What has been going on since then?

Let’s see…..

I found out I was having our third girl, hit the big 3-0, almost went into full blown preterm labor at 23 weeks, had to wean a 16 month old Pipes that night, finally had Pipes’s Christining, went on our last vacay as a family of 4, got a new swaggerwagon of swaggerwagons, got strep throat for the second time while pregnant, had to kick Gabi out of the Hoo’s room for pulling her tail until it cracked (thank God not broken), almost had a baby in my new van, got a juicer, collapsed at a conference, went on our first family vacay as a family of 5, went out without MayMay for the ball, went to my parents’ for Thanksgiving, didn’t go Black Friday shopping for the first time in years, celebrated Pipes 2^nd birthday, went on a big Christmas beach house vacay with my in-laws, had the dreaded pre-deployment leave and d-day, and have been slowly descending into chaos and insanity as I try to survive with all my blessings, which now include a kitten, Graben having another IVDD episode, and setting up a cross country move by myself.

Life is….busy!  But blessed.

(I think?  Maybe?  I know, I know, full of confidence here)

To  start writing again.  I miss it.  I get other people telling me they miss it (how freaking cool is that?!  You all really like me!).  And it is more productive at the end of the day than zoning out by refreshing Facebook or Pinterest over and over again in hopes of one new thing to look at.

A bunch of factors all came into play that led me to turn a short term, temporary break into the extended one it has been.  I even kept posting to the Facebook page with intentions of coming back to it after a month or 2.  First and foremost, my faithfull MacBook decided to only work when it was plugged in.  Any jostle of the cord would turn the whole thing off.  You know how much that sucks when you are trying to write something?  Pretty much, I couldn’t use it for anything more in depth than simple internet searches, and of course, Crackbook.

I had won an iPad from Operation Homefront’s Spirit Photo contest, so that became my new computer.  But, I hate typing on the damn thing.  Writing a blog post was out of the question.  But it did hold me off of getting a new Mac, since I had something I could use.  I even got a keyboard attachment for it.  However, you couldn’t use the OtterBox cover with the keypad.  An unprotected iPad in my house?  Yeah freaking right.  I hadn’t been driven that insane.

The whole start of the break was when Pilot flipped his shit over my last blog post about facing the possibility of him dying.  And then he started in on how much stuff I talk about involving our kids and the like.  He was also away in some high stress training, and well, I usually get the brunt of that.  He doesn’t get the whole blogging thing.

Annnnd then the pregnancy.  Oh man, being pregnant with MayMay was like a one way ticket to the toilet with a detour to the pharmacy for Zofran until about 34-36 weeks.  Yes, that long.  I had these cute ideas of going month by month, taking pictures, doing the whole what am I craving thing, la la la, but really, you don’t look that cute at midnight when you are force feeding yourself so you wake up sick at 5-6 am instead of 2-3 in the morning.

So welcome back!  We are still tweaking the design a bit, and  soon the birth story of MayMay Boo, our 3^rd girl, will be up, and of course, the crazy tales from my new life as a mom of 3 under 4 with a deployed hubby.

Thank you all for supporting me through this journey.  I appreciate all of it.

Enjoy the ride!

1) I will have a ‘lovey’ that must come everywhere.  I must sleep with it every night.  However, I will change what I want that lovey to be every.damn.day. and even several times a day.  And which lovey I ask for at night will be whatever one I have stuffed in the furthest corners of the house so an epic search must go on before I can go to bed.

2) I will refuse to blow my nose, wipe my hands or face, & run away screaming at the top of my lungs when they approach me with a tissue or cloth.  When they finally do succeed, I will announce loudly in a group of people that they, in fact, hit me in the face.

3) If I need help getting buckled into the car, I will scream loudly enough for everyone in the county to think I am getting violently murdered in the backseat.

4) And if I don’t want to be in the car for whatever reason, I will scream the whole bloody time the car is in motion.  I will stop whenever the car is not moving to breathe hope into the driver, only to resume louder when we start again since I am not getting out.

5) On the weekends, I will make everyone in the house get up when I do, aiming for about 5:50am.  On days where there is morning stuff to do, I will sleep past 9.

6) I will loudly and proudly announce whenever I have made a big, big, stinky poo-poo in my pants.

7) Unless my medication is bright pink and tastes like a tablespoon of cherry flavored sugar, I will spit it out.  Bonus points if it is extra sticky and gets all over a just mopped floor.

8) I will hide bits of food and cups of milk in a variety of places until the stink from mold gives them away.  Alternatively, I will partially chew or swish milk around in my mouth, then spit it on the floor for the dogs to eat, or I will take the carefully prepared, balanced, healthy meal and just chuck it on the floor and laugh.

9) I will find the most annoying TV show possible (maybe something along the line of Antiques Roadshow, American Pickers, or anything on the weather channel-isn’t that what the elderly like to watch?) and only sit still for meals if it is on, with the volume blasted, on repeat, so it plays in the head of my children as they are trying to fall asleep.

10) I WILL SHIT IN THE BATHTUB EVEN THOUGH I AM PERFECTLY CAPABLE OF USING THE TOILET AND JUST SAT ON IT FOR 10 MINUTES BEFORE I WENT IN THE TUB.

It will be glorious.

I came downstairs to a grinning Hoo with her hands in the supposedly ‘child-proof’ (she has been able to open child-proof caps since she was 14 months old) bottle of gummy vitamins.  She had eaten nearly half, with her chipmunk cheeks stuffed full.  According to Poison Control, ODing on gummy vitamins is a fairly common occurrence with the preschool set.  She warned me that her stomach was going to be a little bit upset.

That was a flipping understatement.  Within 2 hours, during naptime in MY bed with no plastic protector on the mattress, the vomiting started.  I had no idea a toddler could puke that much.  You know those classic fountains where the statues have water spilling out of their mouths?  Yeah, it was like that only peppered with bits of partially digested gummy bears mixed in.  I had to shower her with her shirt on at first because it was so saturated with vomit.

Pilot and I were hoping that episode would be the worst of it.  We thought, fingers crossed, that she would have gotten most of the vitamins out of her system.  Boy, we were wrong.

Now that was the only time she puked.  The next morning the shit fountain started.  I’m talking newborn-esqe blowouts that were up to the shoulders and down to the knees.  Just pure mush.  The worst was unlike having the stomach flu runs, she felt fine enough to eat normally.  And she is a good eater.  Thank God it happened on a weekend and Pilot took care of the worst of it-cleaning her.  I got to wash mounds of poopy laundry.  I seriously noticed a difference in our water bill from that one weekend.  To top it off, she also got an ear infection from the vomit getting deep in her ear since she threw up while lying down.  The antibiotic tore her stomach up for the next 10 days, but the blowouts were mostly over.  And I got to sit on her to get the drops in her ears.  Good times all around.

The next time I had to call, I thought that I had her beat.  All the vitamins & meds had been placed in a basket on the very top shelf on the pantry where she would need specialized pantry scaling equipment to climb.  I hid her stool and the one in the bathroom.  She was secure in her room at night with a ‘childproof’ knob on the door.  I had a baby gate on the bottom of the steps that was always up to keep dogs and kiddos from treating the upstairs like they do the downstairs part of the house, or to contain them upstairs.

Have you ever heard of the Swiss cheese effect?  You know where little things happen, like holes in Swiss cheese, and if you line them up just right, you have a perfect hole straight through?  Well, that would be this incident.

I take my prenatals at night.  Since the girls aren’t up when I take them, I had left the basket out.  With Pilot being gone, the dogs are in bed with me.  I move the gate at the steps so they can get up to my room without me breaking my back by lifting 40lbs of weiner (yeah, you got that right, I have big, fat, fuzzy weiners in between my legs every night, oh yeah).  I had forgotten to put it back up.  Her knob was on, but she had figured out how to get it off and break free.  She had decided to bypass my room, with the open door right next to the steps to see what havoc she could wreck downstairs.  The stools were gone, but her mini shopping cart was out, along with all her play food that she had thrown in there to make it high enough to climb in and get to the counter where she got into my prenatals.

Thank God this didn’t turn out as bad as it could have.  She told me she had eaten them.  After some calls back and forth with Poison Control and the pharmacy we figured out that at  most she could have ingested 4.  She would have to eat 12 to start to get iron toxicity, and 24 before it would become take her to the hospital now type deal.  But it was another ban on vitamins for the week & upset stomach deal, only not at all to the previous level.  God took pity on me.

The third time I thought I had her beat for good.  It was naptime for Pipes, so I had moved everything I thought she could possibly use as leverage out in the garage.  All medicines were up high.  We were good.

Then I came downstairs to a grinning Hoo digging into a bottle of Tums.  Tums!  They are such a fixture with me being pregnant that I didn’t even consider them something to be put up.  I mean Tums!  She had gotten into the pantry, drug out the dog food container, and used that to climb on the counter.  It was in this call that I asked about cross reporting to CPS since they get your name and phone number with every call.  The laughing guy on the other end told me not to worry.  I don’t have the only crazy creative child out there.  This time was a ban on milk and another upset stomach.

Now this hasn’t been the only times I have had to call PC for her.  The first?  She ate some Excedrin that had been through the washer in Pilot’s flight suits that left her foaming at the mouth.  Then she drank some liquid Tylenol and tried to cover it up by closing the bottle.  The red liquid all over the floor, her mouth, and the bottle kinda gave her away.  There have been other calls, but probably the most insane one was when she was on medication for sticking her hand into a fire ant mound.  I had the ‘child-proof’ bottle on her dresser which was about 3-4 feet away from her crib.  During her nap, she had grabbed the side of her crib and somehow managed to scoot the crib over to the dresser, stack her books up, and get to the bottle where she drank it.  I just had to watch her from excessive drowsiness.  Her doctor called in a new prescription for 2 bottles instead of one.  She knows my children well.

I am expecting this to happen:

Ahh, any day now kiddo.

What crazy things do your kids get into?

See!  See!  Now I know the costumes today have matted fur, but seriously, that only hides the dampness from leaky diapers better.  You couldn’t pull that off with paper mache.  Plus, I can’t be the only one questioning the sanity of grown adults that want to dress up like creepy animals to get abused by children all day.

Then I saw an episode of CSI where someone had, in typical dramatic CSI fashion, died some gruesome death, only this one was wearing a full scale raccoon suit.  The CSI people tracked the raccoon guy down to a “Furries” convention where a whole bunch of people like to dress up like animals and then a subset of those people like to do kinky things while dressed up as animals, like fur orgies, ‘scritching’ (I know that isn’t spelled right, but I am so not Googling that term), etc.  ~note: I wasn’t going to Google ‘Furries’ for fear of what I would find after watching that episode, but there is a whole wikipedia out there for the fur people called WikiFur and a very small part of them are about the sexual aspect.  It is “fandom for fictional anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics”  

After watching the guy that plays Stanford from Sex and the City get it on in a fur orgy with horrible techno music dressed as a kitty, the image of the costumed mall Easter Bunny has really become set in my mind with lots of sweaty people in smelly costumes rubbing all over each other and easily disguised bodily fluids.  The costume is white you know….

Don’t take this as I am some kind of huge germaphobe.  I’m not.  My kids love dirt.  My house is far from scrubbed clean.  The dogs are frequently found ‘cleaning’ my children.  I just draw the line at anything that comes out of the lower half of the body.  Working at a certain big name lingerie store really emphasized how absolutely disgusting people can be (just a little FYI, if you want to return things after your ‘sexy times’ for the love of God wash them first) and we didn’t even have anybody frequently take a shit in the fitting rooms like the discount clothing store next door.

And besides, if our picture with Santa Paws is any indication, the Hoo feels the same way about strange adults dressed up in costumes as I do.  Absolute look of terror on my child’s face, forever preserved in picture memory.  Granted, that could have also been from what can best be described as a decoupage of various types of fur, skin, probable blood, and anal leakage all lacquered on with the heady scent of ammonia from all the piss that made up the Santa suit, but still…

So yeah, not happening.  I much prefer the pictures from my youth with my sister and I in our Easter hats & fluffy dresses playing with tulips.  Maybe that’s why I like tulips so much.  Fond memories of dressing up verses sitting on the lap of an oversized creepy rabbit.

Also, don’t take this as some kind of judgement against other people’s sexy fun times.  Personally, I don’t care what legally consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes, and I would defend that right to privacy to the bitter end.  I might just think you are a bit weird, but hey, everyone is weird to someone else.  After all, some people like to dress up like animals, some people like to dress up in leather outfits, some people like to dress up like strippers, and some people that might have enjoyed any number of fun private sexy time activities became parents to young children where the sexiest thing you are wearing is whatever is on when you manage to get all the kidlets to sleep at the same time, no matter how many layers of food, snot, and spit up decorate your outfit and hair.

What’s your take on the Easter Bunny?

And in midst of all this, Pilot left for some training til late spring.  The Hoo’s behavior took a nosedive almost immediately.  She drug her sister by the hair at nursery school.  Misbehavior everywhere.  Hitting tantrums.  Being sassy.  Running away in parking lots.  I’ve had to call the Poison Center 3 times in the past 6 weeks from her climbing into everything.  Things have gotten a lot better since I started using some of the techniques in Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood.  I’ll post more on that later.

So no Pilot equals no back-up or relief for me.  Our bedtime routine was dragging out until 10:30 at night (thanks again, Love and Logic, for the past week I am usually out of the Hoo’s room by 9!).  Pipes still nurses 3 times a day, so it was bath for both girls, chasing two naked girls all over the upstairs (do you know that working together they can dismantle a humidifier in less than 2 minutes?  Seriously!), then nursing Pipes for 30-60 minutes while listening to the Hoo fuss in her room alone with books, then storytime for the Hoo, and laying down with her until she would fall asleep.  And then I get downstairs to a whole kitchen to clean up, take my shower, & eat my snack, leading to me not getting to bed until past midnight.  Pipes usually wakes up, happy and babbling, at around 6:30am.  It has been fun.  I’m fucking tired.  My house is a mess.  And I’m seriously getting panicky at the thought of doing this with 3 children and Pilot really deployed.

On top of all that, I have been trying to keep very busy to help the time pass by.  We have seriously only had Sundays off for the past few weeks.  It has been nuts!  School, dance, soccer, playdates, Bible Studies, deployed spouse’s dinners, OB appointments, lunch dates….madhouse.  The nice thing is when we are home, naptime lasts about 3 hours for both girls, with the Hoo insisting on naps in my bed with me holding her hand until we both fall asleep.

But enough whining!  Time for the Baby B #3 update!  I’m a little over 17 weeks.

My bump was bigger before I lost all the weight from not being able to hold down anything but some water and a saltine cracker in 24 hours, and then nothing but soup and ice pops for the next 24.  At least this has killed any desire I have to ever eat at a McDonald’s again.

So what edible object is my baby the size of now?  An apple!  Or a turnip!  Baby B #3 (BB3 from now on) is about 5 inches long from head to butt and weighs about 5 oz.  The bones are beginning to harden, and he/she can move their joints.  Sweat glands are developing.  Whoohoo!  I have seriously been feeling flutters since a little over 11 weeks.  Braxton Hicks contractions have started.

And even better news?  My specialist couldn’t find any evidence of the bleed!  I never bled, so my body just reabsorbed it!  However, I’m not cleared with him yet.  Since my incident of preterm labor with Pipes, starting at around 19 weeks, I get to have routine cervical and placenta ultrasound checks to hopefully detect any problems that could lead to another incident before it happens.  At my last appointment with him, he didn’t think starting progesterone shots would be helpful, but that could change after my next appointment when I get to have the fun transvag ultrasound.  My placenta is anterior, so it looks like I could be having my 3rd sunnyside up baby.  Fun times!

So yeah, I’m an all over the place mess lately.  Have things been this crazy for you?

6) Hormone outbursts.  My temper is so short this pregnancy.  With the Hoo, the dogs got the brunt of my totally irrational outbursts of emotion.  I could randomly cry in their fur, or take out my rage by screaming at them for eating all the baseboards in our rental house, or eating the back of the dryer, or eating the whole side of the bathroom door, or a huge section of the master bedroom carpet, or using the house as their personal bathroom….okay, so maybe some of that was justified.  Unfortunately, and to my great shame, the Hoo is getting the short end of my temper.  She can drive me so nuts by being, well, 2.5.  And then I’m in tears by the end of the day because I have yelled at her over being herself.  It’s a lose lose situation.

7) Doctor’s appointments.  You don’t really realize how damn easy it is to just go to the doctor pre-kiddo (or let’s be real, anywhere for that matter).  I could just go.  No adding in 20 extra minutes to park, get the stroller, get the snacks, the drinks, the distraction toys.  No worrying about potential outbursts.  No worrying about where you are going to stick the kid during the ultrasounds or appointments that involve a paper sheet & stirrups.  No wasting extra time & money to find a sitter or a drop in daycare place.  When you have to go 2-3 times a month, and to a high risk OB that is an hour away, it kinda wears on you a bit.

8) Baby shopping.  When you are first time mom (or maybe this was just me, but whatever), going shopping for all the cute little baby things you need is fun.  Exciting.  All the cute stuff you can match, the little clothes, the accessories, researching what is the best, etc-it’s almost like you are setting up your parenting style right then and there.  Now, granted, it quickly all goes down the shitter when you actually have said baby, but it is fun while it lasts.  Your next pregnancy?  Not only do you get to look at the swing you loved and realize that they make ones that plug in so you aren’t hacking into your retirement fund to pay for damn batteries, but going into any place that sells baby stuff for the disposable things that need to be replaced or clothes for a different season baby (yeah a May girl, then a Dec girl-not smart thinking) also sells toys.  And usually fish crackers, DVDs, and the bane of our shopping trips, balls.  Balls that send the Hoo into screaming fits of joy and fits of “MINE!”  She is obsessed, and she doesn’t sit nicely with them until we leave.  No, she has to start playing with them right in the store, leaving my eight months pregnant butt chasing bouncy balls down the rows of Target.  Yeah, I should have sold tickets to that hilarious event.

9) The hospital stay.  I’ll be honest, I hate hospitals.  I couldn’t wait to leave with the Hoo.  I wanted her HOME.  I wanted my own bed.  I tried to leave early with Pipes, mostly because Pilot was deploying eight days after and my family was coming in for Christmas.  However, once I found out I couldn’t leave (and ended up being a good thing, since the family practice doctor in training tugged on the cord and that caused a piece of the placenta to be left inside me) I started to realize that it actually wasn’t that bad of a thing.  I got my meals brought to me.  They were decently hot.  The nurses brought me water, towels, and other supplies whenever I asked.  Diapers and wipes magically refilled themselves.  Sure I had to watch two lame videos and get woken up several times to get checked out several times a night, but I was waited on.  My new hospital has even nicer rooms and better food.  And I have two kids at home.  I think I am going to beg to stay for at least forty-eight hours.

10) The pregnancy brain and klutziness.  Kind of ironic that I came up with this, because I have been struggling all day for the last thing to write about.  When you are first pregnant, all you have is the pregnancy brain for those minor slip ups and the klutziness.  It isn’t that overly bad.  Now add in a kid or two.  Not only is your brain affected by the growing baby in your belly, but you now have small children that like to suck the gray matter out before breakfast.  I feel like I have no brain left.  And being a total klutz- I broke an entire carton of eggs all over the checkout line while pregnant with the Hoo.  I would also trip over my own feet just walking.  Add in some learning to walk children, damn freaking Legos, Matchbox cars, and you have a recipe for disaster.  If I don’t start my day in a sleep deprived haze that is shocked out of my system by walking into a doorframe, then it will be a good day.

What have been some things that you have taken for granted?

When I was pregnant with the Hoo, there were so many things I took for granted.  When it’s just you and the bebe, you have so much glorious freedom.  For example:

1) Sleeping.  Glorious, glorious sleeping.  Pregnant with the Hoo, I would come home from class and crash on the couch.  What made it even better was Pilot was deployed the whole time, so I didn’t even have to cook dinner or try to clean the house.  On weekends, I could spend the whole day in bed.  Now, I have a baby that is ready for the day by 6:30-7am, and a toddler that frequently breaks out of her room at ungodly hours, comes to my bed, and stares at me until I wake up with a looming, Children of the Corn looking child two inches from my face with a binkie.  When I was pregnant with Pipes and trying to lie down on the couch, I would frequently get hit with books until I woke up.  The Hoo wouldn’t take naps with me either.  I would lie in bed, practically crying from sheer exhaustion, begging her to sleep with me.  Didn’t happen.  That would be why I started drinking coffee after I gave birth to Pipes and have kept it up this pregnancy.

2) Food.  I went through a phase while pregnant with the Hoo where all I ate was 7 layer dip and cocktail shrimp.  Don’t judge, it was pretty awesome.  I could have ice cream for breakfast.  Cheeseburgers and french fries were heaven sent.  If I was out and wanted food I could go wherever and eat anything I liked.  When you are pregnant for the 2nd + time, you can’t just go on a whim and indulge in whatever crazy ass pregnancy craving you have.  That involves work.  If it is a real restaurant, like my obsessive craving for super hot Thai food while preggos with Pipes, I would either have to go at lunch with the Hoo, find a place to ditch the Hoo, or get take out while worrying who was going to call CPS on me for leaving her in the car for 2 minutes while I ran in and paid.  And then you have to go home and make them something different.  You can’t eat ice cream for breakfast in front of a 2.5 year old.  You can’t just relax and grab a snack without the toddler radar going off that you are eating, and they need to beg until they get a piece.  And the whole eating heathy.  Yeah, I know, that should also be a major concern for the developing baby, but when you are so sick that the only thing you have held down all week is boxed mac n cheese and crackers, how much you eating verses what you are eating is priority.  However, I don’t want my growing children to live off of crackers and cheese.  I try to have a fruit, veggie, grain, and protein at every meal.  Granted, the protein is mostly chicken nuggets or ham & cheese, the veggie plain steamed frozen peas or baked potato chips, and I should probably keep a better eye on the fruit, since I just cleaned out moldy strawberry tops that had been shoved down a toy dinosaur’s throat, but still.

3) Being able to pee wherever.  This is a biggie.  Like huge.  Pregnant with #1, you can just stop mid grocery store trip and run to the bathroom.  You can go into a gas station while on the road.  Now?  Freaking forget about it.  I would almost rather pee myself than drag a 2.5 year old that likes to loudly narrate your bathroom activities (“What you doing Mommy?  You go pee-pee?” etc) and a 13 month old that has just started walking and doesn’t get how disgusting public bathrooms are into one.  Especially when on the road, because that involves unbuckling car seats, getting them strapped back in, getting the snacks, sippy cups, & toys all readjusted.  I only use public bathrooms now if I have the stroller to keep them both contained, or a shopping cart (which you can’t bring in the bathroom when it is loaded down with groceries), or I am wearing Pipes, which will have to stop soon with the growing belly (and seriously, it is hard anyway trying to balance yourself over a toilet with a 22lbs wiggle worm on your back).

4) Dirty diapers in the morning.  OMG.  For real.  My kids have excellent digestive systems.  EXCELLENT.  If they both didn’t shit themselves at least twice a day, I would be concerned.  I could load them up with cheese, bananas, or anything else binding and they would still go.  It is usually what wakes them up in the morning, you know, just to make to make them even better.  One of my worst puking sessions when I was pregnant with Pipes was over a diaper from the Hoo.  Not only did I get to clean up her mess, but I also got to clean up myself, the carpet, the hallway….good times all around.  We aren’t even cloth diapering right now because I simply cannot stand the smell.  And sometimes it isn’t even the smell.  It’s just the….poo.  Anyone that has ever changed a dirty diaper knows what I mean.

5) Nice looks.  People love pregnant women.  Well, most people.  I would get some weird looks/whispers on my college campus to the point where one of my male classmates stuck out his gut while walking with me, but I think that’s more because I look young and a vast majority of coeds are part of the under 20 set.  It’s like the pregnancy glow just envelops everyone around you and you get big smiles, doors held open for you, line jumping in bathrooms, nice comments, etc.  Now try going out in public with a child while visibly pregnant.  Throw in a tantrum, or a moment of disobedience, and you get the stares of death that you dared to reproduce again with your obviously poor parenting skills.  I had to drag the Hoo out of the bookstore biting, kicking, and screaming while pregnant and I swear people would have tripped me if they were closer.  Now when you are out by yourself, you start to get the nice looks again-until they look down at the plethora of crumbs, sticky handprints, and snot that your little darling managed to wipe across your behind without you noticing.  Just another sign of an unfit breeder.

Stay tuned for part 2!

Looks so pretty and innocent huh?  We have added a few more plants too, so it looks even nicer.  Unfortunately, as we all know, looks can be deceiving.

We have lost some more fish, and the ones still remaining are highly stressed out and getting the ‘ick’ which is some kind of bacterial infection from stress.  Yesterday, after spending most of the weekend in bed or trying not to throw up, I got to run to Petsmart at 5pm to return the latest victims before our two week time limit was up.  I actually didn’t mind, because I was blissfully child free.  This week’s victims of the Zoo’s Camp ‘o Death was an angel fish that we found plastered to the filter, and our algae eater, who we thought was doing great & getting bigger.  He was entangled in a plant and looked like he had been dead for a week, even though Pilot saw him alive yesterday.  I also returned the second dead Rosebaro.  As I pull into the parking lot, I get a call from Pilot with strict instructions NOT to get new fish, but instead a new heater since someone ours had shattered when he put it back in the tank after cleaning it.

So yep, not only is something (most likely the nitrate from the fish waste-Pilot keeps talking about ‘cycling’ and ‘good bacteria’ while I picture money being flushed down the toilet) killing our fish, but now, despite his best efforts at cleaning, there are most likely shards of glass in the tank.  Not good for my pretty little catfish that cost $17.

I didn’t inform the fish lady about our horrible fish parenting skills with the heater and instead asked her advice on the possible ick and nitrate.  We have since turned the heat up to eighty degrees (with the new $$ bloody heater) and added the recommend amount of aquarium salt.  We will see how this goes.  Right now we are pretty sure the remaining angelfish will be the next to go.  We are hoping since the catfish and shark are bottom dwelling fish that live in crappy water, they will survive this little bump in the road.

Now if we can just get this thing to stop stressing them out….

let me at them!

Seriously Gabbers, you are NEVER going to catch the damn fish.  I know you think since you nearly got the catfish as I was adding her to the tank you have a chance, but she was in a bowl on the floor, not in the tank yet.  You are stressing them out and driving me nuts by trying to jump the tank.  Just chillax already!

Have you ever had bad luck with pets or are we just that special?

Let me explain-Thanksgiving weekend we were in WV, so no time to do it then.  The next weekend Pilot had some super special important flight stuff that caused him to go into work all weekend.  The next?  He had 24 hour duty.  The next?  He left Sunday for a week of training.  We haven’t had a complete weekend to get stuff up.  And sorry kiddos, but I don’t have the time or sanity left to climb up into the attic and risk waking anybody up during naptime, nor can I exactly leave my little darlings unattended downstairs for so long since the Hoo likes to climb on the counters and Pipes eats jingle bells.  No seriously, jingle bells.  All that, plus the fact we were leaving early the next week to go to my parents til the New Year left both of us kinda wondering if it was worth the effort.

So yeah, I’m lame.  We had really good intentions though.  Dec 10th, for the awesome bargain price of $30, we got 4 hours of scream free time with the girls’ school’s PMO (Parents Morning Out) fundraiser.  We decided to spend that time shopping for the girls’ Christmas presents.  I had been getting some things periodically, but I wanted to include Pilot.  Off we went to the big box toy store to look.  Being in the girl’s section there was making me depressed.  I was looking upon aisles and aisles of limiting, plastic crap in various shades of pink that told my daughters they had to be obsessed with their looks or housekeeping.  Even the science kits for girls were around beauty (Make Your Own Lip Gloss!).  Nothing was appealing as their big gift from Santa.  We went across the street to Target, and still we couldn’t find anything that hit us as the must have gift.  The Hoo didn’t know what she wanted.  We don’t have cable, so she gets no exposure to the damming TV commercials that tell kids what they want (I love that-I know when the Hoo wants to be something or wants something it is from a genuine place in her soul, not what an ad executive has sold to her).

We decided to throw in the towel, just get dog food at Petsmart and chill for the rest of our time.  We walked into Petsmart.  We saw the fish tanks immediately.  We both looked at each other, each reaching the thought at the same time-a fish tank!  The Hoo LOVES fish.  Talk about a perfect Santa gift!

Pilot never had a fish tank growing up.  I did, but the largest one we had was 20-30 gallons.  We started looking at those.  I also only had fancy goldfish-the big ones with spots and pretty flowing tails, one with ‘bubbles’ on its head that I named Raspberry because of what it looked like, and a Black Moor called Blackie.  Yes, I was such a creative little kid.  My sister had two murderous/suicidal angelfish-one killed the other by flipping him out of the tank, then later did the same to himself.  We figured that we could easily handle a 20 gallon tank and some goldfish.

Then we saw a 37 gallon tank kit that came with the tank, hood, lights, heater, filter.  We went around the other side to check out stands.  There we saw a 40 gallon kit that came with the stand.  We walked back around to the tank side, and what do you know, there was a 50 gallon tank kit!

It was getting a little out of hand.  We were back and forth, comparing prices, deals, kits, filters, & accessories.  We left and went to the local furniture store to see how much a table/stand would be from them.  We got some estimates, talked ourselves back down to a 37 or 40 gallon tank, and went back to PetsMart, where we saw this beast:

The tank and stand were on sale for what the cost of a 40 gallon tank and separate stand would have been.  Bubbles of excitement washed over us.  Sixty gallons!  A 60 gallon tank!  Wow, we could fit so many fish in it!  The girls would love it!  Never mind that I hadn’t had a fish tank in about 14 years.  Who cares that Pilot has never owned a fish in his life?  It was a great deal and logic be damned!

So we got it.  We couldn’t fit it in the trunk-it didn’t look that big up on the shelf.  I had to go back later that night and pick it up after we had removed the carseats and laid the seats down flat.  Also, the thought of just getting goldfish was so passe.  We weren’t going to just get common goldfish after having such a kick ass tank.

Pilot kept talking about what a great deal we got.  He was wondering what the catch was.  Well, that would be the 75lbs of sand, hidey holes, filter, plants, and bloody fish to put in the damn thing.

So far we have only managed to kill 3 fish.  Luckily, PetsMart has a two week return policy on fish.  We have 14 (soon to be back up to 15 once I exchange the rotting fish carcass in my garage with a living fish) Rosebaros, 3 Angel fish that will likely turn on each other, 1 male Beta, 1 female Beta that will probably get knocked up, a Red Tailed Shark (part of the carp family, but they call it a shark because of the fin shape), an algae eater that keeps growing even though we don’t have any algae and can’t figure out what it is eating, and my only pick, a Feathered Fin Catfish that is leopard spotted and likes to swim upside down.

Right now all is going well, minus the dead fish.  All they do is eat and shit.  And Pilot is responsible for cleaning up the tank.  I clean up after everything else.  Ask me again when he is gone and they are eating each other, and I might be singing a different tune.

So what cool things did your kiddos get for Christmas?