me, screaming at the tv/computer

I had a little rant yesterday and decided to share it here too ... its about small houses.

Actually, its about advising people on how to utilize their space in small houses better ... when the houses you use to reference aren't small.  Or at least aren't as small/built like mine.

James Young, please come find someone
who actually needs your help!  ME!!!

This rant started when I sat down to feed the baby.  Breastfeeding is a teeny bit boring when the baby isn't pretending to be a Cullen, so I turned the boobtube (so much more aptly named now) on.  It was on the DIY channel and a show called I Hate My Kitchen.  Since I have uttered the show's title a few times I thought to myself:

Self, maybe I will figure out something useful on this show!

And with great hope I started to watch this episode.  The home owners had little sound bites saying things like "Its so small," "Its so ugly" ... I nodded, agreeing and sympathizing with them.  I hadn't seen the full kitchen shot yet, but they showed the cabinets and I thought to myself  with sudden trepidation:

Um, Self, they have more than two lower cabinets next to each other ... that suggests some length in their kitchen ... I don't have that.

Then they showed the whole kitchen.  And my jaw dropped, blood boiled and the yelling commenced.  The baby was much displeased with me.

These people are whining about their "small," "ugly," and "outdated" kitchen while they have at least three times the space I have, about 40 times the counter space, black (and not almond) colored appliances, shiny cabinets ... ugh, I could go on.  Lets just say I would trade them their kitchen in a heart beat.

Reaching to turn the channel, I heard the guy gripe about how you can't walk out the entry way when the fridge door is opened because you get pinned between it and the island.  I had a momentary lapse of logic where I thought to myself "okay, that would be annoying" ... then I realized that you can't open the door to my fridge and walk by at all, not because of an island, but because its basically galley style.

I changed the channel and moved on with my life hoping these people wind up spending $4,000 over budget because I'm spiteful like that.

Later I was reading one of my fave blogs* and there was a guest post titled 5 Tips For Living In a Small Space.

Yay, I thought, I love this blog, there is always practical stuffs here!  I bet I can use this!

So I eagerly started reading.  Tip One: Do not compare your home to other's homes.  Ugh, yeah, that is probably reasonable, but, so not happening.

Creative use of space: Kids don't need rooms!
My shoes do!

But lets give me something to do, not something to not do! I thought to myself.

Tip Two: Embrace the space you have.  Ooooooookaaaaay, I can hug my shoe-box-sized master bedroom closet but I fail to see how this is helping me!

Don't worry, it went down hill from there.

Tip Three: Be creative with your space!  Yippie! Reading on I hoped to hear something uber useful like a way to store kids toys, how to put an extra roll of toilet paper in the bathroom without it becoming a kid toy, or anything another human being would pin and want to do.  What did I get?  Ideas about how you can store things in bathroom vanities ... {insert sound of tires squealing to a halt here} wait hold up, people can use bathroom vanities to hold more than their hair drier?  I don't even have towels in either bathroom because there is no space.  Don't tell me how I can store stuff there, it ain't happening.  Next tip involved a comment about how the author has one whole side of her closet filled with stacked plastic totes.  Allow me to just say that if you can fit even one of those (I assume) big assed 5 gallon muthas in your closet and still put clothes in it AND access any of that stuff I do not want to hear you whine about storage solutions.  

Sheesh, where will I put the Pop Tarts?!

Moving on, and slightly less happy I  read into Tip Four a bit and saw that it dealt with organizing and keeping things clutter free, which I am all for and was okay with.  Until I read this: "One of my nightly goals is to clear off the kitchen island" ... bitch, please.  That is one of my lifetime goals -- to have a kitchen that has an island!  It discussed organizing drawers and stuff, but seriously, when you only have 4 kitchen drawers, and only 2 of them are full sized its not so much about organizing as it is about swearing and not owning much.  

Tip Five dealt with managing your "stockpiles" and I think if you can store extras of anything anywhere I don't want to speak with you anymore, and certainly won't be reading your tips on organized living.  

So here is my goal: I want to either find an actually useful/applicable article that will give me tips I can use or I want to write one myself.  If you have a home built in the 80s when storage was apparently very un-trendy, your backyard is bigger than your house, you have no laundry room but rather a section of your garage with a washer and drier crammed into it, and the biggest closet in your house is actually the shed in the backyard then I want to know your tips for storage and organization!  Otherwise I'm going to mope in my 1500 sq feet of mess and work on a new blog series of my own!

*This is one of my fave mom/money/practical blogs, but I am not linking to the original article (you can search for it if you really wanna) because this isn't exactly a friendly commentary LOL

Yay, I can fail at this too!

I was so excited to make my own baby food. Really, I felt so jazzed about the whole thing.  I was reading up on recipes before Thing 2 could sit up and was already figuring out what I'd make loooong before I was actually making it.  I was having one big hippie, rainbow-shittin', successful-mama-moment dreaming about how I was going to do something wholesome and right for my little boy.  He would grow up all strong and noble, knowing how to write in cursive, match his own socks, and win the Nobel Prize -- despite my failure at cloth diapering -- all because his mommy made him his first foods.

And it has been one big massive failure.  He hates it. Anything. Everything.

I tried rice and oatmeal first, even though I was biting at the food-processing-bit, and he had super fun allergic reactions.

Oatmeal Art ... unfortunately,
 consuming it made him violently ill

So I researched, and decided to start with orange/yellow veggies first and move to the greens, then fruits.  This is supposed to lay down pathways in the brain that lead to healthy eating habits later.  Supposedly by eating things in this order he would be less likely to develop a sweet tooth -- which led me to believe my mother was giving me chocolate by IV at 4 months of age, but this is beside the point.

I talked with my awesome pediatrician, found websites, read books, then went to websites with simple how-to-recipes that a monkey could follow.  A brain dead, blind monkey ... with a peg leg.

I tried sweet potatoes first.  I grinned like a fool and my husband took pictures.  Baby shivered like a naked man lost int he arctic and gagged like I had asked him to lick a live 9V battery, but he got used to them and eventually he would eat them with only a minimal shudder. But he would eat them.

Yams? Um, two bites then he mutinies.

Squash? Oh hell-to-the-no. You'd swear its torture.

Carrots? Ha!

Avocado? If he could run he would have.

So I figured maybe I just really suck as a baby chef.  Really, who would be surprised by this particular development?  Bought carrots.  Jarred carrots.  He tried those and while it made me feel like less of a failure as a cook (he ate even less of those than he did mine) he still wouldn't eat them.

Giving up I bought pears today.  Pears are yummy. They are fruit, the thing I had intended to not give him until after we'd successfully navigated the less sweet and tasty stuff.  I bought Gerber in a plastic bin, didn't even attempt to make them as it is a lot of freaking work for him to gag on and refuse.

Sigh. Nope.

Now he is sick of the sweet potatoes and won't eat them anymore either.

"Oh Lawd, that airplane is back!"

I let him play with it, play with a spoon, eat in a high chair, on my lap, eat it warm, eat it cold ... in a house, with a mouse ... and a partridge in a pear tree … he wants nothing to do with anything I give him that is "food" ... but he is quite into breast milk still. He also loves to watch people eat and grabs at our food.

I know nutritionally he is fine, I know he can continue this way more or less for a bit. He is about 32 inches long and weighs 23 lbs or so ... not like he is wasting away or anything. I am just baffled. My oldest was inhaling baby food by this age.


I just can't help but laugh that I walked into parenthood this time around thinking I was sooo open minded and was going to do so much better than the stumbling act I did a decade ago with Thing 1.  Well in the immortal words of Lennon, life is what happens while your making other plans.

homework assignments & fear

For all my numerous faults as a mom, I am at least one impassioned supporter of my children's education.  I can give my children many things ... fodder for the therapists couch, genetic predisposition toward various chronic ailments, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches heavy on the jelly for lunch ... but the one thing that will remain with them, always, in spite of the weather, who is in the White House, or any other variable out there, is their education.  For this reason (and the fact that my mother was just as maniacal and I come from a long line of teachers) I am a tad hard core when it comes to school related things.

Its how I roll.

So I diligently check emails and communicate with Thing 1's teachers all the time.  Like his mother before him, my child never comes home following a bad day without my already knowing the ins and outs of what happened.  Fortunately for me and my child, there aren't many bad days.  Thing 1 is a good kid, I'd like to take credit, but I am pretty sure he is raising himself.

As I was checking my emails the other day though I came across this message from his fabulous teacher:

As part of our Reading-At-Home assignment your child should be asking you about some “funny” stories about you as a kid. Help keep them motivated by giving them some time at dinner to ask you some questions.

Thanks for all you do.

And my blood ran cold.

I know that the teacher wasn't asking me to share funny stores from my teen-years youth.  I have a few more years before high school aged shenanigans come back to haunt me, and I am praying to never need to explain my college years to my kids, or parents for that matter.  I mean really, I narrowly escaped a terrorist bombing and was too drunk to know it and that was just another Thursday night as far as I was concerned at the time.  True story.  Maybe for another day.

But really, "funny" stories from my youth.  I couldn't think of any immediately that would not make my nun-of-a-child get all judgey-pants on me.  Shall I share about the time I dumped my new born sister into a flower pot?  How about when we got cold at the bus stop and lit notebooks on fire?

So I asked my mom.

Yeah that was a mistake.  {Sigh}

After the fourth story where she told me that she explained to the traumatized witnesses that I was in fact her identical twin sister's daughter (we look quite a bit alike) so as to not have them judging her for birthing the demon child with freckles and pigtails, I decided that I needed to make up some stories. This way, I reasoned, I would have something good to tell Thing 1, were he to ask.

Still trying to make something up, I checked my email and I had a gem of an email from my mother reminding me that I could also tell the story the note I gave to a girl on my bus that would have warranted a greater than PG13 rating due to the volume of "eff off"s included ... then signed my name.  First and last.  Hey, I felt strongly about what I had to say, I guess.

But at any rate I have decided that in this one instance, I am going to just hope that Thing 1 doesn't do his homework.

an open letter to the jerk who stole my ads

Dear Jerktastic Buttmunch Who Stole My Black Friday Ads,

I just wanted you to know that I have spent the better part of my Wednesday wishing you a lot of misery.  If any of  my exes are correct, I am a witch.  If I am in fact a witch, you are really in for a rough couple of days because I have been focusing all my witchy powers your way this fine pre-Thanksgiving Wednesday.

First off, by now your hands should have turned into a bloody, pulpy mess given the number of paper cuts you acquired thumbing through MY ads.  Yes, I did that.  I hope that cheap newsprint glossy stuff feels like razor blades, you thief.  I started off hoping that each page gave you a paper cut but I realized that freaks as hardcore as you must go through them multiple times to price compare, so I amended my original curse to include a new slice with each page turn.

You may as well not bother staying up after gorging yourself on Thanksgiving to start shopping online at 12:01 AM because your computer will only explode right at that moment you click the button that says "Proceed to Checkout" causing you to not only not get any of the things in your cart but to also send a variety of embarrassing spam emails to those you are most concerned with impressing.  Family pictures? Passwords? Tax info? Internet favorites?  Yup, all gone too.

Imagine this, but times like a million.

If you decide to not heed my warnings and turn your computer into a nuclear wasteland after all, please stop there.  Because if you decide that you must physically go shopping, you will make the news.  You might get trampled or you might get buried alive under a mountain of those Lets Rock Elmo toys, but I assure you that you won't get a single one of the things you went out to shop for.  Not one.  You will be exhausted and have nothing but your frazzled, theify nerves to show for it.  And everything you go to buy this holiday season will be full price, and dang hard to come by.

For the record, had you asked me for the Black Friday ads I would have given them to you.  This is because I think that people who actually leave the house on this, of all shopping days, are either nuts or really nuts.  I respect some of the nuts, but for people like you, I got nuthin'.  At any rate, we are too broke even for Black Friday deals and all I wanted was the regular, boring grocery ads so I could feed my family.  Ass hole.

In closing, my temper is quick to rise but burns out quickly, so while I hope a lot of misery for you it will all be fine by Saturday morning and you will be healed but hopefully a valuable lesson will have been learned.   In case you missed what that lesson was let m spell it out for you:

Stealing is wrong, but stealing the ads from my paper? Really low and pathetic. Even without all the names I have spent today calling you and the misfortunes I hope befall you, I pity someone like you because karma's a real bitch and if you are so sad as to think you neighbor's ads are worth stealing I am willing to bet you have few friends and even less of a life.  Happy freaking Thanksgiving, you jackhole.

Sincerely,

Me

P.S. To all the peeps who didn't jack my ads, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving with those you love.

attacked by the bird in Dumbo

Oh look at that Corolla speeding along down there ...

You know in the opening scenes of the movie Dumbo where the patient Mrs. Jumbo finally and with much relief hears the stork calling out her name and is given her baby elephant with the massive yet adorable ears?  Okay I saw him.  Not the elephant, the bird.  It was huge, it was grey and was not wearing that smart little hat but it was a stork or a crane or something like it.  It was huge, it had a long neck with a floppy skin-pouchy looking area under its beak and it was apparently not at all afraid of my Corolla speeding down the street.  Scared the crud right out of me and between the startle factor and the fact that I have a nasty and otherwise unexplained phobia of birds, it aided in the unleashing of an impressive litany of swear words.

Problem with this story?  Both kids were in the back seat.

Now Thing 2 wouldn't have noticed anything given he is seven months old and mommy's forgivable time is still at hand.  The ten year old Thing 1 ... um, yeah. He's part nun and has been sniffing out swear words from a rather young age.  One of my friends just hands him a five dollar bill whenever she sees us so that she is "pre-paid" and doesn't have to worry about it for a while.

But rather than tell me that I didn't make good choices with my words like he once would have, he laughed.  He said that my word choice was funny.  I honestly don't remember how I combined words, but it is my art, so I am sure it was well done of me.

But it got me thinking about how I have some bad-mom tendencies of "do as I say not as I do."  Anyone who says they don't do this is either lying or not actually raising their kids, and I accept that I am not a fully conventional-mother-of-the-year-award-winning-Martha-freaking-Stewart-esk mom with as much grace as I can muster.  I read blogs.  I see the homeschooling moms who change their mantle decor every 15 seconds so that it can reflect the current season while sewing clothes for their children and making lots of cakes.  Not her, and won't be.  But I am open minded and think of me as a student of life.

So that big nasty bird that swooped over the street whilst I sped toward it and made me slam on the breaks and craft word chains that could have made a sailor blush made me also realize that I have not paid any attention to my list.  So I will be adding to it, and I will hopefully be marking some stuffs off of it soon.  And I am sure I will have plenty of sad, yet amusing, stories to share because failure is a part of learning.  And lord knows, when it comes to domestic skills I am bound to do both.

they call me *fart*

If beating myself up counted as I hobby, I could finally say I have a damn hobby.

I don't mean literally physically damaging myself, though with my innate sense of grace I most certainly do that as well, but I mean I can mentally tear myself to shreds in a mater of seconds.  I don't need help, I am quite skilled at neglecting myself, putting me on the back burner, taking care of everyone else ... then feeling like I am some sort of failure for the one, two, or ten things I failed to do or didn't do well enough by my abnormally and unfairly high standards I hold only me to.  Don't even ask me to address body issues, post- or pre-kids.  You'd be here for days hearing words like hideous, flabby, and Mr. Sunffelupagus and I would ruin the mascara I actually managed to apply this morning.

This said, I clearly have a low enough sense of my personal value.  But I still know, somewhere in the back of my mind, that my family needs me and couldn't run with out me.  Oh they'd survive, but they'd smell (worse) and be hungry(er).

This said, note the following conversation which just occurred and has happened in some form now twice.

Me: Can you say mama?

Thing 2: dadadadadadada

Me: Yes, yes, that's very nice, now say mmmmmma-ma!

Thing 2: Looks at me very seriously and says "DAdadadaDA!"

Me: *sigh* Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma (all while making his toys dance in time with each syllable)

Thing 2: Leans to his right so that his left butt cheek is off the seat and farts. Then lets out a nice sigh.

So after he cracks one off by way of saying "mama" I think to myself, "Self, I am giving up!" only to see him lean in very seriously, probably having some kind of internal dialog that sounds a bit like this

Seriously, she wants me to say mama but she never lets me play with her phone once I figure out how to turn the stupid thing on ... wait ... holy crap, is she wearing mascara???

And he proceeds to yell at me, in his loudest most projected voice he can:

DAAA!!!

I sincerely hope that since this has now happened twice it is purely coincidence and the child eventually decides to call me something else.  Otherwise, those whiny toddler years which are so often punctuated with "mama? Mama? MAMA!!!" are going to be really gross at our house.

Someone pass me some Mommy Juice please.

words with forking friends

I love Words with Friends. My darling husband and soul mate, sent me a request ages ago, got me hooked like he was some kind of freaking dealer.

He told me the names of everyone we mutually knew that played so I could request games with them. He fed my only slightly obsessive and competitive nature with the dark goodness that is this word wielding game. I was designed for this stuff. Words are my sole weapon. I can beat the crap out of someone verbally, with a smile on my face and walk away while 20 minutes later they finally wonder "Hey, did she mean that as an insult?" This is so my ace in the hole. My shit. My god-given-ass-kickin' talent. It’s all I got. I can't dance, the domestic skills fairy skipped me completely, and really I have no hobbies or skills to speak of that are any use to anyone.

And he knew that.

And then he stopped. He stopped playing me.

Yeah. Go ahead, call him names, I don't mind. I called him those names too. Mine were even more colorful I assure you.

And if that weren't assholey enough, he somehow coerced our mutual friends into abandoning me on the deserted Scrabble-like island.

No one wanted to play with me.

It’s not like I win every game. No it’s not like that. It’s just that if I don't win them all I sort of shut down and speak in tongues for a day or so. I think that is perfectly reasonable. It’s better than my reaction to Monopoly. My oldest child still gets big eyes and says "ohmygosh no my mom doesn't like playing Monopoly, please don’t ask her to play" after that last time ...
My saintly husband claims I cheat. I don't cheat. I want to, but I don't even know how the frickity frack you would cheat with this game (anyone who knows totally pass those goodies on). I don't cheat, I just rock. Recall a paragraph or so ago, this is my thing. I love it.

I am sure somewhere in our vows there was something about not abandoning your soul mate in the midst of an obsession you started. It was right after the “thou shalt give wifey back rubs every night you jerk” vow. He can't remember saying that one either, but clearly of the two of us I am wired for remembering the sappy emotional times in our life better because I have a uterus, therefore I recall our wedding with a great deal more detail and he should just trust me.
But ha ha, I found other friends. Friends who will play with me. Lots of them. And now I am furiously wording them to death. Like a junkie getting her fix.

But if my darling soul mate ever wants to stop being the jerktastic whineybag he has been for the past few months I will play him again. It’s not like I hold grudges or will attack him with a vicious vengeance with every word bearing a high pointed J, X, or Z that I can think of. Nah. Not me. Never. Trust me. I can let bygones be bygones – and I can slam the word bygones on a triple word square and soundly kick his posterior into word-loving-point-bearing-oblivion.