When I was having Genevieve, I listened to Etta James on my third day of labor for at least 6 hours, once my water had broken, while I hollered at the moon. Labor made me feel like fighting dirty and growling like a big cat and Etta James sings from the center of her being, just like I was. Pitocin will make you sing all kinds of things and it's all from the base of your toes to moan like that. I think, too, it gave me a focal point because I knew every single word to every song and occasionally, I'd breathe and sing under my breath. I remember distinctly, Mike asking if I wanted to change it every time the CD ended and me yelling,"NO!" There was no time to explain between contractions what I needed from listening to it over and over. Now, that I do have time, I still don't know what I needed from it, only that I needed it desperately. This might explain Genny's love of music.

So today was a Monday. I came into work and was told upon arrival: the web server was down and it was down most of the weekend. Oh, the stomping, the pissing, the moaning. Most of it got fixed pretty quickly, but talk about having a Monday.

Then I started back to my style sheets to get my pages to do what I want at work. I'd let the student write them and they worked, but there were all these bells and whistles that I wanted and to create them it suddenly became a bitch and a half and our style sheet was totally inadequate. Learning stuff like this with no time is totally humiliating in some ways because your mistakes seem so monumentally stupid once you understand what you're doing.

Not only were the bells and whistles going to be a pain, but then I looked at some samples from online and while the student had made the page very specific, it really needed to be very generic, so there I was with my ass in this self-made sling debating what the hell I was going to do. Stop, reassess, regroup.

We've got our anniversary coming up. Mike and I have been offered a weekend without kids. We're taking it. I don't even know where we're going to go, but we just plan on going. This weekend (April Fool's) has a job interview out of town and we're renting a room, but we're taking the kids, so it's not a sex thing by any stretch. The following weekend is our anniversary and an evening of love.

I donated a bunch of baby clothes to a local charity this weekend and was hoping it would make all this mystical space somewhere, but I can't hardly tell that we did it. I'm glad I did it and the clothes were nice and went to a good cause, and I've found even more, so I need to ask if they could use them.

I am never going to get my house clean. I felt like I spent the whole freakin' weekend cleaning and my house is still not fit for members of the porcine family. On top of that, I am quite clear that we're never going to have enough space for shit. Never. I need to surrender to the possibility that even a storage space won't cut it and just ditch the crap that we might use some day.

What are we having for dinner? Well, that would be chicken sausage, potatoes, broccoli and whole wheat bread. And no, I didn't burn it, but dessert is another matter entirely and I fully expect to discover that "The nightime is the right time...."