Thought for the Day, Vol. 2

If Jesus saves, are hoarders doing the Lord's work?

Stuff I Never Thought I Would Say, Vol. 9

"Don't eat the crayon.  I mean, lick the salsa off, but don't eat the crayon."

Stuff I Never Thought I Would Say, Vol. 8

You're naked and muddy.  Get out my closet.

Stuff I Never Thought I Would Say, Vol. 7

I don't think you have enough body weight to decapitate a zombie with your bike. 

Detective Story

One of the roles I like most about parenting (in addition to librarian, historian, and archeologist) is that of detective.  I can walk into a room and piece together events that have transpired from clues and prior knowledge of the parties involved.  Fan blade completely sheared from the fan in the guest room?  My money is that it can't support 30 pounds of dead weight, the rough equivalent weight of the same kid who used to scale his window blinds like they were a ladder, albeit the worst ladder ever constructed.   "Anna Pearson Anna Pearson Anna Pearson" written over and over on the window blinds?  Probably the kid that can spell.  Or James.  I could have been way off there.  I enjoy detectiving, and I think of myself as good at it.That just means I am taken aback when I walk into a room and am like, "What...the...fuck?

Tonight, the two younger brothers and I went to Chick Fil A.   It is a great place to kill some time.  The five year old is consistently entertained, and the baby can climb.  All of this in a relatively safe environment.

Five year olds today are not what they used to be.  In my great grandfather's generation, a five year old might walk several miles unattended to spend the day fishing at a creek.  I am pretty comfortable with letting my five year old use the rest room by himself in an uncrowded restaurant.  I am also comfortable leaving him an a sound proofed padded room while I travel 50 feet to the ladies bathroom.  Especially since there are numerous adults around who, with a head nod, will supervise briefly.

I am a fast diaper changer.   I have had three kids.  You get it down to a science.  My typical time, even with a crying squirming baby who would rather sit in his own shit than have it wiped off, is about three minutes.  Three.

At Chick Fil A, I walked into the ladies room with a child playing in the play area.  I walked out three minutes later to the same child walking toward me carrying the biggest fucking ice cream cone I had ever seen.  How the fuck did that happen?

For one, for all his strengths, he doesn't really get the concept of money.  He sees it change hands a lot, but he doesn't get that he has to give money to someone to have them give him something back.   He absolutely did not pay for this iced dairy dream tower he was so busy downing.  The lady at the table who had been keeping an eye on him said that he had wandered around saying "Mommy?  Mommy?" for a second before he walked right up to the counter and asked for ice cream.

Apparently, the teenagers working behind the counter were terrified of his soulless ginger gaze or were just total and complete suckers who randomly hand out ice cream to any ragamuffin who crosses their path (also not ruling out the Jedi mind trick).  They may have taken his "Mommy?" as distress that needed to be calmed before it overcame the rest of the customers.   In reality, I almost guarantee he was just casing the joint to make sure I was nowhere in sight to stop him.

I can't even convince myself to be that mad at him.  In the space of three minutes, he got himself an objective, came up with a plan, and executed it successfully with zero resources at his disposal.  He's the stuff shows like Burn Notice are made of.  I could have a secret operative in training in my very house. 

Stuff James Says, Vol. 2

Did you give the baby sour cream?  Quick!  This is important!

Stuff I Never Thought I Would Say, Vol. 6

"Did you really just hit the toilet with your car?"

Stuff I Never Thought I Would Say, Vol 5

"That's why we aren't doing it.  It's retarded."

"I recall that stopping no one from doing anything ever."

Stuff I Never Thought I Would Say, Vol 4

"You have a choice.  You can go on a beer run or an actual run."

"Actual run.  See you in thirty "

90s

There are times that I feel super old.  Yesterday at my lunch table, I was the only person who was born before 1990.  While it is kind of mind boggling that kids born in 1992 can buy alcohol, I am more concerned that those kids are actual professionals in the real world.  They lack an entire frame of reference.   They don't remember watching the Goonies every day or quoting the Princess Bride or taping a song off the radio.  It's like they aren't even people.  At some point, they asked me what made me nostalgic for the 1990s.   After careful consideration,  here is my list.

1)  Angst.  Respectable angst when we all wore flannel and wanted to try heroin not wear eyeliner and cut ourselves.
2)  Wearing jeans and drinking a latte.  Now, all my lattes are consumed in pencil skirts and reasonable trousers in uninteresting but respectable colors before a long day of working at a job that is marginally socially acceptable.  Long gone are the lazy days of slacking and doctoring my coffee drinks with so much dairy and sugar I couldn't appreciate the level of craftmanship required to make it.  Plus the only lesbian to buy me a drink was totally coffee and totally in the 90s.
3)  Sweaters.  A guy in an oversized sweater  and shell necklace instantly transports me to high school.
4)  Belly shirts and overalls and baby doll dresses.  Everyone wore belly shirts, even me.  Hell, I was on the front page of my college newspaper wearing a belly shirt, and I am not the special.  I was horrified when overalls started to come back into style ironically referencing fashion trends from my coming of age. 

This is why I don't do things.

I am a bloody mess.  Not bloody in the sense of cheeky British slang, but literally bloody with a trail of road rash from my knee down my leg, on my hip, and on my hands.  My friend has a more severe version of similar injuries.  He got his while trying to take a bike off a ramp.  I got mine while lightly jogging in my neighborhood, because that is how awesome I am. 

It would have been better if I hadn't been jogging in front of someone at the time. She managed to stop and not me over, but her audible gasp of concern was a little disheartening.  Nothing like trying to shake it off and finish a workout, even though your leg stings like crazy, and the more you sweat, the worse it gets.  Who's a brave little soldier?  I am, that's who.

This time, at least I have an excuse.  It was dark, and the sidewalk was lightly raised.  I clipped my toe on the sidewalk and down I went faster than a stereotypical sister of Alpha Chi Omega after a couple shots of Jaeger.  "OMG I NEVER DO THIS!  I AM SO WASTED!" 

The last time I fell when running was on a treadmill where I tripped over my own feet and then shot off the back like I was in a cartoon.  The last time I fell walking was only a couple of weeks ago.  Beer plus really tall shoes plus the kind of gawky normally reserved for a 2 minute old giraffe is bound to equal problems. 

Apparently, horizontal running only works for Fat Amy, because when I tried it sucked.  I had to drown my pain in over the counter painkillers and Coors Light, because my husband apparently thinks that if it's not gentle enough to wash you car, it's not real beer.  I should go back to being fat and awesome.  In all the time I spent sucking down raw brownie batter and watching Dawson's Creek on Netflix, not once did I wind up bleeding, not even in my soul, which is kind of amazing.

 

The worst part is that I am out of pants and had to wear a skirt today, and people keep sucking in air between their teeth and asking me what happened.  I am really struggling to keep up with the lies that make me sound slightly less idiotic than I am.  "I was attacked by two foot tall ninjas wielding cheese graters"  "My kids threatened me bodily harm if I left them with the sitter again.  This is what happened."  "Python bigger around than my leg" "Yeah, but you should see the other guy." 

Stuff I Never Thought I Would Say, Vol. 3

"Pie fueled sex binge"

Stuff James Says, Vol. 1

"Just goes to show you that in a race between heroin and booze, the heroin is going to kill you faster."

"Well, it's not called hero-lose, now is it?"

Stuff I Never Thought I Would Say, Vol. 2

"He's a sandbagging son of a bitch, and you know it!"

-About a golden retriever

Milk Was a Poor Choice...

Saturday, we took the kids to a local dairy farm for Family Day.  It was 93 degrees outside.  My half vampire kids were roasting in the sun.  We showed up, and in the space of about an hour, bought milk, got a hot dog, listed to a Johnny Cash song, pet some baby cows, took some pictures, ate some cotton candy and got the fuck out to some place with both shade and air conditioning. 

I love milk, I really do, but I HATE other people and their families and mostly just people.

The free hot dog and sweet tea was really nice.  I felt appreciated, and then I felt a little sick because it was over 90 degrees outside and I was carrying around a couple of quarts of extremely warm root beer flavored locally produced glass bottled milk.  Turns out, even the kids can't handle warm milk.  Probably for the best, since they just get stickier the more milk they drink.   

My kid proclaimed it the "best day ever."  Seriously, though, their standards are lower than a bunch of drunk fraternity brothers, God bless them.  Load up my sweet fluorescent orange kiddos with even a hint of sugar and some artificial color and suddenly they're rolling.  They might as well be on ecstasy.  "I LOVE YOU!  THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER!   HOLY SHIT THOSE COWS COME IN AWESOME PATTERNS! MOO!  MY MOUTH IS SO DRY!  IS YOUR MOUTH DRY!?!  I LOVE YOU FUTURE HAMBURGERS!"

Thought for the day, Vol. 1

Are you ever falling down drunk, if you fall over all the time when you're sober?

Netflix is My Nemesis

I love Netflix.  I really do, but it is really fucking up my life.  Oh, it was fun for the first few months.  I experimented.  Documentaries.  Independent movies.  Three part mini series on the life of Mark Twain.  I felt edgy and intelligent.  Not at all like the mess I have become.

We didn't have cable for a few years after we moved into our first house.  That means we missed out on a lot of things like Mad Men and Lost and Arrested Development and Breaking Bad and Archer and basically anything that wasn't a Backyardigans DVD.   Now, we are years behind on pop culture, because what I needed in my personal life is the embarrassment of walking into a room and being like, "HEY, ISN'T IT EXCITING WHAT JUST HAPPENED ON THAT SHOW TONIGHT THAT YOU TOTALLY SAW THREE YEARS AGO AND I AM JUST NOW GETTING AROUND TO?  I MEAN MIND BLOWING, RIGHT?"  I am never watching Lost, ever for that very reason.

It's the TV shows that get me.  Seven seasons of Supernatural?  Don't mind if I do.  I have two weeks to blow.  It's not like I need to clean or do my laundry or work on my nonexistent fitness level.  Yeah, I can watch another one.  Oh, hey friend, you say that every season of Ghost Whisperer is on Netflix?  I can't wait to see that bitch's wild collection of pantaloons.  Life doesn't need to go on.  James would show up and be like, "Why is her husband living in the garage?"  "Well her husband died and took over the body of some other guy and he doesn't really remember who she is because he thinks he's the architect who's body he took over and she totally lied and said he was refinishing her garage when he had his accident to keep his parents from coming to make them live with them and NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF HER NOT DAD HADN'T TRIED TO KILL HER NOW SHUT UP I AM TRYING TO WATCH."

Lately, the problem is Dawson's Creek.  I never watched this show when it was on the first time.  I was busy in like college or something.  My biggest memory of it was that my college boyfriend freshman year was kind of obsessed with Katie Holmes.  I see all these people and think about everything that has happened to them in the years since.  Watching Michelle Williams and thinking that some day she is going to bang the Joker and have his baby before his untimely demise.  It makes me sad, and I haven't even gotten to the part where her character dies.  I wind up sitting in front of my tv eating brownie batter without any eggs in it* and weeping about where my Pacey was in high school and how this is JUST SO NINETIES AND THE SWEATERS!  This is how people wind up on antidepressants. 

*As a side note, the internet was the reason I know about this eggless batter trick.  Apparently, the only thing stopping me from morbid obesity was the fear of salmonella poisoning.  Eating brownie batter without any eggs is the culinary equivalent of banging a chick just because you have a condom.  "Oh, you mean I won't get a body ravaging disease?  Well shit, when you put it that way..."  There is still the same amount of shame.  The same thought that you're not meeting your personal standards.  But either way, deed is done now.  What are you going to do?

Stuff I Never Thought I Would Say, Vol. 1

"You're not a crab!  Walk like a person!"

Staycation all I ever wanted.

This weekend my husband and I took the entire family to a local hotel/indoor water park for some summer fun.  Being as the kids are all gingers, the cost savings in sunblock alone covered the cost of the hotel, so it was worth the trip to see the kids enjoy themselves in a setting where they weren't likely to catch on fire like vampires back when vampires did that instead of just laying in fields and sparkling and listening to Muse and trying not to eat the local teenagers as a metaphor for teenage sexual abstinence. 

Walking into this place, the Prodigious Lupine Abode, is like entering the hot and sticky vinyl covered foyer of Satan's summer palace.  Every which way you turn, the walls are lined with places to spend money and each one of them is geared toward kids.  To make it through without having to spend a whole lot of money on something that is going to be at the bottom of a pile of donated toys in six months, you have get used to the idea of constantly and consistently beating down your child's every hope and dream.  The only thing that can possibly be a similar experience is opening up every cage and the pet store and kicking the puppies as you go.  "No, you can't have ice cream."  "No, you can't have a stuff it yourself version of a woodland character whose name you don't even know." "No, we don't need to do crafts." "No, you don't need a souvenir cup."  "No, you don't need to press a coin to remember this magical experience."  "No, you don't need an ice cream themed spa pedicure." "OMG FINE LET'S GO TO THE ARCADE!!! WOO!"  Just an amazing amount of money spending opportunity like what I imagine Las Vegas and Disneyland would be if they had a baby with a giant plastic squirrel.  I admire the ability of someone to plan this place as it took a keen understanding of child psychology and an enormous set of solid uranium balls.

The kids did seem to be genuinely thrilled when we walked into the hotel room to see the bunk beds and their own TV.  Winning!

And then, the party started.  We got changed and went to the water park.  As someone who, on a good day, shouldn't be allowed out of the house without a helmet, I have never thought, "Hey!  You know what would make rushing water and bathing suits and slick surfaces even better?  More adventure!"  Where's that motherfucking climbing net?!?!  A giant dumping bucket of water reminiscent of splash dance?!  HOLY SHIT!  YOU GOT IT BITCHES"  Tube slides taller than my office building!?  BRING THAT SHIT ON!  I am so wet right now.  No, literally, you get wet, and you just stay that way, because the humidity, regardless of what I am sure is a super bitchin HVAC, is about the same as a fucking tropical rainforest.

Overall:  A++, but I would never fucking do it again.