Monthly Archives: October 2010

No matter what, you probably did not consume sour milk.

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It’s been a strange week.  If you were to run an ultraviolet light over our house, doubtless there would be an offensive amount of germs and viruses squirming on the surfaces.  I myself came down with a weird 24 hour virus characterized by a high fever and narcolepsy.  After sleeping a lot I felt better.  Then Jake was up in the night vomiting.  There’s nothing quite like the night time vomit.  It puts you on edge the whole night, just waiting for the next episode.  The slightest cough or movement jolts you out of bed.  Then there’s the cleanup.  You strip the bed, you change the pajamas, you wipe down the bathroom, but since it’s the middle of the night and you are a zombie, and also you are comforting a very upset vomiting person, you tend to miss a lot of things that come to view in the harsh morning light.  Ew.  So I have been spending the day in an exhausted cleaning haze, except when I actually lay down on the bed I was remaking and fell asleep.  I woke up with Mark holding a Lego masterpiece right up to my face, talking about it in great deal.  I think he actually thought I was awake the whole time and was too amazed by his Lego skills to answer.
It was a pretty good Lego sculpture, after all.
Because of the vomiting, we decided to cancel our Thanksgiving trip which makes me a bit sad – I was looking forward to fresh grapes and apples – but also a bit relieved because frankly, I am just too tired to spend eighteen hours in the car this weekend.  I’m also a little confused, because I have no idea what to do for Thanksgiving dinner.  I mean, I’m not about to make a turkey or a pie.  But will the kids feel deprived?  Will my husband be deprived?  Should we just go out for dinner?  The pressure is on.  I did buy a butternut squash yesterday.  Maybe I could festively make some soup?
As I write this, Jake asked if we COULD have turkey, even if we are not going to Grandma’s for dinner.  Maybe, he said, we could go catch one.  Mark then joined the conversation by asking if turkeys available at grocery stores are already dead, or do you have to kill them yourselves?  I’m guessing soup might be a disappointment for them.
Further in the chronicles of Things I Would Rather Not Have Happened this week, I attempted, at my husband’s urging, to Keep Up My Strength by eating while sick.  One morning I poured skim milk on my cereal and started eating.  It tasted terrible.  “Everything tastes terrible when you’re sick” my husband admonished, “You just have to eat it and Keep Up Your Strength.”  So I did.  I felt kind of gross, and later I was mixing muffin batter and opened the skim milk.  Although the best before date was days away, it was completely sour.  I consumed sour milk for breakfast while sick. 
It’s been quite the week, but it’s Friday, it’s the long weekend, and with any luck we are all on the mend.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  I am thankful to have you all in my life.

Frankie says RELAX.

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I have an article up at Yummy Mummy Club all about picky eating.  You should read it just for the title – it’s all Super Hits of the 80’s.  Also there are some very cute pictures of my kids when they were small.  If you can, comments on the YMC site would be much appreciated.  Hey, if you can’t, comment over here!  I’d love to hear from you and commiserate about your picky eater.  Or even hear jealously about your non-picky eater, whatever.  xox

Finally Scaredy Squirrel decides that nothing horrible is happening in the unknown today.

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My neighbourhood is, for some reason, a squirrel graveyard these days.  I take my dog for a walk and there are squirrel carcasses in varying stages of decomposition everywhere.  It is quite disconcerting.  Also disconcerting is the fact that dead squirrels are to my dog what giant bags of potato chips are to me: not part of my regular diet, certainly, but irresistible when within a two-foot radius.
Disturbingly, my current favourite children’s book is Scaredy Squirrel, and when I saw a fresh squirrel corpse today I thought, calmly, that maybe it was just Scaredy playing dead.
All the dead squirrels made me a little nervous to rake the leaves.  I kept scanning the yard nervously, but thankfully my yard was corpse-free.

Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee that the leaves were free of dog urine, but some things are better left unthought.

I read a post by the Bloggess about that episode on Little House on the Prairie where Ma is all alone and has some weird infected gangrenous cut on her leg and then she reads in the Bible something to the effect that if a limb is bothering you then you should cut it off, and so she attempts to do JUST THAT.  Perhaps a less literal interpretation would be in order here.  But it reminded me of another disturbing Little House episode wherein some random girl gets raped, and is subsquently pregnant, and everyone blames her for her loose morals and her grandfather says ominously “You reap what you sow.”  Then Albert wants to marry her to, I don’t know, SAVE her, but in one of those odd Little House happy endings, before they get married she falls off a ladder and dies.  Intense!  Does anyone else remember that?  It doesn’t seem like particularly family friendly programming to me.
And what does that have to do with dead squirrels?  Nothing at all. 

Wake me up when September ends

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Last Friday I realized that there was going to be a joint family birthday celebration on the weekend for Jake and my dad, and, like always, I needed to buy a gift for my dad.  For some reason I always, always leave his birthday gift for the last minute, and then make a panicked rush to the mall where I wonder what to get a sixtyish man who has everything, and end up buying the same splash aftershave that I always buy.  This is exactly what I did last Friday, and when I got home I opened a drawer to find the golf shirt I bought for him a month before in an effort to bypass my usual end-of-September panicked mall rush.  I guess I can cross him off my Christmas list, that is, if I remember.
While I was at the mall I decided, in addition to purchasing evidently redundant birthday gifts, I needed to look for a pair of jeans.  My stay-at-home mom uniform consists of jeans, and a couple of my standbys are getting quite threadbare.  So I popped into a jean store, spotted a super-perky eighteen year old salesgirl, and said, like a hip Betty White, “I need some jeans that will make my butt look really good!”  She nodded earnestly and said seriously “I totally understand.  I have a really bad butt too.”  Hm.  That wasn’t exactly the response I expected.  I was still a little congested, so I stood there for a moment wondering if perhaps I had misheard her – after all, who would actually say that – but I couldn’t, and still can’t, figure out what might had been said instead. 
As an aside, any of my girlfriends to whom I have related this story have reacted with appropriate horror, but my husband seems to have taken a peculiar blame-the-victim stance, saying that I shouldn’t have asked for something to improve the look of my butt as that implies that I do, indeed, have a bad butt.  So it’s really my fault, in his view, and the salesgirl was just trying to help.  I do not think I agree with this assessment.
Anyway, maybe my bad-butt bonding with the salesgirl was actually beneficial, because she brought me the most comfortable and flattering jeans that I have ever worn.  I’m wearing them right now as a matter of fact.  However, before she brought me my new favourite jeans, she brought me a pair of skinny jeans, just for “fun”.  Against my better judgement, I tried them on.  I had a small self-esteem crisis right there in the change room.  Not only were they terribly unflattering, but they were also an unwelcome and unnecessary reminder of the Flight of Time, since they strongly resembled jeans I wore over two decades ago.  Remember safety pinning the ankles of your jeans?  Or rolling them tightly?  Or – if you had a mother who knew her way around a sewing machine, as I did – having them sewn tightly along the calf and ankle?  Yeah.
Never again.  After this debacle, someone told me that the Gap sells skinny jeans that are, apparently, awesome, so I looked them up on their website.  That’s when I saw these.  Stirrup jeans!!  Stirrups!  I never thought I would see the day, I tell you.  Flight of Time indeed.