No that man isn't pregnant

Ah, the 5 year old conversations continue.  Today on the ride home from a friends house, with the windows wide open in the car, we passed a man who was out getting some exercise.  My guess would be that he wasn't walking fast to maintain his physique, but instead was maybe trying to slim down the waist-line.  Without missing a moment, from the backseat my soon-to-be-kindergartener shouted, "Mom, that man's going to have a baby!!"  When I questioned why he thought that, knowing full well it was because Mr. Sweatbands had a dicky-do belly, he confirmed that it was the tummy.  I tried to tell him that men can't grow babies in their tummies the way that mommies can.  "But that man was married!!"  Really??  How could he tell?  Well, he informed me that he must be married if he was going to have a baby (I wasn't ready to have that long conversation just yet), and that he had used his imagination to determine that the man was married.  The conversation became dull after that point, because he moved on to discussing other ways he had used his imagination in the past when creating things with his Lego's. 

Right at this moment I'm crossing my fingers that his kindergarten teacher is in good shape and doesn't have any dinstinct/unique features, because otherwise it's going to be a long year with a lot of uncomfortable conversations at the parent-teacher conferences.

Nervous and Excited

Tomorrow marks the first day of classes towards my Masters in Nutrition.  And I'm so nervous!!  I can't really explain the nerves I'm feeling.  Am I afraid I won't be able to keep up?  No.  I've got 7 years of hospital experience under my belt and a strong desire to get my hands dirty and learn more than my brain can possibly hold.  I think what makes me nervous is the fact that despite my best efforts, I've become somewhat accustomed to conversations with preschoolers.  Not that these aren't interesting in their own way, but answering "why mommy?" eighty times in a row doesn't really prepare me for forming scientific hypotheses.  My 5-year-old just informed me, as I was taking him to bed, that someone was controlling his butt as he farted the entire way to his room.  That kind of discussion doesn't really help me to determine the etiology of gas production, since I'm pretty sure the root cause of his was broccoli and not someone with a remote control.  So when it comes to getting back into the scholarly mindset I'm a little apprehensive.  Perhaps this will subside once class begins and I get into a routine.  More than anything, I can hardly wait for the opportunity to expand on what I already know and to nail down all those nagging little questions that I've had since my undergraduate days.  And at least I will always have my boys around if I need to develop new interview questions regarding bowel movements.

The Tedious Side of Small Business

www.westroadcandles.com

I have always loved the creative arena of small business.  Here's a spot where your personal drive and ambition are the key components to success.  The harder you work, the more successful you are and vice versa.  In my small business I'm the boss, the bookkeeper, the creative product developer, the customer service representative, and the grunt.  That's right, it's a company comprised of me, myself and I.  So when a big order comes in I don't have the luxury of delegating authority, I have to just roll up my sleeves and get to it.

Right now I am in the midst of wrapping up an order for a popular wedding website.  I'm taking a break from it for a moment to eat a little lunch and write a blog about it.  They offer my small soy candles to their customers to use as wedding favors.  What most of their customers probably do not realize, is that each candle is hand-poured by me instead of mass produced in China by a machine.  At some point I should go back and do some calculations to see just how many of these candles I've made for them over our 6 year relationship.  This particular order is for 2448 candles.  To make 2448 candles by hand, I have to lay out the containers, place wicks, pour the wax, let the wax cool, clip the wicks, add the lid & warning label, and put them in bubble wrap and boxes.  It takes an average of 10 minutes for each set of 24 candles, which means this order should take me approximately 17 hours from start to finish.  The creation of these candles is without a doubt the most tedious task I complete for my business.  Just before I took the break to eat something and write this post, I seriously started thinking I might cry if I see another one of those little candles.  And one year around Thanksgiving, when this company ordered 9600, I thought I was just going to fall over from either exhaustion or boredom.

So why why why do I keep going?  Why not find something else to concoct that I love to make which actively using my brain and isn't such a huge stress creator?  Because this one particular company has supported my entire business ever since I formed a relationship with them.  These tiny, seemingly insignificant, wedding favors have funded my website hosting, shelves of supplies, and allowed me to branch out into other creative endeavors like last year when I began researching and formulating pedicure products.  These tiny little candles, that make me groan for three days straight, have allowed me the ability to stay home with my boys and move cross country with my husband when the military required it.  So can I really complain too much?

I have always felt a very strong connection to anyone else who shared the entrepreneurial spirit and anyone out there who wants to start their own business I think should go for it!!  But just remember, no matter what business you are in, if you're going to be successful then you will most likely have some sort of "tiny candle" that drives you crazy yet keeps you going.

Investing in AA

I was thinking this morning as I swapped out yet another set of dead AA batteries, that perhaps in this down economy it would be a good idea to invest in batteries.  I don't mean investing in a battery company like Duracell or Energizer, I was thinking maybe we could trade batteries based upon size.  Like a commodities market.  I would be investing in something like AA batteries because we go through those like they're toilet paper, but a hard-of-hearing gentleman might want to invest in hearing aid batteries, or a jeweler would invest in watch batteries.  Christmas time would naturally cause the AA market to tick up, while after the fireworks on the 4th of July, the hearing aid batteries would be in full swing.

Perhaps I need more coffee this morning.  Or maybe I'm just tired of the Energizer commercials which make me think those batteries will last forever, when in fact they last maybe two days in a Wii controller.  Even the batteries in my home phone are inconsistent after a year of sporadic use.  Time to pick up some of those rechargeable puppies before we break the bank with all our electronic devices, and before we run out of room in our dead battery jar - which I have no idea how to dispose of properly.

Halloween Treats - The "Fun Size" Candy Bar

Ooooh, I love Halloween.  My pants don't, but for some reason I can convince myself that eating a dozen fun size snickers bars isn't really like eating a couple regular size ones.  I recently heard a story regarding the use of a small candy bar that is going to make it impossible for me to eat these in a couple months.  First let me throw out a little background nutrition information.  There is a growing incidence of Diabetes in this country.  Type 2 (previous called "adult onset") is expanding exponentially, to the point where adolescents are being diagnosed.  Type 2 diabetes is preceded by insulin resistance where if left unmanaged will lead to an individual's inability to maintain regular blood sugars.  The next step may be an attempt to manage it with changes in diet and exercise, but a large number of people are not identified early enough and often have to start taking oral medications immediately.  Some have let it progress too far, or the oral medications are no longer effective, and find themselves with daily insulin injections.  Okay, so for people who are maintaining their blood sugars with diet/exercise and/or oral medications the risk of running a low blood sugar is minimal, whereas those who take insulin injections need to be more careful and be sure to adjust insulin levels depending on what foods they are eating and when exercise is being done to avoid this.  Alright, enough with boring background crap.

So my friend tells me this story of 30-40 year old man who was told that since he has diabetes (we are assuming non-insulin dependent based upon his physical makeup and age) and is doing some extra exercise, he needs to be careful to avoid a low blood sugar.  In an attempt to prevent going into a diabetic coma (highly unlikely with non-insulin dependent diabetes) he must carry around with him a ziploc with a little tube of lube and a fun size candy bar.  He informed my friend's husband that if he passes out, they should turn him over and insert the candy bar into his colon.  ............  pffffft....  Excuse me a moment, I had to get a good laugh out again about this.  He was dead serious!!  He claimed his doctor had told him to follow this procedure.  My friend is going to school for nursing and had never heard of such a thing, but she wanted to see what my response was since I had worked with so many diabetics.  My initial response was to wonder why he needed the lube.  I mean really, if you're inserting a chocolate bar, like a Twix, won't the chocolate melt and become easy to insert?  Next I wondered who was going to step up and handle that particular task if this guy passed out.  And on top of that, was someone going to shove this tiny "fun size" treat all the way up to jejunum (small intestine)?  It wouldn't be as simple just popping it in his butt?  Your rectum doesn't do much, but put stuff out, and your colon (next up the line) isn't going to absorb carbohydrates.  Finally, if someone is passed out because of a low blood sugar, the first thing you want to get into their system is some pure high-octane sugar.  You don't want a candy bar because it has a nice combination of carbohydrate, protein and fat (which slows down the absorption rate of the sugar).

Take home message??  Sometimes your doctor might have a sense of humor and it helps if you do to!  Oh, and if you have diabetes and you want to carry around something in case your blood sugar runs low, how about some Gluco-Tabs or Glucose Gel packs - not a sandwich baggie with a Milky Way and lube.

Penis Poop Penis Poop... Bagina

So now that you've read my boring comments on why I blog, let's take a sneak peak at today's witty conversation coming from my sweet little boys.  Apparently in the world of a 5 years old, if a sentence is going to be funny, then it has to have the word penis or poop in it.  Oh, wait "poopy" works too.  A knock knock joke is not truly funny unless we add poopy to the description.  For example, "knock knock... who's there... poopy car".  Oh, sorry, were you looking for the rest of the joke?  It doesn't exist since we only get this far before the giggling starts, and then suddenly I'm given the exact same joke from my 3 year old, in his broken English (which I have to admit kind of makes it sound a little funny).  I was also informed that "stinky" Daddy farts and poops - which is typically a given - so when I didn't respond with surprise, I was told this same fact 4 more times.  Trips to the store have to include the running penis/poop commentary so that everyone in town gets to enjoy it too.  My sister, who was visiting, got to hear from my 3 year old that Daddy has a huge penis - as he held up his arms like he was showing me the size of a fish he once caught.  Oh, young boys.  Everything looks that big when you're 3.  And last, but not least... bagina.  For those who are not seasoned with toddler-ese, this term means "vagina".  This would be the item that girls have whereas boys have a penis.  I don't think I could even count the number of times in a day that I get interrogated about possessing a bagina.  "Where is it mommy, is it in your butt?"  or "Mommy do you have a huge bagina?"  Well, I certainly hope not!!  I can't for the life of me figure out how they know that this is a sensitive subject for some more proper individuals.  Anytime they make comments about their equipment I certainly handle it the same way we would talk about their arm or leg.  So what is it in that male brain that drives them to focus so much on that one dangling appendage?  I can hardly wait to send my 5 year old off for kindergarten and have him question his new teacher about her lack of penis.  Parent/Teacher conferences should be interesting.

My Life is too Mundane to Blog About.

Are you curious why I started a blog?  Well, while I felt like I might be able to offer words of wisdom from the different things I had experience frequently, I never thought it was worthy of writing about.  And certainly not something anyone would ever want to read.  So I started the blog for myself.  My husband has left, yet again, for a few months abroad and my nights are pretty quiet.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that we have incredibly stimulating conversations every night, but at least having someone else there at the end of the day to share your moments with so nice and surely missed.  So that was the reason for the blog.  Since I can't be sure when he might call or send an email, this was my way of sharing those ridiculous thoughts that stream through my mind.  My hope is that if I'm able to get it out of my system in some format, then maybe I can sleep better at night, and I won't incur extra dental bills from grinding my teeth off.

Ever been out to a store with a 3 and 5 year old?  Preparing for such an occasion is like getting ready for battle and usually ends with my eye twitching and teeth ground off.  But now I get to add the embarassment of obvious comments from their mouths too.  A typical trip to the grocery store is my least favorite event of the week.

One day we crossed paths with a retiree with an eye patch.  Thankfully he was a good sport and more than aware that my 5 year old could see his eye patch, so when Parker shouted out that he had one I was able to tone it down by remarking that he must be a pirate.  This made things easier when we kept seeing him in every aisle and had to keep having the same conversation and saying "arrrrr matey".  Next came a trip where my 3 year old kept hanging his hand out of the cart to stroke all the price tags as we passed them.  Too bad he also decided to stroke some man's bootie.  No this isn't another pirate reference, he really caressed some older mans buns who was bent over looking for floor cleaning supplies.  Ooops!  Loudly informed Grady that people don't like to have their buns rubbed when they're grocery shopping.  The man said it was the most action he'd seen in months.  Poor guy.  ;)

So this leads me to our most recent trip.  We had made it through the whole store with one aisle to go when we came across a man in the motorized shopping cart.  Now every time we had gone into a store that offered these, Parker would want to jump on one since it looked like fun, and I would remind him that those are for people who can't walk very well.  So he sees this guy coming and loudly points him out and tells me he's using it because he can't walk so well.  "You're probably right, buddy", I said in a voice loud enough for the gentleman to hear me.  I could tell he wasn't amused.  No smile, nothing.  But Parker didn't care.  The man stopped the wheelchair and had to stand up to get some yogurt off a high shelf.  Well, now I was informed by my observant (socially slow) boy that he had a HUGE BUTT!!  Do you have any idea how much I wanted to look??  Oooooh, it was so hard to avert my eyes.  But now I was stuck, because we needed to shop, couldn't run away and hide, and I also couldn't just agree with him loudly because Mr. No-Sense-of-Humor was definitely not going to smile about that one!!  He literally looked like one of the angry old people that chased George Costanza when he pretended he needed a motorized wheelchair, only much larger.  Had a long conversation a moment later about how saying things like that might hurt that man's feelings, but I know it didn't sink in.  How do you recover from that?  Anyone come across this with their little detectives?  At least I know if I'm curious if my ass looks fat in some jeans, my go-to-guy is Parker from this day forward. 

Perfectionism - Desired trait or curse?

Seeing as though I possess this quality, I can definitely say it is a little of both.  It certainly is my most often used attribute when asked about strengths at an interview.  But at times it can be a bit waring.  Is everything in a perfectionist's world perfect?  No!  I think you'd have to carry some degree of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) for this to be the case.  In a perfectionist's world, your mind simply chooses particular things that it deems important to make perfect.  Do you have control over this?  Maybe, but your mind makes a pretty compelling argument which you can't reason against.

Okay, so why am I rambling on about perfectionism?  Well, because my stupid brain decided that instead of cleaning up the house to prepare for a visit from my sister tomorrow, I should instead mow the lawn.  Oh, but wait... it gets better.  Once the lawn was mowed and I was putting the yard bin back by the driveway, suddenly the perfectionist neuron activated.  For some reason my brain was able to convince me that I could not possibly have company arrive tomorrow and see that I had not properly hosed down the driveway and removed all weeds from any cracks/crevices.  What??  Why did my mind decide this was of vast importance?  That stuff is all covered the moment you park the car!  It took a solid hour just to get it... yup, perfect!!  Imagine all the cleaning inside the house I could have accomplished in that amount of time!  Cleaning that actually needed to be done as opposed to this frivolous crap I just did.  Grrrrrr.

Does it come in handy to have that much attention to detail?  Well... I'm rarely disappointed with projects I complete, my bosses have always given me rave reviews, and now my sister and I can eat our dinner right off the driveway if we wanted to.

Essential Life Lessons Learned from MST3K

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (aka MST3K) was something I started watching when I was in college, forever ago.  For anyone who has never come to appreciate or even seen MST3K, I'm literally weeping for you.  It's hilarious.  The gist of it is this guy who was a janitor is selected by scientists to be sent into space.  Then the mad scientists perform this experiment on him just to see how much he can take before he cracks.  They make him sit with these robot friends (that the janitor built) and watch horrible movies.  In order for him to endure these movies he and his friends make witty/super sarcastic comments the entire time.  This is the place I picked up rare phrases like "the elusive male camel toe" and I honestly believe it was a big part of what prompted my rapid slide into a long life of sarcasm.

Okay, so what could one show, with so little redeeming value possibly teach anyone?
1.  You have to be able to think on your feet.    You can't walk around with your every thought and comment mapped out on a power point presentation.  Hello??  Life will happen and screw up your whole master plan.  You have to be able to process things fast.  MST3K taught me this, because that one guy and his robots were coming up with comments pretty fast.  Sure they were probably well scripted, but I'm just going to ignore that fact.
2.  Quick wit is not something that a humorous person can be without.  I've met a lot of people that took a long time to get a joke, and/or rarely had a comeback.  If you are lacking in the area of wit, I highly recommend at least learning to appreciate it in others.  If you are doing something that is causing your wit to run slow, please please please get a tune up.  Nothing worse than a day that just drags by with witty remarks that enter your brain too late and thus are wasted.
3.  You have to continue to learn.  Okay, I might be stretching a little bit here, but humor me on this one.  So, if you have a running commentary about a movie and one of the most "prominent" parts of the movie is the main character's seemingly painted on pants, you are going to have to come up with new ways to describe the nut hugging jeans or else your audience will get bored.  Expand that vocabulary!!  You don't have to use big words that no one has ever heard of to sound intelligent, but you do need to use a variety or else you start sounding like a toddler.  Also, I don't believe you can ever know too much.  The moment you stop learning, you stop growing.
4.  If you are stuck in a crappy place where you don't want to be and no way to change your situation, you might as well make the best of it.  Hello!!  Here was a guy who just wanted to mop the floors at the mad scientists' factory, and instead he was sent into space to watch horrible movies!!  He found that he could joke around about how bad the movies were.  So can't we all try to find the good in our situations too?

A Color Wheel for Scents

Today I was thinking, while doing laundry, that perhaps I should develop something like a color wheel for scents.  With the color wheel you begin with the primary colors and you can see where they overlap and form new colors.  If red and blue overlap you get purple.  If red and yellow overlap you get orange.  Okay, so with the scent wheel, you could take two very unique scents, overlap them, and Voila! it tells you what scent you will get.  Why would this come in handy?  Because it could help me explain how a laundry hamper full of clothes from two potty trained boys could possibly smell like pure poop at the bottom.  Clearly no one dropped messy underwear in there, so it must have been a combination of two unique scents that somehow managed to burn my nostrils as I reached for that last sock.  Bleh!  If I had the scent wheel, I would have known what not to mix together.

What has this experience taught me?  Perhaps a plastic or wicker hamper would be a great replacement for the current cloth variety we possess.

Me in 1200 words or less?

As I started setting up my blog, this was my first hurdle.  How can I possibly describe my experiences and my thought process in a way that might make people feel a kinship to me?  And then how could I fit my experiences into 1200 words?  Well, I can't.  I suppose I wouldn't have started a blog if I had as little as 1200 words to say about anything.  Then I wondered who would want to read what I had to write?  I'm not a celebrity or the CEO of a major company.  Just a regular girl.  I have two boys, ages 3 and 5 (which I'm sure will provide a large amount of material for me to blog about).  My husband of 6 years is on active duty in the Navy and presently deployed.  I am the owner/operator of West Road Soy Candles as well as Uforya Body.  I was raised in MidCoast Maine and attended the University of Maine where I received my degree in Nutrition.  After graduation I worked as a Dietitian for 7 years and bartended on the weekends (which is how I met my husband).  I currently reside in Washington State and am about to embark on my Master's in Nutrition program in two weeks (eeeek!).

Wow, so I guess I have a little bit of a resume.  So what can you expect from a blog written by me?  I'll be honest.  There really isn't anything I won't discuss.  Takes a lot to make me blush and I haven't come across many topics that I shy away from.  My primary purpose for the blog was a daily outlet for me.  With my husband gone, I find that I observe a lot of different things over the course of a day and then have no one to share them with - preK boys don't want to listen to what I have to say unless I use the word "poop" a lot.  I would like to empower other military spouses to be strong individuals while still being great supporters of their loved ones.  I want to help people who want to take something they love to do and create their own small businesses (love a good entrepreneur).  I want to share my quick wit so that others can find the humor in every situation, because anyone who knows me is well aware that I can't take anything seriously.  Finally, I want to talk maybe just a little here and there about Nutrition, because it is a big interest of mine. 

Well, I think that's a good start.  Doesn't really let you know all that much about me, but I like a little mystery.