Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Christina's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
8:35 am	today's the day! with apologies to the backyardigans: moving day, it's moving day! moving day, it's moving day! it's not theorem-proving day! today's the day we move! we won't have internet access for the next several days, so i'll see you later! Current Mood: cheerful (! x 3 | ?)
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
2:33 am	i have an extra kid tonight. but only until 10pm or so. i'm keeping lil miss for cass and j while they go do some adult thing that involves dressing up and putting on make-up and staying out past sundown. it's all good, though. they did the same for me; keeping keric for me while dustin and i did essentially the same thing at dragon*con two weekends ago. dustin wore all the make-up and did all the dressing up, though. i just drank the pie. :-) so, yes, i went to dragon*con and so did dustin. it turned out that dustin got sunday off because of labor day, though he did work on the actual holiday. baffling work schedule. anyway, we both had a fantastic time. dustin got to walk around in costume and get his haunt on, gearing up for haunting season; and i got to hang out with quite a few of the usual suspects. and drink pie. work on the house continues, or it did until antonio went out of town for a couple of jobs this past weekend. he's supposed to be back on monday to finish up the fiddly, detailed, clean-up parts. but the big things are done. all the walls, painted white. flooring, installed (hardwood in the office and boys' room, place-holding carpet in living/dining room, master bedroom, and toy room, until we get more money to replace it all with hardwood). new water heater, installed. roof, patched; pending its complete replacement this spring. new water main, installed. new-to-us stove and out-of-the-box stove hood, installed. dustin and i bought a new fridge at a scratch-and-dent place a few weeks ago and had it delivered. it's becoming more and more *our* house. i can't wait to get settled in there. however, i'm not looking forward to the move. i have boxes. now i just need some oomph! to go pack them! *sigh* a huge thing in our favor, though, is that we haven't really accumulated much junk in the almost three years we've been here. so there's not much decluttering that has to happen during the packing. once i get up and get going, packing up the whole place will be pretty straight-forward. not *easy*, but straight-forward. i went ahead and started school lessons with séan, impending move be damned. we're working on "hooked on phonics", courtesy of amber who loaned us level one. séan's been really, really ready to start reading for a while. he's had a firm handle on the alphabet and the sounds of the letters, and so just needed a push to start stringing things together. any systematic approach would've worked for him to give him that push, i think, but since amber offered, i went for it. and séan likes it! and read his first sentence the other day! he's *so* proud of himself. :-) i started with reading lessons, then added writing (really, handwriting) lessons after a few days, and will be adding math lessons to the mix shortly. we're talking less than an hour total per day of "school". add in getting out of the house regularly for playdates and frequent (frequent!) read-alouds, and i think we have the preschool thing covered. though, when finances allow, i'd like to get séan enrolled in some sort of activity. gymnastics? martial arts? something. he's mature enough, as long as we find the right class, and i'd like to start him early on chasing kinesthetic experiences. keric is being a toddler-- cuddling and shrieking by turns. to be fair, though, keric really doesn't have a whole lot of shriek in him. he whines, he fusses, he can be melodramatic, but the shrieks are so few and far between that i'm truly startled when they happen. he's a real cuddlebug and give hugs and kisses freely, if he knows you. he strings together new combinations of two and three word sentences all the time now, so i'm constantly surprised by what's coming out of his mouth. just the other day, i was getting the boys buckled up in their carseats to come home from a friend's house, and because our usual routine of me buckling séan in first was disrupted, i buckled keric in and, completely forgetting to buckle séan in his seat, i sat in the driver's seat and buckled up. and just as i started driving away, i heard keric call out, "séan! buckle! séan! buckle!" and sure enough, when i asked séan if he was buckled in, he told me no. of course, i immediately stopped the car to correct that! and thanked keric profusely for letting me know. :-) and today, we were at another friend's house, when i told keric it was time to go home. he frowned and said, "no go home!" it was the first time i'd heard him say that. i had to laugh at the emphasis he put on the sentence, in his incredibly high-pitched voice. even if he were in a chair-throwing rage, with that voice, he can't sound anything worse than peevish, poor kid. i hope puberty serves him well, in that respect. :-) i started typing out this post at 8:20 this evening and now it's 2:30 in the morning. lil miss has been gone for hours, séan's been in bed since midnight, and i finally just put keric to bed. i think i'll head that way myself. (! x 5 | ?)
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
2:22 am	séan says... séan and his nine year old cousin, sophia, were running around the living room at dustin's parents' house, pretending they were servers in restaurant and taking everyone's orders. séan got to aunt amber (sophia's mom) and asked her what she wanted to eat: séan: what would you like to eat? amber: can i order dessert? séan: why sure! amber: what's the house specialty? séan: sorry, we're just a restaurant. amber: okay, so what's the restaurant's specialty? séan: sorry, we only have sprite and hot cocoa to drink. Current Music: jane's addiction in my head, of course. (! x 1 | ?)
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
7:52 pm	want frou-frou baby and kid stuff for really cheap? mamabargains.com fills that niche admirably. it's a one-deal-at-a-time website that i was turned on to several months ago-- via mothering.com, i think-- and now i'm sharing the love. (though, in the interest of full disclosure, i will be getting a coupon code in exchange for this plug. even still, you should click the logo and check them out!) (! x 2 | ?)
Monday, August 31st, 2009
10:45 pm	*rubs hands together* antonio is coming down tomorrow to start working on the house, a full week earlier than originally scheduled, because his work schedule was switched around on him at the last minute. even though this meant some scrambling for us to get utilities turned on for him, and my plans for this week have been more or less upended, this means that the work will be done sooner than we thought. and we'll be able to start moving stuff sooner than we thought. we will be hiring movers for our big furniture, but will be taking care of most of the easily tote-able boxes ourselves, so the more we can move before the big day (september 29th, right now), the better off we'll be. we tried going refrigerator shopping over the weekend with not much luck. going the scratch-and-dent route means moving fast, and this time we weren't fast enough. try, try again. i have houseguests this week, until thursday. ladydagger2evil and her 1-year-old daughter are staying with us while her man is getting some work done before dragon*con. on thursday, they'll be travelling down to their hotel room at the con. speaking of dragon*con, i will be going, but only on sunday. finances (mainly because of the timing of buying the house) have made it ridiculous to consider going all out the way we have in the past, with hotel room and passes for the whole weekend and time off from work (in dustin's case), so dustin's elected to just miss it completely this year, and i'm just spending sunday there. keric will be spending the day with cass, and séan will be spending the day with dustin's parents. have i mentioned how fantastic my family and friends are? because they are. really. (! x 4 | ?)
Friday, August 28th, 2009
8:56 pm	we did it! the closing took about 45 minutes, and right afterwards we went to the house to change the locks. with hud houses, they don't give you a key when you close, because all hud houses are on the same key. ( a sneak peek at our new digs ) (! x 27 | ?)
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
9:36 pm	the saga continues. doesn't it always? because livejournal-land is just *dying* to know, i'm announcing that yes, i'm bleeding, three weeks after making this post, and also 78 (yes, seventy-eight) days after my last period. livejournal-land, i'm not amused. do you know long it could take me to get pregnant if i revert to ovulating only 5 or 6 times a year? ugh. i was hoping that having and nursing babies had knocked some sense of order and decency into my hormone switches, but obviously, i was mistaken. it feels too easy to think that my body is at its happiest while i'm either pregnant or lactating, because my cycles went to hell after i weaned keric. my first postpartum period after keric was born happened at 14 months, and while i wasn't clockwork, i could count on 30ish day long cycles. then at 18 to 20 months, i night-weaned keric. then i weaned keric completely when he turned two. my last four cycles have been 23 (that was a definite wtf), 35, 61, and 78 days long. i just hope i get pregnant really soon so i can stop obsessing about it. in news not related to my uterus, but related to this post, work on buying our house proceeds apace, though at several points in the process it did not feel like it. we won the bid, got approved for the loan, had antonio (my sister-in-law amber's husband, contractor by trade and chef extraordinaire, and holy cow generous!) come out and write up an estimate for hud/fha mandated repairs, had a home inspector come out, and gave the go-ahead for getting the closing paperwork ready. all systems go, right? right? well, we hope so. we're supposed to be closing this friday the 28th, after having the date bumped from this thursday because of one last bit of required paperwork (a septic tank letter? really?) that was sprung on us. our contract expires monday the 31st. someone remind me to breathe. i'm happy about the house. every time we go over there, it feels more and more right to me. dustin fell in love with it at first sight, but it had to grow on me. there were two other houses i that i preferred, but dustin did not like my first choice, and we were outbid on our second. it's just as well-- this one will suit us well for years to come, i think. it's in the lawrenceville city limits, near the intersection of sugarloaf parkway and grayson highway, which will make dustin's commute to alpharetta a bit longer than it is now, but he insists he's okay with that. he's even the one who suggested we look at this house-- i had originally ruled it out because of how far from dustin's job it is. anyway, the house started out as a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom ranch on a sloping lot, but someone put a two-story addition on to the back of the house, where the top floor of the addition is a new HUGE master bedroom and bathroom and is level with the rest of the house, and the bottom floor is effectively a finished basement. so the house has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, but we'll be using the old master bedroom as our office and schoolroom. it's about 2200 square feet in total. two car garage, rocking chair front porch, large deck out back, large fenced-in backyard. the property is about two-thirds of an acre. the house is on a somewhat busy street (it's not in a subdivision), but the location is extremely convenient to just about everything we need. hopefully, we'll get moved in in late september, after we get some repairs taken care of-- the house needs flooring all throughout, among other things. also, we did get dustin's car to pass the emissions inspection. it only took 5 (yes, five) tests to do it. and the patient perseverance of our (holy cow generous!) mechanic friend, patrick. and several hundred miles of driving with an expired tag to reset the car's computer. and lots of *headpalm* *facedesk* *headwall*. and dustin driving my car back and forth to work cuz gawd knows the last thing we need right now is a ticket, which curtailed my schedule somewhat to accommodate his. and. and. and. but we have two legal cars now. yay. life post-gwinnett daily post is coming together. i made it through my last day on july 13th, and left the building for the last time with no fanfare. since then, i've been trying really hard to keep a rhythm to our days. on some days it works out better than others. a big part of the issue, i know, is plain old lack of self-discipline. i've been willing to call the last six weeks decompression and regrouping and finding my way, but now i'm starting to get a bit impatient with myself, especially since i've decided to start actively schooling séan starting after labor day. he'd be going into pre-kindergarten this year if i were putting him in school, so it's not like there will be a lot of academic rigor involved, but he's very interested in learning to read and write, so i figure something a bit less haphazard than what we're doing now would probably do us both some good. we have a pretty good framework for our week so far. i've been going to quaker meetings on sundays for the past several weeks (that's one of the things i promised myself i would do as soon as i quit the gwinnett daily post-- and man, it feels good to do!) and putting the kids in the nursery/sunday school there. i left behind the idea of a personal, anthropomorphic god a long time ago, but the quakers embody the expression of a religious life that i, as an agnostic/atheist/pantheist, am drawn to pursue, study, and emulate. and the sunday meetings are just plain cool. anyway, sunday mornings are at the meeting-house, and we'll be adding weekly trips to visit my mom and grandmother in the afternoons to that since the meeting-house isn't far from where they live. hopefully this will cut down on the "why don't you come by more often?" conversations, and also get rid of the dreaded weekly phone call. yeah, i'd rather visit than call-- i'm that kind of averse to telephones. mondays and tuesdays, cass and i do a kid-swap, so we can have guaranteed blocks of kid-free time to do whatever. when i was working at gwinnett daily post, we did this on tuesdays, alternating who took whose kids, because that was one of my days off. now, i take lil miss on mondays, and she takes séan and keric on tuesdays, thereby giving each other a chance to breathe. or nap. or shop. or stare at the wall. you know, stuff that's hard to do with preschoolers under your feet. wednesdays (barring scheduling issues) have become playdate day, courtesy of curvedmetal. moms and preschoolers descend on her house en masse for a few hours in the afternoon, and do what moms and preschoolers do. thursdays and fridays are kind of a free-for-all. saturdays are ostensibly for housecleaning, but the furthest i've gotten with that is doing the laundry and washing my and the boys' hair on that day, while spot-cleaning the house during the week. so the structure is there, and it should be easy enough to slip in brief, regular lessons in the mornings, right? right? being a bit more insistent on a regular bedtime would help with that, i'm sure. *sigh* overall, life is good. things are progressing. and this post is quite long enough, thank you. Current Mood: fine, all things considered. (! x 12 | ?)
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
6:05 pm	oh, ffs, just BLEED already! st00pid uterus. ugh! (! x 3 | ?)
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
4:28 pm	winning some and losing some my van passed. but dustin's car did not. we won bid v2.0 on a rather nice house. we paid the earnest money. now we have to figure out how to get dustin's car emissions-retest ready, while simultaneously paying for a house inspection. we'll be talking to the loan officer sometime this weekend, probably. i'm happy we're over the first hurdle, but as i was telling cass, turning in the earnest money is just the beginning of a life-eating slog that will hopefully culminate in moving in. so please excuse me for not popping champagne corks yet. wow, it's raining like whoa. (! x 6 | ?)
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
1:39 pm	i'm at the emissions inspection place on their thoughtfully provided computer with internet access, praying really hard that my van passes the inspection. they just pulled up in the van. *girds loins* (?)
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
7:41 pm	we got pre-approved for a mortgage, and went and looked at a few houses last weekend. we even found one we liked well enough to bid on (we're buying through hud), and were outbid. the tiny sliver of silver lining is that our bid was the next highest bid, so if the winner's contract falls through, our bid is up next. we're not going to sit around and wait on that, though. i put in my notice at gwinnett daily post today. my last day is monday, july 13th. yes, it's a full month earlier than i was originally intending, but dustin convinced me to just go ahead and do it. and really, i was ready to be convinced. i'm tired of the whole merry-go-round, and really our lives between now and the end of the year will be full enough without trying to work around my work schedule, too. my well-fed north-american privilege-- let me show you it. (! x 2 | ?)
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
11:35 am	breaking it down, thinking out loud i'm quitting gwinnett daily post. the major parties affected by my decision are also ready for me to quit-- possibly just waiting for me to realize that quitting would be in everyone's best interest. what can i say? the slowest boat still makes it to shore eventually. i don't love my job-- not that i hate it, but still. it's easy and low-stress, but it's also boring and tedious. it's also the same desk-jockey, phone-bitch work i swore off when i quit vagabond back in 2004. at least when i took it up again working at pax when i was pregnant with keric, the job there was interesting and challenging. if i'm going to turn my life into a fruitbasket turnover to work a job, i'd really rather look forward to going in every day, or at least not dread it. gdp doesn't pay all that much. it pays little enough that dustin can make up the shortfall by working 2 or 3 extra shifts per month. once i got our finances in order, i kept my budgeting goal of using my checks solely for savings and childcare (and walkaround money), but dustin can make up the savings without us shelling out for childcare. i had originally gotten the job in order to take some of the burden of saving up money off of dustin, but since then, he's gotten a raise, and we realized that the hassle of him losing sleep to watch the boys while i work (among other things) was actually more than the hassle of him just pulling a few extra shifts. i *could* find a job where i'd make more money, but we'd still run up against dustin's unforgiving schedule (6pm to 6am, 4 days on, 3 days off, 3 days on, 4 days off, on a 20 week cycle). at this point in our lives, having more than one adult working outside the home is just a huge pain in the ass. i'd really like to get some sanity and order and sleep back in my life. as it is, the boys get two days home with me, two or three days over at cass's while i work, and two or three days home with dustin while i work. it's too little time in any one place or with any one person to get a real routine going, so we're all just putting out fires and making sure no one starves or is maimed on our respective watches, and really that's no fun for anyone. i take time for myself when i should be sleeping, dustin and i don't see each other all that much, the friendship between cass and me is being submerged by our provider-client relationship, and the ultimate pay-off is really not worth all that. it's time for me to let it go. august 12th will be my one year anniversary. i'll be putting my notice in at the end of july. (! x 14 | ?)
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
12:33 am	because we all REALLY needed to know that "gwinnett daily post. this is christina... okay, can i have your address, please?... and what's the name on the account?... yeah, i don't know why the carrier missed you today, but i'll have someone bring a paper out to you... i'll make sure i let the manager know... have a good day... goodbye." "...and what dates did you want the paper stopped?... okay, i have it set up for you... have a good day... goodbye." "...and what card did you want to use to pay for your subscription today?... okay, i'll get this submitted to our accounting department. thank you! goodbye." and then there was the lady who told me all about how she was going in for a d&c next week, but she was going to have to be put under for it, so she needed to get a stress test done on her heart first, but it was really nice the way they did it now because she doesn't have to get on a treadmill like she did last time before they removed her gall bladder, and they have to inject a dye in you and you just sit there doing nothing for FOUR HOURS, but, hey, it's better than getting up on a treadmill, and she had to deal with a sick yorkie at the same time this week, but fortunately she has a friend that will dog-sit for her while she's out of town and she really didn't want to take up any more of my time, but thanked me for listening. i learn something new every day, i suppose. (! x 4 | ?)
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
8:49 pm	oh, internet, how i love thee-- in the past two days, this presentation (via not_hothead_yet) by a brain scientist about having a stroke moved me to tears, while this article featuring my friend sarah (isarma) made me cheer, and heather's post on dooce.com made me want to throw things because no one appreciates being called stupid, and this video (via karnythia) made me laugh my ass off, because they're twi-hards, and what's not to laugh about with die-hard "twilight" fans? (! x 2 | ?)
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
11:07 pm	so i've been nudged. i'm doing okay and not so okay. the grind is grinding, and it's starting to tell on me. our savings for the house are almost, but not quite, on target for where i budgeted them to be. we're living pretty close to the bone, but not any worse than we were before i really *owned* the title cfo in our house. before, i tried to pretend that i could do this finances thing half-way, and we paid for it with an embarrassing amount of overdraft fees. now, i'm being an adult about it, and while money is still tight, we're slowly but surely getting ahead. on some days that feels good, and on some days it just makes me tired. we're pretty sure we have an agent lined up for when we're ready to start looking. she didn't bat an eye when i told her our price range (unlike some other agents i felt out before her), and immediately set me up on her website, with listings of potential houses coming directly to my email. so on that front, there's really nothing else to do but take things one day at a time. i'm not getting enough sleep. i'm staying up way too late, probably in some childish attempt to keep tomorrow (and all the grind that goes with it) from happening. i fool myself into thinking that i'm just grabbing my alone time when i can, but all i'm really doing is playing word games on facebook in an effort to convince myself that i'm not as brain-dead as i feel. i'm feeling gray and fragile, like an old sheet that's been bleached too many times. one tug in the wrong direction, and i'll fall apart. so i'm tired all the time, and making up for it by eating all the time. the emotional eating is getting out of control. i'm popping out of all my pants, i'm too tired to exercise, and worst of all, i'm just so disappointed with myself. where's the girl who got up an hour early to do yoga every day? oh yeah, she faded away sometime in 2004. where's the girl who tag-teamed with the husband to go swimming three days a week? huh-- last seen in august 2008. so i'm working on getting reacquainted with eating when i'm actually hungry, and not just when i feel like eating, and hoping a solution for getting my body moving again falls out of the sky. cuz gawd knows that everything i've tried so far hasn't worked worth a crap. i wish i knew why i can't pull it together. and still, some things do make me smile. like remembering that on this day, at this time, two years ago, i was hugely pregnant, three weeks overdue, cranky, weepy, and determined to get some sleep, contractions or no. i was rewarded with a baby 12ish hours later. :-) happy birthday, keric! (! x 7 | ?)
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
8:54 pm	so, um, ignore the previous radio silence, 'kay? two links that caught my attention today: derailing for dummies. "A simple step-by-step guide to derailing awkward conversations by dismissing and trivialising your opposition's perspective and experience." more comprehensive than a bingo-card and just as snarky. yum! lost generation. a cleverly done little video with an inspiring message. enjoy! (! x 1 | ?)
Friday, March 6th, 2009
4:17 pm	interview with séan, 4 years 4 months i think i may revisit this in six months or so, since so many of his answers were "i don't know". not sure if that's a reflection of how much/little we communicate, or how well he understood the questions, or what, but it would be interesting to compare his answers down the line. also, séan insisted on typing with me on the last few questions. i left in his contributions for the record. :-) ( séan's interview ) (! x 9 | ?)
Friday, February 27th, 2009
6:38 pm	best theme song ever "peep and the big wide world" Well, it's a sunny day I feel brand new There's about a million things That I could do! Whoa-oh-oh Would you like to Do them, too? Yeah Well, it's a big wide world And it's waiting for me and you! Let's look around What will we see? Round every corner, a discovery! Whoa-oh-oh There's no place I'd rather be! Oh, yeah Well, it's a big wide world And it's waiting for me and you! i think i'm going to make this my personal anthem. and, yes, i'm happy that taj mahal will be inducted into the blues hall of fame. (! x 2 | ?)
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
7:03 pm	[séan's running around riding on his stick-horse, then trips over his feet and falls, dropping the stick-horse.] séan: oh no, mommy! my horsey is dead, my horsey is dead! me: oh no! what're you gonna do?? séan: i'm gonna give him a band-aid! (! x 11 | ?)
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
12:08 pm	long post is long spring makes me crazy. starting from way back in my teens, i'd say about 90% of the inspired, crazy, weird, or life-threatening things i've done has happened in the spring. this year, i caught myself looking at two- and four-year college degrees, and daydreaming about how i'd juggle that, plus child-care, plus working a part-time job to save for a house that we absolutely must buy this year. i found myself wondering if full-time institutional day-care for keric would be such a bad thing, and if putting séan in school for a year or two would seriously derail my intentions for homeschooling. and then i went to work yesterday, and as i drove home i noticed how warm and hopeful the afternoon air was, how clear and bright the sky was, and *ding*. i realized that, of course i'm thinking these pie-in-the-sky thoughts-- spring is coming! i'm a text-book example of spring fever. i don't actually have a real interest in going back to school for a formal degree. not at this point in my life anyway. but it was an interesting thought experiment, all the same. so that was yesterday. working backwards, we filed our taxes last week, and we're looking for our refund to arrive this coming week. we'll be paying off dustin's car with it, fulfilling a couple of other nagging obligations, and that should hopefully help us keep on track for the Great House Hunt. (which, by the way, has been put off until the end of this year, rather than this summer. preparing for home ownership is no joke, yo.) i'm working on night-weaning keric, and except for a couple of rough nights, he's been adapting well to it. thank goodness, because i was almost at the point of beating him over the head with my breasts whenever he asked to nurse at night, when the logical portion of my brain said, "uh, couldn't you just wean him, instead?" genius! hopefully, by the time he's two or so, i'll move him and séan to sleep full-time in the other bedroom. (i have to catch myself to stop referring to it as "séan's room", because really, it's not, even though séan has had the lion's share of the use of it so far.) séan will be fine with that, i'm sure, because he currently starts out his nights there more often than not, and greets the morning in there most of the time when he does. when we buy our house, there will definitely be enough space for the boys to have their separate rooms, but i expect they'll want to share a room for some time to come-- they're both awfully young. we'll wing it. my birthday was awesome, even though i was recovering from being sick. i had my birthday massage, and the mt was *awesome*. good strong touch, and she really worked my hips and butt amazingly. i made sure to get her card and leave her a good tip. amber and her kids surprised me by making the trip down from blue ridge for my birthday. i was so thoroughly not expecting them to make the trip (it *is* a two hour drive), that when they did show up at dustin's parents' house (rick and shirley, of course, were in on the whole thing-- i was embarrassingly oblivious), my first thought was, "hey, cool! i get to see them after all! i wonder why they came down?" *blush* so, yeah. dustin's parents took us all out to dinner at longhorn steakhouse, where i got my amaretto sour. (i was forced to. dustin said i had to.) and the day after my birthday, cass and i had a girls evening out-- dinner (at the cheesecake factory) and a movie ("the tale of despereaux"). it was my first movie in a theater since before keric was born, and keric is now 20 months old. oh! and dustin got me a stand-mixer for my birthday! am i allowed to call a stand-mixer sexy? well, mine is. kitchen-aid artisan, 5-quart bowl, onyx black-- i'm in lurve. and it's probably obscene how often i'm using it. and the illnesses. oh, the illnesses. only recently have i been able to breathe normally through my nose-- i haven't been able to since, oh, possibly thanksgiving. no, seriously. there were stretches of days where i sounded like a cartoon character at work, "theck you for callick the gwiddett daily post. this is christeeda," because my nose was completely stopped up. there were also stretches of days where i had absolutely no sense of smell/taste. i can't remember the last time that happened, and it really, truly sucked. there were also stretches of days when my snoring drove dustin, that master of the buzzsaw, out of the bedroom in search of more peaceful sleep. and i lost my voice for a few days. and then there was the stomach bug. no vomiting or diarrhea, but i couldn't swallow so much as a sip of water without intense abdominal pain, so i didn't eat or drink for 48 hours. recovering from that and the resulting dehydration was slow and painful. i still have a lingering cough. and that was just me. everyone else had various illnesses to deal with, too. dustin's currently on antibiotics for a sinus infection, and the doctor also diagnosed the flu. keric just recently recovered from a stomach bug that *did* include diarrhea and vomiting, which he caught from cass's little girl, who apparently caught it from candace's little girl... *sigh* keric is so recently recovered that he's still passing bright yellow breast-milk poop (you know, the kind that blows out of damn near everything?), since breastmilk was all he was ingesting for the two days he was sick. séan is relatively unscathed, though he's holding on to a runny nose, as is keric. can i say that i've filled my quota and then some for effluvia for winter 2008/2009? because, damn. new year's eve was nice and low-key. we spent it at cass's house, as we have for the past few years. there were lots of toddlers there, which was nice. we all just watched the babies play until they fell over, rang in and toasted the new year, hung out and talked and played on the ps2(?), and went home. my kind of evening. and of course, dustin and i marked the 8th anniversary of the day that we met with a big, juicy kiss in cass's kitchen. one of these years we'll do something more special, but it's not the season for that yet, and that's okay. christmas (yeah, i'm going there because-- have you seen my journal lately?!) was spent in blue ridge at amber's fabulous new house. we travelled up on christmas eve after i got off work, and travelled back home christmas night because i had to work the day after christmas. dustin's parents arrived christmas day. on christmas eve, antonio treated us to an amazing "feast of the seven fishes", a traditional christmas eve meal in his very italian family that is all seafood. i, of course, couldn't have any of the shellfish because of my allergy, but i most certainly did *not* feel deprived. i rolled into my bed that night. christmas day dinner was just as decadent. yum. a few days before christmas, an old friend from high school came into town from albuquerque to visit her parents, and we got together to hang out for an evening. that was definitely a fun blast from the past. before that, the last major thing to happen was thanksgiving, and i already wrote about that, so i guess we're pretty much up to date! a couple of random tidbits-- you know how a little while ago i was crowing about how i saved *so* much money by switching car insurance companies? well, when we renewed our lease on this apartment in december, our rent went up. of course. only $40, so it's not eating all of the amount we were saving, but when we found out about the increase, i just laughed to myself and shook my head. isn't that always the way? also, i mentioned that keric is 20 months old now. he's just the age that séan was when i got pregnant with keric. now i know-- know!-- that 2.5 years is not the spacing that i want between keric and kid3. it was problematic between séan and keric, and would be even more so now. but try telling my uterus that. that's all i'm saying. a picture post will be happening next probably. lots of cuteness to share. (! x 12 | ?)