video vednesday: i'm not there yet, you guys.

fall weather always makes me get nostalgic about starting school. this video always makes me nostalgic about school dances and being besties with my mom.

everything is shiny and brand new!

with this pregnancy, stuff has gone pretty easy.  lots of fatigue and some puking, but nothing like it was with either of my other kids.  it was actually kind of a nice excuse to do nothing but lay on the couch and read gone with the wind.  (maybe i should have spent my time reading something with a little more substance...)

however, 14 weeks was a magical turning point for me.  a crux, if you will.

not only did i ditch the puking and the fatigue (although i still sleep like i'm brain dead), but i gained a HUGE surge of energy.  as in, i have chopped down close to 10 trees in our yard.  literally.  (well, i guess to say 'literally' would mean to admit that i didn't chop them so much as i bow saw-ed them, and to confess that one particularly obese mulberry tree got the chop at the hands of my dear husband.  but the point is, i have the energy to ORDER my husband to cut down said tree.)

(and, yes, if you caught that, i cut down the mulberry tree.  i'm not sorry.  no more ma-ingallsin' it for me.  now i get my berries the old fashioned way - from the store.)

i also decided to paint my living room (although deciding on a color has been more than slightly problematic).  and paint my storm windows.  and direct todd to hang said storm windows.  i also got caught up on laundry, hung some art in my kitchen, cleaned out my cupboards, and pulled out the kids' fall clothes.  dang, i'm like a whirlwind of activity.

i did not vacuum the stairs. even though i probably have had the energy to do it, vacuuming stairs is what they make you do in hell.  oh, also in hell, they tell you that the stairs you have to vacuum will lead to the exit but then there IS NO EXIT and you're all like, whut the crap, and they're all like, get it through your head that this is hell and not a sitcom.  now vacuum the stairs again...and for all eternity.

(todd would also like to insert here that they make you eat mustard while you're vacuuming the stairs.  turns out, people in hell are mean.)

anyway.  back to my stories.

also, i got a haircut.  for the first time since my only-semi-successful freauty school cut.  which means i've been rocking the homecut for the last year.  which, if you know me at all, is kind of my M.O.:  i have the greatest intentions of getting my hair cut on a rigid 12-week schedule and then it's all a year and a half later and TLC is wanting me to come on one of their shows about pathetic losers who never cut their hair.  (if there is one thing TLC is awesome at, it's making you feel sick at the human condition.  and also, giving you a glimpse inside the lives of little people.)  but this time, i broke down and actually drove all the way to madrid (through construction, mind you) and shelled out cash for a professional.  i'm nothing if not determined.

anyway.  all i really want to say is that the second trimester of pregnancy is like prozac and caffeine and also lots of street drugs, all rolled into a magical, mystical time.  and i have to say, i quite like it.

'member that time?

hey, 'member that time in high school when i tried to TP my bff adam's yard?  but i'm sure you remember how i'm hardly known for my iron core biceps and so i was having kind of a hard time getting the toilet paper all the way up in the tree... so after like fifteen minutes he came out and helped me.

then 'member how, as i was driving away, his lame neighbor was already in the yard picking up all the fruits of my labor?


not a brag-worthy attempt at vandalism.  next week i'll tell you how i tried to redeem the night... and my street cred.

i should become a scientist.

a while ago, we had a tree frog sitting on our window. not on our windowsill. our window.

so from the inside, you could see his little frog belly and what i can only assume were his her little frog parts. which i can only assume because i'm not well-versed in frog reproductive health.

so then i'm all, this is weird. that frog is suctioned to glass. vertically. it defies gravity. nay, it defies nature in its entirety.

so i laid it upon myself to figure out the science behind how a tree frog does this. (maybe someone else has attempted to explain it before; i don't know, i didn't check. encyclopedias are for nerds. real smarties use their own brains.) and here is what i came up with:

i think god has to lick all the tree frogs every day to keep them sticky. like when you have to lick a spoon to stick it to your nose. and it really gave me a profound perspective on god, because that kind of job takes a lot of patience and a lot of spit and a lot of tolerance for the taste of raw frog. but that's how much god loves the tree frogs.

marinate on that little nugget for a while.

i suppose three cribs would be too many.

three nights ago, atticus officially moved out of his crib.  granted, it wasn't to a technical 'big boy bed,' considering we haven't had time to go pick out a bed (and the promising garage sale listing for a 'twin-sized jenny lind headboard/footboard' turned out to be a big dull dud of a 'generic 1970's grandma headboard with no footboard').  so we just took the mattress out of his crib and put it on the floor.  whammo, instant tumble-proof alternative to the real thing.

eventually, he will be getting a real bed of his very own.  just to clarify that we won't permanently be keeping him in wartime prison-like sleeping conditions.

the relevance of this story will make sense in a second:  i cut atticus' hair for the first time when he was two months old, and probably didn't keep the clippings.  mostly because it kind of grosses me out to keep chunks of hair around.  (ask me sometime about the flourescent orange ponytail we have in an envelope in our guest room closet - we have more than enough human hair around for my liking.)  i really could care less if my kid keeps their 'baby curls' at the expense of sporting a mullet - mullets weigh heavier than baby curls in my book, and that stuff has got to go.  

in fact, more generally speaking than just in terms of hair, i love it when they start to grow out of the baby stage and start sleeping like a normal person, eating like a normal person, and in general behaving like a really short and sometimes out of control adult (so basically, like danny devito).  maybe chalk it up to the fact that i'm not really a 'baby baby' person, or the fact that i have a soft spot in my heart for the episode of friends where danny devito plays a tiny little stripper.  all i mean to say is that i'm not super sentimental about keeping my kids in that baby stage of life.

but the other night, laying in bed and knowing atticus would never again (under normal human developmental conditions) sleep in a crib...i got teary.  my oldest baby isn't a baby.  he's a kid.  and there's really not a whole lot left tying him to those little baby moments.

and the pragmatist in me (the side of my brain that is much bigger and stronger and probably better-looking under MRI) knows that it's time - he needs to be in a bed, and soon we'll need the crib for the next kiddo.  and purchasing a third crib is just insane, even for the van voorsts.  but that other side of my brain - the side that proudly admits to it not really being christmas without watching love actually and not so proudly admits to having repeatedly imagined a boy at my middle school standing on a lunch table and singing me a backstreet boys ballad - well, that side...

may or may not have crawled onto a tiny crib mattress at midnight and laid next to a tiny kid and cried for fifteen minutes.

video vednesday: do you hear that?

that friends, is the heartbeat of the tiniest van voorst, scheduled to literally burst forth in a blaze of guts and glory on march 3, 2012.  (we are nearly 15 weeks knocked up now!  i told you i'm awesome at keeping secrets.)

you've been forewarned: the van voorsts are about to be five strong and you don't stand a chance. 

thanks, church guy.

i have this tshirt that i have loved for a long time.  what can i say?  it's boatneck, it's gray, it's long enough, it's fitted but not too tight, it's from the gap, i got it for free.  all things add up to one major WIN.

so, i wore it like every day that i actually got dressed.  which was about once a week, so it was always clean.  another win.

then i ran into this guy from church who was all like, 'my wife has that same shirt and she LOVES it!  yeah! she wears it when she really doesn't care what she looks like and just wants to be comfortable.'

why is it that even the best-intentioned conversations with church guys frequently make you feel like a burlap sack full of crap?

this tshirt is now officially my painting shirt.   

'member that time?

hey, 'member that time in second grade i watched the berenstein bears valentine's day movie and learned that S.W.A.K. means 'sealed with a kiss'?  so 'member how i wrote a love note to the boy sitting behind me and wrote S.W.A.K. on the outside and threw it under his desk?  but 'member how he didn't notice it was there, so i was all, hey there's something under your desk, and he was all, who is swaaack?

then 'member how i was all, how dumb are you? s.w.a.k. stands for 'sealed with a kiss,' duh.  also, don't talk to me you have cooties.

he never figured out it was from me, but i'm not sure what i was trying to accomplish with this whole episode.

whoops, there goes another rubber tree plant. i mean, well-intentioned bible read-through plan.

this year, i had high-apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes for reading through my bible from cover to cover.  (minus the table of contents and the maps and that weird part in the front of every bible that explains why they put this version of the bible together in such-and-such a way when you're all, who cares.  also minus the concordance and the index.  skipping these parts made a bible read-through plan seem much more realistic, since there seem to be a lot of pages in my bible that aren't actually the bible and are therefore unnecessary to read.)

in fact, i even got a little cocky and can be pressed to admit that i even casually mentioned that i'd like to finish by september, and once i may or may not have said something about a read-through-the-bible-in-three-months plan.

well, i think i heard somewhere that god humbles the proud and it is now officially september and i am officially halfway done with deuteronomy. for those of you who are new to the bible table of contents, that's the equivalent of being about 15 minutes of the way in to a lord of the rings marathon.

so, because i haven't yet learned my lesson, it crossed my mind to sprint the last leg of this thing and actually accomplish that whole read-it-in-three-months craziness.  but then i realized that a) running analogies should tell me something about the realism of this plan, since i can't run half a city block without sending myself into cardiac arrest and b) i'm sitting here blogging and eating tootsie rolls and it's highly unlikely that that's a recipe for success.  i'm not ruling out the possibility that helen keller and jonas salk spent hours on end eating soft candy and staring into space.  but i'm basically ruling out the possibility that helen keller and jonas salk spent hours on end eating soft candy and staring into space.  or if they did, i'm quite confident they attribute their success to something in addition to that.  something which i currently am not implementing.

so here's my cheery note of the day: it is currently september and i have no hope for the next three months holding anything remotely resembling accomplishment for me.

wherein i tell you about my bathtub.

this is a picture of our bathroom, stolen (the photo, not the room) from the MLS listing site when we first became smitten with our house.  not much has changed since we moved in, other than the fact that all the fancies you see here, such as wall art, a bathmat, and towels, have not been replaced.  so it looks pretty bare.

BUT.  i'm not here to discuss my lack of decorating motivation over the last few months, nor am i here to tell you about this inexplicable primal urge i have to wallpaper the top of this room in something really crazy to make up for all the blah i feel in there right now.

nope.  today is the day i'm here to tell you about our tub.  this is the day the lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.

i had long dreamed of having a clawfoot tub and i literally developed an arrythmia just looking at those listing photos.  then i saw the little beauty in person.  i think this tub was nearly singlehanded in making me fall for this house.  (although it was aided by pretty much every other feature of the house, minus the kind of creepy damp smell the basement gets when it rains and the fact that our newly remodeled shower is unusable unless we want to cause irreparable water damage in the kitchen and encourage mold spores to exercise squatting rights.)

in fact, this gal will turn 100 years old next year - she's original to the house - but you wouldn't know it.  her clawfooted legs are still just as spritely and trim as they were when she was a teen (i'm guessing.  since i was about 3 generations away from even  being a sparkle in my daddy's eye when this little lady was a teenager).  she's the kind of 100-year-old that you can tell was a total hottie in her heyday because she's STILL a total hottie.  there is not a single wrinkle or sag anywhere to be found on this tub (although i'm fairly confident she's had some work done, mainly in her 'plumbing hardware' and 'leg' areas.  plus, i think she may have had an all-over airbrush effect done at some point recently.  oh well.  can't blame a girl for trying to maintain her youth.)

anyway.  want to know the thing i love best about our tub? the way she cradles your head just so when you're taking a bath.  stupid fiberglass tubs have that rim around them that's too low and pointy-edged and flat, and you get out of the tub with a headache if you lay in there for more than five seconds.  but this baby makes you feel like a masseuse is holding your head up for you, minus actually having to invite a masseuse to bathtime.  call me a buzzkill, but bathing with a hands-on audience sounds considerably less relaxing.  so this tub is win-win.

however, i do have to be honest here and say that there have been a few unforeseen drawbacks of having this ancient tub.  one, she's mouthy.  two, she's way hard to clean - i have no idea how this tub was kept clean in the, oh, 93 years between her birth and the advent of the magic eraser.  you look at this tub wrong and it gets a soap ring.  third, that lovely, skinny, rounded edge that is so perfect for cradling your neck is not so practical during toddler bathtime.  there is nowhere to set shampoo.  there is nowhere for the kids to set their toys.  there is no margin of error between 'in the bath' and 'on the floor' when it comes to water pour-age.

do not get the wrong impression.  barring some midlife crisis, i will never trade this tub in for a younger model.  but i have realized that she is like a lot of old ladies:  all sweet and serene on the surface, inviting you over for cookies and a hearty game of scrabble, but then she says something racist and you're all, i'm pretty sure i still like you but i think i should probably go home now.  but she lures you into staying with a handful of werther's and the opportunity to see photos of her husband liberating a concentration camp and you're all, let's be besties and watch law and order all day.

so, if you're still following along, that's where i'm at with my tub. 



also...really craving a werther's.