So.  This is going to be pretty random. But I guess that’s the point, eh?

Brianna is teething or something, that all I can think of to explain it.  She has been sleeping less than usual (!), grumpy at home, and a bully at daycare.  Hopefully, this will resolve itself in a few days, otherwise, I’ll go more nuts than I already am.

I’ve fixed my tags – mostly.  Turns out, WordPress has this cool little importer thingy that converts categories into tags.  With a few minor glitches it worked. Yay! Still don’t have all the entries tagged, but that will happen someday, maybe.

In looking through my old posts, it seems I worried about a lot of silly things back then, and spent a lot more time than I needed to stressing about friends and life and school.  I wonder what my future self will think when looking back on these posts in 8 years?

Updated my blogroll with some current blogs I read. Yay for links!

I need to do some more work on this stuff, but I’m lazy and also have very little time.A ton of old links are broken ,and some pics that were working before the WordPress move stopped working, so I’d at least like to fix those. But again, it takes time.

And I need to clean the house (um, always).  It seems like I have so little time to even get that done, and it gets dirtier faster than I can clean, lol.  But I’m working on it.

Family is crazy and drama-prone, on both sides it seems. When I hear from my side of the family, that is.

Chad says my new theme is very very pink.  I think he might have been a little disturbed by it.  What can I say… having a little girl has changed me? Maybe a little.

And this is funny…

For more randomness, head to Keely’s place.

I did not spend the better part of Saturday morning in my jammies, trying to entertain a grumpy toddler.  I did not bribe my grumpy toddler to be good in the grocery store by promising animal cookies when we got home, and I most certainly did not let said grumpy toddler eat about two dozen animal cookies once we made it home just to keep her happy, even though she didn’t eat much of her lunch.

I did not totally screw up her sleep schedule by not finding a way to force her to nap Saturday or Sunday, and I would have never let her go to bed without finishing her dinner (because then, we all know, she would wake up in the middle of the night hungry).

And I did not pull her up into my bed between me and Chad this morning at 6am, after she’d been up for two hours screaming (even after a bottle, diaper change, snuggles, etc), and proceed to wake Chad up by crying myself because I was So. Freaking. Tired. And I did not then sleep through my alarm, run around like crazy to get ready, and squeak into work 5 minutes before my weekly status meeting.

Nope. Not me.

You can head over to MckMama’s blog to read what she and everyone else have not been doing this week.

So my template and everything is still kind of a work in progress.  I’d like to get all my links back (or, most of them I guess, and some new ones), and get some other things that I don’t quite like tweaked just a little… but the most annoying problem right now is that when I imported all my blogger stuff, it imported the tags as categories instead of tags, which makes my word cloud weird and not right, and so I’m going back through (1200+) posts and fixing it.

Other than that one problem, wordpress is rocking, a lot.  I feel like I have a lot more control than blogger (at least at the end) – they kept automating things, which was nice, but in the end it was really hard to change something you didn’t like.

so here’s my first post on the new WordPress blog.  It’s pink

Considering I hadn’t really changed my template in um…. 5+ years?  It’s a refreshing change.

This is the last Blogger blog entry for me – they will no longer support FTP here in a few weeks, and I don’t want to mess with their new system. You can find my new blog (inlcuding all of this content!) at http://lydaalexander.com/wordpress/.

So today is Ash Wednesday. Thus the start of Lent.

Picking something for Lent was hard this year. I don’t always do it, especially now that I go to the Church of Christ – they aren’t big on liturgical stuff, so it gets lost sometimes. And I don’t always go the traditional route, something I give up something by way of an attitude or feeling or somethign else abstract, or use the time to cultivate a good habit or whatever. But I digress.

So this year was hard.

Back, before… before I found out I was pregnant, when i was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do about having another child, to try for VBAC or go with the c-section or whatever… back then, I decided that if/when we did this again, I would cut out most of my refined starches – white sugar, white potatoes, white flour, the whole bit – in an attempt to have a normal sized baby (and thus avoid another c-section – most docs won’t VBAC with 9+ pounders, so I was trying to tip the scales a bit).

Fast forward to yesterday… I am still weighing the options of VBAC, but given the short time frame since my last, my amount of anxiety over having another labor/birth experience as traumatic as the last, an a huge number of other factors… it’s looking more like a c-section. Which has actually given me a fair bit of peace, which is somehting I didn’t expect. So yeah. I’m all good with it. But my “avoid refined starches to avoid an OMG big baby” plans… went right out the window, because 1) I figured out early on it probably won’t matter so much and 2) ummm…. life. So refined starches are easy, whole foods are hard and take time and can’t be bought through a drive-through window.

Add all this to the fact that I’ll be on a cruise the beginning of next month… yes, this year is hard.

So I decided that refined starches is too much to give up, given my life craziness, sanity level, and travel plans. But… White Potatoes. I can totally give that up for 40 days, right? No hash browns, no french fries, no baked potatoes, no potato soup…. And maybe, it will have the effect of reducing my overall refined start intake (how could it not?), thus possibly helping me to not grow a giant baby, lol.

Either way, I can probably eat healthier without them (especially the fries).

So that’s what works for me for Lent this year.

For more sharp Works for Me Wednesday tips, head over to Kristen’s at We Are That Family.

This. Actually, that sums up just about exactly where I am. Except maybe – just maybe, I’m a little closer to the psychotic episode than I would care to admit.

I’m joking. A little.

So this week. This week has been hard. Chad’s working nights, flight-following for his crew, I’ve been sick, plus I’m still exhausted from being pregnant (um. Consider this a blog announcement, I guess. I’m too tired to do it up right. we’re due August 17th.), plus Brianna’s going through her second (third?) section of separation anxiety… and yeah. Crazy stuff abounds. I send a fiery email to my MMO group about having no life and them wanting every second of what I have. True story. I felt a little bad afterward.

But… we are surviving. And. We are making progress.

So. I’m going to play “Not Me! Monday.” Here goes:

I did not let Brianna sleep in the swing in my room pretty much all night several nights in a row because it was easier than fighting with her to stay asleep in her room by herself. Also, on Saturday night when I decided she needed to stay in her room to sleep – all night, it was not because the swing batteries were dead, and I couldn’t find a screwdriver. I did not sleep in her room on the floor for over an hour, to make sure she was really asleep. And last night, I most certainly did not give in and take cold medicine, which I knew would cause me to be too drugged up to find my way out of the bed when she woke up, and I did not let her cry it out in the middle of the night because of the aforementioned lack of direction out of the bed.

For more Not Me! Monday, head over to MckMama’s blog.

In unrelated news, I had an awesome Valentine’s yesterday, in spite of the fact that we had no babysitter, and Chad had to work all night (and the night before). If you have (a ton) of money to spend on dinner at some point, I highly recommend Killen’s in Pearland. Don’t be fooled by the outside – it’s a really nice steakhouse, not a honky tonk, lol. And it was good. And Brianna behaved, so all was well.

Brianna,

Today you are a year old. Even as I write that, it is hard for me to understand. An entire year. Of you. It doesn’t seem like it could have possibly been that long.

And yet, there you are. You’ve grown so much from the little tiny thing we brought home from the hospital… You’re independent and smart and stubborn and all of the great things I could have hoped for you when you were born. You constantly amaze me with the things you learn and understand – you pick up so much, even when we’re not really sure we’re teaching you. You have an amazingly sweet spirit – you love people, and animals, and seem to make friends wherever we go.

You are walking – running, and want to be on your own feet everywhere we go. Even though you only have two teeth, you love grown-up food and would eat chicken at every meal if we let you. You love to give hugs and kisses, and this morning, for the first time, you responded to my request to “give mommy kisses” by planting a big slobbery toddler kiss on my cheek. You understand so much more of the world that I would have thought possible for a one-year-old.

I hope your next year is as special and amazing as your first – and that you every bit as much this year as you did last year. I am starting to miss my baby – but I am loving the girl you are turning into, and looking forward to seeing you grow even more as a person day by day.

Happy birthday, sweet girl.

Love,
Mommy