Notes From the Weekend

[eema.gray]

No, we didn't do anything "special."  Ranger Daddy's work schedule sees to that.  The holiday pay on his next check will be nice though.  :-)

CO Springs has a hot air balloon festival every Labor Day weekend.  We always forget, lol.  But in our new apartment, we have a wonderful view of the balloons coming up from the park they stage out of.  Both yesterday and today, the flight path (i.e. which direction the winds are blowing) went straight past the corner of our building.  We had a fabulous view both from the living room and from Yeled's bedroom window.  Getting little boys out of bed at seven in the morning is MUCH easier when there are brightly colored balloons floating past their bedroom windows.  It took an hour for all of them to move through and Yeled had his nose glued to the windows the entire time.  Hardly even noticed Abba coming home.

I'm thirty-five weeks today.  I *think* this baby will show up right around 41 weeks although I've had a few premonitions lately of a much earlier arrival than that.  I suspect the recent premonitions are based on the fact that the last time I saw Alice, she told me she was leaving Blue Sky at the end of September.  I've had a few crampy contractions here and there since around 15 weeks.  Tonight's the first night I've had them for more than an hour and just generally felt icky to go along with the cramps.  They're a lot sharper than what I remember in the run up to Yeled's birth too.  But I happen to know I've lost a lot of muscle tone since his birth and that probably has something to do with it.  I've eaten dinner, snacked, gotten thoroughly hydrated, taken a rest on my left side, all to no avail.  I'm about to go take a nice warm bath next.  That usually does the trick.

Why is it that I can spend all day making a wonderful special dinner (usually on Fridays) that Yeled will just pick over, and then when I make a desperation, I-have-no-idea-how-I'm-going-to-get-through-the rest-of the-week meal out of leftovers, he scarfs it down like it's going out of style?  Last night was leftover egg noodles with eggs scrambled in, along with shredded carrots, onion, and garlic.  Tossed with hoisen sauce, it WAS very good.  But the child's willingness to eat this, as opposed to chicken cooked all day into toddler friendly shreds and served over couscous has me scratching my head.

I've finally figured out how to deal with those ugly bi-fold metal closet doors found in cheap apartments the world over:  In a toddler's room, turn them into a learning center.  :-)  Yeled's double wide closet is now plastered with posters (colors in spanish and english, body parts), shapes, the english alphabet, hebrew aleph-bet, and numbers.  We've also got arrows pointing up and down and have his daily schedule somewhat formalized in the form of pieces of construction paper with clock faces and what we do that time of day.  It's not a hard and fast schedule but it's more or less what we do most days and around what time of day we get to each thing.  Mostly, it's a help for Ranger Daddy when he gets stuck with Yeled care for a couple weeks after the baby is born.