Kickin ass? Check... On to taking names.

Due to a small oversight, I won't be going back to work until Thursday. In the mean time I've been trying to get our apartment back in shape now that Allie will amuse her self in short bursts.

Today, for the first time, I was able to get a shower and brush my teeth in the same hour.

I've been able to do a little decorating, get some things organized and yet, somehow, it doesn't look like I've gotten anything accomplished.

My biggest accomplishment this week was hooking up our new PS3. My Husband openly , admits that I'm better at hooking up electrical equipment than he is, so it's always my job. Well, I was frustrated and grumpy when I hooked it up so of course it didn't work right the first time around. The PS3 worked just fine, but we could no longer watch cable tv. This was fine for a while since we have streaming netflix through the XBOX 360, but it's Monday and I wanted to watch the new episode of True Blood.

With about 10 minutes of magic time I managed to get the cable box, PS3, XBOX 360, and Wii hooked up to the same tv and they are all fully functional. I felt like a freaking genius.

I celebrated by putting Allie on my shoulders and bouncing her around. Pretty soon that turned in to "Mommy is my new pony" and she used my hair as reigns. She was holding on enough to sit up unsupported and we tried to get a picture. I had my hand up just in case, and then she leaned (not fell) back as hard as she could, giggling.














Mommy was not giggling.

Oh yeah

By the way, my daughter is the cutest thing ever.



I'm glad you agree.

Mother of the Year...

If you have ever had the pleasure of letting me ride shotgun in your car, you've probably seen me freak out by something I deem as an immediate threat. Be it an SUV on a rampage, a bunny hopping across the road, or a shirtless old man jogging down the sidewalk, wrinkly man-boobs flapping in the breeze.

The less threatening the object is, the more I'm able to come up with with an actual word rather than pointing and yelling "BEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!" Which is the sound of an SUV about to smash into our car. Yes, I actually yelled "BEEEEEEE!!!!" and we narrowly missed an accident because I couldn't say "Hey, watch out for that SUV. He's running that stop sign."

Well, after a rather frustrating night of babysitting and a rather long ride home, I totally lost my mind. There was a lane closure at the next intersection and you had to kind of weave through construction barrels to get into the left turn lane. Well, someone did a really bad job and knocked one of the barrels over. It was laying in the lane, totally blocking the road.

For the first time, there was actually something hazardous and I was able to form an actual word. It totally did not pertain to the situation, but it's something you might overhear in a conversation.

I pointed at the overturned barrel and yelled "DOUCHE BAG!"

With my infant in the car.

I am soooo glad she can't talk yet.

Hold on a minute...

Due to the response of my last blog post, I'd just like to make a few things clear. Please do not take any of this personally, I love you all, I just want you to understand the factors.

1. We do not live on base nor can we afford to break our lease and move on base. Robin could move into the dorms to live for free if we got divorced, but he would lose about a thousand dollars a month in pay. Yeah, I could come home to stay with my parents for a while but then we would have to pay 5k to break our lease, I would have to divorce my husband, and we would still be losing money.

This is going to sound really bitchy and I'm sorry, but I just have to say it. People on and off the blog have suggested that I move in with my parents for a while to save money. We would still have to pay rent on our apartment and our family would still be in separate states and I still wouldn't have an income. How can we keep from breaking up our family by breaking up our family?

2. Her sitter is going to cost me $100 a week. I make $15 an hour, so this really isn't eating into our money. We will be fine, financially, with me going back to work. Even after child care costs.

3. I would be sending money to my parents to take care of Alyssa. She would not be in daycare since they would be watching her. If they needed someone to give them a break, there are 10 people on standby and I would only need to pay them a little bit for their time.

4. Student loan companies will only offer deferments if you haven't had your loans deferred repeatedly. They also don't like to work with you when you have defaulted on them repeatedly in the past. Yeah, I was young, dumb, and financially irresponsible. It has bitten me in the ass more than once.

5.This is something we are considering as an option ONLY if we find that we cannot take care of her while My Husband is working overnight. This is for her well being as well as ours. If we feel that we can't care for her at that time, my parents are willing to step in and help. Since we are states away, we would have to leave her with them until we could go get her. We are under no circumstances abandoning our child, considering giving her up for adoption, or trying to get rid of her.

6. I like pie.

7. After December I will not be working because that awesome bonus would be more than enough to pay off the loan and make sure that we can make the car payment for a while. These are things that my job pays for. My Husband's income covers absolutely everything else. Rent, utilities, groceries, gas, insurance... everything. I technically may not HAVE to go to work, but then we wouldn't have to worry about where the money for the car payment was going to come from. If we get behind on any of our payments, My Husband can lose his job. That's not really something you have to worry about in the civilian sector, but if he gets a dishonorable discharge for failure to meet his financial obligations he will be completely unemployable.

These are the things that we're taking into consideration and we are not going to take this lightly. We are weighing the pros and cons and your input has really helped us try and come up with other solutions.

Change of plans...

For the last 6 months, we have known that we will be moving to New Mexico in October. Everything was going to work out perfectly since I would get to stay home with the baby and pack, then we would move and we would be able to afford for me to be a full time mom without having to worry that we wouldn't be able to pay our bills.

I worked really hard to pay off our credit cards and pay down our car as much as possible to make things even easier. Currently, I have one student loan to pay off and then we just have our car payment left.

Well, the day My Husband was supposed to get his orders making our move official, the day I was going to officially quit my job, we found out that "Guess what?! Your squadron did something awesome so the President (PotUS) wants to give you guys more work immediately!"

Yes, Obama fucked my plans.

This means that we will not be moving, I have to go back to work, and Alyssa is going to miss her momma for 11 or so hours a day.

Since she doesn't sleep through the night yet, things are going to get really stressful and I just hope that I can make it to December without getting my ass canned. Why December? While I was on maternity leave, our company made a deal with the devil. The new company offered a buttload of cash for employee bonuses. My company decided that the bonuses would be 40% of your pay from July 2008 to July 2009 and will be paid in two installments. The first installment will be paid around Christmas 2009 but you must be an employee in good standing as of December 1st. The second will be paid around Christmas of 2010 but you have to be an employee in good standing as of December 1st 2010.

There's probably no way I'll be getting the second installment, but I sure could use the first one. It would be roughly $7,000.

Well, one of our friends is going to watch Alyssa during the day for about $100 a week. This is all fine and dandy while My Husband has a daytime or afternoon schedule. When he's on overnights? We're fucked.

Insert plan A: Starting October, My Husband will be on overnights. The possible plan A includes taking Alyssa home to stay with Gigi and Grumpy and either her Mimi and Pops can bring her back for Thanksgiving or Gigi and Grumpy will bring her back in December.

This would mean two months away from my precious baby, but also two months of sleep. Worry free.

Plan B: Suffer through it, go batshit crazy and possibly lose my job. I CAN NOT LOSE MY JOB. Everything banks on getting that bonus and I do NOT want to put that in jeopardy. Even if it means my baby gets some extra time with her grandparents.

Now, of course, I would not let my daughter suffer so that I can make some extra cash. That would be insane so please keep your hate comments to a minimum. Her grandparents are totally capable of taking care of her and have support handy if they need a break. My entire family has offered their time and energy, all I have to do is ask and provide some financial compensation (diapers are expensive)

Also, in September I have to have a colposcopy (Copo) to check for cervical cancer since my recent pap came back HPV positive with mild dysplasia to high risk dysplasia. Fabulous.

We have some hard decisions to make and I get the feeling that the next few months are going to be rather exciting indeed.

I should have stayed longer...

On the 3rd, I took Alyssa home to meet her great mammaw and her grandmother's on My Husband's side. Mostly it was a trip to meet her Mammaw since she is very ill and probably won't be with us much longer. Fortunately, we got to celebrate her 92nd birthday in person and she got to hold her great granddaughter, and kiss her, and tell her how amazing she is.

I spent two weeks back home and, somehow, it wasn't nearly long enough. It was nice to see as many people as I could, but I didn't get to see or do half of the things on my list. I wanted to hang out with all of my friends but I am really glad that I got to see as many of them as I could.

My dad also had to have back surgery while I was there, so that caused me to throw a lot of my plans out the window.

There will be pictures soon but for now I am adjusting to taking care of the baby on my own again. It was really, really nice to be able to hand her off to someone else so I could get a few hours of peace and I honesty don't think my family minded one bit. She has everyone wrapped so tightly around her tiny fingers that I'm amazed we got on the plane with all limbs intact.

Now that I'm back, I hope to update with more frequency-- it was really hard to try and cram in a blog update between napping, spending time with family and hanging out with a few of my friends...

Anyway, look for more awesomeness soon!

So this is what they're talking about...

When parents are around their friends without children, they tend to romanticize what family life is really like. I guess this is nature's way of making sure that we continue the species.

When parents are around new parents, they tell you all of the horrible things you never wanted to know about raising children.


Well screw that, I'm not going to candy coat this for anyone. You need to know what you're up against.

For the last few days, Alyssa has had a sour stomach and there isn't a whole lot that we can do about it. We've tried Karo syrup, rice water, and now we're going to get some "Gripe Water" from the pharmacy to see if that helps. In the meantime, I've been trying to relieve as much of the pain as possible through massage and the use of teething tablets. For those of you that don't know, teething tablets are meant to dissolve under your tongue or in water and are made from chamomile and belladonna. They help the baby relax so that they are not in so much pain and can sleep. I have started taking these myself and I must say, they are fabulous.

Last night I got to see two of my best friends for a little bit and shortly after they left I had my most horrific moment as a new mom. Worse than when she rolled off the couch. Worse than when she almost choked on her bottle during the airplane ride (Oh, I'm back home with my parents, I'll explain that later) and much worse than when I dropped Cool Whip in her mouth.

With her tummy troubles, Alyssa hasn't been able to poop normally for about a week. She was doing okay until a few days ago when she went from 3 messy diapers a day down to one or less. She still has lots of wet diapers so she isn't getting dehydrated, but her bowels aren't moving as well as they should. The doc said not to worry until it's been 5 days with no movement. Kay.

Last night after my friends left, she finally pooped for the first time that day. I was so proud of her and I was excited to change her diaper and go to bed. (Yeah, you can tell I'm a mom. 'Yay, you went poopie!!!') I laid her down on a changing pad on my air mattress, then took her diaper off. Wow, that was a lot of poop. I wiped her down and reached over to get the new diaper. She started to go again. Quickly, I covered her up with the old diaper so she could finish up. When she was done, I unhooked the diaper and started wiping her up again. Just before Before I was able to get the new diaper in place she started going again.

I wasn't able to cover her up as quickly as before.

My stomach hasn't been that awesome lately either, and I almost threw up on my baby.

I raced to get her cleaned up and get a new diaper on so that I could clean everything up. I moved her to another changing pad right next to me so that I could keep poop from getting all over the comforter since it was already on me and her clothes. Then she started crying. A lot. I made sure that she was completely clean, got her in a new outfit and tried to put her in the swing while I cleaned up the mess. I ended up using 2 diapers and 3 changing pads and one extra outfit. She wouldn't stop crying and I was afraid that she was going to wake my mom up (she had to go to work in the morning afterall) and I started crying myself. Apparently, I was calling out "I need help" while in tears and trying to calm Alyssa.

Mom came to the rescue.

I threw away all the diapers and changing pads, then went to the bathroom to scrub her clothes. Once I was confident that nothing would stain, I threw the clothes in the washing machine and had a cigarette while mom calmed Alyssa down.

After I was positive that all of the poop had been cleaned up, I sat down and talked to mom for a little bit. Once Alyssa was asleep, I laid down with her so that we could go to bed. That's when she got really mad. I could hear her stomach bubbling and I would have given anything to be able to make it stop, but I don't have magic powers so I just had to let her cry. I held her and rocked her and tried every "get rid of gas" treatment that I know. After a while, the bubbling stopped and the massage put her to sleep. That was at 3 am. Mom went to bed and I crashed.

Something we tried must have worked because she slept until 7 or so this morning and only woke up because she wanted to nurse. I latched her on and went back to sleep. When she was done I woke up, burped her, and laid her back down. Since then she has slept for most of the day.

Sadly, now I can't sleep.