slogging through a swamp of fetid molasses

we have:
a HUGE credit card bill to pay
a toilet that is leaking and destroying the floor
a shower surround that needs replacing before mid-january, along with most of the drywall behind it and around it to replace
an even HUGER car repair bill to pay

christmas coming soon and many gifts not yet gotten, let alone sent to their recipients
three rooms to at least partly furnish so the new roomate and her son don't have to sleep on the floor
and all the stresses of normal life with two babies, a marriage, regular bills to pay, work to be gotten done, housework to be avoided, etc.

today a friend borrowed the boy for a couple of hours so i could get caught up. i got a little bit done on xmas gifts and some laundry done, plus i picked up some of the piles of crap that appear around the house whenever i'm not looking. it was good to get those things done, but where did the rest of the time go? why is my life still chaos?
maybe i should fold laundry instead of whining about how nothing ever gets done around here. or make coffee. mmmm. coffee sounds good.

money and hair

so today:

the huge-ass credit card bill came. it included such expenses as our flights to toronto for xmas and the repairs we did on the upstairs bathroom recently.
i noticed that the main floor toilet is leaking all over the basement floor. fortunately that part of the basement is unfinished, but we still need to replace the toilet asap.
we got the repair bill for the car - more than three times what we had budgeted, but if we leave it, the repairs will only get more costly and it will be dangerous to drive.

if these things were staggered out over a few months we could handle them. it would suck, but we could do it. instead, we're about ten grand in the hold, about to owe more. so maybe i won't spend a few hundred dollars on my hair, after all. i have two options, hair-wise, at this point. i can:

• get my friends to dread my hair and hope for the best
• cut my hair off and hope for the best.

my friends might give me awful dreads. they take lots of time and are hard work, i don't want to coerce them into making dreads that i might just cut off right away. on the other hand, cutting all my hair off means i may look like a chia pet for a long time. i have really thick hair that sometimes looks bloody awful short. i can't just leave my hair as it is, i find it incredibly annoying and it's forming messy, ugly dreads on its own.

i'm leaning towards cutting it all off.

i'll post pics, either way.

humdrum

after at least three hours of playing sims i'm ready to do something else. i've felt a creative urge for a few days but i have no outlet, what with these children all over the place and all. so i play sims. i really, really want to be painting, but that's impossible. i'd settle for collaging, but i can't do that, either. there are no magazines in the house. i could tolerate building something out of wood or other materials or sewing, but i have nothing to use. i'm deeply frustrated.

on the other hand, i just set up the baby swing for the first time. the boy is pushing the baby, the baby is killing himself laughing, and the boy is 'wheee'ing as shrilly as possible and piling his toys into the swing on top of the baby. good times. serioulsy, they're both in heaven and i don't have to do a thing. how could this be better?

today is buy nothing day. i'm participating, but i probably wouldn't have bought anything anyways, except maybe some booze to celebrate my non-pregnancy. that's right, i am not pregnant. i know nobody knew i might be, but i'm not.

back to buy nothing day. i think it's so cool. i would love to do buy nothing christmas one year, but i have a feeling that nobody else would be into it. especially now that we have the babies, i'd be accused of depriving them and being a no-fun commie.

speaking of no fun, while i was writing that paragraph the baby decided he'd had enough of the swing. i rescued him, causing the boy to have a major meltdown. good times have been had by all.

does this post have a point? probably not.

my new deity

originally an evangelical christian, i have been on a journey for the past few years. i've established that i'm definitely not a christian (don't tell my parents or in-laws) and i'm not an atheist... according to beliefnet's belief-o-matic quiz i'm a neo-pagan, but i'm disinclined to express that faith in any but the most casual and cynical of ways.
today i realized what my faith is. (aside from pastafarianism, which will always be my true faith) i actually worship the internet. i'm not sure what the name for that would be, but there you have it. the internet is an invisible, powerful, mysterious being that brought me together with some of my closest friends. it gives me companionship, comfort, entertainment and information. it it who i go to when i can't sleep at night, when i'm worried about something, and when i'm bored. i can't imagine a day without the internet and i talk about it fairly regularly. this very blog could be considered a prayer.
internetian? nope. um, webworshipper? uh... i need to think on this.

ps. googleimages was unhelpful in my quest to end this post with an appropriate image. alas. the internet let me down.

more ethical clothes

i just discovered a new, CANADIAN ethical clothing company. htnaturals is a vancouver company that sells bamboo, hemp and organic cotton clothing. i bought a shirt of theirs on saturday and it is madly sexy as well as very ethical. they get five stars from me. plus their clearance section on the website is really well priced.
i've been emailing with toby the sales rep about running a co-op for better prices on their stuff for my friends and i, and i complained about their lack of plus-sized items. here is what toby said.

We are a small gorwing company, so while we would like to offer a broader array of colours and sizes, we are a bit limited in being able to take all of this on at once. Our men's sizing extends up to XXL, and our women's sizing to XL, but we'd certainly like to do more.

You might want to check with Continental T-shirts as they make Organic Cotton and Bamboo shirts, and I believe that their sizing extends to XXXL (men's) and XXL (women's). Another option would be to try Bamboosa

continental sells regular clothes as well as organic cotton/ bamboo clothes, which is ok but not as cool as being 100% environmentally friendly. i'm a little biased towards them because the male model here is freaking HOT. their prices are not listed but they seem to have some really nice stuff.
bamboosa looks great, but pricey. 22$ for a tank top and 28$ for a hooded baby bath towel? not terrible, but not great. at least they're usa made and very environmentally friendly. but they're clothes aren't super stylish or interesting. i can find organic, ethical plain, boxy t-shirts for less elsewhere. i don't think i'll be buying from them.

cooking fiasco story

chris at notes from the trenches suggested that people blog their cooking mishap stories. read the comments on that blog, they're great. so here it is.

my funniest cooking mishap

in grade 12 my best friend was annie*. annie was the cutest person i have ever met. she was tiny and had dimples and pink dreadlocks. she looked just like strawberry shortcake, but funkier. because of her appearance no one really took annie seriously, which is good, because she did waaaaay too many drugs and her brains were addled.
one day when my parents were out we decided to make cookies. we made cookies or cakes almost every day because annie was hypoglycemic and so got high off sugar. she was fun high and it was a cheap high, so we became excellent bakers.
the recipe said to soften the butter and also said to preheat the oven. we decided to kill two birds with one stone and soften the butter in the preheating oven. annie put a huge block of butter in a small bowl and stuck it in the oven.
a while later we began to wonder why the room was full of smoke. then the smoke detector went off. while i was taking the batteries out of the smoke detector i noticed flames in the oven. oops.
i knew not to open the oven and give the fire oxygen, but it's hard to think straight when your friend is running in tiny circles shrieking. so i called 911.
911: 911, what is your emergency?
me: DON'T send a fire truck, but what do i do if my oven is on fire?
911: can you see flames?
me: yes.
911: inside or outside the oven?
me: inside, and i haven't opened the oven door.
911: and you're sure you don't want the fire department?
me: YES, but what do i do? the flames are getting bigger!
911: have you turned off the oven?
me:... oh, yeah...
911: is everyone ok there? who's screaming?
me: uh, no one. i gotta go. thanks.
*hangs up*

a couple of hours later my parents got home and wanted to know why all the windows and doors were open in the dead of winter. i told them the house was too warm. they wanted to know why i hadn't turned down the heat instead. annie, high on sugar, giggled and started twirling around like a ballerina. she made a good diversion.

*her name wasn't really annie, but i don't want her, wherever she is, to google her own name and find this post since it's not all that flattering.

to the end of my rope and beyond

two hours of sleep. three, tops.
see how active she's being and how involved she is with her kids?
yeah.
that'll teach them to take turns keeping me up all. fucking. night.

my 11th post

there are ten posts previous to this one, and here are the tags they bear:

• about the boy (4)
• avoiding housewifedom (1)
• ethical clothing (1)
• exhaustion (4)
• filth and squalor (2)
• gf cooking (2)
• housekeeping (2)
• navelgazing (2)
• pastafarianism (1)
• personal appearances (1)
• piss-poor parenting (2)
• vomit (3)

as you can see, 40% of them are about exhaustion, 40% feature my older son, and a third of them mention vomit. i'm actually surprised that vomit didn't get mentioned in more posts, since it's the main feature in my life lately. but there you have it. this blog is exhausted and puke-infestd, mostly thanks to the boy. take a bow, son.

my future hair

in a month and a bit i hope to have hair like this
but hopefully without the facial hair. and my glasses are cooler. and i'm not a guy. and... yeah, you get what i mean. dreads, with colourful accents. i'm stoked. right now i have such awful mom hair - it's long with a million split ends, frizzy, and always either in a ponytail or straggling all over the place. and it often has someone else's puke in it. dreads won't help the puke situation, but i won't look like i should be driving a minivan, at least. all thanks to this woman.

his noodly greatness

so if my son can't have pasta, is he excluded from the church of the flying spaghetti monster? i can't imagine having to endure life without the touch of his noodly appendage... is there a flying spaghetti squash monster for celiacs? i suppose he could be made with rice noodles or corn noodles, but those are nasty and my deity is many things, but nasty is not one of them.
i've requested clarification on this matter from the facebook group. may the fsm (and his facebooky minions) reveal all that is hidden and inform us in his great wisdom.
ramen.

weekend of a thousand pukes

all weekend the boy was pukey, droopy, weepy and sleepy in turns. i got thrown up on at least seven times. the baby has recently become a night owl, too, so it was not the best weekend of my life.
on the other hand, we came out of the weekend with a much tidier house than we started it with. our beautiful midwife/ friend and her kids came for dinner so the punky papa and i took it as an excuse to get our act together and haul 8 bags of garbage & recycling out of our dining room. i washed the floor by hand, even. it was a shock the first time i walked through the kitchen without my feet sticking to the floor.
after the puke and the scrubbing and the complete lack of sleep i deserve this:
or maybe about twenty of these:

eau de puke

last night the baby cried from around 10 (when we went to bed, being party animals on a friday night) until midnight. so we finally made it to bed. it's been a long week so we were more than ready. then, ten minutes after lying down, the boy projectile vomited all over himself and his bed. it was lovely. the kid was lying in a pool of his own vomit. so we got him cleaned up and suggled back into bed - then he puked again. this time all over both of us. the poor kid was shaking and his eyes couldn't focus so i spooned him while my partner slept in the other bed. then he puked again. each time he waited until everything was tidied up before puking everywhere. all told he puked 6 times, the last time at 5.30 am. he and i both have dried vomit in our hair and on our skin. we're going to take a bath soon, then i'm going back to bed.
we actually have a really busy day today, watching my midwife-friend's kids while she's at a birth. we need to get moving. and no one in this house (except the baby) has slept. urg.

pathetic.

today i did almost nothing. i played around on the laptop, played sims2, tolerated countless tantrums, and lactated. i have no energy. actually, that may be because
a. i have had almost no sleep for 3 nights in a row, now
b. i haven't eaten anything at all
no wonder the coffee isn't helping.
tomorrow i'll be productive and all that shit. for now i'm going to put an elmo video on and drink more coffee.

homework

the assignment: list five things about myself that i like. two have to be physical traits.

1. i'm a pretty good mama. wen we're out and my boy is holding my hand and looking adoringly at me as i walk, i feel like a good mama. not so much when i'm yelling at him to leave me alone, but overall i think i'm doing ok.
2. my friends. (i don't know if this one counts) if i were in a cafe and a couple of tables over there was one of my friends (irl or online, it doesn't matter) and i didn't know her or him (confusing enough scenario for ya?) i would spend my time in that cafe sneakily watching that person, thinking how cool he or she is and how this must be a really great cafe to have people like that come here. somehow i've surrounded myself with these people that are simply incredible. a midwife, a few doulas, a playwright, a stained glass artist, photographers, teachers, videographers, parents, children, gardeners, all sorts of craftspeople and creative types and compassionate, passionate, loving people. if i look at it egotistically i must be pretty freaking great to attract such amazing people. whatever it is about me that they like, that's what i like about me.
3. i can make almost anything, given time. i can draw well, sculpt, craft, etc.
4. i love my ankles. i wish i lived in a culture where ankles are considered to be sexy. i would be a goddess in such a culture.
5. i also love my wrists.

there, i did it!

ethical undies

for some reason i'm huge into not harming anyone else or the planet just so i can have stuff. silly, isn't it? so my choices are fairly limited. thrift stores are ok, but i hate thrift shopping. it takes forever to find anything. i'd rather just thrift for the babies, who are easy to shop for. in case you're interested, here's a list of what i get where.

• i get my t shirts & long sleeve shirts at mec.ca, where organic cotton, sweatshop-free shirts are 12-14 $.
• i'm currently sporting no sweat hemp hi-tops on my feet, but
• i think my next shoes will be simples.
• winter boots and coats are a lot harder to locate, but i have a few years until i need to worry about replacing my current ones. i haven't yet found good, affordable, ethical pants yet, or socks. the sock thing is going to become an issue in the coming year.
• but for underwear i've found the answer.

sooner or later i'm going to get tired of only buying very specific items from very specific retailers, but hopefully by then i have more choices.

a gluten, dairy and nut-free post.

the boy is one of those horribly annoying children that can't eat anything. at 6 months he stopped gaining weight, by a year he was diagnosed as failure to thrive, and at 18 months i'd figured out that he is a celiac and he was gaining weight once more. the alternative ending to that story was that he die of malnutrition while eating us out of house & home. i'm more than a little glad that the story ended the way it did, i'm not crazy about that alternative ending. so now he's 2 and weighs about 22 pounds, only 5 pounds more than his baby brother.
anyways.
i am constantly searching for gluten, dairy and nut-free foods for the little man. (yes, he has food allergies. the fun just never stops) and i have discovered a couple of great things this week:

1. thick slices of eggplant will work as pizza crusts. i haven't tried it yet, but i'm still stoked. one day the little dude is going to realize that everyone else eats a much wider variety of foods than he does and he will want to eat pizza. so now he can have a little pizza on an eggplant crust. so long as he doesn't want cheese on the pizza.

2. these 'cookies' are pretty decent and nicely versatile, as well as being ridiculously healthy. i got them from this book. it's the best gf cookbook i've found yet. i want to kiss jeanne marie martin on the lips. anyways, the recipe:

brown rice breakfast chews

• 1 cup cooked brown rice, cold (i used hot rice. it worked fine)
• 1 tbs maple syrup (i used honey. spank me.)
• 1/4 cup chopped almonds or other nuts (i was out so i omitted this but will use sunflower seeds and coconut next time)
• 1/4 cup raisins, currants or other dried fruit (my chopped up dried apricots got all soft & delicious)
• 1/4 cup tapioca flour (i used minute tapioca. i have no idea if it's even close to the same thing, it gave it an odd texture but the kid doesn't seem to mind. i'll have to try it with actual tapioca flour someday)
• 1-2 tbs arrowroot flour (skipped it, don't have any. might try rice flour or potato flour or another of these crazy expensive flours i have kicking around next time)

mix all together and try not to squash the rice. drop by the tablespoon onto a greased cookie sheet and form little ball thingies.* bake at 300 for 40-50 minutes.

*these things are insanely sticky and i couldn't form them into any shape at all. they're little haystacks, with tons of rice scattered all over the cookie sheet that burned. if i could figure how to make them into granola bar shapes i would, they're the right consistency. oh, and don't skip greasing the cookie sheet like i did. the nonstick surface of the cookie sheet came off with the cookies and that can't be good.



if you know of any good gf recipes or whatever, let me know.

g-rated filth

as i write this i can hear my 2 year old playing with the toilet. the toilet that looks like something from the mens' room in a truck stop. the punky hunk put the toilet bush somewhere safe from the 2 year old and now we can't find it. it has been over two months. i've thought about buying a new toilet brush, but if i do that will be the day that the old one shows up, and what will we do with two toilet brushes? actually, i've already bought a new one. then the hunky hubby hid that one, too. so we would have three toilet brushes. i am losing the war on filth. me and my indifference are, that is.