Pool Boy

Still have not made a final decision about the nanny. Still have not even started to write an entry about the nanny.

Decided to go to the pool instead.

Here. Have some thighs. Does that make up for it?

No? Then how about some delicious beefcake?

We had a wonderful time. Noah adored everything about everything -- the water! the big kids! the community toys! -- and I forced myself and my HIGHLY DESIRABLE FRIENDSHIP on another mother with a boy Noah's age and then tried to poach some poor defenseless babysitter who was totally having none of it and the vending machine ate my quarters. (Universe to Amy: Karma!)

We swam until we were pruney, which was precisely when Noah hit The Wall. The Wall of Nap.

Woe!

Agony!

Turtles!

Tomorrow: Nannies. Probably. I think. Maybe? Argh.

Money For Nothing and Your Links For Free

1. The Wednesday! Advice! Smackdown!

2. Speaking of the Smackdown, did you know that our own Intrepid Amalah Commenter and Friend of the Smackdown Real Girl has a book? An absolutely fabulous and delightful book?  A book that you can buy from various reputable purveyors of books and book-like substances? She does! And you can!

3. Speaking of nothing-related-to-this-at-all, but as I mentioned over at the blog about blogs where I say the word blog a lot, I have been busy this week interviewing NANNIES. Nannies who will occasionally come to my house and look after my preshus baby so I can do important stuff, like write on teh Internets about how much I love my preshus baby. An entry about that will be coming soon, oh my holy hell.

Weekend Report: I Got Drunk & Accosted Ted Allen

So this weekend we continued our pattern of pawning off our young on the sober and attended the DC International Wine & Food Festival, which was very much about the wine, not so much about the food, although there was an entire table devoted to Irish butter, and I have never been so proud of my Irish heritage, because that shit was DELICIOUS.

I am proud to say my wine snobbery has come a long way, as I was able to say shit like, "Hmm, I taste peach with a hint of earth, however, there's entirely too much alcohol on the finish," and people actually nodded instead of tossing their wine in my face and screaming "WRONG! TOTALLY WRONG! YOU COULD NOT BE MORE WRONG!"

Of course, they could have just been being polite. Like Ted Allen also was.

OMG! It's Queer Eye for the Drunk Girl! Iron Drunk America!

We spotted him while waiting in the taxi line and I did my patented Amalah Shriek of Dorkitude, alarming Jason and our friends, who were so not impressed That Ted Allen Was Standing Right Over There, He's Totally On Television And Therefore Our Better.

My friend Paul offered to just march up to him and ask for a photo, while I aimed my camera phone in frustration, but I was all, "Please, no, whatever. I really don't care." 

Meanwhile, Amy's Heart says, "Oh, but I DO CARE. I care so very, very much."

For the five of you who may still hold a bit of affection in your hearts for the Queer Eye guys (I stopped watching after the episode where Carson said only whores wore red shoes, because I cannot support such lies, such damned damned lies), I am happy to report that Ted looks fucking FANTASTIC, really downright ADORABLE, although he was accompanied by a female WOMAN. (Ted Allen Caught in Heterosexual Scandal! News at 11!)

Ted Allen was also super friendly and polite when I (after repeatedly declining various dares and offers from my friends to go fucking say hi already) suddenly dashed away from our waiting taxi and went right up to him and stuck my hand out and...I don't know. Words came out of my mouth. Words that I don't believe included pauses or breathing or even actual English.

He smiled, shook my hand and said, "Thank you so much. I'm so glad to hear it." And possibly more, but I was already running back to our cab.

Moral of the story: I am a FUCKING ASSHOLE. The End.

See? See what it feels like to have a camera phone shoved in your face, asshole?

Also, TUCK IN YOUR BRA STRAPS. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

My Own Private Paparazzo

After noting Noah's affection for the remote control, we took the batteries out of a couple remotes we never use anymore (aside: what, do these things BREED or something? is the "Sanyo" remote the bastard lovechild of the Sony and Panasonic remotes? because we don't OWN anything by Sanyo. remotes! cease with your fornicating!) and gave them to Noah to play with. We thought this was terribly clever of us.

This morning, Noah was chowing down on what I thought was one of the battery-less remotes until suddenly, the sounds of Dan Zanes' Catch That Train! (best kids-ish CD EVER, by the way, and you can officially add Mr. Zanes to my list of Bizarre Crushes On Men Whom I Love Merely For Their Remarkable Effect On My Child, like my elderly pediatrician and Joe from Blue's Clues) flooded the room.

Noah and I both jumped and looked at each other, and besides the immediate thought of dude, nice fine motor skills, I was suddenly struck with the realization that Noah had his back to the CD player and the remote in his mouth, and that the trajectory of the...I don't know, remote control laser beam firepower had just traveled through his brain and skull.

"That," I observed to the dog, "cannot be a good thing."

(Ceiba farted and immediately jumped off the couch to smell Noah's butt. She is not helpful, but she is a damn smart dog about a very narrow range of things.)

However, I think the most disturbing aspect of this whole story is that my first instinct, even before grabbing the remote out of Noah's mouth or looking up "remote-control battery-slobber brain tumors" in Dr. Spock, was to rush over to the computer and tell the goddamned Internet.

Enough Talking. Let's See Some Hot Multimedia Action

Baby! Laughing!*

Like a total crazy drunk person!

Noah Laughing on Vimeo

Who knew? Baby dolls repeatedly plummeting to their deaths are the FUNNIEST THING EVER.

I mean, it's funny, right? He's not going to be sticking their heads on pikes tomorrow or something, right? Should I maybe hide the Nirvana CDs?

*Also! My bra strap!

Like a total crazy homeless person!

I Love New York, Mostly

One week ago today, I was in New York with my sister and my 11-week-old nephew Nicky. And I convinced her to take me and the two babies shopping in Soho.

I know. I should probably go to jail or something. I am a threat to all of decent society.

"I took Noah out all the time at Nicky's age!" I told her, clearly hallucinating about SOMEONE ELSE'S MATERNITY LEAVE, because unless Jason was around to carry the stroller and the diaper bag and...I don't know, a spare rubber band for my hair, while I staggered sloooowly behind, clutching my newborn against my chest with a vise-like grip on his thigh, I think I took Noah out exactly twice. And one of those times was just to the mailbox.

But still. I decided that my sister needed to Get Out And Go Places And Get Over This Whole "Babies Are Haaaard" Thing. So we packed up our diaper bags, plopped Nicky in the Bjorn, stuck Noah in his B-stroller (B-stroller being the One We Bought That We Hate With The Heat Of Many Hot Suns, with the A-stroller being the One We Love, But Is Fucking Huge And Heavy And Arrrgh) and set off for the subway.

Please read those last five words again. Now weep for our souls.

Here in DC, all of our Metro stops have elevators and escalators. There's a shuttle system between stops in case of an elevator outage. And there are only 83 stops total, as opposed to New York's 14,283,182.

I am telling you this just to provide a semi-excuse for why I kept saying, "Where's the elevator? There has to be an elevator! Come this way, I think I see an elevator!"

There are no elevators, and my sister is too nice because she never once smacked me in the back of the head while screaming THAT THERE ARE NO ELEVATORS, GIVE UP NOW.

Instead, we faced a variety of staircases of varying lengths and widths, revolving doors, turnstiles and at least one or two of Dante's circles of hell. I tried taking Noah down the stairs backwards and forwards. My sister tried to grasp different parts of the stroller while I tried to not run her over or send her hurtling down the stairs (just because she had the baby strapped to her, of course, otherwise her ankles would have been fair game). We took Noah out and tried to carry the stroller and our bags and the assortment of crap I stupidly left in the storage basket underneath.

(So yeah. If anybody saw the blonde girl with plastic linking rings wrapped around her neck, kicking a folded-up Peg Perego down a flight of cement steps off Lexington Avenue last Tuesday while ordering her baby to NOT POOP, OH NO YOU BETTER NOT BE POOPING RIGHT NOW I SWEAR TO GOD, that was probably me.)

The best thing I can say for us is that we did think to take Noah OUT of the stroller before attempting to go through a revolving door, which saved us from an appearance on the 7 o'clock news after the stroller got totally stuck.

Eventually, we did get to SoHo, where we decided the only way to make the return trip even better was to, you know, buy shit. Shit we would need to carry back, but let's not think about that right now, just hand over the credit card and let the retail therapy do its thiiiing, baby.

Of course, our first stop was the Scholastic Store, a store my sister had been talking about since forever, where you can let infants roam free in their natural primary-colored habitat while you buy toys that come with a Harvard-acceptance guarantee and there's free wine and little magic fairies fly around giving you candy.

At least, that's what I'm assume happens at the store, because FYI: the SoHo Scholastic Store is currently CLOSED FOR WATER DAMAGE.

"I'm so, so sorry," my sister fretted. "I should have called before we came down here. I'm the worst hostess EVER."

"Please," I said, while repeatedly bashing the stroller into the doorframe in my attempt to exit the store's lobby, "Like who calls a STORE to inquire about possible WATER DAMAGE?"

"Before the baby," she sighed, "I would have."

I looked at her and blinked, and then decided I believed her, and felt like calling all once and future guests in DC to apologize for never, EVER thinking to call a store to make sure no acts of God had occurred in the past 24 hours.

Plan B was to find some sort of ultra-hip, clever and deliciously overpriced baby boutique called Giggle. Which we had the address for and every reason to believe that they were open, and the promise of fully stocked changing tables and stroller parking (STROLLER PARKING!), but we. Could. Not. Find. That. Fucking. Store.

It was on a street that appeared to not exist. We asked Starbucks baristas and random people and some kind of scary guy wearing a sandwich board started pointing and yelling but we weren't sure if he was giving us directions or telling us that the world was going to end and indicating which direction the fireball would come from.

Although in a bitterly ironic personal victory for me, while we were wandering around, looking for, I don't know, 42nd-and-Three-Quarters Street, some random dude asked ME for directions -- directions that I was TOTALLY ABLE TO GIVE, LIKE AN ACTUAL NEW YORKER PERSON. Since I've sort-of come to terms with the fact that I will never actually live in New York, the most I can hope for is to BLEND IN while I'm there, so...score one for me and my totally impractical shoes and lack of fanny pack.

Eventually, we asked one last guy, and he knew where the Magical Street of Illusion was, and we found the store.

"Um. Can I just say something about that guy?" my sister asked as we arrived. "He was...well, he was really, really, ridiculously good-looking."

"GOD. YES." I gasped. "Like I wasn't sure if I wanted to make out with him or punch him in the face."

Once inside Giggle, we decided we never wanted to leave. There was indeed, complimentary stroller parking. (AMY, SINGING AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS: Ooh, baby, do you know what that's worth? Ooh, heaven is a place on earth!) There was a private area for my sister to breastfeed. The floors were clean and the merchandise displays were baby-proofed. (SALESGIRL: Um, does this child like, BELONG to anyone?) (AMY, FROM ACROSS THE STORE: Why? Did he poop?)

I bought the smallest diaper bag I could find, along with a sling, cleverly plotting to abandon the stroller there in the store (LONG-TERM PARKING, BITCH) (I didn't) (Wimp). And I absent-mindedly handed Noah a colorful little maraca shaker, which I also ended up buying because he wailed when I took it away from him, and because it never occurred to me that a rattle would ever cost TWELVE FUCKING DOLLARS.

(Also: That is probably how kids grow up to be spoiled brats, isn't it? The whole "Mommy will buy you whatever seems to be amusing you lest her preshus-weshus honeybunkins is not 100% happy and joyful right this very second" thing? I should probably work on that, hmm?)

Anyway, the trip home was slightly less horrifying, as Noah fell asleep in the sling, the stroller became our shopping cart, until we needed to get back down the subway stairs, when a nice man offered to help us, which we LET HIM, OH MY GOD.

Of course, my sister pointed out that the people who offered to help probably didn't know what they were in for, as not only did I make that nice man carry the stroller down the stairs, I left him to figure out how to fold it up AND carry it through the turnstiles. And then a woman offered to hold the stroller on the train, and I said thank you and then promptly bolted halfway down the car to sit down in a seat where I could pretend that I NEVER HAD A STROLLER. I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.

So I guess it's official: New York turns you into an asshole.

A manic, stroller-throwing, screechy asshole with a $12 rattle.

God, I love New York. I really, really do.

Noah, seconds before realizing that Mama has replaced his beloved plastic measuring cup with some other stupid rattle.

Weekend Report: I Got Drunk & Fell Down a Hill

Specifically, this hill:

"SHUT UP. IT'S DECEPTIVELY SLOPEY."

And specifically, I was this drunk:

No. Really. Look at how cleverly ironic I thought I was:

"Klassy! With a C! Or a K. I don't know. Whatever the fuck."

We were at this vineyard:

"Look! We're on the label! It's the Mythical Three Drunk Girls!"

Please note the variety of spit receptacles available to us. We did not use them once, but lo, they were festive.

This was my wound. From the hill. That I fell down.

"Pour some wine on it!"

I would write more, but I am too busy attempting to edit a financial newsletter which needed to go to print about 20 minutes ago, but as it turns out, a contoured changing pad actually DOESN'T make the greatest home office workspace, because even if your clients can't smell the Diaper Genie, YOU TOTALLY CAN.

Please don't ask.

(I really, truly am no longer drunk, I swear.)

I have no need for anger with intimate strangers

I really can't write the entry y'all want me to write about the reunion.

There are a million reasons: I have no anonymity among my classmates. My amalah.com email address is listed in the alumni directory. I have to assume everything I write will get back to pretty much everybody.

But more than any of that, who the fuck do I think I am to judge anybody there?

That's not to say that I didn't judge the hell out of everybody. I glanced through the directory and snickered at how so few of us ventured beyond the Bucks County cornfields. I was shocked at how many babies people have, and at how very close together they've been having those babies. I was taken aback at how many pastor's wives and how few career women my class produced. I was furious when people wouldn't let me finish my sentence about quitting my job to pursue a writing career before jumping in to tell me how wonderful staying home is.

Ugh. It's a wonder anybody spoke to me at all.

As I was getting dressed, about 30 minutes before we needed to leave for the reunion, I realized I'd left all the underwear and jewelry for the trip at home, in a different suitcase. I borrowed a necklace from my mom because I realized the one I was wearing (an heirloom chain from my grandmother) was the very same one I wore every single day in high school.

(As for the underwear situation, I went commando. Top and bottom. Yes.)

The area around my school (about 25 miles away from where my parents live, 45 minutes straight on into bumblefuck) hasn't changed. At all. The farms and tiny houses are completely untouched by sprawl and new townhomes and Super Targets. It's like time has stood still.

While negotiating the directions to the reunion with Jason, I suddenly remembered a left turn we were supposed to make because it's where my friend's mom ran over a chicken one time.

I had a mini-anxiety attack as we passed the driveway where I crashed my car and started hyperventilating as we passed my school.  We sat in the parking lot of the restaurant for a few minutes while I tried to chill the fuck out. Jason offered to drive me home but I said no.

A couple people didn't speak to me. A couple others said gracious hellos and introductions but then seemed to actively ignore me all night. After I left I realized there were a few people that I'd made absolutely no effort to talk to.

I loaded a plate up with food and could barely eat a single bite. I ended up at a table with a bunch of people I'd never really been friends with.

I made a joke to a girl (someone I'd had a rocky on-again-off-again friendship with) about being drunk, and she laughed dismissively and remined me that I was the girl who gave her a hard time about watching Dirty Dancing at a sleepover.

There was something about her delivery -- or maybe something about the fact that it was HER -- that threw me back 10 years, when I was the girl who JUST WANTED THESE PEOPLE TO LIKE ME, and instead of telling her to fuck off, people GROW UP SOMETIMES, IMAGINE THAT, I just smiled and laughed and although she'd clearly turned her back on our conversation, I kept following her around.

Once again, I was just a pathetic baby chick flapping its wings, chirping "LIKE ME! LIKE ME!"

I drank too much. I swore a lot. I went into the bathroom and yelled FUUUUCK at no one in particular. I huddled in corners with a few friends as we cast nasty, bitter eyes across the room at who had gained weight, who was still a bitch, who was lecturing people about smoking cigarettes at the bar.

I didn't especially like myself by the end of the night.

When someone asked how long Jason and I have been together, I realized I'd completely forgotten that I got married when I was only 20 years old.

The only teacher who attended was our old chemistry teacher, Mr. Bauer. I thanked him for being the only teacher to realize that I had a learning disorder. I struggled with math and science my entire life, but it was okay because I was good at English and math was hard and I was a girl. Mr. Bauer figured out that  I wrote numbers backwards and upside-down. He had me take my chemistry tests using graph paper, writing each number in its own box. I took this habit with me to college, where I got straight As in my Algebra classes. I told him I'd even been a financial editor, and that now I was a writer. He hugged me and told me how happy that made him. All night it seemed like everybody was swapping stories about how Mr. Bauer changed their lives.

He was fired the year we graduated, incidentally. They said his teaching style was too "unstructured" for our school's rigorous educational criteria.

A bunch of us bonded over just how fucked up our high school really was. We joked about taking four years of Spanish instruction only to get placed in Spanish I in college. I admitted to changing my degree to a Bachelor of Science just to get out of dealing with the foreign language requirement. I made a joke about not knowing anything about evolution either, but that didn't really go over quite so well.

When I told someone else that I'm a writer now, they responded, "Of COURSE you are!"

My classmates look great. Some look better than ever. Most of them seem very happy.

I don't belong there anymore, and that makes me happy.

Live! From New York!

It's me!

Redefining the phrase "OMFG!"

So there I was, in a conference room at ClubMom, with my back to the door, yakking about blogs and bloggers and blawwwgs and out-of-the-box synergistic capstones, and when I finished talking I realized everyone was staring at me. So I thought, "I have enraptured them! I will KEEP TALKING."

So I did, and then I kind of realized that they were actually staring at a point just behind my head. I turned around and BWAH. Andrew Shue was right there.

I SHRIEKED, people. And it was not a cool shriek. It was a spastic, flip-out kind of shriek, like I had just in that very moment realized just how influential Melrose Place was in my young life, and I had to like, TAKE A MOMENT to put my head down on the table to breathe and get my burning red face back to a normal fleshy color.

And then he sat next to me, and we talked about blogs, and...I don't know...stuff, and I kept stealing glances at him because photos will never prepare you for just how good-looking this man is in person, with the smoldering eyes and the cheekbones, and every time I stole a glance at him he was LOOKING AT ME and SMILING, and I would giggle. And then when he asked me questions I couldn't look directly at him, his life force was just too much to bear, so I would answer while looking off in random directions in the room.

Don't you just love the camera phone photo? Don't you just love the fact that I showed up with a camera with no battery? And I stood there for agonizing seconds trying to turn on this camera, while Andrew politely tried to excuse himself to watch World Cup soccer and I tried not to panic and bellow YOU WILL NOT LEAVE WITHOUT A PHOTO YOU WHO ARE TOO GORGEOUS IN PERSON TO BE REAL, IN FACT, GET BACK TO MADAME TUSSAUDS, AHHHHHHHHHHHH, I WILL CRY NOW.

I did not yell that. I pulled out my camera phone and shoved it at some poor pregnant woman, and tried to console myself with the fact that a camera phone shot would mask my flat, stringy hair, since I left my curling iron and most of my hair products at my parents' house in Pennsylvania after the reunion.

(THE REUNION. OH MY HOLY HELL.)

(And I also consoled myself with the fact that at least today I was actually wearing underwear, UNLIKE THE REUNION.)

(Yes, clearly there is an entry coming about the reunion.)

Anyway. That's what happened when I met Andrew Shue. Let the mocking commence, but at least I did not call anyone a whore and I didn't say the F-word once, which are exactly how I have blown more than one job interview.

I'll be leaving New York tomorrow, a thought that is making me increasingly sad, because hot fucking whores on a platter, I adore this city.

P.S. Noah fell off the bed in our hotel room approximately 15 minutes after we arrived, and he fell on his nose and his nose started BLEEDING and I ran around the hotel hallways looking for the damn ice machine and I couldn't find the ice machine and MY BABY WAS BLEEDING and then we ended up using a Diet Coke from the minibar and did I mention the BLEEDING?  It was super awesome.

Further Correspondence, Perhaps Actual this Time

Actual email that I sent to pretty much every person on the planet yesterday:

From: Amalah
Subject: omfg andrew!

Andrew Shue likes my blawwwwwwwwwwwg!

http://www.toptensources.com/topten/member/Andrew-Shue-Top-10/

Actual email I received regarding this Saturday's reunion:

From: Person who was apparently our class president, although I don't remember voting
Subject: Reminder! Class of 96!

Reunion this Saturday! 6:30 pm!
Attire: Casual - What you feel comfortable in - no fancy dresses or ties.

*shakes fist*

*twice*

But...what if I AM comfortable in fancy dresses? What if my husband looks particularly hot and out-of-my-league in a tie?

Bah.

So after the reunion on Saturday, we're heading up to New York City for a few days to visit my sister and meet my newish little nephew. I'll also be meeting with ClubMom and AlphaMom and reveal myself to be a big dumb fraud who is really boring and stammer-y in person.

Supposedly, Andrew Shue has been invited to the ClubMom meeting on Monday, but I really, REALLY won't be hurt if he doesn't attend, because I have a truly horrific track record when it comes to meeting even the most minor of celebrities. (A track record that includes 1) shrieking, 2) pointing rudely, 3) crying, and 4) flinging my camera into a garbage can at the sight of Jay Leno in Vegas once and being forced to reach in and dig it out RIGHT when he walked by me, and he didn't even make a quip about it, because I think he thought I was homeless.)

Seriously. I just kind of socially implode, and I don't know why. I am completely unable to hang onto any semblence of Cool. Or... you know, just get a fucking GRIP. But I do know that if you put me in the same room with someone from Melrose Fucking Place, I guarantee that I will either 1) throw up, 2) injure myself, or 3) inadvertently call someone a whore.

I should have Internet access for most of the trip, although I might not have a lot of time for posting.

But I'll make sure to let you know if I accidentally call Andrew Shue a whore. Or if I am suddenly back in the market for a new freelancing job. Or both.