Category: Grimmy Grim

I’ve seriously got to get some kind of written schedule going to help me stay on track. I’ve got piles of folded laundry that need to be put away in drawers stacked on the futon, half the dishes that were in the sink are still in there, and I put the toilet cleaner in the toilet, but I’m just now remembering I was supposed to clean it. I can’t just do one thing and finish it. I get bored and absentmindedly move on to something else.

I need to shower, but Mario’s at a seminar and won’t get here till who knows what time. I don’t want to go to sleep stinky :(. I think it’s about time I rearrange my routine and bathe while Mom’s here during the day. I bathe the boys around 6-6:30pm, so maybe I should bathe them at 6 and take a shower myself at 6:30. Then get dinner started at 7 like I usually try to. But then when am I supposed to work out?! At 5:30? Darn John won’t go running with me. I totally need a running partner and nobody wants to join me :(. I’d feel silly jiggling running out there all by myself.

Anyway, going off on a tangent there.

Tonight would totally be a great night to update from bed. I’m crossing my fingers that there’s a fantastic sale on awesome laptops in this Sunday’s ads so we can get one already.

Alaethia slept in her crib for the very first time Monday night. My sore throat was awful and my nose was between running and being stuffy so I was certain I’d end up having to sleep with my mouth open that night–you know, to avoid suffocation and all. Since Alaethia sleeps in the crook of my arm I didn’t want to get her sick so I placed her between her little wedge thing in her crib and prayed for the best. I was super paranoid even though her crib’s right next to my bed. I closed my eyes and felt like I’d woken up just as quickly when I heard her little “I’m hungry” cries. Look at the clock; she’d let me sleep for 4 hours!

I fed her, burped her, changed her, cuddled her and put her back in the crib. It was no-go that time though. I was too tired to continue to try and get her to sleep in there. I like holding her and breathing in her baby smell anyway :).

I tried putting her in her crib on Tuesday night after giving her her bath (the last piece of belly button scab fell off Saturday night, so I can bathe her freely now :)!) and feeding her. It takes so long to burp her. Most of the time she doesn’t even burp and she’s gotten into the habit of spitting up a little bit after her feedings. I placed her in the crib and she stayed asleep. I curled up in bed while Mario was making copies of CDs and fell asleep. I could hear something far away, something like a gasp and then I heard gurgling sounds. I realize that it’s Alaethia and I spring out of bed to find her gagging on her spit up. I freaked out, picked her up and turned her onto her stomach and patted her back to help her stop choking. I was so scared I scrapped the idea of putting her in her crib for now. Maybe after she starts learning how to burp correctly =\.

I had absolutely no idea what we were going to do for Valentine’s Day. I’d asked Mario and we both just sort of shrugged it off since we knew he wouldn’t be getting out early enough to celebrate. I tried not to be excited, and I tried to convince myself that I wouldn’t be disappointed if something incredibly romantic didn’t happen.

The boys were little terrors the morning of Valentine’s Day. Eenan eventually got the point that I was quickly getting frustrated, so he shaped up right away. Jaylen on the other hand continued to lazy around on the couch and talk back to me when I told him to get ready. He left me all of 5 minutes to get myself ready. I told him he was grounded since he never listened and then began the waterworks. He wailed and cried all the way to school and once we parked in a parking space, he magically stopped crying. Just like that.

I got them both to their classrooms and made sure they had their large Ziplocs containing their Valentine Cards for their classmates. Rushed back home since I needed to get Mario’s stuff ready and then drop him off to pick up the Sentra at Whataburger since John had taken it in the morning to get to work. First thing Mario does is start complaining about how he only had one pair of tube socks left in his drawer, how my coffee was watered down and how tired he was of having to rush to pick up his car. He was all ready to go by 8:30, but Noelia wasn’t ready till 8:45. Not my fault he was rushing, even though he didn’t have to be at work till 10. We’d made plans the night before to have lunch together for Valentine’s Day. He continued to make little complaints about the car and when I’d finally had enough I told him, “You know what? Forget meeting for lunch. Just forget the whole thing.”

When we were about to walk out the door he tells me, “Are we meeting for lunch or not? If not, so I can pack something.” I roll my eyes and say, “Yeah, we’ll meet. Whatever.”

I tried napping with Alaethia when I got back but I got about half an hour worth of sleep since she wanted a bottle and then wanted to stay awake. Picked up Jaylen then got home and flat-ironed my hair and put on some make-up. I call Mario and ask him what time he’d like to meet and he said he was at a service call with Albert, so he’d call me whenever they were on their way back to work. This causes me to quickly become annoyed, but I was trying to be civil so, through gritted teeth I said, “Okay. That’s fine.”

He calls back not long after that and tells me to go ahead and take off so we’d get there around the same time. I give Mom a quick run-down of what Alaethia needs and how Jaylen’s not allowed to play video games and I take off. Traffic was terrible, but I made it over there in half an hour.

I see him when I drive into the alley behind the shops and he gives me a huge smile and suddenly I don’t feel as resentful towards him as I did just seconds before. (I hate it how he can make me forgive him so quickly just by flashing a sweet smile. I’m so weak!) He gets into the truck and says, “Hey, Beautiful, where do you want to go?” We decide on a Chinese Buffet place since it’s pretty fast.

We get our food and have a nice chat. We discuss how the kids behaved (or misbehaved) in the morning and chatted about the cute things Alaethia does. He tells me how he told everyone that I was upset with him and it all becomes a huge joke. I tell him thank you for lunch; it made my Valentine’s Day. The hour went by too quickly. I dropped him off at work and gave him a smooch on the cheek. I was pretty bummed that I’m sick and couldn’t even give him a decent kiss. I won’t even get into the fact that we can’t be, erm, intimate for six weeks and Alaethia barely turned 3 weeks yesterday LOL.

The rest of the day’s pretty normal. Mom wanted to get the kids a little gift, so after we picked Eenan up we went to visit Gramma then to Target. Jaylen was acting up at first, but after a while he calmed down and behaved. We chatted with Gramma for a while and she swooned over Alaethia. We said our goodbyes after half an hour and set off to Target. I wanted to get home before it got dark, since I can’t see well at night and I was already feeling dreadfully sleepy.

Mom lets the boys pick out a toy each (Jaylen, a Batman action figure, Eenan, a Naruto action figure) and I get some diapers and a burgundy bed sheet set that was on clearance for $13. I’d been looking for burgundy sheets and hadn’t had any luck. Can’t beat $13!

I get home and do my nightly routine and Mary treats everyone to some McDonald’s. I didn’t even have to make dinner–yay! I get a call from Mario that he’s going to be a bit late, again, since he and the guys had a system to do. He appologizes, but I tell him it’s fine and I genuinely mean it. I put Alaethia in her crib and change the bedsheets. Alaethia starts fussing when I’m done so I pick her up and hold her and Jaylen joins me on the new, crisp sheets. We’re watching TV when I suddenly see a shadow on the door. It’s too high to be Eenan, who was in their bedroom playing. I stare at the doorway at to my surprise it’s Mario holding a beautiful bouquet of flowers and two packages wrapped in yellow paper. He has the cutest expression on his face and says, “Happy Valentine’s Day!” I immediately feel a lump crawl up my throat and my eyes welled up with tears. I croak, “Babe! What…you didn’t have to!” I place sleeping Alaethia on the bed and hold him, bawling my eyes out. Eenan starts to get worried, because he hates to see me cry and Mario tells him softly, “It’s okay, man, Mama’s crying because she’s happy.” The boys both come over and hug us and Mario asks me to read the card attached to the bouquet. And I bawled my eyes out again :).

He tells me, “Open the rest!” So the boys help me tear open the small package first, which is a DVD I’d wanted: Friends With Money with Jennifer Aniston. The second package is something I’d been wanting forever: a box of Whitman’s chocolates :). How he guessed I’d really wanted one of those is beyond me.

We put the boys to bed after that and then we bathed Alaethia. We cuddled in bed while we watched Open Season until I started drifting into sleep. I brought Alaethia back into bed with me, who’d been sleeping in her crib until she needed a bottle. She slept pretty well the first part of the night and then, after she’d woken up at 3:45 stayed awake till 5:15. I was so tired this morning. I was supposed to drop Noelia off at work but I didn’t think I would make it back, alive, afterwards. My throat also felt horrible, my ear ached, my Wisdom tooth is ripping my gums apart and I was afraid I’d gotten Alaethia sick. I called Mary to let her know I couldn’t drop Noelia off and instead I went to the doctor.

I weight 119 right now, which is pretty good but I’d LOVE to get to 115, and maybe even 110. That’s my goal. Alaethia is now 7 lbs. 10 oz. and is 20 inches long. She got a clean bill of health. Dr. C. recommended cuddling if she gets fussy LOL. I, on the other hand, have a throat infection but no Strep, thank goodness. My ear was clear of infections (and clear of everything else–Dr. C. said I maybe needed some ear wax since my ears were that clean LOL); he said, as I suspected, that the pain was probably due to my darn Wisdom tooth.

Mario’s been home for a while and Alaethia’s asleep so I should take the chance to take a quick shower and put some beef stew to cook in the slow cooker for Mario’s lunch tomorrow. I hope Alaethia lets me get some good sleep tonight. I have to drop Mario off tomorrow so I need to sleep!

Now that I’m driving again (and I shouldn’t actually be driving till after Wednesday) the past two days have been OMG-Kill-Me-Now hectic. I try and sleep after I drop the boys off at school and Mario’s left to work, so I get at least two extra hours of sleep (from 9am till 11am) but I totally skipped my nap yesterday. John and I went to the bank, to get milk at the corner store and to pick up his paycheck at work (which wasn’t ready, grr). Picked up Jaylen, came home and got everyone else in the car (Mom and Alaethia) and left to town.

We were supposed to get a “price adjustment” at Circuit City, where we bought our laptop. Since Best Buy had the exact same one for the same price and had instant savings instead of a mail-in rebate, they told us to take the ad in and we’d get the $130 in cash, at the store. We go, and what happens? The laptop isn’t the same dontch’a know? All the specs are the same, looks exactly the same but the model number’s off by two letters. I thanked the girl that was helping us for wasting half an hour of my life and we left. To Target (where I saved $2 on Huggies diapers–oh yeah!) where I returned a curtain rod I’d bought on Sunday and some Link Sys thing we didn’t use. We went to Wal-Mart afterwards where I got a new curtain rod I’d seen (but still not too happy with) and undies and sports bras, since, for the life of me, I can’t find about half of my old underwear O_o.

We rushed home and got Mom, Jaylen and Alaethia off since we had to pick Eenan and Brandon up from school and there was no way we’d all fit. We go home, Eenan does his homework and we go back to town so we could give Gramma a visit. We hadn’t seen her in almost 3 weeks!

I was feeling the effects of skipping my morning nap; I was literally nodding off at the wheel, which I never do, no matter how tired I am. We get to Gramma’s and she’s just in love with Alaethia. We arrived just as they brought her her dinner and she said she’d forgotten how hungry she was now that Alaethia was there. She said she’s got rosy skin like her :). We sat around and talked for a good while and then we left home before it got dark since I’m having a harder and harder time seeing when its dark. This time John made me laugh the whole way home, so the endorphins or whatever was floating around my body helped wake me up. I stopped to make our storage unit payment and then we really went home.

Alaethia was a doll and let me bathe the boys without a problem. Mario called to tell me he was on his way home (two hours earlier than usual) so we could put the bunk beds together. I’d been calling around looking for prices on twin mattresses and had little to no luck. Most places were closed. Mom comes over to watch the kiddos for us while we went to Wal-mart, since we were going to exchange the bunk beds we got at Kmart for less expensive ones (the exact same ones). We ran into Paul and Norma and their kids, which was a huge coincidence since Paul had just called that morning. We talked for a while and then decided we’d leave straight to Kmart to get the bunk bed mattresses they had that went with the beds.

We get there and it’s probably one of the worst customer service experiences we’ve ever had. Omar, the guy I spotted and asked for help left us standing there like idiots for 40 minutes while he “checked” if they had the mattress. Everytime we’d ask if he was almost ready, he’d give us the run-around and would say that yeah, they were bringing one out. We’d had enough, so we left.

The boys had eaten at home, but we were starving (all I’d had for lunch was a bitty cup of mac-n-cheese and a green apple). We stopped at Burger King, where they welcomed us with, “Welcome to Burger King. Can you hold on, please?” and never came back. So we left that place, too. We ended up going to McDonald’s and I actually ordered a quarter pounder with cheese meal. We get home and Mario scarfs down his food and so do I. We ate at the couch while we watched The Guardian and when we were done and Mario was taking our trash to the trashcan I tell him, “Man I was hungry. Did you notice I actually ate my fries?” He says, “Yeah! I thought, ‘Since when does she order a quarter pounder?'” It was delicious I have to admit. I’ll try not to make it a habit though. Don’t want to gain all my pregnancy weight back XD.

Today was just as hectic. I know I forgot details from yesterday because I could have sworn I did more shit than that. We went to sleep late last night since we watched the movie and Alaethia woke up twice so I got mmmm, about 5 hours of sleep. I dropped the boys off, made Mario breakfast and after giving Alaethia a bottle and eating some Cheerios, I snuggled up with her in bed and we fell asleep till 11am. It felt so darn good to sleep. I picked Jaylen up while Mom watched Alaethia (bless that woman) and from then on I had stuff to do, like go to Mary’s to get copies of the mail-in rebate papers and receipts, bought the mattress for Eenan’s bunk bed ($99, best price and it’s not too crappy) then we rushed back, picked up the other two kids then went to the bank to withdraw money. Poor Vito was in a car wreck this morning. Apparently, the truck that hit him was transporting illegal immigrants and they fled the scene. Left the truck there, but they ran off. There were choppers patrolling the area and everything. Vito was fine, thank goodness, but his car’s a total loss. We all pitched in some money so he could get himself a little car he’d seen for $500. I felt more than obliged to help; he’s always helping us out, whether it be rescuing us when one of our cars breaks down or picking up the kids for us when we desperately need it, he’s there for us.

Mario had me mail off some speakers to his Nino, Jorge, and I mailed off the rebate. I hope I did everything right and that we actually receive the rebate. Rebates make me nervous, like I’m never going to see the money.

I got to bathe the kids with no problem, cleaned up a little, folded clothes and did 3 loads of laundry and even got to make dinner while Alaethia slept. I got the dishes ready to wash and got the cups washed and rinsed and then she woke up. And stayed awake. Mary called around 9:30 asking if I’d do her the favor of dropping Noelia off in the morning around 8:30. I was pretty bummed I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but all was forgiven when they took Alaethia to their house for a bit so I could take a shower. I thought I was going to have to go to bed stinky since it’s Tuesday and Mario’s having a night out with the guys. I hope the boy went to Jorge’s to get his cellphone. He left it there when we went over Sunday night.

Now that I’m clean and Alaethia’s actually sleeping I should get to bed. Life’s pretty much back to “normal” now that I’m pretty much back on my feet. My Snuggle-Bug’s got a big day tomorrow: a doctor’s appointment. I’m a little nervous that she might have to get immunizations. I can feel the lump in my throat already.

Before I start complaining about my weekend 😛 I’d like to thank everyone for the well wishes :). I’m finally feeling much, much better. I can breathe through both nostrils!

I’m hating Roadrunner right now. For the past 3 days we’re connected for about 10 minutes (sometimes only 5) and then it’s out for about 20-30 minutes. Argh! A technician’s supposed to stop by sometime today but of course you never know when they’ll actually get here. With my luck, it’ll be while I’m out picking up the boys. Grr.

The last time I updated we were about to leave to visit Gramma and run all these errands. (Didn’t get the chance to vent about that evening when I wanted to since RR was off and on all darn night.) We visited Gramma for a good, solid hour. It was nice sitting there with her, chatting. The boys were incredibly well-behaved; they even shared her breakfast table and drew pictures while she watched.

We took her Christmas decorations down and put them away. Mom was looking through her clothes, putting stuff back on hangers when she notices this maroon velour hoodie sweatshirt that we hadn’t seen before. She asks if Aunt Nora gave it to her and Gramma says, “No. Yajaira gave me that one.” I tell her, “No Gramma, we gave you a solid red one.” I pull out the red sweatshirt we’d given her for Christmas and she says, “Oh…well, I guess just put the other one there.” Mom tries it on her and it’s a size too small. All the years I’ve known Gramma, she’s been a size Medium. She’s put on some weight the past few months since she’s been at the nursing home and she’s now a size Large. It thrills me to say this since she was so thin and fraile back in 2004 when she first moved to the nursing home. She’s our little linebacker now :).

We left Gramma’s and went to Walmart, where I got a few things we needed and we walked away with yet another Beta fish. Eenan was jealous that Mom had gotten one for Jaylen, so he asked her for one and of course the woman said she’d get him one. He got a red one and I got them some new glass bowls and pebbles. The cool thing is they both fit on the little “hutch” on their desk so they hopefully won’t knock them over. They’ve been doing pretty good so far with feeding them once in the morning and once at night :).

Mario called while I was at Walmart and asked if I could drop some money off to him at work. I had the darn Senta and Mario failed to tell me that it’s really hard to turn the wheel to the right. Something having to do with the transmission. When I’m trying to turn to the right to get on the frontage road, I get stuck there! I can’t turn the wheel, so there I am, sticking out several feet into the frontage road while crazy Shary Road traffic is turning in. I step on the gas as soon as I get a chance before someone slams into me. Stupid car. If it’s one thing that gets me into a bad mood is being seconds from getting killed because of that damn car.

I get to Mario’s work and lo and behold, he’s out to lunch. I call him, frustrated, and he tells me to leave the money with one of his friends. Fine. I look at the clock and it’s 1pm. I’m starving and so are the kids and we still need to go to Aunt Nora’s. We stop by Taco Bell and get some tacos, nachos and drinks and I call Aunt Nora when we get on the road again.

She’d told me they usually go out in the evening, so we figured we’d go during the day. Turns out she was leaving the house at that exact moment and said she’d call me when she was back.

I’m fuming once again and am even more annoyed that I spent $10 (as little as that is) on Faux Mexican Food for nothing. Had I known she wasn’t going to be there we could have just come straight home and had lunch here.

I start hacking up a lung so I ask mom to pass me my drink. I feel something cold on my belly, but I assume it’s the cold cup so I keep drinking. When I start feeling really cold I stop drinking and look down; there’s a puddle of Raspberry Iced Tea on my boobs and belly. GREAT. We checked the cup and the lid’s fully on and there aren’t any cracks, yet I somehow managed to spill about a cup of it all over myself. Stupid thing.

We got home and ate and I tried my hardest to calm down and be in a good mood. Aunt Nora didn’t end up calling and there was no way I’d drive at night if she had, so we chilled out here at home and I made Chicken Alfredo Pasta for dinner. Eenan ate and then went over to Mary’s to sleep over and Mario, Jaylen and I stayed up watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets LOL. It was supposed to be night 1 of getting the kids used to falling asleep early but that didn’t happen. Not for Jaylen anyway. He likes to cuddle with us when we’re watching TV :).

We woke up considerably early on Sunday morning, again because of all the noise outside our bedroom. We got up, took showers and ate breakfast (barbacoa tacos) then we headed to Home Depot (with Jaylen only, Eenan was in town with my in-laws) and bought some materials so Mario would finish up the shelves in the bathroom, to get rid of the rackety, flimsy over-the-toilet shelf we currently have our towels stored in. (Of course, Mario never actually got around to building the shelves. Grr.)

We bar-b-q’d later on during the day and learned all about some family drama that’s still going on. I don’t want to air out any dirty laundry, but Jesus, people just need to grow the eff up! I can only see absolute disaster happening (more than it has already) if people don’t learn how to control their tempers =\.

I shall continue the rest of my entry about yesterday (Monday) when Roadrunner stops pissing me off. I wanted to take a nap, but I’m waiting for that darn technician. Ah! Speaking of the devil, they just called to confirm the appointment. Thank GOD.