When we built the first house, we moved in very prematurely. We spent three years living there without any painted trim and a master bathroom that wasn’t finished until the day we put the house on the market.

When we started construction on our new house we vowed to not move into it until it was completely finished. Completely. We didn’t want to have any trim pieces to paint. We didn’t want any doors left to be hung. It had to be 100% finished. (Well, except for the deck and yard. That could wait.)

The upstairs of the new house will be 100% completed next week. The tub in the master bathroom is done. The toilets flush. The shower room and vanity area are finished. Babboo’s bathroom has been tiled and the radiators are installed. The King hung the bedroom doors up last night. The carpet installation has been scheduled.

The main floor continues to be a work in progress. The refrigerator is plugged in and running and the range is ready to be installed. The new couches for the front room are being stored in the basement. There are no kitchen cabinets. No tile has been laid. No working toilets on this floor. No doors have been hung.

The washer and dryer in the basement are working and have been used many times. The bathroom is still being tiled. The spare room is being used as a storage for new furniture. The garage (which is half of the basement) is full of tools, saws, siding, paint cans, tile, and nails.

The outside of the house has areas that still need siding. The yards are muddy. The back yard is being held together by a gabion wall. The decking has been purchased, but is nowhere near close to installation.

The new house, it is still under construction.

The King works over there every night (except Friday, when we hang out as a family) and all day on Saturday. His part-time retired dad works there everyday while the rest of us are at work.
For the sake of this post let’s say that I make $100 a month. The King makes $110.

That means we bring in $210 a month. Our bills go as follows:

• Rent - $51
• Daycare - $49
• Mortgage (on the house we tore down, which we have been paying for years!) - $48
• Construction costs (on the house we are building) - $32
• Charitable donations - $20

That only leaves $10 a month for food, clothes, car payment, and anything else that may come up. In case you’re not good at math, $10 is not a lot of money. Especially when you need to buy furniture for a new house. Sheets, beds, curtains, art…all of that, are expensive. Our savings isn’t growing. Babboo’s college and Disneyland funds aren’t where they should be. Our retirement funds haven’t been added to in a while.

Today we’ll be signing another 3-month lease on our one-bedroom downtown Seattle high rise apartment.

The last week in April will be spent packing up our apartment, getting our stuff out of storage (finally!) and moving into our unfinished house.

Not because we want to, but because we have to.

I admit that I have food issues. Issues that, I’m afraid, might rule my life if I let them. My issues go something like this: I see a bag of Baked Lays, I want to eat entire bag of Baked Lays. I see a soda, I want to drink said soda.

The King has his own food issues. They go something like this: eating is a waste of time. Therefore, I will not eat.

Seriously, he says this. And I don’t understand it. Not even for a second.

(Traveling with The King is hard. While I’m taking jaunts around Paris looking for bakeries to eat at, he’s busy walking right past all the bakeries searching for cool graffiti in back alleys.)

I’ve admitted that I come from a big family. And I don’t mean that there are a lot of us. I love them, but they aren’t the poster children for healthy living. (Need proof?) I learned to eat from the best.

The King and I are nervous that we’ll pass our food issues on to our currently super skinny child. I’m afraid that Babboo will be too conscious about food and will choose to stay away from it. The King is nervous that our kid will overeat junk food and have the food addictions that I have.

Unfortunately The King and I are on two completely different sides of this. We aren’t moderate at all. I’m one extreme. He’s the other. How do two completely different food extremist raise a child that is an educated and healthy eater? How do I show Babboo that while it’s okay to have a cookie now and then, it’s not okay to have them for breakfast?

How does The King teach Babboo that eating a couple of cookies a day isn’t going to kill him? How does he show him that dude, you must stop at one or two cookies when he doesn’t eat cookies himself?

Babboo is saying more words by the hour. His latest words all revolve around food. He happily points to the fridge and says “yogurt” and “cookie”, or “cheese”. He wants “candy” and “drink” and “raisins”. It’s all food all the time at The King household. The King and I are both nervous about this. We like to think that he’s just a kid learning how to express his wants and desires and being independent for the first time. We’re not sure this is the care. What if he becomes like us?

We don’t want our child to only be focused on food. We’d like him to wake up in the morning and ask for Snoopy and not food like he’s done the past two mornings.

Good thing I’m pretty sure this is just a phase and he’s just going through some sort of intense growth spurt. Because seriously, this kid is eating us out of house and home.

I know we can’t be the only household with food issues. So tell me, what are your food issues?

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Head over to SeattleMomBlogs to read what I have to say this Wednesday.

There is a proverb in the Old Testament that says:

“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh the city.”

I am not slow to anger. In fact, I’d say that I was the Speed Racer of anger. I go from calm and collected to raging with hate and anger in about .5 seconds.

If I had to make a list of all the things that made me angry, it would go something like this:

• The King
• Co-workers
• Babboo
• Idiots
• Family
• Bus drivers
• War
• Customer service workers
• My hair
• iTunes
• DVR
• Writers strike

Okay, I’ll stop here. But, as you can see, many things make me angry. And we all know that an angry person is an ugly person. In fact, to quote scripture again:

“Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.” (Ecclesiastes 7:9)

Lately I’ve noticed how angry I am. I wake up angry. I get angry when I’m late for work. I’m angry when I get to work and see that I’m the last one to arrive. I get angry when my co-workers comments on me being the last one.

And then my day pretty much continues with that same vein until I go home at night and proceed to relive all my angers and frustrations with The King and Babboo.

This last Sunday at church we talked about being slow to anger. Scriptures were read on how anger is bad. Stories were told about how anger never solves anything. It was if the lesson was meant for me. I listened intently and patiently awaited the conclusion of the lesson where we would learn the magic ways of slowing your anger down.

Alas, there was no magic solution for my anger. I realized this and decided I needed to listened to the message even closer. I was going to have to figure out how to deal with my anger issues on my own.

The past couple of months with a certain co-worker have been trying, to say the least. He says things, that I feel, are intentional to belittle and upset me. He mocks what I wear. Questions how I do my job. And just makes coming to work unbearable. The thing is, he’s a good person. He has a good heart. He just has poor social skills. I should get as upset and angry with him as I do.

To share some more quotes from the church lesson:

“So many of us make a great fuss of matters of small consequence. We are so easily offended. Happy is the man who can brush aside the offending remarks of another and go on his way.”

I’m know I’m making a “great fuss” of these small matters with my co-worker. I know it, and I hate it. I need to learn to brush his hurtful comments aside. I need to stand tall and not let him get to me.

“Grudges, if left to fester, can become serious maladies. Like a painful ailment they can absorb all of our time and attention.”

I don’t want my attention to be absorbed by anger and grudges. I want rainbows, butterflies, sunshine and cute babies bums. (It might help if I didn’t live in Seattle, where the sun doesn’t shine from October until June. But that’s a topic for another post.)

On our drive home from church on Sunday I made a commitment (with myself) to be slower to anger. There is no way I can say I’ll stop with all anger. Dude, I’m only human and must make baby steps. So for now, I’m trying to be slower to anger. Slower isn’t perfect. But it’s what I can do, for now.

In order for me to be slower to anger, I need to remind myself of this commitment. When I feel my ears heating up and my throat closing, I must remind myself…slow to anger. I thought about making a sign that says “Slow to Anger” and hanging it in my cubicle, and in my kitchen. And maybe above my bed. Heck, maybe I should make an iron-on that I can wear everyday.

But for now, I’m just going to share this commitment with the interweb. I’m telling you so that you’ll keep me in line. I want you to remind me to be slower to anger. If I’m not ready to answer to God, at least I can answer to the interweb.

To remind all of us why I’m choosing to be slower to anger, let me share you the quote that sealed it all for me:

“I plead with you to control your tempers, to put a smile upon your faces, which will erase anger; speak out with words of love and peace, appreciation, and respect. If you will do this, your lives will be without regret. Your marriages and family relationships will be preserved. You will be much happier. You will do greater good. You will feel a sense of peace that will be wonderful. May the Lord bless you and inspire you to walk without anger, without bitterness of any kind, but to reach out to others with expressions of friendship, appreciation, and love.”

So tell me, don’t you want to join me in my quest for being just a little slower to anger?

Today is a very special day. It marks the start of a new way of life for us at The King household.

I am no longer a single mom.

Okay, so technically I wasn’t ever a single mom. But every other week, I sure felt like one.

For the past eight or so months The King has packed his bags, boarded a plane for exotic places like Minneapolis or Iowa and left me at home alone with my Sweet Babboo. Every other week. Him being away from home has brought on new stresses to our lives and to our marriage and has slowed down the construction of our new house. Dude, having to do everything all by yourself is hard. Very hard. And frankly, I didn’t like it one bit.

(That’s not true. I did like the eating pizza for dinner every night and the watch whatever you want on television aspects of it.)

Of course this was something I choose to not blog about. You know, for obvious safety reasons. But starting this week, The King will no longer be required to travel for his job.

Praise the Lord.

There will be no more complaining and bitching about how I hate having to get Babboo off to school every morning. And pick him up every afternoon. I won’t be able to feel sorry for myself as I climb into our new bed all alone. No more murmuring as I do another load of laundry and sit down to the dinner table alone. Basically, no more feeling sorry for myself.

Being a single mom is hard work. It also isn’t something I signed on for when I married The King. But then again, who does sign up for single parenting?

I will never forget the first week of Babboo’s life. I laid there, in my hospital bed, with a cut across my gut, just watching The King change diaper after diaper. I watched him rock our crying baby. I marveled at the love The King already had for our new little guy. And I just kept thinking “how do mom’s do all of this alone?!”

I woke up this morning knowing that this week will be different. It will be better. Because I have my family back.

So tell me, how do you deal with your significant other being gone? And for you single mom’s out there, how do you do it? Because really, you are me heroes!

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Did anyone, besides me, watch the CBS miniseries Comanche Moon? I finally finished it this weekend and loved it. I also blogged about it over at WeHeartTV.

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Rhett Miller, lead singer for my all-time-favorite-band the Old 97’s is being featured this week over at fivechapters. Fivechapters is a website that features a new weekly serialized story every week. Dude, not only can Rhett Miller sing, dance and make me happy, he can also write a pretty good short story. Make sure you check fivechapters everyday this week for more of Rhett’s story! You know I will.

One of the bazillion e-mails I missed while out sick was one from The King on Tuesday, before he knew I had left work:

I heard Heath Ledger died today. I didn’t know who that was when the receptionist here at work told me, but I played it cool and said that I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it past the primary race anyway. Then I looked him up on the internet and found out that he was in “10 Things I Hate About You” which I remember. And that there were drugs involved. I guess he wasn’t a candidate in the presidential race after all. Good thing, because I think being on drugs is a bad way to start out a presidency, or VP for that matter.

It’s a good thing he’s so darn handy with a hammer and nails, or I might have to kick him to the curb for saying stuff like that.

(Check out the tub over at the new house. Dude, we are this.much.closer to actually moving in.)

While I love my new mattress, I hadn’t really planned on spending the last 24 hours on top of it, praying that I wouldn’t puke. Again.

(Note to the interweb: if you think that you might puke at some point in the day, don’t eat beef jerky. You’ll thank me for this advice.)

(Seriously, no beef jerky.)

Things I have done in the last 24 hours:

• Watched the season premier of “Scott Baio is 46 and Pregnant“.
• Teetered between thinking Scott Baio is hott and wanting to kick him in his perfect teeth.
• Set the DVR to tape the entire season of “Scott Baio is 46 and Pregnant”.
• And also “My Fair Brady“.
• Fallen more in love with new template, and Carrisa for her blog knowledge. (Click over from your reader and check it out.)
• Overheard, for the first time, the lady in the next apartment getting it on.
• Wondered if The King and I are that loud.
• Because seriously, they were loud.
• Eaten Babboo’s weight in Teddy Grahams.
• Freaked out after reading that another blogger is pregnant!
• Seriously people, I don’t need anymore pressure to get knocked up. (We still have a few condoms left from our 100 pack. I would hate to waste any perfectly good condoms.)
• Oh yeah, and I wrote a post over at SeattleMomBlogs.

So tell me, what have you been up to in the last 24 hours?

(And please, no mention of beef jerky. Or any type of smocked meat of any kind.)