Today I quietly turned 28.  Well, “quiet” is a relative term since I have a 4 month old who likes to yell at me now, but you get the idea.  Without friends in the area yet, it was just me and my boys to celebrate this year.  And I’m okay with that because last year I had a pretty outstanding birthday that no birthday can top.  As a few of you may remember, I decided to celebrate by performing one random act of kindness for every year that I had been alive but I didn’t finish them all before I cryptically announced that I was “sidetracked.”  Well, I was sidetracked by the doctor telling me that I was, in fact, pregnant and what better birthday present then 9 months of nausea in a Phoenix summer?  But I digress.  Last year on my birthday my mom told me that her random act of kindness for the day was donating to March of Dimes because “everyone deserves to feel the love for a child” which was extremely fitting while I was in the parking lot of the doctor so this year I donated to them myself on my birthday.  Really, my birthday should be a national holiday or at the very least come pre loaded onto the calendar of new smart phones.

But here’s how I gracefully turned 28 (because after all, I’m a mom now so lets hike up my jeans to my bellybutton and stash children’s toys in the glove box of my car because it’s a sleigh ride into menopause from here):

First, I woke up early (too early if you’re asking my opinion, which I know that you were dying to) and got myself and Lucas ready for a Mom Group at the church that we went to on Sunday.  While Lucas is great company when he’s not blowing out his diapers, I promised myself that I wouldn’t spend my birthday in the house alone.  So I went this morning and I met some great ladies in the area and may even make this a Thursday morning tradition!  On the way home, I bought myself lunch because I didn’t feel like cooking and then met the painter at the house to repair the holes in the walls that the movers made last month.

Then, and here’s the best part of my day, Lucas curled up and fell asleep on my chest so I laid propped up in bed with him sleeping on my chest and Molly sleeping at my feet and I took a nap.  Afternoon naps with my son and my dog are honestly my absolute favorite part of any day and the fact that Lucas let me enjoy it for 2 hours instead of his normal 30 minutes leads me to believe that he knew it was my birthday and wanted to throw me a bone for the evening of screaming that he had planned.

I got beautiful tulips from my parents delivered in the afternoon and then made leftovers for dinner so that I didn’t have to cook and Angel took Lucas to the basement for 2 WHOLE HOURS so that I could do whatever I wanted to upstairs.  I understand how incredibly dull this sounds to non moms, but go ahead and take my word for it that baby cuddles and 2 hours alone are like gold around here.

But then because it can’t all be sunshine and green grass (or around here I would say “grey skies and snow”),  Lucas puked ALL OVER my comforter that I washed yesterday so that it smells again.  He may as well have just peed “Happy Birthday Mom” on his carpet while he was at it

Tomorrow Angel is working from home so that we can leave early because we’re going to Chicago for the weekend!  We (and by “we” I mean “Angel”) are excited to take Lucas to his first Bulls game.  We (and by “we” I mean “me”) are nervous about how a baby is going to handle the loud noises in the evening and how often mom is going to be required to whip her boob out in public to calm him down, but maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll decide that bottles are okay again and then peacefully sleep in his carrier so that I can enjoy the game.

Well, a woman can dream!

Okay, so apparently I’m not allowed to upload any pictures today because I keep getting a bunch of errors, so I’ll try again later and you’re going to have to use your vivid imagination to fill in the gaps.

For starters, It’s been “warm” and I even saw the sun once or twice this last week.  It clearly must be spring.  And for a day, I even saw a little bit of grass peaking through the backyard.  up until this point, I wasn’t sure if we had grass in the backyard or not because it’s been so cold and snowy!  And then the morning after I saw grass, I came down the stairs to another snow storm that covered everything again.  Naturally.

But since spring is starting to peak it’s head through the grey clouds, I’ve decided that I’m going to take advantage of the fact that summers won’t be 120 degrees and I’m going to get back into running.  There are a lot of trees in our area that I assume would be beautiful when they have leaves on them and there are big biking paths that run through it all and it’s been a while since I’ve run.  And added bonus- it may even help me loose the extra 3-4 pounds that nursing hasn’t taken off of me.  If it also happens to reshift my midsection back to where everything came from about a year ago, I wouldn’t stop it.  The only problem is that I don’t have a stroller that I can safely use to run.  I did some investigating and after seeing all of the reviews and talking to a few of my runner moms, consensus for a good jogging stroller is the Bob Revolution, which is a cool $300.  I nixed that pretty quickly and decided that I’m going to have to take advantage of the evening light and leave the baby at home with Angel to go running.  We’ll see how well that works out since it’s dinner time and family time when Angel gets home and I doubt that I’m going to want to leave the house.  So anyone who happens to see awesome deals on a jogging stroller- let me know!!!

On Thursday, Angel’s coworker invited us out to dinner with her family and another Kellogg’s family.  His coworker and her family are from Ireland and the other family was from Spain (via Ireland) who originated in Mexico.  Our three families and children may be the only diverse families in the area.  But that’s beside the point.  I met Ellie, who is also a stay at home mom to two little girls and speaks Spanish.  She was working and planning to put her baby in daycare and go back to work at the end of maternity leave but her husband got a job in Ireland and so they moved countries with a 4 month old and she decided since she was leaving her job anyway that she was going to stay home.  Does this sound familiar to anyone?  She lives near me and we decided that we’re going to go to lunch Monday and then she invited me to a mom group with her Tuesday morning.  When she started explaining the mom group, I said “it sounds like MOPS” and she said “that’s exactly what it is!”  And then I decided I’m desperate to meet people, so I may as well give it a try and maybe it won’t be as bad as I’m thinking.  Besides, Angel pointed out that going to a mom group at a church can help us in our quest to find a church in the area and get our sweet little Lucas baptized.  If we don’t get on this soon, he’s going to be the only 40 year old in history to get baptized so on Sundays we’re going to start trying out churches in the area to find one that we like.

In the mean time, we’re headed to Ann Arbor today to go to Costco for paper towels.  It’s an exciting life that we lead.  So I should probably call the blog done for now so I can feed the baby and we can get on our way out of town.

Happy weekend, everyone!

So I was planning this whole witty post about how the move went,  but instead I’m going to write a little about the move and a lot about my crap-tacular day.

First: the move.  We had our stuff delivered from storage on Tuesday.  So Tuesday morning we wake up early to drive over to the house and wouldn’t you guess, but we woke up to another big snow storm.  (Sarcastic) yay!  When we get to the house we get a call from the movers that they are going to be late because they are driving down from Grand Rapids in the snow and the weather is pretty bad.  They finally get here, and I can only properly describe the day as “emotionally trying.”  One of the first items off of the truck was our patio table, and 8 hours later when everything was off there was probably a foot of snow on the table.  It’s not enough that it was snowing like I live at a ski resort, but there were probably 20 mile an hour winds as well. Kill me.

The movers broke Lucas’ crib and put a hole in the wall of our rental.  The hole shouldn’t be a problem seeing as how the owners are so picky that we have a clause in our rental agreement regarding the number of nail holes we are allowed to put in the walls.  But that was only nail holes and didn’t say anything about mover-created punch-out holes.  So we should probably be fine (enter: sarcastic eye roll).

So anyway, I’ve spent the rest of the week getting internet set up and enough of the boxes unpacked that I could make beds and we could get the hell out of that apartment and all that it entails.  The morning of the internet guy it’s still snowing like crazy and Angel and I decide that we are sleeping in the house come hell or high water snow.  I bring the dog with me and she’s still a little confused about where we are and what we’re doing to her.

I start with Lucas’ nursery before all else so that the baby has somewhere to sleep.  Because I’m so obsessed with it, nursery 2.0 is nearly immaculate before I start on anything else in the house:

I then move on to making my bed and clearing a path to the nursery and as soon as I pull the sheets out of the box, something clicks in Molly’s mind, and she finally realizes what’s going on:

She slept with her nose buried in my down comforter for over an hour before I could get her off and make the bed.  It was like she hasn’t slept in a month since our house was packed and finally realized that she was home.  I understand, dog.  I get you.  So I made our bed and started to unpack clothes to make room for us to move in our bedroom.

While I was unpacking, I caught my supervisor sleeping on the job a few times:

One looooooong day and 7K+ Nike Fuel Points later, I call it a day and am about to crawl into bed with Angel says to me “I’m in the mood for hot chocolate and Amazon videos on the iPad.” and once the idea was planted, I thought it sounded great.  The only problem?  I hadn’t stepped anywhere near the kitchen yet.  So we went down thinking how hard can it be to find a giant Keurig machine in a box? The answer: hard.  An hour later, we have found the mugs, the hot chocolate and cider k cups…. everything EXCEPT the Keurig!!  The last box that it could possibly be in and I start diving in.  All of a sudden I see black and silver amazingness and scream “Yes!!!!!” and start throwing around packing paper like it’s going out of style.  Except when I get it out of the box I quickly notice that the freaking water tank isn’t with it.  Which means that it’s somewhere in one of the 23 kitchen boxes that we have in front of us (assuming that that really is all of the kitchen boxes and none made it downstairs, like, say, my underwear getting stacked in the basement with Angel’s tools and painting supplies).  God must have had mercy on us, because I found it only 5 minutes later and about an hour and a half after we started looking.  Here is what our “kitchen” looked like after the hunt:

Then yesterday it’s more of the same and we get DirecTV installed and rejoin the world of trashy TV.

So on to today’s crap-tastic events.  Angel was going to be home from 12:30-2 and I planned on leaving the baby with him and actually venturing out on my own minus baby for the first time in about a month.  He agreed and the second he got home I was gone.  I had to go to Target to get a few things to organize the house so I could finish unpacking the kitchen and to Babies R Us to get a sleep sack for Lucas.

To properly get you into my state of mind, let’s start with the sleep sack.  Okay, so our new location is a tad colder than sunny Phoenix.  As a result, at night it’s a touch colder as well.  We still swaddle Lucas, but he’s too active at night now and gets out of it.  It takes him about 2 hours in his sleep but once he does he gets cold and then wakes up and cries.  So I asked my mommy friends and came up with the idea to get a sleep sack, which is like a sleeping bag that he wears and can’t get out of when he moves around.  So I’m standing in the aisle and I think the stress of the move hits me.  I start BAWLING.  Okay, there are cotton ones and fleece ones and ones that swaddle and ones that don’t.  Lucas like’s to be swaddled but you don’t want the baby too warm with the fleece but he’s too cold now so will the cotton be enough?  But then what size do I need since he’s between them?  I don’t want to have to replace it in a week but I don’t want it so loose that he suffocates himself in his cold sleep.  And I think you get the idea.  Here’s a crazy lady in the aisle at Babies R Us sobbing over swaddling blankets.

I make it to Target but then run out of time to go to the grocery store before Angel has to be back to work so I run home.  Now, sidebar, I’ve been subtly asking Angel to shovel the driveway every day that we’ve been here and it keeps snowing.  But he drives an SUV so snow is no big deal.  Okay, so I get home today and my car gets stuck half way up our seemingly-mile-long driveway.  I think to myself “f it” throw the car it park and go inside.  I annoyingly tell Angel not to hit my car on his way out as I’m putting on my hat and gloves to go throw snow around for a few minutes.  So I tell Angel to put Lucas somewhere safe (like his crib) while I’m outside.  Mentally, I know I have about 20 minutes before he’s going to need to eat and I need to get rolling to get my car in the garage.  So I start shoveling, Angel gets ready for work, and leaves telling me that he’ll call me when he’s done and I tell him that’s fine but my phone is inside so I’ll see it when I’m done.

20 minutes later I go to head inside to wake up and feed Lucas and Oh My God, the door is locked.  LOCKED!  So here I am with my phone, keys, and BABY inside the house that I am now locked out of 2,000 miles away from anyone I know.  I calmly check all of the doors while mentally looking for rocks to throw through a freaking window to get to my baby but decide that I’ve been enough crazy for one day.  So I remember the landlord telling me that the neighbors are an old couple and I figured that they would probably be home in the middle of the afternoon.  I walk over, knock on the door, and am sobbing when I introduce myself as the neighbor who just moved next door and I’ve locked myself out of the house trying to shovel the driveway and my 3 month old is upstairs so can I please use their phone to call my husband and/or a lock smith?  Long story short, 2 hours later I’m sitting on the step, leaning against my door crying I assume as hard as Lucas is upstairs while Angel tries to pick the lock with an old credit card and we wait or a locksmith.  Right about the time the locksmith gets the door open I’m about to come undone and just start running up the stairs to grab Lucas, who is screaming this blood-curdling scream like I have never heard before.  I come downstairs 20 minutes later with baby in tow and it starts snowing and I tell Angel (pardon the french): “I’m not going anywhere near that fucking snow shovel!” And then I make him take me to dinner because I never made it to the grocery store and it’s hard to cook anyway when you won’t set your baby down.

Once I calm down I call my mom to tell her about this and she says to me “some people think that having a baby makes them a mom.  It’s things like this that make you a mom.”  She’s a wise woman.

And that’s how we came about getting a spare key to the house.

It’s been a busy few days!

On Valentine’s Day, Angel took me (and Lucas) to dinner at this Italian restaurant called Bravo.  Every Valentine’s Day that we have been together, he would always take me to this little place in Phoenix called “Aiello’s” that was amazing.  While this place was no Aiello’s, I love that Angel was sentimental enough to pick another Italian restaurant.  The food was great, the wine was good, and it as a great date night with my two boys- both smiling at me all night.

The last 3 days I’ve spent at the house painting bedrooms.  3 bedrooms, 4 paint colors, and 6 gallons of paint later, I can hardly move my arm because it hurts so badly but the rooms are more our taste now.  The bedrooms were painted interesting colors that just didn’t match our decor.  For instance, here is the before and after of what’s going to be my craft room (that I negotiated in the move):

We went back to finish up on Sunday because these…. bold? colors needed two coats of paint to cover.  On Sunday, Lucas decided it was the perfect opportunity to scream when we set him down.  He was screaming like we never give him attention, which I know for a FACT is false because I ambush him with kisses and cuddles often.  Hours and no progress later, he finally fell asleep:

In the bathroom, because that’s how we roll.

I went back this afternoon to finish putting the rooms back together because the movers come tomorrow morning to deliver our stuff from storage!!  I can’t wait to have my bed back.  I have turned into such a bed snob after sleeping on this crappy, small,  mattress with itchy sheets.   As it seems, Angel and I are incapable of sharing a bed smaller than King!  I’ve kicked him in my sleep, and he’s elbowed me in his, and our poor puppy isn’t sure where she fits so she takes her half out of the middle and I usually have some limb hanging off the side and into the baby’s rocker, which I literally have to crawl over to get in and out of bed.  These are what our sleeping arraignments look like in this glorious crap castle.

On the topic of sleep, my little munchkin has slept 8 to 8 1/2 hours a night for the last 3 nights!!!  I’m so excited that he’s not waking me up at 4am anymore, that I wake myself up and lay there for an hour to make sure he’s not waking up.  It’s a very efficient process.  If my internal alarm could just let me sleep, I would appreciate these 8 hours a heck of a lot more.  Instead, I wake up at 6 or 7 feeling like I took a hit directly to my chest and I can’t feed the baby fast enough.

At 7 this morning, I was so distracted by the fact that he was smiling at me that I hardly cared that he wouldn’t go back to sleep.  That’s a total lie, I’ll take sleep over smiles any morning when I don’t have coffee in the house.  And I don’t.  We ran out 48 hours ago, and they feel like a loooong 48 hours.  I don’t want to go get more, though, because tomorrow I plan on tearing into the kitchen boxes to find my Keurig machine and say “goodbye” to crappy ground coffee until our next stint in temporary, furnished housing.  I anticipate that to be 6 weeks after hell freezes over my dead body.

And because I talk about Lucas like the proud momma that I am (and it’s the internet and my blog so I would like to see someone stop me), here is your overdose of cuteness:

In other news, every Wednesday Angel has the opportunity to load up on Kellogg’s goodness from the employee store.  We usually talk on Tuesday night about what he’s going to get so that we can plot what we need and what we’re sending to friends.  Last week they were out of our usuals, so Angel came home with this gem, which is like a sugar high in a box (if that translated into: ah-mazing):

Do you see how awesome this is?!  It’s Fruit Loops with something like Lucky Charms marshmallows.  I’ve never seen these in stores, and that’s one of the awesome perks of Angel’s new job.  The other being that I get to spend 7 days a week in sweat pants with my poop machine if I feel like it.

And finally, happy 3 month birthday to my little man.  He’s growing up so fast and the time is flying by.  Mommy loves you!

Today, I had some amazing deliveries.

First, I ordered this iPhone case on sale at the Coach Factory store:

When I went to pick up that delivery in our Crap Castle office, there was a second package waiting for me:

My NEW computer!!!!  I’ve been rocking my work computer for years, and since I turn that sucker in when I travel to Arizona in March (see: ending employment to stay home with my poop machine), Angel got me a sweet new Ultrabook that I know nothing about, other than it’s sweet and looks pretty 🙂

I put the case on my phone, sent Angel a picture of the computer box, and just started to tear into the box with UPS rings my door buzzer to deliver a package.  Thinking it was Amazon diapers, I went to the door to get it and was surprised with this:

It’s the embroidery machine that I’ve  been eyeing for months but refused to buy because I thought it was too expensive to buy for myself.  So my awesomely awesome husband surprised me and got it for me!!  I had no idea he even knew which machine I was looking at, but he totally nailed it and I love him for being so thoughtful.

Short post tonight because it took me an hour to figure out where Internet Explorer on this computer is, and I’m overwhelmed with all of the new machines that I got today from my husband who thinks that I deserve them all.

He’s awesome ❤