Month: April 2019

Reasons to leave

/ dashtikalin / 1 Comment

I know I talk about it entirely way too much, but I just cannot stop thinking about moving. The thought excites me so much. Even if it never actually happens, just thinking about and mentally planning for a big move makes me happy. Planning what furniture I’d take and what I would toss. Trying to predict where I’d put what furniture if we did move. Looking at adorable dog houses I could buy since I would finally have a yard for my dogs to run around and play in. Just so many things. So instead of blabbering about it in every other blog post, I’m going to lay out my reasons for wanting to move in this post.

1) Space

I’m not sure how many times I’ve mentioned it, but my house is small. Like, very small. It’s only about 600 sqft, and that’s including my patio. This is shared with myself, my husband, our two toddlers and baby number three who is expected to make his appearance at the end of this year. Obviously there are many people out there who survive with far less space and more people sharing the one house, but I spend most of my time at home, so the small space is really starting to wear on me. If I can afford to upgrade, I would really like to do so. Not only would we have more space to breathe, but the kids could really benefit from having more space to play.

2) Yard

I don’t have a yard. At all. I have a very small patio, and then the yard outside that is considered a “common area.” I cannot let my dogs outside my patio unsupervised, tethered or not. So if I am busy taking care of the kids, the dogs will just relieve themselves on the patio. Even though I clean the patio off several times a day, I hate them going to the bathroom on the patio. My oldest dog was trained to go on pavement because she was not born into a very good household (she was left in a garage to use the bathroom and do whatever else) and now our younger dog has picked up this bad habit as well. It has made house training/potty training very difficult because they are just dogs, so they don’t really understand the difference between flat floor inside and flat floor outside. I would like to be able to let them inside more often and not have to sit on the edge of my seat so I can hurry up and pull them outside when the try to pop a squat in the living room after being inside for fifteen minutes. I think having an actual yard with grass will go a LONG way with improving their quality of life. Right now I try to take them out on tethers several times a day if I can so they can potty in the grass and run/play together, but the tethers are pretty limiting, and the dog park near us is just absolutely disgusting. Having a yard I can easily clean myself will be so amazing for them.

3) Neighbors

As you can see from my first crazy neighbor series… Some seriously insane people have lived near me. After those people left is when I started having issues with a different neighbor. So far we haven’t had problems since the second crazies left, but I really don’t feel like waiting around until I get another psychotic neighbor! I know you can grt bad neighbors anywhere, but our neighborhood has statistics against them. We have a higher rate of police calls for domestic disturbance/violence and and animal control than any other neighborhood in our area. Why? Because our neighborhood is the cheapest in our area and is filled with a bunch of young newlyweds. Some of these kids are literally teens that married right out of high school. I have no issues with mature teens living around me, but a lot of these kids are bringing their high school drama and immaturity with them. In fact, not neighbors who caused issues for me were teenagers. I’m just really tired of it and am ready to move somewhere with a higher rate of mature adults living in the neighborhood.

4) Laundry/housing company

We don’t have laundry hookups in our houses, so we use communal laundromats in our neighborhood and it sucks. Not only are a lot of the other tenants very inconsiderate with their laundry, but the housing company in charge of my neighborhood is absolutely horrible at keeping up with fixing our laundry machines. So you have people leaving their loads running in the laundry room for hours at a time, but none of the other dryers work, so you’re pretty much screwed. Some people will straight up take your load out and toss it on a counter if you leave your clothes in the laundry room too long, because it’s ridiculous to have to leave your clothes sitting wet in the washer as you wait hours and hours for a dryer to be freed up so you can dry your clothes. And it’s not only the laundry rooms that housing sucks at maintaining. A lot of apartments also have issues with vermin, pests, and black mold. The maintenance people will come look at a spot of mold and with seriously tell you it’s just dirt or mildew, then spray/scrub it with bleach amd leave. It’s absolutely horrible, and the worst part is they are guaranteed rent each month because it’s a military neighborhood, so rent just goes straight from the government right into housing’s pocket. We have no opportunity to deny them rent if we are being mistreated.

5) I’m too fat for stairs

This is kind of a joke… But also not really. Pregnancy takes a toll on my hips, so stairs is really hard for me the more pregnant I get. Not only are they hard for me, they are dangerous for my mischievous toddlers. I just really do not like having to confine the kids to our teeny living room because of how clumsy they are on the staircase. The neighborhood I want to move to offers single story homes, so I am really hoping that is what we can get.

6) Air conditioning

Our current neighborhood does not allow any kind of air conditioning usage unless you have some kind of doctor’s note stating AC is medically necessary for you. I doubt I can obtain any such note, even while being pregnant. Our house gets surprisingly really hot during the long summer months, so moving to a neighborhood where AC is allowed would be so ideal for us. Heat stroke just does not look good on me, and it doesn’t look good on my babies either.

So yeah, there you have it. Pretty much all my reasons in a nutshell. I think they’re pretty good reasons! Let me know what you guys think.

Crazy neighbor 1: part 3

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Hey there! If this blog post is the first one you’re seeing, hold up dude! This is part 3, so you probably want to go read parts 1 and 2 before you skim this part of the story. Wouldn’t want you to get confused! Go check out parts 1 and 2 and then come back and enjoy this final installment of my first crazy neighbor series.

Erin’s command put into place a protection order. Erin was not allowed to come anywhere within a certain distance of his family or house unless accompanied by someone in his command with a rank of staff sergeant or higher. April lived with me for about a week after the police found the steroids. Her house was trashed from her husband throwing yet another tantrum and destroying everything, and she didn’t want to be alone. So she slept on my sofa for the next week or so. I did all I could to help her see this was such a good thing for her. She was finally free! We went shopping, we hung out, we had fun together. Anything to take her mind off what was going on. I encouraged her to abide by the protective order and cease all contact with Erin, but she had absolutely no self control when it came to talking to him. She confided in me that she had also cheated on her husband while he was in bootcamp with some guy from her hometown because she had a lot of people telling her a relationship with a military dude wasn’t going to work out. So she got lonely and slept with someone. This was a huge piece to the puzzle for me. No wonder she kept trying to justify this man’s horrible treatment of her, she was guilty and a hypocrite for expecting Erin to come clean about his cheating, yet she told me she had absolutely no intention of sharing her mistakes with her husband and swore to take her secret with her to the grave. Little by little she went from being so confident in herself and liberated, to falling right back for Erin’s manipulation. She had people like Erin’s parents pressuring her to stay with their son despite knowing many of the horrible things he had done. By the end of the week, she had lost all her confidence and was back to begging to work things out with her abusive husband. It was one of the saddest falls from grace I had ever seen. I went from being so proud of her and happy for her to mourning her loss of freedom and chance at a normal life for her son. She was selfishly planning on throwing her child right back into an abusive household. I should have seen this coming, I mean she did say some extremely immature things quite often. She told me once that she refuses to have children from different fathers, and that if she and Erin didn’t work out, she would still go to him purely for impregnation so she could have another child. She also shared that Erin had told her on multiple occasions that he would kill her and her lover if she ever cheated on him, and that she wholeheartedly believed he really meant that. I don’t know about you, but I would walk away from any relationship immediately if someone threatened my life.

Eventually I helped April move back into her house and helped her scrub things clean since it had been rotting in trash the whole time she was staying with me. We had things like glass to clean up because Erin’s last tantrum resulted in another tv being broken. April moving back triggered a sequel of back to back horrible decisions. The second she became lonely and started talking to Erin more, she pulled away from me again (she does this every time she comes to me upset, then runs back to her abusive husband’s arms). She started having Erin over nightly to climb in windows and be snuck into the house. This violated the protection order that was in place and concerned myself and the surrounding neighbors. Erin was an extremely dangerous individual. Not only was he mentally unstable in general, but his hormones were imbalanced due to his being deprived of steroids. So neighbors would call every time they saw him slinking around our buildings, which was an almost nightly occurance at one point. Police officers started to be able to recognize us on sight because of how often they were called to our housing area. He was never physically caught by officers for violating the protective order because he somehow always managed to sneak away.

There was one point when I met one of Erin’s co-workers by chance at a get together hosted by my friend, D. I was very curious to see what Erin was like at work as was asking him questions. April has told me a while back that she suspected Erin talked sh*t about her at work, so I asked this co-worker if he remembered anything Erin said about his wife at work. He didn’t really remember anything, so we all started talking about how prevalent abuse is in our neighborhood. D was telling us about one of her female neighbors whose husband shoved her through closet doors and pushed her down the stairs. We briefly chatted about how insane it was that women stay with men after being treated that way, and then eventually moved on to other conversation topics. Well I got a call from April days later and she said she knows I was telling people that Erin pushed her through closet doors and down stairs and that she didn’t want me to talk about her business to people at all, let alone lie about it. She said Erin was told by the coworker at work that I accused Erin of these things at the party, which most certainly did NOT happen. I wanted to slap this girl and shake her head while yelling “LOOK AT WHO YOUR SOURCE IS.” She was heavily insinuating that I was lying after I assured her repeatedly that I did not ever say anything of the sort at that party, and that someone was getting confused about who said what. To this day I wholeheartedly believe Erin purposefully lied to put a wedge between April and I. He was extremely upset when I started standing up to him and protecting April, and he said several times on several different social media platforms that April was “choosing me over him.” NO you stupid idiot, she was choosing herself over your sorry ass for once in her life, and it was beautiful!

His manipulation worked, though. I was shocked she believed her husband over me after all the lies she had caught him in over the course of the past year. Not once had I ever lied to her. Not once. Yet she believed him over me because he was on day 2 of “trying to change.” That was it for me. I had sacrificed enough for this teenager who just used me and didn’t appreciate all I had done to help her and her poor son. If she was dumb enough to run back to the man who didn’t respect her in any way, shape, or form… Well she could do it alone. I was done with holding her hand. I looked forward to the day she’d finally move out because that meant her trashy husband would have no reason to hang around the outside of my house anymore. My family’s safety was my biggest priority, and his existence was a threat to that safety. I focused on working with sharing the truth with investigators so they would have all right the information instead of whatever bullsh*t lies April would undoubtedly make up to protect Erin. I gave them proof that Erin was not only doing steroids, he was also dealing them to co-workers. Meanwhile, April was trying to turn out mutual friends against me. I now have proof of her telling people that I somehow caused her marital problems and that somehow I was the one responsible for her husband threatening divorce. She told them I costed her tens of thousands of dollars. First of all, I had absolutely nothing to do with her nasty husband cheating on her and abusing her. That is what caused their marital problems, not me. And I would like to see proof of this tens of thousands of dollars I costed her, because I can promise you my broke ass didn’t see a cent of this money I allegedly costed her. Hearing all these childishly constructed lies just confirmed that I was done with her. If she wanted so bad to stay with the mentally ill man who abused her and her child, so be it. I hope she enjoys this life of misery and suffering she chose for herself. I’ll keep my amazing husband who loves and respects me, thank you very much. My husband goes out of his way to ensure I am not being abused, to the point where he specifically requested I have not only access to his bank accounts, but that I have my own bank accounts to keep any money I make on the side from odd jobs here and there. He was very particular that I have a copy of every key that he has so we have equal access to absolutely everything. One of his cutest qualities is he is obsessed with making sure the kids and I are thoroughly fed, and even fusses at me when I forget to eat a meal during the day. It’s to the point where we’re all a little chubby because he’s so worried about our being fed enough. This is how a woman SHOULD be treated. No husband is perfect, but abuse is a deal breaker. If your man abuses you in any way, just throw the whole man away. Seriously. He’s not worth it.

The last I heard of April and Erin, they are still trying to force their gross relationship to work. She apparently thinks she’s some kind of hot sh*t for successfully sinking her claws into a gross man literally not self respecting woman would want. Despite all she has done to me with her pathological lying and her spreading rumors about me behind my back, I feel sorry for her. I really do. She’ll never know what it feels like to be in a truly loving relationship with a man who respects you. Most of all, I feel sorry for her son. He will grow up seeing his mom being mistreated and will have to fight so hard in life to not follow in his father’s footsteps. He’ll have to teach himself what a truly good relationship looks like, because god knows he won’t see any of that at home. I absolutely believe Erin will beat his son more and more as he grows older. All I can do is pray that kid survives childhood and doesn’t become yet another child failed by CPS, only to end up in news articles after being found critically wounded/murdered. People close to me have survived horrible, abusive childhoods and came out functioning adults with minimal psychological issues. So I’m really rooting for this kid to do the same.

You’ve finally reached the end! Thanks for sticking with it and making it this far! Let me know what you think of my experience. It’s insane, right?! Almost like something out of a novel or movie. But unfortunately everything I have written is 100% true and really happened. Hope you enjoyed!

Crazy neighbor 1: part 2

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If you haven’t already, go read part 1 to this story before you read this part, otherwise you’ll probably be pretty confused!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to mom shame. I hardcore struggle with juggling my household responsibilities with making sure my kids don’t kill themselves. I can absolutely sympathize with the struggle of motherhood, and I could clearly see April was having a hard time. I think she tended to take her frustrations out on her son. There was a huge disconnect with her disciplining him. She seemed to alwaya go straight for hitting him, and it was to the point where this kid did not respond to spanking or slapping of any kind. He was basically immune to her punishments because of how frequently she hit him, which was well beyong simple spanking no matter if you agree with spanking or not. I suspected her husband was physically violent with this child as well, though there were few times when anyone witnessed anything substantial in public. Erin was always extremely careful to keep his abuse behind closed doors so no one could get him in trouble. This played a huge part in the end of the investigations opened on them.

I’ll try to summarize all Erin did as best I can so you can fully understand what kind of person he was/is: He continuously bought his wife gifts and then broke them during their next argument (destroyed countless TVs; destroyed many phones, both cheap and expensive, one of them likely being the one I bought his wife because this scum bag refused to provide for his own family; let her buy makeup for herself them poured it in tue toilet and peed on it; let her buy a few new articles of clothing then lit them on fire amd burned holes in them on their patio). He cheated on her with multiple women (this includes women whose ads he repsonded to on Craigslist…ew. He also set up dates with a trans woman on a dating app, and tried to hit up my married friend who is black american. This wouldn’t normally be strange for anyone else, except Erin was openly very racist and very judgemental of those in the LGBT community). He blew the vast majority of their money on food/workout gear for himself (I’ve seen the emails exchanged with his dealers, steroids are EXPENSIVE as hell and he purchased them often) to the point where April could not afford to provide for herself and their son and their own child was so skinny, you could see just about all of his bones. He locked his wife and child purposefully out of the house twice and they had to come stay in my house because they had absolutely nowhere to go and no reaources to provide for themselves. He took his wife off their bank account so she had zero access to any money, and she had never had a job because he forbade her from working. He hit her on several occasions, usually somehwere that would not show a bruise easily like her head (any bruise there would be hidden by hair. One time he actually shoved her in her abdomen not long after she found out she was pregnant, and she miscarried that baby a short time after). He would take her car and move it to an undisclosed location so she couldn’t use it or would take her keys so she couldn’t get into her own car or her own house without him there. He controlled her to the point where she would not leave the house and was not allowed to go a certain distance away from the house… And if she did, she had to take pictures of herself along the way and send them to him so he had solid documentation that she was not lying about where she was going. He ripped her child from her and hid the child at a stranger’s house for several hours sitting in a poopy diaper (he claimed to be “spending time with his son” but was pacing in view of the distraught mother while the chikd was sitting in a stranger’s house and would bring the child out in the open periodically just to see her completely flip out. He would wrench the child away from her grasp with NO regard for the child’s saftety when she tried to take her baby out of his arms). He “lost” all of her important documents like her birth certificate, driver’s license, military dependant ID (I think he “lost” her social security card too. Of course this wasn’t actually an accident on his part. Anyone familiar with military life knows how important a dependant’s ID is. She can’t stop anywhere on base without it, but she can’t leave base because she needs to have her military ID to get back on base due to the base being protected by gates staffed with armed guards who scan your ID as you drive onto the base). He bought her weed, which is not only illegal to take on base, but she is a minor and it is illegal for him to give it to her (the first time police were involved, he thought she was going to snitch on him so he threw her under the bus and told the police she smoked weed in their house on base). There’s probably so much more that I’m missing, but this is what I can remember at the moment. It was such a long battle to try to help April through everything that happened. Erin strikes me as having a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder. Every other sentence out of his mouth is always a lie, and when you try to tell him he’s doing something wrong, he attacks you and points out your flaws and proceeds to victimize himself. I tried telling April my suspicion of NPD and tried to explain to her what it is, but her response was something like, “I know what it is, I took a psychology class in high school. I’m a little narcissistic too. Like I lie sometimes and have a hard time admitting when I’m wrong.”

First of all, high school psychology? Just… Lol. As you can see, she’s an expert in this field. She has literally no awareness of his manipulation. It’s ridiculous. She used to tell me, “I know I’m stupid for staying with him,” or, “I know I’m stupid for believing this thing he said.” I would tell her she’s not stupid, just in a bad relationship with a manipulative person. I am not ashamed to wholeheartedly admit I was most definitely wrong. She really is stupid, and it took me way too long to see it.

So let’s jump to where things got really insane. April found out Erin was cheating yet again, but instead of confronting him and having another CPS case opened against her due to her son witnessing the confrontation, she removed herself and her son from their house and walked across the sidewalk to my house. I tried my best to console her as she told me what was going on. Erin, however, locked himself in their house while she was venting to me. She was so distraught when she left her house, she didn’t take anything except her son, who was just sitting in a diaper. It was already late, so she wanted to get supplies for her child, like more diapers, clothes, his cup, and some snacks. Yet her trashy husband would not let her in the house to provide for their son. This was when I finally reached my breaking point. I had been silent this long because I knew if I went to the police, April would just lie for yer husband and nothing would ultimately happen. But I was livid that this grown ass man had his pity stick shoved so far up his ass, he didn’t even have the decency to provide for his own flesh and blood. I texted him and told him if he didn’t stop fumbling with his whithered, steroid afflicted balls, I was going to call the cops. One way or another, this baby was going to get what he needed to get through the night. After sending me a few barely coherent texts attempting to insult me, Erin left a few diapers on the sidewalk and left with the house still locked.

Obviously a few diapers was just not going to cut it. So after Erin left, April and I called our neighborhood’s 24 hr maintenance hotline. She told them she needed her house unlocked for her yet again. They said they would need to see a valid ID, but she didn’t have one because her husband purposefully lost them. She ended up having to explain that her pos husband locked her out of the house in a tantrum and he took her IDs and car, so the best she could offer was an expired state ID that only maybe was still in the house. Thank god the maintenance worker they sent over was a smart man who suspected there was abuse going on. He called police, who showed up the same time the maintenance worker did. This was around midnight, so April was so physically tired and emotionally drained, she started actually telling the police officers the truth when they asked her questions. She had me there to back her up, which probably helped her feel confident enough to open up and be honest. One of the officers pulled me to the side and asked if I had anything to share privately. Boy did I lay it on that poor man. I told him so much in a span of a few minutes. They ended up entering the house to make sure Erin wasn’t there. He wasn’t, but surprised! This b*tch ass ran off to dump his steroid stash! So April helped hunt down empty steroid jars and the police found all Erin’s needles he left behind. The officers and investigators documented absolutely everything. We stayed with them for several hours as officers and Erin’s unit searched for him while the investigators photographed everything in the house. He showed up to the house at one point, obviously enraged. The investigators apprehended him and patted him down before taking him outside so he would be a safe distance from April. It was a very long, stressful night.

Stay tuned for part 3! Part 3 is when all the really juicy stuff comes out!

Crazy neighbor 1: part 1

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So… Yeah. Remember when I said before that I’ve had some legit insane neighbors? I wasn’t kidding. And these people weren’t just the typical kind of crazy… They were legit BONKERS. Lost their marbles, nutty as a fruitcake, a few bananas short of a bunch, etc. You get the picture. They were (and probably still are) nuts. And unfortunately my family had to suffer for it. These people played a huge part in my being so motivated to move. Their drama and malice seeping into my life has been a ridiculously irritating experience, and I’m tired of it. Even though neither horrible neighbors live near me any longer, their living here has left a bad taste in my mouth. We’ve outgrown our house anyway, and the neighborhood in which we live is notorious for drama. I don’t really feel like sitting around and waiting for the next neighbor drama to strike, because this is the kind of place where there’s neighbor drama everywhere you turn.

So who was involved with neighbor drama #1 and what happened? Let’s call the wife April and the husband Erin. April and Erin had a son together about the same age as my son (they were born a month apart), which is how I came to know them. April started inviting us to play outside with them, so I would take my kids outside and my son would play with hers. The first weird things I started to notice were her troubles with keeping an active phone. Her phone always seemed to be having issues, so she wouldn’t always be able to contact me or our mutual friend. Soon enough I found out her husband did steroids. It made sense. He was hella gross looking, all enormous and ill proportioned. He looked as if he’d shoot away in a gust of released air if someone held a needle too close to his bulbous, balloon animal esque body. Keep in mind, this man is enlisted in the military. Doing steroids while in the military is something that will screw up your career real fast if you get caught. So not only was he ugly, he was dumb, too.

As time went on, she confided in me more and more. One of our mutual friends shared walls with April’s apartment (they were nextdoor neighbors) so I heard some concerning things coming from this mutual friend as well. April revealed to me that she was so often lacking a working cell phone because her husband would break her phones in anger to punish her for upsetting him. And that’s not all he broke. Over the course of their living here, he bought probably close to a dozen TVs and would break them dur8ng arguments as well. April would vent to me and our mutual friend because he caused her to lose all her friendships from back home, so she didn’t have anyone to talk to. Her father didn’t seem very supportive of her either, despite being the one who had to give permission for her to even get married.

You see, she wasn’t just a military mom and wife… She was still a teenager. She had her father sign the appropriate paperwork so that she could get married at 17. Her relationship with this ugly man (her husband) seemed to me to be just one bad decision after the other. They started trying to conceive a child after dating for about two months… Even though she was a very young teenager at the time. I was internally shaking my head when she was telling me all this. This girl was just not particularly smart. I’m all for marrying a man with dreams, but Erin thinks he’s going to be some kind of professional body builder someday. That’s literally what he thinks will happen after his contract in the military. His plan was to join the military, pump himself full of steroids all balloon animal style and whatnot, then get out after his 4 years and enter the world of body building and make loads of cash. I’m embarrassed for him at this piss poor attempts at life planninf and I don’t even like the guy. Yet somehow this douchebag convinced a girl, April, that his life plan was solid. She would make excuses and dish out very immature explanations any time someone tried to ask questions that challenged the solidity of their life plan. I could see from the very beginning that they would not work out and decided to try to help her as best I could for the sake of her innocent son who was suffering the most from living with Erin.

My first tactic was to be as supportive as possible for April. My hope was she would feel confident enough to leave if she knew she had people to catch her if she fell. I was there for her every time her husband broke yet another phone or TV. I was there for her every time her husband put a new hole in the wall or broke another appliance/piece of furniture in their home. I was there for her when she found out he had been cheating for months, and was there when the cheating continued to the point where he had been cheating on her for about a year. I was even there for her when she couldn’t afford to feed herself and her son because all of their money went to her husband’s workout gear and his steroids. My husband and I bought her a cheap smartphone and month of cell service from walmart once because her husband broke her phone and she needed something to be able to contact people on her layovers since she was flying back home with her son to visit her family. I was there that one time her husband hid their child in a stranger’s house, sitting in a poopy diaper for hours, just so he could watch his wife panic and sob due to her not knowing where her child was. This man was scum. He was the sh*ttiest excuse for a human being I have ever layed eyes on, and by the time this whole drama came to a close, I hated him with every fibre of my being.

Police were involve quite a few times because of his domestic violence. The only reason he would go free is April would lie. She would lie and take blame for stuff that happened, stuff that he did, because she is ultimately a stupid little girl and does not realize how much doing so endangers her keeping custody of her son. A CPS case was opened on her family because their glass screen door was shattered from her husband chucking her phone at it in attempt to break the phone (she lied and told police she was the one who threw it) and police ended up getting involved. Their son was in the house when it happened so CPS automatically opened a case. She freaked out because their home was in a constant state of squalor. The housing company that owned her apartment had given her many notices for leaving trash outside her house and even went as far as gave her notice of a home check once because maintenance workers going in to fix something in her house found their house was in “unlivable” conditions. She battled with a constant rodent problem and killed well over two dozen mice in her house before she eventually moved out. Between the trash and the destruction in that house, I can only imagine the horrors maintenance faced when repairing the house for the next tenants. And her move out bill must have been astronomical.

Stay tuned if you want to hear part 2 of my experience with these crazy neighbors!

Insta is up!!

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FINALLY. I was able to successfully contact Instagram and verify that my account was run by a real person not trying to make scams. I had to send a picture of myself holding a written code and other information. I also had to send a whole bunch of screenshots of my account to verify I own the blog. It was kind of funny, but also kind of annoying. Whatever. I’m just glad it’s finally up and I can use it! I’m really looking forward to building up my insta in addition to my blog. I’m also really excited to see where all of this takes me! I have a feeling Instagram will be the most successful in attracting traffic. How amazing is it that we live in a time when social media can be such a lucrative tool for entrepreneurship! I really am so grateful to have such an opportunity to cultivate my creativity from the comfort of my own home. This is so important to me as a stay at home mom living in a time when daycare is so expensive, any money I could make from a typical out of the home job would almost completely go towards covering the cost of daycare. Not only would I not be really making any money to go towards our family, but I would miss out on raising my own children. The thought of someone else (either daycare workers, babysitter, or even a relative) spending more time with my children than me… Well, it just makes me really sad. So anything I can find to do from home makes me so happy. If I could only manage my time better, I could get into even more lucrative at home projects. Like crafting, for example. I keep telling myself I will craft and put my creations for sale on Etsy, but it is honestly so hard to find the time to craft! And don’t even get me started on my energy level. That is often nonexistent. But if I want to make money, I need to buckle down and make it work. Money doesn’t make itself! And the amount of money I make will depend on how much work I am willing to put into my projects. So bring on the challenges!

Even if I don’t make much money from these adventures, I’m still grateful to have a creative outlet where I can vent and share my struggles. Life can really start to feel cloistered as a stay at home mom. Being introverted doesn’t help, but it is what it is. The few friends I do have a good ones, so I’m fortunate in that regard. Life is going to get a lot more lonely in the next couple of months, so I’m hoping that focusing on trying to move will keep me busy. There will be a lot of planning that needs to go into moving, not to mention I need to start making some serious moolah before moving can even happen. Fingers crossed I can make this happen!

I’m still alive, I swear

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Whew, sorry for the radio silence. We have been super busy lately and crazy stuff has happened. We took the kids to disneyland early this week and holy moly that was exhausting. It took a few days just to recover from that one day of fun. Note to self: put extra padding in shoes if going on some kind of all day excursion with toddlers (especially while pregnant). Because let me tell you… My back felt broken by the end of the day and I could barely feel my feet anymore. Standing in long lines holding a squirming toddler (my daughter) while they’re trying to fight you to get down and run away… That crap will wear you down real fast while pregnant. But despite all the pain and exhaustion, we still had so much fun! Our wallets sure didn’t appreciate the adventure but the kids had an absolute blast. It was a little bit of a bummer that my husband and I couldn’t go on some of the crazier rides since neither child is over 40 inches tall yet and there’s no fun in waiting in line over a half hour to go on a ride by yourself, but I was pleasantly surprised how many rides were stubby toddler friendly. The kids were basically unconscious on the drive home because of how much fun we had that day. And I am really happy with how many steps I logged from walking around so much! I definitely say the day was an overall complete success.

Now for the crazy stuff… Guess who figured out how to unlock the backdoor and open the patio gate all in one day? That’s right, my lovely 2.5 year old son. I left them zoned out on the tv downstairs so I could run upstairs and rummage through our clean clothes to find some good clean pants. Well, my son had other plans. He let himself, his sister, and both dogs out of the house to run away into the neighborhood. I felt like I was having a heart attack when I came downstairs to an empty living room. Luckily a nieghbor saw them before they made it very far so I was able to get everyone back in one piece. We put a heavy duty waterproof chain and lock on the patio gate later that day. I’ve tested him a few times since and sure enough, the second he thinks I’m distracted, he silently slides the backdoor open and tries to make another break for it. Of course he can’t because of the new lock, but he sure still tries! After all that, the best part is one of the pairs of “pants” I grabbed actually was a shirt. All that pain of going through heart attack after heart attack, and I didn’t even grab the right clothes. I now have plans in the works to put high locks of some kind on all of our doors, both regular and screen doors. Because I really don’t want to have to find out the hard way that he’s learned a new trick.

The escape hasn’t been the only trouble this past week. This kid has also learned he can open his bedroom door despite my having the knob purposefully pinned so it’s hard to turn and open. So I need to be careful to wake up about the same time as him so he doesn’t try to bust out of the baby gate and wreak havoc on the house while I’m sleeping. I have tried knob covers in the past and he can easily disassemble those in minutes. How??? I have no freaking clue. Those things are hard for me to get off! But somehow he’s a baby proof destroying pro. Send up a prayer or good thought for me or something because I swear this child is going to be the death of me. I will be surprised if I have any dark hair left by the time one 30. I guarantee it’ll all be white by then!

Toddler tornadoes

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I remember being pregnant for the first time and being told by seasoned parents to not get too hung up on the idea of having a cute, clean house after baby is born. Kids are messy and you’ll go crazy trying to keep up with them 24/7. How hard could it really be to clean up after a miniature human, though? I mean they have such little arms and legs. They couldn’t possibly destroy faster than I can clean, right?

WRONG. Having a child was so sobering. I realized I was scrambling to keep up with everything a lot more than I thought I would. Not only was I having to find a balance between cleaning and caring for a very demanding little human, I was also battling the intense exhaustion new parenting brings. So when I finally got a break from entertaining my baby, I had to choose between catching up on sleep or getting up to clean the house a little. Admittedly, napping won a lot of the time. And falling asleep was not always intentional. There has been many an accidental nap in my short time as a mother, and those can surprisingly be some of the most refreshing naps you’ll ever experience.

Juggling everything definitely got better over time. And so did my sleeping habits, though I still go crappy phases sometimes (like now… Thanks pregnancy). Strangely enough, I feel like I had a way better handle on everything when my second child was born, which you’d think would be way harder than just one child. But the first few months after my second was born was when my house was at its cleanest. Part of it likely had to do with the fact that my sister helped me get the house reasonably clean before she left to go back to her life states away, so I had a much easier time maintaining the house and catching up on chores here and there.

Since then, things have definitely gone downhill. Which is something I think a lot of parents understand. It makes you feel so crappy to get to a point where your lack of healthy time management is exemplified by the state of your house. My world revolves around caring for my children, so places like the living room and their bedroom get first priority when it comes to cleaning because that’s where they play. My room definitely is bottom of my priority list, and you can tell just by looking at it! It’s okay, though. I’m slowly catching up, and I don’t mind if my room is a little messy as long as my kids have a safe space to play and live.

I see a bunch of wives in my area who have to die for adorably decorated houses, and I’m not really sure how they do it! They somehow have clean houses 24/7 and have decoration themes that are so cohesive, their house looks so elegant and expensive to me. Even when I do try to decorate, my house still looks like butt. I tend to gravitate towards functional furniture rather than pretty, and then cheap furniture rather than expensive. So my house right now is just a mishmash of furniture that served a purpose at least one point in time, but none of them match. So yeah… My house is pretty embarrassing, ha. If I can move, I plan on changing that. I have a few cute furniture ideas, but there’s no point in me buying cute things in my current ugly shoebox house. We’ll see if that plan actually works, though. I am still very far away from my goal of making $1000 per month. But I am determined to make this work out. I am tired of living in a small area that my family has completely outgrown, surrounded by people who are so bored with their lives that they feel the need to try to destroy mine. I can do this, and I will do this!

Solution?

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So I think I sort of figured the ad thing out. Maybe. (Hopefully?)

Long story short, I didn’t end up using adsense despite my fondness for google products. The advertisements are run directly from WordPress itself, if I understand correctly. So hopefully that starts to generate some revenue. My grand plan is to get an Instagram account up and running for this blog and hopefully I can utilize the hashtags there to attract more readers. But of course there’s a catch. A dilemma. Instagram is apparently being run by angry monkeys or something. Why do I say this? Because I already made an Instagram account for this blog a few days ago. And it was deactivated upon creation. Meaning I created the account and Instagram deactivated it on the spot. Why? I HAVE NO CLUE. I just wanted a freaking account for my business for God’s sake. Now I have to wait for Instagram customer support to answer my repeal request, which I have heard can take up to a week. That’s seven whole days I could be attracting followers! Seven whole days I could be bringing in revenue from my new followers! So I think it’s safe to say I’m a little peeved. Not to mention I have been really struggling with the insomnia thing so two nights in a row of only 5hrs of sleep is pretty much always going to make me more cranky and irritable.

I do feel a little better with the ad thing sorted out, though. That is the main reason I have stayed up quite so long the past several nights. Hopefully now that I have ads sorted, I can finally get back to starting to make myself get to sleep on time. I truly despite staying up all night because I hate when mt kids wake up before me. I mean, they are safe no matter when they wake up, but still. It makes me feel like a crappy mom to wake up after them. And it sure doesn’t help that my oldest is a dang early bird. They do have many toys in their room to keep them entertained so I am definitely glad for that. That makes my life a lot easier and I am happy that they are happy with having time to play in the morning. Fingers crossed this moving thing works because there’s a high possibly the new house will have enough room to have an entire playroom for the kids. I couldn’t be more excited! Now excuse me while I go to dream about what kind of toys to put in their future play room.

How the hell do I blog?!

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I need to stop being so damn overly confident. I thought I was being so cool and on top of things by researching how to make money from blogging. Ha! I was so confident that I would figure adsense out that I upgraded to a premium plan. I’m not sure what y’all consider to be “a lot” of money, but I’m a cheap b*tch. So paying for a premium blog was a huge leap of faith for me. Now I feel stupid because it appears putting ads on my blog is way more involved than I originally thought. I know that there are more ways to make money on a blog, like product promotion, for example. But let’s be honest here. I’m an introvert. Sometimes a severe introvert depending on my mood that day. Being giddy enough to sell a product is just… I don’t know, uncomfortable? If I tried to sell a product, I doubt I could convince anyone to buy it. I lack that special salesman skill, which is why I have completely turned away from MLM business opportunities after making a fool of myself and trying one once.

I guess all of this is why I have turned to blogging. I can do this from the comfort of my own home at my own pace. And if I can figure this dang adsense thing out, all I have to do is gain traffic to at least start garnering income. Not only will I earn money, but I will be earning money for doing something I love: writing. I have missed writing so much since having children. I miss other hobbies as well. I’m 2.5 years into this motherhood thing and I STILL haven’t figured out how to balance my new responsibilities with things I enjoy. So for all the parents out there reading this who feel like they are fighting a losing battle and can’t seem to find a foothold, welcome to the family! I am not one of those parents who has my sh*t together so I can totally relate to your struggle.

Despite not being skilled at juggling parenthood and spouse related responsibilities, I am determined to keep up with my blog this time. And I feel better this time around because I am just going to write about my life and experiences and cross my fingers that someone out there will enjoy reading my craziness. Plus, it helps that I’ve had some interesting experiences where I live… So that will provide me with some VERY entertaining reading material to give you and I cannot wait to share those experiences with you guys. Also, feel free to share suggestions for future blog posts. If you have anything you’d like to know about me, by all means let me know and I may decide to answer questions in a future blog post if it’s a question I’m comfortable with answering. Like I have mentioned before, my goal is to post at least 5 times a week so that I can really attract viewers and keep everyone entertained. Some posts will probably be goofy and fun. Others will be serious. I’m just flying by the seat of my pants (per usual) so I guess we’ll see where this experience leads me!

Oh, and if anyone tech savvy feels sorry enough for me… I would appreciate any help I can get regarding establishing adsense on this blog. I stayed up about 4 hours straight the other night dedicating my time solely to trying to figure adsense out and ended up going to bed empy handed. So not only am I bummed, but I am cranky and sleep deprived too! Fingers crossed I get this stuff figured out soon.

Work from home… how exactly?

/ dashtikalin / Leave a comment

As I shared in my last post, this momma is looking to upgrade her housing situation. That means I have to make at least 1k a month to make up for the money we’d lose, according to my agreement with my husband. How will I do this? Here’s my secret: I HAVE NO IDEA. Per usual, I am flying by the seat of my pants. I have been scouring the internet all day for ideas on jobs I can do from home. There seem to be a lot of call center options and tech support options. Then there’s babysitting/nannying. Teaching Chinese children how to speak English via online lessons. But if I’m going to start working and trying to make money, I really want to find something I’ll enjoy/be good at, otherwise this whole thing will wear me down. And I’m already pretty worn down as it is just from daily life as a mother of two toddlers and 2 big dogs. I know, I know. Beggars can’t be choosers. I shouldn’t be so picky when I really do desperately need to get out of my current neighborhood. But that’s why I’m giving this blogging thing a solid try again. And on top of that, I’m going to try to finally indulge my crafty side and start selling homemade items online. We’ll see how that goes. I am famous for making these ambitious plans, only to gwt burnt out and not follow through. My long term goal is to finish my studying so I can officially start the process for becoming a certified birthing instructor. Birthing instruction is just one of my passions, plain and simple. But that goal will take a lot of time and money, so in the meantime I will have to rely on etsy and wordpress to help me realize my dreams of living in a house that fits my family. I can just see it now… We finally live in a house that fits our family’s needs. No more small rooms overcrowded with furniture. I’ll actually have room to decorate with adorable things. We’ll have weekly meetings in my living room for birthing classes where I’ll teach new parents on how to navigate the ups and downs of childbirth. My kids will finally have room to play and dogs will have room to run in the house without knocking toddlers over and running into walls. Each child will have their own room and own personal space. It’ll be amazing. I’m honestly getting myself way more worked up than I should. Making 1k a month is a pretty tall order for someone working from home. Everyone nowadays wants to work from home, so the competition is fierce. So many people blog, too. And so many sell crafts on etsy. I have to admit, this makes me feel like I’m not very special or unique. At this point I might as well start a photography business so I can be even more run-of-the-mill than I already am. My greatest wish is that people who come across my blog and wares on etsy feel entertained by my services and come back for more. I want them to like me for me, not because I’m just another blog to follow or just another ship to love. The market is competitive, so I’m going to have to bring something unique to the table if I’m going to be taken seriously and build a business. We’ll see how all this works out. Hopefully by the end of the year I’ll be blogging from a new, spacious house!