feeling blue, but in a good way

yes, I'm awake at 2am... I couldn't help but want to clean up after we actually finished painting the other bedroom in our "new" apartment.  We finished painting the first bedroom (our family bedroom) over the weekend (that room took FOREVER, it was really annoying to live here for a month and a half in essence in one bedroom with that one empty as we tried to get rid of the prior tenant's cat's pee smell, wait for the landlord to install new carpet after ripping out the old, then pick a paint color that didn't clash with the new carpet... then try to arrange help to paint).  Our friends Carol and Heidi helped with the painting after I did almost all the taping and such. Stupid tape wouldn't stick to the stupid trim in some places so the pre-existing white trim got blue paint on it in many spots, but I was able to clean it off with a solution of dishwasher detergent in water (Dr. Sears' website says to wash suspected lead paint window sills with that, and I was going to do that anyway so decided to try it on the mislaid paint and it worked! YAY!).  The blue is this gorgeous perfect-sky blue.... not the light blue of a cloudless day, but the deeper blue that you can only appreciate with a good scattering of cumulous clouds to show off the contrast.  Just looking at the walls makes me happy.  Of course, after living in rentals that we didn't have the balls to paint for the last 15 years, anything other than a very light shade of beige would have been a major improvement (ok, well, maybe not pink...). Oh, the family bedroom is a medium sage green, for those who care.  Matches our green flannel sheets well, I'm planning to do blue-ish purple window treatments and wall-to-wall padded headboard (gods I love HGTV).  It'll match the rest of our linens... last task after that and building the babywings for the bed (Liam is SUCH a bedhog, he needs a cosleeper space... I'm getting tired of getting kicked in the eyeball).

I'm just so happy to know that the #@$(*&ing bedroom and office furniture that's been sitting in various states of assembly in our living and dining rooms will be moving into their proper room in the next 24 hours.  I'm tired of feeling like I live in a refuge camp already!

If my inlaws decide to move to Cleveland next summer when our lease is up here, I may just cry... then make THEM tape up the walls before painting our new home.

AP-Friendly lullaby from the UU Hymnal

I love my church... stumble upon some really neat things in the hymnal sometimes, this included... I came across it a couple months ago when I was looking for songs for one of the services (didn't wind up using it that time tho), and it's been stuck in my head (already knew the melody - it's one Holtz sings on "Angel").  I like the UU hymnal lyrics (from "Singing the Living Tradition) better than the traditional ones, being a heathen and all...

putting it here so I can find it again later, since I'm not sure if anyone is actually reading this barely-ever-updated-pathetic-excuse-for-a-blog...

The words were adapted by Alicia S. Carpenter and (c)1990.

Sleep, My Child
Sleep, my child and peace attend you
all through the night
I who love you shall be near you
all through the night
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping
hill and vale in slumber sleeping
I my loving vigil keeping
all through the night

Mother, I can feel you near me
all through the night
Father, I know you can hear me
all through the night
and when I am your age nearly
still I will remember clearly
how you sang and held me dearly
all through the night

While the moon her watch is keeping
all through the night
while one-half the world is sleeping
all through the night
Even while the sun comes stealing
visions of the day revealing
breathes a pure and holy feeling
all through the night


So much more pleasant to sing to your baby as s/he nurses to sleep than "Rock-A-Bye Baby"

bored

don't know what's going on with me today... I'm very rarely bored, but I'm very blah today. it's overcast, warm, and a bit humid, which i think is contributing to the mild achiness (rheumatic conditions are a joy), but i'm having a hard time being "mom" today instead of "blob." i think it's more irritation at not being physically able to complete tasks i want DONE WEEKS AGO that's getting to me, along with liam being little-mister-hold-me-constantly (i'm standing at the computer typing this with him in a backpack carrier while waiting for some eggs to get sunny-side-up crispy on the stove a couple feet away... eggs sometimes help when my brain's being like this)

now the little monkey's trying to climb my back... urg. we had an interesting weekend (aside from the vampire incident) and there are pictures to prove it, hopefully i'll get them online someday but i can't bend over to get the camera out of the diaperbag with him on my back *sigh* urg.

my child is a vampire

I feel so guilty!  Today was the first day that Liam was left in the nursery at church even though both Garvin and I were there (I was a part of the service in my role as Worship Associate so I couldn't tend to him, Garvin was trying to take pictures of the service since we were in costumes - Harry Potter themed service - and trying to take pictures while wearing Liam on his back was just too much for him).  Well, since Liam is rarely taken care of by anyone but Garvin or I, and the few people who HAVE watched him didn't have other children to tend to, neither one of us has enough practice at leaving him to remember to warn his caretakers that... well... Liam hasn't quite learned that "kisses don't use teeth" yet.  He's a very affectionate child, very outgoing and loves being around new people (of all ages, though he seems especially fascinated by other children).  And he's a kisser of late.  But he's also getting his first cuspid tooth and this type of tooth seems to be much more painful to grow in than the first eight.  I'm convinced that evolution knew what it was doing when it set the average age of this tooth coming in at around 16-17 months, when children are a bit more able to express themselves verbally.  My son isn't even 13 months old yet and this tooth has been trying to come in for going on two weeks now (I can see the white spot on his gum and feel the raised bump, but it still hasn't broken through the gum).  We are going through a LOT of tylenol and camomile tea (the tylenol makes less of a mess since he'll only take the tea from a cup or sport's bottle - tried it in a baby bottle several times, he rejects the bottle in preference to having the ability to spit mass quantities of liquid down his front when he drinks out of a straw instead).

Anyway, he actually MADE THIS POOR OTHER BABY BLEED! Liam bit his cheek and his nose.  I guess I should at least be thankful that the other baby is not a firstborn, the parents may have freaked more if he was (*I* would have freaked if I'd seen Liam looking like he'd just battled Mike Tyson, which is the appearance this poor kid has - BIG bite bruise on nose and cheek).  The other kid's father is a pediatrician so he's tending to him and they're not mad at us or anything, but I'm goingg to be really reluctant to leave Liam in the nursery again now.  I've been reluctant for a while and the staff kept thinking it was because I'm a nervous first-time mom that has separation issues from the baby (instead of him having separation issues from me), but seriously, it's always been because my kid is STRONG, determined and tends to be underestimated.  I've been worried something like this might happen if he wasn't getting one-on-one care, and it looks like today the nursery was quite full since we don't have Religious Education classes in the summer months, so they had all the younger kids, toddlers, and babies in one room with two teenagers and a couple other adults coming in when they weren't busy running things in the service.

I think I am going to keep an eye open for a couple more baby backpacks at the trift stores and such to donate to the church.  Because of renovations, we're not going to have Sunday School in the fall either (the santuary and classrooms are all being renovated - for the first time in like 40 years, so a lot of work).  Those nursery workers are going to have their hands full!

arguing with song lyrics

man, I must be a little too sleep deprived with the teething.  I just got into an argument with the song "The Rose" (yes, the one sung by Bette Midler, I sang and signed it in 2nd grade or so and the darn thing has never left my head).  The last part of the song bugs me... "when the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong, just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows lies the -->SEED<-- that with the sun's love in the spring becomes the rose".

Funny thing, the majority of consumer roses grown in this country are grown from cuttings, not seeds.  Yes, roses have seeds and yes, plants can be grown from them, but that again brings up another problem... a young perenial bush like a rose bush is unlikely to produce much in the way of flowers in it's first several years, much less in the SPRING right after a bitter winter.  Heck, the seeds take 3 months to germinate and are a real pain to get to do so.  If it was a repeat blooming rose, it MIGHT bloom after 2 additional months (which gets us into... oh... around July... definately no longer SPRING), if it's a once-blooming variety, it'll take a few YEARS.  (information from gardenweb.com's faq section - http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/rosespro/ ). 

OK, so the songwriter didn't have access to the internet (considering I was singing the song in elementary school and I'm 28 years old)... still... Take a look around your average nursery.. how often are they selling rose SEEDS?!? 

Guess it just wouldn't have been as moving a song if after the bitter winter the sun's love grew a frickin' daisy, eh?

Man I suck at updating

the whole move thing is sorta done (we're back to renting, couldn't find a place in our price range that would do for more than a couple years, and we didn't want to lose money on the whole process of buying and selling a house if we had to resell it two or three years down the line).  still have stuff in storage at our friend Jenny's house (where we were staying for the two months we were effectively homeless), my mom's apartment, and my uncle's basement, but we're getting it all together slowly but surely.  Liam's been teething almost non-stop which hasn't helped my sanity at all - he cut his four upper front teeth all at the same time, right in the middle of our ex-upstairs neighbors threatening to have the Hell's Angels on our front lawn and such, got two more lower ones coming in right on the heels of those, and now appears to be cutting his lower left cuspid already, even tho the 8th tooth to appear isn't fully lined up with the 3 next to it yet.  He's still an incredibly sweet little boy, loves recieving and giving kisses (tho sometimes he forgets that kisses don't use teeth), and has this really sweet look he gets on his face when he wants to steal something you're eating (we play a lot of "Smootch the Mooch" - trying to teach him at least to not just grab the food off our plates/bowls/hands, but to get/give a kiss for it first... makes it seem slightly less obnoxious we think).

So... waht's going on now? not much aside from dealing with the mountains of boxes and trying to get rooms painted so they can actually have FURNITURE in them (I refuse to live in a home with off-white walls any longer, I've been staring at off-white walls for FIFTEEN YEARS now and I'm sick of it!).  We started moving at the beginning of May, but the room that is to be our bedroom stunk of cat pee from the prior tenants, the landlord wound up ripping up the carpet and replacing it (which took him like 3 weeks), and we just FINALLY got permission to paint the bedrooms this past Sunday afternoon (he's a bit rententive about stuff, insisted on documenting the condition of the rooms before we painted them... then of course he wrote down that the walls were "OK" and everything on his little form, I went to prep the room for painting and tried to remove a LITTLE loose paint from the baseboards and it turns out ALL the trim paint was loose - some genius in the past painted a satin finish paint over a GLOSS paint without even washing the gloss first, much less deglossing and priming it, so about 70% of the trim paint came off with just my fingers working... where Garvin tried to scrape it actually didn't come off as well.  Hopefully that bedroom will be painted today or tomorrow.


Liam's wanting my attention, that's all I can write for now.