Mom! Dude!

I love Fall...the colors, the (hopeful) change in temperature, the events and holidays. I am very marked by the school year calendar, and Fall, to me, always feels like the first of the year. That’s when I take stock, and do inventory, make plans and decisions. First things first. We felt the need to do more in our church. We had been faithful church goers and Sunday school teachers up to 2004. When Angelia died in 2004, it’s not that we left God....far from it. It’s just that our church is so large, and hubby had been a member there since the 70s, and his older kids had basically grown up in that church, so for a long time after Angel’s passing, we stopped going, simply because there was always someone coming up to hubby, and wanting to know the details and needing to re-hash the story, and while everyone was sympathetic and understanding, it was a constant ripping open of Pete’s heart, every time someone, well-intentioned as they may have been, wanted to talk about it with him....

So Summer of 2006 kept rolling on....my “baby” got his first haircut, and his first pair of athletic shoes! My goodness, what a difference that made in him! I came home from work one evening, and there he sat in his high chair, his daddy feeding him supper, with a new, short haircut and light up, velco Elmo shoes! He almost didn’t look like my same baby! But then....he smiled, ah, that’s my boy! Alex was becoming very popular....he’s very friendly and says hello and waves to everyone! He had been to the beach a few times, and some play dates and birthday parties, and baptism receptions, and for the most part, he was very well behaved. I was very proud of my son. We had a wonderful, long, July 4th weekend that year. We kept very busy. On Saturday, we went to St. Augustine and Alex took his very first boat ride. It was a scenic cruise of the Matanza Bay, about an hour and a half long. We saw birds and dolphins and heard the cannon launch from the old Fort. Alex loved it, and did not get ...

Well, back to my time-line driven (or not so driven, sometimes) blog. Before I got sidetracked with being sick, and two of my kids being sick, I had taken you all through the beginning of 2006, with my hubby fresh out of the hospital and my Aunt Chris and cousin Tabatha having left, and Adrian returning home from her hard-partying New Year’s Eve weekend. So 2006 got underway, and even after the holidays, and a round of hospitalization, and relatives in the house, things just seem to stay hopping busy in our family. January alone contains 5 family birthdays: my mom, my dad, Adrian, me and Aunt Nell. February has Valentines Day (Alex’s very first chocolate, and a coloring book about dump trucks), as well as Alex’s very first steps, taken at my mother’s house on Valentine’s Day; March brought the birthdays of my step-son and his wife, my boss, Tabatha, and two dear friends, as well as remembering Angelia’s birthday again. April brought not only warmer weather, but also the celebration of ...

Well, back to blogging...it’s been a crazy couple of weeks, and not in a good way...but when I last blogged, it was a look back to Halloween of 2003, the hubby’s spider bite episode. I’m going to resume blogging where I left off before that, but before that, I had to share an odd episode that occurred after blogging the spider bite event. As I stated in that blog, I had to poke fun at hubby for the spider bite (after I knew he was going to be OK, of course) and bought a boat load of fake spiders to tease him with. He’s cool with that, and almost everyone who knows us was OK with it, too. A joke is a joke....looking at the bright side of things, taking it easy, etc., etc. Gotta laugh in life, right? Well, at the time the spider episode occurred, and hearing of my spider purchases, one person in particular thought my humor was in very poor taste, and told me so. Well, so what? I didn’t buy the spiders for him, did I? It was my hubby, and hubby thought it was funny, and that’s all ...

In case you haven’t figured it out yet so far from this blog, my life is a study in the incredible, hilarious, bizarre and ironic. This is going to be another look back at my life BC (before children), but while we were in the process of trying to get approved for our very first adoption homestudy. It was Fall of 2003. We had done all the paperwork, put together our financials, written our adoption and personal history essays, filled out all forms, answered all the questions, had our friends write their character references about us, had our criminal background checks done, gone to all the doctors for the appropriate medical checkups, and now we were just a couple of weeks away from the actual home visit by the social worker to get our approval. Our former home was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a very nice, family type neighborhood, backed up to some woods. Now, I do love gardening. I always had nice plants and shrubbery and trees and flowers at every home I had lived in as an adul...

.....contained every drama imaginable between two teenage girls and a hot-tempered grandma like my mom. But before that even, I managed to piss off my step-daughter and my step-son....royally. Hubby, upon first being admitted to the hospital after midnight on December 30th, was only supposed to be in the hospital for one day, just long enough to have IV antibiotics administered, and hopefully get his pneumonia under control. We fully expected to bring him on either the evening of the 30th, or the morning of the 31st. All during the day of the 30th, however, he starred in his own little comedy show. His brain had been oxygen deprived from the pneumonia just long enough to make him Loopy, with a capital L. As a matter of fact, he was just plain bat -bleep- crazy. He thought the newscasters on the TV were actually there in the room talking to him. And he was talking back to them, discussing the local news, politics, etc. Then he thought he was a pizza delivery driver, kept saying he had ...

It’s a good thing we had such a wonderful time for Alex’s first birthday, because the next day, the bottom fell out! Hubby had started developing a cough the day before, but managed to keep it in check for the day of the party. By the following day, he was really feeling rough. I had to go back to work, but hubby reassured me he would be OK, with Adrian’s help. Adrian had the day off from work, too, so she agreed to help keep an eye on both my boys. I spoke to hubby once during that day, around noontime. He sounded awful, so I told him to take some cough medicine and hit the sack. I didn’t hear from him the rest of the day, but that didn’t necessarily worry me; I just figured he was sleeping. When I got home, I found Adrian sitting on the floor in the family room. The hallway door was shut, the heat was cranked up to hellish, the baby was in his crib in his room, screaming, and hubby was nowhere to be found. I asked Adrian where he was and she said to check our bedroom. She said she th...