DH, DS, HT, BS?

I'm not sure I like all of these abbreviations to try to protect my privacy. Surely no strangers will stumble upon my blog, right? So are they really necessary? I've seen other blogs that have people's last names, hometowns, etc. It sure would make blogging a lot easier without having to remember to be generic.

Speaking of other bloggers, my sister-in-law pointed me toward a blogger who was in our high school band with her and my brother (they were four years ahead of me). She was diagnosed about 9 months ago with terminal cancer; she had started a blog to discuss mortality. Recently a scan showed the tumor was gone! A miracle, really! I'm glad the blog was shared with me and I will check in with it to read for her updates.

Which brings me to this...hopefully it's not a requirement to have a "cause" in order to be a blogger. I don't really have one specifically. And don't get me wrong -- I'm not asking for anything to happen just for writing material. Although blogging about winning the Powerball would be my choice, if anyone is listening...hint, hint.

We're late, we're late!

This morning did not go so well for DS and me. My dad was having oral surgery today, and he needed my mother to be there with him. So I had planned ahead to take DS to DH's aunt's home daycare here in town. I told DS several times yesterday evening that he would be going to Aunt B's house the next day. Unfortunately, he usually sleeps as late as 8:00 or 8:30 at home, but I had to wake him up at 7:00 to get ready to go. It was very cold this morning and he did NOT want to get up. I had to lift him out of his crib. Then he kicked, screamed, pulled, and fought me on everything -- changing his diaper, getting dressed, brushing teeth, walking out of his room, putting on his coat. And the worst part -- it took probably 15 minutes for me to get him buckled in to his carseat. He was stiffened up like a board and had the strongest grip on the straps! I finally loosened the straps and was able to buckle him in then tighten them again. He stopped crying but was still sniffling and had worked himself up quite a bit by then (it was after 7:30 by the time we left the house). I called my boss on the way to daycare to tell her I would be late. He walked in to daycare but started crying again (apparently he stopped crying within five minutes of my leaving). I was about 15 minutes late to work. My boss was okay with it, but it was still a pretty humiliating excuse -- a grown woman overpowered by a toddler. Looking back on it, I think I should have kept my calm more instead of getting worked up and angry myself. I was just worried about getting to work on time, but that might have just made the situation worse. This tantrum stuff is no fun, and I've heard that 3 is worse than 2! Hoooh-boy.

Toddler talk

DS did a couple of neat things at bathtime tonight. First he counted the bubbles, very quickly -- 123456!
Then as I was drying him off, he said, "Mommy, share Mommy, share Mommy." I said, "Who do you share Mommy with?" He said, "A baby!" I hope he feels the same way when he DOES have to share Mommy with a baby.

But after the bath and bedtime stories, we struggled again with brushing teeth. I guess he has made that his latest power struggle or stall tactic or whatever. Hopefully we get past it soon.

Also today, I took DS to DH's work for lunch (holiday for me but not for him). We went to a noodle soup place. I got DS chicken fried rice thinking it was something he might eat. He didn't eat much and really only ate his fruit cup that I brought with us, and a few noodles. Both there and back he kept saying, "Tummy hurt." Finally after we got home and before his nap, he pooped and filled the diaper. I didn't hear "tummy hurt" again today, after that. He took a good nap and I gave him a PBJ sandwich afterward for a snack, which he devoured along with some goldfish crackers. Which probably explains why he didn't eat dinner, either. Dinner was white chicken chili. When will I learn? Just somewhat of an off day, I suppose.

December 2007 - What a month!

I can tell you now that this is going to be a long blog and that I will have to come back to it to complete it. So much happened last month (December 2007), good and not-as-good, that I felt like I was going to lose my mind if one more thing fell into our laps. Fortunately, that didn't happen.

Most areas of our lives were affected in some way in December. I'll touch on all of these, some briefly, others in detail.

• Home: weather/power outages, dog destructiveness, organization, almost-lost computer files.


• Work: DH's promotion, my workload.


• Family: DS's birthday, Christmas, travel, DS's surgery.

On the home front, one of the first issues is our two dogs. They tend to take outside and destroy anything that is not tied down -- their history includes a couch, DVDs, DS's toys, books, magazines, newspapers, you name it. Unfortunately, their latest chew toy was my mother's notebook of treasured notes, mostly things that our son does during the days when she watches him. On top of that, my mother injured her leg "diving" into our drainage ditch to try to recover some of the pages from the notebook. Because of this, she was not able to make her homemade pies for Thanksgiving (the incident was a couple days before). This turned into a major family discussion, the result being that we will try to get training for the dogs/me/my mother, and in the meantime, use baby gates as barriers so the dogs can't get to stuff.

Also relating to house/home, we lost power on December 10 due to ice storms in the area. Our power lines are all underground, so there must have been transformer problems somewhere. We were among the more than 600,000 Oklahoma households without power, so we were definitely not alone. Unfortunately, DS had outpatient surgery scheduled for the 11th of December. DH's aunt and uncle live about two miles away, so we packed up our stuff (in the dark; the power went out about 5:00) and after we ate the dinner of chili I had prepared, again, in the dark, we "moved in" to their house. We felt very fortunate to have family in town who still had power, even though we had to wake up very early to get DS to the hospital by 6:00 am for the surgery.

Another home matter: we had purchased (a few months ago) an external hard drive because our 80-gig computer had run out of space due to the amount of pics and videos we had put on the hard drive. We transferred the majority of these items to the external hard drive. Well, after 2-3 months, we started experiencing problems with the external drive. Turns out (from my research on the internet), this seems to be a fairly common problem. We went to the company's website and ordered a replacement; fortunately, they had a deal where they'll send you the replacement drive and you have 30 days to then return the defective drive. So we limped the defective drive through and luckily were able to recover the majority of the data from the defective drive and put it on the new drive. I can't begin to comprehend how distraught I was and would have been had we not been able to recover the data -- pics and video of DS from birth to two years. Thank goodness we were able to recover most if not all of it. Since then we have used BB's 18-month financing to purchase a new computer with way more memory, so eventually we'll use the external drive just for backup.

Okay, on to the "work" world. DH was urged to apply for and after a couple of weeks of hem-hawing, finallly received a promotion to Parts Manager for one of the dealership's stores. He will receive a decent raise and commission, plus the use of a truck. We're currently upside-down in his truck so we can't really sell it yet, so we kind of have an extra vehicle for the time being. DH is hoping that he won't get "screwed" on the deal as there are still some bugs to be worked out. So we're praying quite a bit on this issue.

For me at work, I've had extra work lately due to the resignation of a coworker and surgery for another coworker. Another coworker was promoted to fill the resigned worker's position, but she has not yet been fully trained. Because of the coworker's surgery and another coworker's vacation, for the week before Christmas break, I was the only fully trained person with my job responsibilities. I guess it means job security, but I will be glad when the replacement person is somewhat trained so I can be relieved of some of the additional responsibilities.

DS's birthday was December 7, party on the 8th. I had chosen a car theme but decided at the last minute to narrow that down to Noddy's car. Turns out Noddy is a British cartoon character so it's nearly impossible to find Noddy stuff in the U.S. If only I had decided on this earlier, I could have asked my cousin to send some things from Germany. But I used some pics/art from the internet and made my own decorations, and I made the cake. I considered it somewhat sloppy, like his dragon cake last year, but it was fun and DS actually got it -- he saw it and said, "Noddy car." So I was pleased. He "got" the present thing this year, too, which carried over into Christmas, and for awhile it seemed like presents showed up out of nowhere almost on a daily basis. It got to the point that he would see an empty box and say, "present -- mine." We created a monster. I'll try to post other memories as I think of them.

Over Christmas, my parents went to Germany to visit my cousin's family. My mother is DS's caretaker during the week, so he had to go to daycare (DH's aunt has a home daycare about two miles from our house). That was only for three days; one of the great things about working for a university is we're closed for about a week-and-a-half over Christmas. We have to take 2-3 personal days, but it's worth it since work doesn't really pile up because we're closed.

On health -- DS had been seeing the urologist about every 6 months due to his undescended testicle. (By the way, can you believe an insurance company turned him down because of this?) At his 2-year visit, the doc said he would be leaving CHildren's Hospital later in the month. We had been putting off the surgery to see what happened naturally, but DS had grown so accustomed to this doctor (when he sat down at the 2-year visit, Logan put his head in the doc's lap), we decided to go ahead with the surgery while the doc was still around to do it. So we scheduled it for Dec. 11; this was less than a week after the visit, which was probably good since it left little time to think about it. Dec. 11 was a Tuesday. On Sunday the 9th, a major ice storm hit the area, and on the night of the 10th, we lost power at our house. We packed up and went to stay at DH's aunt's house in town. Woke up around 4:30 am the next morning so we could take DS to the hospital for the 6:00 "call time" for the surgery. Being at Children's really put everything in perspective. Nobody wants to see their child go through surgery no matter how minor, but there were so many sick children -- one boy was having his 10th heart surgery at the age of 12; we really are truly blessed.