Life: Winter 2010-Fall 2012...PART ONE

Okay here we go...

As you will remember, my hubbers left for Afghanistan in September of 2010.  It sucked.  Life was hard for a while.  I cried a lot.  But slowly, things became easier.  Winter came (my favorite, favorite time of the year!) and it started to snow (my favorite type of precipitation).  Watching my kids have fun in it was a major source of joy in my life.  They played in the backyard...

We went sledding...

I even enrolled the boys into indoor soccer to pass some time.  Johnny took to it like a champ:

 Hayden, not so much...

 He preferred to sit on my lap.

(We've since tried several times to encourage him to play, but after this year's fall soccer flop, we've conceded that he just isn't into sports lol).

Eventually Christmas was finally here!

My kids made sure to keep my hands occupied while my husband was away...

(the culprit)

I got a creepy dog to keep me company...

Okay, he can be cute too.

But this certainly isn't cute:

I made my son a shitty Darth Vader cake for his birthday (hey, I tried!)

 But at least it was made of rainbows...

Then finally, the month after the shitty cake, my husband came home.

So we went to Disney World!

The best part:

 

We also went to some other places during that trip. One of my favorites was the Airborne and Special Ops museum in Fayetteville, NC.  They don't allow flash photography so the crappy cellphone pics will have to suffice.

We went to the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia...

And walked around Philadelphia for a while:

After our vacation, my husband returned to work after a couple weeks.  Life became normal again, we happily adapted to our routine way of life.  We spent the summer at home mostly, occasionally having family over for cookouts and the normal summertime activities.  We went camping in the White Mountains in New Hampshire and thoroughly enjoyed it.  

Which brings us to fall/winter of 2011, which I will need to continue tomorrow as a new post.  Goodnight! 

Life Got in the Way...

Wow.  It's been a while, huh guys?  If you even remember me...!

I kept resolving to start blogging again.  Something funny/weird/sad would happen to me, and I would think "I should write about this in my blog..." but I just kept putting it off.   Here's kinda how it went inside my neurotic head:  when I was writing often, I would feel like I was letting people down if I didn't update regularly.  So I got busy or maybe just didn't feel like writing one week, and then another for whatever reasons I had...then eventually it got to a point that it felt weird to come back because so much time had elapsed.  

The kids are older now too, and busier.  They've got school and friends and sports.  That certainly keeps me running around.  Oh yeah, and my husband came home (...a year and a half ago...) so I spend whatever time I can with him too since he has a crazy work schedule.  Blag blag excuse excuse...anyway!

I made some good blogger friends when I was active here, and every once in a while some of you still pop up into my head.  And today I was thinking about them (maybe even YOU!) a little more thoroughly and I started reading through some of my favorite blogger's sites, and it made me really sad that I've missed so much.  I'm going to try, really, to stick around and stop being so lazy.  I truly enjoy writing, and while I still do a lot of it privately offline...I so miss being part of the blog community.  I hope at least one of you missed me too.  :)

So I was just sitting here typing out a list of everything I've done during my extended absence and I realized that my everyday life is still pretty boring.  Have I accomplished anything since I wrote last?  Nah, not really.  Experienced anything noteworthy?  Yes, some things...but maybe not enough to write about.  So I think the easiest and most interesting way to catch you all up to my life in the past 1.5-2 years would be to make a photo post chronicling the most important events.  

I'm getting started as soon as I submit this post!  

Flat Tire. And not the awesome beer.

This morning, I woke up in a great mood.  Which is saying something, because I am definitely not a morning person and perpetually feel as though I haven't had enough sleep no matter what time I went to bed the night before.  I fixed my daughter's lunch, started the car early to warm up, then bundled all of the kids up and headed toward Teagan's school.

It wasn't apparent until I hit the main road.  Then I heard a constant grinding sound and felt my car's obvious struggle on the road, I briefly wondered if we were about to be suddenly engulfed in a fireball.  At the first side street I could find I pulled in and parked in front of an elderly care center...another car pulled in right after me and I reconsidered my stopping location.  I didn't want to be seen by anybody in my bra-less state, wearing plaid pajama pants with Walmart clog shoes and a lopsided ponytail.  But then I said "eff it" and got out to assess the vehicle.  I had hoped for something simple, like ice stuck over the wheels.  But as I made my way around to the other side of the car, the problem was quickly evident: a flat tire.

"Oh shit."  I stood and stared at it for a moment, then looked around at the houses of the neighborhood, willing a friendly neighbor out to solve the problem for me...trailer park fashion statement be damned.  I have never dealt with this in my life.  It was cold.  I was in my pajamas.  I had no gloves.  Even if I KNEW how to change a tire, it would be impossible to do so in this temperature without at least gloves.

So I did what any self-respecting person in a crisis does:  I cried for my mommy.  I got back in the car and speed-dialed my mom, waking her up at 6AM her time in Arizona.  "I have a crisis!" I explained.  I broke down in tears.  "I don't know what to do!"  I had asked if I could drive back to my house on the flat tire.  She advised me not to.  But after we went through my possible options:  "Do you have Triple A?" No.  "Is there a gas station close?"  Yes, but I don't have my cards or cash on  me.  "Do you know how to do it?"  No, and it's freezing, and I'm wearing my pajamas and I have no gloves.

We agreed that I must drive back home.  I put on my  hazard lights and crept along the main road back home, and felt victorious when I pulled back into my driveway.

But now I have different problems.  I've been trying to get ahold of my mother-in-law all day long.  To see if her AAA plan has the "help a friend" service...if she even has AAA anymore.  Or find out if she knows anybody who can come over and help me.  Or...at the very least, if she can help me since I have no idea what I'm doing.

I refuse to call a tow service or some other company.  The last time I had somebody come over for emergency assistance, it was when I locked myself out of this house a week after signing the closing paperwork.  I called a locksmith and that ended up costing me $67.  SIXTY-SEVEN DOLLARS.  For the man to drive down the street from their business location, and wiggle a wire in the door for literally 10 seconds.  Frankly, I'm not excited about the idea of paying somebody to change my tire for me when the cost will most likely be equally astronomical.

And then, AND THEN, even when we do get a tire on, my worries still aren't over.  The tire in the trunk is just a temporary.  So this means that I get to go buy a new tire very soon.  After Christmas, my wallet is still recovering from being beaten worse than a pinata filled with roofies at a frat party.

I'm afraid there is not going to be a completely happy resolution for this fiasco.

God might not want me to blog

I was all pumped up and ready to go when I made my last post.  I told myself "I'm going to post every day like I used to!  I still have so much to talk about!  I have so many stories saved up!"  But one fateful day soon after I made my comeback post, I fell ill. 

So I've been laying around, listening to Sarah's Key on audiobook...which it turns out is very, very depressing so far.  And then I told myself that of course it's going to be depressing, it's about the Holocaust.  But then I found myself angry with the author:  it's not a true story, so why be so brutal?  Why can't anything actually go right in this story?  Will there be some sort of happy ending?  I like happy endings.  And then I told myself to shut up because most real life Holocaust victims didn't have happy endings.

When I'm not listening to the book, I'm ordering from a pizza place just so that I can get milk delivered since I am too sick to pack everybody into the car and go get it myself.  "I have a really weird question for you," I said to the thick-accented Italian man on the other end of the phone, "would it be possible for you to send me, like, just a gigantic cup of milk?"  Of course I asked this after I ordered some actual food.  For a reason I still don't understand, he handed off the phone to an equally accented woman who asked if I would mind if the driver picked up a gallon from CVS Pharmacy.  I said of course not and that I would be eternally grateful.

The delivery man showed up here about 20 minutes later and handed me my sandwich and "mac n cheese bites".  I said "where my mo'fo milk, man?"  and he said "I don't know dawg, they wrote milk here on the receipt but never told me to pick any up, but I can go get some if you want, homez" and I said "Fo real man, I'd 'preciate it."

So he came back another 10 minutes later with my milk and I gave him a $10 tip for his time.  Though $4 of it was to cover the milk. 

I have MUCH to talk about!

I've been gone a long time, I know, I'm sorry.  But I promise, I'm going to be around for awhile from now on. Here's a tl;dr rundown of what I've been up to:

June - July: my husband and I were house hunting.  We looked at...I don't know, maybe about 15 houses in all.  We put offers in on 3 total.

The first, well it was a major fixer-upper.  It was a ranch-style house that clearly hadn't been updated since the 70's.  But it had a nice, spacious, fenced-in backyard and was right on a quiet cul-de-sac in a great neighborhood.  We offered at asking price, but the lady just didn't seem to be ready to let go of it...it was her mother's house, who had just passed on.  

The second house was also nice, although it was pretty small.  We loved that it had a fireplace in the livingroom and a finished basement.  The downside was that it had endured a little bit of flood damage with the Great Rhode Island Floods of '10, but honestly we were sick of looking and said the house was good enough for us.  Our offer was outbid by somebody else.

We were ready to give up hope.  We were really crunched for time, and wanted to have a house before my husband left (explanation below).  But we pushed on and decided to go for one more round of walk-throughs.  The moment I walked into the house, I fell in love with it.  It smelled new, with fresh paint and new wood flooring...but the house is over a hundred years old.  It's got beautiful original woodwork throughout.  It's pretty big, at almost 2000 sq ft.   After our first tour around, we came back into the mudroom and I told my husband "you do whatever you can to get me this house.  I HAVE to have this house!"

It had only been on the market for 4 days, and we were offering less than the asking price, so it would take a miracle to get it.  I prayed and prayed all day.  I felt nauseous I was so nervous.  The sellers accepted our offer that night.

So, my dream house also became our first house.  No starter home necessary.  Unfortunately, closing took a bit longer than expected so I moved in by myself...since my husband had gone by then.  We were living in hotels for 3 weeks, as our lease was up at the townhome we were renting.  It seems like that might be a luxurious way to live...but with three kids and a cat in one room with two beds, it wasn't.  I finally signed the paperwork and got my keys on September 16th.  I spent the first few nights on an AeroBed set up in the dining room.

September 5th - My husband got shipped off to Afghanistan.  You see, when he first got out of the military almost two years ago, he was briefly unemployed before getting hired by the police department.  During that time, he had joined the Air Force Reserves for the extra $400 a month, he was told he could get out before his contract was up.  Well, recruiters lie.  Big surprise.  So long story short, about 12 people in his unit became active and now he's over there until the spring of '11.


That's him on the far left.   It was really hard at first.  The kids cried every day.  I cried every day.  We worried about him.  I still cry sometimes.  Sometimes, it still feels like more than I can bear.  But I find it a blessing that I had this new house to buy things for, the holidays, and the kids to shop for...I signed the kids up for an asinine amount of activities to keep us all busy (scouts, sports, etc), and I've been going to the gym regularly to keep my spirits up.  I live 10 minutes away from my mother-in-law, so she watches the kids a few times a week so I can run errands and just have some time to myself.  Which really helps.  I can't wait for him to come home.

 This was taken the day he left at a USO family send-off

I'm glad to be back to my blog.  I always found blogging therapeutic.  I think I'll stick around.

LOST finale...

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Jesus Bunny Thumb Print

As you can see, I have been lacking time (and blogable material) lately.  Last night, mom encouraged me to post a new entry concerning an awkward family moment...which I will be doing  hopefully later tonight.  But for now, I bring you this:

8th Grader Finds Jesus on Thumb While Doing Science Project?

Here is the image from the article:

But to me, it's obviously The Easter Bunny:

But I suppose it's just as well, since both Jesus and the Easter Bunny have a lot to do with Easter, right???