Getting my spirit back

I love my mountains, the solitude of the impossibly blue sky above your head, lightly sprinkled with fluffy clouds, feeling the forest growing around you. Something in the mountains has always kept a part of my spirit, my self, feeding it back to me at each visit. It's immediately cleansing and soothing to my soul to feel the solitude, the silence, the earth doing what it does best, and to know that out here, I am merely me, and my problems and trials are so small.

That's how I feel about the ocean, only more. There's something about the ocean that has always called to me. The waves, with their gentle sighs, give and take the edge of the sand, always changing it. The sound is like the heartbeat of the universe, calling out to me, begging me to let go of my negative emotions, to let the waves carry them out. The wind ruffles my hair, like the gentle breath of a loving parent. The wind, the sea birds' cries, the waves, all take the toxins from my soul, my spirit, cleansing me; I can breathe, I can think, I can daydream. The gentle sun, warm on my skin, is like a caress; not the caress of a lover, but the soothing, calming caress of a friend, a partner, a parent. Warm, safe, and comforting. I may leave the mountains feeling a little forlorn; after all, I've left a piece of myself there to fly with the eagles. I always leave the beach feeling energized, ready to tackle my life.

Yay, long weekend! Or not...

My kids' school is closed for Good Friday and Easter Monday (not currently celebrated in America, but hey, everybody likes a day off, right?). Which means, of course, that Josh and I have to use personal time to be home with the kids.

We were each going to take a day, make it fair. Then Josh says, "Oh, wait, honey, I forgot...If I take 8 hours of personal time, I'm not going to have enough days for our July beach family reunion, or the "honeymoon" we want to take in December!" Convenient, eh?

>So I'm taking 16 hours of personal time to be home with them Friday and Monday. Friday is covered, we're going to Pump It Up in the morning, taking Josh lunch, picking up the dry cleaning and sending off the sale from my Etsy site. Saturday, god willing, my hair dresser will be able to give me a break from my kids new perm. If not, I'm getting my nails done. And conveniently, we can't go to the commissary until Saturday when Josh can come with, because I just have too much to do on Friday and don't have the next week's menu done. Like my sneakiness there? Maybe it's retribution for him reneging on taking the kids one day...

Sunday, we're having an egg hunt with my friends Kendra and Ariel, and having our own Easter dinner. Monday, the girls and I are taking our boys (5, 4, and 2) to a local coffee shop that has, besides coffee, cute purses and an indoor play area. However, no matter what I have planned, I know that on Tuesday morning, I'm going to hop out of bed and eagerly dress for work!

Here's what I want to know: why is it called a day off when I'm really going to be working harder than I do at work, and a dairy cow to boot?

Oh my god, it's on my foot!

My poor Sadie...she has both of her incisors coming in, and teething always gives her loose diapers. Which means diaper rash. But this time has to be the worst.

She screams and arches away from diaper changes. I actually cried last night changing her diaper, having to inflict pain on her. Even putting diaper cream on her makes her scream. My poor angel!

Her school called this afternoon to tell us that they couldn't take her crying anymore. She was crying and screaming whenever she wet her diaper, not just at diaper changes. So they had her in a large T-shirt, letting her poor little area air dry. We took her home like that, and left her like that while Josh went out to find the ultra-mega diaper cream.

Of course, the inevitable happened. She's a baby not wearing a diaper, you figure it out! After I got dinner started, I found her in the hallway playing in a puddle (gross!). Cleaned that up, and her. Stirred dinner halfway through, and found another puddle on the kitchen floor (gross!). Cleaned that up, and her. After dinner, we let her play in the living room while we took a quick, 5-minute break outside. Guess what we found in the living room? Not a puddle...(gross!gross!gross!)

Josh cleaned that up while I got her and her dress into the tub (gross!). Got Jacob in bed, Sadie in jammies, with the ultra-mega diaper cream that she didn't scream for. Hurray, this expensive shit might actually work!

Stood up from nursing her to go lay her down for the night, and my bare foot, right in the arch, found a tiny piece that got missed in the clean up. (gross!gross!gross!gross!gross!gross!) Can you tell I don't do bodily secretions very well?? shudder I stood there, grossing out, a sleeping baby on my shoulder, horrible grossness glued to my foot in all it's sticky, gooey, cold glory, begging my husband in stage whispers to get his butt in there and get it off my foot before I totally gagged myself, him laughing all the while. Some white knight...

Now that I've confessed to the un-mom-like quality of grossing out at my kids' bodily needs, I totally have to steal a line from Jacqueline's blog: Who the hell put me in charge??

Saying good-bye to Momformation

Today, I prepared myself to say good-bye to Mommy Wore Combat Boots, the column I've written for BabyCenter's Momformation since July 08.

And saying good-bye with grace was harder than I expected it to be. It's funny how finding relief, and ridding yourself of one more thing on your to-do list, can be difficult. I guess it's the emotional investiture that makes it so...

But now I can focus on blog posts when I want to. I can make them any word length. I can cover any topic. I can cuss if I want to. I don't have to worry about turning readers off from a nationally-recognized sight, one that's paying me. I can be me, unedited.

But I find myself adrift, wondering just who am I without it. What's my voice, now that I'm not writing for BabyCenter? What do I want to cover, what do I want to promote, what do I want to accomplish?

The first thing is getting some sleep! I've got a lot to tackle this weekend, besides the obligatory dishes and laundry. We have 2 birthday parties this weekend, which means gifts. The slacks I ordered Josh don't fit right, so they'll have to be taken back and replaced. (How does that man wear through slacks so fast, just sitting at a desk?) And we have to start getting the house ready for my mother-in-law's sort-of surprise visit in 2 weeks.

She had told us she was flying to the beach, staying for a couple days, we were joining her for a couple more, and then I thought everyone was heading home. But she told Josh tonight that she's coming back with us! SO, the playroom will have to be cleaned and rearranged, the playroom TV moved somewhere else, the living room cleaned up (oy! the living room), etc. Oh well, I guess it's incentive to straighten the house, right? At least I finished the wallpaper border in that room!

It's not that I don't have things to look forward to; I do! I just don't know how the writer Emily is without BabyCenter. Guess I'll need you guys to help me figure it out!

I f-ing hate taxes

Seriously. I don't get to decide how they're spent; some old, rich white dude up on Capitol Hill does. And mostly, I don't like how they spend it. This is what I imagine goes on behind those mahogany doors our tax dollars paid for:

Let's decide to give billions (yes, billions, as in more money than Joe Public will see in personal income in several lifetimes) to banks who are failing because of bad debt. Let's act shocked when those banks later use that money indiscreetly to pay off their cronies, rather than their bad debts. Let's publicly castrate them for doing what we knew they were going to do anyway with that government money, and hope it saves our ass.

Let's not give some of that to, say, Joe Public to pay off his credit cards and car loans, thereby making it much easier for his family to put money back into the economy by, say, buying food. Let's see what happens when Joe Public doesn't get his share of several hundred billion to pay off his debts; that certainly won't help those outrageous banks.

Then, when we've proven to the public that we haven't learned our lesson from Wall Street, and turned a blind eye to blatant obsequious grafting of people with already inflated wallets, let's instead direct our ire at the blue collar workers of the auto industry for not doing more. More with what? Are they supposed to wring money out of their coveralls to retool the assembly lines into making more fuel-efficient cars that people can't afford right now anyway?

And then, to top it off, let's make some random person, who is doing her mother's taxes out of the goodness of her heart, sit on hold for 45 minutes with the IRS only to be cheerfully transferred to a department that is now closed so she didn't get a chance to get her important tax question answered.

GOD, if women ruled the world, this shit just wouldn't happen! Give a Mom the reigns of the White House, Capitol Hill, and the national budget, and before you know it, every single f-ing American will be given a band-aid, a peanut butter sandwich, $5 for the road, and a kiss for luck. What's your take on this?

Whining with Sour Grapes

So, I have a dilemma. I recently started working full-time, which I LOVE. I love being at work, making a name for myself, being professionally respected. I love that I don't have to watch, save, entertain or punish Jacob all day long, just for being himself. (God, I have GOT to get that boy some help!)

Being away from the kids for 50 hours a week puts me at a disadvantage in the parent blogosphere. I mean, really, how do I write a 900+ word essay every week on being a full-time mom post-military, if I'm not a full-time mom anymore? I'm rapidly running out of material.

So when my other blog gig called me and laid me off due to recession cuts, it came as somewhat of a relief. I mean, I truly love writing, and I love writing about my zany kids and my adorably wacky husband. But between my messy house, my work schedule, and the sleep Jacob is not letting me have, I really haven't had the energy to write. So, I took the news with grace.

Then I log onto the site, and see a new writer. Granted, she has previous posts so she's not NEW-new, but her last post was a year and a half ago! And they let me go because they had to cut someone and my page views aren't high enough to justify keeping me, but hers are? Serious ego drain.

And then my friend Andrea gave me some great advice, which I think I'm going to embrace: "Please don’t let this irk you. You got to XX Website because of your cajones – and you’d never written before? Now you can write to someone new saying you have written for a huge website. That’s BIG." Thanks, Andrea!

So, I guess I'll focus on work, focus on my kids and marriage, and vent and laugh on Chocolate and Whine. Thanks for listening!

My Kingdom for a Break!

I really detest weekends now. There's not much going on that we can take Jacob to, other than shopping. We can't take him to Chuck E Cheese, because that's where all the working parents go on the weekends, with their big kids, and god forbid they pay attention to the smaller kids getting run over or pushed out of the way.

There's no library story time; no story time at the bookstore. The kids section of the art museum is overrun with big kids shoving, parents no where in sight. The skating rink is only open for regular skate. And I am so sick of taking him out for fast food just so he has somewhere to play.

The kids are sick, I think they both have RSV. We'll know tomorrow or Tuesday, whichever day the doctor's office wants to see us. They're both miserable, horribly stuffy, snot running down their faces, too sick to really eat, too sick to play, up all night and moany all day. But they're not running fevers, and their coughs are minimal. I just want to spend all day holding them, if they'd let me!

Sadie took her first steps! I can't say she's walking, but if you stand her up a couple of feet from you and hold out your hands, she'll happily totter to you, then fall into your arms with wild giggles, flailing her arms in excitement. She's so proud of herself!

All of this adds up to one tired momma. There's at least 2 loads of dishes in the sink, and one in the dishwasher (I need to run that...). There's a load of clean clothes in the washer, and both kids' hampers are overflowing. But damnit all, I need some frigging sleep...wine just adds to my headaches. And thank you, Mother Nature, for not giving my any warning that you were about to ruin my new leopard print undies from Victoria's Secret...seriously, give a gal a break!