Done. Or am I? Okay, I'm done. Pretty positively maybe done.

Maybe if we didn't make such breathtakingly beautiful babies, this wouldn't be quite so difficult for me.







As Charlie nears his second birthday, as he becomes more "big boy" and less "my baby", and as Ella is inching closer and closer to the first day of kindergarten (ohmygod) I find myself in a sort of a pickle. I am torn between being excited that we are moving beyond the baby days, the diapers, the teething, and being sad to wave goodbye to this season of my life, with the snuggles and the first words and the milestones.

Some days are full of smiles and hugs and I-love-yous, and I think "YES! I could totally have three kids, no problem. This would be easy, because I am so on top of my life and have everything completely together." And the idea seems plausible, do-able, even like it might be a (gasp) good idea. After all, there is nothing more delicious than the smell of a newborn, or fat baby legs just begging to be kissed and/or eaten whole, or the way that they sleep on your chest curled up like a little tree frog. Then the next day Charlie slams his face into the wall while running seventy miles an hour and needs hugs at the exact moment that Ella needs me to wipe her in the bathroom and the oven timer is beeping and the dog just puked and we have to be in the car to drive to dance class in three minutes. And then the idea seems horrific, scary, and not at all like something a semi-sane person would consider doing, ever. After all, there would be nothing worse than adding MORE poop for me to manage, or reverting back to the twelve gallon diaper bag days, during which I feel like a damned pack mule, and let's not forget the reason that babies sleep like sweet, sleeping little tree frogs is because it is 3:45am and they finally pass out on your chest after you have walked around the house for seven hours doing the Baby Jiggle. And they wake up ten minutes later to eat. No thanks.

I think that in all of this I am mostly just mourning the loss of this whole time in my life: The Baby Bearing Days. I will never feel another little foot kick my ribs from the inside. I will never fold teeny tiny onesies with a smile on my face, anticipating a new little someone's arrival any day. I will never smell baby neck in the wee hours of the morning as it snuggles into my side. And I will never watch another baby of mine cross from baby to toddler with one drunken, wobbly step. But, I will also never have to heat up another bottle at 4am, or go through colic again, or know the pain of caring for two kids while recovering from childbirth again. So I guess I can only be so sad about the changing of the seasons for so long, because we are on to other things. Things that people with newborns cannot do, like take family vacations, or be thisclose to being completely done with diapers FOREVER (I think I gave myself chills just typing that...IMAGINE! NO DIAPERS!), or go out to eat without a newborn screaming at the top of their lungs. So while I may be sad about the end of my baby-making career, I know that we have already made two awesome ones that will give me more than a lifetime of happy things to come. And that will be enough.

I'm terrified of the country, y'all.

So, I've been running for a while now. When we moved into this house I was excited to map out a serene, isolated route for my morning jogs, one where I wouldn't have to worry about crossing busy streets and running in the grass to dodge traffic. Two paths presented themselves: Running back through our neighborhood, complete with streetlights and houses and a general feeling of safety. Or I could run on the golf cart path that winds its way through the middle of our neighborhood, with no lights and very few houses around. This is what I pictured when I thought about running the golf cart path:





Needless to say, I chose to run through the neighborhood. "This is gonna be GREAT! And QUIET! And so peaceful! Not to mention that I have the safety of other houses being nearby, but I run early enough in the morning that no one will be out to witness my ass jiggling up those huge hills" I thought. So I set out at 5:30am for my inaugural run. Everything was going great until I reached a stretch of road that is completely, 100% pitch black, with no houses....and it crosses under the interstate overpasses. Having lived in the city my whole life, interstate overpasses mean one thing to me: homeless people. They live under them. They have grocery shopping carts full of god knows what, probably rags soaked in gasoline and some carving knives. But! In the city, this is not generally a problem because you are on a CITY street, with lots of other people around. Lots of witnesses. Not so at 5:30am on a country road that runs straight in between a deserted golf course and a not-corn field. City homeless people know that they are surrounded by people, and thus they remain harmless. But country homeless, left all alone in the forest, could start to get ideas. The husband eased my worries by pointing out that homeless people don't generally hang out near the golf course. Well, he tried to ease my worries, but I tend to catastrophize things until my brain can see nothing but DANGER! FEAR! TERROR! and I have a mini freakout over something that just isn't really deserving of that level of panic.

So off I started, into the darkness with my ipod blaring. This is another thing that is problematic: I am incapable of running without music pounding into my ears. I hear people say that going for a run centers them, lets them think about their problems and meditate, in some form. Well, I hear enough whining and bitching during my days, thank you, and I do not need to hear it from myself for 45 minutes every morning. "You just shut your brain off, young lady, and you RUN", I tell myself. The idea that it makes sense to listen to myself is insane to me, I would much rather listen to The Killers screaming into my ear about what someone told them about a boyfriend or a girlfriend or whatever. This becomes a problem when my brain starts spinning its wheels and realizing that I couldn't hear the overpass-dwelling homeless guy's footsteps approaching with my music up so loud. So I settle for turning my head every ten steps or so just to make sure I am truly still alone out there in the wilderness. While I am looking back, preparing for the inevitable attack, I approach the interstate. Enter fucked up brain again. The interstate is so loud, my brain tells me, that anyone could do anything to anyone out here and no one would hear a thing. Well, shit. So now on top of looking behind me every ten steps I am also now sprinting in the darkness at full speed. Also? Sometimes the pants that I run in tend to slip and slide and maybe start to fall off a little, so what I am doing at this point is sprinting, head-turning, and pulling up my pants at the same time. Somewhere in between the first interstate and the second I become increasingly afraid and maybe start to sing whatever song is on my ipod, just as a coping mechanism. Or, quite possibly, the Homeless Murderers who live on our golf course will think I am certifiably insane and leave me alone. Just then, when the fear has ramped up to Code Red, PANIC, I spot the field. In this field there are very large hay bales scattered about, and in the dark, at 5:30am, they look remarkably like hiding spots for someone to lay in wait for an innocent jogger to pass by and then BAM. What is the "BAM", you might ask? I once saw an episode of CSI where there was a pig farmer who abducted young girls and then killed them and fed them to his pigs. Brain: Stage Left. Running at a heart attack inducing speed, singing "Sexy Back" by Justin Timberlake, pulling my pants up, looking behind me in terror, and now scanning the horizon for pig farmers. This? Is not the peaceful morning jog that I had in mind. As I near the entrance to our neighborhood and see the sweet safety of a street light, I can only imagine what anyone inside their house who might be witnessing this insane spectacle is thinking. "God bless her little heart, there's that retarded girl again. She must really like jogging, she always runs so FAST. She also sings Britney Spears songs while she's coming up that hill, which is weird."

About a month ago my new chiropractor told me that due to me having the "spine of a 55 year old", I should most definitely never, ever run again or I could cause horrific back pain and a possible future surgery on two of my discs. Do you think if I explained to him that the country was trying to kill me, so I had to RUN FOR MY LIFE, he would be cool with it? Sorry, Dr. Josh, but there was a pack of pig farmers after me. Plus the homeless guy. I had to run, the voices told me so.

I'm reaching the end of my rapidly fraying rope.

Maybe it just comes with getting older, maybe having a beyond-busy schedule with two kids and school and dance and laundry and playgroups and everything else that comes with having kids has something to do with this, maybe I've just always been this way but am only recently really realizing it. Whatever the explanation, I find myself rapidly becoming OVER IT. I think that if I was someone who got tattoos, I would get that inscribed somewhere on my body, probably on my forehead so everyone could see it. I'm just...over it. Over people who are fake and flaky and just generally crappy people. People who patronize and blather on and on about meaningless things, when all I really want to say is "SAY WHAT YOU MEAN AND MOVE ON." Friends who do nothing but take take take, and then take some more, with no regard to what may be happening with me or my family. People who waste my time with petty bullshit when I seldom have time to waste on anything, let alone bullshit. Anyone who has a holier-than-thou perspective, and people who look at the world through NOTHING but rose-colored glasses. 'Cause guess what? Life isn't always beautiful. Things suck. No need to paint a bad situation with your sunny yellow paintbrush and call it a masterpiece, when what it really is is sick kids up all night, or a mountain of laundry that is threatening to overtake the house, or seventeen bills all being due in the same week. Shut up. Life IS beautiful most of the time, but your inability to say anything other than "This is GREAT! It's an opportunity to GROW as a PERSON!" makes me want to scream, because it makes me feel crazy. "IS life really perfect, and do I maybe just have a shitty one?" I wonder to myself. After much deep conversation with the sister about this subject, I can say without a doubt that no, no I do not have a shitty life. I have a quite wonderful one, actually. I love my kids with a fierceness that sometimes scares me, I love my husband, and I get to stay home and take care of all of them. But when you, oh, get a flea infestation in your house that makes you consider moving again, and you have seventeen hundred flea bites on your legs and nothing will get rid of the damn fleas? THIS is not beautiful. Bad things happen. It's okay to let the words "This sucks" pass through your lips.

Not sure where I was going with this except to say that I'm over it. All the fake people, the fake happiness, and bad friends. Like I said, maybe it's just getting older that has allowed me to lower my tolerance for these types of people. But lowered, it is. And I have a feeling it's not going to go back up any time soon.

PS: After another conversation with the sister, I realized that I have been censoring myself. I have a fairly filthy mouth (not around the kids, of course), but thoughts in the back of my head have kept me from writing the way that I want to write. "But, I know that such-and-such reads my blog, I can't say THAT!!!1!". That is not to say that I am going to scatter the F-word about just for the hell of it, but if I want to say it, goddammit, I will. So there. And if you have a problem with it? Just go and read this blog instead:

http://www.dailycuteness.com/