No Clever Title Required

I always feel compelled to make some excuse as to why I'm not posting more. In my blogging heyday, I posted every single day. Part of the reason why I don't is that I've voluntarily given up my niche. I don't consider myself a "mommy blogger" anymore and I don't want to talk about my kids all the time, for a variety of reasons.

Almost everything else going on at the moment is a bit repetitive, and not really worth extensive obsessive updating.

Anyway, we're all recovering from "Week from Hell, the Second" of this winter. Can't wait for the next one. We all still have coughs, and the grownups have lingering sore throats, but I'm blaming either the low humidity or the mold for that.

Speaking of mold! It's a long story, but we were finally able to prod our landlord into acknowledging our existence, and we have a mold remediation company coming out on Wednesday. It's not much, but it's something. Supposedly we are to hear from some chimney/flue companies as well, but that hasn't yet happened. Things are moving, though, and I think we have some leverage. Keep your fingers crossed, if you do that kind of thing.

I was only off my normal exercise routine for four or five days, but apparently the illness was pretty thorough because I wasn't able to charge right back like nothing had happened. The first class I went back to I had to take pretty slow, and I kept up with yesterday's okay, just a little slower and weaker than usual. I'm not sure if this was a good idea, or very stupid (and honestly, I can't bring myself to care) but I started a T-Tapp bootcamp (Google it, too lazy) on Thursday. It's only a measly 15 minutes of exercise in the morning, so I can't believe it's too much, you know? I don't know why T-Tapp feels so unbelievably corny and silly to me, but it's supposedly a pretty impressive workout, and again, takes up very little time, so what the hell. I'm on Day 4 of what I hope will be a 7 Day Bootcamp, but if it ends up being less, I don't care. Four consecutive days is supposed to be the important bit, and that's now done. Yay.

The children really need to go back to school because they are kind of driving me crazy. Baby C has this new atrocious habit of speaking continuously in a totally random way. It goes sort of like this:

"Daaaad?"
"What?"
...
"Daaaaaaaad?"
"What, Cel?"
...
"Daaaaaaaaaaaaad!"
"If you want to talk to me, come here. I don't want to keep shouting!"
"What?!"
...
...
"Daaaaaaad!"

Repeat every three minutes indefinitely. Side effects include irritation, unpredictable fits of rage, inexplicable helpless laughter and hair loss. And presumably, if left untreated, insanity and death.

Another part of her plan to drive us all mad is her curious refusal to take herself to the bathroom to pee. If she has to poop, no problem. We don't hear about it until she's ready to be cleaned up. If she has to pee, she begins an elaborate song and dance routine. She denies she has to go, then she starts to whine that she needs help, then she bursts into tears because OMFGSHEHASTOPEE! but will not make any attempt to bring herself to the bathroom. You know, that same bathroom she just used to take a crap all by herself a few hours previously.

Fortunately for her, she's very, very cute, what with the dimples and the curls and her natural inclinations toward ducking her chin and batting her eyelashes, so we haven't yet sold her off to a traveling carnival.

(Though to be fair, it's a slow season for traveling carnivals.)

Preoccupations

Lately, I am so engrossed with music. Now that my Sansa is working, and fully loaded, and the dock is working (it stopped for about six months, then mysteriously restarted again), I'm using that to full advantage. I'm also blipping when I can, although lately my laptop is behaving badly and tends to crash when I'm using blip, so I've cut down a bit. That site is so much fun, I'm rediscovering all kinds of music that had completely fallen off my radar. When I hear something I loved years ago, but had forgotten, it's like all these little lights turning on in my head.

It's like a portable drug. It makes me happy. The other day, My Sharona came on the Sansa while I was out in public. Due to my overdosing on a particular YouTube video with this song as background music, I started giggling uncontrollably. I tried to pretend it was in response to something my toddler did, and buried my face into her hair, but all I could see in my head was Buster Bluth dancing in his WWI/stripper uniform, and I was helpless.

I'm also spending a lot of time at the dojo. After we were all sick with horrible illnesses in November, and I missed a lot of time, I made a goal that I was going to try to get there four times a week. I've been doing pretty well with that, and have been doing a lot of back to back classes to boot. It's been really fun and energizing for me, and helped me kick ten pounds in the last month alone. (I still have about 13 more to go, though. Grr.) I got my first stripe on my blue belt on Monday, yaaaay.

And I was on a quest to update my wardrobe, since it'd been about a year since I bought anything new and most of my things weren't fitting anymore. I finally found a pair that fit perfectly at Target, of all places, but when I tried to cheat and buy more pairs based on the ones I tried on and liked, they didn't fit, and I have to bring them back. WTF is up with that? I bought the same brand, same size, same cut, different leg styles. And they are entirely different, not just the effing leg openings. I found a place online that makes custom jeans and I swear, I'm trying that next. They're no more expensive than Gap jeans, NONE OF WHICH FIT RIGHT IN ANY WAY! Ahem.

I hate the garment industry.

Today I should blitz the laundry, and do some baking, since it's a non-dojo day for myself and A, which is rare (I think between the two of us we're there 5 days a week), and because the entire world is covered with a giant sheet of ice. It's a good day for hunkering down, holing up, and daydreaming about a vacation somewhere sultry and warm and abandoned.

Catching Up

I should just rename this blog to "catching up." Just like I told someone at karate, I'm going to change my name to, "I haven't seen you around in a while."

For the last two or three weeks, we've been embroiled in trying to buy a used car. This has been ridiculous. We tried a few, found one we liked, started to buy it, felt like the dealership was taking too long and screwing around with us, and walked. Found another car, tried to buy it, felt like the dealership was screwing around with us, and waited. Finally signed paperwork after a week of dickering, and now, one week after that, today, we should be able to pick the damn car up. I am so emotionally wrung out by the experience I'm not even excited. I keep expecting to get a phone call saying, "The mother decided to keep it," as if it were a big, one ton metal baby I was trying to adopt.

I've also been trying to get the jewelry thing up off the ground. Start up expenses for a jewelry business are, I'm guessing, slightly higher than your average crafting business. I've been out of silver for weeks, so I have all these cabs lying around forlornly, waiting to be wrapped. I've finally, finally been able to order some of the finishing equipment I need, but I'm still waiting for it to arrive, so I'm a bit locked in limbo.

See, again with the waiting?

Since we finally decided to go ahead and buy a car because I essentially snapped and refused to chauffeur anymore, while we've been waiting for a car to materialize, I've been going hardly anywhere. Which is actually fine with me, but we have been skipping things we should be going to. Ani hasn't wanted to go to karate lately, which is An Issue, but especially lately, I am not going to force her to go if it means I have to drive 24 extra miles a day of rush hour commuting JUST to take her 2 miles to and from the dojo in the middle of the afternoon. Sorry, not doing it.

Ironically, I am buying a car so that I can stay home more.

Annika has been a handful lately. Well, you know, she's always a handful, but there's been a lot of moodiness and extra intensity and drama, and I'm trying to hit it from every angle, supportively (diet, extra sleep, vitamins, blah blah) but she does tend to cross me at every turn. When she's most in need of emotional support is when she's at her most unsympathetic, and generally when we're both tired, she's clinging for interaction and I'm trying to squiggle away for headspace, and it just doesn't jive very well.

She says she doesn't really want to quit karate, but she feels like karate and kindergarten is too much, and she can't quit kindergarten. Well, and she's right, she really can't. If she actually hated kindergarten, then we'd have to look for another program or school or something, because we can't homeschool. She would kill me and feast on my brains. I've said it before and I'll say it again: she is too much extroverted child for little old introverted me. Anyone who claims there is an easy solution for this has never met her. I've spent MANY MANY a day together with her all day, and whether we're staying home, going hither, thither and yon or somewhere in between, she is unsatisfied and I am totally exhausted. She needs a more communal structure, and short of me buying some extended family to live in our house with us, school is going to have to do.

(Yeah, she did just have a five day weekend. How did you know?)

Celyn gets short shrift in my blog just because she's so darn easy going. When we stay home all day together, she's totally happy with that. And she's happy to go out. Happy to play near me while I make the bed or write or knit, asking for something every once in a while, or just hang out. My biggest problem with Celyn is that she hates pants.

I thank the Universe every day for Celyn, for without Celyn, I'd have continued to think that my head-butting with Annika was just proof that I was and am totally unsuitable for parenthood. It's a little easier for me to accept it's temperamental differences, since my relationship with Celyn is pretty much how I imagined parenthood to be, before I actually had a kid. Annika is a terrific kid, but she's also turbocharged. It's really exhausting to be her center of gravity for long stretches of time.

Celyn is doing amazingly well at preschool. She loves it, can't wait to go on school days. She adores her teachers, and plays every day with her "best friend Owen." Owen is actually in the older kid class, he might be nearly four now, and oddly enough, he and Annika were good buddies buddies over the summer. Celyn lets me know, however, that she does not like the boys in her class, because they are clumsy and rough when they play.

Celyn also started writing her name recently, which really surprised me because I wasn't even sure she knew very many letters on sight yet. I guess Annika showed her how, and now she writes her name almost every day, and points out the letters in her name whenever she sees them.

"Dere's a Y! Dere's a Y in my name, too!" she'll cackle gleefully.

She'll be three in just a few months. Three? How can that be?

I have also kept busy lately selling as much excess stuff around the house that I can find on eBay, to further help fund the purchase of precious metals and semiprecious stones. Unfortunately, with several moves over the last few years and much clutter purging, I don't have a lot of things worth selling. Now, worthless junk? I've got all kinds of that.

Now, I better stop wasting time and do some laundry and finish touch up painting in the foyer before the littlest gets home and wants lunch.

And I really could use some coffee.