kdiddy.org

I’m still working on my recap of our trip to Detroit, even though each day that passes makes it more irrelevant but whatever. It’s my blog, I’ll post what I want and you’ll read it and you’ll like it. In fact, next week I might post about Valentine’s Day and how wack it was. If you don’t read it, that just shows how uncommitted you are to this relationship.

In fact, this isn’t working out. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s what I’m going through. But let’s have angry and weepy break-up blog sex real quick before I help you find your Wii games. Jerk.

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Anyway, I have this vague sickness going on and it’s weird. It hasn’t knocked me out and only makes me feel really crappy every so often. My throat is sore but not killing me and I’m getting what can only be described as hot flashes. I must have that throatal menopause that I’ve heard absolutely nothing about.

Last night I went to bed pretty early and when the husband came up a little bit later, he found me drenched in sweat and panting. And I imagine he resembled Bill Murray in Ghostbusters when he said of would-be girlfriend Dana Barrett, “Okay…so…she’s a dog.”

He popped a thermometer in my mouth and I didn’t have a fever, so I don’t know what happened.

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I’m kind of not watching the Penguins game right now because I am HIGHLY concerned at this point and instead have been attempting to take a picture of the baby and the cat with whatever photographic devices in reach (ie, husband’s iPhone, my laptop). They fell asleep next to each other on the couch, but with the cat’s butt perilously close to the baby’s head and god damn if that ain’t one for the baby book shameless mommy blog.

“And here’s the time that the neutered cat teabagged you…”

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All of this is to say that I’m not totally “with it” right now, so bear with me. Oh ALSO I have to do a “field observation” for my class on Friday, so I’m going to watch the staff at Starbucks interact from 9:30 to 11 a.m. And you know what my sophomore classmates said when we decided on that time? They said, “Hmm…well, yeah…I guess I can get up that early.” ISN’T THAT THE MOST PRECIOUS THING YOU’VE EVER HEARD?

Sometimes, mothers keep used Kleenex in their pockets. And sometimes, mothers use their spit to clean the faces of their children.

And sometimes, mothers put their spit on a tiny, clean corner of a used Kleenex from their pockets to clean the faces of their children.

And the wails of disgusted protest that the children emit secretly give us pleasure because, “Haha, twerp, that’s why you should wipe your face when I tell you to. Now you have slobber and possibly boogers on your face.”

Still more rough days trying to get through this semester. Yeah, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s some old lawn furniture and a bear and some marbles and a field of sharpened bamboo between here and there.

But obviously, what I have to go through in the next few weeks is nothing compared to what other mamas have to go through the rest of their days. So, in recognizing how very, very lucky I am and how not even the greatest deed would make me worthy of my kid, I want to remember this goofy little moment that we shared earlier this evening that might otherwise be forgotten if I hadn’t gotten that harsh reminder to do whatever I can to relish it.

For Easter, we gave the baby a few books out of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, including the Do-It-Yourself Book. He was filling out the page on his predictions and got stuck on, “In twenty years, cars will run on ________.” The baby thought about this for awhile and finally said, “Cars will run on…sidewalks!”

Thanks, dude.

I feel the need to warn you that this post is kind of potty-humor-centric. Sort of a Farrelly Brothers/Judd Apatow movie wrapped in bacon and deep fried. It’s just a collection of weird/gross/immature things that have happened in the past few days.

Under the category of Boogers

The baby likes to help me cook, which is usually a good activity for us to do together (though the oppressively small kitchen and its tendency to drive me to drink sometimes make this impossible because my dear son if you don’t GET OUT OF MY WAY RIGHT NOW I SWEAR TO GOD!). The other night I was making pizza cobbler and the baby was helping me to put the dough on top.

I’ve had a tough time getting him to remember to cover his mouth when he sneezes and when he does I like to point out that that was a good thing. You can already see where this is heading, right? So, he sneezed and covered his mouth…with the hand that was holding a piece of dough.

“Um, it’s good that you covered your mouth but try to do that with the hand that’s NOT holding our dinner. kthxbi.”

Under the category of Crotches

The baby was goofing off the other night while I was nagging him to do something…probably going to bed or getting a shower or something.

And he just wound up and punched me in the crotch.

Like…

It wasn’t a hard punch, so it didn’t hurt. It was more dramatic sparring with a slightly slowed-down, kung fu, “HHHWWWWAAAAHHHH!” flare. But still. Demoralizing.

But I paid it forward. The husband and I have a tendency to act like brothers; lots of pinching and noogies and wedgies and trash-talking. This recently prompted the baby to ask us why we married each other if we hate each other so much. (Spite.)

This afternoon, as we were heading into the baby’s school to pick him up, we were engaged in an epic battle of Stop-Touching-Me-I’m-Not-Touching-You-See-I’m-Not-Touching-You, when I ended things by punching him in the crotch. PWNED.

Under the category of Pubes

I really dislike stray pubes. They’re certainly my least favorite aspect of cleaning the bathroom and I get really skeeved if I come into contact with them. I just hate how they’re so unapologetically coarse and all, “Nyah, I was on a crotch and now I’m on your towel!”

I was in the shower earlier and as I was rinsing off my washrag I noticed a pube on my hand. Ick. So I stuck my hand under the water to rinse it off…and the spray shot it off my hand and right into my eye. I had to dig a pube out of my eyeball. Like, who has that happen to them? Only me. I’m still so irritated about it.

Thanks to Facebook, I’m pretty close to collecting every person I’ve ever met in my entire life. The connections that I have to people that add me now are getting more and more fuzzy, like, “Oh, yes, we did have World History together in 9th grade. What have you been up to since that day that we learned about the Battle of Hastings? Harold FTW, right?”

I kind of like it, though. I mean, I imagine I should be lamenting the time just a year or so ago when, if I reflected on so-and-so, all I could do is wonder what they were up to. At best, I could Google them but those almost always led me to pointless genealogy sites. Now I can quickly find out who they married, how many kids they have and, usually, what they’re doing at any given moment.

But I think it’s kind of nice, at least for a social phobe like me, to have that bare minimum of contact at all times. I get to avoid that awkward conversation if I happen to bump into someone on the street: “Oh, hi! Great to see you. How’ve you been? Okay, I’ve got to get going/do something other than this.”

Anyway, my favorite thing to do now is if someone from high school adds me on Facebook and they’ve turned out to be hardcore Republicans, I read their wall back to November 4 to see if they got all pissy.

What? I’ve never made any claims to being sane or mature.

Also, my kid startled me by knocking over a chair in the dining room. I replied, “Yo, what the FUCK?” I’m just going to start apologizing now for how he turns out. He never stood a chance.

I got a bag of coffee beans from a local roaster in my CSA box last week. I was really looking forward to trying them and yesterday morning I ground them up and brewed my morning medicine, that which fuels me to actually get out of the house each morning.

I poured my cup and took a sip. It sucked. It was bitter and tasted like the stuff that sits on burners all day at the 7-11. I was upset. And it all went downhill from there.

My kid has been a real pain in the ass lately about getting ready for school. He dawdles and whines about how he doesn’t want to go. As far as I can ascertain, there’s no real problem causing him anxiety, no bullies or anything, he just doesn’t want to go because, “all we do is LEARN.”

So he was pulling out all the stops yesterday. Whining. Stomping his feet. Trying to slap my hands away when I dragged him out of bed. Screaming back when I told him for the sixth time that he needed to eat his breakfast. Far too much for me to deal with on a half cup of shite coffee.

While I was explaining to him that, “What do you mean why do you need to put your socks on? You need to put your socks on because WE. NEED. TO. LEAVE!” the sleeping husband peeled open an eye a little and mumbled, “What’s his problem?”

I stomped out of the house with the baby and put him on the bus. When I got home I started working on getting the husband up and out of bed in a reasonable amount of time. Around 8:20, I told him to get out of bed for the third time, and he snapped at me, “I KNOW! I HAVE A FUCKING EXAM TODAY! LEAVE ME ALONE!”

I hated both of them in that moment. I couldn’t believe that I had to endure both of them getting pissed at me for trying to get them off to where they needed to go, especially when they just had to go to school while I had to go to work and school and deal with situations at my job that, frankly, aren’t always that fun or easy to deal with. Plus, the nagging anxiety that my husband is graduating from college in the midst of the shittiest economy ever and it’s possible that the thin financial string that we’ve been hanging by the past few years will have to sustain us even longer, provided nothing catastrophic happens like me getting laid off.

And the people who were so terrible at their jobs that our economy is now in the state that it is not only are guaranteed to keep their jobs, they get millions of dollars in bonuses.

That thought set me off and I went on this misanthropic spiral thinking about all of the utterly shitty people in the world and how they go on to create shittier copies of themselves and how I wished I had some superpower where I could drop 2 liter bottles of Coke on the toes of people I hated without consequence. And it’s not that we need to start regulating the number of children that people have but there does need to be some kind of social shift in the face of biological imperatives that it’s okay to not want to have kids but goddammit why do some of the most vocal proponents of the childfree movement have to be such a-holes and it’s not that I’m a total nihilist because I’ve felt something real when I’ve been in the presence of my family.

Oh and THEN I read this article that pissed me off even more. I mean, it’s not that it’s hard to draw parallels between Pittsburgh and Detroit but they’re two totally different places and what works in one place won’t necessarily work in the other. And I must have been looking for things to make me angry because then I went and read the comments which just made it worse because I hate people and all of their stupid “thoughts” and “opinions.”

I don’t know. Maybe I should go back on anti-depressants.

Or spike my coffee once I get better beans.

I was pissy throughout the day. I think my little family is at its worst when we convince ourselves that we’re not in this together. That we’re the only ones bogged down in our struggles and the other two members simply don’t understand what we go through day to day. I don’t know how to fix that.

My son is precocious. Whether or not he’s exceptionally precocious or not, I can’t say, because I don’t see how other kids act when they’re one-on-one with their parents or the people in their lives that they trust the most. But I do know that more than one person has commented to me about the things that he says, the questions that he asks, and the way that he’s perfectly at ease conversing with anyone.

At the very least, there are some hints that his soul is older than his 7-year-old body.

I forget this sometimes, though.

This morning, we were getting ready to leave for school and work. I had told him several times to get his lunch out of the fridge and put it in his backpack, but he was intent on crafting a robot head out of a cardboard box right there and then. I explained that he needed to do that later because a) we needed to leave and b) he wouldn’t have time to play with it right now anyway. While I brushed my hair, I repeated, “Get your lunch, please. Get your lunch. Dude, seriously, go get your lunch right now.”

This happens a lot. We’ll ask him to do something or to stop doing something (“Put the cat down. He’s going to scratch you. Put the cat down. PUT THE CAT DOWN! I don’t know why you’re crying, I JUST told you he was going to scratch you,”) and he’ll flat out ignore us. It’s maddening. It makes me stutter.

So, this morning, he kind of smirked in my direction and continued working on the robot head until finally, I yelled, “YO! GO GET YOUR LUNCH RIGHT NOW!” He finally responded and seemed rather shocked at my outburst. I think it was especially loud. I felt bad…really bad…as I do every time I yell, and he seemed hurt. I didn’t feel obligated to comfort him, though. He knew why I yelled. I do wish that I was more cool-headed and that we got the same results by merely saying, “Please.”

I guess it’s just one of those things, though. Harmony is often the casualty of the modern workday.

Anyway, we got down to his bus stop in plenty of time. The last two days that I’ve taken the bus into work, it’s worked out that his bus comes a few minutes before mine and our bus stops are within spitting distance of each other. So, I’ve been getting to work right on time (even if it does take an hour).

Today though, my bus was a few minutes early and it happened to show up right as the baby’s bus did. I pushed the baby onto the bus and started struggling with the seat belt. He is perfectly capable of buckling himself, but I like to make sure that he’s nice and tightly strapped in with those large, unwieldy van belts.

You know how when you tug on a seat belt too hard it locks? Well, that’s what happened in my rush. So I’m standing there all, “*thunka thunka thunk* Argh!” when I hear MY bus pulling up to the light. The baby sees this, then looks at me and says, “I’ll get it, Mum. Go ahead. I don’t want you to miss your bus.”

Melt.

I gave him a quick kiss and ran off his bus and started after mine as it pulled into traffic. “HEY! HEEEYYY! WAIT!” I yelled. It was no use, though. The bus sped up and there was no way I was going to catch up to it. “Fuck!” I yelled after it, especially since I was going to have to wait another 30 minutes for the next one.

But I stood at the stop and waited and thought about him. Even though it often seems like he’s hellbent on giving me a hard time, and even though I yelled at him just a few minutes prior, he knew that it was important for me to make that bus and did what he could to make that happen. It was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me.

Last night, we watched Time Bandits with the baby. He dug it, but we started the movie kind of late and I was debating with the husband, who was in the bathroom at the time, whether we should just let him finish watching it or stop and finish watching it the next night.

“It’s getting close to 9 p.m. What do you think?” I asked.

“*errrr…gruunnnnt…bathroom noises* Well, how much time is left in the movie?” he replied.

And here’s where the set up for the embarrassment that I would endure later happened. I looked at the DVD player and noted that it was 53 minutes into the movie. I looked at the DVD case and noted that the movie ran 118 minutes long. I tossed those figures around in my head and answered the husband:

“There’s about 25 minutes left!”

For the record, 118 minus 53 equals 65. About 45 minutes later, we’re in the midst of the showdown between Evil and the Time Bandits and I go, “Dude, what the fuck, I said that there was 25 minutes left and that was like 45 minutes ago.” The husband looked at me, confused, and asked how exactly I arrived at that conclusion about 25 minutes. So I got all snotty and said, “Well, duh, the movie was at 53 minutes and the total running time is 118.”

The husband’s eyes widened and he said, slowly, “Kelly…what comes before 100? 59 or 99?” I realized my mathematical error but luckily my 7-year-old whispered, “99,” to me. Thanks for lookin’ out, kid.

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I have vague memories of something funny that I thought of last night and now it’s gone. But trust me, you would have laughed.

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I got a little panicked this morning about this blog and how I haven’t been writing very regularly. I started to worry that I effectively killed it. But I remembered that I have that same worry every semester and I eventually get back into it and people eventually start being able to read what I write again.

I’m still clearing my throat, as it were, when it comes to this space. I’m amazed at how quickly I get out of shape for writing about myself. I’m of course still writing at MamaPop and We Covet, but about other people and things. So maybe I need some help. I’ll open the floor up for questions. Anything you want to ask me?

The baby had an allergic reaction last night. For those of you who are new to this corner of the internet, my son has a tree nut allergy. Luckily, we haven’t had much trouble with it and tree nuts are not as pervasive as peanuts, so he doesn’t have to live in a bubble or whatever. Last night was actually only the second time that his allergy flared up, the first time being when we found out that he had a food allergy.

When we go to restaurants, we always ask the staff to check to make sure that no nuts are used in whatever dish the baby is getting and so far this has kept us in the clear. But probably what happened was there was something nearby that got in his food. We had his EpiPen with us and for a few minutes had this vague panic of, “Do we jab him?” But we didn’t since he wasn’t having any trouble breathing. Our poor waitress stopped over to see how our meals were (they were delicious, rogue nuts be damned) and had the misfortune of coming upon the scene of us sitting in silence, watching the baby’s lips swell and uncertainly holding a large, green shot near his thigh. We drove to the hospital and just kind of waited. Eventually the swelling started going down and the baby reported that he felt fine. We took him home, gave him some Benadryl, and put him to bed and checked on him every couple minutes.

I am, of course, tremendously relieved that he is okay and am hoping that these symptoms are as bad as it gets. Avoiding anaphylactic shock would be tops.

It was just one of those moments where it was like, “Of COURSE you’re having a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction. WHY THE HELL NOT? I haven’t had a panic attack in at least 15 minutes, so I was due.” I’ve been working on a mid-term paper for one of my classes for several days now and to say that it’s stressing me out would be an understatement. On Tuesday, around 11 a.m., this particular academic nightmare will be over. I have another, large-ish assignment due on Thursday that I haven’t even looked at because I just can’t deal at the moment.

I never got this stressed about school until I started grad school (and I have the QPAs to show for it!). But I guess the stakes are just much higher this time around. Plus, I have to juggle so much more. It’s really wearing me down. After this semester, I have one class I’ll take in the summer and then one in the fall. Obviously, not having to deal with two classes at once will be a huge relief. I’m just trying to hang on until the end of the year when I will finally be done. It just sucks because I’m wishing for the time to go faster so I can get to a relatively easier phase in life, but in doing so I’m wishing away large chunks of my kid’s childhood. I actually apologized to him the other night for being so grumpy and impatient and busy. I’m doing all this so that I can make a better life for me and my family, but I guess in the thick of it the cost seems way too high.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to get all morose and I didn’t mean for this to sound like, “My kid had an allergic reaction and it was really scary for ME ME ME IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!” I’m glad my kid’s okay, obviously. And I know that this will all be over soonish and it will all be worth it. I will have a pretty kick-ass MA at the end of all this, after all. It’s just that this particular gauntlet of job + writing + school + school + school + being broke + whatever other crap has gotten really old.

The baby’s Valentine box that he decorated at school:

It’s J Dilla-themed. (Pardon the homework that I was actively avoiding underneath there.) What’s especially cute is how hard he tried to recreate the Donuts album cover.

Please note the tilt of the head and the smile and the fact that his hat obscures his eyes.

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The other night, we went to Chipotle for dinner. Since I was away last weekend and the Super Bowl was the weekend before, we haven’t gone grocery shopping in a number of weeks so we were really scrounging for food. The woman who waited on us labeled the baby’s burrito as “The baby’s,” which was pretty wild.

For those of you who might be new here, the baby is not actually a baby. He’s 7 years old. I started blogging when he was, in fact, a baby and the name sort of stuck. So how did this random woman at Chipotle know to call him that?

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We watched I <3 Huckabee's the other night just because and I was reminded of how much I LOVE that movie. "What happens in a meadow at dusk?" ... I talked to my dad on the phone yesterday and he actually sounded pretty good. Chemo is a motherfucker. ... Five years ago yesterday, I asked the husband (known back then as "the boyfriend") to marry me. It was a (mostly) good idea.