She's crafty....and she's just my type

So in my quest to be the single most cheap frugal bride on the planet, I am resorting to several Do It Yourself projects. Yeah, yeah, I know some of you are chuckling right now and I'm okay with that. I am the first to admit that I am NOT a crafty person. When I hear the term "crafty", it actually brings to mind an old Beastie Boys song that I used to listen to. Believe me, the two meanings of crafty are far from similar.

So we've established that I do not have a creative, talented or artistic blood cell in my body. Needless to say, when I came across this Seating Card chart on the Martha Stewart website, I thought I was going to have to enlist the help of a friend to help me make it (read: have Cheryl make it). Then the other night my man had a couple of buddies over to watch the hockey game and I decided that attempting to make the boards would be far more entertaining than hanging with them while they swilled beer, shouted at the TV and behaved like swines in general.

So off to Walmart I went, since it was the only place at 6:30pm on a Sunday I figured I could buy the necessary supplies. I was actually a little bit nervous on the way up there, this being my first time buying fabric (there's that chucking again..) but I sucked it up and walked straight to the fabric & notions department. What exactly are notions, anyways?

So I'm standing there, like a deer in the headlights, staring at probably 30 different types of white fabric. I mean seriously, who knew there could be that many kinds? Certainly not me. There was this one employee nearby who kept looking over at me, I think he mistook my clueless pacing back and forth between rows of fabric as possible shoplifting. So rather than have security come and ask me to empty my Prada bowler, I quickly grabbed one that I thought would look the nicest and carried it up to the counter where they cut it for you. Of course, I had no clue how much I needed, but I did have the dimensions of the boards I needed to cover and that's what they have staff for, right? Wrong. The lady, although I am sure a lovely person, could barely speak English and clearly math was not her strong point in her school days. First she tells me I need 5 metres and I nod "ok"...she is the expert after all. Then she says "you agree?" Ummmm, yeah. Sure I do. Then she kind of squints up her eyes, as if she is thinking really, really hard and tells me no, I only need 3 metres. Side note: I always thought fabric was sold by the foot. LOL

So after making a complete jackass of myself at Walmart, I head home, happier than a pig in shit with my purchases. On the way home, my dear friend Cheryl sends me a text telling me that I will need quilt batting. First of all, I didn't even know what in the hell quilt batting was and second, I was already half way home and really didn't feel like turning around. But, the nagging little voice in my head that sometimes knows better, knew that she would be right. She's crafty like that, and not in the Beastie Boys way.

And so, two evenings, hundreds of pins and one ridiculously tender thumb pad later, I am finished my little project. Martha, eat your freaking heart out.


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Cost of my DIY mission:

Styrofoam board $18.19
Fabric $13.46
Ribbon $16.53
Quilt batting $5.86
Making something myself for the first time ever.....priceless.

Deep Breath In.....Exhale....ahhhhhh

I've calmed down. I've also come to the realization that I simply cannot please and accomodate everyone. I'm just going to roll with it and do whatever I think should be done. I might have felt differently if any of the parents were paying, but as of yet the fuckers have offered up nothing!! So it's my way or the highway. I am of course asking opinions from my friends, because unlike with my mother and MIL, I actually give a damn what they think.

I am hereby making a promise to myself to enjoy this experience. Think I can keep it?

Liar Liar My Pants Are On Fire

The stress just started. Apparently my mother disagrees with the date, the time and well, basically everything to do with what I've planned already. Oh and she thinks we should change the date to the weekend before, which would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that my in-laws are going out of town then.

Maybe I can't do this.

A wedding

So we had planned on taking a trip to Vegas in March, just before I (try to) get (and stay) pregnant. One last hurrah, so to speak. We had bounced around the idea of getting married while we were there, so the other night I sat down and started pricing out the trip. Now I am not one for big fancy weddings, but I want to wear a beautiful dress, have a semi-nice ceremony and not be married by a fat guy in an Elvis suit, know what I mean? So by the time we factor in airfare, hotel, decent wedding package cost, spending money, tux & dress rentals, and all the little miscellaneous stuff, we were looking at about $6,000. Coupled with the fact that my man's family would be absolutely pissed if we "eloped" (mine wouldn't care...lol) - we decided that we would do it here in town instead.

I don't like to drag things out and despite the way my life seems to go, I don't like complicated ordeals. I definitely don't like drama. So you can imagine that taking on planning a wedding is the last thing on this planet I would want to do. Not to mention all the other shit going on in my life. Ah well, what's one more thing on my plate right?

In one day, I have picked a venue for both the ceremony and reception, booked a DJ, chosen colors, style of bridesmaid dresses, picked bouquets, centrepieces and have a basic idea of everything else. Tomorrow I am going to try on dresses at a local sample sale and if that doesn't pan out, I am going to take a deep breath and buy a dress off eBay. Tuesday I meet with the catering co-ordinator to confirm the menu, but I've already looked at it and basically know what I want.

I have actually been less stressed in the last 2 days than I have in the last 2 months. Maybe this will be good for me, it will keep me occupied and keep my mind busy. And maybe people will be asking me about the wedding, instead of asking me about other stuff that I don't want to talk about.

I have exactly 8 weeks to plan my wedding. I know I can do this. I have single-handedly planned fundraising dinners/dances/silent auctions for 100+ people in the same amount of time, and they were far more complicated.

So far, no Bridezilla. Let's hope it stays that way!

StupidShittyLife

I can't even think of a title for this blog. I don't even want to be blogging but somehow it seems easier than dealing with emails asking me why I haven't been blogging or the dreaded "how are things going" emails....god I hate those. How the hell am I supposed to reply. How do you THINK things are going?!

It all started on Thursday. I was out shopping and my SIL called me on my cell to tell me that my daughter was on her way to the police station. She had been arrested for shoplifting makeup at Zellers in our local mall. Oh lovely. When I got home, there was a message from a police officer, so I called him back expecting it to be about the incident. It wasn't...it was about my Uncle, who is accused (and undoubtedly guilty) of molesting a child in my family. The officer wanted to come over and take a statement from me to see if there was anything I knew that could possibly help the case, which keeps being bounced back from Crown Counsel due to lack of evidence. So anyways, he came over and took my statement, which of course was heartwrenching and awful for me. To me, harming a child in that way is the unthinkable. It makes me physically ill.

Then, on Sunday, my SIL calls again and tells me that my daughter has just called her and is bawling her eyes out because she has nowhere to stay. She has lost her winter jacket and it is -35 outside. I took down the number she called from and my man called over there to see what was going on. Daughter was drunk and said that she needed help because she can't stop drinking and doing drugs. She claimed to have been on ecstacy every day for the last 30 days. How much truth to that I do not know, because she is a habitual liar and a drama queen. Horrible thing to say about my own flesh and blood, but I am just speaking the truth. She will say anything for sympathy lately. Well, sympathy is something she is NOT getting from me at this point. No fucking way am I playing into that. She has made this bed and in it she must lie. So we load everyone in the car in 30 below weather to go and get her. We pick her up from this shithole of a townhouse. She's drunk, her hair is dyed bleach blonde (from black last week, you can imagine how nice it looks) ...I can't even look at her. When I look at her, extremely unhealthy emotions boil up inside me. I said nothing as we drove her to the hospital's Youth Detox. I had already called ahead and reserved a bed for her. We get there and the doors are locked so we ring the buzzer and we wait. And wait. And wait. A good ten minutes in the freezing fucking cold, waiting to admit my 15 year old daughter for Detox. Not a real high point in my life, let me tell you. We walked in, I wrote down her Care Card number and we left. She shouted something at me as I was walking away, something about how I didn't fucking care anyways. Oh yeah right, this was how I wanted to spend my Sunday evening. I cried the whole way home and then cried myself to sleep.

Yesterday, SIL calls (she really needs a slap upside the head for being such a bearer of bad news) to tell me that a mutual friend of ours delivered her baby girl at 6.5 months along last week and buried her on Saturday. What the fuck. This world is one cruel place and if there is a God, he is one sadistic motherfucker. My heart goes out to her like you wouldn't believe. She has one 6 year old boy already and did NOT want any more babies, her first pregnancy was awful. She is divorced and remarried now and decided to have another because it was so important to her new man. I have to wonder if their relationship can handle something this devastating. She told SIL there is absolutely no way she will try again and that she is getting her tubes tied ASAP. Will he resent her for not trying again? Will she resent him for pushing her into a pregnancy that she didn't really want? What will happen to ME if I suffer yet another loss in a couple of months...???

And so today, I sit here still in my jammies, unshowered and not giving a shit about anything or anyone. I have spent the majority of the day laying in bed with severe stomach pain. Not sure if it is gastroitis that I have had previously from stress, as it feels MUCH more painful than that, but whatever it is it feels like I have been kicked right in the guts. I guess in reality life has kicked me in the guts. Now I just have to figure out how to get up and get on with it before it drags me down to the point of no return.

Tattoos and Tulips

So I have been wanting another tattoo for some time now and have finally decided to bite the bullet and get one. I actually have two planned out, both with very significant meanings to me. The first is a symbol that both my man and I are going to get done between our shoulder blades. He has practiced Judo for 25 years and has an extreme respect for the Japanese culture, so we have decided to have the Japanese symbol for 'eternity' permanently inked into our skin to show our commitment to each other. Maybe it's as crazy as the guy who gets "Donna" tattooed on his bicep and then has to live with it day in day out after they break up, but I don't think so. I truly believe with all my soul that I will be with my man for eternity. Sounds cheesy, I know, but it's honestly how I feel.

My second tattoo has a much different meaning. I am sure everyone can relate to the eternity symbol, nearly everyone has been in love. This second tattoo will symbolize something that nobody else can possibly ever imagine or understand, unless, like me, they are living it.

When 3rd baby M was born (at home, accidentally...but that's a whole other blog entry) and after we were rushed to the hospital, my doctor came in, sat down beside my bed and held my hand. I remember the look in his eyes, as if he was terrified to speak. He began to tell me that they suspected that baby M had Down syndrome. I remember looking down at this perfect little being in my arms who was looking up at me with squinty, swollen eyes and thinking there was no way. They were wrong. They absolutely had to be wrong. I recall asking how this could have happened and all I remember hearing were the words "chromosomal abnormality" and "freak of nature". I know in my heart now that my doctor was at a loss as to how to explain it to me from a medical standpoint, but that's all I took out of the 15 minute conversation. My womb was abnormal and my baby was a freak of nature.

In the days following his dramatic entrance to the world, I was in a fog. I merely existed day to day, having no clue what I was doing. Baby M was in an incubator on oxygen and was tube fed and I was helpess. I would even go as far as to say I felt completely useless as a Mother. I developed mastitis but refused to stop pumping, after all feeding him was really the only thing I could do properly at that point. I'm not sure how many days it had been since his birth, but I was sitting in the pump room one afternoon, hooked up like a Jersey cow, bawling my eyes out. I'm not sure what hurt more, the physical pain from the mastitis or the emotional heartbreak I was feeling, it hurt me right to my very core. There was a gentle knock at the door and the lactation consultant came in and sat down next to me. It was one of those moments were there was nothing but intense, raw emotion. This woman, Jean, whom I had only met a few times for a couple minutes each time, held me while I cried. I layed my head on her shoulder and cried like I had never cried before. She said nothing until I had stopped. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out a sheet of paper. A beautiful, colorful stationary with tulips on it. Printed on this beautiful tulip paper was a poem and I would like to share it.


Welcome to Holland

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.


For me, landing in Holland is definitely not what I had planned. I have shed many a tear over the fact that my trip to Italy was permanently cancelled. I have become a person I never thought I would have to be, a person I never wanted to become. I have met people I never wanted to meet. My entire world came crashing down on June 4th, 2003 and even though it's been rebuilt, it will never be the same again. Somehow, I have adapted and grown to love this person I have become. Before I could never have imagined my life with a son with Down syndrome and now I can't imagine life without him. He is my special boy and I love him to bits.

Interestingly, tulips have always been my favorite flower, even as a kid. As an adult my gardens were always full of tulips in the spring and I often bought myself tulips for inside the house once mine were dead and gone for another year. So I am getting a tattoo of a single tulip to forever mark my trip to Holland. It's beautiful here.

A Happy Medium

When I was growing up, I was the biggest bookworm around. If my nose wasn't buried in a book, there was something seriously wrong. I have read THOUSANDS of novels in my lifetime, which I think has contributed to my ridiculous obsession with spelling mistakes and typos (the one main thing I forgot to write about in my 7 crazy things list) but I also think it has made me a more intelligent, well-rounded person. If that makes sense. Anyways, there is a point to my blather about reading, I promise. Since I was little, every time I hear the term "happy medium" I think of the book A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle. In the book, the Happy Medium was actually a woman, or a spirit if you will, that lived in a cave and had a crystal ball. Now I am all grown up and feel as though I am desperately seeking my very own Happy Medium in all different aspects of my life. The real meaning of happy medium that is. Compromise, middle ground or whatever you want to call it.

For example, this recent decision to try for another baby, which by the way has been put off until March cycle because I don't want to be a giant whale in the dead of summer, not that we get a summer here but whatever. It really is a HUGE compromise on my part. This is something my man really wants and is looking forward to and something I am scared to death of doing. We are on extreme opposite ends of the spectrum on this matter, but there is really no common ground, nowhere to meet in the middle. There's either a pregnancy and (hopefully) a baby....or there isn't. It's pretty shitty that I have to feel this way about it and totally unfair that I would have to add 'hopefully', but that's just the way it is.

Along with my intense fear of having yet another miscarriage or crazy pregnancy comes another fear that is totally shallow and vain and I am not ashamed to admit it. I've mentioned before that I lost a lot of weight last year (in the neighborhood of 65lbs) and to be honest, I just don't want to gain it back. Since the move and excessive eating/drinking over the holidays, I managed to pack on a nasty 14lbs. I am utterly disgusted with myself. I am however bound determined to lose it and get back in shape (I finally found a treadmill, yay!) I'm on Day 5 of a cleanse right now and feeling fantastic. I have been working out every day, sweating my ass off and loving it. I'm actually down 9.5lbs already, but I will gain some back when I reintroduce food next week. I didn't do the cleanse to lose weight, because I am smart enough to realize that would be a temporary fix. I did it to kick start myself and my body into action and clearly, it's working. I flat out refuse to go into this pregnancy feeling unhappy about my body. I already told my man that since this WILL be my LAST baby, I have every intention on enjoying the ten months of Hell pregnancy, or at the very least try my best to. I will buy killer maternity clothes and I will be radiant, god damnit. lol. The decision to wait until March to try also gives me the opportunity to shed some fat and tone up a bit before I get myself knocked up, which is a bonus. I can picture myself now in SFAMK maternity jeans and a tight fitting, low-cut top and everyone looking and thinking how great I look for being preggers. Oh come on, a girl can dream can't she?

OK, so here's the Happy Medium thing in relation to my weight loss. When I lost all my weight last year, I thought I looked fabulous. I was so proud of myself (and still am) for perservering and achieving my goal. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line and I am honestly not sure where, I surpassed my goal and lost control. I have pictures from a trip to Kelowna that we took in August and let me tell you, I don't look anything like I thought I looked. My head looks too big for my body and my neck and arms are scrawny. My man's friend Jamie told me last week that I looked like I was about to die. I burst out laughing when he told me that, but I suppose in some exaggerated way, he is right on the money.

Somehow, I must find my middle ground with my body. I'm not sure how I go about doing it, but I sure as hell am going to try. I plan on being very careful once I feel that I am approaching a weight that I am comfortable with. I am well aware that I have some major body image issues so this really is a difficult undertaking for me. I lose weight very quickly too, and not because I crash diet, it's just the way I am...but of course it doesn't help when trying to achieve the difference between fit and emaciated.

I need to find a balance between where I was a little mushy in some areas (I'm wearing shorts for a reason, people) and still felt like I hadn't quite achieved my goal (in June):



and Bobble Head Girl (in August):




If I had a crystal ball like Madeleine wrote about, then I would know when I would achieve my goal. But since realistically that's never going to happen, it leaves me only with the question...Is a true Happy Medium actually achievable?