Check her out!

This is really my daughter.

and so is THIS. can you believe it?!

Wow.

In the home stretch

Wow! Only 10 more days til I'm done with the most hectic part of this schedule. I can't wait til I can relax. I've been going for so long now I feel like it's not real that I will be able to take it easy.

My mother is taking pictures of Melissa lately that really blow my mind. Melissa is so beautiful and so grown up, I just can't believe she's my daughter. The photos are so amazing, too, that I can't believe my mother took them. And this is just their trial run...they haven't taken the "real" ones yet. Can't wait to see those. I'll put some links in here as soon as I can get the location of the pictures from Mother.

I'm almost done with my Christmas shopping now. It's going to be the first time ever that I haven't had to go frantic shopping on Christmas eve for everyone's gifts. Although, I did make a vow last year not to wrap anything ever again. Perhaps that was unrealistic. I think I'm gonna have to break down and wrap some stuff this year.

I KNEW IT!!

We are all ignorant sponsors.

Christmas shopping: now is the time to do it

Because man, after Thanksgiving, everything is going to be insane. I say get it all over with now.

This weekend we went to the Gilroy outlets. It's always an overwhelming experience going there. At least this time I was somewhat prepared, and drove around to scope out the store selection before we actually got out of the car. As it turns out, most of what we were interested in was in one small area, so we were able to accomplish most everything pretty quickly (relatively). I stopped in at Harry and David and got the truffles that turned me on to chocolate. We went nuts at Carter's, and got pajamas galore and a green lined rain coat for those cold rainy days. Matt went nuts at osh kosh. We didn't do much beyond that, but it was still a good time.

Nikolai was sick with croup again this weekend. I think it's the 47th time he's had it. Every time this kid gets a cold it turns into croup. We took him to the doctor, and he weighed in at 35 pounds. I looked this up in the chart and apparently it's just about right on the 93rd percentile for weight. Given that, you'd think he'd have a throat big enough to avoid croup all the time. Oh well.

All is well

So, I went to the doctor (finally), and she seems to think the whole thing can be explained by sinuses. Maybe Nikolai collapsed one of them when he whacked me in the head...

Speaking of Nikolai, we got the cutest little christmas outfits for him a couple of days ago. I'll have to post a photo once I get it transferred to the computer here.

Oh, and in case you care at all, I've finally given up the notion that I am going to make all my christmas presents. I can't believe it took me this long to figure out that I am insane to entertain the notion that I might possibly have time to make 47 christmas presents while simultaneously working against a December deadline at work. At any rate, you all should be expecting something perfectly manufactured from an assembly line somewhere in another country. I'm sure it'll be better than anything I could make, anyway...

OK, I'll put some more info in here

I guess I can go on a bit more about what's been going on lately. I was just sitting here whiping through things I need to get through, while Nikolai is happily entertaining himself. I figured I had a good solid 3 minutes to get everything done...

15 minutes later, he's *still* playing quietly in his room. When I peek in there I realize that, lo and behold, he's brought out all his train tracks and is constructing many varied and random structures with his train tracks. He has turned the clickety clack tracks over and has made a "road" for his cars, and he's assembled the bridge backward. But *most importantly*, he's done the whole thing with absolutely no intervention from me. none. it's great, what he's done. Only last night, when he was sneakily playing with toys instead of going to sleep, did I realize he could even assemble the tracks himself. I think this might be the new craze. I could handle this.

breathe

I have to remind myself, every now and again lately. things are really that insane. it doesn't look like it's going to slow up any before christmas, either. I'm praying we have a simple january. we were promised a week off sometime in q1, and I'm going to take serious advantage of it. I desperately need it now.

I never did make it to the doctor, because I'm a loser. hopefully I'll make it later on this week.

It was a stroke of genius to decide to make all my christmas gifts this year.

I think I have a problem

I think I have blogger's block. Here I am with this create window open, and I just have no idea what to write. Amazing, eh? I can imagine you're thinking to yourself "wow, rebecca has nothing to say? did hell freeze over?" Well, I'm wondering that very same thing myself. Perhaps the devil will let me know.

So in the last couple of days I've realized I have a strange set of things going on. I've been depressed...very severely depressed. Yesterday evening I had the worst headache i've ever had in my life, which is saying something since I suffer migraines regularly. This morning I felt like gravity had shifted to another plane entirely, and my vision was doing really wonky things. Finally I got it into my brain to look at the "warnings" section of the patch (ortho evra), and lo and behold, I'm showing all the symptoms of a blood clot somewhere. great. off I go to the doctor tomorrow. Ugh. Pray I don't have a stroke or serious blood clot somewhere.

Maybe tomorrow I'll go over all my introspective crap. Stay tuned.

Holidays commence

So, tonight Nikolai and Anthony and I built a gingerbread house. It was an interesting thing to do with the two boys. It was incredible to see how different they are, and what a difference 12 years makes in a child's life and mentality. Anthony sat quietly while I constructed the walls and ceiling of the house (well, not exactly quietly, he did have a few smart alec remarks here and there), but as soon as it was time to decorate the house he jumped at the chance. He grabbed the bags of candy and started the decorating process. It was my job to squeeze the sticky goo out of the little pouch all over the place (do note in the pictures there how well I did this job; decorating gingerbread houses doesn't seem to be my fote, either), and Anthony and Nikolai's job to plant the candy into the sticky goo.
Here's how it went:
1) Anthony takes a piece of candy out of the bag and puts it on the house
2) Nikolai picks it off of the house and pops it in his mouth
3) Anthony says "Nikolai, don't take the candy off the house"
Repeat steps 1 - 3 about 30 times.
Eventually, I had to put my foot down and tell Nikolai he couldn't touch the candy unless he was putting it on the house. Nikolai didn't touch the candy a whole lot for a while...until he could no longer restrain himself and would pick a few pieces off and shove them in his mouth before I had a chance to object.
Anthony finally made some progress, and when it was done I couldn't help myself (I know I should not comment like this when one of my children makes an atistic statement, but we all make mistakes sometimes...), I had to comment to Anthony. One side of the roof was very organized. The chimney fell inside the house after the two panels of the roof slid apart. The other side of the roof was chaos. Big blobbiness in the center. I said to him "Anthony, why do you always have to make eveything look so goofy?" his response was "Because I'm a goofy guy." I think I should have been able to figure that out for myself.

The important part is that we had fun, and I got pictures this time. :-D

I think this thing is gonna have to go up on a very high shelf til Christmas.
"Just one more gumdrop, mama, I promise I'll go to sleep."

Dear Santa

To facilitate the proper execution of going Borland, I'll need one of these

I'll definitely need on of these, as well.

Home for the holidays

Well, it looks like no one will be joining us for Thanksgiving or Christmas this year. We were going to have guests for Thanksgiving who will not make it now, and my invite to Matt's mom for Christmas was declined (sniff...sniff), so it looks like it's just the immediate family for both.

It's not like we have a whole lot of room, so maybe it's for the best. I still can't help being a little sad.

Nikolai is growing so much, and so fast. His vocabulary has grown so much that it's very rare that his sentences are unintelligible or incomplete now. Even when he's not sure exactly how to construct the sentence he says the beginning of it 8 or 9 times while he figures out what the rest of the sentence is supposed to be. It's a little painful to endure, but still very sweet to see that he's making a concerted effort to complete his sentences.

We bought Herbie: Fully Loaded over the weekend. Oh man...I've had enough Lindsay Lohan to last a few lifetimes. Not that I don't like her, she's great. I've enjoyed her in almost every movie she's done. But after about the 47th time, she gets a little too old. Her boobs get a little too big...her waiste gets a little too thin. Nikolai, on the other hand, is totally in love with Herbie. Every time there's a scene with the people building plot he says "where's Herbie??". We should re-cut the movie with only the Herbie parts in it. We've named the yellow car that Herbie falls in love with Esmerelda. It's great to hear him try to say it. For a while he called her "zelda", but I think it's actually graduated to something that more resembles the actual name now.

The show goes on...or does it?

Here we are on the cusp, as a team, of making the same mistake we made last time. Are we in any position to control the outcome? I don't know. I guess we're gonna find out. I think loyalty will be made or broken by the decision.
It sure is hard to talk about private information in a public forum without giving anything away. I'm finding it increasingly frustrating that I can't really talk about anything that's going on in my life that means anything, because it's private to one party or another.

So, Thanksgiving is approaching fast. Have I gotten a turkey? Nope. Have I made any preparations? Nope. Do I have a plan? Nope.

It's amazing with all the crazy things going on around me, all I can talk about is Thanksgiving.

Amazing Anagrams

These are really cool:
Dormitory == Dirty Room
Desperation == A Rope Ends It
The Morse Code == Here Come Dots
Slot Machines == Cash Lost in 'em
Animosity == Is No Amity
Snooze Alarms == Alas! No More Z's
Alec Guinness == Genuine Class
Semolina == Is No Meal
The Public Art Galleries == Large Picture Halls, I Bet
A Decimal Point == I'm a Dot in Place
The Earthquakes == That Queer Shake
Eleven plus two == Twelve plus one
Contradiction == Accord not in it
To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Becomes:
In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." -- Neil A. Armstrong
becomes:
A thin man ran; makes a large stride; left planet, pins flag on moon! On to Mars!

This is the last post today. I swear.

But oh man...I just ran across the funniest article. How many times are you watching TV and one of those commercials comes on for pain medicine or a disinfectant/antibacterial of some sort "simulating" the pain relief/bacteria slaughtering action?

This article pretty much sums up my feelings on "visual aides"

This one's for Connie

Our fearless leader strikes again.

Musings of a 3 year old mind

I often wonder what goes on in Nikolai's head when he's glotzing. Perhaps this is a glimpse, a window through which I can see his thoughts...

Halloween, a time for ghosts and goblins

Well, last night was a lot of fun. By the end of the evening my back was breaking, and Amber's was breaking before we even set out, but I think that in spite of that we all enjoyed the evening. Nikolai and Madisyn were Prince Charming and Cinderella. I was the wicked step mother. Anthony was a pirate and Andrea was a witch. Melissa was a devil, although she didn't go with us this year. She was with her friend Lindsey. I think she's decided mom is definitely NOT cool.
Nikolai and Madisyn were completely different this year. Instead of having to encourage them to walk up to the house and then waiting 30 seconds for them to blurt out something that remotely resembled "trick or treat", they were bolting up to stranger's doors yelling "Trick or Treat!!", parents scrambling behind them hollering "WAIT FOR MAMA!". Nikolai, apparently, was a tad confused about the whole thing in that he thought we were actually going to visit the people for a while and would just wander past the person holding candy and into the house checking out the home decor.
We ended the evening a bit early this time, because our endurance was limited. Perhaps we should work out next year in preparation for the intense trick or treat experience. They will be 3, after all.

Here are some other various pictures from the evening
The princess prepares for her high profile evening
Well? Are we going, or what?!
Prince of Doom
The princess shows her affection; the prince endures the moment
Evil step mother and her step-son-in-law
The only photo of my hair from the back
Candy? Where?!
The pirate and the witch