Every winter, ’bout this time, when the cold days have dragged on and on to the point where a 100 degree day (Celsius even!) sounds more tolerable than bundling up the kids AGAIN and having the boogies in my nose freeze for the forty-millionth time that day, and when getting the mail (at the end of my driveway) seems like a drastic undertaking, I start to have this fantasy in which we move to more temperate climates.

And because, in my fantasy-land, I am also slightly practical and don’t have visions of moving to a completely foreign country and having to learn a new language (you mean people don’t speak American EVERYWHERE?), I envision us moving to one of the coasts.

For a good 290 days of the year, I like where I live, honestly I do (and probably in part as a defense mechanism, as moving out of state would be brutal as far as custody arrangements go for The Big One), and besides a small jaunt away from here several years ago, I have lived in the same town most of my life. It’s a sweet river town, full of character and pep (and a number of the exact same strip malls), and it’s great BECAUSE I KNOW WHERE EVERYTHING IS (I never claimed to be adventuresome, now did I?).

But, for as teeny as my family is, I do happen to have some that live out of state in California, where I have been any number of times. And I genuinely love it out there, it’s interesting, it’s clean, people are nice, and if it weren’t for such amazingly high property prices, we might live out there for reals.

Well, the cost of living AND the fact that I am not positive that I am good-looking enough.

California is weird like that, and I’ll never forget being there as a teenager to attend my cousin’s wedding. A busboy (a BUSBOY!) in the joint where we were dining nearly caused me to choke on my steak, so uncanny was his resemblance to Brad Pitt (the 12 Monkeys/Seven version, whom I had many a naughty fantasy about).

A couple of years later, I was back again, and I noticed that even the bums on The Haight were sexy. BUMS were SEXY! Even the one who flashed me his penis was good looking (and well hung)!

It was like entering an alternate universe.

As I got older and every time I went back to Cali, I noticed more and more unlikely and attractive people. Airport baggage claim guys were hot! The chick at the rental car place looked as though she’d stepped off the runway to make my car rental experience a complete nightmare. I kept expecting the dude who took my toll money to start selling me shampoo, so magnificent was his shiny mane of hair, so full of body and style.

Just based on experience (and without real knowledge), I would even venture to guess that the people who worked at the DMV were extras on a movie set in their spare time (away from being nasty to people who were stupid enough to get into the wrong line– EVEN THOUGH IT WASN’T LABELED).

I don’t know about your state, but typically the DMV workers are thought to be the bitchy Missing Link anthropologists are always harping on about (I wonder if their studies would take them to the DMV, because it should), but I would venture a guess that in California, they, too, are beautiful, attractive, and of the highest genetic pedigree.

Even if I were rich enough to buy a shack in California, I’m fairly certain we’d be turned away at the border for being undesirably unattractive.

For now, I will take comfort living here in the Midwest, just outside of Chicago, knowing that while we may be ugly and dumpy, at least we’re landlocked, so no hurricane will make it to our doorstep.

DENIED ENTRY INTO CALIFORNIA DUE TO EXCESSIVE UNFLATTERING GENES.

(Niobe may be the only one who gets the title. Google it if you must. Or don’t. It’s cool.)

So Hey, Universe, what’s up?

I just had this simple request, okay? It’s not too hard, I promise.

But could you make sure it’s at least a month between funerals? I’m not so big on attending them and stuff, so, maybe you could just cool it on the deaths for a bit.

Respectfully (and please don’t strike me down. I’m a nice person, I swear.),

Your Aunt Becky

Still haven’t shaken The Laze ™, but I’m OCD enough that I feel as though I must post something anyway. Since I’m too bored to formulate a REAL post, I will present to you a post in bullet form:

*I just ate expired Ramen for lunch, because I couldn’t think of anything else to eat. When I’m expelling the lining of my intestines later, I’ll only have myself to blame.

*I still have yet to find the dime in Alex’s diaper. I’m pretty sure that it passed, but I after I rooted around once in his diaper and nearly lost my lunch (sadly, not the expired Ramen), I decided that kids have swallowed worse.

*I went to Toys R Us yesterday to look for a Radio Flyer ride along thingy (I needed to see it in person to ascertain if it was too plastic-y for me to spend my dough on), and although I didn’t locate it, I did get suckered into buying him a bunch of presents for a birthday he will not remember.

*I bought a box of Cap’n Crunch (with Crunchberries) and have devoured it. I figure I’m reliving the glory days of college WHILE turning my excrement a delightful color! It’s a win-win situation here.

*Dave came home from work the other night and exclaimed that Alex had bruised both of his tootsies. I bought it and felt suitably guilty until I shamefully realized that his feet were not, in fact, bruised at all, but were covered in the Winter Grime that collects on my floor. Methinks I need a cleaning lady STAT.

*I’m trying as hard as I can to figure out how to de-allergenize my house (is that a word? Probably not) for some guests who are allergic to my menagerie. I’m at a loss, here, save for a bottle of Febreeze and a vacuum.

*sighs*

I need a nap.

I’ve been so full of The Laze ™ these past two days that it would be laughable, except that it’s not. I can’t seem to find the motivation to do a whole lot, save from playing Lego Star Wars (no, sadly for The Daver, I am not a Video Game Person, I just happen to like playing that one) and taking care of the absolutely pertinent day-to-day stuff.

I could lie and tell you that I’ve got a To-Do list a mile long that’s preventing me from being productive, but you know I would never lie to you, baby. Ssshhh, baby it’s okay, don’t worry, Aunt Becky wouldn’t lie to you. I love you too much for that.

Once Alex is carried back to reality from his morning nap (oh.my.God.my.kid.finally.naps.like.a.normal.kid!), I’m going to hoist myself off my less-wide (thank you Synthroid, oh THANK YOU for finally making my metabolism go the right way and allowing me to lose 6 pounds. I am going to throw a parade in your honor!) ass and run some errands.

Normally, when I’m feeling full of The Laze ™ it’s because I’m depressed and lonely and sad and pathetic and dramatic (oh! the! drama!), but this time it’s not the case. I think I’m just sick to death of winter and am feeling rather stir-crazy and bored. Staying home with the kidlets is great in some regards, but can make a person feel like they’re slowly being pecked to death by a flock of adorable chickens.

Sighs.

At least the snow is melting today (this means it’s likely to dump 12 feet of snow on us tonight. Stupid Chicago weather).

—————-

I got tagged by my darling fellow Chicagoian LAS (who you should really check out. She could use a bit of Internet Loving right now, and I know you guys are up to the task) AND my sexy friend Complicated Mama to do this book meme.

Directions: Pick up the closest book. Open the book, turn to page 123, count down to the fifth sentence on that page, and then post the next three sentences.

Without further adieu, I present my book:

“Baby Make Me Breakfast,” by Lisa Brown. Since there is no page 123, I will be giving you the book in it’s entirety:

“I would like…

half a grapefruit,

a soft boiled egg,

a piece of toast,

a cup of coffee,

and a couple of aspirin.

Thank you Baby!

(now scoot, Mama’s hung over).”

(oh yes I just did).

Hmmm, I’ll tag… Pauline, Ames, and KC.

—————–

Okay, Sexy Internet, quick question for you. Put yourself in Aunt Becky’s kicky pink gogo boots and riddle me this: if you were throwing a birthday party at the end of the month for your second child, but you didn’t have many friends with kids, AND you stupidly put “RSVP regrets only” on your invites, would you:

1) Make gift bags for everyone who may be attending (which will likely be mostly adults).

2) Guess how many kids will be coming and make gift bags accordingly just for the kids.

3) Fuck gift bags. You’re already giving them food.

*smootches, Internet, I heart you*

Alex ate at least three-quarters of a box of Macaroni and Cheese for lunch today, immediately after ingesting a container of yogurt, a granola bar, and a serving of pureed fruit. He ate so much that I needed a cigarette after watching him tear through it all.

When he was first born and nursed approximately 14 hours a day (I only wish I were exaggerating), I was convinced that the reason he had to eat so damn much was because my body wasn’t producing enough milk to sustain his frame. Little did I know that he was merely born with a metabolism I would kill for (much like his good old Dad).

It’s funny, because I used to hate people like myself, whose kids ate normal food without acting like it was laced with rat poison, because my darling firstborn ate so little that I often wondered how he gained weight at all.

And that’s one of those things that you place blame squarely on yourself, partially because you feel the all-too-familiar tug of Parental Guilt tapping you on the shoulder (none too gently), and partially because other people blame you for it. It’s amazing how quick to judge other people become when you have a Non-Eater for a child, like you alone are responsible for their shitty diet (and I swear on all that is holy that I eat more than saltines and oatmeal).

Save from paternity, all the variables are very similar between my kids, and who knows, maybe Ben didn’t want to eat because he felt nauseous knowing who his father was. Shit, I know that fact made ME skip a few meals.

It’s one of those funny things that has redeemed me time and again with Alex. Just knowing that I am not at fault (and never have been) for all of Ben’s “issues” has made the sleepless nights and hair pulling worth it’s weight in gold.

Now if you’ll excuse me, dear Internet, whom I love more than life itself, I must go save the cat from being eaten by the baby. Lunch was an hour and a half ago, and he’s HUNGRY again.

This Sunday, after attending Ben’s annual Open House at his Crunchy School, I demanded sweetly requested that The Daver take us out to one of my favorite haunts for a lunch/dinner (linner?). After much protesting, he agreed, and off we went.

Afterwards, in my quest to win the title of Most Annoying Wife ever, by rudely taking away valuable video game time, I insisted that we pop over to Target to grab some baby yogurt for the week.

As we walked in, Ben grabbed his kid’s cup and declared that he was going to throw it away inside, which was fine by me. Less crap in the car for me to throw out = happy Aunt Becky.

When we finally located a garbage can, Ben pulled the sticky straw from the cup and declared that he wanted to take it home to reuse it. Now, over the past couple of years, we at Casa de la Sausage have made quite the effort to become more Green, and I am all for any small thing we can do to accomplish that goal.

But I draw the line at bringing home straws, not because I don’t see the good in reusing them, but because a) we don’t use those straws at home, so he’s not saving anything by doing so and b) the last time he did that, the straw was left sitting on the kitchen floor for me to throw away.

(truth be told, he wanted the straw so that he could PLAY with it, which wouldn’t have bugged me in the slightest if he didn’t want to save every sticky gross thing he comes across.)

So when I rudely insisted that he toss the straw away with the rest of his sugar-drenched cup, he balked at it. I argued and he finally relented and angrily threw the straw into the garbage. It was then when he uttered the words that afforded him the Longest and Most Drawn Out Lecture From The Daver:

“FINE, Mom, if you want to KILL the EARTH!”

The words were dripping with such snot and disdain that a teenager may have been able to do it no better.

Ben: 1, Parents: 0.

———–

Although most of my house is fairly well baby-proofed, occasionally, we will construct a makeshift gate at the edge of the couch to keep the Beast That Is Alex out of his favorite places, namely the dog dish, the cat door and his personal favorite, the toilet.

The area that he is sometimes contained in doesn’t allow us to put up a usable gate, so we usually just shove two laundry baskets in the space and call it a day. Often he will howl at this injustice, but usually he is pretty content to play in this room.

Yesterday, because I have a bladder approximately the size and shape of a Froot Loop, I ran to the bathroom for the 47th time that hour and left him in his toy filled prison, but peed with the door open so that I could listen and make sure he wasn’t trying to dismember one of the cats.

As soon as I let that flow go, I heard a strange noise: it was the noise that a sliding plastic laundry basket makes on a wooden floor. After I did my business (that’s the dumbest phrase, isn’t it?), I came back out to see the most satisfied baby on the planet.

He had hoisted his considerable weight onto the basket and pushed it out of the way, and now he sat on the kitchen floor looking like I’d just handed him a wet nurse AND a new Corvette.

Alex: 1, Parents: 0

——————

If you want me, I’ll be in my walk-in closet popping Valium for the next 18 or so years.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always gotten headaches. They’re not the sort that leave me stranded in a dark room with an ice pack across my eyes OR seeing these delicious sounding auras, but they’re more an irritation, somewhat like a burn. You know, the sort that just always reminds you that “Hey, you have a headache, idiot, isn’t it fun?”

Unless you have a migraine, headaches aren’t something that tends to elicit much sympathy. I should know, as The Daver gets ’em as well. And despite his pleas for sympathy and possible BJ’s to “make them go away,” I never feel particularly sympathetic towards him. They tend to be more an irritation of the highest degree, a thorn in my side, and occasionally a fight-provoking ailment.

Mainly because he tends to get them (in my mind) in order to get out of completing annoying tasks. Am I being a bitch? You be the judge.

He has gotten headaches right before the following tasks (and subsequently having to lay down):

*Packing our loads of crap into boxes before the movers came

*Painting the walls before we put the condo on the market

*Packing our stuff AGAIN before the movers came

*Scooping for Cat Box Crunchies

*Familial birthday parties

*Cleaning before we had guests over

and my personal “you will never live this down so long as you live and I may put it on your grave stone, motherfucker:”

*While I was in labor with Alex.

It’s not that I don’t care that he has a headache, on the contrary, if he got them while we were just farting around the house trying to complete absolutely nothing whatsoever of any importance, I probably wouldn’t say a word. BUT, one’s sympathy dwindles after being in labor for a full 12 hours with the lights down low and the television set to an inaudible frequency WHILE having to worry that no one will hold your leg when you have to push.

That said, I obviously can’t expect to get much sympathy for the headaches I’ve been having with alarming regularity now that I am taking Vitamin Z. They’re not really bad enough to make me want to go to the doctor and demand a different SSRI, because really, the benefit outweighs the cost in terms of my mental health here.

But shit, I just wish I could make them go away for a day or two. The NSAID’s I have don’t touch them, and I don’t have the sort of life that would allow me to just rest and relax them away (I’m not certain it would help anyway).

What do YOU do when you have a headache? Any and all assvice would be highly appreciated.

Walking (er, STUMBLING) into motherhood for the second time, I knew that I had some extremely complicated feelings about nursing. Now, I’m not the sort of person who claims to know what is best for anyone else in regards to parenting and all of the choices that come along with it, to me, I still engage in the Whatever Gets You Through The Night (Or Day) school of parenting.

As such, I don’t find fault in the decisions of other parents that I know that are not the same as my own. Co-Sleeping? Whatever, not my personal cup ‘o’ joe, but if it works, go for it. Baby Wearing? Again, whateves.

Feeding evokes the exact same feelings of ‘meh’ in me.

Now, this isn’t to say that I didn’t spend the first 5 years of Ben’s life wondering what the fcuk was wrong with me that no matter what I tried, I couldn’t nurse him, because I did. I convinced myself that I had low milk supply, inverted nipples, and likely a nasty case of BO, and THESE were the reasons I never got to nurse him.

Until Alex was born with a latch to beat all latches and an appetite like a teenager, I was sure that I was at fault for being unable to nurse Ben. My milk supply was pathetic (according to the pump) and my dinner plate (hubcap) sized nipples would certainly have turned ME off, were I in his diaper.

It wasn’t until later when I realized that any issues I had with nursing Ben had nothing to do with me.

It was his own fault.

I am blaming all of his nursing issues squarely on him alone.

(anyone who has had issues nursing their own children can understand the magnitude of this statement. If you have not had issues, it would make very little sense as to why this would be a big deal. Just roll with me, baby. Or ignore me. It’s cool.)

My feelings about nursing are now not so complex. Alex is weaning himself, and down to about one nursing session a day (if that), and aside from once again being amazed at how quickly he’s grown up, I’m having a hard time pegging which emotion I feel about it (I need one of those ‘match the emotion with the proper face’ chart right about now).

On the one hand, the thought of him turning one is freaking me out a wee bit, mainly because I am pretty certain that this is our last baby, and therefore I should have savored some of the baby-ness a bit more. The late night nursing sessions were annoying, for sure, but as with even the good parts of having kids, they never go back to that kind of intimacy again. Pretty soon, he’ll be getting his own food from the cupboard and begging for Dino-Shaped fruit snacks and Cap’n Crunch (with Crunchberries, if he’s anything like his Momma–which is is.), and when I blink again, he’ll be chugging shitty beers with The Dudes (just like his Momma) with the same intensity that he went after the boobs.

On the flip side, being one is so much more interesting (and exasperating) than being an ickle baby, and I’ve always preferred kids that I can interact with to those who are a drooling mass of baby.

I guess the only real emotion that I can see right now is relief. Plain and simple relief.

I’m glad he’s weaning himself, I’m glad he’s turning one, and I’m glad those all nighters are gone for now (until he hits college. But by that time, I will be relaxing by the pool, and likely asleep while he’s drinking his braincells away). I’m glad that his favorite game to play right now is “ball” and I’m glad that I can feed him whatever I am eating (without teeth, to boot!), and I am glad that he is in my life.

Maybe my heart will always skip a beat when I see (or hear) that newborn cry or smell their special smell, but maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just be glad that my time is over and I can focus my time on enjoying my children, who, while they are not getting any younger, are two of the most enchanting people I have ever been fortunate enough to know.

And maybe I will just thank the powers that be that I was deemed fit enough to be the mother of these two fascinating souls.

I cannot wait to see what new-ness today will bring.

I fell into parenting in the same way I’ve fallen into everything else in my life: an opportunity presented itself to me, I made a choice, and have reaped the consequences ever since. I don’t pretend to be Type-A enough to have a five year plan unless it involves the phrase “Don’t Die” as it’s sole criteria, and this is fine by me.

Alex was a deliberately executed child, although the circumstances surrounding his conception were, of course, up in the air (the whole marriage thing didn’t matter to me as much as it did to The Daver), but even after having had one child, I was in no way prepared for having another.

I’ve always expected to write off the first year of a child’s life as not having much real joy in it, between the colic, the sleepless nights, and the formidable task of having to learn all about a new person without so much as a guidebook to consult. It seems easier to me to have the defeatist “everything about this is going to suck” attitude than to try to piss rainbows and sunshine about it and be disappointed when things don’t work out exactly as planned.

But today, after prying the Wii controllers out of the hands of the Elder Sausages and interrupting their Saturday morning Sitting On Our Asses Routine, I packed all three of The Sausages into the Meat Wagon and led the way to a local bakery to select a cake for Alex’s first birthday party (March 30th for those local and expecting an invite, which should be arriving this week sometime).

After carefully selecting a cake that is quite reminiscent of our wedding cake (see, I have a Cake Fetish. I don’t like to eat it because I am insane, but I require fancy-assed cakes for most occasions), and paying the approximate cost of a down payment on a house for it, I was overtaken by an emotion that I couldn’t quite place.

Suddenly, I felt light and buoyant, like a rather chubby balloon floating in the breeze. I could hear the birds singing (no small feat in the dead of winter here) and smell the teeniest hint of spring on the air. Alex’s babbling became the most adorable thing I’d ever heard, and Ben’s incessant monologuing suddenly seemed the perfect backdrop for the day. Hell, even Dave’s Rank Ass became more tolerable to my delicate girlish sense of smell.

For the first time in several years, I felt completely at ease with myself and the world around me. Life seemed to be more for living and less for surviving.

It’s really a glorious feeling, and it shocks me to think that normal people probably walk around like this all day, every day and take it completely for granted.

Life is sweet, baby. Just sweet.