Life Lately #19

Reading: Still working on Spaceman and the Babylon Bee book. Clearly I have been in a huge reading mood lately. Hahahahahahahahaaaa. I don't know how people do it, those who read like 5 books a week. I used to be able to do that. When I was a teenager and Netflix wasn't a thing and, like, I didn't have a baby. Toddler. Whatever. She isn't walking yet so until then, she's a baby in my mind.

Watching: Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It's completely stupid, but in a good way. Along the same vein as The Office (though nothing will ever truly measure up to that show, RIP), 30 Rock, and Parks and Rec. It took me a good 5-10 episodes to really get into the show, but now I'm hooked. Those who watch, who's your favorite character? Mine is a tie between Captain Holt and Gina.

Listening to: Lots of toddler-friendly music. The Happy Song by Imogen Heap, lots of Elizabeth Mitchell and Raffi, and lots of Disney soundtracks. Beauty and the Beast 4 Ever.

Wearing: Pajamas, because I just put Imogen to bed, took a shower, put some purple dye in my hair to test it out, and now I'm sitting on my own bed typing this blog post out.

Smelling: The aforementioned hair dye. Lovely smell.

Eating: Nothing, but I could go for some chocolate ice cream right about now. Have you ever tried Halo Top? It's hit or miss with the flavors, but if you handed me a bowl of their plain chocolate and told me it was Tillamook, I'd believe you.

Loving: This workout shirt from Old Navy. It fits well and it's cute. And on sale! I have the olive and I'm tempted to snag the white and black as well.

Not Loving: Being back in Sitka. Granted, the temperatures are hovering right around 60 and it's been sunny and looks like it'll stay that way for the next week or two (hallelujah), but nothing compares to the 80 degrees that Seattle has been seeing lately. All you summer haters can bite me! Fall is great and all, but just once I'd like to go outside for more than a day or two without a jacket. I wore sandals every single day while on vacation, and I haven't been so happy in a long time. Sadly, those sandals will now probably see nothing but the back of my closet until next summer.

Annoyed with: The cost of groceries in Sitka. I will never stop harping on this topic, and I apologize. The other day I bought the following: One bag of Kirkland Signature frozen hamburger patties. One bunch of asparagus. Two packages of mashed cauliflower. One container of baby cereal. One container of black pepper. One bottle of red wine vinegar. One head of cabbage. One small box of baby spinach. One small container of blueberries. Two packages of kielbasa. Two packages of lunch meat. One large package of sliced cheddar cheese, and one bag of shredded cheddar. 

I bought zero treats. Zero junk food. Zero anything we don't need to, you know, eat and survive. Half of what I bought was either on sale or the generic brand, as long as it was cheaper. I spent just over $140. ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY DOLLARS. I about lost my you-know-what in the checkout line.

Thinking: That we might try and transition Imogen to one nap soon. We had a horrible, horrible month and a half of her fighting naps, fighting bedtime, and waking up early, all at the same time. I started stretching out her naps and cutting them shorter, but nothing was working. Just in this last week or so, she's started to go back to normal - she's never been a 12 hour sleeper (how I wish!), and on a good day we'll get 10.5-11 hours out of her at night. Her naps hover right around 1 hour each. At this rate, we've stretched out her awake time as much as we possibly can, and I'm not willing to cap her naps any shorter because she's a cranky monster if I do that. The next step, I know, is switching to one nap, but that means keeping her awake from 7am (or earlier, usually) all the way until 12 or 1:00 in the afternoon. Usually she's tired by 10:30-11am. Good luck to us. I'm PRAYING she starts taking 2.5-3 hour naps like I've heard some kids do, once we switch. Two 1-hour breaks during the day is nice and all, but I would love a little bit longer of a break. These days it feels like once I do a chore or two, by the time I sit down it's time to wake her up again. I've read that the average age to switch to 1 nap is somewhere around 15 months. Did anyone else's kids switch around 13 months instead? Tell me your stories!!

Wanting: A gym membership. We have a treadmill, but we also have zero closet space and no garage, so half the time our treadmill is buried in stuff - usually the supplies for whatever house project we have going on at the time. We have some dumbbells and a kettlebell and I have yoga mats, but I am having a really hard time getting motivated to work out at home when I only have two 1-hour chunks of alone time during the day to do so. I really would like to be able to get out of the house and go work out when Isaiah's off work, but a gym membership here (there's only one) is SIXTY DOLLARS a month. And it's not even a super nice gym. They have like, three treadmills, a few bikes and ellipticals, and a few stationary weight machines. When I lived in Seattle post-college, I paid $35 a month to go to a two story gym with a TON of equipment. As usual, everything in Sitka is inflated beyond what's even reasonable.

Laughing at: This dude on America's Got Talent. I don't know why it made us laugh so hard, but it did. TELE-KIN-EZISSSS. (Sidenote: Mel B drives me insane. I don't know if she's actually dumb or just plays dumb, but she's always irritating.)

Contemplating: Quitting blogging. I know, I know...I do this at least once a year. Sometimes I actually leave, and inevitably come back to it. But lately, I just really haven't been feeling it. Often I'll sit down to write a blog post, type out a sentence or two, think to myself "screw it, I'm bored" and delete the draft. I'm much more drawn to Instagram these days - I love that I have a smaller following of people I actually personally know, whether through blogging or elsewhere, so I don't have to censor myself as much. Everyone who follows my blog follows me on Instagram, and lately I feel like my content has been redundant. Do I really need to blog about things like vacation or taking Imogen to the park or baking something new at the same time I'm posting pictures of the things we're doing?

I'm so vain, I probably think this blog is about me...

Raise your hand if you remember the Sunshine Award!! We're throwing it back to old school blogging today with a questionnaire from the lovely Callie at Through Clouded Glass. I never thought I'd see this award resurface - thanks, Callie!

1. What is a favorite childhood memory?
At least once every summer, my parents and sister and I would drive 6 hours from where we lived in Washington to spend a week or two in Bend, Oregon at my grandparents' house. They had an irrigation ditch that ran through their backyard, and more often than not, there would be a duck family living in the area, complete with little ducklings. My sister and I would spend hot days swimming in the ditch, digging up handfuls of mud and smearing it all over ourselves and declaring we were at a spa getting "mud mask treatments." My grandparents also had old bicycles and wooden stilts, and we would spend hours riding bikes around their cul-de-sac or practicing our stilt walking. One time, we were sword fighting with some sticks we found, and my sister accidentally hit me in the arm hard enough to give me a small cut. To this day, I have a small scar on my arm from that cut. I don't know how, since it barely even bled and certainly didn't need stitches, but nevertheless, it's a reminder of fun times in my childhood.

2. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
This is a tough question, because I haven't been a lot of places in the world. At the moment, if someone offered me the chance to move anywhere, I would move back to Washington. If Washington was not an option and I had to choose somewhere more exotic, I guess I would choose Iceland (mostly because besides there, I've only been to Canada and Mexico). Barring my opposition to their political views, it's a gorgeous country with a really neat culture. The only thing not my favorite is that they don't get hot summers.

3. What was the last book you read?
I'm in the middle of two books at the moment - Spaceman by Mike Massimino, and How to Be a Perfect Christian by the Babylon Bee.

4. When you have spare time, what do you do with it (besides blogging, of course)?
I usually either bake something, macrame something, or play with Imogen. I never have baby-free time other than when she's napping, so all of these things are things I can do while keeping an eye on her.

5. With whom is your longest friendship?
I'm actually still friends with a girl named Katie that I met in 5th grade. She and my sister took harp lessons from the same teacher, so that's how we met. We aren't super close these days, though she was one of my best friends in junior high and high school, but we still keep in touch and stay mostly up to date on each other's lives.

6. Favorite summer beverage?
For sure iced coffee. Give me a giant glass with a packet of Stevia, a tablespoon of heavy whipping cream, the strongest cold brew you have, and a ton of ice and I'll be happy. Sometimes I'll throw in a splash of vanilla extract if I'm feeling extra.

7. If you had the opportunity to attend your own funeral, what would you hope to hear people say about you?
I hope people would say I was a good and Godly mother, wife and friend.

8. All you ladies are married - how did you meet your spouse?
I went to college in Oklahoma with a girl from Alaska, who was married to a guy originally from Oklahoma, and the two of them happened to be best friends with Isaiah (who still lived in Sitka). After college, I was living back in Washington, and my friend - who had moved back to Sitka -decided to play matchmaker. She kept trying to get me to send Isaiah a message on Myspace (LOL) and I distinctly remember telling her that if she could get him to send me a message first, then I would send him a friend request. He actually did, on March 20th, 2009. We spent many days messaging each other, which turned into Skyping and phone calls, which turned into me moving to Alaska in May of 2009. On March 20th, 2010, exactly a year after our first internet chat, we were married.

9. Finish the sentence: "In high school I could have been voted most likely to..."
Immediately forget all about high school the minute I walked off the stage at graduation. (Fun fact: I hated high school with a fiery, burning passion.)

This is how 17 year old Angi felt about high school.

10. Tell us something we don't already know and wouldn't think to ask you.
I was a waitress for 3 1/2 years during junior high and high school, and 4 1/2 years right before, during, and after college. For those keeping track, that's a grand total of 8 years of waitressing. In junior high/high school, I worked at an upper class retirement center, in their main dining room. In college, I was a server at Chili's in Oklahoma. Right after moving back to Washington after school, I worked at a restaurant called Claim Jumper (it was the worst waitressing job I've ever had and I quit after a month). To this day, despite being 12 years removed from working in restaurants, I still have a hard time not being super judgmental of restaurants, servers, and food that doesn't live up to basic standards. I've about lost my mind several times in this one particular restaurant in Sitka that doesn't bring silverware when they bring our water, because I'm so sick to death of getting my food and having to ask for a dang fork to eat it with. I'm obsessed with any show featuring Gordon Ramsay screaming at some poor restaurant owner who doesn't think it's a big deal to put raw chicken on a shelf above cooked chicken in a refrigerator, and I think Isaiah's about sick of hearing me say "If I owned this place..."

I nominate ALL OF YOU.

These Are My Confessions #4

Hello from Packwood, Washington! Imogen is napping, and Isaiah and I are sitting on the back deck of the cabin we're renting, typing away on our respective computers while listening to the rush of the creek a mere 20 feet away.  It's approximately 75 degrees out at 10:00am, not a cloud in the sky, and I'm drinking an iced coffee and wearing short sleeves. And not freezing to death. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Anywho, I didn't really want to write out another Life Lately post yet because I feel like I just did one, but I didn't really have any other topics to write about that would take an entire blog post, so confessions it is.

+ I feel like I live in the stone ages when I don't have cell phone reception. I know this is totally a first world problem, but we do live in a first world country, and you would think we would at least have roaming out here. Nope. This area only uses Verizon and US Cellular, and apparently AT&T contracts with neither of those. So, unless we're on the (very spotty) WiFi at this cabin, our phones are basically bricks. I was able to download offline Google maps so we can at least find our way to the hikes we're going to do, but other than that...SOL. It's a bit frustrating, and even my computer has been dropping the WiFi about every 3-4 minutes. We'll see if I can even publish this today...

+ I love my daughter. I love her to pieces. I wouldn't go back to pre-Imogen life if you offered me all the treasure in the world. But sometimes - SOMETIMES - I get a little frustrated that we're still dealing with a two-nap schedule, and even though she's generally a really flexible and easygoing baby (toddler?), there are things we can't really do that we could do before that I really want to do. Did that sentence make sense? For instance, there are a lot of hikes in the area that are like 8-10 miles long. Pre-baby, we would have gotten up early, left in the morning, hiked all day long and not cared how long a 10 mile hike would take us. Post-baby, we have to consider...how long will this hike take us? Can we squeeze it in between two naps? Will she nap in the car or the backpack (probably not)? Will she be okay if she just skips her afternoon nap and goes to bed early (probably, but we can't do that very often or she gets overtired)? It's just a lot to think about and even though she is TOTALLY WORTH IT, sometimes I do kind of miss the carefree schedule we used to have when we went on vacations. Even once she's on one nap, it's still going to be a little complicated, because her nap will be smack in the middle of the afternoon and she CAN'T miss that nap if we're out and about doing stuff, since it will be her only nap.

+ Imogen's first birthday party turned out so well, despite the fact that we were supposed to have 15 people and ended up with seven. All the food and decorations turned out perfectly and she looked so cute in her little birthday dress...I posted a few photos on Instagram, but is it terrible that I have zero desire to write an entire blog post about her birthday party?

+ I still hate Disqus. The end.

That's really all I've got...I'm on vacation, we just spotted a coyote making his way down the riverbank, it's nearing 80 degrees now, and I'm going to go put on some shorts.