Alabaster Mom

My middle sister (with whom my daughter and I are currently staying on our little vacation) read my last blog entry and couldn't help but notice that I failed to mention her extraordinarily gracious hospitality, good looks, and generalized charm and wit. I regret the oversight. In other news, I'm enjoying having some quiet time. Today I watched two Dateline episodes in a row and got some reading done. My kid spends every waking moment with her eight-year-old cousin.  They get along pretty well. One interesting little development,though .  .  .  she's been kissing him. A lot. Now, I think it's fine, but I'm not sure at what point one should discourage such displays of affection - or at least the frequency of them. Earlier, he threw a dirty sock at her and she said, "If you do that again, I will kiss you!" He replied, "That's not really a threat because I don't mind at all." We went to my sister's gym today and while we were waiting

The kid and I are hanging out in the DC area for a week or so. We're staying with my middle sister and her family. My sister had a doctor's appointment this morning and two of her three kids had school, so she dropped us off at the Metro and A and I headed downtown. The kid has been studying American presidents in school and I thought it would be educational for her to see the Lincoln Memorial and whatnot. When we got downtown, we walked from the Smithsonian Metro stop all the way to the Lincoln Memorial, which is actually a bit of a haul. As it turns out, it takes even longer when the shortest member of your party stops every 30 seconds to pick dandelions. Anyway, we made it to the memorial and she even read part of the Gettysburg address. We also visited the Korean War memorial and the WWII memorial. The Washington Monument is closed, but we walked up to it and took some photos.  After that, we walked to the Old Post Office Pavilion and rode to the top of the observation t

The worst has happened: our washing machine died. I deduced that it was not working properly when I attempted to wash a blanket, only to find that it weighed a hundred thousand pounds when I attempted to pull it out of the washer and put it in the dryer. The spinny thing inside the washing machine? No spinny now. When I told my husband about the washer's passing, he rolled his eyes and said this: "Fine! Let's just replace it. Again! I swear, we've had to replace that thing so many times!" I waited until he was done with his rant and suggested that he go downstairs, lift the washer's lid, and look at the date of manufacture. I knew he wouldn't do it, so I took the liberty of advising him of the date, which is 1998. You know, the year we bought our house? While it is true that we've had to replace the dryer, the washer served us for 14 years. To me, that seems like a pretty good run. I gave up on trying to convince my husband of the washer's dutiful

My daughter attends public school. As such, I understand that education budgets are tight. I'm all about supporting my kid's school. Book fair? I'm there. Butter Braid pastry fundraiser? I'll take three (cinnamon . . . mmmmmm). I send in snacks for the class whenever a reminder comes home. I attend the concerts and the special events. I try not to be a pain in her teacher's ass. Recently, a note came home about a drive for hygiene products needed for local families. I promptly bought a couple tubes of toothpaste and some shampoo and sent it in. The student council held a similar drive in December and we participated then as well. I mention all of this not to make myself sound like the most awesome mom ever, but rather to make it clear that I am not anti-charity. Obviously I've been feeding foster dogs for a dozen years now, so if I can directly help someone (someone with or without fur), I'm in. What I don't like: sending money to humongous charities

You talk too much, you worry me to death. You talk too much, you even worry my pet. You just talk, talk too much. My daughter talks a lot. So much, in fact, that her teacher made her draw a diagram of where A could possibly move her desk so as to quell the insatiable need to chit-chat with her neighbors. I Googled the term "least populated state" and came up with Wyoming. So, that would be my vote. And of course there's always the moon. (click for larger view)

Well, spring has sprung, eh? It has been freakishly warm. Normally in these parts we're still wearing jackets in May. So, I was ill-prepared from the sudden onslaught of warm weather (as in, summer clothes are still sound asleep in plastic bins in my basement). What really struck me as odd is that it wasn't a one or two-day anomaly - it's been a sustained stretch of above-average temperatures.  Part of me thinks, "Well, isn't this nice? I can walk the dogs after dinner!" But the rest of me thinks, "Holy shit, we're all going to die in a fiery apocalypse when the planet hurls itself into the sun once and for all!"  Seriously, though, if this year's weather isn't proof positive of global warming (or climate change, or whatever you want to call it), I don't know what is. The kid and I are flying to DC next week, so we are really excited about that. We're leaving P with four Boxers, but he doesn't seem to mind too much. He can p

As you'll recall, my foster dog Valentino was in rough shape when he came into rescue.  I dropped him off at a veterinary clinic on Tuesday to be neutered. He weighed in at 52.4 pounds, which is nearly a 20-pound gain since he first landed at animal control on Valentine's Day.  Now, we knew that his jaw was broken at some point. We couldn't put him under anesthesia and run x-rays because he was too thin and sick to risk anesthetizing him. The vet who saw him initially felt that the bone in the jaw was starting to callous over and that it was healing. Sure enough, Valentino has been eating well and I, too, thought his jaw was healing. When I dropped him off at the vet clinic on Tuesday, I confirmed that we still wanted to run x-rays to see what was going on with the jaw. My best guess was that the jaw was healing but that it would always be misaligned (which would account for the way Valentino flings food in all directions when he eats and the fact that his tongue sticks out

"She used her Play-Doh to make a what?" School was closed on Friday, though I'm not exactly sure why (I've given up on understanding the method to the madness that is our school district's open/close schedule). My daughter spent the day at Kindercare.  When I picked her up, a staff member approached me. She smiled and said, "I just wanted to mention something to you . . . "  Uh oh. She explained to me that the kids had been playing with Play-Doh earlier in the day. Apparently my daughter announced, loudly and repeatedly, that she was shaping her hunk of Play-Doh into . . . "a wiener."  I immediately began silently repeating in my head: maybe she was talking about a dog . A friend of hers has a miniature dachshund, so maybe? "I'll talk to her," I told the staff member. She went on to tell me that she had tried ignoring A's loud proclamations about the phallus she was making, as she didn't want to give her the attenti

I have been feeling out-of-sorts for a few days and couldn't figure out why. I spent several days this week feeling uncharacteristically emotional. Maybe it's because five different people challenged me to "Words with Friends" on Facebook and I am losing every. single. game. At one point, one of my letter trays contained six E's and a T. I mean, fuck my life. Seriously. So yeah, I laid down the word TEEN and racked up five points, yes I did. See, everyone thinks that English majors rock at Scrabble but the dirty little secret is that many of us are painfully bad at it. Scrabble (and Words with Friends, which is the same thing) is a game of strategy and math, not vocabulary (I felt a little better when I heard the hosts of A Way with Words confess that they are not good at Scrabble). So, while I am laying down awesome words like malaria and getting very few points, my friend Kate slaps a Q on the board somewhere (without even using a U, mind you) and gets hundreds

I am happy to report that Valentino basically looks like a normal dog now. He was 33 pounds when he first ended up at animal control. As of last Thursday, he was 48 pounds. I'm sure he's gained a couple more pounds since then. I soak his kibble ahead of time (before each meal) since he has a hard time chewing because of his broken jaw. I am having him neutered on Tuesday. At that time the veterinarian will also run an x-ray of his jaw. It seems to be healing and I don't think there is anything we can do about it at this point. I suspect he will always just have a hard time closing his mouth fully. His tongue sticks out most of the time.  The reason we haven't done the x-ray before now is that (and I learned something new here) you have to flip the dog on his back so that his chin is exposed, move all of his appendages out of the way, and then shove an x-ray plate in his mouth. Apparently dogs do not do this voluntarily, which is why anesthesia is required.  I am plann

Although he will deny it if you ask him directly, I embarrass my husband occasionally. When we first met, I was in college. I was a junior at George Mason University. One fall morning, I was rushing to class and, as parts of the campus were fairly woodsy, I slipped on a leaf-covered path and fell. My backpack went flying and my tights ripped as my knee hit the asphalt. When I got home that evening I told P what had happened. His response: "Oh, did anyone see you?"  Not, "Are you okay?" or "I'm sorry to hear that" but "Did anyone see you?" I am not sure how I could have embarrassed him in absentia, but apparently it was possible. So, I have known since then that the dude does not want to stand out in a crowd. He'd prefer if I stay pretty low-key, too. When I got home on Friday and told him I had gotten a tattoo, he looked at my cream-colored camisole and the pink button-down I'd worn over it. My tattoo was hidden under a glob of vase

I got a tattoo.  That's right, I'm pretty gangsta. I decided to go with a pot leaf on my neck. Kidding, I'm kidding.  Well, you'll just have to hope I'm kidding, because I can't actually show you my tattoo. It's my daughter's name (and you know I love you, reader o'mine, but there is always the possibility that you are criminally insane) . Anyway, I had the kid write her first and middle names. Then I had the tattoo artist add four shooting stars, which symbolize the four babies I lost to miscarriage before my daughter was born. The stars are emerald green (my daughter's birthstone and - coincidentally - my favorite color), purple, fuchsia, and bright blue. I think I was the tattoo artist's dream come true because my skin is so fair that the ink is pretty vivid in contrast. Where to put the tattoo was a big decision. She took a lot of time with me and put a stencil on my calf and also on my chest so that I could see how both would look. I m