A is for Beautiful

By “we” I of course mean “Jonathan.” I mostly just supervised the munchkin.

It’s not quite finished, but it should be by either late tonight or tomorrow afternoon. All that’s left is getting the tunnel and slide on.

We also watched Michael Phelps win his 7th gold medal which was awesome. Did you all see it? AMAZING!

I’ve now lost 7 pounds in only a week and a half of dieting and I fear that Monday I will be paying for a little of the extra calorie consuming that I’ve done this weekend. That’s OK though. I fully expect it to take 5 or 6 months for me to get to my goal weight and I’m just happy to be doing something about it.

Jules and I went to the doctor Friday afternoon because I suspected she had a UTI. She was urinating so frequently that we would hardly get settled back in the family room before she was running back to the bathroom announcing, “I have to potty again!” She also had three accidents Friday morning which hasn’t happened in months and she had a tiny bit of blood in her urine. The highest her temp got was 99.5, but I still thought it would be better to get her checked out since it was Friday and all.

At the doctor’s office they worked us in in between appointments and immediately we had to try to give a urine sample. That went really well, actually. The full lab work won’t be in until next week, but they did prescribe an antibiotic because it did appear to be a beginning urinary tract infection. The good part is that Julianna no longer had any symptoms after her first dose of meds. Now hopefully if I have lunch at Chick-fil-a again in the near future I won’t be running back and forth to the bathroom every five seconds.

Hope you’re having a good weekend!

I’m sorry for the lack of posting lately. I’ve been working on many, many things.

• lack of money has led me to take a temporary job at the Y
• keeping an extra child this week while his regular caregiver is out of town (again with the no money thing)
• beginning participation in a medical research study (once again, NO money over here)
• making a gazillion cards (see announcement below)
• planning more bachelorette festivities
• trying to find time to start exercising again (to go along with the diet I’ve got underway)

I’ll be back to post more later this week, but for now, I just wanted to say:

Head on over to my Etsy shop today while the gettin’s good. I am clearing out shop over there to make room for a bunch of new stuff coming at the beginning of September. Plus, prices are going UP so this is your last chance to get some cards for $2 and some for less. Go take a look! Everyone can use beautiful handmade cards for something or other!

Chapter 1:
My dad and Julianna quickly developed a routine with each other down here. One of the first few days we were here at the beach they headed to the swimming pool as usual right after Jules woke up from her nap. They played until she was ready to go and then Pap convinced her to head to the ocean to ride some waves for a little bit. They stopped by the potty underneath the building first and then they headed out to the ocean for a while. When they came back upstairs I noticed right away that Julianna was wearing her swimsuit backwards. Dad told me that he had some trouble getting it back on after they went to the bathroom at the pool. She must have worn her bathing suit like that out on the beach too. Luckily she was with her grandfather the whole time so maybe people understood…?

Chapter 2:
I can’t remember now what I was doing one day a couple of weeks ago when Julianna looked up at me and exclaimed, “Mama! You not paying attention to me!” That certainly did the trick and she got my attention for sure. I was laughing so hard about her sincere honesty that my side began to hurt.

Chapter 3:
My little girl? She wants to paint billboards when she grows up. We were riding down the road the other day and Jules mentioned something about not being able “to get up there” as she pointed to the billboards. We told her that yes, she was right - the only way to really get up there was if we were the men who painted the billboards. Julianna replied matter-of-factly, “I need to be a painter. I want to go way up high and paint the billboards!” Now when people ask her what she wanted to do when she grew up she can say that she always wanted to be in advertising - she wanted to be a billboard painter. Although it is strange indeed, she has her first life goal.

Chapter 4:
I’ve been wanting to go to Senor Frogs ever since it opened in Myrtle Beach three years ago and last night I managed to convince my brother and sister-in-law to go have dinner with us there so that I could get my free nachos. We figured that if we went kinda early (around 6, 6:30) that it wouldn’t be too crowded and non-kid friendly since we would both be taking youngins. We didn’t have to wait too long once we got there and Julianna was pretty excited about it. She kept walking towards the place pointing and yelling, “Look at that frog, Ya’ll!”

We got to a table pretty quickly and as the bartender was standing on the bar pouring free shots of tequila straight into people’s mouths I was wondering what I’d gotten my child exposed to at the ripe old age of two. Well, it was so loud in there that we couldn’t hear the waiter enough to give our order. He was a jerk anyway. My sister-in-law jokingly asked Jules if she wanted to go up on stage with her and dance to which wide-eyed Julianna replied with fascination, “No, thank you.” At one point they got everyone to get up and stand on their chairs to do the YMCA. It occurred to me then that Julianna didn’t even know what the YWCA was so after a really quick lesson so got the hang of it and went to town. She had a blast! So after a little bit Jules starts saying over and over again, “I need to go up there, Brittany! I need to go up there and dance with you!” We could hardly convince her otherwise. Jonathan finally just started telling her that she wasn’t old enough yet.

My daughter, doing the YMCA while standing on chairs at the bar since the early age of 28 months.

Today Julianna got to do something that she’s been longing to do all month. When we first got to the beach and we first rode down Highway 17 and Julianna first laid her eyes on Planet Hollywood you would have thought it was Christmas morning for all the squealing that took place in our car. Ever since that day she’s exclaimed in her deepest Southern accent, “Look ya’ll!” every time we’ve driven by that place. We’ve had to promise her over and over again that we’d take her there one day. Of course we all speculated that it was going to be a huge disappointment to her since it’s really just a restaurant, but nevertheless she still wanted to go even when we explained that little fact to her. She would call Daddy on the telephone and tell him excitedly that she wanted him to come to the beach and take her to “Planet Earth.” And today was her day.

Actually, when we pulled in the parking lot we saw a parked cop car and a policeman escorting a man wearing a shirt and tie out the back door in handcuffs. So yeah, that was interesting.

Anyway, we first went in the gift shop area since my dad wanted us to buy Jules an overpriced T-shirt. Unfortunately, they don’t sell kids T-shirts and the $10 ones were sold out in size Small. Besides, Julianna didn’t care much she just wanted to go on in the place.

When we did finally go in the restaurant, Jules was mighty impressed with the ceiling and all of the decorations. She especially liked the airplanes that were flying around and he Power Ranger character. We walked up the big staircase up to the bar area and he was craning her neck the entire time trying to absorb all of the stuff going on around her. She was enthralled.

After we had seen it all we went outside, back down the huge front staircase and she was just smiling. We got to the bottom of the stairs and she immediately started dancing to the music that was playing over the speakers.

A fun outing for a two year old and we didn’t even spend a dime. Pretty nice.

Untitled from c525600 on Vimeo.

Julianna has adopted a few pets over the last few weeks. She has promptly named easch one of them and carried them around for a while.

She got two Little Pet Shop Happy Meal Toys and

Meet Pickle and Pumpkin:

Then she started carrying around the inflatable alligator. She named him and even invited him to take a bath with her one day. Although that did make it a little difficult to, uh, bathe.

Meet Ali:

Finally, my mom made her three little stuffed birdies a few weeks ago. She immediately adopted them as her own, named each one, and asked if they could take a nap with her.

Mett Han, Bean, and Hay: