April showers don't let me down.

Okay, so it's been months since I've blogged.

I read other's blogs with such envy as they manage to make cooking dinner and taking out the trash news-worthy, while I struggle to figure out what in our lives would make good blogging fodder.

In a little less than three weeks we leave for our Caribbean cruise and I am both excited for vacation and terrified that the bikinis that I must wear will be hideously unflattering. Prior to now, I would have just stopped eating for a few weeks beforehand, dropped ten pounds and been done with it. But, it turns out that starvation mode isn't so good for the body when you're trying to get knocked up so I've been sticking to my promised 1200 calories a day and putting in time at the gym a little more often. Our fertility specialist won't treat us if my BMI falls below 19, and right now I'm at exactly 20, so unfortunately I'm not allowed to lose much more. Although I'd love to get back to my high school weight, I am happy to now be a little lighter than the weight I was when I was diagnosed with cancer five years ago (FIVE - YAY!). If you didn't see me in the year or two that followed I will just let you know that hormone therapy packs on the pounds! At the highest point I think I had put on THIRTY pounds! Yikes. Not ever being heavy before, it was tough to take off, and especially hard to do the healthy way since Corey isn't a fan of me only eating every other day. I have about four more pounds that I'd like to lose, and then I'll be done.

We are trucking along with the infertility treatment. I will spare the gory details because not only is no one interested but me, but it also involves a lot of acronyms, drama, emotion, and disgusting things you'd probably rather not know about Corey or I. So, just rest assured that we are doing whatever we can medically do.

Corey was officially promoted last week. I know it seems like forever ago that he found out he was getting promoted, but the Air Force takes it's sweet time and does things in a particular order so he was one of the last groups to get promoted. Although it doesn't change things much in his particular job, it's still nice for him to see an additional stripe on his uniform and it's another step on our ladder.

Easter was quiet around here, but we will have an eventful April so it was kind of nice to stay home, catch up on episodes of LOST and chill with the puppy (who is almost not a puppy anymore). Next weekend is NASCAR which means that my parents will be down working for their charity, and our one year anniversary is Sunday, which means that I have exactly six days to figure out what kind of lovely paper central present I am getting for my darling husband. Do nudie magazines count for a paper present?

In the spirit of living in the moment

After reading what I wrote in my second to last post (let's all just ignore the mental breakdown that was my most recent) Corey and I sat down and had a little chat. By the grace of God, we managed to be on exactly the same page about things and made a decision: we are going on vacation.

Had I known exactly how stressful real vacation planning is, I might have rethought our conclusion, but a week later I am happy to say that we have researched, re-researched, compared, and agreed on a location as well as booked it, paid for it, and mentally packed for it.

We are going on a seven day cruise of the Western Caribbean with stops in Belize, Honduras, the Cayman Islands, and Cozumel, Mexico. Clear water and warm, humid air never sounded so sweet.

We did decide on Carnival cruise lines, which we're a bit leery about given the party ship claim to fame they have, but the fact of the matter is that I somehow became inherently cheap and had we decided to go on Princess we would have gone with a less expensive interior room. Granted, many people stay in those rooms and things go well for them, but let's just say I've seen Titanic and the people with the suites get on the rescue boats first. So, we decided to ride in style on Carnival and take the money we'll save and use it on scuba diving the great barrier reef and zip line rides through the Belizean jungle.

The money vacating our savings account has bothered me much less than I thought it would, and I can honestly say that I think the memories will be worth every penny.

Now I just have to figure out how my parents will survive eight days of their Grand-dog, the Beagador Crown Prince of the Western Hemisphere. May the Lord be with them.

I want a baby!

I don't have the time or the emotional energy to elaborate on this, but in the spirit of sending thoughts into the universe a la "The Secret", I am saying this out loud (or as out loud as one can get through a computer keyboard anyway).

I want peanut butter and jelly stains on half of my clothes, mud pies on my living room carpet, sleep deprivation, sweet pea puree in my hair, and half of my savings account spent on Pottery Barn baby furniture that never gets used because I can't bear the thought of the kid sleeping more than ten feet from my bed in a pack and play.

If I have to hear one more story of someone we know accidentally getting knocked up when they didn't want kids to begin with I'm going to drive directly to Gymboree and punch someone. Damn breeders.

That is all.

Walking the line

I'm a planner. I'm a super, mega, anal, OCD, planner of everything. I have binders in every room of the house containing daily to-do lists for the next week, savings schedules for this year, grocery lists, weekly menus, gifts to buy for the next decade...you get the picture.

I wasn't always this way and had you asked me five years ago whether or not I would own ten notebooks of purposefully varying sizes and colors for specific cataloguing of daily activities, I would have looked at you like you were mad and screamed something about never turning into my mother. But in this way, I very much have. And for the most part, I cringe to admit, it is highly effective and makes parts of my life a cinch.

What it doesn't do is nurture the freckle faced twenty-something that I have hidden inside. She yearns to break free and leave town on a whim, belting out her favorite song through the sunroof while the wind tangles her hair. She wants to leave fertility treatments and pest control appointments in the back of her mind and focus on the way things feel, taste, sound and look.

There are people (I know there are as I have blog stalked them) that take off unexpectedly to go on trips. Maybe they decide to go to an amusement park for the weekend, or maybe they quit their jobs and travel through Europe, staying in hostels for a year. I LOVE these people. And even more so, I want to BE these people. I want to wake up Saturday morning, throw an extra pair of jeans and my toothbrush in a bag and take the boy and his dog to the beach. I want to take ten grand out of our savings account and head for Bora Bora just because we can. I want to go to the airport and get on the next flight, no matter where it's bound.

Sometimes, generally in the foggy haze between asleep and awake, I convince myself that I can be this person. In a split second I assure my conscious self that I am capable of throwing my notebook out the window and going wherever the wind takes us. Then slowly, I feel the cloud lift and reality settle with great density upon my shoulders. Sometimes I even go so far as to make a list of places we could go spontaneously. Then I realize the irony of my actions, ball the paper up into my palm, and open my small brown binder to focus on the tasks for the day.

Very recently, a man I went to high school with passed away. I wasn't close with him, then or now, but that doesn't mean that his death didn't impact me. The fact is that he died of natural causes, as ridiculous as that feels to say about a 28 year old. His lovely wife is having to endure not only his loss, but also the loss of both of her parents in the last year as well. It sounds like a movie you'd never want to watch, and it brings me physical pain that all anyone can do for her now is pray. And as I pray for her I think about what she must miss about her husband and what she must wish they had done with the time they didn't know was dwindling away. I'm certain she doesn't long for more time to do laundry, or wish that the house was cleaner that week. I doubt she yearns for time to move backwards so they could put more money in savings or succeed in more lucrative careers.

If I were her I would long for more weekends on the beach, doing nothing. I would wish we'd used up the forty days of vacation time the boy has. I would thirst to get the time back spent scrubbing muddy paw prints off the microfiber sofa and instead go outside and play with the dog in the rain.

I made several resolutions this year, all catalogued neatly in the blue folder on the kitchen island, but there is one predominant one that I'm adding to the list: "To Identify the Line".

The line between too perfectionistic and too apathetic. Between laundry washed, dried, folded, starched and hung according to color, and piled up in the corner to petrify. Between never taking vacation time and going AWOL to live off the grid in Brazil. Between putting every penny in savings for some yet-to-be-named emergency and blowing it all on Jimmy Choos and mint condition Nintendo NES games. Somewhere between those poles there is a vast gray line with a little less structure and pattern and a little more complexity and delicious chaos.

I want to walk that line.

Post Xmas wrapup

I'm so bad at blogging for the same reason that I'm horrible at taking pictures during interesting things - I'm too busy DOING the interesting things. Okay, maybe things aren't always interesting, but they are almost always busy.

At the beginning of November Sprocket helped me put away the Halloween decorations and get out the winter things:

That was pretty exhausting so he got a pillow and a blanket and took a little nap. He thinks he's a person:



Then Corey and I did what we do each year to get into the holiday spirit. We put together our Operation Christmas Child boxes. I love this charity so much and we have a lot of fun putting boxes together thinking of the children who will be getting a Christmas present thanks to this wonderful organization.




This was also exhausting for my boys, so they cuddled up and took another nap. I am in love with this picture because a) it's the cutest thing this side of a baby in footie pajamas, and b) this is the first time I was actually able to sneak up with the camera and snap a shot without waking one or both of my guys up:



We spent Thanksgiving at my parents' house in Pinetop and enjoyed ourselves although we really missed my baby brother's company as he had to work. Unfortunately, I spend most of our time in Pinetop with terrible migraines thanks to the altitude so I don't have many pictures of the Thanksgiving feast itself, but rest assured it was lovely. Sprocket doesn't get much people food, but we have established that while he is a fan of turkey, broccoli elicits a much different response:

Last week my best friend in the world finished up her degree and was commissioned as an officer in the Navy, so I made my way out to San Diego to celebrate with her and attend the presentation. Unfortunately, both of my guys were sick (Corey with the stomach flu, and Sprocket was on a thirst strike until we bought him a cat water fountain) so I had to make the trip solo, but it was wonderful to see her and spend some time with her lovely family.





Once again we spent Christmas with my family in Pinetop (a ritual that I think will be changed next year as my altitude headache reared its ugly head in the worst way), and enjoyed having another white Christmas. Sprocket wasn't quite sure what to think of the snow at first, but after a few tentative bites he declared it both entertaining and delicious and spent quite a bit of time running amok in the back and front yards.



I think that catches you up on most things that have taken place in the last six weeks or so. Of course there have been other amazing, or disappointing, or confusing things, but I'll leave those for another post on another day. Right now I'm just enjoying the post Christmas high and the peace and quiet that can only mean that the puppy is taking another one of his naps on the couch. If only I could find the camera.

Christmas traditions...

Just last week (literally) I was basking in the 90+ degree sunlight of my backyard, watching our neighborhood children trek over to the community pool while balancing noodles, inner tubes, snorkel gear and water wings precariously over their heads, and sprinting on tip-toe out to the mailbox because the driveway was hotter than my broiler.

This morning I sipped my hot white tea while wrapped up in a thick blanket, waiting for the heater to come on.

Only one conclusion can be derived from this sequence of events: Fall this year in Phoenix was a full 48 hours long and it is now Winter.

I hate the cold, but it's impossible to hate everything that Winter brings with it: pumpkin carving, turkey roasting, hot chocolate whisking, tree shopping, present wrapping glory. The only problem with the holidays in the valley is that we don't have autumn to help us ease our way into it. So now, before I could see it coming, plans need to be made.

For those of you who aren't readers of this blog, or who we don't talk to often (how unfortunate, we keep meaning to call), Corey and I have made it a tradition to adopt a family for Christmas. While we have made it a goal to be more thankful all year long for the rich blessings we have in our lives, Christmas is a time where we have found it particularly rewarding to wrap all of those thankful feelings up into a big gift and bless a less fortunate family. Especially with the current (and seemingly never ending) economic climate, one would think this would be an easy task. Unfortunately, it's not.

So, I am enlisting all the help I can get.

We are looking for a family in need of a little help this Christmas. It could be help buying some presents for their children so they have something under the tree, or it could be a load of firewood and a Christmas dinner. We aren't particular about the nature of the need, but we do have one large stipulation, which is where we went wrong last year.

The family must be in need. Not 'in want'. We are not looking for someone who is brokenhearted that they can't buy their kids the largest plasma TV for the playroom. We aren't looking for a family who will sneer at a Guess coat because they were holding out for a Prada one. And, we also aren't looking for a family that can't afford Christmas presents because they spend their entire paycheck on cigarettes, alcohol, and eating out.

I don't mean to sound snotty about it, but I am well aware that there are thousands of families just getting by for a multitude of legitimate reasons, and I have no interest in ignoring their needs so I can pay the electric bill of a lazy drug-addict who signed up for public assistance so he won't have to work.

Also, we simply can't afford to buy a family of six every new video game system just so they can keep up with their friends.

So, if you know anyone who is deserving of some help this Christmas please let us know. It can be as face-to-face or anonymous as the family is comfortable with, we just really want to help someone who needs it.

Thanks!!!

Bad Blogger!

It's true - I'm a very bad blogger. It's not due to lack of conviction on my part, as I have sat down with the laptop approximately twenty times since my last post, but I just never manage to hit the "Publish" button.

There has not been much excitement in our little corner of the world, and a major part of that is Corey having been in Texas all month completing his instructor training for the new position. It's not the first time the Air Force has separated us, and God knows it won't be the last, but to say that I'm counting down the minutes until his return would be an understatement.

In the meantime, Sprocket and I have been at home trying to find some sort of routine in the chaos that is a puppy's first few months of life. So far, we've come to a stand-off in the area of sleeping habits as he would prefer to only sleep a few hours at night and then lounge around all day taking naps as he pleases. As this doesn't quite work for my schedule I have been a walking zombie, at least until noon, and not as much gets done as I would like. These are the days that I miss coffee. A lot.

He is growing quite well though, and once we got his sicknesses under control he has put on enough weight to make him a happy 24 pound, four month old lab. He is quite obviously mixed with a breed that has a less substantial bone structure than normal black labs, and we don't expect him to get anywhere near the 60-75 pounds that most full grown adults get to, but we would be foolish to think he would be a good guard dog at any weight. Sprocket has never met a person he didn't want to paw, lick, and nibble to death - regardless of the location, time of day/night, or just the fact that they look frightening.

I have some rather unfortunate medical tests and problems to deal with in the coming months, and it will be nice to get Corey home and establish a little order to our tumultuous world (as least as well as we can). Nothing life-threatening, but definitely emotionally draining, and I am very thankful for the thoughts and prayers of my family and friends in-the-know (and of course those who just send general good tidings our way).

As we get more resolution and perhaps some answers I will post more about the situation, but until then I am doing my best to find comfort in the blessings I DO have. It's sad and amazing to me how much we (and especially me) overlook the things we are gifted with while focusing on the things we can't and don't have. It's a daily struggle for me to remain on the positive side of the fence (perhaps Maleficent gifted me with pessimism) but I do appreciate the warmth that comes with good friends and family.

I hope that going into the holiday season this year all of us receive not only the gifts that we are asking for, but also the ones we need.