I did the Macarena with my Mobile phone because I'm crazy.

Borrowed from the awesome Christi's blog...


Pick the month you were born:


January-------I kicked
February------I loved
March--------I karate chopped
April----------I licked
May----------I jumped on
June----------I smelled
July-----------I did the Macarena With
August--------I had lunch with
September----I danced with
October-------I sang to
November-----I yelled at
December-----I ran over

Pick the day (number) you were born on:


1-- -----a birdbath
2-------a monster
3-------a phone
4-------a fork
5-------a snowman
6-------a gangster
7-------my mobile phone
8-------my dog
9-------my best friends' boyfriend
10-------my neighbor
11-------my science teacher
12------- a banana
13-------a fireman
14-------a stuffed animal
15-------a goat
16-------a pickle
17-------your mom
18-------a spoon
19------ - a smurf
20-------a baseball bat
21-------a ninja
22-------Chuck Norris
23-------a noodle
24-------a squirrel
25-------a football player
26-------my sister
27-------my brother
28-------an ipod
29-------a surfer
30-------a llama
31-------A homeless guy

Pick the color of shirt you are wearing:

White---------because I'm cool like that
Black---------because that's how I roll.
Pink-----------because I'm crazy.
Red-----------because the voices told me to.
Blue-----------because I'm sexy and I do what I want
Green---------because I think I need some serious help.
Purple---------because I'm AWESOME!
Gray----------because Big Bird said to and he's my leader.
Yellow--------because someone offered me 1,000,000 dollars
Orange--------because my family thinks I'm stupid anyway.
Brown---------because I can.
Other----------because I'm a Ninja!
None----------because I can't control myself!

Thank God for Guardian Angels

I am thanking my lucky stars that my guardian angel was working extra hard this morning while I drove to work. While turning left onto Eagle Run Drive, I came within inches of create a new back end for a swanky looking red truck in front of me in the turn lane. Even though I was going uphill, and I wasn't going too fast, I had a terrible time stopping. I even had to swerve into the other lane, which my angel made sure was empty, to avoid the crunch. I am so sick of winter!

Creeping Back to Normal

After our 6 day bout with the flu, I think we are all approaching normal. Still some coughs and sniffles, but at least we aren't so delirious with fever that we aren't looking at each other and thinking "Who the hell are these people in my house?" At the very least, since all I could do was sit and shiver for so long, I sat and shivered in front of the computer screen and I got the taxes done. Which is a relief, because I have big plans for that refund, baby.

So, it's back to work tomorrow, with all the fun that entails, especially after a three day absence. My stomach is cramping with the thought of all the homework that Evan will have to make up. 3rd grade is killer for parents.

Sesame Street is full of Bogeys

In my fluish delirium I have been thanking God for the miracle of the OnDemand feature of digital cable. For free you can dial up all the popular kids shows at any time of the day or night. Since I have had to rot my kids brains by parking them in front of the TV while I lay moaning on the couch, we have been pretty plugged into this. Yesterday, during our 4th episode of Sesame Street, they showed a segment where two children are talking about things they have learned to do since they were little. While one child was talking, the other began to ACTIVELY PICK HER NOSE-WHILE ON CAMERA! Evan and I looked at each other over the babies' heads, groaning in disgust when we noticed that both Charlie and Sam also had their fingers up their noses in devoted imitation. Normally, this is a great thing while watching Big Bird, but apparently their standards have lowered considerably since the 70s, when I was an avid fan.

Influenza A

On Tuesday night, the boys and I were all diagnosed with Influenza A (and Charlie also has an earache and sinus infection). My parents were both diagnosed with the same today. I have not felt this sick in YEARS. Here's to hoping I didn't pass it on to anyone else!!

Defecting to the Other Side

I was trying to get some work done last night on my NBPTS portfolio...I had about an hour to work with, and I really wanted to get some major writing done. However, I spent 10 minutes waiting for the computer to start up and get to the desktop. Then I spent another 30 minutes waiting for it to load Outlook and then Word, which took forever, and then it wasn't keeping up with my typing, and I was making all kinds of mistakes. After only 5 minutes the computer rebooted itself without warning, and I had to start all over. I wasted the whole hour on the stupid computer. We got it right after Jeff and I got married, only 2 1/2 years ago, but apparently that is a lifetime in technology terms. I have had numerous people look at it to see if it can be improved or sped up, but alas! No one has been able to help...it is obvious if I am going to get this portfolio done I need a new computer.

I have been toying with the idea of getting an Apple today. I have always stayed away from them in the past, but I it would be SOOOO nice to take my work home from school and vice versa. The formats are a lot more compatible from PC to Mac these days, but it doesn't work the other way around. I could also get a pretty good educators discount, which would be nice.

Actually though, anything that moves faster than a snail and doesn't make me want to smash it against the wall would be nice.

Charlie is not Afraid of the Water

I had the nicest afternoon on Friday (which was nice, since the rest of the weekend has been filled with three sick boys and their green snotty noses). I signed Charlie up for spring swim lessons at Swimtastic awhile ago. His preschool teacher, who is also a swim teacher at Swimtastic, thought it would be a good idea if we took Charlie to a family swim time there because she was really worried that he wouldn't get into the water at all at lessons (which makes me wonder how well she actually knows my child, because I wasn't worried about that at all, but whatever). Charlie was thrilled to FINALLY be allowed behing the glass wall and into the WATER he has lusted over the last 6 weeks of watching Evan swim. He loved floating on his back, on his front, was not scared at all to put his face in the water, and went down their water slide of his accord at least 10 times. I would have been terrified at that age to go down a shute and splash into deep water, but he thought it was all a lark. I think lessons will go fine! The best part was we met Christi and her little fish Alyssa there and we got a Koch fix in. Even though we had to shout bits of conversation at each other while our kids were in and out of the water, it was still so nice!!! I wish I lived next door to Christi. Then we could be like Lucy and Ethel.

Back to the Doctor

I went back to the doctor yesterday afternoon to discuss the results of my latest round of bloodwork, and I am SO disgusted. My blood sugar levels are right on the edge of being too high, and my insulin levels are also too high. He said that this is to be expected, as it is part of my polycystic ovary syndrome, and also the Metabolic Syndorome I was diagnosed with last month. He told me to expect diabetes to develop sometime within the next 10-15 years, but that I could hold it off a bit by pretending like I am diabetic now, and also by taking a new medicine called Metaformin. (Because we don't spend enough paying for prescriptions every month already!) So, like a good girl, I donated all my V-Day chocolate to my mother today. Sheesh. I told him how frustrated I was to be exercising and dieting like a freak and to just be maintaining, and not loosing. He said not to expect to loose much, and that I am working like a horse to just maintain because most people with these conditions are MORBIDLY OBESES!!!! These words should not be uttered to a former anorexic. Sheesh!! To top it all off, I have another kidney infection. I am a wreck.

I'm Good Enough

Yesterday we were running seriously low on groceries. Usually, I make the grocery list, and my rockin' husband gets the groceries so I can avoid the torture of taking my two toddlers to the grocery store. It's tax season though, so I knew if I waited for Jeff to have time to do the shopping, we would all have wasted away from hunger (which is maybe not such a bad idea in my case). So, I loaded my three darlings into the van and headed off for Walmart. I made my first mistake at the very beginning of the trip. I went to the fruit aisle first. Charlie saw me put bananas in the cart, his favorite of all foods. He immediately started shouting, "CHAR CHAR BANANAS! EAT NANAS!!" Crap. So, I detoured to the free samples in the bakery and sadly they were offering cream cheese pumpkin things. Which the toddlers loved, but also were very messy. It got me through three more aisles, but then Sam thought maybe we were at a restaurant and he should have more food RIGHT NOW. Sam and Charlie are equal opportunity brothers, so when Sam started crying, Charlie got started too. I just let them scream for the next three aisles, but Evan was getting steadily more embarrased, especially as he was pushing the stroller, and he began to say (louder and louder) "We need to go home NOW. These babies are AWFUL!" By now people are staring, and I know they are looking at me as the classic terrible Walmart mother. At least I was not yelling at any of my children, and I was relatively calm. By the time we got to the checkout lanes, Sam had nacho cheese in his hair (don't ask) and Charlie was adeptly climbing out of the stroller restraints, Evan was almost in tears, and I was thinking of shipping the children off to a foreign country. If anyone tried to return them, I was imagining creative ways to pretend I had never met them before. Fighting back tears, I picked up Oprah magazine as a treat for myself. I had never read this magazine, but I am so glad that I did.

When I got home, I fed the kids lunch, put away the groceries, and then allowed myself 10 calm down minutes to read. I was feeling pretty bad by this point after wishing my kids off on strangers, but it has been such a long week. I have had the kids by myself every day this week. The first article I opened to was entitled "What's wrong with being angry?" by Mark Epstein. I came upon the following paragraph: "Studies of [mother and infant] relationships have exploded the myth of the 100 percent responsive mother. Research suggests that the best parents are fully attuned to their children only about 30 percent of the time, leaving lots of space for the child to make their own mistakes...this has laid the foundation for this shift to Winnicott's concept of the "good enough mother". "Parents cannot possibly be at one with their children all the time" he suggested. "Babies are not benign beings emititng only love. They are rapacious creatures who love ruthlessly, and who, as ofen as not, bite the hand, or breast, that feeds them." The good enough mother is one who can tolerate her infant's rage as well as her own temporary hatred of her child; she is one who is not sucked into retaliating or abandoning, and who can put aside her own self-protective responses to devote herself adequatelyto her child's needs. This "good enough" response, while not denying her own hatred, teaches the child that anger is something that can be survived...the child whose mother survives her destructive onslaught learns to love her as an "external" person, as an "other", not merely as an extension of themselves. This child recognizes that the mother has survived the attack and feels something on the order of joy or gratitude or relief, a dawning recognition that mother is outside his or her sphere of omnipotent control. This is the foundation of caring for her as a separate person, what we call consideration or concern or empathy." The article goes on to describe how our adult romantic relationships reproduce the ways that our mothers delt with tension and conflict, and our relationship with our mothers.

I can't begin to tell you the immediate relief that I felt, the weight that fell away from my heart. I have always dealt with perfectionism, which has manifested itself in many ways in my life, one of them being anorexia nervosa. As I became a mother, much as I modeled my weight in my teens after the pictures of skeletally thin girls in magazines, I modeled my mothering after the inachievable images of perfection presented to us in the media and popular culture. Not once had I ever heard someone say that not only is it okay to be just a "good enough" mother, but it is actually BETTER to be a good enough mother. I am doing my kids a favor in not being perfect, and modeling to them picking myself up and trying again. By showing them that after anger, a relationship can grow and get better.

My parents had (have) a wonderful marriage and were a stunning example for me growing up. However, I can only remember one time as a child them ever arguing or disagreeing. At least in front of us. I remember vividly seeing my mother cry, and my dad looking helpless. I felt so completely unsafe when it happened, because it never did, and it wouldn't again in my childhood. Of course, this is better than the alternative, and I am so thankful to have had a peaceful and calm home to grow up in. However, I don't think I learned to deal with conflict, or that anger is okay. As an adult my relationships with men have of course included times of disagreement, but when it happened, I completely dissolved. I thought that conflict shouldn't be happening at all, that there should be peace always. I didn't (don't) know how to handle it when it does happen. My first reaction is that I have done something wrong, it is my fault, I have to fix it immediately. Not healthy, I know. I'm coming to realize that, and I am starting to deal with it better. What a huge relief though that by not being perfect, by allowing healthy conflict and management of such in our home I can give my kids a good start. And the best part of it is, I can be myself while I do it because I am good enough.

All that from a magazine. Sometimes God speaks to us in strange ways, huh?