I wasn’t planning on joining the UBP 11, but it is 2:45am and I am up with a sick 2 year old, so I figured this sure beats watching Sesame Street on Sprout with her, but still allows me to cuddle with her.

So if you found me on UBP11, let me introduce myself.

I am a Heather, a 32 year old full time Domestic Engineer. Obviously my shift does not end at 5pm, sometimes I get lucky and I get to go on break from 9pm-7am. If I am even luckier, it is uninterrupted and insomnia stays away.

Ten Facts about me/us
• I have five kids, 4 boys, 1 girl.
• The boys are 14, 13, 6, and 3 months; the little girl is 2 1/2.
• I have been married to my husband for almost 14 years.
• We married when we were just teenagers.
• I was an Army wife for 8 years and lived at two different installations.
• My hubby is now a PMC (Private Military Contractor) working in Afghanistan.
• I have spent 3 years of my life being a geographically-separated parent, and I just started on the 4th year. Not single or solo parent, as hubby is very involved, but you can only do so much when you are 6,000 miles apart.
• Despite having 5 kids, I am an infertility survivor. I adopted my oldest son through a stepparent adoption almost five years ago. My 2nd oldest was conceived easily. My 3rd child took 6 years to conceive after many failed months with a specialist and infertility drugs. My 4th child took 2 years to conceive and I needed fertility medications combined with an IUI. My 5th child was quite the surprise!
• I try to be as natural of a parent as I can be. I believe in extended breastfeeding, cloth diapering, baby wearing, and natural childbirth.
• Despite believing in Natural Childbirth, I have only achieved it once, and that is when I had my 4th child at home, in the water.

My blog title, Mistakes in Motherhood, stems from my belief that we are all flawed, and parents are not immune. As a mom I know I have made many mistakes, said things I regret, done things that make me cringe, but in the end they are all learning experiences. I look forward to meeting new moms (and dads) so we can share and learn from each other.

I just started a Facebook page, so be sure to follow me, but be patient as I learn what the heck I am doing!

Well I never did find a program I liked as much as I did Paint Shop Pro X, until I downloaded a trial of PhotoShop Elements. Looks like I will be buying it in a few weeks, it works for exactly what I need it to do.

Anyways, I hope you like the new header as much as I do!

Last Monday.

That seems like an eternity to me.

It started with typical cold symptoms, runny nose, fever, aches. By Wednesday I knew I had an ear infection. I called at 8:01am Wednesday morning to get in to get checked out and she has two appointments that week. One is at the exact time I have to be at my son’s school to pick him up, the other is Saturday. At that time I scoff Saturday, I just *know* I will be better by then, or I will just go to Urgent Care.

I take it as easy as I can the next few days, which of course is not easy at all. On Friday I tell myself I *will not* leave the house under any circumstance, except to take Austin to and from school… and then fate intervenes. An angel from heaven swoops down in the form of a tax refund. The tax refund I did not think I would get for weeks because I forgot to add the kids’ social security numbers to my rough draft in the tax software and it showed me getting almost nothing.

So of course my promise not to leave the house is broken by 9 AM, the time the Mac store opens. I gather up all my paperwork, and by noon I am am not a PC anymore. I am a Mac. I will refrain from gushing, because if you were like I was, a die-hard PC lover, you won’t want to hear it. But I will say, all my misconceptions of a mac were wrong.

Friday night around 5pm, I go check the mail and I got a shocker. It was a letter that made absolutely NO sense. It was from my insurance company and it seemed like it was proof of coverage, until I looked closer and it said “Covered until 1/31/09″. Holy crap, I am sick, and I don’t know who my insurance company is! A little bit of research yielded who I think may be my insurance company, but without proof, no one would accept it. Thankfully I knew that we have one public hospital that will bill you if you have no insurance, instead of expecting payment at the time of service like a lot of private Urgent Care centers do. So Sunday afternoon I head to the Urgent Care and I have a double ear infection! The one that hurts really bad was just starting to get infected, where the one that had not started hurting until that morning, figure that one out.

Anyways, it took about 15 minutes on the phone this morning to get the mess sorted out, I am holding now to pass the information on to the hospital now.

I just hope that the 60 pills I have to take over the next 10 days clear this mess up!

Other than that, we had another Financial Peace University class tonight, it was a lot of fun and Sophie actually made it about 2 hours without me and I was only paged at the very end of the class. It was really refreshing knowing my baby girl will allow others to hold her without me being there because I have a few things coming up to where I won’t be able to have her with me.

I found out that one of the other ladies in my class cloth diapers her children, it was pretty darn cool meeting another cloth diapering mom.

Lately I have noticed a HUGE increase in they movies you can watch instantly, but watching it on our laptops was sucky because it was tiny and the sound quality was not the greatest. Xbox 360 came to the rescue and integrated Netflix into its online feature making it possible to instantly watch streaming DVD quality video right on your TV!! YAY! Last weekend I think we watched half a dozen movies, from Underdog to some National Lampoon movies and even a very funny interview with Kevin Smith (Silent Bob, writer of Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma, etc). My favorite part of the Instant movie feature, is that it is unlimited and free with a Netflix membership.

So if you have Netflix membership and an Xbox 360, check into it!

Back in 1997 I discovered this when I was watching a movie about Saint Theresa, and how when she died the house she died in filled with roses. He was not paying attention and said “What? Mother Theresa died?” That was September 4th, 1997…. on September 5th, 1997 this world lost a great woman when Mother Theresa died.

He also put a ton of Chinese restaurants out of business when he told me that by us ordering from another place, and this “cheating” on our regular place we were going to put them under. One by one, he put three Chinese restaurants out of business.

There are countless other examples… but the most recent happened on Saturday. I got Bobby a new laptop at Best Buy to replace his four year old one that was dying. On Sunday he comments that we probably need to replace our modem, as it was a couple years old and probably far behind the times and a new one would give us more speed…. so who do you think I wanted to throttle this morning when I woke up and I had no internet?? A 30 minute call to tech-support revealed that my area was fine, Qwest was fine, I just could not connect to my ISP. Since Best Buy carries the Qwest DSL products we need and has a return policy, so I met Bobby at the store and we got a new modem.

We get it home, and the fun continues… we hook it up and encounter one silly problem after another, and when the Internet light fails to light up, I call tech support back. This time I am on the phone for an hour and nothing works. He tells me he has no choice but to send tech support out on Wednesday, but in a last desperate attempt tells me to unplug the modem and plug it in again. He is just about to put me on hold to get the appointment time, when the light comes on and ta-dah, we have internet!

While I was on the phone, our friends brought their 18 month old by. Matthew had a lot of fun playing with his new friend as he called her. At one point, they ran up to each other to hug and it was like the movie cliche of a couple running up to each other to hug, except for his little friend ran harder and knocked him onto his ass and landed right on top of him… where is the video camera when you need one? It was a total AFV moment.

Sophie’s little sheepy came in too, she loved her “soft”… this is a name my niece gave my parents sheep skin that they brought back from New Zealand; all the other grandbabies loved it so much, I wanted one for Sophie. Pictures and more plugs to come in the morning!!

I just wanted a full QWERTY keyboard and good reception, so this is what I got: Lookie lookie! Mine is in Maroon though, it’s purty.

2. Dogs are the most annoying creatures EVER, just ask the one who lays in front of me and won’t let me move, or the one who is obsessively licking a bone and will not stop bringing it in the house no matter how many times I toss it out the door. The bone is supposed to keep her from chewing my deck, not enable her to annoy me in the house.

3. Friends are friends are friends. Be them online friends, or real life friends, it does not matter, they are there to pick you up when you are down and it works. After some encouraging emails and phone calls, I feel so much better about my day. I am not at 100% yet, but I think that won’t come until a good night’s sleep.

4. YouTube is EVIL! I watched this today and turned into a bawling puddle of tears… any of the videos they show about Soldiers or Iraq hit so close to home I just have a mini emotional breakdown. I have mentioned how much I LOVE what the Patriot Guard Riders are doing, but this tribute from an Aunt of a fallen soldier touched me even more than the news stories I have seen. I also love the Welcome Home Soldier program too. THANK YOU to our men and women serving our country, and THANK YOU to the men and women who serve those who serve or served! You are just as important as the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen!

Enjoy your cry, I know I did.

—————-
Now playing: John Mayer Trio – I Got A Woman
via FoxyTunes

Even cooler were these biotectures called Earthships. These unique homes are made of earth and tires and bottles to make fully self sufficient homes that use about $100 a year in utility costs. These homes are completely independent and use no city utilities. It makes it’s own power, recycles rainwater, takes care of sewage and heats/cools itself.

The next thing they showed was paint that could last for 1,000 years, resists graffiti, mold, and breaks down carbon monoxide emitted from cars. They also showed windows that could control how much sunlight would be allowed through them and green rooftops on skyscrapers (rooftop gardens) which would reduce wastewater put into the sewage system, as well as lower the temperature on the roof and make the air conditioner work more efficient, as well as reducing pollutants in the air.

In my own home, I feel like I could be doing so much more to reduce my carbon footprints, yes I use CFL bulbs in almost all my light fixtures. We recycle and we have replaced all our old appliances with new energy star appliances. We use a HE washer and dryer to reduce the water I use, and we use cloth diapers on the baby. I am in the process of switching to all natural cleaning products and laundry soap to reduce the amounts of pollutants I put in the sewer. I know I could do SO MUCH MORE. I have all the supplies to build a clothesline, yet I still don’t have one because my backyard is so smelly from the lack of grass and overabundance of dog pee. I also don’t have a garden because again the dogs make the back yard unpleasant. I also could not justify the cost of a new tankless water heater, so we did go for a more efficient one than the old one, however I think the only way we will ever have higher efficient home is to start fresh and build our own home where we can recycle rainwater for landscaping, incorporate solar panels into the design, have a tankless water heater, use CFL, all energy star appliances, and possibly geothermal heating, cooling.

I think with a little more planning we all could take baby steps to reduce our carbon footprint and all live a little greener with tiny little changes that make less of an impact on our day to day living, but a great impact on the amount of strain on the planet.

My old blog posts are all now available over here and my old free blogger blog will now bring you here, so you don’t have to update your blogrolls until you are ready. I can also be found by going to http://www.mistakesinmotherhood.com.

The old theme, as much as I loved it, did not mesh well with WP2.2 so now I have the new pretty butterfly theme… come on, I need SOME pretty in my life, otherwise I might drown in all this masculinity/testosterone in my home full of men/boys.

I promise I will try to update a little more now that I have a little less off my oh-so-full plate.

Today I spent hours uploading all my old music CDs onto my iPod and now have almost 1700 songs on there… as well as videos and Podcasts… almost 8GB total. I can listen to songs for over 5 days without hearing the same song twice.

I have a little bit of everything on there, from Alice Cooper, Disturbed, Tool, The Rolling Stones, Ani DiFranco, Zero Seven, Led Zeppelin, John Mayer, DMX, Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, Talking Heads, The Beatles, Shawn Mullins, ICP, Tori Amos… I think you get the point… my music is a little eclectic.

Anyways… My name is Heather and I have a problem.

The newest zip program, SecureZIP is a very simple download, and for a limited time can be downloaded for free; this is the full version, not a trial version. Secure Zip encrypts and compresses files for fast and secure transfer, this program is great for business projects, sensitive files that may have personal information like a social security number or banking information, or anything that you would not want to fall into the wrong hands. This data security program is also great for protecting your own personal files stored on your hard drives, portable media, or laptops. SecureZIP – The next generation of ZIP.

Within two minutes of submitting my email address, SecureZip was downloaded and two minutes later was registered and up and running. The program is easy to use and is also integrated into Outlook Express which makes it super simple to email encrypted files. You also want to check out SecureZIP’s impressive review over at PC Magazine.com, they made 4 1/2 marks out of five marks, and have great raves.

Check this program out, it is a great asset in total data security.

This week’s theme is: Technology

Well, this may not be the most exciting picture but it is my Toshiba Satellite A105-S4094.

The processor is an Intel Core Duo T2250 / 1.73 GHz, 1 x 1 GB + 512 MB RAM, the Hard Drive. has 120 GB, and it has a double-layer DVD burner; a wide 15.4-inch display with a 1,280×800 native resolution, and various types of Wi-Fi cards.

Since I listen to so much music, I have a pair of USB powered external Logitech speakers, an external wireless mouse, and I put it on a cooling pad which includes 4 extra USB ports (for a total of 8).

The background image on the screen is the Queen Victoria Building, Sydney.

So a couple days ago I got an email from Best Buy that says they have received my return and refunded the price.  I was pissed!  I called them up and they first tried to tell me that the post office said the address was unknown, which was bullshit..especially because I get stuff from Best Buy weekly, from Reward Zone offers, to our Best Buy credit card statements.  Then he told me it was “lost in the mail”, which I am not sure it right either.  So I had it re-sent and hopefully this time we won’t have a blizzard slowing our mail down.  Because of the holiday, it probably won’t be picked up by UPS until Tuesday or Wednesday, but this time I will know where it is and stay on top of it…