Archive for the ‘baby’ Category

667, the neighbor of the beast

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

Oh, I don’t have much time to chat here, but I think it would be a blogging crime of the highest order if I did not mark the significance of this date.

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See this guy? You all know him as The Baby. Well, he turns 7 years old today. Can you believe that shit?

It’s hard for me to do comparison pictures since 2001 was quite a few years before we leapt into the 21st century and got a digital camera. I scanned a few pictures some time ago but never really dove into that project. So his baby pictures aren’t readily available to the online public. I mostly show this one, which is one of my favorite pictures ever, even though it’s more a picture of my armpit cleavage than anything else:

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The baby wanted to look at his baby pictures the other night so we lugged the photo album out. He marveled at the size of my pregnant belly and couldn’t help but coo over how cute he was as a brand new kid. He also asked me, “Why did you look like that?”

See, I had an emergency c-section and it really wiped me out. I was completely dopey for the first few hours after the baby was born. There aren’t many pictures of me in that state and of course none are online but I can recreate it for you:

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Later.

can you thtand it?

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

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The baby finally lost his other front tooth. It hung in there, literally, for a couple of weeks. I kept trying to pull it but there was one little piece that wouldn’t let go, but a stray smack to the face in gym class today did the trick. (I am not a fan of the kid who delivered the dental blow but I’ll let it go this once.) It’s hard to see the nice big gap the way he’s smiling, but trust me. The cute. It’s ridiculous. And I totally hadn’t thought of the endless entertainment of making him say “s” words until he mentioned wanting to read a “Dr. Theuth” book. And since I’m such a nice mom:

I’m taking requests.

Anyway, I’ll probably be pretty scarce ’round these parts until next week. Classes end this week, then the baby’s birthday is on Saturday, I’m going to a baby shower on Sunday, then I have a final and an article due on Monday. Then I’ll probably collapse for a day or two.

just, you know, for the record

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

‘Twas the night before Thanksgiving, and all through the house…

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Dudes were sleeping and drooling all over that heinous couch.

The pie crusts were baking, the mum without care…

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…for she knew that wine would always be there.

I would totally translate the whole thing into “‘diddy” but I’m a tad too tired at the moment. But I will say that I am thankful for my family, for my opportunities, for writing, and for having time to think with a full belly. We saw Synecdoche, New York earlier and I’m thankful to know that I’m not the only one who thinks such weird things. I’m just glad that Charlie Kaufman puts them down on paper and has beautiful actors speak them for the screen. I’m thankful that art helps me to feel human. I’m thankful for my son, seeing the best pieces of me in him, knowing that I help people to experience him and all of his amazing thoughts and actions. I’m thankful for the husband and our life together.

And I’m thankful for Sidney Crosby and Yevgeny Malkin. 😉

kdiddy: extreme wifey edition

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

Started this last night…

So, first things first: how are you guys? I’m okay. I’m very tired right now. But at least tonight I don’t have to talk myself out of going on a stabbing spree. That was last night, before I remembered that, once a month, my normal, bearable contempt for my fellow humans turns into BLINDING STABBING RAGE FLAMES! FLAMES! ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE! I did teach the baby some new and inventive ways to use the word “motherfucker” in a sentence, so I can’t say I haven’t been productive.

Speaking of the baby, he turned to me earlier and said, “Daddy makes you unhappy and poor.” I laughed heartily and then gave him a raise. He’d earned it…the cute little motherfucker.

Anyway, yes, the subject of this post. I’ve gone wildly Stepford the past few weeks. I think it all started when I said to my mom, “You know, I made some pretty tasty pumpkin puree and froze it. I could make the pumpkin pie this year.” Apparently what is an offer in my world is a throwing down of the gauntlet in the world of my mom and my grandmother. They’ve given me multiple opportunities to back out. Whatever, man. My pie’s going to be fucking awesome.

The last time I made cookies, I noticed that my cookie sheets were pretty gross. I’ve had them about 2.5 years and they’ve seen plenty of mishaps. I’ll still use them, but for more dirty jobs…say, catching whatever bubbles out of a casserole dish. So I bought some new cookie sheets and some of those nifty Silpat thingies so I don’t have to struggle with tearing parchment paper into strips to fit the sheets. Those came yesterday today.

So, to go with my upcoming pie baking and Cookie Baking Extravaganza ’08, I bought some aprons. Oh, yes.

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WE ARE THE ROBOTS!

This darling thing and another Christmasy one that reminds me of one that my mom used to wear came from Boojiboo on etsy.

I’ve been on a small etsy/handmade binge lately. My buddy Cristina and I went to the Handmade Arcade a few weeks ago. I got a few Christmas gifts and a few things for myself, most notably this purse:

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It’s by these folks, Ray-Min, and I absolutely adore it. It’s made out of vintage upholstery fabric. Know what that means? SCOTCHGARD!

I’m also rocking this necklace from etsy seller HouseThatCrowBuilt:

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Jen posted it to We Covet a few weeks ago and I snapped it up immediately. Admittedly, that’s kind of a dick move since I write for that site, but whatever.

To top off my wifey-ness, I made a Bundt cake the other night. A Banana Caramel Bundt Cake to be exact. The bottom (top?) burned a little bit. I don’t know why. But other than that it’s pretty awesome.

It’s the little things. I get out of work at 3 p.m. today, which is awesome, but I noticed this morning that the day or two before a vacation I get very, “Who gives a fuck?” about getting out of bed on time. Like, we’re going to be off of work and school in a day so why bother going now? Clearly, I have some work to do in the whole maturity area. Also, the Boulevard of Allies reopened the other day and our commute is no longer a gigantic joke.

I should probably go take some valium now, right?

general update…i hear it’s big with those blogging types

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

The semester is starting to wind down, which means both work and school are getting a tad psychotic. I keep hearing about how awful “Christmas creep” is but I’m going to be honest and say that I am all about Christmas this year. I’ve already started listening to Christmas music because I have this cockamamie theory that it makes me more productive. I listened to Christmas music when I was arbitrarily cleaning my house last week and I was surprised at how motivated I was. I think maybe my mom used to pull that with me when I was little, putting on Christmas music and telling me to help her clean and decorate, the incentive being that if I did, Santa might not give me the shaft. And, you know, I had some serious Tinkerbell and Cabbage Patch habits back in the day.

I’m also very gooily and mushily in love with my husband and son right now, and Christmas music reminds me that I will soon have days and days to cuddle with them and soak them up. I hate being this busy, but it really does make me appreciate how much I love them and miss them.

Anyway, here’s what’s been going on.

My dad is doing well. Very well, in fact. He’ll need to do a round of chemo to ensure that any microscopic spreading of the cancer is killed, but his doctors are very optimistic. Right now, he’s trying to figure out what he wants to do about his job…to retire or not to retire.

The husband finally had the tendon in his finger repaired about two weeks ago after some really ridiculous delays. By the way, anyone in need of an orthopedic should NOT seek treatment from Ronit Wolfstein, who does not return phone calls and schedules appointments and then just doesn’t keep them, which is especially unnerving when she tells patients that they need to have surgery as soon as possible. But whatever. A new doctor was secured, surgery was had, and all is looking good.

The husband has this foam stabilizer thing that looks like a wedge of Swiss cheese to keep his hand elevated. He only has to use it when he sleeps now, which results in some hijinks.

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I took this picture without his consent, but I think I’m justified and I’ll tell you why. We have a full-sized bed which makes things cozy and with this thing sharing the bed, I often wake up gasping for breath in the middle of the night because the husband’s be-cheesed arm has found its way onto my face. Narrowly escaping suffocation every night is pretty exciting.

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The baby finally lost his front tooth, which was dangling by a thread for weeks and just generally looking pretty gross. Now he looks so cute I can barely stand it.

And this kid of mine turns SEVEN in a few weeks, which I really cannot believe. He’s awesome, of course. Mischievous, sure, but smart as hell. He’s doing so well in school. He’s reading like crazy and actually adding inflection and emotion when he reads out loud, which is just so cool. He’s really interested in his Spanish classes and is picking up math really well. He can spell like a mad man and his handwriting is surprisingly neat considering the husband and I both scrawl like serial killer chicken scratchers.

He’s also drawing a lot, which is cool because he really wasn’t into art very much until recently. In preschool, he was way more interested in trucks and trains, and when the teachers would encourage him to try drawing something, he would sigh and scribble a few lines on paper before getting back to stuff with wheels.

Now…well, check it out:

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He has a whole series of attack scenes. I keep waiting for his teachers to call us in for a conference where we’ll be forced to meet with a team of psychologists and some dudes from Homeland Security. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s on the no-fly list but, eh, we don’t go anywhere anyway. But here we have Godzilla and some other monsters attacking a city (presumably Tokyo) in Japan. How do I know it’s Japan?

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The Lapan Japan sign! Duh!

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Here, some aliens are attacking Washington, D.C. Lots of detail in this one. Let’s take a closer look!

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Ah, there’s the Wigt House, aka the White House. And I think that dude fleeing is George W. Bush. What a little girlie man! If only Bill Pullman were President! The baby is vying for a position in Obama’s cabinet as head adviser on alien and giant, nuclear reptilian attacks.

Another detail of note:

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That’s the Subway that’s two doors down from the White House at 1604 Pennsylvania Avenue. Aliens love them some $5 footlongs.

Also, another gem from his homework:

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I was pretty irritated about including a McDonald’s sign in his homework, mostly because I really hope that our public schools don’t have to turn to frightening corporations to subsidize our learning materials. But the husband pointed out that it’s an exercise working with signs that the kids see. Valid point, I guess. But, as I already noted on the flickr page, if I wrote 1st grade learning materials, food would have snarky quotations and the other option would be constipation.

So, that’s pretty much what’s going on. I also wanted to say that I’m sorry I suck so much at responding to comments. I really appreciate you guys that read this nonsense and then take the time to interact with me. I read everything! I’m just kind of shitty about replying. Kisses!

vindicated

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

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The baby won “Most Funny” (seriously, that was the name of his category) at the neighborhood Halloween parade yesterday. He felt particularly triumphant after going home empty-handed last year and was rewarded with a $25 gift certificate to any business on the main boulevard that is a member of the local chamber of commerce which means he can get…uh…maybe an ice cream cone. Or what might happen is I’ll say to him, “Take mommy to the nail shop to get a fill-in and some airbrush. I want to get a beach scene on my right hand and I think ‘Water Lilies’ on my left. Chop chop.”

Or maybe he can go to the corner store that is a very poor front operation and buy some used jelly shoes and some chips.

We went to see the Zack and Miri premiere at the Oaks last night and it was so good. I’ve heard that it’s not been getting very good reviews which is just stupid. It’s so funny and really classic Kevin Smith. He did a Q&A afterward and was really funny and interesting.

After watching the movie and driving through “the wrong side of Pittsburgh,” I got a really strong swell of love for the city. It really is an awesome place to be.

I’m going to go bake a pie.

toonces

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Sometimes I think me and my family are being directed by some omnipotent force with a seriously sick sense of humor. God? I don’t know. Maybe if god is a drunken Woody Allen, then his direction for last night’s comedy of errors would be something like this:

Okay, Greedo (cat). You haven’t knocked anything off of any surface in months. Now stare deviously at the cactus on the mantle in the baby’s room. Lick your lips and jump onto the mantle. Tiptoe to the cactus. Now touch…touch…push! Now hide! They’re going to be pissed!

Kelly, grab Greedo, call him an asshole and give him to the husband, then carefully pick up the cactus with an oven mitt.

Cactus, stare up at Kelly with a “What did I do?” look. Great!

Husband, start your futile attempts to re-pot the cactus with the dry-ass soil. Wiggle the cactus to see if it will stay put. Once it starts to fall, grab it with your bare hand! Perfect! Now swear! Keep swearing! Tell the cat you’re going to kill him. Amazing. This is great stuff, guys.

Enter neighbors across the street! Alright, 3-year-old daughter, start screaming and crying! Keep going! Parents! Don’t make any attempts to comfort her. Repeat this process for the next two hours.

Okay, now we’re at the bar. Kelly, order a gimlet and some potstickers. Order another gimlet. Burn the roof of your mouth on the potstickers. Order another gimlet….aaaaaand one more. Great! Talk to Jwan about some stuff. Talk to Karen about vegetables. Show Maria your iPhone and then slur to her about graduate school.

Alright, let’s go home. Husband, curl up next to Kelly and attempt to make some moves. Kelly, be waaaaayyy too tired and breathe vodka breath into the husband’s face.

Oh, it’s 4:50 a.m.! Kelly, it’s time for your sneezing attack. And the baby, it’s time for you to get up and need some help turning the light on in the bathroom. Yeah, you guys do this every night. You know the drill.

Kelly, it’s 6 a.m. Your alarm is going off. Press the snooze button. Repeat this action 15 times. Alright, now it’s 7:15 and you really need to get out of bed. Note that your hangover seems to reside solely in your knees. Check the weather on your phone and wonder why you were reading the Wikipedia page for William F. Buckley, Jr.

i love lamp

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

“The Husband.”

“Mmph?”

“Turn the light off.”

“What?”

“Turn the light off!”

“What light?”

“The light! Turn it off!”

“What?”

“Your lamp! Turn it off!”

“What lamp? What the hell are you talking about?”

“YOUR BEDSIDE LAMP! THE ONE THAT’S ON EVEN THOUGH IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT! TURN IT OFF!”

“*snore*”

“DUDE!”

“WHAT?!?!?”

“TURN. YOUR. LAMP. OFF.”

“YOU ARE SUCH A PAIN IN MY ASS!”

Or something along those lines. That was the argument that we had ’round about 3:30 or 4 a.m. The husband fell asleep with the light on and I woke up to help the baby to the bathroom and then had that infuriating exchange. What light? Give me a goddamned break. The light that is replacing the darkness that I should be seeing right now, you ass. God. It’s not like I asked him what newspapers he reads.

Anyway, I used to have this big old Toshiba laptop that I bought with some of my college graduation money. It turned out to be a bit of a lemon and a few years ago I brought it into work so that the computing people here could at least get it to function a little bit and I could get my pictures off of it. I put all of the pictures onto a bunch of zip discs. Yes, zip discs. I intended to take them home and transfer them to a functioning computer, but just never got around to it.

Yesterday, I was poking around in my office and came across both the discs and a zip drive. So I spent a little bit of time transferring them to my computer and uploading the pictures to flickr. They go back to 2003 and it’s really neat to see so many pictures of the baby being all little that I had totally forgotten about.

I have another big post in me about how looking back at these pictures has also been very upsetting, because in a lot of them I’m very thin. It’s been drudging up a lot of stuff that I really want to get off my chest, but I can’t do it right now.

Meh. In the meantime, my kid is cute as HELL.

We are jam PACKED this weekend. Tomorrow at noon, the baby is going to hang out with the husband at the record store while I go to the eye doctor, then after that I’m getting a massage! I’m in dire need, really. My neck and back have been totally messed up. Then we have a kid’s birthday party to go to and the baby is going to some Magic Tree House show with my mom.

it destroys oxygen. i call it…the oxygen destroyer!

Monday, September 29th, 2008

We took the baby to the Regent Square Theatre last night to see the original 1954, Japanese Gojira, aka Godzilla. The baby loves Godzilla movies because there’s a big monster who smashes stuff, but the screening last night also served as a platform for Remembering Hiroshima.

It seems that many Americans are still surprised to learn that the original Godzilla was actually a very serious film and commentary on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings during World War II, and on the neverending nature of the arms race and destroying The Enemy. In the film, there are two scientists: one who holds the key to destroying Godzilla, even though further H-bomb tests will simply create another monster somewhere else, and another who wants to study the creature and learn from it. Though how one would go about capturing a seemingly indestructible dinosaur and studying it, we don’t know.

Pthpthptthpthpth. I intended to go on here about the empty notion of triumphing over evil and how it’s still VERY relevant today(*cough*everywhere in the Iraq such as therefore *cough*) but frankly, I’m not up for it and I get the impression that the only audience for my philosophical rants are those two or three crickets that happily chirp away and the one or two of you who bother to say, “Nuh uh.”

Anyway, the baby obviously wasn’t that interested in the post-film discussion, but I think it’s good to at least give him the opportunity to hear these things.

If you aren’t already keeping a list of things that I demand that you check out, you should start one and add the following items to it: Bill Burr’s latest stand-up special, Why Do I Do This?, and Chris Rock’s latest special, Kill the Messenger. The husband and I often describe Burr as, “The red-haired, white guy on Chappelle’s Show who was one of the commentators on the Racial Draft.” We’ve actually seen him live a few times through those underselling, free-ticket deals through the Improv, which is cool because I think he might actually blow up a little bit fairly soon. Rock’s special isn’t as good as his earlier ones and seems to slack off into recycled material and generic “Let me tell you about the nature of black and white women,” schtick, seasoned, I would guess, with bitterness over his marital problems, but whatever. Dude is still hilarious.

more from the beavis & butthead files

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

In somewhat stark contrast to the picture below, in which my brand-new son and I clung to each other, skin on skin, I report to you that I spent a good portion of the evening bellowing, “DO. YOUR. HOME. WORK. NOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW.” And throwing in a, “There will be no TV ever again and if you think I’m joking, just TRY IT!” for good measure.

Gah. Today was perfectly fine until we tried to drive home and got stuck in the most horrendous traffic ever. We didn’t actually get home until 7 and I was just going to make us some grilled cheese sammiches, because what’s better after a stressful fall day than grilled cheese? But, lo, there was no cheese.

In the midst of this meal angst, the baby was just being…I don’t know…purposefully and infuriatingly obtuse about his homework. I went to help him and read the directions aloud: “Read the words in the box…Come. Good. On. That….Uh.”

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