Severus... The Best Cat Ever

It has been a while since I have written a blog post but today I finally have a chance to sit down and write one. It has been a trying couple of weeks. David was in WLC (classes for becoming a Sergeant) and he was hardly home (literally came home, ate, and went to bed and was up before the rest of us and left). So I have been busy with all the house and kid stuff and weekends were just a lazy affair. To be frank, there was nothing to write about. I felt drained for the most part and just wanted to sleep.

This week has been even worse because my beloved cat passed away. Severus was young and up until the end didn't show signs of anything being wrong. Monday night he was acting weird and could hardly walk. I checked him from head to toe and he didn't seem hurt in anyway. I chalked it up to him perhaps hurting himself while getting his fat butt off the dryer (my dog pulled a muscle playing with our other dog, he limped for a bit but was fine in a few days). He could still walk so I thought he would be fine. I put him on the floor close to our bed, wrapped a blanket around him and he slept there the whole night. I woke up once when he tried to climb on the bed and couldn't and again when he threw up. That morning he drank some water and seemed like he was getting better. My husband was already gone, there wasn't much I could do. So I brought him out to the living room with us and set him on the couch, making sure he was warm and near family. Later in the day he started breathing funny. It was wet and gurgul-y sounding. His body twitched when in he inhale. I started to panic and pray. I couldn't do anything. I had the kids and no car. So I prayed and prayed that he would miraculously heal and be better. He was like a child to me. He was my bestest friend. The thought of losing him so soon was incomprehensible. When he started panting I changed my prayers from survival to a quick death. I knew he was in pain and I didn't want him to be that way until I could get the car and do something about it. With my final words I looked over and he was gone.

His tail was bushy and his hackles were raised as well. I had never had a pet die in front of my eyes, I didn't know what was happening. I sat next to him and placed my hand on him, waiting for the inhale. It didn't come. At that point I broke down in tears. My poor Daughter asking me what was wrong. I sat there sobbing for sometime before I had to move his body.

That day we buried him in the yard (even though we are not allowed to. I really don't care, I was not about to just throw him in the trash and we could not afford cremation). The kids got to say goodbye. David and I had to explain death for the first time. We have talked about it to the kids before when they asked questions but seeing it first hand was different. Hayley still asks when Severus is going to come back home. Natalie wasn't as heart broken and understood. Logan, however, was crushed.

I let them stay home the next day of school because Logan and I were still pretty upset. I just wanted to stay home with them and they with me. I know to most it was just a cat, but I am an animal lover and even more a cat lover. He was perfection. The cat I had always wanted when I was growing up. He will forever have a big chunk of my heart and I will never forget his sweet face and annoying snore. When I miscarried our fourth child, he sat with me in bed and cuddled, knowing my heartache, and when we had Aria he would lay as close to my belly as possible and purr as he kicked against him.

The kids want to know when we will get another cat, and we will. But I need time to heal from my loss and told them after we move to Georgia next year we can rescue another cat.

This was the day we adopted MJ and Severus. He always let her climb all over him and never got pissy with her kitten antics.

Rest in Peace Severus. You will always be the best freaking cat in the whole world.

Black Friday

Ahhh Thanksgiving is over now and what fun it was. Cooking all say and spending maybe thirty minutes eating. Since it is just Hubby, the kids, and I for the holidays we have tons of leftovers too. So we are going to ham it up this week (yes, ham, I cannot cook turkey for the life of me. I blame the stove). Over all I can say I am extremely thankful for all that I have received this year. Yes times are hard and we have had our ups and downs but we have each other and we are comfortable in that.

I miss our families this time of year though. Especially the wild Kalita bunch who always throw one heck of a get-together. I remember going to family gatherings as a child and I cherish those memories. I am saddened that the kids are not going to experience that with us moving halfway across the country and all that jazz. I would love to be able to, one day, travel home for the holidays even if it would be a zoo doing so. I have always wanted a big, close knit family, even if some of them drive you nuts. I wish my family got along better with my husbands family so we can have one huge gathering… Oh well. Best not dwell on such things.

On a side note David and I ventured out yesterday (black friday) with the kids. It was already the afternoon so we figured we would be safe because all the back friday shoppers go early and would be home by then… yeah, I forgot, people here do not wake early for anything. It was a mad house for the most part but I was able to pick up two little gifts for David and a little something for Logan's teacher from last year who is due any day now. Over all it wasn't that bad (Aside from the kids constant need for the bathroom and the crowdedness that triggered my claustrophobia and anxiety). Poor David is such a trooper.

Today is grocery shopping day. Yay… NOT.

Conversation With Myself

Since my resent obsession with dreams--prompted by one that pretty much came true a few days later which was just too weird not to take note and dig in to the deeper meaning of it--I have spent sometime learning more about them. More specifically lucid dreaming. The past few nights have been futile on that front.  Last night however sparked my interest.

I have been researching the whole lucid dreaming and the ability to actually talk to your subconscious through it. It peeked my interest of course. I mean who wouldn't want to know what that "inner you" really wants. A guy, who has posted a lot of videos on the subject, talked about how, like in Inception, the people in your dreams are a reflection of your subconscious. So if you wanted to ask it a question, your subconscious would answer. I took it a step up though. 

Last night I started with the simple F.I.L.D. (finger induced lucid dreaming) it failed several times since I fell asleep and did not have a lucid dream. But thanks to Aria I wake up several times a night still, and on my third go I went straight into a lucid dream. Which sort of goes like this. I lay in bed, twitching the fingers slightly, concentrating on playing the piano and before I know it I am opening my eyes into a dream. Unfortunately for me that means I am in a state of sleep paralysis (not sure why this always happens when I go straight from a thought to dreaming, I am working on that NOT happening). So instead of just laying there I pull at my body, separating my "spirt" from my body. Sounds wonky but this is a dream after all. I managed to pull away from my sleeping form and float towards the ceiling for a bit. When I glance down I can see my sleeping form and I am elated that it worked. Now I know this is a dream and I go straight to the mirror to chat with myself.

I ask myself "What do I really want to do?" I often flitter between possible career choices, never really sticking to one thing.

The mirrored version of me answers "A writer. You can't make up your mind because nothing else will make you happy. If you write, you can become all of those things and more."

I ask again, "Who am I?"

The mirrored version smiles, "You are you. The good the bad the ugly. You are everything at once."

At this point I feel my sleeping body calling me. More so I feel Aria starting to rustle around. I look at David's sleeping form (because I am dreaming of exactly how my room is that night, baby and husband too) and turn to the mirrored me again.

"Are we ever going to be truly happy?" 

She knows what I mean. She knows what my heart has been crying out for. She is me. She knows what I long for. She also knows him, and his unchanging ways. She smiles at me, sadly, and shakes her head. That is when I know. Nothing will change. This is it. I will never be enough for him and in turn he will never be completely there for me either. He has a foot in both worlds and that won't change. I frown and nod my head and before I know it my eyes snap open and I am awake.

I have never had a dream so real like this before. I have never asked my subconscious anything before. But deep down the truth is there and I am to stubborn to see it most of the time. So now the truth is there. I can't avoid it anymore. No matter how many times I look away and pretend it doesn't exist it does. Time to face the music.

When I started out, thinking about what questions to ask that last one was not one of those. But when I turned and saw him sleeping, his phone on his nightstand almost glowing I had to know the truth.

The truth hurts, but I am not a quitter. 

I fully intend of trying this again and again, if only I could actually sleep through the night. It has been almost two years now that I have not been able to sleep properly. First pregnancy insomnia and now a child who still nurses at night or gets sick and wants comfort.

Coffee is my BFF.

I should note that I also dreamt about the Vampire Diaries :) that was indeed a pleasant dream.

Lucid Dreaming

Dreaming. I am obsessed with it. I am also obsessed with lucid dreaming. Every once in a while I will have a lucid dream, but I really would like to have them on command. So I was doing some research, stumbled upon this guys youtube videos and have been hooked. He talked about this thing called finger induced lucid dreaming. Basically you have to imagine yourself in front of a piano and with two fingers pretend you are pressing the keys. Not hard, you don't really want to concentrate on actually playing the piano, it is just small, nearly still, finger movements. Do this for a while then check to see if you are sleeping. Reality check is what they call it. Well last night I tried this method. It was by far the weirdest and perhaps creepiest experience ever. I closed my eyes, moved my fingers for a bit then opened my eyes and did a reality check. Yeah, I was really awake. So I closed my eyes and tried again.

After a while I opened my eyes to my dark bedroom and thought, 'Nope, still awake'. I did my reality check and realized I was indeed dreaming. Normally when I transcend from awake to asleep I am transported into a dream elsewhere. Waking in my dream bedroom was weird. I stood. Looked around. Saw Aria sleeping and David too. So I willed Aria to be out of the bed and elsewhere and… well I am not going into detail of what happened because that is beyond private. After I started to wake so I grounded myself to the dream. Things became fuzzy so I climbed out the window and took off in flight before I really woke up. The execration of flying woke me and I tried to open my eyes… but I couldn't. I tried to roll over. I couldn't. I was on my stomach and I felt something pressing me into the mattress. This has happened before. Sometimes I wake up paralyzed. I am unable to move or talk. I just have to lay there and wait until it is over. I was finally able to open my eyes and wiggle my toes. Everything was blurry and I started to feel that panic of not being able to see. I felt like the room was spinning. I was extremely dizzy. Thing is… David and Aria were not there. I was in another dream. A dream within a dream. Once I realized that I woke myself up.

Freaky, right? I enjoy dreaming, and I love having control over them. I mean who doesn't want to swim without needing to breathe, or run for miles without the pain, or even the much loved flying dreams. I am not a fan of sleep paralysis though. Freaks the crap out of me. Also sometimes lucid dreaming can create false memories, which I have a few of. The mind is a tricky thing, we haven't even begun to understand its capabilities. 

Past vs. Present

        My husband and I were driving around the other day and talked about people from our past. Often I think about friends or non friends from my past and wonder where they are at now. I reply different scenes from our shared history and often wonder how things would have been had I done things differently.

Am I the only one who regrets a lot of stupid decisions of my past and dwells on them daily? Probably. So many people have influenced me and changed me over the years and I wonder if they even realize how much they have impacted others lives? And then I wonder have I done that for anyone? Do any of these people think about me periodically? Or was I simply that insignificant that no one remembers who I was? I tried to be invisible most of my life so I wouldn't be surprised if people didn't even remember who I was. Isn't it sad that I care about that? Maybe it is because I have tried to remember almost everyone I have met, I still remember friends from grade school, enemies too.

Moral of the story is, I think too much. I need to let the past go and embrace the people who want to be in my life now. I can pine over lost relationships for hours but those who matter stuck around. I will always look back fondly at friends, even enemies from my past because they helped me become who I am today. But who I am today is not anywhere near who I was back then so I need to keep remembering that and move forward.

On the plus side, my husband does the same thing… so at least I am not alone in that.

Thinking Outside the Box

The other day my kids and I were talking about the solar system. My son loves to learn and when he finds something cool he wants to know everything about it. So this prompted him to ask me all about the solar system and outer space. So of course we spent some time on the internet learning about planets and such (because there is only so much I remember from school lol).

We are browsing the internet and he is asking all sorts of questions and one of those was "how big is the universe?" So here I am trying to explain infinite to a six year-old. How does one explain that when, as humans, we have this mindset that there is a beginning and an end for all things. Maybe it is just me who thinks this way, but when I think about infinite things my brain gets all wonky, like it is trying to disprove my thoughts. Thinking about infinite things makes my mind hurt. I know they exist, numbers and the universe for example, but it is as if my mind does not want to accept that knowledge. I just can't wrap my brain around it.

Naturally that lead me to thoughts of God. For those of you who do not believe in God that is fine. I am not here to preach or shove my views down your throat; so fret not. I am just simply giving you an insight into the way my mind works. God-an infinite being, right? But again my brain is saying "cannot compute". During PE in high school we would sometimes walk around the track on lazy days (which was most days) and a friend and I would talk about anything and everything. One of those things was God's infinity status. She too talked about how, as humans, we have a beginning and end for everything so to think about something with no begging or end tends to baffle the mind. We (or at least I) like to put everything in a neat and tidy box. Rules, everything has them. Science, math, writing, living (although most people break them from time to time). Everything has a set equation and religion is one of those things that breaks those set perimeters. I know in my heart and soul that God exists, it is something that has been with me since I was young (and no I was not raised in a religious household). I have from time to time thought about his nonexistence but then I look around me, at my children, nature, life and my belief is reformed. Getting back to to point (because boy to I tend to ramble on) thinking about God not having a beginning or end riddles my mind with questions. So as my son and I are learning about space and I am trying to explain infinity I start talking about God and his infinity. So then my son says something that really makes me think and also gives me that "I am so proud of my son" glow. He asked me "So if God has no beginning and the earth does, and God created us, who else did he create?"

It is something I have often pondered myself. There are other galaxies out there, space is infinite, so what other planets has he created and inhabited with humans or other creatures of his own design? I know scientists say there is no proof that there are aliens or life on other planets but they are human and humans usually are wrong about most things. I live by my feelings more so than my brain. My brain likes to put everything in a neat and tidy box but my heart knows no bounds. I don't have to see to believe. Am I wrong? Maybe. I am only human after all. For the record I believe in magical creatures too.

Everything At Once

To dare mighty things... is brave and exasperating. Thank you Images program for getting this blog started for me. I dare very many mighty things… it is the follow through I have a problem with. I am the queen of leaving things unfinished. I have all these "brilliant" ideas but never see them through to the end. I really need to work on that. This was supposed to be the year I figure it out and re-invent myself and honestly the self actualization was there but it is the changing and growing I have an issue with.

When I was younger I thought by this point in time I would have life figured out. I would be accomplished and set in my career by now. I envisioned a swanky London flat, several cats,  a best friend I did everything with, and a job that I loved and paid well. Never in a million years would I have believed someone if they told me that by the age of 26 I would be married, an Army wife, and have 4 children. I would have laughed and called them crazy. At 15 I didn't want children, I didn't want to get married, I just wanted to be free.

But here I am, 26, an Army wife, stay at home mother of 4, adoptive mother to 2 dogs and 3 cats, and completely and totally in a daze. I don't have my shit together; I barely know up from down on most days. I do not live in London--in fact I am living on a military base in Texas. I don't know what I want to do with my life, I don't know what goals I should be setting and I am hoping and praying that I am not somehow screwing up my kids while I fake my way through parenting. I am lost.

But then I think about it… REALLY think about it. Does anyone ever have it figured out? Life is messy and hard. You cannot predict what is going to happen, and the older you get the more you change and grow into someone new. It isn't a simple metamorphoses, you don't just magically change over night and become someone different and stay that way until death. Everyday you change and grow into someone else and it isn't going to be a one-time thing; it is constant. One minute I want to be a makeup artist and the next I want to be a writer. The fact is THIS IS IT. There are no unicorns farting rainbows or a moment where everything clicks and you become this awesomest version of yourself. It happens overtime and if you are anything like me you will fuck it up… A LOT. Moral of the story is I don't have one single thing I am shooting for. I am the epitome of ADHD, I want everything at once.