Alabaster Mom

I had the audacity to show my face at another Weight Watchers meeting this morning. I took the kid along so that my other half could sleep in. The scale rewarded me with a 2.8 pound loss, though I will probably need several more weeks to atone for the "summer o'fairs and festivals." After the meeting, we picked up "Father" and drove to a place called The Farm. It's . . . well, it's a farm. The first thing you do when you get there is to buy a couple of bottles of whole milk to feed to the baby goats (kids, right?). We knew to get there early, because by 11 a.m. the goats are all lurching around, each with a distended belly stretched tight as a drum, while young visitors continue to poke them with rubber nipples. We also bought some corn to feed to the older animals. I know that the farm has a lot of baby animals on the premises and part of me wonders what happens to them when they become adults. I mean, there ARE adults on the farm but I imagine that the...

Chloe, looking through the cat door. Our foster dog had surgery on Monday. Chloe had a small mass on her back that needed to be removed (assumed to be non-cancerous - we're just waiting for the histopathology report to come back from the lab). She also has some chronic issues with her ears. It seems she has had yeast infections in the past and that her former owners didn't bother to treat them. So, the condition just sort of snowballed over time. While Chloe was under general anesthesia, Dr. Barr flushed out her ear canals all the way down to the ear drum (she was born deaf, so no worries about harming her hearing). She is on meds for a week or so, and we are hopeful that her ears won't need more than routine maintenance in the future. She doesn't have any adoption prospects so far, but it looks like she and I may have a couple of television appearances (local news) in the next couple of weeks in order to promote an upcoming fundraiser for the rescue. I'm hopeful th...

As both of my readers know, I hate going to the grocery store. I would rather contract a violent stomach flu (and have my period and a head cold at the same time) than to venture into my local supermarket. I never really enjoyed it before A came along, and thanks to her, I have grown truly to abhor it. We were at the grocery store on Friday evening, me grimly pushing the cart up and down the aisles and she smugly sipping the Icee with which I had bribed her. I tossed a box of cereal (Cocoa Puffs, if you really must know) into the cart. She was sitting in the front of the cart and grabbed the box. She proceeded to open the flaps so that she could eat the cereal. Not surprisingly, I put the kibosh on that little project and shoved the cereal to the back of the cart, where she couldn't reach it. The kid got mad. Really mad. "I'M GONNA TELL YOUR FATHER!" she yelled at me. "Really, you're gonna tell Granddaddy how mean I am?" She nodded, brow furrowed and low...

The kid drew this picture inside a birthday card that I am sending my Aunt. I am assuming it is Jesus, what with the walking on water and all. However, I am pretty sure Jesus had a torso. She got another chance to flex her artistic muscle at an art festival we attended this morning. Or festibul, as she called it. Speaking of festivals . . . you may have noticed that we've attended quite a few this summer. I signed us up for every fair and festival I could find. These celebrations, combined with two vacations in a row . . . well, let's just say that they weren't altogether compatible with Weight watchers. I did attend my Weight Watchers meeting this morning. Well, lumbered in was more like it. As it turns out, the scale did notice my summertime over-indulgences. I apologized to it and vowed to make it proud next week. I'm picking up a local owner/surrender this afternoon, which will bring my household dog total to four. Fortunately, I am attending a volunteer mee...

"You don't need to open every can," I told her helpfully. "But I made you a birthday cake. You have to blow out the candle." It's not my birthday, in case you wondered. (Speaking of cakes, have you seen the Cake Wrecks blog ? It's hilarious! My favorite was the Grand Theft Auto Cake . . . for a four-year-old!) But back to the topic of Play-Doh . . . my younger sisters never had the opportunity to play with Play-Doh, because our mother banned it before they were even born. I got to play with it for a brief and shining moment when I was very young. Apparently, I promptly ground it into the carpet, where no amount of scrubbing/cleansers/elbow grease could remove it. It's probably still there . . . in a little apartment in Maryland somewhere. Little hard blobs adhered tightly to the carpet fibers. But anyway, thanks to my failure to play with the colorful dough responsibly, my sisters never even got their hands on a can. So sorry, sisters o' mine.

I resisted it for as long as I could. I didn't want to join MySpace or Facebook, both of which seemed, at least in my mind, to be nothing but a time-suck. Between working full time, donating my time to Boxer Rescue, and oh yeah - raising a child, I just didn't want anything else lapping up my time. But then my moms' group from BabyCenter decided to defect in light of some changes that BabyCenter has made. They headed over to Facebook. So, not wanting to lose contact with all the moms I've met over the past three years, I joined Facebook. Lo and behold, though, I started getting "friend requests" from people I hadn't seen since high school. Then I dug around and found some on my own. I found several friends that I've known since elementary school! Next thing you know, people are sending me virtual gifts and I'm reading their updates and so on it goes. It's almost downright fun. I also get to harass my middle sister online, which is worth the pr...

We received our first incident/accident report from A's new school on Friday. It was filled out in triplicate and I had to sign it and everything. I wonder if this will . . . GO DOWN ON HER PERMANENT RECORD! The upshot of it is that she was attempting to sit down in her little chair and have some lunch at the table. She missed the chair, slammed her chin on the table on her way down, bit her tongue, and went into hysterics. She may be adopted, but she sure seems to take after me in the "grace and poise" department. Needless to say, her tongue bled impressively. According to the report, her teacher cleaned her up and then gave her a freeze pop and some TLC. (The report actually stated that my child received some TLC.) I signed the report when I picked her up on Friday afternoon and then called her dad on the way home. "We got our first incident report!" I told him. I figured maybe it was one of those landmark parenting moments or something. I put A on the phone s...

In my ongoing quest to suck all the marrow out of summer, I scheduled a bunch of stuff again this weekend. You see, in our neck of the woods, winter is long - far longer than any reasonable person would deem necessary. Sub-zero temperatures, snow piled up to my cooch, frozen car door locks . . . these days are not too terribly far away. So yeah, I schedule the hell out of summer and make no apologies for it. Early Saturday morning, I headed to church to help out at a rummage sale fundraiser. Each room within the fellowship was filled with a different product type: clothing, books, bake sale, electronics, and so forth. I somehow ended up working in the children's toy room. It wasn't long before I was engaged in a full-scale covert operation: namely, hiding stuff that I wanted to buy for my kid. I collected games, stickers, and other paraphernalia in a corner and then guarded my pile with a ferocity only a mother could muster. After my shift at the rummage sale was over, I picke...

As usual, the kid woke up in a less than joyous mood this morning. We used to ride out the 6:18 tantrum with the resigned assumption that it was unavoidable. But, one day we discovered that if we carry her straight from her bed and lay her on the couch in the living room, where "Blue's Clues" is conveniently playing on the television, the tantrum is much more tolerable. She sleepily gathers the clues while I get her dressed (I've also learned that she is much less likely to protest the ensemble I've chosen when she is not completely conscious). Good ol' Blue's Clues. I always thought it would be kinda funny if Steve/Joe actually failed to figure out the clues and then left the mystery hanging. Then he could go back to it years later, a la "Cold Case." Ohhhhh, Blue wanted to have a finger puppet show! It makes so much sense now! This morning I got her dressed and then suggested that she pick out a box of cereal from the pantry. Some days I make eg...

What a four-hour drive gets you! Our wee family took a vacation last week. Yes, I know we just took a vacation last month, but that's how we roll, suckas! We spent five days together in a beautiful cabin next to a pristine lake (the cabin is actually located in a National Forest). A friend of mine owns the cabin and lets us use it every year. It's a four-hour drive (involving lots of dirt/gravel roads) to get there, so we don't go unless we have at least a few days to spend. There is something to be said for a vacation with no internet access. Hell, I can barely get a cellular signal at the cabin. I have to sit out on the deck and face North, and then maybe I get two bars. I did a lot of reading. I read The Memory Keeper's Daughter and also finished When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris. I also completed a good chunk of Dog is My Co-Pilot . It is pretty rare for me to find the time to do that much reading. When I wasn't reading, I was eating and/or dri...

Sleeping on the beach The other morning I was leaving for work and P and the kid were leaving at the same time. He takes her to daycare in the morning and I pick her up in the afternoon. I backed out slowly as she stood in front of the garage, holding Teddy in one hand and waving to me with the other. I eased the van into the cul-de-sac and then rolled down my window as I passed the house. I kissed my fingertips and then flattened my hand and blew the kiss in her direction. Her little arm shot into the air and then her hand closed into a fist, capturing the kiss inside. "I caught it, Mama!" she yelled to me. It is moments like that that make me want to scoop her up and eat her alive or something. Like most three-year-olds, she spends most of her spare time plotting new ways to push old buttons. But there are those other times, too - the ones that make your heart swell and leave you grinning like a fool. When we walked into the state fair on Saturday, she was exclaiming over ...

On the skyway We got to the State Fair bright and early yesterday morning (after a two-hour drive). We go every year, so we've got it down to a science. We know where we can park for free. We know which attractions to hit first, before they become too crowded. Everything was going as planned until . . . I nearly puked on the midway. P and I were standing behind a giant pig, which had a slide inside. We were waiting for our daughter to slide out of the pig's butt, when all of a sudden I felt faint. I'll spare you all of the details, but my stomach was churning and I was sweating in a way that was not at all ladylike. I spent a fair amount of time in the ladies' room trying to decide if I was going to be able to keep the baked potato I had eaten or not. And that was the kicker - I hadn't even eaten any junk yet! I had eaten a $5.50 baked potato (I think that's, what, a 500% mark-up?) and a pinch of cotton candy. No deep-fried Oreo's, no food-on-a-stick, nothin...