Do you write all things that are real? Do you ever write fiction? Like stories? I do. I have since I was little. I used to let people see my poems (I was a kid, they all mostly rhymed). I once wrote a short story in 3rd grade for school but my teacher loved it and kept it so I don't have it. I remember most of it though and it would make a great children's book.
As an adult, I've started and stopped and started and stopped writing several different stories. Nobody will ever see them but me. I'm not that good at it but I have the stories in my head so I try to put them into words. I don't have a whole lot of writing confidence, I'd NEVER let anyone see what I write, other than the real stuff that I post here. Real stuff comes easy for me.
My daughter read one of the stories I started writing in a composition notebook. I don't use computers. I like good old pen and paper. She didn't really have much of an opinion. But she's also only 13. That further ensures nobody will ever see any story I ever write. Unless I rewrite the kid story I wrote in 3rd grade. That would be ok to let people see.
I know I'm rambling and boring as hell. I want to write though and I don't really have anything to say right now. I can ask you all questions though.
Do you write fiction ever?
Do you let people read it if you do?
Do you think you're any good at it?
Would you even let your best friend read what you write? To answer this I did let my best friend read something I wrote once and she liked it. But I still don't have the writing abilities that I see in the books I read every day. Absolutely NOTHING like my favorite authors.
Like I said, I write for me. If there's a story floating around in my head I put it on paper and I read it and rewrite it a millions times. It's what I've always done. Someday I'll burn all my notebooks before I get old and senile so my family can't get ahold of them.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Bunker Punks Tour!
Seeing as how I was inducted into the Bunker Punks community, I have to like participate in their shit. I mean shenanigans. I mean cool stuff. So I'm going to answer the following questions for the #bunkerpunkstour. I seriously don't know what I'm doing so bear with me.
What is your most prized possession?
Film negatives from when my oldest 2 children were little. Because that was back in the day before digital cameras and websites that can hold every picture you've ever taken on your digital devices. Those negatives are all I have if I lost the actual printed pictures. Other than my children of course (I'm not that kind of psycho!), if I had the choice to save ONE thing if my house were on fire or flooding, it would be those negatives.
How do you unwind after a long day?
Well it depends what happened in that long day. Sometimes all I need is junk food, my blanket and couch and a good Hallmark channel movie. Other times I need all of that plus beer or wine or beer AND wine. I have insomnia most nights though. That hinders my unwinding a great deal. So I stalk you people who are reading this on fb all night long. I've got my eye on you!
What is one song that has followed you throughout your whole life?
Are y'all ready for this? Do you want to know what my real name is? This is a sappy, sentimental answer I'm going to give. It's Rosanna. See where I'm going? I was born in 1982. That same year Toto came out with their album Rosanna. It has the song Rosanna on it. My mom claims she did not name me Rosanna because of that album and song even though it came out the same year. Riiiiight. Sure mom. She claims she wanted to name me Heather but my aunt stole the name for my cousin the year before. I am soooo not a Heather! Here's the sappy, sentimental part: my daddy was so happy and proud when I was born he went out and bought the Rosanna album. An actual record. You know, as in not a cassette tape, not a cd, not an iTunes song. A record. My name's sake. My dad is a sentimental ball of feels. I am Rosanna. Everyone sings it to me on my birthday. Wait for it........................... My birthday is July 4th. OMG! (But that's a different story.)
If you could give one piece of advice to new bloggers, what would it be?
Be yourself. Nobody likes a faker. Personally, I don't want to read your blog if all you talk about is what's "trending". I want to read real, from your heart stuff. I don't care if Calvin Klein had Justin Beiber's dick enhanced in their underwear ads. I want to know what you are feeling.
Now that you're famous we need a quote from you...
When life gives you lemons, squeeze them into the eyes of the people who gave them to you! (For the record I've been saying that for years and years, long before social media, and then I said it on Facefuck one day and now a lot of people say it. Just know I said it first!) Who stole my saying from me? Huh? It was YOU wasn't it?!?!
What is your most prized possession?
Film negatives from when my oldest 2 children were little. Because that was back in the day before digital cameras and websites that can hold every picture you've ever taken on your digital devices. Those negatives are all I have if I lost the actual printed pictures. Other than my children of course (I'm not that kind of psycho!), if I had the choice to save ONE thing if my house were on fire or flooding, it would be those negatives.
How do you unwind after a long day?
Well it depends what happened in that long day. Sometimes all I need is junk food, my blanket and couch and a good Hallmark channel movie. Other times I need all of that plus beer or wine or beer AND wine. I have insomnia most nights though. That hinders my unwinding a great deal. So I stalk you people who are reading this on fb all night long. I've got my eye on you!
What is one song that has followed you throughout your whole life?
Are y'all ready for this? Do you want to know what my real name is? This is a sappy, sentimental answer I'm going to give. It's Rosanna. See where I'm going? I was born in 1982. That same year Toto came out with their album Rosanna. It has the song Rosanna on it. My mom claims she did not name me Rosanna because of that album and song even though it came out the same year. Riiiiight. Sure mom. She claims she wanted to name me Heather but my aunt stole the name for my cousin the year before. I am soooo not a Heather! Here's the sappy, sentimental part: my daddy was so happy and proud when I was born he went out and bought the Rosanna album. An actual record. You know, as in not a cassette tape, not a cd, not an iTunes song. A record. My name's sake. My dad is a sentimental ball of feels. I am Rosanna. Everyone sings it to me on my birthday. Wait for it........................... My birthday is July 4th. OMG! (But that's a different story.)
If you could give one piece of advice to new bloggers, what would it be?
Be yourself. Nobody likes a faker. Personally, I don't want to read your blog if all you talk about is what's "trending". I want to read real, from your heart stuff. I don't care if Calvin Klein had Justin Beiber's dick enhanced in their underwear ads. I want to know what you are feeling.
Now that you're famous we need a quote from you...
When life gives you lemons, squeeze them into the eyes of the people who gave them to you! (For the record I've been saying that for years and years, long before social media, and then I said it on Facefuck one day and now a lot of people say it. Just know I said it first!) Who stole my saying from me? Huh? It was YOU wasn't it?!?!
Thyroid Cancer Can Suck It!
I never thought it would happen to me. Nobody does. Then one day your thyroid surgeon's office calls to tell you that yes, indeed, you had cancer. But let me start at the beginning. It's important because I didn't pay attention to the signs and maybe if I tell my story, I can help someone else.
I was 18 when I got pregnant with my first child. She was planned. And I'm glad I had her when I did. I had just turned 19 two weeks before her birth. I gained a lot of weight with that pregnancy though. A LOT. I chalked it up to the fact that I ate everything all of the time once I got past morning sickness in my 5th month. I'm not entirely sure how much I weighed after she was born but I never did fit back into my pre-pregnancy clothes. I was huge. By the time she was a year old I was even bigger. My mom thought something was very wrong. At the time she was in nursing school and she read and researched EVERYTHING. So I knew that she knew something was wrong. So I went to the doctor.
I weighed 202 pounds. You know what the asshole told me? I needed to go on Weight Watchers like his wife and lose weight because I was too fat. He also told me I needed to lay off chocolate and junk food because I had pimples. What? I don't eat a whole lot of junk food. And who the hell are you to tell me I HAVE to go on Weight Watchers? He was extremely rude. I walked out of his office that day not wanting to ever see another doctor again. I was embarrassed, upset, wondering why he was such a jerk.
I managed to get my weight down to 195 and I got stuck there. A plateau. Then I got pregnant with baby number two. After I had him I lost a significant amount of weight but not enough. I ignored my exhaustion. I associated it with the fact that my son didn't sleep for the first 16 months of his life (but that's another story). I started getting fatter again. We moved 900 miles away when baby number 2 was 6 months old and my oldest was 3 years old. I still ignored the exhaustion. I ignored the brain fog. I fought through not wanting to get up and took care of my children anyway. I got depressed. I got suicidal. I got pregnant.
We were 900 miles away from home, only my sister in law and her friends to lean on, I was home sick, scared, sick as a dog, and pregnant with a 3rd baby we couldn't afford. I wanted to die. And still I didn't know I had cancer. We moved back home 6 months after moving away. I was happier, no longer suicidal because I was home. But I was still sick.
Things seemed ok after I had baby number three. I lost over 40 pounds because during the last month of pregnancy I had 8 gall stones and severe pain and I couldn't eat. Water made my gall bladder hurt. It put me into early labor but they stopped it. I was sent home to live on Gatorade and Percocet until I had the baby. Then I could think about getting my gall bladder out. So was that it? All that time, being so sick and tired, was it my gall bladder?
No. It wasn't. My thyroid was slowly growing a tumor. And then I found myself pregnant with baby number 4 because I was the stupidest 20-something year old on the face of this earth. But I thank God every day for being pregnant with that baby. Why? Because that's when my mother saw it. The huge protrusion sticking out of my neck. From my throat area to be exact. She freaked the hell out. She freaked me the hell out. She said I needed to get my thyroid tested immediately.
My OBGYN ran a thyroid work up. All came back normal. I stopped thinking about it. I was focused on the 3 kids I had and the baby on the way.
After he was born I got very ill. I was delirious most of the time that I was awake. That's WHEN I was awake. It got to the point everyone thought I had narcolepsy. I'd just randomly fall asleep. And they couldn't get me to wake up. Eventually I just slept all the time. I couldn't take care of my kids. My sister lived upstairs from me and she and her boyfriend used to sleep downstairs because I wouldn't wake up for the babies. My son Cooper was 2 years old then and he used to be awake in the middle of the night all the time for no reason. He's now my early riser at 9 years old. So my sister and her boyfriend used to stay awake with him because I couldn't.
Finally my mother convinced me to go to an endocrinologist. The very day I saw him he was concerned immediately. He felt the huge lump in my throat. He poked, prodded, and felt around some more. He did a needle biopsy right there in his office and sent me for blood work. The blood work came back normal. Again, as it did a year prior. The biopsy results came back negative for cancer. What a massively huge relief right? Wrong.
They told me, after an ultrasound that it was too big to leave in there, cancerous or not. So on February 19, 2008 I had the left half of my thyroid removed along with the golf ball sized tumor. No. Scratch that. It was the size of a baseball. The tumor was absolutely huge. It had invaded one single little blood cell. But it wasn't cancer according the first biopsy.
Then I got the phone call 2 weeks later. "I'm sorry to inform you, but the biopsy results came back and you had cancer." I froze. No I didn't! It was benign. No. It wasn't. I indeed had a rare form of thyroid cancer. They told me it was noninvasive (in other words it was contained to just my thyroid) follicular thyroid cancer. My mom was there. She hugged me so tight and cried. I remember thinking, what's the big deal? They got it all out. They scheduled me to have the right half of my thyroid removed 2 months later.
I found out afterward that my thyroid was actually dead. As in it was decaying inside me and would have started poisoning me. But my blood work was still normal. How can a dead, decaying thyroid still function normally? And how could the first lab have made such a gross error in diagnosing my cancer? All questions to this day I don't have an answer for. I never asked why the first lab was wrong. I had too much to deal with on my plate already. And the doctors didn't know why my thyroid supposedly was functioning normally while also being dead. Decaying. That's disgusting! No wonder I was so sick all those years.
I was supposed to go for a radioactive iodine treatment after the complete removal of my thyroid to kill any possible thyroid cells that may be left in me. But the same hospital that told me I didn't have thyroid cancer screwed that up as well and I never got it done. I'm glad for that though. But that's another story that will take time to write about.
I have to go to my oncologist-endocrin doctor every 6 months for blood work and neck ultrasounds to make sure I remain cancer free, especially since I never got radiation therapy. It's been over a year since I last went. BUT in May of 2014 I had a third thyroid surgery. An ultrasound tech who decided to go higher up my neck with that little probe thingy (I think that's the technical term for it haha) found a piece of thyroid tissue that was missed from the previous 2 surgeries 6 years before. They again wanted me to do radioactive iodine treatment to kill it and not have surgery because the piece of thyroid was so small. I said no, I'll go for surgery. Don't you think if my thyroid was dead and decaying 6 years ago, that any piece left is also dead and decaying? Also, I don't want radiation unless I'm going to die RIGHT NOW without it. So they went in and took out the itty bitty piece of thyroid. No radioactive iodine for me! No. Radiation almost always causes other cancers 5, 10, 20 years down the road for people. If I can live my life without it and live for a very long time and not get cancer from cancer treatments, then that's the route I choose. It's the route I chose.
I'm not completely healthy today. I just don't have cancer anymore. Without a functioning thyroid I've got a multitude of side effects I have to deal with from the thyroid replacement medication. But if I don't take the medicine I will get sick. And I WILL die. Slowly, painfully, and very sickly. Insomnia, weight fluctuation, extreme body temperature changes every 5 minutes, exhaustion, depression, anxiety (just to name a few) are side effects I'll take any day over death. I'll deal with them all because it means I'm still alive. I'm here to take care of my children and watch them grow up.
Since the cancer, I've had a 5th baby. She is the product of thyroid medication and birth control medication clashing with each other. Something even the doctors didn't know could happen. I'm glad the medicines clashed. I love my Toddler Tyrant! That was another journey, for another blog post though.
I'll end with this: Fuck Cancer! Fuck you! I fought you and I won!
I was 18 when I got pregnant with my first child. She was planned. And I'm glad I had her when I did. I had just turned 19 two weeks before her birth. I gained a lot of weight with that pregnancy though. A LOT. I chalked it up to the fact that I ate everything all of the time once I got past morning sickness in my 5th month. I'm not entirely sure how much I weighed after she was born but I never did fit back into my pre-pregnancy clothes. I was huge. By the time she was a year old I was even bigger. My mom thought something was very wrong. At the time she was in nursing school and she read and researched EVERYTHING. So I knew that she knew something was wrong. So I went to the doctor.
I weighed 202 pounds. You know what the asshole told me? I needed to go on Weight Watchers like his wife and lose weight because I was too fat. He also told me I needed to lay off chocolate and junk food because I had pimples. What? I don't eat a whole lot of junk food. And who the hell are you to tell me I HAVE to go on Weight Watchers? He was extremely rude. I walked out of his office that day not wanting to ever see another doctor again. I was embarrassed, upset, wondering why he was such a jerk.
I managed to get my weight down to 195 and I got stuck there. A plateau. Then I got pregnant with baby number two. After I had him I lost a significant amount of weight but not enough. I ignored my exhaustion. I associated it with the fact that my son didn't sleep for the first 16 months of his life (but that's another story). I started getting fatter again. We moved 900 miles away when baby number 2 was 6 months old and my oldest was 3 years old. I still ignored the exhaustion. I ignored the brain fog. I fought through not wanting to get up and took care of my children anyway. I got depressed. I got suicidal. I got pregnant.
We were 900 miles away from home, only my sister in law and her friends to lean on, I was home sick, scared, sick as a dog, and pregnant with a 3rd baby we couldn't afford. I wanted to die. And still I didn't know I had cancer. We moved back home 6 months after moving away. I was happier, no longer suicidal because I was home. But I was still sick.
Things seemed ok after I had baby number three. I lost over 40 pounds because during the last month of pregnancy I had 8 gall stones and severe pain and I couldn't eat. Water made my gall bladder hurt. It put me into early labor but they stopped it. I was sent home to live on Gatorade and Percocet until I had the baby. Then I could think about getting my gall bladder out. So was that it? All that time, being so sick and tired, was it my gall bladder?
No. It wasn't. My thyroid was slowly growing a tumor. And then I found myself pregnant with baby number 4 because I was the stupidest 20-something year old on the face of this earth. But I thank God every day for being pregnant with that baby. Why? Because that's when my mother saw it. The huge protrusion sticking out of my neck. From my throat area to be exact. She freaked the hell out. She freaked me the hell out. She said I needed to get my thyroid tested immediately.
My OBGYN ran a thyroid work up. All came back normal. I stopped thinking about it. I was focused on the 3 kids I had and the baby on the way.
After he was born I got very ill. I was delirious most of the time that I was awake. That's WHEN I was awake. It got to the point everyone thought I had narcolepsy. I'd just randomly fall asleep. And they couldn't get me to wake up. Eventually I just slept all the time. I couldn't take care of my kids. My sister lived upstairs from me and she and her boyfriend used to sleep downstairs because I wouldn't wake up for the babies. My son Cooper was 2 years old then and he used to be awake in the middle of the night all the time for no reason. He's now my early riser at 9 years old. So my sister and her boyfriend used to stay awake with him because I couldn't.
Finally my mother convinced me to go to an endocrinologist. The very day I saw him he was concerned immediately. He felt the huge lump in my throat. He poked, prodded, and felt around some more. He did a needle biopsy right there in his office and sent me for blood work. The blood work came back normal. Again, as it did a year prior. The biopsy results came back negative for cancer. What a massively huge relief right? Wrong.
They told me, after an ultrasound that it was too big to leave in there, cancerous or not. So on February 19, 2008 I had the left half of my thyroid removed along with the golf ball sized tumor. No. Scratch that. It was the size of a baseball. The tumor was absolutely huge. It had invaded one single little blood cell. But it wasn't cancer according the first biopsy.
Then I got the phone call 2 weeks later. "I'm sorry to inform you, but the biopsy results came back and you had cancer." I froze. No I didn't! It was benign. No. It wasn't. I indeed had a rare form of thyroid cancer. They told me it was noninvasive (in other words it was contained to just my thyroid) follicular thyroid cancer. My mom was there. She hugged me so tight and cried. I remember thinking, what's the big deal? They got it all out. They scheduled me to have the right half of my thyroid removed 2 months later.
I found out afterward that my thyroid was actually dead. As in it was decaying inside me and would have started poisoning me. But my blood work was still normal. How can a dead, decaying thyroid still function normally? And how could the first lab have made such a gross error in diagnosing my cancer? All questions to this day I don't have an answer for. I never asked why the first lab was wrong. I had too much to deal with on my plate already. And the doctors didn't know why my thyroid supposedly was functioning normally while also being dead. Decaying. That's disgusting! No wonder I was so sick all those years.
I was supposed to go for a radioactive iodine treatment after the complete removal of my thyroid to kill any possible thyroid cells that may be left in me. But the same hospital that told me I didn't have thyroid cancer screwed that up as well and I never got it done. I'm glad for that though. But that's another story that will take time to write about.
I have to go to my oncologist-endocrin doctor every 6 months for blood work and neck ultrasounds to make sure I remain cancer free, especially since I never got radiation therapy. It's been over a year since I last went. BUT in May of 2014 I had a third thyroid surgery. An ultrasound tech who decided to go higher up my neck with that little probe thingy (I think that's the technical term for it haha) found a piece of thyroid tissue that was missed from the previous 2 surgeries 6 years before. They again wanted me to do radioactive iodine treatment to kill it and not have surgery because the piece of thyroid was so small. I said no, I'll go for surgery. Don't you think if my thyroid was dead and decaying 6 years ago, that any piece left is also dead and decaying? Also, I don't want radiation unless I'm going to die RIGHT NOW without it. So they went in and took out the itty bitty piece of thyroid. No radioactive iodine for me! No. Radiation almost always causes other cancers 5, 10, 20 years down the road for people. If I can live my life without it and live for a very long time and not get cancer from cancer treatments, then that's the route I choose. It's the route I chose.
I'm not completely healthy today. I just don't have cancer anymore. Without a functioning thyroid I've got a multitude of side effects I have to deal with from the thyroid replacement medication. But if I don't take the medicine I will get sick. And I WILL die. Slowly, painfully, and very sickly. Insomnia, weight fluctuation, extreme body temperature changes every 5 minutes, exhaustion, depression, anxiety (just to name a few) are side effects I'll take any day over death. I'll deal with them all because it means I'm still alive. I'm here to take care of my children and watch them grow up.
Since the cancer, I've had a 5th baby. She is the product of thyroid medication and birth control medication clashing with each other. Something even the doctors didn't know could happen. I'm glad the medicines clashed. I love my Toddler Tyrant! That was another journey, for another blog post though.
I'll end with this: Fuck Cancer! Fuck you! I fought you and I won!
Friday, January 9, 2015
It's Officially Official Now!
It's become officially official, if the title didn't clue you in already. June will be the last month we reside in this big, beautiful house we've called home for the past 4 years. Last night when the hubs and I got home from bowling my mom asked me if we were going for it and I officially told her yes!
The happiest smile, one I have not seen on my mom in a long time took over her entire face. There was a twinkle in her eye! I knew buying a big house and living all alone in it was only going to be great for so long for her. I knew she'd get lonely, and even miss us. She even said she missed hearing us opening presents Christmas morning while she got ready for work. She said she even missed hearing Scot (my husband) dictating to the boys "how things were going to happen", before they dove head first into an unwrapping shark-like frenzy. That actually made me want to cry.
I miss my mom. She moved out 5 months ago. She only lives, literally 4 minutes away. But I still miss her. I miss her coming home from work and plopping on the couch next to me and telling me about her frustrating day or about a beloved patient who finally passed away. I miss knocking on her bedroom door and saying "Hey, wanna play Scrabble?". Now if I want to play Scrabble or cribbage I have to call her and drive there or her here. She's back working full time and she's exhausted so mostly she stays home now. And I'm busy with my family in the evenings with dinner, homework, and all the other things you do as a parent with your kids so I can't just jump in my van and go see my mom.
I really miss my mom. My mom hugged me so tight when I got the phone call that I indeed had cancer. My mom drove me around when I didn't have a license or a car. My mom rented a house with my family and I because she knew we couldn't afford it on our own. My mom worked upwards of 3 jobs, no sleep, AND homeschooled us when my siblings and I were young, just to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. My mom watched my first born literally tear her way into this world. My mom, even though she was already over extended financially living with us, paid a portion of my younger sisters rent every month for 3 years because she suddenly found herself a single mother with 2 young girls and got no help from her now ex-husband. My sister has found the best man ever though, but that's another story. A very long story. My mom suffered great illness, both physically and mentally my entire life, but she's never once given up on life or her kids. She would give you her last breath if it meant saving yours. My mom is a homecare hospice nurse. She sees life and death right before her very eyes almost daily. That takes some kind of strength. Strength I could never possess. My mom has made me get out of bed when I just wanted to give up.
I could write a book of all the things my mom is. All the things I'm not. All the things she did and still does for me that she didn't/doesn't have to do, but because she loves me unconditionally, she did/does them anyway. Nothing I could ever say or do can possibly express the love, gratitude and most sincere thanks I have for the mother I've been given to walk this thing called life with that could properly do what I feel and what I wish I could say any justice.
Now I've gone and made myself cry! It's a good thing I can type with blurry vision. I couldn't ask for a better mom than mine.
This blog post was originally supposed to be about our big move and all the changes it will bring for my family but it turned out my heart needed to talk about my mom. One of the most amazing, wonderful, best people to ever grace this earth. And that's ok with me!
The happiest smile, one I have not seen on my mom in a long time took over her entire face. There was a twinkle in her eye! I knew buying a big house and living all alone in it was only going to be great for so long for her. I knew she'd get lonely, and even miss us. She even said she missed hearing us opening presents Christmas morning while she got ready for work. She said she even missed hearing Scot (my husband) dictating to the boys "how things were going to happen", before they dove head first into an unwrapping shark-like frenzy. That actually made me want to cry.
I miss my mom. She moved out 5 months ago. She only lives, literally 4 minutes away. But I still miss her. I miss her coming home from work and plopping on the couch next to me and telling me about her frustrating day or about a beloved patient who finally passed away. I miss knocking on her bedroom door and saying "Hey, wanna play Scrabble?". Now if I want to play Scrabble or cribbage I have to call her and drive there or her here. She's back working full time and she's exhausted so mostly she stays home now. And I'm busy with my family in the evenings with dinner, homework, and all the other things you do as a parent with your kids so I can't just jump in my van and go see my mom.
I really miss my mom. My mom hugged me so tight when I got the phone call that I indeed had cancer. My mom drove me around when I didn't have a license or a car. My mom rented a house with my family and I because she knew we couldn't afford it on our own. My mom worked upwards of 3 jobs, no sleep, AND homeschooled us when my siblings and I were young, just to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. My mom watched my first born literally tear her way into this world. My mom, even though she was already over extended financially living with us, paid a portion of my younger sisters rent every month for 3 years because she suddenly found herself a single mother with 2 young girls and got no help from her now ex-husband. My sister has found the best man ever though, but that's another story. A very long story. My mom suffered great illness, both physically and mentally my entire life, but she's never once given up on life or her kids. She would give you her last breath if it meant saving yours. My mom is a homecare hospice nurse. She sees life and death right before her very eyes almost daily. That takes some kind of strength. Strength I could never possess. My mom has made me get out of bed when I just wanted to give up.
I could write a book of all the things my mom is. All the things I'm not. All the things she did and still does for me that she didn't/doesn't have to do, but because she loves me unconditionally, she did/does them anyway. Nothing I could ever say or do can possibly express the love, gratitude and most sincere thanks I have for the mother I've been given to walk this thing called life with that could properly do what I feel and what I wish I could say any justice.
Now I've gone and made myself cry! It's a good thing I can type with blurry vision. I couldn't ask for a better mom than mine.
This blog post was originally supposed to be about our big move and all the changes it will bring for my family but it turned out my heart needed to talk about my mom. One of the most amazing, wonderful, best people to ever grace this earth. And that's ok with me!
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Ramblings of My Foggy Mind
So. Get used to that word. I tend to start a lot of things with it. Even when I talk out loud because I type exactly the way I speak. Anyway (I use this word a lot too), I'm sitting here drinking yesterday's reheated coffee cuz I forgot I used it all yesterday. You'd think at my age and the amount of coffee I drink, I'd learn to buy 2 big cans of coffee every week, not just one.
You know that Ultimate Proposal some of you read about? It's happening. I left hubby be to think about it in his own way. I didn't want to nag him (let's face it, we all nag each other sometimes and we shouldn't) about it even though I was so hyped up that I already was planning colors to paint all the rooms and I didn't yet know if Scot was going to go for it. Somewhere deep down I knew he would. The financial aspects were far greater than any downfall to moving. In fact, it's financial security. If one of my kids needs a new pair of sneakers (which with my 3 sons is like every other week), I can go buy the damn sneakers. I don't have to look at my checking account and think 'do I get gas in my van so I can take my daughter back and forth to color guard practice this week or do I ask her to find rides so I can buy a pair of sneakers for her brother' because I'll be able to get gas AND buy sneakers. I wont stress out, hubby wont stress out and my brother (who lives with us and will move with us) wont stress out about running out of heating oil and having to go without heat and hot water for a couple weeks because we have to pay the rent first or get oil and risk the landlord evicting us because we ask him to hold the check late too often. We're stressed, we're exhausted. We don't want that anymore. Who does?
When Scot and brother go away on road trips for work I'll have my mom right downstairs (it's a plus that she's a nurse) if I need help with the kids. Right now my oldest son (he'll be 11 February 2nd) is very tough. I'm not sure if he's going through puberty or what but he's been getting kind of violent, very mean and nasty too. Even toward hubby and if you knew my hubby you'd wonder why this boy of ours is still alive with his terrible attitude and behaviour lately! But he'll have his own room when we move. He wont have to put up with 2 little brothers making a mess or touching his stuff. He'll have his own little sanctuary to get away from his big, loud family if he wants or needs to. And then there's my 3 year old girl Lillie. You know that whole "terrible two's" thing and "horrible three's", yadda yadda.... Well my older 4 kids didn't get that. They were very great (messy but what kid isn't) toddlers. I laughed at the terrible two's. And then Lillie came along. It started when she was 18 months old. And it gets worse with each passing day, week, month, year. I kind of understand why some people snap and do bad things. I would NEVER, but I kind of understand it.
When you have your 3 year old screaming in your face, telling you NO, hitting, kicking, biting you, you can totally lose your cool! I've had to walk away, go outside and smoke a cigarette while Lillie pounded on the glass door screaming and crying and wanting me to come back in but I wouldn't. Not until I was calm enough to be as patient as possible with her. I never thought I'd say this, but, as a mother, I'm 100% completely at loss as to what to do with this 3 year old of mine most days. I can't spank her. I wont spank her. She would just hit back anyway. Time out chairs don't work; I'd have to strap her to it and sit there to make sure she didn't topple it over on herself. So there's that.
We're going to stick it out in this amazing house we live in for 6 months though. I'm going to miss it more than a crack head needing their next fix. But I have to put my family and our financial crisis first. It wont do my kids any good to be homeless if we can't keep paying to live in this big amazing house. So we have rooms to build, floors to put in, walls to paint before we can make the big move. And that's ok. We can do it all ourselves. We are quite the handy and crafty family. I may need lots of coffee and I'm going to be a total wine whore through the process, until we're officially settled in and secure, but we're going to make it! *giant weight lifted*
You know that Ultimate Proposal some of you read about? It's happening. I left hubby be to think about it in his own way. I didn't want to nag him (let's face it, we all nag each other sometimes and we shouldn't) about it even though I was so hyped up that I already was planning colors to paint all the rooms and I didn't yet know if Scot was going to go for it. Somewhere deep down I knew he would. The financial aspects were far greater than any downfall to moving. In fact, it's financial security. If one of my kids needs a new pair of sneakers (which with my 3 sons is like every other week), I can go buy the damn sneakers. I don't have to look at my checking account and think 'do I get gas in my van so I can take my daughter back and forth to color guard practice this week or do I ask her to find rides so I can buy a pair of sneakers for her brother' because I'll be able to get gas AND buy sneakers. I wont stress out, hubby wont stress out and my brother (who lives with us and will move with us) wont stress out about running out of heating oil and having to go without heat and hot water for a couple weeks because we have to pay the rent first or get oil and risk the landlord evicting us because we ask him to hold the check late too often. We're stressed, we're exhausted. We don't want that anymore. Who does?
When Scot and brother go away on road trips for work I'll have my mom right downstairs (it's a plus that she's a nurse) if I need help with the kids. Right now my oldest son (he'll be 11 February 2nd) is very tough. I'm not sure if he's going through puberty or what but he's been getting kind of violent, very mean and nasty too. Even toward hubby and if you knew my hubby you'd wonder why this boy of ours is still alive with his terrible attitude and behaviour lately! But he'll have his own room when we move. He wont have to put up with 2 little brothers making a mess or touching his stuff. He'll have his own little sanctuary to get away from his big, loud family if he wants or needs to. And then there's my 3 year old girl Lillie. You know that whole "terrible two's" thing and "horrible three's", yadda yadda.... Well my older 4 kids didn't get that. They were very great (messy but what kid isn't) toddlers. I laughed at the terrible two's. And then Lillie came along. It started when she was 18 months old. And it gets worse with each passing day, week, month, year. I kind of understand why some people snap and do bad things. I would NEVER, but I kind of understand it.
When you have your 3 year old screaming in your face, telling you NO, hitting, kicking, biting you, you can totally lose your cool! I've had to walk away, go outside and smoke a cigarette while Lillie pounded on the glass door screaming and crying and wanting me to come back in but I wouldn't. Not until I was calm enough to be as patient as possible with her. I never thought I'd say this, but, as a mother, I'm 100% completely at loss as to what to do with this 3 year old of mine most days. I can't spank her. I wont spank her. She would just hit back anyway. Time out chairs don't work; I'd have to strap her to it and sit there to make sure she didn't topple it over on herself. So there's that.
We're going to stick it out in this amazing house we live in for 6 months though. I'm going to miss it more than a crack head needing their next fix. But I have to put my family and our financial crisis first. It wont do my kids any good to be homeless if we can't keep paying to live in this big amazing house. So we have rooms to build, floors to put in, walls to paint before we can make the big move. And that's ok. We can do it all ourselves. We are quite the handy and crafty family. I may need lots of coffee and I'm going to be a total wine whore through the process, until we're officially settled in and secure, but we're going to make it! *giant weight lifted*
Sunday, January 4, 2015
The Ultimate Proposition
It's not what you think. I don't mean I was propositioned for sex. Unless you count my husband. I mean, my mom made the deal of the century for my family and I.
Let me start at the beginning. Bear with me, as this may be a long story by the time I'm done. My husband Scot and I once moved to South Carolina where his sister lives with our oldest who was 3 and our 2nd who was 6 months old at the time, in hopes of making a better financial life for our little family. That didn't work out so well. We were worse off than before we left Connecticut, financially. And then after a few months, and missing Christmas with my family and New year's AND my son's first birthday, I was suicidal. I also found myself pregnant with our 3rd child because we were epically stupid and didn't use birth control. So that February of 2005, we took our tax return, rented a truck, bought a mini van, packed ourselves up, and came back home. We stayed with my mom for about a month in her tiny 2 bedroom apartment that she shared with my 2 youngest siblings. That was rough!
Finally we found a really great place that we shared with my dad. Things were going great for a while. Then we got a mice infestation and the cheap ass landlords wouldn't hire a real exterminator and got their lawyer to lie to the Dept. of Health so there was nothing we could do but move. I was not about to stay there with mouse shit everywhere, dead mice on my now 4 year old daughter's bedroom floor, with a 2 year old and a 1 year old. And guess what? I was pregnant again. Can you say STUPID??? EPIC, what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-us stupid. We had condoms, but one night Scot just didn't put one on and I looked right at him, dead in the eye, and said, "You do know this means I'm pregnant right?" Of course he blew it off as nothing until the next month rolled around and I didn't get my period. I'm getting off track though. My point is, we HAD to move. It was now a severe health hazard to stay in that place. So what do we do then?
Well, my mom's upstairs neighbors moved out so there was an entire 2 bedroom apartment for rent. With the landlord's consent, we moved my mom upstairs and we moved in downstairs with 3 kids and one on the way that we never even told them about. Legally we didn't have to tell them. Things were good for a while. The rent was cheap, it included heat. Then the health problems hit me. I found out I had thyroid cancer. Pretty advanced. I had a baseball sized tumor on the left side of my thyroid that started to infiltrate blood vessels. I'm happy to say 7 years later I am cancer free though! But I'm getting off track again. I warned y'all that I do that!
We started having problems with the landlords not fixing things around the house. The electrical wiring was shot. The walls were crumbling. The bathtub was falling through the floor. They just kept sending "John" their horrible handyman to "fix" things. Finally we had all had enough. My mom started looking into buying houses to get us out of there. She just needed to clean up her credit just a hair more to get the loan she needed. So she moved in with us and gave up the apartment upstairs apartment so she had the money to clean up her credit. Then one winter the landlords dropped a bomb on us. They had moved to Georgia and one day I get a phone call from the wife saying they were no longer going to buy oil to heat our 3 family house that shared ONE furnace! Excuse me? Fuck you! So we stopped paying the rent. I knew the eviction papers were coming. A month later we found a new place to live and we got the hell out of dodge.
That new place to live is great. It's where we currently reside. My mom had her own part of this huge house and we had the rest of it. The only problem is that it's extremely expensive to live here. The rent is $1,900 a month. The electric bill runs anywhere from $230 a month to $500+, depending on what time of year it is and if we have air conditioners running. Luckily there's no gas in this house. The furnace heats our hot water and it's well water so there's no water bill. But the cost of heating oil is not exactly inexpensive right now. Which leads me to my next paragraph. I have to back track a bit.
For a while I had temporary guardianship of my sisters 2 children and they lived here with us. But it was only supposed be for a couple of months, which turned into a year. Our landlord didn't want that many people here anymore and gave us until September 2014 to get my niece and nephew out. My sister, a single mother, had nowhere to go with them so my mom, who was finally in a position to buy a house, went and bought a house. She thought she was going to have to take over guardianship of the kids and move with them. But my sister and her current boyfriend (not her kids fathers), wound up getting their own place finally. So my mom went ahead and moved into her new house. But that left Scot and I in a really big bind. We can't afford the rent by ourselves at all, let alone the exorbitant electric bill and oil every month throughout the winter (only every 6 weeks in the summer, or so), on top of our vehicles, our phone bill, car insurance. All the every day things we need for our kids. Oh by the way, we now have 5 children. But baby #5 was a truly honest oops. I got pregnant from complications of medications and health issues related to the cancer I had.
My mom said she would pay her half of the rent for this house until we got our 2015 tax return so we had the means to move into something we could better afford. And then my baby brother moved in with us, in place of my mom. But he can't afford what she was paying here. She's a nurse. He builds office furniture for $12 an hour. So my mom is currently still paying $350 a month of our rent but Scot and are are struggling with our portion, the electric bill, the phone bill, our car insurance. Right now my van is not registered. I have to pay my city property taxes before I can reregister it. So yes, I've been driving it illegally. SShhhh. I know I just posted that for the whole damn world to see. Oh well. There's just not enough money for everything. With my continuing health problems, and having 5 children with no way to pay for childcare, I can't work to help support our family.
I knew my mom wasn't going to like living alone for very long. She's lonely. She's also now struggling financially because of her new mortgage, her continuing to help us with our rent, and all her expenses (she totally has way too many credit cards, I may have to reign her in a bit financially haha). So yesterday she made me the Ultimate Proposition.
Here's the deal... When she dies, I get her house. Not my brothers. Not my sisters. I DO. I'm the only level headed one of us that can even take care of a house and final expenses and her life insurance policies, etc... So I get the house. She doesn't want to live alone anymore. She was planning on renting out 2 of her rooms to someone to help financially and so she's not alone in the big ole house of hers. But she REALLY doesn't want to rent to a stranger and frankly, I don't want her to either. I'm fearful of that and it'd be awkward going to visit my mom knowing she's got someone living upstairs in her house. We had a nice long talk yesterday about all this. Here's the deal... She offered her entire upstairs to me and my family for $1,000 a month INCLUDING EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. If we want cable tv we'd have to pay for that ourselves cuz she's happy with her Roku and Netflix and Hulu. And of course our cell phones. But this would mean financial security for us and her. It would mean going from wondering where the fuck we're going to come up with $300 for the next oil delivery because we're going to run out and have no heat or hot water, to never having to worry about that again. It means only having to save $250 a week to give to my mom, not some landlord who doesn't like fixing his properties up, instead of scrambling at the beginning of the month to come up with the $950 that is our share of JUST the rent for this big awesome house we live in now. It means never having to move again unless, God Forbid, the house burns down. Even my brother can come. She offered to build him his own little space in the basement. She's got a 3 tiered back yard. The neighborhood is fabulous.
There's just one catch. Her town's high school does not have color guard. I'm afraid it would devastate my daughter to move away from here. So what do we do? Struggle financially, be under so much stress Scot and I are at each others throats, and STILL possibly lose what we have here because we just can't do it anymore (after March my mom isn't helping us with the rent anymore, she just can't)? Or break our almost-14-year-old daughter's heart? I know you're thinking, she'll get over it. Financial security is the most important thing in this world we live in right now. I know. God do I friggin know. IF, and only IF, we go through with the move, it wouldn't be for at least 6 months or more. We have to build a room for my brother. We have to winterize one of the upstairs rooms to make it a bedroom. We have to put in new flooring in one of the rooms the old owners cats ruined by using the carpeting as a litter box. Also, I'm not ripping my kids out of school mid-year to start another school and take Amanda (my 13 year old) away from color guard right this instant. We did that when we moved to this house and I wont do that to them again. The move would be during the summer when there's no school to interfere.
So what do you think? I really would appreciate opinions, realizing that yes, they're just opinions, and that my husband, brother and I need to figure out what the best decision is for us and our family. But I'd still like to hear from you.
Feel free to share my blog with everyone you know. Share it on facebook, Twitter, your own blog, wherever. I don't mind. I just started this up and have nobody to read what I have to say yet! Thank you for reading this though. Really. Thank you. And please, get used to really, REALLY long blog posts. The writer in me just doesn't know how to keep anything short and sweet. Also, I'm Italian and I talk A LOT!
~Rosie
Let me start at the beginning. Bear with me, as this may be a long story by the time I'm done. My husband Scot and I once moved to South Carolina where his sister lives with our oldest who was 3 and our 2nd who was 6 months old at the time, in hopes of making a better financial life for our little family. That didn't work out so well. We were worse off than before we left Connecticut, financially. And then after a few months, and missing Christmas with my family and New year's AND my son's first birthday, I was suicidal. I also found myself pregnant with our 3rd child because we were epically stupid and didn't use birth control. So that February of 2005, we took our tax return, rented a truck, bought a mini van, packed ourselves up, and came back home. We stayed with my mom for about a month in her tiny 2 bedroom apartment that she shared with my 2 youngest siblings. That was rough!
Finally we found a really great place that we shared with my dad. Things were going great for a while. Then we got a mice infestation and the cheap ass landlords wouldn't hire a real exterminator and got their lawyer to lie to the Dept. of Health so there was nothing we could do but move. I was not about to stay there with mouse shit everywhere, dead mice on my now 4 year old daughter's bedroom floor, with a 2 year old and a 1 year old. And guess what? I was pregnant again. Can you say STUPID??? EPIC, what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-us stupid. We had condoms, but one night Scot just didn't put one on and I looked right at him, dead in the eye, and said, "You do know this means I'm pregnant right?" Of course he blew it off as nothing until the next month rolled around and I didn't get my period. I'm getting off track though. My point is, we HAD to move. It was now a severe health hazard to stay in that place. So what do we do then?
Well, my mom's upstairs neighbors moved out so there was an entire 2 bedroom apartment for rent. With the landlord's consent, we moved my mom upstairs and we moved in downstairs with 3 kids and one on the way that we never even told them about. Legally we didn't have to tell them. Things were good for a while. The rent was cheap, it included heat. Then the health problems hit me. I found out I had thyroid cancer. Pretty advanced. I had a baseball sized tumor on the left side of my thyroid that started to infiltrate blood vessels. I'm happy to say 7 years later I am cancer free though! But I'm getting off track again. I warned y'all that I do that!
We started having problems with the landlords not fixing things around the house. The electrical wiring was shot. The walls were crumbling. The bathtub was falling through the floor. They just kept sending "John" their horrible handyman to "fix" things. Finally we had all had enough. My mom started looking into buying houses to get us out of there. She just needed to clean up her credit just a hair more to get the loan she needed. So she moved in with us and gave up the apartment upstairs apartment so she had the money to clean up her credit. Then one winter the landlords dropped a bomb on us. They had moved to Georgia and one day I get a phone call from the wife saying they were no longer going to buy oil to heat our 3 family house that shared ONE furnace! Excuse me? Fuck you! So we stopped paying the rent. I knew the eviction papers were coming. A month later we found a new place to live and we got the hell out of dodge.
That new place to live is great. It's where we currently reside. My mom had her own part of this huge house and we had the rest of it. The only problem is that it's extremely expensive to live here. The rent is $1,900 a month. The electric bill runs anywhere from $230 a month to $500+, depending on what time of year it is and if we have air conditioners running. Luckily there's no gas in this house. The furnace heats our hot water and it's well water so there's no water bill. But the cost of heating oil is not exactly inexpensive right now. Which leads me to my next paragraph. I have to back track a bit.
For a while I had temporary guardianship of my sisters 2 children and they lived here with us. But it was only supposed be for a couple of months, which turned into a year. Our landlord didn't want that many people here anymore and gave us until September 2014 to get my niece and nephew out. My sister, a single mother, had nowhere to go with them so my mom, who was finally in a position to buy a house, went and bought a house. She thought she was going to have to take over guardianship of the kids and move with them. But my sister and her current boyfriend (not her kids fathers), wound up getting their own place finally. So my mom went ahead and moved into her new house. But that left Scot and I in a really big bind. We can't afford the rent by ourselves at all, let alone the exorbitant electric bill and oil every month throughout the winter (only every 6 weeks in the summer, or so), on top of our vehicles, our phone bill, car insurance. All the every day things we need for our kids. Oh by the way, we now have 5 children. But baby #5 was a truly honest oops. I got pregnant from complications of medications and health issues related to the cancer I had.
My mom said she would pay her half of the rent for this house until we got our 2015 tax return so we had the means to move into something we could better afford. And then my baby brother moved in with us, in place of my mom. But he can't afford what she was paying here. She's a nurse. He builds office furniture for $12 an hour. So my mom is currently still paying $350 a month of our rent but Scot and are are struggling with our portion, the electric bill, the phone bill, our car insurance. Right now my van is not registered. I have to pay my city property taxes before I can reregister it. So yes, I've been driving it illegally. SShhhh. I know I just posted that for the whole damn world to see. Oh well. There's just not enough money for everything. With my continuing health problems, and having 5 children with no way to pay for childcare, I can't work to help support our family.
I knew my mom wasn't going to like living alone for very long. She's lonely. She's also now struggling financially because of her new mortgage, her continuing to help us with our rent, and all her expenses (she totally has way too many credit cards, I may have to reign her in a bit financially haha). So yesterday she made me the Ultimate Proposition.
Here's the deal... When she dies, I get her house. Not my brothers. Not my sisters. I DO. I'm the only level headed one of us that can even take care of a house and final expenses and her life insurance policies, etc... So I get the house. She doesn't want to live alone anymore. She was planning on renting out 2 of her rooms to someone to help financially and so she's not alone in the big ole house of hers. But she REALLY doesn't want to rent to a stranger and frankly, I don't want her to either. I'm fearful of that and it'd be awkward going to visit my mom knowing she's got someone living upstairs in her house. We had a nice long talk yesterday about all this. Here's the deal... She offered her entire upstairs to me and my family for $1,000 a month INCLUDING EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. If we want cable tv we'd have to pay for that ourselves cuz she's happy with her Roku and Netflix and Hulu. And of course our cell phones. But this would mean financial security for us and her. It would mean going from wondering where the fuck we're going to come up with $300 for the next oil delivery because we're going to run out and have no heat or hot water, to never having to worry about that again. It means only having to save $250 a week to give to my mom, not some landlord who doesn't like fixing his properties up, instead of scrambling at the beginning of the month to come up with the $950 that is our share of JUST the rent for this big awesome house we live in now. It means never having to move again unless, God Forbid, the house burns down. Even my brother can come. She offered to build him his own little space in the basement. She's got a 3 tiered back yard. The neighborhood is fabulous.
There's just one catch. Her town's high school does not have color guard. I'm afraid it would devastate my daughter to move away from here. So what do we do? Struggle financially, be under so much stress Scot and I are at each others throats, and STILL possibly lose what we have here because we just can't do it anymore (after March my mom isn't helping us with the rent anymore, she just can't)? Or break our almost-14-year-old daughter's heart? I know you're thinking, she'll get over it. Financial security is the most important thing in this world we live in right now. I know. God do I friggin know. IF, and only IF, we go through with the move, it wouldn't be for at least 6 months or more. We have to build a room for my brother. We have to winterize one of the upstairs rooms to make it a bedroom. We have to put in new flooring in one of the rooms the old owners cats ruined by using the carpeting as a litter box. Also, I'm not ripping my kids out of school mid-year to start another school and take Amanda (my 13 year old) away from color guard right this instant. We did that when we moved to this house and I wont do that to them again. The move would be during the summer when there's no school to interfere.
So what do you think? I really would appreciate opinions, realizing that yes, they're just opinions, and that my husband, brother and I need to figure out what the best decision is for us and our family. But I'd still like to hear from you.
Feel free to share my blog with everyone you know. Share it on facebook, Twitter, your own blog, wherever. I don't mind. I just started this up and have nobody to read what I have to say yet! Thank you for reading this though. Really. Thank you. And please, get used to really, REALLY long blog posts. The writer in me just doesn't know how to keep anything short and sweet. Also, I'm Italian and I talk A LOT!
~Rosie
Friday, January 2, 2015
Starting Over
Hi! Let me introduce myself. I'm Rosie. I'm married and we have 5 kids. I'm not new to blogging, I just decided the past needs to stay there. 2014 was a pretty bad year for my family and I. So I'm leaving it all behind.
I'll give y'all the short version of me (which is still pretty long so ya might wanna grab snacks and a drink now). I smoke, I drink (but I'm only a lush on Thursday nights at bowling), I use all the swears. I'm a loud mouthed, opinionated Italian-French-Cherokee-Irish Bitch. I'm also a cancer survivor which is why I'm trying to quit smoking but it's hard. It's really hard to quit something you've been doing since you were 17. I don't even know why I was stupid enough to light that first cigarette. But I did it nonetheless. I bowl, sometimes I scrapbook, make cards and do some pretty crafty shit. Sometimes I go down to hubby's man cave and shoot some pool on our pretty awesome pool table. I love to write and I don't do it nearly often enough. I love to talk. Sometimes you have to tell me to shut up or just talk over me. I love collecting shit. Not literal shit, but stuff. Tiny stuff, mugs, beer and shot glasses, Christmas ornaments and really quirky, unusual earrings. I can thank my Grammy for that one! Oh and vases. I'm a total dork. I'm so not ashamed of it like I was once upon a time either. Some people might say children too but I got that fixed after 5 kids! I'm a couch potato. I eat potatoes. And I'm a complete and utter whore of all the wine. And beer. And coffee. Especially if the coffee has chocolate in it. Eat. All. The. Chocolate.
I'm told I'm funny. In real life. Never when I write. My funny apparently goes out the window when I try to put my thoughts into words. I can write about all the hilarious shit my brother says though. That boy gives me more material to talk about than all 5 of my kids sometimes. Speaking of him, he wants to go to Walmart and I'm his ride. I'll end this here. Thanks for reading! I'm glad you stopped by.
Rosie The Krazy Wine Whore
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