No One Is More Surprised Than Me, To Be Writing This.

So...

We moved.

I know, right?

Trust me, no one is more surprised than I am to be seeing those words.

We moved.

After deciding to stay, renovating our house, and writing a long blog about it all, we moved out.

I'll be honest, I really didn't want to. I cried when we made the decision, and I cried my way through packing.

Welcome To The World Little One (Also Known As The Day I Screamed At Everyone)

Wow. These last few weeks have been quite the frenzy of activity, but what is life with a newborn if not a little bit hectic?

In the event that you missed my Facebook announcement, The Littlest joined our family on March 2nd. Tipping the scales at 7lbs 6oz, he was my biggest baby yet, but not at all the ginormous baby that the doctor had said I might expect.

Thank you Jesus.

Especially, because the labor and delivery was hard enough as it was.

P.S. I would like to speak to whomever conjured up the theory that so many have tossed my way in the last several months, when they said “being your third, this labor should be easy!” because that person lied.

LIES.

Seriously, lies.

With The Girl Child, I went from 1cm to having her in my arms, in nine minutes. Yes, truth. With The Boy Child, labor was six hours long, going from 6cm to in my arms, in less than 30 minutes.

With The Littlest?

FOURTEEN FREAKING HOURS.

Sex, Diagrams, And A Cheesecake

* If the pictures appear blurry, select the desktop version on your mobile device*

In case you didn't pick up on this from my last post, I am very, very, extremely ready to have this baby. Even more now, since I dislocated my hip (stupid genetic disorder) not long after hitting "publish" on the last post, and it's really difficult to heal a hip with all this extra baby weight pressing on it.

Awesomeness.

And my poor husband, well let's just say that the man should get some kind of medal, or nomination for sainthood, because I think that the wife he married and loves, has recently been replaced by a ball of weeping, eating, complaining, hormones.

I'm the green, and my saint of a husband is the gray, texting from his place of work.

A Court Date, A DCFS Case, And A Cry For Help

"Do you know what makes you special, in a different way than the baby in mommy's tummy?" The Guy asked The Boy Child as he pulled him onto his lap.

"I'm better at building with Legos" The Boy Child replied, apparently confident in his six-year-old understanding of how the world works.

"Well, yes" The Guy replied, trying not to laugh, before asking "but do you know what makes me love you so much?"

"Because I'm your best buddy!" The Boy Child exclaimed, throwing his arms around The Guy's neck.

Hugging him back, The Guy explained "yes you are! You are my buddy, and what makes you so special to me, is that your brother is being born into our family, but I picked you to be mine. I met you, and I took a good long look at everything that makes you who you are, and I said to myself  'I want to be his daddy, because that's how much I love him.' Forever, and ever, and ever, you're mine, because out of all the little boys in the whole wide world, I picked you."

With The Boy Child in is arms, The Guy is showing him how to hold his candle during the Christmas church service.

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

A couple weeks before Christmas, The Boy Child was injured, intentionally, by a respite care worker we had hired to keep him safe. And due to a pending investigation of her, I can't go into details, but this woman had worked for us for a couple months, had gone through a background check, interview, drug test, and CPR class, all through a respite care agency. Yet still, she harbored an anger streak that none of us knew about.

On Going To Court This Week, Pregnant

Not long ago, The Guy, the kids, and I were in the car. I can’t remember what we were talking about, but at some point I looked into the backseat, and saw that The Girl Child’s eyes were welling up with tears. When I asked her what was wrong, she didn’t answer me. Confused, The Guy repeated my question, and her response to him caught me completely off guard.

“You’re not my real daddy!”

She was visibly upset and by the quiver in her voice as well as the emotion packed behind her words, it was clear that her statement was something that she had been thinking about for a very long time.

Not wanting to jump the wrong way in the conversation, I asked her what she meant by that, and she surprised me with the simplicity of her answer.

Grand Finale

*If you are viewing on mobile, select the web version to de-fuzz the photos*

First We Were Three, 

And Then We Were Four.

Now We're Completing Our Family, 

By Adding One More!

This Is How We Roll...

If you remember from my last post, "Don't Tell Me I'm Losing My Son," I was having a difficult time finding joy amongst The Boy Child's complicated health situation. I felt like I was swimming, and swimming, and I wasn't getting anywhere, except closer to the bottom of the pool.

But, if you also recall, sitting there on the bottom, I realized that I needed a reminder that life is what I make of it.

In keeping with my desire to live intentionally, I looked back over my photos from the last couple of months, and suddenly, I was able to see things in a different light. Yes, there were times when The Guy found himself pulling a wagon, for a child that was too weak to walk, and there were nights when I went out with my friends, only because I knew that I needed to step out of "epilepsy" for a minute and take a breath. But looking back, I was able to see what I hadn't necessarily seen in that moment; joy, family, memories, and life.

I saw us living life, despite the fact that it wasn't always perfect.

So, since you've listened to me cry over the last few posts, I hope that you will join me in this one, while I take you back over the last few weeks to laugh, giggle, and smile with with us, as we live our lives. 

It Was Always Meant To Be

On Friday, The Boy Child was hooked up for an extended video EEG, which basically means that a bunch of electrodes were glued to his head, several EKG electrodes were placed on his back, and then an EEG machine was wrapped on top of his head, therefore making him look like a smurf. The box was then attached to a larger box that he had to wear around his waist, and then all of that was connected to an extremely heavy video monitor that would record everything he was doing, at all times.

He screamed hysterically the entire time the electrodes were being applied; more out of fear and frustration then any actual pain, and I can't say that I blame him. 

This has been a rough ride.

My Husband Was TERRIFIED

So... I'm about to make fun of my husband, but it's OK because he gave me permission.

Source: Gipy.com

Sunday night (or rather, Monday morning), I was awoken from a dead sleep by the sound of my husband breathing rather heavily. Trying to figure out what was going on, I leaned over the pillow that had made its way between us, and saw that he was lying on his back, and beginning to hyperventilate. 

My first thought was "he must be having a sex dream!" but as his breathing quickened and his face began to reflect panic, I realized that he was actually having a nightmare.

I Don't Want My Ex To Move Back Into My House

Well, to jump right into it, last week’s post stuck with me more than I was expecting. (If you haven’t read it yet, I’d suggest doing that before you continue on, but for the TL;DR, I've found my feelings of anger towards my ex, reignited as I watch The Guy with my children.)

Anyway, it’s been interesting for me to reflect on last week’s post. Although I stand-by everything I said in terms of not letting my negative emotions consume me, as with any source of anxiety, sometimes it takes a while to figure out where it stems from.

Then sometimes, you figure it out and it just clicks.

I was married to my ex for twice the time that I’ve been divorced, and although I hate to admit it, I still feel more like the wife that was left behind by her first husband, than the wife I am now. 

Pumpkins At Midnight

Five years ago, my ex took The Girl Child to a Daddy Daughter dance, and in the morning, he walked out of our lives forever.

Last Friday, exactly five years since that night, The Guy escorted The Girl Child to his very first Daddy Daughter Dance.

And although The Girl Child has been blessed with a "Stand-In Dad" for the dances in between the last one with her biological dad and this first one with The Guy, there is something extra special about being able to go with someone who won't say "goodbye" at the end of the night.

She has already had too many men in her life walk away from her.

I Got Into A Physical Fight With My New Husband

I woke up kicking him and shoving him away from me.

“Eden, it’s me! It’s just me, and you’re safe. You are safe, wake up!”

The voice, it sounded familiar.

It was Friday night, or rather, now early Saturday morning. The Guy and I were unwinding after the kids had gone to bed, by watching a movie and having a drink. We weren’t drinking excessively — not even close — but I was tired, and so was he, and at some point we had both fallen asleep in a pile of pillows that we had been using to cushion the floor; which was a much better option than our ridiculously uncomfortable sofa.

When the TV shut itself off and The Guy awoke just after 2am and realized what time it was, he gently shook me by the shoulders and tried to wake me up so that we could both make our way upstairs, and into a bed that would be much kinder to our backs than the floor was.

But my back was already screaming in pain, and I was disoriented just enough by the darkness of the room, my position on the floor, and a man leaning over me, that my half asleep, wine relaxed brain, didn’t immediately piece the entire scenario together.

Instead, it pulled what little information it knew, and it flashed me back to a time when I was 19, and I found myself groggy, in the dark, in pain, and with my ex-husband pushing my shoulders down into his futon.

And right then and there I "realized" that I was about to be raped again.

So I fought.

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.

I Got To Ride In An Ambulance

Yesterday I was having lunch with a fellow nonprofit board member, and as I usually do, when the waitress came I asked if the restaurant had any gluten free options. To my excitement, they had a whole gluten free menu.

SCORE! 

Unfortunately when my burger came, my supposedly gluten free bun looked IDENTICAL to my friend's gluten one, so naturally I became suspicious. Wanting to confirm with the waitress, I asked her if mine was gluten free. When she paused and then said "uuuummmm...... yeeeeesssss. Yeeessss it issss," I became even more suspicious.

And did not want to touch that thing with a ten foot pole.

Deciding that I wanted a second opinion on this burger that may or may not contain gluten, my friend and I sat, and waited, and sat and waited, and then waited some more, until ANYONE at all would come to check on us so we could inquire about my now cold hamburger. When it got to the point that my friend was done eating and no one had come back to the table, and I suggested that maybe my friend dramatically fall out of his chair and throw himself to the floor so that we could get some attention, the manager walked by.

Looking at the burger, he said "oh no. No that is definitely not gluten free. I am so incredibly sorry and I will be right back."

He came back less than 30 seconds later, with the same burger.

"Sorry, the chef said that we use a company now that makes gluten free buns that look just like our regular buns."

Lie?

I thought so.

But feeling guilty that my friend, a busy attorney, had already been overly gracious about waiting with me through the whole charade, and having not eaten gluten in so long that the threat of actually dying from it seemed like a distant memory, I decided to eat the damn burger.

Bad idea.

This is me messaging my husband two hours later.

Marriage Is Great, And We Are Already In Counseling

Do you guys remember the post "My Christmas Tree Might Actually Fall Over," in which I threw out the big tree that I had once shared with my ex, and in an attempt to embrace our new life as a family of three, bought the only tree that my measly budget could afford?

This year, The Guy and I decided to keep that tree, and use it as our one and only. No expensive, six foot tall tree could replace three and a half feet of cheap plastic, that has always had pride and strength hanging from its branches.

So this year, I got to watch my husband put up the tree that symbolized my new life as a family of three, which has now grown to a family of four, and through it all, I watched my past continue to intertwine itself with my future.

It felt amazing.

Now that the dust has settled a bit on my surprise marriage, everyone keeps asking me the universal standard "First Year of Marriage Question," which if you were unaware, is "Sooooooo, how is married life?"

And it's funny, because it almost makes me wonder if there are people who really answer "it sucks. Honestly, I wish I had never done it. I'm like a week in and I already have one foot out the door and another stepping into the grave."

Because there would be nothing awkward about that... 

But since I'm always never awkward, I end up giving nifty little answers such as "it's great, except that I keep forgetting he lives with me now. Like he is there. All. The. Time."

There's Something I Need To Tell You (Part Two)

If you haven't read Part One of this post, I highly, highly suggest clicking here and doing so first, as this is the second half of a story that really needs the first half in order to make sense!

If that just seems like much too much work, the super quick synopsis is that shortly after my ex left, another man came into my life and "married" me in a wedding that was not even legal.

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

A week later, after he had “married" me, he moved in; something that he had wanted to do for a really long time, and something that I had been very resistant to since we hadn't been married. Yet upon his arrival as my co-dweller, to my horror, he proclaimed that he wouldn’t be paying any bills, or helping to clean (since it was my house and not his), that I would be doing most of the cooking since I was his wife, and that although he was excited to start working on fathering another "genetic offspring," that he would no longer be helping to raise my kids since they weren't his.

And I, maybe for the first time, truly found my voice, when I put my foot down and said “no.”

The next night, while I was at work, I got a call from my babysitter who was concerned because The Helper was “moving a lot of stuff out of your house.” I raced home to find him loading his car with not only his belongings, but also mine, my children’s, and the wedding gifts that we had received the week before.

I fell to the grass on my knees and begged him not to go.

It’s one of the most shameful moments of my life, and one that haunted my dreams for years to come; the moment I graveled at the feet of the man who had been scamming me.

There's Something I Need To Tell You

**********

“Um… hey. So I know this is a weird question but do you know a good divorce attorney? Did you like whoever you used?” was basically the Facebook message that I was sending a former friend’s, former boyfriend.

I say “former friend,” because life had been drifting us apart until new babies and new jobs had widened the gap far enough, that although on good terms, we hadn’t spoken in several years. And I say former boyfriend because he was her ex.

He was also the only divorced person I knew at the time, and my ex had just left.

Messaging me back only a few minutes later to ask what was going on, I was fairly brief but blunt about my situation, and what came next was what I can only describe as “overwhelmingly helpful.”

Within an hour he had set up consultations with several local attorneys, given me instructions on how to freeze my bank account, and offered to come over and talk me through a plan.

At this point my parents were the only other people who knew that my ex had left a week prior, and they weren’t too keen on doing anything other than waiting around to see if he came back. But I knew that not only was this my chance to finally “escape,"  but that I couldn’t wait any longer after some things that I had found out shortly after my ex left… and everything he had done that had led us to this point.

I needed to be free, but I was completely falling apart, and a week after my ex had left, I still had absolutely no idea what my first steps should be.

But this guy, “the Helper” if you will, well he knew exactly how to take care of the situation, and he wasn’t shy about stepping in to “help.” Repeatedly asking me if he could come over, calling me every hour to see how I was doing, and messaging me more information than I knew how to handle, it left me feeling both smothered and relieved at the same time.

I didn’t trust myself to do anything right after I had spent so many years living life where every decision that I had made turned out to be wrong, and suddenly when I was the most lost that I had ever been, here was someone who seemed to know what he was doing, and was going to make sure that this time, I was going to do everything “right.”

Looking back, I can see exactly what was going on, but back then, I was just too unaware. So when the Helper kept asking me if he could come over so we could talk about this in person, I said no as many times as I could before he eventually wore me down and I said “yes.” And when he offered to take a few days off work to watch my kids so that I could get some appointments lined up with social services and handle things with the bank, I said “yes” again, because I had no other help.

Several months later and before I even knew what was happening, the Helper had become completely ingrained into every single aspect of my life. He would come to my house directly after work, and sometimes stay through the weekend. If I had something come up and needed a babysitter, he would take the day off work. If I was tired and the baby was fussy, he would run errands for me so that I didn’t need to go. If something in the house needed fixing, he made it a priority to work on it in his very next free second.

But even though I was drowning in life, I spent most of that time attempting to resist his insisting assistance, yet I always gave in at the end because I was too tired to fight every battle that life seemed to keep throwing at me, and in all honesty, I did need the help. And at night when the sun went down and the lights went out, he would fill the room with his promises for our future, and the reasons why no one else had ever deserved me like he did.

Yet I never wavered from the fact that I did not want to date him.

No, I had repeatedly told him that I was not ready to date so quickly after my husband's departure, and that I was only looking for a friendship. And while I remained firm on my end, I could tell that to him, we just weren’t there “yet.”

Eight Months Later...

So... I just realized that it's been like EIGHT MONTHS since I did one of those "and this is what we've been up to" posts. 

What the hell Eden, pull it together! 

With that being said, I just went back through my photo files from the last few months and I'm here to update all of you in a fashion that can only be described as "overwhelming."

For that, I apologize.

I know that a lot of you were relying on me to describe the free or low cost activities that we attend so that you could look for similar things in your area, and I completely dropped the ball! For that I really am sorry. Life just kind of got away from me and I'm going to back up that explanation by taking you all the way back to December and showing you how we have spent our weekends.

We started out the holidays by attending a free local Winter Wonderland thing with my kids, The Guy, and My Platonic Hubby and her family...

Can I just take a moment to brag about how The Girl Child has not gotten THREE years out of this dress? I'm impressed.

Words I Never Thought I'd Say

So….

After I wrote the post where I talked about what a horrible human being my ex is and why he will probably burn eternally in hell and how I don’t like him, I realized something when I said that The Guy I have been dating, stepped up and took care of my kids while I sat in bed and cried my eyes out.

I realized that I owe him a lot more on this blog than just the dramatic trilogy detailing his crazy female friend who hates me, and I think it’s time to rectify that. Because what you don’t know, is that he has been around for over a year, and has been personally dealing with all the crazy stuff that you have seen me going through. And I have to admit, he's done a pretty swell job of holding me up every step of the way.

So why haven’t I told you that much about him?

Because it terrifies me to put myself out there and be vulnerable again. 

I've made a lot of bad decisions in my life when it comes to men. My friends and the people around me have watched me fall, and it hasn't been pretty, and it hasn't felt good. In the same way, I feel embarrassed that I’ve come on here before, all excited about someone I have been dating, only to have to come back and explain why it didn’t work out and that guy is now gone. I didn’t want to solidify another man into the pages of my safe space within this blog, that I thought I might one day want to rip from my memory.

"Maybe," I thought, "if I don’t really talk about it, it won’t be so real; because real hurts you know. When things get real, hearts get invested, and when that happens, you’ve just given someone the power to hurt you."

I don’t know how much more hurt I can take.

So here, and "in real life," I didn’t invest myself into him, not right away anyway. We dated, he asked me what we were, and I told him “humans.” The term “boyfriend,” well that’s too much pressure for me. You see labels create expectations and expectations turn into dreams and future plans and that was all just a little bit too much to handle. In my life, people leave, so let’s just not look at tomorrow, OK? Let’s just try to get through today.

He wasn’t thrilled, but he was willing to give me the time that I needed in the space that I required, and so off we went; day by day. But then suddenly all those days rolled into weeks which turned into months, and then a year, and now here we are.

Invested.

Part Three Of The Threatening Female Friend (And All The Hateful Stuff She Said About Me To The Guy I'm Dating)

If you remember from the last part of this unique three-part-post, I had been struggling to get comfortable with the very close relationship that the guy I'm dating, has with a female friend. Where we left off, The Guy had come to the realization that maybe the relationship he had with this female friend, was not as platonic as he had previously thought. Attempting to rectify the situation, he took it upon himself to email her (cringe!) without my knowledge, and tell her that he needed to redefine the boundaries of their friendship. 

If you have not yet read parts one and two, I suggest you read those first! You can find Part One here, and Part Two here.

As for the rest of you, enjoy the conclusion!

Photo Credit: Giphy.com

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Her response to his email was quick, and it was brutal.