Category: Life as I know it

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One of those days

You know, the days where you feel like you just can’t win. Like whatever you do, it’s not good enough, or you can’t get it done fast enough, or it’s just not right. Yesterday turned into one of those days when I got home from work.

All I wanted to do was sit and relax in the sun for half an hour when I got home, while it was still shining on the back part of our driveway. I’m feeling seriously vitamin D deficient after this miserable “Spring”, and I was exhausted. Well I had to take D out there with me because R was working on something, so I grabbed one of her books, her water cup, and a little container full of Cheerios, and I strapped her into her stroller so she couldn’t boogie away from me. This worked well on Monday – she played in there for quite a while as we grilled and ate dinner outside – so I figured it’d be a fine alternative to hauling her playpen outside again, especially since I was only going to be out there for 30 minutes. Of course not. She played with her stuff for a minute or two, then got totally fidgety and everything started being thrown overboard. After about the fourth time of retrieving and replacing her Cheerio tub I just left it. Whatever got thrown out and onto the driveway stayed there, while she contorted her body into every angle possible trying to launch out of the straps. R came out to take out some garbage and I think could sense my growing frustration, so he took D with him when he went inside. Thank you! Too bad my quiet sun-filled glory that I so desired was short-lived, because after no more than 2 minutes I heard D start screaming. Good lord, now what? She’d apparently fallen into the side of her playpen holding her water bottle and I think scared herself more than anything, but either way my chance to relax outside was now thoroughly shot to hell. And only 20 minutes later, a good portion of which was spent picking up baby paraphernalia. Hmpf.

Last night I also wanted to get a load of laundry done and D’s and my clothes packed for a mini-vacation we’re taking this weekend. After the playpen crying, though, she was all upset and cranky, so I decided it was time for some supper for her. And then, oddly enough, she was covered in food and sticky whatever leftover in her hair from daycare, so she needed a bath (no, i don’t bathe her every day. babies aren’t that dirty, but this child was pretty filthy last night). I finally got a chance to get the first load of laundry in the washer after her bath, and I could tell she was getting sleepy and ready for her bedtime bottle at that point – it was 6:45. So I heated up her milk, got situated with her in my arms on the couch, and almost instantly her eyelids became heavy as she drank down the moo juice. Just as she was about to konk out completely, R shouted out from the bathroom to get him a towel since I’d thrown the ones that were in there in the laundry. What?? You’re joking, right? Just step on the mat to dry your feet and walk out to the hall closet to get one yourself (our hall closet is approximately 4 steps from the bathroom door). And of course I didn’t want to shout that I couldn’t come running at that exact second because I didn’t want to disturb D as she was falling into slumberland. So after the third bellow from the bathroom, I tried as hard as I could not to jostle her and carried her into the hallway with her bottle to get a towel to throw into the bathroom. Failure. She was totally awake and then ready to play once she saw Daddy. Back into the living room we went.

It took 3 tries to get her to bed last night, for each time she’d doze by the end of her bottle something would grab her attention and it was playtime once more. Boo. Then when I finally did put her in her crib, she began another screaming session, which he haven’t had for months now. Why can I not please this child?? Ear infection back? Sickness of some sort (she was kind of pukey last night)? Just mad at the world (hey, i know the feeling kid)? Whatever it was it was not helping the mood of my day. Thankfully R put her to sleep that time with a little rocking, so I could switch the loads of laundry (when i was only expecting to do one in the first place) and get something to eat for myself. Just as I was finishing my sandwich and getting ready to simply sit for a few minutes, which was all I’d wanted to do since I’d gotten home, D started crying again in her crib. Silly Mommy, you don’t get any down time. So I went in there after a few minutes when it was obvious she was really awake and not just doing her little sleep cries where she puts herself back to sleep, and picked her up to rock her. Then she barfed on herself. Then she barfed on me. And it’s no longer just the little spit up of sweet-smelling breast milk, oh no. It is now curds of foul-smelling sour whole milk and whatever else she’s eaten that day. Lovely. So I had to change her onesie, and fortunately through all the screaming and crying I could tell she was still wiped out tired, so it only took a minute of rocking after that and she was zonked out for the night.

Okkkkk, now where was I with the rest of the shit I wanted to get done? Oh that’s right – NOWHERE. By then it was 9:30 and I had to start the dishwasher, get the second load of laundry out of the drier and fold everything, then go to bed. My exhaustion from earlier in the day certainly hadn’t magically worn off, and I wanted to get to bed early. Failure again. And the packing I wanted to at least start? Didn’t even get the duffel bag out of the attic. Mm-kay, fun. So my lack of progress there, coupled with the unexpected trials and tribulations of D at bedtime, more laundry than I felt like doing, and late bedtime once again made for one crabby SM.

But things always seem better in the morning, right? Wrong. D woke up crying 15 minutes before my alarm went off, and of course I was the one who got up with her. Of course. Sorry, R, that’s why I slammed the door this morning. I just wanted those 10 extra minutes of sleep by the time I actually got out of bed to go into her room. So the mood to begin today picked up right where it left off last night – shitty.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot the best part. For the first time in 19 months my body is doing that thing. That thing that women’s bodies do monthly-ish? Yeah, that thing. Oh sweet, let’s have a parade. On one hand I’m actually glad to see it again, since it means my body is getting back to normal after the whole experience of pregnancy, child birth, and breastfeeding. On the other hand it could be contributing to this funk. I’ve never been a “PMS-er”, thank god, but man if I’m not in a mood right now. And I just feel bleh – my body looks gross to me, the milk machines are done and now back to their original non-existent state, I need to do more exercise, my skin has decided to give me the gift of breakouts, and I’m still tired (crazy, i know!).

And now I get to add packing to my to-do list for tonight. Joy.

 

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It was a family affair

Did everyone have a nice long weekend? I certainly did. I LOVE 3-dayers! We usually have an annual Memorial Day party to kick off Summer, but this year we changed things up a bit and decided to push it back to later in the season. So this year we had the whole weekend free, and it was blissful.

Friday night my mom came up to spend the night and get her requisite monthly Grandma time with D. Saturday afternoon R’s mom came down to babysit D while we went up to Kohler for one of their Festival of Beer weekend events, Cheers to Beers. One of our good friends planned a surprise get together for his wife’s upcoming 30th birthday, so we headed up to be a part of it. It was a blast! Cheers to Beers was a 3 hour beer tasting held in the Kohler Design Center, and it was a lot of fun. What’s better than sampling some of the best beers from around the country while moseying through some of the finest toilets in the country?

Sunday my dad came to town for the afternoon, and despite the cold, rainy day, we had a really nice visit. Plus he brought some of my favorite sandwiches up from Peoria, always a bonus. 😉 Yesterday was fantastic. We woke up to blue skies and what turned out to be some blazing sun, so we took advantage. We walked over to a park a few blocks from our house for a round of frisbee golf, which D enjoyed immensely by taking a nap. It’s quite obvious I haven’t played in a couple years, judging by the number of discs for which I had to go foraging in the woods surrounding the course. R trounced me, as usual, but that’s ok – it was fun to be out on a course again and enjoying some finally nice weather. (i usually don’t even keep score during frisbee golf. my lack of aim and arm strength make for a discouraging combo when i do) Afterwards D and I headed out to some friends’ house to see their 2 week old baby boy, K, and he is just about the cutest, tiniest peanut ever. He snoozed the whole time we were there, and he looked so little and scrumptious in his swing. Congrats again, Ds! When we got home R fired up the grill for some outstanding brats, we sat in the driveway and listened to the Brewers on the radio, then enjoyed a fire in the fire pit until it was time to call it a night.

It was the perfect way to ring in the summer. Family, friends, warm weather, ahh… Thank you to all of our servicemen and servicewomen who have allowed us to enjoy these times.

 

I love frisbee golf

 

 

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No words

I’m sorry to post such a sad story, but there’s no way I could not. Jenny over at What the Blog? wrote today about a family’s story she found just by clicking around on the internet last night. It is an absolutely heart-wrenching tale of a family that has had to make one of the worst decisions parents should ever have to face – to let one of their babies go. I can’t even recount the whole thing without bursting into tears, so please go read about them. This is their family blog, and this is little Owen’s very own page.

If you scroll back a few pages on the family blog you can read the dozen or so posts leading up to the newest one and get the whole backstory. Their nightmare has all unfolded over this past week. As I read through everything my mind was made up from the first sentence that I was going to help them. But when I got to the end and saw that they’re right here in our own backyard, I knew there was absolutely no way I could not pass on their story. They have been at Children’s Hospital through all of this, and they were even featured on Dave and Carole’s Miracle Marathon for Children’s Hospital that has been going on these past two days on radio 96.5 WKLH. We listen to this marathon each May (as much as we can, anyway, without sobbing. the stories are incredible), and I have donated the past couple of years. Last year especially, it really hit home that with a child of our own (well, D was still on the way at that time) we are so fortunate to have a facility like this in our area if something would ever happen that we would need it. Just yesterday I actually became a donor member of their Miracle Network. Little did I know that donation would be put to use so soon.

On Owen’s page is a link where you can help with a donation directly to the Bissing Family Relief Fund. I can’t even begin to imagine having to face a seemingly insurmountable pile of hospital bills, not to mention funeral/memorial costs, on top of having my heart and soul ripped out with the loss of a child. I just sent them a donation, and I know every $1 will help immensely. There is also a link on the “How you can help” page of the family’s blog if you are in the area and would like to help with meals for them instead.

Please, please go help the Bissing family. If you can’t help financially, please help them with your prayers. That sun that finally came out today? Maybe that’s little Owen, letting everyone know he’s ok.

 

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Backlash

So the “Where’s Bernie?” promotion turned into a huge fiasco yesterday, escalating even more after I posted my little rant about it. It turns out the girl who swiped ~35 of the “stach”-ues from the big lakefront location posted braggart pictures of them all jammed in her trunk on Twitter and Facebook. Then she had the gall to complain that she didn’t get any that had a prize attached!! (the 400 scattered around in the other parks were the ones that had prizes attached. the 1,000 lakefront ones did not) Seriously, the greed on display yesterday was incredible and pretty sickening, what with her and others taking as many Bernies as they could get their grubby hands on just to turn around and try to sell them on eBay for hundreds of dollars. This girl became Milwaukee’s most hated person by 7:30 yesterday morning. I kept reading the comments people were posting about her on Twitter and in response to numerous articles on the debacle that cropped up throughout the day, and it honestly sounded like a lynch mob was going to form to hunt her down.

Now here’s where it got a little out of control. Someone published both her home address and her phone number on Twitter. What?? Sure what she did was shitty and helped ruin the fun for the rest of us, but publicizing her private information? That’s too far. She had to delete her Twitter account and lock down her Facebook page, I’m sure because of all the hate traffic she was getting. Now she has to worry about people storming her house to harass her in person or leaving her steaming voicemails? Wow.

This whole episode presented an interesting study in human behavior. On one end of the spectrum were those of us who followed the rules, played fair, and lost, and on the other end were those who disobeyed the rules, cheated, and won. And then of course there were the resultant angry masses of fair-players releasing their disdain for all of the cheaters through any social media outlet they could find. Throughout the hatefest that ensued once everyone realized people had cheated and gone early to grab the Bernies, I couldn’t help but wonder – if I had gotten there early and seen everyone taking the stach-ues before the designated time, would I have joined in and taken one while I had the opportunity too, or would I have waited until the start time like we had been instructed and watched as my chances of getting anything vanished before my eyes? As much as I wholeheartedly wanted to say I would absolutely 100% have waited like we were supposed to, there was a tiny piece of me that kept thinking, but man, it would have been nice to have a Bernie if I’d had the chance.

And then I got really frustrated with myself for thinking that way. Here I was, joining right in on the bashing of those who disregarded the rules and got the prize at the expense of the rest of us, yet maybe I would have been one of those being bashed if I’d just gotten to the park half an hour earlier. I’d like to think that the simple fact that we did not arrive at the park any earlier than a few minutes before 7:00 yesterday morning, fully expecting to see a lawn full of Bernies waiting for us, proves that I really was one of the fair-players. But what if we’d gotten ready that much faster, dropped D off at daycare 10 minutes earlier or even taken her after we’d gone to the park, and gotten down to the lakefront in time to see the Brewers van guy handing out Bernies to anyone who was already there? Hmm, what if?? Would we really have been able to say nope, we’re waiting until 7:00 like the rules state? Unfortunately, I can’t with a clear conscience say that answer would definitely have been yes. That 18″ tall plastic lawn ornament statue may have just been too damn tempting for the fair-player in me to resist.

This episode has proven to me, however, that I really do want to be a fair-player. Sure I may lose out on stuff sometimes like we did yesterday with the Bernies, but I want to be able to teach D by example. You know, the whole actions speak louder than words thing. And I certainly don’t want her growing up believing the notion that nice guys (or girls!) always finish last and the only way to get what you want in life is to knock others down and out of the way. Yes, she will have to fight for what she believes and wants sometimes, but I want her to learn that can be done without cheating others. Integrity is something I want to instill in her, not greed. (wow has this kid changed me or what? a year ago i probably would’ve said you can take that fair-player stuff and shove it. i want a bernie!)

So I apologize for hating you yesterday, Ms. McHardie (the Bernie hoarder). What you did was not fair or right, and I hope you realize that now (hopefully without too many eggs or too much tp on your house). You and all the other cheaters ruined a really fun event for the rest of us, incensed entire legions of Brewers fans, and received national coverage of your shenanigans. But having your privacy invaded wasn’t fair either – they were just lawn ornaments, after all. I guess my point here is that through all of this I hope both you and I learn to always be fair-players. (and if you don’t, then i at least hope people saw through your eBay greed and you got zero profits from your Bernie haul yesterday. suck it! i can play fair, but that doesn’t mean i have to like you! 😉 )

 

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Leave it to people to ruin it

The Brewers have been running a promotion called “Where’s Bernie?”, Bernie being the team’s mascot. Over the past week or so they’ve been hiding mini-Bernie lawn statues in county parks around the state, and today was the day the hunt for them began. Starting at 5:00 this morning you could go out in the parks and look for the “stach”-ues (Bernie’s got a big handlebar mustache), taking one if you found them. They were placing 1,400 total – 400 of them were spread out across all the parks they chose and had prizes attached (game tickets, game-used merch, zoo passes, etc.), and the remaining 1,000 were all in one location which was not announced until this morning. Bernie had been leaving clues on Twitter as to what parks were going to contain the “stach”-ues, but the location with the big 1,000 lot wasn’t revealed until 5:00 am today.

Now here’s the kicker. The 1,000 Bernies weren’t supposed to be available to get until 7:00 am today. They announced the location at 5:00 when the rest of the scavenger hunt began, but you couldn’t grab these Bernies until 7:00 (the 1,000 Bernies did not have any prizes attached, they were just plain). As I was getting ready for work I checked out the Brewers site to see where the secret location was, and I was excited to see that the 1,000 Bernies were going to be placed in the lakefront parks downtown, really easy to get to from our house. Sweet! No way were we getting up at 4:30 to try to find a park to start looking for lawn ornaments at 5:00, but we’d said last night that if the big stash happened to be near us and we could stop on the way to work we’d give it a shot. So we hurried to get ready, dropped D off at daycare about half an hour early, and headed down to the lakefront to nab a Bernie. We got there around 6:50, plenty of time to spare, and we even saw a Brewers van with a guy in it. Awesome! We’ll get a Bernie for sure.

Um, not so much. We stopped by the Brewers van as another man and his young son were talking to the guy in it, and R hopped out to see how this was going to work. Well, turns out they’d already given away all the Bernies. And it wasn’t even 7:00 yet! What?? That’s not fair – all the press on this explicitly stated in bold and underlined that the 1,000 Bernies were not available to grab until 7:00 am (bold and underlined?! that means it must be so!). That totally sucks! So we drove down the lakefront a little further to where a big Brewers truck and Bernie himself were stationed. A big truck – they must have more Bernies there! Nope, they were gone too. WTF??

We were so annoyed. I mean, I know it’s not a huge deal; they are just plastic lawn ornaments after all. But it would’ve been a fun Brewers souvenir to have (not in the yard, mind you!), and we followed the rules like they’d asked! If I read it once I read it a million times throughout all the tweets and clues leading up to this – you won’t be able to pick up Bernies from the secret location until 7:00 am, and if you find more than one please be nice to other Brewers fans and only take that one. So who played nice? Apparently no one, not even the Brewers people themselves! If you’re going to hype this all up, make these rules, and then emphasize them so much, at least follow them yourselves so the rest of us who are trying to play your game have a shot at success. Don’t say ah well, people are already here early and trying to cheat so we may as well just let them win. That’s not how it goes. I don’t care if there was a camp of 8,000 people overnight hoping they were in the right spot for the secret 1,000 Bernies. We followed instructions, we looked up the location, we were there before 7:00, and yet you catered to everyone else. Way to instill trust in your fans, shitheads.

And the worst part? People already have these up on eBay. I just saw one for sale for $500! What?! These things were free you greedy bastards!

So the Brewers get a big thumbs down for their “Where’s Bernie?” game. What could have been a really fun community event was turned into a big fat failure by all the cheaters and those who allowed them to cheat. If you were one of the lucky ones who actually followed the clues to a park to find a Bernie with loot attached, or got down to the lakefront half an hour early to grab a plain Bernie when the jerks gave them out before they were supposed to, then bully for you. But leave it to people to ruin it for the rest of us. *sigh*

The elusive Bernie "stach"-ue

 

 

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That thumb? It’s green again

Today it was finally nice enough outside that I could get our veggie gardens in for the year. I know – 75 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, warm breeze? Was I in the right place? I figured before Mother Nature had a chance to answer that question and piss on us again I’d better hop to it. (good thing too, for as i type this we’re in the middle of a thunderstorm)

Of course everyone else in the greater Milwaukee area had the same idea, and the garden store was PACKED. But I got everything I needed relatively painlessly and was home an hour later to get to gardening. I got 2 Roma tomato plants, a Boxcar Willie heirloom tomato plant, a Mr. Stripey heirloom tomato plant, a green pepper plant, a red pepper plant, romaine lettuce seeds, sweet basil seeds, purple basil seeds, cilantro seeds (yuck! but R loves it), tomato stakes, some new netting to put around all the gardens so I no longer have to scratch the crap out of my hands trying to weave together all the stupid short pieces of chicken wire I’ve been using the past couple years, and 3 Gerbera daisies for the pot I put on our front walk. R went to Home Depot this afternoon and brought home some more seeds – cucumbers, sweet peas, and more herbs – so I planted those as well as some green bean seeds we had from a year or two ago.

Keep your fingers crossed that my netting works to keep all the vermin out, our seeds germinate, and our vegetable gardens flourish. If they all survive we will have quite the bumper crop! Here are some more pictures I took today to show off my handiwork from this afternoon as well as the color that’s now blossoming from my bulbs.

Here's the cool hummingbird feeder I got at The Fireside

 

D's peonies again - they're growing!

 

Back garden in bloom

 

Veggies behind the garage - beans, cucs, peas, peppers, 1 tomato on the left, chives, garlic, and lettuce on right

 

Veggies behind garage from other end - tomato in foreground on right, lettuce in netting on left

 

Side of garage - hops in foreground, 3 tomatoes in netting, and me being a shadow nerd

 

Driveway garden again, much bigger this time

 

Front - gardens blooming, hanging plant from my bday, pot full of daisies on walk

 

 

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Back to the roots

R and I watched an awesome documentary tonight, “The Real Dirt on Farmer John”. It was about a guy who grew up on a farm in northern Illinois, took over said farm when his father passed, turned the farm into kind of a hippie commune as he actively farmed it in his 20s, went broke and had to sell almost everything at age 30, and his subsequent return to the farm and eventual transformation of it into a CSA. (side note – we joined a CSA last summer. wonderful premise, but unfortunately we were disappointed with ours. so this summer we’re just going to try to get more veggies going in our own gardens and frequent the local farmer’s market)

The movie also showed the sad demise of so many surrounding family farms in the 1980s. Seeing a farmer actually start crying as he spoke of watching the concrete being poured for all the neighborhoods that sprung up on the beautiful farmland brought tears to my eyes. And it got me thinking, as I have so many times before – what’s going to happen to R’s family’s farm when his dad dies?

R grew up on a 400 acre farm about an hour north of Milwaukee. His dad’s parents started it, his dad and aunts grew up on it, and his dad has been farming it ever since he came back from California in his 20s to take over. It used to be an active dairy farm, but now it’s mainly crops. They have a few cows left, but not nearly as many as they did in the milk-producing hey day. There are also some pigs and lambs, but it’s definitely not a meat producer. We occasionally reap the benefits if his dad slaughters a hog, but it’s not like we get all our beef and pork from there. They used to raise chickens, but those are gone as well. His mom still tends a magnificent garden each year, though. And when you’re on a farm, your garden isn’t your little run-of-the-mill thing like we have in the backyard. It’s a garden. I can’t even list how much stuff she grows in there, but the first time I saw it I was like this isn’t a garden, it’s a field!

R’s brothers both still live in the area of the farm and have helped their dad with the farming and chores their whole lives. R was much more sports-oriented in high school and then went away to college, so his days as a farm hand ended years ago. We have talked seriously, though, about maybe someday moving back to the farm and starting a rural life for our little family. He has a plot of land on the farm that consists of roughly 40 acres, and it’s beautifully situated on the river that runs through their land. He has said how he’d love to build a little cabin up there for a weekend house or something like that, but we’ve also discussed relocating up there to start a hops farm. These are all just pipe dreams right now, but it’s something that I know would free his spirit and take him back to his roots.

Every time we start talking about this I can’t help but ask myself, would I really be good on a farm? To tell you the truth, I actually think I would. I obviously have never done farm chores (save the one time i helped pick stones in a field, but that doesn’t really count since i got to drive the tractor the whole time), but I absolutely love being able to spend days outside and see and enjoy the fruits of my labor. I think that’s one reason I’ve taken so well to gardening. Yes, I know gardening and full-on farming can hardly be compared, but I’m just saying I think I can picture myself in that setting.

And if we were to someday move to the farm, like I said, we think it would be to do hops farming. There is currently a rental house on the farm land that we could remodel and fix up to live in, then we could dedicate just a little plot to the hops. This is an enormous undertaking, and one that would take years to bring to fruition, but the more we talk about it, and especially when I see documentaries like the one we watched tonight, the more I can see it happening someday.

I’ve always said I never want to live up there, and I still have a hard time picturing myself living in Sheboygan Falls, but a rural life would be pretty great. It takes less than an hour to get there from Milwaukee, so we could still come down here whenever we needed pretty easily. And if I’m perfectly honest with myself, what’s the big thing we do around here now? It’s not like we’re going to the museums or theaters every night, or even out to eat. I would miss our friends most of all, but then I’d just have to come down for girls’ nights that much more often. Plus with all that land, we could have everyone up for cook-outs and camping and visits whenever they could come.

Having seemingly endless property like that to roam and explore would be wonderful for the kids too. Assuming D has a brother and/or sister someday, but even if it ends up just being her, having acres and acres of nature as your backyard is something amazing that there’s just no way she’ll get here. And instilling in her the importance of respecting and nurturing the Earth by experiencing that daily would be pretty cool. Obviously we could teach her that from the city (i grew up in the city and learned that lesson at a very young age), but being able to play in the wild blue yonder every day I think would help her appreciate that firsthand.

(another side note – we’ve also contemplated moving to a more rural area just north of where we live now, not going all the way up to the farm. that one is much easier for me to accept. i already love it there, and if we really wanted to get hops farming started, R could get up to the farm as often as he needed more easily than from where we live right now. and as long as need be, i could keep my current job because that move wouldn’t make my commute impossible, whereas moving to the farm would)

R thinks his oldest brother will probably take over the farm after his dad. I know his family has expressed interest in actually living there in the farm house after R’s parents, which would be fantastic. While watching the documentary tonight I just started worrying that no one would want to take on the full responsibility of the farm after their dad and all that spectacular land would end up being sold like so many of Farmer John’s neighbors’ farms. That’s what always spurs me to ask myself, “Could we do it?” “Would I be willing to sacrifice our city life to save the farm if we had to?” And I think that answer is yes. Because if I saw concrete being poured over all that precious black soil, I would cry too.