It’s been a long time since a news story made me cry as much as finding out that the missing San Francisco man was found dead. That poor family.

It always fascinates me to watch the way that Breanna mimics so much of what Hayley does. Today Hayley was climbing up over one of the little chairs she has and jumping over on to the couch. I asked her to please stop because her sister was watching and I didn’t want her to get any big ideas since she tries to copy her so much. Hayley said, “no, she doesn’t copy me!” but it’s not true.

Take the image above, for instance. Hayley was sitting up on the couch with George, having a yogurt tube. George had one too but Breanna ended up finishing it off because she wanted to sit up there beside her big sister and eat the same thing.

Or brushing her teeth. With Hayley it was a nightmare when she was little, but now it’s not so bad. Breanna saw Hayley getting her teeth brushed all the time so when her first ones popped out, it was no big deal at all getting her to let me stick the toothbrush in there to clean them. All she knew was that she was doing the same thing as her big important sister. The image may be grainy (camera phone at night = grain) but it still shows how much she enjoys doing anything that Hayley does.

More than once I’ve caught Breanna standing on Hayley’s stool, and today I came out from flipping the fish and chips I was making for supper and I found Breanna was standing on an upside-down toy bucket, hanging on to the end table, just like she sees Hayley doing all the time. I’m going to wind up with a full head of grey hair within the next six months, I am almost positive.

I hope some day Hayley realizes how amazing it is that she is a constant role model right now for her little sister.

***

In other news…

Before you’re a mother, no one ever tells you that some day you’ll have to (gently) sit on top of your baby to keep her still and keep her arms pinned beneath your legs and her head trapped between your knee caps so that you can suction snot out of her nose with a bulb aspirator while she screams. Fun times!

For the record, I never had to do that with Hayley because she was WEIRD and liked it. But I did have to pin her down like that three times a day (including in the middle of the night) to put the antibiotic gel in her eyes after her first eye surgery. And that was fun too.

I have read a lot of parenting books. A LOT. Where is the chapter on tackling and pinning down your children in all those damn books? I’m starting to think I should write my own.

Breanna’s in the music room right now, dancing like a little wild woman to Billy Idol’s “White Wedding”. I think that if she grows up to be that girl who dances on top of the speakers in bars I will not be surprised at all.

Everyone always seems to think that Breanna is short. I guess it’s because Hayley is so tall that Breanna seems that way, and we forget what Hayley was like as a baby, but it’s not true.

I think Breanna’s destined to be fairly tall as well. I’ve measured both girls on the door frame of Hayley’s room and Breanna is roughly the same height as her sister was at the same age, maybe half an inch shorter.

My mother-in-law bought her clothes for her birthday and the outfit is 12 months and the tights only 6-9 months because she was afraid anything else would be too big for her. Luckily the outfit should last a little while but the tights just barely stretched over her legs and butt because she’s taller than people think; we told her to go ahead and buy 12+ in tights next time and that almost all her outfits are 18 months now.

I really think that picture sums it up. Hayley is four years old but look how high Breanna reaches on her when they’re walking around together. She’s also gone through a bit of a growth spurt (actually they both have, and thank God I know Hayley’s bound to get clothes as gifts in a few weeks because she has a sudden shortage of pants that are long enough!) and she suddenly looks so BIG every time we look at her. It’s almost creepy how kids do that, how they just grow overnight and look different all of a sudden.

Of course, she’s still little enough to get into this sort of trouble and still get away with it.

This neat little flickr tool is wicked. You draw a little sketch and it calls up random images that bear some resemblance to what you drew. Addictive and fun!

Things seem to be clearing up around here a bit. Yesterday Breanna was still stuffed up and feeling less than enthused about life. You can see it in her eyes in that picture, she was here but not REALLY here. Her naps were ridiculously short because she kept waking herself up by not being able to breathe properly but she was more or less okay.

Luckily she slept last night. She managed to only wake up twice while in the crib between 8:45 and 11:30. Then I went to sleep and I’m not even sure what time it was when she woke up again, but I brought her to bed and she miraculously slept the rest of the night, waking up at about 9:15 this morning (!) when the phone rang. Even better, I slept that whole time too, sleeping for almost ten straight hours.

I can’t tell you the last time I slept for ten hours. Seriously. As a mother, I have to tell you that ten hours of solid sleep is pretty much on par with having someone hand you a thousand bucks. I felt great this morning. I even felt better cold-wise, having dropped from blowing my nose every ten minutes to only every hour and a half or so; my nose is grateful because it was getting pretty sore.

Winter, in the meantime, has hit even though it’s officially still a couple of weeks away. We got blasted by the freezing rain the other day, but today it’s been snowing steadily since before we got up. It wasn’t a heavy blizzard, just lots of big flakes continuously hitting the ground and it’s cold enough that it’s sticking. Hayley even went out and played in it and shoveled over at George’s parents’ house today with his sister. It was one of those snowfalls where you actually think winter is kind of nice and pretty and I would have taken Breanna out in it for a bit to see what she thought of it except that 1) she was still technically sick, 2) we have to exchange her winter boots because the ones she has are too big but she’ll likely outgrow them before next year so they’re not worth keeping, and 3) I’ve had enough Canadian winters to know that as pretty as the snow looks right now it still sucks, I hate winter anyway, and there will be AMPLE opportunity to get Breanna out in the snow before the season is over.

Yes, I’m a little bah humbug about snow.

Hopefully by tomorrow everyone will be back to at least 90% functionality and we can get on with life again. Today I spent part of the day just madly cleaning up the incredible mess that had been generated by four sick people who just didn’t give a shit and I’d like to avoid having it get that way again. Also I have to get to the dollar store before Tuesday night because Wednesday is St-Nicholas Day and I have to pick up a few little things to put in the kids’ shoes before I go to bed Tuesday so they can find them in the morning. I had never heard of that holiday when I was a kid but I love it now. Last year I totally forgot and had to use some costume jewelry that I had from my younger years and a few cookies, so this year I want to actually pick some stuff up specifically for each of them. I’ll probably get Hayley some hair stuff and maybe something crafty, along with a chocolate bar, and I’ll find some kind of toy for Breanna. Dollar stores are perfect for this kind of thing.

Mostly though, I just want everyone better so I can stop hearing sniffing, snorting, sneezing, and whatnot, and stop seeing everyone – myself included – moping around like we’re all dying.

So, as you know, I’m doing holidailies again this year, wherein I try to update every day in December. Yesterday I did my post and only realized after the fact that there are writing prompts this year. Obviously, the prompts are optional, but yesterday’s was a suggestion to introduce yourself.

I feel really silly introducing myself on a blog that I’ve kept for years to readers who have also been here for an eternity. On the other hand, it is true that the portal over there means a bunch of new people who don’t know me at all may pop by, so an intro would be handy for them, especially since I would be delighted if they stuck around after December is over.

So. I’m Sherry. I’m 32 and I live in Montreal. Yes, everything you hear about Canadians discussing the weather is true, at least with me. I am sort of married to George in the sense that we’ve been living as common-law spouses for over seven years. We really do intend to get on with actually getting married officially some day but we’re both really lazy planners and I’m not a big “oh my god, weddings, woo!” kind of girl. Actually, to me the perfect wedding is one done at a destination resort where you walk off the beach, get married by someone at the hotel, eat a nice dinner, and swim in the ocean for the next week (if George is taking notes, I should mention that I really love Cancun, especially the Arrecife hotel) without having to worry about any details beyond the time of the ceremony. But for now the status quo works. We met while working at a now-closed recording studio and we got together after realizing that we have a lot of fun together. So far so good.

In those past seven years we had two kids, Hayley in 2002 and Breanna in 2005. Having kids has made everything different and interesting, and it also spawned the name of this blog, Chaos Theory. I’m one of those dreaded mommybloggers; while I do write about other things, my kids and parenting take the front burner an awful lot.

I started my first website in 1996 and it was totally hideous with a dark blue marble tiled (badly tiled, too) background, more animated gifs than your eyes could handle, and it was written in yellow text that scrolled on for miles. I almost wish I still had it somewhere so I could laugh at it. Over time I learned more html than just the center and blink tags and I discovered online journaling. In stereotypical fashion of many others who started that way, I just started writing about myself and only realized after the fact that there was a community of people dong the same thing. Eventually blogging started and I kept a separate blog with snippets alongside my journal. After Breanna was born I just didn’t have the time, energy, or inclination to keep up with both so I stopped the journal and made the blog a combination of both. It’s working for me.

My hobbies include wielding my digital camera like a weapon, watching more television than I should admit, getting sucked in to more reality television than I should admit, reading, occasionally knitting, and inhaling anything to do with Harry Potter. I always had a love of astronomy, hence the domain name, but didn’t have the brain to wrap around physics so a career never came to be. I always wanted to be an actress but was too afraid to pursue it seriously beyond some courses and very fun performances through them. I would really like to write more for a living though I do actually get paid to write for Webshots in their pet channel and I write for free over at Montreal Metroblogging. I’ve had a piece published at Imperfect Parent and have an upcoming piece as well in an online literary magazine. If I could keep doing that – preferably getting paid – while staying home with my girls, I’d be ecstatic. Not quite as much as I would have been in my Oscar acceptance speech, but close enough.

I guess that’s it. If there’s anything you want to know, just ask!

I made myself into a goofy dancing elf! You can too – it’s worth a giggle!

Well okay, we don’t have two houses but it’s still one of my favorite parts of Romeo & Juliet, and although it’s not an actual plague, melodrama is fun when everyone feels like crap.

Hayley is starting to get a little better but she’s still exhausted and sick and run down. Last night it really hit Breanna too. She woke up a ridiculous amount of times between 7:30 and 9:30, then she woke up screaming and was totally inconsolable. I couldn’t feed her or comfort her by rocking her and there was no way she was interested in lying back down again. I brought her out to the living room for awhile, and then took her back to put her to bed just as Hayley woke up.

Apparently Hayley didn’t go back to sleep until the early morning. Breanna did fall asleep but woke up – no joke – every five to ten minutes, crying because she couldn’t breathe through her nose. Being upset, the thing she wanted most was milk but of course she couldn’t get much because she needed to keep her mouth open to breathe. I dozed here and there, but had trouble drifting off because she sounded so rattly while she did sleep. I managed to get her to sleep at about 7:30 on top of me while I propped myself up against pillows. We stayed like that for an hour, at which point she wiggled off me in her sleep and we slept for another hour until George left.

She was fine when we first got up, as was Hayley, but it all rapidly deteriorated by the time breakfast was over. They both managed to hang in there while I had a purposely hot shower so that the steam would help us all, but then Breanna spiked a fever and was utterly miserable for most of the afternoon. Sometimes she tolerates the nasal bulb aspirator but other times she creams and pushes it away and I find myself cursing – yet again – the fact that mothers only have two hands when we clearly need at least four. In the meantime I’ve spent much of the day cleaning snot off myself that didn’t even come from me; one of the many things they don’t tell you before you have kids.

On top of it all, George can barely breathe and I am having trouble even getting water down because my throat hurts so much. My nose isn’t blocked but it won’t stop running, and more often than not it runs the wrong way which isn’t helping my throat at all. I think I’m going to get myself a hot cup of decaf tea because heat is the only thing that I think will help.

Well that and the fact that Breanna is now sitting on my lap, wild bedhead sticking up in all directions, laughing at my screen. That helps a lot too.

I’m so thrilled that my first Holidailies entry is all about how sick we all are.