Ants

We have lived in our apartment for the past 6 months and the only insects that I have seen are an occasional silverfish...until last Friday. Callie started meowing the moment I got my sleepy head out of bed. She usually does this if she is out of food or water. I walk over, turn on the closet light, look down and see that she still has food. "Stupid cat", I think as I turn off the light. Wait...what was that I saw...I turn back on the light and see the food she does have brimming with happy little ants. Sh*t! Ants!! I run the crawling bowl to the trash can and dump out the contents and wash out the bowl. I scramble to find ant spray, can't find any and figure 409 will do the trick. I pour a decent amount over the ant-covered food in the garbage and feel a tingle of joy. HAHA you stupid ants!

I pour fresh food into Callie's bowl and set it down on her now clean mat. I get some water to drink, eat breakfast, and hear a baby calling out to be fed. After Elias is down for his morning nap, I make my way to the closet to disrobe to take a shower. I look down at Callie's bowl...double sh*t! The whole bowl is completely covered with ants again. OK, this means war! Only it is Friday and I am trying to get ready to go on a retreat. The ants will have to wait...I clean out the bowl again, more 409 and move Callie's bowls on top of our chest at the end of our bed and finish getting ready.

Monday morning I get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. As I am sitting on the toilet I feel a bite on my foot...HUH?!...I look down to see a couple of ants walking on my feet. A few more are on the mats and a few more are casually parading around on the floor. Great....they migrated to the bathroom. I walked in to the kitchen and see a mass of moving brown specs on the counter...WHAT?!...I turn on the light and yes, the bastards moved to a better feeding ground. I feel rage building inside of me. Why would they all of a sudden decide to invade our home after never gracing us with their presence before? I turn on the water and start drowning them. I feel slightly happy at the little revenge I am getting. I look down on the floor and they are feasting on some granola I had dropped the past Friday morning. AAHHHHHH....I get as many as I can and have my sponge ready as I scan the kitchen. I see another and I actually say out loud, "You can run but you can't hide!"

I call the apartment office. Ah, the one nice luxury of not owning your home, you can call someone to come and fix anything. They tell me they will send an exterminator over on Wednesday. Cool...but its Monday. I pack up Elias and we head to HEB. I buy some ant spray, get home, clean the kitchen so there are no little morsels anywhere, and "go crazy with the cheese wiz". Later, Dallas gets home, we eat dinner and take Elias for a walk. I get back, go into the kitchen to get some water, and guess who is there?? Two little ants licking up some tasty gravy...will it ever end?

A Cup of Hair

Every morning I pull a hand full of hair (literally) out of my tub drain. One morning I thought, "Oh my gosh! It's a cup of hair!" Disgusting, right? I agree. Let me back up and explain. I have always "lost" a lot of hair. Being that I have pretty thick hair, it falls out quite a bit, always has. It was quite scary one night when I was ten and watching a TV movie with my mom. I watched in horror as the lady was in the shower started pulling out clumps of her hair. She had cancer, but what I failed to hear was her hair was falling out because of chemo, not just because she had cancer. So, for about a week, I thought I had cancer. I finally, tearfully, had the courage to ask my mom about it and was so relieved that I wasn't dying. Another much lighter thing happened when I was in high school. My parents housekeeper would say, "Whoever lives upstairs in the teal bathroom sure looses a lot of hair. She should get that looked at." Well, I did and my hair just grows REALLY fast and I lose a lot in the process. Move up 10 years to this past January.

I was well into my pregnancy...just hit 20 weeks. I started noticing that I wasn't pulling ANY hair out of the tub drain. Weird. I also realized that I didn't have to clean my hairbrush. I researched it and found out that during pregnancy, some women's hormones make it so that your hair is really strong and grows in thick and you might not lose as much. Cool...it was the nicest 6 months of my hair's life. Not only was it thick, shiny, and healthy, but I wasn't shedding like my cat in the middle of summer. I totally enjoyed this luxury....until....

Enter Elias and 2 months after giving birth....hair and lots of it falling off of my head. The first time that I noticed, I looked down at our tub's drain, I actually gasped. A swirl of long brown hair twirled together, looking something like a big brown bug. I realized it was my hair and cleaned it out. I slowly started noticing that my previously clean hair brush was now littered with my post-pregnancy hair. All that lush thick hair was now falling out...not slowly, but really fast. Cups and fistfulls of hair now plague my life. A couple of weeks ago I thought I would try to help the situation by cutting off 3 inches. It didn't really help, now I just find my shorter hair everywhere.

My husband is also annoyed with my sloughing off. I get in the shower after Dallas has taken a bath and it is like Hair Art on the shower wall. He pulls out my long hair from his bath water and sticks them to the wall. Elias has even fallen victim. Dallas pulled a long hair out of our son's mouth one morning last week. I have also found my hair in his crib, on his skin, and in his diaper...YIKES! I have a horrible nightmare of one of my hair's wrapped tightly around his penis. I do have a reason for that...it happened to my nephew with one of my sister-in-law's hair. He was crying hard for no reason until they stripped off his clothes only to find one of her hair's cutting off circulation to his penis!! OH MY GOSH...what a horrible thing! So I frequently check my son's penis to make sure this isn't the cause of his discomfort. (Do I get props for using penis 3 times in a blog?)

I don't see any slowing to this process. Maybe since I didn't have any hair fall out for 6 months, it will take 6 months for it to fall out. I have 4 months to go. My only solutions to this nuisance would be to get pregnant again or shave my head. Not gonna happen...

My First Post!

Hello fellow bloggers!!! I am here finally...after months of thoroughly enjoying reading all of my friends blogs, I have decided to jump in. Actually, I have secretly wanted to start my own blog for the past two months. I don't know what the draw to blogging is. Maybe it brings me back to my pre-junior high days of having a diary.

I was rummaging through my old school stuff at my parents house... yes, I still have boxes of elementary-college crap still in my old closet. Really sad, I know. Anyway, I ran across my old red and white striped diary and anxiously used the little gold key and opened it. I laughed and laughed as I meticulously wrote in every day for the first three months of 1985. The rest of the year must have been pretty boring because those are the only months filled in. I was 10 at the time and if nothing of interest happened on any particular day, I would just write "A Good Day!" or "A Boring Day". I did run across a few key memories like the first time I got a bra (blush).

Also in the boxes were about 6 old notebook size creative writing/journals that my 5th grade teacher made us write in every day. I remember really enjoying writing in them whether it be about a certain topic or a fiction story. She was a great teacher, Mrs. Ruthanne...one of my favorites. She would comment on EVERY journal entry with a red pen and would always draw a little picture to go along with her comment. I wish I could draw on this post and show you the girls face she would always doodle on my journal. It is vivid in my mind to this day.

Those two things were my only memories/keepsakes that I have from writing. After 5th grade I must have hated writing. I never enjoyed it in high school or college. But, you don't really write creatively...just papers on novels read or on some form of methodology. Pretty boring if you ask me and my mom helped me write most of them. I was never a good writer so please forgive this post and all future posts because I am no way near fluent or clever and I probably will not use the correct tense throughout a whole post or use commas correctly and I will surely use exclamation marks WAY too much and I will probably have lots of run-on sentences :)!!

So, what is the draw to starting a blog?? Once again I return to reading all of your blogs. After the baby arrived I had more time on my hands (not much but more than when I was teaching) and Dallas LOVED writing on his blog and reading others. One day I found myself sitting in front of the computer reading all of the blogs that my husband had linked on his blog. I was fascinated! I felt so much closer to my friends and loved hearing about their thoughts. This started me thinking of what, if anything, I would write about if I had a blog. Probably just about baby puke and poop and the musings of being a new mom. Pretty boring...but I then started thinking of little oddities about myself and before I knew it, I already had about 4 posts lined up in my head. So...here I am.

Thanks to my husband for setting this up for me and helping me with the title. I wanted something more clever than "Carrie's Blog"...which is all that I could come up with. He asked me where I kept my wallet and keys and I said..."The Diaper Bag". So, there you have it my friends...my first post....YEAH!!! I am so pumped and so excited to be a part of this blogging world, so please comment because that is almost as fun as reading everyone's posts.