Last Blog Post of 2015!!

For Pennsylvania, which is where I first celebrated my New Year holiday, making it the only time zone I have to honor when it comes to waiting for the ball drop.  Considering they only show the rest of the country repeats of the NYC ball dropping, I figure that's fine.  Oh crap...3 minutes until the ball drops, gonna wrap this up way quicker than I intended.

Happy New Year...here's to eating healthier, doing more stress relieving activities, and trying to get published...I turn 33 in 2016 so I feel like it has to be a good year.

Love you!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!

Christmas Day...Holy Shit, Where's the Tylenol

I'm in Colorado Springs, typing this post with my awesome Christmas present (husband surprised me with a Surface 3!!!! I cried.  I've been begging for one for months and he made me believe it wasn't gonna happen...then there it was!  Love it!).  So I'm currently sitting in the basement of our new home with my whole family.  We had a very eventful couple of weeks.  I flew with the kids to Atlanta and drove to Alabama for Steve's graduation for a one night trip.  That one night turned out to be the new worst night of my life (the runner up is now the day Jane threw up on the plane and in the airport).  Jane started throwing up in the hotel around 11 p.m. She ate 11 chicken nuggets, I learned the next day.  She threw up from 11 p.m. all over the bed and floor (I was in the other bed, Abby in her pack n' play) and didn't stop until about 4:30 in the morning.  She slept through most of it, thankfully, but I didn't sleep more than a couple of hours broken up throughout the night.  Somehow, we both still managed to make it to Daddy's graduation the next morning at 8:30 a.m.

Then Jane went with Daddy to drive to CO Springs and I flew back to Arizona with Abby.  The next morning we packed up and picked up my very amazing friend from work who offered to help and keep us company for the drive to CO.  We started our drive and stopped at the Grand Canyon (GORGEOUS..breathtaking..so glad Jane wasn't with us..that thing is a death trap!).

That day was a great day...we made a lot of progress on the drive and thoroughly enjoyed the gorgeous scenery this country has to offer.  

The next day...not so much.  Husband texted me throughout the night to let me know he too had fallen ill with a stomach thing...was puking from midnight until the next morning while he was driving with Jane to CO.  So of course, I'm now mentally convinced I'll be getting sick, as well as Abby.  Then we start driving through the Rocky Mountains and that takes my mind off of anything else. 

 

The roads were snow covered for almost the first 2 hours of our drive that day.  It took us an extra 2 hours at least to get to Denver and we barely made it in time for her to have enough time through security to make her flight.  She's always calm and cool though, which made it a lot easier for me.  And now I know my van doesn't suck too bad in the snow, so that's good, I guess.

So now we're here, with a million more boxes to unpack, but we're able to breathe again.  I'm so glad the past few months are over...

Time for another beer...bedtime is soon for the kids, and even though we showed up at this house two days ago, we're still watching the kids play with their Christmas presents and eating Christmas cookies in our home.  I love the house, by the way.  Can't wait to spend some real time here and get truly settled in, but it's a damn good start so far.  

Merry Christmas!

This is so depressing.

My kids are asleep in a house full of the boxes of all our things.  I'm battling with feeling sadness and feeling detached from all of this.  I was thinking earlier that the last time we did a move, I did something similar.  My mind's way of coping is apparently to pretend this is all normal, but it compartmentalizes these moments.  For instance, I vividly remember walking through our house in Pennsylvania when it looked like this and feeling the same way.  Like I'm sectioning off the memories of my life by states I've lived in and things I've done in each.  Lots of uncomfortable encounters in Louisiana (really bad job...then a really good job which only lasted a few months but almost made up for how bad the first job was), baby in Pennsylvania, baby in Arizona ...wonder how I'll categorize Colorado (bc for sure no more babies).  I really want to publish a book while I'm 33 (I turn 33 on 3/3 so obviously I'm a fan of the number 3)...that would absolutely be the highlight of our next state if by some miracle it happens. 

I'm drinking wine out of a kid's cup from Chili's right now because literally everything I didn't set aside today is packed in boxes.  I was proud of myself for remembering a cup for my daughter for milk and water (she's got it in her room now but I almost resorted to borrowing it tonight for my mommy beverage...I'd've cleaned it and returned it before my own bedtime...probably). 

In the past few weeks I've:

• Celebrated a major holiday without my spouse (Thanksgiving...it was rough...just me and my kiddos...and I'm no cook but that dinner was damn good)
• Made over 50 pieces of jewelry and shipped the last 8 packages out today...it was a lucrative holiday season for my jewelry shop and at least a few of the orders were extremely emotional for me...I make personalized items (handwritten keychains, baby footprints, etc.) so I often have sales for memorial jewelry and one in particular had me crying pretty major tears as I packaged it up
• Worked a full time job (2 hours each night and 6 hours each day...those were the least exhausting 6 hours of my days for the past several weeks...I love my job and my coworkers and will miss them terribly)
• Cleaned out our house of all garbage and junk we didn't want moved to CO (well...most of it)
• Bathed and fed my children regularly (it deserves recognition)
• Exercised regularly (highlight of most days....aside seriously from picking up my kids from school every day...that makes my heart smile every time)
• Worked a conference with my children over a weekend in Phoenix
• Cancelled a few utilities here (hubby helped with this)
• Set up utilities in CO
• Survived at least 5 major mental breakdowns
• Oh...and moved a treadmill out of my house single handedly....then me and my awesomely strong friend from work lifted it onto the back of her truck WITHOUT the hatch down...because we're awesome....she's driving up with me to Colorado and I seriously love her...I could write a full post on her

So, I'm not trying to display how amazingly badass I am...I am just reminding a future version of myself that I can handle a hell of a lot.

I really, really, really, do not want to publish this post and go back to my reality...it is much easier to avoid than face.  I just want to write endlessly about how I feel than actually feel it.  It takes me a step away from it all.  I'll just keep writing then.  Right after I pour myself another Chili's cup of wine.

I'll write until I should go to bed...and then maybe I'll watch some Netflix on my phone.  I'm obsessed with Criminal Minds right now. 

There's so much to clean in this house...only floors and walls and sinks but there are sooo many floors and walls and sinks.  Once the movers load a room I plan to vacuum it and clean the walls (dog hair on white walls/molding is gross)...I'm hoping to get done when they do.  I have a hair cut scheduled tomorrow for 3:30 and I only have tomorrow and a couple of hours Wednesday morning to finish earning our deposit back on this house.  We close on a house in Colorado a week from tomorrow. 

One hellish week.  Thursday morning (early, early, morning) we fly to Atlanta, rent a car, drive almost 2 hours to Alabama and spend one night there for my husband's graduation from OTS...then drive (the day after we get there) back to Atlanta, fly back to Phoenix, pick up our dog, then get up early the next morning for 2 loooong days of driving to Colorado.  I know I'll be exhausted so I can't even imagine how my kids will handle it.  My older daughter will stay with her father and drive to Colorado with him...which should be fun for her. 

So one more week of this and we'll all be together again and for better or worse, we'll start the next chapter in another state.  I'm so tired...

So many things.

I don't know where to begin.  Single parenting is so hard.  That's the root of this thought but by no means the end of the story.  But there's so much I can't write here. So many things I have in my head that I can never put down onto paper or into words...I can't even say them out loud.  And the moral of this thought is that I want to write.  Not this post, not in my journal, I want to write for real. I want to be a writer, get published, write more, become compensated for my writing enough to justify that it's all I do.  It'd be the only version of my life that I could truly love.  I love my children and my job but when I shut my eyes, I can only see that yearning to do something more.  To contribute something more, not just to my family, but to everything.  This is all selfish but it's the only way I can make myself get through things that are too hard to see past otherwise.

My younger daughter was bullying another little girl at the daycare at the gym this morning.  I was only 3 miles into a very good run that was going to go on for at least another 2 miles when I got called down.  The thing that bothers me is she's not even 2 years old and she seemed totally happy and harmless when I came in...but they claimed they couldn't put another girl down without my daughter trying to tackle her.  So as soon as I stayed for more than 2 minutes, trying to figure out what to do, my daughter started crying to the point where I knew I couldn't just have a talk with her, put her down, and go back on my merry way.  So we left and came home and I had a good cry on the drive.

Of course, this self-pitying moment let my mind spin out of control until I was thinking the deepest, darkest reasons I have to be sad.  The things I can never write down.  And the only thing that pulled me out of the new, overwhelming despair I'd fallen into, was the thought that my life could be different if I could write.  If I can focus all my extra minutes, every moment I have that isn't consumed by jewelry, children, work, house, if I can really apply myself, then maybe I can pull myself out of this ongoing failure I feel.  I can gain some independence from some things.

Now I'm begging my older daughter to take her nap and threatening her by claiming I won't take her to the pool later, like we had planned, if she doesn't quiet down and fall asleep.  In a few minutes, I need to work on jewelry.  Hopefully that won't take too long because I'd like then to spend some time doing something to dedicate my every free minute to writing.  Writing here counts because I'm committing myself beyond just my own thoughts.

If nothing else, dedicating my time and efforts toward making this lifelong dream a reality always seems to make me feel better in the interim.  So there's always that.  It's good for my mental wellbeing.  Also, I've never felt more drive, more confidence about something being a possibility than I do about this.  So even when every other thought sounds like: "so many people have this same dream that try a thousand times harder and never make it a reality, why do you think you'll be any different?", the in between thoughts are so much the opposite that I know I can't just give up on this.

Time for jewelry.

Finally, some time off.

It has been such a busy couple of weeks, it feels really good to have one full day where I spent most of it making sure my children were fed and didn't do something to hurt themselves or set the house on fire.  Truly, I still had a busy day.  We woke up early (6:15) and I fed Ike and the girls breakfast...finally sat down with coffee and my own food around 7:30.  I read for a good chunk of time (which really was delightful) then we got ready to head to the gym.  I didn't do as much as I wanted to, but I got to run a (slow) 5k, then did a little bit of muscle rolling and stair walking before the daycare called me down to check on my kids.  I assumed my younger one had pooped, but no...my older one had a bloody nose.  No big deal (seriously, it's at least a weekly occurrence in our house), but they suggested I take them home.  Fine, whatever.

We go out to the car and my 22 month old (I'd say my '1 year old' but she's almost 2...I'd say my '2 year old', but she's not quite 2...deal with it) put up SUCH a fight when I was putting her in the car that even I ended up crying after the whole ordeal was over with (I basically had to restrain her and push her into her belts like a mental patient refusing to go to the psych ward, only I felt like the mental patient when I finally got to drive out of the parking lot).

So then lunch happened...they had pizza.  Then nap time, where I usually end up with over 2 hours of blissful quiet in the house where I get real free time all to myself and the only condition is that I don't make too much noise...I'm telling you, every mother on the planet would agree that this is like a gift for us...like a biological present given to every parent of a young child (and not all are lucky enough to have children who nap...so I will never forget how grateful I am that mine do...and to have two that nap at the SAME TIME...just incredible, Im telling you).  Sadly, today, my younger one decided to continue her naughty streak and wake up less than an hour into the normally 2ish hour nap.  Damn it.

She tormented me for another hour before her sister woke up and we went to the park, spent almost 2 hours there, then drove to the fancy grocery store up the street (okay, it was over 20 minutes away...I love this soup from there and the fact that it'd eat up over an hour of our evening with kids strapped into the van and listening to music didn't exactly deter my decision to go to the far away store).  We got home, I fed them these overpriced twice-baked potatoes that they both refused to eat, then sent the little one to bed when I got back from putting clothes away and found her COVERED in potatoes.  It's now well past their bedtime and the little one has been asleep since 6:50 (in trouble for being so messy) and the older one is sitting next to me watching those damn Disney shorts on Netlix on her (my) iPad...again.

And she watched that heartbreaking one.  Again.  And this time I bawled my eyes out the entire time...I could cry right now if I stopped for even a second to think about it.  And I think my kid took pleasure in my pain.  She kept looking at me and smiling while I was crying.  Now my contacts are all dried out...again.  And I'm about to wage battle with my kid to get her to give me the iPad and go to bed.  Wish me luck.  I've had some wine, so there's a good chance she'll win.

Edited to add...
I truly adore my children, just FYI.  I spend at least two thirds of the day kissing them and telling them so...or playing with them and absorbing all of the time I get with them at this adorable and innocent age....just didn't want to let any readers walk away thinking I must be some kind of heartless and horrible mother.  Well, you can walk away thinking that, but I really only come here to vent (lately especially).

My Life

It's past my bedtime but I wanted to soak up this night off from all the things that have been on my mind lately.  I am 32 years old and I have realized tonight that this is probably the craziest my life has ever been and will ever be (including this chunk of time where my children are children, until they're adults and are living independently of me).  When I was in college, I thought I was busy.  I was, definitely, for a decent part of that time in my life.  There was a time when I had three jobs and still managed to take classes and do well in them.  That was still not as much as I feel like I have on my plate now.  I don't mean to sound like a complainer.  I'm just trying to come to terms with where my life stands right now, and where I hope it'll be in the future.

Take today...I got up (late...7:10am) and got my kids dressed and ready for school.  Threw a couple of meats from the freezer to the fridge to thaw for dinners the next couple of days...made myself coffee and toast.  Begged my 5 year old to get dressed.  Dressed my almost 2 year old.  Begged my 5 year old to get dressed again.  Turned off TV and finally accomplished 5 year old getting dressed.  Took kids to daycare (2 year old seemed fine at the time, ominous, I know).  Came back home and worked a little, then went for a short run with the dog.  Got in the car and went to work.  Spent three(ish) blissful hours at work with actual adults and sat through part of a staff meeting when my phone rang and a very nice woman at my daycare informed me that my almost 2 year old had a 101.3 degree fever and could I please take her home at my earliest possible ..right now.  So I made a rare announcement to my coworkers that I had to leave and basically rushed out of there.  I'm a terrible mother because I stopped for wine on the way to get my sick daughter.  It was on the evening agenda (I'm sorry Abby).

Called several times until I finally got a nurse to agree to let her come in to the health center on base to rule out ear or throat issue that could possibly need antibiotics.  Tomorrow's a holiday and taking both of my children to urgent care in the Fall sounded much worse than badgering my pediatrician to fit her in for a quick check up.

No ear infection, no throat issues.  Probably just a yucky virus.  So then we go to the store, because we're almost out of milk.  I end up putting way too much in my basket before I remember I walked to the store from the doctor's office and now have to lug all the groceries back to the car without the cart.  I buy two grocery bags (the sturdy ones with handles) to help me out.  Back to the daycare to get second child.  Then back home.  Children play in the house for about a half an hour while I recuperate (sit) for 30 minutes on my phone, mindlessly scrolling through my facebook feed.  We all get up and get dressed (with blankets and all...it's finally Fall in Arizona!!) for a walk with Ike.  Half of the walk is relaxing and half of the walk entails of me yelling at Jane to sit still and stop turning in her seat when her blanket keeps getting caught on the ground, yelling at Ike to stop yanking us in random directions for no apparent reason, and talking to Jane about things that don't make much sense (she's pretty adorable but when you're trying to zone out, her jabbering on about how funny it'd be if stroller was a real ship floating in the water is just distracting...I know I'll regret saying this in the future, but that's how I felt when I was in between yelling at Ike and trying to avoid getting hit by a car as I lifted her blanket off the ground for the 10th time).

We got home and I immediately started dinner.  We ate.  Then we facetimed with daddy and afterward, I sat them down on the couch for some truly enjoyable disney shorts on Netflix.  Then medicine for both (they have these heartbreakingly yucky coughs and bedtime for both girls around 7 and finally some quiet time for mommy (an episode of Gray's Anatomy...way too much halloween candy...and maybe 2ish glasses (large) of wine).

So while I was trying out some stress relieving activities (bath, book, then tea bags on my eyes), I realized this truly is the most hectic time of my life.  Regardless of how many jobs I have (although a full time job and a part time business are both intimidating without the two kids and a husband away thrown into the mix), and regardless of how much school made me crazy...there has never been a time in my life other than this that I've been this overflowing with things I have a responsibility to keep up with.

The moral to this entirely too long post is that if I could be granted one wish for myself (I have lots more that take priority that are for my children and family but if I were forced to pick one for myself), I'd wish that I could live long enough to see my children grown and happy and healthy and have a moment to spend some truly relaxing time on a regular basis to read or write or do whatever it is I feel like doing that doesn't leave me feeling like I've rotted brain cells (facebook) or stolen time from my children.  That was certainly a long-winded way to come to this conclusion, but that's the inspiration for this post.  Being a mother with a lot on her plate is totally worth it.  I just hope I have a moment in the future to have too much time on my hands.  God does that sound good right now.

I'm an emotional mess.

My 5 year old daughter and I were watching Disney short films this evening on Netflix and The Little Matchgirl came on...I must not have looked up until the very end when she was lighting her matches and seeing amazing things like food and a warm place to sleep.  Then she freezes to death and a nice old woman spirit (grandmother?) comes and carries her soul away....can you blame me for being emotional??

I spent the following 15 minutes trying to make my daughter understand how lucky she has it (in between choking sobs).  She didn't get it at all, which is good on the one hand, but also so depressing on the other.  I hope I didn't just scar her in some way.  I hope she'll be a little more cognizant of the fact that not everyone has the same opportunities as she does.  She's still so young...but she's well past the point that children living in poverty have already come to fully understand their situation.

Now I can't remember what I was planning to write about earlier this evening.  Oh...NaNoWriMo...that's a no go for me this year.  With work, jewelry, husband being gone, kids, house, moving in December....there was no way I'd be able to accomplish writing 50,000 words of a new novel without needing to be committed for some sort of mental breakdown by December 1.  I do have goals, however.  I'd like to really get a good chunk (if not all) of editing done on the Earths Project book I wrote a few years ago.  I've edited it two times already and it still needs an overhaul..but I still have confidence in the story and the characters and I've never given up on believing that it has potential.  So if I go through it again, maybe I'll be able to start querying agents again by 2016....then maybe (oh, please!!) I can get a book published when I'm 33....my favorite number is 3 (and it's more than just a preference, I really feel like luck happens for me when there's a 3 involved).

So now that I'm emotionally drained and can barely see through my contacts, I'll go pour a glass of wine and try some mindless TV watching.  Hopefully there's a new episode of The Affair available.

Good night..