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300 calories per day. That’s supposedly what a pregnant woman needs, in addition to her normal calorie intake, to support the babe growing inside. 300 calories just isn’t much. A bag of Skittles is almost 300 calories. We’re often told that women are eating for two, that an increase in appetite is to be expected. Where’s the room for the pickles and ice cream? A couple of pickles in themselves would take care of the 300, never mind the ice cream.

Recipes for cakes, cookies, and pies beckon, whispering “Hey, you’re pregnant – you can have this stuff, you’re _supposed_ to be gaining weight”. “Pick me”, and another one “don’t forget about me”. But pregnancy overindulgences can’t be sweated away – no 3 mile runs a couple of times a week, no strenuous weight-lifting, nothing that pushes the heart rate up over whatever that magic number is. Any weight gained just gets a free ride until after the baby is born.

So I have to keep my cookbooks under lock and key. No pulling out those magic combinations of flour, sugar, and eggs to make some wonderful delicacy. Any goodies made have to be carefully scheduled to be shared with some guest’s unsuspecting waistline. Hey, that’s why I love potluck dinners! I can make the most delicious things without having to worry about whether it’ll be Jason’s or my belt that needs to get replaced.

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Seattle’s got nothing on us! According to the Post, our area’s only seen 17 clear days this year, compared to our usual average of 36. It’s rained every day for what seems like weeks. Our lawn is growing, both grass and mushrooms, and there’s been no opportunity to cut it because the brief periods of dry weather per day haven’t been long enough to dry out the lawn. My poor garden doesn’t have a thing in it yet. Time to get out there in my raincoat and plant between the raindrops.

My daughter’s even given up on asking to go outside. Instead we spend hours either reading (the same books, over and over again), or she asks to see her Baby Einstein videos (the same videos, over and over again).

Make the rain stop! Our first hope of some partly sunny weather, though remarkably cold for us for June, will be next Monday. Between then, it’s just more clouds and showers and thunderstorms.

Maybe it’s time for a vacation to Seattle! Might catch some sun!

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My client’s offered to pay for my time so that I can go to JavaOne! Actually, that happened a couple of weeks ago. But the request has sat on my boss’s desk since then, due to a combination of external factors. I had nearly written the request off as a “not going to happen”, but decided to give it one more go. Sent off an email requesting a response, stating that I needed to let my client know if I was going or not (rather than saying, “I really wanna know now!”), and got back a request for a cost estimate for the trip. Sent it off… waiting and hoping… drooling over a whole set of sessions that I’d love to attend…

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I just put Cora down for a nap. Normally not worthy of a blog entry, but today she actually _requested_ to be put in her crib for a nap. I was rocking her, giving her a bottle, and she pointed to her crib. I asked her if she’d like to take her nap now, and she answered Yes (in her little baby yes grunt, of course, rather than a coherent “Yes, mother”). I put her in, she tucked into her sleeping position, and… well, she would have drifted off if she didn’t just a few minutes later dirty her diaper. Diaper problem corrected, she’s now snoozing away.

Someone told me not too long go that their toddler would wave bye-bye to them to tell them that they were going to take a nap. I was astounded – it took quite a while (weeks? months?) to get Cora to stop fighting naps, and I never expected that she’d request one. It’s one of those moments that makes you realize that babyhood/toddlerhood doesn’t last forever – which is both exciting, and bittersweet.

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Dreaming of Maui, the Caribbean, a 5-day cruise for two, heck even the 3-day cruise for two. Signed up for ClubMomyesterday. Had heard about it from a friend, and then got a flyer for it with my paper. It’s basically another one of these setups where, in return for directing business to specific merchants, letting them track their purchases, and letting them send you stuff, they pay you. Cora’s college fund is being supplemented by one of these schemes (BabyMint), and our local grocer effectively does the same thing through their shopper card, so I don’t have a problem with letting one more company pay me for the same information as the other places are snagging. Figure I’m getting a bunch of junk mail anyway that I’m not getting paid for – might as well set up the economics a little better in my favor.

Let’s see, the Caribbean cruise is 420,000 points. At 1 point per dollar spent at the grocery store, that’ll take – hmmm… better upgrade how we eat, if I’m ever going to get to go on that cruise! Some lobster, some filet mignon… a few shrimp. Hey, hubby, I’m _saving_ you money ’cause they’re going to give us this free cruise!

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Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. As days go, Sundays are pretty packed for us (day of rest? Hah! Not between hubby’s deacon duty, my Sunday school teaching, church service, evening service…), so I’m neither expecting to do much for my mom nor to be getting much pampering myself. For my husband to pull anything off, he’d have to try to cram one more thing in the day, and try to make it fit around the nap schedule of a toddler to boot.

But I’ve been daydreaming – what would the perfect Mother’s Day be like? I think I found an article out there that expresses it wonderfully:
“What mothers need on Mother’s Day is to have their family honor all those parts of themselves that aren’t about mothering. We want tap dancing lessons and purple bras from Victoria’s Secret. We want leather mini skirts. We want instruction in race car driving or playing the saxophone. We want our husbands to rent us a Harley Davidson for the weekend and take off with us to some little motel without the children. We want the part of us recognized that made us mothers in the first place. ” – from an article on Family Fun

Every day of my life, since February 17, 2002, I’ve been a mom. My daughter looks at me that way; much of my day revolves around that fact and its impacts upon my life. (My husband’s life is impacted much the same, to be fair.) I love being a mom, so this isn’t a moan session about that impact. But the perfect way to celebrate Mother’s Day is to celebrate the person who’s the mom, rather than the mom role. Celebrate how she’s unique, recognize that she’s a _person_ who has stretched (and may have the marks to prove it) tremendously beyond her image of who she is handle the needs of her family.

I don’t recall ever talking with my mom about whether she’d dreamed as a kid that she’d have kids of her own. I know that at the age of nineteen (almost twenty), she was married and having her first of three kids. Our mother’s day gifts to her were of the normal variety – the breakfast in bed, promise to clean our rooms and behave for the WHOLE day set. Even this year, I went with the traditional flower delivery, though I did pick to send her a live plant, recognizing that she’s got a green thumb that might appreciate seeing her azalea grow. Truth is, until she took up the hobby of painting after we kids left home, I could have told you very little about what my mom dreamed of doing or what her talents were, beyond raising us kids. Kids think of their moms as moms, not people like them. In the same way that it’s weird to run into your teacher in a department store, your mom is just your mom, even if she’s really good at being your mom. And that’s why, for this one day a year, mothers ought to be given a chance to celebrate the parts of them that aren’t tied to being a mom, and even to expose their kids to the idea that mom isn’t only confined to the role of their mother. For that matter, moms need that one day a year to remind it to themselves!

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My husband’s had to work a lot of late hours lately. His software project is on a tight schedule, and so the whole development team has been putting in a lot of extra time. We work for the same company, and I even have a minor part of his project, so I’m getting to see the situation from lots of angles. There’s the go-team angle: I’m a fellow employee who knows what the guys are going through, and wants them to succeed. There’s the sympathetic wife angle: my poor guy’s had to give up most of his evenings and his weekend time the past two weeks, and has come dragging in the door 9:00 or later in the evening. And then there’s the ticked-off wife angle: it’s been two weeks of mostly eating dinners by myself, taking care of our home and daughter by myself, and handling anything that comes up by myself. Not that it’s fault, but as each day passes where the workload doesn’t end (for him or me), I lose my patience more and more easily. And that minor work I’m supposed to be doing for the same project is getting ignored, because I don’t have any extra time to put in since I’m doing parental/home front double duty.

Theoretically, the deadline for the work to be done was yesterday. So, I was thinking that maybe, just maybe, hubby would be able to take the afternoon off and enjoy the fruit of some of those extra hours he put in early in the pay period by soaking up some sunshine today. And I had lined up a few activities for me for this weekend and next week, now that I’d have a little breathing room on the home front. But it’s 10:45 at night with my husband still at work. His intent is to work horrendously late tonight (he promised me he’d be home by the time I wake up tomorrow), if need be, so that he doesn’t go in for the rest of the weekend and can actually spend some time with our daughter. Getting home so late at night, she’s been in bed before he’s gotten home every night this week.

Cora and I are doing fine, though I’ve gotten lax on meal preparation: cereal, some cheese and a hot dog make a reasonably well-balanced diet for a toddler, right? And mom will just have a bowl of cereal and maybe a frozen burrito. There just doesn’t seem to be much point to making a real meal – dealing with a fussy toddler, making a mess in the kitchen, cleaning up that mess – all for the sake of eating by yourself (unless you count the food smearer and dropper known as Cora as great dinner company). I’m not sure what Jason’s eating – some combination of canned soups, PopTarts from the vending machine, and whatever else is easily available. Makes fewer dishes to clean this way, anyway.

I came home really mad tonight, but I think I’ve cooled off. Now I’m just tired. Going to bed to recharge for my software widow day tomorrow.

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I’m cleaning up my computer area, which also serves as the finance center for our household. All receipts go through this area, to get entered into Quicken so that we can reconcile them against our credit card statements. I had a very large of receipts that had been filed, but hadn’t yet been discarded, so I set to work. You can’t just throw out receipts, particularly credit card receipts. As I’m discovering, too many companies put your full credit card number on the receipt. That makes that slip of paper a handy way for someone to snag your credit card number and charge whatever they’d like to your account. (Folks worry about electronic credit card fraud, but the fraud caused by folks just snagging credit card numbers is much greater!)

Why is it that they need my whole credit card number to be printed on the receipt? I don’t need it. I much prefer the receipts that show the last four digits – gives me enough to verify the charge account, without giving anyone else enough to buy themselves a nice stack of stuff at Amazon. Restaurants seem to be the worst offenders here, even though they run credit cards through the same Point of Sale (POS) system as someone at Walmart. Maybe the deal is that that POS system isn’t integrated into their records, so they don’t have a way to cross-reference against any reports they get from the credit card company. So buy a better system! Stop exposing me to the risk of fraud to balance out your protection against fraud/mistakes/communication failure with the credit card company. Someone’s got to have a cost-effective solution out there for businesses. And if there isn’t one, I say let’s create a market for such a solution by lobbying somebody to make it illegal to print out that whole credit card number on a receipt.

(Done my rant… ripping up the rest of my receipts.)