A day of shopping

Monday my mom and I drove up to Anthem (about 45 mins north of us) to buy a Burley bike trailer (more on that in the next blog), and thought we’d stop at the Anthem Outlets while we were up there.  It’s funny, my mom used to be anal about me spending money.  She’d ride my ass for a week over buying a freakin CD, but now she’s pretty good at encouraging me to spend money.  And I don’t really need much encouragement when it comes to shopping.

We started off at Ann Taylor Loft (LOVE that store!!!).  They were having a 40% off the entire store sale, and I got a short sleeve button up shirt, a pair of jeans, a pair of longer shorts, and 2 pairs of capris, all for $125!  (She also gave me an extra 20% off because I asked her if they had a military discount.  She said they didn’t but she’d do something for me – and that was give me an extra 20% off.  NICE!)

Then we went to Gap and I bought a pair of cargo capri’s and a shirt.  Then we went to Carter’s…  I could spend hundreds of dollars in that store, easily, but I only spent $18.  I got Abbie 2 pairs of shorts and a onsie – all 12 month sizes.  Then we went to Osh Gosh B’gosh (did you know they’re owned by the same company as Carters?) and I got her an adorable pair of pants and a shirt (size 18 mos).  Then we went to a book store and I got a few books on Italy and Eastern Europe and I bought Mark a book on Ben Franklin.  (He’s been wanting to learn more about him for some reason.)  At that point I said I couldn’t go in any more stores there because I knew I’d find other things I wanted to buy and I didn’t want to spend any more money.  But we stopped at TJ Maxx on the way home, and I bought Abbie 2 24 mos outfits, 2 Sandra Boynton books for Abbie, a pair of kitchen scissors and a box of cards (the kind you write on).

It was fun, but strange, to be away from Abbie for that long.  I’ve only been away from Abbie for that long (about 5 hours) less than a handful of times since she was born.  I’ve kind of lost who I am a little bit since she’s been born.  She requires so much attention that it’s hard for me to do anything else but be a mom.  She’s getting much better now though.  I can kinda do my own thing now as long as the baby gates are up and she’s in the same room.  I can play the piano or write letters or blogs or whatever.  I couldn’t do those things before unless she was asleep or being watched by someone else.  So it was nice to step out of mom role for a while and just shop.  And Mark had a lot of fun with our pippers.  He came home from work for lunch today and said he missed Abbie a lot since he didn’t get to see her before he left and he’d spent a lot of time with her yesterday.  They’re so cute together. Abbie on her new toy.

2010 Valentine’s Day

This is technically Mark and my 5th Valentine’s Day together (although our first one was when he was still my pretend boyfriend and didn’t know it yet) and we started it off by him making me breakfast in bed.  I don’t know what I did to deserve such an amazing man as my husband.  I couldn’t ask for more.

A few things happened today.  First, I washed my damn cell phone.  It’s dead.  So if you want to get ahold of me, call Mark’s cell (same as mine but ends on 5321) or our house phone – 623-236-3168.

Second, my mom got here.  She’ll be with us until the 23rd and my dad is coming on the 19th and staying til the 23rd.  It’s nice to have my parents here.  It’s funny, Mark’s parent come and we clean the house.  My parents come and we clean the car.  =)

Third, I got 2 new pairs of shoes at Marshall’s that I’m pretty excited about.  One is a strappy pair of dressy, pewter sandals and the other is a metallic-y gold pair of ballet flats.  I’ve decided I need to start dressing a little higher class.  I live in my Old Navy t-shirts and tank tops, because they’re comfortable and cheap, but I start feeling frumpy after a while.  So I’m going to start trying to dress a little better, although comfortable is still mandatory and cheap is preferable.  The shoes were dressy, but also comfortable and I feel like I’ll be able to chase after Abbie in them which is important because…

Fourth, and most importantly, Abbie is officially crawling.  As in, she can crawl all the way across the room now.  It’s just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.  She’s still really wobbly and sometimes she has trouble getting her legs to move the way she wants them too, but she’s got it figured out.  She slides her left leg along the floor, but she’ll pick her right leg up about 2 inches off the floor to move it.  Pretty funny.  So she kinda looks like a crab because she goes a little bit sideways.  It makes me sad that she’s growing up so quickly.  I was just looking at pictures of her from October and she just looks like a different baby.  I just want her to stay little forever.

Here are a few pictures of us over the years.  

Look a-likes

EVERYONE and their mother says Abbie looks exactly like Mark.  Which, yes, she does.  But it gets quite old hearing that and seeing that on Facebook all the time.  I’d like her to resemble me just a little bit, but all I ever hear is how much she looks like Mark.  Hopefully the next one will look more like me.  She’s better off looking like Mark anyway.

I noticed in one of the pictures we recently took of her, she looked almost exactly like Mark did in pictures from when he was younger.  What do you think?

Mark

Abbie

 

 

me

Frustrated.

I love my little girl with all my heart, and wouldn’t wish my life to be any different, but MAN, can that kid wears me out!

She’s been a little fussy lately.  Some days she just does not want to entertain herself at all and those are the days that I get absolutely nothing done and feel completely worthless.  I can’t walk more than 2 feet away from her without her screaming.

Other days she’s perfectly happy playing with her toys for 15-30 mins at a time by herself.  She’s getting better about letting us read her books.  She’ll actually sit and listen for a while and she’ll get her little right pointer finger out to touch everything.  And if I point to things, she’ll also point to them.

 

She might be starting to sign a little bit, but we’re not sure.  Last night she was doing the sign for “milk” quite a bit, especially when she saw the bottle.  She also puts her hands in the air when she’s done eating (sign for all done) and sometimes she’ll clap her hands when she’s eating if she wants more (which is close to the sign “more”).

The only problem is, you guessed it, SLEEP!  The kid does NOT want to sleep.  Ever.  I know she’s tired because she rubbing her eyes and yawning, but if I nurse her she’s constantly trying to sit up and look around and then lay back down and does that at LEAST 13 times a minute.  So I try to just go lay her down and she will scream bloody murder for a good half hour at LEAST before she finally exhausts herself and falls asleep.  It doesn’t help the situation at all now that she can sit up on her own.  I just don’t know how to get her to go to sleep without all the screaming.  During her morning nap today, she was doing her usual tired signals, but I kept her up playing for another 10 mins just to be sure.  I tried to nurse her before I put her down, which she wanted nothing to do with that.  So I put her in bed and she sat up and screamed for 15 mins.  So I got her again and tried to nurse her again, but she was too distracted.  So I fed her a 2 oz bottle, and she drank that no problem and looked all droopy eyed.  Put her in bed again and she screamed for another 20 mins before she finally fell asleep.  Afternoon nap, she just got done screaming for almost 30 mins.  Last night it took Mark and I a good 2.5 hours to get her to go to sleep.  I know she has separation anxiety issues, but I don’t know what to do besides keep her with me 24/7 and that’s obviously not going to be good for her either.

I HATE listening to her scream.  I know quite a few kid-less people say that listening to babies cry doesn’t bother them at all, but it’s different when it’s YOUR baby that’s crying and you know that all she wants is you.  I was frantically looking through the book “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child” during her morning nap scream session, trying to find the magic cure, but alas, there was not a chapter on how to get your kid to stop screaming EVERY time you put them in their crib.  It just said that you have to let them cry sometimes to teach them how to self-soothe and that there was no research that proved it was going to affect her later in life because she’d think I wasn’t there for her all the time.  I know it’s not emotionally hurting HER to let her cry, but it’s hurting ME.  I just wish she’d make this easier for both of us.  Ugh.

A lazy day

Today was one of those lazy days, for the most part.

Our little miss Abbigale is in to EVERYTHING now.  She's able to sit up on her own officially, as of yesterday, so she'll lay down and sit up, lay down and sit up to move around the room, along with scooting everywhere.  She'll crawl a "step" or two and then lay flat out on her belly.  It makes our life easier now that she can sit up by herself, sort of.  We don't have to go sit her up every two seconds, but we have to watch her much more closely.  I've caught her tugging on things plugged in to an outlet twice today.  You can set her 10 feet away from any wall, and then turn around and she's yanking on the electrical stuff.  She's pretty good about stopping when I tell her "no" though.  They say kids know what the word "no" means by 9 months.  I think she's ahead of the curve on that one.

We took a walk this afternoon and saw THE cutest bulldog puppy.  He was 5 months old and just adorable.  He was walking with his owner to get the mail and we watched as another neighbor walked across the street to meet the puppy.  We said hi to both of them as we walked by.  When we were about 50 ft past them, I turned around to look at the puppy again (the thing was seriously cute), and here it is, flat out running after us.  It's back legs looked like wings they were so high up because he was running so fast.  And the 2 people were chasing after him.  HAHA!  I stopped and bent down to stop him and say hi, and prayed that Oliver wouldn't act like a jerk, like he usually does with other dogs.  But Ollie didn't even bark at the puppy.  They just sniffed each other and then the owner picked up the puppy.  I want one of those.  =)  (Mark said no way.)

Around 3:30pm, I got a text from a friend.  She has 2 kids and is pregnant with her third and she has whatever that disorder is that makes you SUPER sick during pregnancy.  It's not morning sickness, it's worse.  And she has a sinus infection on top of it.  So she called and asked if I could come watch her kids for her for a little bit since she was having a tough time getting out of bed.  I'm so glad she asked for my help.  Her husband is deployed and she has no family is town, and I just couldn't even imagine being in her position.  I watched her kids for a few hours so she could get some sleep and get to feeling a little better.  I wish I could have done more to help her.  I do have to say, her 2 kids put together were easier to take care of than my one child is.  That little pippers is a handful, to say the least.

Anyway, now Mark is out playing poker with the guys and I'm watching American Idol with the weinas.  I hope Abbie sleeps through the night tonight!

Handling this surprisingly well

I was talking with a friend the other day about my medical clearance to go to Italy.  You have to go before a review board, who looks over all your paperwork and deems you okay to live abroad, and then they send it to your receiving base (in our case Aviano) for their approval.  They ask you everything about your medical history, mental and physical, and you have to go in to see your primary doctor who fills the sheets out that you take to the review board.  So at that appointment I told my doctor that I saw a counselor when we lived in Florida.  It was right after we got married and I was having issues adjusting to military life and giving up so much control of my own life.  I went to see this social worker on base 4-5 times just to talk about things.  She never diagnosed me with anything and I was never on any meds.  (Not that that’s at all a bad thing, I know many people who are, and I see nothing wrong with it.  It’s just relevant to this story.)  So the doctor had to put on my sheet that I’ve seen someone in the mental health field within the past five years.

I’ve been freaked out about that being on my clearance papers because I’m afraid they’re going to deny my medical clearance for Italy.  I was talking to my friend about it and she was shocked that I ever had anxiety problems.  She was like “You’re so calm and you just seem to go with the flow for everything.  I can’t believe that you were having problems adjusting.”  HAHA!  For those of you that know me, you probably laughed reading that, just like I did hearing it, but it was still nice to hear.  Maybe I’m not such a loony bin after all.

Although, if I was a bit loony now, I’d have good reason.  We were told at that medical clearance review that Aviano had up to 2 weeks to get back to us with whether or not Abbie and I are cleared to go over there.  We cannot get orders to Aviano or set up any of the move without that clearance.  So if we don’t get that back for another week and a half yet, that’s going to put us at a week before we want to be packing up before the review is back.  Who knows how long it takes to get orders after the review is done…

And while I’m on the subject of things stressing me out, there’s still no guarantee that Abbie and my’s passports and visas will be back in time for us to leave when we want to.  If we go over without them, we a. run the risk of being deported and b. have to come back to the States to get them anyway and re-enter Italy.  This poses quite a few problems.

1. We already have reservations on the military rotator from BWI to Aviano for March 9.  March 9th was the ONLY time in the entire month of March that they had pet space available on the rotator.
2. We already have reservations for our flight from LA to BWI, with reservations for the dogs to be in cabin with us.
3. It’s too cold for the dogs to travel in cargo because it’s colder than 45 in Baltimore (BWI).
4. If Mark has to fly over ahead of us, he cannot fly with 2 dogs in cabin by himself.  They only allow one dog per passenger in cabin.
5. I REALLY don’t want to have to fly with Abbie by myself across the country and then over the Atlantic.  Plus I don’t know how I’d carry all of our junk and her and her car seat by myself.  Even if I did wear her it’d be really hard for me to haul 3 suitcases, 1-2 carry on’s, her car seat and her by myself.
6. And I REALLY, REALLY don’t want to have to travel with Abbie and one of the dogs by myself.  I’m not even sure we could get them a spot on a commercial flight this late in the game.  Those usually book up weeks in advance.

So in other words, if y’all could spare a prayer or two that our plan miraculously falls into place, that would be greatly appreciated.  =)

Sedona the 2nd time.

Mark’s mom and brother and Mark and Abbie and I took a quick trip to Sedona on Thursday.  Donna and Alex hadn’t ever been to Sedona and we thought we should show them the town since we only live an hour and a half way.  It was a beautiful day – perfect for hiking.

The first trail we tried to do was only open Fri-Mon so we were bummed that we didn’t get to go on that one.  We wanted to see the petroglyphs on that trail.  But we got some neat photos on our drive out there and back anyway.

Our next attempt ended up being quite the drive.  It was only like 12 or so miles from the town of Sedona, but 8 of those miles were on gravel roads, aka – VERY bumpy.  The Jeep tours in Sedona managed the trail we were aiming for, but our Passat held up pretty well.  Alex and I had to get out a few times and build little rock bridges in dips in the road that were too steep for the Passat to get across.  But we got all the way out there and back without hurting the car.

Here are a few pics of the drive.

 

(Maybe that was more than a few…)

Anyway, so we finally made it to the Hanonki Trail as the sun was setting.  It was beautiful.  The sun made the rocks look so red!

Here are a few pictures of the trail to the Indian ruins site.

(Abbie helping daddy take pictures.)  

The ruins were just fascinating.  It’s so neat to be this close to things that are so old.

And there actually were TONS of petroglyphs etched into the rock.  Here’s one of them that we saw.  It was really neat trying to find them on this HUGE rock.

Here are some of the views on the way back.  We ran across one random cow in the middle of no where and watched as he moseyed across the road in front of us.  He wasn’t in any hurry at all.

The sunset was beautiful.  I’m not sure I’d ever get tired of the views there.  But if we lived there, we’d definitely get an SUV for those crazy roads.

 

Taxes, wills and the idiots on base.

This probably could be 3 separate blogs, but I’ll just ramble on it one big long one today.

Mark got all of our taxes done for last year this week.  Let me just say it is a HUGE pain in the ass when you’re military and have lived in 2 different states and then are a “resident” of a third.  Mark can claim residency anywhere since he is military.  He claims IL residency bc military members don’t have to pay state tax in IL and it’s easier than switching everything every time we move.  So I’ve always claimed IL residency too, so we can file jointly.  Well I worked in OK this year, made a measly 3K, and that’s just a huge pain to figure out who we owe or who owes us.  Turns out OK owes me the $11 I paid in state taxes back (woohoo!) and we don’t owe IL anything for me because I didn’t earn enough.  And we’re FINALLY getting a BIG refund for federal.  Thank God.  Ever since we’ve been married we’ve ended up owing $300-$600+ in federal taxes.  Last year our taxes were all messed up and we were STILL getting letters from IL last month saying we still owed them more money.   The whole resident, part-year resident and nonresident stuff will get you every time, but luckily we won’t have to deal with it next year since I’m not working at all this year.  Yay.  (Actually under the SOFA agreement the military has with Italy, I’m not allowed to work anywhere off-base to earn money while we live there.  Not that I would anyway, but I thought that was interesting.)

Mark and I finally got our wills done.  We’ve been meaning to get one done before Abbie was born but he was so busy with training we didn’t have time.  We finally did it yesterday so that’s a relief to have that done.  It was Abbie’s naptime by the time we were done with the lawyer so when we were swearing all that stuff to that person, I could hardly hear her over Abbie’s screams.  They were laughing and the recorder lady said that she thought Abbie was adorable even though she was being a real pistol.  At least they were entertained, instead of annoyed…

So you’d seriously think that we were the first ones to move to Italy from this base.  These idiots make it damn near impossible to get orders, which we need in order to set up TMO (the movers).  Typically you get orders a HELL of a lot earlier than a month before you leave so you can set all that stuff up in advance, but the idiots on base don’t know what they’re doing.  You need like 14 different things signed by 14 different people, and all of these people have ONE day a week that they do stuff for people PCS’ing (moving – permanent change of station).  So we need a zillion medical clearances in order to get orders.  We turned Abbie’s paperwork in to her pediatrician over TWO WEEKS ago.  The dr was on leave for a week and then she only does paperwork on Wednesdays.  Nice.  So we got that back finally and then we have to turn all Abbie’s and my paperwork into this lady in a different office who then looks at it and then sets up an appointment for us all to come in and meet with her.  But naturally, they only do that on Wednesday’s also.  Mark got all his paperwork signed when he was going to Spang, so all the paperwork said Spang on it.  So he’s having to go around to all these people with new paperwork that says Aviano.  It’s just turning in to a huge headache.  Actually, it’s not turning into one, it’s been one for the past 2 weeks.  These people don’t make anything easy.  I tried to call and make Abbie’s 9 month appointment for Feb 18th and they wouldn’t let me because she won’t be 9 months until the 20th.  Really?  Two days is going to make that much of a difference?  Give me a freaking break!  The lady was like, we’ll you’ll just have to do her appointment when you get to Italy.  Oh come on!  Like I’m not going to have enough to worry about between learning the language, in-processing that base, finding a house, buying a car, etc let alone we probably won’t get around to her 9 month appointment until she was over 10 months old.  It would just be nice to have her 9 month appointment done before we leave Luke.  These people really need to learn to do their damn jobs…  You’d think they worked for the government or something….