Tattoos and Drool

This is why I keep him around

He makes me laugh.

Real, full-fledged belly laughs.

Today marks four years since we vowed to deal with each other’s farts and lame jokes for all eternity, and like cheese or wine (or farts), it’s only gotten better with age.

I added this app to my iPhone called Loopt Mix. It allows you to make a simple profile and then, using your location, links you to profiles of people in your area so you can make friends or network or whatever. You know, one of those totally pointless apps that seems like a good idea but really is just a useful tool for stalkers or booty calls. Yeah.

So last night we’re sitting there watching Dog the Bounty Hunter (yeah, we go there) and it’s 11pm and my phone goes off. “Who the hell is texting me at 11pm?” I grumbled, because I was in a grumbly mood and everything was making me grumble. It’s a Loopt Mix message. From a guy, again, because Loopt Mix is a total sausage fest and sausages apparently can’t read the words “women” or “friendship.”

“I know it says you’re interested in women but let me know if you want to bone.”

Oh fer fuck’s sake. Grumble grumble grumble.

I fire back an “I’m married, asshole” and go to turn it off when I notice, hey, that avatar picture looks familiar.

My husband responds, “Well ask him if he minds.”

Blink. Blinkblink. Punch husband in the shoulder. Laugh, a lot.

Yeah, this is why I keep him around.

Four years and counting.

Our family is growing

Avonlea turned three months old yesterday, which warrants a milestone post. I have her picture ready and everything. But it will have to wait until tomorrow, because today was all about this little lady.

Her name is Neva. She made me an aunt for the first time at 5:15 this morning. Welcome, pretty girl!

*there go my teary eyes for the 54th time today*

And on that note, why am I still sitting here?

The husband is walk, walk, walking the baby and I’m sitting here freezing and refusing to turn the heater up any higher. We haven’t gotten to spend any quality time together in over a week ever since Sleep Is Not For Babies ‘09 hit. Although my Bejeweled Blitz score has flourished, our *ahem* closeness, if you will, has suffered. Such is life with an infant. I’m still convinced babies don’t sleep simply for the purpose of keeping you from getting knocked up again at three days postpartum.

Not that we need help in that area.

And not that we actually do much of anything when we do get that sacred, fleeting time alone. Because instead of being all, hey baby, wanna put your bike in my trunk? I’m all, so hey, I haven’t talked to you in like fifty-seven days, and I know we aren’t wearing pants, but did you know your son can fart the alphabet now? And he likes to comment on my mustache? And he’s like THIS IS NOT WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING HERE.

I have a short attention span.

(Hey! He got her in the crib! How long will it last this time?)

Shelby has always been the Baby Whisperer. He has a sixth sense for noticing the tiniest quirks and preferences in our babies and using them to his advantage. Like, he’ll figure out that Avonlea falls asleep almost instantly if you pat her back really hard and fast, and she likes the closet door to be at a certain angle so the light hits her face in the perfect spot, and if we put socks on her hands she’ll stop being so squirmy, and she really likes this one certain song on her Ocean Wonders Aquarium. You know, the little things.

He also was always the first to wake up when Beckett would cry in the night, and he’d go get him while I was still snoring away. Same with Sawyer’s infancy – he was the one who fed him at night, sometimes so efficiently that I’d wake up the next morning and think he had slept through the night when he really hadn’t.

I used to feel bad about this, almost inadequate. I am the mommy and the mommy is supposed to be the one to make everything better and rock you to sleep and know all the secrets. Over time though, I’ve realized what a special bond it has created between my children and their daddy that he has a few tricks Mommy doesn’t know about. I have the boob powers but he has everything else.

Some day, sooner than either of us can really imagine, this will all be a distant memory. No one will will need walked or patted or shushed. No one will wake up in the middle of the night for a cup of milk or dry sheets, or a head-over-heels frolic down the stairs. Some day we might actually get eight consecutive hours of sleep again and won’t wake up from it thinking the baby monitor is broken. (At least, I keep telling myself we will. Don’t ruin that glimmer of hope for me just yet.)

Until then, I guess we do what everyone else does.

We get really good at multi-tasking. Sexytime combined with the weekly booger recap? Why yes, yes we can.

My crafts, let me show you them

So, um. Crafty is pretty much my middle name. I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I can’t do math. But if it involves a French seam or a ruffle or some 100% cotton batting, I’m your chick.

My fabric stash is a little famous amongst my friends. See? Here it is.

Although it doesn’t even come close to touching the awesomeness of other stashes I’ve seen out in the blogosphere, it’s mine. I’m a little addicted.

I don’t have a really interesting and sentimental story about how my grandma taught me to sew dresses on her old Singer and she helped sew flags during the war and then she handed her machine down to me, or something. My story is much more boring and blah. I taught myself to sew (although it was on my mom’s old machine). Pretty straight-forward. I knew nothing other than how to thread the needle and press the pedal. But thanks to the depths of the internet and its wonderfully crafty collection of blogs, I learned. A lot.

Youtube also taught me to knit while I was pregnant with Avonlea. I still haven’t made more than a few hats, but meh. I like to dabble.

I remember the first thing I ever made. It was a “quilt,” as I called it, even though it wasn’t actually quilted in any way. I used the cheap polyester batting because I didn’t know any better. It was just simple squares, no pattern. I didn’t know that a rotary cutter or plastic quilting rulers existed, so I used a piece of plywood and traced it on the fabric with a ball-point pen. That thing was ridiculous. But someone thought it was beautiful (hi Lissa!) and that inspired me to make more. And more, and more.

I kind of used to have a pretty lucrative business sewing custom baby blankets, quilts and other accessories. I paid for my iMac in tag blankets. 1900 dollars in tag blankets, in a three-month span. True story.

Those were the good old days.

Now that I have less time and less sanity, I don’t sew much for a profit any more. I’m lucky if I get time to sew things for my own kids, or as gifts. It’s an easy thing for me to get burnt out on, so I’ve found that I have to keep the pressure of deadlines to a minimum or I’ll stop enjoying it. Every once in awhile I’ll accept a couple custom orders. Which then take me three weeks to fill. And I remember why I don’t do that any more.

The one thing that will never get old is the thrill I get when I create something new. There’s just something cool about making it yourself.

I’ve made blankets with fluffy sushi on them.

A ginormous slice of fluffy pie.

I made Babygirl’s crib bedding, and learned that I will never ever do a ruffle by hand ever again.

I have many works in progress, like this quilt for my sister. That was supposed to be a gift last Christmas. Oops.

I dabble in ginormous head-swallowing hairbows.

I knit my kid a hat. That thing took forever.

And I love it. All of it.

Screw you, Ashton

I would like to say right now that if I’m being punked, you can all STOP IT. Stop it right now. Because I totally won’t give you the comedy you’re looking for, I’ll probably just throw myself on the floor sobbing and screaming KILL MEEEE and you’ll all start backing up slowly towards the nearest exit. And then you’ll just have to pack your cameras up and trash all the footage and find another victim because it will be that sad and pathetic. I also might punch Ashton in donkey omelets and then you’d want to sue me but I’m really not worth anything. So yeah. NOT WORTH YOUR TIME.

And if that’s the case, don’t you have enough footage by now? I mean really. It’s only a half-hour show.

Telling the cats to piss in the rice box I made for the boys? Really not all that hilarious, sorry to say. Especially since I didn’t realize that’s what had taken place until I was absentmindedly running my hands through the box, discovered it was damp, and SMELLED MY FREAKIN’ HAND. Yeah, that was really awesome, as was the struggle to hold down the vomit as I furiously scrubbed the skin off my fingers. I can’t remember if this was before or after I had a kid poop his pants while the other kid was flipping a full-size mattress on its side in order to use the box spring as a trampoline.

The kid’s reoccurring ear infection? Not quite sure how you pulled that one off. Pretty brill. And excellent timing – you know, making him sick on a Saturday, plus a 5-day course of antibiotics, equals getting sick again shortly after they run out. Which is, OH, another Saturday. Fantastic. Now we get to do ear drops. Twice a day, for ten days. Which is totally my favorite activity ever, what with the bucking and the kicking and the screaming at an ungodly volume. I can’t wait to repeat that highly enjoyable task TWENTY TIMES.

And the four-year-old. Can’t leave him out, right? It was awesome being confronted by his teacher yesterday after class to learn that he had yelled maniacally and thrown a pair of scissors at her head. That’s not at all humiliating. And over what? Ah. Not wanting to do the art project. Completely valid reason for a violent tantrum.

The same day that happened, he also came up to me and was all “Mom, look at my hair!” and I was like what could you possibly have put in it now and he goes “It’s water!” and I’m all please don’t tell me from where and he says “It’s from the toilet!” And I was like, hell no, I did not have a child ripped from my vagina just so he could go and dunk his head in turd water. Do-over, please.

But the cruelest part of all? Dealing with the pee rice and the ear goop and the scissor-throwing while also having a baby who DOES NOT SLEEP. I am not lying when I say I would rather have hot needles stabbed under my fingernails than deal with an infant who is fighting sleep to the death and winning. ‘Cause see, too much of that leads to tweeting things like this:

So in closing. I’ll take these kids back and these ones too and also this perfect baby please. Now get out of my house.