Just imagine

In light of reading a new friend's LiveJournal post and enduring the tough week I've had, I thought I'd take a humorous look at motherhood...or, if you're a SAHD, fatherhood.

Those of us who stay home with the kids really do have to wear dozens of hats in a day. Our job is 24/7, we're the sole owners/managers/underlings that run the HomeShow. We're chefs, nurses, singers, actors, artists, movie projectionists, librarians, chauffers, narrators, playground directors, teachers, pet groomers, maintenance staff, laundry personnel, and chief confidant to all persons within the four walls. We're also the police, wardens of the Time Out Cell Block, politicians, mediators, seamstresses (seamspeople? seamspersons?), and bartenders. Bully for us!

Sometimes, I feel like I lose myself in the shuffle of small hands and feet, crayons and diapers, but when the sun goes down and my kids go to bed I take a deep breath and watch my babies sleep. That's when I find myself again. I can slow down and really enjoy what we have.

We don't have much, those who know us or have been reading my blog long enough know that. But we do have is love and laughter and we have an abundance of both. We may not live in the best neighborhood (although for Hayward, we could do much, much worse), and we may not drive the nicest car or wear high-end clothes, but we smile and laugh and love all day long and honestly, I'll take that over possessions any day!

So I guess what I'm saying here is that amid all the chaos, budget drama and worries, I'm really thankful what what I have.

I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a balla...

...or I wish I wasn't such a damn wallflower.

Seriously folks, I haven't had a "night out" with the girls - whether they be girls from C-Town or from college - since mid-2001. SEVEN YEARS. SEVEN!

When I met Rob and got married, I kinda lost interest in that scene. I calmed down for a while. I'm still calm, but now that I've moved out here, popped out a couple of kids, and have seen the calm side of life, I'm wishing I had girlfriends out here who would drag my sorry ass out on a Friday or Saturday night!

A number of things are preventing this from happening:

1. I'm a HUGE wallflower. I'm not a go-getter. I don't join mommy groups or playgroups because I'm afraid I won't be accepted. I'm not everyone's cup of tea. I'm not skinny, I'm not beautiful, I never have a lot of wiggle room with money to do every activity under the sun, I'm a Republican, et al.

2. I don't have many friends out here. I have two local friends but they're both a bit younger than me and have their own activities. One has her own mommy group, not to mention money to do the things they do.

3. I'm very self-conscious. I don't have nice "going out" clothes. Most of my shirts either have holes in them because they're so old or they have some miscellaneous stain on them that make them look as though they'd be put to better use as dust cloths.

4. I'm a Negative Nelly. Look at this list!!!!

I'm just a self-sabotager, I suppose. I have no self-esteem, I'm persistently certain that I'm always being judged for my decisions, my appearance, my beliefs...*sigh*

Honestly, I miss my friends back east. I love living out here, I do. But if y'all could just hop into a caravan of U-Hauls and move your asses out here, that'd be great. Or you could just take vacations in tandem and a few times a year, I could go out and get a little crazy. Maybe cut a little rug. ;-)

From the days when I was a lot of fun...





And a picture of mom and me, for putting up with this morning's posts!

Good news!

She's fine. I called her again at 7:30 a.m., got her machine this time, and then called her at work. Found her! Turns out she was having problems with the phone and they just got it fixed this morning. Yay!

*phew!*

Please talk me down from the ledge

So my sister calls me last night and starts off the conversation with, "Well, the reason I'm calling, and I don't want to alarm you, but..."

Evidently, she had tried calling mom three times yesterday evening between 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. and mom never picked up. It's very unlike mom to not be home that late at night, especially if she has to work the next day. She's usually in bed by 9:00 p.m. or so.

However, her machine didn't pick up either, it just rang and rang. So I'm trying to sit on the optimistic side of things and say Well, maybe she turned the machine off, or even the ringer off, when she went to bed. Or the line came loose from the wall and her bedroom phone isn't ringing.

No matter how you slice it, I'm worried. She's almost 70, she had a cold the last time I spoke to her, and she's a transplant patient. Although she's sailed through having the transplant and has had ZERO problems with it, they did only give her an extra ten years with the new heart. This Christmas, it'll be seven.

So someone please reassure me that she's fine!! I'm not ready to go down that road.

I'm unnaturally excited about this!

Kids should come equipped with cow bells

No nightmare, no scary story, no horror movie will ever frighten you as badly as being awoken by your child in the middle of the night in near-pitch black darkness. The best part? She doesn't announce her arrival until she's three inches from my face.

"Mama."

[pause]

"Mama."

[pause]

"Mama."

[longer pause]

"MAMA!"

me: "Holy shit! What?!?!"

Then I realize it's her and she's at the side of my bed with an unspoken request to sleep in between Rob and I. So with my heart beating a mile a minute, I pick her up, haul her across my body and plop her down in the middle.

This happens maybe once a week these days and I'm thankful that's all it is. Most parents would be annoyed that once a week, they got zero sleep. Me? It's the bomb. She used to do this every. single. night. Now that she's sleeping in her own room (well, for almost four months now) she sleeps through the night more often than not. Yay!

Of all her make-mommy-fall-out-of-bed-in-fright moments, nothing beats what happened this past Saturday. Friday and Saturday nights, it was hotter than hell's bells here and it didn't cool down much at night. We don't have central air in this apartment, so we rely on box fans and ceiling fans to keep cool. If it cools down at night, we open up all the windows and let the night air cool us. Great for the electric bill, total suckfest for us.

Anyway, we decided to camp out in the living room those two nights (okay, we camped out Sunday night too, but that's because Beth fell asleep on the couch with her pillow and I didn't have the heart to move her) with all fans on high. We have a really big sectional couch - about nine feet on the long end, six feet on the short end - so Rob slept on the long end and Beth and I shared the short end. I fell into a deep, deep sleep. I was in the middle of an already-scary dream and all of a sudden, in my dream, I heard crying. It was really out of place in the dream so I started looking (in my dream) for the origin of the crying. The crying got louder. Finally, my eyes pop open and I see a head holding a seemingly-large obect looking down at me, an orange and yellow glow around them.

I figured this was it. This is the big one (for those of you who've watched, it's from "Sanford & Son")! Then I regained my senses and realized it was Beth, standing behind the couch, holding the toilet paper, asking for help. She'd apparently woken and needed to go to the bathroom but couldn't handle the whole process by herself.

Damn kids need cow bells.

"I want my MTV."

Remember that? From back in the days where MTV was Music Television? When MTV was new and shiny, and all they ran were music videos? Well, that and a few select game shows, like "Remote Control" and "Singled Out." It was an awesome time - you came home from school, dropped your Trapper Keeper backpack by the door, grabbed the remote control that was the size of a small photo album, and plopped down on the couch to watch MTV until someone told you not to.

Then you'd put up 15 minutes of protest because Kurt Loder has been saying for the last half hour that George Michael's "Faith" was coming on soon.


more graph humor and song chart memes

What happened to MTV? Is there some alternate MTV that still plays music videos all the time? Now all MTV consists of is craptastic "reality" shows with over-developed teenagers and early twenty-somethings acting like total whores (guys AND girls). What's worse, half of these shows have parents who CONDONE their behavior!!! Have you ever wasted 30 minutes of your life to watch "Parental Control?" It's awful! Moms and dads getting all excited because some strange guy has his mitts all over their daughter.

It's unreal. It blows my mind that people like this stuff! Maybe I'm just getting old. Just once, I'd like to flip through MTV and see Downtown Julie Brown, or ANY veejay for that matter, announcing MUSIC videos. Not TRL where you only see portions of videos for an hour in the afternoon, with a ticker running along the bottom with incoherent LOLspeak emails in it.