On sleeping with my husband again - May 31, 2005 -
No, sorry, not a sex post. It is actually a post about sleeping with my husband, literally.
A while back I posted about the size of our bed. Yes, it is a full, and my many pleas to Bill for a bigger bed have been met with "We don’t need a bigger bed, we need less people in the one we have".
For the last 14 months, Bill has spent a majority of the nights sacked out on the couch. He used to start out in bed, only to move to the couch in the middle of the night. As time marched on, Mia grew, and the bed did not, so he now starts the night on the couch and stays there. This is not what I want. During our entire marriage, Bill always had me come to bed with him, because he said he could not get to sleep without me. Not a problem now.
Although I absolutely love sleeping with my baby, I am ready to have my husband back in bed with me. Mama Mia will officially begin her nights in her own bed tonight. It should make for an interesting night.
I feel so very conflicted about this. If Bill would just let me buy the king bed of my dreams, I would not feel the need to move her out of our room. I want my husband back in bed, and no one can get any sleep with the three of us in the full. Rock and a hard place.
She really does fine with her naps in the crib. I just know I will be up frequently, as she still nurses at night, and I REFUSE to let her "cry it out". Not an option.
The other option is to just order the bed, set it up, and see if Bill notices………think it will work?
PG-13 - May 27, 2005 -
They are home from Star Wars, and as they walked in I asked my oldest, "Well, was it violent"
He replied casually, "Only when Annikan caught on fire".
Schools….out……for….summer! - May 27, 2005 -
Yesterday my kids were out of school for the day, so we went to the zoo with some friends. We had so much fun! Here they are, at left, being cuter than any of the animals there.
We closed the park down, got some eats, visited with our friends, passed out Tylenol to everyone, then got on the road for home at around 10pm, arriving at 11:45pm with one tired and cranky group of kids.
The tired and crankiness rightfully followed us into this morning, when they had to get up and head to school at 8am for Mass and dismissal. They were home by 9:30am, school officially over!!!
By 11am my house was officially destroyed. They built forts all over the place with every pillow and cushion available, and proceeded to play war, using beanie babies (we have around 5 million) as bombs etc., All this happened while I was blissfully cleaning the van of 10 spilled cans of soda and ripping lollipops from their new home on the carpet and seats. Zoo leftovers. It is amazing what a little Texas heat and some humidity will do to a red lollipop. Oh, and these were not your ordinary lollies….they were round, solid globes the size of tennis balls, I kid you not.
Because our God is a merciful God, today was also Bill’s half day today, so the crew minus one were loaded into Dad’s truck, and off they went to see Star Wars Episode Whatever and the Revenge of the Sith.
If there were any reason whatsoever for me to homeschool, it would be so we did not have to experience the insanity of the first day school is out. It is like someone gave my kids a snort of coke while at Mass. I guess 1 1/2 hours of church will make even the most pious 7yo a bit edgy.
Here’s to an adventurous, fun filled, wild summer!!!!!
Parting shot……Mia at the end of our zooathon, nose running, hot as hell, bags under her eyes, and surrounded by mom’s zealous find at the zoo gift shop:
Panic attack below the surface - May 27, 2005 -
I can feel it rising. It feels almost like I drank too much coffee. Okay, so I did drink too much coffee. Let’s try that again. I feel claustrophobic. Like I need to get out of a small space, but I am not closed in. I am in my home, watching my daughter play on the carpet in her room.
My mom has something called essential thrombocythemia. She has had it for years and years. I am too weary to go into great depth about it, but basically, she produces too many platelets, and they don’t work. So, it is a double edged sword. She can either hemorrhage, or the mass amounts of dysfunctional platelets can get into a roadblock in her arteries and form a clot.
This situation makes things VERY complicated in regards to correcting her blocked artery/ies, even if she only has to have angioplasty. I can’t even think of what it means on the open heart front. Hence the rising panic.
I lost my dad to cancer. That was tough. Horrible. Now this with my mom…….I feel so overwhelmed when my mind tries to wrap around the thought of losing my mother, which, folks, is a very real possibility given her platelet disorder. Honestly, I don’t know how the docs are going to pull this one off. I just don’t know. This is the worst possible thing that could happen to someone with ET.
So, I sit here and wait for next Wednesdays CT angiogram, and I try with all my might to push down the rising panic. It comes in waves, and I ride them out. Not exactly the kind of surfing I planned to do this summer.
Todays picture post - May 24, 2005 -
We have spent most of the day outside today. I set up the little pool in the backyard and Quinn and Mia swam and played until they were exhausted. It was determined that being nekkid made for faster sliding.
I give you a post in pictures, due to laziness of course! - May 23, 2005 -
Big bro and his lil’ sista at the pool.
Eating some ice cream after swim team practice. Yes, we are back in the swing of things with the team, and joining it this year is their youngest swimmer to be on the team, Quintin!! He was so incredibly happy. He practiced so hard with them, and I am hoping he will be able to swim across the pool without touching the bottom by the end of 2 weeks. That is one of the requirements to be able to compete.
My oldest son. He got in the water today and when they did drills, he beat the 16 year old kids on the team. I was floored, as were his coaches. They said "Wow, he grew this year. The added height is a plus". This summer should be interesting for him.
My cyst is so much better. It is still oozing a bit, and hurts, but it is worlds better than Saturday. I even got a ride in on Sunday, but that is another story that I will post about on my bike blog. Thanks so much for the well wishes.
Off to join my daughter in the land of nod.
Ohhhhhhhhhhh, Mexico - May 22, 2005 -
Okay, if you want a great read, you must go here. This family is living my dream.
We have talked about doing something like this for years. We almost moved to Guam in 1998. Bill had a job lined up and everything, but after talking with a family that lived there, decided it would not be something that we should do. There was also a job in Cancun, Mexico, but I am not sure we ever really figured out why we didn’t take it. Chicken, maybe?
After reading travelogue, I plan on lighting the fire under Bill! Our kids are growing so fast. The time we have to do it is soon going to slip away. <sigh>
Anyway, go read her blog and dream!
A pain in the…………. - May 21, 2005 -
…………..back. HUGE pain. Large cyst. Enormous cyst. Right…in…the…middle…of…my…back. Between my shoulder blades….on my freaking spine.
Pain. Hot, burning pain.
Swelling. Immense cyst that resembles another head trying to grow out of my spine. Imagine birth, without a vagina to pass through. No hole in which to exit. That is my friend the cyst.
Did I mention pain?
So, off I go to the doctor, after Bill has informed me that it is ready to be lanced. LANCED!!! ON MY SPINE!!!
I sat on the exam table and assumed the epidural "mad cat" position, got several needles in my back to numb it all up, then Dr. Ralph picked up a scalpel and cut the cyst out. DID I MENTION IT WAS ON MY SPINE????
I sit here and can feel the last of the lidocaine ebb away from the sutured crater that remains on my SPINE!! and can tell that I need more than the 500mg of Tylenol that I popped a few minutes ago.
owie
Monkey girl - May 19, 2005 -
I have blocks, dolls of every shape and size, pretend keys and phones, stuffed animals, a little doll house full of furniture, books and more books, several shape sorters and tons of puzzles.
So what does my daughter play with this afternoon? Monkey Mia dumped all the contents of the bathroom trash can into the toilet…….then she flushed.
My little darling.
Stop where you drop, or is it drop where you stop? - May 18, 2005 -
 I am sorry, but this is the life.Â
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New blog - May 11, 2005 -
I have been keeping a weblog of our bike rides. You can find it here. It is quite dull, unless you like to ride. Bill has consented to be a guest journalist from time to time, so that should be worth a good laugh!
We are busy with year end stuff here in regards to school and baseball, so life at our house is chaotic. Not to mention I hosted a Sip and See for 3 of my friends who had babies within 2 weeks of each other. It was fun, but exhausting.
I am feeling a bit reclusive and agitated lately. I know it is my PMDD rearing its ugly head. I tend to feel very sensitive, paranoid and just plan bitchy. Also, I tend to get standoffish with my friends. During this PMDD fun, I just can’t handle all the "closeness" that can be a part of our group. Too much "assvice" from people in regards to things such as breastfeeding my daughter still. This was a topic last night that one friend thought that she should lecture me on, unsolicited. You know, I listened to statements made that included "She doesn’t need it anymore" and "It is more for you than for her" and my favorite, which was delivered to me last night as Mia tugged on my shirt to let me know she was tired (9pm) and ready to nurse to sleep, "If she can ask for it, then she is too old to be nursing". I actually wept when everyone left. These are supposed to be my friends. I just don’t know what to say to these people anymore to shut them up for good. It hurts so bad that I am being judged for doing what I consider a loving thing for my daughter.
So, I end up backing away and needing my space.
I will post more when this wave of PMDD passes.
My life in a nutshell - May 7, 2005 -
My bike rides have been giving me a nice amount of quiet time to think…without interruption.
I get some great ideas for blog posts, only to get home and feel too exhausted to type them out.
Today, I was thinking that I really like to read blogs, but most of them are blogs that start off out of nowhere, give a brief "hi, I’m so and so" and there is no real sense of history, or who that person is. I call them "Big Bang Blogs", without the evolution. KWIM? Internet birth at its finest.
So I was thinking I might give a brief glimpse into my past life, BT, or Before Typepad. Snippets from time, so to speak.
I was born and raised in Ft. Worth, Texas to an amazingly smart, aeronautical engineer father and a lively Italian mother. <snore> At my birth my mother hemorrhaged, and it was at that point that she claims she lost most of her hearing. How post partal hemorrhage can cause deafness has eluded me all these years, but that is her story, and she is sticking to it. It came in handy a time or two during my teenage years when I would yell "You make my life miserable" and she would roar in rage and frustration "Yeah, well, you made me deaf, so there!" The one time she did that within ear shot of my father, I could hear his feet stomp down the hall across the flagstone floors, and in a flash he was in her face with his wagging finger saying "By God, don’t EVER let me hear that come out of your mouth again. Do I make myself perfectly clear?"
WAKE UP!!! It gets a bit better.
I was a very busy child. I loved to play with animals and was always into something. I was independent from the start, and was always trying to escape my mothers overprotective, watchful eye.
At age 3, as the story is told, I figured out one day that if I ran out the back sliding glass doors, I could put a mop handle across the back and my mom couldn’t get out to catch me as I ran pell mell out of our unfenced yard, making my way to the creek in search of my beloved older brother. A fence went up shortly after this episode, and I was trapped.
My love for animals was extreme. I brought them home in lunch boxes, jars and little handmade paper boxes. On any given day there would be a horned toad, tarantula, snake or some kind of rare spider loading into the carpool car with me at days end. One day I brought home an enormous black widow spider and just about gave the carpool lady a heart attack as I explained to the rest of the kids in the car that the large pulsating egg sack that accompanied her in the jar (with many air holes in the lid) would be hatching any minute, releasing hundreds of baby black widows.
I watched Jacque Cousteau every time he was on TV (back in the days when TV was actually filled with lots of good shows) and vowed I would one day be a marine biologist and sail on Calypso in search of exciting sea life. At age 3, I once asked my mother if I could have a dolphin and keep it in the bathtub.
Skipping the teenage years would be a good thing, as life in Cowtown was a real drag, and I longed to get the hell out of FT. W and start my life by the sea. I was basically a good kid, had a steady boyfriend, didn’t sleep around, drank beer occasionally and did not do drugs. A ho-hum kid. After graduation I attended a Jr college for a year. My grades stunk in high school, as I had zero motivation to do well. I rocked my first year in college, and got accepted to Berkley in California…….my dream was to study marine biology in California. Unfortunately, to send me there, my father would have had to cash out on his entire life insurance policy and sell his first born. Out of state was outrageous back then, so I enrolled in my second choice, Texas A&M University in Galveston, Texas.
It was here that I learned that, living on an island made of crushed shell, in addition to its positives, also had its downside. The island that TAMUG was built on is called Pelican Island, and there was only one way to get on and that was via a drawbridge. This bridge would get stuck almost daily, so we coined the term Pelicatraz, as we would frequently have no way to leave our little mosquito island in the sun.
I also learned at TAMUG that I loved flaxen haired men, Tecate, siestas in hammocks strung across dorm balconies, and that tequila can make you as sick as hell for days. I also found my friend Tom, with whom I had a most excellent time and whom I shared many an adventure for over a decade.
I had a boyfriend back in Ft. Worth and it was this person, and a lack of a GPA that had me reluctantly heading back to Ft. Worth at years end, and then on to Arizona, where I spent the worst year of my life.
It was a very abusive relationship….mentally and on 2 occasions physically. One of the defining moments of my life was picking up the phone and calling my beloved father and saying "Dad, he hit me" and hearing my father on the other line choking on his words through tears as he said "Girl, get back here to Texas right now!!" He wired $500 to me, and I rented a U-haul, loaded it with all of my things, climbed into the car with my collie, pet parrot, box turtle and cat and, at the age of 20, crossed the Arizona dessert, the mountains of New Mexico, and trekked half way across Texas back to my family.
I spent 2 weeks there, then drove back to Galveston to start over fresh. Again, my beloved Tom was there to help me get past all the mind games that had been done to me in Arizona. For this, I am forever grateful to him.
Four months after my return, I got the dream job of my life and started training dolphins, sea lions and exotic birds. I lived for each day that I could wake up and spend the day in the company of dolphins. It was hard work, but so very amazing. It was a time I will never forget, and will always cherish.
Through one of the trainers that I worked with, I met this really nice guy. He was such a quiet and gentle person. He wore wire rimmed glasses, wore paisley button down shirts, had blond, blond hair, surfed, did triathlons, and had a gorgeously toned, tanned body! He spoke to me in a calm voice and watched me with curiosity, genuine interest and fascination. This was Bill.
Bill and I dated for about 4 months, and then I got a job in Florida with Ocean World, in Ft. Lauderdale. I was hired to put together a bird show for the park, and I spent 5 months there. During that time, I saw animal abuse at its worse. Dolphins being hit with poles, baby sea lions taken home to stay in trainers bath tubs…..it was unreal. I blew the whistle on the park, was fired, and then approached by a guy from a marine animal protection group. Through him I gave a deposition detailing all the abuse at the park. Heads rolled, people were fired, and in the end the park, which had been open since the 1960’s, was closed down for good. Yes, republicans can be activists for our planet, sea life and oceans.
I had almost taken Arizona guy back at the time when I met Bill. Whew. God, I shudder when I think of all the joy I would have missed with my husband. It reminds me of just barely avoiding a fatal car crash. (If by some chance you are reading this S., sorry, but it is so very true, and you know it).
Upon return to Galveston, I reunited with Bill, and through the eyes of the man that was to be my husband, I healed from my ordeal in Arizona. I learned that I was worth while. I learned that I was a valuable human being with a great deal to offer. I learned how to love again. I felt satisfied and felt complete joy with life. Surfing, running, hiking, camping, swimming, bike riding, sailing, and endless nights of drinking frozen margaritas and talking into the wee hours of the night filled our lives together.
I then married this man, the one of my dreams, became a research associate at UTMB in Galveston, graduated with honors from nursing school, supported Bill as he became a PA, and then had 4 of the most amazing children with him.
My life, to me, has been charmed. Each event intertwined with the next. I feel that there are no coincidences, and each part of the puzzle led me to the next.
Good God, how I can’t wait to see how the rest of it unfolds!!
EHHHHHHHKKKKK - May 6, 2005 -
Did you know that when a baby is cutting 8 teeth at the same time, they are capable of ear piercing shrieks that can break glass?
My daughter has beaten the character in Dumb and Dumber on the ability to make the most annoying sound EVER. It is this unbelievable sound. "EHHHHHHHHHKKKKKK" when she wants to nurse, get down, get up, go for a walk, eat a cracker, go outside, or have whatever thing she is not supposed to have. She shrieks "EHHHHHHHKKKKK" and points to the object of her desire.
She shrieks when she is in pain from the teeth, which include 4 molars and 4 canines. Trust me, she is in discomfort all the time, therefore she "EHHHHHHHKKKK"’s all the time.
Nursing is constant, bless her heart. It is one of the only things that sooth her. My nipples, on the other hand, are in competition with her mouth for the "Body Part In the Most Pain" award.
I attempted a day of shopping with little Mia the other day. What!!!! was!!!!! I!!!!! thinking!!!!! The mall echoed with "EHHHHHHHHHKKKK" from wall to wall. It sounded like prehistoric pterodons had made a comeback and were making up for the last 65 million years of silence.
When these teeth cut through, she will have 16 teeth in her mouth at age 13 months. She is my hero for dealing with this, because her mouth looks like a war zone.
And now, I am off for my yearly well woman check. I will be bringing Mia with me. Hopefully she won’t let out a startling "EHHHHHHHHKKKK" at the moment of speculum insertion. Yikes!
It’s all about the bike. - May 2, 2005 -
We did that THING again……3 more times.
The competition is fun. After one ride this weekend, Bill came up behind me as I washed dishes, wrapped his arms around me and whispered in my ear "You will never beat my time, because, even though you are getting faster, I am too." Then he kissed me and said "I love you".
I also caught him glancing at his watch when I came in the back door from my ride on Sunday. :*)
I have shaved 10 minutes off my time, and am averaging 14.1 mph. Not too bad for an advanced maternal age chick. Bill has also shaved time off of his best, and can ride 20 miles in 1 hour and 10 minutes, averaging about 17 mph. My best time now is 1 hour and 24 minutes, so I need to shave 14 minutes off my time.
It is very different terrain than we are used to. Along the Gulf coast, where we used to live, it is flat and windy. It is hard riding into the wind, but when you turn around, you fly with the wind at your back. I used to average about 21 mph. Here, it is very hilly AND windy, so you really have to push yourself to get a good time. The hills are rough when you are riding into the wind. It makes for a great workout though!
Needless to say, I WILL catch him, and have fun trying!!!
Stay tuned.
