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!

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. :)