a birthday, a hairdo, and the Dreaded Purple Stain

This posting has three unrelated sections, because I need to get my family (and friends) caught up with recent items of interest in the Hansen house. After this posting, I should be caught up with the pictures, and future postings should be more coherent and also more frequent. I'm planning on taking A LOT of pictures from now on.

I.Here are some happy memories of Ms. Dottie Jane's birthday, which was in June. Yeah, I'm a little slow in keeping up with pictures, but hey, this blog, it's going to make me better at taking pictures and sharing them with people. This is some of Dottie's second birthday pictures, when my parents came to town at the end of June.

Dottie chatting on her Tinkerbell phone on her new Dora bike.



Is this my child, or is it Chewbacca's?

II. For all of my girlfriends who care, here is my new haircut. Since pregnancy is a time of life when you're not the most physically appealing woman, you sometimes need to change things up. Hair is the best and easiest thing to change when one is not completely satisfied with life. My friends can attest to my need for change at various times during college, when I had several different hairdos in several different colors. You could literally tell how I was feeling about myself just by hair's appearance. My hair's all-time low was directly after I had ended the ruby red hair phase. It was right before my close friend, Becca's, wedding. I got my hair "stripped," which is a way to chemically remove the dye from your hair. But, ruby red is a difficult color to get rid of. The stripping didn't completely work. My hair was florescent orange for Becca's wedding. What a crisis. Soon after that, I met Joe, and I chopped my hair off completely, ready to start anew. I was a new and better Charlotte with my new love. So here is my hair now, a cute short haircut to make up for my rotund physique.

side view.

front view.

III. The Dreaded Purple Stain. Most of my nightmares as a mother have to do with either something happening to Dottie, or Dottie doing something bad. In this case, it was Dottie doing something bad. We have a new house that we just remodeled. Everything in the house is new: new windows, doors, paint, carpet, appliances, etc. Well, this sad story involves our new carpet. Dottie, my lovely little mischief maker, has been wreaking havoc on our home for some time now. For example, this week, while I was doing the dishes, Dottie found some crayons, and colored four walls in our house. Luckily, crayon does come off with a product called "Bon Ami." Write that down for future reference, because it'll probably happen to you with at least one of your children, unless you're Supermom.
Today, Joe and I were getting ready to go to the store. Joe was getting changed, I was doing my makeup. Dottie was getting into her changing table drawer. We had removed most hazardous items from that drawer, because of Dottie's obsession with mess-making. However, we somehow overlooked something called Gentian Violet. Gentian Violet is a product you can buy over the counter that gets rid of yeast infections. It not only gets rid of yeast infections, it also works as a dye for fabrics. I bought it last summer to help Dottie out with a yeast infection when we were in between health insurances.
So, Dottie found the Gentian Violet . . . and she dumped it on the carpet, our six-month-old, hand-picked carpet. I knew as soon as I saw it that my carpet was destroyed. There is no way to get dye out of carpet, because, hello, it's dye. So I cried, a lot. We went to Walmart, and I shopped by myself. I made Joe take Dottie. I bought chocolate and a Naked juice. Then, I felt a little better, not completely, but a little. I'm still really disturbed about the whole thing, but it can be fixed. Nothing happened to Dottie, just the carpet. And that should make me feel relieved. But sometimes I just wish she understood things so she wouldn't do them, you know?

The Dreaded Purple Stain

The sleeping beauty. She took a nice long nap after her destruction. How can I stay mad at that baby?