girlfiend

In response to a thread about Bratz Dolls a poster on the message board wrote the following:

I detest them. They look like the 4 letter word that starts with a H & ends with a R!

So what, my friends, is a four letter word that starts with H and ends with R? Hair? Hear? Hoar? What am I missing?

One of the moms on my super-awesome message board had baby number one in February 2006, number two in February 2007, and now she’s afraid she’s pregnant again for the third time in two years. Sweet. Over the past few months her posts have centered around how broke she and her husband are and how they don’t have money to pay the bills or the rent. If it wasn’t for WIC they’d be screwed, yet she still has time and money to post on the messageboard all day long.

Two kids in less than a year, a possible third on the way and she’s not even old enough to drink. She’ll be twenty next week.

Yesterday when we got to the playground the usual crowd wasn’t there. One bench was taken up by a woman wearing a wife-beater, low-slung sweatpants and huge hoop earrings with her name written in them. Her two kids were running around with fountains of green snot flowing from their noses. Rather than heading for the kids, the Fiendling wandered over toward where the mom was sitting, probably because the area was littered with food her kids had thrown on the ground and an empty fountain soda cup. I don’t know what it is, but he can spot trash from a mile away and all he wants to do is play with it or see what it tastes like. Because the mom didn’t appear to be making any moves towards cleaning the mess before my kid went to eat the leftovers, I grabbed a napkin from my stroller, used it to put the food in the empty cup and threw the mess away.

A few minutes later, from across the playground, I saw the mom spit on the soft, squishy playground foam. She didn’t spit on the grass right behind her. She spit on the fucking playground. On purpose. Then she stamped out her cigarette. On the playground. She didn’t put it out and throw it in the trashcan, she didn’t stub it out in the dirt right behind her and leave it, she put it out on the playground. I was completely disgusted.

I know this isn’t much of a segue, but it’s been about three years since I quit smoking. I didn’t quit all at once. I tried a bunch of times and failed and then all of a sudden I just didn’t feel like smoking all that much. I don’t know if it was the smell on my clothes or that I felt like a jackass after some of my students saw me smoking, but I started smoking less and less until I just wasn’t smoking anymore.

Because I smoked for more than ten years and because some of my best friends are still smokers I’m not a judgy, rampant anti-smoker until I see parent smoking on the playground, not just outside of it, or until I see a pregnant teenager smoking on the street. Though the parents who smoke on the playground piss me off (though not as much as the parents who spit and smoke on the playground), I want to smack pregnant smoking teenagers silly. Not because they’re kids and shouldn’t be pregnant in the first place and not because of the harm that they’re doing to the fetus but because they’re assholes.

Let me clarify. Everyone knows smoking is bad for you. Everyone knows smoking while pregnant is bad for you and the fetus. Not everyone knows that a cigarette or two a day, while not the best thing you can do, probably won’t have terrible effects on an unborn child. So if a woman can’t quit cold turkey when she’s pregnant and a cigarette helps her stay sane I understand and don’t have a problem with it. But the chicks in my neighborhood who smoke on the street while eight or nine months pregnant aren’t the one or two a day smokers. They’re the nasty, chain-smoking, skanky outfit wearing teenagers who don’t give a fuck smokers. They’re the pregnant kids who become the moms that keep their cigarettes in the cup holder on the stroller after the baby’s born, polluting the playground with their nasty cigarette butts and leaving trash in their wake. They’re the women who become the moms who SPIT on the playground. I hate them.

Now the Fiendling has a cold. Probably from sharing playground equipment with the snot fountain kids whose nasty, spitting mom couldn’t be bothered to wipe their noses. Instead they wiped their noses with their hands and wiped them off on the stairs up to the slide which, of course, the Fiendling had to climb because he likes being near other kids.

Which leads me to the next thing that annoys me- people who tell their kids to cover their mouths with their hands when they cough. While it’s admirable that they’re trying to teach kids not to spread their germs, doesn’t coughing into your hands just spread them more? Shouldn’t we be teaching our kids to cough into their upper arm?

The Fiendling has his first swimming class tomorrow which means I have to wear my first bathing suit of the season. I went up to the third floor where I keep my out of season clothes and dug through the two boxes that house the contents of the top two drawers from my old house. For those of you not keeping track, we moved here almost two years ago when I was about eleven weeks pregnant. I’d already gained ten pounds and a good cup size. Rather than torment myself with bathing suits, bras and underwear that didn’t fit I packed them and shoved them, boxed, to the bottom of a closet where they still remain.

I started sorting through the boxes, pulling out lots of pretty lingerie, slutty lingerie, ratty old bras I should have thrown out years ago, my something blue underwear with “bride” written in rhinestones I’d totally forgotten about, and I came across an unassuming beige bra that made me stop digging. The bra was the tiniest non-baby clothing I’ve seen in a long time. So tiny I had to check the size to make sure that it actually was once mine. It was. I saw a tiny pink ribbon on the tag and remembered buying it at a specialty bra store on Main Street a few years ago. At the time I didn’t mind that it was way too expensive because two dollars went to breast cancer research, it fit well and I hadn’t had a bra that fit well in a long time.

Now, three years later, I still don’t have a bra that fits well. Since I’m still nursing once or twice a day I don’t even know that it’s worth buying one. But seriously, the bra was minuscule. I didn’t even consider trying it on. I wonder if it will ever fit again.

Because I’m obsessive and he’s only nursing twice a day which means he’s getting the bulk of his nutrition through real food I made a list of all of the foods the Fiendling eats and categorized them into things he loves, things he eats regularly, things he eats on occasion, and things that have passed his lips voluntarily on one occasion only. I won’t bore you with the whole list but I’ll tell you that Cheddar Bunnies and cookies fall into the first category,  Hot and Sour soup and hamburger fall into the last category, various fruits, vegetables, breads, pastas and rices fall into the middle categories. It’s a pretty long list, but considering that in a given day he mostly just eats string cheese, crackers and bananas and throws everything else to the floor it’s no wonder that I’ve become a mother who obsesses over what her son eats.

I probably wouldn’t be so obsessed if his iron levels were higher. They were low enough that he needs to take a supplement twice daily for three months which is pretty common- that’s why they test for it- but makes me feel like a failure nonetheless. I want to blame it on the six month appointment. Our regular pediatrician wasn’t in and we had to see a different one. She didn’t tell me to give him the multi-vitamin with iron so I assumed I didn’t have to even though I’d read that breastfed babies often need iron supplements. No one told me. But I should have asked our regular doctor at the nine month appointment which basically makes it my fault.

The iron supplements taste like ass.  Actually, they don’t. They taste like you’d expect them to- like metal - and they leave a nasty metallic tasting residue on sippy cups and hands. The drops also temporarily stain teeth. Charming, right? The Fiendling hates them and I don’t blame him. This is where the food obsession comes into play. To avoid the drops I’ve been attempting to slip iron into his diet through food. I’ve been cooking in cast iron, I’ve made farina stix and the recipe for farina muffins on the box (which are absolutely vile- do not even attempt them), I’ve mixed the drops into orange juice, I’ve tried mixing rice cereal into other foods and I’ve even tried giving him red meat a few times.

I’ve been foiled at every attempt. The kid is smarter than I am and won’t touch anything that will boost his iron naturally. So twice a day, carefully timed because dairy interferes with absorption and he can’t have dairy less than an hour before or less than two hours after taking the drops, I force the dropper to the back of his mouth and hope he doesn’t spit out too much of it. It sucks.

Finally, thanks to the help of the super-fantastic posthipchick,  I made something he’ll eat- Full-Meal Muffins. They’re vegan and smell terrible uncooked, but they’re surprisingly tasty once baked. Most importantly they’re healthy and full of iron. And amazingly he’s eaten them two days in a row.

Since I’m talking about food I should admit that since I’ve been on this mostly vegetarian diet I’ve gained 3 or 4 pounds. Awesome, right? I eat healthier and GAIN weight.

The chick who played Lucky Louie’s wife played one of Lloyd’s friends in Say Anything. I knew she looked familiar.

I’m watching tonight’s Gilmore Girls right now. I was watching American Idol but I was watching the episode before it finished recording and I caught up to the commercials so I switched to Gilmore Girls which isn’t nearly as good as Martina McBride coaching Sanjaya. Anyway I’m not writing about TV tonight. Instead I’m going to reveal a deep, dark secret, one which I never thought I’d admit to the internet. So here it is: I am drinking wine that came in a box. Said box of wine (Merlot, 13.5% if you must know the details) was purchased earlier this evening. Boyfiend bought it with no input from me while I cooked dinner ( brown basmati and wild rice with asparagus in a balsamic shallot sauce and carrots with a balsamic glaze). Believe it or not, it’s pretty good, and that’s the part I was most reticent to admit. Now I will drink some more. Talk amongst yourselves.

He kisses, and oh how I love the sweet open-mouthed is he trying to kiss me or take a bite out of me baby kisses. He’s also learned the sign language for kiss, which is super-cute, but not quite as wonderful as the actual, slobbery kisses.

Now he climbs on and off of his ride on toys. He climbs on his little tricycle, his police car and he tries to climb on and off his rocking pony that after pressing a button on the ear sings, “I’m a little pony. Clippety clop. Clippety clop. Such a pretty pony. Clippety clop. Clippety clop.” The song continues in a masculine voice that is completely different from the feminine pony voice that, after pressing a button on the other ear, says, “I love it when you brush me.”

He’s learning body parts. When asked, “Where’s your head,” he pats it with both hands grinning and when asked, “Where are your feet,” he looks down and very carefully stomps one.

We have achieved our first, bottom molar. It has emerged with little to no discomfort, though sometimes I’m not sure whether he’s using sign language or just poking at his uncomfortable bottom gums.

He loves to be chased. One of his favorite games to play with me is to close the door when I’m in the bathroom. I’ll bang on it and yell, “Let me out, let me out,” while he giggles then I’ll open the door and say, “I’m coming to get you,” and he’ll turn around and run, in his ineffective legs moving fast but they’re not propelling him any faster baby run that reminds me of the cartoons where Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff and keeps moving his legs even though they’re not moving him anywhere.

The most significant of the developments for me is the weaning. For six days straight we’ve been down to two nursing sessions a day, morning and night. It’s been going quite well and he generally only asks to nurse during the day when he needs a nap and I’ve been able to distract him with food to get him through. Yesterday was the first day I thought we might have a problem. Despite the sippy cups of water everywhere and his lengthy a.m and p.m. nursings, he didn’t have a singe wet diaper all day yesterday. This morning when I changed him and found that his diaper was as dry as it was when we put it on him last night I thought for sure I’d have to call the doctor and I told Boyfiend that we needed to get him whole milk. Of course that’s when the Fiendling took the opportunity to pee all over the changing table and floor. I got him down and wiped him off and cleaned off the table while he walked around naked for a minute or two. He wandered out into the hall and I called him back in to get him diapered and dressed. He stopped just outside the door and as I motioned for him to come in he started to pee again. He looked down, puzzled by what was happening to his penis. The flow stopped, he took a few steps and it started again. He looked down, still shocked by what was happening. The flow stopped, began again, then stopped and he ran off down the hall, somehow managing not to walk through the puddle.

I finished the crap knitting book last night. I hate to ruin it for you, but here’s how it ends. The Asian academic finds a friend in the woman who gets impregnated by some guy and is afraid to tell her Catholic parents even though she’s a grown woman. The Jewish widow moves in with her boyfriend who as it turns out owns the entire building, not just the deli below the yarn store. The newly divorced socialite finds herself and starts her own business and the main character dies of ovarian cancer leaving her now teenage, training bra wearing daughter in her recently returned black baby daddy’s custody. The useless characters in turn have a baby, pass the LSATs, and sell their handbag line to Bloomingdales. Oh, and the Asian’s husband forgives her for cheating on him, the black baby daddy introduces his baby mama and daughter to his parents who told him never to bring a white woman home, the main character’s Scottish grandmother imparts wisdom, and the socialite spends money. And someone makes a movie about the knitting club which everyone tearfully watches at their Friday night meeting after the main character dies. Boo hoo.

The chapstick stained clothes sat on top of the dryer for more than a month. After getting sick of seeing them there I washed them in hot water four or five times then gave up. Now I just wear them, grease stains and all.

My mom and her sister are back to being BFF. We all (except for my girl cousin who’s still on the outs with her mom and brother) got together for Passover and everything was fine. The day after the seder my aunt invited my mom over for a gefilte fish (gag) lunch.

Home cooked vegetarianism is still going strong. I just read the Omnivore’s Dilemma and if you have any interest in where your food comes from I highly recommend it. If you generally subsist on diet coke, supermarket meat, or organic freezer foods from Whole Foods that you think are somehow better than the Hungry Man special or Lean Cuisine meal in the regular supermarket you should probably skip reading this one. I’m thrilled I signed up for the farm share this spring.

Right now I’m reading The Friday Night Knitting Club which is truly terrible. The characters are like stereotypes of stereotypes. There’s the owner of the shop, a tough single mom with a half-black daughter whose absentee father, the successful, black architect returns from France after twelve years and wants to be a part of their lives again, the lonely Asian academic, the socialite with a distant, philandering husband, a Jewish widow in her seventies who’s afraid to date and others I won’t bore you with. I’m waiting for a Mexican landscaper to pop in for a knitting lesson with the veiled Muslim woman who everyone assumes is a terrorist. Really, it’s terrible. So of course they’re making a film version.

The Fiendling’s still only napping on the go. Here is he passed out on the porch, blurry because I took the picture through the window.