Valentine’s Day Redux

Hope everyone had a day full of loooooooooove!

Bill and I were in the midst of a minor marital spat on the night of the 13th.  Me being overly dramatic and overreacting about something minor.  As usual.  I was kind of in the mood to forget about Valentine’s Day, but it came anyway.

I’m glad that Bill is not overly dramatic like me, and went forward with Valentine’s Day as if I hadn’t just pitched a hissy fit like a four year old the previous night.  I woke up to flowers and this on the kitchen table.

You know you’re jealous of the man’s rockin’ paper folding skills.  I feel like we’re passing notes in class.  We’re so 12 like that.  It’s getting stapled into the love journal, which is what he got for Valentine’s Day this year.

I’m not sure if that technically makes it his turn to give it back to me, or my turn next.  I guess, since I wrote in it before Valentine’s Day and his stapled note is afterward, that puts it back on me.  Guess I know what the Easter Bunny is bringing him this year!

I was more in love with that note than the massage gift certificate.  Note to men around the world:  being told that we are amazing, inspirational, and fun – in writing – is WAY better than any massage.

Don’t get me wrong, massages are great.  Don’t stop with the massage gift certificates.

Something interesting I noticed on my bags of kisses…

Like I’m planning to share with my family?  Ha!  You think my butt got this big because I SHARE my treats?

Speaking of getting big butts from chocolate treats, we stopped at my dad’s office to give him his posterboard-sized Valentine’s Day card.

Hmmm…that came out wrong.  My dad does not have a big butt.  I wish my butt was as small as his.  However, he apparently likes to contribute to the enormity of my backside, because the kids got new stuffed animals to launch at us for Valentine’s Day from him, and I got this.

See, here’s the thing with my dad and the Whitman’s Sampler:  when I was a kid, he used to get me a Whitman’s Sampler for Christmas.  The normal sized one.  Every single year, I would see the wrapped box under the Christmas tree and I knew exactly what it was.  When I moved back to Tennessee, it started appearing under the tree again.

Christmas of 2011, he forgot about my Whitman’s Sampler.  I jokingly mentioned it a few weeks later, and he hasn’t lived it down.  No, I wasn’t being a bratty kid; I thought it was funny, and it was even funnier when he was like, “Oh, sh!t, you’re right!  I forgot all about it!”  Like I’m going to die without my made in America chocolate.

Yes, you read that right.  That sucker is proudly made in the U.S.A.  While I am a connoisseur of foreign chocolate, and am totally into the super dark stuff, the patriotic hippie in me still loves my made in America goodies, whether it’s Fiestaware or chocolate. My dad knows that, and that must be why he always gets me the Whitman’s Sampler.

Nah, that’s not why. I think it was a simple thing for him to pick up for me when I was a teenager, and now it’s morphed into a thing. Which is totally cool, because I’m all about when stuff morphs into a thing.

This past Christmas, it was missing again.  (My dad does Christmas with us after Christmas, because he’s up in Pennsylvania with his brothers and sisters and other children for Christmas and New Year’s.  So it’s easy to forget it when there aren’t really presents to put under a tree.)  He says he made up for it yesterday.  Because while the scale of the picture may be deceiving, this is no ordinary Whitman’s Sampler.

It’s been super-sized.  Normal Whitman’s Samplers are two stories of chocolate love. This giant Whitman’s Sampler box is a two story chocolate DUPLEX. Yep, if you look closely, the map of chocolate goodness on the top has way less squares than are in the package. That’s because the map covers one quadrant of the contents.

Amazing!

I’m holding out for this bad boy on my 40th birthday. A triplex.  FORTY OUNCES of chocolate paradise.

Source

Makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it.

I’ve clearly been sharing the massive box that my dad gave me.  Whitman’s Samplers don’t last long in our house, particularly when there are lots of munchkin-sized chocolate lovers around.

We went out and ran our 10th mile for Mercy Project (yes, I know I need to catch up with recaps of those; coming soon, I promise) and Taylor hiked up her leggings the entire time. She says they have gotten bigger since the last time she wore them. Based on the amount of chocolate we have consumed in the past 24 hours, I think they’ll fit just fine the next time around.

Bill and I had a totally romantic dinner together after the kids went to bed. We each ran our scheduled training runs on the treadmill and then made huge salads and watched The Real World London while we snarfed down our veggies. Hulu Plus for the win!

And the veggies completely offset the mass quantities of chocolate that were consumed yesterday. Really.

Who am I kidding? Even with the workout I did, I wouldn’t be shocked if I gained five pounds overnight.

But, the most important thing is that I still think The Real World Miami was the most superior season ever. Seattle is in second. That was back when it was an amazing social experiment, with interesting people in the cast, and not the mayhem that it is now. Of course, neither of those seasons appear to be available online or on DVD, which is kind of depressing.

What was your favorite season of The Real World?

 

It’s Taper Time!

It’s less than three weeks until my first marathon.

You know what that means. It’s taper time!

Almost as cool as t-shirt time, but with less guidos.  I don’t care what you guys think, Pauly D and Vinny crack me up, and they are the only reason why I’m slightly sad that Jersey Shore is no longer on the air.

On the whole, I’m way more excited than I am nervous. Especially since I found my happy spot with my shoes, and because I ran TWENTY FREAKIN’ MILES on Saturday.

So, here’s my shoe saga…

I bought a pair of running shoes on Thanksgiving Day in 2011. Just a pair of shoes that were on sale on the Kohls website. I was still pregnant with Ellie, but I knew I wanted to train for a marathon after she was born. I didn’t know that you were supposed to go to a running store and get fitted for shoes and all of that fun stuff. I figured I could just buy running shoes and that would be that.

I wish I could say that I was wrong. But I wasn’t.

I used those shoes pretty much exclusively for the first few months of training last year.  Eventually, we went to a running store and got fitted for shoes, which was underwhelming, to say the least.  Maybe we just didn’t pick the right running store.  There are only two in our area.  The sales girl had me walk across the store in my bare feet, then brought out a few different shoes to try on.  I had no idea what I was supposed to get, and I had no idea what the difference was between the shoes.  She said that it ultimately comes down to what feels good while they’re on.  Which would be fine, if I had any clue what that really meant.

I ended up with my first pair of Sauconys.  Which I did all of my long runs prior to my half marathon in, and ran the actual race in them as well.  No problems.

In ramping up my training for the marathon, a couple of months ago, the side of my knee started hurting during my runs.  My chiropractor has fixed it once and my Google diagnosis has attributed it to my IT band and/or peroneal muscle.  Particularly because I had what I’m convinced is a peroneal muscle-related tendon issue in my foot a couple of weeks ago.  The last time my knee hurt during a run (to the point where I actually had to stop running, and walking was next to impossible) was in those Sauconys.  I’m not sure why, because when I add up their mileage, they shouldn’t even be close to worn out yet.  So I’ve shelved those shoes for the time being, and went back to my original Asics from Thanksgiving for long runs.

They were great with my knee and great with my feet.  Except that they were the ones that gave me black toenail problems.

The week after that, during my 18 mile long run, I thought I would be clever and wear the Asics-that-cause-black-toenails for the first nine miles, and switch to the Sauconys-that-cause-knee-pain for the second half.  Because I can run with black toenail pain, but I can’t go with knee hurt.

I would not recommend doing that.  I ended up straining my peroneal tendon in my foot (full disclosure:  that’s a Google diagnosis) and spent the back half of that run talking myself into continuing.  And hurting bad.  I spent a lot of time on ice after that.

I’ve got other shoes in rotation – a pair of Skechers goRuns (which I’m terrified to wear off the treadmill, for some bizarre unknown reason), K-Swiss tubes (which I love, but haven’t worn for any runs longer than six miles because I’m paranoid), and those not-so-cute-but-plenty-of-room-in-the-toe-box new Sauconys.

So I got a freaking clue through my thick skull and hopped online to order the original Black Friday Asics in a half-size larger.  The original ones were already a half-size larger, so these new ones were a full size bigger than my street shoes.  They’re not as big as the not-so-cute Sauconys, but I still feel like Bozo the clown wearing them.

Sears.com had them the cheapest.  I could combine my ShopAtHome.com rewards with my Sears/Kmart Shop Your Way rewards, plus those fun credit card reward points, and get oodles of points with one purchase.  And Sears will deliver them direct to the store.  So I don’t have to get three kids (and myself) dressed, loaded into the car, drive us all to the store, put myself on repeat (“Stop touching that. Stop touching your sister. Could someone find the baby? I said stop touching your sister. Can’t you guys behave for ten minutes?”) while I attempt to find these particular shoes, which they likely won’t have in stock, and, more likely, won’t have in stock in my size. Instead, I placed the order in my pajamas and few days later, I stopped by our local Sears at our teeny tiny dying mall to pick them up.

So, how’s this for cool?  Walk in, slide your credit card into the machine, touch a button, and less than two minutes later, a nice man appears with a box with my shoes in them.  They say their goal is to serve you in five minutes or less.  At my podunk mall, this seems totally doable.  I don’t know how it will work for those of you in an actual city.

Yes, I will be shopping like this MUCH more often.

I did a five mile mid-week run in these bad boys and walked around Whole Foods in them before putting them to the real test.  20 miles.  THE 20 mile long run.

I had some twinge-y foot pain, but that’s more related to the injury than the shoes.  No toe pain, no knee pain.  Three blisters, but I’ll gladly take blisters (or maybe I’ll grease my feet up with Body Glide and/or get some of those fancy toe socks that people rave about for the next go-round and see if that fixes that) over all of my other ailments.

Best part?  These shoes are way cheaper than anything at the running store.  And most of the stuff from the sporting goods store too.  Score!  They didn’t even require the “expertise” of a salesperson at a running store.  (For the record, I’m officially unimpressed with the whole theory that you have to get fitted for shoes at a running store.  Maybe we just have a less-than-stellar running store, but, in the end, I spent $120 on shoes that were fine, don’t get me wrong, but the shoes I’m going to do 26.2 miles in cost less than $50 that I bought because they were on sale on Black Friday.  Beginner’s luck?  Maybe.  But I’ll take it.)

That was the final piece to the marathon training puzzle.  Now it’s taper time, where my long runs will be 12 miles (a walk in the park) and six miles (is it even worth putting on a sports bra?) before the big day.  Hooray for rest!

By the way, that was a trick question.  It is ALWAYS worth putting on a sports bra.  Just watching other women run without proper boobie support makes MY chest hurt.  Friends don’t let friends flop around.

Oh, and this thing came in the mail today…

Well played, Little Rock Marathon.  Maps of the course (I had just told Bill that I would print him out a map so he and the kids could actually show up and spectate this time around and would know where to go), mention of a mandatory pre-race meeting if you’re doing the early start (good to know, since I am doing the early start and there’s no mention of the mandatory meeting on their website!), an indication that there are pace teams for turtles like me (6:00, 5:30, 7:00, 7:30, and 8:00 …and that’s hours, not average split times), and, what’s this, a lipstick stop before the end of the race?

Now I’m psyched!

Bring on that taper!

 

Towel Off

People think it’s weird that we don’t own any paper towels.

Actually, that’s not an accurate statement.  People think we’re weird for a number of reasons.  And we do have a partial roll of paper towels, on a shelf somewhere in the dungeon basement.  Someone always buys a metric ton of them when we rent a vacation home and then nobody seems to want to bring them back home.  So when we left Nags Head at Thanksgiving, we got the last roll and brought it home.

So, that’s more than two months ago.  We haven’t used any of them since then, but I’m fairly certain they’re still down there.

That roll of paper towels will probably last us about four years.  At least, that’s how long the previous roll lasted us.

This wasn’t a conscious thing, the shunning of the paper towels.  I grew up in a house where paper towels were used constantly, for everything from wiping up spills to drying just-washed hands.  We also had a stack of paper napkins, those crappy one-ply ones that could soak up about 4 drops of any liquid and then completely fall apart.  And forget using them for anything sticky, because you’d end up with the sticky substance you started with, and pieces of paper stuck to it.

I ate dinner at a barbeque place a few years ago, and they had their silverware wrapped up in oversized terry washcloths.  I thought it was the most brilliant idea.  I had a 2 year old and a 4 year old at the time, and they never knew how to make a mess that was small enough to not require 5,621 paper towels to clean up.  Plus, if you’ve ever tried to clean, well, any sticky substance (and, let’s be honest here, do 2 year olds ever cover themselves with anything BUT a sticky substance?) with a paper towel, you know that it’s an exercise in futility.

Before you tell me that 2-year old messes are meant to be handled with baby wipes, I know that.  By the time Blake entered the world, I was using cloth wipes.  I didn’t have to buy cases of disposable baby wipes, I didn’t need paper towels for kid messes anymore, thanks to the cloth wipes (far superior), but I thought it would be strange to ask my kids to put an 8×8 inch baby wipe in their laps for dinner.

So I picked up some cheap dishtowels the next time I was at a store that sold cheap dishtowels.

You know the one.  It starts with a W.  If I say the name out loud, they’ll take my hippie card away.  Old habits die hard.  Does anyone in America make dishtowels anymore?

Now, who needed those stupid worthless paper napkins?  Not this girl.  A dishcloth completely covers a child’s entire lap and can stand up to their abuse.  I knit a few and crocheted a few to add to our collection.  (See?  Someone in America does make dishtowels!  No promises on what country the yarn came from.  Sigh.)  I picked some up at the thrift store once.  Like with the paper towels, it seems like whenever my family goes on vacation, someone buys dishcloths as well, and I’ve always ended up with some of them at the end of a trip.

And somewhere along the way, I found myself reaching for them instead of the paper towels. They get used them for everything, not just for napkins.  If something spills on the floor, it gets cleaned up with a dishcloth.  Need to clean mushrooms?  Use a dishcloth.  I have one that is dedicated for use when I’m painting.  They all get tossed in the washing machine with the other towels and come out ready to go another round.  And, ironically, just like with the wipes, they work better than their paper counterpart.  Crazy.  I mean, have you ever seen a commercial where they do the split screen with a spill of blue liquid, and, instead of pitting two brands of paper towels against each other, they use a dishcloth on one side?

Nope.  Because the dishcloth would beat the pants off of any paper towel.

I’m pretty sure it was one of the cloth diaper moms who “invented” what are essentially oversized cloth wipes, attached snaps to them, and then they can be snapped together in a long roll and wrapped around a bar like regular paper towels.  They sometimes have a printed fabric on one side with something else absorbent on the other.  They call them unpaper towels, which seems a bit wordy to me, since just “towels” would suffice.  (No, I am not joking.  Unpaper towels are an actual thing.)  It also seems like a lot of work, snapping all of that business together.  And then, when someone drops the world’s largest glass of water on the floor, I’d have to take time out from counting to 10 in my head, to refrain from saying, “I’m pretty sure I just told you that you were putting too much water in that cup and you were going to spill it,” to have to angrily unsnap the number of towels I need.  I don’t have the time or the patience for that.

Source

But sometimes the fabric choices are cute.  And maybe some of the fabric (not all, I’m pretty sure of that) is made in the United States.  So there’s that.  But those snaps are made in China.  So if my hippie card gets revoked for buying Chinese dishcloths, I think hippie card applications that include use of unpaper towels should be as well.

I rest my case, your honor.

Nah, I don’t care what mine look like.  They’re just for cleaning up messes.  Few of them match and none of them are pretty. If they’re pretty, it means we’re not getting messy, and if we’re not getting messy, we’re probably not having fun.  When I wash them, I just toss a pile of clean ones in front of whichever kid is handy at the time that I’m doing laundry and they fold them up and put them away.  Blake is still at that magic age where he thinks that is fun.

Yep, I’ll be exploiting that as long as I can.

My mother-in-law stayed at our house for a week, when she was closing on the house she built in the next city over.  It was the first time she had been in the house we bought together, and the first time she had stayed with us while after we merged as a family.  I looked up from the couch – where I spent the better part of my pregnancy – one day and saw her standing in my kitchen looking bewildered.  Not that her looking bewildered is anything unusual, but I figured I’d give it a go and ask her if she needed some help.

“I can’t find your paper plates,” she said.

“That’s probably because we don’t have any,” I replied.

If the woman had been wearing pearls, she would have clutched them.  ”But I just want to make a sandwich.”

“Okay…”

She looked like she was choosing her words carefully. “So I need a paper plate to put it on.” Like a Kindergarten teacher. Like I’m the crazy one in this situation.

“So, put it on a plate.  We own at least 30 plates.  All different colors and sizes.”  Y’all know how I feel about my Fiestaware!  Made in America and everything!

“I don’t want to dirty up a plate with just a sandwich.”  She was borderline distraught at the thought.

I walked over to the cabinet, took out a plate, and handed it to her.  ”It’s going to get washed after you use it, whether it gets ‘dirty’ or not.  It’s silly to put a sandwich on a round piece of paper for 10 minutes and then have that paper end up in the landfill because four crumbs ended up on it.”

She pondered this for a second.  ”No, it’s just a turkey sandwich.  I guess I’ll just put it on a paper towel and eat my chips straight out of the bag.”  She sighs and glances around the kitchen.  ”Where do you keep the paper towels?”

I smile.  ”We don’t have any of those either.”  I hold out the plate.  She reluctantly took it, made her sandwich, and, rather than putting the plate in the sink like the rest of the barbarians lovely people that live in this house, she spent 30 seconds out of her life washing it and putting it in the dish drainer.

When Bill got home from work that day, she lectured him on not having paper towels in the house, to ease the load on his pregnant wife.  He always managed to have paper plates and paper towels when he was a bachelor, she had eaten plenty of sandwiches off of them in his old house, so there was no excuse for not having them now.

He smirked and said, “You realize that my pregnant wife does all of the shopping, and if she wanted paper plates and towels, she would buy them.”

He left out the part where he did 95% of the dishes during my pregnancy, to avoid listening to me whine about my belly bumping into the counter.  Smart man.  Because I was within striking distance of him.

He told me later that she pulled him aside when I wasn’t in earshot and asked if we were having a hard time paying our bills.  When he asked why she would think that, she said she was concerned that maybe that’s why we didn’t buy paper plates and paper towels.

He said he whispered back to her, “We have perfectly fine dishes and towels.  We have plenty of money.  We just prefer to spend that money on other things that we don’t immediately put in the trash.”

The next day, I kid you not, she came home from wherever she went for the day, and plopped a huge stack of paper plates and an 8-pack of paper towels on my kitchen counter.  I thought my pregnancy hormones were playing tricks on me.  Bill put them in her car as she was packing up to go back home.  Nobody else has ever commented on our lack of paper products.  Like, ever.  If they think we’re weird, they are keeping their thoughts to themselves.  I still wonder if my mother-in-law thought she was doing charity work, or if she thought that I was a lazy housewife, or if she really thought we had lost our minds.

It’s okay to not use paper towels.  There, I’ve given you permission.  Now when your mother-in-law comes over and thinks she is in the Twilight Zone because she can’t find any paper towels, you can tell her that paper towels are obsolete.  Your internet buddy said so.

If it’s on the internet, it has to be true!

 

It Gets Easier, But It Never Gets Easy

Earlier this week, we celebrated my second daughter’s sixth birthday.  Chloe was born in a military hospital on the island of Oahu, where my then-husband was stationed.  I had gestational diabetes, which I struggled with at the end of my pregnancy, and was induced on February 5, 2007.

I would lose my hippie card if I didn’t tell you that I was induced using Cytotec (Misoprostol.)  In the spirit of full disclosure, I used to do a lot of whatever I was told, when it came to medical stuff, because I didn’t know any better.  I assumed that the medical staff did.  It only took several years of military-managed medicine (and I use the term medicine loosely) to teach me to stop and question and understand what was being done to my body and my children’s bodies.  I had no idea at the time that Cytotec was causing uterine rupture, that it was not approved by the FDA for use as an induction drug, that once it was given, there was no way to turn it down or shut it off, the way you can with Cervadil or Pitocin.

Thank God none of that happened to me.  I had a Pitocin drip a few hours later, and a beautiful baby girl who pushed her way out without any help from me.  Yep, epidurals and synthetic drugs are awesome.

Obviously, I feel differently now, but at the time, I went with what I knew.  And believed in what other people said was routine.

Remember last week when I said I was stupid and naive?  Well, there you go.

If you’re going to get induced (and I recommend that you don’t unless it is absolutely medically necessary.  And I say that as a woman who has gone post-due date with two of her babies, knows what it’s like to be DONE being pregnant, and pushed out a 10.5 pounder), don’t let anyone try to talk you into doing it with Cytotec.  Nasty nasty stuff.

</end hippie activism>

I had a happy, healthy baby, 8 1/2 pounds, all while 19 month old Taylor watched Blue’s Clues, totally oblivious to life happening all around her.

Not my best shot, like, ever, but has anyone ever taken a “here’s your brand new baby, fresh from the womb, we’ll just put him/her here on your chest” picture and had the mom look good? I’m not sure it’s humanly possible.

Birthdays are to be celebrated, as far as I’m concerned.  I can’t look back on Chloe’s birthday and be sad, because that was the day that God gave her to me.  That’s not sad at all.  I wish I could give her gifts and cake and shower her with birthday love and watch her grow up, and that is sad, but she’s in Heaven, hanging out with my grandmothers and Bill’s mom and my cousin’s son, and that gives me some peace.

Every year on Chloe’s birthday, we symbolically send her balloons, with birthday messages written on them.  Obviously, this is more for me than anyone else; just a way to commemorate the day and feel like I’m still her mom and still celebrating the day she was born.  I give myself permission to do something as silly as buying a few balloons, for the sole purpose of drawing on them and releasing them into the sky.  It’s therapeutic.  Besides, at this point, Taylor would never let me forget to do it.  She’s already been talking about it for days, reminding me not to forget to buy balloons.

Taylor doesn’t really remember Chloe, but she knows her through the pictures that are hanging up around the house, and from hearing me compare every one of my babies to the other, telling Bill that this pregnancy was like this and this other pregnancy was like that, and this baby ate like a champ and this other baby had a crappy latch.  She has no idea that the anesthesiologist let her “sign” my epidural consent form, or that she ran up to everyone who walked into that hospital room, and when they picked her up, she inspected their IDs that were hanging from a clip on their scrubs.  She doesn’t remember how she referred to Chloe as “Coco,” because, well, she wasn’t even two when Chloe was born, and couldn’t pronounce her name.  She has no recollection of carrying canned goods from the pantry and putting them in Chloe’s crib, I guess because she thought that since she enjoyed playing with them so much, Chloe probably would too.

Since Blake never met her, he truly only knows her as a mythical baby that he’s never met.  He doesn’t refer to her as his sister.  Which is fine; he’s almost five, I don’t expect him to “get” it, and I don’t have to worry about him telling people about his sister who lives in heaven with Grandma.

Yeah, Taylor drops that bomb on unsuspecting people more often than I’d like.  We’re working on it.

Bill knows to tread carefully around me on birthdays and angel days and holidays, and to be prepared with alcohol and chocolate and big hugs for my snot-running-down-my-face, can’t-breathe, this-STILL-isn’t-fair sobbing.  It does get easier, on a day-to-day basis, but I can’t say that it ever gets easy.  After six years, the sharp pains have eased.  But just like if you’ve ever broken a bone, and you can feel the changes in the weather in the previously broken bone, the dull ache shows up from time to time.  For me, one of those dull ache days is Chloe’s birthday.

I try to focus on the time I did get with her.  But I often find myself, on the milestone days, resenting the fact that all of her birthdays were stolen from us.  From her, from me, from her siblings, from her family.  I resent the fact that the man that put her in her grave is out in the world, a free man, still thinking he did nothing wrong, never apologizing for what he did to her, to me, to Taylor, and to our family.

Mostly, I resent him for taking her away from me.  Yep, it’s darn selfish, and I own that selfishness.

But, as with every birthday, I put on a brave face in front of the kids, and we got on with the show.

Blake asked how to spell Chloe’s name.  Then he said he needed “to add a few more letters.”   He drew a picture of himself on the back.

 

 

He asked me if we could celebrate Chloe’s birthday at our house.  I told him that Chloe lived in Heaven, and we couldn’t visit her there.  Then, remembering that a book I read once said that you have to talk in absolute terms with small children, I added, “Chloe died, so that’s why she lives in Heaven.”

 

 

 

He replied, “I guess we shouldn’t go to her house for her birthday, because I don’t want to be dead.”

Yep, you guessed it, cue the tears.

Taylor is not afraid to think a bit more abstractly. She kind of remembers my grandmother’s funeral, which she has always called, “That time when we put Grandma in a box and put the box in the ground.”  She vividly remembers my cousin’s son’s funeral, and we still occasionally get drawings from her depicting baby Michael and baby Chloe playing ball in Heaven together.

She wrote Chloe a long letter on the back of her balloon.  It was taking a long time, and I didn’t even read the entire thing before we let the balloons go, because it was dark and late and I just wanted to get past this day and go on.

I read it when I downloaded my pictures.  And, yes, I dissolved, yet again, into tears.

Among other things, she asked Chloe to give Granny (my dad’s mom) and Grandma Ruth (my maternal grandmother, the maid of honor in my first wedding) a big hug and a kiss from her.

Those stinkin’ tears again.

Chloe was the first death I’ve ever had to deal with.  Ever.  Here we are, six years later, and I’ve had to cope with the deaths of both of my grandmother’s and my cousin’s tiny baby son.  I wish I could say that I handle death well now.

I don’t.  I have an ugly, ugly cry.  A loud-wailing-snot-dripping-horridly ugly cry.

I have faith that they are all together, having a grand old time.  I have faith that Chloe found Bill’s dad in Heaven, giving him the granddaughter he had always wanted.

But that doesn’t make it easy.

Happy Birthday, my beautiful angel.

Hug your loved ones tight, on their birthday and on every day.  Because you never know when it will be their last.

The BEST Tip for New Runners

I had a major case of PMS-induced bad attitude this weekend.  Taylor lost a library book, and she “looks” for missing things by standing around in each room of the house, not touching anything or opening drawers and cabinets or picking stuff up, just stands there and calls it “searching.”  Blake has been bouncing off the walls (well, that’s nothing new.)  Ellie has learned to climb the stairs, and will take off up the stairs if anyone pulls down the gate and neglects to put it back up, and, now, instead of just walking around with random pens and markers, pointing them at stuff and waving them like a magic wand, she likes to take the caps off.

And has the scribbled-up jammies to prove it.

It’s also freeeeeezing outside, and we even had a freak snowstorm on Saturday.

One entire inch of snow.  (Hey, that’s considered a blizzard around here!)  Our area doesn’t see snow very often, and we’re wholly unprepared for it.  When it’s raining or snowing, because of our steep driveway, our mail carrier won’t come to pick up packages that have to go out.  The post office is maybe half a mile away, so I’ll drive the packages there in bad weather.  Had I known that the freak snowstorm would end as soon as it started, and the snow would melt within a couple of hours, I would have put off driving to the post office.  Maybe then I wouldn’t have ridden my emergency brake down my own driveway, hoping not to tumble down the hill, since I was skidding on the fresh snow.

Curse words were yelled.  That’s all I’m going to say about that.

If you follow me on Daily Mile, you know that I hurt my foot last week on my 18 mile long run.  Because of the black toenail incident, I decided that I’d run the first half of that 18 miles on the shoes that don’t make my knee hurt, but because they are the ones that caused the black toe (and my newly ordered, larger version of those shoes hadn’t come in yet), I had the shoes that I ran my half marathon in (that now sometimes make my knee hurt, enough that I won’t brave a long run in them) in the car, and switched to them after 9 miles.

The first 9 miles were fine.  About two miles into the shoe switch, a tendon in my foot started SCREAMING at me.  I did a lot of walking segments, and slowed things down, but I was determined to finish.  I have my first marathon in a few weeks, and I know that if something starts hurting me there, I’m going to grit my teeth and push through it, so this was good practice, right?

I made it through the 18 miles.  And it screwed up my training last week because that screaming pain in my foot was a peroneal tendon strain and I could barely walk on it.  I iced the living daylights out of it and rested, but that meant I hadn’t gotten my sweat on in several days, which does nothing but make me have a worse attitude.

Well, when you live in a house full of craft supplies, you tie your cold compress up with a ribbon.  This is totally normal around these parts.  By the way, that’s not nail polish on my big toe; that’s the remnants of Black Toe.  Gorgeous, I know.

So, by Sunday, I was determined to go on my usual Sunday long run, whether my foot was ready for it or not.

And I’m pretty sure my family was thrilled that I was going on a run.  I think they were just happy to get a break from me.

My foot held up pretty well.  I didn’t run the full 12 that was prescribed.  Parts of the Riverwalk were icy (although someone had put down salt to help with that) from the snowstorm, parts of it are still closed or washed out from the mass amounts of rain we’ve had, so I couldn’t go very far in either direction.  When I got back to the car at almost 9 miles, with my foot starting to pick up some twinges of sharp pain, I decided that another three miles wouldn’t do much in the way of training, so I ended things there.  (I did do my usual post-run grocery shopping, at two different stores, so I probably walked at least another mile.)

When I got home, I noticed that a friend of mine had posted on my Facebook wall that she had just bought a treadmill, and set a goal of being able to run 2 miles by the 4th of July.  Another of my (non-running) friends said she wanted to do that too.

I was like, Wait a second!  Y’all can’t go planning these things on my Facebook without me!

Then I saw that they asked for tips.  Whew.  I was starting to wonder if my Facebook had just become a running buddy bulletin board without my knowledge.

Since I hand out tips to Bill all day (and he watches me deal with the aftermath of my mistakes, taking the opportunity to learn along with me from my mistakes), this was an easy one for me.  I’m not a world-class runner by any stretch of the imagination.  I’m not fast at all.  But I can go the distance, and that’s what other people are looking for too.  Just to go the distance.

This post is already too long, so I’ll pass on my BEST tip.  The BEST thing I’ve learned after a year of plugging away at this.

Go slow.

I started with the Couch to 5K.  Which is a good program, except that it expects you to run three miles at a 10 minute per mile pace at the end of it.  Pre-kids, I could pull that off.  And, actually, after a year of training, and losing more than 60 pounds, I could probably pull that off now.

But this time last year, when I was doing the Couch to 5K, there was no way I could pull off three miles in thirty minutes.

It’s a common problem, and it’s what leads to a lot of injuries.  If you’re training to do anything requiring endurance, you’re better off training in Zone 2 – the heart rate zone that tells your body to burn fat as fuel, rather than burning glycogen/carbohydrates.  The human body has a lot more fat stores than it does glycogen stores.  Zone 2 training also builds mitochondria in your muscle cells and increases capillary density, which increases blood supply to your muscles.

The best money I’ve spent during my training was the $35 I spent on a heart rate monitor.  Bill and I have this one:

Figure out your lactate threshold, and then you can calculate the zone that you should train in.  We just got our heart rate monitors around Christmastime, and it caused me to slow WAY down.  I had been telling Bill, ever since our 5K together at Thanksgiving, that the reason he ran out of steam was because he was trying to go too fast.  He’s been struggling with the heart rate zone that he’s in right now, and has been doing a lot of walking.

But he also hasn’t gotten injured.  He hasn’t gotten any overuse problems.  His body is building a good foundation, and soon he will find that he can go a lot faster at the same heart rate.  In the past month, thanks to the heart rate zone training, I’ve shaved a full minute off my mile time, and I’ve managed to stay in the same heart rate zone.  I won’t be winning any races anytime soon.  There are people running full marathons in half the time as I will.  And that’s okay.  The beauty of endurance running is that you get to compete against yourself.  There will always be another race on the horizon to run.

Runners talk all the time about their PRs.  They aren’t called PERSONAL RECORDS for nothing.

Everyone wants to start out going fast.  Heck, I’d like to be going faster right now.  But these things take time.  It’s much more enjoyable for me to do “easy” runs than it is to get winded and feel like crap while I’m running.

So my best tip, especially for people just starting out:  go slow.  Build a good foundation and then you can build a castle on top of it!

Happy (Not) Anniversary

I was chatting with my brother this afternoon, and we realized that today would have been my 10th anniversary.

If I was still married to the piece of scum that was my first husband.

Yeah, I know y’all think of me as that girl who’s always talking all positivity and good vibes and whatnot.  For 95% of my current life, that’s totally my outlook.  There are stages of grief, and, when I think about him and the heinous thing he did and the mess he made of a lot of people’s lives, I’m still in the effing-pissed-off stage.

For those of you who may be new to my blog, and think I may be harboring unfair resentment toward my ex, here’s the Cliffs Notes:  the wonderful specimen that is my ex-husband killed one of our daughters, while I was at the dentist getting a root canal.  He lied about what happened, until the autopsy was complete and investigators coaxed a confession out of him.  In the meantime, we all believed his story, and I got pregnant (yes, on purpose) with Blake.  Yeah, he lived with me for FOUR MONTHS after that happened, while Taylor was being bounced from foster home to foster home (because Child Protective Services nabbed her the night Chloe died), and kept his story up the entire time.  I spent tens of thousands of dollars on an attorney to help get Taylor back, while stuck on an island with barely any support system, while my family is thousands of miles away on the mainland U.S., all of us feeling helpless.

Among the repercussions of his actions, I got the pleasure of enjoying a stint on welfare and food stamps, moving halfway across the world to rebuild my life, never getting a dime in child support, finally finding a job in a recession and working six days a week (and barely making ends meet, because child care 6 days a week ain’t free, y’all.)  Then losing that job because my kids got sick and I missed two days of work because the daycare wouldn’t watch my son when he had a double ear infection and I couldn’t send my daughter to school with chicken pox and I couldn’t find backup care.  Of course, that makes a person ineligible for unemployment, but that’s a story for another day.  When I finally was able to afford my divorce, I got to pay extra money to my attorney because my ex contested the divorce stipulations and he wanted visitation of the kids.

He killed their sister, lied about it, got an amazing plea bargain because the investigators botched one of the interrogations, got out of prison early, Taylor has no recollection of his existence, Blake has never met the man, he lived thousands of miles away and required permission from his probation officer to leave the state, and he honestly thought a judge was going to grant him visitation.

I obviously didn’t marry him for his brains.

Years later, I met the man of my dreams, we got married, and we actually had to fight the @$$clown AGAIN to relinquish his parental rights (because, after all of that, he still had LEGAL rights to them!) so Bill could adopt them, and let them have a REAL father.  Then, we found out after that, that all of his antics are seriously affecting our ability to finish our adoption.

In conclusion, I reserve the right to harbor some resentment and bitterness and curse words toward the man.  And I use the term “man” incredibly loosely.

It’s easy to look back on the end of our marriage and see that it’s obvious that we shouldn’t have been married.  Now, 10 years after our wedding day, almost six years after Chloe was born, my head is clearer and it’s easier to look back on the earlier part of our marriage objectively.

I can see now that I didn’t marry him because I was in love with him, I was just in love with being in love.  And we weren’t really in love, we just thought we were.  We had been friends for years, he told me one day he was in love with me and even though we dated other people before getting married, I continually told people that I’d never find anyone else who would ever “love” me the way he did.  Except it wasn’t love that he had for me.  I’m not sure what it was, but it wasn’t love.

Eh, tell that to my 22-year old self.

We got married at Disney World, which, to be honest, was pretty awesome.  But, as they say, it’s not the wedding that makes the marriage.

And our marriage would be far from a fairytale.  Unless there’s a fairytale that I missed where the handsome Prince turns into the evil villain.

To say it was a roller coaster would be an understatement.  There were plenty of times that I could have left him, I should have left him, and I didn’t.  I thought that marriage vows were forever, I swore to stand by him through good times and bad, and I did just that, because that’s what I would want my spouse to do for me.

He didn’t, of course.  I wasn’t the perfect wife by any stretch of the imagination, but I can look back objectively and see that I was the cause of more good times than bad ones.  I don’t know why I thought I didn’t deserve more than that.  I learned that, in the aftermath.  I deserved better.  My kids especially deserved better.  But I vowed never to be with anyone who wouldn’t put in at least the same amount of love and effort into our relationship as I did.

We came really close to divorce right before Taylor was born.  I remember crying in my dad’s house, with my first tiny baby, with my husband in another state, doing God knows what, spending money like it was going out of style, while I had what little I left with to buy diapers and baby clothes.  I told my dad that this wasn’t the way I had planned things.  Far from it.  I was terrified of being a single mom.  How would I pay for things like daycare?  I’d have to give up my dream of being a homeschooling mom, something we had discussed at length.

Oh, the irony.  It wouldn’t be more than three years later that I’d have TWO of them, no option of child support (because at least, back when I only had Taylor, he wasn’t in a military prison, so he did have an income), and in a much, much worse place, emotionally.  A dead child will do that to a person.

And, as embarrassing as it is to admit (but, well, I am the type of person who isn’t afraid to give you the good, the bad, and the ugly), I sat in my dad’s house, where I co-slept with my nursing baby on a twin-sized bed, because, well, that’s what he had, and wondered what I was going to do with all of my wedding pictures.  How was I going to explain to Taylor that even though we looked happy and in love and had this fairy tale wedding, we got divorced when she was born?  I had spent all this money on the wedding and the pretty pictures, and the whole thing had fallen apart.

Stupid.

Stupid stupid stupid.

I’ll just rename my stupidity:  naivete.  Because that’s really what it was.

Obviously, we got back together, I displayed my pretty wedding pictures in our new house, we had another baby (Chloe) and, well, you know how that ends.  Had I thought for one second that he would ever do anything to hurt either of our kids, going back to him wouldn’t have been an option.  But I had no clue.  Neither did my best friend at the time, a registered nurse.  Or his psychologist.  Or his psychiatrist.  Or the multitude of doctors and nurses who saw Chloe during her short life.  None of us saw it happening and none of us saw the end coming.

Stupid naivete.  I was worried about pictures.

This one is still up in my house.  Me and my maid-of-honor, my grandmother.  I cut him out of the other side of the picture, like, literally, with a pair of scissors.  I never did have the heart to tell my grandmother the truth, when we found out that it wasn’t a freak medical issue, that he had killed Chloe.  She died thinking he was deployed somewhere.

Best picture taken of the two of us.  She was an awesome lady and my best buddy.

I spent a long time mourning the loss of my marriage.

Not the loss of my husband.  Nope.  I wasn’t sad about losing him and all that he had put me through.  I mourned the loss of my marriage.

Because the good times were good.  This was a man who knew me like nobody else.  While we had some bad memories, we made lots of good memories together too.  It wasn’t all horrible.  It’s easy to look back on it now, when I’m married to someone who isn’t in the same league as that complete moron, someone who treats me amazingly, and say that my first marriage sucked.  In comparison, it did.  But when I didn’t know what I was missing, well, I thought I had it pretty good.

I was left with two small children, one buried six feet underground, a boatload of emotional baggage, and nobody to lean on.  Nobody to talk with while cuddled up in bed at night.  Nobody to hold onto while I cried my eyes out, trying to sort out how this could have happened.  Nobody to help me with the kids or encourage me on my way to my goals or laugh with me at anything other than Sesame Street.

That was what I mourned.

With time, I got past that.  Plodded through the stages of grief, as it related to our marriage.  As I mentioned, I remain in the effing-pissed-off stage as it relates to everything that happened since Chloe was born, but as to our marriage, I’ve let that go.  I don’t miss him anymore.  I can say truthfully, wholeheartedly, don’t miss that marriage at all.  Not in the least.

So it was fitting, given the macabre sense of humor I sometimes have about the whole thing, to “celebrate” what would have been my 10th anniversary.  A milestone anniversary.  A whole decade since I took those pretty pictures.

The 10th anniversary ancient rules say you’re supposed to get gifts of tin.  Eh, I’m not big on tin.  Not really big on tradition either.  So we reverted back to the 9th anniversary gift:  Pottery.

I love me some Fiestaware!  But there’s no tent sale anytime soon, and that’s where I choose to purchase my Fiestaware.

So we did it one better than just pottery.  We put a cinnamon roll on that pottery.  And covered that cinnamon roll with caramel sauce.

If you’re ever in the Chattanooga area on the first Friday of the month, reserve some cinnamon rolls at the Blue Ribbon Cafe.  You won’t be disappointed.  If you find yourself here on any other day of the month, well, I’ve yet to be disappointed by anything they’ve made.

It’s not vegan.  It’s definitely not gluten-free.  It’s full of fat and sugar and carbs.  It’s not the least bit healthy.

Then again, neither was my first marriage.  Healthy, that is.  So it was a fitting tribute.

Eat it up, digest it, and it turns into poo.  That you get to flush down the toilet.  And you’ll never see it again.

Yep, a fitting tribute indeed.

Food Evolution

As I was putting together tonight’s dinner, I was thinking about how much my eating has changed.  Not just when we lost the gluten, not just when we went vegan, but since I moved out of my parents’ house, and definitely since I was growing up.

I’ve heard more than one person tell me that they’d like to eat healthier, but, “this is the way I’ve eaten my entire life,” or “this is how I grew up.”

I grew up eating meat and potatoes.  If we had a green vegetable, it was likely frozen peas, smothered in butter and garlic salt.  Garlic salt was the only spice anyone in my family ever needed.  Once a week, we’d have skin-on chicken breasts, baked with a tablespoon of butter on each, with garlic salt and paprika sprinkled on the top, and broiled at the end to make the skin crispy.  We had lots of snack cakes in our pantry.  My mom was a big fan of Little Debbie and I inherited my love of Double Stuf Oreos from her.  The only fresh fruit I ever remember in our house as a kid was bananas, with the occasional purchase of oranges.  This was also back when Little Caesars sold “Pizza! Pizza!” and you’d get two pizzas in one long box with paper stretched over the top.  (Please tell me I’m not the only one who remembers this!  I dug around the internet for a picture, but have come up empty handed.)  The perfect meal for a busy family.

I was lucky I played softball and was a cheerleader, or I have no idea how I would’ve burned all of that off.  As it was, I was a size 10, and I thought I was SO fat.

Ah, perspective.

Now, MY kids think it’s normal to eat raw veggies with hummus for lunch, to have  oatmeal every day for breakfast, to eat lentils and quinoa and butternut squash.  I’m not gonna lie, and I don’t care if it comes off as self-righteous, I’m pretty darn proud of myself.  And I’m pretty darn proud of my kids!  I’m disappointed in myself and embarrassed for feeding my kids Lunchables and artificially flavored (and artificially colored) yogurt.  I’m mad at myself for eating bowl after bowl of cereal (congrats, General Mills, for getting me hooked on Honey Bunches of Oats while we were on WIC) when I was pregnant with Ellie, knowing now that that’s probably why she weighed more than 10 pounds when she was born, and also probably why I gained SO much weight when I was pregnant with her.

But all I can do is move forward, evolve, keep reading and learning and making good choices for my family.

I do realize that I’m “lucky” to have a supportive husband, one who will try anything I make, who likes all kinds of foods, and who would rather eat whatever I put on the table than have to do his own grocery shopping and cooking.  Some of my friends’ husbands want nothing to do with life if it involves a green vegetable or anything for dinner that’s not some version of meat and potatoes.  Meanwhile, Bill will let me rationalize a daytrip to Atlanta for the sole purpose of buying Indian spices and eating at a place with a 55-foot salad bar.

Speaking of those Indian spices, I threw the ingredients for Indian Spiced Lentils into the crockpot to cook while we took Dobby to the vet today for his second Lepto vaccination.

You know your vet is awesome when they have a TV, not just in the waiting room, but in the individual exam rooms.

 

 

 

 

And I stopped on the way to pick up milk for my bestie, from a woman who found her through a milk sharing service.  People who donate breastmilk also rock my socks.

 

 

 

 

Since the woman lives between my house and the vet, it was way more convenient for me to just pick up the milk on my way home, and I can just bring it down to my buddy the next time I am dropping off my milk and the other milk I’m storing for her.  Yeah, nobody’s taking my hippie card away from me anytime soon!

I’m no food blogger, so there’s no step-by-step pictures of the making of this meal or pretty glamour shots.  You just toss most of the ingredients into the crockpot and crank it up.  I soaked the brown rice (this makes it more tender and fluffier when it cooks) while we were at the vet.  Bill and I traded kids at the vet, so when he got home, he dumped out the water, added fresh water, and cooked it up.  Nothing like walking into a house that smells yummy, with dinner ready to eat!

Yes, meals like these are the reason why we run out of spoons quickly!  But oh so worth it!