TerriDoodle

I saw a picture of myself today when I weighed 158. I was so damn skinny....and pretty :blushing: ... of course I was YOUNGER then too! LOL But it kinda threw me for a loop this morning...that and not-so-encouraging phone call from Evan last night. I'll get to see him in a week and I'll feel better then, I think. I feel kinda hopeless and lost lately....about weight loss for sure....and about this whole child-rearing thing. It's damn hard not to blame yourself for every bit of everything that goes wrong in their lives. My friends who have kids the same age that are also struggling have the same self-doubts. Funny.... I just realized that the kids I know that are 'strong and healthy' come from intact families; the ones that are struggling come from divorced homes. Ouch. See? I'm smart enough to have found another reason to blame myself. Crap!! I gotta get out of my head today. Lucky me, I get to go have a mamm-o-cram!!

Jane - Yes, you better call about taking the car across state lines if it's against their policy. Maybe you just need special permission or pay some other fee or something. You might need to go with another company.

That DOES sound good! I love that broccoli slaw.

Isn't that PRECIOUS!!?!?.......NOT!!!

Well, from the sound of it Heather wasn't on an I.V. for long at all! That makes a big difference!

I just keep staring at Ayla's pictures!! She's sooooo SWEET!!!

Oh Heather!! She's absolutely perfect in every way...you must be so proud of her! She and Carson make a lovely couple, don't you think?! Thank you so much for posting!

Shouldn't be a problem, Jane. Jenn can sleep with me...she says my snoring won't be a problem for her. I do snore but I don't think it's an all-night-every-night kind of thing....I've never had the nerve to ask! LOL My son said he's never heard me snore...but sometimes I wake myself up so I know that I do! My husband has just learned not to say a word about it. LOL Smart man. We'll figure it all out, I'm sure. I'm not worried in the slightest.

....and... do you think it would be a bad thing to give my children my best advice, which is "Don't have kids!!!" ??

OMG -- it's so funny to find this thread! Maybe it's because it's the end of the school year??? I"ve got an 18 yr old son who's just flunked out of his 1st year of COMMUNITY COLLEGE, lost his job and wrecked his car! I can't even BEGIN to tell you all the drama that has surrounded him in the last month!! I wouldn't even know where to start! ...but let's just say that I've taken extreme measures to straighten that boy out and pray every day that it takes. ....and NOW my 15 year old daughter has become nothing but a heap of tears, rants and DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA all the time. She's like in a perpetual state of PMS 24/7/365!! Between the two of them I seriously want to just go find a little hut somewhere in the mountains and live off the land. I won't tell a living soul where I've gone. My work partner is going through very much the same thing and every morning we come in with our stories. Our recurring theme for the last couple of weeks has been WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING???:biggrin:

Good morning everyone!! Kat - I've been meaning to ask you.... is Kinsey still loving her new school? I bet you miss each other terribly, though. That part's gotta be hard. What's this other job you've got cookin'? I've got a busy weekend on tap -- none of it involves actual FUN -- just errands, errands, errands! Yuck!! But I only have to work 3 days next week, then I'm on vacation for a week. Heading to the Guadalupe River....ahhhhhhh. So if I can just hang on for a bit longer, I'll be OK. It's vewy, vewy quiet here at the office today and that is a GOOD thing. I've got lots of personal work that needs to be done! LOL

We started off at 309 days and here we are....almost there!!! You've done a splendid job of counting down, Judy!! Thank you!!!!

Huh???? :biggrin:

Yea Jenn!!! I am soooooooooooooooooooooo glad you are coming!!! :biggrin: Wheeeeeee!!! Yipeeeeeeeeeeee!!! :biggrin: Yea!!!! So nice of you to offer to cook etc. -- from the sound of it, you are a great cook!

(((HEATHER))) We are thinking about you!!! XOXOXOOX

Plain...agreed...but if anyone is considering such lunacy in the future...DON'T!!!

I HAVE EXCELLENT NEWS!!!! I called Jenn and twisted her arm....SHE'S COMING TO ALABAMA!!!! :thumbup: :w00t: :mad: :w00t:

Oh, Congratulations, Heather!!! I'll be thinking about you so much tonight!!!! Wish we were there!! Do good!

Yes, Jane -- I got it yesterday. Thanks!

I'm going to be an AUNTIE AGAIN!! :thumbup: :w00t:

That breaks my heart, Tracy! Those poor girls have really been through a lot. I hope their aunt is good to them... I'm sure she will be. ========================= Hey, if anyone wants to come over to Alabama last minute, just hop on a plane! Kat? Tracy(x2)? Jenn? Suzie? We'll treat the lodging! Please!?!? Heather, you are welcome too...but somehow I think you might have other things going on!

Well, I just figured we'd be grocery shopping and all that.... don't think you'll be missing much. Check in time is 4:00p....so we'll have time to pop over to your house after the airport, then we'll leave to go grocery shopping and get checked in. You won't be that far behind us!

Please go to the Google doc and look at how I've arranged the rides. Is this OK with everyone?

Sounds good to me. And we can have 3 'teams' to cook 3 nights, and we'll go out one.... how's that? Or cook 2 nights and go out 2. I don't care!

Anne Wortham wrote the following article ten days after the election of Barack Obama. Her brief bio is at the end. “No, He Can’t”By Anne Wortham | Published 11/14/2008 Fellow Americans, Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America. I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival–all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the “change” that Obama asserts has come to America. Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared “progressive” whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look like them. I would have to wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration–political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. I would have to believe that “fairness” is equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to “go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice” is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the “bottom up,” and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth. Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago, irrationally chanting “Yes We Can!” Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers, and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead–and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism. So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over–and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to–”Do Something!” You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine–what little there is left–for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness Anne Wortham bio; Anne Wortham is Black, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University ’s Hoover Institution. She is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association. She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the Year by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyer’s television series, “A World of Ideas.” The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas. Dr. Wortham is author of The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues. She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality. Recently, she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afrocentrism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctness.