THERE IS NOTHING THAT I LOVE MORE than receiving comments on the pictures I have taken.

It gives me warm flurries and makes me all happy inside.

I normally play it off as, “thanks, but it’s only because I have a great camera”. Which is completely and totally true. The photography class I took in high school can’t get any of the credit since I don’t remember a single thing.

I am by no means a “pro”. Most of my pictures I take, I get lucky with. My rule of thumb when taking photos is take as many as I can in the moment, and delete out the bad ones after, which means that for every good photo you see, there are five more just like it that are either under or over exposed, or blurry.

But still, compliments? Love them, as long as they are on photos of Kevin, or Ollie, or plants, or munchy children.

Compliments on photos of me make me feel funny. I’m not saying this to sound conceited (read: you are too nice to me), but I get compliments on, “you always look so good in photos!”, “every photo of you is great, I’m so jealous.”

I try to disprove this theory as much as possible by posting blatantly unflattering photos of myself.

That was a year ago.

Two weeks ago?

Yea.

I post these to show that nobody photographs perfectly.

This isn’t just with the photos we take. Even in the photos our photographer gave us there were ones of me that weren’t so hot. I won’t post them because Nate is a wonderful photographer and I’d hate to portray him otherwise. He winds up with a ratio opposite of mine – for every unflattering photo there are twenty more like it that look beautiful, wonderful, stunning.

I would recommend him to anybody.

(Psst. He’ll travel).

(Want the link? Nathaniel Ray Photography. Word).

But even in the most beautiful of photos, I can find a way to tear myself down.

For example.

My shirt is wrinkled.

My hair extension is showing.

My hair looks frizzy.

My stomach looks fat.

This is not an effort to gain compliments. In fact, I’m tempted to turn the comments OFF in this post, and I never do that.

This is just my way of saying that we all have insecurities about our bodies. Even in absolutely perfect photos. It doesn’t matter what you weigh, how tall you are, how much you work out, what your ancestors passed on through their genes.

We are women (are you a guy reader? Sorry to generalize/alienate you). Because of this I believe that we are more in tune to our bodies, and that we tend focus on our body image way more than we should. And when you don’t feel good about your body, everything becomes a “when”. When I lose weight. When I look better. When when when when when.

My friend over at 100 Days in Bed (do you read her? Because you should. She is fabulous.) posted recently about weight and body issues, and I think it’s definitely something that needs to be addressed. I don’t care if you are a size two, or a size twenty. We are all women. We are ALL, at one point or another, insecure about ourselves, our body, our teeth, our hair.

We all think we have those “few extra pounds” that we need to lose to be happy.

Isn’t that ridiculous?

We need to learn to love our curves. We need to learn to be okay in our bodies, but yet not be defined by them. Your body has nothing to do with your personality. Nada. Zip.

Currently I have an extra five pounds that seemed to have tacked themselves onto my hips, just days after someone snarked, “now you can’t gain any weight because you have to fit into your dress!”.

My bridal pictures are tomorrow.

But I’m sticking to what I said. I’m not letting those pounds and the fear that I won’t fit into my taffeta a-line worry me. I will go, put on my dress, look at myself in the mirror and tell myself I am beautiful, regardless of if the back zips up all the way or not.

I PLANNED ON WRITING A MOTHERS DAY POST SOMETIME LAST WEEKEND to honor my mother and all the new mothers I’m surrounded by this year. Instead, I spent Friday night at the hospital with Ash and Saige, and Saturday afternoon helping Kevin’s brother Bryan move.

I’d show you more of their new house but I don’t want to intrude. Let’s just say it was full of vaulted ceilings, jetted tubs, walk in closets, granite counter tops and dark cupboards.

I think I may have drooled on the carpet.

Not really, because that would be gross. (Hey Katie, if you want photos of your interior I have some. Email me).

I alternated between taking photos, moving boxes, and trying to snap a photo of James.

He was wearing clothes earlier – really cute mini sweat pants. It was the bomb. But then he peed on everything and everyone so he had to have a change of outfit.

I still think he’s cute like this though. Look at the tiny hands!!

While Katie went to change him I moved to photographing Madyson instead.

It was really hard to not put down the camera and eat those cheeks. Isn’t she a cutie?

Poor Maddie. She was just sleeping, minding her own business when uncle Kevin walked over.

Wanna know how NOT to wake a baby?

1) Find a sleeping baby.

2) Keep whispering their name to wake them up Wait patiently until you see them moving around and waking up.

3) Moving quickly, grab the babies stomach and say, “HI MADDIE!” loudly. Your face should be about 6-12” away.

4) Have Mean Aunt Aub there to photo journal it.

Hey, at least I used my zoom on the poor kid so she didn’t have something else in her face. Unlike Saige. Poor Saige. First thing the girl ever saw was the camera and the freak behind it.

So Saturday was officially spent and I still hadn’t written that Mother’s Day post. Sunday morning looked promising when I ran to the store to get a few gifts for mom and Grandma. I had the post all planned in my head, but I decided to write it later after I got a text from Ash saying that Aspen wanted, “Kevin and Aubrey”. We are always a package deal as far as Aspen is concerned, and if Kevin isn’t with me the first thing she asks is, “Where is Kebin?” We hung out there for a bit and then came home. I hopped online and opened the photos I was going to use. That’s when my phone rang. It was 6:00.

“Can you come up here? And HURRY!” Grams was on the other end, talking fast and breathing funny. I hung up the phone and dashed upstairs to find her leaning over, holding a tissue to her nose.

“I gob a bloody nose and I cab’t get it to sbop” She mumbled through a Kleenex. I grabbed some new paper towels from the kitchen and handed them to her, sitting beside her to wait for the faucet of blood to stop.

Five minutes pass.

Then ten.

Fifteen, and Kevin comes upstairs to investigate.

Twenty and I’m calling mom to see if she knows any solutions, because pinching the bridge of her nose wasn’t getting us anywhere. It wasn’t the bleeding that had me worried, it was the lack of oxygen. Grams has to be hooked up to an oxygen machine all day, and I could hear from her breathing that she wasn’t getting as much as she needed.

Five minutes past that and Mom heads over. We pack Grams into Mom’s car and she takes off like a bat out of hell to the emergency room. They hook Grams up to some monitors and left my mom with instructions to keep pinching the bridge of her nose. When they came back the doctor told her to tilt her head back so they can take a look. The flow was too bad to get a good look, and she was spitting clots and chocking on blood so they put a rhino rocket – or a nasal tampon up her nose (no, I do not make these things up. And I quote, “Nasal tampons are commonly used to stop bleeding, yet their insertion is painful.”).

It wasn’t the most ideal thing. She had to leave it in for a day for the pressure of the swelling tampon to allow clotting of the wound. I felt bad for her but there were funny moments, like her cursing the doctor for “going after her brain” and how she swears the “damn thing was touching my eye”. Then there was the call from my Aunt, “So I heard you’re wearing Kotex again?”.

I don’t think Grams will forgive me for texting people about her tampon.

The most amazing part was watching my mom. My mom, who hates seeing people sick and in pain, sat there and held my grandma’s bleeding nose. She held the bucket up when Grams needed to spit, and she gently washed the blood off her hands and from in-between her fingernails.

Don’t get me wrong. Watching someone become a mother is amazing, and I’m so proud and happy for new moms Ashley, Lindsay, Katie and everyone else that gets to experience motherhood this year. I’m so happy for my friends who have new babies (Evonne and Kamie), and my sisters and sister-in-laws that have older kids to snuggle and read to.

But watching your own mother take care of her mom? There’s something special in that. It’s a true testament that you did right.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there. I hope it was filled with flowers – not fluid.

TODAY I DECIDED THAT ENOUGH WAS ENOUGH. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I was tired of getting up an hour after my alarm goes off. Tired of rushing late out the door. Tired of clothes that don’t fit right (so that’s how that feels), tired of fast food and feeling grumpy, and tired of songs that I’ve listened to one too many times.

I didn’t know what I could do about it. It seemed like my focus was constantly pulling me in two directions. I was always thinking of what I needed to be doing, yet when I was doing what needed to be done, I was dreaming of what I wanted to be doing, and vice-versa.

It got to be pretty darn confusing, and pretty darn frustrating.

But instead of pulling my hair out, I dyed it.

Because like that isn’t a huge decision that comes complete with a side of panic attacks and it’s own subscription to This is What Your Hair Should Look Like But You Know It Won’t magazine. But like the professional I am, I took my phone with me and I documented the event regardless of any hesitation. Only for you Internet, only for you. I was a bit worried when the stylist said stuff about putting more “violet” in it this time, since I hadn’t been there in over 11 months and I was just sure she couldn’t remember me, but somehow, miraculously, she really did.

I’d give five bucks and my first born child to have her memory.

Random tangent: I feel bad for whoever my first kid is because I’ve traded them for a lot of monetary things. I always say I’ll give five bucks and my first-born child for that grilled cheese or I’m dying for a Sonic slushie. I’d pretty much give five bucks and my first-born child for one or I bet you five bucks and my first-born that Justin Bieber is really young black kid (I was wrong on this one, but dang, I was spot-on about him not being over puberty. I CALLED THAT ONE). Just giving my first-born, my baby, the fruit of my loins would be enough, as if I’d even need to throw in the five bucks, but hey! Bonus!

Sorry future child.

Momma loves ya.

But I love this meal more.

So Jenny, my hairstylist is sitting there chatting to me as she dyes my hair, and somehow she talks me into bangs again (that she didn’t charge me for) and I realize why I came back here. That woman is good for anyone’s self confidence. It felt good to socialize, talk about something different than what I was used to, forget about work and home stress and just let myself be pampered.

And I won’t lie. It felt good having someone else wash my hair for a change. I don’t know what they use but it smells amazing. I’m planning on not washing my hair for four days.

Five if I’m lucky and don’t let anyone come too close.

Don’t judge me. You know you wear your jeans just as long as that before washing them.

Don’t you?

As if all that wasn’t great enough, I walked out to my car afterwords and found Kevin had left these flowers on the hood of my car, and broke into my house to start making my favorite dinner.

Here is what I looked like before the chemicals that’ll probably fry my brain transformation:

I look happy, but I’m hurting on the inside. Real bad.

My lips hurt real bad.

Sorry. Random Napoleon Dynamite quote that nobody remembers or understands.

I now give you the after:

And no.

It’s not black.

It may look black. Just like I look like I’m paying attention to you when all I’m really thinking about is one of those slushies… but hey! At least I don’t look almost naked like I did in this photo! Woo!!

Moral of the story is this,

Be selfish. DO SOMETHING FOR YOURSELF because as my friend Jessica puts it, “you can’t make anyone happy if you’re not happy with yourself”.

LASIK HAS ALWAYS BEEN SOMETHING I’VE WANTED. I’ve worn contacts since I was in the beginning of eighth grade. So eight years ago.

EIGHT YEARS AGO.

Moment of silence please for my first, “I’m getting old” moment.

Thank you.

I finally looked into getting lasik last December. After staring into all these funky, high-tech machines they decided I was a good candidate and we set a date to get it done – January 28th. I was excited, and nervous as all get up. I mean, dude, it’s a laser. A beam of light, cutting into my eye, magically fixing it with all it’s beam of lightness and I have get to stay awake for the entire thing.

Let’s do this.

First I had to get my eyes dilated. They have to do that to enlarge my pupils to make sure there is still a brain in there making conscious decisions – or something. But getting your eyes dilated also means you wind up with super crazy Night Vision/Cat Eyes so you have to wear special shades all day.

The kind that come with a complimentary unibrow.

And kind of cool dark eyes.

You don’t think those photos are impressive until I tell you that I couldn’t actually see the camera. And my eyes stayed dilated for two days.

Night Vision/Cat Eyes have their trade-offs I suppose.

Surgery day came and Kevin went with me to document the event and be my chauffeur home. I was pretty excited.

They gave me a personalized name tag! (When are they ever non-personalized?)

And someone came in and scrubbed my eyes for me and gave me this fantastic bonnet.

They gave me a sedative and waited patiently for me to pipe down and shut up. Then the doctor came in, talked about how I’d see bubbles during the surgery – this appealed to me greatly – talked a little bit more about random things – something about a suction? Yea that’ll be important later – and then told me we’re good to go back to surgery.

Now. Here is where I type in bold.

IF YOU DO NOT LIKE CREEPY PHOTOS OF EYEBALLS THAT WILL MAKE YOUR EYES HURT, STOP HERE, CHECK BACK IN A FEW DAYS FOR A POST ABOUT DOGS OR SOMETHING. THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS DEPICT MY EYE SURGERY AND SUBSEQUENT BLOODSHOT EYES AND ARE NOT FOR WUSSES. BASICALLY IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN AN EPISODE OF DR. G, GREY’S ANATOMY, OR ANY OTHER CREEPTASTIC HEALTH RELATED SHOW, LEAVE.

And make sure you come back on happier post days.

You’ve been warned.

Kevin was led to a two seat alcove where he could watch the entire surgery from a screen, while I was led back to a freezing room full of nice lady assistants. They gave me a blanket and a squishy star shaped stress toy. By now I could tell the sedative was working. I was still worried, but mostly just curious. They laid me down and told me they had to put the suction on my eye. Apparently the suction holds my eye in place so the laser can make a perfect flap. Then they flip this flap up, and shoot a different laser in my eye which corrects my vision. Then they push the flap back down and viola! Insta-eyes.

I was excited/nervous about the laser, but they kept saying stuff about this suction-thing.

Suction, shmucksion.

I’m tough as nails. I’ve had my tonsils out.

I was just wondering where the camera was. I wanted to give Kevin a big thumbs up, a look at me! I’m so tough. No big deal, I handle things like a champ type of a grin. I didn’t find out until after that the camera was in the machines they use, so the only thing he could see the entire time was my eye. MY FLINCHING, ITCHING, WATERING, FLESHY, SENSITIVE, PRECIOUS EYE BALL.

Sorry. I get a little teary when I think about my vision.

Back to the real story. They positioned the suction above my eye and lowered it on.

After an insane amount of pressure (but no pain due to numbing eye drops) they got the suction on, and well, suctioned. My vision went dark and that’s when Dr. Lady decided to say, “take the suction off”.

Um.

No.

No. No. No. You don’t do that to me and take it off. You do that and get it over with. She explained that while they had it perfect, they needed to reposition it because the machine didn’t like it.

Well you know what machine? Neither did I.

Then they decided they needed to stretch my eyelids open further, so they put a little metal device up under my eyelids and slowly pulled it open. It only looks painful. That part didn’t hurt.

The suction? Well. It sucked. A ton.

(HUZZAH that’s my second good joke of this post).

The photos below is the laser cutting the flap in my eye. The bubbles is where oxygen is getting under the flap.

Okay. Here’s my second disclaimer.

If you have a weak stomach or if you’re disturbed easily, don’t scroll further. I’m okay viewing it because I am weird…and because I know it’s my eye. If I’d have been shown this photo below prior to surgery, I probably would have yelled eff that or the mormon appropriate freak no and ran away screaming, cradling my boxes of contacts and cherishing them for life.

That’s the metal eye stretcher thingy. My eye is upside down because I’m laying down. The foggy part of my eye is the flap that’s just been created, and it’s 100% normal.

And 100% freaky.

This next photo is a little freakier, because the doctor is putting a sharp object under the flap of my eye to lift it. Looks bad, but it didn’t hurt one bit.

This is the laser locking in on my eye to fix it. My eye appears grainy because that’s how your eye looks underneath I guess.

After staring at a blinking light (the laser) for twenty seconds, they pushed the flap back down, rinsed my eyes out, stood me up, walked me out and handed me to Kevin.

“I don’t know how in the hell you just did that,” was the first thing he said to me. To be quite honest, I don’t know how I did either. All I knew is I couldn’t see worth a darn, it looked like I was looking through a foggy window pane, or a used milk cup. When before I’d dreamed about reading and blogging when I got home, my thoughts changed to sleeping or clawing my eyes out with rusted nails. They hurt.

They hurt real bad.

(Enough of the bad jokes. But my lips are chapped right now and they do hurt real bad. But I’m scared of the dark. I’ll just stick to blogging).

Now you’d hope this has a happy ending, that I’d wake up and exclaim, “I can see!!!” for the whole world to hear. And you’re right, I can see. I can see so darn good. I can see the alarm clock in the morning like I’ve always wanted, I can see cars at night. I can see Kevin when he’s sitting across the room from me, I can see everything.

Do you wanna see something?

Really?

Okay. I’ll show you.

That’s my left eye post-op.

And this is my right.

Is that a wrinkle I spy?! Just kidding. I had to tug on my cheek pretty darned hard to get that shot, since my eyes were sensitive and I still couldn’t see very well. The blood is normal, apparently the suction sucks so bad (man, does it ever) that it breaks the blood vessels on your eye.

It rocks.

It’s just too bad I didn’t do this around Halloween, those red eyes would have made the perfect zombie get-up.

I WAS FOOLISH TO THINK THE WORST PART WAS OVER. Testing was the easy part, the “sit back and do what you’re told for the next three hours” routine that I was well accustomed to, if not a little rusty.

Finding my way around campus was the true challenge. Here I am, in capris and flip flops turning a map this way and that, hoping against hope that if I tilt it a certain way I’ll recognize something, anything and know my way around.

I was lost. I had to get from this building:

To this building:

I found out later that you can walk from one to the other without going outside. Being me, I wound up here:

And here:

And somehow I found myself clear up here:

I even wound up next to another building! But it wasn’t the right one.

Thankfully the college took mercy on me and I found where I was going. Phase two is now complete, I am registered for college and start classes on August 26th.

Also known as the day the word “sleep” disappears from my vocabulary.

As a reward, Ashley and Niel took me out to dinner to celebrate. We all spent about twenty minutes marveling at the turn table in the middle of our plush little corner. What a marvelous invention! How ingenuitive! How creative!

Then we wondered over to see the crabs. Jake and Abby took a moment to ponder why the crabs don’t pinch each other. I had no answer for this. All Aspen was concerned with was how to look into the tank from a safe distance.

We feasted for a while before I demanded one last photo with the kids. Jake obliged somewhat willingly.

To end the night on a great note, Aspen kept asking for “my mato! My Mato!”. I don’t speak munchkin, so I asked Ashley to translate.

“she wants that tomato out of the car,” she mumbled as she passed the fist-sized, plump red vegetable into Aspens open hands. “Open it,” Aspen puzzled as she turned it over and around. “Just bite into it.”

Internet, this child had just finished eating a full serving of Chinese food, and she still devoured that WHOLE tomato. May I sink my teeth into education as willingly as that infant bit into that juicy fruit.

My question for you: Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Either way it is foreign to me, and grows in my garden. Don’t worry, I won’t throw them at you.