Mom! Dude!

So February rolls around and as always happens to me, I get antsy...Spring fever, cabin fever, call it what you will, but the holidays were over, and it was a long way until summertime, and I was restless already. But my first order of business was picking up our (finally) completed homestudy and our profiles and sending them out. We mailed them out to the office of the attorney who handled Alex’s Florida end of the adoption, as well as to an unwed mother’s home in North Florida. That was it. We’re officially “pregnant”. We mentally settled in for what we thought would be a 6-month, 9-month or even a year long wait to adopt our next baby. So to help pass the time during what I thought would be a long, long wait, I bought 2-year premium passes to Busch Gardens and SeaWorld. Alex was walking and talking and over two years old now, so I thought it would be a good time to start taking him to some amusement parks. After all, what good is living in Florida if we don’t partake of the w...

Well, the new year had begun: 2007! It began with our annual New Year’s Day combined birthday celebrations dinner, wherein we celebrate all the December and January birthdays that run together and sometimes get overlooked with the busy-ness of Christmas and then the rut of post holiday blahs. Included: Aunt Chris’ birthday (December 16); Alex’s birthday (December 28); Mom’s birthday (January 1); Dad’s birthday (January 7); Adrian’s birthday (January 10) and my birthday (January 15). So to cover all this, we headed to one of our favorite restaurants, Romano’s Macaroni Grill. Macaroni Grill offers a wonderful loaf of bread for dipping in the tasty olive oil and spices they bring to the table. And while this bread is delicious, it’s a little different from my mother’s bread. I may have written previously about my mother’s home-made-from-scratch-sourdough bread. She makes loaves and loaves and loaves every week, and we get our bread fresh out of the oven almost daily. Alex loves it; ...

....but not the way you think. This episode occurred while dating my current husband. So, while it was long after the end of my first marriage, long after the Vodka Collins era of my life, and after my crazy had ended, it still goes to show that I simply must be a magnet for oddities, even when they are not the result of alcohol, roommates, or exes. It was Spring of some year back in the mid 90s. Pete had to fly down to our vacation island house and property on Union Island in the Grenadines. I can't remember why, and it was going to be only a short business trip. But I was disappointed that I couldn't go, and probably ticked off for some other reason that has long been lost to my memory. I was driving him to the Orlando airport. We stopped for dinner somewhere. We got into an argument at dinner and it never really let up once we got back on the road for the airport, which made for a long, miserable trip...not one you want to make just before sending your boyfriend off ...

This is more my roommate’s story, but I was involved, and I haven’t seen the girl in ages, so I’m telling it! It’s still the same roommate, and I was still married to the same guy. Like I said earlier, this was a crazy time in my life. I wanted out of the marriage, and was going back to relive my teen years that I had spent married and tied down, so a lot of wild things were going on in my life. My room-y had a new boyfriend, after her split from her live-in. He was older, and, come to find out, married. And had no intentions of having my roommate as anything other than a little piece on the side. We were in a bar a few nights later (oh, no, not again) and we’re hashing this over. “Hell hath no fury” and all that. The boyfriend had kind of a blase attitude about their relationship and didn’t think much at all about what he was doing to her. Just, “oh, well, S*#T happens.” So in our Vodka Collins induced commiserating, we kept dreaming up revenge scenarios. For instance, cut h...

Still married to the same guy....only he has a new job where he travels quite a bit. He’s gone for days and sometimes 2 or 3 weeks at a time. We were sort of unofficially using that time as a trial separation. My best girlfriend at the time had recently split from her live-in boyfriend, and so to help me with expenses, and to keep me company, she became my roommate. Now, as I stated, I married very, very young. I was not even old enough to drink when I got married. So between that, and my brother’s life-altering and completely disabling accident the next year, I completely missed out on the whole teenage rebellion thing that most kids go through right at the end of and just out of high school. I saved my rebellion, hell-raising antics for the end of this marriage that was doomed from the start. So one night room-y and I decided to throw back a few of our new favorite drink, a Vodka Collins or two (or three or 20) and then go bowling. Off to the bowling alley we went, where I b...

After returning from the Atlanta area to our hometown to live, the marriage to my first husband began to fall apart. It was really going from bad to worse over time, and I wanted it to work, but I seemed to be the only one working it. He wanted to remain married, but he did not appear to want to put in any effort towards making the marriage work, much less flourish. He was content to stay married, and stay miserable. I hated the idea of divorce, but I also hated the idea of living with him as the marriage was at that time. Now, I think I’ve mentioned before, and maybe you’ve picked up from prior posts, that I am a bit of a drama queen. So it should come as no surprise what I tried to do. I had recently watched a Lifetime network movie where someone had amnesia. It was interesting, and I’ve always been fascinated by the workings and intricacies of the human mind. So this movie was running around in my head for a few days when I went to pick up my husband after work one evening (...

Before I began my journey into 2007, because it was such an eventful year, I thought I’d reflect back on some tidbits of my long ago past. You know: back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (well, more accurately, when I was married to my first husband, and the marriage was coming apart). It was a crazy time in my life...I had married young (while still in high school and to answer the unasked question: NO, we were not pregnant, just young and stupid and...gag....in love). EPISODE #1: (A Personal Drawer Means Just That) We were living in the metro Atlanta area and I was working for an attorney whom shall remain nameless. He was young, only about 26 or 27 at the time, and had taken over his father’s law practice. He was also newly married to THE MOST proper Southern Belle you can imagine. She was so polite and correct and sugary sweet it made my teeth hurt just talking to her. And he was just as exacting and PC and precise and “by the book” as she was. I mean, you look up “Mr. A...