I Has A Baskit

The house is still in total disarray, but the cats can always be counted on to let me know where the comfortable spots are:

47 Weeks

So, you know about the walking. Let me tell you about the talking. My little miss is quite the chatterbox.

When she’s playing, she’s almost always making some kind of noise, chattering away to herself. She has “reading noises,” a certain set of sounds that come out whenever she’s looking at a book. She has generalized chatter while she’s playing, d’s and b’s and a’s and little squeals Long ago she learned how to wiggle her fist or her fingers against her mouth while yelling and make funny noises. She does that a lot. She’s a really LOUD kid. Nobody ever loses us in a store because you can always hear her four aisles away. Which is not bad, but I can always count on having the loudest kid at any given function and sometimes I really need a quiet kid.

She’s had some words for a while, and even if they were of dubious clarity we always counted them because she used them in context. Mama, Dada, bath, cat, and so on. Recently those words have gotten clearer and she uses them more. “Mama! Mamamamaaa!” she howls every single night while I’m trying to make dinner and she is wrapping herself around my legs because she wants my attention. “DADA!” she cries when Ryan walks through the door, and crawls up to him as fast as she can. “Cats!” she squeals when it’s kitty feeding time and the area around their food bowls is one solid mass of yowling fur.

But by far the cutest word she has right now is “thanks.” It comes out like “ats,” but it is “thanks.” She says it all the time. She’s very into handing you things, so she says it when she gives you something: “Ats.”
And when she takes it back: “Ats.”
And when she gives it to you again: “Ats.”
And takes it back again: “Ats.”
When she offers me some of her graham cracker: “Ats.”
When I decline but she shoves it in my mouth anyway: “Ats.”
When she reaches into my mouth and takes it back: “Ats.”
And when she offers it to the cat, who eats it out of her hand: “Ats.”
So I give her another one: “Ats.”

There’s also “uh-oh.” She used it a lot more about a month ago. Eveything was “uh-oh.”
After she hurled a toy out of the shopping cart: “Uh-oh!”
And watched me pick it up twenty times: “Uh-oh!”
I gave it to her and she threw it out again twenty-one times: “Uh-oh!”
So I chucked it into the basket instead of giving it back this time: “Uh-oh!”
When one of the cats came up and grabbed food out of her hand: “Uh-oh!”
Or when she gave it to them: “Uh-oh!”
Sitting in the high chair, dropping crackers over the side one by one: “Uh-oh!”
And watching the cats eat each one: “Uh-oh!”

She wakes me up most mornings by poking me in the eyes. “Eiss? Eiss?” she asks. “Am-am-mamaa…iss?” And I can never be mad. “Yes, those are Mama’s eyes,” I say. “Mama’s very tired eyes.” Then we get up and I teach her how to use the coffee pot.

On Wednesday of this week, she walked all by herself, for real. I set her down in front of me and she just charged off. She went about six steps alone, before she realized nobody was holding her up. Then she sat down in front of the toy box. But – it was real walking. No hesitation, no stumbling, just WALKING…holy shit!!

46 Weeks

It’s been a long time since I did one of these (again), and there’s a lot to report. The first order of business is mobility. Not two days after I wrote the last update (at 38 weeks), in which I stated that she was still only doing her Army-crawl, she started full-on hands-and-knees crawling. She’d done it before, a little, but it was not her primary mode of getting from place to place. Then something clicked, and there was no stopping her. Here’s something you may not know: babies can crawl very fast. Turns out my child is also fearless. She climbs stairs, she dives headfirst off things, she tries to follow the cats down basement stairs or out onto the porch. She climbs on stacks of boxes, scales open dresser-drawers, and has an attraction to hot ovens, dishwasher trays full of knives, and strangers’ large dogs. I have spent nearly every waking moment since that first crawl chasing after her, and have had a number of small heart attacks.

Two days ago, I was standing in the kitchen of my new house chopping vegetables to make Thai green curry. I suddenly realized that Piper was no longer underfoot unloading the bottom kitchen drawer that I had stocked with sippy cups and Tupperware in hopes of keeping her out of cupboards full of less baby-friendly items. At the same time I realized this, I heard some very I’m-so-pleased-with-myself baby giggles and looked up to discover the front door had blown open and my daughter was most of the way outside. She had a handful of dried leaves headed towards her mouth and a terribly pleased expression on her face. I bolted for the door and managed to keep her from eating the dried plant life. She grinned at me and laughed. This is more or less how the days go now – one rescue after another.

Particularly since, in addition to crawling, she continues to cruise the furniture and walls, and still loves to have someone hold her hands and walk her around, but now she can walk one-handed. Sometimes it’s our idea for her to go one-handed; sometimes she demands it. Every time, I marvel at her locomotion, the jerky halting steps that propel her forward. If we let go of both her hands, she can stand on her own. She only falls when she realizes she’s not holding on to anything. We have even gotten her to take a couple of STEPS at a time without help. Steps! My baby, walking! Not so very long ago, this was inconceivable to me – that I would be the mother of a toddler.

Home.

A Few Notes On Moving Into Your Very Own House

1. If you are at all interested in marital harmony, don't buy a house. These past two weeks have seen some spectacular fights. Fights which our neighbors may have heard, fights which resulted in throwing packs of Post-It Notes at each others’ heads, fights where many unpleasant names were called, fights during which each of us proposed the idea of divorce and the other one pointed out that we have to stay here, we own this goddamned house now and anyway neither of us has anywhere else to go.

2. When you have been stuffed into dorm rooms and apartments since the age of 18, and then spent the past nine months crammed into one room at your parents' house, it's really nice to have several days before your stuff arrives at your house so you can enjoy all that space.

3. When your closing has been pushed back a week and you are not 100% sure until the day before that you are actually going to close this time, the gas company is not sympathetic to your plight and will not give you an emergency appointment so you can have heat over the weekend. Not even if you beg. So we spent our first several days as homeowners still sleeping at my husband's frat house rental place.

4. After the above-mentioned fights about your new home, it is very nice to have a separate bedroom for your baby so you and your spouse can have make-up sex (and make-up-for-lost-time sex; he was gone for THREE MONTHS, people) and not have to be totally silent about it.

5. If you are going to have to stay in temporary lodgings until you get into your house, it is nice if they are only two miles down the road from said house. This may, however, inspire a certain laissez-faire attitude in your husband concerning the moving of your belongings from the temporary house to the permanent one. Most of our stuff was moved in the ReloCube, but there was the carload Max brought with him when he moved here in January (his computer, clothes, etc) and the carload that came down with us (a suitcase of our clothing, baby toys, our mattress, various odds and ends). Since we were in the temporary house over a week longer than planned, our stuff had time to spread out and scatter. I wanted to pack our car as full as possible each time we ran between the temp house and the new one; instead Max preferred to throw, say, a bath towel and two t-shirts into the back seat and call that a load. This made me crazy and led to a couple of the above-mentioned fights.

6. This close proximity of houses may also cause you to leave your cats in the basement of the old house for probably much longer than you should, while you attempt to unpack at your new abode and feel like a horrible person for enjoying your nice new home as a pet-free place. This enjoyment of a pet-free lifestyle may in fact cause you to realize that while you love your pets, you will probably not get any more once these are gone. You may also feel a twinge of despair when you calculate that this will probably not happen until your daughter is in high school. Then you will feel like an even more horrible person.

7. I cannot recommend ABF U-Pack enough. They are cheap, reliable, and extremely accommodating. They showed up exactly when they said they would, they were great about letting us have the container two extra days and then holding it for us until we called for it. Everyone on their staff was friendly and able to answer all my questions whenever I called. I will say, however, that the driver who dropped off the ReloCube warned me to pad and pack everything really well because “these things ride pretty rough.” He was NOT kidding. When the cube arrived, there was a big scratch mark down one side of it (not through it, though, it didn’t pierce the hull so our stuff was untouched). I think had I not resorted to stuffing clothing into the cracks between boxes, there would’ve been a lot more shifting going on during transit. As it was, the heavy round base for our living-room lamp was floating around in there unsecured, and it came out pretty banged up. Some screws and most of the little pins for our other lamps went missing, since I didn’t think to tape them into place. But that’s it. So on the whole, missing the clickers and a couple tiny (and replaceable) screws for some $10 Target lamps isn’t that bad.

Did We Get Our House?

Yes, we did. We closed last Friday (the 4th), a week after we were supposed to, but fine whatever okay great. A few notes on closing a house:

1. We were warned that there would be a lot of signing, but ye Gods! It never ended. I tried to count the times we put ink to paper and lost track somewhere around fifteen.

2. Hearing "no, she doesn't have to sign, her name's not on the loan" was one of the most humiliating moments of my life.

3. Being told "yes, you have to sign there, your name is on the title" was one of the strangest.

4. Ryan and I both got the distinct feeling that the lawyer conducting the proceedings was not terribly impressed with us. He was both older (I guessed somewhere around 60) and dressed in a very nice suit. He came off as being very old-school. One of the last names on the door was his and he probably owned the shiny new BMW parked right outside said door, so our raggedy broke-ass hippie schoolteacher married-with-different-last-names selves probably made him shake his head and wonder what the world is coming to.

5. I am also in the wrong business, because if I figured it correctly, Mr. Old School Lawyer got paid $270 to sit for twenty minutes speaking jargon and handing us things to sign. I'm quite sure he didn't even put together the thick sheaf of papers; that's what first-year associates are for.

6. Although logically I knew everything was on the up-and-up and that we had no reason to be paranoid, as I sat there looking at the long list of fees and terms which I only half-understood, I tried not to panic. Somehow I couldn't shake the feeling that we were getting screwed somewhere in all this. This was not helped when I realized that if we didn't have to pay all these people/agencies/firms to do...whatever it is they do...our payment would be about $200 lower every month. It was also not helped by the fact that most of these "processing" and "document research" and "title search" fees really amounted to paying some company's interns to do a couple Google searches and photocopy the results in triplicate. Our house was built in 2005; it's not like there was a lot of stuff to go through.

We are still not really unpacked, the cats are STILL in the basement of the other place, we have no furniture, and I can't find anything. We just got our own Internet connection, so I no longer have to truck around with my laptop looking for unsecured networks or keep the baby from eating electronics and getting bit by ants while I check my e-mail at the other house. Driving here is crazy, I still don't know where anything is. I am behind on everything, so if I owe you a phone call, email, cup of tea, pie, or anything else, just know that I will catch up eventually.

Temporary Lodgings

Still no house. Ohh, yeah. Still waiting.

We left Saturday evening and drove through the night. I was pretty apprehensive about how my car-hating-child would handle a 10-hour drive, but through the valiant efforts of several adults we kept her up all day, with the exception of a 20-minute nap. She slept most of the way, and we took breaks to feed, change, and release her whenever necessary. There were a few streteches where she screamed for 20 straight minutes, but on the whole it wasn't too bad. Ryan and his dad drove his parents' ailing Dodge minivan, which was crammed with us, our stuff, and all 9 of our cats. There was so much shit stuffed in there I barely had room for my feet.

The worst part was that I had to stay awake the whole time to make sure the two very tired drivers didn't fall asleep at the wheel, so even when the baby was crashed out I was poking Ryan in the ribs or asking my father-in-law if he'd ever been to Charlotte before and which basketball teams he was rooting for. Some time around West Virginia I ran out of polite conversation starters and since I don't know Ryan's dad well enough to just poke him in the ribs or pinch his arm like I did to Ryan whenever I saw the car start to drift or his head start to bob, there were several points when I very nearly screamed out "YOU ARE SCARING THE SHIT OUT OF ME. YOU ALMOST RAN OFF THE ROAD JUST NOW. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GODDAMNED MOUNTIANS, IT'S PITCH-DARK AND STORMING LIKE CRAZY. PLEASE PULL THE FUCK OVER BEFORE YOU KILL US." Twice I deeply regretted my decision to chug two Smartwaters and an Arizona Green Tea, because I damn near peed my pants as he started awake and swerved on the dark, wet road.

We arrived safe, but still have no house. Monday we were told that "the lawyers" who needed that 72 hours to look over paperwork had not even received said paperwork yet. Our mortgage person was reportedly "hopeful" that we would close later this week. Yesterday we got word that we're scheduled for this Friday at 3:00. If we get delayed again my head might possibly explode. I am not sure exactly who is holding up what and which pieces of paperwork are missing. I guess that's all for the best, because if I knew who the weakest link was, you can be certain that I would take Piper and all nine cats down to their office and camp out all day, every day, until each and every piece of paper needed for us to get this thing settled was where it belonged.

Ryan's roommate graciously agreed to let us crash here, as he is away on business at the moment. I am thankful he's letting us use his house (our cats are stashed in the basement, since the roommate is allergic), but it's...um...a bit like a college house. I can't seem to locate the vacuum sweeper and there is a staggering collection of liquor bottles on top of the fridge. There are jugs of apple cider exploded in the freezer, along with some sort of dribbly red alcoholic concoction frozen into wine glasses. They cleaned up a bit before we came, so the bathtub and kitchen floor are reasonably safe, but everywhere there are piles of expensive electronics (ahhh, to be a single male with disposable income), thick layers of dust, cd's, half-unpacked boxes, various types of weaponry (nobody was ever sorry they bought that mace when zombies attack, I guess) and keyboards and video games and glass figurines. The baby is perpetually covered in dust, crumbs and hair (yes, hair) and I have been going crazy trying to keep her clean and out of things.

Last night Piper was cruising along the front of the entertainment center and decided to give the deocorative screen-print tapestry hanging there a good, hard yank. Turns out it was held in place by two ceramic ashtrays, which fell direcly onto her little baby noggin. They didn't break, but a large seashell that had been resting inside one did, and the sharp little pieces flew everywhere. Piper is okay, she got a few small cuts on her head and scared both of us half to death. Two minutes after that I found an extremely large red fire ant trundling along three inches from the baby's leg. I snatched her up, stashed her in the playpen where she sleeps, and then took a shoe and killed the sucker. It was of alarming size.

Piper was screaming by now, standing up in the pack n' play and letting off howls of fury at being treated in such a manner. Despite that fact that it was 12:30 and my husband gets up at 5:30 for work, I marched into the room where he was sleeping, flipped on the lights and said "I don't care WHAT it takes or who we have to kill. We better have our house this weekend."

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

If I ever decide to buy a house from across state lines, somebody please kill me. Seriously. Or you could just beat me with a large dirty brick until my brain leaks out my ears and then pile all our worldly posessions on top of me. Make sure you clean out my checking acccount first. That would yield almost the same results as I have right now, with less effort.

We're moving using one of these. Notice how the pictures don't show the length of the thing? I mean, they give you the dimensions, but you think "Oh, six feet long? Eight feet high? No problem!" However, when they delivered it on Tuesday, it was quite short in person. I had some serious doubts about how much of our stuff would fit in there. But my brother came over and rocked out, cramming our shit in there like a pack-master. I was still worried about fitting the remaining stuff that was scattered around the house, so I took the clothes/soft things and stuffed them in the cracks between boxes. Our crap is wedged in there so tight, my brother joked that when we finally get around to unloading, we'll open the door and there will be a slight tremble from within and then poof, everything will explode outward in a cartoony avalanche of household goods.

But, fine, whatever, we got most of it loaded. Ryan was flying in Wednesday night, so I thought we could finish up the packing/loading Thursday. He called me Wednesday before he got on the plane and said he'd heard from the realtor and mortgage people and they said everything was 100% go for the March 28th closing date they promised us six weeks ago. He boarded the plane happy, Piper and I picked him up at the airport, and we went to bed Wednesday night a snuggling little family, feeling quite secure that this was our last night in Michigan. We awoke Thursday tired but pleased that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Our plan was to finish loading the stuff, go pick up our rental car at 4:30 and take off between 7 and 9 pm Thursday night. It's a 10-12 hour drive, so we should've arrived in plenty of time to drop off the rental and go to our closing at 4:00. By 5pm Friday, we were supposed to be unlocking the the door to our new house.

Except for the part where Ryan got a phone call at 2:00 pm yesterday and was told "the lawyers need 72 hours to look over the paperwork" and the VERY SOONEST we can close is some time Tuesday.

Panic erupted. We were mere hours from transporting a minivan full of cats, crap, and baby due South with nowhere to go once we got to Charlotte. Ryan used up two of his three available days off to come here and drive us down. We paid $230 to fly him here, for fuck's sake, plus almost $300 for the rental car. The movers were scheduled to pick up our stuff on Friday and drop it off at the new house on Tuesday.

After more than an hour of freakouts, back-and-forthing, and debating, Ryan's dad offered to drive us down some time this weekend. Ryan's roommate said we could put the cats in his basement for a couple days and crash there until we can get into our house. So we canceled our rental van and will be going on Saturday night instead, and I just hope to God the cats don't trash the basement and that "the lawyers" don't decide they need until Thursday or Friday of next week to do whatever the hell it is they're doing.

In the meantime, I have to make the stuff I left out stretch to cover nearly a week. I've arranged for our belongings to be delivered to the new house Wednesday or Thursday, but the lone suitcase of clothing I left out contains three outfits for each of us - outfits I picked out for the 70-80 degree weather in Charlotte, not the two inches of snow we got here last night. I'm already out of clean socks; I can't find my hairbrush; this morning, the baby pooped all over the one long-sleeved shirt I have for her; Ryan brought just one change of warm clothes, since he had shorts and t-shirts he had left here. Oh, and for some reason, Piper is trashing her clothes worse than usual. Which means my clothes are trashed worse than usual, because whenever her face and shirt are smeared with gooey chunks of graham cracker, drool, and floor lint, my face and shirt wind up smeared with it too.

Aaaaaand I woke up really late this morning and I have a ton of things to do, which means our plans for the three of us to take a family day and go to the museum will probably have to be shelved.

So, like I said, just beat me with a dirty brick next time.

A Day Without Pants

We love us some St. Patrick's Day around here. A couple of loud, rowdy Irish kids who like beer - it's a holiday practically tailor-made for us. So I made Piper wear green every day in March leading up to The Day of St. Patrick. On the actual day, however, she refused to wear anything. Everything I tried she pulled back over her head, screaming "nononononoooo!" and threw it across the room. I managed to talk her into a hoodie and some socks, because the house was freezing. Then I guess she decided cold was good, and played in the open fridge:




This is what she looked like when I told her she had to get dressed so we could go to the store:

The Days Grandmas Are Made For

My mom took Piper outside for a long walk today. Then she took her downstairs to play with and sort the craft supplies down there. In fact, she and Piper spent much of the day together today. Normally, I would probably have been midly irritated, because whenever my mom spends time with the baby her attitude toward Piper takes on a quality of ownership that I object to. That's my fucking kid, lady, so back the fuck off.

Usually I hate to give her any ground, because I am constantly battling my mother for control of my own child. I have to say things like "No, she can't have any Chee-tos. Because they're too salty, that's why. Yes, it does matter." Or "No, I'm not putting her on formula. She has colic; my breastmilk is not making her sick." Or "because she puts everything in her mouth and chews on it, so batteries, can openers, old Christmas decorations, and cellphones are not the best toys." Don't even get me started on my near-daily battles to get the woman to stop trying to rock the baby to sleep at the wrong times (and I say "wrong" not because I am a strict schedule-keeper but rather because my mother chooses to make naptime whenever she feels like it, which usually results in me staying up with a hyper, off-schedule baby until 3 a.m. or trying to manange a sleep-deprived crabby child in a crowded grocery store).

Today, though, all I could do was heave a sigh of relief as I watched her put Piper in the (large, dirty, rickety, and ugly) stroller she bought from a yard sale and charge off down the street. I took a sip of my rapidly-cooling coffee and I think I made an audible "ahhh" noise. Because let me tell you, that kid has worn out her welcome with me today.

Truthfully, I have been short-tempered and crabby with Piper for a couple of days now, and feeling pretty guilty about it. She has been crazed for days, not sleeping, throwing food and toys around, scratching and biting me, unpacking every single box I pack, unfolding every piece of laundry, toppling every stack of books, shredding and eating papers, and generally being a pain in the ass. I have not been responding well. A couple of times this week I have almost-yelled "StopstopSTOP! Let go!" when she was climbing all over me, pawing at my shirt and pinching me because she wanted to nurse; I shrieked "GODDAMMIT!" when the combination of baby using me for a jungle gym + cats trying to eat my food caused me to drop red pizza sauce on my parents' cream-colored carpet yesterday; Thursday night I grumbled "would you fucking go to SLEEP already?!" at her because she'd been alternately gnawing on my nipples, shrieking, smacking me in the face, and climbing all over the bed for an hour and a half. I have picked her up and plopped her down with a little more haste than actually necessary to avoid her eating cat food, crawling through a puddle of red pizza sauce, or tumbling down the stairs. Last night I was trying to do up the last 3 of the approximately 574 snaps on one of her footie sleepers and she wouldn't sit still, instead finding it more fun to try and roll over, stick her finger in the nearby cat litter, and shriek at me when I wouldn't let her eat toilet paper. After 10 minutes of this, I was so frustrated, I yelled "For fuck's sake, Piper! SIT STILL!!" Then she started to cry, and I didn't feel nearly as bad as I should have.

Last night, she slept in 40-minute stretches from 10:30 p.m. to 1 a.m., then got up and refused to go back to sleep until almost 4 a.m., and even then to get her to conk out I had to put her in my bed and nurse her to sleep, which meant laying uncomfortably propped in the bed while she chewed my nipples for 35 minutes. She woke a couple times after that, pawing me and yowling in my ear to indicate she wanted to nurse. When the alarm went off at 8:45 this morning so we could get up and go to storytime at the library, she screamed like it was the end of the world and was clearly not interested in getting out of bed. So I dozed off, thinking that we'd sleep until 11:00 or so. Nope. Ryan called at 9:45 and after that she was up. I tried to settle her back down, hoping for even fifteen more minutes of rest, but instead she stuck her fingers in my eyes, grabbed my lower lip and yanked it, then amused herself by trying to stick her fingers up my nose. When I gave her a stuffed toy and turned over so she couldn't get at my face anymore, she threw the toy off the bed and started yanking on my hair.

So I got dressed and stumbled downstairs with her, and while I was making myself a pot of coffee, she crawled around on the kitchen floor slamming drawers, eating lint, and terrorizing the cats. The coffee had not even finished brewing before I noticed a telltale stain spreading over the back of her pajama pants. I cleaned her up, dropped the mega-poop diaper in the outside trash, and put her (white) pajama pants to soak in a bucket of Oxy-Clean water. Then I put her into the Exersaucer and went to feed the cats & clean their boxes. I was downstairs for less than six minutes, but during that time she managed to coax the noisy Exersaucer talking book toy into sounding like it was dying. I don't know what she was doing, pushing too many buttons at once or leaning on them hard or something, but that sucker was freaking out. She also decided she wanted out of the Exersaucer and started to screech at top volume, competing with the noise of the toy she was harassing. I came back upstairs and freed her, only to have her scream at me when I tried offering Cheerios and chunks of banana. I tried chunks of apple and she spit them at me. I put her down and she immediately yanked all the books off the lowest shelf of the living room bookcase. Throughout all of this, she was making the dissatisfied moan-whine that rears its head when she's overtired. It was nearly ceaseless, and nothing I did managed to stop her from making it. I almost got her to take a nap, but as soon as she fell asleep the cats started a ruckus and that was the end of that.

By noon, I was pretty much done. I felt like a pressure-cooker, a volcano. If this were our own house, I would probably give myself a break and stick her in her crib for a while, crying be damned, and go make a pie or read a book or organize a closet or lay on the couch with a blanket and watch Entourage. This is not, however, our house, and there is always somebody around (usually my mother) to rush in and go "what's wrong? why is she crying? what happened?" when I try to let the baby wear herself out. I feel pressure to keep her from crying at all, because my mom will try to pry her from my arms (no, seriously) all the while repeating, "Oh, she just wants her Grandma, that's why she's crying." Meanwhile, an overtired Piper will continue to scream even as her grandma "soothes" her. My stress level is through the roof because of all this; it's no wonder I can't seem to unkink my neck and my face keeps breaking out.

However, today it was nice to have some actual help, instead of just interference.

Amazing/Crazy Thrift-Store Sweater

Isn't this thing just NUTS? I had to buy it. It's huge, it won't fit her at all for at least a year (probably two) and even then she'll swim in it. Aaaaaand I'll have to pack it and lug it from here to North Carolina to God-knows-where-else until then. But look at the thing! There's half a zoo on there. The colors are bright enough to burn your retinas out. It's some seriously crazy 80's fashion.

It is so worth dragging around. I think the only bad thing about it is that they did not have one in my size.

Eggtown

1. Our house passed muster, with only a few tiny things that will need looking after (missing piece of siding, hairline crack in cement slab,etc). We are now sitting around twiddling our thumbs while the finance people hash their shit out. They have given us a preliminary closing date of March 28th, which seems a very long away but is really like three weeks. I am trying to figure out how we're going to get all of our shit down to North Carolina, plus me, the baby, and the cats. It is probably going to cost us another thousand dollars to move our stuff again. We have no furniture except a couch and the baby's crib, just a small storage unit worth of boxes and lamps and totes and what-have-you. I can't imagnine the astronomical cost had we decided to hang on to everything.

2. Our former apartment complex in California has continued their pattern of shadiness by sending us to collections for $230 of fees that they assesed after we left and then never told us about. I have been trading phone calls with the collections agency (for some reason I can't seem to get the guy in charge of our case on the phone...hmmm) and wishing a pox upon the managment company and staff, since nobody could return our phone calls this summer when we asked for our copy of the move-out invoice and, oh, yeah, where is that hefty security deposit we paid? Also, their timing is both faaaabulous and suspicious - being sent to collections is precisely what we needed when we are knee-deep in applying for a mortgate.

3. I have been trying to spend as much time as possible out of the house when my mother is home, because I really can't stand her anymore. Problem is, when left unsupervised, she tends to get into my stuff and rearrange, throw away, move, or destroy things. And then denies it. I find my stuff rooms away from where I left it, or in the trash, or completely not where it belongs, and when I ask her about it she just starts screeching "I DIDN'T DO IT! WHY DO YOU YOU ALWAYS ACCUSE ME?! I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING I NEVER DO ANYTHING I NEVER DO ANYTHING NEVER EVER!!!" I grit my teeth so much these days I'm going to need some serious dental work done after the move.

4. I have to find some affordable health insurance for Piper & myself, because my husband's new job does not offer automatic coverage to families, and the plans available to buy are crappy and start at $500 a month. Max's coverage is no cost to us, which is helpful, but I can't believe they don't cover families! One of the plans I looked at charged an additional fee for pregnancy coverage - either you pay extra every month, or if (God forbid) I got pregnant, they wouldn't cover it. Who the hell ever heard of health insurance not covering pregnancy?! I don't know what we're going to do - I guess we've just been spoiled by our other jobs in healthcare & education, where the coverage was great and cheap/free. My mind boggles at paying $750 a month in premiums and still shelling out a $25 copay per office visit.

5. I hate living here more than I can describe, and that is not helping the homesickness that now permeates every moment of my day. I've decided California is like an abusive boyfriend: when you're with him and it's good, it's really good, and when it's bad it's damaging and possibly life-threatening. When you're away from him, you start to forget all the bad stuff and miss him. And so you go back time after time and get the crap kicked out of you. A couple of weeks ago, I told Max "I feel like Jack - 'we have to go back, Kate! We never should have left!' because that's what I want to do. I want to go back and do everything right, not make the mistakes we made last time." I am posessed by this, I am burning up with it. Every day I wake up and hope that I will find myself back in our old apartment, with a chance to reclaim everything this move has taken from us. It's been hard not only on our pocketbook, but also on our marriage and our burgeoning parenthood. I long for sunshine, I ache to be near the Pacific Ocean again, and most of all I want to be away from here.

I don't even like dogs, I'm just that lazy.

Sometimes, I think we need a dog.

It doesn't happen very often, and the urge only lasts about ten seconds, but sometimes I think it would be okay to give in to my husband's wishes that we become a dog-owning family.

Now, I'm sure you're thinking "Mother of God, woman, you have nine cats. What the hell would posess you to get a dog?!"

Rice. Rice makes me think we should get a dog.

Or, more accurately spilled rice. These are the times when a dog is necessary, times like today, when I was making some fresh hot rice to go with my leftover Thai carryout from last week (mmmm, week-old leftovers, lunch of the Supermom) and somewhere, between the baby howling (she'd just woken up from a nap on the living-room floor and oh my God that means I've been tricked into sleeping again and that is the worst fate imaginable) and the cats winding themselves through my legs and begging while I was cooking, I managed to dump a sizeable scoop of steaming-hot Basmati rice onto the kitchen floor.

Fritz, the cat who had been foremost in leg-winding and begging while I was cooking the rice, rushed over to peruse the bounty. He tried some, but quickly gave up when he realized that it was plain rice and I was eating a delicious plate of drunken chicken with my rice, which meat that he was entiteld to some delicious drunken chicken too. And then the baby scooted in and began eyeing my food (she loves spicy things, and chicken is her favorite food, so I was pretty much had). So I spent ten minutes shooing the cat away, giving bites of food to the baby, and, once in a while, taking a bite myself. I felt like I was in some sort of Ultimate Fighting Champion cage match just to eat my lunch.

After all that, I had to go back into the kitchen and clean up the rice. Of course that shit's not coming up with a sponge, rag, or mop. I crouched down, picking up the individiual grains of rice and trying to shake them off my fingers into the trash can.

"A dog would so eat this shit," I muttered to myself. I looked over and noticed stray Cheerios, bits of dried apple, and chunks of cracker on the floor under the high chair. "And that."

But then one of the cats jumped into the trash can and tried to drag out the two-day-old chicken bones that were in there, and I decided that perhaps I don't need more pets. I think what would really get the rice off my kitchen floor is a week-long vacation in Maui.

Sledding