Thursday, January 31, 2013

Lists

Let me just give a shout out to my friend Kay for her totally understanding comment on my last post. Incidentally, the book that makes me cry all the time when I read it to Alice is: Where Ever You Are, My Love Will Find You by Nancy Tillman. It's wonderful to know I still have people reading my blog.

Okay, on to the new post.

Some things I find funny about being a mom.

1. I talk about poop a lot more than I ever thought possible - and I even KNEW I would be talking more about it and I STILL find it amazing how often I will start a conversation with my husband like this : "She had two poopy diapers today. One wasn't too bad but the other was really sticky and smelled funnier."
Or (this is my favorite): "No, that isn't poop face. Poop face is more like (*makes similar face as child does*)...

2. Raffi is kind of awesome. I don't even know if Alice LIKES these songs, but I play them anyway and sing Baby Beluga to her. This is VOLUNTARY. She could care less - she'd probably smile and laugh and clap if I were singing to Lady Gaga or Elvis too.

3. One of the highlights of the week is going to the library for Nursery Rhyme Time. Some of this is so I get ideas for when I go back to work and have to come up with story time ideas and things. But most of it is because I get out of the house, and Alice and I have fun together and someone ELSE did all the work to get us to have fun.

4. Going to the bathroom alone is pretty freaking awesome.

5. I totally repeat things other moms say about being a mom (see above). And I don't care. Also - I'm wearing yoga pants for the fifth day in a row and I consider myself to be more stylish than the moms who wear sweat pants. Ha!

Some other things going on in my life.

1. I got to see most of my family. My aunt and uncle came from South Dakota and visited and that was pretty awesome.

2. I'm already starting to plan for our trip to Chicago at the end of June. We'll be going with an 18-month old people, that's why I'm planning stuff now!

3. Despite being always tired, I'm having trouble falling and staying asleep. I think Alice has trained me well. It must be some kind of baby military training for moms.

4. I am very excited for winter to be over, even though we've had a lot of nice days or semi-nice days out. I am ready for the week of spring we'll be having before the heat and drought kicks in for a summer in Kansas.

5. I am still writing my book. Well, actually two of them of wildly different subjects and genres. But I have spurts of great ideas and then nothing. I want to finish one of them by the end of this year. Yeah, good luck with that.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Apparently, It Was Supposed to be Heartwarming.....

Last night, in an effort to up my reading instead of t.v. watching, I finished a Harlequin Superromance. This is my favorite series romance, because the stories are usually really good, I tend to like the characters, and someday I hope to publish something by them. Maybe. If I ever get around to you know, writing anything that isn't a Facebook status or a blog post.

Anyway. I finish the book on my Kindle and I'm already like, "I didn't like the book." I hardly ever say that. But this time, I really didn't like the book. It was the last in a series that portray different characters who have experienced missing children firsthand - a sister, the two detectives working cold cases, etc. This one featured the two detectives who started working together to solve a bunch of cold cases that are somehow linked.

Only, I really didn't care if the two got together. That is technically the whole point of the book. But in this case, it was completely overshadowed by the question of whether they will ever find out what happened to two missing girls: one six months old and one two years old at the time of their disappearances. And how are they linked? So I'm skipping all the blah blah blah romance stuff and going straight to what happens.

And what happens is this: the sister of the detective was either kidnapped and sold through an illegal adoption/baby selling ring or killed when her mother was kidnapped and raped. The other case involved a missing two year old, who apparently disappeared out of thin air. They caught the rapist and the detective (the sister of the six month old, with me so far?) tries to find out what he did with her sister. But he won't talk. And her mother (the rape victim and mother of six month old) doesn't remember because of traumatic amnesia plus blows to the head.

Blah, blah, blah. Story happens. Is romance brewing? Yes. Blah, blah, blah blah. Oh, and what happened to that two year old that disappeared from her front yard and how is she connected to this other baby?

They find out what happened. The baby was taken with the mother, probably under threat "Come with me or I'll kill your baby." Of course, baby is scared and hungry and crying. So while the mother is HOLDING her against her chest, trying to protect her and comfort her, the rapist bashes her head in with a rock and then rapes the mother and beats her up. She can't remember what happens to the baby and it leads her to alcohol but she somehow manages to raise her other daughter (the detective) who is hell bent of getting closure and finding out what happened to the baby.

Flash to the two year old that went missing. Apparently, it's the detective all along, who was kidnapped by the alcoholic and disturbed (not that any one can blame her) mother of the murdered six month old. So she's been trying to solve her own kidnapping case - which would have been awesome, except for the murdered six month old.

And I DIDN'T CARE! She met her biological family and got married to the guy (the other detective) and it's such a HAPPY ENDING. Except it isn't. Because the six month old got murdered and the mother is now locked up in a psych ward (although that's where she needed to be all along).

And I finish the book and then cry for like ten minutes, because I have a one year old and remember what she was like at 6 months vividly and if someone had kidnapped us and then killed her in front of me, while I was trying to comfort and protect her. Well, I'd just go ahead and kill myself, none of this becoming an alcoholic or abusing drugs. And I tell Nick the story and he's all - you have to stop reading about this stuff. And I'm trying to explain that it's supposed to be a fun, happy romance.

And then I eat about six chocolate chip cookies and don't even care when my one year old wakes me up all night long.

So yeah, Harlequin - that supposed romance. It sucked. I couldn't get past the other storyline, which overwhelmed the romance part and basically ruined the book. You couldn't have maybe told the author NOT to kill off the baby? To let her be alive somewhere in some kind of totally against the odds story? Because I can't handle this kind of thing anymore. And it's STILL on my mind. And now, I have take some kind of "learn how to kick ass" class so that if anyone ever comes near me, I can totally take off his head with my bare hands.

The End.

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Random Act of Kindness

I posted this on Facebook, but I had to write a post about it as well. This morning, after a rather late night, my husband and I got up and got Alice ready to go to breakfast with my two oldest, bestest friends and their families. We were both tired and excited to see everyone and exchange Christmas gifts for the kiddos and visit a little, since we are all rarely together.

Anyway, we order and are talking and passing around the presents and our food get to the table. One of my friends hadn't got her breakfast and paused the waitress to ask whether it was ready. The waitress apologized and said, "I am so sorry. I didn't see it. Someone paid your ticket already and blah...blah...blah."

And we were all, "Wait...What?! Someone paid their ticket?"

"No. I mean, someone paid all of your tickets." And I think we all just stared at each other.

Some very nice person (or people) had decided to do a random act of kindness and paid for all of our breakfasts, including the tip. It was such an amazing thing to happen fairly early on a Sunday morning and we were all talking about how we'd heard and read stories about it, but it had never happened to us, etc. And how we are all going to try and do our own act of kindness and how much fun it would be.

So, even though I doubt the person or people read this blog: Thank you stranger for paying for our breakfasts and making our day brighter. We look forward to doing the same to someone else.

And readers: I hope you can do a random act of kindness too: it doesn't have to be anything big.