Monday, September 19, 2011

Bug's Second Birthday

was yesterday. I cannot believe our little baby girl is two. She had a really good birthday, despite the noteable absence of her father. Saturday we had some friends over with their daughters and the three girls had a fun play date and some delicious banana creme cupcakes. After her nap Saturday, she also got to have a play date with our neighbor's son. They love each other and they play so cute. Sunday, her actual birthday, we took a trip to the nice mall in Raleigh and had a nice stroll and M&M birthday cookie. We also sang the happy birthday song quite a few times yesterday.

This year has been full of so many changes for Bug. She's done really well at rolling with the punches and I think we got ourselves one hell of a little military brat. She can now count to ten on her own, she recognizes her numbers and her alphabet, she sings bits & pieces to quite a few nursery rhymes and she surprised, even me, the other day by pointing at the sky and announcing that rain comes from the sky. She is, for sure, a little smartie. She's also very caring and loving. She is constantly giving me hugs and kisses and if I grunt with the effort of moving, she'll ask me if I'm ok. My favorite part of the day is first thing in the morning. When she wakes up, she gets out of bed and comes and finds me where ever I am in the house and we have cuddle time for a few minutes. When she sees me she says, "Mama! Mama!" like it has been weeks since I have seen her. She melts my heart so often.

It was difficult to have her birthday and not have J home and not be able to talk to him. We miss him. He did manage to send a birthday e-mail to his daughter and it was nice that he was able to do that. Not having him here made me emotional and I'm glad that, though I'm sure she misses him, Bug didn't seem to notice.

All in all I'd say she had a good birthday. She has grown so much this year and we are so blessed and thankful for her.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Megs and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, week

The last week has been one comically bad incident after another. Such is life, or my life at least. J left for NTC last week. Of course, I knew we would miss him, I wasn't expecting it to have such an effect on our kid. I'm a pretty understanding military spouse. I try to keep my cool when he's gone and not lose my grip. You can miss your spouse without crawling into bed and crying until they come home. You have to, there is no other option. This understanding allows me to be able to handle a lot of things without cracking from stress. Unfortunately, all the understanding in the world doesn't make my two year old understand whats going on. All she wants is her Daddy. As her Mom, All I want is for her to be happy. Try making that happen when he's 3,000 miles away. I can handle almost anything, but my two year old crying for her daddy and calling for him by name is just too much. Top that with a good sit in front of his picture crying for him and suddenly I can't handle the situation any more and I'm a crying wreck {{seriously, if you saw it and didn't cry I would think you had no heart}}. Luckily for me, he answered when I called that time and he was able to calm us both down, AND we happened to have moved into a pretty awesome neighborhood and when I posted about the situation on FB a couple of neighbors came to my rescue with Daddy-dolls. Not anywhere near as exciting as real Daddy, but it seems to do the trick at bedtime and any other time of day she asks for him.

This isn't the only thing thats gone wrong this week. Last Saturday, while going on post to go grocery shopping my ID was confiscated because it expired two weeks ago. Whoops. I had told J a few times in July we needed to get it taken care of and then between the move and NTC, I flaked on the matter and he's well, a man {{Yes, yes. I know his job is Busy and I don't need to hear it}} and it got forgotten. Until they confiscated it. By the way, this was the day after he left. The gate gaurd was very nice about it. Explained what I needed to do and prepared me for the fact that they probably wouldn't issue me a new one without him. This week has been busy and I wasn't able to get to the ID office until yesterday where not only would they not issue me a new one, they dished out a nice lengthly lecture about how I "let" my husband leave without giving me a POA and how irresponsible it was for him to leave me "not squared away" {{thats a military post term}}. Then, because that lecture apparently wasn't good enough, they sent me to someone else who re-itterated the WHOLE schpeal. {{Awesome.}}

Another thing thats happened this week is that baby brain has doubled since my husband left and I've locked myself out of my house. Twice. Actually, Bug did it once {{she closed and locked the sliding door after I had gone through it}} and she was nice enough to let me back in before I had time to panic. The other time was purely my fault. Our front door has one of those knobs that turns on the inside whether the door is locked or not. Yesterday, the door bell rang and to keep the kid and the dogs safely away from the mail-lady I went out and pulled the door shut behind me. {{Doh!}} I took my package and mail around to find what I already knew, the sliding glass door was locked as well. As was the vehicle where the garage door opener is. Peeeerfect. THANKFULLY, I had my phone in my hand and my wonderful neighbor answered before visions of the fire department beaking into my house where my screaming kid stood waiting, could take over my brain. My neighbor walked to the front of the house and was able to talk Bug into twisting the doorknob enough she could push it open. Our neighbor now has a house key.

The last comically-bad thing I dealt with this week was having to clean a kitchen floor full of bugs {{not to be confused with my Bug}} on Wednesday. Before coffee. Maybe you know this about me, maybe you dont: I don't do much of anything BEFORE coffee. Coming down stairs to a crawling kitchen floor was definitely not how I had hoped to start my Wednesday. After consulting a man and he an exterminator, it was determined that I was "lucky." Apparently, they were after whatever was in the trash can {{a situation I've never had to deal with before}} and if I had come downstairs even an hour later I would have had to clean twice as many bugs and my trash can would have been swarmed. Also, there is a good chance if that were the case, I would have had to pack up and leave until J got home.

There are some shining lights here: 1.) I'm laughing about it all now. At least I have a good sense of humor and even on the worst day I can still maintain proper perspective - things could ALWAYS be worse. 2.) I have AWESOME neighbors. Bug and I have been spending a lot of time with one family in particular who have been so great to us this week. But they aren't the only ones, it was wicked sweet for every one to pitch in when Rylee was having her Daddy-meltdown and its just good reinforcement that we moved into the right neighborhood.

If we couldn't laugh we just would go insane
If we weren't all crazy we would go insane - Jimmy Buffet