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Pretend that I have here a picture of the baby’s last day of school on Wednesday and a comparison shot of his first day of school and, perhaps to torture myself, some half-assed collage of his first and last days of school. I meant to upload those pictures last night but I started playing some stupid game on my computer and it didn’t happen.

But yes, I’m officially the owner of a fourth-grader now, which just seems way too surreal. I only kind of remember third grade. I think the main reason that I remember anything from it at all is because that was the year that I got chicken pox and you don’t really forget that kind of misery (two words: sitz bath) (four more words: pox. inside. my. eyelids.). But I definitely remember the fourth grade so it’s weird to me that all of this is really going to stick in his brain now. Or maybe it won’t since he got that chicken pox vaccine and he won’t have that experience to anchor him.

Little League also ended for us last night in a playoffs defeat. The baby’s team had a really rough season, I think winning only two (maybe three?) games. They had a ton of rain-outs and as a result never really gelled as a team. Oh well. I can’t say that I’m not kind of glad to have our evenings returning to some semblance of a routine and to not get dinner from the concession stand multiple times a week.

I’m not sure what exactly is up with me, but I’ve gone to bed insanely early the last couple nights. I’ve put in at least 9 hours each night and am still forcing myself out of bed, albeit with much less misery on the far too many days that my total sleepage is pathetically low.

As schmoopy and gag-worthy as it sounds, I have a hard time sleeping without the husband and I think his nearly week-long absence caught up with me.

In other schmoopy and gag-worthy news, today is our fifth wedding anniversary.

When we mentioned it to the baby this morning, he said something along the lines of “Time flies,” and it really does.

I was looking through my “Wedding” folder that I have on my work computer (yes, I did some wedding planning at work, couldn’t be helped) for something and came across the track list for the mix CD that we handed out as favors. Among the songs that we chose was “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads, which seems kind of odd since it’s a somewhat cynical look at life and marriage and adulthood. But listening to it today I thought about how there have been plenty of times already when I wondered who I was and what I was doing, certain that I had screwed up terribly. There have been plenty of times when I have, in fact, said to myself, “My god, what have I done?” But when I take a good long look at the husband and the baby, I know exactly what I’ve done and I know exactly how good it is.

A recurring problem that we’ve had this half of the school year is the baby’s school bus. At least once a week, we’ve had to deal with it being extremely late or not showing up at all. I’ll call the bus company. They’ll apologize. Things will be fine for a few days with a new bus driver…until that bus driver disappears into the ether, taking my son’s ride to school with him or her.

I have no idea what it’s like to be a bus driver. It seems like one of those jobs that’s probably very stressful and woefully underpaid, because that’s how we tend to treat difficult but essential jobs in our society. And I imagine that for my son’s bus route, which is made up of a very small group of kids from our area going to their magnet school, a low-seniority bus driver is usually stuck on that route. It has seemed like the drivers that we’ve had were kind of young and maybe just starting out.

All of this is to say that I understand where the problems might come in. That doesn’t make it okay, though, and it really doesn’t make the 40 minutes that I waste on the corner any more worthwhile.

Yesterday, after the bus was again absent, I called the bus company and was told, “Oh! We’ll send someone!” What the? Do I need to prompt them now? Did they morph into a cab company? The deal is, at the beginning of the school year, they say, “We’ll be picking up your child and transporting him to school at this time, Monday through Friday,” and I say, “Great! See you then!” and place the one and only fruit of my loins into their care as they navigate potholes, construction, and *gulp* Pittsburgh drivers. There’s no, “Hey! Guess what, bus company? I’m sending my kid to school again today! I know! Two days in a row lulz!”

Yesterday’s flub was particularly bad because the husband had to go to the airport and having to take both the baby and me to school and work wasn’t really on the agenda. Also, the longer I stand at the bus stop, the better chance I have of encountering some of our neighborhood’s, er, characters. Like the under-toothed woman who, a few months ago during a similar incident, alerted me to a used condom lying on the ground nearby. But, like, in an insane way. Like, she got all in my face with her Newport breath and lisped, “There’sh a yewshed condom over there. A yewshed condom. What should we do?” and I wondered when, exactly, my life turned into a David Lynch movie. Yesterday, I heard her yelling, “MA’AM! MA’AM!” as I was finishing up ordering a school bus and she approached me and said, “The poleesh are looking for a light-shkinned fella who broke into a lady’sh houshe. An 80-year-old lady. And he had a gun. I’m sho glad you have a shell phone. If you shee him, call 911 becaushe he’s light-shkinned and hash a gun.”

Got it. Neighborhood block watch in effect but seriously NOT RIGHT NOW, OKAY?

Anyway, we eventually got to school and work and the airport and no light-shkinned armed fellas or yewshed condomsh were encountered. I put in several stern phone calls to my son’s school and the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ transportation department and today, the bus arrived, manned by a very professional older gentleman who gave me his card and introduced himself.

I managed to saunter over to my bus stop in plenty of time because apparently the earlier PAT bus never showed up, which sucked for the people who had been standing there for 30 minutes in the 90 degree heat. Of course, I was then in the direct line of my enemy, the sun, and tried to avoid getting a sunburn first thing in the morning by positioning myself behind a five-inch wide utility pole.

Survival skills. I have them.

Alas, the bus came and I boarded without incident…until I found an ant crawling on my face.

Remember on Friday when I admitted that we hadn’t been grocery shopping since, like, Bin Laden was still alive? Yeah, still haven’t gone. Normally, we would do such a thing on the weekend, but, well…my weekend was wack. It was a wackend.

Saturday I had to work, which is inherently ugh. Yes, it was for a fun thing (graduation) and yes, I’ll get overtime, but it’s still working on Saturday. After that was over, we headed to the baby’s first piano recital, which was in his piano instructor’s storefront church in Swissvale. The baby, always one to tempt that struck-down-by-lightning thing, displayed the kind of religious tolerance that comes from only having brief glimpses of opulent Catholic churches and loudly commented, “This isn’t even a real church. It’s small. And plain.” I have a feeling this is going to be one of the things that comes up if The Rapture is, in fact, this Saturday. The recital was nice enough and not too long. The baby was adorably nervous but got through his piece, “Yellow Submarine,” just fine.

The husband had to DJ after that and I, after putting the baby to bed, passed out on the couch holding my drink. Classy!

Sunday should have been devoted to groceries and laundry but instead I had to attend a Ladies’ Luncheon. I was not in the mood, but went anyway because I decline them fairly often (they’re always at the worst times of the year) and I know it bums my grandmother out when I don’t attend. Of course, I started coming down with a bear of a headache and contributed little to the conversation, but that was good because I started babbling about Ghost Adventures and saying stuff like, “I wonder how much ass Zak gets in those small towns.” Nobody offered up any guesses.

I came home, still vaguely intending to go to the grocery store, but ended up nursing my headache the rest of the day.

Last night, the baby was supposed to have a baseball game but it was cancelled because the weather here has been less than cooperative. It’s rained so much that my grass is starting to look like something that people work on with sickles.

Speaking of baseball, Jwan came over for a little while last night and we were discussing the Pirates and their quick slide back down beneath .500. The husband commented that he still has faith in them ultimately having a winning season, that this recent streak of losses was a momentary hurdle. “More like a HURRDURRDLE,” I replied. The husband laughed but Jwan, who apparently is not aware of DERP, thought I was having a stroke or something.

see more Hurr

“Alright, let’s get going. We still have to go to the store.”

I gathered up my purse and my camera. The baby girl stared up at me from her swing and I bent down to tickle her behind her ears one more time and pressed her tiny, round feet in between my forefingers and thumbs. We hugged her daddy good-bye and walked outside into the late afternoon sun.

The smell was almost intoxicating. The ground was warming up on the first legitimate spring day. It inhaled the sun and exhaled the possibility of life beginning again, much like how the baby girl’s sighs and giggles had filled the room. The nearby steel mill pumped its scent into the air. The baby girl’s mother had commented on it earlier with a somewhat weary tone, not looking forward to another hot summer with that smell permeating the humidity. “I kind of really like it,” I admitted. “There was a mill in my neighborhood where I grew up. I’d forgotten all about that smell.” That mill was long gone now, the land being reborn into luxury apartments and townhomes. Those don’t have a scent, as far as I know.

The train roared past, announcing our departure from Braddock. Entering that small town had been like a trip back in time for both me and the husband. Despite the tremendous efforts pouring into the community to restore it, it remained a worn version of itself from when it started its rapid decline when we were kids. “This is exactly what Pittsburgh looked like when we were little,” we marveled. “All of it. The houses, the streets…” and the intangibles that we couldn’t quite grasp, like the way your dad smells when he comes in for dinner after working outside. Everything seemed…slower…drowsier. Happy and sad with the knowledge that life just keeps on going, like spring afternoons and baby toes and a groaning, creaking steel mill that used to pump the lifeblood of a community and now just pumps weird scents into the air.

We rode toward our end of town and I let the wind create small knots in my hair, brief suggestions of red lace. We sped past Carrie Furnace, which imposed itself against the landscape of still brown trees aching to burst with yellow-green buds. The rusty red stairs and bridge demanded that you look and respect it. As my baby dozed off in the back seat, the husband turned up the song that had come on.

Home is where I want to be. But I guess I’m already there.

I was sure I’d been somewhere else all this time, lost and alone with no way back. Looking at that huge furnace and its bright red appendages, my chest suddenly ached. This is my home. This landscape created me. It shrivels and dies and seems to disappear, but its elegant beasts remain, landmarks to remind me of where I’ve always been.

This is me, pretty much all the time now:

I feel like all I do is work and then come home and fall asleep on the couch. In between all of that, I mentally toil with some stuff, but nothing that I feel comfortable sharing here. Maybe I could do like the blog equivalent of Mad Libs?

“Kelly [adverb] [verb]ed some [adjective] [noun] with [person in the room]. It was a [adjective] [noun] and it made her [verb].”

I can tell you that I got my hairs cut the other day.

My desire to keep the salon blowout has prevented me from washing my hair, so picture me today with a stringier, somewhat Kelly-Cutroneish version of the cut above.

I have, however, been keeping myself busy around these here internets. I wrote on MoxieBird this week about Arianna Huffington, the iPad 2, legislative fetuses, $14,000 prom dresses, and gender roles in toy commercials. On MamaPop, I wrote about the aforementioned Kelly Cutrone, Kate Middleton, Oprah, and, of course, Big Love (or, as I tend to call it nowadays, “God damn fucking Big Love,” because I write out the events of each week’s episodes and sprain my eyes from rolling them so hard. Who knew a show about polygamists would turn out to be absurd? Oh, wait…). Also also wik, I’m writing on the new iteration of Sweetney. I wrote last week about what my “Mommy Card” might look like, and this week I wrote about how bitchin’ roller skating is.

I’m hoping that Daylight Savings ending next weekend will help. Winter seems to kick my ass harder and harder each year. SIGH.

The baby, not surprisingly, is shaping up to be quite the smart ass. When he was leaving for school the other day, he said good-bye to the husband, who told him (as he does every day) to do well in school. The baby replied, “Thanks for the words of wisdom, Daddy.” I’m so screwed.

I had a not-so-great evening last night. I was in a really bad mood after work and started babbling to the husband about the various Dark Things that I was thinking.

“I feel like I managed to screw up my life without actually doing anything wrong or bad.”

I used to feel this way all the time but I’ve been trying to just push it back and away because it doesn’t help anything. I think it bubbled up because I haven’t been running in about three weeks (no real good excuse…got sick and work’s been CRAZY). But after ranting for awhile I settled down. We headed to our neighborhood and visited with the husband’s grandmother, home tonight after a very rough two weeks in the hospital. Perspective: gulped down like the big ol’ pill that it is.

We trudged to our house, hungry, and I became pretty angry with the baby for not completing his homework at his after school program. If he waits until we get home, he’s always too tired and what should be 20 minutes of work turns into 3 hours. While he looked for excuses to dawdle around his math problems, I picked up a piece of homework that he had finished: a worksheet asking him to study some greeting cards and deduce what the greetings inside might be.

I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I could barely breathe. Tears rolled down my face. I shared the greeting cards with the husband and he cracked up, too.

We seem to be raising some kind of accidental greeting card genius. If I were someecards, I would be very scared right now.

It starts off innocently enough with, “Hope you get well,” but then we move into the cool, detached world of new baby joy with, “Your baby is looking well.”

There’s another basic greeting of, “Congratulations on getting married,” but then there are those other two.

Every time I look at this, I lose it. If I don’t get this card for my birthday this year, I’m going to be pissed.

The baby was surprised that we found them funny, but was pleased to have made us laugh. Of course, after that happy moment, he continued to stall on his homework, which pissed everyone off. Whatever. Cool bike.

I posted to MamaPop last week about a UK show called Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (or My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding according to some sites) and wailed about how it wasn’t available to watch in the US. I forgot, of course, that this is the internet and anything can be had if you know the right people. I won’t reveal my sources, but a few discs with some episodes arrived in my mailbox last week and I spent Saturday afternoon devouring them.

It’s pretty wild. The gypsies and travelers regard themselves as very strict and traditional. Gender roles are severely defined and haven’t changed much in the face of several waves of feminism and a sexual revolution. Girls marry young and move immediately into their roles as homemakers. They do this in their mid-to-late teens, which is around the time that many girls begin exploring their sexuality. So they’re able to say with some degree of authority that there is no pre-marital sex.

Because of the young marital age, gypsies and travelers seem to be far more tolerant about outward displays of sexuality extremely early in life. I watched, slack-jawed, as a group of 8-year-old girls celebrated their cousin’s First Holy Communion by grinding in high heels and tiny skirts and tops. Their parents and grandparents sat and watched and beamed with joy, the same expressions that they might have if they were watching the kids play Duck, Duck, Goose. They’re not concerned about the early sexualization of the girls because a) they’re only a few years out from being married anyway and b) they’re merely imitating the behavior of presumably chaste adolescents. The boys display a sense of territoriality by participating in “grabbing,” a courtship ritual that sounds a lot like accepted assault to me.

I wish the show would explore these gender roles and sexuality conventions more thoroughly, but they spend a lot of time on the bridal attire, if for no other reason than how absurd it is. I’m really curious about the general attire of the young people, which is, again, sexually provocative but to the ends of securing a husband, and other outfits that almost look like stereotypical/racially offensive gypsy costumes that you might see around Halloween in the US.

Anyway, all that pondering aside, I suddenly found myself feeling a bit of a pang during the Communion scenes. It occurred to me that the baby is around the age, perhaps even a bit older, that he would be making his First Communion if we were raising him Catholic. I remember being extremely excited about mine and in the context of this show I began to wonder how much of that was because of the dress and the veil that I got to wear. We looked like mini-brides and were giddy about that. But the important thing about my Communion outfit was that it was my mom’s. I was the latest in a long of people who had made the same sacrament. It was presumed that I would continue the tradition…until I knew that I wouldn’t.

Parenting and life are so scary sometimes, that maybe traditions, even those surrounded by yucky things like inequity, are comforting because they give us some road map that was laid down by people who lived and took care of their families with what seems to be a degree of certainty. Of course, the old ways were once new and there’s nothing stopping us from forging new traditions that are more appropriate for how we feel about and experience life. But I can’t help but look at even the most ridiculous, competitive dress for a young gypsy girl and think there’s something at least a little nice about it, the sheer celebration of survival of it.

Today was a long day and I say that after yesterday, which I dubbed “Tullamore Dewsday” because of how long it was.

Earlier tonight, I plopped down on the floor in the hallway while waiting for the baby to be done brushing his teeth. I was short on patience and told him that I just needed the day to be over. After he finished in the bathroom, I heard him rummaging around in his toys. He emerged a minute later with a Hot Wheels car and some kind of stick. He then proceeded to give me a massage by running the car up and down my back and tapping me with the stick. It didn’t make much sense but it made me feel a little bit better.

The baby has not had a full day of school in close to two weeks due to various things like holidays, school closings, doctor’s appointments, and Surprise! Your Strep Test Is Positive! parties. I’m not entirely convinced that he has retained the ability to read.

On Sunday, I started displaying symptoms of the husband’s Man Cold that he was just getting over.

This resulted in me doing things like NotLaundry and NotGrocery Shopping. The husband and I both ended up passed out on the couch for a good two hours in the afternoon. During that time, the baby turned on Adventure Time and helped himself to a bag of Cheetos (aka our AFC Championship buffet). I half-opened one eye about 1.5 hours into my nap and mumbled, “Yo. Take it easy on those Cheetos, dude,” and went back to sleep. It was a proud moment for me as I have long yearned to reach the same level of parental competence as Britney Spears.

After a night of sleep that could only be described as, “Really weird…and moist,” I went to work yesterday fueled entirely by DayQuil. Aside from being rather drippy and cycling in and out of sweating spells, I felt surprisingly okay. But last night, I started to feel kind of woozy. I told the husband this and he cackled and told me that I had not yet reached the zenith of my sickness. Yay.

Speaking of parenting, over the winter break, I started watching…nay, devouring episodes of Intervention on Netflix. The husband finds this habit of mine entirely absurd and even I reached a point about halfway through season three where I thought, “I can’t watch this anymore.” The situation was so disturbing and I had a pretty sick feeling that we only knew the half of it. Just to be clear, I’m not referring to the episode featuring Sylvia, the alcoholic Southern belle. Though that episode was disturbing because when they first showed her cracking open a mini-bottle of vodka while driving, I said, “Holy shit, is that Lucille from Arrested Development? Is this like the April Fool’s episode of Intervention?” The resemblance was that uncanny.

But the whole thing has me freaked out about parenting. I mean, plenty of the people featured on the show had some really horrible experiences and I don’t think anyone can blame them for just checking out of life. But then there are some people who had relatively good existences and then blam. “My mom pushed me to get good grades so I started doing heroin. My dad criticized my cooking this one time so now I weigh 30 pounds. My mom was tired that one time and couldn’t devote her entire consciousness to me so now I’m 90% Jack Daniels.”

I’m not terrified of the baby trying alcohol or even some drugs when he’s older. But I am scared of him finding any number of my imperfect behaviors devastating and running with that to the crack house. Now, every time I shout, “DO. YOUR. HOMEWORK!” I panic and hide all of the liquor. But I know I’m oversimplifying and overreacting. If something as crazy as addiction could be simply boiled down to bad parenting, I doubt it would be so hard to overcome. I just…I just see a bunch of people who love ya like crazy and they feel like they’re losin’ ya.

(Sigh. Right after I finished writing this, I had to angrily reclaim my iPhone from the baby after I asked for it three times so now I’m wondering what in our house can be used to cook up a shot.)

The baby was sick all weekend with some weird viral thing that the pediatrician diagnosed as “some crud.” Immediately after the Steeler game on Saturday, he puked, but that portion was mercifully over right away and replaced by a fever and sore throat. He was mostly better yesterday, but I kept him home.

Then last night, in the midst of cooking dinner (black bean soup, of all unpleasant visual things), this crap happened again. I’m now fairly certain that the culprit was not a virus but some protein mix that I had put into a smoothie both times that may have turned. I shuffled upstairs to brush my teeth and while I was in the bathroom, the baby adjusted the bed covers, laid a towel over my pillow like I do for him when he’s fighting stomach nastiness, placed a bucket next to the bed, then got some books out. When I came out of the bathroom, he splayed the books out in front of me, three Diary of a Wimpy Kid books and Tales of Beedle the Bard. “Mum, pick one,” he said. I picked the Beedle book. “Uh, not that one,” he replied. Then we climbed into bed and he read Diary of a Wimpy Kid to me while I closed my eyes and tried to think about all things non-vomitous.

It’s really nice to be taken care of sometimes.