Words

We're just trucking along this week, getting ready for the next cycle week (next week, assuming all the labs are alright).  Dave has labs tomorrow, so tomorrow I'll write a brief update on those to keep everyone informed.  He has been ever so graciously giving me ideas on things to cook for Christmas Eve .... the list is ever-growing.

So let me tell you a little about what's been going on with MY side of life!  Some words/phrases to describe me lately are:

Forgetful.
I'm having a really hard time actually remember to do chores.  Like the dishes, and the trash, and the laundry, and the litter box...and even remembering to turn off the Christmas lights in the morning.  It's a battle that I'm seriously struggling with.  I also think I forgot to pay a bill...but I'm not sure which one.

Good Samaritan.
I've been "appointed" as the go-between for one of our co-workers in need at work.  He and his family have been spending a lot of time at the hospital while their 3 month old little girl went through open-heart surgery last week (a very invasive procedure that took over 15 hours, yikes :( .  I became the person to take their updates and give them to the rest of the company.  I'm also the person taking up collections and anything else to help this super awesome family.  It's really quite fulfilling and it's beautiful to see the love and support that our coworkers have for each other here...we really are a family here, through and through.  Plus...doing all of this for those lovely people helps keep my mind off other things...like, you know...cancer and stuff.

Cranky.
It's possible that lately I've been a little extra cranky.  I don't really have any good reason for it.  I think it's just because I get set in my plans...or my specific lack of plan...and then all of a sudden something changes that I'm not prepared for and it makes me angry.  I don't like schedule changes that aren't my idea.  I mean, I REALLY don't like them.

Cold.
Today...today my toddler learned how to lock doors.  She learned how to lock doors with me outside.  She learned how to lock doors with me outside and her inside.  Yes, my super awesome three year old locked me out of the house today.  It was an accident...she wanted to come outside with me (Sophie is being particularly ridiculous lately and won't go poop without somebody going outside with her, so I went outside).  She tried to turn the handle, but ended up locking the little lock instead.  Then when she couldn't get the handle turned, she found the deadbolt and turned that, thinking it would help her get outside.  So there I am...640 in the morning....it's dark, cold, and I'm locked out of my own house and my child is crying at the door just inside because she's not outside with me and she can't get the door open.  I managed to stay calm the entire time and, after 10 minutes of coaxing and consoling (and of course, she had to take a drink break), she finally got that door unlocked.  We then proceeded to have a lesson on the parts of the door that she should use and Dave and I decided that maybe we ought to have a couple hide-a-keys now....just in case!

Stressed.
So Christmas is coming up....FAST! I still have about half of my shopping to do, ALL of my wrapping, last minute menu changes, cooking, sugar cookie baking, cleaning, and preparing for the next chemo week.  And I'm ready for this year to be over.  My brother and sister-in-law were in a bad accident over the weekend and I just hate it.  I don't like when people I love get hurt and there's nothing I can do to fix it.  I just can't stand it.  2014 has not been kind to our family and I'm done. Just plain done.

So there it is.  We'll talk briefly tomorrow about Dave's labs.  Till then...

Fab Friday Five

Scratch that... Fab Friday four!

It's been quite the week.  I feel like I've been super busy and have had very little time to just....be.  Dave is feeling better this week.  He went back to work yesterday instead of his normal Wednesday.  He felt that he really just needed another day...and that is A-O-K.  He came to playdate with me on Wednesday and had a blast...he ate well and got to converse with other adults.  I was reluctant to pick him up simply because stopping at my house before going to playdate is NOT on the way...but I'm glad I did and I'm glad he enjoyed himself.  Last night he noticed that the etoposide rash is already back.  We still don't know what to do for relief for him.

Aria has been a special breed of awful this week.  When my parents dropped her off on Sunday evening, they told me how great she was all weekend for them.  As soon as they left, she transformed into the toddler from hell.  The hell has continued all week long.  All in the same day, she hit one of her little friends at school, lied to me about said hitting, and then blatantly disobeyed me and scratched in the dirt after I had just told her not to.  She lost her iPad for two days for that little stunt. The very next day at playdate, she did not eat her dinner, then screamed and whined about how hungry she was as we were getting ready to leave.  She kept touching the ornaments on the tree and, when told not to touch, she responded with "But I wasn't touching, I was just looking."  So again, another lie. Afterwards, when asking why she was being so bad, she simply replied with "I'm tired!!"  So Dave put a set of new rules in place explaining to her that "If you're too tired to behave, then you must need to go to bed earlier."

Ordinarily we come home from school, she gets on her iPad, she eats dinner (maybe), she watches more iPad, then its up to bed around 8/830....with stalling techniques that last until 930/10 some days.  The new rules:  On school days, no iPad. Period.  We will come home from school, go right upstairs and get a bath and some jam jams, then we'll come back downstairs....have dinner, do some artsy fartsy craft things, then up to bed at 7.  She may have her iPad on the weekends, but that's it.

There's only one problem with these rules...it obligates me to do artsy fartsy craft time with my toddler EVERY night.  Awesome.  Don't get me wrong, I like to do these things with Aria.  But on a Saturday....not at 5:00 on a Tuesday after I've worked all day and I'm exhausted.  It also forced me to go to Hobby Lobby and spend an unnecessary amount of money on craft supplies.  I did need more paint, though....so the trip was not wasted :)

Onto the fun stuff!

(Aria uses tools to help fix cars with Papa...while wearing dresses)

So there's this blog that I follow called Mother Blogger (read it >> here).  She was inactive for quite a while, but she's super funny and quite...real.  I can't stand reading blogs written by happy-go-lucky people who only write down the niceties and skip over all the real, nitty-gritty details of life.  Everything isn't all flowers and rainbows and sunshine....sometimes the rainbows are dark and grey and with a big ol' pile of poop at the end rather than a pot of gold.  THAT'S real life.  Anyway...her latest entry is about gender stereotypes and how they start so young.  I completely agree with her post.  There is NO reason why a boy can't play with dolls and why a girl can't play with tools and a dump truck.  Aria has Hot Wheels, toy airplanes, tools (complete with tool belt and safety goggles), a dump truck, a tractor, and Caterpillar (CAT) yellow construction vehicle toys (an excavator, a bull dozer, and something else).  She also plays with Doc McStuffins, baby dolls, play jewelry, and she likes to wear skirts.  Boys can do exactly that same thing.  They can play with pink doctor kits and pretend kitchen sets and color with the purple crayon all they want.  To teach your child to follow their respective gender stereotype is to further the problem.  Maybe some men beat their wives and children because as kids they weren't exposed to stuffed animals that needed to be loved on.  Maybe some men come home from work expecting dinner to be on the table because they never got the opportunity to pretend to cook a meal for their mommy.  Even Dave tends to make comments about how he wants to have a boy to go camping and fishing and play catch with....I have to remind him that Aria can do all of those things.  He knows she can, and is more than excited to do all those things...but the comment still comes out now and then.  My child wears dresses and skirts and then proceeds to put her tool belt on, fill it with tools, and set off to find something to "fix".  She's secure in her role as a human being...and I hope she stays that way.

(The Professional Chef, 9th edition,  The Culinary Institute of America >> buy at Amazon)

Because we're too lazy to shop for each other, Dave and I ordered our own Christmas presents.  Dave spent a certain amount of money on all of his stuff and I was supposed to spend just as much (really, he told me to spend more because he'd never be able to give me enough to make up for these last few months....RIGHT!!) Anyway.  As I'm SUPER interested in really learning how to cook, my Christmas present to myself is a culinary textbook from the Culinary Institute of America.  It's going to teach me so many things...how to properly use my knives...how to properly saute...how to make a pan sauce...how to do EVERYTHING.  It's 1,000 pages of awesome!  I'm super excited about it! I'm always looking at recipes and I get nervous to try them because they involve a technique I have no idea how to do, or too many steps and I feel overwhelmed.  And I certainly can't afford to quit my job and go to culinary school...so I'm going to teach myself the best that I can.  For my birthday, I'm planning on getting the updated version of the baking textbook (also by CIA).  

2015 is going to be a GREAT cooking year!

(Dark Places - Gillian Flynn >> buy at Amazon)

So I read (well, listened via Audible) this book Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  Now it's a movie...and the entire story just continues to blow me away!  It was so...thrilling!  So I went to my trusty Amazon and looked for what else Gillian Flynn wrote and proceeded to add both her other books (Sharp Objects  //  Dark Places) to my "want to read" list.  I just recently finished listening to Sharp Objects.  That book felt like it dragged on, but I was pleasantly surprised at the end to find out who had done the killing of the two little girls in the small Missouri town.  I'm currently reading Dark Places (and I'm less than 100 pages from the end) and I'm still unsure as to who did it!  The story is about a girl who, at a very tender age of 8 or so, tells the courts that her brother murdered her entire family at 2:05 AM on the night of January 3, 1985.  The girl, all grown up now, is a little nutty...she's a bit of a recluse and has very little money to call her own.  A group of people obsessed with murders finds her and convinces her to REALLY look at that case from so many years ago...and they'll pay her for her investigations.  The story is told by 3 narrators:  Libby (the girl, now all grown up), Patty (the mother) and Ben (Libby's murderous brother).  Libby's story is told in the present, Patty and Ben's story is told in the past.  In the story, I'm currently up to midnight on January 3rd.  I can't wait to finish the book and find out ... who really did the killing of the 'Day' family?  It's my "work" book, so I only read it at work during lunch time (those who know me know that I'm regularly reading 3-5 books at a time) and boy do I look forward to lunch every day and I dread when it ends every day.  Check out these books....seriously, read them...they're pretty great!  Though, I'm not going to lie, Gone Girl is the best of the three.

(I'm currently reading Dark Places at work at lunchtime; I'm listening to Little Women whenever I'm in the car because it's a good Christmas story and I just love the Winona Ryder version of the movie; I'm re-reading the Fifty Shades trilogy so I can be refreshed for the movie in February; and lastly I'm reading the 2nd Harry Potter book during Aria's bath time because I've never read the HP series.)

(not my own image)

This elf that I have to remember to move every night is going to be the bane of my existence.  Although....she comes in pretty handy when Aria is being naughty and I can remind her "Aria...don't forget that Twinkle is watching and is going to tell Santa everything you did today."  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  And what man at the Elf factory decided that this little guy's hands ought to be sewn together.  That's just stupid.  I gotta remember to cut that damn thread so that I can put her in some better places.  Today she's hanging on the blinds...like she got caught sneaking back in the house.  Aria said "That silly elf!"

That's it folks. It's late, I just took a sinus pill that's making me VERY sleepy, and I'm officially an old fuddy duddy who is in bed by 10 on a Friday night. Judge me all you want, I don't care!

The Taming of the Bird

(Wow, I've written several entries about poultry...)

Alright y'all...I made another batch of matzo ball soup yesterday (without the matzo balls, at my husbands approval...thanks honey) ALL BY MYSELF!  I handled that damn chicken like a boss!!  I was elbows deep in that sucker getting it good and rinsed out, and then ripped it to shreds at the end.  And FYI:  there WERE little bones floating all in the soup, as I had feared.  Itty bitty little rib bones...so many of them...yuck!  I think the most disgusting part about picking the chicken out of the soup was the cartilage areas and the spine.  I don't know why, but they were disgusting.

Dave had quite a remarkable weekend!  On Saturday he came downstairs for several hours and even went outside for a little while my dad was putting up the Christmas lights. He had a voracious appetite most of the weekend and ended up eating things such as pizza and turkey sandwiches along with the rest of the chicken soup and the soup my friend Michelle had brought him last time.  He's drinking a TON of fluids (3/4 water + 1/4 gatorade) and hasn't really been too nauseous.  He spent all day downstairs with me yesterday and was in very good spirits.  He did notice that the bone pain from his shot was quite a bit more noticeable this time...he said it feels like a really bad case of the flu or like he spent all day working out.  He's at home today and I suspect that he'll have a pretty good day.

All in all....a pretty great weekend!

And today....on December 1, it's supposed to be 72°.  Go home December, you're drunk!