I have sleep… issues. Any time stress is introduced into my life, sleep goes out the window. Stress like, say, my husband going into the hospital. Or my baby going into the hospital. Or my husband going back into the hospital. (It was quite a year for medical bills.) Without the aid of medication, it could have been theoretically possible for me to have gone most of last year without sleeping.

I love me some Ambien. (And our bank account loved it when Ambien finally went generic.)

But here’s the deal: one of my super powers is that my body can acclimate to just about any medication. Meds will work for a little while, but then I will invariably require larger doses to maintain any sort of effect. This is true for all drugs. I would make a really awesome drug addict. Or a really crappy one… depending on how you look at it.

Now, here is where the hilarity comes in.

As my doses of Ambien go up, so do the occurrences of odd behavior on my part. As my body acclimates to high doses of sleep aides, I sorta do a lot of weird stuff in my sleep… except I’m not really asleep. (And though I appear to be awake, I’m really not awake, either. I guess I’m kind of like a hypnotized zombie, except with a little less of the rotting flesh.)

For your guffawing pleasure, a list of some things I’ve done after taking Ambien:

* Eaten large amounts of snacks. I wake up covered in wrappers of things I have no recollection of eating.

* Watched a wide array of movies which I have no recollection of watching. (I have been known to say many times “I watched that, but I was on Ambien, so I’m not sure if it was any good…”

* Read chapters of books that I don’t remember reading, resulting in the rereading of many, many pages. This is especially tedious when I have to backtrack through my Kindle.

* Made out with my husband, with little-to-no morning-after memory.

* Made out with someone other than my husband. (kidding… just seeing if you’re paying attention.)

* Confided in my husband that I miss my relationship with my younger brother, and declared my love of tiger prawn shrimp… in the same sentence.

* Held a conversation with my mother-in-law where I explained to her that there is a village in Africa where the birth rate of twins is the highest in the world because the people of the village eat a lot of yams. I then told her of my plan to eat lots of yams in order to try for twins. (Sadly, I did remember parts of this conversation the next morning.)

* Posted blog posts that I had to take down the next morning, due to their incoherent nature. One of them may have been about yams and their impact on reproduction…

* Fell off of my exercise ball in the middle of a set of crunches, smashing my face into the television screen during an episode of Law and Order. I got a good look at Detective Green’s pores.

Apparently this “super power” and odd behavior runs in my family. Talking to one of my aunts at Christmastime, she told me about her post-Ambien affinity for eating make-up, and about the time her kids found her out raking leaves and doing moderately strenuous yard work at 3am.

When I start eating eye shadow, it might be time to dial it down a notch.

Until then, for the sake of sleep, I’ll carry on with the occasional loony behavior… and just hope no one films it.

Sleeping under a dinosaur? Is about as comfortable as you’d expect it to be.

Friday night Zoe and I attended Dinosnorzzz at the dino museum. I could explain all of the festivities, or I could show you a video of Zoe in pajamas where she explains it all in giddy detail while an air mattress pump whirs loudly in the background. Yes, let’s do that, shall we…

(ps, why the crap didn’t I think of the air mattress??)

A few things she didn’t mention:
a 3D dinosaur movie complete with frickin sweet glasses

a near-fatal triceratops attack; proving that they were not, in fact, herbivores

(plant eaters, my butt)

and some dangerous pink dino origami, as well

In retrospect, there was a lot of attacking going on. I’d steer clear of the place after dark… even in spite of their claims that everything there has been dead for lots of millions of years. However, if you throw caution to the wind and decide to go, two words: Air. Mattress.

More pics up on flickr.

A comprehensive quickly thrown together list of things I want to do this year:

* Write something every day. Even if it’s short. Some days, it can even just be the shopping list.
* Submit three stories/queries per month to magazines
* Have a completed rough draft of one of my already-started novels by June 30th
* Find at least three occasions this year to play my flute in front of an audience
* Run jog walk use bipedal motion to finish at least two 5ks this year
* Read at least 6 novels to my big kids (bedtime)
* squeeze my butt into those size 26 Lucky’s that have been sitting in the closet with the tags still on for almost two years now…
* find some scripture study time daily

Have your goals laid out?

Happy New Year!

Hi. Our family loves attention. We need to have it all the time. From everyone we know. And even some people we don’t know.

Usually we acquire this attention by being generally awesome. Winning awards. Collecting trophies. Wearing fashionable clothes. Saving puppies. Thinking of creative ways to alleviate world hunger. Awesome stuff like that.

But when these standard practices don’t afford us the attention we think we deserve, we pull out the big guns. And our big guns are: going to the hospital with some sort of weird condition that has doctors and nurses scratching their heads.

(Our goal is to have one of our family members make an appearance in a medical journal… that would REALLY get us some attention.)

Last spring Jon went into the hospital (he drove himself…) with a weird heart condition. People were all like “OMG, WTF? R U guys ok?” and other misspelled tidings of worry. Facebook was all a-Twitter (get it?). His heart thing gave us some nice attention. For a while. But then summer came and people were paying attention to the nice weather and going to the pool and having picnics and taking vacations, and our family was kinda falling by the wayside and not making much note-worthy headway on the whole curing global hunger thing. We began feeling attention starved.

By the fall, it was pretty bad. Wearing fashionable clothes… not working. Saving puppies… nothing. In late September, sweet little Deac had had enough of people not paying attention. He took one for the team and flung himself off the bed, causing a rad head injury. I don’t know what would have happened otherwise. Without all the pics of Deac with a neck brace and a “brain drain”, our family may have fallen completely off the attention radar.

But then Christmas rolled around. People were talking about this awesome guy named Santa and this really cool baby named Jesus, and our family was feeling really left out again. Pay attention to us, we beckoned. But nay, there was no room at the inn (where “room” = “attention”, and the “inn” = “people’s minds”). So Jon decided to make another go at it. (He’s a real peach.) While, in truth, this latest health issue has been plaguing him for several months, he wasn’t admitted to the hospital for it until this past Tuesday. Which was his mom’s birthday. Because the whole thing was set up to steal his mom’s thunder on her birthday. (We are really good planners.) I even got to burst into her dining room during her birthday dinner, ding a fork on a glass, announce that Jon had a blood clot in his liver, and hand-off my baby for her to babysit. On her birthday.

How’s that for attention?

And now it’s New Year’s Eve and he’s still in the hospital. We are trying to steal New Year’s Eve’s thunder. Take that, New Year’s Eve!! (Note: New Year’s Eve will now be called “Jon’s Clot Eve”. You celebrate by curling into the fetal position, clutching your stomach, refusing to eat, and having intravenous narcotics administered to you. It’s not a bad holiday, really. Oh, but then you also have to have blood thinners administered… and that’s done by giving you a shot IN YOUR STOMACH, twice a day. For several weeks. I guess that part of Jon’s Clot Eve is actually kind of a downer…)

Pay Attention to Us!! We are running out of ideas! Up next, though: I contract Scarlet Fever, gout, and swine flu… perhaps with a side of lock jaw.

Let’s see how many Facebook comments and ward casseroles we can get for that one…

I finished the Quiet Book. Before Christmas. I also finished the projects for the big kids. Before Christmas. (Granted, I was still swearing and yanking and adjusting and crying over Jachin’s quilt binding on Christmas Eve…)

Behold:

Deacon’s Quiet Book!

Bound, and with most pages completed (though the clock’s hands keep falling off. I need to adjust the brad and eyelet).

Jachin’s video game character quilt!

Here are all of the characters:

quilt2.jpg

If you look at this quilt even a little bit closely, you will find a plethora of mistakes… luckily, Jachin doesn’t seem to care.

And Zoe and Julie’s aprons!

See the cute ribbon I found for the ties??

Here’s a close-up of Julie’s. Both aprons have fake pockets and everything.

Again, if you look closely, it’s not good. But Zoe doesn’t care and Julie’s eyes are made of glass, so she can’t look closely.

Pigs flew Christmas morning, and fresh bacon was had by all. God bless us, every one.

Deacon turned one year old on Tuesday. It was awesome. I can’t believe how fast the year went by. It seems like just last month he and I were snuggling in the hospital together, watching the snow falling heavily outside, and having A Christmas Carol on repeat in our hospital room.

His birthday cupcake was delicious.

So was his new ball.

And here’s video of him cautiously eating his cupcake. Notice how he says “more”. He can also say “all done” when he’s had enough to eat… but he never got around to saying “all done” with the cupcake. He just kept eating it until it was gone.

Happy Birthday, little guy.

Last year at Christmastime, one of our neighbors was our “Secret Santa”. Every evening, starting on the 13th of December, we would get a gift on the front porch. The first gift said “On the 1st Day of Christmas…” and it was addressed “from your Secret Santa”. The kids loved getting the gift each night. Around 9pm there’d be the customary knock at the door. I told the kids to wait for a few seconds to let the Secret Santa run off (Secret Santas don’t like to be caught… it’s kind of a downer) before opening the door the retrieve the gift. Then my kids would yell “thank you” into the night and giggle and close the door. The gifts varied each night. One night we got popcorn, another night we got fuzzy socks, another night we got cocoa in snowman mugs… it didn’t matter what the gift was. The exciting, enchanting thing for the kids was that someone was thoughtful — and sneaky– enough to leave something each night.

We never found out who it was. If by any chance you are reading this and our Secret Santa was you, thank you so much for thinking of our family.

Knowing how fun it was to be on the receiving end last year, we decided to do it for someone else this year. We picked a sweet, elderly widow down the street. This lady is so kind and thoughtful. She periodically calls me to see how our family is doing. To see how we are feeling.
To see if we have caught any of the stomach flus that have been going around. To say that Zoe looked cute at church last Sunday. To say that Jachin said hi to her and acted gentlemanly. She is adorable and I really wanted to do something nice for her. So starting on the 13th, we began dropping gifts at her door. Soup and a snowman mug, some Christmas cookie cutters, an ornament with her initial on it. Nothing big or amazing, but just something to let her know that she is thought of and loved.

So far, the kids haven’t been caught. Part of it is that this sweet old lady isn’t spry enough to get to the door in a dead sprint. There was one time that apparently someone was visiting and got to the door pretty fast. The kids dove into the bushes by the sidewalk. It was close. They came back through our front door panting and laughing.

This is totally one of those times when giving really is better than receiving. I absolutely think that the kids are just as excited (if not more so) being the Secret Santas instead of getting stuff from the Secret Santa. They get all giddy about it every night.

Try it next year and see for yourself. Pick anyone on your street. It’ll make ya all warm and fuzzy.

This year I decided I’d make something homemade for each of my kids for Christmas. And not just, like, toothpick picture frames… nay! I decided to make each kid an intricate gift that requires pinning and basting and sewing and hard liquor (if only I drank). Now, because I worry that my children are three of my four blog readers, I can’t tell you directly what these gifts are. But I will give you blurry picture clues and vague descriptions that will leave you puzzled and wanting to know more!

For Jachin I am attempting to make something that I’ve never made the likes of before. There is no pattern for this. I am winging it. And me + an idea + a sewing machine + winging it (almost always) = disaster. But I’m going for it.

These are squares of material. Think squares. Lots of them. Sewn together.

These are iron-on pages. You print out pictures of things, like… oh, I don’t know, Nintendo characters, and then iron them onto white squares. (That is dark blue minky behind there. Minky, if you are not familiar with it, is super-soft fuzzy material that feels like kittens rolled in cotton balls. Minky can often be sewn to the back of lots of squares that have been sewn together. You follow me?)

These are some of the iron-on pages. I know. Totally cute.

Shhh… no blabbing to Jachin.

Now we move on to Zoe. Zoe, as you may recall, wants nothing but Julie the American Girl for Christmas. I have it on good authority that Santa may be bringing the goods. Therefore, I am sewing Zoe something that has to do with this:

See? How they match?

And it goes with this:

Hello? Can you get more 70’s looking? I don’t see how.

And Deacon, well… okay, I’m not super-worried about Deacon reading my blog, so I’ll just flat out tell you what I’m making. (Plus, I actually work on it in front of him. Because he’s a baby. And two minutes after I’ve put it away, he’s forgotten about it. Because he’s a baby. And on Christmas day he’ll open it and be like all, Yay! I’m a baby and I’ve never seen this before in my life! )

It’s a Quiet Book. The Quiet Book that I started making when I was pregnant with Jachin. Yes, I have been working on this Quiet Book since 1998. Because have I told you how bad I am about finishing things I start? The Quiet Book is actually the token object that is referred to every time I embark on something new. Like, I will start ripping out everything in the boxes in the basement and labeling and color-coding and Jon will come down and look at me in the center of a disaster and say, “Umm, is this going to be like the Quiet Book?” And I’ll shoot him with my angry wife laser eyes. And then a week later I will have abandoned the color-coding labeling project and you won’t be able to walk around in our disaster-ridden basement.

Yeah, it’s like that.

But this Christmas is it! The Quiet Book will be completed! Jon will have a stroke! Pigs will fly by our windows on Christmas morning! And then we will shoot them and have fresh bacon!… but that’s something else entirely…

Okay, did you get a good look at creepy Jonah?

I guess a few days in a whale’s stomach would make you a little worse for wear.

Anyhoo… these are my current projects. Things that I have to finish before Christmas morning. Which — if I know anything about myself — means that I will be up until 3am Christmas Eve finishing them.

Are you making anything homemade for Christmas??

Clue #16 that your geek-itude is rubbing off on your children-

If you hear your children say the following while watching A Christmas Carol:

“Why is Captain Picard playing Scrooge?”

(If you do not understand the above clue, rest assured friend, you are not a geek.)

No one crying. No one hitting. No one whining. No one with their fingers up their nose or anyone else’s nose. Showered, hair brushed, and generally clean.

And it’s immortalized on film.

Score.