Just can’t get a break

April 30, 2008 at 10:47 am (family)
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I swear, this is just never ending and our house is cursed.

Sophie woke up yesterday morning early (4 am) with a fever.  Not sure how high it was but she felt pretty warm so I gave her some Motrin and we both went back to sleep.  Yesterday as soon as the medicine wore off, her temp was back up, so we kept on top of it.  She wasn’t showing any other symptoms, except being crabby, so I wasn’t sure what was causing it.  Sometimes they call it “viral syndrome” which is their term for “we don’t know what the hell this is but we’re pretty sure it’s viral so we’ll call it something fancy”.

So last night was pretty much a disaster.  Her diaper came open (I should just start using cloth again at night, at least they don’t pop open when they are pinned shut and inside a snug wool cover!) and her pj’s were wet – so lights on and a change, and she was pretty warm so more medicine.  After all the yelling (cold clothes and she hates changes in general) Daddy helped her get back to sleep.  If you mash all the bits of sleep together for the rest of the night, I *might* have gotten 6 hours, tops.  She woke me up this morning for the day, by screaming, then puking.  She was super hot at this point, and when I checked her temperature, it was almost 104!  I stripped her down, called my husband to turn around and come home, and hoped she’d stop puking so I could give her some Tylenol (fortunately I found out that you can get Tylenol suppositories over the counter).  She only puked that one time, and shortly was nursing and wanting water and kept the Tylenol down just fine.  Slowly she started to cool off, played in my lap a bit, then wanted to sleep.  Changed her 1-pee diaper, gave Motrin, and put her to bed.

My guess is that the fever made her puke.  At least that’s what it seems.  I hope so because if she has another stomach bug, I will probably catch it from her and I sure do NOT want to be puking again!  It feels like I JUST got over the last one!  At least, so far, Will seems fine.  I can deal with 1 sick kid and 1 healthy, but slightly crabby and needy, one.  I know he wants to play with friends and go out and do stuff but I’m not taking her out today.

Someone tell me that one day, I will sleep.  I just cannot even remember what that was like, or imagine it will ever happen again.  Oh what I could do with sleep.  I could do anything.  For now, I will knit.  Knitting is keeping me off drugs, both legal and illegal.  So, I will keep knitting.  Even the most expensive yarn I would want is cheaper than paying for some nice prescriptions, and it won’t get into my milk!

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A Potty Tale

April 28, 2008 at 2:02 pm (family)
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Today, I am working with Will on using the potty.  I didn’t plan it this way, but he seems interested so we’ll go with it.  Earlier, he came and told me he pooped.  I told him to get a new diaper and we’ll go change.  He came back and said he didn’t have any more diapers.  !!!  (Insert lightbulb above head here!)  (A while ago, I asked him what would happen if he didn’t have more diapers, and he said he’d go in his pants!)  So, I told him Mommy has no diapers either and what does Mommy do?  He said, “Pee and poop in potty!”  So I said “You can do that too!”  So we changed, and I was thinking he’d give me a hard time about it, in which case he’d go back in a diaper.  But he seemed OK with it so I put the Elmo potty out for him so he wouldn’t have to rush for the bathroom.  So far, he has put all his pees in it and I have not had to clean the carpet.

However, I am totally expecting to find a large pile of poop in his room later.  I am hoping being partly naked will help him remember what his body does and he will definitely remember he has no diaper on!  Whereas even with plain underwear on, I think he forgets or just gets so wrapped up in what he is doing that he doesn’t want to stop to take the time to go.  So we are going to try this for today and see what happens.

Today, I am going to make a dump cake.  It’s where you dump everything in a pan and bake it.  The recipe is simple – one can of apple or cherry pie filling in the bottom of a 13×9 pan, then a can of crushed pineapple.  Then a white cake mix, then a bag of coconut, then a small bag of pecans, then 2 sticks of melted butter.  Then bake it for 1 hour at 350.  You don’t stir it or anything, just dump it all in layers and bake it.  A friend of mine makes it for get-togethers and it’s really, really good!  And Clane wanted pork chops for dinner this week… not my favorite thing but it’s easy and we haven’t had them in a long time.  I just don’t enjoy pig much unless it’s the heavily salted/processed kind, like bacon and ham!

Last week I did not blog much because we were out a lot.  The weather was beautiful – mid to upper 70’s and sunny!  It was great.  Then came the weekend and I was back in the Columbia parka again!  On Friday we went to a huge church rummage sale and I got Will’s outerwear for next winter, plus a bunch of other clothes for both kids and a few toys.  Then I went to a bunch of garage sales on Saturday and was a bit disheartened.  I did find an umbrella stroller for Sophie for $5 but didn’t find a baby monitor (why do you see them everywhere when you don’t need one?) and it seemed like I looked at way more than I bought.  I guess I got spoiled by the huge church sale where everything was in one room.  I like garage sales, but it’s irritating to waste a bunch of time (since my child free time is limited!!!) to drive around and not have much to show for it!

We have decided to join a CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture) this summer.  You pay a fee, and get fresh produce, whatever is ready, each week.  I can post the website when they have one up!  It’s about 15 minutes from here and they have chickens so we’ll get eggs too.  It’s a great way to support a local farmer and eat local produce.  They are not certified organic but working on it.  I’m excited!

No big plans for this week.  We will go to our usual Wednesday playgroup and I have a few other errands to run this week as well.  Maybe we need a quiet week after being on the go last week!  The weather is supposed to be cool so that will be OK for now.  We got spoiled by such summery weather!

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Anniversary

April 21, 2008 at 10:16 am (family)
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Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, 6 years already!  I can’t believe it’s been that long, I guess having kids will do that to you, changing your perception of time.

It was a pretty nice day.  Except for Sophie’s sleep (screwed up as usual), I was feeling pretty good.  We spent a lot of the day working outside.  It was nice and warm, it got up to about 76 I think.  I finished weeding removing sod from the front flower bed and almost finished cleaning up the mess I made while cleaning up!  (Why does that always happen?)  We decided we are going to get a load of dirt and try to fix the grade around the house.  We at least need to make sure that’s right before we pursue anything else to keep water out of our basement.  We will probably also need a truck load of mulch.  We also talked about totally redoing the front, removing the old sidewalk and shrubs and laying it out differently.  It would be a lot of work but it would make the front of our house look SO much better!  We’ll see how much ambition we have and how quickly it dies once it starts hitting 90 this summer!  (My peas are coming up too!)

Since we both have birthdays coming up, we had decided to keep anniversary gifts small as well as mother’s and father’s day.  I got Clane a new insulated lunch box with some neat containers that are watertight and have a vent for the microwave.  Clane got me one of those edible bouquets (has some chocolates on it!) and a gift certificate to this awesome yarn store in Freeland called Apple Valley Yarn Co.  (No website yet I don’t think!)  Then we went to dinner at this little place downtown called Molly’s.  It has a pricier menu than most, but works out fine for a special occasion.

Our friend Annie (who was in our wedding and is Will’s godmother) agreed to baby sit.  We left her the cell phone number and she also asked for the number at Molly’s.  I didn’t think anything about that, because cell phones don’t always get good signals in buildings (at least not around here!) and if I were baby sitting I’d ask for the same information.

So, we went and had our dinner.  The food was really good, very fresh, and pretty!  (It’s nice when the kitchen cares about how things look!)  We definitely want to go back and would recommend it to anyone looking for a nicer place than Bennigans.  We were there for probably 2 hours total (nice long dinner, I like that!) and when we asked for the bill, the waitress said it had already been paid!  We told her we had not paid it, and she told us that Annie had paid it!!!  She had planned it all along, and called them while we were there!  Neither of us had been more surprised by any gift we’d ever gotten.  We brought home a big slab of chocolate cake for her.  (Unfortunately, she paid for that too, as it was part of our tab.  And we thought we’d pay the babysitter with cake!)

I didn’t mention what we had!  We started with a nice bottle of Riesling.  (I forget the name, Black Star maybe?)  We had baked brie for an appetizer.  Then Clane got tomato bisque soup, and I had a Michigan salad (had dried cherries, blue cheese, pine nuts, apple and other stuff).  For dinner, I had grilled tuna (rare) with potatoes and green beans, and Clane had surf and turf (steak and stuffed lobster tail) with mashed potatoes and asparagus.  For dessert, I had tiramisu and Clane had lemon tart.  It was all very good.  And the service was excellent too, all around a very nice place to eat.

It’s about time we had some good days.  It seems like it’s been nothing but bad nights and sickness and other irritations for months on end.  The kids have loved being outside with all this warm weather so I think that’s helping.  (Of course that means I get nothing done in here, but isn’t that always how it goes?)

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Better

April 17, 2008 at 11:03 pm (Friends, family)
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Phenergan has got to be some kind of miracle drug. I am totally OK today, like nothing ever happened. I think part of my problem, was the nausea was actually caused by not eating! And then I still couldn’t eat, so things were just not getting better. Once I got rid of the nausea, and actually got food down again, my tummy felt SO much better. Sophie has even slept fairly well the past couple of nights. So I am starting to feel human again.

Today I got a very sweet card in the mail from Lisanne at Bathtub Junkie. Thank you SO much! It really meant a lot and I really appreciate that you thought of me! :)

Earlier I took the kids and we went to a new yarn shop called Apple Valley Yarn Co. OH. MY. GOD. I want everything in there! Problem is, I would never be able to knit it all! The kids were not holding out well so I didn’t get to stay as long as I wanted but I am most definitely looking forward to going back ALONE. I have a birthday coming up next month and I know where I am going to spend some cash if I get cash for a gift this year! WOOT! That means I need to get my butt going and put away FINISH a few things around here! I don’t know if they have a website or not, they just opened recently, but the lady in there was super nice, really cool about my cranky kids and was very helpful and positive. She’s got stuff for all budgets and several things I’ve only seen online, so I’m excited about that.

This weekend it’s our 6th anniversary and I’ve asked a friend (and Will’s Godmother) to watch the kids so Clane and I can have a nice dinner alone. I have to call a couple of places but there is one place about 5 minutes from us that would be really nice, I’ll see if they are open on Sunday (that’s the day).

It is getting late so I am going to get to bed. Hopefully I’ll have another morning where I wake up somewhat happy and not crabby and tired. OH someday the kids will sleep well, consistently. They have to, right? Either that or they will be old enough to sit up and read when they can’t sleep, so they will at least let us sleep! Right? LOL

OH, and it was in the 70’s today and I WORE SHORTS!!!  :D

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Ahhh, Phenergan

April 14, 2008 at 8:58 pm (sickness)
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This stomach bug or whatever it is that started in the middle of last week is still hanging around.  Sophie woke me up at 3 this morning and was up for over an hour.   My husband came in to help and once he got her to sleep, I was up.  For the day.  I swear, I married the sweetest man alive, he stayed home from work today because I had to get sleep.  I could barely eat anything this morning, but I was crazy thirsty so I downed 3 big glasses of water.  There is something we medical people do called a “skin turgor test”, it’s where you take a pinch of skin and it should snap right back, well mine didn’t and I knew I was pretty dried out.  I managed to get a little bit of sleep and when I woke up I finally gave in and called my doctor to ask if she would be willing to call something in for me.  I could tell by how Sophie was nursing that my supply was down as well.  I’ve just had so much trouble getting enough to eat and drink.  Fortunately I can keep things down but it’s getting them down in the first place that’s been so hard.

Thankfully they were more than happy to call in some Phenergan (it has multiple uses, one of them is that it works great for nausea).  Clane went and got it for me and I took one and went straight to bed.  I slept like a rock for 3 hours (it’s been ages since I got that much sleep at a time) and when I woke up I was finally able to eat.  I’ve managed to eat several times since then and drink too (although I need to really try to stay on that since I’m constantly losing fluid through my milk).  The only trouble with Phenergan is that it’s terribly sedating.  Great for when you need to sleep but could be tricky tomorrow – might try taking 1/2 tablet and see if I can get at least a little relief without falling asleep standing up.  I will take one tonight before I go to bed or earlier if I am starting to feel queasy again.  I can’t believe how weak and tired I feel, but it’s really been 5 days since I’ve been able to really eat a meal.  The stuff is like magic.  I think one of the problems is that NOT eating has made me more queasy too, but too queasy to eat.  If that makes any sense.

One of these days everyone in this house will be OK.  Will puked once yesterday but he was fine today.  I would love to blog about something other than our eating/puking issues.  Maybe later in the week.  For now I am going to enjoy my 7-Up on ice and my nice table water crackers.  At least I don’t have to choke them down.

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Negatives

April 11, 2008 at 1:11 pm (family)
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This week was not that exciting, except for Sophie and I having a lovely bout with some kind of GI bug.  I will spare the poopy/pukey details but it was not fun.  I would rather have a cold any day.  Fortunately the actual puking didn’t last that long, but I sure do hate feeling awful like that!  Yuck.  I feel better today but my morning coffee did not settle well so that leaves me tired as usual.

Sophie has decided that her literal 2 minute nap was enough.  We have to go out later on and I’m sure she will sleep in the car.  I might not get a shower before we go out but I’ll live.  I swear, when the kids are in school I am going to sleep and sleep and sleep.  And I’ll take showers until the hot water tank runs dry, and the house will be spotless, I’ll even scrub the ceilings (well, not really).  At least I got both of them to go back to sleep at 7 this morning when Will woke up yelling because Clane had already left for work.  Thank goodness because I’d really be a bear today.  Caffeine withdrawal plus leftover stomach bug plus chronic sleep deprivation makes a really cranky person!

We got over 1/2 inch of rain last night and we are going to get more tonight.  I haven’t been to the basement yet today but Clane cleaned out the gutters really well last weekend so hopefully we won’t get any water inside.  I came from a hilly place, and my childhood home was perched on the side of a hill with a walkout basement… so it always stayed dry!

We continue our search for property.  There are a couple that we looked into last year that have been reduced, and even with the lowered prices, there are still too many things wrong with them to consider making an offer.  One of them is long and narrow with a driveway AND a waterway cutting straight through the center of it, and the other one has NO road frontage at all!!  And a house that has so much wrong with it, we would never get a chance to build.  You’d think, with the market the way it is, that we would have a better choice, but we don’t!  Ugh.

I thought I would call this post ‘I haven’t posted in a while” but I decided to call it “negatives” instead.  Because after I read this over, I realized I’m feeling pretty negative today.  I’m just tired of things going wrong, being tired, being sick, and turning up short.  It’s getting really old.

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Digging in the dirt

April 6, 2008 at 8:37 am (garden)
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Yesterday the weather here was absolutely beautiful!  It was in the lower 60’s and we all spent most of the day outside.  I managed to almost finish the mess in the front.  When it came down to it, I just couldn’t bear to kill my tulips, crocuses and daffodils, so I painstakingly unwound all the weed roots and things from around each of them.  I did break off a couple of buds so they might not bloom this year, but at least I didn’t kill them.  Once I got done digging up ALL the iris, it started to go much more quickly.  The soil is nice and soft and moist right now, but in another month or two when it starts to get dry, it will set up like concrete.  It’s amazing how much better it looks now, the bare dirt looks better than all the weeds!  I’ve been waiting for 4 years to do this!

We had started some seeds inside earlier this year and they were getting very stringy looking so I planted those yesterday too.  I am afraid they will freeze, since it’s really early to be planting young plants, but they were probably not going to make it inside anymore without some serious repotting and I just wasn’t going to do that.  Hopefully they will be OK but some of them were not looking very good!  It’s still early enough to plant some seeds if Will is interested.  No activity yet where I planted peas, but it will take 1-2 weeks for those to come up.

Sophie was so funny playing in the dirt!  When I gave her a bath later, she had dirt in her ears even!  I would hand her a clump of dirt or a chunk of sod and she would talk to it and yell at it as she was picking at it.  She sat by me for a long time while I dug.  She is so funny!  I even saw a worm run (boy did I dig up a lot of those), I swear I never saw a worm crawl as fast as that one did!  Sophie even found a wooly bear caterpillar that hadn’t quite woken up yet.  I think it was the first time Will ever saw one.  The outdoors is one big biology lesson I think!  I love showing him stuff outside and in nature.

No pictures yet, but when we get the front done and mulched, I’ll make sure to get some up!  It is supposed to be even warmer today (64 I saw) but we are going to Clane’s former co-worker’s house.  I need to grocery shop too, but I haven’t gone out to get the paper yet to check the ads.  Otherwise nothing that exciting happening here.

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The time has come for gardening

April 3, 2008 at 10:57 pm (garden)
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Today I did my first real gardening of the year. And OH MY am I not used to the work out of shape! Our front flower bed is especially bad. It’s to the point where the only thing that will help make it ALL truly better is to dig up EVERYTHING, poison the crap out of the bits of weeds that got missed, replant only what I want and really get truly enough mulch to cover the ground as much as it’s supposed to. One half inch just won’t cut it.

I got about 1/4 of the front dug up. I have some very happy iris that have been there FOREVER and had spread over a large area. So I am trying to hack through tubers and weeds that are tangled around each other to get to the dirt and I wound up hauling a bunch of iris/weed laden sod to the side of the yard. Maybe they will grow there and maybe they will die but I still have only dug up half of them. So if anyone in the area wants some very large white bearded iris, they might bloom for ya this summer (but if not this year, then next year). Just let me know, bring a bucket and I’ll show you where I’ve dumped them. I also have some crocus and daffodils with buds that I really don’t wish to disturb, but they will have to get moved when I break out the roundup. I really don’t like using stuff like that but I don’t know what else to do, it’s horribly overgrown. The last two summers I’ve spent pregnant, and then with a small baby so now I’ve got baby gardens.

I have also planted some sugar snap peas near the steps to the deck, so I hope they come up nicely and we have peas to snack on. Will’s baby pumpkin plants have buds on them already so I’m anxiously waiting to put those out too.

I am already pretty achy so I dread how I will feel tomorrow morning when I wake up. I’ve got inside stuff to do tomorrow and there is a chance of rain so I’ll be able to sit on my fat a** give my body a break!

I have also discovered that Sophie loves to play in the dirt.  And eat it.  And throw it.  When I gave her a bath tonight, it was everywhere – in her hair, up her nose, even in her ears!  She was one dirty baby girl!  Should be a fun summer!

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Happy April Fool’s Day

April 1, 2008 at 11:53 am (weather)
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Last night, we all went down to the basement because we all had work to do down there.  I wanted to go through some things to donate to Goodwill and put toys in bins, and Clane was going to work on the computer.  Until we saw the water.  Not only did the water come in at it’s usual location, but it came in at other parts of the basement as well.  We often get water in one corner because there is a valley in the roof and the gutters needed cleaning.  But on the north side of the house, there is a drainage ditch that is completely full (no thanks to all the construction a couple of years ago that was supposed to FIX that problem).  Also, the ground was frozen solid two days ago because it’s in the shade of the house.   When I walked past that area yesterday, the ground was very wet and squishy.

Needless to say, Clane spent the rest of the evening vacuuming up the water with the shop vac.  It was coming in as fast as he was sucking it up.   He said he probably dumped over 50 gallons of it.   He also was down there at 2 this morning and again at 8:30.  I went and checked a little while ago and there was water but not enough to vacuum, so I will check again in another hour and see what is going on.

We got 1.62 inches of rain here yesterday, which is over double the amount we had for the whole rest of the month of March.  And the ground is quite wet from all the snow that melted (thank goodness that happened slowly).

This is a totally true story by the way.  No April Fool’s Day here.  I’ll be checking the basement every two hours and will vacuum at least once, possibly twice.  It has stopped raining but one of the larger local rivers, the Tittabawassee, is forecasted to flood sometime tomorrow.

The refrigerator is working great, though, I love it!  I especially loved putting the groceries away this weekend.  I used to dread it because the old one was a pain.  And, I did find a new pan just like the one I broke.  AND, I also got myself some gluten to add to my whole wheat bread, it’s made it much better and a lot less crumbly.  We’re all happy to have non-messy sandwiches again.

Oh, and I’m pregnant.

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