sweet.

I am smitten with the Valentine's Day stuff at Target right now! It's so cute! I bought this bath mitt for Beebs today. It cracks her up! I'm loving the little turtles and birds and even the PINK! Look at these little picture frames. Cute!

cuttin' the fro.

Just yer average Monday.

Yesterday I went to my mom's to visit. Fun times and she baked an apple pie for me to bring home. Hands down the best pie I've ever had. My mom makes amazing pie. The crust is just the right amount of flaky and the top was crackly crisp with a wee bit of sugar. Coming in at a close second for best pie I've ever had would be when we were at this Amish auction. We used to frequently spend time in Amish Country up in Jamesport. This guy my dad was friends with was friends with lotsa Amish guys (I'm serious!) and my dad bought a horse from this Amish guy and anyway..we were at this Amish auction and I was busy longing to be Amish as usual and they had pie. The day was kind of cold and windy and at that age I had romanticized the idea of being Amish so much that I desperately wanted to speak German and be courted by a quiet Amish boy. Point of this story: pie. Right, so it was cold and all the adults were drinking coffee and eating pie in the basement of this enormous farmhouse and I ate a piece of warm raisin pie that had just been baked and RAISIN, I know, right? But it was delicious and I will always remember that piece of pie. This evening, Roommate and I had just wriggled out of our pants for a proper hug when the baby woke up from her nap. I scolded him and demanded less foreplay next time! The baby likes hummus. She totally stands up now, a skill she hadn't mastered Saturday morning but by afternoon was a pro. She has developed this thing in her Stranger Anxiety phase where she tilts her head to the side and will slowly crack a smile looking all bashful and demure. Seriously works. Also, she waves. Hysterical. Each time she does it we're both like AH! LOOK! WOW!! She waves! Will her teenage years bring such amazement? ha. I seriously cannot wait to have more. Roommate said, "But we're not done playing with this one yet!" True, true. Just excited for more...at some point. Tomorrow: work bye

Saturday!!

I'm making chili. I wish I had like, a go-to recipe either in my head or elsewhere. As I was adding this and that earlier I started remembering Chimpo's chili he told me about and then wished I could remember what the hell he said. I just remembered it sounded good. I'm searching Twitter now to remind myself. Here it is: "Turkey, black/pinto beans, diced/stewed tomatoes, fresh jalapeno, chipotle/jalapeno/cumin/chili seasoning, spicy V8." I used ground turkey in mine and cooked that with an onion, a green pepper, a red pepper and a couple cloves of garlic then used a can of black beans, a can of pinto beans, fire roasted diced tomatoes and a can of crushed tomatoes I bought by accident. I put in some cumin, coriander, a wee bit of salt, some chili seasoning and a few dashes of hot sauce. It's all making love in a soupy group orgy in the crock pot right now. I never use that thing. Well, not never..but.. We're halfway watching something on TV right now about homelessness and poverty, etc. It again provides a reality check for myself but it's depressing. They were just showing this fam with two little girls living in their car. The mom and dad collect cans while the girls are at school. I'm looking at this baby of mine asleep next to me and having trouble imagining such a thing. Yesterday I was meeting my friend, K, at Whole Foods for breakfast with Beebs. I woke up and texted her and then got up to realize oh...SNOW? Roommate had gone out to fill the car up and he said it seemed pretty slick and rush hour was dragging so my friend, an obviously amazing friend, loaded up on breakfast delights like blueberry scones and breakfast potatoes and brought all that goodness to our house! She even got some fruity oatmeal goodness for Beebs. I was just like damn, man, that's SO NICE!! It was really fun and I SO enjoyed her company. We also work together so the conversation inevitably turned to work but that was relieving to just sort of talk and get rid of some of that. . Lately all I dream about is making mistakes/people dying/getting fired at my job. Stressful. (Just realized this show is "Feed the Children" so at the end they're going to ask me for money. The boy they're showing right now was abandoned alongside a road and dogs chewed off half his face..) Anyway, it's like 45 outside so that's awesome and I think I need a breath of fresh air. xoxo

$$$$$

I was feeling all huffy and had gotten myself stirred up with envy but during the few seconds it took me to log in on my laptop from my comfortable couch in my heated home, I had a reality check. I have been feeling very financially unstable, unsure and poor and as the single income for our family right now it sort of feels like my fault, like I just need to work more. I can pretty much envy about anything else someone has whether that is money, an ability to be more organized than me, being a better nurse, a happier person, having a better body, greater sense of style, cooking better, exercising better, having cooler home decor than me, writing more books than me, etc. The list goes on and on, disgustingly so. I put out an SOS on Twitter for advice about money and one person mentioned Dave Ramsey - so I clicked that link as I'd heard about him and it's a link to Amazon to buy his book. I enter his website and am faced with more things I can PURCHASE to help me learn about managing my money. I guess I could consider the money an investment but it just pissed me off. I'll dig into the plethora of money management advice online, I guess. I was hoping to like, go sit down with a professional and say, ok..here are our goals, here's the money we don't have, now what do we do? I was also hoping that professional would not charge a fee or ask me to buy something. Do these people exist? Right now I think our first step is to track every cent we spend over a month or two so we know exactly where it's going. I can honestly tell you that I couldn't say, oh yeah, we spend $___ a month on utilities, 'cause...I don't know! I nearly choked when I added up (for the first time) how much we will have paid in rent over the course of two years come May. How could that possibly be the first time I added that up and realized the cost? I'm discouraged, man. Money is scary and depressing.

pizza dough is rising and the baby is taking a go at a nap. i just caught roommate organizing stuff in her closet. i should take a lesson. i want to clean our upstairs and baby proof it really well so she has a place to crawl at least a few feet uninhibited. the floor is a different world as seen by a wee baby and i'm like holy tiny microscopic pieces of something that she's eating. everywhere these pieces of somethings to find and eat. everywhere!! cold but sunny. i am..unexciting. i think i'll take the never-decorated-this-year christmas tree back downstairs until next year.

Independent.

She will rarely let us feed her now. She'd rather do it herself. P.S. That's yogurt.

exchange.

Just a bit ago, I made this great dinner. The baby is sleeping and Roommate and I filled our plates then stood side by side at the kitchen counter eating. I looked over and said, "So, do you come to this stand up and eat place often?" He responded around a mouthful of bread, "Oh yeah, all the time." I told him it felt like a date. Near the end of our meal we started dancing in the kitchen and I was singing, "Strangers in the night.." and he chimed in, "exchanging body fluids." I should've known things would take a turn for the 8th grade.

standin' in the kitchen: a salute to apostrophes.

ain't got no shoes on. drinkin' lukewarm coffee thinkin' about makin' somethin' with brown sugar. some pasta stuff for dinner. on my days off work i just want to be a sloth and mostly am. been readin' books and cuddlin' the baby. she is a crawling machine. our hardwood floors scare me. i envision bloodied baby noses. she only has one. nose. i meant. her nose is the only one i envision as bloody. can't stop listening to this bon iver album. i know i'm late on the scene but man. it's so good. yesterday i listened to it in the car, over and over while Beebs and I drove around, warmed by the sun and hopeful. i'm making a list of things i'd like to do this year. one of those things is to take a proper vacation that involves lots of relaxation and no use of public transportation - an insanely stressful thing for us without someone to help us along the way until we've got our...land legs. at work on sunday i only had 4 patients but it felt like 8. one stalked me up and down the halls asking for medication and two others were confused. one of those liked to get naked about sundown and start cursing. then again, who doesn't like that? right now i feel like i'm spinning my wheels a bit. this afternoon i felt guilty for a brief bit of time while i sat on the floor playing with baby and then i thought, um..this is pretty much the most important thing i could be doing right now. it's so gray out today. i have these dried up flowers my mom and i picked in the fall, at the end of the season. they were starting to drop their seeds then and we asked the lady if we could cut some. they look like fat raspberries or strawberries. they feel like straw flowers. when it's spring i'm going to scratch in the dirt out there by the rock wall and plant some to droop and hang.