Andi’s exciting life.

1. Scan and shred our endless supply of random paperwork instead of keeping stacks to be filed someday.
2. Keep our house guest-ready all the time.
3. Write at least one blog post every week.
4. Make coffee at home more instead of paying $3-4 per day on mochas.

I’m sure there are many more ways I could improve myself, but this is it thus far.

I still haven’t figured out Christmas giving. I love giving gifts, but it’s never as easy as just giving someone what I think they would like. If I give a bigger gift than the recipient gives me, then they feel awkward, and I feel guilty for giving them too much. If I am in the reverse position, I feel guilty for not doing enough. Friends, if I give you a gift, it’s because I want to and not because I expect anything in return. If you give me a present and I only have something small or nonexistent for you, I hope you feel the same way. It is very hard to anticipate if someone else has a gift for me and how big or small it will be so that I can perfectly reciprocate. Plus, that kind of takes the fun out of it. Let’s all just give and accept gifts because we love each other and not feel a pang of guilt one way or the other, m’kay?

Love,

Andi

Today at playgroup, I was holding my friend’s 3-month-old, and he spit up all over my sweater and pants. (Yes, she also has a son Falco’s age, and yes, the idea of having a 2-year-old and 3-month-old sounds terribly frightening.) Now I’m trying to make a judgment call of whether or not I need to wash the sweater because it takes forever to dry. (I just washed it and finally got to wear it today after two days of drying.) Only a mother would be torn about this. If an adult vomited on me, I would at least wash the clothes if not destroy them. After having a baby who spit up on me and his surroundings for months and months, a little infant puke on my sweater seems like no big. I hope this means that I have grown as a person, but I do think I’d better wash the sweater.

At her recheck yesterday, Adelaide is up about seven pounds, and an overweight whippet is just so wrong. She used to be such a refined, delicate animal, and now she’s a desperate scavenger. The vet told us we could stop the phenobarbital as of yesterday, so here’s hoping that her appetite gets back to normal.

On the Falco front, so far two is the cutest age ever. He is talking a lot (constantly) and is very busy and fun. Right now he’s super snotty with probably his fifth cold so far this winter, but he is enjoying all the holiday decorations all the same. I’ll post Thanksgiving and birthday photos and stories as soon as I can tear myself away from Fable 2. Who can blog about their kid when there’s polygamy and arena battles to be done?

Falco and I just walked in the cold wind to Safeway to buy ingredients for white chili. I picked this soup for dinner because I had a loaf of delicious potato and rosemary bread and wanted something to eat with it. In a moment of weakness, I decided to leave Adelaide out of her crate since we’d only be gone about 20 minutes. I made sure (I thought) to put all food out of her reach…

Upon arrival home, I found said loaf of bread half eaten in her crate. She had to climb pretty damn high to get it off the kitchen counter. I threw her outside in the cold, got rid of the remaining bread, and threw her in her crate. I am so tired of her ravenous appetite and horrible behavior, but I don’t know what to do about it. She has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, where I will hopefully be told we can stop one of her seizure medications, which causes increased appetite. While I hope that will help, she will still be on prednisone and has developed bad habits that probably won’t be easy to get rid of.

I’m going to go try to swallow my rage and let Adelaide out of her crate. Maybe.

So as to be on top of things, I made our Thanksgiving pies tonight, one pumpkin and one key lime. I was in a bit of a hurry, but I still took the time to cut out an adorable pastry turkey wearing a pilgrim hat for the top of the pumpkin pie. The filling seemed thicker than usual, but whatever. Pies are baked and ready to cool. Done and done. Then I’m putting away the two cans of evaporated milk I bought, one for the pie and one for the mac and cheese. Wait a minute. Why are there still two?

Crikey. I made the stupid pie, probably the simplest recipe ever, with no evaporated milk. I tasted it to be sure, and it does in fact taste bad. So, my first ever pie with cutout just went into the trash, and I have to make another one in the morning. Falco wakes up before dawn, so I should be awake in plenty of time to bake and cool it in time to eat it by 1:00 or so. If not, the key lime pie seems to be in order.

I’m a total goof sometimes.

I think I mentioned that Falco started sleeping out of his crib lately. He’s done so well at it that I ordered his fire truck bed. I have shown him the picture and explained that it will replace the crib, and he’s way into it. He asks to see the picture a lot and often says, “Fire truck bed coming.” Of course he needs new bedding to go along with it, and of course I can’t resist anything custom made, so I found Punkey Monkey on Etsy. She can make a toddler bed set with a fabric of my choosing, and I found this adorable import from Japan. They had just enough left in stock to make the set, and I can’t wait to get it!

After I placed my order, I wondered what other Japanese fabrics are out there, and I found super buzzy. All I can say is, I wish I had a smidge of creativity and more than remedial sewing skills so that I could make tons of things out of all these fabrics. Let’s all remember that I was doing good to sew these hockey-stick stockings, and that’s probably my finest work. I’ll have to head back to Etsy to see what talented people could make me with this. It’s on sale!

Let’s just say I still had readers even though my blogging frequency has dwindled to every couple of weeks at best. Then, let’s imagine that said readers wanted to comment on my thought-provoking posts. I would then tell those commenters that they should avoid using brand names of drugs in their comments to avoid having their much-wanted input deleted immediately. You see, I’m facing a serious problem with comment spam, and the only way I have figured out how to get rid of it is blacklist drug names. Oh, and “rolex,” which is apparently also very spam worthy. So, I’m just warning you now, try to avoid writing about pharmaceutical agents or ridiculously expensive watches in your comments, but please DO comment. I love to know that I’m writing to someone besides myself.

So, Falco has been sleeping out of his crib lately, mostly for naps and sometimes for overnight. (We either put his crib mattress on the floor or use an inflatable bed while we’re waiting for his toddler bed to get here.) This morning he got up before me but couldn’t get his snap diaper off to use the potty, so by the time he called for me, his diaper was way, way soaked. Tonight I put him in a pull-up and told him a few times that in the morning he could use the bathroom on his own if he got up before me.

Apparently the message got through because I just went to check on him before bed, and he was sound asleep with his blanket covering him, but his pants and diaper were off and he used the potty in his room before going to sleep. Cute (and impressive)! To prevent a bed wetting situation, I put his dipe back on, and he barely woke up during the process. We’ll see what happens in the morning.

We had a pretty fun Halloween, and I have the photos to prove it. Falco was a turkey, or a chicken according to most people. He was a real sport about keeping his costume on, just like last year. He had four opportunities to wear it, at the zoo, at school, on actual Halloween, and at a day-after party at our house. We’re hoping to still get more use out of the turkey suit for Thanksgiving, though that seems a little weird since we will be eating said bird.