June 05, 2007

Clara Jane was a Good Little Monkey, and Always Very Curious

You might recall a a tirade I wrote last summer regarding the clusterfuck a local movie megagoogleplex referred to as "Free Family Movie Day", in which I attempted to take Clara Jane to see Curious George. The long and short of it, it didn't go well, and I haven't attempted to take her to a movie since. Not so much because of the bad experience, but because there hasn't been anything I really thought she should see.

One of the main problems with last year's movie fiasco was that I'd built up the movie experience to Clara Jane, only to have things go wrong. Had I not built it up so much, it wouldn't have been such a disappointment. Not that she was terribly disappointed, but the fear of disappointing ones child has got to be one of the biggest parental motivators out there. So, you'd think I would have learned to not build things up, right?

Wrong. Today was going to be yoga class! We took a kid's yoga class a few months ago, and she loved it. After a long wait, classes finally started this week, and I started building them up to her.

How the hell was I supposed to know that it would take three calls in three days to reach someone the day before the class who would inform me that the session was already full?

Crap. Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap. Double-crap when the kiddo wakes up squealing, "Let's go to yoga! I love yoga class!"

Crap.

At 8:30 this morning, I scrounged the 'net, desperately searching for something as fun and special and awesome as yoga that I could pull out of my ass in roughly thirty minutes. Lo and behold, that movie megagoogleplex I swore to never enter again after last year's fiasco were starting the "Free Family Movie Cattle Call Trampede-a-thon" this very day at 10 AM. And what movie were they showing? Curious George, which Clara Jane still hadn't seen.

This time, I didn't tell her where we were going. Not when we had less than an hour to get ready and stake a place in the theater, instead of getting turned away with $14-worth of concession stand crap already purchased, like last year.

No ma'am. This time, we were firmly in our theater seats with $14-worth of concession stand crap (well, two bottles of water and enough popcorn to create Ethanol to fill my truck) a good twenty minutes before the movie started.

For the last few weeks, Clara Jane hasn't exactly been fond of me. In fact, our relationship has been a bit strained. But let me tell you, all it takes to get back into the good graces of a 3-year-old? Curious George and her body weight (38 pounds) of movie theater popcorn. In Clara Jane's world, I once again rule.

After the movie we went to lunch with some friends, as we tend to do more often than not, while my house packs itself for next week's move. That's right. Next week. HOLY FUCK!!! Anyway, it was at lunch that Clara Jane, a good little monkey who's always very curious, made two discoveries via her curiosity:

1) That little monkeys who remove their shoes can run their bare feet through yogurt that's spilled on the floor, then suck the yogurt off their toes, and

2) that a curious little monkey can slip her big spoon into my coffee mug, slurping up Madagascar vanilla coffee with sugar, cream and cinnamon a good three or four times before it finally registers in my tired little mind that, HOLY SHIT, CLARA JANE'S DRINKING MY COFFEE!!!

To be 100% honest, I'm surprised it took her this long to have her first slugs of coffee. Not surprisingly, she liked it. A lot.

I think I was about her age when I discovered coffee. First it was from those wonderful Brach's coffee-flavored hard candies that came in beautiful 1960s gold wrappers emblazened with a Mod red and purple coffee cup design. My God, I loved those candies. I had them damn near every time I saw Granny Viv. She always had them stashed in her purse, pockets, and in every room of her house.

It was Granny Opal, my dad's mom, who introduced me to the real thing. I was older than Clara Jane, but not by much. By my estimate, I was around six or seven. Granny Opal boiled her coffee, poured it from her cup into her saucer so it could cool enough to not set fire to the inner flesh of her mouth, and would dunk either doughnuts from Papa Jake's or oatmeal Archway Cookies into the sludge. And it was divine. The massive amounts of liquid saccharin she added only made it even more delightfully bittersweet.

I don't think it's any coincidence that I stopped growing shortly after a childhood spell in which I spent a lot of weekend nights with Granny Opal. As a child our family doctor predicted I'd be a tall adult, since I have really tall women on my dad's side of the family. The fact that I was five feet tall by age nine was a bit of a tip-off, too.

How tall am I today? 5'3". Why? Drinking Granny Opal's boiled-black coffee every other Sunday morning during my prime growing years.

Could be worse. I could have been smoking Tareyton Cigarettes with her, too, but she wouldn't let me. Granny Opal drew the line at coffee, doughnuts and Archway Cookies as being a nutritious breakfast for an elementary schooler. Besides, developing a taste for coffee was worth sacrificing a few inches.

I hope Clara Jane feels the same because if today was any indication, she's going to be very, very curious, and very, very short. And hyper. Very, very, very monkey-doing-headstands-in-the-coffeehouse hyper.

Posted by Robin at 08:06 PM | Comments (32)

February 15, 2007

Devil Baby Turns Three

Today, my sweet baby is no longer a baby. She's a big three-year-old.

If today is an example of what three is like, I'm already longing for the terrible twos.

Happy birthday, Devil Baby. I love you, even when you're chanting "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!!" at the top of your lungs while marching through the house, banging on an empty rice cracker box to the beat of your negations.

I'll also love you when you spontaneously turn into a scorpion and demonstrate your butt-stinger:

But you'll always be my little baby devil.

Posted by Robin at 06:14 PM | Comments (13)

December 31, 2006

Why I'm Crazy

This is the convuluted way my brain works:

1. Yesterday, while leaving the library, B. was doing a little compare-and-contrast of how different brands of jeans fit him, and my mind immediately flashed to the music in a cheesy-ass current jeans commercial. While B.'s expounding on which brand cups his buttcheeks properly, my mind is elsewhere, trying to place the damn song in the commercial. No matter. It's just some throwaway '70s cheese song, unimportant enough that the creator saw fit to license it to sell cheap pants.

2. While listening to my iPod on shuffle this morning, "Sir Duke" by Stevie Wonder shuffles up. That's it! That's the jean commercial song! And it's not some lame '70s throwaway - it's prime Stevie. I proceed to rock the house until ...

3. Friday's viewing of one of my all-time favorite movies, High Fidelity comes into my mind. Particularly, the scene where Jack Black's character rants on Stevie Wonder. And I'm wondering, is it fair to judge Stevie Wonder because, although he created the greatness of "Sir Duke", he later allowed it to be used to pimp jeans?

Is it any wonder I'm mentally ill?

I had this conversation today while Clara Jane was playing with the kitchen trash can.

Me: Clara Jane, leave the trash alone, please. It's dirty.
Clara Jane: It's not dirty. It's clean.
Me: That's one of the dirtiest things in the house.
Clara Jane: It's not in the house. It's outside.
Me: You argue too much.
Clara Jane: I don't argue too much.

And then the trash can was filthy, because my brain exploded all over it, and that's why I'm yet again not writing about books. Tomorrow, maybe, if my head grows back.

Posted by Robin at 11:00 AM | Comments (3)

December 20, 2006

A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Clara Jane. She lived in a village called St. Louis, where the villagers ate their ravioli fried in boiling oil, the lights often went dark, and the baseball team was pretty good.

Actually, Clara Jane didn't live in St. Louis city proper, but in the outlying feudal land known as St. Louis County, a land of many municiaplities and rulers, and many, many speed traps. While she often drove past the beautiful buildings of downtown and marveled at the magical silver rainbow next to the deep, muddy waters, her mother was neglectful of taking the child into downtown, despite the promise she made to herself to not become one of those suburban mothers who never ventures east of I-170.

So, one cold and rainy day, Clara Jane's mother bundled them into their coats and set the coach in the direction of the St. Louis City Library's downtown branch to see the Once Upon a Time... fairytale exhibit, despite the fact that Clara Jane's mother has some serious problems with the gender issues presented in those classic tales, and would just as soon run one of those jousting stick thingies through her very core as encourage her daughter to be a princess.

While the other little girls dressed up as princesses and their mothers asked them, "Where are your princes? What are their names?", Clara Jane busied herself cleaning the Cinderella exhibit, while her mother vomited from princess overload in the cauldron.

Her mother's malady was miraculously healed when a little boy in a princess dress handed Clara Jane a broom and said, "Here. You can be the witch," and Clara Jane smiled and replied, "Great! Hey Mom! I'm a witch!"

The little witchy-poo finished her scullery chores and proceeded to her cobbler duties:

and then she joined Beauty and the Beast's dining table, where each child was required to leave a saliva sample on every single piece of plastic food:

Here's hoping that the little witch-girl can whip up a potion of cat hair and old candy bar wrappers to ward off the infestation of plastic fruit mites.

As the day wore on and Clara Jane grew more witchy, her mother wrestled her into her coat and coaxed her out the door, where an evil spell turned Clara Jane's legs to gooey red aspic, a spell only remedied by the threat of a royal time-out.

Once the spell was broken and the two stepped out of the building and onto the grand staircase overlooking the city, Clara Jane declared, "I love this city!"

And they all lived happily ever after. Well, except for when that aspic-leg spell took effect in the middle of the doorway at City Grocers, Mother's arms loaded with curried turkey salad and sesame broccoli, the spell only broken by the threat of the world's longest time-out ever if some little princess-poo didn't pick it up and move it on now.

It was only after everyone napped for three hours that they able to live happily ever after.

The end.

Posted by Robin at 10:19 PM | Comments (4)

December 03, 2006

What Every Mother Wants to Hear

Upon awakening Saturday morning Clara Jane said, "I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was playing guitar."

Just as long as it wasn't for some crappy emo band, more power to you, Kiddo.

Posted by Robin at 05:15 PM | Comments (7)

November 30, 2006

Day Thirty - Last Day! Real Content!

Ice has been falling from the sky since 8:30 this morning, minus taking off the noon hour for lunch. This is what my front porch step looks like:

So sparkly. So terrifying.

Awhile back, my Yooper mother-in-law made wise about us "southerners" closing schools when we have an inch of snow, while they function just fine with 3,847 feet of white stuff on the ground. To which my mother replied, "Ever try to drive on a two-inch sheet of ice?" or something to that effect.

We're not having a snow day today; we're having an ice day. I'd decided to keep Clara Jane home from daycare about ten minutes before her teacher called to tell me they were going to close due to weather.

Oh, how I love snow/ice day! I throw the rules out the window on snow/ice day. We can watch too much TV, eat junk food, play a little loose and free with naptime. What does it matter? We're not going anywhere!

The day started with Clara Jane asking to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas during breakfast. We piled onto the couch, she with her apple, cheddar cheese, and sippy of milk; I with my steel-cut oatmeal and coffee, for that is the snow/ice day way.

About a year ago, on a similar snow day, I made a post about making cookies and watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" with Clara Jane. Today was no different, but completely different. I had a job for us.

I've been in a bit of a quandry about our Christmas tree this year. Clara Jane loves Christmas trees with a depth that borders on idolotry. I'm cool with that. The problem is, our tree (which we haven't set up yet; I refuse to buy a tree prior to December) is always decorated in tastefully matched silver and purple glass bulbs that we got for a wedding gift. Very breakable glass bulbs. On one hand, I don't want to deny my little tree-hugger. On the other, I don't want to spend the next month with shards of glass wedged in my feet.

Solution: let's make salt dough ornaments! Better yet, let's paint the salt dough ornaments purple and silver so I'm not completely sacrificing my pretty, pretty ornaments! And even more better, making salt dough ornaments will give us something to do when we hit Hour Three of snow/ice day and I start freaking out because we're snow/icebound.

Oh, what a difference a year makes.

December, 7, 2005:

Clara Jane wears her cookie cutters as creative fashion accessories, and covers two rooms of my house with green decorator's sugar.

November 30, 2006:

Clara Jane personally cuts three baking sheet's worth of salt dough ornaments all by herself, even lifting them off the table with a spatula and placing the on the baking sheets without dropping or breaking. Unlike her professionally-trained cook mother, whose salt dough cut-outs look like the snowmen who live near the toxic waste dump.

Last year: Clara Jane kept talking to the children on the TV as if they were really there.

This year: While making ornaments and listening to the show's soundtrack, Clara Jane recites bits of dialogue she remembers from her breakfast viewing of the show, reenacting the entire Schoder and Lucy piano scene.

Last year: I'm sure there was probably a temper tantrum when all the green sugar disappeared from her grip.

This year: Clara Jane has the emotional maturity to say, "This song makes me feel happy," when "Christmastime is Here" comes on.

Last year: Clara Jane squwaked a bit about being stuck at home.

This year: "Mommy, can we make a snowman?" No, honey. I'm afraid the only thing we can make out of this stuff is a Vanilla Iceman.

Last year: Clara Jane shoved half a tube of pre-made cookie dough down her gullet.

This year: "Mommy, we don't eat Play-Doh." That's what she said when I stupidly kissed the wad of salt dough she held in her hand.

And she's right. Don't eat the dough. It'll dry out your innards. Some things are learned the hard way.

Posted by Robin at 03:37 PM | Comments (11)

November 17, 2006

Day Seventeen - Friday Shuffle - The Sick of Posting Every Damn Day Edition

Is it just me, or have all the NaBloPoMo posters and commenters hit the wall? I know I sure have. I have things to write, things to comment, and blogs I'd like to read but my brain simply won't let me.

In light of my bloggity boredom, I'm going to give you three little tidbits and the shuffle.

Tidbit #1 - Thanks to the still-downed tree lying on my fence, I've started playing a new game everytime I open the back door. It's called "Which Neighborhood Dog is in My Yard Today?" This morning, I discovered the neighborhood weiner dog running amok in my yard. When the fence in your yard can't restrain a weiner dog, it's no longer sufficiently doing its job well enough to be called a fence.

Tidbit #2 - Lately I've found myself concerned about how Clara Jane interacts with other kids. During daycare dropoffs and pickups, I never see her playing with other kids. When I ask her who she played with she tells me that she played with toys. I'm not going to make a big deal of this; if she's a loner, she's a loner. There are worse things to be.

At lunch today, any notion that she might be a loner was vanished. She noticed another little girl sitting a few tables away from us and promptly stood up, waved, and yelled, "Hello, Little Girl! How are you doing? Are you having a snack? I have an apple. I love my apple. Do you love apples? I have yogurt. Do you love yogurt? Hey! Little Girl! HEY!"

Now I'm concerned about her being The Pushy Kid.

Tidbit #3 - I can't recreate what I was writing yesterday, but I can do two things: tell you how it vanished and tell you about the $6 candy bar. It vanished because the ctrl-shift-w function in Firefox, coupled with the space bar, closes the window, particularly if your chubby little fingers are a lot faster than they look like they should be.

Now, the $6 candy bar. For years I've been fascinated with Vosges Chocolate. They're a Chicago-based high-end chocolatier that basically throws weird shit into really expensive chocolate and sells it to food nerds like me who think, "Mmmmmmmm ... white chocolate with Kalamata olives. I could go for some of that. Let's get a second mortgage on the house and eat up!"

Our local Whole Foods started selling a small selection of Vosges awhile back, but I just couldn't allow myself to part with $6 for a 3.4 ounce weirdo candy bar. But yesterday, for some reason, I decided it was time to part with my $6 in exchange for weirdo chocolate.

Alas, the weirdo chocolate I really wanted - Barcelona, which is darker milk chocolate with grey sea salt and smoked almonds - wasn't available. Which is too bad because I have a serious smoked almond monkey on my back. At some point when I was little my parents put a can of Smokehouse Almonds in my Christmas stocking, and that was all she wrote. Best flavor in the world. Ever. That was another one of those signs of adulthood: the day I realized that I could eat Smokehouse Almonds every single day for the rest of my ever-almond-loving life if I wanted. I'm eating some right now, as a matter of fact. I like strong flavors. The only thing better than smoked almonds and sea salt would have to be smoked almonds and bleu cheese. I'm surprised Vosges hasn't jumped on that idea.

Anyway, I did have some misgivings about spending $6 on a candy bar in a flavor combination that might be horrible, despite my food adventurer tendancies. So, I went with the one I knew I'd mostly like enjoy - Creole, 70% cacao (really, really dark) with espresso, cocoa nibs, and chicory. I love chicory coffee. I love mochas. I'm going to love this bar.

You know what you get when you get a $6 candy bar? You get instructions on how to eat chocolate. Those cheapos at Hershey's and Nestle, they just leave their customers to their own devices. Let 'em remain ignorant to what chocoalte is supposed to look like and smell like! Let the philistines eat their dusty-surfaced chocolate that smells like bald tires! And let them *gasp* chew it with their teeth!

For $6, I know to let the chocolate melt in my mouth, instead of cramming the whole thing down my gullet before someone can snatch it away from me, the same way my Basset hound Chloe once did with a Nestle Crunch bar.

I resisted the urge to eat the candy in the car. If I'm going to spend $6 on what should be THe Chocolate Experience of My Life, I don't want to be distracted. I also don't want to be behind the wheel in case the experience is so rapturous as to leave my vehicle unmanned on the highway.

I sat at my desk, read the instructions and did as it said: I looked at the chocolate. I sniffed the chocolate. I snapped off a piece of the chocoalte. I performed acts on the chocoalte that are only legal in the state of Nevada and France. Then I put the chocolate on my tongue and pressed it to the roof of my mouth, just like the instructions said. And sure enough, just like the package said, it slowly started melting around thirty seconds later.

The verdict?

Eh.

Tasted great, of course. The cocoa nibs were rough and irritated my tongue and the roof of my mouth. There wasn't a single point in time where my spirit left my body during the whole experience. A little naked man didn't pop out of the packaging when I opened it, either, and for $6 you'd think they'd include a special little thrill of some sort. While tasty, it did not satisfy my mind and body, as the package promised. I still had a slight backache when I was finished eating the piece.

I just popped another piece in my mouth. Yeah, good. But slightly painful and not decidedly different than a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans. I keep encountering little pieces of hard, pod-like material. Perhaps that's what a flavanoid looks like.

Next time, maybe I'll shuffle through the display and buy a a horseradish chocolate bar. At least then my expectations will be in check.

1. Iko Iko - Dixie Cups
2. Baby Mine - Bonnie Raitt
3. East Virginia Blues - June Carter Cash (a woman who had enough good sense to not buy $6 chocolate bars, I bet)
4. Only Lie Worth Telling - Paul Westerberg
5. Tell Me That it Isn't True - Bob Dylan
6. Don't Get Me Wrong - Pretenders
7. Still Fighting It - Ben Folds
8. Close Together - Jimmy Reed
9. Rose Garden - Lynn Anderson
10. Walking the Dog - Rufus Thomas

The shuffle is filled entirely of artists who would most likely throw beer bottles at the heads of bourgeois idiots who'd spend $6 on a candy bar, and rightfully so.

Posted by Robin at 04:06 PM | Comments (12)

November 15, 2006

Day Fifteen - Schlemiel-Schlamazel

It's a crap day around here. From the hours of 3 AM until 7:15ish AM, my eyes remained open. The wee bit of sleep I eeked out afterwards barely counts for anything. I've got a massive knot in the middle of my back from three nights of trying to sleep on the couch, since conditions in my bed have been less than optimal for sleeping of late. To top it off, once again it rained all day. Normally I love chilly, rainy fall days, but we've had several in a row. Quite frankly, it's making my dogs stir-crazy, which in turn is making me a little nuts. Trust me, there are few things as pitisome as a Basset hound with cabin fever. But we've got one. At one point, she was so bored that she crammed her head under the couch cushions to do a little crumb-surfing. She and Murphy both sat at rapt attention, listening intently while I read Biscuit books to Clara Jane. When dogs take an interest in literature, you know they're mere inches away from the dreaded Death by Boredom.

I totally phoned it in today. Clara Jane and I stayed in our jammies. We ordered pizza for lunch and ate in on the couch while watching "Sesame Street". Since her sleep patterns are a bit wonky right now, too, there was no napping. We read and played, watched way too much TV, and snuggled. No new things were learned. No new experiences were had. We ate bad food and watched bad TV, but we'll get to that in a bit.

I don't know if this happens to everyone, but if I see parts of day which I normally sleep through, it really screws with my perception of time through the rest of the day. Luckily, most of the time, it makes the day fly by. That's what happened today. If feels like it should be about 3:00 and it's nearly 6:00, which means sweet, sweet sleep in the spare bedroom is just around the corner.

We watched a lot of "Laverne & Shirley" today. I know I've mentioned my lifelong adoration of Laverne & Shirley. It was my favorite show when I was a kid, and in the past few months I've rediscovered it via digital cable upper-tier reruns. You know, on the cable channels no one ever watches. As far as I can tell, this particular channel, a spin-off of Lifetime, shows nothing but reruns of decade-old made-for-Lifetime shows and Laverne & Shirley. Every afternoon from 2-4 (which is Clara Jane's naptime), it's time to go to Milwaukee and hang out with those girls.

I'm always amazed that when I'm having a bad day, this channel has a knack for showing episodes I absolutely adored back in the day that still crack me up. Maybe that's because I adored just about every episode. Today was no exception. There was a talent show episode, and let me tell you, if I was allowed only one sub-sub-sub-sub-sub genre of TV for the rest of my life, I would chose the Laverne & Shirley talent show episode sub-sub-sub-sub-sub genre, as that's just about the best TV ever made. There was also the hilarious episode where Laverne breaks a tooth and Shirley's dental student cousin offers to fix it for free. There's a scene where the girls are in the exam room, stoned on laughing gas, that I find just as funny now as I did when I was ten. "Reach for the sky!" "You wouldn't dare!"

Which means I really haven't matured much over the past 24 years.

As an adult, one who happened to be bored and exhausted while entertaining these thoughts, I've noticed that a lot of decisions in my adult life led to Laverne & Shirleyesque situations and scenarios. To whit:

• I fully believe that my obsession with all things 1950s and 1960s stems from this show. To this day I can't watch an episode without coveting an item of clothing, accessory, hairdo, or decorative object. Those chenille bathrobes? To die for, still.
• The first five years I lived away from home, I lived in basement apartments.
• My horrible taste in really stupid comedy, from "Beavis & Butthead" to "Jackass" is little more than a lifelong search for a surrogate Lenny & Squiggy.
• In my roommate days, I always longed for that L&S-style friendship, and I sort of had it with one roomie. In fact, the day we moved into our basement bedrooms in a house we shared with two others, she declared, "We're best friends in a basement! We're 'Laverne & Shirley'!" At that moment, I sort of felt like I had made all of my dreams come true. For me and you.
• Independence. Are there any women on TV right now who exhibit that kind of independence? Of two single, working-class women getting by with what they have at a time in history when most women were expected to marry young and stay home? When I was young, my dreams didn't really involve falling in love, getting married, and having babies. They involved living in a city, working, supporting myself, having friends, and perhaps keeping a convenience-boyfriend a la The Big Ragoo.

In this time-wonky "Laverne & Shirley"-filled afternoon, I caught myself thinking back to being ten years old, and how that seems to be the year that formed my personality. The things I liked when I was ten are pretty much the things I love now: "Laverne & Shirley" reruns in the afternoon, books (I read the better part of an encyclopedia set that year), writing (thanks to an encouraging third-grade teacher), music (I got my first radio that year), cooking (I learned about clipping and organizing recipes that summer. It was a decade before I set foot in a kitchen, but it was ingrained.). It was all there when I was 10.

I was obsessed with baseball when I was ten, something that's fallen by the wayside. And yet, when our power and cable were knocked out the night of the final game of the World Series, you know what I did as soon as the lights were back on? I sprinted to the nearest radio to see if the Cardinals were winning. And when they did, you better believe I cried like a little kid. The baseball thing might not be front and center anymore, but damn if it's not still lurking.

Immature sense of humor aside, maybe this is the sign of adulthood: getting past the trial and error of youth and realizing that what you liked when you were a kid, before your brain was bombarded with choices and options, is the core of who you really are.

If that's the case, pass the milk & Pepsi and smack an oversized L on my left boob.

Posted by Robin at 05:49 PM | Comments (3)

November 14, 2006

Day Fourteen - Phhhhhhhhhhhhht

I'm so not down with posting today.

Only one thing of interest has happened this week, and while I could blog about it, I won't because it would be unfair for reasons I can't divulge.

Don't you hate it when bloggers get all cryptic and shit? I know I do.

Granted, I'll take boring over last week's emotional near-trainwreck and pukefest. It makes for dull writing, though. Yeah, I could go into the archives of my brain like I did yesterday, but I was just there and don't feel like going back just yet. Instead, I'm going to blatantly copy my pal Dixie and give you fourteen dots.

• Clara Jane is having trouble accepting that Halloween is over. Today she led me to my bedroom to show me a pumpkin patch, and then to the living room to show me a coven of witches, led by stupid little Murphy.

• I've become addicted to reruns of Scrubs.

• Oh God. I'm only on my third dot and I'm out of stuff interesting enough to write about. Not because I write for my audience, but because if I'm really this boring I'm going to make myself cry.

• I finished book #26 of 2006 last night - Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Go read it. Now.

• So, um, yeah. Thanksgiving's next week. What's that all about?

• Maybe I should buy that damn Maggie Mason book of blog prompts. I'm dying here.

• I looked into a volunteer opportunity today with a group that works with new moms suffering from post-partum depression.

• I miss being able to see the top of my desk.

• Pogo, the only dog in the world stupider than Stupid Little Murphy, has been spending a lot of time in my yard. While she's pitifully stupid, she did figure out how to scale the downed tree that's still on my fucking fence. You know what's fun? Opening the back door and saying hi to the stupidest dog in the world and watching her run as fast as any animal has ever run to escape.

• Yeah, the damn tree's still on my fence. The bottom half, anyway. We had the great idea of advertising that we have free firewood, but it's BYOC - bring your own chainsaw, since the first 25 feet of the tree has already killed one chainsaw. Cut and haul yourself. Hey! Free heat! We thought we'd be beating people back with one of the many sticks in our yard. Not the case. Of course, some people view this as little more than a minor inconvenience. Spending three weeks trying to get the power, cable, and phone companies to get their shit together and fix all of the downed lines already! is a minor inconvenience, too. Replacing the chunk of the neighbor's house removed by the tree? Also, minor inconvenience, as is magically bringing the neighbor's slide back to life. And all that brush? Why, it'll just put itself through the woodchipper! It's all a cinch, really. We're just chosing to leave the tree down because we enjoy Pogo's company so.

• Also courtesy of Dixie, I just watched a video of a guy trying to remove his pubic hair with a Bic lighter. I can safely say that I haven't lost my ability to laugh my ass off at dumbasses. I've just lost my ability to say anything pithy about them.

• I just got an email from someone who's coming to town for a wedding this weekend. They gave me their schedule, about umpteen zillion phone numbers, and I'm supposed to help with flowers. Problem is, when I say "coming to town", I mean they're coming to Portland. I'm in St. Louis. And I have no idea who Mark and Cari are. Am I supposed to buy them a gift? And if so, what's the most appropriate gift for someone you first heard of five days before the nuptuals? Would a gift card be tacky? How do I go about finding their registry if I don't know their last names?

  This is the most interesting thing that's happened to me all day.

• B. and Clara Jane are at their monthly nighttime storytime at the library. I love nighttime storytime at the library, mainly because I never go.

• This has taken me exactly half an hour to write, half the time it took Dix. Boo-ya!
  

Posted by Robin at 06:28 PM | Comments (2)

October 31, 2006

Halloween in America's Most Dangerous City

Did you see the news about my city? Yep, we're the most dangerous in the country. You know how I survive my crime-riddled existance?

I'm a thug.

So, how does one go about celebrating Halloween in the country's most dangerous city? At first we thought we'd flee to the next county for some trick-or-treating in a quaint, historic downtown, but they close up shop at 5 PM, which is far too early for thugs. Then we discussed going to the mall, but I'm across-the-board opposed to corporate trick-or-treating. Well, except for Trader Joe's. I had no problem going to TJ's today and letting Clara Jane mug the cashier for a goodie bag.

By 5:30 tonight, it seemed like the mall was our only option. Considering that Clara Jane woke up from her nap and declared, "I'm a-gonna get lots of candy!", we had to do something.

I had been out during the last bit of her nap, performing heists. When I got to our neighborhood, I noticed several houses of people I somewhat know were giving treats. When B. and Clara Jane met me in the driveway, I suggested that we load up the flamethrowers for protection and do some breaking and entering on our block.

We have messages like that scrawled all over the streets of St. Louis as reminders that it's dangerous!

Call 911! Call 911! Home invaders! Home invaders! Oh, wait ... it's just a toddler, looking for free M&Ms.

Our impromptu trick-or-treating, much like most of our direct interactions with our neighbors, was seriously fun. We talked to a lot of people we only talk to when we have rummage sales. They all fawned over Clara Jane and gave her enough candy to turn her pancreas to dust. When we encountered one family from down the block, they apologized for not being home, and made their 9-year-old son dig through his treat bag and give something to Clara Jane.

In a teeny-tiny little way, I hate that we had so much fun because I've finally gotten my head wrapped around moving, and this makes it harder. But that's stupid, because we had a blast. All these years of complaining about how Halloween has changed, kids don't trick-or-treat in their neighborhoods, blah-blah-blah, it seemed like maybe I should stop bitching and do something about it. I bitch and complain about my neighborhood, and yet, I rarely make the effort to be neighborly. When I do, though, I'm reminded that even though I don't have much in common with my neighbors, and some of them are annoying and, occasionally, the reason why St. Louis is a scary, scary place, most of them are kind people.

Of course, we don't live in St. Louis City, where the most dangerous crime stats came from. We live in St. Louis County, where all is butterflies and bunny rabbits. There's a bit of a spider problem, though. The problem being, I think someone slipped some crack into her Tootsie Pops because Jesus, someone take that crossbow away from her!

Posted by Robin at 09:30 PM | Comments (7)

October 30, 2006

Hallopanic '06

Remember last Halloween, when I freaked out because I waited until the very last minute to make Clara Jane's candy corn costume? "Sewing for Dummies" my ass! It took an engineer to figure out the pattern for making the hat. Still, the gloating a few days later was fun.

This year, I spyed the perfect costume about an hour after the Halloween sewing patterns hit the store. Clara Jane's all about bugs, and she's all about tutus. The patterns? Bumblebees and ladybugs with tutus. We discussed this at length, and she was thrilled at the prospect of being a bumble bee. Or a ladybug.

Until two weeks ago, when we had this conversation:

Me: Do you want to be a ladybug for Halloween? (I kept asking her this several times a week, as I'm an idiot.)

Clara Jane: No. I want to be a spider.

Me: I thought you wanted to be a ladybug.

Clara Jane: Spider.

Me: Bumble bee?

Clara Jane: SPIDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't know if you realize this, but oddly enough, there are no sewing patterns for toddler-sized spider costumes. I had to get all ingenious and shit.

If she wakes up tomorrow morning and demands a ladybug costume, I'm sending her to boarding school.

Posted by Robin at 10:17 PM | Comments (9)

October 15, 2006

Sports Medicine

Clara Jane has a raging case of athlete's foot.

No, we haven't entered her in any toddler marathons. We haven't even made her run any 5K Fun Runs.

"We usually don't see athlete's foot in kids her age unless they're already active in sports," the nurse said when I called on Thursday to tell her that I think my child has jungle rot. Now I'm wondering, who the hell puts a two and a half year-old in organized sports? Are Clara Jane's peers tackling each other on some super-secret football field I don't know about every Saturday morning? Are their feet flaking off in little chunks?

B. and I think she probably caught her little fungus at the pool. She certainly didn't catch it from B. or me because we're decidedly unathletic. I used to be somewhat athletic, when I was a kid. I played softball for years, plus a few years of tennis, volleyball, and basketball. As for B., I think he watched a football game, once.

When I was athletic, I was always injured and I took great pride in my wounds. The first year I played catcher, when I was eight, was positively stellar with injuries. I once caught a foul pop fly under my chin. I was looking up, preparing to catch it in a more traditional manner, misjudged the distnace, and it nailed me in the neck.

I put my chin down to hold the ball in place, turned around to face the umpire, dropped the ball into my glove and said, "She's out," which came out sounding more like the woeful death cry of a sea lion, seeing as I'd taken a direct blow to my voice box. I was thrilled.

At the end of that season, at the team picnic, I took a bat in the face from a teammate. The coach forgot to bring the catcher's gear, but obviously I was a tough kid and didn't need no stinking mask. But Dee Dee Burnett had a tendancy to throw bats, and that's exactly what she did, nailing me just under my right eye. Once I recovered enough to coherantly speak, all I could say was, "Wow. I feel like one of those Chinese gongs."

Several weeks later, my older cousin was in a tizz because I was supposed to be a candlelighter in her fancy-schmancy wedding and half of my face was the most awesome shade of seafoam green, which probably would have been fine had it matched the ugly dress she made me wear.

Currently, I'm sporting an injury from the most athletic task I perform these days: I have a sleeping injury. The strenuous task of staying still and unconscious for nine hours in a row has left me lame. The right side of my neck and my right shoulder have been pushed to their breaking points from the marathon task of supporting my overweight head in one place for nine hours.

How bad is my injury? Bad enough that it prevented me from competing in my preferred sport - sleeping - last night.

I almost injured myself this morning during another one of my favorite sporting activities: running my smart mouth while watching VH1 Classic. If it's Sunday morning, chances are B.'s making breakfast, Clara Jane's cruising the counters for stray pieces of bacon, and I'm watching "The Alternative" and running my smart mouth.

Today, during "Rush" by BAD II, I made my standard joke that I always make when I see Mick Jones in anything: "Hey! I didn't know that Seinfeld rocks!" Which isn't even my own joke. I stole it from Beavis. See, it's funny because Mick Jones looks a lot like Jerry Seinfeld, only not quite as suave and debonaire. Anyway, I said, "Hey, I didn't know Seinfeld..." and that's when I snorted a Smarty down my windpipe.

This is why I'm not an athlete, People! When I sustain two injuries in the course of a weekend from the basic life-sustaining acts of sleeping and eating candy, I can't be trusted with weapons of terror such as racquets and balls.

Want some Smarties? Or some fungicide? Because we've got both, we do.

My athlete days are two decades behind me, which might explain why, when I saw the video for Morrissey's "Everyday is Like Sunday", I didn't wretch like I used to in the days when I was a jock. Maybe now I'm more like Morrissey than I was back then. Or maybe I simply couldn't wretch because of the candy lodged in my throat and the lack of oxygen reaching my brain.

Posted by Robin at 11:24 AM | Comments (6)

September 11, 2006

The Luxury of Innocence

I've been thinking about this post for a week. Not surprisingly, I don't have anything unique. I don't have any truths about today that the rest of you don't already know.

I was getting ready for class that morning. To defer my big student loans while I was getting my cooking career underwy, I was taking a writing class and two literature classes at a community college. I'd just landed a job with a local foodie rag, which would eventually lead to a gig teaching culinary classes, which led to my catering business. But on that day, I'd yet to write my first article and I had no idea what I was going to do with the culinary education I'd spent the last year and a half gaining. All I knew was I was back where I'd started - English classes.

I was dawdling online instead of getting dressed. Tori Amos' website was previewing a song from her rather unimpressive cover album Strange Little Girls. That day's selection was "Happiness is a Warm Gun". I wasn't impressed. Within a few notes I knew that I preferred the cover that The Breeders. I didn't like how Tori sampled news stories about gun violence into the song. Too heavy-handed. She's dragging this shit out for ten minutes? Please. I don't need to be bashed over the head by how the song ties into modern violence. Duh.

As I listened, I hopped around the web, like I always do, alternating between my email, my web communities, and the news, like I always do. During a brief trip to Yahoo News, I noticed a headline about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I figured it was a mishap, like one that had happened a few years earlier that barely registered a blip. I surfed away, eventually getting up to brush my teeth and get on with my day.

Between brushing my teeth and getting dressed, I realized I hadn't checked the weather in my morning surfing. Not wanting to get sucked back in, I headed to the TV instead of the computer to check the local news.

I remember the spot where I was standing in the living room. When we rearranged the furniture a few months later, I was secretly thrilled that I'd never be able to stand in that exact spot again.

The first plane had hit. Maybe the second had, too. I don't recall for sure. I don't recall much.

I remember being in the hallway by the bookcase when I heard that the Pentegon had been hit. I was looking for my phone to call my mom. All I remember of that conversation was saying, "This is bad. This is bad," over and over.

I got my head together enough to try to call my teacher, but got her voice mail. At a complete loss of what to do, I left for class.

I live just south of the airport, and my class was just north of the airport. The highway connecting the two runs under the flight path of all the jets coming from the east. I knew that all planes had been ordered down at that point, and I watched their bellies, one by one, as they came over me to land.

I had never in my life been as frightened as I was, watching those planes - so many of them - landing above me. Their silence over the next three days served as a constant reminder that the world had changed, right down to the background white noise of my home several thousand miles away from the attacks.

I walked into class a few minutes late. Everyone was taking a pop quiz.

A fucking quiz?

Don't you people know that our world is ending?

I took a seat by the door because figured I'd need to run out of the room to puke at some point during the class.

Turns out, no one else in the room knew what had happened. That was the last moment in my life in which I'd be in a room of Americans who had been afforded the luxury of innocence.

Despite my news/info junkie tendancies, I couldn't watch any of the news coverage. When I got home from school, I parked the TV on Nickelodeon and proceeded to watch nothing but "Spongebob Squarepants" for the better part of a week. Occasionally I'd flip to MTV or VH1, but they kept playing Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah set to images of NYC so I stopped.

I didn't cry.

I just wanted to sleep. But I have trouble sleeping when I'm stressed, so before bed every night, I downed a handful of Tylenol PM, which kept me hazy during most of my waking hours.

I didn't listen to music. I couldn't risk bringing any emotions to the surface because I knew that when they surfaced, they would drown me.

I cooked. I made every comfort food I could find. Cuban Arroz con Pollo. Southern baked chicken and dressing. Lasagna.

I don't know how many days passed before I cried. It happened while watching an episode of Behind the Music featuring Blind Melon. I never liked them. When Shannon Hoon's widow cried about the daughter he left behind when he died of a heroin overdose, I finally heaved sobs for every child who'd been orphaned that week.

A year later, I spent the day driving around St. Louis with my camera, taking photos. I snapped shots of the American flags everywhere, from the drive-thru window at Burger King to the antenneas of every car on a used car lot. I stood on the patio of a restaurant next to the runway and took photos of planes taking flight. I took beautiful photos of the sun shining through the Gateway Arch. A series of those photos in black and white hang on my dining room wall. They've been there for so long that I don't instantly think of why I took them every time I look at them.

There are two photos I took that day that, if I ever happen to lose my copies of them, I'll still be able to envision them in my mind's eye. I'll never forget them.

This is a gas station B. goes by twice a day, since it's near his train station. Five years ago today, the owner of the station placed the words "Act of war. Nuke now." on the board. A year later, this is what remained.

It's easy to declare war when you're too fucking lazy to maintain your message and someone else is doing your fighting.

This was taken on a bench beneath the Gateway Arch. I have no idea who this woman is. She sat there with her shopping bag clutched in her hands, head bowed, the entire time I was there while her husband and young son played nearby in the grass.

I wanted to sit on the bench next to her and cry. Instead, I kept my distance, only getting as close to her as my zoom lens allowed.

Today, I once again vowed that if the TV was turned on, it would be to kids shows. Clara Jane and I stayed in our jammies. We painted and played with Play-Doh and cookie cutters. We ate chicken noodle soup for lunch. We took a warm bubble bath to clean up all the paint, Play-Doh and chicken soup. We read from her big Curious George book and watched some "Sesame Street".

Elmo's World today was about firefighters.

I folded my arms over the back of the couch, laid my head down, and sobbed.

When I looked up, Clara Jane was watching me, looking concerned. I smiled and told her everything was okay.

It's not.

She asked for her slippers. I went to her room to fetch them, taking advantage of the privacy to release the pressure valve. I gave myself 30 seconds to sob as hard as I could into the back of one of her stuffed Basset hounds before pulling my shit together. I took her on my lap and we sat on the couch, watching Elmo while I put the pink slippers on her feet.

At naptime, she did something she's never done before. She said, "I want to sleep in the big bed" as she ran into my bedroom, the soles of those slippers slapping the new floor.

We crawled into bed, and I figured she was just playing the game she calls "Uppie Uppie" where she gets on our bed, pretends to sleep, and then bounces like a monkey.

Instead, we laid there and I asked, "Do you want to snuggle?"

Clara Jane's not much of a snuggler. She's got far better things to do. I understand this, as I'm not a snuggler either. But today, she looked at me and nodded.

So we snuggled under the down comforter, resting and quiet, save for several outbursts of tickling and giggling. Eventually I moved her to her bed. She needed to sleep and I needed to have some time away from her to get my emotions in order.

Today I've seen several mentions around the web of people saying they don't understand the sadness people are feeling today. 9/11 wasn't the biggest event in history and we need to just get over it.

I can only think that these ideas were presented by people who are young enough that they didn't get to experience the luxury of innocence for as long as I did. Five years is a long time to a 20-year-old. They've spent a quarter of their lives living like this. Maybe it seems more normal to them than it does to me.

I was almost 29 five years ago. I think people in my generation, the ones who experienced the attacks somewhat near the middle of their lives, are going to be the ones who have the hardest time letting this go. Or, rather, we have a unique perspective of having half of our lives "before" and half "after". I don't know if I feel sorry for the younger ones because less of their lives will be spent not entertaining the idea of people flying planes into buildings on purpose, or if I envy them for being able to normalize it and move on.

Now I understand a little more about what Vietnam and Kennedy's assassination meant to my parents' generation. And what Pearl Harbor meant to my grandparents' generation. The events they saw weren't the biggest events in history, that's true. But they were the biggest events in their history, and that matters. A lot.

I can't change that this is the world that my child lives in. I can protect her from it for a little while, but it's there, and she'll know. But I don't want her to know now. I don't want her to feel like she has to comfort me because of what I know and what I saw.

Not yet.

Posted by Robin at 02:04 PM | Comments (11)

August 30, 2006

Absence. Heart. Fonder. And All That Crap

You know the old cliche. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Best as I can tell, that's usually because it's easier to forget the bad and irritating crap when that person's far, far away. But I digress, as this is about Clara Jane and you know that she's never bad and/or irritating. Well, that's not entirely true. She's hit the stage where she talks from the moment she wakes up until the moment she collapses in an exhausted, scratchy-throated heap, completely spent from the 12 hours of talking. That can get a wee bit tiring at times. I've been told the constant talking is my karma for having done the same to my own mother. Oh, she's laughing now. Not that I can hear her laughter, what with all the blood trickling out of my ears.

Being with my kid nearly all day, just about every day, it's easy to take for granted how fast she's growing and developing. It's far too simple to get so wrapped up in the constant talking that I don't step back and say, "Holy crap! At this time three years ago, I couldn't even feel this little person kicking inside me, and now she's telling me every single thing about the world around her and that's amazing!" But with her visiting my parents, I get the daily updates of her antics and let me tell you, they're cracking me up. And now I'm going to force you to read about them.

1. Clara Jane never answers when anyone asks how old she is. The ten times a day strangers ask her how old she is, I have to answer for her. So, I figured she just hadn't picked up on how old she is.

I have a cousin who's a social worker with a program that works with developmentally disadvantaged kids. She was hanging out at my parents' house tonight, and she told my mom about one of her clients. "She's two, like Clara Jane," my cousin said. To which Clara Jane interjected, "I'm two and a half."

2. My grandfather underwent an outpatient hernia procedure Tuesday morning. Upon arriving at the hospital, Clara Jane told my mom, "I'm glad we're at the hospital. I have a broken leg!".

Actually, she just had a broken toenail, which my mom fixed in the waiting room.

3. Speakinig of my grandfather, Clara Jane is helping him heal by reminding him, "Old Grandpa's wearing pajamas. He's got stripey pajamas."

4. For the past few weeks, Clara Jane has been attempting a bathing strike. Normal, I suppose. Most kids seem to suddenly go from loving bathtime to acting like they're being dipped in batter in preparation for a dunk in some 300-degree lard. She seems to have realized that regardless of how big a fit she throws, I'm still going to put her in the bathtub and *gasp* let soap touch her skin. Not the case where her grandmother is concerned. After an evening of rolling in the dirt, when my mom informed Clara Jane that it was bathtime, she replied, "I don't need to take a bath, Mimi. I'm all nice and clean."

Ah, the cuteness. I miss her. I could really use a snuggle. Or a wrestling match to get her into the bathtub. I've managed to get some stuff done in her absence, though:

1. I've watched B. finish laying the subflooring, and then I watched him fill in the cracks with liquid concrete. Then I watched him sand the excess concrete. And finally, I watched him call Murphy a "knob" when he caught her licking up the liquid concrete.

2. I took a leisurely stroll through the most insanely massive fabric store I've ever seen. I didn't buy anything, but I did rub against some gorgeous Amy Butler loveliness.

3. I not only won Brainbuster Trivia, but I got the highest score of the past six weeks.

4. I was able to drop everything (and by "everything" I mean, I got out of my pajamas and put on real clothes) to go have lunch with my pal PKB.

5. I made plans to accompany a minor to a tattoo parlor.

6. And, of course, I canned shit.

Here's some more white peach jam in the early stages.

And here's what I mangled it into.

How about some salsa in its infancy?

Here's what hours and hours of chopping has wrought:

Tomorrow's agenda: there isn't one.

Posted by Robin at 10:21 PM | Comments (6)

July 16, 2006

I'll Explain Why Clara Jane's Dancing in a West African/Afro-Cuban Drum Circle Later

Video removed due to bandwidth issues, but you can see it here.

Posted by Robin at 10:45 PM | Comments (9)

July 13, 2006

I Need Some More Toys

If you are sickened or roll your eyes at tales of children making funny malapropisms, don't continue reading this entry. It's sickening. Truly.

When Clara Jane was a wee tot, I bought a Dan Zanes CD for her. Well, for me. The former lead singer of '80s alternative Boston band the Del Fuegos, doing kids music with the likes of Loudon Wainwright III and Debbie Harry? Sign me up, Mister!

It's only been recently that Clara Jane's decided she likes this CD. And she likes it with a vigor usually reserved for, say, Candy Day - a day where we eat nothing but candy! Not that we've ever done that, but you get what I'm saying.

One of her favorite songs is "Malti", which is sung in Spanish:

malti, malti ya es verano
¿por qué no levantamos temprano?
nunca repetimos hoy
lleno del sol y viento soy
nunca repetimos hoy
lleno del sol y viento soy

Translation:

Malti, Malti already is summer
so that we did not raise early?
we never repeated today
plenty of the sun and wind I am
we never repeated today
plenty of the sun and wind I am

Um, sure. Thanks, Google Translate!

Now, for the cute malapropism. Avert your eyes, if necessary.

Clara Jane sings along, which in and of itself is entertaining. It's pretty much gibberish as she tries to phoenetically match the lyrics, until she gets to the "lleno del sol y viento soy" line, which she translates as "I need some more toys! I need some more toys!"

Hey. It's not much worse than Google's translation, is it?

Posted by Robin at 04:31 PM | Comments (5)

June 25, 2006

Why My Family Can't Go Out in Public Anymore

As much as I love music, I've got an embarrassing problem with it. I'm a big ol' crybaby, and nothing makes me weepy faster than music.

I bawled while watching Bruce Springsteen & the Seeger Sessions Band performing Pay Me My Money Down on Conan. Jimmy Fallon on spoons, even!

This afternoon, I got teary-eyed while thumbing through Annie Leibovitz's American Music.

My crybaby tendancies regarding country music are well-documented.

But last night ... last night I reached a new low in the musical bawl bag. I am no longer fit to go out in public if there's even a slight chance music will be played. At least, not until the new brain drugs take effect, hopefully sparing me and everyone I encounter from the burbling spring of emotions that bursts forth from every orifice of my face whenever two notes are played.

The first full day of the new anti-crazy drugs went fairly well, but the antianxiety stuff wore off somewhere around dinnertime. I was a bit of a basket case and didn't want to stay home. Clara Jane had taken a late nap, so we decided it would be okay to delay bedtime and go out for a bit.

We went to a coffeehouse, the one I was visiting the other night when I encountered the makeshift memorial service. In the past I've seen signs at this coffeehouse advertising live music on Saturdays, but I didn't see any such signs the other night. Surprise surprise, we walked in to find a cute little floppy-haired guy playing guitar with a pal on the bongos.

I wasn't happy about this. Live music, especially in such close quarters, tends to really get my bawl baggishness kicked into overdrive. Throw on the lighter fluid that is my current emotional state, and there's gonna be a crying inferno, Folks. Coffee in hand, Clara Jane and I settled into a table far from the music while B. went back to the truck to fetch a forgotten sippy cup. I don't even know what song they were playing. It wasn't sad. It's music. That's all it takes. When B. returned, I had my glasses lying on the table, face buried in my hands, weeping into a brown paper napkin.

The duo played played another song I didn't recognize, and I was able to compose myself a bit. My face slowed its leakage. But then the singer decided to be a real asshole.

"Next we're going to do Jeff Buckley's 'Hallelujah'. If you know Jeff's version, please don't get your hopes up with mine."

Do I know Jeff's version? Oh hallelujah, yes, I know Jeff's version, along with Leonard's version, Rufus' version (my favorite), and John's version.

This song? It's the atom bomb of the Make Robin Sob Like Someone Just Died genre. This song has the power to send me into a fit that could lead to health-threatening levels of dehydration, so plentiful are the tears and the snot and, yes, even the drool. This song is emotional desiccant. Do not eat.

"Oh please God, no. Not this song. No no no. Anything but this song," I muttered to B., sinking down in my chair.

Before the singer had finished talking, I was plotting my escape. Never has the fight-or-flight instinct been so strong. The door was right there, not four steps away from me. Hell, this was an emergency situation. I had enough adrenaline in my system that I'm sure I could have stood up, sprung straight into the air, lept over the table and Clara Jane, and been out the door before he'd strummed the first chord.

But the "rational" part of my brain intervened. You know, the part with my shame center. Not that it usually works worth a shit, but last night, as I prepared to take flight, it said, "Now wait just a second here. Do you really want to be 'that fat girl who inexplicably cried into her caramel macchiato, then stormed off at the mere mention of that song'? No, you want to be able to show your face here. And you don't want to be responsible for crushing that poor guitar boy's ego. Just sit your crying ass back down, put the damn napkin over your face, and deal."

Instead of being "the fat girl who inexplicably cried into her caramel macchiato, then stormed off at the mere mention of that song", I opted to be "the crying fat girl with the napkin on her face who keeps crying and crying and Jesus Christ, what the hell's the deal with all the crying? Shouldn't she be in a hospital? She should really consider laying off the espresso."

The boy did quite well with the song. Well, the parts I could hear over my sobbing sounded good.

A sidenote: if I ever invite you to attend a concert with me, you might want to put a lot of thought into how much public embarrassment you're willing to tolerate before you accept.

I should mention that this wasn't paricularly sad weeping. It wasn't. The music weeping's never really rooted in sadness. It's just ... music weeping. I could probably get emotionally touched and weepy at a Gwar concert. So please, don't feel bad for me and my weeping. I'm fine. Really.

Through all my weeping, Clara Jane was busting a move, standing on her chair, cookie in her hand, shaking her groove thing, which really, ain't easy to do to "Hallelujah". By the time the singer started on his version of Coldplay's Yellow, she was out of her chair, arms in the air, swaying from side-to-side. All she needed was a lighter in her hand. She grabbed B.'s finger, insisting that he twirl her around and around and around until she'd just about unscrewed his finger.

When they started on "Folsom Prison Blues", Clara Jane completely lost her mind. She ran to the other end of the coffeehouse, B. hot on her trail, planting herself behind the duo where everyone could see her. She then proceeded to fling her arms in the air, dress raised, stomping and shrieking to the music. The drummer played to her, egging her on. The other patrons laughed, adding more fuel to Clara Jane's Disco Inferno.

I, of course, sat there and cried.

With 2/3 of my family having completely disrupted this poor guy's otherwise decent set, we shuffled out the door, me with my tear-streaked face, B. with his gnarled dancing finger, Clara Jane exhausted from her performance, our work there, complete

Posted by Robin at 07:49 PM | Comments (15)

May 27, 2006

For your holiday weekend

If you're weekend isn't good enough to make you wanna dance like this, then you did something wrong.

C'mon! Let's all do the Baby Pizza Dance!

Posted by Robin at 09:43 AM | Comments (17)

April 25, 2006

The 26-Month Review

I know I've been quiet of late, and I've come to a realization: it's all Clara Jane's fault. This business of having a two-year-old? It's hard. Not necessarily horrible. I mean, sure, I've had to give up some stuff, like sleeping, bathing, and interacting with humans or other beings, but that's fine. It's worth the trade.

As I mentioned previously, Clara Jane had her much-belated two-year check-up on Friday, and there were hyphens everywhere! She's progressing nicely. 85th percentile for weight and 95th percentile for height, which is funny, since I'm 5'3" tall and B.'s 5'7" on a good day, when he's feeling particularly good about himself and balancing a large encyclopedia on his head.

It seems like good a time as any to assess life with 26 months of fun.

A positive: When the doc asked is Clara Jane is able to make three-word phrases, we both laughed because oh my God, the child can talk To wit: On Saturday B. took her next door to see a litter of freshly-birthed baby kittens. Today, she told me this: "Mama, I saw baby kittens. They were drinking milk from their mama. It's good milk. It's their water." To which I said, "I spent the first five months of your life with my tits attached to a breast pump because someone wasn't interested in nursing. I don't need lactation education from you, Toots."

A negative: With the talking comes other forms of verbal communication. Particularly, whining. I have nothing to say other than that. The whining, fuck.

A positive: She's discovering the arts, paricularly music. She's coming close to being able to sing "Come Together" word-for-word with no help from me, aside from repeatedly hitting the "back" button when she starts whining, "I wanna sing 'Come Together' agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain!'" This morning she lost her mind listening to Springsteen's The Seeger Sessions. In particular, she loves to scream, "Fiddles! I love these fiddles!" at the beginning of "John Henry". Sweetie, you're one-half purebred Ozark hillbilly; of course you love those fiddles! And your my child, so of course you love Springsteen. There is order to this universe.

A negative: She's already finding forms of "art" - and I'm using that term in the loosest possible sense - that irritate the fuck out of her parents. In my child's short lifetime, she's seen maybe a grand total of 20 minutes of the childrens television abomination that is Oobi. And yet, for the past two days, that's all she's talked about. Well, that and fiddles. Oobi and fiddles. Hear that? Yeah, that's my head, being slammed through my hardwood floor.

For those of you without kids, and those of you who have the good sense to not let your kids watch TV, let me describe the show to you. All the characters are hands. As in, "We don't have a large enough production budget to make sock puppets. Sorry kids, the entire show will be performed with bare hands."

This is the look that has captured my child's imagination, People. Unblinking, vaguely reptilian, and creeping my shit out. Clara Jane has recovered from the sleep problems she had a few weeks ago. But tonight, having watched a full episode of those unflinching stares, I'm sure my sleep problems are just beginning. I'm going to see that plastic gaze in my nightmares.

Oobi's the big one. He's a kid. The little one's his sister Uma. She has a big thumb, an even bigger sword and she once overdosed by snorting heroine that she thought was cocaine, but John Travolta drove a syrenge of adrenaline into her heart and she was fine. They live with Grandpu. We know he's an adult because his entire body is covered with hair.

The worst part is, Clara Jane speaks at a much higher level than Oobi and his ilk. I don't want them bringing her down. I mean, they refer to themselves in the third person and they know nothing about feline lactation.

A positive: While she was a bit slow to walk, Clara Jane no longer has any problems in that realm. She gets some air when she jumps, boogies like a Rick James backup dancer, and can run both with and without clothing, although she prefers the latter.

A negative: This child has no fear. Couple that with a love of motivation, and we can guarantee that every single fun activity will, indeed, end in injury. Here's a glimpse at our weekend. The parenthetical notes refer to the number of years each incident removed from my life span.

1. Friday night, we had a lovely dinner at the park, which ended with Clara Jane letting go mid-swing and face-planting in the wood chips. (5)
2. Saturday afternoon, we had a little family time in the backyard, where Clara Jane poked herself in the eye with a large stick. (3)
3. Saturday night, we hit the local frozen custard stand. In her post-custard sugar buzz, Clara Jane was running wind sprints around a picnic table, and ran belly-first into the corner the bench in roughly the location of her liver. (8)
4. Sunday, she spent the day in the house, covered in a 4" protective layer of quilt batting held on with Saran-Wrap. (4)

See why I don't have time to blog? Or do anything else, for that matter?

Posted by Robin at 09:04 PM | Comments (8)

April 04, 2006

Why I'm Never Leaving the House Again

I made a decision today. From this point on, I'm never leaving my house again. Yes, I know, this is rather drastic, seeing as I've always been quite the gadabout. No more.

I'm feeling a little better, having gone to bed early last night. Still not nearly up to my usual manic standard, but I'm not sobbing because I'm exhausted, which is an improvement over my condition 24 hours ago. Even if I hadn't felt slightly improved, I intended to get Clara Jane out of the house, at least for a little bit. Best-case scenario: we would hit the new used-baby store in our neighborhood, followed by a quick run to the fabric store. At 10:30 we'd go to storytime at the library, then lunch at Moe's and lastly, a quick run to Trader Joe's.

Yeah, that's optimistic. We didn't get ready fast enough, so the fabric store was crossed off the list before we left the house. The used-baby store? Two things: 1) Large "open" signs that are visible from the street? They're cheap. Buy one. Potential customers don't like parking a block away, hauling a kid out of a car seat on a busy street, hauling kid to store, all for naught. In fact, they dislike it so much that they probably won't come back. 2) Your shop is only open from 11 AM - 3 PM? How do you make rent? I mean, I know the used-baby business is lucrative and all, but it's not that lucrative.

Have I mentioned what was happening with my bra during all of this hauling and such?

I'm in bad need of new bras. I'm down to one that's wearable, and I'm using that word in the loosest sense. This poor bra ... it's tired. It's tired and abused and so stretched beyond its limit that the strap in the back keeps trying to escape through the neckhole of my shirt. I think the reason I'm so damn tired all the time isn't because I've contracted the Black Death; it's because I spend roughly 6 hours a day in perpetual motion, trying to wrangle this renagade brassaire back onto my body. It's exhausting.

When you visualize the events in this post, don't forget that through everything, I'm constantly fiddling with my bra.

On to the library. Clara Jane's a veteran of storytime. Her last storytime experience? Two weeks ago, we piled into the county library headquarters with roughly 100 other toddlers to see a live appearance by Franklin.

Now, I implore you ... does this look like a kid who has any trouble with storytime?

That's Clara Jane on the right, shortly after she sprinted away from me shrieking, "Hey Frank-a-lin!", but before she insisted on exchanging high-fives with him. After chattering non-stop with her favorite turtle-suited person, she heaped herself on the floor with a pile of crayons - some blatantly pilfered from the gaggle of little boys next to us - to capture her Franklin experience on paper while it was fresh on her mind.

Clara Jane has no fear when it comes to costumed characters, to the degree that I'm a little concerned about her developing a fetish. But do you know what library fixture scares the fuck out of her? Crazy Old Library Lady, that's who.

Things started out just fine, as all library trips do. My kid adores the library. Or did. I'm not so sure she feels the same anymore, as her sanctuary of books has become a house of horrors. But I'm jumping ahead of myself.

Today's election day, and the library we visited today was a polling place for one of the 3,927 St. Louis-area municipalities that are electing mayors. At first I wasn't thrilled, because I was going to have to deal with pamphleting electioneers 26 feet away from the entrance, barraging me with propoganda. However, they were all quite nice and understanding when I explained that this wasn't our polling place and we had bigger fish to fry. Or read about frying.

The problem ceated by election day: the polling place was set up in the meeting room usually used for storytime. Not a problem. As Clara Jane shared an alphabet book with a little girl named Isabella, her mom told me that, when storytime's displaced, they have it in the teen area and it's great and fabulous and Miss Sandra hung the moon and stars. Wonderful.

Another little girl, accompanied by her grandmother, were sitting at a table in the teen room when we made our way to storytime. At the next table, another older woman, flipping the pages of her book with such agitation that I wondered if perhaps the characters were telling her horrible, awful things about her mother. Please don't let this be Miss Sandra, I thought. Because whatever this woman's reading, I don't think I want her reading it to my kid.

Clara Jane and the other little girl chattered, as two-year-olds do. They remained on our laps, giggling and talking. I fidgeted with my bra. Grandma smiled adoringly at the girls. Crazy Old Library Lady Who Best Not Be Miss Sandra flipped pages, turned to us and barked, "This is supposed to be a silent area. Get the kids out of here."

Both girls fell silent, inately aware that suddenly, their silence was required. Perhaps their lives depended on it.

I stopped tugging my strap so as to look at least a little reasonable. "Actually, storytime is starting in here in a few minutes."

"This isn't the storytime area! They don't hold storytime in here! This is a silent area and I came in here for peace and quiet! I need peace and quiet for what I'm doing! This is not the storytime room and you need to leave!"

I prepared to hand Clara Jane to the grandmother, whip off my bra, and use it to truss and bind the woman who was having such a screaming, flailing meltdown in her silent area that she was rapidly turning into a very loud, very slimy puddle on the floor. Just then, a plump woman with a soft salt-and-pepper pageboy entered the room, wheeling a cart filled with books, crayons, monkey puppets and an autoharp. "It's storytime!" she chirped in the general direction of the molten petrolium product that continued to shriek, "You're welcome to stay, if you'd like!"

The puddle yorped in the new woman's direction, absorbed her reading materials into her oil flow, and slithered out of her most-decidedly non-silent area.

I think she took a little of Clara Jane's spirit with her. This child - who's been social since the day she was born, who loves live music, and storytime and coloring, and being around other similarly-inclined kids - would not allow me to put her down. When I did, she sobbed as if I was going to leave her in The Bad Vibes Room to be raised by whatever crazy old person happened by next.

I spent the entire 45 minutes of storytime on my knees, Clara Jane adhered to my torso. If her feet got within three inches of the floor, she'd fire up the tears once again. Nothing assured her that everything was okay. Not the gentle melody of the autoharp and Miss Sandra's sweet voice. Not the giggles of the other kids. Not the stories about shoes and the finger puppets based on Eileen Christelow's Five Little Monkeys, who happen to be Clara Jane's favorite monkeys in the whole wide world. She would calm when she was pressed against me with both of my arms wrapped tight around her, but if my muscles fatigued and her feet came within the dreaded three inches of the floor, she'd cry, legs peddling like a frantic duck, kicking my thighs and stomach as her fingers dug into my shoulders, begging me to take her home.

It's really hard to fidget with a renegade brassaire in such a situation.

I don't expect everyone to adore my child, or to be charmed by her every chatter and shriek. Kids in public places can be irritating; I'm the first to admit that. But Jesus. What kind of person has a screaming hissy fit of such magnitude that it leaves a normally gregarious kid so terrified she can't unlatch from her mother?

I think that woman truly did need some peace and quiet, perhaps the kind provided by solitary confinement at one of the area's mental health facilities.

Maybe I should have given in to Clara Jane's pleas to leave, but what would that teach her? That it's okay to let a bully ruin something that is rightfully hers? I hate that the ire of one unhinged person has the possibility of changing how we go about our lives. My reaction - I quit. I'm sick to death of dealing with people and I just don't want to do it anymore. I'm exhausted and I don't need this. Most importantly, I don't want Clara Jane to deal with this. I want her to believe that people are good and have her best interests at heart for as long as possible. I don't want one crazy old bat at the library to steal that part of her innocence. I don't want the storytimes that she's loved so much to have any shadow of fear. But now, they might, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Clara Jane's going to learn about the meanness in this world, and I don't get to choose when or how.

I'm going to learn about the meanness in me. In the past, the sight of such a person - old and alone, miserable and angry - would have made something in my heart hurt. I would hurt for whatever horrible hurt had brought such misery into being. But today, I felt no sympathy, no "there but for the grace of God go I". All I felt was the overwhelming desire to strike this person so that she might hurt as much as she hurt my child.

Posted by Robin at 02:42 PM | Comments (10)

March 23, 2006

Everyone Loves Baby Horses!

I have nothing of import to post. You don't want to hear about my day. Trust me. You don't want to hear about the hissy fit Clara Jane threw when I refused to let her listen to Wilco's War on War for an 18th time in a row today. I mean, that's enough to put a dent in even my deep, abiding love for all things Wilco.

You also don't want to hear about the fit she threw because I had the audacity to first give her purple Play-Doh, and then orange Play-Doh, instead of the green Play-Doh she required to live.

And you really don't want to hear about the screaming that occured by multiple people when she slammed two of her fingers in one of my desk drawers.

You know what makes everything better? Pictures of baby horses.

Yeah, I ran like that a few hours after I gave birth. You know I did.

Because I'm an only child - or because my parents aren't right in the head, I'm not sure which - our pets were always referred to as being my siblings. So this baby horse is my new brother. By that accord, his parents are my sister and other brother, which means my family is far too Ozarkean for its own good. But that would explain some of the troubles they're having with this new little guy. His mother - my sister, the horse - is having nursing issues. Having been through breastfeeding hell two years ago, I find myself offering advice. To a horse.

I refuse to rent her a breast pump. I've gotta draw the line somewhere.

Also, to no one's surprise, the little guy was born on Wednesday, which means his name is supposed to be Ditzy Little Obnoxious Eighth Grader, after my cousin's child who shares the horse's birthday. I'm going to call him Obnoxy for short.

Posted by Robin at 10:31 PM | Comments (14)

March 07, 2006

Deep Thoughts and Bodily Fluids - A Little Something for Everyone

Which do you want first? Of course, the poop...

As of 6:24 PM today, Tuesday, March 7, in the year of our lord 2006, I hereby declare that no one in this house is allowed to perform any bodily functions until they learn how to do it right.

Last night, B. noticed that Clara Jane had a smidge of diaper rash, so he let her run around the house bare-assed for awhile. This is what we call Danger Baby. I think you probably know why, and I'm pretty sure you know where this is going.

"Oh my God! She's crapping on the floor!" B. yelled, jumping up and sprinting away from my desk, where Clara Jane was squatting, doing what I can only assume was her best imitation of a bear in the woods. He recovered, cleaned it up, and once again fell into shock as Clara Jane ran across the kitchen, a giant turd falling out of the hem of her shirt.

Once all the poop was removed, B. removed Clara Jane to the bath. Once out, she was standing on one of the dining room chairs, still naked. "What's all that water on the chair?" B. asked. "Did that drip off of her from the bath?"

Sure, Honey. You just keep telling yourself that while I disinfect this chair on which we sit while we consume food, for it is covered with urine.

Fast forward to bedtime. I was reading, while my cat, Romi the Motherfucking Lardass, attempted to settle her girth onto my girth, which is sort of like balancing a ping-pong ball on top of a basketball. As she settled, I noticed something. Under her tail. Oh God.

I shoved her towards B., flung a box of tissues at him and requested that he please remove the renegade dingleberry (which, size-wise, was really more of a dinglepear) from her ass.

Once the poop was out of our bed, we sat there, catching our breath, both silently pondering the horror of possibly rolling onto the renegade dinglepear in the night. Romi, in her shame, perched on the edge of B.'s nightstand, looking straight ahead, obviously trying to regain her nobility in light of having, essentially, crapped her pants in front of us. I watched her profile as she sat, unflinching, lost in the thoughts of her shame. She opened her mouth, I presumed to speak of her mortification and sorrow at the frightening end of the evening. And from her mouth, as she emitted a delicated hack, came rocketing ... what? A loogie? Projectile vomit? Jet-powered hairball? I'm not sure. All I know is I watched in what felt like slow-motion as this item came hurtling out of her gullet and across the room. Had the dogs been sleeping in their beds four feet away, they would have thought all their dreams had come true and cat vomit had started raining from the heavens.

I somehow managed to sleep, even with this animal, who had sprung leaks from both ends, slept near my pillow. Clara Jane woke me up before 7 AM. Although I wasn't thrilled with this situation, I took advantage of it. Got us dressed and out the door by 9 so we could go for coffee and chocolate milk, followed by a trip to Whole Foods. I needed probiotics, as my digestive system is still reeling from last week's flu. I won't be giving you details, because I prefer for the rest of the world to believe that I don't poop. However, I'm pretty sure Romi has posted all the details over on Live Journal.

I love Whole Foods, but I don't get there very often. Unless I go early in the morning, it's a madhouse and it makes me want to run over people in the parking lot, which doesn't quite work with Whole Foods' earth-friendly vibe. So we just don't go, unless it's a day like today, where the planets align with my ailing intestines and the child in my house who is suddenly operating on Rooster Central Time.

Two years ago, I was also going to Whole Foods for probiotics. Clara Jane was almost a month old and I was still sick. When I left the hospital, my doctor said my C-section incision looked like it wanted to get infected. She sent me home with a prescription for Keflex. Four days later, I awoke with my clothing saturated in liquid that had burst from the incision. It looked like the tail of my shirt and my underwear had been dunked four inches in a washtub.

In the weeks that followed, I was prescribed every antibiotic known to western medicine, or so it felt. Several times a day I sat on the toilet while B. alternated hot compresses and peroxide-soaked cloths on my incision, which continued to bleed and weep. I went to my doctor's office several times a week, always on the verge of being admitted to the infectious disease unit. The infection didn't budge.

Despite the infection, I was able to go out. As long as I took painkillers and wore elastic wasitbands, I could try to get on with my life, which now contained a tiny little girl and a weeping wound. That was good, I thought, because I had other health issues at hand. Whenever I was left at home with Clara Jane, I would panic. Paralyzing, life-controlling panic that left me huddled on the couch, sobbing, for hours on end. Every morning, Clara Jane and I would drive B. to the train station, then we'd go to the diner for a long breakfast. She'd sleep on the counter in her car seat while I ate my egg sandwich and drank cup after cup of coffee. Perched on a swiveling stool at the counter, my incision didn't hurt quite as much.

When we'd leave the diner, I'd have to find someplace else for us to pass a few hours, and Whole Foods was an appealing option. I'd put Clara Jane into her Baby Bjorn and we'd stroll through the store. If she was awake, she'd gaze at the colors and lights in the produce department. I'd take my time walking down the aisles, maybe buying something to drink or a snack. Lunch from the salad bar, if it was a particularly long visit, as a lot of them were. Sometimes I'd sit in the dining area with a notebook and write, if Clara Jane was willing to snooze on my chest.

When it came time to pay, I always tried to get the same cashier. I don't remember her name, but she was in her early 20s, chubby, ring through the divit between her lower lip and her chin, and hair color that varied between hot pink and burgundy from week-to-week. I could always count on her for a little small talk, and to fawn over Clara Jane. She always projected a bit of happiness, and helped ease my loneliness.

Eventually, it was a trip to Whole Foods that finally brought down the infection. My friend Jackie, a homeopathic therapist in Great Britain, suggested several formulas that tend to help surgical infections, along with an arnica ointment. Within a week, the infection was mostly gone, and I was downing probiotics, trying to get everything back in order.

As I walked through Whole Foods early this morning, I thought about those mornings two years ago, and the tiny baby who snoozed on my chest as I browsed. Today, she pointed at items in the produce department, yelling out the names of fruits and veggies. She demanded samples from the cheese and potato chip departments, and mooed at the cow artwork on the organic dairy products. While gazing into the meat case, I heard someone say, "Hey! It's you! I haven't seen you in ages! Oh my God, your baby's grown!" I looked up, and there was my cashier, this time with fading blue hair and a blood-smeared white coat, working behind the meat counter. "She's gorgeous!"

I thanked her, and we made idle chit-chat for a bit. I found myself wanting to tell her that I'm fine. I'm well. Missing some vital flora, perhaps, but otherwise, so good that an early-morning trip to the hippie store is now fun, not a lifeline.

Posted by Robin at 07:24 PM | Comments (13)

February 26, 2006

Definitely Not Mashed Potato Time

A year ago this week my dad underwent quadriple heart bypass surgery. That, along with a hard-to-diagnose form of arthritis led to his early retirement.

We were all concerned with how Dad would handle retired life, since he'd spent the previous 55.5 years of his life fulfilling the role of Crazy Workaholic Man. As I write, the Bobby Bare Jr.-Buck Owens-Jeff Tweedy-Radney Foster cover of "Take This Job and Shove It" just came on the shuffle. Because the shuffle, it knows. Anyway ...

Dad's adjusted well. He's entrenched himself in Lexi and Bubba, his quarter horses who are going to become parents in the next few weeks. He got Bubba trained to pull a cart and had a few wrecks. Nevermind that trying decapitate his dog Chiggar with a chainsaw is damn near a full-time job.

He's also discovered a new hobby. In my 33 years I don't think I've ever seen my dad read anything beyond the local newspaper and maybe the occasional horse or Nascar-related magazine. But hallelujah, my father has become a reader. At nearly 57 years of age, he recently procured his first library card. He's reading an average of two books a week. Now, I've always been a reader, but I'm lucky if I can finish one book every two weeks.

It was an odd sight when we were visiting my folks last weekend, seeing my dad in his armchair for hours, the TV silent - silent, for God's sake! That never happens! - with his nose in a book. "Hey Rob! You've gotta read this part!" he kept telling me, shoving his book at me. So I read numerous passages out of his book, things that he found funny or interesting, all while wondering, "Who are you and what have you done with my daddy?"

Yesterday afternoon I was on the phone with my mom. She told me that Dad's really enjoying his current book, Gap Creek by Robert Morgan, have I read it? No, I haven't.

I heard my dad in the background, yelling to my mom, "You've gotta read this part to her! Here! Read this page to her!" So, I had a little story time over the phone with my mom, at my dad's insistance.

I've got to say, after five minutes of my mom reading me the terrific details of a little boy vomiting great bucketsful of wriggly white worms, people reaching into his throat to pull them out until he fucking died, I came to the conclusion that I liked my dad better before he became a reader.

Fast forward to dinner tonight...

I made a lovely dinner, after a weekend of IHOP and Moe's. A spicy glazed pork tenderloin, sugar-glazed roasted carrots and mashed potatoes. We believe in the power of carbs in this house, oh yes we do. I didn't expect Clara Jane to eat any potatoes, because my child is completely unamerican and has never, ever liked mashed potatoes. I'm sure this is why I hear little clicking noises every time I'm on the phone. She's tried them a few times, but seems to have issues with the texture. Often, if she finds herself with a mouthful of mashed potatoes, she'll just sit there, mouth agape, potatoes blending with saliva under her tongue, dripping down her chin in a buttery river of drool.

But tonight, armed with a pair of chopsticks, she ate mashed potatoes. Teeny-tiny little dots on mashed potatoes on the end of her chopstick, enough to get that potatoey goodness without feeling like she has a mouthful of paste. Well, except for one bite, when she got a little carried away and found herself with the big drooly mashed potato river.

She stood there, mouth open, eyes horrified, chomping my fingers as I reached into her mouth to remove the offending potatoes, I realized you really can learn a lot from books.

Posted by Robin at 07:15 PM | Comments (2)

February 15, 2006

Happy Birthday, Clara Jane

February 15, 2004


February 15, 2005


February 15, 2006

Happy birthday, Sweet Sweet Sugar Beet.

Posted by Robin at 09:19 AM | Comments (21)

January 21, 2006

Sunny Day

A few weeks ago, while watching a commercial for "Sesame Street Live", Clara Jane made the connection that the be-costumed Baby Bear in the ad was indeed the same, real-life manifestation of the lisping Baby Bear from the show that she loves ever so much. And in that moment, in a frenzy of maternal love that completely blanketed all logic, I called B. at work. "Can you still get those discounted Sesame Street tickets? Because we so have to go."

Fifty dollars and three tickets later, I spent the next two weeks wondering what in the hell I was thinking. She's not even two. There's no way she can handle a 90-minute show, complete with lights, loud noises and about a million other screaming toddlers. We just spent fifty bucks for our kid to throw a massive hissy fit in public. Great. Just great.

Today day began with Clara Jane's first foray into public transportation. B. had been looking forward to this for a long time, being a regular traveler on St. Louis' Metrolink. Really, I'm surprised it's taken us this long to get her onto a train.

And with her first trip via public transportation, she also had her first encounter with an idiot on the train platform. Now, to be fair, he might have been very intelligent, had he not smoked his breakfast.

The entrance to one of the train platforms was barricaded with slashes of yellow tape and orange cones, but that didn't stop this fellow from crawling through the tape to the empty platform. "Hey buddy!" someone from our platform called. "That platform's closed. The trains from both directions are using this platform."

The trespasser shot him a look and kept walking down the deserted platform until a Metro employee barked, "Hey! That's closed! Get off the closed platform!"

To which the trespasser replied, "It's closed? Someone should have said something!"

And then he exited, once again climbing through the yellow tape.

That encounter aside, I do believe this was my first visit to Savvis Center where I didn't encounter so much as a passing whiff of anything being illicitly smoked. The "Sesame Street Live" crowd? Not quite as into the hallucinogens as the people at most shows I see at that venue. Maybe it was because it was the 10:30 AM show. I'll bet the hardcore fans don't come out until the 5:30 PM show.

What we did encounter - enough cotton candy and sno-cones to require Insulin Emergency Stations scattered throughout the venue.

Now, I'm going to admit something that's potentially humiliating. Angela wrote about something similar last summer in regards to seeing "The Wiggles". So at least I'm in good company.

I am such a crybaby, especially when music's invovled. Always have been. When I first started taking Prozac in 2002, one of the first changes I noticed was I no longer got weepy upon hearing jingles in Kleenex and Kodak commercials. While I was initially a little disturbed by this dulling of my emotional edge, I quickly came to embrace it. I could do things like watch TV and go to concerts with others without bursting into tears and looking like an idiot.

While I've adjusted well to life without mood stablizers over the past year, one pre-SSRI trait has returned: I'm a fucking bawl bag. I feared today's show would send me into a blubbering fit and I'm not-so-pleased to report that I was right.

During the opening number - "Somebody Come and Play", which always chokes me up on the show, even with it's the upbeat version and not Ernie's rather melancholy, lonesome version - with all the costumed Sesame Street characters parading onto the stage and my kid hollering, "Hello Bert! Hello Prairie Dawn! Hello Baby Bear!" I cried like someone had burned down my house, stolen my dogs and fed my favorite shirt to a goat all in the same day.

At least it's not choking sobs. I can limit it to the occasionally shuddery sigh, but my God, the tears! Great flooding rivers of tears! Tears that can't be passed off as allergy eyes or a reaction to the bright lights!

I eventually pulled my shit together and was doing fine. And then they had to do the "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon". The regular version gets to me, but oh my God lately they've been showing the version with Aaron Neville, and it's a song about wanting to be home, and with Aaron Neville involved it makes me think of all the people displaced by Hurricane Katrina and OH MY GOD!!! JUST STOP!!!! I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SOBBING AT FUCKING SESAME STREET LIVE!!!

I mean, seriously. You would have thought I was at an Alan Jackson concert with the amount of tearshed I displayed. I can't believe I was concerned about Clara Jane going into meltdown mode. Clara Jane was fine. She loved it. Didn't shed a tear the entire time we were out. Unlike her mother, who left a hankerchief completely sopping wet and was reduced to wiping her tear-snot on her sleeve.

Speaking of my child's exemplary behavior, she had a wonderful time. We made it through the entire show and she was enthralled. Mesmerized. Totally into it. I'm even willing to overlook how she pointed to and addressed the performers. She's a bit young to understand that this breaks Cardinal Rule of Cooldom #73 and might get your ass kicked if you do it at the wrong show. I don't know. Maybe the etiquette is different at kiddie concerts. Regardless, I let it slide, since I was in flagrant violation of Cardinal Rule of Cooldom #32: Thou shalt not sob like a motherfucking sissy when Big Bird makes his entrance.

Besides, I think I'd embarrassed her enough for one day:

Posted by Robin at 09:49 PM | Comments (5)

January 17, 2006

Clara Jane's House of Death & Mayhem

Before I had Clara Jane, I dreaded the foray into children's entertainment. Aside from the classic kids books and occasional viewings of Sesame Street, I wondered how I would stomach all that sing-songy obnoxious crap. I had grand ideas of limiting the crappy kid's stuff and launching my kid directly into real music.

I love that Clara Jane screams, "I'll dance!" whenever she hears Wilco's "War on War" or "Pot Kettle Black" come on. It tickles me to no end when she sprints through the house to get a better listen when she hears the opening riff of U2's "Vertigo". The day she first headbanged to "Blue Orchid" by the White Stripes? I wept, People. Openly wept tears of joy. Booya! That's my baby, rocking her punk ass!

But I'm starting to have some misgivings about my little plan. It started when I caught Clara Jane singing along to Walt Whitman's Niece, a tune that's always prefaced with the word "bawdy". We were in the truck at the time, and I just about drove us off the road when I heard that sweet little voice in the backseat chirping, "I'll not say which seaman".

I didn't react much better the day she was chanting, "I got high high high high!" along with Ryan Adams' To Be Young (Is to Be Sad Is to Be High).

And while it cracks me up that she runs around chanting "Lucky lucky you're so lucky!" from Franz Ferdinand's Do You Want To, I harbor no illusions about what will happen if she ever sings along with the line, "Your famous friend? Well, I blew him before you". We'll all be unlucky unlucky so unlucky because my head with motherfucking explode.

While I don't intend to limit the "grown-up" music Clara Jane listens to, maybe there's something to all this kid's crap. I'm starting to think that I might be stealing a bit of her innocence with my music choices. Besides, she needs her own music. She's got a collection of somewhat tolerable kids music from artists like Laurie Berkner and Dan Zanes.

B. recently found a CD in Clara Jane's collection. I think it was a baby shower gift. It's just one of those generic kids CDs that can be found for a few bucks at Walmart or Target. "Baby's Best Playtime Songs". Looks innocent enough, with tunes like "Baa-Baa Black Sheep", "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and such. He played it for Clara Jane a few weeks ago, and she's hooked.

As with all kids entertainment, I try to not be too disdainful. This stuff isn't made for me to like it; it's made for kids to like it. But sweet Jesus!

For starters, the kids singing on this CD ... I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure these tots spend their spare time wandering cornfields and worshipping Satan.

But that's not the worst of it. Oh no. The worst of it lies in the song "Three Little Pigs". Now, when I think of "Three Little Pigs", I think of "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down", and scalded big bad wolves and such. That, my friends, would be a delight compared to the horrors entrapped in these musical version:

Oh there once was a sow who had three little pigs
Three little pigs had she
The old sow always went oink oink oink
And the piggies went wee wee wee wee

One day one of the three little pigs
To the other two piggies said he
"Why dont' we always go oink oink oink
If they taught us to go wee wee wee wee?"

These three piggies grew skinny and lean
Skinny they well should be
For they always would try to go oink oink oink
And they woulnd't go wee wee wee wee

Now these three piggies, they up and they DIED
A very sad sight to see
So don't ever try to go oink oink oink
When you ought to go wee wee wee wee

So, what's the message in this song? You best not get above your raisin', Kid, or we'll starve you to death? Toe the line or you'll die?

While I could see how such threats might come in handy on the really bad toddler days, I'm thinking maybe it's a bit, I don't know, severe? Harsh? Fucking morbid? So much for my kid's innocence. I think we'll go back to Walt's slutty relations and her ejaculating sailor friends, thank you very much.

Don't even get me started on the "Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" doll Clara Jane got for Christmas:

She's dead, of course.

Posted by Robin at 03:47 PM | Comments (29)

January 09, 2006

You Don't Want to Hear About My Day. Trust Me.

Let me preface by saying that I have nothing to say.

I could tell you about my day, but trust me, you don't want to hear it.

You don't want to hear about the three rounds of toddler diarrhea. Really. You don't. You especially don't want to know how round #2 (literally and figuratively) left me heaving (literally and figuratively).

You also don't want to hear about her just-under-the-gums molars, or as I like to call them, "motherfucking sniper-ass sons of bitches".

You really don't want to hear about how Clara Jane and I were snuggled in bed, reading a book. And how, in the middle of laughing at one of Biscuit's antics, her giggle turned into a wail. You really, really don't want to know how she looked at me with eyes that screamed, "Yo! Mama! Cut this shit out, already! I think I'm dyin' over here!" You really, really, really don't want to know how, because I couldn't do anything but hold her and tell her that I know, it hurts and it sucks and I'm sorry, that I just cried right along with her.

But you might like to know that the worst seems to be past. Nobodys ass has exploded in over three hours. Clara Jane's taking her second nap of the day. But if you have kids, I'm positive you don't want to know that my kid sleeps when she's teething or sick, because such information will make you want to kill me. I understand. Really, I do.

There are some other things you might want to hear about:

For example, I look good all blinged out.

Another thing you might like to know: I think someone's pumping pheremones into my house because the schmoop is thick around here. I partially blame those people who showed up late Friday with all the booze, but I'm not complaining. They're not the only schmoopy ones. I'm smiling for a reason. And believe you me, it takes some good stuff to keep a girl smiling while she dry-heaves during diaper changes. The schmoop, it cures all. I'm just not quite sure at what point the schmoop turns into the smut. Enlighten me if you happen to know.

You might also enjoy knowing that, as long as my child's health is under control and the house hasn't turned into a giant drool-filled latrine, I will be taking myself to my friendly local neighborhood multinational corporate coffeehouse franchise to do some work on the book. You know, the one I'm writing. The same one that, yesterday, got the full outline treatment and is coming dangerously close to being a reality.

And I'm 100% sure you'll be ecstatic to know that I'm bringing this obnoxious list to an end.

Posted by Robin at 02:52 PM | Comments (6)

January 04, 2006

If One More Person...

...comes up to me in public, looks at my child, looks at me and utters a variation of, "Oh! Does your husband have blonde hair?" or "Oh! Is your husband really fair-skinned?", I swear to God I'm gonna snatch the hair right offa that person's head and ask, "Oh! Is your daddy a bald asshole?"

Either that or I'm going to tell them that she has that Michael Jackson disease.

Yeah, get me. I'm all swarthy and shit.

Posted by Robin at 10:05 PM | Comments (6)

December 24, 2005

How Kara & I Came to Blows: Anatomy of a Beating in Photos

Poor Clara Jane. She's a little drummer girl without a drum. All she has is a kick-ass mullet and some wooden spoons to bang on her high chair tray.

Sometimes, when she's not in her instrument-free house, Clara Jane is able to find an outlet for her musical urges, even if it means annoying an entire coffeehouse with her running scales.

If only someone would help erradicate her music-free existance! If only someone would swoop in with a big ol' box of noise! O Kara Claus! Please save Christmas!

Bring me monkey maracas!

And a jangly pandourine!

And then - then! Bring on the rattly, thumpy, bead-filled drum! Beat the turtle drum, Clara Jane!

A merry KISSmas to all! And to all an Anthrax goodnight!

(Kara's getting a box of bees for her birthday next year, mark my word.)

Posted by Robin at 12:44 PM | Comments (8)

December 22, 2005

Happy Head Injury Holiday!

I spent some time riding the short bus when I was in elementary school. However, it was the short bus to the weekly gifted program. B. was also of advanced intelligence at an early age, but if I remember correctly his school system didn't have a program for singling out and drawing attention to the smart kids like mine did. With our genes (and egos) combined, we're somewhat expecting Clara Jane to follow in our big-brained/little-bus footsteps.

However, after last night, I'm concerned that she might be on that bus for other reasons entirely.

6:45 PM - While playing in B.'s office, she walked backwards into a chair, clunking the back of her head hard enough to merit a meltdown.

7:20 PM - Clara Jane has learned the joy of standing in the middle of a room, arms flung wide, and spinning until she pukes. Well, not that she's puked yet, but you know it's just a matter of time. Anyway, she spun and squealed, then attempted to walk across the kitchen. You would have thought she'd been dipping into the pomegranate cocktails from the staggering. She made it halfway across the room before falling directly into the doorframe on her right. But she was fine! She can walk! What are you insinuating, that she's drunk? She's fine!

She righted herself, started to walk again, and promptly fell to her left, conking her head on the doorframe. Screaming commences.

7:50 PM - The previous head injuries forgotten (because, let's face it, that's the perk of head injuries; you forget them rather quickly), Clara Jane partakes in her usual post-bath activity: she sprints from the bathroom, stark naked, finds me, throws her hands in the air and screams, "I'm naked! Mama! I'm naked!" It's a delightful routine.

Last night, while announcing her nudity, Clara Jane sprinted across the kitchen and dining room, right towards my desk. I've got a little pull-out lapdesk that was not in its loaded upright position. It was sticking straight out, and my kid was headed for it, and so engrossed in her nakedness (she gets that from her father) that she showed no signs of stopping.

But stop, she did, when her forehead made contact with the lapdesk with such force and speed that it knocked her backwards onto her little naked ass. I swooped her up in my arms, snuggling her while she sobbed, trying to see if her eyes were pointing in the same direction when I felt something on my foot.

How many blows to the head does it take to literally knock the piss out of someone? Three, apparently.

None of the head injuries were severe. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this; I'm not that heartless. And yes, I checked on her in the night, so concerned was I about the state of her jostled little brain. But she's fine. In fact, in the time it took me to take off my urine-soaked clothing, run into the kitchen and yell, "I'm naked!", she was completely over Head Injury #3. She'd moved on to Naked Gift Unwrapping.

Nonetheless, I'm taking back all of her Christmas gifts and exchanging them for a helmet. She'll thank me someday when she's on that teeny little bus.

Posted by Robin at 11:11 AM | Comments (4)

December 21, 2005

The Bad Trip

Clara Jane has returned and, as usual, I find myself racking my brain. How do I parent, again? I can't remember. You mean I can't just let her have free reign of the Teletubbies library on our DVR and leave an open box of Cheerios on the floor for her to graze from? I'm supposed to do stuff with her? Like what? Does she like drinking espresso and beer? Because that's the kind of stuff I like to do. No? Shit.

Last Friday, when we were in the truck on our way to meet my parents, out of the blue Clara Jane said, "Butterfly House! Let's go to the Butterfly House!" When I explained that no, we weren't going to the Butterfly House, she interpreted it as, "No Clara Jane. We're not going to the Butterfly House. The Butterfly House was torched in a fiery inferno. All the butterflies are dead and it's all your fault!" Which would explain the wailing that followed.

So today, we went to the Butterfly House.

Now, we've been to the Butterfly House quite a few times. We know how it works. Don't touch the butterflies. Don't touch the flowers. If you can manage it, don't touch the walkways with your feet. I understand these rules, and I fully understand the need for them. I work hard to make sure my kid follows these rules as closely as possible.

Within minutes of walking into the conservatory, Clara Jane picked up a fuzzy pink bloom on the ground which had fallen off a plant. One of the botonists was instantly on top of us: "She needs to put that down."

"Right," I said, chasing Clara Jane while trying to snatch the fallen bloom from her grip.

"She needs to put that down and not touch any of the flowers," he repeated. "We don't know the toxicity of any of these plants!"

Well.

That fills me with confidence. Dude. You're a botonist. In an indoor garden. Every single thing in here was planted on purpose. Every single plant has a little sign. You know the toxicity; you're just trying to scare us.

And it worked. A group of parents with toddlers overheard and an audible gasp arose. A few of them looked at me like I was feeding Clara Jane a spoonful of arsenic.

Obviously, the flower was, indeed, toxic. Looks like it was a mild psychotropic.

Clara Jane enjoyed the buzz, but now she's lying in her crib, fighting the images of six-headed botonists with lizard's feet. I hear babies never forget their first bad trip.

She also hallucinated some giant caterpillars:

On Wednesday he ate one tripped-out toddler, but he was still hungry. For her increased toxicity levels gave him a wicked case of the munchies.

In other news of idiots saying stupid things to me today ...

Once Clara Jane came down from The Pink Haze, she demanded a chicken taco, along with a package of Nutter Butters, some Orange Crush and a box of Cocoa Puffs. As we were eating, I noticed a woman watching Clara Jane with that blissed-out look that ovarian types tend to get while watching small children. Either that, or she'd been fondling the fluffy pink flowers, too. As she was leaving the restaurant she stopped at our table and said, "Your little girl is so cute. She must look exactly like your husband."

All I can say is, that bitch best have been smoking crack.

Posted by Robin at 01:58 PM | Comments (6)

December 07, 2005

Christmastime is Here

I positively despise making cut-out cookies. Hate hate hate it. I'd rather cook an entire wild boar by myself over a campfire (a feat I've never tried, really don't want to try, but would be willing to try if it got me out of cookie duty) than deal with sticky cookie dough, cookie cutters, icing and sprinkles.

During my professional cooking career, there was only one job that went poorly. A client begged me to do flower-shaped iced sugar cookies. I told her no-go, that she really didn't want any sugar cookies that have been in the same room as me. My mere presence is enough to burn the edges and smear the icing. She begged. Insisted. So I gave her a low-ball price and agreed, figuring she'd get what she paid for - not a hell of a lot.

I busted my ass on those cookies, and I'm pretty sure I went way over my allotted annual uses of the C-word that day. And by C-word, I'm talking about another kind of cookie entirely. And as expected, the cookies looked like the work of a first-grader in need of a higher daily Ritalin dose.

Sure enough, the client wasn't happy. She wound up buying grocery store cookies to replace my abominations and was entirely too pissy with me, considering I told her, "Yes, I will make your cookies, and I'm going to charge you next-to-nothing for them because I promise you, they will look like shit."

My cookie-hatred is an adulthood development. As a kid, I would beg and plead my mom to play bakery. And even though she, too, has the cookie hatred, she would oblige me once a week. On Fridays we'd fling flour around the kitchen. My grandfathers would call and I'd climb the footstool to reach the phone. "W______'s Bakery. Can I take your order?" I'd ask. They'd place their orders and would come visit later in the day.


Not the face of someone who would grow up to hate cookie-making as much as I do, is it?

I'm not exactly sure what made me think that making cookies with Clara Jane would be a good idea. I think I'm just desperate for anything that might combat 1)the borderline personality disorder she's developed, thanks to the molars she's cutting, and 2)being cooped up in the house because it's so damn cold outside. When we ventured out yesterday, I bought something that goes against every anti-processed-food tirade that's ever issued from my lips; I bought a giant tube of pre-made sugar cookie dough. Mainly because I'd rather feed my child yummy preservatives than take a chance with the raw eggs in homemade dough.

That was a good call, considering that the nanosecond I placed 1/4 of the dough-log before Clara "Lovin' in the Oven" Jane, she had her mouth wrapped around it, attempting to cram the entire thing down her gullet.

We won't be sharing the cookies made from that dough with anyone on our Christmas list. Well, except for people we don't like.

As we patted and cut the dough, flung green sanding sugar around the house, and took turns trying to swallow whole portions of tube-dough, I turned on "A Charlie Brown Christmas", just for a little atmosphere. I didn't expect Clara Jane to pay much attention to it, as she prefers creepy people in weird costumes to cartoons. So is it any wonder that, when the show opened with all the ice skating children and Clara Jane started waving and squealing, "Hello, Kids! Hello!", that I dropped my star cookie cutter and cried. My kid, with a high chair tray covered in raw cookie dough and green sprinkles, bursting with excitement at something that has been a part of my holidays since I was her age. I didn't know which way to go - to be the mom and relish seeing my daughter so excited and happy, or to be a little girl again, awash in my own cookie Charlie Brown memories.

I wound up making most of the cookies, of course, while Clara Jane ate dough and shook the bottles of sprinkles with wild abandon, shouting, "Sprinkles! Sprinkles!" At least I had the forethought to only open one of the bottles, which means only two rooms in my house are now green and sticky. But it was worth it. Even if the cookies were prepackaged, collided with each other as they baked, and were swimming in green sugar. And even if some of the dough was a little slobbery. It was all just fine, because we traded lines from "Jingle Bells" in our sugar-delirium. And that's what Christmas is all about, right?

(Photos of the decorating frenzy located on the Flickr bar to your right.)

Posted by Robin at 07:11 PM | Comments (12)

December 05, 2005

Writer's Angst, Pt. II

It doesn't seem like that long ago since we had Heatwave Lockdown, Day 1 and Heatwave Lockdown, Day 2, and yet today we had the cold-weather version. Which, all told, isn't quite as bad. The cold doesn't agitate me the way the heat does. I like being housebound when it's cold, probably because I know that if I do, indeed, need to leave the house, I won't spontaneously combust. With wind chills not rising above 20 degrees today, it seemed like a good day to stay inside.

I had big plans. In the morning Clara "Frosty the Snowman" Jane and I would play and play and play. There would be cocoa! And marshmallows! And fingerpaints! Woo-hoo!

Then I came to my senses and realized that fingerpaints + toddler = big scary mess. And she seemed perfectly content to color, read, and perform a few song-and-dance routines, which was fine. Fun. Good, snuggly fun.

Promptly at 1 PM, when she ended the fun by slamming her finger in a kitchen cabinet, she went down for a nap and slept until I went to her room at 5 PM to check her pulse.

Now, with this gloriously long nap, I could have spent my day doing any myriad of things I complain about not having time to do. I could clean my house. Knit. Or, God forbid, do some writing. Did I do any of these things? Well, a little. No cleaning, but I did tinker with some editing and finished a scarf for one of Clara Jane's daycare teachers.

I'm still struggling with the writing. For everyone who offered encouragement last week, thank you so much. It helped. It really did. I made a chunk of progress on the book during the weekend and was feeling great about the whole thing. But today I started reading what I've written and wound up feeling just as shitty as I did on Thursday.

When I left catering, I had promised myself that I'd spend a chunk of the time that I used to spend catering, working on the book. Tonight being my first non-catering Monday, that means my ass had a date with a damn book. B. practically had to kick me out of the house. My enthusiasm, it was overwhelming. But since he was nice enough to bring his work laptop home for me to use, I could hardly say no.

I headed to a local outpost of the ginormous chain of coffee shops (I think you know which one) and made my first venture into the world of Wi-Fi so I could retrieve my work.

Slight problem: I forgot that this particular coffee chain doesn't offer free Wi-Fi, and I didn't feel like dishing out $10 to spend ten seconds grabbing a file. While I may be a Wi-Fi newbie, I'm not stupid. It took me about two minutes to locate a connection with the local outpost of the ginormous chain of donut shops located across the street. Hey - they were closed and obviously they're not too worried about people stealing their signal, since they didn't have much protecting it.

This is why I'm not a crook. Well, aside from being too ethical and nice. I'm far too stupid to be a crook and would wind up on one of those stupid-criminal specials on Court TV in no time. Case in point:

I was working, and although I wasn't using the Wi-Fi, I had left it connected, mainly for codependent reasons. I was furiously pecking away, and happened to look up to find another patron , about three feet in front of me, watching. We made eye contact and he smiled.

"Are you Wi-Fi-ing it?" he asked.

"Um, yes," I said, and giggled. "Sort of. From across the street. Hehehehehehehehehehehehe."

I wasn't even drinking caffiene, and I was this stupid.

"You naughty, naughty girl!" he admonished, grinning as he started to leave.

Before he walked out the door, he turned to me, winked, and in a loud stage whisper said, "I won't tell on you!".

I immediately disconnected and cried a little for two reasons:

1) I'm going to Wi-Fi Prison.
2) I attract freaks.

I did get some work done, though, which is good. And there's a small chance I might not vomit when I reread it in a few days, but I'm not making any promises.

I got home a few minutes after Clara Jane went to bed. This isn't unusual. She and B. have fairly regular solo anti-Mom nights and she's never had any issues with that. But tonight ... as soon as I walked in she started crying, "Mama! Mama! Maaaaaaaaaaaamaaaaaaaaaa!" I went to her room and she reached for me from her crib. I lifted her out and her crying was replaced with happy chatter before she pointed to the rocking chair and asked me to rock her.

Now, this is highly unusual, as she has had no use for that rocking chair in months. But we rocked. I hadn't even had a chance to remove my coat; she nuzzled into the collar, drooling on the suede as she fell asleep. I placed her in bed and went to find B. to tell him of this unusual turn of events.

"I think she really missed you tonight," he said. "She kept saying 'Mama went bye-bye. Mama went bye-bye.' all night." But the clencher - after her bath, she usually sprints from the bathroom, screaming, "I'm naked! I'm naked!" at the top of her lungs. Tonight, she didn't. Apparently because I wasn't there to yell, "You're naked! You're naked!" back at her.

And thus the flip-flopping continues. I felt terrible about writing on Thursday. By Saturday, I knew it was right. Earlier today, not so sure. This evening at the coffeehouse, it was right. But now ... the mama guilt is just about as thick as the codependence.

In a perfect world, I'll get this book written without getting hauled away by the Wi-Fi Police and without emotionally scarring my daughter or driving a wedge into our relationship. Someday she'll read it and will be able to see that I wrote it not only for myself, but for her. And I hope she thinks that it was worth not having me there to chase her as her bare feet slap the hardwood floors every night. And if she does think that, I hope she can convince me to think the same because right now, I'm not.

Posted by Robin at 10:02 PM | Comments (7)

December 03, 2005

The Knights in Satan's Service Visit Santy Claus

We've been ate up with the holiday spirit at Chez Poppymom this weekend. For starters, we managed to have ourselves in real clothes and out the door by 9:30 this morning for breakfast at Crooked Tree. All I want for Christmas is a latte with eggnog and buttered rum syrup, please. Then we headed to the Foundry Art Centre. They hosted a Christmas tree showing for Habitat for Humanity. Clara Jane's all about trees. And, apparently, model trains, so it was pretty much a trip to toddler nirvana for her. Add some Elmer's glue-and-glitter craft projects, and you've got the happiest kid in the world.

Here we are, making construction paper and glitter ornaments. But I'm not posting this photo just so you can admire this lovely mother-daughter moment. Nor am I posting it to show off one of my favorite scars. See it, right there on my elbow? I got it during a catering job when I accidentally stuck my elbow into a flaming pan of green beans.

(Little-known factoid about me: I love scars and, given the opportunity, I will tell you the stories about every scar on my body and then demand to know the stories behind all of your scars. That's the real reason why I decided to become a chef; chefs love to compare their wounds. They are my people. Ugly, disfigured people.)

No, the real reason I'm posting this photo is so you can see my daughter. Yes, she's wearing a pastel blue sweater. It's not evident in the photo, but it's pastel blue with a great deal of silver sparklies blended into the yarn. But surely you can see the fluffy, fanciful poofy white chenille trim on the sweater, right? I mean, it's a bit hard to miss, especially after she drug one of the cuffs through glue and multicolored glitter. And just look at her mullet hair - it's well past her shoulders in the back.

Can someone tell me why damn near every person we encountered today thought she was really a he? And it wasn't just today. We had the same problem during our trip to the Galleria on Wednesday.

I implore you, how many toddler boys wear bright purple suede shoes? Aside from Prince, when he was a baby?

Questions regarading my daughter's gender orientation aside, it was a lovely day that left me all Christmasy, so we went on a little light-viewing adventure after dinner.

A few nights ago, I think it was during Thursday's breakdown, B. and Clara Jane went out for a bit. When they returned, B. told me of the most wonderous holiday light display he'd ever seen. Granted, it's not nearly as fabulous as that of MRS' neighbor elsewhere in the St. Louis area. But it sounded like it might be a close second.

According to B., there is a house in our neighborhood, completely decked out in holiday hoo-ha. The usual stuff - icicle lights, wreaths, a few animatronic woodland creatures. But at the top of the house, in multiple strands of lights, a huge sign that reads, "Merry KISSmas.

As in, the band.

As in, let's all go sit on Gene Simmons' lap and tell him what we want for KISSmas!

Wait. On second thought, sitting on Gene Simmons' lap will almost certainly give you a hell of a lot more than you bargained for this holiday season. But if you insist, you might want to take a toilet seat protector with you, just in case.

So, we bundled Clara "Strutter" Jane in her coat and a blanket (and a toilet seat protector) to shield her against the 30-degree weather and icy sleet that was coming down. We headed to the KISSmas wonderland, only to find the worst disappointment: no one was home and they hadn't bothered to turn the lights on! I'd even taken my camera for the occasion, just for you.

"Why would someone go to all that work and not turn the goddamn lights on?" I pouted. Pouted! I was not happy about this situation. I felt like I'd learned that Ace Frehly isn't real.

"I know!" B. replied, also outraged. "They were probably too drunk to remember to turn them on before they went out to get more drunk."

"That's even worse! Without their KISSmas lights, how will they know which house is theirs when they come staggering home?" I asked.

"Easy. Theirs is the house with the most piles of dried vomit in the yard."

To make me feel better, B. drove us past this house. Granted, those aren't Christmas decorations; it looks like that year-round. The owners are probably sick of me stopping my car in front of their house and taking photos, but it still made me feel better.

From there we went in search of eggnog milkshakes. To prevent ice cream from being slung all over the truck's interior, we were going to wait until we got home to give Clara Jane a bite. Which failed miserably. The child has had nibbles of shakes twice in her entire life and yet knew - she knew - and immediately started clamouring for ice cream. "She gets it from your family," B. said. Which is true. My dad has a serious ice cream problem, exasperated by the fact that he was a truck driver for a dairy for many years.

For God's sake, do you know how he met my mom? She worked in an office across the street from the dairy's loading dock. After scoping her out for awhile, he waited until she was walking to her car on a hot August day and ran up to her with a box of Eskimo Pies. Obviously, we have ice cream issues.

In the true spirit of holiday giving, B. continued, "You know,if your dad was an old dog that needed to be put down, before taking him to the vet I'd give him a quart of ice cream covered with half a jar of peanut butter."

Merry KISSmas to all!

(On a completely unrelated note, can I just say that for the past two days I have been cracking myself up repeatedly, simply by uttering the words, "311, I am ready to fight." Seriously. Like, bladder control issue-level laughter every single time I say it. And I've been saying it a lot. I'm pretty sure that line will never stop being funny.)

Posted by Robin at 09:09 PM | Comments (4)

November 28, 2005

Hedonists

Know what I love about this time of year? It's not the togetherness, the merriness, the warm wonderful holiday glow crap. That, I'm not crazy about. What I love - really, really love? Pomegranates.

There are so many things I love just because of their sensuality. And yes, I'm talking about this because my mother is probably reading. Good yarn, wine, high-quality linens ... anything that gets the attention of at least two of my senses in a positive way? I'm hooked. And pomegranates are the ultimate - I love the way the look, their tart sweetness, the way they feel in my hands, tearing them apart, pulling the plump, sticky seeds from the flesh. Oh, and the feel of the seeds between my teeth! That soft cushion, the rush of juice, followed by the crunchy bit of seed. Pure bliss. I even love the shade of red-violet the juice leaves my hands.

Those instructions on the pomegranate website for their three-step no-mess method? What's the point? That takes all the fun out of the experience!

For Christmas, 2002, I got the brilliant idea to make homemade pomegranate jelly. We'd stopped in Chicago on our way home from visiting my in-laws at Thanksgiving, and we had dinner with a friend in the Indian/Pakistani district. After gorging ourselves on curry, B. and I held hands and walked the street, the air filled with the crisp chill of snow and the warmth of subcontinent spices. I was so enchanted with the neighborhood that when we left, I found myself with enough sari silk scraps to clothe half the extras in a Bollywood extravaganza and enough pomegranates to feed them. Two cases of pomegranates.

Oh, c'mon! They were 25 cents apiece! I was paying two dollars each in St. Louis. Even if I was deathly allergic to pomegranates, I would have bought at least a case at that low, low price.

I set to work making my jelly a few days after the Chicago visit. Just as I was starting, I got a call from my parents, informing me that their 12-year-old Lab, Mindy, had died unexpectedly that day. She was the last stray I drug home before graduating from high school, and I was heartbroken. I poured all of my grief into crushing the ever-living fuck out of every one of those pomegranate seeds. I crushed them in my fists, pounded them with a kitchen mallet, squashed them with a heavy rubber spatula. Granted, that's how I would have gone about extracting the juice from four dozen pomegranates even on a good day, but it just felt exceptionally comforting to engage in something so tactile, so violent on a day when I was so hurt and sad.

I wish I'd taken pictures of my kitchen after the jelly-making. My walls were a lovely pale yellow, my stove a gleaming white. By the time I was finished, it looked like something from one of those A&E true crime shows. If anyone had walked into my kitchen and learned of Mindy's demise, they would have assumed that I'd put her in a pot on the stove and boiled her until she exploded.

Suddenly, my newly-painted red kitchen seems pretty practical, doesn't it?

Anyway, long and pointless story short, I'm never making pomegranate jelly again. Next time I find myself in an Indian-Pakistani neighborhood, B. is allowed to throw a pomegranate at my head if I even think about buying them. We haven't devised a suitable punishment to prevent my sari silk remnent problem. But the jelly was really good.

A few days ago I bought the biggest, firmest pomegranate I could find with a plan in mind: Clara "Pom Pom" Jane and I will start a new holiday tradition in which we buy a pomegranate as big as her head, bust it open, tear it apart with our bare hands and luxuriate in all its pomminess. I cut into it tonight while B. was giving her a bath. When she came running from the bathroom, stark naked, it seemed like perfect pomegranate time.

I offered her a seed, which she placed on her tongue, face scrunched in skepticism. She removed it several times, rolled it around in her mouth, and tried to repeat the word "pomegranate" around its tartness. She quickly got bored and skuttled her naked butt to the living room.

But five minutes later she was back. The pomegranate's siren song, it's rich and deep. And for thirty minutes we sat, pulling the plump seeds from the flesh and lolling them in our mouths, our hands sticky and purple. Clara Jane's chin, chest and belly streaked with rivulets of juice.

"They just don't do anything for me," B. said, making a face after crunching a seed. "Have fun with the horrible diaper she's going to produce tomorrow. Ew. Seeds."

So I guess the pomegranates will just be a mother-daughter thing, a little bit of sensuous luxury we'll indulge every winter. And someday, she'll be big enough to take to Chicago and lug all those cases of poms to the car. I'll need my arms free for the sari silk scraps.

Posted by Robin at 08:48 PM | Comments (3)

November 17, 2005

Tales Too Ticklish to Tell

Apparently, I didn't take the dirty, filthy childrens book away from Clara Jane soon enough.

A bit of backstory: A friend of mine used to be in the, um, "marital aide" business. A few years ago she decided to give it up. Instead of having a big clearance sale, she made great big care packages for her friends. I innocently came home from class one day to find a giant box of battery-operated recreation sitting in a plain brown wrapper on my front porch.

You so wish you had friends like mine, don't you?

The package included two things I knew I would never, ever use. So vile and nasty and horrible were these "toys". They're not toys; they're torture devices. Torture devices that should be outlawed, I tell you.

If you think there is anything hot about feathered tickling devices, you are one sick motherfucker.

I have serious tickle issues. I absolutely cannot stand to be tickled. Don't even joke about it. If you act like you're going to tickle me, I will beat the ever-loving snot out of you. The threat of tickle-torture is the only thing that has every driven me to take a swing at anyone.

I'm sure this happened because, when I was really little, my sadistic 6-foot-tall aunt used to sit on me and tickle me until I'd pee my pants. "Oh, she loves it! She's laughing!"

Which reminds me: I need to punch her in the face when I see her next week, because I was never able to get in a good strike when I was a kid.

While there isn't a single part of my body that isn't ticklish, the worst of it is unfortunately concentrated between my belly button and knees. You can only imagine the problems this has caused. Oh, the guys I have smacked and/or kicked. I'm not into that. Really. It's just instinct. You go for a ticklish spot, and reflexes happen.

It does have its perks. I could probably beat the living hell out of any potential attackers without even thinking about it. And the ticklishness ensured absolutely no risk of an unwanted pregnancy during my teenage years. I eventually figured out that a little booze can go a long way in curing terminal ticklishness.

When I was ten or eleven, my mom was alterning a skirt for me. At one point she accidentally brushed the back of my knee and I fuckinig lost my shit. Every time she'd reach for me, I'd automatically rocket away from her, shrieking like a banshee.

"It's not too late to convert you to Catholicism," she told me. "We can get you all confirmed on time and maybe get you onto the fast track to a good nunnery."

Long story short: I probably should have mentioned all of this during my six-month stint in panic therapy.

Fast-forward to today. I was sitting at my desk while B. and Clara Jane played in our bedroom. I heard the pitter-pat of her footsteps running towards me and new words coming out of her mouth. Dreaded, awful, horrible words...

"Tickle Mama."

"TICKLE MAMA!"

"TICKLE MMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!"

I looked over my shoulder just in time to see my child, armed with a tickling sex toy in each hand, running towards me, feathers a-quiver.

I braced myself. Clenched my pelvic muscles tight to prevent any spontaneous bladder expulsions. Tightened my legs and arms in hopes that the instinct wouldn't send my limbs flailing akimbo at my sweet, small, sex-toy-armed child. Who will someday tell her panic therapist about this incident.

Posted by Robin at 05:13 PM | Comments (9)

November 16, 2005

Memory Lane ... What I Can Remember of It

I've been reminiscencing a bit lately. I've finally decided to do something about the 1,084 photos I've taken of my child over the past 21 months that have done nothing but sit on my hard drive. I haven't developed a single one. Not one. Why? Because I will lose them.

I don't really have an excuse for the hours and hours of mini DV tapes we've made of her in that time that are sitting in my desk drawer. That's just laziness.

Anyway, I've been sorting through these 1,084 photos, which is giving me the "Oh my God, how in the world is it that I have a child who's very nearly two years old?" Warning: cliche alert. It seems like just yesterday, and yet, it seems so long ago.

This was me two years ago this month:

You'll surely notice that I was sporting the official mom haircut. The one they make you get before you leave the hospital with your newborn. I got mine during my ultrasound a few weeks earlier.

Just for good measure:

Considering this view, it's rather surprising that I was such a collosal failure at breastfeeding. You'd think I could have put an end to world hunger with cleavage like that.

Where was I? Oh, right ... the whole pregnancy thing feels like it didn't happen, like I wasn't really there for nine months. Or for about nine months afterwards, for that matter. In fact, it's just been in the past few months that I've started feeling normal again. Like me. But with Clara Jane.

Pregnancy's a trippy place to be. I know women who loved nothing more than being pregnant. I didn't. I felt off-kilter the entire time. The physical changes, the feeling of not being in control of my body or my brain - I wasn't fond of it. Not to say that I didn't love feeling Clara Jane moving inside me. I loved how, as I was settling in to sleep every night, I could count on her doing some somersaults and high kicks. I could also count on her doing the same routine at 4 a.m. every single morning. She had a knack for punting my stomach, sending tidal waves of acid rocketing through my esophagus. How I managed to puke on my pillow only once during that time, I'll never know.

The weirdest thing about pregnancy wasn't the craziness with my body. It was the changes it made in my brain. The pregnancy depression and anxiety was bad and my God I'm fucking sick of talking about that so let's just acknowledge it existed and move on.

The real weirdness: I've always had a stunning memory for details. Ask me a date, and I can tell you what I did that exact day. What I wore, where I went, who I saw, what I ate. That's always been my parlor trick, this ability to recall every inconsequential detail of everything. I was virtually unbeatable at Trivial Pursuit because of this gift. Song lyrics? Play it once and I'll be able to recite it back for you.

There was about a two-week window between when I got pregnant and when I got the positive test. B. was the first to notice something was up, because I kept repeating stories to him. I'd call him at work to share an anecdote, only to repeat it when he got home. Of course, when he pointed this out to me, I threatened him with a tire iron.

That was another change: instead of being my usual delightfully acerbic self, I was homicidal.

There has been research that suggests women lose 20 i.q. points with each pregnancy. Of course, I can't remember where I heard that because all 20 of the points I lost were in the memory portion of my brain. I guess it's good they came from the part of my brain with an overabundance. If they came from the part of my brain that balances my bank account, we'd be living in a cardboard box right now.

The rambling point I'm making: I had memory issues which, thankfully, seem to be resolving, although there are huge chunks of my pregnancy and Clara Jane's first year that are simply gone from my mind. So many of those photos I have no memory of taking, or being in. It's a weird place for me, Memory Chick, to be.

So, it really cracks me up that tonight I drug my usual partner in crime into my little stumble down Memory Lane, and she had no recollection of this incident.

Shortly after those photos were taken, I popped. I mean, really popped. That's when my doctor and midwife started warning me that my child might take after her father, who was a member of The Ten Pound Mother-Ripping Newborn Club. My usual Rubenesque proportions shifted from looking like this Rubens and more like this one.

Kara and I were at my house, preparing for a little waddle through the mall. In the half an hour it took me to place my shoes on my watermelon-sized feet I told her, "I am no longer bending over. If anything belonging to me lands on the floor, well, it wasn't really mine to begin with." Being the true friend that she is, she promised to pick up anything that might slip from my fingers, which had turned into something resembling vegetarian corn dogs (the only thing I could eat at the time).

Fast-forward to West County Center a few hours later. Kara was in the restroom. My corn dog fingers and I were at the ATM, fumbling for cash. And because I'd declared I was no longer capable of bending over, you know what I did.

Come on, don't make me say it.

I dropped my ATM card. And you know, I really didn't want it back that badly. If it hand been stuck in a vegetarian corn dog, I might have been willing to manuever my child-girth around to retrieve it. But damn. It just wasn't worth it.

So I did want any exhausted, massive, heartburn-riddled pregnant woman would do. I put my swollen foot on the card and stood there in the middle of the busy mall walkway, waiting for Kara to pick it up. Which she did. It was easier to pick up the card than it would have been to pick me up. Because my center of gravity was so screwed, I surely would have fallen forward had I tried to lean forward. My gargantuan mom-boobs and belly probably would have crashed through the walkway, sending me careening down to the first level.

Well, maybe that wouldn't have happened, exactly. But I'm sure whatever really would have happened wouldn't have been much prettier.

So tonight, I was talking about this to Kara, and she had absolutely no recollection of it. No, she's not pregnant. But if her memory's this bad in a non-knocked-up state, can you imagine what she'll be like if she ever gets pregnant? It'll be nine months of "Who are you? Who am I? Why do I feel like I'm being kicked from the inside-out? Hey! Leave my ATM card alone! I'm sure I put it on the floor for a reason. Gimme a minute and I'll remember why. Um, can you tell me why is there liquid pouring out of my body?"

Yeah, I know, it took me forever to get to that lame-ass point. Really, I just wanted an excuse to post that photo of my tits.

Posted by Robin at 10:20 PM | Comments (9)

November 14, 2005

Second-Hand Kids Books

Clara "Bookworm" Jane's a reader. Well, she can't actually read yet but let me tell you, this kid loves books. Not surprising, since B. and I are big nerds and always consumed by a stack of books. I honestly think we could get rid of all of Clara Jane's toys, except for the books, and she wouldn't mind. Much.

Kara and Jess can vouch for my claims. They've both been trapped spent time with my child during three-hour road trips, catering to her demands to "Read a-read-a-read-a book. Again."

As a matter of fact, as I typed that Clara Jane came to me with her copy of Fox in Socks, open to this page:

Clocks on fox tick.
Clocks on Knox tock.
Six sick bricks tick.
Six sick chicks tock.

When we first started reading this particular book to her, this page always turned into an indavertant bit of porn involving women who have body parts you wouldn't expect women to possess.

Give us a break! It's a really hard tongue twister, especially for someone with an inborn potty mouth like mine.

Since Clara Jane plows through books so quickly, and she's read the entire board book collection from our neighborhood library, we've taken to buying large stacks of used books for her from Goodwill. It's the only way we can keep the supply steady with her demands. Besides, books get a little pricey, and we're probably going to have to start spending money on her college incidentals sooner than expected. Because of all the damn reading, my grandmother has predicted Clara Jane will graduate with her first degree at age 16. We're preparing in every way possible.

Problem is, many of the kid's books at Goodwill are there for a reason. Because they're horrible. Really, really bad. The worst? Big Silver Space Shuttle by Ken Wilson-Max. This book? It makes no sense whatsoever!!! I think it might have been written in another language, and our version possibly underwent several translations.

I cringe whenever I see this book in the current rotation. But Clara Jane loves it, so it stays. I just let her father read it to her. He used to work for NASA; maybe it makes sense to him. B. and Clara Jane are welcome to read the space shuttle book and massage their overgrown brains all they want. I'll be sitting on the bathroom floor, playing that game where your light matches and see how long you can hold them before they burn my fingers.

Today, she cornered me with the space shuttle book and her demand to read-a-read-a-read-a-book. Again. So I read it. And I discovered something ... something disturbing:

Hmm. That orbital maneuvering system looks familiar. Where have I seen that before? Oh, yeah ...

Right here, at this link that's probably borderline unsafe for your work environment, but a-ok for illustration in a children's book!

I'm taking this abhorrant book away from my child immediately. If anyone wants to behold this abomination, it'll be in my nightstand drawer. You know, for safekeeping.

Posted by Robin at 09:37 AM | Comments (8)

November 13, 2005

Why I Love Autumn

There was an autumn day in 2001 when things started to change, and I'm not just talking about the leaves on the 100-year-old oak tree in front of my house. I happened to walk by the living room window and caught a glimpse of my neighbor's yard. Her son and daughter-in-law were raking the leaves while their hoard of kids, three under the age of four, played. I sat on the windowseat, face pressed against the window for the better part of an hour, watching them as they wrestled and laughed in the crisp sunlit afternoon. I was so intent on my spying that I barely noticed when my ovaries threw themselves from my body and began shrieking, "Good God, Woman! Put us to use! We're shrivling up and dying in there! We've got work to do if you want to ever frolic in the leaves like that!"

I thought it was just a momentary thing, overcome by the sheer cuteness of a young, happy family spending a perfect afternoon in the leaves. And like all those occasional moments when my resolve to remain childless melted, I assumed the resolve would come back once I moved away from the damn window.

It did come back, but not fully. Those images stayed lodged in my head. Eleven months later, I was informed that I had one treatment option left and if it didn't work, I'd be facing a hysterectomy and my resolve was destroyed.

Of course, you know how this story ends. The treatment worked and eight months later I got pregnant with Clara Jane.

Today, another perfect autumn day. B. raked a mountain of leaves in our backyard while Clara Jane and I played in the sandbox. Once the mountain reached my waist I walked over and flung myself into the pile, flat on my back, B. and Clara Jane joining me. We burrowed. We flung armfuls of leaves into the sun. I asked B. if he remembered that day when we watched the neighbors playing in the leaves.

"I do," he said. "You've been waiting a long time to do this, haven't you?"

That's right. In all those years when I didn't think this was what I wanted, I was still waiting for this moment, the moment of pure happiness. I just didn't expect that moment to be when everything is dappled in chilly sun and I'm surrounded by the warmth of my daughter burying me in leaves while I hold my husband.

(Tons more photos of our day in the leaves here.)

Posted by Robin at 02:04 PM | Comments (8)

November 02, 2005

Imprisioned

It's all toddler, all the time this week at poppymom.com.

Since Clara "Daylight Standard Time" Jane is awaking at the asscrack of dawn, thanks to that son of a bitch William Willett, may his mortal soul be burning in Hell, we headed to the zoo bright and early. Afterwards, we headed to Hartford Coffee for lunch and the three gallons of caffiene my body requires to function during Willett's Folly.

For my non-local readers, Hartford's a great idea. It's a snazzy little coffee house and cafe that opened the same month Clara Jane was born. Great coffee, great food and one of the most brilliant ideas a new mom ever heard - a big play area, surrounded by comfy couches. I was hooked.

I haven't been to Hartford much lately. For one thing, it's a bit of a haul from my house. Also, after my last visit, I had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Not from the coffee, though. The coffee's still great. My problem's more with the other patrons.

In case you were too lazy to click on the last link, I'll give you a quick run-down: something happens to me when I go to Hartford. Although I'm a rather large woman, with big boobs, big hair and a big, often bright red mouth, I become invisible when I'm there.

The play area is set up to facilitate community bonding-type stuff. You know, big couches, big tables to be shared, all that hippy crap. Which normally, I would like. I'm not a shy person. Not in the slightest. I talk to damn near everyone I encounter.

But not at Hartford.

Today I stood at the counter and ordered our lunch while Clara Jane headed to the play area. Another little blonde girl was there, and they checked each other out. The girls mom and I exchanged the usual "How old is your baby?" pleasantries, then went about our business.

While we waited for our food, Clara Jane played and I sat on the window seat, not saying a word. The other mom talked quietly with the little girl's fedora-wearing father. Pretty soon they wer joined by another young mom with another young daughter. They all talked while I sat, silently drinking my latte.

Our lunch came, so Clara Jane and I moved to the communcal table and ate. She wolfed down a few bites of sandwich and returned to playing. The other parents continued chatting, not paying much mind as their girls scaled the wooden high chairs like they were ladders.

I eavesdropped, of course. The lone mother complained that her father allowed the little girl to watch Nascar. "He's going to turn her into a Hoosier*," she said, whispering the last word like it was a profanity. The other parents complained that their parents occasionally gave their little girl Teddy Grahams at dinner.

These are the same people who, five minutes earlier, laughed when their daughter ate an unwrapped mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cup off the floor.

I considered jumping into the conversation, but no one looked my way, so I kept to myself. I sat, my back to the wall so I could keep my eye on Clara Jane.

In the middle of complaining that her free babysitter mother didn't allow her curry-loving child to eat salsa because it was too hot, the lone mother finally noticed her daughter's precarious perch on top of the high chair. "Hannah," she said, "Maybe you should reconsider whether climbing the high chair is a good idea. Will you please come down? Please? Do you want to come down?" Amazingly enough, Hannah expressed no interest in leaving her peak, and her mother finally removed her from the chair.

Once she set her little climber free, she took the two high chairs and, not looking at me, placed them side-by-side beside me, almost touching my leg, effectively caging me into my little corner in the wall.

I guess I looked like I needed to be caged. Maybe they thought I was going to eat their children. Maybe I should have reconsidered whether wearing my "Cannibalism NOW!" t-shirt was a good idea.

Maybe the hipster could sense that I watch the occasional Nascar race and feed my child the occasional Teddy Graham and was quietly putting me under citizen's arrest until Child Services could get there, putting me in a metal mask and wheeling me to the paddy wagon on a handtruck.

Or maybe I was smelling a bit gamey from the zoo. Maybe they thought I was a wild hippopotamus, running wild and free from the zoo, scooping up small blonde little middle-class hipster girls and taking them out to lunch.

I scooted the high chairs away from me with a shrieking screech along the hardwood floor and gave the woman a look that I hope conveyed, "You can't cage me, for I am strong, mighty and am going to eat your child right now." She didn't notice at all.

For a long time, B. and I had intentions of moving to this particular neighborhood. Considering my last two visits to Hartford, I'm happy with our decision to look elsewhere. I mean, I'll miss all the tasty, tasty children and all, but that's a small price to pay for visibility.

*Around here, Hoosier doesn't mean a person from Indiana. It roughly translates into white trash.

Posted by Robin at 08:38 PM | Comments (14)

November 01, 2005

As If the Candy Corn Wasn't Enough...

My child, she is killing me these days.

I honestly don't know where she's coming up with some of these things, but the cuteness is messing with me. To whit:

--When something is in abundance, she says, "___________________ are everywhere" which such drama and aplomb. Like today, we were walking through the fallen leaves to the car. She flung her arms out and announced, "Leaves are everywhere!" While sitting in rush hour traffic, "Cars are everywhere!" At the butterfly house, "Butterflies are everywhere!" The cuteness, it is everywhere.

--If she can't figure something out, she hands it to me and says, "Fix it."

--On Saturday, B. was letting Clara Jane run amok, naked, which led to her standing in the middle of the dining room, urinating with a trajectory I thought impossible with her particular chromosonal makeup.

Tonight, she was again running amok, naked, but she took precautions this time. She put on her rain boots. You know, just in case.

--The singing. My child, she is discovering her voice, and using it. A lot. It started with some simple songs from Teletubbies and has since skyrocketed. Like one day last week. She was watching PBS when a snip of Kermit singing "The Rainbow Connection" came on. She'd seen this a few times, but never seemed to pay much mind. Until Friday, when I heard her singing along with it. Word for word. A 20-month-old singing, "Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide"? That's not normal, is it? Adorable enough to make me cry so vehemently that I made the dining room carpet wetter than she did, though. She's also working on "You Are My Sunshine", "Sing a Song" and "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High).

--Yeah, I know, this is nothing but a list of brags about my child. I'm lazy. And this is easy.

Posted by Robin at 09:35 PM | Comments (5)

October 30, 2005

For all of those who poo-poo'd the idea of me making Clara Jane's Halloween costume:

Suck.


On.


It.

The pity party has morphed into a Halloween party. I'm still feeling a bit stung, but nothing a little candy corn won't fix.

I will be the first to admit that it would have been a hell of a lot easier to go to Target. But would my child's vocabulary have been enriched and expanded that way? I don't think so. Whereas, by sewing her costume, she's learned all sorts of colorful phrases. Why, just this afternoon she could be heard yelling, "Piece of shit!" shortly after I christened my older-than-me sewing machine by that name. And not long after that she uttered a lovely, "Goddammit!" when the dog licked her face.

Education like that ain't store-bought, my friends.

I had some concerns about the hood portion of her costume. For one thing, I was in the middle of making the hood when my sewing machine decided to crap out. This was mere hours before we were to be at the zoo and I announced, "Fuck it! She doesn't need the damn hat!" Which my child echoed, "Fuck it! Damn hat!"

B. jumped in and managed to finish the hat in time. But there was another concern. It seems that the hat, once constructed, could pass for the regulation headgear of a certain Southern men's social club/cross-burning organization. To whit:

"For God's sake, don't anyone remove the body of her costume without taking the hat off first!" I repeatedly told B. and my parents as we wrangled her into the suit on the tailgate of Dad's truck.

"God's sake!" Clara Jane chirped.

I was able to get over my morose, self-pitying frame of mind before we were even into the zoo. My little candy corn strutted across the parking lot, shouting, "Hello!" and waving to every costumed kid we encountered. "Pumpkins are everywhere!" she shrieked as we walked through the zoo, arms flung wide. "Pumpkins are everywhere!" She was so happy, and I was so happy that she wasn't testing her new sewing vocabulary by yelling, "Goddamn pumpkins are motherfucking everywhere!"

She rode the carousel twice, the first time atop a big gorilla. As she and B. were leaving, she announced that she wanted to ride the elephant. So she rode the elephant, all smiles and giggles. Much different than her last carousel ride, a year ago today, in which she screamed her head off. It's a good thing she didn't have her sewing vocabulary then, because my granny was there. And I'm currently in trouble with my granny because I said fuck on a photo of Murphy.

As we were leaving the zoo, the rain poured down. Still in her costume, Clara Jane stoppped to look towards the sky, raised her arms and laughed, "It's raining! It's raining!" And you know what? No matter how shitty things are, it's impossible to not see your little girl, squealing with delight at the cold October rain, and maintain any coldness in your heart.

Next up: learn to craft without cussing so that two months from now she's not singing, "O Christmas tree. O motherfucking goddamn asshole Christmas tree. How fucking lovely are your whorehopping branches."

Posted by Robin at 09:29 PM | Comments (16)

October 26, 2005

An Additional Halloween Costume Note

Candy corn-colored felt will turn the plate of a too-hot iron into candy corn-colors.

In addition, melted candy corn-colored felt? Almost as sticky as real melted candy corn.

Posted by Robin at 02:43 PM | Comments (6)

October 25, 2005

Good Intentions

I have a plan. Clara "Tricks" Jane didn't dress up for Halloween last year, because 1) she was only eight months old and couldn't be bothered to tell us what she wanted to be, and 2) I was too busy having panic attacks to decide for her.

Things are much better this year. I've got it all planned out and we're going to have the best Halloween ever. Wanna see the plan? Of course you do.

Sept. 13th: Successfully sew a bunch of 4" quilt squares into a shape roughly resembling a twin-sized quilt. Get all full of myself, convinced I know how to sew and buy this pattern:

Besides, I've got six weeks until Halloween, ample time to learn the intricacies of seamstressing.

Sept. 13th - Oct. 7th: Place pattern in storage container with other forgotten sewing notions. Forget.

Oct. 8th: Corner wriggling, screaming child. You know, the one who goes ballistic during every pediatrician visit when they try to measure her head? Yeah, that kid. Measure her for costume. Debate merits of duct taping the child to the floor to prevent injuries to both parties.

Oct. 9th, noonish: Hobble around the hell that is Wal-Mart with an injured ankle. Purchase candy corn-colored felt.

Oct. 9th, oneish: Realize forgot to purchase padding for costume.

Oct. 13th: Purchase padding. Add to forgotten container with pattern and candy corn-colored felt.

Oct. 24th: Sick realization that Halloween is a week away. Have forgotten location of forgotten storage container. Locate container. Place on dining room table. Forget.

Oct. 25th, oneish: Ponder working on costume while child naps. Ponder for a full hour, until child wakes up way too early from nap.

Oct. 25th, sevenish: Complain to blogosphere about how costume ain't gonna make itself.

Oct. 25th, seven-nineteenish: Contemplate distaste for the word "blogosphere", as well as dislike of candy corn. And circus peanuts.

Oct. 26th: Blow off costume-making in favor of dinner with friend.

Oct. 27th: Repeat.

Oct. 28th: Panic. Frantically begin work on costume. Forget how to use scissors. Stab self in the left hand.

Oct. 29th: Repeat. Stab self in the right hand.

Oct. 30th: Give up. Let the child go to Boo in the Zoo dressed like this:

When people inquire about her costume, tell them she's going as a half-naked damn dirty hippie.

Oct. 31st: Too cold to be a half-naked damn dirty hippie. Construct hump to place on child's back. When people inquire about her costume, tell them she's going as Riff-Raff from Rocky Horror Picture Show. To whit:

Clara Jane's natural hairdo:

Commercially-available Riff-Raff wig that we won't need to purchase, thanks to Mother Nature:

Nov. 1: Eat clearanced fun-sized Snickers bar. Throw sewing machine from roof.

Posted by Robin at 06:57 PM | Comments (14)

October 16, 2005

Welcome to the Traveling Vomitorium, Serving Central Illinois!

Clara "Chunky-Style Milk" and I have made it home from our foray into the rural wildnerness near Peoria, Illinois. And wild, it was.

Friday, we hit the road with Jess. Let me tell you something about Jess. I didn't know this, even though I've known Jess quite a long time, but Jess is a diety. A diety. To toddlers. My toddler, in particular.

All weekend, anytime Jess would float into Clara Jane's line of vision, my child would drop whatever she was doing, her face turning slack and dreamy, index finger extended in awe while whispering, "It's Jessssssssss. Jessssssssssss." Clara Jane would then proceed to climb all over Jess, kiss her and demand to hear The Word read by her god's own voice.

It made the three-hour drive much easier, that's for sure.

Friday night was Stonecutter Insanity at Cyn's gorgeous house. Sal was there, all the way from England. Sarah was there, all the way from the other side of town. Beege was there from Minnesota with a slight side-trip to Wisconsin. We also had two Canadians and representatives from South Carolina, Texas, Minnesota, Motown, California. And, of course, Jess is from Oregon. And I'm from Missouri. But we've established that. Anyway, out of that hugely varied group, there were only three people I hadn't previously met. Told you the Stonecutters were different from your typical online group.

After the bruhaha died down, a handful of us spent some time visiting after the babies were in bed for the night. While Jess doesn't have kids, Beege has a daughter who's two weeks older than Clara Jane, and Cyn has a son ten months younger than her. Of course, most of the conversation, with much apologies to Jess, involved topics like contractions, vaginal rips and passing large blood clots. I'm sorry.

The other moms talked about how quickly and easily they took to motherhood. I didn't. Even though I wanted to have a baby, I felt like I had to be drug into motherhood kicking and screaming. Not that I didn't love Clara Jane from the moment she was born. Or the moment I found out I was pregnant. Or even before I got pregnant. I did. I just didn't adjust well. It's just now, after 20 months of parenthood, that it's starting to feel right and normal for me.

Until this trip, I had never spent more than 12 hours alone with my daughter. While I can't remember those few occasions we were together that long, I recall most of them ending with me meeting B. at the door when he arrived home and handing Clara Jane to him as I sprinted out the door. Does that make me feel like less of a mother? Hell yes.

Friday night Clara Jane and I both had some sleep issues, which led to some antisocial behavior on Saturday since she desperately needed to nap. We bailed on the outing to Cyn's shop and lunch in favor of having a well-rested child at the hog roast, instead of an exhausted child who, in a fit of rage, might start shoving people into the bonfire while growling, "Back off, Bitch!"

Speaking of hog roasts, what fun! You know, I'm from midwestern farm stock. For my birthday when I was a kid we used to set a big bonfire for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, followed by a big creepy ride through the woods in a hay wagon. While I'm all city girl now, my country genes still managed to find their way to my daughter, who shoveled pork into her mouth by the fistfuls, had barbeque beans stuck to her sleeve all the way up to her armpit, and followed dinner by getting on the table (in the barn) and having a little country hoedown.

There was a ceremony after dinner. I'm not into ceremonies. My own wedding was barely a ceremony. It was just an excuse to hang out by the cornfield and eat barbeque in my bare feet with 120 family members and friends. Time spent in ceremonies is time I'd rather spend talking and laughing with my pals.

But we had a ceremony after dinner. And like the country gene, Clara Jane also got my anti-ceremony gene. While everyone else was solmenly contemplating the bond of our group, she was shrieking, "Let's go home! Ready skeady go go go! Let's go home!". Except when she was yelling, "It's funny! It's funny, Mama!" during the particularly serious passages.

And this is why we don't go to church.

Because of the sleep issues the previous night, we shared a hotel room with my local pal Stacey, who made the trip on Saturday with her 5-year-old daughter C. and Kara. Our girls adore each other, and I had fun snuggling in bed with both kiddos, trying to explain to C. why they were inflating a duck with an air compressor on Iron Chef America. I told her they were making duck balloons; I don't think she bought it.

We got a great night's sleep and were up and ready for breakfast bright and early. I used the last baby wipe in my pack with Clara Jane's morning diaper, so we took off a bit early to make a Wal-Mart run before meeting everyone else. We got our wipes and were on our way out when out of nowhere, Clara Jane coughed twice, looked at me with absolute horror, and launched roughly two cups of fetid milk vomit down her front and over the cart handle onto my shoe.

You know that pecorino cheese I was crowing about a few days ago? I am so over it, because all that puke? It smelled just like the cheese. I never understood why my mom has always wretched at the mere mention of parmesan cheese, uttering, "Oh God, no ... baby puke ... no." Now, I understand. I understand all to well. This house will be a Velveeta house from now on.

So there we are, standing in the meat department of the Pekin, Illinois Wal-Mart Supercenter. One of us has a lapful of vomit. The other, a shoeful. And I'm frozen. I have absolutely no idea which way to go while Clara Jane cries and the other shoppers dodge us, apparently hard-of-smelling and unaware of the vomit bomb that has detonated. Do I abandon my cart and get my kid to the bathroom and clean her up? No, because then I'll have to carry her outside naked and it's a little too chilly to be outside naked. Do I abandon the cart and take her to the truck to change her clothes? No, because I need the wipes - that's the whole reason why we're spewing all over Wal-Mart in the first place.

Ultimately, I decided screw it. We need wipes to remedy this situation. And since I'm not willing - and wasn't carrying a big enough purse - to steal the wipes, we were just going to have to brave the check-out and hope that a vomit chain-reaction didn't start from the stench.

By this time the puking had stopped and Clara Jane was her usual self. A little listless and tired, but not upset. I changed her clothes and cleaned her, and we headed to breakfast. And again my brain raced, clueless on what to do. I should just start the three-hour drive home. But I don't want to be on the road in the middle of nowhere with a sick baby. Kara's coming with us. Should I feed the kid? What if there's a second, Nagasaki-style vomit bomb in the bombay, just waiting to unleash it's terror at Bob Evans? I decided the time at the restaurant might be a good idea, as it would give me a chance to make sure she wasn't seriously ill before we were in the middle of nowhere and unable to find a hospital.

She refused to sit in a seat at the restaurant. She refused to sit on my lap. I could only hold her. So we sat at the end of the table against the wall, and she lay against my chest, unfevered but exhausted. She'd perk up, then press her face back into my skin. And when Jess came to the table, Clara Jane found the strength to genuflect and chant her words of worship and praise. When breakfast came, she refused the bland pancakes and lunged straight for the bacon. I conceded her one piece, along with sips of apple juice, knowing that I was probably making a big mistake.

I was making a big mistake. An hour into the drive, Clara Jane had just woken up from a nap and was playing with her Leap Pad when Little Man hit Nagasaki.

"Dude, did she eat onions?" Kara asked, holding a transluscent white regurgitated former food item up for me to inspect. We were at a truck stop and she was cleaning the puke out of the carseat while I put Clara Jane into the only clean clothes she had left - a pair of fleece Teletubbies jammies.

"She didn't have onions, and she picks onions out of her food. I think that's bacon fat," I said, mentally adding all the cured pork products to my list of foods whose smells now activate my gag reflex.

Cleaned, we got back on the road. The third, much smaller bomb arrived half an hour later. Since we were out of clean clothes, we kept driving. She dozed the final hour and we arrived home. Once there, she was her usual self. Happy and excited, but tired. She dozed most of the afternoon. Threw up one more time, but eventually ate some crackers and Cheerios, washed down with Pedialyte.

Generally after these gatherings I'm filled with stories of the people I met and the hijinx. But not this time. While it was great to see everyone and I had fun, the weekend was really about Clara Jane and me. I did it. I was her only available parent for three days, and we went through something incredibly unfun with the lack of sleep and exhaustion. But we survived and even had a great time despite the problems.

I also found myself able to make sacrifices - and I hate to even use that word, but I can't think of a better one - for my daughter. Yes, it would have been nice to go shopping and have lunch with the rest of the group, but bowing out for my daughter's sake felt right and good. When people would lunge to take her from my arms, shrieking, "Oh! Let me hold her!", it felt good and right to take the step back and politely refuse.

It felt good and right to snuggle in a hotel bed with my sleeping girl. To change every diaper. To feed her every meal. All without help. Because now I know I can do it. I've questioned and doubted my parenting ability since her disasterously bad birth. For the first time, I'm not questioning anymore.

If that means spending my weekend bonding with my daughter and identifying vomited food particles with Kara, well, that's not a bad life. Not bad at all. Anything else that comes along is cake.

Although I'll miss the bacon and cheese, though. I'll miss it a lot.

Posted by Robin at 06:22 PM | Comments (12)

October 11, 2005

Swedish Meatballs

I was thrilled when I read this news story yesterday about how a bunch of pediatricians are debunking the myths regarding what foods babies should have first. When Clara "Gourmand" Jane first started solid foods, I skipped the rice cereal and jarred mush. For one thing, Clara Jane has been constipated since the day she was born. Rice? That's one of the foods that brings diarrhea to a halt. Giving rice to a constipated baby seemed a little nuts to me. I might as well have gotten in her little moonpie face and cackled, "Bwahahahahaha!!!! You're never going to poop again, Little Girl!" So we went straight to white peaches, which were locally in season at the time. A month later, the kid was chowing on smoked pork, and we haven't looked back.

She loves Vietnamese food. Thai food. Mexican food. She dips everything in salsa. Hey - she's getting lots of veggies that way! Chinese food. Scottish food; last week we discovered that Clara Jane totally digs the haggis. We've gotten a lot of odd looks at the various ethnic restaurants we've tried. To which B. and I say, "Guess what. Babies in Vietnam? They eat Vietnamese food everyday! And those kids in Mexico? They eat Mexican food everyday!"

Why am I bringing this up? I'm not sure. Other than I don't do much bragging about my child on this blog, so I thought I'd gloat about her a bit.

Today we had lunch at the kiddo's current favorite place, Qdoba. Forget the plain cheese quesadillas for my kid. She's all about the soft taco with spicy shredded beef and salsa verde. So happy the taco makes her that she must stand in the booth while she eats! And dance! There must be dancing to convey the joy that is the soft taco with spicy shredded beef and salsa verde!

My apologies to the employee charged with cleaning our booth when we were finished. While my child didn't fling the contents of her taco all over the floor, booth and table, she did throw a bit of shredded beef, which stuck to the window. I intended to remove it myself, I really did, but I got distracted.

How did I get distracted? By my dancing carnivore pepperhead child, that's how. When ABBA's "Dancing Queen" comes on at Qdoba, apparently it's the signal for all dancing carnivore pepperhead children to stand on the booth, spinning and twirling a' la Bernadette Bassenger. But with the twirling, there comes a great risk. And that risk brings with it the chance that the dancing carnivore pepperhead child might get dizzy and fall, cracking her forehead on the edge of the table.

First rule of dining in public: the quickest way to end a perfectly wonderful dance routine is to face-plant on the table. Trust your mother on this one, Child, for she knows.

The big Swedish meatball that's sprouted from Clara Jane's forehead? I call it Bjorn.

Posted by Robin at 02:16 PM | Comments (11)

September 30, 2005

The Rebel's Child Rebels

This afternoon B., Clara "Drum Circler" Jane, Kara and I hit the very beginning of the annual Loop in Motion Arts Festival. Originally I was just going to meet Allison* for coffee and quilt fabric delivery (we're still making quilts for the hurricane evacuees). But I don't go anywhere without my own personal circus parade, thus the summoning of my entourage.

*Go visit Allison tomorrow. She's by the drum circle, in front of Mama's Coal Pot. Buy some of her cute potholders, baby hats, aprons, baby quilts and/or scarves, as she would like to quit her day job and sew full-time. I scored a purse, a set of potholders and a hat for Clara Jane with near-naked ladies on it.

For those of you not familiar with the St. Louis area, the Loop is a stretch of town near Washington University that all the media refers to as "hip" and "funky". Let me repeat: Allison is by the drum circle. As in, a big, raised concrete circle where people come to bang drums. Loudly. With maximum reverberation from the surrounding brick buildings. I think that explains a bunch, don't you?

We had our first sign of trouble upon arrival, when Clara Jane became intranced with a group of hacky sack dorks. I thought it was just sweet childhood innocence, a small child entranced by a ball. But then Kara pointed out that if I didn't turn my child away, I was in danger of having to rescue her from a Spin Doctors concert.

That's all I needed to hear. I moved her stroller so she couldn't see them anymore. But that was fine with her, because a singer/guitarist was setting up on the drum circle.

Oh, she is so my chid. She leaned her elbows on the circle, entranced with the musician, shouting "Hooray!" and clapping her little chubby hands after each song. At one point she lifted her shirt; a little too much like her old lady, if you ask me. But that wasn't the worst of it.

Several songs into the set, it happened. My child - who I labored for over 32 hours before undergoing an emergency C-section, followed by an infection that almost landed me in the infectious disease ward ... and did I mention the six months I spent with my tits in a breast pump because she refused to breastfeed? - my child pulled away from the drum circle, raised her arms into the air, swaying as her knees bobbed, completely enraptured in the music.

My child, she is Interpretive Dance Girl™.

I always wondered how I would deal if there was something "different" about my child. I always thought - knew - that I would love her, uniquenesses and all, no matter how socially inacceptable they might be. But this ... this ... a line has been crossed.

I'll try to accept her as she is, even if her future will be spent in a wispy little dress, swaying, arms akimbo, blocking the view of the concert-goers behind her. I'll find a way to cope, and I'll love her nonetheless.

But if she decides to go on tour with the String Cheese Incident, I'm totally going to disown her.

Posted by Robin at 10:01 PM | Comments (8)

September 23, 2005

Toddler Internment Camp: A Review of a Month in the Hole

It's been a month since Clara "Rebel Girl" Jane started her once-weekly visit to daycare. Let's take a look at how that month as progressed, shall we?

Week 1: Did cartwheels with glee at prospect of spending a day away from me in a plastic-filled room. The downside: brought home Daycareus Nastigermyitis, which brought our entire household to a crashing, snotty hault when all three of us got raging sick. House threatened with condemnation due to excessive number of snotty Kleenex within.

Week 2: Sprints away from me in utter, unabated anti-mother joy when we arrive. Ninety minutes later, I'm called to retrieve her because her screaming is so intense it's a violation of the Geneva Convention; she's trampling all over the human rights of the other kids by inflicting scream torture on them. Stop by coffeehouse for a cookie, where I'm reduced to a sobbing, snotty disaster because Carole King's "You've Got a Friend" is playing. Start making plans for a really painful demise for Ms. King while envisioning what her kinky, curly head will look like mounted on my living room wall.

Week 3: Do not go quietly into that good daycare center, Child. No. Instead, scream like you're stuck in a wheat thrasher while attempting to pull my leg from my hip socket. Teacher forced to perform surgical procedure to remove child from my person. Teacher not paid nearly enough for this shit. Neither am I, come to think of it.

Week 4: Knowing that my child is of a delicate nature, the teachers are proactive, making sure there's an episode of "Teletubbies" playing when we arrive. The screaming commences, but she doesn't repeat her baby octopus leg-suction routine. When I leave, she's crying, but sitting her her teacher's lap, glaring at me. "That's fine, Former Mom. Leave. Go on. Go live your free-wheelin' jacked-up life, eating cookies and drinking espresso at the goddamn coffee house. See if I care. I'm Miss Michelle's baby now, bitch."

Week 5: Clara Jane has an exceptionally large vocabulary; she's about a year ahead of the average on language skills. Still, she doesn't have the skills to express her her more complex feelings in words, so she had to rely on facial expressions. And her face had this to say:

"No!!!! Oh my God, No! You are not abandoning me at this toddler internment camp again! No!!!! They make me eat rat droppings and watch "Barney" and I'm not going, Mom! I'm not!"

And then she ran out of facial expressions and commenced the usual screaming, which continued when we got to her classroom, where she promptly ran to play with her friends - still crying, occasionally shooting me the stink-eye, which is facial expression for, "I hope you burn your tongue on your latte, you fucking whore."

The word on the cell block is, she calmed down quickly and had a good day. Although there was a situation at lunch in which she stole her teacher's lunch and refused to give up the grapes. And she made a shiv during arts and crafts time. But she didn't scream nearly as much, so no one really cared that she might cut them. Because the cut's better than the scream.

That kid's gonna be ok. Just don't let her corner you.

Posted by Robin at 09:56 AM | Comments (8)

September 01, 2005

How to Break My Heart

As if it's not in shards already, after the events of the past five days...

I dropped Clara Jane off at daycare today, and she was more than happy to go. In fact, I wasn't moving fast enough when we were leaving the house, forcing her to stand by the front door while chanting, "Ready skeady go go go go go go go!!!"

When we pulled onto the sidestreet by the daycare facility, she started squealing, "Babies! Babies!" Good, good ... she remembers last week and is happy. This is a cake walk, I tell ya. A cake walk!

Took her to her room, where she hit the floor running to play with the other kids. I slipped out the door without incident.

Ninty minutes later, my cell phone rang. She's been screaming for an hour. I beat feet to the center and picked her up.

As soon as she got settled into her carseat, the screaming stopped and she announced, "I want a cookie!" And because I'm weak, I took her to the coffeehouse, where I bought a scone for us to share and a second cup of hot tea for myself, since I had to chug the second one in order to fetch her.

I sat down at the table, gave Clara Jane her first bite of scone, and then heard what was playing on the sound system...

"You just call out my name
And you know, wherever I am
I'll come running to see you again."

Fucking bitch Carole King.

So, if you happened to be in a coffeehouse today where an 18-month-old was happily noshing a scone while her rather frail and frazzled mother sobbed, that was me. Sorry.

Posted by Robin at 03:02 PM | Comments (9)

August 29, 2005

Hope

Any other time in my life, when people around me are suffering and catastrophes that affect millions of people are afoot, I would find myself entertaining apocolyptic thoughts. And that's still happening, but do you know what gives me a sign that everything will eventually be ok? The sight of an 18-month-old with a massively snotty nose, toddling around the house while wearing an adult-sized ballcap featuring the image of a disembowled Kenny from "South Park".

Posted by Robin at 10:29 AM | Comments (6)

August 25, 2005

I Can Tell That We Are Going to be Friends

Despite the title, this isn't about last night's show. I'm too beat to string those thoughts together yet. No, this is about my child, Clara "Big Girl" Jane.

Today was her first day of daycare. She's only going one day a week, so it's not like our lives are going to be completely different. Just Thursday will be different. Even though I knew she would love the change of scenery, the kids and the new environment, I was still worried. What if she hates it? What if she's scared? What if they don't take care of her the way I take care of her? This morning, waiting for time to take her, I had to keep a pep talk on loop in my head: "Don't back out. Take her. We both need this. Don't back out. Take her. We both need this."

We arrived at the church where the daycare is located a bit late. She held my hand as we walked through the lobby, stopping to watch the other late stragglers. She didn't cling or beg for me to hold her. She walked, so brave and ready.

When we walked into the room she immediately ran to the middle of the room, filled with kids and toys, completely forgetting I was there. I took care of business with one of her teachers and moved to the door. Clara Jane glanced at me as I was leaving, then turned back to what she was doing. I waited outside the room, listening to see if she would cry when she realized I was gone. Nothing.

I darted down the deserted hall, hoping to make it to the restroom without encountering anyone before the tears in my burning red eyes started to fall. I passed an older lady, a church employee, who simply smiled and nodded, used to seeing teary-eyed mothers beating hasty retreats to the ladies room after leaving their babies for the first time.

As I stood in the stall of the bathroom, pressing a wad of toilet paper under my eye to keep my mascara from streaking down my face, the loop in my head changed: "She's a big girl. She's such a big girl. She's a big girl. She's such a big girl. She's big enough to not need me for everything."

There have been so many milestones in the 18 months of Clara Jane's life, and with each one I've passingly thought, "Oh, she's growing up." But today, for the first time, I saw that she really is an independent person, not an appendage of me. She can walk away from me and make it on her own. I didn't feel sad or snubbed. What I felt was overwhelming pride and joy.

Okay, maybe I felt a little sad that, officially, she's no longer a baby. She's all kid.

Once I pulled myself together I headed for the neighborhood coffeehouse. While making chit-chat with the owner I told her that I'll be there every Thursday. She empathized with the first day of daycare blues and made it known I was welcome to spend as much time there as I wanted. For three and a half hours, I worked on the various "real" writing projects I have in the works. I didn't mope or feel sorry for myself. I worked. And it felt great.

When I picked Clara Jane up at 3, she squealed, "Mama! Mama! Mama! Ready skeady go go go!", our vernacular for "let's blow this joint" that I've said to her since our very first solo outings when she was a newborn. Her teacher approached me as I scooped Clara Jane into my arms. "She is such a talker," she said. "Does she have older siblings?" I told her no, that she's just language advanced and speaks on the level of a two and a half year-old. That's just her.

The teacher went on to say that Clara Jane was happy and active all day. She ate a good lunch and snack, had a 90-minute nap, and even did a bit of macaroni art. She got excited about the cows and pigs in one of the stories they read. I didn't have to be there to know what she did. "It's a cow! Moooooooooooooo!!!" and "It's a piggie!" exclaimed while pushing her nose into a pig-snout with her index finger.

And yet, I'm a little sad I didn't see if myself, but happy that Clara Jane now has something that's all hers. Her school. Her teachers. Her friends. Her life.

Posted by Robin at 10:35 PM | Comments (12)

August 09, 2005

Pea-Picking

When I was being an evil child, my mom used to tell me that she hoped that I would someday have ___ number of children who acted just like me. The number fluctuated depending on the magnitude of my sin. For not cleaning my room, it was 2, maybe 3. Mouthing off, somewhere around a 6. Getting my 1980 Ford Mustang stuck in the mud at cemetary after dark with my two gay boyfriends and being brought home by the cops, 17 kids.

So far Mom's threats have backfired because A) I'm almost 33 years old and have only one kid, and B) that kid is perfect.

Until today.

This afternoon I made Clara "Good and Light" Jane a lunch of all-natural peanut butter on preservative-free whole-grain bread with an organic banana, hormone- and antibiotic-free milk and organic freeze-dried peas. See? That's why she acts so much better than I ever did. It's because she eats a varied diet of good, healthy natural foods, while I subsisted on a diet of Velveeta and Kool-Aid with Sweetn'low.

Anyway, she devoured her sandwich and banana, then turned her attention to the peas. They're crunchy little nuggets, easily pulverized to dust by a single press of a toddler's finger, but most days, like today, she's perfectly happy to eat them.

Or so I thought.

I turned my back for a minute. Maybe two minutes, tops. When I looked back, Clara Jane had finished her peas and was smiling a huge, happy grin at me.

But her nose ... why are her nostrils green? And round?

Like two perfectly-fitted decorative orbs, a dried pea perched just inside each of my child's nostrils. I swear, the kid knew when I made this realization, because she started laughing like a loon.

Great Mom, I thought. This is where it begins. This is payback for that time when I was about 18 months old and filled my nose with peas and fried potatoes. What's next? The living room furniture covered with powder?

With the slightly-long fingernail of my pinky, I easily popped the pea out of her right nostril and her laughing stopped. By the time I popped the pea out of the left one, Clara Jane had moved into a full-on panicked wail completely with flailing arms fighting to keep me away.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "Are you that upset about losing your peas? Geez. We're having Mexican food tonight. You'll be able to shove pinto beans up your nose soon enough. Chill."

It was then that she threw her head back in rage and I saw it. My child, she has turned her nose into a pea-loaded Pez dispenser. In the depths of each nostril, way up by the bridge of her little pug nose, I could see two more peas.

I went left, taking the back of her head in one hand while I tried to get my pinky up her left nostril, doing battle with the waving, shoving toddler arms all the while. Seems it was at this point that Clara Jane decided that she's not fond of having things shoved up her nose. Regardless, I managed to extract Pea #3.

I took her out of her high chair and tried to hold her face-down in hopes that gravity, along with the snot that accompanies panicked crying jags, would help things move along. She fought to sit upright. When I did manage to get my finger up her nose - I HAD MY FINGER UP ANOTHER HUMAN BEING'S NOSE, PEOPLE!!! - I made a terrible discovery: because of the volume of wet crying snot behind the remaining pea, it was rehydrating and expanding.

I grabbed the phone and called my mom to see what she did in this situation. Of course, I got no answer. I'm pretty sure her Mother ESP had informed her of my peril and she was sitting at home, listening to the phone ring and laughing.

Not knowing what else to do, I carried Clara Jane, who by now was about three miles past hysterical and had entered the realm of the shrieking trembles, across the kitchen. I'm not sure where I was going. To the bathroom to get the tweezers? To the closet to get the vaccum cleaner? I don't know. But it doesn't matter because she gave a giant honking snort, shooting the snot-drenched pea out her nose to the floor, where I promptly stepped on it with my bare foot.

After the whole ordeal was over, I did manage to get in touch with my mom. When I did the pea-shoving trick, she was getting me dressed to take me to the hospital when I sneezed a snoutful peas and fried potatoes all over her.

Today, I have passed my snotty pea-sneezed torch to the next generation. And for that, I fear for my future.

Posted by Robin at 05:32 PM | Comments (20)

August 03, 2005

Baby Photo Insanity

Clara "Second Cuz" Jane is totally in l-u-v with The Cuz, who took a billion photos of her during her weekend visit.

If you're not moved by the tremendous chip-and-salsa-dunking photos, you have a heart of pure, black coal.

Posted by Robin at 12:19 AM | Comments (3)

July 07, 2005

Child of Funk, O How You Are Mine

Yet another reason why I am 100% positive I was given the correct child at the hospital:

While watching a Red Hot Chili Peppers video on VH1 Classic, B. began to yell - as he does everytime he sees a Red Hot Chili Peppers video - "Flea! Flea! It's Flea! (which he got from Beavis, who also appreciates Flea's funkalicious bass stylings).

My child, the one borne from my body, goes out of her damn mind when talk about Flea. Which we do. Often.

And right now, as B. gives Clara "Apache Rose Peacock" Jane a bath, I hear him asking, "Hey Clara Jane? Who's your favorite bass player?" To which she squeals, "Flea! Flea!"

Maybe she knows that Flea has a little girl named Clara. Or maybe, like her mother, she has the stanky, stanky funk.

Posted by Robin at 06:48 PM | Comments (3)

Sip, dog, sip!

If there is anything cuter than a toddler trying to cram the spout of her sippy-cup into her dog Murphy's fucked-up little mouth for a drink, I sure don't know what it would be. Although watching said toddler getting her funk down to Bjork's "Human Behavior" comes a close second.

On unrelated notes ...

My dad spent his birthday, which was yesterday, driving a vanload of Amish farmers to an auction in northern Missouri. Turns out, the Amish aren't opposed to taking rides, just to doing the driving themselves. And it also turns out that the Amish really know how to party. I talked to my dad this morning, and he sounded completely shredded, since the Amish party boys didn't return him home until after midnight. Keep that in mind next time you need a bachelor party idea for the man in your life: Amish farmers road trip.

On a slightly more serious note, go wish my baby cuz Wendy good luck and safe travels. She's on her way to Boston for the Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk. Now, I remember when Wendy was too little to walk, so the idea that she'll be walking 60 miles in three days blows me out of the fucking water. Her team, Blister Sistas, have raised over $8000.

And on a really serious note, I'm sending all my love to my London friend Sal and her Detroit-dwelling sister Kirsti. The attack on the double-decker bus was near Sal's workplace. Luckily, she was home at the time. But it's a huge reminder that while I'm sitting safe in my cozy home in a second-tier Midwestern city, the ugliness of the world that I often think can't touch me, can. I learned that first-hand this morning, in the excruciatingly long minutes between learning of the bombings and getting word that Sal was safe at home. And I'm so lucky that my fear was brief and unwarrented. There are so many people today who aren't so lucky. Sending love and prayers that all of them.

Posted by Robin at 11:43 AM | Comments (4)

July 05, 2005

The Enabler

First and foremost, I would like it noted that I might possibly have a terminal case of Sinus Filth Rot, a condition in which severe sinus pressure leads to possible rupture of the frontal lobes of the brain, while blood flows like there's a knife fight occuring in my head. And that's not just a figurative way of addressing my mental illnesses this time, either.

Second, Clara "Wimpermeister 2004" Jane has returned from her vacation at Mimi and Papa's house. You know, the place where she's allowed non-stop Teletubbies action, an endless parade of adoring relatives, and enough swinging to make her throw up a portion of the two pounds of red seedless grapes she ate in just under three days. Is she happy to be home? No.

We brought her back on Sunday, and yesterday was a bit off-kilter, since B. was home for the holiday. Not that we did anything for the holiday, unless watching roughly 12 hours of "King of the Hill" reruns constitutes "doing something". But it was still different, because B. was home to do all the work while I partook in a day of benign child neglect.

Today, it was back to business as usual. I woke up to The Whining at 8 a.m. Fed her breakfast to minimal whining, then turned her loose to play. That was fun for about seventeen minutes. Then, it was time to pounce on the remote and aim it at the television while moaning, "Tubbies! Tubbies! Tuuuuu-uuuuu-uuuuuuuuuu-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bieeeeeeeeeees!!!!"

I tried to stick to my guns. I really did. I've sworn that I will not surrender to The Whining. By surrendering, I'm just teaching her to use The Whining to get what she wants.

Did I mention that a porition of my brain was already oozing out my ears before The Whining began? Yeah, well, I'm weak. So I turned on the damn "Teletubbies". Which was all well and good, had our cheap knock-off generic Tivo not frozen the fuck up in the middle of the show.

At this point, while my child staggered around the room, screaming for the Tubbies as she crashed into furniture and toys, I realized that I might as well be living with a mean drunk. The screaming's there. So's the beligerence. Irrational? You betcha. The bodily fluids are definitely present. And here I am, smiling and saying, "Sweetheart, would you like another beer? I'll get you one right away. Just please please please please don't throw the bottle at my head when you're finished. Please?"

And when that bottle bounces off my forehead and I think I can't take one more act of drunken abuse, she gets all sleepy and snuggly and it's all a-ok.

The rest of our day was more of the same. We spent the afternoon running errands. One minute, she was the smiling, laughing lampshade-bedecked life of the party. The next? Angry screaming. Angry, angry screaming. "What in the world's wrong?" the cashier at Trader Joe's asked when one second The Lil' Drunk was laughing and smiling, and literally the next second she was red-faced and sobbing like I'd just threatened to leave her in the freezer case.

"You'll have to excuse her," I said. "Her excessive drinking makes her have erratic mood swings."

At Whole Foods, she took it down to a dull, ever-present whine. I set my resolve: I will not respond to whining. I will not hear it. I will not react. I will enter my own world la-la-la there isn't a child issuing a constant low-grade moan in my cart. That's just a bad cart wheel. Nothing more.

The Whiner eventually realized that she wasn't going to get anything out of me. The Enabler has left the building! So while we were in the check-out, she leaned as far to the side as she could until she got the attention of a woman in the next lane.

"Oh, how cute are you?" the woman shrieked. "Would you like a beer?"

"Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh .... eeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhh ... iiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeee .... *hic*," The Whiner replied.

"Are you singing, Sweetheart?" the woman asked.

"She's whining to anyone who'll listen," I snipped, right before The Whiner's empty bottle clipped my left ear. At least when she gets really drunk from the whining, her aim gets bad.

A minute and a half later, while I was strapping her into her carseat (or as I like to call it, restraining her in the drunk tank), the whining suddenly stopped and she was ecstatic - completely, utterly over the moon - because there was a small baggie of Fruit Loops! In the front seat!! For her!!! FRUIT LOOPS!!!!!!!

Five minutes later, the ecstacy had converted back to agony because, ah hell, I have no idea why. Probably because the Fruit Loops weren't loopy enough.

Tomorrow's game plan: start drinking before The Whiner wakes up. Beat her at her own game.

Posted by Robin at 09:18 PM | Comments (10)

June 26, 2005

Be careful what you wish for

Remember how I was whining about not wanting Clara "Pukes-a-Bunch" Jane to leave me for a few days? Well, I got my wish, but certainly not in the manner I'd hoped.

She has the flu.

There's green puke involved. And calls to the doc, who has amazing psychic powers and sees diarrhea in our near future.

She's feeling fine right now, just having trouble eating and drinking. We'll all survive.

Posted by Robin at 10:47 AM | Comments (4)

June 25, 2005

A Boatload of Crap

Until a week ago, the child-cleansing routine in this house involved Clara "Rubber Ducky" Jane and me climbing into the bathtub together while B. hung out on the bathroom floor. While fun and a great way for some family bonding, we've reached a point where it's getting harder and harder to schedule these drawn-out luxury baths on a regular basis. It doesn't happen often enough to accomodate our filthy, filthy child. Besides, she's big enough to be in the tub by herself with one parent assisting. So for the past week, she's been in the tub solo and she's loving it.

Did you notice last night's bathtime photos on Flickr?

She's all about this bath business, and playing with her toy boat. All is right with the world.

Until tonight.

This child ate a massive dinner tonight. A 5-ounce piece of mahi mahi, two Thai veggie potstickers, and a fistful of peas and corn. She wore a good portion of it, too, so B. took her straight to the bathtub while I did kitchen clean-up.

I'd just finished loading the dishwasher and was sitting down when B. yelled, "Uh, could you come in here and give me a hand?" Of course, but what could possibly require assistance? I mean, now that we've entered the world where it only requires one parent to get this child clean?

"Take her!" he said, foisting my slippery, still-soapy child at me as I walked into the bathroom. "She crapped in the tub!"

Yes, my friends, you read correctly. It's taken over 16 months, but we finally had our first bathtub-crapping experience, mere days after I stopped bathing with this child.

I did the dance of glee and relief with my soggy child, all the way down the hall to her room, where I threw a diaper on her before I bothered to wipe the last of the soap out of her hair. You know, in case she wasn't done. My gleeful dancing, while B. was in the bathroom moaning, "Oh my God! It reeks! And there's corn in it! Corn!!!" made me a karmic lightening rod and I wasn't taking any chances.

You see, Clara Jane's a constipated child. Pooping is an event around here. We talk about it. As she sits, her entire body tense, beet-red to the roots of her hair while trying to squeeze one out, we say, "Hey Clara Jane? Are you pooping? Poop? Oh, it's awful poop, isn't it? It hurts, I know. Poop. Poop." and so forth. I figure, since she takes so much time to poop, I might as well use that time to tell her about poop. Who knows? Maybe she'll automatically get potty trained because of this. This is called "resourceful parenting". Or "scarring for life". I guess we won't know for another few decades, will we?

Anyway, because of the constipation, we usually get ample warning before the kids arrive at the pool, so to speak. Not tonight. "I just thought you were peeing! Really. I thought she was just peeing!" B. wailed as he dug for the can of Scrubbing Bubbles. "It was like she had a cork, holding everything in. And ... and ... the cork shot out, and so did everything behind it!" He explained with appropriate sound effects.

"Stop the dishwasher! We've got to throw her toy boat in there!"

Uh, no. For two reasons. One, the dishwasher is so crammed full that there's no way her boat will fit. Two, I'm not washing the S.S. Pantload with forks and spoons I put in my mouth. Or the coffee mug that gives me life every morning. Or the plate that marinated my mahi mahi.

By this time I was already on the phone with my mom, saying, "Hey! Guess what! Clara Jane shit in the bathtub and I wasn't in there with her to get shat on! My life is awesome!" Over my laughter I could hear B.'s continued shrieks. "Oh my God! There's crap in her boat! We've got to put it in the dishwasher! Or burn it at sea! Oh my God!"

How I kept from telling him to buck up and swab the poop deck, I will never know.

Posted by Robin at 09:08 PM | Comments (7)

June 16, 2005

Seriously. Where are my panties?

There's a shopping center about thirty minutes from my house, out in the suburban land of $800,000 homes in subdivisions with names like Apaloosa Trails, Wild Horse Babbling Brook, and Big Ol' Expensive Feedbag. I hate that I make so many trips to this shopping center, but I've got to admit there is such convinence in these suburban sprawls. Target and Trader Joe's are there, along with any other gigantic eyesore box store I might possibly need. So, in the name of convinence and not driving all over hell and creation, I find myself at this shopping center on a regular basis.

Yesterday I went with intentions of going to Target, Trader Joe's, and Michaels. Unfortunately, while paying at Target, I discovered that I had left my debit card at home. I wrote a check - did I mention that most of the checks in my checkbook are glued together and smell like rotten milk from a sippy cup incident? - and we headed home.

Once I got home I realized I'd forgotten half the items on my list, since I hadn't actually taken the time to make a list. So once again, Clara "Repeat" Jane and I found ourselves at this shopping center today in hopes of doing what we didn't do yesterday.

We went to Wal-Mart, since I was hoping I could get the yarn I needed there and eliminate the trip to Michaels. No such luck. And Repeat was distraught at being in Wal-Mart. Actually, I think it has more to do with the four incisors that have been trying to cut through her gums for the past seven months than it had to do with her feelings of dejection and hypocrisy at giving our money to the Evil Empire. Either way, she was a wreck.

And I wasn't doing much better. Remember that period business I mentioned yesterday? Well, not only does PCOS mean periods that go on vacation for months on end, and periods that prattle on and on and on for weeks, but sometimes PCOS means periods that stop and start more than Toyota in a traffic jam. Since all signs indicated that my period had stopped, I didn't take exteme precautions, if you know what I mean, but I did go prepared with the necessary tools in case my period decided to hit the shoulder and gun it.

Which is exactly what happened in the pool aisle. Clara Jane was melting down because, as best as I can decifer from her communications, she really doesn't want a wading pool. There I was, holding my screaming child, bouncing her up and down when it happened. Like a stuck pig, People.

We quickly finished our shopping and headed to the restroom with the cart. The plan: push the cart into the handicapped stall, take care of business, then leave. Simple, right?

Not when the toilet in the handicapped stall is broken, as proclaimed a sign taped to the stall door. Granted, I didn't need the toilet, but apparently they saw the need to lock the stall door. You know, just in case someone with the handicap of illiteracy tried to use the broken toilet.

Panic building, I parked the cart in front of a stall where I could see Clara Jane through the crack in the stall door. Bad, I know. But don't think I wouldn't come running out of that stall with my bloody pants around my ankles and garout anyone who tried to take my child. Not that she realized this. My disappearance set her into a screaming fit of seismic proportions. Earth moved. Warnings were issued. People were evacuated to other Wal-Marts.

I fumbled with the tampon, all the while calling, "It's ok, Clara Jane. I'm right here, Babe. I'll be right out. It's ok," all while thinking, "It's not ok. It's not ok. Holy God, it's so not ok right now!!!"

By this time I had broken out in a sweat because 1)that's what fat girls do in June and 2)I was freaking the fuck out. Do you know what happens when you try to pull up a pair of high-waisted Spandex suck-it-in fat girl underpants while sweaty? THEY DON'T MOTHERFUCKING BUDGE!!! In fact, they roll into a tight wad -hence the phrase "panties in a wad" - and dig into one's thigh fat and hang on for dear life.

I pulled and tugged and yanked with all my strength, frantically calling to my child that it was all ok. Really. It's ok. I'm just bare-assed and bleeding, but it's all a-ok! Oh, and did I mention there were other people in the bathroom? There were. None of them said anything. Because really, would you talk to the crazy lady in the Wal-Mart restroom? No. You would do your business as fast as possible and bolt out without washing your hands because frankly, a little pee on your fingers is probably safer than making eye contact with the crazy lady in the Wal-Mart restroom.

Finally, I pulled hard enough that my underpants finally moved. Rocketed, really. Whatever. As long as they were up, that's all I cared about ... until I felt the draft. On my crotch.

You see, the high-waisted Spandex suck-it-in fat girl underpants have a snap crotch. You know, so the wearer can take care of business without having the panties-in-a-wad situation I was currently facing. Had I remembered the snaps, I obviously wouldn't have been in such peril.

Actually, I would have been in such peril, because the snaps are teeny-tiny. We're talking the size of a pinhead, and for once I'm not exaggerating. If I could contort myself into the position required to snap these tiny buttons on my crotch, chances are I wouldn't require high-waisted Spandex suck-it-in fat girl underpants.

So I did the only thing I could - I took off my pants and underpants so I could snap them, all while reassuring Clara Jane that everything's peachy! Just peachy!

"Do you need some help?" someone from outside the stall asked.

"No! Everything's peachy!" I cried back.

The woman started talking to Clara Jane, reassuring her that everything was fine, and aren't you a sweet girl? And look at your shoes! Aren't they cute? To which Clara Jane responded by FREAKING THE FUCK OUT!!! Which prompted the woman to just talk more.

I could see the look on Clara Jane's face in the crack fo the door, and she looked terrified. "Um ma'am?" I said. "You're scaring her." I braced myself for her response, knowing that this could very well be the exact moment when I would have to bust through that stall door, bare-assed and bleeding, and administer that garouting if that woman didn't properly respond.

Lucky for her, she apologized and left, and Clara Jane promptly calmed down.

By now my underpants were snapped and back on, but once again twisted and stuck around my thighs, and I was seriously entertaning throughts of going commando, which isn't exactly the best way to wear a pair of light khaki linen pants. But what else could I do? I struggled for a few more minutes and then realized I had snapped the snaps in the wrong way, creating underpants infinity. So, once again, the underpants come off, get resnapped, miraculously slide right into place, although I put them on with such force I gave myself a massive wedgie. Like I cared at that point. I just wanted out of that bathroom.

Once again, we went all the way back to this shopping center, only to go to one store, because do you think we were in any position to go elsewhere after waging the underpants war? Even if we were, we didn't have anyplace to put any other purchases. The handle on my truck's tailgate, B. informed me last night, was broken but usable. For him, perhaps. Do you think I could get it open, after what I had just been through? I mean, honestly - do you think a woman who can't put on her goddamn underpants on the first try can manage to open a broken tailgate? Of course not.

And that is why I sat in the parking lot and cried today.

Posted by Robin at 02:45 PM | Comments (13)

June 15, 2005

A little segment I like to call "Passagaes"

Ok, not really.

About a month ago you might recall I posted praise to the powers that be that Clara "Scooter" Jane was finally walking. Well, I never followed up to tell you that it was a bit of a false alarm. Since then she's walked no more than two steps at a time, no more than three times a day. Oh sure, she can scale the back of the couch like nobody's business, and if we were to turn her loose on a rock climbing wall, we'd have to pay somebody to get her down because there's no way my fat ass is climbing up the damn thing to get her from the very top, where she would be perched within two minutes, I'm sure.

Today, Clara Jane turns 16 months old. In exactly 10 minutes, it will be exactly 16 months since my belly was slashed and I had a human being ripped from it. Meaning, at this exact moment 16 months ago, I was sadly passed the point of extreme elation brought on by the C-section drugs and the holy terror of HOLY SHIT!!! I CAN'T BREATHE AND THEY'RE ABOUT TO SLASH MY BELLY AND YANK A PERSON OUT OF IT!!! A PERSON WHO'S GOING TO BE REALLY FUCKING PISSED OFF!!!!

So it only seems fitting that something clicked in my child's head today. I think it happened shortly after her morning nap, while she was lying in her crib, quietly contemplating life ... or standing in her crib, shrieking while slamming her stuffed elephant against the bars as hard as she could. During this time of quiet contemplation/elephant abuse, she must have said, "Clara "Me" Jane, you are 16 months old now. Get off your knees, already!"

Not ten minutes after I got her out of her crib, I looked up and said, "My lord, there's a midget in my house running towards me! No, wait - that's my child. Walking. On her own. And more than two steps at a time!" She toddled the five feet from the kitchen to my desk in the dining room. She threw a ball across the kitchen, then chased it. Then she nudged the ball across the kitchen with her foot, following it. Then she used her little rocking chair to attempt to climb onto the top of the dining room table because you can make the mountain goat walk upright, but you'll never stop the mountain goat from climbing the furniture. Never.

In the course of calling everyone related to me to tell them the good news, I spoke with my grandpa Chuck, a man of few words (but most of them are humorous and/or absurd). "Good thing," he said. "I looked at buying her an electric wheelchair yesterday. Guess I don't have to now." Damn straight, Chuck.

All of this walking business has got me a bit nostalgic. I've been terrible at keeping a baby book for Clara Jane. I figure, this blog is her baby book. But I know there's a lot of stuff - the little day-to-day things - that have already gotten lost in the cracks of my memory. So I thought that I would make a list here of things I don't want to forget, and I want her to know about someday:

• When she was really tiny, she would jerk her arms around all willy-nill. B. and I likened it to kung-fu fighting. Occasionally, we'd sing the song to her.
• She spent almost every morning of the first three months of her life snoozing in her baby carrier on the counter at Olivette Diner while I spent an hour or two drowning my post-partum depression in cup after cup of coffee while shooting the shit with the old guys who hung out there. Once, they offered me a bunch of breastfeeding advice.
• Walking around Whole Foods with her cuddled against me in her Baby Bjorn, intently watching all the produce when she happened to be awake.
• The way her left eye kept wanting to cross all the time.
• How cranky she'd get if the house was quiet, and how really loud music always soothed her. Such a mama's girl.
• The magical way she had of not just spitting up on me, but always managing to spit up down the neckline of my shirt onto my boobs. I know she didn't want to eat from them but Jesus, she didn't have to puke on them all the damn time. I got the message loud and clear without the vomit, thankyouverymuch.
• Leaves blowing on the trees were the most fascinating things in the world. We would lie on the bed, looking out the window at the trees, and I would recite the lyrics to "What a Wonderful World". Not so much for her benefit, but to remind myself.

There are so many more things, and the list of forgotten bits will just get bigger as she gets older. We'll forget more than we remember. It's only been seven months, but I can barely remember what it was like when she couldn't crawl to me. Soon, I won't be able to remember the sound of her hands and knees slapping the floor, and the wiggle of that diapered butt and she scoots across the house.

Posted by Robin at 04:25 PM | Comments (2)

June 08, 2005

Who needs sleep?

So, apparently Clara "Insomniac" Jane no longer requires sleep. Waking up in the middle of the night and screaming for an hour? That's A-ok in her book. Shrieking through any attempt at a nap? Fun! That business about toddlers needing 11 hours of sleep a night and 1-3 hours of naps a day? Totally doesn't apply to her.

If I have to live through one more day of this, I'm going to rip my hair out and shove it into my goddamn ears.

And my poor husband, having to deal with her crying through the night last night, and then having to listen to me sobbing into the daylight hours because I CAN'T FUCKING STAND THIS AND IT'S DRIVING ME FUCKING CRAZY!!!! If you're the praying type, say one for him because he's living in a war zone and the enemy is sleep. And the enemy is kicking our sorry asses, my friends.

You know those people who consider their pets to be their children? Yeah, well, cats and dogs sleep 18 hours a day without all the shrieking and screaming, so they can just suck on it.

Posted by Robin at 05:21 PM | Comments (6)

June 06, 2005

Classy Ladies

When one has a garage sale and is selling purses, one should be careful to remove all old items from the purses. Like the reciepts from a "marital aid" party attended two years prior. Lest one should come home to a phone message from Jane, the purse's new owner, saying, "Um, do you want the reciept for your sex gadgets back?"

Okay, she was much more discreet and polite than that. I'm just glad the purse went to someone I know who was willing to make that call. And destroy the evidence.

My daughter, it seems, is taking after me.

We spent the afternoon at Hartford Coffee, where she got into the whole boho coffeehouse vibe right away:

Nothing like whiling the afternoon away at the coffeehouse in a comfy chair, with a good book and a sippy cup of espresso.

This shot was taken before Clara "Hoochie" Jane made friends with two little boys. Jess, an older man at 2.5 years, and Ian, a cradle-robbee at 14 months, were all set to do my child's bidding. She may look calm and quiet in that photo, but don't be fooled. Five minutes later she was standing on that chair, leg flung over the back of it, barking orders to the boys. They brought her great riches in toys and books, bowing at her feet (with only one shoe, since she took the other off and flung it) while she squawked, shrieked, and laughed the most manical laugh known to the pre-pre-school set.

Demure and classy, we ain't.

Posted by Robin at 06:10 PM | Comments (5)

May 31, 2005

It's a tidbit kind of day

I'm tired, so stringing together something thoughtful and pithy probably isn't going to happen. Here's some chunks from my day:

Clara "Ambien" Jane woke up before 7 a.m. this morning. Now, I know those of you with early-rising children are going to hate me for this, and I totally encourage you to hurl heavy items and obscenities at me. But dammit, it's soooooooooo hard when she wakes up that early. She usually sleeps until 8-8:30. I'm spoiled. Slap me.

But the good news: we were able to make our weekly Target pilgrimage early, before all the good parking spaces by the cart corrals were taken. While we were there, we had the type of encounter that leads to me drawing conclusions about the lack of friendliness in this city.

There was another mom that we kept seeing in the store. She had an infant and a little boy, about two years old. Granted, it was before 10 a.m. and she was carting around a couple of kids, which gives her every right to be surly. I would be, too. I smiled every time I saw her, and every time she glared at me.

But her little boy ... oh, he had eyes for Clara Jane. Whenever we'd pass he'd just gaze at her and grin. Around the fifth time we saw them, he paused, smiled, and said hi to her.

Clara Jane looked at him, looked at me, pointed at him and announced, "Mama! He's a baby!" The poor little guy looked absolutely crushed, not realizing that in Clara Jane's vernacular, everyone is a baby. His mother glared at me extra-hard for that one.

Clara Jane asked to take a nap when we got home. Parents with poor sleepers, you're welcome to kick me in the shins and my husband in the groin for that one. If you could see how Clara Jane presses her hand to the side of her face (the sign for "sleep") and sighs, "Seeeeep," you'd probably want to kick her, too. Or maybe just startle her. It's adorable and it makes me absurdly thankful that for the most part, I have the easiest child in the world.

She napped. I knitted. I've finally started working on my first sweater project. It's a darling little pink and pink varigated striped hoodie from the beautiful Nursery Knits. I finished the baby blanket I was knitting; now I just need to learn how to block it.

This afternoon, after making catering deliveries, I sat myself down and watched a rerun of "Oprah" regarding how women should release their inner sexpot. I've got some issues with this. And of course, you're going to hear them:

1. One week, Oprah is whole-heartedly agreeing with Trinny and Susannah that us gals need to give up the flimsy support-nothing underdrawers and go for the supportive granny garments that are ugly on the inside but pretty on the outside. Now Oprah's whole-heartedly agreeing with Kim Catrall that we need to ditch the granny panties and go with the thongs. Which one is it, Oprah? And why are you so interested in my underdrawers, anyway?

2. Don't tell me that I have an inner sexpot who's dying to get out. I had an inner sexpot, once, way back when. I killed her. She was crushed to death under the mounds of belly flab after the support system of my abdominals muscles was destroyed to retrieve the human being that was created by that inner sexpot. Ever see a front porch collapse with a hound dog under it? That's what happened to her. And just to make really sure she's dead, I suffocate her every day with my granny panties.

3. Frumpy, balding men who are still wearing their circa 1983 Member's Only jackets in a non-ironic way who complain that their wives are no longer the slutty little dreamboats who wooed them into marriage need to be crushed under a porch. Or they need to experience first-hand the inner-thigh chafing that happens when you wear a G-string and hump a pole to your Carmen Electra's Aerobic Striptease DVDs.

I'm not feeling very empowered right now, Oprah.

I'm supposed to go to the zoo tomorrow, but I'm thinking about cancelling. I'm going to call in fat and frumpy. You know you're feeling fat and frumpy when you don't feel glam enough to go to the zoo.

Posted by Robin at 08:15 PM | Comments (8)

May 23, 2005

The reason why Trader Joe is my boyfriend

It's a bad day in 15-month-old-childland. Do not be fooled by the angelic photos from last Friday's trip to the zoo. The reason she's wearing my dad's baseball cap in most of the photos is to hide the devil horns that are sprouting from her scalp.

We've hit what experts like to call a "phase". It's the phase that turns all mothers into slobbering foods with Tubby Custard for brains that renders them incapable of ever finding their car keys. It's the shrieking/whining/total-utter-meltdown phase.

Her father isn't helping matters. Like most parents, it hurts his heart to see his little girl upset. So, she shrieks, and he jumps to her command, forgetting that he only has to hear the shrieking on weekends and for a couple of hours each evening while for me, it's a lifestyle.

Today, we had the kind of shrieking that follows a three-day lovefest with her daddy and grandparents, when she realizes she's once again stuck with me - The Mean One, the one person who won't jump and grant her every wish with every shriek. The one who won't carry her through the store, instead of subjecting her to the horrors of riding in the shopping cart. The one who forces her to sit in a chair at a restaurant - who straps her down and imprisions her!!!, instead of taking her on a little constitutional while The Mean One sits alone at the table, waiting for brunch.

And my brain is officially custard.

Shrieking Day is really bad when it happens to coincide with The Mean One's catering day and we have to go get supplies. Clara "Siouxsie Sioux" Jane shrieked through both stores. She shrieked through each leg of the car ride. At one point she became so overcome with anger that she threw her water bottle, her binky, her hat and every book within her reach (she travels with a small personal library). When she had exhausted all of her flinging materials, she did what anyone who is raging against the machine would do - she removed both of her shoes and flung them. She got some of my brain custard on one of them when it whipped past a little too close to my ear.

Thank God one of our stops was Trader Joe's, where the people are nice. Oh so nice. And they never shriek or throw their shoes.

When we arrived at the check-out lane, Siouxsie Sioux was in full Cities in Dust" warbling shrieking meltdown mode. "Sorry," I told the clerk as he gave me a sympathetic look. "We're cranky today. And my 'we' I'm not being cute. I mean, we're both cranky," I said, removing Siouxsie Sioux from the cart before the seat could eat through the flesh of her legs!!! He smiled and continued to look sympathetic as he rang up my purchases.

When he got to my bottle of Three Buck Chuck - if you lived with The Shrieking, you'd thank God for decent cheap wine, too - he asked to see my I.D.

"You're just saying that because I told you I'm cranky and you're trying to put me in a good mood."

He no longer looked friendly and sympathetic. He looked very, very serious. "No, I'm asking for your I.D. because you don't look like you're 21."

I'm 32.5, exhausted, massive dark circles under my six hours of sleep eyes, wearing no makeup aside from a little mascara and tinted lip balm.

You know, he can blow sunshine up my skirt and tell me I don't look like I'm 21 all day, and I won't care because sometimes, that sun feels damn good on my ass.

That's true love, my friend.

Posted by Robin at 05:11 PM | Comments (4)

May 21, 2005

Shameless mommy blogging

Clara "Child of a Lesser God" Jane did the cutest damn thing today.

Since she was six months old, we've been half-heartedly teaching her baby sign language. Now that she's really starting to talk, she tends to do her signs while saying the words. She's way into animal names, sounds and signs these days. Especially kitty-cat. Not cat. Kitty-cat. Anytime she sees a cat - including the tigers at the zoo yesterday - she says, "It's a kitty-cat! It's a kitty-cat! Mao! Mao!" (that would be my socialist terrorist influence on her), all while doing the sign for cat, which involves using her fingers to act like she's pulling whiskers on her cheeks. Or the top of her head. Or her nose. Or the back of her head. Or the back of my head. Whatever's in reach.

Today, we were walking across the parking lot at Trader Joe's when she started her, "It's a kitty-cat! Mao!" whisker-pulling frenzy.

She had spotted the hood ornament on a Jaguar.

Posted by Robin at 10:17 PM | Comments (5)

May 20, 2005

It's a damn zoo in here

Because I'm exceptionally bright, I caught myself about to say, "Goddamnit! It's a zoo in here!" this morning while being jostled by the crowds at the penguin house at, ahem, the zoo. And not in an ironic way, either. I meant it in a,"Goddamn, People! Quit acting like a pack of wild dogs fighting for a chunk of freshly killed gazelle! This isn't the zoo! Oh, wait ..."

Clara "Monkey House" Jane finally had her first trip to the zoo. It's a bit embarrassing that she's 15 months old and it's taken us this long to get her to the zoo, considering that:

a)We live just a few miles from the zoo and drive past it almost daily.
b)It's free.
c)It's one of the best zoos in the country
d)It's free.

The excuse: everyone wanted to be there for her first trip to the zoo. Everyone. My parents, B., a few foreign dignitaries. I finally got fed up, because we're quickly entering the time of year when it's going to be too hot to take my translucent blonde child for an outing. So I said, either make arrangements to join us at the zoo today, or shut the hell up.

Arrangements were made and the zoo was visited by Clara Jane, both of her parents, her maternal grandparents, Kofi Annan, REv. Desmond Tutu and Camilla, Dutchess of Cornwall.

The highlight of the day didn't involve any non-human animals. Nope. The highlight was the fact that my child was a walking machine, ladies and gentlemen. A machine, I tell you. Granted, she had to be holding onto something at all times, but still ... she actually requested to be put on the ground so she could walk. There's hope yet that I won't have to carry her to her first day of preschool.

(Bunches of zoo-walking photos have been uploaded to Flckr, if you'd like to take a peek. Just scroll to the bottom of my main blog page.)

Pleasantly uneventful zoo visits are a rarity in my family. When we go to the zoo, there's usually an animal attack of one sort or another. It started when I was 14 at a run-down zoo in Springfield, Missouri. The poor elephants were in a cinderblock building, chained together at the ankles and seperated from the viewing public by only a big chain. People packed into the building to stare at the rather sickly beasts. One in particular looked particularly goopy and horrific. The one standing directly in front of my parents and me. Who stuck his trunk out and blew his nose all over us.

You'd think that alone would keep us out of zoos. I mean, once you've spent an afternoon trying to wipe black elephant snot out of your shirt, you'd think that would be enough zoo to last a lifetime.

Wrong. We're a tenacious bunch, my family. Which is just another way of saying we don't learn too quick.

The next incident happened a few months later. My family, accompanied by my best friend drove to the Grand Canyon, spending a few days in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

At 14, my friends and I weren't exactly girly-girls. Eighth grade turned us into a pack of sailors, and we had taken up habits such as excessive profanity usage and blatant passing of bodily gases. My dad was 40 going on 14 at the time, so we had a lot in common.

When planning the trip I guess my mom didn't take into consideration the overabundance of Tex-Mex cuisine in the region. If Clara Jane goes through this sailor phase - and she will, for she is of my loins - we'll be vacationing somewhere with very, very bland food. Like Upper Michigan, where they have three seasonings: salt, pepper, and ketchup.

After a few days of being trapped in the Fartmobile, my mom made a new rule: if we belched outloud, we had to give her a quarter. Public farts would cost us fifty cents apiece.

The next day, we paid a visit to the Rio Grande Zoo. While standing under a large tree, my mom said, "Is it raining?"

It wasn't.

Well, not in the scientific sense. Moisture was falling from the sky in the form of bird shit. From a bird the size of a condor, perched in the tree directly above my mom's head, which was soon covered in about a pint of fresh bird dookie.

You can only imagine the reaction from The Mighty Fart Brigade on that one.

"Don't worry! It's just a little sap!" an onlooker told my mom as she went into a full-blown palsey of a freak-out attack. Yeah, it's ass-sap!

My mom high-tailed it to the bathroom, where she hoped to regain her composure and take a quick bath in one of the sinks. While she was convulsing and washing her hair, my friend and I took a little potty break, since we were both on the verge of pissing our pants with hysteria.

Mom finished her little clean-up and entered a stall before my friend and I exited our stalls. In her trauma-deminished capacity, my mom hadn't noticed that we had left the stalls and were sitting on the counter ('cause we were cool 14-year-olds), waiting for her. All she knew was there was a someone in the stall next to hers, wearing shoes just like mine, and cutting the most tremendous fart in the history of mankind.

Now, my poor Mom - incapacitated and absolutely furious, did the one thing she could to try to regain control of the day. She pounded on the wall between her stall and the farter and bellowed, "That'll be fifty cents!"

My friend and I didn't even have to say a word to each other; we just knew that it was time to hightail it out of there before we started laughing at my mom yet again.

Mom, with her soaking wet hair dripping down her shirt, came marching out of the bathroom shortly after us, with the farter right behind her. She spotted us under the tree - the same tree, 'cause we were cool 14-year-olds - and turned roughly the shade of a baboon's ass as she realized she had demanded fart money from a stranger.

We didn't go to any zoos for a few years after that. Not until 1991, in Denver.

My extended family used to make an annual trip "Out West" My parents, grandparents, Cuz Wendy, her parents and brother, and Great-Aunt Helen would pack into a van and a truck with more shit than the original pioneers ever thought about cramming into a Conastoga wagon. They'd spend a few days driving, then a week living in the luxury of one RV and one pop-up camper, which is why I refuse to stay anywhere less luxurious than a Holiday Inn these days. I paid my dues the two times I took part in this traveling circus.

Now, I might remind you that my relationship with my dad has a tendency to be a bit on the volatile side. If it's volatile now, when I'm 32 years old and live three hours away from him, can you fathom what it was like when I was 18, after 12 hours driving across Kansas with him, followed by a few days trapped in a half-camper/half-tent hovel-on-wheels in the woods?

At the zoo, Wendy, her brother, my dad and I left the rest of our clan and headed for the polar bear exhibit. As you can see in the link, the bears swim in a glass-sided tank. We approached a section at an area where the water became shallow and the bears could walk up to the glass. In the viewing area, there was a knee-high bar against the glass with messages telling people to stay off the bar and the glass.

Since rules don't apply to my dad, he perched himself on the bar and leaned against the glass.

"Oh, I'm not hurting anything," he said when I pointed out he wasn't supposed to do that.

He started to say something else, but the words never came because, directly behind him, a polar bear took offense at his callous disregard for rules. Unbeknownst to my dad, she swam over, walked out of the water, stood to her full height, and slammed herself into the glass where he learned, roaring like she might take his head off and play a little water polo with it.

Dad screamed like a little girl as he fell from the bar, running and stumbling out of the exhibit, while my cousins and I were doubled over, laughing until we couldn't breathe.

Since then, Dad likes to skip the polar bear exhibits. Not so much because they put the fear in him, but because of the brutalization we put him through. Do you know how many polar bear birthday cards my dad has received since 1991? I don't know either; I've lost count. At least that visit didn't involve bodily fluids.

Not from the animals, anyway.

Posted by Robin at 05:42 PM | Comments (3)

May 13, 2005

It's about damn time

Clara "I'll Walk When I'm Damn Good and Ready,Bitch" Jane, two days before turning 15 months old, has finally taken her first steps.

The muscles in my arms and back that are sick to death of carrying 25 pounds of non-toddling toddler are weeping with joy.

Posted by Robin at 02:52 PM | Comments (13)

May 11, 2005

Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head

As you regular readers know, I don't really do concert reviews. I'm not a music critic. Other people do a much better job of concert reviews than I do. You can read one of them on Interference.

My post-concert posts have two possible directions: making fun of my fellow concert-goers, or waxing philosophical. Monday night I saw U2 in Chicago. Guess which way the discussion is going.

The set list is available here.In other coolness: this particular show was filmed for their next DVD release, which tickles me to no end.

Of course, there were moments of wit and hilarity. Since our seats were in the nosebleed realm, which is always entertaining when attending a show with Kara, who's afraid of heights.

"Oh, you're not gonna fall!" I told her during her post-Kings of Leon hand-wringing. "Not unless I push you, anyway."

"THAT'S WHAT I'M AFRAID OF!!!!"

Later, Holley nudged me, laughing as she yelled, "We paid $100 each for these seats!" And then we all laughed and laughed and laughed. The laugh of the damned, of course.

A bit later, when Kara went in search of a toilet, Holley suggested that we throw Kara's jacket, just to freak her out. I thought that was a great idea, and that we should leave a note on her seat that said, "You're next!". Unfortunately, I would have had to borrow a pen and paper from Kara (which she had on hand to write a rough draft of the terse letter she's sending to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, but that's another story).

While we were waiting, four conical, glowing red lights were lowered, one for each member of the band. I tried to tell Holley that they were special U2 heat lamps, specially designed for maximum pop star freshness, but employees are required to dispose of any pop star left under the lamps for more than 15 minutes. I wasn't exactly successful in relaying this info, because I cracked myself the fuck up and couldn't get my entire long-winded fast-food joke out without heaving with laughter.

Obviously, I had a touch of the altitude sickness, coupled with the bad karma that comes from eating a 1/2 pound of pure Chicago beef under an autographed photo of Oprah at the Palace Grill.

Now, before I get into the show itself, let me tell you something. In the big moments of my life, especially over the past four years or so, U2 has always been present. When I know I need to walk out of my house to face something big, and I'm having trouble doing so, "Beautiful Day" appears, and I'm coaxed out of my home and my comfort zone, into new territory. It happened when we were trying to drag ourselves out before the Nov. 2001 U2 show camp-out, and when my friends and I were getting the gumption to hit the road for my 30th birthday road trip to Memphis. It happened the night I went to the hospital to give birth to Clara Jane. After 14 hours of early-stage labor, wondering with each pain how much longer I could stall, "Beautiful Day" appeared on VH1. It was the last song I heard played in my home before it changed forever. It was how I knew it was time to make the most frightening journey of my life.

About a month prior, it was another U2 song that triggered the notion that I was on the verge of something big. I was undergoing some tests to make sure all was well with Clara Jane. One of the tests involved measuring her heart rate and movement to ensure that they corresponded with each other. Just as the nurse started the test, "Where The Streets Have No Name" started playing on the lite-rock station the nurses were listening to. The song starts quiet, with a flutter of melody from The Edge's guitar, building into a racing heartbeat of drums and bass until it explodes with Bono ...

I want to run
I want to hide
I want to tear down these walls that hold me inside.

And as the music built, my baby began to wiggle, then tumble. By the time Bono's voice burst through, I could feel my child in every square inch of my body. She gyrated, kicked and twisted. Her little heart thundered in jagged lines on the fetal monitor. For five and a half minutes I was more aware than ever of the human being inside me, seperate from me.

The song ended, her movements returned to normal, her heart rate slowed. It was just a momentary burst of interuterine excitement, the fetal equivilent of stopping your daily routine, cranking up your favorite song and pogoing around the living room to blow off a little steam.

In the eight months I had carried her, she never seemed real. I felt her movements, but the concept of carrying another human being just felt completely abstract. She was never as real to me as she was in those five and a half minutes. Music could move her, just as it has always moved me.

My daughter and I had found our first common interest.

Why do humans dance? Why do we bob our heads to a tune? Because we're wired to do so. It's in us before we exit the womb.

Can you hear me when I sing...
You're the reason I sing
You're the reason why the opera is in me

Bono wrote those words in a song for his deceased father. I was dreading hearing those words in concert, in the aftermath of the most recent blow-out with my own father. But it barely fazed me on Monday night, when I expected it to lead to a blubbering breakdown. My heart seems to have decided on its own volition to no longer dwell on every single way I have failed him in my life. I can't feel bad about that anymore, because it's damn near destroyed me, these feelings of never being adequate, of knowing that the only person I ever wanted to please still sees me as being little more than a lazy smart ass.

Can you see the beauty inside of me?
What happened to the beauty I had inside of me?

I'm trying to reclaim it. I can see it. It's there. I can almost touch it, if I reach.

In all of the glitz and rock star spectacle, beyond the screaming crowd and filming, it came down to two songs for me. Two songs that turned me inward and left me tear-streaked and shaking, reminders of what this life of mine is supposed to be about.

"Beautiful Day", six songs into the show:

Touch me
Take me to that other place
Teach me
I know I'm not a hopeless case

Words I've heard so many times over the past four and a half years. Words that have always given me a little push when I needed it. But they didn't push this time. They pulled me back.

As much as Kara fears falling from the nosebleed seats, I have feared falling of late. In the worst moments of the past 15 months, when I've felt inadequate at best, and like a whirling sandstorm set to destroy everything I love and myself at worst, I have felt myself falling. It would be so easy to fall, so easy to just let go of this life and be done with the pain. A few times my fingertips have relaxed and I've just about let go. Said my goodbyes, made my peace, and waited to drop.

I know I'm not a hopeless case. I know I'm not a hopeless case. I know I'm not a hopeless case. Sometimes, I need Bono to remind me of that in person, in the presence of 30,000 other people.

And in that moment on Monday, I felt something shift. A question answered. A flutter followed by a gyration that makes life real. Real and good.

Nine songs later, "Where the Streets Have No Name", and all I could think of was that little girl at home, the one who came to life for me during that song, the one I'm going to hang on for.

And once again, I walked out at the end of a U2 show completely shaken to my core, and reminded of what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, and what power there is in surrendering to something much larger than myself and having faith that I'll be caught should I lose my grip.

Today, Clara Jane and I were back to reality. Groggy breakfast. Swollen baby gums with teeth gleeming just under transluscent skin. Frantically rushing to take care of my basic hygeine and the bills while she napped. Grocery store and Target in the sweltering heat and humidity.

I was listening to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb as we ran our errands. While I've enjoyed it, it hasn't touched me like other U2 albums. But then again, Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby and All That You Can't Leave Behind didn't reach me at first. It took time.

Pulling into the Target parking lot, it suddenly meant something to me as I looked in the rearview mirror into those smiling blue eyes, the child giggling as she pulled her big toe to her mouth just because she knows it makes me laugh:

Baby slow down
The end is not as fun as the start
Please stay a child somewhere in your heart

I'll give you everything you want
Except the thing that you want
You are the first one of your kind

And you feel like no one before
You steal right under my door
I kneel 'cause I want you some more
I want the lot of what you got
And I want nothing that you're not

Everywhere you go you shout it
You don't have to be shy about it

And I cried as I pulled into my parking space. I cried as I laughed at the giggling girl in the backseat with both of her bare big toes in her mouth without shyness, without fear and with nothing but love and joy.

Posted by Robin at 12:03 PM | Comments (5)