Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
In anticipation of summer/bikini season I’ve been trying to make it to the gym a little more and step up the workout a tad. We’re not going for body perfect or anything, just like to tone up the more jiggly sections before they see the light of day. I’m not what you’d call a runner by any means, in fact I’d be hesitant to even say one who runs but I’ve been giving it a try the last week. Man am I sore. I mean it feels good and all like I’ve really gotten a workout but it also kinda makes you feel like well what the hell have I been doing before this?
Thankfully Nate loves the childcare room at the gym so I don’t feel bad that we’ve been going more often. Maybe he loves it a little too much. The last couple of times I went in to fetch him he was having so much fun playing that he didn’t want to leave. I literally had to drag him out of there. Well I guess that’s better than pitching a fit when I leave. Heck maybe he’s trying to tell me to do a longer workout. Children can be so critical.
Speaking of Nate, he has a favorite toy now. I think some people call this a “lovey” or what have you. On the one hand it’s pretty darn adorable to see him dragging this thing around everywhere, on the other hand it’s a little gross that he won’t let go of it even when he’s eating. Remind me to sneak it away from him while he’s sleeping and wash it every now and again. The toy in question is a matchbox car (I think I mentioned previously how totally obsessed with “cahs” he is right now) and while it is small and more convenient than say a large stuffed animal, it does have small parts that are probably not age appropriate i.e. a choking hazard, which Ben pointed out to me last night. Grrr, if I could get him to play with his age appropriate toys don’t you think I would? Seriously Nate will not give up that damn car out of his chubby little fingers no matter what I offer him. I love when Ben says really obvious things, it’s so enlightening. Pffft.
Make that a double pffft. Just when I was getting into the whole “canned salmon in lieu of canned tuna thing” (full disclosure: I love tuna sandwiches) they go and declare salmon endangered on the west coast. Not that I’m feeling all freakout because of the mercury threat in tuna, but I thought I’d branch out and give the canned salmon a try, especially since it’s so reasonably priced now. Lo and behold, it’s delicious!
I was especially enjoying a nice salmon salad sandwich (canned salmon, chopped cucumbers, chopped dill, mayo, lettuce, served in a warm pita) and them wham-o, endangered salmon. The price is going to go through the roof. Oh sure I’ve got my trusty tuna as back up but now it just isn’t the same. I’ll be fine, I’ll move on. There’s other fish… right, I’ll stop now.
Nate’s 1st birthday is on Saturday so I’ve got lots to prep work to do. We decided to throw a small friends and family party. As in a small party with small friends, a little confusing, non? Well it has quickly turned into a ballooning guest list of ridiculous proportions. Who knew a 1 year old could have so many friends? Egads, we’re turning into those parents I totally make fun of, the ones that have a huge kegger for their baby, the baby that wouldn’t know the difference between a party and a diaper pail. They’re one year olds, I don’t have to give them party favors do I? Oh why do I get myself into these things. We could have just ordered pizza for the three of us and called it a day. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted (you = totally on the edge of your seat I’m sure).
Monday, May 12th, 2008
I can’t decide if this means I’m officially an adult and therefore lame or just officially lame but I was at the gym today trying to work off the Mother’s Day parade of food that included an actual breakfast made by Ben which hasn’t been seen in existence since we started dating, dim sum for lunch and the most delicious and fattening dinner known to man complete with multiple desserts. I’m on the treadmill probably burning through one bite of a thousand bite meal when I decide that my iPod selection, Battles, is perfect for working out.
There used to be a time, not so long ago, when I used to think music was important, that you should focus your attention on listening rather than have it be just background music and all that blah blah b.s. that only self-important young people think, particularly those who play instruments and therefore “part of the craft”. Today from somewhere in the depth of my music loving soul I thought “this truly important song is freakin’ awesome for working out.”
So very, very shallow.
Well whatever gets your ass in gear I guess.
So Mother’s Day was awesome. Not just for the gifts and decadent meals or the fact that Ben mopped the floor on Saturday night so I’d wake up to sparkley floors. No it was awesome because it was my first actual Mother’s Day. Last year at this time I was hugely pregnant waiting to go into labor at any second. I thought I might get even a little consolation gift like “here you go mom-to-be.” No dice.
This year it was nice to actually celebrate it, kid n’ all.
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Here it is, finally. Please excuse the complete dorkiness of these photos. Also, is there a more elfin/12 year old looking mom around? I’d like to pass the torch to someone else please.
The “after” was taken this morning, um about ten minutes ago so that is why I have that the usual morning, “not ready to face the world yet” look. I hate the lighting, my face looks completely washed out, grrr! but if I wait any longer with these stupid photos my hair will be long again so anyway, here:
Before (taken in the middle of the day when I’d happily eaten lunch and dessert already):
After (no morning beverage yet and no dessert):
Don’t you dare say you like long better. Why are you siding with Ben? Do you know what a total freakin’ pain that long hair was? Why are you conspiring against me? Whatever, it’s my hair and I do what I want!
Geez, these things are so anti climatic when they’re four days late. Anyway, so yeah that’s the haircut. I love it, Ben hates it and there you go.
Here’s something much cuter:
Huh? Who me? I know all you ladies just love me for my warm up gear.
Monday, May 5th, 2008
Well I finally went out and got a haircut, hurrah, but Ben was so busy crying over the lost hair that he wouldn’t take any pics of the new ‘do so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Sorry. Yeah I know, the suspense is killing you right?
Instead you get 6 completely fascinating uninteresting things about me. The lovely Joy tagged me and I just can’t resist a good meme.
Wait, where you going?
Come on, it’s a short list.
And without further ado, the list:
- As a small child I was the pickiest, most stubborn eater you will ever know. I liked three foods: tater tots, lamb chops and tomato/zucchini soup. Oh wait, make that four things, I also liked creamed corn. Very odd things to like, it’s true but that’s what I liked and that’s about it. I would sit at the dinner table until bedtime refusing to eat any of the wretched homegrown, organic food my mom prepared. My parents never relented or made me special meals and eventually I started to eat like a normal person. Perhaps it was too late though since I am the shortest person in my family. Now I’m quite the food aficionado. Except Nutella, not crazy about ground hazelnuts. Weird huh?
- I’m pretty good at keeping track of the time in my head. I’m a clock watcher but I don’t wear a watch anymore so I rely on the clocks around my house, the clock in my car or my cell phone. I can fairly accurately tell you the time of day at any given point of time (unless it’s the middle of the night, I’m not that good). I don’t consider this any sort of talent, it’s more an annoying anal retentive, closet type A thing.
- I’m wildly inconsistent. Sometimes I’m hard working, sometimes I’m lazy. Sometimes I’m organized, sometimes my house is a complete tornado. Just when I think I’m undisciplined I manage to take my vitamins consistently. I wish I could choose one or the other and just BE but I can’t even be consistent about being inconsistent.
- My maiden name is very unique, the only other people in the US with that name are my relatives. I used to be the only Skiplovey ReallyUniqueMaidenName in the world but then I got married. Now my name is kinda common. Mostly dead people. And a singer/songwriter who wrote a song called “Hard to Love”. Ben thought that was funny. I thought it was hilarious.
- I won the limbo contest in 7th grade. It was the last time I ever limboed.
- I have a food-o-graphic memory. I can usually remember what everyone ordered from any particular meal, from yesterday to a few years ago. No, I never worked as a waitress. It’s the food game thing, where I like to think that I ordered the best thing on the menu and if you ordered something better than me then I lost. No I don’t pretend this is normal behavior.
Ok there you have it. Hey were you sleeping? Anyway, I’m supposed to tag 6 people but how about this, if you’re reading this and you’re just itching to play along, consider yourself tagged.
If you want to play:
Link back to the person who tagged you.
Post these rules on your blog
List 6 uninteresting things about yourself.
Tag 6 random people at the end of your entry (or like me, completely ignore the rules and thumb your nose at authority, ha!).
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
I was contemplating a few alternate titles for this post:
Multitasking: not for the easily distracted.
or
Proofread: It does a brain good.
I settled on Uh Oh because that is the phrase Nate picked up on Monday and he’s been saying it non stop ever since. Everything is Uh Oh. Perhaps it was prescient of him.
And now on to the story.
Did you ever have that panic feeling mere milliseconds after you hit send on an email? That “oh my god NO NO NO, stop delete, Danger Will Robinson! Go Back, ARGEEAHHHHH” feeling?
Nope, me either.
Until yesterday.
I was in the middle of emailing, cleaning up the kitchen, mopping the floor and drinking a cup of tea, all in a mad rush while Nate was napping. Without boring you/incriminating myself on the email subject matter, let’s just say that my friend, who we will refer to as Friend from here on out, sent me two emails, one about dinner plans for Friday night and the other about a non political but equally potentially highly charged or rather boring depending on your mood topic. I forwarded the latter email on to Ben so that we might e-discuss amongst ourselves, tee hee tee hee.
There I am in a cleaning frenzy, mentally compiling our grocery list (I know, it’s terribly fascinating the life of Skiplovey, non?) when I decide to just “check my email for a second”. There’s a response in the long, confusing only for simple people Gmail thread from Ben asking if the Friday night dinner plan was a go and also a short reply regarding the current topic.
I hit reply then type my usual pithy, sardonic style response in regards to the actually pretty boring by now topic.
In the fraction of a second before the email was officially “gone” I glanced up at the To box. Ben’s name wasn’t there, I had just responded to Friend’s email.
*White noise, brain exploding.*
You know that frantic moment when you think for a split second like there’s something you can do about the colossal mistake you just made, like an undo button? Why don’t they make a big ole Please Undo Because I Am An Idiot button? Cause I think it might be damn useful, especially for gifted people like myself.
The tremendous irony of this all was I was just saying to Ben, a mere 24 hours earlier, how I would never send out an email filled with grammatical errors and “why don’t people proofread anymore for the love of god?” All humphy, flipping my hair sighing at the tackiness of the world like. Uh huh.
The high and mighty, oh how they fall. Here I go and make the biggest email faux pas of all, responding to the wrong person.
Dear floor, please open up and swallow me whole.
Frantically I started to read over what I had just sent. Did I say something asinine like “Yeah let’s go over to their house, mooch off their A/C and eat all their ice cream?”
Or snobby, “Oh I hope they don’t make those margaritas again, it’s practically all mix and no tequila over there.”
Hopefully not something controversial, “Don’t bring up that subject with them, you know how so and so feels about that and we’ll just spend the whole night listening to them sound off about it.”
In the end what I had actually written was quite benign. Thankfully. I had rather loudly sounded off my big fat opinion about the completely boring and pedestrian subject matter but I hadn’t said anything too stupid or incriminating. Reading it over you might not even realize I didn’t know who the hell I was responding to. Luckily for me she fired back a funny response indicating she didn’t know the difference either.
Whew. Big ole fat WHEW.
And the take away my friends: always proofread, don’t multi-task if your little pea brain isn’t awake enough to handle it and for crying out loud don’t type anything you wouldn’t want falling into the wrong in box.
Well I better wrap it up, the washing machine just finished, my pasta is boiling over and my other line just beeped. Sea ya latter.
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Apparently Southern California didn’t get the memo that technically it’s still Spring, not Summer. Or maybe I keep forgetting that there is no Spring in Los Angeles. It goes from its wintry 60 degrees to a blistering 90 overnight. We spent the weekend trying to divert our attention from the 200 lb gorilla in the room that is the lack of air conditioning in our house. (Yes I know, do something about it already, right I heard you.)
Obviously watermelon will be involved.
Here’s a little something you should avoid in sahara-like heat, go to a park. Y’know, outside where there’s no air conditioning. Genius, I know. Anyway, Nate didn’t seem to mind the heat though. Give this child die cast metal with wheels and he is satisfied.
Was I just telling you that he refuses to eat anything these days? Seems like I need to feed him with neon green chopsticks more often.
I bought one of those kiddy blow up pools. After nearly passing out from inflating the thing with my weak ass lung power, Nate’s interest in the pool where somewhere around nil to negative. He consented to getting in only after I gave him the hose to play with.
A few splashes
and game over.
Here’s the real interest. Playing in the dirt.
You’ll see this theme repeated. He completely ignored the ginormous lawn we’re sitting next to in favor of grabbing dirt and putting it on Ben’s shoe.
Yep, fun filled and air condition free.
Oh boy, I better fix this situation or this summer is going to be one long hot beast.
*I posted this yesterday and for some weird reason it was marked Private, which I didn’t even know that was an option. In my pre-caffeinated morning daze I must have inadvertently tapped a wrong button. Odd. Anyway, pretend it’s yesterday. Or if reliving another Tuesday is too painful for you then imagine it’s old timey days when you’d read an actual newspaper from the day before and think nothing of it.
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
Nate and I have been working on concepts this week, particularly putting things in and taking them out. This sounds way more egghead than it actually is, basically his favorite thing to do lately is toss all of his toys out of the toy chest. So a few days ago I started saying “out” as he was grabbing and throwing. Then I showed him (about a million times) how to put things back “in”. I can’t wait until he learns how to put his damn toys away.
Since he’s been quite the verbal little man this week he’s been mimicking a lot of the sounds I make, as I say “out” he says “ow”, “in” is “nnnn”.
Well he’s taken the out thing to heart, especially with his food. You put more than one thing on his tray, he tosses it over the side. You give him something he doesn’t like (which this week is most everything), over the side it goes. This starts as soon as he gets in the chair so it’s not because he’s “all done” either.
It’s driving me nuts.
I like to think of myself as calm, I’d also like to think of myself as tall but who are we kidding here? The thing about it is he looks at you while he’s doing it and smiles. He thinks it’s hilarious. My god, he’s yanking our chain at barely a year old, we’re doomed. Clearly he’s too young to process any of that “we don’t throw our food on the ground b.s.” and he’s not picking up on the stern looks I give him while I’m picking a million cheerios off the floor. Grrr, what to do?
Anyway I know he’s just exploring, learning, playing, it’s just a phase blah blah blah and he’s too young to process much in terms of discipline so I’m cooling my jets and trying to ignore the avalanche of food falling on the floor. My tactic, starting last night, is give him only one piece of food at a time which, as you can imagine, is a pain in the ass. He will accept food in a spoon IF and only if he has a toy to distract him so it’s either the one at a time crap or back to the very aerobic barrage of toys “lookee over here don’t notice that you’re eating oh damn you noticed now you’re throwing up the surprisingly accurate arms of defense.” We were just celebrating the fact that he can put food in his own mouth willingly while we scarf down our dinner. Oh back to the drawing board Wiley E. Coyote.
Tell me my wizened internet friends, you’ve survived this I’m sure, anything in particular work for you? Luckily the little man isn’t exactly lacking in terms of weight so a few less successful meals won’t hurt him. Seriously though, everything I looked up (yes I freakin’ googled that shxt) the kids were at least 15 months old. That’s my little go getter eh, can’t wait to get in on the good fight apparently.
So other than be patient and wait it out, anything else I should be doing?
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Nate speaks thusly on the following subjects:
Car - Cah
Truck - Guck
Ball, Bye, Balloon, Baby - Bah
Mom - Mama
Dear old Dad - Dada
Shoe - Shhhhh
Dog - Da. (this is particulary hilarious to me since we don’t even have a dog and Ben is really anti having pets but Nate is clearly smitten with dogs. I feel this subject will come up again.)
By far the word used most often these days is Cah. Nate is obsessed with cahs. When we’re outside, he point to the passing cars and shriek “Cah!”. Sometimes if it’s a truck I’ll politely correct him. “Guck” he’ll pronounce. I can see how he might get confused though with these SUVs. Is it a Guck or a Cah? Hard to say little man, hard to say.
Mama has proven to be more allusive than Dada. Dada is said a million times a day and if I point to Ben, Nate will say Dada. Mama, ehhh. He says it but it’s not high on fav list. Whateve. Hey if he calls for Dada in the middle of the night, guess who’s going in there? Not Mama, I wouldn’t want to confuse the poor child.
This whole “making sounds that actually sound like words quite possibly talking” thing amazes me. Overnight we’ve gone from waa waaa agoo incessant raspberries to Guck.
*sigh. wipes tear.
Did I mention the signs? So far he’s learned two baby signs, milk and all done. I’m a little sorry I taught him all done since he starts throwing the all done thing the minute he gets in his high chair.
Ah progress.
When I’m putting on his shoes, he’ll grab the shoe and say Shhhh. And then he’ll put it in his mouth. He’s still a baby after all.
At least for one more month.
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
I recently started taking calcium pills, like for reals this time, like two whole weeks in a row for reals. Not sure why but I think it’s affecting me in weird ways. Aside from the probable placebo effect where I think my hair, skin, nails look positively glowing, I’m so much calmer, sleeping fantastically and my god I think it’s cured my sciatica! No the weird affect is that I’m craving dairy now. All the time and for weird stuff. I bought tapioca pudding. Eww, just typing it feels weird. But strangely it was delicious. And kefir, mmmm kefir. So yogurty, tangy good. Also, loaded up on whole milk. What? Where the hell did that come from you full fat devil? Sour cream has always been my friend but now we’re so BFF. Cheese, well cheese has always had my heart (except for those dark days when I went dairy free quasi vegan for a year but what else can I say but college?) Anyway, the love I have for dairy right now is intense. Is it the increased calcium that’s doing it to me? Seriously what is going on here people?
No I’m not pregnant.
I swear I’m mental over this because we all know now that vitamins probably don’t do much good. Goodbye ole trusty Vitamin C, A and E. I barely knew ya (ok that’s not actually true. I’m embarrassed to admit ingesting ridiculous amounts of Mr. C to ward off colds I always got anyway.)
Despite years of completely ignoring the impending doom of osteoperosis that is my inevitable future since I’m one of those “small framed predisposed” types, I finally got around to buying a bottle of calcium pills and actually started taking them. So does it matter if it works or not? As long as I think it does, that’s all that counts, non? So could someone shed some light on this odd dairy fetish of late then? This is not good for bikini season.
A complete aside but since we’re talking about food, the Shio version of packaged Yakisoba is, IMO, disgusting. It’s just a salty, chicken-y mess with none of the flavor and all the MSG. Blech.
*****mind spinning out of control from msg high. ahhhhhhh.
Just between the two of us, when eating something you realize you don’t like, do you put it down like a normal person and stop eating or do you continue inhaling it until you finish it only to realize that you feel positively gaggy?
Just checking. I totally put it down, I mean anything else would just be gross, right?
*with apologies to The Velvet Underground
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
- Vacation in Hawaii.
- Go shopping, big time.
- Double my refund at the craps tables in Vegas.
- Go on a (short) shopping spree at Tiffany’s.
- Buy a new a shiny new Mac Pro.
- Rent one of these for a day.
- Eat a nice dinner at French Laundry.
- Take a spin over the Grand Canyon.
- Spend a relaxing day at the spa.
- Erase an error in judgment from my youth.
Chances are the money’s going in the bank though. I know, lame and BORING!
What exciting things are you doing with your tax refund?
Unless that is, you owe taxes. Sadness. I will drink in commiseration for you.
But seriously, what fun things do you have planned with your money?
