Crazy

I'm pretty sure no one is going to be interested in reading any of this...but I guess I need to write it for myself so that one day I can read it over and know that I'm a whole lot less crazy than I used to be...and maybe feel good about that.
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The other day I was perusing a website where you can find a health practitioner in your area and insurance network, looking for a therapist I can see locally and who could write prescriptions for me after I've had this baby. I'm going a little crazy not being able to medicate my chronic anxiety and depression, and it's especially bad that I can't fall back on the herbs and supplements that I would normally take in a period where I'm not on drugs. Anyway, on the website I saw a link to an article about compulsive hoarding and clicked on it. There are currently three articles it brings you to and I read through them all, laughing and shaking my head. That information is nothing new to me, it's just always startling to read about yourself like that.

I spend maybe the first 20 years of my life not throwing anything out; having a very emotional attachment to all my things. I'm still hugely attached to things, but on most days I'm somehow able to overcome it enough to not be one of those people who only have little pathways running through piles of crap in their home. Infact, I'm like the opposite now, I have a fear of getting too many things, and it makes me crazy, makes other people think I'm crazy. I know that once something comes into the house it will grow in sentimentality and I'll never be able to get rid of it. So my solution is to be crazy in the opposite direction and be uber controlling about what comes into the house.

"The most commonly saved items include newspapers, magazines, old clothing, bags, books, mail, notes, and lists....Some keep food products, broken items to be fixed, clothes, books, craft materials and leaves. " Hoarders may rationalize: "This is too good to throw away," "This is important information," "I will need this later on," "This should not be wasted." These thoughts are generally normal, but their frequency and the importance attached to them are clearly excessive in compulsive hoarders."

This is from one of the articles...of the above list I have every single one of those things (including autumn leaves picked up in the back yard) and I clearly don't need them any of them, but I also don't know how to get rid of them. The broken items one is what is most scary to me. I have things that were broken years ago and I still think they'd make a pretty mosaic one day!

My new obsession is hoarding memories - writing and taking photos. I'm obsessive about my photo albums and writing. I have a method and perfect order for the life of a photo. If I can't get a thought down on paper, I'm nervous until I do record the thought. That's sometimes what keeps me up at night.

"Yet, ironically, people often report anxiety about having to engage in compulsions. Sometimes people avoid doing things because they know that they will be stuck for long periods engaged in some compulsive ritual."

Lately it's been really hard to keep up with all the photos I take, so at times I've just stopped taking pictures for a week at a time even when I've really wanted to because I know I won't be able to manage them.

"More commonly, hoarders have anxiety when their hoard is threatened in some way." When we went on our trip this summer I went to great lengths beforehand to cart all my photo albams and journals up to my mom's house because I had this irrational fear that the person who was house sitting would burn down the house or something.

"A survey of elderly hoarders found that hoarding constituted a physical health threat in 81% of identified cases. These included threat of fire hazard, falling, unsanitary conditions, and inability to prepare food."

"One hoarder had a collection of pictures of staircases. She believed her children might want them some day. Another explained that she kept newspapers because someday her grandchildren (not yet conceived) might be interested in contemporaneous coverage of events."

OK, these examples I just thought were funny, particularly the fact that an elderly person might become so insane with hoarding that they wouldn't be able to feed themselves, and rather than move some stuff, they would just sit there and starve.

I did get freaked out inside when the little girl at Marisa's school holiday party threw out an entire, uneaten cupcake. I'm definitely one of those parents who tells their kid not to waste food because there are children in the world who don't have any. When my mom heard me say this to Jacob the other day she remarked, "I thought those parents only existed in my generation." It shouldn't matter to me what other people do, or should it?

I'm always fighting the urge to keep things, but it doesn't feel good to get rid of something I know could be used in another way. These two forces are always fighting each other and it makes it so hard to know what is right - to be 'safe' by keeping everything, or to be in control of my life by just saying no. I do know that I feel liberated when I get rid of things, like the energy in my space has been cleansed, so maybe I am coming out of this on the right side.

Macro!

I finally got another lens. Just the other day I got the 60mm Canon macro lens, and don't ask me anymore about it because I won't be able to answer your questions, let alone understand them. I have no idea what I am doing with it, or even what it is capable of, but until I have some really good bugs and flowers to take pictures of, I'm going to mess around with all the random stuff laying around. Today Jacob and I went ice skating, and it it nice to know I have not yet lost my center of gravity.

Macro Skates

Dasher Board in Macro

It takes normal pictures too

Macro Baby Jesus

Macro Olives

Pineapple in Macro

I've never been prouder

Jacob and I are home alone again tonight so I put a video in so I could catch a break. I guess the video had finished and was rewinding because when I walked around the corner Jacob was about two feet from the TV and Seinfeld was on. "This is the funny show!" He exclaimed. That's right, baby.

Let the Nesting Begin

I stopped by Target today and picked up a bunch of those plastic storage bins because I knew they were on sale. I'm experiencing that post-Christmas freak out where I'm looking at the size of our house, lack of storage space and all the new things that need to have homes found for them. The project I had in mind was Jacob's closet. Since the time he outgrew his first onesie it has been on its way to looking like this:
I just always packed his clothes up in cardboard boxes and they had to stay in the closet because they wouldn't be safe in the attic or basement. Not much is safe in the attic and basement. The attic is a tiny little strip of space that not much can fit in anyway. The basement is dusty and messy, half of which is designated for the bunnies, and we always have projects going on in there so anything that does get stored down there would just need to be moved around every couple months.

I've got to clear some space before the baby comes so Jacob and I didn't waste time re-packing the clothes in the new bins. It was so funny going through everything and being reminded of some of my favorite outfits Jacob wore. He got such a kick out of seeing the tiny little things too. It was nice for me because I got to refold everything so it all matched perfectly and sort them into categories...and you know how important extreme organization like that is to me.

My baby shoes

The shoes Jacob wore to our wedding
before he was a year old

My most favorite jammies of his -
Under the Nile Organics and the pea hat

Shirt that was originally mine as a
baby, and Jacob wore too

Hat Jacob wore home from the hospital,
and the socks he was supposed to wear
but his newborn feet were too big!

I'm always looking around and seeing all the clutter in our house, wondering how it ever got like this, how we acquired so much in such a small period of time. I'm starting to realize the main difference between our house and a normal person's house is not that we have more stuff or more junk, but that we have absolutely no storage space. We have a small closet in Jacob's room just deep enough for the clothes in it, a bigger one in our room and then a (slanted) coat closet under the staircase, but it's not accessible for stuff that you'll need on a daily basis. We have no garage, a tiny shed, and the basement just isn't practical for storing anything other than tools and crap. So all our 'stuff' either has to fit in a desk drawer or under the couch, and the rest is right there for all the world to see. I have gotten control of my former hoarding self, but it's like a 12 step program where all your faults (clutter) are there in plain view of everyone.

Anyway, we did pretty good with Jacob's closet and now there is some room on the floor for the overflow off toys for which there are no other good places. But just once I would like a portion of floor or wall that is just there, empty.

In sickness and in health?

One word to describe our Christmas: Margaritaville.

Christmas season for us is always a marathon of visiting different sides of the family. It started last Saturday and won't end until this coming Saturday. But it was nice this year, we had things under control, got to places on time, had a good time. The actual Christmas day we got up and did the stockings. We've sort of developed a little tradition of just giving Jacob a few small things in his stocking. He's really happy with this and gets plenty of stuff from the other people with less restraint. Zach and I also get a little something for each other now so that Jacob can have something to give as well. We never used to get gifts for each other, but it's nice for Jacob to experience the reciprocity, so I guess that'll be a new little tradition too.

By the way - we don't do Santa. Jacob 'knows who he is', even sat on his lap at the mall, but as far as we're concerned he's just a jolly guy who hangs around to spread holiday cheer, but Mom and Dad are the ones filling the stocking. I still haven't figured out how to explain this lifestyle choice to relatives and well-meaning strangers without them feeling as if I've personally offended them...

Anyway, back to actual Christmas - Zach discovered three inches of standing water in the new part of the basement after we did the stockings. He stayed here to clean up the mess and sort out what was salvageable while I ushered Jacob out of the house as quickly as possible before he had a chance to learn some nice new vocabulary from an unhappy Zach. We spent the first half of the day at my mom's. My uncle and his wife were in town and had brought some heavy duty margarita mix. I stuck with my once-a-week glass of wine, but when Zach came along he hit the margaritas. He usually sticks with beer and is not a hard liquor kind of guy so he basically had no chance.

A couple hours later it took me and my back up (Mom and Jamie) to get Zach out of the house and into the front seat of the car. We hadn't gotten halfway down the road before he started throwing up all over the front of the car. The best part about that was that my bag was sitting at his feet and the time he leaned over and puked, it went right in with my wallet, journal, book, etc. Fun. We stopped at home before Round Two (dessert) at my sister's in order to take care of the animals and by then, get Zach some new clothes. He obviously wasn't going to get anything out of going to my sister's, but it was one of those times where you're afraid to leave the drunk person alone, lest they kill themselves, or burn the house down.

Zach never made it back out of the house. And I'll leave his part of the story at that.

Jacob and I finally made it to my sister's house and had a good time. My relatives all enjoyed laughing about Zach and planning how they'd make fun of him next time they see him. I told Zach later that he's lucky I have such a light-hearted and humor-inclined family. Everyone had a good time talking about their own drunk stories. One uncle told of the dangerous combination of shrimp and gin, and how it ended in the backyard of his girlfriend's house. Another uncle got blasted on a booze cruise, which involved him falling in a bush and peeing himself. Someone else told me about the time my father puked his way across the Canadian border and how his father-in-law (my grandfather) teased him about it afterward. Ahh...everyone loves a good drunk story.

All the while that I was cleaning up puke, doing extra laundry, kicking Zach to make sure he was still alive, I was thinking so highly of myself...thinking what I could milk out of this one...thinking maybe I could finally get that new camera lens. Then I finally came around to realizing that I did take marriage vows, that in less than six months I'll be having a baby and possibly be more incapacitated than Zach was last night...and that maybe this is all part of the job.

The Heartbeat

In the period of first trimester fatigue I started and stopped about a dozen posts without posting them. I would get too tired to finish and never go back to them. But now I am remembering and I guess I'll go ahead and post a few of them. This one is from just a couple weeks ago - December 7th.
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Friday was my 12 week check-up at the doctor's office. The boys came with me because they were eager to hear the heart beat, and after about five minutes of trying, the doctor finally got it. You know, it was cool I guess. I'm surprisingly not very sentimental about that kind of thing. I remember when I was pregnant with Jacob and we first heard it, Zach cried...hehe.

Jacob also has his four-year visit today. All is good. He is 38 3/4 inches tall and 35 pounds. I'm writing it here so I'll remember when someone asks me in the future because I can't remember the last time I wrote in his baby book. It's the first time since Jacob was an infant that his height and weight are even on the charts! At this rate it will only be two more years in a car seat....woohoo! Then he can ride in a booster seat until he's 16. I wonder if he'll even weigh enough to ride in the front seat when he's old enough to get a driver's license.

After the check-ups, I had to go around the corner to get some blood work done. I do not like this. But I am a hell of a lot better than Zach. He is a baby, and he wasn't even getting his blood drawn! At the mere thought of it Zach squirmed his body all around and looked like he was going to gag. You know how you get when someone scratches their nails down a chalkboard...thinking about getting blood drawn is like that for us. But at least I can suck it up when put to the challenge. I dared Zach to stay and watch, but there's no money in the world that could have convinced him.

I spent the car ride home talking about getting my blood drawn and getting Jacob to talk about what it looked like. I would roll up my sleeve and stick my veins in his face whenever I got the chance. We almost crashed a few times but it was so worth it to see the pained looks on Zach's face when he couldn't run away.

After the doctor's office we drove to a local garden center to check out the artificial Christmas trees....and you know what happened after that.
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I got my bloodwork results back last week. My thyroid is low, my vitamin D is very low and I'm anemic. That could explain some things...

Staples is getting coal in its stocking from me this year.

I just got back from a 'special trip' to Staples, which is something if you realize I rarely make special trips for things if they are more than two minutes away from my house. I like to combine my errands, maximizing my time and gas mileage.

I get calendars for all the grandparents and great-grandparents for Christmas each year...oops, I ruined the surprise (but by now you should all be expecting them). I get them done at Staples, and I know I could do it more easily and cheaply online somewhere, but I tend to do better with the more concrete handing over of my pictures of knowing exactly what I'm getting...or so I thought.

I've always been happy with the service and results but this year they really suck in both departments. I actually got everything set early this year so it makes sense that this would be the year they get all messed up. The calendars were supposed to be ready on Friday and I went to pick them up at the prescribed time. They weren't done. Come back in three hours they told me. I did. They weren't done. A couple more minutes they said. I erred on the side of caution and went to run another errand. I went back many minutes later. They weren't done. Four of them were, so I waited for the fifth to be done and then checked out of there. I told them there was no hurry on the last one since I got one for us this year too. They insisted that they would send it to the printer tomorrow (that would be Saturday) and it would be ready for pick up.

I really erred on the side of caution this time and gave them three extra days to get it done. I went back tonight (Tuesday). I waited for 15 minutes while they looked around aimlessly for it. Then a girl got on the phone and probably pretended to call someone. What's your name? she asked. I told her. No, your last name - apparently I have a first-name-ish kind of last name, which I really don't consider to be so and infact I didn't know anyone with that name as a first name until I was out of high school, and to this day I still only have ever known two people with this first name. I repeated what I had said. No, your last name she said. That is my last name I said. XXXX is your last name??? She was very confused.

I get this all the time now. I don't know why. Do people think that I am an idiot and when they say 'last name' I hear 'first name'? Anyway, when the girl got off the phone she came back to the counter and reported that my calendar is not done. I don't believe them. I believe it is done and it is sitting right there under their noses. She told me I can come back tomorrow - yeah right, to see if it's done. I told her since it was the fourth time I had been there to pick it up they could just call me when it was really done.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Go ahead, click on the picture to see it bigger...


Ready to guess?

A) Too many clementines
B) Boots from Dora is in the fridge
C) There's only four beers left
D) Um...the hammer on the shelf



If you said 'D'....ding ding ding ding ding!!

And that is what it's like living in a house with Jacob.

Should I be afraid?

Jacob still goes nuts with the Bob the Builder stuff. Every day is a new fantasy about different job sites, different things being delivered to the house, different projects. Lately he's been all about Pilchard (the cat), and his fantasies revolve around her. Pilchard did something bad, Pilchard ran away, Pilchard told Jacob to do something for a certain job, Pilchard is riding with Muck to make a delivery.

But anyway, I am just dying to know what it's like to be inside this World of Bob. What does it looks like to Jacob? Does he actually see this stuff happening? Does he really believe it, or does he know it's make believe? Most importantly, how can I be sure it isn't more than just make believe? Maybe 'Bob' is like a little creature that only innocent children can see and interact with. Maybe he's got a little Santa in him and you truly have to believe before he'll reveal himself to you.

I'm always prying into Jacob's pretend world, trying to get some kind of answer from him that's going to give me an idea of just what it all looks like from the inside of his head. Well yesterday I lucked out. In a flash of inspiration I thought to ask a very basic question: "How tall is Bob?" I queried. "um...about this high." Jacob answered with his hand up to his collar bone.

So Bob is actually shorter than Jacob! What an insight. Now I'm trying to picture a two-foot Bob walking around my house, ordering around the rest of the crew. It's kind of weird to think about, and it also evokes another image....one of a little red-head doll clad in overalls, toting a jagged blade, who I used to have nightmares about....and now I'm thinking it would be good to know whether or not Bob has a mean streak.

The First Casualty of Christmas

It's an ornament from a high school dance, apparently given out as a souvenir. Now it's in the garbage. But you know what this means, we must be decorating our tree. To do that we would have had to actually gotten a tree. Last year we got the live tree with the root ball attached, remember? We were planning to do that again this year, and then maybe after Christmas when all the trees were on sale we'd get an artificial one for the future. Last year we lucked out after Christmas because the ground wasn't frozen yet so we were able to plant the tree right away. If we hadn't done so, it would have died and that would even worse than killing a tree by cutting it down; letting a perfectly good replantable tree die would have just been negligence.

This year winter crept up on us and before we had a chance to think about digging the hole ahead of time, the ground was frozen. We debated chancing it, but ultimately decided that if we were to spend $60 or so on a live tree then get a fake one half price after Christmas, we would probably end up shelling out about the same amount of money by just avoiding the live tree and going straight to the artificial one before Christmas.

So we got a tree; we looked around a lot, took a whole week to decide whether or not we actually wanted an artificial one and then finally picked one out over the weekend. We did it mostly because we're actually in a Christmas mood this year. And we did it so early too! What's up with that? we keep asking ourselves. I hate Christmas. I usually put off thinking about it for as long as I can and then can't wait for it to go away. For at least two weeks now we've been listening to the Christmas music station on the radio round the clock, Jacob and I have been coloring in this Christmas coloring book Stella gave him, we've been making Christmas crafts. I've even started Christmas shopping already! And how many more times can I mention 'Christmas' in one paragraph?

We even decorated the tree. It's the earliest I've ever had a tree up in my life. Last year we put it up three days before Christmas. What happens now? Am I going to get sick of it before Christmas is here?

Zach and I are thinking maybe it's because we're in the 'family way'. I don't know, I haven't been pregnant at Christmas before, so it's either that or it's some weird once-in-a-
decade occurrence whereupon you can actually stand the holiday for once. But then of course one full-out Christmas season is enough to last you until another 10 years go by and you can go back to hating it.

The things that come outta his mouth.

Last night we were getting ready to leave the house and Jacob wanted a certain winter hat. "You know, the one with the meatball on the top," he said motioning to the top of his head. I knew what he was talking about but it was an odd way of describing it, especially for a vegetarian. I searched and searched but couldn't find it.

I asked Jacob if he knew where it was. "Uh...I musta left it in with Pilchard's cat toys."

"So like, where would one find Pilchard's cat toys?"

"Oh, they're probably all mixed in with Scruffty's leashes."

And if I only knew where Pilchard and Scruffty kept their things I might just discover the land of missing objects.

Zach doesn't have to paint this morning, nor does he have to go to work. It's rare that he spends a whole day at home with us. At 9am Jacob sat bolt up in bed and yelled, "Zachhh!!" Zach didn't answer right away so Jacob said, "This is interesting, Daddy said he was gonna stay home all day today!" Then Zach came upstairs and Jacob was so friggin happy to have us both there in bed with him. He wrapped one arm around each of our necks and wouldn't let us get up for 10 minutes.

He was so excited that even when the ambulance siren blared by, Jacob waved his arm in the air and said, "Ah...I'm not gonna answer that one."

My sister called this morning...

The first thing she said was, "How are you feeling?" all chipper and nice. "O....K...." I answered suspiciously. "Just OK?" she asked. "Yeah....?"

When I got off the phone I relayed the conversation to Zach. I told him she asked me how I was doing. He look at me confused. "Then she asked me to watch Marisa tomorrow night." Clarity spread across his face and his nodding head seemed to say, "Oh, that's why she was being nice." Which is exactly what I was thinking.

Our relationship is so predictable.

Found:

In the couch. Not lost and found because no one had any idea any of this crap was missing. But I was having a cleaning fit last weekend and for some reason had to look under one of the couch cushions to retrieve something that had fallen beneath the cracks. I didn't take a picture of the crumbs that collectively could have fed a small country; nor did I take a picture of the huge amounts of dog hair that was in there, cuz I didn't want to make you all puke like I almost did, but believe me, there was enough to knit a sweater. That would be one nasty sweater. I did take a picture of the rest of the treasures though.

Back left: One of Jacob's tape measures.

Back right: One of Jacob's many golf balls. I believe this particular one made it's way in between the couch cushions because it was playing the part of bird egg and that's where the mama bird decided to lay her eggs.

Front left: Tiny part of a real (copper?) pipe that Jacob carries around in his toolbox. Just one of the many 'authentic' doo-dads he's got in there.

Front left: That's Kara's baby. Kara is a cow, the same kind of cow as this one, but bigger, hence the fact that Kara is the mama. This one is actually my fault. I had totally forgotten about it, but right after I saved it from the depths of the couch, the memory came flooding back. One wretched day, many months ago, Mange chewed it. Right in front of us. She did it on purpose (this I know) to make a point. We were on the couch, ignoring her, and she got all, "Yeah? Well ignore this bitch!" I saw it before Jacob did and was able to grab it up without him even noticing. Since we were sitting on the couch and I had nothing else to conceal it with, I quickly stuffed it beneath the couch cushions so Jacob wouldn't see and be crushed that Mango ate Kara's baby. Kara, by the way, is a real cow that Jacob got to milk (well the plastic one is a Kara replica) when he was two, so it was a particularly horrid crime against humanity.

Here she is up close, in all her three-legged, faceless, gory mangled-ness.

Dear Jacob: November 2007

Dear Jacob,

November seemed to go on forever. You've been four for an entire month now and you use this being four as a reason for everything. "I didn't cry at all because I'm four now!" You declare with almost a whole hand's worth of fingers in the air.

You've also been kind of bossy. Daddy takes you down to the basement a lot to work on little projects and you think you're so cool getting into the big time stuff with him. One time recently I was coming down into the basement with a huge laundry basket and I bumped into the pole running from the ceiling to the floor. "See, that's why you can't be on construction sites!" you started to scold me. You do have an extreme amount of confidence of 'construction sites', but that's actually warranted. You've been using real hammers and nails since you were two and I can't remember you ever getting yourself on the thumb like I tend to do. At MamMa and Papa's you've got this one board on the bottom of a door frame that Papa lets you hammer nails into all day long. I'll be upstairs doing something and I know that as long as I can hear the constant "bang, bang" of the hammer, you're all right down there.

Your dad and I joke about how when you grow up you'll be the next Bob Villa or something and we picture ourselves sitting for an interview and we'll be explaining how from the time you were two, tools were all you cared about, etc, etc. - just like the Olympic athletes who learned to swim at two or started hitting home runs at five. I think we also both hope you'll have some athlete in you too though.

This last month though, you declared your first when-I-grow-up-I-want-to-be statement. You want to be an 'electric man'. Part of this future hope is that you want to be able to install a traffic light in front of our house so that no more deer get hit on the busy road. You'd also like to put up a deer crossing sign by our house as well. You were really affected by the deer that got hit in front of our house in October. You've been obsessed with death since then, but you already were a little bit before that. You have this beautiful picture of Heaven in your mind. All of the people we've ever mentioned the death of are there. My father, Daddy's grandfather, Bartie, the deer that got hit, and most recently, Chris's horses. You know Chris, Alley lets Bart up on her back so that he can ride around and see better. They're friends.

Another thing you've been super into lately is cleaning. Cleaning or assisting with any kind of housework you can. A few weeks ago we were at MamMa's house waiting for them to get home. I was upstairs doing something and suddenly heard the water running downstairs. I didn't think it could be a good sign, but when I arrived in the kitchen I found you, wearing rubber gloves, soapy sponge in hand, taking it to the dirty dishes in the sink. You looked at me with a big smile and said, "MamMa will be so happy I did her dishes for her!" Talk about initiative. You regularly do the dishes now, ask to wash the kitchen floor, sort laundry & fold it without being asked to do so. Strange little boy.

And the dedication with which you carry out these activities is unreal. You'll go outside to rake leaves and won't stop for and hour. You answer the phone with unyielding persistence - and you do it well, only sometimes going on for five minutes about what job you're currently working on while the poor person on the other end kindly waits for an adult.

To balance out all this sweetness, you do display your fair share of angry outbursts. We'll be walking across a parking lot and someone in the distance will beep or a car alarm will go off and you verbally honk back. "Stop it!!!" you scream to the offender. There's also the 'smack talk': "We have to put Mango in the dumpster!", "I'm gonna smack this shirt out of here!", "I don't like my clothes, they're all cwappy." And the speed, you're obsessed with speeding, as in verbally abusing people who you think are speeding. This comes from sitting at the window in our house watching the cars go by, and sometimes seeing them get pulled over by the police. But sometimes you are the offender. One time you were riding your tricycle around the circle in our house and you stopped to yell to the imaginary police officer. "No aplice man, you're not gonna give me a speeding ticket! I'm going through the red light!"

Where is all the anger coming from? I've always taken my cues from you, gauged my behavior according to how I see you acting. So it naturally occurs to me that if you are behaving very loud and very negatively, that I need to change something within myself to set a better example for you. But then the other night I was watching a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond, it was the episode where Michael puts together a little book for a school assignment and titles it 'The Angry Family'. Everyone has to go to counseling, and they're all concerned they're messing up their child, etc. Then in the end, in response to someone's comment about the book, Michael says, "Yeah, I like that show." So the book wasn't even about them at all and they could relax in the knowledge that they weren't screwing up their kid. Well I just don't know how to tell the difference anymore between something that is going to mess you up and something that I should just let roll off my shoulders.

But if you've been displaying some anger lately, it doesn't even compare to the sensitivity that you still exude every day of your life. We still can't watch Curious George (the movie theater version) because it's too scary. Papa was watching TV with you a while back and when I found out it was Happy Feet you were watching, my radar went up. It's just a kids' movie, right? Any kind of major motion picture, whether it's marketed for kids or not, has to have some kind of climactic part. And that kind of drama is just too much for sensitive souls like us. If you ever get over this, great, but if you don't, I won't be surprised. I still get mad at my parents for taking me to see Beetlejuice when I seven. Bambi? Forget it. I'll never be able to watch that damn movie. I'm so sorry I made you stay at MamMa and Papa's late last Saturday night to watch Beethoven's 4th. It was a stupid idea, and I should know better than to encourage you to watch a movie on the Disney Channel. You spent the whole movie running out of the room screaming because the dog was not with his family. Didn't matter that he was happy and with nice people, he wasn't where he belonged. And now, thanks to Disney, you know what a gun is. You're still questioning me about that movie and getting the worried little look and a furrowed brow.

Anyway, this month's entry is very long, and very late. I'm sorry to the readers for the great length of it, and the lateness I can only attribute to the other thing that's been going on in our house this month. Come June, we're going to have a new little baby in the house. You are so excited about this, and I am so tired. So tired. It's been hard to motivate myself to do much of anything. Perhaps next month I'll have my energy back and some cute stories about all the nice things you're doing for the little person growing inside of me.

Love,

Mommy