Afterthoughts of the election.

I always feel bad for the losers in any large election. Hell, I feel bad for a sports team after losing a game (Except the yankees. They can lose for the rest of eternity and I'd be happy.)!

I wasn't for the McCain/Palin ticket, but to be honest, I simply wasn't for the Palin half of the ticket. I'm from Arizona and I had always liked McCain, but he made a critical error in bringing Palin on board. What a whackadoo. It was terrible that I was more voting ~against~ Palin than for anyone.

I will be spending my time today to see what all of the individual states passed or shot down.

With only 87% of precincts reporting, I was ~thrilled~ to see my state (colorado) shot down Amendment 48, the "Personhood" bill. Anti abortion activists tried to define the concept of human life to start at conception. While I think this is a potential human life, I don't think the law should be defined as such. If this would have passed, it would have made me and my husband murders for disposing the 3 embryos that weren't up to grade before our transfer. It would have made all abortions illegal, even if the woman was violently raped. Ugh.

So I was happy to see 1.5 million Coloradans vote against this measure. But it scares the shit out of me 546,540 people actually voted "yes". Scary.

Work From Home Mondays

Well ~that~ didn't go well at all.

Due to the increase of daycare rates and the fact I simply don't have $2,881/month spare change to pay for full time, we have decreased our care to 4 days/week. This means every Monday, I will work from home. I am a self professed bad "work from home" employee and I try not to ever do it. When someone is sick or the roads are thick with ice or snow, that's one thing, as it's rare, but I don't like having a set schedule for WFH days.

My plan is this ...
~ I only have 11 weeks before maternity leave. Due to that, I don't have large projects nor anything new on my plate. So I'll just take it easy and won't stress on my Mondays until I go into labor.
~ Then I'll have 12 weeks maternity leave.
~ I'll be back mid-April (if I deliver when due) and my parents will be back in Colorado by then. (they are snowbirds - living in colorado in summer and arizona in winter). My mom has graciously offered to watch the children on any Monday she isn't out of town so I can go into the office. Cool.
~ Ella will go to kindergarten in August, so that will be back to having 2 kids in full time. I'm just going to work towards that budget.

I have moved my office into my living room, to a little corner desk next to the entertainment center. This is going to take some getting used to because I used to be in the back office, away from the hustle/bustle of the house. I declared the day to be "movie Monday" which lasted about an hour. Then I decided to run a lunch errand with the children and ended up being gone almost 2 hours. Definitely not good for the 'ole career. I had to work after the kids went to bed to make up my time. I can't do that every Monday!

Anywho, thank goodness it's Tuesday!

The Nursery is Done!

I've been working on the nursery since 8am this morning. It started out as an empty room with new carpet, but a closet full of our off season wardrobe. These are the things I have done today pretty much all by myself:

~ Put together a new shelf for the room
~ Cleaned changing table which was in the girl's room, holding their stuffed animals, blankies and miscellaneous baskets of toys. Cleaned out all baskets and stocked it with baby supplies. Recovered changing pad with an organic cotton cover.
~ Went to HellMart and exchanged 3 packs of girl pullups for newborn diapers. (Yes, I'm going to be using cloth diapers, but expect to use disposables for first few weeks.) Also bought a hanging closet shelf organizer.
~ Did Karl's first load of laundry - all his bedding and blankets.
~ Went to storage unit and got crib, glider, gender neutral sheets I had from the girls, bouncy seats, playgym and baby toys. Pretty much everything he'll use for the first few months. Left highchair, older baby toys, etc.
~ Went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and bought heavy duty wardrobe to store our clothes. Also picked up some linen storage boxes to store toys and whatever in nursery.
~ Cleaned everything from storage, put together crib.
~ Put bedding, aquarium and mobile in crib.
~ Hung wall decor (some were there, so only had to reposition them)
~ Took out all our clothes, put them in storage bags and hung them on the rolling wardrobe I just put together.
~ Put up closet organizer and cleaned out everything else. It's empty and ready!

Here is how everything turned out ...


This poster is a subpop poster for a 1993 show in Tokyo featuring the supersuckers. Appropriate for a nursery, right? Oh, and those wall letters are totally even. They look so off in this picture that I went back in to look at them. It's just the photo, which, I may add, is bugging me.



The other orange curtain panel is on back order until mid December! So I simply have this one hanging to get the color scheme shown. I do have a new black metal curtain rod to hang, but I'll just wait until I get the other panel.



Check out this awesome shelf! Looks like a professional ~had~ to have put that together, doesn't it? ~wink~ I have two bouncy seats because I got the blue one for Ella, but she never liked it. When I had Allie, I bought her the papasan one, but ends up she liked the blue one. I'll never win. The poster is from a Fugazi and Shellac show Tom and I went to. We heard of the show, bought tickets to hold at will call and drove straight through from Colorado to Chicago. This was May, 1998. The next day, we drove to Kansas City and I attended my first Red Sox game. It was my first view into seeing Tom in his "element". Have you seen the movie "Fever Pitch"? Yeah, it was like that. Later that night, Tom told me he loved me for the very first time.



I just love the crib. LOVE it. The pictures on the left were paintings I found which seemed to represent both Tom and I as children. The girl is blonde haired, standing on the wet sand of a beach with her swimsuit riding up her little butt. The boy had light brown hair in a bowl cut, climbing a tree. It's almost like the artist painted these from childhood pictures.



I love the bedding. And I love the mobile. I am determined to get a mobile that grabs the attention of my child. The other mobiles I have gotten have just been your average mobile that matches the bedding. This time, I researched mobiles and ended up with this one. It plays 3 different classical music pieces, the arm itself moves left and right and the main part of the mobile rotates. Hell, it gets ~my~ attention, I'm confident the baby may actually glance at the thing once or twice.



This one just shows where the door is located. It also shows the infamous crib aquarium which each of my children have received as babies. Both Ella and Allison still use it, every night without fail, when they go to bed. It's been worth it's weight in gold.


I wish I had more room, but I have a teeny house. The nursery is actually the largest bedroom in the house, larger than the master bedroom by about 6-8"!! I see other blogs showing pictures of their nurseries and I'm just so damned jealous. But I do love what I put together.


This was me today, trying to leave to go to HellMart. It was such a nice day outside, I wanted to get photographic proof of wearing a sundress in November. (It even was so warm I took off that little sweater!) But my husband is the slowest picture taker on the planet and I was blinded by the sunlight, so no good picture. And it's another picture I just don't look too pregnant.



And then I turn to the side and dispel that myth!

Tom and Jerry are not PC.

My kids ~love~ Tom & Jerry. I think it's awesome because I too loved Tom and Jerry. There is an hour long block of T&J cartoons today (probably every sunday or even everyday) and as I was setting up my new computer workspace, I was watching it with them.

My goodness, it's ~so~ not politically correct! But for the time, no one blinked an eye. I wonder if there are any episodes the networks have completely banned. I seem to remember some really bad ones using the very stereotypical and racist image of a "mammy"-like black maid and cook for a white household. In 1940, when Tom and Jerry was first produced, I'm sure no one took offense. Well, at least the general public. I could definitely see how many of the groups it depicted wouldn't like it.

I just checked out Wikipedia on it and read this:

Like a number of other animated cartoons in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Tom
and Jerry was not considered politically correct in later years. There were at
least twenty-four cartoons that featured either racism or with characters shown
in blackface following an explosion, which are subsequently cut when shown on
television today, although The Yankee Doodle Mouse blackface gag is still shown
in other countries. The black maid, Mammy Two Shoes, is often considered racist
because she is depicted as a poor black woman who has a rodent problem. Her
voice was redubbed by Turner in the mid-1990s in hopes of making the character
sound less stereotypical. One cartoon in particular, His Mouse Friday, is often
banned from television due to the cannibals being seen as racist stereotypes. If
shown, the cannibals' dialogue is edited out, although their mouths can be seen
moving.

So I was right, much is cut out, like it should. Although I do think the cannibal racism is quite funny. Unless it's a different kind of racism and not just about cannibals themselves. Hrm, the Boomerang channel has planned to edit out "where the characters were seen to be smoking in a manner that was 'condoned, acceptable or glamorised'". Good for them!

I do get a little bummed when classic cartoons and stories are edited for today's audience, but I completely agree with this type of editing. The storied that have irritated me are the "nice" version of Grimm's Fairy Tales. They're grimm for a reason people! I bought a Goldilocks and the Three Bears book only to read, to my amazement, how they all sat down and shared dinner at the end. Bah. By protecting children in such a manner, we're going to raise a nation of pussies.

Yay for the "stupid teenager tricks"!!!

I finally got a big group of teenagers without costumes. A few of them got a pass, as one said he was a baseball player (hat and t-shirt of same team, so I accepted that one) and one had a hoodie that when zipped all the way up, the hood created a mask, complete with crazy plastic eye thingies. Although both those boys would just wear those clothes on any day, they worked it enough for me to say okay.

But one of the girls said "I'm a boy" and just had on normal clothes. She had done her hair and makeup in her normal girl style, so that wasn't acceptable. She ended up doing jumping jacks for me while all her friends laughed. I told them all to shut up because at least she ~tried~ to do a trick and they were all wearing lame costumes. She said "yeah, shut up!" and I gave her the most candy. It was funny. They all were cool with me and wished me a good night.

I had ~a lot~ of moms come to the door carrying little teeny babies dressed up in cute costumes. Okay, that's fine, but they were asking for candy! Come on, a 15 week old baby doesn't need candy. I could see going to your next door neighbor's house for the "first halloween" picture, but going door to door, street by street, collecting a huge bag of candy? Lame.

Living in the ghetto is so entertaining though, I'll give it that.