The Name Conundrum

I'm finally starting to feel better, and that means resolving something that's been bothering me for months.

What the heck are we going to name this kid?

I've been too sick and tired to spend hours and hours scrolling through lists of names only to have Will reject the ones I pick.  Now I'm not so sick, but I'm still tired, which makes me cranky when he does it.  We're closing in on a girls' name.  We're down to two, actually.  The problem is that I like one and Will likes the other, of course.

Our boy name situation seems to be going in circles.  If Joci had been a boy, her name would have been Calum, which is Scottish (where Will served his mission).  I like it ok, even though I HATE the nickname Cal.  The problem is the middle name.  I want to use either William (Will's name, duh) or Wheeler (my grandpa's name).  Will doesn't like Wheeler, but Calum William sounds weird to me (it's the 'lum 'lum).  So either we find a first name that goes with William (WAY more difficult for my picky self than it should be) or I thrash Will into submission and we go with Calum Wheeler.  My vote is for thrashing.

Anyway, I'm going to post a poll with our girl names, so vote.  Vote for mine!  I'm not telling you which one it is, but no pressure (PRESSURE!).  If we ever come up with another option for a boy name, I'll post a poll about that, too.

Another 2011 Recap

It seems like all of my friends have done their year recaps already, so I thought I'd do mine.  First thing, my three goals.  I don't remember exactly which order they went in, but they were:

1) Move out of my parents' basement.

2) Submit something for publication.

3) Lose a pound a week for an average weight loss of 52 pounds.

As many of you probably know, I accomplished 2/3 this year, and that's not bad.  I didn't lose 52 pounds.  It went really, really well at the beginning of the year and in the first two months or so I lost 15 pounds.  Then in March I fell off the wagon and over the course of the summer gained most of it back.  Thanks to morning sickness, I'm down to about where I was again, but now that I'm in my second trimester, I'm pretty sure that will be changing.

Here are some of our monthly highlights:

January: In one month, I wrote about 98% a 75,000 word novel.  I've never been prouder of myself as the moment when I typed "The End."  Of course now I have plans to rewrite from the bottom up, but I think we can safely say that one's first full-length novel, no matter how bad, is an accomplishment!

February: Not much happened.

March: Still not too much going on.

April: Will and I decide that it's really time to move out.  He calls his old boss in Utah who says, "Sure you can have your job back."  We celebrate Easter and Joci's first birthday early because Will left Ohio a few days before both.  I spend the rest of the month packing, getting ready for a garage sale, and relying heavily on my parents for help with my kids.

May: After about three weeks which consisted entirely of packing, garage sale prep, and more relying on my parents to keep me sane, the girls and I boarded a flight to Utah.  Even though I thought Joci would be the problem, Chaela's handful of drop-to-the-floor, scream-her-head-off tantrums proved me wrong.  Thank goodness for kind fellow travelers.  When we finally arrived and I saw Will standing in the airport, I literally cried with relief.

June: We settle into life in Utah, reacquaint ourselves with the area, and reconnect with some great friends.  Thanks to the fact that most of our stuff is still in Ohio, we live a fairly spartan lifestyle, and for the first time in my life, I keep our apartment clean all the time.

July: Not too much goes on.  The girls and I head down to SF reservoir with Rosalie and hang out with her a lot.  She is a life saver while Will works those 10-14 hour summer days!

August: More hanging out.  I talk to some other women in my ward and we organize a Joy School (a small pre-school taught by the moms).  Had an INCREDIBLE girls' night/sleepover with some old friends from high school.

September: Chaela begins Joy School, which is her favorite thing in the world.  Pretty sure it was around the beginning of this month that Joci finally began to walk at 16 and 1/2 months old.  My parents brought out all of our stuff, and Kristin, Lindsay, Rosalie, and families all came out to help.

October:  This was the month I accomplished my goal to submit something for publication, which also earned me my first professional rejection letter, which I may frame.  At the end of the month, when I found out I was pregnant with baby #3!  For Halloween I made the girls some pirate costumes and we had a ton of fun trick or treating with Rosalie and her kids!

November: Chaela turned four, which she seems to think means she's an adult.  She had a fun little party with her friends and I had a fun little party with their moms.  Saw some of Will's family for a pre-Thanksgiving weekend, awesome!  For Thanksgiving itself  we visited my sisters and discovered that Kristin could, indeed, cook a turkey.  Also during this month, morning sickness ruins my life.

December: More dealing with morning sickness, but mostly preparing for the holidays.  We had a great Christmas and were thrilled to see family, not as thrilled to see them move out-of-state.

So that's pretty much year.  It's been fun, and I'm looking forward to the next one!

Baby #3!

I posted on facebook a few days ago, so I'm guessing everyone who reads this blog knows, but we found out a few months ago that we're expecting baby #3 next June!  I'm excited, even though for the past ten weeks it's been difficult to feel much but sick.  I'm hoping that will clear out within the next two weeks, though, and we can get back to normal around here.

I've told the girls.  Chaela is pretty excited, but every time we ask Joci if she wants a new baby in the house she says, "Uh-uh baby!"  I think she'll be a great big sister, though.  She loves all the babies she sees at church and she's getting a new cousin about two months before our baby is born, so we'll use him as a sort of practice-run for her (sorry Kristin, ha ha).  Chaela is an old hand at being a big sister now, so I'm not worried about her, she's really a loving and helpful girl.  I will probably keep our bedroom door shut for the first few weeks the baby is home, however, because when we brought Joci home from the hospital, we woke up the next morning to find Chaela in the pack and play with her.  It was both terrifying and amazingly cute.  

We don't have names picked out yet.  I looked a lot at first, but sort of gave up for a while.  We have plenty of time, and now that I'm past the first trimester and S-L-O-W-L-Y starting to feel like a person again I'll probably restart the hunt.  It's such a pain trying to find something Will and I agree on.

I also put up a ticker under Joci's picture on the sidebar.  I know some people think this one is creepy, but I love seeing a representation of what the baby actually looks like.  And I would love to hear name suggestions in the comments; it's always fun to hear what people say!

Well it's been almost a month since I blogged, but not too much has been going on.  We're gearing up for the holidays, and I'm sure there will be more to talk about with those coming up.  The person in our family who has been changing the most lately is Joci, because she's learning a lot of new words.  Here are some of them:

Hot! (usually followed by her blowing on whatever it is)
Soo (soup)
Hot soo! (blowing noise)
Shoe
Show
Pop
Juu (juice)
Mine!
Bye Pooh!
Bye Joe!
Bye sis! (these are all said randomly)
Ball
Yay!

So that's Joci.  She vocalizes constantly, but for the most part it's babyspeak.  Sometimes between her and Chaela, though, I think I might invest in a pair of earplugs.

"Well, I didn't ask if I could have cookies!"

A funny story from today.

It was my turn to teach Joy School this morning (a preschool taught by a small group of mothers, way cheaper than traditional if you've got the time).  Halfway through, I got a migraine.  Ugh.  It was awful.  But I went along with the lesson as long as I could.  I made it through snack time, which was two Halloween Oreos I bought especially for this the night before, one candy corn pumpkin each, grapes, and crackers. When it got too bad, I put on "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown," which got me through until parents arrived.
By the time the kids left, it was bad.  I could hardly see, couldn't focus, had a pounding headache, all the lovely things that come with a migraine.  It was lunch time, but I could hardly stand, so I gave my kids a cheese stick and made Joci a cup of milk and stuck her in bed with it for her nap.  Thankfully, the milk filled her up and she slept.

I told Chaela that I was sick and had to lay down for a while, telling her, "Sweetie, if you need anything, wake me up and I'll try and get it for you, ok?"

"Ok, mom!" she said, then sat herself at the computer, which she loves to play on.
Too far gone to care about the daily recommended amount of screen time for young children, I collapsed into bed.

I woke up when Joci did about two hours later, feeling much better.  Chaela came into my room and we had this conversation:
"Hey, honey, I bet you're really hungry since we missed lunch!" I said.
"No," Chaela responded.  "Not really."
"What?  Are you sure?  You're not hungry at all?"
"No."
Silence.
"Chaela... what did you eat?" I asked, suddenly suspicious.
"Um, I don't know, ha ha!" she giggled.
"Yes you do," I said.  "What did you eat?"
"Ha ha!  I don't know!"
"Chaela," I said in my 'mom' voice, "Tell me what you ate."
"Well..." she said, "I didn't ask if I could have cookies."
I remembered I had left the bag of Oreos on the counter, at least 1/2 full.  I remembered Chaela's propensity for using a stool to reach things she wasn't supposed to have.
"Chaela, did you eat that entire bag of Oreos?"
"Ha ha!  No.  There's one, two, three left!"
"You ate all the cookies but three?"
"Yeah!  And some pumpkins!"
"The candy pumpkins we had at snack time?"
"Yeah!  I put them in a bowl!"
I rubbed my face with my hands and sighed.  There's one thing to be said about being sick, it makes me much more mellow.
I sighed.  "Alright, well I'm glad you weren't hungry the whole time.  No more candy or cookies for the rest of the day."
"Ok mom!"
And she bounced away.
When I walked into the kitchen, I saw she'd even poured her own glass of milk and had obviously been dipping the Oreos in it.  She hadn't spilled a drop.  If she hadn't left the gallon out on the floor, I might have missed the fact that she'd done it.  And no, she never got a stomach ache or acted like she felt sick.

Kids.

Bucket List

Inspired by my friend Maya over at Musings of a Marfan Mom I decided to post my bucket list.  I don't think I have before, but if so, oh well!  She did it as part of a contest so check that out on her blog if you're interested, but I'm just posting mine for fun.

 1. Own our own home.
 2. Finish and publish a novel, preferably with some measure of success.
 3. Get some dogs, probably Siberian Huskies.
 4. Get a Master's degree.
 5. Become a more patient and kind mother.
 6. Travel to Hawaii, Alaska, the UK, Australia, Japan, and a bunch of other places.
 7. Get back into drawing and painting.
 8. Be in a musical.
 9. Make exercise a part of my daily (or at least every-other-daily) life
10.Always maintain a reasonably clean home.
11.Live in forested mountains in a house that has a loft with a sliding glass door that leads to a balcony.
12.Do something meaningful with my degree in linguistics, like help preserve a dying language.
13.Pass my passions, loves, and beliefs on to my children, if they're willing.
14.See the world from the cockpit of an airplane, or from a helicopter, or some view that's wider than an airplane window.
15.Learn to be conversational in Spanish, French, Japanese, and for fun and shock value, Welsh.

Costumes 2011: Complete!

The sewing is finished!  Here is Joci's costume... a little different from the picture but still cute.  I only hope she deigns to keep the hat on, or else the effect won't be as good.  We'll see.  That floppiness at the top is supposed to be a hat (the pink thing inside is a bandanna... her head needs all the warmth it can get).

So all I have left to do is get them some shirts to wear underneath and see if a friend has some fake plastic swords I can borrow!  I'm excited!

2011 Goal #2: Submit something for publication - Complete!

Well, as virtually all of you saw on facebook, I reached 2/3 of my goals for the year when I submitted a short story entitled "Faerie's Child" to Daily Science Fiction yesterday afternoon.  I haven't heard back from them yet, but I should within three weeks.

I'm planning on a rejection because, as I've said before, rejections are what happen.  If I get one, I'm going to print it and hang it on my wall to motivate myself to do better.  As the title character said on Castle this past Monday, "Rejection isn't failure; giving up is failure," or something like that.  It was a timely episode for me.

I'm so paranoid I just checked my email to make sure I hadn't gotten rejected while writing this blog.  Being a writer is going to be bad for my nerves.

And I can't remember if I've said this on my blog or not, but I've decided that if I can't get published professionally after a few years of trying, I'll self-publish.  That way all you people who feel bad for me can buy my stories for pity dollars which I will use to buy myself a pity Pepsi every now and then. : )

"The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell."

Orson Scott Card said that.  It both speaks to me and disturbs me.

Weight Loss Derailed

Ok, I was looking at some old pictures of Will and I on facebook today.  Look at this:

That's us in the summer of 2006, five years ago.  Now (oh, man, I really don't want to do this...) look at this:

This is us at Christmas in 2010.  There's one where you can see us a lot better, but I just can't handle putting it up.  I know they say that weight gain is a sign of a happy relationship, but this is ridiculous.  I have lost a few pounds since this picture was taken, but I am not going to reach my goal of losing a pound per week (52 pounds) this year.   You really can't tell with Will, but he's matched my weight gain almost pound for pound, it's just harder to see.  Probably because he's a guy and six feet tall.

Anyway, I'm tired of this.  I'm tired of feeling like a frumpy mom.  I'm tired of using my kids as a facebook profile picture because the ones of me are heinous.  I'm tired of being afraid of running into people I haven't seen since college.  I want to feel good about myself again.  I've let myself go since being in Utah (gained back about half the weight I lost at the beginning of the year).  It's time to recommit myself.

I recently bought a scale.  I think being able to see myself gaining or losing weight will be exactly what I need. I wish we'd bought one sooner, then I wouldn't be starting behind... again.

There are twelve weeks left in the year.  I would like to lose fifteen pounds by the end of it.  This goal scares me, but if I can accomplish it, I will have lost a total of twenty pounds in 2011.  That's not horrible.  I would like Will to participate, but I haven't asked him yet.

I will attempt to accomplish this goal by controlling how much I eat and incorporating exercise into my routine.  The exercise is going to be hard, because our place is small and my kids are underfoot.  Not to mention I'm already trying to balance writing, housekeeping, sewing, cooking, and actually being mentally present with my daughters on a regular basis.  Oh, and spending time with Will (ha ha, love you).  Anyway, if people who do all of the above plus work can make time to be healthy, so can I.  

Right?