Mamarati

I have a lot of reading this semester. I’m only going to be able to see about an inch in front of my face when this is all over. I have to remember to look away. Focus. All those eye exercises you’re supposed to do when you’re on the computer and read too much.

I don’t have much time to make a long post, but let me get some random thoughts out of my head…

There’s been a flu outbreak over at J’s Dad’s house. This is on top of the MRSA that his dad has. I’m not kidding. MRSA.

So, J has been over here hopefully waiting it out. He was sick last week, but it was mainly just sniffles and snot and a headache. He’s about 99 percent better now, so I’m hoping that he will avoid this flu. We’ve had enough illness. Of course, as soon as it’s done over there, J will pick it up at school and then it will go around here. That would be about the Murphy’s Law way, no?

I’m still cold. We figured out the science behind relative humidity and the fact that there is no humidity in this house, relative or otherwise. Now we just have to settle on a humidifier, which we haven’t done. I almost burned up a pot boiling water and of course that’s a huge electricity waster. But that was experimental anyway. We just wanted to see if it would actually make me feel any warmer without changing the thermostat and it did. Bonus: No nosebleeds in a week and my eyeballs don’t feel like crunchy little cheese puff balls. Bad news: Until we purchase a humidifier, I continue to feel frozen and miserable.

I think the stray orange cat that has been hanging around is pregnant. She seemed to be entertaining some noisy suitors in the last couple of weeks and now she’s puking every day and is in love mode 24 / 7. I wish I’d taken her to the SPCA or something, but I kept holding out hope that the neighbors who may or may not be her owners would step up to the plate. I don’t know why I thought this, though, because they don’t even have electricity or running water half the time. Why do I think they can take care of a cat? I just really try to have faith in people when given the chance.

Plus, around here, it’s like cat central. And I never know who owns any cat. Except Hopper because he actually wears his tags and I’ve met his people. But the other cats in the neighborhood roam free and tagless and I never see them emerging from any home or hanging out at any particular place regularly. Truth be told, they all hang out here. So, it’s hard to just say, OK, you’re going to the SPCA so you can go to a good home instead of roaming around here catch as catch can. But like, the grey guy that was hanging around all last year… I thought he was a stray maybe and there were several times I thought about taking him in. Come to find out, he belongs like 10 houses down and around a corner along with 2 other grey cats just like him. I’m glad I didn’t take him.

I have taken a few though, and they’ve all originated from that one cursed house. Just like I believe this orange one did.

More later, I need to go get the boy and mail some of my Amazon stuff off.

Mental note to self, talk about Jacob taking the personality test. Nuts. Completely nuts.

I used to be obsessed with the Bermuda Triangle. As a kid, I had some kind of perception of it that was askew– like that as soon as ships went in or planes flew in, they just disappeared. Just like that, lickety split. Every plane, every ship. I had some idea that you weren’t even supposed to go into the area.

I have no idea what fueled this, but I remember thinking about it a lot. I remember being scared that my birthmother would fly in there and disappear and when I went to look for her one day, she’d be gone.

There’s a show on TLC about this right now.

I’ve decided that I need a dog. I really really need a dog.

I love Jacob to death, but it’s not his job to make me feel unlonely or fulfilled. He has too much will and independence for all that. He doesn’t make me feel needed for much more than meals and fast forwarding through commercials and laundry and such.

I need a dog. I want someone to be happy to see me when I come home. I want someone to snuggle with and pour my affection on. I want to feel like some other life is here when I am alone and Jacob isn’t here, but not necessarily a life that needs a lot of my undivided attention.

I need to feel useful.

I feel like I have outlived my usefulness in other places in my life I guess…

So to take up where I left off. It was freezing cold. And only just recently did we get the furnaces completely fixed. Then we discovered that he had a cataract in his left eye, and we had to have surgery for that when he was 21 days old, during the week of Thanksgiving. He had to go under general anesthesia, he had all kinds of monitors and crap hooked up to him. It was quite the ordeal. D and I were running on fumes for sure. We were barely getting any sleep… and I was nursing him about every 2 hours around the clock, so I was exhausted. Then that same week, we found a bunch of blood in his stools. Turns out he is allergic to all the milk that I drink as it comes out in my breast milk. So we try him on Similac but he is allergic to that, then we put him on Nursoy, a soy formula and he does fine on that, then he gets his contact lens at the beginning of December. That is such a joy. Not. But it is great for him, because he can see so much better. He took to it immediately. Then D starts all this travel with his work. Not just the usual travel, travel to other states. So we have to drive Christmas night to Arkansas, and Jacob gets sick with a cold and an eye infection (in the lens eye). I have to suck his nose a half a million times a day. Carmel gets depressed at home and won’t eat. Checks aren’t being direct deposited and our checks are bouncing…….. it goes on and on.

Now, I just went to the Doctor yesterday(?) and he got his immunizations and can’t be around D’s mom for a month or she could get polio. Plus he has this condition called Hydrocele, where some tube didn’t close up prenatally, and he has testicles filled with water… and if it doesn’t clear up by the time he is a year old, we will have to have surgery for that. Lovely, eh?

And now for the good stuff (which also never ends). He is just the most precious baby in the entire universe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He is getting so big (75th percentile in both weight and height). weighs 12′5″ now, and smiles and talks to me in his little baby talk. Loves daddy’s scratchy face and silliness. Today he was pulling his head up to try and sit up, it was so neat to see him try so hard. Like he was thinking about it, and knew what he wanted to do and was trying to help himself to it.

He is sleeping through the night for the most part, takes a morning and afternoon nap, and once in a while an evening nap. He has been nursing a lot, but I am trying to get him on the bottle throughout the day, and nurse only in the early a.m. when he wakes up. It’s hard though. He wants it a lot, and prefers it over the bottle any day, and I want it a lot as well. It’s very special and comforting. Relaxing.

We both get a little tensed out over the bottle.

He is trying to sleep on the floor right now. Keeps kind of stirring when a loud truck goes by outside. I better go. I actually had things I was going to do, but that’s the story everyday. If there were 12 more hours in the day, I still couldn’t get all I needed to do done.