moving already!

not me but my blog.  i just don’t like this one.

for the 2 people who have looked at this blog, if you oare interested to see any more of my life unfold please visit me at:  http://theadventuresofmandlsmommy.blogspot.com/

Single Mom

I am a temporary single parent. It is not my favorite situation. Big G will be gone on a business trip for 2 weeks. We have not been apart that long since last year (he started his new job in the southeast 6 weeks before the girls & I moved down here from the northeast…that was tough for me & the girls). This is nothing compared to that…but still hard on us. Big G & I are very close…we have moved around a lot in the 16 years we have lived together…lots of times we only have each other as friends, you know until we meet people & start a new life in our new place. So I don’t like it when he’s gone.

It wasn’t until we had kids that I really appreciated how hard it must be to be a single parent. Big G has almost always been gone from dawn until well after dusk…just the nature of his job. But he always comes home, he’s always here for at least some of the weekend and I am not the only one who has to worry about where the money is going to come from. I don’t know how all you single parents do it…but I have tremendous respect for you…you all deserve more of it than I think you get.

Sleep Over

Miss M had her friend sleep over last night. Honestly, we were all so excited (me & the girls anyway, Big G thought it was fine but excited is a bit of an overstatement!)! Everyone had a great time…there was dress-up time, signing, dancing, board games, coloring, snacks, pizza, more snacks, movies, painting…fun, fun, fun! I thought maybe we would make a bead project, the kind where you fill the board with beads & then iron it, and I also thought maybe we would make some popsicle stick craft but we ran out of time (we only had 24 hours!).  Honestly I think they all had a great time.
I have waited for this to happen for years, literally…since before E was born.  I like to plan! I purposely picked out her crib because it converted to a full size bed’s headboard. I always thought it would be nice for my little girl to have a sleep over & be able to just have her friends sleep in her bed. I didn’t go to lots of sleep overs when I was little but I know that we all thought it was a big deal IF we could share a bed…I always remembered that. So please imagine my feelings when this is how it all went down…so cute but just not MY plan…oh well!

(all on the living room floor!)

A Sleepover!

I can’t believe my peeps are old enough for this but they are having a friend sleepover this evening. This little girl is in M’s class but, as we there so much (room mother here!), L thinks she is in the class as well… so they all get along. I just never imagined having a sleepover in Kindergarten…they are already having so much fun! It is so cute!  Right now I feel like a good mom…a feeling that I am sure will fade
My little people are 18 months apart (I tried to get them closer in age, just didn’t work) and most days I am so very glad they are close in age. My sister & I are 4.5 years apart, we didn’t really get along when we were little simply due to the age difference.
When I am feeling like a less-than-stellar mom, I am always happy that they are close in age…they can find solace in each other

Points…

Do you know what else I worry about?  Weight.  I am too heavy.   I was always thin.  I was always the skinny kid.  In High School, so many of my friends had eating disorders.  Even though I didn’t (or so I thought), I would partake in some of there food games.  One of our favorites was to see who could go the longest period of without eating over x number of calories (normally 50-100 a day).  When we had gone as long as we could, we would pool our money and buy TONS of junk food and see who could eat the most.  This was followed by who could puke the most or take the most laxatives… you know, your general High School fun!

Fast forward 20 years and I still have a weight issue.  I sort of had it under control but then I had a baby & then 18 months later I had another.  Add a year of breastfeeding to that (which I of course used as license to eat at will) ans I was FAT!  I tried to go back to Weight Watchers, I had been successful in the past, but this time no luck.  I am an emotional eater with a ridiculous response to looking int he mirror…instead of looking at myself and saying “I am too heavy, I need to lose weight.”  I look at myself and say “I am too heavy, I need cake!”  This has gone on for the better part of 4 years.  I was extremely successful last year and lost 63 pounds.  Sadly, as I stated, I am an emotional eater so when Big G, the girls & I moved to an unfamiliar place and he worked 70+ hours I ate and ate…I ate because I had no friends here, I ate because he was gone 1 or 2 nights a week, I ate because I was too heavy.

I am changing that I am back on the Weight Watcher plan.  I am on my second week…it is much harder this time but maybe that will make me stick with it…even after I’ve lost the weight.  So I am counting…all the way up to 26, everyday!

Welcome to my life…

I am the proud mother of two wonderful girls affectionately called M & L.  I love them, some say to a fault.  Just about every single thing I do is for them.  I have a hard time, like a lot of moms, buying things for me but I’d just about put myself in the poor house to make sure my girls have everything they need and a lot of what they want.   I have a lot of what I call ‘future guilt’ when it comes to my girls.  I am always sure that they will suffer some horrid fate (real or most likely imagined) because of something I have done, or failed to do.   I am sure that my 6 year old will resent me for having a second child, for not paying her 100% attention.  She will spend years in therapy trying to undo all the “fairness” and “right” things I tried to do.  My 4 year old will always love me too much (due to successful breastfeeding of course) and yet have abandonment issues due to me “cutting her off” at 11.5 months. I spend everyday trying to make sure they have a great childhood.  Trying to ensure that when they are my age and they are looking for a Mother’s Day card to send me they won’t do the same thing I do (almost every year), I call my sister, while staring at the cards, and say “Hey, they don’t have any cards here that say ‘Mom, I know there were mothers that were worse than you, so Happy Mother’s Day!’…what should I pick??”… all the while afraid that I am as bad as my mother was, just in different ways.  Who knew that being a mommy would bring up all of the issues of your childhood, whether they have resolved or not.

When I am not fretting about the future mental state of my girls (which is not often) I am worrying about money.  My husband (then boyfriend) and I started living together when I was 20.  We had nothing…so much nothing that my mother (at a good stage in her life I guess) would send me 50lb boxes of food so that we would have enough to eat.  Big G (my husband) and I moved to the mid-west 1 week before my 21st birthday.  My entire family was in the Northeast and his was in another country.  He had a job, had to to be allowed into the country, I however did not.  What I did have was a credit card and my mother’s shopping habits.  Big G was only to happy to shop right along with me.  We had a great couple of years living on credit, but then one day it hit us, we needed to pay it back.  We were overwhelmed.  We had over 40K in debt and little to show for it, sad pathetic I know.  We got a debt consolidation loan that took care of most of it and started paying it back, very slowly.  We moved a lot because of his work, so every 2 years or so I was out of work for a few months and managed to rack up more debt.  Two and a half years ago my husband came home with horrible news, he had been fired… (I’ll go into why another time) .  All I could think of were all the bills we had to pay, by this time we had a mortgage, home equity loan AND all the credit card mess.  We were able to sell our house before the market fell apart (thank you God!) and moved back to the Northeast to live with my parents…me, Big G and M & L!!! What a joy!  While we were there we did 2 things almost everyday 1) he looked for another new job (the one he had there was temporary) and 2) spent his money like everything was okay.  We did not go further into debt, actually paid some off BUT we could have done so much more.  I have just started to sip the Kool-Aid that is Dave Ramsey…I am hoping to be drinking by the cup full soon…we’ll see!

Well, that is my life in a nutshell…I’ll fill in the details as we go along, I hope you”ll stop by to see how I’ve messed up, figured out my life and what adventures we are currently having!!!