Waking up to coos and giggles
Sweet little I love yous written by little hands for family far away

Baby smiles spotted around corners
The smell of little boys
Playing at the park
Dancing to the music baby in arm and big brother accompaning on guitar
Wet and sloppy kisses from tiny mouths
Popsicle grins
Itsy-bitsy sneezes
Little hands wrapped around my thumbs
The site of sleeping angels tucked all snug into bed

….this time it’s our first black eye. Yes, I somehow managed to make it five years with two very active boys and never suffer a black eye.

But that all ended two days ago. The boys were playing pleasantly while I was cooking dinner. It was a nice game, roll the ball back and forth. Doesn’t sound black-eye enducing does it? I didn’t think so either. That is not until I heard screams coming from my youngest and proclaimations from my oldest that it was an accident. I ran out into the living room to see what’s going on. Nikolas, true to his form is crying.

“Mommy it was an accident! It was an accident.”

So I asked him what he did. “I hit him with the ball!”

“Where did you hit him?”

He points to the middle of his forehead. Maks had calmed down by this time and I didn’t see any damage so I sent Nikolas to timeout and I went back to our dinner.

Later that evening as dad comes home and I’m telling him the story, I notice Maks’s eye is a little swollen. Taking another look I also notice he has a purple ring under his eye. It is then that I realize the ball didn’t hit him in the forehead as his brother had initially told me. It had hit him square in the eye.

How you ask was a child’s ball able to give him a black eye? Well it was a wooden ball. Yes I said wooden. For his birthday, Maks had received a wooden hammer ball set. You know, one of those tables with holes in it just the right size to hold balls that the baby then hammers through with a mallett. Well his is wooden. Very nice actually. Not so nice for throwing at your baby brother as it turns out.

Where the story gets really funny is that when asked about what happened by his father, Nikolas had the audacity to blame it on Maks and his inability to catch! Apparently Niko doesn’t grasp the concept that at only one, Maks does have the dexterity to play catch yet. Oh well. Maybe next year!

Today has been a bit of a nostalgic day for me. Really, when I think of it, the whole month has. My babies are growing up. And they are growing up fast. On August 9th Maks turned one. That’s right. It seems like I was just bringing him from the hospital just the other day and here is, no longer a baby, but a full-fledged toddler with a mouthful of teeth. Well maybe not a full mouthful, but six teeth by the time he turned one? That seems like a lot to me. He’s a monster too, eating anything in sight. He’s even been known to bite my cheek a time or two.

Yes he’s a hungry little boy. It’s very hard not to give in to his demands either when, even though he’s just been fed, he crawls over while I’m eating my dinner and begs even more food off me. I don’t think he has an off-switch when it comes to food. That doesn’t even count the time that I had fed both of the boys waffles for breakfast, one for Maks, and two for Nikolas. Well apparently Maks finished his, before Niko even finished one, and he crawled over and snaked Nikolas’s other one. I had been in the other room when this occured. When I returned, Nikolas told me what had happened. Maks was already halfway through the second!

And all of this is from a child who we used to have to take to twice monthly appointments for weight checks as the pediatrician was concerned he wasn’t putting on weight. Let me tell you, solids did wonders for this boy. Apparently milk just wasn’t going to cut it for him. He’s still on the low end of the weight charts, amazingly, but I don’t think he could eat anymore than he does. We just had him in for his one year checkup and he is a nice healty 20 lbs 14 oz. I was beginning to think he’d never cross the 20 lb mark. But we did it at last! Still not walking, but I attribute that to the fact that he’s been crawling since month four. He feels no need to walk. He can get anywhere he wants on his calloused little knees, and he can get there quickly! I’m sure someday soon it will happen and I’ll cry. But for now I don’t have to worry about it.

And Nikolas, he turned five back in June and this past Monday he went to his first day of school. I know it’s only kindergarten, and it’s only half a day, but it’s still school. You wouldn’t believe how excited he was either and disappointed that I insisted upon driving him there for the first day, instead of letting him go in on the bus. As it turns out, that was a good choice as the buses were very behind schedule. By the time classes were to have started, the buses hadn’t even arrived! Yes, that’s a great first impression. However, all told, I’ve heard fabulous things about his teacher, so I’m willing to overlook that, for now. He’s loving school, even though he remembers very little of his actual day and calls all of the other kids his friends, but can’t remember anyone’s name.

It is good for both of us though that he’s getting that time in school now. Maks naps for a good bit of the time Nikolas is gone, so I’m actually getting some time to myself for the firs time in I don’t know how long. I still haven’t figured out what to do with it all yet. I could use it to exercise, which I badly need to do, but I could also use it for creative time, whether it’s writing or crafting. Oh the possibilities.

8/28/08: I feel I need to clarify some things regarding some questions that have apparently been posed to my husband and not to me regarding this post. In fact due to these questions, I considered making this post private. But I don’t want to feel have to do that because a few people have misunderstood what I had to say. I feel I should however point out that though he has the opportunity, Gary has not read this post. He is more than welcome to, but has decided not to for his own reasons. That is fine. But he’s not really going to have any answers regarding anything I may or may not have said, because he doesn’t know. Secondly, it seems that some people think that I explicitely stated that I’m leaving him. Again, they didn’t choose to question me, they questioned him. I did not say that I was leaving for certain. I said it was something I’ve thought about but don’t know what to do. I also said that the boys need their father and it wouldn’t be the responsible thing for me to do. If you’re going to read that my saying I might leave as I will leave, then you could just as easily read my statements regarding them needing their father at it being irresponsible of me to leave as that I’m staying. So, in essense, if you have questions about what I’v said, ask me, not him. Get the facts straight before you go to him and tell him that I said I was leaving.
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So I’ve not been posting much here over the past year or so. There’s a reason for that. I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to just talk about mundanes or my children or crafting or shinies. I want to talk about life. I don’t feel like I can. At least not without hurting other people in my life. I don’t like hurting people. I think it’s a terrible thing to do. But should you let yourself be hurt in the process? Most people would probably say no. But I also think that most people would allow it to happen regardless of how they feel. That’s what I do. I’ve got this tendency to put everyone else in my life first. Sometimes being altruistic is a good thing. But not always. In living your life, it’s probably always no. If you’re not happy, how can you expect the peope around you to be happy. You’re just going to drag them down with you. Well, I feel like I’ve been doing that for too long. It’s time for me to live my life. To talk about my life. So here it is, in all it’s loving glory.

Over the past year and a half, my life has been, well it’s been shit. Really it’s probably been more like the past five years. But it’s been the aforementioned year and a half that I really started to notice it. So let me start at the beginning. Close to six years ago, I found out I was pregnant. For most people, this would be a happy occassion. When the doctor told me, I broke down into tears. And not just little tears, I was bawling. I was convinced it was the worst thing that could happen to me. My husband and I had only been married just over a year. We weren’t ready for a family, nor had one been planned. In fact I had just quit my job and another was not on the horizon. Not a great way to start out. Not only was a family not planned, it was unexpected as it was planned against. I had been on birth control, Depo Provera, though I was at that time about ready to change to another form. The Depo had really screwed up my hormones. I couldn’t even have intercourse without extreme pain. I had talked to my doctor about it. Turns out is was vulvodynia. Not only was it affecting my sex life, but on particularly bad days, I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t stand, and I couldn’t walk. The only thing that would even vaguely help was a warm bath, and that was only mild and temporary relief. So there I was, in constant pain, out of work, and pregnant. We talked about other options. In the end, I knew there wasn’t really any choice. The other options were just not something I could consider, despite how it was going to turn my life upside down. So we cancelled the appointment we had with the realtor in Park City and we started making plans for our new, unexpected life.

Gary was certain that there was no way we could keep the apartment. I think we probably could have, but we just would have had to make some changes to our lifestyle. It was only a one-bedroom, but we had a huge walk-in closet that we could have used as a nursery temporarily. Plenty of mothers have done just that. You just make do. Instead, I was convinced to go along with his plan to move in with his parents. It was suppossed to just be temporary. Instead it turned into four years of hell. Instead of at least having the privacy of a closet to put the baby in, plus our own space, we were instead reduced to two rooms in his parents, and less than halfway through, his grandmother moved in as well. I hated every living moment of it. We couldn’t even have a minor disagreement without everyone knowing. We couldn’t have sex without everyone knowing. In fact it killed my libido entirely. It got so bad we would go months without because there was always someone there, just on the other side of the door. Not to mention the fact that there was a tiny person sleeping just feet from our bed. Not exactly a situation to engender amourous feelings. This got to be a strain on our relationship.

But so did a lot of things. I felt like I was trapped in one of two rooms. There were people always there, always watching, always listening. We weren’t even allowed to open our curtains becase it might bother the neighbors. His mother would come in our rooms to “clean,” aka snoop and rearrange our stuff. As a result I’ve become an incredibly claustrophobic person. I don’t just mean minor claustrophobia, I’m talking full-blown panic attacks, complete with inability to breath. I won’t even use an elevator anymore if there is any other reasonable option. My last job, where I worked for three years, I took the stairs every single day, no matter how I was feeling, and this included through my second pregnancy. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

So here we are, trapped in two rooms in his parents house. After spending the first year of Nikolas’s life at home with him, I found a good job. I figured, we’ll find a place within the next few months and move out. This was not to be. Gary wasn’t willing to consider an apartment, and was convinced that we couldn’t afford a home. Despite the fact that millions of other people did it on less income than we had. So we stagnated. I finally got him to start looking again after I moved on to another job with better ay. And again he refused an apartment, and though he was willing to start looking at houes, none of them were good enough. His expectations for a first home were too high. I think that came from the fact that most all of his friends had enough money to build. We didn’t. We had enough for a starter home. Would it have been perfect? No, but it would have been ours. We finally found a place that would have worked for the three of us, and then bam, we find out I was pregnant with baby number two. They have a knack of turning up at unexpected times. The house would have been a little more difficult, but manageable, but again he was convinced we couldn’t do it. So, no bid on that house. We lost our realtor over it too. So then after finding another realtor, one whom we didn’t like nearly as well, we started looking again. We finally found another house. But it was overpriced, but we put in a bid. The guy would barely deal, only coming down maybe one grand. We put in a counter offer. Only another grand. We let it go. There was no way he would come down to what we felt was reasonable. Finally I just put my foot down. I told Gary I was moving to an apartment and he could come or not. I found a nice little three bedroom place and we moved into it just two weeks before the baby was due. One week before I was put on bedrest by my midwives.

During the my second pregnancy was when I realized just how bad things had gotten. I’ve always been very friendly. At least that’s how I think of it. Apparently a lot of other people think flirt is a better term for it. Either way, I had become quite friendly with someone I had met through work. And that’s all it was. I didn’t realize until later that he had a bit of thing for me. Things may have crossed the line a bit as far as things that were said. But nothing was ever acted on, and still hasn’t been. Gary found out eventually and it made things even harder for us. What had already been difficult, the two of us arguing daily, even in front of Nikolas, got just that much worse.

I realized that if things had gotten so bad between us with the constant fighting, the screaming and yelling, the inability to even speak to each other anymore, that even the little bit of emotional straying I had done would never have occurred. I’ve spent the past year trying to make our marriage work. We even tried a romantic weekend away to Niagara Falls, where we had spent our honeymoon. But in that year things didn’t change. He became more angry, and I just gave up. I didn’t have any fight left in me. I felt like I had spent the previous four years struggling alone to keep things together. He hadn’t even noticed. I had even written him letters telling him how unhappy I was and while read, they were never acted upon. I had even tried to kill myself, twice. Both times resulting in therapy for me, the second in being prescribed anti-depressants. And while my depression has improved, my marriage has not.

We still fight over virutally every little thing. My not coming to bed at the same time as he, my recently going out with friends (the first friends I’ve made since moving here 9 years ago) for too many hours, the tone of voice that I feel he speaks to me with, etc, etc, etc. We could argue about the color of the sky. In fact we probably have. I’ve come to realize that were it not for the kids, I would have already left. But there are the kids. And I don’t know what to do. They need their father. But they also need for their father and mother to be happy. I don’t see much chance of that happening with the way things currently stand. I feel trapped by the situation. I can’t fathom taking them away from their father, but I also can’t fathom spending the rest of my life in this dreary city. I need to escape, to find somewhere where I can start over. I know I have the option of moving back home to my family, but I couldn’t do that. I love smaller towns, but the drama, especially the drama of my family, is not something I can or need to cope with right now. If I had my way, I’d move to Portland, Maine. But it’s expensive and I’d be all alone, just me and my boys. I don’t mind being alone so much, but I’m just afraid of how we could survive. I know we’d find some way to make it. My mother did, so I know I can. It’s just so scary. And I’ve always been the smart one, the responsible one. How responsible is it to leave my husband and take my boys to a strange city that I’ve never seen before? I guess it depends on your point of view.

So there you go, my life, and all it’s gory details. Somehow, though it is very personal, I feel better, freeer for having laid it all out there. And not even a tear, amazingly.

No this is not a post about the movie of the same name. However it is a post about the stunning jewlery I found while browsing their website. As anyone who knows me well knows I adore Tiffany jewelery. In fact my favorite necklace is a Tiffany kidney shaped sterling silver pendant given to me by my mother. It’s so simple that it can be paired with jeans and nice tee or worn with the ubiquitous little black dress. So, in way of an apology for my long absence, instead of sharing with you all, the copious amounts of news I have, I figured I’d share some eye candy.

I love the pop of red peeking from behind the double row of hearts.

The black just gives it something different, and I’m a sucker for unique bracelets.

This is the pièce de résistance. It is absolutely stunning. I am in love. I love this more than my family. Okay, that’s a tad bit of an exaggeration. But it’s a close trade-off. However, at $350,000 I think I’ll keep my family.

Everyone have a safe and happy 4th. Enjoy those picnics, ballgames, and firework displays, but don’t forget what it is we’re really celebrating. 232 years ago great men and women fought tyranny for our freedom and today they still fighting and dieing today to protect his great nation. Please take a moment to remember them in the midst of your celebrations. Without them, we wouldn’t be the greatest nation in the world.

Yes, this is unabashedly patriotic, and I don’t really care what anyone else thinks about it. I am only speaking to the truth of my emotions.

So I don’t really have much of an answer to that question. I come up with ideas to blog all the time, but by the time I’m near my computer again, they’ve faded away. To be honest I’ve spent very little time online in general the past couple weeks. I’ve been trying to focus more on family-time. I’m not sure how successful I’ve been, but I’ll keep trying.

What I have managed to accomplish though is crossing several more items off my list. Most notable, to me anyhow, is one of my freebies. I’ve long wanted to recycle more but it was made difficult that the county recycling program only collects plastic. Sure it’s great to recycle all that plastic, but what about everything else like paper and aluminum? However, the city has finally started putting out collection bins for these items as well. They may not be collecting at the door like the do plastic, but they are making it much more accessible for everyone else. So much so that my husband thinks I’m recycling everything in sight. I’m feeling pretty good about myself for even remembering to bring home my recycling from work (ie, boxes from my snack crackers and granola bars).

I’m also hoping to cross another item off my list tomorrow. I’m not sure which one yet, but it’s likely going to be either “attend a gallery opening” or visiting Fallingwater and/or Kentuck Knob. You see Monday is my seven year wedding anniversary. Since both my husband and I will be at work Monday, we decided to celebrate tomorrow instead. It’s not quite clear what we were doing. Initially my husband was going to plan the day out and surprise me but apparently none of his ideas panned out, so we’ll be discussing some ideas once he gets home from the hockey game (which the Pens won 5-4, overcoming a 0-3 deficit!). Regardless of what we decide to do with our day, it is certain to include lunch or dinner at the Melting Pot, our favorite romantic meal location. We didn’t make it out there at all last year, so I’m really looking forward to it. A nice dinner and a child-free day. What could be better.

Okay, so that last statement sounds really bad. It’s not to say I don’t love every moment I get to spend with my boys. I cherish everyone of them. Even the not so pleasant ones when Maks is screaming because I’m not feeding him quickly enough or Nikolas is smarting off. But, it’s good to get some adult time. And a whole afternoon alone is a big improvement than the few minutes we’re able to snatch between the time the boys go to bed and we shut our own eyes.

Hi Everyone! I just wanted to bring your attention to a worthwhile cause, taking place today, Earth Hour 2008. It is designed to bring attention to climate change and it’s a n easy thing to do. You don’t have to go tie yourself to any trees, start riding a bike to work, or even start buying organic food. Simply turn off all your electronics and all your lights for one hour today, starting at 8 PM local time. One hour is all it takes to make a powerful statement that you are ready to make a change, that you are aware of a dangerous crisis that effects every single living thing on the earth.

Several cities across the globe have pledged to join in and will plunge themselves into darkness. Started in Sydney, Austrailia in 2007, it has grown exponentially over the past year. This year in the United States alone Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Atlanta, among others have agreed to participate. Don’t you think you should to?

“Mommy wait! I need to see myself.” Steps on stool, looks in mirror, “I look good.”
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“I’m a funny kid.”
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Me: Sorry, I took so long. Traffic was a bear.
Nikolas: There was a bear in traffic?
Me: Yes. A big one. He was scaring everyone so no one was going anywhere.

Rest of the night…
“Mommy, where’s the bear? Is he at Danny’s? (gas station). I don’t see him.”
“Mommy! There’s a bear on the roof. I’ll scare him. RAWR!”
“Mommy, is the bear inside Giant Eagles?”
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Gary: I’m going to drop you off at the door to pick up the diapers, and then we’ll go to the liquor store and you can get me a drink.

Nikolas: Me too.
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That’s a picture of mommy and daddy when they got married. When I was in mommy’s belly.
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Nikolas (pants lying discarded on floor): Mommy why does it stand up?

Me: So it doesn’t fall off.

Nikolas: I don’t like it!

Me: Then don’t play with it.
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Nikolas: Mommy, can I feed Maks?

Me: No honey, you can’t do it. He needs special Mommy milk.

Nikolas (pinching his nipple): Yes, I can. See!
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Nikolas: Daddy, were are we going?

Gary: The moo juice-store.

Nikolas: That’s left. Right?

Gary: That’s correct pal.

Nikolas: Mommy, was I right?

Me: Yes you were.

Nikolas: I’m a genius.
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Nikolas: Damma, do you have the stuff to feed Maks?

Damma: Yes, punkin. I’ve got the bottle right here.

Nikolas: No not that. That! (points at her chest)

Damma: No, I can’t feed him like that. I give him a bottle.

Nikolas: Then why do you have them.

Damma: For decoration.

Nikolas: Can I see?
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While listening to Taylor Swift’s new song “Picture to Burn…”

Daddy! She said stupid. But that’s okay. She’s my girlfriend.