She's not stubborn, she's my daughter

Well, the Boy is pretty much back to normal ("I need more tetcherp. Karpetch. What is this stuff?" "Ketchup." "Yeah, ketchup. I kept trying to say ketchup, but it was not working."), and the Girl is pretty much--very much--TWO.

We went to the park on Saturday--The Dinosaur Park, which is not what it's really called but it's what we call it, this fantastic melee of children and fake fossil-filled climbing walls and a giant stone mammoth right in the middle--and this lovely little 7-year old adopted the Girl. "Can I play with her?" she asked, and of course I said "Hell yes!" Okay, I just said yes, and then sort of followed them around at a safe distance. This girl helped my Girl slide and spin and play hide-and-seek and get into one of the little rocking dinosaurs, then she must have needed a break and ran off to climb the mammoth while the Girl occupied herself. After a few minutes, the Girl realized her idol wasn't attending her anymore, and started to get frustrated trying to climb out of the dinosaur, so I went to help. Boy, good thing toddlers aren't allowed to handle daggers.

"Wheah my guhl?" the Girl demanded. "She's climbing. Do you want some help getting out?" "DON TUSH ME!" Her Majesty spat out, then: "GO HOEM, MOMMY. GOOO HOEM!"

She and the Boy have a new evening game. It's called--I am not making this up--Lick My Face. In which the involved parties chase each other, with the intention of--you guessed it--licking each other's faces. I am either way too cool or way too beaten down because my take on this is, Hey. They're happy, I have 10 minutes to make dinner, no harm no foul. I usually manage to get nearly all the way through the food prep before I hear the game end, and here's how it ends: Someone yells "HEY! LICK MY BOTTOM!" Oh yes, we have rules in this house, people, and the number one rule is that only the cat is allowed to perform any sort of bottom licking and then only on himself. It still ain't pretty, but it's legal.

What else, what else? I went mad with exotic spending and bought a crapload of aromatherapy shite to replace those nasty chemically plugin things, and also a hutch. A hutch! It's cheap, and it's modestly sized, and it will hold all my kitchen appliances. Hallelujah.

List of Things We Didn't Have When I Was Your Age, as explained by me, to the Boy, at dinner:

• VCRs
• DVDs
• CDs
• Microwaves
• Push-button phones
• Home computers
• Gameboys
• IPods

"Oh!" he interjected, really getting into this game, "and HAMBURGERS! You didn't have meat, right?"

Nope, no meat. The dinosaurs kept getting to it first.

Just a question...

Gee, does anyone think that Sid and Marty Krofft might have done some serious drugs? Anyone? Anyone?

This here place needs some spiffin' up

I need to do something with all that boring wasted space in the right column. Book list? Movie list? Anyone know offhand a good way to do that in Blogger? Cause I could look it up, but have you people not figured out that I am L-A-Z-Y?

Speaking of which, off, off, damned computer--I must go get some exercise. I WILL triumph over Self-Defeating Behavior #4:

My.Big.Ass.

Reunion coming up this summer, dontcha know. Plus, I keep hurting random body parts, like my wrist, which is STILL tweaked from shoveling the first time it snowed back in, oh, October? I really do not wish to end up feeling decrepit at the age of 37.

Poetry time!

Ode to Dove Eggs
An Egg is not a Heart, and yet
The chocolate tastes as good, I'll bet.
And like the Heart, the Egg, I'm sure
Knows places where it can endure.
On ass, on thigh, on poochy tum,
On every part (except my thumb).
"No more! Go jogging!" Good Sense begs--
Oh, what the hell, just one more Egg.

Crying a little

Exactly.

When I come around

I promise to go the Jo(e) route--I love your list, Joe(e)--and do some explainin' about some of the meme items. Maybe tonight; today I'm taking a mental/intestinal (we won't go there, will we? Oh no, we will not) health break during which I will drink a lot of the acidophilus powder that the Acupuncturist gave me (look! She's been Upgraded to Title Case!), work on my f-ity-f laptop, and try to find answers to the following questions:

• Medically induced childhood mania--will my poor baby ever stop talking long enough to breathe? And how long should I give the doctor to call me back before I Completely Freak Out?
• What to do when your school district comes right out and tells you that they're going to rezone your neighborhood whenever they darned well feel like it (and they've felt like it 4 times in the past 5 years)?
• Bacon? Or bacon?
• Will I ever learn to quit procrastinating? (well, maybe I'll think about that one tomorrow)
• Does anyone still have Dove Hearts on clearance?
• Am I the only person who checks my email obsessively, praying for a crumb? A little crumb? As though I live in the backwoods with no one to talk to (which I don't)?
• Dear God in Heaven, will I never get laid AGAIN????????

Until then, talk amongst yourselves, please.

I know! I know! Shut up.

Well, who can resist this, though? Via Profgrrrrl, Jo(e), P/H, and Frog:
Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't

1. Been an illegal alien
2. Given birth, sans drugs, in less than 3 hours
3. Attended a "naked party"
4. Married a guy I met in a Lambada bar (well, doesn't that explain a lot?)
5. Had a modeling contract
6. Had premonitions
7. Gotten drunk on Dom Perinion
8. Taken ski lessons in the Alps from a guy named Jacques
9. Dated someone who ended up making porn movies
10. Had dinner at the Reform Club in London

Tonight, as I was putting him to bed, the boy looked at me and said, "Hey...what's that? You have sparkles in your eyes! What are those sparkles? Oh, I know those sparkles--those are love sparkles, that sparkle because you have so much loooove." Oh boy...

Please stop me(me) now

Found at Cheeky Prof's, and not so shocking that y'all will disown me; bold statements ARE true (i.e, I have not done those things).

I’ve Never Kissed A Member Of The Opposite Sex
I’ve Never Kissed A Member Of The Same Sex
I’ve Never Crashed A Friend’s Car
I’ve Never Been To Japan
I’ve Never Been In A Taxi
I’ve Never Been In Love
I’ve Never Had Sex In Public
I’ve Never Been Dumped
I’ve Never Done Cocaine
I’ve Never Shoplifted
I’ve Never Been Fired (laid off, yes; fired, no)
I’ve Never Been In A Fist Fight
I’ve Never Had Group Intercourse
I’ve Never Snuck Out Of My Parent’s House
I’ve Never Been Tied Up
I’ve Never Regretted Having Sex With Someone
I’ve Never Been Arrested
I’ve Never Made Out With A Stranger
I’ve Never Stolen Something From My Job (ok, I waffled here, but I'm with CP, office supplies probably count)
I’ve Never Celebrated New Years In Time Square
I’ve Never Gone On A Blind Date
I’ve Never Lied To A Friend
I’ve Never Had A Crush On A Teacher
I’ve Never Celebrated Mardi Gras In New Orleans
I’ve Never Been To Europe
I’ve Never Skipped School
I’ve Never Slept With A Co-Worker
I’ve Never Cut Myself On Purpose
I’ve Never Had Sex At The Office
I’ve Never Been Married
I’ve Never Been Divorced
I’ve Never Had Sex With More Than One Person Within The Same Week
I’ve Never Posed Nude (I assume we mean professionally? Let's hope so.)
I’ve Never Gotten Someone Drunk Just To Have Sex With Them
I’ve Never Killed Anyone
I’ve Never Received Scars From My Sex Partner
I’ve Never Thrown Up In A Bar
I’ve Never Purposely Set A Part Of Myself On Fire
I’ve Never Eaten Sushi
I’ve Never Been Snowboarding
I’ve Never Had Sex At A Friend’s House While They Were Throwing A Party
I’ve Never Had Sex In A Dressing Room
I’ve Never Flashed Anyone
I’ve Never Met Anyone From Online

Although, geez, now I look at it, I feel awfully boring. And please stop me from doing more of these dang memes.

Geeky Friday at SBFH

I am slightly alarmed by how exciting I found this randomly located post. My God! I just want to go around subtracting things. Honestly, I'm not being sarcastic, I really do. Austrian method, where have you been all my life?

Furthermore, I think the sentence meme would be more entertaining if I added the previous player's sentence. As I commented to GM, my poor little sentence all by itself sounds geeky, but when I add hers:

"Or find a way to make it more pleasant. Training with a megabyte each of spam and non-spam seems quite sufficient."

Now that almost sounds kinda kinky! Goodie!

Okay, okay, I'll do the damned meme already

Might as well...via Geeky Mom (among others):
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

"Training with a megabyte each of spam and non-spam seems quite sufficient."

Aren't you glad I don't do memes?

VITriol, anyone?

To go off an entirely different tangent from what I usually blab about...
Interesting...to me at least...is the response to this new "corporate" blog. This is an interesting situation. It's a technical publication with primarily technical content, including several very technical blogs--and this blog. I'm assuming the primary readership of this site is male. Is that sexist of me? Uh...no. I can pretty much guarantee the primary readership is male. But that might be sort of tangential...is this blog getting slammed because 1) it's a "editorial" style blog on a technical site, 2) it's a "feminist" style blog on a male-dominated site, 3) it's being force-fed to people who subscribe to the site's RSS feed purely to get technical info, 4) it's too "personal" to be on a "corporate" site, 5) the author doesn't seem particularly technical herself, and so far hasn't really written about specifically applicable examples from a tech worker standpoint, 5) other? Looking at the comments, there already seems to be a sort of pro/con dynamic going on...Hmmm.
I can say right off I don't like the blog format, and the site itself--ugh. Usability, anyone? But the content...the content I'm not sure about. I don't know, the whole thing just muddles me.

Got your vanilla, full-caf, slippery qi here

So the acupuncturist is flummoxed by my "slippery qi". Yep, you heard me right--slippery qi. Now that there's some sexy!

And so I found myself being spoken to, sternly, about the necessity of taking all my herbs, dammit (except the acupuncturist doesn't say "dammit", she just gives me the patented Disappointed Alternative Healer look) and--worst of all!--deprived of Yellow Blankie. Bummer. Instead, I got poked in the back this time, meaning not only no Blankie, but I had to get nekked from the waist up and lie face down with my head in one of those funky massage-bed head-holding thingies. Not to get too technical.

Well, I thought to myself, look on the bright side. I usually can't really fall asleep because she has me flat on my back and I end up starting to snore (yes, I'm my own Gramma) and wake myself up. No snoring with my head in a yoke like this! Snoozies all around!

So there I was, in the nice little room with the nice little candles and the little CD player playing little chanty-shmanty music, and I'd dropped off into a nice peaceful slumber, when something sort of intruded on the edge of consciousness. A voice...far off, and yet...awfully...rednecky.

What's that? my brain sort of thought about thinking, Something about a horse? There's a tack shop next door. That sounds like a radio. Does she have a repairperson in another room? And why does Hugh Jackman still have his clothes on, dammit? When suddenly, directly behind me, a voice blared out:

BLAYECK STALLION! COMIN' THROUGH TOWN, Y'ALL, AH'M ON THE RODE NOW, INEEBODEE GOT A WERD FER BLAAAAAAYECK STAAAALLION?!

Have you ever seen a half-naked pincushion scream and levitate 3" off of a massage table? Well.
Somehow, the CD player picked up some CB transmission from the highway. And she thought my qi was slippery before.

In which my vocabulary earns its keep

The Boy, upon being splurted by his yogurt while opening it:
"I'm being assaulted by yogurt!!"

And so it begins...

Metaphysically speaking, I'm digging my own grave here by even acknowledging this, but...
Remember my silly little childhood qualms about inanimate objects? Well, tonight, the Girl's bedtime was severely disrupted by the fact that she is now afraid of her nightlight. Her boring, clear plastic, light-sensitive $3 nightlight. Uh-huh.

G: Lighut scare me!
Me: What scares you?
G: [pointing] Lighut!
Me: Your light? Your nightlight?
G: [nodding] Lighut see me! Lighut lookin...it see me!
Me: Your. Light. Sees. You.
G: Ye-ah...
Me: Sweetie? It's. A. Light.

[Turn on lamp. Take G to nightlight. Pull out nightlight. Hand it to G.]

Me: See? Just a silly ol' light.
G: Uh-huh.
Me: You ok now?
G: Uh-huh.
Me: Okay.

[Put light back in. Turn off lamp. Take G back to bed.]

G: LIGHUT SEE MEEEEE!!!
Me: [AGHGHGHH!]

Forget wanting to have only one kid at a time in diapers. I'll take having only one kid at a time in therapy, thankyouverymuch.

I didn't say it!

So, the Ex said that the Boy was having sort of a hard time this afternoon. After some discussion and calming down, this conversation (which, btw, the Ex handled with a good sense of humor) ensued:

The Boy: So, this is why I'm going to start taking some medicine.
The Ex: Yes. How do you feel about that, buddy?
B: Pretty good.
E: Do you understand what the medicine is for?
B: Yes, it's to help my brain get the chemicals it needs, so I can make better choices.
E: That's right.
B: You need some of that medicine, Papa!
E: Buddy, I already take lots of medicine for that sort of thing.
B: Oh. Well, it's not working.

First the pear jam, and now this. Sigh.

Bad Mother has decided to leave us and go legit (as if she wasn't already--I just meant with the bloggish stuff) over at Salon. Catch her there.
(And no, I can't believe I just said "leave us". Where the Hades did that come from? I would say I need to get out more, but we know what happens when I go out.)

Coolio

Thanks to Profgrrrrl for pointing me to Julie's brilliance. Have I done it correctly?
I have! Yay, me. Well, no, yay Julie.

Go home now!

Not quite to the Divine part

[I just wanted to say thank you to those of you who have listened (in RL and here) to me gripe and sent me good vibes. I feel like Blanche DuBois, only more sober and with less of an accent. And without the creepy brother-in-law.]

Self-defeating habit #3: Death grip

So I've been thinking about forgiveness. It has some nasty connotations, that word. As in

I forgive you
because I am good, you are bad, and you need me to forgive you. Go on, admit it. Admit it, damn you!
I forgive you
because otherwise I will be bad, we must forgive, must must must must go ahead, do it again.
I forgive you
but don't worry, I'll find some way to make you pay, probably by being a complete Betty to you for the next 10 years.
I forgive you
but not really.

Well.
But then there's the definition of forgiveness that I've seen Anne Lamott (among others) write about:

Forgiveness is giving up the wish that things had been different.

I wish that The Boy's teacher understood how to encourage him instead of be frustrated by him.
I wish that The Boy didn't have ADHD.
I wish that the Ex was well. I wish he had made different choices. I wish I had made different choices in our relationship. I wish we had been able to love each other in a way that would have turned out differently.
I wish that my father had made different choices. I wish that my mother's second husband hadn't been deranged.
I wish that I hadn't hated myself for as long as I did.
I wish that my kids didn't have to grow up in a split family. I wish they didn't have to deal with emotional illness.

These are lovely wishes. I'm very attached to them. I've nurtured some of them from tiny little wisps of wishes into huge towering blinding flames of wishes. I don't want to let them go. But they're hanging on around my neck and they're dragging me down to the bottom.

I think I'll let them go. I think I'll swim. Who knows, I might even decide to fly.

Go home now!

Ohhhh baby!

Squirrel's Nest is open again! Joy, joy, joy. Time to get my Easter candy on...
Honestly, the stuff they sell is really wonderful and pretty darned inexpensive all things considered. They take a break in January and I'm almost out of Pear Jam! mmmmm.

What have you learned, Dorothy?

All righty, then.
Self defeating behavior #1: Overreacting! to! every! little! thing!
Self defeating behavior #2: Stress drinking as opposed to, say, stress cleaning or stress working or wow, maybe stress meditating?

So that's a pretty good start down the path to self realization, wouldn't you say? Don't worry, it'll take more than that to defeat my Lenten goal. No one hangs onto a Catholic ritual like a Methodist girl with Buddhist leanings who practices metaphysics, likes the way the Episcopalians think, drinks like a Lutheran, and has that Jewish mother-guilt thing going on.

Haha God, Veeeeery funny

Warning: Drunken blogging ahead. (Wow, I almost typed "Blunken Drogging". Uhhhh, yeah.)

So. Day 1 of Lent. I'm giving up self-defeat, remember? Which I would describe, in my case, as all the crap which lends itself to my Drama Queen persona--drinking, over-analyzing, worrying, blah blah blah.

I (stupidly. STUPIDLY!) agreed to go out tonight with a friend from work (whom I briefly considered dating just after my divorce) and his fiance, her brother, and assorted others. Now, I know I don't have anything in common with these folks, all said and done. But I like my friend, and his future brother-in-law is doing me a favor by appraising something material for me, so sure, I can take an hour to have dinner at a restaurant 2 blocks from my house. I'll meet them there after I drop off the kids, I'll have a bite to eat, I'll come home after an hour, all done.

I'm very uncomfortable as the evening begins because at heart, I'm pretty anitsocial in situations like these. I love to go out with my friends, I love to meet new people, but I wasn't all that into being here. Plus, we have to wait for a table (it's Kids Eat Free night), I'm stressed cause I have a lot to do at home. So, okay, I'll have one drink while we wait for the table.

Then they finally show us to our table. As we walk to it, I make eye contact with the woman in the booth directly across from it. Who happens to be...

(you knew this was coming)

The Woman Whom My Husband Fucked And Then Left Me For.

Wow. What a fun night this has turned out to be. I can drink 5 vodkas in an hour on an empty stomach. Who knew?? Wheeeeee.

Is this God's way of telling me not to be a pretend Catholic? Hmmm. Maybe I'll just go for something simple next year, like not sticking red hot needles in my eyes. THAT I bet I can do. Fuck me very much. G'night.
Go home now!

Give it up

For lent, I'm giving up self-defeating behaviors. And I'm not even Catholic!

Or maybe it's this

There was a day not long ago when I sat down mid-staircase and wept because a thought came into my head, and I knew it to be true:

I am disappointed in my son. I am disappointed by him.

This thought slapped me upside the heart. How could I possibly feel this way about my baby, who is truly such a blessed and wondrous creature, whom I love with all my life, who takes my hand while we're walking and says, "I like to help people," who is healthy and smart and sweet and whose only problem is a fairly manageable behavior disorder?

And I thought, it's because I'm just this woman who once was this girl who thought things would turn out differently. That she'd meet the love of her life and do the right things and avoid the mistakes her mother had made, and she'd have her family and she would keep them safe and happy and not at all screwed up like she had been. But they didn't, and I couldn't, and I can't. I know how fortunate I am. I can see how really simple the solutions are. I don't have to agonize over the fact that I married a man who didn't exist outside of my determination. I don't have to blame myself for the Boy's sadness; I can step back and look behind me at every signpost that has been lining the road for the past 3 years and accept that he has ADHD and that medication will help him. I can stop trying to see how much guilt I can slather on myself by feeling like I absolutely must solve every problem because every problem is the result of my mistakes. I can stop agonizing over the fact that I am an ungrateful wretch who doesn't appreciate all she has and has the gall to be disappointed over something so treatable. It really requires such a little thing--to say, I accept these things. I accept them, and so I can see past them. I can see that I truly have everything I need and more. And that I'm worthy of it, despite being a human being who messes up and has unworthy thoughts and worries and fears. But oh, it's hard, it's so, so hard.

I'm struck by how many people out here seem to be feeling some version of this. One woman who finally was able to have children (twins) after blogging about her long efforts now feels horribly selfish and alone because, how can she admit that she is exhausted and frightened and everything else a new mother would feel--because she fought so hard to have these babies. That just breaks my heart. Why are we so hard on one another? And I'm not just talking about the trolls who write horrible nasty things to these amazing men and women I'm growing to know and like and sometimes even adore. Half the time I'm so judgmental I should carry around a jury. My judgment just looks different. I won't insult you or call down curses from an angry god--I'll just figure you aren't the kind of person who would "get" me. You probably think I'm a failure as a wife, a mother, an educated woman, whatever. Not that I'll ever give you the chance to prove me wrong.

Dr. B. is writing about paralyzing malaise. It's so easy to become frozen; only by looking at the one small thing we can do in our own small lives, one day at a time, can we overcome that paralysis, I think. We were talking politics, but it's true of everything. We visited the psychiatrist yesterday. I felt like I was walking the Boy to the executioner, but I pray that instead we'll be setting him free. I don't have all the answers and this may not be the right thing to do. But it's one thing to do. It's time to do it. Why can't I accept that it might be this easy, that it might not be my fault?

I decided to start taking the kids out to the park whenever the weather permits, which means whenever it isn't cold enough for frostbite. I dreaded it--the time I knew it would take to bundle them up like those kids in "A Christmas Story" and pack snacks and diapers and drinks and the Epipen and get back in the car and drive to the park and worry about whether the Boy is going to play nicely if other kids are there. Half the time we don't get there until 1/2 hour before the sun goes down, or I've forgotten the gloves, or something, and it's cold and there's half-melted snow in patches all over the ground and the grass is covered in goose crap and my god, did I mention that it's cold, and then they don't want to leave. But the funny thing is, I stand there losing the feeling in my fingers and stomping around trying to keep the Girl from flinging herself off the jungle gym and pushing the Boy underdog and my eyes are watering and the sun is going down and I can smell wood fires and the geese are flying overhead--sometimes the sky seems filled with them--and I think, my God, I have it so good. I am so, so, so blessed, and we're all going to be okay. And I can just let all this crap go, I can just be happy in the middle of this cold, forsaken month.
Go home now!

Not even a title

Strange...people are blogging sporadically, the Angst is spreading, is it sun flares? February? I think of a thousand things I want to say but they've all flown right out of my head. Perhaps tomorrow.

In the Navy...

I swear that I don't swear as much in person as one might think from reading around here this past weekend. I'm honestly just Miss Merry Ray of Sunshine, and cusswords never touch my virgin lips. Really. Truly! I just wanted you to feel better in case, you know, you were a sailor or something.

Laundry: done, not folded
Work: caught up, but on the brink of being sooooo behind
Everything else: appt. made with ped. psych. for Thursday. Sigh. Wish us luck.

I'm not feeling very bloggy. I'm going to do everyone a favor and simmer down quietly, over here in the corner. The one that doesn't have the pile of laundry in it.