Please help me get out of here

A couple weeks ago, after the pee meltdown, I told my husband all about my dreams for a vacation. I presented him with some fabulous options, including a weekend in Sonoma, complete with limo rides and wine tastings (this was before the positive pregnancy test).

His response? “Isn’t that all a little too fancy for Kendall?”

::head explosion::

“WE ARE NOT TAKING THE CHILD!”

I showed some all inclusive beach resort type things to him, ones that include all the pina coladas you can drink on a beach.

“You know, we don’t have to go somewhere and just drink all day, ” he said. “We need to find something that we enjoy doing, just the two of us, and make a vacation out of it.”

“Uhhh…. that’s the problem. We haven’t done anything ‘just the two of us’ in a REALLY long time, and back when we did, it mainly consisted of drinking,” I replied.

“What about cheese?” I suggested. “We like cheese. We could go to Vermont and do cheese tastings.”

That’s how lost we are when it comes to taking a vacation. It took me less than an hour to become desperate enough to suggest cheese tastings for our romantic getaway.

We have NEVER been on a vacation that doesn’t involve visiting family. And I’m not counting our “mini moon” after our wedding because it still wasn’t long enough or far enough away from family (nothing against family!).

After the miscarriage last week and all the other stress that came with it, I brought up the vacation to Scott again. I don’t think he really took me that seriously the first time around, so this time the request came with lots of tears, some yelling and phrases like “I don’t think you UNDERSTAND,” and “My life is the same EVERY DAY, ” and “I know it’s work for you, but at least you get to get out of here!”

It was a long day/night, but we finally came to an agreement, an understanding. My husband, forever frugal, is petrified to spend money on a vacation that might suck.  And all the vacations he knows will be amazing are out of our budget.

I, on the other hand, feel like 1. there are sacrifices we can make to make a vacation happen and 2. an amazing vacation (or at least one that doesn’t suck or revolve around cheese) doesn’t have to be expensive.

So here’s where I need your help. I need suggestions. I need you all to tell me about places you personally know don’t suck and won’t suck up our budget. It can be anywhere in the country (with a few exclusions). We’re pretty open to all suggestions. We were really close to booking a 3 day weekend in San Francisco, but I thought I’d do a little more research before we do.

What are we looking for?

We hope to travel at the end of April for 3 or 4 nights. We’ll be coming from Dallas. I really don’t want to do anything in TX, since we live here. Nor do I want to do anything in DC or Chicago since we also lived there. There *can* be drinking involved. That’s MY executive decision. Like, if we go to SF, I’d still really love to take a semi private tour up to Napa for some wine tastings. The budget is max $1,500, and that needs to include everything.

I don’t need you all to go surfing Priceline for me or anything. Just give me some suggestions of areas/specific places in the country you think totally rock for a romantic vacation for 2, and I’ll do the rest. I really, really appreciate it!

Kendall is one week shy of 23 months and I can’t believe it’s taken us this long to commit to a kid free vacation

Photobucket

Laughing because…what else can I do?

So… as many of you know, negotiations for the second kiddo commenced a while back. I’ve received many fabulous bottles of wine out of the deal, and many late Saturday and even Sunday mornings. It took us three solid months of “trying” before I got pregnant with Kendall, so I was expecting as much this time around. Imagine my surprise when last Sunday morning I woke at 6 am, queasy and 2 days late on only our 2nd cycle.

I quietly snuck out of bed, grabbed the lone leftover test from last month’s pee-on-a-stick-a-thon and discovered minutes later my urine produced 2 pink lines. The second wasn’t very dark, but definitely noticeable and not much lighter than the first one I got with Kendall. I hopped back in bed, abruptly woke Scott by shoving the stick in his face while saying, “Turn on the light. Are there TWO lines?” I’ve never been able to pull off the well executed reveal,  complete with pink and blue balloon release and encrypted map that leads to a bun in the oven.

We squealed in bed together, but it was obvious we both kept our level of excitement at bay… guarded a bit. It was really early. I promised myself I wouldn’t think too much about it until the end of the week, but quickly broke that promise by downloading various Iphone apps that tracked out each milestone for me and revealed the due date would be the week before Thanksgiving. I mean, could we have planned it any better?

Scott left for a week long business trip Monday morning. On Tuesday morning I started spotting.  Surprisingly, I wasn’t that alarmed by it. I spotted so much with Kendall in the 1st trimester I figured maybe that’s just my body’s way of dealing with pregnancy. By Wednesday morning it was much worse than I ever experienced with Kendall and I began to come to terms with this pregnancy not ending well. Really, I wasn’t that upset. I mean, I wasn’t happy. I was incredibly irritated and hormonal, but you know, now is SO much better than later.

Never having been through this before, I called the OB/MW office. They insisted I come in. That was at 11:30 on our way home from the bounce house for lunch. They wanted me in at 1:30. It’s a 30 minute drive from  here. It had already been a morning that tested my patience. Kendall, as of late, thinks it’s totally acceptable to hit random kids at the bounce house, which was all SORTS of fun. He was pissy, I was hormonal. I barely had time to make him something to eat while I frantically tried to fill out my insurance information online. Lo and behold, my insurance card was lost. Oh, it was one giant clusterfuck just trying to get out of the house. Then we drove 30 minutes only to end up at the building the office used to be in 4 years ago, thank you very much you DUMBASS GOOGLE. Then it took me another 20 minutes to find the correct location.

We arrived at the (seriously gorgeous) office nearly an hour late at 2:20. Did I mention Kendall normally naps from 1 to 4? And something odd happens to my kid when he skips a nap. He doesn’t become sleepy. He’s never been one to just fall asleep wherever he’s at. No, he becomes some sort of psycho, cracked out, hyperactive animal. This office looked like it could have been a spa, and here’s my kid, tearing the place apart. I was dizzy just trying to keep him from scaling the ornate tables to get to the intricate “wower” arrangements. Did I mention I didn’t have time to eat anything? Did I mention the whole nausea thing was still going strong? Since I was an hour late, they, understandably, had to make me wait so they could work me back into the schedule. It felt like an f-ing eternity. I know I got all kinds of “my kid will NEVER” looks from all the newly pregnant women. 

I had to give a urine sample,which was a whole new level of awkward and challenging with a toddler in the bathroom. I was literally holding the cup of pee over my head while my son pointed and shouted, “Juice!” He was trying to climb on my lap to reach the cup, I was trying to get my underwear back up without getting any bodily fluids on him or me. He played with the stack of clean cups, then reached for the Sharpie just as I was buttoning my pants.

We burst out of the bathroom, visibly unsettled, and the nurse called us back to the room. She went over my history with me, asked some questions, and pretty much told me what I already knew – that this was most likely not a viable pregnancy. Then she left me alone in the room with the table and the stirrups and lots of drawers full of off limits things and a toddler for what seemed like another f-ing eternity. When the nurse practitioner finally made it in, Kendall was playing with/chewing on two giant q-tips they use to swab vaginas. Clean, I promise. She told me she wanted to do an exam. I raised my eyebrows and looked over at Kendall as he chewed on the blown up glove she just handed him while running circles around the table.

“Do you think we could give him a lollipop?” she asked.

“I don’t care if you give him a bowl of sugar. Whatever you’ve got to keep him occupied for a minute. That would be great,” I replied.

Apparently, she took me seriously and came back to the room with two giant frosted sugar cookies.  Luckily, she also brought another nurse to use as a babysitter. At one point soon after, I’m laying there with my feet up in the stirrups, surely bleeding all over the place, and the NP asks the babysitternurse to hand her some stuff. Kendall takes the opportunity to walk over to the side of the table, look up at me, face covered in frosting, smile and say “Momma! Owie? Momma! Cookie?”

Wow… this is so not what I ever, ever thought would ever be a scene from my life.

“At least he has no idea what’s going on,” the nurse said. Yeah, at least. This was totally one of those moments in life that you have to laugh at, or else you’ll just fall apart and go crazy.

We left the room a complete and utter mess. I’m fairly certain they’re going to have to send the plush chair covers off to be dry cleaned to get all the green frosting off of them.

OH, and then I had to get blood drawn… with Kendall… in my lap. Luckily the tech was swift with the needle and he didn’t have any sudden movements at that very moment.

I’m going back in for a second blood draw tomorrow, and am so happy that a friend will be able to watch Kendall for me this time around. I guess we’ll just see where to go from here. Really, I wouldn’t know this to be any different from a late period if I hadn’t known to test as early as I did (just a little past 4 weeks, I think). So it’s not devastating or anything, just a bit annoying, I guess. But, 2 good things came from it. 1. I got to know my new OB/MW office very well, and am SUPER happy with them. They were so amazing with me and with Kendall. and 2. I got a tiny taste of pregnancy boobs for a few days, and momma liked it. Bring back the boobies!

Kendall is 22.5 months old

The hardest part about all of this was  not being able to blog about it! Things are so different this time around with TTC. This blog is no longer the anonymous sanctuary it once was, which leaves me trying to strike a balance between using this as the outlet I intended it for and keeping stuff private long enough for those close to me to find out from me and not my blog. To my friends and family that read this and may not know what happened, please understand. It’s not something I probably would have brought up with you right away anyway, but it does make a hilarious story now, and I’m sure I’d share it with you at some point over a glass of wine.

Photobucket

I’m melting in pee

Let me paint you a picture of my life right now. I’ll hit you up with all five senses.

You can’t see the bottom of our closet through the massive mound of dirty clothes (and honestly, some of them aren’t dirty, but they’ve gone so long without getting put away that we just tossed them back in the pile), Kendall’s laundry is piled in the hall next to the laundry room, waiting for it’s turn after the pee-soaked towels are done in the wash. There are dishes stacked in the sink, my kitchen floor has visible foot prints. I am suddenly disgusted by the amount of dog drool stuck to the walls and the baseboards should be burned.

It sounds like screaming, and whining, and Diego, and a washing machine running, and a white noise machine on the in the background that I always forget to turn off after I get my terrorist toddler out of bed in the morning. It sounds like “Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh, UH OH!” and like “It’s NOT an uh oh if you do it on PURPOSE”. It sounds like a giant dog pissing on my carpet AGAIN.

It feels like a grimy table that’s next to impossible to get all the stuck on granola cereal cleaned off of.  It feels like sticky tile floors. It feels like stepping in a wet puddle of pee and wondering if it’s from the boy or the dog.

It tastes like coffee, a lot of it… and then later it tastes like wine. It tastes like omelets for lunch AGAIN because I know he’ll eat eggs. It tastes like chips, secretly consumed when the kid’s not looking.

It smells like pee. It’s inescapable. It also smells like I need to vacuum AGAIN. It smells like vinegar and water cleaning solution. It smells like baking soda where I’ve tried to soak up the pee. It still smells mostly like pee.

Today I’m not holding it all together very well. Today I’m frustrated and annoyed and overcome with guilt. Today I want nothing more than a break from my son. I want the whining and the screaming and the tantrums and the turning to jelly so that I can’t possibly gracefully pick him up from the floor of the bounce house and take him home to stop. I want it to be someone else’s problem for just a little bit. I want to come home to a house that is clean and will FUCKING STAY THAT WAY. Counter to what you may think of my housekeeping skills based on the description above, I do actually clean. A. LOT.  I want my dog, my nearly 7 year old dog who has had diabetes since he was 5 months old, requiring 2 shots of insulin a day, to get his damn blood sugar under control and to stop PEEING IN MY HOUSE. I want to leave this place and go on a vacation.

Today I’m guilty. I’m drowning in guilt. It’s washing over me and beating me against a rock wall. I don’t know what’s wrong with my nearly 2 year old kid. It could be that he’s nearly 2, or it could be that he’s not feeling well. I thought about making an appointment at the pediatrician, but I really have nothing to base it off of (no fever, no runny nose, no cough, no rash) other than him seeming completely and utterly bipolar for the last week. I want to have more patience with him. I envision myself being more loving, more kind, less frustrated. I hate that I get frustrated. I HATE THAT I WANT A BREAK.

I feel guilty for not caring more about my sweet, loving English Mastiff Bruno. I mean, I do care, but it’s hard to remind myself that he can’t help peeing all over the place when his blood sugar is at 400 for the 3rd day in a row. We left the dogs over the weekend with a dog sitter checking in on them twice a day. With his blood sugar being so high, he couldn’t make it the 12 hours between visits to potty outside. We came home to a house that smells like a kennel. The dog sitter did a great job cleaning it up, but this place isn’t going to be the same until we clean the carpets.  I hate that I’m so irritated by this.

It took nearly an hour and a half to finally get out of the house this morning and head to the gym. You know, the gym that watches my kid for 2 hours? Yeah, Kendall doesn’t like the child care center. He’s been three times now and each time he sits by the door cries or whimpers the entire time we’re working out. (It doesn’t help that the last time I came to pick him up I found him playing with a file drawer and grabbing a stapler. The staff, at least the times we’ve been so far, seem apathetic and it’s starting to piss me off.) He started screaming the minute we pulled into the packed parking lot, just moments after I realized I forgot my headphones. Enough. It was enough to just say eff it. I got a coffee at a nearby drive through and headed to the bounce house. It was, of course, storming and pouring the whole time. Once there, 5 minutes of happy followed by incessant request for “nacks”, followed by inevitable meltdown.

Finally home, I fed the kid, what else, some form of eggs with cheese and veggies. While getting him ready for his nap, I made the strangest, most mind boggling discovery. I took his shoe off and noticed his sock was wet. The other one was, too, but just a tiny bit. Hmm… I thought it was probably the rain, although I figured it was weird that he didn’t seem to get wet anywhere else while we were out. I smelled the sock (like a reflex, I now smell all fluids since becoming a parent). It was soaked in PISS. The diaper? Dry. The shorts? Dry. The right shoe? Most definitely smelled like piss, too.

My dog peed on my kid.

::hands thrown in the air::

I’m done. I need a vacation. I need to go somewhere far, far away from diapers and dog piss. I want to go somewhere where the only fluid I’m smelling is wine.

Yesterday I planned to blog all about my many ideas for a vacation and ask for your opinions. Unfortunately, I just spent all my blogging time breaking down over pee.

I’ll try to get it together for the vacation post tomorrow.

Kendall is 22 months old, and I love him, I really, really, really do. More than anything. And I’m so grateful that he’s healthy and that he’s so amazing.  And I hate that I want I break, that I even think about wanting a break. I hate it.

Photobucket

Poop consumes way too much of my life

While some bloggers are taking this time to look to the next year and predict what it might hold for them in terms of personal success, like my bloggy friend The Feminist Breeder (check her out on TLC soon, and no she’s not a little person), I am thinking of the next year only in terms of poop, pee, potties… potty training. Yes, I am hoping that 2010 is the year of the potty trained toddler in this house.

All signs are really pointing to potty training, I believe, starting with the trail of turds left on our living room floor “Christmas” morning at home (which was really Jan. 1st due to all our crazy holiday travel). Turns out he was so excited by all his presents that he crapped his pants, then, while out of view, decided he didn’t like the feeling of crap IN his pants and undid his diaper from inside his cute Christmas jammies. I noticed he was starting to stink so I called a present opening timeout and went to change him. As I removed his fleece bottoms, turdlets flew from them and across his room.

“Well, I guess it’s a good thing none of them fell out in here,” I said as I brought him back to the living room.

“Uh… I think I see one… Yup, that is definitely poop,” Scott replied and he reached down to retrieve it with a piece of crumpled wrapping paper.

I immediately looked down and directly to my right was another one… to my left, another.

“Ewwwww!! Oh my God! DON’T MOVE. There might be more,” I said, and we all (including my dad and his wife) began searching through the litter on the floor to make sure we retrieved them all.

Later that day we drove to San Antonio for my brother’s wedding and checked into a hotel. Kendall crept to a corner of the room behind the bed and made lots of hilarious farts and funny faces. Yeah, I knew what he was doing, but I wasn’t going to interject and try to put him on the potty. I was too tired.  Seconds later he retrieves the bag of diapers and the wipes and lays them in front of me on the floor. Oh, so I see we are REALLY not liking the poop in the pants feeling, eh? This is a sign, no? A sign he’s “ready”? I think so.

We’ve tried sitting him on the little Baby Bjorn potty chair countless times. He’s never produced anything for us, though. However, he *has* learned that we will blow bubbles for him while he sits there in an effort to keep him there as long as possible, in hopes that something will eek it’s way out. He now has a really convincing act in which he sort of corrals us and runs to the bathroom door, making lots of desperate noises that cause us, in turn, to act like complete fools, shouting things like “Ooh! You have to go POTTY??!! Yay! LET’S GO POTTY! Let’s poo poo like a BIG boy in the POTTY!” He settles down on the chair, smiles and plain as day says, “Bubble?”

Scott even tries to get him into the spirit by showing him what a “poop face” looks like and grunting for him. His efforts are noble and hilarious at the same time, although I did tell him in the hotel that he was singlehandedly going to make potty training Kendall 10 times harder after this exchange:

Me:  ”Ooh, I think Kendall has a dirty diaper. That stinks! Kendall, did you go poopy?”

Kendall: “No”

Scott: “Uhh.. no, that was me. Sorry.”

::a few minutes pass::

Me: “Damn, Scott. Did you fart again?”

Scott: “No. I swear.”

:: a diaper inspection proves this time Kendall is the culprit::

Me: “What the HELL? You two have the same foul smell coming from your ass. Is that genetic?”

This morning we pretty much had a repeat of “Christmas” morning. Kendall pooped, reached into his pants and undid his diaper, ran amok in the living room and dropped a turd right by the couch. It was a pretty raunchy diaper and I could see  more of it threatening to ooze out of his pants so I was faced with the dilemma of cleaning up the poop on the floor then or cleaning it up after I cleaned Kendall up. I foolishly opted to clean Kendall first. The dogs took care of the turd while I was gone. This was not the first time they’ve gone after such delicacies, but, to my knowledge, it IS the first time they succeeded in their quest.

Inspired by my best friend whose little boy is merely 6 weeks older than Kendall and already wearing “big boy undies” for most of the day with no accidents, I took Kendall to Target today and purchased his first package of briefs “just like daddy’s!”, except these have Elmo on them. I briefly wondered why they didn’t make grown men underwear with matching characters on them, thinking maybe that would make potty training even more “fun” for all involved. Then I realized how wrong that picture really was… on so many levels.

So we’ve got the “big boy undies”, the little potty, we’ve even got the Elmo Potty book (a fantabulous Christmas gift from the grandparents).  I *think* we even have a little bit of “interest” in the whole ordeal, or at least interest in not having shit stuck to his ass. I know it may seem early to some, but I’m going to run with it for now. January is a dreadful month anyway, and we’ll most like be stuck inside most of the time. Might as well take advantage, right? My friend has invited me to go through hell week with her as she employs what she calls the “naked bootie” method with her son. I’m game. I’m also open to any other suggestions you marvelous readers of mine might have. So spill it.

Kendall is 20 months old

Photobucket