Harper's Hair

I cut Harper's hair quite short a couple of days ago. She had been thinking about doing it for awhile and finally said I should just go ahead and cut it. It took her a bit to get accustomed to it, but I think it's growing on her (growing on her!). Having it this short is really great for her because she has a VERY sensitive head and loathes having her hair brushed. So, when it's long, it has a tendency toward looking like a rat's nest.

Speaking of rats, she's holding Saren's rat, Skittles. Saren bought another rat (Milky Way) last week as well, but we took her (the rat, not Saren) back to the pet store because she was breathing funny. So that rat is still there and we will probably pick her up tomorrow. We are, apparently, a two rat, three cat, two turtle family. There were some caterpillars there for a while, but they mothed out.

Current Wall of Art

I want a new camera.

Irina's First Haircut

I cut Irina's hair this morning. Her hair is still very baby-ish in its texture and curliness. It was similar in its look to what Saren's hair was like when she was about three. Lots of little ringlets on the bottom and still quite wispy. Because of that I wouldn't have chosen to give her first haircut to her yet (I waited with Saren and Harper until their hair had thickened and straightened quite a bit), but she really wanted me to do it, so I chopped off all of those ringlets. :( She's still got quite a bit of curl left though, and I think it looks quite cute, so I guess it's okay.

These pictures are from my broken camera, which now has some dark spots around the edge and doesn't do a great job of focusing anymore. I was going to crop out the dark spots, but I don't really feel like it anymore. I could almost just put some more dark spots on the other side and it would look intentional.

How Lost May Have Put Me Off TV For Good

I haven't been watching very many shows regularly in the recent past. I used to sit down and watch a few shows each week with Pat and sometimes the girls. Pat is a lot more interested in television (and movies, for that matter) than I am. But lately I've become less and less interested and the only shows I was watching regularly were Survivor and Lost.

Last night was the series finale for Lost, as most people probably already know. I was severely disappointed by it. What makes me really sad about it though, is that I didn't start to get an inkling that I was going to be disappointed until the last few episodes. And I didn't know just how disappointed I would be with it until the very end of the very last episode. What I essentially feel is that I wasted 6 years. Of course, I didn't. Each episode is only an hour long, but waiting in between episodes and in between seasons counts for something too.

When you are reading a book and you start to get the feeling that it isn't going to pan out, you can put it aside and only have invested a short amount of time and energy into it. Even if you don't get a bad feeling about it until you're at the very end and you doggedly read it through to the last page, you've still only put a minimal amount of time into it and upset as you might be about it (Into the Woods, I'm looking at you), it's still relatively easy to shrug it off. But when you've been interested in a particular story for SIX YEARS, it's a lot harder not to be bitter when the writers don't deliver.

And deliver, they certainly did not. Never has a television show raised so many weird and intriguing questions. That was part of the appeal. The show never would have been as popular as it was without the mysteries that the writers built into the story. But when all is said and done, the writers shoved most of those mysteries aside and said the show was all about the characters from the beginning. That was apparently the important part. None of the other stuff mattered much, so it's okay to not tie up %70 of the loose ends, and to do a half-assed job with the ones they couldn't avoid.

And I don't know if maybe it's just the medium. Is this just a danger of becoming involved in a tv show? A good novel writer makes sure to tie up every single loose thread in their story. Is it just considered perfectly acceptable for writers on tv shows not to? I see so many people talking about how in real life not all your questions will be answered, making the loose ends in Lost okay, but um... Lost is not real life. It's a story, and I fully expect all my questions to be answered. A certain amount of ambiguity is okay, but leaving almost everything still ambiguous is ridiculous.

I won't get into details because I don't want to be all spoilery, I just wanted to rant a little bit about how disappointed I was. I felt so let down by the ending of this series that it has tainted all my previous enjoyment of it. It feels like such a waste of time, I don't ever want to invest myself in something like it ever again. I think I'm sticking with Survivor as my only watch-it-every-week show from now on.

The Beauty of Renting

You notice a leak in your hot water heater. You call your landlord, he calls someone else, it gets fixed, the end.

This could also be called, "The Beauty of Having a Good Landlord," I guess.

I'm so glad we're renting. And that we have a good landlord. We also had a broken sprinkler that we didn't have to stress over and that got fixed right away. We still haven't paid for the water heater that broke at the old house.

Time Rewind

Last night I had a dream that I turned back time to when Silas lived in my belly. Maybe I've been feeling a bit sad about how quickly time has passed with Silas, my last little one. You really only get one year with a baby. After that, you can call them babies, but they're really not. They're children.

Every time I see a real baby, one of those tiny creatures still in their first year, I can't help but sigh wistfully. I've had four baby years all for myself, which is more than a lot of people get, but still I get a little bit sad knowing that I won't have any more.

In looking back, I wonder if I appreciated those four baby years to their fullest extent. I tend to think I didn't, but maybe that's just part of looking back. You can only ever be in the present, and so maybe it just feels like I didn't savor them because I'm not in them right now savoring them.

In any case, it was a nice dream, feeling my belly all swollen and full of squirming Silas. And, as is sometimes the case in dreams, it took a minute or two to realize I had actually had to turn back time a whole year to get to the still pregnant point. In the dream, as in real life, I was surprised that so much time had gone by. My boy, my littlest, is one.

A Bad Day, A Good Day

Yesterday was a bad day. Much of the day was spent brooding over money. Or rather, the lack of it. Then my camera was broken. So I spent the rest of the day feeling sorry for myself about that. The one thing I have for myself, WAH WAH WAH. Broken at a time when we can scarcely afford to pay the bills let alone replace my camera, WAH WAH WAH. I have no way to record my beautiful baby's face, WAAAAH. WAAAAH. WAAAAAH. I felt bereft. I still feel a little bit of that.

But, not so much as before. It's a camera. I do have a film camera and a few rolls of film as well, which I hardly ever use. I don't even necessarily need to shell out any money to have the film developed right away. It can sit for a bit. Also, I went onto Amazon and looked up the exact model of my camera (Canon PowerShot A710 IS, it's just a point and shoot, but damn, I love that camera) and it pointed me to the newer version. It comes in three colors and the cheapest is green at $140. That's about $100 or so less than what I originally paid, and not so much that I feel like it's completely out of reach. Well, for now it definitely is, but maybe in the near future.

Anyway, today was a good day because I got over myself, yes, but it was also a good day because Silas took his first steps!

Of course, I have no documentation of this, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Silas on His First Birthday

Happy birthday, my sweet boy.

Tomatoes, plus me and my littlies

I just went out there, despite being sick as a dog (cuz dogs are sick all the time?), and I counted 9 tomatoes! There is also a zuchinni plant and a cucumber plant, both of which are looking good and have flowers on them and such. And there is also a strawberry plant and a bell pepper plant, both of which I do not have much hope for.

This is a picture of me and the bean and Si.

Ohmigodohmigodohmigodohmigod

There are like six tomatoes growing on our tomato plant!

PLEASE DON'T DIE.

Mother's Day

Saren made me a cake for Mother's Day. It's chocolate with cream cheese frosting. Yummy. All my girls decided to wear purple because it's my favorite color.

Silas's New Favorite Spot

Meet Skittles

This is Saren's new friend, Skittles.



Yesterday Skittles was purchased from the pet store with Saren's hard-earned* cash from babysitting. She is named Skittles because she was so skittish as first, due to (according to the pet store lady) not having been handled enough. Saren has been very excited about getting a rat for a while now, so as you can imagine, she is well pleased.



*actually, it wasn't really that hard for her to earn it. the babysitting was done here, at our house, and the babysittee mostly plays with Harper while she's here.