Jinxyisms

We have turned our living room into a giant play pen with baby gates on each door way. Because our cats are fat, lazy and some of them are old and stubborn the gates are raised off the floor 4-6 inches. We knew that Lily might be able to wiggle under the gates but hoped we were wrong. We were not. Yesterday she was playing by the gate to our bedroom and threw a toy to the other side and next thing I knew she was in our bedroom. When I brought her back to the livingroom she kept trying to walk through the gate.

Today I was able to catch video evidence of how ineffective the gate is.

Under the gate from Christy Wiggins on Vimeo.

Sorry the video is a little shaky I was laughing (silently) so hard at her.

When I went in after her she took off in a high speed chase around our bed laughing at how fun the whole thing was.

Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging and that is what happened to me in the last couple of weeks.  The main things are Lily (of course she’s my main distraction) and work, I try to get in as much work time as possible which usually amounts to 2 hours a day.  Since Lily is my first priority I try to only work when she’s playing happily or napping and since she doesn’t really nap much I don’t get much time in, oh well.  On top of these two important things I’ve had two other dramas or at least semi-drama stuff keeping me away.  And that is what I’m here to tell you about tonight.

First the simple one.  I turned my computer on one morning last week, I think it was Monday and while Waldo and I talked I started smelling something really weird.  We determined it was my computer and so I turned it off and used Waldo’s all day.  After work my Knight in shining geeky armor pulled my tower out of my desk and started inspecting it.  We realized my power supply fan wasn’t running, turned it off and ordered a new one.  It came in Thursday evening and pretty much the second he got off work Waldo went to work putting the new power supply in because he wanted his computer back.  This whole power supply crap is what kept me from uploading Lily’s Monday picture.

The other drama that I’ve been dealing with is a whole lot stinkier and energy draining.  Oh funny I just went and got a piece of angel food cake and when I got back reread that last sentence and realized how accidentally funny I am.  The situation was energy draining but that was the only thing draining.  You see the whole time we’ve lived in this rental the kitchen sink has drained really slowly.  At first we used drain cleaner and it would fix the problem temporally.  Then I bought one of those tiny plungers and that along with the drain cleaner would work and then all of the sudden not a darn thing worked. And just in case you are wondering this wasn’t a problem because we were putting food down the drain, we are very careful to not let stuff go down especially since we don’t have a garbage disposal and the drains have always been slow. So a month or two ago it started taking about an hour for the water to drain and then one day I was nursing Lily and the dish washer was running and I hear the very distinct sound of water hitting the floor. I checked on it and sure enough the sinks were full and water was running onto the floor. I swore a blue streak at Waldo on AIM, I was so mad.

The water hitting the floor started a very long annoying DIY streak at Casa Jinxyisms. Yes we are renters but didn’t want to call our landlord because they have been weird about repairing stuff in the past and just didn’t want to deal with it. My Dad suggested a shop vac so Lily and I went to Home Depot and bought one, it worked great to empty the water out of the sink but it did nothing for the clog. We bought a cheap pipe snake, it did nothing. My Mom said that you can rent stuff like a snake so I found a place in town and rented a pretty hefty one and can you take a wild guess at what happened? Not a darn thing, well Waldo did pull some white flakes out of the pipes. Oh and during the whole snaking fun Waldo also took a lot of pipes apart and really stinky water went all over the basement and him. I felt so bad for him. This DIY plumbing adventure took over a week and during it my cousin Melissa and my Dad kept telling me to call our landlord but we just didn’t want to. Oh and after Waldo got done with in the basement with the hefty snake he burst into the living room stating that he was going to the hardware store to get some really scary acid that is labeled for professional plumbers. When he got home he poured it down the drain and I went and got in the shower, when I got out I inquired about it’s effectiveness and was totally shocked when he told me that the water isn’t draining at all. I mean this stuff is sold with a protective plastic bag around it and when you pour it down the drain you have to put a pot over the drain in case water volcanos out of the drain or something like that.

At this point I gave in and called our landlord the next day. Mr. Landlord came over the next evening and had a bottle under his arm of the same scary acid and when I told him we already tried it he was shocked. I told him everything we had done and he left because he knew he didn’t have what he needed and wasn’t going to be able to come back till after the weekend (it was Friday by then). We weren’t happy with the fact that he wasn’t coming back till Monday or Tuesday but we had called the real plumber (yes that’s right we were going to pay out of pocket to have a plumber come, that was where I drew the line) and knew that Monday afternoon was the soonest we could get a appointment. So we ate more fast food and waited. Tuesday afternoon Mr. Landlord showed back up and worked and toiled in the basement cutting pipes apart and making the whole house stink. In the end he had to replace about 12 feet of pipe because the guy he had hired to paint the house before we moved in had cleaned his paint brushes in the kitchen sink night after night and the pipes were full of dried white paint. Waldo looked at one of the pipes and was amazed that we ever had water drain at all, he said there was about this (hold your index finger and thumb very close together) much room under the paint for drainage.

After Mr. Landlord left I cooked my little heart out I was so happy to have a usable kitchen again.

The moral of the story is DIY plumbing sucks.

These are just some random pictures I’ve taken of Lily over the last month. We spend 90% of our time during the day in our living room and the camera is always close by so when Lily is being especially cute or doing one of her signature moves I try to grab a snap of it.

Lily loves lip blam like her Mommy

Lily's checking out the new gate

Lily's doing tricks in our new Ergo

We love our Ergo

Fun in a box

Snow baby

This Boon cup is the best and Lily loves doing this

Honk honk

And for comparison here’s Lily a year ago at 2 weeks old

December has come and gone and with it so has Lily’s first birthday (a separate post to come) and Christmas. These events have brought up a lot of emotion and some questions. Mainly about Santa and weather or not we are going to tell Lily that Santa is a real magical guy or something else. This is something that Waldo and I have talked about since before Lily was born. Waldo remembers his brother breaking the news to him that Santa isn’t real (sorry to burst anyone’s bubbles) when he was about 4 years old and I don’t actually remember believing in Santa ever really. I don’t think that our non-belief in Santa hindered either of us in our childhoods and then there’s the whole issue of lying to Lily which I just don’t really want to do. It’s funny we know that we will just tell Lily the truth about my Mom being a lesbian. It wasn’t a decision that we had to make, we just knew that we wouldn’t lie or try to skirt the subject, like some people we know. So then why is this whole Santa thing harder for us? The only decision that I have come to about Santa is Lily looked really cute being held by him in front of our tree this year.

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Since Lily’s birthday is three days before Christmas I was having a hard time deciding if I wanted to send out Christmas cards or first birthday photo cards. Then my friend Starr (Gramma Starr) gave Lily a beautiful princess Christmas dress so Christmas cards it was. One weekend we went and bought a Christmas tree and wreath fixings and rented a Santa suit (more on that in a second) and set up a whole scene in our kitchen and went to work. I took like 294 pictures over the course of the weekend. I’m no professional and all I have is a couple year old Sony point and shoot but I was pretty pleased with a lot of the pictures. Lily was a champ and posed for hours.

This is one of my favorites

This was Lily first taste of sugar, it happened totally by accident. We gave her the candy cane thinking that the thin wrapper would keep her clean. We didn’t take into account how sharp her teeth are.

The scene we created on our kitchen table

A couple weeks before our Christmas photo shoot I was telling Waldo that we were going to have to brave the mall one day soon to get Lily’s picture with Santa. He laughed and said that there was no way that Lily would let Santa hold her so (totally jokingly) just rent a suit and I’ll play Santa. He didn’t expect me to run with it. I showed him. I asked on facebook if anyone in our area knew where I could rent a Santa suit and was told to call the local costume rental place. For $25 we got the suit for 24 hours. It was money well spent. We had planned on taking some funny Santa pictures like Santa with his head in the oven but ran out of time.

When we were taking pictures I thought it would be great to do a picture with Lily standing up holding Santa’s hands. Waldo just put the jacket and the gloves on and for some reason it freaked Lily out big time. I was really surprised because she could still see her Daddy’s face.

The next day Waldo let Lily play with the jacket and wig for like two hours before he put them on and then she watched him as he got dressed. She was much more comfortable with Santa this time.

We tried taking some pictures in front of the tree as a family but we had lost all daylight by then so I wasn’t happy with any of the pictures.

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Christmas was a nice quiet event at our house this year. We woke up and opened our gifts and then Jack came over for a while. I made dinner for everyone and that was our day. We didn’t very many pictures somehow.

This little car was a birthday gift

It’s funny to remember that Christmas day 2008 we were bringing our 3 day old baby girl home from the hospital. Crazy what a difference 365 days makes.

**edited to add: It was the Christmas pictures that I was hinting at here.