So remember how I’ve been begging for a camera?  And then I told you last week that all that soul sucking begging paid off and then never told you how it paid off? 

Yeah, well sorry ’bout that.  Well my new Canon 450D/Rebel XSi arrived via UPS yesterday afternoon amidst much jumping up and down and gleeful shouting.  Here was me, all day yesterday…”Was that the UPS truck!!!” as I ran to the window only to see NO SIGN of the UPS truck.  “Oh I better not shower, what if the UPS man comes while I’m showering??”  “No vacuuming today!  I might not hear the doorbell when the UPS man shows up!”  “Carson BE QUIET!!!  I can’t listen for the UPS man!”  “Did you hear that?  Did it sound like a UPS truck, Carson??”

So needless to say, I got very little done yesterday waiting and waiting and waiting.  It was torture!  But I’m guessing you’re sitting at your computer saying, “GET TO HOW YOU GOT THE CAMERA ALREADY!”

Jeez, I was getting to it.  Patience.

One of my wonderful readers, Trish,  emailed me recently and told me that she works for a company who sells cameras at wholesale price.  She offered to let me choose a Nikon d60 or the Canon XSi for free for 30 days.  After 30 days I could either box it back up and return the camera OR buy the camera at wholesale cost.  Her exact words to me were “I know it’s not as cool as Canon contacting you directly…”

Shut up!  Oh it’s as cool alright!  Since it’s not a free forever camera and I’m not expected to write a review, I’m not even in violation of my BlogHer ads agreement! I, of course, accepted the offer and am now in a mad frenzy to prove to my skeptical husband that we NEED to buy this camera.  He’s convinced that we won’t be able to capture any better pictures with the XSi than we can with our S5IS point and shoot. 

I have 30 days to prove him wrong…and YOU can help!  Send me your best camera tricks, tips, settings, WHATEVER so that I can become a photography wizard.  HALP!  I CAN HAS NO CAMRA SKILLZ.

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Tags: Little Monkeys, Lucky Me, Men?, Pictures, begfest '08, hole-y matrimony by Jennifer
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Some days I’m completely at peace with the way things are in my life.  I’ve more or less chosen this life, the one where I’m a stay-at-home mom of two kids and I’m a supportive and loving wife.  In fact, when I imagined my life while growing up, I wanted to get married, make babies, and cook dinner.  My Barbie dolls were forever pregnant, hanging around the Barbie house, driving the Barbie purple corvette, all paid for by Ken.

But with accepting my life the way things are, means accepting that the bulk of home related tasks rests upon my often weary shoulders.  It means that I do laundry, and pick up all the water bottles someone leaves all over the house, I plan the majority of meals, I know when we’re out of diapers and Teddy Grahams and soy sauce.  These aren’t necessarily bad or unfair responsibilities, but things that occasionally make me feel bitter and overworked.

I hear my husband talk about his career and we discuss his plans for the future.  They really are our plans for the future, but with the way things are, it means that I agree to move, uproot our family, and lose my safety net of friends every few years for his career.  In other words, I don’t really feel like I have any control over my own future as it’s completely based on what happens to Tate.  I haven’t pursued getting licensed as a Speech-Language Pathologist in nearly three years because I’ve been the devoted wife who’s agreed to move twice and put my career on hold to raise our children.  But I do realize that the way things are, are because I chose this.

Tate has two business dinners and a softball game this week, which he didn’t have to think twice about since he didn’t need to worry about childcare for his two kids.  Of course I’ll be home to take care of them, that’s what I do.  I stay home and tend to the children.  But when I have an opportunity to go out in the evening with friends or when I plan on going out of town for a little blogging conference, I have to make sure Tate will be home or ask my Mother-in-law to come watch the children.  I don’t get to just make plans and go and be free.

I don’t mean to sound like Tate is a modern day neanderthal that comes home and pounds his chest and demands dinner and his woman stay home, care for children.  It isn’t that way at all.  If I weren’t generally happy with the way things are, he’d be fine with me pursuing my career, though I doubt the household responsibilities and childcare arrangements would change if I were working outside the home.  

This is just one of those days when I have a hard time feeling content with my chosen lot in life, despite it being EXACTLY what I always wanted.  

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Tags: Happy Homemaking, Mommydom, Randomness, hole-y matrimony, my stream of consciousness by Jennifer
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We spent this past weekend attending a family reunion in Missouri.  There were lots of lowlights from the trip including (but not limited to), Ella’s diarrhea, Ella’s vomiting, cockroaches in the bathroom of our cabin, and a verrrrrry cranky and sleep deprived Carson.

Despite the lowlights, though, there were also many highlights.  One of these highlights was the acquisition of some homemade apple butter.

I LOVE apple butter!  LOVE!

Imagine my disappointment when we got home and discovered that the lid of the jar of my beloved apple butter had “popped.”  (You know those home canning jars with the ring and the lid…well, it wasn’t sucked down, it was popped.)

Trying to head off certain botulism poisoning, I sadly decided the apple butter would have to be tossed in the trash.

Tate WHOLEHEARTEDLY disagreed.  “NO, no, no, no, no.  We are NOT throwing it away.  Let’s smell it,”  he said, trying to convince me that this not-properly-sealed apple butter was fine for human consumption.

I have NO IDEA if botulism or any other death-inducing food disease even has an odor, so smelling it wasn’t going to change my mind.  I stood firmly behind my decision to throw out the apple butter.

Tate STILL disagreed.  “See?  It tastes fine!”  he said after dipping his finger in the diseased apple butter.  “I bet it was made just a few days ago, we’re keeping it!”

“Fine, Tate.  Keep it.  I don’t care if it was made this morning, I won’t eat it!  And!  I don’t want the kids to eat it either, because it will make them SICK.”

Very often, Tate and I disagree about food safety issues.  He has no problem (barely) reheating food that has been in the fridge for DAYS.  I won’t touch leftovers after about two or three days.  If food has been sitting out for too long, I won’t eat it, but Tate would probably eat potato salad that had been sunbathing for three hours.  He regularly gets annoyed by my “overzealous” and “ridiculous” attempts to keep my family free of food-borne diseases.

What do you think?   Should we keep the apple butter or throw it away?

(PS, I’m merely curious as to what you think.  Unless you have a Ph.D in Food Safety, you probably aren’t going to change my mind.)

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Tags: Ask Teh Internets, Extended Fam, Quirky Me, hole-y matrimony, jennifer and tate battle by Jennifer
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There is a sinister force at work here in my home.  Of this, I’m certain, because there is CLEARLY no other explanation.   I still just can’t wrap my brain around what happened.

Sunday morning started out as a regular morning, nothing seemed immediately amiss.  The first thing I noticed were the bits of food on the seat of the high chair.  Then I saw schmeers of food all over every nook and cranny of the high chair.   And then I saw corn and crackers and dried up cheese surrounding the floor around the high chair.

“How EVER could this mess have gotten there??”  I thought to myself.

I was utterly confused.  Here’s the thing…Saturday afternoon I left the children with Tate so that I could go see Sex and the City*, get a pedicure, and go out to dinner with some friends.  Oh how wonderful it was to be responsibility free for an entire afternoon AND evening, especially since I’ve been a little overwhelmed lately.  I felt comfortable leaving for SUCH a long time, knowing how well Tate would care for the children AND the house.

As I’m standing there looking at the VERY DIRTY high chair, I try to think about how on Earth this could have happened!  This whole situation was so mind boggling!  Surely, SURELY! Tate saw this enormous mess when he retrieved Ella from her high chair the night before.  I mean, who in their right mind wouldn’t clean up such an GLARINGLY OBVIOUS mess?  Certainly NOT Tate!  Of course, he’d clean it up!   DUH!  There HAD to be some other explanation.

So how could the high chair be that dirty? **taps fingers on the counter** 

With a furrowed brow and my head cocked to one side, I wondered ALOUD, “Hmmm.  I WONDER why this high chair is SO DIRTY??  I KNOW Tate wouldn’t have left SUCH a filthy mess.  Did a pack of ravenous toddlers run through our house last night while we were sleeping, leaving a trail of peanut butter and schmutz?  HOW could this have happened?  HMMMM?  I’m SO bewildered.”

Apparently the sinister force at work in home leaving messes in high chairs also possessed Tate.  He wasn’t able to help me brainstorm this VERY SERIOUS problem, but instead just gave me the evil eye.

*Please go see Sex and the City!  I want to talk about it!  I’ll wait right here for you to get back.

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Saturday brought beautiful weather to New Town, IN, perfect for heading to a farm auction.  If you’ve never been to an auction you are truly missing out.  But this isn’t about the auction itself, it’s about using our stupid navigation system to get there.

I (probably should) take some of the responsibility in the resulting clusterf*ck.  First of all, I waited until we were in the car to ask Tate if he knew where we were going.  HUGE mistake.  I know from prior experience that we should have the route secured prior to departure.  Secondly, when he said that we’d just use the navigation system to tell us how to get there, I didn’t immediately say, “ah hell no.  We need to look at a real MAP.”  HEE-YUGE mistake.  When the navigation system seemed to be sending us on a route I wouldn’t have thought of myself, I didn’t immediately stop the insanity right then and there. 

**head explodes**

Let me back up just a bit to explain my extreme irritation with our navigation system.  It works splendidly if you merely want to go somewhere using our nation’s interstate system.  When used for in town navigation, though, it tends to choose odd routes and sometimes it gets confused and tells you you’re driving off road even when you know for damn sure that you are INDEED driving on a road.   It has also told me to make a u-turn to get back on the correct route, right after it’s told me to turn, like I’m the idiot, or something.

These “quirks” don’t deter Tate from his LOVE of the navigation system, though.   To him, the navigation system is infallible.

Here’s what the route to the auction looked liked…

What should have taken 15 minutes or so, took about 45 minutes.

What should have been a fun family outing, instead is probably going to lead to years of therapy and anti-anxiety meds.

What should have been a leisurely drive, filled with talk of the tractors and combines we’d get to see, was instead filled with angry accusations and heavy sighs. “Well if SOMEONE would have looked at a map BEFORE we left, we wouldn’t be in this position!”  “You have NO sense of direction!!!”  ***HEAVY. SIGH.***

After about 20 minutes of following the navigation system, Tate and I both realized that the route it had chosen was definitely the LONG, LONG way. But since we didn’t know where we were and didn’t have one of those old school PAPER maps with us, we still had to follow the route. That damn navigation system had us by the balls.

We easily self-navigated our way home and agreed that in the future we’d FINALLY learn from our mistakes and look at a real, bona fide paper map before leaving the house.  Also, we decided to go ahead and start a “future therapy” fund, just in case.

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Tags: Go Fly a Kite, Indiana, Men?, hole-y matrimony by Jennifer
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List of things I accomplished before 9:10 AM…

Nursed the baby, grew a banana tree, harvested it and fed one to the baby, checked and answered several emails, dressed the baby, dressed the boy, reminded a certain person of our quest to leave the house by 9:10, changed two poopy diapers, showered myself, invented a shower lock, patented the lock, marketed it, and began to reap the profits, brushed my teeth, flossed, put on make-up, dried my hair, put on clothes (including pantyhose), reminded a certain person AGAIN of our quest to leave the house by 9:10, realized I had no time to eat breakfast, planned in my head the meals to be made for the day, laundry to be completed, and bills that needed paying, packed a travel bag for the kids filled with snacks, toys, diapers, wipes, and burp cloths, came up with a few viable solutions for world hunger, got two children into their coats and buckled into their car seats, wrote this blog post in my head, seethed with anger.*  9:10

List of things accomplished by a certain person who shall remain nameless…

Got up and hour after me, complained about the baby being fussy and loud, did some work from home on the Internet, “made” breakfast for himself and the boy that included pouring cereal and milk into a bowl, patted himself on the back for making breakfast, rolled his eyes at repeated reminders of our looming departure, asked what time we were leaving, showered, got himself a road sody, marveled at his amazing ability to get ready by 9:10, wondered outloud to himself why his wife was “sportin’ a ‘tude.”

*Certain accomplishments were embellished for EFFECT.

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What is up with the men in my house?  Both of them think it’s their God-given right to invade MY shower.

First it was just Tate attempting to ruin my shower.  He’s always looking for a little sumpin’ sumpin’ and I’m just wanting to be ALONE while I clean my body.  I don’t need, nor do I want, companionship in the shower.  On the weekends when Tate is home, I’ve learned to shower when both kids are awake and in need on very strict parental supervision so that I can shower in peace.  When I do make the mistake of waiting until the afternoon to shower and the children are napping, I have to fend Tate and his eyebrow wagging and feeble romance attempts in order to JUST shower.  Alone.  And clean my body.  And nothing else.

It wasn’t always like this.  In fact, we used to shower together regularly.  Sometimes we showered together in our attempt to save the planet and save water, other times we showered together because…well, just because.   You’re a smart group of Internetz, I’m sure you can figure it out.  Anyhow, now one of my only solo excursions IS the shower and I’d like to be left the hell alone.

Showering is an iffy prospect many days since the birth of my children.  Some days the stars align and the wind is blowing just the right direction for me to shower in peace.  Ella naps while Carson watches Wonder Pets and I shower ALONE.  Lately, though, Carson has also decided that showering with me is absolutely necessary.   No amount of bribing, cajoling, or strong arming him makes him see the need for mommy to have her few minutes alone.  Admittedly, the first few times he hopped in the shower with me, it was pretty cute.  Now WEEKS later, and nary a solo shower to be had, it’s cuteness has completely worn off.

Can’t a girl just shower in peace?  Maybe I should invent locking shower doors and curtains.  I’d probably be a bajillionaire.

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