}i{

doesn’t even know I exist…

I love you dooce!

I love animals and I need sleep.

For growing up in a suburb in San Diego, I was raised around a lot of animals. We had rabbits and cats/kittens, dogs/puppies, birds, a couple of ducks, an owl, a tarantula and a turkey. Even at over two feet tall, the turkey thought one of the ducks was his mom. Our beloved turkey met his fate of leaving our family after a neighbor walked into her kitchen to find him standing in the middle of it. A few weeks after giving the turkey away to a shelter, my mom asked them if the family that took him in were enjoying him, they responded by saying they thought our family pet was delicious. It was then my mom realized the poor guy was given away near Thanksgiving.

I always wanted to be a Veterinarian. I was always the mid-wife to our dogs and cats during labor and delivery and I always got the pick of the litter, almost always naming the pup or kitchen “Precious”. Yes, this was before watching Silence of the Lambs. I once saved a possum that was attacked by my three dogs. I walked up to the puncture-riddled, lifeless body to assess the damage and the damn thing freaked the hell out of me when it turned it’s face to mine and started hissing like a witch that just got it’s nose cut off. I figured I should probably do the thing a favor. Despite the puncture wounds, it was still ugly. So, I got a bucket and filled it with water. To drown it. I paced back and forth for quite a while until I finally realized I didn’t have it in me to kill a poor innocent creature, even if I thought I was helping it. So, I grabbed a pink towel from the house, wrapped the possum in it and loaded it into the trunk of my 1980 Ford Mustang. I had no plan, other than ditching it somewhere. Up the street from my house there was a nice shady spot under a tree so I pulled over and got the thing out and placed it, ever so gingerly, in the shade. I can imagine the confusion and alarm the neighbor across the street was thinking as he walked down his driveway toward me as I walked away from the bundle in a pink towel. After I explained the situation, he kind of smiled, in that, my-god-you’re-freaking-crazy kind of way and told me he’d take care of it. The next day, I drove by the spot and the towel was there but the possum was gone. Now, I imagine the thing healed and ran off into a field of pansies to start a hideous beautiful family and live happily ever after. But I still wonder if that neighborman had him some possum stew for dinner and left the towel in hopes that I would be steered in the direction of false jubilation. Although I don’t really care what happened to that possum, I do love animals, especially the domesticated kind.

I’ve been sick lately. I can’t tell if it’s season-change allergies or a cold but going to bed at midnight and waking up at 630am just wasn’t working last night as I sneezed every minute and blew my nose every two. My wonderful hubby agreed to waking up with our son at 630am this morning and getting him ready and off to school so that I could sleep in. Currently, my parents live with us as they find a job and home after moving here in July, so our baby is sleeping in her crib in our room. When going to bed at 130am, I couldn’t stop reading blogs (!), I laughed at the irony that would most likely take place of my baby waking up at 645am and not letting me sleep. Sure enough, she woke up… at 645am. Having been up since 620am, I was ready to get my congested head back to sleep. I grabbed my body pillow, went into my son’s room and climbed onto his bunk bed. At this point, the floor was a perfect option as well. Anything to get me back to sleep before my body and mind realized what was happening and woke up completely, preventing me from sleeping again for the rest of the day. Finally settling in and drifting off to sleep, the soft cotton t-shirt sheets and pillow case lulling me to dreamland, I smiled as I realized the desire I’ve had (for months) to sleep in was finally becoming a reality. All of that came to a crashing halt as I snapped to alert-status and my blood pressure rose to the yipping sound of some pesky neighbor dog that decided now was the best opportunity to show some neighborhood squirrel that he had the mouth of a sailor. POS. I left my earplugs in my room. So I tried to start my dream process while I was still awake, maybe incorporate this pesky fool into my dream somehow? It just didn’t work. Every time the dog yipped (it couldn’t even qualify as a bark) my brain became a bowl of Jell-O stuck in a Japanese earthquake.

Then it hit me. As much as I love animals, I love sleep so much more and if I was within range of that mutt, he probably would have been given a swift kick in the chops. If I had a gun, I might have made that animal my target. If I had some cyanide, I would have flavored it’s food with it. Did this mutt not know that I am a busy mom to three kids, I never get enough sleep AND I am fighting a war with some head gunk AND my husband is finally able to help with getting the kids off to school so I could FINALLY GET SOME REST?! UGH!

Remembering my experience with the possum, I thought it much easier (and so much less painful) if I just moved back into my room. So, I did just that. Thanked God that I didn’t own a dog at the moment. Thanked God that I couldn’t hear the dog from my room and thanked God (yet again) that my baby daughter sings sweet lullabies to herself when she wakes up in the morning.

Ahhh, sweet, sweet sleep here I come.

God knew that I needed encouragement and confidence in who I am tonight, SO… he sent some crackheads to our neighborhood.

I was drifting off to sleep about an hour ago when a very large/loud truck decided to park right across the street from our house. After about a minute (The people they were dropping off should have been dropped off already. Why, the heck, was the engine still running??) I got up to peek out the window. When, lo and behold, I notice the familiar lighting and passing the torch of A.) the lighter to a pot pipe or B.) the lighter to a crack pipe. I stood in awe at their stupidity (courage?) to sit in a neighborhood chock-full of signs that read “Neighborhood Watch, we call the police,” as they passed the dutchie to the left and right hand side. After a few minutes (and feeling the anger rise in me as these people are blatantly doing drugs in front of my house while my little innocent children slept) I went to ask my hubby if I should call the police. After all, I know how psycho people can get… I used to be psycho. If these are serial crackheads and they find out who called the cops… well… I’d hate to live while looking over my shoulder and my kid’s shoulders any more than I already do. Anyway, my hubby came up, witnessed the raw ignorance and said I should call. Of course, as I was about to call, they then started their engine and proceeded to pull away. I was not having that. I was almost asleep and they woke me up, doing drugs in front of my house.

** Sidenote: At this moment, as they drive away, I’m having visions of being a kid (growing up a few miles from Tijuana) and my dad and neighbors running outside with their guns drawn AND shooting at people trying to steal a neighborhood car. Neighbors were like family, don’t mess. End Sidenote**
**Dual Sidenote: I’d also like to point out that I am a let-people-be-who-they-want-to-be person. If you want to be an atheist, that’s your choice. If you want to smoke out, well, it’s your body, do what you will. HOWEVER, if you want to bring drugs into the neighborhood where my husband and I are raising our children, then you’d better be prepared for retribution. End Dual Sidenote**

As I watched them drive a couple hundred feet away, I realized that I didn’t hear their vehicle anymore. I figured they lived right around the corner and I was going to find out where they lived. I reassured Jase I wouldn’t do anything stupid, hopped in our car and drove around the corner. The only proof that they might have been there was the lights on in someone’s garage. I was bummed. So, I drove toward a stop sign to head back home and pulled up right behind the same truck!! Haha! They turned, so I turned. They went into a neighborhood, so I followed. All the while, I’m still contemplating calling the police. They turned down an even more tightly knit residential neighborhood so I drove past. I wasn’t about to make these stoners even more paranoid. So I did some u-turns and round-a-bouts and then realized that I lost them. I realized that was probably a good thing since the markings on our vehicle were kind of individual and a giveaway to anyone wanting to track us down. I drove home, changed vehicles (into our more inconspicuous vehicle) and went back to the place I last saw them. I drove through all the back roads of those neighborhoods and couldn’t find that truck anywhere. Damn it. I decided to go home. I felt good about my persistence and mother-bear mentality and was confident that I was a good protector of my family.

However, my night was not over. As soon as I threw in the towel, their headlights and row of orange lights on their cab appeared in my rear-view mirror. Woohoo, it’s on! So, I dialed 911. As I drove through the neighborhood streets again, I gave the dispatcher the information on the vehicle (I’d gotten the license plate when I first pulled in behind them). After driving around for several minutes while looking for the truck and completing the call with the dispatcher, I decided that I should call it a night, leave it in the hands of the police and get to sleep. As soon as I left that neighborhood and began to pull out into the street to go home, the familiar spinning lights of two police cruisers caught my attention. I changed course, yet again, and ventured off to see if they caught the perp. Sure enough, they had the truck pulled over and the driver in front as they searched it. Wow, those cops were fast. They made me proud. I went home and changed vehicles again. I had to confirm that this person was taken into custody and this was freaking exciting! I drove by, for the last time, as a police SUV and two police cruisers pulled away from the scene… with the truck… parked in the nearby parking lot.

Seriously. Don’t mess.

As my seven year old son was putting on his new shoes this morning, he stated that they really looked like soccer shoes, “they’re just missing the pokie things on the bottom”. Then he asked, “What type of shoes are these?” I said they were running shoes and he replied, “Yeah! If I was in a race, I would totally win!”. He then gave me an example of his new-shoe-power. While walking briskly, he showed how he used to run in his old shoes and as he sped up and ran through our living room, he demonstrated the speed he could now attain in these new shoes.

I look at my shoes a little differently now.

During breakfast this morning, my four year old daughter pointed to what she was eating and asked if it gives people moles. I laughed and told her that it didn’t and she asked, “Then why do they call them ‘ga-MOLE-a bars’?”

Holding back about five minutes of laughter, I let her know that she was eating a graNOLa bar.