One Perfect Mess

Archive for April, 2010

Today the Daddy of the house turns 29.

We celebrated with Bojangles for breakfast.

Fun with sidewalk chalk

Then we had ribs for dinner.

Talking to the grandparents on the webcam.

Homemade birthday cookie.

Watch more cool animation and creative cartoons at Aniboom

You have to have an account to vote which is fairly painless to sign up for but annoying nonetheless. Still if anyone is so inclined here is the link to vote, I’ll be your super best friend.

Over the weekend I saw the references to Jillian Michaels’ pregnancy controversy and have read what some of my fellow mommy bloggers have to say about the subject. As someone that gave birth twice within two years and as an adoptee I have all sorts of dogs in this fight. It seems that she is being attacked on two points in the interview.

1.) She chooses not to have a biological baby because she doesn’t want to endure the physical aspects of pregnancy and childbirth. Oh honey, none of us do. But, for most people the desire to have biologically related children overrides the unpleasantries of pregnancy and then afterward we all join up with the Shredheads to put ourselves back together again. There are lots of reasons that people choose not to have children: lifestyle, financial, emotional, and physical. All of them are valid reasons and nobody should be made to feel like a selfish person if they know that they are not equipped for the challenge. I honestly do not understand the drama on this point. I don’t feel like Jillian is saying that I made a poor choice when I decided to become pregnant. She just said in the interview that wasn’t something she felt compelled to do.

2.) Jillian then went on to say that should she ever become a mom she would do so through adoption. Plenty of fertile people choose adoption as the means to grow their families. As someone that is adopted I don’t generally think about it in terms of being noble or as Jillian put it “rescuing.” However, when I think of adoption, due to my own circumstances I generally think of domestic adoption of infants rather than the more widespread international adoption. Perhaps one might think of it as “rescuing” a child from overseas when getting a child out of a poorly run orphanage. I suppose I can see that argument. And it could be entirely me being egocentric that I have never considered myself “rescued” although certainly my life is on a much different path than it would have been had I stayed with my biological family. That is a whole ‘nother (password protected) post yet to be written. Adoption should ideally be the joining of a child and set of parents that both genuinely want and need that relationship. It should be a symbiotic process where everyone benefits. But, Jillian isn’t an adoptive parent. She isn’t someone that was adopted. So until you are there, you just really don’t know. Like Bill said on Twitter, lots of people say their pets are like kids to them. I was guilty of that myself. And, yes, I loved my pets a hell of a lot. I worried about them. I spent thousands (tens of thousands, sigh) of dollars on their medical expenses. I bought them toys and loved on them. Just realized I was writing all of that in the past tense… I still have those same pets. And I still take excellent care of them and love them a lot… but they are absolutely not like my kids. Not even close, but it took me becoming a mom to understand that.

I guess my take away from it is… so what? So she implied that adopting a child would be like getting a puppy from the pound. Everyone that has been there and done that knows that it totally not the reality of it. I’m sure Jillian is well aware it isn’t that way either. I doubt highly she thought long and hard beforehand about how she would answer if adoption came up and was talking on the fly. She has made numerous attempts to clarify her feelings both on Facebook and Twitter and I think it is time to give her a break.

When Weebles was very small my favorite books to read to her were Seuss. Mostly because they were more entertaining to me to read rather than the board books with fifteen words total. Now they are among her favorites and she has a bunch of them. The problem is now that she is older and questioning more everything they are a huge pain in the ass to read. I cannot be the only parent to run into this issue. How in holy hellfire do you explain what is going on in some of these books?

“What’s that Mommy?”

…”Umm, well it is a Nink in his sink honey”

“Mommy what’s a Nink?”

…”Well.. it is that thing right there. In the sink.”

“Mommy what’s that?”

….”Sigh, it looks like a cat but different”

“Mommy what they do?”

Shit.

Then there are the books that don’t even give names to the weirdo creatures that grace the pages. What is Mr. Knox? Hell if I know. Everything must be explained to a 2.75 year old and there just is no explaining some things. I’m sticking with the Cat in the Hat.

I watched my kid eat a crayon today and I didn’t even bother to stop him. I think I hit a wall about two weeks ago and I haven’t recovered yet. I basically want to lie around all day and do nothing. No tweeting, no blogging, no housework, no childcare, no online shopping so you know this is serious. The only thing I can find motivation for, oddly enough, is running every other day. If you’d told me three months ago that I would ever make myself run on a regular basis, much less look forward to it, I would tell you that you had done a damn fine job of hiding your crack pipe but your mouth was totally giving you away.

Part of the problem is that I finally got around to doing some spring cleaning. To me, that means taking one area at a time, totally emptying it, scrubbing it down and reorganizing it. This makes one hell of a mess as things are displaced from their original locations where they probably didn’t belong in the first place. Plus, all the effort going into this intense cleaning means that I have nothing left over for the routine stuff that keeps the house livable. Like putting away toys, or picking up the entire box of raisins on the living room floor, or even putting away the load of laundry that has been in the dryer for a week and a half. Therefore the majority of  the “living space” in my home looks like a freaking episode of Hoarders.. not that I’ve ever seen it because I don’t get to watch adult TV. At times I have literally had to wade through knee deep chaos in my living room. Disorder is one of the surest ways for my mood to plummet. I just don’t handle it well. Are there pills for that?

Things are gradually getting back to normal around the house thank goodness. I finally finished all the closets and the pantry. I got the carpets shampooed in the bedroom and bathroom (yep, carpet in the bathroom… I can’t tell you how much I love it. Because I totally don’t.) Tomorrow I just need to clean up the kitchen, clean out the fridge and then attack the mass of toys in my living room. Sounds easy enough.. I hope. On second thought, maybe I’m not depressed after all. Maybe I’m just tired.

So, why did you leave your husband? Well it had more than a little to do with the fact that he cannot plan ahead to save his life. His brother’s birthday was over a month ago. A minimum of a month prior I started to get the idea in his head that he needed to start figuring out what he wanted to get him for his birthday. I kindly dropped hints every few days until about a week before his birthday. Then I started in with the all out nagging. The birthday came and went and the decision was made that we would have a birthday party for my mother in law, my husband and his brother all at the same time since their birthdays fall within about six weeks of each other. Temporary reprieve for the husband. The party was yesterday. I continued to remind. The presents ended up being purchased on the way home from work the day before the party. Nevermind we had plans that evening to go somewhere and were in a hurry to begin with.

Putting things off is how these sorts of things happen:

That, is my husband sitting on the ground in the parking lot of the local Kerr Drug trying to wrap a huge oddly shaped gift for his brother…. with no scissors, or tape. We didn’t have enough gift wrap here to wrap the darn thing so we had to stop on the way to the party. We also had to get a birthday card. So there we were, in the parking lot being stared at by passersby as we struggled with the stupid thing. All the while listening to this, repeatedly:

She picked the card out herself.

Ants! Construction workers, exterminators, C25K run, hole in side of house, WHAM WHAM, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, ANT STAMPEDE! Frantic IMs, Shit there are ants every where, WHAM WHAM WHAM, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, WAAAAAAA, WAAAAAAAA, Change diaper, Snack time, Why is nobody eating today? ANTS ANTS ARE EVERY WHERE! WHAM WHAM BANG, Potty break, Mommy Mommy Mommy can I have candee Mommy? Bunny Candy? Mommy, I want Daddy’s Peeps, Mommy, Mommy, Lunchtime! Seriously? You aren’t going to eat anything today? WHAM WHAM, naptime everybody! Are you playing in the pesticide? Wash hands, repeat, repeat, repeat, Mommy I have Peep now? Diaper change, WAAAA WAAAA, it is really naptime now I mean it, why aren’t you sleeping? Fine okay play quietly, splinter! WAAA WAAA WAAA, workers have a question, excuse me what was that mom? The water isn’t working? What? WHAM WHAM WHAM, No water?!? What? Honey you are getting take out for dinner. EVERYBODY GO TO BED! Fine. How was yours?