So, I keep buying plants - forgetting to water them, and have them slowly die. What does that say about me as a person? I type this while guiltily glancing at my mostly dead red-leaf pineapple plant. A week ago I was wandering past the Super Wal-Mart Garden Dept and decided to pick up a 4 ft plant I saw sitting there. I looked briefly at the tag which did an excellent job of educating me to it’s needs by announcing it’s name was “Tropical Plant Assortment”. Leave it to Wal-Mart to bring even live plants down to a level that is totally generic. It started withering the moment I got it home - and YES I watered it. Maybe I’ll forget about foliage-a-fying my house again til spring… *sigh* is it spring yet?

I’ve been having a hard time sleeping these past few weeks. It’s becoming a problem - I feel like I ACHE for sleep but my mind just won’t go there. I called into work this Monday - I slept until it was time for me to go to my book study at 7pm. My gym attendance which was like clockwork these past few months has taken an erratic dive b/c of insomnia. I know that getting there will help me get my internal clock reset but when I fall asleep at 3am and my alarm for the gym goes off at 5:30am… let me just say last Friday that happened and I started to cry with the thought of leaving my bed - literally TEARS. So I reset my alarm and slept another three fitful hours.

In other news…two weeks ago I was vacuuming the carpet in my bedroom. I saw a piece of lint on the floor and kicked at it with my bare foot. I felt a sharp pain in the sole of my left foot and it started bleeding. I couldn’t find anything on the carpet but it felt like a needle had jabbed me. Since I have a sewing machine in my bedroom I figured it was pretty likely that’s what happened. Two weeks later and I’ve been limping on it. I knew whatever had stabbed me in the foot had stabbed me deep but it felt like an unreasonable amount of pain to be in. I couldn’t put a normal amount of weight on it for walking, exercising, heck name an activity of daily living I was impaired by this poke to my foot. Tonight after the meeting I sat on my bed and looked at the area of my foot where I had been gouged. It looked as if underneath the pad there was an infection. So I took a disinfected needle and poked it making a little opening. A HUGE amount of yellowish puss came out and I noticed what appeared to be a blue speck of something underneath the callus of skin. I thought at first it was something rubbed off from my tights but every time I applied any pressure it would float away from the surface of the puss-filled bubble. So I decided to open the whole thing up and get a better look. As soon as I incised the wound the “blue dot” began to push itself out of my foot. It was actually the broken off end of a darning needle IMBEDED IN MY FOOT. When it was in there it looked to be about 1/8 inch long. But when I took a pair of tweezers and eased it out the rest of the way I found out it was actually about 3/4 inch long at least. So now I know now at least I wasn’t just being a sissy - the pain was real and purposeful. How would you like to go around with an almost-inch of metal bobbing around in your foot? Not very much I don’t doubt.

On Saturday night I had my niece Cali overnight. She’s so sweet I love how she is so classically 18 months old. We went to Target grocery shopping and she did the hey-this-is-cool-what-if-I-drop-it-over-the-side-of-the-cart thing. Right now she’s fascinated by anything shiny. I bought her a sippy cup filled with silver glitter, flowers, and leaves. It gets the “snow globe” effect when you shake it - Cali’s in love with it. I don’t have a playpen or crib so when Cali spends the night she sleeps in bed with me. It can be nerve wracking - I make a little pillow barrier but in a dramatic sweep of irony Cali who is so easy going in every area of her conscience life is not a contented sleeper. She almost does cartwheels in bed. Stomach, left side, stomach, right side, back, right side, quarter turn, back, right side, sit up, flop down - stomach, et cetera. At one point her head was on the bed and her little arms and legs were all tucked up to her chest - her little tush sticking up in the air. She stayed in that position the longest of them all. She took a bath in the morning, although I ended up getting a shower with her and reminded me again how very 18 months she is with her gleeful splashing. I love that baby so much. It’s times like that where I seriously consider motherhood. I dropped her off with her mom and she kept reaching her arms out for me to take her back. When I started to walk away her eyes filled with tears and she let out a wail of protest - how very, VERY 18 months she is. I know it’s a phase, every child goes through their clingy stage - several clingy stages - preferring one person over another. I know next week she will have a new object of her affection. But you can’t tell me for one second it wouldn’t give you the warm fuzzies to be the one she picked. This little person so warm, sweet, and wonderful picked me - even for a moment, even if it was because she didn’t know any better. It doesn’t make a difference. THAT moment was mine.