Goddamnit, boy, why'd you do it? *

a) he wants to be a mime and didn't know how to tell me b/c he can't speak that well, which is why he might want to be a mime, which is why he didn't tell me, which is why he took matters into his own hands, literally

b) he thought (correctly) that a Triple Paste mask treatment might help the unsightly patch of dry skin near his eye (although this doesn't explain the rest of the face, unless it was some sort of prophylactic)

c) he wants to be a clown and make people laugh b/c laugh and the whole world laughs with you and cry and goddamnit boy I'll give you something to cry about

d) he wanted to get a buzz cut and knew the Triple Paste would be almost impossible to remove from his hair and the face, hands, and feet were merely collateral damage

e) he knows how I adore Triple Paste and proselytize about it constantly and he thought I would love him more if he were covered in it and did not realize that I would actually love him less b/c he wasted at least $12 (conservative estimate) worth of the finest diaper paste on the market


* Title thanks to reality-is-better-than-fiction: in a transcript on a criminal case I worked on, a guy who was talking to his brother (who was being held in jail for murder) on a telephone which included a recording at the beginning stating that all calls were recorded, said, at one point, "Goddamnit, boy, why'd you do it?"

Snowbunnies

Two posts in one day - I'm on a roll! Just wanted to post recent pics from a "snow" day - we had less than an inch of snow and S-phie was ecstatic, school was cancelled, she was making snow angels in the pathetic snow and trying to build a snowwoman - global warming makes for sorry snow days. Anyway, they had fun, the babies were little scientists, investigating the properties of frozen precipitation. Today, it so happens, was another "snow" day, this time only a dusting, but the pictures are from the last one, 2 weeks ago.

Zen Pukism

So funny how it is that on Saturday nite, whilst enjoying a lovely evening with friends for a yummy salmon dinner, with five kids running amok, the subject of vomiting offspring came up. I was commenting on how bizarre it is that some people are grossed out by the gore of childbirth, when childbirth is nothing, at least in terms of gross bodily fluids, compared to parenting. My friend Karen was talking about her friend who caught her child’s vomit in her hands. Anyway, at least childbirth occurs in a hospital (or maybe not for you homebirthing hippie types) where the mess is confined to a small, otherwise sterile area, where you do not have to live, and where someone else cleans it up. Can you see where this is going? Surely you can, as poop and vomit stories are the bread and butter of parenting humor. Hackneyed though the subject may be, I simply cannot resist blogging about it.

How to describe it? Wall-to-wall-puking occurred to me. My friend Anna used to talk about wall-to-wall-fucking, but somehow wall-to-wall-puking doesn’t have the same ring, as wall-to-wall fucking has a figurative aspect (or not) that the wall-to-wall puking does not here. Anyway, point made about extent of said vomiting. Poor S-phie. It was such violent, unrelenting vomiting for hours and hours and hours. And diarrhea, and yes, both at the same time. She said, between heaves, “I . . . hate . . . when . . . this . . . happens!”

I write about this incident because it made me grateful for the small (or not so small) things. Since Anna's death, I am trying to be a tiny bit more Buddhist in my approach to life, thanks to my friend Maase, and in this context that means expecting vomiting, accepting that it is going to happen and will be gross, and just living with it and not feeling all disappointed about it. And then I find that I can see how good I really have it – not sure if this part is Buddhist – but it is working for me. So, here, I was just so elated that I have a washer and dryer in my house. Vomit-soaked were: down comforter, sleeping bag, pillow, sheets, two blankets, favorite stuffed animal, bedskirt, bed rail, and book jacket (not machine washable). But b/c I have a washer and dryer on-site, this was not a catastrophe, just a minor pain in the ass. I was also happy that I have a porch where I could put the pukey items-in-waiting and thought about what if I lived in a tiny NYC apt. how I would have to embrace the vomit stench in order to be Buddhistic, and that since I live in a house I didn’t have to get that Zen, which is good, b/c I'm not sure that I could. But then I realized that in NYC there’s always the fire escape for the items-in-waiting and so maybe parenting is about being crafty and Zen.


p.s. Speaking of Anna, check out our new blog about her.

p.p.s. what happened to my old font, blogger? It was like Georgia, only sans serif. Shit.