The Real Work has begun...

I think the three of us are finally starting to feel the stress of this move. It's not terrible, but the strain is definitely there. I'm extra sensitive, Lila's extra whiny, and Doug's extra irritable. And the kitties and hedgehog are fuzzy and pointy, respectively.

The good news is that the house is ours now! We closed yesterday morning and picked up the keys yesterday afternoon. As soon as Doug got home from work, we loaded up everything we would need for dinner and went to the new place. Lila and I were back over there this afternoon, cleaning. The house is in great shape, but the baseboards and doors need wiping down and some of the walls need cleaning too. (Also, the cleaner I can get the doors, the less likely Doug is to insist that we need to paint them!)

In spending so much time with my face that close to the floor, I became well acquainted with several tiny spiders. I didn't tell them they'll be going the way of the fire ants soon. (my first act today was to sprinkle amdro on the ant mounds in the back yard.)

Well, I'm pretty sure there's something important I should be doing right now, so I'll stop. I wonder if the outer doors of the post office are still open at 9 p.m. We still need to fill out a change of address request...

Insomnia

We close on our new house tomorrow morning and I'm so nervous that I can't get to sleep. Not nervous in a worrying kind of way. Just nervous in an expectant kind of way. Or, I suppose, it might be the fact that I can't breathe through my nose that's keeping me awake. Either way, that's why I'm posting to my blog at midnight.

This photo is of Lila with her friend, Naomi (daughter of my friend, Ellen). This was a particularly cute day for the two of them because it was the first time that Lila actively played with Naomi (who's roughly a year older). When this picture was taken, they were sharing a snack of pita and hummus while laying on the coffee table. Not long after this, they began collaborating on some kitty torture. As cute as their interactions were, I had to intervene at that point.

And speaking of photos, I have been terrible lately about having any pictures printed. I usually do that monthly - pick my 10 favorites from the past month, upload them to the Walgreens website, have them printed, and put them in our photo album. I like having physical photos to flip through now and then (and to show off). I get double prints of some of them and those get sent to various family members who don't make it down here to see her very often. Anyway, I'm about three months behind on this and I need to catch up! . . . after we move.

The Good and The Not-So-Good

Some family and friend updates for you:

One of my grandfathers, Dorsey E. Jordan, has been having some health problems lately and I would love it if you'd join me in praying for him. The short version of the story is that he had an artery that was 75% blocked, which they cleared out and put a stint in. He is also anemic and they found masses on his kidney and lung. He is going to start receiving injections for the anemia - something to try and prompt his body to produce more red blood cells. The masses are still being explored and I don't have anything more to report on those yet. I will keep you updated. They did, however, just tell him that his kidneys are only functioning at 50%. That is bad, but not bad enough to need dialysis. They can't reverse the damage, but they think they can stop it from progressing. Whew! Please pray for him.

Our friends, Wilson and Melissa Wicks, had their baby girl, Bryce Michelle, at 10:20 this morning. She is 8 lb. 9 oz., 21" long, was delivered by c-section, and she and mommy are doing well. Hooray!

Achoo! Waaaaaaaaaa!

Since I started taking allergy shots and prescription antihistamine/ decongestants again (couldn't take them while i was breastfeeding), my health has been SO much better. I only get sick occasionally now, instead of monthly. And when I do get sick, it's not as bad and doesn't last as long. Praise God for allergists! Sadly, all this dust that we're stirring up with packing has been too much for my poor body to handle.

I was sick sick sick this weekend, but felt mostly better by yesterday evening. I started packing again this afternoon and have become a sniffly sneezy mess. [sigh] It makes me want to stay up for 24 hours straight and get all this packing done so I don't have to worry about it anymore. That would be way better than a few weeks of prolonged torture. Doug seems to think that plan is not in the best interest of my health. Oh well.

I think Lila had a bad dream last night about bumping her head on something. :( She has had a few more incidents than usual recently where she fell down or got a boo-boo in some way. Early this morning, I heard her start crying and I could tell from the way she sounded that she was crying before she even woke up. It just sounded like a bad dream cry. When I made it into her room, she sat up and said, "Bump on da head," and kept crying. She was really upset - tears and everything. I rocked her for a long time and she went back to sleep, but I felt so bad for her! Poor baby...

Lila's Friends

Lila has a new friend in the neighborhood. For a long time, our 12-year-old next-door neighbor, Elizabeth, would come over about once per week to play with Lila. Sometime over the past several months, she kind of lost interest in that activity and we haven't seen her at all this summer. Kinda sad, but not a big deal. There's only so long that a pre-teen is going to think it's cool to hang out with two adults and a toddler.

Well, Elizabeth's place in our family has now been taken by Tichina, a 13-year-old who lives up the street. Since school has been out, she shows up at our house 2-3 times per week to play with Lila. I really find it amusing that these girls like to come over and play with my toddler. Fun, and amusing.

On a less fun note, I've been sick all weekend. This was both helpful and detrimental to my Harry Potter reading plans. On the helpful side, I couldn't do anything besides lay around anyway and Doug admitted that if I hadn't been sick, he would not have let me sit around and read all weekend (though i would have been lobbying for that). On the detrimental side, I was reading more slowly than usual because I felt like dookie!

Stirrin' up Dust

I think I'm enjoying this packing process more than I should be. I mean, I've never been excited about moving before and I've certainly never been excited about packing! Doug did make a good point though. There's a big difference between moving from one apartment to another (as i did in college) and moving into a new house that I'm excited about (as we are doing now).

We've gotten a good amount of work done this weekend. The number of boxes we got packed was not that many, but the amount of organizing and purging we did was much. We are spending our weekends working on closets because those are the hardest and require both of us to be here (to consult each other on what can be gotten rid of). During the week, I'll be packing the easy things (cabinets, bookshelves, etc.).

Lila has been exceptionally cooperative during all of this too. She has spent a lot of time playing with her new Play-Doh (an early birthday gift from some grandparents) and her new Barbie (which i bought at HEB for $2 on Friday). Speaking of this new Barbie, I've decided there must be a Barbie gene in some girls. About 10 minutes after I gave this one to Lila (the first she'd ever seen), without any prompting from me, she requested a comb and spent about 20 minutes "fixing" Barbie's hair!

Blah

I find myself with a lack of things to talk about today. Well, I suppose there is plenty that I could talk about, but nothing that is inspiring me. I will throw random facts at you to defend myself.

I have 6 friends who are pregnant and two with newborns.
I have 4 friends who are buying, selling, and/or building a house (plus us).
Doug and I saw Order of the Phoenix last night.
Lila tries to force bites of her food on the cats.
I have checked six things off of our moving checklist so far.
We are having a friend over for dinner tonight.
I need to buy more chicken.
Lila, apparently, has learned to find and open the bread bag.
She is currently eating our last slice of bread.
I am going grocery shopping tomorrow.
I'm tired.
The mailman has not come yet.

PG-13 Story

Lila has developed a recent interest in one of my moles. I have a few tiny red nearly-flat moles on my body and she spotted the one on my belly. Any time she sees it, she'll point and say, "mole!"

Yesterday, after I stepped out of the shower, she pointed and said, "mole!"

"Yes," I said, "That is my mole."

Then she pointed higher on my body and said, "Big mole!"

"No, dear. That is not a mole... Very funny, but no."

My Letter to the World

This is Charlie speaking. Mom has no idea that I'm using her computer, but I must get my message out! The level of disobedience among my humans has reached a level of crisis. From the beginning of my relationship with The Woman, I have suffered innumerable little indignities. Claw trimming... being held like a baby... being spun on the hardwood floors... being forced to wait for my food... being scolded for attacking the monsters under the sheets...

I have an impossible time getting these people to just stay put. Besides the fact that they seem to have selective insomnia, they don't know how to stay in one room for more then a few minutes at a time. Mom is the worst - she can't even sit still in front of a movie! And don't get me started on how disruptive it is to my emotional well-being when they leave town. I don't know whether they'll be gone two days or two weeks!

As time goes on, their creative means of torture have escalated. Was it not bad enough that they brought home this other cat to be my "sister"? You know what she's good for? Nothing! She picks fights with me and then starts causing a scene when I fight back. And then I get squirted!

Then there's that Baby Thing. Whose idea was that anyway? I haven't liked it from the beginning and things only get worse as it ages. Instead of becoming more civilized and subdued, as any self-respecting cat would do, it just gets lounder and faster. I've heard the Big Ones tell her to use "gentle touches" at least 7,000 times, but I think that is a secret code for "scream really loud while you beat on his head!"

A couple of months ago, Mom brought home this little pointy thing that makes lots of huffing and puffing noises. I still haven't figured out what that is, so I'd rather not talk about it.

And now they are using words like 'moving' and 'new house.' Someone, please, come and rescue me from these sadistic villains!

Changes

Goodness, has it been a week already?!? Clearly, we've been busy. 4th of July... Doug took a couple of days off... We went to Dallas for a visit with family... oh yeah, and we bought a house! This is a photo of what will soon be our living room. I'm very excited and more than a little freaked out! I haven't had to do this moving thing in almost 5 years. Plus, we've built up a lot of memories in this house!

Overstimulating Love

I think you already know how much I love Lila. I love the way her skin feels, the sweetness of her hugs and kisses (which she gives much more freely these days). When she sits in my lap, it makes me all warm and fuzzy, and when I'm rocking her before a nap, I just want to stay there forever.

However, by the end of the day -- or by 2 p.m. if I have had a muscle tension headache since I woke up that is progressing to include sinus pressure -- I just get tired of being touched!

I go to the bathroom and she not only follows me in, but leans against my knees and tries to play with the button on my shorts while I'm sitting on the potty. If I'm sitting at the computer or standing in the kitchen, she'll come and just lean and hang on me like she's a monkey and I'm a tree. If I'm sitting in the floor, reading books to her, she climbs all over me like I'm a piece of furniture.

Mommies get overstimulated sometimes too!

On a totally different topic, I wish you all could have seen her at church yesterday. We take her into the grown-up service with us to listen to the music, then check her in to the nursery before the message. Yesterday, she was totally getting into the music. She stood between us, clapping her hands and dancing, the whole time. The amazing thing about her clapping is that she was on-beat more often than some of the adults in the room. And her little Bob and Stomp dance was just too much! It was a definite "I wish we had the video camera" moment!

Sicko

Apparently Lila has inherited my habit of being sick while having no symptoms that a doctor can do anything about. She continued to run a fever all night and into this morning, so I made an appointment with her pediatrician for 1 p.m. It was a bit soon to worry about the fever, but I didn't want to get into the middle of the weekend and have her suddenly get worse.

Well, we went to the doctor and she couldn't find a thing wrong with her. She's just got a fever that hovers around 101 degrees (without tylenol) and is slightly more tired than usual. That's it. So, it's the Wait and See Game. If she develops other symptoms of a cold - fine, she's got a cold. If she continues to have this low-grade fever with no other symptoms all weekend, then I'm supposed to call again on Monday. If her temperature spikes up to 102.5 or higher and she has no symptoms, then I'm supposed to call the on-call doctor for this weekend. Or it could just go away and we'll never know what happened.

It's possible that she's teething, but unlikely. Every other time that she's teehted, she had a nasty cloggy runny nose and was insanely cranky. So, if this is just teething, then she has changed her M.O.

...pause while i change a diaper and take a temperature...

Her temperature is currently 100.1 degrees.

Go Back A Seep?

Things have continued to be silly and eventful around here (i would expect nothing less). Lila took a pretty good nap with her new pacifiers yesterday and was reluctant to give them up when naptime was over. Within an hour, she was requesting to "go back a seep?" I was pretty sure this was more about wanting her pacifiers than about really being tired. I told her she was just going to have to wait until bedtime. So she spent the rest of the day periodically requesting to go night-night.

When bedtime finally did come, she was very enthusiastic about it and went to sleep without a peep. She then slept until 8:15 this morning, which is at least 45 minutes later than she usually sleeps! When Doug got her out of bed, he said she felt pretty hot. We checked her temperature, and, sure enough, she had a low fever. So maybe there was something to those sleep requests after all. [sheepish grin]

She seems to be fine now, though she has continued to ask for night-night whenever she thinks of it (which is usually when she's just been denied something she wants). She has also been taking her stuffed animals' temperatures all day... rectally. She spent most of the time I was in the shower this morning taking Snoopy's temperature and, after I was out, declared that his 'tee-tee hurts'. Alas for poor Snoopy!

UPDATE: I just took Lila's temperature again and the fever is back, higher than this morning. She's acting like she feels fine though, so I guess we'll just see what happens.

Baby or Fish?

Lila and I have had a very full day already. It started off with swim class, which was lots of fun, as always. When Lila got up this morning and I told her we were going to swim class, she got very excited and spent much of the intervening time saying she was going to "jump in da wa-wa!" And she has totally turned into a fish since last week's lesson. She was fearless today! Woohoo!

After that we ran to Babies 'R' Us to buy some new pacifiers. That is part of a long story that I won't relate all the details of, but it invovled me making the decision to start weaning Lila off of her pacifiers without really exploring why I was doing it. After doing some research and discussing it last night, Doug and I decided to give them back to her. There is no reason to take them away yet.

From the store, we had to rush home so we would be here when another mom and her baby showed up. This was a work meeting though, not a play date, so Lila was only around for the first 15 minutes. After that, she went down for a nap (with her new pacifiers, freshly sterilized), and I did my Community Leader thing. This other mommy, Jen, has a baby boy who is only 6 weeks old and already weighs 16 lbs! Wow!

Brag Post

Okay, I have to brag about what an amazing memory my child has. She already recognizes (and can name) all of the 'big' letters and most of the 'little' ones. I made some flash cards with all of the letters (26 bigs and 26 smalls) and we were just going through them. Even when presented in random order, she got most of them right. I could totally understand why she missed some of the ones she did. For example, she called 'little a' a 'little o'. Well, a 'little a' is a 'little o' with an extra line on the side. Rather confusing, I'd say.

She just blows me away sometimes! We have a few CDs of kids music that we have listened to ad nauseum. She can recognize and name a few of the songs after hearing only the first two notes! I can't even identify them that quickly! There have been a few times where she said or did something that left Doug and/or I sitting there with our mouths hanging open. I don't even know where she learns some of this stuff!

My apologies for not being able to include a photo of the little genius today. The website is having some sort of problem and can't upload the file... Okay, and I'll be honest. Even if the tool were working, I was planning on posting a picture of Charlie, not Lila.

A weekend I don't want to repeat

Whew! What a weekend. Honestly, it was long and insane and I don't want to talk about it. If you are in town and you'd like to see our short film, along with the other teams' films, you can do so on either Tuesday or Wednesay evening. They are screening all the films submitted for Austin at the Regal Arbor Cinema on both nights. Gateway's film is called 'A Long Time Coming' (i think).

I missed my husband and baby terribly this weekend. When I get the house to myself for a couple of hours now and then, it's a marvelous treat. But to have the house to myself all weekend - it was an unnaturally quiet and lonely experience. I thought I'd be busier with the film project, but we did most of the filming on Friday night. I also thought I'd spend any free time I had with friends, but that didn't happen.

When deciding what I should do with my free time, I pondered all of the normal options: go to a movie, spend time at the bookstore, etc. However, I decided I wanted to do something that I cannot do when Lila is around. So, I spent much of my weekend sitting on my tush and watching bad Lifetime Movies. I clearly watched too many of them because I had a dream last night that one of my friends was in an abusive relationship and I was trying to help her get out. Yikes.

Eyebrows on Film

I have an appointment today, at 5:30 p.m., to have my eyebrows lightened. My hair has faded to a nice, fiery sort of strawberry blond. It's not what I expected, but I can live with it. However, between the lighter hair and my fair skin, my eyebrows stand out like two woolly worms on my face. I don't expect to leave the salon with my eyebrows the same color as my hair - that would probably look odd, really - but I do hope that they are lighter and more camouflaged.

I am mostly concerned about this because I could, possibly, be on camera this weekend. I'm part of a team participating in the 48 Hour Film Project, and I'm hoping to be an actor. Even if our script ends up not needing me to act, I'll still be a part of the crew. It's going to be a fun weekend and I'm super excited!

Since I will be out-of-pocket, Doug and Lila are going to Houston for the weekend. I might not be home much, but when I am here, I'm sure I will miss them a lot! Especially at night... [sigh]

Brusha brusha brusha

Lila had her first appointment with the dentist on Monday. We talked about it all morning. "We're going to the dentist today! That's like a tooth doctor. He's going to look at your teeth! How fun..." She was excited and talking about it as we drove to the office. "The dentist. Look at the teeth!" She even brought along one of her teddy bears, Barbecue, to join in the fun.

It was all good until we got into the waiting room and then it registered that this was some sort of doctor's office. And rarely do pleasant things happen at doctors' offices. At that point she suddenly became rather clingy. By the time we got into the exam room, with the pre-dentist (i don't think she was a hygienist, but she wasn't the dentist), Lila had decided that this was all a scam and she wanted out.

Thankfully, things weren't too bad, but no amount of putting Barbecue through the paces first was going to convince her she should relax or cooperate. They were able to look into her mouth and they found that she has two teeth that are fused, but no cavities or other noticeable problems. They also told us we need to be brushing her teeth more like three times per day (as opposed to the once per day we'd been doing). That's easier said than done. I've had to lay down the law - You cooperate and help us brush your teeth (or at least let us do it) or we will sit on you and brush them anyway. And I'm not kidding.

She's just about to get out of the bath now and we'll see how it goes this time. :)

The Girl's Got Style

We chose Lila's outfit today in the same fashion we always do. That is, we grabbed the next outfit in line out of her drawer and put it on her. My intention with this post is to discuss today's outfit, but first I will take a slight detour to justify this method of choosing clothes.

First of all, it makes sure that all clothes get even wear (as opposed to only picking out favorite things and wearing them out faster than the things we like less). Also, since we mix t-shirts, dresses, and everything in between, you never know what's going to be next. It's kind of fun to have no special plans for the day, but still wear a pretty dress - just because! Anyway, this will all end once she forms an opinion on the matter.

Back to my story... Today's outfit is a yellow sleeveless dress with a kitty on the front. I put a white clip in her hair and that was that. Lila did the rest of her accessorizing. By the time we went to the gym, she was wearing her new glittery white shoes, a very fashionable black belt (from another outfit), a yellow mardi gras necklace, and her red sunglasses with white polka dots. This was definitely an attention-getting outfit. I don't think she really understood why everyone was fussing over her, but I enjoyed it!

P.S. - Can you spot Lila in this photo?

It is currently my bedtime, but I happen to know that certain members of my family are on the verge of holding their breath if I do not post a new photo of Lila.

Does anyone read my blog to find out what's going on in MY life? I'm feeling bitter.