AND WHOOSH! A Month Disappears

So, wow. I can't believe how quickly January disappeared, taking me with it. I've had so many different blog posting ideas bouncing around in my brain but then, just like *that*, I'm thinking about cheese again. (I think I may die if I don't get a slice of pizza in the very near future.)

We have all been sick this past week which is never fun, but when it's your 6 month old's first cold of his life and he wakes you up at 2:30 in the morning with a croupy cough, it pretty much sucks monkey balls. Although, I was able to have an enlightening talk with my BFF Lyteyz and learned an important lesson in breastfeeding a sick child. Y'all can credit Lyteyz with coining the term "Booger Boobs." I've thankfully not had to experience that glorious benefit of breastfeeding since Little Mister only had a cough. I ended up with all the rest of the cold symptoms so I pretty much feel like death right now. And since it's summertime in the Land of Oz, I don't know if I have a fever or if my head is hot simply because, based on the temperatures, this is the land Down Under Hell. It's been over 100 degrees for most of the past 2 months and I have discovered something very important about myself- I DO NOT like the hot. DO NOT.  It is a "dry heat" and so instead of being drenched in my sweat, it dries very quickly leaving me salty and smelling like the wrong end of a dingo.  DO NOT LIKE THE HOT.

Luckily things will start to cool down in about a month or so, so I'll hopefully finally be able to step outdoors and go on walks with Little Mister again. (Actually, just checked the weather and it looks like the next two days are going to be only in the low 90's which means we may be able to go for a walk in the morning! YAY!)

I've been on a crochet binge as I'm working on my "Secret Project" and I hope to have it finished by the end of next week since we're going to go on a mini holiday (Ha! I'm so Aussie now!) at the end of the month. We're going to visit Brisbane and the Gold Coast and I'm sooooo excited about it! I've already staked out some yarn stores I want to check out and hope to find some yummy Australian wool which would be great!

For now, I am working with the Lion Fisherman's Wool and I must say I'm loving it. It's my first wool project that isn't supposed to be felted, so of course I'm worried sick I'm going to accidentally felt it before sending it off and then I'll not be published and then my life will be ruined. (Whaaat? Melodramatic?? Moi?!?)

Anywho...I had more to say but now I can't remeber because there was a commercial for cheddar. So. You know.

Ok, y'all. I hope your 2012 is going well so far!

Sleep is a Battlefield

With all due respects to Pat Benatar, I'd like to propose that love is merely a Plain of Contention and that sleeping with an infant is the true battlefield. 

Last night was the first night in I can’t remember how long that Little Mister actually slept 5 hours in a row. From around 7pm to 12am, with fidgeting only once at 10 where we had to turn on his mobile in his crib thus knocking him back out again, he was asleep. Blissful sleep. This was great for us since we have started going to bed earlier, especially since Big Mister had to go to work the next morning, so we were able to take advantage of those extended hours of sleep, right?

You are so wrong! Ha! Had you going there for a moment! Suckers!

Yeah- I ended up having insomnia for the first half of the night. I *never* have insomnia. If anything, I’m more of a Super Narcoleptic- able to fall asleep in a single bound. But, last night, for whatever reason, me no sleepy. Argh.

So, I was basically a zombie all day today. So glad I could keep the status quo. I guess the upshot of the day is that I learned two very valuable lessons. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about them, though.

Lesson One: Time to Wake Up!

I was finally able to fall asleep during Little Mister’s morning nap after earnestly praying that he would not only fall asleep, but stay asleep for a few hours- preferably all day if possible. Unfortunately, after just one measly hour of slumber, the time came. The time when Little Mister decided, “YAY! Its morning time! Wakey, wakey birthday cakey!” and then immediately put “Operation Wake Mommy Up” into effect.

He started with ever so gently petting my face which quickly escalated to punching me in my eye. Hey- I can’t blame him. He’s still developing his gross motor skills and I’m sure he meant to gently pet me once again, but his arm was behind his back and all he could do was roll over so that the momentum would carry his chubby arm over his body where it would hopefully make contact with my cheek but instead resulted in giving me a mild concussion. When that didn’t work, he simply went old school and pulled my hair. I debated filing for elder abuse but decided to keep sleeping instead. I mean, it was just a mild concussion. No big whoop. It's amazing how much I can ignore to win the sleep battle. And then, he did it. He pulled out the big guns- the one thing he knows- KNOWS- will wake mommy up. Oh yes- it was all systems go! *aOOOOga! aOOOOga!* Commence the Bubbly Farts!!

Dagnabbit. Sly little sucker. He wins.

Lesson Two: Time to Go to Sleep!

Later in the morning, my sister and I (and her roommate, our good friend) were able to Skype, for which I’m ever so thankful since I now have tangible proof that I have a case for elder abuse. You see, Little Mister was behaving pretty well for his auntie….until it was nap time.

Oh the humanity!

I could see the little wheels in his brain turning as he thought, “Hmmm….” *strokes chin* “If beating up mom works to wake her up, it might work to get her off the phone and feed me so that I can get my beauty rest.” And then he put his fingers together and said, “Exxxxcelllent.”

And then he pummeled me.

So, I got off the phone with my sister and fed him.

DANGIT! He wins again!

Don’t believe me? I HAVE PROOF!!!

Behold: A screenshot from my sister’s phone!

Feed me, Monkey! And charge your phone, Auntie!

I think those rings gave him super power or something. I'll know for sure once my jaw is no longer wired shut.

So, I learned that when it's time to wake up, he beats me and when it's time to go to sleep, he beats me. Hmmm....not too sure I'm liking this development.

Ok. It's time for me to put on my armor. It's bedtime. You and me, Little Mister. It's on like Donkey Kong.

Happy New Year!

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Beets Me

I may have mentioned once or twice that, by education and until recently also by profession, I am a nutritionist. I've spent many a year studying nutrition and so I know quite a bit about food. However. Apparently there are new things for all of us to learn, so I am now passing on my knowledge to you guys.

First, some background. I am not a picky eater. Never have been really. I remember as a kid, I didn't like onions- I'd even pick out the tiny little ones in a McDonalds hamburger Happy Meal on those rare occasions we were lucky enough to eat out at one of those high-falutin' restaurants. I also didn't like zucchini, unless it was in my aunt's zucchini bread which is basically banana bread with zucchini instead of banana. Moral of the story- sugar makes everything better.

There was just one other food that I knew of that I DID.NOT. like. The culprit: beets.

Beets were one of those tricky foods- they look so gosh darned purdy with their purpley purpleness oozing out in a, "Hey baby....you should taste me because I'm purple and you know you can't resist purple so why don't you take a nice, big juicy bite out of my tasty purpleness. You know you want to. Baby," sort of way. Apparently beets are also quite the sleazeballs of the tuber family.

(An aside: My mother-in-law's first language is not English, so she sometimes still to this day will have very amusing turns of phrases. This past Thanksgiving, she was talking about a really unsavory person she once knew- a real jerk. She said, ever so seriously, "He was a really big squeeze-ball!"  Oh dear me...I don't think I'd laughed so hard in a really long time.)

The only problem with beets is that they kinda sorta really taste like....well, like dirt. Or at least what I assume dirt tastes like because that is not something I'd know from experience. Nope. Surely not.

So, I pretty much have avoided beets, no matter how purpley they were nor how much my coworkers told me they tasted good and were good for me. Yes, I'll grudgingly admit that they are indeed a very healthy food. But still. DIRT.

HOWEVER. At a work conference I attended two years ago, there was a beet and walnut salad available on the buffet and, since my coworker told me that it was a really good salad, and since I was a new employee and wanted to look tough and adventurous, I decided to try that darned salad. If anything, it would test my acting ability- could I get it down without making an, "EWW GROSS!" face? 

Much to my surprise, that darned purpley salad tasted as good as it looked! Well blow me down and call me Popeye! I couldn't believe it! Beets that didn't taste like dirt! They had some sort of vinegar on them, that I knew- whether balsamic or red wine, I don't recall- but ever since then I've been on the hunt for the pretty, non-dirt tasting beets but to my dismay have not been successful.

Until now. I found a recipe on Epicurious for Roasted Beet Salad with Oranges and Beet Greens and it had decent reviews, so I thought, "I am going to try this one more time and if they taste like dirt, well, at least I'll now know what dirt tastes like because I have never tasted dirt before in my life. Ever."

So I made the salad with a few modifications- I didn't have the sweet onion, so I omitted that, and I really just wanted the beets and not the oranges, so I used a little bit of orange juice instead of the orange slices.

OMG. I don't remember dirt beets tasting so good! I really really REALLY enjoyed them. My Mister...not so much. He thought they were good, but they didn't float his boat. HOWEVER. He's not writing this blog so his primitive taste buds don't count. I really liked this salad A LOT. A lot, a lot. I ended up eating most of it last night and then finished it off for lunch today. That's right- I, an avowed beet hater, ate beets TWO DAYS IN A ROW!

And now comes the, "Wow- I did not know that," part. I feel like I should have known this since I am a nutritionist, and I may have learned it many years ago but may have repressed that knowledge along with any memories I may or may not have had about eating dirt. I'm also sure that had I been a beet eater all my life I would have also known this so my ignorance is justified.

Apparently, what goes in purple.....COMES OUT PURPLE. There is no need for alarm. You are not dying. Your intestines are not falling out and you don't have cancer of either the urinary or digestive tracts. There is absolutely no need to call your husband over to take a look and see if he thinks you are dying, as well. NOPE. All completely normal.

And you can take my word for it because I'm a nutritionist. A really really edumacted one. 

'Twas the Day Before Christmas...

...and all through the house, Gege was crocheting, with a baby under her blouse...

Oh yes, my friends. Even though I've been crocheting quite a bit in the last few months (though not quite getting the whole "finishing" thing), I brought out my hooks on Christmas Eve because I was on a mission. An important Christmas mission to save our poor little Charlie Brown tree from looking entirely sad and dejected, not to mention naked. We had the lights. We had the bulbs, though not the hooks for the bulbs, so, you know. We had the lights.

We even had gifts. Or, at least I had some gifts. My Mister didn't because he was married to a Grinch this year who hadn't wrapped any gifts yet. She's just lucky there is something called "expedited shipping," otherwise she would have had a large I.O.U. to give her wonderful, thoughtful, Christmas-loving husband and then have to look at his large, blue eyes, brimming with disappointment, and feebly say, her voice cracking ever so slightly, "Surprise...? Heh...heh.... Ummmm...thank you for all the thoughtful gifts that you bought for me ages ago....yours are on their way....heh! Ummm.....Look what I can do!" and then try tap dancing, but since she has dance moves akin to Elaine on Seinfeld, she just ends up looking like a deranged woman in the midst of a grand mal seizure.

Ahem.

As I was saying. Something we didn't have was a tree skirt for our tree. However! I do have yarn- lots and lots of yarn and so, being the easily distracted innovative girl that I am, and to do some stash busting as well as show Big Mister that having a ginormous yarn stash is actually a good thing, I decided to crank out a Christmas tree skirt. In just over 24 hours.

A largish crochet project? With little time to complete it? And a grumpy, hungry baby to feed all day long, as well? Oh yeah, baby. BRING IT.

I actually started it the night before Christmas Eve, thinking I'd have loads of time to get a huge chunk of it done while Little Mister was sleeping. Especially since we still had some last minute shopping to do on Christmas Eve, including grocery shopping for the amazing Christmas meal that I had not yet planned. Hey- I thrive on stress and am so much more productive when I've procrastinated until the very last moment. Or so I like to tell myself. And I usually believe me, even though I know that I will usually lie to myself in order to make myself feel good. "Oh no, Gege. Of course breastfeeding means you can eat dessert every night without gaining weight since you're burning so many calories. Besides. Nutella and crumpets are healthy. Says so on the container."

I figured I'd use up some of my cotton yarn since I had quite a bit and, if it got too hot under the tree, it wouldn't melt like acrylic. Brilliant! Or so I thought.

You see, I've been crocheting an awful lot of lace weight stuff recently. I have just discovered lace weight and I'm in love, but I'll go more into that later. The point I'm trying to make here is that my fingers have gotten used to luxuriously soft lace weight alpaca and, as such, have become quite the prissy little digits. They scoff at anything so thick and blundering as sock weight, much less the hefty boorishness of worsted weight, so the choice of a worsted weight yarn was bad enough, much less that the yarn was also cotton. *shiver*

You see, crocheting with worsted weight cotton yarn is....oh geez. I can't come up with a metaphor strong enough to convey the torture my poor hands went through while trying to create a little Christmas cheer for my naked little tree. Crocheting with cotton is dumb. And extremely painful. And the fact that cotton becomes like a Chinese finger trap when it is wet making it near impossible to crochet with it at all, much less crochet quickly under pressure when your hands are so wet and clammy because you are afraid you set yourself up an impossible goal and yet you so desperately want some Christmas cheer in your house and so you are going to make this tree skirt RIGHT NOW because the Baby Jesus didn't complain about being wrapped in swaddling clothes, so stop complaining and work those fingers, monkey!

And so I crocheted with the stupid cotton. I could have stopped and used acrylic since I had all the colors I needed, but, what can I say? I'm stubborn and just a wee bit mental, so I continued on and on with the stupid cotton. Did I mention it was stupid?

I restarted 3 times the night before Christmas Eve because I couldn't figure out the right color combination I wanted to use. I had a lot of colors so I thought I'd use them all so that our little tree would look like it threw up a rainbow which was why it had no color on it's branches. But, it just didn't feel right. And My Mister said, "Well, it's nice, but it's not Christmas." So, I decided to do something much more simple- a dark berry red, black, and white to resemble a Santa outfit. Brilliant! (Truth be told, I was stuck on the rainbow throw up...it was My Mister who suggested the red/black/white combo because he wanted a tree that didn't suck.)

First try with a rose color- beginning of rainbow puke

Christmas Eve morning, I was out the gate with 10 rows (out of 30) down. (I'm making a 9-point star, or round ripple, but without closing it.)

Christmas cheer- can you feel it??

Then I had to take a break and go last-minute Christmas shopping (picked up some paperclips to use as ornament hooks, too- take that, Scrooge!), scare Santa, 

He has his mother's Christmas cheer. *wiping tear* That's m'boy!

eat lunch, and feed Little Mister a few times. I crocheted a little bit in the car, but still only completed 5 more rows.

15 rows down and a blister starting to form on my thumb. Hard core crochet, y'all.

Little Mister was having a Dickens of a time with his teething and was a complete Scrooge the rest of the afternoon. (HA! See what I did there??) Thankfully Big Mister was home so we could take turns pacifying the beast the poor little guy. However, since I alone have the ability to feed him, I ended up not having much crocheting time, no matter how hard I tried learning how to crochet with my feet.

20 down! THE REST OF MY LIFE TO GO.

By the end of the night, I had run out of the berry so I had to start the white a little earlier than I had anticipated. But, I ended up having 5 rows left when I started the white, so my OCD with numbers was appeased. 

I had to stop crocheting and wrap presents so that My Mister wouldn't have that sad, puppy dog look in his eyes as he looked at my ever growing pile of presents. Oh yes- that hard lump of coal where my heart should be had started to soften.

We woke up Christmas morning and I had only one thing on my mind- NEED TO FINISH THAT TREE SKIRT! Who could think of presents when there was crocheting that needed to be done? PUT DOWN THAT STOCKING, MONKEY! No unwrappy until I finish! HI-YA!

I had just over 4 rows to go and crocheted while we watched the online Christmas Eve service of our old church in VA and while Big Mister played with Little Mister and while I ate breakfast and after I fed Little Mister for the second time. Crochet, crochet, crochet!

And finally....I finished!

CHRISTMAS! And Santa! And CHRISTMAS!

So then we could put the presents under the tree.

My Gummy Bear!

Although Little Mister was ashamed that I had not weaved in the ends before putting it in use.

Ughhhhh. What am I going to do with her?

But Santa Koala approved.

I'm a koala and I approve of this skirt.

Merry Christmas, y'all!