"Terrible" Is An Understatement

When I was around nine or ten years old I discovered my female hamster, Daisy, eating one of her babies. She was crouched over the slashed-open belly of one of her young, chowing down with both front paws.

I will remember that moment for as long as I live. It was one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen, including my husband's toilet when he was still a bachelor. It has literally haunted me. I already lacked any fondness for Daisy, and had in fact put her in solitary confinement (with her young, whom she was supposed to be CARING for) because the father hamster, whose sex was unknown at first and was thus named Tootsie, had been terrorized by that bitch for months. Every night she'd chase him around the cage and he'd finally scamper up the side and wedge himself against the hamster wheel and dangle there all night to escape her. She'd march around the bottom of the cage, eating the tastier pickings out of the food bowl, waggling her fat ass pompously while Tootsie hung there for 9 hours. Sometimes Tootsie's balls would swell up to the size of two Clementines, and they'd hang halfway down the side of the cage, where she could reach them. One day she took a chomp and that was it. With my allowance I got Tootsie his own digs, a small but safe and comfortable bachelor pad.

Given all this, given the fact that Daisy was the female hamster equivalent of Stalin, you can understand the severity of my situation when I tell you that this weekend, I actually feel a tiny bit of empathy for Daisy. After spending the last 48 hours with my toddler whose head I expect, at any moment, to start spinning 360 degrees while emitting a torrent of pea soup, I can kind of understand why Daisy went a little bat-shit crazy.

And she had 6 of the little fuckers to deal with. SIX.

I don't know what happened to my sweet little girl. Every once in awhile, my husband or I will lift our weary head and offer a hypothesis - "Ear infection?"- before collapsing again in misery, or wiping her streaming nose, or coughing up a lung, or fetching more water or another snack or a suddenly fervently missed and required toy. But there is no point in guessing, because it really doesn't matter what the problem is. Knowing the problem would, for some reason, make my husband feel better, because he's one of those people who has an urgent need to know WHY, but knowing why she is being the world's biggest pain in the ass isn't going to make her any more charming. And chances are the only "why" is because she's two.

The littlest thing will set her off. It's like living with Anna Wintour. We scamper around like minions, terrified that if we don't have the milk and snack waiting the MOMENT she steps from her royal bath all hell will break loose. Because it will. And very often all hell breaks loose anyway, despite our fervent commitment. The oddest, most unpredictable things will set her off. Like, I put on a sweater because I was a little chilled and the next thing I knew my three foot daughter was making a sound akin to an air raid siren. "NOOOOOOOO Mommy NO SWEATER!"

Once she's off, there's no rhyme or reason to what will stop her. It's a lot of trial and error. Sure, the immediate reaction is to take the sweater off but really that's locking the barn door after the horse has escaped. She's off and running, tears plopping, snot dripping, hair popping out of her cute pony tails like a mini Medusa. My husband and I scamper around with humble offerings of toys, books, snacks, an empty water bottle, because that worked once, three weeks ago. Eventually, just before a vein pops in my neck, I'll hit randomly on the magic solution. "Do you want to draw with chalk outside?"

And like a light switch she'll suddenly beam angelically through the snot and tears, throw her hands up, and cry with unbridled delight, "CHALK TIIIIIIIME!"

And you can see behind the malicious glimmer in her eye an expression that says, "It was so simple. What took you cretins so long to figure this out?"

I'm not big on cannibalism, so no need to call CPS (or "CPA" as my husband mistakenly referred to them when, in response to the latest freak-out, I sobbed, "Alcohol tiiiiime!" which my two year old latched on to and repeated, alternating with "I want alcohol!" until I was able to distract her). Nor would I ever harm my child - certainly I would never do to her what she is doing to me, namely, psychological torture. However I am starting to wonder if boarding schools take them this young.

If all else fails, I'll move in with Tootsie.

Hellooo Blogger, Well Helloooo Blogger....

Welcome to my new blog! I decided to fire my web maintenance guy (oh, wait, I didn't have one) and discontinue the old site in the interest of simplicity and coding ignorance, and also it was really broken. So now I have a brand-new site to not write on!

I haven't written much the last few years. I'd like to blame it on having a baby but that would be a) a lie and b) kind of shitty. Instead it's really c) I don't have many brain cells left after a day of work and mothering to make up funny word string usages. It really hit me how much I've let the blog slip when I started copying over the archives to this new site. It didn't take long before I had gone back to 2007. Like, 5 minutes. That's just sad.

Oh, wait - I thought of another excuse why I'm not blogging! I'm working on my novel! Well, not exactly working, as in putting words on a page, but sometimes, in my head, I hear dialogue that I'm pretty sure is part of a blockbuster struggling to come out, or perhaps a psychological disorder that maybe I shouldn't be mentioning here.

My fans, both of you (Hi Mom, Hi Dan) are probably wondering how I've been! I'll skim over the assumption that my mother would know this regardless of an up-to-date blog and tell you I've been just fine! So now we're all caught up.

So! On to some blogging... give me a minute... I'm thinking... let me get back to you on this.

Why I Wish I Was More Like My Toddler

You may be saying to yourself, "Karen, if you want to act more like a 2 year old, I'm going to have to re-evaluate the true value your friendship brings to my life." Which is totally fair. I am not saying that behaving like a 2 year old would be pleasant to those around me, but it would be incredibly nice for me.

First of all, I wouldn't care that I had a tummy that sticks out like a basketball. For one thing, by the morning it will be gone (reminiscent of the famous Churchill quote). For another, the tummy would be so cute it would actually add to my appeal.

I would be able to throw tantrums whenever I felt like it, regardless of how unreasonable the trigger was. Cafeteria is out of wheat bagels? I would burst into tears, run to the wall, fling my head against it and wail wholeheartedly for about 90 seconds and then turn around, smiling, tears still on my face, and go about my business.

I really wouldn't give a rat's ass what you thought about me, my appearance or my interests. I would be able to set aside any difficulties of the day to pay full, 150% attention to a Disney cartoon and get MORE delight out of it every time, no matter how many times I watched it.

I wouldn't eat my vegetables. You couldn't make me and, what's more, the fact that it was The Right Thing To Do and Good For Me wouldn't factor into my decision at all. I just wouldn't do it. And if you tried to make me, I would bawl like you were tearing my fingernails out with rusty tweezers until the MOMENT you stopped bothering me about broccoli, at which point I will instantaneously be happy again because I got what I wanted. I wouldn't just be halfway happy because I was harboring a little grudge, or because I still had that whole potty-training thing hanging over my head or a doctor's visit the next day. I'm completely unaware of those things until the moment they are happening to me, anyway. It would be like a switch: broccoli = unhappy, no broccoli = happy.

A bit of chocolate would solve pretty much any problem.

I could spend a good portion of my afternoon napping. The longer I napped, the happier the people around me would be.

I would never look in the mirror and make judgments. What I saw there would utterly fascinate me, and yet I'd really have no opinion about my reflection one way or another. If I discovered a booger hanging out of my nose, well, that would just make it all the more interesting. It wouldn't occur to me to wonder or care how long it had been there.

I would get a SHIT TON of presents at Christmas.

I wouldn't care if you took a picture of me naked. In fact, I'd look so freaking cute naked, even if I understood society expected me to be shy about my body I still wouldn't care.

If my boss asked me to take on a project that was unappealing or too menial I would stomp all the way back to my office, back rounded, arms swinging loosely, head flung back and whining at high volume, "But I don't WANT TO!" over and over until I lost interest in expressing myself.

...and the number one reason I wish I could be more like my toddler is:

I could announce proudly to everyone within earshot my simplest accomplishments, such as, "I made a poop!" and be met with applause.

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.