G.T.T.

In times past, people would leave their old lives and leave notes which simply read "G.T.T." and their loved ones knew...they'd Gone To Texas.  Well, so have we.

We were chased out of town last Tuesday by the awful tornadoes which decimated so many.  They were a blessing to me.  Just as I was beginning to get weepy over leaving home, my friend Peace called to say "It's headed right for you.  Get to cover or get out.  You have about 30 minutes."  With no time for long last looks or tearful goodbyes, we threw the last of our suitcases in the car and left home for the last time.

We spent our last night in Oklahoma at our beloved Oma and Opa's house.  Wednesday morning we left for Texas.  By Thursday night, we were sleeping in our own beds and doing our best to ignore the strangeness of our surroundings.  It wasn't that hard as we were all so tired.

So.....here we are in Texas, all but my husband who will join us this week.  We're finding our way around and figuring out how to get to where we need to be.  It doesn't feel like home yet but it will.  Today I got home from the grocery store without the GPS and only took one wrong turn.  If you could see the maze that is our neighborhood, you'd know what an accomplishment that is.

Dallas people aren't as friendly as the Okies we left behind.  It's not Texans, but big city folks, I think.  I miss the friendly.  I especially missed it this morning at Mass when no one said hello or even smiled in our direction.  I told my eldest that that "never would have happened at our church back home."  She smiled and said "That's because you were the person who always told new people hello."

That's who I need to be here, I think.  I need to be the person who says hello.  I need to be the person who walks up to the clumps of talking people and introduces myself to them all.  What I wouldn't give for a friendly glance or a welcoming smile, some indication that such overtures would be welcome.  I've never been a wallflower, but it's rare that I've met such an unwelcoming crowd....but then again I was on my own home turf so it was easier to be bold and friendly.

Who knew that I would ever need help talking to strangers?  I keep trying to be nice and they keep looking at me like a 3 headed monster.  Where is the vaunted Texas hospitality?  I'm still looking for it.  I know it's here somewhere.

Someone I love likes to say that you only need one good friend and to just pray that God will bring you the one that you need.  Last time I did, I ended up on my neighbor's porch ordering her to come to lunch and so began a great friendship.  I need a crazy lady to show up out of nowhere, God.  Can you send just one loony my way?  thanks.

Ugh

You can convince yourself that you've become a pretty decent housekeeper right up until the moment when they move your fridge.

Making it Through Today

There are packers in our house this morning.  Strangers sorting through our carefully gathered treasures.  They quickly wrap them in brown paper and place them in boxes.

It would take me hours and days to do this same work because these things are my own.  They are a part of our life here, and it's strange to watch it be so swiftly dismantled by people whose names I've already forgotten.  Tape. Wrap. Box. Label.  Move on.

With breath-taking speed our Okie life is coming to an end, and it's no longer us in charge of ending it.  For a person who likes to be in charge, it's been a challenging morning of sitting on the couch and trying to stay out of the way.

My job today is waiting and watching.  When they are done, it will be time to clean, but until then I sit on the couch or pace the house and try to let the professionals work.

If only I could slip out the door to Mass.  I'm so in need of the peace of Christ this morning.  A weekend spent consoling my children's tears has left me emotionally unprepared for the turmoil of today.  I had prepared for this and steeled myself against it all, but I gave those reserves to my weeping daughters and spent them on my crying sons.

Today I have only the strength to witness others ending the life I love.  I am trying so hard to simply float along on this wave and hope it carries me into tomorrow and beyond to Friday.  Oh blessed Friday, when our new life will have begun again.  The tears will have dried and the hope begun.  I just have to make it through today.

Because You Asked For It

I wrote that I didn't want to whine any more about moving and I'm a little surprised by the number of you who replied, "JUST SAY IT!"  You people are a bit masochistic I think, but here's a run down of my morning so far:

• Morning sickness
• Spent 20 minutes searching for the answer to the timeless question "Why does my nose fill up with snot when I puke?"  Dr Google doesn't know.  It'll have to just remain a mystery.
• Choked down my second breakfast of the day.
• Weighed myself and laughed in an unfunny way at how much I've lost.  If I weren't pregnant, I'd be rejoicing.  My teenager calls it "nature imposed bulimia."
• Got off the phone with the real estate agent.  We've had no showings in 2 weeks.  We're droppping the price.
• Sent an angry email to the property manager we hired to lease the house.  She hasn't shown it at all.  I put an ad on base and have shown it 3 times in a week.  I'm beginning to question why we would pay her.
• I'm reviewing my to-do list to see what can be ignored for today ad what absolutely MUST get done.  There's too much that needs doing.  I was hoping for a short anti-nausea med induced nap.  Not happening today.
• After 4 weeks of frantic phone calls, I finally found a midwife in the DFW area who delivers in a hospital, does VBACs,and had room in her patient list.  I should be elated, but the thought of how far it is to her office is making me ill.  I can't use a OB, they want to automatically cut me, and I need a hospital delivery because anything else makes me nervous for the safety of both the baby and me.  
• Our move schedule for next week got changed so that now instead of a seamless transition from one house to another, we have one night with nowhere to go.  The movers load the truck on Tuesday afternoon and don't unload until Thursday (it was supposed to be Wednesday.) Which leaves me scrambling for a place to sleep on Tuesday night with 6 children and a dog.  I don't want to stay with friends because it just sounds like an additional ass-pain to me.  
• We've had 3 leases on our house fall through in the last month.  I'm not sure what God's plan is in all of this, but could he hurry it up just a bit?  Please?
• Oh, and while He's at it, the nausea is not helping.

Show of Hands

The countdown to the move continues.  (5 days!!!!!!!!!!)  I haven't written much because I'm tired of whining in public about moving, and that's all it would be....griping about the stress of moving.  Then yesterday, I heard a story that made me so grateful for where we are.  A friend of mine met a family that has been "camping" at the lake with their 4 children for the last few months.  Here I am complaining about going from one beautiful home to a bigger beautiful home, and they are living without electricity in a tent.

Well, no more for me.  So I'm offering it all up.  It's easier for me to suck it up and not offer it up if it's for a good cause...so who needs it?  If you could use the sacrifice and the prayers, leave me a comment or email me at shovedtothem@yahoo.com 

We're moving next week, and I'm looking for the blessing...maybe it can be one for you, too.  Show of hands, who needs it?

Ziplock Bags and Plastic Totes

The packers arrive at our house one week from today.  I'm surprisingly calm as we're entering the home stretch.  My military friends (who move a lot, that's why I asked their advice) have a repeating litany of ziplock bags and plastic bins.  Put all the clothes, except what you need for the traveling days, in plastic bins.  Put anything you want to stay together, such as the contents of your kitchen junk drawer, in baggies.  They've all waxed rhapsodic about the 3 gallon sized bags so often that my heart went a little pitter-pat to actually find them.

Monday they pack.  Tuesday they load.  Thursday they unload us at the new house.  It's pretty exciting and dead frightening all at the same time.  I have help for 1 day.  The Computer Guy got Thursday off and that's it. Then he will be returning to Oklahoma to oversee the packing of the office computers before returning to us. 

We have a plan.  That unpacking Thursday, he's keeping the kids away all day until the unpacking is done.  They'll be hanging out by the pool at the hotel while I boss the movers around.  It's better that way, trust me.  The kids don't need to be anywhere near that chaos, and I get bossy when I'm stressed.....perfect!

That first weekend, our new neighborhood is throwing a pool party!  They say it's for Memorial Day, but that's just because they don't want other people to get jealous that they're throwing this big to do for us.  It's right friendly of them to collect all the children together in one place to make our friend selection a little easier.  We can see who's nice and who's a bully all at once.  (Who has a smart/potty mouth, who's disrespectful....it's a great time to weed through the neighborhood.)

So that's the timeline....7 days we're packed, 8 we're out of this house, 10 we're sleeping under our new roof.  Holy cow.  I can't believe that after all this time we're down to the single digits....I'm excited and want to throw up all at the same time....but the puke part could be pregnancy...so I'll just go with excited.

Mental Meanderings -- What's on my mind

I've been too busy to post this week, you'll see why.

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The kids got a stomach bug this week.  They've taken turns puking since Tuesday night.  I really hate puke, especially milk puke.

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Worse than cleaning after the kids was when it hit me.  The only thing worse that cleaning up sick is having to clean up after yourself.  There are days when I hate being the grown-up.

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I joined the ranks of elite Catholic nerd-dom this week by joining LarryD et al. in the season of Fantasy Bish-ball.  It's like Fantasy Baseball except with Bishops instead of players.  We get points for everything orthodox they say/do publicly.  My team is the Heresy Hunters made up of Bishops Aquila and Slattery and Gracida, the Bishop Emeritus of Corpus Christi.

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Bishop Gracida has a blog, and if you're not reading it already, you should.  It's funny and insightful and he says things no other bishops are saying.  Things like "Go Heresy Hunters! Here’s wishing the Heresy Hunters a good Bish-Ball season!"

That's right!  I got a Bishop to publicly use the term "Bish-ball".  It was sadly a very proud moment in my life.

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We move in 9 days, y'all.


I don't think you're properly appreciating the seriousness of that statement, so I'll say it again.

We Move In 9 DAYS!!!!!!!!!

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I took the at home Gender Prediction Test by Intelligender this morning.
Actually I took the test 4 days ago, but apparently sex, drugs or rock-and-roll within 48 hours before you
take the test invalidate the results.  Who knew?

So...ahem...I had to retake it this morning.  I have pictures, but just puked half an hour ago and don't feel like going to find the camera and its cord so I'll describe it to you. (You don't really want to see a bottle full of my pee anyway, do you?)

You have to use the first morning pee, so that was at 4:30 this morning. ( I'm pregnant, I have to pee in the middle of the night.)  I had to pee in a cup, draw it up into a syringe and then put it into the test bottle through a teeny little hole.  That's impressive work at 4:30AM, let me tell you.  Then I had to twist, not shake, the bottle for 10 seconds BUT NOT LONGER!, and then wait 10 minutes, BUT NOT LONGER for results.  

Boy turns green, girl stays yellow or turns orange-ish.  Let me just say that normally I know my colors, I did extremely well in Kindergarten thank you, but this morning, I kept turning the bottle and looking at the two colored stickers they provided for comparison.  

I didn't want to turn on the bright lights, it was early y'all,  so I stood in the semi-gloom of the bathroom and said out loud, "Is it yellow?  Is it green? Is it yellow?  Is..." I finally had the realization that I should have peed in the cup at 4:30 and filled the bottle at a normal hour like 8-ish.  (Although, is there a normal time to be playing with pee?  Really?)

 I finally woke my poor husband at 5AM to tell him that we're having a boy, I think, but his wife might just be color blind, so I'm just guessing here.  I think it was green in the semi-gloom of my 4-5AM bathroom.

For picks of what the test looks like, go here.

My thoughts on the whole thing?  They gave it to me to try and blog about.  It was free, so that made it fun-ish.  It would be a great pregnancy funny gift, but at $39 a pop, it's a bit pricy for that.  

If you're dying to know, or completely impatient, go ahead and try it.  It's supposed to be 90% accurate if it's light enough in the room to actually see the color.

I won't be doing it again.  I'll wait 9 or so weeks for an ultrasound to confirm it all for me.

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That's what I've been up to this week:  cleaning puke, stalking bishops, preparing to move, and playing with pee......oh, yeah, and it looks like another boy around here.

It's been quite a week. 

Strange Bedfellows

I took part in an interesting and enlightening chat on facebook tonight.  A childhood friend of mine and I were discussing life and people.  Well, one talked and the other listened.

The "talker" said that she has a spouse she loves and a family she adores and yet they hesitate at times to be seen together in public.  The whole family's being together opens them up for stares, whispers and rude comments.  She has been screamed at more than once in front of her children by crazy people who called her lifestyle immoral.

The family went to dinner the other night as a treat to them all and sat quietly as people pointed and stared at their little group.  She wondered a thousand times why they hadn't just ordered pizza and eaten at home instead of running the gauntlet of whispered (and not so whispered) rude comments about their family.

Trips to the grocery store could be brutal, she said, because zealots and fanatics make it their business to loudly proclaim judgment over the private sex life which was so publicly displayed just by their being together in one place.

She said that she is constantly judged by the way she looks.  People look her over, up and down, and then decide that she's not the "right kind" of people.  She stands out in a crowd of ordinary as decidedly not, and bears the burden of that.

But mostly, it's about the sex.  It's about other people deciding that they have the right to decide with whom and how things....come together....as though those private moments between two people somehow include and need the approval of anyone else.



My friend from childhood is a lesbian, but it was me telling the story.  You see, we both lead alternative lifestyles.  We are just at opposite ends of the spectrum.  She lives with her beloved Rose and the child they adopted, and I live with my husband and our 7 children and have a sex life which defies society's rules in our refusal to contracept.  We are both derided and ridiculed by society for the lives we lead.

People of good morals and conscience can differ over political issues, but we should realize that we have something in common too.  On both sides of the political fence, where my friend and I find ourselves, we both just want people to let us live our private lives the way we choose and stay out of our bedrooms.  Isn't it funny where you can find common ground if you just sit down and chat for a bit? 




(I'm not trying to start a comment war about the morality/immorality of the way anyone is living.  I just found the similarities in our experiences of discrimination to be interesting and thought provoking.  After all, when you strip it away, no one is convinced of the validity of anyone's argument by yelling, rudeness and insults.  We are all people who deserve a basic respect as human beings created in the likeness and image of God.  Even the people whose lifestyles we don't like are created in His image.  It's easy to forget that when we see them as political symbols instead of people.  The truth is that when you strip the particulars away, jerks are still jerks and whether you are "right" or not doesn't change the being a jerk part.)

Our Unsung Hero

It's Mother's Day, and I was going to write about my mother....but this isn't about her.
It isn't about my "volunteer" mom, my mother-in-law or any of my grandmothers.  It's about the hero who wasn't a part of our family.  The woman whose courage and strength leave me in awe.  She is my hero, and I don't even know her name.

My father was adopted.  He was the child of a romantic fling between a young 20-something woman and a saxophone player at the end of World War II.  She thought they were getting married and was in love.  He knew they weren't because his pregnant wife and large family were at home waiting for him.

When my birth-grandmother (BG)  discovered that she was pregnant, she traveled to her sweetheart's hometown where she discovered that the woman she assumed was his landlady was his wife.  When she told his wife that she was expecting my dad, his wife didn't go crazy.  She didn't sob, scream or cry.  She calmly and gently brought my birth-grandmother into her own home and helped her to understand what was going on and figure out what to do. 

She must have been devastated at her husband's betrayal, but she instead focused on the woman in her kitchen who so desperately needed help.  When my BG finally made up her mind to go to a convent home for unwed mothers and place my father for adoption, it was his wife who drove her, paid all her expenses, and occasionally visited her so that she was not alone.

My family talks about BG, who we were privileged to meet before she died, but no one discusses the other hero in all of this mess.  We never talk about the wife who was deceived, betrayed and humiliated and yet found the strength and grace to find kindness, compassion, and charity for "the other woman."

While I am grateful for  all the wonderful mothers in my life, in all the roles they fulfill.  This morning I said a prayer of thanksgiving for the nameless woman whose Christian love made all of this possible.  Without her, who knows where we would be.

Ack!

The other day I overheard a conversation between my husband and a friend of his.  The Computer Guy had just told him about #7 when his friend responded with the ever popular, "Don't you know what causes that?"

My sweet husband blandly retorted, "Yeah, and I keep knocking her off, but she keeps climbing back on."

Are you kidding me?  That's our response?  "I'm so hot my wife couldn't help herself?"  Really?

I don't know whether to hide my face in shame or meet the world with a devilish grin.................. I think I'll go with grin and a knowing wink.  Of all the husband's in the world....I get the dead-pan funny one?

Mental Meanderings -- What's on my mind

I went shopping with my mother-in-law last weekend.  When I purchased a rhinestone encrusted lizard ring (I'll post a pic later today), she smiled and said, "I know why God put you in this family.  You're here to save us from beige."  Awwwww......Don't you love it?

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The Computer Guy and I went to my midwife appointment yesterday and saw #7 taking a siesta.  Not a lot of activity at first, then I coughed and woke the little guy up.  After watching our youngest bounce around on th
e screen for a while, my husband gave me a worried look and said, " Does that look like another jumping boy to you?"  Ummmm.....kinda.

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My pregnancy craving?  Carrots en Escabeche (those carrots that get pickled with jalapenos.) YUMMMM!  Does that mean boy or girl?  I think it means Texan....but other than that......I don't know.

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Speaking of boy/girl......I got an email last week asking if I would take one of those at-home sex predictor tests if it were free.  Heck Yes!  Will I blog about it?  You know it.

I have to wait until I'm 10 weeks minimum before it's accurate.  That's next week!  Woo-Hoo!!

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It's 2 1/2 weeks until we move.  I have tons to do.  I'm making a list.  I'd rather be shopping for rhinestone lizard rings.

And hats!  Big wild-colored sun hats! (They're my new obsession.)

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I'd Demand a Refund

My sweet mother in law and I went to the Senior Art Show at the University of Oklahoma over the weekend. Her niece is graduating with a degree in graphic design, so we went to see her stuff. (It was amazing!)

Her niece told us that the fine art students were having their show on the 2nd floor if we wanted to check it out, and we did.  I have to admit that I LOVE art.  Love it.  I studied it in high school, a bit in college, and go to art shows and museums whenever I get the chance.  All that to say I get the whole weird art thing.  I understand existential angst and love to listen to artists try and explain their creations.

But this weekend......this weekend I couldn't help but look at the senior projects as a mom.  Some of them were witty or clever, some were amazing and thought provoking, there was one of such breath-taking beauty that I would have happily carried it home.

Then there were the two that would have p*ssed me off if I were the mother of either "artist."  One was a can of spray glue.  That was it, a can of glue.  This kid went to Wal-Mart, paid $15.99 (according to the price tag) put it on a pedestal and declared himself done.  The other student made a paper airplane and hung it from a broken rubber band.  (It wasn't even a good paper airplane.  I made better ones in 3rd grade.)  I listened to the explanations of both "artists" and they couldn't even spin decent stories.

Senior shows are supposed to be the culmination of 4 years of art education.  They are meant to show a student's best work and potential.  If I had been the mom of either of these boys, I would have listened carefully and then held out my hand and said, "You owe me $100,000."

'Cause if they're not even going to try?  On the one day when their parents get to try and be proud over blowing the cost of a house on art school?  "You owe me 100 grand and I want my money back.....oh, yeah....and take a shower, get a haircut and discover deodorant, you hippie!  I spent all this money so you could lose your sense of personal hygiene along with your good sense?  I want my money back!"

That's what I would say if they were my kids. So, if you're my kid...you've been warned.  I want more for my money than a sorry paper airplane and a broken rubber band.  For that kind of money you could at least add some glitter.