I am so boring. All I do all day is stay inside. I haven’t gone out on a walk since Saturday. I didn’t even get dressed yesterday until five in the evening. I wouldn’t have gotten dressed at all except a friend was coming over. No shower, no lotion on my legs, no fresh hair do, no nothing. Just sicky-mc-sick with the ever running nose that makes me crazy!

Sick posts are boring so I’ll just move along. I made some lemonade from the lemons my Grandpa brought over from his back yard last week. Real home grown lemons are the best. Especially when some of the leaves are still left on. These lemons were very ripe (maybe last year’s crop?) so I had to juice them right away. That’s not very exciting except I finally got to use my cool little silver juicer thingy from Paris! I miss Paris. I can’t wait until I can go again. When Baby Bug is ten or eleven maybe?

Did I ever tell you that I wished for Baby Bug as I was going under a bridge on the Seine in Paris? It’s one of those things that I tend to repeat over and over so skip the next two paragraphs if I’ve told you already.

We were riding on a boat on the Seine at night and the microphoned narrator lady was droning on in this thick accent that put me right to sleep. Maybe it was jetlag, I don’t know. I felt like my eyelids weighed ten pounds. I think it was her voice. Kinda like that Economics professor I had in college. But then near the end of the water tour I woke up enough to hear her say that legend had it that if you kissed someone as you went under this bridge for the very first time, (like a virgin bridge go-er-under-er) and made a wish, your wish would come true! (ack! where are the commas supposed to go in that sentence?!!) I didn’t have anybody to kiss but I made a wish anyway.

Of course I wished for a baby! That’s what I wished every time I ever had a chance to wish anything. A penny in a fountain, my necklace being on backwards, blowing out candles, etc. etc…

I had no idea that Baby Bug was already conceived and growing her little cells in my womb at that very moment! It all just makes my Paris trip that much more wonderful. Someday I’ll have to take Baby Bug back to that exact same spot and let her make a wish. Of course by then she’ll be so sick of my wish story that she’ll be trying to ditch me to go hang out with cousin Rapunzel somewhere else.

There, it’s not a completely boring post just about baby stuff. I think I’m thinking I’m boring because my friend that came over last night told me that he doesn’t really read my blog anymore because he just doesn’t relate to all the boob talk, no offense or anything. Of course I didn’t take any offense but I did start thinking that maybe I need to get out a little more.

Soon! Soon I will be released from House Arrest!!! This is really big exciting news and I hope I don’t jinx it by writing about it before the deal is sealed and delivered. But I’ve sold a bunch of my pregnancy illustrations and with the money I receive, I’m going to put a down payment on my new car!!!! It could happen in weeks! I’m so excited. Toby was going to buy it for me anyway (we’ve long had a new car in the budget) but I feel so much prouder knowing that I earned the first payment all by myself! See! Stay At Home Mom’s can do it ALL!!! Well, not really but almost. As long as I don’t have to go to any meetings with eye goop on my shoulder and a spit-up rag tucked in my waste band.

So what’s the deal with the house arrest anyway? I was going to write about that but then I got some feedback from a few people that said Toby’s requests weren’t as freaky as I thought they were. You see, Toby really doesn’t want his precious little girl around air conditioning vents that blow skin cells and germs all over the place until she’s big enough to fight infection without having to go to the hospital. This means no Target, no stores with dirty rugs, no going to Old Navy to get some cheap “fat” clothes that I am desperately in need of now that my maternity clothes are falling off me… I pretty much can’t go anywhere. Add to that the fact that he won’t let me drive my unsafe car anyway. He’s a tyrant! Just kidding. He just worries a lot and I try to humor him. But sometimes in my attempts to humor him, I feel like I’m in prison.

The irony is that this cold I’m fighting right now… I got it at the birthday party of HIS friends! Actually they are my friends too and I totally would have gone anyway but the point is I’m so glad I got sick on one of his shin-digs instead of one of mine because if it had been one of my shin-digs, I would have never heard the end of it.

Rambly Rambly Rambly! And I thought I had nothing to say!

Here’s some pictures for those who need their Baby Bug fix of the day.

We just had a scare. Yesterday was Baby Bug’s two month check up and she got five big ugly scary vaccination shots. It was horrible. There she was so happy and innocent in only her diaper on the examination table, waving her arms around, smiling with glee and then… we let the doctor stick her in the leg with five big ouchy needles when she wasn’t expecting it at all!

She wailed and screamed! She cried like I’d never seen her cry before. Nothing I could do calmed her down. I dressed her, held her close, tried to let her nurse, gave her her pacifier, rocked her, covered her with her soft pink blanket… nothing helped. I felt like I’d betrayed her in the worst way. How could I let them poke her like that?!!

The doctor said she’d be a little grumpy until we got to the car. He was wrong. She was grumpy the whole ride home and more. To make it worse, when we got home I handed her off to her grandmother. Tuesdays are my get-some-freelance-work-done-while-Grandma-babysits day. You thought I was done working? I thought so too. But the work keeps on coming anyway. I think I’m busier now than ever! Who knew being a mom could make my art more marketable. Anyway, that’s a tangent. What I came here to say is: I made it all worse by handing Baby Bug off to her Grandma and then hiding myself in my room behind a closed door.

The poor baby! She was distressed and her mom turned her back on her! Thankfully, her Grandma is pretty good at soothing babies and managed to keep her cries somewhat muffled and distracted by endless bouncing in the baby sling. But really Baby Bug wasn’t happy. I just chalked it up as her usual five-seven fussiness but Grandma said she wasn’t herself. She thought maybe the shots were making her feel sick.

When Grandma left, I snuggled Baby Bug extra close and tried to make up for my two hour abandonment and a whole days worth of scary tramatic things. I forgot to mention I had given her a bath in the morning before the doctor’s appointment. She’s not so fond of baths, even though I’ve been giving her one almost every other day to combat the exploding poop and endless goopy eye problems. But the snuggling just wasn’t good enough.

Her cries got louder and louder as seven crept into eight and then nine–a whole two hours past her bedtime. Finally around nine-thirty, she just wore herself out crying. By this time I was getting really worried so I woke her up again to take her temperature. What an awful parent I am. She had to cry for another half an hour just to get over the scary thermometer being stuck up her butt and then Toby and I arguing over whether or not you are supposed to use vaseline on the thermometer etc etc… It was awful. I’m surprised she hasn’t packed her bags and moved out.

She did sleep. But not well. Usually Baby Bug just barely wakes up to eat and then falls back to sleep again. Last night she wailed every time she woke up. It was almost like she was having nightmares from the days events. I felt so bad. I didn’t mind waking up a zillion times to hold her and rock her, it was the least I could do to say how sorry I was for all the horrible things that had been happening.

Then I worried more… because I am a mom and I must worry. You see I’ve gone and caught a cold. $#@!! I’m hoping that she won’t catch it because she is drinking the super stealth antibodies in my breast milk. But there is still a chance since we were both exposed to it at the same time. If she has a cold (or flu I guess I should call it) then her body is weak when it needs to be strong to fight off all those scary vaccination germs. Maybe that is what is making her so sad and upset. I tossed and turned all night thinking about it.

This morning I cuddled her on the couch and it seemed like things were not getting better. I skipped my morning shower and decided today we were just going to lay low and be sick together. I would hold her all day if I had to. This actually appeals to me since I’m feeling like crap anyway.

But then around ten-thirty as I put her on the changing pad to change yet another diaper, she smiled at me! And then she smiled some more! In fact, she smiled a lot and giggled and kicked and acted like her old happy self!!! I fed her and put her down for a nap in the bugaboo and she didn’t even scream. She slept a bit and then occupied herself for quite a while batting at her little crab toy that I keep attached to the side of the stroller. She’s never played with her crab toy this much. She bats at it now and then but I can’t figure out if it’s just in the way of her flailing arms or if she really is playing with it. Today she was definitely playing with it.

She seems happier than ever. Go figure!

You know you’re a seasoned blogger when you’re bummed that everything turns out perfectly. It makes such a better story when life gets royally screwed up. Flat tire in the rain? Bring it on! Long lines at the DMV and an obnoxious clerk who gets your paperwork wrong and sends you to the wrong line where you waste your entire day? Yes! You can hear the chuckles from the cubicle walls already.

What’s the fun in a chocolate cake from a box mix that turns out perfect without any lumps or bumps? It isn’t lopsided, flat or burnt, the icing goes on smooth without ripping off the top layer of moist crumbs, and you even spell the birthday boy’s name right in soft light blue loopy letters!!! Snore. This is boring. At least bake a pacifier into the cake or slop some of that goopy pudding batter into Baby Bug’s ear or something. Sheesh!

Nope. Nothing hilarious happened. The cake was baked. The baby was securely fastened on like my personal little parasite. I didn’t bang her head on the oven door. I didn’t even make a mess with the eggs or chocolate powder mix. I had the whole day to plan out this little dinner shindig and everything went fine without a hitch.

It does, however, remind me of other shindigs that have gone down with lots of hitches. In fact, I’ve made many chocolate cakes (very much like this one), that turned into lopsided icing messes. I have no idea why the icing went on perfectly yesterday. I have never had such good luck before.

This all also reminds me of the first time Toby made me a cake. Way back when we were still dating (before the hills got dusty) and I had recently decided to turn away from my very tight knit family. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in months. It was a very very sad and lonely time for me. Especially on my birthday. Birthdays in my family were always grand events. Maybe because we didn’t celebrate Christmas we had to make up for it. (And no, my family isn’t Seventh Day Adventist…they’re just different.) There were always mountains of presents and any kind of dinner and cake your heart desired. The whole day was your day and I was pretty much the princess of the party every time my birthday rolled around. So you can imagine how pathetic I was feeling in my sterile white apartment in a new town with no family or friends or even a cat!

I decided to cheer myself up by making myself a cake. Chocolate of course. I’d never baked a cake by myself before. I was up to my ears in chocolate powder when Toby decided to drop by with some birthday flowers he’d picked from the city landscaping. He was so romantic back then… What I didn’t know about Toby then was that he was the master chemist. He took one look at me and my mess and quickly took over. All those years washing rat lungs in a lab taught him that me making a cake was a quick disaster. I know nothing about procedure, precision or orderlyness. I speed read, transpose numbers and skip steps. I talk a lot and get distracted and lose track of where I am. How many cups was that I just dumped into the bowl? I’m a wreck in the kitchen. Especially back then.

I think I fell in love with Toby when that cake came out of the oven. It smelled like cocoa heaven. I’d never seen a cake so beautiful outside of a magazine before. It was round without any sloping or bubbles that threaten to collapse into themselves. If food is the key to a man’s heart then chocolate cake is the key to a woman’s. Of course this is long before I discovered that Toby used to date a stripper, he smoked nearly a pack a day, he kept trash in his car a foot deep and he wears the same shirt for five days in a row*. But those were things I’d learn to love later.

*Not really. He’s just freaky with his clothes. If he finds a shirt he likes, he buys five of them. So it seems like he’s wearing the same shirt over and over. It drives me batty.