I've been trying to avoid cursing as it seems like the polite thing to do. But. But! Shit and fucking fuck! It is still raining here!
We have had a few days without rain here and there. I think we have actually had two days without rain since november. November!
The past few days however have been freakishly monsoon like. Torrential wind and rain. My house is surrounded by two and three hundred foot cedars – hundreds of them. Plus, a bunch of equally tall birch and fir trees, several of which are dead. Dead and ready to fall. The other night as i listened to the wind howl i seriously considered writing a "just in case you never hear from me again" post.
Today the wind stepped it up a notch and the power has gone out three times, the last one for five hours. We had to eat dinner at mcdonalds! So gross. The occasional happy meal lunch i can handle. But dinner. For me. No way.
The power is probably going to go out again any moment. Wish us luck as we all hunker down together in one freezing, but smelly, room in our freezing, but clean, house.
I feel obliged to start this with i'm tired. Real tired. We are fighting colds and flu's and backaches and asthma. The usual suspects.
Parker has been sleeping a little better. He goes to sleep pretty easily most nights. Except on days when he naps because we have reached the black hole of not quite needing a nap but I WILL GET REALLY GRUMPY AND LOUD AROUND 4:30 AND IT WILL LAST UNTIL BEDTIME but then i will go to sleep really freakishly easily.
He's even *knock wood* been sleeping from the time he goes down until around midnight. Which means i get 3 or more hours of uninterrupted time alone. So! You'll be seeing a lot more of me in all your comment sections and i am a lame commenter so watch out! Then, well, he wakes up 3 or 4 more times for *ahem* the booby. So, tired. Always with the tired. Not to mention that i have FOUR kids. That in itself is exhausting. Two kids are exhausting too. I think this whole motherhood thing is wrinkle causing exhausting no matter how many of the little things you have.
So! I have a very cunning plan! Aha! In two weeks we are splitting the kids up and having a girls weekend and a boys weekend. I will be traveling to vancouver with the girls for two nights and, if all goes according to plan, that should be the end of operation booby drop.
Or not. Because i have spoken of these things MANY times before.
I remember when i got pregnant with parker. I remember, aside from my own terror at the thought of four kids, that we had to hold off on telling our families. Being pregnant AGAIN! was going to go over like a lead balloon. I had all four of my kids in a six year period. It was a lot. I don't think my body is ever going to fully recover.
Stretch marks aside i knew that my mom and my mother-in-law would be disappointed. Why? Well, i think shane's mom worried that it was too much, that i was somehow limiting her son's potential. Somehow three was okay, but four crossed the line.
We chose to have four kids. And at some point a few years earlier we chose to have two kids. Two was good. Perfect – a boy and a girl. Then? Well. Eliza. Who was perfectly perfect, but turned perfection into three kids. Three kids with insecure little toby in the middle. In the middle of TWO girls. We knew pretty quickly that three was not a magic number for us. And so four it was to be.
At exactly the same time i got pregnant with parker my sister and my sister-in-law got pregnant too. I knew that their second and first pregnancies were going to require all the energy my family had to muster. So, we decided to keep our fourth a surprise for as long as possible. We let the bomb drop when i was 22 weeks pregnant by sending ultrasound pics with "it's a boy" in the subject line of a family wide email.
The response was not good. Everybody was upset. Shane's mom couldn't even muster a congratulations just lots of "oh my goodness". His brother was the only one who said anything positive and i think that was along the lines of "holy shit! way to go!"
We had many "have you guys figured out how it happens yet?" Har har.
My mom wasn't disappointed, but i remember her saying "oh, now your in trouble! You're never going to get out of this now!"
I've thought about that a lot since then. Like whenever shane and i are really not getting along. Those nights when you lie in bed planning your escape. For me it sounds something like:
Shit, if i kick him out how the hell am i going to pay for everything? No more private school that's for sure. And speech therapy? How much money could i get? How am I going to get a job? Who will take care of the kids? What about eliza's allergies? AND! I will be single FOREVER because nobody wants a 35 year old woman with four kids! Damn, i better make-up with shane in the morning.
I think THAT is the core of what my mom was saying. I will never get out of this life. And that's okay. Good in fact. I don't think she meant what she said to hurt my feelings, although it might have a bit at the time. I think she was speaking to me as a mother of four kids herself. A mother who gave everything to her kids and when we all became adults was faced with reinventing herself or pass away her empty nest years as, well, an empty nester.
In becoming the new, childless woman i think my mom saw a bit of what she had missed all those years. She saw it and wanted me to have everything just like all mothers do – want the best for their kids.
Me summed up by snapshirts. Thanks to sweetney for the idea.
But, damn "amazing ass" – i sure know myself!
Apparently. Because today someone searched that on google and i won! I won! I'm a sucker and always the last to know.