As it turns out, that casserole was really bad

Astonishingly bad. But I didn't eat it myself. No, I did not. And I won't be, since right now it is double bagged in two thoughtfully re-purposed shopping bags on my back porch, waiting for someone less lazy than myself to haul it out to the trash can. Now, the evidence most strongly suggesting that that was a bad casserole is the fact that my child spent last night vomiting it in quantities 17 times greater than what she actually ate. Actually, in quantities 17 times greater than every single thing she's ever eaten in her life.

Now, there are times when I kind of think my kid might puke. Like when she's hung out with other kids who turned out to be pukers. Or when I let her eat half a birthday cake or something. And then there are times when I don't think she's going to puke, like when she spends a lovely day dicking around the house doing my toenails, like she did yesterday:


So I was on my way home from water aerobics last night, feeling really shitty about things I won't go into at this juncture, and my husband called. After some basic pleasantries, he casually said, "Phooker's up." It was about 8:30 or so, and this would be wickedly late for Phook to still be awake in the evening, so I was confused. He then elaborated by informing me that she had puked all over her crib. Now, if our roles were reversed, I would have called him, screaming at the top of my lungs, "She puked! She puked! Fuck!!!!!!!!!!!! Get home NOWWWWWWWWW!!!! I'm going to kill myself with a paper clip in 30 seconds if you do not pull in the driveway right NOWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!" This man starts by gingerly telling me she's awake. Weirdass.

I got home about 10 minutes later to find her freshly bathed and looking decidedly forlorn. At that point, I took over the snuggling of the child while Big K went upstairs to deal with the blast zone. He came downstairs with a laundry basket full o' chuff and grimly informed me, in reference to one of Phook's resident crib stuffed animals, "Eeyore took a head shot that makes JFK's wound look like a hangnail." Heaven help me. So the man rinsed chunks off the basket of goodies, started the laundry, and went back upstairs to put on new sheets or something. Phook and I were snuggling in the living room in our rocker recliner thing watching an episode of Oprah about freegans off the DVR, and I thought she was about to pass out. But then she wanted out of the chair. I wanted her to pass out, so I was saying, "Stay with Momma." She wiggled out of my lap anyhow. She knew best, man. Because the second her feet hit the floor she projectile vomited about 16 oz. of brown liquid and the remaining solids from her gut across the room. I had worried such a thing could happen, so I had a cloth diaper/former burp cloth in my hand when this went down. I caught a lot of puke, but the leg of my pants caught more. And the floor, God bless us for never having had the money to get the new carpet we've been wanting for years, took a nasty hit. I started screaming for my husband, because I do not do vomit. Phook was just sobbing and dripping in antichrist stew. The cats were really curious as to why there were lights on in this house past 7 p.m.

I stripped her down, added the garments to the washing machine, and threw her back in the tub, where she cried pitifully with her lower lip in full extension and halfheartedly bopped her little Ernie-piloted boat around. There is just nothing so sad and needing of love as a sick kid. (Well, my sick kid. I'd probably just shoot yours to put it out of its misery rather than have to care for the vomiting spawn of a stranger. (I'm kidding, people. Sort of, at least.)) So anyhow, we repeated the process with another set of sleepwear. At that point, we offered her a small drink of water, which didn't come back up immediately, and which we considered a minor victory. We then put her back down in her crib. Big K came downstairs and I inquired as to her well-being, at which point I heard the unmistakable sound of vomit over the baby monitor. Up we went with towels. Another wardrobe change, another sheet change. I then sat with her in the rocker in her room for a bit, and she passed out a bit here and there. Big K then said he'd sleep in her room with her, and made a little nest on the floor for them. He burritoed her up with him in some blankets, and they were both passed out presently. I slumped off to our bedroom and read all about newfangled addiction vaccines in Newsweek while freaking the fuck out.

It's not that I thought she was dying or anything, but WE HAVE PLANS THIS WEEKEND. Man, I have been looking forward to these plans forever, as documented in multiple places on this blog. I was imagining that the house would be a surround sound symphony of a 3-man vomiting band by 2 a.m. After going through the disaster scenarios for an hour or so, I finally passed out.

Phook woke up at 7:30 this morning, acting herself. I cautiously gave her about 2 ounces of water every 15 minutes until she was ready to pass out by 8:45 on account of missing her first 4 or so hours of sleep last night. She then took a mega power nap until 11:15, at which point I gave her an entire piece of dry toast and 8 ounces of Pedialyte. This was followed an hour later by a banana. It is now shortly after 2 p.m., and there has been no second showing of last night's horror film featuring Phook's stomach contents. She has had 1 poop today and it was of normal consistency. She has had no fever. I don't know, man. I have heard of kids vomiting from having excessively runny noses, what with all that nastiness making it to the belly and whatnot, and Phook has had a pretty yucky runny nose for several days. I just don't know if you can get the 3-time, down to the last drop of liquid puke-o-rama from that. If you know, dear reader, please advise. I feel normal today. Big K feels normal today. Is it possible this was a rogue incident that happened under the cover of night and will not resurface to destroy the weekend away I have been hanging my mental health hat on since Christmas? Could that be possible?

Well, we are proceeding as if that is the case, and I'm getting more optimistic each time Phook climbs on the couch and tries to jump on it for the sole purpose of openly spiting me. In a situation such as the one I am faced with today, I recommend the following three-pronged approach to healing:

1) Do not attend to your personal hygiene at all. Sit around in the afternoon blogging, still completely unkempt. Know it is the path to righteousness.

2) Bake compulsively. I am currently on asparagus quiches after finishing a double batch of chocolate chip cookies and a double batch of cranberry orange bread.

3) Dress your child in an undershirt that is at least one size too small, pair it with some hand-me-down sweatpants of fuzzy origin that are at least one size too large, and let her climb on shit around the house. Photograph her to prove that you really are a nutcase, but only if you're feeling extra ambitious:

So that's where I'm at. The other thing that has been popping in and out of my mind for the past 18 hours or so is that this is a seriously strong item to put in the "Reasons to Stop at Two Children" file. Last night, Big K and I were tag-teaming the situation, with him dealing with the heavy labor of the puke zamboni variety and me handling the snuggling and pointing out where various items of necessity were located. When Circus Act shows up and s/he gets the pukes right along with Phook, well, such an approach will get more logistically complicated with two pea-soupers at it at the same time. If we added children beyond the number of available parents and they ALL went to town, well, what the hell would happen? I can't even wrap my mind around that nightmare scenario. And, really, vomit is at the top of my nightmare scenarios. I just do not do vomit. So, I don't know. This factor has now been placed squarely above "Sketchy Finances" and "Would Eventually Need to Acquire Additional Kitchen Chair" as far as reasons to send my husband off for a prompt snip-snip and an ice pack the moment Circus Act crowns. Just throwing that out there, so as to help ensure that this post remains true to its spirit of horrifying each and every reader.

Okay, I've gotta go find a recipe for scones or something before I lose consciousness. Word to Big Bird.

The fruits of my desperation are decidedly spoiled

I think that over the past several months, if I've done anything on this blog, it is establish these two basic facts:

1) This winter has been insane, from a meteorological perspective. Feet of snow coupled with subzero temperatures.

2) I'm going batshit crazy up in this mother.

So, you know, it's going on March now. The snowpile out my front window, one of several made by the good neighbor who plows our driveway, is 10 feet tall. I cannot see the state highway that is 10 yards out my window without standing up, pressing face to the window, and twisting my neck funny. There are icicles on my house that are 7 feet long.

Today, when I woke up in the vicinity of 7 a.m., which is my relatively luxurious habit at this point, I thought that it was much, much later than the actual hour. I assumed that some godawful combo of Big K's alarm failing and Phook oversleeping her usual rooster cry had resulted in us all lying there, bloated and drooling, until at least 9 a.m. Why? It was just so damned sunny out. Upon learning it was the standard hour, I had an extreme winter version of that thing that happens to all us snowbound assholes in mid-April on that warm day that hits the mid-60s, which is to assume that it's summer and it's here to stay. I woke up today with some assholish sense of that. When I actually rose and saw there was some friendly snow falling, I didn't let it interfere with the schema my goat brain had already established for today. Today, said the schema, it is nice out.

So I went about my business of the morning, which included nose wiping, vacuuming, laundering, dusting, and doing the prep work on this kind of nasty sounding casserole I'd found a recipe for, because I had a head of cabbage from SHARE that I didn't want to waste. It involved making some brown rice, chopping some cabbage, browning some hamburger, and combining it all together with some other nonsense and thinking it didn't look great. So the day proceeded, and Phook had lunched, and my sense of the day as sunny got the best of me. I decided I would put Phook in the stroller and run a few errands of the post office and convenience store variety on foot. Hmm.

So the thermometer stuck to my window, which may or may not be accurate, revealed a temperature in the upper 20s. Balmy, by my current standards. I dressed Phook in her winterwear. I dressed myself in my winterwear. Given that I am disturbingly prone to wipe-outs in the best of conditions, I requested and received this product for Christmas as part of my feeble efforts at avoiding getting my ass in traction before the winter is over. They're basically like snowshoe type things for your shoes, without really being snowshoes. So I am putting these things on over my tennis shoes, and they really have to stretch to get over the shoe, and this weird thing happened where I snapped it on and my foot flung out involuntarily, and I, well, I kicked my kid in the face with the metal coil part. She didn't mind too terribly much, so I didn't let it mess up my plans. Perhaps, if I were behaving rationally, I would have realized that having to strap a coiled metal device onto your footwear in order to get to the post office without requiring a body cast is a good sign you should just stay home. But I wasn't and I didn't.

So I strapped Phook into her stroller, and she started gasping as the penetrating winds assaulted her. But, and I'm not even lying here, she was pretty happy to be outside. I mean, I'm not the only jerk who's been hanging out in this house with barely an exception for a good third of a year. So I started pushing the stroller, which is your standard Graco contraption, through the snow. A lot of people were nice enough to shovel their sidewalks. But even the shoveled sidewalks had a nice coating of ice over them. And then there were melty parts. And then were unshoveled parts. So I pretty much had a stew of impassable treacherousness on my hands. You know, the sort of environment lots of people choose to push their children through in a device best suited for cruising the mall.

By the time we got the half mile to the post office, we were both coated in snot. My feet were wet. I was getting rather tired. I was thinking I had shin splints, actually, from the effort of maneuvering the stroller through the snowier portions of the terrain. Phook had taken to just emitting a low growling sound, because she seemed to enjoy the way her voice reverberated as she was jostled (okay, thrown) about as we went over the ice caps that had formed on the sidewalk. I wiped the snot off of our faces before entering a federal facility that was probably videotaping my bad parenting. (Or not, since this is The Woods.) We mailed our package and bought some stamps and socialized briefly with Phook's great grandma who of course is a mail carrier, just like everyone's great grandma.

Next stop was the convenience store next door where I like to buy generic tortilla chips, since they're two full-sized bags for $2.22, and that's totally the sort of bargain for which I'm willing to risk my spinal health. When I walked out of there, I found the parking lot to be remarkably clear. And now that I had a bit of a buzz from the oxygen concentration out of doors, I thought, "Well, heck, why don't I just keep walking?" So we walked through "downtown," another half mile or so, to visit Grandma J at her post as secretary for the local police department. The sidewalks of the downtown, what with the foot traffic of all the taverngoers, were deceptively clear. The wind was whipping and the snot flow not abating, but that was cool. Grandma J offered Phook some goods from her phookstash of animal crackers, and she was pleased.

Then it was time to head the mile or so back home. Rather than take the same route, I theorized that taking the "back way" would afford me less busy streets that I could potentially walk on rather than having to negotiate more shitastic sidewalks. I started on that route, but aborted my plan of roadwalking when we almost got smoked by some joyriding asshat in a crappy Mitsubishi with mismatched body panels. So back on the sidewalk we went. The first obstacle I encountered was a dogshit-laden stretch of sidewalk. I know it's just a little poo, and that has been one of my specialties for the past 17 months or so, but I just didn't want to come home and have to scrape a shit/ice combo off the Graco wheels. So I had to slalom through that. Next up, I could see a car parked blocking a driveway I had to cross, so I had to veer out into the road again through a puddle roughly the depth of the Mariana Trench. Sweet.

But then it got really interesting. I encountered a stretch of "shoveled" sidewalk. It was shoveled in the sense that someone had run a shovel down the mid part of the sidewalk...making a shovel-width trail. The Graco is decidedly wider than a shovel path. Being not smart, I discovered this once I was in it to the point where turning around would have been even more dumb than pressing on. So I was just bulldozing my kid through snow coated in ice coated in melted snow frosting. (At this point my memory of forcing Phook from my nethers is blissfully fuzzy, but it seemed to me that my efforts today were on the level with that contest.) Anyhow, people were driving by. The energy of their "Look at that moron!" vibes was doing nothing to prevent every muscle in my body from erupting in fireworks of protest. Nor was it doing anything to prevent me from self hate.

I finally got through that terrain, and turned the corner at the top of the hill to make a final descent to my house. (The same hill that almost always triggers my little hobby of pants-pissing). So I got about halfway down it and saw that one of my neighbors had not bothered to manage their snow in any way. I was standing there, coincidentally having to piss, looking at about 20 inches of snow on top of the sidewalk that was between me and my toilet. Despite my seriously valid efforts at not swearing in front of my kid of late, I lost all ability to reason and I just started screaming, "Shit! Shit! Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!" at the gods. I may have shaken my fists at the sky. Fine, I did. Now, if I wasn't living in a mecca of snowfall, I could have just cut out onto the road from there. But there were 5 foot high snowbanks between the sidewalk and the road, and I didn't think that was possible to summit even for an asshole such as myself. The remaining option was to drag Phook/stroller back up the hill in reverse, since there wasn't enough room to turn the thing around with the snow on either side. At this point my hands were sweating at Nixon-esque levels, so I crammed my mittens in the cupholders I really wished were holding bottles of liquor, and commenced hauling the kid up the hill backwards. Halfway up the hill, I looked down and saw that Phook had dropped Sleep Guy, the lovey which is second only to, well, nothing, in terms of Phook's overall demeanor/ability to sleep/desire to live. So back down we went and grabbed Sleep Guy. And back up we went again, in reverse. (I had probably pissed down my leg by this point, but that would have been the least of my concerns.)

We made it to the top of the hill. At this point I had the option of going back through the shovel-width segment of sidewalk or hauling the stroller and myself over an approximately 3-foot tall snow bank. I picked the snow bank. So snotty pregnant me lifted a Graco stroller (not known for being a featherweight), with approximately 25 pounds of Phook (plus probably 3 pounds of outerwear) in the hot seat, plus a gallon of milk and two bags of tortilla chips in the undercarriage. Essentially, I dragged the whole fucking unit over the snow bank on its left side, stumbling and snotting, trying really hard not to break my own water on a buried snowmobile trail sign. Phook, being Phook, enjoyed this. Me, being me, screamed the whole time in an unholy rage. Passersby, being passersby, laughed and picked up their cell phones to call everyone they know.

I then walked down the nice little stretch of the highway I live on pretty much wagging my sweet ass down the middle of the thing and not giving two shits who had to swerve to avoid me. (I should probably explain that while the road in question is actually a state highway, in The Woods, that really only means it's one of two main roads in our town that actually sees the occasional semi...it's not a 4-lane interstate or anything). Finally, blissfully, we were home. I had blue flames shooting out of my calves, but we were home.

By now, it was 2:45 in the afternoon, so Phook dutifully crapped her pants and required an overdue nap. Only, on account of my hijinx, the nap was really overdue, which you would think would lead to a child in a coma but really leads to a child pulling off her socks and cramming them in her ears while yodeling in lieu of sleeping. So she dicked around in her crib for a good hour before finally passing out. At this point, I myself was so exhausted that I ended up drooling and comatose on the couch in a haze of muscle spasms and self-loathing. Phook chirped me to life over the monitor at 5:00. Oh shit. That gross ass casserole needed to be in the oven at 4:00 in order to be boiling over and fucking up my oven in time for Phook's dinner. I could have audibled at that point and gotten out the waffle maker or some shit, but I still felt like I'd been dragged behind a truck though six states and the District of Columbia, so I called Big K and told him to stop at the aforementioned convenience store and bring home one of their semi-decent take-and-bake pizzas (File Under: Ends, Inability to Make Meet). I crammed an orange in Phook's grill to tide her over until the pizza could be cooked and sat around and reveled in my lack of awesomeness.

Big K came home and it took the entire baking time of the pizza for me to tell him the saga of my misguided ambition. With a greasy sheen of pizza drippings adorning his face, he lovingly said, "I'm glad you got stuck in the snow bank honey. This is really good pizza." You gotta love him.

So how was your day?

Sometimes you just feel like talking, even though you don't have much to say

That would be the case for me. I've opened up Blogger like 96 times in the past few days, and no good topic has come to me. So now I'm just going to type for my own enjoyment, and make you suffer for it.

Firstly, the human I am gestating has found itself a "name." When I originally mentioned the whole little implanted seed business, I asked for naming recommendations, and even threw some out there myself. But nothing fit. Just as with Phook, the name had to come to me, as if in a vision. The name, being something I cooked up, is subject to change. To illustrate this point, let me provide for you a sample selection of the things I have called my cat, whose given name is Lucy, over the past 7 years:

• Donkey
• Trout
• Pineapple Upside Down Cake
• Low Rider Belly
• Short, Furry, Hairy-eared Gray Lion
• Shib
• Shibby
• Shibonium
• Shibidi Shibidaba Shibidaboo
• Boner

And that is seriously abridged. So I guess what I'm saying is that the child's name is subject to change. But anyhow, I have found myself, upon feeling the wondrous movement of this creature, referring to it as "Circus Act." I have spontaneously used the phrase, "Aw, Circus Act is at it again," about 467 times. So I feel as if a name has come, dropped from the heavens. Henceforth, if I reference "Circus Act," I'm talking about my unborn child. Just so you know.

I'd also like to note that my husband has been lying to me a lot lately for sport. He's really a disturbingly honest chap, so if he were to inform me that an asteroid had just crashed into our front yard, I'd probably just casually grab the camera. So the other night, we were sitting here watching a movie, and he says, "I just ate a dime." When I inquired as to the means he used for dime-eating, he said that he had some medicine he wanted to take in the front pouch of his hoodie, and when he reached in there to grab it he forgot there was change in there too, and ended up taking the dime with his ibuprofen. When I asked how he knew it was a dime, he said it was because three pennies were still in there, and the dime would have been the leftover change from what it was that he bought. This was all very casual. My basic urge to panic was blighted by my basic urge to just sit and cram popcorn in my maw while watching a movie, so I was just like, "Look, I will panic for you if you really did this, but I'm not going to get worked up until I know you did. You have to fucking tell me if you just ate a dime, because I am really tired." After insisting that he had eaten a dime about 43 more times, followed by me calmly repeating the above statement 43 more times, he admitted he had not eaten a dime.

Then yesterday, Phook was jumping on our bed (yeah, excellent parents) and we were hanging out in there with her. At one point she face-planted or something into something and started crying a bit, and it was clear she had bitten her tongue. Big K inspected and informed me there was a little blood, and we moved on. So then I left the house and went for a walk for about an hour. When I came home, Big K said, "She really actually did bite her tongue really good. You can see a little place in the front of it where it looks forked." I was like, "What the hell? Are you serious? She sliced her tongue that bad and we didn't know it?" And he was like, "Yeah, basically." So I'm getting ready to panic and imagining her on some horrible Discovery Channel special featuring people with severely atypical anatomy when he proudly informs me that he can indeed convince me of anything these days. What a bastard.

In our home, this is the height of amusement. There is something about pregnancy (parenting?) that gives the brain a certain fog. When I type these days, I'm just as likely to write "hat" when I mean "elevator" as anything else. My previously seamless capacity for using the correct form of words like "their," "you're," and "its" is now fatally flawed, and upon proofreading, I find myself aghast at my grammatical crimes. So when my husband tells me he ate a dime or that our child now has a forked tongue, I pretty much just assume that that's what's up. Cheap entertainment for everybody.

You know how sometimes there is something you have to do, and you just do not want to flipping do it? But you HAVE to do it, it's not even remotely optional? So then you just kinda wanna puke whenever you think about it? Well, I've had one of those yipping at my ankles for the last month or so. While I'm not normally particularly prone to procrastination (nice unintentional alliteration, self), on occasion I'll come down with a case of it. This year I've been having a tough time forcing myself to get our tax crap together. Not that it's particularly complicated, but we do have the wee computer business of Big K, and I had a disturbing amount of receipts for unreimbursed medical shit on my hands, and stuff like that. And I had to produce records of various expenses that could be related to the business and these types of things. But more than the actual chore of assembling the shit, I'm really just scared about how our taxes are going to turn out this year. We've had the good fortune of receiving relatively robust refunds the past few years (especially for '06 with that dual income (a number which I can't even allow myself to contemplate at this juncture) and the birth of a really nice little tax deduction) and this year I just am pretty concerned. I had my short-lived little daycare career which was virtually untaxed in there, Big K has his virtually untaxed little city councilman career going on, and some other shit like that that is just going to mess up my whole plan of getting back 6 times more than we ever even paid in via some miraculous tax loophole. I know, the financial experts say that you're letting the government play with your money for free if you get a large refund, but for fools such as myself, it just always seems like a check from Santa. So I don't know, I'll drop the shit off with the tax guy and see what happens. Hopefully we'll get back at least a dime for my husband to eat. Either way though, at least I have my shit together now, which is better than having it strewn about.

I have some things coming up that I am really looking forward to. This weekend, the Family K and the Grandparents J are heading up to Closedfortheseasonville to spend the weekend with Auntie Hode. Hode won a little hotel stay in her winter-drenched vacation destination, and we're using it. There will be a pool. There will be some dining out. There will be scenery that is not the 10-foot high snow pile directly out my front window. There will be the kind of thoughtful snacks my mother always packs. I'll be able to go to this store I like there and replenish my supply of garlic olive oil. There will be grandparents and an aunt to hang with the Phook for a 48-hour period, meaning I should get out of at least one diaper change and one administration of nourishment to the child. I don't know, I've always been rather fond of the weekend getaway. Without the potential hassles that come with real travel and the extreme depths of letdown of returning to real life, it can be just the ticket. (At this point in this record-breaking Wisconsin winter, I think that finding a nice sale on chicken breasts could even be the ticket, but I digress...) Anyhow, I'm pumped. Phook has a new swimsuit to wear in the pool and there is nothing like the roundness of a baby/toddler belly taxing the lycra of charming swimwear to restore your faith in humanity.

In addition to this excursion, the Hosedog Trip of the Century is coming up March 15-19. I believe I have mentioned in passing that my sister is taking me (just me!) to San Diego for a sisterly excursion. I had financed some earlier sibling getaways for us and now that she is that ambitious single teacher who is class advisor/softball coach/mock trial something or other/chaperon of everything and has an extra 50 cents in her pocket on account of never once entering her apartment during normal waking hours, she's blowing it on a trip for us. We will be acting like the children we are and going to the zoo and Sea World and generally dicking around. We will also be eating a lot. She's lost like half her body weight lately on account of Weight Watchers/turning into a gym rat, but our plans include a lot of dining nonetheless. The thought of walking around without a diaper bag is something I can't really even wrap my brain around at this point. I'm planning on taking the smallest possible purse to make the most of it. Given that I'm at the halfway point in what will be at least a 4-year stretch of marathon pregnancy/breastfeeding/pregnancy/breastfeeding, I think it's time for a relatively unencumbered trot around the track. But I have to admit that I'm already missing Phook in advance as I contemplate 5 days without sniffing her. (Well, actually, it will just be the 3 days in the middle that I can't sniff her, given that the beginning and ending days will have me at home for at least 2 minutes.) But, man. This is way way way way way way way longer than I have ever been apart from her. I wonder how she'll feel about it. Probably not as strongly as I will, but that's really for the best. So anyhow, I am counting the days like a fool. I've considered getting out my suitcase and packing already, but then I realize just how pathetic I'd be if I did that. Plus, then the cats would sleep on my dark blue luggage for 3 weeks, and I'd never be able to remove the matted fur. So, there's that. I've been looking forward to this since the onset of the dark months, and now it is within reach. I might just live until those tulips come up.

Finally, I have to mention the new season of American Idol. Big K and I enjoy the show, we do. I'm having some mixed feelings about this season. I know the judges are saying they have a seriously talented batch of singers this year, but I just can't stand so many of them. The most notable exception is that David Archuleta kid. Slight cheesiness aside, he seems like such a genuinely nice and well-balanced kid. You don't see a lot of these. Big K announced that he would "let this kid date Phook," if that tells you anything. So I'm rooting for him. And we're also fans of Carly Smithson, the Irish girly who apparently already had a majorly failed album stemming from a fairly major recording contract. Big K informed me that she could "sing him into love with her." So that's high praise. So we're rooting for them, and feel okay about a couple other cats too I guess. But all in all, they seemed to select a lot of marmot-like people this year that just make me feel itchy. As always, Simon Cowell makes me feel woozy with his over the top smarm and his megawatt smile o' charm. I mean, I probably outweigh the man and his v-necks by 50 pounds, but I have a thing for him. He's just such a smarmy charming bastard and I think I'm gonna call him if Big K ever chokes out on a dime.

And I guess that's it. Once I get an appropriately illustrative photo of the phenomenon, I'm going to post about why Phook so strongly resembles Nick Nolte, but until then, this edition of Nonsense with Big W will now sadly come to an end.

I probably shouldn't go here...

...but every now and then, I make questionable blogging decisions. I would like to discuss the fact that I need some respite from Christina Aguilera's breasts, for reasons outlined below.

Firstly, I would like to introduce this lovely nude picture of the mother-to-be, which I stole from the most fabulous nasty gossip-tastic website, Perez Hilton. The reason I'm starting with this picture is because I actually kind of like it. I think it's pretty tasteful. She looks good. Her facial expression is joyful. It's a nice celebration of the pregnant form. I can get behind that sort of thing. So I am starting with this because I think it establishes a nice baseline of a sexy mama that I can appreciate.

Unfortunately, since the birth of her son, Ms. Aguilera's funbags have been on a red carpet tour the likes of which no breasts have ever seen, as far as I can tell. And I'm just kind of wishing they'd find shelter. She's nursing her kid. Obviously, the bosom gets larger when your milk comes in. And Christina wasn't exactly lacking in the teet department prior to lactation. Being a sexy lady who has recently had a baby via c-section, her oft-bared midsection, although surely more fit and lovely than your average woman who has recently given birth, is not what is being highlighted by her garments. No. On the contrary, those of us who partake of the images of pop culture are being treated to display after display of her gigantic breasts.

Here is the first image I saw of this notable display, which I also stole from Perez (the scrawled commentary on the photo is Perez's handiwork):

Now those are some knockers. Those are some huge, huge knockers. And they are accompanied by her sexalicious snarl look. Now, a part of me is wanting to congratulate her for being sexy and confident and bosom-baring so shortly after giving birth. Lord knows that is no easy task. And I don't begrudge her for managing it. But, if I'm being honest, I'm was just kind of horrified when I saw this. The combo of the cleavage and the snarl just kind of made the "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" sign flash in my head.

And here is another image consistent with recent Christina shots:

Man. I could just do with 30% less boob. I fear that this post will come off as an argument for desexualizing of mothers, a patriarchy perpetuating diatribe of ignorance. But that's not what I'm going for. Really, I guess I am just disturbed that she felt like she had to get out there and show she was still Dirrty old Christina within a couple weeks (days?) of having her son. The kid was born on January 12, and these pics have been out there for awhile. Dude. I didn't have a c-section so I can't speak from experience, but that shit is definitely major surgery. Woman should still be taking it easy...not glamming it up, pimping out her sexiness, proving to all the gossip bloggers and fellow celebrity moms that she's just as hot as ever. It feels like a competition has been born, particularly among celebrities, to be re-hotified before the anesthesia has even worn off. So we have pictures of moms on the red carpet, snarling and revealing giant teets, letting us know they haven't lost their game for even a second. There are probably still staples or something holding together the belly under those dresses. Can't a woman take a break after giving birth?

And here is her People cover:

A nice new mom pose of baby on mom's chest...by why does it have to be a largely bared chest? And, being caught in a line at the grocery store, I had the opportunity to flip through her full spread in the magazine. Most, if not all, of the photos were boobtastic. Yes, the robust chest of a new mother is quite a sight to behold. And certainly it is a beautiful thing...I'm not saying it is gross or shameful or should be disguised. But does it need to be advertised? Does it need to be the focal point? Does your lovely little newborn baby need to be the hood ornament on your 32EEEE boobage? Man.

I guess I just think the whole thing is bogus. Sure, she has a full-time baby nurse, but she's gotta be tired. Why can't she chill? Why can't she step out, after she has fully recovered, in a tasteful garment designed with her comfort, rather than her sexuality, in mind? What pressure is it that would make a lovely lady display what in reality is probably fairly painful, uncomfortably leaking breast engorgement at every possible opportunity?

If this look is really an expression of how she feels, well, good for her and shame on me for suggesting otherwise. But I just have a hunch that this has more to do with the ubiquitous "Hot Post-Baby Bodies!" spreads in magazines she feels she needs to land a prime spot in for the sake of her career. And that, I believe, has a trickle-down effect to all of us regular trainer-less, chef-less, nanny-less fools trying to button our $24.99 jeans. Dammit.

So, Christina, I hereby invite you to put your pursuit of hotness (as defined by The Man) in the closet while your body heals and you adjust to motherhood. You really are hot, I swear. It just doesn't have anything to do with your cleavage.

Shake, rattle, and roll

There are many things about pregnancy that are heinous. I mean, it really is a parasitic relationship, when you think about it. There is a weak little creature taking all of its nourishment from the body of another human. And said human generally suffers some ill effects from the arrangement. But there are, of course, some very neat things that the mother experiences during a pregnancy. This isn't true for everyone, but I'm one of those cats who actually enjoys watching the belly expand. I am never so forgiving towards my person as I am in pregnancy...that belly has a job to do and a purpose...it's not just messing up the way my jeans fit. Some women also really experience pregnancy as a bonding experience with their unborn child, talking to the baby a lot, singing to the baby, what have you. While I feel this way to some extent, I can't begin to compare it to the bonding that occurs once the baby is on the outside, so I don't exactly sit around and weep over the uterine bonding. But there is one thing about pregnancy that I love. Love, love, love. And that is feeling the movement of the baby.

Now, I've felt this baby moving for an incredibly long time. I swear I felt the kid at like 8 or 9 weeks, even though everything you read says that would be impossible. However, I had felt it before with the little Phooker, who I also felt early (maybe 12 weeks or so), and it was the same feeling. So I maintain that I felt it, call me crazy if you like. Some people describe the initial movement of a baby as a "fluttering" sensation, as if there are butterflies in the house. My description would be more akin to little tiny delicate bubbles popping. Like if you had a little bubble blown from an actual little bubble wand inside your bits, and then that bubble rose up from somewhere inside you and gently popped. And there were like 4,000 of them. That's how I experience the early movements. That's pretty sweet, right there. And so reassuring too, when you're pretty sure you just have some god awful plague that people can only get in the tropics. It's nice to be assured that your plague is actually human life.

But then, the little bubbles turn into something a little less little. Little baby bee bops. Bop. Bop. Bop. Tap. Tap. Tap. Is anyone out there? Bop. Tap. Spin. Whirl. Bop. And then, you get to thud, thud, thud, clunk, thud. I am now in the stage of thudding. My dear Big K can even feel this rad action from the outside. "Hi Dad, Thud!" Dude, I love it. For awhile, I only was really able to appreciate this action in the evenings, when I myself settled down and was able to actually sit quietly and feel for it. Now, it's pretty much a concert of activity in there. The big show is still in the quiet, still evenings, but I can pretty much feel some nonsense in there throughout the day. This is the best part of pregnancy, in my opinion. There is a person inside my body! Doing stuff! This little snippet of the human experience, reserved for those lucky souls who have been biological mothers, is seriously one of the more amazing things I have ever had the pleasure of enjoying. It is the real, solid evidence of the miracle of life before the actual arrival of the little miracle in question. And once you get to this babe's stage of thudding, dad can experience it too, since I think the whole expectant dad thing is probably even more surreal than the expectant mom thing, and this gives him something to touch. Which is good. This baby seems to know when I've invited Big K to come feel the party. And if he comes over by me talking loudly, he will make the babe be still and quiet (he had this effect on Phook too). So I always alert him to extremes in movement by silently waving him over, and he has to sneak up on the baby, and put his hand on the belly ever so gingerly. And sometimes we can trick the creature. And then there is awesomeness for Big K.

However, like the pain of childbirth, the ability to recall the actual sensation is fleeting. Although I felt some whackass phantom baby kicks for a couple weeks after Phook was born (I don't know...weird), after they faded it was impossible for me to really recall the way it felt. I knew it had been cool, but I couldn't really go there and feel it. Same concept as labor...you remember it sucked, but you can't recreate the pain for yourself...mercifully. It's just not something that can be held onto. Which makes me appreciate it all the more. Who knows, maybe this baby will be my last, and my last little kick is only a couple months away. I wish I could bottle it, and then take a sip years down the road when the little kicker in question is kicking his big sister in the teeth and I really need a good dose of love. Of course there are times, later in pregnancy, when the kicks can keep you up at night or get you in a vital organ and perhaps there is the tendency to be annoyed. But this is one I'll take. It's just too amazing--and too fleeting--to do anything with it other than cherish it.

Phookapalooza

People, you have requested photographs of the Phookinator. Since I'm fundamentally a giving person, I have decided to comply. Luckily for you, our weather here in The Woods took a rather insane turn today. Yes, friends, about 9 inches of snow were dumped on these parts over the course of this fine day. Now, maybe someone from Florida is reading this. And maybe they have a 16 month old kid. And maybe they wouldn't dream of taking their wee babe out of doors in sub 50 degree weather. Well, that's not how we roll. No. We are Wisconsinites. I have many memories of spending entire days of my childhood in snow drifts, coming into the house all snot-slicked, exhausted, soaked, and really fucking happy my mom put marshmallows in the hot chocolate. Phook's childhood will be filled with the same, if Big K and I have anything to say about it. And we start 'em young.

Here we have Phook, decked out in her winterwear and ready to be pulled around in a chariot like the princess she is:

Now, Big K pulled the child around until he just about had a gripper, which is to say for about 4 minutes. Here he is on the cool down lap:


Then we decided to see what would happen if we let her attempt to walk around in the snow. Of course she has been out in the snow many times, but generally contained by parent or sled and generally not in depths so closely approaching her height. Anyhow, being that she is Phook, lover of all things active and novel, she adored running around in the snow. When I say she "adored" it, what I mean is that she screamed if I attempted to pick her up to relieve her stubby little legs of their burden. That's how much she loved it. I submit to you the following glee-filled expression as evidence:

Since no one was out on this particular side street that runs perpendicular to ours, and it had been plowed at least once today, making the snow only about 4 inches deep, we commandeered it for our personal playground for a good 20 minutes. I captured this undeniably iconic image of my two favorite short-legged people:

We then headed back to our vicinity, with Phook gamely trudging through snow up to her hips. She diced out several times of course. And unfortunately, when she reached into the snow to push herself back up by the hands, she would tip forward and give herself a facewash with snow. She didn't even really mind that. By the time we got back to our yard, her entire person was crusted with snow, her cheeks were absolutely apple red, her snow-soaked hat was nearly fully obscuring her vision, and she had turned into a remarkable snot fount (a snount?). So I took the opportunity to pose with her for a photograph:


We then returned to the homestead. Big K then realized the irony of the fact that he was wearing a North Carolina t-shirt, and insisted I take this photograph of him cashed out on a snow pile in our backyard for our Wisconsinite friends, KC & JC, who currently reside in temperate North Carolina. Wish you were here, guys:


Now, because I love you people and I've been a bit off my game in terms of providing photographs of late, I've got more to share with you. In addition to fun in the death-defying weather, we've been occupying ourselves lately with a bunch of really big boxes in the living room. I hosted one of those home parties a few weeks ago and all the shit people ordered was shipped to me, and I ended up with 3 gigantic shipping boxes to show for it. Now, maybe in Normaltown you would break down these boxes and recycle them. But here in Povertytown/Boredomtown/Iglootown, we keep them in the living room for over a week to entertain bored housebound animals of all species. Here we have a smash-nosed Phook hiding inside a box and playing peekaboo with her crazy mother through the handle hole (I love this picture, I do, and it's good practice for someday when she's an inmate and I have to love her through a bulletproof glass window):

And here we have a cross-species expression of the usefulness of giant cardboard boxes in terms of personal amusement (I don't know why I thought Phook needed a sibling, what with this kind of relationship already in place):

And, you know, if you're Phook, you climb on shit. And if you're her mother, you let her.

And, you know, if you're Phook, you don't just climb on shit. You rejoice in the fact that you have climbed on shit, structural integrity of the box be damned:

So, after falling on your head a few times and after a few hours pass, you get into your pajamas and notice a new box has arrived. A wee one. A wee perfectly Phook-sized box. So you throw it on the couch and then climb into it:

And let us now switch gears about from boxdom and just appreciate the awesome rad cuteness that is Miss Phook:

And since it is Valentine's Day, and my valentine is none other than the esteemed Big K, let us now appreciate some photos that will shed light on the man, the myth, the legend. Firstly, I would like to share a photo I discovered one morning after an evening I spent away at water aerobics. Noticing the camera on the bathroom counter, I turned it on out of curiosity to see what occasion had popped up and caused my husband to document something via photograph. I discovered that the following activity had taken place in my absence:

You gotta love a man who bathes his child with such panache. And, in the name of love, I have to share one more photo from our outdoor excursion today. Now, it is well documented on this here blog that Big K is the type of guy who doesn't take a diaper when he's leaving the house with a crap-prone kid for a 3 hour journey. He's the type of guy who probably wouldn't notice a corpse rotting in his own bathtub. He is more than a little inattentive/distracted/absentminded. So when I discovered that after spreading his own snow-soaked garments around the house with the force of 3,000 whirring helicopter blades he had paid attention to this little Phook-centric detail, I nearly cried:

Seriously. Maybe it's the pregnancy hormones, but seeing her little boots propped up on the heat vent and being warmed dry on account of my husband's rogue bout of attentiveness just about did me in. What a valentine, that Big K. I really do love the bastard. Embarrassingly so.

P.S. I just thought of one more thing I had to add. While I generally try to avoid styling myself after the asspie parents of the "my child is a genius" variety, something occurred today that made me kind of think Phook was a genius. As Big K was walking out the door this morning, I mumbled to myself that I had to blow my nose. (You know, the sort of important narrative a lot of people engage in with themselves.) So anyhow, I walked into the bathroom to look for something into which the nose could be blown. But my tissues were out in the living room, where I've been regularly nose-blowing for several days. So I walked back out into the kitchen, where I found Phook freshly returned from the living room and standing at the doorway to the kitchen, holding out a Kleenex to me and saying, "Ma Ma Ma Ma!" Dude. The child is a) nice and b) a genius.

My kid is detail oriented

Let's talk a little bit about Phook, shall we? You know, since I started this blog to talk about Phook and then went all egomaniac on your asses. Phook, you see, is detail oriented. I have been considering putting up a post on this topic for awhile now, but since I don't really know much about child development, child behaviors, or children, I have feared that I'd be putting up a post describing what every kid in the world does, naively believing it was worth exclamation points. But now I think I see enough of these behaviors that they simply must be worth noting, if only so I can read this when she's 13 (and, puke, her little sibling is going on 12) and leaving shit out all over the bathroom every morning.

So, Phook. It pretty much started as soon as she got some fairly decent skills under her belt in terms of manipulating objects with her hands. Her favorite toy as a 6-monther or whatever was her little set of nesting cups. She would stack and unstack those things forever. Nothing could hold her interest like nesting those things in each other. I know that those things are a recommended toy for that age group, since I was still consuming magazines and books on babies at that point, before I decided that said media sucked rocks and just served to make me worry about my kid's development rather than enjoy it. So her interest there was normal. I'd argue that her focus in the task went beyond the norm, but it doesn't so much matter. And nesting cups will still keep her busy for a bit even now, which is a miracle.

The next major thing I noticed was that Phook enjoyed putting toys (or anything, really) away perhaps even more than playing with stuff. Before she could even walk but could crawl faster than an Indy car racer, maybe around 9 months or so, she had this tendency (which she still has) to whip out her bag of diapers, which we just wedge beside the couch since we usually change her on the living room floor during the day, and pull all the diapers out. After putting 37 diapers back in the sack for the 400th time, I decided I'd "teach" her to help me put them away. Only I didn't have to. I said, "Phook, get me a dipe." And she power-crawled to a dipe, brought it back to me, and shoved it in the plastic bag. And proceeded to do this with an entire bag of diapers, shrieking with glee. The bestest game ever, as far as she was concerned.

As far as playing with blocks or anything that has its own container is concerned, the fun lies in putting the object in the container, dumping it out, and putting it in, repeat, repeat, repeat. At my parents' house, they have a set of the classic little wood alphabet blocks for her. They are stored in a plastic container with a plastic snap-on top which originally held pretzels or something. She will often throw a single block in the container, snap on the lid, remove the lid, throw in one more block, snap on the lid, remove the lid, throw in one more block, repeat, repeat, repeat. Like a little ritualistic thing where the placing of the lid between blocks is important. At times like these, I ponder whether there is such a thing as baby OCD.

The nice thing about this Phook characteristic is that I can make a game out of about anything involving chucking an item into a receptacle. I am currently suffering from winter ailment #623, which is a nice chest cold with a painful cough and an intermittently sore throat. (Seriously, immune system, get over the fact that I am pregnant and help ME out!!!) So yesterday I was feeling highly shitteous and was couchbound for a lot of the day, which has a tendency to anger Phook. But luckily I had a little package of cough drops out. And Phook sat on the couch and dumped them out and put them back in the package for a good half hour with me adding the occasionally sound effect when she dropped them in and occasionally holding one in my teeth by the wrapper and then loudly blowing out and jettisoning it back into the bag. (Desperate times, desperate measures, friends.)

With Phook, there have been a zillion times where I've said something offhand, never thinking she'd understand it and not even addressing it to her directly, and she has shown me that she does indeed know what I'm saying. The wonder of receptive language skills is neverending. Sometime last summer, maybe when she was 11 months or so, I started saying "Can you put that away?" or "Please put that back" in sort of casual terms. And I realized that she immediately knew what I meant. Since then, asking her to put something away or put something back has become more fun than peekaboo for this kid. Of course there are times when she'll stare you down all beady-eyed and openly defy you by walking off with something you've asked her to put away, but by and large, putting stuff away is a game for this kid. Oddly, putting stuff away is a phrase (hell, a concept) that her father doesn't understand at 31 years of age. But Phook loves to put stuff away. She'll empty a drawer and then thoroughly enjoys restocking it. She'll dump out toys and then yelp with happiness as she puts them back. WTF?

In addition to this, Phook has a preternatural understanding of categorization. This manifests itself most insanely as far as our trash management is concerned. In our kitchen, we have a tall garbage can with a lid with a button you press to open it. On the floor next to that is a paper bag into which we put recyclable paper goods. Hanging on a cabinet doorknob to the right of that is a plastic bag into which we put recyclable cans, glass, and plastic. Several months ago, Phook was snacking on some string cheese one afternoon, and after she was done she took off towards the kitchen with the wrapper. Thinking she was either going to try to eat it or shove it in a cat's orifice, I followed her. No. She walked to the garbage can, pulled up the lid, and unceremoniously threw the wrapper away. I swear to you people that despite my general love of tidiness, I never purposefully taught my child the concept of garbage. I don't understand how the toddler mind can just become aware of it, either, but apparently it can. So I kind of wondered if this was a fluke. But the next day, she pulled a piece of tape off of a box that was out, played with it until she had it wadded in a ball, and then walked to the trash and threw away the tape wad. Not a fluke. So a few days later, she was wandering around with a junk mail catalog I'd given her to occupy her for a few minutes, and brought it out into the kitchen, headed toward the trash. I said, "Good job, Phook, that is garbage." And then I muttered under my breath, "But actually, it's recyclable." I turned in Phook's direction and saw at that very moment that my child was putting the catalog in the paper bag designated for such a purpose. Auntie Hode was there. She knows this happened.

Since then, my kid has consistently managed trash of all 3 varieties without parental prompting. Big K has a tendency to guzzle a 2-liter of soda (no, that's not a typo), crush up the bottle, and leave it on the floor. If Phook finds such filth, she will pick it up and put it in the bag containing recyclables of this nature. For Christmas, she got a grocery cart full of play food from the Grandparents J. This included a few little paper foods like a box cake mix and a hamburger helper box. One day I noticed that the cake mix box was missing from the cart. I then found it in the paper recyclables. It had a tear in it. Clearly it was no longer any good to her. A few days ago, I had a little index card with some info on it that I needed. I had been using it for a bookmark in a magazine. I couldn't find it when I needed it, so I looked in the recycling bag. Bingo. It had clearly fallen from my magazine and been recycled by my kid. I just do not know how she can understand these categories and apply them perfectly. I do not know. What I do know is that this is an ass-kicking capability to have in a kid. Because when I'm lazy and trash creates itself in my presence, I can hand it to Phook and say, "Please put that in the garbage." And off to the garbage it goes. Dude.

Then there is her love of orderliness. A few weeks ago, I was in the bathroom and Phook was of course accompanying me. We have a rug outside the tub, and I noticed that a corner of it was flipped up. Apparently Phook did too, because as soon as she saw it she rushed over and flipped the corner back down. Damn rug! She has done this multiple times since with multiple rugs. At lunch time, Phook eats in her high chair, which is right by our kitchen table, and I eat seated at the chair closest to her. After lunch, I clean her up, get her out of the chair, and set her down. She then, without exception, pushes my chair back up to the table where it goes before heading out of the room to play. She just does it. That chair goes there! If I forget to shut the baby gate into our laundry room, no worries. Phook will shut it. Dude. I'm guessing this is some developmentally normal stage (I wouldn't know, since I've sworn off the materials that would tell me) in which the kid is just figuring out how the world works and puts it into practice. But it just seems so odd to watch it. I can't imagine why she would decide it's important to push my chair back to the table before she leaves the room. I mean, she's busy. But she does it. The other weird thing I noticed was that the first day after instituting our new playroom, she knew where everything went on the little individual bookshelves. I've walked in there several times and found her gingerly placing things back in the exact spot I had originally put them. This includes a general shelf of miscellaneous random crap including happy meal toys (ooof, yes, she has a few), her extensive collection of toy cell phones, and other random crap. She will put a tiny toy from this collection back exactly where it had been on the generally disordered shelf. Dude.

Phook is also in the mimic stage. I brush my hair, she gets her brush and brushes hers (and mine). I brush my teeth, she grabs her toothbrush from her drawer and starts brushing hers. (And I have to add that this past weekend she was over at the home of the Grandparents J and they brushed her teeth before bed. And she opened their bathroom cabinet and placed her toothbrush on a shelf there in a location roughly equivalent to where her toothbrush would go in our cabinet at home. She doesn't even let down her guard when she's on the road, man.) But, of course, the thing she has seized on the most is cleaning. I wonder why? The first time we noticed this was a couple months ago. We were at Big K's mom's house, and there was some crud on a white wooden chair in her living room. Big K was changing Phook and so he grabbed a wipe and started cleaning the stuff off the chair. (That fact right there probably should have been a post.) He then left the room momentarily. And Phook grabbed a wipe and started cleaning the chair, with perfect technique. I nearly sharted myself. Now, months later, she's an advanced housekeeper. If I have the broom out, she grabs it and runs around pushing the thing around the floor as soon as I step away from it. This is pretty funny to watch given that it's twice her length. If I'm cleaning anything with a rag, she grabs the rag and mimics my motion as soon as she gets a chance. If she spills something on the floor, she uses her hand to rub at it in a little cleaning motion. But her favorite is the vacuum. For some reason I have a tendency to add "car" to the end of any word describing something that can be put in motion. So sometimes I call her play grocery cart a "cart car" and shit like that. The vacuum is the "vacuum car." So the other day, I said I was going to get the vacuum car out, and she of course excitedly ran to the closet where the item is stored and started banging on the door. So I start vacuuming and she runs in her playroom and grabs this little push toy she has from Grandma N. You push it on its wheels, it plays a merry tune. She starts pushing the thing back and forth like a vacuum. She's done this multiple times since. (As an aside, she also hurriedly brought me the cordless phone that was ringing as I was vacuuming, because I couldn't hear it. Christ, people.) The other day I busted out my new handheld vacuum car to suck up some packing peanut foam type shit (yeah, I asked for this item for Christmas and meant it). She was in love with the mini vacuum car and after figuring out it wasn't going to ingest her, started driving that thing around the floor too.

So, yeah. There you have it. Phook is heavily involved in making sure her world is right. I don't know if this is just a developmental phase or if it is indicative of a real personality trait, but I sure as hell hope it is the latter. Having a neat freak kid seems like an asset. And if that's the case, I'm sure the one I'm gestating will be a filthy hoarder with an actual blindness towards disorder in the very image of his/her father, so I'm gonna need at least one little helper in this house. And even if it's not a longstanding trait in her, I'm just gonna pray that it lasts through the newborn stage with #2, because I could really use another set of hands to put diapers in the garbage. I'll wash them people, don't worry.

Fear

Perhaps you've noticed that I haven't done much pregnancy blogging since breaking that big old news to you. Perhaps you haven't. I mean, there have been a few horrors I considered writing about. Like earlier this week, when I discovered stretch marks on the front of my thighs. They aren't the red kind...just the subtly torn skin kind you can only see in certain light. I was kinda pissed and thought about putting up a profanity-laced post, but honestly, when it comes down to it, I don't give two shits about it. Maybe one shit, but not two. It just seems petty and stupid against the backdrop of how I'm really experiencing this pregnancy.

First off, I just don't feel that awesome. I never slept better than when pregnant with Phook, at least for the first six months or so. This kid is a uterus full of insomnia. I can drift off, kind of, but I just don't get into a deep/restorative sleep and I can give you a full report of my husband's snorts, roots, and farts for the entire evening, since I'm conscious enough to experience all of them. I am in bed for usually at least 10 hours per night, but I wake up feeling like death. My overall energy level sucks. I want to nap a lot, and sometimes it works out that I can. But I have a hard time waking up from naps when it's time, and then I feel groggy and shitty for quite awhile afterwards, so that whole thing perhaps isn't worth it. I don't know how much of this is pregnancy related and how much is related to my general malaise with the gray weather, but it doesn't really matter. I'm just feeling down. Since becoming a SAHM, I've never prayed for Big K to get home and end my solo caregiving like I have the last month or so. When he tells me he has to work late, I almost cry. I'm new to the business of wishing away my days, and it sucks, and I seriously hope (and do believe) it will end when the winter lifts and I can get us outside for several hours per day. I am also having troubles of the intestinal tract. I don't have much of an appetite, which is just a raging anomaly for me. I feel indigestion-y and heartburn-y and my colon (sorry, people) just isn't bringing the A-game. Overall, it's uncomfortable.

But the thing that kind of really blows, and the thing that is preventing me from posting stupid little amusing anecdotes about the joys of harboring this wee creature, is that I am scared. With Phook, I consumed your basic amount of pregnancy literature, which is to say no less than 9,872 books and web pages educating me on every single aspect of gestation. I can recite the "pregnancy no-no" foods like my address. I can tell you a lot of pretty factual information about a lot of random pregnancy complications. But with Phook, I wasn't especially nervous about those things occurring. I wasn't wandering around all, "Shit, it's Tuesday, I think I have placenta previa." No. I was basically worried about having a kid and becoming a parent. I had never changed a diaper. I thought she might show up with colic, a malady I almost killed my own mother with, so I read some books on calming that sort of terror. Although a few random thoughts crossed my mind now and then, I wasn't seriously worried about her health. I pondered whether any of my own genes would leak through and color my alpha-male husband's destined-to-be-dominant DNA (they did not, except the yelling gene and possibly curly hair). I thought a lot about which gender would show up. I put diapers in a lot of weird places around the house, because I wasn't sure where I'd want to change her. I preemptively bought these soothie things on the recommendation of a friend for the sore nipples I never got from nursing. But I wasn't worried that she'd be born with a heart defect or weird skin disorder that would force her indoors for her whole life.

With this kid, I feel differently. I am not scared of becoming a parent, because that's water under the bridge. (Yeah, I have a touch of the "two kids under two is gonna be hard" fear, and I seriously hope this blog is full of fun and exciting tales of that adventure come summer, but it's just not the thing that's got me majorly worried.) I'm not even scared of this kid being a "difficult baby" and keeping me up all night...because now I know how fast those first months go, and I know I can make it through anything that temporary. The thing I fear, good friends, is that this child will not be born healthy.

You see, I have had high blood pressure for which I've required medication since about the age of 17. It runs in my family. Or maybe I should say it tramples in my family. When pregnant and nursing, I have to take a medication that is less effective for me, because the kind that works really well is unsafe for pregnancy. With my Phook pregnancy, my already dicey blood pressure got really high in the last 6 weeks or so of pregnancy. After having gained 11 pounds throughout 8 months of pregnancy, I gained 8 pounds in one week...and not as a result of wolfing down moon pies. No, I started retaining a wicked amount of fluid. I also had some protein in my urine, and had to collect an entire 24 hours worth of piss in a jug and store it in my fridge with a "This is not apple juice, Big K!" sign on it on multiple horrifying occasions, but there was never enough protein there to actually diagnose me with preeclampsia. However, it was enough to get my ass on full bed rest at home for the last month of my pregnancy. It was enough to have me enjoying NSTs at least weekly. It was enough to get my labor induced (twice, no less, as the first attempt didn't produce anything more than 5 or so days worth of useless contractions and a lot of really irritating and insensitive calls from well-wishers thinking a baby would magically drop from my parts 9 minutes after I walked into the hospital). It was enough for me to be forced to spend my entire labor and delivery in bed hooked up to every conceivable monitor and device, with no physical coping mechanisms available to me. But, even through that, I wasn't really worried about the Phook-to-be, because it got serious when she was fully viable, fully good to go, fully cooked if not totally browned. I never had the fear of a serious preemie situation. If at any point my protein got for real bad or my blood pressure went intergalactic, I could have had the kid and we'd be basically fine.

So what I am most worried about with this wee nugget is that the blood pressure will go batshit and I will have for real life-threatening preeclampsia before that kid can safely show up. As my husband has, with good intentions, informed me on numerous occasions, worrying about it isn't going to do my blood pressure any good. But fuck, it could go so bad. I am trying to not be a psycho, but here I am, the mayor of Crazytown. I've already mentally figured out a ton of people I could come to ask watch Phook during the day if I had to go on bed rest again, so I'm not even really worried about complications of merely the "inconvenient" variety. What I'm worried about is this situation really taking a long walk off a short pier and landing my ass in the operating room for a c-section at 28 weeks. I'm worried about underdeveloped lungs, lifelong developmental delays, months in a NICU, and the death of this baby I want so unbelievably badly. There, I said it. I fucking said it.

When I first learned of my pregnancy, I went online and did some research on preventing preeclampsia. I found one totally weird diet and about 9,000 web pages that said, "You're screwed, sister. If it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen." Thanks, tools. I am lighter and fitter this time around, and my blood pressure started out a tad lower than with Phook, so I'm glad for that I guess. But it just seems so randomly possible that this could occur. And now that I know how huge of a job and how big of a gift it is to parent a healthy child, the prospect of the alternative is so much scarier. As my very rational husband has informed me, this is a) out of our control and b) won't change anything, since we'd love a child with health issues just as much as we love Phook. I truly wish I had his composure and his ability to use practical reasoning over the wild ride of emotional nonsense. But this baby, this person inside of my body, is happily kicking away and reminding me to love it and want everything for it. And I fear for the little creature so deeply. I just want to give it a nice, fat 40 weeks of healthy bopping around in there, the little bug.

And, if I'm being totally honest, my fear isn't even limited to preeclampsia and associated complications. I'm pretty worried about this baby's health in every conceivable way. We had the quad marker test done awhile back, reasoning that we'd go forward with the pregnancy if we would be having a baby with a birth defect, but would want the time to adjust our expectations and prepare. I had an awful feeling it was going to come back abnormal. It did not. And I still didn't really feel better. The other day, I randomly found myself reading this blog written by a woman who had a little guy who was missing most of his forearm and his hand due to this complication called Amniotic Band Syndrome, in which amniotic bands break (or something like that), catch up the baby's parts while they're in the uterus, and can randomly amputate assorted bits, as well as cause other complications. It is of course rare and if our baby suffered from this we'd just get all hip to the "limb difference" scene, but heaven help me did it get me off on a new tangent of worry. I'm pretty embarrassed by my own nonsense, actually, but that isn't doing much to stave off the nonsense.

I think the only thing that will help me chill is time. No sunny statistics or husband-sponsored reasoning is going to make this go away. Reaching the point of viability will help. Reaching the point of viability without a strong likelihood of serious complications will really, really help. I just need to get there. The milestones are coming. I'm 20 weeks (halfway) tomorrow. Viability is strangely not too far off. Heck, maybe I'll do an amusing post about my disturbing theory that, against all odds, I'm "carrying this kid in my ass." Maybe I'll tell you about how rad it is to have a 36-inch inseam and be requiring of maternity pants, due to the cruel irony of my Phook maternity pants being undeniably too large. Or about my delight in the fact that our local one-screen movie theater sells giant bags of popcorn for $3 to people who aren't even seeing a movie, and that I have sent my husband on a gathering mission of this nature at least monthly since the beginning of said pregnancy. Or about my semi-serious and semi-ridiculous plan to walk a half marathon at about 33 weeks, provided I'm not on bed rest. Maybe I'll be able to do some of that. I hope to, I do.

And, I have to report that, defying my expectations, the ultrasound we had yesterday did do quite a lot to reassure me. I saw the baby doing its baby tricks in there. Opening its mouth, sticking hands in mouth, squirreling around and stuff. I saw appropriate amounts of limbs. I saw a nice little heart beating. I saw a placenta hanging out in a nice spot on the top of my uterus. The tech didn't go pale and hurriedly rush out the door to get the doctor. This baby had a decidedly Big K-ish profile, just as Phook did, and I can tell already it will be another K clone. The tech didn't accidentally slip up and show us genitalia we don't want to see until the big day.

I then had my regular appointment with my doctor, at which I used a visualization technique of scratching my cat Uncle Growler under the chin in my mind and ended up with a blood pressure reading of 132/70, which is for me a tremendous victory. I can't remember the last time the bottom number was south of 80, since I tend to get pretty close to a panic attack at the mere sight of a blood pressure cuff. The baby's heartbeat was 168; girl all the way. My total 20-week weight gain of 3 pounds was deemed "awesome" by my doctor. (If I wasn't 3 inches taller and 30 pounds heavier than the average American man, she'd probably want me to have gained a bit more, but let's just say I already have the "infrastructure" in place to support a pregnancy. Probably my pregnancy and that of nine other women, actually.)

So honestly, in closing this post, I have to admit that I'm feeling the best about this whole matter that I have felt since peeing on that stick. Up to this point, I have received all available medical reassurance that this is a healthy kid. And I know this is in God's hands and have been discussing it with Him regularly, but deep down I remain a child myself, pining for exactly the gift I want come Christmas morning and knowing I can't really do anything to make that happen.

Little baby, I just love you so much.

Organic Housekeeping: The Update

So last summer, I told you all about my new cleaning paradigm, the Motivated Moms program. I have stuck with this system for keeping my house clean and somewhat tidy, and I can't say enough about how happy I am with it. The original post goes into the pros and cons and details a bit more, but it just really works for me. The best thing about it, other than keeping me from falling off a cliff of cleaning madness, is that it helps you keep your house pretty much clean all the time because you are doing each task at a regular interval, never allowing anything to get too disgusting, which means that once you de-disgust something the first time, the task is never really that bad again. The ultimate effect of this is that you never have to go on a rampage cleaning every surface in your home because you are having people over or whatever. It was really nice for Phook's birthday party, during the holidays, and other times when we've had events here or just randomly had people over and I don't have to go, "Oh shit, I have to clean the whole house!!!" on top of having to cook and do everything else. It's already pretty much clean all the time (if not 100% tidy, due to the Phook-nado and her constant "inventorying" of everything in every non-childproofed cabinet, closet, and drawer). This makes me more willing to have people over, which makes me less of a person who only talks to someone with about an 8-word vocabulary, with pretty shitty pronunciation at that.

So anyhow, since this SAHM thing is my job--or at least that is how I choose to undertake it so I don't drown in a pool of self-imposed feelings of worthlessness--I am always trying to do it better. Of course this means trying to be a better mom to Phook, but it also means looking for better ways to run the household. And I do realize that to a certain readership this may sound pathetic, but I really have to look at it as an actual little business I'm running that could always be run better. When I discover efficiencies of time or money or whatever, I'm genuinely happy. When I improve the way I do something, I am proud. I guess I'm not sure what people on the outside would think of that...maybe it sounds reasonable or maybe it sounds pitiable, but I have assigned meaning to my job and think of it in similar terms to the ways I thought of successes in my former career. So be it.

So the next phase of my improving the running of the household has been making my cleaning, and to some extent our overall living, green. Now, I have to be honest here. I have not always been a conscious steward of our environment. I never littered or trashed things that could easily have been recycled or did anything purposefully bad to the world, but I have definitely been largely unthinking about the whole issue for the majority of my life. I have always "cared" about the environment and animals who live in it in particular, but I never took the time to actually delve into what I could do about it until the last year or two. I kind of thought it was a big issue outside the scope of something I could affect personally, and that it was reserved for those who were willing to adorn their cars with bumper stickers, go vegan, and generally make it a major, major part of their lives to be a vocal environmentalist. If that's how you roll, I seriously do commend you for it. But it's not me. And it had never occurred to me until relatively recently that there was a more quiet form of practical environmentalism that could be practiced in my own home.

By chance, I read a review of Ellen Sandbeck's Organic Housekeeping, and Auntie Hode got it for me for my birthday upon request. This thing is a Bible of information on how to clean every single thing in your house organically. She suggests multiple methods for many different cleaning tasks and problems. She suggests things to prevent certain cleaning nightmares (i.e., a dirty oven) from even occurring in the first place. She suggests products. She talks a ton about the environmental impact of typical cleaning products, and her arguments are sound and backed up by research. The most powerful message in the book, for me, is how utterly unnecessary the vast majority of cleaning products are. For example, in most homes, you will find a toilet bowl cleaner, a tub and tile cleaner, a floor cleaner, a glass cleaner, and maybe some random all-purpose cleaner. And that is just for the bathroom. The reality is that you can replace all that with cheap household products, such as vinegar and baking soda, and save yourself an assload of money. And save the environment an assload of pollutants. We are so used to having the newfangled cleaning product for every conceivable surface, but we really only need a few basic items to keep our homes clean.

I think there is a misconception that "going green" in terms of cleaning means replacing every existing product in your home with a more expensive organic version. I certainly thought that. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead, what you can do is weed out the vast majority of the products you are using, and then replace the very few remaining necessary products with organic alternatives. While perhaps you will pay a very slight premium for these products (and I find that if you look around online and buy in bulk, even this discrepancy disappears), overall you will save boatloads of cash. Boatloads. In this house, that is a major consideration. If green cleaning resulted in more cost for our family, in all honesty, I would not do it. Our budget is already fried, and $50 a month in extra cost or something like that is just not conceivable.

So I have jettisoned the vast majority of typical cleaning products from our home. The #1 thing I use for cleaning is vinegar. I have a squirter bottle of it for various uses. (Note that before you start squirting vinegar on things, you should do a little reading on the matter. It can harm some surfaces. And sometimes it needs to be used in combination with other natural stuff in order to do the job you want it to do.) In terms of off-the-shelf stuff that is not going to kill the polar bears, Murphy's Oil Soap is vegetable based and can be used for a variety of cleaning jobs. Borax is another natural product you can get at the grocery store. (Sandbeck recommends adding a touch of this to your mopping water if you have ants in your house (which, sadly, we do sometimes get in the summer) and it will repel them. She is not lying.)

Some things you will still need are dish liquid and an all-purpose cleaner. There are tons of environmentally friendly options available. For dish liquid (for hand washing dishes...obviously you need another product for your dishwasher, you lucky S.O.B.) I bought a case of Seventh Generation dish liquid from diapers.com, where I buy Phook's dipes. (This site has free shipping for orders over $50, gives you 5% back for orders over $75, and has cheap prices to begin with.) So with 5% back (since I am stocking up on new baby diapers, wipes, etc., while I'm at it) and the bulk price, it turns out to be cheaper than regular stuff anyhow. I am happy with the stuff. It doesn't instantly foam up to the degree regular dish liquid does, but the bubbles are there and it does its job. For all-purpose cleaner, I have both Seventh Generation (a gift from a pal) and Babyganics (from diapers.com). They both work swimmingly. I also have the Babyganics glass cleaner, although this is a product I could probably eliminate. It works well.

And that's probably all the products I have to clean my entire house. Now, the one area where I haven't switched over completely is laundry, and this is a pretty major area. I have ditched regular fabric softeners in favor of vinegar (yes, that miracle of a substance really does work and does not make your clothes reek like vinegar). But I am still using regular laundry detergent. I have switched to a dye and perfume free Arm & Hammer variety, theorizing it is a slightly smaller evil, but I know it's still not good. I have done some research into alternatives, but so far can't seem to find anything that is cost-neutral or close to it. If you have recommendations for product or place to buy product (preferably online, since The Woods has no commerce), please recommend. Also, I don't know that I can part with my undercover lover, Shout spray. Sandbeck has tricks for removing every conceivable kind of stain from clothing. But unfortunately, many of them involve labor intensive methods like immediately ironing a grease stain. I live with a 16-month-old and I myself am one of the most stained individuals on the planet, and I just can't see myself realistically consulting a manual for how to deal with each of the 19 things on my shirt at the end of a long, pregnant day. I like to bust out the Shout, liberally coat my shirt and Phook's shirt, and simply Shout it out. It's not like a stain is a rarity in my life and I can conveniently whip up a little concoction made of kosher salt, baking soda, and goat semen to fix it because it hasn't happened since last month, so who cares if I have to waste five minutes. No. My child and I are both heavily stained with multiple unidentifiable substances every single day. And my husband dumps a pot of coffee on himself at least twice per week. Hence, I Shout it out as a survival mechanism. So obviously my brand of environmentalism is self-serving and unpure, but I'm not gonna lie to you people. If you know of an effective organic stain remover, sing me a song in the comments. I am willing to change these things if good alternatives exist. But heavily soiled laundry is a big chunk of my workload and I can't make it suck or not work at this point in time. I do, for the record, plan to use my clothesline as much as possible once it stops snowing 6 inches per day, if that's any consolation.

Now another book I read about green cleaning, gifted to me by my BFF, is by Deirdre Imus, wife of the infamous Don Imus. So she's obviously batshit crazy. Her book, "Green This!," which is the first in a series, is decent. She focuses more on the personal health risks of using traditional cleaning products than the environmental impact. While her arguments also seem sound (but not entirely uncrazy at times), I'm just personally more fired up about Sandbeck's points on the issues of pollution and petroleum use than I am about growing the third eye that Imus promises. Anyhow, her book is a much higher level look at how to clean green than Sandbeck's. Rather than give copious detail on every conceivable hitch in your cleaning giddyup, she just writes a few paragraphs on each of your basic cleaning areas/issues. At one point, she has a little section about cleaning your microwave which states that she does not believe in them, but if "you insist" on using one, here's how you clean it... When someone makes the blanket statement that they "do not believe" in microwaves without giving any reasons as to why this is the case, I get a bit suspicious. It's not like they're UFOs or ghosts or something...there is strong evidence that microwaves do exist. So anyhow, I think she's a bit of a loon (she is married to Don F'in Imus), but her book contains some good basic information, conveys the same basic point of Sandbeck's that we use way too many products, and gives even more specific product recommendations for various situations. (Of course, her Imus' brand is one of them, but I think the profits go to support their kids' cancer charity, so it's cool.)

The other area where I've worked really hard is reducing our consumption of paper and plastic goods. The main thing is paper towel. We now use cut up t-shirts for most light clean-up jobs (like Phook's ravioli-covered mug) and washable scrub rags for most household cleaning. I have gone from using an abhorrent 3 rolls per week to probably 1 roll every week and a half. And I'm currently looking into unbleached varieties and whatnot to replace my regular brand. I have also given up individually packaged foodstuffs almost entirely. As much as I want to buy those little mini-cups of fruit cocktail to whip out for Phook, I just can't do it. Freaking conscience, the asshole. We've almost completely given up paper plates, which in a dishwasher-free household is a real bitch, but oh well. Even in the dead of the night when I'm having a wee snack, I just can't bring myself to use the paper. Rather than storing every conceivable leftover in a plastic bag, we now almost exclusively use washable storage containers. I'd like to up the ante in this area even more with cloth napkins (buddy Sandbeck says to just use dishcloths for everyday) and the like. Really, this has been an easy transition since I started actually thinking about it. It is just so simple to use this instead of that once you think about how "that" is killing those lovely polar bears. And by accident, you save money too.

So anyhow, I just wanted to throw this out there. For me, it was a matter of waking up and just becoming conscious about these issues, instead of thinking I needed to give my car to charity, move into a yurt, and stop using deodorant in order to make a difference. I just turned my brain on to consider the environment in my daily life. When I'm at the store, cleaning something, going somewhere, whatever. I just think a little bit.

The next frontiers for me in my quest to be a non-dickhead to the world are personal care products such as shampoo and the like, and food. I realize I could add another several paragraphs already on the food issue, but I'll save that for another day.

In writing this, I fear infuriating the real environmentalists out there who have been doing the super-right thing since way before it was cool or way before mainstream publications started doing regular articles on easy ways to live greener. To you, I say I'm sorry I'm an asshat. And I'm sorry I can't cut all my ties to petroleum. But, friends, this is what I'm doing, and I thought I'd share it with you. Since I like to share.

Gotta go check the mail for my AARP card

So here's the thing. I have lately been receiving cues from the universe that I'm aging. The primary cue is that there are people named Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt (or something like that, and I'm not bothering to google them) all over my US Weekly, and I don't know who the hell they are. Nor do I care to. There is this whole crop of young stars that I am completely unfamiliar with. I don't know if they sing, dance, "act," lip sync, or if they just happened to "accidentally" shoot the beave getting out of their car one night at some Hollywood hot spot, and now they and their vagina are famous. So I am getting detached from the up and coming kiddos in our pop culture, to the point where it's weirding me out and I might consider not renewing US Weekly sometime within the decade. There's that.

Then there was this incident when I was first pregnant with Phook (and didn't even know it yet) and I was observing teachers at my old high school during my very expensive and unfinished foray into getting my teaching license, and when I informed this student that I went to said high school and she asked when I graduated, her jaw just absolutely hit her desk when I said 1997. To me, 1997 is like yesterday...it's not dinosaurs roaming the earth type shit. But this girl was just taken aback and was like, "Wow, you're really old." Obviously that was her warped perspective rather than an accurate commentary on my age, but these things are starting to occur.

So yesterday I had yet another dental appointment, after which I had some time to kill before trekking cross-state from the town o' dentist to the town o' water aerobics. I chose to kill some of this time by sitting in a coffee shop and reading a book in the town o' water aerobics. Being a dork, I ordered a small hot cocoa with whipped cream and just took up residence in a chair. I totally forgot that this town is the home of a very tiny, very expensive private college. I was reminded as I perused my fellow patrons.

The first couple I had the pleasure of overhearing (or maybe eavesdropping on) were a couple of cats clearly on an early date in their courtship. This was obvious by the way he held her hand across the table and then awkwardly reached across his body with his other hand to paw nervously at the forearm attached to the hand he was holding. She was clearly uncomfortable. They weren't all that interesting...discussion of working in a lab, going home for the weekend, etc. He spoke of wanting to get together with her on Sunday night after his return, and she shot him down by saying she needed to do homework. He was deeply saddened. They left a few minutes later, and I saw him put his awkward arm over her shoulder on their way out the door. Witnessing this interaction didn't make me feel old so much as it made me really exuberantly happy to be married, and married in a permanent fashion. The thought of having to try so hard, of having to cover up my under-eye bags for any reason other than a flight of my own fancy, or of holding hands in any way other than in complete comfort makes me want to just absolutely convulse and shriek and die. So there was that.

Then I noticed this dude, all funkdified in a purposeful way, waiting near the counter. Finally a cute little lady with an interesting accent came in to meet him, and they sat at the table next to me (their mistake). They were inches from me, and I couldn't help overhearing the vast majority of what they were saying, despite my attempts at discretion. (Okay, I didn't make any, but whatever. I don't get out much.) So these kiddos were major, major world travelers. They had both lived in Europe in their childhoods and had extensive international travel under their belts. I know this because the topic of traveling constituted the vast majority of their discussion. Since the girl spoke of her long-distance boyfriend (who, FYI, will be flying to California to participate in the Los Angeles marathon from his home in Arizona, and is very nervous about the altitude difference and will therefore be arriving in L.A. a week early to acclimate...), I presumed them to not be on a date. But he totally wanted her. It was painfully obvious even to people like me who were trying so hard not to listen.

So anyhow, I hear the boy make a statement that went a little something like this: "You know how when you start living in another country, you learn where everything is and how everything works, and you start to feel comfortable there? That's when I know it is time for me to just go, move on, get out of there. It's just over at that point." This is when I blew whipped cream out my nose and wished that AARP had sent me a free sample of Depends. I was so struck by that comment that I nearly went code blue right then and there. Of course, there are many adults with a lifelong love of travel, with raging, unrelenting wanderlust, and I don't mean to undermine such individuals. But the way this kid made his point, in the philosophical tone used only by undergraduates in coffee shops that involves the basic cadence of someone who is mild to moderately stoned coupled with thoughtful pauses in unusual places where other people don't put them, was as if everyone in the world routinely had the experience of moving to a new country, growing used to things, getting bored, and having the option of just throwing a dart at the map to determine the next landing spot. I wanted to throw myself across the table and tell him that this very outing to the coffee shop was possibly the most exotic thing I'd done in over a year...the most out of the ordinary journey I'd been on.

Maybe that is actually sad and pathetic, but I truly don't feel that way when I reflect on it. Right now, this life is the exact existence I have always dreamed of having. Marriage, babies, a deep affirming love for my KitchenAid mixer. This is my life's dream. Even as people heaped awards and scholarships on me in my younger days and talked of my potential to "do anything," I knew that what I wanted first and foremost was a family. And that's what I have. Sure, I can get to feeling a little caged up on occasion, and my own wanderlust strikes relatively often in the form of yearnings for the sniff of the ocean, but the idea of just having to get out of an entire country because it's so disgustingly familiar just kind of cracks me up. That feeling of the need to be on the move--really on the move--is not something that has occurred to me for what seems like ten million years. I mean, I'm looking forward to summer so I can get an ice cream cone and drive around looking at deer on Sunday evenings with the family, but the sensation that I need to get to Reykjavik by Tuesday just doesn't smack me in the face all that often. House and home--both the dwelling and the concept--are comfortable, happy places for me. I just want to be there...with no desire to cut the cord.

So, their conversation of world travels continued. She had recently been to San Francisco on part of a 7,000 mile road trip (which he of course cited as the distance from L.A. to Hong Kong, but with more precision, citing the actual miles, which he claimed as 7,233, and which I also have no desire to google to check accuracy), and he inquired as to the weather there, as he just so happens to be flying out there this weekend. Apparently, the next in his long line of colleges is there. She commented on it having been rainy and then busted out her iPhone to check the current weather, and they had a lengthy discussion on the awesomeness of the iPhone. Here, again, I felt like a fossil. I do have a cell phone, but I don't even use speed dial. I can technically send a text message, but I usually get frustrated and screw it up. They were just so damned hip about their gadgets. I am not hip about gadgets.

Next up was a discussion of the boy's parents and their impending retirement. He laments that while his mother seems to enjoy her job, he just doesn't know what she actually does in the evenings, and worries she may be understimulated. When both parents retire in the near future, he really hopes he can convince them to move "somewhere cool" that is worth visiting, as they are apparently currently rather local to the college, and that is no good. First off, I'm thinking that once middle aged momma comes home from work, she makes dinner, pisses around, and then cashes out for the night. I bet she has some pals and likes to read and feels pretty good about her situation. But her son perceives her life as boring to the point where it is of grave concern for him. So that made me feel old. And then there is his main concern with their retirement...that they move somewhere he considers a valid vacation destination. Nevermind whether the community has a nice eldercare van system for when they need it. It had just better be somewhere rad. Yowza.

This basic theme repeated itself for an hour or so, and then I departed. I thought about those kids all the way home. Although my above paragraphs are a bit snarky in their tone, I am really not trying to condemn them for their mindset or for where they are in the world. In all honesty, they did seem intelligent and kind and decent and all of those things. I was just struck by how completely different their thought processes were to mine...the things they consider when plotting their next move...the sheer magnitude of their next move for it to even warrant consideration...their complete lack of consciousness of the fact that they are in an absolutely tiny minority in the world's population in terms of their mobility, their options, their freedoms, their lucky roll of the dice to have been everywhere, done everything, seen everything...to the point where they wind up bored after ten minutes sitting still. It just seemed so youthful. And so far removed from what goes through my head. They talk about which airport is the best to fly out of in different circumstances...I worry about the cost of gas to get to water aerobics. They hop through colleges like everyone can eat at such a buffet...I bitterly pay off loans for a college experience I recall only vaguely. They only get excited when they experience something completely novel...I get a spring in my step when I grocery shop alone and can actually pause to check out what's in the deli, even though I never buy anything. You get the idea.

So I know that these kids were atypical even for people in their age group and therefore probably don't make the best sample group against which I should judge my own aging. But the experience occurred as it did and struck me as it did and was what it was. Things along these lines have started to happen with more frequency of late. And while I know it is just the tip of the iceberg, and I am indeed a spring chicken yet in all real terms, it is slightly jarring to recognize that people of younger generations exist. In my head, I have not aged. But the world around me has begun to move at a certain pace that I am not necessarily keeping up with. I'm on my own little country road, and while it is a great road because it's most definitely the one I want to travel, it's weird to see the traffic of the nearby interstate zipping by. Like, how did that happen? Why are those cars going so much faster than mine? And why is this big dickhead Spencer Pratt on my Us Weekly?