it is with mixed feelings i am blogging today.

Saturday morning dawned with Jocelyn’s right eye all pink and puffy. PINK AND PUFFY PEOPLE!!!

This makes a grand total of 3 episodes of pink eye for her. Ethan is finishing up his eye drops for his 3rd episode as well.

WHEN WILL THIS STOP!! I can’t help but feel like a failure as a parent. It goes like this. Child A has 5 more days of eye drops. Child B finishes their eye drops and both eyes look great. Child B goes 2-3 days off the eye drops and suddenly wakes up with their eye all red and irritated. We have changed pillow cases every day. We’ve changed towels every day. We’ve neer used a washcloth more than once before it goes in the laundry hamper. We’ve washed hands as often as is humanly possible while not just standing all day in the bathroom with the water running. I’m starting to go a little crazy.

To our credit, Jocelyn has a cold, and has had it for the past week. Nothing too bad, but she’s got some serious snot issues going on. Luckily, she hasn’t been coughing, and hasn’t had a fever or anything. There are usually 2 ways to get conjunctivitis. You catch it someone who’s got it, or you have a cold and it kind of works it’s way into your eye. So it could be that we’re doing nothing wrong, she could have just gotten it because of this cold she’s fighting.

I still feel like shit about this though. And Ethan is supposed to be done with his very-much-a-pain-in-the-ass drops (tobramycin) (must be given every 4 hours, so one of us makes a trip to school during our lunch break to administer them). And I’m totally freaked out that he’s just going to turn up with them again 2-3 days after he’s off of them.

Our pediatrician was closed this past Saturday, so I took her to an urgent care place, who prescribed some drops (sulfacetamide sodium opthamalic solution). Something different than she had been taking before (which was vigamox). We got them and dutifully have been putting them in her eyes, but when monday morning arrived, she did not look ANY BETTER. There was no way she could go to school with her eye still pink and swollen, in fact, if anything, I think her eye was MORE swollen than it was Saturday.

So today, I blog from home, as I stayed home with her. We went to the doctor, who gave us a new prescription (and she commented that the drops we were using wasn’t likely to do any good, ergh), went to target to fill prescription, then drove to the school to give Ethan HIS dosage of drops.

I toyed with the idea of going from there up to have lunch with James, as he did last week when he was home with Ethan, but the Jocelyn was acting pretty grumpy and tired, so off we went home, and I got her into bed for naptime (with no fewer than FOUR crying jags, the poor dear was so tired).

So this sucks, because damn. Pink eye. GO AWAY ALREADY!

However, it doesn’t suck too bad, because instead of trying to work from home as I usually do when I’m home with a sick kid, I am taking the day off. It is so nice. I’m not putting movie after movie in so as to entertain the child while I try to accomplish something. I’m not saying, “Not now, mommy’s working,” whenever the child wants to inform me of inane, but nevertheless very important details,

“I”M THREE!”

“I’m the MOMMY! You’re the BABY! NAPTIME, GO TO SLEEP NOW!”

“I can do a SOMERSAULT!”

“LOOK MOMMY! I took off ALL my clothes! I’m NAKED GIRL!”

“LOOK! I picked out this booger! FROM MY NOSE!”

Now I can actually acknowledge or reprimand these announcements on a case by case basis instead of hoping to distract by pointing out what Cinderella/ Lightning Mcqueen/ Totoro is doing on screen.

When the day started I had grand plans of cleaning the house from top to bottom in this beautiful gift of a day spent home with my offspring, and I did manage to go through a lot of the crap sitting on our coffee table (and under our coffee table) but then the morning gotten eaten up with errands, and the afternoon has been eaten up with blog reading (and now writing).

But one thing I shall be doing. I’ll be donning the latex gloves (because i have very girly sensitive skin) and wiping off every fucking toy and surface with those bleachy sanitizing wipes to make sure no pink eye cooties can stick around to infect my children again.

-amy won’t rub eyeballs with bleachy sanitizing wipes though

I waited to relate this until I had the pictures taken and off the camera and uploaded. Yay!

We had a lovely father’s day. The kids got up and snuck downstairs while James and I slept in a bit. I must say, this is the nicest part about them getting a bit older. When they started making a bit of a racket, I got up and went downstairs with them so daddy could sleep in.

We got out the present we had gotten for James and got to work. I mixed up some concret, poured it in the mold, and then the kids got busy sticking glass bead-like things in it, making hand impressions, and trying very hard to distract me so that they could do letter stamps all over the place willy nilly. I, however, used my mom-powers to not get distracted and kept all the words as actual words.

The resulting garden stepping stone turned out quite nicely.

I am pretty unoriginal, as this is the same thing we did for Father’s Day 2 years ago. I’m glad I got a fancier kit this time, because in the other one, we had to just scratch the letters into the concret with a toothpick and it really didn’t look that great. We had to embellish everything with paint.

I don’t mind that it’s unoriginal and now we have 2 because look at those handprints! We’ll want those later! Too cute!

So we made the stepping stone and set it in a safe place to set for 2 days. After we let James sleep in, we brought him breakfast in bed (poptarts and coke) and all the homemade cards and pictures the kids had made in school.

The sweetest part of the day was after I shooed the kids from basically jumping on Daddy, he turned to me, his eyes moist and said, “I’m so happy we have them. I love being a daddy. They make me so happy.”

We spent the rest of the day poking around at the Potomac mall (legos for ethan, new shoes for jocelyn) and then came home to launch teeeny tiny rockets at a nearby soccer field.

Everyone had a great day.

Thanks for being such a great daddy, James. I love you.

-amy

WHY I DON’T WRITE HERE ENOUGH

I haven’t done this in a while, you know, the writing about what actually happens in our lives, type of thing.

Sometimes I feel like this is a “journal” type of thing then I get all hung up about the things that I DON’T post, and I feel like “oh i can’t right about thing Y, that happened today, because I haven’t yet written about thing X, that happened 2 days ago,” and then nothing gets written.

Other times, I want to write about things that I have photographic proof of, but then said proof is either still on the camera, or on the computer at home, NOT uploaded onto flickr and then I put off writing because everyone knows people are more interesting when they post photos, right? Right.

And then we get into the whole shmiel about if I’m writing anything that might have someone I KNOW in it and all the strict and various rules I have in that regard it’s no wonder I write anything at all.

Oh wait. Let’s look at 2007… yup, no need to wonder, I HAVEN’T written hardly anything at all!

I think a part of that is also because when I’m feeling all angsty and weird and ‘how did i end up here in this place in my life?’ depressed, i need a place to vomit all the brain yuck up out of my brain and then i feel better and well, i haven’t had any brain yuck in a long while.

So really it’s a good thing that my blog is more like a random banner that changes every month with a ‘hi there’ and a photo thrown in now and then for good measure.

I’m going to try to stop letting all these reasons keep me from updating more often. Because there’s a big reason I need to overcome all that and just post already.

The children. The cute, cute terribly cute children. I need to document the cuteness if only so when they’re both snots wanting to borrow the car and $20 when they’re 16, I can load up the archives and go, “Awwwwwww..”

SO ON TO THE CUTENESS

Last week Jocelyn had a pretty bad case of pink eye which caused first me, and then james to stay home with her (1 day each) so as not to infect her entire school with the puss and eye boogers (we’re so thoughtful) (and also, her doctor made us).

Me and Jocelyn in the car, driving around, to/from doctor/target pharmacy/home:

Jocelyn is playing with her pink toy cell phone.

Jocelyn: I’m the mommy! And I’m driving!
me: OK! Am I Jocelyn?
J: Yes. You are Jocelyn. Only you’re a baby, and you’re in my tummy. Let me call you.
M: BRRRING! BRRRING!
J: NO! WITH YOUR PHONE!
M: I pick up my cell phone and flip it open.
M: Hello?
J: Hi!
M: Hi!
J: You’re out of my tummy now!
M: OK! Where are we going, mommy?
J: We’re going home.
M: OK. Are we there yet?
J: Nooooooo.
M: When will we get home?
Jocelyn pauses a moment, thinking this over.
J: We’ll get home in nine, six.
M: OK. What will we do when we get there?
J: I’ll make some dinner.
M: What are we having?
J: Cheese. Bye bye!
M: BYE!

We hang up.

Nine, six. Obviously, she’s trying to say something like, 10:30, but it comes out 9 6. I died of the cuteness. I’m dead now.

These sorts of conversations take place over and over and over and over, and all I can say is, I wish both of my children had come out of my tummy with the ease of which I came out of hers.

Other variations of this conversation take place when she is Cinderella, and I am either Anastasia, Drusilla, or the step mother (“only nice!”) Then she usually changes her mind and wants to be Anastasia/Drusilla/Nice-Step-Mother herself. She then regales me with how she is going to the store/ taking me to school/ driving to work/ going to dinner. Very cute.

Let me just add that giving eye drops to Jocelyn is no easy feat. I’m relieved to say that tomorrow is her last day of drops to be administered. HALLELUJAH! We will be a pink eye FREE house!

OK, That’s all I’m going to write today. I could go on, but I don’t want to kill you from the shock.

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend, and happy father’s day to all the dad’s out there!

– amy is an accomplished concrete mixer

It’s been almost 2 years since I returned to the work force after staying at home with my kids for a few years. When I first went back to work, I took a temporary job in DC covering for a woman about to go out on maternity leave. I got up while it was still dark, put on dress clothes with sneakers, drove to the VRE train and rode for an hour and 15 minutes to L’Enfant Plaza. Then I hopped off, crossed the street and hopped on the metro. Then I hopped off at West Farragut and walked 3 blocks to my office, where I took off my sneakers and put on some heels. Then I did all that in reverse to get home again.

This was actually a step up from what I started – driving up 66 and just metroing up into DC. The train took a little longer, but it was worth it. I got to sit and relax, read a book, work a sudoku puzzle, read the paper.

Still… it was about an hour and forty minutes of commuting. It sucked. Almost 4 hours daily just getting to and from work.

So when I took a permanent position in the Falls Church area (merrifield, really) it was a big improvement.

I seem to recall from last year that the commute was easier in the summer. For some reason, after school gets out the roads clear up. Is it all those teachers who no longer are going to work? Is it because now parents don’t have to get out the door at a certain time to avoid buses, or drop kids off? I don’t know what the reason was, but I do remember it being easier. I keep waiting for it to start getting easier. Shorter. Zippier!

For some reason or another, I’ve begun to think wishfully about staying home with the kids. I don’t know why, but as they get older and “real school” looms on the horizon, I want to be home. Specifically, I want to be home when they get home. I don’t like the fact that they’re in preschool until 5-6ish each day, even though we all love our school. Even though they’re out on a HUGE playground, running around having a ball with their friends. Even though I know they like school, they are happy when they get picked up a little earlier on occasion. On days when they get picked up a little later than usual, and things in the evening are rushed with dinner, cleaning up, laundry, bathtime and bed with little playing time, they complain.

So for whatever reason, when I think about them in elementary school, the thought of extended day just really doesn’t appeal to me. Maybe it’s the fact that I was never in any sort of day care when I was growing up. Do I want to be there when they get home because my own mother was? I don’t know. Ethan is starting kindergarten in the fall. I don’t know about you, but that qualifies as “real school” to me. We are keeping him at his current school, in their private kindergarten, so I am not too anxious about this dream of staying home YET, but I have decided to try to pick them up earlier than we have been doing. I guess the thought is maybe if I can swing it, then maybe later on when they’re in “real school,” I could work it so I’m home from work in time for school ending. I don’t even know when school is out for the day, but regardless, I’ve been trying to get in early to work so I can leave early, and pick up the kids early. So far, “early” has only equaled picking them up at about 5pm. (IE: not very early, but it’s better than nothing.)

I keep waiting for the “easy summer” commute to start. Every monday I wonder if maybe NOW the traffic won’t feel like I’m sitting in a dentist’s chair just WAITING for the drilling to start. But every Monday it sucks ass. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting up earlier now, but it even seems like it’s worse than before.

Today it took me 1 hour and 20 minutes to get from home to desk. Grrrrr.

So 2 years of doing this commute is making it really really old. It’s making the romantic visions of staying home seem even dreamier, and it’s also making me dream about moving. To a house in a nice neighborhood with a fenced in yard and beautiful mature trees and ample gardening space with friendly neighbors, excellent schools, and is equi-distant between mine and james’ places of work.

Sigh.

I hope the magical easy 15 minute summer commute starts on monday.

And I’d also like a pony.

… for june.

i love this photo of my strawberries, but now every time i load up my site, i get hungry and all salivate-y.

we are home now. it is so nice. 4? 5? I can’t remember really, days of camping in the La Sal mountains about 40 min away from Moab, UT was lovely. Getting back to civilization, in the garb of staying at my folks house in Park City for the remaining 5 days was even more loverly. Plumbing! Running water! A microwave! It’s amazing how the camping in the mountains/desert can give you a greater appreciation of these things. Seeing my entire family was so much fun. All those cousins and watching them play was just the cutest. The scenery was incredible. Arches National Park left us awestruck. There will be lots of (non blurry! non camera phone! yay!) pictures coming.

We flew to Utah with 5 checked bags. We accumulated more stuff out there and came home with 7 checked bags. Only six of them made it on our plane though, and the 7th will be arriving at our doorstep sometime tomorrow morning. I don’t really mind. It took a few hours to unpack and go through five of the six we actually have, and I didn’t have the energy to even open the sixth.

The best part about being home – sleeping in your own bed.

I think the kids would say, playing with your own toys…. and not having to share 🙂

The worst part… thinking about getting back to normal life in the next day or two. Going to work. And also, that spoilt milk in the fridge you didn’t throw out before you left. Yeah, that sucks.

Also.. someone in VA cranked up the heat, and turned the humidifier WAY up in this state. Utah was fairly temperate.. but even when it was hot.. it was a dry heat. Much easier to tolerate.

Ahhh. Bed. I think I’ll go reaquaint myself with you.

or is it guy? first of all, i’ve always liked to assume that the term “guys” in the plural includes both genders. I have no problem if I’m standing with a small group of people, and someone else refers to the small group as “guys.” It’s a non-gender group term.

Just thought I’d get that out of the way.

So hi guys. Or is it just like, one lonely person out there by now, in the cobwebby land of crazymokes? Of course not. No one stays in the cobwebby land of 1 site. No, the feed in the reader just never has that little bold style or a little (1) that shows that look! amy posted something! SHE DIDN’T DIE IN A DITCH SOMEWHERE, WHO’D A THUNK?!

The strep had a better chance of wiping us out, but we PREVAILED! Jocelyn had the last case, and then 3 days after her last dose of antibiotics, she came down with it AGAIN. On the day of Ethan’s birthday party. Poor girl. We caught it very early though and a scrip of zithromax nipped it in the bud.

Once Ethan’s party was out of the way, I’ve had time to kind of focus on the next big event coming — our vacation. My folks live in Park City. We leave on Wednesday and will be gone for a week and a half. We’re flying out to utah (4 non-stop plane tickets to SLC = we are now broke.) I can’t really remember how it got started, but idle talk of going camping in Moab has grown to epic proportions involving my entire family. Out of all of my family, we are the farthest away, so it was relatively easy to get others involved. I have a sister coming up with her husband and 4 kids from southern utah (cedar city), a brother coming over from Colorado with his wife and 4 kids, another brother coming down from Oregon with his daughter, and my other siblings are in Salt Lake. It’s going to be so much fun! I have 6 siblings, and between the 6 of us, there are 12 cousins, ranging in age from 14 to 3 (Jocelyn is the youngest, but only by about 5 months). So there’s going to be a gaggle of us swimming, biking, hiking, keeping small children from hurling themselves to their dhoom off the arches, roasting marshmellows, and digging holes for our own poop (because campgrounds? with facilities? THAT’S FOR WUSSES. We’ll be out in the DESERT THANK YOU VERY MUCH.) (I actually have no idea, but there’s been talk of an outhouse and if that’s correct I think I might prefer digging my own hole.) We’ll be camping in Moab for 4-5 days and 3-4 nights, and I can’t wait.

So, to that end, I got my mobblogging plugin working again so that I may plague the internet with blurry photos of the various events of our trip. Those of you who tuned in for this last August may wish to turn their feed off – I hope you won’t though. I think it’ll be fun.

I’ll try to post more before our departure wednesday, but lately, the blogging bug hasn’t been biting. I don’t know if this just means that my mental health has improved, because generally, I blog when I have shit to get off my chest, or I have just been busy living and enjoying life. Either way, I need to write more because I love to have things here to look back on. I look back now and laugh at the things about the kids that I’ve already forgotten.

Anyway. More later. I definitely need to give a hair update.

I don’t think I’ve detailed all the strep that’s gone through this house. First Ethan got it. Then 2 days after his antibiotics was through, he was crying and holding his side so hard one evening that we phoned up the ambulance for fear he had appendicitis. They laid our fears to rest and said that it was probably still the strep. Sure enough, it was. I think he went into the doctor on a Friday for the second prescription, and by Sunday, we made a trip to the urgent care place to get a diagnosis for James, who didn’t want to move from his bed.

They both are healthy and well now, I think they finished their antibiotics early last week. But then last Saturday, James brought both the kids home from a birthday party and Jocelyn was crying and running a pretty high temperature, which continued to run into sunday. So last Sunday, Jocelyn and I spent 2-3 hours at the urgent care place to get a culture for her. Positive. Poor girl.

Jocelyn is particularly hard. She won’t tell you what hurts, ever.

“Here?”
“No!”
“Here?”
“NOOO!”
“Where then?”
“NOT ANYWHERE!”

Suuuuuure. Not anywhere. Sorry, kid, I’m not buying it. she always strings those “no’s” out as long as she can, so they sound more like, “noooooo-wuh!” “nooooooo-wuh!”

Daddy stayed home with her yesterday and she’s doing much better. but then last night, I felt those tell-tale prickly feelings in my throat. I got myself to a doctor this morning, and now am on augmentin.

CAN’T WE ALL JUST STAY HEALTHY? LEAVE US ALONE STREP!

LEAVE! US! ALONE!

Now if you’ll excuse me. I have to go pass out in hopes of the getting the throbbing in my head to stop and the dislodging the jagged glass that has somehow found it’s way into my throat. the worst part is knowing that this is what my kids felt when they were sick. Poor little guys.

So, while I’ve told you I dyed my hair pink, showed you pictures, told you HOW i did it, and how many times, I haven’t really talked about why I did it, or what it’s been like since.

First, a brief History of Amy’s Hair.

Primarily, it’s red. Dyed red. Dyed as brilliantly and as vibrantly red as I can get it. This is what I think of as it’s normal state, although my natural color is kind of a paper brown bag.

I have gone through some paper bag natural brown spells.. like when I was pregnant with my kids… like the time in college when my brother bet me $50 bucks that I couldn’t NOT do anything harmful to my hair for 1 year (hahaha, i showed him. Nothing harmful, took the $50 bucks and went out and bought a bottle of red dye.) I think I had somehow convinced myself to stop dying my hair for a while a year or so ago, I think I thought it was time to give it up and just highlight a lot. I think I thought that is what the Grown Up Amy should do. So I tried it out for a while. While not bad, I tossed in the no dying towel and went red.

Then I decided to go blonde for the winter last fall. that was kind of fun. I did it in a salon each time, and they never want to do anything drastic. Something about it being “too damaging” or some other hogwash. They just highlighted it each time with a light dye on the rest each time. So it took most of the winter to actually GET it blonde.

So of course, shortly after that I decided to go for the whole pink thing.

OK. Glad we got that out of the way. Now I feel like you know the actual hair backstory. Not much mindset backstory though. I guess the easiest way to fill you in on that is to say that I’ve always felt like a haircut/dye is kind of like a jolt out of personal hygiene inertia. I’m not a girly girl. I don’t love to buy makeup and paint my nails every other day. I like to shower, run a brush through my hair and go, but I know I need to spend more time on my appearance. A haircut or dye job is kind of like a shot of excitement that I use to propel myself into WANTING to do my hair up all fancy instead of prefering to use my blowdryer to heat my eyeballs until they explode rather than dry my hair with a round brush with it.

So pink was something I always kind of thought about doing but never really thought i could or would. Having a job usually precludes that sort of hair color, you know? I used to moan to James that I should have done it back when I stayed at home with the kids with no bosses or clients to be grumpy about it. Until one day last year I mentioned the pink thing to my boss, and she was totally fine, even encouraging about it. I think her exact words were, “DO IT, OOOOH, THAT WOULD BE SO COOL!”

So the thought grew more and more, like a little seed in my brain. As my hair got blonder and blonder throughout the winter, the thought of trying out pink put down roots and lifted little leaves (sorry it’s spring, i can’t help the gardening metaphors).

When someone I know sees the pink hair for the first time, they usually freak out for a bit. Then they always ask, “Why?”

My typical response is, “I thought it’d be fun.”

But if they actually seem to be more interested in my thought process, I will get into it a bit more.. I guess it all goes back to my feeling Not Grown Up. Not just FEELING Not Grown Up, but not WANTING to feel Grown Up. It’s a way to look at myself a little differently. I may be 33. I may be a surburban working mom and wife, but now when someone sees me, they can’t just stick me in that Suburban Wife & Working Mom slot and leave it at that. I’ve forced them to look at me in a different way, and I’m also forcing myself to look at me in a new way. Which leads to my second favorite answer to the question, “Why?”

“Oh.. just to prove to myself that I’m not dead.”

I’ve stopped using that one, because I’ve only once gotten the instant recognition to what that statement means. That was from a husband at the neighborhood ladies bunco gathering. He instantly knew what I meant. He motioned his thumb in the direction of his garage as he nodded and said, “Exactly the reason I bought a motorcycle.” He knew that what I meant was it’s a way to shake things up, get out of your usual routines, get out of the habit of counting the days to the weekend, to the payday, to the summer, to the holiday, to the birthday, to whatever day until one day you wake up and you’re 90 years old and about to die and you wonder why you spent all that time counting the days, and just did something TODAY.

I’ve had the pink hair for.. I think 2 weeks now? I need to check my own archives to check! As I mentioned, I went to my neighborhood bunco gathering last week. I can say that I know at least one woman who saw my hair and loved it. I am not sure how everyone else really took it.. I think that it very likely when I left there were a few, “What was she THINKING?” comments.

I suspected this, but then last night it was confirmed. I went to a Mary Kay affair for a friend in the bunco group just starting her own business. After the Mary Kay stuff ended, I stayed a while with her and 2 others, talking about anything and everything. Just before I was about to leave, one of them started to talk to me about my hair, and it wasn’t for a few moments that I realized that she thought I totally ruined my hair. she started by telling me that her mother was a hair dresser and how she did very vibrant red colors that would look awesome on me.

I first thought she was recommending me a hair dresser that does wild colors because I obviously like wild colors.. Then I realized that she was saying that her mother could help me ‘fix’ my hair.

My hair, apparently needs “fixing”.

She talked some more, and it was actually kind of sweet, she seemed to be worried about me, and while I can’t really remember what exactly she said, it was along the gist of, really, I can just be me, I don’t have to do weird extreme things, I can just be my sweet self and be happy with that, and she’s so worried about me, and i need to make sure i’m taking care of ME and finally I realized, hey! she hates my hair! a lot!

It was actually kind of shocking to hear it all and realize she thinks pink hair is some sort of desperate grab for attention. It was also refreshing to have someone just tell me right to my face what they thought, even though it was in a round about “concerned” sort of manner. The only other experiences I’ve had with STRONGLY disapproving people have been a couple of older women strangers, and they see me, and then steadfastly refuse to make eye contact, or refuse to use more than 1 word (or 1 syllable, if they can help it) answers when I speak to them. This was when I bought some fabric at the local JoAnn’s – the lady cutting the fabric would have rather cut out her tongue and gouge out her eyeballs than have to serve me, and I took a bit of evil glee in trying to get her to say more than one word to me. (“What do you think of this fabric?” etc.)

So anyway, back to the “i’m just worried about you your so sweet and you can just be YOU and OH MY GOD i don’t think you realize you’ve totally RUINED your hair I could go get you a mirror if you don’t see it OH MY GOD YOUR HAIR IS PINK you must really be depressed about something because it’s something *I* would never do, so obviously something is wrong with you!!”

OK. I’m reading a lot into this. But I thought of a lot of things I *could* have said AFTER I left, and I still have that remorseful burning feeling when you wish you had said THAT, and THAT, and boy, THAT response would have been a real zinger, and so I’m kind of using this as my venting place.

I came home and was still kind of processing my reactions to it all and kept blurting things out to james. I think the thing that made me actually angry(ish … because i wasn’t THAT angry.. actually not really angry at all. just DEFENSIVE) was the fact that she thought it was just a bid for attention.

but it got me thinking. I mean really. Who dyes their hair hot pink who is NOT looking for attention? Did I do this becuase I’m trying to get attention for some reason?

I thought about it long and hard, and aside from the normal attention that we all want on a regular basis (I mean, hello, everyone wants SOME attention or we wouldn’t say a word all day), I don’t think this is really true. When I’m walking through Target and get the OH MY GOD LOOK OVER THERE, SHE HAS PINK HAIR looks, I find it kind of tiring, and in my head, I wish that other people would dye THEIR hair an abnormal color just so it will be more NORMAL and there won’t be the head turns. I actually find myself rationalizing the color of my hair away, thinking \ things like, “It’s not like it’s not a color found IN NATURE. Haven’t these people ever seen flowers? My hair color is perfectly normal in nature!!” Yeah. I know. I talk a lot of sense while trying to get some shopping done, don’t I? –even as I acknowledge to myself that this is kind of crazy talk, OF COURSE people are going to look at the pink-haired lady, I still maintain that I didn’t do this in a depressed grab for attention.

So why DID I do it? I’ve already stated, but here goes again.

I did it to try to define myself in a new way.

I did it so that the definition of “surburban wife and mom” can no longer be applied to me with no other factors.

I did it because I always wanted to give it a try.

I did it because I didn’t want to wake up 90 years old one day and wonder how I got there. I wanted to remember the days when I had pink hair.. and maybe it’ll give me the nerve to do it again. At 90.

And.. I did it because it’s just hair. Just like I thought it’d be fun to go blonde for the winter.. I thought it’d be fun to go pink for the spring.

It’s just hair. It fucking grows back.

You’d never catch me getting a tattoo. HELLO! PERMANENT! I’m way too fickle for that.

Plus, Ow.

It’s just hair. what’s the big deal? You can find this color IN NATURE, PEOPLE.

– amy looks and looks ’til she can’t look no more.

but i’m back! you knew i would be some day. and i just spent several hours looking through the best of, browsing through the rants and raves, missed encounters is always good for a hoot, and then of course I couldn’t help looking at the for sale ads. and I just have to say.. if wanting this sofa is wrong.. I don’t ever want to be right.

now if you’ll excuse me.. furniture purchasing is just not in my plans right now! … so I’ll see you again in 6-12 months. I just can’t handle it when you have so many things I want.. i’m sorry to say goodbye so soon after returning to you.. but the pain is just too much to bear.

OH CRAIGSLIST! SAY YOU’LL WAIT FOR ME!