Staci\'s a quirky bird

Poop. Bloody poop. I wish it were the funny British cursing poop, but no. Real bloody poop. From my dog. In my kitchen.

That started by day yesterday. I rushed our 9 year old lab to the vet to find out she has an bacterial infection in her intestines and…wait for it…….Hepatitis. I’ve got to get her to stop sharing needles with the junkie dogs in our neighborhood.

It’s totally treatable. That’s the good news. And, we got a wellness plan which saved us a good 500$ yesterday. Also good news. That didn’t really stop my afternoon from being a complete wreck though. Walk through it with me for old time’s sake.

3:15 – vet calls with the news, lets me know I can come get her.

3:16 – Candice starts screaming. She’s tired! But the bus lets off at 3:45 and I don’t want to wake her up, so up she stays. She is visibly unhappy about this.

3:45 – Claire comes home off the bus. “Where’s Chloe,” I say? “Uhhh, I don’t know,” says Claire. Oh yeah – it’s Wednesday which means Chloe has nature club until 4:30.

3:46 – Candice starts screaming in earnest. I pack everyone in and drive to the school hoping (wistfully) that she’ll fall asleep in the car.

3:47 – Cue torrential downpour

4:30 – Nature club is released, but it’s raining. There’s a bush in the way and I can’t see Chloe, she can’t see me, so the teacher won’t let her go. I have no idea where she is, so I have to get out in the pouring rain leaving screaming baby in the car with 5 year old.

4:32 – Soaking wet, deep breath, drive to pet store

5:00 – pick up Lula, need to get her some different food and treats to hide her giant horse pills in. Chloe pushes cart with baby in it, I wrestle 88lb dog and try to read dog food labels

5:01 – Lula bloody poops a gallon on floor of Petsmart. I sheepishly apologize to a teenage girl that walks by who points me disgustedly to a pet mess station. Um, did you not see the GIGANTIC mess? And you want me to use single server paper towels and a poop bag? Classic. Claire happens to be standing in the center of said poop mess in rain boots and a rainjacket, looking around with saucer eyes like she’s in a mine field.

5:05 – After 10 trips to the poop station for supplies, a manager finally comes over with a ream of paper towels and a petsmart bag. He saw me and came to help – the little snatch that left me there with my three kids, a gallon of bloody poop, and a freaked out 88lb dog that my 7 year old was trying to keep in check, was no help whatsoever.

5:08 – Attempt 2 at reading dog food labels

5:09 – More poop. Ensue song and dance deux.

5:12 – Decide to get the $(*% out of Petsmart. I have to get the treats though or she won’t eat them. I’m sweating buckets that this point from stress.

5:20 – Kids, dog, meds and self are in car headed home.

5:45 – 7:15 – screaming baby

6:30 – 7:00 – fit throwing DivaClaire, sent to room, locks me out. Result: Claire no longer is allowed a doorknob.

8:00 – kids in bed, beer in hand, nerves somewhere on Mars.

Let’s hope today is better because more days like that and I may end up in a mental institution.

busy beavers

So I’m busy. Like, really busy. And so is Jeff. We realized about 6 months ago that we were wasting mad cash because we weren’t planning our meals. But we didn’t have time to plan meals either.

I saw through following the owner of Project Life’s facebook that she used e-mealz, which is a meal planning website.

E-mealz -Here’s how it works

Subscription is 5$ a month which gets you access to their weekly meals. You can choose from various lists (safeway, walmart, vegetarian, meals for 2) and every week you get a menu with instructions and a grocery list. EASY!

the only problem

The meals were totally hit or miss.

Sometimes the meals were great. Sometimes the recipes were jacked up and I ruined dinner. Most of the time, the meals didn’t coincide to use the same ingredients. Sometimes there was way too much food. Sometimes there wasn’t enough. They say on their site that groceries for your weekly recipes should be 85/week. We were spending about 120. And, there were only about 5 real dinners per week, plus a lunch and a breakfast. I don’t really ever want to cook lunch, or one of their breakfasts. Also, I couldn’t choose what I wanted, or recall any other recipes.

relish relish.

Then, Jasmere ran a deal on a meal planning site called Relish. I so  jumped ship because we were so sick of the meals with e-mealz. Here’s the rundown:

Subscription is 7/mo
You get 15 recipes to choose from to add to your weekly list (as many as you want)
There are also 15 freezer recipes to choose from (set it all up, stick it in the freezer, cook when you want)
Once you move the recipes into your list, you can print up a grocery list and your recipes
You can set how many servings you want (2-8) so the recipe is automatically adjusted to your family size
Each recipe gives you a rundown of calories, protein, sugar, etc as well as WW points
You can save your favorite recipes and add them back into your list whenever you want
The recipes are DELICIOUS
They have real instructions (e-mealz is one short paragraph, typically as long as your ingredient list)
Groceries for a 6 dinner week was 94$ last week
The ingredients coincide through the recipes
They have other lists you can access at any point (like kid friendly, vegetarian, various holidays, etc), as well as all of their past recipes
The meals generally take 30 minutes or less to make
All of the recipes I’ve had so far are pretty low carb (e-mealz: just about every meal had pasta, rice, or garlic bread in it)

Can I tell you that I LOVE THIS WEBSITE. Love. It not only makes my life easier, but it’s saving me money and getting me excited about cooking again. I used E-Mealz for about 6 months, we’ve been on relish for a few weeks now. There’s really no comparison. Relish is amazing and full of really delicious recipes. Every week they have a theme too, like last week was pineapple. They had me making pineapple mango salsa, grilling amazing marinated pork chops with grilled pineapple, etc. This week it’s jamaican, several of the recipes have chimichurri or jerk flavors. The other night, we had lasagna spinach roll ups with a salad with homemade buttermilk cucumber ranch dressing. DROOL.

Go give it a shot, you’re not going to be sorry. Click here to go to Relish and get your grub on.

get dressed, lazy.

Working from home it’s easy to get into a rut that involves sleeping until you want to and working in your pj’s or yoga pants all day. FYI – wearing yoga pants is not equivalent to getting dressed! At least, I tell myself that or else I’d wear them every.single.day. All day.

so what did I do about it?

My biggest issue is how to get  motivated to get dressed and put a spot of makeup on so I don’t feel like a slag come 5pm. So I decided to take a picture of myself every day at 9:45 am. Either I was going to look cute, or I was going to look a wreck. I opted for cute. And, for accountability sake, I’m posting them here. Talk about motivated!! I’ve gotten dressed every day. In real clothes. Complete with a little lip gloss.

how to make it realistic

I’ve been taking a shower at night and blowdrying my hair before bed so I don’t have to do it in the morning. If I have to shower in the morning, it’s going to take me 45 minutes to get dressed and get on with the day. Yesterday, it took me 12 minutes to throw on clothes, foundation, blush, mascara, and a little lip gloss. And brush my teeth. Don’t forget that.

did it work?

You bet. It’s made a huge difference in my attitude, my productivity, but best of all, my self esteem. I didn’t realize how crappy I felt at the end of the day when I was in the same thing I went to bed in the night before. I was amazed at how quickly I got dressed and put a smidge of makeup on. Do you have 12 minutes every day to get presentable? I found the time and am so much happier for it. So is my husband

The first few months here haven’t been so bad. I’ve been skyping, texting, calling friends from back home and it hasn’t really felt like I’ve been gone. Until recently.

get out of my butt

That’s what Parrish said (with her mind) last week after I was constantly hounding her about…well…everything. Like I needed to call her every time anything happened, or I saw something that made me think of her, or wanted to talk to ask her how to do something (like paint furniture, or really anything – she’s like a hipster martha stewart). And then I realized – I need some friends here.

meeting moms

This has to be one of the hardest things to do without joining a mom’s group. So I joined a mom’s group. I actually thought I gt rejected because it took a few days to get approved. sad face. Was super stoked today to get APPROVED (say it like the Target lady!) – am going to the first event next week. happy face! I’m way too excited about it – which tells me again that I really, really needs me some friends!

To all of you out there (hi mom! Actually, I don’t even think my mom reads my blog haha), I hope you have a happy holiday weekend full of sparklies and yums and good times.

Have you heard of GTD? It’s pretty awesome – it’s an easy way to plan out and catalog anything and everything so that you can actually get it done. And, you can get it out of your brain. Here’s how it works.

worry wart

One of the reasons that you worry (theoretically) about things that need to get done is because your brain is constantly trying to remember all of those things at once. So you just go around and around in your head about the things you need to do, which makes sparks shoot out of your ears as you freak out. The GTD process gets everything out of your head and into a manageable list that you can reference, so your brain can stop worrying about all those things you need to get done.

make a big fatty list.

So the first thing you do is write out a fat honking list of everything you need to do. It can be anything from vacuum to plan a baby shower to send out thank you notes. Just download everything out of your head and into a list.

organize it

Look over everything. Anything that’s takes more than one task becomes a project. For instance, plan a baby shower has many steps (make guest list, get addresses, source invitations, choose menu), but vacuum is only one. Now you should have a series of lists for each of your projects.

expand it

Now that you have your projects, expand each one to make sure you have all of the steps written down. For instance, I may have yard work as a project and one of those tasks is to weed whack. But I need a weed whacker, so I have steps associated with weed whack that include finding a weed whacker and buying it.

put it in order

Now, number all of the tasks/subprojects by what needs to happen first, if applicable. When you’re ready to work on that project, you just start at the top.

take it a step further, if you’re ready for that

Typically I don’t take it further than putting it in order, but you can! Give each task a note for where it needs to be done. For instance, confirming the guest list for the baby shower is something I need to do on the phone. Collecting the addresses is something I need to do in email, or computer (whatever label you want to give it). Buying a weed whacker is something I need to do as an errand. The idea is that you can sit down to email and take care of everything in your email label, or run all of your errands in that label at once.

what can make this easy for me?

Let’s be honest – if it’s not easy then we’re not going to do it. So how can you make it easy? Well, we use Things (mac only) – you can try it out for free and see if you like it. There’s an app for that too. If you have a PC, there are quite a few out there, just google GTD Software and try a few out. Most have a free trial.

I actually like writing things down on paper, so I made some printables that I’ll be offering for free here pretty soon! They turned out super cute, hopefully you’ll enjoy them as much as I have been.

David Allen wrote the book on it (literally!). Get it on Amazon here.

you can’t make this sh!t up.

Chloe, age 7, writes a note to her mother while she’s on a work call asking for a Coke.

Soooo it’s 6pm and I totally flaked on day 1 of my attempt to blog daily. Ha.

turn that frown upside down

I hate Mondays. I really thought this one was going to be a good one, but I was wrong-0. If only my nook 2.0 had come in today! Sigh. Good news is that my art books shipped from Amazon today. Yipee! I’m looking forward to all of the goodies in that package, and sharing them with you readers out there. All 5 of you, love your hearts.

At least the day went nuclear AFTER I finished work for the day. And, there’s a cold beer plus a good book, a smiling baby and a hot dinner to make it all a little better.

Was your Monday better than mine? I sure hope so.

Sometimes we just have to face the facts.

So I’ve been trying to figure out HOW to make myself post more. I happen to be one of those people who, if something is part of my routine it gets done. If it’s not, it doesn’t. Simple as that. Problem is my routines are daily. I’m way too ADD to routine a week. So it occurred to me I should blog every (weekday) day. Which means…what? I mean I can’t blog once a MONTH, nevermind daily. Right? I guess we’ll see.

In my defense, I have been a little busy.

hello, denver.

We love it here. The scenery is amazing. The people are super friendly. There are a zillion things to do. The schools are amazing. Colorado had big shoes to fill coming from California, but I have to say it delivered, and then some. Let’s see how I handle the winter though, after having lived in a practically tropical latitude my entire life. Check out the view from one of the kid’s windows…

I love LA.

Went back to LA to stay with my bestie, Parrish. Had an amazing time with the girls for a pre-birthday eating/dancing/drinking/shopping marathon. It was excellent.

31 times the lady.

I turned 31 over the holiday weekend which we spent in Breckenridge. It was beautiful. I definitely missed our friends though, it was my first birthday without my people.

Candice chuborama

She’s getting so big! And cute. She’s starting to babble and grab things. Such a fun age – she’ll be four months old pretty soon. I can’t even believe that.

Ok, so enough about me. I have some blog posts in the works that aren’t about me (I know, shocking) and I’m going to try to get on here once a day during the week and post pictures if nothing else. Wish me luck with that hahahaha!

candice violet

2.12.11
5lb 12oz, 19.5 inches of cute.

it all started with a bad case of the flu

Chloe brought home the flu and was sick for a week with a super high fever. At the end of that week, none of the rest of us were sick…until BOOM. Claire and I both caught it. We had been mall walking for a few days trying to evict the baby, but Thursday the 10th we went into Labor and Delivery because my contractions were 2-3 minutes apart for 3 hours and bad enough that I was having to breathe through them. Yeah – they sent me home because I wasn’t progressed enough.

Friday the flu hit hard, we cut our mall walk short because I was feeling like roadkill. After a nap, I was laying in the living room and was feeling like I was going to pass out – my blood pressure was dropping intermittently. So they told us to come back to Labor and Delivery. They checked my amniotic fluid, which was super low, and voila…I was admitted and prepped for induction.

labor + the flu = THE SUCK.

Let me be the one to tell you that delivering a baby while fighting the flu is hellish. They induced me that Friday  night on the 11th at midnight: by 3am I was in bad shape. I was so sick, my head hurt SO bad that the bones in my face hurt. The nurse got me some advil, but by 4am I was still hurting. She suggested a narcotic, promising me it was just going to knock me out for 1-2 hours so I could get some sleep and get my epidural around 6am. Yeah, at noon I was still puking, totally hungover from the la la drugs. I never would have agreed to them if I hadn’t been so freaking sick, I just felt so awful I would have taken anything she had offered. Literally – anything.

fast and easy

I went into labor at midnight and Candice was born at 1:57 the next afternoon. My fastest labor yet! I pushed for about 8 minutes. The nursing staff and midwife were super cheerleaders. They put Candice right on me after she was born, that’s the first time out of three deliveries that I was able to experience it. It was amazing.

recovery? what’s that?

We left the next afternoon to come home. I was still battling the flu, but after a few days Claire and I were both feeling a lot better. By the next weekend though, both her and I were feeling worse. We thought our flu came back – that would have been easier than what actually happened. Claire, we discovered, had Pneumonia. I, we discovered, had an infected uterus. HTF does that happen?? Not sure, my guess is that my immune system was so busy taking care of the flu that the infection ran rampant all up in my womb. It was so bad that by the time I got in to see the doctor I could barely walk. When I got there, they were really concerned. They hooked me up to an IV chalk full of antibiotics and gave me a shot of penicillin in the butt. They sent me home with 875mg of amoxicillin to take twice a day. Holy horse pill, batman. But by that evening I felt so much better, finally able to walk comfortably for the first time in a week. It felt like my lady parts had been a punching bag for a prize fighter.

my baby is awesomeness.

This baby is a dream. She wakes up once in the middle of the night to eat (HOLLA for sleep). She rarely cries and is cute to boot. She’s mellow and makes noises like a baby dinosaur. We adore her. So much in fact, knowing it’s my last baby…I’m having a hard time watching her grow up! Every night I mourn that day lost. I’m getting over it though, she’s just graduated out of preemie clothes and into newborn size. 0-3 month are ridiculously big still. Candice was born two days before Valentines, which is appropriate since her nickname is Candi. Here are a few of our favorite pics.

It’s been a hairy couple of months.

Christmas madness

Christmas was nutso, we had my brother and his wife in town and my parents here often plus Jeff was working pretty much non-stop through the holiday. We survived though!

Claire got glasses

Claire, we discovered, is far sighted. Really far sighted. She got her first pair of glasses in the beginning of January – and surprisingly is adorable in them!! I was really concerned – I was the kid with glasses in school and it was…let’s just say it was less than awesome. They’re super cute though, and she’s rocking them out. The chances of her eyes correcting themselves is pretty high too, but with my raging hormones it was a lot to handle! It’s turning out to be way less of a deal than I thought it was going to be initially though.

baby shower goodness

Mid January we had my baby shower, thrown by a group of my best friends. It was super fun, and gorgeous to boot. Parrish headed up the operation, it was candy themed (YUM) – even more appropriate as we’ve chosen the baby’s name: Candice Violet. No, we won’t be calling her Candy as a general rule, but I think it’s a little cosmic that the shower theme coincided with her name.

chloe’s 7 and toothless

Chloe had her 7th birthday party the week after the baby shower at Chuck E Cheese. Don’t judge. It was easier than throwing a party anywhere else! And, the kids had a rager – success! Also, Chloe lost one of her top teeth and now has the cutest speech impediment that I’ve ever heard.

this baby wants out.

During the holidays, I was a lethargic mess. I couldn’t get enough sleep, my heart rate was doing whacked out things, and my body was in bad, bad shape. Went to the doc two days after Christmas and we discovered – I’m anemic. Like super hardcore don’t pass go – get some supplements now anemic. Started taking iron supplements and almost immediately felt a zillion times better all around.

The day Claire got her glasses, we were out all day (without enough water for me) and I was really upset about her having to get glasses. So upset that by the time we got home, made dinner and did homework, I was having contractions 1:30-1:45 apart. Scary contractions. Breathe through it contractions. So we packed up and went to the hospital for a magical shot of terbutaline to stop them.

Less than a week later, we thought I might be leaking amniotic fluid. Went to L&D and got a false positive on a litmus test – turns out NOT leaking fluid: just peeing on myself. That’s right, folks – I was leaking pee instead. Being pregnant is awesome. I’ll take peeing myself over leaking amniotic fluid at 35 weeks though any day. I couldn’t believe how happy I was TWICE to leave the hospital with no baby.

Self – imposed bedrest

My midwife and I had a good talk a week ago or so and she made me feel a lot better about becoming an invalid. If I get up from my desk and walk to the bathroom and back, I have contractions that hurt. Bad. So I’ve been laid up in bed working over the last week trying to keep this kid cooking for a few more weeks. I can’t express how much I appreciate that my midwife has had 5 kids – she definitely understood how much pain and frustration I’ve been dealing with and swore to me that I wasn’t going to have to deal with it that much longer. My worst nightmare is going 42 weeks in this state. Ok, that was melodramatic, but seriously – I’m going to be crying non-stop if I’m still pregnant in the middle of march.

eviction weekend

Next weekend I’ll be 37 weeks and we’re planning an all day mall-walk-a-thon to try to evict this kiddo. I had Claire at 37 weeks and my midwife assured me that we’ll all be good to go from that point, so the plan is to instigate. Wish us luck with that – I may have a nervous breakdown if it doesn’t work.