Before this nap expires:

Today is MUCH better than yesterday. She was up and at em at 5:30 this morning, but was cool until 6:00 when she got up to eat. I don't know if I ever mentioned this, but 6:00AM is my first pump of the day. Tim and I set it up awhile back that I would pump at this time and if she woke up during that time he would take her while I finished pumping and making bottles (the morning pump yields two bottles). Well Tim had it easy for a few weeks there until she started to get up at 6 consistently...and while I am tad nervous about this 5:30 wake up time -- at least she has the decency to keep it to herself until a little later. So, now the morning routine is I get up, warm up her bottle and get her medicine ready, start coffee sometimes and start pumping. Then Tim gets Morella up, changes her diaper and feeds her, has breakfast together, chills for awhile and then ends up back in bed because she gets sleepy! Quality Daddy/Daughter time...aww.

So she used to sleep a long time in the morning -- not so anymore. Now I get a half an hour nap after the first bottle, MAYBE 45 minutes and then she is up up up. The upside is that she takes a longer nap during the day, which is nice because then I can get stuff done -- like my midday pump and lunch.

Oh lunch was great today. I got these chicken nugget strips awhile back and microwaved a few of them, put them on a tortilla with some spinach, grated cheese and ranch dressing and voila -- my OWN chicken wrap! It was so delicious. I finished it off with a handful of jalapeno potato chips and a Jazz Diet Pepsi (black cherry and french vanilla flavored). The sucky thing is that I followed the stupid directions on the back and blindly microwaved the first batch of stripes for 4 minutes, which was the low end of the range they gave. When I went to retrieve them the nugget stripes were shriveled up and rock hard. The plate was hot too -- so put it over to the side on top of a plastic plate. Whoops!

What if it melts the plastic tupperware plate? Thinking quick, I decided to add some water under the plate to cool it off in case it decided to melt the plastic plate. Um. Hey I said thinking quick NOT thinking smart. Of course the plate cracked and had to be thrown out as soon it was cool enough. I guess it's a good thing that we don't care that much about matching dishes, because between our goof ups, hand washing dishes and the cats knocking stuff over and eventually with Morella -- well dishes just don't last all that long around here. The upside to this is that they sell them all over the place in the summer for garage sales. :D

This mornings walk was nice. Yesterday I had made spicy oatmeal cookies (with cranberries instead of raisins...oh that's a tidbit...hold on). I packed up a whipped topping container with them and wrote on card "Welcome to the neighborhood" and went over across the street to give it to the neighbors. You see, the woman who lives there over the course of the winter had her sister and her family moved in with her. They have two little kids, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to get to know more of the folks on our block. There is another woman up the block who has two young kids -- one a baby only a few months older than Morella that I have been eying up too. But one house at a time..right? I already have altered our morning walk to pass their house every day in the off chance that they are outside and I can say hi.

Do I sound pathetic? No, it's not that...I am a leader! A determined, get something done sort of person. Yeah!

Okay. So the walk went well though I missed seeing Morella kick off one of her socks somewhere from the school to my house. Nutz. I wasn't about to go and look for it so I just threw away the other sock once I got inside. If I find it tomorrow I'll retrieve it, as it's in the living room garbage which isn't nasty like the kitchen one is. BIL Phil was at the house doing some awesome lawn stuff to make the grass greener and the weeds gone.

So I told Phil that he should take some cookies with him and mentioned they were made with cranberries instead of raisins. He said "Oh good, I HATE raisins in food."

Huh? So does Tim! I mean likes it as much as I like seabugs---er shrimp. Oh man, I hope this doesn't mean that Morella is going to turn into a raisin hating person too. I LOVE raisins in food.

Okay. Today's goal in Operation House Overhaul is the tea/coffee cupboard. I should try to do that while I still have time. We have to go grocery shopping and make a trip to the bank later to get a cashier's check to pay for the DNA testing that we all need. Getting Morella onto the tribal roll isn't an endeavor for the faint of heart.