My husband is so smart....

Conversation with husband last night:

Husband: I see that you bought toilet paper at Costco today, but didn't use the coupon.
Me: There's only one roll left in the entire house.
Husband: But that's like three dollars you could have saved with the coupon.
Me: That coupon isn't even good until April 4th. Today's March 27th - that's 8 whole days.
Husband: So?


8 days, 1 roll, 3 toilet-paper using human beings. You do the math.

An open letter to my 18-month-old son

Dear Mr. Mc-BooBoos,

When you're a sweaty, brooding, monosyllabic teenage boy, I'll look back and remember how lovely you looked coming around the corner wearing your sister's old purple ballet slipper footed jammies, armed with a Barbie in each hand - brunette on the left, blonde on the right.

Sure, you had nothing to do with the choice of evening wear, seeing as how at this point you don't have the fine motor skills necessary to dress yourself. But double fisting the dollies was all you, and next time there will be photographic evidence.

I suppose that cross-dressing in the interest of getting a bit more use out of perfectly good pajamas will no longer be a viable option once society has imposed upon you its preconceived notions about the appropriateness of ballerina-themed clothing for children of the male gender, but who am I to interfere with your love of miniature silken haired misrepresentations of female beauty with remarkably unlikely bust to waist to hip ratios?

Love,
Mama

p.s. I promise never to make you wear hand-me-down days of the week Disney princess panties.

Overheard last night in the kitchen...

3-year-old actress-in-the-making to her daddy (you're going to have to imagine the dramatic tone for yourself as there's no way to convey it in the imperfect medium that is the blogosphere):

"Could you please just go away, I'm trying to relax by myself."

Note to self - the precocious three foot tall one will repeat whatever you say, verbatim. Proceed with caution.

Note to husband - please stop saying "Nice ass" to me every time I turn around or you're going to be the one to explain it to her teacher.

Note to self

Stop going to the gym at 3:30 when school gets out and the entire cheerleading squad in all their 20-inch-waisted glory is parading around the locker room in their skivvies. Not so good on the self esteem.

Just wait until your father gets home

This morning my friend stopped by to drop off a giant pink plastic Barbie house that has outrun its course of usefulness at her house. She thought that maybe my little princess might have fun with it. Since I'm not one to turn away free stuff, I happily accepted it....in all of its unassembled 30-some-odd pieces glory. With no instructions. This friend of mine is about to find herself demoted from my list of all-time most favoritest people. I've spent the last three hours trying to dodge my daughter's persistent pleas to put the darn thing together so we can play.

Now I'm no dummy by any standards, but spatial relation type problems have never been my forte. Write an 8 page paper overnight about the significance of bodily functions in 16th century Spanish novels? No problem. Explain the ins and outs of the Dewey Decimal system? Right on that. But ask me to put a bunch of seemingly unrelated pieces together to form something that will stand up on its own and sort of resemble a house? No thanks.

Now the last thing I want to do in 2008 is tell an impressionable 3 year-old girl that Mommy just can't figure it out and we'll have to wait for Daddy to come home to fix it for you. But it's the truth...(well, Mommy just doesn't really want to figure it out right now is probably closer to the truth). Here's hoping that a couple extra math and science summer camps will make up for the inappropriate message of female inadequacy I'm probably sending.

Pulling out the big guns

So my three-year-old is smart enough to have figured out that "I have to go potty" trumps everything and uses it as an excuse to get out of just about anything she doesn't want to do. If she's feeling particularly savvy, she'll slip in "...or I'm going to have an accident." After shoving her brother off the ottoman today she swiftly got her hiney taken to time-out and predictably pulled out the old pee-pee excuse to escape punishment. But you can't fool me, no siree bob, so I told her that she was just going to have to have an accident and clean it up herself. For extra measure, she added in a little crotch grabbing and against my better judgment, I said o.k., go potty, because really, who was going to be the one blotting the pee out of the carpet? What a sucker.

She promptly resumed her jumping on the ottoman yelling "Oh my God, Japanese." Whatever that means.

Panty mystery...solved

So it sems that they do make Sunday underwear, I just happened to get a package without. I was trying to examine the Disney princess 7-pack without opening it, (I'm pretty sure that "research" wouldn't have been an adequate excuse for putting my hands all over someone else's little girl's future undergarments)and it looked like there were different designs for every day as opposed to my faulty package with only six. But the O.C.D. in me has come to accept it and even lets fancypants wear underwear that doesn't correspond to the proper day of the week. That's progress. Trust me, it is.

Isn't there a lifetime limit for that kind of thing?

So I'm taking my daughter out of the carseat in the back of the van when, plop, there it is, bird poop on my coat. This is not the first time this has happened to me. No, my friends, it's not even the second. It's the third. Do we think that's above the norm for how many times a bird-crappeth-upon-a-person? But at least it didn't hurt, because the last time it happened it about knocked me out.

Let's go back to the summer of 2001, shall we? The husband and I were up north in Michigan and all of a sudden I was ready to turn around and smack him because I was pretty sure a rock had just my head. But was it a rock? Nope, it was the giant stone-like turd of one of those big seagull type birds that are constantly flying way too close to our heads here in this great state of ours. The husband (who was then just the boyfriend and is pretty lucky he got the upgrade) thought it was pretty funny, especially considering we had just tried to check in at the hotel and they told us our room wasn't going to be ready for a couple of hours, therefore I had to walk around with greasy yellow avian fecal material in my hair. I have to hand it to him, though. He did do a pretty thorough job trying to wipe it out with a newspaper or something similar, which was the only paper product we seemed to have in the car. So much for a romantic walk along the waterfront.

So I suppose in the scheme of things, a little birdy poop on the fleece pales in comparison with the poopbomb that nearly caused a closed head injury.

Bad bunny

Are those old raisins I keep finding on my carpet or did the Easter bunny get loose in here?

Hey, fellow Michiganders...

You know how there's those big old nasty dirty mountains of three-month-old snow piled up so high in our parking lots that you can't even use half the spaces? (Did you ever wonder how the grocery carts managed to get themselves stuck up on the top of those things seemingly all by themselves?)

Well, right now, as we speak, there are people living in our very own country, napping contentedly in their hammocks outside at 8:00 p.m. enjoying 75 degree weather?

And their votes counted.

Just thought you should know.

Awesomely Excellent Quote of the Day

Yes, I know, I got all excited about starting this thing and then abruptly disappeared. Life has been distinctly unfunny for a couple of weeks, but I'm getting my mojo back.

So here goes....

And today's awesomely excellent quote of the day came from a young man who is clearly an outstanding example of the quality youth today's public schools are churning out and apparently had nothing better to do today than walk around the mall and inflict his amazing intellect upon my husband (who was minding his own business, walking around with little man on his shoulders) with this winner:

"Hey man. Is that white boy your son?"

Rock on pants-around-your-ankles-dude