Friends Don't Let Friends Knit....

I am caught in a time warp. Because I haven't seen many movies since I started on this child-raising thing 16 years ago (lack of money, lack of time), my points of reference for actors and actresses are, well, a little off. So when Derfwad Manor posted fairly recent pictures of Jessica Lange and Ellen Barkin, I thought she was playing a cruel joke. I remember the fresh-faced Jessica from Tootsie. Ellen, girlfriend, in my heart you're still the young wife in Diner. But here I am looking at pictures of (not very gracefully) aging women. I feel like Rip van Winkle, waking up after 20 years. Ah, the ravages of time.

Giddy with triumph over our potty training success yesterday, I neglected to stick a diaper on Susie when she fell asleep in my bed last night. So, when I went up to go to sleep, I had to strip the baby and the bed (I love doing this at midnight). Susie slept through all of this. The whole episode agitated me a bit, so I went back downstairs to get the pee smell out of my nostrils and edit some more photos. I went to bed at 1 AM. Which explains why I passed out while I was putting Susie to bed (with a diaper) this evening. And missed half of my weekly Knit Night.

Which is all right, because I hate knitting. I invested so much time in one stupid sock, and it persisted in getting bigger and bigger (not in a good way) as I knit it. I kept telling myself that it would still be all right, that it wasn't that outsized; but tonight the scales fell from my eyes (what does that mean, anyway?) when another knitter looked at it and suggested, not unkindly, that maybe I could hang it from the fireplace on Christmas Eve. It's that big. I think you could fit a small laptop in it. Or you could have, but not anymore. Because now it is just a big pile of yarn sitting in the middle of my dining room table. Waiting to be made into a smaller sock. Or maybe a sweater, if I can find a pattern simple enough. Or maybe I should just cut it all up into tiny little bits to punish it for wasting hours of my life.

I take failure sort of personally, I guess.

Time is running out....gotta post or the NaBloPoMo monster will get me.

Blogrolls and Banality

I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the blogroll over there to the left. It's short, because I don't do that "You blogroll me, I'll blogroll you" stuff. I read other blogs (lots of other blogs - this whole blog thing is slowly taking over my life, but let's not go into that), because I like them or the person writing them; but, in an effort to keep the blogroll useful, I try to keep it short. Today I couldn't resist adding a new member - finslippy. I have no idea what that means, but she is breathtakingly, seemingly effortlessly funny. Enough so that I briefly considered throwing out my keyboard and never attempting to be even mildly amusing again.

But, I came to my senses. Some of us need to be willing to be second-rate. It makes everyone else feel good about themselves.

Anna hates me again (don't you love roller coaster rides?). I mean, it's been over 24 hours since I've done something for her, which is an almost intolerable situation to her befuddled teenage brain. She also hates David. He was standing in her general vicinity today, which annoyed her greatly.

She hated him when he was born, too. I remember holding him in my arms one day and Anna saying, "I hope you drop that baby and break his head." We used to regale her with that funny anecdote from time to time after she turned into a sweet little girl who wouldn't dream of saying anything like that about her little brother. But, nowadays, the story seems just a tad too realistic to be amusing.

Susie spent over an hour screaming this afternoon because she needed a nap and I wouldn't give her one because then she wouldn't go to sleep in the evening and I would start hating my life. Tolerating tantrums is exhausting. But I prefer 2-year-old tantrums to 14-year-old ones.

Truth? You want the truth? I wouldn't be posting today if it weren't that NaBloPoMo made me. Nothing happened today. Larry took the car to the garage, so we couldn't even go out. It ended up costing us a thousand dollars to get it back, so now I can't even afford to go out.

In my attempt to ingest as many carb goodies as possible before I head back to Weight Watchers in January, I baked bread this afternoon and I let David make cookies; that was probably good for another pound or two. My jeans finally arrived from Lands End, but I'm scared to try them on, as they probably won't be quite, um, roomy enough at this point.

I got stuck doing all the dishes tonight. I think we broke a family record by using almost all the pots and pans today. I'm talking 3 cookie sheets, 3 mixing bowls, 6-qt pot, 12-qt pot, 3-qt steamer, square pyrex pan, and the colander. Oh, and 4 loaf pans. The pile in the sink when I came downstairs after the meal was almost breathtaking. You would think that after 16 years I wouldn't find this situation that remarkable, but I guess my youthful capacity for wonder remains undiminished.



Minutiae, folks, that's all you're getting here tonight - the stultifying minutiae of an average suburban mom's life. Scary, isn't it? Maybe the educational powers that be should use this blog in high school sex ed classes as a powerful motivator to use birth control. I can see the poster now: "Do You Want Your Life to Turn Out as Banal as This?" or "Condoms Can Prevent Things Even Scarier Than STD's."

Shopping Madness

I am totally defeated by this Christmas shopping thing. Generally, we get each kid a "big" gift - meaning, one that they would really like - yet inexpensive (for the younger ones, we rarely spend more than 10 dollars, usually much less; the 2 older ones get 25-dollar gift cards). But the kids like to open a lot of presents; so I go out and buy a whole pile of little tzotchkes for a buck or two each, and the kids have fun "shopping" in my bedroom for all their siblings. (And given the sheer number of presents this type of gift-giving generates, you've got a recipe for massive confusion on my part).

All of which is my convoluted way of explaining why I've spent over a hundred dollars on rather unimpressive presents for 6 kids. I mean, I could have bought something really nice for that sort of money. Sock yarn, electronics, kitchen tools.... the list is endless. Instead, all I have is a big pile of crap. Of course, the good thing about crap is, it tends to break just about the time the kids are getting tired of it. A mother's dream...

But it still bugs me, spending all that money on...well...nothing.

Anyone else feeling like NaBloPoMo has turned November into a very long month? Larry wants to know why I'm sitting up so late. When I tell him I have to get my daily post done, he looks at me funny. "You're not getting paid for this, you know. You don't have to post." He doesn't understand - it's the peer pressure. Besides, everyone needs a goal; and NaBloPoMo sure beats my default goal of seeing how much Christmas candy I can consume between now and New Year's. So, in the interest of being able to fit into my new jeans, I am going to persevere with this unremunerative idiocy.

Besides, I can't let Barb beat me.