Three

Happy birthday, Amaris!  My little girl is three today.  And ornery as ever.  Except today she woke up with a pretty high fever and hasn't been herself.  I had to cancel her birthday party.  Poor baby.

Hopefully she feels good enough tomorrow to have cake and ice cream.

What not to worry about.

I sit in my living room and watch that horrible show What Not To Wear on an almost daily basis.  Regardless of the fact that I can't stand Stacy and Clinton.  And then I look at my own wardrobe and wish that somebody would just nominate me.  I'd deal with their obnoxiousness if somebody would just send me on a $5,000 shopping spree.  My wardrobe consists of t-shirts and jeans.  None of it is REALLY the right size.  None of it is age (or situation) appropriate...  It's a bunch of silliness, really.  Things I'd have worn in high school, for the most part.  And then I beat myself up and realize that I need to grow the hell up.  I stopped buying "fat shoes".  But the rest of me just doesn't move forward.  I am stuck in my adolescent slump.

My new couch is here now, so I figure that this will be happening even more often.  Since my TV watching spot got infinitely more comfortable.  Vicious cycle, I'm telling you!

But on a brighter note, I'm almost out of sugary junk food and I got a recumbent bike.  So I should exercise more often too.  Maybe being a different size will motivate me to buy clothes IN the right size.

Comes and it Goes

I'm beat.

In the past few days, I have felt like I was going to lose my mind on more than one occasion.  Yesterday at the aquarium, I lost Amaris.  She vanished from the playground area and I spent an agonizing 15 minutes panicking over her.  While her friend (who was with her before that) kept saying "Someone took her!"  Finally she turned up two escalators down at the aquarium ticket counter.  Today I asked her "What happened to you yesterday, Amaris?"  She said, "I lost my mommy at the playground."  I said, "Did somebody take you or did you follow someone?"  "I followed."  "Did you cry?"  "Yeah, I cried."  "Were you scared?"  "I'm scared of robots."

Earlier today, Cadence woke up thoroughly annoyed for some unknown reason and it took me a long time to soothe her.  Weird because she is usually so easygoing.

Then just a bit ago, Amaris sat down at the table to eat her dinner and proceeded to vomit all over herself.  She immediately burst into tears and said, "MOMMY THERE'S SPIT ON ME!"

I'm feeling more than a little burned out.  I miss Mark beyond my ability to describe.  I miss everything.  I am frustrated and sad and lonely and surrounding myself with good, helpful, wonderful people doesn't even really dull the feeling all that much.  After the good times settle down, I go right back to feeling this way.  I'm just emotionally exhausted.

Another week

The week has come and gone.  The days keep on ticking by.  Another check mark on the calendar.

I did a really...  well, probably irresponsible thing today and bought a couch.  For under $1,000, it will be delivered and set up and my current (heinous) government furniture will be returned to the government furniture warehouse.  It's a beautiful couch.  I am looking forward to movie watching on it.  It has a right hand chaise.  I am already imagining Mark on the chaise and me spread out over the rest of it, my head in his lap, watching movies.  It will be good.  I can't wait.

Amaris had a great week at school.  Cadence ate her first solid food (avocado).  I shipped off FOUR big care packages to Mark, who got settled into a new location in the dump, with a new email address and all.  It's been an eventful week.

Trying to teach Amaris the celebration of Fridays, I took her out for ice cream.  She excitedly picked strawberry.  I got myself a scoop of red raspberry (I don't care for strawberry).  She took two bites and then decided mine looked better.  So I had a few bites of sorbet and then ended up relinquishing it to her and throwing away the strawberry scoop.  And I couldn't help thinking to myself that if Mark had been home, that would never have happened!  He'd have inhaled her little piddly scoop of strawberry ice cream without thinking twice!

I've been missing him a lot these days.  I don't think deployments ever get "better", really.  I don't buy into that.  I think they become routine, and that it makes it seem a little bit easier.  But realistically, there isn't a lot to call easy about the situation at all.

We went to a deployed spouse meeting last night.  I'll admit that my loser self is a bit eager to be involved and do volunteer work for the command.  I applied for that family readiness officer position when it opened up (and clearly didn't get it, I figure due to my lack of college experience), but honestly the more I think about it the happier I am that I was passed over.  I'd rather do it on a volunteer basis - come and go as I please, set my own hours and don't abandon my kids.  Till they are school-aged, I think that's really the only appropriate work for me.  It's not really about the money anyhow.  (As cheesy and cliche as that sounds!  Don't get me wrong, I'd definitely take compensation...  Just saying that I'd happily do the work [and have in the past] without monetary incentive.)

Anyways things are moving along.  Just trying to keep myself distracted.