Sun Madness

The weather has been unseasonably nice here in Cleveland. Warm, sunny, a nice breeze. Heaven. Unfortunately, heaven also comes with sun madness, a disease that makes you want to buy a crappy convertible and play hooky for 4/5ths of the work week.

(BTW, I've got a personal blog that will probably update more often than Nerdmama, and you can view it here: http://www.toribeth.com. A lot of it currently deals with sun madness.)

Pax and I have been out and about a lot because of the sun madness. We visited the zoo last Wednesday, and we've been out for daily walks--sometimes, twice a day! We had a big family walk last night with my husband and the dog... after a short walk in the afternoon and a walk to visit grandpa in the morning. I'm going to have killer thighs by the time the clouds roll back in.

Last Saturday, we got some sandwiches and took Pax on his first visit to the lake. In retrospect, it might have been a bit soon, because he got sand everywhere, but it was so nice out and I think Pax really enjoyed himself. He regarded the still-frigid lake as a giant bath and splashed around without much care for the cold. I can't wait until he's a bit bigger and can toddle around in the sand and not try to eat the rocks.

I also finally took the leap of buying the big carseat. My tiny VW Rabbit now sports a rear-facing Britax Marathon Classic in the backseat. It's, um... it's interesting. More on that later, maybe. The good news is, at least it fits. Kind of.

School and things are still trucking along, I am still running myself ragged, etc. etc. I have an interview next Thursday for an internship at the art museum--I am VERY excited for the opportunity and will probably be antsy until the interview. This weekend, my husband and I are joining my German class to go see a movie at the international film festival (and maybe we'll have dinner, too). That will be fun, I'm sure. And then the rest of this weekend... homework. Soooo much homework.

I need to clear off my camera's memory card, then I want to post some photos of baby at the zoo, baby at the beach, etc. One moment, please...

Sigh.

Here's what has happened to me this February:

1. I got food poisoning. I always thought that food poisoning was when you ate something and a couple hours later your stomach hurt--you just took some Tums and got over it. I learned that that is not exactly the case after throwing up for five straight hours and being taken the ER. There is nothing quite like vomiting into a plastic bag while a handsome male nurse is pushing drugs through your IV line--and then becoming completely overemotional and crying about how grateful you are for modern medicine. There is also nothing quite like being bedridden for nearly a week while your stomach continues to attempt to empty itself of everything you ingest. Thank you, salmonella.

2. Attempting to get my academic life back on track after missing a week--disastrous. Well, I say disastrous, but in reality that's just the neuroticism acting up. I still feel like I'm behind, but I guess I'm really not.

3. Pax's nine-month doctor's appointment happened. He is HUGE--over 20 pounds and 30" tall. He also eats like a pig, although we're still working on "real" finger food (i.e., not puffs/wheels). The main problem is that Pax loves to shove as much food as possible into his mouth and attempt to swallow without chewing, so everything is a choking hazard. Actually, we spent a lot of time rescuing things from Pax's mouth, food or not... he is really very fond of picking up animal hair and scraps of paper from the floor. He's also starting to look less like a baby and more like a toddler, as evidenced by this photo of my darling son in a bear hoodie:

4. Someone please tell me all of the things ever about Willie Bester. I'm doing my seminar project on him and my research is going too slowly. I have books requested through ILLiad that have somehow vanished from the face of the Earth, and I need those books for the project to be any sort of success. HALP.

5. Doing the student bit with the mother bit is continuing to wear me down to my last bit of sanity. Paxton doesn't think that long-winded scholarly articles on geometry in classical Islamic art are nearly as interesting as I think they are, so I almost never get to actually read what I'm attempting to read on a daily basis. Coupled with an online class that I swear is going to give me an aneurysm by the end of the semester and four summer internship applications that are 50% finished and due by Thursday, I'll be lucky if I'm still alive by spring break... in two weeks.

So, there you have it. That's been my entire month! Hopefully, March will be a bit easier to handle...

Eleven things.

NEO-blogger Alicia from Poise in Parma tagged "whoever wants to" in her Eleven Things blog post today, so I'm picking up the baton.

11 Random Things

1. Low-carb ice cream frustrates me. The only "real" low-carb option seems to be Breyer's Carb Smart, which I can only find in vanilla. It tastes slightly of cardboard and sadness.

2. I'm kind of sick of people (mostly my family) telling me that I don't eat enough or that having some more food isn't going to hurt me. Um, yes, it will! Excuse me, I am trying not to get diabetes over here, thanks. I'm 25, I don't want diabetes until... well, preferably never. They're probably just jealous that I'm getting thin again.

3. Paxton is also frustrating me, a great deal more than low-carb ice cream is. He's currently having a growth spurt and teething molars and he's obsessed with trying to walk. This all adds up to his sleep schedule being thrown out the window and a lot of angry/frustrated tantrums. I had to get up at 5:20 this morning to calm him down before the alarm went off at 6:00. There is not enough coffee in the world.

4. This semester is actually a lot more difficult than last semester. I thought commuting 3 days a week instead of 5 was going to be helpful, but instead it has completely thrown off my schedule. Since Pax is growing up and starting to eschew naps in favor of activity (and he's easily bored), I get nothing of adult value done two days a week--I'm too busy re-reading board books, fetching puffs and rearranging baby gates. Cramming a 5-day week into 3 days on campus is proving more difficult than I'd first imagined.

5. I've recently discovered the wonders of TJ Maxx, Marshall's and Nordstrom Rack. I could waste hours shopping for clothes, but for now it's mostly window-shopping.

6. I've got to get costuming again--this coming May we're doing a Regency ball somewhere in NEO (details forthcoming) with the Rifles, which has me hoarding photos of gorgeous Regency ballgowns on Pinterest. A week later, we'll be packing up for World Steam Expo in Dearborn, MI. I need ideas for a steampunk baby costume!

7. Speaking of Pinterest, I am completely obsessed. Follow me here. There's a Nerdmama board!

8. Coming up with eleven things is really, really difficult. Damn.

9. Life with the iPad is sweet. It keeps proving itself surprisingly useful, to the point where I am beginning to resent having to use my cell phone or a computer. It even comes with me to the store--I feel a little pretentious using it for my grocery lists, but it's easier to keep track of then a piece of paper and a pen!

10. I bought new makeup last Avon campaign. My makeup was beginning to get crummy and the stuff I ordered is really nice (and cheaper than the drugstore brands I was using, if you can believe that). I am currently in a love-love relationship with Shine Attract Lipstick, which is a brand-new product... lip color wrapped in a clear medium that goes on like lipstick but shines like gloss. I have the "wrapped raisin" color. Loooooooooove. Go buy it, it's on sale for $4.99 and I can pretty much guarantee you won't be disappointed. I usually don't wear lipstick at all but getting to sample this stuff completely changed my mind.

11. My husband got a raise at work. We might be able to have iPhones again. This is kind of a big deal, because the prepaid phones we've been using have got to be the crappiest phones in the history of mankind. They freeze constantly, crash constantly, have next to no dedicated memory, and sometimes they turn themselves off for an hour or two at a time. No, the battery doesn't die--they just turn off and stay that way. Real winners, these phones.

The First Snow

It finally got around to snowing in Cleveland a couple days ago. Up until last week, we'd been having unseasonably warm weather... I mean, really, ridiculously unseasonably warm weather. When it is 62 degrees and sunny in northeast Ohio in December, something has got to be wrong.

Inspired by another mom from WTE who lives in the NEO (how's that for acronyms, BTW?), I wanted photos of Paxton outside in the snow. There was one problem with this: the child doesn't have mittens.

We went to Babies 'R' Us, loathsome, soul-sucking store that it is (obviously my feelings about the store have not changed since before my pregnancy) to seek out baby mittens last night. When we finally found the one, teensy rack of winter gear for infants, they only thing they had that was not pink and covered in pom-poms was a powder-blue hat/mitten set, sized 3T/4T. We did not buy it. Babies do not need mittens that badly, I decided.

So this morning, I bundled Pax up and brought him outside. I made my husband take pictures of us in the cold. Less than five minutes later, we were inside, enjoying a warm bath.

Worth it? Oh, yes. Look at his cute little confused face:

For the record, Pax was wearing his footed Superman PJ's underneath a pair of fleece footed pants, insulated jeans, a hoodie, hat and coat. This is proof that babies look cute in pretty much anything, whereas their mothers don't fare so well in winter gear, which only makes them look chunky. Therefore, silly moms like me go outside for photos in what they deem to be cute "wintery" outfits (made up of yoga gear, Wellington boots, skinny jeans and matching accessories), sit in the snow and freeze their butts off:

Now that the novelty has worn off and the photos are taken... is it spring yet? Three days and I'm already sick of the cold and snow...

Marathoning.

Somewhere between finals, the death of Salvador, the baptism party, Christmas Eve, Christmas, Christmas dinner, visiting family in southern Ohio, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, my dad's birthday and now I seemed to have developed some sort of mental impairment toward anything that could possibly be construed as "work". Mid-December to the second week of January always seems like some sort of impossible rush that I somehow muddle through each year without really remembering it, but this time around it was especially difficult.

Then I get about a week of actual vacation and school starts again.

I am actually pretty psyched about this semester. Art history seminar students are getting semester loans on iPads, which is really cool, especially since my other art history class this semester is online. I'm hoping the iPad will let me get out of hauling my ancient PowerBook back and forth to campus everyday, as that computer is probably the reason I snapped the straps on three bags last semester.

I am literally staring at my keyboard right now, trying to think of something interesting to say. I'm coming up with nothing. To be honest, I'm in what I like to call "a mood". It's a funny feeling where you feel a bit snippy and completely fed up/exhausted for no reason at all. Maybe I've had too much/not enough vacation.

Christmas (photos)

I'm not going to say much about Christmas, because things got a bit crazy, but we did have a pretty good time. :)

(Not) The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I've been in college for the past seven years. It is hard for me to get too excited about Christmas until about a week before the holiday, because I have to deal with these things called "final exams". Since I'm an art history major, I also have to deal with these other things called "final papers", which are due maybe a week before I have to take the final exam. Am I the only one who thinks revising a 10+ page paper a week before I have to memorize 75+ slides for an exam is a little unfair? Maybe we could do the paper thing mid-way through the semester? Maybe the paper could be the exam? Something?

On top of that, Paxton is (finally) getting baptized this Sunday and stupid me decided that it would be no problem to throw a party afterward.

And on top of that... my guinea pig died last night. The guinea pig that I'd had since early 2005.

Said pig was elderly and had been sick for awhile (almost a year) with things that would, normally, kill a younger guinea pig with a certain amount of speed. We were beginning to think he was immortal. Sadly, that didn't turn out to be the case. He had a seizure last night, and I took him into the bathroom and held him until it was over. It was one of the saddest things I have ever experienced, honestly.

So now I have a dead guinea pig in an amazon.com box, chilling out in my house because I really have no idea what to do with him. The box won't fit in my freezer--I'm considering putting it in the garage since it is fairly cold outside. Sometime today I will have to call the vet and see about getting him cremated (he was not the sort of animal who would go for being in a box in the ground).

...excuse me, I have to go cry uncontrollably and flunk my math final now.

Salvador Dali

b. 2004 S. Portland, ME

d. 2011 Cleveland area, OH