The ugly

Set-up: I haven't gotten my highlights done since Oct. 13th. I hate going---it costs too much, it takes too long, and since I switched places I'm not fully confident in what I'm going to get. Dave is on break so I made an appointment for yesterday to get the roots done.


As the stylist was combing through my hair, she asked "Have you been very stressed lately?"

(Stressed? Life over here is a piece of cake!)

Me: No, not really. Why?

Her: Well, you're losing a lot of hair.

Me: Well, I think I always lose a lot of hair (Hmm, maybe it has been more than normal recently). Good thing my hair is so thick. Ha, ha, ha.

Her: Hmmm. Let me show you.

At this point she parts my hair is several different places and points out that I have little bald spots, about the size of a pencil eraser, scattered throughout my head. Yikes.

Her: You need to not stress so much. Don't worry, don't worry. Everything works out.


And with that reassurance, she bleached the hell out of my hair. I looked like this:


To be fair, it doesn't look terrible down, in that lighting, but check out this:



Holy crap.

After some freaking out, I went back this morning for lowlights, which brought it a little darker than usual, but at least I don't look like that anymore.

Repaired-ish:

Anyway, I think that if you share, you should share the good, the bad, and the ugly. So there's your dose of ugly for a while :)

If rodents aren't your thang, then just move along, there's nothing to see here . . .

Yesterday Dave was in the kitchen while I was attempting to wrestle the lid off of my (now chipped, because I dropped it yesterday) coffee cup. I hear him half say/half mumble something from the kitchen " . . . spending too much time with the rats because I thought I just saw one across the . . . so weird . . . " by then, I had stopped listening. I could only half hear him, I was annoyed at my current project, and it seemed like he was just musing for the sake of it.

Turns out not so much.


We caught a mouse last night. Eeeeeek!

And, despite my zoological training, the weeks that I lived at the wildlife hospital in Hingham, and the fact that I've owned every small animal know to man, I shrieked like a girl and hopped from foot to foot. Twice!


It's the element of surprise that causes the shrieking, I swear. I'm standing, texting a friend, when suddenly a see a tiny dark streak out of the corner of my eye. I gasped and told Dave that I thought a mouse might be under the couch, and he started an excited "Hey! Didn't you hear me this afternoon?! I saw something too. Only right away I figured I must be hallucinating."

(((Side note- What the hell? How is that a logical leap? When faced with a discrepant event, such as mouse in a forever-mouseless apartment, I would try to figure out what the frick is going on. Dave, apparently, just figures that he's hallucinating. Hallucinating?)))

Anyway, long story short, we clear the living room so that we can see all the way around the couch, open the door to the terrace, and ready ourselves with mouse-catching buckets. And we caught him (Dave scared him towards me and I got him in a bin).

As it turns out, he's freakishly tiny, hops with lightening speed, and burrows under woodchips (this morning I thought he had made an escape from the cage we kept him in last night).

I'm just a little tiny mouse . . . .

But I can cause big trouble . . . .

Check out tiny mouse vs. former rat baby (now he's a big jumbo rat)

Sigh. So, for those of you keeping track at home, we now have the snakes (2), the rabbits (2), the rats (6), and one very small hopping mouse.

Two days in pictures, with no transitions between stories, and the worst and longest title ever

So, folks asked about the flier that I mentioned hanging around the neighborhood. I'd love to share it because I got so many responses! The title was "Young neighborhood mom seeks companionship" and no sooner did I hang it up than the emails started pouring in.

:)

Ok, for real, here it is (at Starbucks):

("Attention Parents of Kids with special needs" is the title)

Speaking of Starbucks, you may have noticed that you can see a giant Starbucks cup in almost all of my stroller pictures. That's a reusable iced coffee cup, and we make the coffee at home. I'm not buying coffee (and disposing of plastic cups) everyday. Here's Maya, and my cup, at the dog run:

Playing with the new camera has taught me about angles. Here she looks like she's at a park in the middle of a big city:

While here she could be swinging in a much smaller town

But really, there's just one big skinny building, and the shots were a few seconds apart.

Around 7:25 every night, we say "Maya, do you want to watch "Baby Signing Time?" And she does this:

Everyday I wear 3 rings. Last night I made pizza, and before I started kneading the dough I threw the rings in an empty baby food container. This morning when I went to put them on, I found a fourth. One of these things is not like the other . . . (Dave made it pre-work)

Maya tried to feed it a veggie stick.

We're working on veggie sticks in feeding therapy. She wants to do it all by herself (which has varying degrees of success).

While I made her breakfast, she went to work unfolding the laundry:

And she subtly tells me to put the camera away.

(An aside: A few posts back, I mentioned my "throw yourself into the universe" theory (henceforth TYITU), but I haven't had time to extrapolate at all. Way back when I wrote about the not knowing, a few interesting things happened. 1. I was forwarded an article from the Wall Street Journal about a family dealing with a lack of diagnosis for their son, and it brought to light how many people in the country struggle in that limbo situation. 2. In line with TYITU, I emailed the author of the article 3. She responded and pointed me towards an actual organization solely for families of kids who don't have diagnoses (SWAN . . . "syndromes without a name"). That's what the "swan" tag on some of my posts stands for.)

Ch-ch-ch-changes*

Big changes are coming. The blog is boring me. (The format of course, the content is amazingly top notch). So don't be surprised if you start popping in and see several background changes, etc. until I settle on one.

EDIT: ROCK THE VOTE: PLEASE weigh in on the poll and help me decide what to do with this thing. ------------------------------>

New camera

And I experimented with it on a bike ride around the neighborhood . . .

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

You lookin' at me?

Mommy, INAPPROPRIATE time for a picture!

And then we walked over to our fave, the dog run:

Doggies far away . . .

Closer . . .

Closest!!!

Get back here, doggy!

Oh, you doggies are too much!

We get by with a little help from our friends . . .*

That's nearly been the mantra this week. I wish I had pictures for each day, but . .. eh. Here was our social calendar this week:

-Wednesday (St. Patrick's Day) morning with Sarita & baby Olivia (complete with fresh baked Irish soda bread & coffee cake , c/o my best baking friend)
-Thursday morning: playground playdate & brunch with my folks (pics from Grandma)

-Thursday afternoon: playground playdate with Cathy, Fernanda & Wendy (see pic on my last post)
-Friday evening: steakhouse celebration with Dave's folks, and Uncle Alan, Aunt Lori, & cousins Brooke & Sammy
-Saturday: lunch & playground date with Aunt Lisa, Uncle Jason, Collin & Emerson
-Sunday: brunch with Whitney &  Craig (by the way guys, we got the camera!)

It might look busy, but it was fantastic. I'm operating under a throw-yourself-out-into-the-universe philosophy (yeah, yeah, insert eye roll here). But seriously . . . the weather is getting warm. We have a very heavy therapy schedule (getting busier as we add 2 weekly trips into the city this week for private feeding & speech therapy), and we (or I) need to socialize. And I feel little sparks of possibility as I push myself out of my comfort zone. So I've (literally) posted fliers in the neighborhood, thrown things up on message boards, and am reaching out to old friends for contact. Do you live nearby? We'd love to meet up. For real. Don't be shy :)

Also this week, Maya got a (home-made) license plate:

And learned that shadows are mysterious and elusive:

And she's a monkey at the playground, climbing climbing climbing. I'm trying to get a good video, stay tuned.

Who has time to update a blog when the weather is so great? Here we are leaving the playground, powered by Fer & Wendy:

You know who else comes out to play in the sunshine? DOGGIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(this is Maya giggling while a dog in the dog run jumped to catch a ball. Not quite giggling until she threw up, but pretty cute)

Mommy, I thought you said there would be leprechauns . . . ?

Oh well, Happy St. Patrick's Day, anyway :)

Baby's first piercing (ear drum piercing, that is)

Surgery went well. We're pretty tired, and Maya is a little off (and a little puffy) from the anesthesia. We ended up spending a while in the hospital, because, just like with the adenoid surgery, Maya refused to drink in recovery. And since they won't remove the IV until she's drinking, we were stuck. We watched other people come and go, and after 4 hours in the recovery room they finally told us just to leave (with permission from her ENT). Ironically, about 10 minutes into the car ride home Maya started signing "water, water" and then drank :)

We spent most of those 4 hours passing her back and forth while she rested and slept on us. Then she would perk up and cry, then flop back to sleep. It's funny to look back on pictures from the adenoid surgery---she's a much bigger girl now, but a lot of the faces that she made today were the same!

First thing this morning: Dave & I are exhausted, Maya thinks we woke her up early to party.

We arrive in the hospital playroom, Maya realizes where she is and tries to bolt for the door:

How big is Maya? Soooooo big!


Driving around the hospital hallway:


All scrubbed up:

Dad's in scrubs, too!
Signing times pre-surgery:

Immediately post-op:

Leaving the surgery floor:



A nurse offered to take a family picture :) Maya's thinking "Really? You've got to be kidding me with this camera"


Sleeping:


Awake, but so groggy:

Andddddd . . . back to sleep:
I. Don't. Want. This. Stupid. WATER!

Hopefully now the tubes will do their job----less ear infections, more hearing clarity, and (fingers crossed) more speech sounds.