Friday, September 29, 2006

Pardon our mess

while I monkey around with the new templates & crap. This may take a while.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Okay, fine





















Your Political Profile:


Overall: 20% Conservative, 80% Liberal
Social Issues: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal
Personal Responsibility: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal
Fiscal Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal
Ethics: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal
Defense and Crime: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal



I'm not crazy about the wording of some of the questions, but that's the problem with polls and questionaires. Anyway. Not too surprised by the results.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Standing amidst the ruins

He stood up today. By himself. Aided by a chair, fine, but he stood up. I sat there, aghast, as he teetered on his teeny baby feet and wondered, "Would I get arrested if I hobbled him once in a while?" For his own safety, of course.

When Perp was about 13 months old (I was either newly or almost pregnant with the Dude at this time so probably a hormonal mess already, though it's always seemed to me like being a hormonal mess is an okay thing because it allows you to do things like eat an entire jar of Nutella and not even put it on bread, or, say, eat a pound of bacon. Not that I've ever done either, I'm just using them as examples. ahem), she fell down the stairs. Thirteen stairs. Uncarpeted, hard wooden stairs that lead to an uncarpeted, hard wooden floor.

I'd been playing with her in her room and she took off down the hall. Every other time she bolted, she went straight to my room. This time, she hooked around the corner and let gravity do the rest.

She landed flat on her back and I was sure that she'd injured herself, either breaking her neck or something equally hideous.

She sat right up and I figured that her back/neck must be okay, but I also figured that head trauma was a real possibility. You know, because of how she sailed down about thirteen feet of hard wood and landed flat on her back while I wasn't paying attention. Stuff like that.

Off we go to the ER, and I guess because of all the crying and freaking out, she started falling asleep, which made ME freak out and I was smacking her leg, frantically trying to keep her awake (ah, how ironic that is now).

The nurses at the ER were, frankly, total whoretard bitches. I know they have to assume that injuries to children are suspicious until proven otherwise (legal system notwithstanding, apparently), but it should have been entirely clear that this was just a household accident and I hadn't, in fact, given in to my darkest urges and shoved my toddler down the stairs. I'm waiting until she's 16 for that.

So now we have a gate between the upstairs hallway and the stairs landing. And we're using it a lot more now that the Dude is becoming semi-mobile. And I hope that his injury rate is lower than hers. But given what happened last night, I may be wasting my time:
Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting


Who knew you could trip while crawling?

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Worm!

He's gonna be a mad popper one of these days.

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Friday, September 22, 2006

Me (watching To Catch A Predator. Again.): Seriously? What's bad head?
Husband: I dunno, it's like pizza.
Me: .....? What, it's bad but you'll eat it anyway?
Husband: No, like even when it's bad, it's still pizza. It's not like the rest of it isn't important. There are degrees of pizza.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Eek

I moved Perp into her big girl room last night. Dude sat up in the crib by himself (instead of me sitting him up). Big shakes chez Smacky. I'm a little freaked out by how fast this is all going. And, since I'm posting this like a week late, you can see that we've had another update since. Craaaaap.

Another night melded with the couch, reading fantastically funny and touching blogs and wishing that I had the nerve and the talent to do what some of these women do. Granted, some of them write for a living, so they have a lot more practice than I, but while I'm cranking posts out, they never seem particularly interesting or funny or touching or whatever it is that attacts me to the others.

Then, sometimes, I go back and read them and damned if I ain't kinda funny. Sometimes. But not touching. We don't go for that up here. Too many Finns. NO TOUCHING ALLOWED unless you're trying to have kids in which case I guess it's okay but don't enjoy it.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Master Sergeant Dude

First Battalion, Clog Army. Reporting for duty!



Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Why we love Husband

After my day-long imitation of a meth junkie on a cleaning spree: "Stuff is our enemy and kids are its foot soldiers."

Don't give me no lip

Apparently the Dude got into that prestigious dental hygienist program. He just spent 20 solid minutes trying to remove the plaque from my teeth. Right after he put his considerable powers of concentration toward trying pull off my lower lip. It's a wonder I can eat soup.

A pregnant pause

Apropos of nothing, I swear to God.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why the general public is so hot to tell first-time mothers every possible pregancy/delivery horror story. The shit random strangers said to me when I was pregnant with Perp would boggle your mind. When I tell people that--even with the general total-body trashing, the tears, and pooping in front of strangers--I actually liked labor, they generally look at me like I'm insane. It's not that it didn't hurt like hell, 'cause it surely did, but it was so exhilarating, like just about nothing I've ever experienced. I don't tell them the stories I heard ("My sister's husband's cousin's neighbor's cleaning lady was in labor for three and a half months and she split in half!"). I tell them how amazing women's bodies are. I tell them how you can't just push hundreds of thousands of years of evolution (yes! I said it!) to the side with 150 years of medical "advances." I tell them that even if their heads say they can't do this, their bodies can. Can, can, can. And I tell them to call my doula because she's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe better.

God help me, but I liked labor better than the pregnancy. At least I knew it was going to be shorter, and I was actually doing something, you know? Participating, instead of just toting a fetus around until it was ready to make a break for it. I hate waiting just that much. After having the Dude I realized that I am a full-fledged labor junkie and if it weren't for the first and third trimesters, I'd have like a dozen kids. I wish I could have them for other women. It's something I'm actually good at without trying. I just shut down and let my body do its thing and hey! baby!

There's a social taboo against complaining about motherhood or marriage without prefacing the rant with a disclaimer: "It's a blessing to be pregnant, but..." or "Don't get me wrong, I love being a mom." or "I adore my partner, it's just..."

I try really hard not to do this, because it seems like I'm apologizing for my feelings, I shouldn't have to. I try to avoid that as much as possible, if only so Perp grows up knowing that her feelings count as much as anyone else's. They're valid. They mean something. She shouldn't be sorry for them, as ugly as they may be. It's a sorry state of affairs that we feel obligated to include prefaces like that, ain't it? I mean, I don't apologize for hating olives: "I love the trees, I think they're beautiful, and I'd bathe in the oil if I could but I just don't like olives that much."

Maybe this is a generational thing, because it mostly came from women my mother's age and older. Most of the stories centeree around the horrible. I just don't get it. I didn't love being pregnant, but it certainly wasn't the worst experience in my life. I had a drug-free delivery and a third-degree laceration, but that's not what I concentrate on when I tell P's birth story. Okay, I do put some emphasis on the drug part but I'm proud of that. That's okay; I don't push it on other people, I just point out that it is possible, evenwith big-ish babies (8.8# and 9.2# respectively).

I think there's a natural desire to relate stories that portray one as a survivor. So no matter how minor the incident really was, coming across as some kind of superhero means embelishing. But just a leetle bit.

I also think that there's a small part in us that wants to either scare or prepare other women for what's coming up. I'm not sure which it is. I just wish that more of it could be about the first time your baby smiles up at you when she's nursing, or the first time he laughs a real laugh as you tickle his lips with his toes, or the first time her father holds her after she's born.

Perhaps what I wanted was for people to not volunteer these stories, but to tell them IF I ASKED. One woman passed me as I waddled across the habitrail at work and said, "Oh, I just loved being pregnant." It was all I could do not to snap back, "Then you can just finish this for me!" But I smiled and kept going. One look at my face should have told her I wasn't too happy but it didn't matter, she had her comment to make. Maybe that's it, in the end: the willingness of complete strangers to make each and every pregnant woman into a piece of public property to be commented on and to, as if she either weren't there, or was, like, paid to listen.

I don't recall getting any paychecks.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Changing or dressing the Dude has become an exercise in speed and patience. He'll be calm and quiet for about five seconds before he flips himself over like a cornered armadillo. Do they flip over? Whatever, HE WILL NOT BE CONTAINED! The only time I can get him to stay on his back is if he's unconscious. It seems a little excessive to club him like a baby seal every time I want to change his diaper. Or maybe not.

He's started rocking on his hands and knees, which, as we all know, leads to teenage drinking and drug abuse, so I'm trying my level best to scare it out of him. HE WILL NOT BE DETERRED! Sometimes, he'll do his little rock and roll show, then lunge forward onto his stomach and voilĂ ! he's four inches closer to his goal of world destruction.

Because of his shiny new set of physical skills, his sleep has gone down the shitter. He actually gets into rocking position when he half-wakes at night. I seem to recall Perp did this, only with sitting. Oh, the joys of early onset senility! you can forget all the icky stuff.

He still doesn't have any teeth. This is worth comment because Perp had a couple by this age. Further evidence that they're TOTALLY DIFFERENT PEOPLE AND I SHOULD STOP COMPARING THEM. And yet I cannot.

He's much more demanding of constant attention. To this day, Perp is happy to play by herself, or nearby, whereas the Dude wants eye contact on a regular basis. Plus? He wants to be held a lot more. Easy to do in the carrier, but not so much when I'm cooking with substances hot enough to melt his skin.

So he has to spend some time every day in his exersaucer, johnny jump-up, or on the living room floor whilst I bustle about like an honest-to-god housewife, and HE WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS! Alas, I'm the one with the better hand-eye coordination (oh, and the ability to WALK), so he has to do as I say.

I'm sure it will all come back to haunt me one day. That's why I take incriminating pictures at every opportunity.

He supports the wrong teams