guest post: 10 Things I Think I Thought I Thunk

Since I'm spending most of my days 1) throwing up, 2) trying not to throw up, or 3) asleep so I'm not throwing, the husband is blogging for me today. I'm sorry for unleashing him on you yet again. ~Alicia

Hi everybody, the husband here again, blogging again as the wife tries not to throw up (and often fails). Failing having anything interesting to talk about (maybe next time), I thought I would share a few of the random items that bounce within my head.

So, with apologies to my wife, here’s my “10 Things I Think I Thought I Thunk.”

Stop laughing. Thunk is a word. Just like Squozen. After you squeeze something, it is squozen. Just sayin’.

Buckle up people, here we go!

1. – I’m finding it far too amusing that the best shows we’re watching right now are cartoons. I’m not sure what that says about us or the current state of television, but I feel like it’s been this way for a while now.

Transformers Prime, Bob’s Burgers, the new Turtles. All quality. What else are we going to watch - Honey Boo Boo?

Heck, even some of Grayson’s shows beat the pants off of 95% of the drivel on TV right now. I’ll take Phineas and Ferb over just about every network’s prime-time line up any day.

2. – My child falls for the Bugs Bunny argument trick. I’m not sure if I’m proud or sad.

Me: “Come here.”

G: “No.”

Me: “Yes.”

G: “No.”

Me: “Yes.”

G: “No.”

Me: “No.”

G: *pause* *nods enthusiastically* *comes over*

I can’t wait until he’s older and we can have the “Wabbit season / Duck season” debate.

3. – It’s about time that someone else in our household gets an introduction. Meet Teddy:

Teddy is G’s best friend. Teddy joined our family on G’s 2^nd birthday and G loved him instantly, carrying him through the mall after we made the little bear. 

Teddy was G’s first bedtime companion, and still keeps him company every night. He’s never thrown him out and has often used him as a pillow… but who hasn’t used their best friend for a pillow from time to time, right?

Teddy is far from a security blanket, and G tends to largely ignore him (and all his stuffed animals, to be fair) unless he’s actively playing a game with them, but still, he’s the best friend that the boy’s got.

Teddy is also occasionally a projectile. But, again… who hasn’t occasionally chucked their friend at their parents? 

Behold the cuteness!

4. – Toodee stares at me every day. Toodee, from Yo Gabba Gabba. Yup, that Toodee. Every day I open the shower curtain and BAM.

It’s like some sort of weird Hitchcock movie in reverse. Staring children’s stars in giant costumes. Next one is Barney in reverse “Rear Window,” where Barney sings as he slowly crawls back home from a neighbor’s house and gets a cast taken off.

I don’t really know where I was going with that. Pretend it was funny.

END TANGENT

So there Toodee is, in the shower, every day for over a year now. But hey, at least that one’s at eye level. The other Toodee is at a very unfortunate level, as you can tell by her shocked expression.

 

5. – Serious alert. 

I hate the fact that I haven’t really enjoyed us being pregnant since baby 2 (our first loss). I hate that I feel like I’m just waiting for things to go wrong again. I hate that I did that with baby 3, and then we lost it. I wish I could enjoy every minute, every nauseous, vomity, tiring minute. 

I try to enjoy it when I can. When she complains about feeling horrible, I give sympathy while also being extremely happy at the nice strong symptoms. I try to gently remind her (and myself) that all her problems are because BABY, but that only goes so far.

Oop, and I’m being sent out for a McDonald’s double cheeseburger (pickles only) at 11pm. Be right back.

…

6. – I’m back. Ok, so on a less serious note, I write most of this post as I watch a football game. The Tennessee Titans are miserable this year. Amazingly, I don’t really care, and I watch every game to the end. People ask me how I can do that, and I just respond with the fact that I’m also a Cubs fan… so I’m completely used to rooting for losing teams. 

And drinking. Drinking during the games helps quite a lot too. 

(the Titans went on to win, which only made me all the happier)

7. – Every once in a while I wonder if I’m confusing my child because I tend to do voices and accents when I read to him. Everyone in The Hobbit talks in an English or Scottish accent (Hobbits and wizards = English, Dwarves = Scottish. Really. I shouldn’t even have to explain this to people). Tom O’Malley (the alley cat in Disney’s “Aristocats’) talks in an Irish accent (because: O’Malley). Everyone in Anastasia talks with Russian ones, for some reason Tinker Bell is Swedish… you get the point. 

I can’t help it. I like to do voices. Someday he’ll really appreciate it. Or beg me to stop. Either way.

8. – Every night during my goodnights to G I paraphrase ‘Blazing Saddles.’ Some day he’ll realize this. Someday I hope it will amuse him as much as it amuses me. Some day he’ll properly squeak back at me, and I will die from pride. 

9. – It’s starting to seem like every day G is saying (ok, telling) a new word. Today we were driving to the mall (one of his favorite places because of the play area). As it came into view, G pointed with excitement and yelled, “Mall! Mall!” It’s more than kinda awesome.  

10. – I feel like I haven’t been funny enough in this post. So here’s my absolute favorite joke ever:

A small town in the middle of nowhere is in crisis. It seems that whenever anyone enters a local flower shop, they never come back out. Suspicion is that the pair of monks that run the shop are killing all their customers.

The police chief is frazzled, and is about to quit his job when a man walks into his office.

“Chief,” says the man, “I am here to help.”

“And just who the hell are you?” asks the chief.

“My name is Hugh, and I will put an end to this town’s nightmare.”

“We’ve lost over a dozen police and an entire SWAT team, what makes you think you’ll fare any differently?” asks the chief.

“Chief, you’ll just have to trust me,” replies Hugh, “I can handle these monks.”

For some reason the chief believes the man, and he takes him to the flower shop immediately. Hugh takes a long look and strides purposely towards the shop. The police beg him to stop, but he waves them off, and with a final wink, he pushes open the door and disappears inside.

Minutes pass and the police get worried, but finally the door swings open again and out steps Hugh, carrying the unconscious bodies of the two monks.

Hugh drops them at the chief’s feet, and without a word, he walks away… never to be heard from again.

The moral of this story?

Only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

Yup. Ending it with a pun. A grand pun. A glorious pun.

I’m amazed that my wife let me post it.

my trip to Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in pictures

1. Soooo hard to leave this kid behind.
2. But I know he's in good hands with my Mum.
3. And then we hit the road at 6:30am. Time for our first baby-free weekend!


4. Almost 4 hours later, we're on a tram! Hold on! Old dude is crackin' jokes but please just get us there safely, m'kay?
5. Time for a quick shot of the two of us. Aw.
6. And we made it into the park!


7. The entrance to the eagle.
8. The eagle ride at Dollywood is %&^$^# awesome. You feel like you're flying. And about to die. But mostly flying. The wooden roller coaster was mostly "I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die," the tornado was all "I can't see because I'm dizzy G force omg," the mining roller coaster was so cool we rode it again almost immediately, and the indoor only other mining ride was like the beginning of a horror movie where the ride breaks down and there's fire everywhere and screaming, lots of screaming.


9. It stormed on us both days, causing us to leave. But we spent half a day at Dollywood plus most of a second day. Under the train tracks? Not a great place to wait out a thunderstorm.
10. The mostly empty theater was better.
11. A duck.


12. The hot tub at our cabin rocked the socks off my sore feet. I spent every night here. I should've spent every day, too.
13. The view off our balcony. We had a few neighbors but our cabin was one of the most secluded around. I wanted to stay in that rocking chair forever.
14. A tunnel through the Smokies. Honk honk!


15. When we got rained out the first day, we headed to Ripley's Seaquarium. It was cool. This is Dave is the tunnel o' fish. Seeing sharks from upside down = sweetness.
16. Atreyu the penguin.
17. I'm also in a fish tunnel! I look excited!



18: Jellyfish = among the coolest things at the aquarium.
19: Another jellyfish.
20: A sharkface only a sharkmama could love.
21: Sleeping seahorse.


22: Convinced my heights-phobic husband to go on the sky lift with me.
23: On the way up!
24: Aw. <3


25: At the top. Most of Gatlinburg down below.
26: On the way down. Way scarier!
27: Another view from the top. Just gorgeous.


28: Another view from the top. Gotta love the Smoky Mountains.
29: Ate here. I was starving, so it was tasty. Margaritas weren't as good as our local Casa Fiesta, though.
30: 1977 Bumblebee, actually used in the first Transformers movie! I made Dave drive back to Gatlinburg on our last day when I saw it was there in a car museum. Luckily, we didn't even have to pay to see it. I gave him a pat.


31: I LOVE PUTT PUTT.
32: A shot right before my first of two holes in one.
33: Yeah, we had to go through these clouds to go home. The hours of rain weren't fun.

Also:

• Huge amounts of fudge.
• A giant blister on the bottom of my foot. Ow.
• Holding a pregnant woman's four-year-old while she held her sleeping two-year-old on the Dollywood tram - the hubs held all of her stuff. It was pouring and the tram was packed. The four-year-old dealt well with me holding him, though he kept giving me half-awake "who the hell are you?" looks.
• Huge amounts of food. And alcohol.
• A shower with two separate shower heads. Awesome.
• Every picture on every roller coaster looked the same. Me: eyes closed, mouth wide open while I'm screaming. Hubs: relaxed and smiling as though he was going in for a headshot.
• Having my son run across the room to fly into my arms. Coming home is as fantastic as going away.

ups and downs at the zoo

This zoo day from yesterday did not end well.

But before I get to that, lemme share some cute photos of my kid.

He loves this pond. He almost didn't want to leave this spot.

I'm afraid I'm gonna have to cut his hair soon. sob. It's a mop though and I can't tame it anymore.

This is also one of his favorite places in the zoo. This kid is hesitant to get into water but boy does he love looking at it.

After I took the above photos, I glanced over at Dave who was sitting on the rock near the stroller. His head was in his hands. I walked over to him and his face was so pale, his lips bloodless. Soon, he started to shiver all over. He didn't feel hot yet but I just knew he would start running a fever any moment. He said he felt like throwing up, but when we tried to walk out of the zoo, he started to lose his vision and hearing, signs that he was about to faint.

I told him to sit down near the bathrooms in the sun while I went with G to find a zoo attendant for help. Eventually, a cart pulled with with a stretcher attached to it - I guess what they use to drive out anyone who gets injured in the park. It had a seat too. They strapped Dave into it and cranked him onto the back of the truck.

Don't think I'm heartless, okay, for taking this pic. Dave told me too! He's all huddled like that because he was in the shade and shivering like crazy.

There are all these back ways of getting out of the zoo, so they shuttled us out a secret exit and I drove us home. Soon after that, Dave started running a high fever and it stayed 102-103 well into the night. We were afraid at one point that we'd have to go to the hospital but a lukewarm bath helped bring it down. His fever broke sometime during the night and his temperature has been steady at 98.6-99.6 today, thank goodness.

We took a good look at his throat and sure enough, there were the tell-tale lesions. Dave has caught Grayson's hand, foot, mouth disease. I was exposed to HFM when I was a kid because my brother got it from daycare, but apparently Dave has never been. Sigh.

I've spent the past two days holding down the fort while Dave sleeps it off and praying I'm actually immune. I won't get my test results back until Wednesday, so I'm nervously feeling my head every five minutes and checking my throat for bumps. I'm not worried about the bumps and sore throat and the aches, but the fever terrifies me. I know a fever, especially in the first trimester, can be fatal for a developing fetus or cause terrible birth defects.

G is almost back to normal with just some leftover red spots on his toes. I'm sure Dave will sprout spots on his hands and feet soon but he would be back to normal by the end of the week in time for G's second birthday party. My baby turns two tomorrow!

Anyway, it was cool to see behind the scenes at the zoo. But getting sick to receive the VIP treatment wasn't worth it!

guest blog: the hubs and insomnia

The hubs guest blogs again! This time, about his fight with insomnia. ~Alicia

Oh sleep, thou fragile and oft unobtainable thing.

So Grayson has been having some fun times with his sleep lately. Over the weekend he decided to be awake for 2-3 hours each night in the middle of the night, then suddenly he wanted comfort to fall asleep (but then slept through the night)… so with all of that fun going on, I thought I’d talk about sleep for a little bit here.

I’ve been an insomniac for most of my life. Luckily I’ve had small breaks throughout ( I’ve had as much as almost a year without it at times), though normally I don’t get more than a week’s reprieve before it comes back to visit for a while.

The oddest thing about it was that I thought I was normal (ok, in the sleep department… definitely not in other departments). I would watch TV and scoff at the stupidity of people simply falling asleep as they hit the pillow (I still kind of do, especially in our newest favorite show Awake). I chalked it up to director’s necessity. You can’t really show someone tossing and turning for an hour… not exactly riveting (though perhaps better than Jersey Shore)… It was actually only at the end of my teenage years (when I gained college roommates) that I learned that people actually WERE capable of falling asleep quickly… like in 10 minutes… unlike me.

For my youngest years, until I was 25 or so, it literally took me at least an hour to fall asleep, if not two. I’m sure now that part of it was due to my ADD (which I was diagnosed as a late teen… more on my broken brain in a further guest blog, perhaps). My brain simply would not shut off, and more to the point it could not even settle on one thing for more than a minute or two. My thoughts would bounce around like a caffeinated monkey in a padded room, leaving me largely unable to sleep. I learned to counter this by listening to books on tape at night. It gave me something to focus on, and helped. With that I rarely was up longer than an hour and would usually fall asleep in about 45 minutes. The headphones were uncomfortable, though.

This all means that my body is astoundingly used to functioning on 5-6 hours of sleep.

Amazingly, my first year with Alicia was probably the best I’ve ever had, sleep-wise. During that time I suffered almost no effects, but it has slowly crept back over the years. I’m currently running at about 30 minutes.

So, what are the effects of a baby on an insomniac?

When G was a newborn, it was both extremely tough and amazingly easy. On the bad nights, G would wake up every 2-3 hours to eat… eat for 20 minutes, go back to sleep. Then I’d take another 30-40 minutes to fall asleep, only to be woken up again far too early. On the flip side, a lifetime lacking sleep left me much better off during the days than my poor wife. Five hours of sleep, even broken up, was okay with me most of the time… Lis, not so much.

Then G went through a period of waking up at 3am or so, and simply refusing to go to sleep without mass amounts of rocking. This was given to him in the form of Dad (me) with a foot on a bouncy chair for an hour or so until he was asleep enough to be transferred back into his crib. Sometimes I simply did it until morning. I didn’t mind too much. I was honestly kind of used to just getting up for an hour or two in the middle of the night and doing things. I believe it was during this time that I finally managed my 100% completion of Final Fantasy X. Go me.

It wasn’t all beneficial… if you can call any of that actually beneficial. That’s like being touched with a cattle prod and saying “no, no, that’s fine… I’m used to being electrocuted.” No matter how many times it happens, it’s never a good thing. I think the worst part was the last month or so that G slept in our room. He slept in a little crib in our room until he turned 4 months, and it was during that last month or so that he started to not like little noises in the night. This was problematic to a guy that shifts around a lot while trying to fall asleep. It made me very self-conscious, and made it even harder on me to get back to sleep after his wakeups.

My shifting still annoys the crap out of the wife, but she falls asleep in about 5-10 minutes these days. I can usually hold still enough for that long for her to get to sleep, and then I can go about my horrible nights without bothering her unless I’m going crazy. I change positions about once every 1-5 minutes, I’ve figured out. That can drive a co-sleeper nuts, I’m sure. The wife occasional gets woken up and pokes me or mummers something in a “settle down or I hurt you” kinda way.

As I stated, I’m at about 30 minutes these days… which is pretty good. Usually an hour tops, with rare nights that go on so long that I’ll get up and go do something else, for both our sakes. I don’t know what to credit with the decent time span (YES, 30-60 minutes is a decent time span, ye gods yes). I feel like my ADD is worse right now than it’s ever been, but I feel like my mental outlook is at its best. I love my life right now (even with all the recent horribleness included), and it makes being at peace and serene quite easy most days. I go to bed most nights happy and madly in love with both wife and child, and that seems to be enough. After all, what more is there in life?

Okay, okay, I don’t have any of my world-famous badly photoshopped G pics here. Last time I blogged, I mentioned my fear of G tripped while running at the zoo and smashing his face into the concrete so badly he would resemble a Batman villain. So here you go: the new Batman villain:

Zoo Face!

guest post: my husband is on crack

The husband blogs! Again! I claim no responsibility for this. Truly. - Alicia


While the wife is drowning in tests to grade (seriously, she’s in the bathtub covered in tests, gasping for air – she’s weird like that), I thought I’d throw my thoughts around and see if they bounce.
I have no clue what that means either.

So the theme this month is "play"… hmmm… play…

Webster’s dictionary defines “play” as “amorous flirtation.” That can’t be right. Seems an odd theme for a blog month. Could be interesting, I suppose… How YOU doin'?

Oh wait… that’s just one given definition. Ok. “Play.” So my favorite play is probably Macbeth. I can just see Grayson up on stage, giving the famous soliloquy, “Is this a dagger I see before me?”

Cue badly photoshopped picture!

Wait… no… that can’t be it either.

Ok, next definition: “The spontaneous activity of children.” Yeah, that sounds about right. Spontaneous is a much nicer word than “bat-shit crazy.”

Grayson is full of energy. Many mornings I take G to the zoo, and I tend to see only the back of his head for a vast majority of our time there… he speeds off like he’s training for the 100-yard dash.

I used to be able to keep up with him just walking at a good pace, but now I actually have to jog. It’s pretty great, but he leaves knots in my stomach bolting around at such break-neck speeds. They don’t call it “break-neck speed” for nothin’… Going to fall and end up with asphalt in his face, that one. Maybe after that he’ll become some kind of Batman villain… “Zoo-Face” or something.

Totally need a badly shopped Batman picture here, but it’s getting late. Next time.

Anyway, I considered going into G’s favorite playtime activities… but not only would that make this one heck of a a long post, but I certainly don’t want to use up all the interesting stuff while my poor wife still has to fill a month with super-happy-play posts.

I concede that I said absolutely nothing in this blog post… So I will simply conclude with this:
My son hates ice cream, bacon, and peanut butter. I’m raising a monster.

And now a random picture just for the hell of it:

Goodnight, Cleveland!