Time has gotten away from me again. I feel like I should do penance. "It has been 21 days since my last blog post." Except I'm an atheist, not Catholic.

Michaela is teething. She has 3 teeth all the way through the gums and two more that have poked through. There are lots more right behind them.

She is pulling herself up like crazy. She always wants to be standing. ALWAYS. If not standing, then moving. She can do what I call a "big girl crawl," but she's faster at army crawling, so she usually does that.

A friend of mine has a son, S., who is like a little monkey. He is two weeks older than Michaela and has been on the verge of walking for some time. I was talking to his mom today and Is aid something about having some time before Michaela walks and she was like, "oh yeah, you have lots of time." She didn't mean it in a mean way, but my competitive hackles were raised. I know babies do things on their own schedule, but dude. Then I comfort myself with the knowledge that Michaela has more teeth than S.

So tomorrow will be the last day I take the pill. I'm going to go off it and we'll start using condoms when we have sex. Which continues to be practically never. I have no interest in sex. As I've expressed her, I'm not sure how much of that is hormonal and how much of it is my connection with Mike. He got really mad at me yesterday and just totally blew up. Now that he's gotten it out, it's better, but whenever that happens, it always puts me on a path of thinking, "hmm, do I want to stay married? Should we get divorced? What's best for Michaela?"

My job is going very well. I have this nagging sensation that when my boss is out on maternity leave, I'm not going to get promoted to fill her spot. My prediction is that I'll get some sort of temporary promotion-- VP of Communications, maybe (instead of SVP) and a small raise. I think I'll probably take on a lot of her work, but not the management part of it, and if I had to guess, I'd say I'd start reporting to the chief of staff. So we'll see.

One of my coworkers, who I've become really close to, goes out on maternity leave next Wednesday. I'm really going to miss her. And not only because I'm totally freaked out about how much of her work I'm going to have to pick up while she's gone.

Both of our apartments are rented out. Hopefully it will stay that way. One of our tenants is in the Navy. He's a low-level grunt and he was only allowed to live off-ship because he was married. Now he and his wife are getting divorced and it's only a matter of time before the Navy figures that out. He's supposed to ship out to the Middle East in about a month. I'm hoping she will get shipped out and they won't make him move out until he's back (7 months later). That'd mean no tenant (yeah, quiet! plus, we could do some renovations in there which would make the place more marketable next time it goes on the market) but rent money, and then we'd be looking to rent it out during a good time to advertise vacancies. Fingers crossed!

Michaela's daycare is going well. It's not like she can talk about it, but I trust the provider and know she's in good hands. That's a big relief. The provider has another day open, so Mike and I need to talk about if we want to take it and have Michaela go to daycare three days a week. I happen to feel like that would be good, but Mike doesn't seem to. (What shock, we disagree on something.)

My mom is doing okay. She's been really tired lately. Not sure why. And of course she won't go to the doctor. I haven't heard anything about how her social security disability case is coming. Don't know if that means they denied her or if there hasn't been word, or what. She's not a very active participant, so whenever I suggest she call her attorney to find out what the fuck is going on, she blows me off.

Have I mentioned that I recently have been feeling like I don't want to get pregnant again? I was thinking we could start trying this fall, but now I am in a "not so much" kind of place. I feel like Michaela is so perfect and so special and so wonderful, I couldn't ever do any better. Also, she's so awesome, I want to spend all my time with her and give her all my attention. Of course, that's very selfish. The unselfish part of me says, "but what about the special bond siblings share? You want her to have that!" And I do.

Mike and I had a big fight about it, about 4 seconds after Michaela and I got home from visiting my best friend in Chicago. I told him the above, plus if we do decide to have another one, I'd ideally like to have at least a month where my body is my own. You know, where I'm not breastfeeding anyone and I'm not gestating anyone. He doesn't understand that. He told me I hated being pregnant and that he would be happy to adopt. I told him I didn't want to adopt, he asked why. I said because if we're going to have another kid, I want it to be my kid. We agreed not to talk about it for a while. Sigh.

Chicago was awesome. Michaela came down with a double ear infection. Not good. We put her on antibiotics about 4 days before we flew and it seemed to clear up the infection. She did great no the flights and we had a nice time, though she did get my friend's twin daughters sick. Oops. I guess that's life with kids.

So yeah. Things are mostly good. Except for the drama with Mike (which most of the time actually isn't drama, it's more like having a roommate), I have no complaints.