That La Kid

wishin' an' hopin'!

to-do

I should make a to-do list every day.  When I woke up this morning, my mental list included making a flag banner for the shower, but the paint marker that I bought doesn’t show up.  You tell me what a white paint marker is supposed to show up on if it’s not supposed to show up on not-that-dark-blue paper.  My list also included washing my pajamas and Tom’s athletic shorts.  I started throwing stuff in the washer and there was a little lake in there.  Crap.  How did I not notice that yesterday when I emptied the washer?  I am having more problems with this thing… who buys a Kitchen-Aid washing machine?!  Honestly.

I DID eventually run a load and separate the next load in the queue.  Need more detergent.  I organized my closet.  I started setting hats on a bookshelf in there and before I knew it, the whole shelf was full of hats – so I guess that’s what it is now.  It’s a hat shelf.

Image

I have more baseball caps that you would believe.  And, well… lots of a certain other type of hat as well, something like a dozen.  Most people probably have what, one pair of mouse ears from one trip to Walt Disney World 13 years ago and they HAD to have them (‘cuz that’s what you do) but now, it’s like, what do you do with them?  You can’t just wear them around town…

…unless you’re me.

If you’re curious (It’s lengthy – don’t feel obligated.  We can just say “Goodbye” here.):

In my defense, I had one pair FOREVER… okay.  Then, they stopped hand-stitching the name on the back.  And mine was actually VERY well-done.  I got lucky, a true artist and professional was working in the hat shop on Main Street that day.  It’s basically a regular embroidery machine now using a font that’s very Mouseketeeresque.  A Cast Member stopped me in line for a ride once and was like, “Where did you get those ears?!”  I said, “Main Street” and she said, “Well, don’t lose them! They don’t make them like that any more!”  Sure enough.  So, I got myself a new pair.  They have a chin strap, which is nice so I am less likely to lose them – but if they DO fall off on Tower of Terror and get lost, it’s okay because they can be replaced and will look almost exactly the same.  When I was getting married, I wanted a white hat with a veil, but they didn’t sell them so I bought a black hat and painted it and added a veil.  By the time we went on our honeymoon, I had conceded to the headband with the veil on it.  We got Tom a top hat with ears, so one of those is his.  I think the Sorcerer hat came from Property Control waaay back before Lindsay even started at Disney.  I have a red, white and blue top hat – forget where that came from.   I just kind of inherited that one.  There are 2 pair of gold ears that I believe celebrate Disneyland’s 50th Birthday.  I think we got those on a cruise.  We also got 2 regular pair of ears on another cruise that have Member (hand-stitched!) on the back.  I have pirate ears.  Tom has pirate Goofy ears – but I didn’t count those.  I bought a pair at Grad Nite, although I am disappointed to report that the tassel has disappeared.  We bought a pair of One More Disney Day ears on Leap Day this year, our Babymoon.  That’s the only pair that I bought that I probably had no reason to buy.  I just thought it was neat.  Somehow I also ended up with a “baseball cap” (use that term very lightly – it’s so much more than that) with a plastic Mickey face on it with ears on it.  So, if you count that one, we’re up to 15 Mickey Mouse ear hats.  I’m as stunned as you are.

I really wish that they had just left those Member ears blank.  I don’t know anyone who’ll walk around with “member” on their head.  Everyone wants their own name.  You know?  I considered cutting the name off, just the thread, you know?  But now that it’s hand-stitched and they don’t do hand-stitching anymore, I can’t bring myself to do it.

It’s not a good job, either.  You can tell they had to hand-stitch about 2500 for a cruise full of Disney Vacation Club Members.

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free shipping

Diaper Junction has free shipping right now with a very small minimum purchase!  You know… just in case… you wanted to get… something…

Shipping Schedule

In stock orders are shipped within 24-48 hours of receipt. Orders received after 10:00 am EST on Friday will begin processing for shipment on the next business day. (Usually on Monday unless it is a holiday) If your order should be back ordered, you will be notified by email. We will provide you with the anticipated date of shipment as well as substitution options for a quicker delivery.

 

 

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epcot

I am so “home”sick. We need to have this baby so I can go to Disney World.

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asian time

Tom has a tendency to run his life on something his best friend Nathan calls “Asian time.”  Basically, it means if he has to be someplace at 7 o’clock, he leaves the house at 7 o’clock.  I’m not sure if this actually has anything to do with being Asian.

I, on the other hand, cannot stand being late.  I think I was traumatized in my youth by choruses of, “well, look who finally decided to grace us with their presence” when we’d have to run from one family’s Christmas to the other.  I don’t know why – but we were always late to everything.  Fifteen minutes late to church, like clockwork – every week.  You’d think that we would have just started waking up 15 minutes earlier.  Nope.

I don’t like close calls!

I’m nervous the shower will fall into Asian time.  (Sounds so racist, we really should come up with another name for it.)

We have 2 weeks until the baby shower.  There is one weekend in between.  In those two weeks:

  • We need to buy bedroom furniture for the grandparents’ bedroom downstairs.
  • We need to have that room painted or paint it ourselves.
  • We need to unpack.
  • The Target registry is almost entirely online-only items.  So, do I wait until the shower to see what we get?  Shipping takes a while, so we’ll have to order what we don’t get and pray it gets delivered before our boy does.
  • I’ve got to buy some newborn size diapers.  (Cloth or otherwise.)
  • If I get newborn cloth diapers, I have to wash and dry them about 10 times BEFORE we put them on Jr.’s butt to increase the absorbency to full capacity.
  • My dad needs to hang my Mickey Mouse chandelier and move the light switch in the Bonus Room.  And we need to patch and paint the spot where the switch is now.
  • Tom’s Uncle Larry is coming to stay with us during the Democratic National Convention, the week leading up to the shower.
  • Pick out, figure out how to pay for, and purchase the most awesome rocking chair I can find.  (Special gift from my Baby-Daddy.)
  • Pack for a month in Charlottesville.

So, I.  AM.  PANICKED.

…to say the least.  I reckon I should go unpack instead of writing a whiny blog.

The planner in me is like, you can’t just do this on Asian time.  But… there is a little half-Asian boy inside me that is doing EVERYTHING on at least half-Asian time.

We are really doing this.  In about a month, I WILL HAVE A FREAKING BABY.

Hooooooooly cow.

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craft all the things!

We have so many pictures to hang on the walls!!!  Yesterday we found the Ark of the Covenant: a box full of pictures big and small from the Virginia house that had been wasting away in the garage for a year and a half.  I can’t wait to unpack my life!!!

Okay, I have been waiting, and waiting for this.

Basically, you buy as much food as you want in the cafeteria at Ikea, and then use it as a coupon on your purchase of $100+.  With a nursery to furnish, I was like, “How AWESOME would it be if everyone that is coming to the baby shower goes with us to Ikea to buy the $800 worth of baby crap and WE ALL eat for free?!?!?!”

Not happening.  Eat for Free is the weekend before the shower.  Womp wah.  And as it turns out, that’s a VA weekend for us.

However!

However, there IS a silver lining!

My dad needs to come down here and hang up my Mickey Mouse chandelier and take care of some other electrical work before the shower.  So, I think I conned the family into coming down after the UVA game on Saturday.  We can buy part of the Baby La Collection and at least Mom, Dad, Tom and I will eat for free!  (Squirt can have some free Texas toast, I guess, as this only applies to the restaurant, not the food stand near the exit that sells the pizza.)

We had a busy day around here yesterday.  My beef isn’t with opening boxes and putting things away.  I just don’t want to take everything up and down the stairs.  Tom is perfectly willing to take stuff to where it needs to go, but he doesn’t know where that is.  Match made in Heaven!

I actually emptied one of those under-bed storage containers, which has been full of junk (art supplies and cards and pictures) since maybe high school?  Middle school?  There was some college junk in there, too, so who knows.  Anyway – it’s totally empty now.  All the cards are in boxes with other cards.  The pictures are in boxes with other pictures and the art supplies are all sorted into their appropriate bins.

I told Tom that my Art Closet is a dream come true.

“You want crayons, here’s the crayons!  Glitter, what color?  Seashells?  There’s a box for that.”  It’s like my own personal Michael’s Arts & Craft store in the hallway, and it makes me want to get crafty RIGHT NOW.  Now I understand why people get so excited about organization.  It’s really a beautiful thing.  My whole life has been, “dammit, I knew there was a glue stick in here somewhere!”  And now I can just go to the glue bin!  (Or the hot glue gun/sticks bin, depending on the kind of glue stick to which I was referring.)  (Was that the proper use of which?)

I think I’m going to go stand in front of my art closet for a few minutes.  Kirk out.

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baby shower invitations

Lindsay and I, well, mostly Lindsay finished the baby shower invitations over the weekend.  They look outstanding.

Neat, huh?  My only regret is that it doesn’t say, “it’s a small world” on the invitation anywhere.  I think people get it, though.

The basis for this idea is this invitation that I designed for my cousin’s wedding.  But how much better is this – using the double doors AS DOORS and opening the exterior of the it’s a small world attraction to the symbolic inside of the ride.  It’s like being there… in invitation form.  I wish I could make it play the song.

So… here’s the play by play.  I drew all the little kids, drew the exterior of the attraction, and drew the clock face.  Tom scanned all of my pencil drawings and since my computer DIED on my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day… I told Lindsay all of my ideas and she colored everything in.


I sketched them, Tom scanned them, and Lindsay colored them in.

Original Sketch – This is my original drawing of the ride exterior.

Lindsay emailed me printable .pdf files that I could print from my lesser laptop.  I bought photo paper and printed the invite interior.  On a second sheet, I printed 2 sets of doors.  The dimensions of the door invitations are the same as an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet folded in half, so the inside is borderless… the one thing I don’t hate about my evil printer is that it does print borderless when you can get it to print.  Instead of folding it in half, you fold the left and right quarters in.  Anyway, it makes measuring and designing pretty easy.

Here are the door pieces that I printed, cut, and glued to the outside of the invitation doors.

Putting it all together.

Shutting the doors.

AND VOILA!

Piles of finished product.

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maybe tomorrow

I was hoping that as people started getting home from work they’d be all, “Wow!  Wendy!  I just got my invitation in the mail!”  And… maybe the invites haven’t shown up, or maybe they’re not THAT incredible.  I don’t know.  I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.  Maybe.  A couple of them weren’t mailed out until today.

Our neighbors around here are so nice.  They just are.  We had nice neighbors at the old place, too.  Oh!  Speaking of the old place, we are getting our full deposit back.  Woot!  Tom met to do a walk-through of the property with a guy from the new rental company (in April, they switched from this realtor that we really liked to some company that is ridiculously awful) the other day.  The guy used words like, “dream tenant.”  I only wish they had been that appreciative while we actually lived there.  You’d think that someone would want to keep a “dream tenant” in the place for as long as possible, even if that is on a month to month basis.  We worked really hard.  The house was immaculate.  I’m very proud of the job that we did.  Tom was mowing the lawn (he has to do it all the time because our neighbor is meticulous) and the neighbor (meticulous guy) brought over his leaf blower and blew the grass off of the driveway.  I feel bad that we’re not more social.  I feel bad that I’M not more social.  Day one, the lady across the street brought us brownies.  We spent three weeks at the other house packing up, and now that we’re all moved in I have to unpack.  There’s just not much time for socializing.

Unless you count facebook.

**Update**

They’re showing up in C’ville!

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gross

The scab on supertoe from the slip at WalMart is so epic that I almost want to pull a Goldmember, here.  Almost.

I’m Peeling. That’s Just Disgusting <click it.

I was going to post a picture, but my toe looks like an alien planet… so, no.  Toes are gross.

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shower invites

Most of the shower invites went out today.  I wish I had put a tracking number on one of them so I could keep an eye on where they are.  I wrote a blog post about creating them, but I didn’t want to ruin the surprise in case someone who reads this happens to be invited so I scheduled it to post on the 24th.  But man-oh-man am I excited!

They’re pretty cute.  I don’t know if it’s worth the hassle/cost/hours of back-breaking (yeah, that’s right – Lindsay bent over her computer or me bent over the cutting board) work.  I could probably have just bought something, or created a simple postcard… but it was nice to have my vision become a reality.

Side note, if you get an invitation with a dirty rubber cement spot on it that I tried to rub off, don’t take it personally.  I stuffed the envelopes in the dark at 3 this morning, so it’s totally random.

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wahoowah

I’m not a huge fan of Lord Hardwicke’s.  It’s not my favorite place.  The burgers are like charcoal bricks.  You have to pay extra for fries, they give you chips.  I forget why, but I told Tom to remind me never to get the Club again.  I was very offended once when we walked in 15 minutes before they closed and they wouldn’t serve us.  That just grinds my gears, ask my dad about the fried chicken people on Friday nights when he was trying to pick my mom up after work for dates in high school.  You just don’t do that.  You’re not closed.  I never wanted to go back after that.  You don’t want my money tonight?  Fine.  I won’t give it to you ever again.

My family loves it.  So, we keep going back.  Their pizza is pretty good.  I have to be careful with this gestational diabetes thing.  I ordered a taco salad.  No jalapenos, but since the menu said “ask your server for sour cream or salsa,” I did ask for sour cream.  “What kind of dressing?”  Dressing?  Really?  It’s a taco salad.  “Um, yes, I’d like a drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette…”  What?  I thought sour cream or salsa was the dressing on a taco salad.  I mean, I guess if you’re Lindsay, and eat ranch on anything and everything, well, yeah… I guess you could go with ranch.  I just don’t see ranch and sour cream.  In lieu of ground beef, they put chili on it.  It was different.  Not bad, just different.

I guess I just do not understand the things that they do.

I had a good weekend, though.  We went to Maryland to see Tom’s mom before she leaves for Texas and she went shopping with us at Buy Buy Baby.  I found the small world swaddling blankets that I LOVE live and in person!  I was able to hold them, and eventually buy them – which I thought I’d have to do online.  I am irritated that I didn’t have a 20% off coupon (they’re a branch of Bed, Bath and Beyond) but so, sooo happy to get those things.  Overpriced, but I love them.  We also saw a red dragon humidifier that I LOVE and it IS available at Target ($10 less!), so I put him on the registry.

I need to do serious research on breast pumps and strollers.  I like the pattern on the stroller that we picked, but it’s huge and bulky.  It comes with the infant carrier, you know, a travel system… and I feel like those are mandatory.  I’m open to suggestion on that.  As far as breast pumps, I’d say more than, “open” to advice – I desperately need help.  “…I’m supposed to attach this contraption to those and do what now?!”  I’m not all that into nursing, but I do like saving money.  My plan was to pump and bottle it.  I’m sure for a while there I’ll just be pumping it straight into the kid.  No sense washing bottles or getting out of bed and going down to the kitchen to get a bottle… too much hassle. BUT at some point, I’ll be pumping regularly?  I hope?  They say the handhelds are more for occasional use.  I guess I’ll need to pump at Disney World in December so Lil’ Happy can stay in the hotel with Grandma some times.  Right?  Help.

Lindsay finished helping (i.e. creating in their entirety) with the shower invites.  They look amazing!

Did you know UVA is playing Penn State the day before my shower?  Crap.  Kind of rains on my weekend getaway parade.

I forgot about football.  When we got married, I was diligent about picking a weekend that wasn’t a game weekend.  There was only one such weekend in the fall, and one of my bridesmaids was already scheduled to be a bridesmaid in another wedding the same weekend.  We tied the knot in December after all.

Anyway… if it’s not one thing, it’s another.  There’s no game the weekend of the 15th or 22nd, but Lindsay has something else to do on the 15th.  Haley’s birthday is the 22nd – not to mention I’ll be at 38 weeks, and from what I understand, at that point it could be any minute.  So – the nursery needs to already be ready already.

I worry I waited too long!  Everything I read said guests would be miffed if I had it too early – but now I’m worried it’s not going to come together here at the last minute.  Aiiiiiya!

AND… it doesn’t help that we thought we were pregnant countless times and it turned out to be my imagination AND I look about as big now as I did when I had Mr. Nasty.  Like, I think if you saw me on the street you’d say to yourself, “Hmm… is she pregnant, or fat?”  The size of the Happy bump is comparable to the size of the Nasty lump. In some ways, I’m still not convinced that we actually are pregnant.

Although I never had to pee this much with the cyst.

P.S.  Strawberry shortcake and a handful of VA peanuts for breakfast, and my blood sugar was in good shape.  106 and it needs to be under 120.  Not whole wheat, but it’s nice to know I can eat it and survive.

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