Best Superbowl Ever & A Finished Project (finally)

So obviously Sunday was the Superbowl, and it was hands-down my favorite one ever. This was for two reasons:

(1) The Packers, and much more specifically, former California Golden Bear, Mr. Aaron Rodgers, took home the win. GO PACK GO, and GO BEARS.

(2) I got to watch the game with this girl:

Tonight I was also very pleased to finally finish my wall organizer project that I started a week or two ago... I rather enjoy how it turned out, and am looking forward to having a central place in the kitchen to sort all of our bills, outgoing mail, coupons, and miscellaneous notes.

I also really like that I purchased absolutely nothing to make this; I used cardboard, a scrap piece of plywood, and some odds and ends of fabric and ribbon that I already had. Hooray for crafting!

Saturday Morning Thoughts

Nick is working, Nora is taking a nap (...or at least in her crib, supposedly trying to fall asleep judging by the ongoing moans and quiet humming I've been hearing over the monitor for the last ten minutes...). How should I spend my precious time?

...try to finish my newest DIY wall organizer project I started last week with the goal of finishing it in a couple of days so I could actually use it to sort the bills we have before (1) they're due or (2) they get lost in the shuffle of the rest of the mail and miscellaneous papers on the counter and don't get paid on time?

(...this is my idea for a wall organizer I created to hang in the kitchen in an effort to keep track of bills, incoming and outgoing mail, coupons, etc. This is the drawing I had made to be able to make a pattern; I'll post the finished project whenever I get around to finishing it.)

...throw on some jeans and a sweatshirt and take advantage of the nice weather this morning to do some light yardwork and prune those ugly rose bushes like I've been meaning to do for the last few weeks?

...start packing up all of Nora's stuff for her first overnighter with her two Omas tonight, since it will take forever to round up everything she could possibly need for 18+ hours away from home?

...do some cleaning - ok, in reality just sweep the floors - and gather up all of the dog fur that could potentially be enough to create two additional Dundies that might just end up being perfectly well-behaved replacement dogs for our misbehaving real dog?

...or just stay in my pajamas, drink my coffee, ignore the dog fur, and watch HGTV dreaming that I will one day be as motivated as these people to really get something done on a Saturday morning. 

Done and done.

A Cinderella Story

A warning: if you're expecting a love story, a rag-to-riches story, or a story about making your dreams come true, you're reading the wrong blog. When I say Cinderella story, I mean this is a getting-locked-in-the-bedroom kind of story.

This past weekend, my sister came to visit, just to visit and hang out. I loved getting to see her and spending time with her for a couple of days when there wasn't much else going on, since most times when she's in town it's for a family get-together or for the holidays, etc, etc. This time we just got to hang out (partly because I was sick and not up to doing a whole lot else) and she was gracious enough to babysit for us on Saturday night while Nick and I blew off his ex-work party in SF (yes, they were nice enough to still invite us and we totally ditched it...) and instead went to eat the most delicious sandwiches with french fries on them (that I've been craving since I first became pregnant almost a year and a half ago) and have a beer at this place, then headed over and had coffee and dessert at my much-missed before-work coffee spot in North Beach, Caffe Greco. It turned out to be a very nice and much overdue date night. 

The next day, we slept in (my sister stayed the night at our house after babysitting the night before), made breakfast, and relaxed a little before Kristie started getting ready to head home. She stayed in our guest room/office. Nick hopped in the shower, I was sitting in the living room feeding Nora lunch, and Kristie was getting dressed in the guest room. I then heard a bit of a struggle and jiggling of the door knob, and a muffled, "I'm stuck!" Our doors, which apparently haven't been replaced or had the door knobs replaced since the house was built in 1950, aren't the most reliable for how do you say, passing in and out of rooms easily. This door was stuck. Really stuck. The doorknob didn't appear to be locked on the inside according to Kristie, but the bolt was stuck in the out position and was not budging. Nick and I  dismantled the doorknob as much as we could, with a less-than-skillful combination of hammering, prying, unscrewing, and aggressive jiggling. More than a few broken pieces of metal fell out onto the floor and we did manage to get the door knob itself out, but could still not move the actual piece keeping the door shut. We finally gave up and my sister, who is luckily about the same size as me, was able to toss her bags and herself out the window onto the side of the house (good thing we only have a one-story house). I then crawled through the window into the bedroom and with the help of a screwdriver, was able to finally get the door open. I was relieved to get the door open, but less than happy to see that we'll still need to replace the broken door knob, part of the door jamb, and probably the door.

This is what I get for saying that I've been in a 'home improvement kind of mood' lately.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll want a glass of milk. You remember the story, right? Well, if you give me a sick day, I'll want to clean my entire house.


I've had a pretty bad sore throat the last couple of days and felt borderline sick (which by this morning had evolved into confirmed sick), so Thursday afternoon my boss told me if I was feeling sick on Friday to just stay home and take a sick day. I woke up feeling pretty crappy, so I decided to take his advice and stay home.


Before Nick left for the office, he noticed me wiping off the counter after making some tea, and asked me, "You're not going to clean all day, are you?" I looked at him with a bit of the stink-eye and defensively said, "No, why? I'm just wiping off the counter..."


"Because every time you're sick and stay home from work you spend the day cleaning the house." Well... he's right. I usually do. I keep busy taking care of Nora, but then as soon as she goes down for a nap, I feel so lazy and useless just sitting on the couch and watching TV or reading a magazine or whatever else I should be doing to 'take it easy' and rest up on my day of rest. Well of course since Nick pointed this out, I decided to prove him wrong and NOT spend the day cleaning this time. I tried anyway.


Nora inevitably got tired mid-morning, and was ready for a nap. I put her down for her nap and walked out of her room. Once I walked out of her room, I noticed the plant in the hallway was looking a little thirsty... sooo, I watered it. Ok, I over-watered it. I didn't realize this, however, until a few minutes later when I was sitting on the couch attempting to not do anything and I heard a soft tap---tap---tap. I ignored it for a minute. Then I got curious. I got up and walked around a little, and noticed it was coming from the hallway; from the plant specifically. The excess water had gotten to the bottom of the pot and was pooling around the bottom of the plant on the shelf, dripping down from the top shelf, down to the middle shelf, then down to the bottom shelf and onto the floor. So I got a few paper towels and started mopping up my mess - I moved the plant, moved the little shelf out of the corner, and discovered - GASP - look how much dust is in this corner! I used the wet paper towels and quickly wiped up the dust on the floor and in the corner of the walls... and wiped the baseboards. Here is where I trapped myself: I realized how dirty the baseboards were and how easily they wiped clean with a wet paper towel. Naturally, I immediately looked to the other wall and noticed that they were also pretty dusty. How had I not noticed this before?


And that is how I ended up spending half of my sick day cleaning all of the baseboards in my house.

Holidaaaay.... Celebraaaate....

...by cleaning.


Oh yes. It needs to be done. I think I have a pretty good idea of how I'll be spending my day off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day - cleaning the house which SOOOOO needs to be done, and finally, FINALLY taking down the Christmas lights. I could say that they're 'civil rights' trees, but I would be lying. We all know they're Christmas trees, made of Christmas lights. Which also reminds me - we still have our Christmas tree sitting naked and probably quite thirsty on our back patio. I can't look at it once all the lights and ornaments are off, and both me and the tree know that its time is up. The Christmas season has come and gone, and there's really just no reason anymore to have a tree indoors. So, out it goes, and I look away and fight back tears, feeling sad and guilty, as if I'm abandoning a greyhound after its glory days of racing have come and gone. The only thing worse than banishing it out to the back patio is cutting it up into pieces small enough that will fit in the green can... I just can't do it. I'm insane, I realize this - it's just a dead tree - but I'm still making Nick do it (plus we don't actually have a real saw to cut it up, so I have no idea how this will even be done). 

I love Christmas way more than any human being probably should, so there's always a bit of a mourning period for me when all of the Christmas stuff comes down - luckily I took down all of the indoor decorations a couple of weeks ago, so the only things left are the outside lights and our sad tree. I'll still need consolation once all of this is done though, so I think I'll have to round out the day by making a small trip to Crossroads for a little retail therapy and maybe some sushi tomorrow night.

Nora the Explorer

So my family is going to Budapest in April, and we’re super excited. We’ve been talking about this trip for almost two years now, and it looks like it’s actually happening. Since we decided on going a couple of years ago, we had left it as an open invitation for our family: whoever wants to go and is able to go is welcome. So far it will be me, Nick, my brother and sister, and aunt and uncle, Kathy and Norman. …Oh, and Nora. Yes, Nora, our baby who, upon departure, will not quite be ten months old. I’ve been asking myself one question since we bought our plane tickets two days ago: am I crazy?

In the last few days I’ve been reading all kinds of air-travel tips for traveling with babies, and I don’t know if this has done more to reassure me or stress me out to no end. So many things that I had kind of thought of before but not really, and then so many other things that had never even crossed my mind. We kind of keep saying, ‘eh… we’ll figure it out.’ Will we? I, for one, like to plan… and I’m pretty sure I’ll be planning the crap out of this trip until the minute we leave.

What would possess us to make such a decision, you may ask? Well, we thought, if we leave her here with the grandparents, it will be really hard on them and on her to be away from us for ten days. If we bring her, it will probably be pretty hard on us for ten days. We decided we’d be the responsible parents this time around and bear the burden. But really, I am doing my best to be totally optimistic and remind myself of the fact that yes, we will now need to plan more carefully, we will need to pack more stuff, we will need to work around Nora’s schedule, BUT – if I was away from her for that long I just KNOW I would be missing her and worrying about how and what she was doing the entire time. At least now she will get to be with us, we’ll get to be with her, and she’ll get a taste of international traveling at a very young age. And really… how cool will it be for Nora to have a passport with stamps from halfway across the world before her first birthday? Plus I think she’ll have the cutest passport picture ever.

Silent Day.

Downside of maternity leave: you end up with very little vacation time, so when everyone else decides to take the week of Christmas off, you’re the only one stuck going to work. That would be me. Today I’m the only one in the office, which is both strange and oddly peaceful.

It’s actually not even close to the most boring day I’ve had at work, since I can literally do pretty much anything I want and there’s no one here to know the difference. My most boring days are when everyone else is here but no one has any actual work to do but we all want to look busy like we are actually working so we all just sit at our desks in front of our computers as if we’re responding to emails and working on spreadsheets or whatever the heck it is we’re supposedly working on in the middle of winter.

Today is different. I feel a sense of freedom and relaxation. I can play Christmas music as loud as I want. I can wear whatever I want. I can burp out loud. I can talk on the phone to friends and not care who’s listening.

Since getting to work this morning, I have….

• Done my makeup (why waste time on it at home when you can do it at work?)
• Straightened my hair better than I have in I don’t know how long (spending a half hour straightening your hair makes a WORLD of difference compared to spending my usual less than ten minutes if I even bother to do it at all…)
• Made coffee
• Drank coffee
• Ate a bowl of oatmeal
• Pumped
• Checked email about 10 times
• Spent a half hour reading about 6 month milestones and baby food on the internet
• Called Nick and was told that Nora does not seem to care for my homemade baby food

As a side note, Dundie is apparently more excited for Christmas than any of us as he began opening Christmas presents this morning. This begins a new Seevers household Christmas tradition, of not placing wrapped presents beneath the Christmas tree, but in the closet.