The Light at the End

I feel terrible for not posting this earlier. I mean, how could I forget?! I suppose the same way I forgot to post Monster’s 12th birthday letter until well over 16 days past his birthday. I think it was the unemployment thing, the stagnation of life that happens and enfolds you when you’re scrabbling to search for that light at the end of the tunnel. The long ass tunnel I was stuck in for 2 months. That was torture.

My last post, on the 5th, was at 5 in the afternoon. Hey, that’s kind of neat. Anyway, I posted shortly after returning home from an interview wherein I got the job. I can’t believe I didn’t mention it or anything, but I guess I was high on life and feeling goopy with emotions towards my son. I’ll never know. The past week was a blur of activity and happiness.

I can honestly say that for the first time in a year I thorougly enjoy what I’m doing. My first job was taxing and frustrating, trying to squish a 40 hour position into 20 hours was too much to ask of one person. My second job was easy, but boring. I guess it was a nice break in the monotony, though. My third job, the most recent past one, was trying in its own way – a personal way.

This job, however, is brilliant. I’m transcribing dictations for two lawyers and helping around the office as needed. I love my boss, even if he is batty, and I love the office manager and other lawyers here. It’s relaxed enough to not make me feel stressed, I don’t have to battle 7 a.m. traffice since I start at 9 a.m. and lunch isn’t a thing to plan around, it just happens. I can’t say it’ll always be like this, what if it won’t? It doesn’t matter. I didn’t fall into a position that was overwhelming in its duties and priorities. I’m easing in, slowly taking things on as they come at me, learning the programmes and systems as things flow. I’m just starting to answer the phones on a more regular basis, with slightly more confidence than last week.

I’m looking at long term employment here. I’ll work here through my transcription degree and transition into a part-time medical transcription job while continuing to work for this law firm. I hope that after two years, I’ll have accrued enough in-field practice to bid the firm adieu and focus full time on my medical transcription job. So I’m going to be insanely busy.

One thing I realized, with great sadness, is that we will be living in our same apartment for another year. Which means Monster is stuck at the same school for another year. Which means we’re stuck in our crappy neighbourhood for another year. Tihs also means we wait another year to get a dog. Which kind of destroyed me for about three days. I want a dog with such a ridiculous passion, I imagine every dog I see on the street as being our dog and how it would work out. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. Another year to plan isn’t too bad, though.

The last thing on my mind right now is TTC. It’s still there, though, gnawing at my brain. Every time I see a little baby, my heart gets that fluttery feeling and I wonder when our relationship will get back on that track. Not any time soon, and I’ve accepted that. I cherish that knowledge and hope that when we are ready, we have everything we need to hit the ground running. This includes a dog first. And a bigger place – a rented house, maybe? Who knows.

Right now, I’m happy. I haven’t been happy in months. My last job was sucking my soul straight from my body, and unemployment just made me feel terrible about myself. This job seems to be restoring a huge part of my personality to ‘right’. I’m also spending a lot of time with my best friend, and that seems to be helping substantially with my cabin fever.

My next post will be about the hardcore/awesome/amazing weekend I just spent with her. Let me just say that we communed with nature.

(Also, yesterday was my cat’s birthday. Nefertiti turned 6 years old. I remember the day I got her, she was only 8 weeks old and tiny as can be. It was the middle of summer and she used to cry because she couldn’t get onto the desk to sit with me. She learned how to crawl up the side of my bed, using her baby claws, just so she could sleep by my head. I miss the tiny, sweet kitten who watched Law & Order: SVU before bed and slept with her favourite toy mouse betwee her paws.)

Wednesdays are Rarely Wordless

I like alliteration. It’s fun and it makes teaching children easier. Like on Yo Gabba Gabba, the story that involves anthropomorphic animals and alliterated names gets kids to associate letters with animals – Gary Gorilla etc. etc. My point is, I think alliteration is great, but I can’t ever seem to be truly wordless on a Wednesday post. Plus, I haven’t had the energy/time/patience to scour through the past months of photos – Christmas, being a big one.

Instead, I’ll tell you that we babysat Baby B today while her parents attended a funeral. Things went like this:

Her mother swooped in at almost 11 a.m. and dumped her on the couch and ran off. I’m guessing things were falling way behind schedule. I immediately switched on the On Demand Preschool channel and found, thankfully, five Yo Gabba Gabba videos (together, move, car and two others I didn’t pay attention to). Don’t mess with that child’s YGG, she knows ‘Gabba’ by sight and will point it out before you have the chance to switch to BBC Kids or Sprout. She was provided with Kix, ice water and an array of toys. She alternated dancing, chasing our terrified Siamese around the house, and screaming at our youngest cat who was lodged firmly beneath the bed. Lunch was a chopped up turkey dog and more ice water. Nap time was had, merrily, by this growing toddler (did I mention she’s TWO now?!) and she was down for more than an hour. There was more YGG after nap time, baked Tuscan herb chips, more toys, more chasing of the cats, more dancing. I settled her for a book – 1 Zany Zoo, which can be found in the Cheerios box – which she yelled at and enjoyed, I think. Her mom appeared at 4 and now the kid is gone.

I think this is where most people are happy that they have the sanity of their home back. I guess I am, because she got a bit disobedient when her mom showed up – the whole time though she was pretty good and agreed to put things up when we said so. But I’m also saddened, because it was nice to spend time with someone, even if they still kind of speak their own language.

Tonight will be W1D2 (week 1, day 2) of C25K (Couch-to-5K Running Plan), followed by a nice relaxing shower and rounding off the day with the classic film noir The Third Man. I’ll be blogging about C25K elsewhere, but I’ll make sure to add anything important over here – trust me, if it’s noteworthy, I’ll note it. (What is noteworthy right now is that the soreness in my legs lasted up until this afternoon, sheesh!)

Day 7: Grocery Shopping

I’d like to think we have a great routine for grocery day, but I know that’s not the case.

Since Fil is on forced medical leave, she gets to keep her Medicaid and her Food Stamps. We get a little over $350 a month for groceries, and it’s always on the 3rd of the month. Usually we do a whole months worth of shopping on that one day, ripping the bandaid off fast I guess you could say. Normally this works alright – we huff and puff up three flights of stairs, at least four times, and for the next hour clean out the fridge and pantry and restock. It’s a pain, for sure, but we’re done and only need to fill in with bread, milk and veggies as the weeks go on.

Occasionally, it doesn’t work out so well. Like this past week when food stamps came in, it was a Tuesday. Both Fil and I knew there was no way we could accomplish a full grocery run on a weekday. We’re usually in the store for 2 – 2.5 hours on a big shopping trip. It involves two grocery carts, a calculator and a lot of patience. I don’t have a lot of patience during the work week, so we opted to grab a few things to fill in for the rest of the week and we’d get the shopping done on Saturday - er, today.

I can tell you that it sucked. I don’t know why we don’t just get it done on a weekday, when it’s not as insane and packed with loud, obnoxious UT students. Saturday, the good vegetarian selection is picked over and the vegetables have been horribly manhandled. It’s just all together frustrating and I dread dragging pounds of groceries up and down the stairs.

But, it’s all worth it, in my opinion. By the time we’ve finished and cleaned up dinner, our fridge smells nice and clean and it’s packed with yummy foods and so is our pantry. It gets very scary at the end of the month, when we’ve got some bread, milk and a bunch of Zataran’s sides… and nothing else. Be careful if you ever come to our place – our freezer is perpetually booby trapped, you might have a box of our son’s Le@n Pockets jump out at ya.

Song of the Day: Jump (for my love) – The Pointer Sisters

What’s not to love? It makes me feel happy inside, and after that shopping trip I feel triumphant enought to dance. On the inside, of course.

The Long Stretch

** I will be posting a PW post after this one, so if you want the password, you know what to do. **

This weekend was wonderful… probably because it was the first one in months where we haven’t been scrambling helplessly for money to cover our expenses.

Fil got the refundon Friday. We also got Baby B from Nk’s place (we had her for Friday, Saturday and almost all of Sunday) and went to Wal*mart for all the “needs”.

We spent the majority of the weekend out of the house. Baby B is holed up inside that tiny trailer all day and rarely gets to go on adventures, so against better judgement, we took on a ton of errands. We knew it was best because if we waited we’d run out of everything and then we’d have to take Monster and there is a reason I call him Monster.

All Friday was spent running from place to place buying way too much stuff. Well, it felt like too much. We got incredible deals and had lots of coupons so, that was okay I guess. We got a lot of cleaning, grooming and cat supplies, not to mention a lot of presents for Monster’s up-coming 11th birthday. We bought Baby B a new upright car seat (it was only $40 and we considered it Nk’s present) and a booster seat for when she’s with us, we also got new pants for Monster (his belly is just too big for his old ones!). Filand I got some cool stuff, too. She got Levi’s and rock shirts, I got sunglasses and perfume and we both treated ourselves to the B!ssle Little Green. We still haven’t even broken it out of the box, but I have a feeling that Fil is doing that right now. The best part of the whole day was paying off every one of our bills, including rent. We still have to pay our cable bill, but that’s only because it came in on Saturday.

Friday night was very, very hard. It was Baby B’s adjustment period and she was too over stimulated to even think about going down for the night. I was up with her ’til midnight rocking her, bouncing her, singing to her and laying her back down in her bed so she could drink her baba and get tired already. Every time I would try to slip away she would promptly get to her feet with a flurry of limbs and grip the side of the pack n’ play (we opted not to get her a bed yet, which was a good choice because that child held onto the railing and was able to keep an eye on us without actually following us) and scream for me until I came back in. But she finally passed out from exhaustion around 12:30 a.m. and I slipped away to relax.

Saturday was much the same, although Monster wasn’t with us as Nk and Mt took him for the weekend as that’s what Big B wanted for her birthday. They went off and did their thing while we went shopping, again. This time we got the rest of Monster’s presents (all but one), some new jeans for yours truly and silly things like socks without holes in them, bras without holes in them and a new belt for Monster.

She was much easier to put down that night, with a baba and her favorite classical music (all of the stuff on my iPod is incredibly soothing) and some dark alone time, she was out like a light at 9. So Fil and I rented an on-demand movie and got caught up on laundry. We also decided to get rid of our computers (laptop and desktop) in favor of a brand new computer. So Fil spent a lot of the night (’til 3 a.m.) fixing the older desktop while I cleaned up the laptop. Somewhere during the Property Shop on HGTV I passed out.

Sunday morning was like Saturdays, I woke up with Baby B at around 9 (she did wake up at 8 but I begged her for 45 more minutes, so she flopped back into her bed and played with her toys and yelled at herself until 8:45 on the nose when she popped back up and started yelling at me.) and I fed her some breakfast (toast with bread and honey) with apple juice. We watched Phineas and Ferb on Disney and played with toys until Fil woke up. We didn’t get to sell the computer stuff, so we just bought the new computer and I’m selling the old stuff today.

The new computer is quite nice and fancy with 4 GB of memory, a 500 GB hard drive and a 19″ LCD (energy star) monitor. Filwanted that specific computer because it was a much slimmer design and came with a HUGE 500 GB external hard drive and a free printer. We’re selling the printer on Cragislist since our newestKodak refurb works really well.

The night was very long, as Nk and Mt didn’t bring Monster home ’til 9 p.m. So we were left to feed Baby B dinner, her night snack and her twothree night babas. During her night snack she spilled juice all over herself, her booster seat, the chair it was on and the floor. Girl thought it was hilarious, meanwhile Fil’s scrubbing the floor with  soap and I’m running the drippy sticky baby to the bathroom for a bath. When Monster did get home he barely had any time to do anything but shower and play his game for 20 minutes.

My god it was a busy weekend. Baby B spent most of her time on my left hip or in the stroller. After this weekend I’ve decided that Bj*orn’s are a great invention and are a worthwhile invention. Baby B got so attached to me she would stand next to me, balancing against my side with one hand, while the other one tugged on my shirt or an errant lock of hair.

It was really hard to hand her off Sunday evening, and the entire night I kept glancing at the pack n’ play, thinking that there was a baby needing my attention. I felt like she was so happy, so comfortable that she just fit in and worked like a little cog in our family clock. She and her sister (Big B is sick) are going to be over at our place today, as Nkis getting the birthcontrol thing in her arm, so I’ll get to see both of them this afternoon (Nk is going to wait until later when I get home to unload the stroller in my back seat).

$1,700 Later

Our home is quite stocked.

I generally feel more at ease when things to smoothly and as planned. Especially when money is involved.

A lot of things went right this week.

We got our loan on Tuesday. It was almost $3,000 which was of a huge relief. We were so low on almost all household needs it was scary. That day we huffed it to Tar*get and spent almost $500 on household supplies. We are stocked for at least another 3 months in about65% of cleaning and other supplies. That was such a relief… even if it was a pain to drag everything up 3 flights of stairs. We also managed to choke up the change for Mc*Afee Total Protection so our computers would stop becoming riddled with viruses.

On the same day we treated ourselves to dinner out. We had to wait for a whole damn hour to sit, but it was almost worth it. Even if JT was all kinds of cranky and sleepy, the food was still great and I finally indulged in queso. Mmm!

Wednesday was a surprise. Fil and I were planning to spend a little money on ourselves and get another tattoo – NOT matching this time! – so we printed out some ideas and took them to our tattoo shop. There was an open slot at that moment – like 4 p.m. – so the artist took Fil’s ideas, made a quick sketch and then whisked my idea away and before I knew it I was getting inked. I don’t have a picture of it yet, but it’s a Celtic motherhood knot (look it up): two interlaced hearts in red (black outlining) with a really deep rich purple for the dark shaded regions. In one of the lobes of the heart there’s a bright purple guitar pick shaped dot that represents JT, amethyst is the Piseces birthstone, and since he is *such* a Pisces… well, it works. I will keep adding dots with the more children I have.

Thursday, which was my day off, found us sleeping in way too late to have a date. Boo. But we got up and got into gear. Our plan was to get clothes (to replace my threadbare shirts, add to my work clothes and to Fil’s jeans) and maybe indulge in a PS3.

Well, we got the clothes thing. In exchange for a PS3 we got a … new table! As we walked into Sears to get Fil’s jeans we saw a gorgeous 5 pc. set. It was the same height of our last table but looked a whole lot smaller. It has a tabacco finish on the table top and seats of the chairs, while the rest is in a rich espresso. It took FOREVER to build and we had to take it out of the box in order to take it home (remember? the IK*EA incident?) but it was SO worth it! It was $379 list price, which we gulped down and decided to go for it anyway. When the woman ringed it up, it was ON SALE, $279. When I looked at the total ($303) I almost choked. I was over the moon in LOVE with that table and was so happy it was a hundred bucks less!

We also got our replacement printer from Kodak. This one, so far, works! Hooray!

On the same day, JT finally got to spend his hard saved Christmas money on his dream: an XBOX in his room. He put himself in a little debt, but it’s totally fine since he won’t care about allowance as long as he’s playing Halo. And yes, I realise Halo is violent, but JT has proven that he can seperate game violence from real life behaviour. He’s a good boy.

All that being said, we’re only out a little over half our money. I was shocked when I checked the bank to see that we still have about $1,000 in there. The rest, including my first check, will go towards the bills we have to pay, groceries and if there’s any left, fun.

For now it seems we’ve stumbled on a lucky patch, and I’d really like to keep the good mojo flowing. So I’ll knock on wood and cross my fingers!

No News?

The title of this post is a misnomer. I have a lot of news. And because I’m rushing around, trying to find my final project for math, I’m going to start with the bullets.

• Work is going really well. I’m still in the training stage, but it seems relatively easy. Plus, I get to see my father 3x a week, rather than every few weeks.
• JT is on vacation, which means I can just relax after work and not worry about helping him with homework for like, 2 hours every night.
• Fil got a huge dose of chemo on Wednesday, as well as a lot of Nexium, Cymbalta and pain medicine to hold her over until her next appointment in January.
• We’re almost done with Christmas … sadly we thought we were ahead of the curve when we got 90% of JT’s presents out of the way before Thanksgiving, but since money has been tight, the last 10% have had to wait until ALMOST Christmas Eve. Ah!
• Fil bumped into our potential donor again while dropping of papers at work. I completely forgot about him because Fil hasn’t been into work or seen him in months. I’m so excited that he’s still in the picture!

I guess not everything’s been good, though. My sore ankle has gone from sore to painful. It’s constantly tense, and it’s very hard to point my toes forward without a jolt of pain.

We’re missing a lot of ornament hooks from the bottom of our tree and we’re nervous our younger cat Isis has swallowed them. We’ll have to take her to the vet soon if we can’t find them by next week. Uh oh!

Now it’s off to shower and get ready to turn in for my early morning tomorrow.

Double Whammy … Literally

I’m not sure how it all happened. Or really, why it all happened to us, within 2 short days.

BEWARE: THERE’S TALK OF THROW UP BELOW! TMI

Sunday, Fil … fainted, and then had what looked scarily like a seizure. She came in from having a cigarette (let’s not go on about how she should quit, because even her doctor reccommended she keep up the habit) and promptly fell onto the floor with a loud, resonating thud.

For the next 5 minutes she lay on my lap, shaking and wheezing, her eyes shut like she was sleeping. She made these choaking noises and murmured “I can’t breathe” a couple of times. I managed to sit her up, have her take a few deep breaths and waited for the shaking to relax. I got her off the floor completely and walked her the shakey 10 feet into the bedroom and into bed.

After a few tense minutes of her not speaking and shaking I got her to ask for water and a nausea pill. I gave her two. And some ibuprofen, since she hit her head on the floor pretty hard. After she managed to take a short nap, I convinced her to eat (a piece of pie, a plate of leftovers, and some more pie), which she did slowly, and then slept from midnight ’til 2 p.m. the next day.

In the rushed-ness of it all, Fil never realised she took a tumble, so she didn’t understand why her head hurt so damn much (scarily enough, she doesn’t remember anything the hour before she fell, too).

It was pretty scary, I can tell you that, to be idly watching Food Network and then to hear her smash against the floor behind me. My heart was pounding so fast, I had to calm myself as I rushed to her side so I wouldn’t rashly call 911. Good choice, I think.

And onto the second whammy.

Last night around 2 a.m. I was up getting Fil some pumpkin pie whilst doing a project for HG&D (incidentally is due in an hour and a half) when I went to flick the kitchen light on. I heard something no parent wants to hear. The sickening *hurk* and *sploosh* of my son vomitting in his bedroom. Without a blink I rushed to Fil, told her that JT is throwing up, and quickly scrambled to put the pie up as the cats were eyeing it like a hawk.

I won’t go too far into the gory details, suffice to say we’re near positive he has food poisoning. His friend JM came over on Saturday with it, interestingly enough from Chuck-E-Cheeses, from the pizza. Incidentally, we went to Gatti’s for a quick dinner and what did he wolf down? Pizza. Not that we’re blaming ourselves, it was only $15 for the buffet and we had a grand total of $29 to our name. But still, perhaps we should have gone with IHOP…

He only threw up 3 times last night. A vast improvement on the night he got food poisoning from a piece of bad, microwaved fish. Looking back, I don’t think I posted about that. One night he went over to JM’s house after having wolfed down an not-so savory microwave meal (Hungry Man!) of fried cod. Hmm. I hadn’t been feeling good, so I was sleeping in the bedroom while Fil made him dinner before he left. When he came home, because he felt queasy (this was at midnight) all hell broke loose. He puked his poor little guts out for hours, all through the night into the next day. He stayed in the bathroom for over an hour, crying and shaking. It was so bad we had to buy nausea medicine from W@lgreens. That night was… with nothing else perfectly descriptive… HORRIBLE.

Last night… not as bad. He did however, manage to make the one mistake he always makes, and tried to run to the bathroom… or stumble since he was sleeping. He made it a whole 2 feet before he let loose and consequentially is lying in bed while his carpet is still wet from a hardcore scrub-down. We made sure to get him an empty trashcan for later episodes (which, to his credit, he used).

Not to mention, as I was attempting to print my wonderful project… the printer decided to go to hell in a handbasket. I spent nearly 2 hours trying to print my paper that took 1 hour to write. ARG!

I feel like this weekend offered myself no respite from the wickedness of the holidays. No rest for the weary, I guess. It’s so unfair, I just want to throw my body on the floor and have a good temper tantrum!

Day 25: Santa?

No, I’m not going to get into this here. I don’t feel like writing about watching my son’s belief in Santa die before my eyes. At least not today. Maybe after Thanksgiving when I’m full of thankful thoughts and food.

Instead I’ll write about how I have nothing to write about. About how I’m stuffing this cop-out version of a post full of text and nothingness in hopes of pushing the drama of the weekend further down the page.

I’m still angry about all that.

So now I’ll roll over and cuddle with Fil. We’re both so much more snuggly after watching The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2. Cute movie

Day 14: My F*cking Tires

Well… it happened.

I shoulda known when we went to fill the tires with free air at the V@lero, that the tires were set to blow soon. They were cracked, leaking air, and in generally bad shape.

Now, this morning was a cool morning. Not too bad, 71, but a lot cooler and wetter than yesterday. Also, I might mention that I sped a little (not excessive, maybe 5 miles over? Not even, enough to get me to school faster as I was late) over a maybe 10 mile expanse? 15 miles maybe? So, them puppies were HOT!

I should have known something was going to happen when I pulled out of my parking space at school. But I continued along.

At the 360 exit, my tire exploded, sending stinky bits of hot rubber into the air.

Crap.

So I pulled over, called Fil and then immediately phoned my father for help. I don’t have a jack or anything as the 10k car didn’t even come with one.

After 20 minutes of sitting in a hot car (with cramps, I might add) and then struggling to change a very heavy, destroyed tire, I was on my way. Dad treated me to some lunch while I got new tires and then I drove off into the sunset.

I will not say it, but seriously, KNOCK ON WOOD.

Day 8: A Wonderful-ish Day

Today really was a wonderful-ish day. We woke up late to a dressed, fed and gaming JT. I was relieved that he brushed his teeth and fed himself and was happily playing Fable on the computer. He is quite self sufficient, even if we occasionally have to remind him of his routine.

We had a tiny breakfast and got ready for the day. A little under 2 hours later, we made ourselves eat a decent sized lunch. I made Fil some vegetable broth with white rice and I had left over vegetarian taco meat, spanish rice and vegetarian pinto beans with a little bit of homemade guacamole. Delicious lunch. We watched T.V. and cuddled all day until dinner.

Fil and JT were craving corn dogs so we made up corn dogs and baked fries and had a simple yet filling dinner. I worked on some homework for anatomy.

Later on Fil asked me to make up some cookies, my now world famous amazing chocolate chip cookies (with peanuts and pumpkin pie spices and oatmeal). So I spent the majority of the evening converting my recipes into a less filthy format while the cookies baked.

It sounds lazy, it sounds boring, but I was thrilled to just relax when I spent all of last night working on my anatomy homework (5 hours of it). Alsok, I treated my poor, sickly Fil to her favourite cookies and a really easy, nyummy dinner.

I’m pleased with my Sautrday. (I also might be getting a recipe box out of this so, woohoo!)