Mixed Drinks and Mixed Emotions

Thanks Dave Wakeling for the lyrics.

Sitting in our living room yesterday the following conversation ensues:


Me: Honey, I know money is tight. But I think I want to have another baby.

Him: Well, okay. How do we go about doing that?

Me: (30 seconds of hysterical laughter)

Me: (through tears of laughter) Well, dear, first a daddy loves a mommy very much...


This is actually something we've been talking about a bit in the last few months. There's still a lot that needs to be done around the house, but The Four Year Old will soon be the The Five Year Old, and if I'm going to have another baby I should probably do it sooner rather than later.

It also seems like everyone around me is pregnant. My husband's cousin is expecting another baby (and, boy, didn't we hear about that!), a coworker of ours recently told me she's pregnant, a friend of mine told me his soon-to-be wife is "in the family way", and everywhere I look it's like there are bulging tummies surrounding me on all sides.

TFYO was not planned. She was a honeymoon baby, and I found out I was pregnant in the middle of a lot of turmoil at work, and things were rough after she was born. But I can't help but think that if I keep "planning" for the next one, the next one might not happen.

Friday Five

After yesterday's wild and raving rant, I promised a suitably silly Friday Five. Now, some might say this is a little macabre, but I ran it by my husband and he felt the possibilities with this topic were endless. And he was right, it was hard to narrow it down to just five. No pictures today, I'm feeling lazy. Sorry.

So.....

Five Dead People I Like

1. Julia Child (8/15/1912-8/13/2004)

Fun, warm, witty, and hell bent on teaching America that food was more than melted Velveeta. Very close to the end of her life, she did a guest shot on Emeril Live. Emeril had just destroyed something he took out of the oven, and Julia said "Don't worry over it. We're just going to get the pre-made pretty one out of the back anyway." Which at that time sort of broke the "taboo" on Emeril's set that he supposedly cooked "live". It was awesome, and felled everyone with laughter. She also worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII, because the Navy said she was too tall.


2. Richard Harris (10/1/1930-10/25/2002)

Marvelous actor and hell-raiser extraordinaire. How Peter O'Toole outlived him, I'll never know, and he probably doesn't know either. Check out the movie The Molly McGuires from 1970. And of course, he originated the role of Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series. He played it exactly as I imagined Dumbledore to be, which is pretty amazing. Harris lived life by his own rules with his friends Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, and Albert Finney. He had fun right up until the end.


3. Fred Rogers (3/20/1928-2/27/2003)

Mr. Rogers was awesome. While there has been some contention lately that he caused a generation of kids to grow up with feelings of entitlement, I think it's a bunch of hogwash. I was enthralled by this man when I was a kid, and whenever I was going through a period where other kids were picking on me, Mr. Rogers made me feel better. And, no, I don't have a sense of entitlement. I don't think anyone owes me anything, whether I'm special or not.


4. My Great-grandmother Dorothy Scott

She was fun, and she made the best Yorkshire pudding ever. As she got older, she would laugh so hard, she couldn't get up, and woe betide anyone she fell over on. She put up with a lot through her life. She lost a sister to disease, I think it was diphtheria. She had three daughters of her own, and helped raise my mother when my gran become a single mom. The best story about "Nanny" comes from my second cousin, Scott, who gave the eulogy at Nanny's funeral. Scott sometimes took Nan to her doctor's appointments, and she hated the waiting room. She always said they shouldn't bother showing up on time, since they never saw her until twenty minutes after her appointment should have been over. One day, she brought a cap gun, and fired it off after repeated attempts to get a nurses attention. She got in for all her appointments very quickly after that.


5. Albert Einstein (3/14/1879-4/18/1955)

Patent clerk, physicist and pacifist. Brilliant and tempermental. Not a perfect human being, but a an almost perfect mind. He wasn't always good to his wife, but he did love his children, and in the space of a very short time helped revolutionize the way we looked at the world and the universe. It just took a while for some of his ideas to catch on.


Honourable mentions: Ben Franklin (who is definitely dead) and Abe Vigoda who everyone seems to think is dead, but isn't.


Those are my five...show me yours! And have a good weekend, y'all, I'm working through mine.

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys

Okay, this is not a funny post. There may be funny elements in it, but if you're looking for HA-HAs go over to willowtree, or The Rotten Correspondent, or bellevelma at Running with Books or well...anywhere but here today. This is a rant, pure and simple, and you have been warned. If you really want to stick around, I'll put some goofy pictures at the bottom. So, abandon all hope, ye who enter here....




I was doing a lot thinking yesterday reading some of your comments about the little exchange between my daughter and I the other morning, and I started wondering if I really was a prude because my first instinct was to shut the door on a pair of eyes looking at my naked body.


You know what? No, I'm not. In an age where I can't turn on the TV without seeing some poor girl whoring her body out for attention or money or love, I really don't think I'm a prude.



I have no problem with nudity. Michelangelo's David? A work of art, beautiful in form, execution, everything. Botticelli's The Birth of Venus? Also marvelous. A bunch of women stripping down to win the favour of Flavor Flav on VH1? Well, I find it moderately disgusting, and not because their bodies are ugly (really some of the girls were pretty), it's because what they're doing is ugly in my eyes. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should legislate morality (we can't!), and I certainly defend their right to do what they want on national TV. After all, that's why I have a remote control. I don't have to watch it. And I choose not to.


But I don't think I'm a prude because I think my daughter should learn a little modesty.


Tuesday morning, my first instinct was to shut the door. Why? Because I like my privacy, that's why. It's not that I think my body or the human body is so hideous or immoral that it needs to be hidden away. I just like keeping my bits to myself (an my husband of course). And it's not like The Four Year Old hasn't seen me without clothes. Goodness knows for the first three years of her life I probably never went to the bathroom alone. But I thought I was alone, and was surprised to find out I wasn't. First reaction? Make my self be alone.

Some days I worry that in our quest to be open and accepting as a society, to let everyone do their thing, we've made it okay for kids to be sexualized without them even understanding what it's about. I don't know why parents think it's okay for their 11-year-olds to wear low slung jeans that show off the fact that their precious snowflake is wearing a black lace thong. Or why they think it's okay for their 9-year-old daughter to wear a pair of tight pink shorts with the word "Juicy" written across the butt. And then they scream and cry when grown men make sexual advances towards their children. If you're an adult and you want to hang your black thong out the back of your pants, go on ahead, it's your right, but stop dressing your kid like a prosti-tot. Most 9-year-olds aren't ready for the sexual attention that comes with looking like an adult. I know this from experience.

As for what I'm going to teach her about her body, she already knows her body is her own. But I am also going to teach her that running around naked in a crowd isn't necessarily a good idea, unless you're at a nude beach. It's a cultural thing. We wear clothes, for modesty, for covering our bodies so they don't get injured or sunburned, so we don't get cold. I'd prefer that she wears clothes. If she decides when she turns 18 that she doesn't want to, I'm not going to stop her. I probably won't spend a lot of time visiting her at the nudist colony, but I wouldn't try to stop her from doing what made her comfortable. My daughter feels no shame for her body, nor should she. She also shouldn't feel that the only way to win love is to tart herself up for the benefit of others.

By all means, teach your kids about sexuality, and let them learn about it in steps at a young age. I'll answer any question my kid puts to me. I may not give the best answer, but I'll give the best answer I can. But I'm not going to walk around naked in front of my kids. That's just not my style. However, I'm also not going to tell you you're a bad parent if you do. Teaching my daughter to cover up once in a while doesn't mean I'm teaching her to hate her body or be ashamed of her body. Teaching my daughter that privacy is okay, and that her body is her own, and hers alone, is not teaching her that her body is wrong.

Okay, so what does this rant prove? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Other than that I think that being comfortable with your body doesn't mean I have to run around naked to prove it, or that shutting the door when someone catches me naked in the bathroom makes me a prude. Feel free to believe I'm wrong. It's your right.


Anyway, rant over. Got it out of my system. Enjoy some LOL Cats and silly pictures until we get to the Friday Five tomorrow which I promise will be suitably ridiculous.

You can leave your hat on

I think I've scarred my child for life. Or maybe I've scarred a cat for life. Or maybe I've just scarred me for life.

I've been getting up fairly early each morning, in order to be up before TFYO so I can get a shower. Occasionally she gets up while I'm in the shower, but then she usually stays in her room with the door open, so no problem.

Yesterday was different.

I took my shower as normal, but when I was done I heard the cat meowing at the bathroom door (we have our own bathroom in the master bedroom), so, wrapped in a towel I opened the door just to make sure the cat was okay. I took a quick look around to see if TFYO was up yet. I didn't hear her, and looking down the hall, her bedroom door was still closed. Ah, peace, solitude and privacy. I took off my towel and tossed it in the basket at the foot of my bed.

It was at that moment I realized she was laying IN my bed, not saying a word, but looking at me with very big eyes. I yelled something like "GAAAAAAAAAAAH!" and almost decapitated the cat while slamming the bathroom door shut. TFYO at the same moment yelled "MOOOOMMMEEEE!" and pulled the covers over her head. Oh, Zoe is fine, by the way, she's much quicker and smarter than I am.

I peeked through a crack in the bathroom door and yelled at my child "Could you at least knock or something when you come in to let me know you're there?" I closed the door and started putting my clothes on, because thankfully I'd had the foresight to at least bring those into the bathroom with me.

A few minutes later there was a tiny knock on the bathroom door.

"Mommy, I'm here in your room. The cats and I want you to put your clothes back on now, okay?"

From the crisis we’ve created with our self-indulgent ways

I don't have much time to post today, I'm again working every single flippin' day this week, straight through Sunday, but I did want to share an article I saw with y'all.


It's about blogging and what it does (or apparently does not!) add to our culture.


Somebody the other day asked me if I didn't think blogging was a narcissistic waste of time. Obviously, I don't think that, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. When I started, I was just looking for a way to improve my writing and tell some of the stories I had picked up just from living here, but I also discovered some great blogs as I surfed around. Maybe it's just the archaeologist-historian in me, but I think everyone has a story to tell, and most of you tell it incredibly well. Some of you were and are writers by trade, but some of you are metal workers, nurses, moms, dads, regular people telling incredible stories about yourselves and your lives.

This article is a bit cynical, and it makes a point, but this guy has obviously never read any of you. If he did, he might be a bit hopeful.



http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/07/blogging_adds_to_the_language.html


Oh, and a quick side note, the program director at the classic rock station I worked on last week has decided I do, indeed, need to have my picture on the website. I hemmed and hawed and then he told me he could put a picture of Paris Hilton in my place. I told him if he put my name underneath a picture of the walking hazardous waste pit, I'd quit. So, I get to have "my picture made", as they say here in the south.