Inspirations from cheese in a can. joey, kelly, danny, and charlie

Remember last year, when I blogged every single day of November?   Yeah, well, I had one less kid then and it still just about killed me.  So don’t get all crazy.  But today is the thirtieth birthday of my very favorite man, and so here you have it, second post in two days:

Just keeps getting lamer, doesn’t it?  Oh well, at least our kids are cute.  I give you:  Peter Pan and Tinker Bell.  And Joey.

Since I realized the old blog has been pushed to the way back burner (of maybe the neighbor’s kitchen), a week or two ago I absently made it a goal to get something up in September, just so when you scroll through the archives, the month will appear at all.  As it stands, getting pictures to appear here is a little beyond my scope, so I’m going to try something new.  I’ll do the writing, and maybe Joey can insert pictures as needed.  You game, Joey?  Okay, great.  You maybe can’t hear me since you’re sleeping or whatever.  Eh.  Snooze, lose.  My dad taught me that one.  I wonder if he’s a reliable authority on this subject, though, since he sees no problem at all calling people at, say, 6 a.m. on a Saturday if the urge strikes him.

So anyway, what’s new?  Well, you know about my haircut already.  That was pretty big.  I may have mentioned the root canal here or there.  And my final verdict on root canals is:  they are not that serious.  Other than the cost, which is quite serious.  It’s been an expensive year, dentally.  That reminds me:  Joey got braces.  In maybe June or July.  He wants his teeth to be straight or whatever.  Good for you, baby!  [Joey here.  I was told to insert a picture at this point but I coudn't find one that I approve of]

So yeah, the baby.  She’s adorable and fat.  There’s something about my pets and my children that leaves me unable to only use the one name.  I’m constantly making up new ones.  I thought she could use a unique, catchy name….one that really represents her essence.  So I came up with Obesitee.  Her pediatrician (and lots of other people) always argues with me when I say she’s fat.  But to me, there is no higher compliment for a baby.  By the way, has anyone figured out what the hell Lyle Lovett was talking about?  [Joey....here we need one where she's obviously fat, but also adorable.  Oh, she's adorable in all of them, so let's focus on the fat.]

Let’s move on, shall we?  Let’s see, what else, what else….oh, yeah, how about Danny.  When he was born, we sent a picture of him to pretty much our entire combined email address books.  The pastor’s wife sweetly replied, something about how cute he was, and that he’s “all boy.”  I always puzzled about that, since to me, he was just a little adorable, dark-eyed, bundle of incredibly fantastic amazingness.  That looked vaguely Chinese.  Anyway, let me tell you:  Christa Skipper, you were right.  This child is the boyest boy of all boys that have ever been.  If he’s awake, he is climbing, running, destroying, poking, building, jumping, or otherwise boying.  He is, in fact, all boy.   Oh yeah, and mom, he was singing “You Are My Sunshine” yesterday until I foolishly attempted to accompany him.  Like mom reads this.  Uh, somebody tell mom.  [Joey:  boy picture here.]

Other stuff:  someone broke into our house a couple months ago when I was having my weekly tryst with a dental professional.  (Okay, not really a tryst.  Though Dr. Shim is cute, no kidding.)  I think that day I was having a crown placed, and a cavity filled.  Anyway, that wasn’t really the focus of this bullet point…..it was more the fact that someone broke into our house and took some of our stuff.  People can be so disappointing.  We have a shiny new security system now, though.  It’s been an expensive year, stuff-wise.  Oh, yeah, and I should mention…they didn’t really find anything they liked in the jewelry box.  They did enjoy Joey’s laptop and some cold hard cash they found (and by cold and hard, I mean cold and hard, as in a tub full of coins.  These were baffling thieves.)  [I think the jewelry box here, Joey.  I hope that's not too traumatic?]

Now I’m ready to move on to one of the other 3,582 things I need to do today, but I can’t leave it on that note.  It is not fun to be robbed, but really, it’s just stuff.  (I learned that from my dad, too.)  And anyway, it’s quite possible that Joey’s laptop might make it home soon, due to his super-cyber-sleuth laptop tracking skills.  Okay, what else, what else….hmmm….well, there was that epic flood last week, but that’s not really a happier subject.  Oooh, ooh, I know.  [Charlie in her sassy red bathing suit, please.]

Some of you know that I could qualify for the A&E show “Obsessed” based on my hair neurosis. That’s a slight exaggeration. But seriously, I’ve been known to pine for days over an annual haircut that most people fail to notice completely. Not this time. The combination of: the month of August, the baby who tries to eat my hair, the enormous amount of time my long hair consumed, and how FREAKING HOT I WAS, this time it was easy to get rid of a lot of hair. And, as luck would have it, I finally got the haircut I have always wanted. I feel like a character from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, or Places in the Heart, or a Dorothea Lange photograph (except I have a little more meat on me than all that).

Cayla Roberts at Bob Steele Salon created this literary magic for me.  Also, she packaged up all my hair in little ponytails and sent them off to Locks of Love for me.  Nice, huh?  Anyway, I didn’t have time to find a picture of a target haircut before I got there, and I liked her hair, so I just told her to make mine like hers.  I can be very Single White Female like that.  But since she’s a professional and all, she told me that she’d take a look at my hair and see if it was remotely like hers in texture, etc.  It was, remotely.  So I got a version of hers.  And yes, it’s a version of the haircut lots and lots of moms have.  Short in the back, a little longer in the front.  Or, as my sister Danyelle calls it, a tellum.  That’s mullet backwards, y’all.  Well, I couldn’t love my reverse mullet more.  And that picture up there?  Just rolled out of bed.  THAT is the kind of haircut I need.

Oh, y’all. Our little blob. So neglected. All these children in my lap, and all this laundry. Pottytraining. Et-setra, et-setra. And to save the life of my sad little laptop, Joey just blew away all the pictures I had on here. Don’t get mad at him, I asked him to do that. Anything and everything I did on this computer would blow its little mind, and make it run so hot it would burn my lap, and that is why we lightened its load by getting rid of all the pictures. So, I’ll just have to go use another computer whenever I have the time and energy to make a picture post. But not this one. This one, see, is a link to a Flickr set. Of pictures Martine took of Charlie when she was 8 days old. 8 days old! What?! Now she’s ginormous (16lb 4oz at 4 month checkup) and grabbing things and shoving them in her mouth, getting ready to scarf food from the table. And I’ll get around to more recent pictures sometime. But for now, please marvel with me at how tiny she was, how helpless, how ittybitty. I’m not sure how I avoided eating her whole. But I did, and now she’s too big. So I guess she’s safe.

Here’s a partial list of things that have happened that it would have been nice to blog about:

Vacation in Myrtle Beach
Joey’s big concert
Travelling with two chirren
Visit from the one aunt, etc
Visit from the other aunt, etc
The big chicken
My torrid love affair with Joe. Trader Joe.
My fat fat fat baby
My boy that speaks in complete sentences, with a few prepositions even
The end of the world as we knew it
Sun Valley Beach trip

Yeah, busy much?

But here, here is a picture of my fat fat baby’s first fourth of July. Not the best one we took even, but there is a 2.5 year old removing my festive pigtails and friends are set to arrive any minute. Also said fat baby will wake up yowlering in T minus….. anyway, gotta go.

danyellewon
3:29
do they have military school for 4 year olds?

Kelly Rutledge
3:29
hey good question
maybe you could start one

danyellewon
3:29
riiiighht
because i have such disciplined children to show off and advertise…
like the one sucking on a mustard packet on my sofa

Kelly Rutledge
3:30
lmao

danyellewon
3:30
how ’bout the one in the ds-induced coma, upside down on my sofa?
3:31 HOOO-AAAAH

Last night, after we dragged ourselves to bed, settling in to go to sleep:

Him:  ”Did you eat dinner?”
Me:  ”Not really. I had some leftover turkey salad and some fruit. You?”
Him:  ”A piece of cake and a shot of tequila.”

I realize my last posts have been heavy on the whine, so I’m going to swing to the polar opposite. Just look at my beautiful children. I love them, and they are mine. And Joey’s. 95% sure. HA!

He loves to have her sit right beside him. “I hole baysissa?”

Hear no evil, speak no evil……he just needs a blindfold, I guess.

These are mine, mine….somebody pinch me.

She is quite tasty, I can’t fault him.

She sleeps a lot, thank God.

He’s a little engineer, no kidding.

Just another member of his menagerie.

MINE

…..to go with the cheese in a can. Get it? Yeah, weak.

Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to whine now, and hopefully get it all out of my system. And since this is already going to be obnoxious to read, I’m going to go ahead and put it in list format, because what do I have to lose?

1. Summer. Summer’s great, except for: the heat, the fleas, the sweat, the grass, the bugs, the sunburns, the rain, the dirt, the stench of the dishwasher, the fleas, the smell of dog fresh in from outside, and the vehicle-as-oven effect.

2. Fleas. They have invaded my sofa corner. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT, as that one kid on Little Einsteins says. Though he always says it with awestruck wonder. Anyway, wherever the dogs hang out, there are fleas. And since my son routinely terrorizes them, they hang out a lot of different places, most of which happen to be directly under my feet. Also, they still eat poop.

3. Food. Makes me fat, everybody is always expecting me to make it appear for them, I have to go buy it (thanks, Joey, for going for me on Sunday), it costs a lot, it’s exhausting to think about, and I’m feeding my child marshmallows for lunch, I think. Well, just the one. The smaller one is easier to feed, much less thinking. If I could just keep up with which mother-loving side we’re on. And yes, there’s an app for that.

4. Clothing. Nothing fits, nothing looks good, and I don’t want to buy more to fit this body. I plan on having a different one soon. So I just look frumpy all the time. Meanwhile, clothing for males and females of 10 different sizes is piled in every corner, oozing from every shelf, mocking me. Drowning in clothes, nothing to wear.

5. Maintenance. Of everything. Dishes, laundry, walls, floors, linens, children, vision, lawn, finances, hair, fingernails, vehicles, relationships, vajayjays, responsibilities, teeth, food, appliances, and on and on and on.

Now I’ll carry on with my day and see how that worked.