Disappointment

The disappointment falls unexpectedly with a thud, and rests heavily in my heart. "What?" I answer to the receptionist on the other end of the phone.

"I said we need your half of the payment before the orthotics will be be made."

"I was under the impression that the orthotics had already started being made. We thought they'd be done at the beginning of next week."

"No, we need your payment first. They will be ready two weeks after we receive it. I have a note here that we left you a message."

"I never received any message..." I reply slowly, thinking, The note was for you to call me and leave me a message. The ability for my daughter to walk rests in your company's hands, and your misunderstanding of a note just cost us another month. I do not like you.

I give her my credit card information and end the call, feeling the disappointment spread its black wings from my heart until it has devoured all of me. I am upset. It's so easy to blame the receptionist, You didn't call us. You were supposed to call us. But a nagging thought reminds me that I am just as guilty of neglecting to move the orthotics forward, "Here is my card," the doctor had said, "My assistant should call you within two days to work out payment, but call this number if she doesn't get a hold of you." I stare at the card stapled to the inside of the file folder and point the finger squarely at myself, I was supposed to call her. Why did I forget to call her?

Since Wednesday, May 18th, when we took Rosemary to an orthopedic doctor to ask why she walks on her ankles when she pushes her alligator push toy, I have been keeping this file full of business cards, x-rays, doctor visits, and consent forms: yes, we have insurance, yes, we will pay what insurance doesn't cover, yes, our daughter will walk. Cavus and weak leg muscles be damned, Rosemary will walk on her own two feet; we just need the help of physical therapy and ankle braces to get her there.



I'm sorry, Rosemary, for not getting your braces sooner. You are one day shy of being 14 months old, and too tall to still only be crawling. I know that you want to walk. You pull up on chairs and push them across the room. Anything that can be pushed, you push it until it hits a wall. I can't wait for you to break your hands free of supportive objects and see you take your first steps unassisted, save for the sturdy orthotics in your shoes that keep your ankles squarely above your feet. Oma reminded me that you don't know you don't have the orthotics yet, don't know that you even need them, but since Daddy and I have discovered that you do need them, they can't come fast enough. And I cost you another two weeks.

It feels like forever.

I'm sorry.

Living Smarter: Homemade Deodorant Q&A

Yes, yes I did make my own deodorant. Does it work? You betcha'.

Let me preface this post by pointing out that I am a pitta dosha. What does that mean? It means my hair is red, my temperament is fiery, my skin is oily, and... my pits stink. ^_^ Senpai KNOWS when I forget deodorant, and so does everyone else. I used to keep a spare stick in my massage room (back when I had one) just in case I did forget to apply before leaving the house. I think you have an idea of what we're working with here.

Why in the world try making your own deodorant? Because I'm always up for improvement. Yes, store-bought anti-perspirants "control" sweat and make you smell like a field of jasmine or whatever, but they're also loaded with aluminum, leave greasy stains on my t-shirts, and I still smell rank at the end of the day, and certainly by the next morning. I've tried natural store-bought deoderants such as the crystal and other sticks to get away from the aluminum aspect, but they don't help the smell issue much if at all. So when I saw a fellow blogger make her own deoderant, I was thrilled to try it myself.

I found this post back in February. I had all of the necessary ingredients in the house already and made my deoderant stick in about 5 minutes while R napped. It was easy as pie. I wanted to first try the deoderant while the weather was still cool as, remember, it's not an anti-perspirant. I kept it hidden in the refrigerator and applied it every morning instead of my store-bought sticks. I didn't tell Senpai about it. He had no idea that I had read anything about homemade deoderants, had made some myself, or even that I was using it. Not a word until after a full month of me being pleased with the results, and then he was quite surprised to hear of the change. He hadn't noticed, nor could he tell a difference. I kept on using it, waiting for warmer weather to come around before really knowing how I felt about it. Well, the temperature has reached 85 degrees a couple of times and, you know what? I'm still in love with my deoderant.

But what about the fact that it's not an anti-perspirant? Aren't you sweating bullets? No. I'll tell you why. By the time my pits start to trickle, I hardly notice because the rest of me has already been drenched in sweat. It isn't until my whole body is glistening that my pits feel moist, too. And I smell a whole lot better now than I did before with my jasmine covered-up funk. The baking soda, coconut oil, and essential oils really do REMOVE the smells as opposed to covering them up. My brand new t-shirts are not getting greasy pit stains like my older shirts that have been exposed to store-bought anti-perspirants, and I still smell pleasant the next morning.

What essential oils did you add? I threw in a couple of drops of lavender, tea tree, and rosemary for pretty smells and anti-bacterial properties. I forget about how many drops it ended up being. I just remember that I kept adding more until I could smell the oil without having to take too deep a whiff.

What's the downside? There has to be a downside, right? Get ready for it, here it is: I have to wipe off the excess deoderant clumps that stick to my pits with a dry washcloth. Tadaa! That's it. I apply the deoderant after I get out of the shower. By the time I'm ready to get dressed, some clumps may have appeared based on how much deoderant I slathered on. I usually do have clumps more often than not if you're wondering about a ratio. But it's such an easy fix: I just keep a dry washcloth on my dresser-- wipe, wipe-- then get back to picking out clothes.


I looooooooove my homemade deoderant. I hope I've inspired you to try it, too! If you're on the fence, start in the winter like I did when there's less risk. Good luck! Let me know if you have other questions I didn't cover!

Mids

We woke up together only because I had slipped in bed beside him to take an afternoon nap. At 3 pm we hear the baby chirp over the monitor, and he gets up to use the restroom. I lift R out of her crib in the nursery, then Senpai walks past us in the hallway as he goes back to the darkened master bedroom. I carry R down the steep staircase, "Let's go downstairs to let Daddy sleep, Sweetheart."

R and I return back upstairs at 5 pm. I place his daughter on his inert form and Senpai blinks himself awake. I glance at the clock, "It's 5 o'clock. Are you ready to get up or do you want to sleep some more?" "I'm awake," he says, still blinking the sleep away.

We make dinner, put R to bed at 7 pm, and settle in to enjoy the season finale of "Chuck" that we had missed yesterday. The ending has us both laughing with relief and gasping in anticipation for the season to come. September is too far away. Senpai gets up and switches the tv feed from his computer back to the network stations. He flips through the channels and stops on "Dancing With the Stars." He comes to lie back down on the couch and I gently run my fingers over his feet, just the way he likes it. He falls back to sleep. The show ends, I get up to waste time in front of my computer in the dining room. He asks across the room, "What time is it?" "9:17," I reply. "Woohoo!" he exclaims sarcastically, "I get 15 more minutes."

I don't know if he fell directly back to sleep after that, but when I lean over him at 9:30 pm he is out cold. "It's time to get up now, Sweetie. 9:30." He has a harder time blinking off the sleep this time. When he is able to get up from the couch, he makes his way to the shower, and I start gathering the coffee making supplies. Fill the reservoir with water, stuff the grounds into the filter, pound them down, then add more and pound again. Screw the filter into the machine and turn it on. Pour milk into the frother mug and position it under the steamer nozzle. Watch the espresso drip into the decanter then flip the switch to steam. As the temperature on the thermometer rises, fill one travel coffee mug with ice and squirt flavored syrup into another. Pour half of the espresso into each travel mug. Add creamer to the iced one, and the steamed milk in the other. Screw lids on and assemble nicely on the kitchen island along with whatever meal was thrown together and some snacks. While I'm doing all this, he is donning a uniform. The tan, hybrid computer byte camouflage does not accentuate his olive skin as nicely as the old green camo used to, but it could just be the paleness of exhaustion washed over him.

This is his third night of doing midnight shifts ("mids") for the Air Force. As my day winds down, his "day" is gearing up, and that thought alone is weirdly unnatural. We are both looking forward to getting back into the rut of the typical 9-5 work week, or in his case, usually 6:30-3:30. Anything but this 11 pm to 7:30 am jazz. He is out the door at 10:30 pm. I type up a blog post and get ready to go to my lonely bed. Senpai will be back tomorrow at 8 am. Three more nights of this.

Though he is asked to do a lot, and sometimes it feels like too much, he proudly serves his country. He does it for the betterment of himself and the nation, but mostly he does it for his family. He is a Reservist. My love, my heart, my rock, my Senpai.

Goodbye

I am saddened to admit-- but extremely relieved to have done so-- that I have blocked all phone calls and text messages from my mother-in-law. I also added a filter to my email to send her messages directly to the trash. I write this here in case she wonders why I'm not getting back to her. It's because I don't want to ever hear from you again.

She is certifiably paranoid. Every single person in the world is up to no good and out to get her. She believes it so hard that it comes true. I was a nice person, until I got to know her. Spend too much time with her and she twists you into exactly the rotten person she wants you to be. It justifies her madness.

I'm done with it. I'm done with her.

Everything is a secret. "Don't tell anyone; it's a secret. Keep it in the family." She can keep her own secrets. I will talk when I want to talk about whatever I want to talk about and she has absolutely no right to stop me. She zippered my mouth shut while she stabbed me in the heart. Repeatedly. I'm done. I have unzipped my lips and I am prepared to never hear from her again because she's afraid of what I'll say. That's fine with me. I'd live a much happier life without being accused of stealing her checkbook, her credit card, or more ridiculously, her husband. So now I've zipped her lips shut. No, that's not true; she can talk all she wants. I have closed my ears and won't listen anymore. The secrets, the suspicions and paranoid delusions, they were always hers. I refuse to hear another word of it.


Mother-in-law, I wish you all the best. I really want you to succeed in life. And you most likely won't believe a single word of those previous two sentences. So be it. For my own sanity, I can't listen to you anymore. Goodbye.

Cooking Smarter: Life, Unmicrowaved

We unplugged our microwave.


And plugged in this baby.


We haven't looked back.

It all started with Senpai being miffed at how long it takes to preheat our conventional oven (20 mins), when we typically only cook little things that are in the oven for less than 10 mins (garlic bread, taco shells, na'an). This happens multiple times on a weekly basis. He wondered why we should expend the energy (natural gas) to heat the entire oven, when we're only using a fraction of the space. Enter the idea of a toaster oven. Now, when it comes to this family, we believe in buying quality goods that will do exactly what we need, instead of buying a cheaper product that will only work marginally as well. All of a sudden that toaster oven idea became a countertop convection oven. A very expensive countertop convection oven known as the Breville Smart Oven. This thing is AWESOME.

We ended up buying it with the intent to not only bake more efficiently, but also to replace our microwave. You may or may not have heard about the science project in which a girl heated water in the microwave, let it cool down, and then watered a plant with it. That plant died. Well, that experiment has been replicated with better controls, and the theory that microwaved water kills plants was debunked. But still, it plants (pun intended) that seed of doubt in one's mind. What if this is true? What if microwaved food isn't just not good for you, but worse, hazardous to your health? So we bought the Breville Smart Oven and decided to jump right into unmicrowaved living by banishing the microwave oven to the cellar. It's still there if we ever need it again (technically, TWO microwave ovens are in the basement: the countertop unit and the above-the-stove-mounted one that I insisted be removed when we remodeled the kitchen. I just couldn't stand the thought of that thing going right by head while I was cooking... and pregnant), but the Breville has not let us down.

The main difference I have found is that I have to figure out everything that will go on the table before I start cooking; no more deciding on a vegetable dish halfway through food prep. I find myself using potholders more often, heating water in the kettle, and eating out of pots so as to cut down on dishes. I have had to beef up my stock of oven safe dishware. If I haven't thought out a meal in its entirety before I start cooking, I find myself in situations like this: Oh! I didn't think of cooking the Morningstar Farms Chik Patty until after I had already started the noodles and veggies on the stove! It needs 18 minutes in the Breville plus the 3 minute preheat time! Hem. Haw. It's going to take FOREVER! But you know what? Even though the stovetop foods finished cooking first, they still needed time to cool down. By the time they were cool enough to eat, guess what? The oven beeped; the Chik Patty was done. Though 18+3 minutes had seemed like forever when I was punching the settings into the Breville, by the time the meal was ready to eat, it really hadn't felt like a long time had passed. So my lunch took 20 minutes to prepare instead of 10, but, really, what's an extra 10 minutes to prepare a meal where there's no worry of free radicals, radiation, or nutritionally "dead" food?

It is SO worth it.