One for the moms (and dads, but...mostly the moms)

There comes a point in every winter, in our house it seems to be February, where everyone is over it, but especially the moms.

I'm sitting here in my messy kitchen and I'm writing a blog instead of cleaning it, because I'm over it.  I'm over coats, socks, boots, gloves, hats, and after this week, I'm certainly over germs!  It seems every summer, fall, and even spring, I develop momnesia on what it is like to have 3 kids couped up in the house during a week off from school for snow days sharing germs.  And then once I hear one of them cough a deep horrible cough, or worse yet, see them lose all color in their face and go purple around the eyes right before they explode everywhere like that kid on the Exorcist, it all comes crashing back to me.  If one of them is gonna puke, they're all gonna puke.  And even though after 10 years of being a mom I can wipe a butt with one hand and clean up puke with the other, it is really, never fun, From the first gag my heart turns black like the Grinch's heart, and I turn into a zombie until it's over.  I spray lysol on everything from the couch to the light switches, I wash everything that will fit into the washer, I line beds with towels and buckets with trash bags to try to save myself the tiniest bit of trouble, but it rarely matters.  They've been contagious for days before this, swapping germs as they rudely spit into each other's faces or give each other wet willies, and the germs have already taken a firm grip on their digestive tracts.  They're gonna puke.  They're all gonna puke, and it doesn't even matter what you do to try to make sure at least one of them escapes.  Us moms, we can only hope and pray that we remain the last man standing. That we can keep the stamina and stave off the exhaustion long enough to do one more load, bleach one more toilet, provide one more cracker and hope it stays put.

So, to all my othah muthahs out there.  I salute you, and I salute me.  We are going to make it through this long, germy, icy, freezing cold, cloudy, but beautiful winter, and soon we will be sitting at the pool having a chat and our biggest worry will be sunburns.  We can do this ladies!  We will persevere!  We will rise to the occasion wearing freshly washed (because someone puked on them) yoga pants and our favorite hoodie. Find something to get you there!  I'm looking at you March Madness.  I am looking at you.  Pull me through to the end!

Go Cats! If (when) Kentucky goes 40-0 the puke fest will be forgotten and I'll just remember this as the best winter ever. 

What started all the moving?

We get asked all the time "Why on earth have you moved so many times?"  I usually say that we are in witness protection and we're terrible at it, so they have to keep relocating us.  That confuses people so I've stopped using that line.

 It wasn't something we set out to do purposefully.  We moved to Hendersonville, TN from Louisville, KY a year after we got married.  TJ was working in a job at that time that had him traveling to Nashville for several days every week, so it just seemed like the logical thing to do at the time.  We bought our first little house, and Sydney was born in Hendersonville.  During the 3 years we spent there, TJ decided to get his MBA at Belmont University.  He wanted to work in healthcare administration.  Once he finished up his degree, you would think that it would be easy to get a job here in the health care mecca of the Earth.  Not so.  After an exhaustive job hunt, we landed in...Monroe, GA.

When I describe Monroe, I tell people it's like Mayberry on the Andy Griffith show.  There was one restaurant, one grocery store, a McDonalds, and that was about it.  It was also as if civil rights had never arrived.  Black people and white people literally lived on opposite sides of the train tracks.  People were happy on the outside, but it was almost like there was an undercurrent of something more volatile just beneath the surface.  In order to pay our rent, we had to walk into the bank and give a check to the teller and just tell her to put it into our landlord's account.  We could also pay in cash if we wanted. Once I even left the rent in the bathroom drawer because we were going to be out of town, and my landlord just came over and got it and locked up after herself.

We rented a house directly across the street from the hospital, Walton Regional Medical Center.  (Regional was an understatement.)  After a few months there, we decided that I was going to go back to work too.  So, 18 month old Sydney went off to a wonderful day care, and I went to work at the hospital as well, in the Human Resources Department.  I loved my job.  

TJ and I didn't advertise that we were married, just because it was a little odd to both be in administration at the same hospital.  Sometimes we would drop Sydney off at day care and then drive to work, rather than walking across the street.  On one particular day after we did this, a new girl from TJ's office came to my office, closed the door behind her and said "I saw you driving in with TJ.  You do know he's married?!?!?" Ha!  She thought TJ and I had "pulled an all nighter".

The house we lived in had two apartments under it.  The entrances to the apartments were around the back of the house, so we never saw the people that lived there.  Shortly after we moved in, the people in one apartment moved out, and new tenants moved in.  A girl and her boyfriend.  One day, I was sitting in my office and I could see a police car in my driveway!  I walked over and asked the officer what was going on (as he was using a flashlight and peering into my car), and he said they were looking for the new girl that lived in the apartment, and he wouldn't tell me why.  Ummmm.  Oookay.  After work another officer showed up at our house and asked "Are you April?"  When I said no, he made me get my drivers license to prove it.  After I was established as Ellen, he said if we see or hear the new tenants come home, we should call 911.  Say what?!?!!  A couple of days later, we did see her come home, and we called 911 as directed.  The dispatcher acted like we had just fallen off the turnip truck and claimed she had no idea what I was talking about.  About an hour later the cop shows up again, asks for my proof of ID and then tells me to call 911 of I see her again.  Oh Lordy podunk Georgia.  Get it together!

Two days later a friend comes to my office and says "Is everything okay?  Your stuff is all over the lawn."  I look out the window of my office, and my landlord has apparently decided to evict April the convict.  My rental was the only one with a lawn, so there was her stuff sitting all over it.  Everyone that we worked with thought we were getting evicted.  We moved to Orlando shortly after that, but Monroe (pronounced Mun-row) will always have some interesting memories associated with it for us!

Monroe, GA came back to haunt visit me last year.  I got a call on my answering machine from the Monroe police department's evidence unit.  I lost my wallet once in Monroe in an abandoned parking lot when I stopped to help baby Sydney do something in the back seat.  Apparently, 8 years later, they finally decided to call me and tell me that someone had turned my wallet in.  Did I want them to mail it back?

I wore Uggs to Whole Foods...and lived to tell about it.

As many of you know, TJ and I have decided to do a 30 day "cleanse" this month, and several of you have asked me to blog about it.  Thank you for being interested!  There is a timeline included on their website which describes how you may feel each day of your detox.  So far, it has been dead on for me, and on Day 4 when they said I was going to wake up and just want to "kill all the things"?  Well, let's just say that at one point TJ was hysterically laughing at how grumpy I was.  And I think it was because he was trying to keep from killing ME.  Apparently "kill all the things" day didn't hit him as hard as it did me.  Someone had to be there for the children...

We both felt the need to do something drastic to get healthy, and hey, as they say, bathing suit bodies are made in the winter!  We are horrible at "healthy eating".  Mostly because, we just don't know what to eat!  There are so many things out there that seem healthy, but are they?  Will it really do anything if we start eating whole grain bread instead of honey wheat?  Also, all cleanses seem to want you to eat a ton of beans and eggs to make up for all the other stuff that you're NOT allowed to eat. This has always been one of the huge issues for me when trying to get into a more healthy eating habit.  I hate beans and eggs.  And I have to eat something!  I finally stumbled upon the Whole30 cleanse.  In a small nut shell, it is your basic Paleo diet, commonly known as the way cave men probable ate, with a few more restrictions.  In this cleanse we are not allowed to have beans, grains, dairy, sugar, or alcohol.  None.  At all.  Even as an ingredient in other things.  Even vanilla extract to sweeten my black, dead coffee.  And boy, let me tell you, sugar is in EVERYTHING.  It has a lot of different names that you get to memorize in order to avoid it, but it's even in things like frozen hash brown potatoes, lunch meat, even bacon!  Follow this link if you would like to learn more about the Whole30 plan.  We are not hungry, and it has helped me get very creative in the kitchen.

  http://whole30.com/

In this past week, I have done things I have never even considered before.  I made my own mayonnaise!  If you have never done that, you should try it.  It is delicious! I made up several side dishes so that we wouldn't get bored with your basic green beans.  I'm nightly telling TJ "I'm nailing this."  I didn't know I could cook that way!  Several of the ingredients and sugar free things that I felt would make cooking and preparing dishes that we would actually enjoy easier, forced me to go to Whole Foods. Now, I have always been a fan of Whole Foods, but it's not a one stop shop for me, and with limited kid free time in the week, I just don't usually have time to go to two stores.  The one very big draw back from eating this way, is the amount of planning, preparation, and shopping it takes.  It is extremely time consuming.  However, I am committed to this, and I have just completed my second weekly trip to Whole Foods...I caution you, if you are going to shop at this crunchy fine establishment, wear Uggs at your own risk.

It is pretty cold here for Nashville, and when it gets chilly out I like to wear my favorite Ugg boots to keep my toes nice and warm.  Today was one of those days.  As I walk up to Whole Foods, I am looking forward to hunting down Japanese sweet potatoes, and some red palm oil, and adding some good old fashioned tamarind paste to the cart.  I was really in search of what was apparently the holy grail of dijon mustard, made without sugar or white wine, so I could make some salad dressing that my friend Autumn posted about on Facebook, and eat a salad again.  I'm deep in thought on where this mustard might be when I was accosted by a lady coming out of Whole Foods.  She gave me a good tongue lashing about how terrible it is to skin sheep just to keep my feet warm, and was it really worth it to me to cruelly take the life of an animal just to wear something on my feet?  I have no idea what my face looked like, but if you know me, you can imagine.  I stared at her for a few seconds, and then I said, "Well, I'm Paleo.  I think I recently read somewhere that cave men wore sheep skin boots, so I guess it just goes along with my diet.", spun on my heel, and walked purposefully toward the Japanese sweet potatoes as if I was getting paid to do so.

Me in my very very offensive Uggs.

If you have any questions about the cleanse I'm doing or how it's going, feel free to message me on Facebook or shoot me an e-mail.  I'm sure I will post about it again before it's all over.  Follow the link if you'd like to learn more about it yourself.  It's been a very doable cleanse so far.  We are focusing on all the yummy things we can eat, (HELLO! I can have steak for breakfast!), instead of what we can't.  So far so good from the cavemen on day 7.