There Comes A Time In Every Woman’s Life…

When she thinks about having a baby. Or babies! Maybe several of them (possibly not all at once), and she thinks fondly about it.

Maybe she doesn’t think fondly about it, and instead she thinks fondly about other people’s babies, in the same fond manner, because she can play with them and send them home.

But I digress!

This woman, she is thinking about her future baby (or babies). The film playing in her mind’s eye is rosy colored, sepia toned, with a lovely serene glow around everything.

Then One Day She Has A Baby, And Realizes THIS IS AN EFFING HARD JOB.

She loves the baby, of course she does! It’s HER BABY. But yes, babies are hard work.

And then the baby gets older, and starts to get into things and try to eat things that don’t qualify as food, and then the baby figures out how to stand up and WALK AROUND (sneaky baby!), and then all bets are off.

The next few years are a blur of keeping baby (now toddler, but it’s still YOUR PRECIOUS BAYBEE) out of things, off of things, and fed proper food, at least most of the time. Sleeping and not sleeping, napping and not napping, learning what ‘NO’ means, dealing with crying and tantrums and potty training and bedwetting and car seats and all manner of other insanely stressful things that you didn’t really KNOW about until you brought that wee little thing home from the hospital, thinking to yourself, oh shit (or something similar).

(Parenthood is when you start to think in swear words.)

Then One Day When You Feel Like You Have A Handle On Things, Really This Is Not So Bad, You Could Totally Do This One-Handed, Life Takes A Dump On You.

Ha ha ha ha haaaaa, is what Life is thinking. Or it might even be laughing out loud at you.

What sort of dump? Oh, any kind, really. Your kid throws up on your clothes right when you were about to leave them with the babysitter and go out to dinner with your significant other, which so rarely happens now that you are Mommy.

Or maybe, your kid was messing around in the bathroom and now the sink doesn’t work because the faucet is broken.

Or maybe, your kid wanted to see what was underneath the carpet in his room, and now there are carpet tacks everywhere.

Or maybe, someone else’s kid gave your kid lice at school, and then your kid had it for a while before anyone realized – because they don’t wash their hair all that great usually, but you let them do it on their own because they are old enough to take showers and wash their own selves. And maybe, that kid gave one of your other kids (because you are so clever you did this MORE THAN ONCE) that same lice, unbeknownst to anyone, and by the time the school realized what was going on and sent kid #1 home and you spent seven hours de-lousing that kid (trying not to throw up, because EWW BUGS ALL OVER MY KID’S HEAD YUCK), it was allllll too late. IF ONLY YOU HAD KNOWN.

And maybe, in that same hypothetical saga of kids and lice and the universe laughing at you, YOU get lice but refuse to think about it for a few days because YUCK OMG BUGS ALL OVER MY HEAD, KILL ME NOW and then kid #2 begins to present signs of infestation and then you start to cry and holler about how stupid everything is and then you go to the drugstore and spend an obscene amount of money on lice products and a better lice comb than you had with kid #1 (because it’s obviously the comb’s fault that there are still jumpy horrible bugs on people’s heads), and you come home and before you do anything else with the kids’ hair, you shave your hair off, all of it, and while you are shaving your own head you stop sniffling and actually begin to ENJOY it.

Then you comb the stupid lice out of your hair, you use the stupid horrible lice shampoo, and you feel much better. No hair, no lice, everything is AWESOME.

YAY NO MORE HAIR

P.S. The kids don’t have lice any more either. Or much hair. But everyone feels much, much better.

1. Sometimes I don’t wash my face until it reminds me that it’s dirty. Like, my skin feels itchy and I suddenly realize OH DUH, IT FEELS LIKE THAT BECAUSE IT’S NOT CLEAN.
2. I don’t enjoy going out in public until I’m already out in public.
3. I hate answering my phone.
4. More than two cups of coffee usually gives me a headache, but I have a caffeinated reputation to uphold, so I soldier on! (Feeling sorry for me yet?)
5. I have to visit my own design website to remember how much to quote people for stuff. Because I FORGET HOW MUCH I COST.
6. My favorite music to design or write to is mindless, shallow-tastic Britney Spears and Black Eyed Peas.
7. When a ThinkGeek newsletter arrives in my email, I either have to delete it unopened, or spend at least an hour putting geeky crap in my shopping cart before I force myself to close the tab NOW.
8. My moonstone ring that my husband bought me (with HIS birthday money!) is so awesome that even though it is a size too large, I wear it anyway because I don’t want to give it up even for a few days to have it resized.
9. I can’t stand having Twitter ping my phone when I get a DM (see above, re: hate answering my phone).
10. I have more paper than I will probably ever write on, and yet I never seem to have the PERFECT paper for writing on.

Your turn!

1. You want to mention on Twitter about your neighbors’ ongoing (and LOUD) home renovations, and the first phrase that springs to mind is that they’ve been editing their house.

2. You are momentarily confused about what to do with your dirty lunch dishes, because you can’t seem to drag and drop them into the trash.

3. You notice that some furniture in your house is looking a bit faded and are disappointed that you can’t adjust the contrast to punch up the color.

4. You become frustrated by someone else’s website design and have to restrain yourself from demanding FTP credentials so you can fix their CSS.

5. You realize that it’s time to eat dinner, but you forgot to eat breakfast.

Thanks, folks – I’ll be here all week (designing). Don’t forget to tip your waitress. ;)

…because I’m SERGEANT STRICT!! Bwa hahahaha!

(I’m really sorry if you came here expecting to see something USEFUL. I guess I’m actually having a day full of silliness and relaxing, so you get to join in!)

(The next thing I post will be useful. PROMISE.)

I found this over at Mrs. Fussypants’ blog yesterday, and I’ve watched it multiple times since then. If I watched this every morning along with my morning coffee, I think I would ALWAYS have a good day.

Things I will absolutely NOT miss about living in this trailer park:

1. Crazy neighbor lady’s pot smoke seeping in through my paper thin walls.
2. Incessant banging and pounding and swearing, which accompanies taking down the horribly dilapidated trailers that are being replaced with new ones (presumably).
3. Crazy neighbor lady’s filthy flea-ridden cats leaving dirty kitty-prints all over my car windows and hair all over my lawn chairs.
4. Park management insisting on being handed rent in person, and never being in the office (or anywhere else to be found) during normal business hours to RECEIVE said rent.
5. Neighbors who play popular music excessively loudly and with far too much bass boosting.  For HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS.
6. Two to four police cruisers parked outside someone’s trailer at least twice a week.
7. Not being able to sit outside without being stared at like a zoo animal that has three heads.
8. Wind storms in the middle of winter.
9. Playground covered in obscene graffiti and garbage, and poop.
10. Not feeling safe enough to take a walk with the kids or by myself.
11. Being hooted at by rude teenagers while attempting to drive out of the park. Having to come to a complete stop and wait for said rude teenagers to move their lazy asses out of the middle of the road.
12. Creepy ice cream van that makes at least six rounds (IN A ROW) through the park at just about exactly bedtime EVERY DAY.

Things I will miss, but not enough to live here any more (although maybe enough to visit occasionally):

1. Zero guilt about driving directly toward previously-mentioned filthy flea-ridden cats when they are sitting cozily in my parking spot or stubbornly refusing to stop napping in the middle of the main road.
2. Very low gas prices.
3. Sitting on the porch with Troy last summer at night, with a beer each, trying not to laugh too hysterically as we listened to a teenage drama (complete with boy throwing rocks at some girl’s window and being cussed out by his drunken father).

Things Troy and I would love to say we had done when we left, but would rather not get arrested for:

1. Run over a lazy ass teenager.
2. Run over every single cat in the park.
3. Punched holes through every wall in the trailer, laughing maniacally the whole time, just to prove how thin the walls really are.
4. Turned up our own music so loud we simultaneously burst every window in the entire park.
5. Moved the piano out of the trailer by pushing it firmly through the wall.
6. Written warnings on the inside walls in ketchup.
7. Pushed over the creepy ice cream van and left it lying there in the street like a beetle on its back.
8. Set fire to all those dilapidated death trap mold-infested trailers.