Category: Life as I know it

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Week in My Life – Day 3: Wednesday

This Week in My Life with Adventuroo is rolling right along, so let’s see how Wednesday played out, shall we? In case you need a recap, you can check out Monday and Tuesday here and here.


Just as a reminder, I’m focusing on documenting the “after work” hours of my days here, since those are what’s most important to me. However, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek as to what my desk looks like during all those hours I’m hiding from you, so I compiled this little gem today. I sit in front of 4 monitors all day, so I tried to capture that. This pic doesn’t really do my setup justice, but here is what each of my monitors looks like, in their real-life order from left to right.


Ok, now that that’s out of the way…

As we creep closer and closer to the end of our prolonged nice weather here, we decided to take advantage today and go out into the woods on the Ice Age Trail after work. Each year we like to hike up to a big lookout tower near Sheboygan called Parnell Tower, which is roughly an hour from our house. So I left work earlier than usual today to go pick up D and head north before the rush hour traffic ensued.


We left home just before 4:30 and started our hour-long hike just before 5:30. I carried D in the backpack carrier on the way up, R carried her on the way down, and she squealed with delight as she touched many trees along the way. There was even a puppy at the tower with his owners when we got up there. She was thrilled!

You’ll have to forgive the blurriness of the actions shots, because they’re, well, action shots. And taken on a phone camera. Ahem.

By the time we got back to the car, dark was settling in and we were starving, so we decided to hit up KFC on the way home. I can’t remember the last time I ate this since I’m not really a fan of fried chicken, but R got it in his head on the way there and I was so hungry I would’ve agreed to eat just about anything by then. I gave D her dish of Cheerios and a bottle of milk when we got in the car, and she was lulled to sleep by the highway rhythm within half an hour. We tuned into the start of the Brewers game, and what a dismal one it was, with Gallardo giving up 4 runs in the first inning. Eesh. Too bad it never got much better for the Crew tonight.

This next picture is beyond terrible, as it was taken on my iPhone like all the others and zoomed in as far as possible to aim at something in our orbit, but I couldn’t not take a shot of the amazingly gorgeous harvest moon we saw on the drive home. It was huge, orange, and simply beautiful, shining brightly down on the hills and fields of the countryside. It was very Halloween-y as it peered out between leafless tree branches, and it was even surrounded by a light haze of clouds. I half expected to see the silhouette of a witch on her broomstick flying past it.

The coolest part of all, though, was the shooting star I saw on the way home. I couldn’t believe it! I haven’t seen one in ages, and it wasn’t even totally dark outside. In fact, no other stars were out yet, but this was definitely a shooting one. So I made a wish, wished again on the first real star I saw in the night sky, and hoped they both come true.

We pulled into the driveway at 7:40, and I was hoping I could just get D inside, changed, and quickly back to sleep with the aid of another bottle of milk. I was planning on giving her some green beans and mashed potatoes from KFC, but she’d been asleep so long at that point and it was past her bedtime anyway, I just preferred she go to bed as quickly as possible. Too bad my nice smooth bedtime transition didn’t turn out to be so nice and smooth. D became inconsolable as I was changing her and only took a few drinks of her bottle. She screamed harder when I tried to put her down, so I just cradled her in my arms in the glider next to her crib and patted her back while rocking. This seemed to work, and she snuggled in so hard while slowly calming down. After a few minutes she clamored up onto my shoulder in a big bear hug and fell asleep. Poor little girl. I was afraid she’d wake up at some point in the night since she had so little to eat for dinner, and I was right. Not 5 minutes after I left her room she awoke crying. R went in there and got her back to sleep with some more rocking and a little bit of milk, and fortunately we didn’t hear a squeak after that.

Now here it is, 9:20, and I need to get in the shower before uploading all the photos for this post. I’m a total greaseball after getting all sweaty carrying my 25 lb. baby rucksack on the first half of our hike. These Week in My Life posts are keeping me up past my bedtime, but I think it will certainly be worth it in the end. Stay tuned for Thursday’s antics. You know the best part about Thursday, don’t you? It’s 1 day closer to Friday, wahoo!

 

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Week in My Life – Day 2: Tuesday

We’re underway in Week in My Life, and this is pretty fun. In case you need a refresher of what this week’s all about, you can read yesterday’s recap here or check out the full guidelines over at Adventuroo. Now let’s continue…


R picked D up from daycare today on her bike taxi and took her to the park since it was another beautiful afternoon, but she was ready to be done over there before I was able to meet them after work, shortly after 4:30 again. So once I got home, D and I had some silly time together and I relaxed for a minute while Daddy watched his afternoon sports shows and she had some snacks. Then I had to make up for missing the park with some outside play time of our own. She even got to pet a puppy as it walked by – her favorite!

Dinner time for D came at 5:00 tonight and consisted of a delicious menu of mac and cheese, banana, and some fresh tomato from our garden that was leftover from Daddy’s dinner sandwich. Once sufficiently messy (and full), it was definitely time for a bath.

After her long night at the ball park last night, D started acting pretty sleepy shortly after 6:00, which didn’t surprise me at all. So I filled up a bottle, let her play a little while longer while I cleaned up the kitchen and bathroom and got changed out of my work clothes, then she got up on the couch with Daddy for the bedtime wind-down.

That didn’t last long, however, and she was soon back up and cruising around the living room – “helping” me write this post, checking out what shows we were catching up on from the DVR, and reading books.

Finally at 7:30 it was time to try for bed again, so back up on the couch with Daddy she went. She drank her milk for about 5 minutes before she started coughing again, so R just put her in bed awake (which, *fingers crossed*, has been working ok lately). We heard one small cry as he left her room, then all was silent in baby dream land. Ahh… Time for Mommy’s dinner (leftover R’s homemade sweet and sour pork – yum!) and a glass of her favorite, Hallowine.

R went to watch baseball in the bedroom at 8:00, which meant I then had the tv all to myself for the rest of the night! So I promptly turned on E! to watch Kim Kardashian’s wedding special. As you may remember, I NEVER get to control the tv in our house. So when I do, I go big. Now that’s the perfect way to end this Tuesday. Cheers!

(yes, that’s the same pj t-shirt from last night to go with the shine on my forehead. don’t hate.)
 
 

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Week in My Life – Day 1: Monday

I’m excited to be joining a pretty rad-sounding week-long series over at Adventuroo – Week in My Life. My mission? Document a week of my life pictorially, with as many or as few supporting words as I’d like. Sounds pretty cool, eh? And since this blog is all about “Life as I know it…”, well that seems just fitting, wouldn’t you say?

Now I’m definitely not a pro at this like Melissa is, so I’m going to try to capture just a portion of each day of the week this week, as opposed to all day every day. My time at home after work each day is what I really want to remember here, so that’s where I’ll focus my Week in My Life efforts this time around. Plus I’m not so sure my workplace would appreciate me running around snapping pictures of me and everyone else at their desks for all those hours anyway.

Here we go…

Tonight we were fortunate enough to have tickets to Game 2 of the NLCS at Miller Park, so I left work at 4:00 to go pick up D and head home to get her fed, changed, and have some supper before heading to the stadium. We were so excited to see if the Brewers could pull off another win against the Cardinals to take a 2-0 series lead!

I forgot to take a shot of the clock when I left my desk, so the car radio will have to suffice. And please excuse the less-than-professional quality of my pictures tonight – they were all taken on my iPhone.

D actually came willingly and excitedly to me today at daycare, which was great. Touchdown!

We got home just after 4:30, and I fed her right away while R ran to the store to get fixins for our subs for dinner. While D was eating I also unloaded the dishwasher from the previous night’s load. Multi-tasking. Key.

She loved drinking her water out of a different cup with dinner, then happily watched Daddy make sandwiches.

That happiness soon turned to squirminess, however, and it was time to get D out of the chair and cleaned up. We finally got everyone fed and ready to go, and headed to the ball park around 5:45.

The Good Year blimp hovered over the stadium all game tonight, which was pretty cool to see.

Once inside we took up post in our usual standing room only spot behind section 118 and cheered on the good guys. Go Brewers! Or touchdown! as D likes to call it.

This vantage point was great and all, provided a nice view of the field and had plenty of room for us and the stroller, but since this was our 2nd game in as many nights we were ready to actually sit in our seats and give the legs a rest. So up to the nosebleed section we climbed. Fortunately Guest Services was outstanding and let us “check” our stroller into their room so we didn’t have to mess with trying to cram it into the jam-packed row of seats in our section. Bonus points, Brewers.

While sitting up there, also, I was reminded of our wedding while watching the Jumbo-tron. R’s cousin plays for the Brewers and did that year, too, and the day after our wedding they surprised us with a huge congratulatory sign for us and our wedding party up on the big screen during the game. Too bad I was climbing the stairs when they showed it and missed it completely. Ah well, it’s the thought that counts, and that was an incredible gesture.

After an inning or 2 the close quarters and vertigo-inducing grade of the rows made us a little antsy, so we decided to give up resting our feet and headed back down a few levels. We had to make a pit-stop on the way to change D into her 2nd pair of jammies, since she peed through her original outfit while sitting on R’s lap up there. Oops. Our good friends A & S were also at the game, so we hung out behind their section for a bit to chat and commiserate over how poorly our team was doing. Ugh. Della loved S’s Brewers beads, though.

Finally after 7 and 1/2 innings we decided to head home. The Brewers were down 9-2 at that point, and went on to lose 12-3 unfortunately, so we didn’t miss anything by skipping out ahead of the crowd. We were all so tired and D really needed to get to bed. She fell asleep in the car on the way home so this was my last shot for the day.

She did do another gagging coughing spell on the way home in her sleep and got a little puke on herself, but it turned out to be mainly on the car seat straps and not her, so fortunately we didn’t have to change her into yet another set of pjs once inside a little before 10:30. Gheesh.

Now here I am, up waaay past my bedtime, putting together my 1st day of Week in My Life for you. I hope you enjoyed it. Stay tuned – 6 more to go!

 **sorry, i don’t know why my pics are all screwed up and jammed to the left. they look centered when i’m editing the post, promise. i’ll try to make sure they look better for tomorrow.

 

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Dead man walking

Steel yourself for a heavy one here… Capital punishment is a highly debated and debatable subject, the likes of which I usually prefer to steer clear. But with the 2 executions earlier this week, it’s been on my mind. Specifically, do I agree with the death penalty or not?

And the more I think about it, the more my honest answer becomes “I don’t know.” See here’s the sitch: Say someone murdered one of my loved ones. Would I want them dead? Absolutely. Yes, I know how horrible that sounds, to say I would want another human dead, but I’m being brutally honest here. If someone killed R or D or any one of my family members, I might even want to go kill them myself. Screw waiting around for a death sentence.

However… (there’s always a however, isn’t there?)

Say it was one of my loved ones who did the murdering (or whatever other heinous crime would have to be committed to warrant the death penalty). Would I want them dead? Absolutely not. I would much rather have them sentenced to life in prison so I could at least go see them and call them and write to them and just know that they were still alive. Is that fair? Would they rather spend the rest of their days confined to a cell knowing there’s probably no hope whatsoever of ever seeing the free world again than be put to death? I can’t say for sure, but I’m selfish and assuming the answer would be yes. If it were me I would definitely prefer a remainder of a lifetime of imprisonment over dying, so I’m just going to simplify things and say someone I love would too.

So what’s my answer? See, herein lies my dilemma. In one circumstance I’m for it, and in another I’m adamantly against it. And I’ve tried to put the shoe on the other foot in my first scenario, where someone I love has been murdered, and see how the accused’s family would not want him/her to die just as I wouldn’t one of my own to die in my second scenario, but the seething black hole of loss in which I imagine I would be suffering usually takes over and makes my decision for me. They must die! God, that’s an awful thought to have even hypothetically. It kind of makes me ashamed knowing I’ve thought it at all. And I definitely don’t want to be teaching D that an-eye-for-an-eye is the rule by which to live, perpetuating violence and all, but really, if someone killed part of my family I would unequivocally want revenge. I’m sorry, I would. Call it a character flaw, call me barbaric and savage, call me a beast, but when I picture something that horrific happening in my life, I just can’t see it as a wound that would ever heal. Do I forgive easily? Unfortunately, no. Maybe that’s something I need to work on (actually i’m sure that’s something i need to work on, but that’s beside the point here). Maybe if this unbearable scenario did play out in my life someday (and dear god i hope it never does) I would be able to find the strength to not want to enact revenge and rip the accused’s head off with my bare hands as his/her death sentence. But I really just don’t know.

Then when you bring all the exogenous factors into a death penalty case, the decision can become even more complicated. Take the 2 executions this week, for instance. Troy Davis – a black man accused of killing an off-duty police officer in Georgia over 20 years ago; a case that lacked physical evidence linking him to the crime; eye witnesses recanting their claims that Davis was the perpetrator; a confession by another man; Davis’s own offer to submit to a lie detector test to prove his innocence; an enormous outpouring of support for Davis and outrage at this seeming miscarriage of justice that there was no stay of execution. And then there was Lawrence Brewer – 1 of 3 white men found guilty of the dragging death of a black man 13 years ago in Texas; they chained the man to the back of a pickup and dragged him by the ankles until he was decapitated when he hit a culvert; the crime was intended to promote Brewer’s white supremacist organization; odd, but there wasn’t much public outcry for this one; did you even hear about it?

I’d like to think that the gumption with which I stand behind my resolution that I would absolutely 100% never want the death penalty enacted against someone I love is stronger than my desire to have it enacted against one who would take someone I love from me, so therefore means I’m against capital punishment, but does that count? Or am I allowed to say “I don’t know”? Can the answer to such a weighty question be “well, it depends”?

What say you?

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Worth at least a couple thousand words

Ever have one (or more) of those weeks where you just can’t seem to get caught up? That’s how I’ve felt since we got back from Colorado the other weekend. I’ve been doing a lot of exploring of and venturing farther out into the social media/networking world, and have set some pretty lofty goals for myself with this here little blog, which has ended up taking up much of the time I usually use to dedicate to my posts. Hence, the lack of pictures for you.

Until now! I finally picked out the ones I thought best summed up our awesome trip. The wedding was beautiful, the scenery was divine, and the company couldn’t have been better. Besides D’s illnesses, it was fantastic. Congratulations again to my sister M and now brother-in-law C – may you enjoy a long and happy lifetime together!

I made the photos small again since there are so many, so please click on any to make them bigger:

Get me!
R pretending he's freezing on an "ice cube" chair at Coors

Continue reading “Worth at least a couple thousand words”

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Love to Zaria

Yet another tear-jerkingly sad baby story, but I just can’t ignore it and not pass it on. I found Zaria’s tale through Jenny at What the blog?, then clicked over to read about her myself.

I can’t even imagine her parents’ pain. To have one of their twin daughters stillborn at 21 weeks, cling to the hope of the other’s survival for a month, then face the indescribable pain of losing her as well, all too soon.

I really have no more words – I can’t seem to think of anything quite fitting for the loss of such tiny little souls. So please go read about Zaria. Suzanne is hosting a most excellent fundraiser for the family, and all you moms-to-be out there could have a chance to win some pretty sweet gear. Or if you are so inclined, give a little something to the March of Dimes, an organization dedicated to helping families like Zaria’s through their struggles and giving those tiny ones a fighting chance.

Love to Zaria!

 

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Waxing nostalgic

I found this beautiful post the other day on BlogHer Moms and it almost brought me to tears. Not because I can relate to lemead’s summer camp experiences on Cape Cod, but because I, too, look back on my childhood summers with such aching fondness. The long days of play, hearing the cicadas and crickets on hot summer nights (i hate bugs, but that sound always takes me back), the hours my sisters and I would spend making up languages and forts and engaging in general make believe, the utter lack of responsibility save putting away toys at day’s end, and an overall age of blissful innocence that only children know.

My sisters and I never went to summer camp, but we did have Canada. And I wouldn’t swap those 2 for anything. When we were younger there were years when we were able to spend a good couple weeks up on the island, and it was pure heaven for us. For during those long stays we usually overlapped with my mom’s entire family, spending days and nights on end with our grandparents and all of our aunts, uncles, and cousins, some of whom we never saw except up there. We held countless diving contests off the dock, swam in and across the lake (but not through the seaweed, ew!), made treasure maps and turned the island into our own coded little world, read stacks of old comic books, set up tents and “camped” in various spots on the island, had water fights, made up songs, played endless games of cards and Scrabble and bingo, listened to old-time records every night at cocktail hour (one of my favorite traditions that still lives on), roasted bags of marshmallows and popped nightly bowls of popcorn, awoke each morning to the smell of bacon and a fire in the wood-burning stove in the kitchen, and fell asleep in the loft each night listening to the grown ups reminiscing about when they were our age and always trying to sneak peeks through the blankets over the railing hoping we wouldn’t get caught and forced back into bed. They were the best days of our lives, and the countdowns to the next summer’s trip usually began on the way home. I still get butterflies of excitement the night before each trip to Little Pine Isle.

Canada has always been a family place for us, though, unlike a summer camp full of outside friends. Not that others aren’t welcome, by any means. And some groups of family do take friends when they go, when there’s room enough without too many other family members already there at the same time. I think this is kind of what made it special for us, too. We bonded so strongly with our family when we were up there and loved spending that time with them. What could be more fun for kids than playing with their aunts and uncles who always gave in and let them get away with stuff that their parents never would? Granted, as we’ve all gotten older (and bigger) it is kind of nice when the island isn’t crammed full of people anymore, but as kids it was wonderful.

Much like lemead’s summer camp, our island is littered with these boundless memories and happy ghosts from our pasts. And now I am thrilled to be able to take D there and let her create her own lifetime of memories as well. She only has 1 cousin right now, but I know they’ll be joined by many more and will probably explore every nook and cranny and play every island game imaginable, just as we did. Now we will be the adults in the living room reminiscing each night while they try to put off sleep as long as possible up in the loft. And I hope she falls as deeply in love with the place as we have and makes boatloads of memories there with her own children and their children someday, too.

Me & my sisters in Canada ages ago
Crushing cans in Canada while rockin' a bikini. Awesome

 

p.s. totally unrelated, but i wanted to get my run stats from this week down. tuesday i ran 3.57 miles in 31:41 for a 8:51 pace, and last night i ran 2.86 miles in 24:04 for a 8:25 pace. my time from last night is only 4 seconds off my fastest time ever for that particular route, so i was pleased. both runs felt pretty awful, but i was very happy i got more than 1 in this week.