Twits and Tweets

I had to share this, because this guy is really freaking funny. If you don't like naughty language, don't go HERE. Very Archie Bunker-ish.

Just in case you are wondering, a friend shared this with me. A church friend. I'll defer to her if you are offended.

:-)

Enjoy!

Unrefreshing Naps and Offensive Baby Books

I am feeling sluggish today. The most notable thing I have done is read to baby M.

Oh, and I took a nap. It wasn't a refreshing nap, however. It was one of those naps in which I didn't exactly feel as if I was sleeping, but I kept waking myself up when I started to snore. Therefore, I must have slept a short time, in a manner that must have been pretty sexy, too. I would have been irresistible to my husband if he came home to see me like this: sleeping in the middle of the day, drooling a little and continuously waking myself up with spontaneous snorts.

But back to the books.

Driven half mad by the monotony of the current book rotation that M currently had, I fled the house one day last week when troop reinforcements arrived (read: Cal came home from school). I was determined to find some new "favorite" books for her as I was going to slit my wrists if I read another Boobah book. (Razzle dazzle shooting star, here come Boobahs from afar. Zipping zooming through the air, flying Boobahs EVERYWHERE!)

I headed to the children's consignment store a few miles away in search for some new reading fodder, where the board books that she likes to destroy so much are generally .25 or .50. I can buy a half a dozen for this price and my chances of having a winner in that bunch is greatly increased.

The one that she attached herself to immediately to was a small, portable board book with the "lift-off flaps" inside, most that have already been ripped off by its destructive former owner. It was called "Daddy Loves Me," and was filled with pictures of attentive, helpful fathers doing everyday things with their babies.

The idea of this book was nice, and there is a companion to it (also purchased) called "Mommy Loves Me." The mothers are also portrayed doing things for their babies: playing with the babies, reading to the babies, feeding the babies, kissing the babies. It is what mothers are expected to do; but the same actions in the "Daddy Loves Me" book seem like a bit more of a novelty. I don't know why.

For example, take the picture of the daddy feeding the baby in her high chair. It is a sweet little snapshot, but behind that picture is inevitably a mother who was mercilessly hounded with questions that led up to that Kodak moment.

"Where are the baby's spoons," he would ask. "What does the baby eat at this time of day," he would inquire. "What do you mix in the cereal? Is it warm? Cold? Can I microwave it? Where are the bowls? Does she need a drink, too? Where are the cups?" The mother must have been driven crazy by all of the questions leading up to that single moment. She was probably rocking back and forth in a corner, or at the very least, hiding in the shower. I just KNOW it.

Another page shows a baby of about a year and a half tossing a football with his father, the caption reading "Daddy plays with me." This is a very nice moment, also. The baby has socks and lace-up shoes on that must have required some effort to put on (no velcro in sight). But the little one is clad only in a diaper.

This game of catch clearly took place outside and I am sure that the weather was such that only a diaper was needed. Yet, the father was fully clothed, and I assume the mother was too, when she arrived home from wherever she was when these activities were taking place, whereupon she would flip out on the well-intentioned father. Because come on...at least put a onsie on the kid.

This same father and baby duo was pictured in several places throughout the book, none in which the kid is wearing any clothes. Among their activities were, "Daddy helps me walk" and "Daddy reads to me." Mommy must have been shopping for quite a while.

The most disturbing picture in this book, however, was the one with the caption "Daddy cooks for me." A little boy is shown sitting on the floor of the kitchen playing with pots and pans and reaching for a cookie from his father. The father, smiling with a goofy pleased-as-punch look on his face, seems very proud of himself. He apparently is awaiting his gold star for the day.

This isn't the part I object to.

No, the part I have a beef with is that the father, wearing an oven mitt, is holding the cookie sheet directly next to the baby, where if the baby would happen to topple over he would most likely receive a nasty burn.

But, the piece de resistance in this entire cluster-foogaysie is that the oven door is still open directly behind the the baby. Surely, the mother was not there and didn't witness this because I'm sure if she saw it she would haved freaked. The. Crap. Out. Personally, I don't think I would have even been able to give my husband an "A" for effort for the cookies if I would have walked in at this very moment.

After reading this book to M, I want to give a mini-sermon on safety to her. I want to tell her, "No, it is not all right to go outside naked...even if Daddy says it is okay. In this day an age, there are too many weirdos. You just never know."

I want to use the book as lesson material for my two boys and husband: "Never, ever do this. You must move a baby far, far away before you open an oven door, and you certainly don't hold a hot cookie sheet in reach of a baby."

We have new reading material, but upon further investigation I have fundamental issues with the said material. This will inevitably drive me bananas, and I will once again flee the house in search for new, less offensive books again... sooner than I thought I would need to.

And so it goes.

Flashback Friday: Chester Arthur and House Hunters International, Malta

I am afraid I am making my husband question his decision to marry me.

We were recently watching House Hunters International.  House Hunters International is a show that is particularly intriguing to us because, really, when will we ever shop for real estate outside this country? We might as well live vicariously through others.

The couple was Italian, apparently. I am not certain of this, but the woman's name seemed very Italian to me.

They were looking for a home on Malta in the "multi-million dollar budget"   range. This intrigued us even more as it is not very often that House Hunters participants have a multi-million dollar budget.

The people who generally participate are average, middle-class folks who are just trying to eek by.

 When I come across House Hunters that involve jet-setters and millions of dollars in their budget, I get sort of a sick voyeuristic curiosity that washes over me and I take notice.  .

The show also caught my attention because I wasn't sure exactly where Malta was.

 Geography has never been my strong suit.

(Addition: It hasn't gotten any better.  Three years later, I just realized that the Cayman Islands were WEST of Cuba.  I always had believed them to be somewhere East of Puerto Rico.  )

I mean, the last House Hunters International show I watched was in Panama. I could vaguely picture the Panama Canal, although I couldn't tell you much about the country itself, except it has strip of land that was highly contentious during the Carter administration.

Even more perplexing, though, was that the man-half of the couple mentioned that he had children in Belfast, and the Malta didn't look anything like I believed Belfast would look like.

I could tell by the architecture that Malta must be Mediterraean, though.

I considered the options: I could sit through the entire show and not know where the hell this House Hunters was filmed, or I ask my husband and risk him making fun of me.  

"Honey," I asked.

"What," he said distractedly, playing Angry Birds

"Where is Malta?"

"Seriously, Mary.   Where do you think Malta is?"

"Greece?" I asked. The look on his face wasn't encouraging. "Italy?" I continued. He didn't say anything. "I feel as if it is an island," I carried on. He nodded a bit. "Off the.....coast....of.... Italy?" I questioned.

"Malta is where Maltese come from," he explained.

The light went on,  although the intellectual respect had been greatly diminshed.

 In his mind, it was sort of like in 1992 when his sister asked where, exactly, the Star Fleet Academy school was since she had been seeing so many stickers on the back of cars recently. Was it a new college?

So it was with great horror that tonight the husband witnessed another error in judgement as we sat and watched "Antiques Roadshow."

It came in the form of a signature in a book about Indians that dated...well...before any of us had been born.

The signature was that of Chester Arthur, to which the commentator referred to as "President Chester Arthur." Really? We had a president named Chester Arthur? I made a mistake saying this aloud.

"Are you freaking serious," he asked. "You don't know who Chester Arthur is?"

"Well, they just said he was the President, but I don't remember him at all." My husband prattled off some sort of trade agreement fact that only a history major with a photographic memory would remember.

According to Chris' little Iphone,  that he whipped out to demonstrate his coolness, Chester Arthur was the 21st President of the United States.

 Add that to the list of "Things I Don't Know," I guess.  Such as where Malta is, or that the Cayman Islands are farther west than I had always believed.

Combine this with the fact that I haven't taken a shower for the past two days, I have gained a considerable amount of weight in the past month or so. Oh, and I'm a bad housekeeper.

I am really quite a catch. Really. Quite a catch.

Flinging Turds and Shirking Responsibility

My life is a poop fest.

It is pretty much a given that when one becomes a parent, poop is just something that has to be dealt with on a daily basis.

After the novelty of baby diapers wears off, the monotonous chore of changing them becomes the sole caregiver's responsibility (unless there is another willing individual present. In my experience, there usually is not).

It's a sobering moment when one realizes that there is no one else who will do this for you.

To the extreme, this soul crushing thought occurred to me during labor, when at 9 centimeters, the epidural wore off and I was thrust into what could be termed as "The Suckiest Experience Ever." As much as I wanted (and begged and pleaded) to hand this responsibility off on someone else, unfortunately, it was not possible.

My example is a bit drastic, yes. But on a day-to-day basis of me shirking responsibility, my boys come in pretty darn handy.

Let's say I am watching a particularly crappy t.v. show and notice that the remote control is across the room.

"Wes, please go fetch the remote control for me," I call nicely, then he fetches it for me. It's magic, that way!

"Cal, the dog just blew chunks," I call. "Please clean it up before your sister gets into it!"

Being 14 years old, he understands the urgency of the matter at hand and that usually sends him scurrying.

All that being said, it was a sobering experience at home alone the other day when the baby toddled towards me, proudly holding something out in front of her.

She stood before me as I sat on the couch, inevitably watching some sort of Bravo Channel programming, and dropped her found item in my lap. She then turned and ran off, apparently to get some more. I picked up the mystery item that had been deposited into my lap and held it up to my face, still unclear as to what it was.

I smelled it.

"OMYGAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWD," I shrieked, violently gagging and dry heaving, as I flung the dog turd away.

I caught up to her as she was making her way over to the other little turds deposited in front the door by our Cairn Terrier, who probably had been holding his little doggy cheeks together ~ undoubtedly with a puckering ferocity ~ for the better part of the morning.

I held her hands in a vice grip and smelled her mouth, gagging yet again, because it had the faint smell of dog poop. She had put the damn thing in her mouth. I wretched.

I ran to a sink to scrub the offensiveness off her hands and face and I considered washing the inside of her mouth out, too, but decided that might cause more trauma than just a little feces in the mouth.

Being the only one around, it was up to me to clean up the dog poop; I had to take responsibility for this mess and couldn't shove it off on any husband or child who had the unfortunate luck of being in my immediate vicinity.

He had made it to the front door, I give him that. And, thankfully our home is mostly ceramic tile which makes disinfecting the contaminated areas even easier.

I realized that although they bring joy and fun, animals and babies also bring the foulest of the foul into the home: vomit, boogers, turds....the list goes on and on.

Hopefully next time something particularly disgusting occurs, I won't be alone to deal with it myself. I will effectively be able to burden the task on someone else, which in Mary's world, is how it should be.


.

Sniffing Dirty Laundry and Picking Noses at Stoplights

Last night as I was searching for my pajama top, I realized that it had been tossed on top of a pile of dirty laundry in my closet.

I wasn't sure if the tank top had taken on the general odor of the surroundings in its time on top of this pile, so I did what any other woman would do.

"Are you sniffing that," my husband asked, incredulously, as he walked into the bathroom.

Why yes, I was. Didn't everyone do that?

"I just took it out of the dirty laundry and I wanted to make sure it didn't smell," I explained.

"You were, uh, sniffing the dirty laundry."

"Whatever, Chris," I said. "It's not like I was sniffing my underwear," (which, I have to admit, I am not above doing if there were no clean options and I need to assess what exactly could be worn, inside out, a second time. You can't just "tell" these things from looking. God gave us our olfactory senses for a reason).

"You're gross," he said.

I would beg to differ, however, as I am not the one who picks his nose at stoplights. This was a subject that was especially sensitive when we had out of state license plates. I could just hear the conversations from inside the passing vehicles. "Look at the dork from Iowa picking his nose, honey," the wife would shriek, then hilarity would ensue in the car as they mocked us from the confines of their minivan.

"No one notices," he stated with confidence. I would tend to disagree. I mean, I notice when people are picking their noses in their cars. And when I notice this with my husband I make a big deal in pointing it out, just to prove my point.

There was no odor on my pajama top last night, therefore I put it on and crawled into my bed. I can't even say that, had there been a slight odor, that I wouldn't have put it on anyway.

Such is life in our house.

The Get Real Gallery and I Did This For a Reason

My husband was mortified that I posted pictures of our dirty house online. I tried to tell him that it was for a reason, but whatever....he still wasn't happy. This is what it was all for:

http://granolasdodallas.blogspot.com/

See, honey? We aren't disgusting slobs after all. We are just normal.

(For those of you linking here from "The Lawsons Did Dallas," the pics of my home are on the next page...so just click on "Older Posts" at the bottom of this page. I've been unusually chatty lately and have a lot to say since I posted my dirty house pics!!! :))

Wristcutters and The Alternative Universe, a.k.a. Walmart

My sweet baby M toddled over to me this morning. She placed her hand on my knee as I was drinking my morning coffee and very sweetly looked up into my eyes.

"Mama," she pleaded. "I don't want to go on our daily three mile jog. I would like to stay at home in the air-conditioning, watch a movie and eat leftover spaghetti for our second breakfast."

I'm just kidding. She did no such thing. She is sixteen months old and we are working on "mamma" and "daddy," let alone full sentences.

This was, however, what we did in lieu of our jog.

We had started the movie "Wristcutters: A Love Story" last night. Unimpressed with the suicides and the fact it was an indie movie, Chris was unwilling to suspend his disbelief for the remainder of the show.

With a whopping plate of spaghetti on my lap, I sat down to watch the clever little movie about an "alternate universe" to where suicides went when they died. It was hot, dusty and reminded me a lot of Barstow, California. It was a place where they went to carry out their eternities, covered in dust, scarred and unable to smile.

As I watched, I realized that later today I needed to visit our local "alternate universe," a.k.a. "Super Walmart" because I was out of my value size bottle of ibuprofen, and these headaches lately have been kicking my ass.

I try to avoid this universe with all of my might, but sometimes it is necessary... like the other evening at 9:30 when I realized that I was out of coffee and baby formula.

We were on our way home from a fiftieth wedding anniversary dinner, so I had been wearing heels for about three hours. By 9:30, I was limping and my mood was such that I very well could do some sweet-ass jujitsu moves on the first unfortunate sloth I encountered (undoubtedly, pushing a cart aimlessly while simutaneously beating a child) on my way to the coffee aisle.

We made our way with purpose, unlike 90% of the other patrons, towards the "Enter" door. The "Enter" door at which we had to wait for the apparently illiterate individuals exiting to continue through.

Finding one's item in Walmart is only part of the battle, as you may well know. When one finds the aisle that the desired item resides in, not only does one have to physically get to their item, but one needs to retrieve that item from the shelf . Upon finding the aisle, we noticed that the entire city appeared to be making a last minute run to buy coffee.

Although it was a struggle to do so, we found our items and made our way to the express checkout line, which is a misnomer in this alternative universe where it feels as if you are wading through knee deep water and everything takes ten times as long.

Thirty minutes later, Chris and I carried on our favorite conversation, entitled "Why Thoroughly Jacked Up Things Are the Way That They Are." Among our favorite topics in this conversation are: government-run agencies, Walmart, and, most recently, Suntrust Bank.

The conclusion my husband came to is that we need to love people a little more and instead of performing that upper-cut on that elderly woman who was effectively blocking the coffee I wanted from all sides (kidding), I should have reminded myself that I love her. Have I told you lately that my husband is a much better person than I?

I just don't do alternate universes very well, as they cause me too much stress and subsequent gnashing of teeth. Instead of experiencing them in real life, I would much rather watch them on television, where they are not directly affecting me.

I can sit and observe the actions and reactions of others without the repercussion of me ultimately having to take a Xanax.

"Wristcutters" wasn't for everybody. But I enjoyed it, as did my little baby "M" who thanked me with a sloppy kiss, for not taking her on the big, bad jog this morning.

Apoplectic Fits, Tears and Blessings

I slept today.

The baby went down for her afternoon nap and so did I, wiped out by the tumultuous emotions of the past 16 hours. I woke up only slightly when my husband lifted the pillow off of my head and whispered that our tiny niece or nephew's heart had stopped beating after only several weeks. I cried myself back to sleep.

The nap wasn't as refreshing as I had hoped it would be, but the News put our crazy evening into perspective.

We picked up our 8 year old from flag football practice yesterday evening to the surprising information that, since their first coach left for another school, they didn't do football so much anymore.

"So what are you doing, exactly, for two hours in the afternoon," I asked him, as I thought of the $100.00 check I wrote out a week ago at the flag football display table at school registration. In the memo, I wrote "flag football." There was no question as to what we were signing up for.

"We play games, and sit around," he answered. Excellent. When were the Friday games going to begin? He didn't know. Why weren't they playing football? He didn't know.

"You need to call," I said to my husband. "I didn't pay for an afterschool babysitting service."

That was stressor number one.

The second occurred at the grocery store. We piled the groceries in the cart at such a rate that only happens after a paycheck has been deposited and posted to our account. We try to buy enough that will limit our trips there in between, because the 3.00 gallon of milk generally ends up being $60.00 worth of crap we didn't know we needed before we walked through those sliding glass doors.

I slid my debit card through to pay for the items and heard an unfamiliar beep. I looked down.

In bold letters, I read, "Declined. Insufficient Funds." Truly, this was a dumbfounding, what-the-frack moment, as I had spent the better part of my afternoon on our online banking account, paying bills and balancing the checkbook.

"It's a mistake, Mary, it will be okay," my husband said, using the smooth, calming voice that could also be used for someone who was about to jump off a bridge.

His blood pressure performed the same acrobatics later that evening when, upon investigating and speaking to customer service and the bank's resolution center (with individuals who needed a review in how to treat customers), we discovered that the bank had decided to debit out the payroll check and put a hold on the deposit for seven days.

Seven days. The implications were horrifying , as I thought of the bills I had paid because in Mary's world, it was business as usual. In the bank's world, however, the paycheck that we had been depositing into this same account for two months raised some sort of red flag, although it was a local check and the bank it was written from was literally across the street from our current bank.

"Where is the check, physically," he asked the vice president the branch this morning. "Because I will come over there and pick it up, take it across the street and cash it, then bring the cash back to you people." You idiots, he meant.

I began to hyperventilate as I looked at the fees that had accrued so far online, and was on the verge of becoming apoplectic as I thought of the possibility of the bank actually returning checks and refusing to pay items as they came through. I don't do apoplectic well.

Chris eyed me warily as I began to weep. Aware of the implications of this situation both to his wife and the finances, he visibly put on the Army officer hat and began telling the unfortunate individual on the other end what she was going to do.

"You will fix this," he ordered. "You will take this hold off of my paycheck, and you will remove all the fees that you have charged us because of your error."

The scrambling on the other end was quite apparent.

I realized, yet again, how much I love my husband. I thanked God for him at that very moment and realized how blessed I am to have someone who takes care of his family with a protectiveness that is the indication of a real man.

My tears turned from desperate to thankful and continued throughout the day as a weariness set in after the climax of our emotional roller coaster.

The tears then turned to sad this afternoon at the news of my little niece or nephew of whom God decided not to bless us with at this moment in our lives. And I prayed that He would, in His grace, give us the possibility of another again soon .

CAPSLOCK MAKES ME SMART

I'm sorry. This is just too funny. I just love this website.

http://emailsfromcrazypeople.com/2009/09/01/capslock-makes-me-smart/#more-532

Leaving your account open

Mary always writes on Cal's facebook when he leaves it open, so I only thought it fitting that the husband who brings such laughter should write on Mary's blog when she leaves it open. Notice I'm not using bad words.

The centipede thing wasn't funny or nice. hehe

Close your blog page when you walk away from the computer Mary!

(it's hard to type with the"A" key missing....)