My Valentine's Day

My Valentine's Day started off just like any other random day: a kid-related wake up call at 2:30 AM.  My husband, who is on a terrible (but lucrative) overtime assignment for the next two weeks), was up at 2:30 and heard my daughter (Twincess #2) wheezing and hacking in her sleep.  He brought her to me, gave me a quick kiss, wished me a happy Valentine's Day, and told me #2 needed a breathing treatment.  Greeaaaaat.  So I'm up for an hour with a girl who I keep having to pulling off the ceiling because she's so amp'ed on albuterol!  When we do fall asleep, snuggling together in my bed, my sleep is interrupted with her spotty breathing. 

At 7, we all get up to face the day.  Another breathing treatment for #2, breakfast, then off to school for the Twincesses, complete with Valentine's cards and pink rice krispie treats for the class, and then off to "Toddler Boot Camp" with the Twinados (whom I think I will renamed the Twinkies now that they don't leave a path of total destruction in their wake).  At noon, I pick up the Twincesses to find a pink note from the teachers: "Don't bring your sick kids to school!"  Gotta love their memory ... when I dropped of #2 I told them she had an asthma attack.  No big deal, but yeah, the girl can't breathe and she's going to cough!  If they didn't want her there, at that time was when you should say, why don't you take her home.... right?

Lunch, then another breathing treatment for #2, and then I called the doctor's office for an appointment.  I told the operator she was having a pretty bad asthma attack and the home nebulizer treatments weren't working too well.  The first appointment I could get was for 7:30 at night.  Really?  I got a text from the hubby, "horrible day at work, I feel terrible, love you!"  Poor hubby - just a few more hours until he can come home.  It's 1:30 and it's nap time for all (including me). 

Hubby comes home at 4pm, exhausted from his day and just passes out cold.  I felt terrible waking him up at 6:30 so I could take my pink Twincess to the doctor's appointment.  We left at 6:35 to drive out a half hour to the urgent care center they sent us to (because the center 0.3 miles from my new home was closed at 5pm), where my daughter struggled to breathe until 8:45 when we were finally seen by the doctor.  We got home at 10:45 and I finally managed to calm down #2, who was so whacked out on breathing meds that her poor little heart looked like it was trying to escape her body!

I climbed into bed at 11:30 and accidentally woke my husband who gave me a sleepy, almost obligatory kiss, and rolled over again, in anticipation of his 2:30am alarm.

It truly is love that will allow for a Valentine's Day like this.  There was no hurt feelings for lack of exchange of cards, for seeing each other in person for all of 9 minutes for the entire day, no wonderful dinner (well, the kids and I had a great steak dinner during hubby's nap... since he doesn't eat beef!), no flowers, no candy or chocolate.  Without true love, this could have been a day of bitterness and resentment.  Instead I am grateful I was able to spend time with all of my kids during the day, and even more grateful for my husband and the great provider that he is.  And, I did get to go out on a date... but it was to the hospital rather than a movie, and I had a kid with me instead of a spouse.



As for February 15?  Well, apparently Groundhog's Day moved because it's been a repeat so far!

Sinterklaas

The Dutch have a Sinterklaas tradition that mirrors the American folklore of the breaded man in a red suit with his magical helpers and flying stabled animal friends.  I spent a few minutes really thinking about their traditions, and I don't think its gonna fly as a mainstream thing over on this side of the pond. They are SO un-PC that to even mention some of these things in passing makes me lookout for possible retaliation!  Yet, it is based on this holiday that our own Santa Claus tradition was born.  I can see why we changed things up a bit!  I'll break it down for you:

Plateaus and Periods

Gosh, diet plateaus sure stink. (Content was edited... I really feel much stronger about that opinion!) 

Periods are no picnic either.  (Again, I could write a novel on that topic too!)

Put them both together and this is a recipe for diet disaster which includes a trifecta of depression, brownies, and lethargy.   Makes me kinda want to pull my hair out.

Cuteness!

Beautiful.  Adorable.  Happy.  Loving.  Cheeky.

All words to describe my kids during a photo shoot we took as a family a few weeks ago.   I couldn't even wait until tomorrow (a typical Wordless Wednesday, which I've never even done before.... so why start now, right?) to post these photos for the world to see.  

Are you ready for supreme cuteness?

And supreme silly loving cuteness...

And sassy goofy party time!

I love my girls!!!!!

Photo Credit:  Tracey Meyer Photography  (http://www.traceymeyerphotography.com/)  714-985-1914

You got all this candy… Now What?

Let’s face it: Halloween candy is totally unnecessary for the human body to consume.

Humans do not need the massive quantities of refined sugar, fat, preservatives, and questionable filler that make up most of the candy passed out on Halloween by your neighbors, shopkeepers, and friendly strangers whom you encounter. Does anyone really need 20 Snickers, 14 Milky Ways, 55 tootsie rolls and pops, stale bubble gum and other impossibly sticky things that make Dentists both cringe and get excited for the overwhelming number of November 1st phone calls at the same time?! No, we don’t.

Does that mean I’ve never touched a delicious King Size Butterfinger bar or dug into a Milky Way Dark Mini before? That would be no… I’ve had my fair share as a child, as a teenager, and now as an adult, because we have to give it out to total strangers who knock on our door on the 31st, right??! It would be downright criminal to turn off the lights and hide in a back room somewhere because we didn’t want to answer the many calls of social pressure that occur between dusk and the late evening on Pumpkin Day!

Besides, do we really need to send our children out into the night, dressed up in all things from princesses to superheroes to creepy crawly things or undead monsters we don’t want to run into in a dark alley somewhere, all the while begging total strangers for treats with the unspoken promise that they won’t in turn smash their pumpkins, egg their front door, or cause other illegal forms of mischief and mayhem?? Again, no. But it sure is fun!!

So now that the night is over, and your kids have gone trick or treating on no fewer than 3 different days at 5 different venues, they have amassed a gianormous fortune in hard candy and chocolate. What do you do with it all? What will keep you from having to put 2 pieces of poison in your kids’ lunches every day until next Halloween?

Where I'm From

I stumbled upon a post by a fellow blogger, On the Rocks and Straight Up.  Her prelude was:  This was written for this week's writing meme at the Red Dress club. The prompt was kind of a Mad-Libs fill in the blank poem called "Where I'm from." Where I'm From template.