Just wanted y’all to know that I am still alive.
I just don’t really have much to say yet.
Maybe another week or so and I will feel less blue about Henry’s untimely demise.
I’m going to go back to feeling sorry for myself now.
See you next week.
I HOPE.
Henry died last night. I am not intending to make a big post about What Happened, because I don’t really feel like reliving it, so that’s really all I’m going to say about it. Unfortunately, what was a fantastic birthday had a really horrible ending, but I am thankful I can separate the two events in my memory. Anyway, some very good friends came over and helped us bury our buddy before we went to bed and then it was IM-POSS-I-BLE to fall asleep. We finally dozed off about midnight, but every hour and a half or so one of us would wake up and then of course the other would too. (Does this happen to anyone else? Wake up the moment your spouse’s eyes pop open? We’ve been doing that for about 3 years now and it totally creeps me out.)
And to make matters worse, Analie woke up an hour early again this morning. So we’ve been dragging around like zombies AND my eyes are still swollen twice their normal size so it’s super hard to see. As in, I may actually wear my glasses today.
Anyway, neither of us really felt like doing much awesome parenting this morning. Joey let me lay in bed for awhile and he got up with Analie first, and when I finally wandered out he had his favorite movie on (Bourne Ultimatum) and he and Analie were contentedly watching it. Well, she was beating the brains out of her spinning bird and he was watching the movie.
After we fed her solids, she was having so much fun beating her high chair tray that I decided to give her a bit of prunes to smear around. Because it was easy and she could play with it without much energy expended on my part. She’d been up for almost 2 hours, and by this point of the morning we usually use Henry as our entertainment because the more tired she was the more HILARIOUS she found him.
The prunes will have to suffice going forward, I guess. She liked them OK too, although she was pretty intense about it, and I’m pretty sure playing with your food is supposed to be fun.
I miss you, Henry.
Even though you smelled.
I keep expecting you to be in your chair looking lazy.
Bye, Buddy.
Question: which is the inmate and which is the visitor?
Analie and her hair had fun outside this afternoon. It was cloudy and gorgeous and perfect for happiness and playing.
It’s true that her outfit is a major color coordination disaster, but hey; AT LEAST HER CLOTHES ARE CLEAN.
After her second nap of the day, we packed up the Bumbo, her sunglasses, some water for Mommy, Mr Elephant, and a beautiful blanket one of the ladies from church made us and the three of us went outside to play. The third person being Henry, of course. Not my childhood imaginary friend Gerlick. (Don’t make fun of her name; I also had Terlick and Derlick and a few others too. They will beat you up.)
The sunglasses? Well…Analie did OK with them. I make her wear them in her carseat and a little bit of the time whenever she goes outside so she’ll get used to them. This time, I only made her wear them for a little bit when she was sitting in the Bumbo, when the sun would try to squeeze a few of its rays through the cloud cover.
I just let her leave them off after she ripped them off her face, and once she was able to look at the world in all its cloudy glory, everything was SO! FUNNY!
I set her on the blanket and let her play for awhile, but looking up into the cloudy sky was a teensy bit too bright. And her sunglasses are too big to wear whilst laying down, so it didn’t last long. Especially once Henry came and pretty much laid on her. He always wants to be where the is action, especially if it involves lying on a blanket.
And now I think it’s time for a nap again. Someone’s getting whiny.
Good morning.
I am skipping church.
But not because I am in labor, or any stage of early labor. Just because I don’t feel well at all. I feel like one of those rotten pears at the grocery store that got buried under the perfectly ripe ones.
I want a pear now. A ripe one.
I had this epic moment at 4:30 this morning: I feel like I need to share. I was laying there, asleep, and for some reason I suddenly felt like I was going to lose whatever I had eaten for dinner the night before. (What WAS that, anyway?) So, half asleep, I shot straight up, launched myself out of bed and somehow missed crashing into and destroying the Pack ‘n Play, and ran to the bathroom.
And once I was in the bathroom, I realized I felt completely fine. There was no reason for that whole lunging from the bed thing I had just done. Must have been in my dream?
In any case, I haven’t moved that fast in about…ten months. I kind of wish it had been caught on tape so I could relive it.
So far this morning, I have eaten some breakfast, threw lunch in the Crock-Pot, and sat on the couch. Today’s agenda is going to be basically take my sweet time cleaning the house (so it’ll probably take about 5 hours instead of the usual 3 1/2 hours…lame) and maybe put up a few Christmas decorations.
Maybe if the child senses Christmas decorations, it’ll inspire her to want to come out into the oxygen.
I’m not getting my hopes up.
Also, Henry needs a bath. It has been at least three weeks (he usually gets bathed once a week) and he smells not unlike the rotten tomato I discovered behind the vegetable drawer in the refrigerator of our first apartment. Thing had been in there so long and was so rotten that it completely disintegrated when I touched it….and oozed its rancid guts all over the bottom of the fridge.
It was one of the grossest moments of my life.
In preparation for the upcoming addition to our family, I have been, like, OCD on getting stuff ready. We have our bags packed, and each bag has a list which goes with it, and on that list are the things which need to be added at the last minute before we leave for the hospital.
I don’t want to forget anything.
The cleanest room in our house is the nursery. (Aside from the fact the floor hasn’t been swept and mopped in a week, that is.)
The pack ‘n play is set up in our recently re-arranged bedroom so that it is about 2.5 feet away from my head for easy retrieval of baby during the night.
Her carseat, freshly laundered so as to get rid of the creepies they sprayed on it in the factory, has been rigged up with the BundleMe and fuzzy shearling strap covers, so she will be cozy and warm on the way home from the hospital.
And then there’s Henry.
He’ll be playing with his friend Indy while we’re at the hospital, and his bag is packed and ready to roll too. But he needed a few more touchups before he was really and truly ready. For instance, his toys needed mending.
What, you don’t mend your dog’s toys? And you think it’s weird that I do?
Meh. Go ahead. Because you’re right, it IS weird.
Henry has this yellow-ish doggy bed that used to be sunshine yellow and plushy. Now it’s kind of…yellow and gray and brown with several large holes in it because Henry likes to use it as a toy during the day. His Strawberry, which is his favorite toy times INFINITY, is in similar condition.
I mended them both about a year ago in Dallas, and I remember the ordeal we went through. Me sitting on the couch, needle in hand, and Henry sitting on the floor staring at his best toys ever and completely bamboozled as to what I could possibly be doing to them.
A year later, new holes had appeared and some of the mending had become un-mended. Henry is violent with his toys. So, in preparation for the fact that he’s not going to be Numero Uno around here anymore, I decided to mend them again. I totally realize we could just buy him a new bed, but that costs like $30, and why bother when I can just sew up the old one? And the Strawberry is irreplaceable. It’s from Valentines Day clearance about 3 years ago. Maybe 4. I looked online and can’t find its replacement.
Henry naturally flipped out while I mended his toys, but now that they’re finished he has made himself a nest out of his bed and is protectively holding on to his Strawberry so I can’t take it and stab it again.
Seriously, the guy’s got a rough life.
Joey gets to take Mondays off, being that he’s all pastoral and whatever. Mondays are a pastor’s Saturday. It’s pretty cool and stuff, you get to wear your loungies and drive around town running errands with strange looking hair while everyone else is all FRENZIED BECAUSE THEIR MONDAY IS FALLING APART AT THE SEAMS AND NOW THEY HAVE TO GO GET PENS FROM TARGET!!!
The unfortunate part about Monday is that our small group meets Monday night. Now, small group is not unfortunate, but the fact that Monday is our Saturday is. We usually show up looking like street bums who haven’t showered in a week, and we have glassy eyes because we worked on too many projects. So…yeah, poor small group people. At least we don’t forget to put deoderant on and brush our teeth. Well, usually.
It’s Monday today. Our goal was to sleep in, and when I woke up at 6:00 ravenously starving, I didn’t see it as a good sign. So I went to the fridge and got out some cheese, and Henry came sliding into the kitchen when he heard me open it. I always share my cheese with him. (Nobody tell the Dog Whisperer.) I picked up Henry and we all got back into bed, because that’s the most logical place to eat cheese at 6am, right?
One piece for me, one piece for Henry. And then he’d smack his jaws like the uncultured varmint he is. We repeated this process for a few minutes, until poor Joey rolled over and asked, all confused, “are you eating something?”
“Uh, yes,” I said. ”I am eating something. But the person you can HEAR eating something is Henry. He has bad manners with cheese.”
Joey rolled right back over and fell asleep, because his spiritual gift is falling asleep immediately. (Mine is…staying awake for hours? So lame.)
Once the man finally wakes up, he has about 6 projects he wants to accomplish today. He only has enough daylight for about 3, especially if he stays sleeping like he is. We’ll see which ones happen. MY project for today is: buy Pepsi.
I never keep Pepsi in the house because I drink it if I have it. And…me loves Pepsi even more than usual right now. It’s creepy.
Also, my OB said I could drink clear liquids during labor and as far as I’m concerned, you can totally see through Pepsi if you put it in a super small glass. That means it’s clear. I need to throw a few cans into my hospital bag so I can keep my morale up. I also have to buy a package of disposable diapers (sigh) because I didn’t want to buy any newborn size cloth ones or covers since they wouldn’t fit for very long. However, we probably shouldn’t bring our baby home from the hospital and not have any diapers that fit her.
The most exciting part about today, is that Joey said we could go to Cancun for lunch. Cancun is a Mexican restaurant up here, and I couldn’t tell you if I’ve had any Mexican since we moved. I know Joey has, and he hasn’t been happy with what he’s found. but I know Cancun has ridiculous queso because I tried some at a party I crashed a couple months ago.
It was delicious.
And no one kicked me out even though I ate a bunch of the queso, and it was running low.
I’m not sure Joey remembers saying we could go to Cancun for lunch, because I asked him while he was still asleep. And he said, “Huh? Yes…” and then fell asleep again. But he said yes, and that’s the important thing.
The cheese wore off and now I’m really hungry again. So…I need to go find breakfast so I can hurry up and get to the store to buy my Pepsi.
Do you think Joey would notice if I drank two in a row?
Couplea weeks ago, we scheduled a duct cleaning service to suck all the gunk out of our ducts. I wanted them to come on Thursday so I’d be able to clean up after them on Friday, which is (naturally) my cleaning day.
They were scheduled to come at 1:00, which was why I was surprised at 9:30 this morning when they called and said their guy was running ahead of schedule, could he come early? Like…in 30 minutes?
Joey was assembling the baby’s dresser/changing table in her room, so I panicked, of course, and cleaned up the breakfast and dove into the shower. The last place you want to be when a duct cleaning service is coming is in the shower. Well, this is my assumption based upon pretty much nothing other than my own personal opinion.
10:00 came…and went. 10:30 came…and went. Finally at 11:00, a big red truck drove into our driveway. And Henry melted down. He tried to eat the technician, so I had to hold him. And as the tech began unloading his strange duct-cleaning tools, Henry got more and more fritzy.
He finally just sat on the couch wearing his little doggy polo shirt (because it’s cold this morning) and looked worried about the whole situation. Poor guy. As soon as The Giant Hose came in the house, Henry began shaking like a leaf. He was not a fan of the giant hose.
The hose was so huge that Henry could probably have walked through it like one of those snake tunnels I have seen small children receive for Christmas. Perhaps you have too.
It was around this time that Joey decided he needed to take a shower. Apparently he wasn’t as freaked out by the prospect of being in the shower with a repairman in the house as I was. (And I greatly appreciated the fact that he stayed here with me during the entire duct-cleaning experience. It was my first time having a worker man in the house.)
On the way down the hall to our bedroom, Joey passed the laundry room and noticed the door was mostly closed but still slightly open. He decided it should be fully open, so he pushed on it….and suddenly heard a large CRASH! and a terrified, muffled yell from somewhere under the house.
“OH MY GOSH!” He yelled, as he looked in the laundry room and realized the tech was in the crawlspace and he had just about killed him by knocking the crawlspace door onto his head. ”Are you OK?”
“Uh…yeah…” said the tech. ”Just had a pretty good surge of adrenaline.”
Several jokes were made about the near untimely demise of the tech, and then Joey got into the shower.
Soon, the tech was out of the crawlspace and grumbling about how it was a mess down there, a bajillion pipes and cables and whatnot, there was no way he could hook the duct sucker up to anything down there. ”I’m going to have to use this vent,” he told me.
He pulled the HUGE hose through the living room and into the currently table-less dining room and got out a roll of blue tape. He started taping the hose to the vent in the wall, all the while mumbling, “I really hope this holds…”
Finally, I said, “I really hope it does too.”
He had made a point of saying he was going to be shoving 250 libs of air through these ducts to clean them out (how does one weigh air?!) and I wasn’t sure I wanted 250 libs worth of airy dust exploding into my house if the tape didn’t hold. It had better be some serious tape.
He finished about ten minutes later and then laid down on the hose and started yanking it away from the duct. It didn’t move. ”I think that’ll hold,” he said.
I was not reassured.
A few minutes later, he went out to his truck and flipped a switch, which turned on the 250 libs of air. The hose cracked, shifted around a bit…and stayed in place.
HAAAAAAAAAAA-le-lujah!
Henry on the other hand, did NOT stay in place. He started shaking again like a rattlesnake’s tail, so bad that I finally just picked him up and took him outside. Which was where we stayed for the next hour (and it was cold) until the guy was finished. We did take a short break to come inside during a lull in the action so I could heat up Joey’s and my lunch, but we went back outside to eat it.
Then Henry tried to eat some raccoon poo in the back corner of the yard and that was the end of the line for him. We pulled out the stake and 10 foot cord and made sure he hung around close to us so we could monitor what he was or wasn’t consuming.
All in all, the duct man said they really weren’t “too bad” as far as gunky ducts go. I say they were terrible.
After such a morning filled with excitement, I’m not sure where the rest of the day will take me. I know it involves washing diapers another two or three times – wahoo. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll have the changing table all set up and organized with her little diapers all lined up in an attractive but not actually practical way.
This morning, I woke up kind of slow and confused. I realize that it may seem to you like most mornings I wake up slow and confused, but in reality I usually wake up like this: JOEY! WE HAVE BEEN GIVEN ANOTHER DAY! LET US REJOICE AND BE GLAD IN IT! WE CAN CLEAN THE HOUSE! BAKE A PIE! HAVE ADVENTURES!
Joey wakes up like this: Still….sleeping….go….away….Jenna…
So I guess I woke up more like Joey than like myself.
Anyway, the sun was just thinking about starting to stream in the windows above our bed, and I thought I could feel my bear poking me in my back. Now, my bear is actually a stuffed dog but I still call it a bear. It used to be a bear like five years ago, because Joey got got me a stuffed bear on our honeymoon to replace my Blankie (which I still sleep with also). Anyway, three years ago or something, he got me the stuffed dog and I liked it better than the original bear. But I still call my dog a bear.
The bear (read: dog) works awesome in lieu of one of those huge pregnancy pillows but sometimes it goes rogue in the night and I wake up with it next to my head. Or on my back, as was the case this morning. I worked up the inertia necessary to roll myself over and get my bear back to where it belonged and, once I was finally rolled over, what I saw confused me greatly.
Joey looked to be 100% asleep, but he was holding Henry. And I’d never felt Henry on the bed, so at first I thought he was my bear (read: dog). I just lay there staring at him, thinking how much my bear (read: dog) looked like Henry, and then Henry blinked.
“AAAAAAAAAUGH!” I screamed, and jumped a mile. ”It’s….HENRY!”
“Yes, of course it’s Henry,” Joey grizzled. He was still mostly asleep.
“I thought it was my bear,” I sighed, once my heart stopped pounding.
Joey just looked at me like, why would I be holding your bear like this? He does have a point.
“Where did Henry come from?” I asked.
“Down by my feet,” Joey mumbled.
It still didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But now that I was awake, had been scared to pieces, and was starting to feel more like my normal self, I wanted Joey to wake up. So that we could HAVE ADVENTURES! Actually, more so that he could put the changing table/dresser together for the baby this morning.
I poked him in the arm a lot, but that didn’t seem to work. I asked him tons of questions along the lines of “when are we getting up”, but that was definitely not working either. Then, I whipped out the spider.
The spider is mostly just my hand and I move my fingers around a lot all creepy like it’s a bunch of tarantula legs.
“The poisonous spider is going to bite you if you don’t get up,” I said. ”Poor spider, some jerk pulled off two of its legs last night so it doesn’t have the requisite number of legs to be a real spider. But it’s still poisonous.”
“Someone only pulled off TWO of its legs?” Joey mumbled.
Then I added 5 plus 2 in my head and realized it only came out to be 7, not 8 like I had originally thought.
Darn.
“The other missing leg was from a birth defect,” I said. ”Makes him more poisonous.”
“Right,” mumbled Joey.
So I moved the spider to right in front of his face and wiggled its legs with ferocity. Then I tapped his forehead about 12 times. ”It’s biting you. You’re dying.”
“No I’m not,” Joey said.
The point is, he got up shortly after that. I think I had annoyed him within an inch of his life. Plus, we were 45 minutes past our alarm going off, and we really DID need to get up.
Between the two of us having lingering colds, me being what some might consider very pregnant, and the fact that we scored a 480 on the Holmes-Rahe stress test we took online (and any score over 300 was an indicator of a stress level so high due to major life crisis and means we we have an 80% chance of getting a serious illness within two years)…we have a hard time getting up these days.
All this to say, Joey is now attempting to assemble our daughter’s dresser and changing table so I can put all her clean clothes in the drawers! He was just reading the instructions and mumbling “man, this is complicated” under his breath. It has something like 48 steps and a bajillion pieces. Also it weighs about 100 libs, so I never did try to haul it in yesterday…I waited until he was home.
I wonder how many more points assembling a dresser would give him on the stress test scale?
