This commercial seriously makes me cry every time I see it.  The marketing people must test their commercials on a room full of first-time, sleep deprived, moms and as soon as we cry go: "Yep, nailed it."

I don’t feel like writing all about my weekend in Chicago yet (plus, I don’t have time), so here are photos of the trip and I’ll write about it tonight after I unleash a teething baby on daddy.

I’ve been running around all day, and now it’s 11 o’clock and everyone in my house is asleep except me.

Naturally.

I have a “To Do” list that’s so long I’m not even sure how to calm my mind down enough to write about what I’ve been doing.  So today I finally got around to taking my car in for it’s first oil change.  my car, much like my baby, are both growing up 😦  Lucas started sitting up on his own.  Granted it’s only for about 5 seconds before he leans to the side and falls over, but he doesn’t even cry when he falls over he just rolls around and giggles.  He giggles and smiles constantly, he can grab onto our fingers and pull himself up to stand, he jumps, he grabs toys that are in front of him, he coos…. My baby is just so smart.  Last night when he was laying in bed with us cooing I teared up a bit at the thought of how smart he is and how proud of my little dude that I am.

When I was getting my oil changed this afternoon there was an older lady sitting in the waiting area waiting for her car as well.  Lucas was going crazy with the yells and coos, and noises while he was rolling all over the place and sticking toys in his mouth.  I politely told the old lady that if his noises bother her to please let me know and I can take him for a walk.  She laughed and said “Honey, those are the best noises in the world!” and spent the rest of the time I was there eating him up at how cute he was.  She made the comment to me about an hour into my waiting adventure that you can tell that he is a very well cared for baby who is happy.  I smiled and told her that I hope so and in my mind I was doing back flips because I certainly have the days where I feel like I didn’t play with him enough, cuddle with him enough, or you name it enough.  Especially with the move and an entire house to unpack I feel like he gets set on the ground to be on his own for far too long.  No real damage done, I suppose.

And then I ran errands, cleaned my kitchen, washed all of the laundry, picked up the house, and finished unpacking the last real room that I had left.  I started putting the little nick-knacks away and hanging pictures and everything up.  It made it feel about 5% more like home but at this point I would take 0.5% because this place just doesn’t feel like home.

Because I’m still 110% homesick for Arizona, I booked my flights tonight to go home May 16-24.  First, I should probably stop calling Arizona “home” by instinct, and second, I AM SO EXCITED!  I just want to be in the sun.  I want to spend time with my friends and my brother and I just want to be in an environment where I feel comfortable because I still feel like a fish out of water here.

Speaking of the tundra that I now live in, it snowed on Saturday.  Which really sucked, but the silver lining is that Lucas can now attend college with the money I owe his swear jar.  The weather has been so beautiful, that here’s a photo of the grocery store parking lot at noon with the FREAKING STREET LIGHTS ON because it’s so dark.  It’s also pouring rain which adds a whole new challenge to not waking up a baby and still get him out of the car and into the store.  Again, with the swear jar.

Lucas has entered the foot stage.  He grabs them, plays with them, tries to put them in his mouth.  in fact, I don’t think I have many photos of him this week where he isn’t grabbing his toes.

Except this one, which is quickly becoming a Lucas favorite.  This pretty much sums up how my days are spent and what a playful little hairball I’m raising:

I guess now that I have my house unpacked I should take a few pictures.  Maybe I’ll get on that this week.  Let me just add it to my loooooong list of crap that I need to do but probably will forget all about as soon as I turn my computer off.

Oh hey, guess what?  I finally found out who would buy a large bathing suit top and a small bottom: Someone who is nursing a growing boy.  Not that I don’t appreciate my boobs out to here, but I don’t appreciate them and wouldn’t be one who complains if the life gets sucked out of them as soon as I’m done nursing.

Molly got a bath today.

This really isn’t one of my most polished and organized posts, but that probably just goes to show you how scattered my mind really is at the moment.

And lastly, there was something funny and witty that I was planning on saying but now for the life of me I can’t even remember what it was about.  So with that, I bid you all a good night.  And I also apologize for the boring and confusing post.  Except I’m not sorry.  So there.

I wish that I could just get past this feeling of what I miss in Arizona because it would make my life a lot easier.  I’m trying my best to embrace what Michigan has to offer, but when I spend all day alone with overcast skies in a house that doesn’t feel like mine it’s just not happening.  I feel like the only thing that I have really embraced is being able to stay home with Lucas.  Other than that, I spend my time on Facebook reading with envy what all of my friends are doing (usually together) and calling and texting those who now live over 1,000 miles away.  I just can’t get past my dream house in Chandler, my pool that’s warming up, the cloudless blue skies, the lady who would cut and color my hair, and the job that gave me a sense of identity and pride.  And I hated my job so that’s really saying something.

I’ve met a few stay at home moms so far.  I feel like I may have more in common with my patio set then some people who I’ve met, but I’m doing my best to explore different outlets and try to fill my time while I mark lines on the wall like a prisoner waiting to be released.

And then I remember that I felt exactly this way when I moved to Arizona until I met Erica and things seemed to turn around.  So where’s my dorm floor meeting for me to meet someone who can help me turn the experience around?

It goes without saying: I’m homesick.

This week I asked Angel if it would be okay if I went to Arizona to visit some friends.  Luckily, I have a husband who is very supportive and probably doesn’t like to hear me complain about being lonely anymore because he said that he thought it was a great idea.  I’ve already planned to attend a wedding, a pool party, a place to stay, a happy hour, a couple of lunch dates, a play date with Lucas, and a list of other friends who I would like to see.  And I haven’t even booked my flights yet.  Proof that I have an underlying need to go let Arizona recharge my battery.

God bless all of the frequent flyer miles that our credit card earned last year that we couldn’t take because I was on pregnant travel lock-down.  I’ve only been here 4 months and I’ve already burned through half of them.

I miss home.  And no matter how hard I try, this just doesn’t feel like home.

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.