That's right!! BABY. FEVER. That's me. Guilty as charged.
I know, I know. I'm not the first to sing this tune. I also know that I have no idea of the real ramifications of having a baby. I'm not saying I want to have a baby now. I'm just saying that recent events have my mind choosing nursery colors. Last weekend, a couple that J and I are friends with got married. They have been together for years and have two beautiful daughters together, the youngest of whom is just a couple of months old. Due to a mis-communication between J and the groom, we arrived at the reception an hour early. The bride happened to be at the reception site and invited us to come wait at their house while they got ready for the reception (they had been married earlier in the day by civil ceremony). When we arrived at their house, the groom and J wandered off, lost in man-talk, and I offered to help the bride get ready (getting ready for your wedding reception while watching after two little ones sounded like a daunting task). I ended up being assigned to baby duty, and sat on the couch with the little one in my arms, watching her fight off sleep while she drank a bottle of formula. My heart fluttered as I thought about eventually doing the same thing with J and I's baby...someday.
Fast forward to today, I arrive at work late (which I will explain momentarily) and see that a client has brought in her infant daughter with her. She is beautiful as can be, sitting on the floor playing with a pillow that has a mirror-ish piece of plastic in it. She seems entranced by her reflection, big blue eyes watching big blue eyes. Against my better judgement (I know fully well how quickly I get baby fever when I'm around babies), I put down my things and sit on the floor with her, indulging in some baby-talk and making funny faces. She was eventually scooped up by mommy, off to her appointment, and I could only walk back to my office and sit quietly as the waves of baby fever washed over me.
Again, I'll say that I have absolutely no intention of having a baby any time soon. I definitely want to be married for at least some measurable amount of time before J and I have the baby talk in any degree of seriousness (we've had the baby talk before, but it was always in the "someday" tense). But I simply can't help it. It's like gravity - a force of nature. J knows all about my tendencies with baby fever and is always very patient with me for it. He doesn't pretend to understand how I feel, but he lets me feel what I need to feel and talk about it if I want to. Mostly situations like this make me think about when it will happen. My mother always says, "There's never a 'good' time to have a baby... It will never be convenient." I agree. I know I'll never be as emotionally, mentally and physically prepared to get pregnant and have a baby as I will wish I was about 3 nights into a sleepless week, but I do think I can still prepare myself any way that I can. I recognize what a serious undertaking a baby is, but that doesn't make me shy away from it. Granted I don't have this fever all the time. It's just during and for a couple hours after being around little babies. But that makes me wonder... How intense will the fever be by the time we are ready for "the talk"?
Much else has been going on since I last posted. Halloween came and went, and I took that opportunity to decorate a little bit, complete with fake spider webs on the outside of the house with creepy plastic spiders, window clings that looked like pumpkins and ghosts, lawn decorations (four little reflective Halloween shapes on metal rods that you push into the yard) along the sidewalk, a life-sized cardboard vampire hanging on the front door and pumpkins carved by J and I!
It wasn't much, but I wanted to do a little something. We bought an immense amount of candy, having no idea what the trick-or-treating in our neighborhood was like, and were left with almost all of it. I probably handed candy out to 5-6 groups of trick-or-treaters, and I was generous with the candy. Having all the excess sugar laying around the house has been bad for my diet, and I've considered just throwing it away or sending it to work with J on more than one occasion. What can I say?? I've never been good at resisting temptation...
Last weekend, I finally broke down and started buying craft supplies to start making homemade gifts. I've started with Christmas ornaments, and this weekend I will be continuing my efforts, as well as making homemade gift tags. It's going well so far!! I've also finished making our return labels for our Christmas cards, which turned out really, really cute. The envelopes are red, and our labels are ivory with holly and berries in the corner. I'll have to post up a picture later... :)
Today has been hectic already, thanks to my usual Master of Messes... Huck!! Only this time it's not really his fault, or anyone's fault for that matter. As I've mentioned before, I'm hosting Thanksgiving this year. In an effort to start preparing for that in advance, on Tuesday I decided to bathe the dog so I didn't have to worry about it as we got closer to the holidays. J and I had picked up some new doggy shampoo that was advertised to be organic and anti-shedding. I bathed him as usual, using the hand-held shower nozzle to wet him down and then rinse him off, toweling him off with some junk towels that we keep in the garage. Everything went perfectly normally. About half an hour into his drying process, as he was tearing around the house, I noticed that the fur on the back of his neck and shoulders looked a little funny... I touched it and realized that it had formed into a giant mat! Ohhh nooooo......I thought to myself. I knew what this meant. Huck is an American Eskimo. His fur is beautiful, but very long and comes with a heavy undercoat. I knew untangling this mess would be extremely difficult and messy. I decided to let him dry off more before I attempted to brush it out (wet dog hair is more difficult to untangle), and as he continued to dry, more mats appeared. I was starting to panic. I wasn't sure anymore if I'd be able to brush them out because they were getting so big and there were so many of them! After he dried off a bit more, I realized that all of his fur - that's right, all of it - was matted. Most was in small mats that would be simple to brush out, but the hair around his neck and along his back were in clumps so large that they would have to be cut apart before I'd even consider brushing them...
I tried. I really did. I tried so hard that I ended up covered in fur, and stopped when the brushing started to hurt Huck. I made no progress in brushing out the mats, and started to worry what that might mean. When J got home from work in the morning, he too attempted to brush Huck out, and failed as miserably and messily as I had. He woke me up and asked that I research groomers at work that day...which is where Huck is now. When I dropped him off at the groomer we chose, Dirty Paws, he was terrified. As I explained the situation to the groomer, she felt his mats and told me that she probably wasn't going to be able to get them out. She'd probably have to shave him. I decided that he would look too ridiculous if she only shaved the mats off... it would look like chunks of his hair had fallen off!! I told her that if that was the case, she should just shave him all over to one even length. I feel so bad for him, he's going to be so cold!! And right before the snow starts... poor thing...
Maybe I'll get him a sweater... :)
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