or just look for the zits on my chin

wanted: part-time nanny.

must have extremely flexible hours, becuase i will really only need you a couple of days a month, and i'm not quite sure when those days are going to be.

how will i know when i need you? when all of the sudden, with no warning or reason, the fact that wile is putting his magnetic letters into his dump truck one by one at the pace of a turtle on valium is far far far too much for me to handle and i have to ask him in an eerily calm and quiet voice to hurry. up. please. and when he asks me "what cause hurry up?" all i can say is "becauseit'stimeforbednowputthoselettersinthattrucknow", and when we go upstairs to brush his teeth it's all i can do to not rip the toothpaste out of his hands when he tells me he needs to open it himself and then spends 30 seconds turning it in the wrong direction, and then the sound of the cap bouncing across the tile floor when it inevitably drops from his hand after he finally manages to get it off makes me want to take a large hammer to the tile, the cap, and possibly the entire bathroom.

so, yeah, when this happens, you would swoop in for a couple of days while i hide my head under a pillow and try to ignore the world and the things about it that irritate me, which is every single little thing.

perhaps we could set up a bat signal of some sort. in the shape of a giant tampon, maybe? that would go over well with the neighbors, i'm sure.

references available upon request

what now, geniuses??

every so often i'll read an article—on line, in a magazine that i pick up somewhere—about parenting the 2-year old. most of them focus on "creative discipline", or "how not to live under the thumb of a 25-pound dictator".

one i read recently was about food issues, conquering the picky eater, how to get your kid to try new things, etc. it's thesis statement (hello, 10th grade english!) was that you shouldn't push too hard, but you shouldn't wuss out either. in practice, it said, this was carried out by always putting a little bit of what you want the kids to eat on their plate and asking them to try it. they can say no, but it has to stay on their plate.

here's how that plays out at my dining room table:

"mama, what that?"

"it's your rice and beans, and some zucchini and onions."

"i don't want keeny and onions."

"you've eaten it before and liked it, at nana's house. i'd like you to try it again. it's really yummy."

"take it off plate?"

"nope. you don't have to eat it if you don't want to, but just in case you change your mind, it's going to stay on the plate."

wile gets up from table, walks over to shelf, gets small bowl, and comes back.

"mama, not want that plate. want ricenbeans in this bowl."


(stephen's take on the situatuion was that we should be pleased, as it seems that, with his ability to spot loopholes and creative solutions, wile will have a bright future as a litigator.)

have you heard the one about....

this is wile's new joke. he said that he doesn't mind if you use it, as long as you credit him.


1) point to something. anything.

2) say "that's peanut butter!!!"

3) hopefully, hopefully, your audience will, seeing that what you're pointing to is not, in fact, peanut butter, say "no it's not."

4) laugh hysterically.

5) repeat ad nauseum.

killed the cat

it would be far too long and boring a post for me to list all of the things about my midwife that i had problems with. but here's one: when i was in the final push, a metal cart full of medical doodads was wheeled into the delivery room. i managed to gasp out "what are those for?", to which my midwife chuckled and answered "now, you just concentrate on pushing and let me handle the rest." i didn't make an argument out of it, what with the mind-blowing pain and all, but holy moly did that piss me off. i asked a simple question. i wanted a simple answer. i didn't want to be told not worry my pretty little head about it. i wasn't worried about what was on the cart (although i should have been, but that's another story altogether), i just wanted to know what they were. dammit.

of course, as much as i'd like to just be purely bitter at my midwife about this, considering all of her other missteps during the 24 hours that we spent together, i really can't. for 9 out of 10 people, her answer was probably the right one—9 out of 10 people, in asking what was on the cart, probably really would be just looking for a reassurance that everything was fine, and that they could put the cart out of their head. she didn't know me well enough to know that that's not really my m.o.. what would have made me feel better was knowing what was on the freaking cart. i like knowing what's going on. i want concrete answers and explanations. i'm kind of a pain in the ass that way.

i haven't thought about the cart incident in a long time, but it popped into my head the other morning when wile and i were at school. during circle time, miss diana took a white handkerchief and jimmied it around her hand in some way to make a little rabbit puppet, and was telling a story with it. all of the kids were pretty entranced (it seriously looked like a rabbit, i was impressed), except wile, who was entranced...in a different way. he got up and walked over to miss diana, looked at the puppet, then looked up at her and asked "what in there?" she told him it was snowshoe the rabbit, come down to visit. wile pretty much waved this story away and asked again, "what in there?" she tried to sell him again on the rabbit story. he looked at her, sighed, and walked back to me. he plopped down in my lap, looked up at me and asked: "mama, what in there?" i leaned over and quietly told him that it was miss diana's hand, that she had made a puppet and was pretending that it was a real rabbit. he nodded, said "oh!", and turned back and listened to the rest of the story happily.

a little antidote to barry bonds....

he's an all-star. he just signed a $55 million contract. he almost won the home-run derby. he batted .311 with 20 homers last season. he has absolutely no obligation to be with the team right now. he could be home playing golf or buying more pastel shirts. but where is david wright? signing mets bears for little old ladies.

peter paul and wile

(sorry you have to watch this with your head turned sideways, i recorded it vertically and can't figure out how to rotate it....)

waaaaaaant.

all i want for christmas is jesus, jerry, and jesse

freecycle.org is a wonderful organization that really puts in to practice the kind of recycle/reuse ethic that i admire and strive to follow.

it also gives you great opportunity to laugh your ass off at your fellow man.

i found this winner yesterday:

I WOULD SINCERELY APPRECIATE YOUR UNNEEDED COPIES OF THESE DVD MOVIES:

PASSION OF THE CHRIST

JERRY SPRINGER

SHOWGIRLS

THANK YOU. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

oh no, happy holidays to you, my friend....

hi, i think i have a blog?

so let's see, what has gone on in the past 3 weeks or so....

1) wile has become even more enamored of the phone, and now wants to call gwen all the time. to thier credit—more gwen's than wile's—they actually manage to have conversations of a sort. he says hi, she says hi, she tells him what she's been up to, he says "yeah" in the appropriate places.... aw, reminds me of my phone conversations with stephen the first couple of years we were dating!

2) my grandmother told my dad that if i didn't cut wile's hair, all of the kids were going to laugh at him on the first day of kindergarten.

3) someone peed in the vestibule under our stoop. peed! a human being! peed! essentially on my house! a while back the gate that usually closes off the vestibule rusted off the hinge that had probably been supporting it since the hoover administration, and we had been a bit slow in getting it fixed. so one day i'm in the living room and i hear diane, our neighbor from down the block, calling to me through the window. i hop outside, and she tells me that the day before she had been taking one of her walks to the corner bodega and saw a woman squatting in our vestibule! she yelled at her to get the hell out, and the woman told her it wasn't her house and to mind her own business, but diane is not someone to be reckoned with, and told the pisser that it might as well be her house, it was her block, and she best get her ass off our property. so the woman did, bellyaching the whole time, and diane made her wipe up the pee and asked her why in the hell she chose our vestibule when there were several perfectly good vacant lots, alleyways, and construction sites not a block away. the woman handed diane her sob story about getting out of rehab and not being able to make it and so on, so diane walked her back to her own house, gave her some food and a clean pair of underpants and told her never to set foot on our block again. i can't say i would have been so kind if i'd been the one to discover her....

4) wile watched shrek at aunt peggy's house ad now will not shut up about the big yellow guy and the donkey.

5) wile's infatuation with the yellow diapers has reached dangerously high levels. one morning after we managed to get him in to a red diaper, he told stephen "wile pee in red diapy, dada put on yellow diapy." soon he will learn to be less vocal about his conniving.

6) stephen started dvr-ing csi, which is in syndication on spike (the "network for men", god help us), and i just can't break free from its tractor beam. so i know much more about epithelials and gsr and blunt force trauma and marg helgenberger's hair than i ever dreamed i would. [one gigantic bonus to watching old csi episodes: seeing julie cooper as "lady heather", dominatrix.]

7) i cashed in my childhood savings bonds and got this:



wile calls it "mama's laptopooter"

and, since the loaner i had from stephen's mom was filled up with a couple of gallons of flood water, i went on ebay and got this too:



and just for good measure, this:



which, if you don't know, is a serger, a fancy kind of sewing machine.

8) we got a "kristen tree", and put up "kristen lights" on the porch. questionable pronunciation aside, wile grasped the concept of "kristen"—presents—with no problem, and took in the santa myth after only one telling. big guy in sled brings me presents? i'll buy that, no prob.

9) truck was reunited with his long lost love, the purple chenille blanket, which had been buried in the blanket basket for almost a year. i think all of wile's stuffed animals can sleep with both eyes shut again now.

10) wile now answers in the affirmative by saying "yeah, sure!"

11) the weekend before christmas wile and i were both felled by a stomach virus, thankfully not at the same time—he took the first 24 hours, i took the second, and somehow stephen escaped unscathed. it was a fairly routine barf-fest, but it did leave us with one of my favorite pictures ever. wile was sitting up on the island in the dining room drinking a cup of tea between barfs—he likes to sit on the counter and watch me while i do kitchen stuff, i think i'd been putting almond butter on my toast. he wanted to stay up there, so i sat down in a nearby chair to check my email, and when i looked up a couple of minutes later, i saw this:


dead asleep. (don't worry, i moved him to the couch after i took the picture and stopped laughing at him.)


12) i didn't feel i'd gotten my fill of barfing for the month, so i let wile eat five (five!) "hotadogs" for lunch on christmas day.



he didn't barf, but i held my breath the rest of the day.