Kelly B.com

I'm going to admit something silly because...well, why not? One of the more interesting things about being human is relating to other humans. I'm sure at least one other human out there is as weird as I am, so I'll break the proverbial ice and just admit my own shortcoming...I never learned how to ride a bike. Let's rewind to the 80's when I should have learned this basic skill and point the finger at two busy hardworking parents who literally saw me a few hours a day to pat me on the head, feed me and tell me to go to bed.  My dad worked 2nd shift most of my life and as a result I saw him for a few minutes in the morning in between the morning rush of getting ready for school and the mild grazing of his lips on my forehead at 11pm at night when he got home.  My mom was there for me in the afternoons after school got out but she was the only ticket in town and she was terrified of doing things out of her comfort zone. As an example I became quite a library rat bec...

I was much more prolific with opinions in my younger years, huh? Most certainly I still have them I just don't have time to process and work through them and I hate spewing thoughtless things in the world. There's certainly an overabundance of that in the world already. My problem (in part) is a little PTSD from a not-so-great friend breakup and before things went radio silent I felt very heavily criticized about but not even in a productive way like when in drama club our director would rip us apart with feedback, it was all side-eye, backhanded, so and so said this about you yesterday high school BS.  And I'm honestly a little trigger shy after this most recent round of Presidential change and it's taken a while to put words around it because it sounds ridiculous but at the same time when the two main parties are constantly yelling yelling yelling you begin to feel a little bit like a child of divorce. I'm very torn and I'm not the cause of this issue per sa...

Do you believe in New Year's Resolutions?  I don't really because I think it's silly to set goals just because it's arbitrarily the New Year.  If you want to set a goal just do it, you don't have to wait until a specific date to set it.  However I do like taking a moment to access yourself and determine how to better one's self.  That's nice.  So I have a love/hate relationship with the whole thing. Totally unrelated to the Earth completing a rotation around the sun, my cousin, I shall call Haley got engaged and has sprung it upon me that she needs me to participate in her wedding.  To which of course I think I'm just like, making food or prepping flowers but in fact I now need to be dressed identically to three other girls for the ceremony, so....in that roundabout way that I get wrangled into a lot of things I will be an active participant.  Since I had her be part of my wedding party I suppose it's only fair.  But when she was a bridesmaid fo...

I had another baby.  Let's just get that out of the way.  He's gloriously beautiful. He puts girl babies to shame with his full head of wavy hair, big smiles and dimples. Oh the dimples. They just kill you. And in case my opinion is not enough please ask the half dozen strangers that stop me at the grocery store just to compliment the baby. EVERY TIME. The kid smiles and giggles at the drop of a dime, he's the politician of the crew. I say that because three seconds before that he tried to scratch my eyes out and was wailing at the top of his lungs. Mercurial doesn't even begin to describe it. On a side note, I rarely ever had that happen with my first boy.  Not that he wasn't a good looking child, but he had a very grown-up, serious expression glued to his face all the time. He came out a mini adult.  It took him a lot longer to figure out how to manipulate smiles out of people...but not the baby.  That kid can turn on the magic whenever he feels like it. A...

Other than boring mom stuff you're probably wondering what fills my days. I'll breeze past the boring stuff like laundry and grocery shopping and admit that in the few moments I have left to myself I have become fond of online shopping and getting free samples and generally trying to find deals though I do draw the line at hoarding 300 tubes of toothpaste. I grew up in a house where we never lacked in toiletries so perhaps I'm a tad sensitive but there is no logical reason you'd ever need that much of anything before it goes stale anyway. Since Trevor doesn't like clothies and he's home with the kid most of the time we consume disposables and watching my son poop away our money is sobering so if I can save a few bucks I try to. I figure every buck I can save is a buck he can use toward college, and when you put it into that perspective it seems silly not to try. Cloth nappies are not an exponentially big savings when you take into account the energy it take...

Happy 2 year anniversary to my Trevor. A year go we didn't have one of these Or one of these And now I can't even imagine a life different than the one we have. And I certainly didn't see this coming And baby makes...4? (I realize that might be the smallest bump you've ever seen but trust me, it's there.) Sorry for the hush-hush. It takes a while to internalize that you've got a tiny human being developing inside of you and to decide how much of that person you'd like to share with the internets. I've decided for me that we're sharing very very little because one day when he or she grows up they're likely to lament what I've shared and there's enough to be embarrassed about when you're 17 without adding in pictures of your naked baby bottom floating around for all of the internet to see. Consider it a case of me proactively shortening the area in my kid's autobiography where they blame me for everything that's wrong with th...

Been nursing a bit of a cold. Probably from running around in the rainy weather before. I kind of want to sleep all day and the things I swore I wanted to write about have all fallen out of my head in a haze of exhaustion. I'm not sick very often so when I am I am entirely out of my element. Even though I felt awful recently I still made dinner, organized the kitchen, vacuumed and tried to assist my husband around the house. I'm probably not doing myself any favors by running around instead of resting but resting feels like a waste of a day and each day has a long list of necessary tasks. Like going to redeem cans and buying bread and getting blueberries to munch on. All very important things. This summer should be an interesting one. The Cape Cod Cottage we've spent so many summers at is going to be demo-ed and replaced with a bigger, newer, shiny house where my bonus momma will be living full time. So I have no idea when we'll go to the Cape because we don'...

Clearly I spoke to soon. Takesies backsies anyone? Lex and Mike eloped this Saturday at Wickham Park on what would have been their planned wedding date anyway. It was very last minute even though they had originally planned to be wed on that day and they've been engaged well over a year but all the most important people seemed happy, albeit rather harried. Since Amanda's been in town anyway I've kind of used her as my go between with Lex and this whole wedding because to be rather honest I thought Alexis fell off the face of the earth and hated me for some confusingly unknown reason. I'm not saying I'm perfect but I try really hard to be empathetic. Rather than bother her about it I just preferred to not push the issue any further. Getting married, or not getting married or eloping is a pretty stressful thing without dealing explaining it to every Tom Dick and Harry. Because through the 1+year of plotting this wedding it's shrunk from a 300+ guest event t...

I guess I should just say it because I've been ignoring it for months. Lex's wedding has been postponed so, unfortunately no wedding this June. No rush of getting your hair done that morning. No pretty dresses to wear. No tiny favors to wrap. Because the underlying reason for this postponement are hers and hers alone there's not a lot to expound upon except to say that if you have any reservations in your mind about what you're doing then you're absolutely doing the right thing to push the pause button and if anyone judges you for it then they're not a terribly understanding friend or aunt or whatever. It's a huge decision to make and not one that you take lightly after over a year of being engaged in the first place. Moving on to a different subject, Amanda's still coming to town and I hear Cathy's coming into town as well, so I am elated that I have friends that will be in the area even if they're schedules are busy with seeing everyone else...

Somebody finally has a beautiful granite kitchen countertop. But somebody is not sharing any pictures of it because she'd rather have folks come see it when we finally get the housewarming together. Yes we are planning to have something this summer. I think the constant work we've been putting into the house has made it easy to become hermits. And now that we have a dog who needs human interaction? The pup loves us despite unwashed hair and bad social skills. Kidding aside, I love this dog but he is waring on my last nerves with the biting. Hardly a day passes where he doesn't break the skin and I'm wiping blood from my arm or hand. Seriously. My arms are a weird roadmap of scratches and nibbles. Between eying his poops and cleaning up wounds I'm really beyond exhausted. I love him but it's been something that wears on you. The bones have not come out. Repeat. The bones he ate like a MONTH ago have not come out. The vet says that if he's pooping regu...

I am ugh..behind in posting. Have I mentioned I don't believe in owning a scale? Not because I'm overweight. Rather, it's the contrary. I am naturally slim but I have a bit of a streak of obsessive compulsive when it comes to my weight. So in my experience it's better to just not know. Not put the temptation in front of me. Not to have that number scream at evil judgmental thoughts my way. But my dad asked how much the puppy weighs now. My guestimation is a lot. I carry that little guy around like he's a big sack of sugar. He's such a sweet little cuddle bug and I don't care that he's going to be gigantic one day. Right now he's a puppy and right now I get to hug him and cuddle him. But anyway the point is that dad was curious and asked if he could weigh Roni. Well, sure. Why not? But you can't get a puppy to sit on a scale, so I had to carry him. Well, long story short the weight of me and the Roni is under 140lbs and I started to ...

House is coming along. I wish I could tell you I finally had counters but, ya know you get used to whatever you have and I hardly mind the cement board and the wood planks we've been using in the meantime. There's no more visible pink on the first floor. Can I tell you how momentous that is? How much more normal our kitchen looks, even with no tiles on the floor and a ton of junk on top of the cabinetry. This might be how normal people live. I was reading this article that Nia Vardalos wrote about Mother's Day after finally becoming a mother this year and it nearly broke my heart because although I'm never that person who would ever ever ever assume someone is pregnant without like, a written documentation of the fact and like 3 sonograms I can understand how women have a build in competition. To be the thinnest. To be the most fertile. To be the smartest. To be the most successful...and it's just true of people from all walks of life. Whether you're a celeb...

Usually I'm not very timely with my posts but just in case you had your hand on the trigger waiting to call DCF, babysitting was rather successful in that it was totally uneventful. Kim's baby is perhaps the most laid back a child can be without the aid of say, anesthesia . He let everyone hold him and didn't seem in the slightest bit concerned that we were all strangers that smelled different than his momma and made weird faces that him and repeatedly tried to eat his tiny feet. Kim finally saw the house, and if she were slightly closer and didn't have, oh ya know, a small infant to take care of I imagine she'd love helping out painting, decorating and generally taking advantage of my shiny new appliances. Obviously I'd love help. I can't do all this myself, after all, but she's got different priorities than the rest of us do because of the baby and I'm totally understanding that he's the number one on her list. In fact, if he wasn't he...

We got the house. Finally. The problem with that is that I've been so busy packing, cleaning, painting, unpacking, reorganizing and buying stuff that I've become terribly unsociable and grumpy and tired and generally unlikeable. But after working 8 hour+ days at work, running to our multi, changing, throwing together some boxes, running them all down 3 floors, packing up my car, driving to the new house, unloading those boxes from my car and then painting, cleaning and generally tiring myself out until about 10pm when we go back to the multi, shower, sleep on an air mattress because all of our other furniture is at the new house and repeat. I know, I know, I signed myself up to this. But it's really exhausting and to describe it would be pointless because it's just a haze. My mom's been worried about my constant g0, go, go and thinks I'm making myself sick. She doesn't even know I've been skipping lunch, consuming nothing but coffee all day long and th...

News? Ugh, nothing good, so I'll just say things have been happening but most of them not-so-much things I want to talk about because I totally believe in jinxing things. For example? My husband went to NYC for a business day-trip. He got there just fine. Hopped on the Amtrak and was at the conference hall just fine. He insisted on taking my phone because mine is a normal cell phone. I told him he should then give me his for the days "just in case" and he brushed me off. I know when he's listening to me and taking me seriously and I know when he totally doesn't think what I'm saying has merit; this was one of those times. He didn't think it was a big deal and I'd be fine without a phone for one day. And I am the first to admit that I am not a phone person, and often forget the darned thing or keep it on vibrate. Well, inevitably things go wrong. He misses the last train from NYC to our town. He'd have to take a train to New Haven. I'd hav...

Merry Christmas! I'm so lame for writing on Christmas, huh? But I have sufficiently spent time with my family, I'm full of prime rib, and I have consumed an unusually large quantity of cookies. Every year I say I should make less, but every year I still insist on making at least 3 full batches, and thus 100 dozen cookies are created. Um, because talking about presents is super lame and superficial of me I'll mention my friend Cathy had a baby boy recently. That sounds way more important than my desire for a spiffy apron. I know because she picture texted me. I haven't actually talked to her since her wedding. We're really quite awful friends, but babies tend to always bring forward a feeling of goodwill despite general lack of good communication otherwise. She had a boy and his name is Alex. For the sake of general personal security I'll refrain from yelling his full name from the internets. Since I've already wandered down this topic I may as well co...

I have officially created a cookie snob. I finally made those cookies from the Toll House dough from the refrigerator section of and my husband doesn't like them. (It's snowing, nice warm cookies are a fun treat.) And he doesn't like them. It just figures! I've now cultivated in him a taste for real butter and real vanilla extract and and all the warm deliciousness that it implies. (This is clearly why he blames me for making him fat.) I don't really like them either but I'm just saying...people are not supposed to know the difference, right? But he totally knows! On a side note I think I've given up on Holiday Shopping. Am I really done? Not so much. But I'm over it. lol I like the holidays, and I like lame holiday music, and I even like Egg Nog but it's not really the same. I miss Amanda and cooking strange random recipes with her. I miss Kim not being literally attached to the baby all the time and buying me gifts that have absolutely n...

Holidays? Good. I don't have much to say about it because it was nice. Non-dramatic. No burned turkey. Turkey day with my husband's family. I love them, they're so cute. Day after with my family. Lots of deboned turkey stuffed with duck was consumed. I guess my mom was moved to make one after hearing about Devin's Turduckhen. I worked Friday because I was not fast enough on the draw to ask for it off and my coworkers were. Not like anyone called or emailed or anything. So it was a pretty good day to catch up and work on stuff I'd been having difficulty with. I did go to HRD's Hair Cut-a-thon because they had a deal where they were donating food to the Windsor Food Bank. If you brought in 6 items you could get a wash, cut and blow dry for $10. Of course I brought in way more than 6 items, but that's mostly in part to my love for food drives. I know there are people worse off than me and my husband is annoyingly negative and will stand on his high ...

Happy Mid-November. Chances are I'm going to forget to mention Thanksgiving but, heck. It's my favorite holiday of the year so I'll make mention of it now. I think the plan is to go to my mother in law's house. I'll need to come up with a better title than mother in law. Maybe, "Bonus Mother" is a more apt term. Mother in law sound so...negative and ugly. Anyway, I look forward to it. I show my best eating ability around the holidays, though I admit as I get older my appetite seems to shrink. That whole guilt thing about not wanting to die of morbid obesity where they have to cut a hole in the side of my house to get me. Devin is scheduled to make another Turduckhen . For the uninitiated it's a deboned chicken stuffed inside a deboned duck stuffed inside a semi- deboned turkey and is traditionally considered a southern dish. I would LOVE to host Thanksgiving. I wouldn't so much want to make a Turduckhen , but maybe next year just hostin...

So yeah, Hi. I didn't die. But I have been excruciatingly busy at work and I've kind of turned into a bleary eyed zombie. Also, so. many. things. have. happened! The farm had an offer put in on it so we had a small window of time to rent a UHaul and divide up the furniture among us. Trevor and I, although we have no space whatsoever in our apartment have aspirations of a bigger house and a bigger house requires a good amount of furniture. And furniture? It costs money. Money I don't have to spend. So that we were allowed to take things from the farm was nice. Other folks took things too; don't think it was just me and Trevor. The rest of the clan took chairs and tables and wicker and mirrors...etc. Halloween. I dressed up as Snow White. Trevor was Herbert the Pervert. We wanted to be a couples thing but we never agree on what we mutually decide is a "cool" costume. Though to be fair I mostly picked my costume to go with my hair because it's not l...