Exquisite Turmoil

The kids went to the doctor on Friday for vaccinations.  They’ve actually had quite a few shots over the course of this year, but this is the first time that Dan was able to go with us (as we scheduled the appointment for after school, whereas previously Anya was only going to half-day school and we made appointments for while Dan was at work).

Getting shots is always a big undertaking.. the kids sob and scream, then we go get ice cream and usually pick out a toy.  Apparently, however, Alex decided that Daddy being along meant he had to be brave.  Firstly, he declares that he is getting his shots first today (normally he and Anya fight and try to make the other go first).

Then, he asks the nurse how many shots he needs to get, and she says two.  So he replies with…

“Two?  Hah, I laugh when I get two shots.”  So she gives him the first shot, and we hear “Waaaaah-ha.. ha.. ha.. hah.”  I wish I had a recording of it.  He so obviously wanted to wail but he forced out the most fake laugh I’ve ever heard.  It was adorable.

So, Thursday Dan and I are sitting down at our computers, Alex is in the kitchen eating a peanut butter and Nutella sandwich.  Next thing we know he walks around the corner looking like this, and we both just started busting up laughing.  I love when you know someone so well that you just KNOW what they’re thinking, and we were both thinking “WTF Joker”.

Anyway, now for the promised Alex quote.  We’re outside and I’m working out on the Bowflex, Dan is treadclimbing away.  The kids are playing in the nearby sandbox, having a tea party on the concrete, picking flowers, running around like nuts, etc.  Anya comes up to have a chat with me while I’m working out and screams and says that a bug ran across my butt.  I didn’t feel or see anything, but I took a glance around, didn’t see anything.. and got back to working out.

The next thing I know, I look down and an ENORMOUS spider is ON MY LEG.  And when I say enormous, I’m not just being a girl, it was seriously enormous, even Dan admits it.  He estimates 4″ across, perhaps a little bigger.  A fuzzy, hairy, disgusting thing.  So I scream at the top of my lungs and jump up… the spider falls on the ground, Anya is trying to scale me to get away from it..

Alex just kind of stands there looking at it and Dan stomps on it to shut Anya and I up.  The two of us are practically hyperventilating while the boys are just standing there.  I asked Alex, “You weren’t scared of that spider?”

He gave me this look like I was a complete moron and said “No, I’m a man.”

So we finally, finally get a night to ourselves, and what do we do? We go out to our favourite restaurant, of course.  Then we sit around and talk about how we can’t think of anything to do :p So finally… we drive down to the gaming store to get some movement trays.  Talk about all dressed up and no place to go.  I think everyone in there thought I was a whack job or something.

But seriously, I can’t believe we couldn’t think of a single thing to do (rather, a single inexpensive thing to do, since we’re saving money for the move right now) when we finally had a night to ourselves.  We ended up renting some movies at Blockbuster and then snagging some ice cream and going home to lie around on the couch.  We watched “Definitely, Maybe” which was cute up until maybe the last thirty minutes or so and after that it sucked.

I wish the kids hadn’t trashed the house so spectacularly this week.  We rented “The Karate Kid” as well, which I haven’t seen in ages and I want to watch it with Dan today, but he’ll be cleaning like all day with the way the house looks right now.  I suppose that sounds kind of off.. “he’ll be cleaning all day” rather than “we’ll be cleaning all day”, but I’ll admit it — Dan does all of the cleaning around here.  He actually does like.. all of the everything around here except for cooking.  How did I manage to get so lucky?

Well, today is our sixth anniversary! I’m 24-years-old, so by my math.. that means that I have been with this man for a quarter of my life. It’s amazing to think of how quickly and slowly the time goes at the same time. On one hand, it honestly doesn’t feel like six years have passed, but on the other hand — it feels like Dan and I have been married forever.

It’s probably wrong and unromantic or something, but each year when an anniversary rolls around I can’t help but feel self-satisfied and a little smug. We got married quite quickly after we met (a matter of a few months — three, was it?) and we gave our families about a weeks notice that we were going to tie the knot. We’d originally been planning to get married in October (2002), but found out that we had exactly one week to get married or we wouldn’t have enough “time left in station” to move out of the barracks and into a house together. So we figured, “hey, why not?”. We were going to get married anyway, so we just pushed it up and tied the knot. I think just about everyone who flew out for the wedding was in tears, and not wedding tears. These were tears of “why the hell are they doing this?” and I can’t count how many times we each got told that it was stupid to get married like this and that it would never last, etc, etc, etc..

So yes, I always feel smug and self-satisfied when we have another anniversary and all of those people who told us that it wouldn’t last have to send us ANOTHER happy anniversary card.

I should probably just be feeling all gushy and romantic and in love today, but there you have it. I feel gushy and romantic and in love every day (in fact, my family makes fun of me for it all the time :p apparently I am “obsessed with Dan”), so I guess it is hard to feel different on our anniversary, aside from being surprised at how much time has passed. Before I know it, all of those people will be sending me cards that say “Happy 10th Anniversary!” and then I can really chuckle to myself.

I love you honey, and I’m looking forward to many more years of self-satisfaction with you!

School starts so early here.. Anya’s first day of Kindergarten is August 7th! Gosh, in Connecticut we didn’t start school until the very end of August — sometimes not until September, even. I know that they start early here to get the kids out of school before the really hot summer rolls in, but honestly, this seems kind of stupid to me. It is MUCH hotter now in the beginning of August than it is in the beginning of June. I can only think that it would be better to start school in late August and end in June, rather than ending in May. Ah well, no point complaining about it.

Anya is ridiculously excited, and can’t wait to ride the school bus. I always drove her for preschool, of course, and now she’s going bonkers over the idea of riding the bus. Now if only I could get her excited over the idea of waking up before 10am :p School starts at 9:10 (ends at 3:40) and the bus arrives at the bus stop at 8:48. I have a feeling the first few weeks of school are going to be one big fight over bed time and waking up.

There is another thing that confuses me.. school ends at 3:40 and the bus won’t be dropping her off until 4:06.. but we literally live like.. a mile from the school. How can it possibly take 30 minutes to drop her off here? Dan thinks that they drive all the way out and drop off the furthest kids, and then work their way back in, but again — that seems ridiculously stupid to me. Why not drop off the closest kids and then move out? Once the novelty of riding the bus wears off, I imagine I’ll end up picking her up from the school rather than waiting for her at the bus stop.

Anyway, off to actually work on that Varghulf x.x I don’t know why I’ve been slacking so badly lately with my painting. I think it’s because I’m not happy with how the model is turning out, so I keep putting it off…

If not, you should be. I swear to god, at least three days a week my mom calls me at 8:30 and wakes me up, and then tries to sound like she feels bad about it “Oh, did I wake you up..? I’m sorry..” and every freaking time I tell her “Yes, you woke me up. I wake up at 9:30 every morning.” She isn’t really so stupid that she can’t remember this after a week, let alone like two years. I think next time I’m going to hang up on her, as this is really starting to piss me off. I don’t really care who thinks that I should be awake earlier than 9:30. 9:30 is when I wake up. It is before the children wake up, so who the hell cares?

Anyway, it is my dad’s birthday today and I’m already supposed to be making some cake that my mother wants and getting balloons and the like. Now I’m supposed to go to my parents’ house and wake up my sister and get us all out the door by 12:30 so we can pick up my mother and drive a freaking hour downtown to surprise my father at work. Apparently they’re having cake for him at the office and my mother wants to crash the party (which I don’t think he’s going to be happy about by the way).

When the hell am I supposed to make this stupid cake? I asked my mother this and she tells me “Well if you don’t have time to make it, you can just buy one.” Since when is it MY responsibility to pay for everything? Seriously. I get to buy the cake (if I don’t have time to make one with the mound of ingredients I had to buy to make her special cake), drive everyone around for two hours with MY gas, and Dan and I get to pay for the food that my mother wants Dan to pick up on his way home from work (from my dad’s favourite ridiculously expensive restaurant).

I know I’ve told her that money is tight for us right now because of everyone’s birthday being in rapid succession and our anniversary being on Friday. But does she care? Of course not. My dad makes a fucking fortune, but I’m going to get stuck with likely a — $200 bill today (that I assure you they will not compensate me for) because my mother is too lazy to run her own fucking errands and buy her own fucking cake. I may as well kiss celebrating our sixth anniversary at our favourite restaurant goodbye.

Just.. GAH. I didn’t mind at all being asked to make the cake. I like to bake and everyone knows it. But it is not fair to ask me to buy a bunch of things that I would never normally have around my house (she wants a Red Velvet Cake, btw) and now tell me that I should go buy a cake because she wants to drag me out of the house at the last minute to go downtown. This seriously couldn’t have been mentioned to me last night so that I could bake the cake before bed and only need to ice it after we got back?

Oh yes — and I’m also supposed to find time to do some “game” that they are sending around at her work because she can’t be bothered to do that either. This will be the third such one that I’ve done in the past two weeks.

So Dan and I are in the shower a few minutes ago, and Anya comes in the bathroom and asks if she can make some Toaster Strudel for Alex and herself. We said yes, of course, but not to make any for us since we weren’t hungry.

We get out of the shower and she yells out to us that breakfast is ready and we should come eat. I asked her what she made, and she tells me she made meatloaf with a gravy of peeps (those Easter marshmallow bird things). At this point, I figured that she had put down some empty plates and we were supposed to pretend that she made meatloaf with peep gravy..

That’s what was sitting on the table in four different place settings :p It’s bologna, not meatloaf of course, but like…. QQ I didn’t even know we HAD peeps. I guess they were in the cabinet on top of the fridge that I like.. never go into.  I guess my creative cooking techniques will be passed down o.O;

What an awesome weekend this has been with my sister! Honestly, I think this has been the final straw with living here with my parents, and that we aren’t going to be able to take it any longer. I generally try to keep the bashing of my family to a minimum, but I’m so angry right now that I guess it is time to let loose.

First, I’ll start by saying that Dan and I are homebodies. Sure, we like to get out occasionally, but for the most part we are happiest when we’re at home doing whatever it is that we like to do at home (reading, painting, dinking around on the computer or the 360, just sitting around talking since.. you know.. we have a good relationship and people with good relationships actually enjoy.. uh.. speaking with each other about more than just how “our days were”). I believe that we’ve made this quite abundantly clear to my family. Yes, we will get together with them occasionally but they shouldn’t expect that we want to be with them every night, or even necessarily every weekend. And when they want us to come and hang out they should.. ask.

So anyway, my mother decided to book every single freaking summer holiday at a hotel with like.. a buncha pools and a lazy river. All without asking us, mind. This means that Dan and I get not one single long weekend just to hang out and be together (since, as previously stated, we actually enjoy being together). Fine, whatever. We go. My parents spent a lot of money on the room, the kids enjoy being in the pools (at least for a little while.. they actually refused to go this time originally — guess they had their fill when we did this LAST FREAKING MONTH).

So there we are, hanging out at the pools — when everyone gets hungry, we get sent out for food, since everyone else is too lazy to go. Might I add that we can’t all go out and eat food because we have “a spot” where everyone’s shit is parked and god forbid we lose “the spot” and have to find somewhere else to sit our lazy asses under some other fucking umbrella while we all stare at each other since we can’t all go swimming and leave “the spot” unguarded. Or uh, all go out and eat as was the original point of this statement. Fine, Dan and I go out and pick up food. Which we pay for, by the way, for nine people. Whatever, it’s worth it not to starve and not to listen to the kids whine about how hungry they are.

On to whining! And the last straw, I suppose. My father, in all of his assholishness, flips out whenever the kids whine about anything. At all. You know, a kid falls on a knife and cuts their arm off.. it pisses him off that they cry about it, etc. Anyway, Alex starts getting a little bit whiny today and my father goes into full asshole mode in which I’m the most awful mother in the world because I haven’t already dragged him off to bed because.. you know.. he sniffled. So fine, I decide to take Alex back to the room and have him take a nap to placate my father. I must, of course, bring Anya with me because no one but Dan or me is capable of watching her sit on the steps of the pool. They’re all too busy playing dominoes (which infuriates me, since the reason we have been forced to go to the stupid hotel is because of the kids). Everyone lies down for a nap.. 45 minutes later when dominoes are over, my mother comes to fetch Anya since now it is convenient for them to want to spend time with her.

Alex continues sleeping. Dan is bored out of his mind and falls asleep (since we can’t even really talk, or else we’ll wake Alex). I read a book for a while. My mother calls at some point and asks me to come outside and hang out.. fine.. I do. Might I add that they didn’t actually want me to hang out. They wanted me to come out and take Anya away from them, so they can play some more dominoes without having to bother making sure my kid doesn’t drown. (They’re masters of taking the kids whenever they want them and handing them off as soon as they don’t, no matter how inconvenient it may be for Dan or me). Maybe 30-45 minutes later I decide to go wake Dan and Alex up (after, of course, being warned not to take long since they don’t want to watch Anya, even though she’s the reason why I am forced to be at the fucking hotel, as previously stated). So I wake Dan and Alex as quickly as I possibly can. We come back outside and take Anya around the lazy river. Alex stays with my parents since he doesn’t have his bathing suit on, thus no one minds watching him since they don’t actually have to watch him.

While we’re taking Anya around the lazy river, she loses her goggles and is quite upset by this, since they’re her brand new pink and purple goggles with Ariel on them. We go around the river a few times looking for them — my mother even deigns to help. At some point my mother asks my father to take a trip around the river with her to look for the goggles. He starts screaming that he won’t go around even once because it’s 4pm and he hasn’t eaten since 11am and he needs to eat RIGHT NOW and who cares if Anya is crying? So fine, everyone starts gathering up their crap so we can feed my teenage father. As we’re gathering up our stuff, I ask “So, do we have a plan for dinner — like are we all going out, or should Dan and I take the kids and fend for ourselves tonight?” This leads my father to explode at me how ABUSED HE FEELS because Dan and I spent the afternoon in the room and then Dan comes out and says that he is bored. HOW DARE WE? Mind you, Dan did say he was bored, but the conversation went like this.

Dan comes out from being stuck in the hotel room with Alex for like four hours.
Grandma: Hey Dan, you happy to be outside?
Dan: Yes, I was so bored in there.

Clearly, my ungrateful mooch of a husband is disparaging my parents’ legendary hospitality. That bastard. I’m going to divorce him tomorrow, or something.. as soon as I can get the papers filed.

I like to think that while I may have a quick temper, I don’t get truly angry until someone wrongs Dan or my children. To me, this is wronging my Dan. Therefore, I am well and truly angry at this point. This, of course, leads to a fight with my father where I basically tell him that he can blow me since all he can do is interrupt me before I get two words into any sentence (literally) so that he can scream at me in the middle of two-thousand people how it’s impossible to talk to me because I keep walking away from him (you’ll notice that I am not walking away from him.. I am standing in the same spot that I was standing at when he started screaming at me).

So anyway, I told him to think whatever he wanted, took my shit and my family, and went back to our hotel room (which we never asked for, and in fact told my mother last time that we didn’t really want). We pack up all of our shit and prepare to go home and my mother comes by to chat and tell me that she wasn’t trying to sound upset with me when she was yelling, she was upset with my father for not looking for Anya’s goggles. She does, however, think that I should apologize to my father because, afterall, he was only being an asshole because he was drinking and it’ll smooth things over if I apologize. Well sorry, but no — I am not apologizing to someone who is a drunken asshole just because he was drunk. If he was right, fine. But who the fuck is he to talk to me like I’m some kind of leech? I ask them for NOTHING. I pay rent to live here, mind you, when they told me we would never have to. I don’t bitch when they won’t fix my air conditioner, the leaks in my roof, when they store their shit in my house (which already doesn’t have enough storage space, etc).

And you know what? Alcohol is ALWAYS involved with him. He is a drunk. I don’t care how you look at it, he’s a fucking alcoholic. Dan has SEEN him drinking at 5:45 in the fucking morning before he gets on his motorcycle and drives to work. Drinking in the garage and hiding his fucking alcohol.

Anyway, I just can’t take this anymore. Dan and I have been talking on and off since we moved here, basically, about moving out. I’m not going to lie — we pay rent here, but we pay cheap rent and utilities are included. It’s a scary prospect to move somewhere else because our bills will, of course, go up. If we’d known things would be like this, we never would have bought a new car and locked ourselves into a $500 a month car payment.

But money aside, this is untenable. We can’t live like this. As much as Dan doesn’t want to do it, he’s going to look into an NSA or contracting job back in Georgia. It will pay enough to live down there. He, quite obviously, wanted to get out of that field for reasons of mental health.. but this.. I’m sorry, but this is worse for anyone’s mental health than anything he ever had to do during his time in the military. We can not live like this.

Word of the day: Fuck

Well, Jamie got the news today at her ultrasound (today was also her first wedding anniversary ^_^) and it’s a girl! So sometime in November-ish Dan and I will become an Aunt and Uncle for the first time to little Lilyana.

They’re thinking either Kate or Madison as a middle name at this point in time. Anya’s vote is for Lilyana Alicia and Alex’s only input is that they not name the baby “Transformers” because Transformers can be very mean.

I finally have an Alex quote to impart! This day shall go down in history, or something..

In a moment of drunken idiocy (always the best kind) Katie jumped off of her friend’s roof and into her friend’s pool and slammed her heel straight into the bottom.

Anyway, the next day my grandmother took her to urgent care to get some x-rays and find out if it was broken. When they came home Katie was on crutches and in a walking cast type of thing. Alex sees her, gasps and says “Aunt Katie! What did Grandma Joan do to you?!”