I finished!!!

Okay, so I didn't actually finish, I just reached the 50,000 word goal!! The story isn't done, but I reached the goal at 8:12 my time, that's right, I had 3 hours and 48 minutes to spare! GO ME!!!!!

we got jokes here...

So, I've kind of been waiting for Miah and Cody to hit the age where they understand and tell jokes. I love jokes, especially cheesy ones so I guess that's probably the reason for this. The other day in the car Cody goes, "mommy, I know a joke" and he does the "knock knock banana, knock knock banana, knock knock orange, orange you glad I didn't say banana" joke. Now, the amusing part of this is when delivering the punch line, (orange you glad I didn't say banana) he didn't say the word orange. Then he proceeded to tell Jeremiah that the joke worked with anything, like he could do the same thing with apple and pears and it would be just as funny. I chuckled a bit and didn't correct him, I mean, he's just starting out, who am I to crush his comedic dreams?

Jeremiah, feeling inspired by Cody's joke telling, he busts out with this little keeper: How do you make a Kleenex dance?





You put a little BOOGIE in it!! LOL! I laughed out loud. GOOD TIMES!

Cody, not to be out done goes, okay why does an A have an upside down V in it?

Me: Um...not sure, why?

Cody: Because it's POOP!!!

Me: *scratching head, confused* where did you hear that one buddy?

Cody: I made it up, just now!

Me: Um, I think the punch line needs some work....how about why does and A have an upside down V in it?

Cody: Why?

Me: Because it's a VERY awesome letter!

Cody: *blank stare*

Me: or is that kind of stupid?

Cody: no Mom, its VERY stupid!

Well, I guess that settles it then...he's going to be good at dealing with the hecklers if he decides to pursue comedy!

the pursuit of a smaller ass.....

So, one of my favorite foods, discovered as an adult mind you, is Chicken fried steak and country gravy. We never had this in my house because of my fathers aboration of things that are fried, and things that are swimming in gravy (the man knows how ruin the experience of a Carls Junior western bacon cheeseburger too so don't take him with you if you're wanting to clog your arteries, I'm just sayin!) I wish that I hadn't ordered that first chicken fried steak skillet at Village iInn...I can't say that convincingly even to myself, that stuff is just SO FREAKIN' GOOD!

One of the things I try to get occasionally is the chicken fried steak meal that's on special on wednesdays at KFC, for just $3.99 you get chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, coleslaw and a biscuit. Pretty good deal right? Well, knowing that by definition chicken FRIED steak is going to be bad (in the bestest kind of way) I decided that in order to "reward" myself with this wonderful, wonderful meal, I would walk there and back with Gage (well, pushing Gage) that way, I would be doing something good to offset the bad. Good thinking right? According to Mapquest, KFC is 1.13 miles away from my house. We set out walking, it went pretty well as far as Gage being good and sitting quietly and you know, we didn't get hit by a car or anything. Other than that though the walk proved to me that I am so horrifyingly out of shape I kinda grossed myself out and pissed myself off...at myself.

You see, last year about this time I was loving being at home with my son, I was going out wearing him in his little sling, meeting people randomly, I was going and doing, and loving life and I was also losing weight. So much so that by my birthday in february I was able to buy and wear a pair of size 9 pants...that's right, single-digit pants. Things were good. Then things were not so good. A lot of crap happened this year and I shut down. I started just kind of drifting from day to day and not really enjoying the good stuff and just kind of wading through the bad. That's probably why my blogging dropped off so much this year. I'm working on getting my head back in the game so to speak and with that comes the anger and frustration with myself for letting that kind of wallowing reverse all the good things I had done as far as getting myself in better physical shape. Needless to say, I unfortunately gained back all the weight I had lost +10 lbs. This is horribly depressing.

By the time I got to KFC (and then again on the way home) I was red-faced, sweaty, and out of breath. You'd have thought that I'd just run a race for my life. I was pathetic and sad and I had a pain in my chest, and I can't breath....oh wait that last part was from a George Lopez routine...but it was almost that bad. At that point I wanted to cry. I got over that and went and got my chicken friend steak meal anyways because damn it, I walked there, I looked like a gross sweaty pig and I earned it! Gage played with his hot dog meal, only eating the teddy grams and I ate my food, sharing half the biscuit and half the coleslaw with Gage.

As I huffed my way into the condo complex where I live I was thinking about how good it was that I at least got off the couch and did something physical that even though it was difficult, will be a small step in the right direction because I definitely need to get this ball rolling again. Not so much because I want to be skinnier, but because of the process I went through last year, I gained so much confidence in myself and my abilities and it strengthened my relationship with my husband and my children and some of my friends.

Here's to the long and difficult journey ahead of me to hopefully see single digit numbers on the inside of my pants!!

Stats:

Chicken fried steak w/white peppered gravy 390 calories
Mashed potatoes 100 calories
Coleslaw 180 calories
Biscuit 180 calories
Honey sauce ?calories (www.kfc.com didn't have it listed)
Total Calories for the meal 850 calories
- 180 (for half the coleslaw and biscuit gage ate)
770 calories I consumed

2.26 mile walk round trip
187 calories burned

770 eaten - 187 burned = 583 calories for lunch...not too bad, especially since breakfast was a 270 calorie cup-o-noodles.

Notes to self for next time getting this meal:

1)biscuit gets the axe...sorry biscuit, you're just not 180 calories + honey calories worth of good

2) sub 30 calorie green beans for 180 calorie coleslaw

These two cuts alone bring the meal back down to a reasonable 520 calorie meal while still being delicious.

And a final note...I just realized that the honey you get at KFC is not just honey....I know...I'll give you a moment to gasp! I was shocked myself, it's okay!






The ingredients to the Colonels Honey Sauce are as follows: High Fructose Corn Syrup, Sugar, Honey, Corn Syrup, Natural Flavors, Carmel Coloring.....

Yep...so that killed the delicious honey biscuit goodness....thanks a lot KFC!

My little bug is growing up...

Sometimes it's the little things that can make my day better. For a while I've been getting Gage the little toddler meals for lunch, usually because I don't really cook anything for myself for lunch, I just make ramen or something like that, not really healthy toddler lunch fare. Now, Gage eating these little meals either ends up with me sitting there forever to feed it to him bite by bite OR me giving him a spoon and letting him make a disaster of his face, his clothes, the high chair, etc.

The clean-up of which would typically require a bath, a wordrobe change for him and a good wipe down for me, and then me swearing on waiting on the whole eating with a spoon thing until he's older.

Today however, it finally paid off. Finally, all the days of disgusting, slimey baby culminated in this wonderful video! NO MESS!






Angels were singing a light shined on him from above....it was GLORIOUS! Okay, maybe I'm SLIGHTLY exagerating....but man, it was a good moment to see that he can eat, with a spoon and the mess was almost non-existent. WONDERFUL! IMMD!

The birds and the bees...and my butt

So I don't know if you have these commercials where you live, but we have ones where a bunch of different kids are looking out of the TV telling me as a parent to talk to my kids about sex. Now, being as I got pregnant very young and that my "sex education" came from books (one that my mom gave me when I was ten that explained mechanically what would happen combined with harlequin romance novels I started reading around twelve that glamorized what it would be like physically) I knew that I wanted to have open honest communication with my kids about sex as soon as they needed/wanted to know about it.

Now Jeremiah was sitting in the living room a week or so ago and that commercial came on the TV again. Jeremiah turned and looked at me and goes, "yeah mom, lets talk about sex!!"

DAMN!

"uh, okay, what do you want to know?" I wasn't sure what if anything he already knew. "I don't know!" he giggled and then kind of went back to what he was doing. Bullet Dodged! Right?

Okay, I think when the kids were younger we had a conversation about eggs and sperm. I'm fairly certain we hadn't discussed how the egg and sperm actually meet up and party together. I decided that I wanted to have a more in depth conversation with them but wanted some back-up. After some hard core googling I came across this book http://www.robieharris.com/work_book-amazing.html and decided that it was going to be an excellent tool to help me talk with the kids. So I went and bought the book, we looked at the pictures of the boys private parts and girls private parts both internal and external and we looked at the differences. We talked about puberty and the path of the egg and the path of the sperm.

Jeremiah freaked out a bit when he saw a cartoon drawing of the male ejaculation but settled a bit when I explained again, that nothing like that could or would happen until he went through puberty. He seemed to find it comforting to start naming all the men he knew that, based on that information, could have an ejaculation. Daddy? yep. Grandpa? yep. Pop-Pop? yep. him too. I tried to not actually think about the fact that my father and father-in-law could also ejaculate...really...but I kept a straight face and answered his inquiries with the appropriate level of seriousness. After that we got to chapter 9. What is sex?

I like this chapter because it started out with encouraging kids to look at their birth certificates and they'll see the word sex right there. I showed them my driver's license and where it says sex on there. They thought it was interesting that sex had more than one meaning and even made me laugh when they saw the cartoon of a couple engaged in sex they were like oh, that's sex? you and daddy do that!

(um, remind me to analyze that later)

Granted, it was just two people no clothes showing, Dad facing down on mom with a blanket covering them up to their shoulders so it wasn't really graphic or anything at all...trust me, I'm not trying to traumatize them or anything!

Now, that is about halfway through the book and we decided to stop there for the day. The rest of the book has chapters on love, different kinds of families, how a baby grows from an egg into a baby and even shows birth and c-sections. (the whole book is drawn by a cartoonist that makes a good mix of realistic but not freaky like a photo might be to a kid).

Later in the evening, after dinner, Jeremiah is flipping through the rest of the book, I'm reading the catcher in the rye and Cody is reading to Gage. We're all kind of hanging out, winding down for the kids bedtime and then it happens. Jeremiah walks over, holding the book open to the page that illustrates how the baby is born and he climbs up on the chair next to me and points at my crotch.

Miah: Is that where Gage came out?
Me: yeah
Miah: (looking thoughtful for a minute)
Me: why? Where did you think he came out?
Miah: (points at my butt)
Me: you thought I pooped him out!?
Miah: (just giggles and giggles)
Me: Do you understand better now?
Miah: yeah

So, apparently my work is done here for the moment...my son at least knows he didn't come into life from his mother's Bowell's

A new adventure

So...I have thought about writing a book for a long time. I'm certain that more people think about this than you'd expect, you're probably one of them if you think about it. I recently discovered this site www.nanowrimo.org which stands for national novel writing month. This month, incidentally is november. Basically, when you sign up, you are going to work your butt off to produce a 50,000 word story no later than midnight November 30th. The emphasis is to push yourself to crank out a story in 30 days and to quote from the guidelines, "the emphasis is on quantity here, not quality" I am looking forward to tackling this project this month and hope to have finally gotten a whole novel down on paper.

That being said, those of you that will be spending Thanksgiving with me, I'll do my very best to be able to put the laptop down for at least a few hours that day, and if I can't, please forgive me!

I thought Mondays were supposed to be crappy.....

Okay, so I know, it's early in the day but really not off to a good start at all. I woke up, not wanting to be anything close to coherent at that point since Eric and I stayed up way too late last night. I was eating my breakfast and since it had been pretty cold recently with a lot of mornings of frozen windows so I figured, hey, why not let Jeremiah go start the car? He's already done eating and it's my father in laws car which is an automatic so I figured Jeremiah could handle it. He looks very enthusiastic at the idea and grabs the keys and runs outside. Two minutes later he comes back in the house, closing the door behind him going, "Oh man....I locked the keys in the car!" I was so not happy. I went outside right away on confirmed that we were in fact locked out with the car running. I called hubby 2x and sent an angry text with no response. I figured I'd just have to take care of it then, so I called locksmiths, 8 to be exact, before finally one answered and said they can send someone right over. After what seemed like forever the guys shows up, unlocks the car and charges me $125...OMG....I couldn't believe how expensive it was. As I was getting my receipt hubby finally calls me back...

Him: "What's up"
Me: "Jeremiah locked the keys in the car and so I just paid a locksmith $125 to open it"
him: "you paid HOW MUCH!?!?!"
Me: "you heard me...you didn't answer your phone and so I was kind of panicking and so I just called until I got someone to take care of it"
Him: "you do realize my Dad has another set of keys for the car and he could have just come over and unlocked it, right?"

and then my head exploded. the end.

I love having kids do homework!

Okay, so I've been a mom with kids in elementary school for just over two years now, and there has been some interesting moments along the way so far. Like the time a kid got suspended for hitting Miah over the head with a road cone. Or when Dink got suspended for bringing a pocket knife to show off to the other kindergardeners. And lets not forget when Miah's new den leader realized that his son was the one that stabbed Miah with a pencil their kindergarden year. Yes, a lot of interesting times along the way, and without a doubt more to come.

Now, Dink is at the point in his math education where he's doing a lot of drawing items in certain quantities so that he's mentally equating numbers with visual pictures. So, last night, as I was glancing over his homework, I see this....




While keeping a completely straight face (SERIOUSLY) I handed it back to him and told him to show Daddy his awesome carrots and then head on up to bed. He did and Eric and I both held it together until he went upstairs....then the appropriate level of immature parental-our-kid-is-going-to-be-the-penis-drawing-kid to his first grade teacher kind of way we fell on the floor laughing! Oh yes, there are good parts of being a parent!

starting a new...

Reading back through some archives, I realize that in some ways I was kind of in the same place that I am now, I'm still home with the baby, we still did JDRF, still the mom of three wonderful boys. In some ways though, I'm much different. My confidence that I would surely find a job when I went looking has been replaced with a strong fear that the whole time I juggled being a mom with a full time job and being a full time student is going to climax with me becoming a shift leader at the local wendy's. My faith in my relationships with friends and family have been rattled and some I'm not even sure are repairable. All in all, this last year has been one of the best and worst for my little family and in the end I think we'll be fine. I'm just trying to kind of get re-oriented and then work on getting back on track mentally.

That all being said, being home has given me excessive amounts of time on my hands. I've started looking for small things I can do while I'm home that I wouldn't usually have time for. Things like going to the library and putting all the books on Jeremiah's book fair wish list on hold so that when they get back to the library I can pick them up and we can still read them (with out the hefty price tag) or baking muffins once a week (the current family favorite is almond poppyseed). I've also joined a web "cooking club" of bloggers. Once a month a baking challenge and a cooking challenge are shown and then I'm supposed to make my own version, write about it on my blog on a certain day and post pictures (my first challenge is a vietnamese soup and I'll be posting my results on Oct 14 in case you're interested) and then on October 1st I'll get my first baking challenge and that'll be posted sometime later. All in all an interesting way to try something new, meet some new people, and have a shared experience. I think that's what I'm missing out on most is shared experiences with people. I mean, the people you work with have things in common even if it's just in regards to he job at hand. I just have to keep working to find ways to incorporate that into my life more.

Anyways, I'm doing well, we're doing well, things are going well.

um....how did September get here??

Well, it's apparent that things have been going on, at least I've been to busy (Or lazy, whatever!) to post on here. Lets see, graduation went off without a hitch, that's right! I now have a bachelor's degree! YEAH! Still no job, not so excited about that, but ya know, it's something I'm working on. We moved, not far from our old house, definitely not as far as I was hoping as I saw sandy beaches in my future, but alas, it was not meant to be. Gage turned one.

junes here!

Well, what can I say, it's monday, the begining of another week. We broke in the pool yesterday, twice! We had too much fun! The kids wanted to go swimming on Saturday and since we had our first night out in a long time on Friday night, we were still recovering that morning and thought we'd go in the afternoon. We met our buddy chess for lunch and then set off to target to purchase new swim suits. Their old ones were like 2 or 3 years old so we thought that it was about time plus it was Gage's first time swimming ever so we thought we'd get him a floatie too! $150 later (ugh!) we made our way back home just in time for the thunder storms to start. Okay, so, swimming wasn't going to happen. We played some board games and just kind of hung around the house. Then just as we were finishing dinner, Mr. Nick showed up. Apparently when we were texting back and forth about my upcoming graduation there was a little bit of confusion. He said that he wouldn't be able to make it because he was working on Friday and I responded with, well, we're having a bbq on saturday so maybe you can come to that. Well, he thought I meant THIS saturday! So he showed up, expecting us to be having a big celebratory bbq only to find us all being lazy bums reading books and playing on the computer. We hung out and watched some movies, it was good times! Then yesterday as soon as we got up, we hit the pool. It was a beautiful day and the water was perfect. We had to use a trash bag and duct tape to wrap jeremiah's cast in the hopes that it would stay dry. I hope that it won't be disgusting and moldy by the time it's ready to come off, but I don't know that its going to work out like that. I just hope we can figure out how to keep it dry so he doesn't have to stay out of the pool until the end of june when the cast comes off, but I guess we shall see on that one. Happy june!

Today I'm suffering a feeling of fear and self loathing. I have been trying to find a job and at the same time I've been feeling like I should wait until we move and get situated into whatever our new living arrangements are going to be. I've been feeling like I'm failing my kids and my husband by being so negative recently and so down about everything that's going on. Most of all I've been feeling desperately lonely but unsure how to reach out, or who to reach out to. I've also been feeling a personality change in myself, my anxiety is back bigger than before and I fell almost switched off. Every day is getting harder and harder to try and figure out and it's so dumb because I know it's all in my head. It's all just me worrying and obsessing and mentaly beating myself up for everything...that is the part that's the worst. I mean, how do you escape from that? The power of positive thinking had me living the best most carefree life I'd ever experienced last fall and through a series of events I feel like whatever happened in my brain that had me just happy about life and the possibilities and my children just stopped. Now I'm just a train wreck. This is terrifying because I don't know how to move on. How do I get back my zest for life and my outgoing fun-loving personality? I have no idea. I just know that I need to stop this pain, this anxiety. I need to laugh more and play more. I also need to figure out what we're going to do, where we're going to live and I need to stop being so hard on myself.

my baby is a velocarapter!!

Okay, so Gage now is the proud bearer of 6 teeth, 4 on top, two on bottom. He's worked hard for these teeth getting a fever and really grouchy each time a new one came in and he has recently started biting the spoon when I'm trying to feed him which is cute and irritating all at the same time.


So yesterday was kind of a rough day home with Gage, he's just been really fussy and clingy recently and just always wants to be held which can be a little frusterating when you're trying to maintain some form of cleanliness in the house so that your husband doesn't come home from working a long 12 hour day to look around and say, "what exactly did you do all day?" He's wonderful though, if the house isn't clean, which it usually isn't, he doesn't mind. So yesterday I was definitely a little tired and a little irritated with Gage and it was time to go and get the brothers from school. I got him loaded into the car seat and I accidentally pinched him a little bit when I was trying to get him buckled. He was upset and started screaming. Me, being a big baby just handed him the bottle and said, you're fine. Where's my mother of the year trophy? I left it in my other pants that day...Anyways, I climbed in the front seat and drove us to the school when I went to get him out of the back seat, I found his bottle, looking like this...



I guess I need to work harder to make sure that I don't piss him off lest he turn those chompers on me!

Thankfully he got my pain tolerance!

Jeremiah and I went to the doctor today to get his cast put on. Not very eventful but for some reason I was completely grossed out when they took off the splint and ace bandage that had been wrapped around his broken arm. It wasn't like there was bone sticking through the skin and it was only slightly bruised...I think it was just knowing that it was broken and that he was moving it...it just gave me the heebie jeebies! At the same time it made him laugh hysterically watching me twitch so he got more into it making me twitch more, the little snot! I am just glad however that this happened to Jeremiah because, well, he's bionic. He hasn't wanted to take the tylenol with codeine they gave him for pain and he doesn't even want to take the IBProfin. Yep, he's a real trooper! He selected black for his cast color after much consideration and was shocked when the nurse told him that a lot of teenage boys get PINK casts! Apparently it's some kind of skate boarding company that has pink logos and I'm sure they see plenty of skateboarders that get injured I guess the whole thing makes sense. I don't know how I feel about the whole boys wearing pink thing....I guess that makes me old fashioned?

life sucks

So last night Cody came downstairs and said that Jeremiah's wrist was bothering him. Since nothing had injured him earlier we didn't thin anything of it. Eric took an ice pack upstairs and got him settled. We watched a movie and went to bed. Then, apparentlly while I was sleeping Eric was woken up not once, but twice to Jeremiah crying about his wrist. I woke up this morning to learn that Eric took Jeremiah to the hospital last night and that he actually broke his wrist by falling off the bunk bed last night. He's a real trooper....he doesn't seem to be bothered by it at all. He's wrapped up, in a charlie brown sling, and is getting a cast in the next few days...that is...if the freakin' dr. calls me back...ugh!

if at first you don't succeed....

Well, seeing as it has been forever since I've posted anything on here, and posting on here is something that I used to really enjoy and now as I've been home for so long the post pardem depression is finally catching up to me, or maybe it's just regular depression. Either way, having been home this long and just being with kids day in and day out has finally caught up with me and so as part of my plan for not getting swallowed whole I've decided to make sure I start posting again on here, among other things.

I went to my graduation fair yesterday, got paperwork all filled out and got my "graduation gift" from the staff there at DeVry. Not very impressive, a water bottle with the DeVry and Keller logos and a very cheap plastic desk calculator...kind of depressing considering I had to buy my cap and gown, I had to buy my announcements and I've taken out over 50k in student loans...and I get like a $5 gift....very annoying. I also had a person telling me I'd have a better chance of getting a job if I went ahead and started my graduate coursework through Keller. Ha! I won't even consider taking out even more student loans until I manage to at least get employed! I was so excited about graduation, thinking that now I'll be able to apply for all kinds of jobs previously unavailable to me. As my previous job hunting experiences always had me finding jobs that I was completely qualified for except for having a bachelors degree. This time around seems to not be the case. I find that very few jobs actually require a bachelor's degree and those that do require like 10 years experience! UGH!! Well, I signed up for career placement assistance with DeVry so hopefully they'll be able to get me a job soon! For sanity's sake! After all, there's only so much bacon and friend chicken a girl can consume to forget her Woes!

Oh well...I guess we shall see how that goes. Other news, we're taking the kids to cub scout camp tomorrow in which we'll be shooting bb guns and bows and arrows...I suppose I had some kind of freaky death wish when I agreed to this because I don't know about you, but Miah with a weapon is a little scary...although I could be flashing back to taking him fishing a couple of years ago, that was a near death experience for sure!

Soccer season has ended and I've been looking for the next sport to sign the kids up for, I found summer flag football, but I think I might keep looking until I find swimming leasons or something like that.

Other news, Eric got me a Wii for mother's day...it's AWESOME!! We've got a few games, one of them is called "game party 2" and Eric and I have like a nightly duel! It has darts: 301, 501, cricket. It also has ski ball, shuffle board, beer pong, and lawn darts. It's so much fun! We get really into the darts especially and it's nice because you don't have to stand and you don't have to be worried about hitting someone at the bar when the darts go off target. Also, the drinks are cheaper, and we can smoke! All around good evening entertainment for the likes of us.

Gage isn't walking yet, he likes standing up a lot but hasn't really seemed to interested in the whole concept of walking. I think I'm going to get him one of those upright push-n-walk toys but we'll see how that goes. He has four top teeth now and two bottomw teeth and he's become extremely klingy. I thin this is part of my sudden urge to find a job ASAP. I can't get anything done because Gage wants to be held all day, if I don't hold him, he sits, and he screams...not pleasant.

Cody is about the same as usual. Just chilling, he's my fairly low maintenance child and sometimes that's what I love about him the most. Although he is fairly sensitive to people who hurt his feelings he has gotten much, much better about not having an emotional breakdown when someone or something inflicts a tiny measure of pain.

Miah is as squirrely as ever. I think his recent behavior has been so appalling it's actually made my head spin around on my shoulders. Okay, maybe not that bad, but we've had a family meeting, made a whole family rules list, car rules list, punishments list and still, the child behaves in a way that is just so difficult to handle.

Jeremiah: LA DA DA DA DA DA (as loud as possible)
Me: Miah, no screaming in the car remeber, that's one of the rules....this is your warning okay?
him: oh, yeah ok.
<<<>>>>
Jeremiah: cody....cody.....CODYCODYCODYCODYCODY (LOUD)
me: jeremiah, I asked you to stop yelling in the car, that's a quarter in the jar tonight
miah: oh, I wasn't yelling...
me: yes, yes you were, and I'm not going to argue about this...

and on, and on, and on, he had 5....count 'em 5 warnings on the way to school and it's only a 15 minute drive! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Okay, I know I'm being childish and whiny right now but I think that I have the right considering the my seven year old still acts like a two year old. I know a lot of it isn't necessarily his fault, and could have a lot to do with his ADHD but somehow that just makes it so much more frusterating because it makes it seem like there's no hope for him to do better. I know he tries bless his heart but man, I don't know if we're going to even make it to the teenage years, much less survive them at this point. Okay so that's definitely being melodramatic but like I said, I've been whiny so that's gonna go hand in hand with melodramatic!

Eric is doing well despite frustrations with his job and I personally think he should receive saint points for his patience in dealing with me during the recent happenings. Lets just say nuerotic (and whiny!) would be a good way to describe my demeanor. His frusteration with his job comes from the fact that they were told with the new contract his company got on shriever and peterson air force bases that they'd be working 55 hour weeks for the next six months and then he got his check and it was for 38 hours, they're taking all kinds of extra time off their checks....not cool. Plus since they're going straight to the job site and not going to the shop to clock in it makes it more difficult for Eric to have any way to prove that he should be getting more money on his paycheck....double trouble.

As for me, I'm trying to stay positive, stay on top of the laundry and stay sane. Wish me luck!!

Monday, Monday

Well, what can I say, it's monday. School is underway, just 7 more weeks and I'll finally have a bachelor's degree, I'm so freakin' stoked! Although it is somewhat disheartening to be looking for jobs at this point and still not being able to check the box next to 'bachelor's degree' and having instead to check 'some college'. It's definitely close to where I can check the next box though, that's good news, right? My little brother is moving to Las Vegas soon and has started sending me job listings out there, subtle hint maybe? Due to recent events Eric and I have been considering moving out of Colorado Springs, maybe even out of Colorado. The trouble is that I probably could have convinced him to move earlier this year when he had NO work at all, but now that his employment is actually starting to pick up he's probably not going to be quite so open to relocation. I know a big part of his concern is not being close to family, because they do help us out so much, whereas my concern lays in the lack of boundaries between us and our families. It's healthy to have boundaries as in, not stopping by without having verbal confirmation that this is acceptable. I guess that always comes down to specific situations and while I wish that my relationship with certain members of my family was more "normal" I know somewhere in my heart that it never will be and that I was a lot more satisfied with my life when those people weren't such an intrinsic part of my everyday happenings. Maybe I can convince him to move to Kentucky where we can be close to other family members and we can take our kids to the lake like I used to do when I was a kid. We'd be closer to Florida and my only remaining grandparents and closer to a lot of the places I lived as a kid...hmmm....this is definitely something that has my attention...I guess we'll see how it goes! I'll let everyone know if and when we're leaving the Rocky Mountains!

Champagne Friday

So, champagne thursday sounds great in theory, but instead I spent my Thursday night looking at a potential future employment opportunity and I have to say, I was intimidated. I sat in a gymnasium while two women in their early twenties entertained ten little girls between 6 and 8 for an hour. The activities included hand stands, front rolls, parallel bars, uneven bars, rings, balance beam and floor mat activities. Now, I'm not as tiny as I once was and definitely not as in shape as I wish I was, but I looked at this as an opportunity to possibly find employment outside of my current work history. I thought, hey! not sitting at a desk all day will mean that work will be varied and exciting! And working with kids is pretty cool, I mean, they're pretty straight forward, you don't have to work to hard to impress kids. Then there's the fact that it's indoors and there's all these activities to do with the kids, right? Not like soccer where they can go running off in all kinds of crazy directions and kicking balls into eachothers faces and stuff like that. Gymnastics coaching would be WAY better, right?!?! At least you can see some of my logic behind that thought process, right?!

Well, I think I'm a little bit tramatized. I mean, I thought girls, well, with girls they'll do better at listening and taking turns and things like that right? WRONG!!!!! OMG, half of those little snot nosed brats where HOLY TERRORS!!! One of the things I like about coaching soccer is that I like my team parents. They don't mind it when I yell at their kids and appreciate it when I have them run laps when they can't seem to concentrate on the task at hand, which makes practice that much more effective in improving team performance as well as running out some of their excess energy...mutually beneficial!!

I have to say that taking the job which is part time starting at $9-$12 an hour is a HUGE drop in pay for me, but I guess I was feeling like I really need to just get a job doing something, I even looked at volunteer opportunities just to keep my sanity, I mean I'm used to having a lot to occupy my every waking moment between juggling school, work, the kids and their schedules (OMG, my kids have thier own SCHEDULES...MAN....I JUST MADE MYSELF FEEL OLD!!!!) and I've just been taking care of Gage which does have it's own fullfilling aspects but for me, I need other things. My last two classes for my degree begin on Monday and looking at the syllabus they will be pretty grueling so that was part of the appeal of a part time job, ya know? Not so much work as I'd been doing....which brings me back to the trauma....

So you know that Marry Poppins is freakishly thrilled to be with kids right? Well the girl that was the ringleader of this gymnastics circus was like Mary Poppins....ON CRACK!! She was like OMG, you kids are SO AWESOME! ALL OF YOU! Even you demon-in-pink (I made up nicknames for the kids in my head while I was sitting there....yeah, I'm bored okay!) and then while the other group leader closed the class, she walked out of the gymnasium where all the parents were seated watching the class through the windows and with all the enthusiasm of a high school cheerleader went through all the activities the kids just completed and what developmental milestones the activities where helping the kids reach.

Yeah, gymnastics is no longer because flipping over some bars is fun or learning how to walk a straight line high up off the ground is scary and you feel cool when you do it. It is now a way to "strengthen not only children's physical abilities, but also their ability to learn through progressive curriculum and individualized instruction that begins at infancy and continues through pre-school and grade school to ensure that your child gains skills in an age-appropriate way." I just threw up in my mouth...just a little bit....AHEM...

Has society gotten so shallow that they can't just say, hey, my kid wanted to do gymnastics so we said yes, now look at that cool flip thing she can do, neat eh? Does every single activity that your kid participates in have to have some deeper nurological result that you can brag to your other mommy friends about? Is it so that when your kid grows up and inevitably blames you for everything that goes wrong in their life you can say, "no way man, not my fault, I put you in developmentally appropriate activites to encourage your fine motor skill development, your displeasure can't possible be because of me!" I still maintain that some of my least favorite people in the world are first time parents that are near forty that only have 1 child. I think it's because they usually act like they're kid is God's gift to the planet. It's been my experience that those kids are usually the worst kids in the world, and this is from my experience based both on working with kids now and going to school with those kids throughout my youth...ASSHOLES usually, yes, spoiled rotten brats...Sorry....I was having flashbacks there for a minute...ahem...

I wanted to get on here to post a new pic of the people that mean the most to me in this world, the ones that I considered working at the demon-child-gymanstics-mary-poppins-on-crack-place for. I actually still am, I don't know if I'll even be offered a job, but I really gotta do something...it's getting to the point that my hubby and I are talking about our feelings, and sharing secrets, and stuff....it's nice don't get me wrong, but I think that there comes a time in every marriage when you realize that if you don't ever come home from work and go, DAMN I HATE MY JOB then hubby can never help you work out your frustration in spontaneous and lusty ways.....ahem..... ;~) Happy Champagne Friday this week (yes, it's come twice this week) and hugs and kisses to you all!

Worst Weekend EVER

So, Friday I interviewed for a job as a manager for an indoor soccer center. The guy that interviewed me swore during the interview and asked me ILLEGAL questions!! He asked how old I was, if I had kids, how old my kids are and if I was married, how old my husband is, and what kind of work he does. Are you freaking kidding me? It sucked too because he asked me these things and I felt inclined to answer because I really wanted the job, it was a position I thought I would really enjoy working in. I didn't tell him it was illegal to ask me those things as I didn't want to sound threatening and not get the job because of that so I smiled sweetly and crossed my fingers. The interview ended with, "hopefully I'll be calling you on Saturday". So I'm thinking my job chances are looking pretty good.

In the meantime I had been watching my baby very closely after finding out that a trip to visit family in Wyoming resulted in him being exposed to RSV. He'd started coughing on tuesday and we were watching his symptoms get worse and worse, he's cutting teeth to so all around just not a good prognosis. So no phone call on saturday about the job...maybe he'll call sunday?

Wake up sunday morning to discover that Eric had been up with Gage all night in a sitting upright position because that's the only way Gage could breath and then gage started to vomit mucus. OK...emergency room, here we come! My older two boys were at Grandma's house so it was just us and the baby. The doctors got us into an exam room very quickly but then was trying to treat us like young, over-concerned, first time parents that were over-reacting to his being exposed to RSV. After telling us that there is no cure for RSV and really the best thing to take care of him is the good ole' fashioned nose bulb syringe sucker thingy, he looked at my admittedly pathetic looking baby and said that he would do the RSV test, and in the mean time, he decided to do a nebulizer treatment on Gage. And give him some oxygen after his pulse ox level showed that it was really low. After doing that he's like, there, are you happy now? The RSV test hasn't come back yet but see how much better he's doing?

Now, I'm a pretty patient person, but you sir are being a DICK and my kid CAN'T FREAKIN BREATHE!!!!

is what I wanted to say...I didn't, I simply said, I think, if you listen to his chest he's still having problems breathing....Gage was sitting on my lap, face against my chest sleeping a bit, wheezing like crazy...

so then the doctor says, well, there is one final test since the RSV test isn't back yet....and he turns off the oxygen that was helping him breath and leaves the room. Um...ok....the machine starts beeping like crazy because his pulse-ox level, which should be @ 100% is bouncing between 81 and 84....great...so hubby gets annoyed at the noise and doesn't want to wake our little guy who hadn't slept more than 20 minutes at a time for the last two days and shuts off the beeping...then goes and tells the nurse/dr that it's super low. The doctor tells my hubby, "well let's just see where it settles...." two minutes later a nurse comes in, watches it for a minute and turns the oxygen back on...in those two minutes the lack of air caused my little guy to, uh...WAKE UP SCREAMING BECAUSE HE COULDN'T F@#$ING BREATH! UGH!

Needless to say, shortly thereafter we are being admitted. Because well, he DEFINITELY has RSV and is OBVIOUSLY having trouble breathing...um...yes, well, thank you doctor, your 8 years of medical school did wonders!



Okay, so hospital, us, yes. I could complain about the elderly nurse doing her FIRST EVER round in PEDIATRICS that woke me and Gage up every hour unneccesarily, but really, what would be the point? She had a kind heart and was really trying to help, she just didn't get the memo that sick babies need sleep apparently. So Eric comes back to the hospital monday morning after taking the boys to school and sits with Gage while I catch up on some sleep the doctor tells eric that they're going to continue to keep him on oxygen until he starts getting better. okay...

So we wait, all day, no doctor, nothing, Eric gets the kids from school and takes them to Grammies house, then comes back to the hospital for his turn at the overnight shift. Apparently hubby got the priveledge of having the most wonderful nurse in existence! She brought him toys to play with for Gage and a portable oxygen tank so they could play on the big ole bed rather than in the huge metal hospital crib of death and she let him sleep when he was tired, GO AWESOME NURSE!!

Meanwhile, I was driving to grammies to pick up the kids and then going home and going to bed, I had great plans! Unfortunately, due to the crappy ass weather, THIS is what ended up happening:




Yeah! Now we've gone from having 2 cars to having ZERO! And okay, so now how are we going to get the kids to school? How are we going to get Hubbby and Baby home from the hospital? A million things race through your mind after an accident and I guess the most important is that I'm fine, the kids weren't there and we're all okay now.

So that all being said, Gage is home from the hospital and doing much better! My car is in the shop with 9k in damage and apparently it will be at least feb 13th before it's back to me, and I didn't get the job from the illegal interviewer guy.

This weekend looks much more promising, Miah & Cody have a b-day party, Eric's Birthday party is tomorrow night and then Sunday is the superbowl or to me, great commercial day!

Here's hoping that January is no indication of how this year is going to go!

so....I was thinking....

Ya, I had a thought, I know, it was lonely...I'm blonde, heard it!!!! Okay, so anyways, what is the problem with safe fun? I love driving, I love driving at excessive speeds, and I LOVE getting there faster than the guy next to me! LOVE IT! Especially when it's a sixteen year old punk that looks over at me at the stop light and gives me that, "are you ready to see the SIZE OF MY ENGINE" look, and then I KICK HIS @$$~~~LOVE IT!!

Okay, so, that being said, in my early driving years, I had 2 accidents, one I was rear-ended and the other, I rear ended someone else. In all fairness, the first accident a dog ran in the middle of the road and I was 17 and had just found out I was going to be a mommy so OF COURSE I braked! The second one was a day where I was taking my, now hubby, to work with both my kids in the back seat of the car which had bald tires and there was an accident on the other side of the road....I was definitely rubber necking and then I knew I needed to stop and slammed on the brakes and then...the bald @$$ tires locked up and I went careening into the back of another car....highly dramatic (tramatic) I think. Anyways, since that second accident I became extremely paranoid about other people driving me around. After all, who is going to be more concerned about my safety, than me? I don't drive in other people's blind spots any more than I have to. I don't accelerate when I see brake lights ahead, I'd rather slow down and risk getting rear-ended, than keep doing what I'm doing and hit a brick wall going 60mph, ya know? This "paranoia" has caused more social strife than I'd care to dig into at this point, but it's interesting to me how driving is so important to some, and so irrelevant to others. My hubby, has NEVER been in an accident, and he was offended when I didn't want him to drive. My mom, has been in several (I have scars...)and she's like, fine, whatever, drive. My little brother Guido always wants to drive my car or me to get into his and my other little bro BGC is just glad that he's going where he wants to.

Is it because people know the statistics on traffic accidents? Is it because we've all had close calls from an errant driver disobeying the traffic laws that almost got us killed? Why do people put so much pride in their ability (or lack their of) to operate an automobile? Is it because when you hear about an accident, you want to be thankful that, you'd never 'be that guy'? I don't know...I guess driving isn't as hard as it seams at first and some people are 'naturals' at it and some have to really work to be able to drive and find the 'safe fun' in it like I do.

Hello 2009!!

Wow, a new year! My hubby and I were talking about birthdays (being as I'm turning the big TWO FIVE this year)and he's turning 26 just two weeks before me. It's funny, there were times in my life where making it to 18 was the goal and then again when turning 21 was the big goal. Now I'm looking at another milestone age, twenty-five! I surely don't feel old and it's funny because a lot of the people I spend time with are older than me. My buddy James just turned 33 on Christmas Day and my Buddy Chess turned 26. I guess the thing that made me think about was that although it is true that with age comes wisdom, I also know some people don't really need as long to gain the wisdom of having made bad decisions as other people do. I know that I've made some poor decisions and have gotten myself in reall bad situations. Things that if my parents ever knew about they would be horrified!

But haven't we all? I think there comes a time in everyone's life where suddenly you try to figure out why you feel so wrong in your head. I know that a lot of things that I used to worry about (excessively I might add) were only important to me. If the house wasn't spotless, it really didn't matter to the person who came over. If the dishes STILL needed to be washed, it was still OK! I guess that's just part of growing up. At some point you go back and question your parents, you question your morals, your ideals. For instance, why do I claim to be a christian (as I was brought up that way) when I disagree with a lot of the things in the Bible? I think a lot of the teachings in the bible made sense when it was written (ahem...THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO) but a lot of things just don't make sense in this day and age. Why hasn't a new, new testament been added? If God speaks to man and then man writes a book of good teachings then why can't God get on the ball? If there is a master plan and that is for world peace, then man, I'm surely on that wagon! I would love for people to not have huge wars in which millions of people are murdered. I just can't believe that someone is going to rot in hell for eternity for cheating on their wife or being jelous of something someone else has. I also think that if there is a God that truly wants people to be happy then he wouldn't actually require a belief in him. I don't know, it's hard to explain my ideas. I guess I tend to "over analyze" EVERTHING (just ask my hubby!) and a lot of things don't make sense to me. Things like biggotry or racisim or philosophers turning into war bringers. I think a big part of it is ignorance.

It seems like I was more blessed than I ever realized now looking back. I was an Army brat which means that my childhood was spent trapsing about the country, living off and on base and packing and repacking all my earthly possessions and moving them around the country. This had a few consequences to my emotional psychological make-up. First off, people that said they would write almost never did. People of all ages can be really smart, really stupid, really mean, or really funny, irregardless of their religous background, marital status, whether they had kids or not, rich or not, etc. I could never understand how you could become racist when there are so many different kinds of people all over the world. And there are so many resources readily available to study. There are magazines, books, websites, blogs, myspace pages...really we are so priveledged to have access to such a wide variety of un-censored press.

I know that even certain of a few basic things as previously mentioned that I've still seen pants or shoes or belts that I was afraid to buy because they were too "ethnic" looking and what would someone think? Or say? OMG....I'm LMAO right now about how stupid I was! I mean, really, if I care so much about what some stranger might mutter about my clothes and what they might think of me then really, really....that's all my problem!!! I was so lacking in the self esteem department, it was pathetic. I mean really, who doesn't buy something they like for themselves because of something someone MIGHT say! LOL!!! Oh well, I think I'm gonna go shopping and maybe try on some apple bottom jeans.... :~)