did you miss me?

probably not.

oh well. i'm going to tell you all about what i've been doing since my last entry.

gardening:
i've been spending quite a bit of time outside, which surprises even myself. i moved our tomato patch to the other side of our yard (not an easy task, do you know how damn many rocks there are in connecticut?!?) and got those in the ground. i put a fancy planting around a utility pole that was in our yard (emphasis on WAS...2 weeks after finishing the planting, the city came & removed the damn pole...now i just have a circle in my yard...and the damn seeds aren't even growing into daisies like they were supposed to. arg).
i've been working on planting things around the house, to hide our foundation. it wasn't too long ago that i didn't even know that was the main purpose of putting plants around a house. i really thought it was a personal preference, either people wanted shit around their house or they preferred to see the concrete. now that i know BETTER, i've decided to plant some shit around our house. i'm pretty much planting whatever our elderly neighbor brings over. probably not a good idea since she spends a lot of her spring cutting back and pruning these plants. however, these plants are FREE. do you know how much plants cost these days?!?!? not cheap, my friend. even at walmart, they're not cheap. so now i have some mums, some lilly of the valley, some iris, and some kind of bush thing with yellow & green leaves (not a hosta, i know what those look like) taking root in the crappy rocky dirt around our house. good thing i have a big damn bag of mulch...it's not a 'planting' in my book til you can smell the cedar mulch.

growing a baby:
baby girl #2 is doing just fine so far. she's getting kind of lazy though, she usually doesn't wake up in the mornings til after i've eaten breakfast and she prefers long naps that tend to worry me. but usually i'm too busy dealing with the house or the kids to stop and think about the last time i felt movement from her. bedtime is still her favorite time to get active (of course).
at the ultrasound at the end of may, she was measuring just under 28 weeks (i was 26 weeks at the time) and was estimated at 2 lbs, 6 oz. she looks a lot like cade in the u/s pictures and is 100% girl. whew, so now i can pass along cade's baby stuff to some other deserving little boys. i wish i could keep it all though. going through reese's baby clothes in preparation for this baby, i remembered so much about every little outfit...even the ones where she had those 'up the back poop explosions'. sigh. but i'd rather see the clothes go to someone i know than end up being pawed through at goodwill. and yes, i am a control freak!
still no names yet for this baby. reese came up with the following names though, in case we needed some help. she added: vanilla, expert, kevin, and duchess. i hope rob & i can come up with something a bit more mainstream...if we end up with a vanilla peters, you'll know who dreamed it up.

killing the car:
rob's acura has bitten the dust. only for a short period though. why is it that i cannot keep a car's battery alive for more than 4 months? when rob was gone for his 6 month deployment, my task was to start up his jetta every so often. i would have driven it but sarah doesn't do stick. (ha ha.) by the time rob got back, the battery was dead and it had to be towed to the dealership to be recoded & etc. i don't remember how much it cost, but it was more expensive than learning how to drive stick shift would have been.
i had been taking rob's acura out every week, usually driving it down to the mall b/c it's so fun on the interstate. last time we drove it, one of the kids didn't shut the back door tightly enough to cancel the interior dome light. and i didn't double check on the kids. i wondered why the automatic lock on the key fob wouldn't lock the damn car...turned out the battery was already dead by then. oops. and the doors were locked and so now i can't even UNLOCK the back door to relock it and shut the door more firmly.
so this means the acura will have to be towed a further distance than the jetta was in order to make a trip to the dealer. and i believe this car has more crap to it than the jetta did, so i'm sure it will be expensive. arg.
rob handled it well when i told him over the phone. i had turned into a blubbering mess, so frustrated at myself for not double checking the doors and not being able to take care of his car while he was gone (and this was an automatic, i thought taking care of the acura would be FUN...not just starting up the car in the driveway for 10 minutes once a week). but no, i failed on this task. sigh.
but at least the kids and cat and dog are still alive! whew.

computer issues:
do not ever put norton 'goback' on your computer. it was part of a norton package i purchased and it downloaded itself with an internal error which proved to be FATAL for my hard drive. arg. i was sans internet for 10 days. do you know how hard it is to go w/o internet COLD TURKEY???? but i learned a lot of things.

1. always make system backup disks. rob is going to teach me this when he returns. he doesn't know it yet, but he is.
2. the techs at gateway are AWESOME. i love them. i wish i could keep one around the house with me at all times.
3. i spend way too much time on the computer. i got a lot of gardening & reading done when my computer died. i stopped drinking general foods international 'coffee' and tried tea instead (not too bad). i drank more water. i drank less pop. i snacked less. i ate meals with the kids. think i'm a little addicted? :/