So Here We Are

Here would be Western Massachusetts. At my parents' house specifically, dying the death of a thousand dog hairs. We arrived on Friday. Calder was superb on the plane. He fell asleep while we were taxiing down the runway and woke up with only about 30 minutes left in the flight. This was surprising since about 15 seconds prior to boarding the plane, Calder was screaming louder than I had ever heard him go off before. You see, he had just fallen off the radiator and whacked his head while I was trying to grab our carry-ons and fold the stroller. Travelling alone with a toddler is fun. All this drama happened directly next to the boarding queue and I could see the looks on all the passengers' faces. Those looks said, "Oh god, that abusive bitch is taking her shrieking hellspawn on the plane. Kill me now." In your faces, other people. He was a fucking angel. That's because I teach my child about manners. And Benedryl. Just kidding. Or perhaps not?

Saturday, Grandma and Grandpa got some alone time with Calder while I went to an impromptu mini college reunion in another Western Mass town (Ware, now with more rural-ness!!!). Calder did better than I had expected without, me especially considering he didn't really want to give my parents any hugs or kisses. The eleventy billion dogs that are here to entertain him may have had something to do with it though.

So here we are, languishing in podunk bufu. Perhaps today we will head over to the Big E for some tractor pull and fried... things. It'll be fun.

I Got My Camera Back!

Kudos to Canon repairs services. Now I can go back to taking pictures of Calder until he wants to kill me. Yippee!

Twenty-One!

Calder is 21 months old today! Only three more until I have a two-year-old. Goodness. And no, it is not time I start thinking about #2. I am too poor to afford a #2 especially since new car payments will wipe out any extra income that could go towards a second day care tuition. So just stop it. All of you.

So what has one and three quarter years brought us? Well, Calder started his first full week in the toddler classroom on Monday. He seems to be having a grand old time in there with the exception of nap time. It seems he rejects the cots and demands to be taken back to his crib in the old class so instead of napping peacefully, he tires himself out with his drama queeny hissy fits until he falls asleep on one of the teachers and she can then put him on his cot. Next step big boy bed! Not really because there is no way in hell I am converting his crib until he proves to me that he can climb out of it. Please don't tell Calder this or show him how since I have no idea where the directions are in order to do this.

Calder talks a lot now. He even uses short sentences or phrases sometimes like "down now" or "deef way" (this way, FYI). Usually Bruce and I can understand what Calder is getting at but occasionally we are stumped. It's been in use months for several months now and I still cannot figure out what "gickup"is supposed to mean. Pickup? Pick up? Jacob? No idea. That's when i use the smile and nod and say, "That's very interesting sweetie. You sure are smart." Then I change the subject to include words that I understand like, guck (truck) or bots! (stop).

Becoming a mom has totally changed the way I think and interpret every day life. No, I am not talking about "mommy brain" and how having a child somehow make you stupider. I have done plenty of things in my life to kill off braincells and I fairly certain getting knocked up is the least of my worries there. Nor am I talking about some newly developed nurturing earth mother empathy type bull shit. I still honestly could give less than a damn about most other people. What I am talking about is something a little more subtle and perhaps bizarre. Now instead of driving down the street silently judging teh other motorists and thinking about different ways I could force them off the road without getting in too much trouble my thought processes go a little more like this: "Driving... driving. Turn left. Ooooh Truck! Driving... driving... Plane! driving... More Truck! Dri- A BUS! A BUS MORE BUS!" It's not just in the car either. I find myself mentally tabulating every large transport vehicle that crosses my path whether it be the El or the many street sweepers that regularly converge on Chicago streets. It's like my internal monologue has been replaced by a truck obsessed toddler. Not that I mind too much. All that anger can't possibly have been any good for me.

Hmmm, let's see... what else has nearly two years brought us? Oh! I guess we are potty training now? I mean, it's not something we are doing/have done on purpose. Calder's had a potty here for a while now and would use it if we all gathered in the bathroom before tubby time and placed him on it and said, "go pee pee now!" and then applauded his efforts. (Oh how the mighty have fallen). However the potty have never really been more than a novelty to the boy until recently. While going over his daily activities sheet at day care the other day I noticed that the diaper change notations were different than usual. Instead of times of day and the occasional "BM" to denote a nasty one, there was the word POTTY. At first I thought new classroom, new teacher, new method of keeping track so I asked about it. New teacher was all, "Oh, he asks to use the potty all the time since he sees some of the other children using it." Is potty training really this easy or are we just insanely lucky? Well, considering in the past few weeks we have been in a car accident, had one tv die, had the satellite service go nutso, killed one laptop and broke a camera I am inclined to believe that potty training is just that easy. Now if you'll excuse me I am going to go buy a shitload of scratch tickets because we are obviously owed a little good karma around here.

So That Happened

On Monday morning, around 8:15, we became a family that used to own a car. Now, living in a city is not a terrible thing if you don't have a car. Particularly Chicago, which has a fairly comprehensive public transit system. The CTA is not the greatest but it seems to do well enough for the millions of other carless Chicagoans. HOWEVA. I am fairly certain that those other people don't have their kid in day care in Skokie, 6 miles northwest of home, and work 9 miles southwest of their residence. I am also fairly certain that these people were not getting along fairly well with this type of commute via a shitty but reliable car until some dumb beotch rear-ended them on the highway last Monday at 8:15 am. All this to say, some chick busted up my car and I am ANGRY.* Fortunately we had already dropped Calder off at day care so he was spared any potential physical trauma in addition to the added mental stress of languishing for over two hours on the side of the highway in rush hour while the Illinois State Police and IDOT are doing something but whatever it is, it is decidedly not coming to the aid of three stranded motorists and one stupid bitch.**

Despite Calder not being in the car*** at the time he is still serving some kind of punishment. Due tho the accident, any safety advantages of having him in his car seat are now null and void. It seems that once any child restraint is in an accident, it is essentially worthless. That's nice since until we get this whole mess sorted out Calder will be riding around town in a death trap. Well for 10 days anyway. Since the car was totalled the lady driver's insurance will only cover a rental car for ten days. Since we are on day three of rental car-ness that means, hmmmm, we have a week to find a new car. A week and a pittance from the insurance. Now, my loathing for the Echo is well documented here and I am not saying that the insurance should provide us with enough money to get a brand new car but really, how does one get a car for less than $2,000? Ok yes, I could find a car for that much on any dirt lot or roadside but it would be a shitty car. And yes, the Echo was itself a shitty car but it was my shitty car and I knew exactly what was wrong with it. Any new shitty car does not come with the same level of understanding and mutual loathing that was shared between me and the Echo. Plus, the Echo was, you know, drivable. PLUS plus, it was paid off. It just doesn't seem fair. Why should we have to go thousands of dollars into debt just because some ding bat decided she needed to change lanes on a portion of highway that is only two lanes wide and has almost no exits. Seriously, it was the express lane. Everyone on it is going to one of three places that are kind of far apart. There is no advantage to switching lanes to get in the faster one. There IS no faster one. We weren't even moving when she nailed us. I bet she was texting too. That's was all those young people are doing these days, updating their ebays and tweeters in the car. So basically, Bruce and I are now stuck paying her stupidity tax and the insurance that we pay a hefty sum for is pretty much unable to help out.

Maybe after the Democrats are done fixing health care, perhaps they could look into auto insurance next? I would like to humbly suggest that they add some sort of hardship compensation. If the accident causes any material loss in the quality of your life due to having to buy a new car, you should get compensated for that. Like, how about the little chickie pays my cable bill**** while I start making $200 monthly payments on my imaginary new car? That seems like a start. Or maybe she can come pick up Calder and take him to day care every day so I can use the bus to get to work although knowing how she drives I am not sure I would be totally ok with that.


*We are doing ok for now. Bruce and I have sore necks from whiplash and I have an uuuugly bruise on my knee from the dash but we are bleeding or anything (that we know of). And we have pain killers. And muscle relaxers.
**There was a third car involved since our tiny Echo was unable to absorb the entire momentum of the giant SUV that hit us and we subsequently smashed into the car ahead of us.
***And boy is she lucky he wasn't otherwise I would have gotten right out of the car and slapped her senseless right there on the side of the highway. I bet THAT would have gotten the damn emergency crew there a little bit faster.
****Yes, I consider having cable a major quality of life issue and asking me to live without the Travel Channel, TCM or Bravo is tantamount to making me live without running water.

How Do I Love Thee?

I complain a lot. I know this. It's kind just my personality. I enjoy complaining. It gives me great pleasure to be a crotchety old whiner. That is who I am. Sometimes though, I think I complain about Calder too much. Fact is, despite all the not sleeping, anger barfing, crayon eating, pop-up book ruining and camera breaking, I love the shit out of that little monster. (And what a lot of shit there is, yeesh.) This may come across as mushy but Calder is an amazing, hilarious, wonderful little boy and since randomly going up to people on the street to educate them on this matter would seem strange, I am using my own personally bully pulpit to point out what a good mashup of DNA Bruce and I have created.

• First off, is Calder's hair. Hahahah, what hair? Eh, he has hair now. Even in the front some. Let's just say he has the same hairline now that Bruce had when I met him. Eight years ago. The best part about Calder's chickie fluff do is that all of it is stick straight except for one curl that has randomly sprouted in the back of his head. I think it might be his hair's self defense against becoming a mullet.

• Hmm what else? Calder is smart, y'all. Granted, I don't really have any other 20-month-olds hanging around to compare and contrast but the kid can count to five. He has also recently decided to start recognizing the existence of the color red. His scarlet denial was pretty weird given how much he loves stop signs. Seriously, Calder wants to kiss stop signs on the mouth he loves them so much. He can even almost SPELL stop but it usually comes out as "s'pee, oh, pee."

• We also have comment interests. I can tell already that Calder is going to be a huge book nerd like his Momma. It's amazing that someone who spends such a significant amount of time and energy destroying things also loves to sit alone in the corner, quietly "reading" books to himself. He likes trying to remember what the stories are about and narrate them to himself. That's Not My Dinosaur becomes, "no mine! no mine!, no mine! Mine! Sooooft" during Calder's story time. It's very cute and it frees me up to watch ANTM so there's that.

• Calder is a serious love bug. He will kiss anybody. While I can tell this is going to be problematic very shortly, right now it's just adorable. His new favorite move is to grab you by both cheeks and lay a giant smacker right on your mouth. I have no idea where he picked this up but something tells me that Calder gets his cheek'ums smooshed quite frequently at daycare. Calder's affections are not only reserved for the human types either. He has endless love for all the animals in the house and uses every opportunity they give him to kiss and snuggle and love the bejeesus out of them. Even the cats are getting more tolerant of his tender ministrations. He still can't lift Molson on his own but that's more Molson's issue than Calder's. That cat is F A T.

• Like I said, Calder knows a lot of things for his age and what he know, he KNOWS and cannot be told otherwise. Calder has an amazing strength of conviction when it comes to his beliefs. A while back at the zoo, I was trying to explain to him that only the boy lions have manes and that the two without manes in the exhibit were not tigers but instead lady lions. Calder was just not having this. In his mind, lions looks like Mufasa and that is the end of that. Every time I pointed and said, "lion" Calder would howl "nooooo, IGER!" an look at me like I was an idiot. I tend to get that kind of look a lot but no usually from a toddler so that was a tad disconcerting.

• He's adorable and he looks like me. Yeah, so? I am vain. Plus I wouldn't wish Bruce's nose on anybody. Ok, maybe Sarah Palin but that's it. Right now, Calder's looks get him out of a ton of shit for which he would possibly otherwise be punished. Now looks aren't really everything . Attractiveness is a fleeting quality that is not to be relied on to succeed in life and I get that. Seriously. My brother used to look like this:

And I? Used to look like this:



So yeah. Physical appearances can change and I would rather have my kid grow up smart than cute but being adorable certainly helps when Calder decides he wants to find out how the camera works (the $300 camera) and effs it the frick up. Which by the way means there will be no new pictures until I get it fixed. Out of warranty. Calder is sooo lucky he has that curl, yo.

Friday Film Fest Returns

Not Calder but still wicked awesome.




I am excited about this album. I am also excited that TMBG is doing a kids' show in October in Chicago. I am super excited that a band this benign has managed to piss of so many crazy, crazy Christians*.



*No, I do not think all Christians are crazy. Just the crazy ones.

Thousand Word Alternatives

Hmmm. It seems like something's been missing around here. Oh right. I have been wasting space with these writey word type thingies and have been neglectful in my adorable photo posting duties. Please, let me rectify this situation immediately.

Today we did arts and crafts. I made an egg carton caterpillar. Calder made a mess.

Calder showing off his newly split lip. Apparently he face planted while on an outdoor excursion with Bruce. Oddly, these things never seem to happen when I am out with them.

Today's arts and crafts time also included making masks. I am like a one woman preschool program. The picture sucks because Calder had put his greasy mitts all over the frigging lens without me realizing it.

Even a busted face won't stop Calder from throwing down toddler style. It's shame there wasn't any music at this party because I have a feeling Calder's dancing would have been EPIC.

Self portrait. This one is the best as it has nearly all of his face in it. Usually he just gets the lower half of his mouth and chin.

Watch Your Mouth

It's official. Swearing is no longer permitted within earshot of Calder. Even accidental slip-ups will be punishable by cake banning. You say ass in front of my child = no more Leah cakes for you. Kiss that red velvet goodbye because Calder has entered the phase of life where he is in danger of repeating any and all of what he hears you say. Sometimes it's funny, like how I can make him cheer for the Red Sox or when you sing to him and he repeats the last word of every line. With gusto. Like such.

On top of spaghetti (GETTI!)
All covered with cheese. (JEEZ!)
I lost my poor meatball (MEEE-BAW!)
When somebody sneezed (NEEZ'D!)

On the other hand it can sometimes be potentially horrifying if he actually retains the information for any length of time. Por ejamplo: Last night I was flipping through the Macy's circular drooling over kitchen equipment and making fun of the goofy faces on the catalog moddles when Calder joined me to look at the pictures too. I was on the men's clothing page so I told Calder to pick out a shirt that would look nice on Daddy. I don't think he quite understood the question. What he did do was point to one African American guy in a blue shirt and said, "Daddy!" Or maybe he did understand. Bruce does look nice in blue, but still, not looking like Daddy at all. I laughed and told Calder, "That's not Daddy. That's a black dude." "Blag Dood?" Uhhhhhh, uh oh. "Blag dood, blag dood, blag dood." He went on like that for another minute or so. I immediately started having visions of Calder pointing out every person of color we come across and having to hang my head in mortification and timidly explain how my child isn't a racist, his favorite day care teacher is black and blahblahblah white privilege-cakes. In order to avoid this horror scenario I tried to get Calder to see why that's not the most appropriate thing to say by explaining the volatile history of American race relations in detail and how it still affects people today even though we are allegedly in post-racial society because we have a black President now. I think I even called Obama the Daddy of the county.

Did any of this stick? Um, not sure since he basically started falling asleep during my lecture. So instead of continuing on in that vein I switched gears and started explaining the rules of baseball. He was out in under 2 minutes.

Sweet Mother of God, Finally

Calder fell asleep! Two nights in a row!. Tuesday we spoke to Dr. Merens over the phone about Calder's recent sleep issues. Basically she told us exactly what I expected. There is not much we can do. We just have to let him scream and deal with the anger barf as it comes. She did tell us that we had to stop removing him from the crib when we check on him. That apparently just reinforces the idea that screaming will get Calder whatever he wants. She pointed out that Calder is wicked smart and is totally capable of exploiting any weaknesses he perceives in us. Dr. Merens even suggested we stop checking on him so frequently since it just seems to piss Calder off more when we go in and rub it in his face that he is in stuck in the crib and we are not.

How'd it all work out? Let's just say that I was not aware that it was possible to scream consistently for an hour past infanthood. It's actually even worse than baby screaming because babies just make noise, wahhh wahhh wahhh. Wahh could actually mean "Holy shit, I love you so much, Mom. I am screaming because I am super excited to wake up tomorrow and spend another day in your care!" We just don't know. However it's effing heartbreaking to listen to your own child yell "Mommy, mommy, please... daddy, daddy!" for an hour. It will wear you the fuck down. Calder apparently got tired of that as well because in addition to wailing for his hateful parents he also beseeched Elby to come to his rescue in addition to Blankie, Hippo and both cats. Yippee.

After forty minutes of that Bruce and I finally dare to enter to discover, what? Oh right, more anger barf. Fortunately Hippo was the only victim this time as opposed to the entire fabric contents of the crib like usual. One quick change and a kiss good night later Bruce and I were laying in bed listening to more hollering. Bruce takes Ambien. What a lucky, lucky asshole. I on the other hand had to lay there in the dark feeling like a terrible mother for letting my own precious son scream himself fitful for another 20 minutes. When Calder finally stopped I briefly considered going in to check on him since the only rational explanation for his silence was crib death but I didn't dare risk waking him again. Not that I had to worry for too long since he woke up almost exactly an hour later. And then more laying in the dark being serenaded by Calder's sweet sounds of distress and Bruce's snoring. At least I got to punch Bruce for it.

But. BUT! That last two nights Calder has gone into his crib awake and then proceeded to fall off into dreamland with the bare toddler minimum of fussing. I am elated. It's like we finally broke his tiny little spirit and I can sleep without feeling like I am tormenting my son.

Unless you think this has done some sort of permanent damage? That's not likely... right?

Good Night and Good Luck

Calder, still not sleeping. In fact, last night he barely slept at all. He also came down with a fever which may or may not be related although he hasn't had any other symptoms of illness other than the anger barfing. Which, by the way, the internet assures me happens to other children as well. So that's nice. Tonight I am to have a phone conversation with his pediatrician about it. Hopefully she says something useful and doesn't just tell me that it's just a phase or something. I really hate that. Like, "He won't eat anything other than hot dogs and refried beans? It's just a phase, he'll grow out out it." Oh really, will that growing out of it occur before of after he is removed from our home for being malnourished?

Since Calder was still running a fever over 100 this morning despite being dosed with Tylenol, Bruce was required to stay home with him. The boy was acting somewhat sluggish and dopey when I left, so I inquired about his state of activity later in the day so see if he had started to feel any better. This is the response I got:

"well he was on the verge of his second nap when i was trying to get him to do something but everything was "no": til i mentioned the word outside, after which he jumped up and yelled shoes, so we went for a walk, and this way was the long way and he actually said "this way" why..,"coffee", so we went to starbucks"

So yes and no I guess? Calder never takes more than one nap anymore so that would indicate he is still feeling pretty crappy yet the prospect of Starbucks is apparently enough to miraculously cure him. I am raising a hipster and a yuppie all rolled into one surely going to be pretentious wad .