Posting here, from the lake, where my (food-hoarding) mother insisted the cheese was still good, since she’d just brought it back from Aspen. As in, Colorado. As in, Yes, she checked deli cheese. Sigh.

So, daycare drama persists, and I think I’m going to give notice on Monday. We toured another facility on Friday, separate from her current place and not the dream preschool that, honestly, I haven’t yet given up hope for. But dream preschool needs her to be potty trained, and she’s staring down the barrel of 3, and when she turns 3 at the current place, she goes to the preschool room with a 1:10 ratio (with 20 kids), and I just don’t think she’s thriving in her current 1:7 (with 21 kids) ratio room.

This third option is still crazy close to our house, a center, but smaller, older, and shabbier looking. Our current center is kind of knockout beautiful and not typical for daycare centers around here, but I think that a smaller facility with crappier chairs will be better than leather couch lobbies and too many kids, right?

New place has an infant room for 0-1, with 7 babies, Wobblers are 1-2.5, with 8 currently, and then preschool is 3.5-4.5, with 10 kids. Each room has two teachers, and there’s one or two floats, and while it is sort of weird to see such a SMALL place for a daycare, it’s, again, probably because I’m so used to having such a spacious place now. I mean, I’m not in love with this third option like I am the Dream Preschool, but I’m also not in love with where she is now. On our visit, Ing warmed up quickly, took off her coat and wanted to stay, and the teachers seemed warm, and all have, or or working on, education degrees. And if I’m not going to be make-out in love with a daycare center, a smaller teacher child ratio and lower price (to the tune of $100 less a month) is a good reason to switch, right? I think if Ingrid had been twitchy about it, I’d be less inclined, but she seemed okay with it, and has talked about it since leaving there. And as my best friend reminded me, kids are resilient, right? Lots of kids have had more changes in their childcare by age 3 than one switch, right?

I think it’s time to try something new, but I’m still angsty about it. Reassurances?

You know how, oh, once a year I get all hand-wringy about the road not taken by finishing a writing degree, how I used to Write, blahdee blah blah?

Well, I actually have a paid writing gig now. PAID. And granted, it’s not a fortune, but it’s something. I’m blogging for an instructional technology blog, and I have a weekly deadline, and I get $25 per post. It’s not a spammy weird reviews-for-cash site, but a full on professional, affiliated with a major university (not in Maine) tech and teaching blog. (I’m not going to link here, but if you follow me at twitter, you know where it is.)

And today, I got an email from my editor(?) saying that they liked the last piece I submitted enough to make it a feature, for which I’ll get paid $75. Seriously! For writing about stuff I LOVE, I am getting money. WILD.

So, while the great american novel/memoir/children’s book hasn’t been published with my name as author, I am technically now a Paid Writer, right? That’s pretty cool.

Man, what a conundrum. So, apparently, Ing is still not really talking at daycare. She'll talk to her teachers one on one, but doesn't really talk to the kids, and her teacher is in agreement with me that it's a fuckton of kids for one room, but she doesn't have the authority to change that, of course. I've talked to the director about it, too, but you know, it's not going to change at that level either. Ing's teacher thinks that part of it is that she's "smarter than the rest" and "bored," but still, while 21 kids with 3 teachers is within the state ratios (if at the max) that is A LOT OF KIDS. (Even the teachers are frustrated by it, as well.)

Of course I want to send her to the Awesomest Preschool ever, but she needs to be potty trained, and that isn't happening except as 1 step forward, 2 steps back, and I don't want to make it An ISSUE. Regardless, they don't have an opening, and probably won't until June. I'm feeling more and more just… dejected … about where she is now. She's safe, but… she's not talking to kids. I showed the teacher some cell phone video of her at the table (singing ANNIE SONG! at the top of her lungs) and the teacher was like "You are kidding me. I've never seen that."  So, now I'm conflicted. There's current preschool, where, well, she's safe, and it's familiar, but I think she is overwhelmed by it, and it's really fucking sad to think my kid doesn't talk to other kids, even ones she's known for 2 years, now.  There's dream preschool, where she has to be potty-trained and they have to have an opening, neither of which has happened. In between, there is this other daycare center.

It's near our house, no farther away than the dream preschool, and only .4 mile farther than our current daycare (which is .9 miles away. Yeah, I know. Tiny commute= awesome.) I think that they would have an opening for her sooner than dream preschool, because they don't require potty training. They are smaller, as well, but I am not sure of the ratios, exactly, and obviously that matters, but a big pro is that they take babies, and have just 8 in the room at a time. (That's how our current center started, but now they have an 8 baby room, and a 12 baby room, and 12 is WAY too fucking many, ratios be damned.) I've heard good things about it, but then, who IS going to say "oh, stay away from my daycare, it sucks!" I'm going to call and schedule a tour, I think, just to check it out. But the likelihood is that they would have an opening before Dream Preschool, and that's where I get conflicted. Do I put my eggs in the basket of hoping for potty training and an opening at Dream place, or just go with a (hopefully) smaller situation? I just don't know.

So, we are in the midst of refinancing our mortgage, to take advantage of HISTORICAL LOW RATES on account of…. dun dun DUUUUN, THE ECONOMY. It’s weird to be in the position that we can refi and get the low rate and have a mortgage guy be like “you guys are doing AWESOME” when it was so not that long ago that I was CCCSing my way out of a big hole. We were initially going for a 15 or 20 year, but the rate for a 30 was the same for a brief window of time yesterday (4.75!) so we did that, and are now planning our next move, financially.

Our payment goes down by $150. Our long term plan is to pay off the house much faster than 30 years, it always has been, but by lowering our payment/interest/dropping PMI, we are now considering what to do with this ‘found’ $150. There are three options/considerations:

#1: In case you hadn’t HEARD, we want a second child, and the biggest obstacle to that is the cost of daycare. Socking away that $150 in some far off savings account would soften the blow of our best-case scenario timing wise, of double daycare for a year.

#2: tacking that 150 onto my student loan payment, which is at 6%, and about a 19k balance.

#3: Just adding it to the mortgage payment as extra principal.

Also, we’ll have some escrow returned, plus our tax return, etc, and thinking about what to do with that money is also burning up brain cells:

#1: Finish off the window project. That would be about $1300. #2: Replace the fridge (18 years old, and an energy hog, I’m sure, but still technically running) anywhere from 600-1200 (I really like the LG french door fridge — we are restricted to a 30″ wide one) but definitely want a bottom freezer, which are more than top freezers. #3: drop it into a CD as a daycare stash for hypothetical kid #2. #4: Throw it at the student loan

SIGH. Any opinions?

You know you're a mother when you have to fish out the booger that your kid tried to eat, but got stuck between her teeth like corn on the cob, and is making her insane.  You especially know you're a mother when you're more thankful for the kid than grossed out by the booger.

I really wanted to do a new year's card this year, but damn, they get expensive! But then I thought, wait, last year I did a 5×7 photo card, and I liked it for the size and all, but… it was just a 5×7 photo that looked like a card, really….

So, instead, I took one of our family portraits, uploaded to flickr, opened it in picnik, and designed the card using their borders and text options, and saved it back to flickr, where I'm going to order only as many as I need, for 59 cents a piece, as opposed to $1+ per card, and then only available in batches of 25. WORD UP.

I'm picking up a 'proof' tomorrow at Target, just to make sure it looks okay, and then I'll order the rest tomorrow.

Just thought I'd pass that tip along….

(Oh, and flickr friends, that "holiday card" you see is not our actual holiday card. I did that to freak out my mom. :))

Snow on Vimeo
Originally uploaded by gretchen04401

Poor Ingrid had a fever of 103.8 by 4:30 last night, and Daddy is gone allll day today, before she woke, and won’t be home itl long after she’s asleep. Despite that, she thought he made the snow.

(also, kind of testing something here….)

On dialup at my parents house. Please, Obama, get that broadband access to rural areas ASAP, thanks!

I didn't post anyplace else today, so here I am!

Here's my vent: holidays. The unconfirmed but probable schedule for holidays this year is that we have Thanksgiving and the day after (that IS confirmed), Christmas and the day after, and NY and the day after off this year. All good, except we'll have to work Christmas Eve, and my boss is very, very, Company First, and has already told us we are not allowed to take a vacation day because we will be SO BUSY at that time.

And, we won't be. Moving stuff online means we won't be, and even if it weren't online, NO ONE ELSE will be around that day, almost guaranteed. It's up to the offices at that point, and most are just going to close but waaah, employees will need to take a vacation day, but we are Not Allowed to use vacation for that day. It sucks. I'm doing a little sleuthing and am going to pitch that our front desk person (who started this summer, was married in July, and has a million family obligations AND is very devout in her Christianity) be able to take the day off, and that I can do a half day or work from home or something. The main thing that I would be doing is helping faculty navigate online grading, which I can do over the phone, and WOULD be doing over the phone, because NO ONE will be around that day. I KNOW this.

But, my boss will probably say no, because she doesn't even like that I take a lunch (no lie) and don't just eat cold spaghettios at my desk like she does every day. Again, not a lie. Even our student workers were shocked that we'd be working that day, and that none of them even expect to see ANY grades until after Christmas, let alone be able to see ALL of them. Anyway. Whine whine whine. Bedtime!

3 years of Ingrid & Chucky
Originally uploaded by gretchen04401

It’s NaBloPoMo Month! Which I plan on doing again, only because I have um, kind of a ridiculous number of blogs now — uhh, this one, ingrids @ vox, moblog @ LJ, Local Baby one, and now, one at my own domain name (myname.com), um, yeah. That’s a lot. So I’m going to try to post once a day at one of those five blogs. (If you want the addy to any that you don’t have, let me know.)

Halloween was awesome — Ing went trick or treating for the first time, and dave had to miss it because of work BOOO, but, never again. We’ve agreed that 10/31 is way too important for us — as a couple, and as a family — to be apart for the sake of OT. OT is great, for sure, but not worth missing such a big holiday if we don’t have to.

Ingrid was a peacock, and my parents came up to help man the house and trick or treating, and it went great. My mom and I did the block with Ingrid, and met some neighbors we hadn’t yet, so that was cool. We (I, since I’m the neighbor) also wink, wink’ed with the neighbors with Obama signs, so that was nice. Ing kept her costume on until the last minute, greeting trick or treaters in it up til the end.

Today, my parents took us all out to breakfast, and we got a late start, so Ing missed swim, but oh well. Dave went to work at 10:25, straight from breakfast (before the rest of us had finished even, but he had to go) and he’ll be back tonight by 11. BIG OT weekend, on top of last week’s big OT, so it will be a really sweet paycheck on Friday. Anyway. After breakfast, Ing took a nap, and after that we went out for her to get a haircut. Then, we went to Target, where her cousin (who is 22) called because she was in town and wanted to see her. We spent quite a while at their house, and then went and got lobster at the grocery store. Maine’s lobster industry is struggling right now, so there’s a big push to buy it, and man, I’ll take one for the team. Okay, so technically, I took two for the team. But they were softshell, so not very meaty.

Ing is in bed now, and I’ve set up the woodstove with the fire screen and a bunch of candles (some that allegedly smell like a fireplace, but I’m not so sure) and I’ve got a glass of wine. And the Roku playing Airline. I love that show. Just wish Dave were here….