Pants On Fire

I have been lying to most of my family for a few months.  Well, my entire family, in-laws included, with the exception of two people.  I really do not like to lie.  I hate lying.  Lying totally stresses me out.  I feel like the truth is nipping at my heels, just waiting to catch up to me and bite me in the butt.

I am lying to save my sanity.

I think that nearly every person in my family asks me regularly when my husband and I are going to have another baby.  Yes, our daughter will be four next month, yes I am thirty-six and have a limited amount of fertile years left, yes our kids will be far apart in age, I know, I know, I know.

So when each one of these buttinsky family members brings up the subject, I look them directly in the face and lie.  I tell them that “I don’t know when.”  I think I am getting pretty good at this lying thing.  I think every one truly believes me.

The truth is, we are trying.  We have been for a few months now.  I learned the hard way the first time around and decided I needed to lie this time for my mental health.  It took two years of fertility drugs to get pregnant with our daughter.  I couldn’t answer a phone call without hearing “Are you pregnant yet?”  It completely stressed me out last time.  I constantly felt like a failure and like I was disappointing our family.  It got to the point that I dreaded even speaking to anyone on the phone.

So I will continue to lie to all but a few close family members, a couple of close friends and whoever reads my blog or follows me on Twitter.  I will continue to belt out big fat lies to all who ask.  And darn it, I won’t feel guilty about it. 

When I get pregnant, my family will forgive me.  

Family & Prejudices

I am trying to teach my child that all people are different.  Different skin colors, different hair colors, different abilities, different families and different religious views.  I want her to be accepting of other people, to not be prejudiced and not to hate.  It is not always an easy task around my house.

We are a Caucasian/Native American family.  We live in a small farming community with Japanese, Caucasian, and Hispanic populations. There are very few African American families in our town.  Living in a community with a lack of different cultures and diversity makes me feel like my task is even more difficult.

My daughter asked me the other day why a friend of families two children’s skin was so much darker than hers.  I didn’t feel like it was necessary to start a lengthy explanation of race and how the Caucasian parents adopted two African American children, since she is so little and I didn’t want to confuse her.  I tried to make it simple and relate it to something she would understand.  I held her little arm up to mine and asked her if she and I were the same exact color.  “No Mommy, your skin is browner than mine.”  I asked her if her Daddy had the same exact skin color as her, and alas, he did not.  My daughter loves dogs.  So I moved on to that to keep her interested and asked if her Grandma’s dogs looked the same as our dog and if they were the same color.  She couldn’t think of anyone who had a dog that looked like ours.  My final words, “Every person and every animal look different, even if only a little bit and that is the way it is supposed to be.”

Trying to raise my daughter without prejudices is tough, when she is only exposed to a limited human diversity and we are surrounded people that make it the more difficult for me.   My husband’s grandmothers are elderly.  They say what they want without thinking about the consequences.  I have had to stop them from saying something negative about one race or another in front of her or in my house numerous times.  In fact one of them just told me yesterday that she had to lock her front door because there was a “black kid trying to sell stuff running around the neighborhood.”  I was appalled and shocked that she felt that strongly. I had spoken with the same kid a few minutes earlier, when he came to the door, gave me his sales pitch and respectfully thanked me even though he did not make the sale. I didn’t feel the need to lock the door when he left. He was completely non-threatening and just trying to earn a living. I also have other in laws that feel the same and speak horribly of people that are gay.

I am also trying to teach my child about people with special needs and different abilities.  I take every opportunity to discuss with my child how every person learns differently.  How some people need have oxygen to breath, how some people need to use a wheelchair to get around, and most recently we are discussing speech impediments and behavioral issues. 

It is definitely a challenge.  I feel it is worth the energy and time.  My child is only three I can only assume that is going to be more difficult as she grows and different situations arise.  But it is my goal to teach her that hate and discrimination are not okay, ever.

To Intervene or Not?

A couple of days ago I met the mom of one of the little girls my daughter plays with at preschool.  My daughter and this child seem to get a long great despite hearing stories of the girl hitting other kids and not sharing.  Apparently she likes my daughter and is nice to her, so I guess all is well.

When I met her mom, she asked me if I had noticed her daughter’s speech problem.  I told her that I hadn’t really spoken to her daughter other than a simple “hello” and therefore, I hadn’t noticed. Strangely, my daughter did mention to me that very morning as we were getting dressed for school that she couldn’t always understand her little friend, but I chose not to mention it.  This mom proceeded to tell me that her daughter had endured some hearing loss when little due to illness and her speech development had suffered greatly. She stated that sometimes her child gets angry and acts out by hitting etc. when she can’t get her point across to others.  She said that her daughter was attending speech therapy but that she was progressing slowly.  She had already made the decision to hold her back from kindergarten for one more year if she didn’t improve to her satisfaction.  This mom appears to be concerned that her child might be teased and have too many communication issues with her teacher and classmates.

I also have a friend with a daughter the same age as the other little girl and my child.  She also has a huge speech problem.  My entire family and her own family have extreme difficulty understanding her.  She attends daycare and not preschool and I am unaware of any problems that have arisen because of her speech. Her parents have decided to do nothing about it at this point.  No speech and language intervention, nothing.  They are riding on the hopes that being around the other kids will bring her speech up to what it should be. 

This little girl is not my child, and I have pretty much kept my mouth shut in this situation unless her mom brings it up.  It is driving me crazy that they have chosen to do nothing.  I have worked in special education for years, and I have worked with countless children with speech impediments.  I know how quickly and easily a lot of speech issues can be resolved, especially when corrected at an early age.  Do they want their child to enter into kindergarten with the knowledge that the other kids will not be able to talk to her? Aren’t they worried that she will be teased?  Don’t they want to at least have her tested and talk to someone about correcting it? Why do they want her pulled out of class for speech when there is a good chance that it can be corrected before she starts school?  Why are they choosing to do nothing?

Maybe I am wrong.  Maybe it is no big deal.  What would you do if it were your four year old?

Cell Phone Photo Shoot



From a NW State Park

Eggs & Positivity

I ovulated.

You are probably thinking to yourself “Big deal, I do it every month.”  But for me it is HUGE. 

It is still surreal to me to just ovulate naturally, on my own.  All of my girl parts and hormones synchronized in wonderful baby making harmony without the push from fertility drugs.  As I sit here patiently working my way through the two week wait until I can take a pregnancy test, I am not stressed out by the baby making process, or the threat of Aunt Flow beating a path to my door.  At this point, yeah, I will be a little disappointed if she shows up, but not devastated because my body is doing what it is supposed to do, for the first time, ever.

I believe that the fact that my body is having full, complete, regular cycles is making me a little more relaxed than the first time around.  Having had my first child also helps a lot as I no longer have floating around in the back of my head, that harrying worry of: “Will ever be a mom?”  I am trying to promise myself that this relaxed and positive attitude will hang around for a while, even if it takes months to get myself knocked up.  One other little thing that is helping me keep my sanity: LYING. This time I haven’t announced to our family that we are trying to conceive a second child.  My mom and a few close friends are the only ones who know (and no one knows about my blog or twitter account) and it is saving me the constant bombardment of questions that I endured for years the first time.  It is like my own little happy secret.

I ovulated.  For real.

Neglect

Dearly Neglected Blog, we are gathered here today to re-assure you that you have not been forgotten.  A new post will be written soon.

It is a lame excuse, but travel, kid illness, trying to get knocked up and an 80th birthday party kept me distracted.  Not a good thing for a new blog.  But tomorrow is another day............

Princess Rant

I have read a lot of what is out there about how Disney Princesses are a horrible influence on our daughters. I fully understand the point that people are making, it makes sense. I don’t want my daughter to think that she needs a man to rescue her. I don’t want her to think that she needs to look or act a certain way to be beautiful. But I also don’t want to take away her fun.



My daughter loves Disney Princesses. She loves to wear the dress up clothes and she is hoping for a trip to Disneyland to meet those girls she truly loves. I am choosing to let her watch the movies, have a little fun with it and enjoy being a 3 ½ year old princess for a while.


You might not all agree with me, but I believe that the person who influences a little girl’s self esteem more than any Disney Princess could, is her mother. Mommies have a direct impact on their daughter’s self image daily. They see their mommies putting on makeup and fixing their hair to be “pretty.” They notice when we change our clothes a couple times to find the right outfit. Many little girls hear their moms talk about being or feeling fat multiple times throughout the day. What do you think it is doing to your daughter when you speak of dieting and weight loss in front of her?


I believe that the best thing that you can do for your daughter is educate her and teach her independence. Teach your daughter that she doesn’t need ANY one to rescue her, that she is capable to do it herself. Teach your daughter that make up is for fun and not a necessity to be beautiful, that being beautiful is something that comes from the inside and that being a good person is more important. Most importantly never use the words diet and fat in a negative way around your daughter. You exercise because it is healthy for your body, not to be skinny. Teach your daughters to eat healthy and not to diet.


Take some responsibility for your daughter’s self esteem and don’t be so quick to blame others.

Manipulating Mother In Law

My mother in law just called and asked me if I would give her $20 cash for $50 worth of food off her food stamps card. Seriously. She said that she gets a lot of money for food each month and so does the person that she is living with, so she has more than she needs.



I am pissed. We struggle to pay our taxes every year because we get screwed owning our own business. I blame people like her who screw the system every month. I am angry, and needless to say she got a huge lecture from my husband and I both.


That is not what the welfare system is about. My mother in law has been manipulating the system for the last thirty years. She even had her youngest son, who is now almost 18, diagnosed with a behavior disorder and signed him up for disability. They get a check every month because he is a little asshole who won’t work and doesn’t like authority. Meanwhile, friends of mine with special needs children struggle to get help for their children on a daily basis.


Food stamps and welfare should be a hand up not a hand out. I will be glad when her kids turn 18 later this month. After 30 years she will have to get a job and quit using her kids for a free hand out.

I Need to Move

I am battling with one of my Mother In Laws. Yep, I hit the fucking jackpot and got two of them, neither of which really cares for me. My husband’s birth mother lives about thirty miles from us. She comes and stays at his Grandmother’s house, who lives right around the corner but within sight of our house. His mom isn’t your typical mom. She didn’t raise my husband; he was with his grandma until he was five, then his dad and stepmom came and took custody of him. My husband has a half brother who was not raised by her either. He also has a set of boy/girl twin siblings. They were raised by her, but I am not sure that was a good thing.



The twins grew up in and out of drug houses in southern California, no stability with a mom who was using speed and highly erratic. She would get mad at someone and pack them up and leave where they were living for a while, then turn around and move back to the house they spent the most time at. Those kids have been through a lot and at seventeen they have their issues. When the kids were twelve we move them up here for a while so their mom could go to the Midwest and start a new life. That lasted a year and before we knew it the boy was living with my husband and I and the girl and my mother in law were living at the grandma’s house.


Since the birth of our daughter I have had to deal with her regularly. I am having a hard time dealing with the unsolicited parenting advice from someone who I have no respect for and did a pretty shitty job raising her own kids. She is mad at my husband and I because we won’t let her take our kid anywhere, babysit, or pretty much be alone with her for too long. A year ago she threatened to take me to court to get some kind of rights to take our daughter once in a while. My mother in law has the attention span and mentality of a fourteen year old. She hasn’t held a job for more than a few months at a time for the last fifty years and she makes horrible decisions on a daily basis. We are also pretty sure she is still doing drugs on occasion.


My husband’s grandmother defends her. I get it, she is her daughter and she refuses to see how bad she really is. So now I have to fight them both whenever my mother in law is in town. My mother in law will have her mom call my house to see if C can come over there for a while. I know that it is my mother in law behind the phone call, because grandma has rarely asks for her to come over. I have to deal with them both pushing my husband and being angry with me when I say no.


I am at a breaking point here. I have had about all I can take and since we can’t afford to move, I am sure that something bad is going to come out of my mouth soon. And it will be ugly.

Going Nuts

C was born with food allergies.  It is a huge ordeal to deal with food allergies.  Eating out and travelling are especially challenging.  After a little time I figured out how to make it work for our family.  I learned how to bake without eggs and milk, I made baked good, pancakes, waffles ahead of time and froze them to make things move more quickly for me in the mornings.  C also tested positive for peanuts.  It was mild, but we were told to completely avoid peanuts, but not to the extent that I had to worry about foods that were processed in plants the process peanuts.  We were actually pretty lucky considering how deadly peanut allergies can be.

After allergy testing by blood work and skin prick every year, C finally had no skin reaction to peanut and her blood reaction was almost non existent.  Her Allergist said that in order to be safe and avoid a Epi-Pen episode, he wanted to do a food challenge with peanuts.  It is a little scary to take that step and watch them feed your child something you have spent years avoiding.  Not to mention the fact that C is three and might not cooperate.  But we did it.

C went through this challenge like a freakin' champ.  I was so proud of her.  After her first bite, a quarter of a teaspoon, she decided that she did not like the taste or texture of the peanut butter.  I was worried that she wasn't going to complete the food challenge.  But as they brought each "dose" of peanut butter, she sucked it up and gagged down the peanut butter through tears and almost vomiting it back up.  I was so proud of her.

I am so excited that my child has outgrown egg, milk and peanut allergies.  That is going to make preschool snack time a lot less of a worry for me.  The only food we have to avoid now is raw tomato, which is totally do able.

*sigh of relief*

Peeing On Sticks

I peed on an ovulation test stick today. I am not ovulating quite yet, but it was still a win for me. I never got to pee on one of those during the two years of fertility treatments that I endured while trying to conceive our daughter. All of the scheduled blood work to check hormone levels clearly indicated that I was just not ovulating. I think I ovulated three times during those two years. Twice that resulted in nothing but a normal period about ten days later and once that resulted in conception.



This ovulating thing is pretty exciting to me. I became pretty confident about a year ago, just based upon paying attention to “down there,” that I was ovulating. My cycle was also regular for the first time in my life without hormones. This happened to be about the same time my almost three year old began sleeping through the night. Also about the time I was ready to start flirting with the idea of a second child. But the more that my husband and I talked about it, the more I realized that he just wasn’t ready, mostly because of the economy and financial worries. I didn’t really push the issue, I figured we would discuss it again off and on down the road.


Things changed for me in July of this year. We were travelling, headed into Yellowstone National Park and I ate lunch at a McDonalds in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Yeah, Yeah, I know McDonalds isn’t the best food option out there, but we were in a hurry and I like their fries. Well about two hours after I ate that hamburger, I began violently expelling liquid out of “both ends.” I was pretty sure that I had food poisoning. Thankfully we were travelling by RV and I had a toilet and garbage can at my disposal. It took our family nine and a half hours to make a three hour journey. I was in physical pain as well as not being able to keep anything down for nine hours. My husband took me straight to the emergency room in Cody, Wyoming. After a CT scan to rule out appendicitis I was told that I had a pretty large ovarian cyst but that it would not be causing pain for much longer because it had just ruptured. Well at the beginning of August I found myself in pain again. I spoke to my OB/GYN and was reassured that it was still the same cyst and I was reassured that it wasn’t anything to worry about. The nurse was actually a little excited that I had the cyst, as bad as that sounds. She said to me “That means you are ovulating, on your own, that is a big deal for you.”


I thought about it for a day or two after speaking to her. I realized that she was right. This was a big deal for me. I was ovulating. I am also 36 years old and not a spring chicken when it comes to having babies. I had a heart to heart with my husband and we decided that we both really wanted to have one more child. I really believe that if we waited until the world, our work and our finances are perfect, they day would never come.


We will see where this new journey takes us.

Choosing Two

Deciding to have a second child has been an “issue” around our house for a while. My husband and I both always planned on having two children, but so far we haven’t stuck to the plan. I suppose there are many reasons, good or bad, that have kept our daughter an only child for three and a half years.



For the first three years after C was born, she did not sleep well. She was a wide awake newborn, from the second the doctor cut her out of my stomach she was alert and ready to go. I remember strangers, family and friends commenting on “how alert” she was. Well, that alertness also meant that she was awake. Constantly awake. C rarely slept more than two to three hours in a row for the first three years of her existence. The serious lack of sleep on my part made me crabby, or bitchy according to my husband. I was pretty much exhausted all of the time. During those three years, I just couldn’t fathom adding another child. I was already worried about being a good enough parent with little to no sleep and I just didn’t think I could handle it.


Our business was an additional reason to wait. My husband and I are contracted sales people in the Harley-Davidson industry and run our own business out of our home office. As much as I hate to admit it, my exhaustion and caring for our first born pretty much took up most of my time. So our business suffered some and my poor husband was on his own for a good two and a half years.


Another issue: Allergies and asthma. I have them both. My asthma is pretty severe. Poor C inherited them both from me. She was born allergic to milk, eggs and peanuts. We were fortunate that none of those allergies were severe or deadly, but it still created a lot of extra work trying to plan meals and feed her. C has outgrown almost all of her food allergies. She did develop a new and pretty severe raw tomato food allergy this year, but for the most part we don’t have to worry too much. After a pretty serious bout of H1N1 this spring she now has mild asthma. It is controlled by using a steroid inhaler daily and hasn’t been a problem for her. I constantly worry that if we have another child I will be passing it all along to yet another human. There is a pretty good chance that the next child could have it a lot worse, possibly a deadly food allergy or asthma like mine.


My dear husband is worried about the economy and our financial situation, and I am too. I know the economy isn’t in the best possible place, and who couldn’t use more money? I get it. I worry too. I don’t think that I need to elaborate on this issue. If you don’t live under a rock, or if you are not a billionaire, you get it too.


I think we are going to start trying any way……………..

Spring Cleaning Mid-Summer

Our garage is a nightmare.  We can not even park our car in it.  My husband is a pack rat and saves everything that he "might use someday."  He has tons of electrical connections, the wheel off this or that, bolts, and items that I am not even sure what they are.  One of his friends actually called him a "hoarder" a few weeks ago.  I do have to say in his defense that he is not quite that bad.

I have saved nearly every baby toy and piece of clothing from our daughter in hopes of clothing and entertaining a second child someday. I did at least donate some baby items to a few young mothers that really needed baby girl clothing.  We were blessed with so much baby clothing before C was born that we barely had to buy anything for the first year and a half of her life, so I had plenty to share.  Needless to say, our garage is full.

This morning I got some sort of a wild hair.  I told my husband that I would help clean out the garage, if he was seriously going to get rid of some stuff.  I was not just moving shit around for the fourth or fifth time in as many years.  His eyes lit up as if I had just offered to give him a blow job.

We have spent most of the day removing and sorting items from our garage.  It looks as though part of some one's house barfed on our lawn and driveway.  Throughout the day I have had to turn away car after car of hopeful yard sale seekers with a promise of a future yard sale to come.  Unfortunately it is now 7:30 P.M. and we are not even close to being ready to put items back in our garage.  I think my poor husband is going to have to camp out there tonight and keep an eye on things.  Even worse, I think I am going to have to spend tomorrow finishing up the job.  It was my idea, what the hell was I thinking?

Off And Running

My blog is off and running, but still under construction.  No hard hat required.

You can call me Fibi. 

I am a work at home mom who is running a business in sales with my husband.  He travels a lot.  I am home a lot.  It is a challenge working with your spouse full time.  I am sure you will hear me complain about that more in the future.

I also have a lot of in-laws that you'll be hearing about.  Sometimes dealing with family is a huge issue for me and I WILL be complaining about that in the future too.

After a few years of infertility, we were blessed with a baby girl.  That baby girl, who I will simply call "C" (to make my husband happy) is now three and a half years old.  She will be starting her first year of preschool at the end of the month.

I am a very opinionated person.  I am not afraid to share my opinion with you.  I can guarantee that you will not always agree with my or maybe not even like everything I have to say.  If I piss you off, you know where the red "x" is in the upper right hand corner.  Feel free to use it.

Welcome to my life......................