BYOCCC

I bite at making real life decisions. 

I go through all the grief stages over things like job-ing and child bear-ing.  And I'm not even joke-ing here. 

Of late, I've spent a precious many hours on a scouting mission to replace my eyesore of an oven that decided 615F is an admirable temp to bake a pan or two of cookies.  To which I say "Nay, tis not."  So we could go through the laborious process of having a tech come out to diagnose what we already know is the problem, which is likely to involve someone tromping throughout my house while wearing shoes before pulling the guts of the oven out on a price per minute basis.  Or, we could just chuck its 18-year old almond-and-black colored bum self to the curb and start over again, which likewise ends in hours = lotsadollas spent.  So, I've been working in minutes here and there to swing by the few appliance joints that we have around here as well as surf various retail and outlet sites in the hopes of saving $40 somewhere. 

It took a solid seven days for me/us to even figure out what kind of stovetop I/we want.  The answer - neither.  Thanks but not thanks, I'll just take a gas line plumbed to my kitchen for a cringe-worthy amount of cash and we'll go from there.  What...that's not a feasible option?  Fine.  I still want neither. 

And now I'm on the suck-it-up-and-just-pick-something search for an appliance that I'm not at all excited about, which is frustrating given the amount of time I spend dancing with it.  It's like going to the prom because you love dressing up, going out to eat and socializing, but then not really wanting to dance with anyone when you're there.  But you do, 'cause you spent a lot of money on that prom dress, hair do and limo.  Plus, you really like the outcome of it, which is to say glorious pictures of you looking your best. 

So I'm planning on marching into one of those stores, credit card in hand tonight with the intent to sign on the line for a brand new, shiny piece of metal that I'm already feeling anxiety about lest I break its shiny glass top. 

The whole thing came about when I had my absolute favorite chocolate chip cookies in the oven last week after the boy sent me one of those "Sixth period was rough today" messages (rarely happens that he sends me an SOS in the middle of the day).  This, of course, makes me want to sympathy stress eat with him, and if his favorite is chocolate chip cookies, then by all means, let's mix up a batch.  I was 2 pans in before the oven went nutsy on me.  Good news: Some of the cookies were salvaged.  Bad news: It was like the set of a horror movie...chocolate chip briquettes everywhere.  Eight days later, on the day when I'm going to say "Yes, I want that one, and it can't come soon enough," the boy just sent me another message saying "Extra cookies in the break room...bringing some home."

Lesson learned:  When the oven goes down, it's BYOCCC (bring your own chocolate chip cookies) if 6th period has been an arduous adventure in teenage wrangling.  

Hold My Hand (but only in French)

The Elder had a field trip yesterday, and from her perspective, it was a good day.  I had the Younger in tow, so I dropped her off for attendance and herding purposes before driving to the site and meeting up with them for the day.  This turned out GREAT.

1.  The Younger and I got there a solid 30 minutes before the bus, which gave us time to do some fun things on our own.
2.  I got to take both girls back home with me in my car, which saved me frantic pick-up/drop-off moments since I had class last night.
3.  I got all of the benefits of being a chaperone with none of the duties of being a chaperone.  It was like being the cool aunt at Christmas.
4.  I was able to hang back and watch my kid doing her thing when she wasn't even paying attention to me.
5.  The Younger and I left the class a couple of times to explore places exclusively designed for littler hands. 

The trip didn't start GREAT for the Elder, though.  Once I got to the site, I texted another kid's mom so that she would let me know when the bus arrived and I could meet up with them.  Then she wrote back right away with this:

Other mom:  "Does your kid get carsick?  She's up with the teacher at the front of the bus now.  I held a bag for her.  My daughter was sitting with us in the seat, but she bailed."
Me:  "Ha!  Yeah, she does get carsick sometimes." 

I may have just laughed at her.  Right after my kid just puked in a plastic bag that this other mom was holding. 

I definitely read that first text from her wrong.

So I thought that my kid was a bit motion sicknessy but didn't realize she, you know, actually went full throttle on that.

It also turns out that this other mom is fully on the squeemish side herself.  Lesson learned: Read those texts more carefully before laughing at the other person's plight. 

But this whole scenario also served a purpose other than sending me into flashback mode to my 5th grade field trip to Chicago and my first airplane flight AND my second flight.  And then there was that time on the Tilt-o-Whirl...(fortunately, that one ended A-OK).

So basically, my kid comes by her tender tummy honestly. 

But a change of scenery and a fresh perspective does wonders when we're overwhelmed, doesn't it?  Sometimes, we just need to change our seat, fan our face, take a few deep breaths, and let someone give us a hug while they try their best to distract us from the trouble at hand.  People, we are called to nurse and assist in a number of ways.  When you see someone needing some help (even if there's something yucky happening in the moment...just deal with that later), you have to take that person's hand. 

And on a lighter note, I suggested to the Younger that she practice writing her name on a paper that she was coloring.  But she was having none of that, proclaiming "No Mommy, I want to write it in French."  [scribble scribble scribble]

'Cause, you know, those letters are different in French...?!?

Melaton-ahhhh

Hi.  It's been a weird couple of weeks here, which culminated in weepy stress-ville about a job that I don't really even want and a trip to the doctor to help me sleep in my own bed because "bed" is better than "couch." 

And my baseball boys are now a salty 0-fer-the-start-of-the-season, which is basically 10 days of misery right here.  There's already some talk about "growing pains" and "first pick in the draft" and "just trying to keep it fun around here," but we're only 9 games into the season.  And as I'm writing this, I keep thinking about the shiny new bottle of anti-anxiety pills sitting on my counter right now.  FITTING.  And perhaps mildly necessary.

In what was another quasi-bizarre-trip-to-the-doctor (if ever I needed a Prozac, this was it), I was given the 2-minute "Are you really, really sad?" drill a few days ago.  At one point, there was even a clipboard with questions, and anyone who's been through a job interview knows that there is always more than one answer to the question.  So I'm staring at this thing thinking to myself "Do I want her to think that I'm depressed?  Or, do I need to just look stuff up on web.md?"  Because that was about the same thing happening there. 

Let me be clear, I think she was a nice enough doctor, but I wasn't expecting the harsh honesty of the questions, which amounted to the likes of "Are you depressed?" and "Do you want something for anxiety, depression or both?" 

I'm not someone who wants a menu from which to select my drugs when going to a doctor's office.  Someone else just order for me, already.  That's why we're here on this date, isn't it?

But, hoo-ray, the clipboard quiz revealed that I'm not depressed enough to warrant worried looks (and meds).  I did then get tripped up when asked "So what are you anxious about?" and all deer-in-the-headlights, I'm thinking "How much time do you have?" 

I think there's a disconnect between sitting nonchalantly and calmly in the neutral waiting room style chair and replying "Well, what am I not anxious about?  I'm pretty good at it.  Real gold star quality."

-I want someone to make my life decisions for me since they feel suffocatingly overwhelming.
-I can't reason how I'm supposed to take care of my kids but also take care of myself.
-I'm not sure what "taking care of myself" even means.
-I don't know how to plan for the future when it's seemingly impossible to predict.
-And most importantly, I need someone to help me get "Let It Go" out of my head when I'm trying to sleep. 

(Now, I'm a big fan of "Let It Go," and we YouTube it frequently.  But the mind needs a break, friends.  And it seems so ironically cruel when this is my torture-sphere - the witching hour between getting sleepy and getting sleeped.  But that Olaf, he's a riot and so deliciously punny in his little soft-shoe number.)

Perhaps the "How anxious are you?" should have been answered something like this: "Well, I'm pretty sure I've screwed up my whole adulthood, and I don't know how to get out of this mire, which makes me sound and feel pretty ungrateful (am I?), though I try to be patient and put things in perspective (do I?), but it seems like some day I'm going to look back on everything and think about what a bunch of nothing I accomplished (will I?), and I channel my inner-Elsa every night, so please, help me out?" 

I also casually mentioned that I don't really like sleeping in the same area as anyone else and, you know, I'm married, so that's been rough lately.  To which she asked me, "How long have you been married?" and I answered "11 years."  Then she blinked at me.  For seconds on end.  And asked, "This hasn't been a problem before?"

I know.  Anxiety-inducing.  I'm a bucket-full of contradictions.  You can imagine the boy's delight when he tries to talk to me logically.

But all was not lost.  I took the nice lady doctor up on her suggestion to give it the old melatonin try, and I'm not singing from the mountain tops yet, but it's been t-w-o nights of sleepin' without mental anguish.  So there's that.  Plus, I got the sweet, gummy kind of pills.  And that's good, too.

But now, I accidentally happened upon an explanation of melatonin from the take-it-as-you-will Wikipedia, which describes it as "a substance found in animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria."  I guess we all need a little help every now and again.  
   

Time flies when you're home alone

This past week has been Spring Break for 3 of the 4 members of the house.  (One of these things - ME - is not like the others.)  The boy decided late that what with the influx of relatively unscheduled days, he needed to take the girls somewhere.  Two days later, he had a snazzy little hotel booked and plans in place. 

When he gets a bee in his bonnet, he's on top of things.

This is in comparison with me who takes on the challenge of finding the cutest, breakfastiest, comfiest, all-you-can-drink-coffee-and-afternoon-cookies-iest place to stay and all for the affordable-iest price.  I spend a few hours (e.g. d-a-y-s) on this process in part because I like me some virtual window shopping.  The boy is kind of a get-in-and-get-out kind of person.

For about 30 seconds at the beginning of the "I think I want to go somewhere for a couple of nights over Spring Break" discussion, we flirted with the possibility of all 4 of us going somewhere.  You know, like a normal family.

And then we were both all like "diabetic cat," and that kind of quashed all chances of familial bliss in a Days Inn.  Like that was going to happen anyway.  So, like many a decision that has to be made, color me the sacrificing individual who bore the brunt of shooting the insulin twice a day and, you know, doing some amount of teaching, too.  I was committed to being here anyway, but it seems like I could blame our planning on the cat.  (By the way, I've always appreciated how easy cats are to take care of.  No one ever whispered a word of warning in my ear that sometimes, they're a bit of a bother.)  So the boy did what the boy always talks about doing, which is to call up his siblings and find out if either of them feel like being around us.  Turns out, one of them was game, so the boy found the hotel, packed up the kids (by way of me, obviously, because are we to believe that he did the packing of the sundries while I lazed about with a hot cup of tea and a scone?), and stole my car for a couple of days leaving me an empty house, a crumby kitchen floor, a dependent cat, papers to grade, and almost no gas in his car. 

Actually, he up and left, thereby leaving me with this glorious thing called s-p-a-c-e as well as a fair bit of q-u-i-e-t.

The boy is an all-around keeper.  I've no need of roses, just buy me a quiet house any day.

Admittedly, in hushed tones, I asked him "Are you sure you wanna do this?" and he replied "Yeah, I do.  I'm a dad." and far be it from me to question that. 

Not only did he take on the task of being pack mule and referee, but also he found a hotel room (singular, not a suite) with two queen beds.  This means that our children had to fall asleep in the same room.  THE SAME ROOM.  This has never (ever ever ever) gone well, though we have tried.  But he managed fairly well utilizing a 2-part plan of attack: use an extra sheet and some rope as a room divider and wear them out so they have nothing left to fight with.  Basically, it was like he had them under siege in their castles, holding out until all of their energy supplies were depleted.  'Cause that's a parent-of-the-year approach. 

He found a place with both breakfast (various carb options for the win!) and an indoor pool, and oh the glories, oh the blessings!  You know when you call to chat with your children when they're in this manna-from-Heaven situation that you need to be prepared to talk about how "The water was so warm!" and "I had a doughnut!" and even "I had juice and sausage and a waffle and the hot tub had a little shelf, so I put my feet in and then I had eggs and now my tummy hurts just a little but it's OK because Daddy took us into the deep end of the pool!!!"  And then my kid would ask me what I've been doing, and talk about letting the air out of the balloon cause "I graded!" and "I swept the floor!" and "I bought stamps!" just doesn't have the same flavor.  Her stories were like gumballs and unicorns whereas mine were like dried gum on the underside of a desk and the tired looking work horses standing around placidly chewing hay.  But props to her for showing an honest effort at caring about her out of sight, out of mind mother.  I have high hopes for how our phone conversations will go when she's in college.

But the days went by and the nights went by (in a glorious sort of I-have-the-bed-all-to-myself-and-it-is-fabulous kind of way), and my people returned.  They brought some amount of noise back with them (just for me!) and in exchange took away a good amount of the space that I had been hoarding in their absence. 

But everything was checked off of my to-do list by the time they stumbled in the door, which makes one feel both exhilarated (I was so productive; let's count how many things I checked off [smiley face]!) as well as deflated (I was so blasted productive that all I did was work [sad face].)  So I made up for that spurt of activity and read a magazine in the middle of their chaos because if I can't get around to it when they're gone, then why not when they're home?  Mindless activity also helps to ignore the shrieking. 

Couch potato

I have a log that I've been keeping lately on my nightstand, detailing when I actually sleep in my bed versus when I sleep (happily, I might add) on my couch.  And, folks, the couch is the clear winner. 

So, I've been having problems sleeping. 

Correct that, I've been having MEGA SUPER DUPER EXTREMO problems getting to sleep.  For about 6 months.  Or my whole life.

Inevitably, when I put the book down and turn the light off, one of three things happens.

1.  I fall asleep fairly easily.  (That doesn't happen much anymore.)
2.  I drift off and then magically find  myself wide awake 15-30 minutes after trying to go to sleep.  (I love it when this happens.)
3.  My mind performs mental aerobics about e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.  This includes everything from renditions of Let It Go on repeat to ohmygoodnessohmygoodnessohmygoodness to "Hey, I'm really comfortable.  I'm so glad that I'm fully awake to enjoy this feeling of comfort."

But.  My refrigerator hums a merry tune of white noise and my couch is delightfully comfortable.  And that combo puts me to sleep every time.  Not only that, but I sleep well.  So it's really something of a toss-up some nights; I don't even miss my bed when Option B is Option Pretty Wonderful.

I've come across a couple of "Here's How to Sleep Better in 10 Easy Steps!" pieces lately, and yeah..nothing.  And I'm actually sharing this for a particular reason; I'm a pretty firm believer that you don't have to share a bedroom if you're married.  Why?  Instead, sleep when and how you need to sleep.  So, I'll probably just keep on keeping on - throwing down my little couch nest and getting cozy. 

Plus, the kiddos pile on me in the mornings if I'm still there, and that's always a happy time.

ISO: a new friend, needed immediately

MMo2 (married mom of two) in search of: a new friend, needed immediately

(actually, needed quite some time ago, so pretty desperate here)

There are a few requirements and taste preferences, so please read each carefully before applying.

*female or male - not picky
*would be nice if you're also a parent, but not a deal breaker
*can demonstrate a high level of sanity (this is a deal breaker)
*understands when I'll go AWOL for a few days, acts like it never happened, and feels comfortable doing the same
*enjoys eating (sometimes I gotta bake and have no where to store more muffins)
*is always up for keeping me company when I get a pedicure
*calls me when you're stuck at the tire place on a Saturday morning
*understands that my kids don't like other people touching them and being in their space
*respectfully agrees to not destroy my hard fought battle to limit excessive amounts of sugar and food dyes in my kids' food
*political preference - your choice (!) so long as we can agree to disagree without the need to always be right or judgy
*doesn't need me to talk incessantly on the phone but does answer my random texts
*trusts me to watch your kids/pets/husband (as the case may be) and know that he/she/it/they will be alive when you return
*feels comfortable walking in my house without knocking first
*understands that I watch baseball a lot
*understands that I don't clean a lot
*understands that I am a cat person but can still love your dog and thus expect the same in return

CUBS FANS NEED NOT APPLY.  I can neither support nor condone your woeful choices and behavior.

Not much of anything, so a little bit of nothing

***UPDATE***  It's now Tuesday cause the internet went sketchy when I was trying to post this, but whatevs...still not much happening, so here you are.
 
Well, I'm slowly crawling out of the nether regions of grading Purgatory, and it's good see some light.  You know I've been busy when I haven't even been devoting critical brain cell memory chip space to thinking about random and fairly useless bits of anything on here. 

And because of that, I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT.  But it's one of those days when, dadgumit, I'm gonna get my write on because I have about 15 minutes.  I tell ya, I can make 15 minutes count for something.

Like writing about useless bits of nothing?  Hypocrite.

But it's a soul satisfying 15 minutes.

Unless I'm unloading and re-loading the dishwasher for that 15 minutes, which isn't so much "soul satisfying" as "keeping the crazy at bay satisfying."

SO.  What to ramble on about for 15 13 minutes? 

1.  I haven't been back up to visit my parents since Christmas, and they live just a tick under 2 hours away. 
2.  I'm a pantry hoarder.  I find things on clearance and buy out the store: 10 cans of pumpkin, 8 boxes of mac & cheese.  4 honey bears.  It's a good feeling to think "Crud!  I need something to send in the child's lunch tomorrow.  I need to make muffins or something."  And then you scan your pantry and find 10 cans of pumpkin, which equals 20 batches of pumpkin chocolate chip muffins.  Thanks, pantry. 
3.   I broke out 'ye olde bassoon a couple of months ago to play at our church for the first time.  Color me nervous.  Now I have one week to prepare a piece for next week.  But it's purty slow, so there's some hope for it yet. 
4.  Weekends don't really do anything for me.  Have I said that before?  Just slipping this in (again).
5.  Chocolate and bread products do some a great deal of something for me.  I'm nothing if not a stress eater.
6.  My children still sing "Let It Go" on endless repeat.  AND I LOVE IT.  "Funny how some dissidence, makes EVERYTHING seem small..."  Indeed.
7.  I have six minutes left, and it's not because I type slowly.  It's because what else is there to say?
8.  It's going to rain all week.  There's that.
9.  My favorite coffee shop hasn't had my preferred flavors of late.  But they have all figured it out that I bring my own cup sleeve, and that's a sign that you're IN with the baristas. 
10.  Track season is starting, which means the boy is going to be MIA for about the next 3 months.  And I read a memoir by an ultra runner.  One would think that these two items would indicate that I have an interest in running and track-y things.  One would be incorrect.  I just like the boy, and I've discovered that memoirs are my happy place. 

And I will end with this (3 minutes): I'm reading the most recent novel by MY FAVORITE AUTHOR EVER, and sadly, it's mediocre so far.  Mediocre, I say.  It has me weeping salty tears behind my bookish glasses.  But, ah well.  Even a little Allende makes my world go 'round. 

Happy Monday, my friends.