7 Quick Takes Friday (#46)
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The day Mary Rene decided to start nursing again, she didn’t stop. And honestly she hasn’t stopped since. Before the strike she would occasional wake up in the middle of the night for a nursing session. Most nights she would be satisfied with just cuddling. But since the strike, she has been nursing two, three, sometimes four times during the night. Needless to say, I am tired. Poor baby girl is in so much pain and just needs to be comforted…it would just be nice if the comforting was wanted during waking hours. Wednesday night was a rough night and I ended up nursing her four times and on two or three occasions that didn’t even help her sleep. I slept about five hours off and on and was completely exhausted when I woke up. I started to complain but then Frank put it into perspective when he said, “Mary Rene had a rough night last night.” Yeah she sure did. So I instantly realized that my lack of sleep was due to my poor baby girl’s discomfort. She was worse off then me. And you know it is worth it when she finally does sleep and looks like this
so relaxed, so at peace, so pain-free. I guess I can always sleep another day.
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Monday afternoon, my friend Nicole C and I went to a volunteer orientation for Crisis Nursery. I don’t know where I got the idea to volunteer here but it works out great because Nicole C wanted to volunteer there as well. As soon as I get my physical and TB test then I can start volunteering. I plan on volunteering one of the days I work so then I am not taking away too much time from my family. It will be nice to give back to the community and well…hang out with kids all day!
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Can you guess what Frank is doing?
Besides drinking a glass of wine, he is making his spice jar! Awhile ago I talked about bringing spice back into our marriage. When you practice Natural Family Planning and are trying to avoid pregnancy, you practice SPICE during your fertile days. SPICE means:
Spiritually, Physically, Intellectually, Creatively & Communicatively and Emotionally.
It is a way of connecting with your spouse on a non-sexual level. Well, we just need spice in general because we are so busy being parents that we haven’t made much time to be spouses. So Wednesday night during our stay-in date we wrote down a list of “spicy” things we could do for each other. Then we cut each one out and put them in our jars. Next we decorated the outside of our jar.
Our plan is every Sunday we will pull out a spicey suggestion and we have the entire week to give the spice to our spouse. I was so excited that I quickly started writing stuff down. My list has simple things on it like (Frank don’t read this part): play with my hair, call me cute pet names like honey, sugar pie, love, ask me to dance, etc. etc. I ended up adding about 35 spices to my jar. Frank…he had seven. I’m sure his seven are extravagant items though. When he saw me writing away he said, “I guess this is why women are from Venus and men are from Mars.”
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Tomorrow we are going to my sister’s house to celebrate Thanksgiving with my mom’s family. Can you believe it is Thanksgiving already? The holiday just snuck up on me.
-5-
These are the cabinets in our kitchen. When I am cooking, Mary Rene likes to make a mess and take everything out. We have little locks to go on the cabinets but we haven’t installed them yet. The furthest cabinet on the right houses all our ziploc bags and…there was a full bottle of vodka in there. Yikes. I didn’t realize that until Mary Rene handed it to me the other day. I took the vodka and drank it hid it. The cabinet on the far left houses all our tupperware and let me tell you, Mary Rene has fun playing with the tupperware. It really isn’t that big of an issue until Frank has to find matching tupperware to put our leftovers in. Then it becomes a problem. On Wednesday during Mary Rene’s nap, I moved the tupperware to a drawer above the sink and now Mary Rene has her own special drawer.
After her nap we went in the kitchen so I could cook and she walked to “her drawer” right away. I pretended like nothing was going on but I looked down and oh my word, she was over the moon with happiness. She looked up at me with these wide eyes and the expression on her face read, “is this for me?” She looked close to tears in happiness. She sat in her drawer and played with all her new kitchen toys and was having so much fun. Sure most of the kitchen toys ended up on the kitchen floor but it was much easier to throw them back in then put them in neat stacks like tupperware.
At least someone is getting use out of those kitchen tools.
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Have I mentioned that my dad bought a foreclosure house that is five houses down from his? If I haven’t, I just wanted to say, a few months ago my dad bought a foreclosure house that is five houses down from him. There I said it. When he was cleaning out the house he found this little red table that was the perfect size for Mary Rene. Most of the paint was chipped off so he took it to work, removed all the paint, sanded it down until it was nice and smooth. I planned on painting it pink but never got around to it. I asked Frank’s talented sister to paint it and she went above and beyond and also wrote Mary Rene’s name on it.
Cute. My dad ended up finding the chair that went with the table but we put that in her playhouse in the backyard.
While Elizabeth was painting the table, I also asked her to finish my paint job in Mary Rene’s room. Back in September I wrote, “Guess How Much I Love You” on the wall to pay the utmost respect to the book entitled, “Guess How Much I Love You.” My plan was to paint hearts around what I wrote but well, I never got around to it. So Elizabeth came over and finished my paint job and
wala.
You’ll never be able to guess how much I love my baby girl either.
-7-
I call this: You Know You Are a Blog Dork When…I have realized that I talk about a lot of things but I never had the proper categories on my post. For instance, I would write a post about how Mary Rene was nursing but I would only put the post under Mary Rene and not nursing. Well that is useless. So I was really bored at work (typing the word work is making me add this post to my work category) and I started adding categories and trying to fix the missing pieces. Well, that is just a darn headache because this blog is nearly two years old. So even though, for instance, I have talked about Natural Family Planning on several occasions, I only have it listed twice because I never properly tagged it. So now I classify myself as a blogging dork because I want to go back and reread every post and make sure I have as many categories tagged as possible. Oh I need a life.
November 20th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
I know someone who is also volunterring at the crisis nursery, I went to a fundraiser for the crisis nursery last week, it seems to be a good organization and lots of good people working for them. I would love to hear about your experience there.
December 4th, 2009 at 8:35 am
[...] and I started our spice jars last week and I’m loving it! Two nights ago, he painted my toes red! ha! But the week [...]
January 11th, 2010 at 11:15 am
[...] toe nails? None that I know of it. But Frank pulled, “Paint My Toe Nails” from my SPICE jar and so there we were. He had never painted or even attempted to paint my fingers or toes before [...]
July 27th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
[...] a burning desire to be parents but at the time we didn’t feel it was right. So we practiced SPICE during that time and were able to reconnect on a spiritual [...]