Rant ahead- you were warned.

TLC has a new show about gypsies. Normally I am all about live and let live, there is rarely a family lifestyle or type that I'll even bat an eyelash towards. However, one thing really sets me off.
When people let/encourage/force underage age girls to have spray tans, wear things that show more skin than have actual cloth, and dance like they have something to offer sickens me. This includes the gypsy lifestyle, the parents who have their kids wear makeup and hairspray and ten pounds of cloth for pageants, and those who think it's okay to encourage the attitude of entitlement.
The gypsies are known as travellers, they have a high moral mindset, yet dress like sluts. When the males are only allowed to approach females and impose themselves on the females in a forceful manner, demanding a kiss or some other sign of affection, it seems so off.
Oppulence bothers me, as it seems just wasteful in many cases. What bothers me more, and gets me riled up, is when children are sexualized. A young child of age 6 or so does not have a sexy body, should not be wearing glitter and makeup and showing off breast buds in training for being a sexy 14 year old wearing tassles and shaking her breasts and butt.
I am all for when someone is legal, age 18 in my country, to be as sexy and free and open as they want, but not children! If you want to shroud your body in a burka and be a homebody or strip for a living because you have a great body and feel confident enough to show it off, great! Do what you want when you're legal! I don't care if you want no kids, you want only to adopt, or you want to give birth to 20 kids, go for it. For the love of all the bunny farts in the world, people: don't dress your child, pre-teen or let your 15 year old dress like she belongs on a street corner in a red light district.
You get my idea. Expressing yourself is truly awesome but it can be done without making little girls and even little boys sexualized beings.

Adventures in DIY home improvements, part 1.

I have this house. The mister chose this house for no other reason than the massive amounts of garage space. It has the orginal garage built when the house was, back in the fifties, and a newer one that fits twice as many cars. The house is not all that large. She's a good little house that needs some love. When I moved in two years ago, the house was stuck in the 60s and 80s. There was carpet in the finished part of the basement that came from an episode of the Brady Bunch, and the kitchen had little country hearts and flowers stenciled on the cabinets and wallpaper that could have been in Full House. It was bad.
I promptly removed the wallpaper,and painted white primer over the country blue cabinet doors. Now, two years later, I stripped pain off the upper doors. My poor kitchen (what little there is of it) has robin's egg blue counters, off-white door openings, and country blue cabinet doors and trim. The flooring is (according to a blog I found about remodeling and finding a 1960s kitchen inder a bad fix-it job) a 1962 Armstrong special.

Step 1 was to remove wallpaper.
Step 2 was/is to get rid of  the blue doors.
Step 3 is to remove the countertop and replace it with something made in this century.
Step 4 is to remove and replace the 1960 flooring.
Step 5 is to hopefully repaint the hardware to a brushed nickel finish
Step 6 is the last step, to get rid of the blue trim and paint it all white while I paint the walls all one color.

That is simply the kitchen. More to come on other parts of my home.
 Exhibit 1, the blue on blue on wallpaper and white.

Exhibit 2 and 3, the Brady bunch carpet and the stripped doors.

Exhibit 4, the 1962 flooring

Crafts- HA! I'm dreaming.

I have this dream. One day I'd love to have a home big enough to have a room dedicated to crafts. All things ranging from cross-stitching, sewing/quilting to model cars/scrap-booking. I love these types of things, even though I am no good, and wish to eventually have a room so that I can light a candle or open a window, settle in with a mug of something hot or glass of something iced and go into my own little world while I attempt to create something.
This room would have a great table for all manner of crafting, two or comfy rolling chairs and two reading chairs. Those oversized chairs that can almost fit two people in it. They would each have their own ottoman with storage in which to keep warm blankets. To fit all this, I would need either an open floor plan attic, or a walk out basement.

In keeping with laughing at my lame attempts to craft, it would be a must to have a wall for tacking up ideas. Putting up a huge section of cork board, surrounded by trim sounds just fun an insane enough to give a go. I would have a small stereo system or hook-up thingy for my music player.

There are many, many things I would have set up here. A wall full of open and closed shelving, built-ins because if any of my children are anything like me,  they'll be climbing anything that will hold them, would have a large number of books and also hold cute craft things that have not been too embarassign to put on display.
The colors would be soft and soothing, with earthy tones and floral colors, like greens, oranges, lavender, tans, etc, all in the accents, but the walls would be very neitral, either white or off-white.

The only thing missing now is the things that my sweet loving mother would add to the room, because in this dream, Mom chooses to live with us for a few months of the year, when the weather at home for her is not perfect.

Today was an over all good day!

Have you ever had a day that you managed to put off getting something done, and it turn out to be the best choice for you? Today was that day. My "to-do" list is full, and there are chores that require packing up Little Miss and driving somewhere. I kept putting it off by talking to T2, Mom, and T3 on Skype (each at their own homes, too bad a s a family conference call is always fun!), looking for a newer home that is more like a home for this little family rather than resembling the little old lady living in a shoe, and playing with Little Miss. The day passed from morning to afternoon fairly quickly with all this busy work of talking, wrangling baby-squirms-a-lot and searching online for homes. I managed a few household chores that I won't postpone, and before we knew it, The Daddy was home! We settled in to our evening routine of "What do you want for dinner, what are we doing, am I leaving the house at all tonight?", got things settled and enjoyed our night together.
Mid-afternoon's crazylazyness was abruptly interrupted by the sky going from partly cloudy and bright to churning grey skies, high winds and rain in less than five minutes. Little Miss, the dogs, the cat, and I all went downstairs to wait out the creepy weather, then went back to our nonproductive day.
The Daddy came home, A smiled as big as ever, we settled in and watched nonsense TV while talking and feeding and entertaining the quickly bored Tyrant.  9pm came and went with our sweet girl still wide awake. My goodness the kid had energy today! Awake at 5 am, slept for an hour nap in the morning, slept for an hour nap in the afternoon right before the storm for less than an hour, then was still wide awake. By 9:30 she was giving it up and was out in less than 15 minutes.
Mr K and I watched a documentary on John Lennon, and enjoyed the film.  We love The Beatles in this home. We used to sing (what you might call a cat wailing in agony if you were to hear this mess) to each other and to Tyrant in utero (hmm maybe this is why she is our Two Foot Tyrant now? Payback for torture?) and still love to listen to their music anytime we ride together (rare these days).

So, instead of driving around using up gas, spending money in a few places, I stayed home, enjoyed my quality time with my daughter, sister, mother, and brother, and husband, and was home when scary weather threatened with possible tornadoes. An overall good day.

I'm alive!

It's been ages since I last posted. A has had her surgery, and recovered well, and is now starting physical and occupational therapy.
Her PT is going to focus on her arm movement and coordination, while her OT is going to work on her ability to sit, grab her feet and socks, as well as holding herself in a crawling position/getting her to learn to use her arms in that manner.
As for the mister, he had a procedure done to remove a spot from a toe, and it has taken a while to recover. His podiatrist is about as helpful as a turtle sunning himself on a log. He's doing well considering and is back to walking almost normally.
I am supposed to be getting a new pump but it is taking a while, as does every thing when it comes to insurance companies. I am currently on a minimed pump but plan to go with an animas ping. I'm torn between green and blue. They need to offer purple.

Off to go sip some coffee and enjoy the evening. Goodnight all!

Surgery, oof

Our tyrant had her RCDH repaired midday Monday. She had no ill effects and thankfully the surgeon did not have to convert to an open incision and was able to repair things laproscopically.
A had her chest tube removed about 24 hours after surgery and did well without it the rest of the day.  Her lungs did well and she was only on controlled substance pain meds for 24 hours. She was released today at around 12. We are home and Boog is resting comfortably.
More to come later.
Thanks for reading, whomever you are :-D

Booger's surgery is scheduled.

We went to a doctor an hour and a half away this afternoon for a second opinion for our tyrant. It went well and kind of as expected and then definitely not as expected. Her doc confirmed the diagnosis of right sided diaphragmatic hernia (the "as expected part") and had no idea why the initial diagnosing surgeon would want to wait and when I repeated his reasoning the second doc basically thought it was an invalid reason but was quite professional in his way of saying so.  he went on to say that he recommends getting a surgery scheduled and the repair surgery done in the next few weeks. I called the mister and we spoke and decided to go ahead with scheduling the pre-op appointment. I was still in the clinic area, and went back in to ask the nurses at the check out desk how to go about it and they paged one of the necessary staff to assist me. We wound up doing to pre-op stuff today and got the surgery slated for Monday. As most hospitals try to schedule the youngest patients first, A may get in first thing Monday morning depending on the age of the other person slated for surgery Monday morning. So, Mommy, Daddy and Baby Boog get to have an adventure Monday morning. My guess is: we will be getting up at 3 to prepare, getting on the road for 5 so we can be at the clinic for no later than 6:30 (depending upon traffic) and will get settled as we wait for our girl to get
I will let y'all know more as we know more. (Ah who am I kidding, I think I have about as many readers as Robin Scherbatsky has viewers on How I Met Your Mother (minus the drinking gamers).

Jumping baby and bookworming

I have been salivating over wanting for A, a jumperoo type toy for her to enjoy. We were finally able to get one and got it together last night. By the time I went to the store, picked it up and brought it home and put together A was asleep. This morning we tried it out and it was a hit! There was one tiny little snag, her legs are about an inch too short for this toy. Hrm. Solution was to sacrifice a pillow and voila, the bebe now has a jumperoo in which to bounce, spin and play mad games.
 I am a bookworm. My nickname in school was bookwurm. It was bestowed upon me in 1st grade by a boy named John who kept calling me that all the way through high school. (Small town, USA, some kids I've known since kindergarten.) I've earned it and am proud of it. I could live in my local library. They have a cafe attached, and comfy chairs. What more could a slave to words reader need? My library has one minor flaw. They are not thorough when checking in books from the drop box. I had a two month overdue notice come in. Worried that I did in fact lose the book, I called every person I came in contact with while I had said book and no one knew where it was. Yesterday, to clear things up, I went in and looked for the book upon the shelf where it was supposed to be and wouldn't you know, there it was! This is the second time this has happened. I will henceforth immediately get to the library when smacked with an overdue notice and look for any offending materials before preparing to shell out however many nickels and quarters they ask as payment for my apparent lack of regard for return dates. In the event that my dogs and/or child has eaten any books (not happened yet, thankfully) then I will gladly pay the piper, or in this case librarian, apologize profusely and do my darnedest to get a replacement copy.

A latest doctor appointment.

After our lovely day Thursday, Friday we brought A to a neurologist as per the pediatrician's recommendation. The neurologist evaluated her and diagnosed delayed development and prescribed 4 months of physical and occupational therapy. We will hear from the therapy people on Monday, but may have to switch therapy people before it even begins if insurance gets fussy about the place her neuro picked. Oy. If it isn't one thing....
That was our Friday morning. The afternoon brought another appointment, this time for Mr K. The man is a saint when it comes to patience. We get to the doctor, he looks at the offending spot on Mr K's foot and removes the spot. Aside from being told to take it easy this weekend and he will be fine to drive immediately, but take some ibuprofen for pain, he was not prepared for the level of discomfort from having a small bit of extra flesh removed.
Poor man, he needs a break from his nutty wife and demanding daughter. Instead of me being the sweet wife I had planned on, I wound up leaving him in the lurch with a (temporarily) bum foot and go across the street to help a neighbor clean out her garage and got massive amounts of hand me down toys and clothes for my self and T2's youngest son. He is only about 3.5 months younger than A, so I was able to score a bit of stuff for both out kids. Thank you sweet neighbor who had so much extra to give.
Now the Mr is hobbling around a house that looks like it belong on an episode of hoarders, and cannot catch a break. If I am not blocking his every path to get around our home, the dogs and cat are trying to step on his sore foot.
Have I mentioned the man needs to get away from everything? Because he really, really needs a break.
I love my husband more every day, and it is his attitude through every day like this that makes it happen.
More to come Monday, have a great week everyone!