Carrying the Message

Step 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. 

I had my speaking commitment at the residential treatment center last Wednesday, and dare I say, it went fabulously!  My sponsor is a doll, and gave me a really lovely intro that I was not expecting.  There was only eight of us in the meeting, but that was a great help to me in relaxing.  Big groups make me nervous, but a small group is just like friends getting together for coffee.  I actually managed to say everything that I wanted to share about my experience, strength & hope.  I got great responses, and the women really shared their hearts.  It was great to hear where these ladies are coming from, and I always love to hear other women talk about their recovery.  My sponsor has said before, and said again that night, that she really loves to see women get sober.  That there is something very different about women who must attempt this journey, as compared to men.  We face different obstacles, and the stereotypes and pre-conceived ideas about how women 'should' be able to do this can be pretty intimidating.  Why can't she stop drinking for her kids? Doesn't she know they need her?  The Big Book tells us that frothy emotional appeal will not get us, nor keep us, sober.  I may want to stay sober for my husband and kids, but they can't keep me from drinking.  I have to do the work, ask God for help, work the steps, make amends, go to meetings, take my inventory every day, work with other alcoholics, face my character defects...... When I say it's my job to stay sober, it's because it is a JOB.  Sobriety is not something I got and now keep in a jar on my desk.  It is a living, breathing part of my soul, and if I do not feed it, it will die.  I have a disease that tells me that I don't have a disease, and if I take the risk of complacency, I could very easily fall back into old habits.

I'm really thankful that I could speak at that meeting.  I need to be always mindful of where I came from, so that I don't ever go back there.

Your Mom calls the vacuum cleaner "Jaws"?

Just before Christmas our vacuum cleaner died.  This was not the best timing, so we waited a few weeks before getting a new one.  We set out for Target after Christmas, figuring we'd get a new one there.  It took a while to pick the one we wanted, which they then of course did not have in stock.  Four stores and four choices later, we went home vacuum-less and a bit peeved.  A week later the Man did finally find the one we wanted at another Target, and in a lovely shade of blue I might add.

So we get it all unpacked and bask in it's shiny newness.  It isn't very different from our old one when it comes to features, but really, as long as it can pick up dried PlayDoh while it terrorizes the cat, it's satisfactory.  It does have one new feature though, which is the red and green lights that tell you when an area is dirty or clean.  This is really neat at first, but soon you realize that you have become a slave to the green light, ever waiting for it to appear.  After 9 passes over the same section of rug you either stop believing that it actually can sense the dirt, or you start wondering how filthy your family really is.  Take the kids' bedrooms upstairs for instance:  The light almost never turned green.  I kept going, thinking that surely it would turn green at any moment.  As I continued to sweep the same section again and again, I began to wonder if the children had just been bringing pocketfuls of dirt in to dump on the carpets, or if perhaps the sheer age of the carpet had caused it to just disintegrate more and more with every pass of the sweeper.  I began singing 'Roxanne' in my head, waiting for the red light to go out.  I'm pretty sure it took 3 hours to vacuum the upstairs, during which time I sucked up various beads, Polly Pocket shoes and the cat.  Did I mention the suction power on this thing?  And that it's self-propelled?  So it really can get away from you quickly, and suck up all kinds of things that you didn't intend.  It reminded me of Mr. Mom, with Michael Keaton being terrorized by the sweeper. (If you haven't seen that movie, you should!  It's hilarious!)

This & That

I recently ran across ScrapBlog and am pretty sure I will never get housework done ever again.  It's really lovely and easy to use, and I have always wanted to be that person who scrapbooks.  I instead am usually the person who has a box stuffed with old pictures and negatives, and more recently, the person who has 27 CDs of pictures that have never been printed.  I would still like to make 'real' scrapbooks of the boy's first years (I actually did do the Princess' a while back.) but this will suffice for other things I think.

I'm speaking at a meeting at a residential treatment center next week.  My sponsor is going with me which eases my mind greatly.  I am hoping to not throw up on my shoes from nervousness.  I know that I need to do this kind of thing, but I get tongue-tied and nervous and stupid and then can't remember what I wanted to say, and end up babbling like a crazy old woman picking out melons.  It's quite sad.  My sponsor said she thinks that I do better than I think I do, and I'm just trying to focus on that.  I can't think about it too much ahead of time or I will get overwhelmed with everything I think I 'should' be saying, rather than just sharing my experience, strength and hope the way that I should.

Prevention.com has some neat little brainy games that I've been putzing around with.  I like this one especially.

The Man is working seven days a week right now, and hit around 90 hours last week.  We'll be glad when February is over and we can return to some sanity around here.

The Princess has about 5 more weeks left with her RPE in.  Last week she lost a tooth that happened to be right where one of the front wires ends.  It wasn't attached to the tooth, but the doctor wanted to shorten that wire so it wouldn't block the new tooth coming in.  So I got her out of school early and drove over.  It took longer to drive back and forth than it did for him to shorten the wire.  Then lo and behold, last night she lost the exact same tooth on the opposite side.  So out of school early we go yet again.

I keep trying to think of something else to add or a witty closing.....

Mall Trip

So Kate and I met at the mall on Friday in an effort to escape our fever-inducing cabins.  I generally avoid the mall because A. I am not 15 and B. The creepy lotion kiosk guy has beasty breath and he always wants to sell me stuff.  The beauty of having a child in a stroller to push is that I can pretend to be busy with the child and thus avert my eyes from anything I don't want to see.  Take a shower dude.

Anyhoo, I had planned to eat lunch before we went up, but ran out of time (which is code for I was playing PathWords on Facebook and was so close to beating my top score).  So we headed towards the food court.  Now, the one great thing about being a stay at home mom is that you can go to the mall during the week, during the school-day, when you can avoid all of the loud and ugly teenagers.  And I say ugly only because they bring it upon themselves with dirty Emo hair, chunky girls wearing shirts that are too small for them, and the constant & loud presence of cell phones for which they do not pay nor do they have any use for outside of texting about Edward Cullen.  So imagine our surprise to find that the food court was crammed to the gills with about 723 junior high students on a 'field trip.'  The fast food cashiers all looked like they were in shock, and the noise level was somewhere around excruciating.  The interesting thing was that although they were in an area serving food with many tables, they were all standing or walking and not eating.  Like they had been herded in there and left in a waiting room.  There also appeared to be no one watching or in charge of any of them.  They hadn't reached Lord of the Flies status yet, but there was much giddy loudness, running back and forth, combined with OMGs and LOLs.  It was almost enough to make me consider homeschooling.