Noah and his mom took the girls to Manitoba this weekend which means that I have two and a half days of much-needed stress-free quiet and I have to figure out how to fill it. We’re STILL not completely unpacked, so there’s that. And sleeping in. And NOT getting anyone breakfast. And NOT getting yelled at buy a three-year-old.

Also? Chuck marathon. And Bethany suggested Castle and White Collar and everything she’s recommended in the past has quickly become a favorite, so I’ll probably pick those up while I’m hanging out at the library with all the cool people ON A FRIDAY NIGHT.

I’m definitely one of those people who is scared of the dark and gets creeped out when she’s in the house all by herself, but there’s someone living downstairs, so I’m not completely alone. And I’ll probably sleep with all the lights on so that I can see that creepy guy that Russ SO KINDLY REFERENCED last Sunday. Complete with sound effects. If I get a phone call in the middle of the night from an unlisted number, I’LL KNOW IT’S YOU, MISTER.

So, THANK YOU! (You know who you are!)

Do you see that little speck on Liliana’s shirt? It’s not leftover dinner. (That’s what’s on her face.) It’s a mosquito.

They are INSANE this year and there’s been some West Nile going around from them as well. July was so uncharacteristically wet that they’ve bred like mad and now we can’t go outside for more than 3.2 seconds without getting 482 bites. Thankfully, August is supposed to be proper prairie weather so maybe they’ll back off a little bit.

That is all.

Everything in the salad I pulled out of the garden that our landlords planted for us. They’re incredible! They asked if I’d be using it this year and I said no, they could go ahead. They went and planed half of it for us – lettuce, carrots, and onions. SO delicious.

I don’t know that I’ll be able to eat grocery store produce after this!

Me: “Saskatchewan doesn’t have a president, it has a premier.”

Kaylie: “Who’s the premier?”

Me: “I have no idea.”

Kaylie: “Who’s the president of Canada?”

Me: “We have a Prime Minister, not a president.”

Kaylie: “Who’s the Prime Minister?”

Me: “I have no idea.”

a little googling later …

Me: “Stephen Harper.”

… laughed out when I read that someone tried to use their, erm, size as a defense in court.

… saw a woman crossing the street and could have sworn she had escaped from some kind of hospital.

… was interviewed by some lady and her cameraman about a Tim Horton’s going in downtown (corner of 4th and 22nd I think). I told her that there had better not be a drive-thru.

… got lost downtown on my way home from work.

… saw a guy riding a Harley wearing an 80’s neon blue and green track suit.

… saw a hearse that had been converted into a pest-control vehicle. It was creepy.

… had the most awesome person caring for my children while I worked – she washed the dishes, let Kaylie vacuum, and refused to be paid.

… watched Liliana dance to the music at the end of Kaylie’s VBS.

… realized that Kaylie’s grown almost to my shoulder height.

… thought that Noah got kidnapped.

… finished off the day with a bowl of Sugar Crisp.

It was a good day.

And photos from the kids playing in! the! back! yard!

But I just don’t feel like editing them right now.

I do want to tell you about this guy I ran into on my way back from getting coffee this morning when I somehow arrived at work 20 minutes early. (I’m NEVER early. EVER. I’m not sure how that happened. But it gave me time to run to Starbucks for a (free with a gift card!) black venti dark roast.)

Anyway. That guy I wanted to tell you about.

I was walking back to the office and this dude stops me. He was about 5 feet tall, late 50s, wearing a blue flannel plaid shirt with suspenders, and scratching his head like he’s confused. (No, it wasn’t Russ. He’s closer to 6 feet.) He starts talking, and I can’t remember exactly what he said except I kept thinking the whole time I wish I had a hidden tape recorder so I can remember this word-for-word later. It went something like this though. I’m sorry it’s all in one paragraph, but he was kind of talking in one really long run-on sentence.

Hey … hey … hey, so this guy comes into my garage and he’s looking to steal my bottles and he stole my DVDs and just took off with them like that [*motions with arm like it's flying away*] and there was liquid in the bottles and I think it was poison and is there poison in those bottles? It got on me and my body went pfffft pfffft [*while motioning like a spider is going from his shoulder to his belly button*] but then my arm went bwathfptwathfpt [*motions like arm is rubbery*] and I called the Fire Department and they told me to call poison control but did you know that they only deal with rats? And I was going to go to the hospital but I know who killed that nurse, it was *insert name he said that I can’t remember* and they found her in the park and her arm was up like this [*holds arm straight out in front of him*] and the police dogs found it like that because her arm was up and I know who did it.

He started to turn and I started to continue on my way to my office, but then he added one last thing.

It could happen to you.

I didn’t take that last sentence as a threat, it was more like a warning. Like he was afraid for my safety and just wanted to give me a heads up. I’m assuming that this guy has schizophrenia because I had contact with a few schizophrenic guys during my high school Tim Horton’s career who told stories like this.

I got to the end of the block and was about to cross the street when I glanced to my right and saw half a bajillion police cars. And heard the echo of dogs barking inside.

And then the (older-ish) lady behind me says, “Double you tea eff?!” I may have snickered. Quietly. Someone else said something about someone being up on the fire escape. I didn’t want to join the band of gawkers, so I went on my way. I crossed the street and almost fell through the sidewalk.

Seriously!

Look!

There’s a hole in the sidewalk and there’s a four-foot fall if someone falls through. They’d have to have a 7-inch waist to fall through.

BUT STILL.

There’s that possibility.

Fact: I didn’t get home until the wee hours of the morning from work last night. Or this morning. I get confused on that.

Fact: Today is my first day off since Thanksgiving Day.

Fact: Getting out of bed at 12:30pm is something I wouldn’t mind doing every day.

I have a confession to make. A couple days ago, I was going to shut this site down. I’ve done it a couple times before, temporarily, but at that moment, I was going to shut it down permanently.

You see, I don’t deal with stress well. Stress turns me into an unrecognizable (to most) form of me. My husband knows this part of me well, as he is (the victim) who sees it the most. Outside my home, I’m really good at being fake. Not that I’m fake in my relationships, but I’m fake in my Hi! I’m good! Everything is going just fine! I have no problems! It’s not real. It’s a facade. It’s a mask.

That day last week was an extremely stressful one. I think it was Thursday. I was trying to potty train Liliana (I think this is attempt #3) and it was NOT going well. She screamed almost the entire day. She did not nap. She sat in her room and screamed for a couple hours instead. I put a diaper on her after two hours of (no accidents, but) not peeing on the potty toilet and not wanting to even sit on the potty toilet and not wanting to go anywhere near the potty toilet. She continued in her screaming all the live long day.

That sounds pretty normal and trivial, right? Well I cannot handle it. Even those potty training stressors make my head start to pound and it feels as though it is about to implode. Bad thoughts start to flood my head – about how my family would be better off without me – about how I want to leave them and live by myself where I don’t have to have any responsibility over anyone else’s life – about how I really don’t want to live at all anymore. It’s not a good place. I cannot control my thoughts. Fortunately, though, I can control my actions. I know that my going insane is NOT Liliana’s fault and I do my very best not to take it out on her (or Kaylie) (Noah isn’t so lucky).

I put Liliana in a diaper to do away with that stressor. I put on a movie and let her watch it while I tried to calm down. But, she didn’t want to put a diaper on, she didn’t want to watch that movie, she didn’t want to put clothes on, she didn’t want to do anything I asked her to do. In our house, that doesn’t matter, as parents always win and she does the things she is told whether she likes it or not.

When my mind goes to that dark place, I start to close down socially as well. Those are the times when I put my phone on do not disturb, my Facebook account disappears for a week or two, or my blog disappears for a couple days or weeks. This time, it was going to be permanent. I’d even designed a static page with a little poem about how it was the end of heymrswilson.net.

And then I didn’t do it.

I’ve found that it’s not a good idea to make decisions while I’m in that dark headspace. (Duh.) So, here I am. I’m still here. I don’t know where to go from here. I could just post photos and little things about the kids – as they’re not the ones who are mentally unstable. They’re doing just fine. (Really.) I could do as I do in real life and pretend that everything is all peachy and write all happily with glee. But, that would be fake. That would go against the whole reason I started blogging in the first place.

So where do I go from here? I don’t know. But I’m going to ask for your patience while I figure it out. I really love this little space that I have on the internet, and I love the friends that I’ve made through it (even though I neglect them all too often because I’m an anti-social hermit afraid of any and all relationships with other human beings).

Thanks for your patience. I owe you one.

Besides not blogging myself, I haven’t been reading any blogs. I just haven’t had the time! But I miss it! I missed big events. Elizabeth had her baby!! There are probably more things that I’ve missed, but there are still 209 posts in my reader, so obviously I’m not caught up yet.

It’s been kind of nice living in “real life” though. Anna didn’t make it to the Bible study we both attend on Thursday mornings, so we got together Friday morning. And afternoon. Our three little blond kids got along better than I expected. (Liliana doesn’t usually like other human beings.)

Time just kind of flew and before we knew it, it was almost 1:00pm, and I was supposed to pick up my race package with Kami for the CIBC Run for the Cure on Sunday.

Since Anna and Kami hadn’t seen each other for a few months, Anna suggested that I leave Liliana with her, get my race package, and then meet back at her place with Kami so we could all have coffee together. It was an awesome idea. I really enjoy those two ladies.

Photo by Kamden

(Yes, ladies, I’m emailing you the photos right away. Feel free to steal this one if you want, because I take forever to do things. I give the two of you permission.)

***
Saturday was a rough day for me. It was one of those days. I struggled to smile through work, but when I got home, I completely crashed. Thankfully, I’ve got a very forgiving, laid-back, hard-working husband who did dinner with the kids so that I could have some down time after work. He even did the bedtime routine with them and put them to bed.

Saturday night we were going to catch up on some DVR’d shows from the week when Noah noticed that we had water coming through our ceiling in the kitchen. Awesome.

We’ve been told before that we pay more for rent than we should for a two-bedroom apartment, but consider this. In the first place we lived after we were married, our rent, including utilities, was almost $200 less than we’re paying now. It had one more bedroom, more square feet, a HUGE back yard, it was the top half of a house, and we had (shared) laundry in the basement. BUT, it took a year and a day for our landlord to come and fix anything, unless it was on fire. Literally. (It only happened once, and it was the oven – wiring, not my fault.) There were things that the landlord PROMISED would be done before we moved in, and they were still not done when we moved out almost three years later.

Our apartment, while small, has nothing wrong with it. Our suite, and the building itself, is very well maintained, as is the surrounding area – including a huge field and an outdoor swimming pool. And when something goes wrong, they deal with it right away.

When we noticed the water leaking, Noah started cleaning it up while I got ahold of the after-hours service for the company that owns our building. We had someone at our house within half an hour. It was 10:30pm. THAT, my friends, is good service.

It turned out that the people in the unit above us had left their dishwasher on and it was one of those ones that plugged into the sink. The problem was, that they left the plug in the sink. Again, awesome.

***
Sunday morning I discovered that my new cell phone’s alarm clock tool was a little more complicated than I thought, because I set it for 7:00am, but did not wake up until 8:13am when my bladder was threatening to implode. I had to be at a staff meeting at 8:30am, Kami was picking me up from there to go to the Run for the Cure, and then she was dropping me back off for my 11:30am shift. Awesome.

I grabbed everything for my run and for work, and headed for my breakfast staff meeting. Thankfully, I didn’t forget anything. But, as I sat down for the meeting, I realized that I’d put my watch on upside down. Mornings are not my thing.

Kami and I got to the race starting line a little early and danced around to the beat of the drum (literally) to keep warm until the race started. We (Kami) decided that we should run the entire thing without stopping. She is my coach, supporter, encourager, and challenger. We did it. I tried not to let the fact that a lot of people were passing us at the beginning get to me. I forgot all about it when we crossed the finish line of our 5k run with a time of 32:22 – my personal 5k record.

When I got off work that night, I could hardly move. My legs had reached their limit and Noah spent the rest of the evening referring to me as an old lady because of how I was walking.

***
Noah and the girls are heading to Manitoba this weekend to join his parents at his grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Since I work all weekend, I was going to stay home alone. By the time Monday hits, I will have worked nineteen (19!) days straight. I was looking forward to a day off (finally!) and getting the house back together.

The thing is, my husband kind of likes me and apparently wants me to join him and the girls for Thanksgiving. I can see his point. So, my plan for the next couple days consists of getting all the laundry washed, dried, folded, and put away (to me, those are four SEPARATE chores), replacing the sandals basket with the hats and mitts basket in the front closet, getting our winter gear out of storage, cleaning all the summer and too small clothes out of the girls’ closets, and finishing the editing for the photo shoots I’ve done recently. I’m thinking it’s going to take a lot of time, and therefore I may be absent on this blog AGAIN this week. Please forgive me if I’m absent in your comments as well.

It’s not you, it’s me.

And I really mean that!

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Dear friends, I have been neglecting you. I haven’t been reading your blogs. If I have, it means that you’re either alphabetically at the top of my list, or you’re closely related to me.

I hope you’ll stick with me while I try to figure out how to fit blogging in with working 40+ hours a week, having more than 3-month-old salsa and a few pickles in the fridge, and spending more than 3.5 seconds a day with my husband and/or children.

I appreciate it.