It’s no secret that I have issues with anxiety, I’ve written about it before. I’ve had meltdowns, I’ve had panic attacks, I have overwhelming fears of things that really aren’t scary (dentist’s anyone?). I’ve said stupid things because my head gets so cloudy in the moment that I can’t think straight, and my head itches. Yeah, one of the side effects of my anxiety is an itchy head. Who knows why, but when I’m in a situation where I start to feel that feeling, I can’t help but scratch my head incessantly.

I also have slippers. Wonderful warm fuzzy slippers that I live in. My Mother gave them to me, the first and second pairs. The first ones developed a hole by toe where the stitching came undone. In all fairness though, I wear them everyday, all day, everyday. I walk outside in them. I’ve even been known to become so attached to them that I forget they’re there. I’ve gone to my parents house more times than I can count without remembering to put on real shoes. I’ve had to borrow socks from my Mom because I remembered at the last second that I needed shoes, so I grabbed them, but forgot socks. (S was already in the car and I just grabbed the shoes from the back door really quickly)

I’ve been called a grouch, a pessimist, and plenty other things because of my hatred of snow. I usually try to play it off and be positive by saying things like I did in my last post. “It’s pretty, it’s fun to play in” etc. Truth is, I hate it, I just despise it. When it snows I get to be stuck in the house, because I refuse to drive in it. James, however, doesn’t get that privilege. He has to go to work. We’ve been fortunate the past couple of weeks that they’ve closed early, or closed altogether.

Not today though, today I can’t see the pool across the street, and James is at work. Today I’m terrified. Today I can’t see the good. Today I can’t get the car accidents and terrible things out of my head. Today I’m overwhelmed with the urge to break down and cry. Today I want him to not come home, I want him to just spend the night in a restaurant, because then at least I know that he’ll make it home safely tomorrow.

I shoveled out a spot for his car. I keep hoping he’s going to call and say they’re closing and he’ll be home soon, so it doesn’t get worse. I made a safe place for him to pull his car into. I piled snow on top of piles that are already 4 feet tall. And dammit, I did it in my slippers. And my feet are cold. And my slippers are wet. And I need him to come home.

And my head itches.

I had dream last night. It involved swimming with sharks that turned into dolphins, an all access pass to an Aquarium in Pittsburgh (that as far as I know doesn’t exist, but it was awesome) where S got to feed the dolphins, and my mother in law trying to take a picture with a Nintendo DS held backwards. Yeah, it was strange.

James has been home the last 4 days, we’ve been stuck in the house for that whole time. While James was able to get out this morning and go to work, S and I are anticipating another day of house arrest. We have an appointment tomorrow, so it better only be one more day. (More on that in a bit)

Snow, ahhhh snow, snow and I have a love/hate relationship. I love to look at it and play in it, and hate every other thing about it. We now have about 30 inches, which is a rough estimate, and probably an exaggeration, but we’ll go with it. We are expecting more later this week, blah. Even James says he’s had enough at this point, and for anyone who know James, that’s saying something.

In anticipation of this snow, we bitched and complained about shoveling our freakishly long driveway once again. We talked about how in our next house we want a much shorter driveway. (More on that later) We planned on only digging out one side again, like we did in December, and just moving the cars around to get out. What we did, however, is one of those things that you kick yourself for not thinking of before. A very “how stupid of us, what’s wrong with us, maybe our parents actually did drop us on our heads” kinda moment. What we did was move the cars to the end of the driveway. Yeah, they’re not protected from the snow like they are in the garage, but wiping off 30 inches of snow from a car is a hell of a lot easier than shoveling 30 feet of snow from the driveway. We just made one path, from the back door to the cars, and James shoveled it over and over yesterday, but it only took him 5 minutes each time. Why didn’t we think of this before?

Also, in the midst of this snowstorm, S lost her first tooth. She didn’t seem too worried about the Tooth Fairy making it here in a blizzard, and luckily, the Tooth Fairy can fly, so it was that much easier on her. She spent two weeks sticking her finger in her mouth and playing with a loose tooth, so now she can’t stop. Flu season be damned, she is going to stick her fingers in her mouth, and it’s just about impossible to get her to stop.

Well, that’s enough for today…more on that “more on that later” later. Suspense! Intrigue! Annoyance!

Bye!

Tonight I read S a great book based on a story by Leo Tolstoy (yeah, that Tolstoy). It was about the meaning of life and we waxed philosophical after reading it and then I sent her up to put herself to bed. A moment later she popped her head back in the room and blurted, “Columbus!”
I didn’t know how that related to our previous conversation, and I must have looked confused because she then said, “Do you know why I said that?”
I tentatively offered, “Because tomorrow is Columbus Day?”
Her jaw dropped, her eyes widened and she said, “There’s a Columbus Day!?”
“Yes… that’s not why you said, ‘Columbus’?”
“Why is there a Columbus Day?”
“You should ask Mommy tomorrow in school to tell you who Columbus was and …”
“There was a person NAMED Columbus!?”
Again, her mouth fell open at this incomprehensible idea. I tried telling her that she was stalling and needed to head upstairs to bed, but she was already in my lap, back on the previous stall tactic.
“But I want you to tell me states and I’ll guess their capitals”
“No, S, it’s time for bed…”
“Please, just three?”
I smile, and give in, because that was the spirit of the book we just read, and well, because her little finger squeezed me into it.
“Fine, Delaware”
“Dover”
“Maryland”
“ummm…. Chesapeake Bay?”
“No…”
“I don’t remember what the mouse-looking thing said before Chesapeake Bay.” For those of you who don’t understand this reference, The Animaniacs, in the early nineties had a fantastic cartoon series which included an educational “Fifty States and their Capitals” song which I have used to teach my daughter. One of the jokes in the series was about what kind of animals the animaniacs were, and I love that she called them mouse-looking things.
“It’s Annapolis.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that one now.”
“How about Pennsylvania?”
“Ummm, I don’t remember.”
“Harrisburgh.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t going to get that.”
“Okay, It’s time for bed now.”
“No, how about four?”
“Good night, S…”"
“I was really hoping you were going to ask me Texas”
“I love you…”
“I know Texas is…”
At this point I gave her the look that conveyed that it was indeed time to finish stalling and go upstairs. Now, I am sitting down here wondering if she thinks the capital of Texas is Columbus.

While watching CNN this morning:

Sanjay Gupta: Blah blah blah….h1n1…blah blah blah…wash hands…blah blah blah…prevent flu

S: What’s he talking about?

J: You should wash your hands so you don’t get sick.

S: That’s not news

So we’ve had some picture issues on here. I’m not sure for how long. To me it seems like this just happened in the past few days, so I think some of it is my fault. (I changed all of the times we used our daughters name to S, but didn’t change some of the folders behind the scenes) Some of the other problems could have been going on for months but I never noticed on the older posts. So If you come across any broken pictures, let me know. Fortunately it seems to just be a capitalization issue. Thanks!

S is sitting behind me, at my sewing machine, sewing a “baby blanket for Darrell and Lesley”. It’s been a sewing filled morning here. Although, I guess it’s not morning right now, but my whole day is thrown off. More on that later.

She used the sewing machine all by herself for the first time today. So far she’s made two pincushions. I don’t think she’s stopping any time soon.

She just came up with this:

She made Pippin a shirt!

I think this is hilarious.  She can’t reach the foot pedal if it’s on the floor, so she puts it up on her stool, isn’t that cute?:

We went to Red Sox game last night, S’s first major league game. Awesome. So awesome. Ben outfitted her properly, he’s such a great uncle.  He had a shirt made for her, and bought her a hat.  Plus he bought me a Papelbon shirt.  All of this and he’s an Orioles fan.  You know, the Orioles,  the team the Red Sox crushed last night.  (Which is good, because if they had lost I would have had a lot of people to apologize to)  My Dad caught a ball during batting practice, so that takes S’s baseball count up to 6.  2 of those were caught by my father.  James did his best to convince the three boys sitting in front of us that neither the Red Sox or the Orioles were going to win.  He was adamant that the Pirates were going to show up and any minute and take the whole thing.  One of them said he was awesome. It’s something to watch how happy James gets when a 10 year old boy says he’s awesome.  I’m guessing because he’s very much like a 10 year old boy.

We didn’t get home until after 1, and S fell asleep on the train sometime just before midnight, so she didn’t get out of bed this morning until 10:30.  Wow.  It’s hard to believe that it’s 4 o’clock right now, my whole day is thrown off.

Oh!  Another cool thing Ben did.  He found his old baseball glove at my parents and gave it to S.  She didn’t have to try to catch flying baseballs with her hat.  She just sat there with her glove out and willed them to come to her.  It only worked to bring them to Grandpa, but close enough.

I’m seriously abut to put my head down on this desk and fall asleep, so I should stop typing.  It’s been a really long weekend, with little sleep.  I have a bunch of pictures to post, so I’m hoping to get them up soon.  You’re all welcome to bug me if I forget!

Head on over to the Fall preview guide all this week as I update our viewing patterns this fall!

I got a letter from an attorney today. Do you know how much your heart starts racing when you open your mailbox to find a letter from an attorney? A nice thick envelope from an attorney?

Let me back up.

Thursday night some friends of ours invited us to a concert in our town. It was awesome. We had a lot of fun. These friends have a four year old daughter, so her and S ran around playing for almost 3 hours. At some point S was getting grumpy so I decided to drive back to the house and get the biggest bottle of bubble stuff known to man (Thanks to my Mother), just to keep her sitting still for a while. So I grabbed my purse, and the kid (I wanted to distract her for a couple minutes so I dragged her with me), got in my car, drove to the house, grabbed the bubble stuff, and the accessories for blowing bubbles, got back in the car, and drove back to the concert. Around 9 we packed up all of our stuff, and carried it back to the car, chatted with the wife of the man who played the guitar all night long (they have a five year old daughter and live just around the corner from us, so that’s cool too), exchanged e-mails, and loaded the car.

I’m assuming that at some point during all of this walking back and forth to the car, is when the circumstances that caused me to get a letter from an attorney, occured.

The letter was incredibly nice, it said

Dear Liz,

Last night when I was in (our town) I found your bank card in the street. I tried to find your phone number but you weren’t listed so I ran your MVA record to find you.

You have probably already cancelled the card but I didn’t want you to spend the rest of your life wondering what happened to your card, so here it is.

Thanks,
(Name of Attorney)

Yeah….Guess who hadn’t cancelled the card? Guess who wasn’t even aware that the card was not currently residing in my purse? Guess who got a fancy copy of my driving record in the mail (No points! Yay!) complete with the most terrifying 5×5 license picture of my face? Those things look bad when they’re 1inx1in, you don’t want to see them blown up.

I’ve already checked the bank account, and everythings fine…for the parents out there reading this. I’m going to cancel the card and order a new one anyway, because I know James is paranoid.

I’d like to send the guy a thank you, and maybe something extra.

This is all very nice, and I’m glad a nice person found my card and mailed it back to me the next day. It’s a little wierd that it was someone with access to MVA records, but whatever.

Yup, it all turned out well. I’m still bothered though. Some of you might have picked up on the one little piece of info that leaves me scratching my head and going “Hmmmmm”

He called me Liz.

BRRREEEEEE…..BREEEEEEEE…..BREEE BREEE BREEE

What’s that sound?

Why, it’s the EAS!

What’s the EAS?

Well, it’s the Emergency Alert System, silly.

We heard the telltale sound of it maybe 10 times when we lived in DE. It was a “test” every single time. We hear it an average of 4 times a week now that we live in MD. One day we heard it 6 times. I think it’s been a “test” maybe 3 times. Why bother testing a system that works so hard already?

S knows the sound. When we first moved here, she barely looked up. She just assumed it was a test. After a month or two, she realized that it was never a test. It was always “golf ball sized hail”, “Nature’s biggest killer” (lightning), or a “Flash flood warning”.

This bothered her. She would jump every time it would go off, she’d say “Is it a test?” and then immediately ask if Daddy took the scooter to work. She was convinced that whenever the torrential rains, killer lightning, and hail-so-big-it-could-penetrate-a-motorcycle-helmet, hit, it would be right when Daddy was walking out the door at work and heading home.

About a month ago she realized that the sky almost never becomes even cloudy after one of these announcements. The TV is telling us the the storm of the century is about to hit us, and yet, it stays sunny outside and nothing happens.

Now she’s become cynical. Now when the alarms start ringing out, when the list of counties start scrolling across the screen, when the computer generated voice starts talking about the horrible end-of-the-world conditions heading our way, does she get scared, nervous, jumpy??

No. She promptly rolls her eyes, picks up the remote, and mutes the TV. That damn EAS has never read The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

I wish I could remember all of S’s great one liners and crazy stories, but they seem to slip away when I sit down to share them all, no matter how hard I laughed when she said them. But, here is three of my favorites from the past two days.

On trusting authority:   Yesterday S shared her conspiracy theories by stating that she believed that the police had listening devices in everyone’s cars and houses with invisible wires that went up to the sky so they could make sure no one was saying bad things.

On my driving:   S asked why we were stopping, and I told her that we had to let the other cars go. She told me I should just go. I asked her why and she responded, “I want to see what an air bag looks like.”

On my comedic efforts:   She finally told me on Sunday that I embarrass her when we were leaving Lowe’s and I was talking to her in a funny voice (because thats what I do) and she told me that I shouldn’t do that somewhere that people could hear me unless she wasn’t around.