A Quick Check-In

Chris is on Day 5 of suffering with The Crud. He has been banished to a corner of the upstairs and is only permitted to leave to use the facilities. I bring him his food and drink, and he texts me when he needs something brought up to him. He is feverish, lethargic, congested, sore throat, and naseaous. It is not good.

It is also not good that Jenna appears to be coming down with the same Crud. She is on Day 2 of suffering with something suspicious, we don't know what. So far she's just feverish and tired, so this could be another week of fun for me (I'm so self-centered! Of course we want her to feel better soon, too). I'm telling you, this house is like a $200,000 petri dish these days. I keep the windows and doors open and hope that the breeze, and the grace of God, keeps these Crud germs away from the twins.

The babies are still doing very well. They are entirely healthy. Lauren can say almost all the words to Twinkle Twinkle. Kyle can make sounds that follow the melody of Twinkle Twinkle, but can't say any of the words yet. He has a speech therapy evaluation next Friday, when we expect he'll qualify for speech therapy with Early Intervention. Lauren is right on track, or ahead of the curve, for being 20 months old, but Kyle's lower muscle tone seems to be affecting his speech abilities. We shall see.

Chris is waiting for some follow up phone calls with open positions with two companies. We're keeping our fingers crossed that the phone calls come, and that he is healthy enough to come downstairs and answer his phone when they do!

My carpal tunnel and RMD on my left arm/hand are causing me major distress. The timing of the pain seeme like it coincided with Chris getting sick. It makes me wonder if the fact that he's had to disengage himself from family life which has caused me to personally get no down time possibly also caused me to "over use" my arm. All I know is that OTC pain meds don't help it at all, and it hurts like Hades. But I bet I forget about the pain when the Twilight DVD is released this Saturday. If you buy it at Target, it's a 3-disc set instead of just two discs, plus it comes with a code to download the entire movie from iTunes. Score!

And no more spider sightings at our house. WOOT WOOT!

Otherwise things are great here! If Chris and Jenna could just get better, that would even be more great. Greater? The bestest, for sure.

A Good Week

This was a great week. The babies saw their pulmonologist for a post-hospital checkup. He agreed that they're doing great. He sympathized with the hassle of making them wear their bi-pap machines at night, and just told me to do the best we could with it, and not to worry right now if they are only on their machines for a few hours per night. I told the doc as soon as they're old enough to be reasoned with (aka "bribed"), we'd try to go all night. But their lungs sound great again, and hopefully we don't see the inside of a hospital again for a long time.

Jenna had a great week, as usual. The sophisticated vocabulary that continues to tumble out of her mouth amaze us, as usual. Kindergarten registration is in ten days--yeeps!

I finally saw Twilight at the theater this week--score! It sort of sucked--bummer. I will wait for the extras on DVD next month and hopefully time passes quickly between now and then. I can't wait to see it again and hopefully I'll like it better the second time around.

I got a new iPod. Most of my songs won't transfer over from my old iPod and my new iPod. I've always had problems with music files that I obtained from old fashioned music CD's, but now most of the songs that I've purchased on my old iPod won't transfer over, either. Apple says I can only download them once, so there's no help there. Wah! All that money wasted! Off to the library to check out dozens more individual CD's to rip one little song off of each one. I love iTunes, but I refuse to give them extra money for the songs that another Apple product won't recognize now. Grrrr.

Twilight

Whew. I finished the Twilight saga.

What a delicious book.

I raced through the first three books in about three and a half days, but took nearly a week to get through the final book. I loved them! Forget that the target audience is teens and the book is displayed in the “Juvenile” section. I think that the intensity of the books requires more maturity than “Juvenile”. Also, after studying Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a college literature class, I can’t miss the sexualization in vampire stories. I don’t know if I would have been mature enough as a teen to appreciate Twilight, but I sure can now.

Let’s see, where to start? I had avoided the hype over Twilight until three weeks ago when I decided to add the $6 Twilight paperback to my Amazon order, in order to qualify for the free shipping. I promised myself that I’d “try” to get through at least half of the book, expecting that I’d hate it, but I at least wanted to get a feel for the story so that I wasn’t so in the dark. I began reading it at 10pm one night while my husband was out of town, and didn’t put it down until nearly 2am! It was so intense. I was sucked right in. The first book was the best, in my opinion, though the second book New Moon was very good, also. The third book, Eclipse was my least favorite, though still overall a good book and essential to continuing the story. And the final book, Breaking Dawn, was also very good. I remember hearing that fans complained about the ending in Breaking Dawn, but I’m not sure why. I thought it was just fine. Sort of wrapped up nicely in a bow for us. Nothing wrong with that.

I began reading this saga with the following knowledge/expectations:
• The story is for young people, not older readers
• It’s about vampires, which I don’t care for
• Robert Pattinson (YUM) and Kristen Stewart play the leads in the movie
• The movie got slammed by both critics and fans of the book
• The ending of book 4 was disappointing.

So of course, after reading the books, I can safely say that:
• The story may be appropriate for some young people, but I bet we older readers get more out of it than a young person! Lots of subtle details and mature references that a young person may not fully appreciate.
• Indeed, the story is about vampires—the very best kind. The kind which are sexy, impossibly good looking, sexy, mysterious, intense, intriguing, and did I mention sexy? Which is a great combo to engage a reader like me, who doesn’t “care about vampires”.
• As I read the books, I didn’t get to use my imagination to form an impression of Edward and Isabella, since I already knew what Robert Pattinson (YUM!) and Kristen Stewart look like. That’s okay. They’re plenty good enough for me!
• I want to see the movie so bad!
• The ending of book 4 was just fine! And lastly,
• Vampire sex is hot!!!


I'm looking over my post thus far and see that I haven't yet addressed how obsessed I was about finishing these books once I started. I just devoured them. They made me insane. It was all I could do to remember to feed my children, as I was so obsessed about finishing these books. As it is, one of the kids went without her allergy meds all week because I had other things on my mind at bedtime--like getting everyone to bed as quickly as possible so that I could get back to reading! And one morning, I dragged the kids to Super Target with me at 8am to buy the book and some donuts, and we sat at the Starbucks inside so that I could start reading right away, while the kids were busy with their own breakfasts.

Thank goodness there are internet support groups for Twilightaholics. Really, it's not often that you come across a book that is so, so satisfying, not to mention addicting! I hope Stephanie Meyer makes an absolutely obsene amount of money from these books, as she should. She deserves it.

If you’re intrigued at all by these books, I say drop $6 on Twilight and give it a whirl. But the one major mistake I made was not realizing that I should just suck it up and buy all four books together. I should have known better. Because guess what is impossible to do at midnight with a house full of sleeping kids? Going to a bookstore to buy the next book, after you’ve finished the last book, that’s what. That was excruciating! I was bribing friends to bring me their copies at midnight. Nobody would agree. Jerks! Tee hee, just kidding.

What a rotten night.

Kyle’s sleep study last night could have only been worse if he would have thrown up on me. It was pretty bad, when by 2:45am he still had only slept about 30 minutes the whole night. But then he upchucked chocolate milk and French fries all over himself and the bed, and I almost packed us up and walked out right then and there. And if last night wasn’t already going to cost me $1,300 out of pocket, I would have. But I couldn’t bear to spend all that money and get none of the data we needed, so we cleaned up Kyle and the bed and stayed to give it one last try. Ugh. He finally let the tech put a mask on him and fell asleep somewhat quickly at that point—I imagine he had just finally exhausted himself entirely.

In the end, he slept 4.5 hours, one hour longer than they minimum needed to get the data on the bi-pap titrations for him. I slept considerably less than that. And I am so sick of Baby Einstein DVD’s today that I am tempted to trash them all. We “watched” Baby Einstein from about 8pm until about 4am. Blech. This should be the last sleep study for him.

My next blog should be an account of my experience reading Twilight. Does that sound boring? If I were read this sentence on someone else’s blog a week ago, I would have been turned off—who gives a rat’s patootey over Twilight? But I was curious about the hype around the books and movie and decided to read just half the book to find out how much I hated it. And I love it. Love isn’t even a strong enough word (heh heh, and if you’ve read the book, how appropriate it is that I just said that). I am obsessed with it. As you all should be.

Okay, must go finish book 3 and start book 4. Ta ta for now.