7 Facts about me

I got tagged by Karen at Busy Mamas for this 7 facts meme.

Here are the rules:

-List these rules on your blog.
-Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog.
-Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.

1. We are moving back to the Northwoods of Wisconsin in a matter of days! So I probably won't be posting again for at least a week!

2. I have an MA in English. Which you probably never would have guessed from my writing! ;) Once I return, I plan on concentrating more on the writing aspect, so I will probably not be posting as often. Its too easy to write too casually in this forum.

3. In one semester I taught 5 or 6 English Composition classes at 3 different community colleges! And they were all at different levels or different types (developmental writing, technical writing, business communications, comp I and comp II)

4. I started this blog because I love writing. And because I wanted to meet other moms and I'm too lazy to actually get out and go somewhere.

5. I love to crochet! I really love to crochet baby stuff! I love it so much that for the past couple of years I have crocheted all the neices and nephews x-mas gifts (which is a LOT).

6. My favorite food is anything Mexican! Sadly, there are no Mexican restaurants up north :( We have to drive an hour for a halfway decent one.

7. I really can't wait to get back to my fenced in yard back in Wisconsin! At least we will still have about a month of decent weather to enjoy it! Winter starts way early up there :)

OK, phew... now for the seven lucky people I tag for this meme: Suzie at Up the Hill Backwards, Jenn at I Hate Whine!, Nut Nut at Nutty Tales, Nissa at Nissa's Niceties, MamaGeek at What Works for Us, Beth at Around the Funny Farm, and Pepper Scraps.

Baby Carriers Galore!

I happened upon this contest for a baby carrier stash: Win the Essential Babywearing Stash from Along for the Ride (one Beco Butterfly, one Hotsling baby pouch, one BabyHawk Mei Tai, one Zolowear Ring Sling, and one Gypsy Mama Wrap)
How cool is that? If you haven't tried a carrier, sometimes they are a must! Baby B wouldn't make it through a store without one!

Wordless Wednesday: Lets go for a walk

Since my Tuesday Toot was about my daughter M, I thought it was high time I posted a picture of her... she gets a little left out on this blog :( Not because she's any less photogenic...

Tuesday Toot

It has been forever since I've done a Tuesday Toot, so it's about time I got back in the game here. :)


As many of you have expressed, moving with two little ones is no picnic. It's not easy to get much done, and when you are busy doing things to move you feel guilty about the lack of attention you are paying to those dear little ones...


We made the big move here merely 5 months ago... and it was a difficult move. Very disruptive for the kids. And in getting things ready to move, it was almost impossible for me to get anything done. Baby B was only 6 mos old and at that point where there wasn't a whole lot that would keep her occupied. I probably managed to pack about 3 boxes total. My husband and older daughter ended up doing most of the packing.


But this time around things are going much better. I'm able to get a little more done. Partly because B is more mobile and able to occupy herself quite a bit. But the big difference this time is that it's summer and I have the help of my 11-year old daughter. M has really stepped up and done a great job helping out with the two little ones while I've been busy making phone calls and packing boxes.


She has become the expert at getting B to sleep! I hate to admit it, because in reality she's had an easier time getting B to nap than I have! B fights me like crazy when I try to get her to nap. She puts up very little fight for M.

So my toot this week goes out to my daughter M! Mommies little helper ;)

If that Mocking bird don't sing...

but boy does mine sing and sing and sing... Toddler D (who is almost 3!) has been repeating everything for a few weeks now. And I mean everything. He went from saying very little to nonstop mocking. He's almost like that mockingbird from "Failure to Launch." OK, my boy could never really be that annoying.

Most enthusiastically he repeats whatever we tell him.

"D eat your taters," "D eat your taters."

"Throwing food is naughty," "Twoing food is nawwtyyyy"


"Get down from that chair and sit in it right," "Did doowwnnn n sit wiiiighttt."


Which sometimes can be frustrating, as it sounds like sarcasm...


I'll admit it was funny for about the first week or so. He'd repeat something from a commercial or tv show that was years beyond his comprehension and we'd all get a big kick out of it.


He is still yelling at himself, though in different ways. Now he's actually waiting until after he does something to say "D don't twow. D dit down. D don't jump in the chair." But he's also expanded it to just about anything I would and do say to him. If he's doing something good, he will tell himself "good job D." "Is D eatin his mac & cheese? Good job." "Did D twow it in the gwarbage? Good job."

At least I don't have to think about what to say to him at any point during the day. He's telling me what he wants me to say to him. And of course I oblige ;)

Week in Review...

It was a challenging week. Aren't they all? (well my week wasn't as bad as Suzie's!) For starters D was really on an eating strike this week. Wouldn't take more than a bite or two of anything - if even...

Every day for lunch and dinner I made things he usually eats... wouldn't touch them. He usually eats mashed potatoes the best, but last night he took about two bites. He was asking for chicken nuggets, so I made a special trip to the store... made them for lunch today and he managed to eat almost two whole nuggets... It's been so frustrating.

I tried negotiating with him. He was yelling for cookies at dinner last night and I told him he could have some cookies if he ate some more mashed potatoes... after about a half an hour of his yelling for cookies (1, 2, 3 cookies! 1, 2, 3 cookies!) I finally broke down and gave him some. He took one bite of each cookie and that was it. I shouldn't have caved. And of course I felt less guilty after he didn't even eat the cookies. But then again, I felt more guilty because he hardly ate anything! I was surprised that he didn't eat them.

Kids and dogs know when something is up. Things have been extra stressful this week. Mostly with trying to get everything ready to move...

Needless to say we've been busy packing.

Which has probably caused a little disruption to the little ones. Naps this week were really hard to come by! 2 or 3 days D wouldn't go to sleep until late in the afternoon, thus woke up late and didn't want to go to bed at a decent hour... and the other days he refused sleep altogether, but then went to sleep quite early in the evening (which I almost prefer). B's 2 naps a day have been getting shorter and shorter, and of course not coinciding with D's at all. It's been really difficult to get anything done.

I may not have too many posts for the next couple of weeks with moving and all... so bear with me and stick around. I'm sure things will get pretty fun! ;)

Bloggy Award!

For me! :)

Jenn over at I Hate Whine! Awarded me this today:

She's so damn sweet :) It's such an honor!

Now in turn I need to award it to my 7 favorite bloggers! Hard to narrow it down to 7!

The rules for this award are as follows:

1. Put the logo on your blog.
2. Add a link to the person who awarded you.
3. You must nominate 7 fellow bloggers for this award



Here it goes:

Suzie at Up the Hill Backwards She rocks big time ;) and she gave me my very first blog award!

Nissa at Nissa's Niceties who is finally back from vacation!

Beth at Around the Funny Farm - I just love hearing about her adventures!

Stacey at Is There Any Mommy Out There? - she has some really wonderful posts!

Missy at Bees and Boo-Boos - She's been on my must read list lately!

Vared at MomGrind - I just love her last post about keywords on Google!

Nut Nut at Nutty Tales - She makes things, and Reads! ;) and I just love her header - makes me hungry every time I look at it.

So there you go. All of these people have great posts, great comments on my blog and are just great to read! If you haven't sampled them yet, now's the time! :)

Oh Snap!

The landlord called last night at 8:30pm to tell us that she's bringing someone to look at the place today at noon! What happened to 24 hour notice? It was too late to mow the lawn. I'll just tell her we're doing a crab grass restoration project...

Not to mention, I am so not the greatest housekeeper in the world... she said she was giving me a head's up so I would have some time to "pick up the place." I wish it was that simple! :) I did take care of the counter full of dishes last night. But boy is my work cut out for me today! Of course it would just be a quick pick up if I was any good at housework. I should be fired in that area of life. I just really hate doing it, so I put it off way too long. I've never been good at it, but it just gets worse when you add more people to the mix...

Amazingly, I had broke down and swept the six dogs' worth of dog hair off the back porch. (The big dog is shedding like crazy!). Seriously, I had swept the back porch a few days ago, and I still got an entire Wal-Mart bag full of dog hair. I could have made 6 dogs out of what the one had shed back there in a few days!

At least we have two rooms full of boxes that I won't have to do anything with. The one is a bedroom upstairs that we were using as a storage room for the boxes we never unpacked ;) Then we managed to get the entire office/den area packed up this weekend. And our bedroom looks like we have about half of it packed up already... though really it was stuff that never got unpacked.

Of course all of this was to put off the inevitable for another 15 minutes... guess I better start on getting this place the least bit showable! Thank God for Lysol wipes! They make those quick clean up jobs so much quicker :)

It's official...

Now we know what we are doing. After a couple/few weeks of anxiety... we are headed back to the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Back to our home. It feels good to finally know what we are doing. And it feels so good to be going back home.

Of course there is still some uncertainty, as we are headed back home jobless. My husband has applied a few places, and he will be job hunting more as soon as we get back there. But at least we have our wonderful house!! And our wonderful fenced in yard!

Would we have stayed here in Iowa, we most likely would have lost our house in Wisconsin. Which would not have been good at all. Aside from all the other crazy issues my husband was facing at work, the word came last week that they were most likely going to a mandatory 32-hour work week come September - which would mean, aside from the paycheck decrease, no health insurance.

Just keep your internet fingers crossed for us to find a job when we get back home!

In the meantime, feel free to donate to help keep me in internets until we find a job :) Of course, considering all the scary stuff, not having the internet is not the closest to the top of that list.

Mentally, I feel so much better. In reality, we never should have left. Of course part of the reason behind the move to Iowa was for a better life for our kids. Unfortuately, that just was not happening. Our life took a step down on that ladder with our move. We were living much better up in Wisconsin with less of a paycheck. And not to mention that our 11-year-old daughter was not fitting in well at the school here, and was very unhappy with the move here.

Anyway... not looking forward to the physical aspects of the move... but we did get at least one and a half rooms packed up over the weekend! It's moving right along!

Wordless Wednesday: What to do with a toybox

after you've emptied out all the toys...

Luck Luck Luck :)

I can't help but think that our luck is changing for the better!
We waited around all day Saturday for the mail... my husband was still short one recommendation letter for his application materials for a job back up north. He ended up asking 5 people (he needed 3), and as of Thursday we only had 2. He asked all of his references in plenty of time. We were ready to send it out one letter short this afternoon - otherwise it wouldn't have gotten there in time - even overnight. Apparently, some places overnight means 2 days... anyway, we didn't get anything in the mail on Saturday. No economic stimulus payment either (which was supposed to be delivered that day according to the IRS)...

But today in the mail we got 2 more letters of recommendation AND the economic stimulus payment!! Woo Hoo. And just when I was on cloud nine about all that... after mailing off the application materials we walked to the grocery store and discovered that we had the winning ticket for the weekly drawing! We won a $50 gift certificate to the grocery store!! Double Woo Hoo!! I should so go buy a lottery ticket! :)

Needless to say, I feel really good for the first time in a while :) Today, I have hope that things are turning around for us and that everything is going to work out just fine.

Shorts! :)

I spent some of this past week coming up with a shorts pattern for baby B! We have quite a few shirts with no bottoms to go with them... so I decided I needed to make her some shorts. And they turned out so gosh darn cute that I want to make some for my niece and make some to sell... maybe even sell the pattern on Etsy. I set up a store on Etsy probably a year ago, but have yet to list anything... I really planned on getting hard on it once we moved here, but things went so awry and were so crazy that I really haven't had a chance to do much with it. This time I will absolutely follow through once we move and get settled.

I thought about selling these shorts, so tried to have baby B be my model ;) OK, really... how do people get such great pictures of their stuff on Etsy! These are the best modeling shots I got out of 30!

Mass Quantities of Sanity Needed!

It's amazing how things can go from bad to worse to completely surreal. And everything in between.

The past few months around here have been pretty damn awful and stressful to say the least. My husband's job has just not been going well. I feel really bad for him. And for myself too of course, because I have to listen to everything that's going on with his job ;). It is all pretty unreal. It all started out with issues in upper management, which were crazy in a bad way... then came the internal personnel issues that he's had to deal with among the people that work for him. He actually sought out "family counselling" for his employees because they were more like a dysfunctional family than a department. It's been completely ridiculous. And just when he thought things were as bad as they could get - they got worse. He discovered that the one person in his office that he felt was capable of actually doing their job, and who he had felt like he could trust, was actually behind a large part of the problems going on in and around his department. He's had a really impossibly awful time of it.

And sadly, we've suffered two great losses in our family, which I just really can't and won't discuss in such a forum... but amazingly the people that work for my husband took advantage of his being off for funeral leave to pull a bunch of crap. What kind of people take advantage of such a situation? Not to mention the weight of these issues on our personal lives, we've had to deal with the issues at his work...


Anyway, long story short we are in a bit of limbo at the moment. He went on a job interview on Monday. I really hope he gets the job. Either way we will be moving. If he gets the job we will be moving about 2 hours away - to another somewhat small town in Iowa (of course don't know which one because we will have probably have a hard time finding a place big enough that allows dogs and is affordable). We will find out about that job by the end of next week. Our other option is moving back to Wisconsin. He did apply for a job there too, which if he doesn't get the one here in Iowa, I really hope he gets the one back in Wisconsin. At least we have a house there. If he doesn't get either of the jobs... we will be moving back to Wisconsin and getting some kind of job to make house payments and get by until something better comes along.


It's all so uncertain at this point. And it's a horrible position to be in. But it feels better having made a decision. And we felt even better when my husband gave his notice yesterday. With all the issues he's had at work, it's been impossible to deal with the issues we've had in our personal lives.

Regardless, by the end of next week we should know whether to start looking for a place to live here in Iowa or head back to Wisconsin. And at that point we will take another step up on the feeling better ladder ;) because we will know a little bit more about what we are doing.

Wordless Wednesday: What to do with a bookshelf

after you've eaten and torn all the books ;)