As of tomorrow, I'm be mom to a teenager. Shea turns 13 tomorrow. I dunno where the years went....it seems like just yesterday that I was pacing the floors at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge, waiting for Professor Moriquand to come out of the OR and tell me she made it through the surgery ok (she had a duplicated kidney on the right and it had a different drain rate than her main kidney...meaning that she got infected regularly and spent a lot of her first year in the hospital). ...
'I am human and I need to be loved... ....just like everybody else does'. Everything I do is wrong. From the way I talk to my taste in food, from my actions one day to my inactions the next. Everything. I. Do. Is. Wrong. It's displeasing. It pisses him off. I don't know how much more I can take and still be sane. He's going to end up breaking me.....
My eldest urchin will start Junior high school next week. That makes me feel pretty damn old. I've never really paid much attention to my physical age; it's always been about how old I feel rather than how old I actually am...but having a child in junior HS makes it hard to ignore. It seems like just yesterday I was pregnant with her and was considering calling her Nirvana (yes, I really did toy with the idea for most of my pregnancy). Now here she is wearing a bra and getting ...
He comes tearing down the street on his low-rider, hanging onto the chopped handlebars with they're a couple of vines. His chrome helmet reflects the awakening street lights, shining them back at themselves. The neon skull stem valves blink with each rotation of his wheels, making green loops in the dimming light. He turns into the driveway, back tire locked up and screeching, and dismounts...light saber hanging from the tab of his carpenter jeans. Typical boy equipment, that...
My kid Jake is 9 today. He's pretty stoked about it...he's dying to get into double digits and this year is the last year he'll be in singles... Jake's my youngest, my last child, and my summer solstice baby. Born at a little after 6 in the evening, he took his time coming but when he decided it was time, he came fast. Dave had to stick his head out of my hospital room and yell for a nurse because I was pushing (didn't want to or mean to, but I just couldn't help it)...she c...
I think I must be speaking a different language than my kids, because they don't seem to understand me. Because of my back issues, I have weakness in one leg and foot and I don't have normal sensation in some of my toes. This makes navigating around things left on the floor difficult and sometimes hazardous. I trip over stuff regularly. I don't feel where my foot is, you see, and I think that I'm clearing the object when I'm not. Tripping over things makes my back ...
I had to buy my eldest kid new shoes today. She's been wearing my shoes for about a year now...I've banned her form wearing heels and pointy toes not only because I don't want her to get bunions, but it'll make her taller than me too. I wear a size 7, sometimes a 7 1/2. I had a couple of pairs of size 8's that she's been wearing, so I thought that's what size she'd need when we got her new shoes. Wrong. She's in an 8 1/2, and there were a couple of styles in which she fe...
I have a mole in my yard. He's burrowing all over the place. It seems like there's a new molehill every morning. I don't want to kill him, I just don't want him in my yard. Unfortunately, there aren't many effective deterrents for moles. Castor oil, dried fox pee, cayenne pepper, mothballs...all old wives tales, apparently. So, the base entomologist is coming out today to set a trap for him. I'm asking for a live trap, so they can just re-locate him.....but I th...
I made the second trip to the ER in a week tonight. I had to take my son in because his brother busted his nose in a fist fight. I have one boy with a black eye and bruised ribs, and another with a busted snout and a healing split lip from the last altercation (which was why we were there last week for visit number one). I'm tired of refereeing these fights. I'm tired of wading in and breaking them up. I'm tired of them fighting over every damn thing. I'm tired of litt...
My mum and dad will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary on Saturday. They know I have a blog, so I'm going to dedicate this entry to them and direct my brother over here so they can read it.....if any of you Joe Users has anything to add, please feel free to do so...I think they'd love that! If someone asked me to show them a good example of what married life is supposed to be about, I'd show them my Mum and Dad. To me, they epitomize how to make a mariage work under any ...
"d'you think this is the way our lives are going to be?" D asked me as we were fixing supper this evening. "y'know, me going away all the time". I do think this is the way things are going to be. I think that we're not going to measure things in years anymore, I think it's going to be pre, during and post-deployment. This career field is so overwhelmingly undermanned. We had reservists coming to assist for a while, but they all went home in November. Now we ha...
My big brother came to visit this afternoon. He only stayed for a couple of hours, but it was fan-freakin'tastic to see him again. He bought me loads of English chocolates, played with my kids...it was just wonderful. we both got teary eyed at seeing each other again...stood in the middle of a Metro tram platform in the freezing cold and biting wind, blubbing at seeing each other again. I'm still crying as I write this. I'm promising myself that it won't be another 10 ...
..that show me just how much he loves me. Like this morning, when he came home from PT, all sweaty and breathless, clutching a bunch of flowers he had bought for me. Like this lunchtime, when he came to my office to escort me to lunch instead of having me meet him somewhere. Like over lunch when he took my hand (he was in uniform; Public Displays of Affection are a no-no) in the middle of a crowded eatery and said that although things have changed since we first met and got marri...
...D and I got married. (Jan 21st, 1994) It was a slightly unconventional wedding. I wore green crushed velvet, he wore jeans and cowboy boots. We rejected the idea of a church wedding and chose a simple justice of the peace ceremony instead. Our friends were there, but no family...his couldn't make it, and my father was too ill to travel at the time, so we had two of our friends stand up for us instead. 11 years of marriage....it hasn't been easy. It hasn't ...
...just got his report card back today. The first report card since he got diagnosed with ADD and medicated with Concerta. This boy has bought every single one of his subjects up at least one grade. A couple of subjects he did outstandingly well in and went from a 'C' to an 'A'. This is the boy that I've watched grow and change in the past couple of months. I've watched him blossom and come into his own. He's no longer an angry, frustrated, tightly wound child.......