Rumours

The last and only time I went to Blogher, I had a great time. Seriously fabulous. Then I came home and learned that a fairly weird rumor was making the rounds about me -- somebody said I said something hurtful about somebody else, and although I could never quite nail down the specifics of who and what and huh, what I was able to piece together was something like this:

Somebody wrote something on their blog, quoting something they'd supposedly overheard an anonymous "mommyblogger" say about another blogger. This quote, which may or may not have actually been said by ANYONE, or at the very least was taken ridiculously out of context, somehow got attributed to me and expanded offline to include all sorts of other hurtful stuff. It sure didn't sound like anything I would ever say (mostly because I DIDN'T SAY IT), but still. I think the crazier the rumor, the harder it is to sputter out a believable-sounding denial. I did deny it, of course, and apologized in case I had said something as a joke (hi, wine! lots of it!) that had gotten misunderstood and twisted around. The injured parties assured me they believed me, but still. It's an ooky feeling to realize people think You Might Be That Sort Of Person, especially after meeting you in real life, when you're supposed to be safe from misinterpreted tone of typing or spam-filtered emails or a forgotten winking emoticon.

Anyway, it was all very strange and annoying and hopefully I'm the only person who even remembers it by now. Which brings me to the point of this post:

Listen. If you hear some CRAZY PUNK ASS rumor that I went and broke our own dear IzzyMom's foot with a baseball bat over a discounted conference pass just so I could indeed go to Blogher this year after all, let me just say right up front:

No comment.

The Battle for the Hearts & Armpits of America

Or, When an Advice Smackdown Column Idea Goes Terribly, Terribly Wrong
Or Or, Why I Don't Do Product Reviews On My Personal Blog
Or Or Or, Jesus God, Do I Need To Get Out More Or What?

SECRET FLAWLESS: Oh, hi there! So I know you've always used Secret Platinum, and I bet you were a little thrown when you saw me all over the shelves, but let me explain. The whole "platinum" thing was just a ploy to make you think of jewelry, but like for your armpits, and it really worked for us, especially among girls who were dating fuckwit commitmentphobes. But now my marketing folk tell me that platinum actually gets pretty dinged up and scratched after awhile, and it's time for something new. Secret Sparkly Six-Carat Diamonds was the obvious first choice, but that tested badly with the focus groups, probably on account of that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. So instead I'm "Secret Flawless," complete with a botanical-themed label and package shape. I don't actually contain anything particularly botanical, but Research tells me that nature is super hot right now. Plus, 5 FLAWLESS BENEFITS! Five! I dare any deodorant to offer you more than that.

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: Hey, what's up?

SECRET FLAWLESS: What the...?

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: Oh, you noticed my new packaging! What do you think? Six essential benefits! Marketing really went above and beyond this time, I gotta say.

SECRET FLAWLESS: ...

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: Oh! Uh. Hey, five is a GREAT number, dude. People love the primes. What are your five flawless benefits, by the way?

SECRET FLAWLESS: Well, I've got "Skin Nurturing Conditioners."

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: Mmm. Interesting. We went with "Skin Caring Conditioners."

SECRET FLAWLESS: I'm "Smooth and Lightweight."

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: "Smooth and Silky Application." Check.

SECRET FLAWLESS: "Continually Renewing Fragrances."

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: Mmm, science-y. I've got a "Clean, Fresh Fragrance."

SECRET FLAWLESS: "Goes on Clear!"

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: Bitch, please. I'm "Little Black Dress Approved."

SECRET FLAWLESS: Well, and of course I offer "Strong Protection."

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: Wow, that's really informative. I offer "24-hour Body Responsive Wetness Protection" AND "24-hour Body Responsive Odor Protection.

SECRET FLAWLESS: I am soooo firing my marketing people.

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: That's probably a good call. Plus -- and I really hate to point this out, but from the top your cap kinda looks like a vag.

SECRET FLAWLESS: What? No! It's a leaf!

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: I'm just saying, man.

SECRET FLAWLESS: Whatever, don't even get me STARTED on all the weirdness going on with your label. A strapless dress with a belt and armpit-length gloves and Tracy Turnblad hair? You know most women have stopped playing with Barbies by the time they buy deodorant.

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: Okay, THAT'S IT. It's ON, motherfucker.

TOM'S OF MAINE: Hey. Heeeeeey. You guys. Cut it out! Stop fighting! You know, I bet if you would just cut all that aluminum out of your diets you'd be way less irritable. It's like, messing with your neurons and stuff, dudes.

SECRET FLAWLESS: ...

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: ...

TOM'S OF MAINE: Anybody up for a colonic? There's this great place that also sells smoothies...

*KICK PUNCH BLAM BLAM THUD*

DEGREE ULTRACLEAR: Fucking hippies, man.

SECRET FLAWLESS: God, I fucking smell like patchouli now, or something. Continually renewing fragrance, my ass.

Can't Blog, Wii-ing

I don't know if any of y'all have heard about this "Wii" thing -- I'm not sure how much "buzz" it gets from the "kids" on their "webbylogs" or anything -- but I have to say, Nintendo just might be on to something here. Illiterate people read it here first!

So Monday's entry aside, I really did buy Jason a birthday gift -- ye Gods, I am not that heartless -- and while this is definitively the final nail in the Not-Going-to-Blogher Coffin, the poor guy really did deserve a great big toy this year, and I don't think we're QUITE at the point where me taking a solo trip to California for four days would constitute a birthday present, IN SPITE OF me being completely annoying as all shit to live with.

(ALTHOUGH! Perhaps I could sell tickets for public performances of my hulking pregnant self awkwardly flailing around the room playing "tennis" while screaming THAT WAS IN, MOTHERFUCKERS at the bobbleheady figures on my TV. That might just finance the airfare.)

I am not really a big video game person. The last game I played was Grand Theft Auto III, and I only made it about halfway through the game before I realized I had to quit playing, since I found myself regularly planning my trajectory over highway medians and through that crowd of hookers while on my way to work. Yeah, that'll shave a few minutes off my commute for sure, especially if I can get some sweet air coming out of that aqueduct.

Hopefully it won't get so out-of-hand this time, provided I don't lose too badly at Wii Bowling tonight and like, break a lamp over Jason's head. Luckily, I have REALLY GOOD REASON to go outside occasionally.

Oh, it's so terrible for the lawn and yet so very, very good for everything else.

Dear Jason, I Bring You the Gift of HYSTERICAL PREGNANT NESTING. You're Welcome.

For Jason's birthday, I made him finally replace that godawful Eyeball Nipple Lamp in the living room. Happy birthday, darling! Don't electrocute yourself, or else you might miss next year's birthday, when I make you reface the kitchen cabinets.

Installing this absolutely unremarkable lamp required two (2) trips back to the hardware store for missing parts, three (3) hours spent with the lamp hanging two feet down from the ceiling by a small mess of wires while we wondered how soon an electrician could come over and bail us out of this nightmare, and five (5) yards of embroidery thread, which was used in strange ways that I can't even adequately describe, except that we ended up having to like, WEAVE screws through holes, and that sounds like a dirty joke if you are Amish. Weave those screws, baby. You sure know how to churn my butter.

Now, if you come over to our house, I would like to ask that you refrain from standing on the coffee table to poke the New Lamp (I know, it's always so tempting), and also maybe from sitting on the couch and blowing really hard at it, because one set of screws we used is too long and the lamp kind of...wobbles. A lot.

I've also found another fixture that I like better than this one, but I figure we have a couple months before the stray knots of embroidery thread that are still tied around a bunch of internal screws catch on fire. Perfect! Now I don't have to make plans for our wedding anniversary.

Graduation Day

Noah's official graduation from Early Intervention came in the form of a phone call one morning to inform me that the building had no electricity, therefore his mock preschool group session was canceled. After the results of the assessment testing, we had already agreed this was to be his final class -- I was going to provide the store-bought, peanut-free snack and I was planning to write a thank-you note for all of the therapists, perhaps with a little photo of Noah tucked inside, if that wouldn't be too presumptuous to assume that anybody cared enough to remember Case File Blond Dimpled Boy #2980542618.

After I expressed my understanding of the power situation and the last-minute cancellation, I was then told that Noah's spot in the class had been filled for the next week. There would be no make-up class, no snack, no three cheers for the Little Toddler Who Could Talk Now. We were done.

The week before, another mother was reeling from her daughter's recent diagnosis of apraxia from Children's Hospital. She'd known for awhile it was apraxia, she told us, but figured she was being neurotic and spending too much time on the Internet. So when they had their appointment at Children's she was determined to keep her mouth shut and never mentioned her suspicions. Sure enough, she was right all along.

Another was worried that her former micropreemie's assessment scores were indicating that he was on the autism spectrum, something she'd also been secretly fretting about for months now. I sat with them, feeling like a total shit, since I'd so brightly burst into the room that day with the news that Noah was no longer eligible for services, isn't that great? They of course clapped their hands and hugged me, because it WAS great -- only a nanny eyed me with suspicion, declaring that her charge talked waaaay more than Noah, and spoke more clearly at that, so why wasn't anyone talking about ending HER services? But still.

We always join the class at the very end for a final circle time and goodbye song -- we usually arrive right when the children are cleaning up after snack, and I'm always charmed by the sight of Noah slowly and seriously carrying his plate and juice cup over to the plastic bin, and then his giant smile when he turns and sees me standing there. There was a new little girl in the class, and her mother had spent the session observing. I recognized her drained, tired face. Her daughter had screamed the entire time. She'd refused to join in, she'd thrashed and sobbed. Her mother couldn't comfort her and there was a telltale red patch on her cheek, likely the result of a toddler head butt.

They sat next to us on the mat, the mother engaged in full-contact wrestling to keep her terrified toddler on her lap, trying to offer soothing reassurances through her clenched teeth. She noticed me watching her and apologized. For what, I have no idea.

"It's okay, I know." I told her. "I was YOU."

I hastily tried to tell her about it all. About the time I broke down in tears at Lunch Bunch. About feeling like a freak at the one place you weren't supposed to be a freak. About the time that little girl screamed at Noah, demanding an apology for something or other, while he sat there silently, frantically signing SORRY over and over, wondering why she didn't understand him. And about the time I broke down in tears after getting Noah's first glowing behavior report from a teacher.

"So it gets better?" she asked. I noticed her mascara was slightly smudged.

"SO MUCH better." I promised.

I was looking forward to talking to her again. I hope it gets better for her. For everybody.

***
We were going through a fat stack of memory sticks this week -- all our precious family memories, still housed as zeros and ones on a bunch of incredibly tiny bits of plastic -- and I came across this one from late last summer. Noah is not quite two.

There it all is. The gibberish, the lack of sounds, the singsongy attempts to mimic the sounds of speech with just a single syllable. Everything I wrote on our Early Intervention application. Everything I didn't really want to acknowledge or talk about -- if you look through the archives of this site you'll find I was much more eager to post videos when I'd managed to coax a word or two out of him. It was easy to brush aside -- LOOK at him, he's still a BABY -- but at the same time I could never quite brush it all the way aside. His playmate could talk; Noah could hum.

Untitled from amalah on Vimeo.

Whenever I write posts like this, everyone rushes in to reassure me that I did the right thing. Which, dude, you don't need to tell me twice or 78 times. But I know. I did the same thing last week, when my friend mentioned the apraxia diagnosis, which usually isn't discovered until the child is three years old. Her daughter is two. Right there, I said, is the reason she's going to be fine. You got her answers and now you'll get her help and you're ahead of the game.

Noah is, hands down, a complete Early Intervention success story. We're still working on his articulation, but really, he's progressing and catching up at an admirable rate on his own. So it's time to send him off into the world of "typical" kids, since he tends to be the odd little duck on the playground who clams up when kids ask him his name or age and prefers to invite them to play by  leaning in close to their faces...and roaring at the top of his lungs. "Chase me!" is the translation. "Let's play monsters! I like you!" I used to rush in to interpret his signing for other kids, and now I hang back, nervously letting playground law sort it out, although I'm always sort-of delighted to see how many kids-- after a moment or two of shock --look at Noah's beaming face and laugh, and roar back.

They speak his language now.

22ish Weeks or Maybe 23

Either way, I really need to work on my neck fierceness.

And yes, babyproofing, which gets pointed out every time I post a photo with these shelves and mess o' wires in the background. It's like some of you think I'm an idiot, or something. I don't know where you ever got that idea.

Tivo is still breech, which he demonstrates every day with vicious kicks to the cervix and...uh, whatever else is down there, and jeez, I prefer getting pummeled in the lungs, all things considered. We can watch him kick and squirm under my skin, something I never get tired of seeing but I think it creeps Jason out a little bit. Or maybe it's just because I point to it and say SEE THAT? IT'S COMING, GO MOVE SOME FURNITURE ALREADY AND THEN DRIVE MY ASS TO IKEA.

I'm finally gaining weight at the recommended rate, I think, thanks to a daily intake of multi-thousand-calorie burritos with extra hot sauce and chocolate milkshakes, which are the only things that reliably sound delicious. Just for the love of God, don't talk about toast. Toast and I broke up. Similar to my breakup with tequila a few years ago. You don't need the details. It's best if we all just move on with our lives and besides, I have tortillas now.

Also on notice: eggs, swiss chard, chicken in non-nugget form, any food that is not a burrito or a black olive.

Now Available From Stephen King: PETTING ZOO

OH BUT FIRST...

Is there anyone here with a potty-trained kid? Anyone?

Me! Me! Meeeeeee!

It's glorious. Or maybe it's just a novel new party trick right now, like my double-jointed ring fingers -- one of those things I think is glorious and awe-inspiring and everybody else just secretly looks away and hopes I'll stop talking about pee-pee in the potty already and OH MY GOD STOP BENDING YOUR FINGERS LIKE THAT.

(Exhibit A!)

Everything just sort of...clicked this weekend, at some point on Sunday. Tab A into Receptacle B = high-fructose corn-syrup bribery. Eureka!

And not a moment too soon, since on Saturday Noah kicked me in the chest and emitted this otherworldly howl of rage -- he sounded, incidentally, EXACTLY like those things from I Am Legend, which we watched on Friday night after arguing for a week about the premise. The DVD arrived in the mail on Monday and Jason claimed it was about aliens, while I said no, it was some Castaway-type meditation piece on survival and isolation and Jason continued to insist that no, it's aliens and shit gets blown up and I said fine, we'll watch it provided nothing bad happens to Will Smith's dog.

We were both way off and our super-low expectations were rewarded with getting the ever-loving shit scared out of ourselves, and I kept a throw pillow on top of my head for a good 20 minutes at one point, which is to say: two thumbs up! Except don't talk to me about the ending, because I have a very complicated alternate ending that so totally could have worked and made everything way happier, but Jason informs me that I am missing the POINT and the SYMBOLISM, but I really do have a pathological need for happy endings and this is why I am not ever invited to test screenings.

POST-SCREENING SURVEY, STEPHEN KING'S THE MIST

AMY: What the fuck! WHAT THE FUCK! He could have rolled down the window and heard the cars! I could hear the cars! You don't just fucking shoot people before ROLLING DOWN THE WINDOW TO CHECK FOR CARS. Everybody knows this. Go back and reshoot the ending and have him roll down the window, Jesus Christ.

POST-SCREENING SURVEY, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

AMY: But...is the cat okay?

POST-SCREENING SURVEY, GONE WITH THE WIND

AMY: A great film, but probably would have been better if Rhett knocked on the door a minute later to come back to Scarlett after all, perhaps with Bonnie in his arms who was not actually dead but just lost in the mist all this time.

Anyway. Noah is no longer screaming like the viral undead from Mars. After a few bad hours during which I did waver and wonder if I should bust out the Huggies again after all, I did the smartest thing ever. I abandoned him to the care of our babysitter (who I believe Noah worships as a deity) for a few short hours. She informed him that yeah, dude, sorry, I'm also part of the Evil Toilet Agenda and expect you to use it. And that pretty much was the end of any form of resistance. We are fully potty-operational here, people, and also covered in bright-colored fingerprints from hard candy shells that fucking DO melt in your hands AND in your big-boy pants, not like I've figured out how that one happened yet.

SPEAKING OF JASON...

(Shut up, I mentioned him a couple tangents ago, I'm sure of it.)

We did Father's Day up RIGHT, y'all, what with the trip to Home Depot where Noah had a harrowing encounter with an automatic flush toilet (oh God, okay, I know, I'm dropping the topic now) and then to a petting zoo where I had a near heart attack because Noah got within six feet of a fucking GOOSE and then we took a tractor ride where fucking OSTRICHES came up to us and children were TOUCHING the ostriches and oh my God, we all could have had our eyeballs pecked out and I threw all the contents of our souvenir cup of grain pellets off the tractor in a desperate attempt to get the fucking ostriches AWAY and honestly I never knew that I had such a deep fear of ostriches. But I do. Huh.

And I was not alone in my fear, either, as another mother was equally as terrified by the giant pecking peck monsters who were trying to nose around in a little boy's Thomas the Tank Engine backpack while the guide explained that ostrich brains are actually smaller than their eyeballs and when our husbands had our toddlers off feeding the things or something (I couldn't look, I COULDN'T LOOK), she quietly whispered, "I'm gonna go eat an ostrich burger after this, motherfuckers."

I wish I'd gotten her email address. We had a lot in common, I think.

Post-Ostrich Encounter. Noah also just touched a filthy camel. Was promptly bathed in Purell minutes later by killjoy mother who was convinced every animal here was going to eat us.

Filthy I say! And what, you don't think those souvenir grain pellets don't taste just like human flesh? Because I totally heard this one kid say they tasted like chicken and YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS and also, ew, please don't let your kids eat souvenir grain pellets, people. I know those sort of things can happen really quickly when you aren't watching them but you know what else happens really quickly?

OSTRICH ATTACKS. THINK ABOUT IT.

Don't. Even. Get. Me. Started.

Okay, so that's kind of pretty cute.

AHHHHHHHHHHH DEMONIC SHEEP CLIMBING OUT OF ITS PEN WITH ITS CLACKY CLOVEN FEET AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

The kind of wildlife encounter I can get behind.

Happy Father's Day, Jase. Thank you for not letting that ostrich peck my baby to death. I'm sorry the words, "Stop that, Noah, you're scaring Mama" have to come out of your mouth as often as they do, but thank you for noticing.

PopPop & His Boo Boo Hurt All Better, reports area toddler

Oh, Internet Peoples. Thank you for everything this week, the comments and emails and positive granola mother earth vibes or whatever it was y'all sent out. You guys are the wind beneath my wonderwall, or something.

My dad is FINE. Once again he pulled through something that could have very well killed him in record time and was eating hamburgers within 24 hours and bemoaning the lack of extra ketchup. He was discharged late yesterday because of a never-ending string of last-minute MRIs and EKGs and heart-monitory things in futile attempts to figure out why he fell (we still don't know, which is very frustrating, but I'm hoping one of the bazillion follow-up visits and consultations we've had to schedule will eventually reveal something). But for now, he is home and healing and complaining of nothing but a headache (you know, from all the SKULL FRACTURES AND WHATNOT) and that TiVo cut off the ends of all his Phillies games while he was gone.

My mother originally ordered me NOT to visit, on account of my delicate with-child condition, and I immediately pish-poshed her and tossed myself and my kid in the car and drove up there, where I proceeded to live on pure adrenaline for two days before crashing in the aisles at Target, clutching my parents' grocery list and nearly coming to tears over the stress of choosing Band-Aids for other people when you don't know what kind of Band-Aids they like, and when did fucking Band-Aids become so complicated? Flexible Fabric? Sheer? Antibacterial? Activ Flex? Do they prefer the 40-pack with the oversized wound patches? Or the 80 pack with those tiny little square ones that are probably only useful to people who routinely stab themselves in the thigh with freshly-sharpened pencils? Spongebob?

By the time I got to the cough drops and discovered that Halls now come in no less than 17 different varieties and then audibly yelped after Baby Tivo kicked me square in the cervix for the hundredth time that day, I realized that I was, maybe, just a tad useless and a little more delicate than I cared to admit.

Let's see, what else...oh, so while I've always figured that Noah would prefer if there was not a public blow-by-blow record of his potty training, I would like him to commend him for thoroughly proving my mother-in-law (and her Many Theories of Potty Training and How Easy It Is) wrong. I mean, sure, I would have LOVED to have gotten him back from her care on Tuesday completely trained, but I did get a tiny bit of perverse pleasure from the shell-shocked look on her face over the Crazy Delicious Stubbornness she witnessed that day. And then I innocently shrugged and said I was surprised, because he'd been doing SO WELL with me and it was just happening pretty NATURALLY, much like she sat on my couch once and shrugged and said she didn't understand why I was having such problems with breastfeeding, it always went SO WELL and happened so NATURALLY for her.

Wow. I sure do hold on to things sometimes, don't I?

(For the record, we went the cold turkey to cloth pants route, with disposable training pants for naps and bedtime only, a complicated give-and-take reward system involving a plastic baggie of spare buttons and chocolate, and an epic battle of wills. So basically, Potty Training in Less Than a Day, rewritten to be the slightly more accurate and yet no less optimistic Potty Training in Less Than the Rest of Your Life.)

I am now going to sleep. For awhile or so. In my own bed, free from the fear of my bedmate wetting it (my mother-in-law DID do a pretty good job with Jason, I'll give her that).

Coping

Thank you all so much for the prayers and kind thoughts. Noah and I got here yesterday afternoon and he promptly peed through every blessed pair of pants I packed. I've done laundry twice already, although one of those times may have been more because I forgot to add detergent. Maybe. I cop to nothing.

I got to visit with my dad last night -- he's conscious but not feeling super great (NEWSFLASH! NO WAY! WOW!), and looks like he and the pavement got into quite the barfight.

He's still in the ICU and undergoing a zillion tests to determine the cause of his fall (he didn't trip, it was more of blackout and a dead drop to the ground), but a CAT scan revealed that the bleeding in his brain is NOT getting worse. So. There is that, and y'all feel free to cue up the ER theme music in your heads right now. Doo doo doop doop, or however it goes.

I made some fabulous ratatouille for dinner last night, and then we ate the hell out of some ice cream. Noah climbed on my head at 6 am this morning and Baby Tivo is present and accounted for. We're heading back to the hospital now for what is sure to be a full wonderful day of cafeteria cuisine, weak coffee and inappropriate gallows humor from me.

My mother-in-law, meanwhile, who has been talking trash about how her boys were potty-trained by 12 months old since Noah's first birthday, will be handling that side of things today. It's like I had some master evil plan that is all coming to fruition, or something. I mean, it's a little more head-injury-ry than I would have liked, but still. HERE'S MY KID AND A COMPLETELY INADEQUATE SUPPLY OF DRY PANTS, HAVE FUN GOTTA RUN HA HA HA.

I just got a call from my mom and it wasn't a detailed description of the 27 little blue outfits she bought over the weekend, oh no, it was about my dad, who fell outside their house last night and is now in the ICU with a brain bleed and broken occipital bones and they think it's his heart but they don't know yet and anyway, I'm putting Noah in the car and driving up to PA just as soon as I can find my keys and maybe some clean underwear. PA is fancy like that, you know.

In other news, Noah is willing to keep his pants dry in exchange for spare buttons from my sewing kit. If that doesn't cheer you up a tiny bit even after the words "ICU" and "brain bleed" then I suggest you just start hitting the hooch right now.