Why is my Flickr widget showing photos from a blog in China no matter how many times I reset it?
I've temporarily removed the Flickr widget until I can figure out how to make it work. One of my techier friends should help me. Consider that a hint.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
John and Kate Plus Hate
For the record, I normally have a profound lack of interest in anything having to do with either celebrities or reality television (two categories that should probably be mutually exclusive but somehow are not), but I am finding myself sucked into the John and Kate drama. Why is that?
We watched the first couple of seasons, not religiously or in order, but here and there because reruns would be on at night while I was getting Genevieve to sleep in our bed. SAM and I used to tease BD about having a little thing for Kate, at least until he saw the belly surgery episode. We would shake our heads and say "Poor John" when Kate would treat him like her ninth child, and wish for a van like theirs so our crew of nine could someday travel in one vehicle. But then we lost interest, because really, it was never that interesting in the first place.
I've seen whole websites transformed by swarms of loyal J&K fans coming to duke it out with J&K haters on the basis of one editorial. There's a thread of comments over thirteen thousand posts long on a parenting site I frequent. It's nuts! And truly, I would never dedicate that much emotional energy to loving or hating people I don't even know. But I have to admit, I'm not sorry to see Kate getting her comeuppance.
Maybe it's that I find it harmfully dishonest to present such a shiny-happy false facade to the world, in which one woman pretends to (almost) singlehandedly keep her eight children clean, clothed, and fed an all-organic diet in an immaculate house with a perfectly-organized laundry room while maintaining individualized relationships with each child and having a hot date with the hubby on a regular basis. Girl, please. Who are you fooling, and why would you want to?
Here's something I've learned: if you make yourself look too much better than everyone else, they will take the very earliest opportunity to crucify your uppity butt. But if you make people feel like they are not doing so badly after all, they might just love you. Maybe if Kate hadn't been so busy allegedly elbowing people out of her way on the path to fame and fortune, someone would have told her that.
We watched the first couple of seasons, not religiously or in order, but here and there because reruns would be on at night while I was getting Genevieve to sleep in our bed. SAM and I used to tease BD about having a little thing for Kate, at least until he saw the belly surgery episode. We would shake our heads and say "Poor John" when Kate would treat him like her ninth child, and wish for a van like theirs so our crew of nine could someday travel in one vehicle. But then we lost interest, because really, it was never that interesting in the first place.
I've seen whole websites transformed by swarms of loyal J&K fans coming to duke it out with J&K haters on the basis of one editorial. There's a thread of comments over thirteen thousand posts long on a parenting site I frequent. It's nuts! And truly, I would never dedicate that much emotional energy to loving or hating people I don't even know. But I have to admit, I'm not sorry to see Kate getting her comeuppance.
Maybe it's that I find it harmfully dishonest to present such a shiny-happy false facade to the world, in which one woman pretends to (almost) singlehandedly keep her eight children clean, clothed, and fed an all-organic diet in an immaculate house with a perfectly-organized laundry room while maintaining individualized relationships with each child and having a hot date with the hubby on a regular basis. Girl, please. Who are you fooling, and why would you want to?
Here's something I've learned: if you make yourself look too much better than everyone else, they will take the very earliest opportunity to crucify your uppity butt. But if you make people feel like they are not doing so badly after all, they might just love you. Maybe if Kate hadn't been so busy allegedly elbowing people out of her way on the path to fame and fortune, someone would have told her that.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Open letter to Toilet Hoverers
Dear T-H-ers of the world:
The way this works is that if your butt is actually on the toilet seat, you are not able to pee all over it. In other words, the only one making the seat too nasty to sit on is you, the one who thinks you are too good to sit on it. Please stop doing that.
Yours truly,
Sweet Sassy Molassy
The way this works is that if your butt is actually on the toilet seat, you are not able to pee all over it. In other words, the only one making the seat too nasty to sit on is you, the one who thinks you are too good to sit on it. Please stop doing that.
Yours truly,
Sweet Sassy Molassy
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
The New Math
Days since last nursing: 10
Weeks this fell before projected goal: 3
Months spent nursing Genevieve: 35
Months spent nursing Somerset: 36
Months spent nursing Joshua: 14 (he got the shaft because S was born when he was 14 months old and I'm not woman enough to tandem)
Months spent nursing Calvin: 27
Grand total of months spent nursing (drumroll please....): 112
That's 9.333 in human years.
Weeks before I got pregnant again the last time I had a weaned, diaper-free three year old: two
How sure I am that this will not happen again: 100%
Months not spent pregnant or nursing since 1997: 4.5
That's right. Four. And a half.
I just figured that out. No wonder I've been cranky!
Weeks this fell before projected goal: 3
Months spent nursing Genevieve: 35
Months spent nursing Somerset: 36
Months spent nursing Joshua: 14 (he got the shaft because S was born when he was 14 months old and I'm not woman enough to tandem)
Months spent nursing Calvin: 27
Grand total of months spent nursing (drumroll please....): 112
That's 9.333 in human years.
Weeks before I got pregnant again the last time I had a weaned, diaper-free three year old: two
How sure I am that this will not happen again: 100%
Months not spent pregnant or nursing since 1997: 4.5
That's right. Four. And a half.
I just figured that out. No wonder I've been cranky!
Friday, May 08, 2009
Analyze This
Suddenly this past week, I've been having very strange and vivid dreams. One was very tactile and color specific, involving a lot of grit and the vomiting of orange feathers. One involved a group of roving attackers breaking into my house and keeping me hostage. We'd heard they were on the loose, so we were going around locking the windows, and then they walked right through the front door. That's probably significant.
Last night I dreamed that a group of domestic terrorists (label applied post-dream) killed everyone in the world who wasn't with them with poisonous gas, but I was part of a secret resistance that survived by somehow not breathing the gas while pretending to be dead. Once they moved on from where I was, I quickly packed one bag for myself and my kids. It was a white nylon drawstring backpack of the cheap fundraiser variety, if you want to know. I chose very carefully the clothes that would get us through life on the run. They turned out to be tshirts mainly. I asked myself if I needed to be stealthy, but since the terrorists assumed that everyone who wasn't one of them was dead, I didn't need to. But as I encountered people I had known before the attack and they acted normal toward me, I started to wonder if these were really the same people, or if their bodies had been somehow taken over. If that were the case, did they have some way of recognizing a body that hadn't been snatched?
What does it all mean??
Last night I dreamed that a group of domestic terrorists (label applied post-dream) killed everyone in the world who wasn't with them with poisonous gas, but I was part of a secret resistance that survived by somehow not breathing the gas while pretending to be dead. Once they moved on from where I was, I quickly packed one bag for myself and my kids. It was a white nylon drawstring backpack of the cheap fundraiser variety, if you want to know. I chose very carefully the clothes that would get us through life on the run. They turned out to be tshirts mainly. I asked myself if I needed to be stealthy, but since the terrorists assumed that everyone who wasn't one of them was dead, I didn't need to. But as I encountered people I had known before the attack and they acted normal toward me, I started to wonder if these were really the same people, or if their bodies had been somehow taken over. If that were the case, did they have some way of recognizing a body that hadn't been snatched?
What does it all mean??
Monday, May 04, 2009
The Ponderous Adventures of Cindabella and Bootie
In an attempt to act like a good mom and play with my kids yesterday, I parked myself in front of the three-story Barbie mansion with Genevieve. Delighted, she helped me pick a doll and parked her at table on the veranda with her own.
"What's your girl's name?" I asked her.
"Um...Cindabella," she replied. "You can be Bootie."
Clearly the Disney Princess indoctrination starts early. Genevieve has never even seen any of those movies. Oh well. I giggled at her interpretation of the names and dressed my brunette Barbie in a sundress that I could barely yank up over her misproportioned hips. We pondered the mystery of the stairs that go only from the second to the third floor, and the elevator that goes only from first to second. I noted that although the mansion seems spacious, Barbie is apparently the doll-equivalent of 8 feet tall. The bar-height kitchen table sits at her hips when she leans awkwardly against the stool. I guess it doesn't matter, since neither Cindabella nor Bootie was able to bend her elbow to take a drink of her "glass of line."
Barbies were a nice diversion in the middle of a day that both started out and ended up sucking. I have been working toward weaning Genevieve, with her third birthday at the end of May looming as our deadline. Sometimes she's been cooperative with the limits I've tried to set, and sometimes not so much. After she woke up at 6:00 yesterday morning and nursed without ceasing until I finally couldn't take it at 8:00, she screamed and cried and threw a fit about being denied. Then I pretty much screamed and cried and threw a fit at BD, and it was all just ugly and upsetting and the result of a lot of frustration and exhaustion and I think we all realized that we just can't do it anymore, any of us.
So we stayed in our jammies all day except when he took the kids to the book store for a brief outing before dinner, and we played Barbies and watched bad (really bad) tweener TV on Disney and tried to just be easy with each other, and when G asked to nurse and I told her I can't nurse her anymore, she handled it fairly well. Until bed time. We have never night-weaned any of our kids, because I'm too lazy and I can't stand all that crying. This is the first time in four kids and eleven years that I have not wanted to nurse more than I have not wanted to deal with difficult weaning rituals. (Usually I just take a trip or, you know, go to the hospital to have another baby.) BD had warned me not to come to her room no matter how much she screamed and called for me. It seemed to go suprisingly well for a while, then it went horribly. I read until I couldn't, and then I cried and felt like a selfish ass while SAM reassured me that she was in the hands of a loving parent who was taking good care of her, and that she was just mad and was making sure we knew it. I knew she was right, but it still sucked.
I never thought I would be anything but ready by the time she finally weaned, ending a nine-plus year nursing total, but I really hate the thought that Sunday morning will be the last time I ever nurse her, because I was just angry the whole time. And I really do have so many sweet, wonderful memories of curling around her little body, warm in the bed with the comforter around us. I can't decide if I can give us both a different last time or not without setting us back. I guess we'll see. In the meantime, I definitely feel like the Bootie in our little duo.
"What's your girl's name?" I asked her.
"Um...Cindabella," she replied. "You can be Bootie."
Clearly the Disney Princess indoctrination starts early. Genevieve has never even seen any of those movies. Oh well. I giggled at her interpretation of the names and dressed my brunette Barbie in a sundress that I could barely yank up over her misproportioned hips. We pondered the mystery of the stairs that go only from the second to the third floor, and the elevator that goes only from first to second. I noted that although the mansion seems spacious, Barbie is apparently the doll-equivalent of 8 feet tall. The bar-height kitchen table sits at her hips when she leans awkwardly against the stool. I guess it doesn't matter, since neither Cindabella nor Bootie was able to bend her elbow to take a drink of her "glass of line."
Barbies were a nice diversion in the middle of a day that both started out and ended up sucking. I have been working toward weaning Genevieve, with her third birthday at the end of May looming as our deadline. Sometimes she's been cooperative with the limits I've tried to set, and sometimes not so much. After she woke up at 6:00 yesterday morning and nursed without ceasing until I finally couldn't take it at 8:00, she screamed and cried and threw a fit about being denied. Then I pretty much screamed and cried and threw a fit at BD, and it was all just ugly and upsetting and the result of a lot of frustration and exhaustion and I think we all realized that we just can't do it anymore, any of us.
So we stayed in our jammies all day except when he took the kids to the book store for a brief outing before dinner, and we played Barbies and watched bad (really bad) tweener TV on Disney and tried to just be easy with each other, and when G asked to nurse and I told her I can't nurse her anymore, she handled it fairly well. Until bed time. We have never night-weaned any of our kids, because I'm too lazy and I can't stand all that crying. This is the first time in four kids and eleven years that I have not wanted to nurse more than I have not wanted to deal with difficult weaning rituals. (Usually I just take a trip or, you know, go to the hospital to have another baby.) BD had warned me not to come to her room no matter how much she screamed and called for me. It seemed to go suprisingly well for a while, then it went horribly. I read until I couldn't, and then I cried and felt like a selfish ass while SAM reassured me that she was in the hands of a loving parent who was taking good care of her, and that she was just mad and was making sure we knew it. I knew she was right, but it still sucked.
I never thought I would be anything but ready by the time she finally weaned, ending a nine-plus year nursing total, but I really hate the thought that Sunday morning will be the last time I ever nurse her, because I was just angry the whole time. And I really do have so many sweet, wonderful memories of curling around her little body, warm in the bed with the comforter around us. I can't decide if I can give us both a different last time or not without setting us back. I guess we'll see. In the meantime, I definitely feel like the Bootie in our little duo.
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