A productive, expensive weekend

My brain is scattery – I probably didn’t get enough sleep, this is not the flowy post you’re used to.

Landon’s paternal grandparents were supposed to come this past weekend. But it didn’t work out, so in retaliation we spent a ton of money instead. I can’t remember exactly what we spent money on during our Saturday outing, but I remember telling Clinton that my head was about to explode and we needed to go home before we spent any more money.

We got in the hot tub on Saturday night. Which was nice, and Landon really enjoyed it too.

I had compiled a list of things I wanted to get done, and figured I’d have time, what with the extra entertainment for the dictator, and my arms being free to say…put away the Christmas decorations. Of my list, only one thing got done (and it was not the Christmas decorations, or Valentine’s Day stockings as I’ve been affectionately calling them – I guess that makes them Easter stockings now.) I did finish and submit our taxes. We did get other stuff done and had a very productive weekend anyway.

* We hung Landon’s swing on the back porch.
* We trimmed the sago palms and sprayed them for scale.
* We repotted a plant we got from Julie – oh the irony…it’s a money tree (you’ll see.)
* We repotted a plant I won at Kandi’s bridal shower
* We miracle gro-ed all our potted plants.
* We put Tiki torches around the pool
* We replaced one of the skimmer baskets in the pool
* We sprayed the clear coat on the mosaic armadillo and cow skull

(When I say “We”, it’s code for “I watched while Clint…”)

We spent a lot of time outdoors this Sunday, which was nice, it was a really pretty day. Our goal is to try and do that more often, 1 or 2 nights a week when the weather permits, have dinner outside, and when it warms up, swim a little. Landon seems to really enjoy being outside, and who can blame him?


Anyway, after a weekend of spending money and doing house projects, having done only about half our laundry…our dryer died. Just when Landon had already worn all his feetie pajamas that fit and they were soaking wet in a sad little pile in the bottom of the dryer. It smelled like burnt copper. Apparently that’s what money smells like when it’s leaving you. Clint took the clothes to Jay’s to put them in their dryer, and I picked them up Monday night when I pick up Landon.

Monday night Clint took the whole dryer apart and tested parts of it. Motor is blown, according to the internet a blown motor in a Maytag also means a blown circuit board, and based on prices of parts, even if we could fix it ourselves completely, we’ve almost spent what a new dryer costs. So…we went dryer shopping, and ultimately decided to give it one more day and sleep on it. When we returned to Lowe’s on Tuesday night to make the purchase all the dryers were moved around. Apparently ours is the old model as of Tuesday and therefore $50 cheaper. SWEET!! Finally procrastination works in my favor.

So my cushion in the bank account now looks like a big white box with knobs and a little door. Goodbye, money.

The upside is that maybe this new one will alleviate us of having that faint cat urine smell in the utility room while we dry clothes.

Oh and someone killed a bird and left it on the driveway for us. I don’t want to name names, but I have a few suspects.

(Oh and hey, check out the side bar, I got to delete some stuff!)

Teef

Or toof, anyway. Landon cut his first tooth on the 13th. He’s been drooling since, well – it seems like forever. And his doctor said he’s a little young to be cutting teeth, and that it was probably his salivary glands forming and that he just didn’t have teeth to hold back the saliva. Well, various sites on the internet say between 4 and 7 months. So we’re in that window. The emergence explains quite a few behaviors: the drooling, the facial rash, the fussiness while eating, the weird sleeping patterns and the constant bringing things to his mouth to chew on. Two days ago he started pulling on his ears – which is also a sign of teething, but I was more afraid that it might be an ear infection. Anyway, no ear infection.

The culprit



So we went out and bought the toothpaste for babies and the little rubber finger thingy. Landon LOVES his toothpaste. I squirted a tiny bit on the little finger thing and stuck it in his mouth. As I started trying to maneuver around getting all his gums and the top of the pretty little white tooth, he sucked so hard, that he sucked the little finger glove off my finger.

I fought with him over it while I tried to finish the process, but when I was done, and I took it out of his mouth for good…oh the HORROR!!! How dare I!

The next time didn't seem so traumatic when the toothbrush was taken away:

MACS

Remember that do good thing over in the side bar? Yeah, well, it’s the second Wednesday of the month, so I’m talking about what I did.

I went out and bought valentines to send to the January kids. I signed them and sent them off and I kind of felt like I was cheating, because it was too easy.

So then, we had this little debacle with the Girl Scout Troop meeting for last week, and no one remembered whose turn it was, so I thought – AH HA – perfect timing. This time, we’ll do it for the February kids. So during lunch the day of the meeting I went out and bought Valentine making stuff. I bought blank card thingies, valentiney paper, some foam hearts that stick on, and some stickers. Also some funky scissors, some glue sticks, and some new markers, cause let’s face it, when you have a girl scout troop for 4 years, a $7 package of markers will only last so long. In the girls’ defense, the ones we have left are in pretty good shape – but since I throw away 3 or 4 capless ones each time we use them, their color choices have been decreasing by the meeting. But, I suppose every 3 years I could splurge and buy some new ones.

So I took my newly bought stuff home and went to work. Now I’m not a super duper scrappy booky gal. Landon’s scrapbook is pretty much, the fancy paper and the little black corners – and at the moment, only goes through his first month. But I only had about 10 minutes in which to create a “go by” card, because this evening, I’m going to have my hands full. So I used the first pair of funky scissors I grabbed to cut out a small rectangle and the next pair to cut a smaller rectangle and regular scissors to cut a heart each out of a different paper. I arranged them on top of my card, along with 2 foamy hearts and I got this:


On the inside, I just wrote “Happy Valentine’s Day.” But I think it turned out kind of cute. Here are some pictures of what the girls created. I had them each make 2, they could each pick 2 kids and or 1 kid and take one home. I’m putting them in big envelopes with a letter from the troop. I'm very impressed with the girls' creations:

Meme #1

Ok, sooooooo, I’ve got nothing. Nothing has happened, nothing funny, nothing absurd, nothing exciting. Someone needs to run around my cul-de-sac in their underwear, or I have to resort to the memes.

Oh also – a short list of things I will never ever discuss again, because the universe is out to smite me. I will not discuss them here, I will not discuss them with you in person. DO. NOT. ASK.

1. Landon’s Sleep Habits.
2. Post Partum Hair Loss.

OK – On to the meme.

6 Weird Things About Me.

1. I eat candy categorically. Skittles, M&Ms, Reece’s Pieces, are sorted into groups with all the colors, when I run out of a color, I make a group of the colors that are left. I then eat the smallest groups first, leaving me in the end with even amounts of the colors. I eat candy bars in pieces. Snickers I bite the caramel/peanut part off, then eat the outer chocolate away from the nougat and then the nougat last. I can’t help doing it.

2. I am always counting. I count steps, I count when I’m rocking Landon, I count while I’m waiting for the microwave, I count at stop lights. Chances are if you see me not doing anything, you can ask me what number I’m on, and I will have one. Sometimes I count for totals, sometimes I count to eight over and over again, and sometimes I sing the Blue Aardvark song in my head.

3. I am compelled to do math problems that are presented to me, either on TV, or in the movies, or in general. Just to make sure they come up with the right answer. I have seen that tutoring commercial where the little girl figures out how much they feed the fish each week like 100 times. I do the math EVERY. TIME.

4. I can’t hear out of my left ear and I have no desire whatsoever to have it fixed.

5. I don’t want things. I’m the hardest person in the world to shop for, because I just don’t want anything really.

6. I don’t like hamburgers or ketchup – I’ve been called un-American for it.

If you have a blog consider yourself tagged.

What else do you need, when you have a puppy who loves you enough to let you do this and keeps coming back for more:

Today's Lesson

When you pack your pump bag, and you pack 4 bottles, it's probably a good idea to pack more than 1 lid.

Olly Olly Oxen Free

No, I haven’t been hiding. I had been posting everyday and you people were getting all excited and loving it, and I was getting more hits and the modem crapped out on me and I not only missed blogging for a few days while Clint was still gone, but I missed a blog post about our Dr. visit and his 4 month newsletter. So I’ve backdated those posts along with a couple others that I wrote during this down time, and I’m sorry for the delay. But seriously – take it out on the modem. Oh and the modem…took our network card out binge drinking and caused all kinds of mayhem – cause they’re buddies like that. Anyway, new modem, network card has recovered from its hangover, and we’re back in business so to speak. Also – don’t cry too hard, because you nearly got some really boring posts anyway, as I was running out of stuff to talk about – do you really want me to do meme’s when you could be reading about power issues and pumping? Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t care and only come to look at the pictures anyway and never read a word of what I say. You’ll probably still get them (the meme type posts), but just not now.

And in the nanny search land. The lady next door can’t do it because she doesn’t have room in her car for his car seat and she has to go pick her daughter up from school. I really liked the lady I spoke with two weeks ago and had she been in our neighborhood or on my way to work it would have been a no brainer. We’ve decided to have Jay’s wife Linda take care of him during the day. Linda offered to watch him, she lives around the corner, she’s got a 9 month old, and she’s had a child with colic – so she pretty much is everything I was looking for. When I left him I felt good about it.

In The Dark

It’s a wonder that anyone in town has power. I didn’t post about my fight with the electric company when we moved into our house because I wasn’t blogging yet. So I’ll start with that LOVELY story.

We moved 5 houses over last January. Actually, technically, we moved down the street first, because the people who bought our house moved in before the house we bought was ready. Anyway, we were moving into our new house. We scheduled the move out and move in a week apart so that we could have some rooms painted and clean up and blah blah blah. So the night they moved the previous owners out…they cut off our power. This was a Friday. A Friday NIGHT when we discovered it. Luckily the painter didn’t mind painting without power.

No one required a permit 3 years ago when we had moved in to the old house – or maybe they did but someone else took care of it, because I certainly didn’t, but now…MUST HAVE CITY PERMIT. So I got the permit issued, after some finagling of the gate in the back yard. And TXU said – you will have power on Tuesday. And Tuesday came and went and we had no power and I called and they said. “You’ll have power Wednesday.” And Wednesday came and went and we did not have power. So I called and they said “You don’t have a permit.” So I called the city and the city said they issued it.

I called again and I got a lady who said “There’s a permit for your street address, but in another city, same day…but that’s not your permit, you still need a permit.” And I got off the phone and called the city again and they said they issued it, but they would re-issue it. And I got to thinking. Kind of weird that we, in THIS city, would be moving on the EXACT same day as someone in THAT city would be to the EXACT same street address.

So I called again, and the lady was not helpful and I asked her what number she called when she called Centerpoint, because I only got a machine to talk to and I wanted to talk to a person.

Her: They’ll tell you the same thing.

Me: What number do you call, when you call Centerpoint?

Her: They’re going to tell you…

Me: What number do you call?

Her: Well, there’s no permit.

Me: WHAT NUMBER DO YOU CALL?

Her: You don’t have to yell at me.

Me: Well, I didn’t think you could hear me, you weren’t answering my question. What number do you call?

And she gave me the number FI.NA.LLY. At this point, the movers have come, they are unloading furniture, and I had Shane with me, because I didn’t want to be alone when they came…he called Clint and told him I was getting more and more mad every time I got off the phone and I think I may have even scared him a little.

So I called Centerpoint and I spoke with Belinda, who I later fell in love with, and considered switching teams to be with her. And I said “Here’s the deal, our power was turned off on Friday, we didn’t have the city permit, the city permit was issued Monday, They said power on Tuesday or Wednesday, it’s now Friday – I’m now moving furniture into my house without having been able to even so much as vacuum the carpet. Now they tell me that I don’t have a permit with Centerpoint and the city says I do. And this morning I was told about a permit that’s for my exact same address but only in THAT city instead of THIS city…and I find it odd that people are moving in at the exact same time as me to the exact same address in THAT city. I think that’s my permit. I’d like to give you my permit number and see if that is indeed my permit.” I was completely amazed that she let me tell my entire story, and even more so when she said “Ok.” I gave her my permit number and she said “Yes, that is your permit. Oh my, you should not have been without power that long, let me give you my extension and my name, and I will speak to my supervisor and see if we can get your power turned on today – and give me a number where I can call you back…if you don’t hear from me in 1 hour, call back and ask for me.” I felt very good about this call and skipped/danced back into the house (cell reception being what it is at our house, I was making these calls in the backyard.) And she called me back in 15-20 minutes and had my power scheduled to be on by the end of the day.

When the guy walked up to the house, he didn’t even knock, he just drove up and walked to the side of the house where the power stuff is and I leaned out the front door and yelled “YOU ARE MY FAVORITE PERSON IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW!!!” I refrained from running out and hugging him, but I seriously considered it, also I didn’t want to cheat on Belinda.

All this to say, guess who doesn’t have power? Clint’s cousin Jay, who has been living in their house for a month now. And they just now cut off the power, and the landlord, just now got the permit issued, and they will be without power until Friday. And when he asked to speak to Belinda? They don’t know who Belinda is. She no longer works for Centerpoint. She must have been too smart or too nice or too good to work for them. It’s sad for us, but for her, I hope she’s found a better job – one where she’s not surrounded by all the other morons I spoke to during that week.

Linda is still watching Landon this week, even without power. She has his milk in a cooler and since the weather is nice, it’s not like they’re dying of heat stroke or freezing to death. She also has a key to our house, just in case she needs something electrical – or gets tired of living in campground style.

Leprechaun Gangster

According to the powers that be, Fluor is required to have a transgender restroom. And when we were told about it, we were told it was the bathroom by the auditorium.

So when I asked about a pump room, I was told, there’s a little room off the auditorium. And I only knew of a bathroom…a transgender bathroom. So I never went to check it out. I mean, if I’m going to pump in a bathroom, it might as well be the one closest to my desk, no?

So, I’ve changed projects and I’ve moved to a different area, and I’m using a different bathroom. The bathroom closest to me, doesn’t have an electrical plug close enough to a stall even with my extension cord, so I have to go to the next closest bathroom. I’m using the bathroom on the floor with a lot of the department managers. Among whom are the managers who are women and most of the secretary types. They’ve been around quite a while, so they know some things that aren’t known to everyone. While I pumped in the bathroom today, I was told a few times about this pumping room. I got told about it a few times by women in the other bathroom, but no one seemed to know exactly where it was. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak. So I clarified with one of them that it was indeed NOT the transgender bathroom, and where exactly I should be looking for this room.

This afternoon I had to take a piece of mail to the mail room and since this mythical room is only about 100 yards further, I decided to give it a visit. Color me impressed. There’s a lock on the door. There’s a couch and a bunch of magazines. There’s a sink and little fridge. With this room, I no longer would need my extension cord – well, I do if I want to sit on the couch, but if I sat in the chair I wouldn’t. There’s a little dry erase board to sign up on for time slots, so you don’t interrupt someone. I’m totally going to this room from here on out. The only thing missing is a way to lock up my pump in that room so I wouldn’t have to lug it back and forth, then it would be perfection.

Chubby Big Head

Our doctor visit went really well this time. No scale peeing, no fussing while we talk to the doctor, although he did make some fun noises to get his attention. He weighed 15 lbs 12 oz (75%), is 24 ½ inches tall (50%) and has a 43 cm head (75%). He’s doing the things the doctor expected him to be doing by now. The doctor held him up by his armpits and had him “stand” for as long as he could, I guess we never really let go of him when we do that, but he gave him about a ½ inch clearance, so he freaked himself out when the wobbling started.

We read a few books while we waited for the nurse to come in with the shots. Well, I read them; he tried as hard as he could to eat them.

He got his shots, which he was not happy about, but recovered from very quickly – like within seconds. I can only hope this is a trait he keeps. He ran a VERY low grade fever after and was cranky and I’m guessing sore all day Saturday. Nothing a little Tylenol couldn’t take care of.

Monthly Newsletter #4

Dear Landon,

Wow, what a difference a month makes. In an effort to keep your nasal cavity clean, this month you’ve been home 99% of the time. Your cousin Ashley and Grandma Logan have been taking care of you while I go to work. It’s quite possibly the best arrangement EVER. But as it is, all good things must come to an end.


I’m not sure who to give credit to, but one of them got you to lay still for diaper changes instead of flipping and trying to scoot away with your naked butt up in the air. This was cute at first, but oh so annoying after a while. Grandma said she’s been working on singing and sticking your tongue out, you’re still not really doing anything when anyone else thinks of it, and most of your feats seem to be complete accidents and you even shock yourself. Grandma said one day she put you in the bassinet on your tummy and when she came back to get you that you were on your back. You’ve done it a few times for us too. They also got you to take a pacifier pretty reliably.





You went to your first Girls’ Night Out dinner this month. Where I became that woman who brings her child into a restaurant lets him scream and doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it. Everyone took turns trying to make you happy. Myra was most successful, but you certainly let her know when she changed her bouncing pattern and it wasn’t to your liking. You should know that it’s privilege to come to that and if you’re going to keep up those kinds of antics, you won’t be invited. Also, one day your Daddy will feel confident enough to keep you at home while I go by myself! Oh sweet freedom, I can almost taste it.


You went to your first (and second) basketball game. Dylan’s team won both times, and aside from that whole pesky being tired and hungry at the first one, you did pretty well. The noise and movements kept you busy for the most part. And your cousin Dylan was super excited that you came.

Your dad spent about a week with your Grandparents, so you got a taste of what life would be like if you only had one slave. I think you went pretty easy on me, which I totally appreciate, but it also didn’t go unnoticed that upon his return you realized you need to ramp up your demands so that you could keep us both busy. You wouldn’t want a slave to have a break and say…groom themselves or anything.


Starting on Monday you will be staying during the day with your not-so-distant cousins. You’re going to have to be nice to Linda. Right now she thinks you’re very cute and sweet, and we don’t want her to know otherwise. You and Noah will have a great time playing during the day, and hopefully you will be nice and tired when I get you home. Because we all know I could use the rest.

Love,
Mom