adios, 2007

i barely knew thee, two-thousand-and-seven.

new year's eve :: rockin' sf style

something new this year :: spending NYE at our friends JL+JP's place in san francisco. it was a last-minute trip; we basically invited ourselves over while JP was in a drunken stooper at the mermaid on christmas eve.

i'm really glad we went ... although i'm kind of afraid that maya's craziness may have scared JL+JP from someday having children of their own. for instance, maya dropped an entire plate of lemon bars on somebody's coach purse. and she randomly vomited in her sleep. fun times.

we didn't do any SF sightseeing since we were only there for a couple of days, and one of those days we were prepping for NYE dinner. in between basting the ham and trimming string beans, we played a lot of rock band. what can i say ... i luuuuurve that game!

playing many many songs prevented me from imbibing too much. after all, you have to stay sober to hit those notes. ;) i think we are gonna have to get the game when it comes out for the wii.

thanks JL+JP for hosting us! (JL makes a mean ham and rib roast, btw.)

bah, humbug!

i am soooooo not in the holiday spirit this year. it's just not coming to me, that happy, twinkly, excitedness. and i feel like it's getting harder and harder to be festive this time of year. it's so stressful, ya know? when did it stop being fun?? oh yeah ... when i had to start buying the presents.

this year rupert and i decided to donate to one of my favorite charities instead of buying gifts. this went over surprisingly well, but i'm not sure it's something i will do every year because, quite frankly, i think it cost more than buying gifts (i'm a bargain shopper, after all). however, in the true spirit of giving and reducing waste and clutter, donating to a worthy cause is really the way to go.

unfortunately, my mother did not seem to agree with this and asked that my sisters and i chip in to buy something in particular for my dad. her reasoning? they already donated a lot this year. huh? is there a limit to donating? i wasn't aware of that.

eventually, i'd like the kids to choose a cause to call their own and work towards raising awareness and/or money. i've been very bad about public service lately, and i'm aiming to make it a part of our lives in 2008. a couple of years ago ian chose habitat as his charity (this was after katrina) and earlier this year we donated to nothing but nets. it's all fine and dandy to donate money but that's the easy part. being an active participant in a cause is so much harder and takes dedication, something we currently lack as a family. there's so much more we can do ... and should do.

one of my rie friends, K, has a charity event at her house every year. this year they'll be collecting toys for spark of love, inspired by her son's love of fire engines. her kids are both under the age of 2, but it's so wonderful that she somehow includes them, even at this young age. we will definitely be attending; it'll be a great opportunity for ian to get involved because i'm sure it's something he can empathize with (what kid wouldn't be devastated if he lost all of his toys in a fire?). plus, K secretly encouraged us to donate all of those noisy christmas presents we don't want! hee!

hmmm, it appears i have digressed from my original post about the holidays. what was it that i wanted to say? now i can't remember ... i guess my point was supposed to be that the holidays are getting too materialistic. i'm no christian and i don't believe in jesus, but christmas sure has strayed from its original significance. even hanukkah, which is what our family celebrates, isn't supposed to be about the presents; i believe that's a relatively new tradition. in all honesty, as much as i like getting stuff, i'm over the presents and having to spend time and money on purchasing gifts. i would much rather spend time with my family sans gift-giving and count my blessings. (what? that's what thanksgiving is for? oh come on, work with me people!)

in conclusion :: the holidays are fun while you're a kid, but not so much once you're an adult.

the end.

and, now, back to our regularly scheduled programming

at the request of rupert i'm back ... although i'm not sure i have anything new to say ... hence the long absence from posting ...

november flew by in a hurry, didn't it? there was so much going on at breakneck speeds i can't say i got to savor the individual moments very much. even with the kids' birthdays, ian's soccer, and thanksgiving (and my brief bout of stomach flu) over, i can expect this month to whiz by too.

rupert's super-busy with final papers due this coming week, so he's been preoccupied with school (and rightly so). i knew school would take up much of his time and energy (for the next five years), but, frankly, i'm annoyed that he's not as available as he used to be (granted, he still pitches in a lot). more importantly, he's been writing his papers on the laptop, which means it's unavailable to me in the evenings. doesn't he know that a girl needs access to her laptop 24/7?! but maybe he got my subliminal bitter rays because now he's out in the garage/office using the desktop.

a huge thorn in my side is that we have three major malfunctions around the house :: the camera (that's a huge part of the reason why i haven't been blogging), the oven, and the shower plumbing. the shower has been unusable for at least a couple of years now (long story) so i won't dwell on that now. but the camera and the stove? i'm dying here; life is just not as enjoyable without them. the camera will have to get professionally fixed once i figure out the warranty. the oven, however, seems like something we could fix on our own (i think the gas ignitor needs replacing) ... will we though? we don't have a particularly good track record about getting things done in a timely manner. but what kind of winter would it be without baking and roasting food in the oven??

in other news, my sister is finally coming home from hawaii on the 4th. yay -- a free babysitter!

and, of course, chanukah and christmas are coming up ... or, as we call it around here, chanumas. it's rather sad that i dread this time of year :: the stress of trying to get gifts for everyone, dreading all the beeping, flashing toys the kids will get, and the pounds i'll gain from all the eating. i can't remember when the holidays became more of a chore than a joy for me. alas, i guess it's the apathy that comes with age.

this year, however, i intend to minimize some of the stress by making donations in people's names instead of getting them gifts. [i probably just ruined the "surprise" for my in-laws before they open their gifts.] and i intend to enforce the "one toy in, one toy out" rule with the kids' gifts. [ian is reading over my shoulder as i type this and he may not be so happy with this rule ... but that's what mama has planned for your old toys, little dude!]

i've finally gotten around to purging some things that weren't necessarily in the way but were taking up room :: old snacks on the top shelf (some of the stuff was like three years old!), the many unused mugs we have, and old clothes i just don't need/wear. it hasn't made a dent in the clutter around here but it's definitely a start. next stop :: ian's old clothes and maya's infant toys.
we don't have any travel plans this winter break, so i intend to take it easy and maybe get some crafting done. (see the next post.)

update complete. over and out.

what kind of fortune is this?!

(thank goodness i wasn't the one who got it. ian was the lucky recipient.)

changes, yes. fresh start, not so much.

i was purposely vague in one of my previous posts about making october fresh start month. mainly because i have no clue as to what kind of changes i should be making.

i know for certain that rupert needs quiet time alone to get his schoolwork done. i also need to understand that sometimes he'll come home late from school or work. but other than that what can i do to make our family life better without sacrificing my own sanity?

here are some things on my "i really have to put effort into this" list ::

• saving money + not spending what we have :: this is going to be really hard for me; i'm the spender of the family.
• purging unwanted + un-needed items :: giving them a second life by donating them.
• making more meals at home with fresh ingredients :: including the kids in our food choices + preparation.
• work first, play second :: getting my priorities straight and taking care of business first.

i shouldn't have to make a list and remind myself of these things; they should come naturally to me as a stay-at-home mom. however, i foresee having to come back to this list daily to make sure i'm putting my family first.

someone's showing me they're ready for a dog

not that i'm going to let her get a dog, but it's more effort than i've seen either of the boys show!

last week maya got into our plastic bag drawer and pulled out a produce bag. the first thing she did with it? went straight to her wooden dog toy and pretended to pick up poop! she must've been really paying attention during her walks with my mother-in-law and her dog.

i noticed today that the "poop" she picked up was a little brown stuffed animal kitten. how appropriate.

(and, don't worry, she's always supervised when she has the plastic bag and we take it away from her after she's done picking up "dog poop.")

remember how i said rupert cannot seem to find anything in front of his face? i just needed to give you an example :: for the last two nights, at maya's bedtime, he comes out of her room looking for daisy. daisy is another hand-me-down stuffie from ian; it's a duck from the jane simmons series of picture books.

both nights he claims to have looked in maya's crib before coming out of her room. and both nights guess where i found daisy? in the crib! how is it even possible that two nights in a row he cannot find a duck in a crib that measures no more than 2x4 feet?? i just don't get it!

you know you've made it when the simpsons parody you

we love the simpsons at our house. and tonight's episode, midnight towboy, really hit home :: marge hires a c.r.i.e. method counselor to help maggie become an independent baby. um, hello ... that's totally a parody of rie, the class i take maya to!

of course, the c.r.i.e. counselor wasn't exactly like a rie educarer, but it was pretty darn funny, especially since rie isn't very mainstream and not a lot of people know about it.

p.s. rie doesn't believe that "hugs are drugs" ... just so you know, we're okay with hugging our children!

p.p.s. i'm a pretty firm believer in the rie method (although i don't subscribe to everything); it's the way i'm raising both ian and maya. if you're in the los angeles area and have an infant, i highly recommend checking out our rie associate, karen, or reading your self-confident baby (which, i must admit, i haven't read).

if your kid is impressionable ...

... don't watch nacho libre.

we rented it from the library yesterday and while we were watching it maya was going crazy :: laughing at the two furry little people, saying, "ow!" during the wrestling scenes, and practicing her moves on rupert.

to top it all off, i wasn't particularly amused. it was no school of rock.

lunch. massage. facial. sisters. bliss.

i can't believe i went 31 years without a facial! sure the extraction was kinda uncomfortable. but having someone else wash your face for you? loved it!

and it was all thanks to my step-sis, D (second from left in the pic). she organized a girls' spa day at burke-williams in santa monica as a late birthday (for me) and late graduation (for our lil sis, A) celebration.

but more than the spa day i'm totally loving that we're finally connecting as sisters. like many people, the three of us come from a messed up, mixed-up family. A and i grew up a few cities away from D physically, but emotionally we were very very far apart. it's taken too many years for us to connect, but i think it's finally happening, and i couldn't be happier!

[rupert mentioned to me just now that i thanked D but i didn't thank him ... the person who gave me the gift certificates for the massage and facial. they were gifts from my first year of motherhood and i never got around to making an appointment. so, thank you rupert! and if you can't think of anything to get me in the future, i did like the facial a lot. just thought you ought to know.]

my baby's growing up

today was ian's first day of second grade. it really does seem like just yesterday that we were walking him to kindergarten ... maya wasn't even born yet!

the excitement today was being on a new campus. his elementary school was torn down over the summer and will be rebuilt this year. in the meantime the students are at the old middle school down the street; the new middle school just opened today as well, so there's lots of confusion and chaos with drop-off and pick-up.

second grade is the highest grade at his school (he'll move up to the upper elementary school next year) so ian's a big man on campus this year. fortunately, i like the teacher he has and he already knows a few other kids in his class. i think we're all getting used to this "first day of school" business because there was no nervousness, no anxiety, no apprehension. we hadn't even picked out an outfit or emptied out his backpack from his montana trip until this morning.

i may, however, be a bit more nervous about rupert's first day of school, which is coming up in a few weeks ...

faux shaved ice

i still have to do a bit of journaling for this layout but i think i like where i'm going with this one.

this is from our last night in waikiki in may. my sister's graduation dinner was down the block from waiola bakery + shave ice II, which is where we were intending to take ian for a snack ... and a real taste of shave ice. but it was closed by the time we got there. it being our last night and late already, we headed to a cafe near our hotel.

we knew it wasn't going to be hawaiian-style shave ice, but my sister recommended it because of the sheer size of the serving. sure enough, it was huge and it was more like a sno-cone. if you've had hawaiian style shave ice like matsumoto's or japanese kakigouri (the hand-shaved kind, not store-bought) you know there's a difference between sno-cones and shave ice. the texture of shave ice is almost fluffy (before the syrup goes on) because it's so finely shaved. the sno-cone -- and this shave ice we had -- has an almost grittier texture in comparison; the ice is chunky as opposed to flaky.

ian, however, did not care one bit about the finer points of hawaiian shave ice. he was thrilled with the sugary iciness that we bought for him. we spilled/dropped quite a bit of it and we still didn't manage to finish it all.

[click on picture for details about materials.]

a little scrapping

i've managed to find some time here and there to scrapbook. i completed the following layouts (click on the image for details about materials) and i'm in the process of completing a few more, which i hope i can share soon. (sorry about the crappy scans.)


do babies get brain freeze? journaling :: maya inhaled her first taste of jamba juice ... it was hard to get her to stop! you have to share, maya!


hinamatsuri 07 journaling :: did you know the longer it takes to put away the hinaningyou the longer it'll take the girl to get married? at least, that's what they say. but if that's true maya may never get married 'cause we never got around to putting away the dolls last year! thankfully, mom put them back in the garage right away this year!

lucky number seven ... lucky me

best friends. partners. cuddle buddies. me + rupert.

we've been together for a long time and married for more than half that time. i almost can't remember a time without him in my life ... all the things worth remembering happened after we got together.

i'm lucky that he understands me almost better than i understand myself. otherwise we wouldn't have lasted this long. we always joke that the number one reason we're still together is because we're too lazy to find someone else. but the real number one reason we're still together is because we genuinely love, care for, and respect each other. (right, rupert? right?!)

in the grand scheme of things seven years isn't that long. i anticipate we'll stick together for at least another 40 years despite all of the ups and downs that are sure to come our way. we've weathered enough to know how to make this relationship of ours last :: i'm the boss and he does what i say! ;)

love ya, sweetie! happy anniversary!

we're so supportive of each other

you can say that i'm a bad mother, but sometimes i honestly think, "if maya weren't around i could get so much more done." i was thinking this the other day when i was trying to get an order filled and maya kept distracting me. then i realized, i never would've started making my tagE*blankEs if i didn't make one for maya in the first place, and i never would've met my friend K who orders tons of my stuff because i met her at rie class, which i take maya to. so without maya's existence i wouldn't be so busy.

and then you know what rupert said? "that's the kind of positive thinking i don't appreciate around here."

family week

blogging consistency hasn't been my strong suit as of late. but i have an excuse :: i was actually enjoying life!



a busy week for our family, what with father's day, ian's last day of first grade, a graduation, and family visiting.

i wasn't a particularly doting wife on father's day. poor rupert. he took the kids to the park in the morning (i think i might've been taking a nap), went to the beach with ian in the afternoon, and spent the evening with his family. meanwhile, i was in a totally bitchy mood so i wasn't my usual super-sweet self (ha! i make me laugh!).

thursday was a busy day for us because it was ian's last day of first grade. it was also his last day at this particular campus. they're tearing down the school over the summer to rebuild it ('cause it's close to 60 years old). construction will take at least a year, which means ian will never get to attend the new school because it's only a K-2 school. but maya will enjoy the new campus in a few years.

after school we went to chuck e cheese (not my choice, of course) with ian's best friend and his mom. thankfully it wasn't too crowded and maya was on her best behavior. regardless of the "good" experience, i refuse to go back there.

that evening was rupert's sister's high school graduation ... at the same school we graduated from 13 years ago. can you believe that?! 13 years ago! not to sound jaded or anything, but listening to the graduates' speeches made me feel old because they sounded so naive and untarnished. i'm sure they are very accomplished students but they are still so inexperienced. but inexperience can also be interpreted as "potential," and i hope that my young sister-in-law takes advantage of the many opportunities awaiting her as a college student. congrats, L!

we also got to spend the weekend with rupert's younger brother, who visited with his girlfriend. they currently live in the midwest and we only get to see them once or twice a year. because he is the kids' only uncle i really want them to spend quality time with him. and it was a bonus that his girlfriend came along because she is so good with the kids. i just wish we got to see them more often.

in case you were wondering ...

most of you may know that my husband's actual name is not rupert. i started calling him that on my blog after he returned from a conference last year where the professor kept calling him that. my husband doesn't look like a rupert to me (or to most people) so i found it to be hi-lar-i-ous that i was married to a rupert. at the time, i thought the professor meant a human rupert, but it turns out i was wrong ...

rupert's co-worker attended the same conference this year and came back with this story (as told by rupert in an email to me) ::

A [his co-worker] was at the Northwestern workshop that I went to last year and inquired about why Prof. Cook called me Rupert. Apparently when he said I looked like Rupert he was refering to this Rupert:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Bear

I don't find that to be a complement.

[because i'm a mean wife who likes to (further) humiliate her husband, i didn't bother fixing his spelling errors ...]

this story, of course, made me laugh even harder. i've actually watched a bit of the animated, early-'90s rupert show and i just don't see the resemblence.

i knew i was worth something around here ...

salary.com came out with the 2007 figure of how much moms would earn if you tallied up all they do during the week :: $138,095. that's a heck of a lot of money. i wonder what life would be like if mother were an "actual job" and the government (or some entity) paid a salary?? i'm sure more moms would stay at home. and dads too. but would the productivity of the nation, and therefore the economy, go down? but if moms had more spending power that would boost the economy, wouldn't it? interesting ...

i know moms (working moms and stay-at-home moms) who definitely are worth the $138,095 mom salary + regular job salary. they put me to shame. i can't really say that i do enough to earn much money. i know that i do stuff around here to keep things chugging along but compared to other moms i'm not very productive. i would, in fact, probably get fired from the job of sahm. thank goodness i'm the boss around here!

p.s. you can personalize the mom salary to see how much you would get paid by using the mom salary wizard. i plugged in numbers for the number of hours i think i do stuff around the house, my zip code, and voila! apparently i could earn $143,354 as a mom in my area. okay, okay, i might've fibbed a bit on how many hours i work as the janitor at home ...

maya's a real piece of work

yesterday was one of those days i wish didn't happen ... at least, i wish it had happened differently. it started off like any other saturday. but then maya woke up from her nap screaming her head off, which, admittedly, isn't that different from some other days.

the difference was that she was inconsolable for over an hour. and, at the same time, she was kinda lethargic. she was flopped over in our arms but tossing and turning because it seemed like she couldn't get comfortable. she refused liquid and food, and that got us really worried because we can always convince her to eat a snack.

after lots of rocking, dozing off in our arms (another thing she never does), walks outside and a lukewarm bath, on the "advice" of a pediatric nurse hotline, we headed to a clinic that's open on saturday. of course, they wouldn't take our insurance so we had to go to the emergency room. this is where i wish our decision making skills had steered us in a different direction. specifically, the direction of home.

no surprise the emergency room was crowded and it took four hours to get from waiting room to triage to registration to the treatment room. within that span of four excruciatingly annoying and boring hours maya was miraculously cured of her symptoms.

we spent the most time waiting for the doctor in the treatment room. it's difficult to remain patient when you see the doctor right there and you still have to wait close to two hours to see her.

and it's also difficult because the daughter you thought was sick is now happily walking around the emergency room, eating and playing. by the time we finally see the doctor all she can tell us is to go home and keep an eye on maya to make sure her symptoms don't reappear and get worse. gee, thanks for telling us what we already know. and that diagnosis of "irritability resolved"? so not true; maya continues to be quite irritable ... and irritating!