not that you asked...

Reason 4,300 Why I Hate My Kitchen

Series Premiere located here. This particular episode also known as: WHAT ELSE IS LIVING IN THAT ONE ODDLY-SHAPED CABINET OVER THE OVEN?

Prior offenders included spider crickets and massive, suburban-stay-at-home-mom-eating spiders. But now! New feature for December! FIELD MICE!

Dave opened up the cabinet yesterday afternoon and found three of them huddled around a six-pack of whole wheat hamburger buns, chewing away happily. I am conflicted about the rest of the story, the part where two of them met their demise at the bare hands of my masculine, beastly husband. Well, one of them met his demise, at least. The other one could quite possibly still be running around the bottom of the outdoor trash can, gorging himself on dirty diapers and wrapping paper. DAVE ISN’T SURE. And one of them, the strong one, the quick thinker if you will, ran off into the woods.

However! Lest you go on thinking that the one that ran off was ultimately the SMARTEST of the three, I’ll have you know that this afternoon we discovered that he had returned to the scene of the crime, this time gnawing his way through a loaf of bread. Not Dave’s bread, though. A loaf of MY BREAD, my 100% Whole Grain Safeway-Brand Bread, the bread that I eat two slices of every single morning WITHOUT FAIL.

I felt bad about those mouse death(s) yesterday but today… not so much. You mess with my bread—MY BREAKFAST—and I take it personally. I have been angered. I have been VIOLATED. I am heading out to Target at the crack of dawn tomorrow to arm myself with 85 different varieties of mousetraps. And also various bleach products, because mice are disgusting, impolite creatures who defecate while they stuff their little adorable faces with stolen baked goods.

I doubt I will be any less angry tomorrow when I wake up either, once I get downstairs and realize that I am going to have to eat some stupid EGG for breakfast instead of my delicious, hot, crunchy, buttery toast. I may dry heave over the sink with displeasure, this is how great my love of A Predictable Breakfast is.

Right now, though, I am trying to decide which scenario is worse: discovering a mouse alive, inside my cabinet, peacefully eating his way through our family carbohydrates or discovering a mouse dead inside a mouse trap, right NEXT to our family carbohydrates. I AM TORN.

Last week we came up with a plan for renovating our kitchen this year, as you now may suspect, just in the freaking nick of time. Our kitchen was built in 1978, by a crack team of Corner Cutters, as Dave discovered when he removed the range hood to see if he could figure out how the mice got in and discovered that there was nothing behind it but a giant hole in the wall. Not even any drywall, just one big open breezy giant rat hole. Why we haven’t been absolutely plagued by rodents before this, I’ll never know. What I do know is that I cannot continue to live like this much longer. I know that must sound so spoiled and self-centered, after all, I HAVE a kitchen, albeit one with crappy cabinets and gouged countertops (perfect for bacteria!) and an ice maker that leaks and is creating a lovely display of Shenandoah Caverns-worthy stalactites.

BUT THE END, IT IS NEAR. I will have my kitchen. I will have it SOON. I will probably have some mice to thank for it, too. Perhaps I will even feel mildly remorseful about their untimely deaths. Perhaps.

In the meantime, however, I am going to drive my husband absolutely crazy redecorating our bedroom. Because that’s what he promised me I could do for my Big Thirtieth Birthday next month and I have spent the last two weeks thinking about color schemes and what I think would work best for what will eventually become our bedroom-slash-home office whenever Baby Number Two becomes a reality. What do you think about soft yellow and slate gray? I think modern, edgy, and soothing. All Dave thinks about is what a bitch it’s going to be to prime and paint yellow over blood red walls.

Send chocolate. And earplugs.

This last month has been challenging. I almost want to say something about how I wish it was already over, or that January can't come fast enough, but two things are making this difficult for me: 1) if December ends now, I WON'T HAVE GOTTEN ANY PRESENTS, and 2) all January consists of is the last 21 days of my 20s and the first ten of my THIRTIES. My thirties!

It occurs to me that perhaps I should be wishing for February instead. Except... wait. February = STILL THIRTY. And therefore, even closer to forty. Aaaaaaand discussion of this topic will cease immediately, before I start to panic and sweat through my pajamas at the thought.

I can say one nice thing about this month: I have gotten a couple of unexpected freelance jobs that will help to dig us out of Christmas debt. Unfortunately, I agreed to one of them before discerning the true nature of the job, therefore, tomorrow morning starting at 8:30am, I will be on a three-and-a-half hour phone call with two Mexican men and a translator, because I don't speak a lick of Spanish. Don't you think I should be able to charge extra for being subjected to the trauma that is translation over the phone? Maybe I should be kicking myself for always switching Asher's bilingual toys back to English. Regardless, it is going to be the longest three hours of my life, I suspect.

Wait, no. I take that back. That esteemed title belongs to "Days When Asher Only Takes One Nap," which he is not so good at doing. Despite what numerous moms have sworn to me, Asher is not one of those kids who takes one nap that is as long as the two naps he used to take. Nope, instead he is up after an hour, an hour and a half, TOPS, and this wouldn't be so bad except that lately he is All Whine, All The Time. The "h" is very important in that phrase; I am willing to bet that All Wine, All The Time would be rather pleasant.

The whining has gotten so bad that Asher is actually guilty of Pre-emptive Whining. If you can believe this, he actually starts whining before anything remotely unpleasant or not to his liking has happened. For example, he has this little Chicco driving toy, which you can see, there on the left, has a key on a string and a place to insert the key for a lifelike ignition sound. When we first got the toy, he couldn't get the key in to the slot, and after a few frustrating tries, requested that we do it for him. We did so happily, fully expecting him to catch on in time. Now, though, the moment he touches that stupid key, before he makes ANY ATTEMPT to try to do it himself, he is already expressing his indignation that someone has not anticipated his needs and done it for him. It is BEYOND ANNOYING.

Also the car these days is no longer a car, but a big metal torture device that we're putting him in not because we need to go out and do things, like, oh, I don't know, buy food so we can LIVE, but because we think its funny when he screams. There is no toy in the world that can keep him occupied in the car for longer than sixty seconds before it ends up on the floor, preferably behind my seat where I can't possibly reach it, with the switch set to ON, which we all know in Baby Toy World, means Playing The Same Damn Song Over and Over and Over at a Decibel Level Usually Reserved for Fighter Jets and Nuclear Explosions. Playing Baby Tiger does work, but I'm sorry, I just cannot justify the use of the DVD player for trips around town. This is personal preference, of course, and part of that preference, I confess, is due to the fact that a pint-sized tyrant follows me around the house all day long shoving that DVD case at me and demanding to watch it, and when I finally say YES, FINE, WE WILL WATCH BABY TIGER IF YOU WILL STOP WITH THE YELLING AND THE SHOVING, do you know what he does? He giggles, and then he goes over to the TV and turns it on. And then he turns on the stereo. Because we have to have the Auburn University Marching Band at full volume, or he will be angry. The car is the only place I can escape from this hellish living nightmare.

There are still good things. I would be an awful awful person if I let you go on believing that my life consists of bad freelance phone calls and a cranky toddler. For starters, I have a new chicken enchilada recipe that ROCKS, as well as burns the skin off your lips. I made homemade brownies for the first time in my life and they were completely edible. I was asked to extend my Parents gig for another full year. Our Christmas shopping is almost finished and we haven’t had ONE ARGUMENT about it. I’ve only gotten three addresses wrong on my Christmas cards. Dave and I are getting along so much better than we did in November, which will hereby be referred to as The Deadly Hormonal Downward Spiral Month. And the boy continually makes me smile, regardless of his penchant for low-budget Baby Einstein rip-offs.

 

Maybe I can hold out for the end of December after all. MAYBE, I said. But there is going to have to be a lot more chocolate to get me there.

I'm such a downer

Friday night I babysat for my niece while my brother and sister-in-law went to some big fancy party at some big fancy mansion wearing their fancy holiday attire. The kid was already in bed when I got there, so all I really had to do was watch some bad Friday night TV, eat a turkey sandwich and reinsert a pacifier whenever a certain seven-month-old requested it.

Oh, yes. And also stew in a fetid pool of my own jealousy.

(Side note: I just typed “fetid” without knowing AT ALL what it really means. But then I looked it up and do you know what? I think it works.)

This year has majorly sucked in the Festive category. We had tickets to the lighting of the National Christmas Tree and had to skip it because Asher was sick. Crappy weather kept us from spending a fun afternoon cutting down our own Christmas tree (we plodded through a muddy lot near our house instead). Then Dave had to take a last-minute business trip to Miami that prevented us from attending the annual Christmas concert at his parents’ church (his dad sings in the choir) as well as our Bible study dinner and White Elephant gift swap. And Dave’s office doesn’t throw any type of holiday shindig, which is extra extra sad, because work parties usually have lots of free wine. (Well, and also sad because they aren’t making it up to us with a big fat year-end bonus check.)

Perhaps the most depressing part of this situation is the fact that every single clothing store has roughly 16,000 racks devoted to spangly, sparkly eveningwear and approximately three shelves of turtleneck sweaters. THIS SADDENS ME. I want to wear something cute and fancy! I want to accessorize with dangly earrings and bedazzled footwear! I want to buy something sleeveless and impractical so I can freeze to death in the middle of December! I WILL EVEN WEAR HOSE!

Unfortunately, NO ONE IS TAKING ME ANYWHERE THIS YEAR.

I had myself a good pout about this when I got home on Friday night. It made Dave very angry; not because it was stupid to be upset about something so trivial and dumb, but because I refused to talk to him about it. Mostly because I didn’t want to come off sounding so… well, trivial and dumb.

But I just think about how I felt last year at this time, wearing jeans to church on Christmas Eve because I had nothing else that fit or looked even remotely attractive, and now this year I feel confident and secure as well as absolutely DESPERATE to throw my credit card at someone if they’ll wrap this up in tissue paper for me to take home and wear out somewhere nice. Except it is just not meant to be.

Anyway, I finally confessed to Dave that it didn’t feel very Christmasy in our house, although I didn’t say anything about it being in any way related to satin sheath dresses (SHALLOW), so he took our family out for a little drive the other night to look at Christmas lights instead. We saw gaudy inflatable snowmen and flashing NOEL signs and one house that seriously HURT MY EYES. I know LEDs are now the trend for Christmas lights, but I don’t think they’re particularly wise if you’re going to cover your ENTIRE MANSION with them.

I felt better after that. You know, the whole real spirit of Christmas blah blah blah thing and all. Except that then I tried to make this awesome mix CD of Christmas music for the car yesterday (I cannot tolerate the all-Christmas station if all they’re going to play is Mariah Carey and Gloria Estefan and THE CHRISTMAS SHOES, shoot me) and iTunes denied me and gave me some craptastic error message.

As you may have suspected, today I’m back to inventing reasons why I need a silver cocktail dress.

Now that I think about it, this post has a lot of disgusting stuff in it

So I don’t know if you’re keeping up with me at Parents.com, but if you aren’t, today would be a good day to catch up, what with all the bleeding and trauma and panic and also STITCHING TOGETHER OF MY CHILD’S HEAD that occurred on Monday. It was pretty awful. Well, for us, at least. Asher, on the other hand, has not even the vaguest notion there are two fierce-looking knots of black thread holding his eyebrow together. I mean, yes, he had a notion that something was going on when his very own parents helped a doctor strap him to a papoose board and administer an injection into his open wound before sewing him back together, but he seems to have forgotten it, perhaps because I have been continuously feeding him M&Ms out of pity for the last 24 hours. A diet consisting solely of chocolate could make me forget damn near ANYTHING these days.

After some discussion on Monday night about whether we actually needed to take him anywhere for medical attention, we ended up at an urgent care center instead of the hospital emergency room. I actually had taken Dave to this urgent care center a few months after we were first married, when he had come down with some horrible version of the norovirus and had been throwing up for six straight hours and couldn’t muster the strength to get himself up off the bathroom floor.

That trip was an experience in itself. Dave was severely dehydrated and also COMPLETELY INSANE because of it. When they had shown us to our little curtained room, he thrashed so wildly on the bed that eventually the sheets just fell off of it, and his legs were completely hanging off the end and he was so disoriented that he was yelling, “Someone get in here and effing HELP ME,” even though a nurse had been with us not three minutes prior. Also he did not say “effing,” he said THE ACTUAL, REAL F-WORD, which is very, very unlike him, even though yelling at nurses… probably not so much.

And the reason I’m telling you this is because when they took us back to a little curtained room for Asher on Monday night, they referred to it as the “stitches room,” and I remembered how, when Dave was thrashing about like the dehydrated lunatic that he was, there had been a boy in the stitches room who was—ahem—having his tongue reattached because he had BITTEN THROUGH IT.

Also just because I am remembering it and I found it so humorous at the time, when Dave was ill the nurse had given me a bedpan for him to use, and he used it, and it was gross, and so I helped myself to a new bedpan for his next barf attack, as a courtesy to both of us. But then the nurse came back in, and saw the new, shiny, clean bedpan and said to me, “He can use it more than once you know,” and gave me a dirty look. Which, I don’t know, seemed kind of awful and cruel—because when you’re throwing up? I’m pretty sure one of the worst things ever is looking at the LAST bunch of stuff you threw up. This is why people who have the luxury of throwing up in a toilet FLUSH IT when they’re done; before they crawl back to bed. Right? RIGHT? Evil nurse. Also, what do bedpans cost, like $.03 each? Something like that? MY HUSBAND IS TOTALLY WORTH THREE CENTS.

The other interesting thing about this particular urgent care center is that it is the EXACT SAME PLACE that my husband’s mother would take him when he was young and needed stitches. In fact, when they strapped Asher onto the papoose board, the nurse made a mention of the fact that the board had been there since the facility was opened 30 years ago and that they had never had to replace it. This means that when Dave was brought to the stitches room as a kid, that exact same board had been hanging there on the wall. Frankly? It was a little bit mind-blowing to think about. My only hope is that Asher doesn’t have to have stitches as often as Dave did, which is something in the neighborhood of eight times. It got to the point where he never went back to get them taken out—his mom just did it for him at home.

This is something that I will never do. Because stitches totally ick me out. I don’t particularly like looking at them, and I’m not usually a very squeamish person. I watch the Discovery Health Channel WHILE EATING DINNER. I have an iron gut! But the stitches… no thanks. And touching them? DOUBLE NO THANKS. And you can guess how I would feel about pulling them out of someone’s head. It is hard enough dabbing antibacterial ointment on them twice a day.

And I don’t know how to wrap this up except to give you a few more updates: I have not bought a diaper bag yet for two reasons, 1) awaiting windfall of money (in form of winning the HGTV Dream House… er, Dream Home as I see we’re calling it this year) and 2) am taking a girls’ shopping trip after Christmas and am hoping to find something more original and fabulous then. Matt Damon went back to Netflix (sorry, DaisyCake!) and this came in its place and I LOVED IT. I admit to being rather biased, as I have a bit of a thing for Keri Russell (being as she was one of my childhood heroes on the Mickey Mouse Club and my college heroes as Felicity) but even Dave found it enjoyable, and Dave’s favorite movie is this, so make of that what you will. Am I forgetting anything?

Complaining. Kind of a lot.

It snowed here on Wednesday, which was nice and festive and pretty and all, but then turned into major suckage when I figured out that in order to go anywhere, I was going to have to take charge of clearing off the car and deicing it by myself. Except that I have this little toddling shadow glued to me, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him while I worked. I obviously couldn’t leave him inside the house (I’d have found him dead of happiness from being left to turn the TV on and off as many times as his little heart desired), nor could I bring him outside with me as it was 28 degrees out and he still owns nothing in the way of protective snow attire, WHY DID I EVER BELIEVE YOU ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING, AL GORE? I suppose I could have waited until he napped, but that would have been a real bust because HE NEVER DID. Also! He’s sick! And teething! And waking up like eighteen times a night!

So we just stayed in. Forty-eight long, drawn-out hours of togetherness. In a house the size of a matchbox. For those of you wondering, the end result looks something like this:



I assure you that I looked no better. This morning I took my first shower in three entire days.

Then yesterday morning, Dave had to drive down to Virginia Beach for a meeting, a trip that takes between six and seven hours round trip. He left the house around six a.m. (I know this because I was AWAKE and wrangling an angry non-sleeping toddler who had already been up for forty minutes) and called us around eight: his car window had rolled all the way down and had stuck there—it was broken. He was driving 65 miles an hour on the highway in sub-freezing weather with his WINDOW DOWN. And he had to come home that way, too.

Thankfully, he had taken his heavy coat with him as well as a spare pair of gloves, but when he got home it took him a couple of hours to get warm again. And the process to get him there required every last drop of water in the hot water heater.

I don’t know which scenario is worse, frankly: two solid days of a snotty, whining toddler who wants to watch Baby Tiger 6,000 times in a row and feeds all his crackers to an already overweight dog and then throws your hairbrush in the toilet or seven hours of driving in 30-degree weather, in what might as well be a convertible.

Actually, this question is really no contest to anyone who has a toddler and realizes that seven hours in a car, ALL ALONE, with the ability to decide for yourself exactly when you’ll eat or go to the bathroom and without the threat of being hit with toys someone hurled at the back of your head IS THE CLEAR WINNER.

Here’s the thing that’s weirdest to me though: it never crossed Dave’s mind to stop somewhere and buy a couple of cheap blankets or a hat or some footwarmers or something to make the ride a teeny bit more bearable. When I asked him why he hadn’t done this, he said—clearly exasperated— “You can’t drive with a BLANKET over you!” This confused me because, WHY NOT, EXACTLY? I wasn’t asking him to bind his legs together with it or anything.

His reasoning for not stopping somewhere was that getting off onto an exit ramp and looking for a retail establishment would just extend the amount of time he had to sit inside the car with the window down. I don’t get that at all, so I am wondering if this is one of those man/woman things. He was all fixated on making good time and spending as little of it as he could in the car no matter the circumstances. I, on the other hand, would have been thinking more about staying as comfortable as possible no matter how much time it took me to get somewhere. I would probably have driven 15 miles an hour on the way home if it had meant I wouldn’t have had blue hands and feet when I got there.

Anyway, so happy holidays to us, who have to spend God knows how much money to get a window fixed on our crap car, the one currently parked right smack dab in front of our house with a big black trash bag duct-taped over the window. HOW DEPRESSING. The only thing worse would be if all we had to do tonight was watch Matt Damon.

BUT WE ALREADY SENT IT BACK. Without watching. That's one burden lifted, at least.

A lazy Wednesday for everyone but my uterus who is totally pulling overtime

First things first!



SNOW! SnowsnowsnowsnowsnowSNOW SNOOOOOOWWWW!



And also! Ads for television shows are now appearing on my deli Honey Ham! Jimmy Smits is watching me intently each and every time I eat a sandwich! THIS IS VERY VERY WRONG ON ALL KINDS OF LEVELS, perhaps most disturbingly that Jimmy’s co-star—the one all cozied up to him on that picture, the picture stuck to the plastic bag that contains DELI HAM, lest you forget—has probably never eaten a sandwich in her entire life.

On to the more important things. I failed to understand that a raging case of PMS last week would be the precursor to the worst period I can remember having in all my fertile days, and I started having Fertile Lady Cycles at the tender age of ELEVEN. I did a little Googling and found that it is reportedly common for the first period following a miscarriage to be a doozy but what I did not expect

[IMPORTANT SAFETY ALERT: If you are squeamish, or a man, or one of my relatives, specifically one of my squeamish male relatives who is at risk of passing out on his keyboard while reading anything mildly icky, I highly recommend doing something other than continue to read this post. I hope you got a laugh out of the ham situation up there, but now I think you should go somewhere manly, like here or here or here, and leave me be to discuss some things with the ladies for a few moments.]

was to ruin two pairs of pants in the course of three hours due to its heavy qualities. That’s not two pairs of underwear, people; TWO PAIRS OF PANTS. It was awful and Dave was out with friends and I waited up for him until almost midnight (UNHEARD OF) because I was too scared to go to bed where I would lie horizontal and also mostly unconscious for seven or eight hours and therefore risk ruining our mattress. And do you know what is worse than ruining your mattress? Taking it to the dump with a big old bloodstain in the center, that’s what.

He was finally able to convince me to get some sleep (albeit on a pile of stiff old towels from the hall closet that we keep for the sole purpose of wiping the dog’s feet) but when I got up from the office chair where I had been crafting all night, I failed to be discreet about checking the seat for traces of… leakage, and Dave went all pale and ashen and I could see him mentally vowing never to sit in that chair again.

Everything went ok overnight, although I am going to be in need of some additional Feminine Protection very soon which is a real travesty because there are .0002 inches of snow on the ground which means everyone in the Metro D.C. area has probably already raided the grocery stores for supplies in case we are TRAPPED FOREVER IN OUR HOMES and I don’t know about you, but if I am going to be trapped in my home for weeks on end, I am going to have some tampons on hand. There are probably none to be found in a sixty-mile radius. I am going to have to sew some myself.

Which is ok, because did I mention that I am CRAFTY? Except I won’t tell you exactly HOW I’m crafty or exactly what I made because I have two blogs and I need something to post on the other one later today. But you’ll want to go there, you know, LATER TODAY, because what I made is cute and adorable and a total rip-off from about six gazillion other people on the Internet. Also I won’t even be able to use it for at least another year or two. Aren’t you curious now? Don’t worry, I’m not aging cheese or anything. Not being able to use it for a couple of years has nothing to do with curds and everything to do with the physical and mental capabilities of my child.



Aaaaaaand judging by his reaction to the laser pointer, maybe we’re talking five, six years. Best case.

You know, the commercial with the wishbone?

Dave hates my diaper bag.



He thinks it’s ugly and loud (maybe you do, too) and my guess is that he’d also think it was ridiculously overpriced if I ever told him how much I paid for it. Every week, Dave and I attend a couples Bible study and we’re usually late leaving the house to get to it on time, so rather than unpacking and transferring my personal items to a smaller bag, I just take my diaper bag with me. I did this a couple of weeks ago and Dave said, “You know, when you don’t have Asher with you when you carry that thing, you just look like someone who loves crazy, ugly purses.”

And Internet, no matter how you try to twist that statement, YOU CANNOT MAKE IT INTO A COMPLIMENT.

Fortunately for Dave, a couple of weeks ago an entire sippy cup of water flooded it and the fabric bled and now it looks rumpled and tired and probably exactly as it should look now that it’s done more than a year of hard labor without the benefit of waterproof fabric or plastic lining.

I am ready to move on. This is maybe the one time in my entire life that my husband will completely agree with me and encourage me to do something about it BY SPENDING MONEY. I think he’s embarrassed to be associated with it in any way, shape or form. Much the way I am embarrassed to be associated with him when he wears that pair of Baggy Fit jeans he bought in ninth grade. You have seen my husband, haven’t you? He is on the slight side. Which means EVERY pair of jeans is Baggy Fit for him, and actual Baggy Fit jeans look like he’s encased in two enormous billowy denim garbage bags.

Anyway! I’m going to buy myself a new diaper bag. And now that Asher’s older and less prone to poop explosions that require me to carry sixteen diapers and three outfit changes along with me, I can buy something a little smaller. And yes, I know I could technically get away with just a tote bag at this point, but I still carry diapers, wipes, snacks, a sippy cup and a couple of toys with me wherever I go (in addition to my wallet, keys and makeup bag), so I hope to find something that has a place for baby things (see above, re: SIPPY CUP SPILLING EVERYWHERE AND RUINING PREVIOUSLY ADORABLE BAG).

Does anyone have any experience with medium-size bags that they could recommend? I own a Skip Hop Duo, but it’s still too big (and it’s black and I can’t ever find anything I put into it because the thing is like a big black hole) although it is a great bag for longer day trips. I was looking at bags like this and this and this and wondering if they’d work for me. And also wondering if anyone vehemently opposes any of them. I do love it when people have violent reactions to certain products, you know, like the way I am still (STILL!) hating Charmin and those ridiculous bear commercials. (Do you think those bears bury their toilet paper like responsible people would?)

That’s really all I have of interest today. Isn’t it boring? Asher’s teething and every ounce of my energy this past weekend was squandered on Staying Calm and Rational amidst some of the most irritating whining I have ever in my LIFE heard. And also I have had PMS of the Severe variety, which I’m sure you know, when combined with Whiny Teething Toddler Syndrome, is enough to make someone go INSANE. So completely insane, in fact, that you find yourself weeping openly during a holiday Zales commercial. A ZALES COMMERCIAL. There should be considerable pointing and laughing at Zales commercials, and generous rolling of eyes, and here I am requesting a Kleenex. I hope to be better soon.