The Stigma of Addiction and other Mental Issues

The topic of stigma and mental problems has been coming up a lot for me lately, especially (of course) in relation to addiction.  So it was rather fortuitous to discover another great blog this morning and this post...

Sometimes I find it easy to forget about, because I have a lot of supportive, loving people in my life who just don't go in for stigma.  Couple that with having even less of a social life than usual this summer and I found myself in that comfortable place - the place where I just don't have to think about the destructive force of words - words that perpetuate shame.  It is that shame that really gets me fucking angry as hell.  I get enraged at the notion that a whole lot of people - some of whom I know - are so terribly ashamed of their own fucking brain.

To me, it is so obvious now...Feeling ashamed of the way one's brain works, is a lot like feeling ashamed of having brown eyes instead of blue, or red hair instead of blond.  It's obvious enough to me, that I forget sometimes that it is not so obvious to others.  It's obvious enough to me now, that I even forget sometimes that it wasn't always so obvious to me.  And even as obvious as it is, it is still easy enough to feel shame about who I have been and how I have behaved - because it is impossible to sort out where my neurochemical issues end and just plain old bad decision making begins.  It is especially hard, because everything I have done, all the bad decisions that I have made - all of it was at least influenced by the way my brain works.

How then, does one separate what one should be ashamed of, from what they should just accept as part of having neurological issues?

My short answer; one can't.  Trying to do so requires sorting through every factor that influences our decision making.  As a thought exercise, I would ask you to think for a moment, about the last book you read (or article).  I want you to consider everything that went into the decision to read it - don't just scratch the surface - dig deep into your motivations.  Follow the chain that brought you to the point where you wanted to read that book or article.  Where did your interest in the subject of that piece come from?  Where did the interest in whatever influenced you to get into that subject arise?  What else did you read, that indicated you might like to read this piece?  What influenced you to read that?  In short, try to untangle the skein of influences and motivations that brought you to the simple decision to read that book.  If it was a friend who recommended it, why do you trust their judgment?

If you just did as I asked, you probably got stuck rather close to the decision you made to read whatever it is you recently read.  Unless you took quite a bit of time and really went at it, you barely touched on a small fraction of everything that went into that very basic decision.  And even if you did take the time and focused, you quite likely still only scratched the surface - just a little deeper than some people would scratch.  Now think about this - we're just talking about the decision to read something.  How then does one sort out the decision to wander the country, sleeping outside as often as not?  How does one sort out the decisions to use virtually every mind altering substance set in front of them?  How does one sort out the decisions to have sex with virtually every woman and some men, who were willing and willing to use protection?  How does one sort the decisions that leaves one virtually homeless for more than five fucking years?  How does one sort the decisions to sell drugs, so one has drugs and sometimes a little money (and sometimes a lot of money)?  How does one sort the decisions to buy dope, instead of buying shoes that aren't literally falling apart at the seems?  How does one sort all the decisions that led to losing the roof over not only one's own head, but that of their family?

How does one sort the decisions that paint a picture of a reprehensible excuse for a human being?  How can such a person not be brutally ashamed of their own fucking brain - regardless of what actually influenced those decisions and how?

I wish there were a simple answer.  I really, really do, because it is hard being that person - hard not to be ashamed to the point of incapacitation.  It's hard not to extrapolate thirty some years of bad decisions into an inherent failure.  It is hard not to take those stigmas that are attatched to being mentally ill and accepting them as absolute truth.  But there is an excellent place to start - a place that not only helps the person who has made these decisions, but helps others as well.

Fighting these vile fucking stigmas is a very important place to start.  Being loud and proud of who and what one is, because as reprehensible as many of my decisions have been, I am also a good person on a great many levels.  And what makes me a good person, what fosters the positive - these factors are just as influenced by the way my brain works.  Just as the bad - the things that can foster shame - are influenced by the way my brain works, so are the positives.  The same chemistry that has seen me getting high on all manner of stupidity, has also seen me fostering my children's native intellect - communicating, reading and providing them with the absolute security of my absolute love for them.  The same chemistry that has seen me sleeping under bridges and in all manner of flops, has also seen me work feats of extreme beauty and grace in multi-million dollar homes.  The same chemistry that sees me lashing out in extremely harsh words, has also seen me develop a love for a wonderful women that transcends anything I ever thought anyone could feel in that context, let alone me.

Stigma is a trap.  Stigma is a prison of invisible bars that hold some people far more firmly than steel and concrete could ever manage.  Stigma does nothing but destroy and break further, people who are already broken and in need of healing.  Not broken because our brains are atypical, but because we haven't the tools to integrate our neurochemistry with the society in which we exist.  We are broken, because our society doesn't have a place for us - though that is slowly changing.  But regardless of what makes us broken, stigmas just exacerbate the problem - the brokeness - the shame.

As I lie here, without her next to me

I am here in the hotel by the airport, where only 90 minutes ago my lover and co-conspirator was lying next to me - by myself. I have tears in my eyes, because while having Juniper in my life means I am not alone, it will be a couple months at best before I can hold her again, kiss her again and sit quietly with her, just enjoying her presence. I held her one last time this trip, just fifteen minutes ago and already I miss her terribly - even though we have been together virtually non-stop since Monday.

It is easy to take for granted, the things that lovers do. It is easy to get up and walk away for a while, knowing when you get back your lover will be waiting. It is easy to get angry and wish they would walk away just a little more often. It is easy to take for granted, simply sitting together enjoying the quiet, when the quiet times are often. It is easy to take for granted, lying together, your lover in your arms - when every night they are there, body pressed against yours.

I am sorry, those friends we didn't see while she was here. But I was jealous and guarded about my time with her - the more of it that passed, the more I wanted her all to myself. It's not that I don't love you, didn't want to introduce you. It's just that I needed that time - the time together in person - to plot, to plan our takeover of the world. Not all of it, not by a long shot - just our tiny little corner of it.

I miss my co-conspirator, I miss her so desperately it hurts...I can't imagine how I'll feel a little later, when it has really sunk in that I won't feel her lips pressed against mine for months now. And on and off, this will be our life for a while. Which I can accept, because in the end, it is our life and life is a long time. I can accept this, because my lover and our conspiracy is so very worth this ache that never seems to go away - except when her arms wrap around me. I can accept this, because even though she is usually more than twenty-five hundred miles away, she is the reason I am not alone.

I love you as desperately as ever darling, quite as much because of, as in spite of your flaws. Thank you so much for loving me the same in turn.

This Atheist In Love

I love Juniper in ways that are impossible to describe and really attempting to would only demean that love.  Excepting my love for my children, I have never experienced love as perfect as my love for her, yet perfect as that love is, it is also messy.  It's messy, because love is messy - people are messy - life is messy.  And people are all too often broken, broken like me or broken like you.  But we are what we are and we generally do our best to make the best of it - eventually, if we ever start to grow up for realsies.

Love is beautiful, perfect love is a thing of remarkable beauty.  Yet in that perfect, remarkable beauty, it is messy and imperfect.  Like snowflakes and other crystalline structures, it is those very imperfections that make it so wonderful.  Indeed, it is those very imperfections that make it worth the pain and turmoil it produces - inherent side effects of even the most perfect love.  Because in the most perfect love we want so badly to care for our partner properly, that we worry ourselves over it and sometimes care for them in a way that causes some detriment to ourselves.  Allowed to fester like this, love could become rather unhealthy.  But in the most perfect love, both partners feel the same way and it generally works itself out in the end - or more accurately, the succulent beginning. 

Unlike academia, love isn't a motherfucking care-bear tea party.  Neither is it a Walt Disney production, with fairytale castles and beasts who turn into hot princes.  Love certainly isn't a beautiful house with the white picket fence and two and a half kids.  Love is two flawed humans connecting their flawed lives and their flawed perceptions of reality.  And sometimes - just sometimes, those flawed perceptions of reality do not include forays into magical thinking that would artificially inflate the expectations of the participants of that love.  This is where I am at now and I can't tell you how relieving it is to have only my baseline brokenness - our natural flaws to deal with.  Not feeling this need for everything to be fucking magical is wonderful.  Not believing that there is some power beyond ourselves to bless or otherwise interfere with our relationship, thus relieving us of any small part of our responsibility for our relationship, instills such a sense of freedom.

This freedom is important - especially for people like me and Juniper.  Our lives are not ideal right now and while our time together hasn't been perfect, it has been spectacularly wonderful.  I don't need to throw out some saccharine line of shit and claim that I am now even more in love with her than I was before - I'm not, because what I felt before was wholly incredible and it is enough to say that now that we have been together in person for a few days, I am still so very deeply in love with her and she with me.  But even though this has been a spectacularly wonderful time, there are those who could have the same experience that we have had and decide that there were several signs that things are just not meant to be - I know this, because I was once one of those people and so was this wonderful women I love so very much.  Because when one is so into this magical thinking and looking for signs and wonders, one tends to look at things that go wrong as signs that the relationship is wrong.

They aren't and it's not.  Remember, life is messy and so are people.  And while some people, including earlier versions of both my love and I, could look at our experience and focus on the bad signs, or focus on the fact that (this may shock you) we have even had some minor conflicts and decide that it is just wrong, I look at it and think; "Holy fucking shit!!!  We have fallen in love, never having met.  We are two neurotic fucking people with neurotic fucking quirks and mannerisms and we are both moody as all fucking get out.  And yet we are still in love and have only had very minor conflicts, in spite of suddenly finding ourselves not living together, not getting to know each other in moderation, like most people manage, but staying together in a small hotel room and spending virtually every waking moment together - all that and we are still deeply in love!!!!"

You want fucking magic?  The magic is two flawed and broken people developing a relationship from more than twenty-five hundred miles apart, over the course of months finally meeting and discovering that those months of falling in love weren't a wash.  The magic is - I love Juniper just as much today, as I did seven days ago and her feeling the same about me.  The magic is there is no magic, only love.

Of Fish Hatcheries, French Fries and Butterflies

People and their fucking sense of entitlement is such an ass-sucking pain sometimes. People and their ways of fucking up their children for the rest of society to deal with is becoming an increasing pet peeve of mine.

The other day the wonderful Juniper and I were at the Kalamazoo Nature Center, where we witnessed a horrible example of parenting with her female spawn. She was in the process of giving the rest of us two young girls who don't believe that the rules apply to them. They were capturing butterflies, you see, as well as picking bits of flowers so they could smell them closer.

Contrast this with my upbringing at the KNC, where I was taught that if it is alive, we leave it alone and if it is dead, we put it back where we found it when we are done checking it out. This was not a polite suggestion, this was the rule if we wanted to be welcome back to the KNC. And given the amount of time I spent there as a child, not being welcome would have been traumatic to say the least.

Now we just returned from a jaunt to the Wolf Lake Fish Hatchery. The interpretive center is closed on Fridays at the moment, due to funding issues - which apparently means they can't leave the fucking fish food vending machine out by the show pond. This did not deter one pathetic excuse for a family from deciding to feed the fish, they just ran back to the car (or waddled, such as it was) to grab some leftover McDonald's fries. Never mind the big, bold sign on the end of the dock that admonishes people not to throw that kind of stuff to the fish - these people are above the fucking rules and we can thank them for teaching their children to be as well.

And let's not forget our run to South Haven yesterday, to visit Lake Michigan. It was no longer particularly stormy when we got there (a bummer actually, as storms off the lake are fucking awesome), but the waves were pretty intense. Suicide to be on the water like that - but that didn't stop a couple folks from letting their small children out into the waves. Thankfully we weren't around to see any of them drown - possibly none of them did. But if they didn't, it was not thanks to their braindead motherfucking parents.

At least I didn't have my kids with me for this shit. Because nothing says fun like explaining to your own children that we aren't going to do this or that, only to see other children doing these things that are impolite or just plain fucking wrong. My boys are used to watching other children do things they aren't allowed to and eldest actually remembers observing a few situations over the years, wherein a child or more provided him with a great example of why papa said no. But even those memories don't always compensate for the lack of a chance to do what they really wanted to do. But they are my boys and I will be damned if I am going to raise them that badly. I am far from the worlds best papa - I am a pretty good fuck up at times, but I will be totally fucked if my boys are going to grow up as completely fucked as all that.

I'm Such A Happy Boy!!!

I get to get up extraspecially early tomorrow, to make sure I get my morning time, before I get on the road for Flint. I am heading for the airport, to pick up the most beautiful and brilliant Juniper. I am then spending almost a whole week with her, wherein we will spend a lot of time outdoors and doing fun and wonderful things, like simply sitting quietly together and enjoying each other's presence. Things that many people take for granted, but which we never get to do.

It is a beautiful day today and no matter how much it rains tomorrow, it will be a beautiful day tomorrow as well...

(I might find some time to blog this next week....)

FOR THE RECORD, I AM HEADING OUT IN ABOUT AN HOUR TO GET HER FROM THE MOTHERFUCKING AIRPORT!!!!111!!@!!!11!@#

A Fucking Brilliant Time to be Human

It is easy to get caught up in the bad, sometimes outright evil perpetrated by us humans. In just the last 150 years, we have wreaked more destruction than this planet has seen since the dinosaurs went extinct. We still see human rights violations across the globe, sometimes perpetrated by our own "enlightened" governments. In so many ways, us humans kind of suck ass. And in such an ass sucking existence, it is easy to forget the truly wondrous, awe inspiring achievements we have made. It is also easy to forget that many of us are struggling against this ass sucking, to make our home more tolerable, more livable and above all, more humane.

But we are also the people who have managed to cure diseases that were almost certain death and/or maiming, just a scant eighty years ago. We are a people who have managed to find ways to extend the mortality of the general public, even as we have thrown more abuses to our bodies than our ancestors ever dreamed possible. And whatever problems there are for those of us without health insurance, even the poor are able to get unprecedented access to lifesaving medical care - imperfect as that access is.

And we are a people who decided to point a telescope at absolutely nothing, to see what might be there - how fucking brilliant is that? And what we discovered - images that have been traveling towards our position in space, since billions of years before this planet was born of fire, gravity and debris - the very star-stuff that makes up not only this planet, but everything we are and everything we see - every material we work with. Images that help us to comprehend, just a little, of what our universe consists of - billions, upon billions, upon billions of other galaxies. Not solar systems and stars - but fucking galaxies. Numbers that are so staggering, as to be incomprehensible, yet are comprehended just a little, when we look at nothing and notice thousands of galaxies, in just that tiny speck of nothing out there.

We are also the people who managed to send people outside our precious blanket of atmosphere, to walk on an extra-planetary body. That it is our own moon, our own planet's satellite does not detract from the awesome wonder of having sent a human to step foot on another chunk of rock, hurling through space. And we have people up there right now, outside our atmosphere - living and working on a space station of human construction.

And we managed to send vehicles to another planet altogether, to see what is there, learn about one of our close neighbors and see what it looks like up close and personal. We have seen image after image, sent by these probes and seen a landscape that was invisible before, that is not only visible, but has been altered ever so slightly, by our proxy presence there.

We are, to our cores, explorers. We absolutely have to go out and check things out. We simply can't stand not knowing what is around that next bend, what is under that rock - what is at the bottom of that miles deep ocean trench, what is such staggeringly huge distances away from us. We are insatiably curious creatures, with an almost inherent desire to know what there is to know and when we have managed to learn that, we want to know some more. And today, this day, this fraction of a blink of an eye, we are seeing more, learning more - knowing more than ever before and that knowing is coming at us at an accelerated rate.

To think, just moments ago, we were tiny, four legged creatures, trying desperately to evade the smaller scavenger dinosaurs - those old guard rulers of this planet earth, who would shortly be dead and gone. A moment later we were struggling against all odds to survive, to adapt to a constantly changing earth - spending less time in trees and enough time walking in the ground, that our hind hands turned into feet and lost their opposable digits. Moments after that, our brains growing with our increasingly protein rich diet, we started to communicate verbally. In a mere blink of an eye, we went from these tiny, innocuous creatures, to what we are today - so insignificant and small - our entire existence an infinitesimal footnote in the history of our infinitesimal planet, in the backwater of our tiny little galaxy.

And yet we are here!!! Much like the Whos, on that speck of dust, in Seuss's Horton Hears a Who. We shout out to our galaxy and to our universe that we are here, with an unspoken, "we will soon be there. We are no longer bound to this single piece of rock, this starship Earth. We are going places and somehow, someday, if we survive, we will go further and further - because we are fucking human and that is what humans do. We want to know, we need to know, we absolutely must know - more.

If we manage to survive, imagine what we will be in another blink of the eye - where we will go, what we will become. Dream, in this universe of virtually infinite wonder and beauty, of what tomorrow may look like - that you may truly want for a tomorrow, another blink of the eye. Dream of what our ancestors may be - as alien as we would be to our own early hominid ancestors? Dream of tomorrows without limit, so that when you focus on today, you have a purpose.

Dream, because you are human and humans must explore - even the places and times that can only be explored in our dreams

The Creationist Tactics of the Puritanical "Feminist" Movement

Renegade Evolution has a post up about one Donna Hughes, a puritanical "feminist" who's tirades would be right at home with those of Don Wildmon (AFA), James Dobson (Focus on the Family) and Beverly LeHaye (Concerned Women for America). Apparently Donna is taking even more cues from the religious right, using the same quotemining and mischaracterizations creationists are so very fond of. I am not going to spend the time debunking, when Renegade has done such a grand job. I am just going to reiterate a point that I have made here before and several times in meatspace - including to the faces of more than one puritanical "feminist."

When you are pushing repressive, anti-sex bullshit, you are sucking far more patriarchal cock, than those who do it for cash. So who exactly is the whore here?

Please check out her post and share it with your friends... (ht, Lou FCD)

And while we're on the topic of sexual repression, let me post a little tidbit that was sent to me by someone who shall remain nameless (unless s/he chooses to reveal)... Apparently, this does not totally get viewed on my page - clicking on it will reveal the climax...


Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Awe and Wonder and Human Curiosity

This actually brought tears to my eyes. Especially the idea that the images we see in this video, started their journey to the Hubble telescope some nine billion years before some of the debris of our solar system coalesced into a fiery ball that would eventually become this planet of ours. Who needs imaginary magic, when we have this singularly remarkable universe around us and very likely a multiverse around that? Why would we play at simplistic dichotomies, for which there is simply no evidence, when we are a part - no matter how infinitesimal - of something so amazing?

Forget pretending - here we have the real deal.

Give That Moderate Theist A MotherFucking Cookie

Addendum - My lovely partner (and Thomas himself) has pointed out that Thomas isn't particularly liberal. So we can add that he is also one of those delusional fucks who pretends that anyone who can't afford healthcare doesn't deserve it. What would you feel, if you suddenly lost the coverage you have. Seriously, if you did, would you just stoically accept that it is all your fault and that you simply don't deserve it? Because shit happens motherfucker, shit that you just can't plan for. What you have today could be gone tomorrow - through no fault of your own. So tell me, if you lost it all and needed help, can we assume you would be good enough to stand by your convictions? How about if you get desperately ill and your insurance company finds a way to squirrel out of covering it? Hmm?

Exhaustion has prevented me from getting nearly as much done with all this as I was planning, but there you have it. Eleven hours in the car yesterday, with a seven year old and a twenty month old, then another hour and a half after we dropped them off was rough. Getting on the road this morning by eight was also rough. But here I am...

Some moderate theists have been on the defensive, as of late. Philip H. was rather resentful of some characterizations of moderate theists. And a certain Thomas Joseph rather resents being lumped with extremist, fundamentalist loons. He whines that he's different - better. He's a liberal and all around decent fellow. And, and - he accepts evolution... Well YAY!!! Thomas, how about a motherfucking cookie? Because you deserve a cookie for being such an upstanding fellow who is apparently only mildly delusional. And dammit man, I am so sorry if my criticism of religion was in any way offensive - after all, it's your personal thing and your god forbid, I should criticize you're personal beliefs as though they have any impact on the society and the world in which I have to live and raise my family.

Except that they do.

But no, sputter the Thomases and Philips - we're decent people and don't believe monstrous things. We support gay rights and a woman's right to choose - we're decent liberal folks, who just want to be left alone to our faith. Don't alienate US!!! RESPECT!!! RESPECT!!!

I will most certainly not, fuck you very much. More to the point, I will happily respect you. I will respect your political stances when I agree and argue them when I don't. I will not, however, have the least respect for your religion. The fact that it is moderate, even liberal, just makes it more insidious and less worthy of my respect. To be clear, little more than a year or so ago, I was one of you. I spent the vast majority of my life wallowing in destructive ignorance and bullshit, not a whole lot different than your own. Moreover, I was a fundamentalist way back yonder, when I was quite young. I worshiped, with all of my heart and mind, the same genocidal maniac that you worship.

Eventually I got better and started recovering.

It is not the orthodox, fundamentalists and other assorted extreme theists who perpetuate the very worse that faith has to offer our society. It is the moderates who foster this mentality that says we should allow parents not to vaccinate their children, because some imaginary being told them not to. It is moderates who foster the notion that kids should be allowed to be "educated" at home, with little or no real monitoring from the state and allowed to wallow in ignorance, because that is what their religion demands. It is moderates who foster the attitudes that we should allow them to opt their children out of vital aspects of education - some of them lifesaving, because their gods don't want them to learn about science or avoiding STIs. It is the moderates who foster the belief, that I am a very nasty man indeed, for daring to criticize ignorant fucking bullshit, or for simply not believing in magical beings.

It is fucking moderates who foster the social phenom that makes the fringe fucking loons and their egregious behaviors acceptable.

And to make this whole conversation more delicious, Thomas is a bloody Catholic. So Mr. Nice Liberal Fellow, supports an organization that bears the brunt of the blame for the scope of the AIDS pandemic that is decimating massive swaths of sub-Saharan Africa. He supports an organization that hates most of my friends, simply because they prefer to have relations with members of their same sex. He supports an organization that believes women should not have the right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. He supports an organization that believes that birth control is fucking evil. He supports an organization that has repeatedly shown blatant disregard for the welfare of children, by not only allowing pedophiles in the clergy to have continued access to children, but also by actively fighting against those sick fucks being prosecuted or their victims receiving reparations.

While I am certain there are areas in which Thomas and I agree, in which he is even worthy of my respect, he has given up all credibility when it comes to discussing criticism of theism. In that, he gets nothing but my utter disdain.

Bloody Hells, Am I Glad That's Over...

The fucking semester from hell, which officially ended last Thursday, is now finally over. I took my psych final this morning (it only posted this morning) and sold the book they would buy...

Unfortunately, I take the boys back to TN tomorrow. There is other sad news too, but I am loathe to talk about it quite yet - though it will all be fine in the end.

On the upside, I am going to have a little time to write more and get some more of my anthro papers posted, as well as a couple other papers that will actually get expanded a bit.

The first is a summary and opinion on a Community Mental Health board meeting I attended - something I will be doing for the foreseeable future. I will be highlighting in detail, just how fucked this great state of Michigan really is. County CMH's will be seeing anywhere from dramatic, to catastrophic funding cuts, at a time when we are going to be releasing a rather large number of felons who would continue to be in state correctional facilities, were it not for the fact that those facilities are being closed. So they will be ending up the responsibility of the counties and many of them will end up getting priority over people in the community who have lost jobs and who have no way to cover mental health care costs. Stay tuned - because I am more than a little fucking pissed about how this is all working out.

The second is a discussion of the film Out of the Shadows. This was possibly the greatest movie that I will NEVER watch again (not the greatest mind, just the greatest I really can't handle seeing again). It is a very hard film to watch, especially when you can sit there and relate to a great deal of what Millie is going through and what her daughters have and are going through. When you realize the difference is degrees and expressions...

I am becoming one morose motherfucker, but I am also pretty fucking angry, as there have been several well reasoned discussions about atheism and some less than reasoned responses from "moderate" theists and some very unmoderate, lying sacks of shit for Jesus...Stephanie has the roundup and I will be getting on that motherfucker on my way back from TN. That would be a ten hour drive - I can express a lot of irritation in ten motherfucking hours...Though I will probably be filling some of that with light entertainment.

And I will probably fill some of that with a write up about how Greg is yet again, wrong.

My Boys Fucking Rock!!!!

My twenty month old and my seven year old spent 10 hours drive time and about a total of 1 hour, 25 minutes of break time, on our trip from TN yesterday. I will grant that bringing a power inverter and my laptop loaded with Chicken Run, Walking With Dinosaurs and BBC's Oceans helped things run smoothly (there was a little more variety, but those were the things that we actually watched). But there was very little friction, very little complaining. About the worse that could be said was that the eldest kept asking how many more hours we had left - for a while, every ten to twenty minutes.

Youngest did start to melt in the last fifty minutes, but that was because he only managed a twenty minute nap and his really mean, even Cruel papa, refused to let him fall asleep because we were coming upon bedtime and papa wanted him to sleep in his bin, not for fifty minutes in the car.

We had quite a reasonable trip and a great book time before bed and they went to sleep wonderfully. To make it even better, we had a wonderful snuggle this morning. Youngest demanded to come out of his bin and latched himself to me, pulling a hand away only long enough to point at my bed. There we all snuggled and youngest drooled all over my chest...Mmmm, tiny's drool...

And now we are having a dancing break with Tool, from which I needed a break...I just can't thrash like my boys - my roofers knees can't keep up...