Valentine’s Day cards

Jack's Valentine's Day cards

So, my fabulously talented friend Terry over at Sassy Designs created the most awesome custom Valentine’s Day card for Jack, and here is the final proof. Isn’t it ADORABLE?

I’m thrilled with how they turned out. She did an excellent job, and the cards arrived last week! Wooo hoooo!

Also need to thank Kristen, because even though she lives in another state and didn’t take the photos, she did edit them for me and tried to make them look like they WERE taken by a pro photographer!

I didn’t order as many as I usually do for Christmas cards, so not many are getting one of these*.

I always save a couple for myself, and want Jack to have them someday, too. I don’t think he’s ever going to be able to say that momma document his childhood very well or take very many photos! Hahaha.

I have over 7,000 photos of the little guy in my iPhoto library. That’s about 14 GIGABYTES. Yep. It’s slightly crazy, I know.

Shrimp Étouffée

So I’ve been making shrimp several times a week in my effort to stop eating so much red meat. Some are low-fat, some aren’t, but they’re all soooo good. One of my favorites is Shrimp Etouffee. Here’s the recipe:

Shrimp Étouffée

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 20 minutes

Ready in: 35 minutes

Ingredients

• 1/2 c. butter (use real butter, for the love of all things yummy! margarine sucks.)
• 1/4 c. chopped red bell pepper
• 1/4 c. chopped green bell pepper
• 4 cloves minced garlic (use the ready-made kind in a jar if you’re lazy like I am)
• 1/2 c. chopped fresh parsley (or 1/4. c. dried parsley)
• 3 Tbsp. tomato paste
• 1 10.75 ounce can of condensed cream of mushroom soup
• 1 pound medium shrimp (I use raw, cleaned and deveined shrimp as opposed to cooked, because it’s going to be in the pan for 10 minutes and cooking it twice makes it rubbery)
• salt to taste
• 1/4 t. hot pepper sauce (use more if you like it hot, hot, hot)
• 1/4 t. cajun seasoning (optional, but better with it than without it!)
• 1 c. long-grain white rice

1. Most long-grain white rice takes 20 minutes to cook in a saucepan, so get that started right away, follow instructions on the bag. 1 c. dry rice makes enough for this recipe.
2. In a saucepan, combine butter, bell peppers, and garlic. Heat on medium-high for 2 minutes.
3. Stir in parsley, tomato paste, soup, salt, hot pepper sauce, cajun seasoning and shrimp on high for 5 minutes.
4. Reduce heat, stir and cook for another 5 minutes  until mixture thickens. Serve over white rice.
5. Pretend you’re in Nawlins. It’s yummy!

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Protected: So I had this epiphany…

Breakin’ the Law

Surrounded!

I damn near pissed myself, I must admit. Those of you who know me well are fully aware that law enforcement and I have never really seen eye to eye. Mostly little things (like my inability to obey the speed limit or to wear a seat belt), but there were a couple of significant issues 15 years ago. Suffice it to say that I went on a Tour de Stupidé between 1996-1997 and got myself into loads of trouble.

Also, did I mention I hate cops? And not necessarily for any of the above reasons, either. I hate them because they’re always up your ass when you don’t need them and never around when you do*. Because of that, I rank them right up there with the salespeople who work at Best Buy. You KNOW what I’m talking about, don’t even try to deny it.

But I digress…

The cops on THIS day and in THIS particular state have never done anything to me but issue aforementioned speeding tickets. So I shouldn’t really say I hate ALL cops. I will say that they make me nervous, though, in that knee-jerk “I’m not doing anything wrong, so go away NOW!” kind of way. The fact that they were sitting there made me laugh… at first. I made plenty of “go eat your donuts somewhere else” and “your tax dollars hard at work” jokes, because they seemed to be doing absolutely nothing but chatting each other up at a good ole cop convention.

But after they sat there for an hour or two, I started wondering what in the fuck they were REALLY doing here. When you see cops milling about on television, it’s usually because they’re waiting for a warrant to be issued. (Yes, yes, I need to quit watching CSI and Law & Order, I know.) I started flipping through my mental Rolodex of all things I have done wrong in my life that I have not rectified yet and could give them probable cause to get a warrant issued^™.

But I had nothing. I’m a boring work-at-home mom now. The worst thing I do these days is answer the door without a bra on. And the girls are not exactly 18-year-old perky anymore, so it probably IS against the law somewhere (if only for the Fashion Police, who I also thumb my nose at). Probably not warrant-worthy.

So what the HELL?! I started feeling paranoia set in. I knew I hadn’t done anything, but when you distrust law enforcement like I do, you know from first-hand experience that sometimes the truth isn’t always the highest thing on their list of priorities. Maybe one of my former enemies decided to start trouble and tell authorities I had a meth lab or something**.

So I called Brian to share in my delusional paranoia. He laughed it off at first, but crazy is contagious. Heh. No, he was worried for a different reason. He wanted me to get out of the house and go somewhere with Jack in case there was a psycho on the loose. I figured if there were a psycho on the loose, they’d be crouched down with their guns drawn, running through the streets and making military hand signals. (I REALLY need to lay off the tv, don’t I?) But in the end, my uneasiness got the better of me so I did just that.

(By the way, you have no idea how relieved I was when they didn’t surround me screaming to get out of the car with my hands in the air. It was the same ridiculous relief you feel when you’ve had to pee for 6 hours and your bladder can’t handle one more drop and if you so much as clear your throat, you’re going to have an accident and leak a little. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh.)

Turns out, Brian wasn’t too far from the truth! A burglar broke into a house a couple doors down from me and the owner actually came home and interrupted him! The guy was trying to sneak out the back door and run off, the homeowner called the police, and the cops came to surround our subdivision. They caught the guy, so I guess I shouldn’t have been making fun of them milling about and doing nothing.

Talk about a dumb area to break into. This isn’t a gated community or anything, but ironically, it IS loaded up with cops. (Which would explain why there were so many here yesterday.) A cop lives right across the street from me, a state trooper lives 10 or so doors down on the same side of the street, AND there’s another state trooper who lives one street over and a few doors down. Those are just the ones I know about. Idiot should have scoped out the area a bit more. Heh.

I’m so, so thankful it wasn’t my house. Not because I care about the stuff, but because I would have been right here with Jack at the time, and I think the guy had a gun. They said it was “aggravated burglary”, so he definitely had some sort of weapon! I don’t even want to think about that. That’s a little terrifying, honestly.

Brian is calling today to re-activate our home security system. We turned the dumb thing off several years ago because the cats kept setting the alarms off when we weren’t home, but they need to decrease the sensitivity and turn it back on, and I’m going to leave it on when I’m home now, too.  Annoying. I can’t believe a tiny town like this had a burglar. If I’m going to start dealing with crime, I’d rather be back in a bigger city again. Pffffft.

My baby isn’t a baby anymore…

There is so much going on with Jack! My baby isn’t a baby anymore. He hasn’t been for quite a while. He’s a toddler , and he’s growing up sooooo fast. I’m afraid to blink or I might miss something.

Fast Asleep

Brian had been sleeping in Jack’s room since we started the transition, but not last night because Jack didn’t wake up.  (Yes, I’m aware that I’m overusing italics. Bite it. This is super exciting for me. Heh.) So Brian slept in bed with me. Both of us in the bedroom. By ourselves. For the first time in almost 21 months. Oh, yeah, baby…. yeah! [ Insert cheesy porn music here. ]

Numerous milestones there. *happy dance*

Of course, I barely slept a wink, because Jack was in there all by his lonesome and… well, I was wigging out a little. Okay, a lot.

I kept thinking that someone could break into our house and kidnap him and we’d never know because our room is soundproof with the door closed. So I made Brian get up and open the door so we could see (and hear) across the hallway. Then I made him get up again a few minutes later and put a baby gate up, because I didn’t want Oliver wandering around the house all night.

I tossed. And turned. At times I even whimpered like a frightened little girl. There may have been begging involved—I desperately wanted him to wake up so I could quiet my crazy ass mind, but no such luck. He was zonked. So I started imagining other reasons why he may not have woken up yet (the sane voice saying he was sleeping soundly and everything was perfectly fine didn’t win that particular argument, OBVIOUSLY). I thought the blanket might be covering his head and he had suffocated. I fretted that he tried to get out of hid bed, fell and cracked his head open on the foot board. And then I agonized that his pacifier broke apart and was lodged in his throat, and he was choking to death*.  On that last note, I actually woke Brian up at 4:00 a.m. and had him sneak into Jack’s room to check on him. THEN I think I was finally—blissfully—able to go to sleep.

There’s no way to quell this phobia of mine other than to seek professional help. I already have a monitor in there so I can hear what’s going on. And I have a video monitor I could use, but it’s so dark I don’t think I’d be able to see anything. And even if I could, it wouldn’t be close enough to make sure he was still breathing. The motion sensor that I used when he was a tiny baby that DID detect breathing will not work on a toddler bed. So I’m just going to have to get the hell over it. I’m sure I will at some point. (Not. I did that with Cheeto his entire life. And no, in case you’re wondering, I haven’t had a decent’s night sleep in years. I don’t really sleep like most people sleep. My subconscious sleeps with one eye open, periodically making the rounds and checking on everyone around me. It’s exhausting being me, it really is.)

Jack, on the other hand, is sleeping well. Much better than when he was sleeping in bed with us. He falls asleep in 20 minutes instead of 60 minutes now. He doesn’t wake up crying every hour or two. I don’t think he’s fidgeting as much. He seems a lot more refreshed when he wakes up. I told Brian when we started the conversion that if it didn’t work, I was okay with waiting until he was at least two to try again. I do not try to rush this child—he does things on his schedule and not a moment sooner. He’s definitely a stubborn Taurus.

It takes 28 days to make a habit, so we’re well on our way. And it really seems as if this one’s going to stick. (No thanks to ME. I’ve tried to sabotage this plan on no less than three occasions because I miss snuggling with him, but common sense always wins out in the end, thank goodness. At some point I really do need to SLEEP.)

Next up is getting rid of the pacifier. He doesn’t really use it at all during the day anymore… only in long car rides or in restaurants, because it keeps him mellow. Other than that, he’s down to just using it at night to go to sleep. Then it falls out of his mouth in a few minutes and is gone. Shouldn’t be too hard! No rush, but I’d really like for him to be completely done with it before his birthday in April.

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