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Saturday, April 23, 2005

my husband. And his friends' baby.

Here, just from yesterday, is a brief partial list of reasons I'd be totally jealous if anyone else was married to my husband:


  • He willingly went and bought me, um, girlie stuff at the drugstore.
  • He made breakfast and lunch, and dished up the food that people brought for dinner, and he did the dishes, as he has every day since I had surgery last week.
  • HE MADE ME SIT DOWN AND READ JANE AUSTEN. Do I even have to continue?
  • He was outside at twilight having a strategy-and-sneaking sort of war with the kids and LT's friend, who was over to spend the night for LT's birthday. He was on C's team.
  • He spent the morning fixing his grandmother's brakes (for free, of course) and just smiled when she was impatient with him about it.
  • He has extremely sexy arms.
  • He cleaned the guest apartment because his friends were coming to visit today.
  • When I went to bed, he stripped the blankets off and then made the bed while I lay in it, which -- especially the cool sheet floating down -- is just the most comfortable thing ever. In a comfort-food sort of way.

Speaking of T's friends -- they are the ones with the miracle baby about whom I wrote in my old journal. And here's Little Miss Miracle herself, in all her little babyish glory:


This is the first time The Nikon has been set loose on a baby. It is having a hard time controlling itself, let me just put it that way.

Posted by Rachel at 05:26 PM in marriage | pictures | the round of life | | Comments (0)

Thursday, April 21, 2005

that was then...


and this is now...

Happy ninth birthday to the first person to ever make me a mother. *snif*

Posted by Rachel at 12:22 PM in kids | motherhood | pictures |

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

grab for Grover, honey

I have a stuffed Grover. People think it's the kids' Grover, but it's mine (as are, ahem, ALL of the stuffed ducks in our house, but that's another story). T bought Grover for me when I had Natalie; I had always been a Grover fan and had been coveting this particular cheerful blue Grover at our drugstore for quite some time, so when I needed something cuddly to apply counterpressure to my incision (somehow this helps. and pillows = too bulky and quite impersonal, really, don't you think?), and my baby was miles away in a different hospital from me, he thought Grover would be a nice touch. And he was. Grover came along with C was born, as well, and he has been invaluable during these last few weird days of lounging around in soft-waisted pants all day while people get stuff and do things for me. Especially this morning.

See, in case you've never had abdominal surgery, here's a little tidbit of information: Laughing, really letting loose and belly laughing -- it hurts (as do coughing, sneezing, standing up, sitting down, um, breathing deep -- but I digress). So this morning, when T came in and told me to grab Grover before he brought C in, I knew something was up (after all, she HAD been awfully quiet for about a quarter of an hour...). He had advised me wisely, let's just put it that way.



click to see her in all her fullscreen glory

This is what happens when C is left alone with a piece of blue sidewalk chalk in front of the bathroom mirror. Isn't she lovely?
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Monday, April 18, 2005

this is what being laid-up gets me

I guess all I need to get a piecework project actually put together (my least favorite part; has taken literally years on this one) is major surgery. Who knew? And what will I have them take out next? ;)

Posted by Rachel at 05:48 PM in crafts | health | pictures | | Comments (0)

Sunday, April 10, 2005

bye-bye, Snickers (and Special Dark and big bowls of Rocky Road and...)

T has hypoglycemia, specifically reactive hypoglycemia, or if you want to get really technical, he has "nonhypoglycemic hypoglycemia", since when he goes in for a 3-hour glucose screen, even though he's very nearly comatose about fifteen minutes after the glucose hits his system and he stays that way for the entire three hours, nothing shows up in his bloodwork. For quite some time, maybe two or three years, he's noticed that if he eats sweets, especially on an empty stomach, he gets a) very tired, sometimes to the point of literally HAVING to go to sleep b) a thudding headache in his temples and c) extremely irritable. Nowadays if he even eats, say, not-sugared but not-whole-grain breakfast cereal, he is in bad shape. Yesterday he had cake with lunch and spent the afternoon unconscious on the couch, and the rest of the weekend was not a whole heck of a lot better for him. When all this mess surrounding my medical issues is all cleared up, he's going to see a new doctor; meanwhile, since his symptoms match reactive hypoglycemia exactly, we're going to assume this is what he has and act accordingly, and see if all symptoms clear up.

Which, frankly, is not going to be a whole lot of fun.

Well, there is that aspect that's kind of fun, wherein I get to be all methodical and make lists of possible foods to eat and create SIX MEALS A DAY from them. But let's face it, a man who can ordinarily eat nearly an entire single batch of waffles in one sitting is not going to like having one-inch cubes of cheese become a regular part of his diet. My favorite teenaged-boys-eating-horror-story is: when T was in high school and then in the Navy, he would frequently buy a pound of sharp cheddar cheese and a quart of chocolate milk, and that was a meal. Or he and a friend would go buy a dozen donuts. Each. For breakfast. He doesn't do that anymore, of course, but still, it's a big step from where he is to where he'll be from now on: looking at a dinner plate with, for example, two six-inch whole-wheat tortillas holding a total of two ounces of meat and some vegetables. But hey, lettuce is a free food! As is celery! So he should be really happy about those, at least. I mean, come on. Lettuce and celery! Who needs cheesecake when you have those?

I'll sign off with two pictures. This evening at almost exactly five o'clock the whole family started in at the same time with the "I'm HUNGRY" thing, looking at me as if they expected me to pull a roast turkey and all the trimmings out of thin air or some such thing. I told them I'd make dinner but first I asked them if, just to humor me, they could do an actual baby-birds-in-the-nest imitation, to send me into a kitchen with a smile. And they did.

And then here's a picture of me, coloring with C. Did you know that Crayola manufactures a crayon called "purple mountain's majesty"? Anyone who can tell me why that made me send a tersely-worded email to Crayola gets a free signed first edition of my first book: The Essential Guide to Grammar Snobbery.

That's just the working title, of course.

Posted by Rachel at 09:51 PM in health | kids | marriage | me, a nerd? | motherhood | pictures |

Sunday, April 03, 2005

you know you wish he was YOUR dad

Here's what the kids (the 35-year-old, the 8-year-old, and the 5-year-old) spent Saturday afternoon building:



that old dryer just keeps on giving


LT as gunner and C as driver (I think those are the correct technical terms)


inside view. I told them to "look angry." Remind me not to tick LT off, will you?


It was his idea. That should not be surprising to you. :)


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Posted by Rachel at 03:21 PM in kids | marriage | pictures | the round of life | | Comments (0)

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Finisher Prize

Spent much of today playing with C while T and LT played Civilization III (we stayed home from church not because we are heathen rebels but because we are all sick with the same crud I've had for about a week now. Fun times.). One thing we did was a horse race. It's a complicated sort of thing -- the horses move forward in turns; for each turn, the horse's owner rolls two dice, subtracts the smaller number from the larger, and the horse moves forward the resulting number of spaces -- a "space" being a board-width on our hardwood floor. Observe my sneakiness, slipping in math like that, as if it were zucchini in a meatloaf. Anyway. C wanted to use this dollhouse stable as a finish line, and I couldn't figure out why at first:

"It must be the place where they go when they win, because it says 'Finisher Prize' on it."

One of the more difficult small decisions of motherhood, made over and over on the road from "accume-see" and "bop-ooo" onward: When does cuteness have to give way to correctness? Not here, not yet, anyway.

Posted by Rachel at 05:46 PM in kids | motherhood | pictures | | Comments (0)

Saturday, March 12, 2005

we really know how to throw a party

(I thought about putting this entry in the photo blog, since it is rather image-intensive, but since it's more of a daily-life entry, and the photos are, um, not artistic in the slightest, I stuck it here. Sorry about the hugeness of it.)

One night maybe six years ago when T was going to be away overnight visiting a friend, I decided that I would do a lot of fun girly stuff to make his absence more endurable (up until he got a job in telecom with its requisite two-week overtime stints in fire season, we had only very rarely been apart overnight). I rented chick movies -- this was the first time I watched "You've Got Mail", which turned out later to become one of T's favorites, but oh well -- and bought Doritos (which T hates) and made myself meatloaf (ditto), and I stayed up as late as I could make myself so that I wouldn't have to lie in bed waiting to go to sleep without him. (shut up, that is NOT pathetic.) Anyway. Somehow this developed into a tradition wherein when Daddy is gone, the kids and I throw a "party". That sounds really bad, I realize that, but we're not celebrating his absence -- we're more taking our minds off it. Tonight T is at a men's retreat, so here, courtesy of The New Nikon and the fact that I'm feeling a lot better than I was, is a look into the debauchery that the mice get up to while the cat's away.

This is not for the faint of heart.

(OK, maybe it is.)

First we all played a good game of pretend. The kids had torches (flashlights) and were exploring a ruin of a castle (our house, with all the lights turned off). I was the queen, who inexplicably was still alive inside this ruin. Adventure ensued.


observe my stately mantle (made from, um, a waterproof crib sheet. C was the costume designer for this production). And if you look really closely you can see the brown paper crown on my head. (LT took this picture. He is suitably aware of the honor and trust I bestowed upon him in allowing him to use The Nikon.)



LT then made a map of an imaginary country. I am unclear as to whether this map represents the country over which I reigned. I'll have to ask him tomorrow.



Then C made cookies, almost entirely by herself, from a mix she'd been given, um, for her birthday. In September.


it's a good thing these were just for family. C still needs practice at not licking the spoon.



the finished project


Part of a traditional party is the freedom to stay up as late as we want. When the kids can't keep their eyes open any longer, they make a tent in the front room and go to sleep in it.


The sheet down the middle divides it into a room for each of them. Do you notice that their legs have to go between the chair legs? Why again is this fun??


So there you have it -- a virtual tour of our wild, wild life. I'd better hope T doesn't read this one.
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Saturday, March 05, 2005

How To Enjoy Housework

Those of you who know me even slightly have probably figured out by now that I am not a neat freak. I am, in fact, pretty much a Messie. It's not that I don't care that the house is messy; I hate when it's messy (which it is, in varying degrees, most of the time). But I'm too lazy/sidetracked/interested in other things to keep it the way I like it to be. I'm better than I used to be -- oh, it is awful to look at pictures from when the kids were babies and see how messy the backgrounds were -- and I remember feeling so guilty when we took those pictures that my kids' baby pictures would so frequently look like they were living in a neglected methamphetamine lab.

OK, so not THAT bad. But still.

ANYWAY. Tonight I had an idea -- a surefire way to make myself enjoy cleaning up for once. Using my new toy, I mean Nikon, bought for me by the most nearly-perfect man ever, I made a time-lapse movie of myself cleaning the kitchen, as well as one of the living room. And now, because I am, um, really not shy about showing you all really embarrassing stuff, I guess, here are links to the two movies, which are extremely short. You might want to play the Sabre Dance while you watch them. Just a suggestion. You know, like the guy who tells you at a fancy restaurant what wine you should order. Not that I ever GO to restaurants like that. Or order wine.

OK OK HERE ARE THE LINKS ALREADY.


Cleaning the kitchen
Cleaning the living room (featuring in dual starring roles MY NEW FANTASTIC COUCHES. Thank you, they'll be here all week.)

Both movies came out a little dark; there's no way to adjust the shutter speed or aperture manually when it's doing a time-lapse movie, and the automatic everything kind of went, "wha? There is something beyond this table?" But you might be able to get the general idea.

This is where I would ordinarily type, "and it's off to bed for me," or something equally hokey, except that I am, um, way behind on laundry. Again. So I'm up washing some things for church tomorrow. Silly people who think they need socks and stuff. Sheesh.

Posted by Rachel at 11:26 PM in pictures | the round of life | | Comments (0)

Friday, March 04, 2005

I am SO grown-up

First, I have to get this out of the way. Yesterday we got up at the crack of dawn, which of course I photographed:



(OK, so that's sunrise, not dawn, quibble quibble. I'd also already been up for about an hour when I took that picture. Artistic license, OK? Oh, and you can click to see that bigger, in a new window)


We drove to first one city and then to another, to visit doctors. Here is what I learned (ooh, a list!):

  • I have a flow murmur and a classic case of supraventricular tachycardia (neither of those things is actually that scary, but they sure sound like it).
  • I will probably be having a hysterectomy sometime this spring.

  • I should always turn off my cell phone at the GYN office, because otherwise I may end up talking to my dad whilst being examined, and folks, that just feels all wrong.
  • T and I still have the happy ability to make a day of boring, necessary stuff into a date, just because we love each other and enjoy each other so much. (kids were with my parents).


Anyway, enough about that, on to the real news.

First, in case you are new to my journal(s), I must re-confess that I was a thirty-year-old woman who had never owned a pair of high-heeled shoes. This has to do with having reached my adult height (which is taller than average) in junior high, and all this deep-seated insecurity about being taller than everyone else. And also laziness, also known as "never getting around to it".

Yesterday, however, I figured, what the heck, and we bought me these:






T wants me to make sure you know that he picked them out. I said I wanted high heels, he did the rest. Aren't they darling? DO YOU SEE THE POLKA DOTS?

Then last night I wore them to a community chorus concert. My first time in high heels, how sweet. Now I need a frilly organza dress and a cute little ponytail.

(Seriously, though? HOW DO YOU WALK? I mean, is it really all about these little bitty short steps -- well, they're little bitty short to ME, anyway -- or is there some trick to moving quickly and gracefully at the same time which I just don't know about? And also, very freaky when you take off your shoes and feel like your heels are downhill from your toes.)


pictures Archives | Page 2 of 4

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