The Man in Emily's Room

Last night I took about 5 years off my life. Let me explain.

 

It’s about 1:30. I am asleep in bed, as you would imagine. All of a sudden, I hear Emily cry. Not the Mama come get me, I hate this crib kind of cry, but the OMG GET ME OUT OF HERE NOW SOMETHING HORRIBLE IS HAPPENING screech. Of course, I leapt out of bed, opened our bedroom door to go to her room. That’s when I noticed that her room was open. Her room is NEVER open. We shut it at her bedtime, because Tony and I are just too loud and we don’t want to wake her up.  Not only is the door open the cat is running out of there like the house was on fire. I started to run. I mean, the door isn’t supposed to be open, the cat is making for the next county, it’s the middle of the night and my baby is screaming her lungs off. I go flying in there and although the light is off, I can see a MAN holding my baby girl. Well I let out a scream that would curdle milk. And the second I stopped screaming, I realized it was Tony. DUH. The relief was instant and so overwhelming that I promptly collapsed on the floor and started bawling my eyes out. The adrenaline rush and then the instant relief, coupled with the fact that only 30 seconds earlier I had been dead asleep, well, to put it nicely, I was hysterical. I was crying and laughing at myself at the same time. I couldn’t breathe. It was horrible. Tony had to turn on the light, put Emily on the futon and come pick me up and hold me up until I calmed down.  

 

Apparently Tony had gotten up 15 or 20 mins before this to go to the bathroom. He then decided he was awake (he is a terrible insomniac) and was heading toward the guest room to watch TV. That’s when he heard Emily start fussing so he went in there to hold her for a bit and convince her to go back to sleep.  I never heard any of that. I am the world’s lightest sleeper, and I didn’t hear him leave the bed, the room, Emily’s initial crying, nothing.  She only started screaming bloody murder when he tried to put her back to bed.  He was being a good daddy, and here I am charging into the room like he is some serial killer who has broken into the house to steal my child.  *sigh*  Let me tell you about the grief I caught for that. Tony kept saying to me, I LIVE HERE. I’m SUPPOSED to be here.  He called me kuku for coco puffs for the rest of the night. It’s funny now, but seriously, Tony didn’t even enter my mind at all last night until I realized it was him holding Emmy.  Apparently I’m not used to living with a boy yet.  What did enter my mind was Elizabeth Smart, that poor girl who was stolen right out of her own bed in her own house in the middle of the night. I had been talking about that just the other day with some friends (hi Jeff & Jill) and I had said to them how insane I would be if something happened to our Emily. I would lose my mind. I mean, lock me up throw away the key, lose my mind.  Now I have proof that this is true. Because seriously if that hadn’t been Tony in the room, I think I would have killed whoever it was before I even realized what was going on. I was that wound up. I’m pretty much a pacifist, so that’s saying something.

 

 The only good thing about giving myself a stroke last night was that Emily completely stopped crying as soon as I started.  Tony was all for putting her back down, but I told him no way, all three of us were going to our room to sleep together. I needed to hold her for awhile.  Emily was out cold in 5 mins, so I did put her back to bed. But I wasn’t right for about an hour. I was just too wound up.  

 

Everyone is fine today, although I’m sure my lifespan is a good 5 years shorter than it was yesterday morning. Sheesh. I’m a super dork.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1st Snow of the Year!

Cheese!

We saw some snow today, very exciting stuff!  We got about 1/2 inch and it basically shut down the whole city. *sigh*   Emily's daycare was closed for the day, so I took the morning off and we got bundled up to go outside and play. There wasn't much to play with, but the pictures are cute!!

 

A MeMe for you

Totally stole this from Anne’s blog. But since I love to read, I figured what the heck.

 

Look at the list of books below and bold those you have read. Feel free to add comments!

1 Pride and Prejudice-Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series- JK Rowling- love these!!!!
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible- I've read only bits and pieces of it
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell   frankly I found it BOR-RING.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens-  oddly was thinking about this just this morning. Weird.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott- yes, about 6 times.!
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare- I've read several, but definitely not all of them
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger-
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell Loved this book but I like the movie more.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy- I tried, I really tried...
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll   I’m not sure if I’ve read the original Carroll. I think that I have though.
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis  I just re-read them last year.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis-
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden  LOVE THIS BOOK
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown  I’ve actually read all of Dan Brown’s books. He’s good.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez I tried, I really tried...
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving  This is a FABULOUS read. (and you’ll get that if you read it!)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery Love these books
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood  Love Attwood. She is terrific.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan no, saw the movie though
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
6 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon-
60 Love in The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding funny, funny, funny
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker  yes, and cried like a baby at the end.
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White loved all his books
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom sappy, yes, but I still liked it
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo read the book, saw the musical- love it!!

 

 

I’ve read 41 of the titles here (if I added it up right) and some of them were series in which I read every book in the series. Yep, I’m a geek.  The worst part is there a couple I’ve never even heard of, so now I have to google them and see if I want to read them. My geekiness just gets more pronounced with age!

 

 

 

 

Naps are for Punks

Emily has decided once again that napping at school is for punks. The MAIN problem with this is that if she doesn’t nap, by the time I get her at 5 or so, she is a cranky, crying mess.  Yesterday I picked her up and was told she didn’t nap at all. Not even for 5 mins. Groan. I knew as soon as I saw her she was tired. Instead of running around and talking my ear off, she just put her head on my shoulder. Uh oh. She fell asleep about 4 mins after I put her in the car. She slept the whole way home, and didn’t even wake up when I took her out of the car seat. I laid her down on the couch and then made dinner. She slept right thru all that. Finally about 615 I woke her up a bit, cause I wanted her to eat something. She wasn’t having any of it, so I just put her down in her crib. She slept straight thru till 1230!!  When she woke me up, I went in there and put her in her pjs and gave her some milk and put her in bed with me to watch tv for awhile. She wasn’t loud or playing, she was just awake. I put her back down at 2 and she slept again until 7. I can not get over how much she slept yesterday. She is a good sleeper, but it was like WOAH.  I even got to go to the gym last night because she went to bed at 615. Tony and I looked at each other like, well sheesh, what are we supposed to do now? LOL it was crazy. I haven’t had real honest to goodness time to myself, without Mommy guilt in forever. 

 

Wouldn’t it be great if she would do that like, once a week or so? I mean, not every day, because I did miss playing with her last night, and 130 am is not my best time. But still. A night to ourselves. Wow!

 

 

Just Call Me MRS. MUSTACHIO

So I went to the social security office this morning and got my name changed to reflect my new MARRIED WOMAN name. LOL Lucky for me, my good friend Jody (hi Jody!) also got married last year and needed to change her name too, so we went together. The SS office is an interesting place, full of weird, really smelly people. The people who work there are actually pretty nice, and seem competent.  Not like the people at INS at all, who I can say officially were very mean and ugly to everyone waiting there for help the two times I went to be fingerprinted.  It’s just the people who are in there waiting in line with you. They are sta-range. In fact, the SS worker who helped me was telling me she could write a book about all the weirdos she’s seen in there and the fights that have broken out. Can you imagine getting into a fist fight at the social security office? Thank God I’m normal, ya know?   Anyways, apparently it’s a law that you can’t have your cell phone on at all in a federal building, otherwise, I would have taken pics with my phone of the characters in there. (secretly of course!! ) 

 

Anyways, I should have my new card in a few weeks.  That is happy news. Tony is very happy now that I’m all officially Mrs.Mustachio.

 

Next week, THE DMV!  And then after that about 100 other places I need to change my name. How unfair is that I had to plan the whole wedding and then on top of that I have to be the one to wait in line all over town to change my name? 

 

The good part about all of this is that it the first step in getting Emily readopted here in the US with Tony as her Dad.  First, we get me all changed over, then we send in our paperwork to the lawyer. (we already have a lawyer, not sure if y’all knew that)  I have all the adoption paperwork together now, so probably in the next few weeks we’ll start that process.  It’s unbelievable to me how long it really takes to make an adoption final final final.  There is always something more you could do, it seems.  The best part is this re-adoption will provide us with a US certificate of foreign birth, and that should make getting Emily into school and whatnot much easier. 

Emily Funny for Today

This morning I went into Em’s room to get her up and get her ready for school. I walked in the door and she shouted HELLLLLLOOOOOOOO MOMMY!  Like I was on the Johnny Carson show or something. It was so funny. It’s been cracking me up all day! 

 

I love my silly girl!!

 

 

Emily Update

Time for an update on Emily.

 

 

• She is talking up a storm. Easily putting 2 words together now. I’m not sure she comprehends everything she can say, but she sure can SAY just about everything.  She cracks me up when I pick her up and she says, Hi Mommy!  Or last night when we were getting ready for bed, Nigh, nigh Daddy! (night night).  She seems to understand 95 % of what we say to her. It’s a little scary. 
• She is also getting a lot more..twoish for want of a better word. She knows what she wants and she wants it NOW! And man will she have a fit if she doesn’t get it.  Last night she had an absolute meltdown because I wouldn’t let her have potato chips and chocolate candy for dinner. (I’m a horrible Mommy I know!) 
• Her issues with food still linger.  She is NOT happy if someone is eating in front of her and she can’t eat too- even if its something she doesn’t like to eat. She still needs to hold food in one hand and eat with the other. And preferably have more in her line of vision.  More? Is a common saying in our house. She just needs to know more is available. If I say, uh oh, all done, she’ll do the sign for all done and say All Done! And she’s usually ok with that.
• We think she may be a lefty!
• I have no idea how to teach a left handed person how to write. YIKES!
• She LUVS our dog and cat. She calls anything with four legs Puppy and if I ask her what a Kitty says, she does the cutest MEOW.  She also growls like a bear (or lion) and it’s sooo funny to hear her try to be vicious with her little tiny voice!
• She can go up the stairs without holding Mommy’s hand now. It’s still more of a crawl, but she doesn’t require assistance.
• This is terrifying, because she managed to get to the 2^nd floor the other day while T was in the bathroom downstairs.
• We have a potty seat, and she thinks it is the neatest thing in the world to sit on it. She also wants her books while there. So far, no actual potty action going on. But sitting and not freaking out is a good thing, so we’ll take it.
• She no longer runs over to me when I get her from day care. She just keeps playing. This makes me very sad, but I know it’s a good thing that she is happy there.
• Her hair IS long enough to put in a sticky upppy pony tail. However, Emily is so fascinated with the doodads in her hair, that she rips them all at to look at them! *sigh*  One day we will have successful pony-tailage!
• She’ll be 2 next month!! How did that happen?!

 

I decided I didn't post enough about Christmas!

Emily & Grampy. She keeps taking off her shoes. My girl loves her some shoes!

Cody Ryan...walking all over the place!

Emily's favorite gift, her Cabbage Patch Kid and her baby doll stroller. She pushes that thing everywhere!

OK. I know I'm WAY late posting this, but this is me and Emily Christmas night in our matching Christmas Sweaters.  Everyone told us how cute we were at the party we went too!! Thanks to Aunty Paula for the sweaters!!

Lesson Learned

Emily has always been a really great sleeper. We have been super lucky in this department.  The very first day we got her, she slept 11 hours. Of course, that was a big day for her and involved a 3.5 hour car ride, so it was to be expected!   When we got home with her, she would wake up and cry for a bit and we would go in, give her a bottle and 20-30 mins later, she would be asleep again and out for the rest of the night. With the exception of a few nightmares, or having a bad cold, she has, in general, slept from about 8 at night to 7 or so in the morning almost every night for the last 9-10 months.  She has never ever, not once called out for Momma in the middle of the night. For that matter, she doesn’t call out for Momma in the morning if she wakes up before I do. She just sits in her crib and plays or stands up and plays.  Occasionally she’ll cry, but not cry out.  This has made me sad.  I felt so bad that she didn’t understand she could yell for Momma or Daddy and know that Momma or Daddy would come.   We always answer her cries, because we are hoping that she would learn this in time.  Well, let’s just say it’s sunk in.

 

Monday night (or rather early Tuesday morning) I wake up to hear her screaming MOMMA!! MOMMA!!! At around 430 in the morning. I went running in there like the house was on fire!!  And the little munchkin was just sitting in her crib. I picked her up and was checking her all over for some sign of something. She wasn’t even crying. She wanted to play with her Choo choo!!  Ugh! After having a mini stroke, I snuggled her a bit, and explained it was bedtime and put her back to bed.   515, she started again with the yelling. This time, Daddy went in and consoled her. (and she was crying that time)  630… she got very loud, and very insistent. MO-MMAAAAAAAAAA.  But I had to leave her there.  It was so hard to do.  But I knew she was fine, she just was awake.  It’s not easy being the grown up.  She cried for 10 or 15 mins and then fell asleep.  Which was kind of sad, since I had to wake her up at 715 to go to work/school.

 

I figured with all that being awake, she’d go to sleep no problem last night. No sir.  She wanted to stay up and play. We put her in bed with us to watch some tv together. Well she just thought that was the best thing ever. She was so silly and so excited, it was hard not to laugh at her.   I love lying down next to her and looking at her little tiny face all smiley and happy. It’s so great. I had thoughts of just keeping her in bed with us. (as did T) But we decided that would not be a good thing.   Eventually I convinced her that it was actually bedtime, and I put her down around 930. Luckily, she got the message and went right to sleep and slept the whole night. 

 

I’m really glad that Emily learned she could call for Mommy, and Mommy will come. Now Mommy has to learn to let her cry a bit. It won’t kill her. It might kill me though!!

 

 

 

 

Happy New Year!!

Happy 2009!!

 

We spent our New Year’s Eve in a quiet way at home. We did manage to stay up until midnight this year, which is a vast improvement over last year when jet lag and sickness was kicking our butts and put us in bed by 830 I think.    It was fun, even though it was just the 3 of us.  (well, Emily was in bed by 8) 

 

No big resolutions for me this year.  I never seem to keep them, so I’m not really going to bother this year. I’m just going to enjoy my family and try not to stress about work too much and try my best not to go to hospital this year at all!  I want a HEALTHY year for 2009. And I would also like to not have 800 medical bills. LOL   Other than that, if 2009 is as good as 2008 was for me, I’m in for a great year!!

 

Anyone make any resolutions? I’m always fascinated by what people resolve to do. I think that’s why I’m addicted to shows like The Biggest Loser  and Ruby.  I like to watch people make the changes and stick with it.  Also, since I’m impatient, I enjoy watching people loose like 80 pounds over 5 episodes. LOL   So fess up people, who is making a resolution?