It’s so nice that the daylight hours are starting so early in the day. When I wake up there are sunbeams streaming into our living room and it makes for such a lovely start to the morning. Unless that morning begins at 5:18. Seems Avelyn didn’t want to miss a moment of the sunshine and was up for the day at the crack of dawn. All I could do was lay on the couch and will my eyelids to stay open while she ran around the house and the deck. Then she starting smooshing her face into the screen door. All this before six a.m.

Summer has officially arrived and we have been spending our days at the park and the beach and I just love it. Especially since I can bust out all my lighter maternity clothes and let it all hang out, as they say.

You know how some days you just wake up and think, “I am pretty sure I am twice the size I was yesterday.” Well, that’s been happening to me a lot. I am only six months along but feel like I look more like eight. Many times in a day I’ll catch a glimpse of my reflection and wonder, “Who is that rotund woman with the bad hair following me?” Oh. Right. It’s me.

And yes, the hair is bad these days. I am growing it out and it’s got a mind of its own. The back end refuses to lie flat and is all, “Weee! Flipping out is awesome! A tad 2002, but awesome nonetheless!” while the rest of my hair is somewhat cooperative.

Just another inch or so and I’ll be able to coax it into a ponytail and forget about it.

Happy long weekend, all!

Transportation:  A ride into town in a classy, dog-hair encrusted ‘89 Toyota minivan.

Appetizer:  Fresh naan bread with baba ganoush, hummus, tzatkiki.

My dinner:  Falafel wrap with spicy Moroccan soup.

Steve’s dinner:  Parmesan chicken, prawns, roasted vegetables.

Post-dinner activities:  Romantic stroll by the water, then back to the restaurant for a comedic play called “Mom’s the Word”, a hilarious piece all about pregnancy, motherhood, and life after children.

Pat on the back goes to:  Steve, for planning a perfect night filled with good food, nice conversation, and lots of laughs.

While in Regina I stumbled upon a classy little stationary store on 13th Avenue and bought a stack of postcards that poke fun at domesticity.  They just rub me the right way.

Today was rainy and gray and my mood matched the skies.  I just felt kind of blah and have nothing really inspiring to write about today.  Here are my thoughts as they naturally spill…

The baby has been starting to move around a lot which is such a strange, yet reassuring, sensation.  I am happy to be home and back in the swing of our daily routine again.  There are three towering hampers full of laundry in our catch-all of a bedroom that are begging to be folded but I can’t seem to muster the motivation to fish through the rubble.  We had beef stew tonight and, if I do say so myself, it was quite good.  And I don’t usually like beef stew.  Yes, I have been eating small quantities of meat in the past month, thanks to the searing  images from Earthlings beginning to fade.  I am trying to only eat meat one or two times a week and to limit it to local meat.  No more mystery meat from the grocery store.  Except when I was in Regina I had some pepperoni pizza and it was heavenly.  I am officially six months pregnant and feel like a tugboat.  I can’t believe I still have over three months to go, and during the hottest part of the summer at that.  My great-grandmother passed away peacefully two nights ago.  She was 99.  There won’t be a funeral.  I am glad I go to see her last fall when she was still well and that she got to meet her only great-great granddaughter and take a photo of the five generations with her.

Steve just got home and I am going to go spend some time with him.  Tomorrow he’s taking me out for a special date that he planned in honour of Mother’s Day.  Our Sunday was a write-off since he had to graft a couple thousand new apple trees all weekend but I am excited to go out with him tomorrow and see what he’s got up his sleeve.  We were joking that his idea of a great night would be eating Kraft Dinner in the van at the bottom of the orchard with Avelyn screaming in her carseat since he forgot to get a babysitter.  I am one lucky woman.

It’s been a while since I showcased a picture blitz here and most of my posts have been lacking in the image department, so let’s make up for that with a photographic binge.  Happy Mother’s Day!

Here’s Avelyn, a few days before we left for Regina.  Happy as a clam.  A clam who was going to turn into a turd.

The flights to and from Regina were manageable, thanks to the DVD player and Avelyn’s new best friend, Arthur.

Seriously, that’s her favourite show these days.  An aardvark in glasses.  Weird kid.

As I mentioned in my last post, she was pretty miserable for the duration of our visit in Regina.  We managed to squeeze in some fun here and there at the park with Jen and her girls.

I love this one of Abby.

We all tried, rather unsuccessfully, to get a group shot of all the gals.  It still makes me smile, though.

It’s good to be home again.  Here’s to never travelling with a toddler again.  Cheers!

Avelyn and I are in Regina at my parents’ house for a few days.  My mom had been experiencing grandchild withdrawl so she flew the both of us out here so she could get her Avelyn fix.  If there were some way to let a 21 month-old fly on her own, I am sure she would prefer that option because while she’s kind of happy to see me, she is in a state of euphoria to behold the wonder of her granddaughter.

Avelyn seems to have a distaste for the prairies, however.  Whenever we come here she is a total turd.  A big, grumpy, pain-in-the-neck, why-are-you-ruining-this-trip turd.  Today we went shopping and after a couple hours she had a total meltdown.  I was trying to share some of my ice cream with her and she just started freaking out.  The life of a toddler is tragic:  shopping at gunpoint and being force-fed ice cream. 

The thing is, the past few months have been a lot better as far as meltdowns and whininess go, so I am not used to her being such a brat again.  She did fairly well on the airplane (excuse me while I go and hug the portable DVD player that got us through those three hours in the air) but since arriving here she has been kind of a terror. 

I guess she is just more sensitive to change than I expect her to be.  At home our daily and weekly routines are fairly steady, she sees the same faces, and she knows what to expect.  Perhaps she’s just feeling overwhelmed by the new place, being carted around to strange homes and malls, and the insulting offer of ice cream. 

If some happier moments are made, I’ll post a few photos.  I didn’t think to pull out the camera while she was foaming at the mouth, tantruming in her stroller at the food court, so stay tuned for some less rabid photo ops in the days to come.   

I have officially been inspired for our new baby’s nursery.  It took a while, since I had my heart set on a blue cowboy room for a boy, but now that my mind and heart are fully thrilled about having another girl, BRING ON THE PINK!  Originally we thought it might be wise to paint the new baby’s room a neutral colour so that if(/when?) we have a third (not even ready to think about that right now) it won’t have to be repainted, regardless of the sex of the third child.  That’s a good idea, in theory.  But after a couple day of looking at taupe and tan paint swatches I decided that, no, I needed the room to be pink.

The room we are converting into the new baby’s nursery is Steve’s “office” and I use that term loosely because although there is a filing cabinet and desk in there, there are also random boxes stacked floor to ceiling filled with micro machines from his childhood, broken telephones from the 80s and hundreds of books he hasn’t glanced at in years.  I married a packrat and the time has come to destroy his lair!  He is being a really good sport and is willing to sift through all of his “treasures” and put them in appropriate places.  I offered to do this but he declined, knowing full well that my definition of an appropriate place =  the Summerland landfill.

I took some photos of the office the other day but I don’t think you’re ready to see just what we’re dealing with here.  Perhaps once an official Before and After shot is ready, you’ll get to see from whence we came.

Anyways, my plan for the new nursery, once all the junk is hauled out and the room is painted a soft rose, is to go with a sort of vintage playroom feel, if that makes any sense.  I ordered some of the most amazing fabric I have ever seen.  It’s by Heather Bailey and I love it.  It’s colourful and retro-inspired and lovely.  My last nesting attempts, while pregnant with Avelyn, proved disastrous, as evidenced by the hideous excuses for curtains that are limply dangling from the rod above her window.  Seriously gross.  I can take a perfectly nice piece of fabric and destroy it.  So this time I have enlisted the help of Christy, a seamstress extraordinaire.  Last night I went to her house and we (and I use that pronoun quite loosely) made a quilt with this material for the baby.

Well, she did the sewing and I ate tortilla chips.  This is why I love her.

If you want to see the rest of the Heather Bailey fabric collection click here  .  I found the site really great and the prices more than reasonable.

For the past year or so I have become more interested in graphic design and have thought about the possibility of taking a program one day that would teach me the basics and then I could become an amazing graphic designer who makes lots of money and who is loved by the internet, like Secret Agent Josephine. I started mentioning this to Steve, saying, “I think I could be good at it; I just need to LEARN! I am a sponge! I need someone very soggy to let me soak up their skills and then I KNOW I could be great at it! I’ll be able to work from home and make a gazillion dollars! Maybe we should buy a sweet Mac computer and spend a couple thousand dollars on Adobe software and I can start learning from home TODAY. I promise it will be an investment in our future! All I need is the right tools and I know I’ll be motivated to learn the trade and become this self-taught wonder. I promise!”

Steve, realist that he is, said that we should perhaps wait for a while before blowing five thousand dollars on equipment. It turned out that his brother had Adobe CS3 and he wasn’t using it anymore so he gave it to me! I was so stoked (and I kind of hate that word). I installed the program and started playing around. I ordered some books off of Amazon to teach me all I needed to know about becoming a graphic design prodigy. I thought that if I spent just an hour a night, after Avelyn had gone to bed, that I would be a pro in no time.

It hasn’t happened. And I am not really all that surprised. I am the queen of getting an idea in my head, not being able to rest until I see it come to fruition, and then doing nothing about the opportunity presented before me. Kind of like the elliptical trainer machine I begged Steve for a few years ago (”I am going to get SO SKINNY! I’ll use it every day! I prooooomisssssse!). I used it loyally everyday. For about two weeks. And now it sits, like a dusty dinosaur (seriously, those things are huge) in our basement, reminding me daily of my lack of follow-through.

As far as my graphic design prowess goes, this is where we’re at:

Want me to design your wedding invitations? Make important business cards for your company? Design a logo for you?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

Although I have just recently crossed into the Land o’ the Second Trimester it feels as though I’ve set up camp in the Uncomfortable Desert of the Third.  My belly is already getting in the way of everything.  When I bend down to pick up Avelyn’s toys off the floor, I have to hoist my gut up in one hand to make room to bend at the waist.  I can no longer sit up to get out of bed; it’s time to roll like a bloated log to the edge of the mattress and ease myself out with a grunt for good measure.  We have had quite a bit of company the past few weeks and the little jobs like cooking a big meal or changing some bed sheets have left me worse for wear and feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck (or, as Avelyn would say, “ah f%#k”).  If I am already feeling this way at (not even) six months, how am I going to make it through three more months of increasing discomfort through the sweltering summer?

In other news, I kind of hate my hair.  I think that if I were not pregnant and were feeling like my old, svelte(ish) self I would be digging the cool style and chic cut I’ve got right now.  But with my body growing larger by the hour I feel like having short hair makes me look a little pin-headed, as though my skull is too tiny for my frame.  I need some longer layers of tresses to hide behind.  And so, I am officially growing my hair out.

I am never satisfied.

Photo courtesy of Angella.

Avelyn has taken to dumping whole bowls of soup on the floor at lunch time.  She knows this is unacceptable and is just being a little turd about it.  Last weekend she sent an entire bowl of chili plummeting to the already-caked-with-last-week’s-droppings floor below and I yanked her from her high chair, pointed to the splatter of red at my feet and said, “We don’t throw food.  You need to have a time out in your room.”

I placed her in her crib and set the timer for two minutes.  After the the seconds had ticked by, marked by her angry wailing, I went into her room and she collected her snivelling self and said, “Out?”

I said, “Mommy will take you out of your crib when you say sorry.  Can you say sorry, Avelyn?”

She locked eyes with me, jutted out her bottom teeth in an angry underbite and grunted, “No.”

Oooo, that kid!  I thought she was a little young to understand the concept of apologizing, but obviously not.  It was clear she understood that she was supposed to say sorry, to express some remorse and realize that I am the boss, but she didn’t want to.

I explained, “Mommy will come back when you’re ready to say sorry.”  Then I closed the door and left, set the timer for one minute and came back to try again.  After her screaming abated I calmly asked if she was ready to say sorry and again she pulled out the underbite and said, “No.”

Again, I left.  I came back, and left, and came back a total of seven times.  SEVEN.  I knew I had to win this war of the wills or it would come back to haunt me.  After the seventh try she finally caved and grumbled, “Forry.”  I took her out of her crib and she hasn’t dropped a bowl of food on the floor since.

This kid if giving me a run for my money, to say the least.  I told my mom about this incident and she gasped, “Even you were never that bad at such an early age!”  Great.  Just what I was longing to hear.

The whole scenario reminded me of a time, many moons ago, when my little brother had done something mean to me and my parents made him stay in his room until he was ready to say sorry to me.  It took him hours to finally muster the humility to apologize and when he did, he sauntered up to me and huffed, “SOR,”  as though he wasn’t going to fully acknowledge his transgression with that final syllable.  Little turd.  It runs in the family, I guess.