finger

ouch
Avery got her ring and pinky fingers of her left hand stuck in a very heavy steal door on Wednesday afternoon at a community center. She was with Rachele (who feels horribly, but whom I don't blame in the least) and RHG said that when she eventually got Avery's finger out, it was totally flat and gray. She also said it was one of the heaviest doors she's ever seen. Poor Avery. I'm not sure for how long, but Avery was standing there for more than just a few seconds with it stuck, so it was pretty traumatic at the time. Once RHG was able to free her, she called me and told me to start driving to the urgent care, then rushed Avery there. They x-rayed her hand which revealed that nothing was broken or fractured. They put on a splint - which looked more like a cast - and sent us home. While Avery cried a bunch (as well she should have) when it happened and at the urgent care, but since the splint's been on, she hasn't complained once. After the fact, she's always a trooper.

We went in for a follow-up appointment with a specialist. There was no need to x-ray it again. He removed the splint and Avery said it didn't hurt. She said it felt like a rubber band. She favored it a bit for the rest of the day, but Saturday she was using it almost normally.

I found it interesting that both the nurse and the specialist asked questions in such a way that, upon reflection, they were looking for any signs of child abuse. Of course, I'm thankful that do that because I want them to identify any child abuse going on with children, but it was a bit odd to realize that is what was happening.

apple picking
Avery & I, Mom, and Christie & Henry all went apple picking at Kiyokawa Family Orchards on Thursday. Avery stopped by school to have her picture taken with the class, then we drove to pick up Christie & Henry and head up. It was during this drive that I realized my sweet ride (and all other minivans) are missing one key feature: the window partition - you know, like limos have. It would be so nice to just to lock out any bickering between kids. I swear that Avery and Henry bickered more during that drive than they did the whole time we were in Mexico together.

Mom made me a gluten-free apple pie with some of the apples we picked. I just ate two pieces for lunch. I like Mom's gluten-free crust better than her non-GF crust! Mmmmm. Pie.

Mom's birthday
Yesterday was Mom's birthday. I underestimated how Avery would react when I explained that Mom and I were going out to celebrate Nain's BD. That is, she was upset. So, I quickly threw together a lunch celebration wherein Avery and D baked Mom a cake whilst I cooked lunch and bought Mom's gift (a bird bath). Avery was all over it. She insisted that we each lunch in the dining room, not the kitchen. Then she set the table all by herself. She also chose where everyone would sit. Needless to say, Avery sat at the head of the table. Finally, she insisted that we put candles on Nain's cake. We put 7 on to represent each decade.

Nain and Avery on Nain's BD.

For our daughter-mom celebration, I took Nain to dinner and a foot massage. We didn't hit the afternoon movie as planned because I was exhausted and napped all afternoon - bad daughter!

scanned out
I have scanned almost everything in the house. I now wander aimlessly looking for what other paper I can get rid of (this is only partially a joke). I think a lot of the appeal to me is that it's something where I can make fast, visible, tangible progress ... unlike parenting where results of hard work aren't as easy to correlate to said hard work.

I am proud that I managed to NOT scan all past receipts. I decided that would be just an activity of scanning for the sake of scanning. The likelihood I would ever need to reference those receipts is pretty close to nil. So I bundled up the receipts and will put them out of sight until such time as I am ready to recycle them. From here on out, I'll scan in any receipts for products I might have a need to return (meaning, I won't scan in grocery receipts, but would a receipt for a birdbath or stuff like that).

If any friends need any scanning done ... :)

Wedding

Table placements, invitations, party favors ... oh my!

A teacher in Nolan's class asked Rachele about my Cameo in relation to her wedding. Rachele rightly told her I do indeed have a machine and I love to use it. I emailed said teacher  yesterday, she emailed back some details, then I put together some samples of what it can do based on what she's looking to do.  I'm so excited to put my machine to good use! Hopefully Carlotta doesn't think I'm crazy because I just sent her three long emails with options of things we can do, etc. I made sure to tell her I don't care if I have any creative input since most of my enjoyment comes from the execution of a vision.

I suppose this post would be more interesting if I'd taken pictures of my samples.  Just imagine something spectacularly clever and creative, divide that vision by 100 and you'll get at a mental picture of what I did. 

Two TP choices

Now that we have two rolls of TP hanging in our main floor bathroom, I find myself wondering which one I should use. It's like I think the other one will feel badly if I don't choose it. Or I like I want to keep the rolls even. I should have known my OCD wouldn't be able to handle having a choice of TP rolls. 

Leather

---

Strawberry picking

Avery and I joined Christie and Henry for some strawberry picking this morning.  It was a lovely morning and we easily filled up a large box with red strawberries.  Most of them even hulled themselves since they were at the perfect moment of ripeness.  My only plan for these strawberries is to make fruit leather.  I've never made fruit leather, but I got it in my mind a while ago that I should (I like from a post or a share done by Lori).  So off I went to pick a box of berries.  I got home, took a nap with Avery, then went about washing and sorting the berries.  By the time that process was done, I realized I would only be able to do part of the fruit leather process (date night tonight).  I learned a few things during this process.  Shall I share?  Yes?  OK.

1. I don't like making fruit leather.  It's much easier to buy a box and unwrap the nicely packaged and perfectly prepared rolls. 
2. When a pot of strawberries and water is put on the stove to simmer, covered, and left unattended, it will boil over and make the range look like a bloody crime was committed above it.
3. When strawberry puree is put into a blender, holding the lid down tightly is key if you want to avoid strawberries all over the wall and cabinets and your shirt. 
4. Walls and cabinets clean up fairly easily; shirts, not so much. 
5. 12 cups of strawberries yields three cookie sheets of fruit leather. 
6. I picked about 36-48 cups of strawberries.  
7. This fruit leather better be light years better than the boxed kind or I'm gonna be pissed.

---

Movies and Books

I'm still reading the Ender's Game series of books.  I'm on book three now, Xenocide: Volume Three of the Ender Quartet. If you'd told me even a few months ago that I'd be working my way through a sci-fi series, or that D and I would be reading them at the same time, I'd have thought you were crazy.

I wanted a way to rate the movies I see, then post them to FB the same way the Goodreads site does for books. That is how I stumbled upon criticker.com.  It's a cool site that creates a PSI - probability score indicator - for a movie based on your previous ratings.  Basically, after you've rated x movies, it compares those ratings to other users who also rated those movies.  Using aggregated data from all users, it can then create a PSI for each movie you have not rated, which tells you what you will likely rate that movie.  After I entered about 100 movies, I started to pay attention to the PSI it predicted for me before I ranked a movie.  It was surprisingly accurate, I must say.  Especially because it's on a scale of 0 to 100.  They seem to have gotten around the obvious problem of comparing one user to another user (that being what one user considers to be a score of 90 might be another user's 80) by essentially comparing movies based on a curve.  It categorizes the movies you've rated into tiers, then compares tiers to tiers.  Clever.

It was that obsessive rating that resulted in my 1:30 am bedtime last night this morning. I regretted it in the morning, but I do feel like I accomplished yet another meaningless data task and those are my favorite types of meaningless tasks. 

---

Weekend plans

Saturday morning we're planning to go miniature golfing.  Sort of an early father's day celebration.  Saturday afternoon we're heading to a neighbor's house for a BBQ/play date with the families of two neighborhood kids Avery currently goes to school with.

Sunday I'm quite sure I'll spend packing for my flight later in the day.  Since they changed the time of the Timbers game, D will be able to drop Avery and me at the airport.  Avery and I are quite excited to see our CO/WY/CA relatives who will be at Dylan's (my nephew) 3rd birthday celebration.

Off

---

Off Day

After a very, very off day yesterday, I was doing quite well today.  Yesterday, I napped for 4 hours.  I haven't needed a nap in a long time.  That is to say, I've taken a few naps since my energy changes, but those were luxuries and not necessities.  Yesterday I just hit a wall.  Zero motivation, exhausted, and feeling down. On Tuesday I scheduled an appointment, for next week, with my PMHNP/therapist to discuss upping my dosage based on other signs (increased fidgeting, increased irritability, short fuse, etc), so I can't say I was shocked that the wall appeared.

Today I've been doing better and actually doing things in the house.  That is until I had deal with poop-tastrophe number two this morning.  The first one was the usual morning pile-o-poop left for us by Eddie.  Thankfully, that was in the garage.  Without going into details, it was an ickier than usual cleanup.  I'm tootling around the house getting things done when I let Eddie in from the backyard.  Then I start to smell poop. I look around for the inevitable gift only to not see one.  Then I spot Eddie's paw out of the corner of my eye: covered in poo and he's just walking around my house.  That is, in my view, far worse than a pile of poo.  So I get him outside, clean up the entire area where he's been walking, then get a pan of soapy water outside to clean up his paw.  After all that, I'm exhausted.  Not from the physicality of it, but because I'm just Done with it.  And my Done with it attitude is far worse when my medication is not working as well as usual.  

---

Diet & Energy Update

So where am I with my diet and energy?  I'm doing very well, overall, with energy.  I have normal-person tiredness.  When yesterday's wall appeared, I realized that I know for sure that my exhaustion and napping was not in my head.  It's due to a combination of depression and diet - sometimes more one than the other.  However, yesterday took me right back to where I had been for years and it was a good reminder that I can't just will myself out of it.  I decided to just go with the flow, let myself nap, and hope for better things the next day.

Diet: I'm still eating fairly well.  When I was on vacation, I ate a number of things that I try to avoid in my day-to-day life, namely gluten and sugary treats.  I still didn't binge and that is a very good thing.  The gluten typically comes in the form of cheeseburger buns.  I have no problem avoiding cheeseburgers in day-to-day life, but it's harder on vacation and it's even harder when In-And-Out is an option.  I haven't had gluten via pasta since pre-diet and I haven't had any cravings for it.  I'll eat the occasional cracker or item that may have some breading on it, but for the most part, I avoid gluten.  I also break the no-gluten rule when I eat quite a few desserts.  A small amount doesn't seem to have an adverse affect on me.  The great news is that I find it so very easy to avoid most gluten.  Note: if I had to completely avoid all traces, that would be very difficult.  But drastically reducing it in my diet has been easy.  Note 2: Ironically, I ate much gluten tonight when Avery and I ate out at New Seasons. I now regret that decision as my stomach is very upset with me.  But, I don't have a headache.  I just feel unwell.

The biggest change I have made in my diet, when I really break it down, is replacing gluten-carbs with brown rice-carbs.  I used to eat a bagel for breakfast, now I eat brown rice cereal.  For lunch, sometimes I'd have a sandwich or some pasta, now I have brown rice with some protein and fruit or veggie.  For dinner, pasta would often be an option and, again, I have just replaced it with brown rice.  Fortunately for me, I love brown rice as long as it's cooked a certain way. 

Migraine source: I've blogged about my pizza migraines before.  I'm closer to finding the culprit.  It's possible it's tomatoes when they're cooked a certain way, but I lean strongly towards it being garlic powder or onion powder.  I had a large bowl of tomato soup for lunch on Tuesday.  Within an hour, I could feel the pizza migraine coming on.  By the evening, D had to finish cooking dinner and put Avery to bed for the night.  When I checked the ingredients of the soup, I saw it had both garlic and onion powder in it.  I don't dismiss that tomatoes might be the culprit, but I can certainly eat some tomato-y dishes and not get a headache.  Likewise, I don't get pizza migraines from upscale places.  As RHG pointed out, upscale pizza places don't typically use garlic or onion powder as a typical pizza joint might.  I'm not sure if the migraine brought on by food on Tuesday had anything to do with yesterday's offness. My guess is it was one of a number of contributors.

Weight: My weight is hovering about 3-5 lb above where I was before I started gaining weight (which was around April/May of 2009) due to excessive doughnut consumption combined with dropping my daily dog walking habit.  Anyway, I'm happy with that, though I'd like to drop that last 5 lb.  My body fat is nearing where it was back then, too.

---

Mistake

I made the mistake of watching Extreme Couponing on TLC last night. Now I want my own stockpile for next to nothing.  Yet I don't care to do all the work to get there.  Plus, these extreme coupon clippers are kind of crazy.  I could totally see myself going there.  And to be honest, the whole reason I'd want a stockpile is so that I could organize it and then reorganize it.  Hell, I'd probably end up Freecycling most of my amazing deals, thereby costing us money.  For the sake of our financial future, I must avoid coupon-ing at all costs.  I do not have what it takes to save money.  I just have what it takes to spend more money to ultimately save a little money.

Better

Better, much better

I woke up today feeling so much better.  It could be a number of things:

• The Prozac I took hit my system (highly unlikely it's this since Prozac takes a while to build up and I'm on a minuscule dose at the moment)
• I bought and drank detox tea specifically because it said it's good for kidney and liver functions.  You might recall (though why would you?) that my kidney and liver pulses are basically non-existent whenever they're checked by the naturopath or acupuncturist.  I figured what harm could tea do.  I don't like nor dislike the tea, so it's painless and easy. 
• Acupuncture yesterday finally caught up with me.
• I got better sleep last night, though I did have night sweats again - boo!

Valentine's Day cards

Here are a few pictures of the final Valentine's Day cards.

Cards for the students

Cards for the teachers

Snowman

It snowed overnight, so I bundled Avery and out we went to make a snowman.  To be more accurate, I made the snowman while she commanded that we needed to do certain things ("He needs a carrot for a nose!" etc).  I made the eyes out of wine corks - what else? - and the mouth out of celery.

I even had the energy to shovel the sidewalks and the driveway, thank you very much.  Never mind it wasn't necessary to do this since the snow is rapidly melting.  I just couldn't stop once I started moving snow around to make the snowman.  OCD, oh how I loathe thee.

It would have been better to get a picture of Avery with the snowman, but by this point she'd said she was going in the house to warm up and abandoned the project.

To satiate your need for Avery pictures, I shall post this one of a particularly cute outfit Avery picked out for school last week.

Notice how all elements have stripes.  Awesome.

Toilets

And now, since I have energy, I'm going to scrub all the toilets.  I've been aching to do this forever. Yes, I have.  But it's not something I can do quickly because I'm a total germ-a-phobe when it comes to toilet cleaning, so I have to have all my gear ready.  I've just not had the energy and time at the same time to do it.  I love me a clean bowl. 

Sick

Oh, and Avery is still sick, but was a total trooper (thank goodness, knock on wood) through the night.  As with all sick days, it's a eat whatever you want and watch as much boob tube as your little heart desires day.  Hey, maybe that's why I'm so happy? :)

Fidget

Weird & Fidgety & Off

If I'm being honest with myself, I'm in a rather weird state right now.  Something is off.  I don't know what it is, but I feel like I'm trying to find my balance.  I'm not feeling down.  I'm not feeling overwhelmed.  I'm not feeling anxious, though my body is telling me otherwise (see next paragraph).  However, since Christmas ended, I've been not quite myself.  I'm not worried so much as I am confused.  I'm waiting to figure it out.  Because I've had points in the past where I've essentially crashed, I'm always kind of on the lookout for signs that I need to make an adjustment to avoid another crash: am I sleeping excessively? am I losing interest in things I normally love?  am I feeling the urge to hide from people?  am I moodier than usual? am I crying more?  is my energy non-existent? etc.

One clear sign that I must be feeling some sort of anxiety, even if I don't know why, is a huge increase in my urge to fidget.  I've always been prone to fidgeting.  But my urge to fidget goes down when I'm on the anti-depressants.  I hadn't put that piece of the puzzle together until recently.  As I type this, both my legs are bouncing up and down furiously.  I find myself bouncing my legs or shaking my foot.

I suppose I have a few other signs of things going somewhat awry: I haven't been blogging nearly as much.  The increase in things I'm getting stuck on (e.g. email organization).  But normally I see those things reflected in mood, as well.  I don't feel unhappy at all.  Quite the contrary.  I'm very happy with things at the moment.  I'm happy with one child (oh so very, very happy about that decision!), I'm happy with my choice to stay home with Avery, I'm happy I get so many breaks (deserved or undeserved) from being a SAHM, I'm generally happy and content.  So WTF is going on?!

I do plan to talk to my drug dealer PMHNP about it during our next appointment, but for now I just find it perplexing, if not life disrupting.  A thought did just occur to me, but it doesn't make logical sense: I haven't been to acupuncture since December 21st.  If one subscribes to the belief that acupuncture does indeed have the power to direct energy flow in the body, then maybe stopping it has resulted in pent up energy coming out through fidgeting and offness?  I don't know.  That sounds crazy.  I still have a hard time writing about this stuff because a big ol' portion of me feels like I am obviously making all this stuff up in my head and it's not real and I'm just a big baby.  OK, that statement almost made me cry, so maybe there's something there.  Especially since I hardly ever cry when I'm on anti-depressants (seriously, it takes A LOT to cry and even then it's like a 30 second moment and it passes; Megan off anti-depressants is often a weeping mess). 

Continuing Obsessions

When I realized I should send an email to coordinate details for our trip to The Mexico!, I knew I had to seize the opportunity to create a Google Site for the effort.  So I did.  It's way overkill.  It's so not necessary.  Yet I'm so happy I did it.  Except for the fact that I stayed up until 1 AM doing it and messed up my sleeping schedule for a 24 hour period.

FSA rules

I spent several hours today trying to sort out a few things for our FSA for 2010.  I hate the FSA.  It makes me mad that you lose the money and that you have to set it aside to start with.  It's just a stupid process.  But I digress.

Here is what I learned today: if you have an FSA account with a company, then you quit or get fired or lose your job somehow, you are entitled to claim the full amount you designated for your FSA regardless of how much you've actually contributed to the FSA.  Confused?  Let me explain further.  Let's say you quit your job at the beginning of January, therefore you've made one contribution (from January's paycheck) to your FSA account.  Let's also say you had elected, before quitting, to contribute $2000 to your FSA for that calendar year.  For the time that you're still covered under the insurance for that plan, you can claim the entire $2,000 (assuming you have legitimate medical expenses in that amount in January) despite the fact you've only contributed $83.  And this, people, is how I discovered that we really, really should have incurred a hell of a lot of medical expenses in January of 2010. 

Eddie The Pooper

Eddie's inability to control his poop has returned after a lovely month-long hiatus of accidents being somewhat under control.  I'm grateful for the hiatus. 

Sleeping Beauty

Avery has consistently slept in her bed (all night) for the past week.  She has earned her first $2 and says she wants to save it to buy a "tiara and a leotard and brown shoes and a yellow dress and red shoes."  She's going to be a bit surprised when she learns how much things cost.  I've explained she won't be able to buy all that with $2 and that she'll have to save up, to which she responds, "OK, Mom, I will save my money and then I will buy a tiara and then I will wear it."  I'm not convinced she gets it yet, but we'll see. 

Also very odd to me is that she wants another tiara.  She has several and she hardly ever wears any of them.  It's odd. 

Growth Spurt?  

Avery has been eating constantly for the past several days.  She ate an entire package of grapes in a day (among other things).  She'll eat a whole pint of blueberries and then ask for some bagel.  Either she's going through some sort of growth spurt or the milk-in-a-glass thing is a bigger difference than I thought it would be.

Her desire to drink a large amount of milk out of the glass (without a straw) is increasing.  At first, she'd drink it like I see most kids do it: a little bit at a time and sometimes even leaving milk left in the glass.  The past few days, I've seen her down the whole glass in maybe 5x the amount of time it would take her to do the same amount in a sippy cup.  Keep in mind that she can drain 8 oz out of a sippy cup in probably 2-3 minutes if she wants to.  I am hoping this desire to drink large amounts out of a glass doesn't put us back to where we were with the milk consumption.

Counting

Last night I was reading Ten Little Ladybugs to Avery.  She's been solidly able to count (1-1 counting) for months and months now.  Last night, with each page, she consistently was unable to remember the number before the last number she was counting.  For example, if we were on seven, she count the ladybugs: 1-2-3-4-5--7!  On six, she'd do: 1-2-3-4--6!  She always got the number right, but couldn't seem to come up with the second to last number.  Very weird indeed. 

Movie

D and I are seeing the Hood to Coast movie tonight at the Keller Auditorium.  I best be getting ready.

Unlabeled

Label:Insanity

So do you want to know what kept me up until 2 AM last night?  What do you think could be so very important that I stay up that late?  I became obsessed with cleaning out my gmail account.  Never mind my storage is at 3%!  Basically, my goal was to delete all emails to which a labeled hadn't been applied. When I view gmail through my computer, it's not a problem to delete these since I just press the delete button to delete or the archive button to save. And I never press the archive button unless a message has at least one label attached to it.

However, when I delete through my iPhone, gmail doesn't actually delete the message.  It archives it.  This means that when I delete a newsletter-type email from the iPhone, and there are no labels attached to it, it goes into this place of oblivion.  I've known about this since a week or so after I got my iPhone (so just over a year), but thought I could just Let It Go.  Not last night.

You'd think gmail would have a way to search for all unlabeled messages.  If you Google that, you'll find a lot of people want this feature.  You'll also find there are a few tedious ways to find them, though I couldn't get a single one to work.  I think they only work when you have a small number of labels.  I have 63 different labels.  Regardless, I came up with my own method for identifying all unlabeled messages.  Then I sorted through all those that should have had a label and assigned them the correct label.  Then I deleted all the messages that were intended for deletion in the first place.

What about this problem in the future, you ask?  I did actually think this through.  I also developed an easy method for identifying those messages that I "delete" (which is actually archiving) via my iPhone in the future.  It's a manual process to then re-delete the emails from my computer, but not cumbersome.  It's like keeping my spam box cleaned out.  I'm generally very good about cleaning out spam on a regular basis. 

Yep.  I did all that for a personal email account in which I still have 97% of my storage free.  Being crazy is hard sometimes. 

Medication

The next topic isn't far off from the first one: my OCD-like obsessions.  I don't officially have OCD, but I have obsessions that a layman would call OCD.  And with regards to these obsessions, I definitely notice a huge difference when I'm on anti-depressants.  On medication, I can just let things slide;  I'm not obsessed with stupid little things; I don't freak out if something isn't perfect.  All those things take up a lot more space in my mind when I'm not on medication.  I don't really understand why my OCD-like-tendencies are helped by medication, but I know beyond any doubt that my tendencies are definitely minimized.

In the last few weeks, it feels like the medication isn't performing quite as well at suppressing my OCD-like obsessions.  I've gotten in a loop on several things such that, after the fact, I'm shocked by the amount of time I've just squandered on a meaningless task (see above).

Yet, my mood is great and I am very happy in life at this moment.  As such, I don't want to increase my medication dose.  I don't want to mess with it when I'm not having any side effects from it and my mood is stable (well, as stable as any "normal" person). 

Loreto

Check out #8 on the NYT's 41 Places to Go in 2011 list.

Memories

Popcorn

Shortly after Avery arrived, Mom sent me a few of the books I had as a child.  It was one of the books I numbered, with my grandmother's help, when I was in second grade to better organize my personal library.  The book is called Popcorn. It's the story of a bear who is left alone on Halloween night when his parents go out for the night.  He decides to have a Halloween party, calls up his friends to invite them and tells them to wear a costume and bring something good to eat.  His friends all show up with unpopped popcorn - every single one of them.  At some point during the party, someone suggests they pop all the popcorn.  They do and it's so much popcorn that it fills the whole house.  They then have to eat all of it and clean up the house so the bear doesn't get in trouble.  Then his parents come home, to a nice clean house with no knowledge of the incident, wake the bear and tell him they brought him a present: popcorn!  I hope none of you were planning to read the book because I pretty much just told you the entire thing.

Anyway, I loved this book.  Not just the story, but the cover.  I had forgotten until I started reading this to Avery, but I have very vivid memories of studying the back of the book.  Here it is:

I remember trying to find each pumpkin that was different from the rest of the pumpkins.  I would wonder why some of them didn't have eyes that were colored in and why some didn't have a green stem.  I didn't know if it was a mistake on the part of the publisher, or if it was intentional.

Now that I'm reading this to Avery, my obsession with it continues.  Did they do it on purpose?  Make some different?  Why?  If they didn't do it deliberately, how did the publisher miss such an obvious mistake?  I am so tempted to buy it from Amazon to see if the newly published books have the same "flaws."

Small Spaces

Continuing my obsession with small, yet very functional, living spaces, check out this 500 sq. ft. studio in NYC.  I think I am so obsessed with small spaces like this because it's small and cozy, yet very functional and very organized.

Labels

OCD is my name, useless activities are my game

Labeling of posts was a feature added a year or so after I started blogging.  I have tried at various times in the past to label posts, but always stop because I get too specific and end up with a million labels. 

For whatever reason, I decided to start labeling posts again.  However, of course I can't just start labeling; I have to go back and label all past posts.  I'm doing it a month at a time because I don't want to get mousers wrist.  Why must I need to do such pointless activities?

I still have way too many labels, but I cannot stop myself, so I'm going accept this over-labeling trait as The Way I Am.  For the Avery categories, I started them all with {a} to differentiate.  And I still have labels from the past applied (hence so many falafels and kormas.)

Of course, whenever one starts to dig through something, unfinished business elsewhere pops up.  For example, the Annoyances section below is the start of an unfinished post last December.

And allowing myself one crazy act of OCD-driven-uselessness is bound to create others.  Since I decided to consistently use single word post titles, I have this urge to go back and change all the post titles.  However, I will resist this urge because it seems a bit like changing what I said. 

Annoyances

• People who tell people to "enjoy it while it lasts" with regards to children.  Does anyone think that any stage lasts forever?  Should we really have to type "I know this will change, but ..." before every little declaration of enjoyment?
• People who respond "TMI!" to status updates or blog posts.  Really?  Suck it up and stop being a prude.
• People who use FB status updates as a place to be all mushy and grateful about their lives.  With the exception of the occassional "Hubby did this, he rocks!" or "Child did this, am so proud!" I don't want to hear about your blessings.  Basically, if I see your status start to glaze over with frosted glass and cheesy music, ew.  Ick.  TMI! (teehee).

Obsessive

Inconsistencies

I put in a new widget for recent comments when I switched the layout of my blog.  I got tired of the other widget not properly handing apostrophes and other punctuation.  So you can extrapolate from that statement that the random italicizing of comments is really bugging me.  Seriously, it's enough to make me learn how to code my own javascript to handle the comments. Damn it!

Nap Drop

While Avery dropping her nap is at a bad time considering my voice issues, I'm actually happily surprised at how well we're both handling it.  We do have Miss Cranky Pants in the house from about 4 pm on, but overall, it's going quite well.  Avery was asleep by 7:10 last night and slept through until 7 AM this morning.  She does come into our room at some point during the night, but it doesn't wake me so I don't care about that. 

I'm also very happy to report that the sleeping rewards are working fairly well.  It's not a 100% thing, but it's certainly way better than it was.  I have mixed feelings about rewarding her for something she should do on her own.  However, I have decided to look at it like potty training.  We rewarded a pee or poo with an M&M for a couple of weeks to reinforce the wonderfulness that is going on the potty, then dropped it and she didn't notice.  I'm not sure that the sleeping rewards will disappear as quickly or without notice, but I'm hoping for the best.  Also, it's nice that she is motivated by clothing since those are things she needs anyway.  Which is not to say that I wouldn't use toys if that worked.  I would totally do that.  I'm just happy, from a financial perspective, that clothing is working at the moment.  Ah, the phrase "at the moment" - a staple in any wise parent's vocabulary. 

Commenters

Fun with Yahoo Pipes

I think I must have lost my mind for a bit.  I'm not even sure what I was doing that took me on this tangent, but I just spent the past 1.5 hours creating myself an RSS feed that will display the top commenters on this blog. Why am I not displaying it you ask?  Well, Yahoo Pipes (the tool I am using to do this) is acting up.  I can excute the pipe in the debugger, however, when I attempt to bring it into the blog as a widget or an RSS feed, no such luck.

Nonetheless, I could not let all my hard work go to waste.  Are you ready for the top commenters for my blog?  Here we go:

Amber(35)
Rachele(28)
Christie(22)
KMK(18)
penny(11)
bruce(11)
Darren(7)
Snickollet(6)
mom2reese(6)
Heather(4)
Lori(2)
Anonymous(2)
jeremy p(1)
augustine(1)

Christie's Top Commenters

Of course, what fun would this be if I didn't clone my pipe and check top commenters for other people's blogs? 

Dr. A(30)
Amber(29)
Megan(18)
Rachele(15)
Shawn and Becky(14)
Cathy(12)
Zozopdx(11)
Miss Amelia Jane.(10)
Darren(8)
penny(6)
Jen(6)
Anya(3)
B. E. Busby(3)
MissMVK(3)
Elizabeth Prata(2)
Snickollet(2)
VDog(1)
Lori(1)
Anne(1)
Sara(1)
Philippines properties(1)
Brian(1)
plumpy(1)
betty(1)
Lenore(1)

Amber's Top Commenters

Christie(38)
Rachele(23)
Megan(21)
日月神教-任我行(15)
Zozopdx(12)
Dr. A(12)
Anonymous(10)
MamaShift(8)
Colleen(7)
Snickollet(5)
Miriam(4)
Darren(4)
joven(4)
penny(3)
MissMVK(3)
baby gifts(2)
Leslie(2)
Rebecca Medina(1)
Jamie(1)
Brian(1)
Amy(1)
Sara(1)
alugnut(1)
Letherton(1)

Rachele's Top Commenters

Ace's Lady(27)
Christie(26)
Megan(19)
mom2reese(17)
Flo(15)
Amber(14)
Greta and Ryan(13)
Ammi(10)
Michelle B(7)
Dana(5)
Lori(4)
Florence(4)
penny(3)
the aug(3)
Gimpy!(3)
Echal0tte(3)
Don(1)
Laura(1)
Jenny(1)
Theresa(1)
Anonymous(1)
Theresa B(1)
gimpy!(1)