Tomorrow is the last day of school and the first day of the end of my life.

The number of summer camps offered for un potty trained four year olds is, you guessed it... ZILCH. There is no way, and I mean NO WAY I am going to make it through this summer without some ingenuity and a buttload of hand sanitizer. As a coping strategy, I've decided to create my own summer camp series, just for the three of us. Below please find a brief summary of the weeks and their themes:

Week One: Craft Camp: Using Magic Erasers to scrub unidentified food matter out of grout
Week Two: Drama Camp: Let's face it, EVERY week is drama camp
Week Three: Dance Camp: Here's Just Dance 3, see you in four hours
Week Four: Science Camp: Using tweezers to reconstruct what the baby just puked up so we can call Poison Control
Week Five: Sweatpants and Chinese Food Camp: Speaks for itself, really
Week Six: Spanish Camp: 42 episodes of Dora a day for five days straight
Week Seven: Laundry Camp: Learning how to remove human fecal matter from clothing/upholstery/carpets
Week Eight: Soccer Camp: Whenever the World Cup is, we're just going to watch it all day/night
Week Nine: Field Trip Week: First we're going to Target, and then Bridget's diaper will explode in the Home Depot parking lot
Week Ten: School has probably already started, but I won't know for sure until I wait until August 29th to check the school district calendar

Fridays will be a special day with a cookout. We'll have hot dogs without buns because the bun on the end was moldy and I forgot to get more. Also, I don't really know how to grill, so we're having chicken nuggets.

Summer camp/nature/exercise/human contact/enrichment learning is overrated anyway.

Be afraid, be very afraid. In fact, be irrationally freaking terrified.

Remember when you were a kid and you were terrified of every single thing in your bedroom at night? You woke up with jolt, heard nine thousand suspicious noises, and hid under your covers whispering "there's someone in my room, there's someone in my ROOM!!!!" and basically imagining that Chucky was standing over your bed with a bloody ax?

I think I've always had a particularly tough time with this because I'm such a light sleeper. Back during the Cretaceous Period, I had a Blackberry that would blink if you had any kind of new message. That light would routinely wake me up in the middle of the night, and it didn't even make a noise. My husband, on the other hand, needs to be hit in the forehead with a nail-studded two-by-four to wake up. Because of this, I am the jerk always waking both of us up saying "I HEAR SOMETHING. WHAT WAS THAT NOISE??? GO FIND OUT!!!!" This is the sixth place we have lived in the nine years we've been married, and this problem is exponentially worse now that we have an ice maker.  Number of times in a given week that I hear a scalpel-wielding intruder, intent on stealing my kidney for a black market organ smuggling ring, who is also somehow capable of disabling our somewhat intense security system= 267   Number of times it was just the ice maker= 267

I never anticipated that a force could exist that could terrify me even more than an organ-harvesting rabid Chucky doll- but I also never anticipated how absolutely bizarre a three year old can be in the middle of the night, either. Why can't they cry or yell? Why do they have to just walk in and stand there in the pitch darkness? Some nights, I can sense some kind of disturbance in the force and I wake up while she's still walking into the room. Other nights, I just hear breathing. Because I am basically Stevie Wonder without my glasses on, I have to rely on the very ears that have never recovered from 12,764 listenings of Gin and Juice on my Sony Sports Discman in 1994. If the figure stands there long enough, I start to panic. What if it's the head alien of an alien reconnaissance team scouting my bedroom for the easiest possible abduction points? (I don't know, seems pretty likely to me.)  The worse case scenario is that your eyes fly open and her face is an inch from yours, just staring at you while you sleep. I would try to say something funny about that, except there is NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT THAT. EVER.

Thankfully, I have yet to find John Wayne Gacy or a Kraken in my room in the middle of the night. It's always just my wonderfully weird little kid- who eventually reveals herself. "Daddy, I couldn't sweep, it's dawk in my woom and there's noises!" I hear ya, kid- literally.

Bill W. is My Spirit Animal

Well, here it is, come and gone: February 10th. Six years gone by.

The first six minutes were as long as the first six days, the first six days were as long as the first six months, and the first six months were as long as the past six years. I don't know if I will ever be fixed- or if that is even possible. I don't know if I will be able to sit here in six more years and say that that I'm still sober. But I do know that I am sober right now-  and that I have been sober for the past 52,595 hours. I'll be damned if I'm not going to make it to 52,596.  One second at a time, one minute, one hour- clawing through each day and deciding that everything in my life is worth more than a liquid in a bottle. Deciding to live because I was meant to live. Deciding not to spend my days curled up on the bathroom floor, but standing in my backyard like an idiot with my arms up in the air, letting the sun shine on my face. I don't care how hard it is or how much it hurts, I will keep fighting for my life every damn day.

Six years down, infinity to go- here's hoping for sunny days.