an hour as a stay-at-home mom

i was skyping with a friend when sweet pea got stung! i have no idea by what. i asked her if it was a bee? "no." a spider? "no." a bug? "bug!" so i have no idea what stung her. she calls flys bees so i'm wondering if it was a bee but she doesn't know what a bee is and when i asked her if a bee stung her she was thinking i was asking if a fly stung her. so then i went to put dinner in the oven and it's frozen solid. so then i made pizza crust, thinking i'll just switch tonight's menu for tomorrow night's but we didn't have cheese. then i remembered we're going to be in boulder for dinner tomorrow night so now i have half thawed chicken and rising pizza dough. UGH. so we went to the store to buy cheese and ran into the old receptionist, nina, from her daycare and i told nina sweet pea was crying because she got stung and she started sobbing all over again instead of just crying. then she sobbed her vitamin, that i gave her "to make her finger feel better", right down her throat and i had to give her the heimlich in the store parking lot. really? is this really what happened to me in just one hour of this afternoon? yes. yes it is.

this is exactly how i feel

a friend of mine sent me this article about why a couple chose to adopt instead of trying again. this is exactly how i felt about it. and remember that my experience with pregnancy ends 100% in miscarriage. but now it's ok because i've arrived.

highly inappropriate game

lately sweet pea has been wandering up to me with her eyes squeezed shut and her arms out in front of her like a zombie. i figured out that she's acting blind. where she came up with this i have NO idea. to my recollection she hasn't seen any blind people...and she certainly hasn't seen them stumbling around like zombies. but she LOVES it when i say "oh it's my blind child! come her blind child!" and then i scoop her up and kiss her all over. it's the FUNNIEST and most inappropriate game we have come up with to date.

hickey thumb

here's a picture of the hickey thumb i told you about two posts ago.

love me some good hickey thumb.

elmo visits the firehouse. and sweet pea has the firehouse come to her.

we have a bedtime routine, for the most part. we brush teeth, change diapers, put on jammies, then me and daddy and peanut crawl into sweet pea's bed and we all read a story together. then, it's time for night-night. last night, we did the drill and came back downstairs and 5 minutes later we heard "CRACK!" on the bedrails then sweet pea screaming waling crying. i ran up there in about 3 steps-i seriously think i missed about 85% of them on my way up. i ran into her room, flipped on the light and saw blood gushing.
for the record, i have been known to pass out cold at the thought of maybe breaking my arm-turned out to just be a big bump and a bruise-but that's beside the point.
i grabbed her up out of her bed and ran her into the bathroom, called* for paul [*read "screamed my head off"] and grabbed a towel to catch the blood. at that point i couldn't tell if she'd broken teeth out, if she'd bitten through her lip, if it was a bloody nose...all i knew was the blackest/reddest blood i've ever seen in my life was pouring out of my tiny 2-year old's face. paul came up in about as much time as it took me to get up there and as soon as he was holding her i ran for the phone and called 9-1-1. at that point i was pretty sure she was going to need a blood transfusion before the ambulance could get to the house. i was shaking in my boots to say the least. the operator was frantically going through her pages "ok...put all family pets away and turn on your porch light." "ok.....um....let me see....um.....if she seems groggy or sleepy turn her to the side but do NOT let her fall asleep." !!!! OK !!!! "ok.....uh...let me see here.....hold the soft part of her nose...not the bridge of her nose but just below the bone and lay her all the way back." by then i handed the phone to paul and went downstairs to watch for the ambulance because i could hear it coming. i flagged them into our place and told them the rundown, she's 2, she's our foster baby, we've had her since last summer, she's gonna be scared of you at first...and he said "how old is she?!" "she just turned 2." ya-my thoughts exactly mr. fireman!"
all in all she did great. the bleeding stopped shortly after they got here. there was one paramedic that was asking me how it happened and i showed him the blood on her bedrail and the laundry hamper. from what we can tell by the amount of laundry she had hauled into her bed, she had been leaning over her bedrail into the laundry hamper and pulling clothes into her bed. she tends to do this often. and i've caught her doing it and she's on her knees...not standing up. but what they weren't sure of is how FAR did she fall onto the bedrail because apparently her face caught her fall. (ugh-i can't think/talk about it too much or i start to get woozy.) we didn't end up having to take her to the E.R. but i'm waiting for all my nieghbor ladies to ask me what happened. i saw 3 of them peering through different curtains through out the neighborhood. today it's discolored-a little yellowish, but i think we're gonna get off with out black eyes. the paramedic said give it a couple days...she still might get them. eesh! this girl is gonna keep us on our TOES!!!

my friends are getting annoyed.

you know that facebook friend that talks about the same thing so incessantly you can hardly stand to see their updates so you end up clicking that "hide" button on them? i'm becoming that friend. i know i am. i talk about the kids and the adoption so much i'm annoying people, i just know it! but i can't help it! i got the freaking cutest kids on the planet and every day it's something new. this weekend it was that peanut has given his thumb a hickey from sucking on it so much. he sucks on that right thumb like nobody's business. when he's hungry, he's sucking. when he's getting sleepy, he's sucking. when we're feeding him, he's sucking...literally...i have one hand spooning food in his mouth and the other hand holding his right hand so he can't suck his thumb! when he's moaning at 3am, yep, you guessed it...he's sucking! the poor thing is gonna have a blood blister before long.
today it's that i've finally started thinking about our adoption party. i went to michael's to get idea's for the invitations/announcements. i just ordered 65 prints of my favorite recent picture of the kids. i can't wait now. now all i need is the date to drop into the invites for our party and we're good to go. that and i need my friend lisa to continue reigning in my "creativity". you see, i'm a hippy on the inside. not in the pot-smoking-peace-loving kind of hippy, but in the dude-we-need-10-more-colors-in-that-square-inch kind of hippy. and sometimes my stuff tends to get tacky because of my love of color. you know, less is more? well, in my mind that holds true for everyone else. so i want to be careful not to let our adoption party get tacky! it's hard when you just want to throw 10 more colors in there!
anyway, this weekend we took 167 pictures of the kids just so we could get ONE good picture of both of them smiling. and we got it. so i have my adoption announcement picture all picked out and ready to go! now i just need a date!!

skiing vs. snowboarding/backpacking vs. car camping

my poor in-laws. i rope them into all kinds of trouble with me. i feel bad. i don't mean to but somehow i get them to say yes and then half way into it i see the look on my father-in-laws face. it's somewhere between "why did he marry her?" and "how am i gonna live to the end of this?" my mother-in-law, i think, secretly loves it. because i'm roping them into things that she loves to do anyway but never had an accomplice to carry through with.

skiers always ask "skier or snowboarder?" and when you admit that you truly love to snowboard and not ski they usually say "well, it was fun being friends for a while." skiers hate snowboarders because apparently we ruin the ski runs with our boards. especially moguls (those bumps that skiers love to maneuver around). i've found this summer that much like skiing vs. snowboarding it's the same thing with backpacking vs. car camping.

and i discovered i'm not a good car camper. in fact, i gave paul permission to divorce me if he felt the need because i completely understand. i just don't have the energy to car camp. i like it to be condensed, just what you need, on your back.

this last week i called my in-laws and said "hey-wanna go camping with me and the kids next weekend while paul's gone?" of course they said yes. today in talking we discovered my father-in-law was under the impression he had signed up for car camping. (pulling up near a camp spot, pulling everything out of your trunk, and camping right where you are.) i was under the impression we would backpack. (putting everything on your back and hiking in somewhere and setting up camp in the woods.) my mother-in-law says in the background "we can give it a try" which i think means "ya! let's do that!" (she loves to backpack) with a hint of "if you want to" implied for my father-in-laws benefit. i'll update you next weekend after the escapade to let you know how it went. i'm sure they'll have something to tell their co-workers about by monday morning.

here's a picture from the last time i schnookered him into camping and really we hiked from breckenridge to copper. this picture was taken shortly before i started questioning if he'd ever say yes to me again.

sneakasauresrex

tatum has become quite sneaky in her old age. every day i put the kids down for a nap and she waits. and waits. and waits for the phone to ring. and as soon as my back is turned and i'm busy on the phone sneak quick as a bunny she's up the stairs. then she lays against the kids' doors until one of them opens where she spends the rest of her afternoon sleeping under peanut's crib (her first choice) or sweet pea's bed (her second, but not sloppy second, choice.) little booger.