Cribbage

Also in the Stash of Regrettable Childhood: my security blanket, or as I called it, my Cribby.

Everybody, meet Cribby. Or...what's left of it.

Cribby was, at one time, a fitted crib sheet, though the elastic has been gone for about as long as I can remember, and even photos of me with Cribby as a little girl show that it was pretty much a shredded pile of a sadness bowl since very early on too. I don't recall how old I was when I finally allowed my mom to put it away for good, though I know there were at least a couple aborted attempts that ended with me walking into her room and shamefully requesting it back. Cribby didn't come on my honeymoon or anything though, so go me. 

Today, Cribby reminds me of a Regretsy-worthy scarf offering: 

   

I would totally try to sell it for $50 as a FELTED VINTAGE COTTON HAND-KNOTTED AVANT-GARDE OOAK HIPSTER DOUCHEBAG NECKERSCARF if it weren't for a couple mysterious reddish stains on one edge: I am pretty sure biohazards will get you negative feedback on Etsy. 

(I had a back-up Cribby for when the A-squad one was in the wash. It held up a little better, and has just as many modern-day fashion possibilities:

 

WHIMSICLE VINTAGE CAPESHAWL HAND-TORN WITH LOVE, AGED SALIVA GIVES UNIQUE CRUNCH/SHAPE/STRUCTURE, MULTIPLE HOLES ALLOW MULTIPURPOSE STYLING.)

I suppose, now that I've finished mocking them, I can throw them both out. I mean, it's one thing for my mom to save them, but me? Well. Yeah. That's weird. I'll just...put them back in a shopping bag for now, though. Until trash day, or something. I might need to think about it a little more.

 

By the way, Ezra would like to introduce you to Curtain.

   

Don't worry, baby. I'll hold onto Curtain for you someday too. 

Old Hat, Cont'd.

Camp, day two. 

Huddled at B&N again with, unfortunately, no wallet. Hiding behind a...pillar thing so the Imaginary Authority Figures don't catch me poaching free wifi despite not purchasing anything. Though I would love to purchase something! Maybe one of those Twitter marketing books could tell me how to beg for spare change. If every Rockville-based follower stopped by with a nickel I'd be halfway to a latte right now! Where are you assholes? God, but social media is useless. 

I've now been officially singled out as an Old Timer at the drop-off and pick-up. Mothers are all but sidling up to me all, word on the street is that you've been here before and know a few things about this here special ed jungle. Can I get a preschool recommendation in exchange for a playdate? Who's your occupational therapist? Come on, man, help me out, I'm dying over here.

It's funny, but true. I apparently now give off the vibe of someone who knows what they're doing. Maybe I seem less...insane or high-strung or HI HI HI LIKE ME LIKE MEEEEE than I used to, or because I know all the therapists and counselors and even a few of the volunteers by name. Maybe it's just because I already know how to get that stupid fence open in the front of the building, no, here, you gotta lift that thingie like this.

Or maybe it's because Noah is now running around with his confidence going at full-tilt, laughing, riding bikes, talkingtalkingtalking, doing everything that everybody else wishes their kid was doing, everything that he WASN'T doing this time last year. A year of bumbling and fumbling has made us wise, completely by accident. 

This morning I shook hands with a mother who has a brand-new PDD-NOS diagnosis and no earthly idea what to do next about it. She moaned out loud when she heard that Noah issues presented before he even turned two because her child is five already and they just found out and have lost so much time and I saw that overwhelmed, panicked look her eyes and I had no idea what to say. 

So I said that I'd heard Noah and her son played very nicely together yesterday, and the words were only halfway out of my mouth before she asked if we could have a playdate. I said that would be awesome, let's definitely do that. I smiled, and so did she. 

 

 

 

Old Hat

I just dropped Noah off at his first day of summer camp, which is in his old preschool classroom, with his old preschool teacher, along with three or four of his old preschool classmates. None of which helped the case I was trying to build all last week about preschool being over and it not being my fault that I couldn't take him to preschool, I'm not saying this to be mean, Noah, there really just isn't any school but hey, thanks for letting me know that you truly would rather do anything else in the world than hang out with Mommy for a few measly days. 

Last summer, Noah immediately became somewhat infamous at this camp for wedging his entire body into a cubby and refusing to come out for much of the first day. 

Today, he and I got into a spirited discussion in the car about how five was his favorite number, and how five had been MY favorite number as a little girl too, and whether it was okay that we both had the same favorite number, because he didn't think so. I was like, whatever, I claimed five as my favorite number back in 1981, so like, DIBS DUDE.

When we arrived, Noah raced down to the classroom at top speed, shrieking, "HEY EVERYBODY, IT'S OKAY! I AM HERE NOW!" at a group of nervous-looking first-time campers. I tried to smile at all the nervous-looking first time camper-parents, while reciting "don't be a jackass don't be a jackass" to myself over and over again. 

His teacher fretted over the fact that she couldn't remember where Noah's cubby had been during the school year and whether that would bother him. It didn't. Nor did the sight of new teachers and kids and different toys and switched-around furniture. There was a moment of hesitation when his visual schedule was missing, but he quickly decided that a day/month/season/weather chart hanging by the chalkboard was good enough. I'm not sure I've ever seen him so happy. 

So now I'm camped out at a Barnes & Noble, frantically trying to cram six hours of work into the...less than three, that I actually have. I'm sitting next to the business section and I can see a good three or four substantially-sized books about marketing on fucking Twitter, are you kidding me, for real. Mamapop has a brand-new awesome design that I can't even see yet because something something name servers DNS propagation something talkyspeak. 

It's okay, though. I'm going to pick him up in less than three hours and hear all about his day at Speech Camp. I'm going to hear all about his day at Speech Camp because Noah rocks at Speech Camp.

 

(Also at berry-picking and big-red-barn-seeing-omg-Mom-FINALLY.) 

Sentimental Hogwash

(I promise I'll go easy on the scanning stuff from now on, as I'm sure the amusement level is running down with each subsequent post, like yes, yes, we get it, Amy, you were a kid once! Like everybody else! And you said/wrote/wore the darnedest things, etc., ad nauseam, blah blah scancakes.)

(Naked Old Man Monkey Baby says BITCH PLZ SHE'S GOT NOTHING ELSE TO TALK ABOUT.)

 
 

I'm about Ezra's age here, give or take a few months, going apeshit over...something. I do wish my mom had saved those pants, because they are outstandingly awful. I would make my children wear them ALL THE TIME.

There you have it: Definitive proof that the mailman is NOT Ezra's mother.

And here is definitive proof that I was an obnoxious little overachiever, even in preschool:

 

STRAIGHT O's, BITCHES. And two O-plusses, for "Sense of Humor" and "Attention Span." The teacher notes, though, after "Works and Plays With Will Others" that I "sometimes becomes emotional during free playtime. She is sometimes very sensitive about what others say or do."

(Translation: She's a tattle-tale who cries a lot.)

A couple years later my concerns about other people's behavior extended to the afterlife, as I became quite nosy about the state of everyone's eternal soul:

 

Because Valentine's Day is the perfect occasion to ask Did you give your heart to Jesus? Well, did you? 

(Note: I wrote this valentine for my MOM. Who like, drove me to church and read the Bible to me and stuff. BUT YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO SURE.)

Then again...

 

Another card for my mother. Poetry, crosses and wild...loins, all together. So one day if you come to this site and find nothing but long-winded quasi-religious manifestos about sex, salvation and Crayola-funded mind control you can at least say you saw it coming. 

 

Yes. Tooooootally saw it coming.

Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Girl

 Today's childhood relic, scanned and color-corrected and offered up for your mockery, is the very first thing I ever wrote in my life. I believe I have mentioned its existence before, though it turns out I had the title and some very important plot points wrong, and now here it is: Half short story, half children's book, half early experiment in Seinfeldian-like narrative structure of NOTHING HAPPENING, and yes, I know I've included too many halves there but I'm leaving it like that.

After the jump, I present the newly remastered and out-of-my-mom's-hope-chest edition of The Little Bunny Rabbit, by Amy, age 5. 

Christian Side-Part

Among the many things my mom held onto: School photos. Lots and lots of school photos that FOR SOME REASON I CANNOT FIGURE OUT never made it into frames on the wall or hell, even tacked to the fridge with a magnet, because here they are years later still in their envelopes. Most of them didn't even get the wallet-sized ones separated from the 5x7s. 

(Sort of like Noah's school portrait this year, which I only ordered because I thought they were funny, because I completely forgot about picture day and sent him to school in desperate need of a haircut [and probably a bath], in a soccer jersey because it was the only clean shirt I could find. Now I have two dozen of these studies in ragamuffinism and zero idea what to actually do with them:)

 
(CATCH WORLD CUP FEVER!)

(OR ELSSSSSSE!)

Anyway, now on to the really embarrassing shit.

 

This is the only photo I can for-sure identify what grade I was in -- sixth -- simply because of the accompanying class photo with me wearing the same outfit. It was a dress. A floofy full-skirted one, with matching tights. I remember picking it out at TJMaxx and thinking it was a terrific find, because do you see the black check? BLACK. Black = cool. Black = cool enough to totally negate the fact that I was a 12-year-old girl basically wearing an overgrown five-year-old's sailor dress. I am not kidding, I really totally thought the black check made this dress kind of hardcore and felt like getting my mom to buy it for me meant I was getting away with something.

Clearly, I still had a lot to learn in sixth grade.

 

Which...okay, still working on all that learning, and on fashion horizons beyond the sailor dress. I THINK this photo is from seventh grade, but I cannot say for sure. I am at least allowed to wear dangly earrings -- that and the braces mean I'm at least 13, and therefore a WOMAN, a woman who obviously has better things to do than style BOTH sides of my hair. Like figure out which fingers I should put an inexplicable number of cheap rings on, probably.

 

GAH. 

Okay, maybe eighth grade? I'm really not sure. The non-dangle earrings suggest THIS could be seventh grade, but the progression of one-sided poof in my hair tells me I'm older than in the last one. By the time I graduated high school my curling iron and I needed two hours to get ready in the morning -- right before I got introduced to hot rollers in college, which, man. Those were some crazy days. CRAZY CRAZY DAYS.

I only have vague memories of that sweater, but I can tell you for absolute sure that I stuffed my bra special for this picture.

   

You know, I have to hand it to myself: I found a look I thought worked and stuck with it. The left side of my hair could go fuck itself, basically, I was simply NOT going to devote the same kind of time and hair spray on it that I devoted to the right side. 

I remember really liking this photo, actually, because my hunter-green sweater looked black instead. And BLACK = STILL COOL. This photo reflected the darkness, the edge the art, the secular music I only pretended I was allowed to listen to.  

(A trick I'm still doing, occasionally. I never listened to Whitesnake, nor have I ever seen that Tawny Kitaen video outside of a Pop-Up setting. I just read a lot of Wikipedia.) 

(It's Jason's birthday today. When he met me I looked like these photos. Though to be fair he had a regrettable hair part of his own. But still! Happy birthday, Mr. Sainted Selective Memory.)

For Posterity's Sake

We visited my parents this weekend. I haven't really written about them in awhile, I know -- it's easier to report on a crisis than to write entry after entry about a parent's slow decline. But I'll skip ahead to the conclusion of a lot of stuff from this year: My parents are getting ready to sell their house and move into some kind of senior/convalescent/assisted care home. And now I'll gloss over THAT and skip ahead to the bright side of things, which is that my mother's attempts to purge their house of as much clutter and stuff as possible mean that I came home with a HUGE BAG of hideously embarrassing artifacts from my childhood and adolescence to share with you guys. 

There was also an ex-boyfriend sighting and if you're the type who likes to keep a mental score when it comes to these things, let me assure you that I TOTALLY WIN, OH MY GOD.

Bright side! We shall look at the bright side! 

But before I start firing up the scanner so y'all can make fun of my hair and I dunno, I think there's some poetry or some stories about unicorns in there too, please allow me to poke loving fun at my freak children one more time.

 

Noah (pictured above as part of his Portraits In Irony, I'm Not Tired series), has decided that his name is now Noah Yoda. And that Noah should always be spelled N-W-A-H, and he is going to sign your Father's Day card that way, even though he hasn't quite mastered the W so his signature looks something like this: N /\/\/\//\/\/\/AH. But dammit, he is going to spell his name semi-phonetically from now on and there's nothing you can do about it, except curse yourself and your nagging mom-voice and your remnant of Philly twang that probably created this NoWAH mess in the first place.

Also, he will only pose for photos wearing a hat. He is willing to use a very loose definition of a "hat", however.

 

So. There is that.

And now Ezra, who is officially 20 months going on 17 years old. 

 

That's the tubing from my dad's oxygen machine. And the "I know I'm not supposed to touch this" side-eye.

 

And now the "people are saying 'no' to me" scowl of WTF.

 

OoooooohSNAP YOU GUYS.

 

But I'm stillsocuteright?

 

Moving on from the tubing, he's now surveying the room for choking hazards or things to start fires with.

(By the way, his hair only looks like that because he smeared macaroni and cheese in it. I mean, obviously.)

 

MINIATURE CARS AND DISTRACTED ADULTS! NOM NOM NOM NOM

 

Uh-oh. I've been spotted.

 

Willjustusebothhandslikethis.
 
My mom -- along with my baby blankets and junior high class portraits and all of my grandmother's Depression Glass -- passed along the advice to poke some airholes in a box and keep Ezra in there until he's 25. I asked her if maybe Gladware would work too. 

 

(Oh yes, this portrait's a keeper.)

End and Beginning

Indulge me, you guys.

For lo, my memory card reader has been lost for many, many days, trapping so many lovely photos from last week on my camera, because I am dumb and forgot that you can just stick a USB cable directly in the camera, like oh. Right. Technology! What a country!

Anyway, I'm on a very tight deadlines everywhere today because I promised to take Noah to see Toy Story 3 after lunch. He is LIVING for after lunch right now. It is the center of his entire UNIVERSE right now. He cried this morning when he realized that he could not simply eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for breakfast and thus trick the space-time continuum into suddenly being "after lunch." 

(He JUST became aware of the movie's existence earlier this week. He saw a commercial for it and seemed to think, at first, that it was one of the previous installments, but then that big number three appeared under the logo and he was all, "THREE? THREEEEEE?" He's been bouncing off the walls ever since. I foresee a lot of super-geeky camping out in lines in this fanboy's future.)

Anyway! Here are some pictures from Noah's end-of-school parties. They're really boring. But also cute. YOU WILL LOOK AT THEM. DON'T MAKE ME GET OUT THE SLIDE PROJECTOR.

 

Attempting a craft at the first party. I look confused. This is probably accurate.

 

Modeling his handiwork. 

 

Performing a skit about...something....at the second party. Not pictured: Amy, looking confused.

 

Last summer, this program succeeded in getting Noah to wear a hat.

 

Hats! We already wore a hat today! NOW WE ARE WEARING MASKS ON OUR FACE.

 

And sitting on chairs, looking huge and grown-up and so very deserving of an afternoon off with Mommy to see Toy Story 3.

 

P.S. OH HEY THERE YOU THINK ANYONE WILL NOTICE IF I SNEAK UP HERE AND STEAL NOAH'S CHAIR WHILE RIPPING DOWN THIS BANNER ALL CASUAL-LIKE? WHAT UP LADIES I AM SO SMOOTH.

Summer School

One of the things we were told to "work on" this summer was...shaving cream. No! Really. We have a note from a therapist and everything.

OBVIOUSLY, a lot of Noah's sensory/tactile issues have improved dramatically over the past year. He'll walk barefoot in the yard, play in the sandbox, get dirty at the playground -- sometimes he'll even fingerpaint! Imagine that! But shaving cream still freaked him out.

And oh, but early intervention folks LOOOOOVE the shaving cream. They paint with it, "cook" with it, encourage the kids to get really messy with it. They've been trying to get Noah to play with shaving cream for a good two-and-a-half years now. It's like an SPD rite of passage: BOW DOWN BEFORE YOUR GILLETTIAN GODS.

But he wouldn't go near it, ever. He refused. Sometimes there were tears. Sometimes he'd hide under a table. By the end of this school year he would simply scream "NO THANK YOU" as soon as the can of foaming gel made an appearance. His teachers eventually stopped trying -- Noah was improving in so many areas that they decided he maybe deserved a pass on this one little quirk.

So that was on our list of suggested summer activities from his OT -- try to get Noah to play in shaving cream or similar slimy-textured materials. I admit I wondered if they were making a bit too much of this -- don't most adults have certain textures that give them the willies? And don't we all manage to compensate and/or avoid them and/or more or less survive just fine? Who died and made shaving cream so goddamned important?

But since it is such a big part of the school day and curriculum, I agreed to see what we could do at home. I had this big whole plan involving Ezra and the bathtub and good old-fashioned peer pressure (mmm, sweet delicious rivalry), but then I kept forgetting to actually try it. I thought about maybe doing something Huge and Awesome with our wading pool but...come on, even I knew that had disaster written all over it. Put the buy-one-get-one-free coupon down and WALK AWAY. 

Yesterday, Noah asked to play with his phone. I said sure...after we played one last game. On a super-spur-of-the-minute impulse, I tossed a couple little toys in a bowl and buried them in shaving cream. I told Noah he needed to find all the toys I'd hidden in the bowl. Then I stepped back and bit my lip and cringed a little, waiting for the kind of reaction his teachers described.

"Okay!" he said.

He tested the foam with one finger, then quickly found the first toy. He then shoved both of his hands into the bowl and pulled out the rest.

"I found them!" he announced.

15 seconds. The whole endeavor took exactly 15 seconds. No crying, no resisting. He even laughed and posed for a photo before calmly trotting off to wash his hands. No big thing.

Shaving cream: 0

Noah: 3,490,029,280,901

 

22 Hours in Philly

So. Yeah. That was fun.

Those of you on the Twitthing already know, and probably feel like you know too much. But for everybody else: I got sick. Like, really terribly embarrassingly, what-do-you-MEAN-I-have-to-ride-in-an-elevator-to-get-to-a-bathroom sick. 

(Over the weekend, Ezra had one of those mysterious out-of-nowhere barfing incidents, where he just puked up an entire meal and then went on with his life just fine. Flash to 72 hours or so later, and INCUBATION COMPLETE! FULL ADULT-SIZED VIRUS MORPH ACHIEVED! NOW IS THE TIME TO DIE!)

So. Yeah.

I woke up yesterday feeling...not great, but not terrible. A little off. I blamed a shitty night of sleep, since I woke up multiple times convinced that I'd overslept and missed my 8:30 am presentation, only to look at the clock and see that, no, it's 3:15 am, jackass, simmer down. I tried to eat a bagel and just...couldn't. I blamed this on the fact that it just wasn't a very good bagel, ignoring even more signs that my body was getting ready to revolt.

(I would make a terrible protagonist in a Dan Brown novel, don't you think?)

The rest of the morning was a blur -- the first session went okay, even though I had to toss out all my original talking points and go with more of a "pretend you're explaining Facebook to your mom" approach, and my co-panelist and I were repeatedly tripped up because Facebook keeps MOVING THINGS AROUND and RENAMING THINGS and also decided to reject my dummy account suggestion of "Project Awesome." 

Things were...not going so well by my second session (the bagel did not improve on the second showing), though I like to think I put on a good front, turning to Mir right before we were supposed to start talking and quietly requested that she give me five minutes, please. Then I walked calmly to the elevator and back to my room, affixed the Do Not Disturb card to the doorknob before running inside to puke my guts out again. 

I brushed my teeth and was back in the conference room in four minutes, where we talked about blogs and why they are important. I mean, without my blog, how would I tell the world every little detail about that time I threw up a lot? WELCOME TO THE FUTURE, EVERYBODY.

I was determined to stay for my last and final session with Susan, even though everybody was staying a good 10 yards away from me and probably hoped I'd take my diseased ass elsewhere already. (One of the conference organizers basically shouted train rebooking options at me from across the room. She was wise.) I had to check out of my own room at noon and had almost two hours to sit in the lobby in abject terror of getting sick in a public restroom. (Because...again, I will write about it on my blog? And Twitter? But the idea of real live human beings being aware that my GI tract was not behaving? OMG I WOULD BE TOTES EMBARRASSED.) 

Susan graciously lent me her room key and told me to go lie down on her couch. I passed out cold but arrived at our session on time, though probably with upholstery indents on my face. I said a few things about widgets and then stared really hard at the table the rest of the time because we were in the same room where lunch had been served and oh God, I think it will be better for everybody if I just keep my mouth shut. I held out as long as I could before fleeing, got sick onnnnnne last time (luckily the lobby bathroom was empty. hideously echo-y, but empty.), hailed a cab, bought some Saltines and ginger ale at the train station and prayed to all that was holy to please please please let me get home quickly and incident-free. 

Jason and the boys met me at the other end. "You look really pale," he astutely observed. 

THE END!

EPILOGUE!

I'm feeling better today! Kind of. I'm at that point where my brain is all, "Fuck this cracker shit! I want a slice of that leftover pizza!" And then I take a couple bites of pizza and my stomach is all, "Dude. Stop listening to that brain thing. I'm still fully in charge, okay?"

DISCLAIMER!

No, I am not pregnant.

NO REALLY!

I mean it.