Inconsiderate, Much?

I was at the park today with my friend who is fighting cancer. Let's call her Sue. This week was a Chemo week, which means that she's super tired (she's also fighting a cold and her husband has been doing extra work, so she's been feeling like a single mom lately, so she's super tired), but she wanted to go to the water park before it's too cold to go again, so we went.

While we were there she received a text from another friend--let's call her Tina--asking if Sue would look after her kids tonight. Sue explained that Tina asks this a lot. She always says no, but Tina keeps asking. It's not like Tina doesn't know what's going on with Sue. There's a whole FB group dedicated to providing Sue with dinners for her family on Chemo Weeks. And, since I know that Tina is a FB friend of Sue's, I know that she knows about this.

Sue ignored the text for a while, and I suggested she just type in "No" and hit send, but Sue eventually responded with a long negative, complete with the entire explanation of why not (there are about five different reasons why not, but hello, she had Chemo this week?).

It was all I could do to not rip her phone out of her hand and type in:

    "WTF? Are you fucking stupid? Sue had Chemo this week. CHEMO. All of your friends are cooking dinner for her this week because she's too tired from her CHEMO to cook a nice dinner for her family, and you want her to expend more energy than she probably has by looking after your kids all night? Even if her husband was going to be home tonight, WTF are you thinking? He's probably tired from working all day, too, and he probably just wants to hang out with his beautiful wife and kids, not help chase after your kids all night. Seriously, you should be offering to look after her kids. Inconsiderate, much?"

Grrrrr!

We Are the Millers

I needed to laugh yesterday, so I picked "We Are the Millers" over "City of Bones". (My husband's probably thanking me, even if he said it didn't matter.)

Sure, there were a few holes in the plot (such as, what kind of DEA Agent can't smell a "pot baby"?), but we did laugh out loud. A lot. I just hope that my husband never feels the need to describe his haircut the same way that Dave does.

Just as funny, if not even funnier than the movie? The outtakes.

What movies made you laugh lately?

I Preview Samples on my Kindle and I Still End up with Crap

Does someone sit around at Kindle and decide where exactly to end a sample so that it hooks you in and hides how hideous the writing is beyond this point?

Do they contact the authors and say, "Yeah, hey, so you know that book you just wrote? Do you think you could rewrite the first five pages, maybe take out the comma faults, and try to make the heroine not seem so much like a wishy-washy, simpering idiot? Just for the sample section though. That'll make it good enough that people who want to be interested and insist on good writing before actually purchasing the book will do so.

"No worries about the stupid, simpering-idiot heroine who spends the next fifteen chapters going back and forth about the hero and about how much she hates and loves him at the same time (run, daisies, run!)--sure, she needs therapy (if you're doing a sequel, get her some fricking therapy), but so long as you make her seem like a strong, I'll-avoid-abusive/toxic-relationships kind of girl in the sample section, people will still buy your book."

Argh. Sometimes it's really easy to spot the crap, but lately I've ended up with some really stinky stuff. At least it's been cheap!

Sleep Ever Ellusive

It was a hot night, and Sheila decided to wait until it cooled down a little before she went to bed. Usually she didn't have to wait; usually her children kept her up until then. But not tonight.

Miracle of miracles, the older girl, Melissa, decided that all she needed was another story, and since it was the short Goodnight Moon, it didn't take long. And, the title was wonderfully appropriate. After that, she promptly fell to sleep. It probably helped that she spent a good portion of the day playing outside with the dog. In fact, it was a miracle that Melissa didn't fall face first into her soup at supper, she'd looked that tired.

I'm not looking that gift horse in the mouth, Sheila thought.

The baby was a bit trickier. She was destined to follow the usual pattern of nurse-to-fall-asleep-and-then-wake-up-within-one-minute-of-being-put-in-the-crib, Sheila could feel it. Terri looked a lot like her older sister, though, with a lot of head-resting on the high chair's tray at dinner. Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing for Melissa to interrupt Terri's naps today after all.

Sheila did sit on the couch to nurse her to sleep though. It took over an hour, but Shane sat beside her and they watched a couple shows, so at least she wasn't alone like usual. And, Sheila would take any "couple-time" that she could get.

She finally put Terri in the crib and was oh so hopeful that she'd get more than the usual three hours of sleep before being woken up. She and Shane even got to spend some quality time together.

It was cooler now, and Sheila tried to sleep. Miracle of miracles, no little girls woke up until four! Right when she was actually falling asleep.

Of course.

Sleep of Late

Just when I think that there’s hope for my getting more than three hours of sleep in a row, and not just in a night, it’s smashed into wet, teary smithereens by a seven-month-old monster. I mean baby.

My first kid slept for five hours straight right off the bat. Not until two a.m., mind you, but I could get a decent night’s rest after a nursing/”Firefly” marathon. Kid number two, not so much. This one goes to bed much earlier, but then wakes every one to three hours because he peed. Or needs to nurse. Or, more likely, he peed and now he needs a refill. Oy. And, if he wakes up after about three or four in the morning, I pretty much have to take him to bed with me if I want to get any rest at all because being woken up every half hour for a little suck-fest, well, it sucks. So he eats and I sort of sleep.

And by sort of sleep I mean I sometimes have weird dreams but I get woken up a lot to him rooting around for some boob.

Anyway, lately things have been getting better. Once he goes to bed I have a good few hours to sleep. (It’s not his fault that this is when I choose to check my email or Facebook or some favourite blogs.) The nights he sleeps past three are the nights that I have to get up at three to drive hubby to work because I need the car tomorrow. Then nights I don’t have to get up at three, he wakes up every two hours.

Tonight he was soundly sleeping on my lap so I took him to the crib. He hiccupped. He woke up. He peed. I changed his diaper. Did he go back to sleep? No. He screamed for a good thirty minutes before he was ready for more boob to fall asleep by. But hey, he slept.

Only four more months before I go back to work…