Archive for the Category » A Touch of the Crazy «

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 | Author: Erika

I am a bundle of hormones and anxiety and a strange, driving need to do laundry.  My hormones make me moody and prone to oversensitive assertions that no one likes me, the anxiety keeps me up at night that the baby will be born any minute now and we’re just not ready yet what will he wear?!

The driving need to do laundry is a weird one, though.  I seriously want nothing more than to pour detergent into a machine, push buttons, and listen as water whooshes over precious little outfits.  Maybe it’s because this is one of the last things I have left to do to get ready for Squishy (this and also shopping for and buying cloth diapers).  There’s just something so nice about clean clothes, and clean baby clothes are even better.

I mean, the nursery is done.  The last thing we need for the nursery is a dust ruffle (which has been bought and is just waiting to have a ribbon sewn on it by Wes’ mother) but other than that the nursery is done.  Thank you notes for baby gifts have been written, we have wipes, baby shampoo, a carseat, a pediatrician, a stroller, toys, books, and a fuzzy bouncy seat.

Once we get that whole cloth diaper situation taken care of, we’re officially ready.  Except for the clothes.  Those still need to be washed and folded and put away, then taken out and re-organized, then lovingly admired at least a few times.  Then we’ll be ready.

Except we won’t be.  Because Wes is still looking for a job and I’m still trying to wrap up projects at work.  And we don’t have the laundry done.  And we don’t have cloth diapers.  So, what I’m saying is, we will be ready but maybe we won’t be.  Which isn’t helping my anxiety at all.

Also not helping matters is that two other bloggers whose due dates were rather close to mine have already given birth (Heather and Sarah, if you’re curious).  This is not giving me much security in the idea that we still have time to get our act together before this baby comes.

I’m not scared of the birth, or of breastfeeding, or of sleep deprivation.  I’m scared that this baby’s going to be born and Wes will still be looking for a job, none of the baby clothes will be washed, and I won’t be able to figure out his cloth diapers and we’ll just end up using them as expensive dust rags.

Veteran moms, please help me out: At what point does the imminent birth of your child feel more exciting than terrifying?

Monday, January 25th, 2010 | Author: Erika

This weekend was made of the stuff bloggers dream of: Personal failure, too ridiculous to be truly tragic.  I recommend you pack a lunch as I lead you down the primrose path of my journey into Red Hot Mess-dom.

It all started out with hot cocoa.  At my work, we have a large 3.5 lb. 54 ounce container of Swiss Miss hot cocoa mix.  I had a hankering for some of that chocolatey goodness, so I grabbed a mug and started mixing.  As I was carrying the hot cocoa container back to the shelf, it slipped from my fingers and landed on the ground in an atomic cloud of cocoa.

Even after vacuuming the carpet and cleaning the cocoa off the walls, it smelled overwhelmingly like cocoa in our office all day on Friday.  Nobody complained, because cocoa smells so nice, but it was rather embarrassing to be that chick who flings hot cocoa around the office like a monkey chucking excrement.

Then, I left work.  In my car.  Which I steered over a piece of metal in the road.  Said piece of metal punctured my tire so thoroughly that when I inspected the damage you could hear air exiting the tire from ten feet away.  Luckily for me, I was a block away from both my mother in law and sister in law, one of whom called AAA to change the tire and the other who let me occupy her couch while I waited.

My dignity and car destroyed, I went for the piéce de resistance: Damaging Wesley’s car.  I took his car to the grocery store on Saturday (Kermit was out of action due to his gimpy spare tire) and, as I was backing out of the garage, smashed his side mirror into the side of our garage.

So forceful was this impact that one of the pieces went flying clear across the garage.  It’s not that I was being careless and fiddling with the radio while backing out.  It’s that my brain simply does not work anymore.  I have a brain cloud, but no one’s offering me a vacation and unlimited shopping spree in payment for jumping into a volcano (If this statement confuses you, I recommend watching Joe vs the Volcano).

So, I added Krazy Glue to my shopping list and came home chagrined to tell Wes that he now had yet another thing to do around the house.  He glued his car back together (he wasn’t even mad at me for smashing it!) and we moved on to bigger and better things.

Unfortunately for me, this included washing a light blue baby blanket with a bright red baby blanket, thereby turning the back of said light blue blanket (which, pre-wash, was a lovely cream color) a not-so-masculine shade of pink.  Laundry fail.

I showed my handiwork to Wes, and he suggested that perhaps I should retire to our room to fold laundry.  He said, “I’m pretty sure you can’t break anything just by folding it.”

And he was right.  But still, I feel like I accomplished a lot (of destruction) this weekend.

Thursday, January 21st, 2010 | Author: Erika

Oh yay!  I’m excited, because the lovely ladies over at Girl Talk Thursday have another fun topic this week and I’m going to follow in Diane’s fine footsteps and add my own list to the lists of so many others.  I did this once before, and had a blast, so I thought, “Hey, why not?”

Besides, it’s not as though my blog is drowning in new content this week (I wonder if slacker bloggers are on anyone’s pet peeves list…)

Ok!  So, my pet peeves…

People who misuse words that sound similar but really aren’t. For example, someone who uses eminent when they meant imminent.  Affect vs. effect, illicit vs. elicit, insure vs. ensure, you get the idea.  This bothers me most in writing.  When spoken, sometimes I can give someone the benefit of the doubt owing to speech patterns and the general unwieldiness of the human tongue, but in writing?  There’s no excuse.

Bad table manners. I don’t want to see you chewing away with your mouth open, hear you slurp your soup out of your spoon, or watch as your napkin sits unused by the side of your plate while food speckles the corners of your mouth and the top of your lap.  Sure, not everyone knows how to drink wine properly, and very few people know how to eat an artichoke at a fancy restaurant, but criminy.  How difficult is it to not behave at a restaurant like you’re eating a Hungryman dinner in your underwear while watching reality TV?

People who choose squiggly fonts in bright colors for their work emails. Unless you are the director of admissions for clown college, this kind of thing is not cute.  Or endearing.  It’s unprofessional, and it makes me want to delete your email without even reading it.  How am I supposed to take a requisition request seriously when it looks like a kindergartner scribed it with a crayon?

Calorie counts at restaurants. Actually, let’s just include most instances of the government trying to “help” me.  I don’t want your help.  I don’t need to know that my scone has 700 calories, I don’t want to pay higher taxes so you can “help” me get health insurance I’m able to procure on my own thanks so much.  If you want to help me, leave me alone.  I’m a big girl, I can decide whether my hips are capable of adding a scone here and there, and I can get health insurance on my own.  Seriously government, do us all a favor: Stop “helping” the economy with stimulus packages and just leave us alone.  Your spending is helping all right.  Helping us all into an early grave.

Weed smokers at concerts. You’re standing there at a concert, super excited and waiting for the band to start playing, when the smell hits your nose: Weed.  Foul, stinky, weed.  Thanks to some jack-hole who can’t enjoy live music without being high as a kite, you’re forced (literally, you can’t escape thanks to the press of bodies all around you) to partake in an illegal substance against your will.  I don’t think weed is evil.  I don’t think it’ll ruin your whole life.  What I do think is that it’s inconsiderate to remove my ability to choose what goes into my body.

People who leave public bathrooms in complete disarray. I was at Babies R Us this weekend and the bathroom was so unspeakably foul I was actually angry that I had to use it so often.  How is it ok to leave toilet paper all over the floor, or bodily fluids dripping off the toilet?  Where is the decency, man?

That’s all I can come up with for now.  How about you?  Any pet peeves you want to get off your chest?

Monday, November 23rd, 2009 | Author: Erika

Oh my ever-loving sandwiches.  Look at the calendar.  Just look at it.  Where in the world did November go? How did we get to Thanksgiving?  I feel like I slipped into a wormhole, bonked my head on the side, and now I’m coming to with a nasty wormhole-hangover.

In some kind of prankish turn of the norm, time seems to be speeding up.  I always thought ten months of pregnancy (nearly a year, for goodness’ sake!) would seem like an eternity.  I was so very wrong as it’s become abundantly clear that ten months is no time at all.

I keep looking into our nursery, surveying the walls that need to be painted, the crib that needs bedding, the clothes that need a dresser, and feel something best compared to panic.  Squishy will be here any frigging day now and I shall have to scrounge around for twee little socks to put on his delicious little feet!  He won’t be pleased if he comes home to a non-colorful nursery and a naked crib, will he?

Wes assures me we have time.  He always looks at my frenzied eyes and backs away slowly to avoid startling me into a rampage, muttering platitudes like, “We have three months.  We have plenty of time.”

He does his best to be accommodating, but there’s really only so much one man can do in a weekend and there’s really more than enough Crazy to go around.  I’ve kept it contained for a good long while but it’s bursting out from around the seams.

What he doesn’t know is we actually have no time at all.  Because of the wormholes.  All I know is that if I wake up tomorrow and it’s February and I’m in labor?  I will grab a roller and paint that room myself.  Then I’ll have a baby.  If nothing else, his walls will be painted, gosh dang it.

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 | Author: Erika

My poor husband.  My poor, over-worked, hardworking husband.  I say this with not even trace amounts of sarcasm because the poor guy’s become the de facto workhorse here at Casa de Mitchell thanks to my delicate condition.

I’m nesting in a bad way, and the only cure is not more cowbell but rather more sweat!  More projects!  Painting, sanding, scraping, caulking, re-arranging!  And it all must be done now!  How can we abide in a house with off-white door frames?!  What will the baby think when he comes home and the caulking around the bathtub is coming off?  Horrors!

Wes’ very generous (and talented, and funny) brother came over on Friday and Saturday to install our new windows and I have but one word for you: GORGEOUS.  Who knew our backyard looked like that?  When we look out the window in our bedroom, we can see things.  Things that have heretofore gone unnoticed thanks to the musty windows that had stood the test of 20+ years.

I’ll take a picture of the inside to show you later, but I can’t show you what the outside looks like yet because the trim around the windows has yet to be painted.  Apparently caulking takes time to set and dry?  And you can’t speed it up just by being hormonal and demanding?  And sometimes your husband can’t just dry caulking with his mind-powers, even if you get really good and grumpy about it?

Or something like that.

In an effort to sate our painting lust, Wes scraped the old paint off our exterior door frames and re-painted them.  It makes a big difference!  It’s amazing how less derelict your house can look without peeling paint coming off the doors.  Duh.

Wes is a good sport about it all, never complaining when I greet the end of one project with a list of several more.  I assure him that eventually the nesting will stop, when our baby is home and I’m too busy drowning in laundry and diapers to worry about house projects.  He nods, smiles, and doesn’t believe me at all.