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Wish there were just a few more hours in your day? Want just a little bit more time added in somewhere to think deep thoughts, catch up on television, or sift through that stack of magazines? I have the solution you’ve been looking for – have (or adopt) a kid. No longer will your nights be spent slumbering. Those hours previously “wasted” on sleep will be yours… as long as whatever it is yu want to do can be done with a child in one arm.

This blog post brought to you courtesy of Callie, and through the one-handed typing skills of my right hand…

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Peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches?? What a weird, tasty combination, tastefully prepared for me by my husband. For other ideas of peanut butter sandwiches, see Sally’s Kitchen. For the record, I’ve now tried all combinations except the peanut butter and bacon combination. Pig and peanut butter – culinary combination designed to clog your arteries in record time.

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Our cat now has a prescription for antidepressants. If you see her drinking alcohol or driving heavy machinery, please report her to us, as she’d be a danger to herself and to society.

We’ve had to put her on the happy pills since Callie came home. Cat’s don’t show that they’re depressed by moping and sleeping all day – that’s normal cat behavior. No, how cats show that they’re depressed and stressed is to scratch on furniture and try to mark things as their own. It’s a turf war, basically, and my house is the ‘hood.

Cats on pills are a recursive problem, though. To sedate my cat by giving her a pill, you need an already sedated cat if you’re going to get the pill down her throat. My arms are marked with cat scratches from attempts to solve this inherent problem, and yet still no medication has gone down her throat. She’s a suspicious cat, too, so pills or even liquid versions of the medication haven’t been successfully hidden in tuna.

Today I had my six week post-partum checkup. After seeing my wrists, slashed with cat claws, I got a slew of questions of ‘feeling depressed? Angry? …’ No, I haven’t been trying to slit my wrists – my cat’s been trying to do that for me!

Well, our cat has it coming – Monday she’s scheduled to be spayed. Supposedly that’ll help calm her down. Too bad animals are allergic to chocolate – liberal doses, I’ve heard, have near medicinal properties for such things in women.

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Timeline today:
1:53 – Boss sends an e-mail, saying that the proposal I’ve been working on in the evenings needs to be out, not tomorrow as previously promised to client, but by COB today, as the client will be out of town tomorrow. I don’t get the email until later because…
2:00 – get the toddler finally down for a nap, after 45 minutes (at least) of valiant attempts by the toddler to sleep in her “big girl bed”. ‘Big Girl Bed’ has been the challenge du jour for the past two weeks. Each nap time starts with chants of ‘Big Girl Bed!’, but she’s as yet too excited to actually _sleep_ in the thing. Finally mommy informs toddler that BGB will have to wait until tomorrow, and plops toddler into her crib…
2:15 – get the email from the boss. Clock’s now ticking – toddler will sleep for two hours or less…. email the boss that I’ll have it to him in two hours or less.
2:30 – infant wakes up. Wants to eat. Wants held. Doesn’t want mommy to have two hands on a keyboard.
3:15 – having one-handed typed for a while, finally get infant to snooze in her swing. Finish editing/formatting/recosting proposal. Wrangle with Microsoft Word to get it to stop monkeying with my formatting.
4:00 – talk with boss on phone, explaining why proposal’s cost estimate is as fuzzy as it is. Basically, it’s an R&D project – a more tight cost estimate isn’t possible! Hear baby snoring lightly in swing behind me. Pray she doesn’t wake up during call.
4:15 – get off phone with boss, after letting him know can’t commit to working anymore, due to toddler naptime soon expiring… Doesn’t seem professional to state it that way, but, figure I’m working on my maternity leave time, and reality says that I have to let him know that more progress today will need somebody else’s efforts. Else, my daughter will add text of the following variety to our proposal – “asfwrouasdf;asl1 Big Girl Bed!”.

Breathe sigh of relief that toddler slept through whole thing, and that infant could be coaxed back to sleep. Otherwise, the afternoon would have been even hairier than it already was.

Check here in our photogallery for the view of Tina doing the Mommy/work meld thing.

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I’m always excited to see someone put up a comment on a blog entry, but I’ve now been disappointed to see that there’s a new form of spam: comment spam. Rather than send me an e-mail trying to get me to click some link, the spammer puts up a comment on a post. Their comment is full of ridiculous text, seemingly generated to put in as many links to various other commercial sites as possible. Bleah. I can of course delete the comments, but still, yuck. I wonder who they think is el stupido enough to go through those links? Or is it actually some other scheme to try to get those sites up higher in hit counts for search engines due to them being mentioned across various pages? I wonder how sites are targetted for this kind of thing – is there some web crawler out there that just randomly picks blogs and somehow submits comments? Or is some human being paid some amount of money to be web scum and troll the Net for sites to, essentially, graffiti?

If you’ve got some insight, I’m interested. I’d love to somehow turn the scheme around on these folks – become a pain in their electronic neck in the same way that they’re a pain in mine.