sprint. spent.

you're probably still reeling from the madcap funfest that was jesse's blog post yesterday. sorry if it's just too much excitement for you. jokes, i love talking about church conferences. no i hate that. i do love jesus, but i am bitter about jesse being gone. why? well let's see if you can figure it out. i'm going to revisit the last 20 or so hours of my life. join me, won't you?

3:00 pm-pick judah up from babysitter where he is staying after preschool while daddy is out of town. gleefully realize that lena will be at my house when i get home to help me with him so that may sleep and vomit in peace.

3:13 pm-receive text from lena indicating she has just read the blog and remembered jesse is gone. she has forgotten about me and judah.

3:14 pm-i deftly execute a killer text guilt-trip to impel lena to still come down and bring me taco bell as penance.

4:00 pm- lena and tacos arrive. faces are stuffed.

5:00 pm- judah wakes up from a nap that strangely began with full out blood-curdling screams before he just abruptly dropped right off to dreamland. lena takes him for a walk. i go to bed.

6:09 pm- i wake up in raging pain because my quesadilla has decided to go through puberty in my stomach and grow to at least 3 times its original size. it hurts. make it stop.

7:04 pm-i put judah down after a nice long bath that was for the first free from tub-poop fear thanks to our stock of lil' swimmers pool diapers (judah in the tub with a diaper on=weird. not cleaning up soggy turds after a bath=awesome). i tell lena she totally doesn't need to spend the night because once he's down he's really easy. lena decides to order a pizza before heading home (since she for some reason didn't eat dinner at 4 pm like i did. i am still in actual pain from the speed at which i ate taco bell and her recitation of her toppings brings the bile way up to the tippy top of my esophagus.

8:03 pm- just as we are sitting around bored and watching american idol i happen to stumble onto facebook where a message from my realtor is waiting: she couldn't get ahold of jesse and doesn't have my number, we have a showing scheduled for tomorrow (thursday) at 6:30 pm. quickly realizing that thursday is my day to work until 6 and jesse won't be home from orlando until 8, it hits me that that means i have to have the entire house cleaned and ready to impress (aka just not repulse) the visitors when we leave in the morning. at this point the house is a cheerio-encrusted dust bomb and the yard is totally jumanji.

8:05 pm-i retract lena's option of going home and tell her she is now required to spend the night and help clean my house. we spring immediately into action. first up: the lawn. light is failing and we can't start the lawnmower. over to the next door neighbors to borrow theirs (luckily they don't answer the door with a gun like they usually do after dark). rather than loaning us the mower, our sweet neighbor saddles up and proceeds to mow our entire lawn herself because it's not safe for me to bounce around on a lawnmower with a baby in my stomach. you say baby, i say tacos...whatever.

8:16- lena and i tackle the pollen-drenched patio with the hose and the backyard flora with the weedwacker. meanwhile the 14 year old boy scout son of the neighbor is soliciting more aid, asking if he can go inside and dust or fold our laundry (whaaaa?) he hilariously keeps calling lena "elena" and asking me for double A batteries. how is this helping us, justin!!?!?!

the picture of TRUE friendship, people

8:20 pm- the neighbor lady has stopped the mower out front and i go see what's going on. she says, "i ran over your paper." i look streetwards, and what do you know, she did. it looks like a very short parade just came through. luckily all the confetti is on the opposite side of the street. out of my jurisdiction. somehow this is not an issue to me at all and we have a good laugh.

9:07 pm- it is full dark and we have done everything we can for the outdoors. me and lena (no justin, i don't need you help clean the hair out of my brush) head inside and do the rest of the house. lena was amazing and offered to do the grossest of jobs. but even with full blown nausea my pride kept her at bay from the scary jobs such as cleaning around my toilet. waiting for me: a whole first trimester's worth of little barfy splatters that i never really noticed. freaking disgusting. how do i live like this!?!?!?

10:30 pm- finally they stop charitying around and kick someone off american idol. oh, and we are totally finished. the house looks awesome and we have left ourselves no work for the morning. goodnight lena, by the way, you have judah's nighttime feeding.

6:45 am today- i wake up and realize i am geting a cold and feel like double ass (fitting since that's what's growing in my jeans right now). awesome. i do the final prep for the house-opening blinds, last minute tidying, etc. and as i am opening the front blinds i see the reality of the lawnmowered newspaper. my yard, the street and our across the street neighbors' (not the ones who helped, but a scary family of about 16 rednecks who put up 10 of those inflatable christmas air statues every year) yard are covered and look like absolute crap. i realize i have to clean this up because it is bordering on vandalism.

7:00 am-i get our leaf sucker/mulcher bag out there with our 2 extension cords and get ready to suck it all away. the cord makes it to almost 2 inches from the nearest paper scraps and then runs out of length. i am about to cry. i wave to the kids waiting for their bus and possibly scar them for life since my sweet chariots have swung low right out of my $6 pregnancy bra from ross: delta burke collection. let me tell you, what those women were designing up in that sugarbaker house, i don't know, but it sure wasn't sturdy intimates, y'all.

7:03 am- i decide to try to pick it up by hand. you should know wet paper is pretty much my most hated textile/fiber on the planet earth. the scraps were all soaked with juicy morning dew. sick and sick and sick. this did present me the opportunity to pick up the natty light can one of our amazing fellow townsfolk had so sweetly thrown under our for sale sign since in attempt to tell us, :don't go, we'll miss you!" (it was half full!...who says i'm not an optimist?).

7:04 am- after about 3 handfuls i realize that this will take years to do by hand. i contemplate going into the fetal position in our ditch and letting things play out from there.

7:15 am- i wake up judah and lena. somehow judah somehow has literlly NOTHING remotely appropriate to wear despite drawers jam-packed with clothing. all we can find are long sleeved things and 6 month sizes despite the fact that all of his laundry is done.

7:17 am- we decide on a 12 month onesie lena recently bought him. its way too big but i don't care. the last snap refuses to close. it pops out in our faces every time we try to snap it. i cancel his pants for the day and decide he gets a onesie and 2 snaps because that's just the kind of day it's been.

7:23 am- out the door and on the road after a big sweaty goodbye to lena who has literally saved my life. i call father in law dukes in panic and beg him to come over to my house while i am at work and bring another extension cord and suck up the paper for me. god bless him, he says yes.

7:49 am- i drop judah off at the dukes house and give grandaddy the garage door opener so he can get in to our mulcher-sucker. i head off to work so relieved that i took care of the whole situation because, in hindsight, it would have been really not cool to totally trash our across the street neighbors' yard and then not clean it up. shwew.

10:47 am- i am taking a nap in the conference room as i normally do when i feel like death at work. since i am fat and pregnant i have undone my belt and jean-buttons so i can let 'er hang. all of a sudden my father in law comes in. i pop up immediately because it's kind of embarrassing to have your in-laws find you under a blanket at work. i look down and realize my freaking pants are hanging open. i try to smoothly hide my lower half behind an office chair while talking to bob. there's a 1 in 10 chance he didn't notice and think some freaking shit was going on in the conference room between me and my "percy jackson and the sea of monsters" book.

10:49 am- me: "thank you so so so so much, i cannot tell you how much i appreciate you." bob: "yeah i blew out your garage and the driveway and got all the paper up." me: "wow you are amazing, so you got all the stuff that was across the street in the neighbor's yard? i was totally freaking out about how rude we were to have left that there." bob: "oh, no i didn't do that. they were out in the yard doing stuff so i figured it had been them who ran over the paper last night and that they would clean up their yard." me: (dies a thousand deaths inside) "oh that's okay, no big deal. thank you so much."

11:07 am- i ponder what it must have been like for our redneck neighbors to wake up, see the huge mess in their yard emanating from our driveway, see me leave for work without talking to them or leaving a note or cleaning it up, THEN to see another person come over with extra cords so that the leaf-sucker can reach and to surely clean up the mess the awful dukes neighbors made only to see him stop the cleanup effort at to the street and the culprit's yard, leaving mine totally disgusting.

11:09 am- panic sets in. the rednecks are going to raze my entire house (bad) and eat my dogs (neutral).

11:10 am-i leave work, jump in my car, speed home, stop and buy another extension cord (since bob would have taken his extra one back) and pull up to see my pristine house directly opposite their AJC-sprayed landfill of a yard. i run up to the first person i see and spew out my pathetic story followed by LOTS of apologies telling him i am here to make it all right. neighbor dude whose debt i am greatly in: "huh?...oh, that's okay. hey, has the mailman come today yet?" me: "seriously!?!?!?!?! i thought country folk were passionate about their yards...i mean what if paper had gotten in the massive pontoon boat that you store out front or one of your decorative air characters' intake valves had gotten clogged by particles of this week's "parade" magazine?!?!?" i seriously don't think he noticed anything was even different. cue me hating myself for having a conscious.

11:12 to high noon- hard labor involving me with 4 extension cords--thank god bob had left his because it took his plus our first two plus the one i bought on the way home just to reach all the way from our living room to their yard (why the hell did we not get a gas powered one!?!?!?!)--sucking bits of the SUNDAY PAPER up on eat a time. i notice that a surprising number of coupons were actually quite accurately cut by the lawnmower, but then the thought of couponing makes me come really close to desecrating their lawn some more.

12:03 pm- wind up about 200 feet of dirty extension cord, smacking myself in the crotch bone an inordinate number of times. notice about 5 other things that i could do to make the inside of the house look better. reapply deodorant, change clothes, cry, pray to jesus in our empty living room that somehow this first ever family to see our house will for some reason decide to buy it today, because so help me, i CANNOT do this over and over again.

yeah, little drooly-dirty paws, go ahead and touch it all you want. i'll just windex that daily until the housing market takes off again.