Mooch

Edit: I was editting this post and changing up the photo when I made an error and deleted the whole thing. Then pulled a stupid move and "reverted to draft" rather than just exited out of the whole thing thus saving myself the heartache. This is a rewrite.
I've had a few ongoing jokes to explain why Baby El cries and screams when I leave the room without her. The jokes go like this:

She's smart, she knows where the food comes from and gets nervous when it walks out of the room.

She's just worried the food isn't coming back.

I've also taught her the handsign for milk. It's a fun party trick she'll pull out, climbing into my lap, staring at my chest very intently and signing "MILK" with both hands. She's very serious about her food, if I could remove my breasts and leave it with whoever is watching her she'd probably be happy as can be. So it's an understatment for me to say that weaning is going to be notfun, a process that I've already started. Baby El has always nursed on demand durring the day and at eleven months has been known to nurse almost every two-three hours. Most days she averages nursing six times a day. I've started cutting back to four times a day, through distraction techniques or to be completely honest by me personally not being so lazy. Once you get over the newborn hump breast feeding is such a lazy mom's way to parent. Seriously. It goes like this:

Oh, you're bored? I'm bored too. Want to nurse? Hello facebook

Here, mom wants to sleep more come into bed and nurse while I pass out for a bit.

I really do not know how you bottle feeding mother's do it, I cannot imagine all the extra work and stuff to carry. Even if I wasn't so lazy, baby girl is and always has been a comfort nurser. Sometimes she wants to nurse and that's the only thing she's going to take, I'm so excited for her to be a teenager. No really. The introduction of solid foods has proved that she's a mooch. Bring out a tupperware container at a playgroup and she's on you in the blink of an eye. There is no shame, you'll see that cute little bow mouth opened like a birdie waiting for a worm, and those little hands going up to grab what she can reach. I've even been somewhat ashamed when she whined at someone for not giving her food quick enough.

With my weaning goals in mind, yesterday I met with three of my closest friends for group pictures. You know it was all the rage at one point to take pictures with your BFF's, we just kept on the tradition. Baby El was already on her third nurse of the day and I was holding out the last one for right before bed. Something she wasn't too thrilled about but easily distracted by her exciting new walking skill. We were there for probably an hour and starting to finish up the pictures when the smallest of the babies decided she was hungry. My friend T sat down with her baby and started nursing. I think at that point Baby El's mooch senses started tingling, as the next thing I knew she had climbed up T's lap and was staring T down. With angry eyebrows and all, she started making Milk signs and then used her other hand to PUSH T's baby away. Eleven months old and ready to rumble over someone elses food. She was like a drug addict trying to get her hit. Clearly I was right.

Three pots, two mixing bowls and the kitchen sink...

When I see something cool online, an awesome dress pattern for Baby El or a yummy recipe I think "oh yea, I can totally do that!". Reality? My sewing experience is limited to the one pair of leggings I made for Baby El out of an old Maternity Shirt of mine. They're fairly laughable. The top seam is thicker in some parts and thinner in others, and when I went to reinforce the crotch I made the pants tighter. On the plus side the side seams look professional, of course that's because they are since I cut the original material along the existing seam.

Let's be honest though, I still think I'll be able to hand sew a quilt made out of my daughter's baby clothes. My husband calls this denial "wasteful" and usually rolls his eyes when I bring home new projects that in his words (and mine at the end) will just collect dust. As for me? I call it confidence, I am convinced that I can tackle almost any project I truly set my mind to. Or at the least I'm going to try! I am woman hear me roar and all that. As a side note, this confidence/denial extends beyond the "traditional womanly arts" and I think with the right plan, tools and so on I can build furniture. Yes, despite shoving a knife in my nose, I still think in my mind that I am safe to handle a table saw. Just keep 911 on speed dial and a tourniquet handy...

Which comes to where we're at right now, with a big hole in the middle of my house and what was once our guest bathroom. It was previously so Handi-capable chic! The previous owner had widened the door; installed a handicap shower which basically looks like a tub with the apron removed & laid down on the floor and handle bars all over; and built a cubby for the bolted to the wall sink. It was very wheelchair accessible and I'm sure made the previous tenant capable of taking care of the basic needs I take for granted. Except for the shower part, with a screaming baby I am grateful for every single shower I take. In the end though, with the unfortunate exception of one member of our family, we had no need for a wheelchair acessible/handicapable bathroom and are in the process of tearing it all out. Baby needs a tub and we need a much more practical set-up.

Since my husband is mainly doing all the work I've been offering assistance. Asking him what I can do to help during the babies naps and all. Sunday he said "you can crawl under the house and dig holes".

Me: uuuhhhh.... What? How? You'll have to show me

Any kid with shovel experience can dig a stupid hole, I know that. But apparently my "I can do it!!" attitude only extends to things I can take credit for. No one wants to crawl under my old house so I can show off the lame holes I dug. How's that for a party trick?

" Come see what I did in the bathroom! ...... Oh, no my husband did all the tiling, demo, flooring, but see I did the crucial stuff! I dug the holes for the concrete jacks that lifted our house back up, without that we'd have a slanted floor! .... No I didn't use a sand bucket and plastic shovel... Assholes"

Narcissistic much?

*the picture is where the shower used to be, that's now the only semi-completed space. The rest is just floor beams.

The knife incident...

My friends love this story. My friends also like laughing at me. Do we all have friend's like that? Or am I just extra lucky?

A few years ago I ordered a pair of shoes online at a steal. Seriously, it was a steal. I'd seen them on a website & then goggled like a fiend to find the best deal possible. My search culminated into one of those great Ebay moments were you wait till the last minute & get the winning bid and run around your little apartment like a SuperBowl Quarterback Victory Dance tm. Admit it, I'm not the only one.

Anyway, so I come home to find my victory boots on my doorstep all taped up in their original packaging. I go inside and grab the only logical item that can be used to release them from their box, my six inch Chefs Knife..

I said it, my six inch Chefs Knife.

To. Open. A. Shoe. Box. With. Boots.

Overkill? Naw, this is my standard tactics in box and bag opening. Of course the utter ridiculousness did occur to me & the thought to abandon this method passed through my mind right as I'm opening the box, and pointing the sharp end towards my face no less. But I like to learn my lessons the slightly harder way.

As I'm thinking "this is a dumb idea", the knife slips..... I'm downplaying the situation here. My SIX INCH Chefs Knife slips

... and ends up...


in my nose.

The tip was in my nose. In my NOSE.

Cue much shock and some hand flapping. I would say my life flashed before my eyes, but I'm not that melodramatic. What did flash before my eyes were the thoughts of how I was going to tell everyone, I guess you could start it like a bar joke "two nuns & a Rabbi walk into a bar...". What does that say about me?

I believe I started an uncomfortable OMGee laugh & alerted my husband to what had just happened once I realized I wasn't bleeding to death. The look on my husband's face said it all. "How can I trade in for a smarter wife?"

I walked away with a slightly bloody nose, a annoyed husband, and a story. Oh and a really cute pair of boots! Can't forget about those.

Baby says...

If my ten month old daughter could journal I'm pretty sure she'd have this to say about today:

Mom fed me yellow goodness (egg yolks) today, but snuck in some green crap. Sure I ate a quarter of it, I didn't want her to think I was completely ungrateful. But I had to put my foot down & tell her I would not stand for this! She gave me some banana and then taunted me by keeping the rest just out of reach. As a warning of further action if I was not promptly given more banana, I proceeded to wipe my banana covered hands all over the dining table and in her hair if she was silly enough to get close.

Best food of the day?
1) my feet
2) my right shoe
3) blueberry yogurt Mom fed me at the coffee place
4) the silver spoon

Most WTF moments of the day?:
1) Mom putting me in a ruffled monstrosity & then wondering why I looked like a butterball turkey. It was unacceptable.
2) the cat licking his lips at me while I looked like a stuffed turkey.
3) Mom complaining when I followed her into the bathroom. Only fair after she changes the diaper I'd worked so hard to make warm.
4) Mom letting me shut myself in the bedroom. Then "pretending" she can't find me.
5) Not being allowed to eat a pen.

There was this guy at the store wearing blue pjs that I wanted to follow home. I need to learn how he got his Mom to let him stays in pjs all day.

Mama needs a shower...

My friend and I like to play a little game. We call it "Bad Mom or... Evil Genius?".

So a detective knocked on my door...

Think it's a lame start to a joke? It is, since ealier today a detective knocked on my door, informing me that a car parked about eight houses down from mine was set on fire Monday morning at 4:30 a.m. This marks it as the second car on our street to be torched in the nearly eleven months since we first purchased our home in March 2010. Roughly four more cars had been burned down the month before we moved in, in one night of car burning fun. The four cars that night do not include the multiple other cars that had been broken into the same night, in what the local Police Department believes was a related incident. According to them the arsonist was prepping the other cars to be burned as well, and was probably scared off after the cops showed up in response to a report of the first two cars burning.

The last car that burned, back in May, was burned directly across from my house and we first watched it burning from our front window before venturing out to catch the drama unfolding from our front steps. Somewhere I have a really good description of that event, I'll find it and post it tomorrow or write a new one. I might even inclue the video I took from my digital camera of the car burning up.

The Detective told me that one of the neighboors had caught a glimpse of the suspect, tall thin man wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt. Helpful, no? Not to come off like an ass and blame my neighboor for not getting a better view, it was the middle of O'dark and a half past "why am I up?" am. Also, the street that I live on has an Elementary School backing up to it that was closed five years ago and has since been converted to a "continuation high school" with a driveway that lets out onto my street. Directly across from that driveway is a path to a creek that runs behind the whole street, and connects to multiple other creek paths that runs a decent length of our town. To make things even worse, the town High School is two blocks from us. Seriously, why did I buy a house in this neighboorhood? It seems like the perfect breeding ground for getting away with a crime, since traffic around here is almost as changing as traffic in a mobile home park.

Time to finish up the nursery dresser painting project we have going on in the garage so that we can get all of our cars in the driveway and/or garage. Lock your doors ladies and gents, America isn't completely safe.

Starting it all up...

I'll admit like most projects, I started my blog with the intent to make it permanent and a daily activity. Then in an all to short period of time, I become lazy and forget all about my grand plans to have a daily activity. I let other, far un-important things, get in the way and let my projects go unfinished. It would be a stretch of the imagination to call this blog "important" at least to anyone but myself. So when I say "un-important things" I primarily mean that the other things I find to do are utterly lame. IE: watching TV, sleeping, etc. No great excuses such as work, chores, a social life.

What I also mean by referring to this blog as not important to anyone else but myself is this: I used to be a much more creative person. In part my creative outlet of writing poetry and creating stories was an escape from what I deemed a boring and painful childhood/teenage years. Not to get all angsty, because seriously? What teenager doesn't think their life is boring and/or painful? Over the years, I quit acting as I never made it into any of the plays in High School, I cut back on my poetry, I stopped taking art, and slowly my creative writing become less and less important. For a long time my only creative outlet was a livejournal, but even that I've found less time for. I would go over in my mind the posts I wanted to make and then when I sat down to write them I lacked the words. Now my creative outlet has been limited down to random, boring, sometimes fun, "I'm thinking" wall posts on the infamous Facebook. Lame.

As I'm about to embark on Motherhood (even now my spawn is squirming under my skin plotting her escape into the real world) I know that more of the things I use to define "me" are going to become less important. In the face of a child who depends solely on you for sustenance, how do you step away and selfishly do things just for you? Now before I lose more of myself, I want to stake a claim on the creative person I once was. I hope that this stand will help me to keep "me" in this crazy trip I'm about to take, and will leave me feeling more satisfied with myself by the end of each day.

Younger self, I've missed you, let's step out into the cold and find you once again.