I thought I had it all under control this morning.  Kids woke up relatively fine, got orders put together and ready to drop off at FedEx, couldn’t find my usual black legging-type pants to wear to the gym, so I decided to just grab a pair of shorts, toss them into the gym bag, and head out.  When I got to the gym and went to change into the shorts, I realized that while the tag might have said they were a particular size, they were clearly meant for hips that were much smaller than mine.  Still, I figured that even though they were kind of tight (oh, who am I kidding?  REALLY tight.  As in, never should have left the confines of the locker room tight), I’d go ahead and do my run.

I’m training, ultimately, for a marathon, but right now I’m building up to a half marathon, that is scheduled at the end of February.  I’ve had sort muscles in this really weird spot – kind of next to, but underneath, my shins.  Not shin splints, it’s definitely a muscle that is sore.  I could barely go past a mile on Monday, and iced them down on Monday and Tuesday nights, figuring I’d be good to go today.  Well, between the muscles still being sore and the “chub rub” (you know, ladies, when your inner thigh “chub” rubs against itself?) which was making the already-too-tight shorts go up to the nether regions, I managed about five excruciating (from embarrassment, I wasn’t THAT sore) minutes on the treadmill.  Thank goodness I go during a weird hour when there are only a handful of people around!

I decided to not make it a completely wasted trip, and grabbed a magazine and headed to the stationary bikes.  The first FOUR bikes that I attempted to mount were set up too high, too low, or too far back.  Yes, I know, bikes are adjustable.  Unfortunately, I managed to choose the bikes that didn’t want to be adjusted.  I finally get one that will let me get set up, and start pedaling.  It’s one of those recumbant bikes – the ones where your legs are out in front of you rather than down.  20 minutes with the shorts from hell going all sorts of places they really didn’t need to be, and I gave up and headed to the showers.

I WAS finally able to pick up some icing buckets from the grocery store today.  Not only do they make great self-watering planters (more about that when spring comes along), but my main purpose for getting some today was to give my worms a proper home.  Yes, you read that right, my worms.  Yes, they TOTALLY squick me out.  However, I think that is a topic that will need it’s own post, so I’ll just leave it at that.

A friend of mine told me that Walgreens Register Rewards worked like regular coupons at the grocery store.  I decided to go through the self-checkout to see if it would work with minimal embarrassment if it didn’t.  But, because I had gotten so many things with attached coupons (i.e. the stuff that’s going to go bad in a couple of days, so the store slaps a coupon on it to get it gone.  Those are my favorite kinds of things to buy!), the self-checkout did not like me, and I had to bring all of the tear-off coupons to the self-checkout babysitter to scan.  So, I didn’t bother to try using the register rewards, because the babysitter looked annoyed that she actually had to do something, and I didn’t want to get her all riled up.

So, we come home, we bake cookies like a cute little family, we go collect more worms from our worm collector in the garage (two towels that I threw down to attempt to block a poorly constructed area in front of the garage that causes my entire basement to flood every time in rains), and I realize that I still have Register Rewards that are going to expire today.  And there’s nothing I hate more than free money that expires.  And I needed to buy a Powerball ticket, since the jackpot was $77 million.  (I have a thing with 7′s.  Also another post for another day.)  So, we’re off to try to use them at Wal-mart.  (Normally, I’d just use them at Walgreens, like normal people do.  But Walgreens doesn’t have anything good on sale this week, and I don’t like buying stuff that I don’t actually need.)

It was 5:30 when we left.  Wal-mart is maybe 10 minutes away on a two-lane road.  We landed behind a car that landed behind a car accident along the way.  After the police arrived within a minute or two, the car in front of us turned around and went in the other direction.  I thought, well, how long could this take?  There’s a line of at least 20 cars behind me within a couple of minutes, they’ll get it cleaned up quickly.  So we sit and we wait.  And we wait.  Little Miss gets out of her car seat to watch the firefighters cut open a car door.  (For the record, the injuries were minor, from what we could tell.)  And we wait as they get out the spray paint and mark everything.  I watch some cars behind us turn around and go in another direction, but you know how once you’ve already been there for a good amount of time, you figure it can’t be much longer, I’ve waited this long, might as well finish it out.  We watched them begin to load the crunched up cars onto tow trucks, and start sweeping up the road, and I think it’s almost over.

You know how this is going to end, don’t you?  At 7:30, I did finish it out.  When a police officer knocked on my window and asked me to turn around and go in the other direction because they needed to “clear out this area”.  I really wanted to say, “Do you think you could’ve told me that, say, an hour and a half ago?”  But I didn’t.  And then I kicked myself when my navigation system informed me that a detour put Wal-mart five minutes away. 

For the record, the Register Rewards didn’t work at Wal-mart.  But I did snag a rotisserie chicken at half price because it was 8pm.  And I totally forgot to buy a Powerball ticket.  Walgreens is next to Wal-mart, so I went ahead and used my Register Rewards on the one thing that was getting Register Rewards back, contact lens solution. 

I had LASIK nine years ago, almost to the day.  I have zero use for contact lens solution.

And when I got home, I realized JUST how lucky I was, since, after baking cookies, I apparently turned the oven to BROIL and not OFF.  Yikes!  Someone was watching over our house today (and apparently getting a kick out of me not being able to do anything right!)

Yes, I said “in the box.”  My not-yet-ex-husband was allergic to the real thing, and I can barely pay the bills at the end of the month, you think I’m coughing up money for a real tree?  They don’t take food stamps at the Christmas tree farm.

Here’s the deal.  My house is in a constant state of…wreck.  I try to focus on getting one room a day completely “done” from top to bottom, but while I’m focusing on that, my kids are focusing on trashing the other rooms of the house.  Fellow moms, you know what I mean. 

Pro to being a single mom:  Nobody comes home from working 8 hours and says, “This place is a wreck!  What is it that you DO all day?”

Con to being a single mom:  Nobody comes home from working 8 hours and says, “Let me wash dishes since you made dinner,” or, “I’ll bathe the kids and get them to bed so you can clean up.” 

A friend of mine, we’ll call her Hammy (not that she’s at all pig like, it’s just kind of a play on her name.  She’ll love me if she ever finds this blog and discovers that we’re calling her that), offered to take my kids for an entire day – and night – this past week, so I could catch up on work, the house, and attempt to have some semblance of a sane moment.  The problem is, I was jealous that my kids get to hang out with her kids/their friends, and I don’t.  So, what started out as, “I’ll pick the kids up at Hobby Lobby at 10,” turned into us going into Hobby Lobby to shop, then going to lunch at Chick-fil-A so the kids could work off some energy, and I finally parted with them sometime around 1.

The Little Miss has decided she wants a jewelry box for Christmas, and I had a Kmart gift card that I got sometime last year, that I had put in my car for safekeeping, so I would always know where it was when it was time to use it.  You know where I’m going with this already, don’t you?  I made it to Kmart, but of course, couldn’t find the gift card.  Oh well, I think it was only for $5 anyway. 

Am I the only person that can walk into a Kmart/Wal-mart/Target on the search for one particular thing and walk out with 42 things that I never knew I needed?  Sweatpants were on sale for $5, and I LIVE in sweatpants, and my butt is shrinking from training for the marathon, so I HAD to have new sweatpants.  Then I discovered that the sale gods were smiling on me, as I found out that ALL jewelry boxes were 50% off.  (Clearance is my favorite color, if you know what I mean, but sale is a good runner-up.)  I also managed to convince myself that I needed seeds for, um, I don’t even remember what the seeds are going to grow into, but why not get a jump on the season, right?

So, that wasn’t too much damage.  Then, I realized that I had Walgreens Register Rewards that were going to expire at the end of the week, so I had to go there too.  Not the one by the Kmart, no, that one didn’t have any of the free-after-Register-Rewards stuff left that I wanted to buy with my Register Rewards, so I drove 15 minutes to the next closest one.  They were also running out of good stuff, so I ended up with maxi pads (I use tampons), hair brushes (we have a ton), men’s face wash (because women’s face wash wasn’t free-after-Register-Rewards, so I guess my face is going to smell like a man.  Maybe I can pretend that a good-smelling man made out with me for a long time and his smell wore off on my skin.  Yeah, let’s go with that.), and hydrogen peroxide, because it was 34 cents.  I used my Register Rewards, owed one entire dollar, and got $7 in Register Rewards back.  I love this game.

So now it’s 3pm, and I’m just getting home.  My plan was to sew up orders, clean my entire house from top to bottom (or at least enough so that I can walk in a straight line all the way through the house), wash the sinkload of dishes, attempt to manipulate the mess in the garage so that I can park my car in there sometime before 2012, find Little Miss’s sneakers (which have gone MIA since last week) and my two pairs of boots that I know made it to this house when we moved in, but have not reappeared, wrap Christmas presents, and get one tree box (we own FIVE fake Christmas trees.  Don’t ask.) up the stairs and ready to be put up while drinking hot chocolate and playing Christmas music and having a Rockwell moment.  Should we take a poll on how much of that got done?

Making as much of a mess as we do, I don’t know why I thought I’d be able to pull even half of that off.  It’s so overwhelming.  My friends offer to come and help, but I’m too embarrassed to let them come over to help, which is why her taking the kids was a wonderful thing, so I could just attack it myself.  But there was way too much for one person to pull off in a few hours, and while I got a LOT done, I feel like I barely made a dent.  I went to bed at 9:30, which was nice, but in hindsight, I really should’ve pulled an all-nighter.

Hammy lives about an hour away, and I drove up in the morning to get the kids.  Which turned into us sitting around knitting and chatting, which turned into us taking the kids to McDonald’s and letting them play while we sat around knitting and chatting, which turned into us not getting home until 4pm.  Which basically shot another entire day, and $10 for lunch at McDonald’s that would’ve been better put to use on the electric bill.  SIGH.

So, this is why my tree is not up yet.  I can’t figure out where to put it, and by the time I lug it up the stairs and get it set up, it’ll be almost New Year’s anyway, so what’s the point?  I keep going back and forth on driving 11 hours to spend Christmas with our extended family, or staying here.  If we stay here, a tree is going up, come hell or high water.  I’m all about a low-key Christmas, but there must be a tree of some sort, or I’ll feel like a horrible mother, even if it has to sit in the middle of the kitchen and I curse at it every time I have to weave around it to make a meal.  If we travel, I know a tree is already there, but I have to suffer through 11+ hours of driving with two kids and two dogs and staying in a house that isn’t my own.  Decisions, decisions.

So, if you ever walk into a single mom’s home (if she lets you in…I wouldn’t, because it’s much too much of a mess) and there is no Christmas tree up and it’s December 23rd, take pity on her.  Or at least tell her you’ll meet her at McDonald’s with all your kids, some yarn, and some knitting needles to take her mind off of it for awhile. 

I’m a single mom to two living children – the princess is 4, and the little man is 22 months, and I have an angel daughter, who went to heaven at 7 weeks old.  I own a couple of online retail businesses, am a (very) freelance writer, and mostly I just pray that my bills get paid at the end of the month.  (Two kids in daycare + no childcare assistance from the state = would cost me money to work a ‘real’ job.  Sad, isn’t it?)

I would say we are a mostly modern family, but I tend to live my life a bit “old-fashioned”…I use cloth diapers on my kids, I try to make most foods from scratch, I have a garden, I use my clothesline 99% more than I use my dryer, I sew and knit, and I am slowly inching my way into the scary water of preserving food (canning, drying, freezing.)  We don’t have cable.  That said, we DO have Netflix, and I occasionally watch my guilty pleasure cable TV shows online.  My kids have a plethora of plastic toys (they are SO hard to get away from), and I’m online a LOT.

My not-yet-ex-husband is in prison, so that means the amount of child support I get is…drumroll please…zero.  (We’ve been separated for over two years.  You’d think I’d hurry up and file for divorce already.  I’m getting to it, one of these days.)  In this blog, you’ll not only get to hear about my crazy kids, but some of the back story of how I landed in this precarious position, my struggles with WIC and food stamps and other public assistance, the crazy men I let myself date, in hopes of giving my kids a decent father and getting some darn attention for myself, and, well, anything else I feel like moaning and groaning about.  I’m training for a marathon (I’m insane), I have fantastic friends (they are insane), and I like chocolate, three things which don’t necessarily go together, but I’m trying to sum up here!  I try to make the best of what I’m dealing with, and aim to laugh, hard, every day.  I wouldn’t say I’m the portrait of the average single mom, but I am A portrait of a single mom.  It has it’s perks, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

So, there’s your intro to me.  I’ll be interested to see if anyone I don’t already know is at all interested in MY life!