mish-mosh, updates, and a side of ginger snap cookies
so… this morning, after i found myself able to lift my head off the pillow without feeling a strong desire to vomit all over my king sized mattress, i promptly got dressed (no shower FTW!) because who wants to be first-trimester-bloated pregnant and walking around in a t-shirt and underwear when a demolition comes into your apartment?
not me. at least not me today. maybe tomorrow, ya never know.
after inhaling a few ginger snap cookies for breakfast, i wrangled up jackson to head for a quick trip to the grocery store because we’re out of milk and apparently i enjoy milk and all things dairy-like when i’m pregnant. i should just buy a cow for the next 7 months.
the only way i coax jackson into the car and out of the numerous puddles he wanted to jump in was to promise him a donut. a chocolate donut.
parenting at its finest! bribery wins all things.
now that i am back home, the milk is chilling in the fridge, and i took my asshole dog out to have the nervous shits for the umpteenth time this week, my son’s sugar high has kicked in. i should just kick my own ass.
the demolition crew arrived. what? why? demolition crew? they promptly began tearing apart more of our master bedroom due to the hurricane damage. no, the crew is not hot, for those of you wondering. not hot at all.
i started a new gig over at babble.com’s “being pregnant” blog today. totally excited to share my crazy pregnant insight over there, monday thru friday. and the extra income with a little person arriving next spring is nice as well.
my first post was published just this morning, and i burst the bubble of the infamous pregnancy glow that totally does not exist during the first trimester.
you can check it out here.
so with a new writing gig, a torn up apartment, the day-to-day with a 3 year old who still refuses to poop on the potty… oh yeah, AND I’M MOVING NEXT WEEK, things are a wee bit hectic.
life is fun, y’all. fun and fantastic and i’m just rollin’ with it all in the hopes that no one notices my lack of personal hygiene for the next week or so.
also, before i forget, an abundant amount of THANK YOUS to all of you who have commented, tweeted me, emailed, and left me messages on my facebook page with your sweet congrats for our growing family. truly, thank you.
then i sat his damp little ass in a plastic bean bag chair and he got stuck
i heard 4 words uttered from jackson’s mouth last night that i REALLY hoped i wouldn’t hear (though i think subconsciously, i knew i would hear them at some point in time).
“OH NO. I’M PEEING.”
ya see, it’s been a rough week. i’ve been single-parenting it around here this week, and well, i’m basically just trying to keep my head about water.
so when paul told me his flight got in at 9:40 pm, all i could think was “well hell, by the time he gets home, he’ll be hungry.” shit knows, i would be hungry. i eat only 905 times a day.
being the dutiful spouse that i am, i got a large pizza for dinner. not because that’s what i wanted… oh no no… i was thinking only of paul and him arriving home after 10 pm, starving, and THE LOOK upon his face to find A LARGE CHEESE PIZZA waiting for him.
i know. wife of the century. i won it again.
::side eyes::
the sweet local pizza shop owner has come to know and adore jackson. he gave my little dude a free LARGE lemonade tonight when we picked up our goodies. jackson had an entire styrofoam (EGADS STYROFOAM!!!!!) cup full of pink lemonade all to himself.
of course we get home and he eats pizza…
PAUSE: HE ATE PIZZA!!!!! HE ATE!!!!! ZOMG!!!!!
and then downs the entire lemonade. the whole thing. i’m pretty sure he didn’t even pause to breathe. he just drank and drank and drank. much like his father did when we were in our 20′s.
(ok… our teens.)
so i make a mental note of it (sort of) but like i said, i’ve been single-parenting all week long and i’m fuckin tired man and there are dishes to be done and a dog to be taken out and PAUL’S COMING HOME, I NEEDED TO SHAVE MY LEGS!!!
while i’m in the kitchen, tossing crusted dishes into the dishwasher, i hear this “OH NO. I’M PEEING,” come from a small voice in the living room.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” i yelled and then for a minute remembered potty-training our dog.
we were told to “NEVER shame the dog when accidents happen. he’s just as upset as you are about it.”
hmmm… i doubt that.
so, like any good parent, i shamed my son. he looked up at me with those doe eyes, all wide and curious and wondering what he had done that made me respond the way i did. i kept telling him “STOP,” but i’m afraid after all that lemonade, not even jackson was in control of his own body.
seriously, i could never drink lemonade in a cup that big and live to see the bottom of the cup before spilling my urine all over the floor on which i stood. after kids, your bladder is never the same. your EVERYTHING is never the same.
that’s a post for another day.
i picked jackson up from underneath his armpits and carried him to the bathroom. his entire front side was soaked. shorts. underwear. tee-shirt (apparently he aims up). when i put him down in front of the toilet and told him, “ok, you can finish now,” he peed a drip and said, “i’m done mom.”
removing all of his piss clothes, i asked him why he didn’t tell me he had to go.
“because i was peeing.”
“right, i know that. but WHYYYYYYYY were you peeing in your pants?”
“uh. because i had to go.”
“right, everyone has to go, but you need to tell mommy when you have to go so we can get to a potty.”
“ok but i was playing.”
fair nuff. too busy playing to let anyone know that you had to take a leak. happens to the best of us. it’ll happen to you plenty more when you’re in college.
dear absolut vodka, please make a bottle called MADNESS. parents will thank you.
if i were all graphically inclined to do awesome shit with my computer, like most people who have a blog are, this is where i would place an image of a vodka bottle with the label reading ABSOLUT MADNESS and a picture of me crying and pulling my hair out.
perhaps i would add some sort of tornado design circling around me.
and tears. can the vodka be made with tears? human tears. not unicorn.
it’s not that kind of vodka.
i’ll keep my day job. stick to words.
i do hereby vow to rub the feet of all single parents around the world. seriously. i will rub your feet. it may only last for a few seconds, possibly a minute, depending on how quickly my hands cramp up, but i have the best of intentions.
with this being day 2 of single parenting jackson while paul is on the west coast for the week, all i can think about is ZOMG WE’RE MOVING IN 5 WEEKS AND PAUL IS GOING BACK TO A SQUADRON AND HOW THE HELL DO I DO DEPLOYMENTS WITH A KID!?!?!
deployments SUCK.
no, scratch that. any time away from the one you are madly in love with SUCKS. period. the end.
did i mention that after 2 months of being seizure-free, my dog started having cluster seizures yesterday, shortly after paul left for the airport.
THIS IS ME SMILING AND SAYING “I GOT THIS. I’M ALL OVER THIS SHIT.”
yeah, so how do you handle that? please tell me. how do you handle explaining dog seizures to your 3 year old who is asking, “why is red shaking?” or “how do i stop it?” or “do the shakes hurt red?”
thus far, i’ve gone with straight up honesty, but now that i am sleep deprived and questioning every single teeny little decision i make because I AM THE ONLY ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS LITTLE PERSON I HELPED TO CREATE this week, i wonder what the rest of you would do with your kidlets.
baby, red is shaking because he doesn’t feel good.
i want to stop him from shaking, just like you do, but i can’t.
can you help me pet him and say ‘it’s ok, red’?
he’s going to be ok. we’ll get some medicine from the doggy doctor.
yes, it’ll stop some days but today is just a bad day for red.
you know that feeling you get when you’re emotionally spent and THIS CLOSE TO CRYING in an effort to release these emotions of yours but you don’t want to lose your shit in front of your kid so you stifle it and as your eyes water up with tears, you just think to yourself “DON’T YOU FUCKING SPILL OVER, TEARS. DON’T YOU DO IT!”
…and then your 3 year old lays down next to his dog on the floor to comfort him through a seizure.
yeah. THAT.
i know… I KNOW… things could be so much worse. believe me, i know. paul is on the west coast this week for a funeral.
so please put away your pitchforks and just let me cry.
because at this moment, mickey mouse club house is on and all i hear is donald duck’s voice that i could never ever understand, and my kid is spilling trix all over the couch because he’s trying to dance and jump at the same time, and it’s the same trix that he didn’t finish last night for dinner, and we had trix for dinner because we were at the vet with the seizure dog through what is normally our dinner time.
and it’s only 8:25 am.
and i don’t make the coffee as good as my husband does.
google + and the status of social media
(alternately titled: jenny p.)
surely everyone had a jenny p. at some point in their young academic career.
definition of jenny p: male or female, physically attractive to many, is whatever age you wished you could be because then you would be cool, and sets the trend for the entire school throughout the entire school year.
you wanted to be jenny p. (though it pains you to admit that, even years later). in fact, you yearned to be jenny p. everyone wanted her and to some extent you felt like you needed her. if she doesn’t show up at school, people notice. if she fails a test, you offer to tutor her.
because… if you lay down and beg for long enough, you’re bound to get an invitation, SOME RECOGNITION.
doesn’t matter if it’s a pity-invite.
it counts.
and that recognition, that invitation to the party or the seat next to jenny p. in class meant that you may have a shot, at being someone.
other than yourself. better than yourself.
with people. and power.
(if you can’t think of who your jenny p. was, then chances are you were her.)
**********
my jenny p. was incredible. absolutely fucking incredible. she was the helen of troy of 1993.
SHE HAD BOOBS.
the vast majority of middle school girls do one of two things: you either pray to get your period so that you could say you were officially a woman… or, you pray that no one would find out that you started your period when you were 9 years old because if someone found out that you’ve been menstruating for THAT LONG, you were strange.
you NEVER wanted jenny p. to think of you as strange.
you watched her, mesmerized and entranced by her status.
you watched her, not wanting to miss out on anything.
and… you felt yourself start to genuinely care for her.
**********
i wanted to fight the power then.
i want to fight the power now.
and yet, i submit… because i’m human and imperfect.
ya know what? so is jenny p.
**********
i thought i was a late comer to blogging a few years ago. i was one who read blogs for a long time before starting my own. sure, i had a live journal but no one ever knew about it. i had a myspace page only because everyone else did.
even now, after doing this for almost 4 years, i still feel like i’m learning.
i’m noticeably younger than most of those i admire, correspond with, trust.
for a while, i thought there was something that i was missing about blogging. something that other bloggers understood that i didn’t.
TELL ME YOUR SECRET.
it’s not me who doesn’t get it. i get it. i have this space, this twitter account, this about.me page, this facebook account, a pinterest page, and as of last week, i was added to google +.
someone deemed me worth of an invite.
someone placed me in their circle.
ME.
and as much as i would like to say, it doesn’t fucking matter. i’m a creative. i don’t need the NEXT BEST THING. i have my words. i have my quill and my parchment, i can’t say that.
because it does matter. all of it matters.
or so it seems.
**********
when we find ourselves at the place of desiring recognition, power, notoriety, FAME, do we find that we really want to be there? was that our intention? do we then feel heard?
i don’t know…
but that doesn’t mean that my heart didn’t skip a beat when i saw i had been added to jenny p.’s google + circle.
not even age can take away one’s desire to be wanted by others.
clearly i just don’t give a shit anymore
this would typically be a week that would slaughter me. i am single-parenting jackson (starting yesterday) as paul is doing some conference thing with navy people which means early mornings and late nights and too many acronyms.
jackson is trying what eensy teensy bit of patience i have with his “I’M A THREE YEAR OLD AND THAT MEANS LIFE IS WORSE THAN WHEN I WAS TWO” with a side of “HOME ALL SUMMER WITH NO SCHOOL, NO CAMP, NO NOTHING.”
oh, and we’re all road tripping at the end of the week to go house hunting.
::MANIACAL LAUGHTER::
so yeah, i normally freak out a bit when i start to think about all the emails that need to be sent, calendars that need to be coordinated, phone calls that need to be made, researching house info and mortgage info and ZOMG the lease on paul’s car is up.
the house is a wreck simply because it’s not a priority this week.
laundry is a priority. we’re going to be living out of duffel bags and backpacks for 10 days. smelly clothes and shoes in an enclosed space, LIKE A CAR, make me nervous.
cleaning out all of the leftovers from last week that’s still in the fridge because we thought we’d eat it this weekend and didn’t because we’d rather order chinese is a priority.
there’s not much worse than returning home from a trip to a kitchen that smells like rancid death by coleslaw… except maybe a diaper genie that wasn’t emptied before leaving for said trip.
::GAG::
keeping jackson occupied is a priority because if he’s not occupied, i can’t get anything accomplished. like right this moment, he’s not occupied so he is climbing into my lap and asking for a movie while squirting blue gatorade out of his mouth.
and i’ll probably turn it on because i’m that kind of a stellar mother right now. don’t judge me because i let my kid watch what you think is too much tv. judge me because i give my kid sugary, crack-laced, gatorade.
i bow to all of you who are single parents. you’re absolutely incredible.
this week may be kinda kooky. i may forget what day it is a time or two, but let’s be honest, i never really know what day of the week it is anyways. i will most likely not empty the dishwasher and reload it because by the time i put jackson down for bed, i’m going to dive face first into the couch. and i will most definitely leave something crucial in our house and remember it when we are hours into our road trip.
this week will be one of skipping breakfast because we’re not interested but eating two hotdogs and fruit loops for lunch because we’re famished and then reheating macaroni and cheese for dinner.
which reminds me, we’re running low on tater tots.
Have a Sip
