kdiddy.org

Check that out. The baby lost his second tooth on Friday. Also, pudding was consumed. Don’t know if you could tell. He lost it during school and told us about it when we picked him up. We got excited and said, “Oh, cool, let us see it!” And then the baby’s eyes kind of shifted and he said, “I left it at school.”

Yargh.

We were able to get it back yesterday since we were in for our parent teacher conference. It was a good meeting. He’s doing really well in school and excelling in math, which is wild since I’m Miss Two Plus Two Equals Kleenex. He’s also well-liked by all the kids. His teacher said that his morning entrance to school is akin to that of a rock star. “He must have inherited that from you!” she said to us, which was hysterical because while the husband had many friends but even more enemies, I was just kind of…Mary Katherine Gallagher.

After the conference we were imagining his future prom pictures. The baby stands, dashing, in front of the mantle with his gorgeous date then poses with his parents, who are, you know, these assholes:

My weekend kind of failed. I had grand plans to do all of my homework and reading for the week since I am way behind, do all of the laundry, go grocery shopping, watch the Steelers game, and eat some yummy dinner.

None of that happened. We went out on Friday. Our friends Curt and Amanda are moving to Atlanta on Wednesday and were having a going away party at Remedy in Lawrenceville. I had a good time. I got some drinking done and then a big group of us went to Eat n Park for late night noshing with plastic cups and no silverware. It was awesome. I felt…well, probably like how normal 28-year-olds feel.

My mom came over on Saturday. She and I are not really getting along at the moment and I was in a bad mood because I got a letter from our insurance company stating that since someone jimmied my front window open while I asleep and took a bunch of my shit, my premium is going up. Thanks, dudes! My mom wanted to, like, do stuff besides lie on the couch and nap, so that took up most of Saturday. I did get a big chunk of reading done, though.

But see, Sunday…the baby woke up kind of early and did his usual nagging to get me out of bed before 8 a.m. I don’t know. That kid must really like hearing the words, “Hell,” and “No.” Everything was normal. When I finally came downstairs, I gave him some cereal. He ate a few bites and then curled up on the couch. I asked him what was wrong and he said he wasn’t feeling good…and then all hell broke loose, intestinally speaking. There was puke. There was watery poop. There was even a nosebleed in the midst of all of that. He took a long nap while I washed soiled underwear and tried not to gag. He felt better when he woke up, like it never happened. I don’t understand how kids do that. When I throw up I’m out of commission for the rest of the day. But I’m also a pussy.

I started making some dinner and then worked on an essay when the Steelers came on. The husband spent the next three hours screaming at the TV while I typed away and checked the turkey, which was not cooking. See, I had a frozen turkey breast and didn’t defrost it and oh, I’m an idiot. I did some supplementary cooking of that, so we have dinner for tonight already, but last night we feasted on leftover mashed potatoes, ramen, and pita.

I never did get around to the laundry, really. I washed and dried two loads but they’re sitting in a pile in the laundry room, wrinkling away. We have some food, but I’m really low on WW-friendly stuff.

Ugh. Too much. I’m really hating myself for taking this particular combination of courses. The work load is insane. I keep thinking maybe I should drop one, but I would probably just be prolonging some future hellish fall semester. I’m so cranky nowadays, though.

But the weekend wasn’t total shite. Besides Friday’s tomfoolery, some nice pictures were taken. I snapped this one on Friday night:

Every now and then, I let the baby use the digital camera. He normally takes pictures like this:

You know…still lifes with Godzilla, toilet paper, and remote controls. But on Saturday he managed to snap this very nice picture of our cat:

Bonus: fingerprint dusting from CSI. I guess I should wipe that off. But maybe I’ll leave it so I can point to it and go, “That’s right, bitch,” and impress guests. Isn’t that a nice picture, though? I want to get him a camera for his birthday or xmas. I could get him one of those Fisher-Price joints, but it would be nice if he could make little movies with it, too. Like he told Jamie, “I’ve started making my own Godzilla movies.” You know, branching out from astute observer to director.

Oh, that reminds me. In recounting some of the details of the break-in to a friend, the baby lamented the theft of his piggy bank, sighed, and very seriously said, “Now I ain’t got no cash.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the greatest name EVER.

With that out of the way, allow me to catch up on the past week.

The short version: it’s been kind of shitty.

The long version: A not-so-grim version of Murphy’s Law seemed to descend on our household. This was mostly to blame for the 500 different kinds of sick we all got. The baby was out of school Tuesday and Wednesday with a high fever and headachey/sniffley thing that was accented by a short barfing episode in Incredibly Strange Video and a nosebleed. I am now officially overwhelmed by the amount of paper that comes home with him from school every day and am now apparently delinquent in giving them whatever arbitrary version of his life history they have decided that they need this week.

A couple of times since the break-in, I’ve entertained the thought of dropping one of my classes simply because the reading load is much heavier than I thought it was going to be and with things thrown into upheaval with all of that unpleasantness, I’m not always sure that I’m going to do well in it. I’m staying in it for now, but was more than a little embarrassed yesterday when I tried to b.s. my way through a discussion of genre and made it horrendously clear to everyone that I had no idea what I was talking about.

As you can imagine, I’m looking forward to the upcoming weekend. I need to regroup.

The good news is that there is a suspect in our break-in and it was just some random person. Last weekend I had way too much time to think and conjure up all possible what-if scenarios and by Monday I was certain that a psycho internet stalker was coming to get us. Thankfully, that’s not the case. We were able to get a chunk of our DVDs back from a resale store downtown, which was exciting since there were a number of things that are hard-to-find. We got our Pi DVD back and while that’s not hard to find, we were upset that it was gone because that was the movie the husband and I watched on our first…whatever. It wasn’t a date, we were just hanging out at my house, but for whatever reason psychotic mathematicians bring out the romance for us.

Speaking of the husband, his 28th birthday was on Tuesday. The baby and I gave him some Borges books, the new Chuck Palahniuk book, and the Death Proof DVD. When the husband got to school that day he was treated to a birthday surprise: two pop quizzes.

So, you know, nothing catastrophic, just a lot of minor irritations that built up.

Oh, and I just got a humongous spider bite on my back. Sexy.

jwan: How’s your cold coming along, I’ve had the exact same symptoms, last night was the worst of it all
Sent at 12:00 PM on Thursday
me: same
last night was hellish but i’m feeling slightly better today
at least, i feel like my brain is functioning and my shirt isn’t crusted with snot that i wasn’t quick enough to catch
Sent at 12:04 PM on Thursday

So, yes, doing relatively much better today. Thanks for all of the sympathy yesterday. I took some NyQuil last night, but it didn’t knock me out and then keep me knocked out like I had hoped. I did have some weird dreams involving characters from Knocked Up. That was kind of strange. And I woke up a couple of times with severe cottonmouth.

The more I think about it, the more I’m pretty sure that I heard about this awhile ago and just forgot about it: Steven Soderbergh is directing Benicio del Toro in a two-film epic about Che Guevara. I’m really, really looking forward to this. I know Guevara is demonized here in the U.S., but he was truly very fascinating and I don’t think there’s any black-and-white way to view him. Soderbergh kicks much ass and I love love love Benicio del Toro. It’s also being filmed entirely in Spanish, as it should be. Is it just me, or does this smack of the Medellin storyline in Entourage?

Completely unrelated to anything above, the baby and I had a pretty heavy conversation last night stemming from him asking me if Life will ever end. We’ve had the death conversation a lot, but this was on some next level shit. I’ve never been comfortable feeding him stuff about heaven, mostly because I don’t think I really believe in that. While it might be easier for him to take, I’d just feel like I was lying to him. But I have always given him the option of believing in stuff like that. I’m taking the same hands-off approach that I took with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, which is, “Do you think Santa/the Bunny is real?” And for right now, he does, so we’re going with that for now. Our conversation veered toward God for awhile. He’s really not sure about the whole thing. He wanted to know definitively if there is a God and I was honest with him: nobody knows though some people believe that there is and some people believe that there isn’t. In either case, I told him that, yes, Life will end someday but it will be a long, long time before that happens. I asked him if that scared him and he said yeah and I told him that it scares me, too. It’s funny because I feel like he and I are on the same existential wavelength. I mean, I must have pondered these things when I was his age, too, but I don’t feel like I’ve really thought about them until recently. It’s cool to have someone to talk about these things all wide-eyed. Especially since the husband, in all of his smug wisdom, has already thought about everything and has no time for these “Duuuuuuuuuuuude” conversations.

Angela and I are comparing cheesy Lifetime movies and it is easily the best conversation I’ve had yet today. Much like the titles of Friends episodes, we refer to all Lifetime movies as “That one where Tori Spelling gets stabbed,” or “That one with the Texas cheerleader murder plot with Lesley Ann Warren right when she started looking really crazy.”

We had a little resume workshop in my class this morning and of course our prof came over and listened in on my group while we were looking at my resume and cover letter. After she left, there was an uncomfortable silence as we all wondered just how I managed to not kill myself getting out of the shower everyday, now that my utter stupidity has been displayed for all to see in the form of subject-verb disagreement. Simply put, I wrote my cover letter in lolcat. “I haz batchlurs. I will haz masturs. I can haz job now plz?”

In other words, I’ve been a little busy and my work, all areas of it, are suffering. I knew the cover letter was going to be a piece of shit, mostly because when I tried to recall when I wrote it, I simply could not remember. Luckily, the day job will ease up slightly in the next week or so and I might not flunk out of my grad program. Now I just need to remember where I left my kid…

In cooking news, I made Stovetop Cheddar Mac last night. It was certainly inferior to the homemade stuff that Jwan makes, but it was quick and easy and it hit the spot. I added a couple generous sprinkles of cayenne pepper to brighten the flavor a bit. The other night I made Apricot Poppy Chicken which was really REALLY good. The baby declared it “the best dinner I’ve ever eated.” So there. Also, the new issue of Everyday Food arrived at our house yesterday and there are so many awesome cool-weather recipes this month. They feature meat loaf and I curse any available deities that my husband hates meat loaf, cause I need a baked pile of ground beef with a Heinz ketchup glaze in my life, goddammit.

You Tube: Louis CK’s stupid dog.

You Tube: Louis CK, the cartoon.

You Tube by way of retrojunk.com: I’m the only person I know who remembers Cough Whip. This bums me out.

Frisky Wife: I’m supporting my family while my husband completes his engineering degree. In 1960, this would have earned me a “Good Wife Certificate.”

I think the darling lolcats may have already completed their internet life cycle and have entered the realm of monotonous. However, they still have one or two nuggets of brilliance left in them.

College Humor by way of Tracey: Prank War. Apparently this is real, but it’s pretty wild. If it is, these guys have psychologically ruined each other.

The scene is early on a Saturday morning in a run-down house in the wannabe-suburbs section of the city. A husband and wife, reeking of garlic from last night’s salsa, are stinkily snoring away. Their child walks in and starts demanding breakfast and shocks his mother awake with icy cold hands, the first of the autumn. Their cat runs laps from room to room and when the wife pries her eyes open, she sees the cat dragging her cell phone out of the room by the wrist strap. She hisses at the cat to drop the phone and the cat snaps his head around to stare at her, wide-eyed, with her cell phone still dangling from his mouth. He is also whining at the wife for breakfast. The night before, after the child had been scolded for misbehaving and had responded by crumpling onto the couch and sobbed, the cat had rushed to the child’s side and sniffed his face. Concerned, the cat had grabbed the child’s head and playfully bit at it. What strange siblings.

Please tell me that I’m not the only parent who occasionally (like once a day) says to her child, “Buddy, please, PLEASE just stop talking for like five minutes.” I feel like I’m stifling him or just being a bitch, but he really never stops talking. And while I totally appreciate that he’s asking questions because he’s just so curious about everything, how the hell am I supposed to answer stuff like, “Why does Godzilla sound like that?” and “Why do they make popsicle sticks?” I don’t know, dude. It was like that when I got here.

Anyway, with the semester in full swing, I’ve been finding that cooking gives me something to focus on that is usually something I can accomplish and it gives the three of us a chance to sit down and relax for a little bit. I’ve said before that I’m not a natural in the kitchen. That is, I can’t just walk in and cook something. But I’m more than proficient at following a recipe and I’ve even gotten bold enough to deviate from time to time…or sometimes I just forget shit and am lucky enough that it turns out okay.

My main source for recipes is Everyday with Rachel Ray and Everyday Food. While not all of the recipes are budget-friendly or mindful of the fact that crappier grocery stores don’t carry stuff like arugula, I’m usually able to pull about a month’s worth of recipes to follow from the dozens of issues I’ve accumulated. So far this week, I’ve tried out two recipes that I can definitely recommend.

Harvest Creamy Corn “Choup”

I know, I know. Ms. Ray is highly irritating with all of her cutesy phrases and speedy personality, but her recipes are kind of the shit. And this was a perfect early autumn dish and the husband and baby both liked it. I also took some tips from Miss Smilex and used a “garbage bowl.” I also chopped everything up beforehand and put the various ingredients in those crappy plastic bowls that you get wonton soup in from Chinese restaurants. We have a billion of those. Normally I just chop stuff as I go along and I think that makes the whole process take a bit longer.

As an aside, this “choup” (ugh) is not Weight Watchers friendly. I calculated it to be 19 points a serving. But my tactic is to use minimal points during the day when my non-WW family members and I aren’t eating together so that I can cook something “normal” for dinner.

Last night, I made Whole Wheat Pasta Arrabbiata with Arugula.

Like I said before, some stores (coughcoughWalMartcough) don’t carry arugula, so I just used spinach. Not the same thing, but it wilts nicely and tastes good. This dish was a big hit. It was spicy and fresh, also a good early autumn dish. Oh, I forgot to add the reserved pasta water, which I guess would have made the sauce a little thicker, but it still tasted very good. I calculated this to be 12 points per serving.

I did nothing exciting this weekend, which is exactly what I wanted to do. I did get my hair cut on Saturday, so maybe I’ll grace this space with a picture later.

I did have some handy types come over on Saturday to do some work in the small bedroom. It’s possible that that room will finally be finished in October. And it only took two years! At this rate, the house will be where we want it just in time for us to die. Can’t wait.

Another handy type came by yesterday to look at our dining room and give us a price on finishing and painting it. I guess I had never really looked at how jacked the walls are, but I’m really going to have to have a plasterer come in and smooth them out. The previous owner did all the repairs himself on the house and really it would have been better off if he had just let it be. For instance, here is the awesome addition he put on the back of the house, presumably while mainlining Jack Daniels:

Sigh.

In other news, the baby missed the bus for the first time this morning. Aw, yeah. Third day of school. In our defense, the bus was easily five minutes early. So we had to drive him to school, obviously, but once we were there I had no idea what to do with him. I took him into the building but a woman informed me that that was not the thing to do and that he had to wait on the playground until the teachers collected him. So I took him back outside and was like, “Uh, okay, I guess I’m going to leave you here now. But you recognize some of these kids, right?” Of course, he didn’t. But his bus pulled up right as I was getting ready to leave so I’m assuming he was in the right spot. Don’t you love my crossed-fingers method of parenting?

We watched Stranger than Fiction on Saturday, which was pretty good but not as awesome as I had been anticipating. I think Will Ferrell just doesn’t do it for me. But I would watch Maggie Gyllenhaal read the phone book. Love her. Dustin Hoffman was also really funny, but I felt like he just put a professorial spin on his character from I Heart Huckabee’s. But I did love his freakish coffee consumption and the fact that he taught a course on “Little did he know.” And I need more Emma Thompson in my life.

I watched that new HBO show Tell Me You Love Me last night. I’m going to write a recap for MamaPop but I left my notes at home. It’s much starker than any previous HBO series. Very serious. In all of their other dramas there’s always been at least a sprinkle of humor. There’s practically none in this one. We’ll see. It is pretty good, though…which means it will most certainly be canceled after its first season.

Sigh. There he is. My kindergartener. Despite sleeping later than I meant to, this morning went rather well. We got all of his stuff together last night and I explained to him that some of the other parents would be at school with their kids this morning but that Mum and Dad had to go to school, too. We wouldn’t be there to transition him into his classroom, take his picture, give a few extra hugs, but that didn’t mean we weren’t with him in his heart or that we didn’t love him. He cried a little bit but I reassured him and this morning he was ready to go.

The arrival of the bus was a little anti-climactic. After seeing several of the little yellow variety go by, a white van with one of those school students signs on it pulled up. I think we were all a little disappointed, but hey, as long as it gets my one and only child to school safely and in one piece, I don’t care.

We kissed him and made sure he was buckled in. Then they pulled away and were gone.

Then I cried.

(more…)

Listening to undergrads compose short fiction is kind of painful. The stuff that they think is esoteric and indicative of their untapped wit is really just kind of stupid. I know, because I wrote the exact same shit when I was an undergrad. I should see if I can dig up the short story I wrote about the faux-Lifetime channel. It was meant to be a biting satire on women’s television, but it was really just a steaming turd. Oh, well. These are the lessons one must learn on her own.

Someone please tell me that this little phase that the baby is going through will dissipate once he’s in school. Every single night ends in tears (both mine and his) because he is either in total asshole mode, which includes mouthing off, refusing to listen, fooling around when he’s (not) eating dinner which results in food on the floor, flicking me and his dad with his fingers when we tell him no, or he switches right to you’re-way-too-old-for-this mode, which includes screaming, crying, and just general tantrums. Dudes, I am DONE! Louis C.K. says that the reason his 4-year-old daughter is an asshole is because nobody calls her on her bullshit. I don’t get it. I call him on his bullshit. I see no improvement.

Thank god that some monkeys once ate some fermented grapes that had been sitting on the ground and invented wine and the almighty buzz.

The guilt-ridden mom in me keeps thinking, “This is because you work and the husband goes to school and you aren’t around him everyday.” Granted, there may be some truth in there. He doesn’t get to see us during the day and I imagine he’s pretty bored with life by this point. He has some justifiable reasons to act out. I just wish he wouldn’t.

Speaking of Louis C.K., you are all jealous of me because I am going to see him tomorrow night! I should probably invest in some Depends, since he has a tendency to make me pee my pants. However, I bought the tickets months ago, when I thought that the baby’s first day of school was August 30th. So I get to pull another stellar parent moment when I say, “How was your traumatic first day of kindergarten at your new school with the school bus and the kids and the lunchroom I have to go bye kiss kiss.”

I win at life.