I’ve been feeling guilty about what a MIA blogger I’ve been, here and even more so over at my other blog and at SoVo.

The problem with guilt is that instead of inspiring me to go do something, it inspires me to hide out and avoid things, which in turn makes me feel more guilty, and whadda ya know? We have a spiral into paralysis.

So I’m going to just acknowledge all that guilt and see if I can take a step back towards being responsible, not all the steps to try to be perfect. Cuz, not so likely.

Noah has croup. He’s actually almost better — it hit in the night Thursday night or early Friday morning. The awful sound of his breathing woke Jill up around 3 am Friday, and we took him to the doctor’s as soon as they opened.

Fortunately, intense humidification and mild steroids and tylenol helped a lot. He’s also been clinging and nursing like crazy, but not sleeping well. And the electrical transformers that keep our baby monitor handsets working both burnt out. Fisher Price is sending us new ones, but they’re on backorder until May 15.

It was customer service weekend at Casa Booski, actually. I also wooted a Roomba after our vacuum died, and sadly, the one I got just drove in tiny circles. So they are sending me a new one too.

Last night, he was up from 11:45 pm – 3 am, and again at 7. Fortunately, we all had a nap around 9 am.

During my 9 am nap, I had the strangest dreams. First, I dreamed that we had traveled to Seattle for a day for some reason, but we didn’t go visit blogger-pal Isabel. Also, the crappy resort where we were staying was on a shallow, rocky beach, with half a dozen houses out in the water, 3 or 4 feet deep. And a view of the Seattle skyline. In the bright perfect sun with blue skies. So yeah, not Seattle in any way. And we were about to miss our flight.

I half woke up and rearranged Noah, who was sleeping on my lap, then fell back asleep to dream that Mir’s fiance was a student at Columbia Theological Seminary, and was in the midst of an ethical dilemma about whether to tell the truth about something that would keep him from being ordainable, or wait until after he was ordained to say anything. But it wasn’t that he was gay.
Mind you, I don’t know Mir, or Otto, and I have no reason at all to think he is either Presbyterian, OR unordainable. The only link is that I think Mir is moving to metro Atlanta after the wedding. And our long morning nap and still-recovering boy meant that we weren’t going to church.

(Have I mentioned that our church is chock full of theologians? It seems like every 3rd person we meet is either a student or a professor of theology, mostly at Columbia, but maybe 25% of them somewhere else.)

On Thursday evening, I went to a fund raiser for Family Pride,  and later this afternoon, we’re going to a MEGA picnic, both of which have me thinking about a lot of stuff that I’m going to write about over at the other blog.

Do I have a cute family, or do I have a cute family?

And did they have fun playing on the floor yesterday, or what?

Noah also had fun playing BAH! (He got obsessed with these balls at music class on Saturday, so we asked the teacher where she got them. Big Lots! Six nubbled soft balls for $6.34 –> one very excited boy.)

He also enjoyed running around exploring, talking (long!) and wearing my shoes.

UPDATED: Oops! The video of him wearing my shoes doesn’t seem to have successfully made it to youtube. I’ll try again tonight.

I feel like a Bad Blogger, but there’s no sign of that changing at least for a few more days. We had a fun but action-packed weekend, work is superduperbusy, I was a little under the weather Sunday morning, and Noah is like the battery-ad bunny. But here are a few tidbits:

• There’s at least one more tooth breaking through! I tried to feel around to see if there are more, but it was really annoying Noah. Maybe in the morning.
• He spent the weekend as Mr Kissy Sweet Boy. Mostly. We Loooooooooooooooooooooove it when Noah’s being Mr Kissy Sweet Boy. Even though we know sometimes it’s manipulative and he’s just trying to climb on us to reach something behind us and up high.
• The 8-week music class we signed up for with Noah on Saturday mornings was a lot of fun. But the age tops out at 18 months, and Noah is clearly the biggest and most mobile kid there. He liked it, but he wants to run around more than the tiny babies’ parents.
• The Pocket Change diaper inserts do successfully come out in the wash in a front loader. I love our new cloth diapers. LOVE them.
• Not sure about this whole tax preparer thing. He returned them today, and we found that he’d assigned the adoption credit to me. Oops. Um, I didn’t adopt Noah. He’s filing an extension for us tomorrow and getting us corrected forms the next day.
• Random but cool? I got a Citizen Citation from the Farmington, MI Department of Public Safety. They contacted me at work in December with an emergency situation and by a lot of luck, a lot of begging, and a lot of help, we were able to identify who was making some very scary, serious threats in their community, and thus prevent an awful incident from taking place.

Ok, I’m falling asleep now….

It continues to be crazy at work, but at least Noah slept through until 6:30 am. I was able to be fully functional.

But my brain is wrung out. Wrung.Out.

On the plus side, my new cloth diapers arrived today. We’re testing the Pocket Change diaper tonight, with 2 microfiber inserts. They look adorable, I hope they work that well. (And those of you into cloth diapers, we bought the factory seconds, which were almost 40% off.)

Update: The Pocket Change leaked, although not as much as the 7th Gen. I think that could be avoided with using the bigger microfiber inserts, ie the cottonbabies ones. We do have a front loader, so I’ll provide a report back, Jen.

3 am is not my favorite time of day. Especially 3 am with a baby screaming and screaming and screaming for no apparent reason.

The second 3 am in a row is even less attractive than the first, even if this time I got to go back to sleep cuz Jill got up.