i'm sure lots of people say this when they first begin blogging, but i'm going to say it anyway: i never EVER in a thousand years would have thought i would jump on the blogging train. i imagined bloggers as frizzy haired, bespectacled folks holed up in a room with a cat in their lap typing madly away about dust collecting on the coffee table. i guess in a way i sort of fit that profile, except, instead of a cat, i have a six-month-old squirming in my lap and in place of the coffee table, i have a mountain of toys and plush animals littering my floor. oh, and i don't have frizzy hair and i'm one of those people that should wear corrective lenses but because slimy fingers constantly paw them off my face those lenses remain tucked away in a drawer. as a result, little two-year-old boys in church turn around and squint funny-like at me because that's exactly what i'm doing in order to read even 10% of the song lyrics written on the projector screen. so, that's me: squinty-eyed, not-frizzy haired new blogger lady with young baby wiggling in my lap. at the request of a few friends that enjoyed reading weekly email rants from me about my week in review, i succumbed to this blogging fad.
so, what next... oh, right. i'm also a law student and wife to a history phd candidate. both of us are entering our third year of studies. you might be wondering how in the world we are able to manage the fiscal burdens of raising of child on a student's whopping income of zilch, zero, nada and that, i am proud to say, is all thanks to my husband's high iq. the school took one look at him and said "this smart man is so smart we're going to pay him to go to school here." and that's pretty much how it works: the school pays him to stay here and do his research and i get to ride along, taking out small loans (altogether accumulating into very large, coronary failure-inducing loans) to fund my own law school education. we also do cloth diapering exclusively (or we did--more to that story, which i'll tell later), breast feed (because it's free and breast is best!, or so they say), make our own baby food, and rely on the benevolence of one very generous mother-in-law.
we never imagined having our first child under such circumstances. in our dreams, we envisioned a two story blue farmhouse, complete with wrap-around porch, white rocking chairs, porch swing, and a sweaty pitcher of lemonade as the place where we would start a family. also in this dream, birds land on our fingers and bunnies collect at our feet while we sing lovely Disney melodies. the reality is we live in a two bedroom apartment (recently acquired; we were in a one-bedroom for the last 2 years), tucked away in a town no one has heard of because it barely occupies a one-mile radius of land. we have a porch, but it's just big enough to fit my schwinn cruiser and a couple of potted plants. we have birds that frequent our feeders, but they head for the hills every time our baby burps too loud. instead of bunnies we have malicious pot-breaking squirrels. and even if we did have happy little bunnies, we have a 60-pound mutt that, like most red-blooded dogs, chases anything not of the canine species. though this apartment isn't our dream house, we keep it looking nice and find we are very comfortable, though i could do with a sweaty pitcher of lemonade on this 90 degree day...
can't complain too much about the heat here, though. prior to michigan, we lived and florida and, boy howdy!, was it hot and humid. you couldn't tell the difference between the air and a puddle of water. i walked around for two years looking like a wet dog and i probably smelled like one, too. but it was beautiful. we lived in the tampa bay area, right on the water and i have no complaints there. for real, dolphin would breach under our feet while we sat at the seawall and white egrets would putz around in our front yard eating bugs. sounds idyllic, right? it was great. i love florida and some days i wonder what on god's green earth possessed us to pick up and move to michigan, but then i remember weirdo waldo and weirdo crime and then it all makes sense. weirdo waldo was the creepster maintenance man that "maintained" (i use this term totally in jest because he left things more broke than when he started) our craphole rented house that would have caught fire at the smallest spark or blown over should someone have sneezed too close to it. the dude was insane. he never knocked, just walked in. thankfully, our dog, o'malley, lumped him in with non-canine animals and attacked promptly upon uninvited entry. he stole our tools, checked out my behind nearly every visit and once even splayed out on our bed, uninvited, of course. florida had a lot of creepers. hubby worked for a newspaper and the stories that came through on the crime beat were things of nightmares. step sons chopping step mothers up into pieces and tossing them into retention ponds. kids beating grandparents to death with lead pipes. crawling babies getting run over by the ice cream truck. i'm not kidding about any of this. sometimes i thought we lived in some sort of sick alternate universe. we also hated our jobs (i was a special ed teacher at a school under the administration of a bunch of certified idiots and hubby worked second shift hours at a rapidly collapsing newspaper) and always had aspirations of higher education, so we left.
and that's how we ended up here. it was an adjustment, for sure. we went from being the youngest people amongst a sea of blue haired retirees to the oldest amongst a sea of half drunk post-pubescent frat and sorority kids. i was part of a small minority of married law students, which put me at a distinct disadvantage because none of the frat boys wanted anything to do with an old married chick so i couldn't tap into their incredibly insightful notes about pamela's totally sweet bod or gettin' with barbie the night before. and having a kid in law school, well, that just threw me into a uber minority category. i also felt like i had been thrown into the main ring of the big top circus show--walking the halls of the law school, kids stared at me like they'd never before seen a women with child. one girl actually asked me NOT to go into labor during the crim law final exam. no joke. my favorite reaction by far was when i was standing in line at the café, this guy turned around and took one look at me and starts stuttering, "whoa! whoawhoawhoawhoa!" i mean, seriously, what do you say to that?
so the baby. she wasn't planned. i mean we knew we always wanted kids, and after 4 years of marriage my womb was starting to call to me, but we weren't really in the market for progeny yet. we had hoped to finish our educations and settle down somewhere first. but then hubby was awarded a summer scholarship to do pre-dissertation research in mexico for two months and voila! two weeks after he leaves, i video skype the momentous pee-on-stick event. nine months later, we're parents to the world's cutest baby girl with eyes as big as saucers and a smile that sends that tingly feeling down to your toes.
that pretty much brings us up to date. i mean, there are stories in between that i will share eventually, but the purpose of today's blog was to provide an introductory rundown of events thus far. and with that, i must bid you all goodbye before dear baby girl assaults me with her plastic keys for neglecting her too long.
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