I decided that this year I am joining National Blog Posting Month, aka NaBloPoMo, which means post about some thing every single day.
It is also National Adoption Awareness Month, so expect some posts about adoption.
And Widget turns 3 in 3 weeks from today!!
I shall try not to bore with too much inanity or insanity in my attempts at posting every day 
So I didn’t want to go to work today.
I called in with a migraine. Now I do have a headache (one of the dull annoying will-probably-last-all-day type) but it isn’t exactly a migraine.
Of course, by the end of today I’ll probably wish I had gone to work instead because we are working on using the potty with Widget, so I’m likely to spend much of the day taking her to the bathroom or cleaning up accidents.
Can I just say potty training is a pain in the butt?
…to not crawl into bed with us in the middle of the night on a regular basis now that she is in a toddler bed and not a crib? Yeah, every couple of nights, we are woken up by her hurling herself in between us in bed. She’s not scared, upset, nothing. Just wants to sleep with us.
…want to potty train? Absolutely no interest. None. She knows when she has to go potty, she has even told me she has to go but when I ask her to sit on the potty, she says no and runs away.
….let me change her diaper, put clothes on her, buckle her into her carseat without some sort of threat? This has been an issue for quite awhile, she hides or crawls/runs out of reach, laughs, won’t stay still. T and I are about ready to pull our hair out!!! We have followed through on our threats too- no tv/videos, time out, spanking, etc. but it really makes no difference. She does the same thing the next time we have to do any of the above. And doing her hair? Apparently that is sheer torture because she screams and twists her head around every time, even when I haven’t touched her hair yet with the brush.
My session with #5 this week was better than I thought it might be. Lots of him making me evaluate and look at what things I’m stressing over that I might be able to take steps to get answers to. Plus we talked about my great ability to stew about stuff. I said I excel at stewing, which made him chuckle 
My anxiety has been awful lately over the whole money situation. Every time I think we might be able to get on track, we end up in another tight money crisis. On paper, it looks like it should work but it never seems to. We are still agonizing over whether to file bankruptcy or wait because I am picking up an extra day starting in September and I got a whopping 40 cent per hour raise, which will help but we don’t know if it will truly help enough. Whether my “sanity” can take another day in the world of Thermoblah, I don’t know. And of course, we are continuing to get some phone calls from the “friendly” people at our old mortgage company, and since they won’t talk to me and they call my cell phone to talk to T, I guess they are s*0*l. I figure if I get a chance to talk to them, I’m just going to say they might as well give up now because if they do push us for it, we are going to file for bankruptcy protection which we should qualify for with no problem, so either way, they aren’t getting jack from us.
T is leaving me again this weekend for more canoing. This time he is going for one of our friends’ 30th birthday. While I’m glad he is getting some time to do guy stuff, I’m kind of dreading having the weekend to myself with Widget because she has been a bit of a pill lately and having his help on the weekend is sometimes very essential to my stability. I was thinking about tackling potty-training since we would have the weekend with no plans but I haven’t committed myself to it yet. I still don’t know if she is really ready or not (I think I was agonizing over this a year ago, with no progress. Ha!) and it seems like such a huge project.
This morning Widget comes in the bathroom as I am putting lotion on and says, “Mama I need lotion too. I need lotion for my peanuts.”
I turned around and she is standing there rubbing her hands on the front of her diaper. I replied that girls do not have a p*nis, just boys.
She looks up at me and says “Boys have a peanut?”
Yes, dear. Boys have a peanut. 
We spent yesterday and much of today at our friend’s family cottage about an hour north of where we live. It has become our annual gathering, going on for the last 8 years. We either spend the night or just a day enjoying the sun, the lake- our friend rents a sea doo (something I haven’t ventured onto yet). Having kids has made it a more toned-down gathering in the last few years but we still have a good time seeing each other and catching up. We see some of the group very frequently but others, this is maybe one of three or four times a year.
I have to admit after the last couple of years, I was starting to think maybe we would begin to bow out, thanks to some relationship dynamics that always seemed to provoke additional stress and anxiety- not what a weekend with friends is supposed to be like. But we had fun this year (other than when the 3 two-year-olds all became whiny due to short naps and not enough sleep!) and got a little sunburned, except Widget with her SPF50 sunscreen.
Now I have several loads of laundry to do and stuff to put away, before Tuesday when I head to Chicago to retrieve my sister M and her three kids at the airport. They are descending on us for two weeks, well, one week here and one week on the family vacation. They are flying in and were supposed to stay with my parents…. That is, until last Friday when my mother decided she would be too overwhelmed. And I don’t have a session with #5 again until July 9- Am I nuts? We scheduled 3 weeks between this time. At first, I was fine with that but now as a week has gone past and I still have two weeks to go, I’m finding myself having more anxiety than in past few weeks. Bleh.
Anyway, here are some pictures of Widget enjoying the weekend:
And a random one of Widget in the tub with her Dora swim ring:
I’m sitting here ignoring Widget’s hollering at me to get her out of her crib. She seems to think she no longer needs naps. However, when she doesn’t sleep, she is Miss WhinyPants all afternoon.
She isn’t crying, just periodically shouting “Mama, I want out. No nap. Never ever anymore!” I keep hoping if I ignore her, she will give in and fall asleep.
I’m not ready for her to give up naps.
Ye olde imac is in our bedroom because we don’t have room in the living room and I can’t afford a laptop. So I flipped on Noggin for Widget while I checked my e-mail, blogs and whatnot after work, sticking my head out into the living room every 5-10 minutes to check on her.
Yeah, and then I found this:
Apparently she figured out how to unzip the back cushions on our couch.
When I asked her what she thought she was doing, she said “I makin’ a sandcastle Mama!” She was throughly pleased with herself 
1. I’m thinking about going back to wordpress.com when my $1.00 for a year of hosting is up at surpasshosting.com. But I’m going to keep my domain name and point it to my wordpress.com blog, so you won’t have to change links again. I’ve determined that the advantages aren’t worth the monthly fees for hosting. When that happens, I’ll probably be down for a little while while the DNS changes over. I am going to be double posting (I think) between the two….I’m still getting hits and comments at the old site.
2. I still feel unsettled in our apartment. I also feel somewhat guilty because any time someone asks us about where we moved, I fudge and say we ended up getting an apartment as we ran out of time to find a house. I’m struggling with feeling like I’ve taken a step backwards in terms of how life is supposed to go. Plus I obviously don’t want to share with all the people that ask about all our money crap. Of course, I have blathered about it on here my partially anonymous open to the world blog. Heh. How’s that for keeping it on the down low?
3. I’ve had some really vivid dreams ever since we moved, all of them distressing. One full of arguing between myself and my mom over her relationship with my dad and her notion that he is an alcoholic. Another with some really intense conversations with Widget’s firstmom’s dad about how devastated L is over having placed Widget with us and how it is all our fault for wanting to raise a child from babyhood; and that they wanted us to turn custody back over to L. Guess I have some things to sort out here.
4. Speaking of L, we are supposed to get together with them this weekend. I have been completely procrastinating about calling and confirming the visit and determining where we are going to meet, since we are no longer in Grand Rapids. I know I’m dealing with some issues regarding feeling like we failed L by not being as financially stable as we should have been before adopting. They don’t know about any of it and I don’t really want to talk about it with them, even though there is a part of me that knows “honesty is the best policy” with open adoption.
5. We are having some discipline issues with Widget. She has really gotten into pinching, hitting and jumping on me, sometimes because I’m doing something she doesn’t like- like her hair; other times for absolutely no reason at all. I’ll sit down on the couch to be near her and she starts kicking me. I have purchased two books: 1-2-3 Magic and The No Cry Discipline Solution. I’m hoping one of these or a combination of these will help us with her because I’m feeling like a pretty shitty parent lately, when my interaction with her is primarily, “No” “Stop” “If you do that again, you are going in time out” “I will spank you if you keep this up”. Blech. Along with her lovely trend of putting too much food in her mouth and gagging/throwing up. She’s done this a few times now, last night of course when we were meeting with our new small group from church (I’m so excited about this, all couples around our age with kids Widget’s age and younger)- fortunately we met at a park for dinner and were outside when she did it, even after we told her she needed to take smaller bites.
6. And tomorrow I turn 30. No more 20s. I’m trying to determine if this year was better than the last couple. It has had some pretty rough spots but I think the overall trend has been up instead of down. I don’t feel like I should be 30 or married 10 years (on Flag day!).
This is an odd occurrence for western Michigan in April. 80 degrees, a few clouds, light breeze.
I got sunburned spending 3 hours outside with Widget, washing our cars -she was a big helper… okay not so much when she rewashes what you just rinsed. We even pulled out her kiddie pool and filled it partially with water from the hose, partially with warm water from the house.
Gorgeous weather. It won’t stay this warm but I’m reveling in it while it lasts
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