Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Is 4 too young to have the Talk ?



My daughter J brought this project home from preschool the other day. I gushed about how wonderful it was and what a great job she'd done. Then my eyes went to that thing. That "thing" next to the snowman's right arm.

"What is that?" I asked J

"It's his arm." J said matter of factly.

"But isn't this his arm here?" I said pointing to the wooden stick protruding from his body in the place one might expect an arm to be.

"Yes" she said and busied herself with something completely different seemingly to avoid any further questioning from me.

Now, is it just me...or are you seeing what I'm seeing ?

I mean he is after all a snowman, and my J well she's a smart cookie...everyday her drawings seem to get more and more accurate.

Sure "it" is not in it's usual place...but I gotta wonder

Did my sweet little princess give that snowman genitalia ?

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

On Old Flames and Fiery Friendships

Just yesterday I saw a man that,had I not done a double take, would have sworn was my old high school boyfriend. The resemblance was uncanny and it got me to thinking. Thinking about mistakes made, faux friendships and the general melodrama that is adolescence.
Will was a great guy. He sang in a band, had a great sense of humor and most importantly a mom that worked late so as to give us the coolest hangout pad for our group of friends.
Everybody loved Will…except me. While I really enjoyed Will as a friend, I just didn’t have those type of feelings for him.
He was a charmer, though, he wrote me a song, he showered me with flowers and everyone who was anyone said we made a cute couple. So I agreed to go “steady” with him. Silly. Yes, I know. But I was 14. He was 16 and part of me just thought it was cool to be dating an older guy that everyone loved.
Everyone including April.
One night at a sleepover, I revealed my true feelings about Will to April.
April subsequently told him.

He confronted me. I fessed up and days later April asked Will to go out with her.

As I reminisced about how April did me so wrong (even though technically I did Will wrong…but,ahem, I digress) I thought even on my bitchiest of bitchy days I wouldn't honestly have done that to a friend.

Just like I wouldn’t have sex in my friends bed with some random guy.

And yes, that happened too.

I was about 20 years old, living on my own working and going to school. Tiffany was a girlfriend I hung out with quite a bit and could rely on for just about anything. So I didn’t hesitate to ask her for a ride to the airport. About two days in to my travels Tiffany phoned me and said she’d gotten in to a physical fight with her roommate (a male). She asked if she could stay at my place. I was of course instantly worried and happy to let her stay at my place while I was away. When I returned, although it was cramped quarters (I only had 1 bedroom) I told her she was welcome to stay until she could find another place to live.
At the time, I worked the night shift from 5 pm to 2 a.m. One night I felt ill and left work around 11 p.m. I walked in to my apartment and didn’t see Tiffany on the couch. Assuming she must have gone out, I headed in to my room to get some much needed rest.
There she was. Naked. In my bed. With some random dude.
At that moment I wondered how many times she’d done that . Had sex on my sheets, not told me and let me sleep in them.
I made it clear that Tiffany needed to leave. That night. And thus began the decline of our friendship. In hindsight while yes, her actions were less then hygienic they were maybe not the worst in the world. Later, I found out she’d lied about the fight with her roommate, stolen money and other such unsavory things so in the end I'd been right on in bidding that "friendship" adieu.

Fortunately, nowadays, I don’t encounter many situations like that. I’d like to think I’ve matured and associate myself with more mature adults.

But there is always an exception to every rule.

Take for instance my friend Regina. I’ve known Regina for a several years now and while I don’t see Regina as much as I used to we email now and then and try to make plans to get together with one another. A couple of months back, I ran in to Regina at the store. We chatted for a while , catching up on one another’s lives and promised to get together soon. The next day I emailed and told her it’d be fun if she were able to come to my birthday celebration. She was more then excited to come.

That is until she found out that I’m friendly with her ex husband’s new wife. I didn’t know the connection when I met the “new wife” Lisa. She just happened to be the mom of my son B’s preschool friend. And as Lisa and I began to talk about stepchildren she said things that made me realize her stepson was my friend Regina’s son. Regina had told me the story before. How her marriage ended because of her husband’s infidelity. Infidelity it turned out with my new acquaintance Lisa.
Sure the situation was awful. But it was before my time and frankly didn’t have anything to do with me. In any event, when I found out the connection, I let Regina know. She asked that if Lisa and I were going to be social that I let her know if Lisa was going to be at any gatherings she’d be at. I assured her that I would out of respect to her but as I’m just getting to know Lisa I don’t plan on having her at the party. And that was the last I heard from Regina.
She simply stopped talking to me. She didn’t even bother to make up an excuse as to why she could no longer come to my birthday soiree. She just simply didn’t come.

How’s that for maturity?

No matter though. I’m no longer interested in surrounding myself with her kind of crazy.

And there you have it.

The instances are few, but they are forever burned in to my mind. You see, I pride myself on being a good friend and don’t think it’s asking too much to ask others to do the same. But eh…I guess I can’t have it all right.

There (*exhale*) that was cleansing.

You ever had a “friend” like April Tiffany or Regina? Do tell? Leave it in the comments or better yet if you’ve got a “whopper” of a tale to tell blog it and link to the post in comments.

I can’t wait….I loves me a good drama.

Umm as long as it isn’t part of my own life that is.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Waa-Waa-Waa, Whine, Whine...that's all you'll hear here.

Complaint Desk: Complaint Desk, How may I help you?

Me: Yeah, Hi, um I have a complaint

CD:Yes ma’am how can we help ?

Me:Well, first off I had a horrible weekend, it all started when I said “not this weekend” to my stepdaughters younger brother coming to spend the weekend and my husband overrode me. He’s such a softie. All it takes is a couple of alligator tears from a six year old boy and he just rolls over. I mean c’mon. So that resulted in me having not one, not two but five kids this weekend between the ages of 4 – 14.

CD: Oooh that’s rough, but…

Me: You betcha, then to make matters worse my team got spanked in the playoffs. Their season is over. Now what will I do to tap in to my inner 25 year old male if I can’t drink beer, yell obscenities and get out all my pent up aggression during the games.

CD:Right , gotcha , hmmm, that is a tough one, but uh…

Me: The rest of my weekend was spent refereeing arguments between the 4 year olds and the 6 year old. The 6 year old and the 13 year old. The 13 year old and the 14 year old. Then when I finally got a moment to relax once the twins were in bed and hubby returned from taking 14,13 & 6 home we decided to order a movie. You ever heard of Vacancy ? No ? Well there is probably a reason for it. It sucked ass. Bad, bad, ending… So yeah, there was 86 minutes I'll never get back.

CD: But you did finally get to rest right ?

Me: Well sure but then I had to get up at o’dark thirty to get ready for work. Still suffering from “I didn’t-have-a-relaxing-weekend-itis” I hit snooze one to many times and was 1 hour late for work.

CD:Uhh ma’am are you quite finished ?

Me: No, no I was going to tell you about how because I was late I had to drive and use metered parking. When I went out to feed my meter just now the machine was broken so I wound up needing to move my car and when I finally found a parking space I got out,fed that meter and then promptly stepped in dogshit.

CD: Oooo, I didn’t see that coming.

Me: So what do I do now ?

CD: Uh, Ma’am, this is the complaint line for Acme Foods we can’t actually help you with those things here

Me: Oh , right yes, I knew that, well I did have a problem with my frozen lunch entrĂ©e…

CD: Ok, ma’am then we should talk about that

Me: Right…

* And that folks is how off the deep end these last few days have driven me and I may or may not have been curled up in a ball rocking back in forth when I made this call.
.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Scrapbooking Hell

I am not a scrapbooking kind of person. Never have been. Never will be. Now this doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the beauty of a well constructed project but generally I just don’t have the patience or the inclination.

Thus you can imagine my delight when I received a package last month from my sister in law in Texas with an invitation to her baby shower, and a bunch of stickers and such to make not one but two scrapbook pages for her.
Included in the package was a brief letter telling me that I didn’t have to make both if I didn’t want to but that I should send them by January 11.
Did she really want me, me who can barely manage to download photos to her computer in a timely fashion, to create a scrapbook page and actually mail it to her in 1 month.

I sighed and figured I had a ton of time to figure out how to get out of making the pages create the pages.

I received the package in early December and its been lying on the table all month. Taunting me... making me feel awful for not giving it its due attention.

I’ve gone over to it a few times in the last few weeks and pulled out the contents of the envelope trying to envision how the finished project could look. In the end, though, I just became frustrated because dammit I just didn’t want to do it. Besides, there was tons of other things to be done that needed to take precedence over this chore task. I mean the lint in my belly button isn’t just going to pick itself.

But, as the deadline is looming around the corner, last night I pulled out the contents once again hoping they’d magically make themselves decorative and pretty. As luck would have it, amidst all the stickers, foam frames and Ariel themed craft paper I saw an actual completed page

Now mind you, it’s a sheet of plain white paper covered with Princess stickers and glittery letters upside down and backward spelling out "words" like JRBKFFT,DZOT and my daughter J’s name but that’s something right ?

You think if I send it back to my sister-in-law she’ll know the difference?
What if I include a little letter that says “Isn’t this cute? J wanted to make the pages for her new baby cousin”

I mean it’s not like she’d call me back and say “Are you kidding me? You let your 4 year old get in to the package and couldn’t even be bothered to complete a page yourself. It looks like total shit”

Uh, at least I hope not anyway.

Monday, January 7, 2008

You Had to be There

I arranged to have two women come to the house for the Sip Spa and Celebrate birthday festivities; one to do chair massages and the other to help us do manicures and pedicures.

I hadn’t met either of them in person prior to the night of the party as we'd only communicated by email and phone so I was a little nervous about what to expect.

One turned out to be a younger,hipper kind of gal and the other an older,more frumpy kind of gal but both were very nice and very professional considering the antics going on that night.

Let’s just say the conversation started out racy and continued at warp speed.

When we sat down to do pedicures my friend Bree launched in to a story about how she was recently gifted a penis pump and told to take it on her vacation with her.
As we all joked about the laugh the airport employees must have had while examining her luggage she said her friend that had bestowed the gift on her told her just to try it. It wasn’t really for enlarging so much as it was to enhance the overall experience.

Never one to back down from an adventure, Bree, showed it to her husband later that day.Her well endowed husband.

Who promptly took offense and said “A penis pump what the fuck do I need that for?”

So Bree began to explain to her husband and also demonstrated for all the party guests.

At that moment I heard a thud. Looking in the direction of the noise I realized that the massage lady was on the floor.

“I’m ok” she said weakly and hurriedly packed her stuff.

"Are you sure you’re ok ?" I asked envisioning the summons I might get when she took me to court for causing her bodily injury.

“Yes” she said hurriedly mumbling about being a klutz.

"Can I help you with some of your things?" I offered.

“Uh no” she said practically breaking in to a run. She couldn’t get out of my house fast enough

I’m still not entirely convinced she didn’t faint in shock.

Once we were sure she’d gone we roared with laughter. If you’d only seen the look on her face.

When I relayed the story to hubby later that night he didn’t find it quite as funny. Instead, he was fixated on the fact that a penis pump could enhance ones sexual experience.

So he suggested we get one- never one to want to have a dull bedroom life I said “sure, why not"

So off we went the next day in search of a "pump". I’ll spare you the details but just know those suckers (pun intended) create quite the vacuum seal and well… hubby got stuck.

Frantically we pulled at it to no avail.


Bwahahha…ok, I can’t keep it up any longer.

I may have created an alternate ending for my own amusement.
That and well I just created too much build-up around a story that was only funny in a “you-had-to-be-there" kind of way.

In reality the story ended just before the “pump search”.

But if hubby and I ever do decide to get a “pump” and it ever does get stuck believe me you’ll be the first to know.

Well after I stop laughing and tell his best friend, his boss, his co-workers, his pool buddies, the neighbors…

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Happy Snooze Year

Happy New Year my friends. I hope you had as exciting a New Years Eve as I did. Wanting to keep this blog somewhat family friendly (ha, who am i kidding) all I'll say is I woke up with one eyebrow shaved off , nekkid, with my hand in a bucket of water.

What's that you say ? Those kinds of things only happen in frat houses to 21 year olds...

How dare you?

Ok, you got me. You're right. No debauchery for yours truly.

I settled down on the homefront with the hubby and kids, had two margaritas and promptly fell asleep. But never fear, I did wake up at 11:40 only to notice hubby asleep right beside me. He woke up just in time for the countdown, we shared a kiss and well...went right back to sleep.

And that my friends was my spectacular, too hot to handle, rockin New Years Eve.

In my defense, though, last Friday I did go out dancing with hubby, his buddy and my newly almost divorced bff. Let's see I broke up two almost fights, drank, danced, and didn't get home until 1:00 a.m. That still qualifies me for the cool kids club...right ?

Uhhh right ?

Now then, if you'll excuse me I may pull the disappearing act until next week. Still lots to do...but because I'm such an obsessive personality I couldn't stay away for one whole week and not pop in and say hello.

And yes when I return I WILL tell the penis pump story (only now with all this build up I'm hesitant...eh well everyone loves a good penis pump story so what the hey)

Until we meet again...

I dig you all,
WM