Post-Nasal Block

I've been sitting here all morning -- yes, actually physically here, in this virtual white space of my publishing platform, it's kind of like Tron -- trying to think of something to write about. And having a bit of trouble. I'm tired, I'm congested, I've just discovered that this "parent-teacher conference" thing is just a thinly-veiled excuse for schools to force you to parent your own children for two days in a row, and somehow our personal math means two schools x two days off = THREE days of scheduling fuckuppery.

(And only ONE actual parent-teacher conference. RIDDLE ME THAT, expensive hoity private school. EXPLAIN YOURSELVES.)

Anyway.

It's punt time. I could use a little writing exercise, so how's this...YOU GUYS post questions/topics in the comments -- any old random topic you want! the more off-the-wall the better! -- and I will pick some and update this post each time I write a little bit about it. Live, in real-time! Or...you know, whenever I get around to it, in between the whole keeping-children-alive thing.

I have actually done a variation on this before, a long, looooong time ago, if you would like to refer to that post for inspiration. Yeah. That's dryer lint. And multiple paragraphs about a kitchen sponge. I'm hoping we can come up with something a little more interesting than that.

Okay. Go!

(Oh, God. Nobody's going to ask me ANYTHING, and it will all crickets and silence and I will not only be forced to come up with my own post topics ANYWAY, I will also have to spend mental energy on creating sockpuppet commenters to hide the fact that no one asked me anything and maybe I didn't think this through very well.)

***

Whoa. Well. Oh em gee and all that. I guess my little attempt to guilt y'all into participating worked better than I anticipated! While my plans to rapidly update "live, in real-time" did NOT work as well as anticipated, what with the immediate and simultaneous arrival of Thing One on the school bus and the wide-awake caterwauling of Thing Two from upstairs. So there was much lunching and some sobbing when I had to break it to Noah that his afternoon school is closed today.

"But whyyyy I miss my friends, Mommy? Whyyyy my friends are all gone, Mommy?"

"Because it's Staff Development Day, sweetie." 

"..."

"I know, dude. Laaaame."

THEN I got momentarily derailed by the sudden appearance of an itchy, bug-bite-like thing on my boob, which required much Googling. Turns out it's a bug bite. Okay then! Now we are ready!

First up, by nature of her being FIRST!!!1!!1 is Allisone's suggestion of irrational fears.

Yes. Look. I'm still very, very scared of volcanoes. I've told you this one before. It's nothing I made up to be cute or calculatedly quirky on my About Page: I once had a full-on anxiety attack at the Mirage in Vegas while watching the beginnings of the outdoor laser/lights/fountain volcano show they do. THE GROUND RUMBLED. IT WAS OMINOUS. I FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. IN FRONT OF COWORKERS. I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS ANYMORE.

And yes. It really is thanks to an episode of Reading Rainbow. Hill of Fire, to be exact. Farmer finds a bump in his field, bump gets bigger and bigger and then eventually erupts and like, I don't remember. Everybody dies. Some with puppies. I think I was cowering behind the couch by the end. The WORST parts, honestly, were the scenes with LeVar Burton at the site of an erupting volcano in Hawaii. I kind of had my first girl-boy crush thing with LeVar. (Or maybe second, after Magnum P.I.) I was also maybe seven. My memory put LeVar like, RIGHT THERE, on the very edge of the volcano's mouth, gazing into the fiery abyss with his usual non-threatening enthusiasm, but according to the PBS website he was actually 2,000 feet away. 

That night I had a dream that my class was going on a volcano-climbing field trip, and we were all lined up and tied together at the waist with rope, when the girl in front of me turned around and told me that we were SUPPOSED to wear closed-toe shoes, AMY, way to follow the RULES. I looked down at my feet and saw that I was wearing flip flops. Then I woke up. I spent the entire day after in my backyard, looking for bumps. And probably a lot of other days after that. 

Fun update to this story! I now follow LeVar Burton on Twitter, but have never worked up the nerve to tell him this story and/or ask if he knows how I can obtain a copy of that episode. For like, therapy, and stuff. 

Next!

***

Okay, next question, from Mary, who wants to hear how I discovered my love and/or talent (AIRQUOTES talent AIRQUOTES) for writing. 

I'm actually one of those cheesy Tracy-Flick types who ALWAYS knew exactly what she wanted to do. I was going to be a writer. I'm not sure I ever remember seriously wanting to be anything else, beyond the usual "actress/mommy/astronaut" phases. I wrote my first "book" when I was five or so. It was called "The Pink Bunny." My mom still has it. Aside from the questionable design choice of writing a book about a pink bunny on pink construction paper using primarily pink crayons, it honestly was not a terrible first effort.

Pink Bunny is lonely. Pink Bunny goes out to find her friends. She finds one (who I think was a purple cat or a blue bear or some other dubious, carnivorous companion for a bunny) and invites them over to her house. They eat popcorn. The end. I even made a cover and additional title page, asking my mom how to spell each and every word. "How do you spell 'written'? And how do you spell 'and'? And how do you spell 'illustrated' And how do you spell 'by'?" On and on, this went, and my mother never once let any trace of boredom or OMGness into her voice as she patiently went along with it.

I even made a back cover, where I drew long squiggly lines to represent the book's synopsis and publisher's information. 

I routinely started and abandoned book ideas all through elementary and high school -- usually whenever I came across a really cool notebook that I just HAD to write something in. Most of the results were predictably horrible, so, so horrible, but my parents never, ever stopped telling me that I was a good writer and to stick with it.

It also helped that my dad was a high school English teacher and our house was almost hoarder-levels full of every classic piece of literature in the WORLD, and I was encouraged to treat his office like my personal library, and also to write "book reports" for him on the books that his much-older students were reading.

Later, I started mixing in funny short stories based on people and teachers from school, or big controversial events that I thought needed to be diffused with a little humor. I'd pass the stories around and even the snotty popular kids would laugh and tell me that I was soooooo funny and should write a book or for a magazine and I would nod seriously and then go back to whatever crap-ass "serious" novel I was currently attempting to write longhand in an obnoxiously twee leather journal. 

In college I tried my hand at "real" journalism and absolutely HATED IT. I wasn't good at it. The style and form and pace didn't come naturally to me at all, and two weeks after landing a super-prized position at the Penn State student paper, I quit and switched my major to English, even though I had no idea what the hell I would do with it. But clearly, I was not cut out to be a writer after all. I guess maybe I would teach? Or be some kind of editor? Eh?

But! Then! (Oh my God, this story. It is so looooooong. Where's a goddamn editor when you need one?) (Oh. Right.) I took a literature course in American Comedy. Mark Twain. James Thurber. Erma Bombeck. Garrison Keillor. David Sedaris. While I was sort-of famous for being one of Those Students who regularly wrote A-level papers on books that I didn't even READ (hello, HEART OF DARKNESS, YOU ASSHOLE), I read every scrap of assigned reading for that class, and even all the short stories in our textbook that we never actually covered. I still HAVE all the books from that class, to this day. Changed my life, this realization that writing "funny" could still actually "count."

I toiled away for a few more years after that, more aborted novel attempts, some short-story and essay rejection letters, struggling to keep myself disciplined to KEEP WRITING even after a long day of editing investment advice and stock market commentary.

So I decided to maybe start a blog, just to have a dumping ground for my existing stuff and maybe a place to write something new, and just to see what would happen. The end!

(Still haven't written that blasted novel yet, though. Sigh.)

Surfacing

Update! I survived Swine Flu 2009. Or...Faux Swine Flu 2009, probably, since my fever never cranked up much past 99 degrees and I was feeling mostly human again by Sunday. (Although if you take my temperature on a perfectly healthy day you will likely get something like 96.6, so it's all relative, or at least that's what I was FOREVER trying to explain to the high school nurse, that 99.6 is actually 102.6 in Amy Degrees, or something. I wanna go home! I have cah-raaamps!) I survived Really Bad Cold With A Side Of Stomach Unpleasantries 2009.

Anyway. I owe my recovery solely to the fact that I actually took a goddamn SICK DAY. Like, I stayed home. In bed. In my pajamas and everything. I ate chicken soup for lunch, people. I outsourced everything child-related and watched 80s movies in the afternoon and took an honest-to-God nap.

Do you know the last time I did that? Sometime circa 2005, I think. I up and had a BABY last winter and still insisted on going downstairs and mouth-breathing at the toaster, making breakfast and feeding pets and answering emails, while a double ear infection leaked out of my eyeballs. All while insisting that I was Happy and Fine and Whoops, Walked Into The Wall Again.

So let me tell you, it took EVERYTHING in me to call down to Jason and beg him to please, pleeeease stay home. Even though I didn't really need to beg, of course -- TWO full anniversaries ago, a year where we both insisted that there would be no presents, he presented me with five of his vacation days. Five days where he would stay home and I could go shopping or see a horrible chick movie or visit a friend...or...you get the idea. Days off, of my very own.

Two years later, and Friday was the first time I ever cashed one in. What is wrong with me? Oh right, the whining and the martyrdom. I would miss them so. I would have nothing to write about without them! Except: I got sick one time and stayed in bed until I was better.

You see how that will simply not do. Quelle horreur!

Anyway, AGAIN, let's move on with our collective lives. What else happened...I lost some weight from all the illness, bought a killer pair of jeans and some new eyeshadow to celebrate, will probably have to return the killer jeans because my appetite is now all officially better, judging by the pile of fun-sized Snickers wrappers sitting here next to the computer. Noah seems to be doing really, REALLY well at his school programs, which means it's time for parent-teacher conferences to come and knock me off my optimistic ass this week, and also he has suddenly decided that he will indeed be a Good Boy, because if he is a Good Boy Santa will bring him a giant $200 dollhouse that he saw at the store and has not stopped talking about since. A $200 dollhouse that makes the small dollhouse we already got him for his birthday look like TOTAL CRAP.  He wants the other one. He wants both. He wants a city. A tiny town! Then he shall don his monster costume and terrorize all the little hand-painted wooden people on their eco-scooters or whatever the hell. I LOVE YOU, MOMMY. I'M BEING A GOOD BOY. JUST BECAUSE. YOU SEE? LOOK, I HUG YOU. HUG! IS IT CHRISTMAS YET?

Ezra, of course, wants a jet pack. Probably. I bet that's what he'd ask for, if he could talk. 

Or at least if he could talk that much, because he continues to freak me completely out, with the fact that he talks at ALL.  Babies who talk! And gesture! And sign! Instead of like, telepathy and smoke signals or however the hell we communicated with Noah for all those months. He's added "all done" to his vocal repertoire, along with "yeah yeah" and "uh oh" and "Dada." We're working on "oh wow" and "light", which are currently in the iffy category of Things One Parent Swore He Said But Have Not Yet Been Independently Verified. I am pretty sure that "mum" means "more."

I walked out of the room this morning and immediately heard his slappy little hands furiously crawling across the floor after me, and then some distressed bleating of "Mama! Mama! Mama!"

 

Yep. I feel much better now. Must've been that chicken soup.

Sick Day

I appear to have, as Sundry put it, a touch of the Hamthrax. Or some kind of flu. I went to bed with the beginnings of what I assumed was a cold and woke up in the grips of some horrible, lung-hacking, breath-sucking, stomach-purging, body-aching, I'm-hot-no-I'm-cold-so-cold-oh-my-God-get-these-covers-OFF-ME type of illness.

It's awesome, let me tell you. I managed to drag my diseased ass out of bed and onto the landing where I begged Jason not to go to work and leeeeeeeave me with The Children, Oh God, Not The Children. Then I went back to bed and moaned piteously for awhile. I'm still doing that, actually. Here:

meeeeehhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggghhhhhhhh

I know! I write just like I whine. It's a gift!

ANYWAY, so I had Other Plans for today's post -- another chapter of the When You Marry book, some discussion on what educational toys can be manipulated into saying profanity, maybe microwaving some Halloween candy just for the hell of it -- but alas. It's going to be another redirect day.

• I kind of wish I'd chosen a more interesting topic at the Advice Smackdown today, like somebody's sex life problems or major parenting dramz, but no. At some point this week I decided to devote an entire column to laundry detergent. Hmm.
• You could, alternately, read about all the really, really stupid stuff you do when you're newly postpartum and sleep-deprived over at Bounce Back. Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out a way to blame that time I got off the train at Newark instead of New York on my lousy children. I will keep trying, though.
• My second entry for the Slideshare MS Office Parenting Toolbox I Don't Remember The Official Name So I'm Including Them All is also up.
• Over at Mamapop, you know we're doing a little video roundtable thing? Where we all ramble about some pop culturery topic into our webcams and everybody else is so much funnier than me and I swear, I don't really wear as much eye makeup as it appears in these things. Past editions are here. I think the next one goes up on Monday. I hate my voice.
• Also, a Project Runway recap that I wrote (last night, so it's only half-infected with swine flu, though you might not want to touch the photos, which I added this morning) will go up at 2 pm ET. I would link to the specific entry here, but I cannot. Because you cannot link to the future. Yet. Oh, man. That's a good idea. I should totally write that down in my dream journal under Brilliant Ideas I Had Under The Influence Of Theraflu. 
• mmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaauuuuuuggggg, etc.

Five Toys That Are Made of Magic

FULL DISCLOSURE: These are not paid product reviews. If they were, I probably would not get paid, because I'm not sure toy companies appreciate being compared to monstrous black magic hell demons. The links are Amazon Associates, meaning if you decide to buy a monstrous black magic hell demon today, you can click through and reward me with a shiny 1/8th of a penny, or you can open up Amazon in a different browser tab and navigate to the toys yourself, muttering "fuck you, Amalah" the whole time. I am totally fine with either.

1. Hasbro Playskool Busy Ball Popper

The Busy Ball Popper works thusly: you drop some balls into a chute, press down on a lever and and the balls pop up and out and back down the ramps as a merry little circus theme plays. And your kids. Go. Apeshit. They lose their ever-loving goddamned minds over this thing. Babies, toddlers, preschoolers. Even a jaded emo teenager would be powerless to resist squealing and clapping and jumping up and down because OMFG BALLS. Do you remember that scene in Knocked Up where Paul Rudd wishes he liked anything as much as his kids liked bubbles? I don't think there's anything in my adult life that has brought me as much crazed joy as the Ball Popper brings to my children, and I'm including the battery-operated stuff in the nightstand. The Ball Popper is a breakdancing TiVo, an iPhone that shits unicorns, the last faint beacon of hope between this generation and a smoldering pile of war and toxic air and financial ruin.

Cost: $27.99  Alternatively, you could probably make your own with some bent PVC pipe and a hair dryer, but I'd be worried that my neighbors would see the effect it has on their children, and then they'd storm the house in the middle of the night, with torches and pitchforks and their best witch-burnin' stake.

2) Ocean Wonders Soothe & Glow Seahorse

Okay, so I know this thing doesn't really resemble a seahorse. I think it looks more like a Care Bear crossed with My Little Pony sperm, but NO MATTER. You press the beetle-like shell of a belly and it lights up and plays music, just like dozens of other toys that light up and play music, except that this one has apparently been bewitched with magical sleep powers. Yesterday I put a squalling, protesting baby in his crib while I went to retrieve some socks from a nearby laundry pile (shut it), and he kicked and cried and somehow sort of sat on the Spermhorse and the music played and he went into a dazed, silent, thumbsucking trance. Within 30 seconds, he was sound asleep. I honestly keep waiting for an indicator light to come on and tell me it's time to replace the vaporized opium packet located somewhere near the battery pack.

Cost: $14.99. Also available with an extra X chromosome.

3) Ocean Wonders Aquarium

Also bewitched with magical sleep powers of simulated ocean sounds, but be warned: It will eat through your soul at pretty much the same rate it eats through batteries. It will become the bulky, heavy bane of your existence as you feel compelled to drag it with you everywhere that your baby MIGHT POSSIBLY need to sleep, never once encountering a crib design that actually seems compatible with the straps on the back, leading to various precarious jury-rigged arrangements on Pack-n-Plays and relatives' nightstands, because your baby CANNOT SLEEP WITHOUT THE AQUARIUM. NO. NOT EVER. It will demand nightly sacrifices at 2 am of four fresh D batteries, and of course you have no choice but to placate the bubbling, lullaby-playing monster, because without it your baby might wake up at 2 am, or something.

Cost: $49.99, sucker.

4) Fisher-Price Laugh and Learn Learning Piggy Bank

You know a toy is educational when they manage to cram the word "LEARN" into the name twice. (Just wait until the Fisher-Price Busiest Busy Ball of Poppin' Pop Balls hits the market. It's gonna be awesome.) And yes, while both of my children were uniformly delighted by this toy, I must admit I am really including it because 1) its red curly tail looks EXACTLY like a baboon's ass, and 2) one of the song lyrics says "you can put coins in my slot and you can take them out." 

Cost: $18.72. Slot. Heh.

5) Goodnight Moon

In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon and there were three little bears sitting on chairs and one little boy on a big wheeled bike, and an elevator that flooded the hallway with blood and REDRUM REDRUM REDRUM...wait, what? My point is, kids really like this book. A lot.

Cost: $8.99, though don't be surprised to look around one day and realize that you own no less than seven copies of it, even though you don't actually recall buying it in the first place. You back away, a little unsettled. You trip over three or four copies of Guess How Much I Love You. The lights grow dim. And then the bunnytaur is upon you. Goodnight. NOBODY.

Three-eyed two-horned flying blue chocolate phobia eater

Much like last year, Noah refused to wear a costume to school. "NO COSTUME," he shrieked at the merest suggestion of dressing up. "JUST NOAH."

At one point he said he wanted to be the house from UP -- purposely choosing the most terrifying cinematic experience of the past year, as he howled in fear and had to be removed from the theater pretty much every time the house appeared on screen, and he had nightmares about floating houses for weeks. THANKS FOR ALL THE WHIMSY, PIXAR.

Although he's since worked through that fear pretty well -- at his request, we took him to see it again at a second-run drafthouse theater just a few weeks ago, and he loved it -- I was skeptical about this costume request. And indeed, when we did obligingly attempt to thoroughly traumatize him with a trial run of cardboard-box-with-balloons-attached, he would have none of it.

So on Friday, the day of his school parties, I distracted him with a waffle and shoved his green Steve-from-Blue's-Clues shirt from last year over his head.

 

A few minutes later he contemplated a sleeve, and sensing that trickery was afoot, made me promise that the green shirt was NOT A COSTUME. NOT A COSTUME, MOMMY. JUST NOAH.

All of his teachers assured me (when I gave them a heads up on the whole "oh hey, my kid is terrified of Halloween costumes" thing) that this is a pretty normal thing, both for this age and especially for the Kids Like Noah set. Most four-year-olds are still trying to figure out the distinction between real and pretend, while Noah needs and depends on his routines and rituals more than most. He hates -- HATES -- anything out of the ordinary or anyone acting the slightest bit "different." (Last week one teacher had her hair straightened and Noah burst into tears at the sight of her, because her hair wasn't "wiggly" anymore.) Class parties, field trips -- these aren't fun, they're stressful, even scary. 

And so Jason and I, FINALLY, ON SATURDAY, LIKE OH MY GOD WE'RE MAYBE CATCHING ON A LITTLE BIT, decided that we would not push trick-or-treating just because it's "fun" and "he'll like it once he does it" and...I don't know. All the reasons we always stupidly drag Noah to things that we THINK are part of a nutritious balanced childhood.

We told him we could go trick-or-treating if he wanted to, but yeah, he needed to wear a costume. We showed him the options (all leftover rejects from last year) and pretty much left it at that. He seemed quite okay with the idea of skipping it all together.

Then our doorbell rang, and our first trick-or-treaters arrived. Within 30 seconds Noah bolted upstairs and came down with a costume in his hand.

He's a monster. He says RAWR and he scares you when he says RAWR. Just FYI.

 

A boy's gotta do what a boy's gotta do for candy, apparently. I asked him what he wants to be next year and he said "nothing! I don't! I won't!" and collapsed in a dramatic, exhausted slump, like OH GOD, AGAIN? This would be much easier if you people would just hand over the chocolate. I have no more patience for you and your weird Earth ways.

 

Ezra has no opinion on the matter, but was just vaguely passively happy to be there. He would like to point out that many houses explicitly gave Noah "candy for [his] baby brother" and yet he has not seen a single bite. Not cool, dude. NOTCOOL.