I don't do cars...

It was pouring the Monday after Easter when I went to take Crazy to daycare. When I unlocked the car only the driver's side door unlocked instead of all the doors. That should have tipped me off that something wasn't right. I get Crazy strapped into his carseat and go to start the car but nothing happens. I mean nothing, the engine doesn't even try to turn over. It's completely silent in the car except for the sound of rain, which sounds more like laughter to me. I notice that the switch for the parking lights is turned on. The last time I drove the car was to the Easter egg hunt on Saturday morning, in the daylight. I never used my lights. Then I remember that Crazy had climbed into the driver's seat Saturday after we got home. He was pretending to drive while I got all his stuff out of the backseat. He must have turned the lights on.

So holding back a few choice swear words, I get Crazy out of the carseat and hurry him over to the van. I go back for the carseat and install it in the van, toss Crazy in the seat, and hurry to daycare so he doesn't miss breakfast. When I get back home I realize I don't remember how to jump start a car, plus it's raining outside. I don't have a death wish. I ask my friend if her husband can jump it but she tells me her hubby left on cruise the day before. So I call our single guy friend we've known for years. He tells me he'll be by around lunch time. Hubby calls at lunch time and tells me to call a different single guy because Hubby had to jump start his car the week before so he owes him one. I call G and leave a message. G calls back 10 minutes later and says he'll be there in 15 minutes. G and D show up, thank me for getting them out of work, and hold back laughter when I inform them that I'll be taking notes while they jump start my car. Hubby told me that the battery might be so dead that it may not start at all and I'll have to buy a new one off base. Luckily it started right up and I let it run for an hour to recharge. My two new favorite single guys, G and D, leave but promise me that if anything else happens while Hubby is gone they'll take care of it for me. Thank goodness for single guys!

Easter

The week before Easter Hubby left on cruise. That same week Crazy started his first full day in the Toddler room at daycare. It only took four days for him to develop an ear infection, in both ears. I picked him up Thursday and they told me he wasn't feeling well and was really hot. They didn't take his temperature because if he had a fever he would have to be sent immediately home and couldn't come back the next day. Nice gesture and all but I could have taken him to the doctor one day sooner. The boy was on FIRE! I didn't want to touch him, his whole body was so hot. We got home and by 5:30 he comes into the kitchen while I'm making dinner and tells me he wants to take a nap in his crib. I've never heard him say anything remotely like that before. I didn't even know he was capable of uttering "nap" and "crib" in the same sentence! I put him in his crib and he immediately went to sleep. After about 45 minutes he woke up and wanted to sit with me on the couch. He didn't want anything to eat or drink. Around 8pm, his normal bedtime, I loaded him up on tylenol and put him to bed. He woke up every hour, and I mean EVERY hour, crying. His fever just kept going up. The next morning I took him to the clinic to see the triage nurse. We waited an hour to see her. I knew something was really wrong because normally Crazy would be running all aroun the waiting area and instead he was sprawled out on two chairs hugging Bob, his beluga whale. The nurse told us it was an ear infection and made an appointment with the doctor. After 20 more minutes, the doctor confirmed it was an infection, a bad one in one ear and a mild one in the other. We left with antibotics, tylenol, and motrin. The rest of the day was spent watching Sesame Street and Clifford. Crazy would freak out whenever I left the room, even to go to the bathroom. Talk about clingy! Saturday morning was the big Easter egg hunt on base. I thought we would have to miss it but he woke up feeling much better, thanks to antibotics, and his fever was gone so I went ahead and took him. He managed to collect 12 eggs, not too bad considering he freaked out after picking up one egg. When he went for the second egg he realized that he was surrounded by a frenzy of egg-crazed toddlers and just froze. I finally got him to concentrate on picking up certain colored eggs and he was fine. After the hunt we took our picture with the Easter bunny. Crazy is not a fan of the Easter bunny.

Back at home we called Hubby, who was in port, on the phone so Crazy could talk to him a little. We watched an Easter special on TV that night and when I put Crazy down for bed I told him that the Easter bunny would come once he was asleep. He was out in less than 3 minutes. Luckily my mom sent a bunch of stuff from the States for his Easter basket. When he woke up he was so excited to see his basket full of stuff. He took his sweet time going through all of it and then he found the eggs the Easter bunny hid in the living room. He insisted on opening up all the eggs because he knew there was candy inside. After one egg I informed him that it was our Easter bunny's rule that he open only one egg a day. The rest of the candy in his basket could "only be opened by Daddy." It worked. Of course as soon as Hubby came home at the end of cruise (two weeks later) Crazy insisted he open all of the candy and toys that only he could open. Then it was Hubby's turn to tell Crazy that he couldn't have 10 pieces of chocolate all at once. After dealing with ear infections, 10 days of antibotics, Easter, and a shoe-throwing incident at daycare, Mommy was off duty!

Karaoke

The spouses' club had a karaoke night at a local Japanese karaoke bar and of course we turned it into a competition. There were four teams, randomly selected (the XO's wife watched me do it because people don't know how to trust anymore!!!) representing the different decades. We had the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. I was on the 80s team. We competed in three different categories: best song, best costume, and best choreography. My team decided to perform to Thriller. I looked up the dance moves on YouTube and came up a dance routine. I got stuck with that job because M was singing and N was sick, plus M reminded me that I was once a cheerleader so it was right up my alley. We practiced our very long dance for two days before the "big day." Our costume consisted of our husband's uniform dress shirts (which I need to get drycleaned before Hubby gets home from cruise), ties, jean skirts, leggings, and leg warmers. Of course we had the ratted out hair and lots of eye makeup (purple). We ended up winning the dance contest, pity vote? Probably. I have it on videotape so Hubby and I watched it the next day. He couldn't stop laughing. Let's just say that a pregnant woman 6 months along dancing in heels isn't the most graceful thing. I'll be generous and share a picture. Please try to control your laughter...

Crazy's Moving!

Crazy is finally being moved to a toddler room (2-3 year olds) at his daycare center! It was one of the happiest moments of my life when they told me the good news this morning. I'm not joking either! Crazy has been so bored with his classroom because they do the same thing everyday and he's several months older and quite a bit more advanced than the rest of the kids. I hate to brag but he can sing the alphabet and count to 10. When they changed teachers on him at the beginning of the year it was the last straw for him. It's been a battle in the mornings to get him ready to go. Half the time I end up carrying him into his classroom in tears because he doesn't want to stay there. I felt like the world's worst mother. Then this week he actually started hitting his teachers, not hard or anything but still! He tries to do that to us when he's really upset about something and not getting his way. One of his favorite teachers was hit and she said that she thinks it's because he's so bored in there that he's acting out. Well this morning when we dropped him off they informed us that we had a meeting at 9am with his new teachers to discuss his transition. Not a lot of notice, but I didn't care because I was so happy to hear that he's finally moving rooms. He will be moved into a room with one other boy and a ton of girls. It's a good thing Crazy likes girls. Monday he'll visit his new room for an hour. Tuesday he'll spend two hours, etc, etc, for two weeks. I asked if he could transition quicker than two weeks and was told conflicting stories. I'm worried that he's going to throw a fit when they try to take him back to his old class. His new teacher said that if she thought he was ready and Crazy wants to stay with his new class he'll move over even earlier. Does it make me a bad parent if I tell my kid to cry when he goes back to his old room? He needs this transition, I need this transition. It's stressful enough at our house right now without having to battle it out in the mornings. I can't wait until Monday!

Tea lesson

On Saturday I went into Tokyo with two of my friends to take a lesson in chai tea making. A very popular tea shop here called Lupicia, offers classes in how to make the different kinds of tea they sell. We decided that the chai tea class would be fun to take, so my friend made the reservations for the Roppongi store. We took the train up and arrived at Roppongi station without a problem. Then we proceeded to get lost for 15-20 minutes trying to find the store. Even armed with the map the store provided on their website and their address we still had trouble finding it. We weren't the only ones though. We stopped in a store and asked for directions and the man didn't really know where it was. We asked two men on the street and they had no idea. We even asked a policeman who gave us directions that ended up being in the wrong direction. Luckily we're resourceful women. We managed to find it on our own and even arrived right on time.

Our teacher for the lesson was very helpful and spoke wonderful english. We were served cinnamon chai tea for a refreshment to start our class off. It was excellent! Our teacher then made us some chai tea with their new vanilla tea leaves which was wonderful. And I don't even like vanilla. Next she had us make our own tea. We decided to go with a cardamon and pepper tea. This is what our tea looking like while it was cooking:

It doesn't look very appetizing, does it? Trust me though it wasn't too bad, especially for our first time making chai tea. After the class was over we of course had to go buy everything to make our own tea at home.

Then we decided to eat lunch before heading back to base. We stopped in at an Indian restaurant which was pretty full so we knew we made a good choice. We enjoyed their curry lunch set with lassi. After lunch we got back on the train. We splurged on the express train home because it would cut off 20 minutes and it had reserved seats so we could all sit down. The train was definitely worth the extra money. After arriving at our final train station I caught a ride back to base with one my friends because we were meeting our husbands at a rug auction. Hubby and I didn't buy anything, mostly because the rugs were worth around $5000 or more and we didn't think they would hold up well in our house. Hairy cats, a messy toddler, a soon to be messy newborn, and an expensive rug don't mix well. Oh well, maybe we'll pick up a rug at the bazaar this weekend.

Being Pollyanna

So we found out yesterday that we will definitely not being moving to Jacksonville. I think Hubby was a little disappointed. I won't even go into the details of why he didn't get it, it's very frustrating and a story that some people don't need to hear.

When I heard the news I wasn't really surprised, because of the untold story mentioned above I was prepared. I can honestly say that I wasn't really disappointed either. I'm not sure why though. Hubby is planning on working on a MBA during our next tour and JU would have been a great program for him. Not to mention I would have been less than 2 hours away from UF for when I need to take my final exams to graduate from my master's program. I also have some friends who have contacts in the office I wanted to work for in JAX. Maybe I'm kind of glad we're not going there because we sold our old house (not my idea) in a great neighborhood before moving here and now we would have to pay almost twice that to move back to that same area. I've told Hubby countless times that I can be like Pollyanna and play the "Glad Game" so it doesn't matter where we move. He still won't listen to me. It doesn't help that he has no idea who Pollyanna is. I'm mostly upset that we still don't have any idea where we're moving next and it's driving me nuts. I'm a planner, I need advance notice for things like this. Especially since the baby's due the end of June. I'm worried that Hubby won't be offered the job he wants because we would have to move to soon after the baby arrives. I've offered to move back early and stay with my parents so we won't have to deal with any of that but the idea was shot down pretty fast.

So I guess we'll just wait and wait some more until one day they finally decide to let us in on the little secret of where we get to go next.

Oh what a day...

While lots of people probably spent Valentine's Day receiving flowers from loved ones, getting dressed for a fancy dinner, or just stuffing their face with a box of chocolates, I started off the day bright and early at the doctor's office. Luckily it was only for Crazy's 2 year check-up, but it was at 7:15 in the morning. Yuck! He's doing well, blah, blah, blah.

After dropping him off at daycare I headed home to work on my paper for my DNA analysis class. The assignment for this week included an essay of 1200+ words. I unfortunately don't have that much to say on the topic. After working on it for about 5 hours I found out that maybe I did, to the tune of 1205 words. It works for me!

Late afternoon found me at Hubby's squadron passing out free cookies to everyone for Valentine's Day. Here's my question, "Where's my cookies?" Oh yeah, that's right Hubby's still on the ship until tomorrow. Oh well, I'll survive and save myself a whole lot of calories.

My friend, S, came by for dinner while she was on base doing laundry. I guess her Valentine's wasn't much more exciting than mine. She brought over food and then used my kitchen to cook me dinner. I need more friends like her! Talk about service! It was great just to hang out and talk about nothing and everything. So, I guess I didn't have the stereotypical Valentine's Day but I think I would rather stick with my day than to have to deal with dead flowers in a few days and have to workout extra hard to burn off all the chocolate and fancy foods I ate.