Welcome to the Zoo

So I was sitting around staring at my kids the other day, admiring how well behaved they are (no, not really) and suddenly I decided to make a Chin Person. You know, where you put eyes on your chin and hang your head upside down with a tshirt over your eyes and nose and talk like a dork? No? Don’t leave me hangin’, here.

Anyways, so that was an epic failure because both the kids just tried to hit me and smear my lipstick all over my chin. I know, right? Apparently eyes covered = human piñata.

So then since I had the facepaint out anyways, I decided to make Nicole into a lion. This one was a huge success. Nicole chased Olivia around the house rawring and ‘eating’ her. And then I spent entirely too much time making myself into a mime/clown, and then Olivia stared at me for a moment, then acted like she was okay with it until I got close enough. Then she lunged and scratched me across the face so hard she scratched the makeup clean off across my face. And this is that paint type of makeup that dries dry, so yes, ouch.

On the bright side, we found a bottle solution for my picky younger child. Formula from concentrate + drop in liner type of bottle + latex nipple*, NOT silicone. Picky, picky, picky. However, she is all ‘where have you been all my life’ about the combo, and while I’m still not planning to wean her completely yet (nor does she have an inclination to, every so often she makes it clear she’d like to nurse) she and I are quite glad we have come to this little compromise.

 

 

*(hello, creepy men from google search. This is not the latex + nipple combo you were looking for. Sorry.)

Do Not Adjust Your Monitor

So, this was totally one of Those Moments. “Well, they’re being nice and quiet.” :) (long blissful pause, followed by slowly remembering that there is no such thing as Nice And Quiet.)

Now, considering this has previously ended in Olivia receiving a haircut from Nicole when she was too small to wiggle away and/or defend herself… this wasn’t so bad.

Makeup artistry in this post is courtesy of Nicole. The bronzed baby, if you look closely, is in fact Olivia. I am pretty sure, at least. I found her in Olivia’s bed, at any rate, with Nicole standing by the bed holding a makeup brush and looking guilty. (I know, Olivia is super slimy in the first picture. She had a runny nose yesterday.)

Why yes, that is my cellphone, thank you for asking. I had to sacrifice it for the sake of photojournalism, because she kept crawling in and out of the sunbeams, and to the puppy, and to the memory box Nicole pulled out so she could put a flower petal that Chris gave her in it, and to the shoes, and… you get the picture. Sorry, phone.

And yes, the astute amongst have may have noticed that the girls match. I know, that is some crazy shizznit right there, that stuff never happens around here. Actually, right now I’m just killing time because Nicole took a nap (rare) and wet herself and now she’s on her bed screeching because I want to take off her peed clothes AND SHE WANTS TO MATCH OLIVIA AND SHE NO WANT A BATH. So I’m waiting it out. I’m more patient than her. Theoretically. Or Chris will come home and she will choose to let one of us do it over the other. Or I’ll just dump her in the bath fully dressed because she’s at like a Level 12 Temper Tantrum right about now, and covered in pee, and that situation WILL end in the bath, either way. But I’m hoping if I wait it out it will end peacefully .

The Incident

So, for Christmas last year and this year, my parents take us and my youngest siblings (the ones that live at home) to Grand Forks for a few days and get us all a hotel room in the Canad Inns Grand Forks, where we spend a lot of time enjoying the waterpark. (We spend a lot of the rest of the time shopping at places like Target, which we don’t have in Canada. Nursing tanks for $16, whaaaat! Same quality costs at least $40 here…. but I’ve wandered off topic.)

The waterpark is divided into this area, which is a splashpark with two smaller waterslides, and then a middle swimming pool, and then another little splash area for really small kids which is attached to a ‘river’ of sorts that you ride floaties around, and the main attraction, a whirlpool waterslide.

Nicole enjoying the waterslides, and me hovering like the mother hen I am… my mom was up in the hotel room with Olivia, she has Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Disorder and the chlorine really gets  to her. (and clearly I’m not in bikini-body shape but since I had a baby six weeks before this picture was taken I’m not hating on myself.)

Now, we all had a hoot, especially Nicole. She ran around CONSTANTLY. Like, wow. The batteries do not die on this kid. There was no pause, there was no break. Just the on button.

So, I was taking her down the whirlpool waterslide just one more time before I headed back up to the room. The first time I had gone down, I’d ask the lifeguard at the top, who was wearing glasses, what I should do with mine … wear them or hold them. He said, “I’d hang onto them.” So I did. Now watch the photo progression as I hit the bottom on the last round.

Yay/whoosh! Yay/whoosh!Kerplunk! *snap*Oh, shit!Exucuse me… my lens snapped when I hit the bottom and dropped into the pool! (Lifeguard doesn’t say a word and just walks off…)

And now I’m cheerfully yelling at my sister to stop taking pictures and go find my husband and tell him what happened. I get very panicky feeling when I can’t see, my vision is pretty bad. And of course I didn’t pack any spare glasses! Now I need to buy a new pair, but the next night when I got home I did find an older weaker pair with the nosepiece broken, but two lenses. Far worse off was the hotel, they did some diving and came up with four pieces of my lens and decided the responsible thing to do would be to shut down half the waterpark – everything connected and unfortunately most of the main stuff – and drain and totally clean it. I felt really bad for all the people who were there and for the Canad Inns as well. I mostly was just feeling sortof panicky and sorry for myself at the time though, since I could only see clearly out of one eye! My choices for the rest of the time were either a wierd trippy sort of double vision, complete blur, or closing one eye to look out of the good lens. Bummer. Note to self – when you’re dependant on breakable plastic to see, bring a spare, always!!!!

So for now I went to walmart vision center yesterday and got fitted for my first ever pair of contacts. I have been meaning to for a long time, sometimes glasses are pretty inconvenient, although I do love mine. I hadn’t seen myself clearly without glasses for more than ten years (except for really up close.) I kept staring at myself in the mirror off and on while wearing them yesterday and today! (a few hours at a time, to get used to them.) I also keep feeling like I need to put my glasses on, since I don’t see them in my line of sight. Like I said, it’s been more than ten years of wearing them all the time! Here is my last good self-portrait, taken in June.

So, here’s the big reveal of me without glasses, and having done my hair and makeup to be worn without glasses. (The first time I did my makeup to wear without glasses my hubby flunked me and sent me back… LOL.)

So, New Year New Me, I guess! i have been chickening out of trying contacts for years and years now. It wasn’t touching my eyes that bothered me, or putting things in my eyes… I have just been wearing glasses for so long I was afraid I’d look crappy without them. I’m still going to order another pair of my current prescription to at least have on-hand… I haven’t quite decided yet if I will wear contacts most of the time or not yet. I am soooo insecure about this, you have no idea. I’ve had glasses and hinged a lot of how my face looks at any given time on them since grade six, people. That’s a lot of formative years and then the full chunk of my adult life so far. I mean, I have never stepped back and taken a good long look at my adult face without glasses before. I wasn’t sure at first, but I think maybe it’s not so bad. (and now I can buy cheap sunglasses for the first time ever… super yay!)

Happy New Years, everyone!

A quick peek

Here’s a quick peek from this weekend… starting with my little meatball. This is the change table I reviewed for CSN Stores, by the way. I love it. Olivia loves it, too. She just stares at the bars happily whenever I put her here. If I need to put her down for a sec to go to the washroom or something when she’s crabby, I put her here. Keeps her happy.  Another thing that keeps her happy is her minkee lovie. A friend of mine makes them and gave me a great deal. Santa Olivia! My mom bought this dress for Nicole but Nicole outgrew it by mid November (she was a July baby and it is 3/6 mos… Nicole was a little chubster too, but not quite as much as my little meatball.) Me and my girls. Okay, the smallest one is a loaner. Believe it or not, she is only 8 days younger than Olivia! My sister in law was due at the end of December but her water broke a month and a half early, plus Olivia was born 11 days past her due date, so they wound up super close together. Cute though, little girl cousins and they’ll be in the same class! Note that I am not wearing a headband here. Yaay! No headband. Oh, I guess I should admit I gave up on being shampoo-free. I went beserk a few days ago and declared it OVER. I attacked my hair with shampoo and then slathered on the conditioner. No more greasy-looking static hair!

Speaking of going beserk… okay, where I am it is –20 C …ish. Depending on the day. It’s a dry cold, and the furnace makes it a dry warm, too. I WANT TO TEAR OUT MY FINGERNAILS AND MY HAIR AND GNAW OFF MY HANDS. I get this every year. And then I pull out the humidifier and continue slathering on obscene amounts of lotion. I don’t know if I’m the only one who gets this crazy over it or what, everyone else kindof gives me the crazyface when I bring it up. But I literally cannot stand to fold laundry or put on clothes or change diapers or anything that involves touching fabric when I’m this dry. I don’t even have my vents on in the car, I feel like I can literally feel the heat sucking the moisture out of me.

Does anyone else have any Wow-Crazy-Lady things? I have the dryness thing and I also go insane over certain textures of fabric. I won’t go anywhere near a damask-y looking couch, I just know the feel of the fabric will give me shivers up and down my spine. Like nails on a chalkboard.

Oh! Guess what! Stay tuned… sometime this week, I’m going to jump on the scale and share the results. Time to start getting fit again!

This is why I haven’t been sewing

…I can’t find a clean dress to wear, never mind French chalk or lipstick. 

This will not scare you into chastity

I know, most of the time when labour comes up it can be a bit horror-story-ish and seem like its intended to scare people away from wanting to have children, EVER. Goodness knows a few of my pregnancy posts were maybe up there just a little. I’m not gonna lie and pretend like labour is rainbows and sparkly ponies. Heck no. But here’s a little Labour Lite for y’all. Things start off a little more relaxed when you’re being induced. Especially when you haven’t actually been induced yet. Here Chris is trying out my bed. Doesn’t the chair beside the bed look just delicious? We were in the not-shiny area of the hospital this time around. I didn’t care. Because they were getting this baby out of me.  Don’t judge me, she was 9lb 5oz, she had dropped and engaged and then changed her mind and went back up and kept growing and she would have kept growing. I grow some good placenta, rumour has it.My hump my hump my hump, my lovely lady lump. Yup, just one singular lump at this point. No that’s not a coffee, what kind of a monster drinks a french vanilla in the delivery room? Did I say French Vanilla? I meant milk. Skim milk. Okay, I am not going to lie on the internet, because my mom might find it and my mom does not tolerate lying. French Vanilla. I was being induced in the middle of the night, sir. Please enjoy that my tongue looks like the whale from Pinocchio, my husband is wearing a glove six sizes too small and giving me bunny ears, and that he appears to be business in the front and party in the back. It’s not a mullet, it’s just really fierce neck hair that’s taking over the back of his head. Maybe that’s not better, but the poor man can’t help it. There’s an excuse for the moustache, too. MOVEMBER. I know when you add in that he has a lot of camo and plaid and hunts you’re probably wondering how many cars are on our lawn but cross my heart, not a one. And the answer is no, he cannot keep his shirt down. Apparently. Here he is either playing chess or watching Aladdin. It was Disney movies or a chick flick, thats my laptop, not his. Chris is really shy, if you had missed that earlier this month. I do believe this is when I was getting my seventh poke, aka The Successful IV Insertion. I know I said six before but I was counting my trackmarks and it was seven, I forgot about the one that didn’t bleed enough to need a bandaid.  Breathing through a contraction. Doesn’t that look peaceful? Don’t believe a word of it, I totally went for the epidural later on. See? There’s Chris and his ‘Take A Picture Of Me I’m A Doctor’ shot that occurs when I get epidurals. All two times it happened. It’s a tradition. Clearly we are starting to have slightly differing opinions on how fun this is. PS, I got a haircut two months ago and totally forgot to mention it. No long hair clogging up the drain when it thins out postpartum. It normally looks better than this. When I’m not, you know, in labour. Doctor Chris checking his charts.

Right after this is the part where the stork flew in from the cabbage patch and dropped off the baby. And glitter.

So, that is my labour, as documented by Chris. Except the ones of him where you can see both of his arms, obviously. Plus he got bored of taking pictures after this and then distracted when I went from ladeedah(ish) to pushing out a baby over a five minute period.

Baby V ultrasound excerpt

Here is a little excerpt of my u/s in 2D and 3D both, featuring a yawn and lots of fist-gnawing. This was such a neat experience, words cannot express. It was also really cool watching my 3 yr old explain to grandma and grandpa how baby likes to hide behind arms and fists and that baby is disgusting because baby licks baby’s hand. (haha. Little hypocrite, that one.)

I have a guest post scheduled for tomorrow and then hopefully I’ll be back to life! Camping last week was fun, coming down with a monster toothache was not fun. Neither was speeding to the dentist monday morning when I was back, fully prepared to bawl my eyes out at any cop who dared try pull me over (ok, i speed by like 3-5 km/h. odds are against getting pulled over, granted.) to find out I need to see a specialist / oral surgeon. PREGGOS DO NOT GET T3s, kids. Preggos get tylenol and Orajel and sympathetic looks. But google helped me find some homeopathic remedies and guess what works best for me? Warm salt water rinses. Oh. Huh. Okay! I should have thought of that one myself. It has me back to a functioning level, and one where I’m not using a full tube of Orajel every three days while being on Tylenol as often as is safe. Which is great, because I’m waiting a month for that appointment! Eek! I’ll be halfway to baby by then(compared to now)! Oh well. Take my advice, if you’re thinking of getting pregnant, get your teeth did. And then get them cleaned halfways through. There are a few different factors that make you much much more likely to get a nasty toothache during pregnancy, and you want to get on top of that shit because honey, it is not fun gargling salt and avoiding solid foods. Just saying.

Shit, son 2, aka the Skunk Tale

Here we get the whole story of the Skunk Drama, including the conclusion, which is fairly tragic all around. If you really love feral skunks maybe skip this blog post because you may find it upsetting.

So, we’ve had something – a cat, we thought – attacking our garbage at night this week. Very displeased, Chris has been talking about making a trap. Turned out he didn’t have to, and it’s probably just as well that he didn’t.

Last night he was outside doing his nightly lockup of his worktruck, garage, etc. when he saw something out of the corner of his eye. “AHA,” he thought, “that darn cat!” He immediately looked around for something to poke it with.

 

Before he found something with which to do poking, he got a clearer look at what was actually a small young skunk. All 6’5” 235lb of him squeaked like a smallish girlchild and hid behind his truck.

After some unsuccessful attempts to yell loudly whisper for me (I’m not sure what I was supposed to do, if I had heard him, but there you go…) Chris steeled himself and peeked around the truck at the skunk.

 

Chris saw the skunk. The skunk saw Chris. The skunk, apparently being hard of hearing, was so startled it fell backwards. Into the window well. And started freaking out, in the way that skunks do best. With a situationally appropriate mild epitaph, Chris turned tail and ran around the truck to the front door, then darted through the house yelling gibberish to me about skunks and the backyard. He quickly closed the back door in an attempt to keep the smell outside. Unfortunately, the window well in question was right beside the intake vent for our heating/cooling system.  He eventually plugged the intake vent from inside, but suffice it to say, it does not smell like cookies baking in my house.

 

I tucked Nicole into bed – it was around 8:30 or 9 at this point, and we’d just finished moving her bed back into her room – and we both spent the next hour or two on our phones trying to deal with his dilemma, once it became clear the skunk was really and truly stuck in the window well. As you can imagine, the skunk was in quite a tizzy about this as well, and every once in a while the household was treated to a new wave of his, uh, panic.

As the previous post mentioned, apparently nobody in authority – or not in authority, for that matter – really wants to deal with a skunk trapped in a window well. While I can totally understand why that is, that kind of left us in a bit of a pickle. The closest thing to a solution rather than just genuine sympathy and ‘good lucks’ was Wildlife Conservation, who suggested an exterminator might be up to the task. That doesn’t seem very Conservation-ish to me, by the way… Regardless, in the end it was our Boys In Blue who wound up deciding, between downtown and the local precinct, how the situation would be remedied. After they established that a) it was kind of hilarious/horrifying, and b) every avenue had been explored and nobody seemed willing to step in and rescue the skunk (who would have clearly been very grateful, and would have bestowed a wave of, uh, gratitude on his hero) the skunk wound up meeting his end fairly early on in life.

 
RIP, skunk. I’d feel more for him if he hadn’t scattered garbage all over my yard a couple of times and if my house didn’t smell strongly of skunk at 2:30 in the afternoon the next day. Awesomely enough, I was out and about to escape the odour in my house and could smell a skunky aroma. I quickly established –and my mom confirmed - that it was coming from me, and I never even saw the darn thing. I just stink from being in the house.

So, anyone want to come over for coffee???  

…no?

Shit, son…

I’ll tell you what I do not wish on any of you, ever. I do not wish for you to get a skunk stuck in your window well. You would quickly discover that non-emergency services don’t want to touch it… Animal Control does not want to touch it… your buddy the police officer thinks its kindof funny and doesn’t want to touch it… the lady at Information is horrified but doesn’t want to touch it… and Wildlife&Conservation? Wildlife doesn’t work past 5 and Conservation will suggest an exterminator. Oh, and everyone wishes you luck.

THANKS, EVERYONE.

(I particularly do not wish that a skunk get stuck in the window well beside your air intake vent. Oh, and everyone agrees that if it was just them they’d want to shoot it, but that you could get in a boatload of trouble because you’re not technically supposed to. But nobody is going to pull out a tranq gun for a skunk, either. Thanks, universe. Thanks.)

Confession

I have a confession to make about this photograph. You see how she’s studying that silk scarf there? She’s trying to figure out how to turn it into a shirt. Apparently she was cold. Even though it was 25 degrees or more out there. Borderline tropical.

Little monkey. She’d run around naked in the freezing cold if I would ignore it. My neighbours are probably sick to death of hearing me holler, “Get back in this house until you put some pants on! No panties in the backyard!”

But, you know. This was mommy’s idea. Soooo, no.

Also, every time she sees this picture she says she’s naked. Sometimes I can’t remember why I taught her how to talk.

The other day she was chatting with Chris and I and he was asking about the whole ‘mommy has a baby in her tummy’ thing, and she said yup, there’s a baby in mommy’s tummy, it’s big, see? And then she goes on to say there’s a baby in her tummy, too. And then she says, “There’s LOTS of babies in Papa’s tummy!” I nearly choked to death. I think I’ll keep her. She might be a little sassypants but she cracks me up.

this is what snow looks like

It occured to me that some of you might not know what the aftermath of a blizzard looks like. Now, this was just a little bitty baby blizzard. There is maybe a foot and a half, two feet of snow back there. Maaaaybe three by the fence. A few inches in the front where the footprints are, because sometime we shovel that part. And by we I mean, I don’t go out there if I can help it, so uhhh, Chris. I considered going out there but decided since many of you probably can’t empathize with –27 C (with windchill, –18 without) I am not really all that willing to make that sacrifice. And my local friends are rolling their eyes right now because I’m a huge wimp but this is my “I don’t care” face –> :| If I was meant to be cold we wouldn’t have remote start and indoor plumbing.

(out the front window. Don’t kid yourselves, I am seriously not going outside just for you guys. Unless you ask really, really nice. With flowers. We discussed what that means earlier today.)

Also, let’s try not to analyze how frequently I use the tag “crazy.”

zip zip zip

Okay so today is hectic and a wee bit crazy. I sliced my finger and used a condom pocket as a bandaid. I swept and mopped my entire first floor in a move-the-furniture kind of way, so count on another Norwex rave soon because I did not realize that my life was incomplete without that mop.

I am in an exceptionally good mood because between my floor and the fact that I took my new Norwex window cloth to EVERY REFLECTIVE SURFACE WITHIN SIGHT, from windows to microwave to oven front to laptop to door handles to sink, my house is SHINY AND BRIGHT. It is just amazing how much brighter your house is when it’s clean and shiny. And how much better you feel. Maybe that’s the post-workout buzz from scrubbing everything.

Okay so I was not going to rave right now but I just have to put it out there, my house is shinier and cleaner looking with just Norwex stuff and water then it normally gets with el-cheapo generic microfibre cloths and cleaning products. JUUUUST SAYING. Also, Mickey Mouse helped me clean my floors. If by Mickey Mouse you mean a Mickey Mouse stuffie whose arms are being wrapped around my mop when I’m trying to clean. Not super helpful but funny so I let her ‘help’ until she got bored and wandered off.

I’ve also been sewing and that sort of thing. Nothing new in the shop yet but if you want to see some finished custom orders or the sneak peeks, those can be seen on the tw*nkletw*nkle fan page. If you look over to the left sidebar there’s a nifty little widget that will take you there. That way I won’t spam you up with photos of items for sale unless you’re wanting it, because I am  a pretty lazy considerate person.

Now if you excuse me I’m going to go break into song about I WANNA TAAAAKE YOU THERE and bake some cupcakes. Don’t think you could get away without me forcing pictures on you. You’re in for a treat. We’re talking a dramatic photo montage. Otherwise known as my way of entertaining myself while playing Little Peoples with Nicole.

ENJOY. Except this is a serious and dramatic story told in photos so maybe try to feel adequately subdued.

 

In other news, if some Norwex executive is out there googling Norwex and happens to find me, YOU’RE WELCOME. Send flowers. (Flowers is french for cash, for the record.)