Author: Melissa

Ellie: "Mommy, did the mailman come yet?"
Me: "Yes."
Ellie: "Did he bring me a package?"
Me: "No. Why did you think you were getting a package?"
Ellie: heaves a deep sigh "I was really hoping for a package with some cute clothes."

Aren’t we all, sweetie. Aren’t. We. All.

Well, we have quite the week ahead of us here in the Girlymama household.

• The Mother-in-law is arriving on Saturday for a 2 month visit.
  (Some of you just fainted in horror, but let me assure you that my MIL is an AMAZING woman who is eager to help and always telling me to go take a nap. And since this is the only time all year she will see the grandkids, yes, I will basically have a live-in nanny.  Sweetness.)
  Anyway, there is LOTS o’ cleaning to be done ’round here. She will be staying in the spare bedroom, which I usually use as my office/sewing room so I need to clean that out to make it habitable. Because I am NOT neat when I sew. Or when I cook. Speaking of sewing…
• I have taken myself off maternity leave and have started to build my inventory for my store’s reopening in July. I haven’t sewn at all since January, so I am having great fun. But it is hard to stop and do other things I need to do. Like get ready for…
• Ellie’s graduation on Thursday and Colin’s baptism on Sunday. Blessed family events that require light lunches and heavy desserts at our house. Which leads us to…
• Cleaning!! Did I mention I needed to clean? And speaking of graduation, I need to…
• Come up with four meaningful teacher thank-you gifts by Thursday, the last day of school. So soon, I will have the kids home all day, every day. So I can add entertaining them to the other…
• eleventy zillion other things I do around here to keep things running (sort-of) smoothly (usually.)

And where is my husband? In Albuquerque! He sure knows how to pick the weeks to travel! I totally offered to go on the trip for him if he would stay here and did my job, but he didn’t buy it. Smart guy.

Anyway – who out there has a brilliant thoughtful-and-meaningful-but-cheap-preschool-teacher-thank-you gift idea?

Welcome to Girlymama’s new home!!!

Do you love it?? Special thanks to DCR Design for the fantabulous design! If you’re in the market for a new blog design, get her signed up quick. The word is out and that girl is getting really busy!!

Here’s one of the reasons I’ve been MIA all week. There will be an official launch soon, but enjoy the preview!

Beth at I Should Be Folding Laundry has a GREAT POST about how important it is to COMMENT on BLOGS. This means you! Seriously – I get like 400 hits a day and like 10 comments. You know who you are, Lurkers. I know who lots of you are. And you know that I know who you are. So start commenting, dang it.

If you are trying to lose weight – or even maintain your current weight – do not, under ANY circumstances whatsoever, visit this amazing blog I just discovered. Otherwise, go nuts and don’t drool all over your keyboard, since that may cause some technical problems.

And a big shout out and thanks to George W. for the $1800 tax rebate that arrived in our bank account this morning. Woo-HOO!!

Grace: I can’t eat this. Its too big. Can you cut it into small pieces?
Me: Grace, its RICE.

Grace: I only like this flavor on Saturdays. But on… onnn….. What is it?
Me: Thursday.
Grace: Yes. On THURSDAYS I do not like this.

Grace has a new favorite song:

Its on my favorite peppy-song playlist and she’s picked up that catchy tune.  Husband is a bit conflicted about what the girls are listening to.  I don’t think its a big deal. They also sing along with everything from the Beatles to U2 to Coldplay to Ariel to Sheryl Crow to Elmo. (I do always buy the "clean" version on i-tunes so that they don’t hear any REALLY objectionable words.)
Its not like they’re singing gangsta rap with Snoop Dogg about sippin on gin and juice. ("with my mind on my money and my money on my mind…") 

I don’t know. Is this a big deal? Should I be more concerned about this than I am?

So I called to update our credit card info for our automatic payment of our Verizon internet.

I was transferred SEVEN times. To this person who couldn’t help me, to another person who couldn’t help me, to this person could only help me if I lived in New Jersey… Then they couldn’t find my account number. Then they couldn’t find ME. Despite the fact that I have paid them lots of money EVERY MONTH for the last EIGHT years… They have no record of me existing.  Part of me really  wanted to just let my credit card expire and bounce right back to them. Clearly they won’t miss me, since they don’t seem to know who I am.  But instead, being the responsible citizen that I am, I wasted 45 minutes trying to find the ONE SINGLE employee out of thousands who could actually help me.
FINALLY someone was able to update the info I needed. Which took all of 1 minute.

Then, my heart full of dread, I called the company that makes this Hello Kitty boom box.  Ellie got this for her birthday and it just randomly stopped working, so I called customer service.
An ACTUAL REAL LIVE person answered the phone. She told me to mail it to them and they would fix it for FREE and if they couldn’t fix it, they will MAIL ME A NEW ONE! Amazing!!

Feeling confident, I called the insurance company. Who managed to make Verizon look downright speedy and efficient. The insurance is denying to pay any of our maternity/newborn care. Because it was all filed under Husband’s policy number. (Obviously they would deny maternity care for him seeing as HE IS A MAN.) It is very simple fix – they just needed to change things to MY policy number. I tried to explain this to them, but it was apparently MUCH too complicated a concept for them to understand. Seriously – my head almost exploded after having the same conversation over and over for 30 minutes with an women who kept calling me “Honey” and was INSISTING that there had been no mistake.

And there goes two hours of my life that I will never get back.