Rage Me

Today was not so great.

Sometimes I hear, at work, that we spend all this time worrying about how the 1 kid is affecting our class instead of focusing on the other 99 that are being great.

There's a funny thing about one thing. It can mess up your whole day.

One inappropriate comment stops the whole discussion cold.

One misbehavior ruins the whole period.

One rude confrontation can gnaw at you for hours.

You think about your "one thing" s, and suddenly the gnocchi in your stomach from dinner feels like a whole ton of bricks.

Not losing your cell phone helps just a little.

The Day Before Christmas

Before, and After

I am just beginning my third bout of sickness in the last month. There is something seriously wrong with my immune system. I think the technical term is “kids”.

Many people have been asking me about our recent big news and it’s hard to even know where to begin, but really all you need to know is:

We bought a (little) house.

Read on if you want just the tip of the iceberg.

It basically needed to be completely gutted, and we haven’t even started with the outside yet.

For such a little space, it’s certainly expensive in money and time to fix up a house. How do people buy extra houses?

Jake gets all the credit. I watched the kids every afternoon while he worked. I did feel like I was working hard too.

Buying a house in Hawaii is way more complicated and weird than I would have thought. People want way too much for the most falling apart termite-eaten places, more than you’d ever imagine, and we learned all the funny tricks people use to get around legalities. For example, “square footage may be different than tax-records” means that there’s way more house than they can legally list (which is almost every house), and there might even be a rental attached. One place had a tenant living in a part of the house we wouldn’t be allowed to see until our offer was accepted. Some places that are “for sale” are not really for sale, and building your own house or even buying an extensive fixer-upper is almost never approved unless you’re buying with cash. We learned way too much about mortgages, types of loans, and all the costs and credits associated with them. Many houses lately are real-estate owned and we learned a bit about the process from short-sale, to foreclosure, to REO which is a strange process. Flood zones are a killer—we are in the most expensive flood zone and our flood insurance is as much as all the other insurance put together. If we want to build on to our house we have to lift the whole house and we can build on to the outside—but not below us because the bottom of any new house area we build has to be lifted a whole lot of feet too. Our house was a Fannie Mae REO and the closing date was pushed back something like two months because of extremely silly things and we had to fix things on the sly to get approvals. Jase, our real estate agent, worked a lot of miracles to get this thing to go through. I made him take me to every single house for sale within 15 miles. Even the $700k (but still needing work) ones.

One house we saw was literally the most crazy thing I’ve ever seen. It seemed like a joke. The floor plan made zero sense and they had built on to the edges, gradually, so the outside of the house was now on the inside in several places. The bottom floor’s ground sloped to one corner (like a 6-8 inch gradual slope) and the upstairs parts where they built on to were all an uneven step down, even though it was only 3 feet of a room area. It was super solid, but just crazy crazy ugly and still needed a bunch of remodeling work. The bathroom had a straight up full length picture window next to the toilet so you could do your business and say Hi to the similarly crazy neighbor’s house windows 5 feet away. Most houses are literally completely cemented over any area that are not house, so there was no yard at all.

Luckily, even though our house needed a lot of work, it was solid and it was mostly cosmetic. The bathroom had to be completely redone, including the base floor had to be ripped out. Other awesome plusses about our house include a good sized back and front yard, being right up the street from Adam, and a really large covered patio area where Jake can eventually do some work. If we could do something about the covered area, we could also have an amazing view to the mountains.

I am really sad that we won’t be living right next door to Pammy. I think that will be the hardest adjustment for us. And Amaya.

These afters are really still in progress, but it’s the best you’re going to get right now.

Before:

After

 

Before:After

Before

AFTER:

   

I’m glad it’s almost done. I wish it was just a flood of relief to finally be working on our own home and I am grateful but it has been really hard. The fact that Jake hasn’t even been surfing in more than month should tell you something serious is going down. We’re packing and moving this next week. It’s been very very stressful. I think it has definitely been hard on the kids too. It may explain why I completely forgot about Amaya’s primary program and why I bring her late to school almost every day and why we go days, lately, without even writing down what books we’re reading her. Wait, am I reading her books lately? No. Probably not. Everything has been slipping. Absolutely everything.

Or maybe that’s just normal. Who knows. I’m blaming the floorboards for hogging all the attention.

 

Really annoying things that Alanis Morissette would call Ironic even if they’re not.

Best feeling in the world: Throwing off the shackles of a 2 week diet and licking dulce de leche off the spatula after eating cookie dough.

Worst feeling in the world: Right after the dulce de leche/cookie dough binge. And maybe you had a couple of chocolate covered pretzels, too.

 

Reading angry comments on a news article about teachers’ contracts. Because we make so much money.

 

Being told we can leave early from school, because we have comp time for coming to the open house after hours, but I have 45 more essays to grade and for once we don’t have an after school meeting because everyone else has left. Oh, and did I mention, most people leave school early anyway.

 

Playing an “All Things Considered” piece about the misuse of the term “That’s Racist” and then hearing students misuse the term almost immediately after that.

 

Catching students chewing gum after I’ve made 10 of their peers spit out their gum within the same hour. And them telling me that gum tastes good.

 

A parent lecturing me about why her student doesn’t like my class after I’ve called her because the student is messing around and being disrespectful in class.

 

Me complaining about Harry Potter even though I’ve never read it. And don’t intend to.

Babies Cry

I believe that there is another dimension, an alternate universe, where I am not a complete baby.

The day starts with me getting Amaya to school, late, the middle goes like a to-do list a mile long which rolls right over my lunch break and my own class prep, and the end of the middle is when I sit down to start actually working on my own class and Mozely wakes up as Jake is walking away to get some time to himself.

That’s when the end-end of the day is me trying to contain my hysterics about small setbacks.

And that’s when the end of the day turns into Taco Bell for the rest of the family.

Once they leave I start feeling really silly but also extremely angry at them for leaving me behind. Even if they’ve promised to bring something back for me.

Then when my family gets home, they try to show love and affection for me, and I just want to cry in misery.

It’s a spiral of self-loathing. I really, really, really hate that my one year old pulls my hair constantly. It makes me want to cry sometimes. He starts crawling all over me and grabbing fistfuls of my hair, even if I have it up in a bun, and I feel like sobbing: “Just please, please, please stop eating my hairrrrr…..”

I would shave it, but since I already do nothing to make myself look like a girl…

I guess I’ll keep the hair for now. Even if it does have spit matting it down and half of it is pulled out of its ponytail.

This week we’ve been really tired because Mozely has been having a hard time sleeping. We’ve had him sleep trained since he was 6 months old and since he started walking there are nights and way-too-early mornings he cries for so long and so loud that I’m sure he’ll have a brain aneurysm. He prances back and forth in his baby pen, pressing his face against the mesh and screaming. That’s why I’ve decided that baby book parenting is CRAP. We put him to bed, we don’t get him, he goes to sleep. Sometimes. The books say that if you answer their cry then they’ll start expecting it. Sometimes he goes to sleep without crying, sometimes he cries for 10 minutes, and sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and cries for way over half an hour.

Since when can babies tell time? And why does he do this for 2 weeks every night in a row and then not at all, even though I got him every night? And why the heck does he absolutely insist on waking up at 5 am even though every book says that he should be sleeping for 10-12 hours?

I’ve tried everything (for many nights in a row) from going in every 10 minutes to reassure him, to the Super Nanny method of sitting in the room with your back to them (just resulted in several nights of little sleep), to ignoring him completely, and the only solution is milk. Hours of crying will become milk, I think. And I don’t think it’s because I’m wimpy.

Mozely is showing symptoms of some strange joint problem that both Amaya and I have. I only figured out when I was an adult that it was my joints and not my muscles, but I get very intense pain that emanates from my knees at night when I don’t drink enough water during the day. Sometimes in my wrists too. I had so many people tell me it was all in my head (including doctors), but then we realized Amaya has it too. Now Mozely, we think. He was wiggling his legs around like crazy and Jake massaged them and then he fell right asleep.

Plus he finally broke his 3rd and 4th tooth. It was an agonizing week.

My mama totally must have picked me up in the middle of the night. I fully expect someone to come rescue me.

The world is much more forgiving of a crying baby than a crybaby.

My only hope is that I am some CIA secret agent bad A with 10 kids, good hair, and a clean house in that other dimension.

Maybe she should come show me how it’s done.