"un-gwounded"

Remember being grounded? You'd miss your curfew or disrespect your parents, and suddenly it was no TV, no phone, no going out with friends, for a week. Very boring. Grounded, you might as well be dead. And the day you were ungrounded -- that was the day life began again.
My brother N. , however, had a different take on it. As the fifth of six children, nearly everything happened to someone else before it happened to him. And with two rambunctious older brothers, being grounded was cool. And so, at four years old, whenever N. would get in trouble, he would walk around saying, "Shoot. I'm gwounded." The kid actually wanted to be grounded. (No, my parents never actually grounded their four-year-old. They might take away The Lion King video for the afternoon, though, and that was good enough for N.)
I'm taking a page from N.'s book. I wanna be grounded. Jake being gone four nights a week, living with my in-laws partly because he is gone four nights a week, Ghoulie's separation anxiety and consequent sobbing every time I set her down, working odd hours and wondering exactly where all the money is going -- all of it is making me feel very, very ungrounded. As if I might float away at any given moment. I need someone to take away all my "privileges" -- someone please, please take my cell phone away! -- and force me to be totally bored for a few days. Lock me in my room with a book and tell me to think things over.
I am, fortunately, making the time for a regular yoga practice lately, and that seems to get me halfway there. Maybe I'll go mouth off to my mother and see if that gets me the rest of the way. That always worked when I was a teenager.

PS Happy New Year

Ghoulie rocked out on New Year's Eve. We didn't realize until now how much she looks like that kid from Mad Max. . .

voila

I remember when I first discovered blogging, and would faithfully read certain blogs several times a week. When my favorites hadn't been updated, I would be so disappointed. I would check a few days later, then check again, only to find nothing new, sometimes for weeks on end. What could possibly be going on in these people's lives that they had no time left for their blog's dedicated readers?
And then, one day, voila. A new post. It was like heaven.
So here I am. Voila.
Jake is one week into his 12-week police academy. Please no references to Steve Guttenberg; I can't take any more of those. It's so not like that. It's more like basic training, I'm told. Not that I would know. The good news is that he gets to come home during every weekend, up to and including federal holidays like today. During the week, I kill time by working, practicing, and single-mom-ing, while Ghoulie kills time by teething. Top teeth are monsters, it seems.
I had a lot more to say. I had it all formulated before Ghoulie and I lay down to take a nap. But during my short sleep, I seem to have forgotten how this was supposed to go. . .