They're Coming to Take Me Away (UPDATED)

I know I have been a little...anxious these days, but it turns out that The Internets are out to get me. First, I get an e-mail/chain letter telling me that I need to go to msn whitepages and make sure that strangers can't just look me up and find out all about me.



Then, I actually GO THERE, thinking I will find nothing and prove that it is all a big conspiracy theory - and it turns out that you CAN just put in my name and find all sorts of information about me.



THEN!!!! I go to request to have my name removed and this is what I get (note the word verification):

And as if that wasn't bad enough, when I did the form, it kept insisting that my code word was wrong.

Why me, Internets?

I know there is a LOLcat out there that is perfect for this post, but I am a little afraid to leave the safety of my blogger dashboard right now.

UPDATED: Now they are just laughing at me

A Year in Review

I’ve read that there is this blogging tradition of going back over your year at New Years’ time and linking to all the big stories of the year. Since I didn’t blog most of this year, I guess you will be saved a bunch of links to stories you probably skimmed the first time while I catch up on my need to share life.

So here it is: Mama’s 2008

January: Mama adjusted to life with a new baby and toddler. Breastfeeding did not go as well this time around and Mama turned into a one-woman dairy farm, and my firstborn got glasses.

Mama reluctantly decided in favor of an IUD. Let me just say this: If taking The Pill makes you an insane, raging lunatic to the point that your husband would rather face the prospect of never having sex again than share the unstable air that surrounds your hormone-ravaged self, ignore your doctor when he tells you that the level of hormones in an IUD is so much lower that “You’ll be fine.” You won’t be fine. You will find yourself locked in your bathroom to avoid screaming at your already terrified children while you beg the nurse on the phone to GET THIS THING OUT OF MY BODY. NOW. I can has Prozac?

February: After removal of the Foreign Offender, and some chemical assistance from a very remorseful obstetrician, the clouds began to part and I finally began the process of bonding with my precious baby. I can has The Love!

March: Mama went back to work. Mama also grew giant asparagus. I can has giant bowl of hollandaise?

April: Mama began a long, slow march back into the depths of depression. I still don’t know if this is about hormones, loss, or something else, but yeah, I’m going to go ahead and use the D word. I can has no jokes about this one, people.

May: Mama started a new blog, but it turns out that I wasn’t any more consistent over there than I am here.

June-July-August: We learned that Isaac had had what the doctor later called a “neurological reaction” to the DtAP vaccine, or at least to the “P” part. Mama and family made the tough decision to discontinue the Pertussis series, and we continue to learn what that means for us and for him. Hubby had a birthday, which will be recorded in history as The Birthday in Which the Wii Changed Our Lives. Mostly, we enjoyed the Galveston beaches and the summer.

September: Hurricane Ike left both our home and my parents cabin on the beach (The West End, for locals and compulsive news-watchers) miraculously untouched. We even had our power back on in a matter of hours, most likely because we live on the same grid as a major hospital. Unfortunately, the cold front that blew in the next night proved to be the straw that broke our municipal sewer system's back, and we woke up to several inches of water in our house. I can has a new wet-vac?

October: God is just good, people. Despite having 18” of drywall cut from the bottom of every wall in our house and losing all our downstairs flooring, the whole flood thing really brought mostly blessings into our home. We got a new front door out of deal, and we realized that we can count on our friends and family more that we could have imagined.

November: Did I leave out the part where Isaac stopped sleeping at night and stopped gaining weight around six months ago? As it turns out, my 75th Percentile Preemie hit twenty pounds at six months old and didn’t gain more than a couple of ounces by his first birthday. Between not wanting to eat anything that wasn’t served a-la-boob and raging ear infections that kept him on diarrhea-inducing antibiotics for most of the second half of his life thus far, no one was totally shocked. But we were concerned all the same. We decided to get tubes put in his ears, but the we missed the first scheduled surgery because he had The Croup. I can has Amoxicillin?

December: Isaac got the tubes in. The doctor told us he was in the Top Ten of all the babies he’s ever “tubed,” meaning there was more gunk in there than anyone had realized…and within 2 weeks he has another ear infection and has actually started sleeping less. So we’ve come full-circle and here I am back at the blog. I can has naptime? PLEEEZ?

New Year’s Resolution: Sleep more, feel better, enjoy my kids – I think it has to be in that order, but I’ll take it how I can get it.

I'm a b@#$%, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother

And I’m fond of using song lyrics for my post titles.

Last week I wrote a post complaining about going back to work. About an hour after I wrote it, I began feeling guilty. How can I complain about having a job that pays me well for my skills and is even flexible enough to accommodate part-time work? How much of a spoiled little brat am I that I can bitch and moan about 2 days a week in an air conditioned office where people respect me and my work? There are millions of single moms out there working 2 or more dead-end, minimum wage jobs just to put food on the table, and even more who would give their right eye for even one minimum wage job – not to mention the dual-parent families struggling to make ends meet. I have what they are all dreaming about, and here I am complaining.

Now, having said that, and meaning it 100%, let me say it one more time with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek.

I am a spoiled little brat for complaining about having a really great job.

It’s hypocrisy to pretend that I am so empathetic that I can die to my own self-pity just because I know in my head that I’m not that bad off. I wish that I was able to do that, but I’m not. Instead I’m here in the duality of being honest about how I feel without giving myself license to wallow in it.

There is always someone worse off. I recognize that what I am going through is not suffering. It’s really not anything like suffering. It’s unhappiness, and it’s a valid emotion. I don’t need to feel bad for feeling bad when others are feeling worse, but I do need to keep my own situation in perspective and use that to pull myself up and keep going. I do need to appreciate the good in what I have, even when I don’t feel good about it.

I have something in common with those single moms, too. We are all feeling the same pull to be more – more of a provider, more of a lover, more of a playmate, more of a teacher, more of soft spot for our kids in a hard world – all at one time. We tell ourselves that we can choose, and we call it “prioritizing,” but so often the choices feel like they are being made for us. We have words thrown at us like “working mom” and “full-time mom,” as if there is some kind of part time mom or not working mom. Then we beat ourselves up for being in one category or another when we really want to be everything at once.

In this, none of us is alone. It drags us down and it pulls us back up onto our feet.

And if it wasn’t there, the word “mother” wouldn’t mean as much as it does, so I guess I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I need a nap

Based on the theme of this blog, you might be temtped to believe that I sleep all the time, or that I am chronically sleep-deprived. I am not. It's just that I think about sleep all the time. If anyone asked me what I want at any given time, there is probably a 60% chance that I would say a nap. It doesn't matter how much or how little I sleep - I always want to sleep more.

For now, I have an excuse. I have a 2-year old daughter who is potty training (not that well), a full time job where I work with crazy people masquerading as normal business-folk, and a baby on the way. Sleep is precious and rare, and even when I am in bed with all the stars properly aligned, it just doesn't always come. Did I mention that I have a husband? I do, but since pre-season NFL means that there is football on every single day, and Ti-Vo means that we "don't have to miss a single minute," I might as well have an extra venus fly trap.

So, I wrote some nice posts about a 4 months ago when I set out to start this blog, but I never got around to actually starting it and posting them. I'll put the better ones up as I go along.