Since I’ve been *ahem* dead to the blog for, oh, 2 weeks now, I figured I would play catchup, because there has been stuff happening in this household, yeah! I wouldn’t want you to think that just because I haven’t written, nothing has happened, because .. well, you’d be wrong. So I’m going to take this week to try to play catchup as a way to get back in the swing of things.

First off, we got our swap package! and we sent our swap package! And oh my goodness, do these kids love everything they got!

this tutu is so beautiful. Jocelyn would wear it EVERYWHERE, including into the bathtub if we let her.

i mean, just look at these sweet little roses:

Jocelyn also received a little crocheted bag with a cinderella figure inside. It’s been over 2 weeks now since we’ve received the package, and she is still carrying it around everywhere. This evening as we were cleaning up, I asked her to put her cinderella away, and she trotted ALL over the main level, looking for her “cinderella purse!” She also went up to Ethan’s make-a-long boy doll, Aidan, and said, “Hi Aidan! I’m Cinderella! I’m soooooooo tiny!” while moving the little figure about, to show that she’s talking.

by the way, unrelated to anything swap related, this is what we call “crazy hair!”

Ethan has been pretty happy with the items destined for him as well. He received this cute little vintage car, which he loves to drive around on his road rug. The doors and the trunk open and close.

He also received a couple of calendars with vintage cars for each month. He loves to go through them and point out which ones look like Lightning McQueen and Doc Hudson. The calendars came with little stickers that one would normally use to stick on the calendar as a reminder for various events and/or appointments… Ethan has commandeered them and pasted them all over his car.

This item was meant for Ethan and Jocelyn both, but Ethan hardly gave Jocelyn a moment with it (which she didn’t really mind. She was too busy twirling) It didn’t take him long before he could “fly” his way to all the landmarks on the globe. He loves to settle down and fly all over the globe. Sometimes, he drives his car on the globe too.

We received a few other items too, but these are definitely the favorites… and the only ones I got pictures of.
Thank you and your girls so much, Amy!

so as to not shock your system with an actual POST… Here’s some pictures to ease you back in.

Whenever I put her hair in 2 piggie tails, I can’t help but look at her and exclaim, “Look! Now your’e a cutie patootie!”

Now if I can just get her to not pull them out after 30 minutes.

After I took the first picture she declared, “Now I’m going to make a funny face! TAKE MY PICTURE!”

Then she demanded to see it on my phone, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

-amy

Oh, my, it’s a 641 page publication! that includes 371 tables that had to be converted from excel into html and tailored to a fancy stylesheet! I crawled out from under the actual conversion, but now the QC is squishing me! help! help! send lots of diet coke and altoids raspberry sours so i can get this sucker turned in tomorrow!

unfortunately after it’s turned in, i’m sure my client’s QC will find more stuff and I’ll be working this weekend again (last weekend i spent at the office). But by Tuesday of next week, I’ll be having champagne to celebrate the final emergence (like a butterfly! a squished and bruised highly caffeinated butterfly!) of me from under this huginormorificentish pub!

– amy

so what do you want for your birthday?
a 50 f/1.4 lens.
(long long stare, and confused look)
OH! I mean a 50 f/1.EIGHT lens!
but we already have that.
I know, I’m saying, I already got my birthday present. you don’t have to get my anything.
Well. I’ll have to think up something.
OK, but you have a $40 limit.

——-

Me, sitting on the couch, wrapped in blankie just so, with laptop on lap.
James, just walked in.

Oooh. Can you hand me the remote?
(gets and hands me the remote)
And that pillow?
(gets and hands me the pillow)
Ooohh, and the phone?
Kiss my ass.
I will, if you get me the phone.

(luckily, he didn’t make me kiss his ass. I would have though, rather than disturb my perfectly constructed blankie and laptop work cocoon.)

——-

late late at night. we are in bed. it is dark. and very quiet.

will you scratch my back?
moaning and groaning about having to scratch the itchy girl
that’s what you should get me. a back scratcher
But you already have me!
you should get me a back scratcher that doesn’t make ‘oh i’m so put out by this’ noises
heh.
ooh, actually what I should have said I wanted for my birthday is a microwave that works, and pipes that don’t sound like the acopolypse is upon us when you flush the toilet.
I’ll just get you a backscratcher that moans and groans.
But I already have that.

a cute one, for good measure.

at the dinner table, everyone sitting down and eating, which doesn’t happen as often as it should. right in the middle of dinner conversation of the doings of school, piano class, tutus, and the butt and fart jokes (from ethan, oh lord please make it stop):

jocelyn: Daddy is my BEST FRIEND!
(collective “AWWWWWWW” from the parents)

——

the work is letting up. there will be work done over the weekend probably, and all the overtime i put in in the last week was balanced out by the bouts of not working due to the DC metro area being covered in ice, and also a boy with a sick tummy who stayed home yesterday (it was from eating a not-ripe-enough banana and needing to poop, he’s fine now, thanks).

hopefully we will return to our regularly scheduled blogging next week, where i have lots to tell AND SHOW you! Our swap package arrived, and boy was it a hit!

-amy

This is music I like to listen to when I’m in a work groove and trying to get a shitload done. Has to be upbeat, but not so upbeat that I want to dance, or sing along outloud.

my (very short) list:

ABBA
Aqua (the ‘i’m a barbie girl’ album, it’s kind of techno)
Cake

things i CANNOT listen to:

violent femmes – It makes me want to get up and mosh around more than work. Also, I find myself singing along, and I think that me singing, “Why can’t I get, just one fuck..” or “ten, ten, ten ten for EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING!” would produce very odd looks from co-workers, don’t you?

what’s on your work groovin’ list?

But I thought I’d log in during the 15 minutes I’ve alloted myself to shove handfuls of food in my mouth so that I can keep plugging away to tell you these 2 things:

Thing 1:

You know that disgusting sound of food wafting over from a neighboring cube? It’s that sound of the food item being saucy, so you can hear that squishiness as the cubee stirs it slowly, mixing the tupperware’s contents about to disperse the heat that the office kitchen microwave graciously beamed straight into one spot. It’s that SQUISH-SQUISH of moisturey particles rubbing against each other and then letting go that makes my stomach turn and my nose wrinkle and most of all, makes me reach for my headphones so I don’t have to hear it.

You know that sound? I can’t STAND that sound.

Thing 2:

You know when you settle down in your cube with your styrofoam container of edible food-stuff brought up from the cafe in the lobby, and you open it and there you behold (and smell! don’t forget smell!) the delicious scent of chicken marsala sitting in a delectable sauce on top of a bed of fluffy, cooked-just-right rice with taste-bud-orgasm potatoes au gratin sitting to the side, and you put your fork in, and carefully mix some of the rice with some of the mouth watering mushroom sauce and a little bite of chicken, and you cah hear the sound of the creamy moist yummiliciousness as you combine the three and then bring them to your mouth to savor? You know that sound? The one that is in all other respect, identical to the OTHER sound?

I LOVE that sound.

Back to deadline-ulcer-inducing work stress,

amy

i’m feeling pretty busy. it’s the not good kind of busy.

it’s the too much stuff to do in the allotted space of time kind of busy. i feel like i need to take a day off from work just to do the laundry and clean the kitchen kind of busy. there’s so much stuff that i want to do and just not enough time to do it in.

could someone please give me some extra time? i’d appreciate it.

i worked at home yesterday, using the dusting of snow we got as the perfect excuse.

i’m working at home today, except this time it’s because of a kink in my neck that sends me into agonizing pain every time i rotate my head anywhere outside of a safe 40 degree window. i’m going to the doctor’s office this morning to hopefully get some muscle relaxers. please cross your fingers that i don’t hit someone. the last time i had this neck thingee… i hit someone (shoosh, it was really just a scratch, the insurance company didn’t need to jack up our rates THAT much).

i hurt.

and there’s a mountain of laundry to do.

and i still haven’t sent out our swap package or the postcard swap i signed us up for. (or even OBTAINED the postcards.)

let’s see, i also need to go get some groceries, pay bills, pay the piano teacher, finish up ethan’s jammies that grandma sent, do some laundry, fold some laundry, put some laundry away, clean the kitchen, make a valentines day mailbox for ethan to take to school (by tomorrow), make/buy some valentines for the kids, download the pictures off the camera, fiddle with wordpress for non-blog purposes, call and get someone to come fix our microwave, call and get someone to come investigate the pipes of dhoom that thunder ominously nearly everytime the toilet is flushed, sign up to bring something for the kids’ valentines day parties, get/make whatever i sign them up for (bags of candy is looking good at this point), oh, and bill 8 hours, get to the doctor get to the pharmacy (hopefully) and back home again without crashing my vehicle into anyone else’s vehicle… oh such lofty lofty dreams of accident free days…

it’s lists like that that make me want to bill 8 hours to sick leave, sit on the couch with a blankie and play ms pacman all day.

it’s sounding really good.

i won’t though. because i am a responsible adult. RESPONSIBLE.

yeah, i didn’t fool me either. i still won’t, but i’m not very responsible or adultish. because if i did bill 8 hours to sick leave, i would still do laundry and try to clean with my limited mobility, because at the end of the day, having a nice clean house with some things checked off my massive list would make my feel much better than looking around and knowing i COULD have done something but chose instead to piss away time i had (and have been lamenting for*) doing diddly squat.

so maybe i am a little responsible after all.

*lamenting for? did you raise your eyebrows too? is that right? what’s the other word that would have worked there? WAS THAT ALLOWED AM I GOING TO BE ARRESTED BY THE GRAMMAR POLICE? oh well. maybe the’ll have ms. pacman in the grammar clink.

that’s all. pity party for amy today. that’s the agenda. just wanted to fill you in.

-amy has no witty retorts.

It’s a late arrival home. Your husband is at class. Which means that you pick them up from school, play with them, feed them, wipe their butts, answer all their questions, bathe them, change them into jammies, read them both stories and tuck them both in all by yourself.

So you decide to stop at COSTCO after picking them up! I mean, why the hell not. You just LOVE headaches, right?!

It really does go very well, however, the constant need to stay patient and answer questions calmly and not, you know, LOSE IT when your son tries to hook up the chain that closes off the cashier line for the 4th time really starts to make that needley pain in your temples start to throb and those tarty school ma’rm shoes stop being so swanky and start to just really be painful and finally you’re in the car and you’re heading home annd really it is a miracle that you haven’t raised your voice in a shrill sireny lash at the kids yet..

So what do you do, when finally you manage to get the groceries out from the car, at least the perishable ones, and the kleenex, which is the reason why you just HAD to go there in the first place, because everyone’s noses are always running and nary a soft tissue in sight, and you even managed to remember to get a certain someone onto the potty before the flood gates loose and there’s a whole other situation to deal with and where was I again? Oh yeah, what do you do when you try to slap some peanut butter and jam on bread while getting the milk and eggs put away and your daughter steals away your very last reserve of patience by opening up the mongo package of kleenex and scattering all the boxes hither and yon in your kitchen, YOUR KITCHEN, the very kitchen where you are JUST TRYING TO GET SOME FOOD TOGETHER FOR PETE’S SAKE!!!!

WHAT DO YOU DO???

You take a deep breath, reach deep inside for inner strength and enthuse wildly, “JUST LOOK at all those boxes! Why don’t you make A TOWER!!”

Jocelyn: I am the queen of all things towery.
Ethan: I must hide behind my tower of invisibility so you cannot see me.

Jocelyn and Ethan had the best time building towers, kicking them over, and then picking up as many boxes in a tower as they could while exclaiming, “I’M GUS-GUS!!”*

Sometimes I really do deserve a mother of the year award.

* You know, gus-gus, from cinderella, he stacks the kernels of corn up to his chin and then they all go flying everywhere and the cat Lucifee is slowly stalking him down… Yeah. Gus-Gus.

– amy is lying, kind of, because all this happened a week or so ago, but she just got around to typing it up now.

I very enthusiastically signed up for Beth’s “Small Change” (the name suggested by Anna, yay Anna!) when she first posted about it. I thought about what exactly I would like to do. Something great! Something fantastic! Of course, by the end of the month, I had done… nothing. But I had SUCH good intentions.

And I must admit, I let it slip my mind. I’ve been trying to get our swap girls’ package done and out the door, and it’s been extraordinarily busy around our house lately.. well, I forgot.

So this evening, when I was catching up on my blogs, I read a backlog of Looky, Daddy and heard the sad news that one of his readers, JudieDJ had lost one of her twins to SIDS. There’s not a lot of details given (it’s sids. not a lot to give, probably) but as I read I felt my eyes fill with tears that a mother (ANY MOTHER!) would, could lose her baby (of any age).

I knew what my contribution to Small Change would be for the month of January, however belatedly. It’s nothing too dramatic, but it brought back Beth’s original point – my small donation is a drop in the bucket, and with enough drops, we all can make a difference. The point is to just do it already.

So I did it already.. donation to SIDS in memory of JudieDJ’s son Bryant. My heart goes out to Judie and her family during what must be a heart-wrenching time.

I was reading one of my crafty blogs, angry chicken the other day, and she expressed her anxiety over introducing something to her kids that she loves/loved so much in her own childhood. She’s written about it before, when she got out her beloved My Friend Mandy doll, and then more recently, when she put on some ABBA.

I haven’t had fearful moments as big as these ones, but the biggest thing I’ve introduced from my childhood, was my dear, beloved pookie bear. Since I stuck it in his crib when he was a baby, it is not like I would be instantly hurt if he rejected it, since it was several months to a year that he even gave it a second glance.

However, it has been my continual joy that pookie bear has become the most treasured of possessions. He loved it and would carry it around as a small toddler, but was more likely to grab at his baby blanket, given the choice. He still loved Pookie and I remember once, I heard him whispering and asked him what he was saying and he informed me, “I’m talking to POOKIE BEAR!” I grinned, and then butted out of their private conversation. Lately he is even more about the pookie bear. He carries it to school and back, loves to have it with him at every opportunity. I must say, it’s nice to have this sort of attachment at an older age, an age who can appreciate that leaving pookie bear in the car is probably better than bringing him into the store/library/what-have-you. When pookie bear inadvertantly gets left in his cubby at school, we have fun imagining what Pookie will do after everyone is gone. Maybe he climbs down and plays with the legos! Ethan has lately even been putting pookie bear in Jocelyn’s doll high chair, bringing the whole thing over into the kitchen, so pookie can eat his breakfast when the kids are eating theirs. It is just too sweet, and it makes me so happy that my beloved pookie bear is still so beloved.

As I said, I never had that feeling of trepidation on introducing something beloved before. He was sort of bound to love pookie bear, since he had been kicking around pretty much since his birth. Until a few weeks ago. When the movie “Charlotte’s Web” came out, of course I thought that it would be a good one to take Ethan too. However, I did not want him the movie to be first and the book second, if at all. So I have been toying around with the idea of reading it to him chapter by chapter for our bedtime story. I wasn’t sure if he was old enough for a book, though it does have a few drawings in it each chapter. And it had been quite some time since I read it, but I thought it wouldn’t be too old for him.

So now we get to the trepidation part. You see, Charlotte’s Web has always held a special place in my heart. I beleive it was Charlotte’s Web that made me into the voracious reader that I am (or was. haven’t read a lot lately 🙁 ) I read it when I was in the first grade, and it was the very first “chapter” book I ever read. I was so very proud of myself. I was reading books! With chapters! Just like my older brothers and sister! Just like a grown-up! I just adore Charlotte’s Web.

What if Ethan didn’t? I must say, I was really nervous.

James and I discussed it lightly, and he agreed that it was probably age appropriate and what not, and even signed up for the bedtime reading. I was secretly pleased when Ethan closed the door on that one. When James mentioned that he’d read Charlotte’s Web too, Ethan replied that he still wanted Daddy to read other books.

So I tried not to expect too much as I settled in each night and read him a chapter. It really is a very simple book and the chapters are short. It doesn’t take me much, if any longer to read him a chapter than it would to read him one of his other bedtime books. I had to bite my tongue from asking what he thought, did he like it, and just let him take it in and be. He is very squirrely during the reading, and after the first few chapters, I wondered if he was actually even paying attention and hearing anything.

Finally, a few nights ago, we got to the chapter where Charlotte is introduced. He was excited to finally meet Charlotte, but again, not a whole lot of feedback was coming from Ethan. Until the NEXT night we settled in to read. James was putting Jocelyn to bed, but finished and came in to give Ethan his hug and kiss goodnight, when Ethan started telling daddy ALL about Charlotte, nearly verbatim from the book.

“Charlotte is a BLOOD THIRSTY, daddy! She’s a trapper! She’s a good trapper! It’s a good thing there’s spiders, because otherwise there’d be TOO MANY BUGS! Charlotte DRINKS BLOOD!”

I was just so tickled. Of course, it would be the blood thirsty business that finally stood out in Ethan’s head, but obviously, he has been hearing it all, taking it all in, and now he openly expresses his excitement to find out what is happening with Wilbur and Charlotte on our nights of reading together. We’ve also decided that I need to make a bookmark for the book, with a spider and a spiderweb on it. (We’re just using a simple ribbon as a bookmark right now.) Sometimes we settle down and Ethan confesses to me nervously, “I lost our place, mommy.” which means he’s been taking the book down and looking through it, which just makes me pleased as punch. I always reassure him that I can find where we left off.

It’s such a relief when your childhood loves aren’t rejected by your own children 🙂 I can’t wait until Jocelyn is a little older so I can introduce her to the fairy tale books I have from my own childhood. I’m saving those for her.