Free Toy!!! Provides hours of fun!!!

If you follow my blog, you'll know that I wasn't thrilled about getting Samantha too many plastic toys or that her favorite thing in the world is a plastic water bottle. I was happy, however, that the plastic water bottles are free since we reuse and reuse them, so she just got an old one we've had for god-knows-how-long. Well, things have gotten better! She has a new favorite "toy" that is free AND environmentally friendly! Wanna know what it is?

My belly fat. For real.

After nursing her, my shirt's lifted up, thus exposing my belly fat (which I am trying to get rid of...not very hard, though). The other day after nursing her I laid down, belly fat exposed, and put her on top of me. She kind of "crawled down me" until she was face to face with said belly fat, looked up at me, and gave me a great big toothless smile, like she couldn't believe her good fortune! She then gave it another good long look, buried her face into it, and blew a great big raspberry! She raised her head to look at me and had the expression of having just completed the BEST thing she's ever done. She'll do it for a loooong time, too, like 15 minutes (which is a long time for a baby to do anything... except cry...they can do that for a really long time).

It's really funny to see. I'd post a video of it if it didn't mean exposing my fat to the world. So for now, only my husband and my sister have been privy to this phenomenon. My husband expressed concern that she may suffocate "in there" and to be careful. I think he's the one who ought to be careful now after saying that!

I Need a Sub

I'm sick. I don't get sick very often, but when I do, it hits hard. So what I have is "just a cold," but man, I have the cough from HELL. I think I coughed for 4 hours straight the other night...no exaggeration. I managed to get to the doctor today and got some good stuff for sleeping (Tylenol with codeine), but there's not much out there for breastfeeding women. Those are my doctor's exact words. Thank god I can take cough syrup as that is safe for bf'ers, but this over-the-counter crap wasn't cutting it, which is why I went to the doctor.

Before going to the doctor, though, I was rummaging through my medicine cabinet in desperate search of something to relieve my symptoms. Everything, and I mean everything, comes with a warning for breastfeeding or pregnant women. Vicks Vapo-Rub? Come on! When I told my doctor this, even she was like, "What???" Apparently she lived on the stuff while she was pg, so I don't feel so bad having ignored the warning and applied it on myself anyway.

I had a point to this post. Oh yeah, I miss working for one reason only: sick days. I used to rarely use my sicks days, even when I was sick! I just hated having to prepare for a sub in my classroom. Man, what I would give for a sub now!

Gone are the sick days of watching tv all day and falling in and out of sleep during the afternoon. This is not one of the perks of this job. Samantha is clueless to my condition. In fact, I think she's a bit annoyed that I can't sing to her while rocking her to sleep without exploding into a fit of coughing. Poor thing, I about scared her half to death the other night with my coughs.

At least now it's the weekend and I'll have a temporary sub: Daddy!

Money Saver

Even before our daughter was born, my husband and I tried to live as eco-friendly as possible: we recycle religiously, we drive fuel-efficient cars, we reuse everything until it basically falls apart, we keep our heat down, etc. Now that we have a daughter, we try to raise her in an environmentally-friendly way as we can. Aside from cloth-diapering, we try to avoid buying too many plastic toys for her. Actually, since she has 2 sets of grandparents and many loving friends, we haven't had to buy much of anything for her since she's been born!

This Christmas, though, I really wanted to get her something. It's her first Christmas after all! So I went to Timeless Toys, this great toy shop here in Chicago, to pick out something for her that, hopefully, would not be plastic and made in China.

I came home with something plastic that was made in China. I spent more money on it than I would have liked, but whatever. It's cute and fun and she actually really likes it!

What she REALLY likes, though, and in fact I may say that she LOVES and GOES CRAZY FOR are, interestingly enough, plastic water bottles. (Again with the plastic!?!) I swear, if you walk up to her holding a plastic water bottle, she will give you this huge grin that just melts your heart. You think she's showing you how happy she is to see you, how much she loves you. No, she's excited to see the water bottle.

Thanks, kid. Now I know what to get you for Christmas next year.

Favorite Food Swap

I recently participated in a Favorite Food Swap hosted by Laural and Elaine. The premise is that you get hooked up with someone in the U.S. who's in a different region than you. You send them some of your favorite foods and they send you some of theirs. Even better is if you send them something you can only get in your area!

I got my Food Package from Elaine a couple days before Christmas. If you visit her blog (link above), you'll see that she provided a picture of all the items she received from me. Uh, as for me, I didn't think of that before I devoured the awesome locally-made peanut brittle she sent. Oops.

She also sent me a box of two chocolate and caramel-covered pecans. I'm pretty sure they had a proper name, but seeing as though I ate those the night I got them, the box is no longer around. And thank god there were only two because I seriously loved them and would've eaten all of them, no matter how many there were, in one sitting.

She also sent me "K-Ann's Strawberry Jam," which, surprisingly, is the only thing I haven't wolfed down yet. It won't last long, though, once it's opened. It's pretty obvious that I have no self-control.

Thank you, Laural and Elaine, for hosting this fabulous event. You have made a valuable contribution to my holiday weight gain. : )

They Missed the Mark

I love reading with my daughter and I think she really likes it, too. She's a very touchy-feely baby, so books with paper pages are kind of dangerous for her right now. She's already gotten one paper cut, so I'm sticking to board books for the time being.

There are series of books called "Baby Touch and Feel" in which each page contains a different texture for baby to feel. They're usually about animals and you touch the animal's "fur." My/her favorite is called "Frosty Friends." Not only does it have awesome pictures of animals, but it also has information about each animal, plus it rhymes, so it makes it that much more fun to read aloud.

Here's an example from the book:

Fluffy little penguin chicks
huddle close together.
Mommy's fur protects them
from the cold and icy weather.

or

The polar bear is king
of this cold and snowy land.
No other creature on the ice
is quite as strong and grand.

Both of those are good, yes? They're factually correct and they're cute! However, the authors really missed the mark on some of the animals:

Can you feel the wolf's pink tongue?
Forget about your fears.
He's just a big and hairy dog
with furry, pointed ears.

Uh, yeah...wolves are real friendly! Nevermind that if you tried to touch a wolf's tongue he'd probably tear you to shreads.

This one's a little less ironic, but still:

With big and furry antlers,
this reindeer is so sweet...

When I think of reindeer, the word "sweet" doesn't come to mind. Hell, even fictionalized, reindeer are mean with not letting Rudolph join in their games and all!

There are others, like calling a seal gorgeous and friendly, that make me laugh and wonder how difficult it is to write these things without freaking kids out. I'll have to try my hand at trying to make tigers sound cute and fun or making sharks sound like great swimming partners.

Any requests or suggestions?

They Say Everyone Has a Twin

I'm getting really bad at posting. I guess I feel I don't have much to say anymore. I mean, I'm home all day doing pretty much the same thing over and over: nursing, reading, playing, changing diapers, cleaning...repeat. There's not much interesting stuff going on in my life right now. This is not to say I don't like my life right now. I just wouldn't call it exciting.

However, I will share this: What the hell is up with my upstairs neighbor? I really hope he never reads this because he will totally know I'm talking about him. The reason he will know is that I'm going to tell you his name. Arnie. But I call him F'Arnie. You can guess what the "F" stands for.

The worst thing about Arnie is that I like him. He's a really great guy (even though he's a Scientologist. Uh-oh...I've offended somebody. Please don't send me weird comments, people, like someone did with my "Good Thing I Don't Believe in Hell" post. I'm sorry if I've offended you.). Anyway, he's a really nice guy, very funny, pleasant, blah, blah, blah...but he is ALWAYS on the phone. ALWAYS. I know this because I am always home and our building is very, VERY noisy. I can hear his alarm go off in the morning and, after pressing snooze 4 times, he gets up and gets immediately on the phone. Yeah, I can hear all this...it sucks.

F'Arnie keeps strange hours. He is in business for himself and always seems to come home whenever my daughter is trying to go to sleep. Mind you, she sleeps, like, every 3 hours and whenever she is on the verge of falling asleep, I'll hear him (and so will she) walking around (the floors creak terribly) yapping away on his phone. It drives me crazy! I just want to yell, "SHUT UP!!!!!!!!!!!! PUT THE PHONE DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!! WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING TO ANYWAY????"

Because, seriously, who the hell is he talking to all the live-long day? I know that somewhere in the world is someone who lives below the person he's on the phone with, rocking her baby to sleep, cursing the name of her upstairs neighbor, and wondering just who the hell her neighbor is talking to. Well, whoever you are, you now know he's talking to F'Arnie.

She Did It!

This is probably not big news to anyone else except me and my husband (who has mysteriously and annoyingly quit blogging, hopefully to return soon), but SAMANTHA ROLLED OVER! I guess if you have kids, you know what a big deal this is.

Rolling over is pretty much the first thing she can do by herself. Okay, granted, I have to put her on her belly so that she can roll over to her back, and once she's rolled over she'll pretty much stay there forever until I move her elsewhere, but that middle part she's got down ALL BY HERSELF!

She, by the way, doesn't find this a big deal at all. In fact, the first time she did it, I freaked out and was all like, "Oh my god, you rolled over!!! That's so wonderful! Incredible!! WOW!!!" She pretty much laid there like, "What?"

It's exciting since it's the first in many, many firsts. Just thinking of all the things to come kind of boggles the mind: sitting up, rolling over the other way (from back to front), her first tooth, crawling, walking, talking, her first day of school...I could keep going but frankly I don't want to think about her getting too old too fast.

For now I'll just relish in the fact that my baby can roll over all by herself.