Cranky Mommy

Friday I had the tear duct surgery on my eye. As surgery goes, it was pretty minor, but I’m of the opinion that any kind of surgery is not minor. I have no idea how these people get elective surgeries like nose jobs and boob jobs!
It’s amazing what they can do with the human body these days. I now have a tube in my right eye, running from my top tear duct, down to my bottom tear duct, and making a loop somewhere inside my nose. Kind of like this:

The tube, which you can see about 1/4 inch showing if you have good eyesight, will be removed in several months, creating a new place for my tears to drain, to get around the obstruction. So, I won’t have tears pouring down my face anymore. Kinda cool, kinda gross… if you care to read about it here.
The drag is, I still have tears running down my face. Tomorrow I will call up and find out if I have to wait until the tubes come out to see if this damn thing is going to work. And something happened to my left duct, which is partially blocked, when the surgeon tried to unblock it, or something (who knows, I was knocked out). That’s the eye that I didn’t get the tube put in… and now I have a black eye on that eye.

Now, instead of people looking at me thinking, “Is she crying?” they are looking at me thinking “Is she crying? And who punched her in the eye?”

We all turn to PBS for wholesome family shows. You know, the kids shows that you don’t have to worry about giving your kids nightmares after viewing them. Educational, informative, safe. And also providing horrible role models for small children. Let me give you my list of the top PBS kids offenders*.

1) Cookie Monster. He gets an F for table manners and gluttony. Practically every parent has had the misfortune of cleaning up after a child imitating Cookie Monster while eating something. Diagnosis: Binge Eating Disorder.

2) The Man in the Yellow Hat on Curious George. Totally negligent pet owner, the SPCA should be after him. Diagnosis: Animal Cruelty.

3)Zoe. That little monster never wants to share, and is way too into that stupid pet rock that everyone has to pretend is alive. If Zoe were alive and human she would need a therapist to insure that she wasn’t having a paranoid break. Diagnosis: Schizoid Personality Disorder.

4)Ernie. And no, I’m don’t take any issues with Ernie and Bert being ambiguously gay. Rather, Ernie is rude for keeping poor Bert up at night and not letting him go to sleep. No wonder Bert is so cranky. Diagnosis: Insomniac.

5)Jetta from Clifford, the big red dog. Sure she looks sweet, but nearly every episode she brags and lies, then has some kind of catharsis and regrets it by the end. But somehow, by the next episode, she is back to being her bragging and lying self. Diagnosis: Borderline Personality Disorder.

Care to add to the list?

*This is all tongue and cheek of course. Really we love PBS, we do. Even Cookie Monster.

…And Mom, also known as the Easter Bunny, is too cheap thinks it is ridiculous to spend $1.50 on a tiny bag of pastel colored shredded paper Easter basket grass so she is cutting up construction paper to make grass with.
After all, he is just 4!
I bought my Easter basket stuff at Target today, and my God they have a lot of useless stuff that they, and every other store in America, are try to pawn off on parents at Easter time. Among the things I saw were plastic “candy holders” in the shape of the Superman emblem. Somehow that just doesn’t seem very Easter-y.
Or how about a dart gun for our 7-year old? That really just reminds me of Jesus rising up from the dead to forgive us of our sins Easter.
And then of course, their are those Peeps.

I suppose they are kinda okay, if you have the taste buds of the under-6 set. I’ve been known, on rare occasion, to eat them before (if I am needing a sugar fix and there is nothing else nearby). But everywhere I have been lately, every store seems to be a… Peep pusher. They have huge displays with rows and rows of florescent sugar coated marshmallow junk. They even have stuffed animal Peeps, I saw some today at Target.

The bunnies are kind of scary… kind of like, Thalidomide bunnies. Really, do these look like much fun to play with? Maybe they make good pillows.
So, if you are doing the whole Easter basket thing, what is in your basket?

So I’m back. It was nice to take a break. Seriously, I am thinking of giving it up. Not that it takes that much time, it’s just one more thing in my life I’m not sure I necessarily need.
Plus the little things in life seem to be taking over.
In short, what has happened since I last blogged:

So, how the hell are you?

If two of the kids in a preschool class have food allergies, and there’s a birthday party with cupcakes the allergic kids can’t eat, how hard is it to drop the parents’ of the allergic kids a simple email to let them know, so the parents of the allergic children can bring cupcakes in for their own kids?
I don’t expect every mom to bake a special way for my own son (although many of the moms have done that). I just would have liked an email so I could have brought something in — so my son and another kid wouldn’t have been stuck eating just fruit while everyone else had cupcakes.

I’ve been “tagged” by my friend Emma to reveal some deep, dark truth about moms. I am hard pressed to think of any real dark, deep truth about moms that hasn’t already been written about. Still here’s my stab at it, although it isn’t particularly deep and dark:

Moms resent the childless.
They resent how their feet still fit into little, fashionable shoes. And how they can still afford those little, fashionable shoes, and have somewhere to wear them to.
They resent their perky little T and A’s. And their nice, neat, not-extra-wide bellybuttons.
They resent hearing about how they slept in until 11 on a weekend.
They resent their unwelcome parenting advice… unless they’ve been a full-time nanny.
They resent their pre-pregnancy metabolisms.
They resent their spontaneous lifestyles, spending frivolous money on impractical, single-life things.
They resent the freedom they have to put those impractical, single life (and frequently breakable) things on low display shelves without little fingers getting to them.

Of course resentment sits on the shelf right next to envy, right? And we moms know how the childless don’t have little bedwarmers to crawl into bed with them on those weekend mornings, even if they do get up at 7.

One of my dear friends has a strange obsession with curtains… nearly a curtain fetish.
She is always looking for the “ultimate” curtains. She has gone through so many sets for her living room that they pile up in her basement. I think she has finally settled on a set of curtains for her livingroom… maybe.
As for me, I seem to have a problem for the color of my kitchen. Today I painted it, again. A nice unoffensive shade of off-white, kind of the color of melted vanilla ice cream. Vanillin, probably named that by some queeny interior decorator guy, as most of the colors have foofy names. Vanillin is a color that hardly anyone could argue with. But it has taken about 8 years to get to this point. That’s right, 8 years.
You’d think… I have been doing painting since the mid-90s; I have a degree in art; my husband studied art for years; he’s been a painting contractor for more years; we are both artists, we should be able to pick something for a kitchen, right?
Nope.
Of course my husband and I over the years have had very different visions for the house. His initial impulse is always to paint everything bright white. that is fine, but hey, I’m a woman and I want a little but of something to the walls here. Sure, artwork looks best on a white or gray wall, but let’s have a little homey ambiance, right? This is one of the few things I miss about being single — being able to decorate my way without negotiating everything.
My husband and I tried out so many colors over the years on one particular wall, that an archaeologist examining the wall 200 years from now would have a field day psychoanalysing our house’s former residents. It was bright blue. Cobalt blue. It was “Zendo” brown. It was orange. And we argued about it. We threatened each other with calling up an interior decorator about it.
Then we settled on a rosy brick color. That was a couple of years ago. And we got sick of it. There was something just a bit too… I don’t know… PeptoBismol-y about it? It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t… THE color.
So we decided to paint it white. But what white? That took days. I painted it white and didn’t like the shade of white.
And then my husband gave up and said “Whatever you want dear,” which made things a little easier and I picked a color that I liked and he could tolerate.
Vanillin.
He gets to pick the living room color. And damn I am not painting this kitchen again. I better love it for the next 8 years.

While sitting at the opthamologist’s office again (clogged tear ducts… weird) I had too much time to browse the reading material but all of it was lousy, so I picked up a Family Circle. It actually wasn’t that bad, lots of cute craft ideas for things I will probably not have time to do. I did happen to notice one ad that kind of peeved me:

On the surface it looks rather innocuous, and a lot of people would have a hard time thinking why anyone would have a problem with it: A mom and a baby (some celebrity I don’t know); mom has a milk mustache like all those other “Got Milk” ads. Perfectly innocent looking; the print is too small for me to read here, but I remember what I read in the eye doctor’s office: It advocated milk products for weight loss for mom, obviously targeting the new mother who wants to lose the extra pounds that she put on during that pregnancy.
What the ad is missing, in my mind of course, is a big warning. The fact that milk doesn’t always do a body good. Never mind the fact that it can be difficult to digest for some adults; it can be terrible for the nursing mother who is passing on allergens to her baby. That milk ingested by the mother is passed on to baby and can be a very (more than you think!) common cause of “colic”, “reflux” and digestive problems in infants, and that many babies are allergic or intolerant of milk. That by consuming milk while nursing or feeding dairy formula to your child, you may be causing stomach problems or allergy problems for your child.
Consider this: of the playgroup that I was in when my child was an infant, 2 of the 7 or so babies ended up being allergic to milk, one of which was mine. Nursing mothers these days are frequently told not to consume peanuts and nuts, but you rarely hear that nursing mothers are supposed to stop eating dairy.
I know of one baby (friend of a friend’s baby) who almost died last year because of it!
Don’t get me wrong, for the majority of infants it fine. They aren’t bothered by it in breastmilk, they tolerate dairy formula. But for a number of babies, it is not.
I do like dairy products. I don’t consume them as much; we don’t keep that much of it in the house. And hopefully my son will outgrow his allergy by the time he is twelve. (If I am lucky!) Had I been a little better educated on the subject, I would have saved my son some digestive suffering he had as an infant - rash, colic and diarrhea the tests could not find cause for, and now in retrospect seems so obvious what was causing it.
When I rule the world (no time soon), ads like this would have a little asterisk on them: *consuming milk while nursing may cause colic, diarrhea, reflux and give your child a dairy allergy, if your infant experiences these symptoms discontinue use and consult a physician. And remember, millions of Asians have done fine for thousands of years without it!

Yesterday, because my primary care didn’t know what to do with me anymore, I dragged myself off to the opthamologist, to deal with what is my fourth bout of conjunctivitis, a.k.a pink eye, in perhaps the last year.
I left with numb eyes, two prescriptions, and a sense of doubt. I guess he knows what he is doing, I think the place I went to is reputable. But the guy looked younger than I am and had a slightly perplexed look on his face when I told him my story. The kind of face that said, I don’t know why you keep getting this, perhaps you are lying when you say you change your bedsheets every two weeks. And I know I shouldn’t let this bother me, but the walls of the waiting room were covered with photos of famous people I don’t care about, getting their eyes worked on, like Kenny G. Ew. (I agree with Pat Metheny, Kenny’s talents are too teeny. But I guess even mediocre musicians need contact lenses).

Anyhow I hope he has my solution, people keep looking at me funny. Although now instead of looking like I am stoned I merely look like I am crying (until this goes away have to find a way to work this to my advantage).

Despite my last bitter-sounding post, my Valentine’s day has been pleasant, snowed in with my family. Roses and Chocolate for me, and chocolate and valentines for my two men. Hubby is being absolutely sweet and so it the little man. And I did what I do whenever I am snowed in - I baked. I made a chocolate pie.
T spent the morning holding the valentine I made, and thanking me profusely (gee! it was so easy!) and crawling around with it. Crawling, because last night he somehow hurt/twisted his ankle and hasn’t been walking on it today, and it hurts him to put pressure on it. Poor guy. It has been disconcerting, but it isn’t swollen. The doctor told us to give him ibuprofen and if it isn’t better by tomorrow, then he will be off to an orthopedist. That is, if I can get out of here, due to the ice.
Our goal then tomorrow is to get out of our snowed- and iced-in street alley, in case I need to take him to the doctor.
On another note… I have, what else but pink eye for the 4th time in the last 12 months! So, if you see a woman who looks like she is stoned and crying with a gimpy boy spinning wheels in the snow… you will know it is me.

Update 2/15: Thankfully boy is walking again (sigh of relief) and unfortunately suffering from a wicked case of cabin fever, literally bouncing off the walls.