step on a crack

We brought out the chalk before visiting the Science Center on Memorial Day. Owen and Oona had more fun breaking the thin pieces of chalk and flying and crashing the larger crayon (or rocket) shaped pieces of chalk than actually drawing with them. This frustrated Toby a great deal, which I understand and can empathize with, but I was more frustrated by the state of our sidewalk, which is cracked and sprouting weeds. Owen always tells me to not step on the cracks or any painted lines on the streets or sidewalks because they are lasers, my back is safe from sidewalk cracks but not from Oona's girth. And we live on a corner so there's a lot of sidewalk. I swear I should just walk around my house with my eyes closed, I'm always seeing ways things could be fixed and if I start pricing all these fixes out it would quickly out price how much we paid for our home. God help me when we sell this house, I won't be able to be in it when prospective buyers come because I'm sure my eyes would be wandering to all the problems I see with the place, that nobody else would notice until I pointed it out to them with my terror-struck blue-green peepers.

my tuesday feels like a monday

Hope everyone in the US enjoyed their Memorial Day weekend. Toby took the kids to his parents Saturday and Sunday while I worked on this antique bed-frame that I bought for Oona last year. This darn bed is killing me! The last time Toby went to his parents for the weekend I stripped the frame and this weekend I finished stripping it and sanded it down, it's a never ending project. I still have to paint it, because the wood isn't in the greatest shape, and we had to custom order a mattress for the bed because it's 6 inches narrower and a few inches shorter than a standard twin bed. So for right now Oona sleeps on the mattress on the floor and it looks bizarre because it's so narrow that the mattress sort of puffs up in the middle. Suffice it to say, I'm having second thoughts about why I even bothered buying the bed-frame, BUT hopefully once it's all done and in Oona's room I'll see what I originally envisioned when I happened upon the bed frame.

Yesterday we went to the Carnegie Science Center to watch the robocup. The picture above is from the back of the Science Center, I think Pittsburgh looks pretty good for a former steel city. It was a great idea of Toby's to watch the robocup but Owen quickly lost interest and Oona disinterested from the start. She wanted to spend all her time in the train room, which is pretty incredible. It's this great room with a huge train display, each corner of the room sized table is a different season (spring could definitely use a dusting) with all these cute little homes and mechanized miniature people swinging on tree swinging or doing other cute activities. And the room gradually goes from morning to night and back agains every few minutes. One of the men that worked there let Oona push a large button that made the train whistle and gave her a train hand stamp. When Oona wasn't in the train room she wanted to be at the water table, where you can balance balls in the water arcs. But Oona didn't want to throw the balls, just see how many she could hoard. So from this paragraph you can deduce that I was in charge of watching Oona at the Science Center. Later in the day we had an early dinner at Mad Mex where I filled myself to bursting on carnitas enchiladas, I was still feeling full this morning. I love Mexican food but if I ate it as much as I'd like to I'd be as big as a house.

winter in may

The past week and a half it has been downright frigid here in Pittsburgh. It's rained every day and it has been unseasonably cold. On Monday I finally broke down and asked Toby to put the heat back on because my toes were suffering the effects of the cold burst in spring. My feet are not a pretty sight. They're probably the ugliest part of my body, but I needed to show you just how cold I've been. Note the frozen yellow piggy that went to market and the piggy that stayed home is purple with a yellow center, lovely I know. I think I suffered from frostbite when I was young during the many times I would ice skate (from 11 to 14 I skated all winter) until my feet were numb. I'd then proceed to rub them back to life in front of a radiator (basically the two cardinal sins of treating frostbite but this is what my Dad would do to my feet when I was too young to do it on my own). So yeah, my feet have had crappy circulation ever since. Even on cool summer nights, which are still relatively balmy, my toes become waxy yellow hard lumps. It's supposed to warm up over the weekend reaching 80 here by Monday. In the meantime I double up on socks in the house and walk by the heating vent a lot.

student of the month

Owen is student of the student for his kindergarten class for April. The school is a bit behind on the months, they even skipped a couple of months throughout the school year. He was extremely happy and proud of this honor and I feel horrible that I missed seeing him get it. Every day when I bring Owen to school, Oona and I stand in the hallway while the children gather in the auditorium. A group of students play drums on stage and then the principal speaks to the students, a sort of daily pep talk. After Ms. L speaks they do the pledge of allegiance, sing a song and then head to class, where Oona and I wave to Owen as he passes us in the hall. I've had to leave early a few of times due to Oona having a melt down but when Owen was named student of the month I had to leave because Oona did a huge poop that was threatening to burst from her pants and was stinking up the hallway. This isn't the first time that Oona's poop has messed with Owen at school.
I wish I had known ahead of time that he was going to be chosen. It seems like it would be nice for parents to know so they could be there, I'm sure Toby would have gone to work late in order to see Owen get student of the month. Oh well. The picture above is an Owen staged picture 'get one of me reading'. I have so few pictures of him lately, whenever I focus on him with the camera he makes a goofy face. He's growing up so fast. He looks so much older to me than when he first started kindergarten, although he's still got painfully thin little boy body - his bmi is 14!

i love stephen colbert

This man never ceases to make me laugh. The only time I truly regret not having cable is when I miss out on the gems from The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I shouldn't have to wait two days to learn about this clip.

spring banner arrives, finally

Yes, it is almost two months into spring but it took me awhile to get to changing my banner for the season. Pittsburgh makes it hard to have anything springy until mid april but I have no excuse for the past 3 weeks. I might tinker with this banner since I'm not thrilled with it but at least it's better than looking at snow in May. Below is a look at banners past, I think summer is my favorite. Yes that was photoshopped, but I had to get rid of the crappy background. Here's the original.



winter 07/08


fall 07


summer 07


spring 07


winter 06/07

prodigy

Oona and I made an impromptu visit to her doctor's office today because she's had a nasty rash on her nether regions the past few days. I figured it was contact dermatitis (my fancy name for diaper rash) but Toby was very concerned so I figured she should get checked out just to be on the safe side. Her regular doctor wasn't there but one of the partners, who was very friendly, checked her out and, I was right, it was diaper rash. He raised an eyebrow when he saw it, given that I called in and said I figured that's what it was, but I told him, 'my husband was very concerned.' He smiled and nodded with understanding saying, 'Dad's do tend to worry about that with their little girls.' It's a good thing I went though, fifteen dollar copay aside, because he recommended low dose hydropcortisone and an antifungal. If she had developed fungus, which he said she's at risk for when the skin is so broken down, I would have been kicking myself for not getting her to the doctor sooner.

After she was done with her check up the doctor was chatting with her as she babbled about the leopard sleeping on his paws in the framed photo in the room (the practice recently moved into a green building and I'm amazed at how nice the decor is). He was so impressed by how bright she was and if a pediatrician is impressed that's really impressive, no? 'Where did she learn to talk so well?' he asked, marveling at her. 'She's got a big brother who's pretty articulate.' I replied. 'Not just the words, her whole sense of phrasing. She's really bright.' Oona was pleased as punch to perform and as the doctor said colors Oona jumped to the appropriate linoleum square. I was swelling with pride as we got ready to go. Oona stopped for a pretzel rod and picked out a sticker, a dinosaur one over dora and the other frilly girly stuff. I was ready to burst, she was so brilliant and cool. She babbled in the back seat during the ride home playing with her sticker until I heard her demand, 'get it off of me!' and I turned around to find the triceratops running across her bangs. Uh oh, it was so funny looking though I couldn't resist taking a couple pictures. Fortunately, it came off with the bare minimum of hair pulling.

Hope everyone has a great Mother's day!

the child in time & the fifth child

This book by Ian McEwan was good but it pales in comparison to Atonement and Saturday, which would both be in my top ten favorite books ever. The pacing was hard for me, I felt like I was trudging through thick weedy water. It might be the subject matter, a couple whose toddler daughter is abducted and how they cope, or not, with her loss. It just strikes too close to home and there were parts of the book where I would get very confused as to whether it was real or imagined. Maybe it was the author's way of showing the overwhelming emotions that can debilitate a person when struck with such a loss but I was just very confused at times, when I usually don't have a problem with reading comprehension. Oh well. Atonement and Saturday were written after this so I can just hope McEwan's writing will keep getting better with age, I guess I should check out On Chesil Beach to see if my hope is in fact true.


I bought a copy of Cookie magazine a month or so ago and that magazine is probably called cookie because if you buy all the stuff they suggest on their glossy slick pages, you will have enough money left to feed a family of four one cookie for the rest of the month. It is crazy rife with conspicuous consumption. Very pretty looking but who, aside from the supermodels and the other beautiful people on the cover every month, could afford it?! That gripe aside, I was drawn to the magazine by the column on my nightstand by Ayelet Waldman. Her choices and the reasoning behind her choices seemed incredibly insightful, plus she had a great story by Lorrie Moore on her list, whom I love, so I figured we might have similiar tastes with fiction, after all she is married to Michael Chabon, who's one of my favorite writers. So I decided to start with The Fifth Child because I'm all for creepy and it sounded very creepy and interesting. Oh my, this book was way too creepy for me. After finishing the book, that's really more of a novella it's a short quick read, I wanted to take a shower and scrub myself down I felt so dirty and bad. I know that's a very strange reaction to have to a book but it left me feeling horrible and not with any redemptive uplift to that horror, the way a tragic romance, like Atonement, will leave you so sad but at the same time mesmerized by the beauty of the story. Nope, this story just repelled me. The writing is fine but the subject matter was too much for me. And I disagree that the family is incredibly happy until the fifth child. They are strapped for money from the start; with every pregnancy, and they come in quick succession, Harriet gets more worn out and wan, needing to rely on her mother more frequently, and David must take on more work in order to make ends meet. There's darkness from the very start of this book but it becomes an all out horror story as soon as Harriet is pregnant with the fifth child and, somehow, gets more horrific once he's born. The only other book that I've read that I had a similiar reaction to was The Butcher Boy. It's another scrub away the sins after reading.

i need a nap and a skin graft

Oh how I wish I looked this cute when I wake up with major bed head. I didn't want to jinx this revelation by blogging about it but Oona's actually been napping in her room the past month or so. You have no clue how much easier this makes my life and how desperately I need my life to be a bit easier lately.

My Grandmother fell and broke her hip last Tuesday, that's why I haven't blogged in so long. My Mom got in Friday and things have been a bit of a blur the past week. I spent 6 hours at the ER with my Grandma until they finally got her up to the floor for surgeries. She was such a dear telling me how she raved to everyone in the ambulance about the manicure I gave her, I started doing her nails every Sunday when I'd go to see her without Oona. She did real well with the surgery, unfortunately they sent her to a rehabilitative hospital this weekend that's the best in terms of physical therapy but ill equipped to handle someone with my Grandmother's level of dementia. This weekend was extremely stressful for my Mom and me, much more so my Mom who spent all day at the rehab hospital on Sunday because the she couldn't trust the nurses to watch my Grandma. Just how bad was it? A few lows. On Sunday my Mom asked the nursing staff to get my Grandma out of her wheelchair after lunch and put her in her bed so she could nap, like she usually does, they refused. I told the nurse my Grandma was at risk for trying to get out of her bed due to her agitated state, from anxiety and dementia. They put in an order for a low bed which she didn't get for 15 hours. In the meantime they took no other precautions with her and she fell trying to get out of her bed within an hour of our leaving on Saturday. When we received the call that she had fallen I told my Mom to call her Doctor, who was out until Tuesday, and then forced her to speak with a doctor on call in order to up her dose of Ativan so she could calm down. The doctor refused saying it would make her more likely to try and get out of bed which is in no way true. We kept asking for additional Ativan, something to calm her down, saying that with all the stress and changes her usual dose (which is miniscule) would not be enough for her. Thirty hours after our multiple requests to calm her down they wound up giving her Haldol, which is way stronger than Ativan and usually used with acute psychosis or mania. Yesterday I went to the center with my Mom and gave a formal complaint basically reaming the nursing staff (they weren't all bad but three were particularly horrible) and the on-call doctor for their treatment of my Grandma.

The thing that is so maddening to me with the past week that my Grandma has been under medical care is the compartmentalization. My Grandma is not looked at as a whole person, 93 years old with senile dementia. It seems like the healthcare providers just focus on their part and no one is questioning, aside from me and my Mom, what's best overall for my Grandma. There was no caseworker that I know of who oversaw things at the hospital. We only met the caseworker at the rehabilitative hospital after I complained and said that she's to be transferred to a facility that can handle dementia patients and that she's not to receive any more Haldol in the interim. The whole week long episode makes me entertain the idea of going to nursing school, yet again, although I don't know that anger at a convoluted and impersonal system is the best reason. Plus I always worried that I'd be too emotional and nervous to be a good nurse but I do love reading about science and medicine. Oh well, it can be one of those never ending what if's. I also went to the dermatologist on Thursday for my annual mole and freckle check being extremely fair it seems like a good idea. I asked the doctor about Retin A because I'm obsessed with the toll age is taking on my skin and the doctor gave me a few samples along with a prescription. I followed the recommended dose, pea size, but actually forgot and put it on two days in a row instead of starting off every other day. Big mistake. I now resemble a genetically modified tomato crossed with a snake. I'm molting and very very red. I get especially red while exercising and the sweat stings my tomato skin. The price of vanity and I'm not looking at all pretty right now.