Hot!

The Moosh's language skills are growing by leaps and bounds these days. His favorite word, is, of course, "No!" but he's got a few others that have significant and varied meanings.

Take "hot," for example. He understands that the stove is HOT and that freshly prepared food is HOT, but he also interprets the word HOT as meaning "you can't have it." This is understandable, as he is not allowed to touch the stove at all, and he has to wait for the food or drink in question to cool off before he gets it. However, since he interprets HOT as meaning "you can't have it," by extraction he also uses it to mean "I don't want it."

So all I hear for most of the day is "Hot! Hot!" New diaper? Hot. Food he doesn't want? Hot. Jacket before going outside? Hot!

I think that he thinks I just don't get it.

Damn the Winter

See I was going to write this scathing post about the Iraq vote, but it wasn't going anywhere. So instead I will write about the stupid cold weather.

I never used to care about the season. You see, I am an indoor person. Cold? No problem, just stay inside. Hot? How would I know? Oh yeah, I can see the heat shimmering off the asphalt from my air-conditioned house.

But now I have a child and our time together (from about 8:30 AM to 1:30 PM on a workday) is boring, boring, boring. Moosh wanders around the house playing with stuff and I attempt to numb myself by watching all of the shows I have recorded on my DVR. I'm bored with it. He's bored with it. I wish we could go outside. But my husband has this INSANE fear of the cold.

This insanity used to be directed at me. A typical conversation on a cold day used to go like this:

Lisa: [walks into room wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants] Good morning!
R: [wearing three shirts and two pairs of pants] Why are you naked? Put on another shirt.
L: I'm fine. Not cold at all.
R: You'll die! Look at me! I'm wearing three shirts! And two pairs of pants!
L: Is it my fault you're crazy? If I put on another shirt I'll get hot.
R: If you don't put on another shirt you'll die! Die! Die! Die!
L: You know, being cold doesn't actually make you sick.
R: [Head explodes from frustration.]

After we had the baby, it got even worse, but not towards me, towards the kid.

L: Why is the baby wearing three shirts?
R: It's freezing!
L: It's 75 degrees outside. That's nice, not freezing.
R: You want him to get pneumonia don't you?
L: Let me take off one of these shirts. [starts to remove shirt from overheated baby]
R: Stop! Are you crazy! It's freezing! He'll die!
L: He's sweating! No one should sweat in 75 degree weather!
R: NO! HE MUST WEAR THE SHIRTS!
L: [Head explodes from frustration.]

The toughest part of these arguments is that R's reasoning is totally irrational. Consequently, arguing with him from a rational point of view (e.g. cold doesn't really make you sick, 75 degrees is warm) doesn't work. Nothing works. So the poor baby gets to sweat his way through a perfectly nice day, and I can't take him outside in the winter, and my head is exploding.

I can't wait for spring. Except for the part where I have to mow the damn lawn. Hatred for mowing the lawn.

He Doesn't Like it When She Leaves the House

Is feminism dead? I overheard a conversation between two of my coworkers recently. One guy was talking about how he didn't want his wife to leave the house during the day while he is at work. Excuse me? What? Apparently she goes along with it "pretty well," but he's working on getting her to stay home the whole 9 or 10 hours he's gone. ARE YOU TEARING YOUR HAIR OUT YET? This situation is bad, but wait! it gets worse! They have two small children, a 2-year-old, and newborn. Oh yeah, you heard me. This guy expects his wife to stay home all day with two little kids and he doesn't want her to leave the house, and she goes along with it.

I know everyone has their triggers for things that are just W-R-O-N-G, and they're different for everyone, but if I were in this situation, it would be an instant divorce. INSTANT. I put up with a lot of crap in my marriage, but not leaving the house? What?

Junk Food Junkie

I have been a junk food junkie my whole life. I think that it started because my mother can't cook. When forced to cook she makes the blandest food ever. Seriously. I was at my parents' house last week and as a treat I made meatloaf for the family. As I sat down to eat with my brother and my sister A2, and A2 was all, "This is really good. I mean really good. Mom's cooked soup every night for the last week. We haven't eaten real food in a week." Yeah. So is it any wonder that, as a kid, I spent most of my allowance on McDonald's instead of eating at home?

Unfortunately this necessity morphed into a habit, one that persisted througout college, where fast food was the only food I could afford, and into the post-college years where, unfortunately, it started catching up with me. I am not one of those people that makes an effort to exercise. In college, the peripatetic lifestyle worked to my advantage and I kept my svelte figure even though I subsisted on hamburgers and tacos. Then I started working, sitting behind a desk for eight hours every day, and my only exercise consisted of going down the stairs from my apartment in the morning, and back up the same stairs in the evening. That's it. Is it surprising to anyone that I put on 25 pounds in three months?

Well it was to me. It was hard for me to accept this change. I kept thinking that it would just reverse automatically without any effort on my part. After all, I had always been thin, why couldn't I just keep on being thin?

I didn't do anything about it for a while, but then I turned 25 and I felt the need for a change. So I stopped drinking cokes and gave up sugar and fast food. It worked like a charm. I was actually losing weight rapidly and it was awesome! Two months after I went on that diet I got pregnant and I had the worst morning sickness ever. I lost like 10 more pounds in three months. I didn't really gain much weight during my pregnancy, and after the baby was born he nursed like a fiend, so my weight pretty much stayed the same, but, having a new baby and no time, I went back into fast food and coke mode.

When the Moosh went down to nursing just twice a day, all that weight came rushing back en force. I put on 15 pounds in no time. I still had no time to cook, and the only restaurants open after 10:30 PM are fast food places.

But now I've switched to evening shift and I have time to cook. So for about the third time in six years, I've given up the junk food and the eating out. Maybe I can keep it up for a while. At least until the next kid is born.

Winds of Change

The times, they are a-changing.

The most significant changes are work related, as R is leaving his steady job to try his hand at self-employment, and I changed from working nights to working evenings.

My job at Gigantic Telephone Company is considered an "essential position," meaning that we have to be there 24/7/365. There is a choice of three shifts: day, evening, and night. I worked the night shift at GTC for two and a half years, and I worked nights for other companies for two more years prior to that. So, a total of about four and a half years of night shift. I loved working nights for the longest time, but after the Moosh turned one, it stopped being so great and really started to suck.

When the Moosh was an infant, the night shift worked great because I would come home, go directly to bed, and R would bring the baby in to eat and go down for his nap. He usually napped for three to four hours, resulting in seven to eight hours of sleep for me. So I was fairly well-rested and the baby was happy. But by the time he turned one, he didn't want do go down for his nap so early. You would think that this would result in R just staying with him longer, but oh no. R just assumed that he still went to sleep on time (around 11:00 AM), but the truth was that R brought him in at 11:00, and I had to then wake up and entertain him for two hours before he was ready to go to sleep. This severely reduced the amount of sleep I was getting, and my personal outlook and work performance were sinking rapidly. Then we purchased the business, and realized that R was going to have to leave early in the morning to go to work (before I got home from the night shift), and so nights weren't really going to work for us any more.

Truth be told, I was over working nights anyway. It's fun when you're childless, because you can still pretend you're living your bad ass college lifestyle. But when you have a toddler and are running on about three hours of sleep, it kind of takes the romance out of it.

So when an opportunity to move to the evening shift came open, I began moving heaven and earth so that I could take the position. The main problem was the babysitting. Daycare simply doesn't cover any time past 6:30, and R wouldn't be available to pick up the kiddo until 8 or 9. Luckily my sister A1 was able to pick up the nanny job. We love her, and the Moosh loves her. The job pays enough for her to go back to school, which is something she's been trying to do for a long time. And so, after four and a half years of working nights, I switched to the evening shift and got to sleep regularly at night again.

I was really nervous about the change at first, to the point where I was freaking out and crying right before it happened, but honestly it's been the best change I could possibly make. The whole family is sleeping better, and I feel like a million bucks after six months of severe sleep deprivation.

I'm a habitual fighter of any changes in my normal routine, but in this case, change is a good thing.

New Parent Optimism

R and I are trying to decide when (if?) we want to expand our family. You see, our son Moosh, now 19 months old, gave us a real run for our money when he was born. He was terminally unhappy as an infant, and it seemed we could do nothing right. Eventually we persevered, as people do, but our rosy vision of having a baby has certainly been tempered with our prior experience.

I see other people having kid after kid and I wonder what's wrong with me? I can barely fathom having a second child much less a third or fourth. As much as I hate to say it, I think that if I were a stay at home mom, I wouldn't be as reluctant to have another kid, because that would be my whole life. Of course, if I were a stay at home mom, I would probably be crazy, too, so I'm sure my judgement would be impaired.

But I'm not a SAHM, and the whole process of balancing work and family is hard enough with one child, let alone two. So what's a working mom to do?

I must say that as the Moosh gets older, I can sort of see having another one. He is much more independent now, but I still have that nagging voice inside my head. What if he screams for 10 months straight like the Moosh? How will I get anything done with two of them? Will my job/family suffer?

But this weekend as I was reading Michelle Au's annoucement, I realized that what I need is a good dose of New Parent Optimism. When I saw that ultrasound of her baby, I felt a rush of nostalgia for my pregnancy with the Moosh. When it's your first, you have so much hope and so many expectations about how great it's going to be, all of which are total crap because you have absolutely no idea what you're getting into. That's not to say that it doesn't turn out great in the end, but it's the getting there that's the kicker.

Besides, my mom says that I'm due for an easy baby. I know just because she said that, we're going to have the baby from hell. But I hope not. I really want a baby that I can enjoy. So I am going to go into the next phase of baby making with the New Parent Outlook. Everything will be fine. Everyone has two kids. It can't be that bad.

See? It's working already.

My Life, Up to This Point

My name is Lisa. I was born in Denton, TX in July of 1977. I grew up in Denton with my parents and my brother and three sisters. I graduated from the University of North Texas in 1999. In the summer of 1999 I married my husband R, and we moved to Pennslyvania for about 2 weeks, decided it wasn't for us, and settled in Dallas. In June 2003, I gave birth to my son Moosh. He is now 19 months old.

I have been working in wireless telecom for almost six years. I worked for several different companies from 1999 - 2002, and I now work for Gigantic Telephone Company.

Introductions

Hi. This is me. This is my blog.

I have been reading blogs at work for years, and I finally decided to try my hand at writing one myself. Forgive my blog newbieness.

I hope that this blog will serve as a place where friends and family can keep up with me, and where I can put my thoughts into words. That is all.