Category Archives: Uncategorized

Of course I am already thinking about Christmas.

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On MDC there is a thread about trying to limit Christmas so that it doesn’t become a gimmee spree. One woman posted something she got from a book:

The Four Things Children Need At Christmas

1. A relaxed and loving time with family.
2. Realistic expectations about gifts.
3. An evenly paced holiday season.
4. Reliable family traditions.

Combine this with the other maxim about presents posted in the thread:

Something you want.
Something you need.
Something to wear.
Something to read.

It’s making me stop and think about Christmas again. Last year I burned myself out with cookies. I shouldn’t do that again. I’m also thinking that due to financial schtuff this year I really should tell people that we aren’t buying presents. That’s going to be hard emotionally for me and I think for Noah. Awkward.

busybusybusybusy

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I have been very industrious this week. I have been working from when I get up till late in the evening. I’m exhausted. Of course there is more to do. Every so often I get into these cycles of freaking out about the fact that there is Always More To Do!!! Then I decide I don’t care and I ignore allmost of it for a while. I wish I could get to that part already but I can’t. The big thing left to do in the garage is dismantle the shelves that are attached to the walls and I’m afraid that is going to be difficult work because pieces of it are very heavy. Taylor is coming on Tuesday (!!!) so we can get started on figuring out the garage stuff. I’m terribly excited. Yes, I’m aware it will take multiple days. 🙂 But Taylor unlike certain other people I could name but won’t isn’t a flake and will actually follow through when he says he will do a project with me so I’m not stressing. 🙂

We’re going to have a playroom! And I’ve started a fund for a play kitchen. 😀 I think that the play kitchen money should come out of my personal entertainment/fun money because I want it so bad. 🙂 Shanna really doesn’t care at this point.

I went to the orthopedic orthopedic? maxillofacial? surgeon today to discuss getting an implant. This is going to be expensive. 🙁 I briefly read the propaganda they had on the subject but I left it at the office cause it pissed me off. No, this will not magically make my life better. I am, however, quite interested in the procedure because it can help prevent bone loss/decay issues later. So yeah. And once I get the procedure done it is like three months until the next step. So I guess it’s a good thing we decided to wait like six months before trying to get pregnant. oy.

And I went to a physical therapy thing today for my knee. Shanna was remarkably good. She sat on the chair and drew on a piece of paper and played with my sweater for an hour. Ok… probably 45 minutes and then she wanted to nurse. 🙂 I’m once again impressed with my wonderful baby.

Boy howdy is she getting willful. I thought the ‘nononono’ didn’t start till more like two. Oy. When she’s not in the mood for something she is really not in the mood. It’s interesting. Of course I override sometimes when it is a safety issue. I try really hard not to override just because “I’m the mom”. I find myself having to fight my temper more now and that’s difficult for both of us. Like when I’m cleaning up the Cheerios she flung all over the floor. It’s ok that she made the mess but when I’m cleaning it up, don’t come in the middle and throw stuff again! Dude! So rude! I find myself talking about manners, rudeness, politeness, and consideration constantly. I’m sure there are a good many parenting gurus who would describe my system as awful. I’m very very judgmental of her behavior. It seems to me that if I’m not she won’t learn how to evaluate behavior. I never ever tell her she is bad. I do tell her constantly that she is good and sweet and generous. I tell her, “It is rude to yell inside because it hurts peoples ears.” I know she doesn’t ‘get it’ yet but I figure starting young will help ingrain these lessons. She does seem to understand, “Please stop” and respects it more often than I would expect at this age.

Maybe that’s enough babbling for now. 🙂

Appreciation

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Today I am feeling very happy with the world and everything in it, so I’ll talk a little bit about what I appreciate today. 🙂

I appreciate that my wonderful Marcie let me have huge blocks of wood for my yard. Soon I will get around to finishing that project and I will have the coolest sandbox ever!

I appreciate that my darling husband tolerates my ongoing projects and obsessions. 😀

I appreciate that my daughter loves books so much. And that she is picking up words at a prodigious rate. It is getting so much easier to communicate with her.

I appreciate that my house is small enough to be easy to clean. The older I get and the more stuff I have to get done in a day the more I appreciate this. 🙂

I appreciate that Taylor offered to come help me finish the garage. It is almost entirely cleaned out! It will be done by Friday! This is so exciting. (At this point there is probably about an hour of moving stuff and an hour or two of cleaning left.)

I appreciate the heck out of the chest freezer. Man that thing makes my life better. I have a whole mess of (organic) beef and chicken. I have a huge stash of raw milk, butter, cream, and cheese. I have a freak-ton of ice cream (I buy it on sale and stock up). And then there are the ’emergency’ tv-dinner lunches for Noah’s lunch when we have nothing else. It’s so awesome. I think I have enough meat to last me the next six months and maybe longer. This pleases me immensely. We will need more ice cream and milk before then. 🙂

I appreciate the wonderful variety of food available to me here in the bay area. I like that my taste buds have been expanded in ways they wouldn’t have if I lived in middle America.

I appreciate the awesome cookbooks available to me that have taught me how to cook some of the amazing food I enjoy so much. And the baking. *swoon* The baking! I’m pretty good at baking, I have discovered. I really enjoy it.

I appreciate being comfortable financially at a time when many people aren’t. It’s a luxury. I have the luxury of staying home with my kids as long as I want to. It’s really nice.

I appreciate my new roof. Holy crap on toast do I appreciate my new roof. And I really love that we are basically off grid for our electricity usage. That makes me feel good about my impact on the planet. I’m wasteful in other places (like travel and eating meat) so I try to do what I can elsewhere.

I appreciate our wonderful car. It is fantastically efficient and well functioning. It is still pretty through absolutely no effort of mine.

I appreciate having the luxury to sit around and think extensively about what is best for my family. My life is non-stressful and non-traumatic. I get to think about family planning in a safe and comfortable environment where many options are possible. That’s amazing.

I appreciate having yards big enough to worry about. 🙂 It means that Shanna has lots of room to play and explore. And I appreciate how much she loves being outside. That bodes well. 🙂

I appreciate Ikea. My house is turning into an Ikea showroom. It’s kind of funny. But man is it useful and cheap! And I think all the stuff we bought there looks perfectly decent. Yay Ikea!

I appreciate that when I have computer problems I always find a friend to help me fix them. 😀 Man living in the valley rocks. 😀

Consider the needs of the child you have

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That’s a phrase bandied about in full-term breastfeeding circles. Full-term meaning at least until two years old. Two years is the minimum recommended time for nursing as stated by the WHO. Ok, so I’m not exactly one to follow all the guidelines as set down by the WHO so why do I pay attention to this one? If you look at biological studies comparing brain size/development humans should nurse for 2-7 years if compared to our nearest primate relatives. That’s a long time. Milk is necessary for the development of most mammals and no other mammal in nature weans in order to give the milk of another species.

At this point Shanna is physically developed enough to be able to digest milk from other species and I’m certainly not opposed to dairy (mmmm ice cream) but nursing is different. My milk not only is the absolute perfect blend of nutrients for my species, my milk is specifically calibrated for my child. That cannot be duplicated by a bottle of cow milk.

Why am I talking about this? Because when you are pregnant most women lose their milk. There are some women (I’ve seen this as 30%) who maintain supply all the way through a pregnancy. It is also possible to dry nurse through a pregnancy and then move on to tandem nursing. The reason behind dry nursing is that nursing is not just about physical/dietary needs, it also fulfills important bonding/psychological needs. I already have a hard time with unnecessary nipple stimulation. It will be much worse when I am pregnant. I’m nervous about dry nursing. I’m also worried about Shanna losing out on having milk solidly until she is two. That is the biological minimum humans should have. I’m not sure I’m willing to compromise on giving her the minimum.

But that means spacing our kids out more than I really wanted to. That means probably waiting at least another seven months. I have mixed feelings about that. The Meniere’s has been progressing quite a bit just lately and that makes me nervous. It looks like we definitely won’t be trying for three kids so spacing out Shanna and Little TBD is less of a problem than it otherwise could be. I’m not sure how I feel about spacing between kids in terms of potential future getting along/competitive stuff. All of that is guesswork anyway.

So yeah. It looks like the mature, responsible decision is to wait. It’s only seven months. The problem is that I don’t wanna.

Projects

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Right now I am working on/need to work on:
-finish cleaning out the garage. Noah helped me make HUGE progress this weekend. Yay Noah!
–label/send out pictures of Shanna. I never got around to doing the 9 month pictures and now I have 13 month pictures (I procrastinated and missed 12 months–whoops) sitting here. I’ll be shocked if they are done before she is 15 months old. Thank god our family tradition is to not do pictures again until 18 months.
-make jam for the first time!
-put together the storage stuff for the kitchen.
-put together the night stand.
-return the broken night stand to Ikea. (long stupid story here)
-figure out more decluttering/getting rid of stuff. I want us to fit comfortably in this house, damnit.
-deal with the meat in the fridge.
-go to laundry mat to wash the frickin comforter.
-upload pictures from the camera to picasa.
-do more laundry.
-take all the lovely poisonous chemicals in the garage to the recycling center.
-find a frickin electronics recycling place.

I hope that is it for this week. Oy. There is no way I will finish this all this week with my sweet, wonderful little helper. 🙂

so much to do and so little time

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Today I made dinner. It took pretty much all day. I made pasta, pasta sauce, strawberry mash, and shortcake–all from scratch. That kind of preparation is a pain in the butt. All of the fresh ingredients came from the CSA box, the farmers market, or my back yard. 🙂 I’m tired. I don’t know how people used to cook from scratch every day. This is a pain in the butt.

Yesterday I finished my tattoo. I want to do a full post about that very soon with pictures.

Shanna continues to astound me with her development. I’m thrilled that I have a willing sleeper. When she realized she wasn’t going to get me to go lay down with her “nigh-nigh” “I can’t right now Shanna” she more or less asked to be put on my back and she took her nap there. I’m extremely sore but she’s in a great mood thanks to sleeping and I got my chores done. w00t.

Tomorrow we are going to Friday Night Waltz! I hope to see many people there. 🙂

I should ping because I keep thinking about her. I’m obviously awesome at initiating contact though. Oy.

I’m at day 42 of my cycle. The stupid sticks I’m peeing on still say I’m not pregnant though. This is making me fret for a variety of reasons.

I’ve been ordered PT for my knee and a hearing test to get more of a baseline on my disintegration a la (insert accent mark) Meniere’s. I really like my Kaiser doctor. She said despite my eyes, ears, and knee I am in excellent health. She didn’t even blink hard in the direction of my weight and she told me that I should have a bunch more kids because obviously I’m a great mother. 😀 She thinks I have a great attitude about the Menier’s and I think there is no point in having a poopy attitude. 😀

My house is a mess and I have dinner guests showing up sometime in the next half hour. I should probably get off livejournal. 🙂 I get to see my Sarah! I’m excited. It’s been so long. 🙂

worth asking

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So… would anyone like to spend some time with Shanna on the 28th? It would be best if it were at our house because the event we would like to go to starts around bedtime and it would be easiest on Shanna if she didn’t have to deal with being moved after she falls asleep. 🙂

Computer help

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So I tried to back up my computer. I’m told this is a good thing to do but it seems to cause me as many problems as it solves. Bugger.

So this time the problem is that my itunes library seems to be on the external hard drive but it’s entirely gone from my computer and I can’t figure out how to put it back.

Does anyone have any advice?

More about sexual assault.

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Note: I am friendslocking this because I think my journal can be searched via google and I am not yet confident enough about this subject matter to want to broadcast it on the internet.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about rape and rapists. I am close with more than one woman who was raped and who still has to deal with the person who raped her socially. In at least one case this feels even more personal and difficult and it has prompted me to do a lot of thinking. Not too long ago linked to a discussion about rape that made me think. How many people know rapists and don’t even realize that they do? No really–look around your circle of friends, you probably know a rapist and you may or may not be able to figure out who it is. That got me thinking more about my own history of sexual assault. I’ve written about my early sexual assault experiences here in some detail but I’ve skipped the last few sexual assault experiences entirely. Why? I feel like part of the reason is because they were all less physically traumatizing so I minimize them in light of the rest of my history. I mean, if I can survive being brutally sodomized when I was like nine years old, what is a date rape here and there between friends? I say that sarcastically but that is basically how I have treated this subject. There is a part of me that believes that given how “minor” the sexual assault was–no physical damage–I need to just get over it. There is that fucking phrase again. “Just get over it.” Fuck that fucking phrase with a fucking chainsaw. (Can you tell I like stream of consciousness writing?) There is another part of the issue that plays a much bigger part I have realized recently. All of the recent assaults touch other people in my life in some way or another. Two of them are still friends with people I am friends with. If I talk about the assaults I will name them. Naming them creates a situation where people might say, “Oh I don’t believe that ‘x’ did that to you”. How fucking awful is that. I have counseled dear friends to publicly name their attackers because otherwise the bastards get to continue to have squeaky clean reputations and when someone eventually says they are a rapist it will be harder to believe–if there is a history of it, maybe something will actually be done about it. But that means I have to put myself out there and make me vulnerable to disbelief and maybe even to losing friends. That is scary. Hey wait! I’m a counter-phobic six! It’s scary! Here I go.

Cut for length.
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searching for sauce

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The internet is not giving me what I want. Stupid internet. I want to make a whole bunch of pasta sauce (I am now canning enabled!) and all of the recipes are for 2-5 cups of sauce. I know I can just multiply the recipe but I would feel safer knowing that a recipe was intended as a large batch one because sometimes you don’t really want to just multiply straight across the board.

Stupid internet.

Oh –good to pass on

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If you are like me and you spend much time wondering if you are pregnant due to inconsistent cycles, trying to get pregnant, trying not to get pregnant, whatever, I recommend heading on over to: http://www.saveontests.com/ You can get pregnancy tests for as little as $.34/test if you buy 100 of them. 100 pregnancy tests sounds like a really lot but given how irregular my cycle is I am willing to bet I have used at least 40 or so in my lifetime and I’m not done with testing. I’ve only had these cheap things for about the last 20. That means I probably have already spent over $200 on pregnancy tests when I could have spent $34 for all the tests I will ever possibly need. Sounds smart now doesn’t it? Ok, technically they expire in about three years but still! I could have bought a bunch of these every three years and still saved a lot of money. 😛 You can buy them in packs of 5 for only $3.25. No really, that’s awesome.

Slightly paranoid

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Once again I’m obsessing about weight. This time, luckily, not my own. Shanna hasn’t gained a full pound in the last nine months. If she doesn’t gain some weight this month she will have fallen from the 89% to the 9%. If I stop and think about that real hard I feel like I must be doing something wrong. I’m not sure what I am doing wrong. I am giving her as much food as she wants. I nurse on demand (sometimes half the night). Should I stop letting her have water and replace that with something that has calories–like more milk? Should I stop giving her vegetables because they have almost no calories? She doesn’t really eat meat. At this point she is probably up to ten bites of meat in her life. She poops and pees well above what is considered the minimum for this age. She is getting taller like mad–that is still up in the 70-something%. She runs all day. She is meeting all of the developmental milestones months early, some of them as much as four months early.

I’m having a hard time feeling confident that her body is doing what is right. I want to believe it, but I feel really bad right now.

Fashion issues

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I love the sundresses that are popular right now. Very long, I’m good with showing some cleavage and most importantly: the straps are adjustable. However there is one big problem with these dresses (and most of the tanktops I own) they were not cut for women with large breasts. If I wear them without a bra I am in imminent danger of falling out entirely at any second. (No really. It’s not a great thing.) If I wear a bra with them they look retarded because my bras are gi-fucking-normous in order to contain the vastness of my breasts. (Anyone who says, “but you aren’t that big” can kiss my lily white ass.) I don’t exactly appreciate having the top/dress look like little triangles floating on the sea of my bra. It’s fucking ugly and tacky.

Maybe I should have stopped watering them a long time ago.

Random thought exercise

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If I ever win the lottery (I really should buy tickets once in a while) my family would of course want money from me because they are thoroughly charming souls that way. It would be kind of cool to buy a piece of property outright that is not very built up and put a couple of houses on it for them. Specifically houses like these. They would have completed individual little houses. I would probably even build a “town hall” in the center of the little houses so that everyone had a big dining room/kitchen to hang out in when they wanted to get together.

It’s really not an awful idea.

Wallpaper ideas

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Now that I was shown the wonders of wallpaper (previously I didn’t consider them because my experience with wallpaper was all really ugly shit in old people’s houses) I have some awesome choices to make. I am interested in something that encourages a variety of imaginative play. I would like something that isn’t too ‘baby’ because I’m not going to want to change it particularly soon. I would like something that does not dictate that my daughter ought to be a tomboy or a princess. She gets to be whatever she wants to be. And I would like something that is not strictly speaking ‘girl’ because then little boys will scorn it because little boys are trained to be retarded like that. (We have a really machismo neighbor with a little boy Shanna’s age. I expect they will play because I get along with the mom. I expect that his father will make cracks if something is too girly because he’s already made cracks about how I shouldn’t ever cut Shanna’s hair because girls should never be allowed to cut their hair.)

Idea #1 which I like because it’s a neat old library and that’s always fun. I’m not sure how this one would age with a kid.

Idea #2 I like this one because it is very open-ended and it lends itself to all kinds of neat imagination games.

Idea #3 I think this one would age particularly well. I worry that it could be a little spooky for a small child. Of course I do love my tree imagery.

Idea #4 also very open ended but in a slightly more realistic sort of way. This one seems to me to be more about adventure and less about fantastic, if that makes sense.

Idea #5 this is less open ended but really fun.

Idea #6 neat, but I’m not sure.