As a new developer to Grails you’re probably in awe over the vast number of very powerful plugins which are available to you. Without writing a single line of your own code you can do all sorts of cool things like interact with Twitter, Facebook, Amazon’s S3 storage system, Apple Push notifications, Spring Security, and the list goes on and on. As of this writing there are 447 plugins available in the official Grails plugin repository.

It is understandably tempting to leverage all of this code to simply bolt together an integrated solution which solves the problem you’re facing. But there is a downside to consuming someone else’s code, particularly when you’re doing test driven development. Here are some things to consider before you pull the trigger and grails install-plugin.

Using a cannon to kill a mosquito

When you adopt someone else’s code by installing their plugin, you don’t always know about all of it’s capabilities. You very likely did a quick google search, or a keyword search in the grails plugins and found something which appeared to solve the particular problem you were facing. It is very likely though that the plugin you just installed can do what you need, and much MUCH more.

Worse still, it may end up bloating your code with a bunch of functionality that you don’t need, while still not fully solving your problem!

I see a black box and I want to paint it white

If you’re working on a sizable project and collaborating with a team, you’re probably doing TDD, and you probably have a code coverage requirement for your tests. When you install a plugin a lot of the appeal is that it will create a TON of functionality and Grails artifacts for you (controllers, domain classes, services, taglibs etc). If you do have a code coverage requirement, that means that you have to address those new artifacts with tests.

This is a double edged sword. On the bright side, you are forced to really understand what the plugin is doing with the artifacts it provides, and you might discover that you need to rewrite them or refactor them for your application. The negative of course is that you have to expend the mental energy to understand what the author is doing, and how they’re doing it. Very quickly the functionality that you got “for free” isn’t looking so appealing, and you might end up spending as much (or more) time understanding the plugins implementation as you would have to build your own functionality and tests.

The bad that comes with the good

You might have noticed that all but the most mainstream plugins for Grails are not always documented particularly well. This can be a serious barrier to including a plugin in your project as well. If you can’t figure out how to make it work, or get a clear understanding of the inner workings, you may spend more time fiddling with it than leveraging it.

Another consequence of adopting the plugins code is that you inherit the plugins technical debt. The plugin author had a specific problem domain in mind when she wrote the code. If your problem domain is slightly different the compromises built into the plugin may be ones which you’re not willing (or able) to accept.

Looking to the future

If you’ve considered all of these things, and decided that it’s worth the effort to write the tests and accept the technical debt of a plugin, there is one last thing to consider. What happens in the future? What if six months go by and your requirements change, requiring more functionality than your current plugin choice supplies? You could try to find another plugin which covers the new requirement, or you may have to extend the functionality of your chosen plugin. If the plugin you’ve chosen is poorly documented or poorly coded this could be difficult, or impossible, forcing you to pay the price by rewriting all of the functionality provided by the plugin.

Consider too what happens if the plugin author stops maintaining the codebase. When new versions of grails are released, the functionality of the plugin could break and you’re once again forced to maintain code you didn’t write.

Sometimes it’s worth the risk

Of course, I would hardly discourage you from using the plugins that are available, they can be hugely beneficial and save you immense amounts of time. The warning is just to consider the cost of “buying” another developers code and folding it into your solution.

Once you’ve considered all of these things and still decide that a plugin is right for your project you’ll be much better prepared for the effort that comes with using it, and you might just appreciate the functionality that the plugin provides a teeny bit more.

I attended a city college culinary program, which means I know a little about food. I learned the basics of the culinary world, things like mother sauces, cuts of meat, basics of pastries, ect. I’m a foodie. I love food, like it and love to play with it and experiment. Thankfully my husband enjoys my experiments, eating and helping me cook and inspiring me.

Well in my attempts to focus on using on what is on hand I made a simple baked potato dinner. Which meant I could bake potatoes and make fun toppings and have fun with it. I decided we had to have a cheese sauce, it was vital. I made a lovely blonde roux, then a slightly runny bechemel and then added cheeses, nutmeg, cayenne, and mustard. It was delightful and strangely familiar. When my husband came home after a long day he smiled as he put his potato together and let me know the cheese sauce was awesome. He even offered to have my babies (attractive offer after you have had two children). I looked at him and said, “Yeah, I made velveeta. My teachers would be proud.”

I love when I get through a week when I don’t throw away any food and we don’t have any reason to go grocery shopping mid week, it’s exciting to me. Yeah I know, I’m a bit strange.

If you’re running servers in the cloud, particularly on Amazon’s AWS and haven’t heard about RightScale you owe it to yourself to check them out. I’ve been using their tools for launching and managing linux servers on AWS. They allow you to automate all of the tasks to launch a new box, and even run regular operational tasks, all with the use of RightScripts.

RightScripts are just glorified shell scripts which get downloaded from RightScale to your linux server running in any of the clouds they support, and executed with the parameters that you specify in the RightScale dashboard for that RightScript. Of course, as you start to get into more complex scenarios you’re likely to start writing and testing your scripts locally before saving them in the RightScale dashboard. That’s where RightScriptDiff comes in.

The only way to create or edit a RightScript as of this writing is through the RightScale dashboard. So you’re typing your script into a nice big textarea, where you can’t tab for indents or any of the other benefits you get from an editor like vim, emacs, or even *gasp* notepad.exe. As a result I started to write, and even test my scripts locally before I ever committed them to RightScale.

Going this route of course adds a fair amount of overhead to the process. You have to remember which scripts you’ve edited, then copy/paste them into the RightScale dashboard to update the script in their system. After a while I found I couldn’t keep up with the overhead, and I needed to find some good way to compare my local copies of scripts with the ones in my RightScale dashboard.

Thus was born RightScriptDiff. By supplying RightScriptDiff with your username, password, and account id for RightScale along with a path to a directory containing your local scripts, it will use the RightScale API to compare your local copy against the one stored in your RightScale account. If you’re thinking “why don’t you just synchronize the script using the API”, you’re on the right track. Sadly, the API doesn’t (yet) support RightScripts for anything but viewing, here’s hoping they open up that functionality a bit.

In order for RightScriptDiff to compare your local files, they must be named with a specific pattern, namely <rightscript_id>-<rightscript_name>.sh. Actually, the script name and the *.sh extension are optional, but that’s the convention I use so it’s easier to identify them. You can pass (almost) any argument to RightScriptDiff that you can to the “ls” command in *nix and OSX, so something like relative/path/to/RightScripts/*.sh is totally acceptable. This means you can also target just a single script if you’d like. RightScriptDiff uses the RightScript_ID section of the filename to look up the script using the RightScript API, then compares the script against your local copy. If they’re the same, you get a happy success message that there is no difference. If the files are different, a side by side diff is shown.

Here’s an example of a successful run;

Ryan-Geyers-MacBook-Pro:RightScripts rgeyer$ rsDiff.sh
Please enter the path to scripts stored locally...
*.sh
Grabbing all RightScripts for user: ***** on account: *****.  Be patient, this could take a while...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  369k  100  369k    0     0   148k      0  0:00:02  0:00:02 --:--:--  182k
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 236067-LDAP Install OpenLDAP.sh does not differ from RightScale copy.
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 237784-LDAP Create Database.sh does not differ from RightScale copy.
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 237788-LDAP Set Config Admin Details.sh does not differ from RightScale copy.
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 237789-LDAP Tools Install.sh does not differ from RightScale copy.
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 238408-LDAP Enable Schema(s).sh does not differ from RightScale copy.
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 238454-LDAP DB S3 Backup.sh does not differ from RightScale copy.
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 238480-LDAP DB S3 Restore.sh does not differ from RightScale copy.
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 238481-LDAP DB S3 Enable Continuous Backup.sh does not differ from RightScale copy.
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 238497-LDAP DB S3 Disable Continuous Backup.sh does not differ from RightScale copy.

This is what it looks like when the scripts differ;

Ryan-Geyers-MacBook-Pro:RightScripts rgeyer$ rsDiff.sh
Please enter the path to scripts stored locally...
237784*.sh
Grabbing all RightScripts for user: ***** on account: *****.  Be patient, this could take a while...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  369k  100  369k    0     0   172k      0  0:00:02  0:00:02 --:--:--  220k
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --

Local copy of 237784-LDAP Create Database.sh differs from RightScale copy.. Diff below..
							      >	sed -i "s/@@DATABASE_TYPE@@/$DATABASE_TYPE/g" $tmp_file
							      >	sed -i "s/@@DB_CHECKPOINT@@/$DB_CHECKPOINT/g" $tmp_file
							      <
echo "Finishing up..."

As mentioned above RightScriptDiff requires three values, your RightScale account email address, password, and account number. You might notice that in both instances above I did not need to provide them and was prompted only for the path to my scripts. This is because I pre-defined my credentials and account before hand. There are a couple ways to provide this to RightScriptDiff, you can call rsDiff.sh with parameters (-e|–email=)<email-address> (-p|–password=)<password> (-a|–account_id=)<account_id>, or you can rename the supplied rsDiffAuth.sh.example file, to rsDiffAuth.sh and put your credentials in there.

After developing this, I discovered that I had edited one of my script files locally and the change wasn’t reflected in my RightScale dashboard, so it’s already proved useful to me. Hopefully this helps some other sysadmins building our their RightScale managed clouds.

You can download RightScriptDiff by running the following command. I wrote it on OSX 10.6.4, but it should work on most flavors of linux as well.

svn export https://linode.nslms.com/svn_ro/RightScriptDiff/

Chances are pretty good I’ll create a landing page for this, particularly if it becomes popular, so stay tuned here for updates!

I remember being young and fighting every single nap time in preschool, daycare, and kindergarten. I remember whimpering when my parents held true to my 8:30pm bedtime. I just wanted to stay up and play with the adults, I didn’t get why I had to go to bed. I imagined that my parents were having candy and ice cream parties. I could hear soft jazz playing in the living room and muffled conversations that had a healthy sprinkling of laughter, singing and silly noises. I felt like I was missing out on so much. It wasn’t until Jr. High that I started to stay up late for school work and honestly I thought I was a grown up for not complaining. Then high school I stayed up for cram sessions, reports, homework and started to get that sleep was a valuable commodity. Still I would stay up Friday and Saturday in attempts to spend time with my mom and grandmother or with my friends. I had a strict curfew, one that my mom would tell my friends and their parents so that they knew she meant business.

One year I had insomnia, probably had something to do with the 3-5 cups of coffee that I was drinking every day in my sophomore year of high school. I remember accidentally waking up my mom vacuuming at 1am. She let me know that I was only allowed to do dishes, wipe down counters and dust if I insisted on staying up that late doing chores. Clearly my mom was no fool, never tell a teenager to stop cleaning.

I went into a culinary program at the local city college and was in school 40 hours a week. I got in the habit of waking up early daily (classes started at 6:30am). I would go home and study, and have catering events at school regularly. I was a teenager so I would also attempt to have a social life on the weekends minus the class work and catering events. I finished the culinary program and was a baker at a buji organic grocery store so again I was keeping early hours. I would still try to go out with friends at night even though I was up 4am to work. I was a HUGE fan of the power nap.

I changed careers shortly after getting married and was getting used to 8-5 work day but still known to wake up at 3:30am often due to my previous career. I had health issues and all I did was sleep for 6-8 hours a couple years, which for me is decadent.

Now I’m a mom, with a newborn (how long do you get to claim that?) and a toddler which means that I’m up by 7am every day and juggling everyone’s needs and wants. I look forward to my toddler’s bed time on the crazy days when both boys seem to have arranged their meltdowns so I can have a stereo experience. Then I get to play the power nap game through the night. I miss naps, I miss long stretches of sleep. Hell I miss sleep in general.

Dear Sleep,
I miss you love and know one day we will be reunited. I’m guessing it will be about two years but when we are together again it will be fireworks and a crescendo of beautiful music.

Love,
me

So, I just threw out most of this morning trying to figure out why something which clearly should work was blowing up my unit test on a grails app. To spare you the same pain I’m documenting it here.

The scenario is that I have Roles and Privileges as domain classes. A role has many privileges, and any privilege may belong to one or more roles. This is represented in domain classes pretty succinctly as;

/grails-app/domain/com/nslms/mockdomainlimtations/Role.groovy

package com.nslms.mockdomainlimitations

class Role {
  static hasMany = [privileges: Privilege]

  static constraints = {
  }
  String name
}

/grails-app/domain/com/nslms/mockdomainlimtations/Privilege.groovy

package com.nslms.mockdomainlimitations

class Privilege {

  static constraints = {
  }

  String name
}

So I can access all the privileges which belong to a role pretty easily, but what if I want to know all roles which a particular privilege belongs to? Easy enough, we can look that up in a variety of ways. Below I show adding a new closure to the privilege domain class which uses the withCriteria functionality of GORM to return all roles which have this privilege in the privileges map. The new closure is in the highlighted lines.

/grails-app/domain/com/nslms/mockdomainlimtations/Privilege.groovy (with new closure)

package com.nslms.mockdomainlimitations

class Privilege {

  static constraints = {
  }

  String name

  def getRolesWithThisPrivilege = {
    Role.withCriteria() {
      privileges {
        eq('id', this.id)
      }
    }
  }
}

Now, if you’re doing proper test driven development (you are doing TDD, right?!), you’d probably already have a test written for this new closure that would look something like the highlighted lines of the test fixture below. Notice lines 8 and 9 which are also highlighted to show that we’re asking the framework to mock out the GORM methods on the role and privilege classes.

/test/unit/com/nslms/mockdomainlimitaions/PrivilegeTests.groovy

package com.nslms.mockdomainlimitations

import grails.test.*

class PrivilegeTests extends GrailsUnitTestCase {
  protected void setUp() {
    super.setUp()
    MockUtils.mockDomain(Role.class)
    MockUtils.mockDomain(Privilege.class)
  }

  protected void tearDown() {
    super.tearDown()
  }

  void testAbilityToGetAListOfRolesAPrivilegeBelongsTo() {
    def role1 = new Role(name: 'Administrator')
    def role2 = new Role(name: 'User')

    def priv1 = new Privilege(name: 'ReadAll').save(flush: true)

    role1.addToPrivileges(priv1)
    role2.addToPrivileges(priv1)

    role1.save(flush: true)
    role2.save(flush: true)

    def roleList = priv1.getRolesWithThisPrivilege()

    assert roleList.size() == 2
    assert roleList == [role1, role2]
  }
}

Even after you’ve implemented getRolesWithThisPrivilege on the Privileges domain class though, you’ll find your test still fails with an error that looks like the following.

No signature of method: com.nslms.mockdomainlimitations.Role.withCriteria() is applicable for argument types: (com.nslms.mockdomainlimitations.Privilege$_closure1_closure3) values: [com.nslms.mockdomainlimitations.Privilege$_closure1_closure3@8327473]

In short, it’s telling us that the withCriteria method of GORM isn’t implemented in the context of our test. Of course if you put the exact same code in an integration test you’re golden.

/test/integration/com/nslms/mockdomainlimitations/PrivilegeTest.groovy

package com.nslms.mockdomainlimitations

class PrivilegeTest extends GroovyTestCase {
  void testAbilityToGetAListOfRolesAPrivilegeBelongsTo() {
    def role1 = new Role(name: 'Administrator')
    def role2 = new Role(name: 'User')

    def priv1 = new Privilege(name: 'ReadAll').save(flush: true)

    role1.addToPrivileges(priv1)
    role2.addToPrivileges(priv1)

    role1.save(flush: true)
    role2.save(flush: true)

    def roleList = priv1.getRolesWithThisPrivilege()

    assert roleList.size() == 2
    assert roleList == [role1, role2]
  }
}

With this in place, you can run a “grails test-app -integration” and the exact same test which failed during unit testing will succeed. This is of course because the entire grails bootstrapping occurs, and all of the artifacts (like domain classes) are wired up fully by the framework.

So the moral of the story? If you’re planning to test anything more than simple saves with GORM in your testing phase, consider putting the more complex stuff into an integration test. Either that, or keep your eyes peeled for problems like this and be prepared to refactor.

Feel free to grab a copy of the test grails app I created for this example.

svn export https://linode.nslms.com/svn_ro/MockDomainLimitations

I LOVE the Gilmore Girls. I love the cheesy storyline, I love the silly romances, the silly friendships. I love all the dysfunctional relationships that somehow come to a nearly peaceful resting place within an hour. I loved the relation ship between Lorlei and Rori. I felt a kinship with their relationship as it was reminiscent of the relationship between my mother, my sister, and I. We have comical relationships, we play off each other and crack each other up daily, though we had more of a George Lopez, Chris Rock playful antics than what they had.

I looked forward to watching it Monday-Friday on a network I rarely admit watching.

I have even developed a soft spot in my heart for Scott Patterson (actor that plays Luke). In some ways that character has an air that is reminiscent of my husband, protective and hardworking and sweet. I even think he is cute, almost as cute as my husband. I totally blame my husband being one of those spectacular men that I compare all to and that is why I have a crush on him.

On many of my days suffering from my extreme morning sickness when pregnant with my second son, I would lay on the couch watching the Gilmore Girls twice a day. I would squeal when it would start and happily watch it or if I was too ill that day (i.e. running to the bathroom to kneel before the porcelain throne too often) I would record the shows to watch later. I have even been known to set up the DVR to record both episodes being shown that day even though I knew that the morning episode was a rerun played the evening before. I feel shame, I told you it was a torrid confession.

I attempted a day of rest yesterday as it was one of my last days when my husband was easily available while I recovered from my c-section. I ended up watching a lot of the new food channel (Anyone else feel like this is a more cooking focused fine living network? Anyone?) and found my self getting a bit excited at the thought of getting back in the kitchen.

Don’t get me wrong, I do cook but everything has become routine and needs to be easily taken over by my husband as one or both boys may suddenly need something only their mom can provide. My husband can hold his own in the kitchen but I can’t expect him to get where I was going with two or three pots on the stove and read my mind as to what my goal was. I like recipes but love to get inspired, use basic technique I have learned years ago and run with it.

I found myself considering staying home full time with my boys and making bread. Yep, I’m thinking about getting a sourdough starter again and making bread regularly. I watched Giada make a rather small pan of focosia and wondered why she didn’t poke her fingers through the dough and then pour her olive oil all over and debated if I liked the idea of adding grapes as a topping. Then I remembered the challenge of braiding challah and how yummy it was for french toast for breakfast. I had flash backs of making danish dough and how much work was involved and wondered if that is even possible with two boys in tow. I mean having a homemade danish is delightful and you can make some of the flakiest decadent cinnamon rolls ever with it. Can you tell I was never an advocate of the Atkin’s diet?

I suddenly remember my Asian food obsession, how I was attempting to make an array of foods from different countries. Thankfully my husband told me everything was yummy and would clean his plate. I wonder if I can attempt to add sushi to my menu. Oh and I have to try to make Pho again, collect my beef bones and make my own stocks from scratch again.

I’m definitely feeling renewed in my passion, my choice of career so many years ago, mama is feeling inspired to get cooking again. We shall see if I’m successful. I’m sure you will hear from both myself and the husband about said attempts…I guarantee you will have a couple laughs.

My first five days home with both my boys and my husband were a bit of a whirl wind. Slowly my mom has shortened her visits here to help, trying to give our newly extended family more space. When writing these posts I heard Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek with beeps and all. I feel as if I have entered a strange and exciting new world. Each day offering new ideas and new lessons of an alien land.

I have learned that waking up early and staying up has it’s benefits but by noon I am giggly and by 3pm I’m starting to sound like my cranky toddler that is demanding his own quiet time without company. I have also learned that it may be time to give in to naps late in the evening so that I have a fighting chance to have a conversation with my husband without falling asleep mid-sentence.

I’m left further amazed with any mother I know that has done this and survived beautifully. I’m slowly learning that the house doesn’t have to be spotless, playing with my toddler and holding my newborn are much more important than a company ready home. My boys needs will change daily, what worked perfectly yesterday may not work perfectly today and that is ok. I have said for quite some time that my life will never be boring again since I had my first child, and my second child has added a new dimension to life that I can’t imagine my life without.

I heard time and time again that your heart grows when you have your second child. I had no idea how instant this occurred, and it was instant. I adored my second son from his first cry and continued to love him by the minute.

I survived my first five days of being home and a mother of two, with lots of help, and I’m hoping to continue to grow and learn with each following day. I admit that the sleep depirvation caused giggles, the hormonal fluctuations caused a few tears over the silliest moments, but all is worth every second I can enjoy this incredible blessing that is parenthood.

Day Two

Waking up at home is amazing, not having my blood pressure checked, my temperature checked was a nice change. My newborn seems to not be phased with the change of location. My toddler is excited to see his baby brother in the morning. I am thrilled to be allowed to move to another room and get comfy and lounge. I love to be home.

My husband is sick, and I’m starting to worry about him. He is tired, lethargic, and just feeling all around icky. My mom is here and thankfully helping me with my toddler and house duties as we both watch the hubs attempt to do all he can in his current state. He ended up napping much of the day away. Poor guy.

I’m doing ok, slowly recovering, still leaps and bounds better than last time. Breastfeeding has been going well, T is a pro at this point. The sleep deprivation has been interesting to say the least but due to the great support I have so far I have been able to sneak a nap in here and there. My eldest son has been a crack up with his epiphanies about his little brother. Today was good.

Day Three

Today was a day that started with a jump and jolt. My husband got really sick and now it is mission keep husband hydrated and fed. I’m bummed as this means I have to keep myself and my boys far away from him for fear that he may be contagious. Yeah, not an easy feat when you are still recovering from a c/s and have a toddler that wants nothing more but than to be close to his papa.

Today was T’s first pediatrician appointment, thankfully my mom was able to take us to the office and wrangle my toddler. Sadly due my husband’s symptoms he had to miss this appointment, he wasn’t too happy about missing his son’s first appointment. The great news is T is back to his birth weight and the doctor said he was doing well. We made a follow up appointment and we are hoping the hubs will be able to join us. Q was thrilled to be out of the house and have company in the back seat.

I pulled out the Baby Bjorn carrier today and all Q wanted was for me to take it off and let him hold ‘his baby’. T, the newborn, was ok with the Bjorn. Today was long as the hubs was asleep for much of the day trying to recover, I missed him like crazy. My mom was my super hero leaping tall buildings and flying in to save the day for all four of us, I’m not sure what would have happened without my mom helping us out.

I’ve never been so happy to see my eldest son’s bed time till this evening because I knew once he was in bed I could cuddle the tiny baby to sleep and start my longer cat naps of the day. Usually I am not too excited to see his bedtime as I love every minute I get to play with him. Exhaustion makes you look at things differently. I still miss the hubs, a lot. I hope he feels better asap.

Day Four

I slept in, kinda. I woke up at 5:30am in pain, the incision is healing well but I have to stay on top of my Ibuprofen intake or else suffer. The sad part of my morning? I had to wake my husband to be able to get said Ibuprofen, my poor sick husband. The baby and I were off to the living room after it kicked in to have new surroundings and so I had a fighting chance to jump into the shower after the new born was fed, burped and changed. I hopped, well as much as I can hop, into the shower and felt refreshed.

Today is the day I discovered the amazing invention known as the bouncy seat. Who knew that a bent piece of metal that allowed a soft cushioned seat to bounce and vibrate and play music would allow a mother to put down a drowsy, slightly cranky newborn for a few minutes would make the world a better place? I sure as hell didn’t. I am in awe of the person that created this thing and even my toddler knows the baby in the bouncy seat is a good thing for all involved. I was able to put my beautiful baby boy down and tend to the toddler’s needs to the best of my slowed ability and even got to pee without hearing screams from either child. A-MA-ZING!!!

I was excited every time my husband made an appearance outside of the bedroom, it is starting to look like he is doing better. My mom came over in the morning and helped me around the house with both children and making sure the husband was eating and doing better. Knowing that he was improving I even got some girl chat in. I’m learning that if I want a fighting chance to nap this is the only way it is going to happen is if I bathe and then crash afterward once I confirm all is well in the house and all are sleeping.

I’m learning, slowly, and at this rate I may have a fighting chance of figuring things out before I become delirious with exhaustion. My husband is doing much better now, we got to enjoy a lot of his company minus one nap today. The bad part is my early wake up means limited amount of time with the husband, he is definitely the night owl of our household. It worked nicely for us when we had our first son as he took the late night shift with him while I took the early morning shift. Now that there are two, we seem to have fallen back into our old schedule which works but we are going to have to figure out how to make the time for quality time for the two of us together. I know that we are only six days out with a newborn and toddler so we have time to figure things out, I’m just starting my planing now.

Day Five

I slept in even later than yesterday, 6:30am, Hooray!! My toddler announced that it was time to get up and was excited to see his mom and baby up with him. He even made up a cheer for the light outside and us being up. Sadly this meant that I didn’t get my early morning nap, and that I was trying to figure out how on earth I was going to feed my newborn, myself and be prepared to jump up to feed my toddler when he deemed it time. It didn’t work out all that well. It took me two and a half hours to eat a simple yogurt breakfast as my toddler discovered many different things for me to stop eating to investigate. I didn’t get my early morning shower in. Then when the newborn needed to be fed my toddler appeared once I got settled and nursing my newborn to demand breakfast.

Thankfully the husband came in and rescued me and fed our toddler and made sure any other possible needs that could come up in the next twenty minutes were cared for. He then returned to bed. Only to be asked an hour and a half later to watch the boys so I could bathe, he really is a good guy. My mom didn’t come over till much later and we hung out with the boys and chatted. She left relatively early, compared to the first few days, we survived and enjoyed our time with our boys. We even found time to talk and cuddle after our toddler went to bed. Today was a lovely day.

Yes, I know the obvious differences, body parts, hair growth, DNA. My husband and I are different, he is a good foot taller than me, has straight hair, is fair and has dreamy blue green eyes. I’m short, olive, with dark brown eyes, you get the point. I have been reminded time and time again how different my husband and I are. We are a happy fit, we have a good rhythm and work nicely together.

I have had the joy of working with him in some large catering events and at home in the kitchen. We have had some small kitchens during our marriage and yet seem to be able to work together well, it has become a lovely graceful dance. Often he and I do a dance when it comes to taking care of our toddler and taking care of our home and each other. That being said, we are still so different.

We are both type A personalities, in our own special ways. Our son has picked up on it, he likes certain things to be a certain way. Example: He has to have his train put away with the wheels all pointing in the same direction in their cubbies. He can handle some messes but food spills drive him nutty.

Back to my husband and I, we are different in how we do chores. Both of us have had to learn neither of us are doing anything wrong, we just do things differently to work towards the same end result. Example: I cook a meal and love for the dishwasher to be loaded by the time I am plating a meal. Oil, seasonings and food is put away. I wipe down counters as I go and if possible have the dishwasher running by the time we sit down to eat.

My husband, on the other hand, will make a lovely meal and have most of the dishes piled up in the sink, food put away and have a few seasonings and oil out. Pans cooling on the range. He is much more concerned in getting the family at the table and enjoying our meal than making sure the kitchen is clean before sitting down. He will clean the kitchen later and I know that. There is nothing wrong with this, but it still makes me a bit twitchy.

We do laundry differently. I do small chores or have small projects going that are easily stopped and started. I am constantly keeping an eye on where the loads are at in their cycle and as soon as the dryer dings I have the load out and the load from the washer in and I’m folding the laundry. As soon as the laundry is folded I put it away. I hate having laundry hanging out in out small laundry room or folded in a basket in our room.

My husband on the other hand is busy multitasking. He usually needs to finish his thought or where ever he is in his process, then he checks on the laundry. He has no problem leaving a basket of folded clothes at the foot of our bed for a few hours, sometimes even overnight. This isn’t a crime yet again, I’m usually left twitchy and he just looks at me like I have lost a bit of my mind. He doesn’t get it.

I don’t get why he has to watch a movie from beginning to end even if he isn’t enjoying it. Why his keys have to be on the key hook before he takes off his shoes when he gets home. We both have our quirks.

We approach diaper changes differently, we dress our toddler differently (ironically my husband is pickier than I am about what our son wears), we play with our son differently. This doesn’t bother me. I know my husband adores our children and he is only doing what is in our son’s best interest, I also know that my husband’s part in our sons lives is HUGE. He also doesn’t seem to mind how I do these things either, he likes that we have a different approach to these mundane things. It makes life interesting.

Men and women are different, and the differences can be fun and amazing or annoying and frustrating. I am still finding new differences and it blows my mind and gives me a new lesson to learn. I’m still having fun discovering our differences.

There are a few things I miss when pregnant. I miss a ice cold pilsner on a hot day. The full bouquet of an well balanced cabernet savigion. The crisp, acidic flavor of a well chilled savignion blanc. Even the syrupy sweet nearly effervescent flavor of an ice wine. Tequilla, oh how I love it straight up or mixed in a margarita on the rocks with a salted rim and lots of spicy Mexican food. I miss these things when I am pregnant but I can easily live without, the hubs is welcome to enjoy without me and in front of me, no big deal.

My husband is welcome to enjoy a bike ride, roller blade (though I don’t see him doing that, ever), roller skate, ride a roller coaster. Not a big deal for him to do so in front of me, I enjoy said activities but I can live without. I know I will get to enjoy soon enough, no big deal.

There is but one thing my husband isn’t to enjoy in my presence when I am with child, one thing alone and that is sushi. I have given him the death look when he even mentions sashimi in my presence. My mouth begins to water and I end up having those vivid pregnancy hormone induced dreams about a beautifully large serving of Ahi sashimi, salmon, octopus, yellow tale. I wake up drooling and frustrated and annoyed with the world as I have to resist the craving, the need of having the tender decadent sea flavored raw fish.

Well, part of my recovery and my celebration after having major surgery and having my child no longer in my womb but in my arms I get to enjoy a huge helping of sashimi. I begin to plan my attack of this plate ode to raw fish a month before my child’s estimated due date, how I plan to inhale and hopefully recall my first taste of rich, fatty fish.

Editors Note: I would have a beautiful stock image of the actual sashimi she ate, but I dare not stand between her and her fish!
When I encounter my first sushi experience after having my child it is a frenzied whirl wind of fish, soy sauce, wasabi, and pickled ginger. I try to admire my beautiful plate with an glorious assortment of colors so vibrant, I try to sip my miso and gaze at my prey to enjoy the pure anticipation of my meal. Then I attack, trying to enjoy each note of each type of sea food on my plate, comparing and contrasting the texture difference. Then I hit a euphoric point when all goes silent and silky textures, salty flavors, combined with the sweet flavor of fish. Then before I know it my little romance is over and I long for more. But for a while I sit back and smile like the cat ate the canary and recall the glorious first to last bite and consider the next time my passionate, frenzied rendezvous will be with sushi.