Right now I do not feel very optimistic. I feel like crap and start crying at just the thought of what happened today. I have been a head cashier for about a month now and in that time, I have been over/under my drawer at Goodwill by five dollars or more at least three times! I have never had that problem before when I was a cashier and now I am worried that it could cost me my job! Tony and I cannot afford for me to have no job. If I lost my job, we would have to move in with his parents and that wouldn’t be good. They don’t really have any money either, plus, Amie just moved in with us! That isn’t fair to her.
I have been thinking of asking if Sarah would let me go back to being just a cashier, but what if she won’t let me, or my hours get cut back a lot! We can’t afford having my hours cut back anyway. I just don’t know what to do.
I have no job skills, no one is hiring anyway. I really don’t have any good talents to help me find a job.
I am good with animals, but I have no school to do anything with them, I cannot make a living out of babysitting, I would go crazy and eating chocolate isn’t going to help with anything! I just don’t know what to do anymore. Apparently math isn’t one of my strong suits anymore. I apparently can’t count money, no matter how many times I recount before I hand it back to the customer. Well, enough on that. Who wants to hear my rantings.

On a happier note, both Beru and Padme came out of their surgeries just fine. Padme is just finally starting to eat again, so hopefully she will put on the weight that she lost from not eating for a little less than a week. She was really starting to scare me, but she’s much better now. I know that most people didn’t know that Padme and Beru were going in to get spayed, but my blog wasn’t working for awhile. Unfortunately, Padme isn’t any more cuddly than she was before she was spayed, but at least she is healthy. I miss when she was a baby and would cuddle and want to be picked up and held. She’s still my little baby and I love her. She’s just growing up, that’s all. At least that what I try to tell myself.

For the past four days, I have been helping out my friend Amie while she babysits while her mom is down in Texas. You see, Cheryl (Amie’s mom) went down to Texas to help her daughter-in-law, Angel, and Angel’s son, Aidien, move up here, while Zac (Amie’s brother) is over seas. The problem, what was going to be a two week thing has turned into being a whole month! Apparently Angel called and said she couldn’t deal with it, it was all too much to handle on her own and she needed Cheryl down there as soon a possible. Yes, I understand that her husband is going over to Afganistan, and her son is a premie, but is it really necassary for Cheryl to be there a whole month while Amie is up here doing Cheryl’s job and not getting paid for it? Amie was supposed to go down and help Angel for the summer, and get paid, so she would have some money for college in the fall, but that was changed, and now she’s helping her mom for nothing! Amie’s not too happy about it, and to tell the truth, neither am I! Amie is working so hard with these kids and is going to have five children at a time some days. I am staying with Amie and helping her this month, so she doesn’t go crazy. There are days that I will be going back to my house to do some chores around the house, but a lot of the time, I will be over with Amie, because a month is too long for her to have to do this for free. Yesterday, Amie went to her friend’s graduation party while I watched the kids, so hopefully she will be able to do that occassionaly, because I get to leave when I feel like I need to, or should so I can do things at my house, and spend some time with Tony. So I am hoping to do the same for her: let her spend time with her boyfriend and other friends. She will need breaks and I want to be there when she does.

Once Angel gets up here, she and Aidien will be staying with Amie and her family. The problem is that Aidien has to stay downstairs because of his oxygen and other stuff, so Angel has to sleep down there too, but there isn’t really anywhere for her to sleep. Cheryl stays on the couch so she can get up when the kids start to arrive. And another thing, with all the stuff for the kids that Cheryl babysits, there really isn’t room for all the stuff Aidien needs either. Amie isn’t very happy with what is going on, but she really can’t do much, since Angel is family and it’s her mom who is letting them stay. Plus, with the way things are between Angel and myself, it will make things a little difficult for Amie, I think. Angel isn’t very thrilled with me, though I really haven’t figured out why. I have asked Amie about it, and she really doesn’t know either. I have tried to patch things up, to help Amie, but Angel keeps pushing my attempts away, so it’s really up to her, if things are going to get better between us while she’s here.

On a lighter note, Amie has kittens in her garage. There are five cute little kittens and Amie has named them all. There is George because he’s verycurious, Cotton because she’s so fluffy and soft, Jet because she just takes off, Juno and Telula just because Amie liked those names.

CONGRATULATIONS to my sister in Illinois, who gave birth to a healthy 8 lb. 15 oz. baby boy today!!!  I can’t wait to see pictures of the little darling, and I will post them when I get them (HINT HINT – no, just kidding, I know you have much more important things to do right now then to worry about sending pictures)  I just wish I could hold him!  And Congratulations to Austin on becoming a big brother – it’s an important job buddy; I know you’ll be a great one!  Welcome, Ryan Timothy!

Other baby news – our kids’ babysitter’s cat had kittens the other day.  Look how unbelievably cute they are:

See if you can count ’em – makes a good picture puzzle, doesn’t it?  There are 6 – the little orange one kinda blends in with the towel – he’s unique!

My daughter’s teacher had her baby, and my two cousins also had their babies, which means 3 of my grandmother’s 4 expected great-grandchildren for this year are here already!  I am the last one standing 🙁

Seriously, I feel left out, being the only one left pregnant out of all the women I knew who were expecting.  I am ecstatic that all the babies are healthy and thriving though – that is truly something to be thankful for!  For the most part, I love being pregnant, though I have to say this one is the most difficult pregnancy yet in some ways.  Also the easiest in some ways too, so it’s not all bad…  But my feet are killing me constantly…  I feel like I can’t stand for more than 10-15 minutes at a time, and with a toddler and 2 other little kids to care for, that is a tough feeling to have.  Plus I’m exhausted much of the time, and have terrible heartburn a lot…  all this and 3 months to go, not to mention the fact that the weather is only getting nicer, then it will get really hot and then I’ll just be miserable.  I hate not having the energy or the desire to go outside to enjoy these nice days…  it makes me feel guilty, especially because it means my toddler can’t enjoy them with me.  Is it mean for her to be couped up in the house with me on gorgeous days like today?  She doesn’t seem to mind though, and we do play together lots while I’m sitting down, so it can’t be all bad…  I just tell myself that in August I will have much more energy and time to enjoy the weather.  It’s hard to imagine now, but some of the fatigue and aches and pains will lift, I HOPE!

For our date night tonight, we decided to attend the much hyped cooking show sponsered by our local newspaper.  Maybe that explains why it was so hyped right there – being sponsered by the newspaper = lots of free advertising, and since I read the paper every day, maybe it was drilled into my head that this thing would be fun.  Was I ever wrong.

It began when we arrived only 10 minutes before the show started, and every seat was full.  It was held in the high school gym, which means we now had to find seats in the bleachers and squeeze past everyone else – pregnancy bump and all.  I was so close to turning around and leaving right then and there; the fact that I didn’t was my second mistake after buying the tickets to attend the thing in the first place.  Apparently our local high school has no air conditioning, because the 1500 or so people who were crammed into the gym were all fanning themselves with their free cookbooks.  Which brings me to another reason why I thought this thing would be such great fun.  The tickets were $10 / person, then there were coupons in the paper for $3 off, which brings each ticket to $7.  They advertised a “bag full of samples, goodies, and free cookbooks” to every attendee, along with a chance to win lots of pretty cool door prizes.  The sample bag was alright – no complaints there.  The “choosing which wine with dinner” wheel made a great fan to combat the heat, I must say, and I’m not the only one who thought so – most of the 1500 sardines in attendence were using it as such.  But on the way into the show, apparently that’s when they handed out the doorprize entry blank and the free can of chili sauce, and somehow (maybe it was my panic when I saw the crowd we’d have to conquer to find a seat) I missed getting either handout.  So, here we were, sitting on the bleachers packed in like sardines in 100°+ heat, and I’ve just found a way to cut our chances of winning a doorprize in half.  Even though we were a little on the late side, that actually turned out to be a good thing because by the time we bumped and stumbled into our seats (ie, the square foot of space each person was allowed for their person, legs, knees, pregnancy bumps etc.), the “show” was ready to begin, thank goodness.  Except it became clear that once the show began, it was not going to pick up pace.  It was a woman on a stage making recipes (she was there to do 8 of them she said!) so far away that you couldn’t see anything she was doing.  Her “jokes” were lame, and she barely had a personality.  So now, this was hot, boring, uncomfortable for my aching body, and my chances of winning a cool grill are like 1 in 1500 instead of 2 in 1500?  Forget being polite or wasting money.  Our time is so much more important; especially with 3.5 kids.  We bumped and stumbled our way out of there, same way we got in, mumbled our apologies for stepping on people, and didn’t look back.  We fled the cooking show.

So that brings me to the Batman reference in the title of this post.  When we went to pick up the kids at the babysitter’s after the cooking show debacle, we went in her laundry room to check out the 2-day-old kittens…  all of a sudden, screams erupted.  I’m normally not a screamer, really more of a gasper when I get startled, but the babysitter and her daughter and my daughters were ahead of me in the laundry room and saw a bat.  Their screams made me scream – I’m not afraid of a little Ohio brown bat, I swear, but apparently screaming is contagious.  So both of our husbands come running, and hers goes for a broom.  Mine respects how sensitive I am about animals, so he asked for a bowl and was going to capture it.  So they open the door, only to find the mommy cat had beaten the babysitter’s husband to the murder of the bat.  She devoured it whole, and there was really nothing left for me to be sad about, so I pretended it didn’t happen, took pictures of the really cute kittens, and left.  What a night!