Rachel Callahan

The Decaffeination Report.

July 11, 2011July 10, 2011 Rachel Callahan A Day in the Life, Actually Possibly Informational, It's Tough Being a Girl, Newbornities

I know that many of you Mommies out there – Mommies that are clearly better, more loving, more devoted Mommies than I – cease and desist the ingestion of all caffeine the minute you find out you’re pregnant, and with miraculous levels of self-control, don’t resume until you finish nursing.

I salute you.

I, however, am not one of those angelic beings. I have made that clear.

However, as of late, Noah’s napping practices have been tragic.

…Which is creating a severe time shortage, which is causing sub-par blogging, which is causing great personal angst. And for that, Noah seems completely unapologetic.

(Good thing he’s so cute.)

I tried everything I knew and a few things I didn’t to help the kid get a bit more nappage in, but nothing worked.

Finally, I had to face the truth: it could be my fault.

I don’t drink that much caffeine – especially since I cut out (most) coke drinking when we started our diet – but my morning cup of coffee and I are fairly intimate.

But naptime – it’s sacred. It must be guarded, coddled, and maximized at all costs.

With my sanity hanging in the balance, I decided it was worth a try. I promised myself that I wouldn’t touch a drop of caffeine ever again…or for a couple of days, whichever came first.

And so, herein lies the journal of decaffeination.

Last Day of Caffeination: Noah napped twenty minutes in the afternoon. And only an hour and a half in the morning. And, since Ali only naps in the afternoon, that made my alone time equate to all of… twenty minutes. I get more smoke breaks at the office than that – or I would, if I worked in an office and if I smoked.

I woke up rather wide awake – first thought was “maybe this won’t be too hard after all.” I made it through the morning without any Nectar of Energy AND without harming any living being. The only slight hardship came that afternoon when I realized that I couldn’t do my usual drive-by of the Ghirardelli Chocolate Covered Espresso Bean canister – a tragedy indeed.

Noah did sleep better…ish. Not at the levels I desired, but there were blessedly no 20 minute naps.

Day two was regrettably a Monday. I did not wake up so wide awake. In fact, waking up itself was nearly impossible, as my eyelids staged a nasty strike.

Also, a painful dose Coffee Deprivation Depression set in at about … 9 AM.

Coffee Deprivation Irritability quickly followed.

…Which was only magnified with the power of ten bolts of lightning when Noah only took a forty minute morning nap.

I’m doing this for what?!?!?!

Luckily, he saved himself from eviction by taking a 2.75 hour afternoon nap, his best in weeks.

The sleeeeepies hit. The daily afternoon storms did not help.

Nor did Noah’s ridiculously non-napping practices, continuing unmercifully despite my saint-like sacrifices.

Two thirty minute naps nearly put me over the edge, almost making me guzzle an entire gallon of coffee in protest.

Also, I may have learned how to breathe fire.

(If only I could have learned how to breathe caffeinated fire…)

I did accidentally have caffeine at lunch – I ordered unsweet tea without even thinking about it.

And oh, it was good.

After mediocre naps, I rebelled and had caffeine at dinner. But apparently, my body had adapted to a non-caffeinated lifestyle – sleep eluded me that night, leaving me nothing to do but mutter nasty things under my breath.

Noah and Ali went to spend the night with Gramamma, leaving me alone with my pump and no naps to maintain.

I absolutely let loose.

All of my caffeinic self-control completely vanished, and I devoured every smidge of energy-bringing item in the house. My bliss was literally palpable.

(And, for the first time in a week, I had the mental energy to come up with words like “palpable”.)

And no, I didn’t spend a single second of that blissful caffeine high worried about the effect of the Red Bull Breastmilk I was pumping, because it wouldn’t get used until the next visit to Gramamma’s house.

(Sorry, Gramamma.)

A week had passed – the absolute maximum length of experimentation in this sensitive area. I reviewed my napping logs and levels of angst for the week. No patterns or improvements could be found, so I decided that caffeine, maybe in slightly more moderation, was going be granted clemency for the safety of everyone involved.

Then I immediately began forming my next napping theory.

(Without a theory, there’s no hope left in the world.)

New Theory: In order to not wake him between eating and napping, I hadn’t been burping him (I assumed, of course, that I was providing burp-free substances).

This week’s journal: The Belch Report.

I lead a fabulously glamorous life.

Everything I Learned from Flying (and the Beach) With Two Children.

July 8, 2011July 8, 2011 Rachel Callahan Actually Possibly Informational, I'm a Glutton for Adventure, Kids: The Experience., Newbornities

1. Don’t pack any more than you can carry, by yourself, while holding your baby, because your husband will need to be gone for approximately two eternities while signing paperwork for the rental car.

2. Point number one is completely impossible. Therefore, bring a friend. Two kids versus two parents in an airport is outnumbered, no matter what the numbers say.

Plus, we all know that non-parents are much more entertaining than parents. Especially in crowded airports.

3. Make sure your kids study the safety guide – you know, just in case.

4. However, don’t let them study the safety guide too closely, or they’ll decide that they really want to crash so that they can slide down that cool yellow inflatable slide.

5. The Sky Mall Catalog is great entertainment for a baby – although the next person in your seat may not appreciate the ripped out, wadded up, and slobbered on pages.

6. No, the Sky Mall Catalog most certainly doesn’t have germs on it that would be harmful for a baby. Why do you ask?

7. Babies that dislike car seats will love airplanes. Because who wouldn’t rather be cuddled by their Mommy than 5-point-safety-harnessed into a tiny jail cell?

8. However, don’t expect said baby to sleep on an airplane, no matter how tired he should be – he will know something very exciting is occurring.

8. If you find yourself tapping your foot to bounce your non-sleeping baby and then you happen to look out the window and see the airplane wing bouncing at the same rate as your foot, STOP IMMEDIATELY.

9. Then, of course, you will laugh at yourself for thinking that you made the wing bounce, so you will tell your husband about it. Upon which he will laugh at you, and then say, “But, uh…don’t tap your foot anymore, okay?”

10. Make sure that your four year old pees as many times as possible before boarding a plane. No adult human body can possibly shove itself into an airplane bathroom with a four year old – at least not without touching any oh-so-much-more-germ-infested-than-the-Sky-Mall-Magazine surfaces.

11. If you fly to a later time zone and skip naptime, your four year old might sleep until 10 AM every day. However, your baby will ensure that you don’t oversleep by waking up even earlier than normal, seemingly impervious to internal clock normalities.

12. A trip to a different kind of beach may make beaching with children infinitely easier – as much as our Alabama snow white soft sand is gorgeous, Atlantic Ocean hard beaches make things like strollers possible, and is acceptable to kids who normally have an aversion to walking in sand.

13. Also easier: the hard sand offers portion control of how much sand a baby can pick up at once.

14. But it’s still wise to plug them up to prevent too high of a level of microscopic sea creature ingestion.

15. The harsh Atlantic winds will keep your hair a horrific mess for the entire trip. This will be only magnified in it’s disgustingness by your four year old’s hair of ocean breeze awesomeness.

Which, when paired with her 14-hours-of-sleep non-baggy eyes, makes you look even worse.

16. You should never harbor feelings of intense jealousy for your four year old. It’s just unhealthy.

United Baby Union: Rule Number One.

July 7, 2011July 7, 2011 Rachel Callahan Newbornities, The Unions of Family

Never

let go

of the

Food.

EVER.

…And this is why there will never be a decent photo of Noah and I together. Ever.

Discovering The Magic City in America’s Oldest City

July 6, 2011November 12, 2013 Rachel Callahan Every Now and Then I Can Be Sappy Too., I Love Birmingham, Storytime, The Blissfulness of Life

When I was very young, there was a brick-paved street a couple of blocks from my house. It was really just a brick intersection – a tiny slice of leftover history that somehow got missed by the modernization of Birmingham. I loved when we drove over it and I had the opportunity to pretend that I was a 19th century Southern Belle in a horse drawn carriage, and my Mom or Dad was my personal driver.

Not too long into my childhood, modern progress won out, and they dug up the bricks and asphalted my favorite intersection. The bricks were going to be thrown out, so my Dad went down to collect some of them.

He used those bricks to make steps and a walkway up to our house. I remember asking him why he wanted to use the old, chipped and worn bricks instead of new, “pretty” bricks. He showed me the stamping on the bricks:

GRAVES
BHAM, ALA

The bricks were made right there in our town by a factory that was closed half a century before he was born. He explained to me that these bricks were a part of our history – of our city’s story, and that by saving them, he had salvaged a bit of that history for our family.

Although I didn’t care too much about my city’s history at that point, I did look down and see those stamps of Birmingham’s past on a daily basis, and always remembered my cherished brick road because of their presence.

Now that I’m older and passionately in love with my city, I completely understand my Dad’s efforts to preserve our past. I am fascinated with books showing pictures of how Birmingham used to be, and I confess I might still spend a bit of time still imagining that I was one of those ladies with the long, full dresses and dainty parasols being driven down the locally-made brick roads in a fancy new horseless carriage.

Yesterday, we spent a day of our vacation in Historical old St. Augustine, Florida – the oldest city in America. The layers upon layers of different cultures and generations creates a beautiful canvas. Centuries of buildings and churches line brick-paved alleyways, and remnants of pirate attacks, forts, and colonization are scattered throughout downtown. Men dressed up as Pirates amble down the roads, scaring children and having witty remarks always at the ready. It’s easy to imagine oneself in the past in St. Augustine.

Ali and I stopped to admire a 19th century water wheel at a former grist mill.

…Or at least I was admiring it, and she was begging for money to throw in the water to make a wish.

She threw her money in, wished for ice cream, stared intently at her coin, then sighed. She walked away and said, “I threw my money in and made my wish, but it didn’t turn into ice cream. Why didn’t it work??”

She looked down to the ground. I looked down with her.

I Immediately recognized those bricks.

Here was a part of my city’s proud history, tucked hundreds of miles away in the nation’s oldest city.

I was proud, I was thrilled, and I was immediately transported back to sitting on my steps as a little girl, to riding down that brick road, and to imagining all sorts of historical Birmingham stories.

Of course, I pointed the bricks out to Ali, and just like my reaction as a little girl, she was completely unimpressed.

Hopefully though, in time, I will be able to instill in her a love for history, for our city, and for imaginary visits to times past.

Of All the Swimsuits in All the World.

July 5, 2011July 4, 2011 Rachel Callahan Don't Listen to my Fashion Advice, Photographical Oddities, Weird Strange and True

We are currently enjoying the lovely beaches of Saint Augustine, Florida.

Since a majority of my day Sunday was spent on the sand cuddling a certain charming little someone, I had plenty of time to take in the sights.

And there were plenty of sights, just waiting to be taken in.

But the strangest sight I saw…

The strangest sight I saw wasn’t the Mom with long blond dreads (that were pretty awesome, really) who had shaved her 6 year old’s head except for a set of long, hot pink bangs…

It wasn’t even the lady with the most literal tramp stamp ever stamped – simply the word “TRAMP” tattooed, in all caps, above her rear..

No.

The strangest sight I saw was a Grandmother making sandcastles with her Grandkids.

It was…astounding.

My lack of understanding was only multiplied by the mysterious way the stripes transitioned from horizontal to vertical…

It might have been the most confusing thing I’ve ever seen.

And the only thing I can take away from this experience is that if Jane Fonda ever goes to jail, at least now we know what she would wear.

Giveaway – Anybody Want an Awesome New Dress?

July 4, 2011July 4, 2011 Rachel Callahan Giveaways and Contests

Every single time I’ve gone shopping lately, I’ve had to use my dressing-room-imagination, all while doing mental backflips…

What camisole or tank top do I have to put under this?

What cardigan do I have to wear over this?

If I go out in the sun, is this going to be totally see-through?

Nothing seems to be made simply to stand on it’s own anymore – it’s all too low-cut, has too skinny of straps, is too translucent, too short… or is that just me?

Except for Shabby Apple Women’s Dresses. Shabby Apple created a line of amazing clothes that are created to be stylish, to stand on their own, and to go back to the basics of being “just a dress”. They also have dresses to compliment every figure, and a fun guide to help you discover your body type and the dresses that will look best on you.

Plus, they’re gorgeous.

Here are some of my favorites:

This one is awesome because I love a long, flowy dress. I couldn’t have been happier when Maxi Dresses came back in style – (except for the term “Maxi Dress”, obviously – somebody didn’t think that through). The Rosso:

The Spanish Steps dress is so glamorous… it would be absolutely perfect to wear to a wedding:

Bacciami just looks like it would flatter all the right places and hide all the wrong ones:

The Da Vinci looks SO comfortable – I would wear this dress every Saturday, I believe:

And for one more super figure flattering dress, L’Artiste:

If you would like to win your choice of the five dresses above, leave a comment on this post telling me which one you would pick! You can receive one extra entry for each of the following:

Like Shabby Apple on Facebook
Like me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter
Tweet, Facebook, or Blog about the giveaway

This giveaway is open for US addresses only, and until Monday, July 18th. The winner will be announced on my giveaway winner page on Tuesday, July 19th.

Also, if you would like to go shopping at Shabby Apple right now, they gave me a 10% off code to share with all of you – graspingforobjectivity10off … this code is good for 30 days.

(Buy me something pretty while you’re there, mmkay?)

Enjoy, and good luck!

The Continuum of Little Brother Endurance.

July 1, 2011June 30, 2011 Rachel Callahan Boy Child = Bizarre., Kids: The Experience.

Being the little brother comes with its risks.

If you are the little brother to another brother, you will need to prepare to be used for tackling practice, karate practice, as a human first base, and to be the person continuously pummeled at every Nintendo game ever made.

(I was a little sister to a brother and was subject to these same endangerments on a daily basis.)

But to be a little brother to a sister – that’s an entirely different set of occupational hazards.

The risks of sisterly torture can be measured on The Continuum. It starts out mildly enough, but the torture goes beyond endurable by the male race.

If said boy child is lucky, his Father will interject his masculine authority early on in The Continuum and refuse to let the older sister continuously subject his son to anguish.

If not, however, The Continuum will teach him to endure much pain and suffering.

The Continuum starts off harmlessly with…

10. Tea Parties.

Then it gets a wee bit more torturous:

9. Playing Doll House.

Then it splits up into less palatable options…

8. Playing House, or worse, playing Dolls.

Painful tragedy comes next.

7. Playing with Barbies, brother gets to play with Ken.

But he better hope she has a Ken doll available, or …

6. Playing with Barbies, Barbies, and only Barbies – maybe with a Skipper thrown in for variety.

Then the dress up box comes out. If brother is lucky,

5. Playing dress up, brother getting to dress up as the Prince.

But if he’s unlucky on any particular day…

4. Playing dress up, brother having to dress up as another Princess.

Then the torture goes to semi-permanent levels.

2. Toenail Painting.

And more noticeably semi-permanent…

1. Fingernail Painting.

And then, finally, the Ground Zero of Sisterly Torture:

0. Makeup.

Noah has begun his journey down the path of The Continuum.

He earned his Level Ten Badge of Torture upon attendance of his first tea party.

He was taught how to properly hold the cup,

Then was given the arduous task of learning how to lift said cup.

(At least he was given the blue cup…to be thrown a bone of masculinity in a sea of girlishness is all a brother could hope for, really.)

Success was made – his tea sipping skills proved to be quite acceptable.

…which, unfortunately for him, will only increase the speed of his descent down The Continuum – straight down to Level Eight:

The Occupational Hazards and Tortures of Little Brotherdom are risks that he will have to take on – starting, perhaps, sooner than he had hoped.

Rachel: (Dead) Plant Master.

June 29, 2011June 29, 2011 Rachel Callahan I embarrass myself just for your amusement., Just My Luck, Weird Strange and True

I kill green things.

Really, I kill anything of any color if it has a root system.

Part of my issue is most likely a combination of laziness and a detestation of all work gardening related, but part of it is certainly just my inability to maintain life of the Chlorophyllic type.

I’m pretty sure that the desolate situation that is my landscaping ability greatly embarrasses my mom – that or she just has a strong sense of pity on my neighbors – because every now and then, she will bring living things over to my house and plant them in what others would probably consider gardening space.

I am then overcome with a deep shame when those items that she lovingly planted for me die tortuously within days.

However, I recently tried to overcome my lacking in this department – on a very, very small scale.

My super-cool friends, Angie and Trish of Birmingham Mommy, invited me to a Mommy’s Night Out at Dreamcakes Bakery a couple of months ago. It was awesomely fun – there were free cupcakes as far as the eye could see, yummy mexican dips of which I didn’t count the calories, lots of other cool moms, door prizes, and lots of free stuff.

One of the free things they sent me home with was a tiny, adorable, plant of some sort.

(I’m sure that most of you could tell me exactly what type of plant this is, but since me and plants aren’t exactly on speaking terms, I don’t know many of their names.)

When Chris saw my loot, he was impressed. When he saw my cute tiny plant, he laughed.

“What? Surely I can take care of one tiny plant!”

“Seriously? You’re going to try and keep it alive?”

“Yes! It’s cute and tiny and my friend. I’m going to take care of it.”

It was cute, but mostly my desire to make it live came from my strong sense of guilt about being entrusted with this plant’s life. Angie and Trish would weep huge tears of crocodile if I were to carelessly disregard this tender shoot…

So I set it in the kitchen window, right above the sink. That way, I would be reminded daily to water it, and I would have all of 4 inches to move it to make that happen.

But somehow, my lack of the Plant Care Gene made me only notice it’s poor, starving leaves when it would begin to die.

So it would die, then I would water it, and it would miraculously revive.

I actually found my ability to grant the miracle of resurrected life kind of fun, so me and the plant began playing this “die, live, die, live” game over and over.

(This did not help my speaking terms situation with plants in general.)

Then I noticed something odd – the cute, tiny little terracotta pot started looking dirty.

Weird, since I hadn’t been letting my plant play outdoors.

Then… the dirtiness began to grow fuzz.

That’s right, friends, I molded a pot.

I fully expected to kill the plant, but the POT???

My tiny, adorable plant is now using it’s pot to send out spores of nast into my sink, my food, my kids, and probably even my fridge every time I open it.

Obviously, this was revenge for our little game.

This terrible tragedy, of course, flooded back the traumatic memories of 2010’s gaggably moldy pumpkins …

And I knew it just wasn’t meant to be. Any relationship between me and things that grow in the ground, used to grow in the ground, or grow in pots will never work, no matter how cute and tiny they are.

My deepest apologies go out to Trish and Angie, and my sincerest condolences to the plant and its pot of nast that now lives on my porch, where it will surely die.

A Revisit to The Willpower Experiment.

June 28, 2011June 5, 2013 Rachel Callahan Actually Possibly Informational, I'm a Meme You're a Meme, Kids: The Experience., Let's Play

You know that bizarre phenomenon where you go to bed thinking “I’ve got to get up at 6 AM tomorrow”, and then you wake up, with no alarm, at 5:59?

Or does that just happen to me?

(Not recently, obviously – my baby alarm goes off EVERY morning before I’m ready to get up.)

Last week, I had a blog post alarm go off. I wrote this post almost exactly two years ago, and said in the post that I would re-attempt it in two years.

And, alas, I just remembered it last Thursday.

So it’s time to retry The Willpower Experiment.

A quick recap so that you don’t have to go back and read the original post:

I’m all about a good experiment that uses my kid as a lab rat, and so when I read about Scientist Walter Mischel’s study on kids and willpower, I knew I HAD to try it.

(The only problem was that when I read about it, my kid was two years too young for it.)

(However, Age requirements never stop me from subjecting my kid to lab rat status.)

Back to the experiment. He only set out to prove that willpower develops around the age of four. He did this, but he also learned more than that: by following up with his 500 test subjects for the next four decades, he discovered more correlations with willpower at an early age.

He learned that kids who were able to pass the willpower test at age four were significantly more successful in later life than the ones who didn’t. They had better grades in school, made over 200 points higher scores on the SAT, went to better colleges, and got better jobs than the kids who could not grasp the concept of delayed gratification.

The test goes like this: you offer your kid a treat – chocolate, cookies, candy, whatever would tempt them. You tell them that they can eat the treat now – it’s their treat – or, if they wait for you to come back, they can have MORE treats. But if they eat the treat now, they won’t get more treats when you get back. You then exit the room, leaving them to drool over their tempting treat.

My attempt of this experiment when Ali was 2 1/2 was a resounding failure – but a pretty dang cute failure:

At least I proved that willpower does not, at all, develop at 2 1/2.

So technically, I should have done this right at her fourth birthday, but unfortunately, I set my mental alarm clock for “two years later” instead of “age four”, so here’s the repeat, at age 4 1/2.

(Note: I left the room for about six minutes, but I significantly sped up the “waiting” part of the video so that you could see what Ali did, but you didn’t have to wait six minutes to do so.)

(You’re welcome.)

Now whether this test proves anything about Ali’s future or not is quite skeptical, but it does prove something about my counting skills: the first thing she said after she finished shoving the jellybeans down her throat was that she counted those jellybeans while she waited for me, and there were only seven, not eight.

Hopefully, she’ll at least be more successful at counting than her Mother.

Utterly Odder Parts of Life.

June 26, 2011June 29, 2011 Rachel Callahan Photographical Oddities, Weird Strange and True

I ran across this anniversary card a couple of months ago when buying one from Chris. I’m pretty sure the “husband anniversary” category marker should be replaced with a “Sentiments that should never be written in gold foil” category marker.

Speaking of cards, I received this card in the mail from our state’s governor, congratulating me on my new baby…just 5 months after I had Noah – and 5 months after he was no longer Governor.

“Congratulations, and remember to get those shots!!”

– good thing I wasn’t waiting on his reminder to get that done.

Have you been searching for the “Best Graduation Gifts Ever”? I found them – hanging out on the sidewalks of Homewood.

…Because, when headed off to college, everybody needs a wardrobe with school spirit.

When I was desperately searching for some pink hair dye, I used my iPhone to find a phone number… but the reviews were also quite helpful.

I personally love a baked potato on the side of my hair dye.

While I was delivering tornado relief supplies, I also saw this guy…delivering…relief?

Of all of the views on creation and evolution, I’m sure we can ALL agree on one thing: we don’t get to decide what actually happened.

Any Size*

* – any size with the exceptions of which you will search endlessly for – because we sadistically left them off of our billboard.

The Rodeo Drive of Birmingham:

Who doesn’t love to decorate their house with stray cats and buy their “Ladie’s” social occasion dresses within dress code?

And, finally, nothing tastes as good as a cow that was patted daily.

…Because we all know that happy beef is tasty beef.