mamajoan

We're in a period right now where weekends are very difficult to manage because Ruthie still very much needs an afternoon nap and Isaac very much doesn't. Up until recently I was getting away with making Isaac lie down for an hour of "quiet time," but that isn't working any more. He simply does not need the downtime and has too much energy to make it work. So we're left with an approx. two-hour chunk of time during which he and I have to hang around the house, being at least reasonably quiet. And he hates it. And it's going to get harder and harder as the weather gets nicer and nicer.

Case in point, today! We went to "Family Fun Day" at the field near our house. The city put up bounce houses, face-painting, rides, games, and so on. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and we were having a great time, for about 45 minutes, until Ruthie hit her "wall" and had a breakdown. I felt very guilty about dragging Isaac away from the fun, but I had no choice. ...Until, at exactly the right moment, I spotted one of Isaac's friends and his parents! And they were fine with keeping an eye on Isaac. So I gratefully brought Ruthie home and she's napping now.

But I cannot count on that kind of serendipity happening every time, so this is something I'm going to have to work harder at planning ahead for. Sigh.

I really look forward to the days when we can stop planning our whole day around naptime. It's just so freeing.

Hello all my LJ friends! I am sorry to say that I have no idea what is going on with you. I haven't read my friends-list fully in ages. I have it as my browser homepage, and usually what ends up happening is that I open my browser and read whatever happen to be the 20 posts on the first page, and then get caught up into other stuff and never scroll back.

I feel a little weird about how out of touch I'm becoming with (what used to be) my major sources of online community, but well, that's how life is right now. I feel like there's just so much going on and I don't have enough brain to hold it all. Why do things have to keep on, like, happening?!

How am I? I am tired. Oh so tired. I find it hard to believe that I'll ever not be tired. I keep thinking that my life will be great, someday, when Ruthie learns how to sleep through the night. But so far it isn't happening. I feel I need to be doing something to help this along, but I'm too tired to figure out what, and then to commit to it. That's a whole other looonnnng post that I'll likely never write.

Isaac has been sick or "sick" a lot lately, as you may have read in my twitter posts. It has been confusing and frustrating. I'm now of the opinion that he was actually sick the first day (a week and a half ago) and since then has just been tired from school, plus is experimenting with the idea of "if I say my tummy hurts I get special attention." That's my current theory anyway. And yes, I had a talk with the afterschool people about the fact that you cannot just go "oh, he says his tummy hurts, he must be sick, let's call his mom." Dude, he's five. You need to exercise some frickin' judgment here.

Ruthie is doing well, aside from the whole not-sleeping thing. Daycare dropoffs are still iffy, but she's getting better all the time. And she's bursting with funny things to say, some of which I really hope to post here soon.

My mom is in Peru for two weeks. I am not panicking...give me a few more days. ;) Luckily we already have plans for both days of this weekend. Next weekend will be harder as it's a four-day one: Friday there's no school due to "teacher preparation day" and then Monday is Oppressing The Natives Day, oops I mean Columbus Day. ;) Luckily it seems that we already have plans for that Sunday and Monday; and our new babysitter (thanks to ww1614) will be able to watch Isaac for part of the day Friday, so hopefully we'll make it through. ;)

In case you missed it in my twitters, the other evening we came home to find Grover-kitty playing with an almost-but-not-quite-dead mouse. Yeah, that was definitely not one of my favorite moments in life. Ugh. :( On the plus side, I guess, now I know that Grover can catch a mouse. But then tonight ( kind of gross, sorry ) so now I get to fret about what to do about that. Argh!

Several family members and close family friends are having severe medical issues right now. This is definitely on my mind a lot lately.

Work is also in a very stressful and challenging (in both the good and the bad ways) phase right now. That's another post I'll probably not get a chance to write.

I guess that's about it in a nutshell. Okay, well, maybe a coconut shell. ;)

Whew! We had a weekend, all right!

On Thursday it was ridiculously hot and I baked a whole bunch of stuff and the kitchen was like a sauna. d'oh.

On Friday we drove out to the cottage and it was ridiculously wet/rainy and cool, which was kinda sad. But we still managed to have a nice Fourth of July cookout with mom, sandykidd, metafrantic, Bastian, and family friend Brian and his girlfriend. Enormous quantities of food were grilled and consumed. The shortcakes that I had baked on Thursday were made into strawberry shortcake and eaten with gusto. Also mit schlag. ;)

I made some of the shortcakes with Bisquick as usual, but I also made some from scratch, so that's recipe #39 this year for me. Also last night I chopped up some of the leftover grilled tofu from Fourth of July, mixed it with some of the leftover grilled corn (mmmmmmmmm, corn), mixed in some farm-share carrots that I had lightly steamed, sauteed it all up in some oil with salt and pepper, and added balsamic vinegar and chopped farm-share parsley. Yum! So I don't know what to call that, "Independence Day Leftovers and CSA Delight" or something silly like that. So that's recipe #40 for the year. w00t.

Anyway, mom and the kids and I slept over at the cottage Friday night, and Saturday morning we slept super late! Ruthie woke up at her usual 6:30 and was bouncing around on the bed and chattering -- but quietly enough not to wake anyone except me -- and I was lying there thinking sad thoughts of how much I didn't want to get up that early, and then she started nursing again and the next thing I knew it was 9:30!!!!!!!!! ZOMG!!! I could not believe it. Mom and Isaac had also slept quite late.

Saturday was similarly gray and rainy and chilly to Friday, and the forecast for Sunday was more of the same, so we decided not to stay at the cottage. We left around 3pm Saturday, and went strawberry-picking at a farm on the way back (which we always want to do but since we're usually driving past either late at night or in gorgeous weather, we never want to stop). That was fun. We all enjoyed picking our own strawberries. Then we came home and crashed. The kids hadn't napped (on account of the late waking) so they were beat.

Sunday we did not much of anything. We hung out for a while, then we went and played for a while at the water-park near mom's house; went home and napped, got up and puttered around. A slow day. Mom and I were very annoyed that Sunday turned out to be such a beautiful day -- if we had known, we might have stayed at the cottage. Mom actually ended up going back out there Sunday night. (She doesn't work Mondays, so she can stay over.)

So that was our weekend basically. It was a blast! Now we have way too much of the following left over from the festivities:
* watermelon (a whole one, uncut as of yet -- must coordinate with Meta and SK on this one)
* cantaloupe (also a whole one uncut)
* blueberries (none of us really like them, so any amount is too much)
* grilled tofu (I shouldn't have made two packages worth, since no one eats it except me; the meat-eaters occasionally take a bite just to be polite)

We also have way too many mosquito bites, but that's a whole other story....

Yeah, so, when I agreed to adopt/foster a new kitty, I conveniently managed to forget about the part where kitties keep you up half the night... *groan*

On the bright side, Chubby is definitely warming up to us! LOL.

I had a really hard time getting Ruthie to sleep last night. I decided to do a slightly early bedtime because Isaac was super-cranky, throwing screaming sobbing tantrums (complete with adolescent-esque "You never listen to me!!") and I realized that he was tired. Bedtimes have been creeping later and later since it stays light outside later, and we've been getting up early, so he's been losing out on some sleep.

So I got us to bed about 20 minutes earlier than usual, but Ruthie just could NOT fall asleep. At one point I thought she was close and I had to get a break, so I told her I'd be right back, and went into the living room. It was very quiet for about 5-10 minutes and then suddenly she started sobbing loudly. I went back into the bedroom and sat down on her bed, and she said, "I NOT YIKE THE WIPERS!!" O.o So I womanfully refrained from LOLing ;) and took her out to the living room to sit on the couch. Then I think she might have nursed to sleep, except that Chubby came along all "oh, I see you are sitting on the couch, this must mean that I can haz petting now!" and Ruthie woke right up. *facepalm* So there ensued about a half-hour of meowing and "Dat a kitty! Whass dat? Dat a kitty! He say meow! Meow! MEOW! Da kitty say meow! His name Chubby! Whass dat? Dat a kitty!" Groan!!

Finally I took Ruthie back into the bedroom, restarted the CD, and again lay down to nurse her on the bed. Chubby continued to make himself known but I petted him with one hand to keep him quiet while bracing myself on the bed with the other; and at last Ruthie fell asleep. Whew.

Then I had to go watch the rest of the wild, ridiculous Sox game; and then I tried to go to sleep, but Chubby made himself obnoxious again. We had the paws in the face, the meowing, etc., etc....climbing all over me in bed, snuggling me for a moment, then jumping up to check out another part of the bed, etc....

I must have fallen asleep eventually, though. And I slept right through Ruthie coming into my bed again, because the next thing I knew it was about 5am and Ruthie was snuggled up with me and Chubby was rustling some papers on my bookshelf. So I sat up and stage-whispered loudly at him to stop it, and he popped out from a pile of papers and meowed all like "what? who, me? what'd I do?" and I was like, "hush!" And I lay back down very carefully, checking to make sure Ruthie was still asleep...and she was...but then as I settled back down next to her, she said, "Meow!" and I was like, oh crap. But she wasn't waking up! She said "meow" in her sleep. LOL!!!!!!

Anyway, long story short, Chubby is making himself right at home. ;) Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that he's getting comfortable enough with me to come on my bed with me, and with Ruthie to not flee as soon as he spots her. I just hope he'll let me get some sleep in the very near future. sigh.

( Pictures of Chubby behind the cut )

As you can see, he really isn't chubby at all. I'm thinking of renaming him if the people we got him from don't object.

In other news, this morning I went to register Isaac for afterschool, which turned into a bit of a "thing" because as it turns out the flyer had the wrong date; registration for kindergarteners isn't supposed to start till Monday. But the woman took my application anyway, and it seemed clear that I wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last parent coming in that day. I don't envy that woman the day she'll have had today.

I also noticed that according to my income and household size, I just barely miss the cutoff for a sliding-scale afterschool rate of $99/week instead of $115/week. Ah well. It'll still be a nice big jump down from the $220 that I currently pay for Isaac's preschool.

After several nights in a row of waking up quite soon after going to sleep (like 11:30-midnight, ugh), Ruthie slept this morning until 6:15! ZOMG!

And when she did wake up, she only fussed to herself for a moment before realizing that she could get up out of bed herself and come find me in my bed. So she did that, wearing a huge proud-of-self grin. ;) I think the reason she hadn't done that much sooner is that she was waking up while it was still dark outside. Now that it's lighter in the mornings -- and since she was waking so late (for her) -- she could see better and that probably motivated her to get up on her own.

Anyway, so she got into bed with me and we nursed for about half an hour and then got up. She sure was full of beans this morning, and chattering up a storm.

Oops, I meant to write more on this, but got busy with work and now it's time to go. Ah well, stay tuned for more later!

(BTW you may have noticed / be about to notice that I signed up to have my Twitter posts, called "tweets", automatically posted to my LJ every day. I've been tweeting a lot lately, as I mentioned before, so you'll have that to look forward to. ;) )

I almost don't even want to post because I'm so mad at myself about the stupid mistake I made on my tax return. I never should have hit the "submit" button at almost midnight. I don't want to talk about it. (I submitted it with a bad address. All the actual numbers are right, including my social security number, so it's probably not the tragedy I think it is. But I'm still pissed.) Nuff said about that.

Last night I dreamt repeatedly about civil-rights issues. I was a crusader trying to convince black people to revolt and stand up for their rights. Confusingly, I was not trying to motivate them to fight for racial justice, but for fairer labor laws. It was weird. I feel like this was my subconscious's way of trying to deal with the tax thing, but it sure is a bizarre coping mechanism. I dunno. It's weird inside this brain sometimes.

On the plus side, Ruthie slept till 5am which gave me plenty of time for dreaming. Then I brought her into my bed and she had a lot of trouble falling back asleep, but she finally did, and when the alarm went off at 7, she was out like a LOG. I ended up letting her sleep till 7:30 because she was so deeply sacked out.

oops, gotta run, more later

Um. So things have been very busy at work this week, and Ruthie has been waking up a lot so I've been going to bed early. Which is why I haven't been posting much.

Anyway, sorry for the somewhat lame-ass April Fool's post the other day. Ah well. BTW, the part about my financial situation being kind of dire was not a joke, unfortunately. Right now I am ostriching that though; too much else going on.

Congratulations go out to: hardcorewife whose fourth baby and third daughter, Evelyn, arrived last Monday (Ruthie's birthday buddy! :) ), and queenalia whose second son, Adam, arrived last Friday, and my non-LJ-having friend Amy whose fourth daughter, Hope, arrived last Thursday. Whew! And with whuffle and evil_macaroni about to pop any day now, it's just babies busting out all over the place. Must be spring. ;)

In Ruthie news she is starting to be able to identify some letters and numbers. The other day I showed her a letter "S" fridge magnet and said "what letter is this?" and she said "Five!" which I thought was pretty good. :) She also spontaneously identified a Crazy Eights card as "red four" and a letter L as an L. And this morning she counted thusly: "One two three four four five six seven eight nine ten eleven eleven eleven eleven..." LOL. She says "ee-yeh-ven" which I think is just so cute. ;D In other Ruthie news ( cut for TMI bodily-functions stuff )

Isaac came home from preschool the other day with a band-aid on his finger, which he showed me, and when I asked what happened, he said that they were at the playground and his friend M "tried to bite me." Which apparently means "bit me." Hmm. Upon further conversation he said that M and another kid L were "being mean to me" which apparently means chasing him, and that they were "trying to get me out of the way" and he put his hands up, or something, whereupon M bit him. Well, it's really hard to know what really happened from the way Isaac recounts these things; and I'm certainly hesitant to call it bullying because M and L are basically good kids and are Isaac's friends. It's entirely possible that they were actually playing together just fine and M suddenly decided to bite for no reason. It's also quite possible that Isaac provoked M in some way. Who knows? Anyway, I started to tell Isaac that if M and L were bothering him, he should run and tell a teacher; but before I could even get that out, he said it himself. So at least he knows what he should do, though whether he actually does it will be another question.

OK, back to work, more later.

Last night I wanted to use up the leftover couscous from my couscous-and-grated-zucchini dish from the other day. I thought I'd just do the same thing again but with a larger grate. In the end though, I made enough modifications to the recipe that I'm going to call this a new one, #13. (Six and a half weeks into the year I've already made 13 new recipes. Go me!)

I call it #13 "Colorful Curried Couscous." ( And here's the recipe in case anyone here cares. )

I tried to go really easy on the cayenne, especially since it was a brand-new bottle so I knew it would be potent. It still came out pretty spicy though. Isaac tasted it and said it was too spicy and needed to drink a lot of milk. ;) Ruthie ate several bites and didn't seem to mind the heat (and the way she's been eating lately, several bites is practically a four-course meal).

The subject line on this post refers to the fact that after cooking the above, I got all excited and ran right off to vegweb.com to submit this recipe, only to get a server error when I clicked on the "submit" button. :( I'm still getting the same error today on a whole other computer, so it can't be just me. Snif, anyway I've emailed them and hopefully they'll straighten it out. It was going to be my first submission! woe!

um, and speaking of woe, last night was another all-night nursing extravaganza, so that's about all I've got for ya, sigh. brain = fried.

I know you are all bored of seeing yet another post from me about how tired I am. So I shall not go into too much detail. I shall just say that today was the worst day yet. I keep thinking I've reached the end of my rope, but then I find I have new ends to reach. I guess this means I am frayed. How apt.

Two nights of attempted night-weaning down and I'm about ten times more tired than I was a few days ago when I complained about being so tired I couldn't function. The two-hour chunks I was getting when we nursed throughout the night are looking pretty attractive right now.

I don't know what to do tonight. On one hand I know that I need to be consistent and stick with it through more than just two nights if it's going to have any chance of success. On the other hand I still have to be able to function!! And preferably without losing my temper at the kids every five minutes!

The whole "we don't nurse when it's dark outside, nursies need to sleep, we'll nurse when it gets light outside" thing is working moderately well -- there's been some crying and some angry screaming and arching of back etc., but not more than a few minutes at a time and Ruthie does fall asleep. But she then wants to sleep on top of me and is so restless, tossing and turning all night, flopping from one position to another, and waking me each time of course. So she's just about as badly-off today as I am, except for the advantage of youth (whereas all I have is the advantage of caffeine). And no one around today to bail me out -- there's some kind of big sporting event going on today, maybe you've heard something about it?

(in the midst of all this, I get a call from Isaac's friend's mom, asking me if I'm going "to Arlington for the party" because she wants help finding it -- I hesitated, the phone equivalent of giving her a blank look, and she immediately realized she had made a faux pas -- we weren't invited to this particular birthday party. Not that I care, because I don't much like the kid and Isaac seems indifferent to him, but the other mom was clearly mortified. ah well.)

anyway gotta go moderate a sharing issue -- send strength plz