A little of this, a little of that. Let's see what it makes!
Alla y’all are like “Pumpkin spice errything and Christmas music squeeee!” and I’m over here like, “Gross it’s getting cold so I have to try on all my pants and figure out if any of them still fit me since giving birth or else I’mma have to wear leggings all winter long and oh wait a minute leggings squeeee!”
Seriously though, simmer down with that Christmas music nonsense.
New parenthood = a lot panicking, in my view.
Exhibit A:
I sleep lightly, randomly waking up long enough to panic that one of us has forgotten to put the baby down before dozing off. In my half-awake state, I begin furiously pawing at any lumps in the blankets of our bed, at any forgotten burp cloths or swaddle blankets, etc., thinking each one is the baby. This continues until B snaps me out of it by reminding me that the baby is sleeping soundly in his bed next to ours. B and I also trade off so that on nights when I’m not the one doing this, he’s the one having night terrors about dozing off with the child in our bed.
Exhibit B:
Last night the kid gave us five solid, uninterrupted hours of sleep. Did I wake up feeling rested, refreshed, and happy? Not before taking a detour to Panicville first, since something *must* have been wrong in order for him to not have woken us up at his usual 2-3 hour intervals. As it turns out, perhaps he was just being nice to his mother after the events of the night prior. (see Exhibit C)
Exhibit C:
This child makes a lot of noise in his sleep. He squeaks, he coos, he grunts, he farts, and he screeches. The screeches are loud and ear-piercing enough that if pterodactyls were still in existence today they might descend in droves upon us after hearing the kid’s call. The night before last, after keeping me up until 2AM pacing the house, the baby finally decided to sleep for a little bit but only on the condition that he make a lot of noise while he did so. I woke up a short time later, panicking because his nocturnal screeches had crept into my brain as the creepy soundtrack for a crazy and vivid “Run for your life, aliens are invading Earth and snatching all the bodies” dream. So not only do I panic about the kid now, but I apparently also panic about the human race because of the kid.
Anyway, about today.
This morning after I was again woken up early, I stumbled out of bed and threw shorts and a zippered hoodie over my “pajamas” to finally have a conversation with the dog owner whose four-legged friend has been doing this to us for more than a month now, waking us up and serenading us throughout the day with extended episodes of continuous barking.
Husband–who deliberately lets me sleep in on weekends because he knows I’m trying to heal–greeted me quietly upon my return and asked me how it went. As I narrated the calmly worded (albeit growled) conversation his eyes drifted downward to my chest, then he grinned at me and asked, “Was your hoodie open like that when you spoke with them? Because you’re way out in the open right now.”
I looked down and there was one of the girls just as proud as she could be, on display for the world.
The rage monster has struck again.
“Oh, I know this one!” he says. “Here, I’ll tell you the story.”
There’s this girl named Prim. The society she lives in is grouped into puritans, lawyers, scientists, daredevils, and hippies. Oh, and untouchables, since every good story needs a caste system. The untouchables are going to turn out to be special people who have the ability to do two things at the same time; they can simultaneously rub their tummies and pat their heads.
Miles Teller is there too but he’s not playing the drums; he’s just kind of a dick. The lawyers and scientists have an alliance and they’re trying to get rid of the puritans. The puritans are going to leave their current cage, and in puritan fashion, trade for a different one.
So anyway, Prim joins the daredevils, which is a weird underground tattoo culture that embraces hepatitis. Then she falls in love with this guy Numbers who also has tattoos.
Prim also has a brother who is a total goob like Matt Damon who’s like “how do I hold my hands when I run?” He gets upset and says, “you can’t wear that; it’s not the right color.”
Prim and Numbers run away to live with the hippies in Farmerland and then Big Face Bad Haircut shows up after a while and he has, well, a big face and a bad haircut.
Thankfully, the untouchable special people are going to finally bring the series to an end.
I was already feeling helpless and “scrape me up off the floor because I feel yucky,” then Molly-the-Dog decided to have something resembling one of her heart “episodes” at the same time that our washing machine suddenly quit amid an unnecessarily dramatic cloud of smoke and a strong smell of electrical fire and my phone was blasting me with loud, terrifying Amber alert emergency notifications that I couldn’t at the time figure out how to silence.
The resultant voice message I left for my wonderful, strong, will-fix-everything-because-I-just-can’t-right-now husband was beyond pitiful. To borrow something from a common-day dramatist’s vocabulary, “I just can’t.”
At the time, I quite simply could not.
First of all, you need to know that we don’t gamble and we don’t play the lottery. I was so naive about how one plays the lottery that I had to quiz my coworker about it this week. “There’s a sheet of paper with circles that you fill in? Can you use a pen or a pencil? And how many bubbles do you select? And does it cause flashbacks to the Scantron exam answer sheets we filled out in grade school?”
My project team decided to go in together and try to win this week’s $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot, so we each dropped $2 in the pot, drew up a humorous contract to prevent any single member of the team from running off with the money (it includes clauses such as, “team members shall not murder, attempt murder, or maim one another…”), and made our purchase. Separately, I had the wild idea to buy a few tickets on my own then surprise my husband when and if I won something. Plans changed though, so I ended up going straight home after work.
Sometime after dinner I mentioned my surprise plan to my husband then asked him to drive us to a gas station since I was still determined to pay the “stupid tax” and buy a few tickets. He patiently waited while I bubbled in numbers on a couple of lottery forms then he drove us home after I was done foolishly spending $21. Here’s the conversation that took place on our way home.
Her: I feel silly. $21 on lottery tickets; I’ve paid the stupid tax. Oh, make that $23 with the one I purchased at work. I should have donated that money to someone in need.
Him: But if we win that’s not much money spent. Oh, and I bought some tickets too.
