Aw…Thanks for the nice compliments about my hair…you gals are all so sweet! And yes, Justin does have his redeeming moments…yesterday morning just happened to be one of them and I was feeling warm and fuzzy enough from the coffee to mention it. Now if he could’ve reminded me (1) before dinner, (2) after dinner, (3) before I ran out to the store at 8:30pm last night, (4) after I arrived home at 9:45pm last night, (5) before or after I made the baby’s bottles, or (6) anytime before 10:30pm that he still needed some white socks, I would totally let him off the hook. But um, getting a reminder at 10:30pm when I’m going to bed for the first time in weeks before 11:30pm was not cool. Especially since he does have the knowledge and physical capacity to start his own load of white socks and t-shirt and could’ve had them nearly done by the time I arrived home from the store. But instead, I got the “um, I still need white socks.” I look at him blankly, thinking, “is he FOR REAL? He’s kidding, right? I’m gonna open the laundry room and see that he did his own socks and is just teasing me.” Nope. So I start a small load of socks and t-shirts for him, then sit up reading until the washer finishes somewhere around 11:15pm, throw the clothes in the dryer, and go to bed at 11:22pm. And I better not hear one joke about that I actually did get to bed before 11:30pm because those 8 minutes do not mean crap in my book.

About an hour later, I hear Cooper up whining and talking to himself. I pull the covers over my head and will him back to sleep. No dice. He keeps talking and moaning and whining. Finally around 1:30am, after he’s had a good hour of entertaining me, he gets annoyed and decides he’s hungry. I get up, feed him, rock him for a while (he seemed really restless and I was not willing to bring him back to my bed), and got back to bed around 2:20am. I was not a happy camper this morning. Which is why I’m still whining instead of giving you some snarky letters to my fellow DC-area drivers. Okay. I’ll shut up now and not get into the conspiracy theory I have about Cooper changing alliances and now partnering with Justin in his attempt to keep me ridiculously sleep deprived. Just please excuse me if you hear any yawning or overt B-n-M (bitching-n’-moaning…not to be confused with BM, which is a nice way of say “poop”).

Dear Cancer Cultivator in the Silver Prius:

We have a lot of you little “green” cars around here. And I love it. I love that all of you have gone out and bought your hybrids for the sake of the Earth and your gas budgets. Virginia loves it so much that they give you cool “Clean Fuel” license plates and allow you the privilege of driving in the HOV lane by yourself! What I don’t love is that while I’m behind you in my little car, you are chain-smokin’ like a man on death row! I actually saw you light your new cigarette with the old one! (please, I’m crabby, no remarks about how close I was driving at 60+mph) The traffic wasn’t even all that bad…I’d hate to see what you do when there’s an accident and they close down 3 lanes. I am of the belief that all the smoke you had billowing out of your car windows completely negated your hybrid vehicle and that you should be banished to the regular travel lanes where the 30mph speed more warrants your anxiety-ridden chain-smoking.

Sincerely,

A Concerned (about my lungs) Driver

Dear Clueless Lady in the Red Jimmy:

Please, please, please, for the love of all that is sacred and holy (and whole), get your brake-lights fixed. You have to be aware from all the chronic brake-screeching behind you that you lack any sort of warning lights letting drivers behind you know that you are slowing down. I’m sure the gentleman in the Nissan between us would agree since he very nearly climbed into your back-seat. At first, I thought that maybe this was a new issue and you might possibly be on your way to get your brake lights repaired this very instance until I noticed that besides having expired license plates, your state inspection tag appears to be a bit over-due as well, meaning that more than likely you been having a great ol’ time watching in your rear-view mirror as the drivers behind you bug their eyes out in panic at your quick stops, like at that light where it just turned yellow as you approached the intersection. Any TRUE Virginia driver will tell you that you can run 6 or 7 cars through the intersection AFTER it’s turned red. Stopping is just a suggestion, not a requirement. And in your case, you (and the rest of us driving behind you) would be better off if you did run a few stale yellow (or even red) lights once in a while.

Kindest Regards,

A Concerned (about my front bumper) Driver

Dear Very Important Parent at my Sons’ Daycare:

I appreciate that you are in a hurry to get to your job and that the rest of us are simply schmucks. I understand that your need to park improperly supercedes any of the rest of us who need to park to drop off our children, because you are a VIP. I totally get it that I was out of line by getting out of my vehicle and trying to retrieve my baby from his carseat in the backseat while you were in the building and not-yet-in-your-car. So in light of your VIPness, I hope you appreciate the scratch down the side of your car from when you opted to walk out of the building, smile at me, hop in your car, start it up, and put it in reverse while I was still retrieving my child from my car. That scratch was a special gift from my car door to you. I guess I should also thank you for allowing me to quickly slam my back door and hop around behind my car before you popped off your passenger-side mirror and/or slammed my own door on my baby and me. That was incredibly decent of you and I hope you saw the gracious words of thanks coming from my lips.

Warmest Thoughts,

A Glad (to be alive? to have my car paid-off? to not have my baby caught in the car door like a white t-shirt? ) Driver

 

Hope everyone has a blessed Good Friday and a Lovely Easter!

Or:  If You Complain About Your Child, They Will Stop the Annoying Behavior in an Attempt to Make You a Liar.

Yep…Cooper slept through the night last night.  Only one time did he scream, and that was at like 11pm and I was still up, so it only made me cringe a little (and will him back to sleep).  When I went to check on the kids for the night before I went to bed around 11:30pm, I took off my slippers and freakin’ tip-toed into his room around to the head of his crib so he couldn’t see me, people!  I was that desperate to make sure he wasn’t awake when I checked on him and added a couple blankets to keep him cozy since we were getting a nice windstorm.  And he slept.  He slept until about 7:30am with no other peeps besides the occasional cough.  Stinker.

Meanwhile, since we were getting the above-mentioned windstorm, I was up half the night…like every time it sounded as if the siding was being pulled off from behind my head.  The way our house is situated, our bedroom is on the southeast corner of the house, so we rarely hear any actual wind noise…just my wind chimes blaring away on the porch below.  The kids, however, both have their bedrooms along the north wall of the house and the wind just HOWLS past and makes a right racket.  Not to mention that I suspect that the two pieces of siding that were a bit loose from the last windstorm may have possibly been peeled off (they were up so high that we’d need a 30-foot ladder to fix, which means renting one from Lowe’s or something like that, because I am not too keen on paying someone $50 or more to just snap them in like legos when we could do it ourselves…or actually Justin could do it since I am scared of heights).

In the morning, I hear Justin’s alarm going off at 5am so that he can go work out.  I nudge him and make sure he’s awake, and he shortly thereafter gets up and ready to go to the gym.  Just as I’m dozing back off, that man turns on the overhead light and starts interrogating me about a missing white sock.  He’s peppering me with questions regarding laundry and whites, and he’s only got one white sock left, and I think he said something else.  All I know is that I whined back something to the effect of “I folded the laundry; don’t know if there’s any socks in the dryer; I suck because I don’t know what’s in the dryer; wear a black sock instead because they’re both the gold-toe brand so at least they’ll compliment each other.”  Mercifully he turned off the light and left me alone.  About an hour later he comes back in the room and calls to me, and I growl back “what?!?” and wonder how accurately I could throw the TV remote at him.  Instead of another interrogation or blinding lights, he grabs my hand and places a Grande Honey Latte in my hand.  Needless to say, all is about 99% forgiven (sorry, Justin, that blinding you gave me was pretty reprehensible!  I’m holding about 1% against you).

In other updates…you will not be seeing any pictures of Gavin in green since he deemed keeping his clothes clean and dry a non-priority on Monday.  By the time Cooper and I arrived home, that child was already in his pj’s.  So you will have to make-due with the pictures that are already there on that post. 

As for my hair, here are a couple pictures, as promised.  Please don’t laugh at my dirty mirror or my kid’s snotty face:

it actually looked a lot better 10 minutes prior…dang wimpy hair! 

But the color’s been corrected and the bad ends taken off and looks much better on my 5′1″ frame than hair 8 inches longer.

First and foremost, I need to get some Thank-You’s out there.  I’ve been a bit lax in the gratitude department.  I want to say thanks to LaskiGal at From the Cheap Seats for hearting my little blog:

I’m not quite sure who to pass this along to, since it seems nearly everybody that I regularly read has it already (and rightly so!). So I guess I will give to my entire blogroll since I <3 all of you enough to read you (nearly) daily.I’d also like to do a big ol’ shout-out and hug to Flea at Flea’s World for the Bible Story book, Nana’s Bible Stories written by Roberta Simpson. I entered her contest, and HOLY COWS (yes, plural, since I’m talking about Fred and Bessie), I actually won! Okay, really, my kids actually won. But I cannot wait to be able to read the stories to them. Hopefully Gavin doesn’t rename any more of the Biblical Patriarchs.

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I’m sure we’re not alone in this, but I’m starting to feel like a crazy woman because of it:  Cooper screams in his sleep at night.  Usually this happens when he’s overtired (read:  every night).  I’ve been trying to work with the wonderful teachers in his classroom about forcing him down for naps to help (because this rarely occurs on weekends when he gets his two naps), but it seems that this stubborn child refuses to sleep more than an hour or so at daycare with any regularity.  I’m considering spiking one of his bottles or containers of food with benadryl, but uh…thought I’d poll the Interwebs for any other ideas.  Now, for a little background:

• Cooper has never been a good sleeper, which is frustrating enough since Gavin spoiled us by sleeping through the night by 6 weeks.
• When he’s woken himself up with his own nocturnal screams, we have tried rocking him back to sleep, singing, walking around with him, and can only get him to quiet down if we feed him (and by “we” I mean “me”).
• I tried letting Cooper “cry it out” a little, but he’s already so wound up and ticked-off that he ends up waking up Gavin, too, which is no easy feat.  Then we’re all unhappy and I have two kids crying.
• They have a hard time getting Cooper to sleep at school unless he’s in one of the swings (which doesn’t help my plight at all, but hey, I’m not trying to care for 13 kids between the ages of 3 months and 12 months).  I may have to get tough and ask them to put him in the crib because at home he naps without any problems–give him his binky, a blanket to snuggle, rock him a minute or two, and lay him on his side in his crib.
• I stuff him so full of food at dinner that he sits there with his tongue all lolling out like an over-stuffed pug: 




• He usually gets up around 7 or 7:30am and goes to bed around 8pm.  I thought about getting him up earlier, but um, that would mean I have to get up earlier than I already do…and that’s just not going to happen.
• It isn’t too bad when he just gets up once per night, but the screaming in his sleep periodically through the night is a bit disruptive. 

So any ideas?…I mean, outside of drugging him or hitting him with the Baby Mallet to knock him out? 

p.s.  Um, LaskiGal…I’m such a twit…just realized that I’ve had “Laski Gal” as the name of your blog in my blogroll instead of your actual blog title of “From the Cheap Seats”.  So Sorry!!!  And thanks for hearting my blog in spite of my idiocy.

For some reason, I feel the need to confess that I am zoning out watching “Tommy Tiernan:  Something Mental” on Comedy Central.  I cannot stop laughing.  I don’t know if it’s just because he’s Irish, because he’s actually funny, or maybe my little Zoloft pill is mixing weird with my wine?  I’ll let you decide. 

Although hopefully you don’t decide that my last sentence made me sound like Karen Walker from “Will and Grace”.

Hey, it’s a great little car…when it runs!!!

Friday night, I pick up the kids from daycare and pick-up Justin from our house so that we can go pick up his truck from the shop.  He had a bunch of well-needed maintenance work done and the shop we go to are great about letting us pay over the phone and pick the car up after-hours (since I usually don’t get home until around 6:30pm).

Justin gets in the car, he’s in a great mood.  Gavin’s happy to see Daddy and Cooper is sleeping.  We go to the shop, pick up the truck, Gavin jumps in with Justin, and we head out for the 6-mile or so trip back home.  While waiting at a light, my car stutters a second.  I think “hmmm…that’s weird” and put it in neutral until the light changes.  I then put it in drive and gently ease it through the intersection.  About half-way through, it starts stuttering and shuddering and stops responding well to my increased pressure on the gas pedal (hey, just wanted out of harm’s way).  My traction light comes on (tells me that the fancy traction thing that keeps me from sliding all over the road in bad conditions is not working) and my yellow Check-Engine light starts blinking.  I throw on my hazards, call Justin (who was, by now, 1/2 mile in front of me), and tell him I’m breaking down and I’m pulling into a Burger King.  He’s very calm over the phone, which was a good thing, since I was panicking because I was starting to lose my power-breaks.  As I’m waiting to turn left into the restaurant, the car continues to get noisy (like it lost its muffler or something) and shuddering worse.  I see a big break in oncoming traffic and prayed a little prayer to get past safely.  As I hit the gas and turned, I felt the car shudder again and I lost my power-steering, too, and had to nearly stand on the gas to not only make it through two lanes of traffic, but to also give me more leverage to turn the silly car so that I didn’t hit the curb instead.

So I get into the parking lot of the Burger King and was literally rocking back-and-forth in an effort to will my car to continue forward towards a parking space (and not the driving areas of the lot).  I rolled into a space…well, over a couple of spaces…and couldn’t get the silly thing any farther.  So I put it in park, turned it off, sent up a prayer to God for keeping Cooper and I safe while I tried to cross that busy traffic, then promptly burst into tears.

I’m not exactly sure why I started crying, although I know I was annoyed when Justin asked me.  I guess I was scared because it broke down while I had one of the kids with me, scared because we REALLY don’t have the money for what seems like another costly repair (we’ve already sunk over $2500 into the silly thing since April), upset because we’re really budgeted tightly right now with our giant increase in daycare expenses, annoyed because I really try to make sure I take care of this car so that it will last us a while because we’re not at a point where we can afford a car payment right now (it’s paid-off) or the increase in insurance that a newer car would bring, and sad because I really do like my little car but I just cannot trust it as much anymore, it seems.  So literally, that entire paragraph went through my head and out it came as tears and steering-wheel beatings. Also, nasty oaths about leaving it in a bad part of town where someone who won’t love it as much will take it and defile it and put a really funky-huge non-manufacturer endorsed spoiler, like this one.

So really, if anyone wants a little car to putter around to-and-from the grocery store, or for short commutes (less than my 60-mile/day commute), just contact me.  According to Kelley Blue Book, it’s worth about $4,600 once I have it repaired.  I’m willing to sell it at $4,000 because I know if I try to trade it in, the Dealer will screw me big-time even though the car is in excellent shape (besides the silly non-running thing right now).  Here’s a list of all the great attributes of my little car:

• it is a 2001 Chevy Cavalier LS, 2.4 L sport engine, four doors, good paint, indigo blue, clean grey cloth interior with a rear spoiler (extra sporty!), and that increased traction control thing I talked about earlier
• it’s got a CD player and a cassette player, power windows, power locks
• about 84,500 miles (highway miles, baby!)
• tires are 2-1/2 years old, but are in EXCELLENT condition…we’re stunned at how great the tread looks on the tires considering how long they’ve been on the car
• brakes and rotors done last fall…still in great working condition
• new water-pump, timing kit and belts, and new battery in April
• new body control module (aka electronic computer thingy) in July…three days before I gave birth to Cooper
• it parks nicely into small spots
• has working heat and a/c
• when I don’t have all my crap in the car, it comfortably seats four adults (or two adults and two car seats, or any variation there-of, although not three car seats cuz then one would be in front and that is just bad, bad, bad)
• uncomfortably seats five adults (or three adults and two car seats, or four adults and one car seat)
• new ignition module (aka ignition computer thingy) nope…back to square one…new ignition module doesn’t make a lick of difference…going to return useless ignition module and hit Plan B–tear the thing into five bazillion trillion and ten pieces and see what else it could be

So everyone, be sure to go out to your garage, your assigned parking spot, or wherever you park your vehicle, and be sure to give your well-behaved car a hug.  And prayers for my problem-child car would be greatly appreciated (as well as a bake-sale or candy-sale to raise funds for repairs…I also wouldn’t mind some wine right now so that I am prepared for the shop calling me with the repair quote).