What's round at the ends and "hi" in the middle?

Ohmygosh. I have less than a week before we fly to Ohio. Have to find someone to get my car at the airport since we have a 6:20am flight. Who booked these tickets??? Oh yeah, me. Have to get the house in order for the grandma since she will be house/kitty sitting. Have to figure out what to pack to keep the children entertained for five hours of flight time and another two on the road since the cheapest option for tickets has us landing in Indiana. Gotta do laundry. Gotta pack. Gotta pay bills.

I'm sick.

Not a cold. Not a sinus infection. Sick. The yucky kind. I see it all across the blogs and when I notice it creeping closer to California, I brace myself. Trey and Leah had this wonderful experience on Memorial Day so all of our fun activities were cancelled. Bill and I have seem to caught it and are enjoying life today. He's got a 24 hour shift at work to deal with while feeling like, well, fill in with your own favorite adjective. I, at least, called in sick to work while the kiddos were at school/babysitters and slept for three hours. Three very short hours. The worst part? It's absolutely beautiful outside and all I want to do is lie down.

I could have been well prepared and been working on this stuff all last week but I've been wasting time scouring the real estate pages online looking for condos and wondering how we're going to be able to get into something of our own within the next lifetime. Can you say OCD?

It Never Fails

As I was driving to my Monday night Bible study/dinner out/conversation time with adults my car started to make noises at me. There's a strange phenomenon that happens to military wives. It may happen to civilian wives as well but I guess the stories aren't as widespread. Whenever the hubby goes off to work for more than 24 hours something happens. The car breaks down, the pipes burst, your hair catches fire while you're training for the circus. SOMEthing. I thought about this as my dash lights came on and the car dinged at me. Fortunately, it was just telling me it was thirsty for Windex.

My kids were extremely needy today. I don't know if it's because they're making up for the fact that daddy won't be home for a few days or they're plotting against me to get my insurance money so they can spend it all on fruit snacks. I was interrupted at least 57.368 times during the two and a half hours I spent at our Monday night destination. Trey was told by two different adults to not do something and chose to ignore the warnings and ended up in time out. Leah can't quite say what she wants and gets frustrated that our IQ isn't as high as hers and therefore we have no clue what's going on. Eventually the kids all found something to do. Just as I thought to myself, "finally. They're all playing upstairs and I can have a break!", someone starts to cry. It doesn't sound like mine.

"Who's crying?" my friend Heather asks.
"Leah. She's bleeding."

I race up the stairs to see my daughter's mouth covered in blood. It has dripped all over her arm, skirt and the carpet below her. I grabbed her, dodged the other kids and raced down the stairs into the bathroom to get a closer look. Are all of her teeth still there? Did she bite her tongue? Did she cut herself? What happened?? I start to panic and think, "Bill's not here. What if I have to go to the hospital? What do I do? Who's gonna take Trey? What if she needs stitches?"

In an effort to prevent Leah from hurting herself, Trey pulled his little sister off the ladder to a bunkbed, Leah fell and bit halfway through her bottom lip. It's bad. It's raw. She's in pain. I'm in pain. I pumped her full of Motrin, gave her the boob and we left. I held her hand the entire drive home, mind you I'm driving so I've now earned my contortionist license and I'm really trying to not freak out on Trey. We're home and she falls asleep right at nine--early for her.

She just woke up, crying and in pain. I just pray that she heals quickly and she rests peacefully tonight. It's going to be a long week.

The poor kid is not even two yet and has experienced two black eyes, numerous bumps and scratches, a gnarly scrape to the face after falling off our bed and catching her forehead on What to do the Toddler Years (Could I even make that up?) and now this. So, I leave you the irony of this picture:
















This would be the book scraping incident of '06. If you have any extra bubble wrap, send it my way.

This Used to be my Playground

In my quest to find affordable housing...go ahead and laugh...I came across a house for sale on the street I grew up on. Thirty years after my parents bought the home I still dream about, there's a house right down the street that's $500,000 MORE than what my parent's paid. Is it beautiful? No. Are there tons of upgrades? No. There's still wood paneling in the family room. There's only three bedrooms. The bathrooms are small with icky lighting. There's a very big, rocky, 60's looking fireplace. The carpet is dirty. Ok, so there's a pool. The garage is finished. No laundry room. You have to trek yourself into the garage to do that. The kitchen is pretty big, but most ranch style houses have decent kitchens. It's on almost a half acre. Our house was on a quarter. Something you don't find nowadays unless you pay $1M or more, but pretty standard 'back in the day'. The school district isn't great. It went down in the 80's. There's no home owner's association so if your neighbor wants to park his brother-in-law in the motorhome on the street, there's nothing you can do. No sidewalks. No parks within walking distance. No community center. Just a 1960's house that has appreciated mucho grande. Man, my parent's could have some dough if they'd held on to our little ranch house in the burbs.

I Can't Even Afford to be Trailer Trash

When I get something in my head, it sticks until my brain is satisfied with the answer. This means weeping and gnashing of teeth within the household. I'm sick of it, Bill's sick of it, the cats are sick of it, Google is sick of it. Brain. Will not stop.

I'm back to the whole homebuying thing. The market is slowing down, prices are dropping and our rent is going up. Who decided that San Diego, my hometown, needed to be one of the most expensive places to live?? Unless I work full-time, we will start out in a two bedroom condo. TWO bedroom. We are now renting a four bedroom house. I will have to eBay half of our posessions, which requires me to actually list them on eBay. I've had an eBay box just waiting to be photographed and listed for about four years now. It's full of items we either outgrew, never liked or didn't return to the store within the stores return policy time frame. My children will have to share a room. We will be sharing a wall with someone else again. No yard. No garage for the car, for it will hold all the things that don't fit in the condo that we are not willing to part with, like Christmas decorations, PartyLite product and Tupperware so old it says "Tupperseal" on it. We are children of packrats. We love to purge but some things have a strong magnetic field and fly right back out of the Goodwill box.

Our bank is awesome in that it offers a zero down (because, honestly, who has $60,000 sitting around?) and zero PMI for us little veteran families. It's nice to know that if you're willing to deploy and risk your life for the freedom of others that there's someone out there willing to help you own your own piece of the pie. We just need to see what they think we can afford. And I need Bill's deployment money to pay off a few things and add to the bank balance.

HGTV notified me that the average price for a single family home in San Antonio is $150,000. The average price for a three bedroom condo here is $400,000. Where are all these people coming from who can afford the SINGLE family homes and what do they do for a living??? Do you think one of them would adopt me?

If You're Happy and you know it...

So, this morning while listening to the morning celeb dirt, there was speculation that Mike Myers' marriage was ending because he's gay. Gay. What do you think?

The Best Part of Waking Up...

When your phone rings at 4:30am, it's never a good thing. Friday morning I rolled over, turned the light on and stared at the caller ID while the phone rang and woke up the birds. It was a cell phone. Not one I recognized. I let it go to the voicemail. I turned off the light and closed my eyes. Five minutes later, the bird waker called back. "Hello?"
"Hello?", he says.
"Helllloooo.." Didn't I just say that?
"Hi ma'am, this is SSgt Blazeeblahblah, is SSgt [Bill] there?"

No, he's out golfing right now. Or at the club shaking his booty. Or delivering pizza's on the east coast. Where else would he be???

"It's for you, Bill."

Some military jargon went on that I typically don't understand when fully awake so I just basically heard what Charlie Brown hears when the teacher talks.

"What's going on?" I ask.
"I have to go into work because they're scouring the barracks for drugs and they need Staff NCO's there."
Here's what every military wife asks when her husband is asked to do something: "Why you?"
"They're asking all Staff NCO's to go."

This is so lame. We live 30-45 minutes south of where he works. By the time he gets up there, they'll be done with this whole drug search. And guess what? By the time he got up there, they were done. No drugs were found, just a bunch of irritated sleepy Marines.

But here comes the good part. Bill normally helps kick me out of bed in the morning by bringing me coffee. I don't know how this started, but it's what he does. Since he left before 5am and I didn't have to get up until 6:30, he left a carafe of hot, already creamed coffee on my nightstand and a mug so that I could have coffee in bed before starting my day. Wasn't that sweet? Don't your teeth hurt and you have the urge to throw up? I know. That's just how he is. He even set the alarm for me so I wouldn't be late.

Yeah, it didn't work. I was a half hour late to work. But man, coffee in bed is a gooooood thing.

WAIT!!! I'm not ready yet!

Trey was my bumper baby. We stumbled and fumbled and really didn't know what to do and poor thing was the baby guinea pig. I joked I'd keep him in a crib until he was 7 since that kept him in his room in the wee hours of the morning, and that the baby monitor would stay there forever. Of course, I'd disguise it, make it look like it belonged there, sort of like the smoke detector. What a great spy device when he's older!! We nudged him into a toddler bed at three. He didn't really care one way or the other, but I figured that he was potty trained, and needed to be able to get out of bed should the need arise. We banished the sippy cup on his fourth birthday. He's not interested in Sesame Street anymore. We signed him up for soccer. These are all good things (except the Sesame Street part). Trey is less than six months away from turning a whole hand.

Leah is not quite two. We have exactly one month. I am finally able to pull what little hair she has and put it into two little whispy pony tails with rubber bands the same size as the ones I wore in my mouth when I had braces. She threw a HUGE fit because the capri pants that belong to a particular outfit she has were too big for her supermodel toddler waist and I had to put different ones on. Ones that didn't go perfectly with the outfit. Cried. For ten minutes. Tried to get out of the offending capris, so as to put the right ones on. I found a pair of shoes for her for fall. Brown leather Mary Janes. Very Skecher-y. THOSE are the shoes she wants on all the time, nevermind that they are two sizes too big.

Now, she's crawling out of her crib. It's on the lowest possible setting. She's not two. I'm not ready for her to be in a toddler bed. Remember? Trey? 3 1/2 and still in a crib? Hmm, maybe I can negotiate and get her out of diapers before the summer's over. Oh yeah, did I mention she will not give up the boob???

I am SO ready for that to be done with.

More Power to Your Flower

Once again I was waiting for the perfect pictures before I posted anything about my party. Being the hostess, I wasn't really the one taking the shots. My "photographer" has one of those cameras that has stuff on the inside that you have to take somewhere and they magically make pictures out of it, so until she gets her film back, I have a total of six shots of the party.

I've been planning this party for about a year. Yes, I'm that obsessive. We ultimately decided on a 70's theme being that I was born during that crazy decade. We didn't do disco but more of a "Brady" 70's. Flowers, happy faces, green, yellow and orange. Everyone had to come dressed in 70s garb. A picture of Gerald Ford greeted you at the door with the proclamation that he "wants you to party!" We had groovy tunes going although a lot clearer on CD than if I'd actually had the vinyl. Everyone looked great. Bellbottoms, pantsuits, blue eyeshadow and lots and lots of hair.


On the left is Bill in his hip, white, polyester bell bottoms complete with crease down the center. He's got that hideous grandma's couch pattern going on, on his nylon shirt. All completely vintage from this little boutique on Pacific Coast Hwy. Chris in the middle looking more like Bruce Springsteen than anything else, and Eric. What can I say about Eric? I think he left his bong in my bathroom.



Is there a picture of me you ask? No. Not yet. Remember? I was behind the camera. Here's my shoes tho!!


They made me about 6'2" I need to find Bill some platforms so I can wear these again and not tower over him.

We played a couple of games including one I made up called Name that 70's show. I went through Google images and found about 15 pictures from different shows from the 70s and printed them out, hung them on the wall and everyone had to figure out what they were. No one got all of them right. Remember Simon in the land of chalk drawings? That was a hard one.
Lots of food, lots to drink and everyone there was already friends with everyone else so there was none of that awkward small talk going on.

And until I get those old fashioned photos from my friend, here's my groovy cake:

Keep on Rockin' in the Free World.