My My, Look Who Has Grown

I have to say that I am secretly happy that we are quickly crusing through this "ever so cute" puppy stage and getting on with life! Is that terrible? I realize now, that I craved a dog. Not so much a puppy.

Quinn is growing quickly as you can see. He's not as big as you might imagine though. When you see him in person it puts it all in perspective. He's only about one third of Fin's adult size. I predict he weighs about 23 pounds now. He's going to the vet this week so I'll find out for sure.

We've progressed from the stage of my life that revolved around poop. There hasn't been that kind of an accident in the house in longer than I can remember. Now it's all about teeth. Both C's and Q's. C finally has the clear signs of four teeth. Did I mention that I was secretly worried that we were going to have to purchase her a set of dentures before Kindergarten? There's also evidence of a molar popping out. Quincy has a few loose teeth and I noticed this morning that two bottom ones fell out and the adult teeth are popping through. I love the idea that I can use the word adult and Quincy in the same sentence! Puppies are TOUGH.

The potty training has gone really well, he's listening to the word no, he's nipping considerably less, and he's starting to show C the respect she deserves as a superior member of our pack :) A and I have been watching A LOT of Cesar Millan the Dog Wisperer. That guy is amazing. A has even made the time in his hectic life to read his book Ceasar's Way. Speaking of A, I have to hand it to him. He has a really, really tough work schedule. On top of that, he's managed to hold every singe solitary one of his promises to help with the puppy. I really appreciate that.

If only I could freeze time for C and speed up time for Q. That would be perfect. But I know the reality. Before he's one chill, calm bulldog, she's going to be one running, talking toddler. Deep breath and sigh. I can see it now. They are both going to be self sufficient and I'm going to be preggo...

The Next American Idol?

Considering I'm an American Idol fan, I think it's appropriate that little C had her first Grow With Me Music class today, the day of the season 8 finale. It was precious to be on the other side of the fence, so to say. I always had a slight sense of annoyance when parents would show up with their child to class early to "look around." I felt like that was secret code for "we want to check up on you." Everyday you learn something new...

Even though the class was 3.2 miles from my house, we left 35 minutes before class was scheduled to begin - I didn't want to be late, God forbid, and interrupt by coming AFTER the welcome song had already been sung! We got there fifteen minutes early, which was just enough time to get a library card while we waited. Ms. Barb, our teacher, kindly asked little C and I to wait in the hall "because class will begin in 15 minutes" and "I'll open the door to welcome you in at that time" (as Ms. Barb smiles). Yikes! I've done that smile and said those lines before! Really Ms. Barb, I'm just happy we made it and I know you are lovely, I'm not spying on you. We'll wait outside, point taken :)

The kids in the class were ADORABLE and C was the youngest member of the class. You have to be eleven months to participate and she will be...tomorrow. Everyone else could stand on their own and all but one other girl walked. C didn't let any of this hold her back.

As the welcome song was about to begin, she crawled off my lap, straight across the circle and "gently" used Ms. Barb's limbs to stand herself up RIGHT NEXT TO THE TEACHER as SHE WAS TRYING TO SING AND TEACH! That's my girl! She preferred to sit next to Ms. Barb, near Ms. Barb, and did I mention, ON Ms. Barb! I looked like I was there alone without a child! It was so interesting that she knew that Ms. Barb was in charge, out of all of those new people... She was amazed by all of the singing and movement activities. She even clapped at one point! Who cares if it was after the clapping portion of the song? She's so talented.

She got the chance to play with egg shakers, instruments, and scarves. We sang songs and danced around, patted our legs and pointed to our toes. We hugged and swayed, ran and walked.

What an amazing gift to be able to experience all these things with your child. I don't know who is more excited for next week, me or C! I think the highlight was when she got a musical note stamped on her hand at the end of the class. How cute is that?

Mulch Update

Just to keep you in the loop, newspaper trees have grown along side of thousands of dandilions and other prickly weeds. I spent much of yesterday morning cursing the concept of gardening while digging weeds out of my "already mulched" flower beds. It is official, A is fired from yard duty. Perhaps that was his mission. If so, he can bask in this victory while I hire a pricey landscaper for next year :)

My friend, S, put it all in perspective for me yesterday. While ranting about my gardening woes she said, "Well, remember it's just mulch and dirt. I went out and saw that I had some weeds too the other day. I started picking them and then thought to myself, this is stupid. I'm pulling things out of the dirt right now. It's not like I'm going to bother replacing them with flowers or anything. So I stopped and went back in."

Then we went back to talking about more important things that REALLY matter like designer jeans and Tory Burch flats. Gotta love girlfriends.

Am I really that strange?

I am starting to realize that there have been multiple times in my life when I have made requests or sought out information that has made people tilt their head to the side and squint their eyes at me.

I'm not talking WEIRD, R rated stuff or anything silly like that. Now that I think of it, most of it has to do with decorating or party planning. I've told you about that side of me that likes things to be done in a grandiose manner. I thought I had conquered that side and on most days I do live my simplest life, BUT there are big events coming up and the need for glitz and glamor are starting to reemerge.

Both my brother and best friend are getting married in the fall. I have a hand in some of the planning of my future sister in law's bridal shower and am fully in charge (I love being in charge :) of my best friend's shower. Now these are glamorous events. I'm used to planning, preparing and executing the annual mother's day tea party for my first grade students - all the while pretending I'm Jennifer Lopez in the Wedding Planner, so this is the real deal. I'm so excited about these two events because there actually is a budget and the centerpieces don't need to be origami paper flowers painstakingly produced by six year olds. Both of these events are well under way and I can't talk about them too much here for fear that my brides will read this entry. So I'll leave this topic for now and we'll return at another time when all surprises are revealed.

Next up, C's first birthday party!! Now this is an exciting event. We live 6-7 hours away from both of our families so we are really excited that many of them are making the drive to join us for this special event. So certainly, with the people we love driving such a distance, I want them to be comfortable and enjoy their stay.
So when you live on .17 acres and one fourth of that is backyard, where do you comfortably put more than four people? Well, first off they will need chairs. I don't have that many chairs.

When on vacation, I've contacted rental places for things for little C to use while away from home. I've heard people say that they've rented party supplies from similar types of places. I've also been told that you could rent just about anything you'd want. I looked in to local rental places for folding chairs and banquet style tables. I found them, at a very reasonable price, but then started wondering if folding chairs would be comfortable and function properly on the uneven terrain of our backyard.

Then the answer came to me. Picnic tables! We need three eight foot picnic tables! It will look neat and orderly and I won't have to worry about someone going head over heels in a rickety folding chair. Perfect! Now where do I find picnic tables for hire? None the rental places have picnic tables.

I remembered there was a store, Outdoor Accents, right down the street from our house. It's one of those places that you drive by, never a need to go in, but always an interest in what they are selling in there. It's located at the bottom of a steep driveway, off a pretty busy road. They have many of their goods outside of the store. Picnic tables, Adirondack chairs, wooden swings, you get the idea. So I pull in the driveway, Murano on two wheels, hoping to see a "picnic tables for rent" sign in the window. It was quiet, no other shoppers at 10:01 on a Monday morning. There was no way I was getting C out of her car seat for this so I drove up and looked around, squinting at the sale price of picnic tables. Because if they are reasonably priced, maybe we just need to BUY three eight footers...

There's a man! I roll down the window and ask him if they rent picnic tables. He leans in closer to my passenger side window, "What?" (there he goes with the head tilt and squint...)

"I'm looking to rent some picnic tables!" I say with my "bright and cheery I've been up for hours" smile.

"Uhhh...Let me get the owner..."

There is a quick exchange between the two men behind the gazebo (I could see them through the lattice). There was some pointing to my car and some shoulder shrugs.

Here comes the owner! He approaches my passenger window and asks how he can help me.

"I'd like to rent some picnic tables!" (again with my cheery smile)

"Um, I can't say anyone has ever asked that question before." (head tilt and squint)

Then I go on with some explaining about why I need them, all the while C is making animal sounds in the backseat. The man is looking at me like I'm crazy and then I realize that he cannot see the baby so he's more perplexed about the strange animal sounds than my wacky request. So I interrupt myself on my Martha Stewart rant about setting the perfect picnic tables for my BBQ and say, "Oh! That just my daughter. There's no wolf or anything back there."

Seriously Christie, a wolf? What the heck is wrong with me?

Anyway, he saw my legitimate concern about the comfort of my guests and offered to rent me some of last year's "worn" tables. I'll have to check back a few weeks before the party to get an update on "last year's inventory." Something tells me they aren't going anywhere...

I am a woman of my word. For years I've been telling kids, "No question is silly. Ask away." See, it pays to speak up for yourself and find the answers to your queries, no matter how strange they sound. Maybe I'll set a trend and you'll easily be able to rent picnic tables as well! Nobody wants to see granny flip out of a folding chair.

Guess Who Can Say Da-Da!

Maybe it's because she finally got to spend a whole weekend with her daddy, that our little girl became obsessed with the word da-da yesterday! After fourteen days of straight working, A got a weekend off - at last. C had so much fun playing with daddy and getting princess kisses from him. She was "ever so pleasantly" surprised when he would be the one to pop in her room during the night or in the morning.

So all day yesterday - in the house, outside, in the car, from her crib - I could hear her saying her new favorite word.

"A da-da-da! A da-da-da! A-ba-ba-ma! A-da-da-da!"

She has such great communication skills. She also told me that she's looking forward to spending this weekend with her favorite man too.

Mulch

I was deceived by the pleasing aesthetics of the landscape when we came with our real estate agent to look at this house. Oh, everything was beautifully edged, mulched, planted, arranged! It was a new homeowner's dream! The ivy draped over the fence was a blanket of luscious green.

Only just after living here for a few weeks, we moved in in June 2006, the height of the growing/drying out season, everything started to look...well...not as pleasing to the eye. Who the heck knew you had to water all of this stuff? I thought you had to water FLOWERS, but the greenery? Before I knew it the vibrant greens were slowing morphing into brownish-tinged weeds.

So we enjoyed getting to know that lay of the land that first summer. I took a hack saw to many things I did not like, only to learn the next spring, that what you cut back grows in thicker and stronger. Damn those ferns. So really I cut my nose to spite my face, because the summer of '07 brought about a garden of all the things I hated.

I should rewind and tell you that I started having literal nightmares about how I would clean up the mess from the fall/winter AND mulch the yard in '07. I began asking around to the people at work who were noted for having a green thumb. Bags of mulch vs. delivery (in yards? huh?) by truck. Landscaping company vs. doing it alone. Red mulch, black mulch, brown mulch...who knew this project had an endless array of selections...I wished there was one answer, cut and dry, that would have just made my life easier.

I sweat through doing it myself in '07. The truck dropped off some ungodly amount of mulch yardage on my front lawn and I went at it little by little. SO little by little in fact, that the lump in the front yard started growing mold and passerbys started making comments as if we were the neighbors with the 15 junky cars propped up on cinder blocks on the lawn. Jeez...don't they know I'm doing this alone? I should mention that my husband works 1,000 hours per week and was unable to assist in this project.

Luckily, my knight in shining armor, took some time on a weekend off in '08 to get this project DONE - man style. He decided bags would be easier so he went to Home Depot and bought 25 bags of red this time. 25 was enough to do only the backyard. So the backyard got done. Remember, man style, one weekend. What didn't get done that weekend, didn't get done. So who cares if we have two sides to our yard and a front? No one will notice! Gosh C, every little thing bothers you. The weeds in the other flower beds grew so tall that year, I could barely find Finster out there. I was pregnant at the time, 7 months along, so all I felt able to do was give the mulch in the back a little shush with my hand to flatten and spread it out. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, I was VERY grateful that I could look out the back window and see my beautiful yard. I just kept the shades on the sides and front drawn that year. Heck, it was only a year.

We live on .17 of an acre and .16 of it is mulch. The other is grass which we pay a landscaper 20 dollars per week to mow. Come to think of it, I could probably cut the one blade of grass with a scissors, and use that 20 bucks to get a manicure every week...I'm going to revisit that "property upkeep" portion of the budget and consider some tweaks...

Here we are 2009. Post-baby, with my pre-baby body, fellin' strooong. I'm a parent now. Practically superhuman. This yard is gonna look F-I-N-E this year. Again, my husband planned to use this weekend off to tackle this job. Only he approaches gardening a little like decorating a dilapidated house. Imagine walking into the grossest house ever. Mold, rot, cobwebs. You take a throw pillow, put it on the dusty couch, put your hands on your hips, breath out, stretch your back and yell, Home Sweet Home! You would NEVER, right? So why on God's green earth would we approach landscaping like that? He wants to take EXPENSIVE mulch and throw it on top of weeds, leaves, pieces of newspaper that blew into our yard, dog poop - you name it - and call it beautiful. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Mulch was NOT designed to be strategically placed around dandelions. They are not flowers we want to accentuate!

Long story short. The yard is mulched, some dandelions still in place. If you were to remove the mulch, half the yard is clean. The other half might be growing newspaper trees and weeds in a few weeks. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt this year. If no weeds grow in the "dirty" parts of the yard, then next year I say screw it, I'm not edging, raking or cleaning a darn thing.

The moral of this story is don't be tricked by beauty. The previous owners of this house were obviously given a talent by God for yard design and gardening. As for myself and A, we are one step above couch potatoes, with allergies and a fear of yucky bugs. Buyer beware, the gardener doesn't come with the house, but the nastiness of the insects and weeds, well, they do.

The next time you think, "Hey! Let's remove that patch of grass and plant some flowers and mulch around it!" Think again. Let's give the grass some overdue credit. It's a beautiful thing.

Oh HI!...My name is QUINCY

I'm the C family pet! I've been living here with these "ever so kind people" for nearly three weeks and something in my brain just clicked! They speak English so I've decided to start learning this language. They have one word in particular that is certainly very important in this language. It is the word NO. Most of the time, when they talk to me, their sentence starts with this word. But I must be doing something right, because today, more and more sentences have started with "good boy"! This might be because after my mommy washed the kitchen floor I DID NOT pee on it. I did, however, poop in the living room. I just couldn't hold it. I heard NO that time. I'll try harder to remember to cry at the door tomorrow.

I think the fresh air helped clear my head. It was 75 degrees here today! I thought I was on a vacation or something! After my bath, yes my kind mommy bathed me after washing the kitchen floor, I got to bask in the sunshine in the backyard. For a moment I went astray and rolled in some pee dirt, but mommy reminded me using her favorite word, that I shouldn't be doing that.

I live with a little tiny person who I am NOT allowed to bite. I try to be gentle with her because she's just a baby and all. She doesn't even speak English either. She kind of barks like me though. I like her a lot because when I am gated in the kitchen she always comes over to the gate and offers me her finger through the slot. It usually tastes like cookies.

Did you know that you were not supposed to pee on the floor, bite humans, play with other people's toys and shoes or cry during the night? Boy, that's a lot of things to remember!

BUT, did you also know that puppies get kisses and snuggles? They also get to sit in mommy and daddy's lap. Puppies get to play outside, get baths and belly rubs, and get lots of treats when they remember to follow the rules. I also have special times for resting. That's important because I need my rest too.

Did you also know that I am lucky to have my very own special name? Quincy. I like it. I just realized that it was mine.