Cate has felt like over the past few days, I’m really glad we opted to take her to the doctor on Saturday rather than ride it out until today. Poor kiddo, it’s pretty miserable.

And now I’m going to try to actually get some work done, since Cate is finally taking a nap. More tomorrow.

NaBloPoMo Day 4: still not great

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Cate appears to be a little better today, although it’s hard to tell because she’s been asleep for most of it. The poor kiddo is just wiped out – she went down for her third nap of the day around 2:30 this afternoon and she’s still out. And that’s after sleeping for almost twelve hours last night. (She woke up once, for about a half hour at 4:30 in the morning, but quickly went back to sleep.)

She still acts like she’s feeling miserable – just generally cranky and fussy. But the river of snot seems to be drying up, and she can drink a bottle without stopping to gulp for air every few seconds, so I’m going to call that an improvement. And the amoxicillin-induced explo-poops are back, so I’m guessing it must be back in her system. I’m trying to do the BRAT and yogurt diet, but she’s been very clingy and doesn’t want to sit in her high chair for too long, so that’s been a challenge.

I’m relieved she doesn’t have daycare tomorrow, since I’m sure I wouldn’t want to send her. Hopefully by Tuesday she’ll be feeling normal enough that it won’t be an issue.

I’d write more, but she just woke up and started howling, so I’d better go fetch her from Dave.