Squeak’s Squeals

“AAAHHHHHHHHH!” came the cry of terror from the backyard.

The screendoor slammed.

“Mommy!  Mommy!  It’s gonna get me!”  JellyBean screamed while barreling through the house.

“What’s gonna get you?”

“The bug, Mommy.  It wants to eat me.  It was scary.”

“A bug?”

“Yeah.  It was big… no, HUGE.  And it was hairy and fuzzy and it had feathers.”

“Oh, my… hair AND feathers?”

“Yes.  And it was THIS big.”  She spread her hands apart to the size of a football.  “And it was all brown, with giant brown wings… and its eyeballs were under its chin… and its mouth was on its forehead… and its nose was next to its mouth… and it didn’t have any ears….”

“What about antennae?”  I asked, chuckling to myself.

“No.  Nuffin’.  It was just all hair and feathers on top with no ears.  And when it got mad, it blowed up THIS big…”  She spread her hands all the way out to the sides.

“Wow.  That sounds scary.  It was a bug you say?”

“Yes… a big scary, fat bug… and I screamed at it and it flew away.”

So now you know, if you are ever under attack by giant mutant puffer bugs, screaming will save you.  I’m sure you’ll sleep better tonight armed with this knowledge.

You find more mutants at humor-blogs.com.

I received an email from Roo’s second grade teacher.  She says Roo is “very disorganized, unprepared for class and frequently off task.”  While my initial response was ‘be grateful you don’t live with her,’ I opted for a slightly more gentile approach to the actual reply.

So, we now send a notebook back and forth everyday (cheesily titled “My Travel Book” by a teacher who doesn’t want to single Roo out and make her feel different from the other children… I personally think a couple days of making her feel different might be the kick in the pants she needs to get her crap together… but what do I know?  I’m just her mother… it’s not like I’ve had seven solid years of dealing with her behaviors and habits or anything…. ).

Regardless of how I feel about the hippie-dippy, politically correct, happy horseshit nonsense they try to force feed the kids in school, I still have to play along or risk being branded a “bad parent” and frowned upon for my child-rearing techniques.

So, every night, I sign the damned notebook and Roo and I discuss its contents and “how it makes her feel”…. it’s a load of utter crap.  Not to sound like some horrible, insensitive, evil bitch of a mom, but I don’t really CARE how it makes her feel.  If the teacher says to clean your desk, you need to clean your desk.  Period.  End of discussion.  We do not need to attend therapy to discuss what emotional stresses are causing her to not clean her desk.  I can tell you exactly why she doesn’t clean her desk… it is the same reason she doesn’t clean her room… she doesn’t want to.  And as long as the fear of punishment doesn’t exist, she will continue not doing what she should be doing.

Why DOES she clean her room?  What prompts such miraculous behavior?  She is afraid she’ll lose her .mp3 player or won’t be allowed to stay at a friend’s house this weekend.  She is afraid I’ll get mad enough to crack her rear-end and have a go at her room myself…. accompanied by a trash bag.

Maybe I’m too ‘old school’… maybe I’m just more bitter and jaded than I realize… maybe it is my mother’s constant ’shit happens, deal with it’ attitude reborn… but one day these kids will be out in the world with no one to coddle them, no one to care if they’ve had their feelings hurt, no one willing to discuss how something makes them feel.  And they’ll have to survive.

When Roo is 16-years-old, donning a brown visor and a nametag and scrubbing the machine-gunned diarrhea of a sweaty, middle-aged, fat man off the bathroom wall at McDonald’s, no one is going to consider her feelings.  No one is going to care if it makes her feel like less of a person.  They will only care that the job is done.

And when her shift is over and she comes home in tears, I’ll dry her big blue eyes, hug her close and whisper softly, “Shit happens.  Deal with it.”

Everything's explosive at humor-blogs.com!

The kids and I were chasing each other around the first floor earlier this evening - running from one room to the next until someone wised up enough to go the opposite direction and cut the runner off as they lapped the area - when I was viciously attacked.

No, I was not attacked by my children, but by something much smaller and more sinister.

You see, it was my turn to be chased and as I ran through the entry, I felt the stabbing pain of pierced foot flesh beneath me.  I fell to the floor and turned my left foot toward me.  There it was… small, evil, vile, sinister…. it was a butterfly-shaped mood ring… firmly attached to whatever bodily tissues live in the soles of my feet.

The ring was shaped much like my crude little drawing to the right, with giant, pointy wings on top and small, pointy wings on the bottom.  I was lucky enough to land on the upper, giant wing which cut right through the flesh and slid roughly half an inch into the ball of my foot and embedded itself quite firmly.

After forcibly removing my temporary, new appendage, I left a lovely trail of blood across my tan rug and up the stairs where the wound was cleaned and bandaged.  The hole is about as big around as a pencil and hurts like mad.  I could probably use stiches, to be quite honest, but that’s a medical bill I really don’t need if I can avoid it.

And just in case you were wondering, the evil little beast was dark purple, as in “Very Happy”.  The little bitch.

Accident prone?  Find like-minded individuals at humor-blogs.com!

I live in the suburbs. I am not a suburb kind of gal. I may be a little bit country, but a little bit suburban, I am not.

I am perfectly comfortable in a little podunk, backwoods, inbred, redneck town, but I now reside in the ritziest, most upscale suburb in this part of Pennsylvania. I’m not here because I make a lot of money. I’m not here because I want people to think I make a lot of money. I am here because the schools are excellent, the house is gorgeous and the rent fell inside my price range. However, I get the feeling that I am nothing more than that weird, creepy neighbor no one talks about. Call me Lady Voldemort.

Maybe it’s my incessant need to wear my Bert and Ernie lounge pants in public. Maybe it’s the rusty, little, 275,000+ mile, back-firing beast of a Subaru parked in the driveway. Maybe it’s because my kids sing Weird Al tunes as loudly as their little lungs will allow. Maybe it’s because I like to sit on the back porch in my underwear and smoke cigarettes at 5am. It’s probably a combination of all of the above, coupled with seeing my hideous (translation: cheap and/or free) furniture when I moved in, indicating that I obviously am not wealthy and therefore not worthy of their company.

Seriously, my house is gorgeous. My furniture is awful. I have one of those eclectic collections of slightly-better-than-a-college-dorm furnishings (complete with milk crate book shelves). My couch is black velvet with pink and blue swirls. My coffee table isn’t a coffee table at all, it’s a night stand turned sideways. My dining room table cost five dollars at an auction five years ago - the chairs were ten bucks at a yard sale. But they are comfy and they are mine. Though some days I wonder if I should try to spruce things up a bit.. you know, maybe bring myself up to speed with my station in life. You know… start skipping the garage sales and hitting the thrift stores instead….

And I know the reaction people have when I tell them I’m a nerd. Believe me when I tell you the average Suzy Homemaker stay-at-home mom looks at you like a freak and never speaks to you again. Case in point: The kids started back to school this week. One of the bus stop moms introduced herself and we started talking. We hit it off quite well for being total strangers. This went on for a couple days… then she asked me what I do for a living, “I’m a web developer for an IT company across town,” I said. “Oh,” she replied. And she has not spoken to me since. In fact, she started standing on the opposite side of the street… like I’m carrying the plague. “Don’t stand next to that new girl…. you’ll catch the dweeb!”

Don’t feel sorry for me, dear readers, for I love being the odd man out. I like to do things - especially in a neighborhood full of snobs - just to drive them insane:

I let my kids hang a metallic, dollar store happy birthday banner in the front window… and I left it there… just for the hell of it.

I take my trash out while wearing a plaid bathrobe and platform shoes.

Sometimes, I close all the curtains and pull all the shades, then turn the lights on and off as fast as I can for two or three minutes.

I play “I am the Walrus” (the Jim Carrey version) over and over again during my 5am smoking sessions… in my undies… on the back porch.

I draw faces on the kids’ kick balls and make them talk in funny voices.

Yup. I know how to keep myself entertained… and it gives the gossip mongers something to talk about. I’ll stick with my nerdy, dorky buddies. They’re the best kind anyway… I just feel bad for my kids (in a strange sort of way)… they will forever be the girls with the REALLY creepy mom.

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