A day to remember a year

I can't really expect anyone to follow my blog in any form of regularity given that my posts are occasional at best. I do what I can to write when things of interest arrive, but generally it is just a passing thought that is then forgotten until I realize it has been months since I've written anything. Once I sit down to write a few paragraphs I end up sitting in front of a blank screen wondering what I have done with my life. Being a stay-at-home mom is wonderful at times and heartbreaking other times. By the end of the day I just can't put words down on a page. Day to day things seem monotonous and uneventful and the extraordinary things are usually too big of a mess for me to clean up. Once again I have arrived at a new year with the same resolution: To blog the memories so we have more than just pictures to rely on when we want to take a walk down memory lane. Don't get me wrong pictures are wonderful, but you can't capture everything in a picture. You can't capture Bradley saying, "Oh barnacles" when he is working on a problem. All you see is a kid with his mouth open and a quirky look on his face. So, here I am on the first day of a new year, trying once again to capture more of life this year than in years past. I will do my utmost to post at least more semi-regularly, and I will also try to not start out every post by apologizing for the lack of posts. I am sure you understand that life gets in the way and sometimes I am just too lazy to post. However; I will try this year to not think of the everyday tasks as mundane but as a peek into our life as a family. We maybe inexperienced and a totally out of our element as we raise Bradley and try to shuffle life around as need be, but we do the best we can and I can't wait to see how this year unfolds.

An Update...

Not a whole lot has happened aside from the normal crazy ninja-like conundrums. Last weekend was Easter and Bradley had a blast hunting Easter Eggs with his aunts and uncle. His entire cache of candy lasted all of two days. I think I'm still dealing with the effects from that. Yesterday was our wedding anniversary. 4 years now!! We always joke about how we can still stand each other, but to be completely honest, Dave is a wonderful husband and I can't imagine being married to anyone else! I love you Dave!!
I am starting a new cookbook that promises to make me a better chef. *fingers crossed* I've just been taking notes on techniques so far but hopefully next week I can start using some of the recipes. I'm pretty excited about really learning how to cook. Other than that everything is pretty much the same. However, I do have a cute story to tell real quick. We were eating dinner this evening and I was putting the leftovers away for Dave to take to lunch. Then Bradley turns to Dave and says, "Daddy, Mommy is hooking you up!" I thought it was so cute. We couldn't stop laughing.

A story for your day...

Let's just skip the introductory apology about how I don't ever write anymore. I've gotten requests for an update and I have a story to write about today so let's begin...

Once upon a time there was a cute little boy who liked to do very devious things. This little boy was very smart and very sneaky. Today this adorable little boy had a friend come over to play. They played on the stairs and in every room that had an unlocked door. While they were playing in this little boy's room, he decided to open the window. He could do this only because he had super strength and had been able to take off the window lock on this particular window a few weeks before. So he proceeded to open the window and THROW EVERYTHING IN HIS ROOM OUTSIDE!! All of the clothes that his mother had previously put away in his closet, and a good percentage of his toys. All of these items were thrown onto the front yard during a mere 10 minutes of playtime. The only reason the fun stopped was because his mother saw a bright yellow tennis ball bouncing down the sidewalk in front of their house. So his mother walked up the stairs to see what this little boy was up to. While his friend was quietly playing in a corner of the room, there was this little boy running towards the window with a handful of toys to throw out through the screen that he had so carefully ripped to the size he needed to fit his toys. Although this ingenious little boy had succeeded to destroy the clean room he had, he did not get off so easily and is now grounded for life. The beginning of a sentence that I'm sure will be added to every few months.

I hope that this story can bring a smile to your face and allow you to remember the good times you had/have raising your children.

Saying "hello" again

I know it's been a while, daytime projects were so hard while I was working graveyards. It was pretty much all I could do to drag myself out of bed and try keeping track of Bradley. So for all of you that are curious... Walmart laid me (and all of the other holiday help) off on the day before Christmas Eve. They did give us 5 days notice, but it still sucked. So now I'm jobless again. I'm looking at probably trying to become a glassblowing apprentice, and maybe doing some web design/updating for a friend of mine. So we'll see.

Our Christmas was small but filled with love. I got sick on my last day at Walmart and I'm still fighting through it. Sad, huh. Bradley received plenty of fun new things, his favorite of which is the Fisher Price SmartCycle. He calls it his motorcycle and will spend about an hour in the basement playing the different games. It has been a HUGE help for me while I'm sick. Thank you to Grandpa Jeff and Grandma Ali for getting it for him! We went to the Dickson's house Christmas Day where Bradley got a DoodlePro and Dave and I got a faux fur throw that is pretty much the bee's knees. I love cuddling up in it and watching a movie!! It's so comfy!!!!! Thank you!! Thank you!!! We had a wonderful time there and you can see pics of our time there on Lisa's facebook page. Please comment on how absolutely adorable Bradley looks in his Christmas jammies!!! I love them soooo much!!

So now that I'm not working, I'm trying to spend a good amount of time with Bradley to make up for the time that we lost while I was working. I'm also trying to get used to having a normal sleep schedule again. So far that has not been going very well. I wake up around 3:00 every morning and can't go back to sleep for hours. It truly sucks. On the upside, I've been getting up and ready for the day around 8:30 which has been giving me about 30 minutes to myself before Bradley gets up. That has been really nice. Having the time to write out a to-do list or writing on my blog, or just sitting in the living room watching the cats play. It's my quiet time that I desperately need some days.

Well I guess I should go, my quiet time is almost up and I don't want to risk losing this post to an internet malfunction. I hope all is well for everyone and may you be blessed in the new year!!

Let the chaos begin!

I got the job at Walmart and started my orientation process on Friday morning. It was very long and extremely boring but I finally got through it. All of their training is done on a computer so I spent 8 hours on Saturday and an hour on Sunday working through the training modules. I was pretty much brain dead by about 2pm on Saturday. I had soo much information racing through my mind. But I got through it and thankfully I'm done with the training. Now I have my schedule and I start working tonight!! I will be working from 9:30pm to 6am. I know that it will be really hard to do this but hopefully it will help us get back on top of things. It's definitely going to take some getting used to. I really hope they can keep me after the holiday season is over. I'm going to try very hard to make it worth their while to keep me on after. I would like to work through at least next summer. I think that it would help us tremendously through the tough economic times and also help us save up for the things we need to do with the house and getting another car, etc. So keep your fingers crossed everybody! I know your fingers are probably sore and cramping from all of the finger crossing I ask for. You can take a break when you need. I wouldn't want anyone to get hurt trying to give me luck. But I really appreciate all of your well wishes and luck that you have sent me! I will post more soon on how my new job is going!!

Where's my chalk?

I'm sure most of you that read my blog understand this frustration of raising a child. Those that don't understand, I hope that what I write will help you make a decision about having children. (THEY ARE EVIL!!!) I'm sure that most of what I go through is normal mothering stories and the hazards of raising a child. However, I have yet to encounter a child who can ninja 7 gallons of milk into his room in a 2 months. That being said, I often encounter children that I simply cannot stand. I don't know how their parents deal with them on a day to day basis. But as soon as I think, "Wow, I'm so glad my child doesn't act like that," he goes and does something horrible and I'm pulling my hair out trying to deal with him. I don't know how to deal with the complexities of this child. Perhaps I'm just not cut out to be a mom. I just don't think like a mom. I think like a homeowner. It's not a good way to think when your child constantly ruins something in the house. It's a rough way to live, you know? Note to anyone thinking about having children: Don't buy a house that you hope to sell if you are going to have children in that home! It's impossible to keep the house clean and worth looking at. Unless you are rich enough to buy another house where the child will live until you sell the first one. And it will still take you 6 months to a year to completely fix the house you are trying to sell. Unless you have an angel of a child. In which case, congratulations!! Go hold that child so close and tell him/her that you love them!

All of that introduction is for this purpose: I'm drawing the line at power tools! I know that makes no sense to you now, but you will understand shortly...

I'm currently on a medication regiment for anti-anxiety and depression. (No surprise there really) I'm also taking a prescription at night that allows my other medication to work better and also helps me sleep at night. The problem that arises from taking the night-time prescription is that I sleep deeper once I finally go to sleep. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

A few months ago we bought the child door knob covers to try to keep Bradley out of places like my bedroom, the pantry, the linen closet, etc. We also put one on the inside of his bedroom door so that he couldn't get out at night and early in the morning (like 5 or 6am). It has worked wonders for my sanity at night and I loved being able to get up in the morning and he was still in his room either sleeping or quietly playing in his room. It was also really nice for nap time. It really gave me a break from chasing him around the house all day long. He could go in there and either sleep or play quietly while I went to the bathroom finally or just took a break to scoop up the shredded pieces of my brain. It worked really well and I guess I got used to the security that it brought me. So Heaven decided I had it too good and He chose to throw a wrench into things and see how I dealt with it. Bradley figured out Monday last week that if he hung on the door knob cover, it would snap into the two pieces and then he would have full use of his door once again. At first I thought it was just an accident - and it may have been to start out with - but he cataloged that little tidbit of information and continued to use it all week long. I told Dave that Bradley had figured out how to take of the door knob cover (I didn't know how he did it until later) to which Dave replied, "No problem I'll just put some 3m adhesive on it and he won't be able to take it apart unless he has a large, heavy professional tool. So I thought, "Okay, problem solved! I can go back to my secure 30 minute-a-day break." WHICH I WAS SO GRATEFUL FOR! So one night Dave took Bradley into his room, reinstalled the door knob cover, and asked him to take it off. Bradley walked right up to the door, hung on the cover and it happily snapped into two pieces for him. I'm make this part of the story short. There is NO way to fix that thought process. You can't 3m it back together, you can't screw it into the door, there is NOTHING. So we are back to square one...AGAIN!!!

I've been dealing with square one for a week and a half now. It's horrible. There are no naps during the day, no waking up to happy ideas of making the most of the day. I wake up listening to the sound of my child doing something destructive. The worst part of it is that I sleep so deeply because of the night-time medication that he can ninja into my room and pretty much take whatever his heart desires - because we can't close our door for fear that he will move on to another room in the house and destroy something more important than tooth brushes, contacts solution and vitamins (And no that's not all he has taken). This morning I woke up and heard him doing bad things in his room with a towel rod that had previously been placed in our room. So I jumped out of bed, ran across the hall and surveyed the damage. To my dismay I found: the towel rod, a skate board, an empty bottle of cucumber body spray from Avon (and yes the house smells like cucumber was smeared all over the place)and worst of all... Dave's power drill!....Yes the drill that Dave had used to hang up some shelves in the guest bathroom. And perhaps I'm being over-dramatic with this statement, but here it goes... I DRAW THE LINE AT POWER TOOLS!

So out of this ridiculously long post rampant with the nonsense babble of a psychotic mother, I'm desperately begging for something to draw my line with. Chalk, pencil, marker, PERMANENT MARKER, anything. Because this line will not be taken back, It will be burned into the carpet of this house if it must. That line represents the last straw, the foot of authority coming down. I cannot deal with power tools! And as soon as I have an extra $70 I will be buying a door knob that has a numeric code on it so that I can get back to my sanity...if I live long enough to get that money....

Update?

Okay so we all survived the toilet incident. YAY GO US!!! However yesterday Bradley decided that he was going to be sick. His fever was up and down between 97.5 and 104.5. I called his pediatrician and they told me that if his fever went back up that he would need to go to the hospital. Otherwise, it's probably just the flu and it would just take some time for it to run it's course. So yesterday was miserable for both of us. Dave came home early while I was waiting to hear back from the nurse. I don't think any of us got very good sleep last night. Dave got up with Bradley once, but the rest of the time we were both restless. So Dave took today off in case we needed to take Bradley to the doctor and so I could go to my job interview this morning. I got there early and had to wait a little while. While I was waiting I found out that I'm being hired as an over-night stock and price person. My hours will be hard as I'm working full-time over-night. I had both interviews one right after another and they said that as long as my background check and drug test come back okay and no one is hired in between that time then I should get a call next week sometime for orientation. FINGERS CROSSED EVERYONE!!! This afternoon we have been running some errands. I finally got my license renewed while I was out doing the drug test. So I'm finally legal to drive now. YAY!!! Now I just have to not get a ticket. :) So I guess that's all I really have to update with. Sorry we are boring. You should have figured that out by now. lol Hopefully I will get to post if/when I get the job!!