I was about a third of the way through a new post for today when I realized it was kind of heavy/mildly depressing for a Friday afternoon. And nobody wants that on their Friday afternoon! Save that shit for first thing Monday morning, as the gods intended! Instead, here's another thing that nobody wants or asked for. Boring, self-indulgent photos of my pets! Finn and Rey and Fostercat finally seem to have settled into an aloof-yet-peaceful coexistence. I've been trying in vain to get a photo of all three of them together -- between the gray tabby, black cat and a big ol' orange tom, we've pretty much got the perfect moggie trifecta here -- but so far I've only managed to catch two of them at a time. Tormund: "If I don't look at her, it's like she's not really there." Rey: "Derp?" Tormund: "I will stretch alllllll the way out over this giant tiger face to assert my size dominance, even though I'm actually terrified of everything including vacuums, power cords, loud noises, my own tail sometimes, and honestly maybe a little bit of the cat behind me who is barely half my size." Finn: "Yeah but look... Read more →

HOW MY DOGS SEE ME: Wonderful hooman! HI HELLO WOW UR PRESENCE IS AMAZE Beautiful face so haps so haps So good So kind Bet if I just knock glowing rectangle thing out of hand she'll be haps Look now ur hands are free for pets! Am hero! Oh no mad voice oh god oh no I so sry YAY PETS RUBS SNUGS Sometimes bed snuggles :) Sometimes no bed snuggles :( Confusing rules sometimes but ok Eats awful lot of cheese but shares sometimes so ok So much delicious wow how you do that Walk into room wow how you do that HOW MY CATS SEE ME Tyrannical withholder of food Cruel conjurer of inside rain water when we jus lookin for food up where you make food it's not a crime lady Dumb baby voice Food is right there won't give us food Just gave us food now won't give us more food Squishy belly is ok tho Nicer bed than our bed HEY IT'S THREE A.M. TIME FOR FOOD Maybe sort of deaf maybe just ask for food louder please to tidy our poop area peasant just poop outside the box it's okay that's how they learn... Read more →

DUMPLING UPDATE: Rey stole a dumpling! CAR UPDATE: The other driver has been found at fault for unsafe lane changing! Jason's car is toast, but they're giving us way more for it than we ever could've gotten in a trade in! We're even getting our deductible back! This is all very good news! Especially because he was putting off like $3,000 worth of repairs and had been ignoring the Check Engine light for months! Let this be a questionable lesson to us all! The bad news is that my husband now gets to shop for a new car and he is never more annoying to me than when he's shopping for a new car. It will take him months and he will test drive every car on earth. He will look at CarMax listing the way normal people look at Tinder. DUMPLING UPDATE II: Finn stole the dumpling! HAIRZ UPDATE: The only person in the world who is allowed to trim Ike's hair now is my hairstylist. Which sounds like it should be a pain, but she doesn't charge me much and swears Ike is always her best-behaved client of the day. Also, despite the holes in his pants knees... Read more →

We decided to keep things simple this year, so instead of visiting a tree farm, we picked one up pre-cut from the nearest lot. And for the first year ever, all three kids were actually genuinely helpful. The tree got evenly and uniformly decorated (as opposed to 17 ornaments stacked up on a single bottom branch) and -- perhaps even more monumentally, they didn't break a single ornament. The tree looked perfect. A few days later, however, the cats were like, HOLD OUR BEER. (BB-8 NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!) Thankfully, the majority of our ornaments are the of the cheap shatter-proof or kids arts-and-crafts varieties, but we still managed to lose a good number of the delicate, sentimental kind. (Trying not to look at the shards of the very last 70s vintage glass ball from my childhood Christmas tree in that last photo.) Jason and I propped the tree back up, frantically redecorated and scrubbed the crime scene of mass-needle-carnage evidence before the kids got home from school. Of course, it took Ike all of 30 seconds to notice that several of "his" ornaments were either missing or on different branches and we eventually had to come clean and admit that yeah, we're... Read more →

Thank you so much to everybody who commented/emailed/messaged/otherwise-reached-out after Friday's post. Y'all are still way too nice to me, especialy after way (way, WAY) too many years of oversharing and general idioting out here. Two things I've learned since then: 1) Ativan is like an almost-instant, big ol' OFF switch for my anxiety. Glorious. 2) Switching the anxiety off, however, basically cedes full control to the depression, which is unfortunately much worse than I realized. Turns out anxiety, while brain- and breath-rattlingly awful, has been the main thing powering the hamster wheel lately. Once it's gone, the relief of "I'm not going to have a panic attack!" is quickly replaced with "I'm going to melt into my bed like a pile of greyish-blah goo and just stare at the ceiling while my yoga pants slowly fuse to my skin!" Not so glorious. So looks like I have a bit more work to do in the medication/brain chemistry department. And I will do that work, and all the work, and am very very grateful and hashtag-blessed for all the support I have from family, friends, Internetters, and of course, the therapeutic assist from this pack of floofballs: Read more →

Miss Poppy started obedience/doggy manners training a couple weeks ago, and already she's well on her way to being the valedictorian of Dog School, and only SORT OF because there's only one other dog in the class. Honestly, Beau probably needs training more, but it was part of our adoption agreement with Poppy's rescue because she was still a puppy. (We had to pay an additional $50 deposit that we get back once she's completed a properly certified/acceptable training program.) She's a good girl but a big strong girl who already has 20 pounds on Ike and can knock him flat with an overly-excited greeting. Beau gets a free pass on those same not-great behaviors because he's so small. He pulls on the leash during walks but like, nice try, pipsqueak, behold my SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH. Poppy sees a squirrel and I'm like, PLEASE CHILD I HAVE A WEAK ELBOW NOOOOOOO. Likewise, Beau jumps up on people and it's like, "Awwww, look at the little Ewok Toto standing up on his hind legs and bouncing around like a coked-up kangaroo! That's so adorable!" Poppy does the same thing and I end up looking like this: None of it's aggressive, of course.... Read more →

I've been working from/in my actual "office" every day for the first time in awhile, to better bounce back and forth between laptops (three) and email addresses (four), and to have room to spread out piles of documents and keep everything separated by client (five) and basically not rely on keeping everything straight in my head, oh god no, let's not do that, that's how things end up forgotten about and/or on fire. I haven't worked down here in awhile because one time, not long after we adopted them, the cats hid in the closet and got accidentally trapped overnight, and both of them panic-peed on the carpet. And unlike the Lego bins, getting cat pee odors out of carpet is basically impossible. We've managed it PRETTY well, with both professional cleanings and buying our own carpet deep cleaner and using it regularly (like pretty much every time we vacuum), along with throwing just about every pet stain/odor related product on earth at the problem. So it usually smells just fine (though I think vaguely carpet-cleaner-ish), but other times the smell starts emanating from the padding below and I'm just like, I'm out, I'll be working from the couch again... Read more →

Plot twist: Jason has uveitis, not pinkeye. Because clearly regular ol' pinkeye is far too pedestrian for our tastes around here. We prefer the rarer, more obscure forms of eyeball discomfort. The more underground diagnoses, if you will. Epidemic Keratoconjunctitis? You've probably never heard of it. Now pass me the artisanal steroid eye drops. Uveitis is not contagious, although that didn't stop me from getting soap in my eye in the shower yesterday and spending the next hour or so convinced I was dying of pinkeye. (Spoiler alert: I'm fine, just dumb.) Also feeling a touch overwhelmed on the work front. I've been solidly in the "ebb" stage of the freelancing flow for the last few months, popping in occasionally with clients like "need anything? no? not yet? how about now?" while networking my ass off in hopes of landing something new. Which I did! And it's a big one! Like with a fancy badge and a giant laptop and lots of cool shit to do. And then LITERALLY on my FIRST DAY of the gig, I came home to a flurry of emails from three other clients all HELP HELP WE NEED YOU TO WRITE ALL THE THINGS HERE... Read more →

Another reason to perma-love this time of year: It's pet adoption anniversary season!! AKA any excuse to spoil the animals while also eating human cake. Beau's officially been with us for just over a year now, and now that he's fully settled in I swear he's pretty much the dictionary definition of A Good Boy. "Who is a good boy?" I ask Google. "Beau is a good boy," says the search results. (While Alexa chimes in her agreement from across the room.) I still sometimes wish we had more solid information about his life before us, although when I think about some of the behaviors he had initially I realize it was all probably pretty damn bleak and we're better off not knowing the details. (Besides his HASHTAGRUNNING and defensiveness around food and sleeping children, we also had to carefully ration his water. If he saw a full water dish he would desperately and rapidly drink every drop, and then promptly throw it all back up. He wasn't used to having enough water. I'm so sorry, little doggo. That will never happen to you again.) (He's fine with his water dish now, and doesn't have an aggressive or nippy bone... Read more →

It's Spring Break! And it's shaping up to be a disaster. Well, disaster-ish. That hysterical blind-to-privilege mommyblogger definition of disaster. The children have no camps! No activities! They are all just HERE. In the HOUSE. With ME and EACH OTHER and my DEADLINES. I did this to myself, yes, entirely. My new contract gig still hasn't set a start date so I didn't want to plunder our flexible spending account just yet for childcare expenses. I figured I could get away with reducing my hours across existing clients a bit this week, maybe just work half days if possible. But then this morning the news came in that my background check is done and lo, I am not a criminal unworthy of writing web site copy, and they have like a hundred and four projects they want me to work on immediately once the final rubber-stamp comes down. Okay. This could get interesting, very quickly. I sat down with the kids this morning and went over the day's schedule and some detailed instructions. No screen time or TV until chores are done. You will play outside as much as possible, I mean it, you will not mimic your mother's pale,... Read more →