A friend of mine from summer camp used to ask me every day if I'd washed my brain that morning. There might have been a bit of a language barrier. Her native language was Spanish, and even though she spoke English better than most Americans, some things just don't translate. Essentially, her point was that I had a dirty teenage mind, and that somehow I needed to clean it up. I'm not sure I ever succeeded in doing that, and I'm not entirely sure I want to. However, there are some things I just don't need to have in my dirty mind. My brain is in serious need of washing tonight, and I blame my husband. I'm not about to disclose private marital information here, so don't get grossed out just yet. Just yet.

For the past 24 hours, I've been puking in my mouth a little at least once an hour. Flashes of nastiness keep popping into my brain, and I can't make them go away. I'm not sure of the proper way to handle this. Do I need to go and look at something nastier to replace this nastiness? Do I need to look at autopsy photos? Do I need to watch those animations that have allegedly caused kids to go into seizures? Somebody, please help me.

So, here's the deal. Because of the internet (and my husband) I have now seen what is alleged to be Britney Spears' waxed hoo-ha. Oh, and her C-section scar. Oh, and her flabby thighs. Which look a lot like mine, but I'm not a celebrity with a personal trainer and dietician and coke dealer, so there's my excuse. Apparently, Britney's now hanging out with Paris Hilton, and to be a part of that crowd, you have to show your stuff to the paparazzi. By accident of course. Drunkeness and wealth are always defenses for poor behavior, right?

I considered providing a link to this trash, but my two readers are both adults, so they can Google it themselves. My husband found it on Wicked Chops Poker. You can go there if you'd like. A word of warning, however: you may never be the same. You may not be able to shake the heebie-jeebies. You may become bulimic in an instant. If you're smart, you won't look. I wasn't smart. I looked. And then I looked again just to make sure they weren't doctored. And then I looked again to make sure that was really a C-section scar. And then, after reading the comments on the post, I had to go back and check the veracity of the commenters' comments. All of this added up to me needing to take like ten showers. And then ten more. Oh, and my brain needs a washing. Anyone know anybody who can take care of that for me?

2006 wasn't the best year. I'm not all that sad that it's almost over, but I also must recognize that things could have been much, much worse. Instead of focusing on the bad things that happened this year, I'm going to choose to focus on how very lucky we really are. We live a great life.

We lost a grandfather and a very good friend this year. I don't have very many memories of the grandfather, since he is my husband's grandfather, but I do think of him fondly. He lived a hard life in many ways, but he and his wife did the best they could. We also lost a very good friend this year. He died in the spring, but I still think about him every day. I went to sleep last night thinking about his wife and his mother and how it must have been to celebrate Thanksgiving without him this year. Those two women are great people, and it makes my heart hurt that they've been through so much pain this year. I can only hope that they spent the day being thankful for the short time that they did have with him, instead of mourning the time they lost. I know that would be my biggest challenge if I were in their shoes.

Thinking about Gulfman got me thinking about all the friends we've lost over the years. The three friends who immediately come to mind were really great people. My friend Lucia was a brilliant girl. She spoke seven languages and was training to be a translator. She loved her home country (Spain), she loved her second home country (the U.S.), she loved the beach, she loved her friends, and she really loved music, especially U2. She had seen them in concert countless times and knew every word to every song they ever produced. She taught me that the world is a very small place and that very bad things can happen to very good people. My friend Allison was also brilliant. She is very much responsible for the 14 years I spent in television news. She taught me everything I knew about producing newscasts. She was kind. She was giving. She was incredibly patient. She loved tennis, and she loved her husband. Although I never got the chance to meet him before she died, I know how she loved people, and I know she must have loved him with all of her heart. The world would have been a better place if she were still in it. Most recently, we lost our friend Chris. He was also kind and giving. Patience was not his best virtue, but it was something he was working on. He came across as a tough New Yorker, but he was one of the kindest souls I ever knew. He loved his wife. He loved his job. He loved his friends. He loved the Dallas Cowboys. He loved 80s music. He was one-of-a-kind, and the world also needed him. We needed him.

All of this sadness reminds me that we don't know how much time we have here on earth. We never know when our time is up. That's why I tried to spend this weekend being thankful for the time I've had and the time I hope to have in the future. No matter what life brings me in 2007, I hope to keep my focus on just how lucky I am to have been a part of so many beautiful lives. I hope and pray I get to witness the little life we created grow into a wonderful man, but I will cherish every day along the way, knowing that at any moment it could all be over for me. I have no power over that. I do have the power to love everyone around me with all of my heart, and I intend to do that. I am so very thankful for every one of them.

I decided when I woke up this morning that I was going to stop spazzing out. I don't know if this is a long-term thing, but it's something I am focusing on for the immediate future. When I was a working journalist, my husband spent years trying to get me to stop back-timing our life like I back-timed a newscast. I was obsessive in planning out my days to the second. In television news, seconds are precious commodities, and producers often tend to over-emphasize the importance of them in their daily lives. Since I had a child and got out of TV, I have accepted the fact that overscheduling is hazardous to one's health. Plus, I have found that I am happier in my stay-at-home mom role when I'm busy, but not timed out every minute of every day.

In just a few weeks, I will have been out of television news for a year. That's so hard to believe, but it's true. My last day at work was December 15, 2005. I've spent every last day of this past year trying to deprogram myself. For 14 years, a good part of my identity was based on my work and my success or failure in that work. My entire outlook on life could swing with the direction of a single newscast or even a single story. That can be a dangerous prospect for a chronic perfectionist. It can turn you into a cynical beast in a heartbeat. I've been fairly successful in toning down the cynism and shutting off the back-timing, but I have failed miserably in one very important area: I can't focus on one thing at a time.

I spent so many years multi-tasking that I can't just do one thing. Now that I have the freedom to focus, you would think that I would cherish it. I don't. I simply do not know how to function this way. Since I have been stressing a great deal over this holiday trip, I have found myself making up shit to worry about. In short, nothing outside my little brain is stressing me out. I'm stressing myself out by getting overly concerned about things that simply don't matter. I'm letting other people (read: my family) get me worked up over things that would normally roll off my back without a second thought. I'm creating chaos. This is how most of my family lives, but it's not how I want to live. I didn't even realize I was doing this until Soul Mate called me on it yesterday. Once he gave me a verbal shaking, and I had a few precious hours to sleep on it, I think I snapped out of the troubled trance. I think I've turned my frown upside down.

I stopped worrying about buying a new car before we leave for Mississippi. I stopped worrying about the flat tire on my car that we're not driving on our trip. I stopped worrying about finding a birthday present for my dad. I stopped worrying whether My Little Sunshine was going to be a good roadtrip buddy. I stopped worrying about getting all my laundry done in time. I went to Jazzercise this morning, and I danced my butt off. I was sweating like a whore in chuch. (That's a phrase my husband is fond of attributing to his daddy, but his daddy never said anything of the kind. It's just fun to blame him when we want to say something inappropriate.) Then, I stopped at Starbucks, got myself a peppermint mocha, and sat down and watched people for a little while. I focused on every wonderful sip of that chocolatey, minty goodness. I think I just might be in the right frame of mind to enjoy this holiday weekend. Let's just hope the planets align properly so I can make this happen.

I'm about to do something that I will not, under any logical circumstances, be able to explain to my kid. He's not sick, but I'm about to take him to the doctor's office. He's going to the doctor's office, but he's not going to see his doctor. They're not going to look at his ears, they're not going to listen to his heart, and they're not going to weigh him. It's flu shot time, and I hate it. I seriously think the old mom saying, "this is going to hurt me worse than it hurts you" applies here.

I can't tell him about it ahead of time, because he'll scream the entire way there and the entire time until he gets the shot and for about 15 minutes after he gets it. I hate deceiving him, though. That's why I'm half-heartedly debating never telling him there's a Santa Claus. Eventually, all parents who tell their kids that story have to tell their kids they lied to them. Sure, the kids get a whole lotta loot out of the deal, but it's still a big fat lie, and there's got to be something in the back of their minds that makes them question their parents from that point on. Maybe that's a natural part of the growing-up process, but I still don't like lying to my kid. Yeah, he's only two, and he's not going to remember this 20 years from now anyway, but it's the principle of the thing, you know?

Normally, when I take him to the doctor, I can tell them that the doctor and nurse are going to make him feel better, and that makes a little more sense in his growing mind. I don't have that defense today. I don't have any defense really, except I don't want you to get the flu and die. That is not a conversation I want to have with him today, so I guess I'll have to come up with something else. Hopefully, the loot exchange will work in my favor today. They have a treasure chest at the doctor's office. Maybe if he gets a little green plastic dinosaur out of the ordeal he won't hate me for letting them hurt him when he's not sick. That ounce of prevention thing doesn't feel like it's going to amount to a hill of beans right now. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. Maybe.

We're packing up the kid and the car on Wednesday and heading south. It's going to be My Little Sunshine's first roadtrip. He's a very active two year old, so eight hours in the car with him should be very interesting. I started getting things ready for our trip this morning. That's the difference between Working Me and Non-Working Me. I'm actually able to start things early, instead of cramming everything in at the very last second. I used to live my life like I was pulling a college all-nighter. Every day was fueled by caffeine and the fear of failure. Every night was fueled by necessity. There was little time to worry, because there was simply little time. Turns out, for me, that was a good thing. I wish I had less time to worry right now.

Sure, I'm worried about how we're going to occupy the little man for eight hours in a car on many many miles of very boring interstate. What I'm more worried about, though, is what will happen when we get to our holiday destination. See, I don't have a very good track record when it comes to successful holiday celebrations with my side of the family. It hasn't been that long ago when I asked Soul Mate to pack our shit up on Christmas morning, so we could get the heck out of dodge. We ended up spending that Christmas day on the road and having that Christmas dinner at the Waffle House in our Carolina town, instead of with my family in Mississippi.

That's just one example of Holidays-Gone-Bad with my family. There are many more stories I could tell, but that would just be belaboring the point. Since Sunshine was born, it seems that there has been an unspoken agreement among the members of my family to act a little more sane, at least when he's around. Without being too direct, because that's the last thing I do with my family for fear of the reaction, I think I've made it pretty clear that sanity is a minimum requirement for time spent with my son. I would love to ask for pleasantries and merriment, but I'll take sanity any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Sunshine and I have done a couple of visits with my family over the past couple of years. Those trips have all gone better than I expected, but this will be the first holiday extravaganza that we've braved since Sunshine's birth. Holidays tend to be a sad time for my mom and her brothers and sisters, so that's always a challenge we have to deal with. But this year, there's an added element of surprise. In addition to the interesting chemical makeup of my own family, my brother's on-and-off girlfriend will also be there. Her stability is often called into question, but her past transgressions against my little brother have put her in less-than-favorable status with my mother and sister. Three very fiery and emotional women in the same house at the same time? That should be fun. Oh, and did I mention that they all love to talk ... a lot?

Despite the obvious challenges ahead, I am looking forward to this trip. I am hopeful that things will go smoothly, and we'll all be fat and happy by the end of the weekend. If we're lucky, we'll have Thanksgiving dinner at my parents' house this year and not a random Waffle House. If we're really lucky, we'll make some happy memories of this holiday. Hopefully, history will not repeat itself. Hopefully, we've all learned some lessons from our past mistakes. I am looking forward to changing the course of things. I am going to remain cautiously optimistic. I'll keep you posted on how it all turns out.

I have a real problem. I can't sleep. At night anyway. Not at all. Not at all. For two nights in a row, I have tossed and turned and calculated and worried. Thank god for Curious George right now, because it's keeping My Little Sunshine occupied so I can write. Writing right now is not an option. It's a necessity. I have to keep my mind working, or it's going to shut down on me. I'm tired. Really, really tired.

I've never been a good sleeper, but it's gotten much worse since I became a mother. A paranoid nut bag mother. Every little peep out of Sunshine makes me bolt straight up in bed. He's two years old, and I'm still worried he's going to die of SIDS or something. What if his blanket gets wrapped around his head, or what if the sucky part of his cork (pacifier) comes off and gets lodged in his throat? I have to be able to hear him, or I will cease to breathe myself. It's insane, I know, but I can't help it.

Besides the peeps from Sunshine, every move by my husband or dog wakes me up. My husband is a night owl and often stays up four or five hours after I go to bed. The dog then feels torn and runs up and down the stairs to make sure everyone's still alive and well. She doesn't like it when her people are separated. And don't even get me started about when Soul Mate is traveling. Forget about it. I didn't sleep for two months when he was in Vegas.

I think I stopped sleeping when I was eight years old. I woke up in my bed in a second floor apartment in Columbus, Ohio. I saw flames shooting up outside my window. I was paralyzed by fear. I couldn't move, and I couldn't scream. I laid there thinking I was going to die until the firefighters knocked on our door and woke my parents up. My dad came and got me out of bed, and I don't think I spoke for quite some time. I just shook. And shook. I think that's where my sleep problems started.

In hindsight, the fire probably wasn't all that big, but it had a big impact on my little brain. Apparently, one of my neighbors pissed off her boyfriend, and he set her car on fire in a parking space right under my window. Fortunately, she was nearly out of gas. The firefighters told my parents if there was a full tank in that car, it would have blown, and our building would have caught fire as well. Lucky for me she didn't have time to go to the gas station that day. The dude went to jail, and no one was otherwise injured. Except for my psyche.

I don't live in an apartment anymore, and there's little chance someone's going to set a car on fire outside my window, but I still can't sleep. I go from my right side to my left side to my back to my stomach to my right side all over again. Just as I think I'm relaxing and getting ready to fall asleep, I start to panic over really stupid things. Was I rude to that telemarketer on the phone, and will that bring bad karma into my life? What about that spider I killed? What if that was some sort of special spider and smashing him will lead to me being smashed by a meteor in my driveway? It's all crazy, but I can't make it stop.

Last night, I had a soundtrack to my tossing and turning. It was that Snow Patrol song that was on the season finale of Grey's Anatomy. It's Chasing Cars. Everytime I rolled over, I'd hear the lead singer performing just for me, of course. "If I lay here. If I just lay here. Would you lie with me and just forget the world" over and over and over. By the way, those are the only words I know, so those were the only words I heard for eight hours of not sleeping.

This afternoon, I'm already planning to go back to that new baby rule: sleep when the baby sleeps. Yep. Family nap time is definitely in order.

When I started this blog, I vowed to explore all aspects of my world in an attempt at self-exploration. I don't want this to become a space where I exclusively tell poop and snot stories, although those stories are often worth sharing. I want it to be a place where I talk about my entire circle, not just the center of it: My Little Sunshine. But, I tell ya, my kid is damn funny. He cracks me up all the time. Just read my last post if you want any proof of that. One of Sunshine's latest phases has become a recurring skit on the Days of Our Little Lives. We've replayed it nearly every day for the past week. So much so, I think it's become one of those recurring dreams/nightmares for Soul Mate.

There's this show on the Disney Channel called Little Einsteins. It's a cartoon that uses art and classical music to teach kids various life lessons. My kid loves it. He pretends to get into his rocket and blast off on the missions with the characters in the show. Well, lately, his imagination has gotten very detailed. He has been acting out this show with the "bad knight" on it for weeks. Every time he hears classical music, he says, "Mommy, what happened? The bad knight running through the forest!" He then wants me to make up some story about the bad knight to go along with the classical music. This all started with an episode of Little Einsteins and has since taken on a life of its own. Making up these stories is fun, if not a bit tiring at times. There's only so much you can do with a bad knight in a forest that won't scare the be-jeezus out of a two year old.

A few days ago, Sunshine was acting out the scenes as he watched the show, and he looks at me and says, "Mommy, I'm June." "What," I say. "You're June? You mean on the Little Einsteins? Well, honey, June is a girl, and you are a boy," I say. Sunshine thinks about it for a minute and says, "Mommy, stop talking. I'm June." I look over at Soul Mate who has this completely confounded look on his face. I continue, "What about Quincy, honey? Do you want to be Quincy? He is a boy just like you." Sunshine looks at me, then at his father, then back at me. "No, mommy! I'm June! I'm June!" At this point, Soul Mate is getting a little worried. He steps in. "Son," he says, "here's the thing. You can't be June because June is a girl. You're a boy. Boys have penises. Girls don't. Quincy has a penis. He's a boy. You have a penis. You're a boy. There. See, you're Quincy. Got it?" "Yeah, I'm Quincy," Sunshine said proudly. Happy that he solved our son's gender confusion, Soul Mate went back to work.

Not two minutes later, Sunshine exclaimed, "Rocket, blast off! I'm June! I'm June!" Gender confusion confounded by the wearing of mommy's leather slip-on shoes. Father further confounded by the confusion of the gender. Mother laughing hysterically. Priceless, priceless, priceless.

My son has been banned from his school's sandbox. It seems that he has developed a voracious appetite for eating sand. When I picked him up this afternoon, the teachers looked at me with this "Oh-My-Gosh-Your-Kid's-a-Freak-Show" look and said, "Um, you may want to watch him closely this afternoon." "We had to, um, ban him from the sandbox," they said. "We tried everything we could (sad face), but we just couldn't get him to stop eating sand." Another teacher pipes up from across the room, "I mean, it wasn't just a little sand. It was A LOT. I mean A LOT. In fact, he was down on his hands and knees eating it like a dog," she said excitedly. "That is," the teacher exclaimed, "until he nearly puked." I started to explain that I am not, in fact, raising a sand-eating animal and that I don't know why he would do such a thing, when the first teacher said, "We're just worried that he might get sick. I mean, you never know what might be in there." Visions of cat crap and the like began dancing in my head as I nearly puked on site, or died of embarassment. I'm not sure which.

Despite the fact that my kiddo ate half his weight in red-clay clad sand, he seems to be doing fine tonight. He's in a great mood. It seems to have helped clear up his sinuses. If anyone needs more evidence that I'm a hypochondriac freak, though, I went out tonight and bought him some Flintstones vitamins. I bought into my mom's Old Wives' Tale that if a kid eats dirt/sand/anything-else-not appropriate for human consumption, it's because they are suffering from some sort of nutrient deficiency. I think that's probably a load of horse manure (or cat crap), but I thought, "What the hell. Vitamins won't kill him."

The funny thing is that I'm really not mortified that my kid likes to eat sand on his hands and knees like a dog. I know I should be. All good mothers want their kids to grow up big and strong and develop a taste for vegetables. While I am mortified by the thought of there being feline fecal matter in the sandbox, I am not totally disgusted by the actual act of eating sand. I ate mudpies, and it didn't kill me. We just have different taste I guess. His sand-eating put a smile on my face for most of the day as I navigated the ridiculous world of the doctor's office waiting room. I normally would be pissed that I had to wait a full hour before I saw the dear doctor. Today, I just laughed about my kid who loves sand so much he wants to marry it. Yep. That's my boy!

I hope you all have either voted or are making plans to vote today. I don't give a rat's bee-hind who you vote for (well, really I do, but it's your right) as long as you do it. Anyhoo, my husband and I have a great feeling about today for some reason. We're not sure why, but we do. So, he's decided to live blog it from beginning to end. It's pretty hilarious so far, so if you get a chance, go check out Rapid Eye Reality. Our buddy, CJ, is doing this as well. He's at Up For Anything.

Update: Our friend, Jack, is now live-blogging from the Prez's home state. Check out Jack's coverage at 67 Degrees.

I'm having too much fun reading these live blogs and the comments on them that I don't have time to do this myself. Not to mention the fact that I'm trying to play on the computer and wrangle a sick two year old. He's not digging my idea. Days like this make me wish we had two laptops. This cord thing is a real pain in the you-know-what.

Have a good one. And may the best man, woman or marshmallow win.

I've started (and even finished, but never posted) several things over the past week. They're all outdated now. I've been in a real funk, and I just haven't had anything to say. It's not that I haven't had anything on my mind. It's just that what's dominating my thoughts is a topic that I can't discuss at the moment, and it's made my brain so mushy that anything I've written either sounds incredibly angry (which I'm really not) or simply stupid. For all of you stirring the rumor mill, I am NOT pregnant. We do hope to have some resolution on That-Thing-We're Being-Annoyingly-Vague-About very soon, so perhaps we'll fill you in then.

This isn't going to be brilliant work or anything, and I don't even have time to get up on my soapbox. I really want to. I love my soapbox. It's so tall and clean. I'm turning on the computer today to ask you to vote tomorrow. I don't care if you are disillusioned with the process. I don't care if you don't feel strongly about party politics. I don't care if you are disgusted with the people who run for office. You are not disenfranchised. You have a voice. It was not long ago in our nation's history when women and black people did not have this right or privilege, depending on your point of view. That is not something I take lightly. South Carolina was one of the last states in the nation to allow women to vote, and apparently the women of this state weren't all that fired up about it, because they liked the traditional roles for men and women. That's amazing to me.

What frightens me now, though, is that we Americans have allowed some of the rights our citizens have enjoyed since the birth of our nation to be taken away. Most of the people in this country have stayed as silent as a South Carolina plantation wife as our government has taken an axe to our freedom. Not only that, the fat cats are getting fatter, and the whole process is getting more and more tainted. On a very personal level, my whole life is in limbo right now, because of a few jerks in Washington.

I always vote. I vote for School Board. I vote for City Council. I vote for president. This election day won't be any different in that way (except it's not time to vote for president). What is different, is that this time I'm pissed off. I will admit that this go-'round I'm voting more with my heart than my head, but maybe that's where I've gone wrong in years past. I'm going to cast my one measley vote against just about every incumbent on the ballot. My one little ole vote won't make much of a difference, but I would like to drag everyone I know to the polls with me, even if they're kicking and screaming. We are a nation of one and a nation of ones. Add your one to my one and Soul Mate's one and whatever other ones we can gather, and maybe then it'll mean something.

In South Carolina, it's not just about the jackasses in office. There are several constitutional questions on the ballot. I feel very strongly about several of them. If you're going to get up off your couch or your office chair, do some reading first. They're worded just weirdly enough to confuse people, so make sure you know to what you're saying "yes" or "no." As if our state is not already intolerant enough of homosexuals. As if our property taxes aren't already high enough. And, hey, if you disagree with me, I encourage you to vote, too. I'm sure you'll be voting with the majority anyway, so whatever. I just want the jerks in Columbia to know that we're not all a bunch of homophobe yes men.

Please don't make any excuses. The polls in most states accomodate work schedules and daycare schedules and even TV people schedules. You can find time to do it. So what if it's raining? I swear you won't melt. So what if it's cold? Coats and hats are very fashionable this time of year. So what if you don't consider yourself red or blue? Green is nice, too. Rainbows are also pretty. That's what my ballot is going to look like this election day: a beautiful rainbow peeking out from behind some very ugly clouds.

Get up off your butt and vote!