Fold My Laundry Please

Last night was rough.  Aubrey was really not feeling well and therefore couldn’t sleep well which meant I couldn’t sleep well.  Also, I would like to give my blog a makeover for 2008 (Shhh!  Don’t tell it!  It’s a surprise!), but I’m terribly clueless about coding pages.  After spending many hours playing with html color codes, I finally managed to change the font color of the links in the right hand column (over there —> for the directionally challenged) and the color of the post titles and time and date stamps.  The categories and comments kept their mysteries hidden from me, so now my blog looks like I finally got it ready for Christmas.  And just in time, too!  Wait.  What?  Crap.  So now I’m thinking of trying to find someone who is good at this stuff to do it for me.  I know what I want, just not how to do it.

Wow.  That was a long and round-a-bout way to say I was up late last night, wasn’t it?

Anyway, I went to bed late last night and woke up early this morning.  I would’ve tried to sleep in, but I had forgotten to put out the garbage can last night and with all of the Christmas trash to go out, it was vital I get that can out there.  (On a rather unimportant side note, our new neighbors loaded up their overflowing moving-in trash into their Yard Waste can and set it out hoping to get all of their garbage out in one week.  The Sanitation Engineers practically thumbed their noses at their attempt.  Now the neighbors have to put some of what’s in the Yard Waste bin into the regular garbage bin each week making cleaning up last at least a month.  Welcome to the neighborhood!)

I also had a phone call to make:

Them:  Aubrey’s Pediatrician’s Office.  How can I help you?

Me:  My 3 month old daughter is one of your patients and she’s had a cold for about two weeks and now it’s suddenly gotten a whole lot worse.

Them:  We’ll have to see you right away.  Can you be here in 45 minutes?

Me:  45 minutes?  *looks down at unshowered, barely awake self*  Absolutely!  See you then!

So the first half of my day was spent rushing around trying to get cleaned up so that I wouldn’t look like a complete derelict, hopping in the car, and spending an hour listening to the doctor tell me about how he didn’t find out he was an asthmatic until he was 28 years old and that Aubrey was the healthiest baby he’d seen all day.  As my brain finally began to click into place, I started to feel silly for coming in at all.  Isn’t that the way, though?  Your child is sick.  She’s miserable.  She’s visibly wilting.  You get to the doctor’s office, oozing worry from every pore.  The doctor walks in.  Suddenly, Baby is smiling and cooing and showing off her new, mad, Rolling-Over-At-Will skillz…yo.  But on the plus side, it was my first trip out of the house since the Friday before Christmas.  So there is that. 

So now, we are sitting down to watch a movies together before the ball drops (or whatever it is) at the Space Needle in Seattle.  We have to watch online because we have yet to get a television set (9 months and counting) and we don’t really seem to miss it much.  I hope everyone accomplished much in 2007 and that you will accomplish much more in 2008!  Leave me a little note and let me know what your New Year’s resolutions are.  I need some ideas for myself!

Happy New Year!!!  I got you some glasses!!!

Andrew and I bought a bread machine about a month ago and have been having great fun making all sorts of delicious (and some not so delicious) loaves.  The only problem I have with bread machine bread is that it never seems fluffy enough to me.  It always turns out kind of dense.  I decided to take a peek at Youtube to see if I could find any helpful videos.  That’s when I found this terribly helpful nutritional advice:

I would have laughed myself silly if I hadn’t been sick!  Instead I kind of coughed and wheezed myself silly…if that’s even possible.

So if any of you out there have any advice that’s actually helpful, I’d really appreciate it.  None of the recipes I have call for any baking powder.  Should I try throwing some in and if so, how much?  Please help!

It’s been nearly two weeks since my family and I washed up on this viral island.  Such a short amount of time, but each day just.  Draaaaags.  On.  At first, the natives seemed nice enough.  Sure, they seemed to have a nagging cough and their noses seemed a bit runny, but they were good people.  Oh, if only we had known.  If only I had known! 

The children were the first to succumb.  The coughing.  The sneezing.  The runny noses.  It wasn’t so innocent.  Then they set their sights on Andrew.  He wasn’t easy to take down, though.  They had to hit him with both guns and running.  I heard him getting ready in the morning, forcefully ejecting every last food item he had eaten the night before.  After a fairly miserable day of stomach issues, his system was finally weak enough for The Germs to take over.  Suddenly, it was me against the world.  I was running to and fro, distributing medication and tirelessly wiping noses.  I was frantic to free my family from the grip of this mad contagion. 

Finally, I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Ethan and Gideon began to show signs of improvement, as did Andrew.  I had a little bit of a sore throat, but I managed to push through it.  Then we were struck by the dreaded PINKEYE!  Luckily, I still had the eye drops from our last dance with this disgusting enemy.  But that would be the last break we would get.

Days went by and Aurora began having nightly fevers while Aubrey continued coughing and sneezing her way through each night.  At last I can hold out no longer; for the natives are persuasive and their culture is infectious.  I spent last night alternating between sweating and freezing.  I was forced to seek solace in a medicine bottle at the awful hour of 2:30 in the morning.  Tylenol and ice water fast became my friends.

Morning arrived, eventually, and I gathered up just enough strength to scatter a box of graham crackers on the ground for breakfast, much as one would to feed chickens, before collapsing in the La-Z-Boy and recommencing my oblivion.  I sit here now, a mere shadow of the woman I was when first we walked up on shore.  I can only hope *COUGH! HACK! COUGH!* that others will read this *wheeze…wheeze…wheeeeezzze*and learn *COUGH! wheeeeezzze! Sniffle, sniffle, SNORT!* from my tale…

This message was brought to you by, "Fever Dreams!"  Because who doesn’t want to dream the same thing over and over again all night long? 

And, "Tylenol"!  America’s most trusted brand of acetominophin!  "If it’s good enough for a hospital, it’s good enough for my family!"

You have to get through this…

…and this…

…and this…

…and this *sigh*…

…to get to this!

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Ethan got a little digital camera over the summer.  It doesn’t take great pictures, but he buzzes around with it all over the place, snapping away.  The excitement of Christmas has gotten to him and he has spent the day documenting our decorations.  His favorite thing to do has been to get up close and personal with our Christmas ornaments on the tree.  He says things like, "I’m trying to take a picture of my reflection in this ornament," and, "You can use these pictures on your blog if you want." 

Since I have his permission…

We seem to have a lot of red on the tree this year!

I was browsing around the Fisher Price website, hoping to find a replacement part for our broken baby swing and came across this disturbing picture.  Now why on earth would they feel the need to paste a white baby’s head on a black baby’s body?  And a poorly done job at that!  Think I’m kidding?  Click on the picture and see!  It’s just a tiny little picture, but if you click on it, it gets big enough to see.  Perhaps I’ll send a letter to their customer service department…

All across the interwebs, this holiday season has been marked by a distinct lack of Christmas spirit.  So in an effort to dispel the general malaise, I want to wish you all a Merry LOL-Christmas!

And just because I fell over laughing when I saw it…

Now get out there and start being cheerful!  Or I’ll subject you to more LOLcats!

• Today, I finally got the last of the Christmas decorations put up.  They will probably stay up until sometime in mid-February.
• I still have not started making my Christmas cookies.  I better get it done soon, because if Santa doesn’t get his Black & Whites, chocolate chip cookies, and merengue cookies, I might get coal in my stocking!
• I actually like this song:

• And this one:

• To date I have wrapped exactly 4 presents.  I fully anticipate a very long Christmas Eve night.
• Christmas dinner is going to be a pre-made meal bought at Super Suppers. 

What are some of your Christmas confessions?

About a week and a half ago, I noticed the little light on my answering machine blinking.  I was in the middle of washing the dishes (I’m horrible about checking that thing when I walk in the door) so I took off my very attractive yellow rubber gloves and pressed play.

"Hi sweetie.  It’s your mother.  Listen.  Uncle Gene passed away today.  It would be really nice if you would send Aunt Clara a condolence card.  Call me back and I’ll give you the address."

My heart jumped into my throat and hot tears stung my eyes.  I put my rubber gloves back on and went back to doing the dishes.  My shoulders were shaking as I silently sobbed, but I didn’t stop scrubbing.  After all, it’s not like there was anything I could do to stop it from happening.  It was done, over.  And I didn’t need to be able to focus my eyes to clean cereal bowls.  My mind raced over other sad news I’ve received over the phone.  Zeppo (my childhood dog) had to be put down.  Julia has been rushed to the hospital for emergency heart surgery.  Jason shot himself in the head.  Jonathan’s been in a terrible car accident.  I rinsed the suds off of the glasses and silently cursed the telephone for taking so many loved ones out of my life. 

Uncle Gene had always been around.  He wasn’t actually a blood relative, but he and my dad had been best friends since grade school.  He was the lovable black sheep of the family.  The guy who always had a plan that was gonna work this time.  You want in on it?  You’ll be rolling dough!  But fortune never graced his pockets.  He had to keep grinding along in order to provide for his family, but the ideas were always flowing. 

I remember running around their house as a little girl with his daughter, giggling that shrieky sort of little girl laughter; just two miniature co-conspirators.  The two of us would go out back to the shed and watch while he and my dad sat around smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and soldering together circuit boards for some sort of machinery that I didn’t yet understand.  Probaby one of those com-pu-ter things you heard about on PBS. 

I remember one summer when Uncle Gene, Aunt Clara, and their two daughters came to our house for a visit.  Uncle Gene always had a sort of scruffy beard and mustache and longish, slightly unkempt hair.  I remember him holding up his baby daughter in the air and smiling and saying to her, "Can you say ‘de-lin-quent’?  Can you say ‘va-grant’?" and everybody laughing.  Funny thing, all of my memories of him involve laughter. 

Uncle Gene and my dad took me and a friend of mine to a Pink Floyd concert at Sundevil Stadium and both he and my dad called them "Pink Fricky" the whole time.  I can only imagine it was some sort of private joke - "You had to be there!" - from the 70’s.

Things were always "groovy" or "right on" with him. 

He was the photographer at my wedding, and I can’t thank him enough for the great pictures we have of the whole affair.

But the wonderful thing about that phone call was this.  Uncle Gene had been born with some sort of heart condition.  Doctors had told his mother all through his childhood that he wouldn’t live past 18.  He was almost 60 when he died.  Take that medical science!  And that was exactly the attitude he had about it, too.  Stickin’ it to tha’ man! 

So now here I am.  It’s 2:30 in the morning nearly two weeks later.  I have a sleeping baby in my arms and I’m having a teary moment.  

I still haven’t sent a card to my aunt.  What can I possibly say to her?  I’ve lost loved ones, but no matter who you’ve lost, you can never say that you know how they feel.  I tried to find his obituary in the online version of their local newspaper, hoping it would give me some inspiration, but there doesn’t seem to be one.  I can’t not send a card.  And I have to write something in that card.  I just don’t think I can fully express the way I feel to her.  No matter what I write, it’s going to sound more cliche and contrived than heartfelt.  *sigh*

I’ll miss you, Uncle Gene.  I just hope you know that you were loved.