Filling in the blank months

Holey moley (or moly?) I've missed blogging but y'know life takes over sometimes... Waah, two whole months of not blogging leave me with so much to say, but no idea where to start. Here's a brief synopsis of the most exciting bits.

December: 

Christmas preparations and Christmas (duh). This was of course Little V's first Christmas and Little C's first totally-obsessed-with-Santa Christmas. I don't know how many times we went and visited Santas at the mall, but by Christmas time they knew us quite well and one in particular seemed to enjoy making me sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with him in front of all the other parents and kiddies. 

We had a great Christmas. A trampoline was erected (jeez, I'm old and I still snigger at that word), family was loved, presents were given and received and good food was ingested with gusto. At one stage there was a little too much gusto involved in V's ingestion resulting in a very scary blue baby moment.  The offending piece of food was eventually extracted from the wee one's trachea and Little V quickly returned to his usual pinkness, with a post-choke breastfeed to comfort the teary boy (and freaked mum).

January: 

Little V turned one. Woohoo! He made it. I don't know why one is such a big milestone these days when infant mortality is so low, yet I still breathed a sigh of relief that we'd made it through his first year with everyone still alive and relatively sane.

I had a weird health crisis that remains unexplained after almost 3 weeks of tests. Apparently it's not a stroke or a TIA or a migraine or multiple sclerosis or a brain tumor or any one of a heap of other things I've been tested for, but what it is remains a mystery. Ah well... I've done enough stressing about it now, so I'm just going to concentrate my energy on getting better. Any spare healing vibes would be much appreciated.

Oh yeah, I turned 34 last week. ANM bought me a cool necklace off Etsy. Yep, my husband actually registered an Etsy account just so he could buy it for me. Love him. 'Tis steampunk in theme, which reminds me I've been meaning to watch Steamboy for aaages. Mmm, will go and do that now, I think...

Pics from my camera

Watching the rain

Favourite spot

Safe co-sleeping?

The only recent photo of Mr T on the camera... his foot with some loo paper.

The gate, the kitchen and the dare

Here ya go Sif!  Isn't it beautiful?

And because I couldn't be stuffed tidying up the kitchen before I took the photo, I'll treat you with and additional annotated pic of our kitchen mess.

Clockwise(ish) from left:

• A mostly chewed (by Little V) grape on a crummy plate, as in a plate with crumbs on it, probably from someone's breakfast, sitting next to a plastic bag containing the stalk of the grapes and a few grape dregs
• An opened packet of biscuits and 2 dirty tea mugs from when my Dad came over a couple of hours ago
• The deep fryer.  I have no idea why it's sitting there
• A used glass and plate (probably from my lunch) and a bottle of dishwashing liquid
• A very grubby gas cooker with some very grubby dishes on it
• Knives, jug and cleaning spray (no, I don't Enjo)
• The sink with more dirty dishes, wine glasses etc...
• Very brown cupboards
• Some vases, a dirty tissue and a coffee machine we've borrowed from my inlaws
• A plastic bag full of something on the floor
• The dishwasher (full of clean dishes because I haven't emptied it yet), microwave and dirty teatowel
• The fridge, which is looking quite uncluttered except for a funky magnet my friend gave me a couple of weeks ago that says "she was the life of the tupperware party", some family photos and magnets to stick them up, a few other magnets (gotta have a Darth Vader magnet on yr fridge!), the kitchen timer and a laminated Little C with removable/posable arms and legs from the "pin the limbs on the C" game we played at his birthday party.
  

Do you dare to show off your as-is kitchen pics too? Yes, you do!

Is this a lame-o attempt at a meme? Yes, it is!

So if you're reading this, take a picture of your kitchen as it is right now and post it on your blog. Surely I'm not the only person with a bit o' kitchen mess.

...okay I'm going to clean it now before ANM gets home from work...

The excitement of fensage and gateness

So here I am drinking my second glass of wine for the evening.  Top qual cask wine too I might add. Yeah, I know, breastfeeding, but... meh.

I tripped over our kitchen fence yesterday.  We've had the kitchen fenced off from the rest of the house since Little C started to crawl because it's horrible and dangerous and we haven't got around to renovating it to appropriate kid safety standards yet. The fence was just one of those octagonal plastic playpens opened out and wedged up against the entrance to the kitchen.  The fence didn't have a gate so for the last three and a half years we've been leaping over it to get in and out of the kitchen. 

Yesterday morning I was carrying Little V and misjudged the height of the fence as we were coming out of the kitchen and managed to snap it in about a gzillion places and send a chair that it was wedged up against it flying across the room. Some helpful god must've been watching over me because I somehow managed to stay upright and avoid major injury to myself and the wee one. Little V barely batted an eyelid. The fence was cactus.

So off to the shops to buy a new fencey thing. ToysRUs had a heap of different kinds but not many that would fit our wide kitchen entry opening.  In the end we went nuts and bought a $200 (totally out of our pre-agreed budget) configurable fence/playpen with a gate in it. OMG OMG talk about luxury. A gate. A gate. It has a gate. For 3.5 years I've had to hurdle in and out of my own kitchen.  I now have A Gate! Ah, the small things...

Not so lucky was my poor, poor mother-in-law who yesterday tripped down a step (yes, one step) in her own home and broke her ankle in two places. Wishing you a speedy (and hopefully not too painful) recovery, A. *mwah*

Jazzing up twenny bucks

Mr T has been to a few birthday parties lately and it seems the done thing within nerdy 13 year old boy circles is to give money on such occasions.  This is absolutely fine by me.  I'm happy to avoid the stress of trying to find a perfect yet affordable gift for a kid I barely know.  

Simply giving $20 in a card is a little boring though, so this is what I came up with for the most recent birthday boy:

For those of you who aren't familiar with Australian coinage the coin is five cents.  The idea was for the birthday boy to think Mr T was giving him 5c for his birthday then as he pulled the coin out of the pocket, voila! he found $20 stuck to the back.

All the kids at the party thought it was hilarious!

I'm such a dag... but a creative one, huh?

10 months old today

...and it walks!

Nerd post - web host joys

Well, it's been a crazy ol' week for sure.

In between Nappy Fabric Mountaining, Great Cloth Diaper Hunting, some fairly irritating web hosting dramas, looking after the kiddies, and all my usual weekly stuff, I haven't had oodles of time to myself this week.

I'm currently multitasking, or at least my computer is, deleting all the ibreastfed.com files from my 2nd host and then re-uploading them from a backup.  At least I'm really hoping I'm deleting the files from the right host. Eeek.  Yes, I am.  The joys...

I have 3 hosts for the same website at the moment.  

The first host I've been with on and off for years.  They are Australian, therefore they are expensive.  I am on their cheapest plan, which wasn't going to cut it for the Diaper Hunt, and all their other plans involved paying for a year in advance, which I didn't feel like doing for one month's worth of extra traffic.

So I found I nice eco-friendly WAHM-run host in the US that offered what I needed for a similar price to what I'm paying the first host, so I signed up.  They very kindly offered to move my site for me but it didn't work.  Well, it worked in that they moved my site, but it was somehow a version from early September, including an extra database and a whole bunch of files I had deleted before signing up with them... weird.  After they eventually believed me about the September thing, they sorta kinda fixed it, then I fixed it some more.  It looked fine from a user's point of view but it was very much cobbled together and the Wordpress admin area wasn't working properly which meant I couldn't change anything or add new content very easily.  

Ugh, so I had my site running perfectly on my first host but was a couple of days into the month and about to exceed my monthly bandwidth allowance, and I had the 2nd host which looked fine for users and had a generous bandwidth allowance but had major problems with it's admin interface. What to do, what to do...

Host 3: I found a really cheap (and huge) US host and copied all my files and database over to them.  It worked almost perfectly.  There was one teeny glitch with the DB transfer that I fixed very easily. So ibreastfed.com is now running through them. I have no idea why the 2nd host hadn't been able to transfer my site properly.  I guess I'll find out soon enough if it doesn't work for me this time... 

Anyway, that's the short version.  Exciting huh?

Exhaustion and bubbles

I'm so tired.  I'm sitting here typing one-handed (as usual) while Little V nods off.  My sale over at Nappy Fabric Mountain has been going nuts, which is great, but between finding and measuring and listing and unlisting fabric for sale I haven't had time for much else, besides looking after the Littles of course.

Mr T had his best mate Mr B over for a play this afternoon.  Do you still play when you're 13? I can't remember.  They arrived home and watched the end of Narnia with Little C while I made them a snack, then Mr T read some of his new book to Mr B. They're both into sci-fi/fantasy stuff and the new book is something to do with dragons... I think. Then they played Myst (Myst III, can't remember the proper name of it right now) for half an hour on the computer. I usually only let them do computer stuff for half an hour or so coz I'm so mean. They'd both sit on there all day if they could. They played with the Littles for a while and then we all went outside and blew bubbles!!! One is never too old to enjoy the bliss of bubble-blowing.

It appears Little V is now asleep.  He's snoring in my arms.  I think I'll go and put him in bed.

Want cheap nappy fabric?

Go and check out yet another me at Nappy Fabric Mountain.

I'm selling off my post-WAHM nappy fabric stash at ridiculously low prices.

Pathologising the nerd - a brief rant

Autism spectrum disorders (including Asperger syndrome and autism) are very real and often debilitating conditions. I am getting a little tired of uninformed people labelling anyone who is intelligent with slightly dodgy social skills as "autistic" or "an aspie". Just because someone is a nerd does does not mean they have Asperger syndrome or autism.

Mmmkay?