Author Archives: Cindy

pierced

Posted on by

Back in mid-2006, when I was newly pregnant with Catie, my morning sickness was triggered by weird things. One of the things that made me feel like I was going to puke? Wearing earrings. I’d had pierced ears since the fourth grade, and suddenly that simple act of putting on earrings – like I’d done every day for 20 years – made me feel like I was going to hurl.

So I stopped wearing earrings while I was pregnant. And then I had a baby. And babies are kind of jerks about the whole grabbing-and-yanking thing. So I continued to not wear earrings.

Cut to present day: my ear holes (heh, I said “holes”) healed over a long time ago. I had been thinking about getting them re-pierced at some point, but just kept procrastinating about it.

Then my sister mentioned that she wanted to get matching earrings for all of her bridesmaids. So, time for procrastinating to end.

Only, the thought of going to see some teenager with an earring gun at my local mall’s Claire’s store sounded horrifying to my 37 year-old self.

Which is how, this past Saturday, I ended up in a place like this.

DoubleDeuce Tattoo Shop

My local neighborhood tattoo shop has a trained piercer on staff, and it’s a place where I knew I wouldn’t get hepatitis or lord-know-what-else. And the piercer guy (whose name I’ve totally forgotten) just happened to be my age. And cute. And flirty. And he told me I smelled good. And I had a little moment there where I vividly remembered how much I loved all of the tattooed bad boys when I was in my 20s.

Then, you know, I remembered that I’m a single mom of 2 kids in the suburbs and that isn’t my life anymore. And I also have an awesome (non-tattooed) boyfriend who flirts with me and tells me that I smell good all the time. So, whatever. It was a nice little visit down memory lane, then I gave the guy a nice tip for his work and left with my newly re-pierced ears.

re-pierced ears

I kind of dig it. And the best part, no teenagers with earring guns were involved at all.

beach weekend

Posted on by

One of the cool things about living in the Raleigh area is that you can get to the beach in about two hours or so. The downside, of course, is that we typically only make it out there once a year. But we’ve gone in 2009, 2010 – skipped 2011, because, you know, I had a baby and my marriage was disintegrating and all that stuff – but went again last year. It’s always fun.

This year, my parents and I took the girls to the beach and met up with my brother there. Of course, traveling with kids is exhausting, but overall it was a fun trip. And the kids were amazingly well-behaved. I was expecting the drive there and back to be far worse than it was, but they did great. Catie shared her iPad with Lucy and they listened to music together.

(Side note: Catie is obsessed with “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore, and has been for months. She plays it on repeat until you’re ready to rip out your ears. On a two-hour road trip, it gets old FAST. But, Lucy now loves it too and says, “Play da pop some tags song?” which is basically the cutest damn thing ever. So, fine, let’s hear it one more time, and Mommy will thank the stars that she remembered to double-check that she was downloading the bleeped version.)

As for the trip, I didn’t go as crazy with my camera as I normally do, but I did get a few good pictures while we were there.

Pop-Pop & Lucy check out the ocean
This was one of the few seconds that Lucy was smiling when she was close to the water. Unlike last year, she was not a fan of either the water or the wet sand. She kept saying, “No down! No down! I no like the water!”

my girls in the sand together
On the upside, Catie and Lucy did play together really nicely in the sand, during the few brief moments that Catie wasn’t out jumping waves in the ocean. (This picture makes me laugh only because man, that is a LOT of blonde hair right there.)

Exploring the beach

me, Lucy & my mom on the beach

Lucy’s favorite place was lying on the blankets where the sand and water couldn’t touch her. She did a lot of lounging around, pretending to nap and then laughing when she came up.

"I tired. I go night-night on da blanket."

Lucy on the beach
“Suh-pise! I not go night-night!” Oh, Luce. Good one. You almost had me thinking you were taking an unprompted nap for a second there. Right.

My dad, my brother, and I took turns holding Catie’s hands in the water while she jumped the waves. She went farther out into the ocean than she’s ever gone in her life, and she had a blast. At one point when I was with her, she screamed, “I COULD DO THIS ALL DAY!!!” Which is awesome. Except I can only jump waves for like, an hour, tops, before I’m completely worn out.

One of my favorite pictures I got of Catie was this shot of her walking to the water. And it reminded me of a picture I took of her almost four years ago. In 2009, when she was 2 years old, we were on the northern coast of Scotland, and I took a photo of her walking toward the ocean there. It’s one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken – I have an 8×10 of it framed in my living room.

Same girl. Same ocean. Opposite coasts. Opposite seasons. Four years apart.

Four years later, I got a similar picture of her on the opposite side of the same ocean. I love the contrasts and similarities – how she’s stepping forward on the same foot, but in a swimsuit instead of bundled up for winter. I may have to frame this one just to put it next to the picture from 2009.

We got home on Sunday, and my parents went back to their house to collapse. Chris came over, and he and I took the kids to a playground, and to a lake to catch some minnows. Both kids were completely exhausted and sound asleep by 8:15 on Sunday night, which has got to be some kind of personal record.

It’s probably a bad sign that I’m already craving more fried oysters, huh? Hmm.

first grade food issues

Posted on by

I may have mentioned this before, but my two kids are proof that a child’s eating habits have nothing whatsoever to do with parenting skills. Because I did everything the same with both of my kids, but where Lucy will eat pretty much everything I put in front of her, Catie barely eats anything at all.

She’s always been a picky eater. I remember taking pictures to document the moment, the first time she not only touched, but also fed herself, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She was two & a half at the time.

Catie loves her PB&J sandwiches
Let’s call this Exhibit A. Also note: the last time she ate at PB&J was well over two years ago. She insists they make her sick now. I don’t know why.

Another example: at 6 1/2 years old, Catie has never in her life tried a milkshake. Ever. Refuses to even try a sip. She says it “sounds gross.” And it’s not like I want her to drink milkshakes all day, but COME ON! Who doesn’t like milkshakes?? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, CHILD?!

So, you kind of get what I’m up against here, right?

I bought her a brownie even though I can't eat chocolate, sugar, or carbs. I want a prize for not going feral & shoving half of that thing in my face right now.
I like brownies too, but seriously, kid. Throw your mama a bone here.

I shrug off a lot of her food issues. There are so many other parenting battles — and maybe part of it is because I know so many other parents who wring their hands and freak out over every bite their child does/doesn’t consume — I figured that it’s best to try to leave it alone for the most part. My rule has been that as long as Catie continues to grow and thrive, she’s fine.

I mean, sure, I do the “you have to eat two bites of your vegetables” thing at dinner, but I generally try to make sure it isn’t a vegetable she hates, and it isn’t too big a problem. She doesn’t want to eat whatever entree I made for dinner, she wants chicken soup instead? Fine, whatever. Path of least resistance.

The main source of frustration with this has been trying to figure out Catie’s school lunches. She won’t eat the cafeteria lunch (and really, I’ve seen the food they serve there, and I honestly can’t blame her because that stuff looks nasty). And even though she wants me to pack her lunch, she has very specific rules about things she will and won’t eat.

For example, she won’t eat sandwiches. (Side note: she ate a ham sandwich a few weeks ago when my sister & her fiance were here, and even though she really liked it, she still says, “That was just once, I don’t want that in my lunch.”)

And she won’t eat anything that should be served warm, because it will be cold by the time lunch happens and there’s no way for her to warm it up. (So, no hot dogs, chicken nuggets, etc.)

And she won’t eat anything that she deems “messy.”

The list goes on and on.

Before she started first grade, we talked about the types of things I could put in her lunch box. There was a lot of back-and-forth haggling. Here’s what we came up with:

* At least 2 types of fruit (normally a tupperware of blueberries and a bag of pre-sliced apples).
* That applesauce in a pouch that you can squeeze to eat. (I think it’s kind of gross, but she loves it and it’s reasonably healthy, so whatever.)
* At least two different types of crackers. (Yesterday’s lunch was Cheez-Its – “only the white kind, Mom, not the orange ones” – and a ziploc of some Green Giant veggie chips. Oh, and some graham crackers too.)
* A fruit snack – I know, they’re garbage, but I also figured that if it put a few extra calories in her stomach, that couldn’t be too bad.
* A pouch of Keebler mini fudge stripe cookies (that’s supposed to be her dessert/treat).

So, it’s not the healthiest food in the world, but I figured that as long as she was eating breakfast and then eating vegetables and protein at dinner, it was good enough to get her through the day.

Yesterday, when I picked the girls up at daycare, Catie told me that she had been “on yellow” that day. For those of you not familiar with this system — if a child behaves well all day, they’re on green; if they get in trouble a little bit, they’re on yellow; and if they’re just all-out monstrous all day, they’re on red. Sort of a color/behavior chart.

I asked her why she was on yellow, and she said it was for “not listening.” This is the third time this has happened since she started first grade three weeks ago. (She was only on yellow twice during her entire kindergarten year, so clearly first grade is not off to a bang-up start.) The first two times, it was right after Dave went back to Seattle, and I figured that maybe she was acting out or reacting to her dad being gone, so I didn’t push the issue too much. I emailed her teacher to check in and let her know what’s up, but it seemed like sort of a non-issue.

This time, though, something about it worried me. It wasn’t until later, when I went to clean out her lunchbox and pack the next day’s food, that I figured out the problem.

Almost her entire lunch was untouched. She had eaten two things all day: the tupperware of blueberries, and the bag of mini fudge stripe cookies.

Well damn, NO WONDER she got in trouble for not listening, she was running on nothing but sugar and fumes.

I asked her why she didn’t eat the rest of her lunch, and she just said that she “didn’t want it.”

We talked about other foods I could put in there, but the only things she suggested were things like “donuts?” or “different cookies?” Ok, no, I think you’re missing the point here.

I tried to explain to her how our bodies need things to help them work, and that if she doesn’t eat some healthier foods, she won’t be able to grow strong muscles or run fast or do any of the stuff that she loves to do, because the junk food will make her feel too bad. She’s learned about this in both pre-K and kindergarten, so the concept isn’t unfamiliar to her, it’s just trying to make her understand how she has to change her behavior that’s difficult. She was like, “But the blueberries are healthy!” And, well, yes, they are, but you need more than just blueberries alone.

There was a lot of back and forth — and I admit, way more than my share of yelling, which I’m not proud of myself for doing. And finally I snapped.

I said, “Ok, that’s it. Tomorrow? I am putting 1/2 of a sandwich in your lunchbox. Only 1/2. And you have to eat at least 3 bites of it. And when you get home, the first thing I’m doing is checking your lunchbox. If you haven’t eaten at least 3 bites, you don’t get either the iPad or the DS all night.”

Threatening her screen time = hitting her where she lives.

Also, new rule: no more cookies in her lunchbox until she can earn them back with some other, healthier food choices.

She had cried when I was yelling at her about this, and I felt bad about it, so when I went to check on the girls after they were in bed, I kissed her on the forehead and said, “I love you, Catie-bug.”

She rolled onto her side, waved her arm to shoo me away, and said, “Ok.”

Honestly? I have no idea if this will work or not. But I don’t know what else to do.

26 months and counting

Posted on by

Ok, that is quite enough time for those photos to hang out at the top of my blog. Moving on!

So. Two year-olds. Can we talk about how hilarious they are? Because my god.

Hanging with my short friend. She's a ham for the camera.

My dad commented recently that Lucy seemed a lot grumpier and he didn’t know why. I said, “Well. She’s two.” I mean, that pretty much sums it up right there. She is agonizingly TWO about everything. The tantrums are epic, and the drama is high. But on the flip side, her good moods are so much more fun now that she has this huge (and I do mean HUGE) personality.

There are so many times I think, “Oh man, that’s adorable, I should write it down because she’s going to outgrow this soon and I know I’ll forget it.”

Lucy dinosaur ROOOOARRR!!
Case in point: the way she roars and says, “I monstah!” Yes, baby, you’re a monster.

When I tell Lucy that it’s time to do something she doesn’t want to do – like, say, take a bath or a nap – she’ll shake her head and say, “No nap! I happy!” Basically, “I happy” is her way of saying “I’m all good.” Although it has yet to work on me (sorry, kiddo, you still gotta take a nap), I love the way she says it.

And as terrible as this is, I have a hard time not laughing when she realizes it isn’t working and she starts to cry. “No naaaaaaap! I haaaaaaaappy!” Yes, you seem delighted. Now goodnight.

She also invented “the fall-down game,” in which someone counts to three and then she faceplants on purpose. Fortunately she only attempts this on soft surfaces like my bed. It could end badly on the hardwoods.


(I love the way her hair sort of fans out when she falls.)

Her imagination has exploded in the last couple of weeks and she now tells me the backstory on all of her toys and what they’re doing. She tells me how her panda bear is sleepy and needs to go night-night, then she tucks him in with a pillow and a blanket.

Unfortunately, sometimes her imaginary play acts out when I’m not paying attention. She’s been working on potty training at daycare (more on that subject some other time), so a lot of her playtime involves talk about poop and pee and potties and diapers. Last week, she decided that her Brobee (from Yo Gabba Gabba) doll needed to use the potty while I was unloading groceries. From what I can tell, she sat Brobee on the potty and then let go… yeah. She came running down the hall to the kitchen, screaming, “Oh no! Bwobee wet! Bwobee wet!” There was a trail of water from Brobee that led straight back to the toilet. Awesome. Brobee needed to take a “special bath” in the washing machine with some Oxy Clean after that. Yuck.

It’s a lot funnier when she holds up her Barbie doll and says, “Bahbie pooped! I change her diapuh!” And then she demands a folded kleenex for a makeshift Barbie diaper. That’s pretty awesome. Although poor Barbie has a history of having bathroom-related incidents at our house.

Lucy apparently wants to potty train her friends. (Poor Barbie.)

Barbie’s having a rough time, man.

She still remains one of the easiest children to feed I’ve ever encountered. Catie is such an insanely picky eater and always has been. (Catie refuses to eat sandwiches, y’all. Sandwiches. WTF?) Lucy, on the other hand, will eat most anything that you put in front of her. The other day when we got up, I asked her what she wanted for breakfast. She went to the pantry and pulled out a can of green peas.

Me: “You want peas for breakfast?”
Her: “YAH!”

Lucy asked for green peas for breakfast. And she's eating them. #weirdo

Whatever, man, she ate them. No complaints here.

Chris and I took the kids to see “Despicable Me 2” a few weeks ago, and we’ve had a running joke since then that Lucy talks a lot like a minion. There’s a decipherable word here and there, but mostly a lot of gibberish. It seems like most toddlers have their own unique dialect, and it just takes a while to tune your ear to understand them. But either way, Lucy is pretty good at getting her point across, even when we don’t pick up on every word she’s saying.

I told her to show me a sad face. This is what I got.

She still doesn’t sleep through the night, but we’ve gotten things down to a manageable form of torture: I get Lucy settled to sleep in her own bed, and later, when I go to bed, I take an insulated lunch bag with an ice pack and a sippy cup of milk in it. Sometime around 4 a.m. or so, Lucy comes into my room and climbs into bed with me. (I can’t pick her up right now because I’m not supposed to lift anything heavier than 5 pounds for the first month post-surgery, so I put a step-stool next to my bed, and she can boost herself up with that). She snuggles up against me and I give her the cup of milk from the lunch bag, she drinks it down, and we both go back to sleep until my alarm goes off. It’s certainly not ideal, I would love it if she would just stay in her own bed all night, but for now, it works ok.

Side note: for the past few weeks, Chris has been spending more nights at my house than not, so it’s now become a total non-event for the kids to wake up with him here. When Lucy comes in during the night, she snuggles up in between us like it’s nothing. I have to say, waking up and finding her with her little arm across his neck and both of them quietly sleeping away? Kind of kills me with how sweet it is.

Me and my Lucy girl

So, even though she has her moments of being aggravating as all hell, she’s still pretty awesome. I think I might keep her around.

the “after” pic

Posted on by

I wasn’t going to write anything else about my boobs, because you know: this is starting to get a little weird. But, a LOT of people have asked about what my boobs look like now after the surgery.

Since I’m not going to post naked pictures of myself on the Internet (never ever, no no no), this will have to suffice for all of y’all who were curious.

Before:
Before Boobs

After:
After Boobs
Oh hello, awkwardly placed drawstring on my sweatpants, and glass of iced tea (which was on the bathroom counter & looks like it’s on top of my ass). Clearly I have crafted the fine art of the Boob Selfie over here.

They’re still pretty swollen and there’s a lot more “upper boob” (not sure what else to call it) than I’d like, but that’s supposed to settle down eventually so they’ll look more natural. But I’m really, really happy with them overall.

One brief moment of panic? The corner of one of my incisions had been hurting for a few days, and when I finally took the steri-strips off, I saw that it was red and looked possibly infected. I talked with the doctor and she said it’s something they see often. They stitch you up with a clear thread that’s supposed to just disintegrate and be absorbed by your body, but sometimes where the incision ends (where the thread is knotted, so there’s more of it), your body will think it’s a foreign object and try to, um, push it out. And it’ll get stuck. And possibly infected. And it hurts like a sonofabitch.

Let me just tell you that handing Chris a pair of sterilized tweezers and closing my eyes while he took care of it? Pretty much embodies my definition of “taking the intimacy in your relationship to the next level.” He’ll never see me poop on a delivery table (thank God for that), and I sincerely hope that this is as gross as it ever gets.

(He was totally calm about it. I was trying to fix it myself with a magnifying mirror, and he passed by the bathroom and was like, “Want some help with that?” And this was not exactly a “whee, boobies!” kind of moment, since it involved forcibly removing a foreign object from my body. But it takes a lot to rattle the man, I have to give him credit for that.)

Ok, I think that’s it for the boob chapter. Now back to boring blog posts about my kids and my boyfriend and all of that normal stuff.

a week later

Posted on by

I don’t know exactly how much I want to get into the whole boob job recovery thing. Basically: I’m fine. I got my first shower on Saturday, and it was blissful.

As for my first impression of the new boobs? I knew they’d be swollen and higher than where they’re going to end up, but the first image that popped into my head upon seeing them: my boobs were shaped like Snoopy posing as a vulture.

vulture

It was a little freaky. But they’re starting to settle down now, and I had my one-week follow-up appointment with my plastic surgeon today. I’m following my doctor’s orders on not lifting anything heavy for the next few weeks and doing this whole boob massage thing to make sure no scar tissue forms around the implants (which causes hard boobs, and nobody wants hard boobs).

I also got to switch from the post-op surgical compression bra to a regular sports bra today, and my skin almost wept with relief. The elastic on that compression bra has been the worst part of my recovery. It rubbed my skin raw. Awful.

Not much else to report, other than the fact that I got a sinus infection immediately after surgery, because really? If you’ve just had your pectoral muscles sliced open? You totally want to do a lot of coughing and sneezing.

Dave is still in town, and he has Catie and Lucy with him – I’ve only seen them once in the past week, and I miss them like crazy. Being a single mom is exhausting, no doubt, but my life feels all weirdly thrown off when they aren’t here causing havoc. I’m grateful that Dave has been here so I could have this time to recover, but man, I can’t wait to squeeze their faces.

Sooooo…. yeah. I’m fine, the boobs are good, I miss my kids, I wish I could stop coughing. That’s about it, really. How are you?

boob jobbed

Posted on by

So, the boob job? That was yesterday.

And I am… kind of ok? I think? I was expecting it to be a lot worse, so I guess that’s a good sign.

Thursday morning, Chris took me to the plastic surgeon’s office. They have an in-office surgical suite, no hospital stay required. Once the nurses brought me back, Chris left and went to work – his office is only a few miles from the doctor’s office, so the plan was that they’d call him while I was in recovery, he’d come collect me, get me settled at home, and my mom would come over to baby-sit me for the afternoon.

Most times that I’ve had some kind of procedure done, it’s always the waiting part that’s the worst. But Dr. Diehl (who I love, btw) only schedules one patient at a time, so there’s no waiting around. There were four women in the surgical suite: Dr. Diehl, her nurse, the anesthesiologist, and her assistant. And me (so I guess that makes five total). And that’s it. They got me changed into a gown, gave a pee sample (no, really, I swear I’m totally not pregnant), and started my IV.

I talked with Dr. Diehl about how we had discussed the size I wanted, but I was afraid of them being too big, so I asked her to use her judgment and go smaller if necessary because (in my oh-so-classy way of phrasing it), “I don’t want stripper boobs.” She said there would be four women in the OR, and that while I was still unconscious, she’d prop me up and everyone would give their opinion on whether or not they were the right size, evenly matched, needed a little tweaking, etc. Which sounds totally weird, but it was oddly reassuring. It’s not a case of “this size implant, shove it in, stitch up, done,” it’s more about everyone evaluating and giving their honest opinion on what would look best on my body. That made me calmer.

As soon as the IV was finished, I walked into the operating room and got myself settled on the table. I was talking with them about something – I don’t remember what – and I turned to the anesthesiologist and said, “Oh, you gave me the sleepy drugs, didn’t you? I can feel that.” That’s the last thing I remember.

The next thing I remember was Chris walking into the recovery room, which I thought was weird. I had assumed they’d wait for me to wake up before they called him, and it would take him at least 15 minutes to get there. Apparently they called him as soon as I was done, so he was there when I woke up. Which was nice. They gave him all of my stuff and told him to pull his car up to the front door, while they got me into a wheelchair.

The nurse asked if I needed anything, and I made an offhand comment about, “Man, I really want an iced tea.” (Mostly I wanted something cold on my throat after anesthesia, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t get a caffeine-withdrawal headache.) When she was helping Chris get me into the car, she told him that I wanted an iced tea and gave him directions to the nearest fast food drive-thru where he could get one for me. (And he did, because he’s a good egg.)

I got home, crawled in bed, and slept for the next four hours. Eventually my mom came up to check on me and to try to get me to eat something. I got up and felt… sort of ok after that.

Chris came back after he finished work, and seriously, I couldn’t ask for a better nurse. He got me Chinese food for dinner (because that’s what I was craving), he cleaned the kitchen, he took out the trash and recycling, and he even scooped the cat’s litter box for me. Seriously, y’all, he’s good. (He also snuggled up with me on the couch and petted my hair while we watched TV, but he does that kind of thing regardless of whether or not I’ve just had surgery.)

When we went to bed, he made me promise that I’d wake him up if I needed to get up to pee, because he didn’t want me to try to get out of bed by myself. I initially scoffed at this (I am independent! I need no man’s help to use the bathroom!), but in the end, I did wake him up, partially because it’s hard to hoist yourself out of bed without using your arms (can’t push off anything, might strain the pectoral muscles), and also because painkillers make me dizzy and I was afraid of falling.

Today is ok. I was in a lot of discomfort when I woke up, but I’ve found that I feel better when I’m up and about – I think lying in bed makes the swelling and soreness worse. So I’m trying to stay sitting up as much as I can. And I’m regularly putting bags of frozen peas on my chest to help (which is weird). But I’m mostly ok.

And that’s it, I guess. Sorry for this being kind of long and rambly, but I’m writing it under the influence of Percoset, so there’s that.

P.S. I don’t have much to report on the results yet. I’m in a post-op surgical compression bra, and so far I’ve only unzipped it a little bit to peek. I haven’t really seen the new rack, but what I’ve seen so far is impressive. I get to take a shower tomorrow, so I’ll see the new girls in all their glory then.