Not Me Monday

 

It was NOT me who left my Valentine's roses out on the table instead of remembering to put them in the bathroom so the cat couldn't get to them.  Saturday morning I was expecting when Ben entered the kitchen that his first words to me would be "wow, the kitchen looks great" since I had stayed up and done the massive pile of dishes (that NOT I had been avoiding all day).  Instead the first words I heard were "Shauna!  You forgot to put the flowers away!" Which I knew should be translated that there was rose petal cat puke somewhere.  Since I had NOT done that, I chose not to answer and just stay upstairs a few minutes longer...maybe the real offender would be located! (In my opinion the cat was really to blame anyway!)

 I managed to save a few of the roses...still pretty.

It was NOT our family that had a service man come all the way out to the house to fix our perfectly working dishwasher.  That would be silly and costly.  Why would anyone do that?
If something like that had happened it might have gone something like this: Let's just say that several months ago our dishwasher stopped filling with water.  No water was entering the machine.  We've been hand washing dishes for all that time even though our dishwasher is younger than Tobi.  Ben finally had a chance to look at the dishwasher in depth last weekend and there was no easy way to see what was going on.  So he called for a service guy to come out and look at it.  Of course I was in the middle of telling the guy that no water was flowing into the machine and I was about to go into a long over-detailed explanation of the history of our trials and tribulations related to the dishwasher (as I certainly NEVER would do), when I heard a somewhat familiar sound of, YES, water....filling the dishwasher...sounding perfectly normal...ehhhhhh...errrrrr....emmmmm....uhhhhhhhhhhhh...yep, didn't know what to say.  So I gave the nice man $100 for his visit and sent him on his (I'm sure very) merry way.

Uh...I'm so glad that didn't happen to us because it would really stink to have to waste money and time like that. 

(proof that it really was broken: melted cutting board and undisolved burnt soap capsle!)

Well Baby

Monday Tobi had her 18 month check up.  She weighs 27 lbs 11 oz and is 34 inches tall. It's pretty amazing that one year ago she weighed 17 lbs and was just 26.5 inches tall.  That's more than 10 lbs and almost 8 inches of growth in one year's time.  Everything checked out just fine...except of course she is getting over another cold and one ear is on the verge of infection.  This happens with every well baby appointment for us.  At least this time it was just one ear and not the double infection we usually find.  We have an appointment with the ENT doctor in March to see if we need to be more active in fighting these infections.  Thankfully Tobi never seems to be in much discomfort....no fevers, sleeps great.  If it wasn't for her "well baby" appointments we might not ever know that she ever had an infection. She's a trooper!

Out and about

We have been doing some visiting and having some visitors over the past couple weeks.  On Grandpa's birthday we took a trip to visit Grandpa and a little trip over to visit Mema.  At Mema's place Tobi took her baby for a stroll, made herself right at home in Mema's apartment.

We took my dad out to lunch for his special day.   We went to a little sandwich place with a South American flair in Chelmsford center.  It was great to spend some time together.  I really am so thankful for my Dad and Tobi is pretty fortunate to have such a wonderful Grandpa.

 Last week my friend Ann came up from PA for a visit and she brought along her 5 month old sweetie pie of a daughter, Natalie.  Tobi was pretty glad to have a real live baby around.  I was pretty glad to have a dear friend around.  It is so great to have good friends that you can feel like no time has passed between you even if it has been a couple of years since we've seen each other.   So thankful for their visit.

And this was Tobi's first ride in a "big girl" ride.  A trip to Lowe's called for a serious ride.  She was pretty excited to be in the driver's seat.

Not Me Monday is Not Me Everyday of My Life

Not Me Monday is almost over and I really don't want to write this but I feel I must.  Perhaps in a few years I will be able to look back upon this and see how far I've come (however, I have a feeling based on the events of my life thus far, that this will not be the case).  Most people's posts seem to be about how they cut corners in their parenting...and I must admit there are those incidents throughout my week, but I really cannot blame most of the things I am about to confess (or NOT) on the addition of a child to my life.  My life has always been chock-full-o-things I really wished had not happened.  My mind is wired differently, my priorities are different, I often take short cuts even when I know there is probably a better way, but most often it seems that I am in the midst of a perfect storm of destructive forces.  So here is a recap of a week of things that I really wish never happened.

I did NOT leave the burner on low after moving the pot of spaghetti sauce to the warming burner.  And then I did NOT proceed to put the tray for the highchair on the stove where it was waiting to be washed.  I did NOT walk out into the kitchen after a couple of hours and say out loud  (half expecting that my husband was doing some electrical work in the other room, or something like that...)"What is that smell? It smells like burning plastic.", only to find out that it indeed was burning plastic.   The damages: a hole burnt into the plastic of the tray and orange plastic melting on the stovetop.

Good thing that didn't happen, that would have been messy (both for the stove and as you'll soon see, for my personal well being).  I'll tell you what though, if that had happened, I'm certain that my husband would have come into the kitchen and given me a look like "How do you ruin everything we own?".  And I'm sure that if he had looked at me like that I would have returned a look like "Why do you look at me like that?  I didn't MEAN to do it." but really I'd be asking myself the same question "HOW??? do you ruin EVERYTHING???".  It's a good thing none of this happened because then I might have been feeling bad for myself for a couple days and then used the seething coals of my self-absorption to fuel a "disagreement" with my husband later in the week...which I am not sure exactly what it was about but it probably had to do with me breaking something...

Now let's just say there was an actual difference opinion during the week in which I perhaps had slightly overreacted (so unlike me...) and then let's just pretend for a moment that despite my childlike behavior my husband came home carrying a 20 oz. Starbucks latte as a bit of a peace offering, the proverbial olive-branch, if you will (or more likely because he is way more mature that I am and is just nice like that all the time).  And say I was just thinking of ways that I could perhaps be more mindful and careful in my everyday life.  Carrying this possible situation further...let's imagine that I took that $5 latte and carefully set it on the counter away from all possible danger and damage and then leaned back against the counter two feet away from where I set the coffee and then proceeded to witness a chain reaction of epic proportions that ended with milk and espresso covering (what seemed like) 1/3 of the kitchen...I'm not even kidding.  If you are still imaging that something like this could happen, you should picture that when I leaned on the counter it shifted the dish drainer just enough to loosen the grip the cutting board had on the counter while it was precariously oh so carefully balanced against the cookie sheet holding it in place. The cookie sheet then slides down the counter and knocks over the FULL cup of steamy coffee goodness.  Not a drop left...every drop was now on the counter, on the floor, on the space heater and, in true Shauna fashion, dripping into every crevice of the already non-functioning dishwasher. (Hopefully the broken dishwasher was not my doing, but it hasn't been disproven yet. The jury is still out on that one.)

Thankfully this is NOT ME MONDAY and so I am NOT confessing any of the above, just simply weaving a sad tale of hypothetical patheticness.