18 Weeks

I'm sitting at the computer with a hot cup of coffee. Let me repeat that. My coffee is hot. And I'm sitting while drinking it. This is worth savoring. Ok, so I'm supposed to be doing an online training thing for one of my new jobs right now. I'll get back to that in a minute. But I'm so accustomed to living with an interruption every 90 seconds that I can't really focus for longer than that any more.

In honor of my reduced attention span, I'll give you a short attention span update of life here.

I'm now 18 weeks along with Baby #4. (God help us all.) I'm still trying to dig out from the 16 weeks of nausea and exhaustion. This is why I'm doing online training today. It was due weeks ago. I have such a long backlog of stuff to do...

I'm addicted to Oreos. Obsessively addicted to Oreos. Can't eat enough Oreos. With HurricaneDebbie, I was addicted to Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls. I guess this baby's nickname will be Oreo? A co-worker is pregnant with her first, with a due date within a week of mine. The other day she lamented, "Joy, I'm vegan. I do yoga 6 times a week. Or at least I used to. All I've done for the last few months is lie on the couch and eat pizza and burgers. I can't understand it!" Yup, welcome to motherhood. I'm going to chase my Oreos down with some vitamins and not worry a thing about it. As with most things with kids, it's just a phase. And I'm going to enjoy every single minute of it.

We get regular deliveries of hand-me-downs from my friend Kathy at church. Her daughter is a few years older than HeyMama, and she doesn't really like to wear dresses. So that means that her dresses are practically (or actually) brand new when we get them. It's like Christmas every time Kathy brings a bag to church. We switched over clothes for the season earlier this week, and got to pull out some of the clothes for the first time. There was great rejoicing in the household. HeyMama was trying on outfits for school, and brought in a pair of dance leggings to me. "What size are these? They're a little funny." I explained what they were, and said, "I think they'd be fine under your skirt in this weather. But if you don't like them, they should fit MeToo." She thought for a minute, and said, "I'll give them to her. She's just not as into fashion as I am." Apparently I have a fashionista on my hands. I should have taken a picture of her outfit. It did involve a sequined top, a tulle skirt, and her new multi-hued sneakers.

Now that the weather's cooler, I revived my sourdough starter and did some baking this week. I made my first loaf of cinnamon cranberry nut sourdough, which we all love for breakfast. My homemade breads are pretty dense, and toast more slowly than store bought breads. HeyMama was standing by the toaster oven, chatting while I packed my lunch and did things to get ready for the day. I asked her "How does the toast look?" She looked into the toaster oven. "It looks pretty comfortable."

HurricaneDebbie. What can we say about her? Our summer nanny came to HeyMama's 7th birthday party and said, "I hope to live to see the day HurricaneDebbie rules the world." That child is certainly training for something... Not sure if she'll be President or a dictator, but she's certainly not going to take life lying down. Her daycare teacher asked when we plan to have her potty trained. Oh yeah. I should get on that, huh? She's been doing really well at daycare. But follow-through at home? Poor 3rd kid... We set a goal for Undies in the New Year. So I pulled them out last night and let her try them on throughout dinner so that I could monitor her very closely. She did really well! We had to leave the table for a bathroom trip, but everyone was excited about the undies. And HurricaneDebbie had no intentions of taking them off. At all. BestestHusband had the task of getting her ready for bed. I heard a great deal of screaming as I cleaned up dinner. In the end, she wore a diaper to bed. With undies over it. Under jammies, like her big sisters. I call it a win-win. I'm just excited that she's excited. I have no spare excitement when it comes to potty training.

MeToo. My impish and delightful middle child has her head in the clouds. You never know what question she'll ask next. Stars. Angels. Snakes. Flags. Fairies. She's always thinking hard about something. She loves piano lessons, and has been experimenting with improv. Yes, she's still 5. Her creativity is boundless, and her ability for sentence construction just can't keep up with the ideas in her head. So sometimes she says some pretty funny things. Without trying to. It's really hard not to laugh... But her current way of expressing her frustration with things usually sounds something like, "I wish I had a fairy who was a clothes-put-away fairy. Then I'd never have to put my clothes away ever again!" Me too, honey, me too. She loves to read the Rainbow Fairies book series. It has a pretty comprehensive assortment of specialist fairies. But MeToo has come up with quite a few fairies that the book series doesn't cover.

I've switched over to herbal tea. It's still delightful to drink it warm, even without getting a buzz. Time to get more work done. In 90 second snatches, of course.

Have a great day!