such good news!

Happy, happy, happiest of news today!

My friend and her baby girl are doing well! I don't have any details yet, but just knowing that bit of news just made my day--and then some.

a hell of a Wednesday evening!

I'm drunk. (OK, seriously buzzed...working on being drunk)

No, it really is true.

Let me just say, I almost NEVER drink. And when I say that, I mean it. Not like those people who say they never watch television. I really only drink, even a glass of wine with dinner, like three or four times a year--and since I was pregnant for half the year last year, maybe I drank something twice, if that.

So here is what happened...

I love wine. Yes, a non-drinker who loves wine. Let me back up a bit (and yes, I am doing a bit of corrections as I go, so forgive any spelling or mechanics errors, please). The reason I don't drink has nothing to do with any past problems with drinking, and I do not have any family members with drinking problems, or any other reasons having to do with religion or *lifestyle* choices. I guess it is mostly because I am small and have a sensitive system and fast metabolism and, as is happening now, a couple of glasses of wine does me in. Also there is the running thing--when I am training I do not drink because running after drinking is like having legs made of cement. Seriously.

Back to what happened...

Last weekend I bought myself a bottle of wine. The weekend prior I really wanted a glass of wine with dinner and didn't have the energy to go to the store to buy some. So it stuck in my mind all week (because for some reason it didn't enter my mind that it was OK to buy a bottle of wine during the week...) and finally when the weekend came again I went out and chose a nice bottle of Italian Cabernte Merlot-Sangiovese (yes, this is a real variety--I thought that it was wierd, but it came highly recommended). And I only drank one glass, which I enjoyed with my dinner.

And the bottle sat, until today. I can't remember now what reminded me "I have a bottle of wine..." but I remembered. And, forgive me if there are any wine snobs out there but, yes, it has been sitting with a stopper in it for a few days. Can I just say that it still tastes delicious? On an *empty* before-dinner-stomache, two glasses of wine (yes, I am still drinking it as I write) gets this little thing buzzed.

My husband will be home from work soon. What will he think? Will I be able to go unnoticed?
_________________________________________________________

Is this post the equivalent of drunk dialing? Or is it more like embarrassing yourself at a party?

Hmmm...

Well, Mr. C is due to be home from work soon and the sun is still out in the sky (such beautiful Spring weather we are having lately, which I am enjoying despite my allergies) so I will come back later.

To those of you who check in on me...you know if I know about you (because I believe you see me visiting your blogs, too, and I am commenting fairly regularly). But I would appreciate if those of you who are lurking would introduce yourselves. I cannot begin to express how much it means to me to be part of this "community" that I have stumbled into, and knowing "who is out there" really is important to me. Yes, it has been over a year...but what is time, really?

I am tempted to say more, but fear getting into a pathetic-zone, so I will stop now, for now.

and we'll eat chocolate chip cookies for breakfast

You Will Be a Cool Parent

You seem to naturally know a lot about parenting, and you know what kids need. You can tell when it's time to let kids off the hook, and when it's time to lay down the law. While your parenting is modern and hip, it's not over the top. You know that there's nothing cool about a parent who acts like a teenager... or a drill sergeant!

Would You Be a Cool Parent?

I got sucked into the blog things site again!

But see, here is the proof that I will be a cool mom!

soon

I'm sending out anxious, excited, hopeful, happy energy for my dear friend who, as we speak, is being induced. Her original induction date wasn't until April 6th but they moved things up due to some indication that the blood flow in the cord might be compromised...a potential sign of placental deterioration. Since almost a year ago she had to say goodbye to her beautiful son, who was stillborn, there is no fooling around here.

I wish with all of my heart that I could be there to support her and share in her joy when she is holding her sweet baby girl in her arms. However, we live across the world from each other.

So if everyone out there who happens to read this will please send some warm thoughts--direct them to Australia--and I will update when I hear some news.

hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickenson
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I had an appointment with Tiffany today. My body actually was sore, which I guess reflects tension. She did some acupuncture points for stress-relief, too.

At the end of the sessions she has this deck of cards in a basket to choose from. They are similar to tarot cards but they are each about well being somehow. Today the card I selected actually gave me a task: to be positive for the rest of the day. It said to pay attention to what this feels like for me, especially if and when it is difficult.

The poem came to me earlier today. I was thumbing through an old magazine and part of the poem was in some art somewhere.

Dickenson has always been among my favorite poets. I was absolutely obsessed with her when I was 15. I was captivated by poetry that year, and I read tons of her poems and wrote a paper about her for my honors American Lit. class. I tried to get out of that class at the semester because I was taking so many hard classes and was feeling stretched beyond my limits (started getting sick, but wouldn't stay home from school...my neck even went out--and I was just 15!). My teacher wouldn't let me drop the class. She said that she had never had a student who understood poetry to the depth that I did and that the rest of the students in the class benefited from my contributions. She also said that since she knew that I would have an art class in the second semester that she believed that it would make all the difference for me to have that outlet. As it turned out, she was right. She became the first in a string of English teachers to try to persuade me to follow it as a major (all of my English/Lit teachers in college did as well). I resisted, all of the way through. To this day I still haven't finished the paper work toward my endorsement to teach English. My resistance to it stems from my belief that if I were endorsed to teach English then I would be *forced* to teach it (as many teachers who are endorsed to teach subjects in addition to art end up teaching the other subjects instead). As it is, I already teach the humanities (English + Social Studies) class as well as art.

But I've gone off on a tangent...

Oh I do love the bird imagery.

And this poem is very positive, as the card I drew today encouraged me to be.

Now I am off to the Mars Bar once again, this time I will go alone. Mr. C's band, the drop, is playing again. Angie said for weeks that she would go, but called this morning to say that she can't make it. Mr. C doesn't like the idea of me going alone so much because he worries about me walking to and from my car in the dark alone. I'm not worried, though. I will park along the street and there is light.

looking for the light

I miss who I used to be.

I know it is trite and cliche, but I do.

And it's not that I was this oblivious innocent, and losing William has changed me into this person who has a new understanding of the pain of the world, or some other nonsense, and now I'm longing for a simpler time.

Life was never really simple or without pain.

Not more so than for many people, necessarily, but despite all of the challenges in my life I have always been one to "look to the bright side" or at least try to find some way that I was able to learn or grow from life's experiences.

I am able to smile, laugh, feel joy and love. But it is different.

And I do not have hope that it will ever be the way it once was.

More than a year has passed.

I think I had been moving forward over the last several months...after the marathon, really...with a sort of momentum toward the one-year mark. In part because of the significance of it and also because it meant that we would start trying for baby number two.

And now the date has passed, and I am here in this unknown-zone, like I'm in a fog.

I'm still here...

I actually wrote a post yesterday...but in the middle of writing it my screen went black and I had to re-boot and so everything was lost--including my desire to write it all again.

So I will revisit the contents of the post (or something like it, since it now only exists in my brain--so that means the new version will be significantly revised) later...when the mood is right.

It's another lazy Sunday. I am at once overcome with the urge to Spring Clean, organize, and work on projects...yet I'm still in my jam jams and may remain that way for a few more hours.

Tomorrow we are back to State Testing again. Last week we did for three days, which meant that I only saw my students for classes on Monday and Friday. Tuesday through Thursday we had testing in the morning and conferences into the evening. It made for long, fairly boring days. We still have classes in the afternoons after testing this week, but they are abbreviated. Then on Wednesday we are back to normal. And the following week my student teacher, J. starts. I don't want to call her J. but I also want to be polite and not use her real name (it is sort of funny who I use real names for and who I don't...not sure why but I go on intuition with this one). I guess I can just call her student teacher. She seems nice enough. I've only met her once, so who really knows. I generally like most people, very few who I decide that I don't like and that is pretty much only after they have offended me repeatedly. So anyway, then the first week of April we are on Spring Break. Wahoo.

Just for the record, I'm ovulating again. Three months off the pill and three pretty on-time Os...and I can *feel* all of the signs, so that is good, too. It is reassuring that I am in touch with my body enough to know (and OPKs have validated this all three times). Of course Mr. C still isn't ready, so it is purely for observational reasons that I am keeping track. Oh, and by the way, if I haven't mentioned it yet, I have finally realized what *not ready* really means. It does not mean that he is still so broken apart about losing William that he is too scared or sad to try again. No, this isn't it. Maybe I might have figured this out sooner, but sometimes we are a bit blind to these things. This is hard because I saw that he visited my blog the other day (looking for pictures of his band to see if they were any good because he might have used them for some promos...they weren't) so I want to respect his privacy. But at the same time this is my blog and I have done a good job of keeping it *private* in that no one IRL knows about it (besides Angie, but she went out on a quest to find it...and she isn't part of *his life* anyway). So it isn't about fear of losing another child, in fact he has maintained his sense of faith that all will be well (the whole "I'll get you pregnant*You'll get the cerclage*We'll have a baby" thing). It is that he is depressed and hates his job and wants to get his life *figured out* before he will feel ready. Oh. Shit. That could take a while. Or it could happen in an instant. This sucks.

To be clear, what I want more than anything is for him to be well and happy. It would be silly for me to want a baby more than that, and have Mr. C be depressed. I want him to have work that is fulfilling and doesn't stress him out. Even if it means that we take a risk financially in order for him to pursue that. Unfortunately, it may be that for him these two notions--taking a risk to have work that is fulfilling & starting a family--may seem mutually exclusive. I understand if this is what he is thinking, but I don't think they have to be. I also understand if he thinks that both pursuits are very stressful in and of themselves, and therefore we shouldn't try to undertake both of them at the same time. Not that he has said this. OK, now I am just spinning my wheels, so I will stop.

As George Michaels would say, I just gotta have faith.