I promise I'm not as crazy as I sound in this post

Sometimes, like when we're really bored on a long road trip, Aaron and I will have some pretty deep, all existential-like conversations. We have this sort of game we play, which I'll call, "You know what really blows my mind?" Invariably, we'll get to a point where one of us calls the other weird, and then the other tries to be, "But, no! Let me explain better what I mean!" and then the first one is all, "You're still weird."

A recent example of this was when I was explaining to him how amazing it is to me that we can all understand each other - written word, spoken word, visual cues - we all use the same terms to mean the same things and can understand what other people mean. Then I mentioned, what if we all see colors differently? I mean, we're taught that you see a certain color, and that's what it's called. So, you see something and someone tells you it's called yellow, and so from now on, that color is yellow to you. But, are we all seeing yellow the same, or are we do we see it differently but know that it's yellow because that's what we're taught it is? Does this make any sense?

Anyway, this conversation, like usual, wound down to the English language, and how some words are spelled weird and completely unlike how they are actually pronounced. Aaron's most recent examples are the words "one" and "two." I mean, we all know how they're pronounced, because everyone pronounces them this way, but how did they become pronounced those ways and so differently from how they're spelled? And then, also, why is it that "first", "second", and "third" and not, "oneth" or "onest", "twoth" or "twond", and "threed" or "threest". I mean, yeah, they sound weird to us now, but how did that all evolve?

Of course, the remedy for all this major brain usage is to plop down in front of something mindless on the television as soon as we get home, but we know someday it will happen again. We'll be in the car, and one of us will start in: "You know what really blows my mind?"

Don't even get me started on the conversation about how humans discovered animals could be eaten, because there's a whole religious debate raging on with that one and we're not allowed to ever bring it up ever again. Ever.

So how about you. Anything that really blows your mind? I need some new conversation fodder, because we've got some long road trips coming up.

This Post is Probably the Definition of Slapdash (but I'm too lazy to look it up)

  • Last night Aaron and I watched the documentary King of Kong while we were getting Gabbie to go to sleep (yes I still rock her to sleep every night, and I'm fine with it). While we were a little unsure we would enjoy it when we started it up, we ended up loving it. It is always so interesting to me how other people live, and these people are definitely different from us. Not that there's anything wrong with geeks, but these people are geeks. It also ended just how we wanted it to end, so that was awesome.
  • We were supposed to get maybe 2 additional inches of snow today (it has been snowing since late Sunday night). So far we've gotten five, and it's still coming down hard. I'm supposed to go to the theatre tonight, and I'm somewhere way south of thrilled that I have to go out in this crap. I'm making sure my phone is charged and giving myself an extra 15 minutes to get approximately 2 miles away from my house. We're seeing Pilobolus, and my long-time fascination with this dance troop is the only reason I'm braving the storm. 
  • I'm desperately hoping the snow stops by Friday, which is when Gabbie and I are headed to my parents' house for the weekend to celebrate my best friend's daughter's 1st birthday. There are supposed to be a lot of kids there, so it should be fun for Gabbie, and I'm kind of hoping there's some booze for me, but I doubt it. I'm sure I'll still survive. I'll just have a drinking lunch afterwards.
  • I had a problem today that I've had before. Gabbie is growing out of all her shoes (again at the end of a season - I should make sure I remember this from now on) so I headed over to Target today to pick her up some kicks. They had exactly 3 pair of shoes in her size that were not sandals. Well, they also had some awesome Converse All-Stars in her size, but I couldn't justify spending twice as much as the other pair of tennis shoes would have cost. But still. It's February. Target is headquartered in Minnesota. I know for a fact that Minnesota does not have sandal weather right now. Couldn't we wait until April for the all-sandals shoe rack? Or even maybe a sandal or two for spring breakers, but shoes for the rest of us? I still put Gabbie in shoes for most of the summer, unless it gets really hot. I can't be the only parent that does this. Why must retailers always do this to me? (/rant)
And, I'm off to change a very stinky diaper (shouldn't have fed her beans two nights in a row) before getting dressed up to head out. My life is so absolutely glamorous. Ha!

My morning would have been better if...

- It hadn't snowed and wasn't still snowing a ton so that the roads are crap, and my typically eleven minute drive took forty minutes instead.
- We had woken up on time so I wasn't late to begin with.
- My out-of-gas light hadn't come on.
- I hadn't forgotten that I have a boring webinar to attend this morning.
- I didn't have to deal with stupid people.
- Gabbie hadn't been incredibly disagreeable this morning.
- I had remembered my lunch.
- It was still the weekend.

I am not a fan of this Monday.



Top Five Things That Are Getting Me Through Winter Alive (plus 1 bonus quick thing)

I know I am not alone in this sentiment, but I am SO OVER WINTER! Except the winter Olympics. I'm not over those. I love those. However, the rest of it can go away. Since I'm sure it isn't going to listen to me and go away for another month or two, I'm doing whatever I can to make it go quicker and/or fake myself out, and these are the things I'm doing.

1. This one is kind of surprising, but in order to make it through this winter alive, I'm mostly giving up sugar. This is also related to the losing weight thing I have going on, but I discovered that when I did slip up and eat a sweet, my mood took a nose dive and I was ready to go to bed for the next two months. It's so weird! This is not to say that I'm eating zero sweets, because I'm giving in on rare occasions, but for the most part I've sent sweets packing. I haven't baked dessert save for the pie for the baby shower in weeks. I gave up my afternoon candy bar and my nightly bowl of ice cream (is it any wonder I have yet to drop the baby weight?). I gave up regular soda and only have diet soda on a rare occasion. I never thought I'd be one of these people, but I gave up most processed sugar and I feel great!

2. Things that smell like summer. Citrusy perfume, coconut scented shampoo and conditioner, pina colada flavored gum...the list goes on and on and anything that smells like summer is a winner in my book.

3. Wearing bright colors. I especially am enjoying wearing my summer tank tops under cardigans, so I can feel like I'm somewhat dressing for summer while still staying nice and cozy warm.

4. Good books. I've been reading quite a bit, and have enjoyed everything I've read so far. I tried to read Isadore's Secret, a true story about a nun who was murdered in northern Michigan early in the last century, but although it was entertaining, it was really slow, so I abandoned it and have been reading books that would be considered good beach reads. Currently I'm reading The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death and am enjoying the hell out of it. Next on my night stand is Catching Fire, and I can't wait to get to it. I love good books!

5. Decorating (or planning to) my house. We've decided on paint colors and have started shopping for new bedding. We are also watching copious amounts of HGTV and DIY to get ideas for remodeling our master bath and kitchen. It's so much fun, and Aaron and I are finally starting to agree on what we want. Now that the agreement is happening, it seems like much more of a reality. Yay!

One more quick thing that is getting me through the winter: Gabbie being silly.


(It may be kind of hard to tell, but here she's wearing Mr. Potato Head's glasses and saying, "Cheese!" while pretending to take a picture of herself with my old cell phone. She is awesome.)

Getting Fitter

(That title was mostly to bug my husband who insists that very few words should be modified with an -er because it sounds weird to him. So I do it regularly to annoy him. Ask him about "vaguer" sometimes - like nails on a chalkboard and as hilarious as someone falling down.)

So, I'm finally committing to lose some weight and get into better shape. It doesn't hurt that we have a weight-loss competition going on through the fitness center at work. This gave me some excellent motivation to literally get off my butt and do something about the *cough30poundscough* baby weight I still have hanging around. Well, I guess technically it isn't baby weight, but I gained it while gestating, so it's all her fault and I'm sticking to that excuse.

So far, it's been going pretty well. Over the past three weeks I'm down a little more than 6 pounds, which isn't bad, but I'd like to do better. I'm counting calories, but the past week has been full of poor food choices. Ironically (I think I'm using that right) this week when I ate more than others in recent history and exercised less too resulted in my largest weight loss to date (2.5 pounds). Also, those 6 pounds were apparently enough of a loss to allow me to now remove my pants without undoing them, so there's that. It's always encouraging to start seeing the difference. I love it when you can start to see the difference.

So, I think that in order to do even better I'm going to start either the 30 Day Shred or a Couch to 5K program sometime in the next couple of days and focus on eating many more fruits and vegetables and drinking more water, and see where that gets me. I'm so ready to shed some more pounds. I want them to be gone. And then of course I'm sure they'll all come rushing back as soon as I get pregnant again, but oh well. At least I'm figuring out how to get them off so I'll have that experience to build on next time.

What I have been busy doing instead of going anywhere near my computer

  • Going to Aaron's cousin's baby shower, where I ate my first piece(s) of red meat since Christmas and where Gabbie discovered how much fun balloons can be.

  • This was also when I had to field/deflect about a million people asking me when we were going to add another baby to our family. Thankfully, I was able to deflect some of those questions by showing up with chocolate chip cookie pie. Several family members tend to get upset when I show up without pie, so I decided to give them a pleasant surprise, and they were too busy stuffing their faces to ask about a new bambino.
  • Getting a surprise visit from an aunt who got stranded at the Detroit airport, and called us about an hour before she got here. Related: cleaning the house in record time.
  • Freaking out when we realized the opening ceremony of the Olympics took up so much space on our DVR that it automatically erased Shrek, Shrek 3, Kung Fu Panda, and Horton Hears a Who. These are the only way we make it through weekend mornings when Gabbie wakes up at five. Put on one of those and the adult can snooze on the couch for an extra 90 minutes. So, as you can see, this is a tragedy.
  • Stressing out about my annual review (it went much better than my freaked-out-for-no-reason self expected).
  • Stressing out about my dad's gall bladder removal surgery (it went fine).
  • Drinking more whiskey than was prudent between those two events, and therefore barely making it through a 7:30 a.m. meeting today.

Full Blown Randomness

I've been up since 2 a.m. this morning, so my brain, she is not functioning properly. Well, at least not properly enought for a coherent, single topic post. So, random bullets ahoy!
  • Even though I was a little annoyed at the short notice that the kids in Gabbie's classroom would be exchanging valentines and treats today (I found out when I dropped her off yesterday morning), I was pretty excited to get my craftiness on and make some cards. I'll have to post a picture - we made bunny faces out of hearts and captioned them, "Somebunny Loves You!" They're completely adorable, if I may toot my own horn. Thank goodness I had a whole crate of craft supplies though, otherwise I would have been SOL - the stores around here were pretty much sold out of valentines before last night and I wasn't braving heading across town to the craft store with the roads still being pretty snow covered. This morning I told Gabbie that between the valentine emergency and her love of fresh baked breakfast foods, she's lucky she has me as a mom, and I can pull off all sorts of those kinds of things.
  • Wow, that was not well written. Sorry about that. I'd fix it, but I'm tired.
  • Gabbie caught a cold that has felled most of the kids at her daycare - I'm pretty sure they all have RSV or some sort of related cold (there have been 3 confirmed RSV cases). There are some things I don't mind about a sick kid, namely that all she wants to do is cuddle, and there's nothing I like more than cuddling with her. However, there are two things I really, really don't like about having a sick Gabbie around. Thing one is that she stops sleeping, and thing two is that she stops eating, and those two things together are enough to drive me absolutely batty. So batty that the other day I gave in and let her have a cookie and pretzels for lunch because those are the only things she would eat, and I had to get some calories in her somehow. The sleeping thing, though. It is killing me this time, especially since she was finally sleeping through the night again, and had gone on a two week stretch of doing so. It really is a cruel joke when that happens - they're finally sleeping, and you think, "Well, thank God that's over with finally," and then they stop again, and it's worse than you remember, the not sleeping. I have to admit, I am not my best, most temper controlled self at 3 in the morning with a toddler that would rather be playing or poking me in the face or talking. Not my best self at all.
  • So, I think it's safe to say that I have maybe officially watched and listened to too many shows about ghosts. I was doing okay, and could watch pretty much anything and nothing was really bothering me all that much. I just feel really safe and comfortable in our house. But I think the sleep deprivation is getting to me, because the past few nights I have really managed to creep myself out. Last night while I was willing Gabbie to sleep (she was quietly lying there trying to figure out how to get past my defenses and stick her finger in my ear), I remembered a story that makes me really hope Gabbie never has an imaginary friend. Remembering the story creeped me out enough that I had a hard time falling back asleep, even though Gabbie had finally drifted off, hence why I both was up since 2 a.m. and need to lay off the ghost shows. If you don't want to be creeped out, don't read on.

I do not think this means what she thinks it means

Gabbie's vocabulary seems to be exploding lately. She narrates everything, and we're understanding more and more each day (although, we still can't figure out what it means when she repeats "Goy!" over and over and over again on a nearly daily basis - it seems to mean something different every day).

One of her favorite things to narrate is getting dressed. Diaper! Shirt! Pants! and then we get to socks, but she can't seem to pronounce the "s" at the beginning of the word, and let me just tell you, it's both hilarious and disturbing to hear this itty bitty girl yell out in delight with, "C0cks!" Oh, and did you know that socks are her favorite? She likes to take them off, and yell, "C0cks!" Try to put them back on, and yell, "C0cks!" Ask mama or dada to put them back on for her, "C0cks? C0cks?! C0cks, please!"

We've been working hard with her on her pronounciation of this word. She can say other words with an "s" sound at the beginning of the word, so we run some of those with her. All our efforts, though, seem to be in vain. She's sticking to her pronounciation of the word no matter how hard I try. The other day I thought it would be good to maybe stress the "s" sound at the beginning. "Like a snake!" I said. "Sssssssssocks!"

What did I get in return?

"C0ckssssssssssssss!"

And then I died of laughter. Which probably isn't helping the situation.

Gabbie's First Haircut

About a week ago, we decided it was time for Gabbie to get a haircut. Her hair was a few inches past her shoulders and pretty uneven, plus it was starting to look pretty shaggy all the time. Having to get a haircut for a 1 1/2 year old wasn't something I ever expected I would have to do. I didn't have any hair to speak of until after I turned 2, and Aaron didn't either. But she really needed it, and even though it made me pretty sad to take yet another step toward Gabbie being a big girl and away from her being a baby, I manned up and called my stylist to make an appointment.

As it turns out, it was absolutely the right thing to do, because it looks adorable. And, despite the fact that she cried a ton while it was happening, even she loves her new shorter 'do. Check it:







She hasn't stopped moving long enough for me to get a great picture of it, but I'm sure you can get the general idea.

That was pretty much the only thing we did all weekend other than chores and relaxing, so all in all, this was one of the best weekends we've had in a while.
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