All men dream: but not equally - Thomas E. Lawrence

Lately I have been thinking about the many dreams I have had that never came true. It isn’t as if I get a hopeless feeling because these dreams are turning into realities, it is just one of the fact of life. Sometimes our dreams don’t come true, the choice is to dwell or dream again.

My daughter still isn’t making too many waves verbally, not in the way I would have thought she would. She babbles more and makes sounds. She lovely to be sure, but the fact that she is severely delayed in language leaves her feeling frustrated… and honestly me too. She can’t tell me if she isn’t feeling well or if she I hungry. The only word she can really use to answer me is no. I go through a lot of ‘nos’ to get a yes.

I know in the end that it will be okay. My dreams had adjusted for her. Instead of dreaming of college I dream of her just being happy. Maybe she

I think I might cry the day she says: “Mommy, juice.”

It has been forever…

I haven’t blogged in forever. I guess that is fairly obvious to those of you who actually follow me. At the moment I am just trying to distress. Today is going to be a really hard day.

For the most part, I am prepared. I hope that today not only brings the diagnosis that will help us receive the quality programs that we need but also a little justification. I’m tired of having to defend myself to everyone.

I know people try to be supportive but nobody can understand what it is like to be in my situation. Sophia will be my one and only child. I want her to be happy and healthy and the idea of her never having a typical life makes me sick. Can you imagine never having friends? Or never really speaking? It is insanely scary and I don’t know how I can not blame myself.

I have to leave here around 1 ish, now it is 11. After the appointment today I have to go out and be happy with my friends. And frankly I don’t know if I can. I guess we will see.

Anyway, sorry it has been so long.

Until next time...
Flawed

Spring is in the air!

I’m swept up with spring…

and a special thanks to Google for the fun image. I love Eric Carle and to be very honest I am ready for winter to end.

“We have eyes, and we're looking at stuff all the time, all day long. And I just think that whatever our eyes touch should be beautiful, tasteful, appealing, and important.”Eric Carle

I wanted to honor the end to what we know as The Girl’s Next Door…

With my close friends...





Create your own FACEinHOLE

What Kind of Superhero Would You Be?

You Would Be a Upstanding Superhero

You are alert and observant. You can see through people easily. You know who's evil and who's good. You need a lot of freedom in your life. You like to do your own thing, and you don't fit into any normal mold. You understand people quite well and often know what others are thinking. Because of this, you can get people to do what you want. You are a shapeshifter who fits in with almost any group. You can get along with anyone. You're quite flexible. You are a true philosopher. You are thirsty for wisdom. You are trying to figure out the meaning of life.

What Kind of Superhero Would You Be?

Communication

I saw this comic and it made me laugh and reminded me of myself. My best and I are always talking about how it is just easier for men to be friends and maybe it is because they are simpler about communicating. I know we women complain about men being emotionally dull… or not talking about things enough, but maybe sometimes that is best.

I know both sides aren’t great, but what about a happy medium?

BBC thinks most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books...

Apparently the BBC thinks most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books .

I wonder how well I will do. I guess it is just easier for me to cross out the ones I have read.


1) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6) The Bible
7) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11) Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12) Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13) Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14) Complete Works of Shakespeare
15) Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16) The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17) Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18) Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19) The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20) Middlemarch - George Eliot
21) Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22) The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23) Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24) War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25) The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27) Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28) Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29) Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30) The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32) David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33) Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34) Emma - Jane Austen
35) Persuasion - Jane Austen
36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39) Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40) Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41) Animal Farm - George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45) The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46) Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47) Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48) The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49) Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50) Atonement - Ian McEwan
51) Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52) Dune - Frank Herbert
53) Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54) Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55) A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56) The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57) A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60) Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61) Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63) The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64) The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65) Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66) On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67) Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68) Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69) Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70) Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72) Dracula - Bram Stoker
73) The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses - James Joyce
76) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77) Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal - Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession - AS Byatt
81) A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82) Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83) The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84) The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86) A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87) Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90) The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92) The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93) The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94) Watership Down - Richard Adams
95) A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98) Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x38
100) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Mine is better then 6, but I would like to have more of this list crossed out before 2010.

Goodbye... until we can say hello again

I haven’t posted in a while. I think a lot of that has to do with my avoidance of a recent event in my life. I really feel as if I need to post about it now, because if I don’t I will never have a chance to really express my feelings.

My great-uncle died. He was 70, and while I know that death is not an end, it is still hard. The events of his death are depressing made it worse, but I don’t want to get into that and bring down everyone’s days.

We had the viewing on Sunday and the funeral on Monday. In Greek tradition we wore all black.

I am okay now. I feel like I just needed to post this… for me or him.

Inside the Room of My Soul

Your Soul is Fiery

You are very passionate and quite temperamental. While you can be moody, you always crave comfort. You are a very grounded, responsible, and realistic person. People may not want to hear the truth from you, but they're going to get it. You believe that people see you as larger than life and important. While this is true, they also think you're a bit full of yourself. Your near future is all about change, but in very small steps. The end of the journey looks far, but it's much closer than you realize. For you, love is all about caring and comfort. You couldn't fall in love with someone you didn't trust.

Inside the Room of Your Soul

Board Game Reviews, first ever!

Well my friends and I had our first planned weekday board game night… and it was all that I hoped it could be. They came over to my place, which in itself is rare because I live out towards the country while they are towards the city. My friend brought a chicken and we had stove top and veggies. (Okay we all love stovetop…)

Anyway, the important part of this blog is really my board game ratings. Are you ready?

The first game we played last night was Scattogories. It is a fun game, where knowing a lot can really helpful. You can think outside of the boy but all things written down are subject to a vote so if your fellow game members think you are insane for your choice then you can’t get a point. The biggest frustration with this game is the timer, the ticking is annoying and the last few seconds it goes into the domdomdomdom, faster and faster… which makes you want to throw the damn thing out the window.

My team of ‘experts’, which I call the Board Game Committee, have rated Scattogories, I could list the scores we each gave but I decided to do an average of them. Everything is on a 1-5 scale, 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest.


The average score for the amount of fun the game is: 3.5
The average score for the amount of difficulty: 3.75
The average score for the overall competiveness: 4.5

Giving Scattogories an overall average score of: 3.75


The second game we played, yes we played 2 which definitely made us go past of bed times, was Loaded questions. Some of you might have played this game, but we did the adult version. I would say this was a good game, some questions were very lame will others funny. Some of them made my husband feel like the game was made just for women. And honestly he kind of slowed this game a bit because he is too logical and needed to find the best and honest answer. I thought this game was great, definitely not for children. I also think you need all women or a good mix of both women and men. This game has a lot of sexual content so I don’t suggest taking it to a gathering where anyone might be offended.


My team of ‘experts’, which I call the Board Game Committee, have rated Loaded Questions Adult Version, I could list the scores we each gave but I decided to do an average of them. Everything is on a 1-5 scale, 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest.


The average score for the amount of fun the game is: 4.25
The average score for the amount of difficulty: 2
The average score for the overall competiveness: 1.75

Giving Loaded Questions Adult Version an overall average score of: 3.75


I think it is interesting that they both got fairly equal scores, but in defense of Loaded Questions Adult Version, my husband might have been a little meaner to it considering he is such a logical person.


Well I hope you all enjoyed my first blog about board games, I do plan to make this happen every couple weeks. If anyone has any game recommendations I’d love to hear them!

The Rat Race...

I’m exhausted, which is one of the many reasons why it has taken me forever and a day to post. Have you ever been this way? Its not just physical exhaustion but emotional and mental. I know I don’t have a hard life, I know this because growing up was tough for me but now things are much brighter. I just think with all the obligations I have in my life, along with the trials that I am going through I need a break. When I take a break, I fall further behind. I know it is a rat race I can’t win, so why am I doing this to myself? I just want to enjoy each moment not dread them.

Anyway just a small thought…

off to the races.

Broken

This weekend wasn’t supposed to bad for me, but it was. It didn’t start out that way; in fact I was pretty excited about the weekend. My mom and aunt came to visit me on Saturday, I had a party for my friend’s son’s 3rd birthday to attend, and then on Sunday I had church and a super bowl party to attend with one of my best friends. I was looking forward to the weekend... but of course that came crashing all down.

I came home from the birthday party, after a full day of being busy. I had spent much of Friday night cleaning and working on homework, and pretty much all of Saturday morning cleaning and running to Costco, then lunch with my mom and aunt. My husband came outside to great me at the car. Now thinking about it, I know that he was purposely trying to meet me and hurt me. He told me about our outrageous cell phone bill, I told him I was sorry and that I thought we had more minutes then we did.

I don’t think I need to go into the events of that night, because I am not proud of myself. He pushed me to my breaking point. I haven’t had the most pleasant thoughts of late, some days just waking up makes me feel as if I should just give up. I’m not sure why I am like this, I didn’t used to be. My world came crashing down that night, and I think what hurts the most is that he did it to be mean to me.

I feel now as if I have been taken back months. I worked so hard to reach a certain point and now I seem to have fallen off the wagon and fallen backwards. I don’t understand why he needed to kick me when I was down. I know that this weekend will shape my life forever and the relationship I have with him.

All things have a beginning…

So here is the start of my blog. I know that I often think that beginnings should be something special, like starting of with a BANG but I know that sometimes that is impossible. So here is my start:

Today was an okay day. Most days, my daughter Sophia’s lack of language leaves us both frustrated. I hate waking up early to drive to Baltimore, so on the days that I can sleep in, I do. Today I slept until 10 am. I have to admit it was nice, I woke up before Sophia and I was able to actually brush my teeth without a little one attached to my leg. When she did come down, I decided to try to see if she would be willing to eat donuts with powered sugar. Normally trying new foods is like pulling teeth with her. In fact we would go out to eat, and even though I know she likes fries, I would have to still shove them in her mouth to remind her. She liked the donuts just fine, I know they aren’t exactly the healthiest snack but sometimes you have to live a little.

We took a shower, and before I could get her dressed I had something happened that took my attention from her. In that moment she managed to get her snow boots on. Wearing only a diaper and her boots she waited in front of the baby gate at the top of the steps. I had to laugh. She made my day in that moment; had anything else go wrong today I could have remembered that moment and been in a better mood.

We had a lot of shopping to do today. Her second birthday is on Feb 2, and her party is on the 7th. We are doing a Backyardigans theme, because she likes them. They seem to be pretty popular because there wasn’t many plates left. I got everything I could, we went to the party supply store and target. (Of course all these things had to be overly costly but I guess you can’t put a price on happy children.)

I know this doesn’t sound like a wild time, but to me it was a great day. We moved at our pace and talked. (Well she babbled which is great!)

For me, any day that can be consider a ‘normal’ day is great. So maybe this is a great start to my blog.