Judecorp.

I sure did forget this place existed. Hi there!!

I’m posting this to enter a contest offered by Check ‘n Go at Creating Motherhood! I want to win a $500 gift card! Enter to win here: http://bit.ly/plaidcash

We're not getting a Christmas tree this year. It doesn't really make sense to do it and Hurricane Tukey would destroy it, I think. The living room (the only place we can really put a tree) is kind of his safe space where all of his toys are, and I would have to move half of his toys and keep him out of his safe space, so that doesn't make sense at all. Maybe I will hang some garland on the ceiling and hang ornaments from it. I don't know. It's kind of sad, but I guess there is next year.

Punk is sad about not having a tree so I think I will buy a small fake tree and put it in her room. Maybe I will put her presents under her own tree, wouldn't that be something? I'd have to sneak into her room though. That could be disastrous!

Aaah, it's that time again.

Tuke had his first birthday party yesterday. It was a smashing success. Pun intended.

I am so excited. Today is our Special Punk and Mama day! We have been looking forward to it for a week.

Punk gets out of school at 11:30 today, so I didn't go to work. Well, I wouldn't have gone anyway because my work school district doesn't have school today, LOL. But anyway. Tukey is at day care today, so I am going to pick Punk up and take her out to lunch and a movie. I don't know who is more excited, her or me!

With two kids, we have a lot of one-on-one time doing things like running errands or reading an extra story, things like that. This is like a special treat for us, to have outings.

I think we will both have big smiles on our faces when we pick up Tukey this afternoon. :)

Thinking about scheduling a portrait session for the kids to order our holiday photo cards. I could schedule it tomorrow and get it out of the way BUT their matchy-match holiday formal outfits have not arrived in the mail yet. However, I do have matching elf pajamas from Crazy 8 that they could wear.

Or I could wait until next Wednesday afternoon to do the portraits and the outfits probably will have arrived by then, BUT the cheaper photo card pricing promotion will be over.

DECISIONS.

[Poll #1796050]

So if you somehow missed the news of the world, there was a big early snow storm in the Northeast. The snow was very wet, and very heavy, and we got nearly a foot of it. It fell onto trees that still had their leaves, weighing everything down further. Every tree in our yard broke. We have six. Two maples, four oaks. The maples are in the back yard and now our back yard is full of limbs. Less of a big deal than our front yard, which has huge limbs blocking the driveway and the front door. Some fell on our new car and it has some dents on the roof but thankfully nothing worse than that.

We lost power on Saturday night and actually our entire town and the town beside us have no power. 100% of customers. The town north of us has partial power, but really, there are power outages halfway across the state. On Sunday we left our cold house (it was 59 when we left) and went to stay with a friend in Boston through to tomorrow morning. We wanted to trick or treat here because all of the ToT in our area has been cancelled or postponed. Normally I would suck up the cold but it's near impossible with a baby because you can only bundle him up so much and you can't really stick him under a bunch of down blankets.

Now that some local folks have power, Tuke and I will likely sleep with a local heat-having friend and Punk and Jen will hang out in the cold house. We will be in the cold house during the day though. That should be interesting.

They are expecting we will be out of power for at least a week. Since our power lines got ripped both out from the main wire AND out of our house, we could be longer. It's bad news.

Sucks.

First one of the third grades in the school in which I work had lice.
Then a second grade.
And a kindergarten.

And then a lice note went through Punk's school. The lice was in one of the elementary classrooms but they sent the note to everyone.

And then lice was back in the kindergarten at work.

All of this lice talk makes me itchy all the freaking time! MAKE IT STOP, PEOPLE.

Itch.
Itch.
Itch.

Trying to resurrect the old El Jay, so I added a few new friends. Hi, Friends!!

I've been journaling here for ten years, which seems like a lifetime ago. In the summer of 2001 I was living in Columbus, OH with my now ex-husband and was attending social work school. Soon after I started this journal we split up but continued to live together until the summer of 2002, when I graduated and moved into my own place. In the winter of 2001 I got back in touch with an old friend who became my good friend, then my girlfriend, then my partner, and then - when we moved to Massachusetts - my wife. Our tenth anniversary of partnership is just around the corner. My how time flies.

She came to Columbus in 2002 and we left for MA in 2004. Columbus was a great place and I met a group of people who would become my very best friends. I will never, ever have a gang like that again, I am sure of that. I miss it.

My Jennifer and I got married in 2005 at Boston City Hall, in the first year of legal marriage in the United States. We began trying to have a baby in February of 2006 and got lucky in October of that year, becoming pregnant with twins right before leaving Boston for the western part of the state. We lost one of the twins at 10w gestation and went on to have a healthy baby girl (Punk) in July of 2007 in a rural hippie hospital with an amazing midwife and doula with whom I stay connected on FB.

We bought our first house here in the Happy Valley, where I worked first as an Early Intervention Specialist (like I had in Boston for 3 years) and later as a therapist at a local trauma clinic. I left the trauma clinic for outpatient therapy with children and adolescents in an urban school district through an outreach program. I don't have the "status" of the trauma clinic (which is pretty well known) but I DO have a school schedule and summers off to be with the family. A week after I took this job change, in February of 2010, I became pregnant with our second child on our first try in a Hail Mary off my insurance from the trauma clinic. Our son (Tukey) was born in November of last year and is coming up on his first birthday.

As you can imagine, things are pretty busy around here with two active kids and two working moms, two cats and a dirty house in the burbs. I used to have time for endless posting, and that ship has sailed. Still, I miss chronicling my life here and keeping in touch with friends in a more expressive medium.

I've had the privilege of meeting a lot of amazing people via LiveJournal that I would never have met otherwise, including a published author, a single mama of three babies, and a lot of other people in between (including most of the city of Columbus). So, hello!

So I almost never post anymore. The truth is that my life is incredibly busy and also incredibly boring.

I have had this LJ for 10 years now. It was 10 years in June, I think. Maybe July? Summer, anyway. 10 years. In the beginning I had a lot to say about a lot of things. Now I don't sleep, run around like an idiot all day, and collapse in an exhausted heap while making lists of chores. And you know, I wouldn't change a thing. Except maybe the sleep.

Next month my little BOGO baby will be one. ONE! Time sure does fly when you post once every two months.

Oh, and I started another little blog project. If you're on FaceBook you probably already know about it. If not (THAT MEANS YOU, auntiesiannan!!), let me know if you want the deets.

xo

Summer is winding down and going back to work is looming just around the corner. There is one more week of summer life before Labor Day. How is that even possible? We have had a great and busy summer, so I know the time has truly passed but I am not ready. I am clinging to summer kicking and screaming even as the leaves begin to turn and the tomatoes are plentiful on my kitchen counter.

We spent the summer living a simple life, accommodating the baby's naps and just enjoying each other. I treasured the snuggly television watching with my daughter while my son slept in his room for his morning nap. We made crafts and played with water in the sink. We practiced writing letters and completed workbooks. She is falling right into my childhood footsteps - little nerdlet in training.

My son began the summer as a mostly immobile little guy who was content to swat at toys on the play mat and is now a nine month old force of destruction. He can tear apart my clean living room in less than a minute, climbing up and pulling things down, dumping over containers, scattering toys with might and mission. He shrieks and babbles, pulls the cats' tails, and adores his sister ferociously.

We spent a bunch of time this summer watching Punk's BFF, and it was great (and restful) watching the girls interact and watching C grow into an honorary big sister, handing the baby toys and talking to him so sweetly. We took weekly trips to our CSA farm and the big girls picked tomatoes and beans, cut flowers, and helped me choose the plumpest vegetables. We had a number of play dates with school friends and other babies. And kept the living easy.

We are now entering a new chapter in our lives together, me and my two. The baby doesn't remember going to day care and has entered the world of separation anxiety, which is likely to make the next few weeks rough. We switched him from the big day care center to the lovely, cozy home day care that Punk attended when she was two-to-three. I think this will be better for him, to have his own area for sleeping and a mom's touch, not to mention being around the corner from my job so I can fetch him as necessary. Punk is headed back to her Montessori classroom but will add two more days of after-school care since the pick-ups in the afternoon have to shift to accommodate picking up the baby first. She is looking forward to no longer being the youngest child in the classroom and it will be good for her to have some new kids to mentor.

I am not looking forward to going back to work but it will be nice to see the friendly adult faces that sustain me throughout the work day. It is nice to be wanted at work and I have enjoyed the relationship I've made between my agency and my school. I will enjoy seeing how my clients have grown over the summer and see their sun-kissed faces at the start of their new school year.

Time seems to march quickly when the work week hits full swing and I'm gobsmacked to realize that I will soon be planning my son's first birthday party. To think we are mere months away from first steps and words. It is humbling to be entrusted with these sweet souls.

I don't know what the next year will bring for my children and me, but we are ready for it and will meet it all with love.