About that stingray...

Yes, the dratted thing did get infected. And it has taken nearly a month for the bloody thing to completely heal. And if the knob on the side of my foot is any indication, I think the barb broke a bone in my foot. But, hey - I was able to wear regular shoes today for the first time since August.

Stung!

Yes, it's been a while since I last wrote. And yes, I say that every dratted time I write. Consider it a tradition. A hobby I engage in every once in a while, if you will (though I guess if I had cause to say it more often I'd be lying). Anyway, my husband tells me I'm an improbability wrapped in an unlikelihood served up on a weird sandwich. Translated to mean that if an oddball injury is going to happen to someone, it will happen to me. Because that's how I roll.

This time it was getting stung in the foot by a stingray while on vacation with my family. I've had a 33 1/2 hour birth (unmedicated for 28 hours), a five hour birth and shingles. In my eye. The stingray sting hurt more. It was excruciating.

But at least it was me and NOT one of the kids. Small favors and all. What's interesting about stingray lancings is that if you do them "right" and aren't left with a barb broken off in your foot, the pain may go away entirely after you've kept your foot in hot water for three hours. Of course, there's the possibility for infection and necrosis and all that jazz, which must be horrifically delightful.

Anyway, it's one week later and so far so good. Here's to a continuing trend. Of so far so good (no more stingray venom, please).

Karma, you're a stanky skank

Today proves that karma is a biatch. Why, you ask Well... A few months ago, I left a soul-sucking job primarily due to my boss, who was fired shortly after for somewhat related reasons, but mostly because he was a liability and a half. He applied to be on my team at my new job. He didn't make it (thank goodness), but he did get hired by a different team. On the same floor. In the same wing. As me. Damn you, karma.

Exposure

I was thinking the other day of how much personal information I post online. Not personal as in identity theft; personal as in what's going on, family issues, etc. You know, things you probably wouldn't say in person because they're too embarrassing or because talking about them "just isn't done."

I've written posts countless times only to delete them, thinking, "Crap! This isn't something I'd have a hard time sharing with a friend." I expose a lot of myself online for some reason. It's easy. It's anonymous (more or less - if you know me it's not). Even if someone judges me to be a horrible person, I can delete their comments and not think about them. Something that's harder to do if someone dislikes you enough they'll tell you how much they hate you to your face.

In fact, I might well delete this post, whether I publish it or not. The issue is that we're slowly (or not so slowly anymore) losing my mom to alcoholism. A few weeks ago, while I was out of town on business, veins burst in her esophagus because her liver was so hardened blood couldn't circulate properly, making her vomit blood. She went to the hospital and had banding surgery to support the veins and stop the bleeding. She didn't tell us because she was too embarrassed. My sister and I finally got her to agree to let us talk to her doctor after her follow up appointment.

She has end-stage liver disease and needs a liver transplant. If she doesn't have one, she dies. To get one, she has to go to AA and be under the care of a psychiatrist to who will order random urine tests to ensure she's clean for at least six months. The problem is that she doesn't want to go to AA. It's in a part of town she doesn't like, she says. Besides, she's busy! Don't you know she has to get ready for bridge on Tuesday?

Both my sister and I call every day to make sure she answers. Because her doctor said her liver can fail at any time and she'll be gone. She doesn't sound sick, but it doesn't fool us - we've known that this was coming for years. My grandmother died of the same thing.

So how is it that you can grieve for someone as though they're gone even when they're alive and seemingly normal? How can I get my kids ready for this? And how can I force someone to take care of themselves when they deny, deny, deny?

I thought about asking her if she wants to die. She sometimes has moments when she's truthful. But they always say that you shouldn't ask a question if you're not certain you want to know the answer.

My Very Hoosier Holiday

At one point, I tried very hard to prove to my husband that the definition of the term "hoosier" meant someone from Indiana. I looked it up online and in our dictionary and, much to my horror, not only does the term hoosier mean from Indiana, in the Americas it has been a derogatory term meaning hick or hayseed since the 1800s. Fabulous. There goes that theory.

Anyway, last weekend we went on a vacation to Holiday World, an amusement park smack dab in the middle of almost-nowhere, Indiana. And it was fabulous. We stayed in an RV at the nearby campground. Said RV had about eleventy-billion (well, four) bunkbeds, a queen-sized bed and a king-sized bed. We really didn't need that many beds - there were four of us - but we did need the king-sized bed because, as we predicted, we all wound up in the same bed at some point during the night.

The vacation was awesome. Not only is Holiday World perfect for younger kids (I think much moreso than Disney, which is a whole different, my larger, kind of awesome), the park was really family friend and very clean. Oh, and extremely cheap, which is great considering that I'm looking for work.

We had a fire in the fire pit both nights, which was a riot for the kids. There were other kids in RVs nearby, too, so we had about 7 kids running around barefoot in their pajamas, tackling each other a few feet away from us while we relaxed with our junk food before falling into bed, smelling of wood smoke. It was way too cold to enjoy Splashin' Safari, the water park attached to Holiday World, but the whole experience was definitely something we'd like to do again.

So, if you're looking for a Very Hoosier Holiday, I'd strongly recommend Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana. So there.

I'm an aunt!

Yay!!

My sister had a baby boy. He was more than 10 pounds, so had to be removed via c-section. I'm so happy for her!

Welcome, 2012. Suck it, 2011.

I shouldn't be so negative. Really, I shouldn't. But still, I am SO glad it's a new year. Not that a day really makes a difference. Still, I've never really understood why people think that New Year's Day is such a big deal. Now I do.

In 2011, I started my new year off by finding out I was pregnant then promptly almost dying due to internal bleeding and losing the baby because it was an ectopic pregnancy that he begun to burst and bleed into my abdomen. Work sucked in 2011 because we had a hefty dose of the crazy and miserable and I spent what felt like half the year (but really was only a few weeks) traveling way too frequently. A good friend of mine discovered that her breast cancer had progressed to stage 4. The kids were stressed, my husband was stressed and I was about to tear my hair out, curl up in fetal position and cry or lock myself in the bathroom and scream. I think I even did one or two of those things at some point.

Now it's 2012. Unless I'm the Virgin Mary, I probably won't get pregnant again. Then again, I didn't think I'd have eclampsia or an ectopic pregnancy (I was on birth control and breastfeeding at the time, too). Proved myself wrong there, though, didn't I? I didn't think I wanted to have more children. Now I know that I wouldn't mind having another baby, but I don't think I or my family could take the potential consequences.

Anyway, work is getting (slowly) better. The crazy has left the building, for now anyway. Or rather, both crazies have left - the one with the flammable materials hasn't come back, either. And apparently I'm going to have some modicum of control, or so they tell me.

Ragsy is doing better in school right now, Evelyn is in the terrible twos which isn't great but it's a sign of progress and my husband's business is going well. So 2012 does bring with it a certain amount of opportunity and optimism that 2011 just didn't have.

So, bring it, 2012. Make this year better than the last. Make me thinner, calmer and more sane. Make me more successful, more methodical and a better parent. Or at least help me get through 2012 without great loss, without messing up my kids too much and with a stronger relationship with my husband.

The road to hell...

Okay, not hell. It has just been a very strange week, most of it a direct result of my sometimes successful attempts to be a nice person. The most recent event was when I saw a car fishtail off an exit on my way to work in the rain. The man just drove right off the road, so I pulled over to see if he was okay. I leaned out of my car and said, "Hey, you ok? Can I call someone for you?" To which he said, "HUH?" Fine. I'm being lazy. I know it. I'll get out of the car and make sure he's ok. So I do.

I get right out into a bloody bog masquerading as solid ground right next to my car and am promptly to my knees in mud. I managed to get to his car but lost my shoe and was coated with goo that squished between my toes and splatted off my legs in blobs onto my car mat all the way home.

Day One

Rags started kindergarten at the "big" school today. It went better than I could have hoped. We got there, he carefully examined his cubby where he had to hang his backpack and, after he'd confirmed several times that, yes, it was his name on the cubby, he hung his backpack up, put up his lunchbag, walked in and started coloring with a little girl.

When I picked him up, he was energetic, happy and clearly enjoying himself. I'm sure that things will get harder when he actually has homework and "real" class begins, but this is much, much better than I thought it would be. I really didn't give the kid enough credit.

Hopefully I can let go of some of this guilt now. Having him in aftercare has been eating away at me - I don't like that his day is as long as mine is. But, I guess that's one reality we'll just have to deal with. And he seems to be dealing with it better than I am.

Testing

Today was Ragsy's screening for kindergarten readiness at Parkway. It went pretty well - he tested off the charts for math, but unfortunately his writing is behind. His problem is three-fold: (1) he is a perfectionist. I've seen him start letters 10 or more times, only to re-do them the moment he hits a stumbling block. (2) He doesn't like doing things he doesn't feel competent at. In fact, he hates it. So he avoids doing it, which means he avoids practice, which means it doesn't get better. Can't blame him there - I hate doing things I'm not good at, too. (3) He's left-handed. No one else in his class (teachers included) is left-handed. I'm not left-handed, and neither is anyone else in my family except my brother-in-law in Charlotte, NC. Unfortunately, he tries to copy people who are right-handed in the way they hold their paper and pencils, which makes him a little slower, more uncomfortable and less precise, which makes him frustrated, which makes him not want to do it.

Ah, well - there's always a give and take. We're practicing, I'm helping him learn to position the paper more comfortably and hold the pen in such a way that gives him a more precise, smoother result. Just a week and he's already begun to improve. I don't blame our preschool for the problem, but it would've been nice had they told us that there was one to begin with. They were telling me everything was hunky dory as recently as the beginning of May while our pediatrician and school administrators feel otherwise.

It sucks seeing your kid get frustrated about something other kids can do with little effort. Oh, well - with practice, it'll get better. And if that's the worst of my worries, I think we're doing pretty well.