Missed us today?

For the second time in our history, we were down for more than just a couple of minutes. While we are based in freaking cold Michigan, our host is based in Miami. So, while we get all the bad of the cold weather, we also get the "benefits" of hurricane season! AHHHHH!

Please forgive us, and spend twice as much to help us make up for all that lost time ;).

Thanks
Jessica

Deadbeats burn my butt!

Picture my face with steam exploding out of both ears. I can't believe some people. We have recently been the victims of several deadbeats. We've had people place orders with stolen credit cards (to the tune of $6000, thank you very much, and our volume isn't so large that a hit like that doesn't take us months to recover from), place large orders and then pay with a bad check (luckily, before we decided to do away with this option for this reason, we always held an order until payment was cleared), and place orders for items the post office delivered but they insist they never received it and it should be our fault despite the delivery confirmation showing it was the USPS' fault. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm sorry to complain and complain, but these things hurt all of our customers. Because we had to give away nearly $10,000 of money we were already banking on, in just one month, we have been behind on our shipment receipts, which makes us late to get new items, which is especially irritating to those who are waiting for backordered items. We also must shave down the offerings for the next season, and further delay our wholesale line... All the while endangering our relationships with suppliers and other service providers because our payments are late... And the ripple effect is really astounding.

If you are visiting this site and thinking a business owner has it made in the shade, I just wanted to pass out a reality check. Who do you think is the last one to be paid when the doo doo hits the fan like this? Who do you think is so late on her bills that her heat is shut off just as it turns 35 degrees outside with 2 small children in the house? Who do you think cries every night contemplating whether to close up shop and destroy her dream and put many others out of work...?

And please god don't let me ever catch you being a deadbeat! You may think that everyone you do business with is a faceless corporation, but more than you think are struggling each day just to continue to ask for the opportunity to do something for you again, and you need to treat them as such.

Thanks for the soapbox.

Wow, it's been a long time...

You should see how long it's been since I've written to the kids in their journals! Or gotten video tape of them doing anything. Time just creeps up on you like that. Especially when you work about 90-95 hours a week and sleep very little. I've GOT to find someone compitent to share this business stuff with me, because I'm going down in a handbasket soon if I don't. It was fun to go breakneck at first, but after 2 years straight... I just seriously didn't anticipate the growth spurts this business would have. I figured it would be rather steady, not jumping up (and sometimes down) so quickly.

But I still have tons of fun with the kids. Next week is Eva's birthday. I'm going to send a newsletter next week with an announcement and some sale (haven't decided yet) .

We planted all kinds of new plants in the front this weekend. I was digging my first hole, jumped up on the shovel, fell back right on a rock that twisted my foot out from under me and fell square on my butt. Hit so hard my teeth clamped together and I felt my brain hurt. Landed on my hand too and it's now bruised. Julian just looked at me stunned, like he couldn't believe what he was seeing. He didn't say anything. I said "How do you guys do that all the time!? That really hurts!" That broke him out of it and he started pouring out words as usual.

His note from daycare on the days he goes always say "Talkative" for how he felt that day. That's my Julian, just like Daddy. I used to tell Jay to just see if he could be quiet for 5 minutes. He would say "Hey, I haven't used up all my words for today." Somebody decided Julian gets a large allowance of daily words.

He and Eva have been incredibly cute lately. He's been very into imaginative play and she's been copying everything he does.

Last week they were playing with the baby dolls. Julian gave them a bath and got in with them because "You can't leave babies all by themselves in the bathtub, Mommy, or they could drown and then they would die." Then we got them out and I dried them off and asked what you do when you get the babies out of the tub. "Get them dressed and put them to bed." (We've got a pretty solid routine in our house)

So he spends great care in getting them dressed, then picks up his favorite, cradles it to his chest and walks over to the couch with it making slurping noises. I hear him saying very quietly "Ow! Baby, gentle please. That nipple's sore." (Who's he been listening to lately? Me, of course. The constant thrush battle Eva's entire 2 years after the double antibiotics in the hospital during her stay her 2nd week of life has made me very sensitive)

He finishes nursing it to sleep and puts it down. I asked him something and he whispers "Mommy, quietly, or you'll wake up my baby and I'll have to NURSE him AGAIN" and I try not to laugh and I say "Yeah, that's a real pain, huh, Bub?" He nods.

He gets up, goes and gets the other 2 babies and walks back to the couch with them. He says to me in a very excited voice "Mommy, I can nurse TWO babies!" and procedes to nurse both at the same time, with much slurping. He gets up on the couch, lays them on their backs, then lays on top of them to finish nursing them so they will go to sleep. lol

Then he gets up and says "I'm the Daddy now, and I have to go to work" and heads off to the play room. (It's Daddy's busy season and he's been working long days, which effects everyone, but especially Julian since he's always been Julian's favorite person in the whole world)

He is really the funniest kid.

My Eva Lillian and Julian - January 2005

She has enough hair for pigtails!

Teen Pregnancy - What is wrong with parents today?

Why do they have to put disturbing news on the news?

I was listening to the snippets on the radio today. In a nearby city a 16 year old boy is going away for a long time. He and his girlfriend devised a plan for him to beat her in the stomach with a baseball bat daily over the course of 2 weeks to force a miscarriage. A nearly 6 month old fetus was born at her home at the end of the 2 weeks. They didn't say whether or not it survived. I think they left death as a given. I felt like vomiting.

How scared must those kids have been of their parents to do something so phenominally stupid and horrible? What is wrong with parents today that they would be so distanced from their children that the kids would do something like this, not only to another human being, thier very own child, but to themselves and their families. That boy's life is ruined. All because they felt they couldn't go to their parents when the scariest thing that had ever happened in their lives happened to them.

Why do we preach absitenence when we know it doesn't do the trick? Why do we protest abortion clinics, but not do what we can to make adoptions less difficult and costly? When you mention teen pregnancy, why is the first thing that pops into your head a girl dropping out of school, grandparents raising the baby while mom parties and lives on welfare for the rest of her life contributing to the problem with subsequent children?

I know that I was so terrified of getting pregnant before I was ready, and being forced to make a decision I NEVER wanted to make, that I abstained for a LONG time. I had a plan for my life (of course it was totally different than it turned out, but that's beside the point:) ). I wanted to be a mother more than I've ever wanted to do anything else in my life, since I was about 4 yrs old, but I couldn't have a baby too soon, before I was ready to give it more than I had had in life.

I also knew that I could NEVER give away that thing I wanted more than anything in life. If I'd had to love my baby for 9 months and then hand him to someone else never to know of him again I honestly would have probably committed suicide. And while I fully support a woman's right to choose, I could never have chosen abortion and lived with myself. So I did what I needed to do to avoid that decision. (Unfortunately, 99.9% of young people are not so far thinking.)

However, if adoptions were more open... If loving mothers were given the opportunity to be a part of that baby's life, see it, love it, be the friend of the family that visits and brings gifts, maybe it would be different. If children were not stigmatized and ostracized, if they were accepted by their families and society, even though they'd made a mistake, maybe it would different. If girls were valued more highly in any society, and the value of a human life was not reduced to next to nothing (if you want to take it, anyway. $10,000+ if you want to save it through adoption), maybe we wouldn't have teenagers leaving babies in garbage bags on the side of the road or killing them with baseball bats.

Oh, all my tears for a utopian world free from the suffering that wrenches my heart daily...

Never ever get just one of anything with 2 kids!

Uggh! Why do I always have to learn things the hard way. We got a new kitten over Thanksgiving. That poor little thing. Not only is it constantly mugged by one or the other of the kids (which I suppose is good, because she's being trained from the get go on taking it with a grain of salt), but when one is holding her the other wants her. And it's not like she even wanted to be held by the first one, but is instead being pinned down against all her little will.

Eva thinks that every time she meows it's a good thing. She'll pick her up by the throat (we correct her and say by the body), then she meows at her, and if the kitten doesn't meow back it becomes Eva's personal mission to make her do so. She starts shaking her and pinching her and anything else until she hears that longed for sound. Then she grins and hugs the kitty close and puts her head next to hers. Then it starts all over again. lol

Julian loves that thing more than anything in the world. He talks about her when he goes to school, can't wait to get home to play with her, wants to hold her while he's doing everything from eating, to sleeping, to using the bathroom! And he's so gentle with her. Watching him with the cats eons ago (like maybe a year and a half?) you certainly never would have thought it.

And, lastly, Jay and I are starting to really dislike the new kitten because it's developed the odius habit of choosing places other than the litter box for it's business. The cats are permenetly locked out of my office and they have been spending a lot of time locked in the room with the litter box. The big ones will teach her, and she has no other place to go. I hope she gets it, because MAN would it be bad if I had to take Julian's Sarabi away. Yikes!

Here are my little Native Americans

That was the first and last 2 minutes Eva wore the hair the entire week of Halloween. But at least we got it for posterity. :)

I have the most beautiful son in the world

I love my kid so much! I've recently been talking to him (just turned 3) about how some people don't have the things we have. They don't have food in the kitchen whenever they want it, they don't have a car, they don't have a house, maybe they don't even have parents. The first time I told him this his eyes about bugged out of his head. You could see his little mind trying to assimilate this information. Then he said "no..." with a half-smile. He thought I was wrong or lying! I wish it were so...

So we brainstormed about things that we could do to help these people. I told him how Mommy gives money to the little orphans in Africa that have no one. And I told him there are people right here in our city that need help, too. I told him about the little kids that have mean daddies (a topic near and dear to my heart, as I was one of them). They had to leave their homes and have nothing nice, and probably don't get to go trick-or-treating. So he decided (with some help from me, of course) that he would choose just a little bit of his Halloween candy and give the rest to the kids with mean daddies. :) When anyone would ask him about what he was going to be for Halloween or if he was going trick-or-treating, he would get all excited and say "Yeah! And I'm going to go to houses and yell 'Trick-or treat' as loud as I can, and I'm gonna get candy, and I'm gonna give it to the kids without houses!"

Last night we divied it up and took it to the domestic abuse shelter in our city and he got to hand the candy to the administrators. I almost teared up. That's going to be a new tradition in our house now.