Once upon a time I had gotten into a really good habit of planning a menu for the week. It was loose in the sense that I am not rigid enough to insist we have Tuesday’s meal if we all really feel like having Wednesday’s that day instead. I also don’t plan lunches (though it’s nice when the supper from the night before is big enough to have leftovers the next day) or breakfasts. Sides are usually some form of vegetables cooked on the stove or just a salad.

However, I got away from it for awhile and it gets frustrating because that’s when we end up resorting to some kind of crap that we order in that isn’t good for us or else we have to do multiple grocery runs to get something to eat. I expect to need multiple purchases of bread and milk, but not meal supplies.

This weekend I managed to get a list of groceries together that will actually allow for a week of meals for the first time in awhile. For the curious, here’s what we’re having this week.

Sunday: Spaghetti with meat sauce (I love this because my sauce makes enough for supper, lunch, and either another supper or a container of it in the freezer for some panic-filled day in the future)
Monday: Roast chicken, inexplicably called Sticky Chicken.
Tuesday: Sloppy Joes
Wednesday: Chicken Tikka Masala (I can’t wait to try this)
Thursday: Either pancakes and beans or leftover spaghetti, whichever people prefer.
Friday: Aztec Beans
Saturday: Breanna’s birthday party which means my lasagna!

It’s nice to know I don’t have to think too hard for supper this week. What are you having?

Or maybe remind me to keep even my mind shut, because I didn’t even say it out loud. Last night, for whatever reason, I was thinking about how Breanna didn’t pull the Midnight Madness as often as Hayley did.

Midnight Madness was what we called it when she would wake up right around the time we were thinking about going to sleep, and she would stay up for hours. It was also how we referred to middle of the night wake-up sessions, where she would suddenly perk up at, say, 3 am and decide there was nothing she wanted to do more than say wide awake for at least three hours.

Breanna has done it on occasion, but not anywhere near as frequently as Hayley. Hayley always treated sleep as something that was possibly the worst waste of time she could possibly imagine and she would do everything in her power to avoid it. Breanna enjoys sleep, she even asks to go “night-night” when she’s tired. Putting her down for a nap is usually very easy and fast – she has a predictable routine where she’ll suddenly start making unreasonable demands, she’ll get extremely pissed off when we don’t do what she wants, then she’ll throw herself in my arms and if I ask if she wants to go to sleep she wails, “night-night!” Then she falls asleep within ten minutes tops. It’s nice. Bedtime usually takes a bit longer but isn’t bad either.

So there I was last night, thinking, “I’m so happy that Breanna doesn’t do the Midnight Madness like Hayley did.” Then I realized that I was completely dragged-down exhausted, so I just about crawled around, getting myself ready for bed, when I heard the door open down the hall and little feet pattering along the floor. Looking confused and ticked off about being upright, Breanna barrelled into the living room and I carried her back to bed. I willed myself to not fall asleep since I still have to pee and waking up for a bathroom break a few hours later was not in my plans. I managed to hand in there until she was asleep, and ten minutes later my weary body crashed onto the mattress so I could sleep too.

And naturally, at 3:21 am, she woke up. I don’t know what time she went back to sleep because I stopped looking at the clock eventually, but I know it was after 4:30. Eventually, I told her to go ahead and stay up all night if she wanted but to be quiet and leave me alone since I wanted to go to sleep now. I figured, in my mind, that at least she was likely to sleep in a bit.

Which is why she woke me up at 7:15 am and raring to face the day.

Some days, there’s just not enough caffeine.

I just looked at the date and realized we’re one month and one day away from Christmas now. Normally I wouldn’t worry too much because George and I are both procrastinators (there’s a reason we never got married – too much planning ahead!) and we tend to not shop before the 20th of December anyway.

However, I’m feeling just a bit of panic now. For one thing, I want to get Hayley something fun but she’s not really into any one type of toy – the good thing is this means we aren’t buried under eight million Polly Pockets or Barbie dolls (or worse, Bratz dolls), but the bad thing is that it makes it hard to think of some sort of toy to get her as a gift.

As for Breanna, it was hard enough thinking of what to get for her birthday, now I have to come up with a few things for Christmas for her. The joys of being the second child, right? What does she need that we don’t already have?

And on top of that, I have to do at least a little early shopping because my sister isn’t coming back home for Christmas this year due to the crazy cost of flying and also her work schedule. That means I have to figure out what to get for her and her fiance, go buy it, and then ship it out East in time to arrive before Christmas. And her birthday is Christmas day, so I need to think of that gift too. No pressure!

Deck the halls, falalalala, I need another month.

One of my favorite things is when I can peer into a room and see Hayley and Breanna playing happily together. Even better if I can sneak off to get my camera and come back to get photographic evidence. These days they squabble a lot, and I mean that on both sides. I’ve seen Hayley refuse to share with her sister, and I’ve seen Breanna smack Hayley on the back of the head for no apparent reason. Still, sometimes they manage to get along for at least five minutes.

Breanna is so excited over her tea set that she wants to have a tea party with anyone who will sit with her. I have had more “tea” in the past few days than I’ve had actual real tea in the past few months. Tonight at bedtime, she was even telling me that her Pablo doll was going to have a tea party. I told her she had to go to sleep and she’d have to have her tea party tomorrow, and she said, “Okay Mommy. Pablo a tea pah-tee!”

Apparently Hayley likes the tea set too because the day after Breanna’s birthday, she came home from school and was so eager to play that I didn’t even have to ask her to change out of her uniform like I usually need to do. She flew into her room, came out less than a minute later in a shirt and some jeans, and immediately threw herself to the floor to play tea party with Breanna.

It was very cute.

Of course, about 30 seconds after I took this picture, both of them wanted the same milk pitcher at the same time (naturally – there’s four of everything except the one milk pitcher, one sugar bowl, and one teapot, so of course they fought for that) and there was a bit of yelling, some throwing, and matching meltdowns. Thank god a bit of distraction and a snack helped.

Good thing there are indeed the good moments to save you and get you through the crazy ones!

Is it too soon to say that? Because I know it’s only late November and I know we have a long way to go yet, but this first snowfall only served to remind me that I hate Winter and I don’t know what my ancestors were thinking when they came all this way and then just stopped. I know some of them kept going South but noooo, MY gene pool had to stay up here in the land of the stupidly humid summers and frigid icy winters. Yay!

No, okay, it wasn’t the end of the world today but it still sucked. On Wednesday, I stopped and took this picture of a path through a field. I was particularly taken with how vivid the green color of the grass still was, despite dropping temperatures and a bit of snow.

What a difference about 15 hours can make is all I have to say. Not that I can show you a picture because I wasn’t stopping for photo ops today and also I would not have taken my poor camera out and subjected it to the ice pellets that were falling at a 45-degree angle. Just trust me when I say that all of that field and path were covered in a crunchy mix of snow and ice pieces.

What was especially entertaining about being outside today was the lovely way that Mother Nature managed to have all that sleet blowing directly in your face regardless of the direction you were facing. Poor Breanna – I had tied her to me in my trusty Mei Tei wrap and she looked cozy all snuggled up against me until we actually walked out the door. I ended up having to shield her face on one side to block the pellets from hitting her in the cheeks. In her usual way, she looked neither upset nor impressed, but I think she was happy when it was all over and she could warm up on the couch while watching “Curious George” on PBS, something she likes to do these days:

Then she looked out the window for a bit, mumbled about snow, and propped herself up on the couch with a good book about babies and went back to pretending that nothing white and cold was falling outside the windows.

Hell, I like pretending that too.

Four or five months and counting…

The absolute perfect thing to cheer you up on an otherwise craptacular day: A Compendium of 150 Monty Python Sketches.

Just what I need!

I think that this year we’re going to be hit with a lot more snow sooner than we did last year. I remember that last year we didn’t have much snow at all until the new year, and I even remember writing about how odd it was, that it was almost disturbing even though I personally dislike Winter a great deal.

However, it’s not even the end of November yet and we’ve already had some light snowfall. It didn’t dump a whole lot on us but it did stick somewhat. It’s supposed to start snowing at some point overnight; right now it’s just foggy. Overnight we’re slated to get anywhere from 5-10 cm of snow, and the overall accumulation by tomorrow night could be between 20-25 cm. (That’s almost 8-10 inches for you Americans, and by the way, I thumb my nose at all of you people South of the border gearing up to celebrate Thanksgiving with delicious turkeys and stuffing and potatoes, and I know we already had our Thanksgiving, but this turkey envy that I have, it is not rational.)

I’m totally thrilled about having to get Hayley to school and back in the snow. Especially since snow tends to make me just want to curl up in bed with a book, a laptop, and a television remote. Perhaps a cup of coffee. Then again, rain does the same thing. So does cold, windy weather. I’m thinking I’m just not a fan of weather in general.

Let’s put it this way, as far as our weather has been going lately with all the rain, snow, freezing ice pellets, and whatnot. One of our local weather guys, Frank Cavallaro, had this to say on the weather forecast this morning: “We call it precipitation because we just don’t know whats going to fall from the sky, but something will!” Yeah. Great!

What are the odds of humans deciding to hibernate like bears?

I’ll be posting another entry later today (perhaps when I’ve had another coffee), but in the meantime, I received a complimentary copy of That Baby CD and That Baby DVD in exchange for a review. The short version is we loved both, but you can read my full review over here in my review blog.

November 20th, 2005:

November 20th, 2006:

November 20th, 2007:

I have no idea how she’s already two whole years old. I sit here typing now and know that this time two years ago, I was probably dozing in my hospital bed because I was too excited to sleep what with the new little person in the bassinet beside me. Or maybe I was sitting up and nursing her while cramming some of my leftover snack into my mouth (I eat a lot anyway – early days of breastfeeding makes me pretty much eat anything that isn’t bolted down). Maybe I was talking on the phone to George who was back at home trying to convince Hayley to go to sleep. I don’t remember. Sometimes I wish that I had been filmed at every second of my stay so I could remember what I was doing at any given moment during those first two days after giving birth. Well. Maybe not EVERY second.

I never could have looked at that little face two years ago, the one that was so new, and imagined who she would grow into. I didn’t know she would grow to have a funny sense of humor, that she would love to draw for an incredible amount of time, that she would be such a dancing fiend, that she would have such a high-pitched giggle, that she would hug me and pat my shoulders if I pretended to cry, that she would love her sister tremendously, that she would start slow on the talking but explode with vocabulary shortly before age two, that she would give me a few grey hairs by walking at NINE months, that she would make herself such a solid part of our family that we couldn’t imagine life before her.

Mostly I didn’t know that the cliche was true. Whenever someone is pregnant with their second child, it seems common to worry, “how will I love two children as much as I love one? How will I divide my love?” And parents of two or more will tell you that with each child, your love doesn’t divide, it multiplies.

I thought it was kind of corny but I came to find it’s true. Some things divide. Your time divides. Your attention divides. Your priorities may divide. But the love really doesn’t multiply. The heart isn’t a pie with each additional person taking one more slice. It’s more like the way the Grinch’s heart grows bigger – the first kid makes it grow bigger so you can love the person you’re with plus your new child, and then with the second it grows bigger again so that you can love that new addition just as much too.

Happy birthday Breanna, I love you!

(There’s a full birthday set on Flickr right here and you can read about my super-fast just under four hour labor was in her birth story.)

I’ve seen many people with a lot of crafty talent making felt play food, and I love the idea of making little treats for my kids to play with in their kitchen. Now, admittedly, I have no problem with plastic food – after all, we just got a set of 120 pieces (oy) to give Breanna from Hayley tomorrow. But my crafty nature loves the challenge of making some food too.

It was mostly for fun and for the sake of creativity. However, in the back of my mind I thought that it would be nice to have SOME damn stuff in our home that wasn’t made in China so I wouldn’t have to worry about a recall taking away a beloved toy and spending the next two decades wondering if the lead content has melted their brains.

So! While running errands this morning (between 6:30 am and 10:30 am, I got Hayley ready and dropped off at school, prepared and ate breakfast with George and Breanna, did some work, went to three stores, and came back home), I picked up a couple of packs of felt. There wasn’t much selection as far as colors go but I figured I’d start with that and if it went well – i.e., I didn’t explode in frustration – I could go to a larger store with a bigger craft section to choose some better colors.

Tonight, after I put the kids to bed, I figured I’d start with one of the easier concepts. You can’t get much simpler than a fried egg. I drew it on cardboard, cut that out, and traced it on the felt, sewed it, stuffed it, finished sewing it up, and ta-da! One easy fried egg!

I am so pleased with it, even if the stitching isn’t great. Sewing is NOT my forte, so I’m happy it came out as well as it did. And I have one whole piece of non-China play food.

And then for fun, I flipped over the package of felt to look at the back.

“Made in China.”

Sigh.