I got an email from Payperpost, via the advice of Jenn, after I’d submitted my site for review. It’s this service where you make money blogging about products, and you know I’m all for making money. You send your site in, and they make sure it gets decent traffic and doesn’t suck and you actually update once in a blue moon, and I was all, Sweet bling here I come! I applied almost a week ago, and they just got around to checking my site. During the three days it’s been down with a holder page. And they sent me an email, all, Uh, I don’t know if you’ve ever actually been on the Internetz before, but that’s not really a blog. That’s actually sort of lame.

As I was moping in my cereal, my Inbox dinged again and it was Mandi. I was nominated as Hottest Mommy Blogger and Best Parenting Blog on the Blogger’s Choice Awards. (You can see which one was most flattering by the one I put first. Heh.) So please vote for me. I try not to pimp voting on the site, but if everyone who read this clicked through– it takes nine seconds– I might even place.

–Never mind, I’m wrong. You have to register and everything. So it’ll take more like four minutes, and if you don’t have that kind of time, I FEEL YOU.

Everyone starts conversations, “What’ve you been up to? Where you been?” and I’ve just been sick, mostly. Sick and angry. First I was angry about the Drama Which Shall Not Be Named, then I got angry at Jason, then at the television, my clothes, the weather, and finally my computer.

Two nights ago, I came out of the shower and sat down to work on the new theme. Jason came up and started kissing me. We do the giggly conversation of, What, you want another baby? and suddenly Jason asks, “Why is your camera on?”

“My camera isn’t ON!” I gasp, trying to recover myself with the towel. “What! OH MY GOD IS MY CAMERA ON! Are my parents watching?!”

“That green light next to the iSight camera means your camera is turned on,” he says. “Do you have a chat window open?”

“No, I closed everything! I closed PhotoBooth too!”

We both look at each other, and I know he’s thinking the same thing I am– that episode of ‘Criminal Minds’ when hot, older Dawson Leery is a psychopath, and he works as a computer tech to get remote access to people’s computers and watch them on their webcams. “Oh my God,” I freak out, turning the laptop away, “there’s streaming video of me naked! On the internet! I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS!”

“Calm down,” Jason says. “That’s probably not true.”

“PROBABLY?”

“Well, just Google yourself, and see if anyone uploaded it.”

“NO,” I snap. Pause. Then turn the laptop back and silently Google myself.

Nothing. The normal hits. Mild relief.

Jason offers, “See? Now just check again in the morning, and it will be fine.”

“You’re not helping! This is the worst thing that’s ever happened!” I moan and cover my face, and Jason tries to give me a back massage. Me: “JASON. I’M NOT IN THE MOOD NOW.”

“I’m just trying to help you relax,” he says. Which is a total lie, but at least he tried.

The next four hours I’m all over the Internet, trying to figure out what happened, and no forum or support site has any advice. I am the only person this has happened to. The iSights aren’t supposed to just be turned on with no related software. I am SURE I am on one of those cheap porn sites and I won’t find out till I’m 34. Or Elias is in middle school and gets passed a screencap.

The next day, while playing with the kids, a lightbulb goes off over my head and I know what happened. It’s so obvious it took me almost 16 hours to figure it out.

If you don’t have a Mac, you don’t know about this program. It’s called Dashboard. It’s a program that runs in the background, invisible, until you hit a certain key or move your mouse to a certain location. Then it pulls it up from offscreen. It’s full of widgets– weather, Warcraft server status, what’s coming on Netflix, theater times, traffic reports, anything you might need at your fingertips– and you customize it.

Three nights ago Jason had been chatting with his coworkers, late night. It was almost 11. One of them was still at work and conferenced in, J and Coworker 2 were at home. They were all using their webcams to discuss some kind of file server maintenance. Jason suggested I join. So I flipped up Dashboard, turned on my Mirror widget, fixed my hair, and logged on.

Yep. My Mirror widget. It uses the camera. And since I didn’t ever turn off Dashboard, it was running like a ghost in the background the entire time.

I tested my theory and then called Jason to tell him I am safe from XXX theater, and also let’s close our laptops when we’re done from now on.

The other big computer-related issue has been my site. Which just hates me for no reason. All I do is coddle this site, and it repays me by breaking my javascript.

Here’s the short, sweet version of a week of labor–

Going to make a new theme. Create a new subdomain so no one can peek. Code. Diet Pepsi break. Code. Sleep. Code. Theme is sexy. Theme slides out, fades in, pops, sings, it’s gorgeous. It’s completely AJAXified. Save theme, save plugins, move them to normal domain. Nope. Everything is broken. It’s a straight copy; I don’t see the problem. I just moved the files. I go through almost twenty files, line by line, trying to find the missing code. There isn’t any. It just works on one site and not the other.

So I get the brilliant idea to backup my database and wipe WordPress, then reinstall. Which I do. I reinstall the entire thing and it’s STILL BROKEN.

Spend another two hours insane with frustration and exhaustion, and then finally just delete all the pretty parts and stick the site up as is. And PS: nothing else works either. Enjoy the front page. That’s all I got.

Moving on: FAMILY STORIES!

We did the community Easter egg hunt, which was fun but cold. It was held at our clubhouse, which leads to the next story. Chatted with the other parents. Most we knew, but some were fresh faces– there was one in particular that just moved from New York, and we both glowed over how much nicer, safer, and slower-paced it is here. Following day was Easter. No church. I was really bummed– I wanted to go, but we were all getting sick. The kids got baskets full of chocolate and candy, and emptied them out in short order. By empty, I mean literally. All over the floor. I’ve been vacuuming at least once a day since and there are still Baby Bottle Pop candies in the carpet.

The clubhouse visit begins the next story, which is The Next Adventure. Elias turns 4 soon. In five days. I can’t get over the fact that my little baby is going to be four years old– and I still think of him like that; my tiny five pound infant, so small he could use half my pillow for his bed and have room to spare, those early days where he would nuzzle in the crook of my neck, like a kitten, mewling for his next bottle of milk. I feel like he’s grown at lightning speed. I blink my eyes, he’s older. I watched him sleep yesterday, still curled into the fetal position. Touched his cheek. I know he’ll be ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, married, and then he’ll be a father and watching his firstborn dream and know how deeply, wholly, profoundly I loved him all those years.

Anyway. The earth-shaking adoration I have for him is not the point. The point is: we need to party.

We got back a sizeable tax return, the best so far in our marriage, and we put some away for padding, and then decided to splurge on his birthday. We found a place that rents moonbounces cheap, and put in to rent our community clubhouse. (That was all Jason. Partly because he liked it so much, partly because we need the parking.) I think we’re renting a helium tank to do balloons, and we got Harris Teeter to specially make a cake. It is SO MUCH FUN planning this, mixed with an overwhelming anxiety. What if no one comes? What if it rains? What about the moonbounce? What if the cake isn’t ready? What if there’s no seating? What if this is the crappiest little kid’s birthday party ever?

I picked up a bunch of invites at the store, and we drove around the community delivering them to neighbors. It was the most poorly planned and executed thing ever. I circled until I found cars with New York license plates, and then ripped open the invitations– Elias and Addie were in the back; Elias was chirping, “Where are you going? What’s happening? What are you doing?” and Addie was parroting, “Guing? Doohing?”– and I told them just ONE SECOND, I have to run up and invite someone to the party. So I take the invitation to them. It IS their house. Whew. The dad answers and says Oh Cool!, sure!, and we talk for a couple minutes. I don’t have a pen. I have to borrow his. I write the information on all the wrong lines, then make crazy arrows pointing to the right ones. Elias eventually pushes his door open so I can hear Addie yelling hysterically inside.

But– they’re coming! All our neighbors are coming. And some of Jason’s coworkers.

As we were walking back from Hamzah’s house (it’s spelled Hamzah, he told me: “You spelled my name wrong! It is not a U, it is an A. But I will come to your party anyway.”), I thought about how nice it was to be domesticated like this. One kid on the hip, one holding a hand, delivering invitations around our culdesac. Nicer than I thought it would be in high school. In high school, what I just described would be known as the Ninth Ring of Hell.

The power had been out at everyone’s house while I was gone. When we got in the door, I heard every electronic in the house hissing back to life. I hope that’s a good omen.

Time for Wednesday night TV with Jason. One last story about Addie. It’s one that made me happy.

We all have varying degrees of colds or allergies at the moment, and I collapsed on Addie’s floor today at lunch. Addie came over and laid down next to me. “Mama,” she whispered, pushing our heads together. “Mama?”

“I’m SICK,” I groaned.

Jason came in, and Elias said, “A bad guy came. A bad guy came and hit Mom and she fell down. It not me. It just a bad guy.”

“Here, Addie,” Jason said, “I brought you your bottle.”

Addie looked at the bottle, and then she took her tiny hand and put it on my shoulder. “No,” she said to Jason, shaking her head. “No. Me mama.”

Addie has never turned down a bottle. Ever. Bottles are her Diet Pepsi plus Sims 2 mixed together. The fact that she wasn’t accepting it so she could comfort me just– some cliché. Any cliché. Hearts smiling, angels singing, realizing why I wanted to be a mom. You can think of anything and insert it, and it would be cheesy but true.