I don’t know if it makes me a better or worse photographer, but I seriously stress about it…dream about it…talk about it.    It doesn’t matter if I’m doing a senior shoot or a wedding, I’m pretty much going to obsess about the job until it’s over.   

I’m the girl in your class who studied like crazy and read the book three times, and stayed up until wee hours of the morning pleading with God to just give me a passing grade.   The kid who had to practice piano twice as much as everyone else, and spent hours and hours shooting hoops or hitting hockey pucks just to be able to keep up with everyone else. The only thing that comes easy for me is reading….too bad what I read doesn’t stick as long as I would like it to.

So, it was a huge relief today when I looked through the pictures and realized that not only did I have a ton of fun yesterday, but I actually got some fabulous shots of Lauryl.  I hope her agent has a heart attack when he/she sees them, and I plan on bragging I did her headshots when she gets tons of work.

We did four looks…Sweet, Serene, Snarky and Sexy.

Sweet

Serene

Snarky

Sexy

The rest of them are  will soon be on my Flickr.

Jim has been home all day, Jamie has been an angel (the two are related I’m sure) and I am enjoying a cup of tea laced with gin backwash (the child suddenly discovered he loves hot tea which he call “soup”).

However, I did pull out and play with my soft boxes for a little while, because I have a photoshoot tomorrow with the lovely Lauryl Lane and I wanted to make sure everything was in working order.   Since Jamie is my only subject (albeit a very unwilling one),  I had to beg and plead with him to cooperate as I chased him around the house with my new ringflash and clamshell lighting.    He did finally confine himself to our Ikea chair while I tested out WB levels, but in the pictures he’s just a wriggling blur of curls and teeth.   I need a doll or one of those wig heads to be my model instead.  

Here’s my favorite catch of the morning.  You can see how utterly thrilled he is with the whole arrangement.

This morning, as I was chasing around a naked two year old with potty seat and wondering when (if ever) I was going to manage to catch a shower, Jim came rushing in the door, pulled me into his arms with a big kiss and said “Happy Anniversary!”.  I had completely forgotten that five years ago today Jim asked me to marry him. 

I hadn’t forgotten entirely, in fact the other day we were discussing when and how we wanted to celebrate it this year and I realized that it’s my turn.  I have no idea when the tradition started but Jim and I trade special days and anniversaries… he plans one and I get the next one.   He definitely got the short end of the stick because I never do half as good a job as he does (but I spend a fraction of the money).   However, I hope he’ll be suitably pleased with what I planned this weekend.   I can’t wait.

But moving on to the potty training tales from this morning:

It helps to have a really good imagination, or a pessimistic streak…or both.   I laid awake last night dreaming of all the horrible things that could happen (some included Jamie at his high school graduation in diapers) and so I’m relieved to report that while he’s certainly not potty trained yet, I think we made definite progress.  Or should I say we actually got to the point where Jamie is willing to sit on the toilet….sort of.    For whatever reason he had decided the toilet was evil incarnate and must be avoided at all costs.   At first it was because it hurt him, but I fixed that and he gave it a whirl and just decided he couldn’t be bothered.  If I tried to pick him up and set him on it he would bend his legs up around his ears contorting around like a pretzel, trying to keep bottom from touching the seat as if it were hot lava or something.   This morning I sat on the potty seat and showed him it was perfectly harmless, but he looked dubious, so I called in the big guns.   There is no one in his world who is cooler than my seven year old sister Julia. I made a quick phone call begging and pleading for assistance, she readily offered her services and within five minutes Julia was demonstrating how unbelievably fun going potty is.   Jamie swallowed it hook line and sinker, and was more than happy to sit on the potty himself… for about .02 seconds.   We did this every fifteen minutes.  Twice he had accidents.  The first time I explained to him that peepee went in the toilet and consequently made him take a rag, mop it up and wring it out in the toilet.  Then I made him mop the floor with disinfectant.  My discipline backfired because he had so much fun cleaning it up he peed again on purpose just so he’d be forced to do it again.  sigh. 

Julia wanted me to take pictures of them coloring together, so I was getting out my camera when Julia said “oh look Jamie has poop coming out his butt”.  I grabbed him and we all dashed to the bathroom, Julia yelling at Jamie to hold it and we made it to the seat just as it went plop in the toilet…whew.   We couldn’t get him to do anything more, but he was content to sit on the toilet as we all sang songs and read books.   I didn’t dodge the mess entirely though.  After we had dutifully flushed the toilet and washed our hands Jamie ran into the living room and yelled “brown, mommy, BROWN!”  Sure enough there was poo smeared on the tile floor.  Gross.

(This picture is incredibly grainy because it was so underexposed it was nearly completely black, but photoshop brought it back from the dead since it was the only one I got the chance to snap).

We went outside for awhile before lunch and Jamie discovered the hard way that rock climbing with no clothes on the bottom can be rough on the body.  However he was not to be deterred (he even dragged his chair up there).  I am Jamie, hear me roar.

All in all not a bad start today .  I have hope.
  

Back in the days when I was still carrying around my Rainbow Brite Doll and singing Mr. Rogers neighborhood, I had an unhealthy terror of strangers, the mere act of catching someone looking at me was enough to make me cringe as I imagined all sorts of things they might be thinking.   My mom was always encouraging me to get outside of my comfort zone and I always bribed or threatened my younger sister into doing it for me.   Like one of the infrequent times we were privileged enough to eat fast food (in this case Taco Bell) and I desperately wanted a fourth taco (I was a big eater as a child) and mom doled out the 39 cents for me to go get another one.   I stared at the cash register for the longest time painfully trying to work up the courage to order a taco.  I was sure the cashier hated little girls and would refuse to give me a taco, maybe he was a murderer or kidnapper on America’s Most Wanted or worse, a social worker in disguise ready to whisk me away from my parents for being out of school.  …whatever the case I could not muster up the courage to do it and so I talked my four year old sister Liz into getting the taco for me (I figured that way I could make a break for the door if it really was a social worker).

Nowadays, most people blame me for being too outgoing and it’s true I like parties and friends and good conversations, but somewhere in the back of my brain, my imagination is always going full swing worrying about all kinds of things, and so it’s little surprise that I don’t like shopping as well as I ought.   I don’t like the whole way employees pounce on you when you walk in the door asking you if they can help, or salesmen trying to push a product on you…or horror of horrors… I hate making a return or exchanging an item.    I stopped into Marshall’s really quickly on my way home from work today to find a birthday present for my dad.   I headed straight for the clearance rack and within minutes I found a dashing AE shirt in his size for $7.00.  I picked up a few other things and went to pay for my items.  After ringing up my total and swiping my card the cashier suddenly stopped and said “oh…nice try”, I begged her pardon and she rolled her eyes at me and called over the loud speaker for a manager.  The manager came and took away the AE shirt and told me to wait.   I waited and waited…and waited some more.  Twenty minutes later he finally comes back and tells me that the shirt had the wrong price on it, and they don’t honor tags that customers switch.   I was a little mortified that they automatically assumed I’d switched the tags on purpose, but I just kept my mouth shut.   They then proceeded to go through all my other purchases,  checking everything, searching the pockets and shaking them out for any possible items I might be smuggling through them.  They then asked to search my purse which I bravely refused (surely that’s illegal?).   They charged me $16.99 for the shirt without asking me if I wanted to keep it, and when I faintly protested she sighed and offered to re page the manager and have the whole transaction canceled while I went and shopped some more.   I looked at all the frustrated and annoyed people in line behind me and decided I just didn’t have the balls to say or do anything more.  I signed the receipt and hightailed it to my car and then started crying (don’t laugh…it’s the pregnancy hormones).  I never want to shop there again. …heck, I never want to go shopping again. 

It seems like lately my pessimistic imagination is closer and closer to real life and it is rarely surprised by any goodness in society.  

Here’s this weeks belly shot.   I took it outside cuz I didn’t have enough light inside and was too lazy for the speedlight.  Problem was I was so cold I forgot to push up my tank top to show off my bump, so I’m including last weeks picture (which I forgot to post) since it’s a more accurate representation of what I look like.

14 weeks

13 weeks

I am the queen of internet tabs and thus Firefox has my undying devotion for being the first to save me from a cluttered taskbar.   At any given time I have no less than ten tabs up (although sometimes as many as twenty) ranging from the most important ( i.e. email, crossings, facebook and xanga) to obscure random curiosities like the sudden desire to find out what kind of spider I just killed in the bathroom sink.   As a hopeless byproduct of my generation’s addiction to technology, I typically google any and everything, so it was very odd that I recently undertook the rather dubious task of potty training Jamie without giving google even so much as a polite nod.  I blame it on my mother making potty training look so easy,  when my sister Hanna was 18 months my mom bought her a package of pink and purple underwear and Hannah ditched the diaper in the nearest trashcan and never looked back.   Why can’t it be that easy for me?   I bought Jamie a package of choo choo train underwear and he gave them one disinterested glance and then tossed them to the side.   Not that I was under any illusions that it was going to be quite that easy. 

I have been approaching the whole subject with the caution a galeophobic has towards the ocean.  I’m afraid of the battle that hasn’t even begun yet.  The very foundation of potty training revolves around praise and rewarding good behavior.   The problem is Jamie has a pernicious streak that often causes him to do the exact opposite of whatever we praise him for.   This morning I found him studiously employed putting away his blocks, but the moment I praised the behavior he looked annoyed and stopped.    I’m also running into problems finding a suitable bribing tool.  Most parents use candy or stickers, but Jamie thinks stickers are boring and food has never held much power over him.  I found he loves sour candy so I bought some sour life savers that I gave him with his potty seat with the explanation that he could have one when he went pee pee in the toilet.   He gave it some thought and handed the candy back to me with a very decisive “No”.   I put him on the potty seat and he screamed “ow…ow… OW…mommy”.     I tried reconciling his relationship with the potty seat for a few weeks but with no success.  I finally decided it really must truly be causing him pain and admittedly I would be fairly annoyed too if I had a butt so small and bony that half of it kept falling in as the other half got pinched.   Julie came to the rescue with an even smaller potty seat that sported a soft, cushy seat. 

So now I have a proper seat, I went to the library and checked out several books on potty training, and mom is loaning me her potty training doll that pees (the one I learned with ironically).   Thursday I plan on cranking up the heat a few degrees planting the potty in the middle of our tile floor and letting Jamie run around nude until he pees (hopefully in the potty but I’m prepared for anywhere).   I’ve even consulted google… so I’m as prepared as any 21st century mom can be.

I am angry, when I should be sad.

    People I love are falling apart; relationships, bad decisions, inoperable brain tumors, cancer, illness.   The old me would be inwardly freaking out, not knowing how to help and half convinced that in this hail storm of depressing news I was somehow also on course for a train wreck myself.   I’d make sure I was driving the speed limit, locking the doors, turning off the phones… in a pitiful effort to sway the inevitable force of fate careening towards me.  Instead, I feel more like an extra in the Phantom of the Opera, some strange shit is happening and haven’t a clue whats going on, but all I can do is play my part to the best of my ability .  The parallel falls apart, because I know there’s not a love-sick psycho in charge, but rather a master creator, however the chaos is difficult.   And I’m ticked because I haven’t a clue what to do about any of it.  

   My own problems seem small in comparison, but by the time our insurance all gets straightened out, I’ll have paid so much money out of pocket it wont even matter.  Anybody who thinks the government health care is a load of bureaucratic nonsense hasn’t tried to deal with an insurance company.  Right now, I am trying to juggle both.  If I have any hair left by the end of this, it will be a miracle.
  I haven’t kept anything of consequence down since breakfast yesterday morning, and thus I’m a mean, hungry pregnant woman who needs a good cry and just wants some gosh darn food.  …any food, it doesn’t matter what kind, it just has to stay down.    But since I can’t drown out my sorrows with comfort food or double martinis, I decided to work out instead.   Two months of lying languidly on a couch has turned my normally flabby body into a veritable pile of goo.  People keep asking me if I’ve lost weight and I have, but I’m pretty sure none of it was fat, sadly all my muscle packed up and went on strike leaving just jelly and bones behind.   I had an epiphany a few days ago when finally realized that laying around really doesn’t make me feel any better, so I might as well be sick and svelte rather than sick and sordid.  Exercise during pregnancy is somewhat controversial, but my Dr. told me I could do whatever mild form of exercise I wanted, providing I don’t let me heart rate get above 140.   Embarrassingly enough, at this point it doesn’t take much to get my heart rate to 140.   I can almost achieve that just while making the bed, but since that isn’t very fun, I decided to play DDR on the xbox instead.   It’s perfect.  I put it on the easiest level, set the timer for 30 min and happily beebop away while my heart beats safely at 140-145.    Today was my third day, and I knew it had been going to good to last.  Ten minutes into my “workout” the phone wouldn’t stop ringing, people started knocking on my door, and Jamie woke up from his nap.   I got everyone and everything taken care of except for Jamie who was inconsolable.   He had a fraction of the nap he needed after getting up at an ungodly hour this morning.    At this point I’m still an angry, psycho, pregnant lady who’s about to lose it and I need some endorphins, so I put Jamie in front of Little Einsteins, lock myself in my room and start running sprints from one wall to the other.    I’m sure if anyone could have seen me, they’d have taken me straight to a psychiatrist, but I feel much better now.   I prayed, got my attitude straightened out and my perspective back,  I think I my heart rate may have gone a little over 140 (er…or a lot), but I think we’ll survive.

Jamie handles frustration in a different way. 


Just kidding.  What are blocks for except to knock them down?

Oh I forgot to add, be forewarned…

WARNING: post below contains explicit and gross descriptions.

After poking around the internet for weeks looking for morning sickness cures (there aren’t any btw),  I’ve seen morning sickness described as everything from having the flu, to being kicked in the stomach by a mule.  In my opinion it is far worse and yet somehow more bearable than that.

To the novice, it at first feels exactly like you’re coming down with the flu or you just realized that the tacos you ate across the border were a bad idea.   On a scale of one to ten (one being normal and ten being wrapped around the porcelain throne begging for an early death), generally when you have the flu or food poisoning you’re in denial until you hit about a level five.   You keep thinking that you just need fresh air, or a nap or something.   After you finally admit you’re sick, you spend a few hours sweating it out and resisting it for all it’s worth, gritting your teeth and telling yourself you WILL NOT throw up.  At some point you go almost instantly from an eight to a ten at which point you go tearing for the nearest bathroom to let your stomach wring itself inside out.   Later you emerge crawling on the ground, dragging your weak body from the bathroom to the nearest couch where you repeat the whole process for the next 24 hrs.   Sound familiar?

  Morning sickness is totally different.   It’s worse because after a week of bloodshot eyes, getting kernals of corn (or rice) stuck up your sinuses, and having all the enamel worn off your teeth, you tearfully realize that this isn’t going away anytime soon.  There is no 24 hr time limit, it’s like some vicious, sinister practical joke.   You don’t even have the relief of briefly feeling better after you deposit your lunch back.  Instead of a cycle of feeling better and then horrible, you never have a break, you always feel nauseas, always hovering between a six and a nine.  This has a bright side though, when you discover that it really means nothing.  Since nothing is seriously wrong with you, (there’s no bacteria or virus holding your stomach hostage), you learn you can just ignore it.  What used to put you in bed, in a fetal position, praying for mercy suddenly doesn’t make you bat an eyelash, because it’s all a big joke.   You’re not actually going to die nor is it going away any time soon.   Somehow you just press on, circle the end of your first trimester on the calendar and hope you survive.  The problem with this facade of normalcy is that anything can put you at a ten nearly instantly.  All it takes is standing up straight, smelling any food, seeing something gross on TV, or even sneezing (the other day I threw up thanks to a rather stressful elimination from project runway), and suddenly you have run to the nearest bathroom. (although planters, ziploc bags, and water bottles work in a pinch).  Even though throwing up doesn’t make you feel any better, it also ceases to impress you after awhile.  You brush your teeth, or pop a mint and are done.  It’s a very different experience.

I personally think the worst effect of morning sickness is the loss of my beloved appetite.  I used to love food; smelling it, eating it, savoring every mouthful, but right now I honestly can’t remember what it felt like to enjoy the taste of something.  Food I previously loved makes the hair on my arm stand up, and my stomach cringe.   People keep asking me if I’m feeling better and that’s really hard to answer.  Jim says I’m doing better because I’m throwing up less, and it’s true.  I also feel as good as a level two or three on some days which was unheard of previously, but I forget to be grateful because now there is nothing left for me to eat.  I have exhausted all the usual meals/recipes and food.  I typically only eat something once and then I hurl it up and never want to see, smell or taste it again.  When you do that for two months you eventually run out of things to eat.   For awhile I was hanging on with peanut butter & jelly sandwiches or ramen noodles, but those are on the black list now and I’m down to potatoes and apples.   I can also manage to keep stuff down if it’s put in front of me suddenly.  In other words, if I don’t have to smell it, think about it, anticipate it or cook it, then I can typically eat it. (with the exception of anything containing tomato sauce, most especially spaghetti).   My first trimester is technically over this Tues. (yay)  It’s circled in red on my calendar, and I’m hoping it will magically disappear then, but I’m being nice and giving it an extra week to leave before I really get mad. 

I want my food back.

All to have one of these. (this is some serious blackmail material.)

Before I was pregnant life was different.  Jim was always complaining about it being too warm and and I was always freezing my nubs off   I’d cuddle up to him for warmth and he’d have half his body out of the covers.  Now we fight over the thermostat.  I like to turn the heat completely off at night, and he wants to keep it at 70!  (unbelievable) We compromised at 67…68 or whoever gets to it first.  I literally feel like I’m being roasted alive in my bed.  Since we’re a very democratic family and the vote is tied between me and Jim,  Jamie is the tie breaker.  Of course he can barely talk (in English), but he blabbers on in what sounds like a mixture of French and Japanese, so Jim and I attempt to interpret for him.   Jim insists that Jamie is also cold all the time like him, and thus for the sake of our poor innocent child I should be a loving mother, and unselfishly turn the heat up.  His proof of this is that Jamie comes wailing into our room in the wee hours of most mornings (think 2:00 am), crawling into bed with us and shocking us both into wide eyed consciousness with his frigid cold feet and toes.   Obviously Jamie is cold in his own bed and it wakes him up, so he naturally seeks the comfort of his parents warm bed all because his evil mother keeps the house too cold.  This is plainly untrue because the first thing Jamie does when he gets in our bed (after putting his cold feet on us of course) is to kick the covers off.  Jim and I inevitably end up chasing the covers down the bed, ending up scrunched up at the bottom while Jamie freely roams the top half of the bed in cover-less paradise.  This is also the kid who rips his sweatshirts off and frequently escapes out the front door to traipse through mud puddles in nothing but bare feet and a diaper.  Any kid who can last 15 minutes happily playing nude in 50 degree weather, before his mother drags him kicking and screaming back inside, clearly does not suffer from the cold.   And I rest my case.   The thermostat is going down to 65 tonight.

I haven’t forgotten about my weekly preggo pics, but until now there wasn’t any difference between one week and the next so I didn’t bother to post them.  However, I proudly hit the 11 week mark last Tues and here are the pictures to prove my growing bump.  Julie says we’re going to laugh at these later when I look like I swallowed a watermelon, but it’s still fun to compare these early weeks.

7 weeks.

11 weeks

We had an amazing Christmas this year.  Jim talked me into staying home this year and I have to admit it was a good idea.

Sometimes disobedience is its own consequence; A concept Jamie learned for the first time today.  We were eating dinner and Jamie kept trying to sneak a jalapeño.   Every time I saw his hand reach for it I told him no, and warned him they were too hot for him.   However as the saying goes, experience is the best teacher and a fool learns by no other.  Jamie successfully a bsconded a jalapeno and jammed it into his mouth before I could stop him.  Moments later steam erupted from his ears, his face turned purple and his eyes grew bloodshot.  He screamed, he cried, sweat poured from his face.  He tried to pull his tongue out, and then rubbed his eyes with hands that were now burning from the juice in his mouth.    I offered him bread, sugar and milk, but he threw it on the ground convinced it was an evil plot to make him more miserable.   I finally managed to get some milk down him, all while reminding him to obey me next time.   He looked at me warily like I had rigged the whole thing on purpose so he’d learn his lesson.  lol

We got Jamie a little toy nativity scene, the kind that’s chew proof, shatter proof and can’t cause bodily injury.   Somehow though in the festivities yesterday we forgot to read the Christmas story and play with the nativity scene.    No worries.  I firmly believe in prolonging Christmas as long as possible and in my opinion it ain’t over till New Years, so we did it today instead.   Surprisingly he was quite enthused with the story and made us read it twice.   He had a few modifications though, when playing with the nativity scene he tossed the donkey and put Mary and Joseph on a hot wheel car.   Despite my repeated attempts to correct him,  he also insisted on having Joseph, and the hotwheel around the baby savior, while Mary ran off with one of the wise men.  One of the other wise man never made it, so only the camel and one lonely wise man actually showed up in the nativity scene.   Jim and I had a good laugh.  You have to start somewhere right?