currently link up | emo, overwhelmed, time-obsessed, chocolate

Currently is a weekly link-up hosted by the amazing ♥ Randalin of Harvesting Kale and I am super happy to be co-hosting the series with her. I hope that you can participate by writing your own Currently post (using the provided themes or your own) and please join us by linking up. This week, around these parts, we have been...

Cleaning but just barely keeping up with simple cleaning tasks like the dishes. Somehow this week my non-work hours have all been super jam packed with passing out at the kids' bedtime or with staying up late or getting up stupid early (4:00am today) to do work. My new job requires a lot of writing and concentration which is hard for me to do when I'm in the office (Captain Distracto, at your what? Look! Something shiny!)  so I've been playing catch up at home but that's not a sustainable game plan. I need to figure out how to get my job done when I'm in the office, or start doing a day a week at home to jam out some projects, or... I don't know. I'm just tired and the house is NOT clean, ha, not at all.

Planning (or hoping to start planning soon) a summer trip to Disneyland. Like a Walleyworld style, no frills road trip, but a trip nonetheless! My breath isn't held at all on this. We need to figure out this year AND last year's taxes first. I'm our family's day-to-day accountant but Rob does our taxes and he does them during his spring break so fingers crossed, breaths held, that some kind of magic thing happens where we don't end up stinking broke in a few weeks.

Planting in my mind a really rad backyard garden! I was told that the golden planting rule in this part of the world is to wait to plant your garden until Mother's Day so I'm thinking that would be a really sweet way to spend that day with a trip to a local nursery to pick out some starters and a day in the yard (if the sun cooperates).

Skipping too much. See also: Cleaning. Sometimes you feel like you're drowning in to-dos and not doing enough and all you can do is (??) not take on too many new projects and truck through the projects you've got and hope the overwhelmed feeling slowly goes away. So there's that. Ugh, sorry, I'm not feeling very inspirational this morning. See also: 4am wakeup today AND we're out of coffee creamer. Head: Desk: Head: Desk. I've also been putting off the "trucking through" part lately in order to snuggle with Otto in the mornings instead of waking up to blog, work, clean, or other of "the things". I've had the feeling that he needs a little more focused attention lately and who knows if he's getting what he needs. I hope so. Trying to be a super mom feels like shit sometimes. I'm hoping that only a truly good mom would feel like shit though. Right? Bad moms probably feel awesome about doing a terrible job and Good moms feel like assholes for doing a good-but-could-be-better-always-criticize-self-never-satisfied-NEVER-SATISFIED job. Right? Someone give me a gold star and buy me some damn coffee creamer, please!

Wearing a maxi pad. As always, sorry Dad! You should stop reading the words and just look at the cute pictures of your grandkids. After a year of nursing, and still nursing but less so, I'm having my first period in about two years. So all emo tendencies and inner crying in corners and midnight eating super old frozen forgotten candy bars can get in line to buy me some damn coffee creamer and give me a gold star because hormones!

Look at how cute my kids are. That's about all the inspiration I need to keep my breakdowns confined to the shower and this here blog. This too shall pass. In the mean time, hide your chocolate, because I don't care how freezer burnt it is it is in danger and that danger looks a lot like a 34 year old, exhausted, sun-starved mama.

That was this week. Here are next week's SPRING! themes:

feeling, imagining, considering, listening to, moving

she conquers forks, what next?

Yesterday at breakfast we handed Loretta a baby fork instead of her usual spoon and were excited to see her go to town with it, making forky motions and getting pretty giddy. It was a dull, plastic, and pretty much useless utensil but she really got into us helping her stab her toast and fruit. So at lunch we dug out some hard core baby silverware to see what she thought: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Fork Master

I wonder if her babysitter has been working on eating with utensils? Or if my girl has been sitting there finger-eating at family meals feeling like a complete heathen and just waiting for us to hand over the tines. Anyways, it was a big surprise to see her stab chicken and bananas and expertly guide them to her mouth. She's getting so big, le sigh. She's also teething and putting us all through the wringer this weekend. How does she have so many teeth? Why is she so mean? Ha. I suppose she is a fierce teether in the same way that she is intense about everything she does. But poor little peanut has the front eight already and seems to be working on some dreaded molars. We could all use a little break from the intensity of it all right about now. Hopefully today will be more chill than yesterday, because yesterday had more than a couple of us in tears.

What's on your Sunday agenda? We're taking Ottobot to a birthday party this afternoon at a pottery painting studio. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to the outing. The rain and grey skies are back, plus Baby Aggro has been giving us all tension headaches, so it will feel nice to get out of the house and do something fun and creative (on someone else's dime, haha). Otto is giving the little girl Hello Kitty toys and jewelry. Jewelry people! It's my fault but still... jewelry. Gulp.

bye bye GFC but Bloglovin was always prettier

So I only get around to finding out about blog-world drama on the weekends. I'm tardy to the "OMG GFC is finally dying; wait didn't it already die? Well yeah kinda but now for real, kaput, dead!" party. So I am officially claiming my blog on Bloglovin' where it's been for a while but I never really did anything with it. I actually use my Google reader every now and again so from now on it'll be my Bloglovin' reader that I go-to when I have insomnia. I hope you decide to add Ot and Et to your Bloglovin' roll. In order to claim it they're asking me to post the following message, I'd be honored if you click the link and follow, gracias!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

And let's all wish a skunk-eyed RIP to GFC. Those morons. We loved you, GFC. You blew it. We're moving on ♥

currently link up | pi day

Happy Pi Day! This was Loretta's original due date, a day for Daddy to dork out (because math), and also a day to embrace the pun and eat pie! Good good day.

Currently is a weekly link-up hosted by the chocolate and springtime craving mom ♥ Randalin of Harvesting Kale and I am super happy to be co-hosting the series with her. I hope that you can participate by writing your own Currently post (using the provided themes or your own) and please join us by linking up. This week, around these parts, we have been...

Watching my kids run/toddle around outside, grubby from play, covered in grass stains and sidewalk chalk all over their clothes, and all of that in the sunshine! Now if plums would only come into season the world would be perfect. So even though I have a feeling this is a false little Spring we're having and another frost plus buckets of rain and grey skies are probably on the way, we are just soaking up the warm temps and sunny days while we have them.

Craving exercise. What kind of alien am I? We get a super discount on the gym at work and I'm hoping to make lunchtime boot camps or pilates or just jogging on a treadmill a 1-3 day per week thing. I need to firm this business ::making a weird, awkward gesture to the torso through upper knees area:: up! ::claps, jumps, points at self in mirror:: Maybe I'm just craving coffee?

Looking a bit more like my old self again. Loretta is sort of self-weaning down to just a couple of nursing sessions a day so my bossoms (ahhhhhhh, so sorry Dad, this is probably the post-per-month you decided to read) are back down to a manageable size lately. Unfortunately they seem to become more uneven with each baby, so we are rocking a 32a on the left and a 32c on the right. Oo

Boob shaming FTW! Honestly though I'm feeling more like myself than I have in a while. My hair is growing out. I'm back to a pre-baby weight. BB cream seems to be doing something youthful-time-machine-y to my face, and the sun we've had lately is even kissing my blue/white gecko translucent skin with a teeny bit of color. This girl is on fire!

Loving my munchkins and their weird, sweet personalities. I took them for their 1 and 4  year checkups, respectively, this week and they are doing great. We do need to follow up on some possible hearing and vision issues with Otto (both minor but both freaking me out) but all in all it was nice to get the thumbs up from the doc. Otto was pretty upset that he would have to get a shot so I did something I rarely do and bribed him to, "just stay calm and be cool, be cool, try to calm down, do you want ice cream? Will ice cream make you calm down? Please calm down! For ice cream! I will give you ice cream!" After the doc, in the Dairy Queen drive thru, Otto said, "Maybe they call her Dare-y Queen because she says (in a royal voice), 'I DARE YOU NOT TO EAT ICE CREAM!'" Ha ha ha. I know *shit my kid says* is usually like 5,000x funnier to the parent, but that is darn sweet, and witty! Bask in my child's awesomeness! :)

Planning a series of home/life improvements for the next 5 months. I am thinking of taking one project on my to-do list per month which feels more manageable than having all of them looming in my face all the time so that I do none of them. They are: living room mantle, kids dress up station, replace pulls on kids dresser, mini-van body work and wash, and mini-makeover our bedroom. I'm going to give myself a budget and deadline for each and hopefully that inspires my inert butt!

That was this week. Here are next week's SPRING! themes:

cleaning, planning, planting, skipping, wearing