My sister in law watched Ingrid today, so that Dave and I could go see a screening of his friends’ (award-winning, crazy-great) documentary. While we were gone, SIL, BIL and my niece took Ing out to lunch, and had a great time, but she didn’t really want to go to sleep at naptime. Julie checked on her at one point, and she was talking to her baby doll, and as Julie walked away, she heard this:

“Do you know who they are? Yeah? That Julie and Kristi and Woody. Do you like them? No, I don’t like Julie and Kristi, only Woody. You have to take a nap and close your eyes, and when you wake up you can go see Woody, okay? OKAY!”

DYING. See, Woody is the guy that ALLLLLL the kids love, he’s quiet with adults, but he loves the kids. He gets Happy Meals at McDonald’s and saves the prizes for when they visit, he always lets them play his drums. He is just goofy and fun A lot like Dave, in fact, when I met Dave I asked who his favorite relative was, he said “my brother in law.” Dave doesn’t remember him NOT being around, and has been kind of a father figure to him, and he’s just such a good person. Anyway, it was hysterically cute to hear.

Totally UNrelated, while I was in Florida, I went to a Prescriptives counter at Macy’s, and did the thing where you sit in the chair and they do you up. The clerk was AWESOME, totally got that I am NOT A MAKEUP PERSON, and with Amy there to help me, too, it just worked. I ended up buying some foundation, bronzer and mascara (and tried to buy concealer, but they were out!) which used up a store credit I’ve had since Christmas, and then some, and then we went to Target and I got a cheapie concealer and makeup brush, and some lipstick. All week long, I’ve been wearing the concealer/foundation/bronzer/mascara (oh, and the foundation and bronzer are from the mineral line) and on Friday, one of my coworkers mentioned that I had some ‘glow’ going on all week and I confessed to having worn makeup all week and they were like OMG! GRETCHEN WORE MAKEUP! Yes! I did! And apparently this combo works VERY WELL because I look glowy but not so done that people thought I was wearing makeup. SCORE. Of course, it costs a fortune, but um, oh well. Right? Right.

Also, have I mentioned that Ingrid is potty trained? By the end of the first week of new daycare, she was going occasionally, and by the end of the second week, she was in undies all the time (save for nap/night) and she’s only had a few accidents, most related to not wanting to leave the playground to go in and pee, which I can kind of understand. It’s been a long winter. SO WEIRD.

Seriously, have I mentioned that the new daycare seems to be going really well? She’s been there two weeks. TWO WEEKS, and spent the entire weekend (when awake) in underpants. Two weeks ago, she freaked when presented with a potty, and now she wakes up, takes off her jammies and diaper, gets a stool, hops up in the big toilet (with a family seat installed) and pees. You know, like, no big thing. WILD.

I go to Florida on Wednesday. I am SO excited to see Amy and family, and while weather is secondary, it’s pretty cool that it looks like it will be sunny and in the 80s. NICE.

That is all.

Oh, and I love my iPod Touch and am not sure how I lived without it for this long.

I ordered free samples from Everyday Minerals and plan on trying them out this weekend.

I ended up with two iPods, basically. I ended up sending my cousin a check for the discounted one, and buying one from Amazon. But, my good friend and coworker was totally jazzed after playing with mine, so I’ll sell her the second one when it arrives, and we’re going to basically split the cost so that we both get a deal.

I have had a period for more than a week now, which is SO LAME. I’ve been saying it reminds me of waiting for my first period to arrive, I couldn’t wait for it to come , but when it did, I immediately thought “I was excited for THIS to happen?” That said, as soon as we’re done with building our family, I am sooooo getting a Mirena again, even if Dave gets a vas or something. Mirena forever.

For anyone that’s still reading, has anyone tried mineral makeup? I’m feeling a little flush with cash right now, and considering going to a salon that does lessons and sells stuff. The place I get my hair cut sells Jane Iredale, and another place sells JI and Bare Escentuals. I feel like the mineral stuff, and a lesson from a mineral place, would be less clown-facey than going to the Clinique counter or something. And, let’s be fair, mineral makeup sounds way more my speed (earthy! dirt on my face!) than traditional stuff.

Separate from that, so, my cousin works for Apple and offered to hook me up with an iPod Touch at a nice discount. Only, he hasn’t done it yet, and I realllly want it for my trip to Florida. I’m tempted to just buy one and call it good, but I can also see one showing up from E before he tells me what I owe. I can afford to have two ipods come (and, quite honestly, I can see Dave being into it once he sees mine, and he’s already filled the 8gb nano I got him for our anniversary) and I can even afford to offload one if I need to (I do work on a college campus, afterall) but it feels a little…. weird to flirt with the possibility of being wealthy in iPods Touch. I’ve already pre-sold my current Nano to a friend (and Dave has a Shuffle that I can co-opt for gym use (which, egads, I need to get back to) and I don’t want to email E and be like “never mind,” because I think he’d actually be a little offended. (Hard to explain.)

Sooo, what should I do? I leave for FL on 4/1, and I have an Amazon Prime membership, so I can get it fairly quickly.

It’s just, I WANT IT NOW! I’m not an impulse shopper, really, I tend to research, obsess, decide and then NOT buy something, but after going to my conference where EVERYONE had an iPhone or a touch, and seeing what’s coming in June, and having a good chunk in savings now as WELL as a new stream of money from the paid blogger project, I WANT NOW.

What would you do? What should *I* do?

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?