The Inaccessible Toilet

In the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, my 2 year old surreptitiously left the room, went around the corner where she thought she was alone but where she was in fact in full view of everybody, squatted, and took a dump. Luckily she's still in diapers, or this story would have been completely different. My brother said, "That's so funny how she goes around the corner to do her business."

Actually, the online articles say, this is a sign that she is ready to be toilet trained. It's not the first sign she's shown, either. Others include announcing the need before she actually goes, giving me plenty of time to get her installed on a potty. We've had an Elmo potty for about 3 months now, but I've yet to break it out, despite the Signs.

Why, you ask? (Because I'm sure you're dying to know the details of my potty training theory) It's purely projection on my part but, frankly, if I had the ability to go whenever and wherever I needed or wanted to, I would be loathe to give up that freedom. The moment we potty train, we are slaves to the location of every bathroom on the planet. I am one of those people who has fairly high toilet standards, which makes it even worse. Not only do I need to make sure I remain close to a bathroom at all times, but it has to be a bathroom I consider worthy of my waste and delicate parts.

I pay a lot of attention to toilets, and I remember where the good ones are. The ones in Macy's on Fourth Avenue are lovely. Each stall has its own counter space, kind of a half-bath, and nice wooden full-length doors. The toilets at the Bellevue Mall are really nice too, very spacious, also with full-length doors. I was incredibly impressed by the toilets in the Chicago airport, which automatically apply a new seat liner for you by waving your hand before a sensor. I greatly admire any bathroom in which I do not have to touch anything. Auto flush, auto faucet, auto soap dispenser, auto seat cover installer all earn big points in my toilet book. If they could install doors that automatically open and close that would be awesome.

On the opposite end of the spectrum (is there a butt joke in there?) are toilets that embody my own personal hell. A hole in the ground with tread marks indicating where to place your feet as you squat over it - this is not acceptable. And common in Europe. Which means that when I travel there, I don't drink much. A stall with no doors is equally appalling. I won't do it. Going to the bathroom in front of someone is a recurring nightmare of mine.

Speaking of nightmares, that's another thing I don't want to subject my daughter to by potty training her. The Inaccessible Toilet Dream. Now I understand from some vague and spotty research I've done (i.e., mentioning to friends in passing conversation that I have them, and getting the "wow, you're even crazier than I thought" look) that this is not a nightmare that plagues everyone but it does plague my mother. So clearly, like a fear of bumpy things, it runs in the family on one of those DNA strands or something.

The Inaccessible Toilet Dream is one in which, for hours or weeks in dreamland-time, you search in vain for a toilet that is acceptable enough to pee in. The toilets you find, however, are either the ones that you'll find in real-life in Europe or the Middle East, or are two stories tall and you don't have a ladder, or someone sealed the opening over so that if you sat and did your business it would run all over you, or is set on a pedestal in the middle of Yankee Stadium so that in order to relieve yourself you will have to do so in front of thousands of people.

Now, the Inaccessible Toilet Dream actually serves a practical purpose, which is to prevent you from peeing in the bed. However, it would be a little more practical for my clever subconscious to just WAKE ME UP so I could use the bathroom and resume more pleasant dreams.

If I wore diapers, I'd just go. No wet bed, the brilliant science of modern diapers would wick away the moisture from my bottom, my dreams would remain untroubled, and I'd sleep happily on.

What kind of sadistic mother would take that away from her child?!

Also, I'm just too lazy to potty train her. Maybe her roommate in college can fill her in.

Another Saturday Night

My husband and I don't have much of a social life anymore. We expected that; we'd been well-informed that having a baby would do this. And while we don't love it, most of the time we don't mind. We've always been home-bodies for the most part anyway. But we do have our limits, and they were severely tested this weekend.

We had just sat down to our usual special Saturday dinner treat: pizza that costs its weight in gold. With a baby in bed by 7pm we don't have the opportunity to dine out very often and thus not much of a way to distinguish Saturday nights from every other night other than pizza delivery. But this Saturday night was to prove extra special in oh so many ways.

It started right after I'd taken my first bite of gold pizza. The dog had been making a nuisance of herself all day by licking her private crotchal area. This is something she has always done with some frequency, so other than getting incredibly irritated - really, the sound of that can catipult me into a bad mood faster than you can say "that pint was supposed to serve four" - I mostly ignored her. But Tom, who apparently pays a little more attention to detail when it comes to the dog's private crotchal area ministrations, noticed something different this time: namely that she really, really would not stop.

Now, if it were still just me and the dog, like in the old days, I probably would have spent another 24 hours or so yelling at her every time she went crotch-diving before it occurred to me something might actually be wrong. Tom on the other hand leapt to attention and grabbed a flashlight in a resourceful and Boy Scout-like manner. I sighed heavily. I generally don't like my meals interrupted, especially to shine a flashlight up my dog's ass, but I couldn't let him do this alone so I joined him on the floor and held the dog still while Tom did the honors.

Oh. My. God. What was going on with my dog Down There made giving birth look pretty. There was oozing. There were several non-solid substances providing varying levels of olfactory insult. It was the Battle of Normandy, if the soldiers had been covered in fecal matter the consistency of tar.

The sight knocked me completely senseless. I held the dog and felt dread sweep through my body. "What do we do?" I whispered in utter horror as Tom clicked the flashlight off with a grim expression.

We gathered Theo up in an old towel and Tom carried her through the rain to the car and to the emergency veterinary clinic where they diagnosed what every couple longs to hear on a Saturday night: "impacted anal gland." "Yeah," they elaborated completely unnecessarily, "those get pretty nasty pretty quick." In fact, they wouldn't even let Tom stay in the room while they treated Theo, for his own protection. While I was upset at the thought of Theo going through this without us there, I recognized that had Tom remained, he may never have had a good night's sleep again.

Theo arrived back home around 11pm, thoroughly drugged and accompanied by a dozen different medications and instructions. And, for the first time in her 14 years... yes. The dreaded Cone Collar of Shame.

I couldn't do it. I looked at my poor dear friend, drugged out of her mind, miserable, scared and shaking and simply could not force this further indignity upon her. She was so drugged, I reasoned with my skeptical husband, that she wouldn't be inclined to lick anything anyway. Let's just leave her be and let her sleep.

Of course I was awakened a couple hours later by that insanely irritating sound of ferocious crotchal area ministrations. With a sigh, I wrapped the Cone Collar of Shame around my miserable little dog and went back to sleep as soon as I was assured she had drifted off.

I was awakened again an hour later. She had managed to crane her neck far enough around the cone to continue her mission. With a cry of frustration and fatigue I pulled Tom out of bed who thought for a long while (he really likes problem-solving, and is fairly good at it, so long as you're patient). "Maybe we should diaper her," he said.

And here I couldn't bear to put a cone collar on her! But it's amazing what you'll agree to do to your best friend when your best friend's ass is leaking something indescribably heinous on your bedroom rug.

So we diapered the dog. How handy we happen to have an 11 month old baby who is, apparently, roughly the same size around.

Diapered and coned, we all fell back to sleep for a few minutes before the baby awoke at her usual Oh My God It's Early hour. I got the baby, and Tom carried the drugged dog upstairs to get her settled on the couch for the day. As soon as I brought the baby upstairs and she saw the dog - I swear this is true - she started laughing. Even our 11 month old daughter knew the dog looked utterly ridiculous.

The indignities were not over. For any of us. The day found us juggling a very curious and mobile baby with the diapering and cleansing of our dog's extra ass hole. I won't go into any more detail on that. Just suffice it to say that I feel like I need a shower along the lines of the one they gave Karen Silkwood. And I may never eat pizza again.

But one thing's for sure: I will never again complain about a boring Saturday night.

He had a charming way that appealed to all the kids...

"Do you like kids?"

What a dumb-ass question. That's like asking "Do you like grown-ups?" Well, some, sure. Most? Not really. Besides, when a person asks that question what they want to know is either, "Do you intend to procreate?" or "Are you comfortable with kids?"

One of the great side-effects of having children is that you don't get asked this question anymore. Which is really silly, because it indicates that people assume that, because you have one or more of your own, you like all of them. In my case, that's a completely false assumption. I still like kids like I like grown-ups - that is to say, not very many of them - and I am still extraordinarily uncomfortable around them, because they are weird.

My daughter is, of course, an exception - that is, she's just as weird as the rest of them, but she doesn't make me uncomfortable because I've been around her enough to understand her alien behaviors. It's like with dogs. If you don't know the species, you may misunderstand the baring of the teeth as a friendly overture when, in fact, you're about to lose a finger. Toddlers are extremely similar, but if you spend enough time around one of them, you can at least identify the warning signs and know when to flee.

So I'm slightly more comfortable with children who are exactly my daughter's age, or up to six months younger (beyond six months ago, I don't remember so well). If they are a day or more older than she, they make me uncomfortable with their unfathomable ways. This makes daycare pick-up pretty tricky, because there are lots of those buggers crawling around.

Usually I take a few seconds to untangle my kid from the fray and then high-tail it for the car. But yesterday this little blond-haired demon child, ala Children of the Corn, cornered me, literally, and started, like, interacting, while I looked around for an escape that wouldn't be too obvious. I didn't want to hurt the kid's feelings, after all, because everybody knows that children possess a telekinetic ability to sense whether a person is good or evil, and as much as children creep me out, I still don't want them to think I'm evil. Luckily most of them give me the benefit of the doubt, with a wise, sage-like twinkle in their eye that indicates they are both slightly amused by my discomfiture, and at the same time graciously forgiving and understanding of it; thus I am generally dismissed not as evil, but as just one of your everyday imbeciles.

But this kid was freaky, and I suspected that rather than benevolently letting me off with a sympathetic nod of dismissal, he would pulverize me by shooting red lasers from his eyeballs if I didn't watch my step.

"My dad's name is Larry," he told me, shifting slightly left and right to keep me from escaping, so I felt like a lamb about to be slaughtered. His blue gaze was steely and unwavering.

"Oh?" I said, because this is my typical response when a child tries to communicate with me. Meanwhile, I was clutching my two-year-old daughter while she gazed down, undisturbed, at the boy-creature. Clearly she, sharing some sort of wavelength with him, understood she was in no danger.

"My mom's name is Mary, and my dad is going to pick me up AFTER dinner today."

"Oh?" I said again, because that's the kind of creative person I am under pressure.

The boy did not let up. "He'll be here at 6:00 and not later."

Was this a threat? Would something happen to me if Larry did not show up by 6:00? Will I be trapped in this corner until then and, if the father failed to appear at the promised time, would I be annihilated? Should I attempt now to toss my daughter to safety, bravely and selflessly sacrificing my own welfare?

"Oh?" I said, because the response hadn't, technically, failed me yet - I was still alive. "Er, and what's your name?" I asked, in a burst of inspiration.

"George and Harry and John," he replied.

This was the most disturbing thing he'd said so far. I didn't doubt he was three people - perhaps he'd eaten the other two? - but felt keenly that my response to this utterly bizarre statement would decide my fate. "That's a lot of names," I said, because it was.

For some reason this seemed to throw him. I could see little sparks going off in his silvery blue eyes, as if his brain were undergoing a severe malfunction. Perhaps he was a robot. In any case, it afforded me that split-second I needed to escape his steely gaze and hurl myself and my daughter out the back door.

God, I hope he isn't there again today. I'd better be prepared, just in case. How does one fend off these things? Garlic? Jelly beans? And today they're all dressed for Halloween - not that that one needs a costume to scare the shit out of me. What if I don't recognize him in time?

If you don't see me on Facebook by this time tomorrow, send help.

Our Wooden Anniversary

My husband and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary last weekend. I'm really excited about hitting this milestone because, in my mind, once you hit five years you officially don't have to return the wedding gifts if you end up getting divorced. Five years definitely gave your friends and family their money's worth. Also, five years is longer than I've ever committed to anything before, except for my rent-controlled apartment in New York, where I lived for six. But really if you are lucky enough to find a rent-controlled apartment in New York it isn't a matter of choice to stay or leave - not like with marriage.

So in honor of this grand occasion, my husband and I turned our noses up at the traditional five-year gift of wood and instead treated ourselves to an Evening Out.

Such a thing would not have been any big deal a few years ago. Certainly not worthy of a five year wedding anniversary. No, a few years ago such a momentous occasion would have been celebrated with a trip somewhere exotic in whose description appeared the words "swim-up bar." But we have a toddler now, so leaving the house after dark is about as special as it gets, and our options were limited to whatever we could find in our own city. So we opted to go with a dinner show that was the kind of thing you would only do on an occasion like this, on account of it cost more than a mid-size luxury sedan.

No, not really. And, no, I would not have knowingly spent that kind of money on a single evening. The ticket cost seemed extravagant, yet reasonably so for a special occasion. But then you get there and they say if you want a knife and fork with which to eat your steak, that will be extra. If you want bread it's extra, and there was a $10 per person "serving" fee which, it was explained carefully to us by our waitress, was not actually a tip, she didn't see a penny of that, no sireee, and she's not just bringing you your food, she's actually DANCING it over to you, which adds a nice dollop of whipped-cream guilt to your guilt pie.

Then there's the babysitter (turns out they don't work for 50 cents an hour like I used to) and parking and drinks and when all is said and done, maybe not a mid-size sedan but definitely one of those smaller ones that's a bit cramped in the back but no big deal if the kids are still small, they'd fit just fine.

But worse than the cost was the evening itself, which turned out to be one of those "audience participation" deals. This large and obnoxious woman would come out periodically throughout the evening, instigating simultaneous pangs of nervous nausea and excited anticipation. The first because her act consisted of pulling some poor sap from the audience and making a joke out of him for 30 minutes; the second because this was always followed by the next course. So the evening went: fun act, obnoxious woman, food; fun act, obnoxious woman, food. For five courses. I became like a Pavlovian dog, except instead of a bell it was an obnoxious woman and instead of salivating I'd get anxiety and a stomach ache.

I am terrified of being in the spotlight. The only time I find being in the spotlight acceptable is if it involves my getting a lot of gifts. Baby shower, wedding, birthday - that's fine. I can endure because I get stuff for my trouble. But if I am the one forking over my daughter's college fund in order to be fed and entertained, I expect someone ELSE to do the entertaining, not me. So I spent the majority of the evening on the verge of throwing up for fear the obnoxious woman would pick on me. I channeled my energy into throwing daggers at her with my eyes, sending silent bat signals of "Don't you DARE even LOOK at me, obnoxious woman! If you do I will barf on your ginormous sequined bosom and SUE you and THEN you'll be sorry" to the extent that I was utterly miserable, didn't enjoy much of the show and wasn't able to stomach any of the food. On the bright side I wasn't able to drink much which was good because drinks were the most extra of all the extras.

All in all the thing I liked most about the entire evening was the gift shop where pretty much every item consisted of sequins or rhinestones glued to various things you wore on your face or head, which was right up my alley. Nothing made of wood though, which would have been the only justification for parting with even more money.

Silly Tom couldn't understand why I was sputtering with indignation as we left. First of all, he doesn't mind that audience participation thing. He thinks it's FUN. Seriously! So he had no anxiety about the possibility of being plucked from the safe and comfortable darkness into the spotlight and was able to relax and enjoy himself. Also, he didn't know how much the tickets cost because I had made all the arrangements. When I bitched about the high price of our evening he conceded it was a "bit high" but not unreasonable for a special occasion until I clarified that the check he'd just signed was for the EXTRAS and didn't include the larger cost of the actual tickets.

I guess a nice anniversary gift would have been to keep that bit of information to myself, rather than ruin his night, too. But then, it wasn't made of wood anyway.

P.S. for those of you anticipating a joke involving giving/getting some wood on my anniversary, don't think I didn't IMMEDIATELY go there in my head. I just thought it was a little too obvious to actually write.

Y-M-C-Zzzzzz

So I was talking to a friend the other day who asked why I hadn't been writing much lately. Was it because I was too busy now that I'm a full-time working mom? Well, no. I mean, yes, I am very busy, in the way that I used to wonder was just an excuse when my friends who became parents claimed they could never, ever find the time to reply to my emails anymore. Can anybody be THAT busy? Yes.

But no, if I really thought I had something interesting to say I could make time to say it. In fact, several times I have thought, "That might make a good blog," but every single time it broke my no "cute things my kid did" rule. As I mentioned before, I do not want to become one of those people who bores everyone around them until they look around one day and realize they have no friends left because they have all hung or stabbed themselves, ala Ted's seatmates from Airplane!

Anyway in response to this, my friend said, "There are lots of parents out there who might actually be interested in what you have to say about parenting."

Well that was an interesting thought. There ARE a lot of parents out there. My parents are parents, for example. And so are theirs. That's... uh... six people already who might read these blogs? And God knows my friends are all procreating like slutty little rabbits lately. Instead of our own hard-partying-induced vomit on our clothes, it's now our offspring's. My favorite hang-out has become IHOP because they are open 24 hours, not for the reason I USED to love IHOP, which was also because they were open 24 hours, but the OTHER 24 hours, the ones where it was dark because it was 4am and I hadn't been to bed yet, not because it was 6am and I was up already. And also I love pancakes.

Wait, what was I talking about? Right, my parent friends who might get the IHOP bit. But by focusing on these sorts of issues in my life (not that pancakes are an issue, per se, no matter what time of day, because any time is a good time for pancakes) will I alienate those who do not have kids, or are still kids themselves?

Yeah, probably. But, I reason, my old blogs probably alienated my parent friends, so it's really their turn anyway.

However, if you don't have kids, I appeal to you in this manner: continue reading this blog, so it may serve as a warning to you. Heed! Having kids FUCKS YOU UP, and I will tell it like it is. So I will keep my non-parenting fans, whoever you might be (because I know my mom, the only die-hard fan I'm aware of, isn't a member of this group) by making you feel incredibly superior, not to mention fortunate, for your childlessness.

For example, a couple weeks ago we had a rare opportunity to go out sans toddler to a friend's wedding. Weddings are generally not something most people look forward to, what with the dressing up and requisite YMCA rendition, but I was totally stoked because a) I'd be out of the house past dark and b) there would be booze. I got gussied up and practiced talking in my grown-up voice and was all set to get down with my bad self, but of course I had two glasses of wine and started to fall asleep on my plate. It was 8pm. No, seriously. 8pm. We had to say our goodbyes quickly lest it become necessary for Tom to carry me over his shoulder to the car. My friend said the next day, "It was so cute how you got tired in the middle of dinner."

No, it was not cute. I miss the days of partying till dawn (stop laughing - I really did used to party till dawn. I DID). But now I have a schedule run by a three-foot dictator who is not, despite genetic predispositions, a late sleeper. When they say that you love your child so much you forget what it was like before? So much that, when you're leaving a wedding at 8pm just as the DJ turns on the strobe light and kicks it up a notch for the young folk who stay to party while the older generation shuffles out complaining about gassy bloating, you consider yourself one of the lucky ones? Don't buy that for a minute.

But hey, there's no wait at IHOP at 6am!

This one time, my daughter...

I haven't written in a long time. This isn't because I haven't had anything interesting to say. In my opinion I've had TONS of fantastic stories to tell you. However I've been in self-imposed exile because I swore I wouldn't become one of those parents who can't talk about ANYthing except the latest adorable thing their offspring did. And frankly there is nothing in my life remotely as interesting as the consistency and regularity of my daughter's bowel movements. I am just barely cognizant enough to understand you may not agree with this.

So, to amend my earlier statement, I could have written TONS of stories you would have found interesting - unless you happen to not be me.

I've managed to extrapolate, however, a few random thoughts that, while mostly still linked in some way to my daughter, are not actual "this one time, my daughter, she did the most ADORABLE thing," stories so I don't think they count. However if you're not a parent or me, I warn you the following column (and probably all subsequent columns for the next 16 years or so) may not be of particular interest.

"B-E-D-T-I-M-E!"

Every night at 8pm, my father would call these letters out with undisguised glee. As a kid, I was completely baffled by this. I recognized the emotion - joy akin to what I felt the night before we were going to Disneyland - but I absolutely could not marry it to the reality of "bedtime," which was, in a kid's mind, the WORST word in the world. "Bedtime" is ritualistically followed by begging, pleading, resorting to simple tricks of bathroom and drink requests, ANYthing to prolong the inevitable necessity of lying flat in our beds with no books, no TV, no stimulus and the order to fall asleep.

How could anyone be so happy about the most miserable part of the day (assuming no doctor visits)? I just didn't get it.

But now? Oh, do I get it.

Every morning brings with it the joy of seeing my daughter again after a long night of separation. As the day wears on, the joy wears off, in equal relation to the crankiness that grows as bedtime approaches. By the end of the day the entire family is worn down to a nub, and my husband and I watch the clock's slow countdown to our daughter's bedtime with a desperate eye. At a quarter to eight we turn to our daughter and announce, "Bedtime!" with very little ability (or attempts) to cover up our eagerness to get her into bed. I don't spell it out, but I am known to sing, "It's the most won-der-ful tiiiime of the daaaaaay," as I carry her to bed.

When she's older I'll probably just hum it.

VIVA LAS VEGAS - SERIOUSLY

I have never been a huge fan of Las Vegas. I thought it was titillating when I was 21 and went with my boyfriend and another couple during college. We were so poor it was pronounced "poh." We shared a hotel room that cost about $45 a night, and when they tried to charge us $55 we staged a massive retaliation campaign consisting of us all whispering angrily in the lobby and then shoving forward the largest and most well-spoken of us to argue the bill. I think what impressed us most about the entire weekend was the free drinks on the casino floor, and they were shitty drinks at a shitty casino.

When I was in my early 30's and married and childless Vegas held even less appeal. Having finally paid off all my debt, I had developed a medically-confirmed allergy to gambling, and I generally preferred to get drunk somewhere a little less seizure-inducing. I much prefer a vacation that introduces me to new cultures, new ways of looking at the world, potentially the opportunity to get mud in my underwear. My feeling is that I have a very limited number of vacations in my lifetime, and certainly a limited budget to spend on them. I want to make sure I experience as much of the world as possible given those two limitations. So Vegas, a place I've already been and didn't really "get," was pretty much off the list.

But then my best friend Katy, for reasons I cannot mention in this column because she still reads it occasionally and owns a gun, managed to secure a free room, dinner and show in Las Vegas for Fourth of July weekend. For this sort of bargain I might consider vacationing in one of the states whose name begins with a K. Probably not, but maybe. Plus, it was my turn for a baby-free vacation. Tom got one when I went to New York for a week, and another when he went to a business conference in California, which I still totally think counts because most geek-related conferences have beer running from the water fountains. If you're drunk, it's not work.

I boarded the plane to Vegas with a feeling of "Oh, well, if nothing else I'll get some extra sleep." Yeah, who goes to Vegas hoping for sleep? Me. But on this trip, my eyes were opened wide to the benefits of Las Vegas. Because this was the first time I was experiencing it since becoming a parent.

When you have kids you have an extremely limited amount of time to cut loose, and even when you do cut loose, you are still half-listening for a 2-foot-person's unrelenting attempts to commit suicide. You cannot let your guard down for a second, even when they are sleeping or at someone else's house. You are always responsible, always alert, and always guilty if you so much as have half a glass of wine, definitely if you accidentally polish off the whole bottle which seems to happen fairly often these days.

In Vegas, time has no meaning, drinks are free-flowing, nobody knows you and everybody is there to have a good time. It is the absolute best way to cram as many sins into a finite amount of time. It is, really, the most efficient vacation one can take, and when it comes to a full-time working mother, efficiency is not THE word, it is the ONLY word. I crammed a year and a half of irresponsibility (stopping short of anything illegal... mostly) into 3 days. It was wonderful. It was liberating. It was just a little bit nauseating but not nearly as bad as being pregnant.

Fuck culture. I'm going back to Vegas, baby.

SuperSenses!

I have a Super Power. It's not anything fancy, nothing that will save the world from Alien destruction or help us achieve our quest for World Peace, but it definitely has its advantages. Keeping it a secret is unnecessary so I will tell you: I have a really super keen sense of smell.

My step-dad used to say if someone farted in Mexico I would complain about it. This is a bit of an embellishment but it illustrates how much envy (irritation?) my super sense has garnered over the years. And luckily my sense of smell has not diminished as I have aged since it comes in handy multiple times a day. Take today for example. I microwaved some popcorn at work. As everybody knows, microwaving popcorn is a real delicate operation. Three seconds too long and a huge section of the middle is burnt. But stop it 2 seconds too soon and half the bag is unpopped kernels. Okay so maybe this isn't a big deal to SOME people but it is to me. Luckily, my nose will tell me the precise moment a single kernel starts to blacken and I can hurl myself at the stop button and come away with a perfectly popped snack. I mean, that's pretty handy, don't you think?

I can also walk into the house and know from the front door if the baby has a dirty diaper. Tom will have spent the entire afternoon with her completely unaware and within a nanosecond I'm yelling "baby pooped!" Or "Something in the fridge is rotten!" or "Our neighbor didn't shower today." Okay not that last one.

If you lived with me you'd probably start to find this a bit annoying. But believe me, sometimes this super sense can be a real curse. Like when Tom eats this God-awful turkey chili from a can, which smells like a bowl of salted barf, I can't be in the same room with him or stand to kiss him for, like, a week. And I can't walk by the Starbucks storefront downtown that, for some reason, the entire homeless population likes to use as their outdoor urinal because the stench literally assaults me. I have to go all the way to the next Starbucks, around the corner.

Also, to make absolutely sure I don't get a big head about my sniffer, fate has bestowed upon me atrocious eyesight. That way things are evened out. Luckily I was born in the latter half of the previous century in which contact lenses were invented. (Can I just point out how creepy it is to say I was born in the previous century?) If I had been born a couple hundred years ago my parents would have had to leave me out on a hillside to get eaten by wolves, because I wouldn't have been able to FIND the field that needed to be tended, let alone tend it. Actually, no, by the time they discovered how bad my eyesight was I would have wandered under the wheels of a carriage and saved them the trouble. Even the first half of the twentieth century wouldn't have been any good. Sure, I would have had a better chance of basic survival but it wouldn't have been much of a life, since I would have been that chick sitting in a corner with glasses the thickness of a phone book, my eyes magnified twenty times, making me look perpetually half-witted. Certainly nobody would have been inclined to procreate with me, not even on a bet.

Speaking of which, all of this leads me to wonder what I have or have not bestowed upon my 13 month old daughter. Evidence thus far would seem to indicate she has no sense of smell, since she is perfectly content to cart around a load of odoriferous nastiness for however long it takes one of us grownups to notice it and do something about it. Which, for now, is definitely on the "blessing" side of things because with both of us constantly bitching about the stench Tom would go out of his mind. But hopefully as she grows older her sense of smell will improve, because burnt popcorn can ruin your whole day.

Guilty

I feel awful that I haven't written anything in so long. I know all my fans (both of you - hi, mom) have been really disappointed in me. When I tried to log on this morning I actually had forgotten my username for this site, which has never happened before. I feel horribly guilty for neglecting my writing.

In fact, I feel horribly guilty in general. Everybody warns you that having a child means feeling guilty pretty much all the time. If you're at home you feel guilty that you aren't at work, and if you are at work you feel guilty that you aren't home with your child. The once a month you go out without your child you feel guilty for dashing out the door, whooping with glee.

You feel guilty for forgetting her hat when it's 30 degrees outside.

You feel guilty for skipping the park one day because you know one of the mothers you can't stand will be there.

You feel guilty for letting her nails get so long she shreds the furniture like a cat, and for having bought a house with wood floors so that she gets bruises on her little shins from crawling around on them.

And you definitely feel guilty about stuffing her with food to the point that she covers everything within a ten foot radius with projectile vomit.

Those few devoted readers I have will recall my extreme fear when it comes to vomiting. And while I don't really concern myself with other people's vomit, the smell is another story, because that can make me wretch. (Aside: what was Chef Boyardee thinking, making spaghettios smell EXACTLY like puke? Am I missing something here?)

However this is where I found guilt to actually come in handy: I was so busy feeling incredibly horribly guilty about force-feeding my child that I was able to get through the whole ordeal without one thought of adding my dinner to hers on the dining room floor.

"You FORCE FED YOUR CHILD?" I hear you asking, your mouth twisted in disgust and abhorrence. As well it should be; your mouth is absolutely right. But let me explain.

Lately, my beautiful adorable brilliant wonderful baby girl, aged 13 months, has decided to make every bedtime and every mealtime into an ordeal. She doesn't want to eat, she doesn't want to go to sleep. She has reduced us to performing any number of trained-seal-like tricks to get her to do one or the other. When it comes to eating, we are forced to perform "Staying Alive" ad nauseam (ha. literally). My daughter LOVES this song. She sings the "ah, ah, ah, ah," part. And when she opens her mouth to join in the chorus, we take the opportunity to shove a spoonful of food into her yaw.

The trick of feeding her leads directly to the trick of getting her to sleep - and stay asleep - which, in turn, leads to ME getting sleep, which is heinously selfish of me to even think about and I feel very guilty about that. But if she doesn't eat enough then she'll wake up a couple hours later - after having spent an hour or two trying to get her to sleep in the first place - because she's hungry. And then she'll figure as long as she's up we may as well read a book or twelve. And next thing you know, the night has gone by and she has slept maybe a total of 7 hours which is about 4 short of what she needs, thus leading to an excruciatingly long and cranky day during which she is too pissy to eat anything, thus contributing to the cycle.

So we've made it our mission to stuff her as full as we possibly can.

In our defense, this has been going on for a couple weeks now, and we didn't really get it when she started to cry and squirm in her highchair that she really MEANT it this time, she didn't want to eat. We kept bellowing Staying Alive and she kept opening her mouth and we kept shoveling it in. And then all of a sudden our gorgeous little girl spewed a torrent of orange and green vomit that would rival the output of the Colorado River should the Hoover Dam ever crack. Except way smellier.

I was horrified. This was the first time she'd ever really vomited. This was not sweet-smelling and gently dribbling spit-up. This was a torrential downpour of foulness and it was EVERYwhere. It was all over her and me and the high chair and puddling on the floor. I had to reach into those puddles in order to scoop up my sopping daughter. But I didn't cringe because of the vomit, even though I could see out of my peripheral vision that there was some in my hair, likely a bit of carrot if one was to judge by the color. I cringed because I felt AWFUL. I still feel awful. My eyes fill at the thought of my abusive awfulness to my innocent daughter who has no way to protest other than crying, and I didn't listen, and I shoved her so full she literally burst. It was that awfulness that dominated every fiber of my being as I hugged her tight and hurried to get her undressed and comfortable.

The thing is, as soon as I got her out of the chair and cleaned up and into the tub, she was happy as a clam. She sang and babbled to herself as usual, totally fine and happy, while I sat on the edge of the tub and pulled out chunks of my own hair as a form of self flagellation.

It's true, she's fine. She's over it and has moved on. Chances are good she won't need therapy as a result of this but me? I'm going to need intensive therapy probably for the rest of my life.

I feel really guilty about that.