What to Say

I apologize for my absence, but I've been a bit preoccupied. I will go into detail later. First and foremost let me just say I know many of you are concerned with Golightly's status. Unfortunately, the reports given by friends and family are few and far between. These are the last two I received and they're both pretty brief.

May 23: Golightly's mother and brother arrived in Dallas today to spend the memorial weekend with Golightly! She has her eyes open and is reacting well to stimulus. They have even shown us how well Golightly tolerates being upright in her cardiac chair. It's a fun day filled with the sing song of 'Annie' and the voices of love.

June 2: Golightly continues to improve and amaze everyone with her progress. She seems to be tracking everyone in her room a lot better now. The breathing tube has been fully removed and right now only has some gauze covering the healing.

So as you can see, the progress is slow and I'm sure will continue that way until she wakes up. Keep praying for her. Someone asked if Cowboy is still by her side. From what I've gathered from a friend of Golightly's, he is still by her side, but he's still pretty down about the whole thing. The friend speculates he's got a guilty conscience, since he convinced Golightly to go out the night of the accident. That's really all I've heard in terms of Cowboy.

As for me, well, heck I didn't realize that May 20 was my last post. That's not very good. But I've had a couple of things going on, so I hope yall will forgive me.

Number one, I've been looking for a job. I haven't been full-force about the job search, but slowly and surely I'm getting my resume out there and trying to make contacts with various people and places. Like I said before, it's pretty tough to do this with a toddler at your heels. It's proving very difficult to focus on cover letters and such with her begging for my attention (read: crying incessantly). She's created disasters in the room, but I'll allow it, as long as it buys me thirty minutes to write out a decent paragraph or two. The good news is I've been offered a part time job, which I will start tomorrow. Although, it's only part time, which means no benefits (boo), I'm still pretty excited about it, 'cause at least I'll be getting myself out there in the workforce. Plus, in a way, I'll be easing Lucero away from me. Her father will be watching her while I work. I'm pretty sure he can manage her for four hours a day. However, I'll be sitting at my new job wondering if she's wearing a bib when he decides to feed her something not on my approved list of meals or if he'll be able to maintain her nap schedule. True, it's only four hours, but she should get at least one nap in in that amount of time. Plus, it will give X a small, teeny, tiny taste of my day. Seriously, four hours is not a lot of time, but geez, it would be nice for him to know what I go through, though I'm sure he won't.

Secondly, I've been trying to wean Lucero. Once she got over her little cold and cough, it became relatively easy. I eliminated the day feeding(s) and night feedings, meaning the middle of the night when she would constantly wake, and it wasn't too difficult. For day, I just distracted her with food and other snacks when I would normally feed her. The middle of the night feedings were, what I suspected, just for comfort on her part, obviously not mine. One night I just decided to stop nursing her throughout the night when she woke, but instead to rock her like I normally do and offer her the pacifier. The first couple of times, she would cry and shake her head at it, but I kept insisting she take it or get nothing. After a few minutes, she eventually would take the pacifier and would fall soundly back to sleep. Now we're pretty much at the point where she sleeps through out the night, no more waking to be rocked or comforted and definitely no more feedings! Yes, thank you, God! So basically we are down to two feedings a day, the morning and before bedtime one. Once I start my part time gig, I'm going to eliminate the morning one and allow her father to feed her breakfast. Normally, I would nurse her in the morning and then an hour later I would make her some baby oatmeal. We'll see how it all works out with her waking and going straight to a prepared breakfast meal. The one thing we are struggling with is to get her to drink more milk. She takes little sips, but no more than a couple of ounces. When I say "couple of ounces" I literally mean only two ounces. We use a sippy cup, so I'm wondering if there's another method to get her to drink more. Thoughts? Suggestions?

Third, together with my friend Blythe, we're working on a project to sale some T-shirts for the upcoming rodeo here in town. We already have the awesome design, thank you, Kazim, but we are currently debating colors of the shirts, as well as colors of the screen print. We are considering going strictly with red, black and white shirts, but a part of me feels maybe we should offer more of a variety in colors, 'cause I feel black and white shirts are pretty basic and everyone already has those color Ts in their dresser drawer. However, the issue we have is there's not a huge sampling of cool color shirts to choose from. So I ask yall, if you could choose three colors for a T-shirt you would buy and wear, which would those be? Answer soon, because decisions are being made quickly. (By the way, the link shows a pic of the design, but it will be the reverse of what you see, meaning the words and graphics will be the screen print color and the other part will be gone, so it'll just be the T-shirt. Does this make sense? We made that shirt with an iron-on, but since we're mass producing the Ts, then it wouldn't be required to have the design contained. Get it?)

And that's all folks. Once again, I apologize for the lean posting, but I'm sure yall understand.