The Queen's Rambles

Elsa continues to grow and grow and grow. What happened to my baby? That’s a little girl looking at me!

Erik must like kindergarten better than he is letting on. He roared down the stairs at 8:34 am on Saturday, screaming like a mad man because he was pissed that I’d let him miss the bus. I’ll take that as a good sign.

We’ve had a crazy weekend. We went to the zoo on Saturday. We had a horrible thunderstorm in our city, but the friends we were meeting said it was clear blue skies down in DC and the forecast said there wasn’t a chance of rain down there, so off we went.

Of course the moment we arrived we got rained on. And of course we couldn’t find parking, so had to park way way way way way up a street away from the zoo, then walk down a giant hill and then up the giant zoo hill.

All in the rain.

Even after it stopped raining it was still wet outside. The humidity levels here have reached an all new level of hell, though it’s particularly hot out.

We saw some animals, had some fun, did some zooey-zoo like things. You know the drill. They have people misters, so we watched Erik absolutely soak himself while we ate lunch. I was thinking “huh, he’s not going to want to be all wet” but my mommy brain didn’t kick in and tell him to get out of the water.

Of course five minutes later he was in front of me, freezing, crying, begging for dry clothes.

Do I carry dry clothes for an almost six year old? No.

I stripped off his shirt and dried him off with my sweaty BodyPump towel and then went to find him a shirt. The first stand we found only sold girl shirts. Purple, hearts, jewels. Erik was not going for that, so we ended up walking allllll the way down the hill* to a souvenir shop that had boy shirts. And allllll the way down that hill we had people turning to stare at the shirtless boy. He didn’t like people looking at him, so he wanted me to put my hands on his moob area to cover his nips. Wonderful sight to see, I’m sure.

That was pretty much our zoo excitement.

I spent yesterday trying to get a shit load of stuff done. Mike is going out of town tomorrow through Friday night so I am going to be even more frantic and exhausted than usual. I had to finish a bunch of MOMS Club stuff, then print out a bunch of pics for Erik’s school and I don’t even know what else. It felt like I was hunched over a computer all day.

Normally I order prints from Wal-Mart if I need them quickly, but the local Wal-Mart does terrible one-hour prints. I don’t know how it can vary so much from store to store, but this store seriously sucks. Too much red, strange lines, just awful. I had the bright idea of checking with Ritz Cameras and I’m so glad I did! As a new customer I got 25 free prints and the quality was much better. Plus their store is a lot closer than Wal-Mart and a lot more pleasant. Win win win and win.

I have a seven photo frame of candid Erik baby pictures and I have plans to make a matching one for Elsa. I used a few of my free prints to get that project started, but I think I need to plan a little better. I need 3 portrait and 4 landscape pictures, but I ordered all portrait. Doh!

All my long time readers will be interested in this tid-bit of news: Remember Annica from Sweden? The one and only Swede crazy enough to talk to the American?

If you’re a long time reader I know you remember her because who could forget? The stories are just too crazy.

She called and I was happy to hear from her, though her English and my Swedish have both deteriorated so badly that we could barely communicate. She has a two month old baby boy named Torsten! The first thing she said, before she even told me about him, was “Can you get pregnant when you’re nursing?”

When I told her you could, she refused to believe me. In typical Annica fashion she told me about all the great sex she’d had and then told me that in Sweden you can’t get pregnant when you are nursing. I don’t know if that applies to just Swedes or to anyone living in Sweden. Take note, my Ameri-Swede friends. Your biology my differ when you cross the border.

She wanted to talk to Mike, so I turned over the phone. He started turning red and I found out later that she told him all about a wonderful hotel in Lund where she had lots of great sex, then she explained how her new baby had been conceived. I don’t think it was any more complicated than insert Tab A into Slot B. She’d been on birth control pills for years because she has female issues. Her older girls are the result of fertility treatments. The doctors wanted her off the pill because she’d been on them too long. Apparently she got pregnant two weeks after going off the pill.

That’s about all I know. We couldn’t even exchange e-mail addresses until Mike helped us because neither of us could accurately translate vowels. I realize that sounds crazy, but our I is their E or maybe our E is their A or maybe our O is their dotted up letter. I just don’t know! And neither did she.

I did a major Costco run on Friday and about fainted at my total. But it wasn’t like I was buying a bunch of junk. I got new PJs for Elsa, a winter coat for Erik, a Christmas present, a couple of sets of Bob Books, a year’s supply of dental floss and tons of food that we will actually use.

I have been hearing about these Bob Books for years, but wasn’t that interested after seeing the price for the set. They were definitely a better deal at Costco, so I picked up two sets. I think I’m going back to get the rest of them. It would be nice to have a complete set for Elsa in a few years.

I started with Set 2 for Erik and he can totally read them independently, which gives him an enormous sense of pride. They are much more like the learn to read books I remember when I was a kid “The bus went up the hill. The bus went down the hill. Stop the bus! Stop the bus!” I hate the Step Into Reading series because they are so dependent on sight words. Erik has struggled with them, so it was a relief to find something that was more on par with my memories and that immediately made Erik feel successful.

I’ve been semi-frustrated with his reading style, but his kindergarten teacher sent home a list of stages of reading development and his style is described very accurately as “Stage 3” so I guess he’s totally normal. Unless it’s a word he’s very confident with he just looks at the first letter and tries to guess based on context. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. I am going to stop worrying about it now that I see it is normal. I will still encourage him to look at the whole word, but I will not let my chest get tight and my voice get brittle.

Ok, guess I am going to go find something fun to do in my last few hours of freedom. If it wasn’t pouring out I might go to the mall. Doesn’t that sound like a thrill on a holiday?

*The DC zoo is built on a very big hill. We always take the hill into consideration when planning our zoo trip, but when you are thwarted by lack of parking and a naked boy in need of a shirt, you might end up walking up and down that bad boy until you collapse of hill exhaustion.