I Like Hellos Not Goodbyes

I love when guests come to visit.  I like seeing someone I haven't seen in a long time and catching up.  I like being with friends and having fun together.  But I don't like goodbyes.  It's not so much that I can't say goodbye, it's that goodbyes are an immediate reminder that our time together is over; it's when we have to face how long it will be until we see each other again.  It's the opposite of the happy event that the hello was.

If the departure is a bigger occasion or for a longer time, it's almost as if we're beginning the mourning process of separation before we're even done being together.  Robert Heinlein said, "When a cat greets you, he makes a big operation of it, bumping, stropping your legs, buzzing like mischief.  But when he leaves, he just walks off and never looks back.  Cats are smart."  That's how I feel about goodbyes. 

So if I ever wander off or don't make a big to-do when it's time to say goodbye, that's why.

The Big Boy Update:  He's getting the wave down now.  He's got the bye bye wave.  He now waves back and forth for "hi."  Although, he's not a reliable on saying hi as he is "bye bye."  He also knows high five and how to blow a kiss.  I got a video of him today picking up the basketball, dunking it and high-fiving daddy afterwards. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Yesterday she ate only three meals.  The last one was a bit drawn out, but she really only ate three times the whole day.  She still slept through the night, but she didn't eat as much as I would have liked.  Today, she's more hungry and has gotten most of her ounces in already in just the first three meals. 

I So Can Not Run

I've been thinking about how to work off the pounds from the pregnancies.  I've never been a runner but I thought maybe I could start.  For those of you not into bodily function-based posts, this is your time to move along--skip to the end as it were.

Our neighbors are joggers, my good friend is a runner.  I thought if I started small, maybe by spring I'd be able to run ... somewhere.   I was wrong.  I realized nursing exacts a certain toll on your breasts.  They're either engorged, extra heavy, and uncomfortable.  Or, their empty, floppy, and unwieldy.  Either way, not conducive to jogging.

When did this revelation come to me?  When I was doing something I've done countless times over the past few months, climbing stairs.  I'm usually in a hurry.  I realized just now that I hold on to my chest as I bound up the stairs (two at a time contributes to extra discomfort.)  Now how am I suppose to look even remotely normal when I have to jog holding my boobs?  I submit to you that it's not gonna happen.  I'm going to have to look through my sports bras and see if I can make it work. But for now, I'm going to have to bench press my son or something to get some exercise.

The Big Boy Update:  My husband's goal was to get him to like his pasta.  He loves to cook pasta multiple times each week.  He wanted my son to not only like the noodles (any kind, but spaghetti for extra, slurping fun) but the sauce too.  I'm glad to report not only does he like pasta, he wants nothing else if he realizes pasta is an option.  He's been known to boycott other options in the hope of pasta appearing on his high chair.  It's also messy.  He loves it.


The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The Big Breakfast.  She's been doing well lately with her meals.  This morning she ate seven ounces for breakfast.  It's almost three o'clock now and she doesn't want to wake up.  If we're going to make her daily ounce quota she's going to have to eat soon.  Hrm, signing off to wake her up and offer her lots of milk. 

Language Arts

It seems in school the subjects people hate are divided into two main groups; those who hate math and science and those who hate history and language arts.   I was in the latter category.   I don't know if it's called Language Arts today, but that's what it was called when I was in school.

My mother was a math teacher and my father was a science teacher.  Given my heritage, it follows that I would like math and science.  I didn't hate history, I just found it dull, boring, and a lot of memorization of past events I cared little about.  But English was frustrating.  I didn't enjoy writing papers.  Grammar didn't make sense, and more to the point, I didn't understand why it mattered.  I liked reading stories, but the books assigned were always terribly dull.  I never enjoyed English, no matter how engaging and friendly the teacher was.

Before I get to the point of this post, I'm going to digress and talk about two specific memories I have from English class.  Both were from a very kind teacher I had in high school.  We were assigned Crime and Punishment to read.  What a dark and dreary book.  But the best day of the whole project was when she brought in a record player and played the Russian character names and had us repeat them back.  These characters had long multi-syllabic names that were both exotic and foreign.  To this day, I don't remember the character, but I remember how to pronounce his name--Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov's name.

My other memory was from the same teacher.  I don't know the book, I don't know the context but sex must have come up at some point and she explained that at that time in history, women weren't suppose to enjoy sex.  On their wedding night, a woman was suppose to "close her eyes and think of England."  How awful, how tantalizing, how unexpected to have a teacher speak about sex to her class.  I'll always remember her standing in front of the class trying to help us understand.

Now, where was I?  Ah, how much I disliked Language Arts.  I did.  I hated all things related to language.  And yet now I want to be able to write well.  I am fascinated by the intricacies of  the English language.  I'm intrigued by words; I love grammar.  Some days I even think I would like to be a writer (of course, I come to my senses in short order, but you get the picture.)

It's one of the reasons I've taken on this blog.   It gives me a reason to write, to see if I can type words and have them make sense, to try and be interesting, even if only to myself.  One month later, I think I made the right decision when I pressed the Create button to start this Blog.  I don't think I'll ever be a writer, but at least I'm writing something.

The Big Boy Update: From baby to boy.   He's still a baby.  Definitely a baby.  But in comparison to his sister, he's a full grown boy.  Soon, I expect he'll be climbing out of his crib and demanding the keys to the car.  It's really amazing how quickly they change and how fast they grow.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  So cute in pink.  I don't like pink.  I didn't want pink.   I hoped to dress her in anything but pink.  But damn, she looks good in pink.  I'm a changed person.  Pink creeped up on me and now I'm a fan.   Six months ago, I would have shunned pink right out of this house.   Times and situations can change your perspective.

The World Is Your Oyster

Wait, what??  I'm back on language again.  Specifically, our strange idioms.   The world is your oyster?  Oysters smell, are slimy and usually have grit.  I'm sure if I looked up the phrase online there would be some explanation of how this crazy phrase got started and what the denotation means.  Probably something to do with finding a pearl. 

A friend of mine spoke fluent mandarin.  He taught me how to say the most insulting thing he knew in Chinese.  The translation was something like "your mother is a thousand-year-old egg."  Doesn't sound that insulting to me.  But different languages and cultures have different idioms. 

It still strikes me that learning English as a second language is an entirely different thing than being able to navigate all our particular phrases like "down the hatch" and "under the weather."  I've tried recently to remove idioms from my speech.  It's hard.  They slip in, you don't even realize how many we use on a regular basis.  I don't think to speak well, or speak clearly, we need idioms.  So I'm going to continue to work on it.

The Big Boy Update:  Sometimes he still has bad skin reactions to food or something else.  Today at lunch he got all red and was trying to scratch his forearms on the edge of the table and tear the skin off the bottom of his chin.  He won a bath and a dose of Benadryl when we got back.  He's sleeping soundly now.  Usually, the irritation goes away after the first interaction or two.  His body seems to get used to new things after an exposure or two.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She is hungry, only she doesn't want to eat.   That's her new complaint.  She complains multiple times per day.  But she's sleeping through the night.  So I'm definitely not complaining.  Speaking of, it's time to go feed the little girl--or try to.

Movie Night!

Every Friday we have Movie Night at our house.  It's something we adopted from a friend who wasn't able to host any more due to work schedule.  I look forward to it every week.  We never know who or how many people will show up.  We have no idea what movies we'll watch.  And still, it's good friends and good fun.

Each week, we have the children upstairs watching movies they pick out.  It's Mathilda every week if one of the kids has their way.  Lots of times it's Netflix movies.  Downstairs we talk for a while, eat dinner for those that brought it with them. catch up on the week's events and eventually settle down to a movie.

Netflix has turned out to be a good movie night option.  Several people bring their movies of the week over and we get to share subscriptions and watch jointly.  For months I wasn't able to stay awake for the movies at movie night due to pregnancy and post-deliver recovery.   This week, I'm up for both movies.  It looks like I'm getting some stamina back, hooray.

The Big Boy Update:  Nana and Grandpa came back from vacation today.  He was very happy to see them.  They'd been away for three weeks.  They both agreed he was walking (running) much better now than he was when they left.  He's more stable all around.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She's sleeping through the night now, but it's been a challenge to get her to eat the same amount of ounces per day when she doesn't eat at night and has little interest in food just before bed.  We're working on keeping her full as best we can during the day.  In a week or two we're hoping this will work itself out and she'll be more hungry in her waking hours.

Is It Really That Super?

I'm not a sports person.  When I was in high school I made the cheerleading squad.  At our first practice we were going to practice offensive cheers.  I had to have a lesson on what offense was (as well as it's friend defense.)  That's how totally into sports I am.

Coming up on the fifth of February the Super Bowl is happening.  It's also my birthday.  Now, to be clear, we've never made a big event of birthdays in my family.  I'm pretty excited that their is something fun happening on my birthday that will bring friends to the house.  It'll be a fun time and we don't have to focus on any birthday things.  That's just my style.

But back to the title of this post.  Is it really that super?  There are only 32 teams.  That means you only have to win for bracket games to make it to the super bowl.  I'm thinking End Bowl or Final Bowl or even Big Bowl would be a better name.   Then again, you sports fans are likely to disagree with me.  But isn't there an Orange Bowl and a Rose Bowl?  It seems naming the bowls has some strange standards.

The Big Boy Update: Ohdeeohdeeoh.  Another word.  A happy word.   A word that means "hey, look, the dog likes spaghetti" and many other things.  He has a closet in the bonus room he's discovered.  There are several baby-safe things in there we let him play with.  Now, he walks down the hall and stands in front of the closet doors and smiles at you so you'll open it up and play with him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She continues to sleep well through the night.  But she's also finding her thumb (and currently two other fingers) more regularly.  Our son went through this stage for a while.  We were able to redirect him to a pacifier and now he has no interest in his thumb.  Removing the pacifiers at a later date is much easier than thumbs.  Hopefully she'll be the same.

Where's My Winter Storm?

Every winter it's nice to have at least one winter storm.  In the south, we don't get a lot of snow or even really cold weather.  But I like to have one big storm each winter.  So far, we haven't even had the threat of snow.  It's not the end of January so there's still time.  Hopefully the weather will turn foul soon.

I've lived in the south all my life.  I've heard all the stories about how we can't drive in snow and for the most part it's true.  It's mostly because we have so little experience.  But it's also because the snow here is commonly a mix of ice and snow.  Or, it's snow, but it melts partially during the day and then refreezes at night and is doubly dangerous the next day.   People who get into or see accidents who aren't from the south seem to assume the people involved must be from the south, because anyone experienced with snow would never get into an accident.   And yet people not from the south get into accidents in bad weather even here.

The thing that's the most humorous to me is how the threat of snow can cause a panic that cleans out aisles in the grocery store.   We may never see a flake, but if the weather man predicts that it could be a bad storm, the bread and milk will be gone.   Even if we do have a bad blizzard, the plows have never had us stranded more than a few days, commonly one day.   But people like to be prepared.   We also have been known to have schools let out early, even before precipitation has (or might) start. 

People who don't see snow often and like it also get very hyped up when flakes start to fall.  Phone calls were made in the years before Facebook and text messaging to let people know they should look out the window.

So it's quite the spectacle here from both nature and the population when it snows.  For me, I just like the quiet white of a nice snowfall.  Hopefully we'll have one soon.

The Big Boy Update:  Hide and Seek.  He's figured out he can hide in a corner from you.  You might see him, but he's trying to hide and he giggles and smiles when you "find" him.  He's getting good at hiding when you're looking away too so you really have to look for him before you realize he's not run off to climb the stairs again.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Her first real night sleeping through the night was last night.  She ate her nine o'clock meal and went straight to sleep.  She didn't make a sound through the night and at 8:40 this morning I asked my husband to go make sure she was breathing.  Sounds awful, I know.  But it's something you think about when they're so young.  She was sleeping soundly.  I got her out of bed at nine to nurse.   She's not even eleven weeks yet and she's doing so well.  I'm a proud mama.