There is a good chance that I should have had this post done yesterday.  But alas, it did not happen. Let’s call this Quick Takes for whatever day Amy gets herself together enough to post it, shall we?  Ok, deal.

There is no doubt that summer is busy, but week before last we were just slammed from every direction. Sunday we had a flood in our bathroom. Two inches of water encased the bathing area and potty area, although luckily it didn’t move much into the dressing / closet area where the carpet is. We used every towel in our house to sop up the water, in addition to a shop vac and the carpet cleaner. It was truly a minor disaster. But we managed to get through it, laughing about how we just added a new memory to our store of doosies.

The next day, Monday, was possibly the worst day of it all. Brady started his science camp and on the way home from dropping him off at 9am Luna threw up in the car. Four times. It was a lot. Did I mention it was yogurt-based? Have you ever smelled yogurt vomit in a small, enclosed space? It’s not pretty. (Reason #298 to love leather seats: easy vomit clean up.)  When we got home, I spent 4 hours cleaning Luna, her clothes, the car, and finally the car seat. Oh, the car seat. What a wonderful invention filled with about a million nooks and crannies for vomit to linger. The majority of the time was spent cleaning that car seat. Let’s say this: vinegar is your friend for smells in safety belt straps.

At 1pm I went to pick Brady up from camp – in TallHusband’s car since my car was seat-less… lucky for me he had taken his motorcycle that morning. When we arrived home 30 minutes later I checked the mail and found a package.  I didn’t think we were expecting anything, but gee, who knows what TallHusband randomly orders for his computer.  I opened it up and found $130 worth of men’s vitamins and acai berry weight loss pills. The package had been addressed to TallHusband. I called him at work and he assured me he didn’t have any clue what they were. I thought maybe it was a mistaken order, so I opened our bank account online to check and see if we had paid for them.

Yep. We had. Along with about $700 of additional fraudulent charges in the three days prior. Ugh. We’d been hacked.

I called our bank right away and spoke with the absolute most friendly, helpful person. She assured me that we’d have everything taken care of and proceeded to go through each charge from the past month to see where the fraud started and who’s card had been stolen. Turns out it was TallHusband’s card. (I won’t lie when I say that I breathed a huge sigh of relief that it hadn’t been mine.)  Whoever had stolen the debit card number had charged up a slew of bizarre, unrelated things: AARP membership, 4 versions of Norton software, 2 orders of flowers, the aforementioned pills, a credit reporting agency enrollment, a teen werewolf thriller from barnesandnoble.com, entertainment coupon books for the cities of New Orleans, LA and Glendale, CA… the list goes on and on. The oddest thing is that they had everything sent to our house (minus the flowers). We got our city police involved, although we have had no resolution on that front, and have been refunded money from all vendors except for the original package that started it all, the $129.77 worth of pills. TallHusband is now sporting a new card and we are never letting our debit cards out of our sight again. No more restaurant uses and no more uses at outdoor sliders like gas stations or Sonic. Lesson learned.

Needless to say, that was a bad few days of seemingly endless phone calls as we continued to fall deeper down the rabbit hole of “How did this happen and what can happen next?”

Later that same week my dad had surgery to reverse his ileostomy so I was out of town for 2 days. Now this week Brady is sick. My in-laws from Georgia showed up Thursday, but have now hastily retreated due to the lingering possibility of the random vomiting illness befalling them. Oh, and did I mention that I started back at my old job part-time? Yeah, more on that later.

Ok, it’s later.

Remember back in May when I was debating going back to work? The Universe, I felt, was trying to tell me something at the time and I tried my best to listen. I listened so well that I nearly gave myself an ulcer! Since that post I have been stressing about needing to get a job.  I applied for the jobs through the online education company. I also met up with my former employer (at the local college) about coming back to work for them.

Eventually I moved past the online education company (it’s a very long story, but let’s just say that there is no way I would want to work there after the experience I had). I kept receiving e-mails from the local college asking if I was going to apply and telling me nice things like they’d work with my schedule. I was torn. It was decent money and they were willing to make my schedule 7am-3pm. After thinking about it, and really doing some soul searching, and I mean a lot, I realized that I  would still have to put the kids in after care and full daycare during holidays, and wasn’t ready to give up this time with them yet. It would have been so stressful to try to get home and spend quality time with them, plus keep up with all the household stuff; it just didn’t seem worth it. TallHusband agreed. It would have been really great to just dump all that money into savings every month, but we don’t need the money as much as my kids need me to be around.

My decision was further solidified by the happenings of the week from Hell. If I had been working full time, things wouldn’t have been taken care of the way they needed to be. More charges would have occurred since no one would have been home to catch the package before bank closing. Luna would have been sick at school, waiting to be picked up. For now I have happily recommitted myself to the position of family manager. The pay stinks, but the benefits are outstanding. Turns out the Universe was, indeed, trying to tell me something: stop looking for something that is missing because you are where you are meant to be, right here, right now, with your kids.

This summer has been a phenomenal boost for Brady. He has been so much more calm and even having the opportunity to spend copious amounts of time alone with me. I don’t think I fully recognized how much having Luna effected him; I always thought that I was doing a good job of finding time to spend with him, even when she was home. But I have realized something of great importance throughout this experience: he and I are both very different people around Luna. Even when I was spending time alone in his room with him or playing a game just with him, I still had my “mom to a toddler/pre-schooler” hat on, fielding random questions and walk-ins from her, or stopping occasionally to get her a drink or snack, and he had his “annoyed brother of a toddler/pre-schooler” hat on. You know how I can tell things are better for him above every other sign? He is incredibly affectionate again. For a long time he was resisting letting me give him a kiss on the cheek or even getting snuggly with him on the couch. Now he’s so sweet and affectionate. He’s happy and joyful and radiant. I love it.

Oh yeah, the job. Crud. I’m really tired. Getting 1-2 hours of sleep each night for the past 3 has been really hard on my old noggin.

So, when telling my former employer that I wouldn’t be applying for the job, they asked me if I would consider coming back on a part-time, temporary basis until they filled the positions they had advertised. I told them I would give them the month of August and part of September if necessary, only on days Luna is in school and only until 2:30pm so I can get home to get them. It will be very little money, but I know I’m helping them out when they are in desperate need of assistance. That makes me feel good about it.

Now you’re up to speed. This is why I haven’t posted. So much has been happening and I’ve been awful about getting back to the blog. I see you’re all still visiting, waiting for a new post, and I heartily appreciate it. You can’t imagine. Soon, when I’m done working, I will have three days each week to devote to writing and portfolio building. During that time I have no doubt that I will be posting more often once again.

Tags: baby germs, being mom, Brady, love, Luna, mommy mistakes, on my mind, potpourri of a post