Her: don’t tell me you finished painting D’s room !.....
Me: I did the walls in the corner and the one over the closet! I had to! I had to get the room back together before the cleaners came or I would have shot myself
Me: BUT
Me: I got a call from Daph this morning
Me: “Mama?”
Me: “I was at the park, and I fell on this… um, brick wall?”
Her: oh no ....
Me: “and I got seven stitches in my chin!”

This year, I painted Daphne’s room without a drop cloth (well, there was one in the room, I could just never find it to stand on), quart-sized mug-o-paint in hand, squinting at edges and corners to see if I’ll ever care about later.

And then? I took a shower, shaved my legs, and cleaned the dried paint out of my razor.

Anyway, everyone claimed stuffy noses, sore throats, burning foreheads (I could have kept potato salad cool on their heads, the little weasels), and poison oak. Well, Dylan actually HAS poison oak, but it’s not contagious and there isn’t much to do while waiting it out other than keep it protected and put hydrocortisone on it when it flares up. (Which happens at approximately four-thirty each morning. He comes in at that time with flaming rashes consuming his legs so I whip out the 1% and slather it all over the ten or so patches all over his body. By the time we wake up, the rashes look all docile and harmless again.)

And then, because the boys each lost a tooth this week, Logan did his best to sap all of the mystery out of the Tooth Fairy. He said his tooth was still there this morning (I forgot to do it last night but got in there when he got up to pee), but then Daphne ran and looked, and found a dollar.

Unimpressed, he said, “That wasn’t there this morning, everyone knows it was Mom.” My eyes bugged.

He kept going and I was making slicing motions across my neck, and then kicking his shins, and he’s all, “Why are you kicking me, Mom?” I finally got him into the other room and explained that once he gets old enough to start thinking that things like the Tooth Fairy aren’t real, it’s part of his job to help keep it going for the little ones. Jiminy.

He finally got it, so I went to check email. When I came back, he was holding forth at the breakfast table, saying, “And she’s got to drink tons of coffee to stay up all night! It’s unbelievable! This one time, she spilled coffee all over my pillow! And—”

I said, “OK, everyone! Enough talking, let’s finish getting ready!”

There was renewed begging to come back home once we arrived at camp, but I smoothed it over with a candy orgy at the general store. Mom of the Year.

I’m so exhausted.

For our holiday issue, we are looking for women who found a way to feel better about themselves and particularly their bodies with a holiday or family tradition. For example, volunteering at a food shelter, handing out toys to the needy, going ice skating with the kids, etc. Women who are selected for this story will likely be professionally photographed, which means professional hair styling and makeup application. If anyone is interested they can email me their name, age, city/state, current photo, and a paragraph about their story.

Obviously, I can’t reply. Remember the last time I took the kids ice skating? Or even better, roller skating? Hoo boy, that was fun. Whiplash on Christmas Eve. And then me, three kids, and a deranged woman in the ER all night 48 hours later.

This makes me smile.

To wit: bank threatening to freeze assets, lawn dying mysterious death in spots, children booooored but unwilling to do anything around the house, in debt to my eyeballs and no paycheck in sight, kids off camp all week but have wonderful neighbor with pool and two accompanying children of appropriate age, Phil well into fifteenth day on east coast, torn between finding more affordable digs and preserving childhood home, warmed by rave reviews of session given to national professional association accompanied by realization that the things most appreciated and valued are those I do for love, not money, and that I will die an entertaining pauper. On anti-depressants.

So. Not much to do but pack up the kids, invade neighbor’s pool, help paint a room, find lunch or at least cash for same, contemplate having car windows fixed (smoke came out of switch when tested with nail file, not encouraging), finish laundry, crack a beer, and wait for the day to be over.

How about you?

All I can say is, It pays to blog this short of slander, or for that matter, anything actionable.

[via monkeydyne]

So, proud that I’ve done so well and haven’t had a sip of alcohol in all that time, I had a small glass of wine with lunch.

I just looked over and saw that there was a sip left, so I kept mousing with my right hand and downed the rest with my left.

Huh. There was something in my mouth. Was it a pretzel? I was snacking, but not over the glass. Piece of napkin? Only one way to find out: spit it out.

Ladies and gentleman, I spit out a live fly. He’s actually still twitching. Soon I will get up and rinse the glass over the disposal, flip the switch, and walk away for a moment.

GREAT GOOGLY MONKEY FUCK I just pulled a fucking FLY LEG off of my TONGUE.

I don’t think I can blog here anymore.

There are oddballs, like “explaining a absence of work because of motherhood,” “dunk tank pictures 2008,” “not feeling good 3 months after birth,” and “up your skirt.”

Of course, there are always the unspeakable search strings one might expect to see (if one were warped and took the time to think hard enough, so to speak), like “mommy likes boys,” “mommy ass,” “mommy love d***,” and tons others I can’t say because they’d just be a string of asterisks. Suffice to say that I have quite a few mental images I could do without.

But today was the capper. Someone found me while searching for “maggots in ceiling.”

(If you’ve been reading here for a while, you’re probably doing the flappy hand dance. If you haven’t, but just want to do the flappy hand dance, go here. And? Here.)

Ahahahahaha! I found this from a hundred years ago. Well, 2004.