Things I Hate

Not to be completely pessimistic and yuck, but I have a lot of things on my mind and I don't like any of them. So. In honor of this day from dark, hot places, I'm going to make a list. Then, someday when my posterity are reading this they will laugh that the charitable, kind, gentle woman they know was ever me. :)

1. Potty training. It's enough to make me never want more kids. Not really, so don't judge me, but I'm fed up with cleaning poop off my kitchen floor. What is so traumatic about pooping in a little pink potty the shape of a harmless frog? Pee? No problem. Poop. Forget it. It's totally illogical.
2. Noisy neighbors. I actually think they are doing it to make me mad now, because they have never been this noisy before. Entering into my third trimester my sleep is becoming more and more precious and difficult to come by. And they wake me up every time I try to take a nap. Chiara has a noise maker that can drown them out - even a nuclear explosion would, I think, not break through the volume of that blessed little machine. But mommy needs to keep her ears open for her own child, so a noisemaker for me is out of the question. Though it doesn't keep me from fantasizing about waking up in the middle of the night to my sciatic nerve or numb hands or whatever and banging on my ceiling with a broomstick each time. "I'm up, you can be up too. Trying to sleep up there, huh?" Spiteful wretch that I am.
3. Spiders. When I'm a goddess that is one little creature that is not making the cut in my worlds. No offense, but I'm hoping there's some artistic preference as to what has to inhabit our planets and maybe Heavenly Mother thinks spiders are charming. I, however, could happily do without them.
4. Slugs. 
5. Nature in general, now that I'm thinking about it. Dirt is just sub-telestial. I like flowers and trees and harmless, toothless, stingerless, clawless animals ... but dirt? I don't think it was in Eden. And I don't think I have to like it.
6. Just realized slugs are toothless, stingerless, and clawless. I still hate them.
7. When the hem of my pants gets wet and periodically freezes my heel. I just moved to Oregon ... so tough luck on that one. 
8. Also socks, in case you were wondering. And close-backed shoes.
9. Fruit flies. But just the ones in my house.
10. Dusting. Truly, truly hate dusting.
11. I don't dust. I kind of hate that I don't, because I hate the dust I can see, I just can't bring myself to do anything about it very often. Because I hate to dust.
12. Chipped nails when I don't have a file or a clipper on hand.
13. Finding my toddler painting her own nails in the office while I was occupied with cooking dinner. That was lovely.
14. Speckles on mirrors.
15. Wrinkles in the spines of paperback books.
16. Wrinkles anywhere on books.
17. Library books with mystery stains.
18. Second floor windows with smears on the outside.
19. The little bumps on the sides of my feet by my baby toe.
20. That "this little piggy went to market" ditty. What does it even mean? It's weird.

This is kind of funny to me, because I'm running out of things now that I came back to this post a few hours later and I'm in a much happier mood. Probably because so many hours have passed since I cleaned poop off the floor. :) And Eldon is home. I really love that.

State Fair

When we moved from the wide open spaces of Star, Idaho I thought we were moving to a more suburban, city-ish place. But no. I don't know why Eldon never corrected me when I told people I was excited to move to a real city, because he'd BEEN to Lebanon and KNEW it wasn't a city ... but whatever. :)

Probably all states have fairs, but I associate fairs with country places. There were lots of stinky animals and there was poo on my shoe when I got home (charmed, I'm sure) but it was fun. Chiara loved it, and that's what matters.

 

She loved the horses. "BIG horse, Mamma! BIG horsey!"

 

Terrified of the llamas. I could not for the life of me get her to get near it. You can't see her face in this picture, but I took it just before she screamed and ran back and hid behind my legs. All the other kids were so excited to touch the animals and feed them that gross $2 crap you can get at the gate ... but mine clung to my pants the whole way through. AND, lucky for us, you couldn't just go back out the way you came, you had to exit at the other end of the yard, so it was more of a haunted house experience for Chiara than a petting zoo. Maybe someday she'll like animals. But in all honesty, I don't like them either ... so maybe it's genetic.

We're surrounded my fun, cool stuff and all our girls wanted to do at one point was sit in the middle of the path and read the books we brought from home. Amanda and I just laughed ... toddlers are totally unpredictable. Jordin, by the way, is Chiara's FAVORITE friend. She talks about her every single day. :)

So tired on the way home. It was a long day ...made even longer when Amanda and I couldn't figure out how to get OUT of the fair and walked a million circles following their very VERY sub-par map. My heck. Seriously, we walked around for an embarrassing amount of time before we finally found our exit. The girls were gone, we were done, and it was all we could do to just not throw our OWN fits of frustration. :)

Blue juice from the gas station on the way home. It was like a 45 minute drive, and Mommies needed beverages. :)

Love it! Like the nail polish? Turns out it's SUPER tough to get glittery nail polish off little fingernails. 

She was too distracted by the uber talented boys-hitting-trash-cans group on stage to look at the camera. :)

The only thing that could have made the day better (other than not getting lost) would have been if Daddy could be there too. For now he just has to watch the videos and look at the pictures when he gets home.

Lebanon, My Love

We are in heaven here. Well, let me toss out a little disclaimer that it's hot with no AC, we have raucous neighbors living above us, and the only non-thrift store store in town is Walmart ... but we love it. We have fun friends, a clean apartment, and a stellar library. What else could a mommy need?

Here's a random collection of pictures. I'll have to take some that paint more of a picture of our world here, but for now Chiara has two sets of grandparents (and a great grandma!) who are dying for ANY pictures of her. :) 

I could use a little more husband, actually, but I have to really praise Eldon on this one. When he's home, he's home, and that means he's 100% Daddy and Husband. So we don't get too many hours with him, but they're good hours. When he comes home I become chopped liver and Chiara is only interested in him. :)

He does this with her for as long as she wants ... that's why he gets those impromptu kisses.

In other news, Chiara has glittery princess shoes that she wants to wear every minute of the day. I got them a size too big, so they fit over these jammies that are at least one size too small. But hey, if she insists on wearing the polka dot kitty jammies it is fine with me. Sooo not a battle worth picking. She's still groggy from sleep, and yet she has found the energy to don her princess shoes and her purse full of sparkly beads.

The on-demand smile. I have no idea where she picked up this cheesy grin, but I hope she'll show the camera her real face at some point during her childhood.

 

This is not it. :) But because I'm excessively classy, let me add this picture. We chose not to bring our TV to Oregon, deciding that we don't need one and don't want to need one. What I hadn't foreseen was the awkwardness of a sick baby who wants to lay down, watch Princess and the Frog, and drink ice water (she orders ice in her sippy now, btw). I brought the laptop into the living room, hooked up a monitor, and put the monitor on the very chic, couch-matching ottoman. It was either that or make her a nest in a camping chair in the office. She wasn't a big fan of the nest idea.

This is the sweatshirt my mom got for Chiara the first day we took her to the beach and I hadn't packed warm clothes for our California vacation. So now every time she sees it she wants to wear it because she thinks she's going to the beach. I tried to capture her excited face right before the crushing disappointment of not actually going to the beach. She always clasps her hands with joy ... I love that. :)

We're settling into a routine now, which is nice. Play groups and grocery shopping and naps have all kind of been shaken around until they settled nicely into my days. Thank goodness there are so many other medical student wives with kids, because we get together all the time. This town is heavy on the elderly population, so I'm grateful for other moms with two-year-olds Chiara can play with. 

In fact, I just agreed to tend a little girl a few months younger than Chiara while her mom goes to nursing school. Her mom and I met through a mutual friend and we're so similar and our girls like each other so much that I thought I'd try it. I'm hoping it's a wonderful thing for Chiara, who would rather play with other kids than do anything else in her entire life. Juice and books and even Elmo pale in comparison. :) We'll see.

Eldon is really enjoying school. I love watching him work so hard intellectually because he's in his element and it makes him happy. He's stressed and stretched to new limits, but it's in a good way. Chiara loves to sit on his lap and "read" one of his anatomy books, pointing to pictures and hearing him explain what things are and how they work. She runs to the bookshelf to get it and brings it to him. She did that once with me, but I don't think she was overly impressed with my explanations.

"Yeah, Honey, look ... that's like a big circle with pink on the edges and some, squigglies in the middle." 

"Op, yep, that's the tummy I think." 

"Uh huh ... I don't know." 

"Maybe that part goes down and this part goes up." 

"I don't know, Honey."

Anyway, she doesn't bring me the anatomy book to read anymore. :) But she is very fascinated by the idea that there is a baby in my tummy. She rubs it and kisses it and talks about it all the time. At first she was convinced there was also a tiny baby in her own tummy, but now she knows there is only food in here.

"Food in here!" she says, pointing to her belly. "And food in there." Pointing to Eldon's. "Baby in there!!" she yells, pointing to mine. 

Tonight we were asking her what the baby's name should be and she would carefully repeat each name. When we had her say Auden she said it so tenderly and then bent over me (I was sitting on her floor) and hugged my stomach for a long, long time. It was so darling. Not that we're choosing that name or anything, but it was an adorable reaction reserved only for that name. :)

Speaking of Baby #2, who we now know is officially a girl, here's a scan of the picture the tech gave me. They gave a friend of mine three pictures, so I don't know why we only got one, but whatever. :) She was smiling, seriously, when they did a close-up of her face. It was the cutest thing. I took this picture to the medical school after my appointment to show Eldon. Then he brought me into the lecture and his friends passed the picture around and whispered their congratulations while the professor was up there showing slides of different people and cultures and describing their different approaches to "medicine" and healing. It makes me jealous, actually, that Eldon gets to learn such cool stuff while I write the ABCs over and over in different colored markers at home. :) I would never trade roles with him, but I do miss school sometimes. Only the good classes, though.

Chiara is learning so much so quickly, I think we laugh about something new she says every single day. Last week she figured out the word "scared" and told us she wasn't scared of dogs, or bugs, or whatever she happened to see at the moment. Then we woke up one morning and there was a mosquito hawk on the wall above the kitchen table. 

"I not scared the buggy my head! I not scared the buggy my head!" she told us, as she covered her head with her hands. Brave words, but the panic in her voice gave her away. :)

Then the next morning I was making pancakes at the stove when a big black spider creeped from behind the microwave, down the wall behind the stove. I yelped and kind of ... flung myself out of the kitchen.

"Mommy, scared pancakes?" Chiara asked me, her big blue eyes full of concern. She rubbed my arm with her hand. "Scared pancakes, Mommy?"

"No, Honey," I laughed. "Mommy's not scared of pancakes." Eldon and I laughed about that all day. She's just such a sweet, delightful child. I am so in LOVE with this stage where she can tell me what she's thinking. For one thing, because it's adorable and for another ten things because her thoughts are so hilarious.

Another example:

"I need food, Mom!" with panic in her voice.

"Okay, Baby, what do you want?"

"I want pancakes."

"Okay, you can have pancakes." She LOVES pancakes.

"I want pancakes. I want pancakes in my mouth." 

"Okay, Sweetest," I laugh, leading her into the kitchen. "I'll make you a pancake to put in your mouth."

I fully recognize that life is going to hit us hard again at some point, that trials are bound to come. But I am so, SO in love with our life right now. Just how it is. We're all so happy and healthy and hopeful ... it's just good. Life is good. It's good when it's hard too, but it's also good when it's not. :)