"bless me, Blogosphere, for I have sinned!"

"... it's been over a week since my last confession."

(if this doesn't give you an idea of how bad a Catholic I was growing up, nothing will)

So anyway, it's been pretty rough around here lately and I haven't been in the mood to share. Really, my MOOD was definitely not something anyone'd want to be sharing with me.

What's going on, you ask?

Well, I'm helping one of my dearest friends get ready to move out of the home she lovingly renovated with her husband a few years ago, because the fucktard woke up on his 40th birthday and announced he wanted a divorce. The kids are reeling, she's devastated and he's got a twinkie on the side that only a few of us know about. It sucks. I don't understand how this can really be happening to them. Other people, sure. But not this family. Mo's 40th birthday's coming up in a few months... he can go live out his midlife crisis in Alaska fishing for crab (this is something he wants to do), as long as he doesn't mess with our marriage. Otherwise, he'll be crab-bait.

Potty training El Niño was going pretty well until we got him into training pants. He'd been pooping in the toilet for over a month, letting us know several times a day when he had to go pee by saying "potty" while making the sign for potty, and had become fascinated with a book about Ernie (of Sesame Street fame) called Too Big for Diapers. These all seemed like readyness signs to *me* and I thought if we didn't get him into training pants, we'd be holding him back. Plus, it was a real pain to be running back and forth to the bathroom and stripping him of Onesies and diapers and whatever other layers of clothing he had on. I thought it'd be awesome to get him trained before I go back to work (which I really need to do soon because we're steps away from the poorhouse at this point). Well, now he doesn't want to go to the potty at all, except when he has to poo, which means that my laundry pile has EXPLODED. I will only use disposable training pants when we're out of the house, and we're usually home all day... so this means we go through a lot of training pants, cloth diapers and regular pants. In the last couple of days, he's decided he wants to run around the apartment wearing nothing at all, which means that I really, really have to watch him or he'll pee on the carpet without warning (with a look of wonderment as he does so). Oh, and his "awareness" of his bodily functions also appears to be messing with his ability to sleep, at night and at naptime. See where I'm going with this? I am one tired, cranky mutha.

On top of this, Hyde decided to walk out of school in the middle of the day a couple of days ago... intending to once again run away. He broke into our church and spent the night there, while we once again spent the night worried about where he was and if he was safe. The male teenage brain seems to me to be a minefield of anger and confusion, and I really don't know how to deal with it. He's home now, and I'm praying we can come to a negotiated peace of some sort, before I lose my mind.
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Some commenters to my meme post seemed to be very impressed that I taught myself English when I was four years old, Dutch even called me a "badass". Which is funny, because the only time I really thought of myself as a badass was the time I installed a million-dollar router that weighed twice as much as I did. Teaching myself to read English has always seemed like an oddity. As a little girl, I didn't realize that English wasn't a phonetic language and was very confused when I came to the States and people started speaking to me. What I've been a little curious about is what my parents were thinking, leaving me in the care of my uncle... and what he was thinking taking me to the UN when I was seven years old. But that's material for another post.

Finally, some sweet things have happened. El Niño has a few new words: hello, morning, yo-yo, hat, Whoo-Oo for his beloved, and newt (for nose, it's a hybrid of the Spanish and English words). I also caught him yesterday trying to get his nipple up to his lips; perhaps he's hoping to nurse himself? LOL! The happiest news is that we may finally have a breakthrough in our attempts to partially wean: he seems to really like Oat milk.