Surviving the Domestic Jungle

Is it terrible that as I write this I am aware of the fact that my 2 year old is spreading baby rice cereal all over the floor? I do not care at all that she is doing it because I have a moments peace and I can clean it up later. I will do anything for a few minutes of peace these days. I go through phases where I feel like Mary Poppins (practically perfect in every way ) or I feel like I need Nanny 911 and her British accent to save my day. Right now I need a good British woman to come over and help me. If allowing my child to destroy the kitchen is what it takes to have a moment that I am ok with that. A mess can be cleaned up…my sanity can leave and never return! It would be missed although some may argue I never had any to begin with! The stress from your kids is almost as bad as the stress from your husband! However, your kids are cuter and way more enjoyable! Sometimes I need to just zone out and I have gotten pretty good at being able to have chaos surrounding me but yet totally focus on the task at hand. Or perhaps that is just what I tell myself. I suppose if this post is full of mistakes that will be a pretty good indicator of whether I can actually focus amongst chaos. Well, considering it looks like it snowed in my kitchen, I better go clean up the rice cereal and then send my babies on their way to make the next mess.

After a very long few days of work, my husband was saying he needs/wants a little break. Unfortunately, we live in the middle of the second largest state in the country (Alaska is number one for all of those wondering) and a weekend away to somewhere actually cool is not happening. Sure their are various cities around us but we have been to them all and they don’t offer much. We have friends/family in one major city but that’s about it. Id love to go to the mountains and wear warm sweaters and look at snow from the comfort of a leather sofa while sitting in front of a roaring fire….ahhhhhh. I’m not really a beach person now that I have kids. When I am on a beach, I like to lay there and tan or walk, and with kids, neither of those are an option until they are older. Also, when you live in constant intense heat for most of the year, it really isnt that exotic to go somewhere hot. Somewhere cold is about as exotic as it gets! Wearing sweaters and mittens is like a Greenland resident heading to the Florida Keys! I dont know if my husband has ever seen snow the way I have seen snow….My kids certainly have never seen more than an inch! Well, saying you need a break and actually taking one are two different things and if we didnt live in the middle of an enourmous state, Im sure we would travel a little bit more.

My daughters birthday celebration continued into today as I took cupcakes to all of her classmates at the end of the day. I am not a kid person which is strange considering I have three kids. I only like children on a case by case basis and even then I am pretty picky. I could never ever be a teacher without having anxiety attacks daily. I went to the classroom and one of the boys that went to Avery’s party asked me if I remembered him and I smiled and said of course and then tons of runny nose kids started circling me asking if I knew them! I looked to the teacher for help which thankfully she provided. She is an awesome teacher and pretty young at the age of 24! I thought she was my age! She looks kind of like the actress Lake Bell. Anywho, she was telling me how she is a germaphobe and cleans their desks at night and makes them wash their hands etc. which I promptly told her I appreciated because it is keeping those kids healthy! Some teachers don’t give a rats behind and those are the ones with poop on their phones!!! Remember that post? We did the cupcakes and had a few minutes to chit chat and then we were out of there and into the fresh air. Luckily I didn’t have to sit in the ever adventurous carpool lane and we sped of (at the speed limit) with orange icing pretty much everywhere!

My husband has been out of town the past few days visiting with his mistress (joking!) and I have had to fend for myself which proved to be a serious pain in the ass this morning. It is garbage day today and I had to take the bins to the corner which was the ultimate in gross considering the trash one has maggots on it. I was not impressed as I am not really a bug kind of girl. I threw some pumpkins in there a few days back and I am thinking that may have created the bugs. I am so grossed out and I feel very badly for the trash-man. Whatever trash-men get paid, it is not enough. I would be in a hazmat suit and I would still not touch anything! Anyway, because it is just me myself and I doing everything, I took the bins to the corner and hosed everything off like a champ. I never want to experience that again. I will triple bag every piece of trash if I have to. It actually annoys me that our trash gets picked up once a week and our recycling every two weeks because our recycling garbage bin is always stuffed to the gills and should be the one to be picked up every week. We only put our trash out every two weeks just because we don’t accumulate much because we recycle absolutely everything and when you do that, you don’t have much garbage. Most of our garbage is diapers.Well, I suppose that is enough grossness for the day for me and thankfully my husbands mistress is returning him today!

My daughter came home from school today and was telling me about drugs and how they were bad. I can only hope she continues with that train of thought through adulthood and especially the teenage years. She told me her dad does 2 drugs (smoking and drinking) and I then asked her how many mommy does and she said none Being a goody two shoes pays off when you are trying to show your kids that they too can be drug free. Lead by example….I am however aware that I am a rarity. Someone who doesn’t drink ( and has never been drunk in their life) and doesn’t smoke nor do drugs can be a challenge to find. I am so happy my daughter has an example of a truly drug free life. I am also a believer in ‘do as I say and not as I do’ but I think the message is always best received when you actually follow your own rules. I know the chances are very very high that all of my kids will do some experimenting and honestly I am ok with that but I just would never want their experiments to turn into full blown addictions. That is a huge fear as one of my sisters is a useless human being because of alcohol. Sounds harsh but she irritates the hell out of me. Anyway, I am so glad they start young with the anti drug campaign as I think kids these days need to be made aware of all of these things earlier than my generation. We still maintained an ounce of innocence at 7 but kids today live in a much faster moving world where innocence is lost way way way to early.

I have a wonderful friend who has taught me a lot about forgiveness in your marriage. She has forgiven things that I would consider to be deal breakers but when she tells you her story, it changes your view on things. I have forgiven things that my husband has done and I know I would forgive a lot more than I am willing to let him know I would forgive. You get to a certain point where all that matters is keeping your family together. As long as the marriage crimes aren’t severe then you can surely work through it. The main thing is you both have to WANT to work through it and the one thing that will keep you focused on working it out is your kids. It is good to meet and know people like my friend in a world where people throw away their marriages because they are searching for something that doesn’t exist. Perfection doesn’t exist. The always happy always fantastic marriage doesn’t exist. There are always going to be issues and ups and downs as we are all human and all make mistakes. What she has taught me is that your family is important enough to work through those mistakes and not just quit because it got hard, or in her case, really hard. Ive wanted to quit my marriage a bazillion times because I bit off a lot more than I could chew in someways but my children absolutely adore their father. Our daughter especially is a daddies girl! If anything my friend has taught me that quitting your marriage may make you happy but your children will suffer and usually they suffer silently. They don’t understand what happened and why. Their feelings are generally blown off because they are kids and we never really take them seriously when we are focused on ourselves. I don’t know….What I do know is I know some very inspirational people that I try my best to learn the qualities that I admire most about them. Take a minute and think about the friends in your life….do they inspire you? Can you learn from them? Those are the friends to have!

I am starting to get really frustrated with certain behaviors. I am not perfect but at least I know right from wrong. I consider myself to try and do the right thing even when it pains me to do so. I put in efforts when it comes to certain things ONLY because it is the right thing. Do I do the wrong thing sometimes? Heck yes and I will continue in the future to make and say mistakes but I also try and learn and don’t sit there repeating certain behaviors. One thing I cant stand is what I call ‘victim mode’. I have days where I feel like a victim but I can quickly pull through because I know I am lucky and live a great life. Other people tend to get stuck in their story that the whole world is against them. What a miserable existence that must be. To always be jealous of someone is also a miserable existence. To be so jaded by jealousy that you spew hate and anger at someone who has done nothing wrong is a sad life as well. I am not trying to sound arrogant but I have had quite a few people be jealous of me and things about my life. I don’t know why. I have had people be jealous because my husband became a better man when he met me. I was the game changer and it didn’t sit well with others. I have had people be jealous of me because of money that I have had or even my figure. I don’t know why this is because Im just a regular person! Nothing all that special! But for me to be treated like crap under the pretense that I am a valued person in their life is just a stupid head game that I cannot be bothered to play. I am getting too old and too wrinkly to handle this behavior from anyone in my life anymore and I intend to speak up about it from here on out because if someone is stealing cookies from the cookie jar, they will not stop until someone tells them to stop or removes the damn cookies. I hope that analogy makes sense!! It’s not my job to change people or their behaviors but it is my job to stand up for myself, my family and what I believe in and I intend to do that from this point forward.

On a daily basis I eat fairly healthy. I love fruit and veggies and I restrict my junk intake the best I can. I have had so much crap this weekend that my organs are probably on the verge of failure! Yesterday I ate Pizza, cake, and fried chicken (I did however peel off the skin) then I followed it up with donuts this morning. I feel awful. I don’t know how people eat like this on a daily basis. I haven’t ate a fast food burger since the 80′s because my body just doesn’t do well with this much crap in it. It is much happier full of fresh healthy foods. Occasionally I suppose it is important to remind your body why you eat right. For the rest of the day I am only eating veggies and fruit with 40000 gallons of water in an attempt to re-cooperate. For someone who doesn’t drink, this is my version of a hangover. The child birthday party hangover! One way to cure sugar overload is to eat garlic. Fresh, whole cloves either chopped up or minced is a great way to re-balance your body. You may stink but consider this: It keeps the vampires away! It is Halloween time so there are a few lurking around town. Im sure I will end up eating a few more bites of cake as it is my baby girls 7th birthday TODAY and we need to keep this celebration rolling Garlic and cake…YUM!

The birthday party was a smashing success! I had soooo much fun! I had as much fun as my baby girl. So many of my special friends came which was just the sweetest thing to me. You really know who your true friends are when they make an incredible effort to come to a child’s birthday party. The weather was perfect, the gifts were awesome and the cake was fabulous! We walked around the zoo (which is more like an animal sanctuary where animals that have been abused, or are retired circus performers and even some that were bought off the internet reside) and saw all the animals and we even took a little train ride. Good times! After the inviting the whole class debacle, only two showed up! The two that showed up happened to be the cutest little boys ever with really great parents and with out of town friends and cousins, she had the perfect amount of kids. When the party was over we came back to our house that I had spent hours cleaning just to dump all of the party crap at the front door and pretty much mess the house up in about 15 minutes! My girls have been having a terrific time with their friends from out of town and I had fun catching up with there mom until the wee hours of the morning. I miss them so much! All in all we have had an awesome weekend and I have been really touched by the efforts made by my friends and family to make my baby girl feel special.

Today is my oldest daughters birthday party (her real birthday is tomorrow) and I am going to have to go out on a limb and say that birthday parties have completely changed since I was a kid. When I was little, we used to get dressed up like we were going to a wedding! I remember the ‘party dresses’ and having big 80′s hair with socks that had lace trim and patent leather shoes. Ahhh times have changed! Another HUGE difference is your parents dropped you off and left you at the party by yourself and nowadays the parents stay with their children. I would never drop my kids off anywhere without knowing the parents. I am paranoid about everything and especially my children. You cant trust parents nowadays to not be total freak shows and I don’t want my kids to ever be in a situation because I blindly trusted someone. I prefer the parties of today. Kids wear whatever they want instead of ballgowns and tuxedos and the parents are responsible for their own kids. I would not be doing a big zoo party without the parents being involved! I have to keep an eye on my kids in a public place and if they wander away, I can yell at them but other peoples kids I cant yell at like I do my own. This party should be a blast as so many people have made an effort to come! I am so grateful that I have some really great friends and family