Like the Nestea plunge in your pants

So potty training was a dismal failure. Oh, well. I went out and bought some more Pull Ups. We usually get a combo pack at costco that has night time ones and daytime ones. The learning design kind that has a picture that fades when it gets wet. I went to Target this time, and saw the cool ones that get cold when they get wet instead. Fantastic!, I thought. He’ll be able to feel when he wets, and maybe that will help.

So I put one on him. An hour or so later I see him grabbing his, ahem, area and notice the design is different, so I ask if he peed. He says yes. I say “Oh, Drew, did it get all cold? Doesn’t that feel yucky?”

“Oh, no, Mama! I LIKE it! It feels niiiiiiiice.”

Crap. They shouldn’t sell those in Texas. Apparently, they just feel refreshing.

What does that even MEAN!?!?!?

From the “certified fitter” at the specialty nursing clothing store:

“Well, I don’t know what to try. That bra is the right size, but your breasts seem to be the wrong shape for it.”

 

Crap. I suppose I have to take her at her word. She’s a professional.

Florence Nightengale I am not.

Cliff has the flu.

I should point out that I have a sort of weird fear of sickness in the best of times. The word “paranoia” is probably appropriate. Thirty eight weeks pregnant is NOT the best of times, so that paranoia is kicking into overdrive.

My abject fear of sickness is something I have always had, and while having a child tempers it somewhat (Hello, daycare, festering swamp of Germiness!), it remains. I think it is partially just that, hey, duh, no one likes to be sick, but that fact coupled with some bizarre work ethic that means that I am incapable of slowing down until my body actually begins to crumple to the floor on it’s own accord means that I am doubly wary. In the three years since I have had the adorable germ fest we call our Drew, I have called in sick for ME being sick exactly three times. All involving grotesque stomach bugs that rendered me literally physically unable to move off of the bathroom floor. All the colds and sniffles and various other ailments I contracted courtesy of all the kids in his daycare preferring to chew on toys some other runny nosed kid had already chewed on? Miserable, for sure, but I was still trucking it up to work, keepin’ on keepin’ on. No leisurely afternoons on the couch watching reruns of Ellen and bad Lifetime movies for me.

So, poor Cliff. He is really sick. This is, for once, no man cold. But because of my girth and other circumstances – -like Drew’s asthma meaning I am doubly fearful HE will get the flu, my total lack of patience, the fact that I could go into labor at literally any second and then have to deal with thorny questions about exposing a newborn and the rest of the maternity ward to FluDaddy — he’s not getting much by way of tea and sympathy. Instead he gets conversations from across the room, nagging about whether or not he’s on top of his medicine and staying hydrated, and some crazy ass giant pregnant lady following him around with Lysol wipes, swabbing down everything he touches. Sometimes before he even puts it down. If we had Hazmat suits, I feel certain I would be employing them.

I am feeling very pressured. For the flu, it’s best if the Little Man stays put until at least after the weekend. But then we get into a weird place with Drew — he was going to stay at my sisters for the 3 or so days I am in the hospital, but she leaves town Thursday for a week. So if the baby doesn’t come by Monday-ish, then I am going to be hoping he stays put until she gets back and after Drew’s birthday, which is the 19th. Do you sense my controlfreaky side threatening to take over? Yeah, I do, too.

So, zen……………ZEN, dammit! Babies come when they come. Right?

What do those words mean?

The words I am referring to are “It’s just too sweet.”

Hmm? What? Come again?

It’s almost Easter. The most glorious candy holiday of the year. Why do I make this claim? Well………Peeps! Marshmallow Hiding Eggs! Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Eggs! Peeps! (worthy of a second mention!) Jelly Beans! Malted Milk Robins Eggs! Reeses Eggs (with a far superior chocolate to peanut butter ration than any other Reeses item)! Cadbury eggs? Thank you, Easter Bunny, Bawk, Bawk!

I say that there is NO better Calgon moment than sneaking away into a room without a begging child grasping your ankles to slowly savor a row of Pink Bunny Peeps that have been left on the counter to get stale for a few days. Chewy but not fluffy. Sweet, but with the ever so slight bitter aftertaste of red dye #40 (which is why, by the way, PINK is the best peep color, unless you are eating chicks, which have an inferior sugar to mallow ratio and can only be eaten in chicky yellow). Don’t even get me started on the blasphemy of the blue, purple, white, and GREEN?!?!?! Peep nuance is something my family takes damn seriously, in case you hadn’t noticed. 

I admittedly have a sweet tooth. I think I am going to blame it on evolution – humans are wired to like sweets. Rationalization out of the way, I just like sugar. It’s a tough mistress, what with the calories and the risk tooth decay, trust me. But people who claim to not like sweets, or who use that inexplicable “It’s too sweet”………..can they be trusted? Have they lost some essence of humanity in rejecting the life sustaining calories of a Reeses Egg?

ii don't like it

That’s right, I hate the Wii.

To be fair, I don’t hate it any more or less than I hate any other video game device. But people’s reactions to my distaste seem to indicate that my dislike of this Revolution in Gaming means that the terrorists are winning.

Now, my distaste is two fold. Part one: I just plain suck at video games. Anyone who knows me knows that I do not enjoy doing things I cannot show at least some passable skill at. I don’t want to be the best, I just don’t want to be the worst. I feel awkward and self conscious, and it kicks off some internal conversation in my brain that makes me feel MORE awkward, which pisses me off, which makes it harder to concentrate, which makes me suck even more. Now, given that hand-only video games make me visibly angry and prove my digital incompetence quite obviously (stupid Frogger frog! Always running into traffic!), how on earth would a video game platform that actually requires full body movement be considered an upgrade to me personally? No. Please don’t call 9-1-1. I’m not having some sort of full body convulsion. I am simply trying to hit the soccer ball and avoid the freaking panda head. (Panda head? This is fun family entertainment? The severed heads of cuddly zoo animals flying at me?) So yeah, I suck. I can cop to that.

The secondary part of my distaste is a general ‘ick’ about video games in general. I grew up in an adamantly non-video game household. My parents were of the “Go read a book! Go outside!” hippie bent, so my only exposure was at friends houses, and my friends all wanted to go play outside when we went over to play since they had 24/7 access to video games when they were by themselves with nothing better to do like play kickball with friends. I did internalize that message, though, which was “Go DO something. Don’t sit in front of a screen and pretend to do something.” I am mature enough (ha!) at this point in my life to see that there is nothing inherently Evil about moderate gametime, that it can be nothing more than just mindless fun, but there is a part of me that still internally cringes to see my not-yet 3 year old ‘bowling’ with his father. Because, you see, he’s not really bowling. He’s standing in front of the couch. The first time he played, I thought “A whole generation of pasty white kids is going to grow up thinking they are good bowlers, but the first time they get to an actual bowling alley, they are not going to have the physical strength to pick up the damn ball!” Yeah, yeah. It’s overdramatic. (Hi, I’m Julie. Nice to meet you.) So I keep my mouth shut, I enjoy that my kid and his dad have a ‘thing’ they do together and enjoy, I run over to watch when Drew comes to get me, shouting “ook, me, mama! Ook! I boowing!” and I cheer him on when his daddy helps his get a strike, cause that’s just freaking adorable. I even play when asked. I can enjoy his enjoyment. But I’d be a liar if I said it was the most fun I ever had.

We have the Wii Fit, too, and I hope that after this baby comes I can find some use for it to get back into prebaby shape (which would mean ever-so slightly less round than I am right now :P) and maybe that will warm me up to it. Hell, if it got me into better than pre baby shape, I’d recant this entire diatribe and marry the damn thing.

What IS awesome about the Wii, specifically? That little song they play when a bowling game is finished. Drew loves that song, and immediately hops up to dance his funky little stomping dance, arms held out behind him like non-flapping chicken wings, circling the living room with a most determined look on his face. That’s almost worth the money.

Almost.

Ashes, ashes, we all spontaneously combust

Someone at work today made a joke about spontaneous human combustion . It totally freaked me out.

When I was a kid, probably 10 or 11, I got a book from who-knows-where that was based on stories from the then-current TV show, Ripley’s Believe It…….or NOT!! You read that correctly. As if the world needed further concrete, scientific proof that I was the uber-nerd, I didn’t even watch the dorky show. I read the even dorkier book they based the dorky show on.

The book was full of people who did crazy-ass things, but it also had paranormal stories in it. There was an entire chapter on spontaneous human combustion. That’s SHC for those in the know, by the way. The stories always were about people who lived alone, hadn’t been seen in a few days, and when neighbors or family searched for them, all they found was a pile of ashes and some personal effect that was miraculously untouched by flame. Usually a cane tip or the soles of the poor victims shoes, sometimes the very chair the poor victim had been sitting in. There was always some quote along the lines of “My God! It was as if he just burned up where he sat!”

Holy. Crap.

Look, I was well aware at the time that the world was a dangerous place. I was in FIFTH mother effing grade. I had seen some shit, you know? But now, in addition to worrying about the fact that next year I was going to have to manage a locker and changing classrooms at school and that my training bra technically had nothing to train, I had to worry about my body turning on me entirely — to the point of bursting into uncontrollable flame?? I fretted about it for weeks. I took extra special care not to get overheated. I worried it, as my mother is so fond of saying, to death. Since I was a pretty anxious kid in general and prone to worrying about random things, they generally left me alone to obsess over things for a while, but apparently eventually I set off even their blunted “What the hell?” meters and they were compelled to ask me what was up. So I told them.

My poor parents. Every parent prepares themselves for the moment their kids asks “Where do babies come from?”……….a precious, unlucky few have to be faced with “I am afraid I am going to burst into flames in the middle of the night and the only thing you will find in my bed come morning is the plastic-y decor left over from the decals on my Wonder Woman Underoos.” (Whatever! You had some, too! You know you did!) Well, my parents tried to blow it off. It’s all legend, it’s silly, that doesn’t really happen. Unfortunately for them, even at the age of 10 I was going to need something more than their lame platitudes and reassurances. After about a week or so, where my position was firmly backed up by a book compiled by interns who worked on a crappy late night TV show while my dads position was backed up by………..his word and nothing more, my dad got serious. Now, this was looooong before the internet, wikipedia, or anything that allowed you to research things instantaneously. My dad, a very rational man of science and an engineer, had to go to the local library, ask a stranger for help, and look up books and articles on a subject he knew was bunk. I assume there was probably even microfiche involved. But he doggedly compiled his own dossier on SHC, and brought it home to me to look over. It appears that, long story short, the victims are almost always long term alcoholics and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that they were all smoking at the time of the incidents. Umm, yeah, even at 10 I was able to make the connection between a pickled human being and an open flame. Mostly. I won’t say I was totally convinced (hello! I read it in a BOOK! Books don’t lie!), but it reassured me enough to get a good night sleep without being afraid my blanket would overheat me.

So far, Drew is a happy go lucky sort of kid. Then again, I am not certain I was showing an awful lot of evidence of my worry at that age, beyond needing to know my Weebles were taped down at night so they could get a good night’s rest. Which, incidently, still seems pretty reasonable. I was feeling pretty good about that, that Drew might manage to escape the not alltogether fun burden of a mind with the ability to ruminate and obsess over Potential Doom. It only occurred to me today, when my coworker said those words, that this baby will be a whole new ball of wax. If this kids a worrier like I was, will I be able to handle it like my parents — for the most part calmly and rationally? Or will Cliff come home one day to find us both curled up in the corner, worried and anxious about………….oh, hell. Really almost anything. High fructose corn syrup, melamine in food, moldy peanuts, chemicals leaching out of plastic into our hot chocolate?

Wait………..

They seemed so happy together

Last night it was a trial to get Drew to go to bed. Usually, we hop into his bed and chat for a few minutes about his day, and then I ask him whose turn it is to close their eyes first and he decides it’s his turn and closes his eyes. (Clever, clever! See how I did that? It’s a competition, and yet I ALWAYS win even though it’s NEVER my turn to go first! :P ) I close my eyes, too, and he thrashes around for a few minutes and might try to talk to me but I feign sleep and within 10 or 15 minutes he’s drifted off to dreamland. Oh, sure, I have fallen asleep, too, but that happens whenever I stop moving. Sort of like a shark. Feeding frenzies included.

Last night, though, thanks to a very late afternoon nap courtesy of dad being in charge while I grocery shopped, Drew just wasn’t having it at bedtime. I closed my eyes and lay silent for a good 30 minutes, and he thrashed around and talked to no one and made shadow puppets and poked my eyes. “Mommy! Mama! Wake UP!”

I finally open my eyes and ask him what was going on.

“Why can’t you calm down and sleep, buddy? What’s the deal? It’s bedtime!”
“Mama, my toes are fighting. They are keeping me awake.”
“Your toes are fighting?”
“Yeah, mommy. They need to work it out.”
“Well, then, what can we do?”

What we can do, apparently, is take off the socks, for starters. And then I can lay down and enjoy the crazy person ramblings of an almost 3 year old helping his toes work out their differences. It was a complex situation, from what I could tell, having to do with the fact that some toes are smaller and some are bigger, and none of their “twin toes” are on the same feet. The big toes do all right, seeing as they meet up face to face when he puts his feet together, but the little piggies are small and lonely, way out there on the ends. And sometimes Big Toe doesn’t WANT to go the market (whoa, boy, do I know where you are coming from, Big Guy!), and that is a problem, too. I’d say it took about 10 minutes for peace to reign in ToeLand once again. And once it did, true to his word, Drew drifted off to sleep.

Wonder if Obama needs any help with that whole Middle East thing. I know someone who can give him a hand.