kdiddy.org

My poor kiddo was sick over the weekend. Indeed, his ailments on Mother’s Day got a little worse before they got better.

He doesn’t have asthma, but his lungs seem to be especially prone to congestion and nastiness whenever he gets a cold.

Saturday he seemed to be sniffling more than usual (we’re all kind of drippy this time of year) and that night he was wheezy and miserable. We sent him to bed and in the morning he didn’t seem to have improved much. He slept most of the day while I pushed fluids and Tylenol, which didn’t seem to help.

We made him eat some dinner and get a long, hot shower before putting him to bed.

Aside: a few weeks ago, he had a stomach virus that thankfully didn’t last too long. We picked him up from school and on the drive home instructed him to let us know if things were starting to go downhill. Close to our house, he suddenly announced, “Things are going downhill!” and then successfully barfed out of the window as we sped home. It was hilarious and cute and kind of pathetic all at the same time.

Anyway, Sunday night, things started going downhill again. From downstairs, I could hear him saying something like, “Mum!” I went up and asked him if he was okay and…well…he began speaking in tongues.

“Mum. Mum. Muuuuummmm. Murrrrmmmm. Maaaaa. Maaaaaaa.”

“I’m here, buddy. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeeeehhhh. Yeaaaahhhhhhhh. Ahhhhhh. Yeeeeeee,” he replied, in a growl.

“Buddy, wake up. What’s wrong?”

“Caaaaaa. Caaaaaa. Caaaaaa. Cuurrrrrrppp.”

Well, shit. That’s never a good sign, is it? I could tell that he was not fully awake but it still freaked me out, so I called for the husband, trying to figure out the best way to inform someone that their son is possessed.

The husband came upstairs, still chatting on his cell phone to a friend, but abruptly ended his conversation when he got to hear some of the baby’s demonic freestyling. “Uh, my son is…ill. I’ll talk to you later.”

We got him out of bed and he started to seem slightly more…of this realm, especially when he informed us that he had wet the bed. We peppered him with questions and he still seemed mostly out of it, saying stuff like, “I don’t like life,” and his breathing was still not great. I declared that we needed to go to the hospital, worried that perhaps he was having serious trouble breathing while laying down, which could have caused the Regan performance.

The husband wanted to cool him down first in the shower, since he seemed to be running a fever. I scurried off to get dressed. However, once the baby was in the shower, the cool water snapped him out of whatever half-sleep he had been in and he started making way more sense.

The husband told me that the baby seemed okay at that point, just a victim of fever-induced nightmares, and that we should just sit up with him for a little bit and then decide if we should continue on to the hospital. I stood in the baby’s room wearing nothing but a bra and some pajama pants and, in that get-up, had the audacity to peer at him cautiously and make decisions about his sanity and well-being.

We let him watch Treme with us and I pulled him into my lap so that I could pat his back. The husband watched us and laughed at the sight of our 8-year-old curled up on my shoulder. “He’s too big, Kel!” he chuckled. Never!

Despite making a dramatic improvement overnight, we took him to the doctor yesterday anyway. The doc commended me on my detailed chronology of his illness. I did not get a sticker. Harsh. However, I didn’t think my account was all that stellar. What must other people do? Plop their kid on the butcher paper, point, and say, “It’s broken?”

The baby politely asked the nurse, “Will there be shots involved?” He was relieved that there weren’t but became slightly alarmed when the doctor prescribed him a steroid for his condition, especially since we had just been talking about Barry Bonds a few nights prior.

“Steroids?” he asked, perhaps worried that he might get kicked out of Little League for juicing. And, besides, heads run big in our family. His small frame can’t support domes of the Bonds or McGwire variety

“Yes, but not the kind that make you…” the doc paused, and curled his arms to flex his muscles.

We were sent home with our prescriptions, which included breathing treatments. We had been through the nebulizer routine once before, a few years ago, when he had persistent congestion. We used to jokingly refer to it as huffing gas. “Okay, kiddo, time to huff gas!” I bet his teachers love all of the colorful phrases that he adds to the elementary school lexicon.

This morning he returned to school and I reported to the husband, “I gave him his steroids and he huffed gas. He’s all set for the day.”

When I was a kid, I had a Cabbage Patch Kids calendar. If I remember correctly, it was for 1987. The calendar had Cabbage Patch Kid dolls posed in situations appropriate for each month: a Kid in rain jacket, galoshes, and umbrella for April, two Kids exchanging valentines for February. My favorite was May’s picture: one Kid in the kitchen, flour splattered everywhere, working diligently on a Mother’s Day breakfast while around the corner his sibling tiptoed down the stairs in footie pajamas, early morning light pouring in from a window, looking cautiously (er, well, as cautiously as one can look when one’s head is made from molded vinyl) behind him in the direction of his Cabbage Patch Mom’s room.

I don’t know why I liked it so much and why it’s remained so perfectly preserved in my memory. Perhaps I was drawn to the intricate short story that the producers of the calendar created with just a couple of dolls and a miniature kitchen. Maybe something about the set reminded me of my home, with its sunny stairs and dated carpeting. Maybe I liked fantasizing about my future kids working hard on a special breakfast for me on Mother’s Day.

I can’t remember if I ever attempted any such grand gestures as the Cabbage Patch Kids for my own mom. In fact, I can’t clearly remember anything that I did for my mom, so I can only hope that at least some of those days made her feel special and loved, especially since I know most of our usual days did not, an unfortunate circumstance that continues to trouble her to this day.

My life as a mom is less tumultuous, though still difficult for different reasons, mostly due to the degree of uncertainty that we feel about life and the shape of our future. Something that I’ve been working on recently is being okay with the fact that things don’t always turn out the way that I had hoped or had pictured it, and that doesn’t necessarily spell failure.

When Mother’s Day comes around, I often indulge in fantasies inspired by those Cabbage Patch Kids and, I don’t know, Hallmark commercials or wherever the lore of picture perfect Mother’s Day mornings comes from. I sleep in and wake up to breakfast that the baby and the husband have made for me. Some nice gifts and sweet words about how swell I am.

This never, ever happens. I mean, sure, I get gifts sometimes and cards sometimes and heartfelt wishes of Happy Mother’s Day, all of which I love and cherished, but they’re never encased in a perfect, soft-focus, ready-made memory. They’re always tucked in between rushed drives to various mothers-in-law and grandmothers-in-law’s houses to wish them Happy Mother’s Day and errands that must be performed on weekends, because our need for groceries and clean clothes doesn’t keep track of holidays and whatnot.

This Mother’s Day, I write to you from the couch. The baby came down with something last night and didn’t sleep much, which means I didn’t sleep much, either. He made sure to give me my cards before collapsing in my lap so that I could thump on his back to break up the junk in his lungs. He’s resting beside me, not himself, and I’m waiting to see if he’s sick enough to warrant a call to the doctor. The husband is still asleep.

Not picture perfect. Not by a long shot. But not a failure. Just how life is sometimes.

One of the ongoing sources of conflict between my mom and my husband and me is the amount of junk that the baby comes home with when he spends time with her.

Full disclosure: my child is spoiled. His toys and belongings have at least some presence in nearly every room in our house. We buy stuff for him (rarely, because a) we’re broke and b) he really doesn’t need more crap), and then he has two grandmothers, two grandfathers, an aunt, two great-grandmothers, a great-grandfather, and a slew of extended relatives who think he is so swell that he deserves another Bionicle. The husband and I have had to be stern/mean to our well-meaning families explaining to them that all of the plastic junk that they buy him is, in fact, junk, that he has a lot of trouble distinguishing between wants and needs (and, yes, we know he’s only 8 but it really feels like we’re fighting an unwinnable war here), that the rate at which new toys come in is way too fast, and that we simply do not have the time nor the desire to constantly find places for new toys or to sort through and get rid of old toys.

Our house is big, over 4,000 square feet, and there’s no reason that we should have a hard time finding room for stuff.

Many of the assorted grandparents have listened and curtailed their gift-giving. My mom continues to buy him trinkets and whatnot when they go out, despite me sometimes tearfully telling her not to. She sees my house. She knows it’s always messy and it stresses me out. And, really, I thought the problem sort of ended there.

The baby spent the night at her house on Saturday and Sunday he arrived home bearing two toys from Kawaii, a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, a big bottle of Sprite, and…lord help me…a can of Axe Body Spray.

Her justification: “Well, he wanted this $50 bottle of cologne at Sephora so we got this instead.”

Why is everyone just apparently drunk all the time? How did I miss this nonsensical party that everyone lives in now?

Anyway, the combination of the Cheetos, Sprite, and Axe gave me a glimpse of the future. Really, I thought I had a few years before my kid staunchly eats nothing but junk food and smells of the signature fragrance of sexual and emotional immaturity and the desperation that only horny teens can emit.

Much like skunks and mustard gas, Axe performs a hostile takeover of each and every molecule every time it is released. About two hours after the substance had entered our house, the baby had squirted himself several times and was starting to ensure that his toys smelled pimp musk by giving them the treatment.

The Axe was then confiscated and is now residing on top of our fridge (right next to his DS, which was confiscated last week and MY GOD has it been a trying time in the kdiddy household), probably making everything up there smell weird. The next step is to gain entry into my mom’s house and set up some kind of Axe bomb.

Sigh. Anyhah. Sad Little known fact about me: some times if the husband is out and I’m by myself on a weekend night, I drink beers and watch music videos and talk shit on them. I remember when the video for Ciara’s “One Two Step” was in heavy rotation and around 2 and 1/2 minutes into the video, a guy douses himself and the air around him with Axe. It makes me choke every time I see it.

That’s me at my desk. I’ve been in this position most of the day because I have this really annoying stomachache.

So what’s been going on with me? Eh, a lot and not much, know what I mean? I’ve been really busy at work, aside from being doubled over and groaning. The baby had his first Little League game last Saturday, which followed their annual parade down our main street to the ball field.
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This morning, I admitted something to myself: I’m neurotic about lunch.

And, like any good mother, I blame my son for this.

He’s a picky eater, though much MUCH better than he used to be. But at any given time, the list of things that he will eat for lunch is pretty short. So, I’m always trying to find some balance of actual calorie input and health for him. Currently, he will eat half of a sandwich, consisting of bread (wheat or rye) and lunch meat (we’re on a chicken breast kick right now), a cup of applesauce (no sugar added or high fructose corn syrup), sometimes a cheese stick (I go totally mainstream here and give him Kraft), sometimes a few baby carrots and/or some other fruit or veggie.

His old lunch box was one of those canvassy, zipper joints that was kind of small and useless. A few times, I let him use my Laptop Lunch and recently that company came out with some new bento lunch systems.
When our tax return came, I took a few bucks and ordered him one, along with some extra containers. Today was his second day using it. He had a sandwich, some carrots, some graham crackers, and some strawberries. He seemed a little indifferent about it yesterday. I hope he gets more enthusiastic about it.

I had a Laptop Lunch because I have been on a quest for the perfect lunch vessel for some years. I liked the Laptop Lunch, but I felt that it was just too small for me. I like to bring a pretty big salad, a “main” dish, dressing and croutons on the side, a snack, and my breakfast. And if I don’t have what I consider a good lunch, I get all anxious about it. I was explaining this to someone the other day as they eyed my tote bag of containers of various sizes. I needed a change.

Around the same time that I bought the baby his Laptop Lunch, I bought a tiffin from Happy Tiffin. I heard about tiffins last summer in my business class when we watched a movie about dabbawalas.

My tiffin arrived yesterday and I was so excited to pack it up today.

Here we have my salad and my bagel for breakfast…

This is my wrap sandwich that contains a layer of fresh spinach and a helping of my tweaked version this Curried Tofu Salad. (I need to take a little more time preparing that salad the next time that I make it. It’s too watery this time from the veggies and tofu. But very tasty.) The other container holds my croutons and dressing, plus a snack of sunflower seeds and dried cranberries in one of those silicone cupcake baking cups, which is a trick that I learned from watching blogs about bento-style lunches.

And here it is, all stacked up, latched, and ready to go. The only problem that I’ve had so far is finding a fork that will fit. Also, obviously, this isn’t microwave-safe, so I’m not sure what I’ll do if I ever want to bring leftovers to heat up. And if I were to bring something that was already warm, I would need to keep it away from things like my salad.

Like I said, I’m neurotic about lunch.

But so far, I’m pretty happy with it.

Speaking of food, I’m going to have some pretty big posts on the matter coming up in the next few days, so be sure to check back, especially if you’re in the Pittsburgh area.

I’m pretty sure that every spring around this time, my brain goes to work blocking my memories of how stressed I get. This is always an incredibly busy time for me at work and yesterday I was thinking about how the three springs prior to this one, I was taking two graduate classes (and getting As). I really can’t even begin to imagine, nor do I want to, how completely freaked out I must have been. And I really don’t know how I didn’t a) flunk out of grad school b) get fired or c) permanently alienate my family and anyone who had the misfortune of coming into contact with me.

I voiced this concern last night. “You were annoying, that’s for sure,” replied the husband. Gee, thanks.

That saying that God will never give you more than you can handle might have some truth to it, provided that God or some universal force does, in fact, exist and determines exactly what pile of shit we’ll fall into and God or this universal force has either a drinking problem or is just sadistic and prickish (because, really, WTF?). My evidence for this is that the baby has been pretty well-behaved up until this year.

He’s not up to anything really delinquent. All of the flies in our vicinity still have wings and he has not seen the inside of a juvenile detention center. But something in him realized that some bad behavior would no longer send his mother completely off the edge so he decided to try some out.

A few weeks ago, I received a phone call at work from his teacher, who sounded so completely DONE that I very nearly offered to buy her a drink. The baby had incrementally raised his level of douchiness over the preceding week or so. At first it was mostly small, isolated incidents of not listening, but by the time I received the call, he was nearing Lord of the Flies levels.

I listened quietly as his teacher, who I know is a reasonable person with as much patience as one should have in a second-grade teaching position, listed the increasingly assy things he had done. I wasn’t entirely surprised. A lot of it was stuff that we struggled with at home, just amplified by the presence of other 8-year-olds.

I apologized and immediately set up a parent-teacher conference, screamed via email to the MamaPop writers that I was sending him to Dutch country, and then the husband and I started crafting the crack-down.

We drew up a contract that outlined the behaviors that had to improve considerably over the period of two weeks and the privileges that would be removed during that time. No DS. No Wii. No Cartoon Network. Earlier bedtime (which will remain in place because I think he might have been a little sleep-deprived, contributing to his behavior). No arguing. No whining. Doing what he’s asked to do the first time. We would evaluate his performance in two weeks. If he had improved, he would start to get some of his privileges back. If he hadn’t, we would take away more stuff: no TV, no iPod, even earlier bedtime, no excursions with grandparents. No fun or joy, basically.

All three of us signed it and posted it on the fridge. We explained to him that it’s bad enough that he wasn’t behaving well for us, but we were disappointed/PISSED that he wasn’t behaving at school.

He got it. He cried, mostly because he was going to miss his DS, but partly because he felt pretty rotten about screwing up. A couple of times I’ve explained to him exactly how and why I get stressed and upset and how his behavior affects that (ie, I’m just trying to make a nice life for us and it’s hard and you being a jerk makes me feel like crap) and while still over his head, I think it twinges his empathy. So that’s good.

By the time we went for our parent-teacher conference, his teacher informed us that he had done a 180. So, I think I’ll go ahead and put a W in our column.

I don’t know. It felt kind of severe, but we really wanted him to understand how not cool it is to behave like a jackass. It’s an important life lesson, you know?

Of course, it might not be entirely his fault. Last night, while looking through the baby’s iPod, the husband said to me, “Did you put The Chronic on here?”

“Um…maybe?”

It appears I was not paying close attention when adding music to the baby’s iPod and added an album that, while undoubtedly a classic and one that I hope will be part of his regular rotation in the future, is not entirely appropriate for an 8-year-old and his spongy brain. Tonight’s project: re-evaluate iPod contents.

The other night, I had just drifted off to sleep. Our cat was curled up against my tummy, purring away and giving me some extra warmth. I was reaching that really good point of sleep when a small, familiar voice woke me up with a phrase that always makes me panic:

“Mum. I don’t feel so good.”

It was the baby, obviously, and his stomach was upset. He’s never been very good about describing his symptoms, but from what I could gather, he’d just experienced one of those vomit-burps. I’m sure you know what I mean. It starts out as a burp and then takes a frightening detour and though you emerge with your digestive system intact for the moment, it freaks you out. Am I getting ready to spew? Or was it just a slight malfunction? I need to know how much I need to dread the next few minutes/hours and whether or not I should move my operations to the bathroom.

I felt my stomach drop, particularly when the baby squeezed out a few tears and rested his head on my chest (partially because I felt bad for the little guy and partially because if there was going to be spewing happening, I did not want his face mere inches from mine).

I interrogated him on the state of his stomach (“Do you think you need to barf? Have you pooped today? On a scale of 1 to 10, how gross does your stomach feel?”) and urged him to try going to the bathroom. I gave him a Tums, even though I wasn’t sure he was old enough to have one yet, and after a few minutes he declared that he thought he was okay.

He climbed back into bed and I asked him if he wanted a bucket, just in case. He did. I climbed back into my bed and stared at the ceiling and waited and listened.

Though I’ve gotten better at handling digestive eruptions since I’ve been a mom, I’m still prone to panic at the thought of one of us coming down with any kind of stomach bug because I can’t deal with vomit. And, of course, because I’ve turned overthinking things into a sport, I’m sure that this speaks volumes about me as an adult and a parent.

I can remember at least two occasions in which the baby has puked and I have handed the reigns over to another parental figure with shaking hands. Once was when he was about a year old and we were living with my mom. It wasn’t the first time he had been sick, but for whatever reason, I stood in the doorway of his room, wide-eyed, unable to move, and asked my mom to please clean him up for me.

Another time was about a year ago and we had made the unfortunate decision to eat at Wendy’s earlier that evening. Regurgitated chicken nuggets are, I’m pretty sure, the scent of Hell. I couldn’t deal and the husband heroically did all of the dirty work.

Because of our recent crushing blows, I’ve been really upset. Like, really upset. And I’m questioning every aspect of my life and how I’m doing. My evaluation of myself results in pretty low marks and my inability to deal with vomit or even the threat of vomit threw me.

I don’t remember my mom ever having trouble taking care of me. I can distinctly recall a particularly nasty stomach bug that I had in third grade that seemed to go on for days and had me spending my nights in my parents’ bed, next to my mom, and when I had to get sick I would KICK her. She would wake up and hold back my hair and direct me toward the bucket. Calm, sleepy, unfazed, and certainly not dry heaving behind me.

I don’t know that I could do that and it’s just the latest in a long list of things that I’m feeling…incapable of. I’m having trouble going to sleep at a reasonable hour, getting up at a reasonable hour, doing laundry, participating in any cleaning activities, exercising, dieting, getting lunches and clothes ready for the next day, figuring out what I want to do about job stuff, raising a man, being a partner to a man.

Am I just overwhelmed? Or am I just incapable?

Failure One: Mousse

I made a cake for my co-worker’s birthday. Specifically, this Chocolate Overdose Cake. I’m not really exaggerating that the cake has made me something of a legend at the office. (And, perhaps, alienated my co-worker for stealing the spotlight on her birthday. Sorry. Am jackass. But with tasty cake.)

Also, Abby (I think) reports that people will never take you seriously if you’re the person who brings in baked goods to the office. To which I say, “Fine. Don’t take me seriously. Enjoy your grocery store cake. Nyah.”

Setting out, I realized that I didn’t have any round cake pans so I convinced the husband to let me cross the threshold of Sur la Table. Oh. My. God. I actually forgot one thing and had to go back the next day. Getting into the car, I said, “I really should be commended for the restraint that I showed in there.” A whole wall of small appliances. Every kind of spatula you could imagine (Spatula City). A stack of shelves with cake pans that I could barely see the top of. It was heaven. And also why I have thus far avoided any restaurant supply stores. I would absolutely break down and chain myself to one of those big KitchenAid mixers. Pictures that I’ve seen from others’ trips to such places nearly had me in tears.

Anyway, to make the mousse layer, the recipe tells you to make the whipped cream in a chilled mixer bowl, melt the chocolate, and put the chocolate in a separate stainless steel bowl. Then, take 1/4 cup of the whipped cream and whisk it into the chocolate to temper it, then fold the rest of the whipped cream in. In an effort to avoid cluttering my tiny kitchen with more bowls, I just left the whipped cream in the mixer bowl, tempered the chocolate, and then put it into the whipped cream. I quickly found out why the new bowl was necessary.

That is not cookies and cream ice cream, but whipped cream with tiny bits of melted chocolate that were shocked into solid pellets upon their meeting the cold whipped cream. It tasted okay, but the consistency was too weird. I left the bowl of failed mousse with the husband and baby so that they could pick at it, and tried again.

MUCH better.

I don’t have any pictures of the finished cake because the “decorating,” if you can call it that, looked worthy of Cake Wrecks. And I made the ill-advised decision to write “Happy Birthday [Name of Co-Worker]!” with one of those Cake Mate “easy to write!” tubes. Here’s the honest to dog truth: any product that claims to be for home chefs and easy-to-use is full of crap. Take some extra time and learn how to use the real thing. Because “Happy Birthday [Name of Co-Worker]!” ended up looking like, “Hbbbj Bbbbby Vcccccc!” with random lines and dots scattered throughout.

Those snafus aside, it was AMAZING. So delicious. Make it. Or have someone make it for you to prove their love.

* * *

Failure Two: Our child evokes one of the characters in Idiocracy

I mentioned recently that the baby is very grumpy about school right now. We haven’t gotten to the bottom of that, but in the meantime we’re still working with him on our own to make sure that he’s learning stuff.

Last night, while sitting in horrendous traffic, the baby asked us what the capital of Pittsburgh was.

“Cities don’t have capitals, buddy. Countries and states do,” we explained.

“Oh,” he said.

“So, what’s the capital of Pennsylvania?”

“Harrisburg.”

“Right. And what’s the capital of the United States?”

“Washington, D.C.”

“Right! And what’s the capital of San Francisco?” we asked, checking to see if he was paying attention.

“Um…Philly?”

“What? No. Philadelphia is a city in Pennsylvania. San Francisco is also a city in California. And cities don’t have capitals, remember?”

“Noooo! PHILLY is in San Francisco!”

“Buddy, no, “Philly” is short for Philadelphia, and it’s in Pennsylvania.”

“Man, I HATE Biology.”

Oh, dear. So, when we finally got home and after the baby had finished his homework, the husband went over some biology geography with him. It hadn’t really been a focus of ours, but we had hoped that he was picking up some useful knowledge from this interactive map game that the husband’s grandmother gave him a while back. Of course, upon closer inspection, perhaps we shouldn’t have handed over some of our teaching responsibilities to this thing.

It has a bit of a Kerouac ring to it, yes? Packing up the jalopy and driving across the America. Wait til we be lovers in Frisco.

* * *

Failure Three: The pesky need for air

I seem to have caught some of the Man Cold that the husband and baby were fighting a few days ago. And it really hadn’t crimped my lifestyle until last night when I went to do the 30 Day Shred. I was kind of excited because it was my first attempt at Level 2. I was getting bored with Level 1 and had been eager to move on, but achey knees prevented me from doing so sooner.

Here’s the thing about strenuous exercise while congested: Don’t. Do. It. Seriously. Very bad idea. I nearly died during one of the cardio portions because I had to exercise while mouth-breathing, which caused severe mouth dryness, which caused a malfunction when I tried to swallow and catch my breath without the benefit of a functioning airway.

While Jillian screeched, “I WANT YOU TO FEEL LIKE YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!” I wheezed and coughed and tried desperately to rehydrate my mouth.

When I finally finished, the husband said, “Do you feel like you’re going to die?” I replied, “I nearly suffocated and saw birdies.” Then I sneezed on him.

I’m trying to power through this writer’s block, especially since the husband resurrected our home computer and we purchased a new router, so my technology hermitage has ended. Fucking finally. And because I am so SO tired of the FML nature of my more recent posts, I want to share with you some tidbits about the fruit of my loins abdominal incision.

He’s getting really tall and so cute…like, in the way that I just know is already making girls giggle. Relatedly, he has a girlfriend. Or had. Apparently she was a little flighty. Whatever.

One day, a few weeks ago, he wore a bow tie to school. And joined the chess club. In the same day. Despite such nerdery, he’s pretty cranky about school and doesn’t want to do homework at all ever. I’m not disturbed by this (homework does indeed suck), but would really like to not have to have the, “JUST DO IT ALREADY, GAWD!” conversation again. I am pleased to say that these conversations have become less heated since I finished school. They no longer contain tirades of, “Write your spelling words three times??!?! Do you know what I would give to have to do that right now? Have you ever attempted to redesign the instructional text of an authoritative book on coherent topical progression? Or had to schedule user testing? HUH? HAVE YOU?” Although, at least that would usually stun him into a puzzled silence. Now he remains cognizant enough to talk back to me and I hate that.

We took him with us to see The Imaginarium of Dr. ParnAssus the other night. He’s developed a taste for Monty Python stuff and when we told him that the director of Imaginarium also directed Time Bandits and was Patsy, the King’s coconut-clacker in The Holy Grail, he was all about it. He liked it. We all did. Depending on your opinion of 8-year-olds, that might make total sense or be totally bizarre.

The movie ended up having some really interesting statements about…not so much celebrity, specifically, but devoting your life to bullshit and whatnot and death. They were especially interesting in light of the fact that Heath Ledger died in the middle of making the movie. Johnny Depp and Jude Law stepped in to act as alternate versions of Ledger’s character in the Imaginarium and seeing them say insightful things about fame and ambition and death knowing that they were kind of talking about the late Ledger was pretty wild.

Speaking of movies, our friend burned Paranormal Activity and Moon for us. The only problem was that the movies were .avis. We watched them on my laptop but my laptop’s speakers aren’t very loud and our furnace makes a huge racket. Whenever it would kick on, we couldn’t hear a thing of the movie. The husband acted as the crack A/V guy and tried several things to remedy the situation. At one point, we had the laptop hooked up to his clock radio, the short power cord necessitating it to be five feet away from us and ultimately useless. We finally wrestled the computer speakers off of the desk and hooked those up, and of course that power cord was too short so we had to get the big, green extension cord off of the porch. It was a total sight. I think it could have only been klassier if we had just extended the power cord with the string of Christmas lights that are half burnt-out and only display green and orange, which appeals to my Irish heritage but looks like a St. Patrick’s Day decoration gone awry.

But, whatever, he MacGuyvered that shit to within an inch of its life and fortunately the movies both turned out to be pretty good. (If they’d sucked, we’d have been pissed.) Moon was especially good, especially after I got over the rapid comparisons that I was making to 2001, Alien, Solaris, Multiplicity (um, yeah), and Los cronocrimenes. It eventually stood on its own two feet and was rather beautiful.

It’s slightly pathetic how excited I am to be back at work. However, I have good reasons: a functional computer (well, sorta, my work computer is OLD), functional internet, one more quiet week to hunker down and get stuff done, and for the first time in years, I can work without having to stop and go to class.

Plus, the baby is back at school today and as fun as our winter break was, he was exhibiting signs of extreme cabin fever. After a day or so of non-stop (literally NON. STOP.) talking, we realized he needed to expend some energy. He went skiing with the father-in-law and played in the snow. We also went roller skating the other night and I am happy to report that our relatively frequent skating sessions have restored my long-dormant skills. Like, I can actually move both feet now instead of dragging along my paralytic left foot and making up for its dead weight by pumping my arms. This skating method is neither effective nor graceful and I do not recommend it.

When we were inside, I showed the baby this montage of Harrison Ford forcefully saying, “my WIFE,” or “my FAMILY” in at least 40 movies and he is now obsessed with it.

I hear him muttering, “my WIFE” every now and then and it’s a little disarming. It is now my favorite pop culture tic of his, with his impersonation of Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight crying, “RACHEL! RACHEL!” a very close second.

Also, and I’m going to abruptly end this post after this because…I don’t know, the engagement photos channel of Awkward Family Photos is absolutely mesmerizing. The pictures of people who look they were caught mid-dry-hump are the best. The husband and I never did engagement photos because a) we didn’t care and b) we’re REALLY not the type. In our wedding pictures, the ones that are posed you can tell that we’re stifling laughter and any other pictures that we have taken together end up looking like this: