A Walking Boy!

I'm sure most of you have already heard by now. Elijah has decided to start walking! I was a little shocked at how quickly it happened. One day he was cruising along and would take one or two steps. The next day he would take five or six steps before plopping down on his tushie. The day after that he was walking across the room! Is it really supposed to happen so fast? He still doesn't know how to pick himself up off of the floor when he falls. He crawls to the nearest object  to pull up to a stand.
 


Some update on toilet training the cat, too. We had a little backsliding, I believe I mentioned this in a previous post, but when I took her in for surgery and she came back all nauseated and loopy she had an accident in her cat bed which was on the carpet. The cat bed was not waterproof and I think some of the scent must have lingered in that spot. Since then she has periodically gone there instead of in the toilet. I deodorized the carpet and have a squirt bottle at the ready. But this morning when she started sniffing that spot and got "The Look" from me she ran off (knowing that a squirt was on the way) but didn't go to the toilet. She went to the baby's room! I gave her a proper scolding when I saw what she was doing. But that convinced me that it was time to take a few steps back in the training process. She was going in the toilet before, but with a thin training device that had some kitty litter around the edge. I'm adding more to that so the toilet is more like a litter box with a small hole in the center open to the water. Now I'll gradually make that hole bigger. Much slower than last time. Maybe I'll wait a week between each change to be positive she's accepting it. Pottying anywhere else is not acceptable.

That's all for now!

Manic Monday

Last Friday was the big Movie Night for all of us ladies for 3rd Combat Engineering Battalion. We watched Julie and Julia and tried out the giant popcorn machine.

The machine worked great and the popcorn was just like you get at the movie theater. I was almost ready to invite more friends over the weekend to try it out again (just to be really sure it works...) but when I went to clean the thing... I decided it would be best to just pack it up and ship it out. The main body of it isn't too hard to wipe down, but combine that with the kettle and the tools and the seed-collecting tray it's a bit of a chore.

Last night Elijah came down with something. He developed a fever and puked all over his sheets, all over his carpet, all over himself, all over me. Neither of us slept well last night. In fact it's hard to believe it was only last night that it started. It feels more like several days ago.

So I was exhausted and emotionally strained when I got up this morning and started packing up the popcorn popper to take to the post office. That took several hours to do. Elijah was still not feeling well and was being quite clingy. He wouldn't go down for a long nap like he usually does so I'm sure he was tired on top of feeling icky. So I worked in short little spurts whenever I got a minute or two reprieve from him.

It was about three in the afternoon when we finally got to the post office. I had a sick baby in a stroller, a very large 50 lb box, and a smaller but still heavy 20 lb. box of popcorn packets. I wasn't sure how I was going to get it all into the post office from my car at the same time but I was sure going to try.

Fortunately for us a very kind First Lieutenant saw me struggling with it all by my car and carried the big box in for me.

Everyone in the post office was in awe at the size of my box.

"Wow! Is that really a popcorn machine?" The lady in front of me asked. (There's a picture of it on the side of the box.)

"Yeah, I'm shipping it to my husband in Afghanistan. He's going to use it to make popcorn for all the guys for movie nights."

"Wow, that's awesome! I'm just sending my husband a toaster oven."

Meanwhile the postal worker behind the counter eyed me critically when I mentioned Afghanistan.
When I got the chance to request some customs forms he eyed the box and told me that there were size restrictions for sending things overseas via airmail and my box was too big.

My heart sank. I was crushed. After all that... After finding the perfect popper, spending an enormous amount of money on it, buying popcorn for it, waiting for it to arrive, arranging a movie night with all the ladies, cleaning and re-packing it, hauling it all the way to the post office with my sick baby, and now they weren't going to be able to send it!

"Really? I mean, isn't there some way? There has to be some way to send it, right?"

"Well, miss. It could possibly go via ground shipping. But that could take months to get it there and it would be very expensive."

"Really? How much are we talking about here?"

"We're talking about a lot of money. I can't imagine you would be willing to spend that much to send it."

I think he was underestimating how much I really didn't want to walk back out those doors with that box. At that point I was seriously thinking that I would spend a thousand dollars if it would just get that darn machine to Afghanistan.

He seemed to see the resolve in my expression and we started filling out paperwork and taking measurements. In the end it wasn't so bad. Yes it will take a couple months (possibly longer) for the popcorn popper to make it to my husband. But that's not much different than half the boxes that I've sent him so far. I sent him a care package a month ago via Priority Mail and that still hasn't gotten to him. It actually cost significantly less than the postal worker was expecting because for FPO APO addresses there is a discount. I don't remember exactly how much it was now, but I think it was around $60.

The packets of popcorn seeds and oil I'm going to re-package in free flat-rate boxes. It will be much cheaper to send them that way. Possibly free if I get them packed up quickly enough and send them tomorrow through our community Care Package Day event.

So that's (hopefully) the end of the popcorn machine story. I hope that I can soon report that it made it safely to the troops and is providing them with loads of tasty popcorn to munch on while they watch their manly movies.

Another great thing that happened today, the previews of Elijah's first birthday photo shoot are up on the photographer's website! They're wonderful and I can't wait to see them all!

Here's the site. Just scroll down to see some of Elijah's pictures.
Shannon Velloza Photography Blog

Birthday Party, Pictures, and More

Elijah's birthday party was on the 8th. It went pretty well, all things considered. I'm not really the best at being in charge of events. But the party got pulled together and the kids (and even the adults) seemed to have a good time. I ordered the decorations from a website and our local grocery store was able to draw an approximation of one of the cartoon characters from his decorations on his birthday cake. There were bubbles for the little guests to play with outside, there were snacks and drinks. The grown ups got to sit on the couch and chat. The cake was delicious. It had fresh strawberries and Bavarian cream in the middle. (I'd asked for bananas, but I'm not complaining. It was tasty.)

I made a Banana Split Brownie Pizza (Pampered Chef recipe) and that was a real hit. Almost as much as the helium-filled balloons were with the kids.

It was all so hectic, and I'm so unused to being in charge of things, that I completely forgot to serve the cheese/meat/cracker tray I bought and the homemade ice cream I'd been working on all that week. So some of our guests who stayed to help clean up got to take home a couple cartons of Natalie's Signature mint chocolate ice cream. I'm stuck with a bunch of crackers pepperonis, salamis, and cheese.

As you can see in the picture above of the cake there is a significant amount of blue frosting. It was very cute as decoration, and made for some really cute pictures like this one:

But we soon realized that the blue was not so easy to get off of the skin. Really, when you order a cake from a bakery shouldn't they courteously ask, "Would you prefer the dying or the non-dying frosting?" I seriously thought Elijah was going to look like a smurf for a week! And he was supposed to have his first year portraits taken the next day!

Fortunately most of the blue came out in the bath. And the rest seemed to rub off easily as he played. One of our guests gave me a call a couple days later and asked if it all had come out, her daughters hands were still blue.

As luck would have it, the day after his party was so windy we had to reschedule his portrait session. Around these parts the wind isn't blocked by trees or hills, it just runs free carrying anything and everything with it; bushes, lawn furniture, small dogs... So when it looked like I was about to see Dorothy Gale or the Wicked Witch sailing past my window I wasn't surprised to get an email from the photographer asking if I would rather hold off on our outdoor session for less inclement weather.

Elijah was supposed to have his one year doctor's appointment yesterday. But yesterday was significantly less windy and it seemed like the only time in the near future that we could reschedule his photo shoot. Normally I would never back out of a doctor's appointment here on base. If you do you aren't likely to get a new appointment anywhere near the date of your original. But the timing was just too close and I didn't want him feeling all grouchy from his shots while trying to get a smile out of him.

The photo shoot went pretty well. The photographer, Shannon Velloza, Shannon's Website went with me out to the park and we got a lot of pictures of Elijah among the rocks and wild desert foliage. Her husband is deployed, too, so she brought her kids along. They all kind of went wild among the boulders, about giving their mom a heart attack when they climbed up to the tops of the rocks. I just chuckled to myself, knowing that if they were our kids and my husband were here he'd be egging them on.

Now I know some of you are wondering about how Elijah is doing in the walking department. Well, he isn't walking on his own yet. He still prefers "four wheel drive" so to speak. But I will get a video of him taking a few steps if/when I can.

Alice is progressing in her potty training. We had a minor setback when she got spayed cut open. She was so loopy from the meds, I think, that she couldn't make it up to the toilet so she went in her bed. It was just once but I'm taking it slow just in case. Still, I think that in a couple weeks we'll be done and I can post a pic of our dear little Alice using the toilet!

I still have not shipped out the extremely large popcorn popper. I'm hosting a movie night at our place this Friday so we can "make sure it works" before I send it. Also, we get paid again this Friday and I'm sure I'll need the extra funds to actually get the machine over there. It's really big and quite heavy. Not to mention that for the movie night I needed to buy a TV and a Blu-Ray player. The TV is a surprise to my husband and I'm hoping he won't find out about it until he gets home. So, please, everyone try to keep it hush hush. I got a 46" Sony Bravia LED LCD TV. It's very thin, fairly large, and has excellent resolution. A friend came and helped me mount it on the wall last night. When it was done, even though it was a little late, I couldn't help but put in Avatar on Blu-Ray just to see how it looked. It was AWESOME! I think Bryan will be thoroughly impressed when he sees it.

Our Poor Expensive Kitty

One of the requirements from the shelter when we adopted Alice was that she must be spayed within thirty days. They gave me a voucher for $30 off the spay at a local vet's office and attached to that was a certificate that the vet would send them confirming that he had performed the surgery. They spoke rather threateningly of coming to steal her away if they didn't receive that confirmation within the allotted time.

So, shortly after we brought Alice home I took her for a check up at the local animal hospital. At that check up they found that she had ear mites an ear infection from the mites and gingivitis. The vet prescribed some medicine to get rid of the mites and some antibiotic drops for her ears. He said he wanted to do a dental cleaning soon to help combat the gingivitis and see if she needed any teeth pulled. I decided to hold off on that and see if her gums got better being at home with us.

So that was a pretty expensive trip to the vet, and I hadn't even gotten her spayed yet. I decided to postpone the spay until she was no longer being treated for her ear infection.

While we were waiting for her ears to get better a thought occurred to me. What if she had already been spayed in her "past life"? It would be silly to shave down and cut open this poor animal for no reason. So I called and asked them. "What happens if she's already spayed?"

They said the only way the Dr. could be sure would be to open her up and see if there's nothing in there to take out. But they would gladly wait if I wanted to see if she would go into heat or not. I remembered the threats of the shelter saying they would come take her away if she wasn't altered on time and decided not to chance it.

So I took her in. With the voucher the shelter gave me the surgery would not be very expensive. I also had high hopes that her gums were doing better. They didn't look nearly as red or swollen as they had when I first got her.

A couple hours after I dropped her off one of the vet-techs called me: "You were wondering about whether or not she was spayed already. Well, we have her sedated and shaved and there is a scar there. We can't be positive that it's not from some other surgery, though."

I sighed. It would be better to be positive and have the certificate than to back out and violate the contract. I told them to go ahead and check.

A little while later I got another call. It turns out Alice was already spayed. They'd shaved her down and cut her open just so I could have a piece of paper.

Sigh... okay.

But there was more. As the vet-tech was extubating her she noticed that Alice had a pretty nasty cavity on one tooth. She touched it and it obviously caused Alice pain. Did I want them to go ahead with the dental cleaning and pull that tooth? She quoted me a total price that was about four times as expensive as the spay alone.

Sigh... okay.

A while later I got another call. The same vet-tech explained that they had done the dental cleaning and the vet examined all Alice's teeth. There were six teeth that he recommended be pulled, one of which was already cracked in half and all of them had cavities all the way to the root. She explained that I could turn down the procedure but that eventually the pain could cause her to become aggressive or, if they got infected, to die. I asked if any of these teeth weren't really necessary to be pulled. She checked with the vet and answered that he recommended they ALL be taken out.

Sigh... okay. (Can you tell I'm a pushover, yet?)

So, in the end, she didn't really need to be spayed, but she had six teeth pulled. I won't quote prices here, I'm not sure if any of you have heart problems and I don't want to put you at risk of a heart attack. But, in the end I spent about SIXTEEN TIMES what I was planning to spend on her spay alone. For what I spent that day I could have driven to Los Angeles and bought a fancy purebred cat from a breeder and still had money left over to get it's shots and spayed or neutered it.

She is a very sweet kitty and I think she deserves to be taken care of. I just wish it wasn't so darn expensive.

Moving Right Along

It feels like nothing is happening, so it's easy to procrastinate with updates. I keep telling myself I'll write something when something interesting happens. But I still keep putting it off. So here I go, forcing myself to write.

Many a spouse of a deployed sailor/marine/soldier gets requests for things to send. "I need some new razors," one might say, "Send me some books to read," another will plead "I've really been craving some beef jerky," is heard a lot.

My husband, in his first email to me, asked for a popcorn popper. It sounds weird, but it gets weirder. He wants me to send him a huge, expensive, theater-style, electric popcorn popper so he can make very large quantities of popcorn. The reason (in case you're starting to think my husband is a lunatic) is that he wants to show movies for his marines on occasion and having a popcorn popper would be a good morale booster. Before he left he packed up all his favorite kung fu and action DVDs to take with him and bought about ten on iTunes to have on his hard drive. So he's got a nice library to choose from. I think he might have access to a projector and speakers also. All that's missing is the popcorn.

So he writes to me asking if I can buy and ship him one of those big poppers like you see at the carnival or in Target. How can I say no?

I start aGoogling and find one for the relatively cheap price of $200. Another $60 for a couple cases of popcorn and oil. The only problem is nowhere can I find a place that will ship to an FPO address. (That's the kind of address military folk get when they are sent overseas on deployment.) So I had to send it all to myself first.

So now I'm sitting here with a very large box (the machine) and two smaller-but-still-heavy boxes (the popcorn) sitting in my entryway and I'm thinking... I need to make sure this thing works!

To be continued...

One down...

Has it already been a week and a half? I can hardly believe it. The time seems to be flying by.

I suppose keeping busy helps. So much has happened, but I'm having trouble organizing it all into coherence. I'm getting used to being in charge of the things that he used to be in charge of, paying bills, putting gas in the car, and even being social. When he was home we would always be on his schedule and go where he would go with the people he wanted to be with. Now it's up to me, the introvert, to make sure our household doesn't become a hermitage. I think I'm managing it... with a little effort.

Elijah and I are putting together a care package to send to daddy. Every month here on base they have a "Care Package Day" on which you can send a special military flat-rate box overseas for free. This month it's on the 20th. So we've got to make some special things to send so that he knows how much we love and miss him. Elijah is going to send a "high five" (I'm going to trace his hand on a piece of paper.) I'm sending a card with a note inside. There will be some practical things in it, too, like trail mix, baby wipes, perhaps some razors and mouthwash. If anyone has a good idea for something to send let me know! I need all the advice I can get.

My husband's birthday is coming up soon, too. Someone kindly brought to my attention an online Cakery that will ship cakes directly to our servicemen overseas! So I'm going to send him a birthday cake! Here's the one I plan on sending. I think he'll like the coffee cake: Birthday Cake

Speaking of birthdays, Elijah's birthday is also coming up soon. As The Lord would have it, Elijah's birthday is the day after his daddy's. In the future we hope to be able to throw combined parties for them, or we can choose to have separate parties. It's a nice arrangement. This year they won't get to be together. We'll have to plan something to make it special anyway.

I get to arrange Elijah's first birthday party all by myself. Part of me wants to go WAY overboard, invite every family we know, hire a clown, rent a bouncy house and all that good stuff. But part of me also wants to just have two or three friends over, a few cupcakes, sing "happy birthday" and have that be it.

We'll see what happens I guess!

Toilet Training the Cat (Part 1)

As mentioned in a previous post I'm training Alice to use our family commode. I'm doing this for several reasons. 1. It will save a lot of money on kitty litter. 2. I don't like to clean litter boxes. 3. If we decide to have another child I won't have to worry about toxoplasmosis. 4. It's a cool trick!

I have done some reading up on the various methods of toilet training cats and have mixed a few of them together to accommodate our particular situation.

The first step was to make sure that Alice was, in fact, litter box trained. I acquired a small white litter box (about the size of our toilet bowl) and flush-able litter. I placed her box right next to the toilet. I intend to train her on the toilet in our master bathroom. I don't want her using the guest bathroom as I can foresee that leading to quite a shock to visitors.

For the first day she was with us I kept Alice shut up in our master bedroom with the door open to our bathroom and her litter box. This way I could make sure she knew where her box was and it would be easy to find any "accidents" if they did happen.

Step 1. Complete

The next phase in training involves raising the litter box to the same level as the toilet. Every day I will raise it up a little higher until she eventually has to jump up to get into it.

One book:

Two books:

You can see that I've taped the box in place. It wouldn't do to have a unstable litter box during her training.

Yesterday we got her toilet training kit in the mail! They shipped it very quickly. Once we're ready it will be exciting to start using it.