Tuesday July 29th
Dad had to go back to work today, which was a real bummer but an evil necessity. Sam spent most of the morning sunbathing and eating (must be nice) while Grandma Janet and I cleaned up up the condo. We sorted through all of the tons of girl outfits that we had lined up for the baby and separated them by where they came from so we could exchange them for something a bit more manly. I’ll admit that it broke my heart a little bit to pack up all of the ruffles, but I’m a fan of blue, too. 
Mid-morning I got pretty sleepy and went to take a nap while Sam & Grandma watched a movie. I had been asleep for maybe 15 or 20 minutes when we experienced our first California EARTHQUAKE!! The first tremor turned my dream into a nightmare and brought me almost to consciousness…I woke up enough to look around the bedroom and dreamed that the whole side of our condo crumbled to the ground, taking Sam’s bassinet with it. From there the second tremor brought me to full consciousness, and I started screaming “where’s the baby?! Where’s the baby?!” when I saw that he wasn’t in his bassinet. Grandma Janet calmed me down and reassured me that Sam was just fine, and we all took cover for a while until we were pretty sure there weren’t going to be any more tremors. It was so scary!! I’ve never been in anything remotely like an earthquake in my life, and the dream just made it a hundred times worse. Apparently all of southern California all the way out to Las Vegas felt the quake, it was like a 5.8. Not a lot of damage was done except for peoples’ pictures falling off the wall, thank goodness. That’s something I could go without experiencing again.
After that Aunt Sarah & her kids came over, and Sam met Aidan and Mason for the first time. They’re all super excited to begin Star Wars and Spiderman indoctrination as soon as possible.
The adrenaline from the earthquake wore off and left me more tired than before, so I bailed out and took a nap for a bit while all of them went on a walk with the doggies and played some games & chatted. I woke up to the beautiful aroma of Sam’s first diaper blowout ever! Truly a monumental occasion; I even took pictures to share with his father and all of you later.
The first of thousands, I’m sure. Good thing newborn poop is like nothing at all.
When Paul got home we headed back to the lab to get another bilirubin test done for Sam’s jaundice. This time we came armed with his pacha (pacifier) so it wasn’t so bad as on Monday. The doctor said that his levels had plateaued and would start coming down again, so no need to take him to the hospital to go under the special light. Yay!
We decided to spend the evening running around to different stores returning girl stuff and buying the last few things we needed for Sam. I swear to you that I’ve never done anything so frustrating in my whole life as try to exchange girl clothes for boy clothes!! I have officially sworn off shopping at Target for the rest of my life just because of their stupid return policy. They wouldn’t take back most of the stuff because we didn’t have gift receipts (!!!), and worst of all, when we tried to return the $75 crib bedding set that Carlos & Amber bought for us for store credit, they wouldn’t do it!! They have a policy that they will NEVER return ANYTHING over $35 without a receipt, end of story. Not even for store credit. I ended up having to call Carlos and have him give his credit card number to the clerk so that she would do it, I was so freaking embarrassed. What a horribly tacky thing to have to do! I just had them credit the money back to his credit card so I felt better about it. I almost strangled their manager.
Babies R Us came next, and while they were better than Target with the general merchandise, they refused to take ANY of the baby clothes back – they said that baby clothes have a “shelf-life” and that the life on these ones (which are 2 months old!) was expired. They wouldn’t return anything that wasn’t already on my registry or that I had a receipt for. So basically if you’re going to register at Babies R Us, make sure that you scan EVERY SINGLE clothing item, because if it’s not on there they won’t exchange it for any reason. Sigh. I had to have Paul take over while I roamed the boy’s section because I was getting so frustrated I was going to burst into tears at any moment.
Then things turned happy and we chose out a crib, crib mattress & bedding set for Sam, with love from my family and Tia Hilda. I am SO excited to finally have his crib, the nursery was so incomplete without it. I really wanted to get this brown & blue star bedding set that they have there, but it was so dang expensive and we found another really cute jungle-themed one that was almost half the price, so we went for that one. Here’s what they look like:
Cute, huh? We were so excited! Thanks, Robinsons!!
We got home kind of late and Paul still had to study for his test the next day, so Sam took his first walk with Grandma Janet, mom and the doggies. He slept through it so I guess you could count that as a positive experience.
Wednesday July 30th
Wednesday July 30
I guess I really wore myself out with all of the returns and shopping the night before, because I was conked out literally ALL morning; I didn’t leave my bed until 1:00!! That’s for sure the last time that happens. Grandma Janet hung out with Sam all morning long and only woke me up to feed him. It was wonderful! But I did feel pretty lazy and guilty when I finally got up. Sam did sleep with me for a short period of time, but mostly hung out with grandma.
What a cute picture of mommy!
Grandma Janet also finally took the clippers to Sam’s dagger-nails, since mommy was too big of a wuss to do it. He was a great nail client.
Paul had a really hard day at work, he failed his test and he’s never come close to doing that before. He was so bummed out when he came home, it was so sad! Honestly he did really well on his test, he just made one mistake and had the extreme misfortune of having the most anal dickweed instructor grading his group. This test has 7 sections to it and if you fail one section, you fail it all. The only people who failed were in his group, under this crappy instructor; he was failing people for the most ridiculous reasons. Luckily he was a “borrowed” instructor from another class to help get through the test faster, so he’ll almost surely not be grading them when they retake it next week. Sam and I spent a while cheering dad up, then we went grocery shopping with grandma and let him take a nap…he’s not getting very much sleep lately. Grandma has insisted on buying all things grocery for the whole week that she’s here, on top of doing all the cooking, it’s so nice of her! She even bought us Persuasion, a Jane Austen book-turned-movie that we LOVE. Thanks, grandma!
We came back home and ate dinner, then Paul & I made a joint effort of changing Sam’s poopy diaper. Apparently he thought it would be wicked funny to pee on both of us at the same time; I have to admit, he was right. We were both caught totally off guard and died laughing in the chaos of trying to get the fountain covered up quickly. We were pretty impressed with the volume of urine that came out of the little guy…took us forever to get it all cleaned up!
Then grandma, Sam & I all went over to the Eddy’s house for games while Paul stayed behind to study again. We had a great time playing Loaded Questions, a game that I definitely recommend to all of you. Just make sure that you play it with people you already know, or it could get awkward.
Sam enjoyed trying to focus on all of us while we roared with laughter. (Nice face, Ses!)
We indulged in some Henry Weinhard’s root beer, which inevitably spouts up out of the bottle and all over at least one person in the group – this time Grandma Janet was the victim. It was hilarious!
Mason really loves holding Sam, it’s so cute. He really had to debate with himself if he wanted to play games badly enough to put him back in his car seat; we compromised by setting the car seat right next to Mason.
Thursday July 31st
Thursday July 31
This was a really chill day, we just hung out watching Jane Austen movies all day and tidying up Uthe condo. We got a package of clothes from Aunt AJ (thank you!!) that was really adorable; he needs another week or two to fit into the clothes, though. Grandma Janet pulled out her nail polish and we all gave each other pedicures while quoting Ms. Elizabeth Bennett and Maryanne Dashwood. I am excited to announce that my feet are finally reducing back to their normal size; the horrible cankles are becoming a thing of the past. WOOHOO! Paul said he hopes that Sam’s sexuality isn’t permanently damaged from being subjected to all of the chick flicks. I said that he’ll be a ladykiller all the more for being able to appreciate good literature.
The most hilariously awful thing happened while we were eating lunch, though; I bit into my perfectly soft ham & cheese sandwich, and the retainer on my fake teeth cracked in half!! I looked down in horror to see my four front pearly whites embedded in the bread while the rest of the retainer remained in my mouth. Of course my mom and little sister immediately burst into hysterical laughter while at the same time trying to assure me that they were really sorry that it’d happened and concerned that I would be able to fix the teeth immediately. Yeah, right.
I called my dentist in Utah to see if there was any kind of quick fix for the retainer, and the receptionist (who, I’ll grant you, has been in my ward my whole life and knows me well) was laughing so hard at my “accent” that she couldn’t even talk to me. She had to wheeze out half-sentences, laugh, then wheeze out the rest of it. Unfortunately, there was no quick fix for it; I’d have to pray that I could find a dentist with a lab on-site so they could repair things faster than sending the teeth away to a lab. I got lucky and found one, but they couldn’t get me in until the next day so I was toothless for the whole rest of the day. For once I was glad that my son can’t see me properly; poor guy would’ve been scared to death of his hillbilly mom.
Friday August 1st
We started the day out at the dentist, who fixed my teeth up in about an hour, thank goodness!! I’m going to have him make another retainer for me just in case we have another mishap like this one. I can see it happening right before some huge event, like Paul’s graduation or something, and I’d be totally screwed without a backup.
When we were done we went around returning more girl stuff again (thank you, wal-mart, for being willing to take anything back without a receipt; even if you are an evil plot to take over the world). We met up for lunch at this great BBQ place, Rattler’s, with Sarah & Chris and Chris’ family. His brother-in-law Travis manages the restaurant, and they all get together every once in a while. Phil & Gail, Chris’ parents, came, and Travis’ wife Ally & their two kids, Jack & Blake. Jack is almost 2 and is the smartest little kid on the planet; not only does he already know all of his letters and numbers, he’s learning them in Spanish now, too, and neither of his parents speak Spanish to have already given him a base for the language. Blake is way cute, he’s 5 weeks older than Sam and we are SO grateful to their family for donating all of Blake’s newborn clothes to us so that Sam didn’t have to go naked or running around in pink for a while before we got some clothes lined up for him. They are all so nice and we had a great time chatting for a couple of hours.
Afterward Grandma, Sam & I continued our shopping and ended up at Barnes & Noble. My family has a thing for bookstores, we totally love them. I bought James and the Giant Peach on CD – I’ve become addicted to books on CD – and a book for my dad entitled 5 People Who Died During Sex and Other Completely Tasteless Lists…something like that. I get so excited when I see things that I know my dad will like, because it happens so rarely. If he wants something, he goes out and buys it. I can’t wait to read it when we go out to Utah, it looked so hysterical. Grandma Janet bought us some freaking adorable notebooks to write down cute Samisms for the next few years, they’re great!
When we got home Paul was there and he played with Sam for a bit, then he & I went to lay down for 1/2 an hour or so…and woke up 2 1/2 hours later! I guess we were tired, eh? Most of the fam had already gone over to the Eddys’ house for games, but Grandma stuck around to feed us first. She’s so nice. We joined the rest of the family and stayed up ’til about one playing, it was great. Especially since it was Friday night so Paul could join us this time.
Saturday August 2
Grandma Janet & I went to Costco first thing this morning to buy the newest book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn. YAY!! I am obsessed with this series, it’s so the greatest set of books ever! I’ve been trying to read it sparingly, only when I’m nursing Sam and have nothing else to do, and I’m already over 300 pages into it. It just grabs you and pulls you into the story!
After Costco we said goodbye to Grandma Janet, which was so, so sad. I cried like a baby, I can’t believe she’s not able to be here to watch Sam grow up. We appreciated having her so much this week, I’m so glad that she came out and took care of us and bonded with Sam for a while. Thank you, moms!
After lunch we all went out running more errands, then we all headed to the shooting range for dad’s weekly dose of bang-bang-shoot-’em-up. Sam and I stayed out in the store on their ridiculously comfortable leather couch while Paul unloaded his 100 rounds that he’d bought. I read my book and Sam tuned out all of the popping sounds from the next room and slept peacefully. We saw a couple of the other recruits from Paul’s class there and they ooh’d and aah’d over Sam for a while until Paul came out. They’re so nice, they’re almost always there when we go to the range. I can’t wait for Paul to get his backup weapon so that I can go shoot, too – I’m not allowed to shoot his primary Glock that the LAPD issued to him. I miss shooting.
After the range we went out to the Northridge Mall, the closest location of The Children’s Place, our last place on the returning-girl-clothes list. We ended up buying some cute new outfits for Sam, since he doesn’t have any yuppy clothes for church yet. They’re really cute! I wish Banana Republic had baby clothes, those would be freaking adorable. We were walking by Hot Topic when Paul started freaking out. He saw this batman onesie in the window and just HAD to buy it for Sam, hahaha. It was ridiculously expensive, of course, but it’s amazing how Paul’s cheap side can run & hide in the face of all things superhero. He was SO excited to take it home and get it washed so he could put it on his son; and of course, he had to put his own batman shirt on to match. We are batman’s fan club, after all, haha.
We decided to have Brinner (breakfast for dinner) that night, a personal favorite of mine. When it came time to eat Sam was wide awake and we hate to waste that time putting him in his bassinet, so we decided to try his swing out and see what happened.
Sam eventually ended up like this, slumped over like a drunk. For a while, though, he was really absorbed in looking at the little globe toy and trying really, really hard to focus on it and figure it out. We can see him getting more and more alert and interested in his surroundings every day, it’s so neat. He’s been trying to grab at stuff lately and put it in his mouth, and you can just see his frustration when he can’t coordinate his hands well enough to do so. It’s so awesome to watch him developing already!
More Sam
Here’s some more pictures of the little guy; I realize that most of these look the same to all of you but we can’t stop taking pictures – we probably have more than a hundred already and he’s only 4 days old!
He will already take a pacifier, woohoo!
Family Picture in which we all look awkward, haha
CUTE little toes!!
Paul is so enamored with his son, it’s so adorable.
We’ve already started faux hawking his hair, hehe
Grandma Janet arrived yesterday to help us out for a week, we are so glad she’s here!
Uncle Chris came last night to meet Sam; Haley came along to make sure he held him correctly
Saturday evening the Chirinos Family came by to meet Sam. They were all great with him and so excited that he’s here – they brought some little boy clothes, and Brianna & Danny even donated hard-earned dollars from their allowances so we can get some more boy stuff.
Carlos bought dinner for all of us and Amber did laundry and dishes…while I lay down Thanks for your help guys!
Sam has been getting more and more alert, it’s great. We’ve been having trouble getting all of his funny facial expressions caught on film but finally managed a couple last night…so funny!
A gas smile, but a smile nonetheless!
Of course dad has already begun superhero training
Trying to focus on mom & dad
Big yawn!!
Think we’re a little bit in love with this little guy?
love, mary
Labor & Delivery
Okay, I’m officially home and more or less settled in, so I can talk more details about my son. The hospital was weird, they had these monitors so you could get on the internet but absolutely no way to upload pictures from the hospital. So Paul had to figure out how to do it at home…despite his tech service days, it took him a while. Sorry for the delay in putting up the pics, but he’s so cute that it was worth the wait, right?
So here’s the whole story of Sam’s little journey last week. On Wednesday afternoon I noticed some bleeding so I called my doctor and they told me to go to labor & delivery to get it checked out. Sure enough, I was in the stage they call early labor, I was dilated to a 1 1/2 and 60% effaced. They kept me for like 6 hours to monitor my contractions, but they were too irregular to keep me there so I went home around 9:00pm. We ate some dinner, then walked the dogs around before coming back home and crashing; despite doing nothing all day I was exhausted! I woke up again around 1:30 and started logging my contractions, which were about 7 minutes apart at that point. They weren’t hurting me, though, so I called L&D to ask about it and they were like “ya, you should be really feeling pain and having to focus and breathe through contractions 5 minutes apart for 2 hours before you come in”. Yikes! Pretty sadistic, if you ask me. I just knew that I was going to have the baby the next day, so despite it being the middle of the night, I started getting things ready – I couldn’t sleep, anyway. I did the dishes, organized everything, paid bills, etc etc for a couple of hours until the house was in a state that I was satisfied with (told you I’m a clean nazi, hahaha) then went to sleep for a little bit.
I woke up with Paul at 4:00 and started logging my contractions again, which I could now definitely feel but were still 10 minutes or so apart. I couldn’t sleep so I watched a couple of episodes of Lost and then called my sister Emily, who lives on the east coast so didn’t mind talking to me so early in the morning. The contractions were getting a little more intense, but still not too bad, and I started thinking to myself “gee, this is actually not so bad, maybe I can stave off the epidural until I’m a 6 or something!” …I later laughed my head off when I remembered that I’d thought that. At 6:20 I stood up to go in the other room and said to Em “Ok, I either just totally peed my pants or my water broke!” The funny thing is, you seriously can’t tell the difference! It doesn’t feel different at all. I called the hospital to ask them if there was any way I could tell the difference without going in there and looking like an idiot if it was urine – there’s not. So I called my sister Sarah to come get me and called Paul to let him know.
It only took Sarah about 15 minutes to get here and I was really feeling the contractions by then. I packed half of our condo into a backpack & diaper bag, grabbed cameras & pillows & books, and off we went. I had this grand scheme of going to McDonalds on our way over there since they won’t let you eat anything until after you give birth, but by the time we got down the street to the McDonalds there was no way that I wanted to stop; the contractions were starting to get really killer. Sarah kept offering helpful commentary such as “wow, those contractions look really intense, maybe you’re going to be one of those women who go so fast that they can’t give you an epidural!” ….I hit her for that one.
We got to the hospital and, sure enough, I was in full-fledged labor. I asked for my epidural pretty much the second we got to the L&D floor, knowing that I had to wait an hour for a bag of fluids to empty into me before they could start the process. Unfortunately for me, not only did I have to wait for the fluids, I also had to wait for lab results to come back and then for the anesthesiologist to finish up a couple of other people before he got to me. Those were hands down the longest 2 1/2 hours of my entire life. My ENTIRE LIFE. The contractions were so intense, it is so hard to make yourself focus and breathe through them! I started panicking and writhing around but obviously that doesn’t help. You have to seriously retreat into your own little world and you don’t want anyone to touch you or talk to you because it will break the focus that you have. Paul got there and I could barely say hello to him. He was trying so hard to be sweet and rub my back & everything, and I pretty much said “thanks, but no thanks” and sent him in the corner with Sarah. I was in so much pain that I was vomiting my way through contractions…awesome.
When the anesthesiologist finally got there I was so happy I honestly almost cried. I have been afraid of that epidural needle for nine months, but when it got to it I was like “bring it on!!” They kept telling me how amazed they were that I could sit that still through 3 more contractions while they set up the epidural…I told them that I would literally be able to do ANYTHING to get those pain meds in me at that point. Once the epidural kicked in, I was the happiest camper around. I made up for my all-nighter and slept through a couple of hours of contractions, chatted with Sarah and called some relatives. I literally want to kiss whoever came up with that spinal tap heaven!
Sarah was great, she stayed until almost 1:00pm just hanging out with me, covering her shift while Paul went and got something to eat, picked some stuff up from home, etc. I found her lots funnier at this point. My labor progressed really rapidly, and by 2:00 I was ready to start pushing. That was a surreal moment for me, the nurse was like “ok, start pushing!” and I just sat there for a minute because it felt like it should’ve been a much bigger deal that I was starting to push than just “ok, go!” hahaha. My epidural was wearing off by this time, so there was a lot of pressure and some pain, but it was a good thing that I did have the sensation that I did because it made my pushing time decrease a lot. After about 45 minutes of pushing we were ready for Dr. Navi. He came in and almost immediately called for an episiotomy…bummer! He started snipping and I could totally feel it, it was awful! So I guess he just dumped this whole huge container of lidocaine or some kind of numbing solution on me and then proceeded. (Thank you, Sam for deciding to come out like Superman, with one arm up over your head – mommy loved the episiotomy ) I thought that I was going to be one of those embarrassing screamy labor women, but in the end I just yelled out a couple of times to give the pushing more momentum.
The moment I pushed him out was a crazy one. All I could focus on was the relief and trying to recover from that last big push, and then they laid her on my stomach and I just started crying, my little daughter was so beautiful! They rubbed her off and she cried a little bit, and all I could do was look at her as they picked her up and carried her away, until I saw the doctor jerk his head up and look at Paul with wide eyes. I immediately thought something was wrong; then I heard him say “what?! You thought it was a girl?? Did I tell you that? No, it’s a boy! You have a baby boy!” I just looked to Paul for confirmation and started laughing my head off. For months we’d been joking that the baby would end up coming out as a boy, and he did! Apparently what happened was that I pushed him out, they laid him on my stomach and started rubbing him off, and when they picked him up again Paul saw his boy parts and said “wait, what the heck?! She has balls!” and that’s where the doctor looked up all startled. Oh, man.What a story for the grandkids, right?
It’s amazing how seriously your whole life, your whole worldview and priority list and everything else, changes in the millisecond it takes for you to lay eyes on your child. I don’t know that anyone who hasn’t had a baby can really understand it; I couldn’t. I am OBSESSED with this little baby boy. I can’t stop looking at him (yes, Lani, I have kinks in my neck too!) and touching every little inch of him. I love his smell, his massive amounts of hair, and his tiny little bum. Paul and I both have been losing sleep in preference of just watching him breathe. I only feel a teeny pang of disappointment that pink butt ruffles will have to wait until the next one.
Baby Sam is Here!
Here is Samuel Paul Lamas. We are both exhausted trying to keep up with his eating schedule, but I will try to post more pics later. Sam weighed 8 pounds 12 ounces, and was 21 inches long, oh and he was two and a half weeks early.
Life in General
I know I’ve been shamefully neglecting this blog, but really I don’t have enough going on lately to merit a post, usually. I’m in that too-big-lazy-and-tired-to-do-anything-or-go-anywhere mode, and who wants to hear about that? Mostly I’ve just been answering the call of my nesting instinct and organizing and reorganizing the nursery. For some reason it gives me anxiety that we don’t have our crib yet; looking at all that crib bedding with no crib is torturous, hahaha. I also really feel the need to put my carseat and all other car paraphernalia into my mommy mobile…I feel so weird that this is like a necessary thing for me. Sigh.
I made my first friend out here, which is really exciting for me. We went to this ward chili cook-off activity a few weeks ago and I met another very pregnant girl named Charity there, whose husband happens to be in the LAPD and is having their first child – a girl. We really hit it off right away and exchanged phone numbers, and then I just let it sit there on my fridge for a couple of weeks until I worked up the courage to call her. I felt like a teenage boy asking a girl out for the first time, for heaven’s sake! Obviously if she gave me her number first then she wants to hang out, right, but just knowing that this is like the only egg in your friendship basket really makes you feel vulnerable. I finally called her this weekend and we ended up talking for like half an hour, it was great. We made a lunch date for yesterday, and then the lucky duck started having contractions on Monday night that were only 7 to 10 minutes apart by lunchtime yesterday, so naturally we rescheduled. I laughed at myself for being lime freaking green over contractions, for pete’s sake!
I seriously can’t wait to have this baby, if for no other reason than just to not be pregnant anymore. My sister told me around 4 months along that throughout the rest of my pregnancy I would continue to think that at that moment I was more uncomfortable and huge than I could possibly get and that it couldn’t get any worse, but that I would always be wrong…that it would keep getting more and more uncomfortable, and I would get larger and larger, right up until delivery. Curse her for knowing exactly what she was talking about. I have found myself looking up all sorts of “tried and true” ways of inducing labor on your own, I’ve made a list and I’m going to start trying all of them on Monday, when I’m officially full-term. Everything from stuff no one but Paul needs to know about to Castor Oil to walking a ton, etc. etc. I’ll let you know how it goes.
On Sunday I had my first EVER experience with giving a talk in Sacrament meeting. By the time we got to the seats on the stand I was so nervous that I was sure I was going to throw up, and I kept telling Paul what our game plan was going to be if I got up and had to puke – basically he would talk for the whole rest of the meeting, and then we would go back home and apostatize or something because I can’t think of many more humiliating things than puking at the pulpit. (side note: why is there no garbage can kept handy up there??) It ended up going really well; in my nervousness I overprepared and it worked out fine. People in our ward are so nice, we had seriously like 20 people come up and introduce themselves afterward and tell us that we did a good job. I think we’re really going to love that ward.
Paul’s doing really well in the academy, of course. He gets his badge, gets sworn in and becomes an official officer on August 15th, and he’s so excited for it. He got his official uniform yesterday and I must say that he looks pretty sexy in it. I made him promise to bring home his hat and everything so that I can take some pictures. He does have days when he gets really discouraged, though. It’s got to be tough always being treated like you’re lesser than everyone else, and he says it’s really discouraging to know that that’s not even over when he graduates from academy. He then has probation for a year, in which he’s called a P1. While he’s a P1 he’s still the very bottom of the totem pole, and it seems to pretty much be policy for everyone else to treat you like nothing during that time. No matter how smart you are or how well you do, you won’t find much praise at all out in the field until you’re at least a P2. Lots of FTO’s (field training officers – your first partners) won’t even allow their P1’s to eat lunch with them, it’s freaking ridiculous! It reminds me of some silly high school ego game where you’re trying to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table and they pour milk on you or whatever. I will never understand the whole “initiation period” that accompanies law enforcement, military, etc. What’s the point of making someone feel stupid? Of talking down to them? Vent, vent, vent. I don’t blame him for getting down. He’s amazingly optimistic most of the time, though – he only rarely has a down day, like once a month.
Anyway, that’s what’s new with us lately. No pictures, since there hasn’t really been anything to record. Sorry, I’ll try to make my life more interesting.
love, mary
Tagged – 6 Random Things About Me
Ok, Jes tagged me to be next in the “6 Random Things About Me” game (about a month and a half ago, I’m a little slow), so here we go.
#1: I am a clean freak. More like clean Nazi. I have been known to stay up until 3:00am doing things like scrubbing out shelves and washing handprints off of the doorframes. No lie. I can’t sleep if there are dirty dishes in my sink; I literally have nightmares about it or wake up every half hour until I give up and go wash them. This would be why the best gift my hubby could’ve given me for mother’s day was my Dyson vacuum. I made him bring the vacuum to Utah with him so I could enjoy it over there before heading out to cali; I vacuumed every square inch of my mother’s house, my car, and my mother’s house again in the week I had it. It was so awesome.
#2: Despite being a clean freak, I LOVE the outdoors and all activities associated with it. Camping, hiking, biking, boating, picnics, etc. I’m going to miss the real outdoors – camping in Cali usually means reserving the site 9 months in advance and being squished in between enormous RVs with noisy generators.
#3: I won’t eat hot dogs. I read about how hot dogs are basically all of the leftover crap that the meat processing plant can’t otherwise sell all ground up into that little package. This would include such things as random tissues, sections of intestines and sphincters. All I needed to hear was sphincter and I swore off hot dogs for life. Sorry, Oscar Mayer.
(plus they just look….yicky. Don’t you think?)
#4: I freak out about messed-up eyebrows. For example, if I see someone, say, wipe sweat off their forehead, and they push their eyebrow hair towards the middle of their face (against the grain) as they do it, it makes me CRAZY! I can’t rest until I’ve not only fixed their eyebrows, but ensured that my own eyebrow hair is nicely smoothed down in the proper growing direction. I get this weird almost tingly feeling in my eyebrows until I smooth them a couple of times. Weirdest thing ever? Of course.
#5: I love calendars. And planners. And lists. I used to have the best planner ever that offered a whole page for each day so that I could fill it with to do lists and all that, and it was honestly like the best part of my day when I sat down and filled it out. However, they discontinued this particular model of planner and I’ve been unable to find a good replacement. *sigh* In the meantime, we usually have at least 3 calendars sitting around our house and I pretty much just put the same things on all three of them, but I totally love it. When I make a to do list, I list every single mundane thing so that I can have the satisfaction of crossing off more boxes as I go. For example, instead of listing “clean the kitchen”, I’ll list “wash the dishes”, “wipe down countertops”, “degrease stovetop”, “sweep floor” and “mop floor”. Much cooler, right? haha, I’m a freak.
#6: I HATE shrimp. Shrimp cocktail, shrimp fettuccini, fried shrimp, doesn’t matter how it’s prepared, I loathe it. Bubba Gump haunts my nightmares. Not only is the taste questionable, but the texture is just unbearable. That half squish, half crunch almost rubbery….yick!! In fact, the first time I met my in-laws we ended up at one of the relatives’ houses who had cooked shrimp fettuccini alfredo for dinner and they invited us all to stay and eat. In latin culture it’s extremely rude to pass up any sort of food that is offered to you, and I started to get some serious anxiety as to what I was going to do in view of that dilemma. I knew that I could NOT choke the shrimp down; I would have gagged and choked and that would have been way worse in the rude category than just passing it up altogether. So when the moment of truth came I said the only thing I could think of to save my butt; I told them that I was really, really allergic to shrimp and so, though it looked & smelled FABULOUS, I had to pass on the pasta. Whew! Anyway, shrimp should be left to whales and seals and whatever else eat them in the wild.
Andrea Jean the Gettin’ Married Machine!
Oh, man, I am SO excited!! My best friend AJ is FINALLY engaged to Brandon, the guy she’s been dating…well, essentially for the past 4 years (there was a mission in there). I am so happy for them, they are the greatest couple and they’ve been talking marriage for so long. They’re both really practical and waited until it was a good time schedule-wise or whatever to get married…I have no idea how they did it!!! I love that everyone around them was way more impatient for this than they were. They’re thinking October or November sometime, but don’t really have any plans yet; they just got back from Lake Powell so she hasn’t even started shopping or anything. Send me your great bachelorette party ideas, this one needs to be incredible! Congrats, AJ & Brand, I am so happy for you guys!!
And you’re welcome for choosing this picture out of the hundreds I have of you to put on cyberspace, hahaha
love, mary
