Fun With Play-Dough

McCain is going on vacation. During his one week trip he’s visiting Iraq, Jerusalem, London, and Paris.  Apparently he thinks: “It’s okay, let the Democrats self destruct while I make nice with my future colleagues”.  Great idea, visiting four countries in one week; you will really be informed by the end of this. Who is he kidding?

Also, he’s having a fundraiser while he’s in London.  The ranting against anything that’s not made on American soil, by American workers, does not extent to Euros. 

Except…they’ll be wasted Euros, since McCain is not going to win. The Europeans know that, which makes me think they’re allowing him to come over for tea for entirely different reasons. When faced with a Republican, Europeans can’t be trusted. I know, because I am one.

They could leave McCain somewhere in one of the less popular Paris neighborhoods. Or they could feed him an average English home cooked meal  (no offense, but, damn! Let me just say; not all English cooks are like Jaime Oliver) or they could dump him somewhere to try and figure out the train schedule for himself.  Even better, lock him in Pei’s pyramid, so he can become part of the permanent collection. I’d go see it.

Read the full article:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/15/mccain-to-host-london-fundraiser/

There are two types of false labor.

There are the times when you think, this is it, and you call your support, you race to the hospital, they check you in, and it all turns out to be nothing but a storm in a shot glass.  If this has happened to you, don’t feel bad: you’re in good company.  Because no woman since the beginning of creation has been able to give a clear description of what actual labor feels like, we’re all just guessing. Plus, by the time you’re close to that nine-month mark, your nerves are so frayed that you can feel a sneeze coming on and think your water broke.

Who even knows what a contraction feels like before they’ve had any experience? There are a lot of ways to describe getting hit by a freight train, being ripped in half, or feeling like a wrung-out towel. Yes, we get it, it hurts. But when you’re pregnant, there’s a lot that hurts, and who knows whether that pain you’re feeling in your gut is the onset of labor, or the result of that taco you ate last night?  So you play it safe, go to the hospital, where they will shake their heads and send you home.  There you sit on your couch, with the remote in your hand. You’d like to watch a movie, but you don’t have the energy to get up, so you flip channels. There’s nothing on at 4 am, so you end up watching Full House reruns, wondering whatever happened to the Olson twins.

And you solemnly swear to yourself that next time you go to the hospital, it will be for real.  Unfortunately, you find yourself in the exact same position three days later (it’s those damn Braxton-Hicks contractions, how are you supposed to tell the difference?) and the medical personnel treats you nice, and says things like It’s okay, we see this all the time. Don’t worry about it! Of course, their eyes tell an entirely different story; they think you’re stupid and hysterical and decide for the gazillionth time that they just have to change careers, right now, so they won’t have to deal with you ever again.

The hardest part about labor is waiting. You’ve already waited for so long, and it’s not just your imagination, those last days really do take forever. Having said that, it’s easy to see why pregnant women fall for the false labor signs so easily; a trip to the hospital covers at least a few hours, and what else are you supposed to do to entertain yourself? You’ve already yelled at your husband 5,726 times, none of your friends still want to talk to you because you have nothing new to say, and even your own mother has her cell phone permanently set to voicemail.

The second type of false labor happens when you want to get rid of visitors, or you are forced to go somewhere and you really want to leave. You pretend, and if you’re ballsy enough, this can be done as soon as you are seven months along. Put your hands on your lower back; put your hands on your stomach; go to the bathroom and splash just enough water on your face to make it look like you’re sweating. Refuse all food.  Sigh deeply, pretend to have a cramp. Most people don’t know what to expect, and those of us who know what labor is like won’t dare argue with a woman who says: “It’s Time.” Honestly, this will get you out of anything with lightning speed; just writing about it makes me almost sorry I’m not pregnant anymore. It’s such a handy excuse to have.

People that are visiting will want to help; you need to tell them your husband is on the way and right now you’d like to lie down and be alone. If you are somewhere else, make sure you have a trusted friend available, who can pretend to drive you to your hospital.  Otherwise you won’t know who is going to volunteer, and then you are stuck. Once in the car, you can go shopping or see a movie. If you run into any of these people later, you just tell them you were having BH contractions; they’ll understand. Or not; who cares?

The only advice I can give you about all this labor business is this: when labor really starts, you’ll know. You really, really will. 

I think.

Maybe.

You went for that check-up and found out the gender of your baby; congratulations, you can finally decide on a name and finalize the décor in the nursery.  In case you are having a boy, there are certain things to consider.

This is a good time to take a closer look at your homeowners insurance; also, if you own any glass tables, get rid of them now. You can’t have those around boys, whether they’re two, or seventeen years old.

One big advantage: no need to worry anymore about decorating the baby room; paint the walls blue and call it good. More is not required, since pretty things will be destroyed as soon as baby can walk. You might want to put some pillows on the floor; boys will climb on anything, and can scale walls with their bare hands. They’ll need something soft to fall on.

Find all things that are remotely stick shaped (brooms, snow shovels, curtain rods, you name it) and lock them in the garage. If you own a baseball bat, take it to goodwill. Little boys will sense it if there’s a bat hiding somewhere and break down the door to get to it. Then they will use it to go after either the fish tank, or your head.

Wet wipes need to be everywhere, not just next to the changing table. Keep them at your desk, in the kitchen, the basement, and the living room; keep them in your car, your dining room, anywhere baby will go. You’ll use them five times as much if your baby is male; at the age of five, it sort of evens out.

Take boxing lessons; it’s a handy way to learn self defense, which mostly consists of being fast on your feet. You need to know how to duck, or you will get punched and have your hair pulled constantly.

Boys like a place to hide; maybe it’s that caveman-thing. They want something that roughly resembles a fort; sometimes a sheet thrown over the dining room table is enough. Once inside their ‘fort’, they don’t do anything exciting or secretive, although they’d like us to believe they do. Mostly they just sit there. Hiding. Thinking about god-knows-what.

Boys instinctively know how to kick a soccer ball smack in the middle of the flowerbed that you just planted yesterday. They never miss.

Boys will not potty-train unless you threaten to throw away their favorite toy; don’t wait too long with that. A twelve-year-old who still needs a diaper is unattractive and won’t have any friends. You want him to make friends; it guarantees he will be out of your hair at least part of the time.

Boys will laugh hysterically when they burp or pass gas; it’s genetic. They miss that oh-so important extra X-chromosome; you guessed it, the chromosome that holds the key to manners, shopping, and the ability to pick up your dirty socks and place them in a hamper.

You went for that check-up and found out the gender of your baby; congratulations, you can finally decide on a name and finalize the décor in the nursery.  In case you are having a girl, there are certain things to consider.

Girls grow up to be six-year-olds, at which point they will have an opinion about everything. Then they will become teenagers and even more difficult.  So what, you say; all teenagers are difficult. No. While boys merely turn into surly, incommunicative, invisible beings that you see maybe twice a week, girls won’t let you forget so easily.  There are arguments to be had; arguments about clothing allowances, about boyfriends, girlfriends, about how much television to watch and what music to listen to. Arguments about which car to drive, where to drive it to, and what time to come home. And homework, what is homework? Who needs it? Like, right, you know, like.  Whatever damage teenage girls will do to the English language in another 16 years or so doesn’t matter; they will argue.

Girls like pink. I know; it sounds sexist, bla bla bla, but the truth is, the power of pink is unstoppable. It’s build into their damn genes; add to that society’s prejudice, which will make every relative buy pink crap as soon as that ultrasound picture hits the streets, and you don’t stand a chance. If you tell people not to bring any of it into your house, they’ll just buy more. Car seats now come in pink, and so do strollers, baby baths, diaper bags. The sky’s the limit. By the time your daughter reaches her third birthday, you’ll be so entirely sick of it you’ll start thinking about giving her an Addams Family make-over.

Little girls like to grow their hair long, own lots of ‘hair thingies’ (official term) and have their hair done; except when that involves brushing out the tangles, which is always. When you’ve waited three days and can’t stand it anymore, you can spray her hair with the detangler and attempt to brush it; you’ll need two adults for this. One to hold her down, the other to brush. She will scream and add it to her list of things to blame you for later.

Girls hold grudges. They may not be able to remember things like “thou shalt not hit thy brother”, and have trouble recalling exactly what it was they were supposed to do for homework, but they remember real or perceived insults forever. If you try to vacuum and decide that those 23 pairs of Barbie shoes should be thrown away because she’ll never notice; think again: she will find out about it and tell her therapist all about it when she’s 28 years old and no longer talking to you.

Little girls like to play ‘pregnant’. I find this mind-boggling. I purposely didn’t buy my daughter any of those strange dolls that really pee and poop, and we certainly stayed away from ‘pregnant Barbie’.  Still, they find out about this pregnancy thing and they run with it. They shove any doll or stuffed animal under their dress, causing them to walk around with a very strangely shaped hump on their belly, exclaiming Look, I’m pregnant! Isn’t this fun? It doesn’t matter that we repeatedly tell her that pregnancy before the age of 30 is simply not an option. You have to go to college, we say, and then grad school. And you have to travel, and get a good job, and travel some more. How are you going to combine all that?

Maybe if we repeat it often enough, we can instill some sense into her. She has to stop thinking pregnancy is fun before the age where she can actually become pregnant.  The thought that that time is only about 8 years away is terrifying; it’s the stuff of nightmares, any parent of a girl can tell you that.

Girls like to dress up. This is something that doesn’t change as they get older; it merely evolves.  They start with Disney dresses, mommy’s stuff (watch out) and princess crowns. They move on to God-knows-what.  Honestly, I sometimes think one of the first full sentences that come out of any girls’ mouth is “I don’t want to wear that” or the equally tiresome: “Why can’t I wear that?”  Ever since she was three, my daughter has been in the habit of changing 5, 6 times a day. It’s gone down a little now that she’s in school, but since she wears a school uniform, she still feels the need to change twice after coming home in the afternoon. She also has no clue when it comes to temperature-appropriate clothing. She’d leave the house in a tank top and shorts to go play in the snow, if only we would let her.  But I don’t know if that is typical for all girls; it might be just that my own child is a little strange in that regard.

Girls like to cry when they don’t get their way. It’s practice for when they are old enough to date, or –god forbid- marry; it helps with the manipulation thing if you can produce tears at will.  So they practice. And practice. And practice some more. They cry when they can’t find something, when you instruct them to finish their food, or when they have to wear a hat. They cry when they have to take a bath, when they have to come out of the bath, and when you tell them it is bedtime. They cry when they get in the car, when they come out of the car; when you take them shopping, or when they go to visit grandma.

You get the point; just remember, they’re not really sad, it’s all just rehearsal.

Eliot Spitzer must feel pretty sorry for himself these days. He lost his job, his wife is probably not talking to him, he disappointed a lot of people, and he’s not sure yet about the extent of his legal troubles. However, there are always those who have it worse. Buck up, Spitzy, at least you…

1. Haven’t been stuck to a toilet seat for two years, like that 35-year-old woman in Ness City, Kansas. She had apparently been hiding out in the bathroom for quite a while, eventually refusing to come off the toilet altogether, until she started growing around the seat. When the boyfriend finally called for help, they had to pry the toilet seat off, and remove it from her body in the hospital.
2. Aren’t one of the stray cats in Randolph, Iowa, which can now officially be hunted down for a $5 bounty.
3. Didn’t try to snatch the purse of 83-year-old Bernie Garcia, who wasn’t having any of that and foiled the would-be robber’s attack, after which he was caught and put in the slammer. Once there, I’m guessing he will be hearing about this story for quite a while.
4. Didn’t get burned to death, like Chinese Wang, who married his wife Luo on February 2^nd of this year. They fought, they got drunk, and he tried to go to bed without washing his feet, after which she set fire to the sheets.  I bet ‘Kristin’ was much, much nicer than that.
5. Didn’t try to buy a coffee at the NY Dunkin’ Donuts, without wearing any pants, like 46-year-old John Greco did this week.  That’s a whole different type of lewd behavior.
6. Aren’t affiliated with a certain law practice in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where some anonymous idiot sent a package, which was subsequently deemed ‘suspicious’.  The bomb squad was called; they X-rayed the package, then decided to detonate it with a water cannon. The package contained a turnip, wrapped in a gift bag. Very dangerous, those turnips.
7. Don’t have to clean up those port-a-potties I saw lying around the Atlanta streets after being blown over by the tornado.  There’s something to be said for being unemployed.