Tag Archives: funny

That moment the Terrible Twos hit

Posted on March 31, 2016 | Leave a comment

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When pregnant women attack!

Posted on March 20, 2016 | 5 comments

The other day, my husband woke up, rolled over in bed and just stared at me, his bleary eyes full of fear.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I had a dream. A long dream. That you were mad at me. Just one, long, giant dream of you being really angry at me,” he replied mechanically while shivering involuntarily.

And there it was. Out of the mouths of babes. Or shell-shocked husbands, in this case. I have managed in my pregnant state to thoroughly traumatize an adult man. So much so, in fact, that he can’t even catch a break in his dreams.

In my defense, this is at least 50 percent his fault. He made his bed and now he has to lie in it while a huge, puffy, irrational wife yells at him because Tina Fey is no longer on “SNL” and why the hell did they take Cecily Strong off Weekend Update? Huh? HUH!?!

Still, I feel deep down that I should apologize. But I can’t. I just can’t. I’m lucky if at this point I can choke out a “good morning” without literally growling afterward.

feeding rage 1

Honestly, trying to pretend to be a normal human being when really you’re drowning in lady hormones that make you want to light everyone on fire is one of the hardest, yet overlooked, accomplishments of womankind.

Have you been set on fire by a pregnant woman? No? That proves right there how much inner strength we females have. Cause somewhere down the line, I guarantee a pregnant woman really, REALLY wanted to do you significant harm. You might not even know her. She could have been standing in line behind you at the grocery store when you were taking too long to find your debit card, unlike a normal person who would have already had their card out and at the ready while the FREAKING CASHIER WAS SCANNING YOUR DUMBASS ITEMS, YOU STUPID, BLOODY MORON, I HOPE YOU DIE.

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It’s worse this time too, believe it or not. Because now I have a toddler and every ounce of non-crazy in my pregnant body (which ain’t much) is used up calmly trying to explain to him for the 33rd time why we don’t headbutt Mommy’s face, no matter how hilarious he thinks it is. And any leftover non-crazy is used up trying not to hurl the sofa at my dog every time he barks (which is any time anything within a three mile radius of our house slightly moves).

Which means my husband gets the full brunt of crazy thrown at him on pretty much a daily basis.

For example, here are some reasons I got mad at him today:

  1. He let me eat too much cheese
  2. Someone drank a martini on TV and I got really jealous
  3. He knew Sookie wasn’t asked to be in the “Gilmore Girls” revival and didn’t tell me because he was worried I’d get irrationally mad about it
  4. He let me eat too much fried chicken.
  5. I fell asleep and missed the end of “Supernatural.”
  6. I’ll never be able to read all the books in the world before I die.

Exacerbating all this hormonal craziness is the fact that all the fun has been taken out of modern day pregnancy. Because science hates fun. So, drinking, smoking, fancy foreign cheese? Fuggetaboutit. Opium dens? Nope. You aren’t even allowed cheap thrills like a heady dose of NyQuil (just non-coma-inducing Tylenol for you, missy) or chugging a Red Bull until you are so caffeinated that the number 11 smells like purple.

You can’t even get properly fat anymore. It used to be you were supposed to take it easy and eat for two. Now my doctor is telling me hurtful things like “eat salad” and “exercise every day” and “your weight gain is unprecedented.” Plus, all those annoying people screaming at me to love my new soft, squishy, pregnant body; the same people, mind you, who for the past 30 years were screaming at me that the ultimate definition of feminine beauty was to be shaped like a scarecrow.

Is it any wonder we go crazy?

So, no, I won’t apologize to my husband. At this point, I’m just trying to survive until my due date.

But I do want to thank him. A huge thank you, in fact. As hard as pregnancy is, at least I know my partner won’t burst into tears and throw the remote against the wall if I ask him to turn down the TV. He has dealt with everything like a gentleman and a scholar. Even when I want to eat dinner at 4:30 p.m. because food is literally the only thing I look forward to anymore or I decide we have to go through all the closets RIGHT NOW and get rid of EVERYTHING because I am nesting and NESTING HARD.

Still, through all this, even when I’m getting ready to sling the last crazy arrow of the day at him, he kisses me, gathers all the pillows in the house and makes me a pillow fort on the floor because I can no longer get comfortable lying down on our lumpy couch.

And each night I fall asleep and sleep the peaceful, dreamless, beautiful sleep of the woman who knows she is truly loved.

prego rage 2

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The real reason I’m only having two kids

Posted on February 21, 2016 | 2 comments

My baby just turned 2-years-old. My teeny, tiny, itty-bitty, little baby is now a steak-chewin’, question-askin’, opinion-havin’ little man.

Sigh. Ah, how time flies and all that.

Of course, any time you get to celebrate a child’s birthday, it’s a time of joy. Perhaps a bittersweet joy but a joy nonetheless. And it remains a joy all the way up until the moment your adorable, big-eyed offspring looks lovingly up at you and asks you to open their giant pile of small, impenetrable toy jails.

Seriously, have you ever had to liberate a child’s toy from modern day packaging? It’s like the escape scene in “Shawshank Redemption,” only on a slightly smaller scale. Giving birth was less frustrating and complex.

First there is the plastic. But not just any plastic. Oh, no. No, this plastic was whipped up in the bowels of Hell and no weapon forged by man can destroy it. That alone is bad enough. But then the toy manufacturers decided that these pieces of demonic plastic that encase the toy needed to be fused together in an alchemy concoction that is so supernaturally strong it likely lists virgin blood and unicorn tears among its unholy ingredients.

Then there are the zip ties that are usually included, because imprisoning baby dolls and shiny cars in Satanic plastic doesn’t go far enough. These zip ties usually fasten said toy to a piece of superfluous cardboard like tiny choker collars and S&M cuffs. Oh, and standard scissors can’t cut these things. They don’t even make a dent. In fact, I’ve broken no less than three sharp knives trying to free Barbie and G.I Joe from their respective miniature torture chambers. As far as I can figure, a grenade might do the trick but only like one of those really big bang-bang military grade ones.

Sometimes toy makers like to switch it up and also add random gigantic staples that can only be removed with three bottles of wine, a steady supply of Vicodin and a sturdy butter knife (or, better yet, a tiny titanium crowbar).

And let us not forget the sadistic bastards who use full-on bolts to secure the toys in their packaging. BOLTS. Those things used to fasten steel in cars and houses and skyscrapers are also apparently needed to keep Buttercup, the shiny, new My Little Pony, from shifting during transportation.

What do these people think is going to happen from the time a toy leaves the factory to the time it arrives in an eager child’s sticky little jam hands? A tsunami of volcanic lava will flood a toxic waste dump and as a result become a sentient volcano monster named Magma Mike and the only way to defeat him is to throw tightly packaged toy tractors and farm animals at him?

Or perhaps this is some sort of secret government plan to enforce population control in a way that can’t be traced back to our elected officials. Sure, you’d love to have more kids. So would I. But the thought of having to go mano a mano with even MORE toys every Christmas, let alone another whole birthday, is simply too much to bear.

Whatever the reasoning is, at least it’s a relief to know that all your hard work and not insignificant hand wounds are well worth it once you get to see the look of pure happiness on your child’s face as they play with their great new toy. Which they do for all of seven minutes before discarding it to go roll around in some bubble wrap.

And let us not forget that on the plus side, should the apocalypse happen, we can all rest easy knowing that an army of Fisher-Price Little People and Bratz dolls will survive in mint condition and hopefully keep Magma Mike satiated once we’re all dead.

 

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Adventures in home haircutting

Posted on February 15, 2016 | 1 comment

When it comes down to it, despite our differences, I think all parents want the same thing for their children. And that thing is that their kid doesn’t end up killing them as revenge for a horrifyingly awful home haircut they received when they were 2-years-old.

No? Just me then?

Well, rejoice and sleep tight tonight because I sure as hell never will again.

I’m not even sure how it all got so out of control. One minute I’m trimming his bangs and then suddenly BAM! I’m reenacting the topiary scene from “Edward Scissorhands.” Mercilessly I hacked my way across his skull as bits of murdered fluffy baby curls swirled chaotically in the air and the snip, snip, snip of the pathetically dull scissors filled the room.

I should have known things were going bad judging by the utter terror on my husband’s face.

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But it just didn’t hit me. And so I kept going. Snip, snip. Oblivious. Snip. Reckless. Snip, snip, snip. And SOBER, for god sake.

Until, suddenly, horrifyingly, it did. It did hit me.

Hard.

And as I surveyed the damage on the tiny battlefield I could only think one thing:

“There goes any chance I had of ending up in a decent nursing home.”

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I had turned my beautiful baby boy into Lloyd Christmas. Into Moe from “The Three Stooges.” Into, god forgive me, Shia LeBeouf post-meltdown. My baby’s hair was a mess. Just…oof. Such a hot mess.

The back looked like it had lost a battle to the death with a deranged weed whacker while the left side looked like a terraced field in some exotic land. As for the right, it looked like the bastard child of a pixie cut and the mid-90’s Caesar haircut, a la George Clooney on “ER.” Most of the top was confusingly left long while the front resembled my own bangs that I brutally hacked as a child right before school picture day in 1988.

haircut_back

In my defense, I’m an idiot. An idiot who thought years of butchering my Barbies’ hair with asymmetrical mullets could translate into real world haircutting skill.

Hint: It doesn’t.

But, oh, how I want to be the kind of mom who can do these types of things. You know, those Do-It-Yourself queens who can sew buttons back onto their children’s shirts and can serve a beautiful, homemade birthday cake without the disclaimer “The middle is still a bit raw and I may have lost my wedding ring in there so be on the lookout, everyone.”

These are the moms who make their own non-toxic cleaning solutions and actually attempt to get stains out of clothes instead of just convincing themselves that the wine stain makes that skirt look even MORE trendy. They can do crafts that don’t end up looking like rejects from an animated Tim Burton film and they have nice handwriting and they actual own first aid kits. They know how to fix things and make things and don’t have to pay other people to do all this stuff for them.

Legend has it there are even women out there who can cut their family’s hair without making them look like a Simpson character.

And then there’s me, who has yet to pick up her 2-year-old son’s birth certificate from the county clerk’s office, has not one, but three, giant mystery stains on her hardwood floor and is banned from ever using a glue gun again because of an unfortunate accident involving a rather sensitive part of her husband’s body.

The good news is that ultimately all this makes me a fantastic parent if you consider the definition of a parent to be “someone who, if they’ve done their job right, have made themselves obsolete.” I mean, hell, I’m pretty much obsolete now. As soon as he learns to cut those crusts off his sandwiches, he might as well move out because we will pretty much be at the same adulting level.

Then again, who knows? Maybe I can learn to be one of those moms. I mean, if he go from a leaky lump of clay who sticks spoons into his eyeballs into a short, almost-human who can average getting roughly 65 percent of his chili in his mouth using said spoons, then honestly how hard can it be to remember to buy band-aids and rubbing alcohol so I’m not frantically running down the aisles of Walgreens with a screaming and bloody toddler in tow?

Hell, maybe I’ll even attempt the very adult act of throwing a dinner party again.

Just as soon as I figure out where my husband hid all the knives after last year’s Gumbo Disaster of 2015.

 

 

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With liberty & naps for all

Posted on February 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

There are a lot of things wasted on the young. Youth. Beauty. A ridiculously high metabolism. Expensive toys when junk mail and an empty shampoo bottle are apparently just as exotic and entertaining.

But perhaps worst of all are naps. Naps are so completely wasted on the young. Yet we hand them out to children like beads on Mardi Gras. Yes, we, the parents, who haven’t had a chance to nap since 2009, give unlimited sleeping time to any two-bit juvenile who can fake a halfway decent yawn.

Actually, no. Forget the young. You know what it is? It’s a bigger issue. A much bigger issue. Because in our society, naps are wasted on the undeserving.

You know who needs naps? High school kids. These awkward creatures have jam-packed schedules, piles of homework and a tsunami wave of hormones assaulting them at all times. Not to mention, they have a daily routine that is the complete opposite of what their biological clock is telling them. I’m old but not so old that I don’t remember what it was like. I routinely didn’t fall asleep until 2 a.m. when I was 17. And yet, I had to be up at 6 a.m. to get ready for school (because eyes don’t aggressively slather black eyeliner on themselves). And yet these teenagers get yelled at for finally succumbing to the siren call of sleep just because it happens to be in the middle of chemistry class. Or, worse yet, woken up early on weekend mornings because it’s apparently illegal when you’re a parent to let your child “sleep all day on such a beautiful day.”

You know who else needs naps? The middle-age-ish sect that are busy taking care of both their offspring and their aging parents. Because you know who the two most ungrateful species in the world are? Aging parents and children over the age of 12.

And let’s not forget pregnant ladies. They need naps most of all. And I’m not just saying that because I happen to be knocked up right now. They really do. One, because creating life cell-by-cell is wicked stupid hard, and two, everyone will be much safer if I can JUST CLOSE MY EYES FOR 10 FREAKING MINUTES, OK!?!

But NO. No. Who do we give naps to? Babies. Babies who have their entire lives ahead of them to nap. They literally are experiencing the world for the first time and what do they do with this wonderful new discovery? Sleep through everything.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have old people. Old people who could die at any moment. And what do they do with the precious time they have left? They nap. And I mean, hardcore nap, like napping is an audition for death and they’re trying to get it perfect. And yeah, sure, you could argue that they’ve earned all these naps after a lifetime of working and raising their family but I can guarantee that when they really needed all these naps was when they were working and raising their family.

And then there’s these guys. Children. With the energy they give off 20 minutes after eating a candy bar, young children could fuel most European cities for a year. Yet, we INSIST they take a nap. And then they have the nerve to FIGHT it. Tooth and nail. In front of their exhausted parents who haven’t seen the inside of their own eyelids in over 19 hours and it’s only noon.

But perhaps most twisted of all, we give unlimited napping privileges to cats and dogs, the only family members who don’t contribute anything to the household (and please, no cheesy comments like “oh, but animals contribute so much love to your home”…of course pets love you but what I need right now is for my loving dog, Buffy, to get off his lazy ass and make dinner for everyone). No job. No responsibilities. Food and water just magically appear. Yeah, no, I can totally see why they need to sleep 22 hours a day.

Well, I say it’s time we finally take a stand and end this madness. We should march on Washington! No more naps for the undeserving! Naps for all or naps for none! Attica! Attica!

Or, I don’t know, something like that. I’ll put it on my to-do list. Right now I have to put my toddler down for night-night.

Sigh.

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Go play outside & try not to die, sweetie

Posted on January 31, 2016 | 3 comments

Ah, winter. That beautiful time of year when everything dies and the air hurts your face and your soul turns as gray as week-old snow. It’s such a pity it only lasts four months, a mere one hundred and twenty thousand million days too long.

On the plus side, all this miserable weather makes it damn near impossible to leave your house, which means you and your entire family get to stare at one another’s stupid faces nonstop as the four walls around you slowly close in. They say murder rates spike during a heat wave but I think that’s just because the police are finally finding all the thawed out bodies killed in mid-February over a family Monopoly game gone horribly wrong.

Yes, winter is always an intense time but perhaps even more so for parents of small children. This is because:

  1. All a young child wants to do, besides eat your sandwich even though they have their very own perfectly edible and almost identical sandwich, is play. All day. Every day.
  2. These same young children have absolutely no concept of age. Meaning they truly believe that you have as much fun playing “Put Elmo and Mr. Empty Shampoo Bottle Inside the Empty Tupperware Bowl 679 Times in a Row” as they do.

And this is what makes the winter so hard for parents of toddlers and preschoolers. Because while nature deals with its four-month long case of PMS, there is no longer any way of escaping those dreaded words…

“Mommy, will you come play with me?”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love playing with my almost 2-year-old. It’s downright awe-inspiring watching how his little brain works and seeing him laugh and smile at his own creativity and knowing that the greatest joy in his life is having his Mommy sit on the floor with him and play “Loud Truck Runs Repeatedly Over Assorted Teddy Bears and Daddy’s Left Boot.”

Honestly, playing with him gives me a sense of peace and contentment that I’ve never known before. And that beautiful feeling lasts for all of approximately four minutes before I’m checking my watch and mentally calculating the odds of my family staging a coup and overthrowing me if I give them leftover chicken and dumplings for the fourth night in a row.

Seriously, have you ever played with a small child? (And it doesn’t count if you’re getting paid for it). Time literally stops. There you are, four games of Candyland, three puzzles and six rounds of “Smell My Stinky Feet & Humorously Overreact” later, and you check the time to see that no more than 7.5 minutes have passed. And yet you haven’t even BEGUN to quench their thirst for play time. They want more. Oh, how they want more. Always with the more and do it again and one more time and Mommy, why are you crying?

It’s specifically for this reason that the Outside was invented. Because no matter how wonderful of a parent you are, your threshold for the mind-numbing boredom of child’s play will always be reached. It’s nobody’s fault, really. It’s just our brains are wired differently. Child brains find funny noises and repetition and spinning in circles to be the height of entertainment. Parent brains find alcohol makes doing all those things much, much more entertaining.

And so, we tell our beloved offspring to “Go play Outside.” Before we kindly, but firmly, kill them. (Or, being that this is 2016, we actually say “Go play Outside but I have to come with you because you know some muumuu-wearing neighborhood busybody is going to call CPS the second they suspect a child might be unsupervised even for a second but just pretend I’m not here and go play and I’ll sit on this bench and look at my phone and secretly judge people on Facebook.”) Because Outside is a child’s natural habitat. It is endlessly fascinating for children.

Except in the winter. In winter, there is no “go Outside to play.” Hell, there’s not even a “go shovel the driveway” yet in my case, considering my son just figured out what an elbow is yesterday. And if you do make the ill-advised decision to let your children play Outside in winter, you will spend 76 minutes putting outerwear on them only to have them knock on the door 11 minutes later whining “we’re cold!” as they unleash a frozen tsunami of dripping snow throughout your house and leave a pile of wet wool behind that won’t dry out until June.

Anyway, what was my point? Oh yes, that if winter doesn’t end soon I’m pretty sure I’m going to die.

Happy almost-February, everyone!

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8 Things I’ll do differently with my 2nd baby

Posted on January 25, 2016 | 2 comments

I. Accept any and all help

If you would have told me three years ago that I’d be the kind of new mom who felt she had to do everything herself, I would have laughed so hard at you I would’ve farted, laughed even harder, farted even harder and then finished chugging my comically large glass of wine. But let me tell you, the second I heard my first born’s screams, it felt like they were physically tearing into me, causing me to whisk him away from whomever was nice enough to try to give me a much-needed break. I felt like I HAD to be the one to comfort him.

But this time? Good luck getting me to even take him/her back. My immunity to cries is nearly impenetrable.

2. Breastfeed in public

I’ll be honest. I’m probably the biggest breastfeeding in public advocate you will ever meet who has never actually breastfed in public. I always wanted to. I always meant to. But my son and I never quite mastered the smooth and barely perceptible mouth to boob maneuver. It was more like an awkward five minutes of fumbling, the breastfeeding equivalent of a freshman trying to unsnap his first bra. So I always chickened out and brought a bottle with us.

But I refuse to be intimidated this time. It’s just a boob. It’s not like I’m showing off my ankles like some kind of two-bit hussy.

3. Not worry about how fast I can drop the baby weight

I’ll lose it eventually. But there’s a only a small-ish window of time after having a baby that you can get away with still wearing maternity clothes and I plan to stretch that window to the limits of human decency.

4. Remember that crying is not indicative of my skills as a parent

And by crying, I mean both by the baby and by me.

5. Prepare the coffee the night before

The only thing that takes longer than labor and delivery is the amount of time it takes to separate coffee filters at 3:30 in the morning while you’re holding a hungry and screaming newborn against your leaking boobs that have transformed into rock hard (and painful) granite overnight. Life with a newborn would improve a thousand times over if I can only remember to take 90 seconds and set up the coffeemaker before I go to bed.

6. Stop worrying if I’m posting too many photos of my baby online

I am. Of course I am. I one hundred percent am. But who cares!? I created life, jerkwads! Look at it! I SAID LOOK AT IT!

7. Stop apologizing for being moody and hormonal

Am I being irrational? *hurls Diaper Genie at your face* Maybe. But my only job right now is keeping this tiny, demanding infant alive. And I have to do it with 20,000 tons of weapons-grade hormones hurling themselves through my exhausted body. So I can’t always be polite about it. Everyone should just automatically assume I don’t really mean it when I call them a “useless idiotic assface.”

8. Share every single intimate (and disgusting) aspect of my baby’s existence a little less

As a new mom, it’s impossible not to be obsessed with your baby. But it’s important to remember that even though to you, lil’ junior’s poop color and consistency is the most fascinating story you’ve encountered since you finished reading “Infinite Jest,” everyone else doesn’t give a crap (pun COMPLETELY intended). Even your partner and the grandmothers can only take so much. Practice in front of the mirror if you must:

“How is the baby?”

“Well, he’s kind of really mangled my left nipple with his overly vigorous sucking so right now he’s just drinking from the right breast so I’m a little concerned he’s not getting enough to eat although the doctor said as long as his poop is consistent there is no reason to worry but then he got that butt rash…I mean, he’s doing fine. How are you?”

And here are a few things I’ll do exactly the same…

  1. Skip laundry, let the dishes pile up and order pizza for dinner just so I can spend one more hour lounging on the couch while my newborn sleeps on my chest. I just made a human and I’ll be damned if I don’t make time to enjoy it.
  2. Continue to dress my baby in whatever ragtag outfit is the most diaper accessible. Cute, unstained, matching clothes are for creatures that don’t vomit and poop every 26 minutes.
  3. Trust my instincts. Everyone told me this before I became a mother and I thought every single one of them was insane. I barely had enough instinct to keep myself alive. But lo and behold, when I popped that gigantic Viking baby out, those instincts kicked in and they have yet to steer me wrong (introducing him to that little red demon Elmo notwithstanding).

 

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Having witch babies & other pregnancy fears

Posted on January 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

Now that I’m the mother of an almost 2-year-old with another baby on the way, I’m an expert at pretty much everything.

Ha! Kidding. That’s all those other blogs written by smug parents of small children that I can’t stop hate-reading.

I, on the other hand, almost take a kind of perverted pride in just how little I have figured out about life, let alone about parenthood. I mean, I have no less than four light switches in my house that I have no idea what they do and currently my toddler is begging me to throw his giant Mr. Bouncety-Bounce ball directly at his face. Then he laughs hysterically, chases the ball, hands it to me and asks me to throw it directly at his face again.

We’ve been playing this for 45 minutes and I haven’t questioned for a second whether this is a good idea or not.

And it’s only going to get worse. Take this second pregnancy. You’d think by now I’d know what to expect when I’m expecting since I expected not even two years ago. But this pregnancy is different from my first in a lot of ways. For instance, with my first one I was convinced I was pregnant with a ninja-trained dragon. And this pregnancy, I’m convinced I’m pregnant with Satan. (It would definitely explain all the projectile vomiting and all the chasing my husband around the house with a baseball bat because he forgot to get the big wheel of cheese from the super fancy grocery store).

Even my food cravings are different this time. All I wanted with my son, Riker, was cheeseburgers. All day, every day. And with this new baby, all I want are bacon cheeseburgers.

But perhaps the most striking difference is what my biggest fears are this time versus last time. Because now I no longer have the gift of ignorance. I now know what I truly need to be afraid of.

For example, the first time around, I can’t tell you how much sleep I lost over worrying what my son’s nose would look like, all because in his ultrasound it looked like he had the exaggerated nose of a cartoon witch. I had repeated nightmares the doctor would hand me a swaddled bundle and when I moved the blanket off his face, there was Miracle Max’s wife from “The Princess Bride” staring up at me, screaming “Humperdinck!”.

But now I know that having an ugly witch baby is nothing compared to dealing with the witching hour. And let’s be honest, it’s witching HOURS. Hours and hours where nothing else exists except the sun sinking into the horizon, burying your hope with it, and the banshee screaming ceaselessly into your ear.

I also wasted a lot of time the first time worrying about how fragile the baby would be and how likely it was that my giant troll hands would hurt it. And now I know that not only are babies tougher than they look, but they hold all the power. In fact, they’re tiny little dictators and I just pray that this one will be a benevolent ruler, unlike his/her brother who was a ruthless albeit charming despot.

And unlike last time, I’m not wasting any energy being afraid of labor or delivery or even another C-section. Because now I know that no matter how my body is violently ripped open to provide an exit for little junior, the pain pales in comparison to the utter mind-blowing torture that is the first six weeks of breastfeeding. Now, I know I’ve complained about breastfeeding before (here, for example, and here and here). But this time around is so much worse. Because now I know what’s coming. I survived the first time only because I was naïve enough to think “it has to get better” every day. But it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t get better until two weeks past forever. And even then you’re too sleep deprived to notice.

To put it in Hollywood movie terms, it’s like escaping from an angry psychopath’s dungeon and realizing with increasing horror that in less than six months you have to go marching right back in there VOLUNTARILY and undergo the torture all over again. Only this time you can’t scream at the top of your lungs the whole time because your husband says it, quote, “stresses him out.”

Luckily, however, I also know that it will all be worth it. Because no matter how bad things get, no matter how much pain or crying or forgotten wheels of cheese there are, one glance at your sleeping baby’s face makes you forget everything else.

That is, until it’s time to breastfeed again.

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Christmas through the ages

Posted on December 17, 2015 | 2 comments

I don’t know about you, but this year I want to celebrate Christmas the way it was always meant to be celebrated: opening presents and then getting day drunk and then eating a huge dinner I did NOT prepare and then dozing off on the couch to the sounds of “A Christmas Story” as someone else does the dishes.

Sounds perfect, no? Except I can’t. I can’t because I’m an adult. And I mean an adult-y adult. None of that “I’m 23 and totally independent even though my parents still pay for my cell phone!” level of grown-up-ness. No. We’re talking “I watched the debates and didn’t even turn it into a drinking game” level of adulthood.

Which means I’m no longer allowed to be the one sitting on the couch wondering how that piece of pie and hot chocolate magically got on my lap. No. Now, I’m the invisible, sweaty, exhausted woman handing the lucky son of bitches sitting on the couch that damn pie that I made from scratch straight out of the box.

See, depending on your age, the holiday season can mean many different things.

As a kid, it’s all shiny, shiny lights and cookies and presents and big, fat men with beards whom you’ve only briefly met but nonetheless are guaranteeing to do everything within their vast magical powers to make sure YOU personally have a very merry Christmas.

As a teenager, it means three weeks off school, the anticipation of your mom finally buying you those “ridiculously over-priced” (her words) pants with the vaguely suggestive word on the rear that you’ll just die without and hanging out with your cool, older cousin with the tattoo at grandma’s.

In your early 20’s, it means one month of never-ending rounds of eggnog and wine and seasonal beer and reddish-looking cocktails with cutesy names like North Poletini and Santa’s Sleigh Bomb at hip holiday parties and festively decorated bars. And then going to your parent’s house where they feed you and give you lots of presents and do your laundry if you ask nicely enough and then give you all the leftovers to boot because you “look too skinny.”

But then, one day you’re married and 30 and BOOM! You realize it’s December but you wouldn’t know it from YOUR house, which still has up an odd mixture of Fourth of July, Halloween and Thanksgiving decor. And it’s all because YOU are suddenly in charge of MAKING Christmas happen. And that’s when you cross the threshold from “this is most wonderful time of year” to “no wonder there are so many suicides this time of year.”

Because now when that massive ball of Christmas lights roughly the size of Utah needs untangled, that angry, throbbing vein is appearing on YOUR forehead, and not humorously on your father’s face. And now when you hear “Silver Bells” for the fourth time before you’ve even had breakfast, it is no longer “festive” but some sort of sadistic audio torture.

Now suddenly you’re Googling how much the going rate for a semi-decent kidney is on the black market in order to afford real presents for your husband, parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, in-laws and even your stupid dog because your husband thinks it’s mean if Buffy doesn’t get at least one chew toy with a bow on it. Because apparently after a certain age, giving out coupon books for “One Free Hug!” is just sad. Not to mention, now it’s a social faux pas to not buy gifts for your mailman, hairdresser, neighbor, boss, co-workers, cousin’s baby, brother-in-law’s dog and the barista who serves you your Peppermint Mocha every morning (even though the barista keeps writing down your name as “Angeilla”).

And while before you always insisted that artificial Christmas trees were just so “bourgeois” and that when you had your OWN home, you wouldn’t be caught dead without a real pine tree, this year your corner is inhabited by a $19.99 three-foot tall fake tree that looks like it died of some horrible fake tree disease in 1974. And then you stuffed it with some pine-scented air-fresheners from your car. Because whatever.

And even though you swore you were going to make gingerbread cookies from scratch this year, two minutes inside the store made you grab the closest pre-packaged desert-like item and SPRINT back to your car out of a not-entirely-unreasonable fear of being attacked by a stressed-out soccer mom with an Elf on the Shelf wearing brass knuckles.

But then, just when you’re about to throw in the towel, just when you are about to stab the shopping mall Santa with a candy cave shiv because you simply can’t take it anymore, BOOM! You have kids. And suddenly the Christmas magic is back. Only better. Because now it’s in technicolor.

Because now you get to watch the tiny people you love most in the world experience all the holiday memories you still hold close in your heart.

And that makes standing in line for 45 minutes just to buy three freaking stocking stuffers completely worth it.

Well…almost.

pollyanna 2pollyanna 3

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Posted in Family, funny, Holidays, Humor, Parenting

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Being thankful for the crappy stuff

Posted on November 19, 2015 | 3 comments

Every year around this time, I like to make a list of all the things I’m thankful for. One, because I think it’s an important tradition of the Thanksgiving holiday (in fact, I’d say it’s almost as important as the tradition of drinking wine all day while you cook).

thanksgiving_cook

And two, it’s the easiest column I write all year. The list just grows and grows the older I get. Loving husband, wonderful child, loyal dog composed of 95 percent fur, pizza that now comes with a hotdog-filled crust. I could go on and on.

But the thing is, it’s easy to be thankful for all the good things in your life. No one struggles to be thankful for having a roof over their head and enough money in their account to buy at least five pizzas with hotdog-filled crusts. So, this year, I’ve decided I’m going to be thankful for all the crappy things in my life. All the things that usually drive me frothing-at-the-mouth super nutjob crazy. Because if you can find a way to be grateful for sweeping up after a dog that sheds enough hair to fill the Atlantic Ocean on a daily basis, you have found the path to true happiness (or at least a path that doesn’t require wine for breakfast just to make it through the day).

So, for example, I am thankful for traffic jams, which give me a regular reminder that the zombie apocalypse is not yet upon us. Added bonus: When the zombie apocalypse does inevitably come, all our commute times will be cut in half. So, hey, a win-win.

I’m also beyond thankful that my toddler son’s lungs are strong and in working order, even when he demonstrates this by screaming directly into my face because his cracker broke in half. Because he broke it in half.

thanksgiving_cracker

I’m also thankful that over the years I have amassed such a wide and diverse group of friends that when I scroll through Facebook, I get a wide and diverse viewpoint of how the world will end. Which will be, in no particular order, global warming, terrorists, crazy gun nuts, crazy anti-gun nuts, disposable Starbucks cups, orphan refugees, evil CEOs, evil poor people, robots, Millennials, the Koch brothers, the Clintons, gluten, aliens, that damn blue dress (it’s BLUE), women, minorities, gays, straight white men and robot aliens.

I’m thankful for cold weather, and in particular this icy blast of wind currently assaulting my face, because it reminds me I’m alive and if all else fails I can just lay down and hope to freeze to death because at least when you freeze to death, you feel warmth for a brief second before you shuffle off this mortal coil.

I’m thankful for the Kardashians for reminding me that I’m not the worst person on the planet.

I’m thankful for my student loan debt because…hmm…let me come back to this one.

I’m thankful my dog feels the need to bark at an unnaturally loud volume at anything that moves, smells weird, makes sound, doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound but might be thinking of making a sound, etc. Because even though there is less than a 0.01 percent chance I will be murdered by the plastic bag floating down our street, if I ever am, he will finally be vindicated after all these years.

thanksgiving_dog

I’m thankful for people who are on a new diet and have to tell me about it in detail even though I didn’t ask (making sure to include everything that is wrong with what I’m eating) because somehow, it makes the deep-fried cupcake I eat right in front of their face taste even sweeter.

I’m thankful for my student loan debt because…education is…hmm…I know there’s a reason. Let me think it over some more.

I’m thankful I’m occasionally required to wear real pants because it makes me appreciate the magic of the humble elastic waistband all the more.

I’m thankful my son likes to wake up at 5:30 a.m. because there is something so satisfying about standing on your porch as dawn breaks and flipping off the rising sun.

I’m so, so, so thankful for extreme couponers at the grocery store because it gives me plenty of time to try to work out the details of how to get away with the perfect murder.

And lastly, I’m thankful for my student loan debt because there is a chance, thanks to my diet of deep-fried cupcakes and hotdog-stuffed pizzas, that I’ll die before the bastards are paid off.

 

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Posted in Family, Holidays, Humor, Parenting, Pets

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