Hump Day HaHas- Booby

(Sorry I missed a week. I was sick last week, so I laid in bed and watched the rest of Grey's Anatomy on Netflix. Score!)

I recently pinned this little guy on Pinterest (follow me here!) and I have to admit that I noticed his feet first. Then I felt guilty after he chastised me!

Just a Hump Day HaHa to get you through  the rest of the week. We're almost there!!!

Writing Prompts

This week's writing prompts at Mama's Losin' It are:

Writing Prompts:

1.) A bad habit you’d like to break.
2.) “Currently”. A simple list of things you’re currently feeling as seen at Sometimes Sweet.
3.) Write about an argument you once had with a parent when you were a child.
4.) List 10 things you are afraid of.
5.) Write a limerick!

I'm so excited to write about number 3! I had a logical argument, where I served up the grown-ups behinds on silver platters with my infallible logic. I'm pretty sure they all hated me after that.

When I was in sixth grade, which was still elementary school, we had "Quiet Time" during lunch. If you aren't familiar, it is the last 5 minutes or so at the end of lunch where students are required to sit with their heads down to make the transition back into the classroom easier. As an adult, I am opposed to this. Kids are required to sit quietly for 7 hours of the day, let them at least have their whole 35 minute lunch.

In the corner of the lunch room, they had the rules and consequences listed. The consequences were as follows: 1st time you break a rule, you get a warning, the 2nd time you get a pink slip and after 3 pink slips, you go to the Principal's office.

One particularly rowdy day, everyone was carrying on and the lunch monitors were having trouble getting everyone to stop talking. Then the cafeteria lady came out to yell. She always annoyed me, because she tried to take over crowd control when she should have been in the kitchen making us a sandwich or maybe some peanut butter bon-bons. Know your role, hag.

Fed up with the chaos, one of the monitors stood up and said, "Fine! Everyone can write 500 times, "I will not talk during quiet time!" Apparently, she smoked crack, because ummm... no I'm not.

Well, my 12 year old self was LIVID when I got back to class and I informed the other girls that we did not get our warning, or our pink slips or our visit to the Principal's office. The consequences said nothing about writing a sentence 500 times. Which is totally pointless, make me write my spelling words 500 times or a chapter out of my history book. 2 birds, 1 stone. My teacher was lit when he heard me telling the other girls this and he tried to squash my mini-revolution. He did this by telling me that I was a spoiled brat. Which I'm pretty sure is a no-no, but I didn't see the principal making him write 500 times that "I will not call my students a spoiled brat." Apparently word traveled of my refusal and the punishment imposing cafeteria monitor came and got me out of class and I told her that, no, I would not be writing them, because I did not receive a warning or a pink slip and those were the pre-established punishments (I probably didn't say pre-established at the time, but it sounds better than, "That's not what the sign says!") They said I was doing it, I said I wasn't.

I went home. I told my mom. My mom told the school and backed my argument. She called my friends' moms. A few of them called the school. A few of them didn't bother and let their kids do it anyways. The principal agreed that we didn't need to do it and we were all issued a warning.

My husband argues with me that this was wrong and it was wrong of my mom to support me. We were acting up and a warning or pink slip probably wouldn't have done anything and making us write was an appropriate impromptu punishment and my mom should have just made me write and maybe he's right. Except, think about the negative consequences of that. I felt so strongly that we had been wronged. Maybe it was a flaw in their punishment system or with the whole quiet time thing in general, BUT I still felt strongly about it. What happens if I feel that strongly about being mistreated and my mom just dismisses it and tells me to do it anyways. What do I learn from that? What I did learn was that if I have a valid argument, with supporting facts, it doesn't matter who you're going against, you have a shot for a change!

Hump Day HaHas- Gas

 

I don't know about you, but our gas went up a dime overnight where I live. This is getting to be pretty true! 

Writer's Workshop

Another week of Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop! Stop over at Mama's Losin' It! to join in!

Writing Prompts:

1.) How has music changed since you were a child?
2.) Write a post in just 12 lines.
3.) Your favorite summer view so far.
4.) Share your best way to beat the summer heat.
5.) Something a sibling did that made you laugh.


This week has been hectic. Work til 4, 1/2 hour commute home. Scrub the kid down and head to Bible Camp from 6-8pm. Have a wired kidlet who can't sleep and squeals until midnight. 12 lines is about all I have time for. (The previous lines don't count!)

2.
New Years Day: 2011 would be different, but C is still sleeping, that's no different than last year...

Better take that pregnancy test, but I'm probably overreacting... omg, two lines!

A Baby on the way!

Vomit and vomit and vomit til I lose 30 lbs!

Spring and Summer come and go. Fall is on it's way and apparently bringing a new baby!

So precious wrapped in pink. I've falled in love already. I hold you all night.

"A baby doesn't stay a baby forever," they said

"It goes so fast," they said

and it does.

For my baby is a toddler. Nearly 2 years old.

But I love her more than anything and I don't remember life before her.

For my life started that day when I held her in my arms and kiss her dark hair.

Because I became someone's Mom that day.

Hump Day HaHas

Just some giggles that I found on Pinterest to help us get through the rest of the week!

The creepiest thing

I'm going through the blog I've followed over the years and deleted inactive ones or ones I never really got into. Some of them are really hard to delete, because I enjoyed them, but they aren't there anymore. One of those blogs belonged to Miss Tiff. She was funny and sassy and always gave me a laugh, but she's been gone from the blog world for over 3 years. I went to her blog, maybe just to say goodbye or get a reminder of who she was (after all, it's been 3 years) but it's been turned into a hypertension blog, by some Gary or Jay or something guy. Tiff's posts were gone. So, I went into my reader, because you can still get some deleted posts there and Miss Tiff's last post was 3 years ago. 9 months ago, Blood Pressure guy just started writing, no introduction, no nothing. Now, I figure that it probably is something to do with blog inactivity and deleting blogs and whatever, but it was still kinda creepy. It's like Blood Pressure guy murdered A Bit of Miss Tiff and replaced it with a pod person. Cree....py.

Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop

I haven't done a writer's workshop in awhile. Stop over to Mama Kat's Losin' It to join in!

Writing Prompts:

1.) Share a 4th of July inspired post.
2.) 10 things you learned in June. (inspired by Chatting At The Sky)
3.) Write a post inspired by the word: strawberries.
4.) Create a How-To post.
5.) Talk about something you were allowed to do as a child that you will not allow your child to do.

10 Things I Learned in June

10.) Grey's Anatomy is really addicting. I didn't want to jump on the GA bandwagon when it first aired. Plus, I was in college, so I didn't have a lot of spare time. Plus, we still had ER... Then, one night, we were flipping through channels and caught the tail end of on the season final and it was good, really good! Even though Netflix Instant is going to crap, it has GA available. Yay!! I'm up to the end of Season 5.

9.) Farmville was ruining my life. It used to be fun. Those digital little crops popping up were really exciting. Then they started changing it. Quests and quests after quests. Ask your friends for this, ask them for that... People were unfriending because I was flooding their wall with junk requests. I tried to quit once and one of my friends unwhithered my crops, so I started to play again. I really was addicted. I tried again to quit and blocked it, so I was no longer tempted to jump back in. I don't miss it at all.

8.) Bee stings really hurt! We had some yellow jackets build a nest under the soffet (sp?) on our porch and while Baby and I were playing on the porch, one came down and stung me right in the top of the head. It felt like my scalp was on fire. Then, while I was trying to get the door open, one got me right in the wrist. Bastards. When I was trying to evacuate, Baby was throwing a fit because she didn't want to go inside. I ended up dragging her inside by her arm, before she got locked into their little missile system. I was going to seek revenge with a flame thrower, but my husband vetoed that idea. Bastard.

7.) I can be in charge at work. I have 2 workers who outrank me at work. One is out for 8 weeks with a back surgery and the other has been on two weeks vacation. I managed to deal with the drama and keep the place alive. Hope I don't jinx myself for the next 2 days.

6.) I can't be a helicopter mom. I worry about every move my baby makes and it will kill me. She's scared of everything new, so I hover whenever we're in an unfamiliar situation, recently, the swimming pool. She was scared to death of the water. Her dad wanted to just throw her in, while I wanted to let her cling to me like a scared cat. Neither one of us were right. After she was in for awhile, she loosened up. When I got out to go to the bathroom, my husband pinched her nose and dunked her. Even though she wasn't thrilled with it, it didn't leave her traumatized like I feared.

5.) 15 minutes of cleaning/organizing does make a difference. I'm easily distract... oh look, something shiny!!! So, it can be tough for me to focus on a big cleaning/organizing task. To deal with this, I just don't do it. Unfortunately, the work all stacks up and it gets totally overwhelming. So, what I've been trying to do is set the time for 15 minutes every evening and work like a man woman to clean, dust, stack, put away, sort, whatever. If after the 15 minutes, I want to keep going, I can. If not, I quit. Even doing 15 minutes a day has giving a lot of order to our chaos.

4.) Even my perfect, well behaved baby will fall victim to the terrible twos. She's always been a good baby. When she started to walk, I'd tell her to stay on the carpet to keep her in the living room and if she was standing on the edge and her toe went over, she would scoot back a few inches. She got complimented all the time in restaurants because she was so well-behaved. Well, it's all changing. She climbs everything, she no longer wants to wait for others to eat when we are at a restaurant. If she's done, she's ready to roll. She's still a good baby and I'm very blessed, but the terrible twos won't be a breeze like I'd hoped.

3.) My mom was a champ. She read to me for 2 hours every night. Right now, we're lucky to finish one book. Baby likes to wrestle them out of my hands and sometimes tears the pages. Then, by the time we get home in the evening, eat, get ready for bed, there's not 2 hours TO read. I pretty much suck.

2.) Thinking really does have a lot to do with how we feel. I feel kinda hypocritical, because I tell my clients at work this all the time, but I've never done it for myself. The way we talk to ourselves in our head really contributes to our feelings. I've been trying to be more mindful of the words I use when thinking and I feel better. Just changing "this sucks" to "It's okay, you can get through this" made a crummy situation more bearable!

1.) I love my husband, even if he remembered his mom's birthday on June 21, but forgot our anniversary on June 20. He always tells me that I'm the one who forgets dates and that he'd remember, even if I didn't remind him. So I didn't. On the 19th, he asked me the date and I told him. I figured he was just being silly. Then he said, "My mom's birthday is Friday, so we're probably going to have to go over there" and I said "probably so." Then, on our anniversary, he came home from work empty-handed, no card, no flowers, nothing. I handed him a card and he asked, "What's this?" "A card." "Who's it for?" "You. Open it." *reads card* "shit... I remembered last week!" But you know, I don't really car all that much. I might have before, but I didn't. I don't know if it's because I have the baby now and anniversaries and birthdays just aren't that important anymore or what. I just didn't tell him that. He doesn't get off the hook that easily!

Phew! That was tough! June was only 30 days!

Confessions, reborn

I loved my Dad. I was crazy about him. I always told everyone that I was Daddy's Princess. When I got engaged, I was so excited, because my Dad's health had been good. For so many years, I was afraid that he wouldn't be at my wedding. I was so excited that he would be there to give me away. I poured over songs that would be good Father/Daughter dance songs: "Butterfly Kisses," "Stealing Cinderella," "I Loved Her First," or "My Little Girl." I listened to them over and over and cried and cried, because we'd made me. My Dad would be here to give me away. I decided on "Stealing Cinderella" to fit my fairy tale theme.

Then my world came to a crashing halt.

Almost 6 months to the day of my wedding, my Dad had a stroke and life would never be the same again. He fought hard. They said he'd be a vegetable, but he got better. He knew us. He helped my mom balance the checkbook. He joked and teased. I pushed the wedding back to give him time to get better. It was a miracle. He'd be there. Maybe he'd have to be in a wheelchair, but we'd make it work. Then, they said cancer. He fought some more, but his body was too weak from the stroke and one dark December night, he gave up and my world stopped again. He was 56.

Sometimes, I get so angry when I think about everything he's missed. Since he left us 4.5 years ago, my nephew has grown up and graduated from high school. My niece who was given up for adoption found me. I had a beautiful baby, who he would have just adored. My wedding went on without him, his absence marked with a flicking candle. And then there are all the things to come: my nephew's wedding, more grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, growing old with my mom, watching him kids grow...

When I look at my daughter, I can't imagine missing out on any of those things. It breaks my heart to imagine that someone else might have to cry at her graduations, or zip her wedding gown, teach her how to sooth her own tiny newborn, cheer her own as she conquers the world. How can I teach her to be strong, fearless, confident when I'm not here. So I did it, I joined a gym today. I can't fool around anymore, I've seen what I can lose and I don't want to.

So that's why I'm writing this. I need you to help me be committed. If I tell you that I'm doing it, then I'd have to tell you that I've stopped and I don't want to have to do that, so I have to keep working, right?

Oh, and in case you are wondering, my godfather gave me away and we danced to Darius Rucker's "It Won't Be Like This for Long." Because it won't. Life moves so quickly and we have to keep up or we'll get trampled.