Bonding Time

So Hubby is finishing his final couple of weeks of bonding time from when Bear was born. He is off for 2 weeks which is nice for me... enough for him to help me around the house and be an extra pair of hands, but not quite enough to make me completely crazy. It's a good balance.

We started off our time together by having an ER marathon on Friday night. We are watching the old episodes of ER in order. (I know, we're total dorks) Anyhow, it didn't matter if we were up late because we each give each other an extra 25 minutes of sleep the next day and it's all good.

Then, on Sunday we had our annual family reunion. We had a great time! Every year my dad's side of the family gets together at Vasona park and we have a big picnic and catch up on gossip from the past year. We take the kids for a train ride and get snow cones. It's just a nice day. This year was our 24th annual and it still seems to get quite a turnout. Kat looked forward to this for days beforehand. She gets to relax and eat all the treats the auntie's toss her way.... it's a fun time. It's been neat to see new generations come through, including my children. I mean, I was 5ish when this thing started and now I bring my almost year old baby and 3 1/2 year old. Really neat.



Today we went and had lunch with my aunt and uncle. Uncle Capi suffers from Alzheimer's disease and it is progressing. He is still fun to be with though, we just get to hear the usual stories more than once per evening. Not a bad trade for the good company :-) Uncle C doesn't know my name but he does seem to understand that I am family. He is great with my kids. I know he is faking recognition but at least he has the capacity to do that. He always asks me "where's the Big Guy?" So he doesn't know my husband's name either, but he knows that I am connected to a big guy. Kat really took to him. She knows he has an illness because we attempted to explain it to her. She decided to be his nurse and she brought him pillows and told him to rest and then she just sat beside him on the couch with her little hand on his. She has a really great sense for who needs her. She really is an angel.

After our visit at The Capi's we headed down to Gilroy Gardens where we have season passes. We didn't tell Kat, we just drove up and surprised her. We had a really fun time. She rode rides and played a couple of games. Bear is a good sport... he let Big Sissy take him on some of the rides and he didn't fuss too much.

Here are the kiddos on a raft ride. Bear actually sat on his own! I was a little nervous but he was fine.

Kat was very excited to take Baby Bear on the carousel with her! He didn't complain too much, but he wasn't super excited either :-)

Here we are on the 'hot air balloon ride'. The ride itself is barf central but the kids loved it, so I guess it's OK.

I don't plan for all of our time together to be this go, go go.... but we've had a really good time so far.

I am very blessed for my life and family... I thank The Lord every single day for my blessings :-)

are you KIDDING me?

I don't really know what to say about this. I mean, I have a lot of things I COULD say but just won't. I suppose there are worse things that a parent can do to their child. I'm all about breast feeding, don't get me wrong. I don't know though, it seems like there are deeper issues here. Maybe I'm wrong... wouldn't be the first time. Seriously though...

Just Now Coming Down...

So for a long time we were looking forward to some family vacation time. First we had my brother's wedding in Alabama. We were looking forward to this as well as dreading bringing the 2 kids on the airplane round trip. We didn't know quite what to expect but it seemed like a worthy adventure. More to come in a minute about that...

Two days after the first trip, we set out on a drive to Southern California for Hubby's cousin's wedding. The 2nd wedding was one week to the day from the first. It felt like it was a month later or something though since there was no down time in between.

THEN, the day after the 2nd wedding we set off to a little further Southern Cali to meet up with some dear friends and go to Sea World.

Kind of exciting to do all these fun, crazy things in a week's span, but it also makes it a bit hard to blog about since it's all sort of a lumped together blur. I'll try though:

First of all, in almost anything we do.... we need to prepare Kat ahead of time. She doesn't like surprises much (unless it's m&m's or something... ) Anyway, we talked about these trips for weeks and weeks before hand. We even bought her special luggage... a 3 piece matching Ariel set with her name monogrammed on it. I know, she's spoiled. Oh well. Back to the story... so she was very well prepared. She knew that Bear might cry on the airplane because it might hurt his ears. She informed me, though, that she wouldn't be crying on the airplane because she was WAY TOO EXCITED!

So the day finally came. We opted for a red eye flight hoping that the kids would sleep the whole time. I have to say... they did terrific! Kat was awake for the first 45 minutes of the first leg of the flight happily looking out the window and making her usual observations.... "right now we're taking off because the plane is going like this" (holds her hand at an upward angle). Then, she crashed. And she stayed that way through storms in Dallas and changing planes... almost all the way to the end of the last leg of the flight. Awesome! And even Bear did excellent. We bought him a front carrier ahead of time so that we could hold him without holding him the whole time. He woke a couple of times during the process, but he would nurse or eat his food and go right back to sleep like a good boy. What a relief!

The stay was nice. It was good to see my brother again, as it had been years and years! (Geography) And it was nice to meet Mrs Brother for the first time. We had only exchanged emails and had 1 phone call up until this vacation. We also got to see my mother and my mother's sister and some other out of town family we never see. It was a family reunion and a wedding all in one happy little bundle.

Although I do NOT love the heat or the gross bugs in the good ole south, when it was time to say good bye I had to choke back tears. I had a nice time with my family and I don't know when I will see them all again. And my kids love their grandmother. They got so spoiled living in her house for a week! But at least we left with lots of happy memories and looking forward to seeing each other again hopefully soon.

So the flight home wasn't as easy as the first, but still not too bad. Kat slept for a good part of it again, but Bear was awake for most of the flight. He wasn't bad, just awake, which is a bit high maintenance.

The day after we got back, I worked. And the next day. And then the following day, we set off on the cluster fuck of a lifetime trip to SoCal. We decided to take HWY 1 because it's so gorgeous and we were driving during the day. We figured we weren't in a huge hurry, why not take the scenic route? Man, did we take the scenic route and a half that time around! Due to the fires burning in our state, HWY 1 was closed a couple of hours into our drive. No biggie, right? Just take the detour.... which was TURN THE F*** AROUND AND GO BACK ALMOST ALL THE WAY TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM! So we landed in LA right at good ole rush hour traffic time, wich hungry cooped up kids and not in too good of moods ourselves. We swam at the hotel and ate dinner though and all was forgiven.

The next day we had the wedding and though it was beautiful, it was more like church camp than a wedding. (Nothing against church camp... it's just different than a wedding) It's all good though, we got to see some out of town family and Kat had a ball dancing the night away.

OK, so the next day we drove another hour south and met up with my dear friends who we haven't seen in a couple of years. They got to meet Bear for the first time and I got to play with their baby who is about 19 months old now. We played catch up and talked the night away, and we went to Sea World. This portion of the trip was super fun because AH and I always get along like we were never apart. We are ourselves in front of each other and it's so nice to fart or over eat or whatever we feel like doing, without worrying that we're being judged.

Then we drove home. Another cluster fuck. We got it into our heads that leaving at night would be good because the kids could sleep the night away and wake up at home. OK theory until you gab your asses off and don't leave until 10 at night. Come 4:00 AM we were hallucinating and decided to stop at some flea bag hotel for a few hours and sleep. Then we woke up, splashed water onto our faces and drove the final 3 hours home. We showered, napped, and took Kat to her first musical theater class....

We're just now starting to come down from all these vacations! I will blog more, with pictures, on each trip individually but that's the skeleton synopsis for now. Meat to follow :-)

recycling was only the gateway drug

Global warming sucks. It's the middle of May in the San Francisco bay area, which normally means that we have another month or two of decent weather, followed by a week of insanely hot weather, and then back to decent. I've always loved the climate here in California. It's not too hot, not too cold. It's just right. My family in the mid west and south would call and let me know their temps were over a 100 and I would say, "man, sucks for you... yeah, it's about 80 here..." Well, guess what? Now it sucks for us, too.

I never used to be much for "go green" types of mentality. I would recycle if there was a recycle bin handy, but I didn't really go out of my way. I'm still not as great as I should be, but I'm making the effort to make changes here and there. I'm running my washer and dryer after the sun goes down. I'm relying more on air circulation and only using AC if I really need to. I drive my smaller car if I can. I walk when I can. And I definitely save the recycle stuff for a recycle bin, even if there isn't one handy. And I'm really, really working on turning off the water while we brush our teeth. I know this isn't enough. I know there is so much more I can do, but it's a start.

Oh I almost forgot! I also just dropped $1700 on a new energy efficient washer and dryer! They are a little more high maintenance as far as, well, maintenance. But the few extra seconds it takes me to clean it after every load will go a long way. I got a $200 rebate from PG&E just for buying the darn things.

It's so cliche but what changed me was having children. I see the world completely differently now that I have them to take care of. I don't want to leave them a yucky smelly world with no ozone layer. My kids and their kids deserve so much better than that. And so do everyone else's kids.

So I thought I was doing OK with all the greener thinking and such and then my friend went to church and came back telling me all about how we do have it hard here in California. We are overwhelmed with gas prices and money troubles, work, kids, jobs, the next event. Yeah, granted, there are people in other countries and even in our country watching their kids starve to death... but man our gas prices are high. OK, ok... there are people who can't afford to wear shoes or clothes and have no shelter to keep their babies warm... but I'm having less and less play money after paying the bills lately. There are families living with war and poverty and so much worse, but I was bummed out because my kids had to wait a few paychecks to get that wagon I had been wanting for them.

I guess my point is... we have it good. Even when we have it bad, our bad is so much better than most peoples great. I wish it wasn't that way. And I want to try to do more for the world. I don't know exactly what yet but I need to do something. I think I'll definitely start local. Maybe try to work some free clinics or something? Give immunizations to underprivileged children? I don't know yet.

And the biggest thing I want to focus on is being grateful for what I have. My children are awesome and aside from some snotty noses they are very healthy and able bodied! I'm really going to try to focus on the positive in every situation. My kids are coughing and have runny noses right now, but they live with me and they are well taken care of. And my husband is an active dad. Dinner will be on the table tonight and they both have warm beds to sleep in. They (at least the oldest) is polite and cares about people. I have an awesome family and wonderful friends. I even have a job I don't mind going to. I'm OK.

It's so hot I'm sweating just writing this blog. But you know what? Life is GOOD :-)

I'm reincarnating as a lesbian, it's decided!

My son is 7 1/2 month sold and starting to climb up stairs, walk along furniture, etc. We are in the middle of a move so all we have right now for him to climb is boxes and crap. Not ideal, right? So I was thinking of going to toys r us and getting him one of those activity tables that sings the ABC's and such, so he doesn't have to climb dingy and potentially dangerous boxes. That's it. That's the story. It was just a thought that passed through my head in the middle of a hundred other thoughts while I was getting stuff done.

I made the mistake of saying out loud, "I was almost thinking.... well, never mind" And I truly meant never mind. I wasn't hinting, or hoping he would ask, or trying to play mind games. I realized that it was completely impractical with our money situation, and it would just be one more thing to move. Bear could climb boxes for now. So I moved on, kept packing, ran a few errands... and hours later this conversation happened:

Hub: Hey, what was it you started to say earlier and wouldn't finish?
Me: huh?
Hub: you started to say, "I was thinking..." and then said never mind. What was that about?
Me: (completely shocked that he heard me or even cared that much) OH, I was thinking of something we could buy but it wouldn't really make sense right now. (I'm not trying to be elusive, I'm in and out of the room packing boxes)

~several minutes later when I enter the room again~

Hub: Babe! What was it? What is it you want to buy that isn't practical?
Me: Geez babe, it's just a toy for bear. I wanted to get him one of those tables he can stand up at and play at instead of those boxes. But we don't have the money and it would just be more stuff to move, so I figured we'd look into that later once we get done with all this move stuff.
Hub: Yeah, that's not really priority for today...
Me: Yeah I know...
Hub: we don't really have the money for that...
Me: uh huh (still packing, growing a little annoyed)
Hub: plus we'd just have to move that along with everything else
Me: mmm hmmm (increasingly annoyed)
Hub: I'm sorry babe, I feel like I'm the bad guy here... I'm just saying maybe when we get some money and after the move is done we can get one of those for him...
Me: OK! (gee, why the f* didn't I think of that???)
Hub: I just don't know why you have to cut me off. I'm just trying to get out one sentence telling you why I don't think it's a good idea
Me: Well, it was a long run on sentence with way too many commas and no end in sight. (I know, I'm a total bitch. But sometimes I can't help it)

Oh for the love of God! I didn't even finish the original sentence that caused this whole useless conversation! I already knew all of the arguments that he would give, and agreed with them, but I had to hear about it anyhow. If you knew my husband you would know, this is SO him. He analyzes a topic until it's dead and decayed.

I told him one day that his comic book name would be, "Analyze Boy!" Can you picture it? A 6'4'' broad shouldered guy with muscles and all kinds of dork equipment in his pockets analyzing the world in order to save it? (Cause he would be a good guy even if a little annoying) I love him, I wouldn't trade him and I'd fight any broad who tried to take him, but seriously I want to deck him sometimes.

Has Anyone Seen Themselves On This Site?

Has anyone else seen themselves on this site?

It's google maps. They have crazy satellite pictures of most addresses in the US. If I happen to type in my address, I can actually see myself in front of my apartment. Pretty nuts! You have to click "street view" once you get to that area on the map. Not every region has street view yet, but you can still see amazing satellite photography.

More About My Zoo

Just felt like writing a little more about my family. My family is my reason for pretty much everything I do, so it seems worth writing about right now.

I'll start with me. It's hard for me to write about me because I am at a loss for descriptives. I'm me, doesn't that say enough? Well, only if you know me I guess. I was one of those dorks back in the day that was pissed if I got a B+ in advanced chemistry and who took pre calculus even though I had finished my math requirement for high school before junior year. I was sure that I wouldn't be one of those statistics who dropped out of college, that I would be an RN by the time I was 22. I even assured all of my friends that I wasn't even going to bother dating when I moved back to California. (I lived in Texas for 4 years) I studied hard for the SAT's, had all my scholarship and admission stuff in order. I was set.

So the first thing I did when I moved to Cali was get a job at Costco. It was a crappy job indeed. I was a cashier and I moonlighted in the pharmacy and one hour photo departments. The job sucked and it was my first realization that people really do suck. Like really, people can be alarmingly stupid. So I lasted there a year and a half and then temped for a while. I turned down a decent paying job with stock options and all to work as a freakin clerk again at Kaiser. I knew that I wanted to be a nurse, and figured it would be nice to have my foot in the door at Kaiser when that degree fell into my lap. Yeah well I've been working there for 8 years now, since I was 20. I went to school at night for a while and managed to become a medical assistant. Better than nothing I suppose but I still have my eye on the RN dollars.

Then there is my husband. We met when we were 12 years old. He was my cousin's best friend so it was sort of convenient that we hang out. I would visit Cali every summer because my parents shared custody and that's when I got to know CR. Funny enough, we really disliked each other at first. Not like flirty 'I hate you' bullshit. Like really, strong dislike. Since MC was his best friend and my cousin and friend though we tolerated each other. One summer my cousin decided she wanted to date this boy. She was younger than me, only 15. Her mom told her that if she wanted to make it a double date, and if I went, she would allow it. So I told her if she found me someone to hang out with, I would go as her chaperon. Well guess who the lazy bitch finds? None other than her brother's best friend. I was pissed! But for the sake of adventure, I went. Well that night CR and I hit it off and my cuz was totally disgusted by her date. And so it began. We hung out the rest of that summer and then again the next summer, and the summer after that I moved here. We were going to be casual so I could focus on school, but it ended up being the other way around.

So we got married in 2004, 6 years after I moved to Cali. We went on a 2 week honeymoon and the day we came back I decided to take a bath at 4:00AM. I was still on Hawaii time and we still had another couple of weeks off work, so what the hell. On a total whim, I decided to pee on a pregnancy test that happened to be under the sink. I didn't really think anything of it, I was bored and they had been under there for a couple of years. What the hell? So I peed on the stick and set it on the side of the bath tub. Several minutes later I glanced over at the damn thing... and what do you know? It had 2 lines! I had stopped taking birth control figuring I would flush it out of my system for a year and then we'd work on having a baby. Oh well. Honeymoon baby it was! So it was a surprise but a happy one.

After the pregnancy from hell, in Dec '04 enter Kat. Oh she quickly became the complete center of my universe. She has since nudged over a tiny bit for her brother, but she's still pretty much there. She was a dream baby. She hardly ever cried or fussed. She was happy and people would stop me to tell me how beautiful she was. I tried putting her in day care but ended up calling in sick all the time. She wouldn't take a bottle so I was convinced that she would starve if I didn't nurse her all day. I ended up taking a part time position so that I could be home with her during the days. I work evenings and weekends and hubby works days. There is a very small over lap of time 3 days a week that a good friend takes care of my babies but otherwise they are with one of us all the time. We are so lucky. Anyhow, I'm going to have to write a whole other blog about Kat because that girl is something else! She was very smart from the get go and I have many a story about that little one.

Around Christmas time of '06 I noticed that some of the procedures at work were making me want to barf. I was in the 'urine room' testing someone's urine and noticed that it smelled SO strong. I gagged a little and figured that person must just have a really horrible infection. Then the next one made me gag, then the next. So I said to myself, "why is my sense of smell so strong? And why the f do my boobs hurt?" Anyhow I got busy and forgot about it for a couple of days. Then the day after Christmas I went to take a bath and grabbed that other pregnancy test from the 2 pack I bought to confirm Kat. Sure enough, 2 lines. Here we go again. In August of '07 we welcomed our Bear. Though I love him dearly, he's definitely not the little angel the first one was. To be fair though, the first time around I had time to hold Kat all the time, nurse her to sleep, etc. Bear had digestive issues at first and would fuss a lot, but after a couple of months he started to smile and reassure us that he was glad we brought him into this world.

Lucky for us, Kat looked forward to Bear's arrival and welcomed him with open arms. She held him for the first time and said, "Hi! I'm your big sister!" She would hold him and hold his little fingers. She would sing songs to him even when he was in my tummy. She is happy to
share her things with him and eager to read books, tell stories, etc. She always wants me to put him in her bed so she can snuggle him. She tells me that she is his little mommy and I can be his big mommy. She is even the one who nick named him "Teddy Bear". When he wakes from a nap she gets to be the one to go into his room and greet him. And it's not one sided either. Bear loves his big sister. He sees her coming and puts his arms out for her. She was the first person to make him laugh out loud. They love each other so much and it makes me so happy. I kind of feel bad for not really liking my brother that much. I don't dislike him I just don't really know him. I know it hurts my mom but that's just how it turned out.

Poor Bear though. I hardly ever left Kat with a sitter. This time around, I'm not so convinced that my babies can't live without me. I still don't go out often, but hubby and I have decided that we need to remember how to be a couple. For so long now we've been someone's parents. We get along well and share a bed, but we forgot that it all started with me and him. So we're working on that. I am so lucky to have the family that I do. I am proud of my kids and I love my husband. I have lots of friends and family around. I'm a lucky girl!