Yep.

Baby is adorable. Baby Hat is still undergoing improvements.

Reinvention.

I am here. We are here. It's just been an exhausting week in Punkyville as the Lovely Miss Punk has been undergoing a self-imposed period of reinvention. Anyone else's kids do this? I mean, this isn't like my eighth grade year when I decided that because clearly nobody understood me, I would buy out the entire clearance section of Hot Topic to convey my pariah-ness through my wardrobe. No, this was a complete overhaul of our previously agreed-upon schedule -- the one that had made living with an infant adorably tolerable.

I don't know if it's the teething that caused it or what, but things that had once been entirely normal became enraging. She did NOT want a bottle (which your exhausted Heroine had provided Punky with after Punky decided that with her new teeth, Mom's nipples made awesome chew toys), when for the last five months she had no problem chugging like a frat boy on pledge night. The car seat was now the most offensive place I could possibly seat her -- despite the fact that she's loved car rides more than my dog. And she WOULD. NOT. TAKE. A. NAP. No naps. She went three days in a row with no nap all day, and would offer a hearty FUCK YOU for insinuating she might need one.

The end result was an extremely pissed off baby by about 5 p.m. But the kid would NOT sleep. I even tried pulling the "I'm Mommy and I said so" card by declaring mandatory naptime, and still nothing. She laid in her crib and screamed for an hour, then somehow in that time writhed herself into a chenille blanket noose. After that, I was too consumed with the overwhelming feelings of, "Shit, I'm a horrible parent" to attempt to force her into napping submission.

And then, as quickly as it came upon us, The Plague of the Napless, Bottle-less Baby lifted and she's back to schedule. I really don't get it. I don't know if some gypsy put a curse on our house, or what, but there were five days there that I really, truly considered taking her back to the hospital, or the pound, or hell, just spreading eagle and putting her back to cook a little longer until she decided to be civil.

In other news, I lack a green thumb. It's more of a brown and dried out and dead thumb. I've officially failed as plant mother to hanging plants. HANGING PLANTS, I screwed THIS up. I hung five plants -- impatiens and something else -- on our porch. I watered them like crazy, especially with the July heat, and all the plants seemed to be doing well enough until two bailed on me in the last week. So now I have a hanging plant still hanging, which is clearly dead, brown, dried-up, ceased to exist, it is no more -- it DIED!!!! -- and I still have it hanging there.

As a warning, just in case the other plants start thinking about getting out of line.

I'll shop here, but I won't LIKE it!

Okay, the title to this post could be applied to just about everywhere I shop nowadays -- Wal-Mart (especially Wal-Mart, GOD I HATE WAL-MART), Babies R Us, the grocery store (on days I decide to take a stand for small business instead of going to Wal-Mart)... but no, today I focus on home improvement stores. As far as large stores go, Menard's is a total asshole. Unfortunately they have just about the cheapest prices of any of the big home improvement stores, and I just keep winding up there, wandering aimlessly while being hypnotized by their mind-numbing, banjo-twanging jingle.

I'm from the country, folks, and I STILL think that jingle is annoying as fuck.

The thing I hate most about Menard's, though, is their absolutely asinine method of corralling and controlling the flow of people into and out of the store. There is an "in" door, and there is an "out" door. You MUST go in the "in" door (appropriately and conspicuously labeled), and you must go out the "out" door. There's no way to pussyfoot around it or try to go against the system. If you go in the "out" door, you're met with pissy looking employees, cash registers, cart barricades, and I'm pretty sure those guards from the witch's castle in The Wizard of Oz. It's also damn near impossible to go out the "in" door, even if you haven't made a purchase, because they have those amusement park-style push things to go in, that don't go both ways.

My biggest issue with this -- besides the fact that I hate being told what to do -- is parking. The doors are like two miles apart. I am of the breed of people that will park as close to the door as possible. I will spend countless hours, gas, and ozone holes to find the closest possible parking spot, because lugging 25+ pounds of child and carseat is fucking heavy. And while I am not a meteorologist, I am willing to wager an estimate that it's about 5,000 degrees outside right now.

So I'm posed with a riddle and a choice -- do I park closest to the "in" door, so I can have a short walk going in but a huge-ass long walk coming out, or do I suck it up early on and park by the "out" door and save the walk later? Or, OR... do I park in between so that I have a considerably long walk both going in AND coming out?

See? This store is an asshole.

I never know what option to pick, and while I'm trying to decide, there's usually at least three or four other cars wandering the parking lot (in the wrong direction, mind you, why is it nobody in this god-forsaken town knows how to drive in a parking lot?). I just want some damn caulk, why is this so ridiculously and laughably difficult?

I usually decide to get my punishment out of the way early and park by the "out" door, so that I can arrive in the store drenched in sweat, my child extra pissy -- probably about her burned retinas because I forgot YET AGAIN to put up the visor hood thing on her car seat -- and my right bicep about to give out because have I mentioned lately my kid is freaking obscenely HUGE?

And the carts. Oh the carts. This is why I never got carts before I had a kid because they're always mangled together and I always swear the girl at the nearby service desk is laughing at me because I'm battling the carts while holding a huge baby and car seat and losing miserably. I'll finally pull one out, and it always happens to be the ONE that cannot drive in a straight line, and the little old lady that comes up behind me to get a cart calmly and effortlessly pulls one out, one that drives straight and is not squeaky and does not contain a screaming child who is pissed from being jarred around so much while mommy battled the carts.

I'm telling you. Menard's is an asshole.

These times, they are a'changin'...

For some reason lately I've been finding myself slapped with the realization that my world has really been thrown upside down from the existence it was two years ago. Two years ago I was still a crazy co-ed and now here I am, wife and mom. You don't think about it much, except in the broadest sense, until you find yourself realizing things like this...

June 2006: The statement "We need to go to the club" = "I really need to go get trashed and rub up on some skeezy guys that will most likely buy us more drinks."
June 2008: The statement "We need to go to the club" = "We're out of hamburger meat and Velveeta cheese, we need to go to Sam's Club and get more."

June 2006: Our freezer was full of Stoli vodka.
June 2008: Our freezer is full of ice cold chew toys for Vampira Punky.

June 2006: I knew exactly how much alcohol was left in the house as I wandered the liquor store.
June 2008: I know exactly what the inventory of our kitchen contains as I wander Wal-Mart.

June 2006: I passed out at 10 pm because I started drinking far too early.
June 2008: I pass out at 10 pm out of sheer exhaustion.

June 2006: My biggest accomplishment was doing the longest keg stand of anyone I knew.
June 2008: My biggest accomplishment is pushing a 7.7 lb. human being from my loins.

June 2006: The sharpest thing to come in contact with my nipples was a piercer's needle.
June 2008: The sharpest thing to come in contact with my nipples are an infant's central incisors.

Anything you can do I can do better...

... sings The Punky to her unknowing best friend/mortal enemy, Baby V. Recently I read over at Shaken Mama's that Baby V was teething, and I thought to myself, "Huh. Strange that Punky hasn't started that, considering she's something like two weeks older than V." She wasn't even showing signs of it. She wasn't pissy. She wasn't crying. I couldn't feel any teeth coming through. She wasn't snotty. I was resigned, and perfectly fine with thinking, perhaps by some genetic oddity, my kid wasn't going to get teeth.

I was wrong.


This morning, A got her out of bed when she started her usual morning chorus of coo's and clicks, and after a few minutes, comes into the bedroom looking like he'd just seen a ghost.

"Feel her gums. Her bottom gums," he said. That was all I needed to hear but lo and behold, upon investigation, there they were: two teeth. Not just simmering under the surface but poking through in all their teethy glory. Punky is now the proud owner of two central incisors on the bottom row.

Punky doesn't seem to be bothered by any of this. In fact, she's dealing with her problems just like I deal with problems in life. She's sleeping. Now if I catch her passed out with an empty bottle of wine, I'll definitely know it's my daughter.

I don't have a problem.

Punkified goodness.

If you can look at this picture for more than five seconds without cracking a smile, then you have no soul.

RSVPlease don't subject me to this...

My five-year high school reunion is this coming weekend. I've been going back and forth for the past month, since I got the invitation in the mail, as to whether or not I want to go. This is my first confrontation with high school reunions and I'm not so sure I like the idea of it. I've been trying to balance out the pro's and con's of the entire situation, and really, the con's far outweigh the pro's.

Actually, there's only one pro, and that is the fact that, once I clean the puke out of my hair, take the time to change out of my sweatpants I haven't washed in a week, and put on a little mascara, I still look pretty hot. And thanks to breastfeeding, I'm even skinnier than I was pre-pregnancy (yes, crazy breastfeeding loons, I can acknowledge that something positive comes from it). That, and it would be fun to see Mr. Popular, the pretentious asshole popular jock (whose pretentiousness is eclipsed only by that of his cheerleader bimbo my-dad-could-buy-your-dad now-wife), and laugh my inner ass off at his receding hairline.

I admit it, I'm vain, but one thing I am not is a gambler. Will I look this good in five, 10 years? Or should I go to this reunion, make my mark (where I am infinitely hotter than I was in high school) and bypass future reunions where I will probably be fatter and less attractive? I mean, let's be honest, don't tell my husband but I'm probably at my peak here.

But the fact remains, I hated high school and I hated all but exactly three people that I graduated with. All the angst and sarcasm you see before you now was exactly what I was in high school, except I didn't have a blog and I didn't have awesome breastfeeding boobs (you see that? Benefit #2 to breastfeeding, in the same post!) to make up for my distaste for pretty much everyone around me. I was not given a mentality that was able to flourish in a high school setting. I had my sights set on something higher and as a result, couldn't identify with those in high school.

I'm basically dancing around saying, I was a total loser.

And while my day-to-day behavior pretty much conclusively points to the fact that I am -- and was -- a dork, I really don't want my husband to see the scope of my high school loserdom. I mean, let's be honest. If we went, I'd probably talk to, oh, two people. Then we'd just be there to try to get a quick buzz off the cheap beer that we paid $20 apiece for, and then leave after an hour and I'd spend the entire drive home bitching about how much I hated high school and how much I wished we hadn't gone.

And on top of all this? It's been five years -- that's not nearly enough time elapsed for me to quit caring about it all.

The cliques are still the same, especially when you come from a tiny little town like mine where all the children are waiting for Kevin Bacon to come teach them to dance. The classmates of mine who have had kids have ensured their kids are friends. Most of my classmates are either 1.) stay-at-home moms with 2-3 kids, 2.) farmers, 3.) factory laborers, or 4.) in jail. Not that there's anything wrong with any of these things, but the fact is, it's pretty much obvious who falls into what category.

The fact that I am sitting here writing an entire blog post agonizing over my decision is probably indicative enough that I shouldn't go. The result will either be a built-up and destroyed expectation, or just general disappointment. And I'll just remember all over again why I nearly hurdled someone's grandmother in the crowd at graduation to get out the door.

Fuck it. I'm not going. I'll just go browse MySpace.

You know you're a child of the 80s when...

... You start spontaneously singing this song to your child, despite the fact that you haven't actually heard the song in damn near 20 years.

But all the cool kids aren't doing it...

My freshman year of high school, I ran on the track team. I only really joined the team because 1.) I thought it might boost my popularity (wrong), and 2.) my parents were pressuring me to do it. So I joined the team and hated it because I've never seen the point of running for the sake of running.

My friend Sara joined the team with me, and if ever there was someone with LESS athletic talent than I, it was she. She and I would run together at the back of the pack, slowly and complaining about how much we hated track, how it wasn't fun, how we didn't see the point of this stupid sport, and how much we wished we could quit.

Then Sara quit track about halfway through the season and just like that, my running buddy was gone. It was just me, surrounded by all these people who actually liked track, and looked down on me for my slacker attitude and my absolute disdain for the whole damn thing. For fear of incurring even more wrath from the track maniacs, I sucked it up and stayed on the team and kept running, but every time I went to practice, I secretly envied Sara for quitting, and stared longingly at the gate every time I jogged past it, fantasizing about jogging out the open gate and going home and never going to another track practice ever again.

This is exactly how I feel about breastfeeding at this point. Now that Shaken Mama has all but abandoned breastfeeding, I feel like I'm the last mama standing, amidst all the crazy La Lache League breastfeeding nazi mothers who look at me like I just punched a puppy when I say, "Ya know... breastfeeding sort of sucks, and I don't really want to do it anymore."

Punky is transitioning to solids well, but Boob is still a major staple of the diet. She does cereal and Boob for breakfast, a jar of veggies and boob for lunch and then the same for dinner. There's usually a Boob snack in there after her afternoon nap, and good-night Boob just before bed. She was waking up once at night, usually around 3 or 4 a.m., for late night Boob, but the past two nights she has successfully slept 8:30 p.m. to about 9 a.m. STRAIGHT. I don't know what the deal with that is, but ever the pessimist, I'm fearing it's temporary.

But anyway. I really don't like breastfeeding, and now that Shaken Mama has quit the team, I really don't see much point in hanging around. Misery loves company and my misery's company has bailed.

And damnit Daddy, I don't want to run track anymore!

Obituary bitching

I still subscribe to my hometown newspaper. I come from a tiny little town in the midwest, one very rooted in its church community, and the youth are eagerly waiting for Kevin Bacon to come teach them how to dance. I love the hometown newspaper (the Idiot Paper, if you will) because it lets me catch up on the town gossip despite no longer living there -- who's getting married, who's engaged, who got arrested, who had kids, etc. etc.

The obituaries are usually pretty boring, just because it's mostly old people and let's be honest, when someone's 87 when they die, you can just skim over the article because it's no real shock.

The best part, though, is the pictures. I swear to Christ, my high school senior portrait will be used in my obituary. I don't care if I am 102 -- my obituary will feature the young, supple 17-year-old me because damnit, I was hot. Sometimes you see the old people as they were in their most recent church directory photo. You get the idea.

Well this week I opened up the paper and let out a shocked/disgusted "GOO!!!!" There, in the middle of the page, was some woman I [surprisingly] didn't know, who had passed away from cancer. And her obituary photo was obviously taken in her last days. Hospital gown hanging off her emaciated frame, head bald from chemotherapy, looking tired and ready to move on to the next journey.

Please don't mistake this for me being insensitive. Okay, I'm probably being insensitive. Cancer is a horrible monster of a disease. That's not what I'm making fun of. But seriously? Is that SERIOUSLY the picture her husband/family felt most appropriate to post with her obituary? REALLY?

If I died of cancer and Dear Husband A -- I don't care HOW grief-stricken he would be -- put a picture of me in my last bald, emaciated days on earth in the paper, I would come back and haunt him every minute for the remainder of his life. And not the sweet dream-sequence hauntings of the cute old couples you hear about sometimes. "He came and sat next to me on the bed and smiled, and he was surrounded in light." NO. I would come back and make sure he knew how bad he'd screwed up. Forever. I'd probably continue to nag and remind him about it in the afterlife.

I would make sure my husband knew for all eternity what a grave mistake it was to put a picture like that in the paper for everyone to see and write blog posts about.

In other news, I've been thinking, I hope I at least look really hot in my bikini when I go to hell.