Customer Service

There's nothing like a good experience with a customer service rep to make your day a little better. Just like there's nothing worse than a bad experience to make you want to strangle someone. I've had an experience on both sides of the coin recently.

Let's start with the good, shall we?

A month ago, I drug out the massive stroller that is compatible with my infant car seat. The positive to saving everything from one child to the next is the cost-savings, the negative is the mice that chew a hole in the basket under the stroller that's been sitting in the garage for a couple of years without being used. The hole was big enough that I would have felt a little white trash taking it out in public, so Keith did what all self-respecting red necks do. He pulled out his pocket knife and cut off all the fabric from the basket unit. It looked better, but now I had a huge empty space under my stroller and no place to put packages.

I started looking online to see if I could find a replacement basket. The first place I went to was Graco's website. How fun it was to see that my pattern that I bought 4 years ago is now discontinued! But surely they had replacement parts for this somewhere, so I called their customer service line. Thankfully the mice hadn't chewed off the model # sticker, so I was able to give the rep the correct info on my stroller rather than say "Well, I bought it 4 years ago, from Babies R Us, it's grey and blue plaid..." After a short amount of time on hold, the guy came back and told me that they didn't have that exact basket, but he had one that was similar and it should fit. He told me it would cost $5 to ship it, so when I went to give him my credit card information, he also told me they only take Visa or Mastercard. Umm, I only have Discover. Rather than telling me to call back later when my husband was home with his Mastercard, he said he was just going to send it to me for free. He wasn't positive it would work and he felt bad charging me for something that might not even fit. I told him I would be happy to either send it back if it didn't work or mail a check if it did, but he told me not to do that.

Within 3 weeks, the basket arrived. It's not an exact match, pattern-wise, but it's pretty darn close. And it fit just fine. Besides, who really looks at the basket under the stroller? If you're doing your shopping right, it's full of purchases anyway. (I'm cracking myself up here. I'm not much of a shopper, especially if it requires hauling my children along for the ride and requiring a stroller to be present.)

I was amazed that, not only would Graco send me a replacement part for a 4 year old stroller rather than just tell me to go buy a new one. But they sent it to me for free with no hassle on my part! I would understand doing this if some part had been defective, but this was totally my fault for storing the stroller in the garage. And I was very upfront about that. So if you're looking for a company to purchase baby gear from, I highly recommend Graco. We've always used their products anyway, but now I feel even better about buying from them.

And the flip side...

I always hate going to the post office. Especially if I have a child or two with me. It's just a pain to go there and stand in line while trying to keep the older child out of the boxes and packages they have on display for sale or trying to keep the younger child from screaming and thus causing everyone else in line to give you dirty looks. On this particular trip, I only had Cooper with me. But I was mailing a couple of packages, plus a couple of heavy envelopes that needed to be weighed for postage. So I kept Cooper in his infant seat to carry in so I could have both hands free to juggle my things once we got inside. His seat could just sit on the floor in front of me and I would jiggle it with my foot in hopes of keeping him quiet.

Yeah right.

Luckily, the time of day we were at our local post office, there was only two people in front of me, both being helped by the 2 employees working the front desk. One of the customers left, but I didn't automatically walk up to the available employee. I've learned my lesson the hard way with that. You walk up to them, only for them to completely ignore you and walk out of the room, then you stand there not sure if they're coming back or if you should go back to the line and wait for the other worker to be available. By this point, you don't feel as if you can go back to the head of the line because one or two customers have cycled through the other employee, so you trudge to the back of the line ready to go postal. (I could totally understand if that saying had come from a post office customer going off rather than a postal worker.)

On this particular day, I waited at the head of the line until I was told he was ready for me. He never really said anything, but he made some weird gesture in my general direction and after having done it a couple of times, I tentatively assumed that he was meaning for me to come to his counter. I walked up, placed my packages on the counter and explained to him what I was needing. Cooper started crying, so I bent down to give him his pacifier and try to appease him. The employee asked me how I wanted to mail the packages so I asked him what the price differences were. As he was going through them for me, I bent down again to try and stop Cooper's crying. The counters at this post office are pretty tall, so I don't know if he knew that I was bending down to take care of a baby, but at this point, there is only one other customer and they don't have a baby. He looks at me and says very rudely "Are you listening to me?" I almost recited back everything he had just said because OF COURSE I WAS LISTENING! I can listen to you ramble off some postage prices while also bending down to take care of my child. It's not as if, just because I'm out of your line of vision I also can no longer hear you. I just looked at him and very flatly said, "Of course I'm listening." And then told him which option I wanted. Then he proceeded to ring me up without the book of stamps I asked for! I almost repeated to him "Weren't you listening to me?"

I've since been back to mail another package and buy another book of stamps. The process went a little smoother than last time, but he still didn't hear me ask for the stamps! And the Postal Service wonders why they're losing money...

The flu or not the flu, that is the question...

Last Wednesday, Garrett's nose started sounding stuffy. By the end of the day he said his head, throat and stomach hurt and he was running a 101 degree fever. During the night, he woke up saying his throat hurt really bad and his fever was up to 102. So I gave him more Tylenol, water, and throat spray. By Thursday morning, the fever was gone without any meds. He seemed to be basically himself, besides saying that his head, throat and stomach still hurt. But none of those kept him from playing like normal and eating like normal so I held off taking him to the doctor. Early that evening, his temp went back up to 101. I told myself the next day I would take him to the doctor, but he slept just fine that night and woke up on Friday without a fever and hasn't had one since. He still occasionally says his throat or stomach hurts and his nose is a little runny/stuffy and he now has an occasional cough. (I think the only reason why he hasn't had a cough the whole time is because of this new inhaler he's on that we're using faithfully. It's been a God-send already!)

So is this the flu or not? Obviously if I had taken him to the doctor I would have a definitive answer. But equally true would be the fact that if he didn't have the flu, he probably would have caught it from someone in the waiting room. It's a matter of fact that it's spreading exceptionally fast in our area. Every other status update of my local friends on Facebook are saying that they or their children have the flu. To be honest, I really hope this was the flu. I want to be done with it so we don't have to worry about it again. I realize the seasonal flu will probably go around at some point, but I know it won't be near as rampant as this Swine flu has been. Thankfully Cooper has seemed to be ok. He did have one grouchy day last Thursday and today his nose has been a tad runny with an occasional cough. But not one bit of fever and he's eating and sleeping fine, so I'm not going to panic and run him to the doctor where he will also catch the flu.

To be honest, I wouldn't even stress about it if it wasn't for 2 things. 1) We obviously have a baby in the house. The news and everywhere continually stresses how TERRIBLE AND AWFUL this flu is for children under 2 and especially those under 6 months old. So I don't want to worry about him catching this. (Side note: As TERRIBLE AND AWFUL as this flu is supposed to be for little ones, I find it very encouraging that none of the deaths that I'm hearing about are children in this age range. The closest one has been the very first US death in Houston of a 23 month old. It's strange how hard it's hitting the school-aged kids.) 2) All the deaths of the school-aged kids in our area! I know that there are deaths from the seasonal flu every year, but I don't think they involve kids this young! Every week, I'm hearing on the news about a different student who has passed away from this. Even though I try very hard not to be a worry-wart, that sort of news rattles me a bit. They're always talking about how some of them have underlying medical conditions. As far as I know, they consider asthma one of those conditions and Garrett has that, so it really doesn't help me any to hear them attempt to explain away the death of a 16 year old, or a 14 year old, or a 12 year old, etc.

Finally: my thoughts on the vaccine. I am highly against this swine flu vaccine. I would honestly rather stress out about my kids having the swine flu and keeping a very close eye on them throughout the sickness, than to give them a vaccine that's been thrown together over the course of a few months with little testing having been done. That scares me much more. I really and truly hope that a year from now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, we don't start hearing about different conditions and problems that have arisen in those who got this vaccine. I'm sure you've heard of the complications that came frome the last swine flu vaccine about 30 years ago. While I know they would have learned from those mistakes, who knows what new ones could come up. Why not spend the billions being spent on a vaccine, to ramping up more production of Tamiflu products instead? They don't really know the outcome of the vaccine, but they do know that Tamiflu seems to be helping the flu some, yet it's in a major short supply right now. Why aren't they fixing this problem as well?!

In order to prepare for the upcoming flu/cold season (regardless of whether or not we've actually had the Swine flu), I've stocked up on some supplies today just in case: Pedialyte (I really hope we don't need this, but it's not something I want to run to the store for when it is needed), disposable thermometer covers for Cooper's thermometer as well as some for the ear thermometer I use for Garrett, Keith, and myself, Tylenol, Kleenex, and anti-bacterial gel (we have quite a bit of this right now. A container in Keith's truck, one in my SUV, one in the kitchen for those moments I can't wash my hands, but need to santize them and also for Garrett to use if he can't wash his hands for some reason, one in my purse, and one in the diaper bag. We now have 2 extra containers for when these run out. Am I OCD? Yes.)

I normally love this time of year, but I'm not loving it right now. I'm already looking forward to next year when I won't have the "baby factor" to stress about.

Give Me Your Input Please

In a few weeks we will be having family pictures taken and I need some help in figuring out what we should wear. I've requested of the photographer that these pictures be taken outside because I love outdoor shots when you have the right photographer and the right lighting and the guy who is doing this is awesome, so I'm already excited to see our pictures. What would you recommend we wear? I don't want to be too dressed up because that's not who we are. So we're definitely going to be wearing jeans (Cooper might be the exception to this, not sure yet). But what color should we go with for our shirts? While it is fall outside, I don't know that we'll have the ultimate fall background. This is Texas afterall. So we don't necessarily have to go with orange or brown or red to match the leaves, but if you think those colors would be good... Living in a house of boys, we have plenty of blue, but I don't know if we should do that or not. Or should we go basic and stick with everyone wearing white?

The last time we had a family picture taken professionally was when Garrett was about 14 months old and our church took pictures for a new directory. Since the background for that was going to be blue, we all wore a light shade of green (mostly because that was the only thing we all had that matched). While I love the picture because it was our first (and only so far) family picture, I kind of kick myself everytime I walk past that picture because the color just wasn't the best choice. I know this upcoming picture will hang in our house for a long time so I don't want to be kicking myself with this one.

Thoughts?

Beach Vacation

Before Cooper was born, I started talking to Keith about the possibility of us going on a little family trip when he was a few months old. We haven't just taken a vacation since our honeymoon. Our trips have all been to Indiana to visit my family, which is great, but we want to start doing family vacations too.

For the past several months, Garrett has been asking to go to the beach. He was desperate to build a sand castle like he saw Curious George do on his show one day. So we made the decision to go to Galveston once Cooper was around 3 months old. We figured he would be sleeping through the night by that point (he is) and a little easier to take out (he is).

My family used to live about 45 minutes from Galveston, so I am familiar with the area and my brother and sister in law still live down there. It was fun to go back after several years and see the changes to the area. The saddest part for me was seeing the destruction still evident from Hurricane Ike a year later.

We left Friday morning around 9:00. After a detour not more than 20 minutes away from our house and then a poopy diaper that we had to stop and change, we were a little behind the schedule I had in my mind. But if I've learned nothing from being a mom it's that I have to be flexible, even though that is a huge challenge for me! So rather than making it to Huntsville (which is about halfway to our destination) we only made it to Centerville before it was time for Cooper to eat. Since it was lunchtime too, Keith and Garrett went into Jack in the Box to eat lunch while I fed Cooper in the car. He was more than hysterical at this point so I needed to stay there to try and calm him down before he would take his bottle. After a diaper change, a bathroom break, and grabbing myself something to eat in the car, we got back onto the interstate. Thankfully Cooper went to sleep and slept until about halfway through Houston. At this point he was totally done with being in the carseat. Neither of my boys have liked their infant carseat. It's very frustrating for me because I can't be *that* mom who just takes her baby in the seat everywhere I go and they sit there contentedly.

So I climbed into the backseat and sat between Garrett and Cooper for the rest of the trip. That seemed to help some, but he still was not happy with me. Instead of going straight to Galveston, to our hotel, we stopped at my brother's house for a visit. They bought a house a few months ago and we hadn't been down to see it yet, so it was fun to visit with them and see their first home. And meet their new puppy that they bought the night before. He was a cutie!

Brad and Cooper in the living room of his new house
The new puppy, Bear. He's only 7 weeks old!

After visiting with Brad and Kristen and admiring their house, we all went to eat Mexican food for supper. I'm of the opinion that Mexican food gets better the further south you go. This meal totally proved that theory.

When we were done eating and visiting, we left and headed for our hotel. It was about 45 minutes away, but the route to get us there is nice. We drove right along the coast enjoying the beach. We also noted several parts of the road that were newly re-done due to Hurricane Ike washing out the original road. Some of the houses along this route looked brand new, or newly repaired. Others looked as if no one had touched them since Ike a year ago. I feel badly for those families, even though they did choose to live on the beach and therefore have a high chance of a hurricane or tropical storm damaging their home. I choose to live in Texas, therefore I have a high probability of my house getting hit by a tornado. And it did 5 years ago. So you never know what will happen when weather is involved.

We arrived at our hotel, got checked in and settled down for the night.

After eating a yummy hotel breakfast the next morning (thank goodness the continental breakfast is going the way of the dinosaurs! I enjoy a good omelet, sausage, biscuits and gravy for free at my hotel.), we headed to the beach.

After the beach, we went to a miniature golf course that sits across the street from the beach. Garrett loves to play Wii golf, so we thought he might enjoy mini golf. I guess he did, but it was hard to tell amidst the tantrums because a)his ball didn't go where he wanted it to, b)Momma or Daddy happened to hit the ball better than he did, or c)he didn't get a "chip-in". (I totally got a hole-in-one on the first hole! Of course this was the easy course for kids, but still...) Keith and I ended up alternating who would actually putt on each hole because we were also holding Cooper and Garrett was whizzing through the holes so we didn't want to drag him down by insisting we take the time for all 3 of us to have our turn. And there was a couple playing a few holes behind us. If we took too long, they would eventually need to play through. I wasn't sure if Garrett could handle that at this point. Trust me, when Cooper is older and doesn't require being held, we will play a real game of mini golf, following the rules, keeping score, and everything. I told Keith that was the fastest 18 holes of golf ever played. Garrett was not happy that he had to putt his ball into the final hole where it didn't come back. It didn't help that the ball didn't actually make it to the hole, but was behind a gate where he couldn't reach it, but could still see it.

Saturday afternoon we toured "The Bishop's Palace". You can google it if you're interested, but a brief rundown is this:

A railroad tycoon built this house in the late 1800's. It took him 5 years and $250k to build it. It has SO much detail. The walls in one bedroom? Not wallpaper, hand-stenciled! Every room had a fireplace with each being from a different country. The stained glass windows were shipped from Germany. The walls (interior and exterior) are at least 2 feet thick and made of concrete. When this house was complete it had indoor plumbing, electricity and gas, phone, pretty much everything minus air-conditioning. And the guy did his best with that. The stairwell is 50 feet tall with the dome being able to open in order to release the hot air that would rise up in the heat of the day. When the hurricane of 1900 hit Galveston, killing more than 6,000 people and almost leveling the island, this house only had 6 feet of water in the basement and 2 broken windows. When Ike hit last year, they had 3 feet of water in the basement and 1 broken window. I'm fascinated by things like this. The vase on the mantel in the parlor was dated from the 1500's!! Can you imagine everything that vase could tell us about if it could talk? You're not allowed to take pictures inside this house, so we only have a couple that we took in the basement. You can kind of see how thick the walls are in these pictures.

When we were deciding where to go for lunch, we knew we wanted seafood. How can you go to the beach and not eat seafood? I asked the hotel for a good recommendation so we headed there. Obviously it's a popular place because there was not one available table, so we left to find somewhere else to eat. Brad had told me about Fishtales, so we went there. It wasn't cheap food, but it was really good and not crowded so that was a plus. During our tours around the island, we drove by this house. It's not a good shot, I apologize, but Keith said he thought it looked like a Miami Vice house. It was pretty cool.

If you ever been to Galveston, then you've probably seen the Flagship Hotel. It's a hotel that sits out on piers in the gulf. Unfortunately, this hotel sustained damage from Hurricane Ike. Here's a few pictures that we took. The restaurant where we had lunch sat directly across the street from this hotel, so that was where I took some of these pictures. In this picture, you can make out a TV and bed inside the hotel rooms. Keith said if they ever repair this hotel, he wants to come back to Galveston and stay there. Preferably not during hurricane season.

Most of the piers going out from the seawall into the gulf were completely destroyed. This one is still somewhat intact, but the part that boggled my mind is the fact that this truck was washed out onto the pier and still sits there today. Anyone missing their truck? I think I found it.
A direct shot.
If you watched any of the Ike coverage, then you saw the shots of all the boats that had washed up onto Interstate 45 as you're leaving Galveston and heading north towards Houston. Here are some of those boats still sitting on the side of the interstate a good ways away from any water. Can you imagine living in one of those houses and having someone's boat sitting in your backyard?

Garrett and I also swam in the hotel pool on Saturday. He LOVED it and was a total fish, even accidentally going under a few times didn't bother him one bit. For supper we decided to stay in and order pizza. The day had been a long and busy one for all of us and the boys really needed to get to bed early. Madagascar 2 was on one of the cable channels so that kept Garrett happy.

The drive home was much easier than the drive there. I just road in the back from the start and then I was able to stop the screaming before it started, for the most part.

We had a great time on our trip. I will admit to being happy to be home once it was over though. It's mentally and physically exhausting to travel with a small baby. I know I'll enjoy our vacations in the future when he's a little older and doesn't require so much "stuff" and attention.

9/11/01

It's so hard to believe that 8 years have passed since 9/11/01. When all the things that happened "over there" in some other country, where it didn't affect us and therefore was easy to forget and gloss over, it all came here.

It certainly makes me view news reports of bombings and terrorism in other countries differently now. We took for granted that we were safe here. And I'm afraid that a lot of people have continued to feel this way. I've been disappointed in the news coverage leading up to today. I've not heard one mention, even in passing, that "this Friday marks 8 years since that tragic day" or anything similar. I should think that a terrible day such as this one deserves more recognition than some passing comments on the anniversary. We have a generation of kids growing up right now who are currently in the 2nd or 3rd grades that were born right around 9/11. If we're not careful, they will know nothing about this day and it will just be something else in the history books. It makes my heart ache to think that all of those people died and will very soon be forgotten because the media doesn't want to disturb us by showing some of the footage from that day. Yet we can be disturbed by the news coverage of the murders and thefts and rapes. Those are ok, but some of the 9/11 footage is not.

I certainly won't ever forget that day. I was in my last semester of college before doing my student teaching. Tuesdays were my late day so I was actually still in bed when most of this took place. I remember waking up and turning on the TV. Initially I didn't pay any attention to what was on, just flipped through the channels. Until I realized that every channel was showing the same thing, so I stopped and took notice. The second plane had just hit the building and they were re-airing the footage of it. I could not believe that had happened. They had initially thought that the first plane had been some horrible mistake by a pilot or plane, but when that second plane hit, they were scrambling to figure out what exactly was going on. I remember I was watching all this footage on the "Today" show and Katie Couric and Matt Lauer were the ones narrating what they were seeing. I immediately picked up the phone and called my parents to see if they knew what was going on and we talked about it for a minute.

I got ready to go to work while keeping all attention on the TV. Driving to campus, I listened to the radio coverage. I can still remember that drive on that particular day and some of the things that the radio DJ's were saying. I took my things to the office were I worked on campus and then headed to pick up some lunch from the student union building. I ran into a friend of mine who was a freshman that year. I've known him since we were kids and I could tell he was feeling very lost that day with everything going on. So I suggested we eat lunch together outside one of the buildings and we did. We talked about what was going on and what we thought had happened with those planes that had hit the World Trade Center. After we ate, he headed to class and I headed to work.

We basically just sat in the office and watched news footage on a TV and online, doing the bare minimum of work that had to get done. Afternoon and evening classes were cancelled that day, so I headed home after I got off work. My roommate and I sat on my bed and watched news footage until late that night. We normally watched our own TV's in our own rooms, but that night we felt the need to be together. I think that was one time where it was hard to be a college student. You felt the need to be with someone but all of your family and close friends are hours away. So my lunch with Jason, my time with Katie, were both helpful in feeling like "the world has not completely ended. There are some things that are still normal and those are these people here."

I talked to Keith that night (we had been dating for several years at this point) and he told me that downtown Dallas had been evacuated as soon as they heard about the buildings getting hit in NYC. At that time he was on the 30th floor of a building in Dallas, so I can just imagine how all of the workers in all big cities were feeling that day. He went home with one of his friends from work where they sat and watched news footage all day. He was also away from his family, so I think he felt that need to just be with someone rather than going home alone to his apartment.

That following weekend he proposed to me (finally!).

I guess it took a national tragedy for him to get up the courage.

3 Months

The most recent picture I have on the computer. This was taken at Garrett's birthday party 2 weeks ago.

Next week is going to be a hectic week for me, so I thought I should take advantage of a spare moment right now and go ahead and record Cooper's 3 month post.

Yes, he will be 3 months old one week from today. Awesome! We are getting closer and closer to the "fun age". He's basically fun now, just not quite to the point of independent playtime. I love it when they're able to sit up and play with toys and I even love it when they can crawl. Yes they get into EVERYTHING, but it's such a fun age. They're active, but not throwing tantrums yet.

Cooper at 3 months (or almost):

-Sleeping 11 hours at night (!). He still wakes up once a couple of times a week for his pacifier or because he's rolled over and can't roll back the other way yet, but I'm ok with getting up for these things. He typically goes right back to sleep. It doesn't always work that way for me though...

-Just today, we've switched to a 4 hour feeding schedule because he wasn't finishing his bottles at every 3 hours, and a 3 1/2 hour schedule doesn't work for the bedtime that he has. The new feeding schedule went really well, so I'm in hopes it will continue to work.

-He's started sitting in the Jumperoo for periods of time during the day. At first, he didn't like the instability of it in comparison to the Exersaucer, but now I think he actually likes it more. He doesn't jump any yet, but he likes sitting there and playing with the toys.

-He's starting to grab at toys and attempting to play with the toys on his baby equipment. It's really cute to watch.

-I've moved his carseat so that he now sits by the window with a space between him and Garrett. He seems to be a lot happier there.

-In a few weeks we will start baby food! I think he's ready for this. He watches us really closely when we eat and he holds his head up really well and sits well in the Bumbo seat.

-He loves to laugh. If we sound remotely as if we are laughing or are about to laugh, he will crack up. (Provided he's in the mood to do so of course).

-I'm still figuring out a napping schedule. That's a bit of a frustration for me because he seems to require more sleep than Garrett did at this age and he's really cranky if he doesn't get it. So I'm working through this to figure out how often he needs to nap and for how long without affecting his nighttime sleep.

I feel like an extremely boring person at the moment. But kids are my life for this season. Hopefully I'll get back to writing some psuedo-interesting posts again, until then, this is all I got.

An Absolute Must-Read

You have got to go read this blog post the second you have a chance. Seriously!! If you grew up in church or are involved in the ministry in any way, you would literally spew tea (or whatever you're drinking) while reading this. So, my advice is don't read it and drink at the same time. For those of you who just aren't convinced to click that link, here's a rundown. The post is about Christian closings to letters and emails and how we try to "out-holy" each other. So ridiculously funny, especially the comments. Everyone is sharing their funniest or quirkiest letter closures. There are currently over 200 comments as I type this so I'm sure most of you won't have the time to read them all (Cooper is napping, Garrett's at school, and I just couldn't stop reading them because they're stinkin' hilarious.) But here are my favorites.

Broken Bread and Poured out Wine for His purpose,

Break-dancing in the Spirit,

If my kids weren't fighting I could be listening to His still small voice, (that ones makes me crack up!)

ROTFLIHN, (Rolling on the floor laughing in His name)

Living quietly and minding my own business,

In the most holy name of Jesus my BFF,

When the roll is called up yonder I'll be there, (the person who wrote this one said she knew a PK who signed his letters with that closing)

Eating leftover Communion bread, (this one is hilarious to me because my sister and I used to do this)

Jesus Loves You and I'm trying,

Continuing in sin so Grace may abound,

Getting fat on the abundance of His blessings,

Grateful I live under grace and not the law because my love of bacon would prohibit me from keeping kosher,

Seeking to glorify Him in the closing,

Living righteously and hoping everyone notices,

Know Jesus or you might go to hell,

Still trying to run with perserverance while holding my side and gasping for air,

Training my children in the way they should go while submitting to my husband and considering a field and buying it and having no fear for my household because all of them are clothed in scarlet (and by the way, also needing a nap),

Now, go read the post and let me know if you were ROTFLIHN.