The Good: Okay, this update about Drew is way late, but better than never right?  When we went to the doc last month, Drew was 55% for weight at 29lbs and 90% for height at 36 inches.  This means that if you take 36 * 2, he should be 72 inches tall as an adult or 6 feet.  Yippee!  He did not inherit my midgit gene (or little person, but I don't have to be PC about myself, right?)
He has a very large vocabulary and can understand words like dangerous and careful, which thrill me.  He can say his numbers through 10, although he doesn't understand how much more than two there are of something.  He knows most of the alphabet, although the difference between uppercase and lowercase letters are tricky for him, but we will get there.
But the most amazing thing is - He has a photographic memory.  He loves to read, so we do that several times a day and most of the time it is the same handful of favorite books.  He shocked me the other day by "reading" the book back to me and telling me what the page said before I read it.  Of course in his own words.  Example: Book: This dinosaur has a keen, eerie eye.  Drew: Noar keen eerie eye.  Too cute :)We have done this now with several books, and I am amazed every time.  I will try to get this on video if I can.  There are a million other things I can say, but I won't bore you :)  I will just say that this is such a fun age, and I love discovering what he will learn and say next.

Also in the good column - I went on my annual girls shopping trip to the outlet mall in Foley, AL, and it was a total blast.  In fact, I outshopped and outlasted those who are not preggers, and I was proud of myself.  When I get in the shopping zone, I am unstoppable :)  I got 95% of my shopping done which is awesome because I will not have the time for that in just a few weeks here.  Also good was that Brad watched Drew for the weekend and took him to restaurants and the zoo for some father/son time.  There are not many men that I know that would care for their son for the weekend, much less take him places by themselves, so I feel very blessed and lucky.  This definitely earned him a spot on Santa's nice list :)

The Not So Bad: The two trials I have been having with Drew involved sleeping in his new bed and potty training.  Well, we have made real progress on the bed front.  I started getting brave and shutting the door while he slept so he couldn't get out.  The first night was hell.  He woke up every 20 minutes banging on the door to get out.  But we got through it, and every night after that was a little better.  Every now and then he wakes up somewhere around 1 or 2 and cries for about 10 mintues, but he never gets out of bed anymore and he puts himself back to sleep without me going in there.  This leads to much better rest for all of us, and I am surviving my guilt of not letting him sleep in my bed.  Take this as a note my friends - Do not let your child sleep in the bed with you.  It is a hard habit to break, and it has been difficult for me.  I don't regret it fully due to the health circumstances we've had, but I should have pulled the plug a long time ago.  I am glad it looks like we are finally getting through it.
On the potty front, although I said I was giving up, I am not really a quitter, so I still got lots of books and rented and bought movies about the potty just so we can keep talking about it.  We rented this movie from the library called, "Once Upon a Potty."  It is the boy version about a boy named Josh who starts using the potty.  The very first time we watched it, Drew said, "Be right back."  When I went to see where he went, he was sitting on his potty.  Seriously.  He didn't go or anything, but this was a major breakthrough.  Since that day, I have gotten him to go on the potty 3 times.  He never asks to go and I let him walk around without a diaper on until I see that he has to go and put him on there so it is not like he is fully trained or anything, but it is a start.  He now tells me whenever he is using the bathroom and if he doesn't have a diaper on, he does not go on the floor anymore like in the beginning.  Even if he doesn't want to go on the potty, he will hold it for 3+ hours, so he is learning control.  Another trick I used was a doll that goes pee-pee in her own potty.  That wasn't that thrilling to him, but when I stuck raisins in her potty and told him she made poo-poo, he was amazed by that.  It was the first time he went by himself on the potty.  I think part of the problem I had in the beginning was that I thought this would be a quick process, but I think it will be ongoing, and I have learned to be okay with that.  I will keep you posted for you future and current mommies who will need this in your file one day :)

The Ugly: Me.  Okay too harsh, and I am not looking for sympathy, but it's just how I feel right now.  This woman recently told me, "You seriously have one month to go?  You look like you are going to pop.  I can't believe you have to wait that long."  Really?  Not ok.  I should have told her, "Well you're not looking so hot yourself with your flabby arms in that too tight halter."   But I am not a bitch.  Only in my mind :)  The baby is head down, but he is still pretty high up there, so we keep waiting to see what will happen.  I am a little over 35 weeks and oh so ready, although Brad is quite glad for some time to prepare.  Not sure why the men always need time to prepare when the women bear the brunt of the work while the baby is both inside and out, but whatever.   

Current Mood: working

This idea has been scratching at me since I arrived, and IT WON'T GO AWAY!

I'm partially blaming Trey for it. He keeps insisting I should write young adult books. Says my writing 'voice' is best suited for that (Really, what does he know?!) Other than my Stealing Ellum trilogy (only the first book is written), I've stayed away from YA. I love my adult books, the ones written and the ones that are still germenating in my mind.

I'm also blaming Meredith Duran. She hooked me on historical romance with THE DUKE OF SHADOWS last spring, and her other two books, BOUND BY YOUR TOUCH and WRITTEN ON YOUR SKIN are equally awesome. I've sworn not to attempt historical romance because I don't think my voice is right for it. Plus, I could never come close to crafting something as beautiful as she does.

So basically, I've vowed not to write any more young adult books and to write no historical romances. Guess what this stupid idea I have is? Yep. A YA historical romance.

Argh! (Ahem. No. There are no pirates in this...  Hmm. Maybe I can put a pirate in it. Why the heck not.)

The thing is, I could ignore this itch if I wasn't living where I am. We're in Windsor, and there's this little town on the other side of the Thames called Eton. And there's this college in Eton. It's referenced in the majority of the historical romances I've read. Seems every duke, earl, baron, and whatever other titles these books' heroes have attended Eton College. (By the way, 'college' is a deceiving term. Until just a couple weeks ago, I thought it was a college - like an American college with students 18 and up. Nope. Boys aged 13-18.) 

All these references to the character's pasts have made me so curious about Eton, and with it just around the corner, it's almost always on my mind. I have no idea who my hero will be, what he'll will do, how he'll interact with the other boys, and for the love of God I have no clue how the heroine will come into the story. It's a school for boys. How the heck am I going to hook hero and heroine up?

This will require research. How nerdy is it that I want to take a tour of the campus? But how can I pass it up? I mean, they have a MUSEUM OF ETON LIFE. Hello, research. I should do the research, shouldn't I? It would be a shame to pass up the opportunity.

But I want to write my adult science fiction romance. It's halfway written already. I could have it finished and polished in a few months. Who knows how long it'll take me to write an Eton story from scratch? Especially with the research. I've never had to research my books before, not like this.

This idea of mine can't be original, can it? I did do a quick search for books set at Eton. Only found a young James Bond series, but surely someone else - someone who's a better writer than me - has already tried it.

ETA: Darn it. The musuem is only open April - Oct.

It ocurred to me that two out of my three completed novels contain love triangles. I never set out to write this type of love story - another guy always shoves his way into my books, thus complicating my MC's life. I partially blame Apopcalyptica's Bittersweet for this. Music inspires me, and I love the contrast of the high and low voices and the anguish in them both.

So I decided to do a little research. I went a-googling for more love triangle songs. I found on a Yahoo! message board a reference to a song called What About Now by Kenny Rogers and some other folk. I dashed off to YouTube it, but, alas, the KR video had been blocked (the UK blocks so much more stuff than the US). There was, however, a song called What About Me by some guy named Ryan Knorr. On a whim, a clicked it.


Love this guy's voice. And the song? Wow. It has so much emotion in it, my heart kind of aches.

Have any of you ever stumbled across good music by unknown or little-known artists on the web? If so, who? I'm always on the lookout for new stuff to listen to. :-) 

Tags: music

I want to like your bookstores. Really, I do. They remind me a bit of Barnes & Noble, though they're never quite as large and I've yet to find one with a coffee shop inside. Like B&N, they're in most large-ish cities in the UK. I stumble into them whenever I have the opportunity, always on the lookout for new books and authors. But, dear Waterstone's, I find that I leave all too often without making a purchase. Do you want to know why? Do you? It's a simple reason, one which can easily be remedied.

You have no romance section.

None.

This is apalling. Do you know romance is the top selling genre? A quarter of all books sold are romances. Granted, these are US stats, but I wouldn't think the English are so different. So why not give them their own shelf? I'm from Texas, a notoriously conservative state. We have aisles dedicated to romance, so it can't be that you're afraid to offend costumers with half-clothed people on the covers. It can't be a shortage of shelving space. You do carry romances, so you can just take them from your general fiction aisle and group them together somewhere else. You will sell more books if you do.

This lack of a romance section was only an annoyance in the past. I could go to Murder One, to their room full of romance and find many somethings to read. But, alas, Murder One has closed *sob* and unless I order books on-line, it's a tremendous labour to locate romance within general fiction. Usually, I don't have the time or patience to try. And to accidentally stumble across a new-to-me, interesting writer of romantic fiction? Near to impossible.

But maybe I've only stumbled upon anti-romance Waterstone's? I feel like I've been in one that had a shelf - a shelf! - of romance, but I can't remember where that one store was. It's certainly not in any of the town's I frequent. I almost believe I dreamed the ocurrence. 

So, Waterstone's, until you decide to create a romance section in all of your stores, I shan't return to any of them. I will purchase my books on-line from Amazon. *gasp*

Sincerely,

Sandy


 

In a word - awesome. In two words, conveniently awesome. My library back home in Texas offers this service and I'm super excited because I can use it over here in the UK. My only complaint is that the collection of audiobooks available isn't very extensive. I don't know if that's because publishers won't let Overdrive offer downloadable audiobooks on all their titles or if my library just isn't paying enough money to get everything that's available. I guess the limited selection is kind of good in a way. I've tried some authors/books which I never would have picked up otherwise. Books like Jay Asher's 13 Reasons Why (tragic, frustrating, but fabulous), Stephanie Meyer's Breaking Dawn (DO NOT listen to this book!*), and Suzanne Brockmann's Body Language (simple, predictable plot but one which I thoroughly enjoyed). 

On Wednesday, I'm taking my grandmother to Paris for an overnight stay. We'll be spending something like 3-4 hours on trains and, since I get motion sick so easily and can't read and travel, I'm ecstatic I was able to download two books to my MP3 player: The Lost Duke of Wyndham and Dark Curse: A Carpathian Novel. I haven't read anything by Julia Quinn or Christine Feehan, so I'm anxious to try them out.


* The description. Oh. My. God. The descriptions went on FOREVER! I think I might have liked this book better if I'd read it, but I couldn't stand listening. Everything I don't like was accentuated, and I couldn't skim through the pages and pages of "his face is so perfect, his skin is like marble" blah, blah, blah. I was okay with the plot, even though it seemed to clash with the tone of the other books.

The other major problem I had with the audiobook was I couldn't stand the way the narrator did voices. Every time another vamp spoke, the narrator would do it in voices that grated on my nerves. And the part of the book from Jacob's POV? Ugh, horribly annoying. Not Meyer's fault. Maybe not even the narrator's fault. I'm thinking I might prefer audiobooks that have only one or two POVs. I'll have to listen to more to see if this theory is correct.  Research, gotta love it. :-)

Tags: audiobooks