Ready? brrrrrrrrrr…you know, I can’t actually make that drumroll sound with my mouth.  So I guess it makes sense that I have no idea how to write it here, either.  Anyway, picked at random using a random number generator (I had this whole elaborate plan of writing the numbers of all the comments down and having Sam pick one at random and documenting it with photos and such, but seriously, who has the time, right?), the winner for the Brain, Child subscription giveaway is brrrrrrrrrr… Chrissy of Sing a Lullaby!

I’m so happy because Chrissy and I have always been bloggin’ buds, ever since the beginning (as in, when I started blogging).  She’s one of those people you meet out here in the good old internet and then go on to have as a real friend.  So congrats to you, Chrissy - enjoy!

Thank you for all who entered.  As a consolation prize, please enjoy this great picture of what I forced my husband to do on Father’s Day. I had completely forgotten about these pictures that were on my phone - how could I? Imagine, if you will, him mounting himself onto the camel in front of everyone and me yelling, “Happy Father’s Day, honey!” That’s a guy who will do anything for his kids, no?

Labels: Bloggy Stuff - Memes/Links/Business, Hubby, Pictures, The Big One

Nearly four years ago The Hubs and I went on a trip to Wisconsin, sort of a last hoorah before he began his second year of law school, and I went back to teaching in September. It wasn’t much of a trip, just to an inn with some restaurants, a pool, tennis courts (we were beginners, but very into tennis at the time), and about the right amount of activity to make us feel like we’d gotten to get away for a break before the drudgery began again. What you need to know, Dear Reader, before I continue with this story, is that we had also been “trying” for one month. With the expectation that getting pregnant would probably take six months or so, we decided to go ahead and get going on that, hoping we’d be successful at some point throughout the year…

So we set off. We swam in the pool, ate at nice restaurants, and had a leisurely time. But not long into our little excursion, things got weird. Let me be more specific: I got weird. It began at the tennis court, on a fairly hot day. We were new at tennis, so it wasn’t totally out of the ordinary for one of us to get frustrated with our own lack of ability, but go ahead and fast forward to the part where I am sitting in the middle of the tennis court crying and yelling at him that he is hitting the ball out of my reach on purpose!!! To which he would have said, had he not be petrified of me at the time, “Isn’t that the object of the game?” Instead, he recommended I drink more water and we head to our room for a rest. I declared that no, we would continue playing, but then every time I was forced to bend over and pick up a ball from the ground, I would start crying again.

We didn’t know why.

When we finally headed in, me, red-faced and swollen, him, dumbfounded, we had to climb a fairly substantial hill to get back to the inn. I had to stop and rest half way through. As you can imagine - more crying. But why do I have to stop and rest?! Why can’t I climb this hill?! YOU don’t have to rest. Let’s just go! At which point I proceeded to huff up the hill, tears still streaming down my face due to total exhaustion, with a bit of stubbornness thrown in.
We didn’t know why.

Inside our air conditioned room, we watched the US Open. I took a pregnancy test, just because I had them with me despite the fact that I knew it would be too early, but sometimes you just gotta check, right? It was negative.

Then the food thing began. Let me just say, I am big on elaborate breakfasts, especially at restaurants, so when I ordered toast and plain scrambled eggs one morning, The Hubs looked at me and doubt passed before his eyes - he wasn’t sure who I was. This was the woman who had eaten huge plates of blueberry pancakes every morning for eight days straight when we were on our honeymoon. When the food came, I ate only the toast.

We still didn’t know why.

That night, when it was time to discuss our dinner plans, I declared that I wanted to stay in and order room service, didn’t feel like going out. More importantly, I wanted French onion soup and apple pie for dinner. As The Hubs scanned the room service menu he said they might not have those things; apple pie was not listed. I said he’d better call down and see if they had some, because I was going to have French onion soup and apple pie for dinner, even if he had to go out and find me some apple pie. Mercifully (for him) they had both items and they arrived to our room a bit later. When the food was presented on the table, I’ll admit, it looked a bit odd, the combination that I’d required, that is. I’d probably never ordered onion soup before in my life.

But the weirder thing was the whole apple pie bit. I’d always hated baked apples. In fact, they make me gag because of the texture. Hubs had heard my story about the time my dad made me try apple pie at a restaurant with his parents even though I told him I didn’t like it, and I proceeded to gag and barf in front of my grandparents when he insisted (he never made me try it again after that:) And now, here we were sitting at a table with really salty soup and mushy pie before us, after it had been made abundantly clear that these were the necessary items, on penalty of who knows what, should they not have made it to my stomach in a timely fashion. I scarfed them down and went to bed early.

And still, we really didn’t know why. . .because apparently we are morons.

About a week later when we were home again. I took another test, and my heart stopped for a moment.

Then I took another.

Then I switched brands and took another.

Then I called Hubs. I had done this while he was at school, because I was so certain they would be negative anyway so it wouldn’t matter. I’d always regret that decision, wishing we could have been together for it. I spoke to him between classes, and told him there might be news, but that I wasn’t sure yet (um, how?) He went back to class, and at some point leaned back in his chair in a weird daze, tilting the whole thing over and falling out of his seat during the lecture in the stadium style classroom.

When he came home finally, I took another, fully expecting the result to be different now that he was here, because obviously it would be impossible for us to be pregnant on the first try.

That was test four (as my four fingers indicate). And he looked at me and said, “We did it!” And here I am, finally letting it hit me as we stood over the tests in our bathroom.

And here he is, looking proud and, um, potent.

And there we sat, having flashbacks of the previous week, the crying, the salty soup, the toast, the crazy woman (me), and, of course, the beer I shared with him, the seared rare tuna I ate for dinner one night, the underwater breath-holding contest we played in the pool, withholding oxygen from our poor spawn (I won though).

And then we knew why.

And we haven’t gotten to get back on the tennis court since.

Labels: Hubby, Pictures, Pregnant, Tales, Vacations and travel

He gets out late. There’s traffic due to the rain. It’s already dark, almost dinner time already, and he hasn’t been home for about ten hours. He’s missing his family - his wife, the older child, the baby - but he’s so tired and ready to just collapse and go to bed. A full day of work and more to come at home, drudgery of a different nature.

A tantruming toddler, battling over dinner - what chair will he sit in, what plate will he use, how many bites will he eat, how many times will he scream, “No! I want Mommy to do it”? A fussy baby - cranky and tired from naps that were too short, unwilling to be held by anyone but his mother because she is the most familiar. And the mother, herself? Cranky. Angry about his lateness, tired from a long day, also just waiting to collapse, bitter and resentful about a lack of help that is beyond his control.

Being a stay at home mom is hard, no doubt. But as much as I complain and feel sorry for myself about my difficulties, when I think about what my husband does every day, I am humbled and so very appreciative. He drives home for an hour after a long day of work and rolls in to find everyone is approaching their threshold. We are at our worst at dinnertime, meltdown time; it’s the scene of an accident. And he is stuck on the side, trapped between trying to help and not wanting to make things worse by getting in the way.

Sam, almost three, often insists that I do everything for him because that is what he’s used to from our days together. My husband believes Sam gets angry at him for going to work. When he comes home, Sam often frowns at him, sometimes he even yells at him, acting out on his hurt or just responding to a change in our normal pace. Robby is so attached to me that often I am the only one who can calm him and keep him happy. He often cries when other people hold him. My husband has to watch his children, who he has missed all day, deny him the privilege of participating. And that is the time he gets with us each day, the hour and a half before bedtime. That’s all.

Occasionally he gets some interaction with the kids in the morning, on those days where everyone is awake before he leaves, but that’s not necessarily any better. Either the kids are awake too early and are therefore cranky, making me irritable and exhausted from the start, causing all of us to act much like we do at the end of the day. Or, and this might be even worse, all goes well in the morning and everyone is pleasant. But then when he has to leave for work he has to face Sam, who wants him to stay because he has been so happy to see him for that extra period of time: “I don’t want you to work; I want you to stay home.” At which point my husband has no choice but to hug and kiss us goodbye, turn around, and walk out the door, listening to Sam cry as he walks down the hall of our building, or watching us wave to him from our apartment until he turns the corner. He does this every day. And I can’t imagine it. He does it so that at the end of the day, he can come back home to us and hear about what we did together, without him.

_______________________________________________________________________________

I wrote this for Scribbit’s Write Away contest. The theme is “Going Home.”

Labels: Hubby, Writing

I’m so ashamed, but it’s time to come clean. Just this past week my husband and I finally got life insurance. That means that up until last Friday, we had none. I know. We have CHILDREN for goodness sake. Why weren’t we thinking of the CHILDREN?! Well, we were; I think we just didn’t understand.

Hubby and I agree that we both have a very strong aversion to salespeople, and that this directly influenced our very (very, VERY) irresponsible choice regarding this matter. See, when we started getting mailings about life insurance when I first got pregnant, we just threw them out. All I could think of was those horrible daytime TV commercials for Col0nial Penn - life insurance for the ahem, older folk - Double Indemnity (this is must see, by the way), and Death of a Salesman, of course. In our minds life insurance was a bad thing, a hoax, if you will. And while I’m embarrassed to admit this to the world of the web and as a parent, I do so because there may be others like me.

See, Hubby and I are not ignorant (no we ain’t!), we’re well-educated (we been educated real good!), and we’re responsible parents (Hey, if I don’t hear ‘em, they must be ok!). But we still didn’t think life insurance was something we needed. I think I started to put it together when I was listening to Suze Orman lecture that blond St@rbucks addicted woman on Oprah a while back, and then it hit me. The first thing this woman needed to do was get life insurance on her husband? Really? She didn’t need to cut her caffeine addiction and shopping obsession, or get medical insurance for her children? And here I was sitting there being all smug about the latter - I’d never neglect medical insurance for MY children - but here I was being a big idiot. Huh.

So we started looking into what all this meant. At the time we decided to wait until my husband started a new job to sign up for a plan. He is starting in October . . . I know! We still were going to wait! Ridiculous. Time went on and I found myself becoming more and more uncomfortable about our plan. I started having a lot of anxiety, worrying about something happening to my husband, thinking of all the ways that something could happen to him between now and when he started his new job, knowing that if the worst did happen to him that we had no plan in place at all. In addition to dealing with that type of tragedy, I’d also have nothing in the way of supporting our kids. I decided we needed to sign up for a plan immediately.

If you don’t have a life insurance policy, getting one is a very easy thing to do. With minimal research you can learn the basics that you need in order to feel confident about the terminology and to get a sense of what (type of policy and for how much) you might need. Here and here are good places to start. When you’re ready, you just make a call to a company and someone will walk you through the rest. We had an agent (a salesguy no less, with a briefcase and everything!) come to our house and go through this stuff with us while we fed our kids lunch. He took our information regarding our debt, monthly expenditures, income, and so forth and plugged these details into his handy little program to come up with how much we might need. We had a fairly strong sense of what we wanted going in and were clear that we wouldn’t be purchasing anything we had not planned on, so we felt in control and didn’t have to worry about being “sold” on anything extra. We even have someone coming out to the house to do the necessary blood work. It is all very convenient, simple, comforting, and I can’t believe it took us this long.

We now have an appropriate policy on my husband and myself. Why me, you wonder? Don’t I just stay home? Why yes, yes I do. And separate and apart from all the hubbub regarding what the work we do is worth and so forth, there is a logistical reason that a SAHM needs life insurance as well. This article from April’s issue of Parenting, laid it out pretty well (see topic number 4. Topic 5 deals with retirement accounts and is also somewhat helpful): stay at home moms need insurance not to cover our imaginary income, but to cover the costs that would be incurred by the family if we were not around - childcare, housekeeper, etc. See, if I was gone, in order to keep the income that supports our family, my husband would need someone to take care of the kids and keep the house running, and that’s why we SAHMS need policies as well.

Maybe this is all common sense. Maybe no one is even still reading because you all already knew this. But I tell ya, we were kind of floored that we had let this go so long without doing something about it. So I expose myself to public mockery in the event that there might be a few of you out there who were like me. Maybe you just didn’t know. Maybe you didn’t know how to start. Maybe you just haven’t gotten around to it. But it’s easy to do. And it’s truly important for your children. Think of the children, the CHILDREN for pity’s sake!

This site is for entertainment purposes only. I am not a financial advisor (whoo Nelly, I sure ain’t!) this post should not be construed as financial advice.

Labels: Hubby, Learn More Every Day

My husband sent me this today. It’s an excerpt from a column he reads on a regular basis written by “The Sports Guy.” Sports Guy and his wife recently had their second child, both very close to our children in age. Pretty damn funny. And here’s the rest of the article in case you’d like to see it, although this is all that has to do with parenting.

That reminds me, somebody needs to launch a Web site for anyone thinking about having two or more kids. The Web site would be called “Why Didn’t You Effing Tell Me?” and would include the following features:

Labels: Hubby

So I wake up around 6:30 am. This is not uncommon. Pregnancy has made me wake up around 4:00 or so every night and then only have some very light sleep until Sam and I both get out of bed around 8:00. 6:30 is also roughly when Hubby begins to get ready for work. As I lay there, trying to go back to sleep, I notice Hubby seems to be making a lot more noise than usual as he prepares for the day. He has shut the bedroom door, as he always does, but I can still hear him stomping around the hall, closing other doors rather loudly, and then, at one point, I hear him talking in his regular phone voice. My husband has the loudest phone voice of anyone I have ever heard, with the exception of the two that can at least match him, his father and brother. So I’m laying there wondering why he is doing absolutely nothing to keep his voice down since he knows we are trying to sleep, why he is slamming doors, why it sounds like he is literally running in the hall. I decide that he has gotten a call from work asking him to come in early, which is possible since the judge he works for is currently the “emergency back-up,” meaning that this week Hubby is, in fact, supposed to be ready in the event of a judge-like emergency to go to work. So I envision him running around the house, having just received the call, trying to get ready as quickly as possible. I go back to sleep.

Amazingly, Sam and I sleep until nearly 9:00 (uh, time change anyone?). We come out to the living room and I put Sam down to play while I go to the kitchen. Next thing I know Sam is bringing me Cheerios from the floor in the living room. When I go in to see where he is getting them I find Cheerios spread randomly over the whole room. I happen to notice that there are even more covering our patio outside. I think back to the noise this morning and put on my thinking cap to solve this odd Cheerio mystery. Sam is still in the background, “O, O, O,” as he continues to find cereal on the floor. When I go back to the kitchen I see the cereal container has been left open on the counter and our couch blanket has been stuffed into the hamper. I don’t want to pull it out to see why for fear that it is just more cat vomit for me to clean up. I try to figure out what would posess my husband to throw Cheerios all over the patio and spill them in our living room without cleaning them up. Was he trying to attract squirrels to the deck for Sam to see when he woke up? Did he just have an accident in his rush and didn’t have to time to clean it up? But then why the cereal outside? I come to the logical conclusion: there was some sort of animal out on the patio, like a raccoon (we live on the 2nd floor, by the way. How a raccoon would get up there I have no idea but that’s what made sense to me at the time), Hubby called some sort of animal rescue line (the phone call I heard) to come out and get it and then for some reason decided to throw Cheerios at it while he waited and also ran back and forth down the hall a few times trying to decide if he should wake me up to show me. Eventually it left on his own, he called the animal rescue to say they didn’t need to come, and left for work late as a result of the drama. This is the story I concocted this morning. That’s how it could have happened…

Hubby and I played phone tag for about an hour this morning as I waited to impress him with my fine mystery solving skills. When I finally got him on the phone I told him my theory as he laughed at me.

In reality, Hubby woke up in the dark and without his glasses. In the living room, the cats were running around going crazy and as Hubby looked up he saw there was something flying around in circles on the ceiling. Please understand this is actually not that odd for him because he has this weird recurring thing where when he’s still half asleep he imagines he sees things flying around on the ceiling…seriously. It’s like he’s been having visions preparing him for this day. This morning it was not his imagination, however. There was, indeed, a bat flying around our living room. And as he’s explaining this to me I’m wondering how the hell a bat got into our apartment and then I have one of those flashback moments that movie characters have where they go back and see that integral moment that has brought them to this crucial point in time. For me, I go back to yesterday afternoon when Sam and I were playing out on the patio because it was such a nice afternoon. I see myself run in to get a jacket as I leave the door open. Then I do the same thing when I go in to get Sam his cup of milk. Again to get the camera. Then as we come in one of the cats gets out so I have to chase it around on the porch trying to corral it back inside. The screen door was open the whole time…”Oh. Whoops!” I say. “Yeah, whoops,” he says.

So imagine, if you will, Hubby wakes up in his sleepy haze and finds a bat, according to him a “big one,” flying around our living room as the cats freak out. He runs down the hall to shut the doors to the other rooms. He runs back and tries to shield himself with the blanket from the couch as he yells in fear. He tries to get the bat to fly out into the hallway (so that it can attack our neighbors?) and this doesn’t work. He tries to shoo it outside through the patio door using the blanket. He yells some more (I told you when he talks on the phone he’s REALLY loud - it could easily have been mistaken for a phone call…from his employer). He remembers that bats eat bugs while they fly around so he decides to try and lure it outside by throwing Cheerios into the air outside the door in hopes of it following. Yeah. So he’s wrapped in a blanket throwing Cheerios out the door while shielding himself from the bat using a blanket and whimpering every time it comes near him. In retrospect I’m shocked that this didn’t make a lot more noise than it did. Eventually, it flew out on its own after circling nearer and nearer to the door. I couldn’t have made up a story so good.

The question is, where was this thing all night? The door was shut for the last time around 5:30 last night. The bat left around 7:00 this morning. Where the hell was it all night…while we slept…in our bed…? I’ve searched the place for bat poo and can’t find anything. For all I know we have a whole family camped out somewhere in here.

Labels: Absolute Favorite Posts, Hubby, Tales

I’m standing in the shower - one of two regular length showers I get each week due to the weekend and Hubby being home - and I think I hear some crying and maybe some screaming. I wonder if I should call out and see if he needs help with Sam or find out if Sam has been hurt. I decide he’ll come and let me know if he needs me. Besides, sometimes I imagine hearing Sam when I’m in the shower and we’re home alone throughout the week, so maybe the noises I hear are just the weird water noises that are good at creating scary mental images for a paranoid mom.

Then Hubby comes in and says, “Does he want me to do something specific when he holds a piece of scotch tape up to his ear like he’s listening to it?”
“Oh, yeah he wants you to stick it to his ear lobe like an earring,” I say.
“Thank you!”

And the door is shut, the odd crying/screaming sound stops, and I take the rest of my shower in peace, picturing Sam holding tape up to his ear and screeching at his father who must be desperately trying to figure out what this toddler is trying to tell him. Earrings Dad, duh.

Labels: Hubby, Tales, Toddler