The Comment

I will be the first to admit that I don't have the foggiest idea what the hell I am doing when it comes to being a mother.  I begin everyday with grand ambitions and lofty goals, only to feel like I have fallen short and that my child will ultimately hate me and end up having a shrink who will inform him that he is the way he is because of his crazy mother.

Deep down, I know this isn't true.  Sacha is a good kid.  He is very happy-go-lucky by nature, always smiling or laughing, loves to read and play pretend and dance the freaken mambo with Dora.  He is, however, becoming a terrible two: he knows how to throw a tantrum (and HOW!) and get on my last nerve.  He has also developed a lovely habit of scratching and pinching other kids.  For no real reason.  Just because he is a 20 month old boy.  But everything I've read tells me that this is normal, and that he is not a bad kid, nor am I failing as a parent.  Then there was The Comment.

I had signed Sacha and I up for a Messy Play workshop at a local drop-in center for preschool children and their parents.  Sacha and I frequent the center a LOT.  The staff are amazing, the toys are great, and it gives me a chance to visit with other moms while the kids play. I had taken Sacha to a Messy Play workshop before and he loved it: a craft, doing some baking and cupcake decorating, what's NOT to like?  Today, apparently everything.  He didn't want to wear a smock for sponge painting, nor did he want to use a sponge.  He didn't want to sit at the table long enough to even see what type of baking we were going to do.  He put his body into full rigor like a plank of wood and refused to do anything that was "organized".  At that moment, in a room filled with moms and their 2 and 3 year olds, one particular mother of 4 looked at me, fully pregnant at 38.5 weeks, struggling with Sacha and said: "If you can't control him, what are you going to do when you have two?"

Huh?  WTF?  I think my jaw dropped to the floor, I probably urinated myself a little, and stood up with Sacha and pretended not to hear her.  But how could I not?  It is one thing to think that you, yourself, are an inadequate parent.  It is entirely another for a bitch of a woman, a fellow mother, to share my opinion and voice it in that way.  I've been stewing over this all day, and I still don't know what I would have said to her.  I know her little boy is no angel (I think Sacha picked up his screeching habit from him), but I still can't come up with a retort that would have put her in her place, the way she did me.

We left about 10 minutes after the comment.  I still don't know what I could have done or said.  I know I will see this mother again, as she frequents the center a lot, but I really wish I could just crawl in a hole and die instead.  Or that she would do the crawling and dying for me.

Too much food on a tiny plate

Bloggers usually pour their lives onto the interwebs to release some tension in the hopes that someone will leave a comment telling them that they are not alone.  Right now, however, I am not really being a good blogger.  I have way too much on my plate, and despite the need for relief and some sort of sedative, I just don't want to bore the netz with my seemingly insurmountable pile of poo.  I will let you in on powerpoint version of it, but not bore you with benign details:

1. Baby is due in 19 days.  It dropped over 2 weeks ago, making the carting around of a 20 month old a real pain in the ass/back/tummy/body in general.


2. Our house has been on the market for over a month and no offers.  All of the activity in our area is in the low-shitty-leaky-basement price range and the high-massive-driveway-parks-20-cars price range.  We are in the middle with a  beautiful home that is in move-in condition.  No one is biting.


3. We have to sell our house by mid-July, as we are set to take possession of our NEW home on the other side of the country at the end of July, and our down-payment for that house is sort of, well, THIS house.  Besides the fact that I don't want to be paying 2 mortgages.


4. The little dude is in a total sleep regression.  Woke up 3 times last night, for example.  Fights us to the death when it is time for sleep and wakes up in the middle of the night convinced that it is day and wants to go outside and play.


5. The husband is having anxiety issues which I have never witnessed prior.  He has generalized anxiety disorder and did have panic attacks before I met him, but I have never witnessed the effects of this disorder until now.  There is so much going on in our lives that is completely out of our control and it is greatly affecting him.  He has been on the brink of a panic attack more than once over the past few days.  Good times.  I told him he needs to get laid, but then remembered whose job that is.

In conclusion, I hope this explains why my posting has been infrequent and blah (at best): too much food on a tiny plate.

I promise to post when the baby comes.

My 19 month old can read!

Ok, that title may be a little deceiving. Sacha cannot read actual words, per se. What he can do, however, is pick out, with his keen observational skills and his ridiculous omniscience, a variety of logos and locate every object in the house (or city) that has the same logo, even if Col. Mustard or I have never noticed these before.

I present to you The Dictionary of Sacha-ese.  Please note that these items are not in any sort of alphabetical order, nor order of importance in his mind.


This one means "Bob the Builder" and "Thomas the Tank Engine".



This one is fairly obvious, right?



This one means "the place where we go to get Thomas videos, and MUST continue to obtain Thomas videos at every possible occasion."



This one means "eating, timbits, coffee, Mmmm."



This one means "the place where we buy bananas."  Yes, they sell bananas, but they also have very narrow aisles and really cramped self-bagging quarters, which are not to my liking.  But we buy bananas there.



This one means "Maman and Sacha's car." Not to be confused with Daddy's car, which is a Kia Rio.  Not that there is anything wrong with Kias.  But I love my Prius.  Sacha loves his Prius.  He points to it and declares that it is HIS car.  I then remind him that it is OUR car.  I don't think he buys it.



This one means "the place where we go buy toilet paper." I have no idea why he thinks we buy toilet paper at A&P. I don't even really like shopping there, since their shelves are poorly stocked and the prices aren't that great. Although, on second thought, this association may be due to the fact that he saw me use a plastic A&P bag as a garbage bag in our bathroom.  And the garbage is located beneath the toilet paper roll.



This one means "the place where Maman bought her new vacuum."  Which apparently only Maman uses.  Not to be confused with Daddy ever vacuuming.  Or cleaning in general.  In Sacha's eyes, only Maman cleans.  Not only that, it is what I spend most of my day doing.  Except when I am on the toilet: while on a little shopping trip to Home Depot with his Daddy, Sacha pointed to every toilet and declared "Mama!".  But that's a whole other issue I may have to take up with him at a later date.



This one means "everything in our bathroom, especially cough drops and generic antacids which Maman must consume every day."



This one means "vacuum, fridge, waffle maker, blender, play kitchen, and hot sauce."  Not too sure how the hot sauce has come to be labeled as Kenmore, but then again, I do NOT spend all of my time vacuuming or on the toilet. Seriously, I don't.  Ask my husband.  Wait, don't.

Aren't you impressed? I know I am.

Bad Kat-ma

Mr. Dash had it coming.

I know I should have stopped it. But I didn't.

I just thought it was a very creative way for Sacha to express his distaste for Mr. Dash's annoying habits. That, or it was just too funny to stop. What's more, Mr. Dash didn't move. He just sat there and let Sacha cover him with Dora bling. I guess Dora rocks his kitty-world or some such nonsense.

Sacha then decided to play a little hide and seek with Mr. Dash. Or maybe he just wanted to placate him with stuffed animals so that he would go to sleep and shut the hell up.

Hmmm...definitely NOT hide and seek. Maybe squish and squeak is more like it.

I know I should have stopped it, but if Mr. Dash wants to sit there and take it, I'm certainly not going to bed over backwards (or do any sort of bending at this point) to free him of his torturer. Besides, I think Dash kind of likes it, the masochist that he is.

Or he realizes that Karma is a bitch.

Or a son of a bitch. And his name is Sacha.

PETA's worst nightmare

Dear Dumbass

Dear Dumbass aka Mr Dash aka the feline who dwells in my abode,

Stop meowing at Sacha's door the second we put him down for a nap or for bed. It is extremely annoying and makes me want to hurl you out the window. Even though you wouldn't get hurt because the snow is all the way up to our windows anyway.

Sincerely,

The one who feeds you