January 27, 2006

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

You must really love me then, hey? If you are wondering where I've been, well, I got a new iPod nano and I have been busy getting music that I want for it, and you wouldn't think that would be so complicated, but I don't have any music on my computer, so I have to rip or download everything, ugh! I am nothing if not obsessive, so pretty much everything else has gone to shit. Hehe.

Liam has learned the cutest thing. He claps. This all started because we were at my Weight Watchers meeting and at the beginning the leader gives out awards for people who have achieved certain milestones, and everyone claps for them. Everytime the group would clap, Liam would look all worried and look around trying to figure out where the sound was coming from so I decided to teach him about clapping. So now everytime he is happy about something I say Yaaaaaayyyyyy! and clap, encouraging him to join me. And we sing If You're Happy and You Know It. So when I sing, "if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands" and prompt him by taking a quick look at his hands he will clap. It is very cute and it dispels my worries about autism. He can obviously pick up on subtle social cues. I had no reason to think he might be autistic, just an irrational fear that I got into my head somehow - like worrying about him growing up to be a serial killer or a junkie. I also imagine him growing up to cure cancer or win a Nobel Peace Prize - it's all about balance I tell ya.

I have a dilemma that maybe someone can help me with. Steve goes out a couple of times a week with friends. This means that I take care of Liam all by myself a couple of nights a week - not a dilemma in itself, but I'm jealous and we agree that it's not fair. Steve has no problem returning the favour, I just have to figure out something that I can do once a week. Anyone interested in a standing dinner and/or movie date once a week? Or is there something going on once a week at night that you think I might enjoy? If you have any suggestions, let me know. I'm thinking about it too, but you know what they say about two heads...

Posted by leah at 02:26 PM | Comments (1)

January 19, 2006

I'm getting an iPod, yay me!

Well, really, yay Steve. Steve's company got me to do some spreadsheet cleanup work for them, and to give me incentive to use every second that Liam didn't need me on their work, they bribed me with an iPod nano for payment. Which is perfect. If anyone wants to bribe me with electronics, I am totally up for it :)

You do know about the nano right? It is tiny and light and beautiful and absolutely perfect for running with. You can get and armband for it and it has a timer built right in that will beep at you through your earphones. No more constantly looking at my watch while running to see if the timer has gone off yet cause I can't hear the beep over my music. So exciting. I can't wait for him to bring it home.

And the baby has napped fairly well today. This is definitely a good day.

Update: After Emira's comment, I decided to actually look into the timer thing 'cause I was working on assumptions, and it seems that the iPod nano has a stopwatch, not a timer. And that is not as useful to me since there is really no track near us. I run intervals, not laps. Oh well, I guess I'll have to keep using my watch until I work back up to 5k. Then a stopwatch will do. I'm still excited about it, just not quite as.

Posted by leah at 04:54 PM | Comments (3)

January 10, 2006

Happy New Year!

Yeah, so I'm kinda behind. Life has had me a bit overwhelmed and that leaves me very unfocused. Ability to focus is essential for writing, hence, no writing. What's been going on, you ask? Well...

For starters, Steve has been incredibly stressed at work. When he finally comes home, he vents about it to me, which leaves me incredible stressed, so not a whole lot of fun. He is oftentimes the only adult conversation I have, so when the only conversation I get is always negative, my mood tends to take a nosedive. He seems to be through the worst of it and voila! Here I am posting again.

I have started Weight Watchers again. I like it cause I can eat whatever I want, it just gives me a sense of control and accountability with regard to what I put in my mouth. And it gives me an excuse to get out of the house too, which is great when you have a baby. I weigh in on Tuesdays, and I have decided to be brave and share with you all how it goes. So, last Tuesday I weighed in at 168.8 lbs, my pre-pregnancy weight was 144 lbs, and the goal I have in my head is 140 lbs. That may seem heavy for a 5'3" shorty like myself, but I'm pretty muscular and I look emaciated at 120, so 140 seems reasonable. I weigh in again this afternoon, so I'll let you know how it went tomorrow, Wednesday will be my WW Update day so you can see how it goes.

Another exciting event is that our very tight financial position is loosening up a bit and in addition to being able to save up for things like my school and a car and a new Widescreen HDTV, we are having a girl come in to clean our place for us every two weeks. We have found a very reasonable service to do the kitchen, bathroom and floors and I am SO STOKED! It means less stress for me, cause I'm not the best housekeeper - I'm very feast or famine in that department and this will keep us more consistent. I'll just have to do spot cleaning between visists and can focus on Liam without worrying about the kitchen floors that need to be mopped and the dust bunnies that are threatening to take form and eat us. Oh my god, I am so happy about this.

Liam is SO close to crawling. I have purchased all the babyproofing supplies and Steve and I need to get on that ASAP. He has also started swimming lessons and he is a superstar! No crying, just smiles and splashing and kicking and he is so cute. We are going on Saturday mornings so it can be Liam and Daddy time. I went to watch, but when the novelty of it wears off, I can use this as me time - mmmmmmmm.... time by myself, oh the decadence.

So, that's my quick State of the Homefront Address. Tune in a bit later for some cuteness, I can hear him waking up, so bye-bye. It's nice to be back.

Posted by leah at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2005

Wish Us Luck!

So we are off on a plane to Kentucky tomorrow to join Steve's family for Christmas. I am freaking out a little - partially expecting Liam to be a horror on the plane and partially because of everything I still have to do to be ready to leave. Oh, how I long for the carefree days of childless travel when you could pack the day of and just step out the door into a taxi. Now there is planning and buying and lugging and juggling and preparing food and OH MY GOD I AM FREAKING OUT! Did I say a little before - silly me.

So a little family update for you before I leave town - I'm not sure if I'll have much of a chance to post while we are gone. I'll be sure to give you your Tuesday Dose, but other than that - ???

On the homefront, Steve has been working like a madman trying to get as much done as possible before we leave. Which means I have been by myself with Liam alot which stresses me out and probably stresses Liam out in turn. Which may be why he has been having trouble getting to sleep at night. Naps have been fine and once he gets to sleep at night, he's been good, but it's been anywhere from one to TWO AND A HALF HOURS to get him to sleep. By myself. Which sucks, but I've managed to deal with it okay.

Liam turned seven months old yesterday and his first tooth is just trying to make an appearance. This may have something to do with his sleep problem, but I don't think so cause you'd think he would be cranky and hard to put down during the day too. I have a feeling that this is probably early separation anxiety rearing its ugly head - perfect timing when we are about to be with family that will free Steve and I to have some couple time. Oh well - I guess we'll see.

He is working hard on crawling. He pushes himself up on his arms and kicks his little legs like crazy - so much so that I am worried he's going to break a toe - but he still hasn't figured out that he also needs to lift with his legs to get mobile. Just this morning I could tell he was trying to put weight on his knees as well, he just doesn't seem to have the strength yet. Soon though - GULP!

I'm not getting as much sleep as I'd like, nor as much exercise - with the holidays, my focus has been elsewhere. I plan to start spending as much time planning my health as I do planning Liam's starting in the New Year.

Which brings me to the end of my post. Liam is waking up from his nap and I have laundry to retrieve and shopping to do. So, wish me luck on our first plane trip with baby and I'll be back at least on Tuesday.

Happy Holidays!

Posted by leah at 11:10 AM | Comments (1)

December 14, 2005

I can totally feel my arteries clogging

I made a quiche yesterday. It was my first quiche ever, which is surprising cause I cook a lot. Steve had mentioned a while back that he'd like quiche for dinner sometime, so I thought what the hell, I have most of the ingredients - I'll give it a shot.

Now, anytime I see a recipe that calls for heavy cream, I pause, think about the possible consequences for my ass, and usually look for a different, more ass-friendly recipe. In this case since it was requested by my cutie I threw caution to the wind and vowed to live on carrot sticks for the rest of the week.

I'm not sure why quiche is considered an egg dish, as there are only 4 eggs in a whole quiche. There are 4 eggs in brownies and brownies aren't considered an egg dish. When you think about brownies, you think mmmmmm... dessert not mmmmmm... eggs. Reflecting on what goes into a quiche, is it not so much eggy goodness as it is a WHOLE LOT OF ARTERY CLOGGING SATURATED FAT goodness.

Of couse my pastry turned out great, because my pastry always turns out great. This is not so much due to my skill as a cook as it is the expert instruction on pastry making I was given by one of my ex's mom (Deb P. if you ever somehow find my blog, thanks - I and my family thank you). I'm not so sure about the filling though. It did not seem like restaurant quiche. I don't know why and I really want to know why cause I am a perfectionist when it comes to cooking and there must be a reason that my filling's texture was that of silken tofu. Or maybe quiche is supposed to be like silken tofu? By all accounts it didn't TASTE like silken tofu, which is an enormous plus. Anyone make a lot of quiche? Or know of a resource where quiche is discussed in excruciating detail? This is the level of my obsession with making perfect food - I want the minutia which bores normal people.

I am pretty sure I won't be making it again for a good while though - you can't eat a lot of this stuff without causing serious damage to your health. I don't think the Heart Health Associations approve of dishes that combine bacon, cheddar, cream, eggs and pastry in the same dish. It did taste pretty damn good - though maybe not quite worth all the carrot sticks.

Posted by leah at 11:32 AM | Comments (1)

December 12, 2005

Enh... Christmas

I finally put some lights up today. I'm not feeling very Christmassy. We're going to my sister-in-law's place in Kentucky for Christmas, so I'm finding it really hard to prepare for the big event when we are going to be on the other side of the border. The things I usually do to prepare for Christmas are decorate, bake and shop. We're not going to be here and I have this baby I have to either entertain or try not to wake up, so decorating isn't all thaat appealing.

And I'm worried that we are going to get hassles if I try to take a bunch of presents and baking over the border. Are they going to want to confiscate my nanaimo bars at the border? If I make cranberry and white chocolate chip cookies, are they going to make me throw them in the big green agriculture bin? If we take presents are we going to get hassles about duty on the way there and the way back? Do I really want to lug presents all the way there just to wrap them up, unwrap them and then cart them all the way back here? How do people usually do this? I can't believe I'm the parent now. My mom is the one who is supposed to worry about this stuff - ARGH! So much pressure and uncertainty!

Do you see why I am not down with the Yuletide? I like having a plan and I like knowing that I am doing what is expected of me and right now I don't know how to make a plan because I don't know the rules and I know that I am obsessing and over analyzing and making myself crazy. So instead I just decided to give up and do nothing which also fills me with dread cause I know that by doing nothing I am not doing what I think is expected of me and on the day I'll feel bad that I didn't do more. And such is my life... worry and obsess - which is why Steve is so good for me, he doesn't care about this stuff.

I am really excited to see my inlaws. That is what I really need to focus on - family. We haven't seen everyone on Steve's side for a long time and most of them haven't met Liam or have only seen him a couple of times a long time ago. I'm sure it'll be great once I shake all these imagined expectations.

Posted by leah at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2005

Not So Freudian Slips

Now is it just me or has anyone else notice a sudden appearance of the strikethrough font on a lot of blogs these days? The first time I saw it I think was on Suburban Bliss and I thought - hey, clever. And then whammo (I REALLY like saying that, by the way, whammo! whammo! WHAMMO!), it turned up here and here and here and here. I'm sure it's been used before November, but that's when I started to notice it. Is this really a recent phenomenon, or am I just suddenly noticing it?

Regardless, I like the effect - it is quite useful and I have jumped on the bandwagon and added a strike tag to my last post. Though I gotta admit, it leaves me feeling a little dirty.

Posted by leah at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

December 08, 2005

Um, yeah, what he said.

I am so tired. After about three weeks of sleeping through the night, Liam has decided he ain't down with that and has started waking twice a night again. At first I thought that he was just getting sick or going through a growth spurt and that it would stop, but no, he is no longer sleeping through the night and you will probably see less activity from me on this site now. I am just too tired to be very coherent. I know I should stop nursing him at night so that he will be more likely to go back to sleep, but at three in the morning I just want to get him to sleep quick so I can go back to bed. We are going to Kentucky for Christmas, so I plan to stop the night nursing when we get back from that. There's no point in doing any sort of sleep training when his routine is about to be majorly disrupted.

So, due to my impairment, I haven't been able to write about the upcoming election like I have wanted to. Specifically, the child care issue. Stephen Harper's puny $1200 a year has me very angry and worried at the same time. Angry that he would jeopardize the subsidy that we qualify for under the Liberals plan and worried that people will vote Conservative just to get a puny $100 a month. THAT is not a child care plan, that is a useless hand out. Child care is going to cost $800 a month - and that is not the most expensive I have checked out - where is the other $400 of the subsidy supposed to come from? That is the jist of my complaint. Thankfully Steve has described it more eloquently.

I need a nap.

Posted by leah at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2005

Yeah I'm lazy, what about it?

I want a Roomba. If there is anything about our place that I hate it is the speed at which cat hair accumulates. And I'm sorry Swiffer, but your sad 2 square inches of dirt-adhering space is no match for the cat hair in even our tiny apartment. All I end up doing is pushing a big pile of crap around the apartment. Somehow, relocating dirt was not my desired effect.

Come to the rescue Roomba! You just turn it on and it goes about it's business slowly keeping the floors clean all the time. Yay! Though I don't know when we would ever be able to part with $300 for a vacuum cleaner when we already have one. Bummer.

Posted by leah at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2005

Aging Population

People are waiting longer in life to have children. I know that this is true for me, but according to a number of articles and Stats Canada it's true for the general population as well. The article that I've linked to kinda irks me though, I mean aren't PEOPLE waiting to have kids, not just women? When I was pregnant, I wasn't having a baby, WE were.

Anyway, people are waiting longer to have kids and it's mainly that people want to feel secure financially and/or establish their career before they take on the responsibility of a child. I get that, we really struggled with whether we should start a family yet when we are still struggling financially and we really had to weigh my age versus when we could realistically expect to be in a comfortable financial position. My age won the debate. While I'm sure that 33 doesn't seem that old, it's such a crap shoot when it comes to fertility and to be completely honest, I suspected that I couldn't get pregnant - obviously and thank goodness, I was wrong.

Which makes me wonder, why are we essentially one of the first of our friends to have kids? I have two other girlfriends who have babies and they weren't that far ahead of me. On Steve's side of our circle of friends, we are the first - with one couple soon to join us in the land with baby. Yay! But every one of us with or thinking about being with child is in their early thirties.

This means that for the most part we are going to have fairly small families and we're going to be a lot older, on average, than our parents were when our kids hit the teenage years. Is that better or worse or just different? Will we be so old that we don't relate to what they are going through, or will we be more mature and therefore better equipped to parent and have less of a need to be best friends with our kids. Which, for the record, I think is inappropriate - your job as a parent is not to be popular.

So, us GenXers are finally having kids just when the Baby Boomers are (hopefully, come on for chrissakes) giving up their power. I don't think that is coincidence. I think it is very telling that the Boomers are FINALLY being forced to retire and the GenXers are finally starting families. It takes time to work up to a position that pays a salary that will support a comfortable standard of living including children. There has got to be a connection between the Boomers holding onto these positions longer that the generation before them and the GenXers waiting longer to have children.

In BC, K-12 school enrollment has been on a pretty steady decline since around 1999. I'm sure there are other contributing factors, but partially, all of our waiting is contributing to a falling birth rate and the already aging population. Which leads to all kinds of tax-base issues and a reliance on immigration to maintain our population base. Nothing wrong with that really, but it sure isn't giving any of my friends incentive to start having babies and isn't that what this post is really about. Me wanting to have more people to have play dates with during the week? 'Cause I am nothing if not COMPLETELY SELFISH about wanting my friends to start pumping out babies.

Call me crazy, but maybe the government should start giving us incentives to have kids, like free child care or larger baby bonus payments or base-level maternity pay for women who weren't working full-time before getting pregnant and higher pay for those were - couldn't hurt. Don't they want to ensure a higher tax base for the future? Don't they want me to have more people to go for coffee with and commiserate with about sleep deprivation and dirty diapers?

Posted by leah at 06:33 PM | Comments (2)

November 09, 2005

Full Meal Deal

I love Vancouver. Seriously. There is nowhere I would rather live and I feel so very fortunate to call Vancouver home. We have everything here. I love the ocean and the mountains and the 24 hour stores (even though I don't use them during late night hours anymore) and the parks and the Seawall and even the bridges and the rain. Especially the rain.

I love this time of year in Vancouver when the air is crisp and my baby gets bright red cheeks when we go out for a walk before lunch. We get to watch the boats from the beach and see people playing with their dogs.

Vancouver is small and I like it that way. I mean it is much bigger than where I grew up, but as far as major cities go, it's pretty small. I like that about it - when walking down Davie Street, it's possible that I'll run into someone I know - it's a charming feature in a city.

Did I mention how much I love living here?

Posted by leah at 01:33 PM | Comments (3)

November 06, 2005

Fresh New Look

I finally got around to revamping the site to be more my style. It is still a little simple and there's more in the works, but IMO this kicks ass on the last version which was just a stock template. Nothing against preset templates - they provide a valuable service, I just didn't want to really tell anyone about the site until it looked a bit more the way I wanted to.

Because I am unique and special snowflake, you know ;)

Come and visit often, Dear Internet, I will be attempting to update daily - and therein lies the challenge. I can't believe I dared to say that out loud.

Posted by leah at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2005

Twinkle Twinkle EFG

It's funny how your perspective on things changes when you have a kid. I never really thought about nursery rhymes or children's songs before Liam cam along, but now I find myself singing them all the time and struggling to remember the lyrics to songs from my own childhood. The internet has been quite the lifesaver in this regard. This site has come to my rescue when mid-song I find myself humming cause I have no idea what the words are. I think that those brain cells may have been victim to my partying days :) Some songs you simply just can't forget, like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the Alphabet Song. As luck would have it if you know the tune to one, you know both cause the tune is the same! I can't believe that at 33 years old I finally realize that they are the same music with different lyrics. Now I like to mix them up when I'm singing them. Poor Liam, I'm already setting him up to question authority when he starts daycare.

Posted by leah at 08:01 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2005

Geek Angst

I read comics. Some people will be surprised by that. Marvel comics and mostly the Ultimate Universe. All my female friends are like, "huh, what the hell is she talking about?" If you need an explanation girls, let me know. Anyway, I was thinking - and I'm sure that this is obvious to all you comic veterans out there - the whole super hero, alter-ego thing is kind of a geek fantasy, isn't it? The kinda geeky regular Joe alter-ego (Peter Parker for example) that everyone sees every day is boring, uninteresting, but underneath lurks the exciting, sexy super hero (Spiderman - I really don't have a Spiderman thing, it's just an example). So I guess it makes sense that there is a stereotype of both the writers and readers of comics as kinda geeky - the whole theme is totally speaking to them. And it also gives them an excuse for distancing themselves from women. Relationships for super heroes are somewhat taboo because they weaken the character, through sexual distraction and having to worry that if the woman knows about the super, they are in danger which ends up also being a distraction - better to avoid relationships altogether and add tortured loner to the super hero persona. The geek can imagine themselves having to keep their distance for noble reasons and deny their actual fear of the opposite sex. How about you, what's you favourite comic to real life parallel? Discuss :)

Posted by leah at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

My First Post

This is going to be short because, well, I'm a new mom and I'm dead tired. I will be writing about my sweet little boy as well as whatever is currently on my mind, but quite honestly, I don't think that I'd make much sense right now. I'm just so darned excited to FINALLY have a blog, I had to write something. Yeah, I'm the late loser on the block.

Posted by leah at 11:08 PM | Comments (1)