So We’ve Reached The Lipnicki Stage, I See.

This morning I was making some special cornmeal pancakes to give Franny a proper send off to Babydaddyport.

“I am really sad, I mean supersad that I have to go back to my dad’s today. I wish I could stay with you for one million years.”

“Yeah, honey, I’m really….”

“DID YOU KNOW, that astronauts in space have to DRINK their own PEE? I mean, they filter it, and they say it’s not yellow anymore, but you would KNOW you were drinking pee.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve….”

“I feel like I’m going to cry. And then I feel SO HAPPY again,” she said.

“I know.”

“Do you like making people laugh, Mom? You do, right? I can tell.”

“Yes. It’s my favorite thing.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“What?”

“Oh, I was thinking something, but now I’m just watching Strudel fuck up the wall with her rocker.”

I love this fucking kid. If she was a snack, I would eat all of her without sharing.

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A.D.I.D.A.R.B.

1. All I can think about is, “Why am I not holding a Red Bull in my grasping claws right now?” Or as we say around here, “Red BOO!” My big kid’s a freaking literalist and she’s even worse now that she can bang a couple of letters together.

Me: Red BOO! What! What!
Franny, reading: Reeeed Booo-ul. MOM! That says “Red Bull!” Not “red boo.”
Me: Red boo.
Franny: Can I try some?
Me: No. You wouldn’t like it anyway.
Franny: What does it taste like?
Me: It tastes like sweet pee.
Franny: EW, MOM!
Me: Mmmm, sweet pee.
Franny: Can I try some? Please?

I love that stuff so much, and I know it’s eating my insides or tarnishing my soul or something. Don’t care. I could put my shoes on and go down to the store and buy one, but it’s much easier to sit here and finger yearn about it.

2. This weekend was an absolute blur, in part because I had plans on both Thursday and Friday, too. I am in a better mood than I was on Wednesday, or whenever it was that I posted that desperate post about drowning in urine. I don’t think I could work in any personal care type industries, because I am so tired of bodily fluids. Sometimes I don’t even want to go pee, so I won’t have to deal with my own. We have had less accidents for the past few days, but don’t think for a minute that there’s not going to be BACKSLIDING.

We took the kids to see Ratatouille, which went pretty well, other than the twelvedy visits to the lobby and the screaming and the fighting over the popcorn, and the running up and down our row, which was empty. Fortch, we were totally surrounded by breeders and they were all in their own personal hells as well. I love that environment, where parents can all suffer together. We nod at each other at parks and stuff as our kids are stripping off their clothes for the fortieth time that morning. I love that there are places for kids, and places that are not for kids. Hi-five, humans.

3. ANYWAYZ, oh hi, did I mention I am going to…

In part because of you people voting for me to get in for free. I probably won’t be able to go next year; I’ll be too busy sucking dick for drug money. I mean, “it will probably be out of my price range.” This shit is bananas expensive, especially Chicago. You could probably go and do that hostel thing, and get in for free due to volunteerism, and live on nothing but creamers and ketchup for three days, but I am using this as a vacation.

The best news, of course, is that I am bunking with Liz of Badgerbag fame (among others), and Shauny from WNP. Astute readers may recall that Shauny was my hostess with the mostest for a couple of years. I “met” her in ’01 but have not met her IRL. I bunked with Liz during one night of Blogher last year after meeting her for the first time after being blog friends for three years.

This internet thing, it’s kind of weird, yes? I still boggle sometimes.

One thing I am sad about is that I still don’t seem to have the internets embedded in my arm (I would give up fine motor coordination…my left arm is useless anyway) so I will be analog again this year.

Here’s a weird question: if you were going to meet someone famous, and you had a part for them in something, would you just bust up to them and tell them? Does anyone do this? This is relevant, I swear.

I have pictures to show you but my house is so messy that I can’t find my camera’s USB cable or my magic stick. SJ FTL.

Bye, Jerk. DIE, JERK!

So, yesterday featured two flavors of drama.

Drama the First: I got really queasy around four o’clock, just after walking down to the grocery store with my lil boobnibblers for some dinner fixins. I sat down on the couch and Franny said, “Wow, Mom, you don’t look so good. Your face looks weird. Can I go outside?”

I almost missed it, but I think that might have been a fleeting moment of compassion. I think my children are too secure.

I remember when I was Franny’s age my mom got food poisoning and spent a lot of time upstairs for a day. I had never heard of food poisoning, but it sounded pretty fatal, so I was freaked out that I was going to spend the rest of my life alone with my stepfather. And this was shortly after I had moved back in with my mom after an extended separation, so I wasn’t sure which end was up. Plus I was one of those melodrama tots who got early access to movies set in the era of TB, so I was thinking that people were still prettily wasting away, leaving a lovely if emaciated corpse and their five starving children were then forced to become loaf-nabbing street rogues.

I asked Franny to please put the cold items away, and to bring me a glass of water. The room kept throbbing in that Oh Shit, Stomach Flu way and I started working on a migraine, which I hardly ever get. I thought it was just a migraine, but my guts started rumbling too.

So, finally, after several minutes of fighting it, my cup raneth over, and I ended up on the bathroom floor while the children played unconcernedly mere feet away from me, as I waited for Death or Companion, whichever one was coming home first.

At one point, Strudel came in, I thought to check in with me, but she moved closer silently and I could hear that animally toddler mouth-breathing that they do sometimes.

Then she stomped on my head three times until I swatted her away.

“What happened, Mom?”

“Strudel stomped on my head.”

“Oh. Can I have a cookie?”

And then I made some kind of miraculous recovery. I sipped lots of water and Companion fed me some Pepto. I skipped dinner and then put the kids to bed, and made Vietnamese bun after they were down, but with no meat. I made my own nuoc cham to go on top, but it never tastes like having it out. Has anyone found a bottled nuoc cham sauce that really tastes like out sauce?

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NO Dogs Allowed

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Can’t sleep. Too much caffeine. I will never learn. Or maybe I will, to the pleasant surprise of me. Isn’t it amazing, that day when you can finally stop ripping wiper blades off of people’s cars?

No? Haven’t gotten there yet? Well, back to self-abuse with nasal spray.

Is this for real? I don’t usually call this stuff out, because 1. I don’t usually care and 2. glass houses and all, but this caught my attention. The goofy syntax/grammar, the stagy outrage and maudlinity. I guess I have my radar up to fake and parody blogs since there was that spate of parody blogs last winter.

Okay, you twisted my arm. I’ll summarize. A woman decides that she will not buy her daughter an American Girl doll, but will instead buy a doll from Target that is $30, which is let’s say, 76/48ths of the cost. That was fun saying that, wasn’t it? Did you remember to carry the three???

Anyway, she then takes the Target dolly into the American Girl Place Styling Salon (yes, there is a salon for dolly hair) and expects to have the dolly styled, and is outraged when it refused service. No generics allowed!

Do people really take their store brand dollies into the American Girl Store and try to get their hair styled? Because there’s quicker ways to make your kid cry, and it’s called “serving them ice cream and then knocking the bowl out of their hands into the dirt.” And you can do that at home, no witnesses.

Anyway, when I’m not bogged down in auctionmatown, I am reading this. It’s all about El Buddha. I am only on book two, where he gets all surly youth stylee and freaks out some Brahmans. Which led me to my dumb question of the day. Supposedly the Buddha thought that all people were equal, because everyone suffered and died in the end. It made we wonder how the caste system held on so strongly in India, home of the Whopper. Buddha.

And all of this is making me think, when parents get themselves all horked up into a big bunch about brands, and labels, and status, and how they want to teach their kids to be above all that, I say, “why?” My kids may still just be budding capitalists, but they don’t care about how much things cost. If they like it, they will play with it or wear it. If they don’t, they won’t. It makes me think that, gee, maybe parents are the ones who are so concerned about status.

And you know what? Sometimes you do get what you pay for. For every corny homily I hear that ends, “And Roo-Roo Bear only had one eye and we found him on the side of the road but he was the bestest bear that ever beared,” I see the evidence around me, and it’s telling me it’s worth it to pay more for quality things sometimes.

Oh, and that Target dolly’s just fugly (left). Poor kid. It looks like the distant cousin of an American Girl doll who got forgotten about in the oven for a while. Sorry. Pwned.

In Other News
Tonight I got my hair did. I did my roots and covered my pink hair up with Devilish, because lo, summer approacheth, and summer means red. The senorita perpetrated Baby’s First Blowout, and I have to say I’m currently a fetching cross between Lorelei Gilmore and The Little Mermaid. I didn’t know my hair could be straight. But you could fill books with what I don’t know.

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West Side of I-5 REPRAZENT!

“Bonus”: Strudel Birthday

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The ritual handling of the pineapple by the birthday child minutes before it is messily disemboweled.
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Beater WARZ

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Daniel and Franiel. Daniel models Franiel’s St. Pat’s hat, boughten with her own xmas moneys.

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“TOOOOOOOOO!” Strudel says.

I’m Just Like Emily Gilmore, But With Forty Ninety Twelvedy Less Zeroes In My Account

Hey, sorry I’ve been so busy. I staged my own death on my LJ and then wrote glowing remembrances of myself under other user names on the various fora dedicated to how awesome I am (was). And then I came back to life and was humiliated. I think it’s still all up on fandomwank. Anyhwey, these things take lots of time.

But sureusly, I have been sucked down the slightly-clogged drain that is my big kid’s school auction. These things are a major fiasco and are responsible for most of the school’s budget. The event planner just bounced, leaving us without a set menu, and I am busy entering items into the software’s database, which is like a slightly dressed up version of Access. Imagine a mangy poodle with two legs wearing a brand-new feather boa. That just got dropped into a puddle.

Hmm. Methinks I need to practice my metaphors more often. I don’t want to veer off into Gaimanport.

Last year I just wrote the copy. This year I am handling all computery operations, which has scored me a table next to the auctioneer and free meal. It’s food by Blortgang Puck, but hey, it’s free, AMIRITE? Anyway, I am rootling through items, some of which are so cool they are making my teeth hurt, and others that look like they made their way from the back of someone’s closet, where they have resided for the past five-plus years. I understand that not everyone’s rolling in the dope money cash G, but please don’t send a booby prize. If what you have for behind door number three is a software program featuring nine-year old maps and only runs on two operating systems ago, then you may want to take off your goggles and see that for the donkey it is.

Did anyone ever keep the donkeys they won on Let’s Make a Deal? Or was that just the same donkey over and over? Because when I was four, frankly, I wanted that hay-chomping motherfucker.

My fella’s working it with me, night of, and that should be fun, too. There’s nothing like a hot night of joint data entry to keep the home fires burning. J/K, that’s what buttseks is for.

Table For Five In the “No Mathing” Section

What an awesome fun time we had last night. Franny’s new teacher came over and had dinner with us. I say “new” because her school is flexible enough to transfer students mid-year, and it’s dependent on their ability and readiness rather than an arbitrary age cut off, which is what we were facing with public school. So Franny just transferred in January. Perhaps you remember that I was flipping out at the notion of her essentially repeating kindergarten this year.

We decided to get her teacher loaded so she would tell us teacher secrets, like where the Ark of the Covenant is, but instead she drank very slooowly like a good citizen. We did not find out this secret, but she did threaten to teach us how to find cube roots on paper. My counter-offer was to find the bottom of a plate of cake, which was a good distraction. Math avoided! It’s pretty fun being around people who are excited to the point about being evangelical about something like learning, though. I feel good about sending my kid there every day.

As an aside, Franny asked me to color her hair pink on Thursday night. I was completely ready to see my ex’s head on a pike when he took her to get her teal hair bleached out for a wedding, but now that she has bleached tips still, they take color really well! I still say that I would rather she never went through the trauma of having bleach burns and sores at four, but I am making lemonade, as they say.

So Franny’s hair looked totally beautiful on Friday, but some of the boys at school were rumbling about it and making her feel weird about it. Which is totally wack, because she’s had orange tips for most of the year. Franny’s teacher has decided to get pink streaks in solidarity. I hope this will make Franny feel a little better about this choice. Or she may decide to stop dying her hair for now. I kind of hope not, though, because the pink looks so nice on her.

Franny’s teacher mentioned more than once that she thought that because of the way I am I’d be good as a teacher in the program and tried to convince me to take teacher training. I’d probably be really into the theory, because I’m a theory junkie, but I think being in the classroom would be a different story. After about a week or so, I’d realize that I had a child army, and I’d make them carry me around on a litter. And then we could go to loot grocery stores. No one would learn anything, except that I suck.

But now I have a nice acquaintance who is also a recovering Midwesterner and is turning thirty the same month I will. I invited her to be part of my Annual Birthday Week and she accepted. And she is coming to yoga with me on Sunday, because she’s been looking for a studio.

So Franny wins, and I win, and the Nazis still don’t know where the Ark is.

This Morning At Breakfast

“HOORAY! It’s Friday!” I said, as I shoveled glop onto plates.

“Actually, it’s Thursday,” Companion said.

“Oh, nuts,” I said.

“MAMA! You told me it was Friday when I asked you!” Franny said as she dug into her eggs.

“Sorry,” I said. “I made a mistake.” I thought for a minute.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you wearing your Friday underwear?”

“Yes,” she said, sulking.

“I saw you wearing those yesterday! You can’t just wear a pair of underwear until that day arrives! Go change your underwear, please.”

“Oh, nuts,” Franny said.