Vampires and Burritos Surpreme

I am fairly confident with my belief that I discovered the vampire genre long before the lot of you.

My passion for these books began as I read Fledgling by Octavia Butler.

A friend slipped me the first in the Undead and Unwed series, by MaryJanice Davidson, along with a copy of "The Becoming" by Jeanne C. Stein.

Okay, admittedly it was not heavy reading.

However, I was reading these books during a time in my life when I needed the lightest reading I could get.

My husband was escorting generals, Geraldo Rivera and Catholic priests around Iraq in Blackhawk helicopters. He was sending videos back of himself poking his over sized helmeted head out of tanks in downtown Baghdad, and doing a little pageant wave to the locals as he motored by. (Okay, I made that up. He did no such wave.)

Yes...I needed escapist fiction.

My interest in these books waned a bit with the craze of the Twilight series.

In general, I tend to rebel against the masses . If something becomes wildly popular, I will refuse to buy it and/or participate in it. Cases in point: the Snugli, the Chia pet, and Dancing With The Stars.

Even though I appear to follow the masses, I am truly a rebel at heart. That character flaw is to be wholly blamed on my parents who were both preachers. You can't mess with a kid any more than that.

My interest also lightened up as I realized that there are, truly, vampires in this world. They are the ultimate takers, unarguably selfish and self serving. They will mercilessly suck the life out of you if you aren't very, very careful.

I have proof of this in the form of a picture. It is a picture of me, of which I will never, ever reveal to you. It was candidly and very meanly taken by my husband who thought it was funny.

I have bags under my eyes and a double chin. There is about three inches of re-growth on my once fabulous highlights and dark circles under my eyes.

These vampires are my children.

As delightful as they may be at times when they give me hugs and tell me that they love me, or when the youngest repeats the word "mamma" four hundred times after I leave the house for 20 minutes to purchase a gallon of milk at Publix, they can be the rudest, life-sucking forces known to man.

Lawd help me people, if I begin to utter the words "another baby would be nice" I encourage ~ no I INSIST~ that you to b***h-slap me and remind me of this blog entry.

The oldest one is the most expensive, I am sure, if I add up all of the food he inhales along with the shampoo and water he uses during his daily showers. I don't know how he goes through so much shampoo, and I probably don't want to know.

He asks for lunch money inappropriately often, begs for Hollister clothing and Nike Shox, and tests our levels of patience with his frequency of detentions for "forgetting" his school ID card.

The middle one is going to give me an early onset heart attack. This is because I know that it is just a matter of time before the neighborhood parents will begin ganging up on me on our front doorstep. The gripe session will be to inform and share with me newest offense he has inflicted upon one of their children.

The most recent report was on Sunday. A mother stopped by to complain that he had kicked her son in the balls. Twice. The boy accompanied her, looking awfully pitiful , crying and hunched over in agony. Sort of like he had been kicked in the balls.

The youngest is currently the the most trying, psychologically, for us. She is the child who, in my opinion, has caused me to age at LEAST ten years in the past 17 months.

When we first moved into the rental house in Florida, we were excited by the entirety of the ceramic tile floors in every area of living space, aside from the bedrooms.

"What a cinch to keep clean," we exclaimed. "How perfect for children," we proclaimed to each other. We punched each other on the shoulders playfully, dreaming and musing with each other about the beauty of the situation we were about to move into.

The red flags went up almost immediately.

We had moved into this house in the midst of a terribly frustrating phase that I will just refer to as "the screaming phase."

We couldn't take Miss Maggie to restaurants for fear she would shriek ~ not because anything was direly wrong ~ but because she could.

I couldn't have her sit with me in church because she would squeal at the most inopportune times, setting off a painful squeal of hearing aids (including the grandparents') in our immediate vicinity.

The vaulted (How airy! How open!) ceilings have added to the noise.

It has become maddening ~ as in drop to your knees, claw at your face and weep to the heavens, maddening.

Tonight, I was crazed to the point of declaring "I need a burrito!" and fleeing.

I left the oldest bloodsucker in charge for ten minutes as I drove, with the windows completely down and Orlando's hip hop station blasting, to Taco Bell.

I plopped down on the sofa with the burrito and pintos and cheese (to add to Chris' misery , no need for him to be happy tonight) and cayenne pepper to sprinkle on each bite.

Because the kids were still awake and checking on me every two minutes, I was unable to order the movie I REALLY wanted (it was of the horror genre). I was forced to order Bride Wars.

I am only ten minutes into it and want to slash my wrists and gnash my teeth, but dammit, I paid $3.99 for the pay-per-view show and it WILL be viewed.

I probably should just go read a book, but I have been uninspired with my reading material recently. I have no fewer than six books started.

I wish I could find a genre I attacked as voraciously as the vampire genre. But now that it is so trendy, it isn't as fun. And it reminds me of the little vampires I am currently housing and feeding.

I love and am enamored by them. They are sort of sparkling and glittery at times and it is difficult to tear my eyes away from their adorableness.

But they are taking all that they can get.

You can't get much more vampirish than that.