My Christmas lights are sucking the joy of the season right out of me.

Fucking things. How is it that you can pack away Christmas lights at the end of the season and they all work just fine, then take them back out the next year and they not work? We have a pre-lit tree, that we bought last year, so it's only been used one season. Got it out and set it up on Mon night and I have three branches that won't light. We can't find a burned out bulb and replaced fuses and nothing has helped. Fucker.
And I have a bunch of pre-lit garlands for the front porch and one of them quit working this year. Same deal, no burned out bulbs or blown fuses, just won't work. At least they are several years old and not new.

As if losing one kid wasn't enough

So, we're at the in-laws for T'day. We got in last night, had supper, the kids were tired and ready to go to bed. So we go get the bath ready and El says she doesn't want a bath. We tell her she has to have one. Get Em in the bath and look around for El. No El. We looked all over this fucking house for her and I was getting that panicky feeling. Finally, I yelled "El, this isn't funny any more!" Because she had to be in the house. Where else could she have gone? Sure enough, she crawled out from under the bed! She had been under there for at least 10 minutes, and not made a peep.

After I got her in the tub, I had father-in-law open a bottle of wine. For my nerves, you know.

I swear to fuck, losing two kids twice in the same day is not good for the nerves. No one should have to feel that sinking, sick, panicky feeling, and especially not twice in one day.

I think they are getting back at me for my own childhood when brother and I ran away and stayed gone for something like 2 hours.

I was this close || to calling 911

Like holy shit damn and fuck. Sam scared the ever loving bejeebus out of me this morning. I was making mac and cheese for his preschool T'day lunch today and he was playing on the deck. What with global warming and all it was plenty warm and I just had the back door open. At some point he went down to play in the yard, which he does all the time. The yard is fenced and I can see it from the kitchen, if I'm not staring at a pot of mac and cheese.

I got it all made and in the dish and went to get him so we could go get dressed and he wasn't in sight. Looked under the deck. Called him many, many times. Checked inside the play thing. Thought maybe he was in the house and I didn't notice him walk by. I tore through the house yeliing "Sam, Sam where are you!??!" No answer. I went out the front door, thinking maybe he climbed over the fence and was playing in the front yard, calling him all the time and starting to fucking panic. I went around the side of the house, and was going to call 911 if I didn't find him over there, when I found him.

He was squeezing (not even squeezing really) through the gap between our fence and the neighbor's fence and back into our yard. He had clearly been out of our yard, but I don't know if he was just outside the fence and I couldn't see him over it, or if he was out exploring and came back because he heard me calling him.

Then the little shit ran away from me in our yard, laughing at me. I snatched him up and brought him inside and called the manwhore and sat down and cried.

The gap in the fence will be fixed when we get back next week. I didn't even know they knew it was there, and really we shouldn't have waited to see. But, we forgot it was there. Bad parents. It hasn't always been there, but the neighbors tore down their old fence and had a new one put up. For some reason the new one doesn't sit quite as far back, thus resulting in the gap.

I need a fucking drink, I think.

Quite possibly the stupidest women on Earth.

There is this message board for supposedly hippy, earth-mother types called mothering.com. They actually call themselves mothering.comune. Several years ago it was a gathering place for people who cloth diapered, breastfed, preferred slings to strollers, used natural cleaning products and beauty supplies, recycled, and probably had a garden in the back yard. Not insane at all.

Now it has turned into full on freakville with women who are completely against anything that reeks of The MAN. Including medical care. Especially medical care for pregnancy and childbirth. They have an entire forum dedicated to unassisted childbirth (UC) which means having your baby at home alone, with no attendants possibly not even your husband/baby daddy there to help. No midwife to help if something goes wrong. Birth attendants, especially those in hospitals are predators and dangerous. Doctors are just looking to haul you off for unnecessary c-sections.

There are women there who claim they would rather their baby die in childbirth than them have a c-section, because of the slight risk of maternal death during the c-section. Someone forgot to tell them, or they just refuse to hear, that even if the baby dies, it still has to come out, one way or another. A baby that dies in the womb because it is too big to fit through mom's pelvis is not likely to fit even after it dies.

So stupid women, stupider message board, because this board is moderated, and the moderators will delete anything that they deem unsupportive. If you gently encourage someone to seek medical care after 5 days of ruptured membranes, with meconium staining, and your post will get deleted. Encourage a woman leaking fluid and having contractions at 28 weeks to see a doctor? Deleted. Do it often enough and you get banned from the board. There is no voice of reason, only insanity.

If this isn't neglect, I don't know what is. It should be criminal, and this message board that enables these women should be shut down.


I want to add that I understand wanting to have the perfect birth, wanting your baby's entrance into the world to be beautiful, that medical intervention can be scary and traumatizing. My daughters are 5 yrs old and I still have strong feelings about their birth and regrets that it had to be that way. It was the single most terrifying thing I've ever gone through, and I have no doubt that I was suffering from PTS afterwards. But, the reason it was so terrifying, the reason I was so scared was not because of the drs and the medical care I received, it was during those moments when we couldn't get the nurse, couldn't get help and then just knowing that they were being born 10 weeks premature, and I was fucking terrified that my babies might DIE. I wasn't thinking about the birth experience then, I was thinking about my babies, that I loved more than myself even before they left my body, and I didn't want them to die. Just get them out and get them in the NICU where they will be safe.

When Sam was born, and my hopes for a VBAC were going down the drain, I was bleeding, he wasn't moving much, and again, I just wanted him out, where I could see him, and I knew he was safe and ALIVE.

Yes, there are feelings of anger and regret about the surgeries and the way things worked out and the lost hours with all of them, but I knew they were alive and safe and under competent medical care. Even with that, I have one child with some minor brain damage, and the guilt I feel over that far surpasses any feelings I have about the fucking c-section.

So, to all of those women at Mothering.com, I say grow the fucking hell up and think about someone besides your own selfish self for a change.



I just want to add that my child with the little bit of brain damage is learning to read. *Proud mama*

That was the yummiest school lunch I've eaten in 14 years.

Of course, it was the only school lunch I've eaten in the last 14 yrs. The girls school is doing T'day lunches with the kids this week. Their class had theirs today (they break it up into two groups because so many parents come). So, off I went to fork out $3.50 for a tray full of slop. Seriously, I asked the mom in front of me what the yellow stuff was, and she had no idea. The lunch lady told us it was turkey and gravy. lmao And the dressing was runny and sagey. Chewy green beans. Frozen strawberries. Pecan pie that tasted like pumpkin pie. The roll was good, though. lol

I'm glad I only have to do that once a year.

I hate bunk beds.

My girls have bunk beds because they have a rather small bedroom. I've seen smaller. I had a friend in elementary school whose room was so small you could barely walk around the bed. But still, their room isn't exactly large. Two twin beds side by side would leave them with no floor space and no where to put a dresser. I'm not organized enough to deal with socks and undies and stuff in the closet, and I think they need room to play in their room, so bunk beds it is.

The beds were a birthday present from Grandma and Grandpa, and I'm sad to say that I hate them. Not because there is anything wrong with them, but because they are bunk beds. Em sleeps on bottom and hers is the easiest to make up, but you risk busting your head every time you lean over. El is on top and the only way to make her bed to just climb up there and pull and tug the mattress pad and sheets down while sitting on the mattress. Not the easiest feat in the world. And, because her bunk has rails to keep her from falling out, there is no way to actually make the bed, as in have the quilt all smooth and all, because the quilt can't hang over the edge. The only easy part about El's bed is that she hates the top sheet, so I just don't put it on. When I did, it stayed a lumped up.

I cannot wait until we have a house big enough to unstack those damned beds and they are finally easy to make up.

I get to play with a pony!

Yay me! I'm going to get my horse fix multiple times a week for a good long while. The lady that teaches my kids' riding lessons has worked out a deal where she is getting a miniature horse, but the horse is only 2 yrs old and was basically stuck in a pasture and ignored. She needs lots of work. So, I told De that I would come and work with Knee High (the horse) at least 2x a week when the kidlets are all occupied. De is over the moon about it, and is going to work with her horse at the same time and going to teach me Parelli horsemanship (attachment parenting for horses). So, by the time the girls are ready for their own horse, I will know Parelli and hopefully they will know at least the basics.

I'm sold on Parelli because I have never been around horses that are as polite and mannerly and just generally like and trust people as the horses on De's farm, and I've taken riding lessons myself as a teen.

Apparently Knee High thinks she is a dog, though, because she likes to jump up on you. Eek!

The evilness of hiding veggies in your kids' food

I am way too excited about this, quite frankly. This week, my kids have eaten pumpkin and spinach and didn't complain. Of course they didn't know they were eating it, but still.

The pumpkin was pureed and went into mac and cheese. Disgusting, you say? Not at all. I swear to your favorite deity that you could not taste it. This was fresh pumpkin, steamed and pureed, so it was the same bright orange as Kraft Mac and Cheese. Yes, I suck doubly because I not only fed my kids mac and cheese out of a box, with the powdered cheese no less, I put pumpkin in it. They ate it, though.
The suggestion I have seen for that calls for butternut squash, and if you wanted to go with canned (or liked jarred baby food squash) I would say that would work better, because canned pumpkin is dark and not bright powdered cheese orange.

In a slightly less sneaky meal, I made stuffed shells and put chopped, cooked spinach in the cheese stuffing. The snarfed it up. Especially Ellie, and she is usually my pickier eater. And since the manwhore has a hate on for cheese, he got his stuffed with sausage and spinach and he liked it, too.

Sneaky and evil or not, I am delighted to see my children getting a vitamin or two that didn't come in the form of a gummy vite. I wonder what else I can puree?

Houston, we have frost

The low last night was something like 27F. The computer says it is currently only 28F. The average date for a first frost here is Oct 20. So, two weeks later isn't too extreme. But it went from 78F on Mon to barely 48F yesterday and all nice and frosty last night. Brrrr!

I like it though. I like having seasons. It would be boring if it were the same all the time. So, bring on the chilly weather and drag out the sweaters. (No snow yet, though. I'm not ready for snow! lol)

Tornado warnings, what fun!

Last night I was yapping on the phone to my dad and noticed that there was a storm approaching lots of lightening. So, I think I should go and turn the TV on to see what the weather is doing. I turn it on and Holy Hell there was a tornado warning for a storm only about 15 miles away from me, and heading in our direction. So, I run to grab the HAM radio and I can't get it to work, thanks to my dear brother locking the keypad on it.
It was a stressful very minutes, as tornado warnings are (we were never actually under a warning, but the warning box ended very near us and would have been over us if it had been extended). In true sucktastic mothering style, I apparently scared the crap out of the girls. I didn't mean to, and I wasn't really scared myself, just getting ticked off at the radio and trying to shush them so I could hear the TV.
El had a nightmare last night, so apparently I scared her pretty badly. Le sigh.

National Novel Writing Month

Apparently, November is National Novel Writing Month.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/

So, I'm am putting the historical romance on the back burner for the month and going to try to write like mad on a contemporary romance set on the Gulf Coast. The goal is 50,000 words by the end of the month. We'll see.

Why, yes, I actually do have a life.

Surprising, I know, but really I don't sit on my ass all day every day. My life is not all writing and romance or romance writing. I get busy, and I get *gasp* tired. I was complaining to my mother about being tired and ready to drop earlier this week and she actually asked me what I could possibly have been doing to get so tired. Um, having a life?

Start the day with a walk, feed yourself and the buddy boy, get clean, dress both of you, fix his lunch, haul him to school, come home and slap some lunch together for yourself to go eat with your other two kids at 10:15am, then spend until 12:30 in their classroom doing their fall party, take them to the park and clean out the van while you are there, go get little boy, come home and throw some laundry in and feed some snacks, run to Tractor Supply, then to riding lessons where you can't sit down because there are 1000lbs animals running around and your 2 yr old is running around, too, come home cook dinner, eat dinner, clean kitchen. Just try it and tell me you wouldn't be ready to drop.

That was Tuesday. I ran all day yesterday, too. Today, I'm house cleaning because for some reason Halloween destroyed my house.

Hell yes I get tired and I have every fucking right to. So, pppphhhhbbbbbtttttt!