IM between my sister and me

itsmeflea: Hey
mommyERnurse: Hey! Did you try to call earlier?
itsmeflea: Yeah! What's going on? I've been getting a busy signal for 8 hours!
mommyERnurse: I forgot and left the internet up - but you caught me here anyway.
itsmeflea: VoiceMail - not a myth.
mommyERnurse: What?
itsmeflea: nothing. How's Petey?
mommyERnurse: Better now, but he had a fever for 7 whole days and couldn't nurse or take meds so I had to stuff Tylenol suppositories up his butt.
itsmeflea: Delicious!
mommyERnurse: Yea, I'm glad I'm a nurse or else I'd have taken him to the hospital to get an IV. He was so sick! He didn't sleep for 3 nights in a row, then his fever broke and he slept for 2 solid days and nights.
itsmeflea: Oh, my god.
mommyERnurse: I know!
itsmeflea: No, crazy customer alert!
mommyERnurse: What's happening!
itsmeflea: brb
itsmeflea: she wants to know if there's a pill she can take that will make her like sex. I told her those are magic pills and we keep those behind the counter.
mommyERnurse: You did?
itsmeflea: No.
mommyERnurse: Tell her they *do* make a pill!
itsmeflea: Really?
mommyERnurse: It's prescription, but yes.
itsmeflea: Viagra?
mommyERnurse: No, it's just for women.
itsmeflea: Really?
mommyERnurse: Yes, it's called Libidozone, it's available by prescription only.
itsmeflea: brb
itsmeflea: okay.
mommyERnurse: Did you tell her?
itsmeflea: Yes.
mommyERnurse: tell her she can get it from Dr. David Hayword.
itsmeflea: Who's that?
mommyERnurse: The doctor on All My Children. That's what Erica Kane has been taking for years.
itsmeflea: Oh, my God.
mommyERnurse: it's not real.
itsmeflea: YOU ASS.
mommyERnurse: You didn't really tell her, did you?
itsmeflea: YES I TOLD HER.
mommyERnurse: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
mommyERnurse: Don't you watch All My Kids?
itsmeflea: No!
mommyERnurse: Tell her she can buy it at www.abc.com/AMC/Dr.DavidHaywood/Libidozone
mommyERnurse: dot org!
itsmeflea: Oh, my god you suck.

Just for snicks, go to the Mirriam-Webster dictionary site, look up and listen to the correct pronunciation of the word "booger". I get the feeling the woman providing this service was enjoying her job at that particular moment.

Two women just came in to browse before lunch. While I was ringing one of them up, they had the following conversation:

One: Do you want to go somewhere for lunch? Are you hungry?

Two: Yes! I'm starving! Do you know where you want to go?

One: No.

Two: Before we go to lunch, do you mind if we go to the salon next door so I can get my eyebrows waxed?

One: .........

Two: Do you mind? Before lunch? Eyebrows waxed? Next door?

One: ........(dubiously) Uh.....okay.....

Two: Great!

They leave.

******************************

I meant to send Wendy an e-mail wishing her grandmother well, but got completely distracted by the hate mail she received and forgot. Answer me this: when you were in elementary school, did the teacher split up the class one day, having half the students learn to write hate mail, while the other half learned the proper use of contractions?

Me either, but there must be some type of explanation that will make it all make sense.

I'm getting addicted to blog hopping. I knew this day would come. I've added Rubber Nun and Tbogg to the list of daily reads. Check 'em out. They funny.

tbogg introduces us to the Worst CD ever made.

Make sure you scroll down and read Jeffrey Atwood's 5 star review of it.

I just saw a man in a leather jacket and a bandana go screaming past the store in a heavy-duty motorized wheelchair, with a woman in his lap and about 3 leather jacket and bandana wearing men hanging off the wheelchair, and everyone was laughing and yelling. He reminded me of Cutter John.

I just finished having the following conversation:

Him: Um...

Me: Did you have a question?

Him: No! No. .... .... Yeah.

Me: Okay?....

Him: ....

Me: It's okay. You can ask.

Him: You probably hear all sorts of things, don't you?

Me: Yeah, but mostly I just answer questions about anal sex.

Him: (says nothing, turns red)

Me: You have a question about anal sex, don't you?

Him: Well, I didn't think I did, until I saw that big book over there (gestures with his thumb)

Me: Anal Pleasure & Health?

Him: Yeah!

Me: That's a good book.

Him: Yeah, well, the thing is...my girlfriend and I...we've been doing it...and she says she really likes it, but now I'm wondering if we're doing it right.

Me: Do you use lots of lube?

Him: Yeah. We use "Wet."

Me: Do you use condoms?

Him: Yeah.

Me: Did you start off small and build up?

Him: Oh, yeah, we did.

Me: Does it hurt?

Him: No, she says no, she says she likes it.

Me: Is there any blood?

Him: No, no.

Me: You're not using Anal-Eze or any sort of numbing cream?

Him: No, just the lube.

Me: You're not going from the anus to the vagina, are you?

Him: Oh, no! She told me not to do that.

Me: Good. Are you monogamous?

Him: Yes!

Me: Been tested?

Him: Yes!

Me: Good! You're taking a shower after.

Him: Yeah.

Me: Well, I really don't see a problem.

Him: Well, I'm worried about it being clean, I guess.

Me: Well, she could poop about 2 hours before you have sex, that should get any feces in the rectum out of the way.

Him: She does that! (said in an admiring, "she's so smart" tone.)

Me: Honestly, it sounds like you're being as careful as you can be. You could get a lube designed for anal sex that helps stop the spread of bacteria, but that's really all I can think of right now.

Him: Is that important?

Me: Well, feces has a high concentration of bacteria that can lead to infection if it gets into the vagina or even a microscopic tear or abrasion, which is why condoms are always a good idea. It's also an effective way of spreading STDs - over 100,000 cases of Hepatitus A are caused by ingesting infected feces every year, which is why I'd recommend using an antibacterial soap right afterwards, and definitely before she gives you a blowjob. It's definitely a higher risk sex practice, but it sounds like you're being careful. Can I help you with anything else?

Him: Yeah. I want 3 of these sugarplum candles. And some of this lotion that smells like cake.

I have a variation on this exact same conversation at least 3 times a week. I even dream about it - last night I dreamed I was lecturing the boy who took me to my high school prom about whether he could have anal sex with his wife if she was pregnant. At one point in my life, not so long ago, this would have mortified me.

Oh, and Happy Turkey Day to everybody. Or Tofurkey. Whatever you prefer.

Chicago columnist Mary Schmich uses her pop-culture characters "Sissy" and "Missy" to express her distain for blogs:

We are a nation drowning in yakkers broadcasting their opinionated yak, a society in which opining passes for deep thinking. Whatever happened to saving your opinion for the coffee shop and the dinner table?"

Sissy stretched her arms in ecstasy. "That's the beauty of blogging, sister! Taking your opinion to the masses is no longer the private province of overpaid, big-media commentators, most of whom haven't had an original thought since Gutenberg's day. Now anybody with a computer can air their thoughts as if they were CNN."

Missy sighed again. "Exactly."

Sissy tsked again. "You are so 20th Century. Do you even know what a blog is?"

"Pass me the newspaper, please," Missy answered.

"The newspaper?" Sissy snorted. "Newspapers are so boring. So stuffy. So full of truncated versions of the world."

"By truncated, I assume you mean `edited'?"

I hope all you other bloggers are paying attention.

Tripod

There is a photo in the December issue of Playgirl that we here at the store have become obssessed with. It's in the "Real Men" section, which is evidently a section where men (or their partners) send in naked photos of themselves. The finalist photos are published, and from them a "Real Man of the Month" is selected by the editorial staff. And they're serious about it being amateur photos, including one of a 64 year old man. But that's not the one we're all thinking about. To be blunt, it's a photo of a very tiny man with a dick that literally goes down to his knee.

I discovered him as I was flipping through it in the store alone, having to hastily hide it when a customer walked in. The magazine stayed under the counter where I'd shoved it until Saturday when Carissa walked in.

I was joking with Carissa about having sent Kyle out for porn. She said she and Kyle had spent quite a bit of time while we were out of town perusing it.

"You know, there's one photo in there..." she began.

"Who, Tripod?" I asked.

"Yes!!!!" she shrieked. "We couldn't believe it!"

"Don't you feel sorry for the guy who had to share the page with him?"

"Yeah," she said thoughtfully, "But he shouldn't worry too much about it. I'd have to take a pass on Tripod, myself. He looks like he'd be...uncomfortable."

"How do you think he rides a bike?"

"I have no idea."

When I got home, I mentioned that Carissa had been looking at the PlayGirl with Kyle.

"I looked at it, too," I confessed. "In particular, this one photo..."

"Who, Tripod?" interrupted Steve.

"Yes! You saw it?"

"Kyle showed me."

On Sunday, with Jo, I discovered that we also had the January issue.

"Yeah, I've been looking at those," said Jo. "I can't remember which issue it is, but there's this one guy..."

***********************************************

E-mail bag

I love getting e-mail about the blog. I dropped the ball on the Fundamentalist swimwear (Sunday, Nov 23), but Kari was right there to pick up the slack:

"My favorite part about the Fundamentalist Swimsuit
Competition is that it's STILL about being slim.
Specifically, they have the "slimming swimwear." For
when those three layers of clothes still make your
modest woman look like a lump, make sure she feels FAT
TOO!!!! Because you can't just judge her on
"modesty", you have to judge her on looks too!"

Yep. All this emphasis on how horrible it is for women to be sexually alluring to men, so they should be MODEST, yet at the same time they place equal importance on being slim. Why?

Here's one from
Melissa, weighing in on the Peppermint candy incident (Thursday, Nov 20):

"when *I* was four ('bout 30 years ago), I choked
on one of those damn peppermint candies myself and
nearly died. Now, I wasn't given this candy by some
complete moron like your son was; it was somewhere in
our house--I can't remember whether my mom said it was
OK for me to have it or whether I discovered it on my
own--but I suppose that's neither here nor there. At
any rate, I was downstairs with a friend when the
choking commenced, and my mom was upstairs cleaning or
folding laundry or something, and somehow, SOMEHOW, I
managed to drag myself up the stairs and alert mom to
what was happening. The rest I remember clear as day:
mom saw me, realized what was happening, panicked,
basically picked me up by the legs and tried to shake
that damn thing out. When that proved futile, she,
goddess bless her, stuck her finger right down my
throat and somehow managed to dislodge the demon
peppermint. (I'm not sure if the Heimlich even existed
back then or was part of common knowledge.) To this
day, if I happen to unwrap a piece of hard candy in
front of my mom, she says, "Please be careful," and
I've often teased her about this.....I guess what I want you to know is that your
little boy, while he probably won't understand the
magnitude of what happened for quite a while, will
remember those frightening minutes and *most
importantly* that mom saved his life."

This was such a timely e-mail. Usually I lose the popularity contest around here to Steve, hands down, but after the choking incident, my approval rating has soared, to the point where Alex is now lobbying for me to stay home and for Steve to go to work, when usually it's the other way around. Note to future mothers: squeezing them out of your uterus isn't good enough. In order to get any appreciation, you also have to dramatically save their lives.

And to everybody who e-mailed me wanting to know if we bought a new coffee pot: Yes. Yes, we did.


I seem to have frightened Eva away from childrearing:

"your blog has been
such a reality check for me -- not putting me off the
idea entirely, but making me consider the seriousness
of the commitment I would be making.

Well, you know, they're pretty darned cute when they're sleeping. And wearing hats. The cuteness of hats on babies and small children can't be underestimated. Plus, you get to hear these really great jokes they make up all the time, like this one:

"Why did the dog go to the bank?"

"I don't know, Alex, why *did* the dog go to the bank?"

"Because he was out of money! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!"


I also want to give special thanks to Chasmyn for her support about the Peppermint Incident, and also to remind me why I love women so much. To give support to another mother's fear about her child's near-death experience so soon after the actual loss of her own child shows a class and strength of character that I could only dream of aspiring to. Thank you, Chasmyn.

Why are Christian fundamentalist online clothing stores following me around? First there was the alarming article in Bust about modest (read: horrifyingly ugly) clothing, and now I came across this one when randomly blog-hopping (I don't remember where I got it from, sorry) - Christian Fundamentalist swimwear. Evidently, grinding women under your bootheel in the name of Jesus isn't enough, now it's preferred that they sink like a stone when thrown into the water, wrapped up in voluminous cotton skirts.

Poor Jesus. His eyes must continually be rolling back in his head from all the bullshit done in his name.

Jo and I were standing around in the store while rain was blindingly pouring out of the sky when two women walked in arguing amongst themselves whether or not they were in the right store.

"Naw, it's the same place, hey - you had the toys in the front and the lingerie in the back last time we were here, didn't you?" said one.

"Yep, about a year ago," I replied.

They asked me if I carried glass dildos. I don't, and my sense of capitalism has been battling with my sense of righteousness over the decision. Sticking glass into the anus or the vagina is really fucking stupid. Even if the glass is too thick to break or shatter, glass and pyrex can still get tiny chips and cracks in them, leading to vaginal or anal abrasions, thus making them a higher risk toy. Plus they're absurdly expensive, ranging from $120-$400. I just don't think they'll sell to anybody but men who pick up all their sex tips from porn, so so far righteousness has been winning out.

I didn't feel like getting into the health issue with them, since I sensed they didn't really care, and just focused on the fact that they were expensive, and that for a dildo, silicone was much better and cheaper.

"I wouldn't never pay fifty dollars for one of them things, but then again, I'm anti-sex toy. I'm against them. I'm strongly against them."

Okay, you know what? Men would never, ever turn down the opportunity to give themselves exponentially better orgasms through masturbation; why, outside of religious fundamentalism, would women be so squicky about it?

Carissa's response for women that turn up their noses at sex toys is that they don't deserve them, anyway.

I toyed with the idea of getting into it with her, also to figure out why, if she was "anti-sex toy," did she keep coming into my store. Ultimately, I decided against it. Why keep them in the store asking them pointless questions when I just wanted them to leave.

The other one, after cutting an eye at her friends declaration of opposition, then told me that she has a friend who makes glass dildos and would we carry them.

"He doesn't want to go around selling them himself because he's a man, so he asked us to do it. Plus his wife freaks out about him making them, which I don't blame her, because sex toys are disgusting. I'm very, very against them," said My Pal.

Her friend continued, "Maybe I could bring you one and you could put it out to see if it sells."

My pal, undeterred, continued, "He asked me to sell them - why would I sell something I'd never use? I'd never put glass up there, Nuh-uh - hey, are you going to pay my doctor bills if it breaks in there?" she asked me.

"Bye. Thanks for coming in," I said.

Her friend grabbed My Pal by the arm, her eyes flashing with frustration, cutting back from her oblivious, idiot friend to me, reading from the expression on my face that she could forget about selling any of her friend's products to me.

The door closed behind them. I turned to Jo. "They were charming," I said.

Jo was already on her cell phone, relaying the incident to her roommate.

I don't get why someone who was so vehement about hating the products I sell would come in to my store in the first place. I had a Christian Fundamentalist come in here last winter and scream about God. That I understand. You expect those people to do exactly that. My Pal didn't seem to be religiously motivated though, so why come in here and bother us?

Good God Almighty.

It was never my intention to use this blog to post my all my doings in a single day. I figured one small fraction of my life was about all anybody else could stand - to subject anyone to reading about what I ordered at Starbucks couldn't be of interest to anyone, unless there was a roach in it or something. Even my mother has better things to do. But to fully appreciate any of the things that happened today, you'd have to see the day in its entirety. The following bits of information should also be given:

1.) This wasn't a particularly unusual day

2.) I have no doubt I left a bunch of stuff out.

Here goes:

12:30 a.m. Christopher wakes up and starts to cry. Steve hauls his ass out of bed and takes Christopher downstairs, where he shoves baby Tylenol cold medicine down his throat and gives him a drink of water before putting him down. Christopher cries for 15 minutes, and falls back asleep around 1.

5:00 a.m. Alex wakes up, takes his pullup off, and climbs into bed between Steve and me, chirruping wildly and boinging all over the bed. Threats and pleadings are useless, as is trying to force him back into his room, and Steve gives up and gets up with him at 6:30.

6:50 a.m. Christopher wakes up. I get up and go get him and go downstairs.

8:00 a.m. Christopher works Alex's nerves by continually turning off the tv during "Dragon Tales". Finally, Alex gets pissed and pushes him down. Christopher cries. Steve and I practice our new parenting skills learned at the new preschool and teach Alex how to express his anger verbally instead of physically. "Say, I'm really mad at you!" suggests Steve.

8:30 Alex cries and begs Steve not to go to work.

Steve: "I have to go to work, buddy. I have to make money."

Alex takes scissors and cuts strips of gauze into little rectangles and gives them to Steve. "Here, I made money for you. Now you don't have to go to work and can stay home. You have money now, and it's gauze money in case you get a boo-boo."

Steve gets teary, but of course must leave anyway.

9:00 a.m. Christopher goes down for a nap.

9:30 a.m. Alex goes upstairs while I'm checking e-mail. Steve and I had made a point of locking the bathroom doors, so I'm confident that he can't get into anything upstairs, and assume he's in his room. However, after we locked the bathroom doors, Steve unlocked the master bathroom one last time and did not lock back up. I found this out when Alex came back downstairs. I looked at his arms. "Are you bleeding?" I asked him.

"No."

"Yes, you are. That's blood on your arms. What happened?"

"Well, I didn't cut myself with Daddy's razor. It was...I cut myself with...Daddy's...toothbrush."

His lip was bleeding. And, looking further, I noticed he was wearing my bathing suit.

We went back to the scene of the crime. He had taken the laundry basket and turned it upside down to reach the top drawer of my dresser where my swimsuits are. He then took off his clothes and put on my swimsuit, then put on the high heels he tried to wear to the doctor's office on Tuesday. He dragged the basket into the bathroom, where he stood on it in front of the mirror, covered his face with shaving cream, and shaved his face with Steve's razor, nicking himself in 4 places, including a really good one on his lip.

"I'm just like Daddy!" he said.

"Okay, first of all, Miss America, Daddy always asks before he wears my bathing suit and shoes.* Second, you aren't old enough to shave yet, and razors are very dangerous. Look at how you cut yourself. Don't ever do that again."

"I'm wearing summer shoes. You're not supposed to wear these in the wintertime."

(Who says he never listens?)

10:15 a.m. Christopher wakes up.

10:30 a.m. Alex and I have a heart-to-heart talk about not shitting in his pants. "If you can make it through the whole day with dry underpants, peeing and pooping on the potty, we'll go to a chocolate store, and you can have whatever you want."

After much balking and not-listening and goofy, frustrating behavior, he agrees to try.

11:00 a.m. Lunch! Alex eats three veggie burgers, Christopher eats one. I eat nothing. It's a beautiful warm Fall day, and I don't feel like fighting Christopher over shoes, so I throw them in the diaper bag and we all get in the Snote car and head off to the nearest strip mall.

12:00 p.m. Haircuts! We go to Supercuts, where there is a fifteen minute wait. We sit down next to a woman in her late 60's, who is also waiting for a cut.

"Where are your shoes?" she immediately asks Christopher(me). Christopher ignores her just like I do, and fills the time by walking over to the rows of haircare products, picking an item, and walking back to give it to me. In 30 seconds I have 10 items. I start reshelving them as quickly as he's relentlessly pulling them down. Alex busies himself by pulling out brochures - don't know what they were for, but Sarah Jessica Parker was on the cover. After playing Sisyphus for awhile with Christopher, I glance at Alex. He's staring right at me, eyes huge, frozen in place.

"Good, he's behaving himself," I thought and continued reshelving. The back of my mind slowly revolved, chewing over that deer-in-the-headlights-pose he was in. I glance back at him. He hadn't moved, and was still staring at me. Warning bells started going off. I went over to him.

"What's the matter, baby?" I asked.

No response. No movement.

Odd. It looks like he's.....nah....couldn't be.

I looked more closely. I couldn't hear him breathing. I couldn't see his chest rise and fall. It looks like he's choking on something. But what? What could he be choking on? He's way past the age where he's putting random shit in his mouth. And I didn't give him any food.

"Say something, baby," I demanded. "Say something to Mommy."

Silence. Still staring at me, eyes enormous and terrified. I hooked my forefinger and dragged it through his mouth. Nothing.

"Oh," pipes up the grandmother ("Call me Gram," she'd said to Alex. "All the neighborhood kids do, because I'm 'cool'. I'm cooler than their moms, 'cause I'm more fun! I'm not so nervous like they are, 'cause I did my stint with raising kids!")

"Oh, I gave him a peppermint hard candy when you weren't looking. Some moms don't like that, you know, so I've got to do it when they're distracted."

Jesus fucking Christ he is choking!

By this time, Alex was turning blue and heaving, his esophagus trying to dislodge the peppermint from his throat. Candy-pink saliva flew from his mouth.

I looked around frantically. Just me, Christopher, the World's Hippest Grandma, and my dying child. By the time 911 gets here, he'll be dead, I thought. And with that I balled my hands into a big fist, put them under his ribcage and pushed upward as hard as I could, lifting him up out of his seat. Nothing. I did it again. Nothing. Harder, have to do it harder. Don't worry about breaking his ribs or bruising his stomach, just fucking do it as hard as you can, oh, shit, he's going to die on me. I did it as hard as I could a third time, and he retched and gagged and a half-dissolved round gob of pink sugar flew out of his mouth. He drew in a deep ragged breath and wailed. He climbed onto my lap and straddled me, arms locked around my neck. I was very zen as I held him, looking over his shoulder while I patted him and kissed him, finally turning my attention back to Christopher. His pile of haircare products had grown impressive.

Grandma looked worried.

"Maybe I shouldn't have done that," she said.

Oh, you think? Think so, do you? You stupid, stupid woman. You almost killed my child. Let me say that again. You almost killed my child.

************************************

Okay, I'm going to take a break for a minute here in the daily diary. God knows, I have no right to consider myself a typical representative of motherhood. I fuck up all the time, I find it boring a lot of the time, I love my career and went back to work because I wanted to, not because I had to. I swear a lot, often in front of my kids, I'm selfish and lazy and my house is a shithole and nobody's ever going to award me with any sort of medal for Motherhood and if my kids don't grow up and write a tell-all book about what a screaming bitch I am, I'll go to the grave breathing a sigh of relief.

But I'm going to speak for all mothers of small children right here, right now. Sneaking them food behind the backs of their uptight, stick-up-the-ass, stupid, no-fun mothers is a stupid, STUPID STUPID thing to do. You are lying to yourself if you think you're doing it to benefit the children. You're not. You're doing it to boost your own ego, to prove that you're hipper than me. Hey, you don't need to go behind my back to prove that - you win! You're way, way cooler than me. You're way cooler than the daughter I remind you of, the one who, with her stupid husband, are real Car-seat Nazis, real assholes about putting the baby to sleep on her back, real dicks about not smoking in front of the kids. You showed us! You're not that uptight - and you're a better parent for it, hell, your kids aren't dead, are they? So lighten up!

Maybe you've forgotten something. And if you don't have children, maybe you don't know this - there is a reason why I'm an unhip, uptight, stick-up-the-ass, no-fun, stupid paranoid loser who wants to know exactly what you're feeding my child. Yeah, yeah, strangerdanger whatever. No. The real reason is that my four year old doesn't know what death is. And not in that Tom Cruise machismo car-racing daredevil rockclimbing blah-di-blah. He really doesn't know. He doesn't understand that if he's not careful while he's sucking on that candy, he can choke on it and die. So it is MY responsibility - my legal responsibility being the very least of it - to watch him while he's eating that candy, to make sure what happened today DOESN'T HAPPEN. And if you're sneaking candy to my child, I won't know to watch him. I'll do exactly what I did - pay more attention to his baby brother than to him, and be grateful that he's being quiet - quiet? - he wasn't being quiet, he was fucking dying - and I had no idea. I had no reason to believe he was choking on anything - how absurd - there's nothing to eat here, no small toys to play with, no toys at all, really. If I hadn't listened to that inner warning voice that told me he was looking kinda funny, gosh, wonder why, and just continued to be grateful that he was quiet, he would have died right in front of me. Because you thought it would be funny to put one over on stupid, uptight me and slip him some candy behind my back.

Involuntary manslaughter isn't hip. Causing the death of a four year old boy isn't cool. You're no different, "Gram", from the gangbanger who accidentally shoots a child doing a driveby. Sure, you didn't mean to do it, but your carelessness and your ego caused you to show a stunning display of irresponsibility. My God, you're an adult. You're supposed to be on my side. Senator Clinton didn't mean shove all kids off in government-run daycares when she wrote "It Takes A Village." What she meant was - as a community, we all have a responsibility to the well-being of all children, not just our own. That means supporting parents. That means treating us with respect. That means working with us in small ways, small ways like finding out whether our kid is allergic to peanuts before you offer her a PayDay candy bar. It doesn't take much of an effort, and I swear, I won't tell a soul if you think it will make you look uncool. But damn, my baby almost died in my arms today. He really, really did. And he wouldn't have suffered for as long as he did, staring helplessly at his mommy, waiting for her to notice and make it all better before he faded to black and learned what death is. I would have been on top of it. Jesus.

***********************************

Okay, where was I? Oh yeah! It's noon!

12:30 p.m. Alex poops in his underpants. No chocolate for him. Christopher poops in his diaper. I'll spare you the details on this, suffice to say I had to change them both while trying to prevent Christopher from diving headfirst into the toilet.

1:35 p.m. Grocery shopping for Thanksgiving and dinner for the rest of the week. I spend $240. Christopher grabs a container of yogurt out of the cart and opens it, dumping it all over himself, the cart, the groceries, and the floor. An employee brings me some paper towels to clean up the mess.

"Where are your shoes?" he asks Christopher. Alex rams the cart into a Christmas display of Andre Champagne, nearly toppling it. We make it to the checkout counter.

"Where are your shoes?" the cashier asks Christopher.

2:45 Come home and unload the groceries. I put Christopher down for a nap again, and put Alex in front of a baloney sandwich while I go into the office to call Steve and have the nervous breakdown I'd been holding in for almost 3 hours. Steve gets pissed at "Gram."

3:00 Alex craps in his pants again, removes his shitty Spongebob underpants, and stuffs them in the coffee pot.

3:15 I nearly kill the child that almost died.

3:16 I punch the drywall in the tv room so hard I feel it give a little bit. Oops.

3:20 p.m. I give Alex a bath and clean all the shit off him. His shrieking wakes the baby.

3:45 p.m. Both boys are sitting in my lap. Alex says, "Mommy, I'm really mad at you." Hey! He expressed himself verbally! Cool!

"Yeah, I'm mad at you, too. But you know what?"

"What?"

"I still love you more than anything in the world."

"Okay."

4:00 p.m. I make dinner. Christopher screams in some sort of unfathomable fit for almost the entire hour it takes. Alex twirls in circles with a string of Mardi Gras beads and will not stop, smacking Christopher in the face and me in the legs repeatedly until I take them away.

4:30 p.m. Alex opens the dishwasher while the dishes are being washed.

"Troublemaker," I scold.

"I am not a pooblemater!" he hotly retorts.

5:00 p.m. I serve Southwestern Chicken Pasta Salad. Both boys think it tastes like ass. Alex demands a peanut butter sandwich. I make them both one and sit back down.

"With jelly on it," he says. I get back up.

5:30 p.m. I clean the kitchen. Christopher and Alex play nicely with a wooden puzzle map of the United States. Alex runs into the kitchen to shoot me with the state of Florida.

6:00 p.m. Bathtime! Here's where I get my reading done. I bring the latest issue of Bust magazine with me and vainly attempt to read

Wendy's article on Queer Eye. Even though I don't have cable and have never seen the show, I would pay homage to Wendy by enjoying the article anyway. Which I don't get to do because of a splashing war that breaks out between the boys and soaks the page. The only thing I remember is the phrase "TV loves to perpetuate the notion that men are essentially poo-flinging apes." It seems she disagrees with that theory. All I can say, Wendy, is if they're under five, that's exactly what they are. Two poo-flinging apes.

Determined to salvage at least some part of the magazine, I almost let them both drown while I try to figure out whether their feature on a fundamentalist Christian woman who custom makes "modest" clothing is written with irony or without. I also want to kill Ayun Halliday for having the time to put together a scrapbook. To heck with her, I don't even have time to take pictures.

The end came quickly.

Christopher was caged in his crib at 7, and Alex fell asleep at 7:50, during the first lullaby I sang to him. (St. Judy's Comet) Usually it takes up to five AM Gold songs featuring Paul Simon, James Taylor, the Beatles, and Carol King before I pull out my trump card - Carly Simon's You're So Vain, which is evidently the most soothing song ever written because it has never once failed to knock him right out, usually around the "Clouds in my Coffee" part. Don't ask me why I know all the lyrics. I don't know. I've been meaning to give a shoutout to Simon for writing a song so boring it puts my child to sleep when he hears it. Now's a good a time as any, I guess.

Parenting lessons I learned today:

1.) God damn, I don't drink nearly enough.

2.) Christopher needs to wear shoes.

******************************

*I didn't actually say that. Steve almost never asks.

Aren't these the fluffiest damned bunnies you've ever seen?


Thanks to Rubber Nun.

More bizarre shit I find myself saying now that I'm the mother of two boys.

"No, you can't wear my high heels to the doctor. Because it's cold and raining outside, and strappy sandals are summer shoes, that's why. You'll ruin them. And don't jump off the bed in them, either! You'll twist your ankle."

***************************

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for: the results of the

My Mother-In-Law Is Worse Than Yours Contest

Or, Misery Loves Company.

Before I announce the winners, I'd like to thank everyone for entering. Your misery made me feel much, much better! Thanks!

Third Place goes to Amie, even though she cheated and submitted her mother, not her mother-in-law:

...it's hard to pick my favorite Moment of all these
> Precious ones, but it might have to be this year at
> the beach, when, during a nighttime walk, she decided
> to plunge into the Why Don't You Call Me rant. I
> congratulate myself for not actually answering that
> rhetorical question, but my refusal to do so led to
> her starting the You're So Selfish rant, which is way
> up there in popularity. So when I finally asked what
> her whole problem was with me, it came out that I
> 'just make my own decisions, I listen to people but
> then disregard their advice if I don't like it and
> just do whatever the hell I want.'
>
> Seriously, that was her problem. That I take a wide
> variety of suggestions, evaluate the advice I'm
> offered, and then make my own decisions. You know, the
> smart thing. Like, the thing she raised me to do.

I'm allowing this one because it reminds me of my own mother, who pounded home the fact that I needed to be self-sufficient and not reliant on men for my self-esteem throughout my whole formative years, then almost fainted away in horror last summer when I referred to myself as a feminist. "I didn't think you'd acually do it!!!" I'm also allowing it because this is 1.) my blog and 2.) not a real contest.

Anyway, moving on...

Second place goes to Kari, whose entry I almost refused to post, it was so awful, then realized that was the whole fucking point of the contest. Here it is. Bear in mind this is Kari's mother-in-law; not Kari, not me.


Was he a buck nigger?" (about a dead body found in a
> > nearby ditch. note that none of that previous
> > information would indicate ethnicity, much less
> > anything else)


It took me about a day to get past the slur to realize that it just doesn't make any sense, even for a racist. Where I was once uncomfortable with this entry, now I'm just confused. What is it about a ditch that leads her to suspect the deceased was a black man? Are only black men found dead? Or are black men more likely to be found in ditches regardless of their condition? I don't get it.

And now, the Winner! Everybody put your hands together for Tina, who breezed past all the competition with not one, but two winning entries. The first one was submitted last week:

Well, the night of our first date, Bob's mom called at about 2am. I answered the phone, because I've always been a night owl, and I didn't want it to wake my parents up. I was 21 and had just moved back home after my father was diagnosed with glaucoma and had started going blind.

"Hello?"

"You're too fat for my son!"

My mind ran through a host of things to say, but I ended up just hanging up the receiver. It was a lovely welcome, no?

*********************

Oh, how I loved that entry. It's perfect, isn't it? See how it starts off with her being young and in love with the man who was going to become her husband? See how she answers the phone late at night. Who could it be? Could it be Bob, calling to tell her how he couldn't wait to see her again, that he'd be counting down the seconds until their next kiss? Could it be? NO! Instead, she's blindsided by a strong attack on her personal appearance by a woman she probably hadn't even seriously started thinking about how to get on her good side yet. This entry made me laugh and laugh, even though it's horrible.

But then, she e-mailed me again today and casually dropped another story, which I don't even think she intended to submit as an entry, but it was so hideous, I have to award the grand prize for this one:

Because of her alcoholism, she couldn't really keep steady enough to have a regular place to live as she got older. She came to live with us for a little while and was so awful she upset and stressed me enough to cause me to miscarry in my 5th month, on my ex's birthday, as I was carrying his cake to him, singing him "Happy Birthday.

Let us all bow before Tina, who wins the dubious prize of having the World's Shittiest Mother-In-Law.

As previously mentioned, Tina wins a no-expenses paid trip to Chicago to buy me a cup of coffee. Congratulations, Tina.
Get busy.

Our store is getting a mention in the latest issue of Playgirl, page 8. Really, they're just featuring a Vibrating Blush Brush and saying you can get it from us, but still. I'm in Playgirl. My mother's going to be so proud.

We sent Kyle out on an errand to go buy a copy and bring it back to us, which is striking me as even weirder than the fact that we got a mention.

Even if I tried, I could never have predicted the series of events that led up to me being a 33 year old woman who pays 20 year old men to go out and buy pornography for her.

*******************************************

E-mailbag

Even though Terri's Tree Incident seemed to have resolved itself, I thought I'd post some of the suggestions sent to her anyway:

From Trish: "Can you trim off the dead parts of the tree and keep them on the ground
nearby? Put the part that already blew off next to it. That way (hopefully)
the critters living in it won't leave. You'll probably attract new critters,
too. If you can remove as much of the dead wood as possible you might not
have to trash the whole tree. Plus new growth will come in."


From Ginny: "find out whether or not the tree is actually on your
>property, first. If it is, then you may want to consult a tree specialist.
> Maybe it can have surgery to save the part that is still thriving and
>prune away the part that might be dangerous to your neighbor's property.
>If it's not officially on your property, then fuggetaboutit."

From Kelli: "I think you should get an arborist (sp? tree doctor type) to just come out
>and give you an idea about how dead/ dangerous it is before you decide to
>actually cut it down. Could be you could just selectively cut the dead
>part away in a pre-emptive strike before it comes down and brings the rest
>of the tree with it."

From Lynne: "Just start chopping it down." (This one was my favorite. Fuck it all, just take a chainsaw to it.)

*******************************

Finally, Kari writes to tell me I got quoted on a blog in France,

her sister's blog, actually. Thanks to Kari, and Salut! to her sister.


Tomorrow!

The winner of the Mother-in-law contest will be announced!

Okay, I'm back. Thanks very, very much to Terri for holding down the fort while I was gone. Thanks also to everybody who sent their well wishes to my family and me while I was gone. Steve and I were very touched by how many people sent e-mail to us while we were gone. I'll answer everybody, but it may take a while, so please don't think I'm blowing you off; I'm not.

My dad is expected to make a full recovery. When I arrived at the hospital on Tuesday morning, he was in full complaint mode, attacking the food, the constant taking of his blood pressure, his boredom, the thing they put on your index finger when you're in the hospital that glows red and makes you look like E.T., the fact that he had to cancel his weekly tennis match.

"My blood pressure is still too high," he groused.

"Well," said my sister, "I'll just tell them you want to stay here until your blood pressure falls to below 70."

"You'll shut up about it," he ordered.

The nurse breezed in to check his vitals. My dad asked him what his odds were of getting a cup of coffee.

"Hmmm. Let me come right back with a light to check your throat and we'll see about getting you some coffee."

"My throat feels fine."

"Well, good!" said the nurse cheerfully. "Then it should look just fine when I check it out."

"You don't trust me," said my father petulantly.

The nurse hesitated.

"Oh, it's all right," my father reassured him immediately. I know you have to do your job."

The nurse gave him a relieved smile.

"If you don't want me to check your throat, I could bring you some ice chips instead."

"Ice chips would be fine. How long will I have to wait for them?"

"Not long," replied the nurse and breezed back out.

"How do you like having Liberace as your nurse?" asked my sister in the wake of his departure.

"You stop that," said my father.

"Oh come on, dad," said my sister. "Everytime he comes back in here, he's got another ring on his finger."

"You leave him alone," scolded my father. "He's an excellent nurse - very professional. Don't talk about him like that."

Watching this little reversal of my father's attitude toward gay men was almost worth the 18 hour, two day car ride down. But I suppose you've got to be a real asshole not to develop an appreciation for the person who uncomplainingly changes your catheter bag.

My father, as it turns out, was tired of people messing with his throat and no matter how badly he wanted a cup of coffee, it simply wasn't worth it to have anybody poking around in there again. During his hospital stay, they'd shoved one of those snake-like cameras down his throat and filmed his insides.

"Did you get to watch your internal organs on the monitor?" I asked.

"No, they turned it around so I couldn't see it," he said.

"Did it make your throat hurt?"

"Kind of. They sprayed it with something to numb it. They said it would taste like bananas, but it really tasted like shit."

Hmm. First he defends gay men from gratuitous mockery, now he's swearing. Evidently, his heart attack had turned him into me.

The released him an hour later. My mom took him to the Waffle House for his coffee. He was eager to go home and change into his tennis clothes, but fell asleep instead, surprising no one.

The next day he got dressed into his shorts and shirt and was ready to go when my sister manufactured an unbreakable appointment instead, dumping my 10-month-old nephew Petey off on him instead, thus causing an entirely different kind of stress on his heart as he raced around behind Petey, preventing him from pulling objects on tables down onto his head and enduring Petey's tantrums when put down for a nap. This was about the time Steve lost his cell phone, and turned my sister's house upside down looking for it, going though all the toy boxes, drawers, and even going outside and rooting through the garbage for it. The battery had run down on it, so we couldn't even call it to see where it was.

Here is a list of things Steve lost while we were gone, in order, that required a massive, hysterical hunt for them: 1.) a piece of scrap paper with Very Important phone numbers on it; 2) keys to the hotel room in Frankfort, Kentucky; 3) the cell phone; 4) his wallet; 5) our business debit/credit card.

Items 1 and 2 were found in the hotel room, after a prolonged search. Item 4 was found in his own damn jacket pocket, and item 5 never actually made it out our front door, as for some mysterious reason he left it in the toy room at home on Alex's plastic workbench. The hunt for the cell phone was the most frustrating and massive, becoming more frustrating by the fact that he seemed to determined to lose mine as well, as he kept taking it out of my purse to use it, then leaving it lying all over the house in the spot where he'd end the call and just toss it down.

The last place we remembered seeing it was in Asheville, North Carolina, where we'd stopped for dinner at this pizza place remarkable for its overwhelming hippie ambiance. We decided to go back there on the way back, just in case, and lo and behold, there it was, in the lost and found.

Looking on the positive side, it's a good thing he lost his phone, because we now had a valid reason to piss away some more time in Asheville, my favorite place in the world. My dad said once to choose very carefully where you go to college, because you might end up living there for the rest of your life. It didn't work out that way for me, but I often wish it did, because everytime I go back to Asheville, I get hit with a horrible wave of nostalgia that makes me never, ever want to go back to Chicago. Steve loves Asheville, too, despite all the hippies, and wouldn't mind moving there himself. When we got there, we pulled into a parking space in front of Tressa's, a kickass jazz and blues club owned by my old college friend Tressa Thornton. I ran in to say hi (and use her bathroom) but she wasn't there.

I started thinking seriously about moving back to Asheville, thinking about reaquainting myself with everyone that I knew in college, both people I missed and people I didn't. It's a true testament to how much I love that city that I'm still willing to move back there, even though I once slept with the County Sheriff's boyfriend*, thus rendering myself in deep doo-doo if I ever find myself in legal trouble while I'm there.

She could probably see fit to let me slide on my screwing her boyfriend, since it happened about 15 years ago, and more importantly, while he was cheating on her with me, she was cheating on him with some meathead frat boy. Not only that, she knew I had a crush on him when she started dating him. I've never been one to be resentful when another woman moves faster than I do. It takes me forever to build up enough courage to approach anybody I find sexually interesting; when you move as slow as I do you have to expect it. I didn't even get jealous when I was stealthily staking out Steve at the nightclub where we both worked, ducking behind the tall grass, eyes fixed on him like he was a gazelle at the watering hole, shifting the weight on my back legs back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, crouched down low, for weeks until another lioness pounced first. I didn't even find out about it until said lioness cornered me in the women's bathroom, drunkenly confessing her love for him and how fabbo it all was. Even though I was disappointed, I sincerely wished her luck and stepped aside, hoping they'd break up but not actively working toward the dissolution of their relationship. As you can see, it worked out well.

Where was I? Oh, yes.

Really, she should thank me for keeping him occupied and enabling her to get away with adultery and keep the upper hand, as she finished first and returned in time to bust us. However, there is this other, small matter that she probably won't forgive me for, even though looking back on it, I'm not sure I would have behaved any differently.

Ellen** and I were roommates when she became pregnant by a 16 year old alcoholic high school dropout. Rather than ask him to pay for an abortion, knowing full well her doing so would result in a Jerry Springer-like drama, she instead went to our mutual friend Gary, who she'd had a one night stand with.

"The hell it's mine," said Gary rudely. "I wore a condom, and I didn't even come. I didn't even want to have sex with you in the first place."

Privately, he appealed to me. "She said she'd tell my girlfriend she was pregnant if I didn't pay for it. It isn't mine! I know it isn't."

I knew it wasn't his, too. It was the teenager puking Jack Daniels into our toilet and refusing to leave our apartment.

"You've got to leave Gary alone," I told her. "Ask your mom for the money."

By this time in our relationship, we were both righteously sick of each other, and were just biding our time until the lease expired and we could move out.

"Fuck you," replied Ellen. But she left Gary alone, deciding instead to convince a third guy, Mark, that they'd had sex at a party the previous month instead of what really happened, that they'd gotten stoned and drunk and passed out in his bed.

Mark was completely besotted by Ellen, despite her abominable treatment of him. He allowed himself to be convinced, even offering to marry her. She refused, and hit him up for the $400 bucks for the abortion.

This bugged the shit out of me. Mark was a sweet man, albeit a bit of a doormat. Having him pay for the termination of a pregnancy that he had nothing to do with was eating at my conscience. So I told him. He hardened his spine and marched right over to her and told her he wouldn't pay for it, and furthermore, she wasn't very nice to have done that to him, so there.

Ellen ended up calling her mother after all, and vowed to hate me forever. Which I probably would, too, if I were her. Stealing a boyfriend you didn't really care about is one thing, but stealing your abortion money is another thing entirely. I'm still not sure whether I did the right thing or not. However, if I end up getting arrested in Asheville, North Carolina, odds are I'll decide I should have minded my own damned business.



*She's not actually the County Sheriff, but instead holds a similar job of importance in Asheville that would make getting on her bad side an ill-advised idea.

**Her name isn't Ellen, either.

Leigh Anne and fam update: Her dad came through surgery with flying colors and is home. She knew he'd be all right when he started griping about the hospital food.

Leigh Anne will be back in action on the blog (and in the rest of her life...) early next week.

Tree update: That enormous limb waiting for my attention? Gone. It's a mystery...

The overwhelming majority of you seem to believe that I should begin talking to my neighbors.

The overwhelming majority of you also seem to be a lot more logical about this than I am. One of my favorite responses, received within five minutes of posting the entry, said: "Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but couldn't you just talk to your neighbor about it and see whether s/he thinks it is your tree or her tree and what she wants to do?"

No drama at all. Hrmph.

It’s interactive blogging!

Well, not exactly. But it is a plea for input. Here’s my dilemma of the day. I have this great tree in my backyard. Actually, a formerly great tree. In any case, it’s mostly dead. And enormous. One section of it faithfully leafs out every summer, but the rest of it? Dead, but serving as a home for any number of critters, including a hilarious sapsucker, a few other various woodpecker-type birds, some nuthatches, numerous squirrels, and, my favorite, at least one litter of raccoons every summer. I know, I know: raccoons are a blight on the urban landscape. They get into the garbage, they patrol the sewers, and they’re generally a pain in the neck. But they’re so cute (awwwwwwww…).

In any case, the tree’s way on the back edge of my property—it overlaps onto my neighbor’s property. Could be her tree, even. I have no idea. It’s far enough away from my house (and down a hill) that there’s no chance that, even if the thing were to fall right over, it would damage anything on my land. It’s pretty close to the neighbor’s house and, if it fell the wrong way, it could take out part of her house, and maybe her fancy new SUV, if she parks it in the driveway. Not that I’m bitter about SUVs…

I don’t know about where you live, but here in the Upper Midwest, we get these crazy winds, which we’ve had for the last few days/nights. A fairly large bit of the tree snapped off during some gust or another and now awaits action on my part because it’s in my yard. We also get the occasional ice storm—beautiful but treacherous (similar to some people I know…but that’s a whole other blog entry). And there are always bits of this tree strewn about after an ice storm.

So, here’s my dilemma: Do I get a bid on removing the tree and ask the neighbor to split the cost with me? Do I just assume that it’s the neighbor’s tree and let her deal with it or not as she sees fit? Or do I just keep thinking about the circle of life, wondering why I, of all people, should fell that tree before its time, displacing all of those animals?

Email me with your solution at territheguestblogger@hotmail.com.

Things that are pissing me off this morning:

• Reader’s Digest is one of the most widely read magazines in the world.

• A man who admitted that he killed his neighbor and dismembered him is not guilty of murder. In Texas, where no one ever gets out of a murder trial with a not guilty verdict. Did I mention that the accused is wealthy? And white? And that 90% of people accused of murder in Texas can’t afford their own attorney?

• Larry Flynt’s getting mounds of positive press for having the remarkable self-restraint necessary not to publish topless photos of Jessica Lynch.

• Medical equipment companies have been scamming Medicare into paying for electric wheelchairs that their clients don’t have or need. Medicare, for the love of God. Because, you know, it’s a bad thing for our elders to have access to things like durable medical equipment and health care. Much better to screw one of the few programs that gives them access to those things. Much better to bilk them out of millions of dollars.

• People are starting to name their children after consumer products like Infiniti, ESPN, and Timberland. Because, clearly, naming a child after its grandmother or a friend of the family is just so 1990s.

• “McJob” is now in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. This should tell you everything you need to know about the state of the economy and the divide between rich and poor.

Here’s my one good thing (damn Leigh Anne and her optimism, anyway!): A Federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit challenging Nebraska’s ban on same-sex marriage. Never thought I’d live to see the day that I say this: GO HUSKERS!

Well, my God. How in the world do I follow up that kind of post, anyway?

As Leigh Anne mentioned, I'm Terri, and I'll be your host until she returns--Jay Leno to Leigh Anne's Johnny Carson.

I've never blogged in my life. I suck at journaling. I have a sneaking suspicion that everyone knows that I can't write and they humor me, but at some point it's all going to come crashing down around me. Every crappy, half-assed thing I've ever written will be paraded before me, probably as the last thing I see before I die. Every 20-page paper that I started the night before. Every end-of-term thesis that I wrote in a few days. Every bit of homework I ever did during halftime of an NFL game. Every poem I dashed off in the hallway between classes.

Every blog entry posted as I guest-hosted my friend's blog.

Damn. The pressure could very well kill me.

You can call me Terri. Or Jay. And you can email me at territheguestblogger@hotmail.com, but if you're just going to rant about how much you miss Leigh Anne and how much this isn't the same thing at all, send it to her directly. ;)

My parents have been married for 49 years. They've lived in the same house, with the same phone number, for 34 of those years, moving in about a month before I was born. Here's the good memories I have of my dad:

a) He built me a toy box and helped me paint my name on it.

b) He put stickers on my new record player he got me for my 5th birthday.

c.) When I was 7, he returned from a business trip with a green velvet dress for me.

d.) He was there at all major events.

e.) He told my mother to quit acting like a lunatic right before my wedding.

f.) For some inexplicable reason, he occasionally would refer to me as "Radish."

g.) He can really, really dance.

Mostly, though, I remember him either: sitting in his chair (think Frasier's Dad's chair) and watching tv, or standing in the den swinging a tennis racquet around and watching tv.

Every joke you hear about engineers, well, that's my dad. I called him in a panic on September 11th, alone with the baby and watching the Trade Centers and Pentagon get hit. Downtown Chicago was being evacuated, and Steve's cell phone wasn't working. I had no idea where he was, and no idea if Chicago was going to be attacked. My dad, irritation sharp in his voice, told me to quit bothering him.

Imagine my surprise when my sister called me on Thursday night and told me he'd had a heart attack and I subsequently found myself sitting on the floor in the toy room, surrounded by plastic crap and wooden blocks and sobbing my heart out, hands over my face to muffle the sound. So I'm packing up the kids and driving 15 hours to be there for him. Which he won't visibly appreciate, but there it is.

He's having surgery on Tuesday, where they'll be doing stuff I'm not very clear on, and don't anticipate being any more clear on it when I return. Speaking of when I'm coming back, that's a good question. It depends on what happens Tuesday.

In the meantime, I'm going to take a page from the Tonight Show, and have a guest host for the blog until my return.

Everybody be nice to her, and keep sending in your mother-in-law stories. I'll announce the winner when I get back.

So say "Hi" to Terri! It's her show now.

What is a fine, upstanding young gay man to do when constantly having to fend off the aggressive sexual advances of wanton females? Read Mykull's blog and see!

We went to Alex's new preschool again yesterday, and again had classes for the whole family. Christopher kills me with his separation anxiety, wrenching my gut with his anguished screams when I leave the room. He gets over the separation more quickly than I do, playing with toys and laughing after about 10 minutes, while I suffer from horrible guilt for, well, I'm still suffering from it, actually.

Alex has no such problem, and could only be talked into giving me a dismissive kiss within the first two minutes in the classroom, too busy wearing a cowboy hat and talking on a fur-lined phone to waste any time on his mother.

("Oh, great. They've turned him into a pimp," commented Steve.)

We're coming to the hopeful conclusion that maybe the only thing that's wrong with Alex is poor parenting, as we've learned some new ways of handling behavior problems that are working incredibly well, and realizing a lot of it is just laziness on our part, like not keeping the toy room organized enough to where he has complete sets of toys to hold his interest instead of a confusing jumble of Mr. Potato Head pieces, puzzle pieces, Candyland cards, wooden train tracks, and hot wheels. We also worked on pumping up his good behavior. This worked so well that aside from him burning himself in the fireplace on Halloween, we had nothing to talk about in group.

However, a few other parents spent that week, in the dryly humorous words of one of the fathers, "collecting a lot of data."

The data-collecting father is a successful Italian actor who does mostly film work. We'd never met before, but have a few overlapping circles of acquaintanceship. Funny who you run into, and where. Ever the actor, he likes to approach Group as a captive theatre audience, and relishes the retelling of his three-year-old's antics, blunting the edges of his difficult week with his boy by fashioning a roughly-rehearsed standup routine for us. His wife usually plays the role of sidekick, encouraging him and occasionally throwing in a few bon mots of her own.

Steve and I enjoy hearing about their week, if only because their kid is a lot higher on the feral child scale than ours is, and makes us feel like, well, we just need improvement as parents, but their kid really does have Something Wrong.

Their son is violent - a frequent biter, and more frequently, a spitter. And it's not just spitting, it's violent fighting and aggression coupled with it. We worry about our kid playing with their kid, but so far so good.

The Actor, taking the advice of the on-location Child Psychologist, is trying to teach his son that maybe spitting is okay if you spit into the toilet, or the sink. He bought his son a brass spittoon. I love that he has a sense of humor about this, because wow, if you can't laugh about having a child that spits in your face when he's mad at you, you're sunk.

This week his wife wasn't having any of the Laurel and Hardy routine. After a long, hard week of "data collecting", she'd finally lost her shit with the boy, Q. Q. had been jumping into dirty rain puddles, over and over until his clothes were soaked through to the diaper. The diaper was full of puddle water, too. When she went over to him to pull him out of the puddle, he spat in her face for the zillionth time that day. And she snapped and spat back in his face. Her face was grim when she retold the story to us in Group, her eyes cast down at the table, her hands pinching chunks off of her styrofoam cup of industrial-strength coffee.

"She lost control," sniffed Steve as he adjusted his halo.

Well, yeah. She did. And I'm grateful that she told the story. I lost control of myself a month ago when Alex ground me down into dust and I had no one at home to turn the reins over to and I couldn't leave the room without him breaking something and I couldn't take a breath and count to ten without him forcing himself into my face and I finally spanked him, after twenty minutes of him screaming "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!" at me, a phrase he knows is a no-no. And I felt the weight of the world in guilt. My mouth broke out in 4 cold sores afterwards, I had a panic attack, I cried to Terri via e-mail. Steve wasn't in my corner either, telling me he didn't want to leave me alone with the boys. All I could see was him leaving me and suing me for custody of the boys, which he'd be sure to get, because I'm the Worst Mother Who Ever Lived. It was beyond awful, and I think the worst thing I've ever done. At least, it's the thing about which I suffer the most guilt. So I'm grateful that the Actor's Wife had enough courage to admit that she spit in the face of her three-year-old son, because I've been to that dark, ugly place. And she's here, in Group, just like me, to help her son and to help herself.

Take a look at the photo of Bush signing the d&x abortion ban. Now imagine the same photo, but with Condoleezza Rice sitting in the chair, surrounded by Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, Laura Schlessinger, Christine Hoff-Sommers, Kathleen Parker, Lynne Cheney, and Beverly LaHaye instead. Would it make me feel less nauseous? Actually, it would.

P.S. - I tried to come up with some names of female leaders of anti-choice extremist groups to put in my little above scenario, without Googling, and couldn't think of a single name. Go figure.

E-mailbag

Trish writes in response to last Tuesday's entry (10/28/03): "She's full of shit! The Rabbit Pearl works like a charm."

Yes, it does. Steve bought me one for Mother's Day.

Stephanie sent in this kick-ass response to Alex's menstruation queries (10/30/03):
"We had a lot of robins in our yard and sometimes they
would nest under the eaves of our house. One time, a
nest fell out of a tree and when I found it, my mom
explained that the smashed eggs would have become baby
robins if the mom and the dad robin decided to turn
the eggs into birds.

Anyway, so when I bugged her with questions during the
poor woman changing her tampon for the zillionth time,
she told me that the biggest difference between people
and robins is that robin's nests are in trees or
sometimes on the house, but people's nests are *inside
them*!

coooooool.

You can't see people-eggs, so you might forget they're
there, but every once in a while the mom and the dad
decide to turn their eggs into babies. Then the babies
stay safe in the nest inside the mommy until it's time
for them to come out. That's because moms are too big
to sit on their babies. :D

Usually, though, the mom and the dad don't turn the
eggs into babies, because that would be waaaay too
many babies. The eggs and the nest wait for a little
while to see if mom and dad are going to change their
mind, and then the mom's body pushes out the old nest
and egg and builds a brand-new nest to put a brand-new
egg into, so that the baby always has a nice clean,
new nest to live in if mom and dad change their mind.
Not that my mom and dad were going to change their
minds. No, they had plenty of babies. And no, they
couldn't just tell mom's baby-nest-maker that they
weren't going to change their mind and it should stop
making nests and eggs, but that would probably be more
convenient. Eventually, though, it catches on.

heh.

The "mommy's bleeding" thing freaked me out a little
bit, but I think the smartass asked me what I thought
our bodies should make the nest out of if they
shouldn't use blood and tissue (this last part
confused me a little - I thought she was talking about
the tampon which must be made of Kleenex, then). I
obviously didn't have a good answer. Sticks weren't
really an option. Blankets would be nice, but I
realized we couldn't grow blankets and we could grow
blood and stuff."

Isn't that the best? I think I'm going to turn it into a picture book for Alex.

Finally, Pinky responds to my Hello Kitty taunting (10/29/03): "I've heard that there is HK toilet paper, and condoms. Somebody
is quite fascinated with cute characters below the waist. Curious, isn't
it?"

Yes, very curious. How could I have missed out on Hello Kitty condoms?

I sent Jo home early today, since she kept mentioning she had a lot of homework, and the store was dead. I'd been keeping her the whole time I'd hired her to work; I assumed she'd want to work to get the money. When I suggested to her that she might want to go, she almost broke her neck getting out the door. I had to think back to being 20, when I'd rather be broke than bored. It made me realize suddenly how far removed I'd become from my college self - I got old so gradually, I didn't even notice.

Not ten minutes had passed since her escape when her dad came in. He looked around for her briefly, then asked if she had come in today.

"I'd wanted to give her this," he said, nodding toward the small plastic bag he was holding.

"I can give it to her, if you want me to," I said.

"Sure, okay," he said as he reached into the bag and pulled out a container of pepper spray.

"Her mother was...her mother and I are worried...about her walking around at night, you know, with that....mugger...they haven't caught him yet, and..."

He trailed off.

Mugger. It got to me, a little bit, that he used the word "mugger", instead of the correct word, rapist.

You could argue that it's anti-feminist to refuse to acknowledge that there's a man in our neighborhood who has brutally raped and beaten nine women over the past few weeks, to whitewash over it, to soften the crime. I mean, who gives that much of a shit about your purse that you'd resort to pepper spray to protect the twenty bucks you've got in it? We all know that's not worth fighting for, right?

But I'm a parent. I know why he referred to the man as a mugger while he stood in my store with his white bag, trying to get to his daughter to arm her before the sun went down. It was because the thought of his daughter being dragged into an alleyway and sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled was so horrific to him that he could not bring himself to say his fear out loud. It's denial. It's superstition. It's the panic that lies underneath the surface of every parent when we realize how many men are in the world that are so eager to destroy those we hold dearest to our hearts. It's the sick nausea I feel when I read in two seperate incidents in my home county that two men are arrested for child pornography - an elementary school principal and a pediatrician, one of which had several "custom made" films of boys - boys just like mine.

So I'm sitting here looking at this pepper spray on my counter, and realizing that there's no age where that fear and panic dissolves, whether it's a rapist stalking your daughter or the government taking your son for a bullshit oil-driven war. It never ends.

Next year is the year I get to relive my childhood through my own offspring, dammit. I'm sick of missing out on Alex's trick or treating adventures. Last year Christopher and I got stuck in traffic and Steve took Alex without us, despite my repeated frantic phone calls begging him not to.

This year was Christopher's first foray into the wild, abandoned greed that is Halloween in our neighborhood. I'd bought the costumes well in advance - Alex was going to be the Cookie Monster, and Christopher was going as a giraffe. That was the theory, anyway. Last year Alex flatly refused to wear a costume, so I wasn't sure whether he'd be more cooperative this year, or what. He was. He wiggled into his suit, grabbed his plastic, black-handled pumpkin and was out the door in a flash, tearing across the yard toward our neighbor's house. I struggled getting Christopher into his suit. He refused to take his afternoon nap, so by 4:30 he was a big ball of baby rage, a total Halloweenie. I tried to lead him next door, but he resisted the whole way, refusing to walk and shrieking with angst. Our neighbors opened the door on the world's angriest giraffe coupled with the world's most excited cookie monster - a cookie monster that wasn't above haggling with the homeowners about the quantity of treats they were giving out.

Finally, I gave up and took Christopher home, where he spat and cried and stomped around.

Steve and Alex came back an hour later and reported that there was a small Barney dinosaur having a tantrum on the front lawn.

So there's always next year for Christopher. Alex was a lot more clued in to the concept of trick or treating his first year. Dressed as a dragon, he went happily from house to house, sucking on lollipops and covering his green chest with sticky, sugary drool. It's been his favorite holiday ever since. Naively, I expected the same from Christopher. Different children, different people. Someday I'll clue in to this.

Alex spread out all his goods all over the floor in the tv room in order to better study the loot, and suggested that Steve toast marshmallows in the fire that he'd lit earlier.

"We don't have any marshmallows," Steve told him.

"Why?"

"Because I didn't buy any."

"Why?"

"Because I didn't think about it."

I suggested Steve take Christopher up for bath and bed early, while I made dinner for the rest of us. While I was stirring a roux and the other two were upstairs, Alex decided that in lieu of marshmallows, he'd roast one of his lollipops. He held the sucker in the flame long enough for the sugar to melt and drip down on his fingers. I was alerted to this behavior by his shrieks of pain. I ran over to him and scooped him up, trying to clear the sugar off his fingers to find out what the problem was. So now he's got a shitty, nasty burn between his index and middle fingers, and a small burn on his thigh, too, where the sugar must have dripped down onto it.

As a result, we spent some quality family time in the doctor's office getting his burn looked at.

Argh.