There is no danger of this becoming a fashion blog.

I'm a jeans and tee shirt girl, and not in the fitted tee and skinny jeans way. I buy boot cut jeans and boxy tee shirts and that's what I wear every day. If it's cold I'll either throw a flannel shirt over the tee or trade it all in for a sweatshirt.  It's very difficult to go out because I never have anything to wear. I always try to have one brown button up shirt on hand, and I wear it with jeans, chunky heeled boots, and make up. That's my date look.  If it's a funeral I trade the jeans for a long black and brown skirt. I know squat about fashion. But I've been trying. I bought a pair of brown cords, and a couple new shirts (although I can't wear them unless I suck my belly in and remember not to breathe), and I really think I need some black pants, but I'm stuck in between sizes where some brands fit me in a 12 and others fit me in a 14.  I sewed elastic into the waist of my (only) pair of jeans because of this. Now my pants are adjustable like toddler pants. lol
Maybe once my hair grows out the rest of the way I'll know better what colors suit me. Also, I need to learn how to accessorize. I think I like necklaces, and I even like cocktail rings, but I don't think anything looks good on me. I need a personal assistant to tell me. :(

Damn uterus

Diaper bags. Baby Mum-Mum crackers.  Gerber Puffs. Folding the front of the diaper down for the umbilical chord. The Moby wrap.
Oddly enough, I don't want them.  I truly think that even if I won the lottery and all my kids died, I wouldn't want to have a new baby.  I think I'm done.
I want a hysterectomy. 
I'll have to think on it  a while. My Mirena is still good for another 3 1/2 years so I have time. But if I'm done using my uterus, why deal with periods at all?

The birth board

I am in a group online. It started out as a "birth board" 4 years ago when I was pregnant with Tommy, a bunch of women due in August of 2008. At some point we remaining few joined with the July 08 group when ours died down. But for 4 years I've stayed in this group, checking for updates almost daily, with the same women.  But you know me (maybe), and I don't do well with groups.  Groups come with group dynamics and group mentality, and I always feel like I'm on the outside of that stuff.  And now I'm in some stupid feud with some lady in the group who has "anger issues" (who doesn't?) and everyone walks around her on eggshells deferring to her triggers and I stepped on her invisible landmine issue and she went nuts and they all told me to drop it.  So I left the group for a few days.  Now, I know that mathematically she's no more important than me, but I can't help but feel that they'd rather she stay than me, and that it's a choice that has to be made.  Like, someone has to leave so why not be me?  But, why should I cater to her hissy fit?  I'm somehow not allowed to defend myself because she has shit in her life? We all have shit in our lives. That's just life.  Anyway, I'm leaning toward just leaving the group and  moving on.  But then a part of me thinks maybe I should be part of a group, a group I've got a 4 year investment in.  I don't know. It's just drama.  But seriously, we were all supposed to go to Vegas next year and meet in real life. Wtf.

My mother is now art.

This is not my mother. This is a random photo from a google image search. But this is how they do whole brain radiation, which my mother had. They mold a plastic mesh mash to your face and use it to bold you to a table to hold you still, and then zap you with radiation from all sorts of different angles. The thinking, as I understand it, is that by coming at the tumors from all sides they will hit each known tumor with a lot of radiation without having to send such a powerful beam through any healthy brain tissue, but they'll get the whole brain with enough radiation to take care of any loose cancer cells that may be loitering in there.
My mother gave me her mask.  I asked her if they'd let her keep it and mentioned that it'd be a slightly more personal momento when all this is over than a generic colored ribbon car magnet, so she asked for it and gave it to me. But what do you do with an irradiated mask of your mother's face?
I screwed it into the wall in my hallway.  We don't have any "art" on our walls.  We have family photos (a lot of family photos), and one large piece of white cardboard Tommy colored a rainbow onto, but no actual official art.  And now I have my mother's three dimensional plastic mesh head silhouette sticking out of the wall.  It's kinda cool, but it's also kind of macabre.  Because even if she lives to 100 and dies in a home full of other old ladies, I will still be able to squint at this thing and see my mother's face, at least in profile.  Someday it will be all I have, the only way to see her in 3D. This thing they used to bolt her head down with and shoot laser beams through.  Creepy, yet too personal to throw away.

A good Mom update

My mom's post-chemo pet scan results came back and she has no visible cancer in her at all. This is small-cell cancer so she has to amass a pretty big grouping of cells for it to even show up, so the odds are very much in favor of her having cancer still inside her.  But she has less than she did when this whole mess started, so that's good. The bad, though, is that this is a very very fast-spreading cancer. And if the chemo every 3 weeks has been keeping it in check, it could just go nuts and run rampant now that chemo's over. I need to find out when her next scan is, or blood test, or how they're going to monitor this to know when/if to do more chemo.  I'm hesitantly optimistic, but still scared shitless.  This isn't like breast cancer, where you can beat it. This will kill her (unless she gets hit by a bus first or something); it is terminal and the very fact that it spread to her brain makes it stage 4- the worst.  But for right now, she's healthier than she was 6 months ago and that is great.

I'm still the only one who can understand him

"Chetch! Chetch!"  Danny comes walking into the room with a half-deflated miniature basketball held on top of his head. He throws it to me, and I "chetch" it. I half toss - half hand it back to him and he holds it over/on his head again and walks out of the room calling to his brother to play with him. "Tah-ee! Chetch!"

My son has hair

My son has hair. He has what, to me, is a pretty standard little boy hair cut. Longish, shaggy, a hair cut I see in the childrens' sections of sales flyers all the time.  I never knew it was so controversial to have a little boy with hair.
I have been told he looks like a girl, which is ironic because people told me Ryan looked like a boy until her hair was well past her shoulders.  And I hear an awful lot of "I would never let my son have long hair," online.  But the little kids with short hair, they all look like they're ready for church, all prim and proper. My son's hair moves, it gets blown by the wind, it swings and bounces when he laughs.  And it's not that I'm too lazy to have it cut. It would be MUCH easier to have it all sheared off  or to cut it short enough to have room to grow between cuts than to go get his bangs cut out of his eyes every month (he is not good with hair cuts).  But to cut his hair off now would age him so much and I'm not ready for that. He doesn't have to look like a little man. He can look like a little boy for as long as he wants (and by the way, I live by a junior high and a high school and I see dozens of teenage boys with floppy hair walk by the house every day. It worries me, since I have a 13 year old daughter who has a penchant for teenage boys with floppy hair.).  And if Tommy wants to cut his hair short someday, I will let him, and he'll have a hell of a lot more to work with than if I'd kept it short.  But he's three. He doesn't need to apply for a job, or look professional, and no one under 60 has ever mistaken him for a girl (and those were both people who kept their boys' heads shaved in the summer so I think they may have said it on purpose to make a point. An assholey point.)

Which is why I claim to be 52.

I am 35, and I'm fine being 35. I'm fine looking 35 if I do. I don't want to look 45, but I have no issue with looking 35. But I am supposed to want to look 21. Why is that? Why do I see ads all the time telling me a 54 year old grandmother looks 32 and so can I if I pay for her secret? Why is it that we can't look good for our age; we have to look good for our kids' age?  It's setting us up for endless disappointment and struggle. Why do we, as women, fall into the trap? It's preposterous!