Mama's New Toy

Well, this is going to be a short post, because I spent all of tonight playing with my new toy -- a shiney new iPhone 4. No, not the 4S, just the lowly 4, which is still a huge step up from the silly old phone I was using, and I like it very much. I got the white one, because it seemed a bit more fem and less popular than the black one. I'm already super obnoxious, I've downloaded all the best free apps, from Pinterest to Instagram and Voxer and DrawSomething. All the ones you gotta have. I've very excited for the baby to wake up tomorrow so that I can start filling it with pictures of her.

Yep, this was my night.

I just need a pretty new case now, and I'm all set. 

So if you suddenly get a bunch of requests to play DrawSomething or have facetime or whatever, just, bear with me. I may be late to this party, but, you know, I brought wine, so at least that's something. 

Wine of the Night

Tonight's offering is a delightful, slightly sweet, cabernet sauvignon from Yellow Tail, which has become a personal favorite of mine. All the better that it's under $10 a bottle at Safeway, which allowed me to also pick up a bottle of pinot noir for tomorrow. I figured, in my newly begun adventure with wine, I might as well start with the bottom shelf and work my way up. I mean, if you find a $7 bottle of wine that you love, you're stoked, right?

That's a lamp next to the wine, though I'll admit it looks suspiciously like a whip handle.

It's a Super-Sweet Thing!

Oh. My. Gosh. I feel like I've just been handed my key into the Grown-Up and Fabulous Club. Let me explain.

Shawn and I have been planning on moving a few towns over for a while now, to get into a nicer neighborhood and find a place where we will want to stay for a few years. I was lining up apartments to go and tour when a friend of ours casually reminded Shawn that another friend's mother owns a big, beautiful, and uninhabited home on the border of Alamo and Danville. Now, the house has been unoccupied for quite some time, and the plot of land it's sitting on has gotten totally overgrown, the spiders have set up shop, and some bored rich kids broke in at some point and spray-painted some of the walls in the upstairs bedroom.

But have I mentioned that this is a big two-story house in Alamo?

The owner knows Shawn from childhood, and when he mentioned the idea of us living in the top floor unit while also taming the yard, repainting, and repairing the rest of the house, and managing the tenants she is trying to get moved into the in-law unit on the property, she was immediately in love with the idea.

So there you have it. I don't know specifics like what rent we'll work out to pay, or how soon we can start moving in, since some things like fixing the spray paint need to be dealt with first. But let me tell you, I've spent the better part of this evening day-dreaming about how I'm going to decorate the baby's new bedroom. Since her bedding is purple, white, and brown, I'm pondering various combinations of lavender and white. Something like this, perhaps:

(thank you, weedecor.com)

I'm just all aflutter over the idea of having a real house to fix up and decorate, within reason, to make it look nice and get to live there. There is a huge yard with a built in bbq and firepit on the patio; I feel myself morphing into Martha Stewart at the thought of all the amazing gatherings we can host there, and just in time for summer, too. The thought of putting on some overalls and gardening gloves, cutting back all the ivy and tall grass and giving the rooms fresh coats of paint, really making the place shine again and bringing it back to life, has really got me excited. 

The house is steps away from the trail that runs through that part of town, and about a block or so down from the shopping area in town where the Peet's and Safeway etc are located.

And did I mention there's a fireplace? Upstairs? And a washer and dryer, which sounds like small potatoes as far as amazing house amenities, but when you've been living in apartments for the last ten years, that's a big potato. 

Plus, I'm still in the Bay Area and close to my family and friends, and now even closer to the bun of my dreams, LJ, who has been living out that way for a while, and who I desperately want to see more often and drink wine with while the kiddos become besties, just like their mommies. 

I just, I don't even know what to do with myself. I have a feeling my Pinterest is going to be getting about 10 new boards on it tonight!

Hot Fun in the Almost-Summertime

Hot, hot, hot today. Not a good day to live on the top floor of the building. Miss V took a long nap this afternoon, which I couldn't resist taking pictures of, since she was wearing her Ruffle Butt pants and sleeping butt-up. Adorable.

Working on this blog is giving me an itch to learn some photography skills. First off will be learning how to properly use the fancy-dancy camera I got for Christmas. Like, how do I get it to not have the stupid date and time stamp?

Afterwards I slathered her in sunscreen and popped on her cute little sun hat, and off we went for a walk down Park Street to the book store.

Mistaaaake.

First of all, wearing jeans was a bad idea on my part. I felt sticky and puffy and bloated. Not hot. Well, not the good kind of hot. Especially watching all the smart chicks in their cute shorts and tank tops.

Second, it was just too dang hot. The baby got all lethargic and sweaty, and I kept giving her drinks from my water bottle and spilling it down her shirt so she could cool off. Once at the book store, I didn't see the book I'd come for, so we left again and just went straight home.

However, experiencing the first summery day of the year has made me want to start training for a half marathon again. When I was in Campbell, I loved running. There was a great trail just down the road from my apartment, and I would go there 2-3 times a week after work and work on my mileage. It was great. So I think I'm going to look into some halfies around here and then put together a training program.

So, stayed tuned for more news on that front.

Something Different

So...I was reading back through last month's workout magazine, in which there was an interview with mommy and all around super lady Rebecca Romijn. Here's a woman who carried and birthed and is subsequently raising twins (who are adorable, btw), and looks like a slice of fantastic in a swimsuit. The article was nice, too, pointing out that she has to workout lots and watch what she eats in order to get that shape back after kids, and maintain it now. She also mentioned the mommy's guilt at leaving house and home to actually get those workouts in, which is definitely relatable. But the one thing that really stuck out for me was when she talked about how, after having her kids, the diet and the forms of exercise that she used to swear by were no longer working for her, that she had to change everything up and do things she'd never tried before in order to get those 60 lbs of baby weight to go away and stay away.

Since bringing Miss Violet into the world, I have been telling myself that losing this weight should be a snap. After all, I've lost a bunch of weight before, I know what things to do and so forth to lose it again. In practice, however, those old habits weren't working for me this time around, and every time I tried to tell myself to just go back there, I would get frustrated and down on myself because it wasn't working. Why couldn't I "just" do what I used to do, why wasn't I strong enough (metaphorically) to just slip right back into that old routine, etc.?

Reading the lovely Rebecca's interview, it dawned on me -- um, nothing is the same as it was before having a baby. So what makes me think that my old tricks and routines would work the same, either? You know how I lost weight after college? After work, I went straight to the gym for anywhere from 60-90 minutes, 4-5 days a week. I didn't even have a cat at this point, it was just me. I bought bags of ceaser salad and ate them for dinner, because I was only feeding myself. I was also getting more and better rest each night, since I could sleep without interruption from the time I laid down until the time my alarm clock went off. I had more time, energy, and well, time, to dedicate to being in the gym and reading fitness mags and being in the zone.

Now, I'm lucky if I get 6 uninterrupted hours of sleep a night. I have to concern myself with making sure the Mister has something tasty and filling enough for his dinner. When I get off work, I know that both Shawn and the baby are waiting for me at home to take over child care duties, give dinner, bath, books and bed; on top of working on my writing, keeping up with housework, reading if I have a chance, etc. So the time to dedicate to working out and exercising must be carefully carved out of each day, looked for and stolen whenever it presents itself. Which means I have to think about it more than I used to -- most days, I can't just head to the gym on autopilot after work, I have to think about my schedule the night before, plan out how and when I'm going to fit in a workout the next day so that I can pack the appropriate bag to take with me, or know that I'm going to do a dvd when I get home so there's no need to bring anything to work.

And while there's good in that, it also makes it more difficult to get the momentum of a routine going -- if everyday is different, it's easier to find a sudden excuse not to workout that day, or not to eat healthfully. And in the beginning stages of a weight loss effort, it's especially easy to be derailed. And what was keeping me the most stuck was the constant inner questioning of why I just couldn't knuckle under and get back to my old routines. As I hope we're all aware, berating ourselves is no way to build positive mojo.

So, recognizing that things are of course different now has relieved that pressure from me, and has reminded me that, as long as I'm doing something just about every day, I'm moving closer to my goals. I made a little mini goal for the next two weeks to use a piece of fitness equipment every day. So if I'm too tired or busy to hit the gym on a given day, I can pick up the hand weights I have at home and do some bicep curls in the evenings.

It's not about going back to the person I used to be, it's about moving forward into the person I will become, a new me, moving into my (jesus) thirties soon, not the twenty-something I was when I first lost weight, but now a busy, strong, determined woman with a fiance and a baby and a lot of stuff on my plate, who will find new ways of being the hot and fabulous chick on the outside that I have always been on the inside.

Blankies and other things

How it gets to be after 10pm on a Sunday night is beyond me. I swear it was just Friday afternoon. Really, work again tomorrow? Sigh...all right, but pass the merlot, will you?

Mommy's been on a wine kick of late. I don't know what started it. When I was in my earlier twenties, I shunned wine, I thought it was pretentious and stupid and I hated hanging out with girls who were all, ooh, wine, let's drink wine, la! Somewhere in the last year, however, I've turned into that girl. So, score one for karma, 2 points for the-jokes-on-me. Maybe giving birth had the added side effect of maturing my palette, I don't know. I'm still not sophisticated enough to consider myself a wine snob, I mean, when I swirl and sniff I just smell wine, not any notes of oak or delightful zephyrs of blackberry or anything. But I do love a good glass of red at the end of the day, either while finally getting to sit down with my book for a few uninterrupted moments, or while checking back in with my writing for a page or two. It used to be I drank wine for the classy, let's play dress-up, appeal of it, since I didn't actually like it. These days, I'm enjoying the beverage for its own sake.

Score another point for karma that I finally got around to throwing out the two wine racks I'd kept in the house for years just before this new found love arrived.

***

Little Miss V was sick this weekend. It took me most of Saturday to notice it. I'm still not sure if I gave her something, since I'm convinced my sniffles were purely allergy-based. But Saturday morning she had a drippy nose, and I didn't trust my instinct at first when I knew she felt warmer than usual. We went over to my friend's mother's place to socialize and so forth, and by the time we were ready to leave, she had heated up to the point that it was plain she needed some baby meds and an early bedtime. So I took the poor little fussypants home, had Mr. S go to the store for baby Tylenol, and fixed her a bottle. She fell asleep before pops got home with the medicine, slept for about two hours, and when she woke up again, we gave her a bath to calm her down. She loves her bath. Still, she was having trouble sleeping because of the congestion, so when she woke up for the second time she and I snuggled on the couch together for SNL. I fell asleep before the musical guest, but Shawn said she laid there awake for the whole show and then fell asleep. We slept on the couch all night.

She was doing better today, got another couple of doses of medicine, and by bedtime tonight she was still a little snotty, but better, mostly her normal temp, though still pretty exhausted.

She has started showing an affinity for different blankets of hers, mostly the soft chenille-y ones. There are two, a pink and a purple, and it makes me infinitely glad to see her dragging oen around behind her on her toddles around the house, or gripping it in her little fist while I'm putting her to sleep and sucking on it, hehe. She never took to a pacifier, but I wanted her to have a blankie or a lovey so bad, everyone ought to have one, I think. I tried to get her to like the pretty blankie my mom made for her, but alas, it's the store-bought ones that she prefers. I will feel less responsible for any neuroses later on her life for the fact that I did not, in fact, force this attachment on her, only that I really wanted her to form one and I shall do nothing to dissuade her from it. She made this choice on her own, I'm just going to encourage it. :)