the weirdgirl

Do they have Rosetta Stone for that?

This is what conversations have been like in my house recently.

Chance: "Hey MOM!"  Super loud, in my ear.

Me: "Ow. Stop yelling! What?"

Chance: "Mutter mutter mumble mutter."

Me: "What??"

Or the other version...

Chance: "Moooooooom!  Whine whine whine whimper whine."

I swear to God I cannot understand a thing he's saying lately.  It's indecipherable because of the muttering or whining. Sometimes I catch the odd phrase of, "Pokemon! Ninjago! Star Wars!" but that's pretty much it.  God forbid he gets bit by a snake or other emergency because I imagine the conversation would go something like this...

Chance: "Mooooom!!! Whine WHINE WHINE!!"

Me: "What?! What is it?"

Chance: "Mutter mumble MUTTER mutter! Whine."

Me: "What?"

Chance: "MOM! Mutter! Whimper! Mutter!"

Me: "Can you say that in a regular voice so I can understand you?"

Chance: "WHINE!"

Me: "Did something happen?"

Chance: "Mumblewhine!"

Me: "Did Timmie fall down a well?"

Chance: "WAIL!"

Me: "How many words?  How many syllables?"

Chance: "MUTTER MUTTER MOM!"

Me: "Um... How about a popsicle?"

Chance: big shaky breath, "Whimper OK."

Me: "Here you go.  Wait, is that a bite mark?"

And I just know the emergency room would give me grief about that.

Why talking it out can be better than blogging it out

This is probably not going to be a popular post. I always seem to be moving a little counter to popular opinion's clockwise.  I know that a lot of blogging proponents hold up things like getting your voice heard and supportive communities as big pluses for being online.  I've been a blogging a long time now and I remember there were big pushes for a while for everyone to be really open and post very personal, difficult things. And the people who did that were often praised for being brave and "opening the conversation" and all sorts of stuff.  I'm not saying those are bad things but the flip side is that some of those bloggers were ostracized by loved ones for airing private grievances, or they got a lot of negative attention online.  And frankly there were some bloggers who just dragged for drama in everything they wrote, from inflammatory posts to picking fights via twitter, and that shit gets kind of OLD. 

I've never really been one of these kind of bloggers. There are a lot of things I keep private because they're not my stories to tell. I will talk about my own shit but not about other peoples'.  If my shit impinges on other peoples' privacy I'm also not going to talk about it, unless I know they're OK with sharing it.  I'm open about SPD and special needs because I feel strongly that there needs to be more awareness about it and I'm happy to share my experiences for other people.

But there's another reason I find myself not blogging about some of the difficult things in my life... and it's because I've already talked through them. Last week some very close friends of ours lost their grandson to an accident. It was tragic and heart wrenching and really made that gut terror emerge that parents try to push down every day anyway. The last two weeks have been long and emotionally exhausting. But I have great friends and what I found was we could get together and talk about it and do what we could to help the family and each other get through it.

I'm not an immediate blogger. I don't run to my computer when I'm working things out. I kind of internalize them a bit, then talk to people, and then go to my computer and not necessarily to jump on the social networking circles about it, sometimes just to write something for me.  That's my process.  And sometimes by that point I'm all done.  I don't feel like I need to bring it up again just to post it.  Just to rehash and reopen.

I know that a lot of people have found a lot of value in the online world, because they can find a community that they might not have access to in the real world.  But there is something to be said for real life communication.  There is something to healing in real time.

To the moms, ain't this the truth...

 

Happy Mother's Day!  Now I'm gonna go sit on the couch with a book and some chocolates.

               - the weirdgirl

 

The ol' dog & pony show, but cuter

The last month of school is disproportionately busy.  It's just about time where everyone (the kids, the parents, the teachers) gets really tired of school and then there's a bunch of last minute activities.  I'm tired, yo!  I think we're averaging two events a week for the last three weeks of school. This week there's a Teacher Appreciation lunch and a Las Madres Festival.

Last week was the First Grade Song & Dance show (jazz hands!) 

Here are Chance and his best buddy NOT getting in trouble. For once.

And their Snake Dance.  Which Chance informed me was "really famous".

It was cute. And Chance managed not to pick his nose as much for the night performance.  Progress! (With jazz hands!)          - wg

I'll CC you

I'm keeping this post short and sweet because there's a lot going on right now.  So I'm back from the dead, which is always convenient.  Chance has his first grade performances today!  One morning and one night show.  I got a flat tire this morning on the way to school so I caught his morning show while I was waiting for the tow truck.  Not that those two are causally related.  I mean, I probably was going to see the morning show anyway and then the car trouble so there you go.  Keen and I will be seeing him tonight, too, because otherwise he'd have to walk himself to school at night and that just seems sort of mean and vaguely irresponsible.  I'll put up pictures soon of my son looking adorable for about 80% of the show and then picking his nose for the other 20%.  :)  And finally, I told you about that local poetry contest I entered and that I'd put up a link when my poem went up with the other entries on the blog.  Here's the link if you want to check it out. Thanks and see you soon!

Why are all my posts starting to sound like emails?

 

And that's how you lose stuffed animals

We've been sick all week.  The kiddo came down with it first, of course, with a really high fever that wouldn't come down, even with the advil/tylenol swap and baths and all that.  I took him to the weekend clinic and they kept us there four hours!  Conclusion: virus.  Then I followed suit and got sick Monday night.  At one point yesterday I woke up from a nap with a high fever and I was probably a little delirious but in my delirium I thought I was lucid enough to write and sent my ramblings to my editor at Culture Brats. They were a fucking trainwreck.  I'm sure he appreciated them. I don't think I've written anything for him in a couple of weeks, I've been trying to remember and I cannot remember so maybe I'm still running a fever. I don't know. At least I haven't started babbling on about LOLcats and noodles or anything because I am having some pretty weird dreams, let me tell you. 

But that's not the part that sucks. The part that sucks is that by the time I start to get sick, Chance is starting to feel a little better and he's bored and he obviously has no sympathy for his poor suffering mother who has diligently taken care of him while he's ill because when I decided that I just really needed to lie down on the couch he decided that was a good time to chuck pillow pets at me. Seriously?!   

Just enough time to bitch

The post I had written, the thoughtful one with a point, just got eaten.  This has been happening more frequently lately.  The ad network was pulled down without notice (and I never got paid out (hello, contract violation)).  The iphone app for typepad doesn't work at all anymore.  I am cheesed off because I pay for this service.  That's the whole point for paying, so I don't have to deal with shit like the program suddenly shutting down.

I honestly don't have the time to move it right now, though, but I may be migrating in the future.

I wonder if they monitor blog posts anymore? They used to back when it was the original, original owners. (I've lost track since then.) Do you think I'll get sabotaged at my hint of defection?  Or will my inbox be swamped by conciliatory helpful hints?  Could I stage a revolution from this blog?  Incite a tsunami of movement, change an assumption to a perception, start a trend and morph it into a mindset?  Inspire the heart wrenching score and the defiant bumper sticker?  Become the voice of something or other in the midst of a sea of other voices of something or other, pushing back the waves, hands desperately reaching... air, air! We need air!

Yeah, let's start some subversive shit.

Perpetuating the wrong expectations

Chance is trying to sucker me into buying him a Dream Lite.  It's a Pillow Pet where they've stuck a bunch of lights into its back. They must have had a surplus on that particular set of animals. Either that or those poor creatures tried to stage an uprising over the injustice of being used as pillows, were brutally repressed, and the electrodes were their punishment. Because let's face it, this company has a strange sense of what constitutes kindness to animals; it's either portraying them as only good as some sort of furniture or they're endorsing submitting animals to electric shock.

Since he is already unnaturally obsessed with Pillow Pets as well as Pokemon (which captures animals and puts them in highly questionable fighting arenas), I'm, of course, gently discouraging the idea that he will get a Dream Lite even if/when hell freezes over.

He has reverted to using the commercial's own slogans to further his campaign. As if I can't hear the TV in the room. "Did you hear that, Mom? It makes bed time FUN!"

"Bedtime is already fun, honey. Sleep is awesome!" He won't truly understand that one for another 30 years yet.

"You can use it as a nightlight! You don't want me to be afraid of the dark, right?"

"You already have a nightlight. In fact, I believe you have two."

"It'll give me a restful sleep!"

"Really? Is there Ambien in that animal?"

"What's Ambien?"

But the final nail in his beggar's coffin for ever, ever receiving a Dream Lite?  Chance walking up to the cat and trying to lie on him. Because wouldn't a live cat for a pillow be awesome?!

At least he hasn't yanked on his tail waiting for the lights to pop on.

Steps thataway

So.  (I know I start a lot of posts with "so". It's kind of my way of taking a deep breath. Or sometimes it's acknowledging that yes, I am going off on another crazy tangent. But then blogging is kind of all crazy tangents. With or without context. Hmmm) 

So. I know I've complained more than once about getting my shit in gear and wanting to "immerse more of my life in art" (which sounds really diva melodramatic now that I'm repeating it) and wanting to be A Writer and so on. However, to do that you kind of have to stop bitching and get your work out there.  I've never really used this space to talk about writing that much and/or showcase much I've written, except the funny stuff.  Well, every once in a while I put up a non-satirical poem but it's usually met with the resounding cry of crickets. *sniff* *so hurt*   But I also realize that those poems are kind of depressing or hard to understand and either way they are a big departure from what I usually write here so I get it.  Anyway, one of the things I've been doing lately is actually submitting work out.  (OK, so far it's only been two pieces but I have plans for more.)  The first one, I entered a local poetry contest that places poetry placards on buses. Yes! The six winning poets would have their words read by transients throughout the county!  Awesome.  I wasn't chosen but that wasn't the point... the point was that I entered.  I'm actually pretty psyched about that.

What's kind of cool is that even though I feel like my creative writing has slowed down a lot over the years, and I'm constantly berating myself about not doing enough, when I go back through it I still have a lot that I've written. So I'm making that effort; I'm trying to review, organize, read, and submit.  *deep breath DEEP breath*  

I'm not saying this blog is turning into a writing blog but you may hear my updates on rejection letters every so often.  I did get a note that my poem would appear on our local Poet Laureate blog that was running the contest sometime this month, so I'll post a link to that for sure.  And if anyone wants to see some creative writing here I'd oblige you.  Hopefully without too many crickets. Or comments that say "Chirp chirp" because I KNOW you people!  Damn smartasses!

But that would make me laugh.             - wg

Stupid things I did today, now with water

It occurred to me as I was standing precariously on a wooden bar stool in the shower, spraying down ceiling tile with 409, the fumes drifting rapturously into my brain, that perhaps that wasn't the soundest idea I could come up with after waking from a nap... of said nap I had taken to cut off an impeding headache but instead awoke with dizziness and a fever so again, perhaps, standing on a high, slippery surface breathing in chemicals that could only deteriorate my already tenuous judgement into something potentially life threatening was NOT the best possible decision.

So I got down. But did I stop there? 

No. After wandering aimlessly between the bathroom and bedroom for a while, occasionally attempting to clean and/or organize sundry items before invariably losing track of what I was doing (only sensing that I WAS supposed to be cleaning/organizing something or other), I then proceeded to plunge my arm fully into a fish tank to scrub its wall without noticing that I had not yet unplugged the electrical devices attached to the tank. Potentially life threatening situation #2.

Unplugged everything. Yay!  Took Zuma Blitz break. Yay!

While using a pump hose to clean the tank I hit upon the idea of fitting the tube over the round opening on one of my tank decorations to suck all the muck out of it.  How clever am I?!  My idea worked so brilliantly the hose was suctioned to the ornament. Fight ensued.  Managed NOT to soak myself or the floor (a fish-tank-cleaning first)!  Yay!

Finally decided that cleaning in general was probably not a good idea (and organizing was obviously not even an option), and went downstairs attempting to juggle iPhone, mug of tea, and thermometer...

...soaked myself and the floor.  But luckily, not the iPhone.         - wg