Less Than Perfect

I've been wanting to post for days (weeks?).  I haven't been here.  I haven't been reading or writing or commenting.  I've just been numbing out.  I've gone down the rabbit hole and I am just starting to try and poke my head back out and scrabble forth.  Trying really hard. I suffer from depression.  It's a concept that's hard to explain to people.  It's a concept that's hard to grasp myself.  Well all know what it is to be sad about something but we move on.  My depression is like I'm sad about nothing, or everything, and can't move on.  Or not sad.  Apathetic.  Unfocused.  Hazy.  It is compounded by life circumstances - loss, grief - but it was there before life threw in what it had to offer.  Most days, I take a tiny pill and life seems liveable.  In fact, as an adult I realized that I had really become an optimist and not the negative and angry woman of my youth.  I count my blessings, I enjoy each day.  I bask in the normalcy and joy o

Today is World Prematurity Day .  We have had two premature babies.  Because of this, our family supports the March of Dimes and preventing prematurity is a cause close to our hearts.  Please click the link below to visit the March of Dimes web site and help support them in their efforts to educate about and prevent causes of prematurity. 

An unseasonably warm day allowed us one more visit to the zoo this fall.

  I am about a week late on this list, which I am a little concerned might get me kicked off of the interwebs.  It just slipped my mind to get it done but one which I thought was a lot of fun and therefore had to complete, even if late!   So, here you have, Top 5 Famous Folks I Used to Fancy.  Lots of people have linked up to this post, so to see more lists of people who make us swoon, click the link above and head over to Kate Takes 5  and check out lots of lists.  It took me right back to those early teen years of tearing out pictures from Teen Beat and plastering them all over my room!   1.  Scott Baio      To be clear, I had no idea what a total d-bag he was in real life.  I just knew that I wouldn't have minded having Charles in charge of me!  Now, if I ran into him on the street, I would punch him in the gut (or at least trip him).  But back then, his picture adorned my wall.   2.  Corey Haim      Back in the day, there were arguments over who was cuter - Haim or

The Nugget can say some pretty funny stuff.  It's so interesting to watch her develop her understanding of language.  Here are a few of the things she is learning about words: 1.  She feels pretty strongly about the difference between "excuse you" and "bless you".  If she, say, belches and we tell her, "bless you", she gets all righteous on us.  "No, not bless you!  Excuse you!"  Or, if she coughs and we say either one (because what do you really say to someone coughing?  I guess we should just keep our thoughts to ourselves but we feel bad for her) we get a similar, "No, not bless you!"  She doesn't give us any idea as to what is the proper thing to say, but she sure knows what it isn't. 2.  She mixes up the word beautiful into anything that has the "full"  or "fil" sound in it.  For instance, if I ask her what the tall pink bird is at the zoo, she tells me it's a "beautiflamingo".  Or

It's super duper Silent Saturday because I'm pretty sure I haven't done one in a month or so.  In my defense, it was because I was busy having an awesome month.  And here's the evidence: Kissing cousins at our family weenie roast Shopping for mums and pumpkins Pumpkin roll at our annual Halloween party The Mister and The Nugget heading out to trick-or-treat The Nugget,  having fully realized that we get free candy at each house decides to run!

 Opening the recipe book, the spattered card falls from the pages as if it already knows what we’re up to. Chocolate pudding covers much of the recipe, one jotted down quickly in my mother’s slanting cursive during a family reunion one hot summer day. I never knew why we called it Baskin Robbins; I have met other people who called this same recipe by another name. I still call it by the name we gave it because it’s ours . I begin with the crust: 1 cup of flour 2/3 cup butter 3/4 cup chopped pecans I mix slowly, thinking back to the many times my mother and I made this dessert together. It became a standard in our house, a go to recipe for all manner of pitch-ins, school functions and barbeques. Making the crust was my least favorite part as a kid. I wasn’t very good at pushing it out to fit all of the corners of the pan. I spread it out with a fork now, just as I did those many years ago, and pop it in the oven for 25 minutes at 350. On to best part. The cream cheese layer

Three and a half years later and I still lie awake sometimes worrying about those eyes.  Eyes of a tiny, newborn boy.  Eyes that I never got to see.  I wonder if I had seen those eyes what they would have told me, what I could have known by looking into them. Three and a half years later and I still see the nurse rushing through the room with the tiniest boy I had ever seen.  I never saw where she took him.  By the time I was sewn shut, he was inside of his incubator and wearing what I thought of as his super hero mask.  The mask that protected his delicate young eyes from the harsh lights of his new home.  I never saw those eyes. Three and a half years later, I sometimes press The Mister for details that he will never be able to give me because I can't really tell him what it is I want to know.  He was taken to that room beyond mine with that tiny little boy.  He got to look into his eyes.  He got to see him before the tubes and the ventilator and the nurses and the IV's c

One of the things my daughter enjoys is listening to CD's while we drive.  My car doesn't have a DVD player in it (I know, the humanity), but I've never found that to be an issue as she has always been perfectly content listening to her music.  Her father and myself, we miss our music.  But we tolerate hers because she enjoys it.  Some of it is even kind of good.  A lot of it, however, is just down right disturbing. The Mister came to me the other day with this proclamation:  "I am thinking about throwing out that CD we've been listening to with The Nugget.  It has come to my attention that no less than five animals, maybe six, lose their lives during the course of CD." I can't disagree with him here.  Dying animals doesn't seem like such an awesome theme for children.  I mean, yes, animals and all living things do eventually die.  I'm just not sure that's a topic I want to explore with my child on the way to, say, the zoo or her grandparen

The Nugget scours the pumpkin patch for the perfect prize She finds one that is just right

Okay, so there's a bunch of stuff that drives me nuts.  And somebody has to know about it other than me.  Sooooo... 1.  Low talkers.  Speak the freak up already.  This chick I work with talks in a constant whisper, and not a loud whisper, a super-quiety, my-baby-hasn't-slept-in-a-week-and-if-we-drop-so-much-as-a-feather-she -will-wake-up kind of a whisper.  What's the big freaking secret?  SPEAK UP! 2.  Coughing.  I have been coughing for something like a week and a half.  The doctor says it's bronchitis and will resolve itself eventually.  I am inviting it to do so ASAP because I CANNOT take it anymore.  For some reason, the cough especially seems to kick in when I make any sort of professional phone call which is so absolutely awesome and not mortifying at all.  No, I promise I've never smoked a day in my life even though it sounds like 2 packs a day.  I promise.  Also, all the freaking coughing is giving me a headache.  Enough already! 3.  Babysitters.  Ok

The other day The Nugget and I were visiting with some of our best friends, my old college buddy and her four year old daughter.  We love going to their house because they have all kinds of toys that we don't have at our house and, well, an awesome four year old who is super cool.  We had a fine old time until it was time to go. At that point, The Nugget started screaming.  And running from me.  And we started having our (recent)usual fight about getting her shoes on.  And my friend started laughing .  Quietly, not egging on The Nugget, but laughing never the less.  Between attempts to keep my head from exploding calmly redirect my child, I glanced at her. "I'm sorry!" she said.  "I've just never seen her act like that.  I didn't know she ever did.  It's just good to know I'm not the only one this happens to!" Huh.  Perhaps I've been giving off the wrong impression.  Have I not talked openly enough with my friends about my struggle

Today is The Nuggets half birthday.  She is two and a half today.  Two. And a half.  *Sigh* So, to my beautiful girl, I say: Every time I look at you, I wonder where that tiny baby went so fast.  Here you are, this big girl who know how to do so many things herself.  This past six months, you have grown by leaps and bounds.  Your hair continues to be a bit curly, your eyes have definitely decided to be hazel and you have grown quite tall and thin.  You currently wear size 3 shirts, size 24 months pants and size 8 shoes. Your vocabulary has soared.  Favorite word right now: familiar.  Everything looks familiar to you!  You are sweet and sassy and certainly have a hard head when it comes to things being done the way you think they should be.  You fight me lately every day when I pick you up from daycare because you want to put your shoes on YOURSELF!!!  And, usually, you can.   I just need to learn to sit back and let it take all the time it needs.  You can (mostly) dress and und

Hello out there!  I realize that I have been MIA for a while.  We took a week's vacation which involved extensive driving and I was so tired.  We have been home for a couple of weeks now, but I have decided that recouperating from my vacation is a viable excuse for any and all incomplete tasks going forward in my life. I know...my life is hard .  Feel free to email any and all sympathy notes to save on postage. Anyway, during a 19 hour trip one way and a 16 hour trip the other, I am pleased to announce that The Nugget did not have a single potty accident!  Woo hoo, people, we did it!  We have potty trained a human being in just a few short weeks. Mostly. We have developed this one little quirk, though.  It's what I like to refer to as "the standoff".  It might better be called "the sitoff", but who ever heard of that? Sooooo...the two of you who read this blog know that we were having a few pooping issues with The Nugget during my last post.  Thing

 Found growing in the late summer soy beans

I looked up the term cold turkey once I started writing this post.  After all, it's a phrase I have been using for years and I have no real idea about its origin.  What's so bad about cold turkey that it got associated with withdrawing from something?  There seems to be a fair amount of speculation about why the phrase gets used, but I like the explanation that the look of a whole, cold turkey is all sweaty and goose-bumpy: Oh.  Well.  When you think of it like that, I guess it makes sense.  Because I certainly felt all sweaty and goose-bumpy just like that turkey when I started thinking about potty training The Nugget.  Just like a heroin addict, I kept coming up with new dates and new reasons to prolong the process of using my drug of choice (in this case, diapers).  "We'll just use up this last box and then we're going for it!"  But once that box was gone, we still had night-time diapers left. "I'm just going to buy a small pack of diapers and

1.  Once kids reach about the age of 8, parents evidently feel that they no longer need any sort of supervision and let them wander the neighborhood alone all evening long. 2.  There isn't much that is productive for kids ages 8-15 to do on a playground. 3.  If you are the first to fall off of the monkey bars, you are a "punk-ass white boy". 4.  If the white lady glares at you when you say racist comments, you will, instead of understanding the intent of the glare, change your statement to: "punk-ass mexican". 5.  That pre-teen girls come to the playground to flirt with pre-teen boys. 6.  That it makes my stomach hurt to have to go to the playground when it is filled with the big kids. 7.  That practicing swear words while climibing the jungle gym makes you seem really tough to all of your friends. 8.  That I will, at some point, want to punch somebody's kid in the head.  That kid won't be mine.  I won't know whose kid it is, because I

We live near and are members of the largest children's museum in the world (who knew?  I guess there really is more than corn in Indiana).  We visit at least a couple of times a month.  The Nugget loves it, and I can motivate her to do almost anything as long as she knows that it will be followed by a trip to "the newseum". Once a month, the newseum has a special event for members where kids can come and play late on Friday nights.  I recently decided to take advantage of this evening.  The Nugget and I spend every other Friday on a date alone due to The Mister's work schedule and I thought this sounded like a fun one.  The Nugget can act like a wild child all she wants, Mommy can sit back and relax and coast until bed time. Or not. The first sign I had that this late night at the newseum would not be a total success was when I arrived to pick The Nugget up from daycare.  She was taking a nap.  I know I have celebrated this fact in the past , but that was becau