Things that suck

I guess I've been in kind of a funk lately, here are some of the reasons why:

• Feeling like no matter what I do it's never enough, in quantity or quality. No matter how much I do, there's a million more things that need to be done and none of them are what I want to do. Sometimes just doing nothing is easier than trying to figure out where to begin and, of course, I can't do what I want because then I would feel worse for not doing the other things.
• Being certain someone, who I thought wanted to be my friend, is avoiding me and having absolutely no idea why. That's fine if you don't want to be my friend, maybe you think I'm not interesting or we don't have enough in common, it's the barely looking in my direction that I don't get. You can say hi and make polite conversation, I'm not going to corner you and force you to hang out with me.
• Being so excited about something and having someone I care about think it's one of the worst things that could ever happen. And they don't even realize how hurtful they're being. Don't rain on someone's parade, people.
• Feeling left out all the time. I think it's more feeling this way than actually being left out that bothers me. I wish it didn't bother me; maybe one day I just won't care and then I won't feel left out. (Don't comment on this one saying "oh, I feel left out too," because you're probably someone who has made me feel left out recently and that will just make it worse.)
  

And now for something happy.
Don't you wish you had milky smooth skin like that?

Super special guest post!

Apparently, I am on an unplanned Christmas vacation from blogging, so here's a guest post from none other than Will Derrenberger himself! Complete with blurry photos from my phone.

Hey you! This is where my mama feeds me lunch.

Lunch is tasty. Mmmmm. Sometimes Mama doesn't give me the next bite quick enough, so I have to have a snack.

Delicious! Mmmmm.

Wanna try?

Eh, more for me!

See ya later, alligator!

What I cooked this week: Better late than never edition

Monday, I thawed out some chicken that's been hanging out in the freezer and made BBQ chicken, green beans, and potato salad. This is kind of my favorite meal, I think it's at least my favorite for my mom to make. Pour BBQ sauce on chicken, stick it in the oven. I prefer French cut green beans, but I've only ever seen those in the can and we don't really do canned veggies around these parts anymore. I'm not about to get all fancy with my cutting of green beans either. I should have made potato salad like my mom does, instead I made Pioneer Woman potato salad, it was rather strong.
Tuesday: Salmon patties, fries. I went grocery shopping this day, I like to cook simple meals on grocery days. Canned salmon (make sure it says "wild"!), drained, flaked, egg, bread crumbs if you're fancy (or if you actually have some bread, I didn't). Fries: cut potatoes, fry them.
Wednesday: I made that sausage pasta again except this time I ruined it. I tried a different kind of sausage. I thought it was called apple-something-or-other, didn't realize it actually had apples in it. It was sweet, which is fine for breakfast sausage, but not for sausage in an Italian warm pasta salad type dish. Bleck.
Thursday: Roast chicken, sweet potato fries (with cream cheese brown sugar dipping sauce), mushrooms and onions. Chicken was roasted using the Peruvian chicken recipe from an old Everyday with Rachael Ray issue, I've talked about it before. Sweet potatoes were cut and baked with a little olive oil (these are what Will had for supper that night as well, sans dipping sauce), mushrooms and onions were sauteed together in a little olive oil. Mmmmmm......
Friday: Oh, Friday? We went out on a date! No baby and everything, first time ever. More on that later.


(Oh, that first pic? Yeah, it's from some time before last week, I just wanted a square. And can you guess which is the "his" and which is the "hers" of the bottom 2 pics?)

Links from last week: Links from the recent past version

Oh, yeah, links!

• Photojojo shares some tips on photographing kids
• Can you believe that this is made of sprinkles?!
• Gretchen at The Happiness Project (LOVE!) shares how to not overeat during the holidays.
• Aren't these cookies adorable?!
• Some songs are banned for really silly reasons.
• I think I'll finish it off with a what? wow.

In other news, has anyone else noticed that Martha Stewart Living writers seem to be getting a lot of their ideas from Pinterest lately?

I'm Thankful for

Yeah, that sounds like a Thanksgiving post title, doesn't it? Thanksgiving was over a week ago you say?


Becky with Will trying to lick Jack's ear on Thanksgiving.

I feel so un-blogivated (motivated to blog) lately. I don't know why; I love blogging. I missed my "links of the week" and "what I cooked last week posts," I blame Thanksgiving for really throwing me off my schedule. I didn't even write my Thanksgiving post. Haven't been doing much blog reading lately either.

Oh well. Instead of trying to make up for the missed posts, I think I'll just resume them this week. Except "links of the week" might be more like "links from the recent past."

I will tell you what I'm thankful for though. This year, I'm most thankful for The Baby Whisperer. We started trying the "Pick-up/Put-down" method from this book again the night before Thanksgiving and it has gone really well! We had tried it before when Will was 4 months old and it did not work at all, but this time has been great.

Previously, it was normal for him to wake up 5-8 times during the night and sleep for a maximum stretch of 3 hours (if we were lucky). The first night we tried this (well, Shawn did the work), if I remember correctly, he only woke twice! Or was it once?! That we can live with. It wasn't easy by any means, but it's getting better. The first night it took about an hour and a half to get him to sleep, the second, an hour, and less from then on. Some nights Shawn hasn't had to pick him back up at all. Now it's normal for him to wake once or twice during the night (once for milk) and go back to sleep fairly easily.



Naps are a different story though. Will was a good napper before this, but he was napping in the carseat, so we had to stop that and it was hard. Naps are my territory, since I'm the one home with him during the day, and I don't deal with his crying very well. For the first few days I was doing his naps, he didn't nap at all. Or, if he did nap, it was in the afternoon and just for 45 minutes, then I couldn't get him back to sleep. One day, he was so exhausted from not napping that he fell asleep in the highchair after lunch. This does not happen, he is not a fall-asleep-anywhere baby, I was in shock.

Friday, I think I broke the nap curse. Really, I think I just figured out the right amount of time that he can handle being awake for so that he's tired enough, but not overtired. Both naps were around 1 hour 20 minutes that day!

He's napping as I type this, praying to sail past the 45-minute mark today as well! But hey, 45 minutes is better than nothing. Update: Didn't make it past 30, but I got him back to sleep for a few minutes.