I have moved this site to a new home filled with many wonderful features that make me smile. It is also totally redesigned!!!! Yippee!!! You should come visit me at my new site: Life As Lou .

Hope to see you there :-) Also. . .I have updated my blogroll on the new site, I hope you'll update to my new little corner of the internet. . .and tell your friends :-)

(Yes, that's a shameless plug to hopefully drive more traffic to my new site. . .humor me. . .I could have an incurable disease. . .)

When I had Maggie I decided I wasn’t going to start her on solids until she wanted them. I wanted to keep this baby a baby as long as possible, and in all honesty, starting solids just causes more work for me. There is nothing as easy as whipping out a breast and being done with it. No prep, no clean up, just instant lunch. I was hoping Maggie would be content with this until she was one. She isn’t.

When we were traveling she grabbed a cracker out of my hand and went into a state of joyful delirium gumming it until it melted and crumbled and I had to fish the tiny pieces out if her mouth with my finger. When I took the remnants away from her, she burst into a well executed torrent of tears that told me not only was she miffed at losing the cracker, but my little angel had discovered the art of manipulation. As soon as I gave her a new cracker my sunny baby reappeared. By the end of the three hour flight I had an entire package worth of soggy cracker bits on my tray table and a daughter who now knows I will give her whatever she wants if she just whimpers.

On our first trip to the commissary after returning home I picked up rice cereal and some carefully selected first foods for Maggie. I have this theory that if I start them out with veggies they will be more likely to accept them in the future. If I start them out with fruit, all they will want if sweet stuff and they’ll never learn to appreciate the flavorful and more nutritionally sound vegetables. I did this with Jonas when he was a baby and it worked according to my hypothesis until I started Jonas on fruits.

I made the gross error of choosing a baby food called Blueberry Buckle as Jonas’ first fruit. I figured it was a good choice since blueberries are loaded with antioxidants and very, very good for you. I assumed that Blueberry Buckle was just a cute name for pureed blueberries. It is actually a cute name for blueberries in which the first ingredient is sugar. Why Gerber even manufacturers infant desert food is beyond me. Anyway, Jonas adored the Blueberry Buckle. In fact, it was all he would eat for the next three days until, on a whim, I looked at the label and realized I was pumping my kid full of sugar. Now I read labels.

For Maggie I chose green beans, sweet potato and pears, to be introduced in that order. So far we’ve done the rice cereal, which she passionately loves (gag), and green beans which cause her to shudder and contort into hilarious expressions. Since we kept laughing at her faces, she kept eating the offending beans. With every nasty mouthful she gave us a look that clearly said, “What is this stuff?” Then she would laugh, blow green bean raspberries at us, and take another bite. Once I got enough pictures to keep me laughing for a long time, we quit torturing her with the green beans and brought the yummy rice cereal back (I’m not that mean.) I guess we’ll try the sweet potatoes next.



She Likes Her Some Rice Cereal. . .



Not So Much With The Green Beans. . . And, yes, that is a "spit happens" bib.

Last night I laid awake in bed trying to make sense of a disturbing situation I found myself in a week ago. I wanted to drop by an old friend’s home while I was visiting North Dakota. It’s been almost five years since I’ve seen this couple, but they were very dear to my heart and they played a pretty important role in my life when I was in high school. My mother had run into one of them and he extended an invitation for me to just drop on by when I was in town, so I did.

When she opened the door I almost didn’t recognize her. I thought that perhaps she had just slept in, and that was why she was in her bathrobe looking a bit disheveled. I didn’t care, I was just excited to see her. It took only a second or two to realize that was not what was going on. She rocked back and forth, nervously shifting her weight from side to side. She looked frightened, the way you would expect to see an hunted field mouse look when the hawks were circling above. She asked me to come back when her husband was home. When I asked when that would be she responded with a panicked, “I don’t know.”

I had heard that she had spent time in a hospital for depression shortly after I had graduated, but I never heard what the outcome was. I assumed all was well now, but it wasn’t even close. She looked like she had experienced a complete breakdown. The woman I knew wasn’t at the door. I don’t know where she was. I don’t even know if she recognized me. I wanted to reach out and hold her the way you would hold a frightened child, but I felt that my very presence was scaring the hell out of her. It was like the cat trying to comfort the canary, so I left.

I’ve only seen things like this in the movies. To see it in real life, in a person who I knew, shook me, and shook me hard.

I can’t help but wonder what happened and ask why. You can talk to me about chemical imbalances and personality disorders til you are blue in the face, but why? Why? How does a woman who was so full of love and joy and music just disappear? I can’t help but wonder if it could happen to me.

I’ve had anxiety issues for years, and mostly they are dealt with. Occasionally I have a mild panic attack, but things are basically under control. What happens if one day you have a panic attack and it just never stops? What happens when you simply stop thinking rational thoughts? How do you get out of there?

To my friend, wherever you are, I miss you.

Maggie hit six months on our trip. She's growing up so fast.

- I realize that the Rescue Hero toys and shows are trying to promote the everyday, nonviolent heros like fire fighters and doctors, but in the whole grand scheme of things, is it freakier to have someone shooting at you or is it worse to have your house picked up by a twister and thrown into the ocean? Just asking.

- Maggie is eating rice cereal. The first box I opened had a bug in it. Yum Yum. Gerber is sending people to inspect the commissary food storage and also sending me several coupons. They had better be good coupons.

- My Pampered Chef stoneware bar pan broke, and my food chopper melted in the dishwasher, and I called for free replacements exactly one week before the warranty expired. How perfect is that? A big whoot-woo to me for saving my receipt!

- I am in the process of overhauling my blog. Expect gi-normous changes soon.

- I got all of my stuff from the Stampin’ Up show I did before my vacation. I made this card today. What do you think?


- I left all of my childproofing gadgets at my parent’s house. Jonas is terrorizing.

- I returned two of the toys Jonas got for his birthday because they really weren’t age appropriate. I got a forty dollar store credit. I bought laundry detergent, stain remover, diapers, and one Rescue Heros guy for Jonas. He’ll never know the difference. Kid has toys coming out of his ears. Asking myself: who spends twenty bucks on a birthday present for a non-relative three year old? The kid is happy with a seventy-three cent matchbox car. I am officially a cheapskate.

- I have been trying to organize the millions of toys we do have. Everything is going into labeled boxes and Jonas may choose one in the morning and one after nap. They must be put away before a new box comes out. I also threw away a few toys, broken stuff and a perfectly good music playing elephant that played so loudly I wanted to rip off it’s head every time Jonas turned it on. I’m fighting back.

- I ate almost an entire devil’s food cake in the past three days.

My little sister, Janice, got married last week. It was beautiful. I have never seen my sister looking so radiant. I even like my brother in-law, Ian As I watched them I couldn’t help but reflect back on my own marriage and the things I have learned in these past few years. My sister is nineteen and seems so young to me. The funny thing is, I was married at nineteen too. I kept watching her and asking myself, “was I really that young?” I don’t believe there is such a thing as too young or too old, or too slow or too fast. It’s just when it’s right.

Those first few years can be really rough on a person when she is trying to figure out how to live with this weirdo who isn’t quite the same person she married. There have been times in the past four years where I have quoted the saying, “Choose your love, then love your choice,” to myself every day. I don’t think anyone gets through marriage without realizing that the person they married isn’t perfect. It can be hard to see past the good when you are engaged; a few months later everything else comes into quick focus. This doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with this person. It means that he is human too. You married him because you saw the good that he had. It’s still there. If it helps, just remember you are probably driving him crazy too.

Another thing that has been interesting is trying to organize your life together. You make so many plans when you are first married. I remember sitting down with Chris a few months after we were married and making a timeline of when we would graduate college and when we would have our kids and how everything would work out. Not a thing from that timeline is even remotely accurate. Even the baby we were expecting came a month early! You don’t expect to have the challenges that will present themselves. Life can throw so much at you. It can be devastating to realize your limitations and irritating to be at the mercy of your spouse’s limitations in addition to yours. We have to constantly verbalize that we are on the same side, because most of the time you are frustrated with the circumstances, not the other person. And, most of the time, the other person doesn’t have much more control over it either. It can be easy to take that natural frustration out on the wrong person, or to take your spouse’s frustration personally.

One thing I wish I had known when I was newly married was how good marriage was going to be after a few years. Life is challenging, and marriage is work, but it is very much worth it. After four years, my husband is my best friend. I want to be with him, even though I am very aware of his flaws and things haven’t turned out as we planned. He knows me, understands my limitations and loves me anyway too. A person needs that kind of understanding and support to deal with everything life is going to throw at you. I’m so glad I have that, and I am happy for Jan and Ian too. Good luck. Just love each other. The other stuff works itself out.

At about 12:15 on the day before we were flying away to North Dakota Jonas curled up in my lap and fell asleep. If we were talking about a normal child, we would say, “How sweet!” but we aren’t. This is Jonas, the boy who stopped cuddling at six weeks old because he had more important things to attend to. If Jonas gets cuddly, I know one thing is for sure. The kid is sick. He can be completely unsymptomatic, but I know he’s sick. On the flip side, it doesn’t matter if he is heaving his lunch onto the carpet, until he snuggles, I consider him healthy.

About twenty minutes later, with feelings of dread, I packed him into the car. I needed to drive to my in-laws’ house and stay the night because they live in the same town as the airport and my flight was leaving at six a.m. We made it a total of six miles before the moaning started and Jonas vomited spectacularly all over the backseat of the car. I pulled over at a Burger King and asked him if he wanted a drink. He pathetically moaned that he was hungry, so I purchased a kid's meal. I offered the drink; he was so weak he dumped it down his front. After toweling him off, I offered the burger; not interested. I offered the fries; no dice. I offered the toy and got a weak smile. “So you just wanted to stop at Burger King for the toy?”

“Yeah.” What do you say to that? After all, the kid was burning up with fever and had just chucked his lunch all over the car. The thing to figure out was weather or not to go home or keep going. Since my tickets were non-refundable, I headed for my in-laws. It’s only an hour away and he can be sick there just as easily as he can be sick at home.

He slept for the majority of the drive, only stopping to puke once. While he dozed fitfully I went through the five stages of grief at lighting speed.

Denial: You know, he is probably just fine. He’s just a pukey kind of kid, he’ll be over this in no time.

Anger: Why does this always happen to me? What am I, a magnet for bad things? Now he’s barfing, but just wait, tomorrow it will be him, Maggie and me stuck in a two foot airplane lavatory going through those little blue puke bags like they’re candy. That’s if they even let us on the plane when they see how disgustingly sick we are.

Bargaining (better known as begging): Ok, God, if you could please just make this all better, I have no problem being sick with the flu for three weeks when we get home, just not on this trip. Please. Please. Pleasepleaseplease.

Depression: I just know we are all going to get this and spend the entire trip sick and I’ll give it to my sister and she’ll be sick on her wedding day. My life sucks.

Acceptance: At this point I managed to stop freaking out and adjust my attitude to the only attitude that can serve a person well in this situation. This is the attitude of BRING IT ON! Because, really, what else can you do? You fire yourself up, tell yourself that you so totally rock and of course you can manage a vomiting, miserable two year old on an airplane for five hours. You can even do it while you are puking at the same time, because you know what? You are that good. You are Super-Mommy. Bring it on! (Cue theme music from Rocky.)

Luckily for me, I never had to find out if I really had that in me. Jonas puked a few more times at my in-laws’ and was happy by bedtime. Maggie and I never caught the amazing six hour flu. We are truly blessed.