Category: MLV

Sun., Feb 2nd – I woke up and had some breakfast, then started opening all the gift bags, taking pictures of everything, and separating by color so that I could start washing Emily’s tiny clothes. I still needed to go buy some Dreft, but I’d do that later.

I literally piled everything up in a corner of my room till we need it, like the tiny bassinet you can put between yourself and your spouse to keep from rolling over the baby if she sleeps with you and tons of diapers and wipees.

I started making a list of all the stuff we needed, which wasn’t much and we didn’t really need anything, it’s more wanting things for convenience. I’d go to Target and Walmart the next day while the boys were in school. Maybe John would go with me.

Mon., Feb. 3rd – I wanted to go to town all day. John never answered my texts. I was going to go to town on my own (Mom was watching Alaethia and about to give her lunch) but it was already 1pm and I only got to go to the bank. I came back home and totally busted Mom eating on sofa. And she says she’s not the one teaching Alaethia bad habits! Grr. Anyway, Alaethia was eating and I made myself some lunch, too. I took a shower and picked up the boys. I dropped them off and went straight to the doctor.

I got to read about 2-3 chapters from Twilight while I waited. Mario texts me that he and Jorge just had Kumori. He does it on purpose! I told him I was mad and he told me not to be. I told him I wouldn’t be mad if he went to town with me that evening. Ha! I got myself a shopping buddy!

I was laughing with Laura, my nurse, when I got called in. I weighed 140.1 lbs. I got a sono done: her head is HUGE. They’ll start seeing me weekly from now on and Dr. C. needs to check me the next time. I needed to get the Group B-strep culture done and Laura was going to be the one to do it LOL. She and I both felt embarrassed about it so she handed the swab to me, explained what to do and so I did it. As I’m walking out of the room Erica takes the culture from me and Laura puts her arm around me and starts telling Elizabeth and Erica how she just couldn’t get herself to do it because we’re good friends. I got my next appointment card from Elvira and then went home to pick up the Walmart and Target bags of stuff to exchange.

I picked up Mario and we went to Target first. I exchanged the white/gray head support for the pink/gray one and we got everything we needed from there. As we were walking I told Mario how, the week before Alaethia was born, John and I were running around everywhere looking for her stroller and Boppy and everything else I needed for her. It was super cold and drizzly that whole week.

We went to Walmart next. We got all the baby stuff we needed and even got the girls matching dresses! We exchanged the dress Sally had gotten for Alaethia on her birthday for a smaller size and found the exact same one in Newborn for Emily! Too cute. I can’t wait to see them in the dresses together :). I was surprised that Mario was actually being a good sport. He wasn’t annoyed or rushing me at all. If I didn’t know any better I’d say he’s a bit excited picking things out for his new baby daughter ;).

We got a new crib mattress for Emily, since the one that ‘s currently in the crib is Alaethia’s and she’ll need it for when her toddler bed comes in. I’d ordered it online from Walmart and it should be coming in from Feb. 13th to the 20th sometime. I still wish I hadn’t gotten rid of the boys’ cute white plastic bed. But we didn’t think we’d have anymore kids and Alaethia’s crib turns into a day/toddler bed and then a full-size bed. But oh well. I’m glad we found a nice, white wooden bed for Aly—and that it was under $65!

Oh the way home we went to Jorge and Maggie’s for a while. We sat around the table laughing with them and watching Jorge put up his new TV stand, then came home after an hour or so. We told them we’d go back. I had been hinting at Mario that we should leave quickly so I could get home, put everything away, make dinner and get Alaethia ready but no. He wanted to stay for an hour. Ok. So we get home and he’s moping around, not talking to me because he’s already in a mood. Too bad; I needed to eat and so did Aly. While he was sitting there moping I told him to please get up and help me to speed things along, so he got Alaethia ready. We finally got to leave after an hour.

Aly was well-behaved. She just sat on the sofa watching the fruits of Jorge’s labor: mounting his 50″ Hitachi on the new stand. It looks really nice! They’re doing amazing things in that house (Jorge’s Mom’s house). They removed this huge picture off the wall that was well, sort of 80’s, and now the place looks even bigger. I can’t wait to see how the house’ll look when they remove all the dark wood paneling.

I think that was also the night the guys started working on the new laminate wood floor they were installing in Jorgie and Justin’s bedroom. They’d already had new drywall and paint done, all the needed was the flooring and painting the trim white. It looked really nice and pretty easy to do. I wish we could put that type of flooring in our house, but the floors need to be re-leveled badly

Maggie didn’t think we were going back so she’d gone to sleep, so Aly and I just watched the guys working on the floor. We got home rather late, around 2am and we were beat.

The day of Emily’s baby shower!

I woke up around 10am and went over to Mary’s to help with potato peeling and whatever else they needed help with. Mona, Elda and Mom were already there helping. We started putting everything into the trucks so Mary, Mona and Elda could take everything to the hall.

Once I was done helping out I came to shower and straighten my hair. I thought I was going to have enough time to do everything, but as always, I ended up having to rush. Noelia got here around that time. I bathed Alaethia and got her dressed in the cute yellow bumblebee outfit Sonia bought her from Gymboree for her birthday. She threw such a fit while I was trying to do her hair—she hates for anyone to mess with her hair—so it took around 20 minutes to do her hair alone.

So I’m getting all her stuff together and finally start getting dressed myself when Noelia and Mary come in to see what I need help with. They were both dressed in cute dresses and cardigans…and I looked at my clothes and I was in a (really cute, but still) blouse and jeans. I decided to completely scrap the jeans and put on my black and white giraffe print dress and black cardigan. But then I looked down at my legs and realized I didn’t shave during my shower. Great. I hiked up my dress, used a washcloth to wet and lather up my legs with soap and started shaving. I cut myself in 3 different places, which is really weird because I have that Lady Shick razor and never cut myself, but I guess I was in that much of a hurry. I re-rinsed my legs with a clean washcloth, slapped on my makeup and Mom, Jaylen and I were out the door. Eenan went with us to Alaethia’s baby shower two years ago but decided he’d rather go with Mario to Jorge’s (Mario’s Nino) to start prepping for the Superbowl Party.

We arrived about 8 minutes late. Mona, Elda, Noelia, Mary of course, Sonia, Yadira and kids were already there. I walked around saying hello and aunts of co-workers of Mary’s started showing up. The aunts that said they weren’t going to make it because basically, the Superbowl was more important, really didn’t show up. Sally and Carmen had already told me they couldn’t; Sally had prior plans and Carmen’s little girl was sick, plus she had to get ready to ship out for the Army (!), so they didn’t make it. But all my other friends…they didn’t show up either. It was pretty disappointing. They didn’t even have to bring a gift…it would have been nice just to see them.

Aunt Nora at least got to go, and that’s because I let her know at the last minute because I’d sent the invite to Justin and he forgot to tell her about it, heh. The games were fun. Mary had them make a baby out of Bubble Yum bubble gum. It was between Norma D. and Venessa’s baby, so they both got a prize.

They also played a word scramble and then The Price Is Right. That one was a little difficult, but around 4 people ended up tied with 1 right each LOL.

We had bingo and the food that Mary made herself (chicken in celery sauce, corn, mashed potatoes and a roll). It was delicious. Everyone kept asking if she’d gotten the event catered!

Jaylen took his DS so he was entertained for the most part. He did get a little teary-eyed when bingo was over and he hadn’t won anything LOL. Alaethia was running around with all the other babies, especially Belle. And when she’d get bored there was always someone who wanted to hold her, so she was happy.

They had a few more games and then Elda, Yadira, Mary and I served dessert, while Natalie, Yazmin and . The cake was great, even though, as always, the lady messed up on the colors. The grapefruit pie and everything else was awesome. Everyone started leaving around this time, except for close family. They waited patiently for my slow butt to finish my dessert and then they made a huge circle of chairs around the gift table to watch me open gifts

There were so many cute, tiny things! Emily has tons of new clothes, plus her hand-me-downs for Alaethia and Vicky—this girl will NEVER run out of clothes!

I was amazed at everyone’s generosity! I had to really cram everything into the back of the Equinox to make everything fit! Aide was a doll and helped so much with putting everything up. She said I shouldn’t be doing anything because I’m pregnant. As she was walking away with a ton of bags I’m thinking, “Hello?! You’re pregnant, too!”

Yes, she is! They’d told us the day before. We’d just been talking about how they’d been trying for months now and still nothing at Jorge and Mona’s housewarming party the week before. Annie said that pregnancies usually come in 3’s, so she was surprised that no one else was pregnant along with me. She said it’ll either be Aide, Noelia, Elda, or Mona along with me. Aide had texted me, “Guess I’m one of the three!” LOL Let’s see who else is next!

We drove over to Jorge and Mona’s and met up with all the guys, who were already bar-b-q’ing and drinking. Mario and I went to Dollar General a few blocks away after a while to get dip, cheese and some of those 3-d glasses for the half-time show, or whatever it was. I ran into one of my students, Eric, when we were walking out the door. Once we got back we watched the game and ate and then the 3-d show started. It sucked. We couldn’t see a damn thing with those glasses LOL.

Most of the girls got bored and went inside to chat around the table. Then we moved our congregation to the living room where I copied the pictures Mona took at the baby shower to my SD card. Technology’s lovely.

As I was copying the pictures, Mario goes over to the sofa I was at and sits next to me. He tells me he’s tired and he wants to go home. I tell him okay, I’m almost done transferring the pictures. I’m into my conversation with Mona and Annie so I don’t notice that he leaves. I mean, really leaves. He doesn’t tell anyone anything, just stealthily disappears like a ninja. He calls me like 15 minutes later and tells me that yup, he didn’t want anyone to stop him from leaving so he just left. When we got home the old man was already asleep! Oh, but when I was working he was up every night till 2am!

I looked around and decided that I’d wait till the next day to put everything away. I had a long day!

I woke up that morning after the phone rang several times. I finally got annoyed and got up to answer it. It was some guy from Bert Ogden Nissan calling, once again, to convince us to go in to the dealership. I told the guy I was speaking to how we had very specific wants and needs, which included trading in the Equinox and having our new car payment cut in half—and I knew this was impossible. He asked how much we owed and I told him, and he said, “Oh yes ma’am, we’ll definitely be able to do that.” So I went to the bedroom to tell Mario, who’d been listening and was already awake. We got ready and went to dealership after I called Mom to watch the kiddos.

I can always tell beforehand how something’s going to go for me, and as soon as we drove onto that parking lot I knew it wasn’t going to work out.

We spoke to someone and told him we didn’t want to string him along and told him exactly what we wanted: trade-in, payment cut in half, and we never give a down payment. We’ve only given a down payment for 3 of the 4 cars we’ve owned and bought at dealerships. He promised he’d be able to help us, so that gave me a little spark of hope, but I guess that’s what they’re trained for, right?

He showed us a Sentra, which was really nice and drove incredibly, but I kept thinking about a van. We’re going to have 4 kids…we need something bigger, not smaller. But Mario said we can always trade it in later when we actually need all the space, so I agreed. Long story short: they were totally trying to jip us. Even after giving them our requirements they still came and told us we’d need at least a $4,000 down payment to have a $400 a month payment and they were only giving us $4,000 for our truck. That was bull, because we’d gotten it appraised for much higher. I was about to just get up and leave and the guy said he’d run the numbers again. Sure, just keep lowering my damn points! But, whatever. I read Twilight and Mario read his book and we waited.

A manager comes to us a while later and sits down, makes small talk about reading. I close my book and stare at him and he begins to talk. This one tells us we’d need a $4,800 payment to get a payment of $545 a month and showed us two other tiers of down payments which would somewhat lower the monthly payment. Um, no. Every single one was still more than we already paid and this was for a car. I told him, “Look. We came here because the first guy I spoke to said he’d help us. I gave him the facts. I wouldn’t be here right now if he hadn’t said that. This is a waste of our time, yours and ours.” He didn’t even try to convince us. He just stood up and shook our hands and we left. Grr. Waste of a Saturday morning!

Since we didn’t have anything to eat in the morning we went to eat at Taco Bell. I hadn’t been there in a while and was surprised Mario brought up going, since he’s not a big fan. When we were eating I remembered that the darn dealership guy didn’t give me my driver’s license back. Grr. We went back to get it then went to Freddy’s (Mario’s cousin) dealership to check how much the car was worth. He gave us the facts quickly and straight up. And he told us the truck was worth at least $8,000, not $4,000.

We went to the mall after that to the Mimi Maternity store. I was on a hunt for an inexpensive, but nice dress for my baby shower the next day. I didn’t want to spent more than $25 since it was a dress I’d probably only be wearing once. JC Penny didn’t have anything and the Mimi Maternity store had one dress I really, really liked, but it was $40. I was moping around, complaining when Mario reminded me about “the store downtown we went to last time”. I put the dress back on the rack and strangled him with a hug. He does pay attention sometimes! He said, “You see, I’m not completely useless.”

All the way over there, we had some interesting conversations about some people we know. Dirty people LOL.

We had an easy time finding a parking space, amazingly, but had no luck finding the store. Mario was remembering Melrose, which is where I got my dress for Mrs. V.’s daughter’s quinceñera, but they didn’t have anything but pants. We reached the end of the strip and crossed the street and went back the other way. The store I was thinking about was one I could have sworn was on a corner, but we went to every corner store and nothing. I was about to give up when I remembered the entryway to the store I was talking about and lo and behold, we found it! They didn’t have any dresses whatsoever, but I did find a nice blouse. I figured I’d pair it with jeans and my brown sandals. I was glad just to have found something.

I helped Mary and Elda with the distinctivos (or, favors) for the baby shower. After a few hot glue burns and making a mess of some, I finished with my part and came back home to start working on the grapefruit pies I was making for the baby shower the next day.

I don’t remember where Mario went, but he said he’d help me and then wasn’t around so I spent 2 hours peeling the darn grapefruits on my own. It felt like an eternity, but it was so nice to be done with it. Now I just had to wait till the next day to eat it!