>I’m planning ahead with the posts today (Saturday) so I’ll have something for Sunday without having to log into my computer at all. You will have to wait to see the birthday boy on his special day for a few days, and I’ll be sure to share some cake (pictures) then too!
So, without further ado..
Happy Birthday to Jack, who has grown so much in 2 years!
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| From Babbling |
We love you so much!
>Things are looking up! We bought a new coffee maker today, and it is programmable, so tomorrow should start off well. I ran 5 errands in 47 minutes today: A New Record!
All that is left to do is make a really complicated 3 layer-with 2 types of icing- birthday cake for Little Baby Jackie’s birthday party tomorrow. Yes, nothing can possibly go wrong now!
>You’d think I would be really calm, and not at all jittery to the point of dropping things and breaking things now that I really can’t make coffee. Yeah, I recently broke the coffee carafe. It wasn’t that big of a deal because we could just use the french press until I search every store in the tri-state area for a replacement carafe. That worked until I broke the french press. There was also an incident where someone knocked a glass into another glass in the cabinet, causing massive breakage, but I am not claiming that. I swear that was Dave.
Regardless, now that I am unhappily giving up caffeine, it’s odd that this sort of thing keeps happening. What sort of thing you ask? The sort of thing where I say, “Oh great! There is the perfect amount of salad left over to make a really big salad for my lunch tomorrow!” And then I followed that up with, “I’ll just take a picture of this with my camera.”
A few nights later I was making a fritatta for dinner.
In case it isn’t clear, that is a picture of four eggs* on the floor. Luke took a look and said, “Crack an egg on your head, let the juice run down.”
On the bright side, the frittata did turn out to be delicious. There weren’t any leftovers. (I took the picture before everyone had seconds.) Happy Friday the 13th, everyone; I hope you enjoyed your week of dummening! (And since the week was about The Dummening, I am sure no one will care that it was only 5 days long!)
* I did not use the eggs that fell on the floor.
>I blame all my work dummening this week on the fact that I absolutely had to solve a problem before I went to sleep on Tuesday night. Did I say Tuesday night? Because I guess I meant Wednesday morning at 2:30 am. That pretty much threw off the rest of my week.
Then today, I needed to create a database link, but I didn’t know the password and the person who knows the password was at physical therapy, so instead of connect to user identified by password, I used connect to user identified by values ‘ ‘. And that apparently can trigger a bug that causes ORA-0600 errors. (ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [kzdlk_zt2 err] to be specific.)
Oh, the hilarious and wacky adventures that I get into at work. I bet you are all wishing I talked about it more often. The reason I am evening talking about work at all, is that I was one dummening story short for the work week, and I am saving a good one for tomorrow. But really, if I start getting hits from people searching on kzdlk_zt2 err I am totally turning this into a DBA blog and I am going to get rich off the add revenue.
Until tomorrow…
(Oh – to you DBA suckers, you need to get rid of the quotes and use the real password. See metalink note 456320.1)
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I already mentioned how I did some dumb things while making my smarty pants outfit. I mentioned ruining the shirt and the end table. But did I mention that at one point I sewed the front and back of the pants together? I did do that. But it still turned out to be a cute outfit. Dave thought I was going to sew the smarties on individually, like sequins. That may have been cool, but I never could have done it while watching our new TV obsession, The Wire.
>Do I talk enough about diapers to officially be considered a mommy blogger? Bring on the ad revenue! I’m talking to you Pampers! Come on Pampers, don’t you want a frazzled, disorganized, Megan Fox look a like to be your new spokes mom-dle?
OK, back to the dummening. I was with other Ladies Who Lunch (at Target) and we were in the diaper section. My Ladies Who Lunch (at Target) friends are two co-workers with toddlers about Jack’s age. They were discussing Size 4 diapers vs. size 5 diapers. I said, “What? Jack is still in 3s! Why move to 4s? You get at least 12 fewer diapers for the same price!”
They had a lot of answers to my incredulous question:
Because 3s are too small!
They leak!
Have you looked at the size recommendation?!!
It is a little odd that we haven’t moved up a size yet, because normally I am the first person to move up a size, weight guidelines be damned. My policy is this: 2 consecutive blow outs and you move up a size. Someone recently questioned the 2 in a row policy. Why deal with that twice? Are you insane? Yes, but 1 blowout could be an isolated incident resulting from bad diapering. And Jack really hadn’t had any leaks or blowouts.
I insisted that 3s were fine for my small bottomed and possibly thirsty little boy and I bought another box.
They did seem a little small, but so what? 96 diapers for the same price as 84! So what if he looks like he is wearing a diaper thong.
Before my next trip to the store, Dave happened to mention Jack’s weight.
Dave: Jack weighs 25.2 pounds, in case you need that info the next time you buy diapers.
Megan: 25.2?
Dave: Yes, 25.2
I looked at the size recommendation on the 3s (16-28 pounds) and I bought another box. Just one more! Dave said, “3s again? He’s at the top of the weight range!” I said, “22.5! No he isn’t! Dave said, no, I said 25.2, and you repeated it.” Oops.
Almost immediately, Jack had 2 consecutive blow outs. Ugh. 94 diapers to go. Dave had a good solution though. Just take all those diapers to the daycare and buy bigger ones!
>I am going to kick off The Week of Dummening with a little story about diapers. The last time I mentioned the topic is was in reference to the fact that we were days overdue for bringing a new stash of diapers to the daycare. It is funny, because there are a lot of families with kids at Luke’s school and younger kids at Jack’s daycare, and we see the parents up to 4 times day, crossing paths at various drop offs and pick ups. But we can rarely coordinate something that would make things easier on anyone. Just twice I’ve plopped one of Jack’s friends into the bike trailer with Jack after dropping off Luke at school to save another parent a trip to daycare. But that accounts for 2 times of the 1000 times we have discussed some sort of coordination with other parents. And of course, I’ve never successfully pawned off my kids on anyone.
One cold day, I decided to drive Luke to school because we weren’t organized enough to catch the bus, and we certainly weren’t organized enough to drop off Jack first. So after standing around until the bell rang, in the cold, I was carrying Jack, both of us in puffy coats, back to the car, to go to daycare when one of the other moms said, “Want me to take Jack?” I said, “Oh, that would be so great! But DARN IT! If I forget diapers again… And I left them at home, so I need to go get them. Drat!” I may not have actually said drat.
And once I managed to buckle Jack in the car for the second time that day, there was no way I was going to go through it again before dropping him off for the morning. I knew Dave was working from home so I called him and asked him to meet me at the end of the driveway with diapers so I wouldn’t have to get out of the car. He said he would just get on his bike in a couple hours and ride the diapers over to daycare. Great! Problem solved. Too bad I didn’t take the other mom up on the free stroller ride to daycare. Oh well. I said hi to her again when I saw her a few minutes later. And Dave dutifully took time out of his day to pedal the diapers over to school because we just couldn’t forget one more time.
Eight or so hours passed and Dave texted to discuss was picking up whom.
Dave: Target plans? Took all the diapers to daycare.
Megan: No problem. There’s a box in the trunk.
Dave: Doh!
Megan: ?
10 minutes or so passed and a light bulb comically lit up over my head. I had diapers in the trunk of the car that whole time!
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Note the time. I had already been up for 2 hours when I took this picture. I started to shut down databases and applications, and I watched the scripts run on part of my screen, while on the other part, I watched Weeds while I pedaled my exercise bike. I had the pancake mix almost totally ready to go on the griddle before the boys woke up at 6:45. I was feeling pretty good about things until my big stack of pancakes fell over and I realized it was going to be a really long day.
Dave was not yet awake when I took this picture, but I can’t complain because he did some serious yard work today.
>You know how every parent ends up saying something without thinking and then being totally surprised about what came out of their mouth? Like, you swear you are never going to say, “Because I said so, that’s why!” and then when you do, it’s sort of startling, but also really satisfying. You’ve finally accepted your role as a real parent, and joined that elite group of half the population that needs to finally just say something and have it be the end of the conversation.
Or sometimes you end up saying something and suddenly you realize that you have turned into your mother or your father? Well today I said something that I have no doubt has been said by countless parents, but it is certainly something I never heard growing up, and I have never said before. It went a little something like this,
“Hey! No fighting by the top of the stairs!”
What? I mean, it’s good advice, but not something I imagined myself saying when I envisioned myself as a parent.
>Remember all that snow? Me neither. It was 77 yesterday. Today, Jack was playing outside and he dumped a play lawn mower full of water onto the patio. Then he jumped in the water. Then he fell in it.
Then, as I valiantly attempted to continue reading the paper, in order to be a great mother, by knowing what is going on in the world, Jack wandered off saying, “Oh no! Water. Oh no! Water.” Then that sweet sound trailed off into silence. Soon I realized that a quiet toddler is a dangerous toddler. It turns out that Jack’s method for absorbing excess water in your pants is to roll in the sandbox.
I should have seen that one coming, for sure.
And that is a good segue into my programming announcement for next week. Are you ready for 5 days of dummening? Starting Monday, it will be all dummeing all the time, all the way through into Friday. I can think of 4 ideas right off the top of my head, so I am either going to have to think harder to come up with a fifth one, or else just keep my fingers crossed that I do something dumb in the next week. Chances are good.
MetaMegan 