I'm the best moocher in all the land, god told me so.

Last night I was feeling miserable. I was uncomfortable and hot and like the whole world was against me sleeping. I eventually became fed up and told James that if he could find some kind of something that would help me sleep that I would develop a faith in god. Lo and Behold, he found an over the counter medication that would do just that.

Just a little side note to god, you know, in case she’s reading: I’m still not convinced, but feel free to keep trying.

I woke up this morning feeling refreshed. I felt like I had actually slept for the first time in months. I don’t remember waking up feeling this good in a long time. I actually woke up before my alarm went off, and that was okay. Thank you, little blue pill. Not that little blue pill, we don’t need that little blue pill. (again, for James’ ego.) Although, the effects may be similar. Take one little blue pill and you fall asleep almost immediately, take the other little blue pill and you fall asleep within a small time frame, but only from exhaustion. Which will you choose, hmm, which will you choose?

So, I’m feeling good this morning, and I think I’ll get some things done. First of all are the dishes. The dishes always need to be done; it’s a never ending uphill battle with those things. Next is actually cleaning the kitchen once the dishes are done. Our table has become like a safe house for junk mail. Lonely, unwanted, abandoned junk mail seems to think it can hole up on our kitchen table and it will be safe. Sorry, junk mail, your stay is ending today. I don’t need moochers; I do enough of that myself.

Speaking of mooching, I have to run by the college today to give them money. It’s not my money, though; it actually belongs to my parents. My parents are so wonderful; they give me money to pay for school. I’m going to think of it as them giving me money, so that some day I will have enough money to pay them back for the money they gave me to make the money later on. At least I’ll try to think of it like that, I’m hoping I can keep my brain understanding that one. Included in this deal is car time, my car is currently out of service, and my lovely beautiful and most intelligent mother is letting me borrow hers. Yup, she’s letting me take her car, use her gas, and go to the school to give them her money. Can parents get any better than that?

Anyhow, I should be getting started on my day; I hope everything is well with all of the people in the world! Oh, and since god regularly reads my blog, and is trying to get on my good side, I think that might happen!

Call the babysitter, it's going to be a wild night.

So, I've been conspicuously absent lately. My class will be done on the 27th and then I'll have a little less than a month free to write about the everyday nothingness that is my life. I feel bad that I haven't been keeping up with this place. I feel really bad that a post about dancing goat heads has been at the top of my page for so long.

I've been getting out of the house more lately, which I think has done me some good. I didn't realize the extent of my cabin fever until I became reacquainted with the outside world. I was beginning to think that people only talked about via*gra and ways to get medications for cheap. Apparently all e-mails aren't true.

Speaking of e-mail, I got an interesting one this morning. The e-mail wasn't particularly interesting, it was just another one asking me to buy via*gra. (James will be happy if I let you all know that we don't need any.) I just think the various subjects for the e-mails are creative. I suppose you don't really want to give your e-mail a subject that will make the reader delete it instantly. Although, I can honestly say I have never thought about oil rags that were in love. Maybe this is some new sex term that I’m not familiar with. Have you ever heard of oil-ragging someone? Sounds kinky, and kinda dirty. The actual title of the e-mail was "Not start at enamored oilcloth".

The “not start at” part is kinda confusing though. Maybe it’s a statement on the lack of romance and foreplay these days. You should not start with “oil-ragging” someone. Oil-ragging is something to work up to. You should all think about this. Slow down the passion, save the oil-ragging for later, we’ll all be much happier if we follow the cryptic e-mail’s advice.

After thinking about it some, maybe the title does have something to do with via*gra. Maybe this e-mail has opened my eyes. Maybe they don’t actually want me to buy the via*gra, but just wanted to share a deep message with me.

From now on, I’ll concentrate on the romance and keep the oil ragging in a pile in the garage. The heat from that pile will eventually spark the fires of passion. Thank you cryptic e-mail, you’ve changed my life.

Do I know how to turn on my husband, or what?

This is an actual conversation that just took place between me and my husband.

(Disclaimer: Not for young children, and please don’t take me seriously)

Me: Can you help me get my homework done so that I can justify reading Harry*Potter?

James: Sure, What’s your homework?

Me: I don’t know, probably something like “record every action you’ve performed in the last week”. Monday: Sacrificed goat. Tuesday: Sacrificed a second goat and had a dancing goat head party.

James: How did you get the goat heads to dance?

Me: Stuck them on sticks and spun them.

James: (small laughter)

Me: Oh my god, you’re getting to me.

On that note, I’m re-reading Harry*Potter before the sixth book comes out. I just finished the fourth today and I’m on to the fifth. I should have the fifth done by Sunday so that I can read the sixth. (James will most likely be done reading it by then…Harry*Potter Freak)

I really need a lawnmower....

I just had a moment, one of those This-Is-Really-nice moments. Sydney has been in bed for a few hours and I just walked into her room.

I don't normally disturb her before 7 AM because sometimes all hell can break loose and nobody wants that, do they? The only reason I went in this time is because some idiot kid just knocked on my door. Yes, it's almost 9 PM and no he didn't really have a good reason. He just wanted to know if I would like him to cut my grass tomorrow. Not tonight, tomorrow. Why this couldn't wait I'll never know.

So in between the dog barking and trying to get at him, me trying to get outside to actually talk to this kid, and worrying about the baby waking up, it was a stressful situation. I was trying to get outside and keep the houndage inside and this kid just keeps asking over and over "would you like me to cut your grass tomorrow?" Obviously I'm going to answer you if you just give me a minute, dipshit. So I finally make it outside and I apologize to him for acting so rude and explained that my daughter was sleeping. Does he apologize for knocking incredibly loudly on my door at 9 PM? No, he looks at me and says "would you like me to cut your grass tomorrow?" Idiot.

Anyway, I made my way back inside and waited for the inevitable screaming coming from the end of the hall, but there was none. Of course I couldn't leave well enough alone because my mind started traveling to all of the ailments that must be inflicting her to make her not wake up. So I made my way down the hallway and into her room. I was very quiet, until I reached the edge of her crib and bumped it ever so softly. She opened her eyes slowly and looked at me. She had a look of complete confusion. The dog howling incessantly for a whole minute at least did nothing to stir her, but the slight tap on the crib made her wake up instantly. I had to pick her up, because If I didn't she would never go back to sleep. So I stood there holding her, she was already asleep again on my shoulder. I laid her back down, covered her with the blanket, and walked out of the room.

It was just a very nice moment. I miss holding a sleeping baby; it's the best feeling in the world. So, that's my sappy moment for the day. You can tell me about yours now! Please...I need comments....

Hey, Dis Fun! Dis Fun! Me love tickles!

I have a feeling that this post will be pretty random; I don't have any cohesive thoughts, just thoughts. Thoughts floating in the abyss that have squeezed their way into my brain. They’ve probably pushed out some useless psychology fact that I’ll need for my impending exam, so I’m writing them down. I need the space. This will probably be my last post for a little while. I have a paper and an exam due on Sunday; I really need to do well on both. Not that there’s ever a time where I tell myself “Who cares, this doesn’t count for much”. Although I have thought about having that thought, I just get pissed because I know by having the thought to have the thought I pushed out another thought that I think was pretty useful.

Anyway, here are my thoughts:

Sydney has another tooth. That’s singular if you didn’t notice. Or so we thought. She had one of her teeth pop through on July third, which took her to 9. Upon closer inspection, James noticed that the tooth directly above it had popped through, too. We weren’t even aware it was close. Such bad parents we are, now her baby book will be horribly inaccurate and she’ll never forgive us for it. So here begins the downward spiral to despising us when she’s a teenager. Yup, it all starts with teething. The teeth that have popped through are the upper and lower first molars on the left side. This is one of those things you have to learn when you become a parent, the correct terms for teeth. Although, that one doesn’t have a fancy sounding name like the bottom left lateral incisor that she got on 12/9/04. The bottom right first molar (which we should call “third molar”) should be popping through soon. So we’re back into teething, and I wanna go home. She isn’t sleeping normally, she’s drooling and choking on said drool, it’s not pretty.

My second thought is a story, a strange freaky story. Sydney has a glo*worm. Remember those? They haven’t gotten any less freaky. We bought it for her for Christmas, she really liked it. We originally bought it because it’s a Lullaby Glo*worm and we thought it would be cute to have her sleep with it. When her uncle uncle (yes I realized I said it twice) took off the packaging and let her play with it, we realized there was no way she could sleep with it. It’s the loudest freaking toy ever made, and it would keep her up all night. Actually I think we were worried about hearing it through the baby monitor all night and having it keep us up. This brings me to my story. This glo*worm has had dying batteries for a while, so much so that it sounds demonic. Scary, scary sounds come from this thing. For the most part it was easy to ignore by keeping it out of her reach and not letting her push the button. (Of course we couldn’t replace the batteries, stop thinking that.) Until one night when I woke up at 3 in the morning to the most horrible music coming from the baby monitor. Think horror movie, soft stretched out demon music coming from the baby’s room. She obviously wasn’t bothered by it, but I couldn’t sleep. I half expected to find her sitting up in bed just staring at me when I opened her door. She’s done that before, it’s terrifying. I fetched the glo*worm and made it stop singing its frightening song. It was three in the morning, so I don’t really remember how, but I think it involved a table and some slamming into said table. I still can’t get that sound out of my head, it really was freakier coming through the baby monitor and being all garbled. Yeah, so that story’s really not that freaky or strange, I just don’t want anyone to change the channel so I use words to keep you hooked.

I can’t think of anymore stories right now, but if I do I’ll come back, stay tuned…

I’m sure something will come to me as soon as I start writing my paper.

Now you know.

This post is going to be hard to write, maybe even hard to read by some people. I just need to get it out, and clear the air about some things. I’ve wanted to write this for a while, I just haven’t been able to, that and I needed time to sort out my thoughts and what I wanted to say.

I’ll start with saying that I had a very difficult pregnancy. At 4 weeks along I started getting sick. Not just throwing up a few times in the morning, but throwing up all day every day with only a few minutes to recover in between. At my very first appointment with my ob/gyn I was sent across the street to the hospital to be re-hydrated.

My OB started me on ginger ale and vitamin B. That was a joke. Eventually it went to more serious drugs; I don’t really remember how many at this point.

I wound up quitting my job, because I couldn’t handle being there and having to run to the bathroom constantly. No one there understood that there was nothing I could do. Most of the people tried to be helpful by offering their advice for nausea relief. They just didn’t understand that I had tried everything.

In August of 2003 I went down to the bay, to the house that James and I were married at. I stayed the weekend with my parents and friends of theirs (the people that own the house). This was the weekend that it became really bad. On Sunday morning I had a cup of decaf coffee. Not 10 minutes later it was out of my system. I proceeded to be sick the rest of the day. On the way home from the bay my parents stopped at the grocery store and I waited in the car. It was so severe that I couldn’t find a plastic bag quick enough. I had to walk into the store, track down my parents and have them buy paper towels and carpet cleaner. I thought it would eventually stop and I could just sleep. Around 5:30 on Monday morning, my chest burning and my body numb, I told James we had to go to the hospital.

We got in right away, the ER was empty. They set me up on a bed and gave me a tiny little tray “just in case” I think I needed a few. I was in the hospital for 4 days. I had to have 13 bags of fluids pumped into me. When I went back to my OB a few days later, I had lost 15 pounds, in about 2 weeks. He finally diagnosed me with Hyperemesis Gravidarum. He said that there was a drug that I could take but it was 100 dollars a pill and he wasn’t sure if my insurance covered it. We obviously couldn’t afford it without the insurance, but we looked into it anyway. Luckily it was covered by my insurance, and as soon as I started taking it, it stopped my throwing up. Well, it stopped my throwing up all day every day. I still got sick about twice a day, and the nausea never went away.

Obviously this is a lot for one person to deal with. I never wanted to get out of bed. I wished I had never become pregnant. I had horrible thoughts that I don’t even want to spell out for you. I cut everyone out of my life, because no one understood. I spent 75% of my days crying. I had screaming fights with my brother and wound up kicking him out of my house and not speaking to him for months.

There was an incident with a friend (probably my best friend at the time) that annoyed me. The “depression” or whatever you want to call it caused me to just stop speaking to her too. She started calling James at work. Looking back on it, it seems normal. If your best friend was sick, in and out of the hospital and you couldn’t get a hold of them, you would probably do everything in your power to make sure everything was okay. I see this now, but at the time, I was pissed. I didn’t think it was right to be calling my husband at work. I guess she eventually caught on to the fact that I wasn’t talking to her and gave up.

I was alone. Yes, I had James, but I pushed him farther away that anyone, without actually losing him.

Fast forward to March 23^rd. My water broke, I went to the hospital and they induced me. 36 hours later I had to have an emergency c-section. It wasn’t exactly the easy labor that I had pictured. I honestly thought that labor would be a breeze. I thought I had been through so much already that there was no way there could be more.

That’s when the true depression started. Any people that I had continued to talk to were abandoned. I tried to put on a happy face, I think it fooled some, but James was my personal punching bag. I said the most horrible things to him. I told him to leave on a daily basis. When he was promoted and transferred to Jersey, I was devastated. I had to leave my parents. I literally never left the house, I was scared to go anywhere with Sydney unless James was with me. I made my way back to Dover every chance I got. I went to a food Show in Philly with my parents and cried the whole way home. I did not want to leave them, and there was no way for me to express the foggy box I was in.

The worst it ever got was right after Christmas. My brother in law was in town, and he witnessed one of my complete breakdowns. It is absolutely the most embarrassing moment of my life. He hasn’t made a big deal out of it, but our relationship changed after that.

When we found out that we could move back home I was ecstatic. That was when everything changed. I guess I made the decision to stop. I know I should have seen the doctor, but when I called to set up the appointment and the nurse told me that it was just PMS (I guess because Sydney was 11 months old already) I was too embarrassed to go. I thought I was just blowing it all out of proportion. I thought they were going to tell me to take mi*dol and get over myself. So I decided to change on my own.

We came home and I started obsessively calling my brother in law. For some reason that was the most important relationship to fix. My progress seemed to rely on whether or not Tom and I were friends again. I don’t think he’ll ever know how much he changed my life. Gradually I started calling people and going out shopping. I think things are a lot better now. I still have a ways to go. There are days that I still can’t bring myself to do anything but sit at the computer, and there are times when I just can’t walk out the front door. There are relationships that are still rocky and some that are still non-existent, but I know I’m getting there.

I’m sorry for anyone that I’ve hurt over the past two years, and I’m sorry to Sydney for not being the mother you deserved for so long. I’m sorry to James for treating you like you weren’t the most important thing in the world to me.

Also, I’m sorry Hollie. I’m sorry I never gave you an explanation. I’m sorry I made you feel like you didn’t matter. I’m sorry I treated you like you didn’t matter. I miss your friendship, and I have no ill feelings towards you. I hope you can find a way to forgive me too. Because…some day when I’ve lost my sheep I hope to find him under an overpass that deer fall from and Jesus vandalized.

I would say "Laughter is the best medicine" but that's so cliché.

James has an infectious laugh. His normal laugh is just that, normal, but if he’s really amused (usually with himself) he goes into this infectious laugh. This laugh is hard to describe, I think it’s like a cross between a hyena, a car alarm, and an 80 year old smoker. It’s the kind of laugh that doesn’t have much sound except when he can get enough air in to allow the sound to come out.

Even if he’s being annoying, and he’s laughing at something he did that annoyed you, you can’t help but laugh when you hear it. Then you, of course, get more annoyed, because you were annoyed in the first place and he trivialized it by making you laugh. Eventually you just can’t hold it in. The pressure on your face is just too great. This laugh has saved us from some wicked fights. Not really, but I like the effect.

The first time I heard this laugh was also the first time I met James’ entire family. We were just friends at the time and he took me and Mel along to his family reunion. I think he wanted to look cool by showing up with two chicks. We hung out all day with his family, and eventually people went to bed and we stayed awake waiting for his brother to show up. When Tom got there, James started filling him in on the happenings of the day;Including some joke that his grandfather had told and forgotten the punch line to. (We didn’t know it at the time, but apparently this was some family joke, Mel and I were completely confused) The telling of this story made James go into his famous laugh. It went on a long time. We were starting to get worried, although, as is the nature of the laugh, we couldn’t stop laughing. James was turning red; we thought he might wake up the whole house.

We started dating about two weeks later, I think it was the laugh. To this day he can’t talk about that night without laughing.

There have been a few times that we have just started laughing about something and not been able to stop. Pope Johnny the Popular comes to mind. I won’t get into the story; I’ll let you come up with your own. (I’m laughing just thinking about it)

When I was about eleven I had my best friend Sandy spend the night at my house. Sandy and I have always had that laughter connection. This night in particular we just couldn’t stop. I don’t know what it was, maybe too much caffeine. We would be half falling asleep and one of us would look at the other and just say some meaningless word, like “the”, and we would lose it all over again. This literally went on for hours.

These moments are my favorite. I love just being able to laugh for no reason. I love that James can make me laugh harder than anyone ever has. I love that James can make everyone laugh. I love that just laughing can make Sydney laugh so hard she falls down.

The past two years have been a little short on the laughter. My mind hasn’t really allowed me to get to that uncontrollable laughter point. I plan on writing an entry on all of this soon; I just need to bring myself to do it.

I’m going to try really hard from this point on to laugh more. I want to laugh like I used to. I want James to make me laugh at the most horrible times to laugh. I want to experience the “giggle-loop” again. So I want my two faithful readers to do their best to make me laugh. In return, I promise not to turn red and pass out, that might spoil the mood…