Trying to control the uncontrollable by peeing in a cup

There is so much in life that we are unable to control. And to a person whose eye starts twitching at the mere thought of loss of control, that is a tough pill to swallow.

My life lately has been an exercise in "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference." Perhaps there's a lesson I need to be learning here.

Perhaps not.

All I know is, there may or may not be a curse upon our new house. And I seem to have lost my ability to control curses, because nothing is working. Let's look at the facts, shall we?

We move in. I notice that wasps have colonized the outside of our house. I cannot abide by flying, stinging insects. Bugman is called. Pricetag? $180.

Fred tries to use sprinkler system. Sprinkler system does not work properly. Fred calls guy out too look at it. Price tag to fix? $1500. We do not fix it. Fred does. For $4.

Ants have infested our upstairs bathroom. I will not share my house with insects. Bugman is called. Pricetag? Actually free... included in the $180 mentioned above.

Elise contracts a mystery rash. A very BAD mystery rash. That STILL isn't completely gone. Pricetag? Pedi visit + derm visit + over-the-counter meds + rx meds... you do the math.

Big storm causes tree limb to fall on Fred's car doing $3500 worth of damage. Pricetag? $500 deductible.

A car driving by (or something just as insignificant) causes another limb to fall, narrowly missing Fred's car. We decided to rid ourselves of this arbored-menace and have it cut down. Pricetag? $280.

Ants move their infestation to the downstairs bathroom. Bugman called yet again. Pricetag? Included.

Downstairs AC goes out. Home warranty people contacted. Run around given. Three different companies come to diagnose. Days go by. Part ordered from Texarkana. More days go by (apparently they are WALKING the part to Dallas). Phone calls made. Joanne is angered. Temperatures reach 87 degrees in the house. Joanne's head explodes. Eight days later AC is fixed. Pricetag? $134 + so much pain and suffering.

This is all in one month, people.

The latest trial is that there is a mole (or moles) in our backyard, threatening to do damage to all the hard work Fred has put into our lawn. I have been enjoying having a lawn that the kids can play on, as opposed to the obstacle course of weeds, fire ant hills, bare patches and mole holes that was the lawn at our old place.

We're not going down without a fight.

Today on the phone my Mom told me you can remedy moles by pouring urine down their holes.

And I was all, "really? Urine? I CAN DO THAT!"

So Fred got a cup and both of us made a contribution to the cause. We then ran giggling like a bunch of idiots to the backyard to pour pee down a hole. It was so awesome, I can't even begin to tell you. Finally... we were taking control of our own destiny (for FREE) and vanquishing the moles!

It's too soon to tell if it's working, but I finally feel like I've gained a little bit of control back in my life.

And if you're ever in our bathroom, and see a cup with the letter "P" written on it. Please don't use it.

For obvious reasons.

Still alive and kicking!

Okay, I have totally been ignoring this blog... not without good reason, though. Life has just been crazy lately, and I thought I'd just do a rundown of what's been going on lately:

• Elise had strep for the second time in about a month. Who knew that you should throw away your toothbrush and flosser when you've been sick with strep? Apparently I do. Now. I'd also like to give a shout out for sugar-free antibiotics... holla! Antibiotics are horrible about raising the blood sugar of a diabetic (not to mention the have a high BG just from being sick). Add flavouring to the mix and it's a recipe for disaster. After her first round of strep, we learned the hard way to ALWAYS ask for sugar-free.
  
  
• I am now 23 weeks along on this joyride called pregnancy. Thank you God for second trimesters! Things have been relatively good, aside from some contractions I was getting a few weeks ago. Thankfully they have stopped. I am still waiting to make the jump from regular clothes to maternity clothes. As one friend put it, "you just look like you ate a really big sandwich." Ha.
  
  
• I am somewhat freaking out about how this pregnancy has zoomed by. I mean, I am over halfway there and haven't even thought about the things that we need to get (that include, but are not limited to); a crib, a stroller car seat combo, boy clothes, a room for the baby to sleep in after he gets too big for the bassinet... I hope that by not thinking about it, somehow it will all figure itself out.
  
  
• Along with over 100 other blogs, I took part in Diabetes Week on my other blog, Death of a Pancreas. It most likely doesn't hold any interest to you if you are not affected somehow by diabetes, but it was very cathartic for me to write a post a day on things like "A Day in the Life", or "Dreaming of a Cure". It was also fun to "meet" new bloggers and read what they had to say on the same topics.
  
  
• Fred and I are celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary on May 20th. Are we really that old?
  
  
• We are leaving for our trip to Vancouver next week! I cannot even tell you how EXCITED I am to go home and show my hometown off to my daughter. Not to mention see the ocean, hug a tree, take a hike, stare at some waterfalls, walk barefoot in the sand, revel in nature, climb a mountain; just generally be outside and loving it again. Also, there will be much eating of some AMAZING food.
  
  

Sooooo, that's about it. Hopefully I will be able to find more time for posting on this blog. I have a bunch of half-written posts, and posts that are completely written, but still reside in my head... does that count?

Stay tuned for updates from Vancouver!

Beyond Thunderdome

I have never seen any of the Mad Max movies, so I don't know what they're about, but I like to use the title from one of them in my crazy vernacular. It's Beyond Thunderdome and you use it when you are so far past a certain emotion/feeling that there really is no description for it. For example:

When you are so hungry that your stomach feels like it has started eating itself, and the idea of gnawing on your own arm sounds heavenly; you are Beyond Thunderdome Hungry.

Or when you are so angry that your entire body is shaking with rage and everybody better get out of the way because you're going to start throwing crap. Not literal crap, but whatever is within your reach, including a 42 inch LCD flat screen TV. That is called Beyond Thunderdome Mad.

Got it?

Well friends, I am Beyond Thunderdome Tired. I swear to you, I'm not sure what decade we're even in anymore. I think my brainwaves are so screwed up that my dog has started communicating telepathically with me. I forget what I'm saying, as I am saying it, and I can't remember what a toilet is used for. I am so far past Beyond Thunderdome Tired, I can't even see it anymore.

All of it has to do with Elise's diabetes, but if you want to read more about that, then you need to visit my other blog. But seriously, these days 4 hours is a good night's sleep for us.

Some of it is our own doing... most nights we don't crawl into bed until midnight, mostly because we check Elise's blood sugar at midnight and sometimes it's not worth it to go to bed, only to have to wake up in 45 minutes.

But the other might we truly outdid ourselves. I don't know how Al Gore managed it, but he has somehow reversed global warning because Texas is in the middle of an Arctic freeze. And when we have any sort weather event, the local meteorologists have orgasms and decide to start freaking their viewers out. Which leads to all necessary supplies within a 100 mile radius being sold out.

You know those water faucet cover thingies (we call them boobies)? Well, the other night we couldn't find our second one, which according to the weather people OUR OUTSIDE PIPES ARE GOING TO BURST AND THERE WILL BE WATER ALL OVER YOUR HOUSE AND IT WILL FREEZE AND THEN YOU WILL DIE.

Or something to that effect.

So at 11:00 at night, Fred sets off on his intrepid journey to find us another boobie. Being Ms. Practical, I told him to call and make sure the store had them in stock. We finally found some in the devil's emporium, Walmart (I personally will not step foot into Walmart, but have yet to convince Fred to follow suit), about 20 minutes away. Except that when Fred got there, they didn't actually have any, the person who answered the phone was just too lazy/stupid to check.

Fred tried again, only to have the same thing happen, and finally made his way home at 1:00 am, boobie-less. Upon further inspection of our outside premises, he found the missing boobie under a bush in our garden. I don't even know what to say about that.

The only positive part of this whole meandering, go-nowhere story is that Fred now agrees with me that Walmart is the worst place in the world and should be avoided at all costs. I told him if he ever regresses, I'm going to do a little classical conditioning on him and kick him in the groin while yelling, "Walmart!", so that if he ever gets the urge to shop there, he will feel pain in his nether-regions (à la Pavlov's dogs).

The moral of this story is three-fold:
I am tired
Walmart sucks
Look for lost boobies in the garden

Sadness/Happiness

Sadness is finding the mini kit kat (the yummy kind from Canada that your wonderful in-laws smuggled... er, brought to you) completely melted in your pocket because you forgot that you had put it in there to enjoy later while your daughter was napping.

Happiness is eating it anyway, and licking every last bit of the chocolate off of the wrapper.

It's the small things, people. The small things.

This is what happens when you blink

I was shopping for some pants for Elise the other day, and as I looked through rack after rack of clothes, I was becoming increasingly frustrated. Why couldn't I find anything in her size?

Then I looked up an it dawned on me that I was in the wrong section. "Baby", the overhead sign said. My daughter is no longer a baby, ergo I cannot find her size in the baby section. Gone are the days of the onesies, and cute outfits that come already matching so it takes the guesswork away from people who are fashionably-challenged like me.

Feeling rather stupid, I toddled on over to the "Toddler" section, marvelling at how quickly time was sliding past me.

What happened? When did my little girl make that transition from baby to toddler?

It must have been on one of the days where I was at the end of my rope, so I put her in the pack and play outside of the bathroom, and took a 20 minute shower, just so I could get some time alone. But I remember peeking out through the shower curtain, looking past the steam and watching her solemnly looking at a book, and she still looked very much like a baby to me.

Or it could have happened any of the times when I was in the kitchen trying to prepare dinner with her hanging around underfoot. I'd get so frustrated with her, that I would send her out to her playroom, asking her to let me be for 15 minutes. But as I peered around the corner and saw Elise laying beside our dog Seven, absently stroking her fur, I could still see that tiny, helpless infant that we brought home from the hospital just over two years ago.

As a mother of a small child, it is so easy to become weary of the work that goes into raising them. Some days I think it would be less painful to repeatedly smash myself over the head with a frying pan than to deal with the many moods of said child.

Some days I want to lock myself up in a closet and pray that Elise won't find me.

Some days I feel like I deserve the World's Worst Mother Award because all I want to do is sleep in until noon, get up, eat some candy, have a two hour bath, followed by a two hour nap and not have anybody ever need anything from me ever again.

And then I have the moments where I realize my baby is a baby no longer and is, in fact, a toddler. And the realization hits me so hard that I can scarcely breathe.

And all the whining, the moods, the tantrums, the screaming, the clinginess, the short naps, the split drinks, the messes that need cleaning up, the waking up in the middle of the night; all of it seems so insignificant when you start to comprehend that this time with them is so very short, and so precious that instead of complaining about the negative aspects of it, I need to be celebrating all that I love about being Elise's Mom.

And there really is so much that I do love, but that is another post for another time.

For now I will just rejoice in the fact that I do have the greatest job. It's not always sunshine and roses, but there is nothing else in the world that I'd rather do.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away in the key of A minor

I love my brain. It keeps me entertained through the wee hours of the morning better than any infomercial for the Magic Bullet ever could. What I mean by that is that I have the coolest dreams of anyone I know.

Now don't worry, I am not going to bore you with the excruciating details of my dreams. We have a rule in our house about dreams (which Fred always breaks); no trying to describe them. Because listening to someone recount their dream to you is like hearing someone drone on about their evening of drunkenness; it never makes any sense and is way more interesting to the one telling the tale than the one having to hear it.

But this was seriously cool... my dream last night was Star Wars, the Musical. I am completely serious. There was a Storm Trooper dance number and even a mournful solo by Darth Vader that truly exposed his tragic inner conflict. That's right, my dreams all have their own original musical score. Eat your heart out Andrew Lloyd Webber.

For some reason I was the director of this spectacle, which is weird. I know I'm bossy, but I abhor being in charge of very large groups of people. I think I should have been Chewbacca... we totally have the same vocal range.

Taking the stroller outside

I've said it before, in this post, that if I were a super hero my name would probably be something like Miss Meticulous. As much as I would like to think of myself as a zany, crazy, spur-of-the-moment type of gal, deep down I know I am just kidding myself.

Lately I've been noticing that the overly anal-retentive side of my personality is creeping up on me, and I'm afraid it's going to take over like a rising tide. If you've ever lived near the ocean then you know what it's like to be playing out on dry sand, and the next thing you know you're knee deep in water and your beach blanket looks very, very far away.

I relish order and, for lack of a better word, cleanliness to my life. And although this is an okay thing in small doses, I don't want it to stop me from living my life.

Elise has this baby doll stroller and she loves to toddle around the house with it. She puts her doll in it and strolls around; clucking her tongue and telling baby, "it s'okay, be-be, it s'okay". Apparently, her baby is suffering from some sort of angst... all the time. The other day she had the idea that it would be fun to take it on our walk with us. You know, outside.

I kneeled down and told her that no, the stroller needs to stay in the house. If we take it outside, the wheels will get dirty, and then track the dirt inside. And I'm the one that will most likely end up carrying it home (I added silently in my brain). As she started protesting violently, as only Elise knows how, I thought about how ludicrous my reasoning was.

But this line of thought is in lock-step with how I've been living my life lately. I refrain from doing things just because it's messy, or hard. The long and the short of it is; it's just easier to keep the stroller at home. If you've been reading for awhile, then you know that my daughter, now 22 months old, was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 12 months. And it has made life hard. And messy. And it has made me afraid.

My day-to-day routine is peppered with "what-ifs". I hate to stray to far away from the house lest something happen with Elise's diabetes. Plus I'm starting to feel like a bloody pack mule with all the stuff I need to carry around for her. And forget travelling. Trying to go through security with all Elise's supplies and food, not to mention what if something happens when we're in the air? Forget it. It's too messy and it's too hard.

But it's dawning on me that I'm not really living my life, I'm hiding from it. Life is messy, it's dirty, and man-oh-man is it hard. But isn't it during those times when you have the most fun?

I can remember when I was 15 or so, I was at my soccer practice one night when the sky opened up and it started to pour. Some of the more adventurous ones on my team thought that was a grand time to practise slide-tackling. In the mud.

I stood on the sidelines and said, "no thank you, I'd rather not have to scoop mud pies out of my shorts" (not those kind of mud pies you dirty, dirty people). But as I watched them, I saw the fun that they were having, I realized that I was missing out, so I took a flying leap into the biggest mud puddle I could find. And yeah I was dirty, but I had a load of chuckles with my team mates that night.

It's a stroller, and what else is it meant for if not for my little girl to take it on a walk around the neighbourhood? So what if the wheels get dirty? It's not like I'm trying to keep it in pristine condition for re-sale on EBay or something. The stroller, like life, is meant to be taken outside and used. And if I end up carrying it, and Elise, and her baby doll for a quarter of a mile; well, so be it. I could use the exercise.

I think what I'm trying to say is that for the past year I've been living my life in a box. Or a hole. Or behind a curtain. Or locked up in a tiny, windowless room with no light or sound being able to penetrate the walls. And I want out.

I want to know what it's like to live again.

Had a Bad Day

To celebrate the suckiness of this day, I decided to title this post with the name of a rather horrific song, just so it would get stuck in your head. Yes, I am evil that way. Impolite and evil.

Why did your day suck, Joanne? Because diabetes is a terrible, sucktastic, crappola of a disease and I really wish it could manifest itself as a person so I could kick it in the groin, thank you for asking. And yes, I am well aware that I have a preoccupation with kicking/kneeing/punching people in the groin. What can I say... I grew up with two brothers. Sometimes the best defense is a good offence. Ka-POW!

Anyway, as soon as Fred got home from work, I let him know that for the sake of my sanity and safety of any nearby groins, I was going to have to leave the house allbymyself. I had no destination in mind, I just went.

As is often the case, I wound up at Target. Maybe it was destiny. Maybe it was the wind. Probably it's my deep love and appreciation for the giant red bulls eye. Into Target I went and we all know how cathartic spending money can be. Especially when everything you buy was 50-75% off. It felt good.

I got back into my car and continued my journey to a nearby mall... and didn't run over the man who thought jay-walking across a 6 lane, extremely busy road was a good idea. Not running him over felt good.

I then ran a red light. It was iffy at best if I could have stopped... but I didn't. And it felt good.

In the parking lot of the mall, I didn't make fun of the girl who was wearing one of those stupid scarves around her neck in the 104 degree Texas heat. Well, not out loud anyway. In my brain I had a good chuckle at her expense. Yup, it felt good.

I walked by a Cinnabon, but decided against the ooey, gooey, decedent goodness of a cinnamon roll. And you know what? That felt good.

As did seeing my husband and daughter at the mall because he had brought her there to ride the carousel as a treat. He had no idea that I was there, and in the hour or so that I had been away from them, I found that I missed them.

I also found that a few small feel-good things can totally erase the crap of a bad day.

And you know what? That feels good too.

7 ways you know it's time to do laundry

1. The Leaning Tower of Laundry is starting to rival the size of the Leaning Tower of Recycling.

2. When you're sorting through the laundry, you find sweaters and other cold weather clothes. And it's June. In Texas.

3. You find yourself trying to fit your 21 month old into 12 month old clothing. Because it's clean.

4. You have to dip into the pile of donation clothes.

5. You implement Naked Thursdays, and not because you support nudists.

6. You start doing sniff tests on clothes that are in the dirty pile.

7. You start thinking about implementing Naked Mondays as well.