Mountains and Follicles and Passover, Oh My!

We are back from our long weekend away with friends, and it was fantastic. Just what I needed.

We had eight adults and four toddlers, and we rented a five-bedroom cabin in the mountains. LL loved having all the people around, and he loved sledding and playing outside in the snow. (For comparison: two of the other kids screamed bloody murder every time we went outside, and the third one took half an hour to get used to the weather every single time we went out. While the other children were fairly miserable in the cold weather and thin air, LL ran circles around them and kept trying to hand them snowballs. The other kids spent a lot of time inside the cabin.) One of my friends is hyper-organized, and thanks to all of her pre-planning, all of the logistics went smoothly. We all drove to the cabin more or less together, we stopped together for lunch, we stopped again to play at a park to give the kids a break, we checked into the cabin without a hitch, we each brought a small collection of groceries such that all of our meals were planned and ready to go... it was wonderful.

I was most worried about whether LL would sleep in the cabin, since he usually doesn't sleep well in a pack'n'play, but it actually wasn't too bad. He went to sleep well each night. He then woke up around 1am, and we just brought him into bed with us and he went back to sleep (after flopping around for a bit). In the past, whenever we've attempted to co-sleep, none of the three of us got much sleep. I don't know if all the heavy playing wore LL out, or if he's just older and more adaptable, but this weekend it wasn't so bad. And the cabin was a bit cold at night, so I actually appreciated the hot little body in footie pajamas that insisted on sleeping on top of me.

Best of all, since we were all staying in the same cabin, we weren't constantly needing to leave in order to get kids home to nap or eat or whatever. We all got some adults-only time each day during naptime, and again at night after the kiddos were all asleep. And we traded off subsets of adults playing with all the kids, so we each got a fair amount of time during the day to put our feet up, have a drink, and chat with other adults. Heavenly.

And now... back to reality. I had another follicle scan, which showed that my one and only little follicle had been reabsorbed back into my ovary. It didn't grow, it didn't shrink, it definitely didn't release an egg (if it had, the corpus luteum would have been visible on the ultrasound). Instead, it just faded away. Since I'm already at cycle day 20+, Dr. M gave me a progesterone shot to quickly end the cycle, so we can move on to the next one. We're going to try one more cycle with 200mg of clomid.

In the mean time, I need to turn my attention to more pressing matters. Like the fact that my entire family is arriving for Passover in less than two weeks, and I have done none of my normal pre-holiday prep. Passover seders for 30 people don't just plan themselves. Also, I'm theoretically graduating in less than 90 days, and my thesis isn't going to write itself.

Double Fail

My one and only follicle on Tuesday measured in at 14mm, below the minimum 18mm needed to proceed with an IUI. They typically grow 1-2mm per day, so we gave it three days and came back today to check again. Know how big it was today? 14mm.

Stupid follicle. Stupid lazy ovary. Did I mention how much this sucks?

So, two possibilities. Either I actually ovulated yesterday, and the follicle grew really fast and then shrank again (unlikely, but Dr. M held it out there as a possibility) or the follicle just isn't growing (probably a bad egg). (And now I want to go rent The Bad Seed.) (My mind works in weird ways.) I'm going back for another ultrasound on Tuesday so that he can check whether it has grown (unlikely), shrunk (also unlikely), or just stayed approximately the same (that's where my money is). Based on how it looks, we'll figure out where to go next. Dr. M thinks that I could probably do one more clomid cycle, at the same dosage, based on the belief that everybody has bad cycles sometimes. He also mentioned maybe trying a cycle or two of femara instead, to see if I respond better. Or perhaps it's just time to move on to injectibles.

My hesitation with injectibles, by the way, isn't a fear of needles. S is scared of needles, but I'm not. I know that S won't be able to help me with injections, but I think that I'll be able to handle it myself just fine. I am a little annoyed with the added expense, but our insurance isn't too bad. My bigger concern is that I'll need to switch doctors. Dr. M is my ob/gyn; he's not an RE, though he does handle a lot of fertility patients for his practice. I've never doubted that I was in good hands with him, and I like him a lot. He helped us to have LL, in only three cycles. But, his office is not equipped to do the extra monitoring that's necessary with injectibles. They have too many patients to be able to handle all the extra monitoring appointments, and too few people with the expertise to make the little day-to-day adjustments that are common with injectibles. So Dr. M will be referring me elsewhere if we need to try a completely different treatment.

My biggest concern with injectibles is all that extra monitoring, especially since the appointments would have to be at a doctors office that is much further away. More frequent appointments that are far from both my home and my office? Not exactly what I want to be doing while finishing my thesis and looking for a job. If that's what it takes, then I'll do it. But I was hoping not to have to. Given today's news, though, it looks like that's where we're heading.

On the bright side (yeah, I'm stretching here to find a bright side), since we won't be doing an IUI tomorrow morning, we'll be able to leave on-time for our trip, so no need to come up with an excuse to tell our friends. I had a good one all figured out, too....

Under Pressure

You may recall that, way back in January, I attempted a clomid cycle, but my ovaries didn't produce a single mature egg follicle. Were you wondering about all the silence on the fertility topic since then? That silence was the sound of me waiting for that stupid canceled cycle to just end already. I took progesterone pills, I waited, I waited some more, I got a progesterone shot, I waited, I waited some more... and my body finally decided to move on. Weeks and weeks of wasted time. (Along with lots and lots of wasted negative home pregnancy tests -- hope springs eternal, eh?) I finally started a new cycle, this time with 200 mg of clomid. Follicle scan was this morning. The result: only one follicle, not yet mature (only 14mm). We're giving it a few more days and coming back for another scan on Friday, we'll hopefully be able to trigger then, and then we'll do the IUI Saturday morning.

For the last two months, we've been planning a weekend away with three other families, and we're all supposed to be leaving Saturday morning. We were planning to caravan to our rented cabin all together, but the IUI Saturday morning means that we're going to have to leave about an hour after everyone else. And we can't tell them why, because none of our friends know that we've started fertility treatments again. Suggestions on what lie we can tell them to minimize questions are appreciated, because I'm kind of at a loss. Also, I get really nauseous for several days after trigger shots, so the car ride should be a ton of fun.

Thanks to last cycle's ridiculous length, we have a lot of added stress for this cycle, too. S's sister, H, recently got engaged. Her wedding is next March, in a different state. We would hate to miss her wedding because I'm too pregnant to travel. We would also hate to miss her wedding because we have a baby who is too young to travel. (Basically: we don't want to miss her wedding.) I know people whose siblings missed their wedding because of pregnancies, and I think it sucks. You only get married once, and you're usually able to give people an entire year or more of advance warning; is it really too much to ask for your one and only sibling to be available on that day? When I got engaged, I knew that my brother, M, was about to start trying for another baby (yep, he told me when they were going to start trying, which I think is a little icky), and I explicitly asked him to wait a few months so that they wouldn't have to miss the wedding. And they were totally okay with that. (My brother and sister-in-law are very very good at getting pregnant. They didn't want to be in the third trimester during my wedding, so they waited three months, and were 5+ months along at the wedding. I'm unbelievably jealous that they could time it however they liked.) Maybe it was selfish on my part to ask them to wait, but I wanted them to be at my wedding!

Now S and I are in a similar situation with H's wedding. And I haven't changed my thinking on this topic: even with the fertility problems, I think that it would be selfish of us to knowingly try to get pregnant at a time when we would have to miss the wedding if we succeeded.

We figure we'll be okay to travel with a new baby when he or she is about two months old. Our first airplane ride with LL was when he was a little over two months old, and it worked out just fine. Earlier than that would be a problem: our pediatrician doesn't recommend airplanes before six weeks, and it took me a full eight weeks to recover from my c-section anyway. In order to have a two-month-old at the time of the wedding, the baby would need to be born by early January, which requires a cycle that starts in early April of this year. Which is just a few weeks from now. If this cycle fails, and the next one starts on time, a pregnancy from that cycle would be due around New Year's, which would cutting it close but still okay. If this cycle goes long like the last one did, we'll have missed our window of opportunity. I don't think that I could fly in my third trimester while also taking care of a toddler, so I wouldn't want to be any more than 6 months pregnant next March. Which means not trying again until September.

So basically: we have this one cycle. Maybe maybe we have time for one more. After that, we will have to take a five month hiatus before we try again.

After today's mediocre follicle scan, S has already started to lobby for us to just continue trying regardless of the timing. My body's lackluster response to this high dose of medication is likely evidence that my fertility has noticeably declined in just the last two years, and it's not like I was super fertile before. He thinks that we'd be foolish to wait for five months, fearing that it will just get harder and harder to get pregnant, and waiting might mean that it never happens. Which is kind of hard to argue with, you know? But I don't know. I think that planning to miss H's wedding is kind of cruel. Especially since she has her heart set on LL being the ring bearer, which she excitedly talks about every single time we talk to her.

No pressure on this cycle or anything, eh?

Gettin' Old

I like to say that LL changes every single day, but I only mean it in a technical sense. Many of the changes are very subtle, the kind of things only a parent would notice. He's a little taller, he's a little more steady, he can move a little bit faster. Then there are periods where it's like a whole new part of his brain suddenly came on-line, and we're like, "Whoa, this is a totally different kid!" We're in the middle of one of those periods right now. Some new link in his brain just came alive and suddenly he's understanding so much, and he's capable of doing so much more. It's really rather amazing. A few highlights:

After adding practically no new words for almost two months, LL is now building his vocabulary. "Up," "Down," and "cheese!" are the new favorites. He's currently eating a lot of cheese, because "cheese" is the only food word he knows, so every time I ask him what he'd like to eat, he says "cheese!" He has also added several new animal sounds (most prominently cows and wolves), which has meant a slight reprieve from the constant barking.

We're having real conversations! We used to have to coax him to say every word he knew, but now he volunteers appropriate words, and he asks and answers questions. He still gets by largely with four words: "Da!" (Russian for "yes".) "No!" "This" and "All Done!" When he wants something, he points in the general direction and says "this!" Then we play a guessing game where I pick things up one by one and ask, "Do you want X?" while he calmly shakes his head and says "No!" until I hit upon whatever it was he was asking for. Then he grins, nods, says "Da!", plays with / looks at / eats whatever it was, then says "All Done!" and calmly hands it back to me. Very civilized. The guessing part kind of sucks, but presumably that will get easier as he learns more nouns. For now, we're just happy that we have a way of figuring out what he wants that doesn't involve screaming and tantrums. And it's great that I've been able to reason with him on occasion: "Let's go change your diaper." "No!" "Why not? Is it because you want to keep playing with your car?" "Da!" "Hm... do you want to bring your car with you while we change your diaper?" "Da!!!" "Great! Pick up your car and let's go to your room!" And then he picks up the car and goes to his room. He wasn't at this level even one week ago.

We're having a lot of luck with avoiding temper tantrums using an "empathy" method that I didn't think would work yet, but miraculously does. The idea is that toddlers get upset about ... whatever (knocking over the blocks; having to wait for something; not being allowed to eat cake for dinner; having a dangerous object taken away from them) but they morph from simply being upset into being a screaming kicking ball of tantrum fury because they don't think that their parents understand why they're so upset. Being denied the cake is bad, but being misunderstood and dismissed is so much worse. So, when you see a tantrum about to start, you name the emotion, accept it, then suggest alternative ways of reacting. For example: "I'm sorry, LL. I know that you're angry that I won't let you have cake. I get angry when I can't have something that I want, too. It's okay for you to be angry, but it's not okay to kick your legs like this. Why don't we go find something else to have for a snack instead? Would you like a banana?" I have to say all of this while LL is still in the winding-up-to-a-tantrum phase, because once he crosses that threshold, I'm out of luck. But as soon as I see him start to get upset, I look him right in the face and start naming the emotion. He usually stops crying by the end of my speech, sniffles a bit, then calmly acknowledges the new activity. It's really quite amazing. It's amazing to me that "I know you want cake, but you can't have it" makes him tantrum, but "I know that you're angry about not getting cake" instantly calms him down. He hasn't had a full-blown tantrum in weeks.

LL is finally learning body parts. After stubbornly refusing to acknowledge eyes and ears, despite lots of singing of "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes," and lots of reading of books like Karen's Katz's "Where is Baby's Belly Button?", he suddenly became obsessed with noses. For one day. And the next day, he was suddenly able to point to many of his body parts, none of which he was able to identify the day before. Mouth, teeth, tongue, nose, eyes, ears, hair, fingers, and toes. He's most consistent with hair, probably because he loves running his fingers through his curls.

He's suddenly into imitation. For a long time, the only behavior that we noticed him emulating was talking on the phone. (Everything vaguely rectangular was a phone.) But overnight, he decided that there are so many other things he could be imitating! He loves trying on our shoes and slippers and clothes (especially belts). He discovered during his last cold that he hates having snot on his hands, so he taught himself how to wipe his own nose with a handkerchief instead. No muss, no fuss! (Why he insists on handing the used handkerchief to me, rather than putting it down somewhere, is another matter.) And in a move that cracks me up every single time he does it, LL refuses to put down his sippy cup unless there's a coaster underneath it. If there's no coaster handy, he'll hand me his cup, run over to get a coaster, put the coaster where he wants it, take the cup back from me, and very carefully place it in the middle of the coaster. Every. Single. Time. We were at a play date last weekend, at someone else's house, and LL managed to find a stack of coasters on an end table, brought them over to where everyone was playing, spread them out, and then carefully moved every other kid's sippy cup onto its own coaster. (By the way, he gets the neatness thing from S, not me. And we've never even tried to enforce a coasters-for-sippy-cups policy. He just watched us do it with our own drinks, and decided it was cool.)

LL is finally reliably giving hugs and kisses. He's been doing the hugs for a while, actually, but the kisses are new. He'll follow commands like "Go give Daddy a hug and kiss," but better yet is that he notices when I'm feeling particularly tired (I lie down on the floor in the middle of his play area and say, "Wow, Mommy's really tired!" I'm subtle like that) and he'll come over on his own, give me a hug and kiss, and then pat my back encouragingly. The lip-smacking sound that accompanies the kisses is particularly amusing.

He's definitely into the "I can do it myself!" independence phase. He takes his shoes and jacket off by himself when we get home. He climbs into chairs by himself. When he's done eating, he takes his bib off and hands it to me before holding his hands out to be wiped off (and he wipes his mouth himself now -- it's very cute!). He loves brushing his teeth. He can stack cups and blocks into towers that are as tall as he is. At the park, he can climb the slide, sit down, and slide back down again all by himself. And he's finally reliably going to sleep on his own without crying. For a long time, he would scream when we put him in the crib; he usually stopped within 60 seconds, but it still bothered me that my peaceful night-night routine always ended with pitiful shrieking. Then suddenly last week, I put him in his crib and, instead of crying, he gently took his blankie from me, hugged it, smiled up at me, and waved bye-bye. It's so nice to be able to blow him a final kiss from the door and then walk out, knowing that he's happy and warm and comfortable and able to go to sleep on his own.

The more I watch LL interact with other children, the more I notice how easy-going he is. At playdates, other toddlers seem to spend much of their time throwing things and banging things and shrieking. LL is usually so much more calm than that. Not that he never throws toys. It's just not his normal mode of play. While other toddlers seem to yell the word "no" to everything, LL has this quiet normal-speaking-voice "no" that is usually accompanied by a gentle shaking of his head. Or, my favorite, he does his very thoughtful, "Hmmmm.... nah!" that is accompanied by a shrugging of his shoulders. How in the world did a one-year-old pick up the body language for indifference?

So, um, yeah. He's getting old. He's just two weeks shy of 18 months. The big one-point-five. It turns out that I'm getting old, too. Tomorrow's my birthday. My age will be a palindrome in both decimal and binary representations. Bonus points to anyone who identifies the other ages where this is true during a reasonable human lifespan. If you always ignore leading 0s, I count six other ages.

TMMI*

*Too Much Makeup Information

My search for a simple, natural-looking makeup regimen had to be put on hold for a bit while I was sick. I wanted to make sure that I was completely better first, because I look fairly awful when I'm sick, so buying makeup to match my I-just-threw-up-from-the-flu skin tone seemed counterproductive. Once my skin had resumed its healthy glow, I was off to Sephora for a consultation.

By the way, "healthy glow" is a bit of a relative term with me. I've never actually known what my skin color was, professionally speaking. Apparently light skin, fair skin, ivory skin, and pale skin are all different things (!) and I had no idea which of those applied to me. The term that I usually used to describe my skin was "night-of-the-living-dead pale," but they don't sell makeup in that color. I don't know much about marketing, but I do know that "Fair" will sell better than "Zombie." I used to wear a little blush just to avoid looking like I was on death's door.

My skin has gotten a bit better in recent years, but in my early twenties, if I needed to leave work early, I would just skip the blush; my coworkers would express concern about my health all day before suggesting that perhaps I should go home and rest. Definitely unflattering, probably unethical, but undeniably useful. But I digress. The experts at Sephora tell me that my skin is "light, with slight pink undertones." I think that they imagined up the slight pink undertone bit just to make me feel better, but whatever. I have very light skin.

My goal was to put together a makeup regimen that was easy to do, looked very natural and understated, but left me looking slightly less exhausted than I actually am. Undereye circles look fairly dramatic when you have the coloring of a ghost. Also, I need something with an SPF. As you can probably predict, given the light skin, there's a lot of skin cancer in my family, so I really truly need to be wearing sunscreen every single day. (When S and I got married, he told me that he was doing me a favor by marrying me, because he was strengthening my gene pool by adding some much-needed melanin.) In fact, my daily use of an SPF moisturizer was a lot of why I hated makeup -- I could do a decent job of applying makeup to go out at night, but in the morning, once I'd put on moisturizer, I could never get the makeup to look right. The nice folks at Sephora demonstrated for me that my problems were because I was using a cheap-ass moisturizer. I kind of always assumed that it didn't matter, but you know what? It does. I bought expensive moisturizer, and I've day-by-day compared it to my old stuff. The new stuff disappears into my skin in a way that the old stuff never did. Which is good, lesson learned, but now I need to buy expensive moisturizer for the rest of my life.

Anyway, here is my new morning face routine:

1. Moisturizer with SPF. Because cancer is bad.
2. Concealer under my eyes. To make me look like I'm well-rested, without the trouble of actually getting more sleep.
3. Very very light mineral powder foundation. Because I have almost no confidence in my ability to do a good job with the concealer, so an overcoat of powder evens things out.
4. Blush. So that people will quit asking me if I'm feeling okay. I use very very little, just enough to stop the comparisons to Casper the Ghost.
5. Mascara. To further disguise the under-eye circles. I didn't really understand how this worked, even though the woman at Sephora droned on a bit about mascara making my eyes look wider, which minimizes the appearance of the circles. Finally she just put mascara on one eye but not the other, and then handed me a mirror. The difference was dramatic. One of my eyes looked awake!
6. Lipstick. In a color that more or less matches the natural color of my lips. I'm not entirely sure what this does for me, and I predict it will be the first thing that I drop from the regimen, in favor of chapstick.

All that time spent with experts at Sephora, and I ended up with the exact regimen that K recommended in comments. Thanks to all of you people that recommended the trip to Sephora so that stuff actually matches my face! Oh, and the reason that I ignored all the suggestions to combine steps and use a tinted moisturizer: I don't trust myself to put it on evenly. It seems too advanced for me. Maybe I'm totally deluding myself, but the powder seems more forgiving. Maybe once I've built up some skills, I'll give it a try.

Total purchases: moisturizer, concealer, powder, blush, lipstick, and two brushes (for the powder and blush). I didn't buy mascara because I didn't like the one that Sephora recommended and I didn't have time to stay and try a different one. I'm currently using a little sample one that I hate, so I should really buy something else to try. The current stuff flakes easily and bothers my contacts. Recommendations? Since I was starting from scratch and had to buy everything all at once, I spent way too much money, but I justified it because (a) this stuff should all last me a while; and (b) my total makeup expenses for the last ten years has been somewhere around $20, so I think that I'm due. Also, ten-year-old makeup is kind of a health hazard.

Last question: cleanser? I laughed hard when Sunny commented about her clueless friend who used Dove body wash to wash her face. Because, um, I have Dove body wash. But it's cucumber scented, and I've seen women in movies getting facials that involve cucumber slices, so surely I'm doing okay?!? I found an old, old bottle of Oil of Olay facial cleanser under my sink, so I've been using that, but it's probably way past its expiration date, so... suggestions?

S has always been anti-makeup. He very much prefers the natural look, and tends to make fun of me when I put on makeup, even if it's for a formal occasion. So he was a bit anxious when I told him that I was going to start a daily makeup regimen. He admits, though, that the above regimen isn't too bad. He claims that it doesn't look "natural" only because the powder makes my skin tone look too even, like it's been airbrushed, and nobody has skin that perfect. Which I guess is a compliment? He can't tell that I'm wearing blush or mascara or lipstick, so that's good. He stumbled over his words for a bit ("It's nice! It makes you look older. Not old, just older. Not in a bad way. Maybe more mature? But not like you're old. Just... like you're not a teenager anymore. Which is a good thing. Right?") before finally just saying that now when we're together, everyone will assume that I'm getting tons of sleep while he does all the work, because why else would HE still have dark circles under his eyes but I don't?

I've timed myself a few times, and the whole thing takes six minutes to apply. I'll probably get faster at it with more practice, but even six minutes isn't too bad. I can spare six minutes each day. It's definitely less time than achieving the same result by actually being well-rested, which would take several hours out of my day.

Contagion!

Ugh. Between LL, S, and me, somebody in our house has been sick more or less continuously since mid-November. Last week was the stomach flu, which hit all three of us at the same time. LL was the only one of us who had gotten a flu shot this year, which is probably why his only lasted ~36 hours. S was intensely sick for four days. I was never quite as sick as S, but my symptoms lasted an entire week. (That's pretty typical for us -- S usually gets sick with amazing ferocity, and then recovers quickly, while I get a milder version of everything, but then I'm sick for twice as long.) The fact that all three of us were sick at the exact same time, though, was particularly bad. We finally declared the entire household "well" on Saturday, and we had a wonderful illness-free weekend.

LL started sniffling a bit Sunday night, but we stayed in denial about it until Monday afternoon, when we all finally had to admit that yes, LL has a head cold. Congestion, runny nose, sneezing, cough. Fairly typical stuff.

At least, it seemed typical until last night, when he started wheezing and having trouble catching his breath. We spent all last night at the urgent care clinic. The wheezing would get better only to get worse again. The doctor thought it was probably just a little upper respiratory irritation, except that LL's oxygen levels were low, so they ran some additional tests and waddya know: lower respiratory infection, coupled with croup. And we're actually lucky (yes, lucky) that he was wheezing from the infection, because then we were able to catch the croup fairly early, before it got too bad.

They were able to get him breathing normally last night, finally, and we now have medicine at home to help his lungs to calm down and heal. He's in a great mood, even though his breathing is still fairly labored, his congestion is keeping him from sleeping, and his fever is stubbornly sticking around. He's running and dancing all over the house, and doesn't quite understand why we won't let him go to daycare and play with the other kids. And between sick days for me and sick days for taking care of LL, my thesis is kinda at a standstill.

At some point we'll all be healthy again, right?!?

Happy Feet

Confession time: I'm a dork. That's probably not a surprise, actually. But seriously, I'm like the least fashionable person I know. I kept my nose in books through those teenage years where I was supposed to learn about shoes and makeup and fashion and whatnot, so it just sort of never happened. And honestly, it never really affected me all that much, because I don't think about it very often. But recently I've been forced to think about shoes, in particular, and I'm attempting to make a change.

I've worn nothing except sneakers, loafers, and flat sandals since high school. (I did own the occasional pair of dress heels, for use with skirts and dresses, but I hate them and I very cleverly avoid wearing them by wearing skirts as infrequently as humanly possible.) I had a small, monotonous (and very very old) collection of loafers and sandals that I made do with for everyday wear, a single pair of sneakers, and I was good to go. Then I got pregnant. And my feet swelled. A lot. I quickly went up an entire shoe size, and none of my shoes fit. So I did what any cost-conscious-but-fashion-blind pregnant woman would do: I bought one pair of sneakers and one pair of sandals in the bigger size, and I wore them for my entire pregnancy.

Then LL was born, and I patiently waited for my feet to return to normal. Instead, they shrank ever so slightly but remained a good half size bigger than they were pre-pregnancy. I still couldn't fit into any of my old shoes. I gave it a good year to see if they'd shrink back, and then I donated all of my pre-pregnancy shoes to charity. The only shoes I kept were two pairs of sandals that still kind of work, the pregnancy sneakers, one pair of black loafers with a broken heel that I've kept for reasons beyond understanding, and the shoes that I wore at my wedding. But the only ones that are actually of any use right now on a daily basis are the sneakers. So... I've been wearing those sneakers every single day. Every single day. For more than a year. (Actually, I wore the loafers with the broken heel on several job interviews, because, you know, job interview and sneakers don't mix. But walking sucked, and it was horribly uncomfortable.)

We've been having torrential storms lately, which have brought something to my attention: there are numerous holes in those sneakers. That's right: not just one hole, but many many holes in each shoe. And yet I'm still wearing them. I told you that I'm a dork.

Anyway, I decided that here in my mid-30s, it was time to start acting like a grown-up woman. (Soon Dr. Grown-Up Woman, thank-you-very-much.) I called up my most fashionable but understanding friend and begged her to teach me about shoes. She took me shopping on Saturday, and I am now the proud owner of brown leather slip-on wedges. I have black ones, too. And a pair of black pumps that don't make me cry when I wear them, so maybe I'll agree to go on a fancy date with S one of these days if we ever have a babysitter. Also, I own my first ever pair of brown ballet flats. And another pair of black slip-ons with a bit of a heel.

Also of utmost significance to this discussion: I now know what a wedge is. And I understand that ballet flats are not what ballerinas wear. And I know what Mary-Janes are, and why I should probably never ever wear them. (Trust me, they're really not a good look for me. Even a dork like me could see that fairly quickly.)

Now that I have such fashionable and grown-up feet, I should really bring the rest of my body into my 30s with me. I know only slightly more about make-up than I did about shoes, so that should probably be next on my list. I've never even owned either eye liner or lip liner. Ever. You're cringing a little, right? I do own various lipsticks and lip gloss, but I'm fairly convinced that every single one of them is the wrong shade for me, so I rarely actually put them on, and they're all so old that they should probably be thrown out anyway. Every once in a while, I put in the effort to put on some light foundation, blush, and lip gloss (maybe even mascara, if I'm feeling particularly fancy). And without fail, people at work comment that I look great, did I change my hair? New outfit? What's going on? So, I'm finally going to take the hint and go buy myself a daily make-up regimen that I might actually stick with. Something simple and subtle, I hope. Something that actually matches my skin tone.

If anyone has make-up suggestions, I'd love to hear them.