I love my mommy...

and my sister! Yesterday they came over and cleaned my living room while my BIL fixed my hot water tank. This was no quick tidy up, they did every thing....for example this closet was a complete disaster. Not only did they pack up all Brad's coats and shoes/boots, but they also went through the other 4 garbage bags full of stuff that had been shoved in there. So now the closet looks like this...

Today my mom came over and cleaned my bathroom and she put up this new shelf which makes the bathroom look great.

Here's the rest of the clean bathroom

This is the living room that my mom & sister cleaned yesterday. Lets just put it this way, Mercedes had pretty much taken over this room and there was not one flat surface that was clean. There was stuff everywhere...on the floor, table, couch, chairs. My mom even put up the new picture above the couch.

And last but definately not least today, my mom took off the blinds and washed them in the tub and then added the valances in the kitchen. And I managed to get all the laundry done so no more mildew smell yay!!!

Now maybe I can go get a couple cards made or something.

What's next?

It all started yesterday...with the flu. At first I kinda thought I was lucky. I mean, I didn't feel good by any means, but it definately wasn't the worst case of the flu that I'd ever had. As long as I stayed laying down and didn't move much, I was ok, just a little nauseous and dizzy. Mercedes didn't feel well either, but hers was more of a cold like thing.

Then last night I couldn't sleep. Part of it was that Mercedes was up a few times, and I don't know why else, but I only got about an hour's sleep last night.

Today Mercedes woke up feeling like I did yesterday, and I did still feel a bit under the weather but I was better than yesterday. I had hoped to catch a nap, but Mercedes was demanding of my attention all morning, and as I wrote earlier, when I did finally go out, that's when she chose to go to sleep.

Then I got an email about my ex husband that meant Mercedes was going to be hurt & disappointed, which of course as her mother hurt me, cause I hate to see her hurting.

And that's when the crying started. Then I started realizing that this is probably just the beginning of many hurts and disappointments that she will suffer because of him and that made me even more sad (and mad). And combined with the lack of sleep and still getting over the flu, I was feeling pretty emotionally drained...oh but how little did I know...

Then a little while later as I was waiting in the drive thru at Dairy Queen, for some reason that I have not figured out, I suddenly got that punched in the stomach feeling realizing once again that my brother is really gone. I know it's been 2 months, but still there are times that it just catches me off guard and it's like I'm hearing it for the first time again. So now I'm sitting in my car, bawling, waiting in line at the drive thru at Dairy Queen...I guess I should at least be glad that I wasn't inside the restaurant. So when I come home and just after Mercedes and I finish our supper we hear a funny noise...it's kinda like a hissing sound. So we follow the sound and it leads us to....


our hot water tank, which is right next our furnace that did not work properly for the last 2 months and just started working right TWO days ago

and as we try to get close enough to investigate what is making this hissing noise we step onto this pile of SOAKING wet dirty laundy (and this is after we've already removed about 10 towels that were just dripping with dirty water).

It appeared that the pipe on my hot water tank had sprung a leak. And as I looked around my laundry room, with at least an 1" of dirty water all over, and I turned my head and looked at my dished from today that I hadn't even got to yet since I hadn't had the energy too, and I just took one more look, and literally sat down on the floor right where I was standing and started to bawl. It was more than I could take today.

Luckily for me, my mom & stepdad live next door and I made a quick phone call, and my step-dad came over and spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to shut off the hot water. Unbeknownst to me, Mercedes called my mom and said "Grandma can you please come over, I'm worried about my mom, she's just sitting in the chair and she's crying but she's not making any noise or moving, just tears, and I'm not sure how to help her". So my mom came over and honestly for the first few minutes she was here I was literally incapable of speech. I just felt like it was all too much for one day. Hell, who am I kidding I think this is all too much at one time.

I think it's just plain wrong for me to lose my brother, leave my husband, try to be a good single parent, learn how to be a homeowner all on my own, deal with seasonal affective disorder, fighting depression, trying to help my 8 year old deal with the death of her uncle and the divorce of her parents. And a house that has choosen now of all times to suddenly have a bunch of problems.

Was there not a way we could have spread those out a bit? I mean really do I HAVE to go through this all at once? It's mentally and emotionaly exhausting and I just feel drained, and in some areas, I know the fun is just beginning.

I said I'd have pics, so here they are...

This is my beloved couch, my most favorite spot in my whole house, and the place where I have been glued too as much as possible over the last day or two. The quilt is one that my mom made for my brother out of old denim and I just love it cause even though it's been washed it still smells like my bro and I just love to snuggle up in it. And the big painting on the wall was my brothers also, so that has lots of meaning for me as well. So this is where I lay...

and this is what I see when I'm laying in my favorite spot...big screen tv, another large painting (this one is my sister's, she just doesn't have anywhere to hang it), and then the boring stuff like stereo, movies, speakers etc.

If I turn my head a little more to the right this is what I see...the doorway goes into my laundry room which then leads into my kitchen and then into the rest of the house. I do believe this room was an addition at some point. The blue shelves on the wall on the right have scrapbook stuff on it as does most other flat space on that side of the room.
This is really getting into the scrapping area. As you can see it is time for another major cleaning/organizing, but I'm kinda just waiting until I get the new computer hooked up, get some of Brad's stuff outta here, and get rid of the box of wedding invitations that are on top of the stack of file boxes. And just for the record, it may look messy to you, but for the most part, I can find *almost* anything I need too...*almost*.

This is the view if I lay on my stomach from my spot and look behind me. Basically everything back there is scrapbooking related in some way. The painting hanging on the back wall were painted by my grandfather and the other one by my mom, so I do come by my creativity honestly...well sorta...I can make ya a card or scrapbook page, but give me a paintbrush and I don't have a clue what to do with it! lol After being sick for 2 days and finally leaving the house today to grab a few necessities I decided that I deserved a treat for tomorrow morning so this is my treat for today. Mmmmmmm, almost makes me want to make a pot of coffee right now! Can't beat Southern Butter Pecan coffee stuff!

And this pic was just to cute to pass up. All morning long I could barely keep my eyes open but everytime I just started to doze off Mercedes would wake me up needing ginger ale, or a cool cloth, or a new movie, or something, so finally I just gave up on the idea of a nap and decided to go out and get a few groceries and when I got home this is what I saw...Little Miss Mercedes sound asleep (snoring and all), with all her stuffies on guard to protect her...and these are just the none Webkinz stuffies cause the Webkinz are all over at her cousins right now...I think if the Webkinz were here, we'd never even be able to find Mercedes in the picture! lol

Isn't is funny how amazingly cute they look when they are sleeping though? ;)

Technology...

Generally I love technology, and for the most part, I have a pretty good grasp on things, but when I got my brother's laptop after he died, for the first couple months we really just used it as a glorified portable dvd player.

A couple weeks ago I decided the time had come to start using this to it's full potential...especially since my desktop computer is pretty much totally full and very slow and it's gonna be at least another week or two until I get my new desktop set up, and well, I must admit that I've come to like laying on the couch and surfing the web! lol

One of my goals this year was to be a better and more consistent blogger, so one of the things I've been doing while surfing the web is reading lots of blogs, and trying to see what I think makes up a good blog and I've come to the conclusion that it's pictures.

So today I decided to try to figure out how to hook my camera up to my laptop. Easier said than done. First of all we have about 10 USB cords...a few were easy to immediately rule out, and then I finally found a cord that fit. I installed the disk for my camera (amazed that I could even find the disk), plugged in the camera and ........................................NOTHING!!!

My dreams of filling my blog with little peeks into our daily lives were crashed it seemed and I dreaded going back to the old way of doing things, which involved...taking the memory card outta the camera, putting it into the printer, downloading the pictures from the printer to the desktop, copying the pics from the desktop to a portable USB thingie, then uploading the pics from the USB thingie to the laptop, etc. etc...big pain in the patootie.

There was a slight glimmer of hope when a friend stopped by and he is much more technologically advanced then me, and he thought he could get it to work, but alas, no such luck, so finally I just told him to take the cord and see if he could find me another one, since I was convinced it was the cord since it hadn't worked in my desktop either.

Then I had a brainwave and thought I would use Mercedes camera, at least for now so I could put some pics up on my blog. So I pulled out the 10+ USB cords again and not one of them would fit! UGHHHHHHHH! So I start digging through my camera case thinking that maybe I put her cord in my case so that we would know where it was, and sure enough at the very bottom of my case was a cord. I tried it in her camera and it fit, but when I tried it in the computer.......NOTHING!!!

But then it dawned on me...this cord was the same size as my cord, so maybe I was trying her cord in my camera and my cord in her camera, and guess what....I WAS!!!

The cord does seem to have a little short of something in it cause I have to hold it a certain way, but as long as I do that it works and I can very easily take a pic and have it on my laptop in seconds!! So prepare yourself to see some glimpses into our daily lives.

I didn't take hardly any pictures last year, so I'm hoping that this will help me to take more pics, which in turn will help me do more scrapbooking. And just because I made such a big deal about pics...here's one for tonight...just Mercedes doing a pose so we'd have some pics to play around with. :)

The simple things...

Right now I'm laying on my couch trying not to move, hoping that my mom has some ginger ale for my very upset stomach, but with a smile on my face as I listen to my daughter in the other room.

What I'm hearing right now is the sound of Hot Wheels cars being sent down a Hot Wheels track and then crashing into my kitchen cupboards. But even better than that, is the sound of my daughter just singing away, enjoying every second of her hot wheels smash up.

I smile because I remember the joy that a little tiny car replica can bring to a child. I smile because I remember hours and hours of fun with my brother playing with his hot wheels.

So even though I'm still mourning my brother, even though I'm going through a divorce, and even though I have the stomach flu...right here, right now...I smile...all because of some Hot Wheels!

Snow, snow, snow

that's what I woke up to today. Everything covered in the white stuff again. I was sure glad that I didn't have to go anywhere today, so Mercedes and I just huddled up in the house and had a busy day of movies, and playing, and eating and scrapping and crafting and all sorts of fun things. The crazy girl didn't even fall asleep until almost 1am!! I don't know where she gets her energy from, but I sure wish I had some of it! ;)

Just did some fun stuff today, starting with some bookmarks. Mercedes had fun finding lots of Dr. Suess quotes that will work for all sorts of different things we will be working on in the future, plus they looked good on these bookmarks too.



These are just a couple gift tags that I made using some scrap patterned paper and a couple more of those dictionary flowers. I made these ones using a smaller scalloped circle to begin with, and the green flower actually has 2 different size of circles used. They look really cute in real life.



This was just a birthday card I made for a boy since I realized that I did not have one boy card in my stash, and I had these cute foam stickers that I got at the dollar store, and the colors went perfectly with the Basic Grey Lime Rickey line. I really like how this card turned out. I definately think I'll be making a couple more cards outta those stickers before they run out.



And all the while I was entertaining Mercedes since she was in a mood of wanting 100% attention at all time. No matter what I was doing or where I was doing it she wanted to be involved or at least in the same room, so we did have a nice close Mommy-Mercedes time, it meant there wasn't much just Mommy time. But I'll have all the Mommy time I'll need when she's all grown up and I'm thinking back and wishing for all these times again. :)