Hi Ho Hi Ho it’s off to work i go

After weeks and weeks of fighting a senseless and head-bangingly frustrating battle, i am going back into work tonight. I ust cannot exist anymore with money. While the people that handle my disability benefits claim it is my doctor’s office and my doctor’s office claim it is the benefits people, i am stuck inthe middle of this hair pulling battle with nary a penny to my name. Since the kids enjoy eating and i enjoy the luxury of a vehicle to take kids to school and to go work, i am dragging myself wounded back into work.

While i am pretty much good to go from the C-Section (after 4 there is literally no feeling from teh belly button down), i still have the nice little area that blew open post surgery. And hello a little warning would of been nice there! While the benefits company states i shouldn’t return to work, this is covered and you will be paid and blah blah. I see no money and not one of the people i talk to are volunteering their paychecks so that we can eat something other than peanut butter and ramen.

So strap yourselves in boys because i am coming back and i am SO not looking forward to trading my four boys for the 15 men (boys) i work with.

To put it plainly after four kids, my body is pure wreaked. I know that i have addressed this in one or more ways on this blog. I am not sure i am wanting you to sympathize or just fix it for me. I am surrounded by women who have all had 50 lb babies and proceeded to shrink back to their 90 lb form with nary a stretch mark or saggy skin. Something is funny in the water here and while i am chugging it like a frat boy at his first kegger, i am just not reaping the rewards.

I can say that right now i am not actively pursuing the exercise route only and i say only because my body has drawn a line in the sand. That line is all that is keeping my sleep deprived self from falling face first into a coma as i have not had more than 3 hours of sleep since high school. My doctor while spouting how amazed he is that i continue to defy medical science and live on such little sleep (really he should be praising all that is that i can rub two brain cells together and dress myself), he feels that it is also going to prevent me from losing weight. Great nothing like finding out the job that is helping keep a roof over my head is also one of the causes in my body looking like a crash test dummy that has been put through a few. But hey for a mere $40K i can have the “Mommy Lift” and have my tummy tucked back into body and my boobs put near my head instead of at my knees where they have lived since nursing said lard babies for a year apiece. As much as i love that idea i don’t have that money to put into a body that we all know i will only wreck with bread and pasta because YUM!

I do however, plan on getting back into riding and training and if i want to have a horse carry me instead of it being the other way around, i am going to have to remove said ass from the couch and get to it. Now anyone want to send that memo to my brain because i just can’t seem to get it to take my calls.

Clutter is only one way to put it

My house is a box filled to the brim with clutter. Now to ask M, most of the clutter is mine. Not true, a lot of the clutter is mine and a lot of it is the boys. M contributes to the clutter in the form of buying everything to support his beloved Redskins, whom manage to disappoint him each and every single year. Football season is just an excuse men have to go through PMS for no reason at all. And it sucks.

For me i have compartments of clutter. I have the craft clutter which i blog about in a completely different place. I have the kitchen clutter in which i create yummy mounds of food that i will be excited about right up until i have to actually eat them. Then i want nothing to do with it because i am suddenly sick to my stomach at the thought of putting this stuff into my mouth. Don’t ask me why, but i am reduced to eating bread and pasta and cheese all the time. I can tell you that this is not a preferred dietary measure and will, i repeat, will cause you to retain all weight gained during pregnancies.

My las compartment of clutter is books. I have books for myself and books that i am collecting for the kids because i know, i just KNOW that they will love books like i do and want to have them forever. Right now they love books, but think of them more as a food group. I cannot tell you how much that pains me since i am an avid member of the “Don’t Bend the Spine” club. Card carrying member for 20+ years. I have spent more than one weekend with a stack of books taller then myself and a comfy couch and nothing made me happier. This was all before kids,since now the only reading i do is while i am on the move. Walking around the house or cleaning one of the piles of crap up in the house. It is funny to watch the boys as they pick up on some of my harmless quirks. They now will gather things up and walk about distributing these things to different areas, not normally where they belong, but still so like me. I am constantly relocating things to their proper location, it is a constant battle since things seem to have a mind of their own. Often times i will catch my 2 yr old sitting down “reading” his books in a rare moment of quiet. Usually it is the calm before the storm as it seems to be a recharging of his battery and he literally flies around after that.

Our clutter is placed in bookcases, cabinets and shelves all around the house. It is funny how we have to HAVE this stuff yet i could count on one hand the number of times i have actually gone for some thing in one of these areas. So why do i HAVE to HAVE it?

As i sit here and try to enjoy one of the few remaining days i have before i go back to work, i reminded of how fleeting this time is. That this is my last maternity leave. My last baby. My last time to be someone’s whole world for a little while. It is sad really.

I got my tubes tied with this last baby and it wasn’t a decision i fully supported. However, M was completely 100% against having any more kids. He wasn’t all to thrilled when i shove the pee stick under his nose and said “Guess what?”. At this point he already knew when he saw the dreaded box and would of been happier cleaning the gutters.

I love my maternity leave and how it gives me a chance to sleep at night and be a bit nicer to all that live in the house. Everyone will agree with me here that that is a glorious thing. Only this is it and on the 30th i will return to work and there will be no more maternity leaves. There will also not be any excuse for the stomach i am sporting after having 4 almost 10 pounders partying up in there.

I guess it is time to start looking for clothing that doesn’t involve a belly band and extra fabric at the bottom to cover the tummy. While it may take me a while because as i have said before “I love bread”, i will lose some of this weight. I will get to a point where the clothes that i wear don’t say comfort stretch or no snaps because they cause weird marks on your skin! I will once again be able to shave my legs without involving my spouse. I will tell myself that the skin does snap back, even at my age.

It does, dammit.

I spend an embarrassing amount of time reading other people’s blogs. Perhaps i have told you this before, but maybe not. In fact i read so many blogs that i have broken, yes people broken, google reader. They have in fact contacted me and told me that i have WAY too many sites on there and could i please GET A LIFE!

I have always liked to read and from an early age I have always been someone who has read one book a day. Crazy, isn’t it. How is it possible though to read SO much and still not lose one of the children or neglect them. Simply put i am a speed reader. I don’t know quite when i got this skill or perhaps it was self taught out of necessity since i would check out WAY too many books from the library and then have to frantically read them before they were due. I don’t know, but i do actually read all the words just really fast. I know that while some of the finer details are lost, i do in fact remember every book i have ever read. While i may not remember the book from the cover and title, i mean they change covers all the time since nearly everything is being made into a freakin’ movie nowadays. Anyways, i love to read, i mean REALLY love to read and nothing thrilled me more then when i discovered blogs. It was a whole new world to me. I now read over 2,000 blogs a week and while i do not comment on all of them, slows the process down people, i do comment on the ones that move me or make me chuckle. I thought i would share a few of my very favorites that i visit daily and they are quite often the funniest people i have never met in person. I hope you enjoy them and if you wonder if i visit you, just leave me a comment with your blog and i will let you know. I would post the list of blogs i read in google (which i now have two accounts because crap there are a lot of you bloggers out there!), but i fear the wrath of WordPress on listing something as big as that. Just rest assured that i may be looking for a world record in the number of people’s lives i can invade and not know personally. Crazy!

All & Sundry (she literally makes me wet my pants all the time, i don’t know that that would flatter her or not)
Friday Playdate
Moose in the Kitchen
McMommy Chronicles (funny and very personable)
Amalah (I swear she lives me life only with less kids and way more fashionably)

Today was blazing hot out. I think someone messed up and turned Summer on and forgot completely about Spring. What happened to the time of year when flowers start to bloom and grass starts coming up. We skipped that and now the flowers are fried and the grass is confused and coming out a mixture of green and brown. I actually pulled out the swim trunks for the boys today and let them play in the sprinklers. Which i should say i set the sprinkler out, turned it on, the neighborhood friends played in it and my boys laughed from the sideline and complained it was hot or that they needed to change because oh no their SWIM TRUNKS are wet. It will be a long summer people, a really long summer. So that was fun! or not i don’t care because i am in desperate need of a shower or just someone to throw water on me.

See that smirk on J’s face (the one on the left), anyone know how to get him to STOP DOING THAT?? That and the ANNOYING back talking and attitude makes me crazy and i am seriously close to sending him to a grandparents’ house to live before i am more than tempted to super glue his mouth into a more flattering look. I dislike this age and am constantly reminded that it will be worse when he is a teenager, great i am REALLY looking forward to the future now.

I seriously just spent 20 minutes writing a post about laundry folks and my hatred of the 5 loads a week that i have to do. I think i may have some serious writers block if i am resorting to writing about my laundry. I think potentially i will have to go back to work just so i have something to talk about. Sad thing is that i go back to work next week and my excitement over doing so rivals that of a trip to the dentist. Those of you that know me know that i hate the dentist, with a passion. I have the world’s most sensitive teeth and just thinking about a cleaning will put me on my knees. *shiver* ick.

So i saved you from reading a meanless post about laundry to this? Oh yes much better, wouldn’t you agree? Good grief i need some blog fodder and fast.

I spend an obscene amount of time on Facebook, in fact it is border line obsession. Who knew that an application that is less trashy than that “Space” page would be SO appealing. How else am i supposed to keep up with friends, people i don’t know but have stalked for years and bullies and ex-boyfriends to see how “well” they have turned out. Yeah right, more like to check up on the bullet i may have dodged. I spend a ton of time on facebook communicating with my friends that live in other states and what is weird is that e-mail would work the same as Facebook, but i think Facebook is a little more personal. Not only can i message my friends, but i can look at their daily thoughts without having to send the “how are you doing?” message. Really cool. Boy this sounds a lot like a p.r. stunt for Facebook, i promise it is not, more like just me spouting my love for something and sounding like a dork. I am super good at that.

Today you are 2!

Today you are 2 years old my little boy. You are the happiest, most curious, playful boy to grace our house. You are always full of laughter and smiles for everyone you know. You have an intense love for your ba-ba, that blanket has been more places then anything else in the house. You are full of adventure and fun and have an intense desire for your brothers to pay attention to you. You want to be such a big boy and struggle to do things that your brothers do.

Don’t rush to grow up little boy. Stay little for just a bit longer. You will be big soon enough and i will miss the way that you crawl into my lap with ba-ba when you are tired and rest there.

I love you little man, today you turn 2 years old and have so much to show for it.

In an effort to get my bread laidened self off the couch, I attempted to organized my beading area. Yeah a good assessment of that would be “attempted” because let me tell you after dragging out all that crap, i had no desire to sift through it and organize it. I am super effective that way. So now instead of an organized craft cabinet (which is more like two craft cabinets since i have totally taken over the boys craft cabinet, but blame it on them anyways because who are we kidding M will never know), i now have a less-likely-to-explode-on-contact craft cabinet and tubs and bags of beads all over the place. Because with little children in the house THAT is the perfect place for them, on surfaces that they can not only see but reach as well. I am bucking for mother of the year over here folks. After abandoning all hope of getting anything reasonable done, the kids and i proceeded to irritate each other until all of us could go down for a nap. I like to think that these naps that i am semi-getting (not to forget that #4 has a way of sensing that i am about to do something like sleep or pee and begins demanding some attention RIGHT NOW OR I WILL WAKE THE OTHERS LADY!), are power boosters so my naps are significantly shorter than i would like, but in reality they are really the only thing that keep me functioning until the end of the day. What is sad is that i am getting more sleep now, then i will get when i return to work (next week people, oh the sadness) and return to the work all night, educate and love and feed children all day schedule that i left back in Feb. *sigh* i get tired just thinking about it. In fact i think i will go and take another nap, ehh who am i kidding i am going to bed because i honestly cannot think of much else to write and who really wants to read a bunch of nothing?

Thought so…

One last word before i go, for all of you bakers out there or not so much the baker, but lover of the baked goods, i am going to share a Pumpkin Bar recipe with you that is simple and easy and fantastic. I had most of the ingredients in my pantry and it was easy easy to whip up, M loved it and that is not something to be taken lightly. So enjoy and let me know how you liked them, I love to bake and eat.

Pumpkin Cake Bars with Cream Cheese Frosting

* 4 large eggs
* 1 2/3 cups white sugar
* 1 cup vegetable oil
* 1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree
* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
* 6 ounces cream cheese
* 6 tablespoons butter, softened
* 3 cups confectioners’ sugar

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Grease and flour one glass 9 x 13 inch pan.
3. In a mixing bowl, beat together the eggs, sugar, oil and pumpkin.
4. Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda, salt and cinnamon; add to wet ingredients and mix thoroughly.
5. Spread into prepared pan.
6. Bake at 350° for 25 to 30 minutes.
7. Remove from oven and allow to cool.
8. For the frosting: beat together the cream cheese, butter and confectioner’s sugar.
9. Evenly spread over bars after they have cooled.