Tinkerbell, butterflies, and vomit

The day got off to a crazy start. Little Guy woke with a stomach bug. At first we weren't sure if he was sick, but a projectile incident one hour before Girlie's 7th birthday party guests were supposed to arrive confirmed it.

We had already hung the butterfly decorations and put together the Tinkerbell grab bags, so we didn't cancel the party and prayed for the best. He didn't throw up again for the rest of the day but had a few toxic diapers which almost made me wish I could suit up in some sort of hazmat outfit before changing him. So far it seems like the worst of it is over.

Girlie had a great day with her friends and I still can't believe I am the mother of a 7 year old girl. She was born the year I turned 30, so now I am closing in on 40 and in complete denial!

Free advice

My message to those of you who don't have children:

Get your lazy ass to the gym. You have no excuse. Trust me, there will be a day when you are finally working on your best eagle pose in yoga class and someone will tap on the studio glass to tell you that your son has been crying for twenty minutes and could you please pack up your shit and take him away before he freaks out the other little ones happily playing in the gym childcare. You will have to leave without the breathing/cool down/relaxation portion of your class and the positive energy you may have been channeling during the workout will be snatched from your grasp as fast as you can say Momma.

How a crazy person sleeps

One of the perks of sleeping more soundly, other than not walking around with my left eye twitching constantly, is that I seem to be dreaming again. I have always been one of those people who have really vivid dreams. I can still remember a few of them from years back.

The other day I woke up in the middle of a weird dream. There was a person in it, a guy, who I don't know, who followed me along a path to a cabin or some kind of little house. I ran inside the house and closed the door. It might have been creepy, but I wasn't afraid of him and in the dream I was aware that I was being dramatic by running from him. He was coming up to the door shouting something just as I woke up. I can clearly picture his face, but I have no idea who he was or what he wanted from me or why I slammed the door in his face.

Last night I dreamt about my first boss. I was trying to return some copy paper that I had stolen from the office before he realized it was gone. Someone else I used to work with, but at a different job, was helping me sneak in to the office at night and return the large load of stolen paper, some of which we hid in the ceiling tiles.

I don't expect the dreams to make sense, but sometimes I can pick up a thread of a real life awake conversation or a person I was thinking of and the dreams seem to have at least some valid relationship with my brain. Other times the dreams seem to have no connection whatsoever. And then I wonder who the dream strangers are, the ones like the cabin guy.

Are they faces from my subconscious, people I have passed on the street or seen in movies? Are they real people or completely made up? Are they people I have known in some other level of consciousness? Is there a whole other existence that I am tapping into? A past life? Or is my imagination just that powerful? Even if the strange dream people are really things or thoughts or issues, how does my brain construct a physical representation of that?

It drives me crazy because my dreams seem so close to reality, like one day I will open my front door and there will be the cabin guy and he'll be all Why did you slam the door in my face?

And I'll know exactly why.

Confession

I really don't like brown rice. I have tried really really hard to. My friends who are into such things extol the rich nutty flavor. I have prepared it several different ways, but I can't get used to the taste. I know it is healthy and so much better for me. But, yuck.

What I do love is sticky white rice. I know it is the equivalent of eating a loaf of gummy white bread, which I would never do in a million years. After switching to wheat bread years back, most white bread is just gross. But white rice, yum.

Anyway, I try to make myself feel better by buying organic white rice and slathering it with organic butter.

A little scar

I have a little scar on my left hand to remind me not to do too much. It is on my palm and you can barely see it, but if you touch it there is a tiny knot.

When I owned my business I had a wonderful person who came to watch my kids for twenty hours a week. I worked two days a week at the store, coming home around dinner time and sometimes went in on Saturday mornings. The other days, I did my office work at home working around the kids schedule. It sounds like the perfect set up, and it was in some ways, but it also felt like I was constantly working. On the one hand, having my own business brought me incredible personal satisfaction, but then again it wasn't like a job you could walk away from. I did the advertising, bookkeeping, buying, merchandising, and payroll myself, which is probably why I always made money at it, but also how I killed myself doing it.

One evening after working at the store, I rushed home to make dinner. My Little Guy was a baby then and always started crying just about thirty minutes before dinnertime. I put him in his high chair and tossed some Cheerios his way. I had two pots simmering on the stove, and one full of boiling water. Girlie was upstairs playing, and I was running in and out of the kitchen to fax an order off to a vendor. Why, at that precise moment it seemed like a good idea to change the bulb in the range hood, I will never know. Except that I always felt like I needed to squeeze in a million things at once, and I did. As I was changing the bulb, it shocked me and I jerked my hand way, slicing my palm on the metal. It bled like crazy and I almost passed out at the sight of it. My husband wasn't home yet and was stuck somewhere where he had no cell service. I had no choice but to call my sister in law who was working at my store and tell her to lock the doors and come save me before I bled to death or maybe just passed out, baby in the high chair, pots boiling, five year old upstairs doing who knows what, fax machine buzzing away...

As I told the story to my one of my friends a few days later, she said Maybe the universe is trying to tell you something. At the time I brushed it off, I was, after all, a person who could juggle a million things, and look how successful I was.

Except I wasn't. I was bleeding in my kitchen.

Now we have sold the business and things have slowed considerably. I am not working and though I whine about it quite often, I also realize that my life is so much happier on a daily basis. I have that little scar to remind me of how crazy things can get when I try to do too much, and I have realized that just because you can doesn't mean you should. I'll be working again in a few years and some days seem a little crazy regardless, but for now I am just going to relish the fact that I don't have TOO much going on.