The myth of the perfect baby

Yeah, you heard me, they can suck it.  They are supposed to be some great charity right?  That's what I'd always thought, that's what I'd always heard, and that's what I'd always read.  Well, I guess I was wrong.  I've had good years and I've had bad years.  On good years, we've even been the family that donates to Toys for Tots.  A few years, we "adopted" a family and bought gifts for them.  That's why I thought that this year of all years it would be ok to ask for help back.  I've had a bad few years financially.  We barely squeak by most of the time.  I supplement a lot of what we have here with my free stuff, I get stuff for the pets and the kids, and I have some really generous friends that have helped me, but I wanted to be able to give my younger two kids a few things from "santa" this year.  My older two kids aren't even getting ANYTHING from us.  Not one damn thing.  19 and 17 and there won't be anything u

Yeah, you read that right. Lips and asses.  I usually associate the term with hot dogs, and it's usually lips and ass holes , but there is a reason I wrote it that way.  This is not about hot dogs.  Or assholes really, unless you count my family being jerky rude assholes and then yeah, I guess that counts.  It's been a while since I posted and I have a little catching up to do with ya.  Thanksgiving was ok.  It was a fully satisfying huge meal that we ended up eating off of for days afterward, thanks to my very dear friend helping me yet again.  I made a beautiful meal that included homemade rolls even.  I made almost everything from scratch and it was amazing and I was and still am pretty proud of myself for having done it.  See? That's my lil Phizzy man there in the background.  He's gotten pretty tall, eh?  So there was that meal, and then this one right after that was turkey a la king, home made bread and in the jars behind the bread is turkey stock... This girl can

So we caught the stomach flu.  Viral Gastroenteritis.  You know the kind right? The going at both ends, afraid to leave the bathroom and you want to curl into the fetal position and die?  Ok. That kind.  For reals, man, I'm not kidding you, this was one of the worst bouts of it I've ever had in my life and I've had it probably 10 times.  Gross, I know, but I was indeed, once one of the dreaded germ spreaders too. My 7 year old, soon to be 8 in January, is a disgusting sick person in general and even more so when it's the throw up kind.  He made it to the bathroom a few times, that's the best I can say for him.  He made it all over the bathroom a few times too if you know what I mean.  He's gross.  I don't clean that up, my husband does because frankly, I can't handle that kind of thing, it gives me panic attacks.  So anyway, Maxwell got it first.  My darling husband cleaned up after him, but he wanted his mommy for comfort, so he came and cuddled up to

It's that time of year again.  All hallow's eve and I haven't written a post in way too long.  I've been having some personal issues.  Yes, again.  I know, I have them a lot.  I can't even begin to describe how hard the last few weeks has been at home.  Financial shit backing up again, the hubs and I constantly fighting, the kids running amuck.  It's just been about as crazy as I'd ever hope it to be, except I don't hope for it.  I want it to calm the hell down.  I'm having issues with my mom still too.  I love her, she's my mom, so of course I do, but HOLY JEEZ she's driving me up a wall.  My cat that I'd had since before Mac was born died in part because she was lactose intolerant and my mother REFUSED to stop giving her milk.  She basically crapped her guts out until she just died.  There was no point in taking her to the vet either, because we knew what it was and my mom still refused to believe it.  She'd stop with the milk for a

I wrote a post the other day explaining why I have such a hard time in October.  If you read it, and read down to the comments, it explains a lot of why my behavior has been so strange as of late.  I'm also just plain not feeling well.  Something is up with my heart again and the shortness of breath is beyond dealable for the moment and it was suggested by my cardiologist that I use my oxygen machine whenever I get short of breath or have any kind of dizziness that doesn't immediately go away after sitting down.  Here's the thing, I take meds that make me dizzy all the time, so sometimes I put it off.  Yesterday, I realized both my portable tanks are empty and I'm out of clean 50 foot tubing and cannulas so I have a whole new bullshit deal I have to handle for the week.  Yesterday, I had a bout of hiccups (I know, seems really lame and benign, right?) but if you have a cardiac history like mine, you know hiccups that just won't go away are a bad thing.  Especially w

I've been through a lot of strangeness in my almost forty years.  A LOT!  So much, that when I tell people my life story, they think I just have a very vivid imagination and that I'm off my meds again or something.  I basically live the real life version of a soap opera.  Every now and then, I'll have some normalcy and things will calm down and we'll have months go by without anything out of the ordinary happen.  October usually isn't one of those months.  Some of my worst things ever have happened in October.  But also, one of my best. I'm one of those "good news first" people, so I'll tell you the good first.  When I moved back home to California from Ohio, it was the first week of October in 2001.  That was a good October.  That trip was pretty cool really.  I didn't do the bulk of the driving, my husband did, and we did it in three days.  Only two nights spent on the road and the third night we were home.  Back home to everything that was

First, I'm going to apologize the the Mesothelioma foundation and especially to Heather Von St James.  She had very graciously offered me the chance to write about National Mesothelioma Awareness day on September 26 and I dropped the ball.  Completely.  I got overwhelmed in my head and in my life and I just didn't do what I said I would do.  I'm so very sorry for that.  I'm not sure how to make up for it, but if anyone has any ideas, please leave a comment. I drop the ball on a lot of things.  I just do.  Obviously, that's not what I set out to do, it just happens more often than I'd like it to.  I suffer right along with everyone else when I've done it too.  I guess that's the universe's way of reminding me to get my shit together.  Which I still, at almost 40, have yet to do.  I've just never been good at the follow through.  I desperately WANT to make people happy, but no matter my intent, I don't meet those goals very often it seems.

I've got this thing where I disappear for days on end from my friends online.  I think I mentioned that once before.  Sometimes I have good reasons, sometimes I just need a break or I've gotten into a book and I get all obsessed and can't put it down and I do everything one handed because I can't stop reading.  How was THAT for a run on sentence?  Anyway, this last weekend I was offline. Not really, I mean, I kept checking Facebook randomly when Memphis would log me in through a game on my iPad or when he'd pin something for me but for the most part, it wasn't me that was there.  He had roseola.  Any mom that's had a kid with this knows the horror of realizing that your kid has a giant fever and you have no clue why.  When Maxwell had it, his fever topped out at 105 and I damn near panicked.  Phiz, never got above 103 and by the time I even realized for sure what it was, he had the rash and the fever had broken.  He acted totally normal through all of it,

You may want to settle in a minute, I'm not sure.  I don't know if I'll become emotionally exhausted halfway through and have to stop, of if it will be one of those posts  that makes people wonder if my shrink needs to adjust my meds.  Either way, I'm having  a REALLY hard time this last week, and the week before.  It seems like everyone and everything has its or their own way of doing things and that within the year we've all been here together we'd have become accustomed to each others idiosyncratic behaviours.  My mother lives here FFS, I've known the woman my whole life, I know how she is. Nothing has gone as it was planned at all.  Everyone still gets on everyone's nerves.  The animals here that were supposed to be shared duty have turned into making my 17 year old the king of shit clean up for animals that do not belong to him.  He is left picking up slack that literally no one else here will.  My husband doesn't understand you can't

Welcome to the Taboo Carnival . Our topic this Summer is “My Parents Failed Me (A Little or a Lot)” This post was written for inclusion in the quarterly Taboo Carnival hosted by Momma Jorje and Hybrid Rasta Mama . This month our participants reflect on the parenting failures of their own parents or in themselves. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants. ******************************* I'm not even sure how many people will understand that title.  When I was a kid, a "latch key kid" was a kid who got home before their parents.  I honestly don't know the origin, and where as I could google it and give you the root origin of the slang term, that's not why I'm writing this.  No, today folks, I'm not going to talk about any products, or stuff I've made.  I'm probably not even going to mention my boobs more than a few times, but I'm betting they'll factor in too, because in truth, I harbor s

Ok, so that's probably dramatic, but it's hell LIKE here some days and I need to talk about a hair product today.  I'm going to get that shit out of the way first, because frankly, it's cool hair stuff and because I don't want to forget to do it.  Uberliss.  Weird name, great product.  They sent me some samples of shampoo and conditioner, but the bigger deal here was the Uberliss Straight Effect Rituoil Orchid and Argan oil complex.  It is AH-MAZING! It really is.  I believe it's designed for curly haired folks to use to straighten with heat but I have extremely straight hair as it is, so for me it just made my hair smell great and feel like cornsilk.  I LOVED using it the first time, and realized that even though the shampoo and conditioner were one use only samples, the oil is going to last quite a while.  You only need about a dime size amount to cover my hair and it's down to my waist so it will last me probably a good 3 months and that's if I share

So one of my lifelong dreams has been to be a tattoo artist.  I'm not sure I'll ever become one, but a rather "easy" substitute is henna.  I henna'd my hair a lot when I was a teen.  My mom taught me how and we did it about every 60 days or so for years, but I wanted less realistic colors so went the way of the colorist and forgot all about henna for years.  Well, MY daughter brought it back up a few months ago and we did out hair.  I forgot how much I LOVE HENNA!!!! So it came time to order a new batch and I went to my favorite ebay retailer for the brand I love (Jamila) and I'll link her in the bottom of this post or in a comment :) We did a test batch because this was a different mix than we usually would use, I'm out of lemon juice and we wanted to try apple cider vinegar.  So we mixed up a test batch and waited for the dye release.  The batch was way too small to do anything but maybe try a few tattoos, so I added some honey to it to see what I could

When I was pregnant with Phiz, my case manager at Care1st called the area I live Never Never land, because if you need good medical care you're never never going to get it.  Oh my good golly is that ever the fucking case when it comes to good old Antelope Valley Hospital Medical Center's Emergency Department. Over the last week I dealt with a nasty clogged duct in my left boob.  THE boob, the one with the pacemaker up top, so it's painful when that boob even gets full, let alone a clogged duct, but they happen. Of course when it happens it's that boob and the duct right under the pacemaker. Since the pacemaker is generally sore ANYWAY, and something I never mention because frankly, if I mentioned every time something hurt on me I'd never say anything else.  So the clogged duct had a weird milk blister thing that I was able to get easily with a sterilized tweezers and the milk started flowing just fine and all was well that day. The next day, the duct was clogged a