WANTED:

A sexy, romantic Gerard Butler look-alike who plays guitar and cooks and appreciates and likes frumpy fluffy girls who like to eat. Irish or Aussie accent a plus.

Is that so hard to find??

Dear Mr. Mower,

The community I live in is lucky enough that we have "landscapers". What that really means is, every Friday, at 7:00am, a jerk with a riding mower and his buddy with the weed wacker come looking for open bedroom windows to sit outside for thirty minutes. It's summer. We live in a part of the country that has no air conditioning. Everyone's bedroom windows are open. It's also my husbands day off today and I'm almost positive they knew that.
I am 99% sure it was intentional. After trying blocking the sound without success, I finally got up and closed the window. Immediately, they left.
I laid there for an hour and, I'm not even kidding, the MINUTE I started to slip into that sleepy stage, HE CAME BACK! It's like they have hidden cameras in my house!

Finally, after an hour and a half I managed to fall back asleep, to dream beautiful candy mountain dreams of a day when we don't live in a fascist, lawnmowering community.

Medicated Momma

The medication I'm on now gives me about 6 hours per day where I am coherent and functional. All for a supposed "ear infection" and "stress headache". Part of me wonders if it's because they know I'm so frustrated I need to be kept doped up to keep from snapping and snapping someone's neck like Arnold Schwartzenegger in Commando. Remember the guy on the plane, who was "dead tired"? Yeah, some days here lately that looks like something I wouldn't mind doing.
Don't get me wrong, please. I am so far from a random act of violence type of person. I love helping people, I rescue run away dogs on a regular basis and find their owners, I counsel my friends about fertility as I'm kind of an expert on the subject after struggling with my own at one point- I do whatever I can, whenever I can, to make people happy. But I am just so freaking SICK of all the complete idiot TOOLBAGS running around that sometimes I feel like the world would be smarter without these people mucking up the human race. Is that so bad?

Woke up dead

Thanks to autocorrect, the title isn't completely true, yet, but I decided to keep it anyway. What really happened is I woke up deaf. This is my first day of almost complete hearing loss. I've been one ear or the other but today... On one side it's just ringing and on the other it's Charlie Brown's teacher. "wa wa WA wa WA wa". What???
This is getting ridiculous. Now, after two months of miserable, agonizing pain and tests, they determine I have an ear infection. Two weeks ago there wasn't one, and the pain was there long before that, but now magically there it is. These doctors are so stupid.

Say Yes

Today on Say Yes to the Dress is a woman getting married and her mom died of cancer when she was little so she obviously wasn't there. It was so emotional. Dying before my kids are grown is my biggest fear. Of course my youngest was in the room so I had to hide the fact that I just started bawling.

Help! I married a misogynist!

Really no clue what I'm doing or where this revelation is supposed to take me, but it has just come to light that my husband, with the exception being myself and our daughters, hates women. HATES them. His own words. I assume his addendum of "except for you and the girls" was supposed to make it all ok, I'm supposed to be relieved and say "well all right then" and go on like I am not seriously insulted. How can you say you hate an entire species except for me, when everything I am and have been in the past 15 years we've been together, is the epitome of all he proclaims to hate?? I knew he didn't like most of my friends, and I knew he never really said much to women in general unless he had to, but until today just made me think he thought I really was just the best so he didn't need to be friends with any other women.
I've given everything I had to this man since I was 20 years old. Followed him around the country, left and returned a few times after he swore he didn't want to be without me, but now?? I feel like a pretty god damn worthless pile of crap.
I should have seen it coming. The other day I told my girls how lucky they were their parents were still crazy about eachother, and he said "well, no couple is perfect". I let it go, because it's true, but now it's nagging me. Why would he say it right then? I'm over-evaluating everything again, the way all women apparently do, which, by the way is one of the many reasons he hates us- I mean them. Not me. Right

Hate not knowing.

My son is still sick. Five days now since it started, the pain medications and antibiotics just don't seem to be working for him. He was okay after the hospital (morphine day) and all day yesterday seemed like he was doing better, but last night there it was again. The pain is still breaking through both the Tylenol 3 and motrin, and now he is asleep in my bed (the only place he seems able to get even an hour (thank you Christmas Memoryfoam topper).

I know it might be premature to really worry... and really I know that statistically the odds are that it's just something relatively minor, but really, I'm pretty concerned.

What if the strep was the result of something else and they just stopped looking a moment too soon?

What if???

Nothing worse

There is nothing in the world worse than a child suffering, and when it's your own child, it just magnifies it by like 1000x.

On Monday, my son (who is 10) began complaining of a headache. I didn't take much stock in it since it wasn't that horrible I figured he'd just tweaked it in his sleep or something. Tuesday, he is in a lot more pain so I call the doc and make an appt, because he's now having neck trouble and I was concerned about possible meningitis. I take the girls to school and head to the clinic. The doc (our normal pediatrician who sees the boy on a monthly basis for ADD) checks him out and decides it's a virus and prescribes Tylenol and sends us home. The rest of the day every 3 hours the poor boy is screaming and crying in pain. The Tylenol isn't working.

We managed to get through the night and head back to ER this morning after I drop the girls at school. They can definitely tell he is in a lot of pain, so right off the bat they give him an IV with fluids and morphine and draw some blood. A while later they came back and inform me that his white blood count is 21- too high typically for just a virus. Even though he didn't have a horribly sore throat, the doctor decided to do a strep test to rule that out and then if that was negative we would look at "other concerns". After what my family went through with Samantha and her cancer, it is my biggest fear so of course my blood ran cold. I did my best to put on a brave face for my son but inside I was screaming, "Not my son!". Unfortunately I know too well that bad things don't just happen to other people anymore, and that lightning CAN strike the same family over and over. I think the doctor understood this and she could do nothing to reassure me yet.

One of the longest hours of my life waiting for that test result.

THANKFULLY- she came running into the room an hour later with a smile on her face and said excitedly "It's strep!". I believe her fears were the same as mine because the mutual relief between us was pretty palpable. Another hour of IV antibiotics and more waiting for this and that and after 6 hours in a 6x6 cell- I mean blessedly private room (a rare commodity in the ER)- we were free to go with prescriptions for Tylenol3, Penicillin, and Motrin in hand.

Tonight the boy is resting comfortably, playing his DS while the girls stay away so they don't get his germs and I am resting too, still riding the little bit of high leftover from my special tweet last night, waiting for the People's Choice Awards.

Oh also I sort of kind of found out when my husband is coming home, but it wasn't good enough news to make my day better, so, whatever to that.

Every day. Every day.

So I am told I need to blog every day. I'm also doing a 365 day photo project and I've found that things I am supposed to do every day make it that much less desirable to do them. However I've ALSO found that if I DON'T do them every day, like exercise, the next thing I know 6 months has gone by and I'm thinking, shit has it really been that long?

Therefore, here I am. Talking to crickets.

Speaking of crickets, I really am interested in learning what that game entails. On twitter probably a good half of the people I follow are from UK and I sincerely WANT to know what they are talking about but so much of it is about their sports, and I'm bad enough at following American sports! I don't know though, that country has always fascinated me, I'm in love with it even though I've never been (hopefully this year will change that!) and I am enjoying learning from my new UK twitter friends what different things mean. It can get pretty confusing. The other day someone I follow was talking about a man having a row with his dog. Naturally, the mental picture created for me was a lovely little stroll down a riverside with a man in a boat taking his dog down the river. It has been since explained that no, the man was more likely screaming at the dog. Totally different picture. I am very much enjoying this.

Well I suppose that's enough for now. Take care, my crickets, until tomorrow.

Love.

Love is a ridiculous, silly, tricky thing. When we get married, we picture ourselves growing old with a person, sitting on the front porch in our matching rocking chairs, him reading the paper, her knitting or arranging flowers or doing some "old lady" activity. We imagine our lives together, how it will be having kids, grandkids, taking vacations, all the normal "growing old together" dreams, right? Problem is that seldom happens anymore.
I've been married 14 years. Got married at 21 and immediately (literally within days) began our family, having four children over the next five years. It didn't take me long to realize that all that crap we fantasize about when we get married is just that... a fantasy. Yes it can really happen but most of the time we don't think about the pain and struggle it takes to get there. We also don't look at the old couple holding hands walking into the store and think "I wonder how many marriages they had before this" but in reality chances are more than one. But we don't think about those things because we see what we want to see.
I've been married nearly 14 years. Sometimes I love it and am so happy we have outlasted both our parents marriages and feel good about giving the kids a stable childhood- but really that's what we let people see. The reality is, we fight more often than we don't, making up NEVER involves the bedroom, and my kids have moved probably 10 times already. We don't see our families almost ever, we make friends in new places just to leave them, I am a single mom every other year, and it is VERY difficult. For the past 9 months my relationship with my husband has been based on a few text messages here and there and a 15 minute phone call once a month if I'm lucky. We grow apart, become indifferent, sincerely don't give a shit, and then something so simple he says can make my hardened heart melt and I'm his all over again.

Now, when he gets home and isn't feeling so nice and turns out he didn't mean it, I may have other things to say.

First Post-new blog. What shall we talk about?

I suppose I should start with an introduction. I'll spare my life story but there are a few things about me that are fairly common knowledge and vital to why I am the way I am and how I became who I am today.

My name is Jen. I'm a married mother of four. So far, perfectly normal right? Nope. Before I became a mom, I became a military wife. That right there says a lot. Being a military wife is ok sometimes, but other times, like the past 8 months while my husband has been in Afghanistan (4 to go), it sucks. We move all the time, can never be near family when there's a health crisis or new babies or weddings or deaths or anything we need to be there for. And when something happens to us, they can't be here for us either. In 1998, just a few months after getting married and having my first baby, we were living in Iceland (love it there, can't wait to go back, another story for another day), my little girl became very ill. We were flown to Washington DC for her to receive care but nothing was good enough and after almost two months in the hospital, she died. It's been 13 years now and I don't cry every day anymore. The past two anniversaries of her death I managed to get through without the usual haunting self-torture I'd grown accustomed to, so I suppose that means it's finally starting to heal a bit.

Let's see what else about me. I have three other kids, two girls and a boy. My girls are performers (one is into music and cheerleading, the other acting and dance). My son is going to be an engineer or something. He's too much of a geek to not grow up to be the boss of some company or other.

I also have a dog, a golden retriever named Sadie. Sometimes I pretend to hate her because as she gets older she is having more problems and every time I turn around she costs me another $1000, but she is part of our family and I'd be lost without her. Also have a cat named Ozzy and he's a huge pain in the butt too but at least he's healthy (so far).

And of course, my husband. He's a soldier in the Army and we have lived all over. We've lived in Iceland, Washington State, California, Texas, and Alaska. California was my favorite for the weather- we lived right on the beach and had dolphins swim past quite often- but least favorite for traffic and rude people. I can't believe how self-absorbed and addicted to "stuff" the people there were.
Washington State will always be my home. I joke that I have webbed feet from all the rain we get there (it's not true but it's funny). I miss it, and my family, terribly. Now I am in Alaska. In January. I shoveled a foot of snow from my driveway this morning and get to do it again tomorrow. In -15F (which is usually not that cold anymore but after 20-30 minutes you can't feel your body parts anymore).

I love to travel. Don't get to do much but as i said I spent a few years living in Iceland and loved it there (aside from the cold, the wind, the dark, and the horrible-tasting ketchup). I have wanted to visit London pretty much since I learned it existed- which was because Davy Jones was from there and I fell hard for him when the Monkees became popular again in the late 80's. Someday I will go there. I also would like to go to Italy and Germany and possibly Norway or Finland- I have friends in Norway so maybe someday I'll get to go visit there.

Well I think that's about enough for tonight. It's almost 2am and the kids have to get up at 7:30 for school, and then I have a tanning appointment (spray- not UV or I'll be the one with cancer). Just started doing that. I've been a paley my whole life and kind of like how a little splash of color makes me feel. :)

OK well nobody's reading this anyway, so... I'll write more tomorrow. (And if you ARE reading this, bookmark it and let me know because once in a while I really do get PROFOUND!)