"No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it's only a question of degree.”

Crystal mentioned several posts ago that I didn't know how to blog. To clarify, I certianly know how to blog (give me a little credit)...but I just never had anything of note to blog about. Well, that will all change tonight. While Crystal has explained her affinity for elections, she has not fully defined the person that she transforms into every four years. Words can not do it justice and, therefore, I will be posting pictures throughout the night documentating my lovely wife's transofrmation from a sane person into what can only be described as a political lunatic. In the mean time, I leave you with the following pictures illustrating her likely reaction if Obama wins and if he does not...

IF OBAMA WINS...

IF HE DOES NOT...

Stay tuned throughout the night for actual pictures.

- RH

Announcing my endorsement for President

Today, I would like to announce my endorsement for the President of the United States. My endorsement won’t make newspaper headlines and won't influence any voters, but I decided if Joe the Plumber can hold a press conference to announce his endorsement, I can certainly issue an official endorsement on my blog. Unlike Joe, I promise not to offer my opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shortly after my endorsement. I’ll leave negotiating the intricacies of foreign diplomacy to the experts….something Joe should have considered doing as well.

Below is a list of the issues that were important to me in my decision as to who to endorse:

• I'm staunchly pro-choice. While I may never choose that option for myself, I do not believe I have the right to make that decision for every woman, in every circumstance.
• I’m pro-gay marriage. I see most arguments against gay marriage as religious ones and given my belief in separation of church and state, I see no reason why civil institutions should bar homosexuals from marrying and benefiting from the legal advantages of marriage. Churches can make those decisions for themselves. It’s my personal right to not belong to a church that teaches against homosexuality (and I never will!)– but churches have the right to teach any doctrine they please.
• I’m against the death penalty. There are too many inconsistencies and prejudices in our judicial system to believe that everyone being sentenced to death is guilty. If one person is wrongly sentenced to death, the cost is too high
• I believe in universal health care. As a family whose bread winner is self-employed, losing our health care scares me. I worry our family is one major health issue away from having our insurance revoked and spending all our savings to keep someone in our family healthy. We have done well saving money in the past and still I worry, so I can’t imagine being poor and having this worry.
• I’m ok with higher taxes for the wealthy. I believe in a society that takes care of those less fortunate among us. Sure, the welfare system has its pitfalls and you can find all sorts of examples of abuse of this system, but you can also find examples of people who were able to make it through tough times and turn their lives around with the help of the government. It would be nice if we could leave this work up to charities and neighbors taking care of one another, but research shows the wealthy give less (percentage wise) to charities than the middle class…so you can’t count on it. I guess I believe there are a lot of greedy people out there who would rather buy another luxury car than help out someone in need in their community. So bring on the higher taxes...I'll happily pay them for a candidate who I agree with on all other ideological matters.

And so with that being said, I am sure it will come as a great surprise that I am endorsing Barack Obama for President of the United States.

I sort of live for election day every four years. I am sort of obsessed with politics. Our TV is perpetually on CNN these days. I am not really sure where my interest in politics started or how I became a staunch Democrat but I have been as long as I remember. I remember being in 6th grade during the 1992 election and hoping so hard that Clinton would win. I vividly remember consulting my magic eight ball several times on election day and that night, I excitedly sat down with my homework, which was to color in the U.S. map based on the electoral results and being so excited when Clinton won.

When I was in the third grade, my parents took my brother and I on a trip to Washington, D.C. I LOVED it! We visited every monument, historic site and tourist destination in the city. Our hotel room overlooked the Washington monument and I would fall asleep every night looking at it. I went home with a children's book of the Presidents and wore out the pages, reading it over and over. I checked out a book about the First Ladies from my elementary school library at least 10 times before heading off to middle school. On this trip, we visited the Georgetown University campus and at age 8 I declared that is where I would be going to college. I wore my Georgetown sweatshirt until I couldn't fit into it anymore and cheered on the Hoya basketball team from that day forward. Ten years later, there I was checking into my dorm at Georgetown University. To say Georgetown is a political school is an understatement. Being there for 4 years only heightened my love of politics. And here I am today, watching CNN all day, constantly online looking at the latest polling and hoping and praying this election turns out the way I would like it to.

I already did my part. We voted early on Friday. We had heard lines were running around an hour long, so we got in line about 2 hours before Joseph's normal nap time. The poll workers told us it was about an hour and 15 minutes from the end of the line.

This is Joseph's face as he sees how freaking long the line is!

We waited, we waited and we waited some more. At the one hour mark we weren't even close to being inside the building (where the line continued to snake along before actually making it to the booths). Here is the last picture before we actually got inside.

We're looking a little bored, boys!

At 3:00 we hit Joseph's nap time but we were inside the building and about 20 minutes away from voting. There was no turning back at that point. Joseph was fussy - so Rich walked around and around and around with him. Around 3:30 we finally voted! Two votes cast for Obama. In fact, we voted straight Democratic tickets (well except Rich voted Republican for Lt. Governor because he went to high school with the Republican candidate's daughter and thinks he is good guy). We were way past nap time by the time we left. Joseph fell asleep in the car on the way home...tired by his first experience with Democracy.

This was not Joseph's first trip to the polls, a few days before he was born, we took him to vote in the Democratic primary. Granted, he was inside my belly...but that counts!

This is my third time casting a vote for President. I've never known the feeling of seeing the candidate I support win. I'm hoping the third time is the charm. Either way, Tuesday night will be a late night.

Joseph's First Autumn!

This time of year provides a lot of opportunities to take cute pictures of Joseph and basically make him do ridiculous things for our entertainment. We took full advantage of every opportunity to do autumn themed events and got lots of pictures to prove it.

Last weekend my mom was in town and we visited the pumpkin patch to pick out the most perfect pumpkins to decorate our front porch. We put Joseph in the middle of the pumpkins and tried to get a few pictures. He mostly wanted to suck on the pumpkins and the picture below is one of the few we could get where he would actually look at us. Being a typical mom, I worried the whole time that some massive pumpkin was going to fall on top of him.

My grandmother sent him a really cute pumpkin outfit. She seriously went to every WalMart in the Albany, NY area in order to find one in his size. We took several walks in the chilly fall weather in the last week and dressed him in his pumpkin suit to stay warm.

At this time last year, I was just entering the second trimester of my pregnancy and I remember seeing pictures of one of my best friend Erin's little boy (also named Joseph) who was 5 months of the time. His crazy parents had hollowed out a pumpkin, cut holes for his legs in it and stuck him inside. I loved it and decided in a year we would be doing the same thing with our little one. So here is our Joseph in his pumpkin. He tolerated it for a few minutes but mostly enjoyed attempting to eat the pumpkin.

On Tuesdays, Joseph & I go to a Music Together class for infants. There are about 10 babies ages 4 months to 10 months and we dance around and play instruments for 45 minutes. Mostly the moms sing and play instruments while the babies put the instruments in their mouth. It's a nice break from our regular routine and it wears Joseph out. He promptly falls asleep on the drive home (we usually don't make it out of the parking lot before he's asleep) and takes at least a 2 hour nap afterwards. This week the babies were invited to dress up so we put on his monkey outfit and headed to Music Together...

Last night was the big conclusion to the autumn events...Halloween. We had big plans to go and "trick or treat" at a bunch of friends houses, but it didn't quite work out. We ended up spending 2 hours in line waiting to vote (more on that to come in a future post) and Joseph's nap schedule got totally messed up. He ended up being cranky in the evening. We made it to one friend's house before we called it quits and just walked him up and down our street, visiting some neighbors.

We did make it to one friend's house, a former co-worker of Rich's who has three children. This couple seriously hit the jackpot in the cute kid lottery.

For left to right...Chris (the Dad) with Charlotte Reid (a doggy), Neely (a peacock), Wilson (a Jedi knight) and Joseph & I. Joseph took an immediate interest in Wilson's light sabre. Neely is the most outgoing child you will ever meet...she will talk your ear off. We had seen them when I was 7 or 8 months pregnant and she had spent a good long while patting my tummy and "petting the baby". When Rich reminded her of that incident, something clicked and she started laughing and jumping up and down pointing to Joseph saying "that was him in the belly". Too cute!!!

I would like to note that while we were visiting Joseph decided to have not one, but two, blowouts in his diaper. It is not easy to change a baby's completely full diaper in a car when that baby has a monkey costume on. This did not help his level of fussiness and we headed home.

We visited with neighbors including Miss. Kay, who refers to Joseph as "her boyfriend".

We also visited Caroline, Joseph's future girlfriend (he likes older women - she's two!), who was dressed as Raggedy Anne.

Our friends Anne & Burr, who have no children, also came over later in the evening with wine! They spent a little time playing with Joseph but we put him to bed and enjoyed spending time with our friends. They kept talking about the new bars and restaurants that had opened downtown and Rich and I felt totally lame! We love our new life as parents and early bedtimes and wouldn't trade it for anything, but sometimes we are reminded of our old life before Joseph and it seems so foreign to us.

Overall, Joseph's first fall was a complete success! Now we move on to Thanksgiving and Christmas...

Pet Peeve

I have a lot of pet peeves, but I will limit to this post to the one that is bothering me the most at the current time. Joseph hates running errands with me. He really dislikes being strapped down in his car seat and being dragged in and out of lame places like the post office or the pharmacy. Therefore, we limit the amount of needless running around we do, but let's face it, sometimes groceries have to be purchased, packages have to be mailed and at the rate Joseph goes through diapers, Target trips happen pretty frequently. When we do run errands, we try to do only a few at a time and keep them quick. Inevitably though, Joseph always gets cranky towards the end of these excursions...no matter how fast I get through them. So my biggest pet peeve is one that slows us down...

People who are still writing checks!!! I mean seriously people, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE get a debit card. There is nothing worse than being in line at the grocery store with a fussy baby about to lose his mind and the person in front of you whips out the checkbook. I am a pretty patient person, but the time it takes for the cashier to ask for the phone number, ask to see the Driver's License and then verify it in some fancy machine they have, drives me crazy! I don't get it. (My apologies to anyone reading this who is still writing checks at retailers - but seriously, think about the debit card).

This happened yesterday at the grocery store, but the guy writing the check was none other than Ric Flair (a.k.a Nature Boy) of WWF fame (which is the WWE pre-World Wildlife Foundation lawsuit). I have never been a wrestling fan, but my brother was pretty into it when we were little. My lucky Dad got to pay money to take my brother and his friends to the awesome live events. Below is a picture of Nature Boy in his glory days. He is sort of infamous in this city since his road rage incident where he assaulted someone after they were driving too slow and apparently lives in our area of the city since I see him all the time.

He took forever to write the check, but I hid my annoyance because messing with Ric Flair, who is know for his rage, wasn't on the top of the to-do list for the day.

In Joseph news...

Joseph has started this new thing...grunting to let me know he is frustrated and annoyed. This started in the last week or so. If he is in my lap and wants to be on the floor rolling around, he just grunts and throws his head around until I get the message. If he has had enough of the Bumbo seat, car seat, stroller (basically anything where he is constrained), he arches his back and grunts until I let him loose. He is much happier just rolling all over the floor - from one end of the den to the other. He pretty much hates having his diaper changed or clothes changed because it means his rolling has to cease for a few minutes. He grunts the whole way through, flips himself over 10 times, until finally, I manage to get a diaper on. Diaper changes have become a 5 minute process, minimum. I have a wild child on my hands. In the spirit of the fall holidays and Rich's Kentucky bourbon roots, we have taken to calling him "Wild Turkey". Here is a picture of my little wild turkey eating some peaches. We get about 4 spoonfuls in his mouth before he decides to feed himself. By feed himself, I basically mean jamming the spoon in and out of his mouth until he gags.

He just has that little devil look in his eyes in this picture. He is soooooo much like his father. He is going to be a two year old someday - god help me!

Trip to Kentucky - Part 3

I know I promised you all this post days ago and I know you all have just been going crazy with anticipation waiting for it, but time got away from me this week. I realized after getting home that I had to pay the bills due at the end of the month and I didn't think AT&T or Verizon would care if I was late paying because I had to update my blog. Now I know you are all thinking "Why does paying the bills keep her from blogging for 4 days?" Ha Ha...if you are thinking that, you really don't know me well.

I am a CPA (certified public accountant). CPAs have a reputation for being anal retentive but even on the CPA scale of anal retentiveness, I rate really high. Ask the people who worked with me - sort of have a little problem with perfectionism it this area of my life. So my bill paying process semi-monthly isn't just an exercise in logging into my online banking system and paying a few vendors. Nope, I have about 6 spreadsheets that are involved in this. A budget spreadsheet, a spreadsheet to reconcile the checking account, savings accounts and our investments accounts (which I will note are really depressing to reconcile these days). All of these fun little spreadsheets automatically filter into our family's monthly financial statements. Yeah, that's right we have a family balance sheet and income statement (year to date and one for the one month period) that I produce monthly. No, I'm not joking (even my fellow CPAs are thinking I am crazy right now). So my bill paying process takes about 4-5 hours twice a month. So after bottle washing, disinfecting toys and folding laundry, I sit down and work on it a little bit each night and it takes me about 3 nights to get through the whole process. So sorry, the blog was put aside for my crazy financial organizing this week.

This obsession with organizing my life on spreadsheets started early on in my life. Somewhere around 7th or 8th grade, I developed a database system to organize my brother's baseball cards. I spent a lot of time one summer entering his hundreds of baseball cards into a spreadsheet. I also organized Miss. America and Olympic results in spreadsheets. Not surprisingly, I wasn't the most popular kid in middle school. Don't feel bad for me, I achieved some level of coolness by about 10th grade (well at least as much coolness as a kid in the accelerated advanced placement classes could achieve). I even managed to be captain of the cheerleading squad three years in a row. I strived for Kelly Kapowski levels of coolness...probably didn't quite get there.

Ok...so on to the real point of my post. More pictures from our trip to Kentucky!!! On Saturday, our last day there, we had a post wedding brunch at Rich's grandparents house. The whole family was there, and its not a small family. All of Rich's aunts and uncles and cousins and cousin's children. I love Rich's cousins, they are a lot of fun to be around, so we had a good time. Here are some family pictures we took.

All of Rich's immediate family:

From left to right is Papa Joe & Grandmommy (his grandparents on his Dad's side), me, Richard with Joseph, my mother-in-law Priscilla, my father-in-law Rick, my sister-in-law Kipling, my future brother-in-law Jason with my niece Kairi, and my sister-in-law Devon.

The 4 generations of Joseph Richard's:

Joseph having fun with Grandmommy:

Joseph and Kairi with Grandpa Ricky:

Joseph and Kairi with Grandpa Ricky and Cilla:

And last, a cute picture of Richard playing with Joseph:

We left on Saturday afternoon. We did not attempt another through the night drive. Instead, we made it about halfway by 7 pm and got a hotel in Knoxville, Tennessee (a nice suite room so we could stay up and watch TV past Joseph's 7:30 bedtime). We made the rest of the trip home on Sunday morning.

We had a wonderful trip home and look forward to seeing everyone again at Christmas!

Trip to Kentucky - Part 1

We are back from our trip to Kentucky and I have lots of pictures (and videos!!!) to post. I am going to have to do it in several parts as it would make for one VERY long entry to put everything in one post.

During our time in Kentucky, Joseph had a great time hanging out with all his family. He especially enjoyed his time with Cilla and his only cousin, Kairi. Cilla is Rich's mother. Her full name is Priscilla and since children have a hard time pronouncing that, they have always called her Cilla - which she decided she wanted her grandchildren to call her as well. Joseph and I spent lots of time doing fun things with Cilla and Kairi. Rich's mother watches Kairi during the day, so the four of us spent a lot of time together while the rest of the family worked away! We went and visited the stables where my sister-in-law, Kipling, used to take riding lessons and fed the horses peppermints and carrots. Joseph didn't know quite what to make of these big animals!!!

Joseph also really enjoys swinging on the porch swing with Cilla. Sometimes he and Kairi swung together. In the picture below they are swinging away and Joseph struck his model pose as I took the picture. Note also that I am the lazy mother with my kid still in his PJs, while Kairi's mother (my sister-in-law Devon) actually dressed her child that morning.


Joseph also had his picture taken with Nana (Rich's grandmother on his mom's side) and Kairi for Nana's Christmas cards. Here is a cute one with Joseph laughing. Kairi is 10 months (4 1/2 months older than Joseph) but Joseph is heavier. The first time I picked up Kairi this week, I felt like I was carrying a feather. Joseph is a complete lug compared to her. She is so tiny and petite and sweet! She has a very easy going temperament and just goes with the flow. She loves music - the minute some music comes on, she is kicking her legs and bopping up and down. She is ridiculously cute and I really enjoyed spending so much time with her and getting to know her little personality!We also took some with Nana outside. In this one Joseph suddenly takes an interest in Kairi's face and is touching her mouth. Right after the picture was taken, Kairi took Joseph's thumb near her mouth as an invitation to suck his thumb. He happily obliged and let her suck his thumb for a few seconds.
We also grabbed a couple shots of me with Joseph and with both babies.

On Friday we had a birthday party for my future brother-in-law, Jason (Devon's fiance and Kairi's Daddy). Happy 29th birthday, Jason!

We had birthday cake, but my contribution to the big party was some Obama cookies. My very Republican in-laws actually ate them (and found them delicious!).

While the rest of us enjoyed birthday cake, Kairi dined on some baby food - peas to be exact. Yum!

Well that pretty much sums up the week in Kentucky up to Friday evening. On Friday evening we attended the wedding of Rich's cousin, Lauren. I have some great videos and photos from a very non-sober evening. Stay tuned for "Trip to Kentucky - Part 2" for all the details!

***Note that Part 2 actually appears before Part 1 due to the fact that I uploaded the videos in Part 2 yesterday, so its recognizing the post as being before Part 1.

Trip to Kentucky - Part 2

As I mentioned in the previous post, on Friday night, we attended Rich's cousin Lauren's wedding. If you know Lauren and that part of Rich's family, you would have known it was going to be a FUN wedding. We had heard they had brought in a fantastic band from Nashville so we were prepared to be out on the dance floor most of the night. Rich and I are pretty shameless dancers. Neither one of us are very good dancers...but neither one of us care...especially if a few alcoholic beverages are consumed. We drove to the wedding with Rich's sister, Kipling, and we got Rich to practice some of his dance moves for the camera. The best part is when Rich calls his sister and I "biotches". Please note that there was no alcohol involved at this point.

(To get the full effect of the video, you need to turn on the sound - make sure you pause our playlist below so you can hear it!)

The goofiness continued at the church. Kipling got the whole family to put on her sunglasses and took pictures of us all. The best one was my father-in-law. When we showed this picture to Rich's grandmother (my father-in-laws mom), who is a staunch Catholic, she was not happy to see her son goofing around in church.

The wedding was gorgeous and the bride looked beautiful. Here is her walking down the aisle!

The reception was held in a large tent on the lawn of a historic mansion in Kentucky. It was decorated beautifully. Here is the new couple dancing their first dance.

We snagged a picture of Rich with his cousin.

Rich's grandparents live right near the reception site and we hijacked their golf cart to go back and forth. There was definitely drunk golf cart driving going on that night. Can you get a DWI for that? Rich's parents got yelled at by some old cranky neighbor for driving on his lawn.

By the time the dinner was over, things started getting messy quickly and Rich's dancing started. When we noticed Rich's Nana was starting to fall asleep at the table, he took the opportunity to bust some moves right behind her. She had no idea...(sorry the pic is a little blurry).

Here are some more pics of Rich's dance moves.

And best of all, a video!!! This video includes classic moves like "The Sprinkler", but also moves Rich invented such as the "Cocaine Snort" and "The Stroke". (The video starts out sideways but I turned the camera the right way a few seconds in!).

There is video of me dancing as well but since I control the blog, it will not be posted. Rich either does not know how to or does not care to post, so I think I am safe.

By the end of the evening, every time I took a picture, everyone would be like "Is that going to be on your blog?"

Unfortunately, both my camera and Kipling's camera battery died during the wedding, but I wish we had some video of the ride home. Kipling, the sober one, had a fun time driving two drunk idiots back to Louisville for 45 minutes. I know the ride involved me insisting a mailbox was a pillar and not a mailbox, me spilling Coke all over myself, Rich falling asleep only to have me stick my feet in his face from the backseat to wake him up. It was awesome!!! Rich and enjoyed an adult evening out while Joseph was well cared for by a very competent babysitter.

Part 3 coming up tomorrow - pictures of the wedding brunch with the extended family on Saturday!