Don't Do That...Er...Wednesday

Yeah, yeah it's Wednesday. I meant to blog yesterday but yesterday was one of those days when one's husband works from 8:30 a.m. - 9:30 p.m. and one's children are afflicted with teething, flu recovery, nap boycotting and general bitchiness (let's just be honest here) and one is still barking like a flu-ridden seal and starting on a lovely pressure headache from impending thunderstorms that one is really, really pissed aren't snowstorms because hello it's friggin' January for God's sake! Why the hell is it 70 degrees?!

Yeah, so "one" wasn't really in the blogging mood.

Anyway, I'm pretending it's Tuesday and y'all can pretend along with me. Without further ado, here is my don't do that for this week:

Don't do yoga with toddlers. Just don't.

Really, I could stop there, but for those of you who don't have toddlers or an imagination, let me elaborate.

So, as I'm still recovering from the flu, I've abandoned my regular workout routine in favor of gentle, "healing" yoga. Generally, I try to get up early enough that I can get 30-45 minutes of exercise in before S gets here so I only have to contend with two small folks clamoring for my attention instead of three. Two out of the three rarely nap and if they do nap, it's a guarantee they won't do it at the same time, so I don't have a whole lot of kid-free time which is why I shoot for mornings. Today, however, I was running a little late and S's mama was running a little early and so he got here before I could get my yoga in.

"No problem," I thought, "I'll just do it when Dylan takes Ry to therapy. I'll only have two kids around at that point. How hard could that be?"

Ha.

Here is a list of what happened during the 30 minutes I was "doing yoga":

Pippa brought a toy bus out from her room, sat on it and proceeded to scoot it across my yoga mat, and my toes.

S stole the bus out from under Pippa, who then fell to the floor and began screaming.

I stopped the video and blathered ineffectually about gentle touches and sharing while they circled each other and gave each other the stink-eye.

S wiped his runny nose on my cheek.

Pippa pulled up my shirt and attempted to nurse.

S put a ball of cat hair on a toy fork and stuck it in my mouth yelling, "Eeeeeat! Eeeeat!"

Pippa brought out a self-propelled inchworm toy and launched it at my head while I was in a backbend.

S grabbed the inchworm toy and Pippa found that to be the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Cue screaming, flailing tantrum inches from my head.

S became perturbed by Pippa's display of awfulness and threw the inchworm toy at her head. It missed her. It hit me.

I stopped the video and blathered ineffectually about gentle touches and sharing while they swore at each other in toddler gibberish and retired to separate corners to fashion separate homemade toddler weapons.

Pippa hit me in the head with a toy hammer.

S hit me in the elbow with a toy spatula.

Pippa jumped onto my chest and then slid down to my neck yelling, "I pooped! I pooped!"

Pippa threw a toy onion at S. S screamed.

I stopped the video and blathered ineffectually about gentle touches and sharing while they insulted each other's mothers and retired to separate corners to write separate anti-S/anti-Pippa manifestos.

Pippa spit milk in my hair.

S slobbered all over the toy spatula and rubbed it on my face.

While I was in corpse pose, they both decided they wanted to sit on my chest, discovered they couldn't both fit there and got into a screaming, pushing, shoving territory war while I quietly suffocated under 55 lbs. of militant, raging toddler.

I stopped the video and blathered ineffectually about gentle touches and sharing and hey, how about we don't sit on people when they're trying to RELAX while they calculated how much biting force it would take to chomp off each other's toes.

I finished the yoga video namaste-ing over two angry heads that blamed me for absolutely everything that has ever gone wrong in the world.

Here is a list of what didn't happen during the 30 minutes I was "doing yoga":

Relaxation

Rejuvenation

Stretching

Energizing

Yoga

So, if you have toddlers and are contemplating practicing yoga when they're around, let me just say emphatically and with much gusto: DON'T DO THAT!!!

Bark Bark!

So I know, I know, I've been away again. Y'all are just dying for a good purple baby butt story, right? There was a very good reason for my absence. We've all taken to our beds with a mortal plague. On Saturday, Pippa, Ry and I came down with fevers and nasty coughs. Methoughts (that's the past tense of methinks, right? Sure it is...) 'twas perhaps the consumption, but the good gentle folk of the East Tennessee Children's Hospital diagnosed the Boog with croup when we took him to the ER for croup on Sunday. Side note: dude, if I already know what it is, I should be able to pick up the necessary treatment at the Walgreenz. That should be a law. If you can correctly diagnose your child, you can carry away whatever high-powered drugs are necessary to treat him. For example, when we knew he had a hernia, the drug store pharmacist should have been able to say, "Congratulations! Here's your scalpel, anesthetic and some sutures. Have at it!"

I digress. Anyway, I knew that wasn't the whole story since Pippa and I had a normal deadly and disgusting cough and not a barky I-can't-breathe deadly and disgusting cough, and when we couldn't get Pippa's fever under 103 and she started refusing to eat or drink, to the doctor we went!

The doc was pretty sure it was the flu, but ran a test anyway. Sure enough, flu! He came into the room saying, "Okay, you guys have influenza A -- no...wait...it's influenza B. Huh. That's weird."

Being possessed of a curious and almost lucid mind, thanks to ibuprofen, I looked it up on the Wikipedia later and it turns out that A is the more common strain of influenza. It infects humans and other mammals as well as birds. It mutates more quickly and spreads more rapidly. Most flu pandemics are influenza A pandemics.

B on the other hand, mutates slowly and is rarer. It also only infects humans and...

Seals!

Y'all, I have seal flu! How awesome is that? Can you imagine how cute a seal with the flu would be?

See???

This is so much cooler than the swine flu or the bird flu. Seals are cute and lumber around like fuzzy pillows come to life and they make fun barking sounds. Plus you can throw them fish and they do tricks...or so I've been told by cartoons and cartoons have never lied to me.

Anyway, I anticipate I'll be lounging on the couch enjoying the mucusy affliction I share with my fuzzy water-dwelling brothers for a few more days. If any of you wants to experience what it feels like to be a sick seal, come on over! I'll bark on you and clap my flippers in your general direction.

Don't Do That Tuesday 1/15

Happy Tuesday, y'all! Once again, I had a week mysteriously free from major mishaps. I swear to God, before I started this blog feature I'd have at least two days a week that were filled with catastrophe after catastrophe: injuries, broken furniture, vomiting from both man and beast. It was like an amateur wrestling competition up in here. Since I started writing about aforementioned catastrophes and thus welcoming them into my life, they've mysteriously dried up. Go figure (So, I guess that's a Do That Tuesday for you: if everything's going wrong, try to profit from it somehow, the evil chaos elves will stop throwing crap your way if you start rolling in it).

I do have some minor Don't Do Thats like "Don't give a toddler his own coat to hold while you're getting the other two out of the car on a very rainy day. This will end with said toddler 'washing' his coat in a puddle" and "Don't say the word 'bioinformatics' to a raving lunatic working on his dissertation in evolutionary biology. This will result in a 45 minute lecture on how the entire field of biology is going to the Dark Side".

The most significant one I've got for you today, though, is a total rookie parenting mistake. By now, I should really know better, especially since the exact same thing happened 2 weeks ago and I made a mental note to never repeat this mistake. Let's face it, though, Mama's brain is a scary jumble of mental notes like a whiteboard covered with the manic scribblings of one suffering from hypergraphia. Thus, I bring you...

Don't Do That!: This morning, it was very rainy and floody (yes, that's a word), so we drove Dylan to work and then went out to run some errands. On the way to the store, Pippa Jane decided she was done with the car NOW. I was treated to 15 minutes of "DOWN! PLEASE! AAAAAAAAH! OOOOOOUUUUUCCCCH! DOWN! MOMMY! DOWN! OOOOOOOUUUUUUCCCCCHHH!" As this charming serenade was not only giving me a splitting headache, but was also causing S to cover his ears and bawl (thus adding to the din) and it continued into the parking lot of the grocery store where I was afraid someone would call CPS on me, I was desperate. Having tried just about everything else in my mommy arsenal, I turned to bribery.

"Pippa, if you stop crying, we can have pasta for lunch."

Immediate silence, followed by a small happy voice, "Pasha?"

"Yes, pasta! We just have to do our grocery shopping and then clean your room and RyRy's first."

"Pasha?"

"Yes, love," I replied, and thought, "How adorable she is! Listen to that little voice."

That adorable little voice continued like a hungry Italian parrot through the store.

She said "Pasha?" in the tea aisle while I attempted to distract her by letting her pick a tea. She said "Pasha?" near the dairy case. She said "Pasha?" in the vitamin aisle where I tried to pick an Omega-3 supplement and my addled brain wondered why none of the brands contained spaghetti as an ingredient. She said "Pasha?" in the chip aisle where I attempted to pick a treat for myself and gave up in favor of the thought of a large bowl of vegan mac and cheese which for some unknown reason kept popping into my head. She said "Pasha?" to the cashier who looked confused and offered her a sticker.

In the car, she amped up her campaign. She said, "Pashapashapashapashapasha!" all the way home. When I asked her to help clean up her toys she replied, "Pashapashapashapashapasha!" She followed 2 steps behind me while I vacuumed yelling, "PASHAPASHAPASHAPASHAPASHA!" I escaped into the bathroom for a moment's peace and as soon as I sat down, tiny fingers popped up from under the door and wiggled while their owner yelled, "PASHA? PASHA PLEASE MOMMY! PLEASE!"

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and I served lunch early. She took one look at her plate, yelled, "PASHA!" one final time and gathered a large armful of it and hugged it to her chest.

What can I say? Girlfriend loves her pasta.

This is the face of a girl stuffed to the gills with "pasha"

So, what have we learned today, folks? Never, ever, ever, ever tell a toddler you are going to give her something she likes until you actually have it in your hand. Just, for the sake of your sanity, don't do that.

Don't Do That Tuesday 1/8

Happy Tuesday folks! At least 20 times during the past few weeks I've done something completely pudding-brained and thought, "Oh man, I need to remember this for Don't Do That Tuesday!"

Guess what? I don't remember any of them (come up with blog ideas but don't write them down? Don't do that!). I do have one Don't Do That that almost reached OMG REALLY DON'T DO THAT status.

Don't Do That: The Boog has a troubled relationship with electronics. He loves them, but his love is a Lenny oooh-this-is-so-soft-I'm-going-to-love-it-forever-OMG-I-broke-its-neck kinda love. To date he has broken or damaged 2 TVs, 2 DVD players, and, here we come to our story for the day, 4 laptops.

I have several theories as to why laptops are so over-represented on the busted technologies list. One is that computers are secretly plotting to take over the world Matrix-style and they speak in a frequency only autistic people can hear and understand. Therefore, Boog is simply trying to save us all by destroying as many computers as he can lay his hands on. What a hero.

Another theory is that Boog is mad that we won't buy him his own laptop and has decided that if he can't have one no one can, so he's breaking our computers out of spite. What a jerk.

In all likelihood, though, these are simply accidents due to his youth and his lack of understanding that when you kick shiny things they go boom. What a...kid.

In any case, he kicked a Vaio off the coffee table at 4 months old and it fell to its death. He threw its replacement on the floor at around 18 months where it met its ghastly fate. That was when Mama switched to Macs (because, of course, when you have a destructive toddler who has killed your previous 2 computers, you definitely want to upgrade to a more expensive brand...). The first Mac drowned in a glass of water he dumped on the keyboard. The second Mac, well-armed with heavy-duty case and keyboard protector lasted a good year and a half...until...

Mama left a glass of water 3 feet from the computer and left the room to use the bathroom...and apparently Boog felt the computer looked thirsty...

Naturally, I did what any sane person would do when confronted with a water-logged computer: melted down into a puddle of tears and "We can't afford to replace this!"s while the computer patiently waited for me to throw it a life preserver. Luckily my husband is less dramatic and quickly took the computer apart and took a blow dryer to its innards.

We left it to dry overnight and amazingly enough it awoke the next morning good as new! Nevertheless, I really have learned my lesson this time. Leave my laptop in the same room as a technology serial killer? Don't do that!

Look at that sinister gaze! Computers beware!

Happy New-ish Year!

Greetings gentle readers! Christmas lasted extra-long for me since my mom came to visit afterward and then I spent last weekend mourning the loss of my mom (she's not dead, she just went home and somehow the dirty dishes aren't magically getting washed anymore...hmm...) so it wasn't until today that I realized I haven't blogged in friggin' forever!

Christmas was great and Christmasy and blah blah blah and New Year's was absolutely wild. I stayed up aaaaaalllll night. Of course, that's because I had a certain 19 month old ball of energy bouncing around my bed telling me what color everything in the room was and pointing out my features with pokey little fingers, but nevertheless, it was a long, crazy night.

And now...January...it's monstrously cliche of me but I usually get depressed in January. There's nothing to look forward to. It's cold. I'm on a diet. Blah. This January, though, all I want is for time to slow down a bit. Dylan finishes his doctorate in May. That means he has 4 months to finish his doctorate, apply for more jobs, interview and get a job. This also means we have 4 months to finish renovations and repairs on the house (note: there's still no toilet over our toilet hole in the redneck bathroom...), get the house ready to sell, and get Ry hooked up with therapies and school in the new place we're going to live which could quite literally be anywhere in the world. Holy. Crap.

That brings me to my one and only resolution this New Year's: Keep my g-d mouth shut.

Weird resolution, right? Here's why: every time I open my mouth it sounds like this, "Ohmyfriggin'GOD! Are you writing your dissertation? How far are you?! Are you working on it right now? But jobs! Are you applying for jobs? How many jobs? When are the deadlines? Where are they? Do you know how much they pay? What areas of town are good to live in in those places? WE NEED TO FIND RY SERVICES THERE NOOOOOOW! OHMYGOD we have to sell the house! Are you working on the bathroom? We have to finish the bathroom! What if we can't sell the house?! We won't be able to afford to live somewhere else! We could rent but OMG renters can ruin your property and then we'll have to hire a management company and WE HAVE NO MONEY! DID I MENTION WE HAVE NO MONEY! WE'RE GOING TO BE LIVING IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!!!!!"

See? It'll be better for everybody if I just grab a needle and thread and sew that sucker shut. If I don't, you just may hear of a Knoxville man shoving the printed pages of his dissertation down his deranged wife's throat and then jumping down their shower hole in a bizarre rednecky academic murder-suicide.

Shut yer trap, Meg!!!