Don’t call me!

These last two weeks I have been having bad luck with things that burn. It all started while making party favors for Ang’s baby shower when I literally melted the tip of my finger right off with a hot glue gun. HOLY SHIT it hurt. To make matters worse the glue was melted into the skin so (and I admit this was rather stupid of me) I took fingernail clippers and clipped the glue right off…..taking my fingertip with it! HOLY SHIT it hurt!!! It felt like a billion bee stings all at once, constantly. Or what I imagine a bee sting would feel like since I’ve never actually been stung by a bee *knock on wood*. I actually had to take a leftover painkiller from my C-Section just so I could sleep.

Next stupid moment…..leaning over the boiling veggies and almost igniting my hair…just like when I was pregnant. That wasn’t so bad. Not bad like when I stuck my hand in the oven to rescue a fallen french fry and burned my hand. Or when making lasagna I stuck my finger into the boiling water. Or dripped hot melted butter down my leg. Or how about when I set the oven on fire while making Joselle’s Monkey Cake….Devil Cake is what it should be called.

All week I had bribed Jeff with this Monkey Cake……will you do blah, blah, blah, and then do blah, blah… I’ll make you yummy Monkey Cake if you do….etc. So I finally make good on my promise and make the damn stuff. Everything is going great until I see smoke rising from the top of the oven. I open the oven and a HUGE cloud of black smoke comes pouring out immediately setting off the fire alarm. Poor Shenzie and Heaten had just gone to bed and WHAMO! Fire alarm. I frantically wave the towel at the smoke detector to get it to stop making the horrible screech while Jeff goes upstairs to comfort Shenzie who is scared to death. I open all of the doors and turn the microwave fan on to get the smoke out….but continue to cook the cake because DAMNIT I want Monkey Cake!!!!! About 3 minutes later I check the cake and POOF! A flame goes up right in the oven. The sugar and butter sizzled out of the pan onto the oven and caught fire. The flames get bigger and bigger and I just stand there watching. I then see my life flash before my eyes…..ok, well not really….but I finally realize I need to do something. This is where you don’t want to call me in the event of an emergency. I run to the stair and yell up to Jeff who is rocking Shenzie back to sleep……HELP! HELP! The oven is on fire and I don’t know what to do!!!! I’m jumping up and down and freaking out, waving my hands up and down like a lunatic. He comes running down the stairs grabs a plastic container and throws water in the oven putting the flames out. Ok, can we all just agree that I had a moment of panic and wasn’t thinking clearly. For some reason I thought you weren’t supposed to use water on a kitchen fire……and as it turns out that is true for a grease fire….not a monkey cake fire.

I’m keeping my hopes up that this next week will be a burn free one!

The invitatons and party bags I made for Ang’s Baby Shower….and in case you couldn’t tell it was Hawaiian Luau themed.

Aloha Ang and Baby

Aloha Baby No Name

More Baby Shower photos found here.

My favorite pastime is reading. I try to sneak in words whenever I get a chance.  Recently I’ve been trying new authors. I read The Handmaiden’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and LOVED it so I read Alias Grace. While it was well written, it didn’t grab me the way The Handmaiden’s Tale did. I also started reading Jodi Picoult. I read The Tenth Circle which I loved, Perfect Match which was really good, and I just finished My Sister’s Keeper. All I can say is wow. I’m not a big crier. I really dislike crying and will give myself headaches holding the tears in. This book brought me to tears. If you haven’t read it I highly recommend it.
Below is the list of books I’ve read this year with my handy dandy star system to rate them.
 
January 2007
 
Sharp Objects                                    Gillian Flynn              *****
Prior Bad Acts                                    Tami Hoag                ***

February 2007

Hannibal Rising                                    Thomas Harris           ***

March 2007
 
Shopaholic and Baby                            Sophie Kinsella          ****
Miss Understanding                              Stephanie Lessing      ***
Lust for Life                                         Adele Parks               **

April 2007
 
The Girlfriend Curse                               Valerie Frankel          ***
The Body of David Hayes                        Ridley Pearson          ***
Immoral                                                Brian Freeman           ***
Blonde Ambition                                     Zoey Dean               *
Brother Odd                                          Dean Koontz            ****
The Watchman                                       Robert Crais            ****
The Handmaid’s Tale                               Margaret Atwood      *****
The Tenth Circle                                     Jodi Picoult              *****

May 2007
 
Perfect Match                                        Jodi Picoult              ****
State of Fear                                         Michael Crichton      ****
Vanishing Acts                                      Jodi Picoult              ***1/2
Alias Grace                                            Margaret Atwood     ***1/2
My Sister’s Keeper                                 Jodi Picoult              *****

It looks as if Heaten is going to be a fan of reading as well. He loves to play with books…and by play I mean beat on them with his giant paw sized hands.

 
Jeff is reading the babies the Chronicles of Narnia. No cows jumping over the moons here.

Well, I screwed something up here so as soon as my wonderful husband fixes it I can resume my posting.

For the past month I have been certain Heaten is teething. I check his mouth fairly often and as of yet no little teeths. Apparently he has the “Crabby Baby Syndrome”.  Shenzie on the other hand doesn’t like fingers in her mouth. When she smiles her bottom lip hides her gums and I rarely see inside the cave of her mouth. Imagine my surprise on Saturday (May 26th) when I randomly felt her gums and found a tooth!!!! Holy shit, she has a tooth!!! Last week she started doing this weird lip suck, tongue swirl thing - I bet thats when the tooth poked through and she was playing with it. Silly mommy for not noticing her first tooth. Not even 8 months old and already keeping secrets!

After hand making 30 baby shower invitations this weekend I am tiiiiirrrred…..but the show must go on. Today was baby food making day. I pureed apricots, green beans, sweet potatos, squash, and carrots. A busy bee for sure, too bad the babies decided they don’t need naps today. Can I get my gold star now?

And because I’m too busy to upload new photos from this weekend you get another tiny tots picture.

Photos from November 2006

It’s been awhile since we had a good poop conversation, I thought we were due to talk poo!! =)

We have a poop conspiracy going on in this house! Our mornings go something like this:

Babies wake up (WAY too early)….mama stumbles out of bed to get the bottles ready…babies eat bottles….mama changes diapers (never stinky)…babies and mama play on the floor…babies eat breakfast (fruit and oatmeal)…babies and mama play on the floor…babies start to get whiny and fussy…mama sings them the ABC’s and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and they are off to bed for a nap.

Enter Stink Butt

About 15 minutes later I go check on each baby (they nap in seperate rooms) and what do I find….STINK BUTT! 99.8 % of the time they have both got stink in their diapers. I wonder how this all works. They rarely go while we are playing, it is always after I put them down for their naps that they decide to do the doodoo. I find it pretty funny that they are both on this poop schedule. Although later on in the day Shenzie will have a second and sometimes even third stink butt. Heaten is a once a day stink kind of guy.

Poor Shenzie is going to be jealous of her brothers luscious lips!

Shenzie blowing spit bubbles….at least there is no food involved!

Along with refusing most veggies Shenzie has now started blowing bubbles with the food in her mouth. Today we had peas and carrots all over the high chairs, in my hair, all over her legs, and even on Heaten. Food fight anyone!?!

I have always been a picky eater. Onions, HELL no. Peppers, nope. Brussel Sprouts, spinach, steak, anything of the ocean variety…no, no, and NO! If something doesn’t smell good I won’t even taste it. I figure if it doesn’t smell good there is no way it is going to taste good. When I eat I have to have things just so. I arrange my food and make “bites”. I always have a chip with a bite of sandwich, I always have a french fry with each bite of hamburger, etc.

I am so sad to say that along with my ‘mean gene’ Shenzie also got my ‘picky gene’. She is refusing foods. Both of them don’t like avacado’s, but anything else goes when it comes to Heaten. I can mix and match pretty much anything and he’ll eat it. Squangos anyone? Shenzie used to like squash and sweet potatos. Not anymore. She will take a tiny bite and then refuse to open her mouth again. I have tricked her into eating another bite, but she is on to me and won’t even pretend to open her mouth. Now when she refuses a food I have to either mix it with something sweet (fruit) or get her something else entirely. All I can say is I hope this is just a phase because growing up being such a picky eater sucks.

Current list of foods they’ve eaten:

Carrots, peas, green beans, squash, sweet potato, mangos, peaches, prunes, blueberries, pears, bananas, applesauce, apricots, plums and banana puffs.

Today I gave them bits of wheat bread (pre-chewed up like birdies do). Shenzie would gum it and then swallow. Heaten would just swallow it down. Same with the banana puffs…Shenzie would “chew” them while Heaten would just swallow. I think Shenzie is ready to try some baby finger foods, but Heaten is, as usual, my lazy baby and will take a bit longer.

There are moments I wish I could freeze time so I wouldn’t forget them. We have a daybed upstairs in our loft where we spend a lot of time. While they drink their bottles I sit in between them on the daybed one on each side of me. Today they both had one leg resting on each of my arms, lying on their side watching videos on Fuse. It was so adorable I wish I could have taken a picture. I have such a bad memory that I already forgot how it was like when they were tiny little clams…how in the world am I going to remember every precious moment?!?

When we brought the babies home from NICU they both had feeding issues. We would have to pace them when eating…meaning pull the bottle out every 2 to 3 sucks and let them breath. They would just suck, suck, suck and not breath. Seeing them hooked up to all of the monitors and watching their oxygen levels plummet while in the NICU was scary. Having them home with no nurses no monitors was super scary! They would stop breathing while eating and get blue around the lips. Feeding them was such a stressful time those first couple of weeks.

Shenzie Weather

Mama and Heaten Grey…Shenzie Weather in the background getting fed by my favorite NICU nurse Bebette.

Today they hold their own bottles and know how to drink from a sippy cup. Oh how times change. It totally blew me away thinking how far they’ve come in terms of eating, breathing, growing, and learning. I mean, I know babies grow and learn and get bigger and such….but it is still amazing when it is my babies doing the learning and growing. They were so tiny, fragile, and helpless back then. Today they seem so big and lively. I loved when they were newborns, but I LOVE this stage where there is no worry over breathing, no jaundice, no fear of breaking them, no getting up every two hours all night to feed them…and did I mention they hold their own bottles…and drink from sippy cups and sleep all night!!! =) Life is grand.

Isn’t it great how vodka looks so much like water. Until you smell their breath you would never know what lushes they are!!