I have been hav­ing myself a lit­tle pity party the last few days. Now I am bet­ter. Every­one needs a good pity party every once in a while. The only trou­ble is.. you are the only one who enjoys them­selves. Every­one else thinks you are being a pain in the you know what. I don’t have many, but when I do, they are doozies !I was feel­ing put upon, not lis­tened to or respected, frus­trated, tense, stressed, tired, mis­un­der­stood, very tired of explain­ing my posi­tion or defend­ing it, weepy, crazy, and all around bitchy. The other thing I have dis­cov­ered in my pity par­ties is that the person/people I am most upset with usu­ally don’t even know it!! I am feel­ing mis­er­able and they seem­ingly could care less. Who is the fool here? Now that I am “over” my pity party I can casu­ally observe what makes a good pity party for me. First, I have to be in a really bad mood. Than I can ratio­nal­ize that the whole world and the gods are against me and only me. I refuse to see any­thing good in my life. I kick things. I never throw things but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to. I get in my car some­times and drive and yell. Not a good com­bi­na­tion really, now that I think about it. I mope. I refuse to talk. I pout. I yell some more. I swear…alot. I cry…alot. Some­times my pity par­ties are jus­ti­fied. Most often they are not. I do not have a piti­ful life but, to hear me tell it at my worst, you wouldn’t know that. You see, my prob­lem is that I have a really hard time seper­at­ing where I end and oth­ers begin. That dreaded word “bound­aries”! Don’t you love to hate it? I know I need to use them, and respect when oth­ers use them, but they are darn near invis­i­ble to me!!  A prob­lem to be sure. Some­times I just get tired know­ing all this stuff I need to work on. I just want to stomp my foot and say “NO!”  But I don’t. Even­tu­ally I pick myself up, dust myself off, and go about the work of mak­ing me a bet­ter me once again. Until the next pity party. Maybe next time I’ll send out invi­ta­tions.
On a dif­fer­ent sub­ject. Today, when I was dri­ving home from town, I noticed that cars com­ing towards me kept pulling off the road. Odd. I kept look­ing in my rearview mir­ror to see what was com­ing down the road that they were try­ing to avoid. Than I noticed that the long line of cars in front of me was going rather slow( my kids are now say­ing “How slow could they be going? You only drive 55!!!!) Than I noticed no one was pass­ing.” A HA” I said. A funeral pro­ces­sion. Some­how I had cut into a funeral line when I came around a curve in the high­way. I LOVE that peo­ple pull off when a funeral line goes by. I have done that all my life and con­tinue to do so unless I logis­ti­cally can­not. I have taught my kids that, but don’t know if they attempt to do it or not. What a lovely way to show respect for not only the one who has died, but for the fam­ily trav­el­ing after. I remem­ber when I have been in funeral pro­ces­sions myself, and have watched peo­ple pull over, just how com­fort­ing that was. Strangers, for a moment, paus­ing. It touched me and still does. Remem­ber to do it.
Grand munchkin Claire has a new favorite word. Yucky. She and I have been vac­u­um­ing up asian bee­tles like crazy but, of course, as soon as I turn off the vac­uum, a dozen appear. I am say­ing the whole time. “Yucky bugs, Claire, yucky!” So now  when­ever she sees a bug she picks it up and brings it to me and says“Yucky”. Obvi­ously we need to work on some details here. She is now also at that stage where she hates to have her dia­per changed. Chas­ing a messy, stinky bot­tomed mov­ing kid, who scam­pers like the wind, is not my idea of a good time. We are into bribes. I have a whole arse­nal of toys she hasn’t played with in a while by my side now to tempt her while I am chang­ing her. She has caught on. You try hold­ing two legs with one hand, lift­ing an wip­ing with the other, all while she is twist­ing com­pletely over. They don’t teach you about THAT one in par­ent classes. They can’t. The baby pop­u­la­tion would bot­tom out (HA HA HA HA HA) Sorry.
Stange how things pop into your head. As I was just typ­ing about Claire, it occured to me that we have pic­tures of Karah and Sherm on their baby potty, but not Chels. How can that be? The bet­ter ques­tion is “How do we rec­tify that?” Any­one? Any­one?   Hope you have a good one.