little bear has been amazing me lately. for one thing, he’s so mobile. and fast! he’s a handful, but it’s fun watching him tool around.

we also know that he’s a total water baby now. he’s always loved baths, but he loves pools and the beach, too. we took him to the beach twice, a couple weeks ago. the only thing he didn’t care for was sand. but that’s okay because mama doesn’t much care for it, either. when we held him so he floated on his back, he started falling asleep. he didn’t even mind getting splashed in the face the couple times the waves got him. then we took him to a pool party that weekend, and he loved it. he kicks and splashes and everything. he still isn’t great at putting his face in the water, and after a couple of coughing episodes, just tended to be very tentative about it after that.

wow. he just stood at the window for almost a minute. without holding onto anything, i mean. he’s doing it again. just standing there… he’ll be doing that all the time soon. and probably walking on his own, too. the other day he let go of the couch to chase brumby, realized he wasn’t holding the couch anymore, and promptly fell on his butt.

he shakes his head “no” all the time now. he does it to tell us he’s not interested or doesn’t want something, mostly. like when he doesn’t want to eat or when he’s ready to leave somewhere or stop doing something. i think he’s also doing it to sass me. when i tell him to get away from something or put it down, he does as he’s told most of the time. but sometimes he just shakes his head. i’m not sure if it’s because he knows i’m telling him “no” or if he’s telling me “no.” seems like the latter.

a couple mornings ago, he came up with a new game he loves to play. he’ll raspberry his daddy on his shoulder, then start laughing. (i filmed it and will get it off my camera and upload it soon.) sometimes he’ll raspberry a toy or just make the noise on his own and bust out laughing.

he’s a great kid. i love him so, so much. and it’s so cool watching him grow up.

today, all i wanted to do was watch soccer and relax. there wasn’t a match today i wasn’t looking forward to.

instead, sohei was getting all antsy about taking his car to get his battery replaced. (the battery wouldn’t come out, so he had to take it somewhere.) so we went to do that. i get to watch part of the first match, but then the repair shop calls and says something else on the car broke. sohei went to go deal with that while i finished my complaint letter to verizon. (long story short, neither of us have fully functional phones but verizon will only let one of us upgrade at a discount. even though the phone we want is supposedly buy one get one free. if sohei would let me, i’d cancel the damn contract today.) sohei gets back but can’t finish watching the match because he’s anxious about the car and wants to go out.

however.

we’re hosting a d&d game tonight, so i have to finish cleaning first. so i get to work on the house while sohei watches little bear. i miss pretty much the entire second half of the first match and part of the first half of the next one. then i try to settle down with little bear to watch the rest of the second match, but he’s fussing and won’t sleep. then the repair place calls with bad news – of course – about how much all this shit is going to cost. at this point, i run out of patience and start venting about how we’ve already spent $500 on that car this month and he’s getting his dad’s bmw, so we should just sell the damn car already and cut our losses. ad he said that car is old, too, etc. and i made the mistake of pointing out that if we hadn’t dumped $900 into fixing my 20 year old car, and about the same on fixing his, we could have bought a brand new, working car by now. this statement somehow meant that the whole vent had been about him, etc. and we get in a big fight about that.

so when all was said and done, by the time it was noon: i’d watched maybe a total of 3o minutes of soccer all day, i’d spent most of the morning either worrying about how nothing we own actually works and we don’t have any money to fix or replace any of it, finishing with a huge fight with sohei while sleepless little bear looked on, bawling.

gee, i’m so glad for weekends. i get to do all the cleaning and fighting i didn’t get around to all week, on top of never being able to relax. fml.

my favorite world cup pic so far:

i love my son so, so much, but i really need a break. in the past nine months i’ve been out exactly twice, and had part of the day off when i had stomach flu. aside from 10-15 minutes every other day or so for a shower, that’s the extent of my time off. i’m not ready to be apart from him for a whole day or anything (i know, i have problems), but a couple hours to myself would be nice. it’s not just mental, it’s physical. my back constantly aches from carrying him and picking him up out of harm’s way and letting him sleep on me. i hurt my back really bad this morning, but here i am, holding him in one arm as he sleeps, and typing with the other. i need some time to myself that doesn’t involve me cooking or cleaning. i still love this more than any other job, but i’m getting burnt out…

i’m a little late on this, but here goes… [my picks in italics, winner in bold]

South Africa v. Mexico (Mexico was robbed!)
Uruguay v. France (i miss barthez and zidane)
Korea Republic v. Greece
Argentina v. Nigeria
England v. USA (i usually like england, but i’m not rooting against usa.)
Algeria v. Slovenia
Serbia v. Ghana
Germany v. Australia
Netherlands v. Denmark
Japan v. Cameroon
Italy v. Paraguay (italy are usually whiners they’re being alright this year.)
New Zealand v. Slovakia
Côte d’Ivoire v. Portugal
Brazil v. Korea DPR
Honduras v. Chile (undecided)
Spain v. Switzerland (undecided)
South Africa v. Uruguay
Argentina v. Korea Republic
Greece v. Nigeria
France v. Mexico
Germany v. Serbia
Slovenia v. USA
England v. Algeria
Netherlands v. Japan
Ghana v. Australia
Cameroon v. Denmark
Slovakia v. Paraguay
Italy v. New Zealand
Brazil v. Côte d’Ivoire
Portugal v. Korea DPR
Chile v. Switzerland (undecided)
Spain v. Honduras (undecided)
Mexico v. Uruguay
France v. South Africa
Nigeria v. Korea Republic
Greece v. Argentina
Slovenia v. England
USA v. Algeria
Ghana v. Germany (this is tough… not sure yet.)
Australia v. Serbia
Slovakia v. Italy
Paraguay v. New Zealand
Denmark v. Japan (gaahhh i don’t knooooww. japan will win, though.)
Cameroon v. Netherlands
Portugal v. Brazil
Korea DPR v. Côte d’Ivoire (i don’t want to blame a [suffering] people for their government, but i feel weird rooting for n. korea over a team i don’t hate.)
Chile v. Spain (undecided)
Switzerland v. Honduras (undecided)

*i know nothing about any of these teams, really. i choose by countries i want to visit or just feel good about. i’ve been mostly choosing the same ones since ‘98. sometimes i’m ambivalent until i see that one team’s players are being jerks and fouling a lot. (greece, i’m looking at you.) also, i refuse to root for brazil on principle. they’re going to win most – if not all – of their matches, but i don’t like hype. apparently portugal’s got the new ronaldo (except for actual scoring), so i changed my picks. not sure what to make of brazil this time, since the coach apparently chose function over form.

this discussion just occurred between myself and sohei:

sohei: …and i’m not even going to get my father’s day weekend. (we’re going to spend next sunday with his dad.)
me: well, we could do something tomorrow.
sohei: no, i want a whole weekend.
me: i didn’t get a whole weekend.
sohei: every day is mother’s day.
me: what?!
sohei: you get what you want all the time.
me: what?! oh, right, like last weekend and then the phone thing. i always get what i want.
sohei: you get a life without physical labor.
me (incredulous): i get a year without working outside the home. (and if you don’t think i work here at home and that it’s not physical labor, you’re insane. also, hello mr. desk job.)

i left the room before he said anything else, because after that, i was afraid i’d kill him.

last weekend, i finally got sohei to agree – after months of begging – to take me to my favorite discount clothes store. none of my clothes fit right anymore, because even though i lost weight, it’s redistributed. i learned that, despite being 30 pounds lighter, i still can’t find anything that fits me. my boobs are ginormous and i still have the baby pooch on the bottom of my abdomen. shirts used to be the easiest thing for me to buy. now? not so much. if the bust fits, the rest hangs off me like a tent. pants are a struggle, too. my waist is really high, and if i wear my pants at my waist, they’re up under my boobs. so i usually wear low-rise. well, now if i wear low-rise, i have a muffin top, which – no matter how fat i was – never happened to me before. so the pants slide down my ass while, at the same time, my gut hangs over the waist band. so my fashion choices seem to be limited to mom jeans and muu-muus. i didn’t find one thing that fit right or that i liked. we even went to target afterward and i couldn’t find anything there, either. sohei got a bunch of clothes, and little bear got some, too, but i’m still wearing the same ill-fitting crap. the fact that i had to beg and plead to go there for so long just adds insult to injury.

then, today, i was supposed to finally get a new phone. my old one is horrible. i can’t hear anyone on it and it doesn’t tell me when people call or leave messages half the time. i’ve wanted this new phone since christmas. today, i went to the verizon store to try it out and possibly buy it. none of the salespeople were at all helpful, so i decided to order it online and get the rebate instantly. the catch was that it was supposed to be buy one get one free and sohei decided he wanted one, too. when i went online to buy it, bogo didn’t appear as an option. so i called customer service and asked what the deal was, and was told that only one line (mine) was due for an upgrade, so i couldn’t get the free phone. it would have been nice for them to fucking mention that on the damn website, but of course, they didn’t. instead, despite being perfectly happy with his phone (until last night), sohei seems to have decided that he needs a new phone more than i do, so i’m s.o.l. until this time next year. seriously. i’ve been researching this phone and going to forums about it and stuff for months. and when i told sohei at the beginning of the week that he could get one, too, he said he liked the phone he has and the one i want sucks. until last night when he decided that the internet on his is too slow. i’m so glad i tried to be generous and get the less cutting-edge phone so he could have one, too. now instead i get jack shit.

i know it’s just stuff, but i’m sick of looking frumpy or like ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag. and tired of having to use a phone that doesn’t work. i’m sick of being disappointed all the time, in general, and having to beg for things only to be let down anyway. even if it’s something small, could i just catch a fucking break?

my little bear continues to grow… a common piece of advice has been to enjoy his being a baby while it lasts, and that’s something i’ve tried hard to do. it’s still going too fast. it’s exciting to watch him go from being a helpless little newborn to an ever more autonomous baby, but there are already things i miss. when he was tiny, it was so much easier to let him sleep on my chest. he still can, kind of, but he’s so heavy. i can still hold him with one arm when he falls asleep on me, and i know i’m going to miss when he won’t fit.

this month has been about the same as last month, except he’s doing everything faster and less clumsily. he walks holding onto furniture and his walker toy, though still can’t let go to move to a different place. he can’t stand for more than a few seconds on his own, but he’s working on it. he shakes his head “no” when he doesn’t like what we’re doing or if he’s had enough to eat. (he also pushes the spoon away as if to say, “i am so done with this, mama.”) i gave him his own spoon to practice with at mealtime, and he tries to put it in the container, but mostly just bangs it on the tray and sticks it in his mouth.

i think he said his first word on the 3rd. he went up to brumby, put his hand on him and said, “dog.” when i asked him if he said dog, he turned back to brumby and said it a couple more times. now he does it almost every time he sees the dog. we went to the beach on sunday to visit grandma and she had her dog there. it is a huge dog, way different-looking than brumby, and he kept saying “dog” at her, too. he’s been saying ma-ma, da-da, etc. for a while now, but it seemed a little too indiscriminate to be his first word. he says “da-da,” “da-dee,” and “daddd” all the time, even when his father’s not around. and he’s been saying “ma-ma” or “mummmm” when he’s upset for a long time. but now he pretty much just says “dog” when he sees a dog. he said “beh” to his bear once, but since he only did it once, i think it was a coincidence. today i was watching rugrats while he played on the floor and i said, “hey, little bear, look at the baby!” and he looked up and mimicked “ba-by.” on the changing table, when i sing “la-la-la” to him, sometimes he does it back, and we go back and forth a bit. it’s the most conversational i’ve ever seen him.

he also started playing with us this month. we roll the ball back and forth when he’s in the mood for it. (most of the time, we only get a couple passes in before he’s off to explore something else. he already has a.d.d.) he also plays keep away with brumby. they play tug of war with his bone toy and stuff. thankfully, brumby is a pretty laid-back dog, but we keep a close eye regardless. little bear is still pretty friendly with other people. in general, this kid knows no fear. when we were at the beach on sunday, he loved it. a couple of waves got him in the face, and he didn’t care. he just kicked and splashed and had a great time. he loves swimming in the pool, too. it’s so neat getting to watch him try new things and have so much fun. (including trying and loving jalapeno ranch dressing. that stuff is almost too hot for mama, but he loves it…)

he’s also been honing his temper tantrum skills. it is very obvious these days when he hasn’t had enough sleep or it’s time for a nap. and if you take something away before he’s done with it, watch out! thankfully, the tantrum doesn’t last too long when that happens…

so that’s pretty much what little bear’s been up to these days. he’s fussing right now, so i guess i’d better see if he needs a nap. (and don’t even ask about the crib sleeping. we were close, but no cigar.)