Numbers Again

A few more numbers for you:

8: Total number of teeth my baby has with

4: being the number of teeth on top. Meaning that when she feeds on my tender milk bags there are some nice crescent shaped red marks accompanying some SERIOUS pain. What was I thinking feeding her this long?

6: Number of weeks until she stops breastfeeding. Is it the end of June yet? Please? Pretty pretty please?

2: Number of very sore boobs I've got right now. Seriously. Did I mention the red crescents? Right next to the nipple? Cause that's where they are. In the "sweet spot" of tenderness. Even now 15 min later, I can still feel them aching.

1: The number of mothers living in this house that will seriously miss it when her baby finally stops breast feeding. I don't know. Call me crazy, but it's been so sweet bonding with her and having fun while she eats. She sticks her finger in my mouth these days and plays with my teeth and I get to whisper to her in Spanish. I'm really going to miss that.

1: The number of mothers living in this house that will NOT miss leaking in the morning. YES!! I STILL LEAK ALMOST A YEAR INTO THIS!!! I'd like to see any of you who still have leaky boobs this long.

Man, I'm like a freak of nature. I should sell tickets. It's a slow economy: I'm charging per boob.

Nuff Said

Is it just me?

When you move into a new house, do you change all the toilet seats?

I don't know about you, but I have learned that almost always, used toilets come with a yellow or brown tinge to them that no amount of scrubbing will get rid of. I don't even try to clean them now. $5, 10 min and a trip to Home Depot makes my life so much better.

And it gives me a chance to clean in the two holes where the seat screwed in. I use gloves, a rag and the strongest chemical possible. The discussion I have with myself:

"Hmm, this one says to use in a well ventilated area. But this one says to use gloves, eyewear AND a mask. . Can I mix them? Oh screw it! I'm going to use oven cleaner and clean till I pass out from the fumes". And then I throw the rags away.

I'm only this compulsive when it comes to toilets. You know me. I don't do toilets, even when it's just me and my husband peeing in them. Forget about other people's pee. It's not happening.

Guess what? I'm sleeping in a new house tonight! And I just went to the bathroom on a new toilet seat! Man, life is good right now.

(To answer your questions, I move 1/2 block away from where I was before. Still in the same ward, but in a newer, smaller, but ultimately better place. Come visit me once the carpet gets put in!)

Dear Kind Sir. . .

Dear Gentleman panhandling for change outside Sam's Club in south Provo today:

I might be more inclined to give you my spare change if you weren't chatting on a cell phone while you sat on the curb holding a cardboard sign which professed your dire need for money because you are hungry.

Just in case you were wondering why I gave you a crusty when I drove by: it was the cell phone.

Love,
Me

Single Mom

I am a single mom. Marcelo is in California for a month earning some money before we go away to Ecuador in June. It's difficult being a single mom. Especially when you have so much to do!

For example, we are moving. . .again. By we I mean Evi and I. Alone. It's horrible. We are packing everything up, and we are doing it alone. I have to figure some way to move everything and clean this whole house alone. Cleaning is the worst part because this home is so nasty, no matter how much I clean it will always be dirty.

Anyway, Here is partial list of errands and places I have gone in the past 2 days: Bank, grocery store, dropped things off at the storage unit TWICE, library, video store, fabric store, Target, Babies R Us, changed oil in the car and had the windows tinted (that my landlord broke). I have also packed and cleaned the bathroom and 1/2 the kitchen. But now what do I do for food? I'm still trying to figure that out. In the meantime Evi and I are only eating pretzels and dry cereal.

Hopefully everything will go down as planned tomorrow. It probably won't. So Scary. I'll let you know if I'm still alive after this weekend.

How Dumb ARE You?

So as I'm watching the Wiggles today, I've come to realize that Captain Feathersword likes to be argumentative and deny things that are clearly obvious. Like the fact that it's HIM pretending to be a cow. I mean, hello! He's not even TRYING to fully disguise himself! He keeps his pirate jacket on and his boots and just puts on a cow head. And then he argues for like a minute when you call him out. Gawl!! The nerve of that guy!

The second thing I've realized is that the new yellow wiggle isn't the sharpest tool in the shed!


I mean Anthony (Red Wiggle) is wearing antenna, butterfly wings and is SINGING a song about butterflies flitting from flower to flower and it still takes Yellow 3 minutes to figure it out!! I mean, SERIOUSLY, don't they give these guys IQ tests before they let them try to teach things to kids? I was screaming at the TV "It's a BUTTERFLY Yellow!! NOOOOOO, not a moth. . . A FREAKING BUTTERFLY!!!" (I mean, he asked our opinion, and so I felt like it was my duty to tell him what it really was)

How dumb can you be? Really!

(FYI: The wiggles are AWESOME, There are no commercials and there are SO many songs. Lots more than Plaza Sesamo. My kid loves singing along with them. I think we found our travel videos!!)

Spring!! A countdown

Top Ten Best Things about Spring:

10. No more snow-All rain and shine. I love the rain and shine!

9. I get to move out of this OVEN also known as a house and go somewhere with central A/C. Now what am I going to do with the 3 fans I had to buy in order to keep the temp of the house out of the 100's and in the high 90's?

8. More trips outside with the Bibi and the puppy. Puppy dog especially loves the birds. I should get a picture of that.

7. Exercising outside. You can jog around and it's just warm enough not to need a jacket, but not too warm that you are dying from heat.

6. The trees have flowers. Why does that make me so happy? But it's seriously beautiful.

5. Marcelo is out of school for the summer so he can finally get a full time job and make me some money. I'm going to need some new pants very soon!!

4. Picnics, BBQ's and playtime in the park. I'm determined to take my kid to our ward play time when she finally converts from 2 naps to one. But when I said BBQ, did you salivate just a little? Yeah, me too.

3. All the variety of fruits that suddenly appear. "Well hello cherries! Where have you been? And I see you are accompanied by your good friend watermelon! Nice to see you both. Now it's time for me to eat you."

2. The mountains turn GREEN. Actually green!! I love it when it's green. And it's only green for a short time, so enjoy it while it lasts, suckas!

1. 78% of BYU leaves and you have the gym, parks, and roads all to yourself. You don't worry about being judged as you jog down the street and your legs/butt jiggle as you go. Ahhhhhh.

I was going to put up a slide show of the Bitters, but I'm too lazy right now. Oh well, maybe next time

Happy Springing!

Book Review-Apples are from Kazakhstan

I don't know about you, but books with cool covers pull me in. This one definitely pulled me in. It kind of looks like the Twilight cover!! Except it talks about Kazakhstan. Also, it was kind of a small book (I thought. I didn't look at the script size) and so I thought it would be a good read.

Then I open the cover and the summary talks about how Kazakhstan is a great hidden country and it has all these cool things that no one knows about. And on the back it says a quote from the UK's Daily Telegraph: "A fascinating read. . Extremely entertaining and informative. . .Hilarious."

*****SPOILER ALERT*****

THIS BOOK WAS NOT HILARIOUS!!

*****SPOILER OVER*****

I think that the author started writing this book and started telling funny stories about his time in the country that were entertaining, for sure. You know, the surly woman at the hotel counter who doesn't understand English. The badly translated menu that offers "Water Melons of Mother-in-law" and "Close your eyes and open your mouth" (I'm tastefully avoiding a sexual joke on that last one). Super funny for sure!! But that's NOT what this book is about. Not by a long shot.

This book is about the tragedy that IS Russia. What it did to it's own people, and what it did to this very VERY resource-rich country of Kazakhstan. It's about how the country has had to fight and claw and thrash just to be able to have it's people not freeze to death on the steppes. Yes, it's mostly about the people. The good Kazakh man and woman just living their lives. . . .amid hundreds of years of occupation, torture, socialism, backstabbing, tyranny . . .well, you get it.

I will agree that this book is 150% informative. . .INFORMING ME THAT RUSSIA WAS ONCE THE DEVIL NATION ITSELF! I don't know how anyone survived those years. And I mean, we are talking like less than 20 years ago. I remember seeing the wall fall. It's crazy the stuff that they had to go through before that. Having the police show up at your house and imprison you just because you are different. There is a horrible story about a boy and his father that moved from South Africa (Basically a "Little England" in Africa) because they were told that Russia was so great!! And Socialism is so great!! And we all share!! Isn't that great??

But when father and son got there, they made him wait like a YEAR to GET INTO the country because they didn't trust them thinking they were spies. You know, they advertise for people to come and then get all upset when people DO come. . .because who would want to come to Russia? And then they just show up at his house 2 years later and basically arrest the father for being an outsider and put him in a prison camp where he dies in 2 years. The son was told that he would never be anything because he wasn't really really Russian. AND THIS IS HOW THEY TREAT THE PEOPLE THEY JUST BEGGED TO BE THERE!! Baffling.

So let's talk about the horrible tragedies this book covers: Work camps where the number of dead is unknown? Check. Nuclear bomb tests and the horrible repercussions of that? Check. Freezing cold winters were people routinely lose limbs (not digits, but LIMBS)? Check. Shrinking bodies of water due to poor land management resulting in loss of life, vegetation and food supply? Check. Biggest stockpile of Nuclear weapons outside of USA, Russia and Ukraine? CHECK!

This book is harsh. It made me feel like I was back in college. And not the cool times, like when I was watching movies that whole semester in prep for going into the film department (consequently the ONLY semester I ever got a 4.0!). No, it reminds me of that crappy part of college when I never got asked out, and instead of going on a date on Friday night I went to the library and read a book about the tragedies in Kazakhstan. Yeah, those kinds of college memories.

But you should totally read it!! It was HILARIOUS!!!

P.S. There is some talk about apples coming from Kazakhstan, but I didn't really care. Mostly because I was trying to get the image of a Russian death camp out of my mind. SOCIALISM ROCKS!!