Had to take a break for awhile...

I can't believe it's been over 2 weeks since I updated the blog! It's not that I haven't had anything to write about -- just the opposite. Life has been so crazy and busy the last few weeks and my poor little blog got neglected. I've been traveling, working like a dog (ha ha, get it? Like a dog?), trying to finish random household projects, attending a veterinary conference, catching up with old friends...it's been a good few weeks with very little downtime. There's also been alot going on "behind the scenes" that I can't address on the blog just yet but let's just say I'm super pre-occupied with new developments in my personal life (nothing bad). I've been doing a good amount of soul-searching and thinking the last few weeks, and I actually have quite a few blog posts in my mind that I just need to commit to the computer. But who has the time LOL? So here's a brief recap of this vet's life over the past few weeks:

• Work is crazy. I work in a two-doctor practice, just me and another woman who also has a 3-year-old. She just went on maternity leave last week with #2, so for the next 3 months...I'm the only doc in the clinic. All day, everyday. I know it's temporary, but my perfect little schedule has been thrown somewhat out of whack, and I now have to work every Saturday. Not to mention the gnawing worry I have about what I'll do if J gets sick over the next couple months - since I'm the only vet I can't exactly call in unless it's a truly dire emergency. Oh, to be a working mom. Thank God (again) for TH.
  
• I turned 32 a couple of days ago. I still feel 25. Moving on.
• For the big 3-2 I flew to Denver over the weekend and surprised my twin sister - she had no idea I was coming. The two of us and our younger sis had a FABULOUS "Girls Only" weekend at a FABULOUS hotel in downtown Denver. We basically hung out, talked, watched the Oscars while eating chocolates and drinking champagne, and attempted to eat our way through Denver in 3 days. Sadly this is the first time since J was born that I've gotten away by myself for a "Girls Weekend." I think I need to do this, oh, I don't know, like every WEEK. If only. More on our weekend tomorrow.
  
• I'm *almost* done with J's Big Boy Room. We transferred him into the Big Boy Bed at Christmas, and I've been planning this big post with before-and-after pictures and close-ups of all the details...except as usual I bit off a little more than I could chew with a large hand-painted mural project on his closet doors. It looks great so far, but it's not...quite...finished. Surprise surprise.
  
• J is still not potty-trained. Although there is light at the end of the tunnel - for some reason he's willing to use the potty at daycare all of a sudden. I'm tempted to offer my daycare lady more money if she'll just take over the whole thing for me. Just kidding. Kind of.
• I'm so excited! We get to have a photo shoot with Lesley (fellow blogger who is also a photographer) this weekend!! Thanks to LauraC who told me about a little giveaway contest on Lesley's blog a few weeks ago that I inexplicably won. THANK YOU LAURA FOR THAT HEADS UP!
• I'll end with a "kids say the cutest things" story. J has 2 music boxes in his room on his bookshelf. So lately he's been in the habit of starting up these music boxes when he's getting ready for bed - it's very cute, he's making his own ritual. Last night he started both music boxes at the same time and then came and got me, and when we got into his room he pointed at them and said, "Look, now they're both singing!"
  

Where a kid can be a kid. And get the Ebola virus while he's at it.

Yesterday was J's first outing to Chuck E. Cheese, for a birthday party. I was hoping he'd never know about Chuck E. Cheese until he was way older. Like old enough to take his own kids there. You see, I can't stand Chuck E. Cheese or any place like it. Neither can TH. I don't know why, it's a little irrational, but I really despise going to these places.

Maybe it's because when I was a kid, we NEVER went to Chuck E. Cheese, or the equivalent when I was growing up in Denver, Showbiz Pizza. I didn't even know about it until I was 11 and I was invited to a birthday party there. And even at 11, it just wasn't for me. The food was craptastic. Half the games didn't work. There were too many kids there, and even as an 11-year-old I was grossed out by the grime on everything and the way my shoes kept....sticking...to the...floor. Chuck E. himself was extremely creepy with one eye that didn't move while he was "singing." I mean, he's a rat, for God's sake. Who wants to play with a giant rat? To top things off, after 2 hours of struggling with the dirty, broken, inane games, all my zealously hoarded tickets got me was a plastic spider ring. It didn't even glow in the dark.

So when my friend T told me that she was having her kids' birthday party (3 kids with birthdays in one week - a 2 year-old and twin 1-year-olds, do the math on that one) at Chuck E. Cheese, I wasn't exactly thrilled. When I told her J had never been to Chuck E. Cheese before, she was completely astounded. "Are you kidding??" she said. "My kids have been there dozens of times already! We LOVE Chuck E. Cheese!!" At that point I started to wonder if maybe I'd been unfair to old Chuck, based on a bad experience at an admittedly, um...ghetto Chuck E. Cheese when I was a kid. So TH and I decided to just suck it up and see if Chuck E. Cheese is someplace we could be taking J on slow nights when we can't figure out an activity not involving walking through a casino. When I told J about the party, he was somehow already well-versed in what goes on at Chuck E. Cheese (it's scary how well commercials and marketing work on these guys at such a young age.) I'd barely gotten the words "and it's at Chuck E. Cheese, do you know what that is?" out of my mouth before he literally started jumping for joy, telling me, "Oh,YEAH!! It has games, and birthday parties, and ice cream, and a party and balloons and-and-and games!! Yeah, CHUCK E. CHEESE!!! BIRTHDAY PARTY!!! LET'S GO NOW!!!" and then he almost hyperventilated with the ecstasy of it all.

When we got to Chuck E. Cheese, we were pleasantly surprised - at first. It was a lot cleaner than what I remembered from the ghetto Chuck's when I was 11, with only a little bit of floor-stickiness. Chuck E. himself was neither broken nor especially creepy, although J wisely kept his distance (he's still a giant RAT, people). The food was better than I remembered, not great, but no worse than alot of pizza joints around here. J of course did not eat anything except ice cream and a bite of cake--even the joy of being at Chuck E. Cheese couldn't entice my picky eater to touch pizza. J was pretty well-behaved, but he was almost vibrating he was so amped to start playing the games. The lights! The sounds! The tickets shooting out! No wonder so many people are hypnotized when they enter a room full of slot machines.

When we got to the games, it was the same old disappointment all over again. Half of them didn't work and just ate our tokens, and the other half were either way above J's age level or in various levels of disrepair. The whack-a-mole only had 1 out 5 moles that would actually pop up. When we tried to play skee-ball (one of my favorites) only one ball came out and then it disappeared after the first roll. Admittedly it was funny watching him and another 2-year-old playing mini air hockey. J was just like me when I play, yelling things like "YEAH, BOY!" or "ha-HA!" when he made a shot, which was surprisingly often.

Things started to fall apart when J bravely entered the tunnel/spiral slide/ball pit thingy which required the kids to climb up the inside of an enclosure and crawl around in a maze of tunnels to reach the slide. As I watched J climb to the top I was so proud that he was hanging in there with the big kids, until he made a wrong turn and got stuck at a junction of tunnels. I could see him through the little submarine-hole bubble window, his face pressed to the smeared-with-God-knows-what plexiglass looking down at me, crying and mouthing, "Mommy." After 5 minutes of me and TH trying to pantomime which way he should go, he gave up and just slumped against the side of the tunnel crying. TH looked at me, I looked at him, and like all good parents we rock-paper-scissored who would have to climb up in there and get J. TH lost. After they made their way out, J was smiling and saying, "Did you see me? I got lost!" and TH looked thoroughly disgusted. "I've got to a find a restroom RIGHT NOW," he said. "I slipped when my hand went into some kid's snot!" That was it for me. We used up our tokens, collected the tickets (which bought us one measly orange crazy straw that made J insanely happy) and got the heck out of there.

I'm sure J had a FABULOUS time, and the first words out of his mouth this morning were, "Can we go to Chuck E. Cheese now?" But as for TH and I...sorry, Chuck E. Cheese. Maybe in a few years.

These kinds of stories are gross. Unless you're another parent...then it's funny.

For the past couple of weeks, every little kid we know has been sick with some sort of flu bug. All of our friends' kids, all the kids at daycare, all the little kids at church, etc. J finally got his turn this weekend. It started as a runny nose that quickly progressed to what we call "glazed doughnut face" (think about it), followed by coughing all day and night. Yesterday morning, bright and early, I woke up to J standing right next to my side of the bed coughing up a lung, telling me, "I sick, I want something to drink." TH got up and gave him a cup of orange juice and I went downstairs to start getting ready for church. A few minutes later, I heard a huge commotion--running around, TH yelling "Go in the bathroom!! Go in the bathroom!!"--so I went back up to see what was going on. J had vomited up the orange juice. Everywhere. In our bathroom, on the carpet in our bedroom, in the hallway, and all over his tiled bathroom floor. He was standing in the corner of his bathroom, looking dazed, basically "painted in" by vomit that he didn't want to step into. But, when he saw me, of course he started crying and attempted to run across the bathroom. And slipped. And started skidding around like one of the Three Stooges. In vomit.

As I was trying to process all of this, TH had run downstairs to get a bowl in case J needed to barf again. I started to get J undressed (starting with peeling off the barfy socks) when I heard a distinctive yakking sound behind me. I turned, and our cat Yoda was now throwing up on the bathroom rug. That's not unusual for Yoda, but normally he waits until the middle of the night so we find it in the morning as we're stumbling around getting ready for work. I guess this time he felt left out and decided to join the barfing party. I turned back to taking care of J, and once he was clean and changed I pulled out our Little Green Steam Machine to clean the carpet and rug. As I started to clean up, the combination of orange juice vomit/cat vomit/steam cleaner wet carpet smell started to overcome me and...you guessed it. I had to run in the bathroom and barf. All I could think of was that scene in The Goonies when Chunk tells the story about how he got all the people in the movie theater to start vomiting everywhere...yeah. It actually does happen like that.

It was gross. But every time I think about J skidding around in the bathroom, I have to laugh. Maybe you had to be there, but it was pretty funny.