Category Archives: Are you freaking kidding me?

The cat is really really really really mad at us

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Cat Two is a sensitive lad.

And a vindictive a–hole.

We know that he is angry with us because he strategically places feces depending on his mood. When all is well, it’s all in the litter box. If he’s a bit miffed, especially about our having a party or overnight guests, he leaves a bit outside the litter box on the floor. When he is ready to throw us out on our ears, aching to take over what is rightfully his domain, he pulls down the covers on our bed and poops exactly where we sleep. Last time, it happened nine times in a week, always where Spouse lays his right shoulder. This time, it’s right where my left deltoid burrows in each night. And he’s managing to get top sheet, fitted sheet, comforter, and mattress pad all in one fell poop.

But the kicker, this time, is that he’s also now targeting Peanut’s new bed. Knowing that we have the real power, and Peanut is just a pawn in our family’s nonsense, Spouse and I get the crap, and Peanut gets the pee. Three pees on Peanut’s bed today, including two where Cat Two pulled down the covers, peed right on Peanut’s sheets, then pulled the covers back up. Not well, or anything. I’m not saying he grows opposable thumbs. I’m saying the f—er deliberately hides his efforts so they can get really good and stinky. So we’re washing four freaking loads of laundry right now, instead of having nap time. At least we had a little extra BioKleen after Peanut potty trained himself early, having decided he hated the bulk of cloth diapers. Hope it works on cat shit, too.

Good times, y’all.

This f—ing cat is damned lucky we believe in fixing whatever is making him mad rather than throwin his ass into the pound, because that sounds really tempting. We spend a lot of time volunteering at the pound, where we see that people drop off their pets for all manner of inconveniences, the likes of which you give a child a timeout or a good talking to, but for which most people think it’s acceptable to just give away the furriest of their family. Disgusting and sad.

But, dude, he’s pooping in our bed to make a point.

I fear that if we ever had another child, both cats and the first kid would be pooping all over the hous, just to voice their displeasure and relative helplessness.

And I thought it felt like a zoo in here already…

Whatever you do…

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…do NOT cave in when they ask, after opening stockings Christmas eve, for just one piece of chocolate.

Grandma, you’ll rue the day you put candy in our kid’s Christmakkah sock.

That toddler had a small chocolate Santa (sure, enormous considering his size, but, still, after a full dinner and the whole confection he asked for more, which is a sign it was less than the one ounce of chocolate he gets each Friday). And he has been singing to himself in his bed, at full volume, in a tykebuddy-in-full-winter-garb-lit room, for 78 minutes. And counting. Invented songs, y’all. Not Christmas classics or Summer Lovin’ or something. Total improv genius he is, btw.

I know that theobromine is not caffeine. But I’ve seen the structure and I’ve seen the effects. And that shit is identical in a three year old body. I’ve drugged my child with mass marketed toxic substances. I’m totally gonna be the cool parent in high school. (For those who know me, ba ha hahahahaha ha. That’ll be the day.)

New rule. No chocolate within eight hours of bed. Unless you’re mommy. Then chocolate only if accompanied by liquor. Mmmmm. Hot chocolate with liquor.

Gotta go so I can be loaded while listening to the toddler carolling.

Little Lord Fauntleroy

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Someone found my blog by googling “how to change toddler clothes for nap.”

Several things. First: boy, did you find the wrong blog. I’m lucky if my kid wears clothes. When he does, they’re usually stained clothes because we don’t care, at all, and do laundry thusly: take clothes, throw in washing machine, add soap, wash, and leave for two days until you remember to dry them. Seriously. We don’t separate for color or size or fabric or any of the nonsense that other people seem to separate for. We don’t pretreat or chemically treat or trick or treat. We just freaking wash.

(Little secret: you know why we’re totally cavalier about laundry? ‘Cuz I don’t do it. Spouse does. And he could rub them in acid and douse them with lye and I would wear them with a smile on my face because it’s the one freaking thing around here I don’t have to do. Other than compost. So it’s the first of two things I don’t have to do. Yay me, yay Spouse, yay stains.)

But asking how to change toddler’s clothes for nap begs two rather obvious, if facetious, questions: what the hell is your kid wearing that it needs to be changed for nap; and how did you manage to get the one toddler in the world who tolerates costume changes? I have a kid who would rather sit in his jammies at home, running in small circles than actually don outside clothes to do his running in the sunlight. (Never stops moving, this one, so it’s a shock when he offers to stay in just to wear jammies.)

It’s not like our kid’s outside clothes are binding or rough or chosen by anyone but him. He just doesn’t like changing clothes. And he likes control. And I’ve just described 99% of toddlers, so who the hell is this googler parenting? How does his or her kid dress willingly in whatever breeches and bowtie Little Lord Fauntleroy costume they’re making him wear, AND willingly change again? (Notice how I pretended there was even one iota of a chance that the google dude is a guy? Please. What guy would even think to change clothes for nap? There are some awesome dads out there, but they attend to emotional, physical, and mental needs. Not weirdass bullshit. This is one of those moms who scrapbooks and crafts and bakes and sews curtains and makes furniture and color coordinates. All before dawn.) Does this jammies-then-clothes-then-jammies kid get to wear his jammies, then, for the rest of the day? Or do they (see, I did it again) change him a third time, and again for nighttime?

I’m all confused. I mean, it takes everything I have to be allegedly responsible and change my kid into clothes in the morning. I sleep in whatever I wear, and I often wear it again the next day (much to my mother’s try-to-keep-it-under-control-but-really-abject-and-borderline-screaming horror). So I’m pretty proud that I’m trying to be all socially acceptable and force my child from one comfy outfit into whatever creative combo he chooses in the morning (or afternoon or ten minutes before dinner when “Mommy, I HAVE to go outside”).

Now that I think about it, and just to make the world a bit more balanced after crazy google lady revealed her tidy little secret to the world via my 60-hit-a-day blog, maybe I’ll start letting my kid wear jammies all the time.

Wait, something just occured to me…are you one of those people who has a toddler in party dresses most days? Combed hair? Barrettes that match her shoes? You know what? It’s the holiday season, so I won’t judge. But I totally just lost 97% of my respect for you, oh random person who googled about changing a toddler’s clothes for nap, and forgot the possessive apostrophe and ess. So needless to say, there wasn’t a whole lot of respect left to lose. But you just wiped it all out, in one frilly crinoline and satin flourish.

Now I’m totally making tomorrow jammies day.

It’s too easy to screw up contemporary English, so now you’re butchering Shakespearean English, too?

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Sign painted on outdoor shopping mall of upscale shops: Feel not shame for thou (sic) love of shoes.

Thou love? No, you dunderheaded idiots. (I know, I know. I taught critical thinking. If you insult the party to whom you’re talking, you generally have no point. But this is a collection of stores who would sell me (if I had that kind of money or cared what I looked like) a $150 sweater and $200 pair of shoes while befouling my sensibilities and dainty editor’s eyes. Shit like that makes our retinas BLEED, y’all.)

Who is hiring these writers, and who is hiring these advertisers?

Thou is a pronoun. It’s Elizabethan “you.”  Thy is a possessive pronoun. Sixteenth century “your.”

So your big marketing push this holiday season reads: “Do not be ashamed of you (sic)  love of shoes.” Take it from me: you meant “thy” love of shoes.

And you painted it on the wall. Like your nudge-nudge-wink-wink lame attempt at a joke is supposed to get me to swerve off the road and into your dank, dimly lit parking garage in the unholiest of all consumerist greed-fests: December. You think classing up being elbow-deep in polyester and perfume-reeking humanity makes shopping somehow more appealing? Well, you’re entitled to your opinion. But you’re not entitled to your own version of Elizabethan English. Use a dictionary when you’re writing. Or an editor. Or stop letting the boneheads in the strategy department write your advertising.

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On an upbeat note, I’m pleased as always to congratulate Trader Joe’s for being one of the few stores in the nation to have a sign reading, “12 items or fewer.” Kudos. Your “unique grocery store” image remains credible to the educated but underpaid masses who traipse into your store for an affordable selection of organic, sugary, and obscure. Thank you for having hatch green chili bread, organic egg nog, and Jack Daniel’s all ready for me, btw, so that my trip down the twelve-or-fewer aisle is particularly sparkly this holiday season.

We’re paying our kid to sleep through the night

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Well, really, we’re offering our kid stickers to sleep through the night. We’ll see what happens. We gave him three stickers tonight and told him that each time he calls us and we have to come in, we’re taking a sticker back to bed with us. Whatever’s left in the morning he can keep. Whatever we take away gets back onto his bookshelf to try again the next night.

Because seriously, this shit has to stop.

For the record, when he’s scared from a nightmare or cold or hurt, I’m happy to go to him. It’s my job. It’s called parenting. No, we didn’t co-sleep. Couldn’t do it. Variety of reasons. Be gentle with me. I know what follows is not nice. But we’ve tried everything except letting him cry, and I’m hoping bribery is slightly better long-term.

And I know paying him to sleep is totally against our parenting ideas. A child who wakes at night and really needs help, we say, is a child who gets our help. We’ve tried just letting it go. We’ve tried the pediatrician-recommended straight talk express: “Your body needs sleep, mommy’s body needs sleep, daddy’s body needs sleep. When you call for us at nighttime for a cuddle, you wake us up and we don’t get much sleep. If we don’t get much sleep, we get cranky. You don’t like us cranky, so let us sleep. Cuddle your doll and don’t call us.” Didn’t work. He tried hard. But he can’t help waking. He can, however, control whether he calls us or not.

Yeah, well, last night there were seven times between 3am and 4:30am when he NEEDED his socks pulled up and NEEDED his tucked-in covers more tucked in and NEEDED to find a place to put his tissue. So needed them so much that he called out, then called out, then cried, then sobbed. So I told him, each time that he cried enough to convince me he was awake and genuinely sad, and I got out of bed and onto freaking crutches in the wee hours, that he did not need me for those things, and that he was old enough to do it himself. From his doorway I refused to help. Bad parenting awards can be sent to 123 Years I Haven’t Slept, NotNiceParentville, Crappy Parentland, 01234.

And so help me, the seventh time I went in, when he, fifteen minutes after visit number six to his doorway, asked, then begged, then cried, then sobbed that he needed his socks pulled up again, I yelled at him that if he woke me again he’d have to sleep in the yard. He cried. “I don’t want to sleep in the yard.” He’s two and a half. I’m not nice. I’m going to parenting hell. You don’t threaten your kid with sleeping in the yard. That’s not attachment, that’s disordered. I don’t want to yell. But he is capable of sleeping through the night. He’s done it before. He’s just pushing my buttons, and I’m out of patience. I haven’t slept in three years.

Hence the sticker bribe.

I don’t know what else to do. When he was tiny this was expected. When he was wordless, it was still normal, if hard. Now he’s big enough to do most things on his own, if not well. We respect him all his waking hours, but have lost the will to live from 10pm to 5am.

So we’re paying him to leave us alone at night. I’ll let you know how it goes.

That’s not ironic, Alanis. But it’s kind of funny, in a gallows humor kind of way.

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When the English professor who torpedoed my doctoral-program applications seven years ago walked into my gym this morning, I had two simultaneous thoughts, and neither was based in vengeful hatred, as they well should have been.

One: any other time I would launch off this erg and choke you for costing me a chance at an academic career when I was still considered of viable PhD program age, but your gross incompetence and callous disregard for your promises allowed me to find a couple of great professors at a college I never would have considered and gave me the window during which to have my son. So fuck you, but I can’t even spare a “fuck you” for you.

Two: I’ve always pictured you, in my pathetic, depressive, post-academic-door-slammed-shut slump, as a bilious monster. You’re actually quite pathetic in your fisherman’s sweater and nylon track pants, there on the treadmill in broad daylight when you could be out walking the world and observing how real humans live.

And for the record, I am right now reading something that, in addition to being far superior to anything you published back in your productive days, has inspired me to return to academia, allowing me to forget for a moment how traitorously you abandoned me one day before your letter of recommendation was due. Did I mention fuck you? And I’m better than you? And you’re pathetic? And I’m not a big enough person to forgive you, but I am big enough to keep working out right next to you, complete lack of recognition on your face, knowing that I’ve lost almost seven years of my dream because of you. I don’t really care about you anymore. I don’t have time.

But the funniest part of seeing you? When the ladies from the early morning dance class tittered that you should join them and you said, “I would love to, but I just don’t play well with others,” I actually bit my tongue to keep from agreeing aloud. At least you’re self aware. Remind me again why that assuages my wounded pride and remedies my incomplete education?

Oh, yeah. ‘Cuz I have a cute kid. Okay. Hope that gets me through the day. And the next day. And every day for about six years until I take your job and laugh at your shriveled hull.

See ya then, treadmill boy.

Please, hire an editor or proofreader.

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I cannot, can’t, will not, won’t go to a coffee chain whose napkins proclaim that their efforts will leave the world with “less napkins.” What, in the name of all that is holy, did David Foster Wallace not explain to us in his review of Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage but that structural linguistics, as descriptive yet still highly judgmental are a farce. Written and standard English need flexible but firm prescriptive rules. The descriptive tack is a ruse, allowing in errors in the name of colloquial usage, yet ignoring other, legitimate alternate usages based in judgment and priorities that hide nothing less than a political agenda.

In other words, just because some people say it incorrectly doesn’t make it correct. Or cute. Think differently.

Please, advertising companies, hire professional editors. You can’t say “less napkins” just because enough people don’t know the rule. It’s “fewer napkins.” You can count napkins. Therefore you can know just how many fewer napkins there are. Just because supermarkets get away with the egregious Ten Items or Less (sic) rather than opting for the correct Ten Items of Fewer; and just because advertising companies get away with the chalkboard-forkdragging of “Where Are You At?” rather than the simpler, more elegant, and freaking correct “Where Are You?” does not mean that you can claim frequent American usage and refuse to proofread your freaking napkins. Written language is standard as used by educated writers. And it’s fewer napkins. You can’t count sugar. So there you get to use “less sugar.” You can count cars. Fewer cars. You can’t count traffic. Less traffic. Fewer napkins, less sugar, fewer cars, less traffic. Less pollution, for that matter. And apparently, far, far fewer writers who actually know the language.

Sign of the apocalypse.

New WordPress Design

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Are you people f–ing kidding me?! New design? I cannot handle this sort of thing. Look. You are young, you are technologically savvy, and you are patient. I am old. I have a small person sucking the life out of me every moment of every day, even the good ones. I have no patience left–I have a high intensity kid and a high intensity parenting philosophy. And no childcare. I am less of a little tiny nub of a person with every gentle-parenting conflict and attachment-parented development. I have nothing left. Please, please don’t go and change the interface or the design or the dashboard or the whatever the fcuk you geeks call the gui these days, because I just can’t handle upheaval in my life right now. I can’t even freaking approve comments because I can’t freaking find them.

Be advised. You’re on warning. If I had to energy to write a strongly worded letter, I would. If I had the education to complain intelligently, or base my claims in something other than neophobia, I would. So just you know, you, you wordpress people, that I am very unhappy, an very put out, and am very likely to do anything about it.

Insincerely,

me

FDA-approved formula—now with added melamine!

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Boy, oh boy does the government have good public relations. Today they announced that they found melamine in U.S. infant formula, but that it’s safe. (Hey. It’s safe. The FDA says so. You believe the government, don’t you? I know they said in October that no melamine in formula is okay, but now they think traces should be fine. Don’t worry.)

“Traces of the industrial chemical melamine have been detected in samples of top-selling U.S. infant formula, but federal regulators insist the products are safe.”

Sure it’s fine to feed your baby formula with some melamine. It’s not like it’s a LOT of melamine. Just a little. Like how much lead we can have in toys (which is okay, because a midnight regulation just pushed through by Bush ensures there will extra lead in the air. Mmmmm. Tasty.)

I like how the FDA will only say that it found melamine in leading brands. Won’t tell you which brand, how much, or how many tests they performed. The AP article linked above say it’s Nestle, Abbott, and Mead Johnson. How very “some of the meat sold somewhere has been killing people because it’s full of toxic bacteria” of the FDA to leave that out. But it’s only melamine. And it’s only killed a few babies in China and only hurt tens of thousands more, and killed dozens of dogs. But some got better, much like the peasant returned from his newt-like state in Monty Python, right? So let’s not do anything rash, like breastfeed, or anything.

What would happen, do you think, if we started calling “formula” artificial breastmilk? That’s what is it. It’s artificial. Not bad, but not natural, either. So if you have to call imitation almond flavoring and imitation butter by their names, why not call the powdered stuff that babies sometimes drink in place of breastmilk “artificial breastmilk”? “Imitation breastmilk”? Maybe we would have enough parents question the wholesomeness of an artificial, imitation milk in their babies that we could actually cultivate a culture that educates and supports breastfeeding moms, so we wouldn’t have so many drop out of the game who are, metaphorically and literally, breastfeeding in the dark (and in bathrooms and in the car because some people find it offensive to make your baby the best meal possible, instead of feeding it melamine.)

So dioxin is fine. And some mad cow is okay. And lead and arsenic and pesticides in our water are okay. And all those drugs that will be pulled from shelves in a few months for killing too many people are fine for now because they’ve only killed a few people.

Damn. I’d really like to have the clout of the FDA. Because they’ve been endangering lives for decades with their blatant disregard for science. Yay for distrusting science. Yay for greenwashing the harmful effects of chemicals and plastics and bleach and lead-based paint. Yay for maimed and dead children all over the world because we don’t believe in real food anymore. But we do believe in corporate profits. It’s the American way.

Read the pr industry expose Toxic Sludge is Good for You.  And then you’ll realize why I quit working in advertising.

Slaughterhouse morsels

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Well, years after Fast Food Nation exposed the rampant practice of misleading and hiring illegal immigrants for slaughterhouse work, the government noticed. And busted several slaughterhouses.

Now it seems the latter group has found this convenient replacement source of abusable labor. Nothing like hiring children to butcher your meat (or win your gymnastics medals).

Please, y’all, reconsider eating the flesh of critters. Each burger includes a healthy helping of fecal matter, it’s bad for your heart, it can give you colon cancer, and the industry producing it abuses its workers, suppliers, and animals. They’re feeding dead cows to chickens, and chicken crap to cows. Why not just save a step and feed us all downer cows and SARS birds?

If you don’t get your antibiotic, hormone, fecal bacteria special burger from a slaughterhouse, and aren’t a particularly good hunter, make sure you have the government gun down animals who don’t have any measured effect on what you want to hunt.

Where’s that absentee ballot when you need it?