Trading Murders

I am absolutely fit to be tied! Last week, my orthodontist's office accidentally charged MY debit card for someone else's payment in the amount of FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETEEN DOLLARS. I called on Friday to talk to them about it and their office was closed for the weekend! They called me on Monday repeatedly apologizing for the error and told me they would credit my money back and here it is Wednesday and there is no trace of that money coming back to my account. I called and pitched a fit, but they do not seem to be grasping the fact that I NEED MY MONEY BACK NOW. All of my end of the month bills are past due, I need to go grocery shopping like nobody's business, and my account is overdrawn.

So I called up my mom to rant about it and she tells me what kind of trouble she has been having with her neighbors. Their big ol' dog knocked down her fence and has been terrorizing her back yard, causing her pets to be too afraid to set paw in the back yard, thus causing them to relieve themselves in the house. Her property management company won't fix the fence because it is a shared fence and the cost will have to be split between them and the owners of the other house. The tenants of the other house are teenage boys who will not accept responsibility for their dog nor the fence and won't give up the information for their landlord because it is a family member. No one seems to be grasping the fact that SHE NEEDS HER FENCE FIXED NOW.

We did a little thinking and decided it would be a good idea for us to trade murders so that they can't link us to the killings. She can go postal on my orthodontist's office, and I can go massacre the neighbors and their dog. I'm telling you... my friend Robyn has a chiropractor who says there is a vertebrae or something that goes out of alignment and makes you "want to kill people" and I am sure mine is out of whack. Keep your distance... I'm dangerous.

***DISCLAIMER: If my mom's neighbors or anyone at the orthodontist's office goes missing or turns up dead it is purely coincidental and is in no way connected to me or my mom, as this story was written in jest.***

Worrisome

Keira finally went to her first checkup at the doctor this morning. She was in between insurance for a while so she is now 4 months old and just now going to the doctor for her shots. We were fortunate enough to get her in with the same pediatrician that I went to since I was a baby, Dr. Jones, who is absolutely awesome. She weighed in at 12 lbs. 9 oz. and is 2 feet tall. Well, 2 feet horizontal that is, because she can't stand. We have tried to get her to stand and she has got really bad noodle legs. She can't support her weight at all. My mom said that each of her 4 kids could stand by her age, so we were a little concerned. Our concern went from a little to a LOT after the doctor's appointment today. He noticed a dimple above her butt called a sacral dimple which is often a sign of a spinal nerve defect called a tethered spinal cord. One of the symptoms is leg weakness... GREAT.

Everything I read about it says that the earlier you detect the problem, the better, so I am glad that we discovered it early, but it seems like the only solution for it is surgical which I am NOT happy about. It is well understood that in the majority of children with tethered cords neurological function will deteriorate with growth and activity. So even if your child does not have any symptoms, surgery is often recommended to prevent future neurologic deterioration and complications. It is considered a low risk operation, with a good chance of success for their future development, but some cases are more difficult and may require more surgery as the child ages. The doctor wants her to have an MRI done to get a better idea of what the problem is and how severe it is, then we will have to discuss what to do about it.

Here is a link to some pretty good information about tethered spinal cords-

http://www.boston-neurosurg.org/publications/faq/tethered_cord_MP.shtml

I am SO WORRIED about my little girl and I want her to be able to walk! Please say a prayer for her and our family.

Raspberries

What do you do when you are teething, don't feel like talking, and have lots of drool to spare? Make raspberries of course! Today is Keira's 4 month birthday and to celebrate she decided to put that drool to good use by making raspberries with her mouth. A couple weeks ago, she decided that "talking" was "so last month" and now she mostly smiles, giggles, and uses her newfound skill of making raspberries. I'm sure she will resume talking again once she can keep those hands out of her mouth. Right now she is constantly teething on them. Hopefully she will pop those teeth out soon.

UPDATE:

Here is a video of Keira doing raspberries during our trip to the coast this weekend. We were having lunch at Round Table in Morro Bay and she entertained herself (and us) the whole time with a chorus of raspberries. You can hear it if you turn off the music and turn up the volume. See all that drool? What a silly girl.

A year ago today...

Valentine's Day never had a special place in my heart a year ago today when I discovered I was pregnant with my beautiful baby girl after nearly a year of painful trying. Now it brings back the memories...

That Valentine's Day, I stayed home from work because I was sick with a cold. I had been trying to get pregnant for the past 10 months and had taken many pregnancy tests in my haste, all of which were negative. I wanted to know if it was safe for me to take cold medicine so I went to Rite Aid and bought a pregnancy test to take the next morning. That night I was awake until some time around 4:00 in the morning because I was too sick to sleep and I was fed up so I went in the bathroom to take the pregnancy test, expecting it to be negative, so that I could take some medicine and go back to bed. Much to my surprise, it was positive! No doubt about it, two dark pink lines immediately materialized in the display window, and I was home alone will no one to share the news with! Art wouldn't get home from work for another few hours and can't answer his phone at work. I texted my mom and told her the good news. She called me and we talked for a while.

I was so excited I couldn't go back to bed and since I had some time to kill before Art got home I devised a clever way to tell him I'm pregnant. Neither of us had exchanged gifts on Valentine's Day since we were sick so I decided to give him a "late Valentine's present" and wrote him a card. It said "Happy Valentine's Day. I'm pregnant!" When he got home I told him I wrote him a card since I didn't buy him anything and he read the card with a puzzled look on his face. He looked at me and said, "You're pregnant???" I said, "YES! I'm PREGNANT!" and the excitement sank in for both of us. It's hard to believe it was a year ago already.

This year, Art brought me home a little flowering plant of some sort and a beautiful card then took me out to lunch at Plaza Ventana. At the last minute I ordered his present online so it hasn't shown up yet, but I got him a wedding ring to wear out and to church or what not. I'm sure you're thinking Dang! She bought him a ring and he bought her a lousy plant! But before you get all worked up, it only cost me $27.00. He spent more on lunch than I did on his ring. I am of the belief that diamonds are way more expensive than they justify- especially when cubic zirconia is way prettier and a small fragment of the cost. If you have "real diamond money" to spare, be my guest and buy them to your heart's content, but I don't roll like that. I only have fake diamond money. It even has a lifetime warranty. If anything happens to it, I just stick it in the mail and they send me a new one. I've been scoping out a ring for myself because the ring I have now was actually supposed to be just a promise ring as a way to deter men from bothering me. Well, it ended up being large enough that people would ask if we were engaged and we looked at each other and said, "Uh, yeah. I guess." So, he never actually asked me to marry him, and he never bought me a wedding ring either. I don't know how he pulled that one off.


Admittedly, I was kind of mad at my dear husband this Valentine's Day which is why I didn't buy him a present until the last minute so I didn't have a card either. I decided to make him a card instead of trying to pick through the remains at the store. He wasn't sure whether he should laugh or be offended.

A little while ago I was changing Keira into her pajamas and she made sound like a dog panting. I immitated her and she thought it was so funny. She started LAUGHING! She has giggled a couple times before when you get her neck or something, but this is the first time she totally laughed at something. I called up my mom and let her listen and got a tiny bit on video, but by the time we got the camera out she didn't think it was that funny any more. Ohhh, I love this baby so much- and all the more when she laughs. I'm so glad I made her. :)

Valentine's Day 2009

She has been teething on her fingers and decided it would be a good idea to get that thumb in her mouth while she was drinking her bottle.

Wiggle Worm

Playing in the Jumperoo for the first time.

Keira has always been quite a wiggle worm, but now her skills are improving with her added musculature. I acquired a Rainforest Jumperoo for her long before she was ever born, which I stationed at my mom's house for her use when she got big enough. My mom was watching her the other day and decided it was time to put Keira's kicking to good use in the Jumperoo. Her little tippy toes just touched the ground, but she had a BLAST playing in it.

I had to take her to the doctor last week because of a persistent diaper rash that kept spreading. I laid her on the exam table long ways and she would kick and kick and quickly work herself around horizontally. I straightened her out and it wasn't a minute before she was turned around sideways again.

Last night, I was doing laundry at my mom's house while my mom played with the baby and she put her on her tummy to play. She absolutely despises laying on her tummy and used her new found strength to flip herself all the way back over onto her back. That was her first successful 180 degree roll. Prior to this she had only made it onto her side from either her back or tummy.

Keira has been sleeping in her crib for the past couple weeks. She usually goes to sleep by 9:30 and starts waking up between 4 and 5 in the morning. She isn't hungry yet, but just wakes up so I just pop her pacifier back in her mouth, cover the side of her face, and she goes right back to sleep. She will do this a few times until it's actually time to get up and eat. I'm determined not to get her used to eating at 4 in the morning, so I don't feed her until she is actually hungry. Well, this morning my alarm went off and I realized she hadn't woken up at all yet. I got up to check on her and didn't see her so I pulled the blanket down thinking she must have gotten her face covered and she wasn't there!!! I started to panic a little wondering if maybe Art got home from work early and got her out of the crib. Then I pulled the blanket down even farther and there she was, sideways, all the way down in the bottom of the crib! My next thought was "OH MY GOSH! IS SHE BREATHING!?" There is no telling how long she had been down there under the blanket. I rubbed her belly and she moved, so I was relieved. She scared the living daylights out of me! First I thought she wasn't there and then I thought she was dead!

Silly girl... I can tell she is going to be on the move once she gets crawling and walking. She is already getting pretty far with her wiggling! I am concerned that she won't crawl very soon due to the fact that she hates being on her tummy, but she is already doing an "upside down, backwards crawl" as I call it. She lays on her back and scoots herself up with her feet- which is the reason she couldn't sleep in her bassinet anymore. She would wake up with her head scrunched sideways against the top of the bassinet. So, as you can imagine it was a real shock when she scrunched down into the bottom of her crib instead of up to the top!

Playing on the Rainforest Play Mat.

I Blame The Internet

This week I set a new personal record for the BEST dinners I ever cooked... and the WORST. To accomplish my goal of having dinner on the table every night, I planned out a dinner menu and a shopping list through pay day. To make my life a little easier, I decided to use my crock pot for most of the meals. I made an AWESOME taco soup fashioned after Katie's recipe and DELICIOUS pork chile verde like my mom makes. Art has been taking his dinners to work and all of his co-workers have been envious of his meals. Well, most of the meals...

I also threw in a couple recipes I found on the Internet that had good reviews and made them exactly as directed, and they were both undesirable to some degree. I made a recipe for crock pot pork chops and they came out a really strange, stringy, tough texture. The taste was good, but the texture was so uninviting I couldn't eat them. But then, night before last, I endured the most horrendous cooking failure of my entire life... and I blame the Internet. That's where I got the recipe, so I'm not going down for this one! I attempted to make teriyaki chicken in the crock pot so I came home for lunch and followed the recipe exactly- which was one can of crushed pineapple, one cup of teriyaki marinade, and chicken. I thought the concoction sounded a little strange, but put my trust in the Internet and proceeded anyway. I set it to low and went back to work.

When I got home from picking up the baby from my mom's house, my house smelled like weirded out brownies. That's not a good sign. I thought maybe the food itself would smell better than the house so I went and lifted the lid and took a whiff and I swear I almost puked. It was the most foul stench I had ever encountered and I was immediately ill. Then I thought, maybe if I hold a piece of chicken away from the pot it will smell better. No such luck. You couldn't pay me to taste it. Never have I cooked anything in my entire life that got transferred to the garbage can so quickly. I took the garbage out to the dumpster straight away, came back in, took the crock pot itself OUTSIDE, opened up all the windows and doors, turned on all the fans, unleashed at least half a bottle of Febreeze, and it STILL smelled awful. My house had been marinating in that odor for hours! To make things worse, it was the last day I had planned on my menu so I had nothing else to make. I waved my white flag and went to Taco Bell though I was still so nauseous when I got back, I could hardly eat.

I guess there are a few morals to this story: stick with the tried and true recipes; if a recipe sounds like it won't come out good, it probably won't; and last but not least, the Internet can't be trusted.

The Unknown

As y'all know, I am in desperate need of a bigger place to live. I would just up and move, BUT there are a lot of factors to consider. My office is moving to First and Alluvial in April and right now it only takes me 5 minutes to get to work, but when they move it will take me closer to 20 minutes. This makes me think that I should move closer to my new office, somewhere in the middle between there and the WinCo where Art works. BUT Art is applying for PIC and might get transferred to the new Kings Canyon store or even the Fresno Store. THEN there is the factor that I am going to be attempting to switch to part-time at my office and I am not sure if they will go for that or if I will be looking for a new job entirely. Also, one of my bosses is just beginning a rather big project that will last about a month or so and if I even suggest going part-time in the midst of this project (and in the midst of the office moving) the answer will surely be NO. But even if I wait to bring it up, there is still a chance they will say no. So then I wouldn't know WHERE I was going to be working, and it wouldn't benefit me at all to have moved closer to First and Alluvial unless by some off chance, I ended up getting another job in that area. Additionally, there was also the idea that we might be able to buy a house which opens a whole other can of unknowns including waiting on Art's W-2 to find out if we are even going to have any tax money to utilize. I'm starting to think I don't even want to go that route because I don't think I could handle that kind of decision right now.

I feel like I am stuck in a big, fat, limbo- wherein I must tread very carefully and wait for things to play out one way or another- waiting for answers to reveal themselves so I can MOVE, and work PART-TIME, and live happily ever after. It is frustrating to be powerless and I really don't want to keep working full-time through April, although it seems it might turn out that way.

For some reason, my mom and I have this random special ability to know certain things before they happen. I'm not sure that I would go so far as to use the word "psychic" but we have had several instances in our lives where we knew precisely what was going to happen, and then it did- even with no reason to suspect that course of action. My mom receives this knowledge of things to come in dreams and I receive knowledge during the day. In my mom's case, when she was pregnant with each of us, she had a dream where she gave birth and saw whether it was a boy or a girl and she was right in every instance. More recently, in October 2005, Art and I took a trip to Six Flags with my brother Kyle and step-brother Caed in our 30 day old 2006 Hyundai Tiburon GT. The night before we left my mom had a dream that we got in a terrible car accident and died. She awoke immediately and prayed for our safety and though she didn't tell us about her dream, she told us to be especially careful. The next night on our drive home, Art was driving and we were all asleep in the car. He also fell asleep and veered into another car. We hit the car once, then spun around and smacked into them again, ending up on opposite sides of the road in entirely smashed cars. After I got everyone out of the car, the first thing I said is to find me my phone because I need to call my mom. When my brother handed me my phone, it was already ringing. My mom was calling because she had sat straight up out of a deep sleep and knew something was wrong. Thankfully there were not worse injuries than bruising, as the emergency crew said by the looks of the cars they thought for sure there would have been deaths.

In my case, the knowledge that has come to me has been much less critical or life altering. The knowledge comes to me at random while I am awake, usually very shortly before the event occurs. The first time I remember it happening was when I was in 6th grade or so. My mom never picked us up from school- we always took the bus, but one day I knew she would be there to pick us up, and that she was going to take us to her friend Cyndi's house. I had no reason so suspect this, but that is exactly what happened. It was the day my dad beat up my mom and she moved us out that day to Cyndi's house. When I was 15, I was casually dating a member from Oakhurst. To avoid accruing long distance phone bills, we often chatted online. One day, I signed on and saw he was online and I instantly knew that he was going to tell me that he kissed another girl and wanted to be with her. Just as I knew, that is exactly what he typed. I was shocked! A couple years later, I was at home cleaning when all of the sudden I knew that my mom was going to come home, crying, and tell me that she and her boyfriend of several years had broken up. Sure enough, a couple hours later it happened exactly as I knew it would. About a year ago, I was getting ready for work one morning and knew that the paralegal at work was going to tell us she got engaged. Sure enough! Most recently, my dad's mom was dying of ovarian cancer in February 2008 and my family went to the hospital to be with her when we found out she wouldn't make it through the night. We stayed until after 10 pm and later that night, I knew that she was going to pass away at midnight. I received a phone call from my dad at 12:15 telling me she had died 15 minutes ago.

Not to be ungrateful for these experiences, but what doesn't make sense to me is why God allows me to know these things before they happen when a) it really doesn't do me any good to know them because of the short notice, and b) I can't do anything about it anyway. My mom thinks maybe God is preparing me to pay attention to this knowledge so that when He does have something important for me, I will know. Sometimes I wish I could conjure up my "powers" and take a look into my future so that I can find the answers I'm looking for, but I guess the point of life is to work through the unknown to prove ourselves and knowing every little thing would just be cheating. :)

Oh, by the way, I took Kari and Kathy's advice to plan out meals until each pay day and so far I have been LOVING it. It has eliminated "the unknown" that used to be involved in my dinners every day. It is so much less stressful knowing what I'm having every day and not having to wonder whether or not I have ingredients for it. No more multiple trips to the grocery store! No more fast food and frozen lasagna! lol

On another note, my life is a constant testimony to the power of prayer. Before I went back to work, I prayed and prayed that Keira would start going to bed earlier instead of keeping me up 'til the wee hours of the morning. Sure enough, the day I started back to work, she was out by 11:30, the next day, 11:00, the next day 10:30, the next day 10:00, and now she is down by a quarter to 10:00 every night and doesn't wake up until it's time. I am SO thankful that God loves me and cares about even the little things in my life. Keira had been sleeping in her bassinet by my bed, but she got too big for it so I decided to give her crib a try. I like to keep her in arm's reach because she will wake up every time her binky falls out of her mouth and it is easier to reach over and pop it back in rather than walking across the room to do it. I was kind of nervous about how many times I would be getting up to tend to her pacifier, but she went to sleep without it and only woke up once looking for it. I was so proud of her sleeping in her crib like a "big girl", I just had to take pictures of her in the morning. She is SO CUTE in the morning. She always wakes up happy and smiling (I wish I was like that!), but this time she had new surroundings to investigate. She LOVED looking at the ladybug pattern on the bumper and playing with the mobile. I better be careful that she doesn't think the crib equals play time.