Twiddling my thumbs

Sometimes I have the sorriest life. I've been bored, waiting for the people who write my favourite blogs to update. In my quest to forget the slowness in my life, I've forgotten that they have a life. I've had a migraine, the little mobile virus infection units they call kids have been running underfoot, and a whole lot of nothing has been getting done. I want to escape, darn it! Is it too much to ask that they call in sick and spend the day writing witty things to entertain me? I know my 3 year old will entertain me all day long (starting with a box of oatmeal poured out on the carpet, followed with a nightcap of a whole bottle of body lotion on another carpet). So maybe it's not excitement I crave, really, just a little vicarious, out-of-the-normal adventure where I'm not responsible for cleaning up.

Products I wouldn't want to live without

Mr. Clean Magic Erasers
The dark day when I realized I had no life came when I made Perry come and see what these little rectangles of goodness did to the refrigerator door. I had actually left a little before and after sample. To this day, these are almost the first things I reach for when cleaning.

Mrs. H.S. Ball's Chutney
There's chutney, then there's Mrs. Ball's. When Perry came back from South Africa raving about the chutney, I went and bought a bottle of Major Grey's to go with some curry I made. He didn't seem all that thrilled with the chutney. I thought maybe it was the variety and bought several different types and brands, all with the same reaction. Yeah, they were good, but they weren't like what he had in South Africa. I gave up looking. Then, one day, he sends me a link to a website telling me he's found it. Mrs. Ball's. Never heard of it before. Christmas shopping for some German mustard in our Harry's Market, I find it has an international section (with lots of varieties of German mustard) and to my delight it has a South African section. Filled with 3 varieties of Mrs. Ball's chutney. Skeptically, I tried some on a cracker. HOLY COW! Now I can see what he was raving about. To this day, I've probably eaten more of the chutney than he has.

The Blue Bulb Nose Syringe
You know, the ones they give you at the hospital when you've had a baby. Nothing cleans out a baby's nose like those. Ours broke on our second baby and we bought the one that has the wide tip. Totally sucked (or rather, didn't). I found one at Babies R Us and grabbed it.

The Hello Kitty Monster

"Mom, I a monster!". After the ketchup styling he gave himself, do I even dare to look and see the latest Joshua monster. I look. I shouldn't have. His legs are striped with 5 or 6 different colours. Some of the stripes are on his khaki church pants. His palms are a dark purplish magenta. But what really takes the cake is his face. Almost his entire face is either purple or bright pink. Oh. My. Gosh. What has this child done? I grab a wipe and start scrubbing. Not much is coming off. Perry tells me to imagine it's model paint and you're really sick with the flu (he's going to have to start a blog about all of the crazy things he's done in his youth). I go upstairs to clean up the markers and see they're from Michaela's Hello Kitty art set. Clean up the markers and I can only find the top to the stamp pad. I call Joshua upstairs to show me where the stamp pad is. Another thing I shouldn't have done. He goes into Michaela's room, where I'm busy stenciling a garden all over her room. There, on the white picket fence that I had just finished shadowing the night before, are pink and purple rectangles. That won't come off. With anything I try. The good news is that Joshua finally came clean after Perry threw him in the tub and that the stamped portion of the wall was pretty small and easy to paint over. From now on, though, I think I'd better be a little more curious when there's silence coming from a room my children are in. I wouldn't want another monster visit.

One of those days

You know you've stayed up too late and shouldn't have when you wake up to the news radio guy telling you that it is 6:11 and you've set the alarm for 6:00. How I missed all of that talking right next to my ear, I don't know. I'm even single-momming it for the week, so my ears should be alert for anything. The kids decided that they weren't going to understand English for the first part of the morning (as far as I can tell because the first 3 times I told them to be getting dressed it went right over their heads and the 4th time a look of understanding lit upon their faces as I threatened to send them to school in their pajamas). I was brushing my oldest daughter's hair on the way to the bus stop (luckily it's at the end of our driveway). Sent them off to school and sat in the quiet deciding if I wanted to take a shower when the baby woke up. She finally woke up and I had just finished feeding her when the phone rang. Michaela is itching really bad and can I come pick her up from the clinic. There goes the shower. Dress the two youngest and out we go. Pick her up and head over to Kroger to pick up some candy for my oldest to give a friend whose candy he stole (a whole other entry in and of itself), grab lunch, and head home to prepare for Daisy Girl Scouts. I'm co-leader for Michaela's troop. It's a really fun thing, but you throw in our 10 Daisies, 2 Brownie helpers, the sister of one of the Daisies that stays most of the time, my 3 kids, plus the girl next door that I watch after school, and 3 or 4 toddlers from my co-leader's daycare, and it's really easy to go crazy. I felt like I was thrown into The Grinch that Stole Christmas- all the noise, noise, noise. It didn't help that we were doing recycling crafts and some of the girls decided to create maracas out of the stuff that we brought. Home brought a clingy baby who was angry when I put her down to throw some dinner together. For such a little angel baby, she sure can scream. As the night went on, it became clearer and clearer that she was getting sick. I hate those nights. I hate it even more when you're alone to handle those nights of endless crying, where nothing is soothing. Makes for very long and cranky days for me the next day. I will have to say, that before we tried to go to sleep, she was the most talkative baby she's ever been, probably about an hour of nonstop babbling. It was really cute when she was lying beside me on the bed and we were both looking up at the ceiling, to just listen to her talking to me. I would look over at her and she'd look at me and smile. I'm convinced cute is a defense mechanism to make tired moms forget that it's the 10th dirty diaper of the day or to ignore the slobber when their little ones try to give them a kiss.

Russian Roulette

I've really debated this post. I have a real hard time showing the bad in my life. I'm usually a very optimistic person. I find joy in all that I do. In the end, I decided that since this is my journal of sorts, I would be doing a real disservice to my kids and future generations if I didn't share my struggles. Maybe in a year or so I can look back at this time and decide that I can survive whatever crisis du jour I have then because I survived this. Who knows. I will preface this by saying I have no real desire to end my life. I had a friend in 6th grade whose father committed suicide. I couldn't wrap my mind around it then, and even though I can understand more of his state of mind, I couldn't do that to my babies. Not that I could do it to my husband, either, but seeing how it affected a kid is my perspective on that.
This is my second bout with post-partum depression. Of my four kids, I've only gotten it with the girls. I've never had the baby blues or any indication that this is coming. It just hits out of the blue. Because I've been through this before, I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel (on some days though, it seems like that light is from a train). I've been suffering this time for about 8 months. My last bout lasted about 1 1/2 years. Knowing that I might only be halfway through this is enough to make me depressed if I wasn't already, lol.
When I'm depressed, things are blown up in severity. No, we're not in the best financial situation, but we're not as bad as I see us as. Yes, I'm bummed I can't give my daughter gymnastics lessons and my kids piano lessons. Did I survive without years and years of gymnastics? Yes. Is ist so important that my kids don't get started on the piano before age 8? Not really. I felt bad throwing away a fundraiser from the school the other day. For $20 I could have both of my kids' self-portraits made into a tile that would be placed on a wall celebrating the 10th anniversary of the school. Then I realized that in 10 years we would be done with the school forever (if we hadn't moved before then). I've never gone to check out my old elementary schools (even online). Why spend that money? Heck, for that money I could take them to some indoor inflatable center and have them jump themselves unconscious for a few hours. The peace and quiet I got after that would be worth it to me!
Anyway, to try to get this rambling post back on track (I think subconsciously I'm still avoiding it). I've been in dark places before. I've been in a pit of nothingness, all of the joy completely sucked out of my life. I've lived in a state of constant anxiety that made me more anxious because I felt like I was going to throw up without a second's notice (luckily this was short-lived and never happened). I've had thoughts of shooting myself (although I think my brain has picked this way to die because 1. I'm deathly afraid of guns, and 2. getting a hand gun is too much of a hassle). Lately though, these thoughts are coming more and more frequently. They aren't as abstract as they once were, either. It used to be more of seeing a glimpse of a gun in a hand, but now I can almost feel the weight of it. I can hear the click as I pull the trigger on an empty chamber. I'm confused because these thoughts come out of nowhere, sometimes on the heels of happy moments. These moments aside, I would classify myself as having mild depression, the kind that's normal during these winter months. I don't know what's going on, if maybe my medication can't handle this little bit of extra depression, or what. Hopefully that's the reason and the close arrival of spring will get me back to "normal". I guess for now my optimistic thought will have to be that I haven't put any bullets in the chamber.

Sometimes you can only laugh

"Mommy, I so hansome."
"Uh huh" I say, absent-mindedly, eyes never leaving the computer screen.
"Mommy, I so hansome."
"Yes, you are, dear."
"Mommy, mommy, I so hansome!" Sighing, I resign myself to the fact that I'm not about to be left alone anytime soon unless I give my son some attention.
I look over at my 3 year-old son, the spitting image of his daddy at that age. His warm brown eyes sparkle, his grin as about as infectious as it gets. Dark blond hair all spiked up. "Yes, Sweetie," I coo, "you are very handsome."
I turn back to the computer screen and am reaching for the mouse when it hits me--I didn't spike his hair this morning.
Calling him back over, I look at him more closely. His normally blond hair has a slight reddish tint to it. My mind races to figure out what type of styling products I might have that are red. Looking closer, the smell gives it away--ketchup. He had taken the ketchup I gave him to eat with his corndog to fix his hair.
"Mommy, I so hansome!"
Yes, you are, Joshua. Yes, you are.

Biting the bullet

Well, I've done it. Decided to put my thoughts down in black and white. It only took a few months for my little perfectionist mind to do it. I'm the type that writes in my journal in pencil so I can go back and change things I don't want down. We'll see how long this lasts before I edit it, lol.