Desperate for my own dirt

I am desperate for my own dirt. I want a house on a little bit of land. Doesn't have to be much. But I'm sooooo tired of apartment living! Tai and I have been looking lately, but houses are hard to come by, and when you do come by them, they are awfully, awfully expensive around here. We're talking $200,000 or more. And that's for a piece of crap, generally. I think we'll ultimately have to settle for a townhouse, which really won't be toooooo bad, just so long as it comes with a fenced back yard.

I was just looking over our lease here. I didn't realize it says that:
1) Waterguns are not allowed.
2) The bouncing of balls is not permitted anywhere near the apartments - only in the tiny little playground.
3) Pet rent and a pet deposit is required even for caged animals. (WHY? What damage is my gerbil going to do to the apartment?!)
4) You are not allowed to make even the most minor repairs yourself. You must wait...and wait...and wait...for maintenance. And then they will charge you out the ass what would have cost you $.75 in spackle.
5) We must have the carpets PROFESSIONALLY cleaned when we move, even though they will replace the carpet before the next tenant moves in.
6) Strollers cannot be even STOPPED on the sidewalk, let alone parked anywhere besides the interior of our home.

Now is it just me, or do at least some of these seem ridiculous? It's not like we had a choice when we moved here. It was this place or nothing. But damn. Wish we'd read that a little closer before!

Stuff & Junk

Tai and I have been sick for the last couple of days. Some flu bug snuck in and bit us in the middle of the night, and we woke up feeling YUCKY the other morning. He went back to work today, though I haven't heard from him, so I'm not sure if he feels any better. I woke up feeling a little better. A vast improvement over yesterday's not waking up at all until more than 2 hours after my alarm had gone off (which I followed by a 4 hour nap in the afternoon)! So far, the kids seem to be doing ok. D did wake up with a coughing fit in the middle of the night, so she might be catching it.

We let A stay up to watch American Idol last night. He asked, and I said yes, figuring it would be over at 9:00, not 10:00. Oops. This is the first interest he's really shown in pop culture. Not the best influence, I'm sure, but far from the worst. It was rather amusing to watch his reactions to it all. I think he was rooting for Dianna. Oh well.

That's about all that is going on here.

It's all MY fault if my male bunny grows up and wants to wear lipstick and dresses...and I'm ok with that.

Yep. I was wrong. Trixie is, in fact, a boy. With an obvious little bunny penis and everything. Ooooooops. So we've been through Bojangles, Trixie...and now Felix? There really is no doubt any longer that he's male. Shall I change his name this one last time?

Trip to the movies...

So we took the kids to go see this afternoon. Everyone enjoyed it. Tai and I found it hillarious - we both thought it was much funnier than the first one. And I ~liked~ the first one. I highly recommend the movie, whether you have kids or not. Go see it.

Should one mom BE this lucky?

Trying out Blogger's Comments...

Until this post, I'd been using Haloscan to power the comments section. But Blogger finally has a comments option, so I'm trying it out. What do you think?

Yay for P's Therapist!

So P had another appointment with his therapist yesterday. I sent along a copy of the journal of P's behavior that I kept for a month at the request of the psychiatrist. He took a look at it and basically said the doc must have been smoking it - this kid has problems. Yay! He's gonna call him up and talk about P again. He also wants Tai and I to meet with him next month - sans kids - to talk about everything. Go Mr. M!

He also offered to write a letter saying that P should not be allowed to be with biomom alone. Excellent thought. But we're going to put that off for another month to make sure he has a full understanding of what's going on with P before he does it. Then we'll have to figure out what good the letter will do us. Will we have to change the visitation agreement? If so, where and how? We're in a different state than where the custoday/visitation agreement was filed. I guess that's something we'll have to look into. Not that there is a big rush. We've been here for 7 1/2 months, and biomom has only visited once.

Virginia is for lovers? Think again...

This comes directly from this site.

"The Virginia General Assembly passed a law April 21 banning all contracts between partners in homosexual relationships. Not just marriage, all contracts... This law not only prohibits civil marriage between same-sex partners, but actively seeks [to] invalidate any and all legal contracts between these individuals. Durable powers of attorney, health care directives, even wills and property contracts are at jeopardy now that this law has been passed." Read more...

Feeling political again

I haven't mentioned my TAKE ACTION page recently, and I'm feeling guilty about it. We are hearing more and more in the news about how President Bush is trying to make 2nd class citizens out of gays, and I'm sick of it. How dare he say all men are created equal except gays? Not too long ago it was African Americans. Before that, it was women. Either we are all equal or we are not. We can't allow the Constitution to be amended to include discrimination. What will they take away next? The right to vote? Once we allow legal discrimination into the very fabric of our society, who is to say which group will come next?! What other rights will they take away? Where will they draw the line? Once they start taking away rights, where will they stop? This particular issue may not affect you NOW, but what about in the future? What group of people are you a part of that they might decide to discriminate against?

For a country that has done its best to fight discrimination for years, we sure are taking a giant leap backwards.

Check out that link above. Explore the site. You can find out all sorts of things - who your lawmakers are, their contact info, how they have voted on certain issues, etc. You can drop them emails letting them know that discrimination is wrong!

I'm grounded...

Or at least P is grounded to me, anyway. Everytime we turned around over the last week, he was breaking, destroying, or damaging something. I don't know how many gouges he's put in the walls. He's also marked on them with ink, pencil, crayon, and Hotwheels cars (they scratch the paint and otherwise leave lovely markings). He's taken apart the vacuum cleaner, dumped out laundry baskets full of clothes, dumped out tubs of dress-up clothes & toys, and ripped important papers to shreds. He's stabbed pencils through his homework, put gouges in the tables, and sprayed water all over the bathroom. So instead of grounding him to his bed, where he has easy access to two walls, I grounded him to me.

Yes, everywhere I go, he must go, with the exception of the bathroom. There is a chair in the middle of the living room (far away enough from everything that he can't touch anything else) that he must sit in if I am in the living room, dining room, or kitchen (all one big room, really). There is also a chair in my bedroom that he must sit in if I'm at the computer or in the bathroom. I accompany him when he must use the bathroom. This is getting old pretty quick, but for at least a full 24 hours, he hasn't destroyed anything except a piece of paper. It could be working.

I'm not being awful and horrible about it - there are times throughout the day when he gets a break from sitting in the chair. He sat with me yesterday at the table and did writing exercises. He got to hold Trixie while he was in the chair last night. Other times throughout the day, I turned on the tv and let him watch kids' programming. He got to play with the little computerized alphabet game thingie for a while. He go to fold laundry, as well. It's not like he has nothing to do...he just can't destroy everything in sight.

The only problem is - by grounding him to me, I got grounded to him as well!

Name Change

I've decided to change the bunny's name. Bojangles just doesn't sound very feminine, now that we know she's a girl. So from now on, she's Trixie, which means "bringer of joy." How apt!

Nazi Mom

I'm getting really, really tired of being The Mean Mom. Sometimes I feel like all I do is tell the kids what to do, and then argue about it. "Clean your room, please." and "Pick up the stuff you knocked off the table, please." But they never do it. It doesn't matter how many times I say, "Please clean your room so we can go to the park!" Or "Pick up the stuff you knocked off the table so we can go downstairs and play with the water guns!" Noooooo....that never works. That would be too easy.

It seems that I'm spending most of my time threatening to put kids in time-out in the corner. Then in their beds. Then grounding them, etc. And the rest of the time, I spend actually doing it. I always follow through. That's what all of the books say. If you tell a child a consequence, follow through with it. Ok. I do that. But then I have no time to accomplish anything else...particularly when I have three kids and three consequences to enforce.

Am I asking too much of them? All I really want is for them to pick up their toys and laundry a couple of times a week. I'm not asking for perfection - I just want their rooms to be clean enough so that I can walk across their floors to kiss them goodnight without breaking my ankle. I don't expect every puzzle to be face-up, or hell, even every puzzle to be in the puzzle tub. I just want them off of the floor and in ANY plastic tub. Is that really too much to ask? Why is it that cleaning their rooms is often a three-day affair? At twice a week, that pretty much leaves us one good day without arguing about cleaning rooms.

*big sigh* I must be doing this all wrong - I really must. I shouldn't feel like a Nazi every evening by the time the kids go to bed. I just want the chance to be a fun mom. The kind who takes her kids to the park in the evenings. The kind who takes 'em for a walk in the mornings. The kind who plays Candyland with them a couple of afternoons a week. But I just can't do that without their cooperation. I don't ask them to do too much around the house - and they won't learn how to take responsibility for themselves if I don't have them at LEAST clean their rooms, right? Is there some sort of middle ground that I'm missing? The one where I can raise decent, responsible kids AND get to do fun things with them at the same time?

Mother's Day

I had a terrific Mother's Day. A brought me breakfast in bed (cinnamon toast with LOTS of butter, an apple, and a Pepsi)- then P & D proceeded to eat it for me (I kept the Pepsi). LOL Tai and the kids cleaned the house. The a/c got fixed...temporarily. (It was fixed the rest of the way on Tuesday.) We went to the park and had a nice walk in the woods. And I got cuddle-time with the bunny. Who could ask for more?

Squiggy meets Bojangles

At first they looked like they would do ok together. Then Squiggy (the gerbil) decided that he didn't quite like the looks of Bojangles, and he took a nasty little swipe at her nose. =o( Big old meanie! This picture was taken right before Squiggy got nasty.

The AWESOMEST Mother's Day present EVER!

Introducing.....Bojangles. Isn't she CUTE???
Just look at these ears!


And lookie, lookie, lookie at these FEETSES!


Aren't Tai and the kids just wonderful??

Ok, so I took a Personality Disorder Test...

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Low
Schizoid:	Low
Schizotypal:	Low
Antisocial:	Low
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Low
Narcissistic:	Low
Avoidant:	Low
Dependent:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Low
-- Personality Disorder Test - Take It! --

...and the results were really boring, so I thought I'd post them!

I'm Melting!

And it makes me feel like the Wicked Witch of the West. Our air conditioning is not working. It's 97º outside today, and it's getting close in here. I'm HOT! I put in a maintenance request a few days ago, and they haven't shown up. You'd think for over a thousand bucks a month, they could fix the gosh dern air conditioning. I'm melting! I'm melting!

Scare of a Lifetime

I woke up this morning to discover that P (the 5yo) was gone. Nowhere in the house. Nowhere to be found. Also missing were his comforter, pillows, some clothes, some toys, and some books. I ran through the house, discovered that the front door was no longer locked, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

There he was - outside in the "outdoor hallway" between our building and the one across from us - laying on the ground, his pillow propped up against the railing, covered in his comforter, looking at a book.

We had a nice long talk about why he left. Apparantly, he is sick and tired of his brother and sister waking him up every morning. They give him a headache with all of the noise they make, and he doesn't like it when they turn on the tv. So we talked about how it is my job to keep him safe, and I can't keep him safe if I don't know where he is. That the reason he can't go outside without a parent is that we won't be able to keep him safe, etc. And we talked about alternative plans in the morning to avoid his brother and sister. Like, when they wake him up, he can go into D's room and lay on her bed until he feels like getting up and dealing with the noise & tv, etc. *sigh*

Let me tell you - it's a good thing I got plenty of sleep last night, or I would have gone crazy when I woke up. Thank God everything turned out ok.

This may look a lot like an advertisement

On Wednesday, April 27, we signed up for Netflix, and we picked out our first few movies. Thursday, the movies were mailed to us, and we received them on Friday. Over the weekend, we watched them, and on Monday we put them in our mailbox. (Our mail isn't picked up until 4PM.) Tuesday, first thing in the morning, I received an email from Netflix saying that they'd gotten the movies back, and the next ones were on the way. We got the DVDs this afternoon. This turnaround time is awesome. At this rate, we will be able to rent more movies through the mail than we would be able to do if we went to the video store. And it gives both Tai and I the chance to pick movies out. I think right now, we have 50 movies in our queue (that we can prioritize at any time), so even if we don't take the time to go back to the site for a while, as long as we send movies back to them, we'll be getting more in the mail! I'm really, really digging this system.

Better Homes and Bathrooms

So yesterday, the kids took it upon themselves to redecorate their bathroom - in toilet paper. All told, they completely ruined not one, not two, but three brand new rolls of it. The sink was totally full of tp - and water. And the tp wasn't still in a roll, noooooo....that would be too easy. It was shredded. The toilet, also, was completely full of both water (to the brim!) and an entire roll's worth. Finally, the last roll was destroyed when it sat on a sink counter in at least a quarter inch of standing water.

Fun times in this household last night, lemme tell ya.

Do they know something about me that I don't?

According to Google, two "related searches" for this page are: excuses and key lime pie recipes. Hmmmmmm. What is key lime pie, anyhow?

Our Secret

Throughout the last couple of months, I've shared a secret with each of the kids. "I love being your mommy." I don't think that's quite the same thing as, "I love you." For some reason, they all, or at least the two younger ones, seem to think it's something special...which is exactly what I was hoping for. Maybe that's because anybody can love them - grandmas, friends of the family, even people who have treated them badly have said it. But nobody has ever told them she loves being their mommy. No woman has let them know that taking care of them makes her lucky. No woman has let them know that taking care of them is a special privilege. No woman has ever let them know that taking care of them isn't just a chore that she has to do.

With Mother's Day coming up, I've been thinking about being a mom. It's really amazing to me - just seven months ago, I only had one child. He was the only child I'd had for 8 1/2 years. And look at me now! I have not one, not two, but three beautiful kids. I didn't have to go through pregnancy, labor, or childbirth. I didn't have to change poopy diapers in the middle of the night, either. Just *poof* Instant family, just add water. And I had two more kids! Even though it's only been seven months, I love them just as fiercely as if I'd given birth to them myself. They are my kids...and nobody better mess with 'em! ;o) Yeah, this Mother's Day, and every Mother's Day hereafter, I will have been triply blessed. I mean, just look at these faces: