Mistakes in Motherhood

I feel like I should be afraid of anything that plugs in today, I really do feel paranoid and that it is out to get me. What next? Is my ice-maker going to start pelting cubes at me? Do I have the anti-midas touch or something? Karmic debt from frying a motherboard 10 years ago?

This morning I wake up to the smoke detectors going off, all 8 of them, out of sync. The 12 yr old decided to turn his bagel into a piece of charcoal. So I get up, life goes on, right? Call the bank for an issue, 24 minutes on hold I give up, decide the issue is not worth it. Hubby and I make a wonderful breakfast, go to watch some shows on the DVR, and the Medium I have been wanting to see stopped recording 20 minutes into it.

Ok, well then I will just hook up my Wii and play my new game, Wii Active. Find the new cord I ordered (red/blue/green, new TV only has one input for red/white/yellow). I get the cord plugged in and Wii working (unsuccessfully at first, no sound) to find that we already had the cord I just ordered and waiting a week for an overpaid on shipping for, it must have come with one of the aftermarket accessory packs. Oh well, no use crying over spilled milk. Put Wii Active in and my console tells me I need to update! ARG! I have a temper tantrum and get over it. I go to plug in my aftermarket Wiichargable (sorry, couldn’t help it) battery pack for my WiiFit board- no dice, the light won’t come on. The 13 yr old brings me batteries, no dice. I get new batteries and finally it works.

So I set up the game, strap on the leg holster for the nunchuck and immediately it finds the ONLY workout I hate, running in place. As I am running, the leg holster starts slipping off, I tighten it, and I can feel a shooting pain down my leg as it constricts my blood flow and I feel like I have a bad case of sciatica. I finish my “run” just to have the very next exercise require the same torture device. Oh well, I will just play another game, I have 3 or 4 of them.

I put in WiiFit plus, load my profile, and I get the message “To start, please step off me and press A”… ok, I am not stepping on you, but ok… press A it recalculates and says the same message again. Turn the board on and off and same message. So I find a forum talking about how to fix it, make it through all the steps just to have the controller die. Get a new controller, it too is dead, in fact all five of them are dead. I guess the universe wants me to give up and be slovenly; I will try again in a few hours of them on the charger.

With facebook not working right, I really should be using this time more productively… I mean I do have a house to pre-pack, and hundreds of pounds of stuff I don’t plan on moving gone through and tossed or donated. I have boxes to fill up to save money on packing. I have beef stew to start, a fridge and freezer to clean, not to mention an entire house to clean. I would really like to be out of here in a week, but is that realistic?

Alright, I need to wrap this up to get back to stressing, err working. This will be behind us soon, we will be settled and happy and it will all be a distant memory. We have moved before, and we survived, and we will move again, there is no doubt.

No Comments | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Family, Insanity, Lame-o, Moving, Ramblings, Stress. | #

It’s been about 18 days since Bobby got home and it is unbelievable to me that it wasn’t just yesterday. These last few weeks have been a blur of activity, and I feel like I have not even had time to exhale, yet alone process. He’s spending a lot of time working at home, and my routine of taking kids to and from school, cleaning, and going to appointments has resumed. But the craziest thing of this is that we are *still* in limbo. We still do not have authorization to move! Yes, here we are at 16 days past the day I planned to be gone, and we don’t even know when and where we are going.

I cope by knitting another row onto an afghan I have been working on for two years. I listen to Bob Marley and remind myself that “every little thing, gonna be alright”, I drink tea and sometimes wine, and take walks and watch documentaries on Netflix. But no matter how much I distract myself, I am still frustrated that we still don’t have the information we thought we would have at the end of December; and every other Wednesday I am thankful that he still has a paycheck, and insurance, and a job, even if he is at home driving me nuts.

I used to romanticize the idea of working from home, but if anything, the last couple weeks has taught me that working from home is the equivalent at working in prison, with between one to five noisy cellmates hanging off of you like a bunch of baby orangutans. I sometimes wonder if he volunteers to go to the store in the evenings just to get away from it all, and even then he usually has to drag along a few primates with him. I really respect that he hasn’t gone all “Here’s Johnny!” on us and redrum-ed the kids and I.

So whenever I complain to myself that I am tired, frustrated, or frazzled (the trifecta of mommy-hood) I just remind myself that not only is he dealing with the same triple-punch, but on top of that has deadlines and reports and real-actual-get-paid-for-work that he has to complete without a nice, quiet space to run off to. Sometimes the silver lining is obvious, sometimes you have to dig deep to find it, but know that it is always there.

1 Comment | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Bobby, Domestic Diva, House Stuff, Insanity, Lame-o, Moving, Updates. | #

I have unofficial news!! Bobby should be home at the end of NEXT WEEK!! SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

TEN more days!!

T-E-N!

wow

No Comments | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Bobby. | #

Sophie and Matthew have a cold, Dr. Mom has diagnosed them with croup, but I have not taken them for a second opinion. They both have fevers and seal coughs, so I am sure their ped would agree with me.

Sophie saw her gastro this morning, all her tests were normal, so after we move we need to get her evaluated by a endocrinologist to make sure there is nothing hormonal going on. If that is normal, I am done testing her. I guess I just don’t want to leave any stones unturned, especially if it is something we can fix. I am fairly certain it is just genetic, but I would feel bad if she just needed supplements or something to reach full growth potential and I chose not to investigate it.

No Comments | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Health, Matthew, Sophia. | #

What a busy day!! This morning my friend Tracie and I took our kids up to Denver to go to the Children’s museum. We had tons of fun and then decided to let Austin babysit his brothers and her 7 year old, while the babies and Tracie and I went to Sephora at JC Penny to find me a color match for foundation. While we were leaving Austin called and said “are you on your way home? It’s 3:50 and your dentist appointment is at 4:10, right?” Oops! Thankfully they were able to reschedule me for an hour later and I *still* was almost late!!

No Comments | In: This is how I roll | tags: Family, Lame-o, Me. | #

Today Bobby asked his boss if he is confident enough with sending us to Ft. Lewis that he would sign a lease if it were him and he got an email back that just said “call me”. Oh man, the proverbial “we have to talk”; that is never good news.

To sum it up, seems like the entire department is going to be going through an overhaul soon and they are not sure how this will change things, so they are trying not to move anyone until they have all the kinks worked out. So now we don’t know if Ft. Lewis is still on the table, and when we would need to be there. We were planning on being there in early February, but now it is impossible. On a positive note, while they are sorting things out he stays here & works from home, which means he can help me with pre-move purging.

Speaking of pre-move purging, we had a walk-through with Mayflower and we have about 3,000 pounds of stuff to get rid of to get our cost below what the company allows.

I refuse to lose hope, no one says this has to change the statement that we will be needed in Washington state. Purging will be good for us, we have a ton of stuff that has outgrown its usefulness that I just have not had a chance to remove, large bulky things I cannot move on my own. This is positive, really it is, I have to believe it, we just don’t know what it means yet.

No Comments | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Bobby, House Stuff, Insanity, Moving. | #

Sophie saw her cardiologist today because a murmur was detected at an appointment I had for her funny walk. Thankfully, both her walk, and her heart is normal. The cardiologist called it an innocent murmur I think.

While I was there, he asked how tall my husband and I were, and I told him we were both short, me at 5’4″ and him 5’6″ and he smiled real big and said “well there is why she is so tiny, two chihuahuas can’t make a great dane you know”.

So there you have it, she is a normal pigeon toed, innocent heart murmured chihuahua, and yes, that diagnosis is official. I hope when I see the gastroenterologist next week, he will agree with the diagnosis.

No Comments | In: People, Places & Things | tags: Health, Silliness, Sophia. | #

This move is teaching me a very valuable lesson on men and women. It seems no matter how stressed I get, or how mad, or sad, or frustrated or any other range of emotion I feel about waiting for confirmation about this move, my husband has appeared to me to be very nonchalant and calm about it. This morning I think I snapped and finally sent him this email.

Hey, I know you are trying to stay on top of this move situation, but I am seriously feeling major stress and I don’t know what else I can do. No matter where we go it is going to be very hard for me to find a place for us to live without giving away all our pets and kids and I am just not sure what else to do to avoid getting ulcers. The longer we go without an answer, the more anxiety I feel and I start crying and have panic attacks multiple times a day. Can you think of any way we can communicate to your boss that we really need to have a for sure answer? Every person I have talked to in Olympia has told us they want us to have one full month notice before moving into a house, which means the longer we go without an answer, the longer the 6 of us live in a hotel together. If we end up going to VA, it will probably take even longer to find a place, and we may end up having to board the pets at anywhere from $12-30 per pet, per day.

Heather

About 30 minutes later he called me, and got me to laugh and smile. He told me he had tried calling his boss several times and left him a voice message. When I freaked out on him and told him I wanted him to fly home so I could choke him for not being emotional like I was (this statement was made very light-hearted, and we both knew it). He told me he knew this was hard on me, and he was allowing me to cry and complain and freak out because he knew I needed to. He knew one of us needed to be strong, so he decided to take on that role. So when I freaking out that he was not freaking out, he was being strong because he knew one of us needed to be or we would both be puddles of goo over this.

This made me realize, that when I felt I was carrying this load alone, not only was he helping me carry it, but in addition he was carrying ME! It is times like this that I really appreciate my husband, even if he does things differently than I do, and does not carry his emotions on his sleeves, it does not mean that he does not have emotions, he just expresses them differently than I do. I am glad he allowed me to step back and see things at face value, so I was not sitting here brooding and stressing, feeling like I was slaying the dragon all by myself.

2 Comments | In: This is how I roll | tags: Bobby, Marriage, Me, Moving, Ranting. | #

I never did update about what happened at the dealership and parts store. I bailed his car out of car jail on Tuesday morning with only a $46 bill, vs. the $90 I was told. I actually just left it there and they removed the dud battery for me, loaded it into my van and I went to the parts store. I showed him the bill and what they said and he took the dud battery, put a new one out in my car for me and apologized for the inconvenience. I decided not to press the issue with getting them to pay for the bill, more than anything I just wanted an apology. The dealership put in the new battery and washed his car up all pretty for me without charging me extra. My service coordinator was so pleasant that I decided to order some parts, and bring the car back for some other things it needs done before we move.

Because I have to arrange for them to shuttle me back and forth to the dealership, I decided tonight I would take it in, this time to fix a couple cosmetic things and repair his remote start & alarm. After the recent battery incident, it sure made me appreciate my dealership. I have always hated finding and trusting new mechanics, because you hear so many horror stories of shady mechanics. The disadvantage of moving so often, is you get to start over at a new city, and have to find all new services. This is why I love the Google Age so much, word of mouth has always been the way I find businesses, but if that is not available, I am all about the review sites. I have never been a fan of flipping through the phone book.

I found this new website today, called RepairPal that is pretty interesting. You can put in information about your car, repair needed, and zipcode and they will not only give you a range to expect the estimate to be, but shops nearby with peer reviews, which would look like this page showing some San Fransisco auto repair shops. Out of curiosity I put in his Civic and pretended it really had needed an alternator and it came up with a very comprehensive report. Not only did it tell me the range of costs I would be expecting for parts & labor, but then it also gives me recommendations of things I make sure are done (i.e. which other tests I make sure they do) and explanations of symptoms and other necessary repairs that may be necessary. Not just that, then maps out shops in my areas with reviews.

The other helpful part of the website is you can enter a specific make, model and year of a vehicle and get reviews, common problems, recalls, etc. So if you wanted to learn more about a 2001 Honda Accord, it would be easy to look up ratings, reviews, recalls, and common mechanical problems. Other neat features are a car encyclopedia, in case you wanted to look up what a timing belt replacement entails; and a section called My Car where you can keep track of your maintenance and repair records, plus get reminders, recall information and service reminders, and best of all it is all FREE!

When we move next month, it is nice knowing I will be able to find a place to take our cars that I can trust, I am extremely loyal to my service center and look forward to finding a place that can take care of all of our car needs, from oil changes, to mechanical repairs.

1 Comment | In: People, Places & Things | tags: Auto Stuff, Bobby, Me, Sponsored. | #

Yesterday evening I had writing out a whiny, negative status about the lack of housing I was finding with my pets, and I decided, if I wanted to attract positive, I needed to think positive, so I deleted my whine, and wrote a very positive message Tomorrow will be a better day. Tomorrow will give us more positive leads on pet friendly homes. We WILL find the perfect home soon. And the government will give us an definite answer soon. The Washington State move is going to go GREAT! Let this become my new affirmation. This all came from a series of phone calls from a large rental agency in Olympia with about 10 homes in our price range, with the numbers of bedrooms we need, who claimed to be “pet friendly” who told us that with our two dogs, and three cats, that they have absolutely no rentals that would allow my number of pets, and told me they imagine no one would.

My mood after this phone call was so low that all I wanted to do was whine and vent and cry, but when I chose to be positive about it and post the positive message, my mood became more positive and immediately I was contacted by a home owner who was willing to consider us, despite our number of pets. Even though he has yet to give me an answer (same with the government, they have yet to give us a 100%), I remain more positive, because if someone is willing to say maybe, someone WILL say yes. This is the far cry from the “no one” I was told, and allowed me to get down in the dumps.

Today, I was emailed by another company, and they gave me a choice of 6 houses, but when I told them about my pets, they told me of a house that was the same price as the other ones, but nearly 1,000 square feet larger where it would be fine for me to have my animals. So now I have one for sure I can look at, and now four houses that are maybes. I am confident that in less than a week we will have our definite answer from his company, as well as have housing secured.

Next time you start feeling down in the dumps, just remember the power of the positive and see how much you can make a difficult situation turn around!

No Comments | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Fur Babies/Pets, House Stuff, Insanity, Me, Moving. | #