Here and there and everywhere.

Which was really yesterday, but yesterday was a little chaotic.  You know how it is.  (Well, you do if you’ve scored a 42″ television from Woot.com…)

Liam is SO close to crawling.  He locomotes around without any problems, using a combination of rolling his way there and scooting/pushing.  If he could figure out that his thighs have to come off the ground, he’d have it.

His first tooth came in on the 6th.  His second one popped through on the 14th.   He’s rolling fully back/front and front/back, and does the best baby crunches ever.

He’s 26 1/2 inches long and 18 pounds 14 ounces.  Chunkymonkey.

Favorite food is peas, least favorite is peaches (but mostly all fruits).   He’s not fond of cereals either, but peas?  He’ll eat you out of house and garden!

I can’t believe it’s been six months already.

(Two toothies!)

(I think I’m going to post an edited version of the narrative that I’ve posted other places.)

What’s it going to be, gods.woot?

Jen: OMG! That’s so mine for the bedroom!

*FedEx guy pulls the next thing out* {cue chorus of ooooohhhh’s}

Jen: Squeeeee!    [Jen starts grabbing boxes off the truck.]

Josh: You know what this means, right? That BIG HUGE BOX? Squeeeeeee!!!

*FedEx guy and Josh pull the HUGE cardboard box off the truck and move it to the ground*

Jen: Do you really think that it could be what I think it’s going to be? Squeeeeeee!

*FedEx guy and Josh use a super huge knife Jen pulls out of the kitchen and opens the super huge box*

Everyone: Squeeeeeeee!

Once everything gets brought inside, we showed Liam the television.  Liam says:

Josh’s uncle lives in Oklahoma.  His insane mother decided that she wanted to visit him and asked Josh if we would/could drive up there and join her.  He (being in a state of both insanity and ennui) told her that we would, but she was going to be responsible for paying for our hotel room for the night.  She even offered to pay for our gambling at some close casino to sweeten the deal.  I was cool with all of that, especially at the (dream) of being able to steal away for a few hours alone, without rats one or two in tow.  I said sure, we can go.

This was about three weeks ago.  During the time between this and this last weekend, she (Josh’s mother) decided to up the ante by driving halfway to Austin and having Garrit’s baby momma meet her and hand over Zoie for the week.  Once she figured out this grand plan, she improved on it by asking if Brian could drive up with them on Monday.  <cue beginning of the end>

She picked up Zoie on Friday.  Saturday, she asked us to come over so the kids could play.  I (the sucker) decided that it wouldn’t be a horrible idea since I expect in the future to see little to nothing of Zoie ever again, and she is the kids’ cousin.  We got there just in time for her to decide that her schedule was changing, and that she had to leave in thirty minutes.  Twenty minutes later, she shooed the kids out the door.  Playdate: Aborted.

Since her schedule had changed, she asked if I’d bring them back Sunday.  (Hahahaha.)  The parenthesized laughter being your clue, you can go ahead and figure that my answer was no.   Instead, she came by that night to pick up the carseat out of Josh’s car so she could take Brian – you know, since she never actually bought one to use.  That went alright, no fighting or catty comments towards me.  She did her best to get Josh’s goat – why would someone’s mother… nevermind.  Been there, done that.

Moving on.  Monday morning bright and early she and Zoie pick up Brian and drive to Oklahoma.  Everything’s fine, they get there okay, etc.  Later that night her husband calls us, saying that she’d forgotten to bring her Pictionary game with her and wanting to know if we wanted him to drive it over.  He also mentioned that they’d had an awesome time on the boat….  wait.  Boat?  BOAT?!

Nowhere was it mentioned that they’d be doing anything other than going up there and hanging out at someone’s house.  No boat.  I assumed they’d be swimming since she’d mentioned how she was taking some extra hoses from their pool up with her (since they are moving and won’t need them) so I’d sent a towel and his swimming shirt/shorts along.  But… boat?   Yeah.  Brian’s never been on a boat before.  The closest he’s ever been to the water is a pool in someone’s backyard.  We don’t even take baths here, we take showers.   Boat?!

I was so freaking pissed off.  Josh was too, I didn’t even have to get mad for him to be mad, he was already mad when he repeated the conversation back to me that he’d had on the phone.  He calls his mom, who gets all attitudey (go figure), and when told that she could have called and at least given me a heads up replied “But what if I’d called and Jennifer had said no?  Then I wouldn’t have been able to go, and everyone else wouldn’t have been able to go either.”  To hell with common courtesy (Oh, sorry, I forget – we’ve been there and done that in the past, too), right?  She jumps the shark and heads for the ‘well should I call you if we want to go to Chuck-E-Cheese?’ train of speech, at which point I start yelling into the end of the phone.  She doesn’t bother shutting up to listen, just continues on her merry bitch path.  He hangs up the phone.  We sit there, fuming like someone had just stuck radioactive plugs in our behinds, and decide that instead of driving up there right then and there, that we’d just go up the next day and figure out then if we had any interest in staying.

About fifteen minutes later, the phone rings.  It’s his uncle’s house.  I answer [of course I have to answer, my baby isn't home, no matter how many times Josh said not to answer it!]…. it’s Brian.  The MOTHERFUCKINGBITCH put my child on the phone, told him to call me, prompted him on what he needed to say, then didn’t even bother talking, just hung up the phone.  Of course he was having a good time – he’s five, he’s with other kids, and he’s doing shit he doesn’t normally do.  YOU FUCKING BITCH.

.

Involving my children in your drama crosses all sorts of lines.

We get there and she pulls Josh aside and talks to him.  She spends fifteen (I kid you not) minutes crying and whinging about the same old shit.  He said that he told her that if she couldn’t figure out how to show us some respect, he was done.  Also asked why she can’t bother talking to me, at all.  She’s yet to talk to me, in fact.  She brought Brian’s car seat and his movies over the other day and had a flat tire so she ducked out to deal with that, then left because she had errands to run.

That’s fine.  My kids.  My rules.  Can’t talk to me, you’re going to have to work to talk to my kids.

(Aside from the bitch, the rest of the trip wasn’t too bad.  I really liked his uncle, and I liked even more his uncle’s partner/un-legalized husband.  Who totally appreciated my rainbow baby leggings, I might add.    The kids are loud and annoying, and when there’s four and a half of them running around it’s pretty unbearable, but I didn’t expect anything less.)

Here’s the two kids at roughly (within days) the same age:

Pretty cool.  (Insert the obligatory I LOVE MY EFFING CAMERA here.)

That’s right:  Liam’s first tooth.  The second one is huge and swollen, so chances are good he’ll have another one within the next few days.  Hooray, Liam!

And my crap didn’t go through. Story of my life… however, in this case it works out.

If you’re not familiar with Woot!, they are a one item a day sale site (that happens to be headquartered about ten, maybe fifteen minutes away from here). I can’t remember how long they’ve been around, I know that my username is from 2006. Normally they sell an item a day, if it sells out then it sells out. Once or twice a month, they have a ‘Woot-Off’ – which is where they sell items until they sell out, then move onto the next item. Sometime (randomly) during each Woot-Off they sell a ‘Bag of Crap’ – used to, you could order up to three, and now it’s just one crap order and they automatically assume everyone gets three craps. Anytime the BoC comes up (best abbreviation I’ve seen in a while was BP Oil Catastrophe!) thousands and thousands of people most of whom are using some kind of Woot tracker click the buy now button and hope for some crap. It’s $3.00 for the crap plus $5.00 shipping.

Josh scored a BoC, finally, after five years of trying. Not only did he score, he tapped, stroked, and impregnated as well – he got a handwritten letter from ‘threepiecewoot’. Sometime in the next week or so we’re going to get something shipped by a freight delivery service. Absolutely no idea what, we don’t even know the ‘when’ yet. In the past, people have gotten things like multiple 40″+ HDTV’s, 1000 identical action figures, 800 containers of car wax. We’re going to get something splendid. It’s crappy. It’s woottastic!

Our craptastic haul (minus the surprise):

1 – Wine.Woot bag, holds four bottles of wine
2 – The Munsters action figures – Grandpa and Eddie
1 – Wyatt Earp action figure
1 – Sound activated light up Snowman
3 – Classic Marvel Battle Team-Up’s – Thor/Hulk, 2 Spider-Man/Green Goblin
1 – Pez ‘Handy Dandy’ puppet
6 – Disney Director Pack boxes for a Flix Video Camera
2 – ‘Folk Art’ Face Wall Decoration pieces
1 – Hand drawn, Hand written note from ‘threepiecewoot’ saying that our last crap item was too big for the box and would be shipped seperately

It sucks, on one hand I want to be jealous, but since in the end it’s still our stuff… we got a bag of crap, la-lala-lala-la-la. =D

If I had interesting things to say and didn’t just use it as a way to complain all the time.

Well, when I post on it, anyways. I totally missed the month of May – I think that’s the first one I’ve skipped since I switched domains a few years ago. /sigh

http://www.jennifertidmore.com/?p=59

(It’s easier than posting it again, and again… )

How am I doing? Well, I can’t believe that I’m thirty. I don’t *feel* thirty, in fact, I barely feel 23. I don’t look any older than that (which I suppose is a good thing), either.

I’m having more good or at least baseline days than I am bad ones. I’m still missing the usual happy go lucky mood that I normally spend my life in, so I’m hoping that’ll eventually return. Liam’s kicking my ass, he’s been waking up in the middle of the night the last few nights. I don’t do well without sleep, at all. Now that I’m re-accustomed to sleeping at night for stretches that aren’t interrupted, having it interrupted is horrible. I just need my sleep, dammit. I’m still filled with this incredible amount of guilt over breastfeeding, I feel guilty that I didn’t try for a VBAC, I feel guilty that I wasn’t functionally able to demand my child sooner after he was born (six hours apart at the time wasn’t so bad, but now, it should have been different – I was too drugged up, too sleepy, too overwhelmed…. and I keep feeling like Liam is suffering for it). I keep seeing all this press about how the breast is best, and how the first hour after they are born is when you should really establish good latching while their instincts are good… and I failed. I failed with Brian, and I failed with Liam. Now he’s covered in eczema, he’s allergic to everything, his super expensive formula is eating away at what little money we have, and it’s all coming back to the fact that I couldn’t manage to get him on the breast.

I could keep going. I beat myself up over it every day, and part of me wants to figure out how to get past it and the other part feels guilty that I’d want to get past it. I know, logically, that I’m going to have to just let go and deal with it, but… yeah. I feel bad that I didn’t keep pumping, I feel bad that I feel like I copped out, that I used all the mastitis infections as an excuse to quit (all the while feeling like Liam would do fine on formula, that I wasn’t going to be depriving him of anything… You’re getting the idea.

Other than that, life’s sort of getting back to normal.

Birthday wise, we’re poor. We went to Atlanta during Brian’s spring break, which coincided with Alison’s having birthed my new nephew Samuel.

They are just adorable. :p

I was on the computer a few days ago while they were playing on the floor behind me. Brian asks me to turn around, to look at them, because they were hiding. It’s going to be so much fun watching them grow, I’m glad that they will have each other.

I bought two matching coffee mugs at Starbucks the other day. I’m going to order this http://www.nelleandlizzy.com/index.php?p=product&id=3&parent=1 once the sizer gets here and I figure out what size my right ring finger is, with the kids’ names on them. And, I’ll probably (hopefully?) make it up to McKinney to the Vera Bradley store to use my $20 off a $20 purchase coupon. Pretty awesome, for being super poor.

.

.

edit – Oh my fucking god. It’s my birthday, for christ’s sake. *screams*

So, today’s been pretty normal. (Liam got up at 2am to eat, I got back to sleep around a quarter to four, he’s back awake at 6:30 to eat, Brian got up at 7, which meant that I was up for good..) Read Brian this hugely long chapter book, got a shower, got Brian a shower, made him something to eat and me a pot of coffee, and got him to school. Liam and I drove to Wal-Mart to buy formula (you’d never guess judging by how often he’s eating that we’d need to do that, right?). I got to Wal-Mart, went to park, and was going to wait on this guy to drive past to pull into the spot but he turned on his turn signal to indicate that he was going to park where I was parking (there were two spaces), so I just pulled in. I got out of the car and he was sitting there with his window down, music playing decently loudly, and said hey. I replied ‘hello’, and he said ‘you have a real pretty smile’ – which was weird, since I was already giving him the not so much smile as the dude you’re creepy why are you talking to me smile. I went into the store and bought my $50 worth of Alimentium using my birthday money from my wonderful parents, came back out, got the formula/toilet paper/kid/diaper bag in the back seat, got in the car, and pulled out. What do I see?

Mister weird scary black man standing there with his penis hanging out, erect, with a condom on it. One of his hands is holding a cell phone, the other is holding his penis, and he’s manipulating it with this weird grin on his face.

Oh my fucking god, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

I drive away, thinking a combination of ‘you’ve got to be fucking kidding’ and ‘why does this shit always happen to me’, when I think… I need to call the police. So, me being me, I turn the car around and drive back down the aisle. I pause right in front of his car (he’s standing with his back to traffic, his front inside his car in the back passenger door) long enough to get the license plate number and look real good at the car and keep going, with my hand hitting ‘send’ on my phone. The very first thing I say to the 911 lady is the license plate number, so I’m about 99.5% sure that I got it right. I gave them the info they wanted while adding ‘I’m not sticking around, obviously’, and drove away. Called Josh all freaked out (I’m *sure* he just loves it when I call him at work, it’s always something bad!), then drove around for a while. I’d just about decided that I wanted to sit in the line at McDonald’s and get some chicken nuggets when my phone rang, it was the policeman responding to the report. He was gone (go figure).

Policeman asked a lot more in depth questions, asked my information (including my birthday, to which I replied ‘Today. 1980.’), asked if I’d be able to identify him again if I saw him (probably) and how certain I was on the license plate number (basically 100%). He made sure to tell me Happy Birthday twice … yeah. Great birthday, happy you’re now 30, right? I didn’t get my nuggets, I just went home.

Thought this was the end, right?

Ha.

Brian’s bus gets here, and the bus driver stops to talk – she does sometimes, checks up on the baby, real nice lady. Well, she said that you know Mr Williams? (He’s this huge black fellow that lives a few units away, he’d been sick recently and hadn’t been driving his school bus route, diabetes/HBP/blown out knee that they wouldn’t do surgery on because he wasn’t healthy enough.) They found him last night.

Yeah. Dude died. Josh had seen two police cars when he came home, and Kevin and Brian saw them when they got back, but aside from seeing a women outside talking to the police, I didn’t think anything else of it. I figured it was a domestic dispute. Welll… Yeah, I guess it was. She said that he’d been dead a few days, too.

Oh yeah – Happy Waco Texas Massacre day, and Happy Oklahoma City Bombing Day!

You’d think I’d learn my lesson, but no.  I guess one of the hallmarks of depression is not recognizing that you’re actually depressed.  I’d say that I’ve been dealing with some moderately decent postpartum depression since Christmas.  Honestly, probably since we were in the hospital,  but it’s so hard to tell the difference when you’ve gone days without a decent amount/stretch of sleep.  If sleep was the only problem, it would have been fixed about a month ago when Liam went from waking up every three to four hours to eat, to sleeping from 9pm to 9am.  Yeah.  A seven week old sleeping twelve hours at a time.  I should be ecstatic.

I have a laundry list of crap, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that my brain isn’t functioning normally:

• New baby.
• Brian spending basically two weeks with Kevin and my parents, which resulted in behavior changes that I’m still dealing with.
• The entire Christmas fiasco that was detailed in a prior post. No need to rehash, aside from mentioning that I still can’t look at any of the pictures taken from that day aside from the ones that Josh and I took ourselves.
• Josh going back to work after spending five weeks at home with us, and the resulting stress he feels about money/bills/etc – which leads to my worrying about the same.
• Mastitis three times in seven weeks, which resulted in Josh basically telling me that I wasn’t going to pump anymore because we can’t afford the doctor’s visits, ultrasounds, medicine, and the effect that the infections had on me.
• Unbelievable guilt that I can’t breastfeed, I can’t pump it out and feed it to him, and I have no alternative but formula.
• Brian getting sicker (he’s had a stuffy nose/cough since before Christmas, but since he did last year too and endless doctor visits got me nowhere I chalked it up to allergies, but one night it just magnified ten fold plus fever) going to the doctor and getting antibiotics and an inhaler, Josh getting sick (doctor, antibiotics), Liam and I getting sick, which lead to Liam’s doctor visit and a positive test for RSV, which explains what all four of us have/had/have.
• Coming home the Friday before last to discover the front door open and the deadbolt/lock hanging out of the door. (the police believe that the robber was inside when he/she/they heard me opening the backdoor and took off. The only things stolen were our HDDVD DirecTV box and an external HD. My (new, widescreen, 24″, 2048×1152 resolution) monitor had been moved sideways on my desk like they were trying to unhook it. The Wii and the PS3 had been moved to the sides (double shelved television stand, the 50″ plasma hadn’t been touched, nor had the Xbox 360 or the speaker that was on the shelf with them, just the bottom shelf had been messed with) The police were able to lift prints off the Wii – I just hope they belong to someone other than Josh!)
• Getting an alarm installed three days after our home was burglarized. At least I found out that I’ve got A1 credit, roffles. (Since my FICO score when we bought the Highlander last year was 783, I’m assuming this means that it’s over 800 now. Sweet – I can’t buy anything because we’re perpetually broke, but damned if I don’t have great credit?)
• Smaller things, like Josh’s mom. For example, she called yesterday and immediately asked to speak to Brian. Spent fifteen minutes on the phone with him and then hung up. No asking me how we’re doing, no asking about Liam, nothing. I guess Liam doesn’t exist. Josh asked her about it later last night, and she made excuses about how she was short on time and Brian didn’t hand me the phone after they were done, and she had only been on the phone with him a minute, etc. /facepalm
• I guess I can also mention the fact that we most likely can’t afford an IUD right now (the doctor said the bill a standard $200 insertion fee and $800 for the device, who knows what our negotiated rate is, so I never made the appointment) and I still haven’t started my period (eleven weeks postpartum now!), so I’m sure that’s contributing to the hormonal imbalance.

I feel like we’re bleeding out our behinds, and there’s so much more that I’d love to do. My glasses are almost four years old at this point, so aside from needing to get my prescription checked (and we’re not mentioning the fact that I just had a baby, which messes with your vision anyways) the photo-grey lenses are breaking down – I look like I’ve got reverse raccoon eyes. My teeth are a never ending money pit, I’m just insanely lucky that none of them have abscessed yet/lately. Bras? LOL. My boobs, which didn’t really change shape with Brian, are now a full cup size larger than they were. Where is the only place that you can buy fat people clothes, and big boobed fat people bras? Oh yeah, that’s right – Lane Bryant. I think if they grow any more, I’m going to have to order bras off their website anyways – they only go up to a DDD cup in store! Family portraits? I’ve only been intending to get those done for two or three years now. It’s even more important now, you know, now that I feel like I do have a nice meshed happy little family. Clothes? I’ve only got one pair of pants that fit well enough to wear without falling down, since I weigh so much less than I did before I got pregnant, but ignoring the fact that we have no money, I’m afraid to buy anything because I’m afraid I’ll just eat myself back fatter again.

I totally feel like this post is one huge bitchfest, by the way.

House. I’d lovelovelove a new house. You know, front door broken into, insane electric bills, jihadist neighbors, one and a half bedrooms/one bath for four people, wood floor bowing up due to broken foundation leaks.. that’s another never-ending description. Once we get all the medical bills paid off, all the credit card debt paid off/down, we can start re-saving for a house. (Note to self: This is why you don’t need to fuck up and end up pregnant. Seriously.) Josh needs to go to a dermatologist, the doctor’s going to have a field day with all his moles, etc.

I could totally keep going.

So, yeah. Money pit. Bleeding out our behind, might as well be the national debt balance. Yeah, that. Our totals for that four days in the hospital, covering everything for myself and Liam?

Total amount billed: $35235.51
Total amount applied to deductable: $11345.89
Patient (our) responsibility: $1519.44

Anyone wondering yet why our health care system is a mess?

Liam’s found his hands. He squirmed out of his swaddle last night and got a hand out the top. Woke me up sucking on his entire hand – which is adorable. He’s wanting the pacifier less and less, which sucks, but if he’s going to replace it with his hand.. at least he’s self soothing, which is more than Brian ever did. He’s getting amazingly good at head controlling, we bought him a Bumbo the other night and he loves it. It lets him sit up and watch, and his head just barely bobs. Of course, he’d rather sit up on his own than he would roll over – who can blame him? He can’t see anything laying down!

His eczema sucks, by the way. Half of his fussiness (and he’s honestly not a fussy baby) is because he’s itching to death and I won’t let him scratch himself raw. I’m doing my best with lotion and aquaphor to keep it (the skin eruptions) calmed down, but I can’t figure out what’s causing it (if anything, at least environmental). Who knows. For all I know, it just could be randomly sensitive skin and he’s screwed.

I remember feeling like this with Brian, too. I remember going through days eating malt balls (hey, body, remember those thirty pounds you gained back? Sure tasted good…) and robot functioning. The loneliness, the being alone with a tiny squalling baby, the worrying about Kevin, the fuckedupness of our relationship… I made it through it, some how. To be honest, the more I look back and think, the more I wonder if I didn’t really pop out of it until Kevin and I had basically ended our relationship, fourteen months after Brian was born. Makes sense, in retrospect.

I don’t know. I know that some days are good, and more days haven’t been good. Some have been completely horrible – I can’t tell you how many days I’ve wanted to either eat myself into Violet Beauregarde or starve myself into Gandhi (at least I’ve only gained back five pounds, so far – I started at 241, got up to 260, delivered the rat, got down to 219, and I’m at about 224 now), how many times I’ve screamed at the kids, how many times I’ve overreacted over something, horribly. How Josh can say something and it’s a complete mental shift, that fast. He can see it on my face, I know he can. It sucks that I didn’t/do/more so didn’t couldn’t do anything about it. I think it’s been better in the last week or so, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we sat down one night and I started talking. He’d been saying for a while that my head was screwed up, but my head wasn’t listening to him.

At least it is now. (I’d call that improvement.)

Who knows how much of one, I don’t get a lot of time to sit and do.  Go figure. 

Kid was born December 16th.  First case of mastitis December 31st.  Second was January 16th.   Third was February 8th.  I quit pumping with the last one (so Liam got six exclusive weeks of breastmilk and two supplemented).   Two or three visits to a surgeon, my six week OB checkup visit, two breast ultrasounds for me.  Brian’s been to the doctor where he got an inhaler and antibiotics.   Josh got sick, got a z-pack.  Liam got sick, confirmed RSV.  Liam and I still cough, Brian and Josh seem/sound better.  I didn’t bother going to the doctor – we knew what it was, and it’s viral.
The front door was kicked in February 19th.   Had the front door replaced the next day (Saturday), had an alarm installed that Monday.  Sigh.

Liam started smiling between weeks six and seven.