well, the baby girl i'm taking care of seems to have decided she's going to sleep while she's with me, and eat while she's at home with her mama. it's a smart move for her, but her mom is going to faint from exhaustion! here's hoping we can settle her into a better routine by the end of this week. she is happy in the sling, so i spent a good part of today wearing her in front, facing out so she could see.

micah was very helpful today, but i did lose my temper with her a couple of times. i apologized for being too loud and rough, but had a serious talk with her about listening and doing what i ask her to do the first time. this is the fourth or fifth in a series of talks we've had on this subject this week. at times, i understand that this is part of her age, and it will get better, and she is a very young child, and this is completely normal, and she needs my utmost patience and loving guidance... and at times, i am at my wits end and feel like i'm doing something wrong, that she should be behaving better and it's my fault she isn't. i know in my heart that the former is correct, and the latter is the result of the more conventional parenting types in my family.

tomorrow, i think the weather is supposed to be a tad bit warmer. maybe i'll take the kids for a walk around the neighborhood, or even down to the park. right now, i'm off to make some brownies to snack on tomorrow, and then go to sleep. i've been staying up way too late!

today was the first day of my babysitting job, with a beautiful little 3-month-old girl. it went better, and worse than i imagined. better in that micah was a tremendous help to me, and rowan wasn't too distraught at not being able to be held and nursed as often as he's used to. worse in that the baby cried a good bit of the time she was here, and it took some finagling to get her to take her bottle. it's weird, but i kind of forgot how much babies cry. micah was pretty fussy in the evenings when she was an infant... i remember many nights of walking the floor with her downstairs at our townhouse, pacing in the dark kitchen, watching the shadows our plants cast on the walls and singing "my rifle, my pony and me." rowan was not fussy at all as an infant. in fact, i only remember having to walk and bounce him one or two times. i think the baby girl i'm taking care of will get used to me and our house this week. i hope she feels safe here soon! and i hope she likes me. i didn't have to leave the house with all three kids today like i thought i was going to. micah and rowan had a pediatrician appointment, but i called and rescheduled it for thursday, because of the nasty weather. i know the roads were safe today, but i just didn't feel like going out. their shots can wait till thursday. murphy's law says they'll both get polio on wednesday... i shouldn't joke about things like that.

i have the creeps tonight. josh went to a friend's house for a bit, and i keep hearing funny noises, and every little sound around the house is making me jump out of my skin. but i have my big, scary pit bull to keep me safe. yeah, right... if her saliva was venomous, maybe that'd work.

i'm writing a story. that's all i'm telling... i haven't gotten anywhere with it, just a bare-bones outline. i have a feeling i'm actually going to finish this one. it's a collaboration, actually, between josh and me. we tried this once before, writing a story together. i think the idea was good, but then we started some classes at richland and it fell by the wayside. this idea is even better, and we can spend our evenings working on it. josh is great at seeing all the angles, and i'm good at developing characters, so hopefully it'll be interesting. maybe no one will ever read it besides us, but who cares?

i'm excited about tomorrow night. 24 is one of my favorite television shows, and it's been off the air for a year or so, i believe, because the writers were on strike. now it's back on, and the season premiere airs sunday. but first... they made a feature-length season preview episode, which i am going to watch with my dad and stepmom tomorrow night, after a yummy dinner of my dad's out-of-this-world pork chops (at my request). i love doing stuff like this! josh will feed the kids dinner and get them into pajamas, and all i'll have to do when i get home is nurse them to sleep. it'll be so relaxing after a couple of somewhat stressful first days of my new job. : )

sharing a snack on the sofa

time to paint

sharing sleep

i'm really frustrated with my lack of consistency, about anything. i get all worked up about something, do it for a few days, or weeks, or whatever... then i fizzle out. this is a weird example, but it's what made me think of it just now... i'm looking at our tarantula terrarium. we have a rose-haired tarantula named helga. a few months ago, while at the pet store buying some crickets for her, i found out from the spider expert at my local petsmart that we were adding crickets to the terrarium way too infrequently, and not keeping the habitat moist enough. that was why, spider man said, helga seemed to never move about, or finish off the crickets we were giving her once a month. tarantulas rely on moisture for energy, so by not spraying her habitat with water every day to keep it all rainforestey for her, we were basically starving her! she didn't have the energy to go after the crickets, and they would end up dying in the terrarium. spider man said she should be eating four large crickets a week, not four a month. i felt horrible, and went directly home to spray her little habitat and feed her new prey. so, my point is, i had this revelation months ago, and i have been so bad about keeping her terrarium moist and populated with crickets since then. i was really good about it for a couple of weeks. why can't i maintain any sort of steady rhythm, routine? it's the same with housework, eating healthy, etc. i feel all over the place, not on track. it's disconcerting.


well, i have to share a sweet rowan story now. rowan loves his daddy's belt. josh only has one, a brown leather one with a silver buckle. it is rowan's favorite toy. he plays with the buckle, drags it around behind him like a puppy, wraps it around table legs and his own legs. anytime josh's waist is within reach, like when he's lying on the couch or the bed or the floor, rowan makes a bee line for his belt and tugs at the buckle and fusses until josh takes it off and hands it to him. then he proceeds to play happily with it for hours.

this whole thing makes josh deliriously, almost tearfully happy. growing up, josh had quite a different feeling about his daddy's belt. and to see his son gleefully unafraid of it, not even knowing what it would be like to feel a fear like that about your own father... and to know that rowan will never know that fear... it's really beautiful.

happy new year!!

i know, i'm a day late. but i have a good excuse. i spent new year's day hugging the commode. and now my lower back and abdomen are really sore and achy, but other than that i feel wonderful, by comparison. i hope this nasty bug has rampaged our family enough; we really can't afford for josh to get sick and miss any work! the kids and i are dying for some fresh air, so since it's been 24 hours since i last puked, we're going to venture out to the playground with some friends this afternoon.

two of my la leche league friends were featured in a news piece on CBS last night, about the protest against facebook deleting pictures of mothers nursing their babies. you can check it out here: http://cbs11tv. com/fuel- for-thought/ breastfeeding. Facebook. online.2. 898682.html . it infuriates me that an obscenity policy designed to protect facebook users, many of them children, from illicit content would be applied to a photo of a woman nursing a child. what's even more upsetting is the fact that the deletion of these nursing pictures was a response by facebook to complaints from users, so they say. that means that people saw the nursing pictures on others' profiles and were offended. i can't imagine what is going through these people's heads. "ew, gross, breastfeeding... i don't want my kids seeing this." what is the matter with these people?! i hope they also demanded that facebook delete the hundreds of pictures of half-naked teenagers and underaged smoking and drinking. there is something seriously wrong with our culture when a photo of a mother nursing her baby is viewed as obscene and offensive. i hope 2009 brings with it some sort of miraculous paradigm shift that will allow breastfeeding to return to the cultural norm, the standard to which all other forms of infant feeding are compared.

okay, i'll step off of the soapbox. for now...

rowan is the sweetest, most playful, affectionate, adorable 1-year-old i have ever met. he is such a tremendous joy to be around. his beautiful, little smile makes my heart melt.