Just stuff

I am sitting in the guest room at my mom's in Michigan. We've been here for 6 days and we're ready to go home.

Thursday, Apr 9 Jack went to work as usual and I spent the entire day packing our things, getting the animals ready for a week away from home and cleaning the apartment. We left our place at about 6pm and arrived in Michigan 8 hours later at 3am local time. It felt like a long trip but I had 2 movies to keep me company and Jack had countless talk show podcasts that he listened to. We fell into bed exhausted.

Friday, Apr 10 I woke up at about 8am and began putzing around the house. Jack was sound asleep so I began to clean and I vacuumed the whole house, swept all the wood floors and scrubbed the whole kitchen and bathroom. Jack slept in until almost 11am and then got up and showered. We went to visit my girlfriend who got engaged in January and I hadn't seen her since November. We visited with her at her fiance's house for a few hours. After that we headed up to the closest Redbox to return the DVDs that I had rented for the trip. We also attempted to grocery shop a little bit since I was going to be cooking the whole Easter dinner at my mom's. After grocery shopping, we came back to my mom's to let the dog outside and play with her for a few hours while we waited for my mom to get home. My mom and I went grocery shopping as soon as she got home from work and I only saw one person I knew (and I of course, pretended I didn't know who she was and just walked right past.) We came back from the grocery store, put everything away and watched tv for a little bit before going to bed.

Saturday, Apr 11 I woke up thinking that I was going to need the whole day to cook and prepare for all the food I was going to have to cook the next day but as my mom and I sat on the couch checking our emails, we discovered that nothing that I was going to cook was going to be able to be cooked a day in advance. So much for that idea. My mom and I went and got some bird seed and did a few errands. Then we met up with my sister and little brother for lunch at Chili's. After that, we shopped at Michael's and Old Navy (where I got a sweet belt that I needed to keep my pants up.) Jack decided to go out with his friends so my girlfriend Lisa came over and we hung out and drank coffee and chatted in my mom's living room. My mom hung out with us for a while while we made fun of husbands and how their brains work. Then Lisa asked me how I would clean soap scum out of a bathtub and I was excited to get up and show her the magic eraser. Unfortunately (er, fortunately) there wasn't any soap scum in the house for me to show her how to scrub off, so I said well let's just go buy you some magic erasers and we'll give them a try. So Lisa and I drove down to Target, bought an arm full of cleaning supplies, and 3 or 4 packs of magic erasers and headed to her apartment.

We literally spent a few hours scrubbing out her entire tub and tiled wall surrounding it getting all the soap scum and mildew off of the walls and out of the grout. I even woke up on Sunday morning with a little blister on the tip of my finger from all the scrubbing. I was exhausted from all the cleaning and Jack picked me up from Lisa's at about 12am and we went back to my mom's.

Sunday, Apr 12 I woke up early and tried to get motivated to start cooking with my mom on the couch. We had some cut up fruit and banana bread that I made at home for breakfast and we talked about what we needed to start cooking and when. All of a sudden my mom announces that my sister is going to come over and start cooking her foods over here too. So I flip, We don't have enough space in the kitchen for the entire dinner which I'm cooking AND my sister's side dishes... UGH stupid sister. Why can't she cook at home??

So my mom and I fly into action, baking cookies, peeling and cutting up sweet potatoes and boiling them for the casserole, snapping green beans, frying bacon, boiling water for macaroni and cheese and baking the ham. It was kinda crazy for a while there. Luckily my sister only had one pot of cabbage to go on the stove and 1 crockpot full of parm. potato soup that went on the counter so she wasn't as big of a nuisance as I thought she would be.

Family began arriving around 2pm and I instantly remembered why I don't like family gatherings.

First thing my Gram said to me when she hugged me was, "I don't remember you filling my arms out quite this much." I almost throat punched my grandma. And of course every single member of my family that was there, every aunt and uncle, every cousin and my mom and Grandma all felt like what Jack and I said about feeding the dog, well NOT feeding the dog people food and that she gets sick, apparently didn't matter. Every time I turned around someone was feeding Bessie. I wanted to scream, and I did. Of course, they all treated me like I was psycho and controlling. MY EFFING DOG WILL VOMIT AND HAVE DIARRHEA IF YOU FEED HER ANYTHING buT HER FOOD!! EVEN DOG TREATS THAT SHE iS Not usED TO WILL MAKE HER VOMIT!!!! SHE IS MY EFFING DOG I THINK I KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT STAY THE EFF AWAY FROM HER!!!!!

Needless to say, I did not have fun.

Bessie also does a few fun tricks like Play Dead and it's pretty cute so everyone kept trying to get Bessie to do it. No one can get Bessie to do these tricks but me, not even Jackie Lee can do this. I don't know why, it's just the way it is. So after about a half an hour of them shouting "BANG!" at her and her doing nothing, I come in and do the trick correctly. There is a certain way you have to say it to her and how you have to point your finger at her and it's pretty stern but that's just how she does the trick. So my sister would say something stupid like, "Can't you just picture her yelling at her child in diapers?? BANG!" DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE?!! WTF. You wanted me to do the trick, I come in and do the trick, and then you make fun of me for doing the trick and insult me as a mother?! And you KNOW I'm struggling with IF.

Basically before they left I wanted to scream at every one of them and rip their heads off. No one in my dad's family EVER feeds my dog from the table. No one in Jack's family on either side would ever DREAM of doing something like that. My mom's side of the family is THE most disrespectful bunch of people I have ever met in my life. I have discovered that I never want to host a "family" event again and that I don't like 99.9% of the people in that side of the family. I'm sick of people acting like that to me, and they've all been like it my whole life. I also do NOT want to move back to Michigan. Michigan is dead to me.

I couldn't WAIT for them to leave.

As soon as they left my mom and I sat down and said WHY did we do that?! UGH.

At about 7pm we went over to Jack's cousin's house and we held her brand new 3 week old baby girl. Lillyanna Rose :) She was the sweetest thing and it was so cute to see the first time parents with their baby. These were Jack's dad's side of the family cousins. We sat there and talked with Jack's uncle (His dad's brother) about all the crap that keeps happening with his parents and the fact that it's been 5 weeks since they have spoken to us.

We went home at about 11pm and headed to bed.

Monday, Apr 13 I woke up and headed down to the kitchen to make breakfast for my girlfriend that was coming over at 9am to visit. Lisa and I had pancakes with fruit and coffee :) We chatted for a few hours and then Jack and I had to get ready to go over to his Grandparents house (on his dad's side) for lunch. We headed to Mayville at about noon and got there at 1:30pm. We visited for a few hours and then headed back to Clarkston for dinner with my mom. Jack headed out with his buddies to look at the jeep parts that his grandpa had given him and I was too tired to do anything so I just headed to bed.

Tuesday, Apr 14 I was supposed to go to breakfast with my girlfriend, Cortnee at about 9am and it was about an hour away so we'd have to be out the door by 8am and I was too tired and felt like crap still so I had to text her at about 8 and cancel. I rested up and felt much better by about noon and Jack and I headed to Roseville (about an hour and a half away) and visited with one of Jack's old co-workers, Steve. Steve and his fiance are getting married in June, so that will be the next time we come back to Michigan. We went out to National Coney Island for lunch (and I was SUPER excited because we don't have Coneys in Wisconsin, or around us anyway.) After NCI we drove back to Clarkston and spent a few hours visiting with my "other" family. I grew up in this house, my best friend Ashley (who was the MOH in my wedding and I will be in hers next summer) has a huge family and they took me in from 8yrs old on up. I was their "red-headed-step-child" and they loved me and treated me like their own. I'm hoping that either tonight or tomorrow night if we decide to leave Friday morning, we will have time to go over to their house and visit some more with my other mom and dad.

After visiting with the Red-Headed-Step-Family, we went back to my mom's to let the dog play outside for a while and get ready to go to dinner with Jack's other co-worker, Matt and his wife, Cathy. We ended up meeting them at Olive Garden at 7pm and we stayed until 11pm talking. (We found out as we were walking out the door that they closed at 10pm and we didn't even realize it!) Matt is a youth minister at his church and he ministers to 18-29 year olds. He and his wife had been struggling with this one 21 year old woman and what to do with her, Cathy asks my opinion and I end up spending the next 3 hours talking to them about what it is like to be a 21 year old in her position. Basically I ended up ministering to the minister. It was amazing.

Tuesday Apr 15
Now we're about to go to a Tea Party in Lapeer. I'm excited!