Midnight parties and realizations about life...

Here I was just saying a few weeks ago how I have a horrible husband. Boy do I feel stupid. Since that breakdown, my husband has shown me daily how he is quite the opposite. It’s a shame it took us hitting rock bottom to knock some sense into both of us, but I’m glad it worked. Things have been amazing! Of course we’ve still had our little moments of annoyance here and there, but that’s just normal. This turnaround came at the perfect time. We’ve had a few weeks to smooth things out and get back to “normal” before D started his last school year. Yesterday was his first day. Considering he left the house at 8:30 and didn’t get home til 11:15(w/ a short break in there for dinner at home at 9:00) he did remarkably well. The “old” D from a month ago, would have been a bear by the time he got home. But we’ve both had such positive attitudes lately, it’s hard for anything to get us down. I’m still exhausted…having only gotten 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night for the last 5 or so nights is really wearing on me. I’m still in good spirits, but my brain is in a fog and I’m moving a bit slower than normal. Last night my coughing wasn’t as bad as it has been. I got Hailey in bed at 8:00, which was amazing compared to the night before(when I was BEGGING her to go to sleep at 10:15…apparently every kid in this town refused to go to sleep Sunday night, how weird is that?? People are blaming it on some lunar eclipse????) and I was asleep by 11:00!! D wasn’t supposed to get home til after midnight from work, but thank God he got home an hour early because not too long after he got home Hailey started crying. He let her cry for a minute to see if she’d go back to sleep and then gave up and peeked in her room. She was standing in her crib, wanting out. I was OUT. I didn’t even hear her crying! I can’t imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten home early…who knows how long she would have had to cry before I snapped out of it and woke up! He tried for 45 minutes to get her back to sleep, until finally at 12:15 he came into our room and turned my bedside lamp on and looked down at me with this look that said “I’m so sorry, I tried”...I asked him what was going on. He put her in bed with us. At that point Hailey was thinking “Yay, PARTY!!” She jumped on the bed, yelled at the cat, giggled, poked us…asked for juice…we gave her juice, because we were too tired to argue. She sucked it down and demanded more, so we gave her more. She splashed it all over the bed and stained the sheets. She wanted to go into the living room and play! How on earth was she going on so little sleep??????? It’s like she took a 3 hr. nap and then was ready for the day. I was so tired I just lost it and started yelling at her to lay down and go to sleep. I feel so bad about it now, but it didn’t even phase her. She leaned over and said “Mom-mee” in that sweet way she does, as if to say “Mom don’t even try, you are totally NOT scary”…at which point I began to have a coughing fit so bad I almost threw up. Eventually I passed out, coughing, toddler jumping on the bed and wallering all over me, husband pleading and persuading her to settle down and go to sleep...I have no idea what time D got to sleep. All I know is that I woke up at 4:00 to Hailey’s head jamming me in my ribs. This morning Hailey was raring to go, in the best of moods. I left her in her pj’s, since I woke up so late. Of course when I got her to school she’d peed even more in the car so her diaper was full to the brim and starting to leak, making me look like a horrible mother…it was barely wet when we left the house, I swear! It was all that juice in the middle of the night… SO…there was my night. Pretty eventful. I’m now on my second cup of coffee at work, and I plan on getting a Mt. Dew this afternoon. And I’ll just HOPE I get some sleep tonight.

Something very odd has happened the past 3 of 4 nights. All but one night, Hailey has wanted me to read a particular book to her. One night she fell asleep w/out me even reading. But the other 3 nights she has requested I read her little pink Bible to her that my mom got her for Easter. It has no pictures. The words are so small I have to squint to read them. Yet she lays there so still, listening to the words she doesn’t yet understand…pages at a time even…until she drifts off to sleep. I’m not going to lie. We don’t go to church. I did when I was a really little girl. I did the whole Sunday school thing. Then my grandpa got really sick when I was about 4 and my grandma put him in a nursing home in another town and moved to be near him. We quit going to church. Life got in the way. For years we only went on holidays, like Easter and Christmas. I know hardly anything about the Bible. I know the basics but that’s about it (so forgive me if I sound ignorant when I’m talking about it’s contents). Even so, all through my life I’ve prayed. I’ve prayed with Hailey before I put her in her crib every night for a long time now. But it struck me as odd that a 16 month old would request to have the Bible be her bedtime story, especially so many nights in a row. On the second night I read a passage about worrying, and it all hit home. I realized that throughout all the bad things that have happened in my life I’ve still had food, shelter, water and love. My life has been hard, but no matter what happened I still had my basic needs met and was kept safe. I’ve always seen myself as an unlucky person, I’ve always focused on all the bad and wondered WHY it all had to happen to me. I always worried, even as a kid, about money and bills, and food and our safety. It’s really frustrating to me that I didn’t realize sooner that I needn’t worry because no matter what happened, we were surviving. I have been lucky. It’s not God’s fault that life has thrown crap my way…instead of yelling at him and asking him why, I should have been thanking him for helping us through everything. If Hailey hadn’t asked to read the Bible again that 2nd night, I would never have realized this. Or maybe I would have years down the road…but I think I wasted enough of my life worrying, and I’m thankful she made me realize it now before I wasted more years. This also made me really realize the big difference between my husband and I. When he said the other night “Well Hailey was an oops, and everything’s worked out OK” I didn’t really realize just how lucky we’ve been. No we weren’t planning on having her right then…the timing was all wrong. But we were able to get pregnant so easily—which was amazing considering the recent scare I’d had a few months before…cancer runs in our family and my mom started having problems when she hit her 30’s…I, however, began having problems at the ripe old age of 20 and since I’d always had this nagging feeling I wouldn’t be able to have kids I thought “well, here’s the proof I won’t” when I found out about the problems I had. But I did get pregnant, even using precautions to prevent it! I was able to carry her to term w/ no complications. I had a wonderful birth. She was perfectly healthy. And despite only making half of what we need to survive every month, we’re not behind on payments for anything. Yes we’ve racked up debt on our credit cards to get Dan through school, but we’re surviving. Hailey goes to a great school, she’s smart. She doesn’t care that we don’t own a house! Why do I??? I realized this morning that something has been different these past few days…I finally pinpointed what it is. The worry is gone. I just have this really good feeling that no matter what life throws our way, we’ll get through it. I’ve got to start living, instead of wasting every day worrying about things that are out of my control. I’ve got to take life as it is right now, and make the best of it!

I generally don’t write posts like this because my thoughts generally take too much time to get in order enough to write it down without making no sense whatsoever. But this was a major turning point in my life, so I tried to organize my thoughts the best that I can. I’ll remind myself each day of everything I’ve learned, and hopefully things will stay this way!!

I wrote this post this morning and here it is almost 2:00 and I haven’t had time to post it yet…busy day. Luckily it’s flying by. I got Hailey the cutest outfit at Penney’s to wear to a bridal shower for a close friend on Sept. 8. It’s one of those little tunic tops w/ the stretchy capris. So cute! It was on sale for $13, can’t beat that for a whole dressy outfit. And my friend is coming over tonight. The one that came over early last week, J. I thought after last week when I was starting to not feel good and so tired that all I did was gripe the whole night, she may not come back anytime soon. I guess I wasn’t as bad as I thought, because she asked to come over and hang out tonight. I just hope I haven’t crashed by the time she gets there…