October 2008

So I was proposed to today.   It went like this:

  The whole class was having a blast making oatmeal chocolate chip cookies when little Brady popped the question.

              “Sarah (Se..wah) will marry (me..wee) me?”

             ” What did you say Brady?”

               ” Will marry (me.. wee) me?  

               “  Well where is my ring, Brady?”

                ” I don’t ’hab’ one.”

                “Well, when did you want me to marry you?”

                “ How bout ’wight’ now?”

I couldn’t believe my ears.  Did my little 2 year old student just ask me to marry him?   He sure did.  Don’t worry guys… I played the ’hard to get’ card.  After his request I told him I couldn’t because I didn’t have a wedding dress to wear.  He soon looked me over and said: 

“yes you ‘hab’ a ‘dwess’ on.” 

He was correct.  This morning I decided to wear one of my summer dresses before the weather got too cold.  So I thought about another excuse :) 

“But Brady…  I don’t have any pretty flowers to hold.  I have to have pretty flowers to hold if I am going to get married.” 

This was a tough one for this little guy.  He thought and thought and then replied:  

” but miss ‘Se..wah’  ‘yo’  ’dwess’ has ‘pwity’ ‘fowers’ on it.” 

As if to ask, isn’t that good enough?  I was left speechless , he got me.  I knew then that he had a suave way about him that would make any girls heart melt.  Even the heart of his 25 year old preschool teacher.  

I’m pretty much constantly exhausted and suffer from frequent headaches and occasional bouts of nausea. According to these symptoms I have:

a. anemia
b. mono
c. an inoperable brain tumor
d. an incurable rare deadly rainforest disease
e. two toddlers that have more energy than 5 of me

P.S. How do moms with like 4 of them make it, I mean really, at some point I expect to see them keeling over dead.
P.S.S. I’m sending Steven and the girls away to the mainland for a few weeks this Spring, I am anticipating that WAY too much. Even though in reality I’ll probably have an anxiety attack by day 2 from lack of seeing my babies, I swear they’re like crack.

To produce the ä on a Windows computer hold down the alt key and type 0228 on the number pad to the right. On a Mac, hold the alt key down and press u, then left up the the alt key and press a.

I’m pretty sure that even though I can eat 2,500 calories a day, 1,000 of them shouldn’t come from Ben&Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie Ice Cream.

When your 11-month old cries and cries and cries no matter what you do, try cool whip straight up that should quiet them down for at least 5 minutes.

You don’t have to be even remotely crafty to make something awesome at Super Saturday, in fact your husband may accuse you of lying when you show him what you made.

Okies, having so many ideas in my head right now, I can tell this is going to be a long post, so sit back and bear with me for a bit.  =)

Jason mentioned it earlier, but let me tell you what we are doing in November.  Jason and I are participating in NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month.  Between 1 November and 30 November we both will be completing a 50k word work of fiction.  

I attempted this last year and got about 4000 words into it before I skipped writing a few days, tried to play catchup, skipped a few more and realized I was way too far behind to write a little more than 40k words in the last 2 days.  =)  So I have to make some rules for myself if I plan on finishing a novel this November.  

Rule number 1:  No Glenn Beck.  I don’t know how many of you know this, but I listen to every word that Glenn says on his radio show, which comes out to about 105 minutes a day.  I download the radio show via podcast, so I get to skip the commercials.  What I don’t get to during the week I finish on the weekends while I do dishes or fold clothes or whatever.  Well, in the month of November there will be none of that.  Dishes and clothes folding time is time to think about a novel, and the time I normally sit down and listen is time to actually do some writing.  (This rule of course only goes into effect November 5 or 6, depending on when the news dies down… I will get into this a little later).

Rule number 2:  No NewsFire.  Märia mentioned this earlier.  Newsfire is a feed reader.  Basically I have about 40 website blogs that I am subscribed to and newsfire downloads all the articles to my computer so I don’t have to go to the individual sites to see if someone posted something worth reading.  I don’t even know where to find half of these websites anymore, it has been so long since I actually went there, since Newsfire makes it so very convenient!  But considering I get probably 2-300 articles a day downloaded to my computer, and I probably spend an hour a day rooting through them to see which are worth reading and which I can just toss, I am thinking that I could use this time more productively writing.  

Rule number 3:  Everything I write is immediately available to everyone to read.  Now I don’t expect you to actually read my sorry rambling excuse for a novel, but I do expect someone every once in a while to check to make sure I have written!  Keep me accountable! (Jason!)

That is it!

Ok, I mentioned politics up there, and I have been having a few thoughts about the upcoming election.  Let me preface this by saying I fully expect that we will be electing Senator Barack Obama as our next president.  I really don’t see any other outcome being really possible.  But let us suspend reality for a bit and look into the possibility of Senator McCain (who was the worst Republican candidate, and that is saying something considering Huckabee was in there!) actually pulling this thing off.  

National Guards across the country are mobilizing across the country to fight the riots that are expected to ensue should this happen.  And if said riots were to happen, I wouldn’t blame the rioters!  Think about it:  Sen. Obama is expected as of now to win in a landslide, The polls are wildly in his favor (on average) and the exit polls are probably going to be the same for several reasons.  First of all, conservatives have always been the ones more likely to tell exit pollsters that it is none of their business who they voted for.  But we have a new issue thown into the mix this election cycle.  No one wants to be thought of as a racist, and the media and Obama supporters (although not really the Obama campaign) have convinced many that a vote against Obama makes you a racist, or shows racist tendencies.  How many are going to come out and say they voted for Obama just so no one looks at them like they are a racist?  So with more conservatives than liberals telling the exit pollsters to jack off, and more McCain voters saying they voted for Obama than Obama voters saying they voted for McCain, the exit polls could show a clear Obama win, while they official results could come back far closer, perhaps giving McCain a win!  And we wonder why we are preparing for riots!

Not something I heard on Glenn Beck or read somewhere, just something I was thinking about…

Having a name like Märia means all sorts of people mispronounce my name. For those of you that don’t know how to say it, it rhymes with Daria OR it’s like Mario, but Mari-ah. I’ve gotten use to it being slaughtered over the years.

Sometimes when I go clothes shopping and the attendant shows me a fitting room and asks for my name, I say it’s Wendy. Because I can’t handle the thought of someone saying “Maria, how are those pants working out for you! Can I get you another size!” Wendy is such a nice name, everyone knows how to say it thanks to Peter Pan, but nobody actually names their daughters it. I mean really how many Wendy’s have you met. Me, I’ve never met one (I’ve actually met 2 Märia’s besides my aunt, although neither spelled their name like mine).

It’s nice because usually I can screen incoming phone calls from solicitors. If you can’t say my name right, I don’t listen you.

Twice I’ve had interviews where I walked in and the interviewer said, “Oh, you’re white.” They thought with my umlaut, that I would be Middle Eastern (which is so off base, it’s kinda funny).

Most people once I correct them a couple of times get it. Some people after correcting 5 or 6 times still don’t get it and I answer to Maria, or Mariah, or whatever it is. There’s a co-worker at work, who I’ve worked with for 2 1/2 years, who still doesn’t get my name right. It wouldn’t bother me so much if she called me Maria, but she calls me Myrah and she has a nasally voice that makes my spine shiver. I stopped correcting her after the first couple of months, but it bugged me so much I pretty much quit talking to her. Lately though 3 of my other co-workers started correcting her, I think it’s hilarious (not sure if it bugs them or they can see it bugs me).

So that’s my name, I actually really love it despite the issues it causes me. When naming my children I really wanted to give them unique names that were easily said. Felicity I don’t think will have a probably. Seporah on the other hand (even though we spelled it phonically), will. I’d never heard of the make-up store Sephora until after I’d named her. Many people call her that. I’m hoping the store bankrupts soon so Seporah won’t have to listen about it (hey with present day economy, it could happen). At this point though I think she’s pretty much immune to what ever people call her since she can’t even say her own name (or Felicity’s for that matter, Felicity is still Baby in Seporah’s book).

I got a blog award from Suzanne, it was a couple of days ago (I was going to respond sooner but I swear I’ve been a busy, busy bee lately). I’ve never got a blog award before. I started blogging when Steven was in Iraq in 2003, some of you will remember www.stebeniniraq.com. And then I “helped” Seporah with her first year at www.seporahscrib.com. And somewhere along the line RushingAround got started. Before we had the kids my posts were nowhere near as frequent, but children seem to always have a story to tell (not like us boring unchanging adults). I’ve always shared a blog with others, I’ve tried to start a couple others through the years that was just mine, but found they really weren’t worth the effort. And that my darlings is my blogging history. Thanks for my very first award after 5 years. So for this blog award I’m suppose to state 6 things I value, 6 things I don’t value, and pass it on to 6 bloggers (I skipped all the duh answers like family because well there’s no surprise there).

Six Things I Value:

1. SLEEP! (goodness knows no one knows the value of this pre-kids)
2. The smell and feel of freshly washed babies
3. Stephenie Meyer (told you I was gonna get her in)
4. A working washer and dryer
5. Gooey Fudge Brownies
6. Comments, like on the site

Six Things I Don’t Value

1. “Baby-Fat” (as in mine)
2. The pharmacy at work
3. Leaving movie theaters due to noisy children
4. Bad hair days
5. Excess wires laying around the house
6. Broken Crayons

Six people I’m passing my blog award to

1. Lynda
2. Sarah
3. Karen
4. Nicole
5. Annie
6. Felice

” Why would a mom test her breast milk for alcohol?
Because every mother is unique! Naturally, the way our bodies process alcohol is unique, too. Metabolizing alcohol depends on several factors including:   Body weight, Type of alcohol consumed, and Food intake. ”

” In the past, there were only generalized guidelines for the questions surrounding breast feeding after consuming alcohol. Now, with milkscreen™, there is one simple and accurate method to let Mom know if her milk contains a level of alcohol that may negatively impact baby. ”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WORLD??

I WOULD JUST LIKE TO KNOW HOW MANY OF YOU OUT THERE WOULD AGREE WITH ME AND SAY THAT OUR PRIORITIES ARE WHACKED.  THIS JUST SCREAMS SELFISHNESS TO ME.  NO LONGER IS THE BABY’S HEALTH OUR NUMBER ONE PRIORITY… BUT RATHER IT HAS TO SHARE THAT POSITION WITH HAVING A “GOOD TIME”.   I DON’T APOLOGIZE IF I HAVE OFFENDED ANYONE WHO MAY LIKE TO CONSUME AN ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE WHILE NURSING.  THIS JUST HAS OPENED MY EYES OF HOW SICK THIS WORLD REALLY IS.