Wordless Wednesday - oh hell edition

7 Random Facts

Okay, I know this one has been done, and redone and I am probably the only person on the internet not sick of it, but I saw over at Aunt Becky's that she's reviving an old post with it, so I am taking that as permission to do it!  I'm such a rebel.

1. My favorite way to eat cottage cheese?  As a dip for Doritos.  Only the original Nacho Cheese flavor of course.  Anything else would be nasty.  But regular Doritos with small curd cottage cheese is a snack I'd... well not kill for, but maybe poke someone really hard for.
2. I have a thing about eyes.  They kind of freak me out if there is anything out of the ordinary about them.  There should be 2 eyes of the same color, in the right place on a face - nowhere else.  Anything else is unacceptable.  Those dogs (Huskies?) that often have 2 different color eyes freak me out.  As does any movie or t.v. show where the bad guy has more than 2 eyes, or eyes on his hands or wherever.  *Shudder*
3. I grew up on a tiny island in the upper northwest corner of Washington State called Orcas Island.  And I do mean tiny.  It's 57.3 sq miles.  Gorgeous, and an amazing place, boring as hell for teenagers, since there was NOTHING to do. (we called it the Rock - as in I can't wait to graduate and get off this Rock!) It didn't even have a movie theatre until I was 14.  The first movie it showed was Batman - the one with Michael Keaton. And the island was not necessarily anything that prepared me for real life.  I was extremely sheltered and naive when I left the island at 18.
4. I love fairies! Not Disney fairies.  The ones that look like they're probably up to something :).  I used to have a collection of them, but I left them them behind when I left Washington.   
5. When I was in high school our class (all 34 of them - the entire Freshman class! Told you it's a small island) went on a field trip to the Vancouver Aquarium, in Canada.  I was wearing a white shirt, and a light blue lace bra.  (And let's just say the boob fairy visited my house early and generously - the bra was at least a C cup by then...) A porpoise spit on me, and made BOTH items see through.  We were in CANADA - and all of my clothes were back in AMERICA.  This was not something that made me, or the teachers happy.  Then I got splashed by the Orca act.  I ended up wearing a teacher's jacket.  I still have never met anyone else who has been spit on by a porpoise.
6. I am duckfooted - meaning my feet naturally turn out.  I would have made a rockin' ballerina.  Well - if I weren't 5'3" and a complete klutz.  You know that position where they have to turn their feet out sideways?  I can do that and then some, pointing my feet halfway backward.  But making them face exactly forward like normal people do?  That's uncomfortable.
7. I hate coffee.  The smell, the taste, everything.  Don't like tea either, except for good southern sweet tea.  I also don't like Coke, Pepsi, Tab, or any other cola drink, and while I used to enjoy Dr. Pepper or Sprite maybe 2 or 3 times a month I haven't had any in almost 2 years. I don't drink juice or anything with sugar in it.  And I don't drink water because it gives me a stomach ache.  The only thing I drink is Crystal Light - well, actually, the generic version.  A minimum of 64oz every day, and I wish they'd invent new flavors because I'm really kind of tired of the ones available.

Okay - so that was actually a little more challenging than I thought it would be.  I'm going to tag a few people who I have just recently found and hope they'll do it too!  belladonna, Shannon, Jeanette, Jill, tinycandi, anemone pie and won.  It was really hard to just choose 7, I've found sooooo many new blogs this past week.  I hope at least a couple of you want to join in!

Random Monday

I don't have enough to say on one topic right this second, so I'm going to post a bunch of unrelated stuff, and call it an entry!

I got tired of having to fast forward through the commercials when Joshy is watching tv (Danny Phantom is his very favorite show right now) so I taught him how to do it.  Total win on my part.  Of course, Lexie then tried to teach him where the volume button was and I threaten to lock her in the closet.  The last thing I need is for him to know how to turn it up!


I checked my gmail account for the first time in forever and found a bunch of friend requests for Facebook.  I'd forgotten I even HAD a Facebook account.  So I went and approved them, and got sucked into it, and spend wayyyy too  long trying to figure it out.  I'm obviously too old or technologically deficient for social networking.  But I am determined to figure it out so I can... what?  Catch up with people I haven't spoken to is 15 years?  Sure why not!


Do you read Emily?  She's doing a living art project.  Each week of the year, she's letting a different person (or animal!  this week it's her dog) tell her how to live her life.  It's been really interesting reading about it.  I highly recommend everyone go there and check it out.


My daughter had the flu this weekend - she missed school on Friday, but is actually back at school today.  According to the doctor, this was h1n1.  So now I'm left wondering if we just got really lucky, and yes, she did get Tamiflu, or if the media is just REALLY blowing this way out of proportion.  Now, she is fundamentally healthy, I'm sure it would be a different story for a kid with health issues, but still...

Also, there are 4 (four!) other people in this house.  If this is supposed to be so very contagious, why are none of us sick?  Now, maybe I'm counting chickens here, but according to the information I've found the incubation period for any flu is usually 2 days.  Lex got sick on Thursday, which would have meant she started being contagious on Wednesday.  She hasn't had a fever since Saturday morning, so is no longer contagious.  We didn't quarantine her, she actually spent most of her sickest hours in my lap - but so far so good on everyone else.  I'm just not impressed with the scariness of this big bad flu.  Of course, now that I've said that we'll all come down with it, right? :)

Okay, I think I'm out of things to blather about for the moment.  And there's chocolate cake in the fridge calling my name...

How I met my husband

In less than a month my husband and I will have been together 10 years.  That's a very long time.  I haven't done anything other than breathe for 10 consecutive years.

I was actually already married when we met .  My first marriage was a bad idea from the start, and didn't get any better the longer it lasted.  I was young, stupid and reckless, and he was abusive.  Remind me to tell you that whole sordid story another day.  Today I want to talk about happier things.

We met online in July of '99 on a website that would rather remain anonymous.  I had an ad up, mostly looking for friends, and S (who prefers I not use his name here - remind me to come up with a pseudonym) sent me an email.  He lived 2 states away, I had been honest in my profile about my marital status (married women a very big nono in his book) and I was not the type he usually looked for, so we're still not sure what made him respond, but I'm sure glad he did!  We connected pretty fast, and it take long for me to open up about the hell I was living in.

Something you need to know about S - he has a huge savior complex.  He wants to save the world.  So finding out about my abusive relationship made him determined to save me.  The fact that we both thought we were falling for each other just added fuel to the fire.  Three months after that first email we were making plans how to get me from where I was - to where he was.  We were pretty realistic about things though.  Unlike so many internet relationships, we weren't planning on me coming here to live forever, it was to get me away, so I could get on my feet, and be safe.  Of course, it didn't work out quite like that.  I snuck out of the house after my ex fell asleep and got on a midnight Greyhound on October 18th, 1999.  We were married July 1st, 2000.

S is the first man I ever met who treated me like a real person - who valued my opinion, who loves me for me.  He knows everything about me, the good, the bad, the horribly ugly, and loves me anyway.  He wants to spend the rest of his life with me, even though I hate to do the laundry, am a really lousy housekeeper, get overwhelemed by life and freak out way too easily, need way more sleep than he does... and a million other annoying habits.  He is an amazing father, who loves his children more than I thought a father could.  I don't know how I got so lucky, but I thank God for him all the time.

Friday5 (a day late)

I am shamelessly stealing this from tinycandi.  I need something to post today and I am absolutely brain dead.  Yesterday was lots of fun, finding out that Lexie has the flu - H1N1 to be exact.  Luckily we caught it within the first 48 hours, so we got a prescription for Tamiflu, and so far so good.  Really, she doesn't even seem all that sick.  Now if I just keep the rest of us from getting it...

Then, I spent all morning, and half the afternoon helping my sister move.  She's been living with us for the past 6 months and just got her own place.  So, me = brain dead.  So, I'm stealing a meme!

Friday5 - Getting to Know You

1. What are the titles of the last 3 books you read?  Oh this is easy.  I've been re-reading Anita Blake.  So the last 3 were Incubus Dreams, Micah, and Danse Macabre.
2. What are the titles of between three and five magazines you subscribe to or used to subscribe to?  I don't read magazines unless I'm at the doctor's office.  I read really fast and a magazine is just a waste of time to me.
3. What’s on your night table?  A lamp, a portable cd player because I cannot sleep without music, usually at least one or 2 hair ties, since I end up taking them out in the middle of the night.
4. What are the three best things that happened to you in the past seven days?  Christopher got all green trees (good days) in school this week even though his normal para was out and he had a sub, I felt welcomed into the OHIH community even though I always feel socially awkward, and I was able to make my sister feel good by being there to help her move into her own place.  She has a lousy track record of people actually being there for her, and showing her people do care for her always makes me feel good.
5.  What was your senior yearbook quote, and what would your yearbook quote be this year if there were such a thing?  Hmm.  Well, I didn't actually graduate, or stick around long enough to have a senior yearbook quote.  (here comes some of that social anxiety)  I got my GED at 23.  There were a lot of factors in this - child abuse being the main one - but it's a long involved story that I am so not ready to go into here yet.  I have no idea what my yearbook quote would be now.... something along the lines of "life is always worth living".  Cheesy I know.  But true.
   

Meet the Kids - Joshua

Joshua.  My baby.  But don't say that to his face.  At 3 1/2 he thinks that is nothing but an insult.  "I'm a big boy!" he insists.  He's right, of course.  Tall and lanky, and skinny and all boy.  His big brother did nothing to prepare me for what a typical boy is.  Super heroes and bad guys everywhere, non-stop motion from the second he gets out of bed until he grudgingly passes out at night.  He's a lover AND a fighter.  Snuggled in my arms telling me he loves me while fighting the bad guys behind me.  That's my baby.

Being the youngest, he's spoiled, of course.  Even more than I would do on my own.  His Daddy is way worse than I am.  Woo has everyone wrapped around those little fingers, and we all know it.  But when he looks at you with that impish grin and says "pwease Mommy pwease pwease??" how can you resist?

He is in a hurry to grow up, much to my dismay.  He wants to go to school like his brother and sister, while I am relishing his last year at home with me.  Next year is pre-k... then kindergarten, and then the world.  He has an unreasonable hatred of commercials and so I spend way too much of my day hearing "make it faster make it faster!" and thanking God for DVRs.  If he actually had to watch commercials, I fear for the safety of the world!  He wants a beard like Daddy when he grows up.  I just can't even begin to picture that.  Those sweet little cheeks all bristly and scruffy.  Of course he also wants to be Spiderman.  And I can't really picture that either, so I think I'm safe for now.  On both counts.

Meet the Kids - Christopher

This is Christopher, my firstborn son.  He'll be 6 next month which is something that just blows us all away.  He's our extra special guy, the one who pulls hardest on the heart, the one who needs the most.  You know how they say a mother always knows?  Well it held true in this case.  I knew by the time that he was 14 or 15 months old, but it took the rest of the world until he was almost 3 to catch up with me.  He's autistic.  He didn't talk at all until he was almost 2, and didn't use language in a constructive way until after he was 3.  He's been in school and therapy for 4 years now, and take a special multivitamin and fish oil and they have all made a tremendous difference in him.  He's in mainstream kindergarten this year and we are so proud of him.  He still has very little in the way of social skills - which is why we were so intent on mainstreaming him.  He needs the peer modeling to learn those skills.  But you'd never believe this is the same kid, who wouldn't look at you, and would get so frustrated he'd scream trying to tell me what he wanted to eat.

We call him Bubby, and half the time you ask him his name, that's the answer you'll get.  He's our Bubba, Bubbalicious boy.  He is delicious.  From his bright blue eyes and dimple to his hobbit feet I'd eat him up if he'd let me.  He loves the t.v. (way too much - bad mommy, no cookie for you!) and has recently graduated from Dora and Blues Clues to Ben 10.  Now I'm having to learn all the names of the guys on there for him.  But I'll do it happily.  I hate Dora!  He's really good on the computer, and spends half his waking life on the trampoline, leading to the most amazingly strong thighs I've seen on a kid.   In the summer he turns into a fish and it takes an act of God to get him out of the water.  It makes him happier than pretty much anything else in the world - but he still hates baths.  Go figure.  He's a conundrum, our boy and we wouldn't want him any other way.

Meet the Kids - Lexie

This is my oldest, Lexie.  She's eight, and obsessed with vampires,(that would be my fault!)  the Jonas Brothers,(so not my fault!) and being sassy.  She thinks she knows more than I do.  Sometimes she's right.  Mostly she's not, much to her dismay.  We share a birthday, and too many personality traits, so we butt heads often.  Being my first, she's also what I call my practice kid... you know, the one I get to learn on?  Poor thing.  Her brothers have it a lot easier than she does.  By the time they do something, she's already broken me in. 

Of course, by being the first, she also gets to be the one who did everything first.  Her's were the very first first words and first steps and first loose teeth and first day of school.  Her brothers didn't get that.  And she's fond of the fact that she is the one who made me a mommy.  I am too.  She's my girl.  My Punkin, my Lulu, my Chickadee.... it's amazing the kid knows her name, actually.  But I'll call her whatever she wants as long as she keeps smiling like this.

Inaugural Post

My kids are still little - 3, 5 and 8. But not for long. Like everyone says, these days go so fast. So I want to do something to keep a record of some of it. And have a place to be me... and whatever else I decide to use this space for. I have no clue. Maybe I'm just a lemming, joining the mommy blogging ranks. I figure I may as well, I read enough of them! So what the heck, right?