You might be the mom of a newborn if....

1.) You can now sleep through a nuclear war in your bedroom, but if the baby so much as sniffles, you are out of bed and over to that bassinet before you're fully conscious.

2.) You find yourself rocking back and forth, even if you're not holding your baby.

3.) It is a GOOD day if you get a shower.

4.) It is a BETTER day if you shower and blow dry your hair.

5.) You find yourself alternately busier than you have ever been and bored out of your skull.

6.) Instead of being drudgery, trips to Wal-Mart or the grocery store now become exciting excursions. ANYTHING to get me out of this house!

7.) You spend half your life looking for that blasted pacifier.

8.) Have stopped showering alone. You KNOW that as soon as you turn on that water, baby is going to start screaming, so it's better if he screams where you can reach him and plug that pacifier back in. Wait, where is that blasted pacifier?!?

9.) The news-worthy events you post on facebook include how many hours of sleep you got the night before and how many poo-poos you've changed. 5 and 8, how 'bout you?

10.) You begin to realize all the sacrifices your own mother made to raise you.

The Perils of Having a Son

That's right folks, I have officially joined the Tinkle Club, an exclusive group of parents who have been peed on by their son during a diaper change. It took me three and a half weeks, but finally I have succeeded in having my pants soaked by baby urine. That's not to say that Logan hasn't "leaked" during diaper changes until now. That is definitely not the case. In fact, the day we got Logan home from the hospital, he soiled 6 outfits in a 24 hour period. Some of these got wet from him doing his business and missing the diaper completely, but some of them were from the diaper changes where we weren't fast enough. Luckily, each time his aim was off, saving me or Casey from having to change our clothes.

I actually thought I might be spared from joining the Tinkle Club, since I have been getting pretty good at changing diapers at lightning speed and have also discovered the usefulness of wipes as a shield. But I guess it was inevitable that I experience this particular joy of motherhood.

When Casey and I announced the impending birth of our son, we got several comments to the effect of, "Boys are different from girls, so be prepared." Be prepared for what exactly? Now I know. It's the golden arch* I have to be prepared for.



*For those who haven't read it in a while, this is a reference to To Kill A Mockingbird. So, I'm not being graphic, I'm just showing you how well-read I am :)

It All Started Two Weeks Ago.....

So I have had a pretty eventful two weeks. It all started last last last Friday when we welcomed Logan into our family a month earlier than we expected. I went in for a routine exam where my doctor decided that Logan wasn't doing a good enough job growing inside me, so he sent me downstairs to Labor and Delivery to wait around for 5 hours before he went in and got him. It makes no sense to me but apparently babies who are lazy bums about growing inside mom tend to be less lazy about it if they have to fend for themselves (sink or swim, kid. Time to cut the cord, I guess :) ). Anyway, one c-section later, I doubled the number of children I have and reduced my gross hours of nightly sleep by 75%.

Logan joined the family on April 23 at 5:21 pm local time clocking in at a whopping 4 lb 11 oz and 18 inches. He is giving Katherine a run for her money by threatening to overtake her as the cutest child on the planet. Once he fills out a bit and starts looking less like an undercooked roast, we'll see if Katherine retains her title as "Fairest in the Land." But for an undercooked roast, Logan is pretty stinkin' cute!

See!!

Katherine likes him pretty well too

But this is not all. Two weeks after Logan made his debut, Casey graduated from college for what I sincerely hope is the final time. He walked across the stage and received his diploma cover and hood for a PhD in Math (I know, what a smarty, huh?) that he will actually complete in a few months. Casey was a good sport and walked for me. If it had been up to him, Casey would have spent last Friday holed up in his office thinking mathy thoughts and completely ignoring the fact that the building next door was filled with his colleagues wearing funny hats and dresses and marching around to "Pomp and Circumstance" while their adoring families looked on. But luckily my husband thinks I'm cute and can't resist my eyelash-batting, so I got to be one of those adoring family members. Proof of the power of eyelash-batting can be found below:

This is Casey being hooded by a professor who is on his defense committee

A little explanation of this picture is required. Again, it's all about the eyelash-batting. I wanted a photo of Casey showing off his hood a la blushing bride showing off her train and he obliged, quite convincingly too. You can't even tell that there was much eye rolling mere nanoseconds before the shutter snapped. Seriously, if you are a wife and you want your husband to do something, just bat your eyes and smile. Works every time!

But this is still not all. Seriously, more momentous stuff happened to me in the last two weeks, but I will only add one more thing because this entry is already WAaaaayy too long. A couple of nights ago, I suffered my second stab wound by a steak knife. Oddly enough my sister was indirectly involved in both stabbings. The first time, I was eight and I got stabbed in the leg which required 50-ish stitches, but I won't bore you with the details. The second time was on Saturday.

I was minding my own business in the kitchen and grating cheese to put on top of a cassarole, when my sister walked by and accidentally (at least that's what she says....) knocked a steak knife off the counter. This knife landed on/in my foot causing severe lascerations requiring a trip to the couch and a couple of those dot bandaids and a kiss from Katherine. Fortunately there are no photos of my injuries. My foot is so mangled, it would make you sick, or more likely you wouldn't be able to find the scratches since they're pretty much healed. Still, I have to wonder about that sister of mine.....

Wonders of the Internet

185 people who have never met forming a virtual choir and sounding pretty good!

Adventures in Digital Piano Surgery

Katherine is a talented, beautiful, smart, funny, mostly obedient and all around awesome kid. But there are days, like today that she suffers from what Bill Cosby refers to as childhood brain damage. Today my otherwise amazing daughter decided that forcing a straw into the belly of my digital piano would be a good idea. Somehow the straw lodged itself in there in such a way that I couldn't open the piano anymore.

We're not really in a financial situation to pay someone from Yamaha to come dig out a straw and charge me some hundreds of dollars to do it nor are we in a position to just wait it out until we can afford it. I am the pianist (heaven only knows why I agreed to this since I can barely play) in my ward's Relief Society and I practice several hours a week to be able to fumble my way through the songs.

So, out of desperation or stupidity I embarked on my first adventure in digital piano surgery. I started out by giving Katherine a ridiculously long time out and threatened to take her Barbie away if I ever caught her feeding the piano sticky notes or straws or toys again. Then I did an online search to see if anyone else had a child like mine and managed to figure out a way to get the piano apart. No real luck there. I found a couple of blogs (courtesy of my super-helpful sister who heard the whole straw-in-the-piano-mom-freak-out over the phone) but they were all written by men who had nothing better to do with their time than to dismantle their digital pianos for fun. They contained no real information other than a few photos of the mess created by taking their pianos apart. Once guy even sustained some injuries because he tried to pry some of the parts apart, which the piano didn't like and retaliated.

Next, I posted a question on Yahoo! Answers which very occasionally gets a real response. Mostly it's bored twelve year olds posting crap. The only response I got from there was someone suggesting I take a hammer to the piano. Thanks! I think I'll try that!

Finally, I decided I would just try and figure it out myself and if I couldn't do it, then I'd suck it up and call Yamaha. Amazingly, I managed to get the straw out and a few other goodies Katherine had stuck in there which I wasn't aware of. I had to more or less dismantle the paino, but I succeeded where others just got scratched up or spent hours dissecting their pianos. Now I feel all feminist and stuff.

Grrr! I'm a tough lady who managed to outsmart a piece of electronic equipment with nothing but my brain and a phillips head screw driver. *flexes muscles and grimaces* I am freakin' awesome! PS: I'm pregnant too, which makes me even more awesome, you know, or stupid...whatever.

So, for anyone on the internet who may do a google search for dismantling your piano without destroying it or wasting time, here is my piano surgery procedure:

I have a Yamaha Clavinova CLP 220

Step 0: Punish whatever child jammed junk onto your piano.

Step 1: Unplug everything! This includes the wires that connect the top of the piano to the bottom ie: the one for the pedal and the one for the wall. You don't want wires tangling everything up.

Step 2: Using a phillips head screw driver, unscrew the main body of the piano (the part that presumably has something stuck in there) from the legs. Put the screws someplace safe so you don't lose them.

Step 3: Get a friend to help you lift the top of the piano off the legs. It's not real heavy but it's pretty unwieldy. Put this part of the piano either on the piano bench or on the floor.

Step 4: Using the same phillips screwdriver, remove the screws from the back of the piano. There should be four or five. Again, store the screws somewhere safe.

Step 5: At this point you should be able to slide the top of the piano off (this being the part that has the music holder thingy). There's a tongue in groove-type thing (that's not really what it is, but I'm not sure what this little dealie is called, so just go with it) on the lid so that it doesn't just lift off. You'll have to slide it forward to get the lid off.

Step 6: Take out whatever foreign object found its way into your piano. I'm pretty sure there are capacitors and stuff inside so be careful what you touch. I wouldn't want you getting shocked.

Step 7: Repeat Steps 1 through 5 in reverse order and you should have a happy piano.

Pregnancy Carol

O Swelly Feet (sung to "O Christmas Tree")

O Swelly Feet O Swelly Feet
I cannot get my shoes on

My toes look like sausages you know,
They just need some Grey Poupon

My shoes don't fit, but it's ok
I couldn't reach them anyway

O Swelly Feet O Swelly Feet
I guess I'll just wear flip flops


I couldn't sleep last night so my sleep-deprived brain made this up while I was tossing and turning. Maybe I'll write another one about baby kicking your vital organs in the middle of the night when you're trying to sleep.

PS: Those aren't actually my feet. My feet are not that pretty, even on their best non-puffy day.

April Fools'!

So, Mother Nature decided that a funny prank on April Fools' Day would be to dump a bunch of snow on us. But, Katherine and I got her back! We thumbed our noses at Mother Nature by enjoying the spring snow and building Katherine's first-ever snowman.

PS: Katherine informed me that the snow-blob she is holding is a baby snowman, which she made all by herself.

PPS: I looked it up on Wikipedia; the apostrophe goes after the "s" in April Fools', you know, in case you were wondering.

PPPS: I'm glad that there won't be much more snow here. It's HARD to bend over and build a snowman with 33 weeks worth of pregnant belly in the way.