Just because they sound alike,

"Monday" actually has nothing at all to do with "Funday."

Aidan woke up at 1:30am, throwing up the remaining portion of his corndog-and-a-half-with-a-side-of-Gatorade.

He came in to give me a play-by-play, including how he diligently told the dog to move, because she, quote, "wasn't going to like what she had to see."  I'm very thankful for this:  not the throwing up, but the fact that he didn't throw up on the dog.  I'm not sure I would've taken the time to consider this, given the circumstance.

I told Bub he'd have to stay away from the baby today, and in doing so he also needed to make sure he got plenty of rest, which would include an afternoon nap when the baby and I went down.  Check, check, and check.  (The kid is definitely sick.  Ordinarily, if I even hinted at a nap, it would be considered the ultimate act of treason toward his seven-year-old self.)

He ate a piece of toast for breakfast, but his fever killed his appetite.  Around lunchtime, I went in to check on him and the poor guy was definitely two shades of toasty.  Having no Children's Medicine in the house, I had two options:  he could down approximately a bottle of infant medicine, or take half a dose of adult Advil to get the fever down.  Knowing how syrupy-sweet the infant medicine is, I decided the best thing for his belly would be one little brown Advil.

Of course, this is the time when I realize that the only Advil we have in the house are the large, green liquid caps, which even Richard has a hard time taking.

We tried it head-on:  put the pill in your mouth and swallow.  This was not happening and resulted in one gooey green thing being spit into my hand, sort of like the inside of a Mike n' Ike after you carefully remove the icing portion with your front teeth.  That was no good.  The second attempt also failed, which was to put it in a spoonful of applesauce.  I'm still stumped at how this didn't work, because I thought it was a helluva good idea.  The third attempt, which was actually the exact same thing as the first attempt, finally worked.

:-D

Or so we thought, until we looked at the bottom of the water bottle to see the green gel tab down at the bottom.  Aidan looked shocked, considering I'd already congratulated him for swallowing the pill.

:-(

"What in the world?  How did THAT get there?" he asked, with a generous and sincere helping of confusion.

"I don't know, buddy," I replied.  "I don't know."  My only guess is that it jumped ship somewhere after the lips but before the esophagus.

The boy was scorching, and I was worried.  Plan B was out the window, considering that's for birth control, so we went to Plan C:  let's try a different pill.  The only other suitable thing was a cold tablet, which thankfully went down with no issues.  This time, both of us were ecstatic.  To nap he went.

Meanwhile, back in Gotham City, the wee one decided he'd take a nice, light poop in his britches while he was supposed to be napping.  That's fine:  there's an app for that.  It's called the "quick change," and it happens right there in the pack n' play and he's none the wiser.  All was well ... until I walked away.

Don't get me wrong:  I remember a little thing called "separation anxiety" when Aidan was just a lad.  I can remember taking him to Grammie's house, and having to sneak out the door, him being none the wiser.  What I do NOT remember, however, is the wailing I heard today when I walked away from the playpen.  Ripped my heart right out of my chest, it did!  I felt like the biggest asshole of a parent in the whole world.  Remember back to the rattlesnake, how I had to tell my legs to move?  It was just like that, only this was happening in the comfort of my own home.

Now, listen.  I'm all for natural selection, or instinct, or whatever it is you want to call it that helps us function as human beings and gets us from point A to point B, but what the hell kind of feature is this?  Are you kidding me?  Apparently in the wild, moms never got a chance to eat, bathe, or use the toilet without a 7-month-old Cling-On dictating their every move.  Again, ancestors:  I'm not really sure how I got here, but thanks, Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandmother, for not killing and eating and using for shoes my Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Whatever.  Separation anxiety?  What purpose does this serve?  The "don't forget me in the woods, Ma, lest a bear eat me" survival instinct?

After continuing to walk to the door and, further, to the back porch, I continued to smoke cigarette after cigarette, all-the-while belittling my ability as a mother.  What kind of (expletive) mother leaves their helpless little (expletive) baby inside the (expletive) playpen while they're sobbing for them to get the (expletive) back here right now, you rotten (expletive) of a mom?

This one, that's who.

Needless to say, three minutes later, the wailing stopped.

Okay, I'm tooting my own horn.  It was more like 45 seconds.  Whatever.

He forgot all about me.

Why, you ungrateful little (expletive).

;-)

I need a personal assistant.

Not the pretentious, "go pick up my dry-cleaning" personal assistant, but rather the personal assistant who acts as a conscience when no one else is watching.

Today, for example, I'm supposed to be snapping photos of random piles of stuff around the house in order to potentially avoid the previously-mentioned garage sale.  I said to myself, "Gee, self---"  Wait.  That came out sounding like Wally Cleaver.

I said to myself, "Listen, self.  If you can list the big-ticket items on Craigslist and get them gone by Sunday evening, then there is really no point to having a garage sale, right?"

On paper, this sounded great.  In reality, however, I did pull up Craigslist in order to remind myself to snap those photos, but instead perused Sarasota County's Farm and Garden section, sending an email to a lady about some Ameraucana chickens.

Kind of the same, but different.

If I had a personal assistant, he or she (or perhaps androgyny would work best here) would tap me on the shoulder and give me that same look my mom used to give me when I'd get antsy in church.

(You all know THAT LOOK.  Don't kid yourselves.)

I wouldn't take advantage of my personal assistant.  Oh, no.  I'd never trick my personal assistant into folding my laundry, or unloading my dishwasher.  No, I'd just ask that when she/he saw me heading toward the couch with a red bowl of cheese puffs in one hand and my Nook under my other arm, he/she would give me that same, know-it-all look.  I'd slink back to folding the laundry, muttering under my breath at how stupid my personal assistant looks in that stupid hat.

I MIGHT have my personal assistant look up some research on the internet.  I MIGHT.  A few days ago, I was at Aidan's bus stop talking to my neighbor.  She had been unable to reach her father-in-law in Venezuela, and was beginning to get worried.  Being East Coast and all, I asked her, "What's the time difference there?  What are they, like, three hours behind us?"

She shook her head.  "No," she replied.  "They are a half an hour behind us."

A HALF AN HOUR??  I thought time zones went by HOURS?

This is the kind of thing I MIGHT have my personal assistant research.

I don't know, though.  Is my personal assistant smarmy?  Would she/he start fucking with me in an attempt to make me look like a fool should I ever go on Jeopardy?

"This planet, rich in molten lava, was first discovered in 1799, when Pope John Lennon the 1st invented the telegraph."

OOOH!  OOOOOH!  PICK ME!

"Cherstin?"

I've got this one in the motherfucking BAG.  "What is Uranium?"

The audience collectively snickers, my personal assistant just KNOWING how much I hate snickers.  Stupid Alex Trebec would be all, "No, I'm sorry," and then he'd probably rush home and tell his wife what an asshole I am.  He'd probably put that video right on YouTube.  Stupid YouTube.

Forget it.  I'm fine where I am.

I've gotta run.  Time to fold the laundry.  Damn you, Craigslist.

Books.

The time has come for another "friends and family" garage sale.  Not the kind where you actually sell your friends and family:  I'm sure, like everything else, that's illegal here in Florida.  No, I mean the good old fashioned "clean out your closets, then your attic" garage sale that seems to rear its ugly head every few years around here.  A day of sunburn, barter, hand-made signs, and foreign currency which signifies one of two things:  either it's the end of summer, or the kids have started outgrowing their clothes.

Like many other American families locked into their current mortgage, most of us hovering in the area of  100K in the hole, we're quickly running out of space.  With the addition of Caleb, the littlest wee one, and the every-other-weekend visits from Richard's daughter, we are in the process (okay, we have the lumber list) of converting the garage into a 4th bedroom, which virtually wipes out my chance of ever having my dream office, lined floor to ceiling with terrific, rainy-day reading material.  So what does a faithful reader do with their well-preserved collections of literature?

I thought about making some money.  I opened lid after lid of hermetically-sealed book totes, reveling in the smell of forgotten paper.  I grabbed a few at random, checking condition (great!) and price tag ($25.00!).  Wow, I must have a fortune here.  I could barely contain myself.  Images of dollar signs danced across my field of vision as I silently wondered which books I'd repurchase on my new Nook.  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?  Check.  My amazing Stephen King library?  Check, check, and check.

As quick as my fingers could carry me, to Ebay.com I went.  I typed in title and author, sometimes I opted to search by ISBN, but regardless of my method, the outcome was the same.  I was searching completed listings, of which there were plenty.

The only problem is that they hadn't sold.

Some of them hadn't even sold for 99 cents.

Ouch.

Okay, maybe books can't be looked at as an investment, but what is going on here?  When I worked at Books-A-Million back in the late 90's, I remember spending full paychecks on carts of new releases.  Hardcovers, where is your worth?  I can pick up any book from my stacks and remember what I was doing when I finished that book.  The last book in the Dark Tower series?  Easy, I finished that one on a vacation to Costa Rica.  There's my Arabic to English trade paperback I last cracked in August of 2003.  I have two brand-new X-Files Collector's postcard books, riding in the same tote as as unused deck of Alice in Wonderland tarot cards, all purchased in the summer of 1998.  Sentimental, sure, but don't people collect things anymore?

Maybe the problem isn't in the non-collecting.  Maybe I'm looking at it wrong.  Maybe it's just that everyone who loves books already has their own collections, thank you very much.  But 99 cents?  It hurts my heart.

I sat back on my haunches and thought.  Certainly, someone in my family would enjoy some of these great books, right?  Sure!  I'll just gift them out!  But wait.  How do I know Aunt M. won't just use The Neverending Story as a drink coaster?  And Uncle D., surely he doesn't have time to read Ken Kesey these days.  Donating them brings about the same fears:  I'm haunted by the notion of books--MY books--laid face-down, spine-up, drink rings hazing the dust jacket.  Ouch.  Not a good way for my books to end up.  They deserve better.  It's not like I bought Bargain Bin books, for crying out loud.

When all is said and done, I guess they'll go back in the totes, and the totes will have a new home in the master bedroom closet...just in case I ever get that office.

Hey, a girl can dream, right?

Rant.

It has been brought to my attention again today how little respect we have for each other as human beings, judging people by perception, or our own, biased, "worst-case-scenario" mentality. 
In other words, I'm angry.

I'm tired of paying for bad service.  I'm tired of people treating one another as if we exist in different castes.  I'm pissed off that no one says "thank you" anymore.  Are we so technologically wired that we have forgotten how to interact with each other in person?  What happened to being polite?  What happened to really LOOKING at someone when you're talking to them?  Is it bad parenting?  A global inferiority complex? 

Think about how many other things you accomplish when speaking on the telephone.  You do dishes, fold laundry, feed the dogs.  You brush your teeth, check your bank account, pick your nose, update your Facebook status.  We've forgotten how to deal with each other on a face-to-face basis.  Half the time I hang up the phone, I've already forgotten the minutia of the conversation.  Details have become obsolete.

"What did so-and-so say?" he asks from in front of the television.

"Oh, something about going to pick up her mom this afternoon, and she wanted to know if we wanted to meet up this weekend and do something," she hollers from the kitchen.

"Oh," he says.  "Where's her mom been?"

She continues putting dishes away.  "Uhmm, I don't know.  Something about work, some work trip or something.  I can't remember."

The weekend comes and goes.  Oops, I forgot.  Sue me.

Social networking has done nothing to help us network socially.  You have 420 characters to describe what's on your mind.  Maybe you have 120.  It's your choice.  Pick your poison, just don't elaborate on it.  We don't have time for the details.  Just give us the whowhatwhenwherehowwhys so we can be on our way. 

And, oh yeah, thanks for posting.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

What a weekend.  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  It was finally a weekend I can look back on and say, "No shit, there I was..." which, as we all know, is how every good Army story begins.  Only this time, I wasn't in the Army.

Oh, no.

This happened right here in the confines of my obviously-unsecured six-foot privacy fence and the glorious, post-kid-safe half-acre it encloses. 

I went to sleep Saturday night with my hands gloved in gunshot residue.

Now listen, if you wrangle snakes for a living, this may come as no small feat:  just another "day in the life of" kind of tale.  If, however, you're a stay-at-home mom and the most exciting thing that has happened in your life as of late is your covert decision to try a new brand of peanut butter ("let's see if anyone notices!"), this is kind of a big deal.

To make a long story short (which I never do and probably will not do even now despite my claim), I went outside with the dogs after dinner, leaving the three kids and the English Bulldog inside with husband-slash-daddy, so I could finish putting the above-ground pool together after spending all day moving it from one side of the yard to the other, for which I'm also famous.  It had been a grueling, back-breaking day of hard work (me) and slip n' sliding (kids), and I felt that if I didn't get the pool filling by the time the sun went down, the day would've ended with me not really accomplishing anything.  I only had about 20 minutes of work left:  lifting the legs of the pool one by one and inserting them thru a rope which circles the bottom of the pool.  Easy peasy.

I start on the left, I always do, and I'm working clockwise:  lift leg, hold pool frame up with my back, pull rope to outside of leg, lower leg, continue.  I've got my head down, and I'm circling the pool.  Up, lift, rope, down.  Up, lift, rope, down.  Up, lift, rope, down.  I've got about five more poles to go.

I clear the backside of the pool and I'm coming around the final turn:  the home stretch.  What was on my mind, you ask, as I walked up onto that coiled rattlesnake?  I couldn't tell you.  I might've been reminiscing about the ham and tomato sandwich I had for dinner, and how I'd used the perfect amount of mayonnaise.  I might've been wondering what I could do to make myself like country music.  Maybe I was thinking about Richard, inside feeding the baby his little baby oatmeal.  Whatever it had been, it stopped.

The crickets stopped.

All I could hear was the rattle, and I was close.  Damn close.  Like, "why does this almost sound like it's at my feet" close (which is always measured in millimeters, by the way).  When I raised my head, I was staring into the cold, beady eyes of the biggest rattlesnake I've ever seen without paying admission.  For one brief second, I remember thinking, "Goddamn, that thing's got a big head," and then panic set in.  Sheer, unadulterated panic, flowing like liquid and pounding like waves.  I scrambled blindly backward, fast.  In my brain, I told my legs to move faster, faster, that thing is going to strike, go faster faster fasterfasterfaster!

I keep two guns in my house:  one is a hand-me-down from my Georgia stepdad, an old clunky woodhandled revolver.  It shoots .44 or .22, and I've got some hollow point rounds for it, but it's a revolver.  I keep it because it makes me feel like a gunslinger:  good and manly, in a kind, softspoken way.  Like John Wayne.  My weapon of choice, however, is my Heckler and Koch USP compact 9mm.  Now this is a handgun.  I'm not sure how those Germans do it, but this thing makes me feel like "James Bond meets Jason Bourne."  Bad ass.

So no shit, there I was, flying around the pool all 5'1" of me, waving my hands and screaming for the dogs as if a hole had just opened up in the ground and all of our numbers were up.  Our Best Dog Ever, Lena, is checking out the snake, thankfully from behind, but visions of Bad Bad Things are still creeping into the periphery of my imagination.  I'm running so fast in forward, trees are going by in a blur.  I'm barefoot.  Nike doesn't have SHIT on a mother running to get a gun.  That should be an advertising campaign right there.  Don't take it:  I'm going to patent it.

Richard, dear sweet Richard, hears/sees/senses the commotion, and meets me at the sliding door.  I'm all "Get me the gun!  Get me the gun!" and he's all thinking I must have to use the bathroom really bad.  (More evidence for the old Mars and Venus theory, surely.)  I give him the brief rundown, telling him to stay inside with the kids in case the cops show up, because I'm about to blow this rattlesnake straight to H-E-double toothpicks.  I'm not sure if that's a felony or anything, but I sure hope not:  at the last check, I was barefoot, wearing a sports bra and a pair of boxers with no underwear.  (Don't judge:  I'm a minimalist because I hate doing laundry.)

A 9-mm doesn't give you much range to work with.  Taking a lesson from every badass in every movie ever, I decided my best vantage point for rattlesnake-shooting-cum-don't-shoot-a-hole-in-the-pool was from above, so I climbed the closest tree.  With a loaded handgun.  My mom would not have been proud.

I lean over my unsuspecting target and line up my shot.  BAM!  BAM!  BAM! 

Rinse and repeat.

Okay, I fired off a whole magazine. 

I had to be sure.

It sounded like the 4th of July.  I kept thinking of a line from the Little Rascals, when Alfalfa is reciting his memorizations:  "Cannons to the left of me!"  BAM!  "Cannons to the right!"  BAM!  How can you be sure a snake is dead?

I know:  you go inside for another magazine, that's how.

When all was said and done, it was indeed dead.  I counted the holes in the snake:  there were at least 4.  I counted the holes in the pool:  zero.  A good day indeed.

Richard came outside and took some pictures of me with the snake, but only after I'd chopped its head off with a shovel.  You know, just to be really really really sure.  And that, my friends, was my weekend, in a nutshell.

Now, who wants to try a peanut butter sandwich?  Come on, we've got new peanut butter!    :-)

Teething and Homework vs. Mom

Today has been trying, to say the least.  With two days until the seven-month mark, Caleb is full-on teething, and I'm suddenly of the opinion that teeth are the meanest, stupidest things in the whole world.  With a pea-sized amount of baby Orajel on my index finger while trying to avoid applying said Orajel to his tongue, I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to see the root of Mr. Crankypants' problem:  when they say "cutting teeth," they ain't bullshitting.

The poor guy had two bleeding subtraction marks across his bottom gum.  Viewing from above, his mouth resembled the following algebraic dilemma:

left gum minus minus right gum equals I hate you.

Of course, after solving and checking, you find the answer to be No Solution.

Stupid algebra.

Ahhh, enter 3:45pm.  Time to pick up the big second-grader.  Homework this evening?  Simple:  study for tomorrow's spelling test.  Yay!  Hooray!  To a second-grader, this translates to "I have no homework!"  Apparently, big guy forgot who his mother is.

Let me break here for a moment and say this:  Smart children are not born smart.  Smart children are born to good parents.  See the difference? 

I give the boy a sheet of paper and a pencil:  we're doing a pre-test.  15 words, the longest of which is "because," at a whopping seven letters.  You'd think I'd told him that Christmas had been cancelled this year.  The waterworks started, and we began.

"Number one:  where."

By the time we finished, the waterworks had been turned off, for which I was eternally grateful after dealing with a day of crying, wailing, and fussiness.  And also the teething baby.    At the end of the pre-test, I checked:  stop the presses.  Again isn't spelled "agian" and "beacuase" in no way resembles because.  Time to practice.

2 words, 10 times each.

You'd think I'd just told him Christmas AND his birthday had been cancelled this year.  And for the five years after this.

Why do children have to be so heartless?

Needless to say, we made it through the spelling drill, only after Aidan cried out his weight in water. 

Listen here, boys.  Here's how my day went:

The desk we were trying to sell for $250 broke during delivery.
I noticed a one-inch gash in the bottom of our $900 pool liner when attempting to drain and move the 350-pound beast in 95 degree weather.
A dear, dear family member is in ICU following a stroke, and no one knows why.
Our electric bill, after turning the air up to 81 degrees during the day for the past month AND no longer running the pool pump, is still a whopping $219.
I'm running low on cigarettes, and I don't quite have the motivation to load up and head to the store.
A windstorm knocked my seven-foot mango tree over.
Someone needs to mow this lawn.
There are four baskets of clean laundry with my name on them.
All my friends have started back to school and/or work, and I'm bored.
I have less than two weeks to get rid of all the crap in the garage.
What are we having for dinner?

So yeah, that sums up my day in a nutshell.

Now who wants me to give them something to cry about?

;)

Dunbar's Number vs. Facebook: Epic.

I could definitely disappear.

Yes, I could definitely disappear.

Don't get me wrong: I love my kids and family with all my heart, but that doesn't mean I couldn't do it.

As an experiment, you know?

Have you ever heard of Dunbar's number?  The Wikipedia version is okay, just to get a hint of it:  it's not like we're writing a paper or anything.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

(Edited to add:  No, I do not use Wikipedia for research papers.  *shudder*)

I read about this when I was doing research for an online sociology class I was taking last semester, and it amazed the hell out of me.  In a nutshell, the theory states that, largely due to the design of our brain's neocortex, there is a comforable limit to the number of relationships and direct interactions we can exchange without said friendships and relationships becoming a burden.  The number is said to be in the area of 100 and 230, with the common reference point being around 150.

150 friends and acquaintances.  I'd love that.

Apparently Dunbar's number has never met Facebook.

Yesterday was my birthday, as most of you know, and I spent a great deal of time responding to every single person on my Facebook page who took the time out of their day to wish me a happy birthday.  It was exhaustingly exhilerating, but reasonable, considering out of my 331 friends, I had approximately 75 birthday messages.  Of course, some came via telephone and text message as well, but it was a comfortable number, and I appreciated everyone who took the time to wish me well.

Yet, lurking in the depths of my mind, I could just disappear.

I'd be up for that challenge.  Sure, it would be hard saying goodbye to everyone I love, and I'm sure I'd oftentimes find myself wondering how so-and-so's change of employment went, or if so-and-so-else ever got over that nasty cold that had been plaguing the family, but I'd be alright.  I could happily buy a large plot of land somewhere, say, Montana, and go farm and herd the rest of my life away in the peaceful solitude one can only find on 100 acres of mountainous cow fields.  I'd write a lot, read a lot, maybe learn to knit.  I'd go exploring, find a hot spring, take pictures.

But then I'd think of my family.

Awww, hell.  I'm a softie.  What happened to me, turning all family and stuff?  Does motherhood/parenthood/wifehood take away our spontenaity?  Our zest?  Our love of adventure?  No.  It doesn't take it away:  it passes it on to our children.

I guess I realize now that my carefree days are over.  Did it take a 37th birthday to tell me that?  Now I live for the adventures of my kids:  Aidan's third day in second grade, Caleb's first teeth.  I speculate via Google, get my news from Facebook, travel across continents via whatever book I'm reading on Nook.  I enjoy the predictability of my peers, get my daytime laughs from talk shows, and send warm wishes via email.

God, I hate technology.

Still, I could always just disappear.

But I don't.

I've gotta go, it's time for Sesame Street.