Alright…two major gripes.  I tried to just suck it up, but these are BOTHERING me a lot.

The famed DC-area Eye Center with Dr. Boutros:  I received LASIK surgery in January 2001 and loved it.  LOVED IT!  I told everyone I knew to get LASIK.  EVERYONE.  After my surgery and the initial follow-up appointments, I tried to go every year…mostly because I was still in the habit of going yearly after wearing glasses and contacts for ten or twelve years.  I asked one of the optometrists a few years ago if I still needed to go yearly, since my vision was great, and she told me every 18 months would be fine.  That was December 2004.  Meanwhile, Life happened, and as in most cases, I forgot to make my appointment for June 2006.  In fact, I didn’t remember to make an appointment until a few weeks ago when I started having trouble seeing well while driving at night.  I go in, and sure enough, my vision changed (although I had both the technician AND the optometrist tell me that it might be because I was still nursing Cooper…don’t know how, but whatever).  The doctor tells me that it’s a minor change, but not really enough to warrant corrective lenses (hello, is she the one driving at night after many hours of staring at a computer screen?).  I asked her how bad it had to be before they’d do surgery again, since my vision is guaranteed, and she told me that since it had been so long since I had last been in, that my warranty was void.  WHAT?!?!?!  Supposedly I was supposed to come yearly for check-ups as part of keeping the warranty on my eyes.  People, I honestly do not recall that stipulation…if I had, I would’ve had all sorts of reminders all over the place.  And, if that’s the case, how come I was told by a doctor that every 18 months would suffice?  Or why hadn’t I received a single reminder card EVER in the 7 years I had been attending that practice?  I truly think that they didn’t send reminder cards to help allow people to naturally forget about their yearly check-ups so that they can minimize their chances of paying for someone’s additional corrective surgeries. 

VPI Pet Insurance:  Ginger needs a new hip…or at least a weird sort of corrective surgery that actually removes the ball of the femur to create a false joint somehow (yeah, don’t pretend to understand human medicine, let alone veterinary medicine).  The vet told me it would run somewhere around $800-$1,200.   Yeah, that’s dollars, not pesos.  *sigh*  So I called our pet insurance to see about how much they would reimburse us for the surgery and was told they do not cover hip dysplasia…at all.  I asked the rep on the phone to repeat himself.  No, I had heard correctly.  They will cover all sorts of thing, but not hip dysplasia.  He went on and on about how it’s congenital in many breeds, etc., and I interrupted, hopeful, “but she’s a Boston Terrier…they aren’t susceptible to hip dysplasia, just luxating patellas”.  He said it didn’t matter, and that they don’t cover luxating patellas, either.  So to all of you who have dog breeds where hip dysplasia and/or luxating patellas are prevalent, do NOT get VPI Pet Insurance.  Go somewhere else.  I actually found one company that does cover it, but they won’t cover it for pre-existing conditions (which would be the case for Ginger).  I can’t say that I blame them for having that stipulation.  But I cannot believe that a pet insurance company would not cover one of the most prevalent issues with large dogs.  Obviously if one of the parents has hip dysplasia, the puppies would have a large chance of having hip dysplasia, too.  But hip dysplasia can happen to a puppy that has healthy-hipped parents, just like other birth defects can sometimes spontaneously occur, which is most likely Ginger’s case.  But VPI doesn’t care that my poor pup has arthritis severe enough that she will walk on only her three good legs, and cries when she can’t get up on a couch or bed to be near one of us.  She’s on pain killers right now to help her manage the pain and get her leg muscle built up again, but she’s only 2-1/2 years old and has many many years of life ahead of her.    So shame on VPI, and here’s praying that the vet will allow us to pay them in installments.

Okay…thanks for letting me gripe and complain.

The other week when I was dropping off Cooper at daycare, his teachers were telling me about how Gavin was in the playground and went up to the window of Cooper’s classroom.  I guess he does this nearly every day and they always bring Cooper to the window so that my boys can see each other and laugh at each other.  Well, the other day when Gavin came up to the window, Cooper was sleeping so his teachers told Gavin that Cooper couldn’t come to the window because he was sleeping.  Gavin was so broken-hearted that he burst into tears, crying “I *sob* Need *sob* To *sniff* See *sob* Cooooooopppuuuh!”

As if my kids just couldn’t melt my heart more!

Merry Belated Christmas and such!

We had a lovely Christmas this year, particularly since this was Cooper’s first Christmas! If you are not blinded by the glare from my shiny non-washed forehead, you will see that Cooper is developing a hatred of clothes as presents and his sibling rivalry with Gavin:

All kidding aside, though, it was very nice. And for the first time in a few years, we actually had other people to spend it with. Our friends Eric and Andrea, their son, Peyton, and Eric’s dad, Scott, came by to have dinner and hang out. And they obviously all had a death wish because we cooked a Lithuanian dish, Vitinnis (it wasn’t like I sprung it on them…they knew what was being cooked and they STILL came over…even after I mentioned that my homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover massive coronaries brought on by my cooking).

But the vitinnis were good (we tried to up the health factor by using whole wheat flour, light sour cream, and low sodium bacon), the salad we had to off-set the sludge in our arteries was tasty, I think the appetizers were good, since I didn’t get any, and the pumpkin pie and sugar cookies were excellent! In fact, I still haven’t stopped eating the pie or cookies (or vitinnis…crikey, we were dumb and made it with 3 lbs of meat instead of halving the recipe!). I just got back down to my pre-pregnancy weight, but I think that’s probably blown out of the water by now! Ha ha!

Well, I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas as well, and hopefully I’ll post again before New Years…if not, have a safe and Happy New Year!

Sorry about that folks. Did you miss me? Well, according to my IT department (er, uh, Justin),

“Our web hosting provider has notified us that we are moving to a “bigger better” server, but in order to do that this website will be down. When you ask? sometime between Dec 20 and 22 and the duration will be unknown. So here is your notice and I am crossing my fingers that I don’t loose any pictures!”

I was slow on the draw (and didn’t know what the date was…I thought yesterday was only the 19th), and never got a note out to y’all. But I’m back.

Meanwhile, we got a larger crate for Ginger from some friends of ours, hoping we could help her leg. She’s been favoring her left back leg for a few weeks and we were starting to think it was because we were stuffing her into a crate a little too small for her. Gavin has decided that it is his crate. Wednesday morning he climbed in it instead of putting on his coat to leave in the morning, and stated “I’m going to stay in here” to his father. I was all for leaving him in there with a juice box and his Thomas trains, but Justin coaxed him out and took him to daycare. Later Wednesday night, Justin recorded Gavin singing his own rendition of “Jingle Bells” (with the tag of his pajamas hanging WAY out and Ginger sniffing him) and when Gavin was trying to watch himself sing “Jingle Bells”.

Cooper has been fighting another nasty cough and has almost completely stopped nursing and drinking from bottles and wasn’t sleeping again. Thankfully he’s been still eating his cereal and vegetables (peas, carrots, squash, and now green beans), but it’s a bit troubling that he’s only drinking 1/2 of his bottles all day, and sometimes refuses the bottles outright. So Thursday I called and made an appointment with the pediatrician to rule out ears (sometimes drinking/sucking can hurt if you have an ear infection). Well, that was just a crazy day. Got to work late; ran to the chiropractor during lunch and got there late; got back to work after my appointment late; left the office to pick up Cooper and due to crappy mid-day traffic, got to the pediatrician’s office late, and then Cooper had the audacity to NOT be really sick. Well, he’s sick…he’s got a cold with a nasty gooey cough…but no ear infection or bronchitis. All we can figure now is that maybe it’s teeth. Which is kind of frustrating. You’d think I’d be happy that there’s no infection, but I was actually a little annoyed that it wasn’t anything specific that could be treated. Instead, I got the ambiguous diagnosis that probably drives every mom crazy. So I’ve pulled out the infant tylenol and the teething tablets (which have been like MAGIC!) and we’ll see how he does this weekend…see if I can coax him into taking a bottle better than what he was doing with his teachers all week.

Today Justin brought Ginger into the vet since the bigger crate didn’t help her leg (well, it sort of did, she only hobbled for a few minutes instead of an hour). Turns out the poor puppy has hip dysplasia!!! Check out her x-ray here since I can’t just embed the picture in this article…or put it on my album on Justin’s site and link to it. Obviously I need to consult IT, eh? Well, anyways, Ginger will need surgery…on both hips (since the “good” hip isn’t all that good…just better than the bad hip). Meanwhile she’s on pain killers to help her use her leg again and build up some of the muscle she lost while hobbling around the house (she obviously hid it well for longer than we thought). Seriously. The bake sale is on. I will bake my almost famous apple pies to raise money, and I promise that Ginger won’t lick them too much before I sell them.

Okay, I did some confessing in the past few weeks (i.e. poor parenting skills, poor drinking skills, poor belly control), it must be the time of year…feel the need to get things off my chest. But these are different. At least in my own head…and I spend an awful lot of time in my head lately, where a lot of things sound different, or good, or just plain fan-freakin’-tastic, ala JD on Scrubs. But I digress (my husband did say I should’ve named my site “Sidetracked” instead of “Wine Please”…but whatever, it’s totally my site and I love wine and, oh. Heh). Here is my list of confessions, or maybe they’re really just little facts about me. hmmm… okay, really, here’s the list:

1. I drink, nay, I CRAVE cheap cheap wine, like Livingston Cellars Rhine Wine in the double-sized bottle…for $7.99. I also can appreciate and enjoy more expensive and complex wines, but when the crap hits the fan, I need something I can chug down without hearing my wallet scream. BTW, it is way more fun to not only drink it, but make my wine-snob-I’m-way-into-Reserves-only-husband buy it for me…hee hee! I also usually drink it in a standard rocks glass (or medium juice glass for all you teetotalers). Yeah, that’s how I roll.
2. If we could financially handle it, I think I would really enjoy working in the infant room at my sons’ daycare. I LOVE babies, and since Justin is very against having any more of our own, this might pacify my baby obsession a little. And it has the added benefit of reduced tuition for my kids, I send the babies home with their parents at the end of the day (they aren’t interfering with my sleeping), and no nursing!
3. I despise unions. Sorry to any of you card-carrying members of a union…I just cannot stand them. When I was in high school, I worked at Osco in Indiana and was essentially required to join the union, regardless of the fact that the store automatically gave me a discount (my only benefit as a part-time worker). It pissed me off to no end that I had $4-something a week taken out of my paycheck…since I made slightly over minimum wage at that time, that was about 1 hour’s pay…to the union, who didn’t do a dang thing for me…talk about taxation with out representation! In college, I worked at a non-union Osco and was so friggin’ happy to have my money back. Then, after working several years in a union environment (though not in a unionized position) at a previous job, I have had more than had my fill of those fat cats “working” for the people. They’re damn socialists is what they are, and they turn completely decent employees into lying, scheming, lazy morons, and create a hostile environment of “us versus them” regardless of how much management works to keep the peace. And they rob companies dry with their ridulous contracts…hello, if the company wasn’t goaded into paying for 100% health/dental/vision benefits for union employees and up to FOUR of their dependents, the company might not have to do these friggin’ RIFs all the time.
4. I wish I could be more creative. I mean, I’ll have spits and spurts, but never anything consistent. I think if I had a little more time, I could be creative (i.e. I have knitted some nice blankets and even a sweater for other people’s babies…but am only about 1/8 of the way through Cooper’s blanket…and haven’t even started on one for Gavin). So I guess wishing to be more creative isn’t really a confession…I guess the confession is that I am not consistently creative.
5. I work in telecom, specifically supporting and managing part of the fiber optic TV product provided by a major telecom company. Prior to that, I did reporting, researching, and analysis (among a million other things) for a call center. The part that is usually interesting to most folks is that I have a degree in Religious Studies and a minor in Humanities. The most technical class I ever took in college was my Religious Studies Research Theories class, and that’s only because it required me to use a computer for gathering stats and creating tables.
6. Really, while we’re confessing here, I went through several declared major while in college. Most of my friends never changed theirs, or only modified it slightly (i.e. went from Pre-K Ed to Secondary Ed). But I started off as a Music Education major (think band director), realized I was too lazy to practice as much as required and switched to General Studies (because nothing else seemed appropriate). Thought that was a lame major and tried Secondary Education (think Middle and High school), but after a few classes, didn’t feel that was my true calling and considered Pre-Pharmacy (think head pharmacist in a drug store, or a research pharmacist). I actually held onto this major pretty long…until I couldn’t figure out how to pass Anatomy (yeah, body parts kicked my butt…Ball State has a surprisingly tough nursing/pre-pharm/pre-med program). Then I realized I always enjoyed my humanities classes and really was interested in world religions…so there comes my major and minor. I wanted to be a professor and teach at a college or university, but I haven’t gotten my Masters yet. So maybe someday I’ll actually be able to put my education to good use. In the meantime, it works out well for me that I alone laugh hysterically at religious jokes, because I really get them, and can answer the occassional question about some of the major faiths in the world.
7. I have an obsession with Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies. When I was pregnant, I would eat an ENTIRE sleeve of cookies (with milk, you know, to make it healthy). In like 5 minutes. Really.
8. I am turning into my mother. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing (I love you, Mom!), but when you spend so much of your life trying to find yourself and be your own person, it’s a little disturbing when you find yourself doing and saying the same things that your mother does. Like when Gavin is driving me bonkers with crying and whining and I hear myself say, “STOP the whining! I can’t stand the whining! I can’t understand you when you whine!” or “STOP the crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!” I guess it’s a good thing, then, that Justin gets along with and likes my mom, huh?
9. I like snow. I like it a LOT. I like watching it fall, I like playing in it, I even don’t mind shoveling it. I don’t mind it when I’m driving, I just mind when I’m stuck driving in it with the knuckleheads in this area that were somehow issued drivers licenses.
10. I was born and raised in the southern suburbs of Chicago…though that’s not really a confession. What might be a confession is my lame attempts at trying to hide my nasally Chicago accent, particularly in words that contain the “short O”, “aww” or “ahh” sounds, like coffee, sconce, or ma. I do alright unless I’m tired or drinking…and then Justin starts giggling at me when I talk because I’m all “sangwich” and “braaaaahhhhtwurst” and “da Bears”. Think the Bears fans from the SNL skits.

So what little confessions to all of you have???

Oh, and I’m totally resting on my husband’s laurels again…go see it for yourself (he’s a much more entertaining writer than me) or just look below for the REAL nitty gritty: