Newborn....again

Welcome home sweet little baby. You are so cute, so sweet, so cuddly and lovable. I will love you forever and ever – or until you keep me up all night long.
We decided in January to get a puppy. The kids have wanted one for a long time and my husband, well; he’s a guy, and I think dogs just further increase manhood, so he’s wanted one longer. Our Saint Bernard was supposed to arrive home on February 14th – just in time to say I love you! I had about three weeks to get the house in order, the kids ready, the cats prepared and all the pre-spring cleaning I could do because I knew it would be at least six weeks before I saw a broom again. On February 4th, we got a phone call from the breeder telling us the puppy had seen the vet, Mom was done nursing and we could get him whenever we wanted.
I wasn’t done nesting! My closets were still filled with clutter that I knew would only grow once we added a dog to the mix. There is logic there, but you’d have to be me to understand it. My husband told me to wait a few days and then go get him, but as he was telling me that, I was telling the breeder we’d be right down to pick him up. I was like a kid in a candy store. “You mean, I can take my enormous lollipop home – TODAY? Squeeeee!!!” So we scrapped our dinner plans we’d had with my mother to celebrate her birthday, and instead, being the loving being she is, she helped us by going to the pet store to buy dog food and dog bowls.
I was taken back to the week before our first daughter was born. You know, that time when you read every magazine and talk to every mother you know to find out what you should pack for the hospital, and instead of taking a few ideas from each person, you are sending your husband out to the store with three pages of things you just know you’ll need from magazines (because you’ll be so bored) to lollipops (because they don’t let you eat – ever) and new underwear because you don’t realize the hospital provides those really neat webbed underwear. I suddenly realized this puppy would need to eat and though he might like Cheerios and fruit snacks, they weren’t the best choice for a pure bred Saint Bernard puppy. But I had no clue what was appropriate. Then I realized I had no place for him to sleep, nothing for him to chew on except small children and I was certain that wasn’t appropriate and then lastly, it hit me that the only thing I knew was that I didn’t know anything. It was like the adoption agency called me the day I said I might be interested in adopting a baby and said, we have one, come and get it. Sure I’ve had dogs before, but I also had parents that took care of all of the extra crap that goes with having a dog. And I’ve never had a dog with children, and I’ve never had a dog in the suburbs, and when do they get neutered, and when will he need his shots, and just how big is big, and oh my gosh, whose idea was this anyway? Breathe, just breathe….
My mom has dogs, so I left the necessities to her and trusted that she wouldn’t come home with fruit snacks and a fish bowl. She didn’t fail me. She even let us borrow her crate. Wait…crate! This is new. My dogs were never crated. We just let them run wild. In fact, I once had a Yorkie that tore up an entire Sunday Denver Post and then made sure it covered every carpeted surface of our apartment. It’s obvious I didn’t know a thing about dogs.
Good grief am I a little high strung or what? Jeff laughs at all the scenarios that go through my head, but it is just how I think.
Once all the issues are figured out, we head to Aurora to get our new puppy. He is the cutest thing ever and all my worries go away. All he needs is a little love, some food and a good home, right? We get him home, which was a feat in itself because he wouldn’t sit still on my lap, and then he hid under Arwen’s bench seat in the back of the van for the rest of the drive. Jeff was so patient when he had to pull over so I could sit in the back and make sure he was safe. When we get home, my mom greets us with food bowls, food and the crate which she sets up for us and trains us in the crate training process. It’s pretty late by the time we are all settled and the kids head to bed after shedding lots of tears about leaving our new Sebastian Bach all alone in a crate in the living room. Little did they know!
By the time Jeff and I were ready for bed, I of course, was not ready to leave the dog. But I also knew moving the crate up and down the stairs each day would be too difficult to manage. So I slept on the floor….in front of the crate….with my hand in the crate and the puppy’s chin on my hand most of the night. There was a span of about two hours that I was able to roll away from him and snooze, but basically, as I did with all of my new babies, I was up all night making him feel secure, loved and worrying about his future – and mine because sleepless nights wasn’t really on my agenda.
After two nights of this, I crashed and left Jeff to lie in front of the crate offering support to the sleeping puppy that was probably laughing at us because he has us beat after only three days. I had no idea having a new puppy was so exhausting. On top of not sleeping at night, I had to take him outside to potty every thirty minutes – in the cold and February snow, keep him from biting the kids with those shark like puppy teeth, and make the cats feel loved. My love was spread pretty thin by day three. On day four, a friend brought us her crate so I could sleep in my room again, and suddenly Sebastian started sleeping through the night….then the toddler phase began.

The Positive Spin on You

Rather than complain about you today, I’ve decided to take the positive spin on your actions and decisions. I feel you should be commended for not even grazing my small child as you drove on the sidewalk today. He’s really very little and the sidewalk is so narrow, what compared to the road, it must have been hard to actually miss him. And I’ve been thinking about those two different times you interrupted me to speak to the person I was talking with and I’ve decided that your rants about housing prices was obviously so much more important than whatever nonsense I was talking. And though I usually look down upon people that continuously park in the fire lane, I figure since you are there while I’m releasing one of my three children from school and have the baby with me at all times, really I only risk losing one child should the fire trucks not be able to put the fire out in time as you move your van out of the way. Saving two out of three ain’t bad, eh? And finally, after seeing a child lift her car seat with her when she stood in the car before getting out, I decided after all you should leave your smallest child in the car while you run in to get your middle child. It all goes back to saving two of three ain’t bad. I see now that parking in the fire lane makes your trip into the school so much easier while leaving a small child in an unattended car makes your trip all the quicker. Sure the walk home will suck the day your car and your child are stolen, but you managed to save about ninety seconds by not taking her with you. I get it. I understand. Maybe those firemen will save her when they break your windows to get the hose through your car to put out the fire that may come. Or maybe not. Maybe some random sicko will take your van with your small child left inside and drive away. But no worries…you will still have two more children, and I will be happy to drive you to a field and drop you off after I leave your remaining children at a safe home or the police department. I’ve decided it’s also a great thing that you advertise to everyone that you have left your small child in the car. I hate it when criminals actually have to work to get their jobs done. I constantly hear about how many car doors they had to try before finding the one that was unlocked or before they found the one with the cute little girl left inside. Molesting takes time you see and when they have to waste so much looking for small children, they lose a lot. So I’m sure they are so appreciative of your loud voice carrying all over touting you left your kid in the car. Me, I’m not happy it’s a choice you make, but I also wasn’t happy about almost losing my child to your wheels or your rudeness or even your need to control people you do not know. But since looking at the bright side of you, I’ve decided if I hear you talking about leaving your child in the car again, you just may find the police waiting for you when you return. That would bring a smile to my face and I’m sure the alternative of someone stealing your van and child would be so much worse. Yep, this positive spin is so much more fun when dealing with you.

School drop off

Is it really that hard to be respectful to other people? Are you in such a rush to get to a line that you must put the small lives that entrust us adults to see them through to their own adulthood safely in complete risk and danger? I’ve seen you squeal your wheels and drive on sidewalks so you can be the first to get to the stop sign…to stop and wait. I’ve watched you drive on sidewalks, even had to move my child out of the way of your tires one morning. Why are you in such a rush and why do you not consider the children that are only trying to get to their school safely? Tell me why you open your doors in the middle of the street and push your children out like a helicopter dropping soldiers in the middle of a war zone. Please explain to me why small children have to dodge land mines with Chrysler emblems making their way to the sidewalk while you try to push your way back into traffic fighting for the first car at the stop sign award. And how about those of you that almost pull over to the curb but don’t actually quite make it sitting there with the nose of the car at a small portion of the curb that is open with your ass hanging out in the street for the rest of us to drive around while dodging children that were left in the middle of the road, and your left blinker flashing to let the rest of us know you plan to take your place back in traffic. Are we supposed to go around your back side while you do your war zone drop off forcing the oncoming traffic into the side mirrors of the parked cars along the other side of the street? I just want to know the rules here because obviously my way of driving slowly down the road, stopping to let children cross the street, stopping at the stop sign, and letting my child out with a teacher at the front door is not the correct way. Should I be running over your children to get to the stop sign quicker? Should I be driving though the stop sign as I’ve seen you do? Or maybe while there are basically four lanes of traffic on a small neighborhood street, I should decide to U-turn while my kid’s backpack is stuck in the closing door and while she’s trying dodge the car sized land mines to make her way to the safety of a sidewalk upon which you are driving. Is that the correct way? Will someone for the love of children tell me what the hell is wrong with people, and is this happening at every school? My young children can’t walk safely on a sidewalk without fear they will be pushed along by a Michelin. My oldest daughter feels so uncool because she’s not dropped off in the street like so many other young children. And you all feel you should be honking your horn at a driver who actually stops at a stop sign or pause after stopping to let a child cross the street. I will say this though… Some of your children actually seem to know just how dangerous it is to cross at a stop sign where it should be safest. If there is a child standing there waiting to cross, please include them in the amount of small numbers that run through your mind as you are counting turns until it is time for you to go. If there is a child there…in the cold, wind, rain, sleet, snow or heat…waiting to cross the street to get to school….LET THEM GO! If you were standing there carrying a forty pound backpack and whatever project you had to finish before morning that is larger that you are tall, I am sure you’d appreciate it if the drivers inside the nice cozy warm cars with no more baggage than the cell phone on which they are currently texting would follow the laws, be respectful and let you cross the damn street. Do you think you could show that same respect for the students? It’s just school, folks. It isn’t rocket science or brain surgery. It’s driving on straight streets with sidewalks on either side, two stop signs and a drive way. Not much different than the neighborhoods where you live. It can’t be that hard. And your trip to get to the stop sign to sit and wait or get to the back of the line to sit and wait can’t possibly be that important to you that it’s worth putting children in danger – or making me angry!

Christmas laughs 2008

I always try to get the kids down for their nap around 1 or 1:30 and we all lay in my bedroom and watch a movie and fall asleep. We had planned on dinner at 4:30. At 1:30pm, the kids and I were asleep and Jeff was at the gym working out. The doorbell rang. I woke thinking I heard something, but put my head back down. Then there was banging on the door. The doorbell rang again. More banging. I get up and head downstairs in my Pjs. I was showered and had my make up done, but if I’m at home Pjs are so much more comfy and I still had a lot of cooking to do so I didn’t want to put on my clothes I was planning on wearing when company was here. So there I am in my jammies opening the door while the kids are napping. They had been sleeping for only about 20 minutes and you know, it’s Christmas, so it’s already been a busy day - they needed rest! I opened the door and saw my Mother in law and Brother in law standing there trying to peek in. I opened the door and rudely said, “We’re all napping, we weren’t expecting you until sometime after 3 o’clock.” My MIL just said in her way too loud voice, (man, I need to record her voice one day and post it here so you can here the nails on a chalkboard voice she has….just imagine a whiny high pitched and way too loud irritating voice and that’d be her), “Weeelllll, it’s Christmas.” I just said, “Come on in, I need to make sure the kids are still asleep.” She came in and said something really loud and I about hit her. I just looked at her and said in my best irritated Mommy voice (the one I use with the kids) “Please…keep it down, I said they are sleeping!” Then I went upstairs and they were in fact still sleeping. I stayed upstairs for several minutes, changed my pants and fumed. When I came back downstairs, Jeff was just getting home. After giving him the evil eye, I ignored Nancy and James, and Jeff and I just started planning the meal.

About an hour later, Jeff and James and I are in the dining room putting the leaves in the table and Jeff and I are talking about place settings. There I hear Jeff and James run to the front door and open it and in walk my two very young newly declawed kittens. WHAT? I looked and Jeff and said, “Who let the cats outside?” James immediately says, “Not me.” Jeff has always talked about the Not Me character from the cartoon strip Family Circus. He says he and his dad always used to talk about the Not Me in the house growing up and how his mom and brother would always deny doing anything. So Not Me evidently just left the front door wide open after coming in and going back to the car to get the gifts he was bringing in. Jeff pulled me aside later and apologized for the cats. Not that he did it, but he said when he walked in and I was upstairs still, the two of them were sitting in the living room and the front door was wide open. No big deal, right….it’s just fucking December and freezing outside; who cares if your ass is too lazy to close the fucking door after you come inside. So the cats of course got outside. I feel so lucky they came back. I think it’s because it was so cold and there was snow on the ground, they couldn’t have gone far. (Although Christmas day it was in the 40s) After Jeff told me that, I walked up to James and just said, “You left the front door open!!???!!!??” And walked away….I didn’t give him a chance to even stammer. I was so upset. I went upstairs and fought back tears. I kept telling myself the cats were fine and inside, but knowing what could have happened and how I would tell the kids just drove me to tears. We have coyotes walking through our yard every night. It’s still upsetting for me. But anyway….

Here’s an annoying fact about my mother in law. She has no social skills. She doesn’t know how to start a conversation or when it’s appropriate to say something or even when something doesn’t need to be said. She had a little tidbit of information that for whatever reason she wanted to share with us. Out of the blue she says, “You know it’s been so cold lately, a lot of restaurants have had problems with pipes freezing.” Now, to my knowledge, she knows of only one restaurant that had that trouble, but she didn’t know how to pipe in and just say James told me the Denny’s where he works had their pipes freeze on a cold night. She made it sound like she had taken a poll on all the restaurants in the area and determined that A LOT have had this problem. So being the bitchy hateful person I can be with her, I said, “Really, A lot?” And her reply was of course, “Weeeeellllll. Denny’s in Boulder did.” The she and James got into the story about that one place with frozen pipes and I ignored them both and started talking to my mom and Arwen who were sitting next to me.

A while after Joe got there and started eating he took a shot at her and said to me, “Stephanie, I think you’re cooking has really improved,” then he smiled and chuckled and winked at me. You may recall she said that very thing at Thanksgiving in front of our 12 guests as if to say I really sucked as a cook before but I’ve gotten better. I guess maybe she’s noticed how things taste if you actually prepare and cook them rather than open a can and pour. Later Joe told me that she said something to him about why she’s not having sex. WHAT?? Joe just said he tried to get Jeff’s attention and talk about guy stuff with him. He was laughing when he told me, but I could tell he was embarrassed a bit. He said, I guess she’s noticed me around a lot and she knows your mother and I are dating, so she’s probably explaining why she’s not bringing someone to dinners as well. I told him a few stories like Thanksgiving last year when she asked Jeff and I at Thanksgiving dinner if we were going to go have sex after everyone leaves. I also told him about the time she told me in front of a waitress at breakfast one morning that I’ll have to handcuff Jeff to the bed to keep him home. Then I said, I can glance at her and tell you why she’s not having sex; she doesn’t need to come up with a bunch of lines about how she doesn’t want to go down that relationship road anymore.

The other kind of funny and very annoying thing (at the time) that happened was she told Jeff and I she got Arwen the Barbie Castle dollhouse. I told Jeff we’d just keep it even though we had gotten Arwen a big wooden dollhouse made for the Barbie sized dolls. She never asked us for suggestions and I didn’t want to make her feel bad (hey, I am human) So I said we’d just keep it and Arwen can have two dollhouses….or we’d put that one in the playroom….whatever, we’d deal with it, no biggie. I sent my mom upstairs to see the huge dollhouse we got Arwen because it really is cool. It’s taller than Arwen. Zoe can’t even reach the top floor which is really cute. I knew Nancy wouldn’t go up there because she can’t do stairs, so I figured she’ll never see it and therefore never know that Arwen got two dollhouses for Christmas. Anyway, I told my mom to go look at the one we gave her and not to say anything because Nancy got her a different dollhouse, and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. A few hours later Arwen opens up a Barbie Island Princess vanity. Not a dollhouse…but a vanity. Arwen loves it, so I’m not irritated anymore, but it’s freaking huge! And with the dollhouse, the giraffe and her furniture in her room, I had no idea where we would put a huge vanity. It’s nice and it’s plastic, but it’s like another piece of furniture. My first thought was this is not a dollhouse. My second thought was I thought it was a bit rude to buy something that big and not tell us. It’s like buying drums for a kid and not telling the parents.

When Arwen opened the vanity and Zoe opened her Little people sets, Nancy kept telling everyone how ALL the people in Toys R Us were watching her put these things in her cart and they all had looks on their faces, like ‘how could you afford all of that?’ I thought that was a little pretentious. I mean I know a lot of kids don’t get a vanity or Little People sets for Christmas from a grandparent, but a lot of kids get that and more. So I’m sure not many people in Toys R Us doing their Christmas shopping were looking at her like she was Donald Trump shopping on 5th Avenue. (I don’t remember much about NYC, is 5th in the shopping district?) I mean come on….really, people were looking at you with envy and wondering just how you could afford these three toys….well, four I think they gave Arwen a Barbie too. I haven’t looked up these prices, but I’ve seen vanities before and they are about $70-$80 and I can only imagine there was a sale. Each Little People thing was probably about $30. So let’s say her whole shopping cart was $140. REALLY?? EVERYONE was looking at you as if to ask how can you afford this? It just annoyed me and it was uncalled for…

The last hilarious thing with MIL and BIL was the Wii. I got Jeff a Wii for Christmas. While Jeff and I were cooking, he set it up and they started bowling. Nancy sat in the chair and told James over and over again his mistakes and how to do it. I told Jeff at one point that she sounded just like my four year old. “I know how to do it” when she’s never seen a Wii or the Wii remote before in her entire life. So she kept telling James how to do it and when it was her turn, she practically rolled herself down the lane and right into our TV. She had gutter ball after gutter ball. She threw balls instead of rolling them and every time Jeff tried to tell her how to hold the remote and when to let go of the button, she’d say, “I know how to do it. I have bowled before, you know.” Yep, ‘cause bowling on the Wii is EXACTLY like it is in real life. And I’m pretty sure you haven’t been inside a bowling alley in 20 years anyway! She’s such an idiot!

The Sweetest Little Girl

Tonight I had a few friends over to scrapbook and Arwen had a tough time going to bed. She wanted to read lots of books and wanted to know what I was going to be doing downstairs with the other Mommies. About ten minutes after putting her down, lighting her stars, turning on her moon and leaving her room, she comes downstairs with one Minnie Mouse slipper on one foot and tells me she needs her other slipper before she can go to bed. The two of us go upstairs together and find her other slipper in bed hidden beneath a princess blanket. I bid her goodnight again and head back downstairs to work on the scrapbook I haven't seen in well over a year. I look at the pictures of her from two years ago and wonder with a small tear in my eye who that little girl is in that picture. Before I can recover from the emotion a three year old walking into the kitchen brings me back to the present. She looks around at the faces around here. Faces that she sees a lot, but is probably unsure of since they do not have toddlers attached to them at the moment. She finds my face and says, "I have to go potty" So we head upstairs together again. Now as soon as we get into the bathroom, she tells me she is bothering me, so I have to stand out in the hallway.(Yep, she is bothering me) I peek at her through the door – you can do this with your own three year old – and wait until she's done, pretend like I'm just checking on her, knock on the door and come back in. I ask if she went potty; like I didn't know from peeking, and then we head off into her bedroom. Now you may ask what makes all this so sweet…besides the fact that it is all really sweet. When we get to her room, she tells me "I was looking for a present for you everywhere. In the play room, in your room, in the bathroom, and I can't find a present for you." Now I'm starting to think to myself, as us parents do too often, you are just trying to keep me here a little longer because there are people downstairs. And though I'm not showing it yet, I am starting to feel that little sense of impatience coming on. She continues telling me that she wanted to find a really special present for me but couldn't find one in all the places she looked. Then she grabs Pablo off her bed and says "Here, you can have Pablo." She is the sweetest girl I could ask for. Sure she wanted a little extra attention because she knew I had some extra to give since I was giving it to others that were downstairs. But I got a very special gift, not just Pablo, but a sweet thought from my little girl that my pictures are showing is growing too fast! Now Pablo and I must head to bed – I do fear a small meltdown if he is not found in bed with me in the morning!