Archives for February 2006

02.28.06 Babysitter-Free Date Nights

02.21.06 Losing Weight – No Crazy Diets

02.14.06 Repressed Passion Movies

02.07.06 ALL Day LONG

Before proceeding with Tip Tuesday, I would like to address some questions on your minds lately:

1. Do we really have Daring Family Freestyle Rap Battles?
Answer: Yes, we do. We just did. Don’t get me wrong, yo. It’s no 8 Mile over here. There’s very little graffiti and people hardly ever get shot. We don’t even wear bandanas or hoodies most of the time. It’s just some good old fashion rhythm and rhyme. We let the lyrics fly when we feel so moved. We do take turns though so it’s more like a Freestyle Rap Cooperative.

2. Am I writing a book?
Answer: Yes. I’m working on a few, actually. My NANOWRIMO project pretty much bit rocks so that’s on the back burner, the way backburner, the burner on our camp stove that we’ve never used out in the garage.

I’m also working on a few other fiction projects but my main project is a non-fiction book written in my blogging style about setting up shop as a new mom, organizing your life and finding ways to be easier on yourself and make life more enjoyable for everyone. I’m pretty excited about that one.

So, the tips, the tips. Today’s Tip Tuesday is brought to you by Susan of Friday Playdate. She has asked for ideas for fun date nights without a babysitter.

I’ve got a couple.

1. Go on a scavenger hunt in your own house. See who can find the most Barbie shoes or puzzle pieces in the course of an hour. Every time you find enough pieces to make a complete puzzle or enough shoes to fill Oprah’s closet, you get a free 10 minute back massage from your spouse.

2. Drive to the best make-out spot in town, your own garage. Who cares about the view anyway, really? Although it’s fun to pretend. He sneaks his arm around your shoulder as you admire the vista of canned chili and disassembled Exersaucers from the backseat. You then re-enact your fateful first kiss. Depending on the size of your house, most baby monitors will pick up a signal from within the car, if you want to invite the kids along on your date (or at least listen to them stuffing their mouths full of marshmallows when they know you’re not looking).

3. Play a board game as a team so there are no hurt feelings when someone loses. For the other player? Just use Loganov. You can borrow him from my family. He is the imaginary player in any game where we don’t have enough players. The human players take turns drawing a card or whatever for Loganov and he aaaaalmost always loses.

What do you do for a fun date night when you don’t have the time, money or planning skills to hire a babysitter?

*Random sidenote. Please go look at my dad’s blog today. He cracks me up and I miss him when he posts stuff like this. OKAY, I miss him all the time.

Like nearly everyone in America, I’m trying to lose weight. You may have guessed this from last week’s Tip Tuesday or from looking at the lovely pictures I post of myself on the website. Anywho, not much success happenin’ around here.

Lame excuses for this:

1. I’m slowly weaning Magoo. My body is still used to eating bigger portions but I’m burning fewer calories.

2. Emotional eating — I’ve made no secret of my PPMD junk and when I get stressed or excited, I grab something to munch on. (No. It is not carrots.)

3. The BLOG — I’ve heard people say their blog makes them fat. Who said that? Tell me so I can credit you. Anyway, sitting around typing and reading things online is not active. When I’m on the computer, my kids wig-out. When my kids wig out, I get stressed. Please refer to excuse #2.

4. I like to sleep and hate to exercise, until I’m actually doing it.

So, today I slept through my gym workout window. I decided to have a dance party this afternoon with the kids to get some cardio in. We rocked. We grooved. It was a blast.

Laylee prefers to “dance” while being held in my arms. I can only do this for so long before I have to put her down. That girl is HEA-VY.

What hit me as I was repeatedly telling her she was too heavy and putting her down was that I have more weight to lose than her total body weight. I am essentially carrying extra weight equal to the total weights of both of my children around – at all times – every day. I’m seriously surprised I can walk at all. Saturday’s little scare also got me thinking about my heart and health.

The dancing was so fun that I decided my reward for losing the first 25 lbs will be to take a Hip-Hop or Jazz dance class for big fat clumsy dorks adult beginners. I told DYD my plan and his exact response was “Kat-izzle in the Hizzle! Yeeee-aaahhh!”

Very supportive as you can see.

So I may or may not keep you all updated on my progress. When I win, you’re all invited over for some sweet dancing. I’m sorry that I WILL dance better than you…the class and all….

Goal Progress 0 (This is the number of lbs lost. Bigger numbers mean YAY!)

I was recently talking with a friend who said she was suffering from “blogger’s block.” I told her that all she had to do was continually embarrass herself in public and she’d have plenty of blog-fodder to spew forth.

Scene:
It’s yesterday. I start experiencing sporadic tightness and pain on the left side of my chest. I don’t worry too much about it. It’s more annoying than painful and besides, I’m too young to have a heart attack, right?

For a bedtime story, Dan decides to read to me about Richard Feynman and his romance with his terminally ill wife Arline. It’s funny, sweet, poignant and thought-provoking. The thoughts it starts provoking are, “Am I terminally ill? What if I die in the night and they ask DYD if I was having any symptoms and he says ‘no’ so they never find out what was really wrong with me? I must tell him about the chest-pain.”

So, as he kisses me goodnight and rolls over, I say something like, “I’ve been having chest pain off and on all day. It’s on the left side so if I don’t wake up tomorrow, tell them to check for heart disease or something. Goodnight.”

He rolls over with this crazy look on his face, has me describe the pain and asks if I’m okay. I say I’m fine and I feel dumb for bringing it up but I just thought he should know. We go to sleep.

I wake up this morning, still the tightness, only now it’s constant and gets worse when I breathe in deeply. So what do I do? I breathe in deeply as frequently as possible, just to make sure it still hurts. This starts to freak me out. Dan and I decide to call the nurse hotline at MegaCorp and ask their advice.

They calmly ask me several questions and then tell me to hang up and call 9-1-1. I laugh.

“I’m sorry. I can’t do that. They’ll make fun of me. There’s really nothing wrong, I’m sure.”

The nurse then makes me promise to go into the ER. I so swear. So, we pack up the kids and all head off for a day of fun at our favorite house of sickness. I’m humiliated. As soon as we get there, I get the distinct feeling that nothing’s wrong with me and it’s all I can do not to flee the building. But we’ve driven this far and I made a blood oath and all, so I start filling out paperwork.

I beg them not to bring me a wheel chair and they relent. They walk me down a hallway full of people wearing gas masks and moaning. Everyone looks horrid and I’m just bouncin’ along.

So, 4.5 hours, several tests and multiple consults later, they release me with a diagnosis of musculo-skeletal discomfort. I love when they come up with big words to make you feel better about wasting an entire afternoon and an ER visit on a strained pectoral muscle.

I say, “Okay. That’s weird since I don’t even remember doing anything to it.”

Nicest ever ER Doc says, “Oh, sometimes you don’t realize you’re straining something. It could be as simple as that you were standing in a funny position when you sneezed.”

There you have it. I sneezed funny, straining a muscle and I went to the ER because I thought I was dying. If that’s not embarrassing, I’m not sure what is. The worst part is, we were JUST IN THERE.

(An Update – We’ve been back to the pediatrician every couple of days since the burn but as of this weekend Magoo is officially bandage-free and doing well. We check back in with them early next week.)

I am really really not one of those people who wants to go into the ER all the time, hoping something’s wrong with them. What that X-Ray guy diagnosed me with in the Urgent Care may be a real sickness but I got over it in second grade.

Now I have a goal to make it a full year without going in to the Urgent Care or ER. I just don’t want to become the “Norm from Cheers” of the ER, “where everybody knows your name.”

I can see it now, “HEY! It’s Kathryn! What’s wrong this time, Daring One? Did you break your femur while stubbing your toe on a My Little Pony? No, no, let me guess. You have really bad pain in your left pinky finger so you want us to check for cranial failure?”

There was a highlight, though. This came unexpectedly from the most patient man I have ever known, AKA my husband. After dropping me off at the emergency loading doors (Rush, rush, rush. We’ve got a sneeze-strained-musculo-skeletal incident here!), he drove around for 2 hours with the kids sleeping in the van until Laylee woke up and had an accident in her car seat. He calmly changed her into the outfit I had put in the diaper bag, cleaned up the car and then brought both kids in to see me.

From the second I saw her, I could not stop laughing. I had almost not packed those pants as the spare outfit because they were bordering on way too small for….MAGOO, who is now wearing 12-18 month clothes. Laylee was wearing a very cute pair of capris, AKA 6-9 month boy’s jeans.

We needed some humor to brighten up our day and there it was.

Another laugh came when Karli sent me this:

I was gonna go to the website and have it changed to say “Daring Young Mom is a Hypochondriac” but that still hits a little too close to home.

I just wrote a post. I really liked it. It is gone. My computer has committed suicide, taking the post with it. It was a longish post. It was a post about being in the ER all afternoon. It is gone. All gone. Everything is gone. My computer is gone. There is nothing, nothing but tears.

That is all.

[note from DYD: DYM’s hard drive is dead. I tried the freezer trick. Nothin’. We do have everything backed up to last night, so she only lost today’s post. So sad, but it could be worse.]

So, I’ve got a bunch of blogging stuff to catch up on. It’s almost Saturday and I haven’t even posted Thursday show and tell. So here’s my meal, roasted sweet potatoes and potato-potatoes and fork-tender roast beef:

Three days out of the week, a friend delivers a hot delicious meal to my door.

I pull it out.

Dish it up.

Yum. Yum. Yum. I’m supposed to add something green, but this one already had something orange so I figured I was okay. Still taking those prenatal vitamins so I think I’m good.

Now a meme from Beth, the fabulous:

10 years ago: I was finishing my senior year of high school in the great state of Texas. I was working 20 hours a week as a geophysical technician, planning on having the oil company I was working for pay my way through college to become an engineer. A few months later I decided to study film and English instead. I was teaching piano lessons and working as a checker at a grocery store, the worst checker in recorded history. I weighed 40 lbs less. I had 2 fewer kids and much more sleep. I went to prom with Jessica’s husband.

5 years ago: I graduated from college, got a job as an Associate Librarian for a public library, supervising their Media department. A professor once joked that I was the only film graduate he knew that was working in a job in the “industry” with steady pay and benefits. I was still working freelance as a marketing person for a big Denver-based library supplier, traveling around the country talking about their digital products. I met Dan, fell in love and got married…in a very short period of time. I stopped going to prom with Jessica’s husband.

1 Year ago: I was pregnant with Magoo, feeling great, excited to be having a boy. We started “aggressively” potty-training Laylee. Hm…she’s ALLLL-most there now.

5 songs I know all the words to: I am a lyrics maniac. I know the words to a LOT of songs, songs I like, songs I abhore. It sort of freaks DYD out. I could even do a stirring rendition of Baby Got Back for no reason whatsoever. Um…eeewwww.

5 Things I’d do with a million dollars:
Sorry to be boring. I’d pay off my house and invest. That is all. With the investment revenue…that’s a whole OTHER question.

5 places I’d run away to:
-My mom’s house
-Paris
-Calgary
-small eastern townships in Quebec
-Cape May, NJ

5 things I’d never wear:
–See-through pants. BETH, WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU???? 🙂
-Taper-legged jeans.
-Anything showing my midriff – Magoo was a MONSTER and Laylee loves my tiger-stripes. The rest of the world is gonna have to live without the tankini version of the Daring One.
-A onesie. I will wear nothing that buttons between the legs.
-I can’t think of a 5th. Being a mom and a married woman, there’s not much I cannot see myself wearing in some situation.

5 Favorite Toys:
-Laptop
-Palm
-Purses and Bags – of all kinds
-Phones – Cell and Land
-KitchenAid

5 Favorite Books or TV shows:
(I’m gonna do the shows because I think I’ve talked about books on here before.)
– Little House on the Prairie
-The Cosby Show (especially the early seasons)
-The West Wing
-The Office
-Seinfeld

5 Greatest Joys:
-Dan
-Magoo
-Laylee
-The Spirit in my life
-My extended family on both sides

Kim asked me to do a meme that I’ve done before but it’s been morphing and so I’ll do the parts I didn’t already do. That woman amazes me. How does she have time to raise and educate all those kids and maintain a great blog too? Wow.

4 places I’ve vacationed
-Gaspe, Quebec
-London, England
-Key West, Florida
-“The States” When I was little, growing up in Canada, I would always tell my friends we were planning a summer vacation to “The States.” So very cool.

4 of my favorite dishes
–Rogan Josh – Indian Lamb or Beef stew
-Any pasta dish, especially those containing sun-dried tomatoes
-My dad‘s Chili
–White Chicken Cilantro Chili

For anyone who cares…I promise to post a real-ish post sometime soon. I’ve been a bit distracted and blah about blogging lately. I’m sure it will come back, that burning need to describe my personal life in detail on the internet in a semi-interesting non-list-format sort of way.

I will not post a picture of Piglet and Pooh’s milk bath which I had the misfortune of confiscating, putting in an obscure corner of the kitchen, and then finding only after their bodies had been cemented in the gelatinous blob that their dairy spa ritual had become.

I was too busy retchin’ to be fetchin’ my camera (hey, that has the beginnings of a sweet piece for our next Daring Family Free-Style Rap Battle).

From that moment on, all citizens of the Hundred Acre Wood were banned from bathing in anything other than water or mud.

Men and women, boys and girls.

I see in my kids a very interesting case study in gender identity. Laylee, the ever dainty one, who cries if a droplet of water enters a 3 inch radius around either eye and begs for a towel. Who demands a napkin at the beginning of each meal and uses it after every bite, also pointing out when I have a stray crumb of food on my face. “MOMMY! Please wipe that OFF!” How embarrassing!

Magoo is the manliest of men. He is all physical and quite acrobatic in his movements. He crawls along smoothly, going over rather than around any items in his path – be they toys, furniture, steps or fallen comrades (read this: Mom laying in a drooling face-plant in the middle of the living room floor at the end of the day).

Earlier today I was watching him charge over a small children’s couch and I told my friend, “He looks like that space thing, the module…the Mars Rover thing, just bouncing over things and adjusting and overtaking everything in his path.” He has no fear of injury.

Tonight some friends had us over for dinner and were watching him go and the husband said, “he’s like that lunar….module…thing.”

“The Mars Rover?” I piped in.

Yep. We all agree. That’s our little buddy. Sheesh! He’s crazy. In the past I’ve referred to him as a psycho-bot, but I think Mars-Rover is more appropriate.

Laylee, on the other hand, keeps getting more and more girly. In my recent book club book, we learned about the differences in the way men and women communicate with each other. While men will seek to find a solution to a problem that’s presented to them in conversation, women are more likely to identify with the speaker and try to share a similar personal experience to make the speaker feel better about herself.

I thought this was something learned over time. Not so, my friends.

I was standing in the kitchen the other day when, for no apparent reason, I inhaled my own spit and went into purple-faced convulsions. I gasped for breath and grabbed for the counter to steady myself. I thought I was dying as one does when one inhales one’s own spit for no apparent reason. I’m sure you’ve done it yourself and, if you’re a woman, you’d tell me about that experience and we’d all be comforted and feel the love.

Laylee asked, “Are you sick?”
Me: No
Laylee: Are you okay?
Me: Yes. I’m (gasp) fine. (yorkle-snorkle-gasp) I just have a (gurgle-dy-gasp) a silly cough. (balgerloojie-hack)
Laylee (very seriously): It’s okay Mommy. I had a really silly cough sometimes too.

I did not make that up. As soon as I could catch my breath, I called Dan and said “HA! It’s innate. We ALL do it.”

Boys, on the other hand, are whirling-churning-psycho-bot-Mars-rovers-of-destruction. But we like them. And instead of comforting you with stories of their own near-death experiences while you asphyxiate yourself, they may actually get you a glass of water.

For the sake of this Tuesday’s discussion, we will consider all “diets” to be crazy. I hate them. I want to lose weight. I don’t want to eat cabbage soup, count my calories, assign a complex scoring system to each food item, or work out more than 30 minutes per day, capiche?

Okay.

Here are my tips:

1. Don’t graze (I stole this tip from Kathy Peel). Cows graze. People sit down to eat. Kathy says never eat while standing or while doing another activity. Being a mother, I can see that this means I will likely never eat again and will therefore lose tons of weight.

2. If you’re currently pregnant, give birth. This TOTALLY worked for me.

3. Don’t buy anything that tastes good. If the food is lame, you won’t eat it, right? I think that’s Dr. Phil’s entire diet plan. Oh yeah, he had all that other stuff in there too.

4. Don’t get mad, stressed, annoyed or sad. This will cause you to eat a ton of Trader Joe’s whole-wheat spiral pasta with red sauce and shredded cheese while simmering in a hot bath and crying. The sweat and tears lost in the hot bath will not make up for the calories gained by eating the pasta. Try to remain calm.

5. Blow your nose before you get on the scale. I actually came up with this tip for myself one night, which sent me over the edge. That very night, I put this topic in the Tip Tuesday queue.

I need your help.

You HAVE to have better ideas than these or you’re a lot dumber than you look.

Update: check out The Bloggest Loser.

Lately we’ve been reading a version of Sleeping Beauty FRE-QUENT-LY.

Laylee (wearing big pink wings): Magoo can be the wicked fairy. (to Magoo) You can be the wicked fairy.
Laylee (slamming Magoo’s head between two pillows): You’re the wicked fairy and I’m the good fairy. (slam slam)
Magoo: WAAAAHHHH!!!!
Me: Laylee. Please stop hitting your brother.
Laylee: He’s the wicked fairy!
Me: Not anymore. He doesn’t like being the wicked fairy.
Laylee: Then YOU’re the wicked fairy.
Me: No I’m not.
Laylee: Yes you are the wicked fairy.
Me: No I’m not.
Laylee: Okay, I’m the wicked fairy.

Later today –
Laylee: We’re having juice for dinner.
Me: Yes
Laylee: Did Jesus make this juice?
Me: Well, Jesus and Heavenly Father made the earth and they made the plants that grow on it. So they made..
Laylee: And goats?
Me: Yeah, goats too. So someone squeezed the apples to make juice.
Laylee: So Jesus made this juice?
Me: Okay.
Laylee: It’s easier to walk if you have feet. We have feet and so we can walk. Did Heavenly Father make us our green couch?
Me: Not really. He made the trees and then we used the wood to make the couch.
Laylee: Penguins are supposed to have wings.
Me: Yes, they do.
Laylee: So they want to fly.
Me: Yeah, but they can’t fly with their wings.
Laylee: Do penguins have fish on their movie (been watching ‘March of the Penguins’ lately)
Me: Yes, they eat the fish.
Laylee: What do the baby penguins eat?
Me: You know how Mommy eats food and then it turns into milk in my body like magic and Magoo eats it out of my breasts?
Laylee: Nods
Me: Well, the momma penguins eat the fish and then it turns into special baby food inside of them and then they feed it to the baby penguins out of their mouth
Laylee (attentively): So it’s like magic. And the fairy godmother uses her wand to make a magic dress for Cinderella to wear. She can’t wear her pink dress if it gets ripped.
Me: Yeah.
Laylee: But now Cinderella’s not lost.
Me: Oh? Where is she?
Laylee: She’s in the cupboard. See. (Runs to cupboard and pulls out the dvd case)
Me: Ah.
Laylee: Up please.
I lift her up.
Laylee: You are the strongest girl in the WORLD!