24 hours' worth of antibiotics and it's like we've adopted an entirely new kitten - one with a sense of smell! It must be like a whole new world to him - he's wandering all around the house, sniffing here and there and exploring like he never has.

He apparently hasn't yet figured out that the scent of dog generally means a huge ball of black fur will come ferociously tearing after him at any given moment. Or he doesn't care. Or maybe he thinks it's a sign of love. Heck, maybe it is.

This tail thing also has him pretty confused. His own tail seems especially bothersome, always getting in the way when he turns in circles to lie down, and teasing him mercilessly with it's endless twitching. But, the gigantic blob of black fur also has a tail! What fun! And he has yet to figure out that the reason he gets smacked in the head every time he chomps down on said tail is because it is, in fact, attached to his 100 pound housemate and she doesn't much care to have it bitten.

Dogs are definitely smarter than cats.

Chasing that pesky tail:



Diaper wrestling - it's a new sport!


This is what it looked like the other night when I was ready to go to bed:


Izzy loves her baby. Cora is actually asleep in this picture.



===

So Chloe was at Mark's house last night. American Idol wasn't on because our TV station had the nerve to catch fire and burn to the ground (how DARE it? Hmphh.) I lost my cable needle and so cannot knit. The lights are out in the craft room so I can't scrapbook. I can't recall ever having been so bored.

So what did I do? I diaper shopped. :-D I bought some absolutely adorable diaper covers for my ever-growing baby. And then I watched 10 Things I Hate About You and mourned the loss of beloved hottie, Heath Ledger. :::sob:::

===

Our poor dog. She's just trying to lie down and be a good dog, and that silly cat keeps crouching down and then springing high into the air, landing on her tail.

==

Today is Thursday, my 'me' day. I need to get the grocery shopping done first thing, and dry and fold diapers. I'd like to organize my scrapbooking desk - something that has to be done after every 5 pages or so, or I can't find anything.

I'll probably spend most of the day knitting, scrapbooking, and just chillin' out. I rather look forward to it, though by noon I'll be missing Chloe terribly.

I spent yesterday hanging out at my mom's house all day with the girls. She is so nice to keep me company. :o) We played with her Klick-n-Kut, did some scrapbooking, Chloe and I went in the hot tub, I helped my little brother with his trig homework, and it was just a nice day.

I leave you with one final picture, one I've been trying to capture now for some time.

How could you ever say no to that lip? LOL She has us wrapped around her little finger with that look. (It took 15 tries to get that picture. Which means I sat there with a camera in my baby's face while she was crying. :-X)



==

Oh my goodness. The cat is actually chasing the dog now.

Over the river and through the woods...

...to the vet we go.

I can deal with a litter box. I can even handle sneezing all the time because I'm still allergic to the little fur ball. But I am officially drawing the line at slimy green cat snot.

And so, we are off to the vet this morning, where he will hopefully fix our kitten. Otherwise, I'm afraid Milo may have to find a new place to live. I feel bad, and I really do like the little guy, but I'm so done with the boogers. Yuck.

==

So yesterday's plan was to go to craft class at Michael's and then a play date with Cayenna and her boys, so we could get out of the house and not drive each other mad. Except that Michael's cancelled the craft class and Cayenna's boys came down with a cold. So we stayed home all day again. It didn't help that was I was cranky all day. I'm not sure what my problem was, but I was just irritable and pissy. So I decided that Chloe could just watch TV all day. :o\ Okay, not really all day, but it felt like it. She probably watched 3 or 4 hours worth of Sprout. Ah well. It won't kill her, and I otherwise might have. LOL

==

I've been Tivo-ing some craft shows on DIY - Creative Juice is my favorite, along with B. Original and Scrapbooking. We went down and watched Creative Juice last night - Chloe was as into as I was. They showed some different things you can do with a Bedazzler. Get this - I still have my Bedazzler, the one my mom bought back in the late 80's. I guess they've come out with it again recently, but mine's the original. It's practically vintage or something. So after we watched the segment on Bedazzling, I let Chloe pick a shirt to put studs on. I thought it would be over her head, but I showed her how to do it and she did a great job! As we put the stuff away she said "Tomorrow, I'm going to put diamonds on my jeans. And maybe on my panties too." I have a feeling her entire wardrobe is going to be Bedazzled if I don't hide the thing.

In other crafty news - The back and the left front of the Central Park Hoodie are complete now, and the first 5" of the right front are on the needles. I'm starting to get bored. This always happens with big projects. Hopefully I can convince myself to keep trudging on. I have knitting ADD, and that usually means it takes me months to complete a sweater because I get bored and cant' help but cast on and make something new in the meantime.

I've almost caught up on all my scrapbooking again. Only a few more pages left. I oughtta upload some photos of my pages - I never think to do that. I have some pretty cute ones done though. I'm trying to do Cora's baby book in scrapbook form - the first time she sits up, rolls over, etc. I didn't do that with Chloe's first year book, and wish I would have.

===

Okay, enough rambling for now. Boy, I can't wait for my hubby to come home. I need some adult conversation!

Grease and preservatives - yum!

So I'm doing this whole eating healthy thing. Not just a diet - I intend to change my eating habits to create good ones, a permanent change. And so far, I really am doing pretty good. But every so often, I feel a little bit deprived, and I don't do well with deprivation.

When I feel like something is taken away from me, I do everything I can to get it back. It's probably residual from my rebellious teenage years.

So yesterday, I suddenly got a craving for McDonald's. I wanted grease and preservatives more than anything else in the world. And I almost went. I mean, we're talking I had Cora changed and ready to go, the car was heating up, and I was about to call Chloe to put on her shoes when I stopped dead in my tracks and realized that I had succumbed to a moment of temporary insanity (or was it rebellion?) and managed to stop myself.

I decided it made a lot more sense to bake cookies instead. ;o)

I called Chloe up and said "I really want to bake some cookies, but I need help. Will you help me?" She says "Sure! You put all the stuff in the bowl. I'll be the washer for the spatula and mixer." (Read: you bake the cookies. I'll lick the spoon.)

So we baked 5 dozen chocolate chip cookies, complete with white sugar and lots of butter. As of last night, there were 4 dozen left.

I know what you're thinking. No, I didn't eat a whole dozen cookies all by myself. I'm not *that desperate for sugar. I had two, Chloe had one, and Isabel had 9 or 10. You would think by now I'd have learned my lesson - EVERY single time I bake cookies, the dog snatches at least a few off the counter while they're cooling. She apparently craves sugar as much I do.

Around Christmastime, Chloe and I baked some cookies using her letter cookie cutters. We spelled out "Merry Christmas". We baked them and had them cooling on the counter. I came back in to check on the next batch, and the dog was looking up at me with guilt and satisfaction written all over her face. I looked at the cookies on the counter. "MERRY MAS" was all I saw. My dog ate Christ. :o/ Bad dog.

==

Well, we've had our healthy smoothies this morning, and we're off to Michael's for craft class, then off to a play date this afternoon. Hopefully today goes by faster than yesterday, because by four o'clock yesterday afternoon I was mildly insane. :o)

No shopping? Yeah, right.

LOL I really did consider not buying clothes for a year. And then I realized how crazy that is. ;o)

We dropped Andrew off at the airport yesterday morning, he's gone for a week for more training in Oklahoma. That means I'll probably be blogging a lot. I decided the best way to start a week of having him gone was to go shopping, so we headed to Kohl's. You just can't do any better than the clearance racks there. In my defense, most of what I bought was for Chloe, all summer and next winter stuff, and was actually needed. I also bought a pair of shorts and capris for me, and a plain white cami top, since I wore my last few out. It's one of those staples of my wardrobe and I'll get $6 worth of use out of it, so I decided to go for it.

Actually, buying bottoms right now is kind of needed for me too. I'm down to a size 5, which I haven't been since before I was pregnant with Chloe. At some point along the way, I got rid of all my size 5 stuff, figuring I'd never be that small again since I was stuck at a 7 for so long. So now I need new pants that don't fall off my hips. :o)

Anyhow, the grand total for Kohl's - $60. And I left with 20 articles of clothing. I'm pretty darn happy with that. :o)

===

The back of the CPH is done now, and I'm about 25 cable rows up the left front - another 50 or so rows and it'll be done, and I might be able to do that today. I've been watching junk TV while knitting when Chloe isn't here. I think I can already feel brain cells dying off. I watched two shows yesterday, on the "style" channel (there was nothing on DIY, I tried!) Anyhow, it was mind numbing. I need to stop doing that.

===

Here are some pics I uploaded this morning:

This is what 'school' looks like in our house. :o)



Happy baby

the girls, watching Baby Einstein together on my bed with the laptop.



And... look who can sit up all by herself now! She's staying up for 15-20 minutes at a time. I can't believe how fast she's growing up!

Look who decided to be friends. :oP I guess they decided since they both want the most comfortable bed in the house, they'd have to share it.

Stuff

How in the world can one little family acquire so much STUFF? Ugh! I'm decluttering, and it's proving to be a great exercise in anti-commericialism.

While Chloe was away, I cleaned and organized most of her room. I threw away a pile of silly little McDonald's toys, prizes from the library and the Halloween party she went to in October, etc. Just little blobs of plastic, intended to entertain a child for half an hour before being forgotten and left in the closet to collect dust and take up space. After that, I got a couple of big Rubbermaid tubs from Wal Mart and proceeded to pack away about half of her toys. I hauled it down to the basement and stuck it in the closet under the stairs. My plan is to switch out those toys with the ones I left out in a couple months, when boredom sets in. Amazingly, you can't even tell that anything was removed. That's how much STUFF she has. Her room still looks quite full.

What gets me is that she is constantly "bored". We could entertain an entire third world country with all the toys in this house, but my spoiled little child is "bored". Argh! She got in trouble once for refusing to pick up her toys. So I packed up everything - every single toy in her room, and took them out, and I tied her closet shut so she couldn't get into it. I left it that way for a whole day. You would think that would devastate a small child, no? But not her! She couldn't have cared less - she let her imagination entertain her all day long, with not one toy in sight.

I'm not buying that kid any more toys for a long time. It's a hard thing for me to do - I love buying her toys, it's so easy to do, and there are so many toys I want an excuse to play with! But she's overloaded with so much stuff that she doesn't even know what to do with herself. I'm talking like, for the next year, I'm not buying stuff for her.

===

I'm not really far off though, if I think about it. I cleaned out my closet. I am one of those girls guilty of standing in front of her closet and whining "I have nothing to wear!" when my closet is about to overflow with perfectly good clothing. I cleaned out my closet and pulled out a whole trash bag full of clothes, and you can't tell I took anything out. I'm putting the trash bag in the basement too - I had a hard time parting with some of the stuff, even though I haven't worn it in years, if ever. I have a lot of clothes that I love in theory, but when I actually put them on, they look terrible. ya know? So anyway, I'm putting the stuff in the basement and if I don't miss it at all in a year, I'm giving it all away to Salvation Army or something.

Maybe I should not buy myself any clothes for a year. ::gasp::: I'm so guilty of seeing some great deal at Kohl's and buying it, even though it's something I really don't need. I just love clothes, so much. Oy. I'm gonna consider that. It would be so good for me.

==

Absentmindedness

Alas, the mystery is solved, I found the camera. It was next to the towels in hall cabinet by the bathroom. Why? I haven't a clue. The same reason the dish soap can sometimes be found in the refrigerator, and my car keys have been known to hide in the silverware drawer. I do things without having any knowledge of it, because my mind is on a million other things, and autopilot malfunctions.

It's a symptom of Motherhood, no?

===

So, here are a couple pictures:


Here's the color we painted the living room. I need to get a finished shot now, it's really quite lovely.

And here is my Central Park Hoodie. Oh, I'm in love. I ended up not ripping, and it looks like the 36 will be just the right size. This is a pretty good representation of the color, a sort of olive green color. The yarn is :::hangs head in shame::: Vanna's Choice, by Lionbrand. It's uber cheap acrylic. But ya know, it's a whole heck of a lot softer than Red Heart, and it's knitting up beautifully. And hey, it's machine washable, you can't beat that!



==

I'm having some girls over this morning to knit. I'm kind of excited - I've never really taught people to knit before, and now I'll be teaching several. But the thought of having some other moms, with kids the same age, to sit around and knit with, is very appealing to me. So keep your fingers crossed that it goes well! Maybe if I had real people to talk to once in awhile, I wouldn't blog so much. :-P

Creativity

Mmmm. Love the smell of Modge Podge in the morning!

No, seriously, for me the smell of Modge Podge is synonymous with creativity. I absolutely love it.

So while I've been sitting here sniffing glue today, I created this:



Is there anything tasteful about a collage of beer labels? eh, probably not. But I'm quite pleased with it nonetheless. This is a project that has been over a year in the making. (It takes awhile to drink all that beer, ya know!) LOL We are doing the World Beer Tour at Old Chicago. Basically, it involves drinking 110 different beers (not at one time. They have rules about that!) Each time we order a bottled beer, we take the label home. I've been collecting labels now for over a year. There are beers from China, Japan, Germany, England, lots from Colorado and the US, one from Yellowstone that we got while were there visiting... There's just something kinda cool about that to me.

That, and we simply love good beer. Why not advertise that fact by hanging proof of it on our kitchen wall? :o)


***Disclaimer: I was not really "sniffing" glue. I swear!

==

Yesterday was so dull and boring. By 8 am I was bored, so I went shopping. :-P I went to Target and bought the girls' January gifts for the gift closet. For Chloe, a tattoo craft kit. You can make over 3600 temporary tattoos. (Should make Andrew real happy. heh.) For Cora, a little turtle thing that lights up, teaches colors and numbers, and rolls across the floor when you push it back. Have I explained my Christmas shopping to you? I'm sure I have, but just in case - I buy a gift each month through the year. At their birthday and at Christmas, they get 6 gifts. I try to spend about $20 (no more than that) on each gift, but less than that is great too. Chloe's tattoo thing was regular 19.99 but I got it 50% off, and Cora's thing was regular 17.99 but I got it for 9.94 or something like that. It keeps Christmas reasonable, instead of blowing tons of cash all in December.

===

My sister in law came over yesterday. We sat and visited for some time, and it was really nice. She's the older of the two girls, and I haven't ever spent that much time talking to her before. I think it went well, though I have been sitting there replaying it all in my head since she left, kicking myself for saying some things. I always do that though. We actually talked about a lot of *real stuff, which was cool. Whenever their mom is around, it seems everything is superficial, but this wasn't. I really do enjoy the girls' company. I just wish it happened more often that they were able to hang out alone!

===

And the last little tid bit I have for today - my hubby is coming home today! Woo hoo! 4:15 pm. It can't come fast enough.

The cat

Sadly, Milo does not seem to be a particularly healthy cat. He has some sort of upper respiratory infection that means he is sneezing constantly. This wouldn't be so bad except that he actually emits large cat boogers everywhere he goes. Big slimy green ones sometimes. It's really, really gross. He snores louder than Chloe (which is quite a feat) and his right eye is always twitchy and runny. We've got him on an animal homeopathic, the vet said not to be concerned, but it's pretty yucky. I'd love him so much more if it weren't for the constant boogers he sprays all over the house.

And he loves us. Oh, how he loves us. He loves us so much that he crawls into bed with us, puts his face right up against one of ours, and purrs. And then he sneezes, and cat boogers are sprayed all over our faces.

Izzy is trying desperately to get used to him. She no longer wants to eat him - she just wants to play. Problem: a 100-lb lab "playing" means using her gargantuan paws to smack him around a little and see what happens, or chasing him at top speed through the house until he's safe under some random piece of furniture. And the cat isn't the smartest. He's so flippin' friendly. All he wants is love. So he rubs his little body against Isabel, and she tries, oh how she tries, not to take a bit out of him. Eventually, her senses get the better of her and she snaps, so he runs under the furniture, only to come back out in about a minute and a half and try snuggling up to her again. :::sigh::: stupid cat.

Currently, I'm watching him bathe himself. Only this weird, twitchy thing keeps interfering. Most of us know the twitchy culprit as a "tail", but he's not figured that part out yet. Apparently it has little feeling - he keeps biting it, and hasn't realized yet that it's attached.

===

So - we have a problem. A rather serious one, really. MY CAMERA IS MISSING. It's gone! It is nowhere to be found. I was handling it rather calmly for the past couple days, but I'm beginning to panic. I am a picture taker. It's what I do, it's who I am! and I have nothing with which to record every mundane moment of my life now. What will I do?

I do have an old camera. I suppose it will suffice until we can solve the case of the mysteriously disappearing camera. The last I saw it, I was taking pictures of our living room painting project. We put the living room back together, and poof! the camera is gone. I'm so sad.

Cora was laughing tonight like I've never heard before. I was holding her in my lap while I played with the cat with my tape measure, and she was belly laughing so hard! Those baby laughs - they just get to you! They are so sweet and joyful, you can't help but feel happy when you hear them. She sat there and laughed at that cat for a good ten minutes. And I had no camera to record it with.

===

If she could see him now, I know she'd be cracking up. He's on my rocking chair, still chasing that strange furry, twitchy thing attached to his behind. He is attempting to cram his head between the slats in order to reach it more easily, but the darn thing just keeps on getting away. :-P

===

I have a good 10 inches of the Central Park Hoodie knitted now. Sadly, I have no camera, and so I can't show you. :o(

Wednesday

So I'm getting back in the swing. You can tell I'm trying because I have a list. Each day, I write down 3 or 4 things I want to get done in addition to my normal stuff. Things like "clean out my closet" or "clean the fridge" or "vacuum the floors". I also list all the errands and activities for the day and the times, and then throughout the day I check off the things I accomplish. Sadly, no matter how long I keep up my 'listing' for, I never seem to get everything accomplished.

==

I casted on for the Central Park Hoodie. No, I more than casted on. I casted on and I knit about 5" of it. Now I think I've decided to rip it all out and do the next size up. It's between a size 36 or 40. My actual bust size is 36, but I'm afraid the sweater will be too tight if I do it that size, so I'll try out the 40 instead. I had such a hard time getting the gauge for this sweater! The pattern calls for size 6 and 8 needles. I ended up using size 9 and 10.5. I wonder if that's normal. Anyhow, I want this to be a sweater that I wear often, and if it doesn't fit just right, I won't. So, a-ripping we will go, and then I'll start again. ::sigh::: I hate that!

==

The Joy of Motherhood

My daughter is terrified to wipe her own ass. Seriously.

"Chloe, honey, don't you think it's about time you started wiping your own butt after you poop?"

"NO! That's what Mommy's do. Kids poop. Mommies wipe butts."

Oy. So glad to know my job is such an important one.

"Why don't you want to wipe your own butt? That's what big kids do honey."

"Because I'm scaaared. Wiping butts is scary."

Heh, Yeah. You're tellin' me.

I'm trying to prepare her for the day when she will have to wipe her own behind. I tell her frequently, "It's almost time for you to try it yourself." She refuses to believe me. Apparently I will be wiping her ass until she is a mommy herself. Lord help me.

==

I was antsy and irritable and restless all day yesterday. I got more done than any one person should accomplish in a day, but I felt like I was in a funk all day. Toward evening, I realized why: I have no projects on my needles! Ack! Not knitting makes me a very cranky person. And so, I have decided I'm going to jump on the CPH bandwagon. I generally try to avoid things that everyone else is doing. It's the rebel in me, I suppose. But this hoodie is too cool for that. I'm gonna buy the yarn at Michael's today when we're there for the kid's craft class. My yarn will be much cheaper than the $60+ that the pattern calls for. I'm a tightwad, what can I say. But I think it'll be great still. I would really, really love to find something in that great avocado green color, but I'm not sure I'll be able to. Purple will be my next choice, followed by sky blue. We'll see what they have.

Ooh! I'm excited to start a 'real' project now!