Arwen/Elizabeth

Me = Sitter

Milla got better!  Blessedly fast, actually.  Like I mentioned, Baby Darth Vader disappeared a couple hours after they gave her a steroid shot at the doctor's office, and never reappeared.  On Tuesday Milla was still clearly feeling sick, and she fussed and clung to me most of the day, but by Wednesday morning she was doing much better.  Now she's basically back to normal, with just a tiny bit of leftover congestion and the occasional cough to keep the congestion moving on out.  (Gross.)

I know it's been said ad infinitum by every woman in my position with a sick baby, but MAY-UN am I glad Milla is nursing.  The poor sore-throated girl would not eat or drink anything for four days, and if she hadn't been willing to nurse I don't know what I would have done.  I mean, besides tried harder to get her to eat and drink, duh.  But it was so much simpler this way.

My mom didn't end up coming to visit because she caught the flu from my dad.  I was bummed to miss her, but obviously it was better for her not to come and give us the flu.  Milla was pretty much recovered by the time Bryan left Wednesday morning anyway, and 36 hours was not so bad.  It wasn't so great, either, but we made it.

Right now I'm resisting the call of Farm Frenzy in order to blog (because I have, uh, so many important things to say) and Bryan is downstairs purging the basement.  We've got these awesome shelves down there that he and my brother-in-law built a couple years ago, but we never organized them, just kind of shoved stuff on them haphazardly, and then more stuff collected and started spilling over onto the floor and before we knew it we had an enormous Pile of Stuff, practically unnavigable.  We've talked for months about organizing it, the same way you talk about doing anything that's beneficial but not especially fun.  "We should do more volunteer work."  "We should read the classics."  "We should clean underneath the fridge."

Maybe YOU think about doing those kinds of things and then immediately go do them (In which case why are you wasting time reading blogs instead of being productive?  Don't you feel bad about this?) but I do not.  I am such a practiced underachiever/procrastinator that I no longer even feel guilt about not doing those things.  This is who I am.  I am a non-doer.  I do the things that are actually important and essential to my family's well-being but the rest of it, eh.  Who needs the stress of self-created imperatives, you know?

We've never explicitly discussed it, but I've observed that my husband has seemed to be on the same page with me in this area.  I don't do things; he doesn't do things.  It works.  Until the other night when he suddenly decided that he was going to make it his Own Personal Project to purge and organize the Stuff in our basement.  And he has since preceded to actually do it.

I'm not complaining about this.  I do want the basement organized and I'm glad it's getting done.  But I feel the way I did back in 1999 when he graduated from high school and I had another year of the old grind.  I'm left behind now.  He's moved on.  He is now a Doer.  And I'm sitting here with my computer on my lap, surfing the Internet for a new handbag.  Perhaps I should get off my butt and go help him.

Perhaps I should do it tomorrow.

Christmas of the Unclean

It makes my head hurt just to think about it, but there have been years when I started my Christmas shopping on December 20th.  Granted, those were days when I was a college student and generally had finals until the 19th, plus I was childless and did not have an enormous sleep debt, and I had plenty of time and energy to tool around the mall until I found acceptable gifts for everyone on my list.

Then last year we had the world's (or at least the neighborhood's) squalling-est child, and the mall was out of the question.  We had no desire to stress ourselves to insanity by dragging the baby there, and neither did either of us want to stay home in the evenings to deal with Her Royal Fussiness alone while the other person used valuable hours that could have been used for sleeping trawling the mall alone.  Ergo, we determined that we would start early and order everything online, which we did, and all our presents were wrapped and under the tree by December 14th.  And we became hard-core converts to online shopping.

If you're walking around a mall and suddenly think of a gift idea, you've got to drag yourself to different stores looking for it, and chances are you won't get the exact style, color, or size you want.  On the Internet, however, you can!  You can get everything on the enormous Internet, and if you're smart about it you can usually avoid paying shipping, and the lovely UPS or USPS man brings it right to your door, which is awesome.  And rather than spending hours on your feet fighting crowds and sweatily wishing you'd left your coat in the car, you can do all your shopping from the comfort of your couch!  To me, that last part is unbeatable.

I do actually like the mall at Advent time (what the rest of the world knows as Christmas time, but it's really pre-Christmas and I hate the mall during real Christmas time because all you see are Valentine's decorations and it's depressing) when I don't have an imperative to find a gift for someone.  I've been there twice recently because my sister had some buying/returning/buying to do, and the place is bustling and the lights are twinkling and the pseudo-carols are playing and it makes me feel happy.  Plus, we've recently realized that Daniel and Camilla are old enough to play in the area with the big plastic figures and the children running around like crazily and they love it, so now mall trips are not just an hour of zipping around trying to get errands done before the agitation to "get me out of the stroller now, please" reaches critical-mass levels; they're an hour of that, interrupted by half an hour of relaxing while our children become socialized.

Speaking of children's play areas reminds me: I read in a magazine article today that the "five-second rule" (??? - I always thought it was the "ten-second rule") when food drops on the floor is Dangerous, and that food and utensils that touch the floor should be immediately discarded or sanitized.  I'll save the rant about the hyper-risk-averseness craze for another time, but I just have to say: what the heck?  The article wasn't talking about public places, either - it was saying that you shouldn't eat or use things that have touched the floor *in your own home,* because "studies" show that they can pick up salmonella or E. coli from the floor instantly.

My baby is on my kitchen floor all the time.  She walks on it, she crawls on it, she sits on it, she even lies down on it.  And while I don't actually serve her meals on the floor, if she drops her breakfast Cheerios off her high-chair tray, sometimes I just leave them down there for her to snack on throughout the day.  But!  I find it hard to believe that large amounts of salmonella and/or E. coli are congregating on the linoleum.  It's not like I'm cutting up raw chickens down there, or doing whatever you do to get E. coli on things (changing diapers? handling raw sewage?).  If I do happen to drip chicken juice while I'm cooking, I clean it up immediately, because of the above-mentioned baby.

Am I a careless messy person who's threatening the lives of her family by not being careful enough about  food cleanliness?  Maybe I just haven't known it all this time?

Nah.  I'm right about this.  I don't buy the hyper-risk-averseness, and I don't buy the sanitization craze, and if my daughter feels like eating dirt she can chow down, for all I care, although I'm totally making Bryan change that diaper.  (Mom, what was that thing Grandma used to say, "You eat a pint of dirt before you die"?  Or was it a pound?)

I hope all of you have your Christmas shopping done!  I feel stressed for your sake if you don't.  Although you can feel stressed for my sake, because we don't have our Christmas cards (86 of them) sent out yet because the photos that are supposed to go in them have not yet arrived, and can I mention how much I hate Apple's photo service?

You can all have a preview of the picture as a reward for making it all the way to the bottom of this ramble.

Meme Time

Back near the beginning of this everlasting month, Lisa (who is a new mom!  Go congratulate her!) tagged me for a meme, and it is going to suffice for my second-to-last post of Nablop.  Thank heavens.

Rules: Once tagged, you're supposed to link to the person who tagged you. Then, post the rules before your list and list 8 random things about yourself. At the end of the post, tag and link to 8 other people and then leave them a comment telling them they've been tagged.

1.  I proofread the above rules before posting them, and corrected one grammatical error and one typo.  You knew I was neurotic about the written word, but did you know I was that neurotic?

2.  The Birth Order Book says that oldest children tend to be rigid rule-followers, but I am an exception to that.  I think this is because my mother is very, very much a rule-follower, and I'm sort of... in rebellion against her?  Can it be considered rebelling against your parents if you're twenty-five years old?  My mother is always very concerned with doing things the "right" way so that you won't get in trouble with "them" (whoever "they" are), and although I do hate being yelled at, I often do things like exit where a parking lot is clearly marked "entrance only."  My mother would NEVER do that. 

(I love you, Mom!)

3.  I have a nearly-photographic memory.  Back in my marching-band (dork) years, I could memorize my music in a couple of days (it took some people weeks) just by spending a while looking at the pages and committing them to memory, then reading the notes off the pages that were conveniently stored in my head.  Having a photographic memory served me very well in school.

4.  I used to be a relatively picky eater, but now I will eat most things you put in front of me.  However, here are three things I cannot imagine I'll ever want to eat: yogurt, bleu cheese, and anise-flavored anything.  Here are three things I cannot imagine I'll ever not want to eat: bacon, apple pie, and Better Made Red Hot Barbecue potato chips.

5.  I am very particular about the sort of lights I like on my Christmas tree: C7s with opaque bulbs.  When we went to buy them we could only find strings of C7s with clear bulbs.  There wasn't time to order them online and have them for our tree that year, so we bought the clear strings and a bunch of opaque replacement bulbs and I switched out every single bulb on four strings.  (Yes, I made a pattern.)  I am nutty.

6.  I can't do cursive handwriting.  All my elementary school teachers said that we wouldn't be able to function successfully as adults without it, but sometime in high school I just started using a scripty print instead and I haven't been able to write cursive since.  I have to say, the teachers lied.  A lack of cursive-skill has not cramped my style at all, and I've known plenty of very successful people who wrote, basically, chicken-scratch.  Perhaps what the teachers meant is that you can't function successfully *as an elementary school teacher* without being able to write cursive.  That I would believe.

7.  I get motion sick very easily.  The first time I ever went sailing, with my oh-so-dreamy boyfriend on his dad's sailboat, I threw up over the side of the boat.  It's a testament to the virtue of said boyfriend that he held my hair back, didn't show the tiniest bit of revulsion, and - three years later - married me.

8.  I can tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue.

Just to show what a rule-breaker I am, I'm not tagging eight people.  Instead, why don't all of you leave at least one random fact about yourselves in the comments?  That should be fun.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

I really wanted to do a real post every day this month, with no cop-out "I'm too busy/tired" posts, because I am stubborn like that and would have been proud to say I'd done it. 

Oh well.  I guess I can consider this post another step toward the goal of perfect humility.  I'm not busy and I'm only a little tired, but the problem is that I have no inspiration.  Plenty of topics, but not one that makes me want to find the energy to be witty or sincere or pensive.  So instead you get this, the first ten random things that pop into my head.  And I make no promises about the ability of these things to interest you.  My head is a pretty mundane place most of the time.

1.  I now have a walking child.  This is amazing considering I can remember a time when I thought there was a chance we'd die of exhaustion before the baby reached two months old.  Milla's toddling abilities are still spotty but she's definitely got them, and there will never in the future be a time BEFORE she learned to walk.  Mind-blowing.

2.  I like to steal my husband's socks to wear.  I'm wearing a pair of his socks right now, in fact.

3.  I got highlights in my hair last week.  First time ever.  I like them a lot.  They're very subtle, which is what I wanted.

4.  In tangential news, I've finally found a new stylist I'm going to stick with, the one I used to like having moved away more than two years ago.  She's great and she's also hilarious as all get out.  Big sigh of relief - my follicles will thank me.

5.  If babies are biologically intended to eat meat, why don't they have canines?  Surely our prehistoric ancestors didn't have food processors with which to puree the flesh of hunted animals?

6.  It's a cliche that women always get great gifts for the men in their lives, while men are out at 5:30 on Christmas Eve buying the last Dustbuster on the shelf at WalMart because they haven't been able to think of anything else.  Why is my life the exact opposite of this?  Bryan blows me away year after year with amazing presents (the one I'm typing on right now being a prime example), and every year I'm all, "Gee, do you think he'd like another sweater?"

7.  In tangential news, I have the best husband ever.  Don't think I'm not grateful.

8.  I'm hungry.  Perhaps this is because we had popcorn for dinner.  How many calories in popcorn?  Probably not enough to tide me over until tomorrow.

9.  My primary love language is words.  No surprise there, huh?

10.  Some day... I'm having my eyes lasered.  (Name that movie, siblings of mine.)

You Knew One Was Coming Eventually

I am not usually a meme girl, but I saw this one at Miss Zoot's and enjoyed it.  Besides, it's November and I have to post every day, so...

It's supposed to be six items on each list.  I came up with four, and that's good enough.  If you like the meme, consider yourself tagged!

Name six (or four) guilty pleasures no one would suspect you of having
(I can't really come up with things NO ONE would suspect me of having, since there are a few people who know me really well, but these are pleasures I think most people would not suspect me of having.)
1.  Television.  For someone who grew up without it and still doesn't own one, I've watched and enjoyed more television than you'd probably guess.  (I've seen pretty much every DVD-ed episode of those shows I linked to.)
2.  Eating Cool Whip directly from the container.
3.  Taking long baths even though I should be helping my husband take care of the baby.
4.  Teen movies.  Like this one, and this one, and this one, and this one.  My childhood best friend (hi Christy!) and I spent hours watching those kind of movies when we were younger, and I've never lost my love of them.

Name six (or four) guilty pleasures you wish you had the courage to indulge
1.  Really fabulous handbags.  (Although my failure to indulge this is due more to lack of funds than lack of courage.)
2.  Really fabulous shoes.  (Ditto.)
3.  Spa-type things like massages and manicures.  I love the idea, but find the reality intimidating.  I'm secretly afraid that I'd show up and they'd be like, "What is this frumpy girl doing here?"
4.  The newest fashions when they're actually new.  I'm not right on top of the fashions or anything, but I've usually got an idea what's new... and I'm usually too chicken to wear it.  Back in the day, I didn't start wearing boot-cut pants until a couple years after they became popular.  Just the other night I tried on a pair of skinny jeans, and thought they looked pretty good, but couldn't screw up the courage to buy them.  Maybe someday I'll be more confident.

Name six (or four) pleasures you once considered guilty but have now either abandoned or made peace with
1.  (Abandoned)  Celebrity fashion blogs.  I like looking at the crazy clothes and reading the snarky commentary, but I ultimately abandoned this habit when I was trying to pare down the number of blogs I read, and decided these were non-essential.
2.  (Abandoned)  Boy-band music.  Every once in a while I'll still turn on a little *NSync (I know!) when I'm cooking dinner or something, but I used to listen to this stuff all the time.
3.  (Made peace with)  Sweet tea.  I love lots of sugar in my tea, but I used to have this idea that I would gradually wean myself off it, for the sake of my health and my teeth.  Now I've realized that the small amount of sugar in a cup or two of tea per day is not such a big deal, and I've embraced the habit. 
4.  (Made peace with)  Chick lit.  I love chick lit, the more frivolous the better, as long as it's funny and decently well-written.  I used to pretend that I was a higher-plane-fiction kind of girl, but now I've come to terms with the truth.  Although there are some classics that I love, I also enjoy many books that aren't classics, and I'm not afraid to admit it.

Revolu-shoe-nary

As a child I loved our family trips to get new shoes.  The shoe store was locally owned and the children's section had a raised platform with a bench where we got to sit to be measured for our Stride Rites.  The friendly salesperson would help us choose them, then obligingly put our old shoes in the box so that we could wear the new ones out of the store.  They also gave us helium balloons.  When I close my eyes I can still remember quite vividly how it felt to walk out of that store wearing brand-new shoes with a balloon tied to my wrist and bobbing above my head.  The rubber on the new shoes seemed to bounce against the pavement - or maybe my joy at having them just made it feel that way.

I've enjoyed shoes ever since.  My parents always provided one good pair of name-brand tennis shoes, plus dress shoes and sandals (in keeping with my grandfather's adage that you can spend your money at the shoe store and the grocery store or at the doctor's office), but when I was a teenager if I wanted extra just-for-fun shoes, I had to pay for them myself.  This meant I got them from Payless, which did not bother my teenaged self.  I'd spent my childhood going barefoot whenever possible, so supportiveness in shoes was not a priority for me.  I had a short attention span, so durability was not a priority either.  Cheapness and cuteness were the priorities.

By the time I packed up all my stuff to go to college, I had a couple dozen pairs of shoes.  This was a few more than most of my close friends, but I didn't (and still don't) think it was excessive.  The grand total I'd spent on those shoes was still far less than one pair of designer boots would cost.

During my early college years I was consistently broke and didn't even have money to spend on cheap shoes, but once I got married I was able to pick the habit back up again.  And since we had a real income rather than just babysitting money and checks from Grandma, I upgraded my tastes a little.  I discovered DSW, and a while later Zappos.  You can imagine how excited Bryan was about this, but I am very good at sticking to a budget and never spend money we don't have, so the only thing he could complain about with the new shoes was the space they occupied.

When we moved into our house in 2004, I had about fifty pairs.  I still don't really think that is so many, but Bryan rolled his eyes every time the subject came up.  I decided I could pacify him by getting rid of two pairs of shoes every time I bought a new pair, since quite a few of the shoes still hanging around were holdovers from my Payless days that I had no plans to wear again.  I would have been willing to throw them out anyway, but I didn't tell him this part, since they made such a good bargaining tool.  Things went along like that for a while, and I threw out several pairs of junky shoes and collected a few new pairs that I still wear today.

Then - and I never would have believed I'd do this, which proves that you should never say "never" - I pretty much stopped buying shoes.  I was infertile/unemployed/pregnant/dealing with a newborn and too sad/unmotivated/swollen/busy to shop.  There was one impulse purchase from Zappos when I decided I had to have this totally adorable pair of Pumas (I was right), but other than that, I didn't buy any shoes for nearly two years. 

In that time, I had a baby.  I felt pretty lucky afterward because my recovery was easy, but a few months post-partum I started noticing that my body was falling apart.  I'd get this sudden shooting pain in my hip, and sometimes it would give out completely.  My back hurt.  My legs hurt.  My feet hurt.  Surely this couldn't all be attributed to the rigors of baby care!

I inherited my mom's feet, which are bad.  I wear flats all the time, not just because I'm 5'9" and tower over everyone when I wear heels, but because I know that if I wear heels more than just occasionally my feet will have their revenge before I'm thirty.  My mom wears SAS shoes pretty much exclusively, but I've always managed to get away with relatively unsupportive footwear, as long as the shoes were flat. 

It took me more months than I'd like to admit to figure out that pregnancy had changed that for me.  (Although my feet did shrunk down to pre-pregnancy size, ha!)  I'd been wearing flip-flops all summer and it occurred to me a month or two ago that this could be connected to all the weird aches and pains I'd been having, especially that hip-giving-out thing.  So I made sure Bryan wouldn't be needing anything from that month's clothing budget, winced a little at the price, and ordered a pair of Dansko clogs.

I've had these shoes for two months, and I am not exaggerating when I say that they have completely changed my way of thinking about the ideal shoe situation.  I used to think that more was better, that having four dozen pairs of shoes from which to choose in the morning was an ideal situation.  Actually, I still think that would be an ideal situation... but only if all the shoes made me feel as good as the Danskos do.  I love them so much that I've been wearing them basically non-stop since I got them, and my hip hasn't given out and my back and legs and feet feel great.  Who knew that high-quality shoes could make such a difference?

The other day Bryan got out a big heavy-duty trash bag and I went digging in the closet and we got rid of a lot of my shoes.  I now own just twenty pairs, many of which I know I'll wear only on special occasions, and I don't expect my collection to grow much over the coming years.  I feel good about this.  I've always loved shoe shopping for its own sake, and I'm sure I'll still browse the aisles of DSW from time to time just for fun, but for the most part I expect my future shoe purchases to be investments in shoes that are really good for my body.  And even if my shopping-loving self doesn't appreciate this, my body does.  Which is, of course, what counts.

(I really finished exactly at midnight, I promise, but I set the post to publish at 11:59 so that it'd still be technically on the 15th.  I didn't know it was going to take so long!  Who'd have thought I could write more than 1,000 words on the topic of shoes?)

Vanity of Vanities, Part II

Let's talk about skin care and make-up.  I want to bore all my male readers (and probably many of my female ones) to tears.  My stat counter is giving me numbers that are much too high these days, most likely due to NaBloPoMo.  Gotta do something to remedy that.

Not really, but I just got back from an Arbonne party and the topic is on my mind, plus I've got no other inspiration for topics today, so this is it.

I've been blessed with fairly good, clear skin.  When I was an adolescent my skin care routine consisted of Clean and Clear face wash and nothing else, and (not to brag, since it certainly wasn't by my own merits, but I'm just stating facts here) my friends always talked about how lucky I was to have such nice skin.  In the winter if I noticed painfully dry spots I'd dab some baby lotion on my face, but for the most part I did nothing, and looked fine.  Sigh.  Those were the days.

Heading into my twenties, I upgraded my regimen a wee bit, and actually started using moisturizer!  (I know!)  The basic Olay stuff caught my eye on the drugstore shelf, and I had no complaints when I started using it, so I kept using it.  The biggest benefit I got from it, although I didn't realize it at first, was the built-in sunscreen.  My face has really benefited from not getting lightly sunburned all the time.  In the cleanser arena, I didn't so much upgrade as make a lateral move, from Clean and Clear to St. Ives Facial Scrub.  It worked fine.  I didn't have any problems, but then, I'd never had problems with my skin.

Fast forward to fairly recently, when I started to notice that my skin doesn't look nearly as even and fresh and firm as it did five years ago.  I'd been reading Amalah's Advice Smackdown since its inception on her personal blog, and I'd never felt tempted by all the products she talks about, figuring that my basic clean-and-moisturize regimen was working fine for me.  But as I started to feel more dissatisfied with that regimen, I went to her archives for help, and decided I needed a tinted moisturizer.

Since I'd always been happy with my drugstore moisturizer, and since the price tags on the higher-end stuff made me cringe, I decided to try the first tinted moisturizer I found on the shelf, which was Neutrogena's basic SPF moisturizer with a light tint.  Would anyone else be interested in trying it?  I have most of a tube sitting in a drawer in my bathroom.  I highly do NOT recommend it, as every time I put the stuff on, my face starting itching horribly within an hour or two.  Also, the "light" tint was too dark for my fair skin, so it looked bad anyway.

(It still kind of shocks me that I have fair skin now.  As a child I was one of those kids whose skin is brown by the end of May, and my face was dark-ish to match.  Somehow as I've gotten older this has changed.  Maybe the sunscreen had something to do with it?  Anyway, I am now deathly pale.  My current moisturizer is in the shade of "porcelain."  Porcelain!  I am delicate and pale, possibly consumptive.  Be careful, I might faint in your lap.)

After my bad experience with Neutrogena's tinted moisturizer, I decided I needed to just get something high-quality that wasn't going to make my skin mad at me.  Also, I needed a good concealer for the ever-more-noticeable bags under my eyes.  (Remember when I asked for recommendations?)  Also, I'd been noticing that my forehead had been breaking out regularly, which was a new thing for me, so maybe it was time to upgrade my cleanser as well.

Is it possible that anyone is still reading this?  I'm the one writing, for heaven's sake, and I'm boring myself nearly to tears.  Man, the depths that we sink to for NaBloPoMo.

At any rate, I saved up a pretty good chunk of my allowance and took a trip to our mall's brand-new Sephora, and got some new products to try (all of which I'd seen recommended various places on the Internet).  Currently I'm using the Philosophy Purity Made Simple cleanser, Laura Mercier Oil-Free Tinted Moisturizer (in porcelain!), and a Stila Cover Up Stick.  This stuff has made me realize that "you get what you pay for" is a cliche for a reason.  I'm still planning to do some more shopping around and trying different stuff to find the products that I love best, but I'm happy that I'm in a place now where I can look in the mirror at my clean-scrubbed, blotchy face and have some ways to make it look acceptable to me.

It is a little sad that my days of washing my face once a day and looking great anyway are over.  This new phase is definitely more expensive.  But it turns out it's kind of fun too.  I used to hate to shop.  When did that change?

Traveling Baby

Ironically considering that she's always acted as if car travel were a direct and calculated insult to her sovereignty, Camilla does pretty well on airplanes.  When we took our vacation to Idaho back in May the trip home was a painful fourteen hours door-to-door, and I still didn't feel that it was as excruciating as the six-hour drive from Indiana we'd endured the month before. 

Compared to either of those ordeals, the two-hour straight-shot flight from Michigan to New England, even with airport and car time on either end, was a dream within a dream.  Camilla skipped her morning nap (BAD) and was so interested in the features of the airplane that she wouldn't go down for her afternoon nap (BAD) but this resulted in her sleeping for the entire drive from the airport to our friends' house on Cape Cod (GOOD).  So it all worked out beautifully in the end.

My favorite part of the trip so far was at 5:30am on Sunday, when the Billa woke up and wouldn't go back to sleep, so Bryan stood up with her to bounce her, and... she pooped all over him.  I bet you can guess which carefully chosen piece of mild profanity was his response to that situation.

Our friends have a television like most Americans, and they also have remote controls for the television.  This excites Camilla to no end:

It excites us not so much because we have the task of extricating said remote controls from Her Highness, who does not appreciate the fact that we are saving her from (A) the displeasure of our host, who is very generous and has a four-month-old daughter of his own, but who would still not be thrilled is she destroyed his remote control, and (B) certain electrocution and possible death.  She is such an ungrateful child.

We are having a wonderful time with dear friends and all is sweetness and light.  Unfortunately the best of the best in the best of all possible worlds does not make for very funny or interesting blogging fodder, but what can you do?

Dinner at a nearby seafood restaurant is on the agenda for right about now.  I am a fan of seafood, except for the really slippery or squishy kinds, so I don't want to miss that.

Here is a picture of Camilla and our hostess's arm:

Tomorrow we are going to meet Maureen!  I can't wait.

Vanity of Vanities

Remember my hair?

Here is a picture of it one week ago:

It is in a ponytail because that is pretty much how I've been wearing it for the last year.  It had gotten mad-long, and I couldn't deal with it and its funky, grown-out layers and its flatness, so whoop, every morning, up in a ponytail it would go.

It is only because of an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances that I ended up with such long hair.  Not that long hair is bad.  I'm sure your long hair looks great on you, but I'm of the opinion that it's better to have a haircut that is flattering than hair that is pretty in itself, and I am definitely a person who looks better with shorter hair.  Mine is very fine and stick-straight, and when it gets longer it starts weighing itself down, and then it's all over.  Flat, boring hair.

In 2005, I'd finally found a stylist I really, really liked.  I went to her a couple of times, called two months later for an appointment, and discovered she'd dropped off the face of the earth.  Then I quit my job, then I got pregnant and spent eight months forcing myself to eat food I didn't want, then I had a baby and before I knew it I'd been talking about getting my hair cut for nearly two years.  Last week I finally did it.

My hair now:

That used to be attached to me.  Creepy, huh?

The happy result of my pathological inability to just pick up the phone and make a freaking hair appointment already is that some child will benefit.  One of my college professors had a son with alopecia areata, and ever since I knew him I've wanted to grow my hair out to give to Locks of Love, but I'd always get sick of it before it was long enough and chop it off again.  This time, I made it!  I had well over ten inches and plenty left on my head.  Since I'd been planning to cut it as short as necessary to get enough to send in, I was happy to end up with a bob.

Bob!

Did I ever tell you about how my youngest brother used to be obsessed with various words?  For a long time it was the word "midget" (which he used as all parts of speech for many months) but for a while it was the man's name "Bob".  The kid was totally thrilled when his fifth-grade class went to see the Christmas Spectacular and one of the performers who came on stage was... a midget named Bob!  Two of his favorite things, together as one!  I believe I'll always think of my brother when I hear the word "bob" said with any kind of enthusiasm.

At any rate, my sister (who is in Austria for the semester now.  I know she was supposed to guest post some more but she never got around to it while she was here.  You should email her to tell her what a bummer that is!  Or just to say hi - she's a little down these days and I bet she'd appreciate it.)  wanted to see pictures of my new haircut, since she's not here to see it in person.

How many do you think we'll need to make her happy?  How about one that makes my nose look big?

Or!  How about a dirty-yucky-unwashed hair picture?  That should be cute!

(I am probably not the cutest part of that picture.)

How about an it's-so-dark-you-can't-actually-see-the-hair picture?

Anyone got a recommendation for a good under-eye concealer?  I'm not joking.

And... if my sister wants to see more she'll have to email me, because I'd like to have some readers left.  Sheesh.

Just to Prove This Blog Is Not Yet Actually Defunct

I've recently learned that it's considered rude to apologize for not posting on one's blog; you are instead supposed to act humbly as if you believe that no one cares a whit if you post.  I'm not sure how I feel about this; I blog to share my life with other people and have a share in theirs, so pretending that we don't really give a flying whatever about each other seems odd.  However, now that I've learned of the rule I'm loath to openly defy it and give the appearance of rudeness, thereby causing people to think my mama didn't raise me right, when she most certainly did.  So apologizing for not posting is out.  On the other hand, once I've gone for nearly two weeks without posting, beginning a new post without an apology feels weird and wrong, like entering a room while speaking the middle of a sentence.  Result: impasse.

Happily, Tracy has saved me from the to-apologize-or-not dilemma by asking if I am okay.  I can now post without giving anyone cause to cast aspersions on my parents for raising me to be A) conceited or B) rude; I am merely answering the question of a friend.  I must post!  I have no choice!  Neat, huh?

There are roughly one million things I've not mentioned here that have happened fairly recently.  Due to the baby's unexpected and INSANE state of awakefulness between three o'clock and six o'clock this morning, I have lost the brain power to give any sort of organization or coherency to my listing of these things.  In random order:

1.  Camilla learned how to crawl.  This happened exactly one month ago yesterday, when we were up north at Bryan's parents' condo.  (Also, incidentally, the place where Daniel first crawled.)  She'd been working on it for a while, flailing on her stomach and scooting backward into walls and furniture, but on that particular morning we cleared a space for her, put Bryan's watch (shiny! also waterproof!) on the floor a few feet from her, and watched as she hesitantly coordinated the movements to get herself over to it.  A month later she is a master crawler, and now pulls herself up on things as well, although she hasn't figured out how to sit back down gracefully and gets unhappy every time she plops awkwardly onto her bottom. 

The bottom in question

We are currently conducting an experiment on exactly how little babyproofing we can get away with and still have A) a living child, and B) an intact house when Milla starts kindergarten.

2.  I have figured out how to nurse Camilla in the car without pulling over and taking her out of her car seat.  Yes, that's right, I can now nurse her while she is firmly buckled in and I am also buckled in, albeit a little less firmly because the act requires some terrific torso twisting.  (It goes without saying that I can only do this if Bryan is driving and I'm sitting in the back seat of the car; if I ever figure out how to nurse from the driver's seat I will be applying for a Nobel Prize.)  I'm not sure why - the achievement not being particularly notable - but I am extremely proud of this.  Giving birth, eh.  Keeping a child alive for almost ten months, eh.  But nursing in transit?  I'm ready to give myself a medal.  Parenthood is weird.


Also weird is the fact that we appear to have spawned a lizard child

3.  My brother is home from the Coast Guard!  After seven months in California learning to be an electronic technician, he's got a few weeks of leave before he leaves for his station in the far north.  It's great having him here, and we've been getting in as much family time as possible.  (Not that I'm making excuses - just kidding, I totally am - but this has contributed greatly to my lack of posting.)  I have the best family ever.

Best and goofiest

4.  I finished Harry Potter!  It took me about three weeks to read all seven books, and I was in agonies waiting to read the last one, especially after it arrived in the mail.  But I'm so glad I read them as a set; I think I got a lot more out of it that way.  I loved the ending; I thought the plotting was brilliant and there were just enough surprises.  I really liked CJ's post on it, and this review by Orson Scott Card is awesome too.

Maybe now that she's done with those books, my mother will start paying attention to me again

5.  After nine months of feeling pretty good about how much sleep we were getting around here, I've finally hit a breaking point.  I've never expected the girl to sleep twelve consecutive hours per night - and still don't anticipate that she will for many months - but the number of night wakings seems to be increasing rather than decreasing, lately.  I can handle three or four or even five, but eight or ten has me really dragging the next day.  So we're working on it.  I've read The No-Cry Sleep Solution and we're using some of Pantley's ideas and some of our own to gently encourage Camilla to sleep for longer stretches without needing to nurse back to sleep every time she wakes.  We'll see how it works.  We feel pretty strongly that the cry-it-out method and those kinds of "sleep training" are not for us, so I'm really hoping we're successful because this is kind of our only option.  At any rate, she won't always be a baby and she will eventually sleep through the night, so no matter how rough this is, it's not permanent.  Right?

If worst comes to worst, I'm planning to petition Bryan to become a full-time baby mattress

I'd love to hear about any get-the-baby-to-sleep ideas that worked for your family.

This will become an endless entry if I don't watch out.  More later, I promise.  (Uh, not that you care.  I'm not by any means suggesting that you care.)

You should care that my parents dress me like a street urchin, though.  Sheesh.