Fractal Custodial Grandparenting

Note to those addicted to Starbucks but who don’t like the prices.

Folgers makes a new coffee called Black Silk. It is passably good.  On sale, it is also about $4.99 for a 32oz plastic well rounded, molded handled, pop top, easy open container.  It is not whole bean, but you can’t have everything.

I learned more about Fashion For Five year olds today.  You cannot wear jeans that have lace on the bottom of the leg hem.  Even if the lace is turquoise.  Even if the lace matches the trim on the pocket, and the embroidery on the legs.  Even if your Meemaw paid $15.99 for them.

I already knew that you don’t argue with a 5 year old when the bus is only 10 minutes away and the child isn’t dressed yet, because YOU overslept by 15 minutes and everything is going not exactly badly, but certainly not swimmingly.

No, you just sigh and trek on back to the closet to find an acceptable outfit.  This time you grab four hangers, two outfits and let her choose.  It’s just better this way.

She can be rather testy.  But totally hilarious as well.  She likes to hide in the morning.  My 52 year old heart should not be put through this.

Imagine if you will….

Alarm. Dawn gets out of bed, does the usual moving around Monster, etc.  Finally gets to the hallway to wake up the kids. Goes into Pint’s room, tickles her belly, tells her it’s time to get up. She ignores me and pretends to not hear, which means I have to tickle harder. Finally I get a giggle which means I can safely leave her room to continue on my preprogrammed path to ½ Pint’s room to get her out of her little Dora Toddler Bed.

I get into ½ Pint’s room, and go over to the bed.  ½ Pint sleeps with a huge amount of ‘stuff’.  There is her Wiggles Pillow.  Her Hello Kitty Pillow.  Her Dora Pillow.  Her Squishy bead pillow.  There are FIVE wubby’s that are all stages of blue, all the same.  She is very attached to them and Meemaw has spent mega dollars on ebay finding new ones when the old ones wear out.  There is ONE pink wubby that Aunt Nursey got her.  Then, there are the covers. The Barbie princess sheets and the matching Barbie princess comforter AND the My Little Pony comforter as well.

Digging through all of this I finally realize that among all the ‘stuff’, there IS NO FIVE YEAR OLD IN THERE!

Madly panicking now, I run and look in my bedroom to see if perhaps there was a child in my bed of whom I was totally unaware.  Nope.  Back to ½ Pint’s bedroom I go to see if perhaps I missed her the first time.  Nope.  Into Pint’s room to see if perhaps she got into the bottom bunk (3/4 Pint’s weekend residence) for various and sundry reasons.  Nope.

Now I am truly and totally frantic.

I am also in my usual state of no coffee yet, and not sure how to walk, talk or function.   Blindly running now (and no, it has NOT occurred to me to simply open my mouth and yell for her) I run past the loveseat (for perhaps the fifth time) and hear a little giggle.

Whipping around I see a little 5 year old face peeking around the loveseat throw at me.

“I tricked you Meemaw!”  Grabbing her and hugging her close, I reply, “you sure did honey. Meemaw was worried when I couldn’t find you!”  Then of course, I ask her to NOT do that again.  She promises faithfully to not do it anymore, and it will be repeated at least three times a week.

It’s funny to her to watch me run back and forth and never look at the couch.  It’s NOT funny to me and the worst part is that I am not awake enough to realize it is happening over and over.  You’d think, but you’d be wrong, that coming out of my bedroom, I would look down on the loveseat which is a mere 6 feet away, and quite directly in my path, on the way to her bedroom.  Nope. Brain doesn’t function well that early.  Sorry.

Tonight is …….bill night.  ARRRGGGH

Tonight is the night I sit down at the old laptop and pay all the bills.  I don’t write out checks anymore.  If a bill cannot be paid online, it will remain unpaid.  I simply do not incur anything which cannot be paid online.

But, even still, I hate bill night.  Tomorrow is VA Pension day.  For one day we will have a fair amount of money.  Then it will dwindle down each day with each ACH transaction that hits my bank.   Sigh.

I have to figure out which bills can be put off until January so that we can figure out Christmas.  I told the girls the other day that it would be a much smaller Christmas this year. Get over it.

I have decided to raise these two differently than the other four.  It used to be nothing to spend 3 or 4 thousand dollars at Christmas.  When you have four kids, plus several extra kids, inlaws, best friends, etc, it can add up enormously.

No. For Christmas and birthdays, we are going low key this time around.

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Silence is golden.  The kids just got on the bus.  The loooonnnngggg vacation is over!

½  Pint no longer likes her coats.  She has three of them.  One brown, which her teacher allegedly and inexplicably told her not to wear anymore….(I am seriously questioning this statement), a black one with nice fur trim, and a blue puffy one.

The brown one is out due to the previously alleged comment by said teacher.  The blue one is out because  “meemaw!  It is PUFFY !  I can’t wear a PUFFY coat!!  All the kids will say YOU HAVE A PUFFY COAT!!”

The black one was acceptable except…  the arms are way too long.  ½  Pint, has my short arms.  (well, all the Pint’s except for ¾ Pint have inherited my short arms).  She was actually crying over the fact that the arms were too long.

Those kids at school must be really picky.  She told me that they would make fun of her because her coat arms were too long.  She wanted me to cut them to fit.

Okay.   I did.  Problem solved.  They look a bit funny to me, but I am not five years old and I don’t go to school.  What do I know?  We turned up the sleeves one turn and exposed the fur on the underside so it still looks like the coat has fur trim.  I know that most people’s coats do not fit their arms right.  I am an adult. I can live with this fact.

She is five and cannot.  Her coat must fit exactly right.  Scissors are a gift from God at 8 am when a kid won’t wear a coat and it is cold outside. Take your blessings when and where they occur is my thought.

My back hurts today.  Pint ended up in our bed again last night.  I told her this morning when we all three awoke with sore backs and stiff muscles….”honey, you cannot sleep with meemaw and pappy anymore.”

A King sized bed won’t fit my furniture, nor my room.  And anything less than king size won’t fit three people in a bed which contains DH.

I get my unemployment check today.  Have to go into town. Good on though, we actually got down to counting pennies, something we haven’t had to do for about 10 years.  Quarters, occasionally, once in a great while, dimes.  Nope. This time we went clear down to nickels and then passed nickels and went to pennies.

I am not supposed to be this broke at age 52.  Something is so not right with this picture.

Baby’s boyfriends birthday is tomorrow.  His present is fortunately on the truck for delivery TODAY.  Good thing too, she would NOT understand why, if she ordered it last week, it didn’t show up before his birthday.  She doesn’t understand things like holidays, ISO 9000 or whatever it is called and shipping times.  I have tried to explain these little things to her, but no.  In her world, if she needs/wants something, it should be automatically and magically produced immediately.  It’s nice to be the baby ***grinning***

There really isn’t much else good about being the youngest, lets face it.  My attitude is that she has put up with Sh** from every other child, blended families, divorces, deaths, arrests of inlaw siblings, births, etc.  She deserves whatever she can get in my book.  

She started out the second child of a couple, one of which included my DH.  They divorced.  We got married when she was not quite 2.  So her family then consisted of One older brother at her Mom’s and the addition of two older sisters at our house.

Then her mom had another baby and got married.  So she then had a younger sister.  Then Mom had another baby.  So she had a total of two older sisters, one older brother and two younger sisters.  Then mom got divorced.  Then mom got remarried and that man had four children.   Then somewhere in there, two of her sisters got married and brought in laws, then one of her brothers got married to my niece and there was another inlaw.

So then, she had  a cumulative total of …..four older sisters and two brother in laws, one in prison, two of the sisters have the same name, three older brothers, one cousin/sister in law,  her, and two younger sisters.  Even I can’t keep up with it. LOL.

And then there are the nieces and nephews.  No. Wait. Only nieces.  No nephews at all.

Anyway, this child has grown up in the midst of every single thing that could happen in a child’s life which wasn’t abuse, but definitely impacted her. So, she is a little spoiled. Not rotten, just spoiled. And I could care less. She doesn’t do much, but the one thing you can say, is if I ask her to do something, she does it for me without complaining and with a smile and does it every single time I ask. She is the Baby. The other kids aren’t jealous.   At least not the ones on our side of the mixed up mess we call family.  She is the baby to them as well.

And surprisingly (NOT), she doesn’t want children for a very long (if ever) time.  Pint is only 10 years younger than her, so Baby grew up watching me raise babies.  She has plenty of babies around her.  She figures if she needs a baby, she will just borrow one.  It’s not like we don’t have any. Then, she can give it back when she is done.

There is a method of birth control I have always used.  Not birth control.  More like sex education.  It seems to have worked.

When they are between the ages of 5 and 10, let them watch a birth of a puppy or kitten.  When the mother goes and eats the afterbirth, casually remark that “yeah, that part is pretty gross isn’t it.  I about puked my guts out when I had to do that after YOU were born…” and then leave the room.

Then, when they are over 14 years old, let them witness a live birth, in person, preferably a totally natural birth.  Let them be there the entire time.

They won’t want kids for a long long time.  When she witnessed ¾ Pint’s birth, which was totally natural, and ¾ pint was over 9 pounds at birth, she got on the elevator with my best friend who has five children, four of whom are adopted.

She said.  “baba?  Is it hard to adopt?”

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It is 9:30 a.m.   I have already taken my first Xanax of the day.  Happy Birthday Mother.   Wherever you are.

The other night, we watched a movie on the laptop. What a weird experience.  Sitting in bed, balancing the laptop on my knees, which went dead almost immediately.  Receiving the broadcast through the miracle of satellite internet, which is almost entirely not quite like dialup…

The movie was called the Man from Earth.  It was an interesting movie.  About a cro-magnon man who managed to survive for 5,000 or more years.  He is a professor at a college who is leaving after 10 years.  Some of his professorial friends show up to help him move, unannounced, so to speak.  He is less than thrilled with their appearance.  After a bit, he decides to tell them that he is over 5,000 years old. The professorial visitors are conveniently and anthropologist, an archeologist, a biologist, a professor of religion, an ingénue student who accompanies the anthropologist  and is some 30 years younger, a professor of English who is in love with the cro-magnon man but doesn’t realize it yet, and the requisite psychiatrist.

They all get very intrigued by cro’s story as it unfolds.  Turns out he was every single person in history just about.  Painted with van Gogh and has an original, studied with Buddha, and was Jesus. Surrogate, you will like this part.  Tells them all that the Bible is mostly made up mystery to satisfy man’s need for mystery.  Tells them that in fact, there was no miracles involved anywhere.  That he had trained himself to go into a trance whilst studying with Buddha, and was in fact, only in the trance when he was crucified.  That once cut down, he came out of the trance and moved on.  That he doesn’t scar because his body regenerates itself, which the biologist confirms as theoretically possible although unknown in current times.

I hated the movie and went right off to sleep.  Anyone who wants to see it can go to watch-movies .com and see it there.  Good on you, but I will pass.

Anyway.  Awoke this morning to coffee.  The little light stayed on all night. The coffee was both ready, and very good.

It is raining. Dreary. Grey.   Matches my mood almost perfectly.  School starts back up tomorrow.  Thank you.  Whoever.

The kidlets got up this morning whining.  Doesn’t take much when you are bored on the sixth day of a six day vacation.  Someone should change the way school is in session to make it year round (thousands of mother’s would vote for that person, trust me) and so that vacations come regularly, and are limited to one week at a time.  One week is the maximum vacation a child can have without driving their parenttype person nuts.  Completely and totally NUTS!

Especially in the winter, or in the summer, or for that fact, in any weather.  Winter is too dreary and they cannot go outside and play unless there is snow on the ground.  We have no snow yet, although it did snow on Thanksgiving Day for a bit.  Summer is too hot and there are ….bugs….out there.

ARRRGGGHHH

½ Pint needed a shower as soon as she got up cause she went potty and her privates burned.  (She is on antibiotics.)  Pop into the shower.  Pint has to go potty and I am on the potty. So she has to go potty in their bathroom, and ½ pint is in the shower.  No biggie there.  Except she is playing a game on her cell phone while she goes potty.  ½ Pint gets out of the shower and Pint drops her cell phone.  Asks ½ Pint to pick it up for her.  ½ Pint does, but her hands are still wet (of course, she just stepped out of the shower) and drops it.  Reaches down to pick it up and drops it again, and again, and again.

Now Pint is yelling from THEIR bathroom that ½ Pint broke her phone.  ½ Pint is trying to turn the water off and turns the hot the wrong way.  Now hot water is issuing from the spout and making ….steam…..

½ Pint is yelling that the bathroom is on fire.  Pint is yelling that ½ Pint broke her phone. Dh is in the bed, ignoring it all.

And I?  I am on the throne, laughing.  Cause what else can I do?  This is so ridiculous that it defies reality.

I ask DH if he could POSSIBLY get out of bed and stumble down the hallway to see if there is anything he can do to alleviate the situation.  He does.

I just had to tell Monster to get the cat’s head out of his mouth…again.  ***Sigh***  It doesn’t seem to bother the cats too much though.  He does it all the time.   All three of our cats have permanently wet heads from Monster.  He just walks along and see’s a cat, reaches down and puts his mouth over their heads.  He is so weird.

He has lips like a horse.  Well, dogs don’t actually have lips do they?  Jowls then.  I don’t know what they call them on horses.  I should, I used to own a horse, years ago, in a galaxy far, far away.  You really have to watch Monster around food.  He is tall enough now to reach the table, counters, garbage and any close by hand holding a sandwich. Those lippy jowls can reach out like they are opposable thumbs and snatch the food right before your eyes, if you were looking, which you are not, because he is smart enough to only do it when you aren’t looking.   His life is totally devoted to irritating me, stealing food, putting cat’s heads in his mouth and sleeping wherever I will most likely trip over him.

I got all the laundry caught up.  I got the dishes done finally.  Today I finish cleaning the house.  So tomorrow it can get dirty again.

Tomorrow I have to go to storage and see if the Christmas tree is there.  I know that the decorations are.  But we will need a tree to put them on.  And then, assuming I find the tree, I have to find a place to put it.  There is literally no where.

Then, all I have to do is figure out where to get the $ to buy the girls Christmas presents.

Every ten minutes from the bedroom, ½ Pint yells, “meemaw….buy me this for Christmas, come look!”  And I have to get up from whatever I am doing and walk down to her room and look at the latest commercial.  Then I say, okay, we’ll put it on your list honey.

ARRRGGHHH again.

Have  a nice rainy Tuesday everyone!!

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There are just some things you hope do not happen of a Sunday morning.

I awoke at approximately 8:30 a.m.  Got up, stumbled out of bed, found my Birkenstocks which I had thoughtfully placed right next to the bed the night before.  Good then.  Grabbed my last pack of cigs which only has five left in it, grabbed and put on my glasses in the absolute hope that I would then be able to see, grabbed the celly, stuck it in the pocket of my sweats, stumbled around the bed, turned sideways to get between DH’s dresser, which is horribly too large for our bedroom, made the turn at the end of the bed, managed to avoid the Cardioglide which holds the dirty laundry of the last three days draped not so invitingly over it, looked down briefly to see if Monster left me any rather large presents on the floor (he didn’t), continued my journey around the bed, made the corner again, did not knock off the DVD’s stored on the shelf of the overstuffed DVD cabinets on that wall, stopped to try and step over Monster who sleeps in one of two places….either right next to my side, or right next to DH’s side, either of which is perfectly placed to trip over by a slightly not awake person, stepped over Monster who realized that I was awake and tried to get up just as my foot reached the other side of him which meant that I was now straddling a 180 pound dog, managed to not fall, (surprising both I and the dog), continued again  into the bathroom to let out the nights fluids so to speak.  Told Monster who had followed me into the bathroom to just hang in there.  He sits exactly 3 inches away from my face watching me urinate with a slightly desperate look on his face as if to say “Mom, I have to GO”….got up, navigated the next five feet to the back door, struggled with the chain lock, struggled with the regular lock, opened the door which sticks at the bottom corner, kicked at the bottom corner, took my foot backwards to stop the cat and the Chihuahua from getting out, and let Monster out.  If they all three get out together then the cat runs, Monster chases the cat and the Chihuahua just runs in circles and barks.  None of them get their business done. They have to go in turns and they don’t like it very much.

Turn just so, step over the cat and the Chihuahua, continue on the journey down the hall to the coffee pot which is set to go off at exactly 7:30 a.m.

My coffee is not done.  My coffee is not ever started.  My coffee, has let me down.

My coffee pot is a Melitta Mill and Brew.  You pour whole beans in the top of the little brown thingy that has blades in it.  Then you put the lid on the little brown thingy. Then you place the little brown thingy in the big white thingy called the coffee pot. Then you close the lid which snaps into place. The snapper has been broken for about 2 months.  If you push the white lid down, then the electronics can sometimes be fooled into thinking that the latch is engaged.  The lights will not come on unless you fool the electronics.  Usually, this is not a problem.

Last night, when I set up the coffee pot, I fooled the electronics. This morning, the electronics have apparently figured out that I fooled them, and were not happy about it.  Hence, no coffee.

I punched the top of the pot.  No light.  I lightly tapped it.  No light.  I stuck my hand down and held it.  No light.

Now, I am desperate.  I lift the white lid, push down the brown thingy, and replaced the white lid. No light.  I grab the heaviest coffee mug I can find and put it on the top of the white thingy. 

And, there was light!

The coffee starts brewing.  I wait, standing in front of the pot, watching it.

I need to clean the coffee pot out. DH hates the smell of vinegar.  The pot is very slow.  Brand new, it took approximately 4 minutes to brew a complete pot of coffee.  Now its more like, um, 20 minutes.

I jiggle the machine, hoping that it will sort of speed things up.

The heavy cup falls off the top of the pot, the light goes out, the heavy cup falls onto the spice rack sitting so nicely next to the coffee pot and hits the salt & pepper shakers which are resident on top of the spice rack.  They fall onto the counter, striking a shot glass (we use them for water to take the meds for the kids –sick people we are), the shot glass then shoots across the counter and into space, like, well, a SHOT!

Across the intervening space between the two sides of the kitchen, hits the opposite counter and rebounds back across the vast expanse to hit the originating counter and then smash spectacularly all over the kitchen floor.

Thousands and thousands of shards of glass all over the kitchen floor, dogs, cats, kids and a disaster waiting to happen and I haven’t even had one of my five cigarettes yet, nor even one small sip of coffee.

I need a new coffee pot, cigarettes, and a more relaxing schedule.  My gas tank is on fumes, I am out of money until Tuesday. God, I hate days like this.  I can’t even roll pennies, we already did that.

Last night, ¾ Pint and her Dad Cop were Christmas shopping, (Nursey and Cop actually plan for things like Christmas shopping and have the money to do so, unlike us) and they hit a deer.  Both are okay, but it was a long night waiting to find out if everything was okay.  They were afraid that ¾ Pint had ruptured her spleen, apparently that is a common injury when a child is in a booster seat, which she was.  Better than the alternatives.

We are grateful that no one was hurt. Well, it was a decidedly bad night for the deer.

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The Holiday starts.

Woke up this morning and both girls are sicky.  Pint has a sinus infection, and ½ pint has a rash. And so it begins.

Someone is always sick at Thanksgiving.  In our family, it’s a tradition.  ¾ Pint is also sick today.  At her school, they are having the Thanksgiving feast.  As of last night, her mother, Nursey, had made a pumpkin pie that ¾ Pint could eat, and several other food items.

There are only 10 children in ¾ Pint’s class. She still attends the local Catholic school that my girls attended until we moved too far away. Actuallly, it wasn’t any farther away, but the gas to get them there and then come back home, then go back and pick them up and then go back home would have been a whopping $20 a day!  And, that made it MORE than the tuition. Just didn’t make sense!!

Anyway, I don’t know if ¾ Pint got to go to school for the Feast that she was so looking forward to.

I kept both girls home this morning.  This afternoon starts their vacation anyway.  They both have a Dr appt at 11 am this morning, so I will go into town with them, to the Dr’s, then to the bank, then to the grocery store (I hate shopping with kidlets present in the store…I HATE IT) then home to start the baking for Thursday.

This year, it won’t be too bad.  Every ten years, Thanksgiving is on the day of my mother’s birthday.  She was a Thanksgiving baby.  I always miss her, she has been dead now for 21 years, but I miss her more for some reason when Thanksgiving is on her birthday.

When she was born in 1933, the doctor didn’t believe my grandmother was pregnant again.  It was the fifth pregnancy, and gram was close to menopause.  The doctor told her she had a uterine tumor.  Of course, back then, they didn’t have diagnostic equipment like they do now.

Anyway, when she went into labor, they headed down to the local hospital, which was the upstairs of the doctors home.  The doctor wouldn’t let her in.  He told her she was constipated and had a tumor and he wasn’t going to admit her for that.

Knowing she was in labor, my grandmother told my grandfather to get her to the nearest hospital.

They lived in Chico, California.  Not knowing what else to do, he headed to the railway station.  There was a turkey freight train headed for San Francisco.  Driving time from Chico to SF is about 4 ½ hours.

They hopped the freight train.  It was about midnight on the day before Thanksgiving.

She was born about 3 hours later, on the freight train, surrounded by turkeys on their way to  certain death and nice crisp brown skin…..

Not a dignified way to enter the world, but a nice story !!  True also.

My grandmother brought the baby back home, and showed her to the doctor, who didn’t even apologize for missing the pregnancy. How rude!!

I miss her.

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Things I both did, and didn’t over the past two weeks.

I did not super clean my house.  I am in process of supercleaning my house, because, well, that HOLIDAY is this week.

As long term readers know, Thanksgiving USED to be my favorite holiday.  No longer.  My family has gotten just a tad bit too dysfunctional to make it a glorious day.  I wonder if my Grandmother felt the same way, and if she did, will I be able to hide it as well as she did?

The turkey THIS year, is safely, and according to FDA instructions, thawing slowly in the refrigerator.  I thought it might be fun to thaw it in the tub again, but you all remember last year’s little debacle???  Of course, THIS bathroom has linoleum in it, so maybe the flood wouldn’t be QUITE as bad….

I did get ½ Pint’s room cleaned. Supercleaned.  And, all the toys matched, binned and put safely somewhere where allegedly, they will be easy to put back once played with.  Sounds really good, in principal.

Pint’s room is today’s project.

It will take all day. Perhaps all week.  Pint has lots and lots of ‘stuff’.

If the person who invented bunk beds was so freakin smart, why didn’t he/she invent an easy way of putting on clean sheets?  My answer?  When I finally move the bed and do the sheet change, I put like SEVEN bottom sheets on. Then I just remove them one at a time.  When I am down to the last one, it’s time to deep clean the room anyway, so the bed gets moved, the side rail detached, and the seven sheets get put back on the bed.

I put all of the newest CD’s on all three players for all three girls this weekend. This entailed two computers and three different programs.  Itunes for Pint who has an iPod.  Pint’s computer for her music.  Then burn discs off the iTunes because ½ Pint’s FP3 player from Fisher Price will not recognize the Hannah Montana CD’s as CD’s because they also have a PC component.  And, when you load the disc in, the computer part of it pops up and the FP3 program thinks it is a DVD, and doesn’t read it. Stupid Fisher Price.

Then, after all that, import the disc’s to Window’s Media Player for ¾ Pint’s Disney Ariel MP3 player.

Now, to start the holidays, they all three have the latest Naked Brothers Band tunes, Hannah Montana’s latest disc along with the Miley Cyrus CD that came with it, (I know, they are the same person, but apparently they sing different types of music???), and of course, they also have the latest Cheetah Girls tunes.  I won’t allow Fergie. They don’t like that. Get over it.

I unpacked the last two boxes from our bathroom and bedroom.

I did not put the canopy on the bed.  It won’t fit in our new bedroom cause the ceiling is too low.  My bed is MASSIVE and stands over 7 feet tall.  I miss my canopy.

I did not get the bookshelves made. The books are still resident in my closet, in the many, many, many boxes.

Pint scored the second highest in her school on her achievement test. Her school is very glad to have her. She is raising their scores LOL.

The girls had a friend sleepover on Friday night.  It was crazy having a 5, 6, 7, and 8 year old in the same room.  Noisy. Busy. Chaotic.

And, the reason I needed to clean the rooms.

They put NOTHING away. Nothing. Nada.

Met with the girl’s mom yesterday, and told her that the counselor is recommending supervised visits only. She is less than thrilled.  I explained WHY, but she didn’t like it one bit.  I told her to call and make an appointment with the counselor to find out why.  I am tired of being the ‘bad guy’.

Got to play with ¼ Pint whilst the girls mom was here yesterday. She is cute as heck and tiny. Very tiny. She is 10 months old and still wearing 3-6 month size.  But ½ Pint was tiny as well. Still is.  Baby is healthy though and developmentally on track, maybe a little advanced.

All three girls wanted Paul McCartney’s new CD on their music players.  Made me feel good.  I’ve now corrupted yet another generation LOL.

My new Celly should come today.

Spent all last week going nuts.  We are switching BACK to ATT from Sprint. We tried Sprint out after 7 years of ATT/Cingular.

We really like the Palm Treo 750’s that we had from sprint.  And, ATT had them as well. So we ordered the same phones with the thought that the information would easily transfer right over.

Yeah.

Well, after three days of finding all the right programs and installing Outlook, which I absolutely HATE, I did get the info to import into Outlook and then Export to the new phones.  I didn’t get things like birthdays or anniversaries, but I did get my calendar and all my phone numbers.  Course DH got all the same thing cause I could only get MY info to transfer so it went onto HIS phone as well.

Now about every five minutes, his phone alarm is going off. LOL.  He called me from ¾ Pint’s house last night and said, “take your blood pressure pill.”

Yes, I have to set an alarm to remember to take my pill.  But, it works, so who cares?

All the kids and their assorted spouses are coming for Thanksgiving. Except for Nursey daughter’s AF Cop husband.  He always works Thanksgiving. Then, we are keeping ¾ Pint that night cause Nursey daughter does…

BLACK FRIDAY. 

I, on the other hand, do NOT do Black Friday.  They simply do not make enough Xanax for me to get up that early and go out in the midst of all those people.  It would not be safe at all.  At the very least, I would verbally accost someone stupid.  At the worst, there would be blood. LOL.

I will have….14 or 15 people here. My table seats six. There are no TV trays. There is the Dora the Explorer card table which comfortably seats three small children.

Baby asked if I was making the traditional dinner, to which I replied, of course, why?

She is bringing her boyfriend.  No shortcuts this year please.  She has told him that mom’s thanksgiving dinner ROCKS and he does not believe her.

This means I will start cooking tomorrow morning.  Homemade piecrust.  Homemade noodles. Homemade Grandma’s recipe bread and rolls.  Milk free pumpkin pie for ¾ Pint, and also her own little loaf of bread which she helps me make every year.

Green beans and bacon and onion.

Off to clean.  Get the house done today. Then cook tomorrow. Then clean up the day after. Then try to figure out where to put a tree this year, which is gonna be dicey as we have absolutely no where to fit a tree.

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I'm much better now. A couple of lazy days helped a lot.  I guess I have had just a bit too much during my chaotic life?  I always knew there had to be  threshold somewhere that I shouldn't cross, or my body would rebel and start to pay me back for all the years of being, well, me?  But now that that threshold has appeared, it has taken me quite off guard!

It's difficult to only be able to handle two or three things simultaneously when one is used to handling 7 - 15 things simultaneously.  But how weird is it that I used to be able to do that and think absolutely nothing about it?  Last night, as I was cooking supper, taking care of all three girls (because it is 3/4 Pint's day to be picked up after school and then DH takes her in at bedtime), watching the news on Fox news and generally cleaning the kitchen, DH asked me why we are broke and it's only 1/2 way through the month.

Well, THAT put me right over the edge LOL. Literally. And there was nothing that I was hiding or anything like that. It was just the one thing that added to the little stupid things I was doing and put me right into overload.  It's like that now.

The car, the other night, on the way back from karate lessons, I stopped at the gas station.  When I started it up and got on the highway, it sounded funny. So I slowed down, put on my flashers and looked at the Tachometer.  I was at 4500 rpm's.  I hadn't shifted out of 1st gear!!  Which, by the way, is one of the reasons I absolutely HATE automatic transmissions.  I prefer to drive a standard stick shift.  Anyway, that was it.  Right over the edge I went. Drove the 10 miles on the highway to the next exit at 20 mph with the flashers on, and then stopped at Autozone and checked the trannie fluid which didn't even register.  ***sigh***

 
It would be nice to have a DH who handled things like that. But alas and alack!! No, it is not to be.

Ran into Autozone with the girls, bought a quart of trannie fluid, and a yellow cone thingy to stick in the tranny dip stick hole to pour it through and tried to shift into reverse.  It went in. Then drove around the parking lot till I was assured that all three forward gears were shifting when they should. Then went home.

Not really a horrid thing...but it did put me quite over the edge. There I am, darkness surrounding me and with two little kids in the car, $20 left in the bank until unemployment which is a day late due to Veteran's day, 1/4 tank of gas, a cell phone which doesn't pick up a signal all the way home, and I don't know if driving around on low almost GONE transmission fluid has done something to the old PT Cruiser and I will break down on the way.  Called DH as I left the highway and went into the dead zone and said "give me 25 minutes. If I am not home, this is the route I am taking, call the Tattooed Love Puppy from Hell (our mechanic who fortunately lives on the way home) and send him out to find me.

We only have ONE car that runs. LOL.

So now, I have discovered the joys of taking a long bath at 11:30 a.m and having a bit of good red Shiraz while in the bath. So what if it's 11:30 am?  It's not like I do it everyday, and so what if I did....

I am trying to teach my body to relax a bit.  And, my mind as well.  It's a slow process I think.

Also, I am remembering what my doctor told me years and years ago.  After Nursey daughter was born, I was bemoaning the fact that I didn't return to my pre pregnant body immediately.  He said, it takes 9 months to get your body that out of shape, it will take the full 9 months to get it back in shape.

I guess it is sort of like that.  What Junkie daughter put us through since Pint was born cannot even be realistically written down. Stealing from us, guns, video cameras, digital cameras, money out of my purse every time I turned around, even taking the money out of the babies piggy banks, lying, emptying bank accounts, writing forged checks on her sister's accounts, bringing drug dealers to our home when her little sister and brother were there....it just goes on and on, drug overdoses, being dead in the hospital parking lot when she O'd, then they called a Code Blue and got her resuscitated, well you get the point.  During this, her two pregnancies, two babies born addicted, one in NICU for three weeks, husband going to prison for dealing drugs out of OUR home....

But the point is, it took 8 years for the stress to break me down to this point.  I think it is going to take the full 8 years for me to recover from what happened.  But, I am trying, and I can feel it's working slowly, day to day.

Financially, we won't probably ever recover.  We had over $20,000 in savings when she graduated from high school.  We had good credit. We had credit cards. We had two rental properties and our house was paid for.  Now we are in debt up to our ass and filing bankruptcy.  We are buying a house on what is called "land contract" which means a bank won't even LOOK at us for a mortgage.  She took everything.  And then, alot more.  Thats the bad part about having a junkie kid who was the smartest in her graduating class.  Then, we paid over and over at $125 a week plus gas for an hour drive there and an hour drive back for methadone treatment for two years, which didn't end up working cause she started using again and again.

Plus, we supported her through the whole time, supported her kids as well, which was a good thing for the kids.  Thank God they always lived with us.

Anyway.  I am trying really hard to recover. I have let some of the hatred go, some of the bitterness go.  Somewhere, deep inside, I remember the child I gave birth to, and still love that person, but she died 8 years ago.  I am slowly trying to accept the person (shell) who remains, and trying hard to find things about her to like.  It is difficult at best.

Meanwhile, we are getting by. Older now, not in the best of health and raising two little kids.  Maybe some day three, depending on how Junkie daughter continues to do with the new baby who will be 1 in February.  But we have food, and I can afford the basics. We laugh, we cry and we hug alot.  We go to church together, well, at least the girls and I do.

Life is still good, just different.