Catching Up On My Correspondence

Dear Project Fang, the Sequel:

You, sir, are an ASSHOLE.

So here I am, all happy and joyful that Project Fang, the Original, was through the gums of my preshus baby la la laaaaaa, when I notice that lo, THERE IS ANOTHER TOOTH. TWO TOP TEETH, coming in within MINUTES of each other, both causing ire and misery and woe.

Besides the fact that you are refusing to cut all the way through, just to drag out the drama, your appearance now means that I am a mother to a child with two front teeth. Two! Like a grown-up human person! THE FUCKING TEETH HAVE EATEN MY BABY.

Hate. That is all.

Amy

P.S. Tell your neighbor, that damned lateral incisor, that I see him skulking around under Noah's gums and I am just not going to stand for it.

Dear Household Swear Mug,

*shakes fist*

<redacted> off,
Amy

Dear Broken Coffee Maker,

I hate you. I hate you so very, very much.

Undercaffeinatedly yours,

Amy

Dear Diet Dr. Pepper,

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE. I LOVE YOU. COME GIVE US A CUDDLE.

Love forever and ever, until you give me cancer or something,

Amy

Dear Noah,

Dancing? You dance now? Who taught you to dance?

We bought you one of those activity tables for you to stand up at (you only want to stand up now, by the way, but I will tell you this: you will spend most of your adult life looking for a nice place to sit down, particularly in malls), and you quickly fell in love with this little spinny thing that plays an assortment of songs. Because you learned that if you spin it, Mama will sing like an idiot for you.

I know about five of the songs, and then there are four that I don't know, and I make up nonsense lyrics for these. Like this:  "I don't know this song at all and yet I sing aloooong. I really have no effing clue so let's go hit the boooong."

(Pls. reference above letter to swear jar. I am trying, but you try accompanying a plastic frog with a banjo for eight hours a day.)

Anyway. You started doing this thing where you'd spin the spinny thing and then immediately look at me, waiting for me to sing. And then you started...swaying to the music when I sang.

And now you dance! You sway and shake and even headbang a litle bit. I put on our Sesame Beginnings DVD and sing like a crazy fool for you and we stand and hold hands and you shake your diapered tailfeathers. Whenever you hear something new you sit there with this awesome, enraptured look on your face, just like you did the first time I fed you vanilla yogurt. You love Dan Zanes, Nicolette Larson, Jack Johnson and the Beach Boys.

Johnny Cash makes your head explode, you rock out that hard.

I've never liked singing. And your Daddy has never liked dancing. But now that's all we do for you. And there's always music playing in our house. Always. For you. And we love it.

Love,
Mama

P.S. If you need me, I will be over at the Swear Mug, unloading a roll of nickels.

Denouement

This morning Noah woke up all sunshine and giggles and light once again. I fully expect him to poop miniature unicorns and rainbows later -- he's in that good of a mood.

It's um, quite a change from the past few days, and completely because a certain tooth -- known in our household as Project Fang -- finally cut through his gums (I'm guessing at the stroke of midnight on 06/07/06 when it failed to successfully bring about Armageddon), and took its rightful place on the top gum, where it shall rule over the smaller, less evil bottom teeth. Amen.

Yesterday was an exceedingly weird day -- Noah pretty much screamed non-stop, save for the two hours when the babysitter was here (that's when he was, again, a little darling ball of happy unicorn shit) -- and an entry about fantasizing about bitchslapping an infant got hundreds of completely awesome, wonderful comments and emails (I mean seriously, there is nothing to say but squee! i heart u all! omg!), while ABSOLUTE BATSHIT INSANITY went down over at the ClubMom blog for no particular reason.

At one point in the late afternoon, while I was walking that fine line between trying to get work done and making sure my child was not gnawing on wires inside of plastic grocery bags, Noah found Ceiba's tennis ball under the couch and handed it to me. I absentmindedly waved it in front of him a couple times and then threw it across the room. I don't know what's sadder -- that it still took me a few seconds to realize what I'd done, or that I was dismayed to realize that my baby totally doesn't know how to fetch.

I called Jason around 5 pm to find out when he was coming home -- a question I phrased by simply aiming the phone in the general direction of the squalling, hysterical child -- and he reminded me that he had a business dinner to attend that night. Empowered by all the comments and emails (ASK FOR HELP WHEN YOU NEED IT), I asked him to please please come home first so I could get at least a 45-minute break to finish up some work I needed to do. I phrased this question by bursting into tears and hanging up on him.

It worked! Sucker.

Anyway. Today is good. Noah is once again someone I think I could be friends with in real life, some assorted boring financialish copyediting jobs are done, as is the Wednesday Advice Smackdown. And a nice ClubMom post about the Antichrist is not sparking any outrage at all.

I think I am going to go shopping. High school reunion this Saturday, motherfuckers. I have some overcompensating to do.

In Memory of Misery Past

Nobody Tells You

I lost my temper on Friday.

I yanked Noah's arm and yelled at him.

It took everything I had in me not to shake him. To grab his baby-thin shoulders and shake him until he started behaving like a reasonable fucking person. A person who wouldn't twist over on the diaper table and try to dive-bomb headfirst off the side. A person who wouldn't use my hair as a jungle gym. A person who would take a goddamned nap. And a person who kept his hands out of his own waste.

I didn't shake him. I put him in his crib and fled the room.

I was shaking like a leaf.

I tried counting to 10, but Noah was screaming. I went into the bathroom and turned the water on full blast. I could still hear him.

I ended up in my closet, upstairs. I counted to 50. I threw a pair of shoes at the wall.

And I've never felt so alienated and cut off in my entire life. I had no one to call -- at least not anyone who could actually show up within a reasonable amount of time to help me.  And there was no one -- not my mother, not even Jason -- that I was willing to call and say what I was feeling out loud.

"Hello, I'm fighting an irresistable urge to backhand my 8-month-old child across the face. Could you please come stop me from doing that?"

No. That was NOT OKAY. That was BAD. That was ALERT SOCIAL SERVICES, YOU DON'T DESERVE A CHILD YOU FUCKING FAILURE BAD.

The thing is, it was totally normal. But how do you know that if nobody tells you?

So I'm telling you.

I lost my temper. It happens.

I went back into Noah's room and pulled him out of his crib. His eyes were damp as he reached out for me. I kissed him and said I was very sorry for yelling. He kicked me in the c-section scar. Jason called and said he was on his way home.

I laid down inside the play yard and amused Noah with some made-up songs (here we go 'round the big baby jail, banging with our tin cups, here we go 'round the big baby jail, OOPS, dropped the so-ap.) until Jason arrived. I climbed out and told him I needed 10 minutes upstairs.

He started to ask something. "10 minutes." I interrupted.

I went upstairs and was asleep within five.

Everything was better when I woke up.

Random Monday Recipedown!

Did you know beans fit into a healthy lifestyle?

I did, because the large can of Pork & Beans told me so.

This statement was later corroborated by three other cans.

In fact, you can make beans an even more important part of an even more healthy lifestyle by adding onion (vegetable), ketchup (also a vegetable), mustard (yellow is the new superfood), maple syrup (part of a balanced breakfast) and lemon juice (totally counts as fruit).

Feel free to balance out all that crazy healthiness with some brown sugar. Go on. You deserve it.

Also: bacon.

Lots and lots of bacon.

Mmmmmm...bacon.

Heat oven to 350F and bake the shit out that bizzitch for an hour or so.

Then, in an effort to promote healthy serving sizes, take beans to picnic but leave serving utensils at home, forcing picnic-goers to use twee little plastic spoons to partake of the beany goodness.

Congratulations! You are an idiot.

Luckily, you are also delicious and do not require a spoon.

(Thanks to Paula Deen for the recipe. Thanks to donrockwell.com for the picnic. Thanks to My Own Damn Self for not having the sense God gave a fly.)

(Full set of picnic photos and other assorted weekend lameness up at Flickr. Like you care.)