Waffling and Woes

Well, this week hasn't been the greatest, but it sure could be a lot worse.
Money continues to be a huge stressor, I sure hope it gets better soon. I'm in the process of trying to decide what to about my job situation - I could go full-time at my current job, but I still feel like I'm not ready to not be without Tommy most of the time. Five eight hour days just seems like so much to me and I'm concerned the childcare costs will eat up whatever extra money comes in. I did call the L&D unit at the hospital and they are doing some hiring. That dept. works 12 hour shifts which means I would work a lot less days and have a lot more time to be at home with Tom (and, by extension, less child care costs). Please say a little prayer for me that that works out - I really think it would be a good thing for us. If it doesn't, I'm at least applying for other jobs - I'd like to at least see what is out there before I accept a full time position in my department. I know if I do accept it, I'm pretty much stuck for a whole year (that's the informal expected committment) so if I don't like it, I just have to be unhappy for that time. :-( Plus, I'm so spoiled by taking off time when I want to that I cannot imagine that I won't be able to take a day off for a full six months (until my probation is over)!!! arrgghhh

I did manage to get back to the gym today and it felt much better!! Probably because it was earlier in the day and I wasn't already worn out from working, but I felt like I did really well.

Emmett and I have decided to go into counseling. Not just one or two sessions and then quitting, but actually focusing on going at least twice a month (hopefully more like once a week at least initially) to a family counselor to help us try to work through some of the issues that keep cropping up and hopefully improve the way that we communicate with each other. I think that's as much of a problem for us as anything else.

Thomas is also a little bit sick and now I'm totally hyperparanoid about whether or not it's going to lead to an asthma attack. So far, so good this time. Say another little prayer, please. :-)

The best news all week was that I got a bonus at work! It wasn't much - about $325 after taxes, but right now when things are so tight after all the traveling and Thomas' birthday - it sure seems like a veritable windfall haha! Now at least we can keep the wolf at bay for a little bit longer. :-)

I think I sound more negative than I really feel because I'm pretty tired. It's after 2am and I have to be at work tomorrow by 8am, so I reallly better sign off now. I'm actually pretty relieved (feel blessed) by the mini-windfall, excited by my progress at the gym (although haven't had the courage to get on the scale yet), and very encouraged by Emmett and my committment to get into counseling. I think things must be on the upswing here, it's just a matter of keeping our eye on the prize, in this case our beautiful and perfect little boy and our family :-).

Love,
Melissa

The Kissing Bandit strikes

Well after a pretty rough week, we ended up having a fantastic weekend!!
Saturday I had to work 10am to 6pm, but, typically, someone calls in sick and the whole schedule gets messed up - but for the first time in memory, the change ends up being that I get to leave early!! (long story) So I left work at 4pm, went home and relaxed for a while (Emmett took Tommy to Golden Gate park to the Children's Playground so they were gone) and then went to the gym for the first time in over a year! It was really hard and not very much fun at all haha, but mentally it felt good to be doing something for myself and made me feel a little better about myself (a real problem I'm having these days). I got back from the gym and Emmett had ordered a pizza so we all had dinner and then it was time for Tommy to go to bed. After Tommy went to bed we watched "Along Came Polly" which we both enjoyed - a fun, feel-good movie.

Sunday morning we all got up and spent some time just hanging out in the backyard. Emmett and I basically took turns trying to keep Tommy out of trouble so that we could read a little bit of the paper and drink our coffee. When it was my turn, I decided to put water in Tommy's little pool, let the sun warm it up a bit and then splash around in his little kiddie pool with him. We had so much fun!! We were both splashing and giggling like crazy, it was so wonderful. Tom is doing really well with his kicking - he was laying on his stomach in the water just kicking those little legs like crazy!

After that it was time for Tommy's nap and Emmett and I focused on cleaning up the house - he's been so productive lately, if he continues we might actually get our house in really good shape! But there is still much to be done...

After Tommy got up from his nap, we called the Ortiz family and invited them to go with us to the park. They came, but they would have to come later, so the three of us met them there. Thomas had so much fun at the park running around and playing on all the equipment there and trying to interact with some of the other kids. But he keeps getting into trouble...for trying to hug and kiss all the other kids! It's crazy - he's always hugging them almost until they fall down and then kissing and kissing on strange children!!! It's so embarassing and yet so unbelievably cute - I'm not sure whether to laugh or apologize to the other Moms. I have decided from here on out to call Thomas the Kissing Bandit - he steals kisses from everyone!

We came home from the park and then made a really nice dinner - grass-fed ribeye steak with roasted potatoes with garlic and rosemary and fresh corn on the cob (not as good as Michigan corn, but pretty darn good). It was a really nice family Sunday dinner and a great way to wind down the day and the weekend. Afterwards we put Thomas to bed and watched Arrested Development before crashing a bit early.

Today's been a pretty tough day - we're worse off than I thought financially and so I didn't get to do all the things I'd planned to do - and then it turned out that the hours for Child Watch at the YMCA near here were not posted correctly on the web site so I didn't get to work out either! :-(

Emmett's Mom is coming tonight, though, it's always nice to have her here. We're planning yummy supper with this tasty eggplant dish, a simmered chicken dish with almonds and dried cherries, saffron rice, and fresh organic garden salad....mmmmmm :-) How am I ever going to lose weight when I love to eat to much?!? arrrgghh

Well, better run.

Love,
Melissa

More fun with toys

Well, we finally got all the toys assembled from last weeks party. We've been working on getting Tommy to ride his tricycle. He's doing really well with putting his feet on the pedals but doesn't seem to have the strength yet to push the pedals. But he really enjoys what he calls his "toy" and keeps trying, so I'm confident that he will get it moving before long.

Last week I assembled his new play structure - it's pretty cool. One part of it is like a play house and the other side of it is a ladder and slide. He loves the slide and will go on it over and over again, but he also seems to like the little house - he opens the door, walks in, and then climbs out the window. The structure is backed up against the deck and our deck is lined with built in benches (I'm not sure if that creates a good enough visual or not) so he'll climb out the window and right onto the bench and then walk along the bench to the end, climb down from the bench, run around and do the whole thing over again. The only forseeable problem is that the clothes line is running across the bench at one point and I'm afraid he's going to try and swing on it like Tarzan and end up falling and hurting himself. So far he is just eyeing the line as he goes by, let's hope it stays that way for a while.

So - he's having fun with all his toys and it's otherwise been a pretty mellow week for him. Emmett and I have been a little on the "outs" this week so that's been a bit rough, but I'm off work for part of the weekend, so let's hope that will give us some good quality family time and help things out a bit.

Hope all is well with everyone,
Love,
Melissa

Tommy Turns Two!!

This was definitely a weekend to remember. My little boy turned two years old!!!! I can hardly believe it - it seems like yesterday that we were celebrating his first birthday, how could another whole year have flown by?
The celebration was fun - unfortunately, there were very few pictures and I didn't take any, I was just too busy with chatting. I think Kathleen got some photos so I'll post them when I get them. Attendees at Thomas second birthday: Da (Emmett's Dad), Kathleen, Emmett and I (of course), Thomas (duh), Tasha and Timmy, Doug, Michelle, Sasha, Sebastian, Henry, Zuz and Nico, Don, Michelle, Lauren, Paris, Oscar and Kris. It seemed like a good balance of kids and adults this time. Not so many children that it was out of control haha, but enough so that it seemed like a kids party. I don't know how to explain it better than that, other than to say that last year there were so many adults that it was more of an adult party than a kid's party and this year my goal was to make it more of a kid's event. I did feel bad about not inviting more of my South Bay family, but hopefully we'll be able to have a summer barbeque sometime soon and invite the whole gang. Alas, I digress...Tommy had a lot of fun at his party, he seemed to enjoy having the other kids around. He got so many presents it was ridiculous!!! We should have put most of them away and given him one per month until his next birthday! But all the kids were having so much fun playing with all of his toys, that it just got out of control and pretty soon all the toys were in play. I got him a bunch of teletubbies stuff: the rest of the videos, an Actimates Laa Laa doll, three other big teletubbies (t.t.) talking dolls, 4 small t.t.s that clip onto things, and some t.t. beach shoes that are really cute. He loved all of them (of course). He also seemed to really love the stuff he got from his Nana - a whole bunch of refrigerator magnets, one set of magnets with various fruits and vegetables and then another set with pictures of family members. She also got him his "pack-pack" which is what he calls his Scooby Doo backpack - he loves it and looks so cute wearing it all over the house! He just got so much stuff that it's impossible to list it all - and, amazingly enough, he genuinely seems to like it all - there really wasn't anything that he put aside. Oh, another one he loved was this alphabet book with magnets inside that illustrate every item, each item represents a letter, so there's a picture and magnet of and apple for "a" and so on. He loves it, going through the book and pulling all the magnets out and playing with them. He keeps pulling it off the shelf as fast as I can put the magnets back and put it back on the shelf. ahhh well, at least he's having fun with it.

He really had a great birthday and that made me so happy because it started out so rough. Friday night when I came home from work at 12:30am, I noticed that he was coughing in his sleep. The next day while we were running around getting everything ready for the party on Sunday, he was coughing a lot as well (Emmett was gone to San Diego for a wedding all day Friday and Saturday returning Sunday at noon for the party). When I went to get him ready for bed on Saturday night I noticed that he sounded like he was wheezing, that whistling every time he exhaled. Oh noooo....I didn't know what to do - I couldn't reach Emmett, I didn't want to end up in the ER all night and mess up his party if he was fine and I was just being paranoid, but I didn't want him to go into a full blown respiratory problem and die in his sleep because I was more worried about his birthday than his health, either. See the dilemma? In the end of course I decided to go to the ER, better safe than sorry and we went to UCSF so they rolled out the red carpet since I'm an employee and all :-). It turned out that his oxygen saturation was fine but he was definitely wheezing. He had a couple of shots of an inhalers and that didn't work so he had to have a breathing treatment and a dose of steroids. Finally the wheezing subsided a bit and they were able to send us home with medicine and inhalers for him to use at home over the next 48 hours to help him breathe. It was scary and made me sad because now with two asthma-like episodes, we will have to consider that he may have asthma. :-( But I can't complain - there are so many children that have so much worse problems than my little guy. He's doing great now and ended up having a fantastic birthday in spite of the setback.

All is well that ends well. :-)

Love,
Melissa

Home At Last!!!

Well, we're finally back in CA. 10 days seems like a really long time! Thomas really put me through my paces on this trip and I think both of us really missed Emmett. Thomas was so happy to see him last night at the airport.

Yesterday was a travel day from HELL! We left my grandmothers much later than we had planned - originally I wanted to leave at 7am, well, we didn't end up getting on the road until almost 10 (9am Chicago time) (for a 3:15 flight from Chicago)! I moved pretty fast across Michigan and I actually thought we were going to get in with time to spare...but then...there was a HUGE traffic back up at the Illinois/Indiana border. I sat in traffic for almost an hour - I was, of course panicking more and more. Finally we got to the airport at 2:15 - one hour to get the rental car returned, check bags, and get through security. Even that would have been okay except that I wanted to pay cash for the car, so that put a big crimp in the plans. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to check in for the flight before standing in the car rental line to pay for the car, so we were able to board the plane at 3:12. Yikes!! To top it all off, they lost one of my bags. The good news is that they found it and it's going to be here today between 12-2pm. Yay!!!

All in all it was a wonderful trip. It was so good to be back in the midwest. I loved going to Lexington and hanging out on the beach and getting to see all the family and old friends.

Hopefully I'll have time to write more about the trip tonight or tomorrow - there's so much to tell!! I'm working on the pics now, so hopefully I'll get those up over the weekend as well. I have pics from 2 trips to Florida, Lake Tahoe, and now Michigan to get up, so it may take some time. :-)

Love,
Melissa

Greetings from Michigan

Well, here we are in beautiful Holly and Thoms and I are starting to really enjoy our vacation. It's been a little rough getting to this point.

It really started on Sunday - I had to work 9pm - 8am at the hospital and then I had Tommy all day on Monday with no sleep. Well, I actually got to lay down for about an hour, but wow, I was pretty tired by the time we got on the plane. I was trying to get Thomas to go to sleep, but he had had a 4 hour nap during the afternoon and was NOT interested in sleeping. In fact, it prompted him to say his first 5 word sentence! I was so shocked. I was holding him against me and saying "rest, baby, rest" and he would lay down on me for like 3 seconds and then sit up again. And I would say "rest, just rest". After going through this several times, I swear to God, this child looks up at me and says out of the blue, quite clearly, "I don't want to rest". I hope that this being his first big sentence isn't prophetic!! :-)

We got into Chicago at 1am, and, wouldn't you know it, had problems getting the rental car. It's too long and dull of a story, but suffice to say, we finally got our car and got on the road at about 3:30am. We went to Andi's to spend the night and she and I ended up chatting until she left for work about 6am. Thomas was thrown *completely* off of his schedule. We got up around 11am and the first thing I did was call Lusky's cottages to make sure our reservation was secure for this weekend. It was not. It got mixed up (another long and dull story) and we weren't going to have a place to stay. So - I did a bunch of calling around and managed to find another cottage up nearby - I think it's called Cozny's or something like that. It sounds nice - we got really lucky - they had a cancellation and took pity on the woman from San Francisco trying to arrange a family gathering for her grandmother's 90th birthday. :-)

So I finally got all that straightened out and got us ready to get out of there, walked out of Andis and to the car and realized the keys weren't in my purse. Oh, NO! I had locked us out of both the house and car. I went to a neighbors house and they let me use the phone, Andi called her mother and Aunt Joannie came and let us in the house. Still we couldn't find the keys. It turned out that Thomas had taken the keys out of my purse and put them on one of the shelves in Andi's entertainment center! By the time we got on the road for Michigan it was 4pm!!!

But we finally made it at 10pm on Tuesday night. And thankfully since getting here the trip has been pretty much drama-free. :-) Wednesday was a little bit rough because I think all of the craziness of traveling, being off of his schedule, and not getting enough rest really caught up with poor Thomas. He had two of the worst meltdowns I've seen in at least a year. He was screaming in rage and throwing himself around, turning red in the face, throwing everything he could get his hands on. The first time I just worked him through it and put him to bed with a bottle, figuring he was just really tired. The second time I managed to get him to the car, kicking and screaming the whole way, held him down long enough to strap him into his car seat and then started driving. He continued to melt down until we were almost into town (about 5-10 minutes) and then finally calmed down, exorcised whatever demon had possessed him, and acted like a normal 2 year old (whatever that is, haha).

Today was much, much better. Tommy was in a pretty good mood today, having gone back to his normal sleep pattern last night and slept 10 or so hours. I think he really misses his Daddy, too. I think when we are in Florida he does okay because he has such a good time with Jerry and that kind of helps him not think so much about missing Emmett. There are no men here, so I think it makes it a lot tougher for him. I pulled out some pictures today at the restaurant to occupy him, and he pointed at Emmett's picture and said "Daddy, daddy!" and seemed to really be more interested than he usually is. It's hard to explain, but I just sense that he misses Emmett. And I don't think I'm projecting my own feelings on him, but I might be. :-) We also went to a really cool park today. It had the largest play structure I've seen in a neighborhood park - it was huge! Tommy had such a good time running around on everything and CLIMBING - that child can climb like nothing I've ever seen!! He went up this ladder thingy that had to be about 8 feet tall! I was scared to death, but he did great and was SO proud of himself when he got to the top (and, as scared as I was, truth be told, I was pretty proud of him too :)). After napping the afternoon away, I took Tommy and we went to the drive through for salads for Grandma and I for supper (soup and crackers for Tommy). After dinner we all sat out on Grandma's deck and watch the day fade into evening. It's so wonderful out there, so peaceful. It faces the west, so you get all of the last of the daylight. And with the water and the swans, it's so relaxing. Tommy did act up once and had to be given a time-out. Man, that child is so good at accepting punishment it's incredible. He just goes along with it and sits strapped into his chair for the whole five minutes without saying a peep. It's actually kind of strange. I wonder what Olga has done to make him act so well. She sure is worth every cent we spend on her. :-)

Hopefully I'll get to post some of the pictures to the web site. We are leaving tomorrow afternoon for Lexington. I'm really excited, I think we'll have a really good time. I know Grandma and Andi are looking forward to it as well. At this point my plan is to visit with Amber tomorrow morning and then Tuesday morning go visit Sheri in the morning and then Michelle/LaNette in the afternoon/evening. On Wednesday I'm hoping to see Jon and Vicki. Of course all that depends on what everyone's schedule is, but I really hope I get to see everyone before I head back. Especially since I missed seeing so many people when I was here in December.

Anyway, gotta get some rest. Tommy went to bed at 10:45 EDT, so if I want a good night's sleep I better get myself to bed as well.

Hope all is well with you and yours,
Love,
Melissa