Chasing dreams...

I have not had a cigarette for 6 days.

GO ME.

I called the school today wondering why the heck is my statement not showing a loan, turns out that the FAFSA didn’t offer one up to me, and I needed to apply to one through a different process. OH the stress! But I got it done in time.

Tomorrow night, my cousin (who has decided to go for nursing, YAY!) and my friend who just found out she is expecting (YAY!) is coming over. What a nice evening having friends at my place, with a big angus roast and green bean casserole. I love weekends.

So I went to fill out the application for a nurse intern position today. There were two other nursing students there. Neither had a resume. I had a resume. I hope I stick out like a sore thumb.

I don’t know how many have already applied or will continue to apply through the week (they stop accepting applications on Friday), but they will begin doing interviews in August, and if I get an interview and a position, I would start working in September.

Gonna keep my fingers crossed and hope for something!

I am beating my personal battle and brought up all that will power again. I’ve hit after midnight, so I’m on day 4 without a smoke. Go me.

I finally got the haircut I’ve been dreaming for. Funny how little things like that make me happy. And I painted my nails too. May as well enjoy that while it lasts, because at my nursing school, no painted nails! And they must be trimmed, and I typically rock some long nails.. yeah.. life is boring right now ;) I’ll kiss them goodbye on August 31st.

Wish me luck, I’m applying for 20 extern positions at 3 hospitals in the morning. I have my letter of recommendation, my unofficial transcripts, my class schedule, my BLS card, my ID, my resume.. I’m ready.

I have to go to the employment service office to fill out an application.. I can’t wait to see the look on the person’s face when they ask which position I am applying for and which hospital.

I am going to stand there straight faced and say “all of them”.

I’m brave like that. And determined. Plus, I got pink nails and a new haircut, so that makes me even more awesome and unstoppable, right?

its been 38 hours without a cigarette. i can do this, i can do this, i can do this. i really need some gum

where the heck is my letter of recommendation.. i’m WAITING… and why can’t i muster up the nerve to open up ONE text book to review before the very last semester of nursing school starts? My ATI books spoke to me last night.. pretty much saying READ ME.. and I just can’t. Not yet. NOT YET. so SHUT UP. it was seriously a moment where i was walking past them and stopped dead in my tracks.. and we just stared at each other.. i then finally walked right on by..

im purposely not capitalizing any letters where it should be.. i made A’s in english. i’m being a rebel before charting begins again.

and WHY do things have to go bad before they get good? seriously? a whole lot of shit just came at us at once.. and i will not write about it because i don’t want to, instead, i turned out all of the lights in the house.. and i’m sitting in my pajamas, feeding my son hot dogs and cheese… and watching PBS kids.

thats all for now.

he said.. “mommy, can you help me read this?” while taking a poop.

promise this isn’t staged.

Ok, with my pounding headache from lack of nicotine, instead of yelling at my husband to get out the stress, I’ll complain about my landlord. We live in a duplex, its a nice neighborhood besides knowing there is a sex offender living 1 house down, the lady attached to me is clean so we don’t have roaches or mice. Her daughter finished classes at my school in December and is a nurse, so she’s always encouraging me to keep pressing on. I like her.

I don’t like my landlord. He’s old and grouchy. He was just diagnosed with lung cancer- taking up both of those lungs of his.. he rides his riding lawnmower like he’s the God of the duplexes. He likes to evict people. I figured it would be coming to us eventually. I think he randomly selects who his next victim will be. And he doesn’t keep his word, and doesn’t repair anything, which by the way is my ticket out of here when ready.

Our rent is 500 a month. If you don’t pay rent, you have to pay 10 dollars a day for each day you are late. Because we are NICE tenants and felt sorry for the old evil man, we didn’t harass him to add on to our driveway pad like he said he was going to do when we first moved in. Instead, we got some more gravel to lay down, since we were sick and tired of the few little pieces of gravel in the driveway, meaning.. every time it rained, it was like a hog farm, it was terrible. Mud EVERYWHERE. So we put down gravel, and he was very appreciative. We paid July’s rent for 490 (my husband had lost his job by being laid off, so we were 10 short.. story of our lives). The landlord said “not to worry about late fees” and just get the 10 bucks to us when we can, and all is fine.

Liar. Next time, voice recorder will be on hand. My husband went and gave blood cuz I was ridin’ him to go ahead and get the money to the landlord, I knew something was going to come of this. My husband’s unemployment check didn’t come that week so we literally didn’t have a dime. Here, you give blood and you get 20 bucks. My husband went to the landlord on the 9th, to give him the 10 bucks. Our landlord, seeing the other 10 in my husband’s hand, requested it for payment of late fees. Wrote a receipt, PAID, all is well.

Until yesterday. Now, on Wednesday, I requested my husband to go ahead and put $100 on next month’s rent so we can have some money to go on with his first check at his new job, and it won’t take every penny. He did, and the landlord applied it to the rent for next month. YESTERDAY, evil landlord calls and informs us that we owe $100 in late fees from July, and if we don’t have it by Monday, eviction papers are going to be written up and we will be taken to court. WTF?!?!?! Where did THIS come from?!?! If we owed $100, why did you take our $20 and say it was paid off? Hmm? You are going back on your word, that’s why. My husband was ready to pawn our gigantic beautiful TV that we purchased a couple of years ago. I refused. We ARGUED. I said, I will not be put in further debt (to buy it back) to pay this liar. I just refuse.

I told my husband, if our landlord knew we were $100 in the hole with him in late fees, WHY did he accept pre-payment on next month’s rent? He should have applied it. He can’t do that. Period. End of discussion. So, my husband called the landlord, and he agreed.. and said okay never mind. Just have rent to me on Friday. Excuse me? In my lease, rent is not due until between the 1st-5th, you’ll get it when its due jerk face.

Don’t threaten me. I’m not a redneck trashy crack head. I’m educated and aware of your little plot to play like we are all a part of your SIMS game. Maybe next semester you will be one of my patients in my clinical rotations. I’ll smile at you and be nice, yes, but I’ll be slow to stick any injections.

I feel better now. Time for a nicotine lozenge.

I’m so frustrated. I cannot find my camera anywhere. I am going to end up tearing my house apart, and go trough the trash outside. Terrible.

My mom helped me build a resume last night. It took us four hours, but it is PERFECT. There are a ton of intern positions opening up in hospitals right now, and I’m supposed to go to their employment services within the next week to apply. I’d about die if I got one, it means JOB SECURITY when I graduate, I won’t be on the search for a position, and will get RN pay on the position I’d be interning for after I get my license to practice. So, I’m very excited and hopeful. I am waiting on my letter of recommendation from an instructor to come through email. And to not have any experience working in healthcare and only have clinical experience, my resume is amazing. And all of my references are nurses, which is an added bonus :) Yay me!

Today is my QUIT SMOKING day. I can do it. I know I can. I have done it before.. three times.

Today is also, get this damn house clean day. Seriously.

Ugh. That's all I have to say. Organizing and perfecting our home with a 3 year old that grabs everything is next to impossible. Hoping that my dear mom and dad will take him for a night this weekend so I can get it done. With Austin (my husband) working 2nd shift, help from him isn’t possible. All errands are ran in the mornings and if I wake up before Garrett, he seems to just KNOW and hops up out of his bed in an INSTANT. I did manage to sweep quickly while he chugged his lemonade. Right now we are having lunch, I’m trying to convince him to sit and eat.

Sitting still and watching cartoons doesn’t happen anymore. I’ll never worry about him watching too much TV ‘cause he’d rather do what I’m doing. I try and give him a “chore” but he never likes them. It worked when he was 2.

And.. I really miss having a dishwasher. Where we live there isn’t one, and it succckkkksss.

My husband MIGHT get put on 3rd shift (10-6), some aspects of that are beneficial for me, but I won’t get any sleep, I know that much. We recently found out a registered sex offender lives 1 house down. Aggravated sexual battery. Niiiccceee. Makes me a bit uncomfortable. It may be put behind that guy, but still. Being a woman alone, just makes me uncomfortable. Our lease isn’t up until April 1st, 2011.

*SMH* when will my 3 year old see me as a disciplinary?

Well the time has come. Time for me to get my summer goals in order and actually tackle them. Classes start back sooner than I realize, and I have nothing done. Today’s goal is to complete my kitchen organizing, clean off the table which has OBVIOUSLY been my husband’s “catch all center”, and tackle my desk where I will spend the last months of my year printing CARE PLANS for nursing school.

I haven’t had a cigarette yet, I don’t know how long this will last today.. just trying, we will see.

Also, its time to pull out a school book. I need to refresh my memory on dosage calculations, and get good with my ATI pharmacology.

My son has managed to eat an entire box of gogurts (yogurt in a slurp pouch) in 3 days. At least its not chips and candy.

Dinner tonight : Chicken Stir Fry with Brown Rice. Yum.

I received this from a friend a while back and found it, decided to share..

This beautiful story was written by a doctor who worked in Africa..

One night I had worked hard to help a mother in the labour ward; but in
spite of all we could do, she died, leaving us with a tiny, premature baby
and a crying two-year-old daughter.

We would have difficulty keeping the baby alive, as we had no incubator
(we had no electricity to run an incubator). We also had no special
feeding facilities.  Although we lived on the equator, nights were often
chilly with treacherous drafts. 

One student midwife went for the box we had for such babies and the cotton
wool that the baby would be wrapped in. Another went to stoke up the fire
and fill a hot water bottle. She came back shortly in distress to tell me
that in filling the bottle, it had burst (rubber perishes easily in tropical
climates? ).

' And it is our last hot water bottle! ' she exclaimed.  As in the West, it
is no good crying over spilled milk, so in Central Africa it might be
considered no good crying over burst water bottles. They do not grow on
trees, and there are no drugstores down forest pathways.
' All right, ' I said, ' put the baby as near the fire as you safely can, and
sleep between the baby and the door to keep it free from drafts. Your job
is to keep the baby warm. '

The following noon , as I did most days, I went to have prayers with any
of the orphanage children who chose to gather with me. I gave the
youngsters various suggestions of things to pray about and told them about
the tiny baby.  I explained our problem about keeping the baby warm enough,
mentioning the hot water bottle, and that the baby could so easily die if it
got chills. I also told them of the two-year-old sister, crying because her
mother had died.

During prayer time, one ten -year-old girl, Ruth, prayed with the usual
blunt conciseness of our African children.  ' Please, God ' she prayed, ' Send
us a hot water bottle today.  It'll be no good tomorrow, God, as the baby
will be dead, so please send it this afternoon. '

While I gasped inwardly at the audacity of the prayer, she added, ' And
while You are about it, would You please send a dolly for the little girl so
she'll know You really love her? '

As often with children's prayers, I was put on the spot. Could I honestly
say ' Amen ' ?   I just did not believe that God could do this.  Oh, yes, I know
that He can do everything; the Bible says so.  But there are limits, aren't
there?  The only way God could answer this particular prayer would be by
sending me a parcel from the homeland..  I had been in Africa for almost four
years at that time, and I had never, ever, received a parcel from home.
Anyway, if anyone did send me a parcel, who would put in a hot water
bottle?  I lived on the equator!

Halfway through the afternoon, while I was teaching in the nurses '
training school, a message was sent that there was a car at my front door.
By the time I reached home, the car had gone, but there on the verandah was
a large 22-pound parcel.  I felt tears pricking my eyes.  I could not open
the parcel alone, so I sent for the orphanage children.  Together we pulled
off the string, carefully undoing each knot. We folded the paper, taking
care not to tear it unduly.  Excitement was mounting.  Some thirty or forty
pairs of eyes were focused on the large cardboard box.

>From the top, I lifted out brightly-colored, knitted jerseys.  Eyes
sparkled as I gave them out.  Then there were the knitted bandages for the
leprosy patients, and the children looked a little bored.  Then came a box
of mixed raisins and sultanas - that would make a batch of buns for the
weekend.  Then, as I put my hand in again, I felt the....could it really
be?  I grasped it and pulled it out.  Yes, a brand new, rubber hot water
bottle.  I cried.

I had not asked God to send it; I had not truly believed that He could.
Ruth was in the front row of the children.  She rushed forward, crying out,
' If God has sent the bottle, He must have sent the dolly, too! ' 
Rummaging down to the bottom of the box, she pulled out the small,
beautifully- dressed dolly.  Her eyes shone!  She had never doubted!  Looking
up at me, she asked: ' Can I go over with you and give this dolly to that
little girl, so she ' ll know that Jesus really loves her? '  Of course, I
replied!

That parcel had been on the way for five whole months, packed up by my
former Sunday school class, whose leader had heard and obeyed God ' s
prompting to send a hot water bottle, even to the equator.  And one of the
girls had put in a dolly for an African child - five months before, in
answer to the believing prayer of a ten-year-old to bring it ' that
afternoon. ' 

' Before they call, I will answer. ' ?(Isaiah 65:24)

One of my addicting shows premiers tonight called Teen Mom. It follows the story of the original cast of 16 and Pregnant, after having baby and living life as a mother. I often see teen pregnancies glamorized, and have been watching a show called The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Which is really mostly about sex and how accepted it is amongst the high school group, and about the pregnancies that occur and all the drama along with it. It really baffles me how these parents aren’t saying “No!”.

Kudos to all the teen parents that do it right and don’t let the life you were used to get in the way. Kudos to being a mommy and daddy for your little one at all times and not pawning them off on your mom and dad.

On another note.. my husband scored a great job, he’s a railcar switchman! I’m very proud of him. I know he’s proud of himself, as he got to sign papers today for health insurance for our family :) He’s never had a job that has offered an amazing benefit package, bonuses, paid time off, paid holidays, etc. So blessed! He’s been laid off since September, and its been really hard. We made it though!

I’m trying to decide if I want to sign up for this extern position in the psychiatric field of a hospital. Do I really want to get spit on or piss thrown at me? Although, I’m sure this happens in the ER as well. Hmmm…..

So, time to start prepping my body for pregnancy next year. I really want to get pregnant. Considering a home birth too.

testing windows live writer :)

this is my son when he was in the hospital, he’s 3 now *sigh*

I recently was reading about a lists of events in my county coming up. I came across a posting about joining a Mom's club.. for "stay at home mom's and part time moms". What the hell is this supposed to mean? Is this speaking of part time moms who only want their kid part time and put the responsiblity on someone else, or is this speaking of working mothers? Since the first was in a referral to stay at home moms, I assume the other is referring to working mothers.

Now WHY ON EARTH would you call a working mom a PART TIME MOM? A WORKING MOM is still a FULL TIME MOTHER. You NEVER lose the title of MOM when at work, you are on the clock 24/7 for the rest of your life as a mother! Yes, you may be working to SUPPORT your family financially and know that you can stand on your own two feet with a child/children, but my GOODNESS you are still a full time mother!

Although I'm not working yet, I'm in college so that I CAN have a stable future with my family under my wings. I will be a full time working nurse. When I'm away from my son even in class, or even if he's off with his dad spending "daddy and son time".. never do I stop thinking of my son, never do I stop praying for my son, and I always call to check on him and talk to him. Because I love him.

Being a FULL TIME MOTHER and Co-PROVIDER is an HONORABLE and BEAUTIFUL thing! To all the working mom's out there, you are NOT a part time mama!

Poor choice of words. Geez!
And speaking of being a full time mother... ugh.. whole different topic. Act like it. Kids are not an interference to your daily life.