Makes a Mother Proud

Yesterday my daughter exclaimed to me with great enthusiasm. "I don't ever want to be a cheerleader! It's too girly!"

Oh, my heart is filled with such pride. (Just ignore for the moment that I was once a head cheerleader myself.)

And then, after her rather inauspicious start at soccer camp, yesterday she won the day's Coach's Award for her perseverance, attitude and for scoring her first goal. She was so proud of herself. And her brother made a spectacle of himself cheering for her.

It was very cute.

Since Tuesday afternoon, a bunch of school parents have been very friendly to me at camp pick-up. And the head coach made a point to talk to me too. What a difference a day makes.

Don't let any of this make you assume that I'm in a better mood. I am cranky and reveling in it right now.

Frumpy Square Peg, Bitchy Round A-Holes

The people who love and care about me have one job for the next year.

They have to remind me over and over again that I didn't like the people at our old school at first either.

Man, there are some snooty parents at the new school. Some have been outright rude! (Misty is thinking well, yeah! right about now.)

I think there is always a danger when you choose a private school that the level of snot will outweigh all the other benefits. The majority of parents I've met in the last couple of days have made me start composing applications for the other schools for the 2009-2010 school year.

But I keep reminding myself, the kids loved it there. This school was one of our top choices because the students there just seemed so happy. The staff and teachers weren't snooty. They were great!

Just because I don't fit in with the private school moms doesn't mean my kids won't be happy there.

And hell! I didn't fit in at the old school either. It took me three or four years to make some really good friends there. And some of the moms I had pegged as the most snooty early on turned out to be not just good friends, but some of the best people I have ever met.

My husband says, "Just be yourself and smile and do the things you always do and you'll eventually find the worthwhile people here too." I know he's right. It takes people a while to see past my exterior. And it takes me a while to overcome my shyness. I know that there are rich people who are good people. I just have to find them.

But it's going to be damn lonely for a while.

Mother of Inventiveness

I have Baileys, JD, Stoli O, and Kahlua.

I also have Diet Coke with Splenda, Light Lemonade, water, peach flavored Propel, Sprite 0, skim milk and pickle juice.

Mix me a drink.

I sorely need it.

The Waterworks

My daughter bugs me.

Have I mentioned this before? Oh, what. Just about a thousand times? That sounds about right.

I mean, I love the kid. I really do. She has some wonderful qualities, not one of which is the ability to stop bugging the hell out of her mother.

Lately, I have been making a very concerted effort to be extremely positive with her. I thought coaching her softball team might ruin our relationship forever, but it actually seemed to help quite a bit.

She just gets into situations that...well...no other mothers seem to have to deal with this crap. These situations always end in tears.

I probably seem like a heartless bitch to every other mother out there, but I know my kid. Coddling her through her tears is the last thing she needs. The slightest showing of sympathy only degenerates the situation further.

The kid needs some stones.

Yesterday was the first day of soccer camp. Even though I think she belongs with the nine-year-olds (she'll be nine in a couple of weeks and has been playing soccer for five years, plus I wanted her to make friends who will be in her level at the start of soccer season) they put her in the "beginner" group with the 7-8 year-olds. Which is cool.

I had to pick my son up from camp at noon so I spied on her while I was waiting. She was doing pretty well.

I came back a little early for pick-up so I could watch her play. As I parked the car I just happened to catch her tie-dye socks out of the corner of my eye. It's a good thing I did because she was playing on the far other side of the complex as I had expected. It looked like she was playing with 9-10 year-olds.

You know I had a moment of ooooh, maybe they moved her up because she did so well pride.

It was to be short lived.

Of course she didn't leave the field and head toward the parents like every other kid when they were dismissed. I had to walk up and retrieve her. Which is when she told me that she had gotten lost after lunch.

She spent the majority of the afternoon wandering around because she couldn't remember her coach's name. Or apparently, what side of the fields she had been playing on all morning or what any of her new friends and teammates looked like or how freaking old she was.

Apparently, she finally asked a coach who just told her to go join in with some team.

And that's how she wasted her afternoon at soccer camp.

You know, that's fine. Whatever. She made a mistake. A totally ditsy mistake that took the joy out of the whole experience, but whatever. But I knew that they made a big deal out of checking each kid out at the end of the day with the right coach.

Her original group was gathered on the bleachers and I told her to run and join them. That's when the tears started.

I was so put out. By her. By the camp. What coach loses a kid halfway through the day and doesn't bother to tell anyone or look for her?

She could have left campus for all they knew.

I was so disappointed. I had been so excited to pick her up and hear about her day. She loves soccer. She desperately needs new friends. And it all degenerated into another tear fest.

I swear. Nothing is ever easy with her. Nothing.

It's funny, because my husband feels the same way about my son.

Ready for the CIA

My husband wasn't gone for more than fifteen minutes on Friday when all hell broke loose.

With the DirecTV guys still in the house, my husband headed off for his very last week in his old job on the bayou. And my son locked himself out of his bedroom.

Who the fuck puts locks on every bedroom door in a house?

Now I can't stop thinking about what kind of kinky lifestyle the former owners led. I mean, what other reason is there to put a lock on a bedroom door than a sexual one? Having met the bleach blond former owner at our cul-de-sac party, the images aren't pretty.

Anyway, I tried to pick the lock without success, so I dismantled the knob. I still couldn't pop the lock and the DirecTV guy felt bad for me so he gave it a try with no luck.

Thirty seconds later, I put some muscle into it and popped that bad boy open.

The DirecTV guy was quite impressed. I think he may have been a little turned on. You know how some men like strong, lock-picking women.

It's a MoBlog! With Pictures

Sort of.

I'm blogging from my back deck while I watch the kids swim in the pool. (One of those cheap above ground numbers you can buy at Target.)

I'd be blogging on my husband's laptop and our spiffy new wireless connection but he took it with him on his week-long trip back to the bayou.

He left me here with two bored kids who only want to swim. I can't leave them in the pool unsupervised so I'm stuck out here on the deck.

Meanwhile, I got two boxes unpacked in the last two days. That's right. Count 'em. Two.

Thank god for soccer camp next week.

I guess the forced rest is kind of nice. It is beautiful here. Too bad gazing at the beautiful landscape only makes me stress about maintaining it.

And there are a lot of bugs. Bugs ruin everything. I'm such an indoor girl.

In other news, I've realized that my skin is more pale than a Band Aid.

Maybe some time communing with the bugs and plants wouldn't kill me.



Update: How about some pictures?

The back deck featuring the umbrella my daughter's class made for the school auction (lovingly referred to as the thousand dollar umbrella).

From the side toward the front.

One side

The Cherry trees across the back

The back corner and the cheap pool. I hope we'll have the inground put in by next summer.

The house from the backyard

Across the back toward the other side.

Back toward the deck.

The other side yard and a half-put-together trampoline. The trampoline might move to the other side and a playset might go here.

From the front to the back.

What do all of these pictures have in common. They all have plants in them that I have no idea how to take care of!

Square Pegs, Roundish Holes

It is taking us a ridiculous amount of time to unpack here at the new House of Tuna.

It took me the entire three days between dropping my kids off at my parents and heading back to pick them up just to unpack the kids' bedrooms. Of course unpacking my daughter's room also meant throwing away mounds of stuff I couldn't get rid of when she was around.

The poor packers must have been horrified to have to pack her room. There was a whole box of stuff that they found behind her beds when they moved them. They also packed up a big green garbage bag very neatly in a box.

I guess it's better then them packing up the sex toys I had forgotten about when we moved from Florida.

There's nothing like unrolling a huge lump of paper and finding a big, purple dildo wrapped lovingly inside.

Unpacking the rest of the house has been an exercise in frustration, like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. The house is so different from our last one. There are tons more kitchen cabinets, but no medicine cabinets. We lost a playroom and an office, but gained a bedroom and open living room/dining room combo.

I swear it is going to take me a month just to get the essentials unpacked. I'm still living out of a suitcase and after three days of unpacking the kitchen, I still haven't found the plates and glasses.

Complain, complain, complain. I know. I'm in a horrible mood and I wish I could have just stayed in bed all day. (Considering I just got up, I practically did.)

Mouthes of Babes

Yesterday as I was heading out the door to pick up some lunch, my son called out, "Why does Mommy always have to do all the work?"

Fuck, yeah, kid! Why is that?

Let's all just ignore for a moment that my husband does more before 9 a.m. than I do all day. Let's ignore his trips to the dump, manual labor, lawn mowing and multiple frustrating fix-its around the house.

Ignore it! Ignore it!

In the eyes of my kid, I do all the work.

And kids always tell the truth, right?

(There's a cookie in the cupboard just for you, Buddy.)

On Swan River

While much has happened in the last couple of weeks, nothing was more noteworthy than my husband's attempt to collect my life insurance policy.

I mean, I know things have been tight lately, but I'm not sure the $300,000 I'm worth dead would be quite enough incentive for him to try and kill me.

You see, while we were on Cape Cod, we had the brilliant idea to take the kids kayaking on a small waterway called Swan River. For only fifty bucks, we could rent two tandem kayaks for an hour and a half. In that amount of time we could either head upriver to Swan Pond or downriver to the ocean side beach.

I was leaning toward Swan Pond.

I was a little nervous about kayaking, as I have never done it before. But when I saw the retired couple gearing up in front of us, I felt a little better. The women overheard my husband ask, "Which way do you want to go?" and piped right up to tell us that the tide was going out so we should head upriver toward the pond.

"You don't want to have to fight the current back up when you're tired," she said. "If you head to the pond, you can practically float back here on the tide."

Sounded good to me. "Did you hear that?" I asked my husband.

"Well, yeah, but I really want to go to the beach." he replied.

"Are you sure? I'm not in very good shape, you know." I felt the need to point out.

"You'll be fine," he assured me as he always does. And we set off.

The first forty-five minutes or so of our trip were quite fun. I was even thinking about buying our own kayak to use on our own much larger river. Then we passed under a bridge. And we saw the ocean.

"I want to turn around!" my son yelled over his shoulder to me.

I have to admit, I was of the same mind. That ocean looked awfully big from that little kayak. But suddenly, we had no choice.

I knew if I stayed broadside against the current for too long that we would get swept away. So I used my paddle as a rudder to make the sharpest turn possible.

And then we were headed broadside out into the Atlantic.

My son, clearly the smartest of the whole family, decided he wanted to bail out before we hit the big surf. I agreed. As I screamed for my husband (who had steered himself and my daughter onto a sandbar) to help us my son gracefully climbed out.

My husband was able to grab onto our kayak as we passed, and I took a full on header into the water.

We rested for a while on the sandbar, but we knew we'd have to get back upriver somehow. And the tide was going out fast.

After walking the kayaks upriver twenty feet at a time for well over a half hour, my husband decided I was ready to paddle. I lasted for all of about two minutes before I had a total breakdown.

If I stopped paddling at all, we'd start drifting backward toward the ocean again. In my panicked mind at the time, I was fighting for my son's life. Though I kept paddling, even though my arms were on fire I was also sobbing and alternating between crying "I can't do this" and yelling "I'm so mad at your father!"

My husband and daughter ended up towing us back to the rental place.

And I haven't been able to life my hands above my waist since then.

I don't know. $300,000 is a lot of money, but my husband should have considered that he'd have to pay for the lost kayak. And that retired woman could have been a witness should my husband have been brought up on murder charges. I'm just not sure if the risk was worth it.

Next time, we head toward the pond.

Limitations

Well, so much for blogging regularly.

I have been almost desperate to get back to some kind of routine. Things have been so crazy for so long that I feel like I have lost a part of myself somewhere in the shuffle.

But how can I complain? Right now I'm curled up and relaxing at our house on Cape Cod.

It's been really nice having this time with my little family. But, alas, we have no computer here.

My hands are shot...carpel tunnel, I think, from too much...typing. I can only write so much from my Treo.

But I will fight through the pain in order to type this:

Go Celts!

See you soon.