The year from Hell.

Even when I went back to college I had it together. I worked out. I lived on a ranch and just getting by required a certain level of physical labor.

I don't know what happened the last semester, though. 2005 was a hard year. It started when we didn't get our income-tax return. Apparently, when my husband left the military, we still owed $60 on his AAFES account. Over the last five years, we had not received one bill, and the late fees, handling fees, interest on late fees and handling fees, had blossomed into a $3,000 bill, which the government happily took all at once. Then my husband lost his job. He got another one right away, but we got behind.

We lost our ranch and moved into a rental house in town, I was trying to hurry my degree and took on an eighteen hour courseload, I was working twenty hours a week as a math tutor, and I started putting on weight. I was also trying to be a good mother to my three kids in school and a good wife.

Then I got pregnant. Picture a woman nearly hitting the bathroom floor when that little "+" showed up and she was honestly expecting a "-" in the window. I couldn't be PREGNANT! It had been nine years since we had a baby! I already had a teenager in the house, I was an entire year of college away from finally graduating.

I was already twenty-five pounds above my desired weight. My doctor told me I should gain no more than fifteen pounds. I didn't know this was possible. All three of my other pregnancies I had started out at an optimum weight, gained thirty pounds exactly, had beautifully healthy children, and lost all the weight within a month.

Oh but I didn't know I was going to be so ill. I had morning, noon, and night sickness for the first four months. Have you ever been carsick while driving? I have. I have pulled over to the side of the highway to vomit on the shoulder of the road. I have kept an empty coffee-can with paper towels wadded up in the bottom in my car so that I could vomit at stoplights. Amazingly, though I was consuming a negative amount of calories at that point, I didn't lose but 5 pounds. I stopped going to my earliest morning class (Calculus II) and scraped a B. I stopped going to my Discrete Math class and scraped a B. I stopped showing up for Probability and Statistics (II) and scraped a B. I started leaving early from my two nightclasses (Classroom Management and Methods and Materials) and still pulled A's. I pulled A's in my English courses because my idiot professor lost her gradebook and just guesstimated what everyone should have earned. I have never been so happy to see a semester end.

I would like to forget the majority of last summer. We didn't have air-conditioning for a long time. When we finally put a window-unit in our bedroom, I retreated to it like a bear into its cave for winter hibernation. Then we moved. My husband changed jobs yet again. We got further behind and our cell-phones got turned off. We turned off the satellite tv. Our home phone started ringing off the hook from credit-card companies. We barely had any food in the house. But we sorted, packed, cleaned, and took multiple trips to our new home with a loaded pick-up and a trailer.

Fall never happened. It just got hotter and hotter. Remember Katrina? Then Rita? When Rita went through east Texas, west Texas suffered, too. We didn't get any wind or rain; we got an oven blast. It got up to 119 degrees when our air-conditioner broke. On a Friday night. The repairman couldn't make it out until Tuesday afternoon. I was seven months pregnant. I literally looked like a beached whale trying to submerse myself in a few inches of cold water in the bathtub, feebly seeking cool relief.

My husband had a good job, but the bills were still piling up. Thank God for my mother - she refinanced our truck so that it wouldn't be repo'd.

By November I had the air conditioner set at 65 degrees and if anybody touched it I would have broken their fingers (dearly beloved husband and children alike). I had gained the required 15 pounds and I was sweating incessantly.

My doctor admitted me to the hospital and induced labor two weeks early because the baby was getting so big. I have always had big babies - no diabetes, but my husband has a large frame and I'm a tad above average height, so a 9 pound baby is no big deal.

Miss Priss was already 8 lb 13 oz (two weeks early). She was the best thing to happen to me all year. She was so beautiful, the nurses made excuses to come into my room and look at the little angel with the curly brown hair. My older kids adored her. After I took her home I would frequently find them standing by her crib, worshipping at the Altar of Baby Sister with awe-struck eyes.

I guess 2005 wasn't so bad, after all.