I’m On An Adjusted Sleep Schedule!
That title is from New Girl, the TV show. I won’t go into why that’s funny because, 1. I AM on an adjusted sleep schedule!; 2. It’s late, and I’m trying to hurry and type fast; 3. I am lazy and don’t want to; 4. If you don’t watch the show you won’t think it’s funny anyway; and 5. Watch the show!; but 6. It’s probably too late, because the end of the world is fast approaching and the show airs on Monday, and this is Thursday, and I think you missed your last chance earlier in the week; and 7. Major sad face all around 😦 Emoticon. Finite. The End.
That’s our chalk family portrait done by my daughter over the summer in the driveway. I was trying to find just-the-right-picture for this close-to-the-end post and as I was browsing through my many, many, many bird pics, I saw this one, and bonus(!), it looks like we are all waving. Waving goodbye! It’s perfect!
So I don’t really think that the world is going to end in 24 hours or so, but, if it does, I will tell you this: One, I am avoiding Facebook like the plague. I can’t even imagine what people are posting about it. I mean the whole 12/12/12 thing was bad enough. I hope it’s mostly jokes. But I will never know. Two, I have the day off. Thursday. So technically I get to spend the entire last day on Earth (provided the world is ending at midnight going into the 21st) with my family! We will all die in our sleep I guess, in the house, or something…I’m not sure how it will end. Quickly I hope. I don’t want to live in a zombie world. Too old. Too tired. Isn’t the whole zombie thing played out? Like vampires? Three, If the world keeps spinning and spills into Friday, I’m good until, like, 1:30 at least on the 21st. Then I have to go to work. My kids will be at school. The BF will be at work. All of us scattered around Illinois. That would be sad. But, Four, Even sadder would be if the world crawls its sick self all the way until midnight on Friday. The kids and BF will be snug in their beds and I’ll be driving on the expressway. Blah humbug.
At any rate, this is something I wanted to sneak in, just in case. Thanks for reading. Thanks for checking every day, whoever you are, and keeping me active with approx 10-20 reader “hits”. Or the same reader over and over. Either way. Even if you were just randomly searching and came across the site and stopped for a minute just to scan the words and liked even one sentence, I thank you. Also: I love my kids. And the BF. My family. My friends. And that feeling of peace and comfort and total relaxation that I get at 8 am when I am laying in my bed, on my side, covered to the neck in a heavy, warm, down comforter, eyes closed, body loose, about to go back to sleep, after getting the kids up at 6ish to send them to school, and after going to bed around 2-ish (3-ish or even 4-ish, like tonight) because I stay up too late after work playing stupid app games on my phone and because I’m not tired. Whiny whiny whiner. That feeling right before falling totally asleep again is really the best feeling. Like, I could die on the spot and not care if that’s how it felt, kind of feeling. Deep sigh. Then shake it off, because yuck! Too much. Too ghastly for tonight. Wasn’t my intention to make this, possibly the last post, so long and wordy. I can’t even reign it in near the end. And I need to wrap this up seriously and get to bed already.
I actually have a plan for the day and it involves doing, and completing, every single Christmas thing I need to have done before the big day, especially since I have to work right up until we do our family Christmas. That would be Sunday. I am off Monday, Christmas Eve, and that’s when I wanted to do my personal family x-mas. Just me and the BF and the kids. And the Sears repair man. Oh yeah. Did I mention that my clothes dryer took a big crap a few days ago and that I also have to go do laundry tomorrow, at an outside facility (outside the house, not actually outside outside)? No? Well it did. And I do. And the repair guy is coming on Christmas Eve morning to fix it (I hope). Sucks for him because he has to work. I am only off on Monday because it’s my regular day off, otherwise I would be working too. That would have been a fun family x-mas to remember. The kids are going with their dad, later in the Christmas Eve afternoon, the way they always do, and since I have to work on Christmas anyway (First time. EVER. In my whole life. I was soooo spoiled with that office job) I won’t see them again until I get home on x-mas or the next morning. On Wednesday. Just another day. Also a day that I have to work. No more winter breaks or office shut downs for me. Oh well. That’s why everything has to be done tomorrow.
But don’t get the wrong idea, I am not complaining. Big whip, a broken dryer and no time to buy a present? Boo hoo, cry me a river. I know that I already have what is most important in my life right now and I won’t waste any time fretting over something like wet clothes and a botched up day. My kids are with me. I have a fab BF. And a rockin’ set of family and friends. I have a pretty decent job, some money to spend, and a house to live in. It’s good enough. I think I already said that earlier in this Armageddon novel, but it bears repeating all the same.
I also have a list and a plan and a general direction of which stores and in what order and what needs to be done in my house. Like, all of it. I dragged all the decorations out into the living room, 3 big boxes worth, and put out about 4 of them. 4 single decorations. 5 if you count the tree. It has lights and a star. And one decoration. It’s a green glitter glass ball ornament that my daughter got from school. I thought, at first, it would be the starting point. Then I thought, well, we can just have the one ornament, like it’s a “thing”, and move it around every day. Then I had another thought: We can just have one ornament. And it can just stay where it’s at. Bottom left when you look at the tree, hanging off the lowest fake branch. Picture proof coming right up.
Anyway I really do have to end this. It’s almost 4 am Chicago time. No, now it is 4 am. Almost 4:30. Tick tock. The weather is supposed to take a big fat ugly turn in a few hours and dump our first sticky snowfall on us here. But right now it is pouring rain. Pouring. Like non-stop. And it has been since I left work at 11. That is 5 hours of fun rainfall just soaking in and pooling up all over the cold-ass ground. They say the temps are going to drop, and the rain will turn to snow. That’s good right? Snow covered ice slicks all over everywhere. Damn Midwest. The BF has work. The kids have school. My son is sick and has had a 102 degree temp for 2 nights in a row now. He hasn’t had a fever in years and years. But he went to school with that temp down to a cool 101 on Wednesday for finals and he has to go again today for more finals. He’s tough. Both my kids are tough. But I still wake them up every day for school because I can.
Here’s to all the hard working, staying up late, getting it done people I write all this crap for. Have a very merry Pre-Christmas and Weekend-Before the holiday. I will try and write more words in the next few hours and days to come if time and the universe allow. I apologize for all the “likes” used in conversational phrasing and the numbering thing/gimmick. I also used way too many commas, parentheses, and italics. I just can’t help myself sometimes. I love love love English and punctuation! What a nerd! Thanks for hanging out with me anyway. Peace, and that picture as promised. Later.
Your Boogers Are In The Chicken
This is the kind of thing I say on a regular basis in my house. We stay up way too late. When we stay up way too late, we get silly. When we get silly, we laugh and make jokes. When we laugh and make jokes, we sometimes say hurtful things to each other. When we say hurtful things to each other, one of us storms out of the room like a little bitch. When one of us storms out of the room like a little bitch, the rest of us just laugh harder. Don’t make the rest of us laugh harder. Stop being a cry baby. Put in a tampon and get back in the game. Wait. No. I think I might be mixing up my metaphors with commercials and football pep talking. At any rate, this whole scenario just played out in the living room about 10 minutes ago. Well, not that scenario. That scenario was based on the above chicken and my sister’s birthday present to my son. Cash and a box of Boogers. Leave it to my sister Noelle to find something gross and hilarious. And we keep all our “back-up” candy in the chicken. (That’s the candy that won’t get eaten right away, but we don’t throw out because you never know when you might need some sugar in any form available. You know, stuff like DumDum’s, Smarties, LifeSavers, Cheap Chocolate Coins, etc.) Like my cousin Linda just said to my daughter today, “We are silly people. It’s in our blood.” Yes. Yes we are. But sometimes it can be a curse. Deep sigh. Insert picture of “Boogers” here:
See? It’s my own fault. I am not a strict mom. I make too many jokes and am never serious enough. My kids like to run off the rails with their witty humor and fast comebacks. Because I let them. And they can. They have the good sense of humor that will be a bonus when they are older but can get them in serious trouble right now. And they like to use my own words against me. Usually I can get everybody back on track without a lot of effort. But this time there were too many wheels in the gravel and the cars were piling up behind the engine. Nobody was listening to the engineer. Me. And the only way to get the control back is to pretty much do a “Hancock” and stop that train dead in its tracks. What this means though, is that I have to get angry and abruptly end any kind of night we are having to get my point across and then send everybody off to bed. Unfortunately, just like in the movie it causes a lot of extra damage. Actually now that I’m thinking about it, it is exactly like that. Everybody starts complaining about the way the train was stopped and its like the train is still moving but now its slowly sliding down the side of a cliff into a ravine with a rapid river at the bottom. (Say that five times fast) It’s no good. Then the train falls into the water and lays there, still complaining, filling up and sputtering for air instead of just getting up, saying it’s sorry and being glad we are all still alive. I might have mixed up my metaphors again, but you get the idea. Focus is obviously not my strong point, at least not here, or when I write stuff down. I have lots of thoughts and slow typing fingers. And I can really lose my own track when I get going so I am not surprised that my kids may act the same way on occasion. Especially when it’s late. And they are tired. My kids have these crazy, smart, dazzling personalities that I am so impressed and fascinated by. I want them to have the big life. But sometimes they have got to just stop when I say stop. And that’s where our weak spot is. We don’t have a good switching system in place. We need a better way to flip the switch and change the direction of the train before it crashes into the abyss. We are working on that. Everyone is still in bed and this night is most definitely over, but we are all thinking about it a little more. And since we never end the night on a bad note, because you just never really do know what might happen, here’s another picture of that Booger box:
Picked out especially for you! Maybe tomorrow I better just post a breast cancer thing. I have a store display, so unmagnificent, to put up here, that you will be sorry you wasted any of your valuable computer time clicking over to my site to even look at. But it’s like a train wreck. You have to look. The picture. Not the site. Well, maybe the site too. Come on! What else are you gonna do?? Click. Scan. Move on. Oh, hey, one last stopping-the-train thing. Spider Man 2 has an excellent train stopping scene in it. I was going to use that as my movie reference but it’s not really a “dead stop” and the people are all grateful in the end. Not applicable to my situation. Plus I don’t feel tired after. I am just glad it’s finally quiet. Anyway it’s a good part in the movie. And finally, here’s one more, completely random, and unrelated to any of the above 900 words, picture, of my children doing something together, and in sync (Comma alert! That last sentence may be a record holder for me. Count em’ and weep.) Here’s that pic:
It’s All About The Family
Even if I don’t do anything else today but this, I will consider it a superior day off. This is my cousin and her beautiful family. They have graciously allowed me to post their picture and talk about them today. That would be Linda to the left (she comments quite hilariously from time to time, as you may have read here if you follow along this little bloggy thing, and/or actually read the comments) and her hubby Chris to the right. The girl in front is their daughter Meranda and the boy in the back is their son Andrew. It’s not really fair to call them “girl” and “boy” anymore as they are now grown adults and living their own separate lives. The way you do when you have awesome parents to raise you and send you out into the world equipped with the knowledge and skills you are going to need to battle on through, and the security of knowing that no matter what happens in this life there are people around who will always have your back and guide you safely home if ever need may be. And that’s a good thing.
My family spent Saturday night hanging out with this family, and all my other family, to wish that man in the back a safe goodbye from our little corner of the world and into the wide open spaces of everywhere else. Andrew is leaving on a plane today and heading to Georgia, where he is going to become a soldier in an easy 15 week program we like to call job orientation. Yeah right. Look at that beautiful boy with that gorgeous curly hair. Tomorrow he will be bald and uniformed up, in the company of a hundred other beautiful sons, from all over America, running running running running until he’s too tired to even eat or sleep, and then running some more. The ultimate goal here is to jump jump jump jump. Andrew wants to fly. But not in the plane. He wants to soar into the sky as high as the machinery can take him and then leap out into the open blue and let the winds bring him safely back to earth. Airborne but rock steady. We raise these kids with our best ability to dream as big as they want, go forward as far as they can, and rise as high as their minds can ever imagine. But we usually like to keep them on the ground. Safe with us. Safe with family. Safe with friends. Just…safe. But when we do get that rare chance to see a sweet little boy turn into a strong young man, well, it’s really hard to try and hold them down. You just have to let them fly. And you have to trust that they will come back to you.
I feel so lucky to have been able to be there on Saturday to say goodbye. And to wish Andrew well on his journey into the clouds, and above and beyond, but still on the ground. (I hear there might be some sort of daily exercise routine that encompasses calisthenics and trail walking. Like a vacation spa! They even feed you for free!) Ha ha. I have to joke somewhere because sometime it’s necessary. And that’s who we are. Anyway, good luck and god speed, to someone who is already fit to live in this world quite successfully, but will return as the new and improved version of the extraordinary young man he already is. Take as much care as you can. Keep your feet clean and dry.
Love and more love to all.
Chris and Linda, you guys did really really good. Your kids are awesome. Period.
just shy of pretty 