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.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a pervert. My favorite subject has always been sex. I enjoy talking about it with other people, and I’ve often been known to give WAY more details than some people want to hear. Part of that is because I don’t mind hearing details from other people so sometimes it doesn’t cross my mind that they might have an issue with it. Sometimes I really LOVE hearing the details of other people’s sex lives, to the point that I once considered being a sexologist. Yes, it’s a real profession. Go look it up.

I was never all talk either. I loved having sex, more than I loved almost anything. At some point in my relationship with Mark, though, I stopped wanting to have sex. It wasn’t that I lost interest in sex really, because I still loved talking about it and thinking about it. But it started to feel like such a hassle, like an obligation. I think this was when I really learned how easy it was to get myself off by masturbating and after that, my sex life was done for. After all, why go through the long hassle of foreplay and sex when I could get myself off in 2 minutes and then drift off to sleep in non-cuddling bliss?

Maybe that sounds weird. I mean, women are supposed to like romance and foreplay and long, slow sex and pillow talk and cuddling. But that just wasn’t me. Oh, sometimes it was, sure. But most of the time all of that felt like WORK when all I really wanted was the orgasm.

When me and Mark split up, I became insatiable. To the point that I realized recently any guy who has been with me laughs at the idea of me going for a week or more without sex. I admit, it kind of offended me. I started feeling like guys look at me like I’m a nympho or something, which I’m really not.

So maybe it’s my determination to not be what other people think I am. I know I have that stubborn, strong-willed streak that often refuses to conform to the ideas people have about me. All I know is that lately, I’ve become absolutely sexless. Not just that I don’t HAVE sex lately, although that much is true too. But I don’t even masturbate. And I don’t think about sex. Or talk about sex. Or drop sexual innuendos like they just sprout off of my tongue.

Maybe worse than not being sexual is the fact that I’m no longer even sensual. I hide my body in baggy pants and t-shirts. When I change my clothes, I do it as quickly as possible, and I don’t dare stand anywhere near a mirror where I might actually see myself. I no longer walk with the swagger of a woman who believes she’s beautiful and sexy (not that I ever TRULY believed it but a part of me could have been convinced). No, I walk with my hands in the pockets of my baggy hoodie, head down, shoulders hunched, not looking people in the eye.

I remember being this girl once upon a time. I didn’t like her. And you know what? I still don’t like her. I just wish I knew how to get rid of her for good, but she’s like good old Aunt Flo; she just keeps coming back. All it takes for me is a lack of guys (or guy, I suppose) showing me attention and flirting with me and letting me know that they find me sexy, and then BOOM! There’s shy, self-conscious Jennifer peeking her head around the corner.

Someday, maybe, I’ll find a way to get rid of her on my own and not have to rely on men. Because, really, we all know how unreliable they can be.

It’s been a long day. We walked about 5 miles all total, but I got my check cashed, cell phone back on, got my Mountain Dew and tomorrow is cigarettes day.

So on our walk we went down this alley and passed a car with a bunch of bumper stickers on it. Ok, maybe not a bunch but there were 5 or 6 of them. They were all about tolerance and being understanding of people’s religion, stuff like that.

Except for these two:

Now, I am in no way a feminist. But I AM a woman and I AM a person. So I admit I was quite offended by that first one. But then I read the second one and I decided that they were right, we should hunt each other, starting with whoever actually spent the money to buy that bumper sticker that says women aren’t people. Because, you know, I really think I could get away with killing the person in that car and my whole defense would consist of bringing these two bumper stickers in to court and showing them to the jury. I think the idiot is pretty much asking to get shot, don’t you?

So who wants to defend me?

At least I don’t think I’m dead. Hang on. Let me check.

*feels self up*

Nope. I found a pulse.

I made another blog today. It’s all secret and stuff, though. Sometimes I think that I have so many blogs, in so many places, that I just can’t keep track of them all. I haven’t been writing on any of them lately, though. There really isn’t a huge reason for my absence, except that life has been a suckfest (great word, right?) lately and I didn’t feel like sharing that suckfest with anybody. It’s better just to ignore it and pretend that life is great instead.

Denial is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Things are the same as always, though. Kids are growing and driving me insane. The teenagers now have “significant others” which sometimes makes my life easier and sometimes makes it a bigger pain in the ass. It also makes me realize that they’re growing up much quicker than I told them they could, and I think they deserve to be grounded for that.

Boogie is in school all day now. In the beginning, it was very weird. I realized that I’ve had at least one kid home with me for the last 17 years. So now I get to do things like sleep in, spend the afternoon writing, hear the voices in my head (I really missed them) and dance around naked in my living room….with the blinds closed, of course.

We moved last month. Nothing fantastical or anything. Just into an apartment by the kids’ elementary school, like I’ve been telling them we’d do for the last 7 years. What that means to me is, I get to have a slew of kids in and out of my house all evening and weekend. Fun, right?

I’ve learned to love my bedroom.

I’ll try to write more here, I suppose. We’ll see how that goes. I have a tendency to be a blog camel. You know….like a sex camel. Don’t know what a sex camel is? It’s what I used to call my friend Val’s husband because he hardly ever wanted to have sex. I’d say he was like a camel. He’d store it up for a month or so, then he’d need it again to store it up and so on. Get the idea? Well, I realized I’ve been a blog camel for the last 7 years or so. I’ll write every single day (sometimes two or three times a day) for a week or two, and then I won’t write at all for a couple of months. It’s ok, though. I’m just storing it all up in my head so it can come eventually come spouting out.

Ok. I’m hungry. But too lazy to go find something to eat. I think I’ll go take a nap instead.

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.

1. My professor apparently likes Paris Hilton. I tried not to jump up and knock some sense into him when he shrugged and said “She’s blonde and cute. What can I say?” Does the man have eyes? Paris Hilton is so not cute. Puppies are cute. Babies are cute. The wrinkles next to George Clooney’s eyes when he smiles is cute. Paris Hilton is….none of those things.

2. I found out where the term “dead ringer” came from. When people died, they’d place a string inside of their coffin and attach it to a bell that was next to their headstone. This way, if they really weren’t dead and were instead..oh, I dunno, taking a power nap or something, and they happened to wake up buried 6 feet underground, hopefully they’d have the foresight to search for that string and ring the bell repeatedly until somebody happened to walk by and realize there was a live person inside. Neat idea I guess, although it makes me think two things. One: the idea that they buried enough live people to have a need for this is a bit unnerving. And two: I’d hate to be walking through those graveyards on a windy night. Also, this doesn’t really explain to me why we use the term the way we do. Next time I see a “dead ringer” for my sister, I’ll be sure to bury the lady in a coffin and see if she can indeed manage to ring the bell to let us know she’s alive.

3. When you’re writing on a white board, you really should make sure you’ve been working on your handwriting. Otherwise words like “rock” will end up looking like “cock” and have the whole class thinking you have a side-job teaching Pornography 101.

4. My professor had popcorn ceilings in his apartment when he was in college. Don’t ask me why I needed to know this. I still haven’t figured that out.

5. Spider poop (aka a spiderweb) on a projector lens is approximately 1 pixel. You don’t want to know how this came up. Trust me.

So that was our class for the evening. Oh, there was also some stuff about rocks and weatherization, but who listens to that stuff really?

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.

There’s nothing quite like getting woke up by a 4 year old voice saying “Mom, the bathroom is flooded!”Sure enough, after jumping out of bed, I found a lake in my bathroom that was seeping out into the hallway. Another 10 minutes and it would have made its way to my bedroom, creating a swamp out of the mounds of clothing, yarn, notebooks and boxes that are strewn across my floor.

It’s not bad enough that the floor was flooded. Both the hot and cold water were on full blast in the sink, which doesn’t drain anywhere near enough to handle that much water flowing into it. I turned off the water, and made my way back to bed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fall back to sleep knowing the lake in the bathroom needed to be mopped up. Oh, I wanted to be lazy. I wanted to believe I could just drift back off to slumberland and the magical water faeries would fly in and soak up all the water for me. I tried to tell myself this. But I knew I was going to have to get back up and deal with it.

Well, that….and I had to pee.

So I grabbed a blanket out of the hall closet and threw it on the bathroom floor. Before I sat down to pee I realized it was awful cold in there, despite the heat coming out of the vent. I pulled back the curtain and found the bathroom window wide open.

Since I was still half asleep, I kind of shrugged, closed the window, peed and went back to bed. It wasn’t until much later that I woke to hear Wren yelling at Boogie about turning on the water in the bathtub and her insisting she didn’t do it. I lay under my warm blankets for awhile, wondering if we had a ghost. Or maybe…..did somebody break into our house and turn on the water? Perhaps one of the kids just decided they wanted an ice rink in the bathroom.

I think I must be really smart when I first wake up. Maybe it would be a good idea for me to do all brain-requiring activities first thing in the morning. Because as I lay there, I started thinking. Last night before we went to bed it was REALLY cold in our house. I mean, like, I went to pee and was shivering so hard I ended up with a headache. The thermostat in this house sucks. The only way to turn the heat on is by going down to the basement to the furnace. Oh, it has a neat little remote control that you can turn it on and off with, or reset the temperature on it. Ideally, this remote is supposed to work from anywhere in the house. In reality, we can’t even get the remote to work when we’re standing next to the furnace and pointing it right at it. So our thermostat is permanently set at 86 degrees.

Now, I’m all for warmer temperatures but 86 degrees is a bit warmer than I really want. So all winter long we go down and turn on the heat usually about once a day, for an hour or so. Apparently it got really cold last night, though. And we couldn’t turn on the heat and then go to sleep or we’d wake up in a pool of sweat (although that may have been preferable to waking up with a lake in the bathroom). In my freshly awakened state, I put two and two together and actually came up with four!

It was cold this morning when the kids woke up. They turned on the heat, and realized the pipes were frozen in the bathroom (this has also been happening a lot this winter). One of them, thinking they were being helpful, turned the water on in both the sink and the tub hoping it would thaw out. Then they left for school. Luckily, Boogie was downstairs in her bedroom watching TV, noticed the water dripping from her ceiling and came up to investigate. The sink always thaws out before the tub does, which is why the water in there didn’t start running until later. Oh, and the window? Well, Boogie loves to open the bathroom window and yell goodbye to the kids in the morning. Unfortunately, I think she opened it too much and couldn’t get it closed.

I swear, I’m a genius.

I got up and went to tell Wren my wonderful epiphany and….mother of all that is holy! It was absolutely Arctic in the house again!!

Thank Moses for warm, oversized hoodies. I don’t know where I’d be without them. I pulled on a hoodie and huddled back up under the blankets. Layers are good. Not only do they keep you warm, they hide any extra pounds you might have put on over the long winter.

You know, as much as I may get sick of the cold, it might just be worth it to move to Alaska. Hoodies and layers all year means you NEVER have to worry about dieting. Hell, I bet they even have sex with hoodies on.

Alaska, here I come!