The boy cracks me up...

when he isn't making me so nuts that I want to pull a Homer and squeeze his neck until his eyes pop out, that is. (Again, I would never actually DO that, it just makes watching the Simpsons THAT much funnier to me.) This morning the boy woke me up to tell me about his dream. He was in the museum and it had lots of ramps and stairs and they went up and up and up and up. And there were ANIMALS there and SNAKES! Somehow I distracted him enough to back to sleep but he was back in a flash with one of his train cars. Its the one that the giraffe head moves back and forth as the wheels turn and he was trying to get the giraffe out of the car. I told him that there was no way to get it out and that it didn't even have a real whole body in there...so the boy decided that we were going to get him some giraffes today. With "roll full bodies and long necks." I asked him where we would find those particular types of giraffes and he said, "well, maybe at Can Soopers or maybe at Giraffe's R Us." Can Soopers must be where we get all of our canned food and where he got "Giraffes R Us" is beyond me...he corrected himself and said Toys R Us later - after I had a good laugh. I can't wait until he starts singing and using his very own lyrics. He got mad at the girl the other day because she was "erupting his reading." He cracks me up!

The Girl and Her Looks

Wow, can my kid give you her opinion. She only has a few words yet but she makes herself understood. I get now why my mother said I could never hide my thoughts - they were written all over my face. Both kids got that unfortunate trait from me, but the girl (at 20 months) has already taken it to the next level. She can give stink eye with the best of them. She will turn in a circle throwing a temper tantrum, screaming and stomping her tiny feet only to suddenly stop and GLARE at the cause of her irritation. Guess who that usually is? It used to be funny but now I have to admit that occasionally I get the goosebumps from it. Mostly, though, I just understand what it means to have your palm itch to wipe a look off someone's face. I would NEVER slap my baby girl so don't go calling the Division of Child and Family Services on me. I just said I UNDERSTAND now. I hate it when I start to understand my mother. That is far more frightening than any look my kid can dole out. Especially 'cuz I got 35 years on her so I have practice giving the looks right back. Have I mentioned how much I am looking forward to her teenage years?

I will never set foot in the ghetto Walmart again.

OH MY! Please, everyone, forgive me this very politically incorrect rant.

The Walmart by my house is easily the worst place on earth. In fact, it might actually qualify as one of the lower rings in Dante's Inferno. I have been in this store twice and BOTH times have vowed never to return - evidently absence makes the heart grow forgetful. There is no excuse. Well, OK, I was doing it for my son. Typically we go to Targhetto for all of our stuff because I find it much more palatable, but the neighbors got light up jump ropes from HELLmart and he really, really, really, really wanted one. Since he has been pretty good about trying to go potty in the toilet (yes, he is 3 and a half, shut up) and he was due for his "reward" I caved. God Almighty. I did not know that today was the first day of school (OK, I did because the neighbor with the light up jump rope started 3rd grade today so I should have clued in) and that everyone in the ghetto would be raiding the school supply aisle in Hellmart tonight at 8:30. Don't start with me about having my kids out at 8:30-the boy napped until after 6 so I think he was fine. The girl, well, if her behavior was any indication - it WAS past her bedtime but the way I see it, she just made the people around us pay for being idiots with their eardrums. Checkmate, suckas. But I digress. Here's the 411.

Once upon a time, my lovely husband and I went to Walmart for a toy. It was a toy that was given to our beloved son who thought it was the best toy ever created. It was a toy that blows little balls out the top for parents to chase all over the house and becomes the repository for all things small enough to fit in the hole on top - causing parents no end of frustration and many exclaimations of "How the hell did he get that in there?" "That isn't coming out anytime soon," "Can you get me a screwdriver?" and "Honey, baseballs are too heavy for this toy, what happened to all the other balls? Did you flush them?" Anyhoo, we decided to share the joy with other parents of a child the same age as ours (sorry Veronica) and found it on sale at Walmart. Hallelujah. A great toy and it's on sale. Well, we paid. Oh yes, we paid. After waiting in line for what seemed like hours (because every minute spent in that place is like an hour in a POW camp for me) we were finally at the front of the line to pay for awesome toy. Our checker was about 11 months pregnant, wearing a dirty, stained and ill-fitting wife-beater undershirt beneath her Walmart vesty thing. Amid the incessant shoplifter sirens from the front door, she was whining to her supervisor as we stood there - whiny child, progressively irate mommy and increasingly placating daddy - that she had been PUKING right and left and that while she just came back from her lunch, she really needed to go home - again. Said supervisor, who also was ignoring customers waiting as patiently as possible to shell out dollars for a toy that was rapidly diminishing in awesomeness, basically told Trailer Tracy that she wouldn't be paid for her lunch and breaks if she didn't complete her shift and that they were short staffed so she would have to suck it up and continue to work. Believe me, I have been pregnant so I have a LOT of empathy for nausea. But this girl stunk like an ashtray, was sucking on a Big Gulp Coke and had a pack of cigarettes in her back pocket, therefore, any sympathy she could have gotten from me was absent. Since she didn't get her way, she decided to do her job with as little haste as possible while bitching to her co-worker two aisles down. The absolute kicker for me was when she took the receipt off of the register and proceeded to wipe her nose with the back of her hand before handing it to me...as I stood there with my mouth hanging open. We escaped and I vowed never to darken that door again.

Fast forward to more than a year later. Hellmart visit, part deux. As we enter the parking lot, I get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Probably terror because this is no ordinary parking lot. It is a ghetto parking lot with lots of cameras to videotape all the cars parked illegally, idling in the fire lane, peeling out and speeding hell bent for a close open spot, honking at others who aren't fast enough getting their wares stowed in the trunk and the inevitable begging "ran out of gas can you help" crackhead accosting pedestrians. There are unrestrained children flailing about within the cars and unsupervised children ducking in and out between other cars just missing becoming parking lot paste by a virtual hairsbreadth. I am having trouble breathing by now but we decide that the light up jump rope and the smile that will be bestowed upon us will mitigate the horror of entering this place so we buck up and troop in. Listen, I have to say that it is a rare and joyous occasion when I actually pick a basket with 4 functioning wheels. We were not so lucky this visit. Strike one. No luck in finding the light up jump rope, either. Strike two. Now our backs are against the wall (although we were smart enough not to mention that we were there specifically for the jump rope just in case - yes we learn from our mistakes) and we have to improvise and allow the boy child to pick his reward from the other offerings on the shelves of the store. The same shelves where the price stickers are curiously absent. Naturally, the child who takes after his parents picks a die cast John Deere tractor despite our best efforts to coax him into the plastic airplanes and sailboats. I am already picturing that thing through the sliding glass door, by the way. Of course, I have no idea how much this thing costs because there are no discernible price stickers on the shelves that even remotely correspond with the items surrounding them. LITTLE PONY $2.99 - no, no pony here. CRE BR SDT $6.59. HUH? So I have to find a price scanner to ensure that little mister moneysucker hasn't picked the sole estate guaranteed collectible in the whole place, while leaving daddy, boy AND screeching girl in a toy aisle. I should have insisted they accompany me but I did not. By the time I had found the price ($11.59 *sigh*) and returned, the boy child had surprisingly changed his mind and had found a SET of John Deere vehicles that he absolutely could not bear to part with. Again, no price tag (should this be strike three?) I find that there is a sign for a price checker much closer than the first one I discovered (in the paint section where everything is clearly marked) so I head that direction, figuring the less time the fam is given to linger in the toy aisle, the less likely I will return to find the kid with an actual John Deere that he must have in exchange for not sitting in his own sh...you get the idea. I am standing directly under the scanner sign before I realize that it has been forcibly removed from the post. Seriously, shoplifting has reached it's apex here. I am now muttering under my breath as I trudge back down to the paint section again. Thankfully, the set ends up being no more than the first John Deere he picked out so I rush back to find the boy with the original John Deere tractor in his hot little hands and force him to make a decision between the two. An hour later (exaggeration -but see my note above about the time warp in Hellmart) he picks and we are on our way to the checkout with 5 items. Yes, we are suckers. Along the way my stoic husband says "what the hell is going on up there?" referring to the enormous swarm of people blocking the main aisle to the undermanned check outs. Yep, school supplies. Not in AN aisle, in bins in the MAIN aisle. Reminds me of city planning. Anyway, we wait as everyone tries to swim upriver through this life crushing crowd and finally bail out and zig zag our way to the front through the tampon aisle with screaming toddler girl causing people to plug their ears and curse at us in Spanish. I do a quick reconnaissance and decide that the "SPEEDY CHECKOUT 10 Items or Less" is our best bet. Again, it is a rare and joyous occasion when I pick a line or lane that actually moves faster than the lines or lanes around it. Again, not so lucky. Is this strike twelve yet? Conventional wisdom will grant that while it's the longest line, since everyone has less than ten items, it should go faster than the checkouts with three or four people whose baskets are overflowing, right? Nope. Of all the signs in this damn store, the ONLY one that is not duplicated in Spanish is the "SPEEDY CHECKOUT" one. But I SPEAK Spanish so I know that 10 is 10 in both. Evidently the people at the front of our line thought it meant 10 children. I have to admit they followed the rules (unlike the three people directly in front of us with 12-17 items in their carts. I counted. Aloud.) because all ten kids had ten items and a wad of ones in their hands. And they rotated off the same basket. For the love of GOD, just ring the whole damn basket up at once instead of allowing this farce of abiding by the rules of the SPEEDY CHECKOUT. Unbelievable. By this point, the boy is deliberately provoking the girl into escalating hysterics and the daddy is doing his best to make mouthy mommy laugh in order to avoid a confrontation with a banger in the middle of ghetto Hellmart. The people in line in front and back of us are grumbling and widening the space between us but since they can't understand my stream of attitude, they have no idea that I am insulting their ancestors and intelligence. I feel a bit bad about that in hindsight. Ah well, the kids couldn't hear it over their whining match, so, c'est la vie. We finally check out after 15 minutes of waiting (no exaggeration so you KNOW how long it felt) and are hightailing it to freedom with the hordes of other shoppers bottlenecked at the escape route, uh, I mean automatic doors when, of course, the gentleman in front of us sets off the shoplifting sensor. Shocking. He does not have enough sense to back out of the way until security can check him out, though. Nope, he tries to put his stroller through two or three more times. The growing lines of natives are getting restless, and I am about ready to search his pockets myself when "security" comes to inspect his stroller. Security is a lady named Shirley who can't be more than 5 feet tall or over, say, eighty-nine. I manage to pull our basket around them in a blatant cut of the line and burst out into the crosswalk where, with my scowl, I visually dare any lowrider to hit me. It works because we make it to the car without incident - toss the kids into their carseats amid impatient honking and peel out of the parking lot, dodging lame 3 wheeled carts, packed cars and sprinting kids.

Never again. I swear it. NEVER again.

Our future addict

Most kids have a lovey of some sort. They boy has blankies. I bought two so that if I needed to wash one we would still have one for him to sleep with. Total backfire...he now has to have one folded into a square as a pillow and one to cover up with. Stars out, of course. I tried to give the girl a blankie or a bear. No way, Jose. This kid won't sleep without a bottle of Tylenol clutched in her fist. Or Orajel. Or the dropper from the Ibuprofen. Or, as is more often the case, all three. Sometimes we can substitute her toothbrush and a baby wipe but usually it has to be some form of pain reliever. Don't worry, the bottles are empty but she doesn't need to know that. Shhhhhh. Nighty night little pharmacist, nighty night.

Health food

So, I know why you lose weight when you eat healthy food. Portion size. I eat FAR less food when all that is in front of me is yucky. If anyone knows a way to make healthy rice taste good please share the secret with my husband, the chef.

On Toys

Seriously, our home is overrun with toys. We may need to buy the house next door and let the kids and the toys have this one since they have taken over anyway. I have said in the past that the house looks like FAO Schwartz hemorrhaged it's overstock in our direction but I think maybe it is more apt to say that we are the island of mismatched toys. There is some bizarre toy tractor beam in operation here. We attract animals that talk. Cars that talk. Tools that talk. Everything talks, sings, beeps or squawks. Plastic, wood, plush. You name it, we've probably got it. Organizing toy parts to find their original mates is an all day job. Trying to keep toys in the kids' room or the toyloft or the toy baskets in the living room is futile. They migrate. I find toy screwdrivers in my bed. I find blocks and robots in the bathroom. If you sit on the couch there is a great possibility that you will find a sharp toy stuck in your rear. We use it as a primitive sort of burglar alarm. If anyone tries to sneak around my house in the dead of night they will trip over toy golf clubs, bump into singing vacuum cleaners and break an ankle on a rattle ball as they try to escape. Believe me? Well, that's my story and I am sticking to it!

I have noticed that some of our toys seem just a tad possessed. I think they just might be designed to make me question my sanity, drive me batty or scare years off of my life (just in case my kids don't have that angle covered already). We have an RC car that moves by itself and I am the only one who has ever seen this phenomenon. I spent an hour staring at it one night after two such episodes. Then it went into a box under a bed somewhere. I will probably find it in the middle of the living room some morning like Christine. And then it will be Goodwill-bound, believe me! Once we had a giggling teether that would bust out laughing without any provocation. That sucker found it's way out of the kids' room (after it was bumped accidentally and woke up a sleeping child) to the loft where it had a brief stay - until it was triggered by a breeze at 2am at which point it found a new home in the garage. A few days later I gave up and tossed it in the trash only to have the pee scared out of me on trash day when the garbage can laughed maniacally. I have visions of archaeologists in the future uncovering this thing (having been unnaturally preserved surrounded by all of those dirty diapers) and fleeing in abject terror when it giggles at them. It never felt so good to get rid of a toy! My most recent fright came at about 3 am when a baseball toy in the loft whose batteries are apparently on the way out decided to shout "Going, going, gone! It's outta here!" I was standing at the end of the bed panting, heart pounding, and palms sweating before I finally figured out that we were not under siege. Now I have to make a sweep of every play area before bed each night to make sure the switches are in the off position to avoid being jerked from sleep by someTHING yelling "Hello baseball fans!" or singing "The wheels on the bus go round and round..." Definitely the stuff of nightmares!

The funny thing about all these toys is that the kids don't particularly like to play with them. They might hold their attention for 5 minutes, 10 if I am lucky. My children would prefer to play in the toilet. Squeeze bottles and cotton balls are a local favorite. Sticks, strings, fuzz and Kleenex. The girl likes anything pokey or chokey. The boy likes things that hurt when thrown. (He has good aim so he gets the cotton balls.) The girl can decimate a roll of toilet paper in just under 1 minute and spread it around the house in less than 4. The boy will chase ancient cat all over the house and pick him up and drop him and pick him up and try to throw him and pick him up and try to squash him into the couch and pick him up and try to put him on the table and pick him up and try to go down the stairs with him...and I wondered why ancient cat's favorite game to play was hide the poop. Ha. My kids like pens. They look with disdain at the crayons and reach for the Sharpies. Write on, wipe off? That is for babies, novices and trainees. They want the real deal - permanent ink, hallucination inducing fumes, chemical flavor. They want them NOW and they want them in the living room. They want them to scribble on the uninteresting toys that talk. AH-HA! At last the answer to why we buy the toys! I am off to spread the word...

Too much blog fodder

So, occasionally I am struck by how much I want to put into this blog. Unfortunately it seems that I have TOO much blog fodder and not enough motivation to type it out. Or I have a toddler clamoring for more juice or T.V. or, gosh, I don't know, attention? But it is in my brain and it is really funny. Today I will attempt to get some down on paper, uh, into cyberspace before said toddler wakes from an entirely too short nap.

So you are considered blog fodder if you are a female Security Guard at my local King Soopers and I overhear you discussing your Glock with the 10 year old whose harassed looking mother is trying to self check about a million items.

There is so much wrong with the previous sentence, isn't there?


Does anyone read the signs? Self check out is for 15 items or less - just like the FAST or EXPRESS lane. How on earth can you fit all 7 of your Diet Coke 12 packs in the 2 bags that they offer on the scale? 4 frozen pizzas, 3 boxes of macaroni and cheese, lunchables, donut holes (from the bakery, no less - hey what's the code for donut holes?) cheese puffs, bean dip...huh. It is my opinion that the grocery store sentry at the self check is on disciplinary probation to warrant that job for a few hours. Can you imagine watching dipshit people trying to swipe their own bar codes, figure out if the apples they chose are Gala or Fiji for the right code, feeding their pennies into the coin slot one by one by one and, gasp, trying to organize their own bags when they can't even read the sign that says 15 items or less? Sheer torture. My mouth would get me fired, believe me.

Should the fact that when I go to the grocery store mid-morning in the middle of the week and encounter a Security Guard who carries a gun frighten me? Not nearly as much as the fact that said Security Guard's judgement is such that she feels it is acceptable to show the gun to a 10 year old child and discuss it with him. My overactive imagination puts the conversation going something like this: "See, Johnny, this is a Glock. Here is the trigger. This is the safety. I use it to shoot people." WTF? By the way, I capitalized 'Security Guard' since she has a gun - I don't want to irritate people with guns, especially chicks. If it were just a stick or a taser I probably would have left it in lowercase. Just so you know. Now, I have no idea if that kid asked her about her gun or not. I have no idea if that kid's dad is a cop and he has a Glock, too. But seriously, did the gun need to come out of the holster? I thought that was a rule - no gun out unless direct threat to self or others or something. So, I guess as much as I don't want my kids' vocabulary to include the words I say on a regular basis, I would really prefer they not use the term GLOCK until they are much, much older as well. I will take "pinched your ass" over "put a cap in your ass with my glock" any day.

We gotta move.

My Children Hate Me

I am not entirely sure, but I think they are conspiring to shove me off the edge of my sanity. They tag team me to deprive me of much needed sleep. They say they are hungry and want to eat bananas but turn their collective noses up at the banana I put in front of them. She because it is much more fun to smash it and put it in her hair and he because it broke. Sigh. The girl will not allow me out of her sight and when I do sneak away (usually to go to the bathroom) I come back to find her comfortably parked in front of my computer, pecking away and drooling on the keyboard. The boy's catchphrase that he repeats over and over again is "I want to go to Grandma's. Is it time to go to Grandma's? When can I go to Grandma's?" and his newest form of torture is to get up at 5am and then wake us up by emptying bins full of toys on the floor. My nervous tic is becoming more and more pronounced with each passing day. The girl prefers to cause a Myocardial Infarction by quietly climbing on top of something unstable and standing up, giggling and clapping to get our attention. This is the same child who can fall off her own two feet standing on the flat floor. Thank God she seems to have sticky tree-frog feet when standing on the high chair. All these things, coupled with the soundtrack of kid show songs stuck on a continuous loop that is burned into my brain causes me to teeter on the brink every day. It's a conspiracy, I know it. You'll probably think I am crazy but I am fairly certain it was the cat that recruited them into this vile scheme. He hates me too.

It is Official!

Welcome to the inaugural posting on my blog. I finally bit the bullet and did it! Here is your first and final warning: Material on this blog may be considered offensive, trite, irritating, personal, exceptionable, objectionable, appalling, distasteful, loathsome and downright uncivilized. Hope you enjoy your stay!