I'll do my thing and you watch your football

...directly quoting myself from just a few minutes ago.

'Tis the season for much football watching and football discussing and much much much reviewing plays with the DVR and much much much much much attempting to get me interested in the football on the screen.  I resist, naturally. 

One of my favorite football discussions in our house goes like this----
Whimsy: When is that going to be over?
Chip:  There's only ____ minutes (insert number here, could be anything like 9 minutes or 2 minutes or 27 minutes, etc) left in the ____ (quarter, half, game, etc).
Whimsy:  Which means that this will be on for another ____ minutes (wherein Whimsy does a quick calculation and multiplies whatever number Chip gives her by FIVE to account for the many inexplicable delays in this even more inexplicable game).


I sound awfully cranky about it, don't I?  I'm not really that cranky.  It's just the post-Christmas doldrums magnified by Intense Pregnancy Crazy, which is not a pleasant situation.  I also counted approximately how many Saturdays we have left before this baby makes his entrance into our world and HOO BOY if I had not already been feeling the nesting insanity then I am surely in the throws of it now.

You know the most shameful Nesting Crazy Thing I forced Chip to do last time around?  (this deserves all caps, as you'll see) I ACTUALLY MADE THAT POOR MAN CLEAN THE EDGES OF ALL THE BASEBOARDS WITH TURPENTINE...WITH (wait for it.....) A Q-TIP.  True story.  When I recalled that tidbit a couple of weeks ago, I laughed until I CRIED.  And then I gulped and realized that, at the time, it seemed a very reasonable suggestion (demand) to make in order to clean up any paint or glue splotches left over from installing our hardwood floor.  Which means that I am RIPE for some homebrewed CA-RAZY soon.

Stay tuned, I'll see what I can do about seeing through the fog and telling you all about it.

For now, I'm frantically cleaning out closets and inventing new projects for myself that have nothing to do with cleaning.  Nice.

Oh, and also: I'm working on a photo for you guys, but a photo requires me to pose in front of a camera and I haven't been doing a lot of that lately.  The closest I've come to that is when Alice put every hat she could find on my head, finished off with some fabric bags, called me a birthday cake and then asked me to take a picture of her creation.

For those of you who have been pregnant, what was the craziest thing you did in the throws of THE NESTING?




...Let me also add that today is my mother's birthday, and although this post has NOTHING to do with her or her birthday, I'd like to wish her a very happy one.  Filled with lots of cake and ice cream and time to do whatever she wants.  I would not recommend cleaning out closets, mom, more along the lines of naps and such.  Happy birthday, I love you.  I'm nuts and you should be very glad that you're not here with me right now.

introducing Holiday Pregnant Whimsy

Say hello to (almost post)Holiday Pregnant Whimsy.

Holiday Pregnant Whimsy drops things.  On the floor.  On the kitchen counter.  In the sink.  On her small girl-child.  On her enlarging belly.  On other people's floors and tables and couches.

Holiday Pregnant Whimsy drops dishes, especially heavy casserole dishes as she's putting them away in the lower cabinets, straining for all she's worth while making very attractive grunting noises.  Super pleasant!

Holiday Pregnant Whimsy is absent-minded.  This is a nice way of saying she forgets.  Everything.  She forgets where she put her keys, what she agreed to do five minutes ago, and where in heaven's name she put certain Christmas presents. 

Holiday Pregnant Whimsy is a mess in the kitchen, specializing in Disastrous Holiday Baked Goods.  While making cookies for friends, she adds too much flour to the sugar cookies, resulting in her having to make a double batch.  When making Susan cookies, she adds the wrong kind of butter.  And while making the Cursed Chocolate Cake, she manages to put in baking powder instead of the required baking soda.  A move that, most definitely, makes a HUGE difference to the cake - as it simply bakes to form a quarter-inch tall pancake instead of anything resembling actual fluffy cake.  When she and Chip bring it to a dinner party, they insist everyone just call it sheet, instead of sheet cake.

Holiday Pregnant Whimsy writes blog posts, dates them, and then simply doesn't ever press the Publish button.  Later Holiday Pregnant Whimsy wonders where those blog posts went and why they aren't up at The Creamery.

Heaven help Holiday Pregnant Whimsy, and you too, if you should run into her.


In other news: how was your Christmas?  Ours was smashing, despite myself.

just in time for christmas

I need your help.

Everything I've ever heard about a child giving up their nap goes like this:
- The child has a hard time sleeping during the day
- The child drives their parent crazy with the NO SLEEPING during the day
which eventually leads to
- The child no longer naps during the day

That is not what is happening at my house.

What is happening at my house is this:
- The child (Alice) sleeps perfectly well during the day
- The child (Alice) takes lovely two-hour naps during the day and I am able to get some stuff done and reset for the late afternoon slog
But...
- The child (Alice) has a HORRIBLE time falling asleep at night
- The child (Alice) drives her parents crazy with the number of times she requests bathroom / water / back scratches / toe nail clippings until an unearthly hour of the night


We've tried everything we could think of to explain what's happening, and the one I keep coming back to is that this weird behavior is her way of giving up her afternoon nap.  That if she didn't take that lovely luxurious blissful 2-hour nap during the day, she'd put that sleep into the evening hours instead.

But I'm not 100% on this theory.  And quite frankly, I don't want to be right.  I want to be WRONG.  I want her to do BOTH: sleep well during the day AND the night.  Maybe I'm hoping for too much, since she'll be four in March and most of her friends have stopped napping.  But tell me what you think, and give me your best advice.  And if this really is her way of giving up the nap, how do I still maintain that little bit of daytime peace?

checking in while checked out

Um.  If I could post a mindless bunch of vowels and random consonants, I would.  Because my current level of tired is so...  off the charts of tired that it can't be measured.  It's, like, stratosphere tired.  Immobile tired.  Can't lift my hands tired.

All these metaphors aren't helping me feel better.

So I'll say that we had a great time with my parents, and Alice ATE THEM UP.  I don't think she stopped talking even once.  That's six days of straight talking, folks.

Now I'm trying to find the energy and motivation to finish off the Christmas prep, including mailing off packages.  Which, if I don't get that done tomorrow, I'm in trouble.

Whimsy out.  But I'll be back - got to clear out the cobwebs.

visiting a famous person

My parents are flying in this afternoon for a pre-Christmas visit.  I don't know if Alice is more excited about Grammy and Grampy coming or Christmas. 

A note about the skirt Alice is sporting in this picture: it's her Christmas skirt and you'll be seeing more of it.  Plus it's fluffy and sparkly and has red AND pink, so basically I knew she'd love it.  And she does.  Which is nice for me, because we've hit the age of Let's Assert Our Clothing Independence. 

what might have been

I would have liked to name her Alba.  Or Violet (if I could have ever convinced Chip).  She would have had the deepest darkest chocolate chip eyes, and glossy chestnut hair to match.  She would have idolized her older sister, wearing her shoes and tripping over her hair ribbons.  My girls - that's what I would have called them, and each time my heart would have melted to welcome such softness, such femaninity into our home.  I would have relived Alice's babyhood, watching another sweet girlchild inhabit Alice's clothes - but with every new dimple and smile, discovered a world of differences between them.

The journey of motherhood has hammered home this lesson: that with every turn of the road, you leave behind another possibility of what you imagine.  When you have a boy instead of a girl, when you have a c-section instead of the other, when you bottle feed---- hundreds of little things that close down the What Might Have Been to tell the story of What Is.

This is not to say that I am sorry for anything that has happened to give us this moment.  Every small detail of our lives is how it should be - and for how it's going to be, I'm willing to be surprised.