Flying solo

Today is a momentous occasion. Not only am I getting a 5-day vacation from my kiddos (I love my husband and sisters for their promised babysitting services), but I am taking my first flight without kids in 6 years! You know what that means? That means I could totally pack in 30 minutes, with plenty of room to spare in my carry-on luggage. (I'm not checking anything!!! Not even one single carseat for Southwest Airlines to rip or lose.) This means I have ZERO Dora books, DVDs, diapers, wipes, fruit snacks, baggies of goldfish crackers, carseats, strollers, slings, toys and children's Tylenol. And I haven't even spent the last week offering prayers on behalf of my mental and emotional sanity and my kids' behavior and who my row partner will be and the person (sitting in front of me)'s desire to recline their seat into the child I'm holding on my lap for 3 hours.

This also means I will be bringing my own reading material (for the first time in 6 years), and I'm actually looking forward to the layover! I don't even care if I'm the last person allowed to board the plane. I plan on choosing the reddest beverage they offer, just because I won't have to worry about someone spilling it in my lap. I may fall asleep. I may stare out the window. I may just write a book. Imagine the possibilities. I've decided not to come back until Eliza's crib tent arrives, either.

And hopefully I'll be helpful to Mark's sister in Kansas, who's getting ready to move. But mostly I think we'll probably just stay up late talking and eating a disturbing quantity of baked goods.

For rent

Last week we started apartment hunting in Salt Lake. I liked it about as much as I like Eliza knowing how to climb out of her crib. And, like the crib issue, it’s going to take a while to solve.

Our first problem was that we set our budget too low. I naively thought there would be lots of people anxious to rent us a two-bedroom apartment with a fenced in backyard and patio and personal servants and built in pool for $600 a month. While that may have been true about a century ago, it was clearly not the case now.

Checking craigslist gave us a list of potential places to check out, and maps.google.com really helped out our search (like when we eliminated a “great” place from our list after noticing the close crop job on the picture hid one of the city's busiest streets running just alongside the house). Sometimes the title alone was enough to convince us. Like one that was listed as "Disgusting 2 bdrm apartment for rent." Lucky for us, it went on to spill all the disgusting details about the mold, management and neighborhood. (Why they were listing it at all, I don't know.) But there were some things that even the anti-privacy street view of Google Earth wasn't able to tell us. Let me indulge you in a quick recap. (And thank heavens for a portable DVD player and McDonald’s ice cream cones.)

Visit #1: Mark made an appointment to check out a place after work. He arrived, and found the next door managers were drunk (at 4:45pm). On his way out, he recognized the government-subsidized housing a few houses down, and was more than happy to leave that neighborhood for good when he noticed a man with his hand down his pants. Seeing as our two-year-old already has that trick figured out, I don't think we need any role models along that line. Suddenly $850 didn't seem like too much to pay for a good neighborhood.

Visit #4: We found a quiet little neighborhood close to Mark’s work that looked pretty potential. There was a grassy area between the two apartment buildings, and a garden area. Feeling hopeful, we were shown to the available apartment, just to find it occupied with the manager’s two cats. Sage (and Mark, of course) thought this was awesome. I’m not sure I want to live downstairs from the guy who keeps cats that he doesn’t like enough to want to stay in his own apartment. How long have they been living there? And what if they decide to move in with us? I can’t have a Napkins experience in my fragile pregnant state.

Visit #8: We took a tour of a cute little house that was nicely decorated and refinished. Until I checked out the bathroom, I was willing to put the words “little” and “cute” together in describing this house. What I saw, in the bathroom, was a “little” and “terrible” passageway through which my 6-month-pregnant body would have to shimmy (sideways) to pass the sink and shower in order to reach the toilet. And you know the affinity we pregnant women have for using the bathroom. Well, I just couldn’t get too excited about having to hold my stomach up and slide it along the sink countertop to be able to reach the throne twice a night and sixteen times a day for the next 4 months.

Visit #9: Nice house with attractive backyard. Big open canal of running water next to driveway. Good bye.

Visit #12: Is it unfair to judge a neighborhood by the number of lawns that are mowed? If so, I don’t know that a 50% stat is very encouraging. Mark and I debated whether it was fair to say that people who don’t take care of their lawns probably aren’t going to be very interested in promoting neighborhood beauty, safety, and goodwill. And I can’t imagine anyone bringing us homemade bread or extra home grown foot-long zucchinis to welcome us to that neighborhood. Forget it, then.

Visit #13: We should have known this was going to be a bust, being visit number thirteen and all. The roads got worse and worse as we entered the south side of Salt Lake proper. We bumped our way down a street that looked like an alley into a “secluded, park-like” area (their words, not mine). We weren’t able to make an appointment in advance, so Mark ran in to check out the public entryway of the apartment building. His grimace, upon returning to the car, confirmed my suspicion. “I thought I was in a third-world country.” Well, since we’ve both already lived in third world countries, we decided to leave that cultural experience for someone without kids who doesn’t mind whether or not the walls are painted or the kids are clothed or not when they run down the public hallway.

Following this delightful Saturday hunt, we decided that Mark commuting an hour each way to work may not be so terrible an option after all. But when we stopped to fill up our car with $45 of gas on the way home, we agreed to take a few more peeks at craigslist. In a week or so when we get the energy.

Lend me your earplugs

Friends, parents, lurkers, lend me your ears. And your sympathy, and your suggestions, and some dark chocolate if you have any.

I am desperate. A desperate housewife, if you will. (But without the infidelity and cleavage.)

Eliza climbed out of her crib yesterday. I always hoped my children would be advanced, but these prideful desires did NOT extend to their ability to exit the wonderful cage that is responsible for much of my sanity--their crib.

My overachieving two-year-old climbed out of her cage, I mean crib, after I put her down for a nap yesterday. I jumped a mile and almost wet my pants (darn pregnancy muscles) when she suddenly appeared beside me in the kitchen a few minutes later, looking very guilty but rather pleased with herself.

If the truth be told, for about thirty seconds, I was pleased with her, too. I took her back to her crib, and encouraged her to show me how she got out. This constituted the final happy thirty seconds I've had in the last twenty-four hours, as the truth quickly dawned on me: no more naps, and no more pre-11:00pm bedtimes for the little monkey. I am an idiot.

Due to the terrible sleep she got yesterday, Eliza went most of this morning without uttering a single phrase devoid of the introductory clause, "No, I no want ___"

After two hours of such delightful interaction, I was ready to slit my wrists. But, as a medically safer alternative, I chose to snarf the rest of the large bag of dark chocolate M+Ms that Mark bought on Saturday night. Nice. The perfect remedy for having a non-sleeping, eternally grumpy child: putting on ten pounds in a week. My OB's gonna love this move.

Please excuse me while I go feel sorry for myself and try to dig up some more chocolate, and wonder when the screaming 2-year-old in the bedroom is going to finally bite the dust. (We took out all the toys and tied the door shut...one of the advantages of never having replaced the missing doorknob. Also, we get to practice the limbo when we need to enter the bathroom...at least until I figure out how else to tie the bedroom door shut.)

Surely there must be some fellow suffering parents out there. Does anyone have any suggestions? And maybe some earplugs?

P.S.--Wall-E was cute. A little tree-huggerish for the likes of me, but cute. I'm always amazed at Pixar's ability to make strange things (like a beat-up robot) so endearing. But not endearing enough to make me want to buy this. Right now I'm saving my money for this or maybe just this.

A night at the movies

Tonight Mark and I are taking our brother-in-law (and my sister) to see Wall-E for his birthday. There are a few things I’m concerned about.

First, Wall-E appears to have received some less-than-glowing reviews. Here's one that Adam found online, written by an acclaimed movie critic whose experience is undeniable:

“wall-e was one of the worst movie i've seen in a long time.And I saw a couple movies in the past few days.And i've seen movies since I was born14 years ago. That's a lot of movies!!!” (1 star rating)

You can’t question fourteen years of experience, now, can you? I wonder if we should change our plans and rent “Stuart Little 2” instead. Because, of all the movie i’ve seen, I wouldn’t want this to be a bust, since it’s a birthday present and all.

Secondly, I’m concerned about what to do about treats for the movie. You can’t go without treats for the movie, but what with the price of movie tickets these days, not to mention the price of a few exploded corn kernels drenched in fat, I’m not sure we can afford to buy concessions—(I can guarantee my waistline can’t afford it right now.)

Speaking of waistlines, as I considered my movie treat dilemma, I had an embarrassing recollection of sneaking in treats to a movie many years ago. My family went all out in avoiding being ripped off, but still having adequate munchies. We made popcorn at home, repackaged bulk candy in smaller bags, and even filled up water bottles to sneak into the theater for the approximately annual event that going to a movie theater was for our big crowd.

This particular time, when I was somewhere around 8^th grade, we must not have had time to pop our own popcorn, because I was assigned to smuggle in two cans of Pringles. Where do you stash two cans of Pringles, you ask? Based on my stunning 8^th grade fashion, I had a pretty easy solution for temporarily hiding the cylindrical cans. I just held my pants out, and snuggled them in between my waist and my humungous jeans. Nope, I wasn’t pregnant with an expandable waistline, and I think by then I was out of the Lycra phase that plagued my elementary years. I just recall thinking that boys’ jeans were so much cooler than girls. Apparently I wasn’t too concerned with the size and fit, as much as the intended gender of the pants. No problem, for the Pringles, though. They fit easily in, and I waltzed into the theater, unnoticed.

Nowadays with my waist more than filling the pants I’ve got on, I don’t think I can pull off The Pringle Job. And since we’re not bringing our kids (thank you to my wonderful sisters, Suzy and Kim), we don’t have the leeway of bringing in a “diaper bag.” But, on the other hand, according to one fourteen-year-old's movie review, we might not be staying long at all. Not long enough to need treats, right?

I’ll keep you posted.

Nice and naughty on the potty

Being the generous parent that I am, I decided that Sage's old potty chair would make a great birthday present for Eliza last week. Eliza was thrilled at her one present from her loving parents.

Apparently it was an inspired gift, because today, while Mark was changing her diaper, Eliza escaped, no doubt chanting, "I'm nakies!" and rushed into the bathroom, where she made her first liquid deposit in the birthday chair while wearing her birthday suit. Who was that mocking our great 2-year-old present? Not laughing anymore, are you?

Mark brought her into my bedroom to share the good news. "Eliza did pee-pee's." I had no idea why he thought this was special, until I took a look at Eliza's face. She was beaming. Oh! In a very exaggerated questioning voice I asked, "Where did you do pee-pee's, Eliza?" And the proud two-year-old grabbed her bottom with both hands and exclaimed, "Right here!"

Even though we'd all just stuffed ourselves with family home evening brownies, Sage and I paraded Eliza around the kitchen, ending at the treat cupboard, where I produced the grand reward of four mini chocolate chips. Heaven for a two-year-old. The four-year-old assistant earned a few herself...as a bribe for future encouragement.

We're not killing the fatted calf or breaking out the undies quite yet, but I am going to stock up on mini chocolate chips and buy a year's supply of Lysol disinfecting spray next time I'm at Sam's Club.

And, in case you're feeling jealous of our success, and want to stop reading my blog because I'm such a bragger with such advanced children, and you're worried I'm going to start into how amazing their APGAR scores were, I should probably confess that my four-year-old got so mad at the public library today that she wet her pants. We've obviously got a lot of work ahead of us. On various issues. But at least we'll be well equipped with mini chocolate chips.

Birthday excess

Tonight as I tucked Sage in for bed, I asked her what the best part about her 4^th-birthday was. She thought for the briefest of moments and said, “Choosing people to say the prayers.” This is a little tradition my family always had on birthdays; today Mark followed suit and let Sage choose the two prayers that occurred after he got home. Apparently it was the hugest (and possibly only) highlight of the day. Were all the other traditional birthday activities unnecessary?

Like boating with her best friend, Connor? (This picture is of Sage watching the minutes tick away on the timer that I set for her marking the time she had to wait until she could go check and see if Connor and Addisyn were awake. We set the timer three times.)

And her joint birthday party with Eliza and friends?

And her presents? (Thanks Grandpa Williams and Amy/David!)

And her cake which Suzy cut into a heart shape, and helped her decorate with an 'S' in M+M's? (When Suzy turned her back on Sage and the sprinkles, and the cake mysteriously turned from white to red. Luckily the birthday girl didn't mind when we found Eliza licking it.)

Now that I understand better how a 4-year-old mind works, I am ready to make next July 1^st a day of total bliss for Sage. We’re skipping presents, parties, and cake, and I’m declaring an official day of prayer (hourly prayers, perhaps), in which Sage will be able to choose the prayer giver. Why complicate things?

P.S. Thanks for all the moral support about "Lily." I've posted this picture on the desktop in hopes of sending not-so-subliminal messages to Mark about the beauty of the name and its namesake.

Oops. I mean these ones.

Double X

Our little fetus decided to play at modesty today, and almost refused to disclose her gender. But, after much, much, much stomach prodding, the Cheerios stayed down (thankfully) and the little one gave up the fight and let us know she's a she!

Break out the pink.

A few of my goals for the remaining 20 weeks (ugh) of this pregnancy are:

1. To convince Eliza we're not naming the baby "George" or "Liza."

2. To decide on a name long before the baby's birth.

3. To definitely decide on a name before leaving the hospital.

4. To absolutely, positively decide on a name before 30 days after bringing "Female Williams" home from the hospital. [If I sound anal, it's because having to submit a formal name change for your 1-month old baby is really annoying. I guess sending "Female Williams" to face the kindergarten teasers would have been worse.]

5. To convince Mark that "Lily" is a GREAT name. Even if it does rhyme a tiny bit with Williams.

In utero rivalry

I committed a serious error when I posted this on my family's blog. Since (and before) then, I have been regularly bombarded with a barrage of somewhat goodnatured challenges and threats such as "Our baby's going to be bigger than yours" and "Our baby kicks more than yours" and "Our baby is going to beat yours up."

Actually the error came long before "The race is on" post. Unbeknownst to me, my gravest mistake occurred when I conceived a baby on the same day as my most competitive sister conceived her first baby. Krista is my most competitive sister, and probably the most competitive female I know. I've spent a lot of years shutting down many of her attempts to compete with me.

For those who don't know Krista, let me indulge you in an example. For family home evening, our parents occasionally treated us to ice cream cones from the ice cream counter at a nearby grocery store. Krista was a fast eater. Before we arrived home, she was often long done with her cone. As soon as the last lick of mint chocolate chip ice cream had been devoured, she'd pounce on me and say, "I'm a faster eater than you" and would likely demand payment for her genius in the form of a few licks of my cookies'n'cream cone.

The next time family home evening graced us with a trip to the ice cream counter, I would remember my "failure" from last time, and I'd devour my cone as quickly as possible, surely suffering from brain freeze and lack of enjoyment in the process. When the last bite was gone, I'd rush triumphantly to Krista to report my win, and there she'd be, carefully licking her cone, and savoring it in a very un-Krista-like way. She'd shake her head patronizingly at my empty napkin and say, "It's better to eat your ice cream slowly. I'm the going to be the last to finish of the whole family." Deflated, I would pout all the way home, without the benefit of a few victory licks from Krista's long-lasting cone. [Lest you think Krista actually won her own "slowest eater" contest, let me assure you that she didn't. Kim always held that title...how was Kim so patient? Krista didn't really care, though, as long as she beat me. Or Danielle.]

Now, babies aren't ice cream cones. But anyone that's ever been to a mother's group will know that comparison of children is inevitable! And when the babies are too young to do much that's brag-worthy, like cooing and gripping toys, mothers will still find grounds for competition on the basis of labor and delivery stories. [I am totally guilty of this...I admit it, I am irrationally proud of my labor stories. Because clearly, I had a lot to do with my body's involuntary responses.]

So, if someone can make a competition out of eating ice cream quickly (or slowly), that is NOT the best person to share a due date with. Or a delivery date. Or, at the very least, a common baby gender.

So, wish me luck. Tomorrow's my big ultrasound. In 12 hours, I'll know the extent of the competition. And since Krista's ultrasound was today (of course she was more than pleased to be first), and she's having a GIRL!, wish me luck. Cross your fingers for an XY Williams baby. Because then, maybe, Krista and I won't have to compare quite as much. That is, once I get over gloating how much faster my labor went than hers. And she gets over gloating how she gained 1/2 the weight I did. And then, maybe we'll go out to ice cream, for old time's sake. And then we'll see who wins.