Remember when I wondered if it was possible to change from a non-morning person into a morning person? Scientists have decided that no, it is not. Apparently there is a morning person gene. I do not have it. Pass me a mug of something warm and caffeinated.

Remember when I said I would try to read more books? After years of bloviating about how I thought e-readers were evil, how they were a terrible invention that was going to ruin books for everyone, and how I would rather die than own one (on account of their terribleness and lack of yummy book smell and inability to be displayed pretentiously around the house) I ended up getting one for Christmas, because my brother decided I was wrong. Turns out he was right! About me being wrong, that is. I kind of love my Kindle, not least of all because it makes it very easy to purchase books (I pretty much just have to think of it, and there it is on my screen). I spent most of January reading the Hunger Games trilogy during every spare moment, desperate each day for just 5 more minutes of nap time so I could read a couple more pages. I also spent most of January constantly feeling cold and slightly creeped out, and having terrible nightmares from which I awoke in a cold sweat on the regular. I’m pretty sure both of those things are related. (I also had a dream about Super Grover, though, so there’s really no way to tell exactly WHAT my subconscious is thinking at any given time. And one of those ones where it’s the day before an exam and you realize all of a sudden you completely forgot to go to class all semester. I have that dream at least once a month, and it is always, ALWAYS a science exam. Why science? I would have thought that any panicked dreams about university exams would be about math, although I guess my subconscious knows that the idea of me taking university-level math courses is laughable to the point of being too ridiculous even for a dream.) So: good books. Highly recommended, provided you are not as suggestible as I am.

Remember when I said I put hydrogen peroxide in my eye? It is possible that if you read that and were unfamiliar with contact lenses, and therefore unfamiliar with the fact that there are in fact lens cleaning solutions that you CAN put in your eye (indirectly, after rinsing your lens — you don’t squirt it directly into your eye), you might have come to the conclusion that I was an idiot, because why on earth I would put any cleaning solution in my eye, much less one made with hydrogen peroxide, maybe I have bad dreams about science exams because I should be more careful with hazardous chemicals, etc. I think for a while there my father-in-law ( PhD and retired chemist) was questioning his son’s choice of life partner, and I can certainly understand why, given the lack of context in that blog post. You’ll have to forgive me, I could barely see to type.

Remember when I sent mail to Kuwait? It still has not arrived. *sad trombone*

APPARENTLY you shouldn’t put hydrogen peroxide directly into your eye. So, you know, FYI. Because they don’t put that on the box. 

Speaking of pain, I decided for a variety of reasons (the gym being 25 minutes away, Ellie having a terrible cold for most of January, the lines at the gym, the other things I’d rather spend my time doing) to figure out a way to work out at home on occasion. I picked up a used copy of the notoriously difficult 30 Day Shred. It is only 25 minutes, so that gives me enough time to do the workout, lay on the floor for a while praying not to die, and crawl to the shower before Ellie wakes up from her nap. I did it for the first time on Friday and it was difficult, but not impossible. I felt smug and triumphant. I would be shredded! In as few as 30 days! I wasn’t sure if that was something I wanted, but the DVD case promised it, so I figured it couldn’t be as unpleasant as it sounded, and lo I decided I would give this delightful little non-impossible workout a try.

The impossible part was getting out of bed the next morning. I had expected my arms to be really sore — they’re typically the weakest part of my body — but I guess I had forgotten that I lug around a 15-pound baby in one arm all day long, so a 2-pound hand weight wasn’t going to do much damage. The problem was my quads, which screamed in pain with every step, especially steps that were up or down in direction. I had a raging case of the DOMS, which apparently only gets worse if you sit, and also is worse if you walk or lay down or try to play with a baby or make dinner or ask someone to please get you a diet coke while they’re up. It was so much more painful the day after, but it was quite a bit better this morning, so I did what any sane person would do, and I did it again.

In conclusion: everything hurts. Please send cookies and an eyepatch.

Anyway, I made some New Years Resolutions, because I love making lists and also throwing myself headlong into projects I will eventually abandon. They are as follows:

• Read more books. I’m ashamed to say that in 2011 I only read 5 books that weren’t about babies. If we add in the baby books, we’re still probably only looking at about 8 or 9. I … don’t even know why. Please don’t tell anyone, or they may come revoke my English degree. Actually, feel free to spread it around, because they give English degrees out like samples at Costco so I can probably get another one if I’m willing to brave the post-Christmas crowds.
• Put some change into the little change-collecting boxes at cash registers. You know the ones so kids can go to camp or diabetes can be cured? Those ones. Every time. This might prove to be a bit of a challenge, because I don’t often carry cash with me, and when I do I tend to spend it on iced coffee.
• Wear more hats.
• Submit to being photographed more often, and then try not to make a big fuss when I don’t like the photo. (Related: learn to accept the fact that I have a double chin. I am an Anderson; it is pretty much an inevitability. In fact, Ellie is already working on hers. She is apparently a Butler in name only.)
• You know when someone on the internet makes a deliberately vague reference to something that you know is going to be unsettling/gross/spidery and there’s a link and you click that link even though you know you shouldn’t click it and then you wonder why you clicked it? I’m going to stop clicking those links.
• If I have time left over, I’m also going to try to make some more madly misshapen curtains with my sewing machine. And say thank you more often and to more people, because people like to be thanked. At least, I do, so I assume it’s pretty universal.

Anyway, thanks for hanging out here last year. My site stats say I have many more readers than I can account for simply by listing my family and close personal friends. They’re required by law to read whatever I post here, but you’re not, and even though I don’t have any idea who you are, I think you’re pretty awesome.

So. You know. January and February are not my favourite time of year to work out (just to be clear, this is due entirely to a character flaw of my own, not because I think these new members shouldn’t BE at the gym, because I’m quite happy they’re there and I wish them all the success in the world with their resolutions, and I enthusiastically cheer them on in theory if not in practice) and in previous years the situation has become dire enough that I was convinced on almost three separate occasions to go to the gym at 6 a.m., and you know who is at the gym at 6 a.m.? NO ONE. Well, no one except me, and some crazy people, and my gym buddy, who was kind enough to keep up a steady stream of chatter while not expecting me to add anything more to the conversation than an occasional confused nod or pitiful moan, because it was still dark out and I was running on a treadmill, so I could barely keep from dying and any leftover brain capacity was devoted to seriously questioning my own sanity.

However, we were telling some stories over Christmas about the wacky things we’ve seen at the gym (as you do) (mine featured a lady who was KNITTING on a recumbent bike) and someone I know (identifying details removed to protect the clumsy) shared that they were once on a treadmill in a public place and were so focused on an exciting/tense moment in the t.v. show they were watching that they FELL COMPLETELY OFF THE TREADMILL. Now, I have done some basic calculations and realized that the more people there are at the gym at any given time, the more likely I am to witness something like that, and that would be pretty cool. (Not cool enough to get there at 6 a.m., let’s not kid ourselves here, but possibly cool enough to brave the crowds at noon.)

1. exact calculations of how many cookies a person can eat before they immediately gain 5 pounds, and subsequent discussions of how this compares to how many cookies someone ELSE can eat before they immediately gain 5 pounds, and smug/self-deprecating proclamations of being “blessed” with a fast metabolism or “cursed” with an insatiable sweet tooth
2. descriptions of what someone ELSE ate, in a judgemental tone, because come on, it was just one hockey game, not every meal they prepared and sat down to for the past six years
3. advertisements suggesting with a straight face that you should eat bland, air-filled cereal for 66% of your daily meals, as though that will help you solve the life-long problems caused by 1) and 2)

I also spent a lot of time in the first few months of Ellie’s life sitting, trapped under an eating baby or a baby who refused to nap in her crib (I’m referring to one baby here, not two separate babies, and that baby is Ellie, just in case you’re easily confused) and the posts got even more sad/comical as the April babies were born, when the formerly pregnant ladies were positively SHOCKED that their useless husbands were still useless, and their friends seemed to have abandoned them (probably due in part to the attitudes reflected in the angel tear bib scenario above), and they were very lonely and/or overwhelmed and kind of disappeared into their babies. One thing I noticed over and over again was that a lot of these women needed very badly to believe that their specific baby was a Very Special and Advanced sort of baby, and this led to posts about how this baby said his first word at the age of 3 months, and that baby was crawling at 4 months, and some other baby solved Fermat’s Last Theorem at just 6 weeks. There was a constant flow of posts attributing preferences and personality traits to these babies that babies just don’t have (mostly because they are babies) but none was quite so entertaining as the post one woman wrote in which she said, “I know my little one is only 3 months old, but I’ve started planning her first birthday party. She really likes birds and the colour red, so I’m thinking I’m going to do sugar cookies in the shape of sparrows and cover them in red icing. Do you think it’s safe to go ahead with these plans, or will her likes/dislikes change a lot in the next 9 months?”

I just … I can’t even. Ellie is almost 8 months old at this point, and I probably can’t list 5 things that I am certain she likes. Okay, I’ll try: mango kiwi applesauce, yanking on my wet hair when we’re at the pool, the cats, hopping around in her jolly jumper, and requiring an urgent change of clothing when we’re running late for an outing or appointment. (Sadly, none of these items would make a really good theme for a first birthday party, so I think the theme of her party will be Come Admire Our Cute One-Year-Old Baby.) Anyway, I can kind of see how people would get confused about the whole First Word Situation, because babies start making sounds that bear a close resemblance to words we WANT them to say, like when they start saying “mummm-mummm-mummm” or “da-da-da-da-da” and we hope they’re addressing us personally and expressing gratitude for all of the time and energy we’ve invested in their care thus far, but they are just SOUNDS at that point, and telling people your baby is talking at 4 months old just makes you look kind of silly. HOWEVER, I do have to tell you that yesterday when I handed Ellie a Farley’s Biscuit, she looked at it in her hand and looked back at me and said, very loudly and clear as day, “YUM.” It was distinct enough that Mike and I turned to each other and said, “Did she just say … ?” and “Why yes, I think she did!” I assume this was just a (hilarious) coincidence, but if not, the girl sure takes after her mother. If she’s this wowed by bland rice cereal in cookie form, wait until she gets her tiny hands on an OREO.*

* I do not plan to give the baby an Oreo. Just in case you thought I had lost my mind. Also, if I had Oreos, I certainly wouldn’t be SHARING them with a BABY.

I would say I’m just making conversation or “asking for a friend” but nobody who knows me would believe that, because if you look up “morning person” in the dictionary, the definition would use words I find obnoxiously cheerful/enthusiastic, and the antonym section would just be a picture of me, bleary-eyed and still wearing my penguin pajamas at 10:00 in the morning. Having a baby has somehow cured my insomnia, and I feel so much better in general than I ever have before, but even after 8 hours of sleep, I think I could only bound out of bed if our house was on fire, and only after glancing around quickly to see how long I have before things get really DIRE, because maybe I could snooze for 5 more minutes if I leave the photo albums behind.

Ellie used to sleep until sometime in the 7:00 hour (I know, I KNOW, best baby sleeper ever! believe me, I know) and after the recent time change she started getting up sometime in the 6:00 hour, and then this week she has gotten up in the 5:00 hour, and while I eventually feel okay — and even good, and alert, and capable of operating heavy machinery — my first thought upon hearing the initial peeps from the other room is always “Urrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhh …” And I’ve started drinking coffee in the morning. Honest-to-goodness COFFEE.

If there are any morning persons out there, please report in. Or any groggy persons who have managed to a) come to terms with their lot in life or b) somehow change their assigned personality type: you can report in too. It’s been 30 years of this, and it’s not like it’s a character flaw, and the coffee actually tastes pretty good, so there’s probably no point in trying to remedy this situation, right?

However. I did not think this through, because I finally made it to the courier place yesterday, and they can expect to receive their package in 3-4 months, because when the courier person told me how much it would cost to send the box to Kuwait, I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants. (There is no Fedex here and both Purolator and UPS were going to be over $220. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?!) So it’s travelling via the much-much-cheaper-but-still-surprisingly-expensive Canada Post regular parcel mail and will apparently be there sometime in the next 3 months. Probably. If it doesn’t arrive before they come home in the summer, I will … I don’t even know. Probably check myself into a sanitarium somewhere. Because SERIOUSLY, CANADIAN POSTAL SYSTEM. I could probably purchase a carrier pigeon, pay to have it professionally trained, procure insurance on its life, have it fly the package to Kuwait, and buy a diamond-studded pigeon Rolex as a welcome home present to be hand-delivered by a B-list celebrity upon the pigeon’s safe return to Canada for less than it would cost to courier a small box to the Middle East.

Also the woman at the UPS counter had never heard of Kuwait. She spent quite a while trying to tell me you can’t send packages to Kuwait, because it didn’t exist. The closest she could find was Qatar (which she pronounced “Kwa-tar”) and I just about died there in the store while I waited because it is a SAD STATE OF AFFAIRS when *I* am judging you for your lack of geographical knowledge. (This is embarrassing to admit, and I only confess it to further prove my point: up until very recently I thought China was a tiny little country. I also once sarcastically referred to it being located near Russia. Pro tip: it really is near Russia.)

Anyway.

It is snowing today, enough that some has actually accumulated on the ground, and while I accept the inevitability of this scenario (winter is like death and taxes in its persistence and also its unpleasantness), I still heartily disapprove.

Moving Day is rapidly approaching, and packing is going … hmmm, I wouldn’t exactly say it’s going “well” but I can say we’ve only had one day that involved any yelling or threats of throwing out someone’s beloved items under the cover of night (sample conversation: “I’m going to FILE FOR DIVORCE!” “FINE, then at least I’ll be able to PACK IN PEACE!”) so I guess we’re doing better than I thought we would. Packing is a challenge for a couple whose members come down firmly on either side of the Keep It/Throw It Out debate, and while I will keep the answer to who is who on the down-low so as not to embarrass anyone, I will say that we would probably have nothing to actually move into the new house if I was solely in charge of this whole packing palaver, and one of us would eventually end up in a tragic news story about having been killed by a falling tower of instruction manuals if Mike was in charge. I assume there is some kind of happy medium between the two extremes, but we sadly have not found it.

I don’t really know how to end this blog post except to tell you that I have received four cat photos while typing this, two of which were orange kittens, so I consider this blog post a raging success in every way possible.

Did you notice above where I said the baby is napping? Did you notice how I said it all casually, as though it’s not the biggest deal ever because it means I can stop feeling a little bit crazier every single day? All it took was doing something simple I could have easily done months ago when her nap aversion started and could therefore avoided this whole situation, but let’s not think about that.

The napping has put me in such a good mood the past few days that I have started listening to Christmas music a few weeks ahead of schedule. And it snowed for the first time this morning (Ellie was asleep in the car when it happened, so she missed it, but that is okay because it will happen MANY MORE TIMES between now and April) so all in all I am feeling extremely festive.