Squeak’s Squeals

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!

It’s been a long, LONG week in the world of the Squeak.

It started on Wednesday when the girls’ daycare called to tell me JB was projectile vomiting all over the facility and I needed to come get her. They graciously gave her a bucket for the drive home and we arrived at the house without incident.

Upon entering the house, however, JB walked into the living room, held the bucket way out in front of her and puked on the floor. “It’s okay. It’s no problem,” I reassured her. “These things happen. I’ll just have to scrub the floor is all.”

The problem with this philosophy is that I am a sympathetic puker. If I see it, hear it or smell it, I’m gonna do it. So there I was, on hands and knees on the living room floor - scrubbing with one bucket and vomiting into another.

Not much work was accomplished on Wednesday for obvious reasons… the kids were whiny and clingy, I was cranky and my throat was sore from upchucking. So Wednesday was a bust.

By Thursday, all was well. The kids went off to daycare, I went off to work. And I had been given permission to work from home Friday as a weird sort of perk for getting things accomplished in the office.

As luck would have it, however, at just after 2am Friday morning, my bedroom door crept open and there stood Roo, tears streaking her face, “Mommy, I puked….”

Shit. I pulled myself out of bed and went to assess the damages.

Pile #1: The hallway. ALL over the hallway.

Pile #2: Roo’s bedroom floor.

Pile #3: Roo’s bed - the sheets, the pillow, the jammies, the Webkinz…. coated in an orange, acidic slime.

I went to grab the buckets and spent the next two and a half hours scrubbing and puking…. and scrubbing and puking…. and scrubbing and……… well, you get the idea.

So Friday was also a bust. No work was accomplished (except for scrubbing floors - repeatedly). Not a problem, right? I can make up the time on Saturday while the kids are with their Doofhead, right? WRONG!

By noon on Saturday, I had a temp of 102(F) and was convinced my spleen was the only possible organ which had not yet shot itself out of my nose. I heaved and puked and heaved and puked… and when there was nothing left to puke, I continued to heave - for HOURS I continued the heaving - at one point, I heaved hard enough to re-injure my jaw (for those of you who read the Brawler post)… I felt it pop again and it sent a shooting pain into my right ear. And I kept heaving. Tears were streaming down my face as I sat in my bathroom all alone, convinced I had reached the end of my days… that I would be living out the last fleeting moments of my life cold, alone, heaving and perched on the porcelain throne.

The good news: I feel infinitely better this morning. The bad news: all the heaving caused the blood vessels to burst all around my right eye (that there picture to the right…. that is really, truly my eyeball, taken this morning… granted, it’s not the best picture as it was taken with my cell phone, but it’s enough to get the point across).

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The kids, the Neanderthal and I went out to the local Chinese Buffet for dinner tonight. The kids love the seafood and we love that they can eat their body weight in shrimp without being left penniless.

Anyway, about half way through our meal, another family was seated on the opposite end of our section (that horrible, nasty place where we smokers go to dine in seclusion, quarantined from the rest of the customers, as if we carry airborne flesh-eating diseases). This family had with them a rambunctious little boy - he looked to be about 2 years old - with big blue eyes and a mop of ultra curly blond hair. Cute as hell, he was.

We dined away and finished our meals. I popped into the restroom to relieve myself (as ALWAYS happens immediately following Chinese food). I was staring at the floor when the hair on my neck stood up - you know that feeling you get when you’re being watched? That ‘Damn, I need a shower!’ kind of feeling? Yeah. I had it.

I looked up and my gaze was met by none other than one big blue eye topped by curly blond hair at roughly 2.5 feet above the floor. That cute little perv just peeped me!

You can peep at Humor-Blogs.com. And no one will call you a perv.

It’s a sad news day, folks. Yet, somehow, it’s not. Maybe I’m in denial. Maybe I’ve had too much time to come to terms with the current state of my existence. Or maybe Obama is right and I really AM just bitter.

Regardless, Og the Neanderthal and I have decided to go our separate ways. Yes, this will mean the end of fart jokes, the end of stupid man tricks, the end of life as an opposing gender cohabitant. But it is for the best.

This moment marks the dawning of a new era in my realm of weirdness - an era of introspect, an era of soul searching, an era of parental overbearingness, an era of aging awkwardly. It is the era of the Thirty-year-old loser who lives with her mother.

The packing has begun. The kids are asking questions I am ill prepared to answer. And I warn you my postings may be sparse as I have trouble being funny while feeling sorry for myself.

However, at the moment, my thoughts are drawn to a query for you, my dear readers. It has been plaguing my mind as of late and I can’t help but wonder if others experience the same form of discomfort.

Stress poop: Does it happen to you?

Not that anyone WANTS to know the bowel habits of an aging crazy woman, but I NEED to know if I’m alone in this.

It has happened all of my adult life - excessive stress equates to excessive bathroom time. I think I was about 22 when it was pointed out to me by a friend that after each and every Biology exam, I would spend an hour in the bathroom. It was pointed out to me - both times - when I found myself pregnant out of wedlock and realized I would have to tell my mother. And again three years ago when my company closed its doors and I found myself raising two children with no income. And it is happening now that I am on the cusp of my 30th birthday and facing the stress of both losing the man to whom I have devoted my life and realizing I will have to temporarily raise my children in my parent’s house.

My girlfriends find this phenomena utterly hysterical. I, on the other hand, find it to be a pain in the ass - literally.

And now I must bid you adieu, for the bathroom is beckoning.

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