Day From Hell Pt. 2

Oh my goodness (not my first word of choice, but I would like to keep this relatively "clean"), I am out of milk, bread and, most importanly, baby wipes. I have my own three children plus the baby that I take care of during the week. What is a girl to do? I am going to brave a trip to Wal-Mart. I don't want to. I could go without the bread and milk until after the baby goes home, but I cannot go that long with out the wipes. Bring it!!

All four kids are packed and strapped in the truck. Everyone is in there proper seat and whining is at a minimum. Hmm, just how long will this last? Not long, I'm sure.

We arrive and so far so good. There are two decent spots available. One near to the door, but one next to a cart return. I take the latter so that the kids can go in a cart right away. The baby seat locks onto the seat part of the cart (is there a technical term for the seat part?) and the two little girls go into the basket. I look down at my oldest, "Ok, put one hand on the cart while we're in the parking lot and let's go" Now the great debate begins.

"I don't want to walk. My legs are tired"

"You're legs aren't tired, you haven't been walking"

"I don't walk. I want to get in the cart, too."

"You can't. There is no room."

"I don't want to walk. Why can't I ride?"

Now I try to appeal to the male ego.

"You get to walk because I can trust you to be a good listener. You're a big kid, not a baby."

"I don't want to be a big kid."

"Too bad. Put your hand on the cart and let's go."

I can tell from the sullen slap of his hand hitting metal that this is not going to be a good trip.

I won't bore you with all of the details. For anyone with an iota of imagination, you should be able to visualize it. For anyone with children, I can see you all nodding your heads and saying been there, done that.

Here we go:

I have lost count of how many times I have yelled at the oldest one to stay by the cart, do not walk away from me, and quit touching stuff! It does not belong to you!

I have yelled at the oldest little girl to quit messing with her sister, it's not nice and do not touch things that do not belong to you!

The middle little gir has gotten yelled at and her hand smacked for messing with the baby's sun shade on her seat.

The baby is being pleaded with. Please don't cry. There is nothing wrong with you. You were fed and changed just before we left the house. Please don't cry!

At this point I remember something my dad told me once. He said that when he was really mad at us kids he would bite the insides of his cheeks to keep from hurting us. Sometimes he bit his cheeks so hard that they bled, but the trick worked. I can't bite my cheeks. I've chewed on them so much that the scar tissue keeps me from feeling to much. Instead I bite my tounge or my lip. I tell you what, it works.

Exclamation/Explenation

Due to a recent comment, I've realized that I need to explain the purpose of this blog.

This blog is not to make me look like a sad sack. This is not my pity party. Yeah, the first few posts have been kind of downers, but that's because these last few days have kinda sucked.

The point of this blog is to be honest. I am tired of going to spouses meetings and get togethers where everything that is broadcast is so sugar coated it make my teeth hurt. I am tired of the unofficial military policy of telling spouses to "grin and bear it" to never let it show (especially to your active duty spouses) just how down you are because that will bring them down.

It is ridiculous to expect spouses to always have a happy face on. Always having a happy face on is what put me and my husband on the brink of divorce.

I am exclaiming, LOUD AND PROUD, that I am a military spouse and while I love my family and I love my husband and I love the life that I choose to live sometimes it's wonderfully awesome and sometime it just sucks.

That Perfect Moment

Once in a blue moon a moment comes along that completly quantifies your very existance. It is a moment that just defines who you are and what your purpose it. It is a moment that you will remember for the rest of your life. It is a moment that your children will remember for the rest of their lives. The other day I was lucky enough to have such a moment.

I am getting ready for the day and decide that today I want to feel pretty. I want to like a women and were "real" clothes. Not my grungy everyday clothes. I put on my khaki jeans with a touch of spandex for the slimming effect and pair it with a "slenderizing" white tank top undeneath of my new pink silk sleeveless shirt. To complete the outfit I slid my feet into my pink platform Steve Madden flip flops (found at Goodwill, can't resist a bargain) I am not only feeling pretty and womanly I am feeling downright sexy.

The day is going well. It is the middle of the afternoon and there have been no major occurances. I am sitting at the computer and when I look into the living room to check on the kids when I notice that the back of the baby's pants have the tell tale sign of diaper leakage. Ok, not a big deal. I take five minutes to finish up what I am woking on and in that time the baby runs over to me and raises her arms to be hugged. What the heck! I can pick her up and hold her. I just hold her rear end away from me so that I don't get dirty. I pick her up, swing her butt away from me and got to give her a zerbert on her back. Never realizing that the diaper leakage had creeped up without my noticing. All I can say is that I am thankfull my mouth was still closed when it connected.

I quickly carried her down the hall to the bathroom, set her down and then looked at the mirror to survey the damage. There is poop on my upper lip and the tip of my nose. I wash my face and get the baby cleaned up. I look down and notice that I have a small smear of poop on the front of my shirt. I take it off and call my mother to ask how you wash poop out of silk.

I am so proud of myself. Not once did I make a face. Not once did I say "eww" either outload or to myself. I just accept that poop is a fact of life when you have children.

That is my moment. That is who I am. I am a mother.

(and I did get the stain out)

Who Needs Sleep

Deployents have there ups and downs. A big down for me is that I can't sleep. Every small noise wakes me up. I can't sleep in the bedroom because that just makes the insomnia worse. I have been sleeping on the sofa for a month now. I average about 5 hours of sleep a night. Do you know what getting only 5 hours of sleep does to a person when they have 4 small children to take care of during the day? It means that by lunch time I am exhausted and by mid-afternoon I can't help but take a nap. Most times it is just a small powernap. Just enought to recharge my batteries but not a deep enough sleep that the going ons of the house don't wake me up. Remember, though, I have stealthy children. And they wait for any opportunity to make the most amount of mischief. Sometimes a power nap just doesn't happen and that deep sleep creeps upon me before I can stop it and that is just the moment that the kids wait for.

One of the deep sleep naps caught me over the weekend. For once the older kids were pretty well behaved. The were watching cartoons when I layed down on the sofa and still watching cartoons when I woke up. It was my little one that was practicing her deviousness.

The baby is fasinated with boxes. She likes to eat them, tear them open and strew the contents every which way. During my nap, the fasinating box of the day was a brand new box of tampons. I woke up and found tampons all over the house. She wasn't content to just take them out of the box. She also had to unwrap each individual one and take the tampons out of the plastic applicators. Remeber the story of Hansel and Gretel? I knew every place the baby had gone during my nap by following the trail of tampons. The really big pain of it all is that every time I think that I have picked them all up, I find another one. Ah, the joys of motherhood.

Phone Calls

Today my husband called me...three times. I feel kinda bad because the first two time that he called, I just didn't feel like talking to him so I didn't answer the phone. By the third time that he called I felt bad enough and picked up the phone. That and I didn't know just how many times the USO was going to let him try and call home in one day. Most of the time the conversation just flows when he calls. We only have 15 minutes to talk, those are the rules. He gets 1, and sometimes 2 if he's lucky, 15 minute phone call home. A lot of the when we talk those 15 minutes just fly by, we say I love you, and talk to you soon and hang up the phone. But every now and then, like today, the conversation has to be prodded. There's not a whole lot to say. I just sent him a long e-mail so there's really nothing new for me to share from my end and since he can't tell me what he is up to (security reasons) what all is there for us to talk about? Then there are the really bad phone calls. Where I don't want to talk to him at all and after several days of him trying to get through I finally pick up the phone. A prodded conversation would be a god-send then. This convesation needs a swift kick in the rear just to be forced. Those are the longest 15 minutes my life. Hopefull call like that are in the past for us.

On a happier note...are there happier notes when hubby is deployed? Oh yeah! I get to clean out the house with out someone telling me "No, don't touch that. I'll go through that later. No, you don't need to do anything with that. Put it with my other stuff that I need to go through." It's been so nice throwing away crap that hasn't seen the light of day for at least three years. The guidelines for what stays and what goes are pretty easy. If it hasn't been used or thought about in more than a year it goes. If I find something that I don't even remember that I had it definately goes. The nice thing is that I have amassing a nice stack of things to sell at the thrift store.

Control

It's a power struggle. Who has the most control. Who controls the important things. Who controls the most things. The scales will never be in balance. I like to be in control. I may not be able to control the things that go on around me, but in my little world I like to be in charge, The Big Cheese, The Head Honcho, The Big Dog. When hubby is home, 9 times out of 10 he is pefectly content to let me handle the daily grind. I take care of the kids and choose their schools. I coordinate the family activities. Most importantly, I am the keeper of the checkbook. Granted, we do make our purchase descions together, but the typical conversation goes like this.

Hubby: "Hey Wifey, I want to go to the store and get such and such. How much money do we have?"

Wifey: "I don't know; how much do you need."

Hubby: "Maybe $20 or so"

Wifey: "Let me check the checkbook."

I then get on the computer and check our online balance versus our checkbook ledger and make sure everything balances. Hubby hovers behind me.

Wifey: (muttering under breath) "You know I really hate it when you do that." (normal tone of voice now) "Yeah, we're good. Just don't spend more than X-amount of dollars."

Probably not the most fair way to do things, but it works for us.

So why is it that when Hubby is home he is so laid back about letting me handle the finances but when he is in the desert he almost obsessively checks our bank account and grills me on every little thing that is in it. Get a clue honey! You don't control the finances when you are home, what makes you think that you can control it when you are 7500 miles away!!! I say this full of love, of course.

Day From Hell, Pt. 1

It is days like today that make me want to sell my children, burn down my house, set the dog "free", and shoot my husband. It is days like today that make me wish that I could just walk away from life with no ramifications. It is days like today that I find myself sitting on my sofa imagining that some annonomous benefacor, in my fantasies it is always a benefactor since practical peeople like myself don't gamble with the lottery, has heard of my plight and is going to finance all of my dreams so that I can walk away.

Today. What is there that I can say about today without getting angry all over again. Not much. I'll just have to work through it. I got up this morning at what I thought was pretty early. Yeah, not so much. All three of my children were up before me. Most kids would make enough noise to wake up their parents before they could really get into too much trouble. Not mine. Mine are stealthy. My 20 month old is in a monkey see monkey do stage of life so imitating her siblings prowess has become second nature. My three year old takes her cues from big brother. The 5 year old, the big brother ring leader, is ready to challenge the navy seals in moving about a house undetected.

So I get up thinking the kids are still in bed so I figure it would be nice treat to make a pancakes for breakfast as opposed to the usual frozen toaster waffels. (I buy in bulk at the commissary. 77 cents for a box of ten. Mama knows a good deal when she sees one) I go into the living room to turn the tv on when there they are lined up on the sofa. So far not alarmed, until I step onto the black carpet. Normally not what I would buy but I needed something to cover the floor as it was being re-done and it was 1/2 off. What can I say, I'm cheap. But I digress. So I step onto the carpet and feel a lot of small crunchy things under my bare feet. They had opened a brand new box of Chocolate Lucky charms cereal, eaten the marshmallows and dumped the chocolate cereal pieces on the floor and then ground them up. From the toys that were scattered about I imaganine that their cereal crunching tools of choice were either the matchbox cars, the building blocks, or a combonation of the two. At least I was able to get the majority of the mess cleaned up before my babysitting charge arrived.

Most people would be yelling at their husbands at this point to help them clean up the mess. No, wait. That's wrong. Most people would be yelling at their husbands to "come down here and see what your children are doing!!" Me, I look at the clock and if the time difference isn't too than I call my mother and whine to her. If I can't call her (she's three hours off from me) than I call my sister (she's only one hour difference). That is the normal in my life because I can't call my husband. My husband is currently on his 8th tour of duty in a war zone.