Alabaster Mom

This girl! It's amazing how fast you can get out of the house when you don't have to yell at anybody about getting dressed, brushing teeth, etc. Of course, I felt a little lonely when I actually got there but it was a quiet morning for sure. The kid caught a flight to Maryland yesterday. She's hanging out in Ocean City with my dad and his girlfriend. She'll be gone for 23 days total. We'll be there with her for a week in the middle so I'm hoping she won't get too homesick. When we leave the beach, we're handing her off to my sister, who has all sorts of plans for her niece - including a trip to the American Girl store.  Both of my sisters got the kid AG gift cards for her birthday and now she gets to use them to buy a doll.  After she boarded the plane yesterday, her dad and I didn't know what to do with ourselves. We went to dinner at a funky place that has multiple vegan dishes (I'm in my third week of trying this thing on for size). Then w...

My daughter is on a mission to ride the same roller coaster 100 times this summer. She's currently at 18, so just 82 to go! The coaster is located in a local amusement park. The ride requires you to fork over four tickets each time you climb aboard. The tickets are only a quarter each. So, just in case math is not your thing . . . it's a buck a ride.  When I told P about the kid's goal, he exclaimed, "THAT A HUNDRED DOLLARS!"  I shrugged. A couple weeks ago, she and I went over there on a Tuesday night and the joint was almost deserted. She was able to ride again and again and again - eight times in all. I rode it with her the first two times and then I was done. I like the ride but it maketh my head hurt after.  It's an old-school wooden coaster so it's very bumpy. I sat below the coaster and waited for her. One time I'd see the cars go by and she'd be in the middle, the next time she was in the front, and so forth. And then she discovered the...

After three weeks of not being able to exercise (because of my foot surgery), I was getting a little depressed. And I was gaining weight, which caused me to get even more mopey. Finally, three weeks after my surgery, I was able to get back into my routine. My left foot is still a bit swollen (it kind of looks like I just have one slightly fat foot and one normal foot), but it does the job. Last week I went biking twice, hit the gym twice, did one yoga class, and walked the dogs a few times. The foster pup chewed his leash for the entire walk, which was exactly as fun as it sounds. I did find that my incision was bleeding a bit after my first workout at the gym, so I've loosened my laces as much as I can without the shoe actually falling off. For the yoga class, I went to a gentle class because I wasn't sure my foot was ready for planks and downward dogs. It went pretty well. When you do a balance pose, you have to grip the mat with the foot that's not in the air. I had...

I had planned to start my "can I do this vegan thing?" experiment at the end of the month. However, over the past few weeks I've been stocking up on vegan food items and last week I decided I may as well get the party started. I began my little journey on Friday the 13th. Since that time, the only non-vegan item I've eaten is a Boca veggie sausage (vegetarian but not vegan). Anyway . . . so far, so good. Will I ever call myself a vegan? No, I don't think so. I've been doing some reading and from what I can tell from a lot of the message boards (as well as comments from vegans on various articles I've read), a lot of vegans are downright militant. It seems like no vegan can be a good enough vegan to satisfy the other tribe members. Vitamin D, for example, can be animal-derived or synthetic. Also, sugar is usually filtered with bone char. For a lot of vegans, if you consume sugar or D3, you may as well put a bullet in your own head. I just don't ever w...

Now, I love summer as much as the next girl, but in most respects . . . nothing really changes for me. I still have to be up at 5:00 a.m. on weekdays. I still have to make the kid's lunch every day. I am still obligated to drop her off at day camp every morning and pick her up again on my way home from work. I have to feed the dogs, do the laundry, go to work, buy groceries, pay bills, clean the house, pick up poop, and so on it goes. The only thing that really changes is that we do funner stuff on the weekends and I walk the dogs a lot more. I am having a particularly unfun kind of week. I most definitely dropped my daughter off for day camp yesterday with my zipper firmly in the down position. Then today we got almost all the way there and I remembered that the thermos in her lunch bag was . . . empty. She likes the crispy tenders from Gardein (they are meatless) and yeah, I forgot to cook them this morning and actually put them in her lunch. So, we stopped at a convenience sto...

. . . how industrious a girl can be when you take her iPad hostage. After dinner she asked for ice cream, so I let her have it. After she was done, she simply walked away and left behind the half-eaten container of ice cream, her utensils, dinner plate, etc. So, I took her beloved iPad and extracted a chore in exchange.  I even threw in a "get your pajamas on and then maybe you can have it back."  The darned iPad was expensive but seriously, it's the best bargaining tool of all time. God forbid she should go a day without watching Minecraft videos or playing with an app that features a talking cat.

It was a pretty quiet weekend. Normally I have our little family scheduled to within an inch of our lives, but I didn't have anything planned this weekend. On Friday, the kid and I biked to the park and hung out until the mosquitoes were alerted to our presence. Is it just me or are the mosquitoes unusually relentless this year?  I keep finding them in my house. Normally I'm not a fan of killing anything (for spiders, I just pretend I don't see them) but I've been killing mosquitoes left and right. And they are always full of blood. Blech. I always think, "Who's DNA is that?"  I have a feeling that the dogs are donating blood pretty regularly. On Saturday, P went to a nerd fest out of town, so the kid and I went to the farmers' market and then hit the trail with our bikes.  Gone are the days with her kiddie bike and her little training wheels. Now she has a big bike and it's all I can do to keep up with her. After biking, we grabbed some lunch an...

Last weekend, the kid and I headed out of town to volunteer at a pet expo (held about two hours south of where we leave). We headed down a day early so we could make a weekend of it.  We went to the farmers' market, did some Father's Day shopping, stopped for ice cream, and just generally had a good time. My still-swollen foot held up better than I feared it would. I would like to have done more shopping after the ice cream but by then my foot was over the whole scene.  I decided that we'd just head back to the hotel and the kid could go swimming.  We stopped at Trader Joe's on the way there. I don't have a TJ's nearby so I have to go when I can. My youngest sister lives in the middle of nowhere and said she'd give up her firstborn for an hour at Trader Joe's. I'll be sure to mention this to my nephew when he gets a little older. I'm still on track with my plan to go vegan for a week later this month. Now, as a side note to my vegan friends . ....

Yesterday was the best day ever - I got rid of the sexy surgical shoe. I can't wait to see the medical bills when they start rolling in. I'll bet you that stupid shoe was a thousand dollars or something. I also got my stitches out yesterday, and ditched the bandages, too. They bandages were pretty gross. I stepped squarely in dog pee the other morning, so that was fun. One time I also spilled chocolate syrup on them. I thought the nurse was going to have to call in a  HAZMAT team to dispose of the bandages after they were removed from my foot. My podiatrist said he was really impressed with how well I healed. I felt kind of impressed with myself for a second there, until I remembered that I have no control over that. My foot is still swollen, but not horribly so. It currently looks like so (but less blurry): Here is what my foot looked like five days post-op (I took this shot during a bandage change at the doctor's office). The photo isn't THAT gross, but I...