Outnumbered Two to One

Hello, I am Mrs. Bear’s sister, also known as the creepy mime. Mrs. Bear is unable to post today because, as she puts it, “my lame-ass Internet provider obviously has it out for me and interrupted my service out of spite, and they suck eggs (I added the bit about the eggs).” So in lieu of one of her sparkling, witty, and illuminating posts, I will dance for you.

I’m dancing, I’m dancing, I’m dancing.

pant, pant

I’m dancing.

No, not exotic dancing. Get your mind out of the gutter. Think Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance. That’s right, stiff arms, high-kicking legs, and patent leather shoes.

Okay, I’m done. Thanks for watching. The Bearster should be back tomorrow for your blog-reading pleasure.

Week 3.

Three weeks.

A three week membership in on line support group for lazing bloggers who want to get healthy. Folks who want toned buns and tight abs and beer can crushing biceps.

I’m talking about club Half as Small as You, headed by the tirelessly enthusiastic and occasionally pushy Casey.  Sounds like a recipe for success to me.

You’d expect I’d have made some progress there, right? I mean, a truly dedicated dieter and fitness follower would have been improving in leaps, bounds and walking lunges, right? Boasting about how the fat was just melting away and leaving creepy little puddles on the floor for the dogs to lap up?

Did I just take it to far?

I am not a success story. No bragging rights in these here parts. I didn’t even bother charting my calories this week. Instead, with all the Halloween hoopla, I gorged. And gorged. And gorged some more.

I did exercise once and likewise went on a single brisk walk with my husband, two dogs and a kid in a stroller.

Did I mention the cookies? Better to overlook the cookies.

The good news is, I’ve maintained last week’s two pound deficit, and this week I’m back on the horse, or in the saddle, or pedaling the stationary bike, or whatever. A little back sliding is okay, but there’s no quitting in HAYSAY. Excuses I’ve got in droves, but quitting is not in my dictionary… although I was able to find it in the thesaurus.

I  even managed to run a little today. Running feels kind of bad, actually. Walking is better, I’d imagine getting pushed around in a jogging stroller probably tops that, but I don’t think my husband would approve of pushing me through the neighborhood. I logged my trail at Map My Run and was surprised to find we’d trekked a good 2.5 miles.

I wonder how many 100 grand bars that cancels out.

Go check out Steenky Bee ’s guest post at HASAY , you might just be inspired to join in the slacking weight loss fun.

Since it was a Halloween Friday this year, I guess we expected the trick-or-treaters would be out in hoards, canvassing the neighborhood, pillaging and what not. We were ready for them, with our super-sized bags of the good candy we picked up at BJs. We’ve got four kids ourselves, so we don’t mess around when it comes to sweets.

I know, plenty of people take the easy route - mints, caramels, those plain nondescript oval shaped lollipops, candy corn. Don’t get me wrong, I love the candy corn. We don’t discriminate when it comes to sugars. But at our house, we are candy connoisseurs - 100 Grand Bars, Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, Twix, Crunch, Snickers, M & Ms. It’s a chocolate goldmine.

Unfortunately this year all our trick-or-treaters had big fabulous Halloween parties to attend. We barely managed to hand out a single bowl of candy, much less refill it, so our pantry is stocked with a good ten pounds of chocolate not including the spoils my own kids brought home after they made their rounds.

If that’s not a diabetic coma waiting to happen, I don’t know what is.I will try to stay strong, club HAYSAYers, but the odds are not in my favor. Not at all.

That little frog caught on fast, my friends. There was not a shy bone in his body as he strode up to random strangers and demanded his candy. He had his plastic pumpkin in a death grip as we made our way around the block. He would not be carried, he would not be aided even though his stash weighed more than he did. That is a true trick-or-treater.

And that’s the last I’ll say about Halloween 08. We’re still nursing our sugar hangovers two days later.

I don’t usually dress up for Halloween.

It’s not that I think I’m too grown up for that kind of zany holiday action, it’s more that I’m way self conscious. I always feel silly and uninspired, so I opt out. No thanks, leave the dress up to the kids, I’ll hang back on the trick or treat trail and let them have all the glory.

This year, since Halloween was on a Friday and my sister and her kids were coming over for some ghastly party fun, I brought up the idea of dressing up to her. She was game and I figured since it would be the two of us in costume it would be less of a stretch and I wouldn’t feel like such a coward.

Last week I settled on the idea of Mother Nature. I bought some fake vines, birds nests, fake birds and butterflies. I was gonna go nuts with a hot glue gun, I was gonna wow my friends and neighbors. All both of them…

It wasn’t in the cards though. I ran out of time too quickly, between the pumpkin carving and making my son’s skeleton costume and running to the store and prepping the house, procrastination had pretty much doomed it to ruin. So by the time we were all ready to go trick-or-treating, my spectacular costume idea was still festering inside the bag it came home in.

While my sister was putting her scary mime face on, I was throwing on a bathrobe, wrapping my head in a towel, and putting on my fuzzy slippers. Her white face paint provided a decent mast, although overall my costume was a complete cop out.  I mean, I am a housewife, although I haven’t worn that particular robe since delivering my youngest two years ago. Still, I guess it was better than nothing, right?

My sister was creeping the heck out of me, though.

It seems like every year I forget what a chore pumpkin carving is. Seriously. I do it for the kids mostly. It’s an activity that solidifies Halloween for them, scooping pumpkin guts, going at the thing with those wee carving knives, lighting it up and watching it eventually rot and collapse on itself. It’s a good time. Or not.

Whatever.

Today I needed a jack-o-lantern, it was getting down to the wire and my five year old was hounding me for a pumpkin, which I kept promising to get. Well, little did I know that for the most part pumpkins are scarce the day before Halloween. None at Target, none at BJs, none at the Lowe’s. I stopped at the grocery store on my way home and luckily hit the jackpot.

Pumpkins galore in a big bin, swarming with fruit flies and on sale for two bucks a piece. They weren’t the traditional roundish orange pumpkins I’m used to. There were all manner of colored gourds, predominantly Cinderella, which look like the pumpkin turned coach from the fairytale. I opted for something called a Jarrahdale, a gray green tinged pumpkin that looked pretty interesting at first glance. At $2 a pop, I couldn’t beat it.

I brought it home, where it sat on my dinner table until all homework assignments were complete. Around 5 we set to the task of carving into the hapless gourd using a scary faced stencil my son had picked out.

Let me just say, this sucker did not go down without a fight. My piddly novelty carving knives were no match for the rind on this piece of fruit vegetable fruit. I was sweating, people. Literally. By the time I finally wrestled off the lid it took me 20 minutes to cut out, I wanted to cry. The tough dense flesh was more than two inches thick and I still had to carve out a face on the thing. The only good thing about it was that it smelled like melons instead of gross gone over pumpkin, which is what I was expecting.

An hour and a half later I managed to get through it. I gave my biceps a thorough workout and managed not to lop off any of my fingers in the process. Take a look.

Also today,Lydia from On the Verge tagged me with this wicked little trinket:

There are rules associated with it, primarily tagging everyone else in the blogosphere all in the name of good Halloween fun. I am supposed to drop little boo bombs on as many fellow bloggers as I can, but today, I don’t have the energy. That pumpkin took a lot out of me and since tomorrow is Halloween and slated to be a busy day on the mom front, I don’t want to let this one lapse. So, new rules, if you’ve come by and seen this adorable little image, consider yourself tagged, er booed, not like boo throwing tomatoes boo, more like boo, aren’t I scary, please don’t wet your pants boo. So pass it on, spread the boo, without the hoo and partake in the no cal Halloween merriment.

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Check out more Halloweenielicious Posts at Sprite’s Keeper: The Spin Cycle

2007 - My five year old, last year at his harvest festival in pre-K.

For more Wordless Wednesday visit 5 Minutes for Mom and WW .

So yesterday, while I ranted and raved from our local library about AT&T and their lame-o troubleshooting procedures, a certain familiar repair woman was on her hands and knees fixing my dog damaged line. We’d been scheduled for Friday. Why she came so early, I will never know. It never occurred to me to ask, as I was too busy embracing her and blubbering my heartfelt thank-yous.

AT&T on the other hand, has still not won me over. While this lady, with her tool belt and cable laden vehicle, is one hard working, efficient employee, her employer and their phone operators leave much to be desired by way of customer service. The reason my neighbor keeps severing our line is because nobody has come to bury it, despite the work order everyone assures me keeps getting issued.

Somehow we keep getting lost in the shuffle.

Surely you all know that living without internet has become synonymous with being cast back in to the stone age. As far as necessities go, it’s up there with indoor plumbing and flushing toilets. Okay and maybe fridges. We use a lot of dairy products at our house. I can live without television, cancel the cable, donate my DVR to charity, whatever. I can always watch full episodes of The Office online anyway. But the internet is vital, you know?

How am I supposed to do research on presidential and political protocol for my ten year old, without access to the web? How am I supposed to map stuff or compare the prices of stuff or get fabulous Halloween menu ideas without an internet connection? I need information at my fingertips, I need 176,000 results if my children ask me whether or not cats can get rabies. They can. 

Lately too, the internet is one of my only social outlets. Whether that’s sad or not is debateable. I do interract with actual people on a daily basis, but being online eliminates alot of the pressures inherent in talking to others. There are no uncomfortable pauses, no nervous laughs, no stuttering and agonizing over what I said or didn’t say. It’s refreshing and this blogging thing has become part of a routine I’m reluctant to part with. It gives me a chance to organize my thoughts, to be creative, to just relax.

Heck yes, it keeps me up sometimes. But whatever, I’m working on a way to eliminate sleep from my schedule altogether. I’ll patent it and ship it to you all free of charge.

This time it was a dog. My neighbor’s dog. Chewing through our exposed DSL cable which coincidentally runs through their yard. Last time it was a mower. The time before that, a shovel.

I really can’t blame my neighbor, who I can blame is AT&T for their slackerrific service. Every time they’ve come to repair a damaged line, they’ve put in an order to bury said line. (Why the repairman can’t just take a shovel to the thing, I’ll never know.) What does get buried apparently, is the repair order, because nobody ever comes. Ever. Because they’re lame.

Yesterday when I called to get my line fixed, the phone support dude walked me through an installation wizard to try to establish a “new” connection, even though I was harping the whole time about the dog and the line and how all I wanted was to schedule for a repair person to come over and fix it. Fix it!

Instead, he scheduled for a support person to come and check my DSL inside the house. Wrong repair guy, wrong department. Now they’re saying Friday is their earliest opening. FRIDAY! That’s a long time to be disconnected, know what I mean?

As I speak I have about 40 minutes remaining at the library’s PC terminal, and I still have to do some research for my tweener who has a political research project due Friday. Don’t even get me started on that topic.

So I apologize from the bottom of my ticked off heart, for not being able to catch up on all your blogs or return the comment love, because AT&T won’t let me do so until Friday. Blame them! Write them a letter. Start a petition. Something!

I thank you for all your well wishes and comments for my 14 year old’s birthday. I will do my best to reply personally maybe when all this technical hoopla is said and done. Know that I appreciated all your comments, especially you moms who related with the PPD and the colic and the first time mommy c-section psychosis.

I’m going to try to phenagel some more computer time throughout the week, but I don’t know how consistent I’ll manage to be. I may post an early photo for Wordless Wednesday from my Photobucket.

All I ask from you, my faithful bloggy friends, don’t forget me while I’m gone.

I’ve got a guest post up on Casey’s blog, Half as Good as You regarding my pathetic club HASAY progress. Check it out. Peruse her blog as well, she’s a funny gal. She’ll keep you coming back for sure.

Till Friday.

Today my oldest turned 14.

14 years ago today at the tender age of 19, I had a baby wrenched from a gaping wound in my abdomen after 13 hours of barely progressing labor. Turned out my troublesome little girl was double wrapped in her cord.

The experience, I’ll admit, was less than gratifying. See, I had certain expectations going in to that delivery. I’d read books, I’d taken Lamaze, I had it all planned out. Oh the arrogance of youth. There would be no drugs, just me focused and breathing and easing my baby in to the world.

Then reality hit with that first startling contraction, then another and another and another.

See, I was a pansy. Worst pain I’d ever felt before that was limited to skinned elbows and possibly an ear infection. I once got accidentally cracked on the head with a baseball bat, but that didn’t even come close to the searing, blinding ache in my guts. Wow.

Of course, I asked for drugs. Which didn’t so much alleviate the pain as give me double vision and make the whole experience a psychedelic blur. When they handed me the release for the c-section, I signed away happily. “Get her out by any means necessary.”

After it was over, my relief was matched only by my disappointment. I’d failed. I was off to a bad start. Worse still was that beautiful alien babe they wheeled in next to my bed. I read all about how to care for her, what to expect, how to identify cries. I knew about meconium and lanugo, cradle cap and colic. All my theoretical expertise thrown out the window as I stared at my baby. My baby? How could I possibly have a baby? What was I thinking?

It didn’t help she was the scariest baby in existence. From birth she had a stare that seemed to pierce right through you. And she cried. Non-stop. For four months. Colic. Not colic as a blurb, or minuscule section in some baby preparedness book. Real, raging colic. Colic as the center of my universe. Colic as my arch nemesis.

Back then the pediatrician said to me, “There’s nothing you can do? Put some cotton in your ears and wait three months.” Jackball. Now a days the Dr. might have played with the formulas, assumed possibly a lactose sensitivity. Then, what did I know? I believed him.

Talk about post-partum depression. When she cried, I cried. It was that simple. Those days for me are remembered from beneath a dark shroud, a cloudy haze of frustration and defeat. It was rough. If anyone had told me then, I’d be volunteering to have three more children, I would have punched them in the nose.

Obviously I got better. I survived. More importantly, my screaming, colicky baby made it to teen-hood no worse for the wear.

I am truly blessed to have her. She changed my life.

So October 24th wasn’t the happiest day of my life, there are no photos of us gazing adoringly in to eachother’s faces. I was too busy worrying that my guts were going to spill out everytime I sneezed. But she was the start of our little family, the headstrong girl that forced me to grow up, the one I make all my parenting mistakes with.  She’s awesome in spite of all that.

My teen. Happy Birthday.

I always hated tag growing up. But then again, I also hated hide-and-seek, dodge-ball, kick ball, soft ball, and volley ball. Pretty much anything that had ball in the name, mostly because I had the worst hand eye coordination ever, and mostly said orbitals always seemed to gravitate toward my head rather than my hands, so that I was almost always cringing and dodging and squeezing my eyes shut when I should have been watching the ball, but I digress.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been tagged with some memes (still not entirely sure how to pronounce that). And in light of recent creative obstacles (see yesterday) I figured tonight was as good a night as any to play your little reindeer games.

First there was my friend, Lydia from On The Verge, who challenged me to share six secrets about myself.

1. I’m a disorganized slob. Seriously, housekeeping is not my forte. Neither is remembering when the bills are due, rsvp-ing to party invites, or sending thank you notes.

2. I’m a closet scab picker. I do it when I’m on edge, it drives my husband crazy.

3. I have zero rhythm. I cannot dance, not even a little.

4. I was an underage drinker because I lacked the proper adult supervision. However I no longer partake of the alcoholic beverages. They make me sleepy and I’m sleepy enough on a regular basis as it is.

5. I also used to smoke cigarettes, which I no longer do, although sometimes I wish I still did, it would keep me from picking at my scabs.

6. I am not that interesting.

Still with me.

Next I got thrown this little number by both Ohana Mama and Savvy Suzie . Both of whom insist I should tell you seven random things about myself, according to this image. If it’s on a JPEG, then it’s practically law.

1. I have smelly feet. You asked. Well…they asked.

2. I do not eat liver. I eat practically anything, I love food, but I tend to veer away from the internal organs. Call me crazy.

3.  I hate talking to customer service representatives over the phone. I also hate making doctor’s appointments and leaving voice messages for people who I’m not friendly with. It gives me anxiety.

4. The last time I saw my father at a local Target, he did not recognize me…because he’s stupid. Before that, I hadn’t talked to him in five years. Before those five years, it had been 10. Yeah, he sucks.

5. I failed three out of four classes my first semester of college in 1993. Not because I was stupid, but because I was lazy.

6. Besides reality shows, horror movies are one of my biggest guilty pleasures. I hate watching them alone and my husband refuses to watch them with me. He’s more of a western kind of guy.

Last but not least the hilarious Kia from Good Enough Mama invited me to participate in this scattergories meme. The rules are to use the first letter of my name to answer the following questions. Let’s go with Mrs. Bear shall we…

1. What is your name?  Mrs. Bear
2. A 4 Letter Word: Maim
3. A Boys’ Name: Maury (he could be a talk show host)
4. A Girls’ Name: Mystique (she could be a stripper)
5. An Occupation: Marauder
6. A Color: Magenta
7. Something you men (shouldn’t) wear: Moccasins
8. A Beverage: Milk (it does do a  body good, unless your lactose intolerant)
9. A Food Group : Melons (not those kinds, get your mind out of the gutter)
10. Something found in the bathroom: Make-up (I don’t use it, but it’s there.)
11. A place: Mercury (you can’t really go there, but it exists)
12. A Reason for being late: Mopping (it’s happened, particularly after a bout of projectile vomiting. You know what I’m talking about.)
13. Something you shout: Move! (As in MOOOOVE your car out of the fast lane so us raging road warriors can get where we need to go.)
14. Make up a word and give its definition: Millaboutismia: A disorder that affects most of the kids in my house, and prevents them from seeing any task to its conclusion because they are too busy walking around in circles and staring at the walls.

I’m not going to specifically call anyone out, feel free to join the fun, I’m leaving it an open invite because I’m feeling generous. I’d like to tag the whole world if I could, then I’d buy them a Coke, then I’d go to bed because so many people all together at once make me want to curl in to the fetal position. Nuff said.