On The Down Low

Ok, so it was suggested by a certain extremely brilliant and handsome person we shall call Jacob (because that’s his name) that I take my blog and GIT OUT. He wanted me to take the blog a tad underground so that any newbies that see our email address and curiously enter the domain name in their browser aren’t horrified by my less than perky blog. Anyone who knows anything about Blogger won’t really have that much of a hard time finding the blog’s new home, but we aren’t worried about people who know anything about Blogger. We are worried about certain people we know in “real life” who may or may not be offended by my slightly opinionated stance on politics and in-laws. This includes new bosses since the old ones are complete fart faces who don’t even know how to treat employees much less figure out what a blog is (we were never worried about the old bosses reading the blog, but I never said anything bad about them, just in case).

Unfortunately for you, Internet, I now have free reign to bitch about my in-laws as much as i want…nay NEED.

I hope you can read this now without cringing, Hun!

P.S. Update your blogroll, yo.

Happy news!

Some happy news here in the Bungalow (since we moved its now technically a cottage, but I digress) that has been really needing some happy news. The Hubs got a fabulous job offer last night that had me screaming so loud I startled the little butterball I was holding. This new job, although in Hollywood (which is about an hour away with traffic, and there’s ALWAYS traffic), is just about the best job offer oh let me think EVER.

The salary is almost 50% more, the hours are SOO much better (I don’t think I’ve mentioned on here Hubs’ current employer but let’s just say being a manager means next to NOTHING when it comes to schedule) and he won’t be working any more weekends! WAHOO! We may just start thinking we are normal if we aren’t careful.

Those of you who know us personally AND read this blog (there are so few of you…I don’t like to spread the word to the family about my little venting medium here) please keep this new job thing under wraps a bit, We need to break the news softly to certain people that tend to be just a TAD judgmental if you get my drift. Apparently you are supposed to stay with the first person who hires you out of college, work your tail off for them thanklessly, shove yourself into that doormat-shaped little box and retire from said company getting some piddly little retirement. Because its so irresponsible to get a higher paying job with a company that won’t expect you to be in that little doormat box for the rest of your days! How DARE you want to make a better life for your family! This is all because you took a vacation last summer, isn’t it? This is because you didn’t volunteer to work late for no pay, isn’t it? You are such a loser you should be THANKING your boss for making you work every weekend! It will all pay off in the end! Loser!

Digressing again…

One of the other reasons this new schedule is so great is because the Hubs will be home at Charlie’s bedtime to take care of Jamie while I take the 5 billion hours it takes to get Charlie into bed. Its really hard to take 5 billion hours to get one kid into bed and expect the other kid to feed himself (especially when it involves someone else’s boob), change his own diaper, rock himself, schedule his favorite shows on Tivo all by himself and be shocked at the scary things they do on The Rebel Billionaire all by himself. Its not fair and may I add a tiny bit stressful for me to be in two places at once, especially since the California wackos haven’t figured out cloning yet.

So yeah! Big time happy dances going on over here.

Guilty.

I usually don’t make a decision in my own mind on big media cases (save for a certain guy who’s name starts with an O and ends with a J) until I hear the jury’s verdict. At that point, when the verdict is guilty, I feel like I just found out for sure that the person did commit the crime. That was my reaction when I listened to Scott Peterson’s verdict read aloud today. “Oh. My. God. He actually did it.” Then I felt incredible sadness and anger. “I can’t believe he actually did it.”

The evil bastard did it. He planned it, he prepared for it and he followed through with it. This pathetic excuse for a human killed his beautiful pregnant wife and his beautiful baby son in cold blood. Instead of just leaving them like any ::cough:: respectable, cheating, dead-beat dad would, he wanted to be rid of them. For good.

He robbed the Rocha’s of their daughter, who they raised from birth, got up at night with her when she was a baby, taught her how to walk, how to talk, showed her love and support. He robbed the Rocha’s of their grandson they never were allowed to meet. Never allowed to see his smile, see him grow, hear him laugh, see the color of his eyes.

This useless piece of shit threw the body of his wife and son into the ocean to be eaten by fish so that her family could not even recognize her. He had no emotion afterwards, barely a tear. He wasn’t even a good actor. He couldn’t even pretend to be all torn up about it. When his verdict was read, he was stoic.

This is the reason we have the death penalty.

I hope he fries.

I’m a sucker for the schmaltz!

We need to seriously talk about the tear jerking, nay SOB INDUCING show that is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Have you people watched this show? Its the most heart wrenching and soul moving show I’ve ever watched. Its a million miles away from realty gone bad shows like The Swan or My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss.

They makeover people’s homes but don’t stop there. They go way above and beyond any other design show by throwing in top of the line furniture, appliances, computers, etc. There’s also the occasional $50,000 COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP too. Yeah, its that good. There’s no way this show has a budget unless its well over $500,000. I mean, they can’t get EVERYTHING donated.

Every single week I am crying my eyes out at not only the sad stories of these families, but the amazing things that this show does for these people. Throw in watching the family’s reaction to their new life, and I need to buy stock in Kleenex.

Tonight’s episode was a special 2-hour one. Twice the crying! Hooray! First of all it made me feel really bad for complaining earlier today. I mean, we have our struggles, but at least Charlie isn’t autistic AND blind. And at least Jacob and I aren’t deaf on top of it. Yes, that was the sad story of the family in need on tonight’s show. This one even brought tears to the hubs eyes. Of course, the autistic son hit way too close to home, so we were already at a ball of mush disadvantage.

This boy (Lance) is “worse” than Charlie by far, but there were many similarities between him and Charlie that struck a nerve with us. Plus, the whole design crew did all kinds of special things for Lance’s sensory issues and blindness. They made a special playroom just for him that looked exactly like the occupational therapy gym that Charlie goes to. It would be life changing to have a room like that in our house. This family knew how life changing it was and they turned into a big puddle when they saw the playroom. It was so sweet and REAL. No annoying “I want to be on TV” people here, people.

Its all access schmaltz and I can’t get enough. Actually, I take that back. Once a week is enough…I’m emotional enough on my own.

Oh. My. Gosh.

We seriously dodged a major bullet. As if we didn’t know that already, check out this post from Little Green Footballs.

How scary is it that the Press knew this and kept it under wraps??

Not-so-pithy complaints

I haven’t had a chance to update my blog about the latest going’s on with Charlie, our special needs son. We got a “second opinion” from a speech therapist who was slightly p.o.’d that our Pediatrician’s office had suggested Charlie has an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. They believe Charlie does have speech delay as well as other behavioral/developmental issues, but those things can be present in a child and the child not have an ASD. So we are one to one, I need a third opinion to break the tie, I guess. We’ve spent so much money on all this already, its very stressful. I mean, you can’t very well just decide not to give your child therapy that big important therapists think he needs. We are working through some state funded channels to help offset the gi-normous costs involved in all this. Hopefully they come through.

You know, its really hard to be pithy or clever when writing about these kinds of things. I want very badly to find the funny, sarcastic side of all this. Well, I don’t have to dress my kid unless we leave the house because wearing pants freaks him out. That’s a plus, right? Less work! He’ll only eat about 3 things on the planet due in part to his Sensory Integration Dysfunction, so meal planning is a moot point. Again, less work! He’s been having raging, screaming tantrums for so long that his brother Jamie has been used to hearing them since he was in the womb. A tolerant brother…again, less work for me!

I need to try to find the “plus’s” sometimes. Because, the truth is, parenting Charlie is one of the hardest things I can imagine. Sure, it could always be worse. Many parents have to deal with children that have full blown autism, severe handicaps, mental retardation, etc. I’m sure they have to be so much stronger than I do and deal with many more harrowing circumstances.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Charlie takes every ounce of me every day (and night). Problem with that is that I also have a husband, a newborn, a home business, other family and many more things that want/need/require my ounces. And I want to give them those ounces. I don’t like having all my ounces in one place. A person can go crazy (or just get REALLY depressed and stressed out) having all her ounces in one place.

I’ve confessed this to some people already, so I might as well confess it to you, Internet. Sometimes I really don’t like being Charlie’s mom. Of course I love him with every drop of my being, so don’t go thinking bad thought about me. But sometimes I just let myself drift a teeny tiny bit into the puddle of self-pity and wish that I didn’t have a kid like him. Or rather, that HE wasn’t the way he is. Its a constant on-your-toes kind of draining, every-little-decision-means-the-world world that I live in. I’m perpetually 1000% drained mentally and physically.

Every day as Jamie gets older and starts doing new things, it sheds more light on how NOT normal Charlie is. Since Charlie is our first, I had no idea, as he’s been growing up, that kids aren’t generally as hard to parent as Charlie is. Jamie is such a piece of cake, I sometimes feel bad for him that Charlie’s extreme demands will naturally pull me towards him more often than Jamie’s occasional needs. I often find myself wondering what parents, who’s first baby is “normal” like Jamie, are complaining about when they talk of “lack of sleep” or “he cries a lot”, when truth is they don’t even know the meaning of those words.

No disrespect to parents reading this, I’m not judging. Its just that, sometimes, when I’m still in that self-pity puddle, I feel a bit of envy for families who don’t have kids like this. They are able to easily have a babysitter because diverting slightly from their bedtime routine won’t throw off their kid’s sleep schedule for weeks. They can buy their kid clothes that snap at the waist instead of only elastic because elastic is only cause for a minor freak out. They can go out to eat! At a restaurant! They can talk more than a whisper in their house after 9pm because their kid doesn’t hear people talking across the house (even thought the white noise cd in his room is playing THIS LOUD) and wake up, therefore being up for hours afterward. Their kid actually doesn’t take hours to go to sleep each night only to wake up 45 min later and keep waking every couple hours even at the age of 2. They can brush their kid’s hair without so much as a peep. They can-horror of horrors-WASH their kid’s hair without a screaming session every time. Their kid can get ONE DROP of water on his forehead and not completely melt down. They can blame even extreme behavior on “the two’s” because their kid will grow out of it. Their kid doesn’t have any disorders. Yes, I’m venting now.

I’m glad that I have this forum in which to vent a little. Ok, a LOT. Thanks for getting this far, if you’re still reading. I’m sorry to sound like such a selfish ungrateful person. I know there are women who can’t even have children, blah blah blah. I KNOW.

I’ll make you a deal. I won’t complain on their blogs. Just mine.

Oh well. I guess the fact that Charlie is one of the two cutest boys on the ENTIRE PLANET kinda helps his case a bit. That and the fact that he’s so freakin hilarious I swear he’ll be a professional stand up someday.

“Hey Mom! I’m a freak, but at least I’m a really funny freak! At least I make you laugh when you’re not crying, right? You don’t REALLY want me to be normal, admit it.”

He’s right. Or at least my pretend quoting of him is right. But maybe just a normal day once and a while Charlie? Pretty please??

Status quo…he just screamed “NOOOOOOOO! NO! NO! NO! NOOOOOOO!”. Guess it doesn’t help to say please.

Seeing Red at the speed of Mach 10

Ok, now that I’m back to the land of the living (a.k.a. high speed internet) I can finally blog about the election. Then we can all move on with life.

I got a call on Tuesday (she left a message) from someone working the polls. She said that she noticed I hadn’t voted yet and wanted to know if I needed a ride and/or a babysitter so I could go vote. I thought that was pretty impressive, especially since such effort was going into getting the GOP voters to the polls here in LiberalLand, USA. I felt kinda bad that I didn’t get to tell her that I had already voted but it was by absentee. I don’t want to let down my peeps.

I felt such intense relief on Tuesday night. My emergency terrorist attack kit can still be ready to go, but now I won’t have to keep it in my living room, available at a moment’s notice (like I would’ve if Kerry won). Also I don’t have to listen to TAY-RAY-ZA or look at her hair for four years. Wow, what a relief.

Take a look at this breakdown of the country election results by county. Pretty amazing what a red country we are. Of course, I relate much more to blue state people in all the other ways besides politics, so I’m not exactly red or blue. Like my mom quipped today, “does that make us purple?”.

Here is a superb article from a woman I really admire. Please take a look, it will make you think and, if you are like me, continue the little jig you’ve been dancing ever since Tuesday.

I’m almost through here with election prose, but not as through as Michael Moore. Yes, he’s through. What more message could the country send? Anyway, he still is managing to be a completely un-funny butt wipe. He’s so pompous, when I read his “election response” I threw up in my mouth a little. Yes, he makes me heave more than morning sickness ever did. And that’s before I look at him. Blech.

But did I mention YAY!!!? As Dan Rather said on Tuesday (albeit about something else, some other senate race or something), we beat Kerry like a rented mule! Yes! It makes no sense! But can I get a AWWWWWW YEAH!