Light Show , originally uploaded by dawnkrutt.

Last night's thunder storm. It was pretty impressive.

"I do?!"

"Yes. Maybe it's laying in the field."

Maybe.


And the Hannah Montana cake...
 

Had a dream I was at some kind of resort place and I was sweeping dirt off of the deck, except I couldn’t get anything finished because Alice Cooper kept trying to feel me up and kiss my neck. I was constantly fending him off. Alice Cooper. Really? Come on! I’m dreaming! I can dream about anything, anyone.

And I’m getting intimate with Alice Cooper.

Nick came home from school earlier this week and told me that his class was going to take real guns and shoot eggs. I told him that he must have misunderstood...I said that didn’t sound like something that his preschool would do.

"But mom!" he wailed. "Teacher said we were going on an Easter Egg Hunt!"

It’s been awhile…did you miss me? You know you did. You’ve been waiting, with baited breath, anxious for the next witty synopsis of my day to day affairs, yes? Yes. Well, I am back and I find myself wondering what exactly “baited breath” is supposed to mean. In fact, I have to look that up…ok, I’m back. It can be either “baited” or “bated” although “bated” makes more sense seeing how it is a shortened form of “abated”. Or, in other words “Breathing that is subdued because of some emotion or difficulty”. There. A little language lesson for you.

Now I’ve forgotten what I’ve come here to say. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Hmmm…

Nick is making play-doh monsters who keep attacking each other, Delaney is sleeping, as is Sam, who happens to be asleep in my arms and I just know that if I set him down he will wake. So, I type with one hand, while the left hand is slowly growing numb and tingly. And I really have to pee. But I will not risk waking the baby. Sam sleeping soundly is such an odd occurrence that I’m reluctant to tamper with it. He does not like to sleep. Ever. They say infants sleep about 16 hours a day. Where are these infants? And why have I never had one? I’m going to have to lie to my Pediatrician again when he asks how he sleeps. Great! Of course he’s in his crib! On his back! Rather than…he sleeps for about 20 minutes then wakes up screaming and I do all the suggested sleep techniques in the books until I‘m so tired that I can’t walk straight and then I just take him to bed with me… the last time I hinted at that I got a little lecture from him. I don’t know why it’s so hard to find a good doctor. I’ve gone through several trying to find one that I am happy with, but I can‘t seem to find a good one. Sigh. Sam doesn’t seem to care for solid foods either. For a while I was pretty sure he had been a dog in his last reincarnation; he licks the spoon, rather than opening his mouth to eat. It’s quite messy and time consuming. The I made a startling discovery! Turns out it’s just baby food he will not eat properly. Give him guacamole and refried beans and it’s a whole different story. The only other time I’ve seen him open his mouth that wide is when it’s emitting unholy screaming. So I think it’s time to break out the baby food grinder and just feed him whatever I make for dinner.

I have to register Nick for kindergarten in about 20 minutes. Kindergarten! That’s real school. He’s a real boy. And suddenly all his clothes are too short. I needed his birth certificate to register him and we keep it in our safe. Which wouldn’t open. We have the key and the combo and it gives the unlock symbol, it just wouldn’t open. So I call the company and she walks me through a few fixes, which didn’t fix anything. So she says I need to find something to hit it with. I laugh. No, really, she insists. Get a hammer and a phone book(so I won‘t dent the safe). So, I do what I’m told ( all the while, cynically arching my eyebrow) and she has me hit the thing a dozen times between the faceplate and the hinge. And it opens. Apparently, sometimes something gets jammed inside and it has to be vibrated loose. Of course.

Anyway, gotta wake up Delaney and off to school we go!

After spending a weekend with kids who had fevers and were coughing so hard they threw up, we spent Sunday in Urgent Care...wasn’t so worried about the older ones; they’ve had colds before and I figured it would pass, but Sam’s fever was really high, and he just would lay there and stare into space. He would hardly react when you’d pick him up. It scared me. A lot. So to the hospital we went...after chest x-rays and flu swabs and all kinds of fun indignities, Sam was diagnosed with Bronchitis and an ear infection. While we were there, I figured they may as well take a look at Nick. Who also has an ear infection. His very first one... Delaney is just plain old sick. But she’s worse today than she was, so I’m hoping another trip to the doctor isn’t in order.

This is when having three kids is really hard...I don’t have enough hands and I have to take turns comforting them, leaving the others to scream and cry. Fun. FUN, I tell ya. Fun.

If I had wanted to be a single parent, I’m sure I could have found someone to impregnate me and vanish. But, no, I had to get married for that to happen. Yes, I am feeling sorry for myself. I haven’t seen Darrin for more that 10 minutes at a time in several weeks. And when he is home and awake for any longer than that he really screws up our schedule and I find myself wishing he would just leave. Along with his work, there is some idiot kid setting fires to cars in town and Darrin has been involved in all aspects of catching him...bait car, fliers, working with the police... there’s a frickin’ meeting about it just about every day, in between the hours it takes to respond to the fire call, put it out, clean it up, file paperwork, report the arson and whatever else they do. I wouldn’t know. I don’t talk to my husband. I don’t see him enough.

I was just reading a story about a 5^th grader whom they believe committed suicide at school, by hanging himself in the bathroom. A 5^th grader! I can’t even imagine. It makes me want to go upstairs and hug Nick. He’s been a terror lately and I have a feeling that he may be picking up on the animosity I have towards Darrin right now. That, and it’s really hard to raise 3 kids completely by yourself. I am with them 24 hours a day. I go to bed and usually 2 of the 3 are in bed with me. There is not a 5 minute space of time that I am without them and I’ll admit I get a bit frustrated with them. I think I’m justified. I honestly don’t know how much longer it can go on like this. I don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect my husband to help raise our children. Or at least come home once or twice a week. But then I always think I should be thankful for what I have. It could always be worse. I have a good friend whose husband was laid off and she’s had to take an extra kid in 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to make some money. Her husband has a bit of a monogamy problem and has recently left town for three weeks for a temporary job in the mountains. So, where would I rather be? Here, in my life? Or there, in hers, taking care of someone else’s kid, plus my own, wondering if my husband is alone in his hotel room? Ahhh... I don’t know. Aren’t there men out there that come home at night and on the weekends, help with the kids and the house and don’t have affairs? Or am I being unrealistic?

Anyway...

I took Delaney to the dentist today to have two of her teeth fixed. They came in missing enamel in two small places and over the past year it has decayed so they wanted to drill and fill them. I was a nervous wreck and it didn’t help when I walk into the room and I’m asked to sign a waiver saying they can tie her down to the cutesy named "papoose board" if they need to. I told them that I was absolutely not comfortable with them using it and I held her hands during the procedure and she did amazing. She never flinched and it over in less than half an hour. The dentist said she’d never worked on a better two year old. Delaney’s mouth was numb for a bit and she kept asking me what was in it...

I’m having a friend over for lunch tomorrow and our kids can play. It will nice to have adult conversation for awhile. Even if all we talk about is our kids...It's funny. I'll never once mention how miserable I am.
 

Sam is sleeping and Nick and Delaney are playing contentedly in the basement. I should be working on my novel. But I’m not. It turns out the whole "page a day" thing was a bit ambitious for me. But I think I’ve maybe written about 3-4 pages this month, so all is not lost. My problem comes when I sit down to write...the chances are so few and far between that I spend a good part of my available time reading what I had written, trying to figure out where I left off. It takes me a bit to get back into character...then the kids are crying and starving and breaking things and I have to go. Sigh.

This morning I woke up to the sound of Charlie barking. From outside. Which would be ok if he hadn’t been inside when I went to bed. So, I get up and go into Nick and Delaney’s room. And neither of them are there. I go downstairs, where all the lights are on and the curtains are open. It also smells like waffles. And the dog is definitely out. But no kids. I go down into the basement/playroom and there they are, sitting on the sofa, eating their toasted waffles and drinking juice boxes. I asked Delaney how she got out of her crib. "Nick helped me!" she said. I look at Nick. "There’s nothing on tv," he sighed.

I’ve been made redundant.

Today is my brother’s 30^th birthday. Which makes me, well, older. We went out to dinner last night to celebrate, where I had a really weak margarita and a very tasty burrito. We all pitched in and bought Andy a belt sander, and I bought him the Planet Earth BluRay movie. Earlier that day the kids spent hours making him cards. They were quite lovely. A little glue, Apple Jacks, noodles and markers and you have a masterpiece. Oh, and pipe cleaners. I also made a cake. Which I can say without a doubt, was the most fantastic cake wreck I have yet to make. It wouldn’t come out of the pan, so I tried to reassemble the pieces with frosting, but ran out of powdered sugar so the frosting was too runny. I suppose I could have made little fondant people and placed them around the teetering mess and made an earthquake cake, but instead, I dumped it into a bowl and added some strawberries and blueberries. Only to discover, too late, that the blueberries had been frozen too long, tasted like the freezer and were extremely chewy and gag inducing. The whole mess went into the trash. So I’m going to make another and bring it over to him next Sunday and we are going to have another little party. A birthday in our family can last for weeks...

Sam is no longer asleep. He is crying. So is Delaney. I suspect Nick.

My head hurts.

Sam has been crying for about 3 hours straight now. He stops if I pick him up, but I can’t carry him around all day. You should see my house. The laundry basket stands taller than I do at this point. Half folded clothes cover the sofa and the table downstairs, there is another half folded basket in the bedroom. And I’ve had to make phone calls today. Fun ones. Like trying to figure out why the hell the State of Colorado thinks we owe them $6,700.00 for our fuel tax which is supposed to be $0, since we’ve already paid tax on our fuel. But of course, no one returns my phone calls. Not that I’ll be able to hear them, over Sam’s screaming. Then I was trying to set up a payment plan for our state taxes for 2007. They refer you to their website. Where you discover that you don’t have a PIN number to access your account, so you have to request one by mail. I finally received it and entered it, only to be told that they can’t access my account online. So I call again and have to go through their automated system, pushing buttons for 10 minutes just till I get to a point where I can talk to a person. Then there is the issue of being paid for work. Darrin was hauling ice slicer alone last year, but was pushed out by a huge company out of Denver. In an attempt to win back the account, Darrin combined his trucks with a few other small companies so they would have enough trucks to compete. We delegated the combined billing to one of the other companies because I didn’t think I’d have enough time to do all the billing for all the trucks with the kids. So, two months ago they started hauling. Two months later, we had yet to get a check. We call Brett daily to ask where it is. "Oh, we haven’t been paid yet." Which is bull, because the ice slicer company pays every two weeks and always has. Which means he would have gotten at least 3, maybe 4 checks by now. Which we know, because Darrin has hauled for them for years and in case you forgot Brett, we got you the fucking job. So he calls today, all pleased that he "finally got a check" and relieved, we go to pick it up. And it’s for two fucking days of work. Two damn days. No wonder he can afford that monster house. He pays for it with other people’s money. I guess he has to afford the crates of Busch Lite somehow. Bastard.

God, how long can a baby cry without stopping? Shouldn’t he be tired by now?