Since my parents are renovating the home they’re buying, I’ve been spending some time looking at “house porn” with my Mom. I came across these amazing light fixtures in a house (which I love, of course) and decided to try and track them down. One or two on our porch would look amazing.

Until I tracked them down and found out that each one is almost two thousand dollars. My taste is disturbingly (and outrageously) expensive, sigh. But they do look amazing.

For a couple of months now, every time my laptop would get unplugged, it would shut down. No warning, no flashing message, just click and off. It drove me crazy, but we’ve been so busy that I just always kept it plugged in and only lost a little work when inevitably the cat, dog or baby would accidentally pull out the cord.

I took it in to an Apple store today and had the genius in stitches. Apparently your battery is only good for 500-600 power cycles and mine was showing over 1100 cycles. “Wasn’t this driving you crazy,” she asked, chuckling. “Yeah,” I said, “but you know, I’m almost never not near an outlet.”

After Apple, we went shopping at a few more places with my parents. My Dad is stocking up on essentials and clothes for the cold weather. To the tune of two extremely full carts at Costco. Oy veh.

I grew up in a relatively religious environment, one with pretty strict rules about right and wrong, regular church going, private schools and the very strong belief that everyone else’s beliefs were wrong. Which is the main reason I am in love with the new show GCB. It’s soapy and campy and obviously exaggerates every aspect of each character (it’s always so entertaining to me that not one person is ever just “normal” on a TV show), but there hasn’t been one episode where I didn’t think, at one point in the show, oh yeah, been there.

Plus I love Kristin Chenoweth and Annie Potts is hysterical.

This week my aha moment came during a church function for singles – where the married women wanted to take the “sin” out of being single. It has been my experience that when you are an unattached female in a church, unless you’re quite young (or quite old and widowed), everyone assumes your goal is to get attached. And if it isn’t, it should be. Because God wants you to be married and produce children. That’s what you’re here for, after all.

When we first started going to the baby gym class, the Peanut stuck close to us. He sat in our laps during the warm up and the introduction; we carried him willingly to do the group activity and during free play, he usually stayed wherever we set him down. These days he’s off like a rocket the minute the door opens. He’s uninterested in staying on the big red mat, choosing instead to walk and crawl up and down the gym equipment (he loves the wedges). The warm up and introduction go as usual, with the teacher pointing to him and waving. He smiles and watches, but stays where he is. There’s obviously way too much for him to explore to waste time with us.

Today his teacher (whom he just adores) set up an obstacle course on the mat. Several hula hoops and rings to crawl through, all while on top of big blocks. As the other toddlers milled around, some banging on the blocks, others refusing to move once placed on top, we grabbed the Peanut and placed him at the beginning. He looked at us, turned and proceeded to crawl perfectly through the entire obstacle course, before jumping down and going back to his wedges.

We were shocked, but clapping, and we grabbed him again. Like a mouse to cheese, back through he went, not once veering off course or getting distracted. His teacher was impressed, and the Porkchop and I smiled a little and shrugged, noting that it must be all the playground time he gets.

Granted, once we left we talked about it nonstop and gave ourselves high fives. Whoop, whoop, parental pride baby!

My memory, never that good, has suffered greatly since the Peanut entered our lives. I’m assuming it’s lack of sleep, but perhaps it’s also affected by having someone else to worry and think about. Nonstop. Because that’s what parenthood is – an unending state of constant attention, sprinkled with concern, panic and terror.

While driving the Peanut back from the park, I had a very funny conversation… that I don’t remember at all. Which is sad, because all I could think was, “Ooo, I should write this on the blog.” What the hell? Five minutes ago I opened a browser window and promptly forgot what I wanted to look up. Thoughts flit in and out of my head with no rhyme or reason, and unless it’s Important Shit, I don’t remember it. Work stuff – no problem; baby stuff – no problem; anything else – it’s a crap shoot.

I’ve always had a “book” problem, one that caused me to stay up until the wee hours of the morning and suffer the next day… the need to finish reading whatever I’ve started. Perhaps I have a problem with delayed gratification (haha), or I’m just impatient, but once I’m into a book, I have an incredibly hard time putting it down – even to sleep.

When I was a kid I would use a flashlight under my covers, trying to soundlessly turn pages so as not to alert my parents.

When I moved out east, I would leave my lamp on, tea (or something stronger in hand) and read to my heart’s content.

By the time the Porkchop moved in, I had slowly begun to keep better hours, preferring to read a book in two nights and get enough sleep to prevent zombie-fication.

When I was pregnant I switched back to finishing in one night – I couldn’t sleep well the last few months anyway, might as well do something.

When the Peanut came, reading became harder. Between work and sleep, my free time was nonexistent. Occasionally I would buy a few books and read them over the course of a week, chastising myself daily for staying awake until 2, knowing full well I’d need to be up by 6 or 7.

A couple of days ago, after an idiotic decision to drink a latte at 4PM, I was reading an article in bed around midnight that mentioned an interesting book. I perused it on Amazon, swiftly downloaded it on iTunes and read until almost 5AM.

Two days later and I’ve purchased the entire trilogy and am halfway through the final book. The author has some serious echos issues, which means I think I’ve been speed reading roughly half of each book (page count: 900, 1200 and 1300), but getting to bed between 2-4AM.

If this was the good old days, I would’ve purchased the first book and waited several days before purchasing the second, and so on. But it’s 2012 and you can download a book in less than a minute.

eBooks might very well be the death of me.

It’s been snowing for a couple of days now. Not a lot, but enough to be cold and wet and generally annoying. Especially considering last week it was warm enough to walk every day and go to the park. The Peanut and I are suffering from serious outside time deprivation. Boo.

In better news, my darling friend had a birthday today and so I made a Ryan Gosling meme with our babies. Heeeee.

On Sunday we went to Whole Foods, an entertaining trip we make every other week or so to stock up on baby milk (non-homogenized), baby snacks (hello Whole Foods homemade tortilla chips), produce and the miscellaneous crap we pick up that interests us. It’s the miscellaneous stuff that always causes trouble.

The Chop has an affection for their cream cheese biscuits, Fleur de Sel caramels and Evol pizzas and flatbreads – all of which are amazing, I admit. But my real problem lies with their chocolate truffles and the Bread & Circus chocolate chip cookies. And by problem, I mean we bought a small bag (six I think) of the cookies on Sunday and I’m down to the last one. Evil, those cookies are. Deliciously, fantastically, magically evil. One cookie and your day perks right up.

Especially when consumed with a nice iced coffee.

Some friends of ours were over last night (seriously, did you think that I ate all that crap by myself!?), and this morning, the boys had a ball playing together. They were both incredibly sad when they departed, but we parents had stayed up until past three and the boys were up at 6 and 7. Oy veh. Parenthood means you aren’t supposed to stay up late. Why do we keep forgetting that??

I only vaguely remember not having self checkout at grocery stores. In high school, a kid that we knew worked one of the lanes at our local Safeway, and depending on what time of day it was and what we looked like (morning pajamas or afternoon clothes), we would avoid or beeline for his lane. These days I can walk into Shaw’s near our house, pick up the few items that I need, go through self checkout and be out the door in less than 10 minutes, without talking to a soul.

Generally I don’t mind the chitchat, but when you’re buying a small chocolate peanut butter cake, five tubs of ice cream (one pint, four individual sizes), eggs and sausage, it’s much easier without the judgement, lol.