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Archives from 2002-2006

JB has returned from hiking over 40 miles through glorious Rogue River wilderness and I am caught between paging through his photos and wishing with every element of my being to do the same trip sometime soon because oh my god the wild beauty of this part of the world—and peering with horror at his Spam-burger’d feet and thinking well maybe we could just raft it instead.

It was rough being on my own with the kids, particularly since Dylan seems to have entered a clingy stage that is in equal parts adorable and annoying as all fuck. All weekend long he crawled in my lap and turned around and around like a dog trying to mash its bed into submission. He walked behind me with his head stuffed against the back of my thighs, fiercely gripping my pants and half-dragging them to the floor. If I left the room, he staggered frantically after me, moaning and howling. At one point I found myself in the bathroom trying to take care of business in private, only to have Dylan collapse in tears on the other side of the closed door. Then Riley barged in, took one look at me, and announced I was doing it wrong because I forgot to push my penis down.

In addition to the clinginess, Dylan’s obsessed with pictures of farm animals and his favorite activity in the world is to sit on my lap with his chewed-up copy of Old MacDonald Had a Cerebral Event And Thus the Repetition or whatever it is while I flip the pages and he provides the color commentary. “Moo. Baa. COCK-A-LOO.”

This is a nice little bonding pursuit but truth be told there are only so many hours I can spend looking at photos of sheep before I start wondering just how many Advil Liqui-Gels a person needs to consume to put themselves into a coma, so in lieu of decent weather that would allow us to escape to the playground, I let the kids watch a fair amount of TV this weekend. Hey, say what you will about children’s programming, if Yo Gabba Gabba lets me take a whiz in peace, I’m all for it.

It was about an hour before naptime yesterday—a prime TV-zombification time period if ever there was one—when the television and DVD player mysteriously stopped working. Since I am a resourceful woman with creative problem solving skills, the first thing I did was rush to the computer and post the equivalent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream on Twitter. At first I waited, foot tapping, for someone to magically appear and fix my broken appliance, but no dice. Dammit. I went and peered into the entrail-like mess of cords behind the entertainment center, but it was like the time the toilet backed up and I opened up the tank: like, what the fuck am I even looking at, here?

I opened up Twitter again and someone mentioned checking the circuit breakers so I ran out to the garage and pulled open what I thought was the electrical thingie but was actually the panel for our water heater. I eventually found the circuit board but realized I didn’t know what I was looking for: would one of the little switches be holding up a sign that said “THIS BE’S WHY YOUR TV DON’T WORK”? I flipped some things at random, then went back inside, where the microwave clock was beeping and the printer was making its ponderous starting-up noises but the TV was still off and now Dylan was wailing because I’d left the house for .5 seconds and Riley was yelling “MAYBE DADDY NEEDS TO FIX IT” and I was like “DADDY IS AN ASSWIPE FOR RIGGING THE WORLD’S MOST COMPLICATED TV SYSTEM THEN RUNNING OFF ON SOME SAUSAGE-FEST MAN HIKE”.

Eventually, somehow, I randomly smashed a button titled “Switched Outlets” on some unknown piece of equipment and like that, everything turned back on. I guess this component protects all the other stuff from power surges or some such thing, but all I know is, it has a stupid dickwad button that makes everything stop working if a small child pushes it.

So it was right after the whole TV debacle that I got both kids ready for naps, tucked them into bed, strolled back out to the living room, fired up my computer and casually hit the “Update WordPress” link in my blog. Instantly, my whole website broke. With an audible snapping sound.

I won’t even detail all the clusterfuckery of getting the site fixed, except that I eventually paid my web hosting company $150 to help me restore it which did no good whatsoever and finally my friend Jon came through like a goddamned knight in shining blog-armor, but holy crap, I felt like some demented version of King Midas, where everything I touched turned to steaming piles of unresponsive technology.

The microwave clock still isn’t working. I have no idea how to reset it. Luckily, JB is home now, so I can probably offload that task. He owes me one, after all.

Riley is suddenly interested in dinosaurs, specifically the Tyrannosaurs rex. Or as he’s known more colloquially in our household, T-Rex. We went to the library and picked out some books on dinosaurs and I’ve been doing my level best to indulge Riley when he repeatedly requests a drawing of a T-Rex, which unfortunately tends to turn out looking like this:

(JB: “What the . . . what IS that? My god.”)

(Riley: “Hmm. I think you forgot the spines. Or I think maybe that is an angry mouse.”)

Anyway, it’s been kind of nice to chat about prehistoric reptiles instead of pirates or Buzz Lightyears but I should have been better prepared for the inevitable moment when Riley would ask me what happened to all the dinosaurs, because when he did so I found myself just sort of sitting there with my mouth hanging open while my brain scrambled around frantically in search of a better answer than WELL SON THEY ALL UP AND FUCKING DIED, CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT SHIT?

I mean, mass extinction, there’s a happy topic for you. How do you even start with this? “You see, honey, there’s this idea of a catastrophic event, maybe a really really big rock that hit the earth and noooo of course that would never happen now ha ha ha ha OH GOD.”

Oh, and seriously one whole day later we were looking at his baby book and there was a picture of me all elephantine-third-trimester and we talked a bit about how he was a tiny baby in my belly before he was born and then he wanted to know how he got OUT of my belly. And for the very first time, I was incredibly glad for that C-section, because at least I didn’t have to tackle anything more complicated than, “Well, the nice doctors made a cut in my belly and pulled you out!” (which sounds like total bullshit but dude, I was there, that’s exactly what happened). Although I suppose if I had to I could always fall back on my brilliant artistic renderings in order to more thoroughly explain the process of a vaginal birth as I understand it:

The vast majority of my parenting experience to date has to do with diapers and tantrums and nutrition and Curious George, not so much the deeper issues in life. Man oh man, and I thought I was clueless before.

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