the sun is but a morning star.

-henry david thoreau, walden

at 5:51 a.m. this morning, like every saturday morning, when i heard the first stirrings from Kitten's crib i groaned to myself and silently begged her to sleep for just a few more minutes. it's hard getting up at that hour every single day.  which is why i find myself going to bed at 8:30 p.m. on a friday night.  shocking, even to me.

but like every other saturday morning, i dragged myself out of bed leaving a sleeping J behind, picked Kitten up from her crib, and took her into the living room to start our day.

by 6:30, after my english muffin and cup of coffee has kicked in and Kitten has been changed and fed a bottle, the world looks considerably brighter (both literally and figuratively), and i begin to be thankful for this time that i have with her each week, those unrushed hours between sunrise and 9:30 a.m. when aislinn goes down for her nap and J and Princess wake up and the making of blueberry pancakes or omelets begins - those in-between hours with the smell of coffee and morning air coming in through the back door screen, the sound of crosby, stills, nash, and young coming through the infinity speakers that my dad bought me in high school (lesson: you must always, always have quality speakers) and Kitten happily babbling, just the two of us.

here's a snippet of this morning, complete with dirty onesie (she played on the patio while i watered the plants and we rescued a caterpillar from death at the beaks of the birds nesting there - or at the hands of aislinn, who seriously almost ate it before i saw it).

(sorry for the formatting problem where the video window runs off the right margin; click on the video to take you straight to youtube if you want to see the whole screen.)

wherein i reduce my life to bullet points because i don't have time to post in full sentences

• summertime starts next week!
• repainted the very large guest bedroom and are moving Princess out of her small bedroom into it next week while she's at her mom's as a start-of-the-summer surprise
• new bedspread, rugs, lamps, paint, curtains whole new 1st-grader look: no more pale pink princess, lots of bold purple, pink, blue, orange, and lime green; J doesn't see the big deal--obviously he was never a seven year old girl
• Princess is going to summer camp at Kitten's daycare - SO looking forward to dropping them off at the same place each morning
• trying to make summer plans, gave Princess the choice of visiting any state contingent to oklahoma, she picked kansas - what's in kansas?? - we convinced her to do arkansas; will probably go to branson 2 nights then eureka springs 2 nights - suggestions welcome
• annual lake trip with my family coming up in a few weeks
• Kitten's 9 month check-up is next week - NO VACCINATIONS THIS TIME so don't have to worry about that for another three months
• J blew out his knee last sunday (kneeling in front of the fridge to check out what kinds of beer we had after helping my sister and her husband remodel all day) which ended us up at the ER; we've consulted with ortho and had an MRI today, check-up next thursday will reveal whether he'll need surgery to repair what is probably a torn ligament
• work is crazy, hectic, miserable, annoying, and makes me clench my jaw, but i still wouldn't trade the flexibility that having my own practice gives me for anything, because you can't put a price on being able to skip out of the office immediately without having to make up the billables over the weekend when you get a call about a sick kid
• Kitten and Princess are complete opposites, i can already tell - Princess is very cautious, "wait and watch" type of girl; Kitten sees it, wants it, and is INTO it in 0.395 seconds
• southcrest hospital ER had us in and out in 1 hour - impressive for the second ER visit of my life
• my first visit: hillcrest, 10p.m., friday night, handful of friends, accident (not mine) with a bottle of spiced rum, a new glass pitcher from pier one freshly washed in hot water, and an ice maker in the dorms
• Kitten update: favorite baby foods: peas (yeck), cherry applesauce; least favorite: bananas, squash; pulling up and sitting down proficiently, moves from object to object (couch to coffee table), will be walking in no time; says "gaga," "yaya," "baba," and a little "mama" and "dada," but doesn't yet assign meanings to anything
• my sister and her husband are still remodeling their house and it is going to look amazing when it's finished
• my sister and her husband also adopted a new dog, lexie, who is like a long-lost twin to their yellow lab maggie
• if you see my sister or her husband be nice to them because their plate is FULL and they can't really speak in full sentences right now
• Kitten's still sleeping in the pack and play in our bedroom; after we finish Princess's room i'm going to actually dec-or-ate Kitten's room with the goal of having her sleeping in there by her birthday in august - we can't have her dreaming in anything less than a well-appointed bedroom, can we?  i've picked out the pottery barn kids "brooke" bedding pattern and hopefully will be able to buy it before they discontinue it
• made homemade chicken fried rice for dinner tonight and it is SO much better than the stuff from Asian Chef down the street
• and finally, congratulations to my friend jennifer taylor who just found out she's having a GIRL!!!!! to become a little sibling to her son blayne.  welcome to club pink.  i know you're thrilled.

confession

i am OB-SESSED with this "Jon and Kate Plus 8" drama.  i've always liked the show, J's always hated it, but he tolerates my watching it because i tolerate him watching "Tim & Eric's Awesome Show."

for those of you who aren't TLC nerds, don't google it because then you'll just think less of me.

i like kate, i know she's a terrible bitch, but the woman can run that household.  i'm fully aware of all of her shortcomings and the writing is on the wall, i know their marriage is collapsing and their household is completely dysfunctional, but MAN it makes for great television.

that is, like, the only show i'm watching right now, other than Real Housewives of NYC/Jersey and Grey's Anatomy which should really just buy stock in Kleenex because seriously?  and we still dutifully watch Desperate Housewives on Sunday, more out of habit than anything.

my days are so jam packed and full of work drama--every day is someone's emergency--that when i come home i am drawn to bad television.  i have a subscription to People magazine now.  i used to have a subscription to The New Yorker, and now i have a subscription to People magazine.  my attention span is that shot.

but they're small indulgences that i allow myself, along with pedicures and adding cream cheese to my california rolls and bringing Kitten into bed with me at 3am when she wakes because it's easier than getting her resettled in her pack and play and i want to cuddle.

life is short and i'm not apologizing to anyone.

malaise

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful. - Gautama Siddharta

Kitten and i are still sick.  last week my doc put me on antibiotics for a sinus infection and the antibiotics (i hate antibiotics, rarely take them) proved to be harder on my system than the sinus infection so i quit taking them, and then in the last 48 hours the sinus infection has redoubled its efforts to make my life miserable, so i started back on the antibiotics along with a little alka seltzer cold and a lot of water and a lot more misery.

yesterday was Kitten's 7th day on her most recent course of antibiotics for the third ear infection she's had since march, and she seemed to be doing worse rather than better.  i took her back to the ped (actually the nurse practitioner because the ped couldn't get us in) and she pronounced the infection to be still raging in her little ears and switched her back to the antibiotic that she was on before.

i'm sick to death of these ear infections (and antibiotics) and i'm ready to get her into an ENT to talk about tubes.  my ped isn't on board with this, says it isn't warranted until she's had four ear infections within six months.  he claims she's had only two, that the first two ear infections was really one long infection.

i say that's bull, that she's had THREE ear infections in THREE months with specific periods of wellness between each one, and each new one being precipitated by a new, easily identifiable headcold.  just because he didn't personally proclaim her "healed" between infections doesn't mean it didn't happen.  and if four in six months will do, why won't two (or three) in three?

whatever.  i'm in a terrible mood today.

i'm also thinking about switching peds.  i walked out of that appointment yesterday with the NP with more information than i've ever got from the ped, and that concerns me.  she gave me some actual helpful tips (try these homeopathic ear drops/watch out this will turn her stools colors/by the way try this for that rash on her mouth from the pacifier/if you're worried about her not getting enough liquid since she won't take a bottle right now try this but don't worry until this).  all i get from her ped is 120 seconds of "yup, she has an ear infection, here's a script, no not time for a specialist yet.  no, don't worry about that.  that either.  see you next time."

not to mention there are other things we don't see eye to eye on.  he is pro-antibiotics, pro-vaccinations, pro-ferber method/crying it out.  i am anti- all of those things.

but how do you really go about finding the right ped for you?  like i have time.  i mean, peds can interview well and that doesn't mean you're going to see eye to eye later, as evidenced by our current situation.  and i don't want to ped-hop.  i don't want someone to look at Kitten's medical history and think, "why in the world did they switch peds so often?  what was that about?"  makes you look ca-razy.

this is all just a rant.  i'm behind at work and the only place i want to be right now is home in bed, and i'm not getting the rest i need at night because Kitten gets tylenol every 4 hours which means she's waking every 3.5 in pain, and i can hardly dose myself with nyquil and pass out for the night when i know that i'm going to be up multiple times trying to settle her.

oh, and J's on call this week.

so that's what i'm up to.  happy spring.

mother's day

“If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer.  If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in!  Come in!”  -Shel Silverstein

8 months old, 16lbs 2 oz

where: under the piano

when: friday afternoon

likes: pulling toilet paper off the roll, opening drawers and emptying them of their contents, the dog bowl

dislikes: having her face wiped, diaper changes, squash

she takes my breath away.

thanks, mom, for making me the kind of woman

who could love her own daughter this way.

if chocolate is the answer, the question is irrelevant

sometimes, you need a chocolate cake in your life.  not because it's anyone's birthday, or a holiday, or any other reason.  

thus was Princess's opinion yesterday evening.

and who am i to deny a child chocolate?  the importance of chocolate has been deeply ingrained in me since birth by my mother, who has been battling a serious hershey-bar-a-day addiction since 1977.  and she's still thinner than me.  *shakes fist at the sky*

she fed us hershey's for breakfast on standardized test days because she read that chocolate improves mental acuity.  hey, worked for me!

anyway.

that says "Happy Friday," not "7APQY PNIDAY." 

my cooking is hearty and rustic;

my detailed icing skills are less than stellar.

i'm more paula deen than barefoot contessa, and you know what?  i'm okay with that.

and NOW i will share with you, my few faithful readers, my family's generations-old, top-secret recipe for chocolate cake from scratch.

this recipe is so simple, and yields such amazing results, that i promise you will never bake another chocolate cake from a box.

GRANNY'S SOUR CREAM CHOCOLATE CAKE

("Granny" was my great grandmother - my mother's mother's mother.  I think she'd be okay that I'm sharing this recipe with you, but don't tell the ladies down at the First Christian Church because it's possible she never shared it with them.)

INGREDIENTS FOR CAKE:

2 cups flour                                  1.25 t. baking soda

2 cups sugar                                 0.5 t. baking powder

1 cup water                                   1.0 t. salt

3/4 cup full fat sour cream        1.0 t. vanilla

1/4 cup shortening                      2 eggs

2 heaping T. cocoa powder (i consider "heaping" an understatement)

dump it all in a bowl in whatever order.  mix well.  pour into a greased-and-floured (really even that step is optional) sheet cake pan.  bake at 350' for 35 minutes.

INGREDIENTS FOR ICING:

1/3 cup softened butter               3 cups powdered sugar (approx. 1 box)

2 heaping T. cocoa powder       1/2 cup full fat sour cream

2 t. vanilla

dump in a bowl.  mix well.  ice cake.

let the cake cool before you ice it or the icing will melt on the cake and be too runny, not set up right.  but i find that if you let the cake cool for about 10 minutes while you're assembling your ingredients and then throw it in the fridge while you actually make the icing--even though i'm sure you're not supposed to put a hot sheet cake pan directly onto a tempered glass shelf in the fridge (although i've avoided disaster so far [but it reminds me of one time when my mom was making gravy from roast drippings in a pyrex dish on the stovetop which is supposed to be okay and the pyrex dish EXPLODED and if that happened inside my refrigerator--nooooes!]) then the cake will probably be cool enough to ice.

***

and then, because it's friday and we've made a cake for no reason,

sometimes it's okay to set the warm cake on the coffee table and eat it straight out of the pan.

sometimes.

(did i tell you J cut his hair?)

Princess looks a little like a black mamba with all that chocolate in her mouth and missing teeth.

"i have to brush my teeth GOOD tonight!"  -Princess

happy [chocolate] fridays!

has swine flu impacted your travel plans?

it did mine.

we were scheduled to take a trip to washington, d.c. to visit my best friend from high school, jeremy, and his husband nick, who just bought a fabulous new home in a maryland suburb of d.c.

i'm not usually one to buy into paranoia, but something about taking Kitten on a plane right now just didn't feel right.  i'm 99.9% sure that everything would have been fine, but i'm 0.1% sure that if something ever happened to Kitten i'd never forgive myself.

i polled just about everyone who would listen to me and the results were split.  half the people said, "just go, it'll be fine."  the other half said, "when in doubt, don't."

so i called my pediatrician, ever the voice of reason.  because when you have kids, apparently you completely lose all objectivity and i could NOT decide what to do.

he said to go, but put a face mask on her while in the airport/plane.

yeah, no.  A) trying to keep a face mask on an 8 month old for a two-leg trip is like, well, trying to keep a face mask on an 8 month old.  and B) i'm not taking my child anywhere that she needs to be wearing a face mask per the advice of her ped.  sorry.

but i talked myself into going on the trip anyway, and went ahead and booked our rental car and did those last-minute things.  and then on wednesday (the day before we were to leave), Kitten got sent home from daycare with vomiting.  we got her home and she was fine, but then i started coming down with symptoms of an upper respiratory infection.  (NOT swine flu.  just a head cold.)  i thought to myself, "if you hadn't been SO stressed out about this trip for the last four days, you wouldn't be getting sick right now.  do you really need one more reason?  screw it."

so i cancelled the trip.

i'm 99.9% sure that i overreacted, but i'm 0.1% sure that i'm comfortable with the decision i made.  and that 0.1% is the part that matters when it comes to my peace of mind and my child.

so we booked a bed and breakfast in springfield, missouri and had a truly restful time playing scrabble in the sitting room while Kitten snoozed in her pack and play.  then we drove around and visited a couple of caves and headed to branson, where we are now.  we've got a two-room suite at a resort.  last night we overindulged at a seafood buffet and then came back to the resort and rented movies from the front desk, put Kitten down in the bedroom and enjoyed our evening.

i will say one thing: there is much to be said for staying at a bed and breakfast when you're traveling with a child.  it sounds counterintuitive, but it's actually much better than staying in a traditional hotel room.  for about the same cost, you have (almost) all of the luxuries of home, and you can put the baby down and then go into the next room to finish the evening just a few feet away - but without having to dim the lights and keep the television off beginning at 7:00 p.m.  

yes, Kitten's bedtime is 7:00 p.m.  i know that sounds WAY early but that's just the time her little body is ready.  if i tried to keep her up later i'd have a screaming mess on my hands.  i fully anticipate that as she gets older her evenings will lengthen to 8:00 or 8:30, which is Princess's bedtime.  but i can't complain - she sleeps through the night until 7:00 a.m.  my little alarm clock.  every day of the week.  woo-hoo.  buh-bye weekends. 

actually it's not so bad.  my weekends are wildly productive now.  like right now, for instance!  it's 9:00 a.m. and i'm finishing my second cup of coffee and blogging - while J sleeps in.  we're going to switch tomorrow and he's going to let ME sleep in.  then we're going to go to eureka springs, which is pretty much our favorite place to be.

bliss.