There's a Baby, Yes, There's a Baby About to be Born

This picture really has nothing to do with this post (Boyfriend took it on our trip to Yosemite the first year he was here) but it's a great shot and looks wintery and it's Christmas, damnit, so it kind of works, right?

Unless we've missed the text with the birth announcement, Soccer Player and the Hairdresser are still awaiting the birth of their baby. I'm hoping now that the Hairdresser has gone over her due date, she won't have to go camping with the newborn on Boxing Day (or as soon as it's born if it's after that day), as was previously planned. All of our friends who have had babies so far have tried to tell her that camping with a brand new baby is not where you want to be when you've just gotten out of the hospital and are trying to figure out how to be a mom still, but the Hairdresser is a trooper and up til now has said she is going. I can't wait to hear what they've had and what they've named it and I can't wait to buy it a "Welcome to the World" outfit here to bring back with me. I wonder if she's in labor, as I write this, and is having a Christmas baby? That'd be pretty neat, but probably not the most fun Christmas the Hairdresser would ever have! Anyway, I'm sending my love and my prayers down to you guys. I hope that it is a quick and painless delivery and recovery and Boyfriend and I can't wait to meet the new little guy or girl when we are back.

In other news, Mom and Dad both got sick last week and are still getting knocked around by it. We're pretty sure that Mom has come down with the Swine, while Dad's cold or flu seems to be different. They had a not so successful, but very stressful, trip down to Orange County last weekend to see my grandparents. If you read the last post (Runaway Train) about the situation, the update is nothing has changed and it has actually gotten a lot worse. Not only is my Grandpa on a quick downhill slope, to the point where my Mom thinks we'll be having a funeral before I go back in February, but now my Grandma is falling apart, too. She's gotten in two accidents in two different cars, side swiping a total of 5 cars, in two consecutive Wednesday nights! My Mom is understandably upset by what is going on, but on both trips she's taken to see them my grandparents have ignored the help she's offered so there's not much for her to do. The light at the end of the tunnel is that my Mom has found an assisted living place in Stockton that has apartments on site that allow the tennants to keep a small animal. My Grandma's brothers all live in Stockton and we've been saying for a few years now that she and my Grandpa should move of up there so they have more people to hang out with so once he passes away we think Grandma should take her dog and move to this facility. It's a good option because she is still capable of living mostly on her own for now and she can still keep her dog, but if and when she declines, she can then move in to the main part of the facility that offers more round-the-clock care. I think she really misses her brothers and this way she can see them more often, too.

Happy Holidays, right?

Other than that, our little 5some of me, Boyfriend, Mom, Dad, and Nae are looking forward to spending Christmas together. I've had all my Christmas shopping done for a few days now and only have a few things left to wrap. Boyfriend is stressed because lots of his online ordered presents haven't arrived yet. Nae is at work now (Trader Joe's) and has a taco eating contest with her coworkers and then she's coming over to make Christmas cookies and spend the night. Boyfriend and I said way back in October that we'd like to try and make gnocchi for Christmas Eve dinner so we'll get that under way this afternoon and hopefully take some good pictures for you guys and I'll post up the recipes. Nae's in charge of the food tomorrow and she's making some kind of roast beast, yorkshire pudding, homemade ice cream, and other stuff so I probably won't fit in to any of my new Christmas clothes after the 24 hours of eating I'm about to undertake! The weather here is bright and sunny and the air is crisp so I think we'll probably get up and do presents tomorrow morning and then go for a family walk and then just hang out for the rest of the day. I like having a mellow Christmas like that.

What about you? Is all your shopping and wrapping done? Are you having a mellow or a stressful Christmas Eve/Day?

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas! Hope you get everything you've asked for and more!

I Just Ain't the Same Without You in My Life

As I write this I'm still a big, teary, snotty ball of a human. "Has something happened back home?" you wonder. Nope. "Has something happened between Little D and Boyfriend?" you might be thinking. Nope, again. What has happened is I made the mistake of watching the Will Smith movie Seven Pounds. If you haven't seen it: DON'T! I was sobbing so hard through the end of it that they were like waves rolling through my body. I'm going to spoil the movie for you if you haven't seen it, so stop reading if you don't want to know. In the end Will Smith's character is wracked with guilt over a car accident that he caused that killed seven people. To make up for what he has done he sets out to change seven good people's lives. He repays them each with a pound of flesh, which is a reference to Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice". In Will Smith's character's case that pound of flesh is literal as he ends up killing himself by taking a box jellyfish in to the bathtub with him. He saves seven lives through organ donation, but makes the ultimate sacrifice and repayment of his wrongs by giving up his own life in order to do so.

I thought Seven Pounds was going to be a feel good movie and it was in the sense that seven lives were saved through the sacrifice of one man, but I hadn't read much about the movie and didn't know there was a suicide in it. This week has been pretty rough because it was the two year anniversary of Uncle B's passing. I forgot on the actual date and I usually email my pseudo cousins then and let them know I'm thinking of them and their Dad and that he hasn't been forgotten one bit so I was feeling awful about that and then my little cousin tells me no one even brought up the anniversary on the actual day so I felt even worse for her and her brother. Then I got to talking to my Mom about how the anniversary had just passed and was sad realizing that two years have passed and it still doesn't seem real. So I've just been thinking about him this week and missing him and his crazy antics and missing the little cousins and feeling super bad for them and I just didn't need a suicide movie on top of it, I guess. If you're feeling sad it really isn't the movie for you!

Anyway, I'll just close this by saying that we still love you and miss you Uncle B and I wish you were still here to inspect my boyfriends for me and call me a Rugrat and yell our last name over the fence when you wanted our attention and stop in for dinner at our house unannounced whenever it suited you and make fun of some of our prissier neighbors and I wish you were still here for your two great kids because they still really needed you and would've been so stoked to have you at their soccer games and wrestling matches. We'll never forget the fun times, the laughter, or the craziness and drama you brought to our lives. Rest in peace xoxo Oh yeah and "Stussy Rat Patrol" for life/forever!

Let's Talk About Sex, Baby

Have you guys ever watched this show? The acting is horrible, the story line is horrible, the messages it portrays are horrible...but I can't stop watching this train wreck! Basically, the story goes that the chick in the picture has sex one time (at band camp, no less) and gets knocked up. She's, also, only 15. She decides to keep the baby and along the way gets married to some dorky boy (still at age 15) from her class who she's dated for all of about 3 weeks. I guess on the season finale, she had the baby.

I was out of the loop, having only seen this show once at Nae's house with her, Boyfriend, and the Camp Counselor, and then a few more times at Mom and Dad's with Nae. I saw that the show was coming back last week and decided to start watching it again. On the first episode of the season some ultra-Christian girl decides to lose her V-card to her college boyfriend. She tells her parents of her plans and they are unhappy. She isn't on speaking terms with her Dad in the episode because of her sex plans and she doesn't speak to him before he's off on a week long business trip. She ends up having sex that night and of course her Dad's plane ends up crashing and he is killed without her speaking to him. Her Mom comes home crying and the girl says, "Don't worry Mom, I just had sex." And then her brother with Down Syndrome yells at her that she's killed their father by having sex.

Ummmmm, awesome! Hahaha, so basically the message of this whole entire tv show is anytime you have premarital sex you are going to F* up your life in a big way....you're either going to get pregnant or kill your Dad. How did her having sex bring that plane down I wonder? I had to stop watching the second episode of the season to post this because they are still going on about how she killed her Dad by having sex. And now they are also blaming her friend who is sexually active for making "sex look like fun so Grace would want to do it, too." Really, Secret Life, really?!? This show makes my blood boil because of it's stupidity and the messages it sends to teenagers and yet I still can't stop watching it. Yes, I think you should be in a committed relationship and use birth control before you start having sex, but everytime you do "it" someone's not going to die and you wouldn't get knocked up if you had proper education about birth control. As an adult, I can laugh about this dumb show and the hysteria it perpuates about teen sex, but if I was watching this as a teenager, I'd be really scared about having sex (even more scared than I already was from my Catholic religious education on sex) and I guess that's their goal?

But hey, here's an idea....more education, less hysteria!!! Abstinence Only Education is not working and has not worked. Let's empower kids with knowledge. Kids are horny, they are going to have sex for the most part anyway, so let's give them the education where they know how to do it safely and so that they know where to get help and what kind of help is available to them if they do get in to trouble along the way.

I've got my fingers crossed (but won't hold my breath) that one of the adults on the show finds some sense and tells this chick that having sex does not bring down planes. How would the mile high club exist if it did?

A Teenage Suicide/ Before I Go/ This is Not an Exit

I remember the first time I was affected by suicide. We had a morning surf practice and then we were going to have a tour of the local surf museum and like none of the guys showed up. I thought it was pretty rude, but figured they must have just had a big night before. We were walking through the surf museum when either the surf coach or one of the few guys that had shown up got a call. All the guys were over at Fabio’s house because is older brother had killed himself. I wasn’t friends with Fabio; I don’t think I had ever even spoken to him. My sister knew him because he was dating her best friend’s older sister. One of my friends from class was best family friends with his family and I knew that he, JB, would be very upset. They are pretty tacky and touristy now, but I remember that the surf museum had St. Christopher necklaces for sale as he is supposed to be the patron saint of stuff to do with water. Anyway, I picked one up for Fabio just to say someone is still looking out for you right now and sent it and a card to him. We went to the funeral and it was heartbreaking. The crowd was huge, standing room only and it was a very big church. This young man must have been really well liked and yet he had felt all alone in the world.

The boys on the surf team were in to Unwritten Law and used to play a few of the songs obsessively. Nae and I couldn’t drive at the time so we’d get rides to school after practice with the boys and it was there that I heard them and liked the songs they’d play on repeat so I got the CD and "Teenage Suicide" was one of the songs on there. That was a pretty rough song to hear at the time, but the killer for me was "Before I Go". Even though I didn’t really know Fabio and I had never met his brother, I just imagined what both of them had/were feeling and the song broke my heart.

Fast forward two years. I’m sitting at our dining room table trying to write my final paper ever for my AP English class when the phone rings. It’s this girl, who went to my high school and I had gone to grade school with; we used to be friends but ran in different groups once we got to MD. She was kinda crying I think when she said, “Noah has been shot; he’s dead.”

(When we were little Noah and I lived across the street from one another. We weren’t best friends, but we were close and did lots of stuff together. We had one of the only pools in the neighborhood so Noah and his brothers and sister would come over and swim. We also used to carpool together and I remember one day his parents couldn’t take us to school but I didn’t know that, my parents had left for work, and Noah and his older brother held me "hostage" because they didn’t want me to call my babysitter and ask her for a ride. I was sneaky and got to the phone though and I remember Noah’s big brother was pretty upset when a ride showed up to take us to school. Also, when we were in Kindergarten, Noah and I decided he should have a pool, too, so we spent an afternoon trying to dig one in his backyard. After grade school, Noah ended up at another local Catholic high school and I didn’t see him for nearly four years, until one afternoon when I went to pick up Nae from water polo, he was there running at the track. That had been earlier this same year and the last time I would see him.)

I started crying and said, “What are you talking about? That’s crazy.” The girl didn’t have any details so we hung up. I came outside where my Dad was watering the lawn or something and was hysterically crying at that point. He started yelling at me “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” He was worried that something had happened to my Mom or sister because neither was at home. I told him about Noah. I went inside and called my Mom at work and she said, “Listen, it’s just a rumor at this point, there are no facts, just pray that that’s what it is, a misunderstanding, a rumor.” So I prayed and prayed, but all the while thought “this probably isn’t a rumor, he’s probably dead, but why?” At this point it was still unclear that he had killed himself. I called my old friend Chiara, I think, it’s a little fuzzy how I got more details, but it was true. Noah was dead and he had done it to himself. After that, I had to drive over to our high school to pick up Nae from a swim meet. She could see that something was wrong and asked if she should drive me. She was probably thinking it was more drama to do with my loser exbf. When I told her about Noah, she burst in to tears. Nae was a pretty guarded and tough person at this time, I don’t think I had seen her cry in years, but here she was driving and crying and asking me to tell her about it. We finally heard from our other old neighbors that he had been upset or something and said he was going out, but he hadn’t really, he just got in his car. He ended up shooting himself in the driveway of his family’s house.

The next day at school I was a mess. His rosary service was that night and somehow they were able to fix him up so he could have an open casket. I just went briefly up to see him and all I could think was that he looked exactly like his older brother, the one who had held me "hostage" all those years ago. The funeral was the next day and I think his whole class came to the funeral. We were about a month from graduating.

I became pretty deeply depressed. I had never lost someone that I loved. My friends hadn’t either so they didn’t know how to handle it and just didn’t talk about it. I cried myself to sleep most nights thinking about him. I remember writing him notes in my journal telling him how much he was missed and that I probably wasn’t the only one missing him this much and how I wish time could be turned back so he’d get a second chance to make the decision over again. I remember getting trashed the night before his birthday….I was at a concert with some friends and the loser exbf and I was underage. I passed out on the dance floor after busting some awesome dance moves, or so I’ve been told, I don’t remember dancing but I do remember laying on the ground. My friend Candy put me on a bar stool and told me not to move, of course I did. Some security guards found me and kicked me out. I threw up in some planters at Downtown Disney, just next to the "Happiest Place on Earth"- classy, I know. I also lost a thong and had to walk around with only one for the rest of the night. The next day me and some of the kids from our grade school class had a little graveside service for Noah. It was pretty painful to be at. I think for a good six months I was a mess because of it, but I tried to hide it from everyone. I still think about him now and I still visited his grave on his birthday and the day of his death when I lived in the area.

About a year and a half ago, I lost someone else to suicide. We called him Uncle B, but he wasn’t our uncle. As I got older, we used to call each other “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” and I know that sounds creepy considering I called him Uncle, but it wasn’t. Everyone thought I had a crush on him when I was little so he’d call me girlfriend to tease me and in the end it was pretty weird when he started dating someone who was only a little bit older than I was. Uncle B was this larger than life guy. He had a pretty sarcastic sense of humor and he was an asshole when he was in a bad mood, but when he was in a good mood he was on fire. He used to come over to our house all the time for dinner, just unannounced and say, “What are we having?” Very often now when I’m watching TV or a movie, someone will say something or do something and it totally reminds me of Uncle B. He left behind 3 kids and an ex-wife who was his best friend. It was really sad going back home knowing he’d never barge in to our house again or yell over the fence to us and call us Rugrats. He’s someone I will always miss and never forget. I know his son is still hurting about the loss of his Dad, he’s only in high school and it’s a rough time for any kid, and I wish I could take away some of his pain so he didn’t have to handle such a heavy load on his own. From the reports his mom gives us, sometimes I’m afraid he’s drowning in this pain and I wish that I could be there to help him swim awhile longer til it stopped hurting so much.

Even just writing this has brought back all the hurt and sadness over losing these two guys and has me crying. It doesn’t really get better, you just learn to live with it.

Life hurts so bad
Don't want you sad
Just look back to
Good times we had
I'd give my soul for you I know
Want to hold you before I go
Before I go
I need you to know
I'm still alive in you
It's my time to go
Don't stay up late
I'm not afraid
And I don't want your heart to break
I know I've seen what's been unseen
Live fast, die young
It's part of me