Call this whatever you want

I realize that I haven't been posting as often. **stares blankly into the distance for unknown length of time**

You see, how do I say this...I haven't been sleeping. **more serious staring** **notes it's raining outside**

Maybe I mentioned this already? Uh, I'm not sure. I can't seem to remember. I can't remember because, and I want you to pay special attention to this next part, I have NOT been sleeping lately.

The Little Guy got a cold. I don't remember how long ago. A long time. Maybe back when there were dinosaurs. I vaguely remember that he used to sleep. But the f*#$ing cold moved into his sinuses and took up residence. Otherwise he's fine except for one minor detail: he can't breath through his nose.

Funny to think that you have to learn to breath through your mouth. Before having a baby I always assumed you had to learn to breath through your nose. That was based solely on the high number of mouth breathers I've encountered through the years and not on actual facts/thoughts/something else probably but I don't remember.

Anyway, the baby can't sleep lying down. For over a week now. We have to let him sleep in his little rumble seat thingy, which I'm sure it expressly says not to do, but f-you instructions we have to sleep sometime. It has a harness. We buckle him in. It's fine.

I mean, yeah, it's a huge parenting failure because our baby will probably never want to sleep in his crib or pack and play ever, ever again, but you know, it's fine. It's the only way I can get more than 45 minutes of sleep in a row, so it's fine.

He's been spending a lot of time in the steamy bathroom. Also we have a humidifier going all the time, and if you leave the room it's running in and walk back in you feel like there might be dinosaurs lurking in the mist under tables and behind the piles of laundry.

So, we had gotten used to the no sleep. Well, we had succumbed to a kind of numb stupor of acceptance anyway. BUT THEN, haha, this next bit is funny, he started teething. Oh yes. Funny isn't it!?! He's all of 4 freaking months old and now my nipple is a chew toy and he's running a mild fever and he's not happy right around dark-thirty. We used to call that bedtime, but that's a misnomer these days. Gotta move with the times, my man. Or woman. Or whoever.

....wait...what were we talking about? Oh yeah, the fuckfestival that's happening to my poor baby's head.

And let me tell you, during the day he's still mostly happy, plus he's super adorable and I love him to death. But at night it's dark and he's just this grasping, pinching, biting, screaming black hole of hunger that occasionally coos or babbles in his sleep - just often enough to remind us of his cuteness so we don't abandon him to his crappy attitude, swollen gums, and snuffles.

So, you see, there was a reason I stopped posting for a while. Let's hope everything returns to "normal" soon. By normal I mean some sort of daily rhythm that involves sleeping for several hours at a time. Please let it be soon.

First World Problems

It's important to keep things in perspective. That is why I having been taking deep breaths since yesterday evening. Breathing and reminding myself how fortunate I am that this is the extent of my problems.

That said, yesterday evening sucked. Which was unfortunate because the rest of the weekend had been going really, really well. Then we picked up our new chair.

Let me take a step back to say that this chair was a bit of an impulse buy. We had been trying to find a moderately priced dresser that we could use as a changing table. Instead, we found the perfect chair to go in our front room: it swivels, it rocks, it's low profile, and it was on clearance. So, even though we weren't looking for the chair, we had given a lot of thought to what we would ultimately put in that spot, and it was this exact piece of furniture...which happened to be on clearance! We easily decided on a fabric color, one called clay that was a brownish orange.

The chair arrived on Saturday, and we picked it up on our way home from a birthday party Sunday evening. We were excited to have it and our plan was to make dinner (homemade chicken pot pie!) and rearrange our living room and basically sit around and congratulate each other on our awesome purchase.

Well...it turns out that something was amiss concerning the fabric swatch we looked at when choosing our chair. Was it the light in the furniture store? Is it that a small piece of fabric does not give you a good idea of what a whole piece of furniture will look like? To tell you the truth, I'm not sure. What I am sure of is this: our chair is pink. Lipstick pink. It's HORRIBLE.

Did I mention that my least favorite color in the whole world is pink? I hate it! I despise pink and I simply cannot stand having a pink chair in the prime spot in my front room. I know, I know. Poor me. My new furniture is hideously ugly. Cover it was a blanket and move on with your life, right? But it's brand f'ing new! It's going to be around for at least a decade. And it's HORRIBLE.

So last night, after we stared at the chair, and moved it around in different lights and tried to convince ourselves it wasn't so bad, I threw a blanket over it and we got to work on dinner. Except, of course, that didn't go as planned either. The pre-made puff pastry we had purchased in anticipation of this meal was actually rolls not sheets, so R ran to two stores trying to find the right stuff. Instead, he came home with phyllo dough...and, because he's always worried we won't have enough of something, he came home with two things of phyllo dough*. Which, of course, doesn't work for chicken pot pie crust, no matter how much you cuss at it.

*I now have to figure out what to do with 8 sheets of phyllo dough. This is going to take some serious ingenuity as R doesn't like cooked spinach or feta...which are the only thing that I think of when I think of phyllo dough.

Even better, while R was out buying bulk amounts of useless Greek dough, I fell off the step stool. I don't know how I fell off the step stool, but there I was, on my hands and knees, chicken bullion powder dusting the kitchen floor. I spent the next hour and a half trying not to freak out because THE BABY! WHAT IF I HURT THE BABY??! To kill the suspense, he started kicking and squirming and I'm sure everything is fine.

So, there I am in the kitchen, resigned to making pastry dough from scratch, knees throbbing, panic eating away at me every time my side twinged. I pull out the ingredients and low and behold, not enough shortening. So off R goes to the store, again, while I proceed to burn myself on the stove.

In the end, we rearranged our living room while the pot pie was cooking. It turned out to be delicious in spite of its hideous patchwork appearance - I can never pull a crust up in one piece after I've rolled it out. But whatever. Our bellies were full, our living room was full. Our chair was covered by a much more attractive blanket. I think we'll make it past this.

P.S. R is currently getting quotes on how much it would cost to get the chair reupholstered. So far, it doesn't look good. I'm considering rubbing it down with coffee or tea and resigning myself to a dirty shade of beige. Anything would be better than what it looks like now. Seriously.

Oh Dingleballs!

As a young adult, I begged and begged for a dog. My parents are not 'animal people' and almost every animal we ever had was because of me and my aforementioned begging. So when I finally wore them down and got a dog, all responsibility for the animal fell to me (though he was only my dog when he needed something, otherwise his moniker was family dog).

The dog was a German Shepard Keeshond mix. Thus, he had lots and lots of crazy thick hair. Which is why he sometimes had dingleballs. For those of you not 'in the know,' a dingleball is a little ball of crap that hangs around, rather than falling to the ground as gravity intended. And guess who in my household got to deal with dingleballs?? Come on, guess.

Now, grown up (and the owner of sleek dogs with very short hair) I realize that I continue to be the groomer of dingleballs in my family. If shit goes wrong, I'm the one everyone calls.

A reason for blogging

I'll come clean. I read other people's blogs. Usually women. Usually women with children. If you've been following my silly blog at all (a.k.a. stalking, but I'll forgive you), you know I'm incapable of not researching important things. And reading all about mothers with infants/toddlers/children falls into the researching category because I plan to be a mother someday and must prepare; way in advance. And obsessively.

Ahem. Anyway.

Many blogs have an info section which details other locations where the author's writing has appeared. These bloggers have contributed to mommy blog sites, major news sites and even wrote books. So many women are awesome sauce!

I, too, have been published in other locations. If I told you my name, you could google it* and discover that I have published many, many things. If, in a fit of maniacal boredom, you actually tried to read one of these publications your eyes would cross and would slip instantly into a coma.

*There is only one other person in the country with my name. No joke. I've considered emailing her, but what would I say?

Most of my publications are in academic, peer reviewed-journals and are therefore boring. (The very words "peer-reviewed journal" are boring!) Which is too bad, because some of my research is on really interesting topics. BUT academia has created a wall of formatting, jargon, and post-hoc tests to ward off the most interested readers without advanced degrees. Why yes, that does severely limit the usefulness of the research. Thank you for asking.

Therefore, more people are likely to read this anonymous blog than my published work. Disregarding how hard it is to get something published in a peer-reviewed journal, this is depressing because I am an applied researcher and my work could make a real, positive impact. I guess I'll just have to be satisfied with making you smile. So smile, damn it!

Geeze, enough about that dog!

I know my last post was about my dog. I KNOW you don't want to hear about it. That's why I haven't posted anything new, but now you're stuck with it. You see, I have once again been bitchslapped by Irony.

Previously, I wrote about loving beer, and then was put on a super-sucky diet of total suckiness by a doctor. THEN, I write about dobermans and Odin gets all cut up. I get it Irony. Sorry if I stole your boyfriend or showed up at that party wearing the same dress as you, or whatever it was. I promise not to do it again. Pinkie swear.

Now, come with me on the magical journey of aging pets. {Swishhhh}*

*You know, that sound effect that represents transitions in movies and sitcoms. Come on people, keep up.

Odin is 7. And, in big dog** years, that's like a gazillion or so. He doesn't know this of course. He runs, plays, and bounces around the house and yard, same as always. But he is starting to get a tiny bit of gray on his muzzle and he has developed fatty tumors on his tummy - my previous vet affectionately called them old dog lumps (when I say affectionately, I mean my knee-jerk reaction was to slap him across his face and tell him to watch his mouth because HE was the old one).

**aka: "Holy sh*t your dog is HUGE;" "Wow, that's a big dog;" and my personal favorite, "Are dobermans supposed to be that big?"

Odin became lumpy overnight. I had starting worrying about how quickly the tumors were growing. But, we were moving, then we were getting settled, and last week I kind of panicked because I hadn't got the tumors looked at (or even found a new vet), which was making me get that sick-to-my-stomach-ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away feeling.

So, I found the dogs a vet, and Odin went to get checked out on Tuesday. The vet had me point out the two tumors that were growing the fastest, aspirated them, and called me later that day to tell me that one of these tumors was bad, as in a mass cell tumor. She wanted to remove it as soon as possible. And, moments later, an appointment had been booked for Odin to go into surgery the next day. Gulp!

The vet had warned me that, to be sure they got it all, she would have to take a "good chunk" around the tumor, in addition to the tumor itself. The growth was maybe 3/4th of an inch. I was expecting a 3-4 inch incision, so I was a bit freaked to see the 7-8 inch row of stitches bulging from my poor puppy's side.

Ridiculous details later, and Odin is fine. He had a small growth on his lower eyelid removed while he was out, so he could see better. And a big chunk of his left side was taken out. He was very whiny, and remains very clingy, but is doing great. Though he smells. And the details include gross things that I will spare you from; things that are best described by words like 'seep' and 'exude.'

You don't know it***, but the vet just called me while I was typing this - to check on Odin. That's nice of her. He really seems to like her. At least, he liked her during the first appointment where she fed him cookies and poked him with needles. He might like her less now.

***An aside: Now you know it.

Anyway: dogs, dogs, dogs. I swear, I'm not quite that focused on them. Though now I'm feeling like Karma is getting left out. I love her just as much, and she has even better surgery stories, and more of them, and thinking of how much money I have thrown down on these dogs makes me feel a bit foolish and a quite a bit more defensive. And, obviously, it is hell on my grammar and sentence structure. So, that's that. I have been working on grant applications, forcing drugs and t-shirts on my doberman (the t-shirt keeps the incision site clean and lick-free), and forcing my doberman-rottweiler to leave the other dog alone, and trying to air out the house as much as possible because healing is a smelly business.

In closing: You win Irony! I will never do it again! Just, please, tell me what IT is!