Martha

Well, I did it. I mailed an invitation to Martha Stewart to come to dinner at my house sometime in June - whatever date is convenient for her. I am not sure where this all began, apart from one night when I was half asleep I had convinced myself that she would come if I just asked her. I was even planning where she would fly in and what to make for dessert. So I told a friend. She dared me to do it. I think she even double-dog dared me. So I tossed the idea around. I told another friend. She thinks I am certifiably crazy but is nice enough to not say it out loud. I told my dinner club. Oh! That was then end of it. They said I should invite her to the dinner club that I am hosting. One of my neighbors really jumped on the bandwagon and started giving me ideas on how I could sell it to Martha - I think that particular neighbor is in marketing, to be honest. Then I got FOLLOW UP EMAILS on the subject. So I wrote a letter. It was a sad and feeble letter - something along the lines of: "Martha, you are awesome, you are so great, you are really incredible how do you DO it??? And please come over for dinner. " Then Jim helped me hammer some nice things into it and I sent it to the marketing genius for input. Them I made an invitation. I really liked it and made an envelope to match. So I wrote out the letter by hand and got a nice picture of the village atmosphere and today I went to the post office and sent it off.

I'm actually a little embarrassed to admit that I've done such a bold thing, but it cannot be undone now. If nothing happens, I can whine about it here. If I get a pretty letter of regret I can crow about it here, fold the letter nicely and keep it in my Martha Stewart cookbook for entertaining - because THAT would be irony. If Martha's people call me up and issue a restraining order, I can mutter over it here, too. And if, by the REMOTEST possibility, my humble invitation is accepted, you will be able to follow my every little obsession about the planning and preparation right here with me. Now, won't that be FUN?

Lunch Observation

It just so happens, that if you go and work out late in the morning and run your little leggs off for nearly an hour, that when you come home and make lunch, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich WILL BE the best thing you have ever eaten. Even if it is leftover from your kids' lunch.

Mommy News all Around

Many things to talk about today. First, let's get the kid content in and over with. The "angels" are napping, but I am on the cusp of them waking up. Today, as the last week and a half, the girls are being more than slightly difficult. Below, in the previous post, you see what happened when Emma was told to put her underwear on. Yep, that's Dora underwear on her head. I really had to go to the bank and the grocery store. By all rights I should have let her go out like that, but rolling boil anger doesn't usually let you think that clearly. After we finally made it to the bank et al, I wanted to go work out but had left all of my workout clothes at home - in the washer. So we came back and I wanted to make some granola. The girls insist on helping any time I am in the kitchen, so after five minutes of them stirring rolled oats with large spoons, there was more of the 8 cups of Quaker oats on the counter and floor than in the bowl. So I banished them and made the granola without them. Right when I was getting out the hand vac to get the remains on the floor the phone rang. This is precisely when Mary BIT Emma hard enough on her back to break the skin. Yes, Reader, it has been a rough day in the parenting realm.

On another front, I worked out with a personal trainer yesterday. One hour of complete hell. That is what it was. This man was relentless. I wanted to be all tough and stoic, but my muscles could only do so much (we just worked on resistance training). At the end of the hour my fatigued muscles were shaking. I fell into bed when we got home and thought I had died. Unbelievable. I truly never knew a workout could feel like that. I'm not really sure I want it to feel like that again. However, I believe if I could work out that hard 4 times a week for a month, I would feel really skinny again. That was part of the frustration of not going this morning. Oh, well.

In other Mommy news, I have found the pictures that I want to include with that invite. I have to finish writing out the second half of it and should be able to send it off tomorrow. I don't really expect anything from it, but even a nice letter of regret would be fun to have. Any way, the pressure of serving a dinner like that would probably be incredible. I'll put the letter up after I send it off.

Final Mommy news that made me happier than reasonable today is in the mail. Emma got into the nursery school that I had been hoping to get her into. Not that there were tests or anything, just a waiting list. So I got the letter saying she would be going on Wednesdays and Fridays. No co-op this time around. I'm very excited about the whole thing.

The other thing that makes me happy is fresh out of the oven homemade granola. Mmmmmm.

Emma's interpretive dressing game.

Having a playdough day!

Play group

Wakeful Musings

Just for the record: it is 2:39 AM and I have not slept a wink. I think it was the caffeine I had at dinner (which was WAY later than usual at 8 PM) and I am not yet tired. Of course, it is a good thing I was not sleeping, as Mary has been moaning and crying every hour that has passed. I just went up with some Tylenol, hoping that when I do finally get to sleep she will stay quiet. So I was on the computer, bumping about random blogs when I found this one. This lady is incredible. She makes these wee tiny little crafty creatures that made me want to run to the sewing machine and replicate. She is my new craft hero-ess.

Today (well, technically yesterday) we went to visit my new twin nephews. Zachary Leon and Alexander Gary are 1 week old as of Sunday. They weighed over 7 1/2 pounds EACH. My poor, HUGE sister-in-law was just unreasonably tortured, having almost 16 pounds of babies inside of her for so long. We went to their house, bearing gifts for almost everyone, as her birthday was yesterday and their daughter's 2nd birthday was today. Everyone seems to be happy and healthy. My brother, Jeff, told me that so far having twins was easy. Bully for you, Jeff. Just thinking about twins and a 2 year old is hard for me, so more power to you.

I wanted to go to the Target over by their house (they live about an hour away), since the quilts I had ordered for the girls' beds have been discontinued and I have decided to get Dora comforters and just be done with it. The Target over here is out of stock. But we went in the afternoon and then had a nice dinner with my parents at TGI Fridays, and it was too late to go to Target afterwards and the girls were full pumpkins by that time. So I am still without some sort of comforter or quilt for Emma's bed. That annoys me to quite an extreme.

We also stopped and looked at a house in our neighborhood that is up for sale. It is just another new house of one of the models I really would have loved to have purchased, but was not financially able to do when we were buying into this development. I love how Jim talks about us buying a house when we just invested a huge amount of time and money doing the landscaping as well as many indoor projects. I don't even have curtains on any windows in this house yet - just blinds - and he is talking like we are putting up a "For Sale" sign in the front yard. Personally, I never want to move again. And if I did, it would not be within the same neighborhood. It would be to a less expensive place (not smaller, which is total unreasonable) and maybe even in Minnesota. But not on Jackson Lane around the bend. I don't understand quite what gets into him sometimes. Next month he is going to Argentina for a business trip and maybe that will cool his heels a little. I think he just doesn't want to organize the garage. Moving would definitely get him out of that. I'll have to do an entirely separate post about the garage organizing.

After reading this entry, I see that I must be truly tired as there is no flow to the ideas or the narrative. That, I think, is unlike me. So I will turn off the soul-sucking computer and try to go to sleep. The caffeine should have worn off by now (I think it is a 6 hour effect, truthfully) and I might be able to get a whopping hours of sleep before my precious darlings are up. I see a long morning ahead of me.

Workout Surprise

We finally edged Emma back into Lifetime's child care area. It is actually very cool, with lots of fun, FUN things to do. But last week she went with Jim and he was there later than her bedtime. She got very upset about some vague incident where "someone was mean to her". In the mind of our delicate little 3 year old, that could mean someone did not stop walking past her when she thought she was talking to them. So, since last Wednesday she has been on absolute REFUSAL to go to the fitness center. I spent the better part of this week gently working her back in. That means I went to the fitness center 3 times this week and did not get to work out at all. Tonight it all paid off and she was her normal, happy self about it. So Jim and I were on the treadmills doing a warm up and who should be next to us but our very own next door neighbors. Yes, the ones who have 2 of 3 kids the exact same ages as ours and we hardly see or talk to. I am not sure if it our schedules or theirs that causes this oddity, but there you have it. All 4 of us were happily working out on consecutive treadmills and not speaking. I can't believe we had to go out to get that.

Honestly, though, what oddness is that? We run into so many neighbors there it is crazy. What is a little sad is that it is Friday night and we all go to the fitness center. None of us are getting together with friends or going out for fun. We are sweating off our little fat cells and ignoring the fact that we all know each other. It is an odd thing to work out right next to someone you know distantly. You feel compelled to talk, but really can not. The whole thing needs some etiquette book addressing the matter. I wonder what Emily Post would say about chance meetings during couple work out sessions. It is all just to weird for me, I'm going to bed.

A Little Something I've Been Working On

If you don't know who this is for, that will come in a later post. I just wanted to put the actual invite up to show it off. I made this little thing for a June Dinner club event I am hosting. Those initials are the recipient's. More to come!

Another Friday, another tea party. It is Zoe's 2nd birthday. The girls had blue frosted cupcakes after she opened presents. At least they matched the dresses, so when the frosting ended up all over them it didn't really matter. Mary was just technicolor after that.

Along the Way, You're Bound to Hit a Speed Bump

We got a strange phone call last night around 7PM. It was DTE, our electric company, telling us in a suitable recorded voice that our power would be "interrupted" for approximately 4 hours on Tuesday, starting around 9 AM. So I called my neighbor, who I was supposed to have a play date with in the morning.

"Did you get a call from the electric company?"

"Um, no. Why?"

explain, explain, explain....

"I don't think so, but I have some voice mail. Let me check it and call you back."

She checked, she called back. No message. The question remained, then, was her power going to be cut off too? It wouldn't be huge except that my children have been devils with intent the last three days and the only thing that will contain them is food and TV, not in that order. So we didn't feel like hanging around if we were going to be without TV for the savages. We made alternate plans to go to the mall for the morning and even try to eat lunch out. I must tell you, Reader, that my last few attempts at going out with the children have been less than relaxing. Trica and I tried, about 5 weeks ago, to have lunch out and we decided it was easier (and substantially cheaper) to eat mac and cheese at home.

So, after getting some air in my slowly leaking front tire, we trekked over to the nearest mall. The girls all had a fabulous time in the play area. Mary very nearly skipped (as much as a 20 month old can) and Emma and Zoe discovered the slide was wide enough to hold both of them at the same time. That was nice. Encouraging, even. This was not without problems, as I only brought a single stroller and Emma decided, to the point that her toddler feet would not budge from the middle of the parking lot in the 26 degree weather, that she wanted to ride in a stroller. Not THAT stroller, which is Mary's stroller, but SOME stroller. After much coercing and coaxing I got her into the mall, where her feet made that obnoxious decision again to stick the the ground. So, Emma got a ride on my shoulders while Mary was pushed in the stroller to the place in the mall where I could rent a double stroller. All was happiness and glee at that point, as the girls decided the mall stroller was very much like a roller coaster and they began leaning precariously over the sides and exclaiming at the sheer fun of it.

We went to lunch and had the normal issues you would have if you were at lunch with three toddlers. First, there is not enough room to move all of the tantalizing table paraphernalia out of reach of all of the kids. Then comes the issue of kicking each other with their feet. And no matter what, when the food comes, they only want to eat off of other people's plates. And there was the issue of the forks returning to their cousins, the under-table-dwellers. Trica and I were exhausted after that. All in all it was not horrible, but only what we expected. Unfortunately, Emma decided we were all having so much fun that she was NOT going to go home. She is still crying about that right now, upstairs, where she should be taking a nap and not keeping Mary up with her wailing and gnashing of teeth.

As I drove home, Trica called from her cell phone to tell me her power, according to her husband, had just gone out at 1 PM. When I got home, mine was back on, with the obvious signs that it had been off at some point. At least I can do laundry and check my emails while Emma screams and protests the injustice of it all.

All in the space of a regular morning with two little kids.

Insidiousness

So after a few Moblogging days using my new camera-equipped phone, I haven't had a chance to add anything. You must know, Reader, a dear friend of mine really gave me grief for putting up so many pictures. "Come ON," she said, "Lunch from Home Depot???? Where's the picture of the clerk that sold you the mouldings?!?!?" I have to justify - of course. When I am home, my laptop is on all day on the kitchen counter. Since we have a cable modem, I receive emails as they are sent. I also check various sites through out the day and frequent blogs that are my favorites. I just assumed everyone would be doing the same. So, if you were checking in two times a day, you would be able to see the progress on the "Big Girl Room" project. If you checked it on Monday, you would only see a series of pictures that really didn't tell you anything. So I apologize. The only time I got to do anything close to blogging was when I was out getting more paint or buying mouldings. Anyhow, I thought I took a SWEET food picture - it was like an advertisement!

So we finished painting Emma's room, although Dora is till not quite done. The furniture came on Tuesday and the room is all together. We are waiting on the shades which are in transit and the valances and bedspread, which are back ordered until May. We didn't get to the closet organizer but plan to do that this weekend. I have been busy trying to catch up from no housework being done for 3 days. Remember, this is after being sick the week before and never quite getting all of that backlog done. So today it is the exciting job of cleaning toilets and dusting, along with precarious piles of laundry. Yesterday I got out the Space Bags I asked for at Christmas time and bagged up all of my miscellaneous bedding - then I sucked the air out of them and stored them like layers of a sandwich. I'm going to be buying more of those bags!

Well, my short time of napping children has ended. I think we are going to go to the gym and workout for a little while. I haven't been in forever, it feels like, and I must start going again. Maybe I'll take a picture of the place for my loyal readers.....

Making progress!

Lunch from Home Depot

Mouldings for Emma's room.

Buying more paint

Tea Party

This is how the Mommy of small girls spends a Friday morning. Emma and Mary got dressed up in their Halloween costumes, as did their friend Zoe, and we went over to Zoe's house and had a tea party. I had made cookies last night and Trica had cleared her dining room for the event. She also found a table cloth to cover the table and put matching pillow cases on the backs of the chairs to make them all matching. Yes, I knew it would be a good thing to do this with Trica. I have a porcelain tea set that was given to us just for such an occasion and the girls happily used that. We put water in the Tea Pot, and since a lot of the water spent a lot of the time on the dresses, the table, and the floor, it was a Good Thing we did not use tea. Anyhow, don't you just love the color of her Dining Room? Just so Derek knows, it is not orange but Terra Cotta. Orange is a bad mistake, terra cotta is a design choice.

Tonight my parents are taking the kids for a couple of days and we are going to paint Emma's "Big Girl Room", add chair rails (Jim's ambition) and put in a closet organizer. If I have time I will do a Dora Princess Mural. There will be pictures, as always. We are also breaking down the guest room bed, which means my basement pictures will start having classy mattresses leaning against the walls. I just can't wait for that. The new furniture is coming Tuesday, but all of the bedding is back ordered until May. One thing at a time, I suppose! Well, enough chit chat, I have Things To Do while the girls are sleeping.

Just Desserts

To answer Mr. Nemesis, yes, I am feeling better. I went to the Doctor on Tuesday and she gave me a wicked antibiotic that is only a 5 day thing. It's like SUPER antibiotic or something. I was fascinated by the insert, which explained the exact microbiology and target of this fine drug. Who knew the 50s ribosome could be so weak??? Anyhow, today I had a LOT of things to do. I spent the last 5 days doing nothing. Well, 2 parties and a Dora cake nothing. Oh, and a trip downtown to see the musical Chicago. But I digress. I mean to say that all daily chores were shoved aside until Further Notice. That was today. I had laundry from last week that was still to be put away, right next to laundry that needed to be done. Piles of it. Don't ask me what was on the kitchen floor. It couldn't be seen for all of the dirt it had picked up after being smashed there sometime earlier this week. It was awful. So I got up and neglected my normal routine that makes me feel human since I would be spending the day catching up. I soaked my hair over the sink and combed it back, letting it dry any which way it felt like. I did put in my contacts and brushed my teeth, but skipped the daily eye makeup. I donned a workout t-shirt, pulled on yesterday's jeans, and white socks - those are almost always coordinated. That is all relevant information.

So, this afternoon, Emma had an appointment with the Ear, Nose, Throat specialist due to an infection in one of her ear tubes. I begged Jim, who was working from home, to come with me so I wouldn't have to wrestle with 2 small children by myself in the office. He did. When we left we were driving by a restaurant we used to go to for romantic dinners - J. Alexanders - and Jim pulled in. Yes, Reader, I went to a nice restaurant with two toddlers and no makeup. I am officially ashamed of myself. I need to add that Emma, who refuses to wear anything but dresses, was in jeans. And Mary, who was adorable in pigtails before nap time, now had rain soaked mop hair. We looked like we belonged on the couch during Saturday morning cartoons. Jim hasn't shaved since last month some time, and his hair is almost as unwieldly as Mary's. It was a GOOD feeling. After we ate, Jim realized he had left his wallet at home. Well, I had left it at home, since it was I who dumped out the contents of his pants to wash them with the rest of the laundry. So I paid. I understand it is ALL THE SAME MONEY, especially since Jim is the only money maker, but it still felt like an insult. If I had looked good, the man would have paid, I tell you. It was like dating all over again.

4:00 this afternoon

Waiting at the ENT doctor's office. I was taking pictures to entertain Emma. The Doctor was running 40 mintues late, we were told.

Surprise Night Out

Jim took us out to dinner! The restuarant is dark (atmosphere), but Emma was being so sweet giving me hugs and kisses endlessly. Gotta love that girl!

Catching Up

Friday was Emma's 3rd birthday. We had a party for the kids at McDonald's and that was fine. Many Moms came, more children came, all had a good time. Except the one little baby who kept spitting up and his Mom. I don't think they were having too good of a time. We let Emma open her presents from us ONE AT A TIME. I don't mean plowing through them individually but all at once. I mean one every time we felt like sharing. HA! It was great! It worked out to roughly one an hour, not counting nap times or McDonald's parties. But she did get to pick which one to open each time. It was fabulously fun and I think we will always run it like that. Jim and I weren't sure what to do - we each had to wait until our fathers got home and we did the cake at the same time. But Jim was home. And the cake wasn't made yet. I baked a Dora shaped cake during nap times and after the kids went to bed I dragged yellow Duncan Hines Dora over to Trica's house and she helped me decorate it. It took us 3 hours. I kid you not, Reader. There was quite the amount of time to get such vibrant colors mixed, not to mention put on the cake in small, orderly, perfect little stars. Yes, it was a task for the truely ambitious. And I will not be adding cake decorating to my list of hobbies any time soon.


Then Saturday we had the family party. I came down with a terrbile sore throat and lethargy and a bit of a fever. But with some phenomenal help I got the house adequately cleaned and shiney for the party. Emma got an art easel, Dora bed sheets (we are painting her room next week), some Disney stock (OOOOOO DISNEY!), and a foam couch that folds out to a little bed. The couch thing she carries to whatever room she is going to be in (including her bedroom) and her and Mary sit on it to do whatever it is toddlers do all day. She spends a lot of time taking it up to her room, where she and Mary have a "pajama party". This also means she cannot get changed out of her pajamas all day long. It is an unseen twist to the new addition. So far she will now only sleep on this couch thing. She is a little too long for it and her feet hang off the end, but she doesn't care. It also has apeculiar chemical smeel about that Fabreeze won't remove and makes my daughter smell like old plastic chairs. I'm hoping that will go away.

You can click here to see the pictures from the parties.

Sunday I was feeling worse, with no appetite continuing and no willingness to communicate with anyone. So I napped and Jim took care of household things like children and some grocery shopping while the kids slept. I tried to take a relaxing and soothing bubble bath but for some reason our hot water was not working and Jim was at Kroger. So I sat in an underfilled tepid bubble bath for 20 minutes and gave up. That evening we joined Trica and her husband and went to see the musical Chicago. I got through it on throat lozenges, but I was glad to go. I love live theater and this was no exception. Then Monday came and I am slightly better, but still had no tolerance for irritating toddler things today. I even went out for a bit with the girls, only to add to my general frustration.

And so goes our Journey.

The Conspiracy of Pink

Well, it seems my inconsistencies have been outed. Now, to explain to Tinybites why I had to list that I Hate Pink yet happened to be wearing a shirt of the EXACT color in a picture I posted, I must go into the whole story of Pink Hatred. If you are not interested in the reasons behind Pink Hatred, you should click on a favorite on the side of your browser now, or type in something on your address bar IMMEDIATELY, because here begins the pinkness.

I can't say when it was, exactly, when I started hating pink. I know in grade school and junior high I was fairly amenable to the color, and even clearly remember buying clothes in the wonderful soft madras of pink and grey in the mid and late 80's. Karol may recall the outfit that she, Amy, and I all owned that was a wonderful rendition of that exact theme. In my freshman yearbook picture (go ahead, Derek, check it out) I am wearing a pink striped sweater. I am also looking a bit loopy and I still attribute that to the filling I had done the same morning and the resulting migraine, but I digress. I believe it was somewhere around sophomore year that I realized my ultimate goal of no longer being a little girl. Please recall that in the decades past, fashions tended to accent the adult that would be coming rather than the child that was being left behind. There was no cute little character t-shirts that girls wore to school. We were 15 and we wore heels to school and looked like the next corporate cutthroat. So I ditched the pink. It became my idea that pink was infantile and cute. I have spent most of my life trying to get rid of the "cute" factor. And so it began. There was the period of accidental avoidance, where I just ignored the clothes in my closet that were pink. Then the more deliberate not-buying things that were pink. Eventually that led to the active dislike and purging of all things pink. By the time I was 16 and off to Spain, it was widely accepted that I Hated Pink. By the time I got married, there were gag gifts all in pink at my shower (go ahead- think of EVERYTHING). Then I got pregnant and found out I was having a girl. That was the antithesis of Pink Hatred and a sign that the Conspiracy of Pink had won. I persevered, I tell you. I painted the nursery robin egg blue and made it a bunny theme, with flowers to make it more feminine. I bought little dresses in blue and yellow. I stockpiled the cutest red outfits you could find. Then, shortly after Emma was born and I was happily Pink Free, people started buying into the Pink Conspiracy. The fact is that every baby is androgynous until we hear a gender specific name or see gender clues, such as PINK. So even in the most flowery red outfits or the prettiest blue dresses people took to be gender clues of the wrong distinction. They referred to my dearest little girl as a BOY. Since I grew up with a non-gender specific name, this was a sore spot. This is where the Pink Conspiracy had begun the moment I was born, laying the foundation for the day when I had to give in to Pink. I went out and bought the PINKEST dresses, headbands, sweaters and pants I could find and dressed my daughter in nothing but Pink. With daughter number 2 I didn't even put the other clothes on. Just Pink. Then that color began to creep into my thinking. Oh, I would say, that pink sweater is quite pretty. Look at that book cover, I really like the pink and green scheme. Suddenly I was realizing my choices of wardrobe pieces were coming down to blue or pink. The green choice is frequently too garish. The purple is well, purple, and doesn't match many things except, um, pink. So when faced with Kohl's table of sweaters I am sometimes forced to take the Pink. Then, to top it off, it is a color that looks great on me. I glow. I hum with a happiness of pink that most people look for with every thing they put on. In truth, Pink suits me. But I still hate it, just on principal.