So it's my last weekday before school starts...

... and I've mixed emotions about that. Sure, I need to get my rump in gear and do 'things' I've got on 'lists'. Sure, I like lists, I just don't *always* feel like doing what they (or anyone) say. I've been big on some of the seven 'deadly' sins lately - especially sloth and gluttony. Not good, considering I'm going to a yoga retreat next friday. Sure, my hamstrings will be better (which is the reason I give myself for my inactivity) but my eating hasn't been very good.

Somehow there's a monsoon outside - it's been dark outside most of the day (for august, relatively speaking) and now I understand why. Dear, I've been meaning to mow the lawn (one of those things on a list) but the last two days it's looked like it was going to rain at any moment - not to mention that you've been home in the mornings and I've wanted to hang out with you instead of do chores and other things like clean the house.

I'm kind of trying to make myself sick enough of sitting around that I'll keep busy during the school year and not sit around here just because I technically have the time to do so. Let's hope that works. :)

Since I was thinking about it, here's a partial list of thing I'd like to do before pushing up daisies (in no particular order):

1. Go on a cross-country road trip in a convertible with Natha
2. Have a round room with nothing but bookshelves filled with books on the walls
3. Own and wear out to somewhere a dress that has a plunging neckline - the kind that goes down slightly past my bellybutton
4. Make a quilt out of Natha's baby clothes
5. See Natha get married and have a kid (if he wants one)
6. Sew a dress of my own design
7. Spend time traveling with Ed once Natha's out of the house
8. Go to Las Vegas and play poker (prepared to lose money)
9. Try a few more goofballs
10. Enter a bikini contest at a bar (just a wet t-shirt contest, maybe)
11. Watch Gone With the Wind every Thanksgiving
12. Go on several more solo vacations
13. Give Ed a small spoon every day until they day he dies

That's all for now - it's time to go stand in line to go pick up Natha from school. Natha's going to a Parent's Night Out tonight - he thinks we 'allow' him to go so he can have fun - and that's how we want it to stay, too. :)

So I also forgot to mention...

I beat Pikmin the other day - which is the first video game I've ever conquered both as a grown-up and by myself.

Hooray for me!

I also have a feeling I'm not going to like Pikin 2 because it seems to be filled with superfluous complication, and I'm all about complication-in-the-details, but not just because someone *wanted* to - I like it when the system depends upon it.

Here's a funny website - we found these two books on clearance at MediaPlay the other day and they're absolutely hilarious - like non-fiction Dada books for children. :)

So I've been watching 'A Baby Story"...

...to make sure I don't have any maternal urges swelling up inside of me when affronted with full-on images of mommy/baby bliss. After many episodes on TLC, I've realized...

I don't have the urge.

I remember now that there's a chance, whenever one has a baby, that it ends in a C-Section. Sure, most of the time you have a healthy mom and baby - which is the important part. Then there's the healing of the cut abdominal muscles.

I don't really want to mess with that chance. I like my stomach the way it is.

I'm also looking at how I'm going to get a teaching license once I have a Master's degree - in Tennessee there are three main options, including Alternative licences A, C, and E - and I don't really understand the differences between them. Anyone have any clue??? One type sounds better for me than another, but there's got to be some option I'm missing about this situation...

The computer situation at the house is all in an upheaval at the moment - some computers are dead, others are lacking power cords, and we're trying to find the USB wireless thingy for another so it's internet-able. Who would have thought, with all the stuff we have hanging around here, that we'd be in *this* kind of trouble. Sure, we have two computers that work and have the internet, but they're both at the same desk - so I'm regaled to interneting when Ed's not here - 'cause when he's here, he's most likely sitting at this desk. :)

I've had some unbalanced doshas the past few weeks - I'm in the middle of a kapha imbalance. I haven't been this way in a while - and it's in response to the stress from waiting for school to start for the semester. See, now when the imbalance first started, I was vata imbalanced because of Natha going to school for the first time. I've been trying some Sun Salutations and more inversions to help, but there's only so much that can help me wanting to eat *all* the time. I need to at least bring my mindfulness back into the mindset of restraint - with Natha starting school, Ed working all the time, and me not distracting myself with Pikmin 2 I've fallen off of the mindfulness boat.

I think I'll go work on that now.

So Natha's now a full-time kindergartener...

...which makes me even more a trophy wife. I dutifully cut 12 bananas in half and placed them in two big ziploc bags for Natha's class snack today - I even threw in two boxes of Vanilla wafers to make it ultra-snack-ish.

So now I've got today and next week until I start school myself (and start teaching again) - there's an 'organizational' meeting next wednesday. I need to file my course of study and apply for unconditional admission now that I have enough hours to...

I made it! I stayed home *2 months* with Natha to get him ready for school - behavior-wise and knowledge-wise he wasn't on par with other to-be-kindergarteners until the end of july and we don't think he would be now if I hadn't stayed home with him. I think that the behavior problems were getting in the way of him learning, namely the excess of sugar making it hard for him to control himself. I was one to have too much energy in middle school and high school - and if I couldn't let it out by playing some sport, I'd jump up and down in place to get it out of me. When I had an avulsion fracture on my left ankle I couldn't do much of anything, so I jumped up and down on my right foot as much as I could - otherwise I couldn't sleep at night. No wonder I got a stress fracture in my right foot 5 months later.

The other thing about Natha to remember is that he *just* turned 5 - there are lots of kids who went to pre-k or otherwise missed the deadline for turning 5 in time for school last year - I was one of those kids. Ed, however, was one of the younger ones in his class - even though we are 4 months apart, he graduated high school a year before I did. Natha just had to mature naturally - which he has. We went to Logan's last night and dinner took 2 hours - and there was no screaming, running around, or other things that most kids his age do. Sure, he did things to get attention, but he rarely got out of his seat and ate quite a bit of food.

I don't think Ed (or even me, honestly) completely understand how atypical Natha and his habits are - he eats way more and much weirder stuff than most adults do, we can go and have a 2 hour dinner without disasterous results, and he has the fine and gross motor skills of an average 6 or 7 year old. I haven't seen all of the kids in his class line up, but he's probably among the tallest if not the tallest (big surprise there, I know)...

Natha's grandpa is coming down to Tennessee to fish at some lake and is going to pick Natha up after school to take him with him - Natha should like that, since he a)loves his grandpa and b)loves to fish. He'll stay overnight and come back tomorrow afternoon...

I'm supposed to mow the lawn today - it just depends on how hot it is after I get back from my yoga class - I haven't been since last saturday which is good in one way and bad in another - it's good because it gives my hamstrings a chance to heal more, and it's bad because I haven't been practicing asanas in that long - and I'm going to a weekend yoga retreat in florida in 2 weeks... where most people have been practicing for *way* longer than I have...

I've adapted a completely different strategy for Pikmin now - I went back yesterday and started over my game (kept the further advanced game I had been playing just in case) to start accumulating ship parts at a rate of about 2 per day to get all the easy ones in while storing up as many pikmin as I could - in my more advanced game, I ran into a problem where I don't have enough pikmin or skill to kill the monsters I need to, and all of the parts that are left are really hard to get. Before I was subscribing to the one-part-in-one-day-is-ok theory, but now I realize that you have to get the easy parts 2 in a day to allow you time to spend a day to set up getting a part guarded by more monsters. I've also had to consult the internets to find out how to kill some of these nasty litle buggers. And yes, I know that Ed is the only one who would understand this paragraph - and he probably doesn't really care. He's secretly jealous that I'm at home playing a video game and he's working all the time, I know how this works. At least this is keeping me from getting in a funk since I'm not very busy at the moment - I'm about to start using my planner to plan out the day's activities for pikmin to get as much done as possible. Yes, I know I'm weird.

About time for yoga... see yous guys later. Dude.

So we're waiting for the pizza I sweet-talked Ed into getting...

to arrive. I wonder if he wants to go play Pikmin which we've been addicted to lately. It's really weird but entertaining - Ed was even playing a different game (X-men) and started wondering where all of his Pikmin were. If you've never tried it and are of the Super-Mario-is-King ilk, it's AWESOME - give it a try! Natha's even hooked - he's been drawing pictures with little Pikmin following the main character around...

Natha found (and picked up) a little spongy cover to an earbud on the way home today - and promptly placed it on top of his pinky finger and told me that his finger was now 'an artist'. Picture it if you don't get it - that should help.

Well, I think Ed's up for some Pikmin, so we're going upstairs. I end up having the backseat driver's license/navigtor role on this one - I look up what things are supposed to be and how to do things with whatever-it-is, then boss him around. Once Natha's in school and I'm not as busy, I'll start my own game, I think. :)

Ed just said he's kind of freaked out that Natha's going to start school tomorrow - I am too, buddy, I am too. I'm just more used to giving Natha up that he is, I suppose...

TTFN!

So I'm sitting here surfing with Ed...

...since we've just got two laptops in the same room and he got home from work late, and we're scrambling to waste oodles of time on the internet since it's been Not-Working a lot lately.

We still haven't decided on dinner. I might just end up eating Easy Mac, which is a *marvelous* invention for people like me who tend to overeat things that have cheese on them or in them. Almost all of my cravings, I've recently realized, are cheesy. They're cheezy too, but that's another blog entry.

Ed just showed me his del.ic.ious site - which is here and we were looking at the List of Unusual Deaths. You know, every day I believe Ed more & more when he talks about his Law of Conservation of Comedy.

Looks like we're having pizza of some kind. Yep, it's one of *those* days.

Natha's in school in 4 days!

So I have no business having another kid...

...there are too many things I like doing that I'm not really wanting to give up to have a kid. Here's a list:

Uninterrupted showers
Driving the car I want (NO MINIVANS!)
Natha being able to go just about anywhere with me
Traveling alone, as a couple, or as a family
Not having kid-junk all in the kitchen cupboards (no sippy cups, bottles, nipples, kid spoons, special bowls, all that crap)
Moving through life stroller-free
Being able to read a book while Natha is swimming in the baby pool
Taking a short nap just about whenever I want to
Leaving small objects lying about without worrying if someone will swallow them
Having a leather couch without any stains, tears, or spots on it
Not having to censor my conversations (other than sex & profanity), especially not having to change how I say something so he understands it (kid-speak)
Keeping regular food in the house and not making something special for a kids to eat
Having a helper for cooking instead of having to make sure he's not getting in trouble
Being able to have a (large) margarita at dinner without it causing trouble later
Buying formula and/or diapers constantly

And these are just the ones I'm thinking of today! Ed, I'm sure you're happy about that... let's hope you don't change *your* mind now or we'll be back where we started!

To all of you who are having small children, want to, or have them now - I salute you for what you sacrifice for the sake of your children. I'm just not going to join you anytime soon - and don't be surprised if I never do again. :)

So I realized why I don't like my car...

...and why I feel the way I do about Ed's car and the possibility of him getting a miata...

Firstly, why I don't like my car: It's plain, has no pizazz, and is an upper-lower class to lower-middle class car. I happen to be an elitist who doesn't like driving around in Brentwood with a car that looks like my parents bought it for me when I turned 16 - I like the idea of having an 'adult' car now that I've got an adult life. Sure, it runs good and it keeps its mouth shut and takes a bit of a beating because I'm a dopey girl who doesn't know what I should do to keep it top-notch. Sure, I shouldn't complain about it. That doesn't make me feel any different about it, though. The main reason I don't like the car is that I don't think it reflects who I am. Now I've never been the type to get too wrapped up in something silly like a car - but this car is only the second one I've owned. The first car I owned was a 1990 Cutlass Calais that I had from the time I was 17 until right after Natha was born. When I was rear-ended for the second time, the car was totaled and I had to get a new one when Natha was 6 weeks old. I didn't think much about it, I just went with Natha's dad and picked out a shiny green car that I could afford and had my mom co-sign with me since I couldn't finance it myself. I was a flibbertigibbet back when I bought that car, a person who didn't know shit from shinola. I waited until I had the credit to refinance the car for a lower monthly payment a year and a half ago as a Mother's day present for my mom - I would have traded it in, but I was still upside down and I was about to go back to graduate school. That was a step in the right direction to make the car my sole responsibility - and I've still got the same car, almost 5 years later. Getting the bright new car was a sign of my new adult status as I now had a kid - my car insurance was even the adult rate since I was a mother - I was 21. I went from the car my parents gave me to the car I picked and would pay for and I felt very grown-up about the whole process. It was the first thing I had on my credit since I screwed up those two credit cards in college and wasn't *allowed* any more credit for a long time. There are a lot of emotions, situations, and choices associated with that car - and I'm not that person anymore. To put it bluntly, the car reminds me of ill-advised, hasty, and not-so-bright decisions I've made prior to when I *actually* grew up 2 years ago. There are guys that I associate with that car other my husband - not that I actually did much in the car, but that the passenger side was occupied by someone else other than him on (not too) many occasions. There are reminders of the bad decisions I made about Natha in that car - like letting him run amuck all the time and not making him keep his part of the car clean. That's a larger symbol of how I just let him flail about so long and didn't give him any direction or use any real discipline with him. There are lots of memories of being alone in that car - sure, Natha was there, but it was just him and me - no one else. Memories of us just doing what we felt like on a friday night and not having anyone else to share it with. That car is what I had when I was a single person raising a child and living alone in a poor neighborhood.

Honestly, I'm *so* over that part of my life now.

Yes, I'm an elitist. No, I'm not expecting to be 'saved' from my car which reminds me of so many things. That's why I put the bumper stickers on the car - to make it newer and exciting - to make me more comfortable with the idea of being stuck with the car. I was just looking forward to driving a car I felt more reflected who I was and the current situation in my life. Yes, I know that's spoiled of me - I prefer to call it 'taken care of'. Sometimes I'm just a pain in the ass like that. I'm not sorry for liking being a trophy wife. ;)

It's about time to take Natha to karate, then he's with his dad tonight. I had a good night last night, just being quiet and reading. We'll see how tonight shapes up...