Archives for August 2007

Today, we went to the elementary school for an open house so that The Princess could meet her new kindergarten teacher, see where her classroom would be, and in general get a sense of familiarity so that when school starts on Tuesday, she isn’t just completely overwhelmed with the newness of the whole situation.

Admittedly, I’ve been looking forward to this open house since finding out who The Princess would have for a teacher. Her teacher was my sister’s teacher (way back in the day), and she was also my neighbor when I was in high school. That I have a familiarity with her goes a long way with me as well. Additionally, Mrs. E is a pretty cool lady – her classes are always involved with community related activities, and I think it’s never really too early to teach kids to be nice to the planet and to take care of the streets where you live. Her class almost always adopts a little residential street near the school, and they care for it by picking up trash, and helping keep it clean. Okay, so it sounds a little creepy that my five-year-old could be picking up trash on the side of the road like some middle-aged loser meeting their community service requirement… but I still think it’s a great start to teach kids to take care of the environment.

One of my fears about the open house today was walking in the classroom and seeing the parents of the classmates and having it be a mish-mash of people I went to school with. That’s an entirely real possibility since we live in the same small town where I went to high school. In fact, roaming the halls of the school I saw many many familiar faces (including the wife of my high school boyfriend – glad neither of THEIR kids were in The Princess’s class). Fortunately, her class seems to be filled with children of people I’ve never met, so we’ll both be meeting all new people – and that’s a good thing.

The Princess got to wander around the new room, check out the stuff, notice the view of the playground from the classroom window, meet the teacher. I really can’t wait to see her off on Tuesday – I know she is really going to enjoy this adventure.

Dell, in their latest ads for their super funky color laptops is using the tagline: “Yours Is Here”. Well, it sure as hell ain’t HERE as this morning, my second scheduled ship date for my spiffy Spring Green laptop, my ship date was changed twice.

Yes. Two times, in ONE MORNING Dell delayed my order.

And I’m a bit chapped.

Some of you know this: I don’t spend money on myself much. I agonized over the decision to order this laptop. I did. I finally justified it because I was doing so much work, it was a business decision. Sad to say, even if I had ordered it without all the internal debate, it probably still would not be here.

I’m only one of many. Dell’s own blog is filled with bunches (in the hundreds, actually) of people like me who are peeved because their laptop orders continue to be delayed with poorly relayed excuses from what they refer to as Dell’s “Customer Circus” team. In fact, I called them myself today and was talked in circles by someone, offering me no real reasons, and no compensation for my troubles and the delay (a $50 coupon to spend with Dell? Um, thanks… So, my inconvenience should benefit them by getting another purchase from me? Try again).

I’m now told my laptop will ship September 10. Any delays beyond that, I’m not sure what I’ll do – if I will continue to wait it out or if I’ll cancel and start researching computers again to make a different selection.

Dude, I’m (not) getting a Dell (this week).

Folks, help me:

When you’re feeling glass-half-empty, and you really would like to not feel so glum, what do you do to perk yourself up? I tried a trip to Target and a mint/Oreo ice cream from Coldstone*, and while that helped temporarily, I’m back to feeling kinda blah.

IDEAS?

*I realize I forgot the Starbucks element of making myself happy today, but I can’t do ice cream AND a cappuccino. My tummy only has room for so much yummy goodness, and the weather dictated that ice cream was the better way to go.

I have been going through internet withdrawal following our computer’s plague by adware and spyware. It’s been insane – Hubby and I spent much of yesterday scanning and rescanning the computer and running various programs (with the aid of several “Geeks”) to eradicate the issue.

Oy.

I have missed being online… and now, I’m finding it hard to enjoy it because I’m afraid of crappy adware and spyware bombarding our system again (fortunately, we now have a nifty blocker AND we have hopefully nipped Hubby’s habit of clicking on popups).

But I’m back.

In the September 2007 issue of O The Oprah Magazine, there is a story about Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John Edwards. I’m not a huge politics person, and don’t follow the political hoo-ha too much, but I have to say, the article about Elizabeth was pretty interesting, and just the fact that the woman has been through and is going through so much – it’s amazing to me that she is still out there, pushing forward and staying active in her causes and in the politics.

Anyway.

Something she said really struck me, and I’m noting it here partly because I thought it was worth sharing and partly so I can recycle the magazine and not have to keep it forever, and can refer to my archives if I want to read it again…

“Life is this great big blackboard, and on it you write all the things that you do. You write your job, you write your mowing the lawn, you write your buying Girl Scout cookies, or that you’re the manager for the soccer team. Sometimes you want to fit something else in; you’re just trying to find a little space. Then you lose a child and everything is erased. You start to think how silly it was, some of those things you put on the board. First time you pick up the chalk to write again, you’re a lot more careful about what you write there. You realize that it actually matters how you spend your life.”

Highs:

• Not having to cook for over 24 hours
• Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s exhibit about The Doors
• Movies about rock & roll and song lyrics – funny, relevant, and entertaining
• The sign at the bar where we had lunch Saturday: “Every man needs a wife because there are many things that happen that can’t be blamed on the government.” It was sexist as all get out, but hilarious
  Shopping at Trader Joe’s – it might seem stupid, but we don’t have one here, so it was fun to check it out
• Getting roses from Hubby at Trader Joe’s
• Vegging in the hotel whirlpool

Lows:

• Being in the car for 9+ hours over the weekend
• Missing the kids
• All the reading at Rock Hall – many exhibits, many pieces of paper, lots of reading. I love to read, but I don’t want to read every phone message that every kid of someone in a band wrote down
• Hubby’s hotel pick – it was nasty, it was skeevy, it was scary. We ended up looking for a new hotel because I didn’t want to sleep there!
• The brats in the hotel whirlpool – apparently none of the parents could read the sign that said “Guests under 18 years of age not permitted” because Hubby and I brought up the average age of people in the whirlpool to about 20. After getting kicked and bumped repeatedly by kids SWIMMING in the whirlpool, Hubby told them if they wanted to swim, to go in the pool. Most of them did (thank goodness!).
• Not sleeping in, still! No kids, nothing to do, and still, we were up by 6! Yikes!

THE RULES:
1. You have to post these rules before you give the facts.
2. You must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name. If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.
3.You need to write your own blog post containing your own middle name game facts.

No one tagged me, and I’m not tagging anyone – but if you do this too, let me know. Luckily, my middle name is super duper short.

A – Anniversary is today. Today Hubby and I celebrate our 7th anniversary. Seven years ago today, we were getting hitched. We took a celebratory trip this weekend. I’ll blog it later, but I’ve been in the car a lot this weekend and my brain is fuzzy.

N – Nights Out! After giving birth to The Princess, I wasn’t very good at taking time for myself because I had to return to work full time pretty soon after she was born. Now that I stay home, even with two kiddos, if it wasn’t for occasional nights out – either by myself or with friends, I would go bananas. I’m a slow learner – I am realizing now (finally) that these times to be a grown up are essential to my sanity.

N – Never tell people EVERYTHING. There is no one person who knows all there is to know about me. I have friends I talk to about things, but I find that I never completely let people know all there is to know about me. Maybe it’s a holdover from living in the small town where everyone told everyone else everyone’s business… but I’ve always kept things to myself rather than be a topic of gossip.

E – Eggs. I hate ’em. Put ’em in cookies or cake, and we’ll be fine. Scrambled, hard boiled, in an omelet, fried, poached, on toast, benedict, whatever. I don’t like eggs. Ew.

I keep meaning to write and tell you all that we have managed to recover from the Pacifier Withdrawal and now sleep seems to be something we’re all getting more of (though not enough, if you ask me). At the same time we took away the Pacifiers, we also moved Pumpkin into a toddler bed, as she was started to hoist her leg over the railing, and I figured it was only a matter of time until she took a dive out of the crib. Having been through the trauma of hearing my child thud against the bedroom floor (when The Princess scaled the rails at 20 months), I wasn’t particularly looking forward to going through that.

We moved the crib mattress to the toddler bed, and the novelty of being able to get in and out of bed at will dulled the loss of the pacifiers, I think. Didn’t do anything to help in the fact that none of us were getting any stinking sleep – but at least I knew that if she ever actually did go to sleep, and if she ever actually did fall out of bed, she wouldn’t fall far.

After a few nights, I realized that one of the bolts holding together the (cheap) toddler bed was loose, and the bed was sort of wobbly. I asked Hubby to go to the hardware store and find a replacement bolt. He did. It didn’t hold. At that time, I had been to a friend’s house and she gave me a tour of her daughter’s room – and in her daughter’s room, she had the box spring and the mattress placed directly on the floor – with no frame. Which gave me pause. In cleaning out my grandmother’s cottage, we gained a twin mattress and box spring, which we had brought home and stored in the garage and were trying to figure out what to do with it. A-ha.

So, apart came the toddler bed, in came the twin mattress and boxspring.

And sleep has been quite lovely, thank you.

I don’t know if it’s just the mattress is more comfy (because I’ve tried ’em both out now, and the crib mattress is soft and squashy, and the twin mattress is not – it’s more firm), or if she’s just tired of the novelty and now she wants to get some freakin’ sleep. I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth – either way, she’s sleeping by 8:30 or 9 these days, and sleeping straight through the night. Considering she’s also getting four new teeth, this is still pretty amazing. Of course, we’ve been up before 6 every morning this week, and that part sucks. Sleep is getting better though, and she seems to have gotten over the loss of her dear, sweet paci-friends.

In your home, if you left a basket of freshly laundered and folded clothes in the room in which they needed to be put away, how long would it take for someone else to put them away? Hypothetically speaking, would someone else actually do it? Or would the clothes sit in the basket until you put them away a week later because you needed the basket to tote several more loads of laundry around on laundry day?

Just askin’.

Just read that there is likely gonna be another recall. Of course, it’s all Dora, and Elmo and Sesame Street stuff – which encompasses, oh… everything my girls got for their birthdays.

Greeeeeeeeeeeeat.