on Valentine's Day

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Cindy

I was in a little bit of a funk yesterday.

This is the first Valentine’s Day that I’ve been single since 2004. Eight years is a pretty long time.

Also, exactly one year ago (on Valentine’s Day eve) was when Dave first announced that he wanted to split up. I was pregnant with Lucy at the time. So I guess you could say that I now have sort of a sour taste in my mouth about Valentine’s Day. It was never a huge deal to me to begin with, really, but that’s a pretty bad association to have with this particular holiday.

I completely forgot about the Valentine’s Day party at daycare today, so I ended up filling out Catie’s Valentine’s Day cards for her at 10 p.m., after both girls were in bed. Those kids are getting the most slapdash, thrown-together Valentine’s Day treats ever. Seriously, I used Ziploc sandwich bags filled with candy and stickers with the kids’ names on them. I figured that when you’re 4 or 5 years old, you only really care about the candy, not the card, right?

Still, that seems like the lamest Valentine’s Day goodie bag ever. It felt like a huge “mom FAIL” moment, even though I know Catie doesn’t care.

So, yeah, I was bumming pretty hard yesterday.

Then I got some messages from Guy #3. I need to call him something else because the other two guys are really out of the picture now. Oh screw it, his name is Matt. I’m not posting his last name, and there are enough Matts and Matthews in the world that I doubt anyone searching for him is going to stumble upon this blog post by accident.

So, yeah, emails from Matt. He managed to steam up my inbox pretty well. (Note: that is not a euphemism. He’s still in another time zone.) My day was brightened up considerably, as pathetic as that may sound.

And then, this morning, Catie brought me a flower for Valentine’s Day. Sure, it was a fake flower that we already had in the house, but still. I thought that was really sweet.

So, you know, maybe it’s not so bad after all.

Still…

Sigh. Yeah. Sad but true.

finding my flirt

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Cindy

So.

Ok.

This is kind of a weird topic for me to bring up, but I use my blog as a place to kind of vent whatever is on my mind, and this seems to be taking up an awful lot of my brainspace lately, so I thought maybe writing through it might help me figure some things out.

(Also, Dad? If by chance you’re looking at my blog today, stop reading now. Really. I don’t want to hear it.)

So, lately I’ve been doing a little… um… flirting.

This all started innocently enough. I have a guy friend from college who I always had a crush on, but for one reason or another, we never dated. We’ve stayed in touch off and on through the years, but in the last month or so, our texts have suddenly taken a turn for the steamy. (As in, “Damn, you text your mama with those fingers?”) Funny, considering I’ve never even kissed the guy outside of a peck on New Year’s Eve.

But, you know, he lives in another state, so it’s not like anything is ever going to happen.

Then there was another guy who I dated (very) briefly, who dropped me an email just to say he heard I was getting divorced, he’s divorced too, he’s been thinking about me… which, ok. It was a random, but totally G-rated exchange. Still, the “I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately” was flattering and nice, and it didn’t come off as creepy, which I appreciate.

Then, there’s Guy #3, who, man, where do I start? We were never really a couple. I knew him when I lived in Wisconsin. I hung out with a bunch of girls there and we all had a crush on this one guy at some point. He was gorgeous, and had absolutely no clue how cute he was. (Which, seriously, is an awesome trait to have if you’re a good-looking guy. Guys who know they’re hot? Tend to be a bit on the douche-y side.)

There is no possible way to explain this and sound like anything less than a total slut, but basically: we never dated, we just fooled around a lot. Like, I don’t think we ever had dinner or saw a movie together or anything. It was just casual and fun.

What can I say? I enjoyed my 20s.

So, Guy #3 (as I’ll call him because I probably shouldn’t be posting his name on the Internet) found me on Facebook a couple of weeks ago and messaged me. Turns out he’s also in the middle of a divorce. We had some friendly “what have you been up to for the past decade?” emails. Then he started emailing me with stuff like, “Hey, remember the time we [fill in the blank with something completely X-rated that I am not about to write here]?” And the emails are… well, they’re pretty hot, I have to say.

The thing is, none of these three guys even live in the same time zone as me, nor are any of them really suitable long-term matches for me. And besides that, I absolutely do not want a relationship right now at all. I have way too much on my plate to deal with. It wouldn’t be fair to drag some innocent bystander into the chaos vortex that is my life at the moment. And it would be absolutely unfair to my girls.

Oh, and let’s not forget that thanks to ridiculously stupid North Carolina divorce laws, I can’t even file for divorce until August, so I’m still technically married for the time being.

So, nothing is gonna happen. I mean, outside of harmless flirting with guys who are all at least 1,000 miles away in one direction or another.

But, what’s interesting (to me) about all of this, is that fairly recently, I would’ve sworn on a stack of Bibles that I never wanted to have sex again. And something about these exchanges lately has reignited some little spark in me that I didn’t think I had anymore.

Obviously, I’m not going to act on anything anytime soon, but it’s got me thinking about the idea of “Someday.” I’ve been so caught up in trying to get through my day-to-day life, that I hadn’t really thought about the future at all. And I don’t just mean sex (although yes, that would be lovely, please and thank you). I mean the whole relationship thing. The idea that I might be willing to give men another chance is a pretty new concept for me.

So, yeah. That’s kind of weird, huh?

Just because

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Cindy

Once again, I mention that Lucy seems fine in one blog post, so it’s pretty much inevitable that we’d end up at Urgent Care over the weekend, right?

Lucy had been acting a little out of character (grumpy, tired, etc.). Then today, I noticed her pulling on her ears, which is basically THE BIGGEST, REDDEST FLAG EVER.

So, off to Urgent Care we went.

Turns out, filming the baby with an iPhone is a good way to keep her distracted while waiting for a doctor.

The doctor said her ears don’t look infected, but her sinuses are so infected that her ears were clogged (sort of like the airplane ear-popping effect, but for poor Lucy, it was all the time), so now she’s on an antibiotic.

In case you were keeping track, yes, that now makes all three of us on antibiotics.

I’m giving the cats the side-eye. They better not get any ideas. I’m getting sick of shoving syringes in people’s mouths up in here.

Friday notes

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Cindy

I feel like every blog post lately is either “we’re all dying from The Snot Crud OMG send help aaaaiiiieeee….”, or it’s some version of “hey, we survived and I think we’re all better now.”

As for today: I don’t know. I suddenly got waaaaay worse and had to go back to the doctor’s office, and Catie has an ear infection, so at the moment, we’re both on antibiotics. I’m hoping we can knock this out once and for all.

Lucy seems ok for now. She’s got the eternal case of Drippy Nose, but she doesn’t seem terribly bothered by it, she’s still happy and funny and sleeping well.

(Oh man, can I tell you about the sleep? I mean, no, I know I can’t tell you about the sleep because that will jinx it and she’ll go back to waking up every 3 hours. But suffice to say: God bless sleep training. We seem to have hit some sweet spot of sleep, and I know it’s likely temporary and we’ll have to start over the next time she gets sick, or a new tooth comes in, or she hits some other developmental milestone. But for now, it’s so, so good, y’all.)

Maybe this makes me a terrible mother, because you know, unconditional love and all that. But I find her much cuter when she lets me sleep at night.

As for crawling – yes, Lucy is crawling, kind of. She gets herself into a yoga downward-facing dog pose on her hands and tippy-toes, then can’t seem to figure out what to do next, and she gets really mad about that. Sometimes she’ll kind of throw a leg out sideways and scoot like a crab. I’ve seen her do a normal hands-and-knees forward crawl only a handful of times. So, unlike Catie, who started crawling one day and then never stopped crawling, Lucy seems to be taking her own sweet time with this.

Or, you know, maybe Lucy just prefers to sit on the floor and scream for me to come pick her up. It certainly seems like it some days.

————————————————————————————

A couple of other random Lucy developments:
1. Probably because Catie and I have been sick so much, Lucy has developed a fake cough. Seriously. If I cough, she smiles and echoes me, like it’s a game. It’s both cute and pathetic at the same time. How many times do you have to cough in front of your baby before they learn this? APPARENTLY A MILLION COUGHS. WHICH I HAVE DONE.
2. She’s started waving bye-bye and saying “ah-bah,” sort of like bye-bye. The only problem is that she seems to have no idea of the appropriate context of how or when to use this. She says bye-bye to the bathtub, to her toys, to the TV, to her own shadow. I think she just likes doing it over and over.
3. According to her teacher at daycare, she learned to say “uh-oh,” but I have yet to get her to repeat that one at home. The few times I’ve tried saying “uh-oh” in front of her to see if she’ll parrot it back to me, she just laughs at me like I’m hilarious. So, who knows.

————————————————————————————

Unrelated to anything: I’m in the process of registering Catie for kindergarten. I just… man. That’ll be a whole other post someday, when I come up with the words to adequately express my feelings about it. For now, I think “overwhelming” about sums it up.

Random car conversations with Catie

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Cindy

Since we are still felled by the Puking Plague here, I thought I’d share a random funny that happened a couple of weeks ago that I meant to write about at the time.

Scene: Driving along, classic rock radio station is on, because everything else is playing commercials. “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger comes on, which is one of those random guilty pleasure “there’s no reason on earth that I should like this, but I kinda love it” songs.

Catie: Hey, I know who this is singing this!

Me: You do?

Catie: Yeah, it’s the same guy who sings [breaking into song], “You better be hooooome soooooon.”

Me: Uhh. No, sweetie. That song is sung by a guy named Neil…

Catie, interrupting: Hey, there’s a kid named Neil at my school!

Me:… Ok. And this song is by a guy named Bob Seger.

Catie, disappointed: Oh. There’s no Bob Seger at my school.

Right. Well. Thank God for that.

birthday party post-mortem

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Cindy

Catie’s birthday party was on Saturday at a bounce house place called Monkey Joe’s. She’d been to birthday parties there before, and was so excited to have her own party there.

[Note that unlike when she turned two and freaked the hell out at the Chick-Fil-A cow, she is no longer scared of adults in giant mascot costumes.]

This year, Catie asked for a cake “with dinosaurs on it.” I learned from last year’s birthday party that most grocery stores don’t do custom artwork, so rather than stressing about it, I grabbed a bag of little plastic dinosaurs to use as cake toppers, and POOF! Dinosaur birthday cake!

She absolutely loved it.

Lucy had a pretty good time at the party too. She got to ride around on both me and her Pop-Pop…

… and she got to roll around on a floor that was covered in oh my god I don’t even want to know so don’t make me think about it.

(See that spot on my jeans? That’s where Lucy had been chewing on my leg moments earlier. Nice, kid.)

The kids ran around and bounced their little hearts out for a couple of hours, then had pizza and birthday cake. Then there were presents, and that was about it. Pretty basic, but so nice to not have to deal with clean-up and all of that other stuff that usually goes with birthday parties.

The last thing Catie got to do was the prize grab. She had seen her friends do this before, and she was absolutely terrified of it, but I explained that if she didn’t do it, she wouldn’t get a prize.

She was so serious and obviously scared, but so ABSOLUTELY DETERMINED that she was going to get her damn prize, no matter what. So into the giant scary ticket grab booth she went.

She ended up getting enough in tickets for two new dinosaur toys, so you know, WORTH IT. At least in her mind.

Overall, she had a fantastic party.

(The whole set of pics is here.)

——————————————————————————————
Then, there was the rest of the weekend.

Warning: things go quickly downhill from here.

Saturday night, we were all tired from the party. My brother Chris & my sister Tracy were both staying at my house for the weekend (they drove over from Charlotte for the party). Catie’s birthday present from Tracy had been a couple of new sets of princess pajamas, and Catie wanted to wear her new Little Mermaid PJs. It didn’t even occur to me that I needed to wash them first.

At bedtime, Tracy noticed that Catie was really itchy and scratching herself all over. She called me to check her out. My first thought was dry skin – Catie gets eczema in the winter sometimes. So I took her into the bathroom and slathered her with almond oil, which is mild and odorless and normally makes her skin feel better.

(Here’s a tip in case you hadn’t guessed: that was my major mistake. I basically took whatever was in the pajamas that had irritated her skin, and I sealed it to her. Which made things go way worse.)

The next thing I knew, Catie was screaming her head off that her skin was burning. She started to hyperventilate and have a panic attack. We went into my bathroom because she was freaking out so much I was afraid she was going to make herself vomit. I couldn’t calm her down, and my brain just kept thinking that she was having some kind of major allergic reaction to something, and I was worried about her asthma and breathing, so I yelled for my brother to call 911.

The EMTs got there within minutes, and were absolutely amazing. They checked her oxygen SATs (normal) and her lungs (all clear), and guessed that it was probably contact dermatitis from the pajamas. Since they gave her the all-clear on her breathing, we opted to not take Catie to the hospital, and instead I gave her a bath and tried to wash everything off of her skin, then gave her all new clean clothes to wear. Once I got her back in bed, she was asleep in minutes. The poor kid was exhausted (it was almost 11 p.m. by the time this was all finished).

On the plus side: Lucy slept through all of this. Even Catie’s screaming. So that was nice. But still? Yeah, that sucked.

——————————————————————————————

Sunday, I sent both girls to hang out with Dave for the day. That seemed pretty uneventful. They had fun, and came home in the evening around dinnertime. We did the bedtime routine, yadda yadda. Normal as usual.

Around 1 a.m., I heard Catie scream, “MOMMY!!!” It was not a normal “I had a bad dream and want to get in your bed” yell, it was… THAT scream. The kind that all parents (or at least all moms) know. The “something really bad is happening” scream. I was out of bed and across the hall before I even opened my eyes all the way.

I ran into Catie’s room just in time to see her vomit all over her bed. Faaaaabulous.

She spent the rest of the night in my bed (she managed to puke into a bowl every other time except once, which required me to change the sheets on my bed at 4 a.m. Let me tell you, I am not a fan of that).

She doesn’t have a fever, so my guess is that it’s some stomach virus she picked up from the germ-factories that are those bounce houses. (She didn’t eat anything unusual, so it’s my best guess. A 24-48 hour incubation period is normal for these things.)

——————————————————————————————

Both girls are with my parents today. My mom called a little while ago to tell me that Catie is keeping down tiny sips of Sprite, and that Lucy is officially crawling as of this morning. So, there you go. I’m sad I missed that milestone of Lucy’s, but glad that my parents and Catie got to see it.

To sum up: Hooray for birthday parties and baby milestones. However, illnesses and 911 calls and all that nonsense? Can suck it.

60 months

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Cindy

Dear Catie,

Today, you are five years old.

Actually, you informed me this morning that today is not your birthday, because you said that it’s stupid that your party is not on the same day as your actual birthday. I can’t really argue with that logic, but today is your real birthday. Get used to the fact that your birthday will not always fall on a weekend. Just because you were born on a Saturday afternoon doesn’t mean that’s when your birthday will always be.

This was probably the hardest year of your life so far, and my hope is that it’s the hardest one you’ll ever have to face in your life. You became a big sister, your dad and I separated, and we moved to a new house – all in the span of six months. The experience almost broke me, so I cannot imagine how hard it was for you. I am so sorry for that. I don’t even know how I’ll begin to explain it all to you when you’re older and start to ask questions.

Overall, though, I have to say that you’ve handled everything phenomenally well.

Sometimes I worry that I put too much on you. Since it’s just the three of us now, I ask you to help out with a lot of things. Sometimes I’ll catch myself starting to ask you to do something, and I’ll hold back. I don’t want you to grow up feeling like you didn’t get to have a childhood because you had to be Mommy’s Helper all the time. I want you to be a kid.

When you get upset with me, you sometimes yell that you don’t want to be a big sister anymore. My response to that is always the same: “You don’t have to be a big sister. You just have to be Catie.” Because, baby girl? Let me tell you, Catie is freaking awesome.

I have to say that watching your relationship develop with Lucy has been one of the greatest joys of my life. I was worried before she was born, because you were never interested in babies before we had one of our own. But you are so sweet and nurturing with her, it’s amazing to witness.

Look, you even make the same facial expressions. Freaky, right?

And oh, babe, the way your sister loves you. She lights up every time you walk in the room. You are hands-down her favorite person ever.

(I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to get away with calling her “Boopy” forever, though. It’s cute now when she’s a baby, but I’m warning you now, she’s going to get mad about that nickname someday.)

You are an absolute joy, and I cannot begin to tell you how thankful I am that I get to be your mama.

Happy birthday, my sweet Catie-bug. I love you to the moon and back.

Love,
Mommy

PooBou.com

Mom. Stepmom. Nerd. Feminist. Pretty good wife. Outstanding ex-wife. I try to keep it light and funny. I'm not always successful.

Author Archives: Cindy

on Valentine's Day

finding my flirt

Just because

Friday notes

Random car conversations with Catie

birthday party post-mortem

60 months

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