Cranky Mommy

Guess what was the special at the cafe at the pool today, for 4 bucks?
Banana and chocolate nutella crepes with whipped cream.
Guess who was a good girl today and didn’t buy them?
Me.
Guess who is still thinking about them?
*sniff*

About a month ago I asked my husband if he wanted to see Glenn Tilbrook and The Fluffers at the Ramshead Tavern in Annapolis. He told me he wasn’t interested, so I bought 4 tickets to share with my single friends who wanted to see him.
A few nights ago, I was lying in bed attempting to fall asleep when I asked my him what he wanted to do for our 8-year anniversary. Which is… on September 12. Now what was the day of that Glenn Tilbrook show? I dashed downstairs to check, and realized that I had bought tickets to be out with 3 of my single friends on our anniversary.
Boy did I feel like shit.
I am happy to say that my husband wasn’t mad (or, if he was mad, he was okay with it enough to act like it was no big deal and tell me to go ahead to the show, and we would celebrate our anniversary on the weekend).
I do still feel a little guilty about going. However since I really want to go, I’ve thought of a few things I could do (besides sexual favors) in a week of penance:

1)I hand over the remote and let him watch as much Ravens football or Elimidate as you please without whining about it.
2)All the CDs that I don’t like that you have down in the basement — play them and I won’t complain. much.
3)He can shave less and do the scraggly soap-opera-hunk thing, while I will shave MORE.
4)Eat a naughty chocolate chip muffin from Eddies of Roland Park every and you want and he won’t get nagged.
5)No toilet training duty for with our son for a week.
6)I’ll make that evil chocolate pie that he likes so much.
7)I’ll get up with T when he wakes up at 6:30 - god almighty that will be hard.
8)He can pick the restaurant when we go out for our anniversary.

Had this been our 2nd, 4th, 6th, anniversary things might have been different. But that is the thing about being married, if you are happily married — you tend to tolerate a lot of stuff you wouldn’t have, had it been the first couple of years. I guess he has accepted the fact that he is married to a really dingy person (I will say though, I got lucky. Had he done the same thing, I would have been a little more pissed than he is).

I’ve noticed on at least 3 weblogs recently that, well, people aren’t playing right on the playground! Someone is bullying. Someone isn’t taking turns. The parents are rude or ignoring the kids. So I thought I would write out a little list so everyone is clear on the rules.

1)Little ones: no eating woodchips. And parents who let their kids eat them will be punished to some unknown splinter-removing hell.
2)The 5 second rule for eating food dropped on the ground that you use at home, usually doesn’t apply at the park, unless you are desperate.
3)If you can’t hold your pee, and there is no place to pee for you or your kids because there is no bathroom, please choose a tree that is remote and far away so we don’t have to smell it.
4)And, hermetically seal those poopy diapers before you throw them in the trash so we don’t have to smell them either.
5)Don’t go down the slide when someone hasn’t gotten off the slide.
6)Don’t go up the slide when someone is going down the slide.
7)Kids who take other kids toys on the playground are evil. That is, unless the kids are related by blood and that just means you are stuck with them for life.
8)If your kids are tired and kicking and screaming, for godsakes take them home.
9)Don’t throw the woodchips! Or grass! Or Dirt!
10)Don’t bang sticks on most things. Especially other kids.
11)Don’t steal other kids drinks. It isn’t a community slober fest.
12)Halt those cellphones, people! It’s the glorious outdoors, with nature and birds and crap like that. And you’ll know where your kid is.
13)Forgive the parent who can’t remember the name of a parent or child you’ve met on the playground 8 times before.
14)Don’t ask what Dad does, to the lesbian couples.
15)Only throw rocks in the stream. All other rock throwing is forbidden.
16)Stay away from the strange sewer-hole things.
17)Wandering up to strange adults for crackers and snacks is gauche (even more so if you are an adult yourself)
18)Say sorry when your mother gives you the evil eye - or else.
19)The classic — take turns. Duh.
20) When your mother says “Come here” it doesn’t mean run to the opposite end of the playground while giggling hysterically.

Got any to add?

Do you remember this commercial from a couple of years ago? It’s a Staples commercial showing parents doing back-to-school shopping joyously to the Andy Williams X-mas song It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year, while their kids shuffle along looking depressed.
I’m not exactly dancing down the aisle with joy thinking of the beginning of the school year, but I am looking forward to September. I have just enough sanity to last me the next 3 weeks. And, I think my son is bored with me and ready to go back to school.
Plus, I don’t think my house has been really clean in 3 months. Then, I will have no excuse for the mess.

…I sit my kid in front of the computer and have him watch this:

He’s absolutely hypnotized. (Of course, now the song is stuck in my head, and all those silly poses to go with it!)

This time of year the past few years, my husband starts getting excited about football, constantly reading and talking about the Baltimore Ravens and other teams.
You’d never know by looking at my husband that he is a football fan. He wears no purple, unlike one of my neighbors who just headed downtown to watch the exhibition game in his purple-camouflage outfit (with his purple-camouflaged family members and their bright purple, Ravens logo-ed van). He doesn’t wear a single Baltimore Ravens shirt or hat, and doesn’t buy any tickets to the games, but deep down inside, he is hardcore about it. At the moment he is upstairs watching the first Ravens exhibition game.
For me it will be long season. I make a lot of effort to act attentive when reads me little tidbits about this new player or that player, the names which I can’t remember, and when he does all his armchair coach lectures. I nod and listen as well as a person who dislikes sports in general, and American football in particular.
But I think he is making a new replacement for disinterested me.
He has started endoctrinating my son. Never mind that he’s under 4 and doesn’t really get what is going on. He sees a bunch of guys “doing a lot of tackles and getting a lot of boo-boos and needing a whole lot of band-aids”. And, I guess that looks really cool and macho to him.
So good news is that, in a few years, T will be totally endoctrinated and brainwashed into the whole football thing by his dad. And that gets me off the hook.

Several years ago, where my parents live in the Atlanta area, a tornado hit. They lost power for several days and lived in a disaster area.They were lucky… they were the only house on the street that didn’t have roof damage. A house a block away was leveled, and there was one fatality in the neighborhood.
Last night, my parents came home from dinner out and the house was all, well… strange. The computer screen was multicolored. Many of the electric bulbs weren’t working. The stereo died, the phone line wasn’t working, and the something with the electronic system that regulates the sprinklers died and flooded the lawn. There were a lot of storms in the area, so yesterday evening lightning (probably) hit the ground outside their house and made a mess of things.
I don’t actually believe in God, but I’m going to let my parents know that this is just God’s gentle way of nudging them into moving up here to Baltimore.

This is most certain:
At one-hundred-one degrees
Frigidaire is cool.

(after 3 hours of sleep that is all I got to give ya)

A little over a year ago, we had the stinkiest hottest day of the year. I wrote about it here. Quick summary: On the hottest day of the summer our air conditioner started to fail. In an act of desperation, I ended up selling my soul and shopped at evil old Walmart (where I’d never shopped before) to get a broken Haier air conditioner. Which I returned, to get ANOTHER broken Haier, which, of course, I returned to Walmart. And, in doing so, reset my karma to the good side, and I can now say once again that Walmart has never made a dime off me (slightly evil Target has, of course, but they are only 50% as bad).
Well, we never replaced that old air conditioner that had started to die last summer. After returning those bunky air conditioners, the old one ran fine the rest of last summer, and the rest of this summer too. And, we figured with a new air conditioner downstairs, it would take a load off the upstairs one and not trip the circuit breaker.
That was a dumb idea.
So guess what decided to die again on the 101 degree, hottest day of the summer this year?
Now we are once again in the position of having an iffy air conditioner and needing to get one on the hottest week of the year, which was a really stupid thing to do, considering every cheap air conditioner for miles has been purchased. The old one may limp along the next couple of days, it may not, but I don’t feel like taking chances. Mommy needs her “beauty sleep” and can’t sleep when it’s 100.
But hell if we are going to Walmart to get one!

What’s more fun than cleaning out a 3 year old’s poopy underwear?
How about the aftermath of a little boy trying to clean up the mess himself?
Yeah, good times. Not.
(In case you don’t get the Irish prison humor, click here and read up)