Today we're having thunderstorms. The power has flickered out about three times now, and needless to say Sweet'ums and I aren't enjoying it.
She and I are both the kinds of people who don't react well to sudden noises and/or events. So when the power flickers out followed by loud claps of thunder, we both almost jump out of our skins.
The first time the power went out it stayed out for about a minute and a half. Sweet'ums climbed into my lap, attached herself like Velcro around my neck, and clung to me. I told her, "Shh, it's ok," and patted her back. Next thing I know, her little face is against my neck, and she's patting my shoulder, telling me, "Shh, it's ok."
I think I might have the sweetest child who ever lived.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Us, Lately
I realized that I hadn't given an update recently on the things that have been happening with us, outside of the whole extended family drama thing. So here's what's up:
--I've lost about thirteen pounds and a bra cup size (or possibly one and a half). My wrist is acting up again but I haven't been back to the doctor yet for it. I've also felt very overwhelmed lately, but unfortunately, that's life. I'm spending time at the doctor again to figure out a little problem I'm having, and the simpler stuff seems to have been ruled out so I go next week for an ultrasound and Round 2. The doc doesn't seem to be too worried, but says it might take a little while to resolve it, but we're trying.
--Nice Guy finally got some of the health insurance stuff straightened out so that he can go back to his normal doctor. We'll see whether it resolves completely or if we have to keep fighting it. He has also matched me pound-for-pound in regards to weight loss.
--Sweet'ums is talking up a storm and loves to give yes and no answers, chatting on her phone, and mimicking everything we say. She's an excellent "mommy" to her babies and has continued to amass an army of stuffed animals. Potty training is hit-or-miss, but we're getting there. She's quite adept with video games (only clean ones, I won't let my baby play anything that might damage her little mind) and loves to sit with her daddy while he plays. Lately, all she has wanted to eat is the beef and vegetable soup my mom and I make, but that's ok--it's fairly well-rounded. She's quite a girly-girl, and knows what she wants to wear and when. She's actually got a pretty good sense of style. She loves cell phones and wanders around the house with her old, dead one and chats away on it with Mimi. The other day she copied me pacing back and forth in the living room and kitchen talking on her phone. She's got this cute little preppy-punk thing going on with her hair--it's a little shaggy, curls up at the ends, and parts naturally on the side. She looks more like an elementary schooler (and sometimes even a teenager!) than she does a toddler, and that scares me. She loves to shake her little booty when she dances, and she'll do "the twist" with us sometimes if we ask her to dance. Her favorite thing in the world is to make people laugh, and that's probably one of my favorite things about her.
So that's where we are right now. I'm gonna go enjoy some quiet time while Sweet'ums is down for a nap.
--I've lost about thirteen pounds and a bra cup size (or possibly one and a half). My wrist is acting up again but I haven't been back to the doctor yet for it. I've also felt very overwhelmed lately, but unfortunately, that's life. I'm spending time at the doctor again to figure out a little problem I'm having, and the simpler stuff seems to have been ruled out so I go next week for an ultrasound and Round 2. The doc doesn't seem to be too worried, but says it might take a little while to resolve it, but we're trying.
--Nice Guy finally got some of the health insurance stuff straightened out so that he can go back to his normal doctor. We'll see whether it resolves completely or if we have to keep fighting it. He has also matched me pound-for-pound in regards to weight loss.
--Sweet'ums is talking up a storm and loves to give yes and no answers, chatting on her phone, and mimicking everything we say. She's an excellent "mommy" to her babies and has continued to amass an army of stuffed animals. Potty training is hit-or-miss, but we're getting there. She's quite adept with video games (only clean ones, I won't let my baby play anything that might damage her little mind) and loves to sit with her daddy while he plays. Lately, all she has wanted to eat is the beef and vegetable soup my mom and I make, but that's ok--it's fairly well-rounded. She's quite a girly-girl, and knows what she wants to wear and when. She's actually got a pretty good sense of style. She loves cell phones and wanders around the house with her old, dead one and chats away on it with Mimi. The other day she copied me pacing back and forth in the living room and kitchen talking on her phone. She's got this cute little preppy-punk thing going on with her hair--it's a little shaggy, curls up at the ends, and parts naturally on the side. She looks more like an elementary schooler (and sometimes even a teenager!) than she does a toddler, and that scares me. She loves to shake her little booty when she dances, and she'll do "the twist" with us sometimes if we ask her to dance. Her favorite thing in the world is to make people laugh, and that's probably one of my favorite things about her.
So that's where we are right now. I'm gonna go enjoy some quiet time while Sweet'ums is down for a nap.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Perking up
After what has been a very long, hard, and exhausting couple of days (not bad... just somewhat stressful) I've finally found something that lifts my spirits.
There's a website called SoulCysters that was designed as a resource for women with PCOS. I don't often visit it, because I'm generally alright with the diagnosis and don't really need a shoulder to cry on, but earlier today I was hunting for information on something in hopes that it was just a consequence of PCOS (no luck, so I'm dreading the visit to the doctor later this week). After hunting for information with no success, I decided to browse the forums.
I found a topic titled "Stupid Things People Say" and on Page 3, I found this:
I'm not sure I can really explain why, but this quote filled me with an enormous amount of joy. Why don't we, as a society, celebrate that which is genuinely female?
I've noticed that only a handful of societies buy into this concept that a woman should be wraith-like, starved and deprived, and practically all of them are "Western" societies--patriarchal, Christian, and the like. Don't get me wrong, this isn't an attack on Christian values, only an observation that countries that place this type of pressure on women are also, predominantly, Christian.
I can't help but wonder whether this is a result of the type of society that we've had for so long. Feminism came through and turned the male-dominated world upside down, but as a result, women had to become so much more masculine--they had to go to work, in many jobs they had to start dressing more masculine to properly perform the job, they had to give up their roles in the homes in order to make time for money-making. And I know those weren't really the goals of feminism, but they certainly are consequences of the freedoms won for women. (I won't go into all that... that's a topic for another day LOL)
I keep wondering whether this drive to do all the things men do has encouraged women to look like men--after all, consider the weight and body fat percentage that is considered "healthy" versus the weight and BFP of the women on the covers of the magazines that tell women what they should look like. The women on those magazines fit the body types of men much more closely than they do women. Why is this? I've had guy after guy tell me that it has very little to do with their preferences... So why do women want to look like little boys?
I think women have just lost sight of the value they have simply as women, rather than as women who are fighting to do the things men do. There's reasons why religions such as Wicca have such an appeal with people today, particularly among young women, and one of those many reasons is that they feel like it values women alongside men simply for being women, not because they're women who learned to fit into a masculine role. It values women of all shapes and sizes, of all walks of life, and encourages true feminine beauty. And for as much as I love my Christian beliefs and heritage, there's not much of a role in Christianity for women (the OT has quite a bit for women but it's the Jewish tradition, not so much Christian itself). Modern Christianity has created space for women, but in its traditional form it's male-dominated and has a nasty tendency to cast women in a less-than-holy light. Just look at what history has done to Mary Magdalene! Of course I'm also trying to take into account that the Bible we have now was passed down through generation after generation of scribes, with their own thoughts and agendas and varying foreign-language proficiencies, and that many of the traditions I've seen in church might not be the teachings of Jesus as much as they are the skewed ideas of some priest or another, or the misinterpretation of some scribe, or whatever.
Anyway, religion aside and back to my point: There's a lot of beauty in being a woman, and you don't have to be 6'3" and 110lbs to be beautiful. You don't have to be the woman who looks like a little boy in a bra in order to be beautiful, and you certainly don't need a bust size to rival Pamela Anderson or a bank account like Oprah Winfrey's.
It was beautiful and acceptable to be a curvier woman until fifty or sixty years ago. Enter birth control, equal pay for women, and low self-esteem. Suddenly the standard of beauty was something much, much smaller, and women have had to try harder and harder to see their own beauty ever since.
I'm one of those rather unfortunate women who went through a period of rapid and (we thought) fairly unexplainable weight gain at a young age. When I finished my freshman year of college I was at about 125lbs, only up five pounds or so from my much-more-active high school weight. A so-called friend of mine back then had me convinced that I was fat. I was miserable and I probably had lower self-esteem then than I have at any other point in my life. Then in a four year period I've gained about 70lbs and my actual weight has fluctuated up and down. The thing is, though, that I've learned to appreciate my body more, and I'm far more capable of seeing the beauty in it than I was. I'm not happy with the condition my body is in, but I've got recent history to compare it to and it's a hard trasition to make, from itsy-bitsy to more-to-love. But you know, I've come to love my curves. Sure, I need to get rid of some of the bulge around my middle, but what's wrong with having boobs and hips and butt? Not all curvy women are unhealthy, the way so many magazines want us to think; an enormous number of larger men and women are far healthier than their thin counterparts.
I'm not in any way saying that people should do things that are bad for their bodies, like put on weight when it would be medically unwise for them to do so, but I don't think women should be made to feel like they are less beautiful for being 38B rather than 32D, or size 14 rather than size 4. I think people, as a whole society, should remember their mothers, most of whom weren't stick figures. They should remember the early movie stars, most of whom were very curvy and who were loved for it. Remember the pin-up girls who kept the soldiers sane through several wars, and the standard of beauty that has prevailed for centuries (with the exception of the few-decade lapse in the last century and this one).
Why not celebrate womanhood in its many shapes and sizes, rather than convincing millions of women that there's something wrong with them because they don't look like one individual girl in a magazine?
There's a website called SoulCysters that was designed as a resource for women with PCOS. I don't often visit it, because I'm generally alright with the diagnosis and don't really need a shoulder to cry on, but earlier today I was hunting for information on something in hopes that it was just a consequence of PCOS (no luck, so I'm dreading the visit to the doctor later this week). After hunting for information with no success, I decided to browse the forums.
I found a topic titled "Stupid Things People Say" and on Page 3, I found this:
"One time i had this very very gay manager of mine annouce that all the men must love me because of my big titties, and grabed them and told me I was sexy. that actualy made me feel good for some weird reason (we had a grabby kind of relationship). He had this whole thing about celebrating what is female, and female is round, and you know...other ignorant people aside, i'm gonna go with that. It makes more sense then society lifting up girls who look like little boys with a bra on."
I'm not sure I can really explain why, but this quote filled me with an enormous amount of joy. Why don't we, as a society, celebrate that which is genuinely female?
I've noticed that only a handful of societies buy into this concept that a woman should be wraith-like, starved and deprived, and practically all of them are "Western" societies--patriarchal, Christian, and the like. Don't get me wrong, this isn't an attack on Christian values, only an observation that countries that place this type of pressure on women are also, predominantly, Christian.
I can't help but wonder whether this is a result of the type of society that we've had for so long. Feminism came through and turned the male-dominated world upside down, but as a result, women had to become so much more masculine--they had to go to work, in many jobs they had to start dressing more masculine to properly perform the job, they had to give up their roles in the homes in order to make time for money-making. And I know those weren't really the goals of feminism, but they certainly are consequences of the freedoms won for women. (I won't go into all that... that's a topic for another day LOL)
I keep wondering whether this drive to do all the things men do has encouraged women to look like men--after all, consider the weight and body fat percentage that is considered "healthy" versus the weight and BFP of the women on the covers of the magazines that tell women what they should look like. The women on those magazines fit the body types of men much more closely than they do women. Why is this? I've had guy after guy tell me that it has very little to do with their preferences... So why do women want to look like little boys?
I think women have just lost sight of the value they have simply as women, rather than as women who are fighting to do the things men do. There's reasons why religions such as Wicca have such an appeal with people today, particularly among young women, and one of those many reasons is that they feel like it values women alongside men simply for being women, not because they're women who learned to fit into a masculine role. It values women of all shapes and sizes, of all walks of life, and encourages true feminine beauty. And for as much as I love my Christian beliefs and heritage, there's not much of a role in Christianity for women (the OT has quite a bit for women but it's the Jewish tradition, not so much Christian itself). Modern Christianity has created space for women, but in its traditional form it's male-dominated and has a nasty tendency to cast women in a less-than-holy light. Just look at what history has done to Mary Magdalene! Of course I'm also trying to take into account that the Bible we have now was passed down through generation after generation of scribes, with their own thoughts and agendas and varying foreign-language proficiencies, and that many of the traditions I've seen in church might not be the teachings of Jesus as much as they are the skewed ideas of some priest or another, or the misinterpretation of some scribe, or whatever.
Anyway, religion aside and back to my point: There's a lot of beauty in being a woman, and you don't have to be 6'3" and 110lbs to be beautiful. You don't have to be the woman who looks like a little boy in a bra in order to be beautiful, and you certainly don't need a bust size to rival Pamela Anderson or a bank account like Oprah Winfrey's.
It was beautiful and acceptable to be a curvier woman until fifty or sixty years ago. Enter birth control, equal pay for women, and low self-esteem. Suddenly the standard of beauty was something much, much smaller, and women have had to try harder and harder to see their own beauty ever since.
I'm one of those rather unfortunate women who went through a period of rapid and (we thought) fairly unexplainable weight gain at a young age. When I finished my freshman year of college I was at about 125lbs, only up five pounds or so from my much-more-active high school weight. A so-called friend of mine back then had me convinced that I was fat. I was miserable and I probably had lower self-esteem then than I have at any other point in my life. Then in a four year period I've gained about 70lbs and my actual weight has fluctuated up and down. The thing is, though, that I've learned to appreciate my body more, and I'm far more capable of seeing the beauty in it than I was. I'm not happy with the condition my body is in, but I've got recent history to compare it to and it's a hard trasition to make, from itsy-bitsy to more-to-love. But you know, I've come to love my curves. Sure, I need to get rid of some of the bulge around my middle, but what's wrong with having boobs and hips and butt? Not all curvy women are unhealthy, the way so many magazines want us to think; an enormous number of larger men and women are far healthier than their thin counterparts.
I'm not in any way saying that people should do things that are bad for their bodies, like put on weight when it would be medically unwise for them to do so, but I don't think women should be made to feel like they are less beautiful for being 38B rather than 32D, or size 14 rather than size 4. I think people, as a whole society, should remember their mothers, most of whom weren't stick figures. They should remember the early movie stars, most of whom were very curvy and who were loved for it. Remember the pin-up girls who kept the soldiers sane through several wars, and the standard of beauty that has prevailed for centuries (with the exception of the few-decade lapse in the last century and this one).
Why not celebrate womanhood in its many shapes and sizes, rather than convincing millions of women that there's something wrong with them because they don't look like one individual girl in a magazine?
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Not a bad day
Today the migraine hasn't been so bad. And I got good news:
My friend and her hubby are finally pregnant!
By the time their baby is born Sweet'ums will be two and a half years old--enough older to be a wonderful partner-in-crime to their little one. I think they're hoping for a girl, and both of them come from families where most of the children are female, so it looks like the odds are good that they'll get what they want. And I'm so excited for them. I've got tons of stuff they can use regardless of gender, and if they have a girl I've got enough baby clothes stored up that they won't ever have to buy any.
So that's the good news of the day. I'm totally psyched for them!
My friend and her hubby are finally pregnant!
By the time their baby is born Sweet'ums will be two and a half years old--enough older to be a wonderful partner-in-crime to their little one. I think they're hoping for a girl, and both of them come from families where most of the children are female, so it looks like the odds are good that they'll get what they want. And I'm so excited for them. I've got tons of stuff they can use regardless of gender, and if they have a girl I've got enough baby clothes stored up that they won't ever have to buy any.
So that's the good news of the day. I'm totally psyched for them!
Happy Fourth
Ok, so it's a little late, but Happy Fourth to everyone.
For me, the 4th is usually a somewhat less than happy. I have major issues with fireworks, and with all of the stress I usually end up with a migraine. I hate the feeling of being bombed and fired at, and when you live in the city it's impossible to completely avoid the stupid things. So I've been recovering the last few days and fighting off a massive headache. And, of course, there's nothing like finding out your daughter has inherited her father's love of pyrotechnics. While I was in the front seat of the car freaking out (we had to pick my SIL up and take her home after she spent the day with her boyfriend) Sweet'ums was in the backseat laughing her butt off. Little traitor. lol
Anyway, yesterday we had dinner with a good friend of mine. She and her husband want to have a baby so bad but so far haven't had any luck. I hope that changes soon for them. They are so understanding about Sweet'ums and her moods and they're the only childless couple we know who don't mind her tagging along when we meet. My friend made homemade pasta and it was SOOO good. We sat and talked until 9 or so last night. It was so nice to just talk and enjoy the company of other people our age.
So that's what we did this weekend. I don't have any new pictures right now but as soon as I do I'll post them.
For me, the 4th is usually a somewhat less than happy. I have major issues with fireworks, and with all of the stress I usually end up with a migraine. I hate the feeling of being bombed and fired at, and when you live in the city it's impossible to completely avoid the stupid things. So I've been recovering the last few days and fighting off a massive headache. And, of course, there's nothing like finding out your daughter has inherited her father's love of pyrotechnics. While I was in the front seat of the car freaking out (we had to pick my SIL up and take her home after she spent the day with her boyfriend) Sweet'ums was in the backseat laughing her butt off. Little traitor. lol
Anyway, yesterday we had dinner with a good friend of mine. She and her husband want to have a baby so bad but so far haven't had any luck. I hope that changes soon for them. They are so understanding about Sweet'ums and her moods and they're the only childless couple we know who don't mind her tagging along when we meet. My friend made homemade pasta and it was SOOO good. We sat and talked until 9 or so last night. It was so nice to just talk and enjoy the company of other people our age.
So that's what we did this weekend. I don't have any new pictures right now but as soon as I do I'll post them.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
EXCITED!
So I've kind of been fretting lately about what to do for Sweet'ums' birthday. I really wanted to do what we did last year, but the money just isn't there for it. So I've been plotting and planning and trying to figure out what to do.
She has boy cousins and girl cousins, and obviously young boys and girls are into very different things and can both be hard to please all at one time. I also worried about the weather, as Sweet'ums has a September birthday and the weather here is rather unpredictable that time of year. There's many indoor options, but most are either too expensive or too old for her age group (she'll only be 2 this year) or they're places that I wouldn't subject to the behavior of this wild group of kids.
Finally, after much pondering, it hit me.
A teddy bear picnic.
It's a pretty gender-neutral theme and should be pretty inexpensive to throw together. Finger sandwiches, cake or cupcakes and some ice cream, all under a pavillion at the park. The weather could still be an issue, but we might just have to take that chance. I can make my own invitations, and fortunately the group of kids we're dealing with don't expect party favors.
So what do you think? I'm kind of excited--I think Sweet'ums will really enjoy it.
She has boy cousins and girl cousins, and obviously young boys and girls are into very different things and can both be hard to please all at one time. I also worried about the weather, as Sweet'ums has a September birthday and the weather here is rather unpredictable that time of year. There's many indoor options, but most are either too expensive or too old for her age group (she'll only be 2 this year) or they're places that I wouldn't subject to the behavior of this wild group of kids.
Finally, after much pondering, it hit me.
A teddy bear picnic.
It's a pretty gender-neutral theme and should be pretty inexpensive to throw together. Finger sandwiches, cake or cupcakes and some ice cream, all under a pavillion at the park. The weather could still be an issue, but we might just have to take that chance. I can make my own invitations, and fortunately the group of kids we're dealing with don't expect party favors.
So what do you think? I'm kind of excited--I think Sweet'ums will really enjoy it.
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