Florida trip

January 28, 2008 at 12:59 pm (travel)
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We are back from Florida!  And it was fun.  It went a lot better than we thought, it started with not getting on the flight we originally scheduled, which caused us to get into Jacksonville 10 hours later than planned.  We have all had colds all week, they have been really nasty ones, gallons of green mucus out the nose, coughs and generally very unpleasant.  The kids did great on the plane, and really were pretty good little travelers.  It’s a pain in the butt flying with little kids, we decided to take our own car seats and we had way more crap than we could haul just the two of us.  Fortunately we got help once we landed in Jax and got our car and got things together.  We spent a couple of nights at Clane’s sister’s house (it’s old and has NO heater… it got down in the low 30’s the nights we were there)!  So it was pretty cold.  Sophie slept with me, all curled up under the blankets, pressed up against me like a cat!  I never expected to be wearing my Columbia parka in Florida, especially not INSIDE the house!

From Jax, we drove to Titusville, and got a room, and spent the next day at Kennedy Space Center.  We like it there a lot and had a pretty good time.  I rode on their space shuttle launch simulator, which basically tips you on your back and shakes the shit out of you!  I also saw a roseate spoonbill in real life which was really cool.  After Kennedy, we went to Kissimmee, to Clane’s parents’ vacation house.  (They rent it out all year ’round so if anyone needs a place to stay in Florida, please drop me a line!)  Kissimmee is full of people, new houses and traffic!

We had a couple of low key days, which were nice.  The kids went in the pool and both of them loved it, I think in another year or so, I will get Will some swimming lessons.  We went to Sea World one day and it was nice there, but one big problem they have is that they do not allow strollers into any of the shows or exhibits.  So we had to haul ALL our stuff out of them, and the kids, HAUL them and the stuff through the exhibits, then go hunt down the strollers in the (unattended) stroller parking area.  One very cool thing though, is that they have nursing mother rooms!  They are small, but quiet and private, with a sink, diaper change area, rocking chair, and even an outlet right by the chair for pumping moms.  So YAY SEA WORLD!  I wish all public places had such rooms! We also went to the ocean a couple of times.  I’ll be sending out pictures via shutterfly once we get organized.

Overall it was a nice trip, nicer than I thought it would be.  We had some good food, great fish, red snapper makes AWESOME sushi!  It would have been so much better if we hadn’t been sick, but even though we all were, it didn’t keep us from doing things we wanted.  I really like Florida, and will be happy to keep going back there for vacations.  I wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s a nice place to visit.  They do not make it easy, or pleasant to fly though.  Getting two kids through security when they cannot help you or understand what is going on, is a really huge pain.  And, it’s inconsistent.  They let us on the plane with water for the kids in Saginaw, but not in Orlando.  Will didn’t understand why he had to take off his shoes and was worried they wouldn’t give them back.  I had to put all liquids/gels under 3 oz in baggies to take on.  We had a lot of them, with the cough syrup for the kids and us and other stuff from the diaper bag, like purell gel and diaper cream.  And they have to be in QUART bags, nothing smaller or bigger.  Because of a few crazies, they make it bad for everyone else.

I’m thinking the next time we fly with the kids, they will at least be able to help haul luggage and might not need car seats.  However, Clane really wants to drive.  It’s a 20-24 hour drive from here, and they would never make it at this age, but as long as we took our time and got to stop and see things along the way, I might consider it later on.  The airlines really don’t make it easy, or pleasant to fly.  You even have to buy your own pretzels on the plane now.  At least we had good flight attendants!  It’s good to be home, but geez louise, I’ve got a ton of work to do here!

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She is walking. And climbing.

January 18, 2008 at 7:10 pm (baby stuff)
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And we are all sick!  Fun, fun, fun.  We had a bad night and she won’t nap.  Need I say more?

The walking is cute though.  That drunken sailor-baby walk.  And she just climbed up on one of Will’s chairs, to climb up on the rocking chair!  Good.  Now that she can walk, she can pop this one last tooth in, get over this cold, and start sleeping.

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Nice.

January 15, 2008 at 5:32 pm (family)
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Just a few days before we are supposed to get on a plane to Florida, we are all sick.  Will kept his dad up all night and he is coughing and has a runny nose.  His eye was all goopy and red last night, so I put some of my milk in it, and amazingly, it’s better today!  (Behold, the wonders of ees!)  (Ees (rhymes with cheese) is Will’s word for nursing)  Sophie’s eye is looking a little red and irritated so I pumped a little milk and have been putting drops of it in both their eyes all day.  Hopefully if it was/is pinkeye, this has cured it.  I really, really don’t want to have to go to the doctor this week.  I went to Walgreen’s and came back with an arsenal of lozenges, suckers with zinc in them, Zicam, OJ, and Triaminic.  Sophie has been crabby all day and my husband doesn’t feel good either, and I feel like I have mono again (temp, sore throat, tired) but I always feel like that when a certain cute baby has kept me up for a good part of the night.

Otherwise, just trying to get ready to go, I don’t want to pack too much too early because I’ll forget what I packed.  But everything must be all done by the time we go to bed the night before we go, because if it’s not, we’ll all be angry and it will add more stress that we don’t need.

Yuck. Why couldn’t all of this have happened last week?  Or wait like 3 weeks?  :(

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It’s another one of those days

January 10, 2008 at 3:49 pm (family)
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You know, one of those days when the kids are both tired but refuse to sleep? Or not sleep long enough? I put Sophie down for a nap and 45 minutes later, she is awake and yelling. Then she spends the next 2 hours whining at me. She is just plain crabby, it’s probably her teeth, but at other times it doesn’t seem to bother her so, ??? Then, I find out later that Will got up at 6 this morning. That’s after going to bed around 10. He has been waking up a lot at night lately for reasons unknown. (He is 3 by the way.) He got the last of his teeth in this fall. So who knows what the problem is. I think he just wants his dad so he yells for him til he comes in. I thought all the cosleeping we did with him as a baby was supposed to “cure” that. When, may I ask? When he’s old enough to sleep with a woman?  Then, I put him down for a nap, and later when I’m putting clothes away in my room, I hear banging on the wall.  I go to his room, ask him why he’s not asleep, and he says, “I pooped.”

So in the meantime I am distracting myself by surfing through sock patterns on Ravelry. I want to make a pair of cable socks someday but I need to find a very easy pattern. If anyone has suggestions (it HAS to be EASY) please let me know! (Free is helpful too!) I have also put up some updated pictures of some of my stuff so if you’re a member, check it out. My username there is Finngarian.

We are talking about buying a new refrigerator. The only problem is that the ones we are looking at are now just between 35 and 36 inches wide. The space we have for our fridge is 31 inches wide. So that brings us to the question: How much do we want to rip up our kitchen? Thinking of that, plus the kids, makes my head hurt. Our kitchen needs to be redone anyway but if we only redo part of it, we really need to redo all of it. And since we are not finding property, we should seriously consider putting some money back into this house. We’d planned on redoing the kitchen at some point anyway, just wish we’d done it before kids. I know that these things always take at least 3 times longer than you think, so I would have to plan to live with a ripped up kitchen for a long time. There is so much chaos in this house, I might as well add a little more.

I will end with this. Picture this scenario. Will is rubbing something against the fish tank. I ask him, “What are you doing, Will” He says, “I’m cleaning the fish tank with my underwear.”

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Projects

January 3, 2008 at 10:23 am (knitting)
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The last post was a long one and I didn’t get much of a chance to talk about what I’ve been knitting!  I managed to finish my Felici toe up sock, and have yet to start the second one.  I am working on the second sock that I’m making with Tofutsies, which I really dislike, because it’s slippery and splitty and I should have used smaller needles.  I have also turned the heel and finished the gusset on my first Wildfoote sock.  And, the hat to match my mittens might be about 1/3 of the way done.  I might finish things a little faster if I didn’t have so darn many projects going at once!  I picked up some nice sockina cotton yarn at a yarn shop back home, along with some cherry tree hill superwash merino.  Not sure when I’ll get to starting those.  I need to finish up some things here.  Speaking of which, even though I really don’t like working with Tofutsies, a certain friend with a July birthday (shhhhh) really liked how my pair was turning out so I am seriously considering a pair of handknit socks for her sometime in the future!  Except I will use a 1 or 0 this time because a 2 was too big.   Yes, Dear, I love you so much that I am willing to knit you some socks with yarn I don’t like.  I wouldn’t do it for anyone else though!  ;)   (Get your mind out of the gutter, this is a girl who was like a sister growing up!)

My same sister-friend also bought me a very nice Arab cookbook called “The Arab Table” and I can’t wait to give a few things in it a try.  The pictures always look SO nice and I think I am ready to try some meat or chicken dishes.

Now that I am pretty sure the mono I had since May is gone, I have started my daughter in cloth diapers again.  I like using them!  But it was too much screwing around when I didn’t feel good.  My husband said I must be getting better sleep because when I wasn’t, I couldn’t stand the thought.  I need to go through the diapers on the changing table and take out all the small ones.  There are covers in there that we used when she was 2-3 months old and no way do they fit her now!  So you can see how long it’s been since I decided to shelve that for a while.  (For the record, we have prefolds with pins, snappis and many covers, both PUL and wool… and some all in ones that are All Together Diapers.)

Oh, and one ongoing project is to try to get this house in presentable condition.  Oh my, that is the hardest of all.  No matter what I do, the place looks trashed, and I mean EVERY ROOM.  Nothing ever looks put together!  Maybe it’s because I have a 10 month old who I can’t put down and a pretty messy 3 year old?  I keep trying to tell myself that it won’t always be this way but it sure seems to be going on for a long time.

I considered putting in all kinds of nice links in here but the kids are all freaking out and I just don’t have time.  So please feel free to use Google and it will take you to all the sites and brands I’ve mentioned.  :)

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Happy New Year and other things

January 1, 2008 at 9:54 am (family)
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We are home now, after a nice trip to the UP.  I didn’t get a chance to update here before we left, and I didn’t have a decent internet connection there, hence the large span between posts.

Something always happens to my sense of time when we are traveling.  The same 9 hour drive can feel like a lot longer, or shorter, depending on how things go.  And, once we get there, it feels like we have a lot of time to do what we want.  But then after a few days, I realize we only have 3 days left or whatever, then I’m sad because I am realizing we won’t be there long and I start trying to pare down what we need and want to do.  Then it’s the day before we leave and my mom and I sit and talk about all the things we didn’t do.  Well, we didn’t get to that this time, and we never did make it there.  Then we leave, and take the 9 (10) hour drive home again.  I’m full of energy as we try to unpack and get reorganized here, just to be all worn out and back to “normal” a couple of days later when we are back to our old routine.

We did have a nice time in the UP.  It is incredibly cold in my mom’s house and by the end of the week I found myself sleeping with two shirts, sweat pants and wool socks just to be comfortable, underneath a mountain of blankets.  We did have a nice time exchanging gifts with my side of the family and we all got a lot of nice things.  My mom had been sewing and knitting and made a bunch of doll clothes for Sophie.  We went to church Christmas Eve with my mom (to her church, which I hadn’t attended in close to 20 years) and the next day we had dinner at my dad’s (didn’t know you could turn venison shoulder into something resembling ham… yum!).  We saw some old friends and took naps and it was all in all a quiet week.  I had been hoping for a good UP rip-snorting snow storm in the middle of the week because it might have been fun for Will, but all we got was garden variety normal UP snow, 2 inches here, 3 inches there, maybe 4 or 5 came one day.  It always amazes us how well they keep up with the roads up there.  You don’t notice it until you live somewhere else.   It’s normal to get 8-10 inches of snow over the course of a week or less, and nobody blinks an eye.   The main roads are always scraped down and sanded many times a day and the side streets even get done at least once a day.  Here, our side road might not get plowed for a couple of days depending on what happens.

The kids are doing fine, Will is totally glued to his daddy right now and Sophie got two new teeth just in the past few days.  They are all coming in out of order which is kind of funny!  She has a snaggletooth on top.  She has taken her non-sleep at night to a whole new level.

So now I could get into all the things I want to try to accomplish now that it’s the start of another new year, but I won’t.  My life will keep going on as it has, the start of a new year doesn’t really give me the sense of a “new beginning” like it does for many or like it has for me in the past.  I always hope for good health (and more sleep of course) and that we try to get a few things done, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same thing as it was a week or two ago.  For today, I need to finish unpacking and get groceries and maybe put in a load of laundry, and later we’ll go to Saginaw for a while.  Tomorrow brings us back to our usual routine.  I have a glimmer of hope that I won’t struggle through each day like I did up until our vacation but reality is that I probably will.

I need some coffee now.

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