Cupcake Batter Ice Cream...

Is divine.

mmm

I Trimmed My Bangs This Morning...

...And then put on my favorite dress. That officially makes this a good day.

And my bangs are rockin'.

Hawaiian Shirts And Ass Kicking

These two things keep coming to my mind because my husband set my ringer on my cell-phone with the them song from Magnum, P.I.

I can't grow a Tom Selleck quality 'stache, so I'm just going to wear the shirt and kick the ass.

Deal?

Sad, Brown Eyes

I encounter many homeless in my day to day life. I don't work with the homeless, I just happen to work in a part of town that is heavily infested with them and even as I type the word infested I'm sickend by myself.

I get entirely annoyed and disgusted when they bother me and the reason why is because it affects me. It cuts right through to the heart of me to see these people, in a place in their life where they are even beyond helping themselves.

I don't really care how they got there or why they are there. It's not my business and I know a good majority of the time it's their own fault. But what does that matter to me? It's not my place to judge and if I'm going to be entirely honest, I've been perched upon the lip of a bottle many a time ready to fall in and let my whole life follow me to the bottom of it. So many times the numbness provided there has seemed like sweet solace from the course of my life that has offered up the suggestion of jumping off the top of the highest building that I can climb onto.

It's not me though. I have too much pride and self-preservation instinct to ever fall into that abyss. My husband and I have a relative that is now homeless. He sleeps in homeless camps, he begs for change and he will do odd jobs for places that will let him sleep on the couch behind their place of business. Knowing someone who has actually made this choice is gut-wrenching and eye-opening. And he did, make that choice. It was a choice and one I don't understand from him.

This morning as I was walking into the post office, that wasn't even open yet, I was approached by yet another homeless. This was the same post office where the guy ran to open the door for me only to ask for a dollar on my way out. I was ready for it. I was prepared with my stock reply of "I don't carry cash."

Today though, today was different. My heart is still lurching from this encounter.

I've seen this person before. I'm sure that she prefers to be called she, so I will do just that. She can be seen walking down the streets, flamboyantly most days. My daughter once saw her and looked at me astonished and said "Mom, I think that was a man." I smiled a little and said "Yes, but she prefers not to be."

As I walked up to the doors I saw her come stumbling out. Doing the "one foot swings wide in front of the other" drunken walk. She eyed me up and down and said "My, you look so pretty." I politely said thank you and hesitated to walk away just yet. I knew what was coming. She looked at me again and said "When you're done doing your business inside do you think that you could spare a bit to help me get a small burger or sandwich in my tummy". With that she jingled the change in her hand and rubbed her belly like a hungry little girl.

I looked into her sad, blurry eyes that sat under perfectly drawn eyebrows. Her face was carefully attended to. As I scanned down, her coat was dirty and her shoes were shabby and those of a man. She would have wanted to be dressed so much differently. She sensed my hesitation but misunderstood and said "I'm sorry but because of my gender issues I prefer to approach women."

Looking into her eyes again, I knew this was her line that she used countless times in a day but the sadness I saw there was like a punch to my carefully dressed gut. All this person wanted in life was to be me. Even on the days where I don't want to be me, she would give anything to be me and she had been abused most of her life trying to be just that.

I had no cash. I never do, but I pulled out my wallet and dug out whatever silver coins I could find. I offered them up with a quick apology.

I shouldn't apologize for giving her all I had to spare and I know in my heart I wasn't. I was apologizing for the hand that life had dealt her. Regardless of whatever choices this person had made in life, many of them were made for her by the unacceptance of others.

Jadon Riley

Today Ian is 11-months old. It feels like such a major milestone. We are one-month away from making that one-year mark.

I have been asked about Jadon. And again, I never mind talking about Jadon I just have to be in the mood to handle telling the story of my sweet baby boy.

When I became pregnant with Jadon, Jason and I were not yet married. We had known each other for almost a decade and we were engaged and living together. We were in the midst of planning our wedding when I found out. We had planned to go to Antigua to tie the knot and quickly dashed those plans.

My pregnancy with Jadon was seemingly normal for the most part. In the very beginning I had horrible cramps that I never remembered experiencing with Marley but I didn't think much of it.

With Marley I had to be on bedrest for the last month or so of the pregnancy. I had been going into early labor. With Jadon, I told the doctor, who I hated entirely, about this and she never really seemed to take anything I said very seriously.

When I was pregnant with Marley, my triple screening had turned up with funny results that indicated that Marley might have Down's Syndrome. I refused an amniocentesis due to the 1% chance of losing the pregancy and spent the duration of it worried out of my mind and in near hysterics.

I refused to worry through my pregnancy with Jadon and perhaps I should have. During the first ultra-sound with him they had a hard time finding all the chambers in his heart. They spent a good long time looking at it and in the end determined that everything was appearing to be fine.

I had follow-up ultrasounds where again they looked with great detail and couldn't quite see everything but always they decided it was fine.

Then? Then I started with the contractions. The same as I had with Marley but earlier. It seems I have what they call an irritable uterus. Really? That bitch was just pissed I was pregnant... All three times.

I was in and out of the hospital, like I was with Marley but worse this time. The experience was extremely similar but it all seemed so much worse and I had a dipshit for a doctor. I was put on Magnesium which my doctor bluntly told me she believed to be one of the worst medical experiences you can go through. She may have been right and it was the second time in my life I had done it.

After over a month of being in and out of the hospital and being on bedrest my body just wasn't going to keep the little guy in there any longer. They kept trying to put me on the meds and something inside me just said it wasn't right and there was a reason my body wasn't doing what it was supposed to.

Finally I refused the meds and told them I was having the baby and that's just all there was too it. By the time they listened to me, Jadon was born in a flurry of activity. It was extremely fast and I felt very little. Immediately when he was born you could tell he wasn't breathing normally.

They rushed him out of the room and Jason went to go watch them clean him up and hook him up to a seemingly endless number of machines. He came back in the room to give me a report on the situation and in all honesty, I didn't want to hear it.

I laid there, totally numb. For the first time in my life, as horrible as it sounds, I almost understood how animals in the wild will ignore the small and sickly babies. I knew in that moment that he wouldn't make it. I just knew it and I can't explain to you why other than it was entirely instinctual.

For a minute I didn't want to see him or know any of the details. But then, then my heart took over and I took myself over to the nursery and there was my little baby boy. He had so many wires and whatnot attached to him but he looked otherwise healthy.

Day after day they said he'd get better. And with every day that passed I fought harder and harder for him. As the doctor's started to get worried and say we needed to look further into the situation I got more and more adamant that he was going to be okay. Because if his own mother didn't believe it who the hell would?

They released me after a few days and everyday I would go up to the hospital and sit next to his little incubator and hold his hand. I would put him on my chest and rock him for endless hours. He would smile and hold my hand. I knew he was in pain, but always that smile would come.

The emotional rollercoaster we were all on was exhausting. Doctor after doctor would come in. His heart was looked at numerous times. And never any determination of what was wrong with my little man.

Finally he was transferred to Children's Mercy and that day I laid in bed and cried. Jason knew I couldn't go admit him so he went to the hospital like the strong man he is and filled out the paperwork that I couldn't bring myself to think about.

The doctors and the nurses there were excited to get him on their floor. He appeared to be the healthiest baby there. They had him for one day when they discovered what the problem was.

They called us at home and asked us to come to the hospital so they could talk to us. We knew it wasn't good. Jason said it wasn't good, but still I held out hope. My baby would be okay.

When we got there my parents were already there sitting with him, so tiny in his little bed. We were taken into a room where the doctor assigned to him started to cry as she told us our son was going to die.

What do you do when a doctor who sees babies die everyday is crying and can barely speak? I don't remember everything that transpired after that because I was numb. I do know Jason threw a chair across the room, he was so heart broken.

After that it was meeting with endless people and being told there was no way to tell what his life expectancy would be. He had pulomonary vein stenosis, an underdeveloped lung that was useless and his veins in his chest were too small and too few.

We met with geneticists, hospice, cardiologists and the people with the oxygen tanks. We didn't know if we had 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 month, 2 years... All I know is wanted to take my son home.

And we did. For two weeks. I slept with my hand on his chest every night, just waiting for him to stop breathing. Stepping around oxygen tanks, worrying and loving my baby. Every morning was spent trying to get all his medication in him until he threw it up and then it was starting over again. Every day was spent, struggling to get him to eat. He spent his first weeks being fed through a tube so he didn't know how to eat.

Two weeks. That is what I had with my son. Two, precious, love filled weeks of agony and pain. It was such a tortuous combination of feeling and being raw.

Jadon Riley died 3 days after my 28th birthday. That was the best birthday I ever had. That year I had that whole day with him.

If you made it this far and you read all of that, then you will understand why heading into this last month of Ian's first year is so very awesome. Everyday I look at him and I see him, I see his brother and I see his sister. My three babies.

I am the mother of three.

Not two.

The First Step Is Acceptance

I need to go to some sort of an anonymous step program for my eBay addiction.

However, I know that I'm horrible at following through on anything other than swearing and drinking too much so chances are I'd quit on the first step I found difficult.

Like number one.

If it has 12 steps then I'm screwed and I'll be right back to shopping on eBay, all sweaty with a cigarette hanging out my mouth yelling things like "that's my machine" to my mouse and co-workers who think I'm busy buying office supplies over here at my desk.

Who cares that I don't smoke. Once you start a program, drinking coffee and smoking become like breathing and eating. I'm not above following all the other sheep.

I have a whole pile of loot here. You'd think once I got it in the mail that would be the end of it. But seeing these envelopes with customs stickers on them from places like China and Singapore make me all jittery and when the item comes out of it all gorgeous and what not then I'm hooked. I'm right back there again.

I'm sick, very, very sick.

I might exaggerating slightly. Whatever

Enlightenment

She was born in August, 1977. The day Elvis Presley died.

Sure, it's a mimicry of the first line of a song I played the hell out of as an angsty teenager. But it's the truth. I was. And that would pretty much set the tone for the rest of my life.

You know, always showing up right as greatness is leaving. Or perhaps showing up right as perceived former greatness is lying drunken, bloated on the floor.

That's probably more like it. And knowing me, I'll try to save that mess and teach him that life is okay.

Looking back on my childhood I realize that I had a fanciful, weird-ass imagination that was in constant go-mode. Example, I remember seeing these large silver, presumably electrical boxes of some kind with doors on the front of them throughout the neighborhoods my mother and I always seemed to be driving through. I was pretty sure that they were refrigerators for the homeless.

Because you know, the huge homeless population of 80's suburbia was obviously sane, organized and respectful enough to share a public, street side fridge. Can you see the Reagan era news stories of street urchins stabbing each other over the last slice of bread?

Really.

I was much like that kid from the cartoons that would be sitting in class listening to the teacher drone on and on one moment and the next he was a fighter pilot, coursing through the air. Being an awesome hero. I was always outside the window of the classroom more than I was ever really there.

Today, I'm really much the same way. Only now I sit and stare outside the window and I really do see the homeless. And they aren't sharing food stuffs. No, they are begging me for dollars and stealing the copper coils out of our air conditioning units so it's hotter than hell in here right now.

Which really lowers their chance of getting a buck out of sweaty, crabby me.

I have no idea where I was going with this. And really does it matter? I just revealed to you all that I actually thought there were public, homeless fridges when I was a kid.

Hey, maybe I just solved all the world's problems.

Just remember, you can always say you knew me when.

Ham Sandwich

Saturday in the car on the way to drop Marley at her dad's house:

Marley: Hey mom, what do you think the toothfairy will leave me this weekend? You know since I lost a molar?

Me: A ham sandwich.

Mar: What? I don't want a ham sandwich.

Jason: Well I'm sure she could give you a peanut butter and jelly instead.

Me: Of course she can, she's the toothfairy. That shouldn't be a problem.

Mar: But I don't want a sandwich.

Me: Sure you do, molars are the sandwich tooth. That's what you get.

Mar: Arrrgh, she's not going to give me a ham sandwich.

Sunday, Mar comes home from her dad's house and anxiously pounds down the hall to find what the toothfair left. I hear tissue paper tearing and then frantic giggles.

She comes running out to the living room, giggling like a goof the whole way:




Mar: I can't wait to tell this.

I know. I really shouldn't be allowed to be a parent.

The Later Skaters

When I retire I think I'm going to start my own Roller Derby team. All the girls will be over 55. We'll be called the Later Skaters.

People will come to see brittle bones break.

Maybe we'll even have another team called The Brittle Bones Brigade.

It will be awesome.

We'll have to have ambulances always at hand and I'm pretty sure that even the AARP won't insure us.

But it will kick ass.

Yeah!

More Rootin' Tootin' Than A Badger

I know you've not spent a lot of time wondering what kind of a weirdo could be married to me.

I'm here to tell you, he might just be the best kind, but that's my humble opinion and some days it might change just a little. But seriously, he kicks ass.

Two-days ago we got a call from our satellite television provider to see when we are going to pay our bill. Jason was a little short with them and when he got off the phone I asked him what that was all about.

As I said, they were looking for their payment. That wasn't due for 12 more days.

Huh?

Rough times I guess.

So last night when Jason walked downstairs and turned on his beloved HD beast the little shiny box underneath cheerily gave him a message that read:

DVR service not available at this time. Please contact your satellite provider.

With that I hear this great cry of "You've got to be shitting me!" (he's such a poet) come rumbling up the stairs as he ran up to grab the phone.

Lamely I inquired what the dealeo was and he told me.

Boy, did he.

Then he informed me that he would be rebooting the box, going to the garage to smoke and when he came back if that fucker wasn't working, he was going to call the company and tell whatever foreigner that answered the phone that he was more rootin' tootin' than a badger and they have no idea who they just pissed off.

Seriously.

Okay he was only half serious, but he was going to say it. I know he was.

I had visions of his call being used in their training centers all across India. I feared YouTube might even be involved. If I'd been smart enough I would have grabbed my own camera and made it happen.

Luckily, for every one involved, that piece of shit DVR knew what was good for it and worked just right when he returned.

However, I will never stop using the term More Rootin' Tootin' Than A Badger as long as I live now.

You can trust that.

Which makes me want to make t-shirts that say:

This Rootin' Tootin' Badger Survived The Mexican Emo-Riots of 2008.

Because did you hear about that shit? Really? That's the best you've got to be upset about?

I mean you don't see me punching sad little Emo Kid that works at the local McD's with his fast food visor crammed down on his oh so black emo kid hair, in the face do you? (run on much?)

The most I would ever do is shake him hard and tell him he looks stupid. But that's for another day.

Fine Already

Some people were upset when I went private on Crazy Man Jones. Never one to want to disappoint I'm going to go ahead and post the totally random bullshit that enters my brain here and probably a picture or two of my kid as well.

If you haven't been able to get onto Crazy Man Jones, I apologize I'm still working out the bugs and fully trying to decide what to do.

I'm a fickle bitch like that.