For reals, everyone. You can’t do SHIT here! All sorts of HTML is banned for “security reasons.” So I’m going back to Blogger. It’s going to take me a day or two to pack up and move everything over there…if I can even do that…but posting will return to normal soon. Thanks for understanding and following me!

Actually, “she” signed up for some research panel online and was plucked from the pot to do an in-home survey on Monday, garnishing me a $200 gift card to Safeway! Basically, two people will be coming here Monday morning, talking to me for about 45 minutes, and then we’re off to a grocery store to walk the aisle for about an hour, talking about cleaning products I do/don’t use. Easy money!

Given that, I’m going to ask Rob to stay home Monday morning to be here while they’re here. Not only will I need someone to watch the kiddies while I interview, but I don’t want strangers coming into our home while I’m here by myself.

I’m really excited! Free groceries! Yay!

I’m falling behind lately, I do apologize. I’ve been hella tired lately and after Boy leaves in the evening, all I want to do is clean up and vegetate on the couch.

Your memory for today:

I’m 15 years old and sitting in my Spanish II class. What does one do in Spanish class? Well, aside from watching Eric antagonize Sra. J, we practice conjugating verbs and rolling our Rs - a skill I could never pick up and recently learned there’s a reason why: I’m tongue-tied! And for the record, my tongue does not look like that of the boy on that Wikipedia page. My tongue looks normal.

I digress, normally we would be learning how to speak Spain-Spanish. Not Mexican Spanish. We ended up learning Spanglish. But on this day, we were glued to the TV. We were watching the O.J. verdict.

HOW IN THE HELL WAS HE NOT CONVICTED???? He couldn’t BE more guilty. Oy.

In other news…
Congratulations to Valeta! She done got knocked up!!! Hey, at least you get to be big in the winter this time, instead of the summer! Take it from me, it kicks way more ass!

Musical Monday

Can someone tell me what happened to my sweet little girl? Now it’s all attitude, all the time!!! She either ignores your request/question and continues to jabber on about what’s important to her (read: watching “Cars” for the 5th time that day), talks OVER you, or ignores you completely until you’re damn near screaming in her face to get her to look at you!

And may the force be with you if you tell her “no.” Seriously folks, you’d think the world had just lost an important cultural icon the way she reacts. Today, for example, she tried to mix the crayons that Mommy bought just for her with the Everybody Crayons and that pissed off Daddy (FYI: she knows not to mix them). He took the crayons from her and she threw herself on the floor, arms outstretched towards Rob crying, “Oooooohhhhh Nooooooooo!!!!!!” and proceeded to bawl for 20 minutes.

The same scenario happens when I deny her milk. I limit her milk - no child needs more than 8-12 ounces a day - and once she’s had one cup in the morning, it’s water for the rest of the day. This is an everyday kind of thing, not something I recently sprung on her.

It’s just 110% drama with her these days, with a big ol’ streak of independence. She wants to do everything herself, and this includes taking a walk on a busy street. Typically, she’s to hold our hand or hold on the stroller I have the baby in. She seems to think that she’s too big a girl to need either of those safety measures. RIGHT. Suddenly, a leaf catches her eye and it happens to be sitting on the curb. She runs to get it. Trips off the curb. *shudder* HOLD ON TO THE DAMN STROLLER!

In Robby news, he’s a crawling fool! It’s an army crawl but that boy scoots right along! He’s also starting to try to pull up on things. He can say “mama,” more or less (okay, it’s more like, “mum-mum” but he only says it to me or in want of me so it counts!), and can clap his hands on command. We’re working on waving for greeting/bidding adieu. I just love watching babies grow and learn!! It’s especially wonderful when it’s a happy baby like Robby is. He’s just all smiles!

Sorry this blog is so…well…bloggy. And to close, a little picture to make your day: I call it, “This is what happens when your husband asks you, ‘Do you remember how to make a paper pirate hat?’”

I’m not a reality TV junkie, really, I’m not. But I have a few that I absolutely must watch, one of them is (at least for the auditions) “So You Think You Can Dance.”

Tonight, SYTYCD continues their auditions. Some of them really knock my socks off, leave me with goosebumps, etc. But then there are some…

…and you either don’t know whether to scratch your watch or wind your butt. It’s truly confounding. They really, truly think they’re good! They can’t understand why they weren’t sent on to Las Vegas. Ooh, ooh, I know why: the judges don’t know good dancing when they see it!!! That must be it! Oy.

I’m envious of good dancers. I always [secretly] wanted to sign up for dance classes; well, since I went to my first dance recital, courtesy of the Shaffers. It looked like so much fun! I love dancing, I love music…but I never had the self-confidence to ask my mom. I figured one of two things would happen: she’d inform me that I wasn’t built to be a dancer - because my mom had a knack for pointing out my weight problem every chance she got during my adolescence, and it was always “out of love,” of course - and tell me no, or she’d let me sign up and I’d embarrass myself. Plus, I wouldn’t be in the same classes as my friends who’d been dancing since they were three. I’d be the 13-year-old in the three-year-old’s class.

So, it never happened. I took Jazz II in college as part of filling my Phys Ed requirements and I LOVED IT. The professor was a bit of a Nazi about movements, but I love, love, LOVED learning the routine. I felt great after class, like a whole new person. It was a really good outlet for the stress of my freshman year.

I highly recommend signing up at your local studio. If I ever get back into a decent shape (and I don’t consider “round” to be a decent shape, at least not for me), I’d love to take a class.

Soirees. That’s what A called them…and it fit, perfectly.

I don’t know from what conversation or idea these things birthed from, but it turned into an excellent ritual and gained quite a following! Every weekend (I want to say they were on Saturdays), my mom and I would go out and buy one of those three-foot-long subs from BiLo, a couple cases of soda, some chips, etc., and people would show up at my house.

No beer, no drugs, no dim lights and loud music…just movies or TV, conversation, antics, laughter and, as cliche as it sounds: good, clean fun! All I had to do was put the word out to a few people and it kind of snowballed. Pretty soon, our front door seemed to turn into a revolving door, people coming and going all night. Well, not all night. Most people were out by midnightish as we were, save for a couple of people, all still on our Cinderella licenses.

So many memories stem from this one big memory…Tim army-crawling wearing the unzipped hood from my mom’s winter jacket, Andrew having a nervous breakdown because someone was chewing with their mouth open or otherwise eating noisily, Eric showing off his verticle and putting a permanent dent in the living room ceiling, just a lot of really funny stuff happened.

It makes me miss being young. My junior year of high school, although filled with a big period of grief and recovery from losing my dad, was my break-out year. I had fun that year. I think (and I know this will sound selfish but it’s a very new revelation I simply must share) I sort of shed the cloak of responsibility when my dad passed away and cut loose. I had to grow up a lot when I was in my early teens, driving dad back and forth to chemo, doing things for him at home, all the while putting on a strong, stoic front so that (heaven forbid) he wouldn’t see that I actually cared. It was taxing on me and I feel like the year or two afterwards, I was trying to make up for the years I spent being dutiful.

I don’t know. Maybe it was just happenstance that I kind of came out of my shell that year. At any rate, I loved those gatherings. I think everyone else did, too.

Nothing gets my goat more than getting GodJesusChristianity jammed down my throat. It’s pretty well-known by now that I’m Agnostic. My friends know this. My family knows this…well, most of them do. I don’t have a bumper sticker proclaiming my lack of Belief (but I desperately want one of those little Darwin fish with the feet) and I don’t send out Monthly Agnostic Newsletters, but if the topic comes up, I’ll speak my mind.

The problem with Christians…er, one of the problems with Christians is that they’re impossible to discuss the plausibility of Christianity with. Their only source of “facts” is the bible. They don’t reference anything else. Like millions of people in 2006, I saw and read “The Da Vinci Code,” and I was hooked. Rob and I had never denied Jesus’ existence, we simply denied that he was the son of God. We also dispute truths in the bible, but that’s too long a diatribe to turn into a tangent.

Anyway, trying to discuss this with Bible-Thumpers is like beating your head off a brick wall. Instead of coming up with hard evidence to disprove “The Da Vinci Code,” they simply say it isn’t true and expect that to be enough. I’m sorry, but I need proof that it’s not true. Rob and I watched a show on A&E the other night, “Beyond the Da Vinci Code,” and the contributors on this show all but stuck their thumbs in their mouths and pouted because they were stumbling over their comments. Their one and only answer - to the idea that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdelene, that it’s Mary Magdelene to Jesus’ right in “The Last Supper,” to the royal bloodline exisiting today - is, “It simply isn’t true.”

I need more. Show me. Show me that Jesus really was a miracle-worker, was celibate, and truly was the son of God (another fallacy as far as I’m concerned) - and I’ll believe. Really, I will. That’s why I’m Agnostic: I’m on the fence about the whole idea. All the proof I have, though, indicates that Jesus was your Everyday Jew, dinosaurs roamed the earth, and the human race is still evolving. That’s right, evolving.

Humor me: How can Christians deny evolution??? Skeletal proof doesn’t do it for them? Our eerie similarity to the gorilla? The body’s physical composition doesn’t convince them? Our instinct to survive is, in and of itself, animalistic in the right situations. So what is their answer to evolution? “It didn’t happen. God made man in His image and blah blah blah…” What about the dinosaurs? They didn’t exist either? Paleontologists fabricated all those millions-year-old fossils in their basements?

I could go on and on. It exasperates me to no end how close-minded they are. How hypocritical they are. God loves all His children! So long as they’re not actively gay, right? Oh, and he also doesn’t care for those who don’t believe in Him. We’re all going to burn in hell. I had a Catechism teacher tell our class that once. She was one of those Catholic fanatics who wore homemade-decorated sweatshirts with God slogans on them - who, from what I hear, had quite the sordid past - and this was during the time when Co-Ed Naked t-shirts were popular. She informed us that anyone who wore shirts like that would, quite literally, burn in hell. Good times!

So what are your thoughts? Was Jesus EveryJew or did he walk on water? Did he spawn? Or is Dan Brown full of bull-honky and I should shuffle my family off to the nearest church post-haste?

So we had quite the pandemonium at 5:30 a.m. It all starts out normally enough: Rob and Beth are asleep upstairs as Beth had come to bed with us when we went to bed because she’d woken up. Robby and I are asleep on the couch because he’d woken up at 2:15 a.m. and wouldn’t go back down. The alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m., loud as hell. I hate that alarm clock. I also hate that Rob won’t move tha alarm clock closer to his side of the bed. Right now, it’s kitty-corner to the foot of the bed on a little nightstand that won’t fit next to his side of the bed. So, being a hard sleeper, it takes him a full minute of alarm going off to wake up and go turn it off. Hmph.

Anyway, the alarm goes off. Sixty seconds later, he turns it off. I hear Beth slide out of bed and shuffle over to the steps. One little foot crept down off the top step. Then my heart stopped. I just saw a flurried mass of Beth tumble clumsily down half the steps. I set the baby down in the Pack ‘n Play as fast as I could without dropping him (but I most definitely woke him up in a less-than-pleasant manner), and screamed, “OH SHIT!!”

That was met with, “WHAT?!?!”

Me: “BETH FELL DOWN THE STAIRS!!”

Him: “OH SHIT!!”

He ran down the stairs and I ran up, we met her in the middle where she was on her back, going headfirst down the steps. She had her left leg through the railing, which I think was the only thing that stopped her from going all the way to the bottom. She immediately started wailing, which although terribly heartbreaking is a good sign, and Rob picked her up and carried her to the bed. I asked her if she was alright, and she said, in between sobs, “Yeaaahh!”

We asked her about boo-boos, and the only one she pointed out was the one on her knee, where she must have banged it in the initial fall. After that, she was fine, as though nothing had happened. She walked fine, talked normally, never vomited or acted strangely. She has been telling me and everyone else all morning about how she fell down the the stairs!

Seriously folks, it is TERRIFYING to see your child fall down the steps. I used to stop breathing when she’d fall while learning to walk…this is a whole new ballgame. You have absolutely no control over anything and it stops you in your tracks. It’s like the whole incident slips into slow motion and in those two or three seconds, you begin to imagine the worst, but hope for the best.

I know I’m starting to sound a bit melodramatic, especially considering the fact that she’s fine now, save for an emerging bruise. But it was really, really scary!