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.

Haz mat, anyone?

The past three weeks have been awful health-wise for my kids, Evelyn in particular. She had roseola on week, which involved temperatures of 105, a terrified mom and eventually a terrified daycare when she broke out in a purple rash about 48 hours after the fever had broken. Then last week another high fever for a few days. Now we're trying to figure out if she has pink eye or just allergies.

So far I have no idea what to believe. With Rags it was so easy to tell. With her...well, they're totally different. The goo gets really bad a half hour after coming inside, fades away overnight along with the swelling, only to return (but only a tiny bit) after going from the house to the car. I'm stumped.

If she wakes from her nap with goo, we'll just go to the pediatric urgent care clinic - I don't want her to have to deal with it any longer than necessary, and I'm going out of town next Wednesday, which will make her miserable anyway. This is probably the worst thing about parenting (other than meting out discipline, a necessary evil, though I understand why some kids are spoiled).

Oh, well. Given my last year, if this is the worst of my problems, I'll take it. But I'm so tired of being covered with bodily fluids. I'm also done with feeling like I need a shower more often than not. Ick.

Fight!

You may or may not know that I'm extremely insecure. Underneath the erotica-writing, legislation-reading, public-speaking exterior, I'm still the sniveling little girl on the playground running around asking, "Why don't you like me?" Which is why, every time I get into a "discussion" (code for argument) with my husband, we have this extraordinarily awkward period afterward where I have no idea whatsoever how to approach him.

I have this completely irrational fear that he'll stop liking me, stop loving me, wonder why on earth he married me in the first place. If I were to play armchair psychologist, I'd say it's because my dad ran off with his secretary when I was 2 and I'm terrified that my husband will leave me similarly. Perhaps that's it. But that doesn't matter.

He's never given me any indication that he'd do such a thing. I have absolutely no reason to think that he might. But that sniveling little coward in me still takes every single argument we have as a commentary on the strength of our relationship. It takes a lot of thinking to realize that the fact that we're still together, even after all those stupid little fights that come out of nowhere, is a better testament to our marriage than the fact that we have those arguments at all.

Phases.

When Evelyn was born, my son became Baby Bear, of Three Little Bears fame. Mostly it was an exclusionary measure - she was only given the honorary title of Little Bear when she was 5 months old and it became clear she wasn't going away. It wasn't until three months after that that he stopped making us call him Baby Bear and stopped calling me Mama Bear. And it ended rather abruptly. We were visiting friends at their house and their son called his mother "mommy." I guess peer pressure is a powerful thing, because I was suddenly mommy again, too.

Now my son is apparently Superman. And his "home" voice is now a Western drawl. He sounds like a cross between Elvis Presley and a drunken John Wayne (he's still learning how to do accents well). I know I have a bit of an accent sometimes myself. But mine is pure southern Indiana hay seed. So I'm not sure where this one comes from, except perhaps me mimicking a Western accent once when reading him a Scooby Doo book.

Oh, well. Unless I speak drastically differently than I thought I did, I'm sure this is just another phase. Could be worse.

Sleep!

I used to complain that neither of my children sleep (and sometimes still do). But now I'm irritated with myself. I don't sleep when I should. I get up at 5:30 or 6 a.m., work all day, come home and manage the house, work out, clean, prep for tomorrow and fall into bed somewhere between midnight and 2 a.m. I should probably get to bed closer to 9 or 10, but I can't seem to make myself. It's so aggravating.

Now I'm wiped out from too many days this week of not sleeping enough, but it's already almost 11 and, guess what? I'm not asleep! Grrr.