finslippy

Isn't this how everyone spends their Sunday afternoons?

Your typical Sunday afternoon crazy dancing. from Alice Bradley on Vimeo.

He was dancing for a full ten minutes before I realized I should go get the camera.

I guarantee that if you have a small child, they will find this video to be the pinnacle of hilarity. Get yourself a small child, and find out for yourself!

Due date.

Today is (was, would have been) my due date, and I'm pretty sad. I didn't think it would hit me this hard, but here it is, and it has.

Seriously, though, they're cute.

Heather B. came over for a pre-Ikea visit the other day. In honor of her visit, I baked awful pumpkin muffins and made her eat one. I'm usually a good baker, I swear, but these were just weird. I ate two.

I thought for sure that Henry would be all over Heather, but lately he's been shy around the ladies, and since Scott was working from home, he stayed upstairs and convinced Scott to complete some Star Wars Mad Libs with him. ("Then Darth POOP raised his light TOILET and FARTED Obi Wan MOMMY.") So we had the morning to ourselves, and while attempting to digest my alarmingly dense muffins, we had a lovely chat about Heather's career, her hopes and dreams, her travels, her radiant youth, etc.

As for me, I talked about my pets. Heather seemed a bit...concerned.

Heather: I think you might be in this house a little too much.
Me: Look, Charlie thinks he's going to get some muffin. He's looking at me like, "I won't think they're gross! Promise!"
Heather: Have you considered getting an office job?
Me: The problem is, I don't like people, or when I have to do stuff. So that sort of rules out offices.
Heather: You could volunteer! That would get you out!
Me: Heh, the cat's sitting at the table. Like she's people! No, kitty, you're not getting any muffin. Stop looking at me like that. Okay, maybe a little piece.
Heather: This is just sad.
Me: You know, I made up two different voices for my dog, but no voices for the cat. I don't know why that is. I just don't think she'd put up with me making up voices for her.

Weird, right? That that behavior would concern her? Youngsters! What do they know.

It occurred to me after she left that this is another reason why I need to move back to the city. Because right now these two are the only beings I have substantial conversations with throughout the day. If I'm going to devote my day to Writing, only Writing, I need to be able to occasional wander out of the house and see SOMEONE.

Sure, I could do this "office work" Heather suggests, but that always ends in tears and lawsuits, and also this is the only thing I'm any good at.

Meanwhile, you should see the cute thing my dog is doing right now. He's all curled up in the sun, getting warm! Like a furry, adorable reptile!

I am becoming a woman, AGAIN

Hello! So I've been working on a whole mess of essays, which is good. It's good to be actually working instead of, say, clawing my face off. Although I have to tell you, I'm not really seeing the difference between the two activities, right now. Because for some reason, some reason I possessed many months ago, I elected to write about my adolescence, and "torture" does not fully begin to describe the experience of tackling this subject matter.

In order to write about the events surrounding my blossoming into womanhood, I have to try and recall what precisely happened, and that means burrowing around in a subsection of my memory that I locked up a while ago. Not that my adolescence was particularly traumatic, although parts of it come close. It was just awkward. And painful. And I was a half-formed human being, reeling around being spiteful and petty and then retreating to my bedroom to listen to the Smiths and feel sorry for myself. "I was drunk and also an idiot" seems to explain a lot of the insane behavior I exhibited, back then. Actually it pretty much wraps up my life from 14-25, which not coincidentally was the year I stopped drinking. (And then, yes, started again in my thirties, but by then I had morphed into an adult who could walk away after half a glass of wine, an idea that would have been completely foreign to me during the years that one drink turned into twelve turned into waking up and not knowing where I was.)

Many of the events surrounding my pre-teen and teenage years make excellent essay fodder, which is why I'm writing about them, duh, but really it would be better if I could simply lop off that part of my brain and hand it to someone who can sift through the material and get it on paper without needing to call her therapist a few times.

All I can think while I'm writing is, my son is going to have to go through adolescence? With all of our scientific progress, haven't we found some way to help us skip this part of life? Can't I put him into some kind of suspended animation?

Where does the time go?

Okay, so I'm glad Obama's the next president and all, but now I would like the sunlight to return. I don't know if you're experiencing this in your area, but since the election, we are living in a cloudy, rainy, perpetual twilight. Look, sun, we know you think Obama's going to do your work for you, but you know what? You have to keep pulling your weight. Get on that.

Besides this new administration-elect's weather problems, things are fairly status quo, over here. Henry has two days off from school, and we signed him up for two days of an all-day YMCA camp, and WOW, can I get more done in eight hours than I can in 2 hours fifty minutes. Unfortunately all that time stretching before me tends to make me 1) panic and b) doubt my abilities and III) decide that I'm an untalented hack and I should just eat Henry's Halloween candy and indulge in some self-loathing. But then I x) get over myself and 16) get back to work. I went through a few of those cycles yesterday. Because I am writing some crap, over here. Crap you will never see; crap that no one should ever be subjected to. Eventually I'll pretty it up and it will be fit for human eyes. Or I'll eat more fun-sized Snickers while setting my computer on fire.

And hey! Have you seen Momversation yet? Because everyone else has, and they're wondering why you haven’t. Momversation features mom-bloggers momversing in momversational videos on topics of interest—to moms! I'm in it, as well as Heather, Maggie, Asha of Parent Hacks, Mindy from The Mommy Blog, Rebecca from Girl's Gone Child, Daphne from Cool Mom, and Nataly from Work it, Mom. The first episode is up, and a second one will be up today, I believe, at any minute. I think the videos are turning out pretty great, and the first one convinced me that I needed a haircut, which I then went out and got! So it's already helped at least one person, who is me, and I think that's really what matters, here.

Also there's a new Wonderland column up. Ha-chaaaa!