MWNews 25

I am going to try to follow everything Maeghan says or does tonight. She appears to be in rare form and I thought I might give you a blow by blow as she struts around the house. I'll be cooking, eating and cleaning up after dinner at the same time, but as far as you can tell, it will be one long typing.

To start off, she was playing something and then said one of her favorite things. She says this when the game she is playing with herself doesn't go right. She says 'Ohhhh Man', then huffs in frustration and says she will have to do it again. This is all said out loud to herself but we can hear it all the same. She was doing that tonight and both Juanita and I repeated after her 'Ohhh Man'. She didn't like that. If you say something or repeat something she says after she says it, she will tell you, 'No, I say that' so that you are not allowed to say it anymore. I just keep repeating it after her and she gets upset with Daddy and comes and waves her finger at me and says, 'No, I say that'. Sometimes, if she is being generous, she will give you something else to say, like telling you 'You say No', or 'You say what is that', or whatever is appropriate for the situation and you are expected to say your line after she says hers.

Its kind of complicated and you really have to be here to have her tell you what you are supposed to do, but we all think it is really funny and just laugh at her.

She has finished doing whatever it was she was doing. I was in the kitchen and she walked around the corner and when she saw me, she covered her eyes and said she is not doing that anymore and walked on by me. I have no idea what she was referring to but apparently I wasn't supposed to see her doing it, that is why she covered her own eyes, so I couldn't see her.

She just came into the kitchen and chased her balloon thru. She apparently missed it a couple of times as I heard her say 'Oh no' a couple of times. She came back in with some big lego type blocks and said 'Happy blocky' but I am not really sure that's what she said as when I repeated it to her, she said 'No, Happy clocky' or 'Happy docky' or something like that. I never figured out what she was really saying.

She is now hunched over behind me walking kind of hunched over. I turned around and laughed at her and she stood up and said 'what's so funny'. I laughed more and she said 'why are you laughing'. I didn't answer her except to ask her what are you doing and she told me she was singing.

She is now going to the toilley (toilet). She is potty trained now but she doesn't like using her own toilet, she likes to sit on the big one. She can't get up on it by herself, so someone has to take her in and sit her on it and then take her off when she is finished. Michael took her in this time. Whenever I take her, we have to sing a song while we are in the bathroom. Usually Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Either that, or she says let's do Spider. That is the Incy Wincy Spider song. She likes to alternate between the two most of the time.

She is upset now because she wanted to go outside but it is getting dark. It is also getting cold and it is really windy here today, and yesterday. She was scared of the wind last night and I had to sit with her while she watched TV and ate her dinner. I always let her eat in the living room but she wants to eat at her table in the rumpus room most of the time and since we are usually in the other room, she sits at her table and watches TV until she is finished eating. Michael is usually in there with her, but last night, Michael was at his sisters, so I had to sit in there while the wind was blowing.

I have to go cook corn on the cob now or it won't be ready in time for the chicken.

Ok, I am back. I burned myself getting the chicken out of the oven. Its ready, but the corn isn't. The chicken needed to cool off anyway and I like my corn barely cooked, so it works out well.

Maeghan is playing in her playhouse. She is banging on it and saying its too noisy. She says mommy is working and the noise it too loud, but she keeps banging on it. Mommy is actually sitting in the living room playing games on her laptop. She sees me working on my laptop and knows I am working so she thinks mommy is doing the same thing. It works out well because she knows not to disturb me when I am working and now she is leaving mommy alone so she can work too.

Since you so interested in what we are having for dinner, we are having chicken legs, baked, baked cauliflower in cheese sauce, and corn on the cob. Of course, I make my own cheese sauce, not because I prefer doing it that way but because you cannot get canned cheese soup or velvetta or anything like what we would normally use to make cheese sauce. Of couch, you are wondering how we make queso dip if we do not have canned cheese soup or velvetta. That really isn't a problem over here because even if I could find those ingredients, we don't have Rotel. Yes, it is truly a barren land I live in. I didn't think it was possible to cook without Rotel, and come to think of it, it isn't possible, but we have to eat something

Oh, in case you haven't realized it, Juanita is out of the hospital. She got out on Friday. They think they have settled on a dosage for her insulin injections. She does it four times a day. Once at each meal with ten units and then an overnight injection of 32 units. I have no idea what a unit is but she just dials it into the needle contraption she has and injects it into her stomach. We still have no idea if this is something permanent or just during the pregnancy but we won't find that out until after she has the baby. For now, she is doing ok, but sometimes around injection time, she starts to get the shakes and has what they call a Hypo. It is short for something but I don't know what. It happened today while I was waiting for them to make her subway sandwich at the mall. It took about 15 minutes as they kept having a problem where all the servers would take turns burning each other with the hot plate. I don't know if they have it over there or not, but over here, Subway now serves toasted sandwiches. To me, that seemed like a natural thing to do and they should have been doing it all along but it is relatively new here and everyone wants there sandwich that way, even if it done not make sense to do so.

I had to run away for a second and put the last layer of cheese on top of the cauliflower. Dinner should be ready any minute now. Maeghan is standing beside me taking her dolly's dresses apart. We bought her new little dolly at the cheap shop over here. I think they have dollar shops over there. It is the same thing here and normally we let her buy something if she has money. She had two dollars today and she picked out this new little doll which has a lot of little dresses with it. She had them on little hangers hung from the desk drawer handle. I don't think you are supposed to take them off the hangers but she has now done so and will probably want me to put them back on.

Well, it is dinner time now. I will return as soon as we finish eating.

The cauliflower has to sit a minute to let the sauce thicken. Maeghan already has hers. She loves corn on the cob, by the way. Last night, she even wanted corn off the cob. We had sausages and gravy, with corn and potatoes. She ate the corn for the first time and that was all she wanted. Normally, she loves sausages and will eat them all the time, but once she tasted the corn, she didn't want anything else. I had to cook some more corn so she could have some as my original serving to her was totally inadequate. She ate a normal size serving and even had some multi-grain bread to go with it. She normally won't eat regular white bread but for some reason she likes multi-grain and wholemeal (wheat) bread. There are these rolls we get from an expensive bakery, I say expensive bakery as it is a bakery that is in all the malls and most of their bread and other things are over priced, because if you go to other regular bakers, you can get the same thing for a lot less. Ask momma as she bought these things called flat rolls at the bakery near where we lived. They cost about three dollars a dozen at this place. At the bakery in the mall, they cost 90 cents each. A big jump in price.

Anyway, we buy these rolls called cape-seed rolls at the expensive bakery. You can get them other places but they are not as good and are not really the same. Other bakers take their normal whole meal rolls and roll them in seeds to make them into cape seed rolls. At Baker's Delight, they somehow get the seeds cooked into the rolls and this makes them much better.

I bring all this up to say that Maeghan just loves these rolls. She can eat a whole one by herself, and they are not small rolls. She had one today after lunch, at which she ate four chicken nuggets and some chippies (french fries). She has been eating a lot lately. Not a lot at each meal, but she is eating all the time. Mostly junk food like lollies, and potato chips and biscuits (cookies). We have to start watching her now and giving her things that are healthy instead of letting her eat anything and everything she wants like before when she was hardly eating anything. Maybe she will be branching out to more kinds of food. She always asks what we are eating but where she used to say yuck and not eat it, she now sometime will try it before she says yuck and gives it back to you.

Did I mention that we are eating now. I have typed the last few paragraphs with chicken grease on my fingers. The cheese sauce never thickened. I think it is because we are using low-fat milk in it. We have to use low-fat now as that is what they told Juanita to eat instead of normal milk. I don't drink milk and avoid it most of the time but this stuff looks like colored water. It is really thin and I don't think you are supposed to cook with it. And, I think when I add butter to it to make my sauce, that probably defeats the purpose of having low-fat milk. But I refuse to use margarine instead so maybe using this stuff will derive some benefit but I do have to draw the line somewhere.

I will probably have to go now, which means I will only type about two more pages. Maeghan has asked for another piece of corn. I anticipated this and did not take mine, so she is eating it now. It means I will have to have a sandwich or something as I apparently did not make enough corn or cauliflower and I only had four little chicken legs for myself. Michael has already asked for more but there isn't any. He will have to add something else to this meal also. I should have known the cauliflower was not enough as all of us like cauliflower but I cooked half a head and normally that is plenty. I did cook 15 chicken legs thinking this would be enough to have as snacks during the week but they are really small, so I think they are all gone now.

Maeghan ate her two pieces of corn and most of her two pieces of chicken. She wants her bracelet now. These are candy bracelets and she can see them sitting on the counter. She wanted one earlier but we said not until after dinner. Most of the time, she forgets or is full by then. Tonight, as soon as she finished her dinner, she asked if she can have her bracelet now. So she is wearing it and eating a lolly off of it every few minutes.

As you can tell, we are through eating dinner now. Michael is in watching the TV and Juanita is still playing her game on her computer. Maeghan is taking all her toys out and playing with them and I am sitting her typing on this computer. I can type these pages from any computer and post them but I am doing this one from my home PC. I have my work laptop sitting beside me but it is not turned on, something I have learned to do since almost everytime I have it turned on lately, someone, somewhere, wants to ask me a question.

Last night, I was just going to bed and someone sent me an irate message from the US saying that something I had told them I had fixed earlier in the week was not working. It was something they had been complaining about for some time and I had kept putting them off and asking for more information from them before I put in the change. This week, I decided I would fix their problem even though they had still not supplied me with the correct information. Yesterday, they said it was not working and I would have to fix it. By the way, this guy is in Fort Worth and is a real pain in the ass. We make fun of him all the time as he sends out these weekly status reports that are a minute by minute report of what he did during the week. Things like 'took a break for 15 minutes and smoked a cigarette' or 'answered three emails today that took 17 minutes to complete'. It is really funny stuff sometimes but as you can tell, he is a real stickler for the absolute details of what you are doing.

Anyway, he sent me a note, saying my stuff wasn't working. I spent an hour trying to convince him that he was on the wrong system and if he would look at the right system, he would see that it was not time for the new stuff to run and it was not a problem. He ended up calling about 5 other people and getting them to confirm that what I was saying was true and then I had to wait another hour until the real time this stuff was supposed to run to show that it was actually working.

Now that I have typed all that, I have no idea why I am telling everyone this. I think it started out as a reason I don't have my work computer turned on, but I have no idea why anyone would care about that.

Maeghan has just come up and said would you please take me to bed. I have realized that most of this has had nothing to do with what it started out to be, which was a chronicle of what Maeghan was saying and doing. She is currently helping Michael put the dishes in the dishwasher. She came in and asked mommy where her plate was and then I heard her telling Michael that it was in the rubbish. I am sure that meant it was in the kitchen and had already been cleaned, but she might have meant anything.

Since she is ready for bed, I will have to go. It is kind of early for her to go, again, which means we will have to lay in bed and play for a while. If she is not really tired when we go to bed, I usually have to tell her I am going to get a drink or something and I will be right back so she will fall asleep while I am gone. Sometimes, this doesn't work and she calls out to me asking where I am. I do know that it is rare for me to actually leave while she is asleep. If I don't make an excuse and leave before she falls asleep, I tend to fall asleep myself and then I have no idea what she does after that. I assume she goes to sleep but I get the feeling that sometimes, she continues to play while I am asleep. Things appear to move around and she is in different places when I finally do wake up and leave her bedroom.

Since I have continued to type after Maeghan has wanted to go to bed, she has now started riding around on her little bike. It is not really a bike, but all the other kids have bikes and she wants one so we told her she has her little car and she can ride it around like it was a bike. She has accepted this and now calls her car her bike. She has gotten really good at it. She can get going really fast and then pull her legs up and roll until she runs into something, usually one of the other kids or one of us. She thinks it is great fun. Apparently, she spent the whole day a few weeks ago tormenting Jarvis by riding around the house and sliding into him and saying ' sorry' then running around the house again until he was in a good position to run into once more. This was a lot of fun for her but Jarvis got tired of it and went to sit on the couch and stay out of the way.

I really have to go now. I have some more cute stories to tell and some other in depth information about what we eat and don't eat here, but it will have to wait for another time. It's been fun and I will get back to the comments as soon as I can.

Ok, I am back. I was proof reading this and Maeghan is sitting in Juanita's lap helping her play her game. She keeps telling Juanita, 'Oh No' and says 'its gone now'. I don't know what they are playing, some Tetris variant I am sure, but Maeghan seems to know what is supposed to happen and lets Juanita know when it doesn't.

I am really going now. Talk to you soon.