Shut. Up.

A few weeks ago I found myself standing in line at Panera, as I do every so often when Frisbee Boy's Mom (AKA my surrogate mom) invites me to lunch so we can chat. She's amazing, she really is. I've honestly never in my life, met anyone like her. She goes so far out of her way to help everyone, and it's just a quality you often see in today's busy world. When The Girl Child was in the hospital, she and her husband booked us a hotel room for the night. When The Girl Child got home, she showed up the very next day with cupcakes. That's what life is like with her, all of the time, because she is, as I said, amazing. 

I like her and she likes me, so it's usually a good time, but it's also weird.

I mean come on, remember the time her and I went to Goodwill and she convinced me to try on someone's bedroom shoes? Or that time we she and I went grocery shopping, and I got stuck in the freezer?

(Bonus points for anyone who can find that blog in the archives, I know it's around here somewhere!)

Deep Throating... Or Something Like It

I peered into the mirror, my face so close to it that I had to keep wiping the steam from my breath off of the glass so that it wouldn’t obstruct my view. With my mouth open wide and a flashlight perfectly aimed to shine down my throat, I could see that there was a swollen lump attached to the bottom of my tonsil. 

Photo Credit: Giphy.com

Super gross, I know, and the gross factor, combined with the pain it was causing, finally convinced me to go see my primary care doctor, who in turn looked a bit startled as she recommended that if it was still there in a week, that I should go see an ENT (ear, nose, and throat doctor) instead.

Fun times.

Well, a week passed, and after peering at it again in the mirror, I begrudgingly slid off my bathroom counter and made an appointment with a local ENT. The next few days were spent religiously gargling saltwater and ingesting massive amounts of natural antiviral and antibacterial concoctions — hoping that the disgusting whatever-it-was might disappear without medical intervention and all would be right in the world.

Unfortunately for me, that didn’t happen. But, when the morning of my appointment rolled around, I got a call that something had come up with one of the DV victims that I work with, and even though I really needed to get to the appointment, she needed me more.

I canceled the appointment and rescheduled it for the following week, and to my surprise, the day before that appointment rolled around, it simply vanished.

Photo Credit: Giphy.com

I thought about it, and knowing that the laws of irony assured that if I didn’t go to the appointment, the lump would come back (and not wanting to cancel on the doctor again), I decided to go to the appointment anyway.

So This Is What It's Like To Be Married To Me

So I can't figure out why the alignment is all messed up in this post, and things are justified left, and right, and center, and I can't change it AND I GIVE UP.

Moving on...

I'm sorry again for my delay in posting. I swear I feel like I do more apologizing than writing here these days! After my fun little poisioning experience, I was sick for a solid week. Like no joke sick; blood pressure issues, heart rate issues, brain fog, stomach ache, headache, and everything hurt. After all the IV attempts where my veins kept collapsing, even my hands hurt too much to type.

But, I'm finally feeling better! I got up today, went to the gym, got some work done, and am happy to report that for the first day in a week, I didn't end up curled up in bed crying in pain. So, yay for progress.

And while I was taking some time to rest, I read an article in which a woman had posted ten texts between her and her husband, that she felt completely summed up her marriage. As a writer, I usually try to see how other works may be applicable to my own life... but this one killed me.

Because really, do you want to see what it's like to be married to me?

The Guy is gray, and I am blue

I'm not really sure what this says about us.

Straight From The Mouths Of The Little People I Live With

As usual, things have not "normalized" around here, meaning that my kids are just as weird as ever. I mean I can't blame them since they have me as their mother, but still, I'm pretty strange, so if I'm constantly being caught off guard by how strange my kids are... well then that's saying something.

Nothing to see here people, move along.

Sorry folks, I don't have normal kids. I just don't.

And to further prove my point, allow me to present to you, exhibits Sunday-Saturday:

Sunday:

The Boy Child, after stepping directly into a wet spot on the carpet that I had just cleaned with a heavy duty carpet cleaning solution, looked a little startled and then assured me "don't worry mom, it didn't burn the shit out of me like you said if would if I touched it."

He then ran off to watch the breakfast cookies bake while I pondered my parenting failures.

*************

It's That Time Again, Welcome To "Conversations I Didn't Think I Would Be Having This Week!"

I don't know about you, but I'm just not really sure if I even know what "normal" is anymore. I think it used to be some kind of goal that I was striving for, but at some point I gave up and settled comfortably into this:

Monday:

I was getting ready for work and out of the corner of my eye, I caught site of The Girl Child staring at me.

Me: "What?"

Her: "Are you sad that you only have like 30 more years of living left?"

Me: Stares at her in what must have been a shocked and somewhat annoyed looking expression.

Her: "What? I didn't say I was happy about it either."

Tuesday:

The route that we take to get to daycare has us go over a bridge and through an intersection. At the intersection the north/south street has a stop sign on either side, and the east/west street (the bridge) does not. So if you are coming off or going onto the bridge you don't have to stop, but if you are driving on the cross street you do.

Until now.

No Filter, Just Like Their Momma!

Has anyone noticed from reading this blog that I suffer an extreme and severe lack of having any sort of speech filter whatsoever? I mean I will literally say just about anything on my mind, and I'm afraid that I've passed that trait down onto my children. I mean sure, they are just kids, and only time will tell if they grow out of their childhood freedom of speech and turn into "normal," adults, but at this point I'm leaning towards the distinct possibility that they might be just a little bit more... like me.

So in the meantime, this is what it sounds like when you cram three people with no speech filters into one family.


Monday:

Tonight I asked The Boy Child to pick his clothes up from the floor and put them in the washing machine. Instead of simply doing what I asked him to do (because that would have been too easy), he said "why do you always tell me what to do?"

A bit startled that he has yet to learn the hierarchy of this family, I looked at him and said "because I'm in charge."

Peering at me, he lifted his little hand until it was directly in front of his face, and pointed his finger at me. Squinting his eyes as if he were questioning my answer, he said "why do you always say that to me?"

"Because I am your mother, this is my house, and that makes me the boss" I shot back (internally reeling as I realized how old I've gotten).

Clearly offended at my answer he threw his hands up in the air as if he were posed to catch a ball and then said "well I thought we were friends. You need to be nicer to me."

He then turned around, started to walk away, stopped, turned to face me, squinted his eyes and pointed at me again, and said "Santa is watching you ya know."

Tuesday:

Although The Girl Child seems to be a fairly bright child, there are moments when I can't help but remember that she is in fact, only 7 years old. While walking on the track at the gym with her one evening, she made reference to a friend we have that is losing his hair.

"Mom," she said, clearly deep in thought. "Maybe he should wear a hat or something when he runs on the track, just like you put your hair in a ponytail. That way all his hair would stop blowing off."

Running too fast, the new cause of male pattern baldness.

A Week With My OTHER Weirdo

As most of you know from my Facebook post, The Boy Child had a surgical follow up appointment last week. It was a week sooner than it was supposed to be but I had noticed a couple of things that had alarmed me a little bit and I wanted the doctor to take a look at him. The doctor sent him for a couple of tests before he saw him and after going over the test results, the doctor informed me that unfortunately the surgery had not been a success. I was pretty bummed, but you know what?

I can't do anything about this.

There is absolutely nothing that I can do except to wait for him to heal enough that we will be able to try again, and when that time comes, we will get through it.

We will.

But that's not today. So for now I'm choosing to turn my attention elsewhere and so today we are not going to be talking about surgery. Nope, we are going to talk about the fact that my son is crazy.

Adorable, but a total nutcase.

I actually wrote the remainder of this post back in October (when I wrote about how strange his sister was), but I never got around to posting it, and I have to tell you, he gives his sister a run for her money in the weirdo department. At just 4 years old, when he isn't busy washing his hands with a used urinal cake, he is doing other things that are just plain strange.

This is what it's like living with him for a week:

Monday:

"Let me show you the cut that I have on my finger."

***************

Tuesday:

There's A Conspiracy Brewing...

A few months ago, a Facebook business networking group that I belong to started promoting a variety of subgroups that the group owner is calling "missions." Before that the group had served as a connection tool where local business owners could network with each other. But then suddenly the group owner started repeatedly asking all of us to join at least one of the subgroups as "a good way for businesses to give back to our community." I wasn't sure how many more commitments I could pile on my plate right now, but when I saw that one of the subgroups was aimed at raising domestic violence awareness and that one of my nonprofit board members had joined, I decided to join the DV mission.

Then things got strange.

Yea, I Totally Eavesdrop

As most of you know, I have a rare genetic disorder that causes me to have to be on a very specific medical diet. Every couple months I have to get a blood test that measures markers in my blood that tell my doctors if I'm ingesting gluten. Because I don't have any immediate reactions or digestive symptoms to eating gluten, I really have no way of knowing if I'm getting "glutened" by something until a major problem arises (remember how sick The Boy Child suddenly got?), which I would obviously like to avoid.

I've gotten a bunch of emails recently asking me (and Mr. Attorney Man actually asked me the same thing not long ago), "if you eat gluten, does it eventually filter out of your system?"

Why Living With A 7 Year Old Is Like Living With A Drunk College Student

Living with a 7 year old is like living with a drunk college student because you have absolutely no idea why they do most of what they do, you constantly have to watch them, and then there are moments when even during their stumbling awkwardness, they are able to argue an amazingly valid point.

I know this because I live with one and this is what a week of living with her looks like:

Monday:

I told The Girl Child to stop running down the hallway of the office building we were in. Looking very annoyed, she informed me “I am not running. I am speed walking and I just happen to be very good at it.”

Facebook Continues To Remind Me That My Kids Are Weird

(I'm going to apologize ahead of time, for some reason screenshots appear a bit fuzzy when you read them via an email subscription. You may want to click the title link at the top of the email and read it directly from the blog if you are having that problem. Sorry!)

Do you remember the post where I told you that "I Learned My Kids Were Weird From Facebook?"

Well a peek at my most recent facebook statuses has alerted me to the fact that not much has changed! My kids are still just as strange and my Facebook page will continue to be the vault that reminds me of that fact. Now that I'm reading over my status updates, does anyone want to adopt The Boy Child?

Another Round Of "Conversations I Didn't Think I Would Be Having This Week"

I hadn't done one of my "conversation" blog posts in a while, so I made it a point last week to take a note of at least one strange conversation I had a day, because let's be honest here, it's not like I'm getting any more normal.

Monday kicked itself off to a rocking start when I was at the Chiropractic office that I work at on Monday's (that's it, I'm going to have to make them a label, they have been on here like 5 times already). Anyway, one of the chiropractors and I were going to be hosting a table together at a local festival coming up in our area — him for his practice and I for the nonprofit, but together so that we could share the cost — and I needed to know some of the details for event. As I've mentioned in other posts, he has a very dry sense of humor that unless you know him, comes off as very blunt and unfriendly.

Game on.

Me: What time are you going to get there?

Him: When I get there.

Me: OK, well how will I know if you are there?

Him: Well, if you show up and you see a tent, I'm there. If you show up and you don't see a tent, I'm not there yet. (Chuckles to himself)

Me: Well look at you Mr. Funny Man, laughing at your own jokes, so proud of how funny you think you are with your witty comebacks.

Him: (Looking slightly embarrassed, he attempts to re-route the conversation) Don't wear black. It's going to be hot, so that shirt you are wearing right now, don't wear anything like that.

(Apparently now I need help dressing myself?)

Me: I'm not going to wear black, I'm going to wear tinfoil so that all of my sun will reflect onto you. At least that way when you are standing around with that grouchy statue-like face, you will have a nice Greek tan going on.

Him: I could absolutely see you wearing a tinfoil hat.

Me: Duh, how else will the mothership find me?

And then I turned around, left, and went home.

*****************************

Tuesday:

On Tuesday a good friend and I went to go see Magic Mike XXL in the theatre. 

(P.S. it was awful. I write better text messages than that entire team of writers did coming up with a plot line, but if you were just going to see the actor's bodies, well then step right up and buy a ticket because it did not disappoint)

After the movie my friend and I were sitting in the hallway of the theatre because neither of us were quite ready to go home yet but we didn't really have time to go anywhere else. I told her that we should take a selfie and commemorate a rare outing without kids, and then at the last second I turned and pretended to kiss her.

Mr. Attorney Man And I Almost Died (not really but almost)

Court was… interesting, but not in the way that you might think.

As you know I posted on Monday night that I had JUST found out that I had a court date on Thursday morning to extend my Order of Protection. I was freaking out because this blog was born out of an attack that occurred due to retaliation when I got the initial order. Obviously I didn’t want to go through that again so I had a tough choice to make; risk my life and extend the order, or risk the kid's safety and let it lapse.

I was supposed to let Mr. Attorney Man know on Tuesday if I wanted to extend it or not, but due to a ridiculously busy week and a lot of inner turmoil, Wednesday night snuck up on me and I still had not made a decision. When I got a text from Mr. Attorney Man that basically said “I need an answer from you," I responded back with the only thing that I knew for certain; “how am I supposed to make a decision on something that might get me killed when I haven't had time to make any safety plans?”

In the end it was decided that if my ex showed up we would request a continuance on the case and if he didn't show up, Mr. Attorney Man assured me that the order would be "rubber stamped through" (meaning that it would be automatically extended and I wouldn't have to really talk to the judge) and then it should take a few days before he would even be served with the order, so that would buy me a little time.

I was about as OK with that plan as I was going to be with anything at that point, which really meant “I get that this is my best option but I really just wish that I didn’t have to deal with it at all.”

When I woke up on Thursday morning I felt so unnerved and sick that I gagged on my toothpaste.

I then got ridiculously lost on the way to the courthouse.

I knew that there was some construction going on near the courthouse, so I had planned for it and left my house early, but what I was not expecting was over 6 miles of one-way-street detours that took me through neighborhoods, a construction zone, what appeared to be an abandoned commercial district, and then eventually spit me out clear on the other side of town. When I passed a house with a sofa on the front lawn and a hotel that advertised "we have color TV and waterbeds," I realized that I was in the beginning of every scary movie I had ever seen.

My GPS had gone from continuously telling me to “make a u-turn when possible” to eventually just showing what appeared to be my car floating around in space.

OH. EM. GEE. NO!!

The Girl Child had curriculum night at her school a few nights ago. Because they didn't want a bunch of kids interrupting the teachers and parents, the school had a drop-off classroom where kids could stay and watch a movie; both of my kids were excited to go.

There were two sessions that night and I ended up being the only parent that showed up in my daughter's class for the second session, which you know, totally rocked because the teacher and I got through everything really fast.

Unfortunately it wasn't fast enough though, because when I got back to the drop-off room The Boy Child was just coming back from the bathroom, by himself. 

The teacher, probably not having any idea otherwise, had sent my just-turned-4 year old down the hall, by himself, to find a bathroom.

Not. A. Good. Idea.

The Boy Child didn't share in my opinion though and was pretty excited to tell me that not only did he get to go wandering around all by himself, but he had gotten to use the men's room for the first time ever.

The Domino Effect (OH GOSH MAKE IT STOP)

My water heater broke.

Not nice water heater, not nice.

Now I know what some of you might be thinking (those of you who have never had the unfortunate experience of having a water heater go out on you), "oh well good thing it's summer and super warm outside, it would suck if that happened in the winter!"

Well I'm here to tell you, IT DOESN'T MATTER.

The water was just as damn cold now as it would have been in December. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that it's coming from like 10 feet below ground, but it wasn't just cold, it was ARCTIC style frigid.

It was so cold that even though I was determined to get my morning shower in (trust me, no one wants to see my un showered hair in the morning), I ended up sitting on the side of the tub and giving myself a sponge bath. It was just so cold that I couldn't even get in.

It was so cold that I hurt my neck.

True story.

Please Take All The Animals

So as I've said roughly 8.7 million times before, I live on the edge of nowhere. In fact even my neighborhood seems to be becoming part of the field these days, seeing as how every spring we become engulfed in corn husks that blow off the fields from last years harvest.

Excuse the poor quality, I was sitting in my car waiting for someone and didn't bother to roll the window down when I snapped these pictures.

You guys, those are corn husks. Piles and piles of corn husks that blow onto my street from the fields and set up camp. 

It's like the field is eating us.

Although if I had to choose between the corn wandering over or anything from the farm on the other side of me wandering over, I'm going to choose the corn because the other farm next to me is a yak farm.

Yep, a yak farm.

That Time I Handed A Duffle Bag Full Of Cash To A Dude In A Parking Lot

A couple weeks ago I was lying on the couch, a glass of wine in hand, and I was watching the movie "The Lincoln Lawyer." There's a scene in that movie where the main character — the lawyer — is in his car when his client pays him using a large envelope of cash. I found myself giggling because you can't get anymore straight edged when it comes to how seriously Mr. Attorney Man takes his career and his license (rightfully so), so the thought of him handling a business transaction out of the back of a car was kind of funny.

I like funny.

I drank a little more wine, laughed a bit more to myself, and when I went to bed that night an idea was already rolling around in my head as I thought about the money that I was supposed to be paying Mr. Attorney Man the very next week.

Oh what perfect timing!

Are you getting excited yet?

I was.

That Time My Ex Tried To Start A Business

It was four years into our marriage, our daughter had just been born, and we were broke. My ex (husband still at the time), unbeknownst to me was not only blowing all our money on drugs, but he was also stealing money from the family business that he worked for and was blowing through that as well. No pun intended.

He was disappearing for days at a time and when he would come home, he would stumble through the door only to pass out in the middle of the wood floor, where I would find him in the morning when my alarm clock went off; the alarm clock that I would set so that I could get up and try to get him up for work. Most days “get him up for work” meant literally shoving him towards his truck after I had lost the battle of trying to get him to take a shower. Many days he would be sent home from work for “inappropriate attire” (aka, he was a filthy, disgusting, mess of a human being), and yet he wouldn’t actually come home, he would just simply disappear again and the cycle would continue.

Eventually my family decided to stage an intervention with him. Like an actual intervention.

I Require Adult Supervision

Last month as my Platonic Hubby and I were trying to figure out something to do for my birthday, the conversation took a turn that looked like this:

I'm the orange-ish bubble

So Saturday night my Platonic Husband, two other friends, and I, spent the night in the city.

There was a lot of planning involved because not only do we have wildly different schedules, but also due to the simple fact that we are chicks.

First, I needed a dress and it needed to fit the kind of budget that a 6th grader might have after getting paid an allowance; meaning that it had to cost less than the $30 that I had left on a gift card that I received for my birthday (I'd like to point out to my real-life friends who read this blog, while you are overly generous, I know what you are up to. Giving me gift cards to places that don't sell children's items or groceries, I'm onto you). Also, I was shopping in between meetings for work, which meant that I only had 30 minutes to find a dress that cheap.

Sounds like fun.

NOT.

And yet miraculously...

But then I couldn't figure out how to get a strapless bra to stay up, and the dress really needed one. I know, at 32 yrs old I probably should have figured this out by now, but when your bra size is "almost," you can usually get away with just using the built in dress-bra, but this time, not so much. So there I was— clueless and bra-less— so I asked The Platonic Hubby for help.

She wasn't much help.

Why Would I Buy That?

A few nights ago after I suffered a minor facial injury that I will take to the grave that I don't want to talk about, The Platonic Husband and I made plans to watch the comedy "The Sex Tape."

I'm the ugly peach color. For some reason it wouldn't let me crop the pics so they are haphazardly pasted together. Sorry!

And as usual, before we started the movie we started talking about everything under the sun, which was how I ended up telling her about these ridiculous clothes that Frisbee Boy's Mom had given me to try and sell (in all fairness they were also given to her, but still...)

"And there is no way anyone is going to buy these things," I explained to my Platonic Hubby. "Not unless I start shipping to the compound. I mean seriously, unless you are looking to go as a Duggar or an 80's inheritance queen for Halloween, no one is going to be buying these clothes."

So naturally, we decide that we must try them on.