Month: July 2013

My No Good, Very Bad Day

It’s no secret that we are having just about the worst summer ever around here. Between my husband being gone for a month, the car accident, sick kids, broken air conditioners, and one financial calamity after another, I’ve had just about enough. I’ve also been trying to regulate my work from home schedule a bit more, because in my frantic quest to scrape up enough money for the Heathens’ tuition, I’ve pretty much driven myself to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

So this week, I was determined to provide my kids with some kind of fun. They deserve it. I planned to take them and a couple of their friends to the public pool for some much-needed exercise, then back here for boy-video-game-time. Great plan, right?

Ha…ha…mwhahahahah!

Apparently all five drops of rain we got this morning (the first in three weeks, by the way) warranted closing the pool for the entire day, which we didn’t find out until we were all sunscreened up and at the gate. I dragged five disappointed kids back to my house to play their less-than-eight-months-old Wii U, and what do you know? The Wii U locked up on the start-up, and was DOA. After thirty glorious minutes on the phone with Nintendo technical support, I was informed that the Wii U is, in fact, toast, and I need to send it in for repair. Thank the powers that be that it is still under warranty; otherwise, you would find me in the loony bin at this point. Subsequently, I had five REALLY disappointed kids, and I was out of ideas. We had to scrap the whole day, and I yet again get to be the meanest mom ever. To add insult to injury, Bean’s bizarre separation anxiety has reared its ugly head, and she freaks out if I make any sudden movements or act like I am going to leave the room. That is, until my husband gets home. Then she just screams in my face if he is not being her personal entertainment committee.

School starts in less than a month, and I feel like this summer has been an epic failure. We’ve had no real fun, our garden was pathetic, and instead of relaxing, we’ve just gone from one crisis to the next. I KNOW I need to be grateful and count my blessings, I really do. In the big scheme of life, we are blessed beyond measure. I’ll remember that tomorrow. Tonight, I’m going to make a cocktail, put my feet up and sulk over my no good, very bad day.

Fourth of July Week: Fun, Food and Biblical Plagues

We had a fabulous holiday weekend, full of food, fun and of course, sick Heathens. There is only a little sarcasm in that statement, I swear.

We started the week by buying a new minivan to replace the wrecked van (I won’t bore you with that tale of woe), and I swear that buying a car is medieval torture. See those smiles? We were just happy that the 7-hour car shopping/purchasing odyssey was over and we could go home and pass out from mental exhaustion. Car purchasing just ratcheted up on my list of “things I absolutely hate,” and it’s sitting somewhere in between going to the DMV and a trip to the lady doctor. However, the new minivan is nice, and we no longer have to cram our family of five into my tiny Sentra.

After the happy, happy car shopping, we tried to make the best of the holiday week, even though the kids fell one by one to the plague that infiltrated our house.

Two trips to the doctor later, I finally threw my hands up when G-Man also got sick and declared that we need a physical and spiritual cleansing in our house, lest this truly go down as the worst summer ever. Despite the black death of fever, rashes and other unsavory ailments, I still got to hang out with the extended family and Best Friend M, which salvaged what little holiday we could muster around here. I did manage to smoke some ribs just for fun, and paired it with a smoked Gouda pasta salad and grilled corn. My husband also made his homemade lasagna with garlic-parmesan breadsticks, so I will be dieting for the rest of my life now.

Now, however, my house looks like a tornado ripped through it, and I’m pretty sure Bean would stick to the kitchen floor if she tried to crawl on it. I better get to cleaning, so we can start this week off right.

 

The Few Tomatoes We Got…

Before our miserable garden died a slow, agonizing death. I wish I knew what happened this year, but from the second we transplanted everything into the raised beds, it all went downhill. No squash, no peppers, no cucumbers…nothing. We are traumatized, and my husband is even talking about ripping apart the raised beds and abandoning gardening forever. My green thumb of death has struck again…and after two weeks of no rain, it’s looking like another craptastic summer around here for our landscaping as well.

*sigh*

It’s margarita time, I guess.

Working My Way Back

It’s been a long couple of months around here, and in between calamities (and just wait till you hear about those) and trying to sock away enough cash for the Heathens’ fancy education, my poor blog is a neglected wasteland. However, after meltdown #978, and both my husband and my friend J having to peel me off the ceiling from stress, I finally clued in to the fact that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to take the wheel in life. We’ve been in survival mode for far too long around here, and it’s time for that to end. Sure, I may be able to earn enough dough for that school tuition with all of my freelance work (assuming I work myself to death), but for what? A family that has followed my neuroses into madness?

Nope. Not here. I’ve been juggling too much, and something is about to drop. Over the coming days, I hope to breathe life back into my poor, wreck of a household, find some modicum of reasonable balance between my real life and my work-at-home efforts, and figure out how to find some joy in the everyday.

So, stay tuned for the tales of the worst summer ever, the best brussel sprouts ever, and everything in between.