At 11:28 pm tonight (02/28/10), a year ago, my Dad died. And a big part of my heart died right along with him. I remember being asleep when my cell phone rang. I saw it was my Mom calling and I thought it was odd that she would call at such a late hour (we were an hour ahead of her). When I answered she didn't speak, she just sobbed. I don't remember what she actually said but I do remember saying incredulously, "Did you just say my Dad is dead?" I dropped the phone and fell to the floor. I screamed, with every fiber in my body, I screamed and I sobbed, "Not my Dad, not my Dad." Ed picked up the phone and asked my Mom a few questions and then told her that we would get on the road just as soon as we possibly could. I cried so hard I vomitted and the pain of such a blow was overwhelming to say the least. I couldn't stop shaking and I couldn't see straight. Thank goodness for my husband there to literally hold me up - because I thought for sure I was going to die too.
We threw suitcases of clothes together as fast as we could and since the next day was the first of my days off, we had very little clean laundry since I did laundry on my days off. We managed to get Garrett into the car and we left Pocatello (after making arrangements with a friend to take care of Kevlar & Siren) at about 3 am. Ed drove the whole way and try as I might, I couldn't sleep. G slept most of the trip thankfully. We got to Mom's house at about 11 am on Sunday, Dad having been dead for about 12 hours at that point. I've never felt more hollow walking into that house.
So much has changed in the last year. The pain is still just as strong but not so overwhelmingly intense. I have given in to the fact that he's gone.
But that's all I want to say about that right now. I will add to this post for my benefit, as my heart is ready to do it.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Hamball!
Here's proof that G is a goof. I can tell he's a natural born entertainer and I wouldn't be surprised if he does something like that when he grows up. I had set the camera on the toilet seat and rotated the screen thing around so he could see himself. Excuse my obnoxiousness - but I do have to beg for the few kisses that I do get.
I'm starting to wonder about him...
He loves to mess with my broom all the time and now he loves this as well - I promise I don't make him do it all the time...
Animal noises!
G isn't having what I'd call a language explosion right now but he is picking things up super fast! :) All of a sudden one day he just started making animal noises. Now he's a sponge for them. He knows how to make the sounds of:
cat
dog
monkey
sheep
horse (sounds the same as the sheep but hey he's trying)
duck
bird
bear
frog
I think there are a few more but off the top of my head that's all I can remember. Even though I'm no cat fan I have to say his kitty noise is stinkin' cute! He also started sayin E-I-E-I-O. That's when I realized that he got the animal sounds from his See & Say! Well I'll be darned! He identifies animals on cartoons now and makes the correct noises for them and everything. I love this stage even if it means he's growing up so fast!
Here's a few videos of him!
cat
dog
monkey
sheep
horse (sounds the same as the sheep but hey he's trying)
duck
bird
bear
frog
I think there are a few more but off the top of my head that's all I can remember. Even though I'm no cat fan I have to say his kitty noise is stinkin' cute! He also started sayin E-I-E-I-O. That's when I realized that he got the animal sounds from his See & Say! Well I'll be darned! He identifies animals on cartoons now and makes the correct noises for them and everything. I love this stage even if it means he's growing up so fast!
Here's a few videos of him!
G & the toddler bed
I was hoping it wasn't time yet but it is. Last week I heard G on the monitor and he was being whiny and such. Ed heard him too and said he thought he heard him kicking the wall (he was supposed to be napping). But kicking the wall isn't unusual - the fact that he was still awake after 45 minutes was. So I cracked open his bedroom door and found this:
Well that basically means he now knows how to get out of his crib. So why bother with the crib then? So we changed his crib into a toddler bed. I wanted to keep him contained at night for as long as I could but those days are now over. G and Daddy worked hard and took the front rail off and put the little rail on that helps keep him from falling out of the bed. Yeah he fell out that first night. That's my boy!
Well, the toddler bed is a HUGE success. He absolutely loves being able to get in his own bed. Just another sign that he's growing up so so fast. I wish he would slow down just a little bit - it breaks my heart to think that in the blink of an eye he's going to be graduating high school and leaving for bigger and better things!
Sometime this summer or maybe Christmas next year, once he gets too long for his toddler bed we'll find him a cool twin bed. Hopefully he won't be falling out of bed still come that time! We now know, thanks to Ed testing it out, that it can hold anything G tries to throw at it!
He has napped so amazingly in his new bed (well he thinks it's new - don't tell him). Bedtime is a lot easier than we'd anticipated as well. When he gets up in the morning he just knocks on his door and I can hear him on the monitor, "Mama - hewp!" At naptime I usually crack his door open after he's asleep and just let him come out whenever he wakes up. I love that sleepy/groggy face he has after a nap! I'm so proud of him for being such a big boy but I'm sad that it's come so soon! Wasn't I just buying a crib?
And of course he loves that he now has a soft place to land when he wants to read his books. We did pick him up a little step stool to make getting into his bed a little easier, but he packs that off more often than not. I'm wondiner how long it will be before he realizes that he can use it to reach other things...
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
A very Holbert weekend
James and his 10 year old daughter Alexus came to visit for the weekend!!! It was a last minute thing and by the time they got here G had already gone to bed, so he didn't see them on Friday night. Before they called on Friday I had accepted a huge project at work, thinking that I had the whole weekend to do it. Whoops. But I still managed to get to spend lots of time with them. G was so excited Saturday morning when he woke up and Alexus was on the couch playing her DS. G loves kids!!!
We decided to run over to Lolo for some groceries and so Alexus and I devised a plan to surprise her Daddy with a birthday cake, since the 6th was James' 34th birthday. I let her pick out everything and design the cake herself. She choose some kind of triple chocolate fudge cake and plain white frosting so we could color it. When we got home her and I started the cake process while Ed and G went outside to play in the snow - we joined them once the cake was in the oven. We let James nap and nap as his birthday present. Ha!
Once we got tired of playing outside (or more accurately, once the cake was almost done and it was getting dark, the four of us came back inside. Alexus and I waited for the cake to cool off and I made dinner after setting G and Alexus up to color at the kitchen table. G colored and Alexus made her Daddy a birthday card.
After dinner Alexus set out to decorating her Daddy's cake and then of course presenting it to him :)
I like he liked it - even though later he told me that the super chocolate is in fact Alexus' favorite - not his. Ha! She did a good job if you ask me. :) I put G to bed for the night and then went to work while Alexus taught Ed (Grandpa) how to play Mario Kart. He was thoroughly tromped, every race. And she kicked his butt at bowling as well. But I think he enjoyed himself plenty :)
The next morning there was more Wii playing while I worked and they waited for the Super Bowl to get started. But before the Super Bowl we all went outside to play in the snow some more. Alexus was waiting for Grandpa to come out and she was down in a snow bunker with snow balls ready. She nailed him as soon as she got a clear shot. :)
They all watched the Saints win their first ever Super Bowl while I worked in my office. I came out only to say hi and put G to bed once the time came.
James and Alexus left the next day, but we were so glad that they came to visit us!
It's all about the Choo-Choo!!!
He loves all things train related. That's what we hear all day long, "choo-choo!" He got a Thomas the Train remote control train for his birthday and it broke last week. Ed's been trying and trying to fix it, breaking it open and soldering wires and everything, but it doesn't seem to want to come back to life. G keeps bringing it to Ed and saying in a sad voice, "choo-choo dada." Ed has to tell him, "but it's broken buddy - I tried to fix it but I can't." I looked online to see if I could find a replacement one (yes, I'm a sucker like that) and I found one...for $69.99. So this Thomas will have to remain dead - because I'm not spending that!I am finding some Thomas stuff here and there though so hopefully we can get his mind off his non-functioning Thomas soon. Yay for eBay!
Something I've always wondered about considering most of my close friends have been guys...
Can Guys Really Just Be Friends with Women?
Can straight men and women also be best friends? Experts weigh in on this touchy topic.
By Mark Amundsen
Paul Silverman had a problem that probably should not have been a problem.
“I don’t think my platonic friendships with other women were the sole reasons behind my divorce, but they certainly influenced it,” says the Westchester, NY resident, whose marriage ended after two years. “Part of our problem was that my ex-wife felt like a lower priority than any of my friends during our relationship. Or a lower priority than my friends and other activities — my music, for instance. There was a time when my wife, while we were dating, was certainly jealous of my women friends, one in particular. This was early on, when we were still establishing trust. But it certainly didn’t help that most of my friends were (and still are) women.”
Silverman’s case raises some perennial puzzlers: Can men and women be best friends in a purely platonic relationship? And what does that mean to the romantic partner on the outside of that friendship looking in?
It’s been more than 20 years since Harry (Billy Crystal) told Sally (Meg Ryan), “What I’m saying is — and this is not a come-on in any way, shape, or form — is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” And then — spoiler alert! — the sex part gets in the way. Since then, we’ve seen Julia Roberts (MyBest Friend’s Wedding) and Patrick Dempsey (Made of Honor) fall in love with their opposite-sex friends, as well as several small-screen versions of the same story. And long before rom-com films even existed, Lord Darlington, in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, said, “Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.” Is culture reflecting reality? Is it impossible for men to be friends with women, especially those they find attractive?
Janice D. Bennett, Ph.D., a New York City-based relationship expert, has addressed this question a number of times on her Web site, DoctorLoveCoach.com. Dr. Bennett notes that physical attraction is not the only kind of attraction that exists: “What makes two people friends? Well, they are ‘attracted’ to something in the other, and they want to spend time together. A young girl likes her Barbie dolls, and her neighbor likes them too, so they play Barbies together. Maybe a boy is attracted to another boy who is very good in sports, or they follow the same teams, and so they become friends and spend time together. So why wouldn’t this be true with the opposite sex, even as adults? A man and a woman both enjoy participating in tennis matches, or they work together on a charity function, or they both like wine tastings. They found some attribute or behavior that is mutually attractive.”
This contradicts the popular notion that men have loyal, superficial friendships that focus on things like a shared passion for Cheez-Its and the NFL, while women have deep, enriching relationships that run straight to the soul (until they have a disagreement about shoes that results in all-out war). So even if there are shared interests, don’t men and women have incompatible friendship styles?
Karen Walker of the University of Pennsylvania published a paper in a 1994 issue of the journal Gender & Society:
“In order to assure a new love interest that there’s nothing more to the friendship than friendship, there has to be A) self-control and B) trust,” says Dr. Bennett. “You have to be the kind of guy with integrity who says what he means and means what he says — that’s my definition of integrity. He can be trusted that he is loyal and committed to his girlfriend, and that this romantic relationship takes priority over his friendship with the woman any day.”
For the person on the third side of the relationship — the love interest who discovers that a significant other has a best friend of the opposite gender — there’s a tendency to presume that the friendship on display is the residue of a romance gone awry. After all, if they like each other so much, why aren’t they dating?
“First off, if you’re in a relationship with somebody who has opposite-sex friends, try not to let your insecurities get out of control,” advises Diane Mapes, author of How to Date in a Post-Dating World. “Confidence is a big plus in this situation; constantly making jealous noises gets old fast and if your significant other isn’t sleeping with the person, you might just talk him or her into trying it.”
That doesn’t mean you have to be silent. “I think asking questions about the nature of the friendship is fine — how did you meet? What do you like about this person? What kind of stuff do you guys do together? Those are the kind of questions you’d throw out for any friendship,” says Mapes. “But hammering on about whether they’re sleeping together or asking if your sweetie loves this friend more than you... stuff like that is just going to drive your significant other away.”
The fact is that some straight men and women are just friends. “I have a couple of very close relationships with men as well, though my closest platonic relationships are with women,” says Silverman. If a guy is honest when he’s dating, it works to his advantage. As for the new girlfriend, Mapes recommends, “Interaction with both parties is what you want. In fact, the best way to handle a boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s opposite-sex friend is to become friends with that person yourself. That way, you can all hang out together, and if the friend has designs on your significant other, that person will now have to deal with the guilt of betraying yet another friend — you.”
Having integrity also means respecting the boundaries of friendship. (Silverman says that he has never run up against boundary issues with his female friends.) People tend to work these things out on their own; men and women are likely to know how much physical contact or emotional intimacy is appropriate.
But let’s say the When Harry Met Sally scenario dos happen: a male-female friendship evolves into sexual intimacy for a brief time. Or perhaps a romantic relationship devolves into a “let’s be friends” situation. Can true friendship survive, or is it like trying to turn a pickle back into a cucumber?
Dr. Bennett finds it improbable. “It’s very difficult to have a platonic relationship with someone you’ve been physically intimate with,” she says. “That’s because you still have emotional energy ‘cathected’ to the other person. This may be more true for women than for men, but as I’ve been known to say, sex is like superglue: It’s very easy to get stuck, but very difficult to get unstuck.”
Mark Amundsen, a writer and editor in New York, makes friends wherever he goes.
Can straight men and women also be best friends? Experts weigh in on this touchy topic.
By Mark Amundsen
Paul Silverman had a problem that probably should not have been a problem.
“I don’t think my platonic friendships with other women were the sole reasons behind my divorce, but they certainly influenced it,” says the Westchester, NY resident, whose marriage ended after two years. “Part of our problem was that my ex-wife felt like a lower priority than any of my friends during our relationship. Or a lower priority than my friends and other activities — my music, for instance. There was a time when my wife, while we were dating, was certainly jealous of my women friends, one in particular. This was early on, when we were still establishing trust. But it certainly didn’t help that most of my friends were (and still are) women.”
Silverman’s case raises some perennial puzzlers: Can men and women be best friends in a purely platonic relationship? And what does that mean to the romantic partner on the outside of that friendship looking in?
It’s been more than 20 years since Harry (Billy Crystal) told Sally (Meg Ryan), “What I’m saying is — and this is not a come-on in any way, shape, or form — is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” And then — spoiler alert! — the sex part gets in the way. Since then, we’ve seen Julia Roberts (MyBest Friend’s Wedding) and Patrick Dempsey (Made of Honor) fall in love with their opposite-sex friends, as well as several small-screen versions of the same story. And long before rom-com films even existed, Lord Darlington, in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, said, “Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.” Is culture reflecting reality? Is it impossible for men to be friends with women, especially those they find attractive?
Janice D. Bennett, Ph.D., a New York City-based relationship expert, has addressed this question a number of times on her Web site, DoctorLoveCoach.com. Dr. Bennett notes that physical attraction is not the only kind of attraction that exists: “What makes two people friends? Well, they are ‘attracted’ to something in the other, and they want to spend time together. A young girl likes her Barbie dolls, and her neighbor likes them too, so they play Barbies together. Maybe a boy is attracted to another boy who is very good in sports, or they follow the same teams, and so they become friends and spend time together. So why wouldn’t this be true with the opposite sex, even as adults? A man and a woman both enjoy participating in tennis matches, or they work together on a charity function, or they both like wine tastings. They found some attribute or behavior that is mutually attractive.”
This contradicts the popular notion that men have loyal, superficial friendships that focus on things like a shared passion for Cheez-Its and the NFL, while women have deep, enriching relationships that run straight to the soul (until they have a disagreement about shoes that results in all-out war). So even if there are shared interests, don’t men and women have incompatible friendship styles?
Karen Walker of the University of Pennsylvania published a paper in a 1994 issue of the journal Gender & Society:
“In order to assure a new love interest that there’s nothing more to the friendship than friendship, there has to be A) self-control and B) trust,” says Dr. Bennett. “You have to be the kind of guy with integrity who says what he means and means what he says — that’s my definition of integrity. He can be trusted that he is loyal and committed to his girlfriend, and that this romantic relationship takes priority over his friendship with the woman any day.”
For the person on the third side of the relationship — the love interest who discovers that a significant other has a best friend of the opposite gender — there’s a tendency to presume that the friendship on display is the residue of a romance gone awry. After all, if they like each other so much, why aren’t they dating?
“First off, if you’re in a relationship with somebody who has opposite-sex friends, try not to let your insecurities get out of control,” advises Diane Mapes, author of How to Date in a Post-Dating World. “Confidence is a big plus in this situation; constantly making jealous noises gets old fast and if your significant other isn’t sleeping with the person, you might just talk him or her into trying it.”
That doesn’t mean you have to be silent. “I think asking questions about the nature of the friendship is fine — how did you meet? What do you like about this person? What kind of stuff do you guys do together? Those are the kind of questions you’d throw out for any friendship,” says Mapes. “But hammering on about whether they’re sleeping together or asking if your sweetie loves this friend more than you... stuff like that is just going to drive your significant other away.”
The fact is that some straight men and women are just friends. “I have a couple of very close relationships with men as well, though my closest platonic relationships are with women,” says Silverman. If a guy is honest when he’s dating, it works to his advantage. As for the new girlfriend, Mapes recommends, “Interaction with both parties is what you want. In fact, the best way to handle a boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s opposite-sex friend is to become friends with that person yourself. That way, you can all hang out together, and if the friend has designs on your significant other, that person will now have to deal with the guilt of betraying yet another friend — you.”
Having integrity also means respecting the boundaries of friendship. (Silverman says that he has never run up against boundary issues with his female friends.) People tend to work these things out on their own; men and women are likely to know how much physical contact or emotional intimacy is appropriate.
But let’s say the When Harry Met Sally scenario dos happen: a male-female friendship evolves into sexual intimacy for a brief time. Or perhaps a romantic relationship devolves into a “let’s be friends” situation. Can true friendship survive, or is it like trying to turn a pickle back into a cucumber?
Dr. Bennett finds it improbable. “It’s very difficult to have a platonic relationship with someone you’ve been physically intimate with,” she says. “That’s because you still have emotional energy ‘cathected’ to the other person. This may be more true for women than for men, but as I’ve been known to say, sex is like superglue: It’s very easy to get stuck, but very difficult to get unstuck.”
Mark Amundsen, a writer and editor in New York, makes friends wherever he goes.
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