This Is Us! My Family and My Life

Who am I? Inside I’m an all American strawberry blonde, free spirited girl.  I love to dream, love to dance, love to laugh, and have fun.  I love romance, and stories about falling in love, labrador retriever puppies, gold hoop earrings, shopping malls, painted toe nails, farmer's market flowers,  baby toes, lip gloss, great books, country music, neopolitan ice cream sandwiches, white sandy beaches, and sun kissed noses with freckles.  I also am particularly fond of the way muscles look inside the strong arms of a good looking man.  My childhood dreams included, getting married a house full of kids,a picket fence and a family dog. Only, my life took a slight detour the summer of 1992.  The summer before my senior year at Ingraham High.  I remember so clearly taking that First Response pregnancy test in the second floor Nordstrom ladies lounge at Northgate Mall. I went in with myself and small piece of plastic to pee on,(so I thought).  I came out of that stall with myself +1, and two blue lines. Holy beep!!!  Life had changed, instead of planning the last year of my high school life, the senior prom and filling out college applications, I was getting morning sickness, prenatal vitamins, and strech marks.  Instead of shopping for the latest accessory at Claires and Express I was shopping for pregnancy jeans,breast pumps and nursing bras. Wowzah! 
 There goes the rest of my care free teen years, along with my future on perfect life lane in suburbia, USA! I was seventeen and pregnant!  Suddenly life changed as I knew it FOREVER!!

Fast Forward 16 years to 2009: That 17 year old is now thirty-something and my visions of my future on beautiful life lane with a perfectly clean and sanitized house,decorated with Pottery Barn Curtains and Vases and William Sonoma baking dishes, with a ravishingly gorgeous hot and hunky husband who gives me all his money now looks more like a crazy, chaotic life raising my 16 year old son, with Cody the psychiotic dog, and Jack the cat instead of the hunky husband.   There aren't many Pottery Barn decorations, just piles of laundry, backpacks from school, boxes of grape sports drink and XS energy drinks, or remnants of what used to be the box chewed into cardboard pieces all over the front room.   Sweaty white gym socks, yellow labrador retriever hair evenly distributed in every square inch, different varieties and shapes of half chewed dog toys and bones, the basketball used in the neighborhood dunk contest last Tuesday, wii game controllers, guitar hero guitars, a sunburst Epiphone electric guitar with a very large extremely loud electric guitar amp.   Today my dreams now involve things like being told when and where my son is going before he leaves and coming home sometime at least within the same calendar day he said he would. This year to have a report card with a passing grade in that English class we have taken three times now.  I dream of decisions being made to actually go to school all of the days that school is in session, or at least enough to receive that high school diploma next year.   I dream of Glacier Peak High School without any teenage girls, or at least any that my son would be interested in.   I dream of peaceful nights without midnight runs to Taco Bell for cheesy double beef burritto and double layer nachos.   I dream of a kitchen without empty pizza boxes, ice cream cartons, and cheetos bags.  My financial dreams are now getting through an entire month with enough in my checkbook to pay the electric bill and the water bill both on time without overdrawing.  In the future my visions are a home with doorknobs on ALL the doors and a microwave that actually has a handle to open it with! Wow, wouldn’t it be great!

So, this is my so called life! Real Life as a teen mom turned thirty-something still single, doing her best to raise a teenage son.  Long gone is the cute guy, my third period American Literature infatuation who sat in the second row. I look like a woman outside but still feel like that seventeen year old girl full of dreams, trying to figure out the meaning of life, walking the halls of Ingraham High in 1993.  Only now I have fine lines, an electric bill and I live with a 16 year old boy (that looks strangely similar to that guy in third period American Literature class), a 1 year old yellow labrador retriever, and a cat named Jack!
I am not sure where this is blog is going to go, but it should be quite a journey.  Feel free to add comments, encouragement, advice, empathy, Prozac, I mean Advil, jokes, whatever.   Don't expect a large amount of great advice and deep profound wisdom, or the secret to raising a teenager and keeping your sanity, because between you and me I really don’t have a clue what I’m doing and I'm pretty sure I might have already lost my sanity! Here We Go!