Walking Backwards

*Sob* I watched last nights special about the tsunami disaster and am still feeling deeply effected by it this morning. Since the news first reported the incident, I have felt overwhelming grief and futility. Last night was the worst. They were actually able to talk to some of the survivors and their stories were harrowing. There was a young Indian girl who was visiting her brother in a hospital and in between tears she was able to say "I can't do anything. My parents . . . both my parents are gone." They showed one image of a woman sobbing cradling her dead child who looked about the same age as Nico. This must be the greatest tragedy of our time. I can only send in money and hope that aid comes quick to those in need of it. I wish I could do more.

Right now I am waiting for the windshield repair guy to show up to repair a crack in my windshield that I got this weekend while driving all over the state behind some very inconsiderate truck drivers. I am amazed that its possible for him to come here to do this, I see so few conveniences extended to people and this is a great one for people with irate toddlers. Apparently it is popular because none of the windshield repair services in Austin have an address, they are all mobile. There are some auto body shops that do it, but if repairing cracks is your sole operation - you better have a van. This waiting should allow me time to do a holiday re-cap. If you have read way too many of these by now, you can skip the rest of this entry and tune in tomorrow when we return to regular programming.

Joe and I had decided that we were going to leave for all of our holiday stuff on Thursday night after he got off of work so that we would only have to drive six hours on Christmas eve instead of nine. Having that break in the middle is really important to someone who gets car sick and to a toddler who can't sit still for five minutes much less five hours at a time. With this thought in mind, you would think that I would have had the idea to at least pack and have dinner ready by the time Joe got home at seven so that we didn't show up at Houston at midnight. I must admit that I am a bigger moron than even I suspected because Joe walked in the door just as I was lamenting over my astronomically large and unfinished to do list. We did get packed in record time and did get away with most of the essentials. I did forget numerous gifts, though.

We made it to Houston at about eleven thirty and then proceeded to try to persuade our now hyper toddler to get into bed. Around one, he finally decided it was time to lay down. Since he was laying down with us, we didn't get any sleep, but hey - that's part of the joy of the season. I woke early with the baby and spent the morning playing around the in-laws house waiting for Joe to get up. When he finally did, the day was transformed into a flurry of activity. We had to go to Target to pick up last minute stocking stuffers, wrapping supplies, and gift cards. While I was there, I found a small brass menorah, candles, and a couple of plates that read 'Happy Chanukah'. Yay for that. I was so afraid of last minute shopping, but it really wasn't that bad. We even got to see a small flurry of snow in the parking lot. After we got back to my in-law's house, we finished wrapping our gifts and scrounged in the kitchen for some food. They was little there that Nicholas would eat so we made him some mac and cheese and hoped for more at the husband's grandparents.

Lake Charles was okay. We sat around for about three hours before the celebration began because one of the aunts was singing in the church choir and got there late. Once again, we couldn't find anything for Nicholas to eat, the picky child that he is. I know next time that I am going to have to bring Nicholas' meals for him. Joe's family is Cajun, too, so everything was way too spicy even if it was something that he would eat. The gift giving was chaotic, but we got some nice stuff. Joe and I got DVDs, books, and some clothes. I got a gift card to a craft store. Nicholas got a ton of stuff, almost none of which was on his list. Some of the items he had already. I need to return a lot of it and get something that he will actually play with. I know the whole "look a gift horse in the mouth" thing and I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but you'd think that they wouldn't give him something that was intended for children over twice his age. After the gift opening was over, we packed up the car and drove off to Joe's mother's house two and a half hours away. Joe got lost on the way there and we didn't arrive until after midnight.

I have to say at this point I was feeling rather unfestive. Perfect time to visit my mother-in-law *insert sarcasm here*. I know she doesn't mean to be hurtful about some things, but she comes off that way a lot of the time. I just had a really bad time there. First off, I was up until three in the morning because the baby wouldn't go to sleep when we got there and then after I got him to go down I had to set up stockings. MIL had bought items for Nicholas' stocking even though we had told her it was taken care of (this was all we were getting him this year except a couple of books). She had also gotten all of my brother-in-law's stocking stuff even though we were supposed to split it with her. It just drove me crazy because it made me feel that all of the thought and effort I had put into it was wasted, most of it wasn't even used - just thrown under the tree. After I went to bed, I couldn't go to sleep because I had taken my medication too late in the day and I was still wired from it. Then I woke up before everyone else. Stupid asthma medicine. After everyone woke up we had a breakfast of cookies and coffee, the baby was so sick of junk food that he dropped the cookie when I pulled a whole wheat bagel out of our snack bag. We did get a lot of really cool gifts and my MIL enjoyed the items we got for her. Once again, most of the items Nicholas got weren't on his list and are currently proving to be somewhat useless. Everyone has to get him toys, the brighter and more battery driven the better. Then my brother-in-law called to say that he wouldn't make it. He had to call MY cellphone of course, so his mother looked at me like she was going to kill the messenger when I was talking to him. After all the gift giving and what not, I was wiped out. I had already been up for about seven hours after a very fitful and short night of sleep. I took Nico to the playroom with Joe and sat down to watch a video with him, promptly falling asleep. Joe just left him in the room alone with me. I was awakened to him shoving a remote into my hand. He had emptied out my wallet and the contents of my bag and had strewn my photos all over the place. I had to have Joe come take him so that I could try to sleep off my anger and general bad mood. After waking up we sat around talking to Joe's mom about college to have her tell me that my field is the easiest to get a degree in, that's why so many people do it, and that my brother's degree is a total waste of time. I was so irritated I could barely speak. We did leave shortly afterward.

Back to Houston to sleep until our trip back to Austin. Joe, once again, relied heavily on me to take care of the baby claiming that there would be "someone else" to help. Grrrr . . . I hate that the most I think. The baby hadn't had a real meal in days, so I raided the pantry for whatever I could find. With him finally sated on peanut butter toast, cheese slices, and green beans, he went to bed at one in the morning. By the time we left Sunday afternoon, I just wanted to get home. I am already dreading the trip two years from now.

So that was my trip, it sucked. Bah Humbug! It might have been better under less stressful circumstances, but that just wasn't the case. I also discovered that my child will no longer sleep in the car. What a time to figure that out!

I made it back from the family travel odyssey in one piece, amazingly enough. After spending fifteen hours in the car in three days, I'm wiped out. Even though I got home last night, I have been catching up all day today. So sorry that this entry has no surface value at all. I promise to provide a much more fulfilling entry when I am not so homicidal. Probably tomorrow morning when I am avoiding the mounting stack of laundry waiting to be done and Nico is distracted by the eighteen colors of play-doh.

Its been almost a week since I showed my face around these parts and I am probably going to be scarce for the next couple of weeks, too. Joe is starting a new position on Monday and I really need to get my act together. Joe was enabling my slacking. I swept and mopped my floors for the first time in a couple of weeks today and I think it would be best if we didn't discuss the state of my bathroom. I have a ton of library books to return (and read) and the amount of television I've been watching has been deplorable. It is so easy to avoid doing anything at all when you have someone else who will grasp at anything that will keep him on the couch or at the computer. Seeing him being so lackadaisical about housework, household projects, or making marginally healthy, well-balanced meals made me not care either. I also have been holed-up here like a hermit, avoiding most outside contact. All I have to say is thank god he doesn't work from home.

Another little bit of work I have ahead of me is the mountain of x-mas shopping I now have to do. You see, the two weeks that Joe was unemployed, our families communicated to us that they didn't want us to get them anything. WooHoo. That previous reprieve from mall shopping has now been retracted. We now have long and very specific lists we must follow. Wish me luck, I'll try to keep up with my writing, maybe. Damn holidays.

I forgot to add in my recent post about my blog modifications, my commenting system is slightly altered. Now, when you click on comments, it takes you to the blogger commenting system. If you have a problem with that, not being registered or whatnot, just click on comments and then at the bottom of the box there is another line that says 0 comments (or 1, 2, 3, etc). If you click on that it will bring you to a pop up for haloscan commenting. I will work on making this a little friendlier when I have some time.

Why can't Joe be home all of the time and still get paid? Don't get me wrong, having him here ALL of the time is getting kind of annoying, but his being here this morning was fabulous. I woke up last night around 3 with a migrane and was in so much pain I couldn't get to sleep until 7. Nicholas usually wakes up around 7:30 and I was dreading it. Enter super Joe to the rescue. He swooped off with the baby leaving me in the nice, dark comfort of our room until 11 this morning. When I did get out of bed, I found the baby playing in his room and Joe unloading the dishwasher. He had even made them whole wheat pancakes for breakfast. There was no screaming and everyone seemed to be generally happy. I am nothing short of amazed. Now it is a question of how I can get Joe to do this regularly.


I fear that, yet again, at least one of my classes (if not both) are going to get cancelled this session. I checked the enrollment numbers this morning since open enrollment ended last week and discovered that one of my classes only has 5 people enrolled. I think that a class has to have a minimum of twenty or twenty-five students for it to make. The other class has fifteen people signed up. I won't know until January if the class is cancelled because they still won't have the numbers for late registration until then. I appear to be having some serious bad luck with this re-entry into college thing. I haven't gotten to attend a class for two years now. The distance learning didn't work either with all of the moving and Joe's previous travel schedule. I now regret not taking a full course load whenever I had the opportunity before the baby was born. I guess this is what I get for being a lazy slug before. In my defense, I was working a sixty-hour-a-week job and partying my little tail off.


On the Christmas side of my life, my mother now has me ordering all of her Christmas gifts to my household. I must say that I thought that I was being lazy about ordering everything from the internet. I am in disbelief that my mother cannot do even that. The upside of this extra work is that I get to find out what everyone is getting and make sure that my brother, my husband, and my son get some good stuff that they'll enjoy. She also let me know what she is getting me. I'll have no surprises by the time x-mas rolls around. I need to go over everything and make sure that my shopping is actually done, Joe's family is large and unruly. Don't even get me started on the whole wrapping thing. Bah humbug.

I'm alive! Amazingly, I think I overreacted yet again to this last medical procedure. Don't get me wrong, it was not comfortable in the least and I spent most of the time with my hands clenched into fists at my sides. I made it through, though, and am now experiencing only mild ickyness. I have a follow-up appointment in two weeks where they tell me what our next step is. There is a chance that this may be it, so that's what I'm hoping for. I don't need any more problems. Joe keeps scolding me for doing stuff around the house and Annie came over to try and persuade me to stay in bed, but I seem to be having another streak of OCD behavior and feel like I should be dusting something. They seem to be okay with having me sit in my computer chair which seems like a much better option than bed to me and a good compromise with the people who try to care for me.


You may notice I'm currently using a new template. I needed something a little fresh and didn't feel like eeking out the code of another one, so this is just a basic Blogger doo-hicky. It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but a blog shouldn't be all that much work in the end, right? I also added a few new features (read: counter) and signed up for blogexplosion.com, but we'll see how long that is going to last. The idea of having a bunch of random people surf my blog is kind of disconcerting. The fact that I could care less about what people read about my life helps and after all, it is much more comforting, in the end, to think of strangers reading my blog than my mother.


Still on the hunt for a menorah. Joe and I stopped at about four different stores last night with no success. I have already given up on finding one in time for the holiday, but I can't stop asking for one because some of the reactions you get are hilarious. One guy at World Market was visually afraid of what my response was going to be when I asked him if they had anything for Chanukah and his response was no. He kind of braced himself and held onto the box in his arms a little tighter while waiting for my reply. Another woman was like "Yeah, its weird that you can't find any of that isn't it." We'll probably end up buying everything online after the season is over so we can nab some fabulous clearance price.

Yes folks, tomorrow is the big day. Its LEEP day. I am going to get a 3 mm deep (at least) chunk of my cervix removed. I am so thankful that I got out a ruler today too, because I had somehow mixed up the conceptual space of a millimeter and was imagining it to be a lot worse. That was kind of scary. I should have known better as I have no depth perception to speak of and can barely park a car, my concept of spatial relations is so poor. Wish me luck and good pain medication.


Elsewhere today I went on an unusual quest. After dropping the short one off for his obligatory (for my sanity) two hours at preschool, I went off looking for Chanukah goodies. I wanted a wooden driedal, a menorah, some gelt, and a few candles. Oh, I also wanted a book or two on the background of the holiday. I just simply would not believe the stories relayed to me by the other parents on my message board that these things were difficult, if not impossible, to find. Now, I know what you're saying: "Jamie, you're not Jewish!" We'll, I'm not Christian and I celebrate Christmas. I'm not pagan and we usually do something to acknowledge the solstices/equinoxes and mark yule, samhain, and beltane. I feel that if I am going to be a religious hypocrite, I might as well be an equal opportunity one. You see, now that I have a small child who is currently riding the first and only grandchild wave a little to fiercely and frequently, I have come to the conclusion that Christmas costs too much, is too materialistic, and fills me with frustration and anger. Sadly, it can't be done away with as my husband's family revolves around this holiday. I thought that maybe by incorporating Chanukah, I could become more in tune with the "spirit" of the season. I know from the small amount of reading I had done on the holiday from before that its a very family centered holiday, that is important to me. I also like the idea of Nicholas knowing that other religions exist in the world.

Ah, but let me get back to telling you about my quest, the search for the illusive holiday paraphenalia. I remembered that a local toy store here carried Chanukah items last year, so I drove up to the other side of town to see what they had. The entire front of the store looked like my grandmother's Christmas decorations exploded in it. All very nice, vintagey Christmas decor. Stuffed by the register was a two foot by five foot shelf with some nice wooden driedals, some blocks with Hebrew characters on them (pretty neat), a few games, and some chocolate gold coins with American eagles on them they were trying to pass off as gelt. Since I didn't have any cash and I wasn't going to pull out the debit card for one wooden driedal (the only item in the store I wanted), I left.

I made my way down to the frou-frou hardware store at the end of the shopping center, figuring that since they carried Christmas stuff, they must have something for Chanukah. I approached the counter first thing after the twenty wasted minutes in the first store and asked "Do you carry menorahs?" Simple enough. The woman said no, and the man next to her asked "What's a menorah?" I am not kidding here. People, this is a religion that has been around longer than Christianity, its where Christianity gets some of its oldest tenets and you don't know some of its most basic ritual objects? The next part of what she said had to be the funniest, though. I asked if she knew of where I could find a menorah and telling me she had no idea she suggested that I go ask one of the managers in a shop down the way because she is Jewish. You know, because only Jewish people would know where to get this "obscure" object that is central to Chanukah. Bah!

I probably don't even need to say what I found at Target, but you would think that a store that dedicated a quarter of its floor space to x-mas would have at least a small bit for an important holiday of a religion other than Christianity. Sadly there was none. I can't even imagine what people celebrating Ramadan or Kwanzaa have to go through. Now I know that I always try to shop locally, but this time, I fear, it is going to have to be internet all the way. At least that way, when I search for menorah, I don't have to face the blank stares.

Okay, tummy has recovered. I can't decide if it was a twenty-four hour bug or food poisoning. Whatever it was, it was nasty. All I wanted to do was lay in bed (or play on the computer) between frequent trips to the bathroom. Nicholas must have also picked up on my mood, because his streak of angelic behavior seems to have hit a snag. Screaming and getting into stuff he knows he isn't supposed to has been the norm today. He, amazingly, learned how to take the keys down from the counter and use them to unlock the file cabinet where we keep his art supplies. I caught him in the act before something unrepairable happened. We originally locked up his art supplies because he was using his markers to color on everything. Despite what I had always assumed about washable markers, that they come off everything, that simply isn't the case. Washable markers do not wash out of grout, corduroy, and whatever my couch is made out of. So they got locked up. I did eventually get him to calm down by laying on his bed with him in his room and listening to him "read" his books. Sadly, it didn't last, he wanted to go run around making loud banging sounds and terrorizing the cat with the broom. I just sat down and made red and green paper chains and talked to him through the insanity. He'll be better by tomorrow, we're going to the pond to feed the ducks. I'm sure they are pissed about the weather, too.


I meant to write the whole "what I am thankful for" entry yesterday, but I totally forgot. I have so much to be thankful for, but it seems I have such an easy time overlooking it, especially in light of my recent streak of not-so-good luck. So here is my list, in no particular order:

- I am thankful for the great take-out Vietnamese restaurant a mile from our house that has very late hours and a gumball machine
- I am thankful for my own walk-in closet with a now working light and high enough ceilings for me to stack my fabric and photo boxes
- I am thankful for my fuel-efficient car that hasn't broken down once (knock on wood)
- I am thankful that people still play Trivial Pursuit with me even though half-way through the game I start answering other people's questions
- I am thankful that my husband makes me a cup of tea every night before I go to bed
- I am thankful that my son loves to snuggle with me and that his hair always smells like lavender shampoo (except when he gets peanut butter in it)
- I am thankful for ibuprofen
- I am thankful that my mother lives a half a continent away, but that we still talk to each other for at least an hour a week
- I am thankful that my dad drives up to visit us every other week, just to get to know his grandson
- I am thankful for my library card
- I am thankful (sometimes)that my brother lives with us, so that I can always know that he is safe
- I am thankful for all of the shoulders I have to cry on and for all of the people who celebrate good news with me
- I am thankful for all of my loving friends and family
- I am thankful for the health and well-being of the people I love
- I am thankful for my new Converse and for the ones that I have had since high school and still wear
- I am thankful that I was able to do almost all of my Christmas shopping on the internet this year
- I am thankful that I know how wonderful my life is and that every moment I have I should be thankful for