whiny

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More Tigger! Less Eeyore!

12/2/2008 in , more about me!, new westminster, two! children!, whiny | 9 comments

I was nursing the baby and thinking about months. I’ve heard a lot of talk about how November is a terrible month but I have always loved November. Even this past November. I did love it. It was fine. The days have been dark but I am cooking more soup. It was no better and no worse than October. I think it is only the months from which you expect Great Things, like JUNE or MAY or FEBRUARY where there is the potential to disappoint.

Of course that would be different from person to person. Those are the first months that sprang to mind for me so apparently those are my hooray months. If bad things were to happen during those months I would be surprised and disappointed.

I like February because my birthday is in it. But I have a friend who hates February because it’s the last month of winter in the midwest US and the last month of winter apparently can just about kill you with its incessant piles of snow and hundreds of degrees below freezing. I don’t take it personally. Every year she sends me an email; I know your birthday is in February and I like you a lot but DAMN I hate this month.

What month do I hate? January. My mother’s birthday is in January. And a few other people that I love. But damn I hate January.

Because: if you start counting from November, January is the third month of winter – whatever that means in your part of the world. Here it usually means freak snowfalls that no one shovels because the stores are all out of shovels because it never snows in Vancouver. And then more rain. And then slush. It’s still dark. It’s 31 days long. After a string of extra days off, Christmas / other holiday excitement, the novelty of a new calendar year: suddenly it’s just. January.

There are no holidays in January (in Canada). It’s Back to Business. Back to School. Stop your slacking. Make some resolutions. Be better than you were last year, last month. It’s like a whole month of Mondays. God.

I hate Mondays. Even now that I don’t have to stand around a water cooler and go on about what I did all weekend, I still hate Mondays. Mostly because the children get used to having enough attention after a weekend with 2 adults : 2 kids and then on Monday they are clambering over me like competing clans of monkeys more more more and neither will take no for an answer.

Also, half the businesses in the Mizzle are closed on Mondays. Not that this really affects me but I mention it as one more strike against.

I am anticipating January 2009 being something like a month of Mondays. Having had SA home a lot in December, come January I will be undoubtedly looping the following recorded announcement, “No, Christmas is over, there are no more gingerbread cookies, not till next year, (yes, I know I can make gingerbread all year round, thanks) Santa is gone, that’s it for presents, now would you go play with them and let mommy lie on the floor in peace.”

Or maybe not. Is January anyone’s favourite month? If so, why? Do you all even have favourite months? Am I crazy?

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Meanwhile…

11/26/2008 in Fresco, new westminster, outside, the parenthood, trombone, two! children!, whiny | 9 comments

Hey good news! Everyone who commented on my last post gets a prize! ONE FULL DAY with Fresco!

I figure after 2 weeks I will want him in my house again.

Can’t think of a new way to phrase this. That baby is LOUD. Previously it was kind of endearing. Shows character. Makes him *him*. Last week, the day after his vaccinations, he spent the day being clingy and whiny and when he gets clingy and whiny, he shouts. Shouts if you put him down, shouts if he can’t see you anymore, shouts if he wants a toy and can’t get the toy. I am not used to this. Trombone would cry. I figured he was normal – I have heard that babies cry. The experiment is not a fair one; when was at home with Trombone crying, there was no one simultaneously saying, “Can I have a treat? Can I have a treat? Can I have a treat NOW? Can I have an Aero bar?” (thank you, Halloween.) So it was stressful, the crying, but at least I was only accountable to me and the infant. And I don’t remember Trombone being so fretful all day long like this.

Also, Trombone slept through the night at an early age. This baby still wakes up twice a night. I am plenty tired and short-tempered on a good day and then, THEN I spend the day being shouted at? And it’s not a “hey, could I get some service?” sort of shout. It’s a “HEY BITCH, WHERE MY FUN AT?” sort of shout. It is imperious and it echoes and it makes everyone around it cringe. Yes, I have that shouting baby at the grocery store. A million apologies.

So he did it this past Thursday. All day. But Friday – Sunday it was all sunshine and rainbows again so I figured Thursday was due to the vaccinations. Then Monday. Shouting. Tuesday. Shouting. This morning, I woke to the sound of shouting. I felt like a big piece of glass about to shatter into a million pieces. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t smile, couldn’t do anything but hold the baby, jam the soother in his mouth, keep him from shouting.

Who gets up at 5 am just to shout? It’s not civilized.

Possible causes of Shoutapalooza include: teething. Can’t quite crawl. Bored. Tummyache from apricots. Diaper rash.

The shouting makes me tense. It makes Trombone tense. It makes me more tense with Trombone and vice versa. Everything is aggressive and in-your-face and like we are living at CNN on the first day of a new war. One day was rough. Three has nearly killed me. I am hopeful there will not be four.

We walked to the Most Depressing Mall in the Universe this morning. It is getting decked for Christmas, which means a Santa’s village and a bunch of mid-mall vending tables. Mostly the vendors are for hand-sewn dishrags and quilt raffles but there was one for Dead Sea Skin Products. I felt bad for them. There was a big, exciting booth and several hotties of both sexes, waiting to accost passers-by with “Would you like a sample of our new skin regime?” but the only passers-by, of course, are very old people, very poor people in from the cold and very addled, rather rude people like me.

I was sitting on a bench, eating my Bacon N Egger while Trombone ate his ham and cheese croissant (we compromised on a “healthy” treat; hey it’s better than an Aero bar) and Fresco looked at the lights. A middle aged guy, tall and gangly with huge sneakers and really big hair stopped to say hi. “Is this your family?” he said. He spoke like he had a hearing impairment. I said yes. “It’s good,” he said. “I grew up with foster families. Real family is better.”

Choose your own ending. Both of these are true things I thought:

1. My heart seized. You stupid woman, I thought. Just appreciate your damn babies and shut up.

2. So I decided to keep the shouting baby after all.

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You Know It’s The Wrong Time of Your Life to Write A Novel When

11/10/2008 in Fresco, trombone, two! children!, whiny, writing | 12 comments

1:15 pm: Read stories to Trombone. Hug him. Kiss him. Cover him with a quilt. Take Fresco to other room.

1:30 pm: Fresco asleep. Come downstairs.

1:33 pm: Drink glass of water. Open novel document.

1:35 pm: Type seven words. Hear Trombone rattling door handle. The other day he managed to get the door open. (Yes, it did take him longer to figure this out than it does most children. Yes, I was appropriately grateful for this.) Heart sinks to stomach.

1:37 pm: Go upstairs and ask Trombone what is wrong. He tells me he has a poopy diaper. He is right, he does. It is good of him to have told me. I tell him this, change his diaper, accompany him back to bed.

1:42 – 1:52 pm: Back downstairs. Type. Try to think of a character name that does not start with “T” because almost all of my characters have names that start with “T”.

1:52 pm: Fresco wakes screaming.

1:53 pm – 2:10 pm: Jiggle Fresco. Burp Fresco. Nurse Fresco back to sleep.

2:10 – 2:30 pm: Back downstairs. Type.

2:31 pm: Trombone is crying and rattling door handle. Claims “there is something” on his hand. There is nothing on his hand. Nevertheless, he is bawling. Bawling. Bawling. I allow him to come downstairs because now he will not nap and if I make him stay in his room he will just yell and I will still not be able to concentrate. Puffy-eyed, he watches The Wiggles while I finish my sentence and count words in today’s novel installment. Exactly 1,000.

2:45 pm: Type whiny blog post while The Wiggles do their Wiggly thing. (New Wiggles, not Old Wiggles. Did you know there was a difference? True.)

Margaret Laurence’s autobiography states that she wrote her novels at the kitchen table while her children were asleep. Alas, the autobiography does not specify how she pulled this off and of course, she is dead so I cannot say to her, “How the fuck did you write The Stone Angel with two children in your house?”

I am guessing she put drugs in their oatmeal at lunchtime.

Total word count: 11,141. I have already killed off two people so I can’t stop now.

Rain: 1, Cheesefairy: 0

11/3/2008 in bloggity!, two! children!, whiny, writing | 8 comments

OK Rain, you win this round. I should have known it wouldn’t be so easy as to throw on my gum boots and my waterproof jacket, tuck the bairns into their wee slots in the buggy and toss a rain cover not specifically meant for that buggy over top for a quick jaunt uptown to return a DVD to the library and pick up some vegetables.

We made it to the library. We got so very wet. The rain cover is 1. ill-fitting 2. plastic and old so torn in places 3. made for a single stroller, not a double so the boys stayed pretty dry but random pockets of stroller got kind of puddly. Oh but I didn’t discover that until much later, when the puddles turned into soup because they were puddles mixed with random dropped bits of bread / cheerios / sand / in other words the most disgusting thing you have seen unless you’re me and change 45 diapers a day.

The vegetable store wasn’t open yet so I stopped at the dollar store instead and dropped a cool fiver on some poisonous Chinese junk that will probably give my children horns, including a gold plated harmonica that Trombone can’t play (burn!) and a baby rattle that says “lovely baby” on it for Fresco.

Misnomer Rattle Company is pleased to present: a very special rattle.

Then we walked home, wet, cold, Fresco by then getting agitated for some reason and screaming his head off while I tried to remember to straighten my shoulders and keep my belly sucked in that my back muscles might actually get to do something now and then and stop bitching at me. Oh and breathe. Trying to remember to breathe. It was one of those days when I forget.

“No, Fresco,” I shouted over the screaming, the wind, the rain, the cars zooming past, “I cannot take you out and carry you. You will hate that. Trust me. You will get wetter and colder and more screamy and I might drop you because it is very very wet.” I stopped shouting as we passed a guy who popped out from an alley and looked at me like I was deranged. What? I’m shouting. It’s the way we roll.

Here is why I am an idiot. Saturday morning I woke up and thought, shit or get off the pot, self. Are you going to blog every day in November, or not? I decided not. I decided that 30 days of MY LIFE SUCKS I TOTES HATES IT (except when I don’t [but my babyeez are so cute!])would be a bit excessive and I can’t seem to bring anything else out to the front of my mind so I am going to spare you all. Maybe once a week I will share MY LIFE SUCKS I TOTES HATES IT (except when I don’t [but my babyeez are so cute!]) and then one day I will be over this particular hump and will write about books or dogs or transit or fuck I don’t know. Something else.

Wait, why am I an idiot? Oh yes. Saturday morning etc. and then I thought well I could write a novel instead. And in the time it took me to take a shower, which on Saturdays is close to 15 minutes, I had decided I could TOTALLY write a 50,000 word novel in a month, after all I’ve done it before and so that morning I went out, bought a new notebook and two pens and started on a November novel. Oh, yes, by pen, because my laptop is in the living room and I will never get anything done on this computer because I will have to write during naptime and then I will be tempted to read Go Fug Yourself or something instead of write my 1750 words per day. Old school, I am kicking it, please to enjoy.

Saturday I wrote about half of what I ought to have. Sunday I went to a coffee shop (also why the pens and notebook are key, so I can go out with them) and wrote my quota and today, well today I decided my hand hurt so I was going to write on the laptop after all and I got to 1150 words before the children woke up from their (very short) naps. Really today is a success story though I was quite angry at the time. Short naps + rainy day = oh so very bad news.

Anyway, writing fiction is very different than blogging. I haven’t written fiction in so long I am horrifying myself at every paragraph break. I figure I’ll give it a week and see what shakes out by next Saturday and then I give myself permission to give up. Extenuating circumstances and all that.

But today the magical thing happened where I was writing really boring shit about these really boring people and all of a sudden a really cool character turned up. I love that. That’s partly why the interruption stung so bad.

I will see you tomorrow, Rain. I am going to kick your ass.

What Up?

10/27/2008 in Fresco, bloggity!, everything, trombone, whiny | 12 comments

Events since my last post, in approximate chronological order:

- I was all achy and fluey and capped off Wednesday night by having to go to bed at 8:30 A MERE HALF AN HOUR into America’s Next Top Circus Sideshow to lie, shaking, shivering and finally sweating through a bad ass fever, too ill to even read the horrendous piece of “youkilledtreesforthis?” chick lit I got from the library last week, (and I quote, “He sent me an IM (Instant Message) on my computer.”) alls-the-while squeezing at my left breast, trying to tell if it felt lumpy, bumpy, sore or otherwise like mastitis. Eventually, after enough squeezing, it felt all of those things. Kind of like when you’re wondering if you’re pregnant so you keep poking your boobs to see if they’re tender because tender boobs means pregnant and eventually you can’t tell if you have just bruised yourself from all the poking or if they really are tender.

- With the fever, I didn’t get much sleep on Wednesday night. Fresco also woke up frequently to check on me and make sure I was OK. What a great baby.

- Thursday we went to our last toddler dance class and I realized that Trombone was sick with a cold or flu. Began to think maybe I had the beginnings of that, not mastitis. Soldiered on to Ikea with my mom and Fresco because I wanted cheap lunch. Ate a bowl of chili and garlic bread which was good, but cold. Why is the food there always cold?

- Sicker and snottier Trombone grew. I began to feel normal again, breast tenderness subsiding, crazy sleep deprivation (requirement: 4 cups of coffee) changing back to just normal tired (1.5 cups of coffee). Cooked frozen lasagna for dinner. Went to bed.

- Saturday Fresco got up at 4:55 am. Trombone got up at 6:ish. SA and I were giddy with something; he made muffins and I had energy. We went to the library and home again and then Fresco started sneezing. Which is very cute. Babies sneezing is one of the cutest things in the whole world.

- We had borrowed two kids’ movies from the library and Trombone was allowed to watch one before lunch. He decided not to nap because the sooner his nap ended, the sooner he could watch the second movie. This happens EVERY TIME we get two movies from the library. We are idiots. Toddler is king.

- SA decided to try his week-old homebrewed beer. It tasted surprisingly good. He poured a glass of it and took a picture and then knocked the glass off the coffee table onto the rug below where it shattered and splattered and rendered the rug (already several years old and quite, er, utilitarian in appeal) throw-out-able.

- We were feeling extra cocky, having kept our tempers about us all day despite little sleep and the two sick children and the no nap fiasco and the shattered glass and beer on the hardwood floor, so we decided to go to WalMart! At 3 pm on a Saturday afternoon, the week before Halloween! With a toddler who had no nap and an infant who was coming down with a cold! To buy a new rug and some heavy beer steins that will not shatter even if we beat them with sledgehammers.

- We got away with it, too. Dear Parent Club: that is negative reinforcement.

- We also bought two more potties, that we might have potties everywhere in preparation for uh, nothing. Nothing to see here. Look away.

- And chips. We bought chips.

- Sunday we stayed in and enjoyed our new rug and our chips. We wiped noses and butts and made chili.

- And now – very abruptly! – it is the last week of October and congratulations! You have at least pretended to read this entire dull post! As your reward, please to answer:

1. Does anyone have any advice about potty training? Even if you are child-free, I want to hear it.

(Ha ha I doubt it, right? It’s not one of those things people have opinions about or anything?)

(Right now my opinion is EVERY POOP IN ITS RIGHT PLACE and so. I am preparing. Battening. Purchasing Thomas the Tank Engine underpants so that they might get shat on, even if this causes a lifetime of trauma. [However I will not be documenting it here. Because that is where I draw my line.])

2. Do I have it in me to post every day in November? I sure do like looking at my archives and seeing at least one month with more than 15 posts in it. On the other hand; blood, stone, etc.

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