Yard decorations ..... OF DEATH

Whenever I talk about adding something to the yard to make it look nicer Jesse shoots the idea down with "I don't know, I worry about the kids falling and hitting their heads on that."

I was reading about compost bins (of course I was) and I read that it's a good idea to plant herbs all around the bins. I said maybe we should do that and then put up some small bricks around the edge to separate the herbs from the grass. The response was "I don't know, what if the kids are running around outside and they trip and hit their heads on the bricks?"

After we took the cancer logs out of our garden we toyed with the idea of putting granite blocks around the garden. Guess why that was nixed. "The kids might trip and fall and hit their heads on the blocks."

A rock garden? The kids might fall and hit their heads. A fountain? The kids might fall and hit their heads. An in ground sprinkler system? The kids might trip over it and fall and hit their heads on one of the 10,000 other death traps we have placed in our yard.

I don't mean to make fun of Jesse's fears. In fact, I understand where they come from. When he was a little boy he was dancing to a Disco Mickey album and he tripped ... and fell ... and hit his head.

Obviously this event had a profound effect on Jesse and it forever shaped the way he looked at lawn decor. I think if he had his way we would just put throw pillows all over the yard. It might look stupid but just think of how unalarmed we would be if one of the kids tripped and fell and hit their heads.

So what do you think? Are Jess's fears irrational? Or is he right to think that the second a hard object is placed in our yard the childrens heads will be drawn to it like soft, vulnerable magnets?

Two years ago I wanted someone to rub my nuts.
Four years ago I had an odd craving.

So how's the new couch working out?

It's great, thanks for asking! It's huge. It's blue. It's a little bit staticy.

Ok, a lot bit staticy.

And it's fun to take all it's cushions off, pile them on the floor and jump onto them.

Home again, home again

Joseph is home again. Thank you to everyone who sent good wishes and kind words his way. The really meant a lot to him and to me. Other than a little bit of a cough Joseph seems to be feeling great. In fact, he was even able to go to school for half a day today. He'll do another half day on Monday then two full days and then we're leaving for Disney World.

Yeah, Disney is coming up fast. I still have all the vacation packing to do PLUS all the moving packing to do. While I was staying at the hospital all I could think was that I wanted to get home and start working on all that. Now that I'm home and looking that huge pile of work in the eyes all I can think is that I want to go back to the hospital and hide out for a few days more.

How did all of this come up so fast? And why didn't I try to get more of it done sooner? Oh yeah, because I am a complete slacker.

Jiggity jig.

Cute girl, too bad about the eyebrows

I know, I know. I've been a very bad blogger lately. I'm not writing, I'm not reading. I'm not leaving comments. I'm not even answering comments. In short, I'm sucking wind at this whole blogging thing. I have an excuse though!

You see, right now I'm just a little wrapped up in me. Or rather, I'm wrapped up in my stress about house stuff. In some sort of crazy miracle series of events we found the perfect house and had someone put an offer in on ours all within 48 hours. Another miracle, the home we found was waaaay out of our price range but the sellers agreed to drop the price and we're getting it for $30,000 than what it was originally listed at. Yet another miracle, the buyers of our house offered us very close to what we were asking and despite the rotten housing market we're still walking out of this place with a profit.

All of this came about about after a lot of offering and counter-offering and haggling and waiting and hand wringing. And it's not done yet. There will be an inspection of our house on Friday and we'll have an inspection of the house we want early next week. I'm worried, worried, worried about what those might turn up. I have no reason to think either one will go badly but I feel like everything has gone so smoothly so far that we're bound for some bad luck.

So for now I'm going to try to be positive. I'm going to focus on getting all our worldly possessions packed (because the proposed closing date is September 23rd!) and getting ready for our trip to Disney World.

The number one thing on my "must do before vacation" list? Getting my eyebrows waxed. I don't want to go on vacation and take a ton of pictures and then come back and show them to people have everyone say "Looks like you had a great time but why were you carrying those two caterpillars around on your forehead the whole time?"

Because people would totally ask that. And if you don't believe me it's because you've never seen my eyebrows.

Dreaming

We have found a beautiful home that is just perfect for us. We're putting an offer in on it tomorrow. It's going to be low, much lower than what they're asking. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that they come back with a counter offer that's halfway workable for us. Of course even if they accept the offer we still have to sell our house. The good news in that area is that the drug dealers across the street are getting evicted. That's gotta count for something right?

Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Anyone want to buy a house?

Don't worry. I'm not really going to take a couple of weeks off so that I can start canning. The truth is that I'm a little preoccupied with house buying/selling stuff right now and it's turned into a huge Internet time suck. In the past few days I've looked at about 8000 listings online, all of which are all wrong for some reason or another. And Jesse has put his foot down and said "No ABSOLUTELY NOT!" to the house on five acres of land with fruit trees, fruit trees just because it's in the middle of nowhere and needs extensive repairs. Party pooper.

The Story of Joseph has not been abandoned. Have the final chapter halfway done but I just haven't had the time and attention span necessary to give it the treatment it really deserves. Soon though. Soon.

In other news, Elle recently overheard someone use the expression "terrible twos" and thought "Terrible? I can be terrible? Why am I wasting my time being the world's sweetest, most agreeable toddler when I could be a holy terror?" Gone is my sweet, gentle baby and in her place is a sassy, bossy, stubborn, cranky monster.

So if anyone is looking for a house that's cute and well taken care of give me call because I've got one to sell. And I'll be happy to throw in a toddler who's also well taken care of but not quite as cute as she was a few months ago.

The weekend

Had our open house, no news yet.

Looked at six houses, really liked one.

Went on a walk with the kids and watched them hold hands, heart grew three sizes that day.

Gave in to way too many junk food cravings, ass grew three sizes that day.

Worked on paperwork for next surrogacy, forgot what a pain this part is.

Stressed and worried about house stuff, got hardly any sleep.

Hope you all had a good weekend, I'm beat.

Pack it up, move it out

We are having a realator come and look at our house tonight to give us an estimate of it's market value. It's just the first step in a long journey towards moving to a new house and this is about the worst time of year to take this on but we've got to do something. There's a lot I can put up with but drug dealers moving in across the street is just too much. There is some crap up with which I will not put.

The most boring entry ever

Monday was a good day. It was the day of my last daily shot. It was wierd going to bed last night without getting a shot in the butt. Now I've onlt got the every third day shot left and that's only until the end of the month.

I also had my 8 week ultrasound on Monday. J was able to be there for this one so that was fun. We had a good laugh afterwards because we could tell the ultrasound tech was struggling to figure out our relationship. J is a good 15 years older than me and pretty obviously gay so we must have made a real pair. The tech was really nice though and pointed out all kinds of things on the ultrasound that I never even got to see with Elle. We even got to see the umbilicul cord. That was cool.

I continue to be tired and groggy a lot of the time. Sometimes the morning sickness is pretty bad and other days not so much. I've learned to eat when I'm hungry though so I'm not losing weight like I did with Elle.

I've got someone coming over to help me out a couple of days a week now. She's the daughter of someone Jesse works and she's a really nice girl. She plays with the kids while I catch up on housework or take little naps. The kids like her a lot and it's nice to have someone here to help out with them.

We're redoing the porch out front. Jesse and my dad ripped out all the old screen this past weekend. We were going to put up new screen but once we all saw it opened up we all liked the way it looked so I think we might keep it like that. It still needs some fixing up but I think it's going to be really cute.

This is such a boring blog entry that I can hardly believe it.

Men are strange

It's past 10 at night and Jesse is in the basement using the loudest paint sprayer in the entire history of the world. When he sprays it, it sounds like there's a fire alarm going off in your ear. I told him that he needs to a) do this when the kids aren't trying to sleep and b) use some kind of ear protection. He seems upset by my suggestions. Why? Does he want crabby, sleep-deprived kids and hearing problems? Or is he just bound and determined to get that basement painted in the least effecient way possible? (His last plan involved a plastic cup of paint and a watercolor brush.)

Light it up

You know, when you live in a house as old as ours is there's always something that needs to be fixed. There's always some project that you want to get to to make your house nice, more your own. Take the light by our medicine cabinet. It's ugly. There's no two ways about it. It ugly now and I can't imagine that it was ever not ugly. What makes it even worse is that now the fixture is cracked and yellowing. It's time for an update.

I found this light fixture at Shoppremier that would look great in our bathroom. Maybe even too great since the rest of our bathroom is done in a Sponge Bob theme. Oh well, they have a lot of other great bathroom lights too.

With free shipping on orders over $100 I just might have to do a bit more browsing around at Shoppremier for a bunch of light fixtures
The words and opinions in this blog post are purely my own. This post was sponsored by PayPerPost.

Tackle It Tuesday

My very first Tackle it Tuesday! Like I said in my last post I already did a ton of other housework today but for my TiT project I chose two things.

The first thing is the end cupboard in the kitchen. It gets really cluttered so it's hard to use my breadmaker and my nice new mixer. This is actually pretty tame compared to what it can be like but it's still not as nice as I would like it to be. Here I have these two really nice kitchen appliances and then I don't even want to use them because they're such a hassle to get to.

Next is Joseph's living room book/magazine case. The poor kid can't even see what books he has. You almost hate to walk by the thing because if you create too much of a breeze the whole thing is liable to explode.





Here's the kitchen counter after I cleaned it off. Ooooooh, shiny. And you'll not that the appliances are actually plugged in and usable. Fancy.




And here's Joseph's bookshelf after tackling. I just noticed there's still a block on the floor by the toy box. Opps! But at least the shelf is clean!

The hardest thing was to not just pick things up and move them to another wrong spot. I did it though! I know it seems like a small thing but I still feel good about it. Awesome days.

Blog Party

How fun is this? I recently discovered this really fun website (thanks IDAT) with a ton of neat stuff. They have contests and theme days and a lot of other ways to interact with other bloggers. This blog party is just a way to get to see some new blogs and to get people to your blog and to make new friends. Check it out if your a blogger and a woman. You don't have to be a mom to get involved.

One of the themes this site does is "Tackle It Tuesday". The idea is to post a picture of a house project that you want to tackle and then post another picture after it's done. After I've tackled getting the camera to work I'm going to do my first TiT post. (Because that's what this blog needs, more tit talk.) Ack! Do I really want to air all my dirty laundry? Literally?

I think it will be a good thing. Just reading what some of the other women did inspired me to put away 3 baskets of clean laundry, load and unload the dishwasher, pick up the living room, put new pillowcases on all the pillows, scrub the toilet and go through a pile of Joseph's school stuff. And I haven't even done my main tackle yet! This can't be a bad thing!

Urgent update!

We got a new toilet seat! We've been meaning to do that since we moved in but we just now got around to it. I wish we had the old one back because the new one is uncomfortable and oddly shaped. I don't think you can return a used toilet seat though so I guess we're stuck.

Well, that's all I guess.

In the weeds

We got a notice from the City Weed Inspector yesterday. Yes, apparently it's a real job. He told us that we had weeds over 8 inches long in our yard and if we didn't cut them then he would and we would be charged for the time. This has pissed me of for 3 reasons.

1) This notice was issued the day after Jesse cut the grass. The only weeds we can think of that might have been that long are either a few growing against the house (because Jesse had not yet used the weedeater) or in the strip between the road and the sidewalk. There is no grass in that strip, just weeds. It's not our fault, there used to be grass there and then they tore it all up when they redid the gutters along the street. Then they put in this shitty sod about 2 weeks before the first snow. All the grass died and there's nothing but weeds there. If you walk around my neighborhood everyone has the same thing. Big patches of dead grass with nothing but weeds that grow at 10 times the rate of the rest of the grass. Even the crazy lawn guy across the street has it.

2) The house across the street from us has been empty for about a year now and it's sidewalks were never shoveled in the winter and it's grass has not been cut in monhts. Why isn't some city bigwig making sure that yard is taken care of? We may not have the best landscaped lawn in the world but at least the grass is cut on a regular basis.

3) The house across the alley from us has 2 jumked cars sitting it the yard. This is somehow ok. It's ok to have gaint hunks of rusting metal in your yard as long as you keep the weeds around them cut to less than 8 inches.

Maybe the City Weed Inspector could use his power for good. Maybe he could do some undercover work to find out who it is that's allowing their dog to crap on our sidewalk on a nearly daily basis. As of yet I've been unable to figure it out and I would really appreciate some help in the matter. Maybe if he figured it out he could even wack the offender with his 8 inch ruler. That would make me feel better.

Strange

According to my stat counter I got about 20 hits from France yesterday. I checked out the refering link but I couldn't see anything that could have possibly led to my blog. Even stranger, it seemed to be some kind of sports news page. The hell?

On Monday I took Elle to her 4 month check-up. When I got there they said "We tired to call you and tell you the Elle's doctor was out today but we couldn't reach you. Sorry about that, here's a $5 gift certificate for coming in." It's the first time I have ever left a doctors office with a lovely parting gift.

Our phone is not working. When people call it rings once or twice and then cuts off. If someone gets through it often cuts off mid-coversation. Sometimes it just makes a lot of clicks and stuff when we use it. It's not our phone that's doing it, it's something about our service. We're going to have it looked into but in the meantime if you try to call me and cen't get through then try my cell phone. Chances are that my cell phone will not be charged and/or buried at the bottom of Elle's diaper bag but it's still worth a shot.

What's the strangest thing that Joseph has ever said? My vote is for when he told my mom "We only eat casserole in my family. It promotes a healthy colon!"

Here's a picture of Joseph before he had his tigerectomy done.

I'm beat

My mom came over today and we cleaned like crazy. Well, she cleaned like crazy, I got stressed and broke out in hives. And we got to do more tomorrow! I'm not complaining though because the house looks awesome.

Just a few days left before we leave for Florida! Yippee! And I haven't started getting ready at all. If I know me I'll put off packing until Saturday and then not get any sleep that night because I'm so worried that I forgot something. I am limitless in my awesomeness. I am limited in my spelling ability though......

Stuff

We searched every store in St Cloud last night and today looking for a very specific clothing organizer that I am not forced to believe never actually existed in the first place. I must have dreamed it. I wanted a canvas clothing organizer that we could hang over the back of Joseph's closet door and that we could put outfits in so that he was all ready to go and had his clothes picked out ahead of time. We couldn't find it anwhere. What a bummer. We did find a living room rug though so that's a good thing.

Jesse was poking my belly today trying to wake the baby up and she gave him a good hard kick. He got a kick (ha ha) out of that. It wasn't so funny for me because she spent the next hour kicking me right under my ribs.

Good Night!

I'm writing this from y parents house where Joseph and I slept last night. I use the term "slept" very loosely since Joseph spent most of the night flipping around, throwing various limbs over me and making loud noises with his mouth and nose. I spent most of the night gritting my teeth and getting leg cramps.

Anyway, we slept here because last night I found a few mites in my bedroom and some on the frame of Joseph's door. I made Jesse spray the whole house with bug spray, wash all the bedding and decontaminate the AC. I figured it might be best if Joseph and I weren't around to breath in the bug spray all night long. Jesse chose to sleep at home though. I'm sure he's fine.

Despite the lack of sleep Joseph seems to be doing ok. I have to take him to therapy in a little bit where I'm sure he will have a complete and total meltdown. It's what he does. After therapy I'll drive him around until he falls alseep then I'll take him home so we can both catch a little shut-eye.

My hope is to try to avoid dreaming about the baby again. For the past two night I've dreamed about the baby and each time it was the ugliest flippin' thing you've ever seen. In my dream last night the baby was about 3 months old and needed glasses. For some reason we picked out tinted lenses for her. Her head was too big to fit any of the frames so we had to just kind of stick the lenses to her face. It was ugly. But she could talk so I guess it all evened out.