Jaded Jennifer

I’m sitting in my bedroom writing today. I’ve been happy because I’m actually accomplishing something. Normally, when I’m writing, Wren stays downstairs and keeps the kids out of my hair, and will occasionally show up with a hot cup of coffee for me, made just the way I like it with hazelnut and caramel creamers and lots of sugar.

Today, though, he started watching the Amazing Race on his computer and I guess coffee didn’t cross his mind. I sent him text messages….that he never even saw because he was so into the show he didn’t hear his creepy phone talking to him. As far as I know, he STILL hadn’t seen them. But here they are, for all of YOU to see:

4:31pm - Coffee?

4:41pm - So is that a no on the coffee?

5:03pm - I want sex. Come and do me now.

5:11pm - So is that a no on the sex too?

5:26pm - You suck

5:30pm - I offer you sex in exchange for coffee and you ignore it. How rude.

5:39pm - What do I have to do for a cup of coffee around here? Offer you a strip tease?

5:40pm - A foot rub?

5:43pm - A blow job?

5:47pm - A threesome?

5:55pm - Seriously. What does a girl have to do to get a cup of coffee around here?

5:59pm - I’d offer to floss your cat but I don’t think that would do it for you.

6:06pm - Fine. I give up. I didn’t want coffee anyway. Jerkface.

Isn’t it fun to have a text message conversation with yourself? Hey, at least I lasted an hour and a half before I resorted to name calling.

Oh, and in other news, a killer whale killed somebody yesterday. Shocking.

Ok, back to writing.

Some days….like today, for example……I just wish I could sit around in my bedroom naked. Ever have those days? Where every place clothing touches your body hurts? Like, I’m pretty sure my ribs are currently being crushed by my bra and my pants are absolutely strangling my stomach right now. I kind of wonder why clothes were even invented and I really don’t get why they had to be made so restricting that they literally break bones. Ok, maybe not literally but it feels that way sometimes.

So why can’t I just sit around in my bedroom naked? Well, I could….I guess. I could always lock my door and lounge on my bed unclothed. Nobody would see me. Hey, if I owned a bathrobe, I could even just throw it on when somebody knocks on the door. Of course, I don’t actually own a bathrobe because every single time I’ve bought one I somehow lose the tie for it or it just disappears completely. But at least with the door locked, I wouldn’t risk somebody barging in and seeing me.

The problem is that I would still have to see me. And I’m not sure I’m ok with that. It’s one thing to see myself in the mirror when I’m standing up and able to suck in my stomach so that it gives the illusion of being flat. Unfortunately, I can’t really do that same thing when I’m sitting on my bed, criss-cross applesauce (that’s the PC version of Indian-style, in case you weren’t aware), leaning over my laptop typing. No, that’s when all of the flab scrunches up and the boobs flop down and all it takes is once glance away from the screen to see it. And I just ate dinner. And it was pretty good so I’d rather not lose it all over my keyboard. Especially since my warranty just expired on my laptop and I couldn’t clean the vomit out of the keys enough to get it to work again.

So I guess I’ll stay clothed. *sigh*  But maybe, just maybe, I could take my bra off and toss it in the closet. Maybe.

I have too much I want to blog about this morning. Sometimes, when I have so many things I want to talk about, they all get jumbled in my head and I can’t figure out how to yank those pieces out and put them back together. So here are a couple of things I managed to salvage out of the wreckage.

Life magazine did a wonderful piece on famous literary drunks and addicts that you should check out. That’s a link, by the way. Click on it. I promise it won’t bite.

It got me thinking….is it just normal for creative people to become addicted to things? I’ve always said that I have an addictive personality. Which, to me, means that I become addicted to things WAY too easily. It’s not just my cigarettes and Mountain Dew, really. I become addicted to foods all the time. Wren makes biscuits and gravy and suddenly I’m addicted, so that all I want to eat for the next two weeks is biscuits and gravy and so what if he’s sick of it after two days, I’M ADDICTED ASSHOLE SO GO MAKE ME MORE!!!! Phew, sorry. Lost it there for a moment. It’s not just foods either. I become addicted to everything. Like drawing, for example. I start drawing and I just can’t stop. I’ll draw constantly for weeks, and then suddenly I’m sick of it and I move onto another addiction.

Really, I sometimes feel like my life is just one addiction after another. What I eat, what I drink, what I do each day is all determined by what I happen to be addicted to at that moment. It’s really not fun. But maybe, just maybe, it’s normal, huh? Go check out that Life article and see how many of those photographs have somebody smoking in them.

Oh, and another thing I salvaged from my messy brain is this:

I completed one of my bucket list items last weekend, just like I said I was going to. I wanted to add some photos but for some reason WordPress hates me today and won’t let me add photos or properly edit any of my pages. So I guess that will have to wait. Seriously, the internet really is trying to ruin my life.

Aliens woke me up this morning. I’m not kidding. Or it could have been a ghost. I really wasn’t sure. I passed out down in the living room on the love seat last night around 10pm, which is WAY early for me. At 5:50 this morning, I was jarred from my peaceful slumber by a jingle and a woman’s voice. I was disoriented (from being downstairs and it being so dark, not to mention the music coming from Wren’s laptop when I always sleep to the television) but I KNEW the voice came from behind my head. I sat up quickly and kept looking around, trying to find this person who talked. There was nobody there. I contemplated the idea that we may have a ghost in our apartment, then I finally decided to get up and pee…ummmm….I mean, use the restroom, and as I was walking in there, I heard a very distinctive beep from the living room. I didn’t turn around and look because I was sure it was an alien spaceship about to beam me up and I figured it would be better if I emptied my bladder first.

I guess emptying the bladder also allowed my brain to start working because when I went and sat back down on the love seat, I realized that Wren’s phone was plugged in and sitting on the window right above my head. I reached for it and, sure enough, he had a new text message. So that explained the beeping. It was some stupid thing from MySpace, which I replied “STOP” to so that they’d quit sending it. I set the phone back on the windowsill and then JUMPED when that stupid voice said “new message” or some crap like that.

So now apparently cell phones are trying to ruin my life too. I should have gone back to bed when I had the chance.

I’m going to give the best advice that you will EVER get in your life. Ever. You got that? So I want you to listen to this advice closely and remember it:

Don’t EVER, EVER, EVER get addicted to anything.

See what great advice that was? If it weren’t for my caffeine and nicotine addictions, life wouldn’t be so terribly bad right now. It wouldn’t be great, of course, but it wouldn’t be bad. Today was one of those days where everything kind of closed in on me at once.

Sitting in my room all day by myself, with nobody to talk to, was getting to me. Then the whole not having a vehicle to even go anywhere, having my phone shut off last week and my cable and internet shut off this week, not having enough money to buy cigarettes, which I’m out of so I’m smoking Wren’s and those make me feel like absolute crap, and not even having the money to go buy a Mountain Dew…it was a bit overwhelming. Seriously, I can deal with not having a vehicle. That’s what buses are for, right? I can live without cable. I have DVD players and every season of Friends, plus Charmed, Medium, Roseanne and Law and Order: SVU. I can’t really live without internet but luckily I’m in an apartment complex and I have neighbors who haven’t figured out how to secure their network. And the phone? Well, yeah, that sucks but honestly, I don’t use it too much. It’s really just a text messenger to me. But I do kind of need it. Wren couldn’t even go look for a job this week like he had planned since he didn’t have a phone number to put down on applications. Check didn’t come today, even though it was sent last Friday. With any luck it will be here tomorrow and since I don’t have a vehicle or money for the bus, I will be walking the 2.34 miles to the bank, then to Cricket to get my cell phone back on because I simply can’t be without a phone. But, see, I could have dealt with all of this today if it weren’t for those damn addictions. To many people, cigarettes and Mountain Dew are just a luxury, one they think I could and should live without. Honestly, those are the people who AREN’T addicted to them, don’t have problems with addiction, and don’t understand how stressful addictions can actually be. And even though I had half a bottle of Mountain Dew left, the fact that my mini-fridge in my bedroom was devoid of little green bottles was starting to make me antsy.

J.R. is the only one in this house with a phone, but he was at his girlfriend’s house, where he went after school without even checking with us, and we needed his phone to call and see how much money Wren had left on his Visa so we could go get me some Mountain Dew. So, I jumped onto my computer, with the internet that I’m pirating from a neighbor that is getting a CRAPPY signal, and I went to mycricket.com to send J.R. a text message and tell him he needed to come home.

And here it is. Proof that everybody is out to get me, even the internet:

What the hell? Seriously? Do you see any triangles up there? It took me 3 times refreshing the damn page before the picture even showed up and then I get this crap. Come on, Cricket. How am I supposed to click on all of the triangles when there aren’t any there???

P.S. You’ll be happy to know that I got my Mountain Dew. Still smoking Wren’s cigarettes for now and I think they’re killing me much quicker than my normal menthol light 100s. His full flavor kings make me feel like I’ve got black lung or something.

P.P.S. I will be quitting smoking soon. Hopefully before summer. I’ve been smoking for over 20 years now, though, so it won’t be fun or pleasant, as I’m sure will be chronicled in this blog.

There’s a reason I don’t walk around my house naked. It’s the same reason that I change my clothes as quickly as possible, with no mirrors in sight. I sure as hell don’t wanna see me naked. Hard to believe anybody else does, but then, I always knew Wren was slightly crazy. Why do you think I started dating him? It takes crazy to handle living with me and my brood.

But, you know, I put my foot down when it comes to bathing and sex. Those are things that just require nudity. Also, golf lessons and driving to the gun range, but we won’t go there.

Tonight I laid in my bed afterward, disgustedly analyzing my naked flesh. I really felt the need to complain about what I saw, but I get no satisfaction when I bitch at Wren. Even when I took his hand and pushed his finger repeatedly down on my stomach saying “squish! squish! squish!” he just laughed and told me I’m a goober. Rude, right? I believe only another woman could truly understand my anguish.

So I’m writing this letter to my body. Does that mean you shouldn’t read it since you’re not my body? Nah, go ahead. My body and I have no secrets.

Dear Body,

What the fuck is wrong with you?! Ahem…I mean, hi, how are you doing? I apologize for interrupting your lovely evening and I am truly sorry I had to stop stuffing cheddar and sour cream potato chips (your favorite) inside of you long enough to write this letter. But your recent conduct must be addressed.

I realize that we just celebrated our 34th birthday, but that’s really no reason for you to throw in the towel and give up. I certainly haven’t. I mean, come on. What’s with the run-away boobs? Boobs are supposed to be cute and perky, or haven’t you heard that? When I lay flat on my back, they shouldn’t try to run away into my armpits. Get some damn control over them before I call the boob-catcher to come in and wrestle them back into place. And nevermind Wren’s whole “boobs don’t sit upright like that without silicone.” What does HE know? He’s not the one laying here with nipples who surely must have had a fight because they’re trying to get as far away from each other as they can.

And yeah, he doesn’t understand the problems with the squishy tummy. Why is it that when HE gains belly fat, it’s all hard and firm so that when he lays flat it could almost appear to be a firm, toned stomach, but the fat around OUR middle is all soft and squishy like a big old girdle made of marshmallow? Really Body. You can do better than that, can’t you? You’re not made out of JELLO for God’s sake.

But I think the worst of it, really, is the stretch marks on the top of our thighs. Where the hell did you even GET those from? The stretch marks on our stomach I can understand. I mean, those 6 kids sleeping downstairs are clear evidence of those tummy stretch marks. But last time I checked babies were carried in the ABDOMEN, not in the THIGHS. I sure as hell don’t remember getting kicked in the femur when we were pregnant, do you? No, I’m pretty sure that was the bladder and kidneys, which are in our STOMACH, not our legs. Did the stretch marks migrate when I wasn’t looking? Do we have run-away stretch marks too? Did they just slide down and take up residence there? Am I going to wake up tomorrow with them on my kneecaps?

I’m sorry to be so abrupt about this, Body, but I’m a little bit fed up. How about we make a deal? I promise to continue to provide you with your Mountain Dew, Hostess cupcakes and Cheetos, if you promise to make some effort to pull yourself together. Just a little effort. Please?

Are my pleas falling on deaf ears? Are you currently laughing at my desperate attempts to bribe you into submission? Fine. How about a threat then?

Get yourself in shape soon or I’ll FORCE you to get in shape and trust me, neither one of us wants that.

No? How about blackmail then? Ummm…oh! If you don’t do as I ask, I’ll distribute photos of your flaws all over the internet and…oh wait. Nevermind. I don’t want that either.

Fine. Whatever. Hand me the freaking bag of chips.

Forever (unfortunately) yours,
Jennifer

Recently Pepsi decided to release “throwbacks”. I guess they’re supposed to be the old versions of our favorite soft drinks. All I know is, one day I found myself driving around town without my standard Mountain Dew bottle beside me. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t go anywhere without my best friend, dressed in all of its green glory. But see, I had driven my car to the car lot so they could replace the O2 censor and I left my pop in there while we ran around town in the van.

So I stopped at a gas station and sent Wren in to grab me a Dew. He carried it out and I quickly opened it and guzzled, sure I was dying of thirst since it had been a whole 20 minutes since I last tasted that citrusy yumminess. It was cold. It was wet. And it was all fine. Until I swallowed. Then I frantically searched the floor of the van for something sharp I could use to scrape the taste buds off of my tongue.

If you haven’t tasted Pepsi’s new Mountain Dew “throwback”, don’t. Just don’t. It’s disgusting. They say it’s made with natural sugars. Tastes like Splenda to me, and let me tell you there is NOTHING natural about sugar-free sugar. That’s like chocolate-free chocolate or a blue orange. Or like Carrot Top dying his hair black. Come on. That’s just plain unnatural.

Seriously. If you ever find yourself with a “throwback”, do what the bottle suggests. And if Wren ever buys me another one (because he’s bought me at least 4 of them in the last week) (because he’s a guy and doesn’t look at the bottle) (”it’s green” he says “that’s all I noticed”), then he may find HIMSELF being thrown back. And if Pepsi continues producing this disgusting product and trying to disguise it as a “return to your youth” I may just have to track down the genuises who came up with this marketing scheme and forcefeed them sugar-free sugar, chocolate-free chocolate, blue oranges, AND Carrot Top.

Ok, I think I’m done bitching now.

I now know why children look so innocent when they’re sleeping.

It’s so we forget about the hell they put us through when they’re awake.

It’s the same reason they say cute things that make us laugh. Like Boogie telling us today that her nose was “just a little bit slobbery” when Wren said it was stuffy. Or in the midst of her 5 straight hours crying and carrying on, just when we ALL (including the other kids) were seriously considering cutting our ears off so we wouldn’t have to listen to it anymore, she suddenly said in her best drama queen voice “I just can’t take it anymore!”

I can’t stand over-tired, cranky kids. Especially when they’re so dramatic all the time. It makes it hard to tell if there’s something REALLY wrong or if they’re just practicing for their Broadway debut.

Tonight, for the first time ever, Wren burned dinner. He was making gravy and he actually ended up scorching it so the whole batch tasted burnt and he had to toss it and start over from scratch. Tonight, for the first time ever, I realized that Hunter may not be my biggest challenge. Tonight, every single person in this house was tense and on edge and would have loved to pack a bag and run away even if it meant sleeping under a bridge and eating canned beans for the next 20 years. Tonight, I sat in my bedroom in tears wondering what the hell happened to my life.

It’s hard to believe a 5 year old can cause so much stress. I’ve lived through 2 kids with colic, one of them being said 5 year old who also had acid reflux as a baby. She didn’t spit up or anything. No, it sat in her esophagus and BURNED so she ended up on 2 different medications that only helped shorten the crying time by maybe an hour a day. So, you know, instead of listening to her cry for 16 hours, we only had to hear it for 15 hours.

I’ve been through a dog bite on the face of my 4 year old that required over 20 stitches. I’ve been through a 2 year old who repeatedly bashed his head into things so that he had a permanent bruise on his forehead, and a doctor who said “Oh, it’s no big deal. If he knocks himself out, just make an appointment and we’ll fit him for a helmet.” Hello? If my 2 year old ends up unconscious I’m not going to calmly call and make a doctor’s appointment. I’ve rushed my 10 month old to the hospital because he had a 106.5 degree fever, brought my 8 year old to the ER to get his head sewn up because he bashed it on a toy when he didn’t want to do his homework, almost had to call the fire department when my 3 year old got his hand stuck under his bedroom door, had to bring my 6 year old to the emergency room when his sister tried to cut his thumb off with a pair of kitchen shears, which they glued back together, which meant I had to bring him back again when the glue didn’t hold. (Sadly, most of these things happened with Hunter.) On a daily basis, for the last 16 years, I’ve refereed and broken up fights, administered advice, dried up tears, mopped up flooded bathrooms, swept up broken dishes, kissed and bandaged owies, brushed knots out of hair, cleaned butter off of walls, spaghetti sauce off of ceilings and gum out of carpets. I’ve tracked down shoes, fixed broken toys, sewn new clothes, baked cakes and cookies and brownies, made Halloween costumes, placed paintings on the refrigerator, hung paper snowflakes from the ceiling, and held wet wash cloths on temporary tattoos until my fingers looked like prunes.

Despite all of this, all it took tonight was one 5 year old to break it all down and make me feel like a helpless parent who has no idea what she’s doing raising kids.

Man, that child has some power.

There are mice living in our basement. They’re not rat-like mice with beady red eyes and scaly tails. No, they’re fairly cute, furry little grey mice. I probably never would have realized they were there if it weren’t for Oreo the Mouse Hunter cat who thinks it’s great fun to catch them, carry them upstairs to the living room and play with them until she either kills them or they escape and run under the entertainment center only to jump out at us when we’ve forgotten about them and are naively watching the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition where the cute little girl has cancer and wishes she could be a baby again so she had more life left to live. Oh, you know the episode. They’re all the same really, designed to have you blubbering like an idiot while simulteously trying to figure out if you could withstand the pain of cutting your own leg off so you too could get a house with a dollhouse bedroom and a swimming pool in your backyard.

But I digress. We’ve gotten used to these little surprises that the cat keeps on bringing upstairs for us so you’d think we’d all be ok with it by now. Wren doesn’t understand how a person like me, who used to have pet mice living in cages in her bedroom and would put her hand in the cage and let them crawl up her arm and then put them on her bed and lay there reading a book with 9 mice running across her legs and stomach, can freak out and scream like a little girl at the sight of a big black and white cat walking into the room with a tail hanging from her mouth. I guess he just doesn’t get it. Those were pet mice. These are real mice. You know, the plague carrying kind. (And if you tell me that the plague was started by rats, I will personally send my cat to your house armed with 20 of these little mice to prove you wrong.)

The girls are afraid of them, of course, but so are the boys. That shouldn’t surprise me since Hunter won’t even pick up our little toy pomeranian-poodle and set her on the floor when she’s in his way. He’d rather stand there and try to lure her out of his spot on the couch with a cookie (she’s a weird dog and would rather eat sweets than hamburger, unless it’s properly spiced, of course).

So yesterday when Boogie started telling me this story about how Oreo brought a mouse upstairs while we were sleeping and she locked them in the bathroom with her, then picked up the mouse (presumably dead) by the tail and threw it out the bathroom window, I really didn’t believe her. I’m not stupid, I promise. I just had a hard time believing that she would ever pick up a mouse, dead or otherwise, not to mention the fact that the cat always tries to rip Wren’s hand off when he takes her playthings away from her. I kind of just brushed off the story until about half an hour later when I went in to pee and I thought, well, you know, she could have been telling me the truth.

Sure enough, I opened the bathroom window and poked my head out to find a little, grey, fuzzy, quite dead mouse laying on the stack of chairs under the window.

And I couldn’t help thinking about our old cat Lynx who used to catch mice and eat them but she’d leave the head behind as a “present” to us, usually right on the floor next to my bed so I’d be sure to step on a bloody mouse head when I woke up in the morning. And then I started thinking about how Boogie has started leaving me “treats” on my pillow so I’ll be sure to see them when I wake up. You know, things like cookies or chocolate eggs or pieces of cheese.

And all I could think of was that I’m really glad that my 5 year old had the common sense to throw the dead mouse out the window because if I had woken up with that plague-carrying creature on my pillow, I may have thrown Boogie out the bathroom window.

Life feels like a giant roller coaster to me sometimes. As great as the highs are, the lows absolutely suck. I’d really just love to find that middle ground.

This week has been one of those weeks. Waiting on a check so I can have a birthday party for my daughter, whose birthday was LAST week. The check should have been here on Tuesday, so I planned the party for Thursday giving me one day to run all over town getting everything for the party. Instead, the check came today. And because my mailman is retarded, I didn’t get it until 4:30pm. So much for a Thursday party. There’s no way I’m running around in rush hour traffic to get everything.

But things were going pretty good this week. I finished writing my book and I’m really happy with it. I’m working on editing it now and want to get that done before the weekend so I can get some friends of mine to be my “test audience” and tell me what they think and if I should change anything. Then I’m off to the fun agent search again, but even that I don’t mind this time because I think I can write a better query for this book.

Found out that I’m getting my financial aid back so I get to start school next Monday. But we still hadn’t heard if Wren gets his back. I sat here making plans to pay for him to go if they didn’t give it back to him, knowing it would mean we’d be strapped for cash this quarter, but also knowing if I did that he’d get his back in summer.

But then we found out, he’s getting his back and gets to start on Monday too! Yay!!!

And then the furnace quit working.

No idea WHY it quit working. We tried changing the filter in it but no luck. I’m not about to call my mother and tell her that her furnace isn’t working because I’m sure she’ll blame us and it’s not like she’ll get anybody here to fix it. I figured, warm weather is right around the corner and by the time it gets cold again, we’ll be moved out and my mom will be back here.

But here it is, April 1st, and it’s SNOWING outside. It’s so cold in this house that we’re all bundled up in thick socks and hoodies, cuddling with the cat and dog under blankets.

Wren made a fire in the fireplace, but he used the last of the wood and since my check wasn’t here yet, we couldn’t really go buy more. So we turned on the oven, opened the door and set up a fan in the kitchen. lol Really, can you GET more ghetto than that?

Even with the furnace not working, I’ve still been in a great mood. Everything was starting to go our way.

Except for the mailman who hates us and seems to be holding all of our GOOD mail as long as possible, but that’s for a different blog.

This afternoon I finally got my letter from the school saying how much I’ll be getting in financial aid. And for some reason, they’re not giving me ANY student loans. WTF? The amount of money I’m getting will barely pay for my classes and books, it sure as hell won’t pay the other bills so I can actually GO to school instead of having to work. Oh, I know a lot of people go to school and work at the same time. I bet they also don’t have 6 kids who go to 3 different schools clear across town so that they have to drive over and pick them all up at 3 different times each day. That, or they have REALLY good childcare.

Could you imagine the cost of childcare for 6 kids? I’d have to get a second job just to be able to pay it.

As anybody knows, though, when you’re on a really big high, you crash really hard. So this letter crashed both me and Wren, who realizes they probably won’t be giving him loans either because apparently we’re both in default and didn’t know it. Since when did they STOP sending out letters to tell you when a payment is due? I’ve never received a thing from them.

Or so I thought. I found some emails in my spam box from them, called their number and they’re doing some forebearance thing to get me out of default and then I have to print off this application for deferment and send it to them along with some papers and my first born or something. And THEN I have to contact the school and hope it’s not too late to get my loans back.

I swear, I had less problems getting into school than I’m having getting BACK into school. You’d think it would be easier since it hasn’t even been a year since I was there.

I’m trying to remain optimistic. Even though my fingers are so cold it’s actually becoming painful to type this, and my bed is covered in papers that I dug out of the filing cabinet to figure everything out, and my book is sitting here open in Word NOT getting edited, and Wren told me he doesn’t WANT to make anything for dinner tonight (I’m mourning the homecooked meal, let me tell ya), and there are rather large snowflakes falling outside my bedroom window, I’m trying to remain optimistic.

Plus side: My book, Unrequited, is finished! Yay!!! I’ll just focus on that thought for awhile.

I’m having one of those “I really want to put all of my kids up for adoption” kind of days.

And I’m trying really hard to remember why I wanted so many kids when I was younger. I always said I wanted 10 kids. Then I found out how babies are born and decided I would just adopt. I mean, come on, childbirth HURTS. Of course, I was only 9 years old and didn’t know anything about lovely epidurals.

When I got older (older meaning 16 years old) me and my future ex-husband decided two kids would be good. We wanted a boy and then a girl, and we thought 2 years apart would be perfect.

J.R. was born on 11/11/92. On his second birthday, his sister Katie was born.

Then came Dustin 13 months after Katie while I was on birth control pills.

Then 2 and a half years later came Hunter while I was on Depo-Provera.

Then 11 months later came Mikaela….well, because we were drunk and stupid which translates to not being careful.

Then Mark had a vasectomy, the only birth control that worked for me.

That didn’t help me once me and Mark split up. So I started taking the pill and ended up with Wren. 2 months later I got pregnant with Boogie.

And a year later, Wren got a vasectomy for Father’s Day. I even took him to the same doctor I took Mark to. I think that doctor likes me.

So now here I am, 6 kids later, and I can’t quite remember what I thought was so great about having kids. I told Wren I want to put them all up for adoption. He said we could keep the two oldest ones. Then he changed it and said we’d just keep Katie. She’s such a huge help around here and never causes any problems, even at 14 years old when she should be a huge pain in the ass. I guess the other kids are trying to make up for her.

J.R. isn’t a HUGE pain but he’s just so dramatic and pessimistic and he drives us insane sometimes with his bitching. Plus, he’s 16 and wants everything immediately. Patience is lost on 16 year olds. And 5 year olds.

For the last 2 months, Boogie has been waking up 6-8 times a night crying. It started gradually when she had that ear infection that wouldn’t go away. She’d wake up saying her ear hurt, so we’d put drops in it, give her Tylenol and she’d go back to sleep. But it’s gotten worse and now she has NO idea why she’s waking up. In the middle of the night, I’ll find her curled up in a ball on the floor in the hallway, or the kitchen, crying. When we ask her what woke her up she yells “I don’t know!” Then we ask her why she’s crying and she yells “I don’t know!”

I try to be sympathetic, I really do. I pick her up, sit with her for awhile and then send her back down to bed. But after the 3rd or 4th time of this, it starts to get frustrating. I probably wouldn’t mind as much if she actually came into our bedroom instead of laying on the floor somewhere crying loud enough to wake the whole house. I also probably wouldn’t mind as much if she could tell me WHY she’s crying.

Needless to say I was really tired today after only getting 4 hours of sleep last night. So Wren went to pick up the kids from school and I took a nap. He told Boogie to sit in the living room and watch TV until he got back because I’d be sleeping. She says “But who will keep me from getting into stuff?”

Ok, so it’s funny, but not so much when you consider that I woke this morning to find her on the couch surrounded by chocolate chips cookies and an open bottle of pink fingernail polish on the coffee table. Oh, and did I mention the coffee table is now painted pink? Yeah, it’s pretty.

So I fell asleep and at some point she managed to find some dum-dums. I only know this because I half woke up when she climbed on my bed to set one next to me. She likes to share. I noticed she had 2 in her hand and fell back to sleep. I got woke up less than an hour later by her crying and running back and forth from the living room to the back door, looking for Wren and the kids.

Her tooth was hurting her. So I got some Oragel and put it on there, and gave up on sleep. About half an hour later, after the kids got home and she played with Hunter in the yard for awhile, she started crying and saying her tooth hurt again. So Wren put some Oragel on it. She spent the next HOUR laying on the couch crying nonstop. She wasn’t crying loud or anything but it was really putting me in a bad mood.

When her crying started getting more dramatic, it became obvious that it wasn’t about her tooth. She was tired, from not getting enough sleep lately, and playing it up. Wren told her to go down to her room and cry. She kept screaming “I can’t walk!” and wouldn’t get up off the floor. Oh, didn’t you know? Teeth are connected to legs.

Finally, Wren carried her down to her room and put her on her bed with a sock full of ice. She spent the NEXT hour screaming at the top of her lungs. I went down there at one point and said “Do I need to take you to the hospital?” She yelled at me to stop talking to her and said she was about to stop screaming when I came down there. lol Funny how quick a threat to the hospital will get a kid to stop being a drama queen.

On top of all of this, Dustin, Hunter and Mikaela were supposed to be getting dishes done so Wren could make spaghetti for dinner. They got them done very quickly and he went in to make it after bringing Boogie downstairs. He went looking for a pot and found 4 or 5 DIRTY dishes hidden in the back of one of the cupboards.

This has been happening a lot. We keep finding dirty dishes in the cupboards because one, two or all three of them don’t feel like washing them so they shove them in a drawer or cupboard with food caked on them, thinking we’ll never know it was them who did it. They’re right, of course, which is the part that really sucks.

If God was going to make being a parent so difficult, why didn’t he at least build us equipped with lie detectors so we’d ALWAYS know which kid to punish?

Wren grilled them for awhile and got nowhere. I decided from now on we’re going to have to stand over their shoulders while they do dishes and inspect each of them before they put them away. Yay!! More work for me and Wren to do!!!

Also, it seems our dishes have mysteriously been disappearing. I’ve bought new spoons and forks twice in the last year, and my sis-in-law bought us some new ones just a few months ago. But tonight there were 5 forks in the drawer. Definitely not enough to feed 9 people spaghetti. We’re pretty sure they’ve been throwing them in the garbage to avoid washing them, but, of course, they won’t admit to that either. Wren sent them on a fork hunt (not as fun as an Easter egg hunt, let me tell ya) and they eventually found enough for us to eat dinner.

Despite my frustration, Boogie DID eventually stop screaming too. She even stood up on her own two legs and walked up the stairs. Oh, she got on her knees and pulled herself around up here on the hardwood floors for awhile, saying she still couldn’t walk, but she made a miraculous recovery when Hunter took something from her and ran.

Soon Mark will be here to pick Dustin, Hunter and Mikaela up. Things will quiet down around here, and I may even be able to relax. But tomorrow, Mark will be bringing Mikaela home since she’s having a hard time staying at his house lately. And with her, he’ll be bringing his girlfriend’s daughter Jasman to stay the night.

Which means we’ll start all of this over again soon. I think I’ll go check into the cost of sound-proofing my bedroom.