Not for lack of trying

We got new family photos taken. I love how Sammi is looking away in this one. Oh yea, and those pigtails.
They are some cutie patooties, those two.
Last Friday was Dave's birthday. I made a cake with a washi tape bunting on top. Jack LOVED that bunting. He went on and on about it. Thank goodness Dave didn't go on and on about the lack of presents (or even a card). I started Friday with good intentions but life is just not very cooperative right now.

I see that everyone else is out and about buying lots of fabulous things. Me? Nothing. And not for lack of trying. I actually had to look back on the blog to see the last thing I bought. It was at the beginning of March. One weekend I went to no fewer than 15 garage sales and bought NOTHING. Not even crap for the kids. It's starting to be a pointless pursuit.

Sam and I went out for a bit anyway recently because it's been so darn rainy. I found a few things, but I had to REALLY overpay for them. (The thrifts are getting insane. And they are BARE. I can't even find a jar for the oxi clean to replace one I broke. Ugh.)

What I did buy:
A piece of fabric.
A way over priced dish towel.
A vinyl tablecloth (with a scalloped edge).
A book for Sammi...
Or two. I love Golden Sturdy books but they are not very easy to find.
Cute!

I guess I will have to start buying stuff from those of you with better luck.

Speaking of luck - with any luck Dave and I are leaving the children with my mother on Friday and Saturday to go on a junking adventure.

I CANNOT FREAKING WAIT for some peace and quiet. No food to clean off the floor! No whining! No crying! Now, let's hope 1) the children are healthy enough to leave with her and 2) I don't puke the entire way or have to lie and down and die or something. (I still do not feel so great. Oy.)

Fingers crossed.

Praise Jesus

Thank goodness the cast is off. There is no sign of a fracture and Sammi is back on the move cast free.

And more importantly she is free to take a bath! (Toddlers get mighty nasty in 10 days, particularly when they hate *sponge baths*.

P.S. Where the hell is the spell check now?

Aye Aye Aye

This is a totally random post to see if I can still blog using this darn new blogger interface.

I cant even figure out how to change the picture position anymore.

Or how to make a paragraph!

Or how to edit a post!

Grrrr. 7 years of blogging on one interface.

I want to blog

I want to blog.

I really do.

But I cannot.

I am drowning over here.

I cannot seem to get out from underneath the constant messes of the kids and the cooking all day and the house and the laundry and blah blah blah.

I still spend a lot of time having to puke.

Sammi will not eat ANYTHING other than yogurt, cheese and cheerios. So she just cries all damn day long because she is hungry. I have tried to feed her nothing but those things. I have tried to feed her everything under the sun. I cannot get her full so she will stop that crying.

I decided this week that I would spend one hour a day doing something I enjoyed.

That lasted all of 2 days.

I had a better balance when Jack was little. (Of course I had a MUCH smaller, more manageable house. And Jack was not into every damn thing like Sammi is.)

I cannot get that balance back for the life of me.

It's wearing me very thin.

And there you have it.

Ugh

In a cast for 10 days, re check with x-rays at 10 days, if there are signs of bone growth (indicative of a break) then into another cast for 2 weeks.

Right now she is madder than hell and won't stop crying or attempt to walk with the cast on.

And me? Still freaking mad too. It's not one of my better parenting moments but frankly I don't care right now.

You're kidding me right?

Oy vey. Last week did not go well. It involved two sick kids and one cat who had scratched herself very bloody. Oh yea, and one spectacular bout of morning sickness.

All on the same day.

Then yesterday the kids were playing in the yard and Jack did something so freaking stupid, and something I had just told him not to do TWICE (never mind how many other times he has been reprimanded for it), which resulted in him injuring Sammi.

And it left her unable to walk.

We went to urgent care, waited a bazillion hours with two very restless children (one of whom had a spectacular tantrum screaming about how much he hates his sister*), had her x-rayed (no visible broken bones YET), and were referred to the ortho today.

When we got home I gave her advil and she was motoring a little.

I hoped with some rest she would wake up able to move today.

But no. Actually she is worse and unable to move at all today. (Doesn't even want to attempt to stand up or walk.)

I have been up all night worrying. The cast will likely be from her hip to her foot, since no one knows where the pain is in a kid her age. The thought of her totally immobile for three weeks is terrifying me. I am still sick and I have been relying on her being able to move around and play.

Also, my baby cannot walk!

And I a M A D. It's not that Jack did something stupid it's that every.single.day. we are *discussing* how he needs to do what he is told and do it when asked. Not after being asked 16 times. (And yes, I have tried a bazillion different *discipline strategies.*)

This pretty much could not suck anymore than it does right now.

Right now I am HOPING that the ortho will put her in a walking cast, but I am not feeling very hopeful.


*I am not unsympathetic to what a challenge this has been for a kid who was an only child for 6 years. I can, however, think of better times and places to express this than an emergency doctor visit. I had to have him and Dave with us because she has to be held down for the x-rays and I am pregnant and cannot do it. I know - he is 7. But holy Moses that was incredibly stressful.

Non compliant

I don't think I mentioned this here, but a few weeks ago Dave gave Sammi a teeny bit of talapia in Costco. Three hours later she was covered in hives. We called the exchange for our ped, which rings to children's hospital, and they INSISTED she was allergic to her augmentin and not the fish and that she needed to be seen immediately at an urgent care.

It was high flu season around here and I knew it was the fish and not the antibiotic so I just refused to take her. The hives went away in about 3 hours.

I asked the ped about this at her 15 month well visit today and he agreed it was the fish and that it was insane to suggest we needed urgent care for that.

So we get to the part of the appointment where I have to decide what vaccines to get for her. I have had her on a selective/delayed* schedule because frankly I think the world has gone insane with this vaccination stuff. It's kind of like the fish problem, it seems that there is just NO common sense anymore.

I noticed that they have added even MORE vaccines to the list since she was born just a year ago.

Really? The forms from the CDC themselves say these diseases are known to prostitutes, IV drug users, health care workers and "men who have sex with men". REALLY?

My very moderate ped says to just carry on as we have been carrying and forget those. He said it's really a numbers game and that the kids chances of coming in contact with some of that stuff is minuscule at best.

But I have to wonder - why in the fuck are we insisting that every child in the US be vaccinated against some of this crap?



I just tell every doctor we see at this point to go ahead and mark our charts NON COMPLIANT.

Because I am getting cranky in my old age and I refuse to just go along with this nonsense.

Sigh. I am starting to understand why my grandpa spent so much time arguing with people. I just thought it was embarrassing them, but in all honesty, it's important.

It's important that more people start making THINKING decisions instead of just herd mentality. Just because they tell us that pink slime** is "probably okay" does not mean we should all be eating it! It used to be DOG FOOD for goodness sake.

*I am all for vaccinating kids against real and present threats. But chicken pox? Rotavirus? Hep B and now A? I also delay that nasty MMR as long as I can.

** I think this food thing is OUT OF CONTROL. I should not have to go find a farm somewhere and drive 900 miles to find food to feed my family. Everyone, EVERYONE deserves access to FOOD not CHEMICALS. I should be able to make my kids spaghetti with ground beef and know they can eat it. I should be able to eat a chocolate bar and not have it filled with chemicals instead of cocoa butter. I should not have to read every single word of every single label and have to sit there and google it to see if it is ANTIFREEZE or NOT! For the love of all that is holy, make food, sell food, and we will buy food. Period. I know it is possible, because even Oreos are 100 years old.

Hoppy Easter

It's a good thing the very first photo was halfway decent, because the bunny ear thing went all downhill from there.
I didn't expect anything else though.
Sammi is in FULL ON toddler shrieking, crying every time Jack looks at her mode.
I tried hard to get a photo of her pretty little dress. Yellow with daisies and little green embroidery on the front. And a peter pan collar. I die. But she doesn't care about dresses yet either.
We dyed eggs.
The Easter bunny came for a visit. (I gave up on making the kids rabbits this year. I have always done it, but the sickies are back and I am tired.)
A basket for Jack too.
Sammi only cared about the puffs. In fact, she is obsessed with having her own can of puffs and WILL NOT let them go.
Jack was happy to find things like microscope slides and new, more grown up, movies and books.

Eggs were hunted. Cupcakes are baked (no rabbit cake this year, I can't muster it). And we are ready for the rest of the family to arrive to eat shiny red ham. (A long running family joke about me and the ham - we are mortal enemies.)

Happy Easter to you and yours!

Vintage inspired foil eggs

A few weeks ago I won a give away of egg boxes from the Speckled Egg . I knew right away I wanted to cover them with some florists foil I have had kicking around for years just for that purpose. And it was perfect timing since I have thrifted NOTHING Easter this year.

(These are crappy photos but taking the pictures and covering the eggs took me all of 20 minutes.)

Here is what the foil rolls looked like. I paid 25 cents each at a yard sale, so it's worth looking for while you are out and about.
I peeled the foil off the plastic backing. This is the hardest part! But once it's peeled off the foil is sort of sticky.
Then I gently removed the cardboard band that keeps the lid on.
Cover them with foil and use an exacto to neatly trim the foil on the inside. Then reglue the cardboard band.
20 minutes later and I had 3 vintage looking foil eggs. If I had an extra 20 minutes I would have put some froofy stuff on the tops I suppose. Flowers or something.
For comparision - the lighter aqua one in front is the vintage one. (I think if I had wadded up my foil it would have looked more wrinkly like the old egg.

Now I had better go use the next 20 minutes to work on the other Easter project I really want to get done this year!

*Also I have not felt like I have to puke for 3 days. WOOOOOHOOOOO! Yesterday was the start of week 14, maybe I am out of those woods.

I didn't do the chores today

I didn't do the chores today
Instead I took the kids to play
It should have been a grand old time
But I am pretty sure I nearly lost my mind.

Jack loves the beach at this lake and since it is BOILING HOT (yesterday my van said 98 degrees at 3 pm), I thought we might as well go. At least the kids could get wet right?

It was all downhill from minute one. The lake is completely covered with nasty green algae slime.

Sammi would NOT wear a hat.

They played okay for a minute or two...
and there were HUNDREDS of butterflies of all different kinds (you will have to look closely to see the yellow ones here, in a moment you will understand why I couldn't leave the children for a single second). I have never seen butterflies like that in the wild, only in the butterfly houses. (That many I mean.)
They thought they would look in the water for a minute.
And then Sammi had an absolute temper tantrum for at least 20 minutes when I insisted she NOT go any farther into the very slimy water where she could easily drown while I was also trying to mind Jack.
At which point I had to carry her kicking and screaming over 1/2 a mile of burning hot sand with my pregnant self huffing and puffing and thinking we were all going to die any moment now, at the very least from heat stroke.
I finally got her to drink some water and she chilled out for a minute.
But even Jack decided after an hour it was time to get out of dodge.

I sat on that beach for a minute remembering when it was just Jack and he would explore that place for hours and I could just sit and watch and take photos of him. Instead of not being able to blink because Sammi was into everything and putting things in her mouth and Jack had wandered off and I couldn't see him AND OH MY LORD there is no way in hell we are going to Florida this year husband Dear.

And then we all had to come home (a 40 minute ride in the car with the two of them aggravating each other non stop and shrieking and screaming and crying and carrying on so much I cannot believe I can still manage to drive under those conditions) and have a nap.

I have promised a trip to the movies tomorrow.

Is there any chance I will survive it?

I think not.

(There are certainly challenges to having kids this far apart. Oy.)

*Jack is really at a stinker of an age. MAN that kid can aggravate right now.

Vintage fabric, how I love you

We spent most of the weekend putting in a much bigger vegetable garden. Which was a huge, exhausting, BOILING HOT (93 degrees on April 1) job.

Hopefully it will be fruitful and I will soon be filling our bellies with real tasting tomatoes and peas right off the vine. Yummm.

It was not a job without exhausting drama though. We had dumped 3 truckloads of compost on that area last week and when Dave started tilling he realized he had tilled right through a rabbit nest. (Baby rabbits in March? This weather is truly bizarre.) And oh my. It was horrible. Only one of the babies lived and Jack and I had to drive an hour away to find a rescue center to take it. Oy.
The weather has been hot enough for Sammi to start wearing that big pile of vintage clothes I bought her this winter though. And just in time, any longer and they would be too small.
We went to a city wide yard sale on Saturday and I only bought TWO little pieces of fabric.
They are swell, but an ENTIRE city and only two pieces of fabric? Junking is just not off to a great start for me at all this year.

Over the past week I also managed to scrounge up some other good fabrics, some full feedsacks, some just bits and pieces, but all sweet:

(I am really digging the turquoise and yellow together.)









I could buy vintage fabric all day long. Sigh.

Jack is FINALLY on spring break this week. I am excited about a break from the daily grind, but the two of them have spent the entire morning tormenting each other! Sibling rivalry already, LOL. They are only quiet right now because our lawn guy is mowing and they are watching out the windows. (The lawn has already had to be mowed twice. I feel like we are living in Florida again. We really didn't have winter at all.)

Alright off with me. I actually made something last week. Perhaps I will get it blogged this week?