California Scheming

I know, I know – I’ve been the worst at posting new entries lately.  Here’s a quick update of what I’ve been up to:

1. We took a trip up to Santa Cruz over my birthday weekend.  We loved it!  All of the trees reminded me of home.  Hopefully we’ll be moving up there one of these days.  Here’s a picture of Shawn frolicking amongst the trees on the campus of UC Santa Cruz.

For my birthday dinner Shawn and I had Afghani food.  Noah opted for some delicious Daddy’s hat.  Yum!

2. My old friend Kim and her boyfriend came out to visit us from Chicago.  They stayed with us over the Memorial Day weekend and it was great to see them.

Big News:  After they left us, Corey surprised Kim with an unexpected trip to Hawaii, where he proposed!!!  Congratulations Kim and Corey!!!

Side-note:  Whenever Noah throws up down the front of himself, I call it “pulling a Kim” due to an ill-fated night during college involving too much booze and the front of Kim’s outfit.

3. At the resident graduation party, Noah demonstrated that he’s already got a way with the ladies. She couldn’t keep her hands off him

4. And, finally, I’M PREGNANT!!!! Noah will have a baby sister or brother in January 2011. We’re very excited!

*** I will be posting pictures of the baby soon. No one yell at me! ***

Now then… I think I may be over this whole California thing. It was great for a while…before my friends started moving away en masse. And before I had a baby and wanted him to grow up with his family around – especially his three adorable cousins. Also, I miss my Michigan friends, those rowdy scamps!.

Plus Michigan is insanely beautiful. Don’t believe me? Check out this website:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jensenl/visuals/album/michigan/

(Whenever I’m feeling homesick, I click on all the different photo albums he’s posted…and then I end up feeling way more homesick. But it’s good to see a little bit of home and he’s an awesome photographer)

Anyway, let me clarify – Michigan is insanely beautiful DURING THE SPRING, SUMMER, AND FALL.

Winter: You are an unholy bitch and I despise you!

I’m harassing Shawn these days to try to convince him that a move back to Michigan is where it’s at. He’s not convinced. I’ve got to figure out a way to sweeten this deal for him. Any suggestions? And don’t say sexual favors! My grandma reads this, people! Let’s keep it wholesome!

We LOVE the RV SO much! Actually, SO much that we’re considering moving out there full time. We’re thinking of trading in our current 32 footer for a 40 footer with multiple slides. The one that we like is actually a two bedroom with 1.5 bathrooms. I swear that it’s actually bigger than our condo. It has a sliding glass door, multiple entrances, and tons of storage. Plus everything is super swanky – totally more nicely decorated than the brothel-theme I came up with for our house

We’re going to experiment with staying out there for a while to see if Shawn can handle making the drive. It’s even further away from his work than where we currently live, but it just may be worth it. It’s amazing to be out there and have bonfires and listen to the creek that runs behind us and hear the frogs croaking. It reminds me of home and, dammit, I miss home!!

I know that I haven’t written anything in a very long time. Life has been crazy, but here are some updates:

1. My parents have abandoned us for the great state of Michigan . They left a couple of weeks ago and are now happily ensconced back home in the Michigan country-side.
2. I really miss my parents.
3. We bought a house!!!
4. The deal on the house seems to have fallen through
5. We’re looking for renters and new babysitters, without really knowing if we’re ever moving.
6. I am very stressed!
7. It was our second anniversary yesterday! I got Shawn a tea-pot. He got me a ring…that I took back. I’m super picky and hard to please. Poor Shawn!
8. Working part-time is the best thing ever. Well, I mean, not working at all and still having money and insurance would actually be the best thing ever…but working part-time is pretty rad.

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s worse at small talk than me. I just can’t do it. I’ve got nothing….seriously. It’s excruciating for me AND whomever I’m talking to. I find it so damn boring and I just can’t bring myself to torture others with social niceties and minutia about my life. Instead, I usually just listen, smile, and nod… and then try to escape from the conversation. Not very smooth.

I’ve got to pull it together and improve on this because I find that, at work and now that I’m married, I have to engage in this horrible activity pretty frequently. Shawn is great at it. He could make conversation with anyone at any time and he manages to seem genuinely interested in whatever they have to say.

Part of the problem is that I have an exceptionally short attention span, so if you don’t hook me with something hilarious and/or interesting right off the bat, I snooze out on the conversation. Also, I’m the worst actress in the world, so you will quickly note the glassy eyes and the yawning when I’m done with the conversation. PLUS, when it’s my turn to respond, I usually panic, laugh nervously, and flee the scene. I’m a train-wreck.

Ha, I just looked on Amazon and found this: The Fine Art of Small Talk: How to Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills — and Leave a Positive Impression! by Debra Fine

I’m not above resorting to this. I’m really not.   

Have you noticed that I barely post anymore? And that when I do post it’s very little writing and mostly pictures? It was so much easier to blog when I was home with the baby. He’d lie down for a nap and I’d use the time to write something. Now that I’m back at work, it’s so much harder to find the time and my life is so monotonous that I feel like I don’t have anything interesting to write about.

I’m hoping that when the job switches over to part-time I’ll feel like I have some free time again. For now, when I’m not at work, I’m trying to get in some quality Noah-time…or I’m sleeping.

Have I mentioned how much I LOVED maternity leave??? I was so productive – I’d go for walks, spend quality time with the baby, the house was clean, I’d write, use the elliptical machine, read tons of books, hang with the girls, etc. Now I’m back to my working self, which means I work, eat, watch movies, and sleep. Boring!!!

But thems the breaks, I suppose. I’ve gotta come up with a get-rich-quick scheme!

Our RV, where my parents are now spending their winters, is parked in the Cleveland National Forest in the Santa Ana Mountains . Shawn and I LOVE it out there. We’re seriously jealous that my parents get to live in a national forest while we’re stuck in suburbia and we try to head out there for some hiking every weekend. Here are some pictures:

Shawn inside the RV with Noah:

For a brief and glorious time last year we had a housekeeper. She’d come over and clean while we’d go run errands or go to a movie or to the beach and when we’d get home the house would be sparkling clean. It was amazing!

As many of you know, I’m absolutely obsessed with St. Patrick’s Day. It’s my all time favorite holiday and last year I decided to throw a St. Patty’s party at my place…and I decided to invite the housekeeper. A very bad idea. She came over in the morning on the day of the party and cleaned the house top to bottom. It looked great!

Hours later she showed back up to find the party in full-swing and the house filled with drunken chaos. There was trash and spilled booze everywhere. And anyone who’s ever been around me when I’m drinking heavily knows that I find great pleasure in throwing things when I’m drunk…mainly food…into other people’s mouths…or cleavage. That night, after many Irish Car Bombs, I thought it was a brilliant idea to begin hurling fake chicken bits at all of my guests. While they loved it (I’m sure), the woman who had recently cleaned my house and who was completely sober did not.

Oh! And it turns out that my dear friend Megan has a very interesting “tell” when she finds someone overweight. She will compulsively rub her belly…so anytime she would be talking to the Housekeeper she would start with the belly rubbing. It was way awkward (and totally hilarious).

Poor Housekeeper had spent all morning slaving away on my house only to find all of her hard-work shat upon. And then she was assaulted by the Belly Rubber. Can you imagine that she didn’t want to work for me anymore? Geez some people!

This weekend my friends Meg and Liz turned 30! They had been the last two remaining twenty-somethings of my childhood friends. It still shocks me whenever I realize that I’m now a 30-year-old woman. Wasn’t high school just yesterday??? I remember having to write a biography junior year in AP Lit about what we thought our lives would be like.  I wrote about how I would become an accomplished author and professor and my husband(also an author and professor) and I would travel around the world doing relief work and adopting international babies. I totally pictured us as these East Coast intellectuals – teaching at a liberal arts college,  driving Volvo’s, with a tastefully decorated home and a summer cottage on the Cape. You get the idea…

Flash forward a decade or so…I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do for a career, realized I hate public speaking and would, therefore,  make a terrible teacher, dropped out of graduate school, and now work in the medical field. I tried living out on the East Coast and it just wasn’t for me. I’ve traveled a bit and definitely like it, but I’ve found I like to have a really stable home-base. I’ve realized I actually like being close with my friends and family – something I never would have imagined as an angst-filled 16-year-old. My husband (a therapist, not a professor/author type) and I live in a home decorated much like a Mexican brothel and do have a vacation home…an RV parked in a national forest. And instead of all of my internationally adopted babies, we’ve got one amazing little boy and we’re planning to have a few more…the old fashioned way. Oh! And I live in Orange County! I never in a million years would have imagined that.

Given the fact that almost nothing worked out as I imagined, I have to say that I’m really happy with my life  I went through a period in my twenties where I was really disappointed in myself for not carving out that AP Lit life. But I don’t feel that way at all anymore. I just wasn’t meant to be that person.

Anyway…after all that rambling…I want to wish Meg and Liz a happy 30th and say that I hope you guys are also happy with where your life has taken you, even if it isn’t quite what you had imagined. And I’m pretty sure this new decade is going to be amazing for all of us! Plus, now that we’re a little bit older and wiser, we’re just getting more interesting, right? Wait…right??? Fuck I hope so!

Happy Birthday Meg and Liz!!!!

My current favorite outfit for Noah is a onesie that says, “I LOVE MOMMY.” Granted he does actually have similar onesies that say things like, “I’m Nuts for Grandpa,”I Heart Daddy,” and “Grandma is Great,” but I KNOW that the Mommy one is the one that he actually feels the strongest about. A mother just knows these things.

The warm and fuzzies that I feel from seeing him in this outfit got me to thinking…what if I could dress my family and friends in similar outfits? For example, how great would it be to dress my parents in “My Daughter is NEVER Disappointing” t-shirts or to have my friends wear “Melissa is SO Awesome” hats or, best of all, to make Shawn wear a dress-shirt to work everyday proclaiming that “My Wife is the Most Amazing Woman in the World…All You Other B****** Better Recognize!”

Wait…you don’t think they’ll go for it??? Dammit! I guess I’ll just stick to dressing my kid up in ego boosting outfits then. He’ll be fine with that until he’s like 16 or 17, right?