I will be able to get things done

I have, for the rest of the summer, 4 hours a week to myself.  I've hired my friend's daughter/Ryan's friend to come watch the boys every Thursday so that I can get stuff done. I am simply giddy with the freedom. I have projects and now I can actually do them, all for the same price Tom pays to whack balls into trees on the golf course.
I want to make this quilt.  I want to make it and sleep under it and drink tea out of a chipped mug under it amidst a sea of crumpled tissues when I am sick. I am therefor on a hunt for fabric with which to make it.  This hunt takes time, so until I find all of the fabric I need (anyone have old sheets for me?) I am making Ryan a t shirt quilt out of all of her old rec league shirts and kiddie marathon shirts, stuff like that.  Today I worked on that quilt and can already tell you that it has the potential to be awesome.  Unfortunately I have the potential to fuck it up, so we'll see how it turns out.  The thing about t shirts is that they are made out of very soft, very stretchy material.  This doesn't work well for a quilt because the fabric puckers up and sags and after a few washings the front of the quilt is bigger than the back and it all hangs wrong.  So you have to buy interfacing to make the t shirt fabric act like quilting fabric. (Interfacing is the stuff they use to make collars and cuffs stuff in dress shirts.)  So today I spent almost my whole 4 hours cutting out interfacing and fusing it to my shirt-fronts (it irons on like a patch) and now I have 23 squares of non-stretchy t shirt logos all ready to sew together into one big quilt of childhood memories.  Unfortunately 23 is not a number conducive to even rows.  So I need either one or two more shirts.  I may go steal shirts that still fit but that she never wears, or I may have to go replace lost shirts from her past.  When she was in elementary school the kids wore their school pride shirts every Friday.  Tom sold that shirt for a quarter at a yard sale and now no one on facebook has one to give me as replacement. :(  But, Ryan has souvenir shirts from vacations, including one she left out in the yard for a week to be leached out by sun and rain. I may steal that one for the quilt.  But still,  I'd like to find a school pride Friday shirt.  I'm almost desperate enough to go pay the full $10 for a new one, but it seems like a colossal waste of money for something I'm just going to cut the front out of.
I will post pics here when I get the quilt done.  I have no idea what Ryan will want to do with a quilt made from old Girl Scout camp shirts, but she will have it nonetheless.  And hopefully she will continue to amass souvenir t shirts and I can continue to add them to the quilt and eventually she will have a giant useless quilt made of ratty old clothes. And who wouldn't want that?

Can I just say this?

Marriage isn't supposed to make you happy.  It's supposed to make you married.  Here's how it's supposed to work.
A large portion of our single lives is taken up with trying to find a mate.  Once you find that mate, a large chunk of life is left free to explore life, develop hobbies, pursue interests.  So then you go become a well-rounded person and become happy, content, satisfied.  And he does the same.  And at the end of the day you come home to someone who cares and asks how your day was.  And then you are happy, content, and satisfied, and together.  You are happy together.  Not necessarily just because you are together, but side by side.  But then people decided at some point that the other person in the marriage is supposed to shoulder the responsibility of keeping you happy, of making you happy apart from hobbies and outside interests. That the old model of Grandpa in his wood shop and Grandma in her sewing room, together until they die in their teak rocking chairs, was somehow bad.  They were only companions, just roommates, and that wasn't enough.  So now we all expect some sort of impossible fireworks from our marriages and when it doesn't happen we get upset.  Perfectly functional, happy, content marriages are now unsatisfying because our spouses are ballsy enough to expect us to go forth in the world and make ourselves happy.  Didn't they know that was their job?!

I wonder

I have a deeply philosophical question. I plan not to debate any of this at all, because it has just occurred to me and I'm just interested in hearing other viewpoints and options.  Here it is:
If it turns out that there is no afterlife, that at the moment of death everything just goes dark and shuts off, which is the worse consequence?  Is it, A) that we will never again see loved ones?  Or is it, B) that there is no universal justice and that horrible crimes committed in life and never caught will just never be caught, such as a serial killer getting away with it?
Discuss.

In my next life, I'm a dyke all the way

I hate when we fight right before bed.  He goes to sleep, I stay up to make the point that I'm mad and not just going to trot off to share a bed with him, and then I'm the one tired but without a bed to sleep in.  Plus, he should be the one awake in the living room alone.  He's the one who refuses to confront or resolve anything.  He's the reason our fights never die, only hibernate. And now I'm yawning into a computer screen that gives me headaches and he's the one snoring into the baby monitor.  I hope I roll over in my sleep and hit him in the balls with my knee.

20 things I've learned about myself from my Spam folder

1. I have erectile dysfunction (and apparently have been sitting here with it just waiting for unsolicited email to fix it for me. I am so freaking lazy!)
2. I have some sort of Hot! Asian! Teens! fetish.
3. I am hopelessly confused by my medicare benefits and would appreciate someone explaining them to me.
4. I have several relatives I've never met, and they've all died after being hit by cars in Dubai. But they died lonely, I am their only legal heir, and they were rich. My poor rich lonely relatives, smooshed into the pavement of Dubai.  
5. I care what David Plouffe has to say. (I really don't.)
6. I owe a shit ton of money in student loans.
7. I suffer from hot flashes that can only be cured by natural homeopathic soy pills.
8. I need coupons! Lots of coupons! And I have to download a printer app to get them.
9. I am expecting a package from UPS.
10. I am expecting a package from DHL.
11. My nonexistant paypal account has been hacked.
12. The amazon.com order I didn't place has been cancelled, but if I sign in I can fix this error.
13. I won a free 52" LCD TV!
14. The federal government wants to help me with my tax debt. (What tax debt? I'm gainfully unemployed!)
15. I like webcam hotties.
16. I am a webcam hottie?!
17. Errr, Canadian Ambien? (explains the webcam thing, though, doesn't it?)
18. I sent myself an email about discount c1alis.
19. I spell cialis with a 1.
20. I am a man.

I'm sure I'm saying this wrong, because that's what I do.

I am so tired of feeling like everyone's happiness and mood depend on me. Everything I say seems to be insulting or mean and then people are pouting and moping and slamming doors. It's like, if I'm not tongue kissing their ass, I'm insulting them.  If I tell Tommy to quit pushing Danny, or to share a toy, he bursts into tears and lies on the floor and then slams the back of his head into the floor, and then wants lots of hugs and kisses because he's hurt. If I tell Tom that I think we should let professionals dig up the perimeter of the house and waterproof the basement, I have no faith in him and I never think he can do anything and I called him stupid.  I causally mentioned to my mother today, in response to her asking me what I've been up to, that I've been going through the boys' room getting rid of old toys, and her response was "Well go through and add up how much every toy cost and then remember that when you buy them new stuff for their birthdays and Christmas!" I said, "So now I have to leave teething rings and rattles in the toybox forever because getting rid of toys they don't play with anymore is a waste of money?" and she got all huffy and offended and apparently my response was needlessly insulting.  I just feel like I can't contribute to a conversation, or make a suggestion, or have an idea, without it somehow being taken as second-guessing someone or correcting them.  I feel like I just don't want to talk, to anyone, about anything, for like a week. Not a "hi" or "bye" or anything, because hi leads to what's up and what's up leads to why whatever is up must be wrong.. Just take a break from it all. But that would be insulting and rude and then they'd pout and slam doors and hang up. Although, to be honest, there's not much you can do but hang up when someone's completely mute.

Why would he even think of it?

Danny has a sippy cup of water and takes it into the bedroom to play with his brother. Ten minutes later I hear crying.  I go in to check.
ME: What happened?
Tommy: "I bit on Deeny."
ME: "You bit Danny?"
Tommy: "No. I bit on Deeny."
ME: "You sit on Danny?"
Tommy: exasperated. "No. I bit on Deeny."  He then mimmicks a hocking throat-clearing sound and (thankfully) pantomimes spitting on his brother.
ME: "You spit on Danny?!"
Tommy: "Alright."

Danny's water cup was empty, his hair and clothes were soaked. Tommy's shirt was soaked. Tommy got his butt smacked, all while crying "I dorry, Deeny. I yuh you. I dorry!"  Danny seemed relatively unscathed, nothing a boob couldn't fix.  But, why would he spit on his brother? What could make him think to do it, and then tell on himself for it, too?

Why I'm more careful with birth control now

• I was 21 years old and was pregnant by a one night stand with an ex, an ex who got back with his son's mother the next day and was thus unavailable to me and wouldn't even take my phone calls.  I worked 2 jobs to pay my $275/month rent and still had to use my mom's washing machine because I didn't have money for the laundromat. So I made an appointment, borrowed money from my mother, and went to terminate a poorly timed and insurmountable pregnancy.
  They assigned me a counselor who gave me a prophylactic antibiotic pill and explained the procedure to me.  They would give me a local anesthetic shot in my cervix, dilate me with a series of increasingly large metal rods, and then suction out the cells. I asked the counselor, a bright-eyed college student, how far I'd be dilated and she held up her pinky finger. pointed out that at this stage (11 weeks) the fetus was way bigger than that; how would they suction it out.  She reluctantly admitted that there's a blade in the vacuum that "breaks down the tissue". (Ever see a Roto-Rooter commercial?)  But she assured me that it was just a clump of cells and asked me to not make the mistake of confusing "tissue" with "flesh". I had done my homework and told her so.  I knew that the cells had a functioning heart, the beginnings of arms and legs, and tiny undeveloped eyeballs.  She stammered and gave me the consent form to sign.
  When I backed out, on the table and in the stirrups, the doctor ripped off his gloves and threw them at my exposed crotch. "I have real patients waiting for me," he snarled. I looked up at my counselor, crying, confused, and scared, and feeling a LOT of pressure to make up my mind right this very second no you can't have a second to collect your thoughts we're busy, she stood up and left the room.  Apparently I wasn't pro-choice enough to warrant her services.
  I wonder what would have happened, how I would have taken it, if I'd accepted what they told me at face value and then found out later about the arm buds and "neural tube" spine. I think I would have had a breakdown. They lied to me.  For all I know, they lied to that college girl when they told her what to say to patients.  I assume they did it to lessen the trauma of the situation, as a kindness to me, but they did me no kindness. And so, because I don't feel that they deserve anonymity, I hereby post a link to the clinic:
  http://www.emmagoldman.com/

Pets, including Frog Babies

I never really thought of myself as an animal kind of person. I've never dreamed of living on a farm, I fear all dogs larger than a beagle and anything large enough to ride on.  But every time we get some new type of pet and I hear my mother sigh when she hears about it, the more I realize that while I may not be an animal kind of person, I am an animal kind of mom.
Growing up, I had pets. Or rather, we had family pets. A dog and a cat, and later a dog and two cats. But no fish, no birds or hamsters or guinea pigs or snakes or turtles or anything like that. Every once in a while we'd have a caterpillar in a mayo jar, or some ill-fated lightning bugs, but no one had any pet that Mom wasn't willing to snuggle with.
Ryan has a bird. She bought it sometime around the first of the year, with her own money, and it lives in her bedroom.  I told her from the beginning that it was her bird: hers to feed, hers to clean up after, and hers to bury if it comes to it. Surprisingly, Fibonacci is still alive.  So we did some asking around and found a great used cage, much larger than the one she had, for free and for her thirteenth birthday we got Ryan a second bird. And so far Fibonacci and Wycliffe are the best of friends in a giant cage in the corner of Ryan's bedroom.
We have a turtle named Spike. He lives in our hallway and eats veggies and bait. He lives next to the albino catfish who has managed to outlive and/or kill all our other fish. We also have a cat named Cat, a dog named Cheyenne, and 5 of what Tommy calls frog babies in a tub on my kitchen counter (to keep Cat from getting them). I named one of the tadpoles Blondie, because it is slightly lighter than its brethren, and I can't wait to see what kind of frog or toad they all turn out to be.
I understand why my mom didn't want a house full of animals to take care of. But dropping fish food into an aquarium or tadpole tub doesn't take a lot of time.  Neither does setting a cup of nightcrawlers in a turtle tank or giving him some lettuce.  As for birds, I guess the joke is on her.  Her boss loves birds and part of my mom's job description now is to take care of the parakeets, macaws, African grey, cockatoo, and other assorted pet birds in the office. In fact, her boss is the one who gave us the giant cage. It wasn't giant enough for the bird it came with.

Grumpy Old Woman

I'm old and cranky. I'm a 34 year old curmudgeon. For one thing, I have a very vocal 2 year old. He narrates everything; it's just who he is. He runs up all the time to tell me what's happening in his movie, or in his book, or to explain to me what the toys are doing while he's playing with them. And when he isn't telling me what the toys are doing, he's talking for them, or making Vroom! noises, or laughing.  I also have a ten month old who has learned to make Big! Loud! Noises! and who exercises that ability all the time. He squeals, or laughs, and occasionally yells "Na!" for no reason. My children are happy, but I get headaches, headaches that last for days. 

And since I am a woman and a mother, I am inexplicably expected to be supportive.  Supportive I can do, if I feel it. I can support you going to school, or getting married, or redecorating your house.  But the theory that I'm supposed to support everything you do no matter what is where my headache and my loud children and my unending exhaustion draw the line.  I will bite my tongue. I will refuse to say anything if I can't say anything nice. But I won't light up and congratulate you or tell you the predictable tragedy was unforeseeable, or pat you on the shoulder and tell you something wasn't your fault when it totally was.

How to feed a baby is a choice, and you can make whatever damn choice you want. But when I hear that a woman is so worried about her baby daughter because she's having issues with her formula and now they're going to try soy formula but the Dr doesn't think it will help and they're going to have to go with a super expensive brand of specialty stuff, I think "No! You don't say! Really, synthetic chemicals don't agree with your newborn baby's tummy? How can that be?"  Look, formula is made for babies, but babies aren't made for formula. If you feed your kid the equivalent of a crushed up prenatal vitamin in milk, and the baby reacts poorly, it is 100% your fault! And I just can't pull off the "Oh no, that's terrible. I hope you find something that works soon." sympathy angle because you should have given her MILK int he first place. It sucks that the fake shit works for most babies but not yours, but you could have taken into account the chance that the fake shit wouldn't work for your kid before you decided to use the fake shit in the first place. Your lack of research is the reason you now how to pay out the ass for the expensive specialty formula.

"We had to bury our dog back in January and so just last month we went and let the kids pick out a puppy and everyone really loved her and yesterday I accidentally backed over her and killed her. I feel so terrible and I can't stop crying." Why is the response to this always "Don't beat yourself up over it, it was an accident," and never, "Why the hell wasn't the dog fenced in or on a leash instead of behind your tire?" Dogs aren't wild animals; they're domesticated pets. Domestication makes animals stupid. You cannot take a creature that has had the survival instincts bred out of it for a dozen generations and let it roam free, and then act shocked when it wanders into the path of a car. You also can't blame the driver when your farm dog runs into the road and gets creamed. Don't want your dog scraped off the blacktop, invest in a chain.

"I can't believe people refuse to spell my daughter's name right! At the doctor's, at school, even family members can't keep it straight. It's not that hard! It's Mikayleh, just like it sounds!"  Then name the girl Sue.  If you give your baby a confusing or complicated name, expect it to confuse or complicate people and situations.  I named my daughter Ryan and I don't get all huffy when the receptionist at the doctor's office says "he". I brought it on myself.

People who play passive aggressive games piss me off too. My neighbor loves to say, "Wow, it;'s about time you get that boy a haircut, isn't it? People are going to start asking how old she is." And if I didn't have to live next to this guy, I'd respond with, "Oh hahahahahah! I see what you did! That's hilarious! You connected his hair with his penis and then implied that bangs equal vagina. That's soooo clever! Hahahahah." But I don't. I just look pointedly at his saggy old fat man boobs and agree that yes, sometimes we have secondary sex characteristics that don't jibe with our gender, but that I like his hair the way it is.

I have opinions. Most of my opinions I have because I formed them. I formed them based on the information at hand, and until I'm given conflicting information strong enough to change my mind, they will continue to be my opinions. Apparently some people form opinions on a whim, based entirely on what will piss people off the most.  I say this because I have a friend who will argue with me for hours and then tell me later, "Oh I didn't really believe that. I was just playing devil's advocate, just for the debate." I honestly do not know for how much longer this woman will be my friend. She seems to have no conviction, and she loves to make my scream.

I have to go lay down now. My headache has returned.

The debil's in the details.

Tom is sitting on the couch in his robe (hanging open) and a pair of boxers with little devil faces on them. Tommy walks up and pokes one of the devils.
Tommy: "Base."
Me: to answer Tom's questioning look, "Face."
Tom: "It's a devil."
Tommy: "Debil."
Tom: "Yes."
Tommy: poking devil faces as he speaks, "Debil. Debil. Debil."
Tom: "Yep."
Tommy: poking one last time at a particularly poorly placed devil face, "Debil weiner."
Me: "Yes it is."
Tom scowls at me.  I laugh.

Pet owners I want to slap

Dogs aren't people. Your dogs aren't your children. It's both obnoxious of you to claim that they are, and insulting to actual parents. The question "Do you have any kids?" should never be met with "Yes, five. Two poodles and three schnauzers."  You can love your dogs as much as you want.  You can set them places at the table and buy them clothes and dedicate a whole room of your house to them, but it doesn't make them children.  If I absolutely had to leave town for a week and leave my children behind, they would be with a baby sitter, not a kennel.  And when I go to a doctor's appointment or to the grocery store, they come along. They do not get left at home with a bowl of food on the floor.  My children use either diapers or the toilet, not training pads on the floor or my yard.  My children go to a pediatrician, not a vet. My children do not lick their own (or anyone else's) genitals.

Human children are a whole different level of love and devotion than pets.  Even crazy cat ladies who would stay in a burning house for their pets feel an even crazier devotion to their children. Or they don't, but that's what makes them crazy.  And you'd be surprised how "parents" to dogs change their tune when they become actual parents to actual children. So please stop calling your pets your kids.  It's stupid and obnoxious and weird.

Migraines and mornings

Danny woke up at 5:00 a.m., nursing and chewing my boob and fussing. I switched sides nursing him a few times, because that generally works to put him back to sleep, but then Tom got out of the bed at 6:00 so we were up. Now, it's Thursday and I've had a migraine since Monday afternoon. I went to the hospital yesterday for it and they gave me a shot in the ass and a bottle of pills with the warning that the pills would make me drowsy, and the headache is still here. So Danny and I got up, I had a big bawling "All I want to do is sleep and not feel my headache and you won't let me!" breakdown, which Tom heard over the monitor.  He offered to go into work late and let me sleep but by then it was 6:30 and I'd been awake for an hour and a half so I told him not to bother. He told me to take a pill but I'm already exhausted and a barbiturate that'll make me drowsy isn't going to help.  I've been crying on and off about it for a while, but what's the point? I know everyone will say "You need to make time for yourself and do things just for you," and blah blah blah. I can't do that, I don't do that, and that's that.  I just need to power through it and deal. Put on my big girl panties and be a fucking mom.  But I will, just for today, try to nap while they nap.  And speaking of that, Danny passed out on a blanket on the floor at about 7:15. 

Offensive rants with f bombs

Religious people I can handle. Religious people I can often respect. But pot-smoking open-marriaging sailor-cussing very much not religious people who post religious facebook statuses 3 times a day drive me fucking nuts!

Also, although I am very happy that you've found Jesus (harder to spot than Waldo, that one), I wish more people would keep their personal relationships with God a little more, shall we say, personal.  As in, don't try to legislate against someone else's personal life and accuse them of "flaunting" things by merely not hiding in shame, and then loudly proselytize your pastor's interpretation of archaic script as though somehow butt-fucking is tantamount to child murder. Cuz it's not.

To recap (and it's sad that I need to post a disclaimer on what is basically me just screaming incoherently into an empty night, but I do): I have no problem with "Had a great time at church today; I am so blessed". I do have a problem with  "If you love Jesus and aren't afraid to post this, make it your status. Most people won't but if you're grateful for His sacrifice you will".  And I have huge issues with televangelists and political preachers (I admit it, I HATE Rick Warren). If God has taught you how to live then great. Live that way. Leave the rest of the world alone. God didn't spare Lot and Noah for being annoying as fuck; he spared them for following the rules themselves.  You can still be safe if Barney Frank gets married.