Oh Norah...

I cleaned my fridge today.

Walk On

The beast, she walks.

I had expected the progression of Norah walking to be fast. Many of the babies I know began walking around their first birthday, and I expected Norah to do the same. Her birthday came and went, and while she was excellent at cruising around, and could even stand on her own without falling down, she did not walk. This continued for a few weeks, and at last! She took her first step.

Surely, I thought, not long after her first step she would start walking all over the place. That's what babies do, right? They take their first step, and then the world collapses as they start walking everywhere. Their mamas never get to sit down again.

I was wrong. Norah's first step was followed by a few more weeks of little walking and lots of crawling. Little by little she began taking more steps, and now she is a walking machine. But it took a long time to get there.

It's so strange to see her do this, walk upright like a little person. Slowly her gait is becoming steadier, less like a drunken zombie. Slowly she is beginning to learn how to turn and round corners. She walks and falls in perfect Norah fashion--looking up and saying "Uh-oh!", then rolling on her back and giggling, pulling her feet up to her face. This kid cracks me up.

Now that she has tasted the wonders of walking, she has little tolerance for being carried. At home this is fine, but at the store where there is an endless supply of things for Norah to break, her desire for independence is really obnoxious. She arches her back and yelps at me, so I put her down and say "Ok Norah. You can walk, but you have to hold Mama's hand. If you can't hold Mama's hand you can't walk." And Norah hears "Blah blah blah WALK!!! Blah blah blah." As soon as her feet hit the floor she slides away from me and tries to escape, walking as fast as she can in the opposite direction, arms in the air above her head, crazed look in her eye. She looks exactly like a bald little monkey.

Sometimes I forget she can walk. I'll leave her in the living room, I'll get my coffee and turn around to see this little blond head bobbing toward me. And it freaks me out. Just what, exactly, does my baby think she is doing? All this walking and talking and growing up business? Wasn't she a screaming little blob just last week? Now she is walking and saying words, combing her hair and brushing her teeth, taking off her diaper, climbing stairs, giving hugs and kisses and showing off whenever she gets the chance.

She is still screaming though. At least some things never change.

For more on how I feel about Norah walking, go here.

Death Toast

This has been a terrible week.

Friday 6/19
I randomly threw up and suffered from various other intestinal issues that I won't describe. This was, of course, after a friend of mine had some VERY serious intestinal issues that required ER visits and whatnot. I, being the ever rational person that I am, decided that he had given me his illness through osmosis.

Saturday 6/20
Further intestinal issues

Sunday 6/21
Even further intestinal issues

Monday 6/22
You guessed it. Intestinal issues... Also, general laze and blah blahs. I felt EXACTLY like I did when I was first pregnant with Norah, so even though we were pretty sure that it was impossible that I could be a month or so pregnant, Rusty and I got a test anyway. It was negative. So there you go all you jump to conclusion-ers.

Tuesday 6/23
Perfect health! I cleaned the house! Which, I have to be feeling pretty glorious to actually clean the house. However, Norah was sick with a fever.

Wednesday 6/24
Norah and I both felt fine. I heard the Hallelujah Chorus, yes I did.

Thursday 6/25
We went to the Aquarium. They fed the sharks while we were in the shark tube and it was awesome! When we were in Houston, my marine biology sister explained to us how to tell if a shark was a boy or a girl. I'm pretty sure that all the sharks in this aquarium were boys.
Late that night I got a migraine. It kept me up from midnight to three., no matter what I did. Then I woke up at five thirty to get ready for work.

Friday 6/26
So technically the migraine happened on Friday. When I got up at five thirty I took some Excedrin and a took a hot shower and by the time I left it was mostly gone. My voice was inexplicably hoarse and manly, but I could sit up without feeling like my brains were going to pour out my ears so I didn't really care.

I went to work, the boys were crazy, we got a flat tire and I had poop water thrown on me. But that's a different story. Not related to my illnesses.

Saturday 6/27
I woke up on midnight to Norah's screaming. She screamed for a few minutes, then let out an enormous burp and several farts and she was fine. She did sleep in our bed though, and randomly slapped and kicked me in the face all night. I know this because I was awake most of the night.

First I had the chills. Awful terrible shakes like I had when I was in labor. I got up, put on some fleece pants and two blankets and slept on the couch for a while. Then I woke up an hour later pouring sweat. I took off the blankets and the pants and looked for our thermometer. I only found the stupid forehead one that does not work. I used it anyway and it said my fever was 101. However, that thing is so erratic it could have been anything. I went back to my bed because we had two fans going in there.

The rest of the night was spent with alternating fever and chills, another migraine, coughing and lots of nose running. Punctuated with sweet little Norah kicks and punches. I finally fell asleep around five and then Norah had the audacity to wake up at 7:20! This, from the kid who usually gets up around 9! Rusty took care of Norah, which was very kind of him given that I felt like death.

I spent the rest of the day feeling like death with thick bright green lava snot and absolutely no voice. For someone who spends her whole life talking, to others or to herself, lacking a voice is pretty tortuous. Around 3:00 I concluded that I either had the swine flu or a sinus infection that was going to work its way into my brain and kill me. Either way I was doomed. After confirmation from my mom that I was probably dying, Rusty took me to the convenient care clinic. They poked around for a bit, were confused about why I was whispering, gave me another pregnancy test (still negative conclusion-ers!) and then THEN! decided it was all a case of bad bad allergies.

I got a steroid shot in my butt! They said it was my hip, but I know the difference between my butt and my hip and that needle did not go into my hip.

Allergies shmallergies. I'm still putting my money on the swine flu or a deadly brain-bound sinus infection.

Cantaloupe Liars

When I was in high school, my mom let Sara and me paint our bedrooms. We got to pick our own colors and during Spring Break we spent the entire week stripping wall paper, fixing ceilings and painting. It was incredibly hard work, harder than any of us expected because the floral wall paper that covered all the walls had spent the last decade baking in the New Mexican sun so that it was nearly impossible to remove. I think my mom still gets the twitches when she thinks about that wallpaper.

It was really very cool of my mom. I'm sure there were many other rooms she would have liked to paint and re-do, but she let us do ours instead. And Sara and I were both really excited about our rooms.

Sara picked a lavender for her walls, and a pale yellow for the trim. I picked royal blue for the walls and a bright gold for the trim. Sara's looked great with her bed spread and room decorations. Mine looked like a Kraft Macaroni and Cheese box.

So after that fiasco, you would think that I would have realized that I don't have the best eye for room color. But then, not too long ago, I picked this awesome grassy green color for my living room wall. It was a raging success in the Perkins' house. It is so fabulous, in fact, that it prompted Norah to speak her first sentence. When she woke up from her nap on the day I was painting, I brought her in to see and she said, "Mama! You are a color genius!", perfectly pronounced. ; )

I admit. After that I was a little over-confidant about my color picking skills. Me and my pompous self began eyeing the kitchen. And, at the same time, Amalah wrote about her kitchen as well. And when she mentioned a cantaloupe color I all but skipped to Lowe's, for BRILLIANT! A cantaloupe colored kitchen would be perfect! The pale orange would look great with my green wall and with my cabinets. I logged onto Valspar's website and found the perfect paint color. Cantaloupe Smile.

I have a problem with paint color names. I get distracted by them. Cantaloupe Smile sounds so perfectly orange and sunny and...cantaloupy. I mean, come on. The green in my living room is called La Fonda Plaza Green, and it turned out great, so surely a paint color named Cantaloupe Smile would be great and ORANGE. And to be honest, if they had named that paint Road Stripe Yellow, which would have been more accurate, I would have stayed away from it.

Rusty told me in the store that it was yellow. But I didn't believe him. It was called Cantaloupe Smile for pete's sake, it had to be orange! Sadly, from the first brush stroke I was unhappy. Even more sadly, I continued through two full coats, telling myself it was orange and it would grow on me and I would end up loving it. It never happened.

I woke up the next morning and walked into the kitchen and announced I hated it. I was going to re-paint the next day. So I went back to Lowe's, gave in to the experts and went with a nice blue shade that would bring out the orange color in my cabinets. Bah.

And I love it. I really do. It's so calming and mellow and not road stripey. And it's called Cincinnatian Hotel Lindner Blue. A perfectly respectable name.

Its Dorothy's Fault

Last night, after a delicious dinner with friends and a coffee run with Jasmine, Rusty and I were unwinding. He was playing Soduko on his phone and I was reading Snow Falling on Cedars. (So good!) We were happily laying in bed absently listening to the news when the weather guy broke in. Both of us put our full attention on the TV because it is June in Arkansas, still considered tornado season, and we could hear the storm outside our windows. We were listening to the storm update when the tornado sirens started wailing.

I. Hate. That. Sound.

I can't think of many things that scare me more than the tornado siren. The siren signals serious business, more than likely someone has sighted a funnel cloud. Its wail tells you to get your butt in gear, no goofing off, in case the storm comes and tries to knock down your house. Even on a perfectly clear day, when the siren going off is just a test, it freaks me out. My throat tightens and I start to feel sick.

So last night, when the siren sounded, we knew it was not a test. Both of us jumped out of bed and ran to get things ready. I threw on my shoes and started tossing things into the bathroom--pillows, blankets, diaper bag, cell phone. Rusty grabbed Norah as I was getting the pillows from the bed and then the sirens stopped. We settled down, sat back in bed, and waited for the storm to pass. Norah slept in our room last night because I am mildly crazy and would not have been able to sleep if she had been all the way across the house, just in case another storm came in the night and knocked a tree onto her bedroom.

It was a dramatic half hour.

And just now, we are waiting out another storm, this one producing tornado warnings in the county south of us. While I'm not hiding in the bathroom closet (yet), that last clap of thunder was so loud it shook the pictures on my walls and nearly make me throw up my dinner.

Again I ask: Why do I live in Arkansas, so close to Tornado Alley, and not in some safe place like Montana?