Post-Odious-Spew

Because yesterday, I vomited a bunch of odious spew onto this blog, I thought I would say some nice things, and since I have been doing yoga, taking homeopathics for my crabbiness, and doing other peaceful shit, I reckon I can say some nice things.....

Boy two spent all of his $60 of birthday money on food (lunch at perkins, two cakes, brown sauce from the cupboard and some candy). This isn't a new thing because he frequently spends his money on sausages or other food stuffs. The remarkable thing is that he shared everything that he bought. Lunch at perkins included his lunch, boy three's lunch, a chai for me, and a $5 tip for the waitress, and the rest of the items were shared freely between his brother's. He's a sweet kid.

Boy one, although he can be the most annoying of the lot of them, is also the most consistently helpful, and he's smart which always goes a long way in my book....  Family Guy is pretty inappropriate for an 8 year old, but when he says things like "God was really mad in that episode. It was like Egypt, ya know the Moses story" and then proceeds to list the plagues, I can look the other way from the inappropriateness of the show, and it's kind of fun to hang out and watch it together because there are references that he gets that I don't, ones that I get that he doesn't ...

Boy three....  well the youngest always has the mother's blessing, but he woke me up too early so I've only had 4.5 hours of sleep, and he smells like poop so we'll just say something nice about him another day.

The man says that people with the "my kid's an honor student cheerleader basketball superstar boy scout prom queen with mid level management potential" or whatever bumper stickers are all wrong. He says if he had a bumper sticker, it would say, "My kids make me fucking laugh." And for once, the man and I agree.

I Hate My Kids

These boys are being totally odious (that's my new word...  OED says it means hateful or repulsive...  so thanks to the boy's who have warranted its constant use for today).

I just told boy one that I would pay him $1 to hang the clothes on the clothesline because I'm busy, and he's cash hungry. Then, boy two who shrinks away from most work decided to stop watching his documentary and get involved in the laundry. Laundry fight ensued which ended with boy two cutting my clothesline in half with his new multi-tool.

That being said, I hate working from home, and I hate that when the work is good and I feel compelled to stop everything and work because I get paid per word, and when the articles are such that my wage goes from an average of $15 an hour to $40 an hour, I gotta make hay and ignore. Really, couldn't they find something to do? I'm not picky....  just a few minutes ago, they were seeing if lighting vodka on fire in a pan of wax would create a fire that would melt the wax...  that seems more constructive than cutting the clothesline of a woman who doesn't have a fucking dryer.

Annoying little jerk faces they are.

Next week is spring break, I'm going to pray that our house is full of public school kids who will keep boredom and crabbiness at bay.

Venting done. I feel so much better.

My Little Buddy

I have monikers for most of my friends: the midwife, the museum director, the vegan hippie doctor's wife, yuppie, the dentist, the Catholic convert, the officer's wife, the cute little Orthodox one, the world's best damn Evangelical housewife and so on, but two friends I have had so long that I have no monikers for them...  

One is arriving at the airport today. She has loaned me more money than any other friend. She was the first to hold all of my babies, and she has generally been pretty kick ass for most of the twenty five years since the third grade. 

Our childhood took us through the usual junk together. We colored pictures and taped SOS messages to her cat. We read teen magazines. Her house was the first one where I ever locked myself in a closet for five minutes with the boy the bottle was pointing at. 

At sixteen, I resigned form the popular group for various reasons (mostly because I was having my love affair with Jesus) so we drifted apart for two years. After high school we both went off on our respective journeys, but when I moved back to Minneapolis from London when I was twenty three, she was there. I was working at the coffee shop which seemed to be a magnet for everybody I had gone to high school and college with. They were all working on PhDs or vet degrees or doing their post docs, and I was wearing a Starbucks hat. There were many fun conversations..

Boy from High School: I thought you would be a math genius by now.

Me: Would you like a flavor shot with that?

It was awesome, but when she sauntered in with her hippie skirt and ordered her soy chai latte, my Starbucks hat seemed not to matter. We became fast friends, and the adult portion of our friendship became arguably more important that the childhood portion of it. 

I had moved back to Minneapolis and left the man in London. In six months, I was going to meet him at our wedding, and in the meantime, it seemed necessary to get drunk eight times a week (twice on Sundays) so she helped me with that goal. Our friendship was sealed at a party when she started fumbling over the lyrics to White Snake's Wasted Rock Ranger. Because I had gotten that single for my twelfth birthday, I was able to swoop in with every other word for the world's best drunken White Snake duet ever. ever.  

Five or six years later, she called because she had just learned that my dad had died the day before. I told her not to come over... 

Her: I've already called in to work. I'm on the way, dude.

Me: Don't except me to fucking cry in front of you, and don't touch me or anything.

Her: I know you, dude. I'm just coming to kick it. We can do whatever you need to do.

Since I had lost my dad the day before and my youngest son was seven days old, it only made sense to go look at apartments to rent. While she and I were poking around another little Victorian a few blocks away from our current place, I realized that I just couldn't stomach another over-priced small place with a mice infestation and no dishwasher so I turned to her and said, "Fuck it, dude, I'm moving to Colorado."

Twelve weeks later, she helped us clean our apartment, and she was the last person I said goodbye to when I left St Paul. I'm sure this week will be full of long conversations and way too many uses of the words fuck and dude, but it will be awesome. She's seen me in labor. She's seen me in curled bangs. More than once, a phone call from her has kept me sane. It doesn't matter how horrible the kids are or how dirty the carpet is, she won't judge me. 

I'll never move back to the Midwest. I may have said once that I'd be tempted to go just so I could see the Evangelical housewife once a week, but there is a more compelling reason now. I can only assume that my friend is going to start breeding soon, and I will be so sad to miss it. I wish I lived closer so that I could go hang out and hold her babies and watch her take care of them becuase she will be a pretty kick ass mother, but oh well, we'll have to content ourselves with the week. 

(I just realized the title makes it look like this post might be about my period...)   

     

God knows his Shit and I Hate the Wii

Remember that time I walked into the glass patio door three times because I was admiring my reflection in my awesome size five mini skirt? Then, I almost immediately gained 30 pounds because as God says in the bible, "Pride goes before a Fall."

The other day, I let my mom buy the kids a wii for Christmas. The only reason that I did this was becuase I knew it would get us in and out of Toys R Us quickly and on to the shoe store so that I could search for the prefect brown boots. I also knew that the faster we shopped, the more time I would have to indulge myself with lunch on her dime. As God also says in the Bible (sorry I don't have the verse and book on this one), "Greed will kick you in the arse".

Apparently, God really knows his shit. This Wii is killing me. I didn't know that anything could make little crazy d-bag number one any crazier, but this has done it. Before he used to cry for hours because his syrup got absorbed into his pancake or because the smell of cheese was following him. Those seem so normal now. Now, this stupid box seems to be making him uber-crazy. I hate the damn thing. I'd spill a cup of water on it like I did to the DS, but we were dumb enough to buy insurance for it. Dumb. Don't Get One. Ever.

Shopping and Family Secrets

My mom came to visit the other day for approximately seven hours. I think it's a sign of good mental health that I used to spend weeks freaking out about a visit from her, but this time I only had a short amount of stress the morning of the event. A 9am Bloody Mary took care of it. She is, by the way, a lovely person, but I always feel judged in categories that I cannot compete in: cleanliness and godliness (mostly the first one). The woman, as I may have said before, makes Donna Reed look like a crack whore while I make Roseanne look like a domestic goddess.

She wanted to come and shop for the boys' Christmas presents with me. I could have just called her and given her a list, but in the back of my nefarious head, I knew that we could finish that task pretty quickly and move on to a free (for me) lunch and some boot shopping.

She was shocked that we have shopping in Fort Collins becuase I apparently never mention it. Uh, that's because I never shop save for the odd trip to the GoodWill or a one item trip to some place like Kohl's. It took about two seconds to buy the boys a Wii (Yeah, now I can get a WiFi modem and let them watch Netflix documentaries on the TV) which left plenty of time for my first trip to Panera and my first trip to a shoe store in over 2 years. There will be a beautiful pair of brown boots for me under the Christmas tree. Then, she wanted me to pick out something in the $50 range which ended up being a great new bedspread for $120 and a pair of yoga pants for $25, but that's close to $50.

Then, we found the boys who delighted in telling the woman that I smoke when I drink (jerks). Allegedly I deserve this becuase I spilled all of my mother's secrets when I was little. Then, they told her about Toby's 22 naked laps around the backyard in the 19 degree snow the other day. Luckily, they didn't tell her about his nude face front snow angel. And she told them about a little kid who was being taken away from his mother on negligence charges because he was found wandering around barefoot in the snow. Of course, I could see a few holes in that story, and a couple of questions revealed that the kid was a toddler who didn't know where he was. The boys assured her that they were not three and that they were in their backyard barefoot and completely aware of where they lived not lost miles away.

I've always been more impressed with their logic than annoyed by the fact that they argue (about everything), and I'm glad to see that they can break down her story as well.

 

Good Moods, Amazing Friends and notes to Old Almost Lovers

Once again, I cannot shake this good mood. All the happiness is starting to wear on me as it chips away at my snarky veneer, but what's a girl to do when she has such a fabulous life, amazing friends and amusing children.

One of my friends called me the other day to tell me that she was so wrapped up in the acid scene that I had written that she wondered away from the coffee bar and completely forget about the mocha she ordered. That's one of the sweeter things anyone has ever said to me, but probably, in reality, I need someone a little meaner and less mutually enamoured with me to read my stuff.

In the back of the journal I kept during that same acid trip, I found the name of a boy. Thanks to the power of the internet, I was able to send the following note to this chap after I searched for him on FaceBook: "Hi. I found your name scrolled in the back of a blue journal that I wrote after a four day acid trip and after not sleeping for seven days. I think we spooned on a ferry while you were on your way to Crete and I was leaving Greece. Hope you're having a lovely life."

And with that note, those friends, and these hilarious kids, this fat housewife is duly sated and amused.

 

Santa: To Lie or not to Lie

So I never told my kids that Santa was real. The first time that Santa visited them, it was actually Father Christmas as we were in England, they were three and one. They got an orange and a piece of chocolate shoved into their socks which were left by the fire, but by the next year, they had re-imagined Santa into hero status.

Over the years, I have never lied to them, but they have occasionally of their own wit decided to believe in him (just as they have believed in Batman and Jesus and Zeus). "If Santa's not real, who drives those flying reindeer." --Boy One when he was Age 5.

As a non-Christian, I can't tell them that Santa's real while also telling them that I don't think that the baby Jesus is a god. I certainly don't want to push the gross-Santa stuff over the great-Baby Jesus stuff. I love the nativity story. It's so sweet, and all of the Jesus metaphors resonate so well with the light traditions that have been carried on for thousands of years by people during this time of the year when the world is the darkest. Santa, on the other hand, mostly represents consumeristic crappy bullshit, and I'm not going to push that story.

I like talking about it the Santa myth though. The other day, we were talking about when flying reindeer where added to the myth (probably about 200 years ago when The Night Before Christmas was written and the author described the reindeer flying to the roof). Boy One added that Santa did not fly in the Christmas scene in the Little House in The Prairie books. "Christmas was a lot different then. First of all, Santa was real," he said, and then, he went on and said a lot of other adorable things.

However, it's pointless to lie. Kid's brains aren't like ours--they're more fluid and less locked in dualism like fake and real. They can completely believe and completely not believe. When the stockings are found on Christmas morning, they completely believe in him. (even though they really know that it was me that slipped in the thrift store book, the deck of playing cards, and the candy).

I'm not ruining childhood by not lying to them about Santa. I'm just recognizing childhood for what it's capable of which is a hell of a lot of magic.