Post Christmas

Wow. We made it through Christmas and are halfway through our headlong dash that is the holiday season this year.

My Michigan parents (step mom and Dad) came into town on Saturday night. We hung out with them until they headed home Tuesday (Christmas) afternoon. We were at Mike's mom's house when they left and we came home shortly after that to put the girls down for their naps.

My sister and brother-in-law arrived Christmas night and Mike and I hosted Christmas dinner here. Dinner went off without a hitch and I only broke one wine glass. I had had a feeling all day that I was going to break one, but I still would have preferred for my gut to have been wrong. My mom says she thinks it was a flaw in the glass, since the stem snapped while I was drying it and not really putting any pressure on it, so I am going to try to exchange it. We'll see.

Holly and Mike (sister and brother-in-law) are coming over here tonight for dinner and they are here until Sunday morning.

We're going to drop them off at the airport on our way out of town. We're going to Cleveland for a birthday party. We'll come back New Year's Eve and then go to a party at Mike's parent's house on New Year's Day.

And then we're back to the regular grind. In some ways I am actually looking forward to it. Trying to keep up with all the regular life stuff on top of maximizing face time with visiting relatives is about to do me in.

We're also still trying to dig out from under all the Christmas presents. There must have been some unspoken request made by me that all the presents gifted to Emily be of enormous size. She received a toy box (this one was most requested and was handmade by my dad), a doll house that weighs 50 (?) pounds and is on a 3x4 sheet of plywood, a nearly life-sized horse, and a cradle for her baby dolls.

Our house is only 1400 square feet and I selfishly would like to maintain some of those square feet for silly things like kitchens and sleeping quarters. I think I arrived at a workable solution this afternoon, but we'll see. And, of course, Lucy is getting bigger and would like to have toys of her own to play with, so some of my living room will soon be given over to the Jolly Jumper thing, too.

Anyone want to come and build an addition to our house? For free?

I hope everyone had a great Christmas! Happy New Year if I don't get back here before then!

Haiku Friday

Four days of Christmas
socks - definitely makes me
a fashion mistake.

A fashion mistake
I may be, but my Christmas
socks make me giggle.

Empty field across
the street. A truck delivers
gravel. Very strange.

Can't stop watching field.
Very curious. I am
becoming (my) Grandma.

Family coming
tomorrow. Messy house and
sick kids. *cough* Welcome!

I took Emily and Lucy to the doctor yesterday to learn more about the soul-sucking colds they have both been fighting since Thanksgiving. Turns out that Emily has some wetness on her lungs. The doctor said she wasn't going to call it pneumonia, but it's closer to it than not. And Lucy just finished 7 days on Omnicef, so whatever she has isn't bacterial. Current theory: allergies. But she's not old enough yet to take any of the allergy medicines, so she & Emily both slept with Sir Benadryl last night. And I mentioned one too many times that I was the only one in the house who wasn't sick, so now I have a sore throat. This is fantastic timing.

Ok - off to tidy the house so it's not a complete hovel when my MI parents get here.

As though I needed further proof...

that my children's therapy bills are going to be at least six digits.

I walked into Emily's room a few minutes ago. She had her Big Bear on his back on her bed and was holding her keys by his butt.

I asked her what she was doing and she answered, but I didn't quite understand her.

And then it hit me.

She was taking Big Bear's temperature. Just like I do to her.

(I know, rectal = gross. Mike won't do it, but it is easier and I think, more accurate than any of the other options. So there.)

Hey - did you notice?

I was featured on 5 Minutes For Mom's 5 Minutes Around the Blogosphere last week.

I wasn't familiar with 5 Minutes For Mom before Katie suggested I send my soap post to them. 5 Minutes For Mom is run by twins who also have two other online businesses: A Rocking Horse To Love and Pedal Cars and Retro Collectibles.

If anyone takes advantage of the soap offer, let me know how you like it.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

My New Life

I'm just finishing nursing Lucy on my right side when Emily's face crumples and she bursts into tears because I told her she couldn't hold the battery charger.

I swap Lucy to my left side and shift her so that I can pull a sobbing Emily onto my lap.

I sit there in my chair, someone else's tear on the end of my nose, rocking. I'm holding my 2-year-old in my right arm, her butt in my hand and her head on my left breast. I'm holding my 5-month-old in my left arm and she is nursing with one of the most painful latches I've experienced in a while. My shirt is hiked up to my armpits. Emily is resting her cold sippy cup of milk on my stomach. Emily's tears are soaking into my shirt.

I can fix neither the tear nor the bad latch. I can't pull my shirt down or get the cold plastic off my stomach. I just hold my girls close and rock.

Eventually Emily's tears subside and I realize that Lucy has lost her latch.

I put Emily down, wipe her tear off the end of my nose, close up my bra and pull my shirt down.
As frustrating as it is sometimes to have two children and only two hands, I know that these moments where both kids need me and only me are fleeting.

So I put up with the minor discomfort of someone else's tear on the end of my nose and enjoy the moment as best as I can.

Argh & Cool!

I am probably not going to be around much in the next few weeks.

The holidays and work are totally kicking my butt. I have a billion things to do and no time to do them.

That's the "argh" part of the title.

The "cool!" part of the title is this: I was invited yesterday to a holiday party for the company where I am an independent contractor.

Now, most people wouldn't think that was cool, but keep in mind that my idea of a holiday party involves me bringing a dish to pass. All of the holiday parties I was involved with at my previous employer were held during work hours and were potluck.

This one is different. It's held during work hours, but it is at a swank country club. How swank, you ask? Well, Tiger Woods has been there. This is the country club where the Senior PGA and the LPGA will be held this year. And where the PGA was held several years ago.

I am very excited. I get to get all dressed up and spend a couple of kid-free hours in a nice country club. Yay.

I will be reading blogs, but currently, I am about 2 days behind and my reader is starting to show the strain. I'll try to post stuff, too, but it's probably going to be sporadic.

Have a great holiday, everyone!

PS: Still have some more Christmas cards if anyone else wants to exchange cards...

Holy Deer, Batman!

Mike went hunting yesterday with his boss's boss (who also happens to be a good friend of my parent's) down near the NY-PA border.

He spent the whole week saying, "If I get another deer this weekend, we should..." and I kept thinking, "OK, that's great, but he's not going to get another deer."

Mike sure showed me!


This is Mike's first buck, a 6-pointer. He is now rather frostily residing in our freezer. It turns out that you don't need to hang the deer to cure it if you are just going to grind it up, which is what we decided to do with Bucky, here. So we dropped it off at the processing place at 10:15 this morning and had a phone call at 2:15 this afternoon, telling us that it was ready for us.

I can't even begin to tell you what a blessing this deer (and the other one) is to us. We now have something like 5 grocery bags worth of ground venison, all nicely packaged in 1-pound increments. I don't have to buy ground beef for the foreseeable future. (NOTE: If you come to my house to eat and have previously professed an aversion to venison, I won't feed it to you without your express knowledge. Unless you're my brother-in-law Shawn and then all bets are off.)

PS: Is anyone interested in exchanging Christmas cards? I would love to share our cards (with a hand-written greeting on the back!) with you guys.

Email me at erinlooneybin@yahoo.com if you want to exchange cards.

Christmas songs

We've been listening to Christmas music around here recently and, wow. There are some seriously annoying Christmas songs out there.

Like, The Christmas Shoes. I'm thinking mostly of the version by New Song, but any version will irritate me to no end.

And then there's pretty much any version of Baby, It's Cold Outside. The one that our local 24-7 Christmas music station plays sounds like the woman is under the influence of roofies.


I can handle maybe 10 hearings of The Christmas Song (Christmas Don't Be Late) by Alvin & The Chipmunks before I start to fantasize about small, furry rodent murder.

The Peanuts song Christmastime Is Here also drives me nuts and it has a pretty serious ear-worm effect on me. It's running through my head just from doing the search.

That said, there are a bunch of Christmas songs that I LOVE.

Like Light of The Stable by Selah (though I think I've heard the Judds do a version of it that is also quite nice), pretty much anything on the BareNaked For The Holidays disc, any version of Carol of the Bells (one of my favorites is the one with the Trans Syberian Orchestra & Metallica).

What Christmas (or holiday) songs are you already tired of hearing?

Post #300

This is my 300th post. Wow.

I haven't marked many of the milestones of this blog, mostly because when my blogiversary came around, I was just getting home from the hospital with a 3-day-old. Blogiversaries were far from my mind. And I always seem to notice that a nice, even numbered post is coming up and then discover that the nice, even numbered post has come and gone and no post to commemorate it. I'm smooth like that.

To celebrate my 300th post and well, because I really, really, really like this stuff, I have a discount for you!

I mentioned a while back that I went to a craft show. It's an annual deal put on by a local Museum. It was packed with people and booths full of fun-to-look-at and crafty things.

One of my favorites was (and always is) the booth selling Blue Heron Soaps. They have a huge display with open packages of all their soaps so you can sniff to your heart's content. I bought two bars; Almond & Oatmeal and Herbal Citrus.

I could tell, when I got home, that Mike was ... unenthused about me spending money on fancy soap.

Until I opened the Almond & Oatmeal and stuck it under his nose.

His eyes got really big and he took the bar from me and put it in the bathroom, unceremoniously throwing out the bar we had been using. He washed his hands a couple of times during the day, always coming out and commenting on how much he loves the smell of the soap.

And the next morning, the soap went with him into the shower.

He said it was making him crave almond-flavored things. (Seriously. The man went through 2 ounces of almond extract in 2 weeks. I didn't use ANY.)

Yeah, it smells THAT good. It's been 2 weeks since I bought the soap. He STILL comments on how good it smells.

So, I wrote to the nice people at Bath & Bliss and told them how much we both love their soap and how my husband has all but taken a bite out of the bar. And they were kind enough to offer my readers a discount.

So, go to the shop and pick out 6 bars of their yummy, yummy smelling soaps and you will get 1 free, AND free shipping! You get 1 free bar for every 6 you buy! Woo! If you buy 12 bars, you get 2 free! And so on. Just leave a note in the comments telling them that you are a Looney Bin reader and what flavor bar you'd like as your free bar and they will hook you up.

I would highly recommend these soaps as great stocking stuffers. Or you could put a couple of bars in a basket with some inexpensive bath things (loofahs and stuff) and have a nifty gift for someone.