Vibrant

I haven't done You Capture in so long or uh, blogged in general, but I was on the Sephora website searching for the name of the vibrant blue toenail polish I'm sporting right now (no pictures, because feet are gross) when I remembered that today was You Capture. Except that it was actually yesterday, but hey, better late than never. I wish I could show you photos of beautiful, vibrant flowers, but Indiana still thinks it's winter. Shane took Luke to the store Monday and since he can't say no, Luke came home with this vibrant lollipop...which this little imp promptly stole. Leaving his patient big brother with only this small piece and his mommy with approximately twenty feet of sticky hand prints to clean off the wall.

Chilled

Although it's only 39* outside, I just walked out to get the mail shoeless, because I miss the feeling of grass beneath my (unpolished, because why bother?) toes. This winter seems to be long, longer than most. I'm sure I say this every year, but I can feel the cold seeping into my bones. I can never get warm, even in layers, even under blankets, even in a warm bathtub.
I want nothing more than flip flops, sitting in the grass soaking sunlight into every ounce of my body, playing at the park, smelling the flowers.


I wonder when I'll get to dig my hands into the dirt and plant this sweet geranium? I'm starting to feel like we're living in Narnia, where it's always winter and never spring.

Love in the time of nachos

Yesterday out of nowhere, Shane said, Was last year our fifth anniversary? Is this June going to be our sixth? Did we not do anything special last year? Thankfully because of this blog, I was able to look back and see that we went out for sushi, which isn't a big thing but was perfect for us. Especially since we promptly forgot that we did anything at all.

Lately I've been so happy and content with our marriage. Of course we fight and sometimes he annoys me and all the time he snores so loud that I consider smothering him in his sleep. But. He also gives me butterflies after all these years and makes me dinner every night and gave me two beautiful boys. I'm really very lucky.

What do YOU think love is? Love for me is this one thing in particular. When I eat nachos, I like to soak the chips in the cheese so when I eat them, they're all soggy and soaked in cheese. It's the best way to eat nachos, in my opinion. When we're out together, at the movies or maybe a ball game, if Shane buys nachos, he ALWAYS puts a chip in the cheese for me so it'll be nice and soggy by the time he pays and sits down. Silly, right? But I never have to ask him or say it, he just does it because it makes me happy. Soggy nachos might not seem like love, but they are.

To all the parents who have a baby that will not sleep:

First of all, come over here and let me hug you and tell you that I understand. And that it will pass, I promise. I don’t know when, but you’ll make it through this.

I’m not going to tell you how to get your baby to sleep, because I know maddening it is when people give you suggestions and they don’t work. Or when people tell you what worked for them, and you want to try because you have tried that and it doesn’t work for your baby and what’s wrong with your baby because it worked for that other baby and then suddenly, inexplicably, you HATE every single person in the world who is sleeping or who has a baby who will sleep.

Ahem. Or maybe that was just me? Let me tell you about my baby who wouldn’t sleep. When he was born, I was so happy because he slept for three hours stretches, he would eat, and then he would fall back asleep. I was all, This new baby is awesome! He eats and then falls back asleep! Then he grew. I kept waiting for the sleep stretches to get longer, only they didn’t. I used to put him down for the night and he’d be up for the first feeding at midnight. I knew that if I went to bed at 9, I could get three hours of sleep. After midnight, he would be up every hour on the hour, until 5AM when he would be wide awake. Shane would take him from 5 until 7, when he left for work, and I learned to live off of those two hours of sleep. Then one night, I went out with friends, thinking I could get home at 11:30 to be there for Tommy’s first wake up. Only when I pulled in the driveway at 11:30, Shane was sitting up with him. Apparently he woke up at 11 that night. From that point forward, his first wakeup started coming at 11, after which he’d be up every hour, until wide awake at 5. This went on for a few weeks, until his first wakeup starting coming at 10, followed by every hour until he was wide awake at 5. When I’d hear him cry out for the first time, it was almost physically painful, because every night I’d think, “Maybe this is it. Maybe tonight will be the night.” I wanted to cry, to pull a pillow over my head and pretend that it wasn’t happening. I used to fantasize about checking into a hotel room just to sleep without interruptions. I used to cry because I felt like a tired zombie, because I couldn’t muster up the energy to play with my well-rested toddler.

I learned to avoid Twitter and Facebook in the mornings, to avoid the moms gleefully announcing that their children, babies younger than mine, slept through the night. Or worse yet, to avoid those who were complaining because their kids “only” slept ten or eleven hours (please, for the love of all that is holy, STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS). Tommy sleeps through most nights now, but it took awhile. Even now, we still consider ten hours to be a victory. Many nights, he’s up in the middle of the night and if we make it until 5AM, we feel good about that night. He’s high energy, high needs, and simply doesn’t need to sleep as much as other kids do. Maybe you have one of those babies. Maybe yours will learn to love sleep someday. I don’t know, but I can promise you that it will get better. I won’t tell you what we did or didn’t do, because I know that those tips and tricks might not work for you, that those tips and tricks might make it even worse. I can’t tell you when it will get better, because I don’t know, but it will. Someday, you’ll feel human again.
From one former sleep-deprived zombie to another, I promise.

Lifey:

I keep accidentally hitting the colon instead of the period on my phone, then I try to brush it off like it was intentional.

Lately life has been full of all sorts of lifey stuff, like using the wrong punctuation and trying to roll with it because you don't know what else to do. Like finding out that one of your very best friends had a pregnancy loss at 13 weeks and how can you NOT be with her, but then the same day you plan to visit, your youngest breaks out in head to toe hives from a suspected pineapple allergy? So, you roll with it and go visit your bestie, but then you miss your exit and end up driving forty miles out of your way ending up in the middle of the University of Illinois campus and you're thinking, What's with all the drunk college kids wearing green? Only to learn that it's unofficial St Patrick's Day and so, it takes you even longer to go hug your bestie.

But! You finally get there and hug and hug and hug and eat pizza and you make her laugh and rub her legs and look at pictures of her baby and then of course, it starts to thunderstorm so you bid her a difficult goodbye and start the 2.5 hour drive home. Of course, you're exhausted and need to put gas in your car, but the credit card reader isn't working at the first gas station you stop at and the rain is coming sideways at this point, so you drive to the next one where the credit card reader is thankfully working. Only you step in a giant puddle and soak your yoga pants, but at least you have gas in the car. Your entire drive home, the rain pours sideways so hard that you really can't see that well so you end up driving under the speed limit THE ENTIRE TIME. And then, you finally get home after 11 but you're so keyed up from the drive that you can't sleep until after midnight. Then your super sweet husband lets you sleep in the next morning, only the phone rings at SIX FORTY FIVE IN THE A-YEM and so much for sleeping in, then you get the kids ready for a birthday party only the hives come back so you only take one and worry about the other and you're so tired that your head feels like it's stuffed with cotton and of course, OF COURSE, it starts to snow so hard that it's a white out on your drive home from the birthday party and you're supposed to go to another birthday party that evening, only you fall asleep on the couch for ten minutes because you're so tired and your baby crawls into your arms and cries because he's covered in hives and his skin hurts.

Of course, there's no sleeping in on Sunday, instead it's filled with family stuff which is good and bad but mostly frustrating and oh, the hives are still there. So on Monday morning, you think, it can't be Monday and you go downstairs to get coffee only to discover that the clock was wrong so your coffee automatically brewed at 11PM, making it ice cold and seven hours old and seriously, is it really Monday already? But it IS and your kid still has hives so you call the doctor at 8:45 and mention that the hives are still there and they're itchy and generally just jerks and you wait all day for a call back from the doctor that doesn't come until six in the evening, by which point you've uttered more choice words about the doctor than you care to recount.

And then finally, the day is over and you try to write a blog post about the frustrations of the last several days, but it's so frustrating that you throw grammar rules out the window and inexplicably write in a second person because it's much easier to leave out the swear words if you pretend it happened to someone else.