must.love.elmo



I'm a bad, bad blogger these days, but I am being productive in other ways, so I won't be too hard on myself. And, American Idol still isn't over yet, so that occupies lots of my mental capacity lately. Ha. Just kidding. Kind of. I am dieting AND doing lots of biz stuff AND caring for a kid, with whom I now can carry on a pretty full-fledged conversation. This morning he opened the fridge and told me he wanted yogurt and reminded me that we bought it at the grocery store. Yesterday he found my tampons in the bathroom closet, unwrapped one, held it up, and said, "That's a screwdriver."

Um, I'm just gonna let that one go and find a new hiding place for my tools.

Here are his new socks that we bought at Yo-Yo (otherwise known as Target). Not quite sure why the designers chose to put Elmo's face on camouflage, but they were on the $1 rack, so maybe they weren't such big sellers.

Happy hump day!

today, we talked to a worm...




...and let me tell you, it was exciting stuff.

juicy

om

Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through distances. That's not for human beings.
Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-- RUMI, as quoted in Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

Tulips from our backyard, with a little color wash editing...because it's fun ;-)

untitled

Yes, we are still upright and breathing. No, I have not abandoned my blog or writing forever (although I've thought about it). Yes, days with my toddler like yesterday make me question whether I want to have more children. Yes, I am trying to diet (with no success). No, I'm actually not trying very hard, as evidenced by the fact that I ate McDonald's for lunch today. No, all the boxes are not unpacked yet. Yes, I think I will be okay, as long as there's coffee. And, oh, yes, I know it's still March on my blog header.

Here's something I really enjoyed that I found linked on Sara's blog. Go on and read it. It'll only take a few minutes.

I'll be back, hopefully, with some real writing, once I drink more coffee and re-attach my head to my body. That could take a while, though.

sniff, sniff...

for Michael Johns, my Australian hot man. I somehow feel responsible for (a) NOT voting for you and (b) saying you would be out soon.

Wah.

Boo hoo.

But fear not, my hottie-would-be poster boy. I feel a Blue Note contract in your future.

:::

Seriously, though, he shouldn't have gone quite this soon.

I'm sad.

Did I mention that already?

gah

I am a lazy sloth who eats salt and vinegar potato chips and chocolate chip cookies, a circumstance which greatly contributes to the (large) status quo of my ass and the lack of energy i have as of late. i guess to be fair, the lack of energy is also attributed to the toddler who lags behind my motherly load, exclaiming:

"Look, momma...Dee-go's (Diego's) truck!"

But to be fair, as he follows me, also recounting the details of yesterday's ride in momma's new car or about putting his shoes on to go 'out-tide,' I am headed in the direction of the kitchen to get another cookie. So if you were inclined to feel bad for me, you shouldn't.

It relieves stress, what can I say?

Apparently I don't want to lose 10 pounds (or 20) badly enough, otherwise I'd be raiding the fridge for a carrot stick. Ha! The very image of that makes me double over in an incapacitating fit of laughter.

So, my American Idol addiction continues, and I personally thought little Archuletta made a superb choice of song tonight, even though I agreed with Simon that his vocals didn't cause the jaws of America to drop to their knees (my words, not his). But do we *really* want the jaws of America to drop to their knees? I think not, people. And, furthermore, I think that sentence makes absolutely no grammatical sense whatsoever. But it's late, and I'm leaving it in because now that I've called attention to this, I find it wildly funny. Okay, perhaps not wildly, just mildly. And, apparently, now I can rhyme, too.

I think D. Archuletta and D. Cook will be the last men standing, even though I ADORE Carly Smithson ;-)

And -- Michael Johns. Ahhhhh. He will not win. In fact, sadly, I think he and little Brookie will be out soon. However, he would be on my bedroom wall (on a poster, people) if my husband would let me. But he's gotta stop with all the Queen/rocker songs and do more blues. And -- I'm sure he will get right on that per my recommendation...because, you know, he's reading my blog right now.

Having said all of this, I don't vote, so how much of an addict can I really be? Truly. I should just stick to the potato chips and cookies. No voting required.

Hope all is well and true in all of your worlds. We miss everyone who is far away, but we are makin' tracks here. And, happy 31st to my lovely husband, who celebrated his big day Sunday with a paint roller in his hand.

21: beer bottle.
31: paint roller.

Any takers on 41? Gawd, 41. Ick, Ick. Get out of my head, 41. La, la, la, la, la, la.

Be back soon with more exciting stuff soon. Really. I will. Once American Idol is over. I promise.

Peace out.

I'm live!

Here is the baby I have been nurturing for the past couple of months (besides Eli, I mean):

www.jennifer-hunter.com

I'd love constructive feedback if anyone has any suggestions to make it better. I'm going to start booking sessions for May...after I get a car! And I have resurrected the old photography blog and will try to post frequent photo news and updates here: http://jenniferhunterphotography.blogspot.com/

Sorry for the lack of photos and writing lately on this blog...I'm having issues with my computer and with Lightroom, so I have to get those worked out. Gah. It's always something.

AND - I will update soon. Just haven't been in the writing mood these days at 10 pm, after the day is done, and I know I only have a few hours to rest up for the next! We are great, just doing lots to continue the process of getting settled in.

Eli is talking our ever-lovin' heads off, which I realize is, developmentally, a good thing, but at the end of the day, makes my head feel a little bit like a squashed bananna. And as I look outside right now, it is raining, which means we will both be climbing the walls by the end of today. Ahhhh.

Hope all is well for everyone. Cheerio.

Colors
by Shel Silverstein

My skin is kind of sort of brownish
Pinkish yellowish white.
My eyes are greyish blueish green,
But I'm told they look orange in the night.
My hair is reddish blondish brown,
But it's silver when it's wet.
And all the colors I am inside
Have not been invented yet.

:::

Just a little inspiration. I'll be back soon with more from our new life.

ragamuffin easter

Well, here's the shot. Weren't sure we would get one this year because, well, we've been preoccupied lately. But we walked down to the courthouse this morning to the kiddie egg hunt and then across the street for a photo op with the rabbit. And, in case you are wondering why our child is not dressed more festively, it was about 40 degrees outside. Yup, doesn't feel like spring to me.

the prom is on

Check it out. Jean and I always joke that Eli and Eva will be each other's prom dates. I'm guessing they will eat (and drink) a little more elaborately then. And chances are the music will be less classical.

But for now, it's fish crackers, sippy cups, and Beethoven.

Rock on.

politics

Isn't this funny?

BSM: when travelling, hold furry pals tightly

Here's another shot from the airport, while waiting to catch our delayed flight. Pooh bear was a rock star, from beginning to end. Seriously...I'm not sure how we would have survived without him.



:::

Updates from the new homefront:

*Last night I shaved my legs for the first time in about a week and a half. We're talking monumental achievement here, people.
*Yesterday our friends/former Maryland neighbors Jean and Jason visited with little Eva, who was born about a week before Eli. Shaun and I lived next door to them for about six months of my pregnancy and almost a year after the babies were born. So, we were thrilled to see them and reunite the kiddos. Eva fed Eli goldfish, and he seemed to enjoy that very much. And Shaun and I were able to do more unpacking while J & J chaperoned young Romeo and Juliet ;-)
*Shaun returns to work today, so we are one step closer to establishing a new, closer-to-normal routine. Hallelujah.
*I am still carless, so Eli and I will be walking into town this week to explore. I'm actually very excited about that, as long as it's not too cold. My blood hasn't thickened back up yet from our time in the sunny South. Car shopping will probably follow this Saturday. We're going the cheap and reliable route, probably via CarMax. And Sunday we will have Easter brunch with our friends Jill and Brian. Very, very, VERY excited to see them ;-)

Happy Monday, everyone. Oh, and Happy St. Pat's as well. Must go find some green...

our house...is a very, very, very fine house

Here are a few photos of the new homestead. Cute, huh? We are loving it more each day and moving box by box towards making it our home. All of the kitchen boxes are unpacked, and tomorrow, we tackle the upstairs. We made it to the park yesterday for lunch, and it is wonderful and within walking distance from our house. There is a great kids' playground with lots of fun structures, so I have a feeling we will be going there a lot, especially as it warms up. More news coming soon. For now, here are a few more photos from the past week. Love from us from Maryland...

the weary (pizza-eating) traveller

normalcy is just a few (hundred) boxes away

We are here.

I feel that statement deserves its own line, so I am giving it its due space. We arrived Monday night, weary and hungry, and we are just now getting internet -- or I would have written sooner. As I fumbled to insert the ethernet cable into the appropriate port on my computer tonight, Shaun said I was like a drug addict lurching for a needle. I think I was worse. Talk about feel cut off. I was not worried about a phone or mail or anything else, really -- only when I would be able to blog and check my email. What an accurate reflection of the world in which we live.

Moving right along (pun intended), we are here. Did I say that already? Shaun and Eli are sleeping, and I thought I would pass out for the night as well, but my mind was doing the 5000-meter dash, so I decided to calm it with some wine and blogging.

We successfully closed on the house in Texas on Monday morning and flew out that afternoon after a delayed flight due mainly to weather conditions. Eli did fabulous, by the way, in spite of the delay, which included 30 extra minutes (which seemed like 10 hours) on the Tarmac. And I can't help but give a wee bit of credit to his poor, overworked parents for our planning efforts. The portable DVD player (equipped with the Doodlebops, his recent favorite) was the star fixture of our travels, followed by his favorite stuffed pal, Winnie the Pooh, who deserves jar-fulls of honey or something for all the dragging he endured.

We spent Monday night in a hotel and drove to the house (our new house) for a walk through around 10 am Tuesday morning. We were greeted by the owners, who came out of the house next to ours/theirs. Julie bounded out, arms wide open, ready to launch into a warm hug to counteract the chilly wind. Then John came from around the corner. Maddie was standing at the screen door with Punkin, their Golden Retriever. We didn't meet Johnny and Carly, but were told of them and, of course, knew which rooms in the house were theirs. They are a great family, and we knew this after spending a very brief time with them, and, of course, by occupying their house. They were eager to tell us about the small, ancient glass bottles they had found in one of the chimneys of the house when they were remodeling, and also about the horseshoe hanging above the mudroom door and the bricks they left for us by the back shed.

We feel honored to be the next caretakers of this home, which is nearly 100 years old. Despite this, however, I am just warming up to the idea that this is our house. And, perhaps, I need a few more days to warm some more. This will be the third house we have lived in in about three years, so I am standoffish, or at least I have been for the past 48 hours. It could be partially related to the fact that the previous owners, as wonderful as they were/are, are still here, next door, at John's parents' house. The kids are finishing out the school year before they all move to Colorado. Their son has severe asthma, so the move is primarily for him. So, John's parents are our next door neighbors, which makes me feel weird and like a squatter, at least for now. But they've invited Eli to ride Bouncer, the plastic horse, anytime, as well as to ride the airplane swing tied to the beauitful, giant, blossoming tree in their back yard, so I think they are happy we are here, in the midst of the sadness they understandably feel that their grandkids are moving away.

Today, our goods arrived, so I am sitting on my very own sofa right now, which makes me feel less like a squatter. We have already painted a room, which is a true testament to our insanity, I realize, but, we had nothing else to do yesterday in an empty house with a VERY red living room.

There is a lot more to say, but it's late, and I promised Eli we would find the park tomorrow, and I KNOW he won't forget ;-) He has been demanding, but so have we, so we're even. We are all looking forward to some downtime very soon.

More Maryland news and photos coming soon, I promise...

love from texas

It's very late, but I just wanted to post a quick one before we fly off into the sunset tomorrow. Flying into the ice and snow is probably a better way to put it, but we're trying to be optimistic.

First, I am premenstrual and more bloated right now than a dead fish, but ain't nothin' gonna rain on our parade, not even a menstrual cycle. Second, why did no one tell us we were going to lose an hour today? -- that was particularly fun to discover. And third, well, I don't have a third, except to say that we are almost completely packed and about to pull the covers over our heads and catch a few hours of nighty night before our very early wake up call. Tomorrow morning we will sign the closing papers on our house here (woop, woop), Fed Ex a final box of goods to Maryland, then head to the airport to catch our 12:30 flight.

Despite a couple of minor kinks, we have really enjoyed our last few days in Texas and will have very fond memories of our year and a half here. We spent today catching up with lots of friends, which was the best way we could have hoped to spend our final day here. I will post again as soon as I have access to the internet, which hopefully will be tomorrow night in our hotel. Until then, wish us luck and say a big, fat prayer that we are not escorted off the plane tomorrow, toddler flailing about ;-)

lots o' stuff

First, why do I feel like I am the last person to find out that Angelina is pregnant again? And that she and Brad are getting married? I know I've been preoccupied -- okay, consumed -- but, seriously, somebody needs to let me know these things.

It has been a while since I've checked in, so I'm trying to organize my thoughts and figure out the best way to update you on all that has happened in the past couple of weeks. There is one Dwight Schrute bobblehead that figures into all of this, but I'll get to that later.

First, I should say everything is still in place for our move on March 10. Shaun had a hellish week of work last week in efforts to meet a Friday deadline, which he succeeded in meeting (after a week of very little sleep and an obscene number of Red Bulls). Consequently, it has been a somewhat manic week for Eli and me as well, because, as it usually goes, when one person in the family is batty, so is everybody else. I guess that's the mark of a truly empathetic family. And I suppose we should feel good about this fact, but really, we are just tired.

Yesterday and today, we de-housed the house, taking pictures off the wall, breaking down furniture, cleaning out the garage and attic, and reducing most of what we have here to its lowest terms in preparation for the movers who come Thursday. I am really not nervous at all about this because we've just been through it a little more than a year ago. They will come in, introduce themselves (or not), bring in the boxes, and rifle through all of our personal belongings (including our underwear), sorting them into categorical boxes. Pretty simple. And we will watch as they shuttle them via squeaky dolly onto the snorting 18-wheeler, bound for our new home in Maryland.

When we moved from Baltimore, I remember being somewhat apprehensive about the movers arriving. What exactly were they going to do with our stuff -- particularly my underwear? Moving really makes you evaluate what your material possessions mean to you -- mainly because you have to go through them all, which is something you rarely do if you don't move. You just stuff them in the attic or the nearest closet or basement and forget about them.

I am always, to a certain, measurable degree, verklempt, when I sort through artifacts of my life -- which is why, I suppose, sorting through our closet last night caused Shaun and me to launch into a discusion of whether or not we believe in an afterlife and all the additional conversations that are associated with such a light, insignificant topic of discussion. It was the rosaries, I tell you. We only have like, a thousand, most of them from various grandparents of ours-- probably enough to start a church of our own. And as I separated them from the other secular jewelry in the lot, I couldn't help but reflect on where they had come from and how I hadn't used them in a very long time and what that meant about who I was and who I have become, and really just how our little family of three had evolved in the past two years. I don't say this as negative thing but as a real mark of growth. More about that later. But in the meantime, I can't help mulling over this blog post. If you have time and are looking for some spiritual contemplation, take a little time to read it, as well as the link to the post that sparked it all. Warning: Heavy stuff.

These past couple of weeks have been more trying than we probably could have imagined. Some days I feel a thousand years old. A couple of weeks ago, Eli and I were in a car accident, caused mainly by me and the millions of thoughts sparring in my head. I have always known I am not a good multi-tasker, but I guess this was the honest-to-goodness proof. Sometimes the universe just delivers a giant bitch-slap, which startles you into a new level of thinking, making you separate into different boxes "the important stuff in life" and "the extremely trivial crap that for some reason you thought you should be consuming yourself with." Everyone involved in the accident is fine, and I am most thankful for that and am focusing on that one fact, even as I feel drawn to replay step-by-step all that unfolded in those few sacred and chaotic moments. It's over, and we are moving on...with one less vehicle, but we'll address that after everything else shakes out.

Mixed in with all of the above have been other collisions of different varieties. This past week our realtor here called to say that the buyers for our house were having difficulties securing financing and were 'exploring other options' for getting the loan -- and this was followed by about a 24-hour period of not knowing whether we would get the sale or have to hang out the shingle again. And then the following morning we got a call from our loan officer in Maryland, saying that our loan program had been eliminated and that we would have to shuffle things up a bit and do some rearranging to 'make things work'.

THEN -- I called the NBC stores to check on the status of the Dwight Schrute bobblehead that I ordered at the beginning of December for Shaun's Christmas present and learned that even after re-ordering it in mid-January, it somehow still had NOT been shipped. I wish I had something really witty and acerbic to say about this, but I am just pissed that not even this miniscule and ridiculous aspect of our life can come together favorably and without a big damn effort.

We have managed to somewhat escape (or at least minimize) the effects of the aforementioned emotional upheaval by (a) watching a lot of American Idol, with which I am admittedly COMPLETELY obsessed with this season, (b) watching considerable amounts of A & E and HGTV, (c) consuming unprecedented amounts of junkfood, and (d) drinking the occasional margarita. Heh. And Eli has been spinning and whirling his matchbox cars across every wall in our house. And he makes his own sound effects, too, just in case you are wondering.

In our last week here, we'll be tidying up things, calling to set up/cancel utilities, saying goodbye to friends, trying to grab a few shots of the bluebonnets as they start to bloom, and continuing to build our arsenal of in-flight toddler gear. So far we have lollipops and other snacks, DVDs, a disposable camera, and velcro.

Yes, velcro. I know, it's weird, but whatever works, right?

more tunes...

I will be back soon with another update from the center of chaos. Until then, enjoy the tune ;-)