Friday, June 30, 2006

Gahgk, spuh-tooie.

Stupid Blogger and it's stupid constipated "comments" section.

Stupid writer's block.

Stupid money.

Stupid reality...

...and I have so very little reason to whine, yet here I am "stupid this and stupid that.". I got time to myself yesterday, I got to go on a lunch date with my sweetie. Last night I talked with my BIL, the husband of Gingerstory, about the cement patio that he will be pouring in our back yard next week. The basement goes on apace... we are all relatively healthy and sane.

It is all stupid, especially me. Dadguy? I'm sorry, someday I won't be such a schmuck. Not today though. Today? Still a schmuck.

Plus... if you are leaving comments on the last post? I ain't gettin' them and I cannot access them. Stupid Blogger... stupid blogger.


*edited to add- I lied, I am still getting my comments via my gmail account... party on.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Que?


P1010029, originally uploaded by bonmama.

This is mostly for my Ma, Aunt Pam or Robbie... but if anyone has any ideas?.... there are three plants that I picked up from Granny's yard last year after Pa's funeral... the purple flowers were kind of a surprise. The ones that have the white pointy pods on the ends smelled like onions when I dug some up to move. The other is a tiger lily?

driving me crazy not to know.


(click on the image and it''ll take you to Flikr where I have tagged the image so you know where I am talking about.)

Monday, June 26, 2006

test


bbpix 051_edited, originally uploaded by bonmama.

here is a very fat pony that Birdie drew a few weeks ago... trying to get a handle on this flikr thing...

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Words

I was kind of a sad kid sometimes, living at the house on Kiowa street. We moved there when I was six and lived there till we moved to another town when I was thirteen. I wanted more than anything to have a best friend, like the kind of friend that you read about in books. I dreamt we would always sit together in the cafeteria for lunch, play at each other's houses after school and during the hot, dry New Mexico summers we would tell each other our secrets and dreams. We would laugh together. I would be hard pressed to say now, at age 37 why I never had that friend. I'm pretty sure that I was a weird kid, a reader and a dreamer. One of those kids who went to the "Gifted" and "Enrichment" classes... a round face, a tender heart. It could have been a geographical lack of viable BFF candidates in my neighborhood but more than that girls were often mean, and I couldn't understand what it was they expected of me so I generally sought the company of boys. But I still wished for that "best friend."

The closest thing to a best friend I had was a girl who lived across the street and around the corner... her name was Nicole Gutierrez and she pronounced it properly. She would correct you if YOU pronounced it Guh-ter-rez. We played together, mostly because there wasn't much else in the way of girls our age to play with. She had HBO and her folks let her watch rated R movies...she would talk about sneaking me in so I could watch those movies with her. It made me uncomfortable because my parents would be pissed-off no end if I watched a rated R movie so I was kind of glad that we weren't really allowed to play in her house anyway. We weren't allowed to play in MY house either. She would tell me about movies that she thought were the funniest things on the face of the earth...Cheech and Chong movies that she watched on HBO with her dad. She would yell "BEANERS!" at the top of her lungs and then laugh hysterically, like it was the best joke in the world, and then let me know that because I was a white girl I would get beat up if I ever used the word.

Later in life I watched a Cheech and Chong movie and I didn't think it was very funny even when I got the jokes, including when they yelled things like "Beaners!" Later in life I realized that she told me the truth that her Dad once ate cockroaches to survive. She said he did it when he lived in a pit dug in the dirt during the Vietnam War. I realize now that he had been a POW. I also realize now that he smoked pot, and that was part of the reason I was never allowed in their house.

I can't remember exactly why we weren't allowed to play inside my house... it probably had to do with the fact that it was a smallish three bedroom adobe with six kids and two parents crammed in. I shared a room with my older and younger brothers, then later my little sister for pretty much my whole childhood. My folks were Mormons, so there probably wasn't a whole lot of pot smoking going on.

At age eleven we went to "Middle School," and the fact that Nikki wasn't in any of my classes started to matter... to her anyway. We rarely ever played together anymore. She started to wear make-up and bra's, and playing outside was mostly boy-stuff and kid-stuff to her. She played over at friend's houses where you could actually go IN the houses. She started spending time with a girl named Mo, short for Maureen. Mo was tough. She was cool, and even though she was a white girl like me, she had friends who were Chola's
(Hispanic girl-gang members...the precursor to gangbanger's), girls who wore Kabuki make-up, black canvas babydoll shoes, and enough hairspray to choke a horse. The meanest Chola in our school was a girl who had flunked two grades and was therefore sixteen years old when I was thirteen. Her name was Jean and she had the fire red hair of a pure blood Spaniard. She was arrogant and violent, she was a bully.

At the beginning of my eighth grade year something happened. I started to have girls shove me in the hallways, and yell filthy things at me as I walked home from school. Mo and Nikki would walk home from school together, and if at all possible I would walk far behind them so they couldn't call me names or yell threatening things at me. Then one day Mo told me that I was "gonna get my ass kicked." I was going to "get jumped." I don't know how she swung it, but she got Jean on my case. The Jean. I started to hear about the knife she carried in her back pocket. All the stories that ended with her using her opponents hair as a grip to smash their faces into the pavement repeatedly came back in a rush. I started to walk home the long way, but less than a week later they found me, and there I was... surrounded by what felt like a huge gang of girls, looking back it was probably no more than eight. One of them was Jean. They started pushing me around the circle and yelling things at me.

I felt like I was some kind of pathetic wuss because I was crying... but I look back on it now and realize that I had guts and nerve and that's what saved me from a beating. I knew I was going to get my face beat in but for some reason I wanted to know WHY!? I demanded to know why they were doing this and I think that sorta threw them off. Jean told me that I had been trash-mouthing her "friend" Mo. I asked what I was accused of saying. They told me I had been calling her a "bitch." I recall doing this funny hitching laugh-cry thing and I told them that was impossible.. they had been misinformed or maybe even lied to because I had never even SPOKEN that word let alone CALLED someone that. It's one of those claims that's so odd, it had to be true and I think these tough girls knew it. I then informed them that they were choosing to "jump" me two houses down from my own house and that this little circle very likely had not gone unnoticed. I was threatened that if I ever DID call Mo a bitch that I would get jumped, but they left pretty fast after that. As they left I saw Nikki peeking at the tableau from behind the tree in her front yard. The dream of a best friend had died long before this day, but it still smarted and I realised then that she was probably my accuser.

At the time I felt like I had talked and whined and cried my way out of the jumping... but looking back on it, these girls who made it their early teen hobby to "jump" people probably rarely ever had anyone demand to know WHY, or laugh at their "reasons" crying or no.

The story doesn't end here... the real "lesson learned" was that night as I was standing just outside my parents room. I can still see my Dad sitting on the edge of the bed in the light cast by the lamp on the bedside table. He held a phonebook open to the white pages and he was speaking to the person on the other end of the line in a way I had never heard anyone speak outside of TV courtroom dramas. His tone was masterful and cold and he used words like "accosted" and "assault and battery." He said things like "litigation," and "responsible parties" and my heart pounded. I was so proud of my Dad, and I felt a fierce love for him because I knew I was protected. I never heard anything more from any Chola after that and two months later we moved.

I have always loved language and words, but that day I saw that words were bigger and more powerful than bully's, Chola's, and the right words spoken well could wrap you in protection. I love words.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Ask Me!

Sigh...
and yet again with the ear infection. I am pretty sure that it is just the same infection as the previous since I noticed her grabbing and squiggling her ear as I gave her the last dose of Amoxycillin last week. I wanted to give it a chance.


Really though? I'm pretty darn sure that this newest possession by the Sulphurous Demons from Hell of my sweet and dreamy youngest is a trifecta of ear infection, standard head cold, and teething. Two nights ago we also added repeated vomiting, but I think that was mostly due to tummy upset from all the injested snot. My poor, poor baby.

It is made all the harder by how frustrating it to deal with a screaming and miserable child. And the not sleeping thing, that sucks too. It doesn't help that I have virtually NO RIGHT to get put out with my Pearl because, not only is she SICK, but as the perfectest and sweetest baby in the world she has oodles of mandatory crying time to make up. Crusty mama... poor, poor baby.

On a happier note, we have entered into an all new era with LaLa even faster that I had hoped... last night when I asked her what her favorite part of the day was, her answer was "ummmm.... tsk, CoolCool." The translation? Cool School. Down the street a couple of kids have decided to run this Cool School thing for the summer. It costs a buck a kid and lasts for one hour once a week. They learn about stuff, do a craft and have a snack. Not one crapping pony in sight. They don't really take two year olds but they like LaLa so....shhhh. The plan was for me to do my grocery shopping in that one hour. Hasn't worked yet but I love to dream.

Mama's of sick kids are boring, have you noticed? All they talk about are the symptoms exibited by the wee sufferer. Enough of the snotpoopbarf. Soooo... here's a thing that Nobody
does occasionally... you ask a question in the comments and I will answer it, within reason. Cause I aint telling you my bra size and stuff like that. Not that I think you care or would ask a thing like that... I'm just sayin'. So, ummm. Ask away!

Monday, June 19, 2006

You've Come A Long Way...

... LaLa.

Yeah, I'm glad that y'all are grooving on LaLa's Pony's... you're likely to read a lot more answers like that in coming Sunday Six's. We've come a long way from the beginning of the year when the answer to ANY question was "ummmm, tsk! Pony dame." Which I believe meant "pony game." Of course we will never know for sure. For the past few months it has been "Pony Dash," as in "Rainbow Dash," the name of a Pony character. Probably.

Last week for the first time ever LaLa gave a coherent answer to the question "what was YOUR favorite part of the day?" She said, "ummmm, tsk! Uh play poe-neeth with Birdie." So I was beyond delighted with all the variety she is up to lately.

Her mantra lately? "I do ita my-chowf." (I do it myself)

New ponyesque addition to vocab? "Peh-duh-thith Shoe-duh-tone." (Pegasus Unicorn)

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Happy Father's Day

Kelly, of Missing J.T. Snow has a great idea that I have been enjoying on Fantastagirl's Blog for a while now... on Thursday or Friday Kelly gives out six questions that you pose to your kids and then post the results on Sunday. Party on... If you are wondering? Birdie is four and a half...LaLa is two and a half... Pearl is taking the fifth(no words yet).

1. What is a Father?
Birdie- A Dad.
LaLa- (mumbled) My little poe-neeth*... (yelled) Wun-away Wain-bow!

2. Why do we have Fathers?
Birdie- Because Jesus sent us Fathers.
LaLa- My Mama!

3. What do Father's do?
Birdie- They play with you. They work at their work.
LaLa- Ummmm...tsk, making dinner.

4. How do you celebrate Father's Day?
Birdie- Until the last day comes you give 'em his card and it happens to be Father's Day! And then we make him his surprise and there are witches in it!
LaLa- Ummmm... little poe-neeth.


5. What have you learned from your Father?
Birdie- Swinging and basing, and sledding.(What's basing?) You get on a skateboard and slliiiide and GO and JUMP! (demonstrates out to the hallway and back).
LaLa- Playing poe-neeth with Daddy.


6. Do you have any other names for your Father - if so, what are they?
Birdie- Jemma, Melon... ummm, 1,2,3 apple tree's here?
LaLa- Ummm... PONY!

*Poe-neeth=Pony's

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Gimmee Five!

Up high.
On the side.
Down Low (in a deep voice).
Barry Joe!

How many times can one mama do this game without losing her marbles down the drain? I will probably be able to tell y'all tomorrow. It's for sure more than 123 times....

Do it ah-din!

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

What the...?

Indeed.

There has been something amiss with my blogging libido, my addiction, my need to put the details of my own personal Chaos out onto the internets. My linky dinky doo's are antiquated and half of them don't even work anymore. I barely keep up on reading and commenting aside from a couple of girlie-crushes that I cannot let go of. Sigh.

It does not help that often when I do get out and about to some faves I am seeing that there is a whole lot of this lackadaisical blogkeeping about. Some of it is vacations, and increased outdoor activity that happens in the summer... for me, it has partly been due to the addition of yardwork to my personal mix. That and the Pearl has needs and interests of her own now... she is no longer the amazing lumpbaby that I shuffle about during the course of my day. She wants me to talk to her and play with her and feed her food she could potentially choke on. Huh. But mostly I just haven't had the drive.

I thought that maybe it was that I had things of a more negative quality that I needed to vent so I started an alternate ranty-crabby blog a month or so back. Wasn't at all satisfying. Reminded me that the kind of writing that saved my life and had the power to change reality was when I wrote about possibilities and hope. Plus it wasn't funny. It was booooring for ME to read all my gripes. delete.

If for no other reason I had this blog to write down a few reminders of the Chaos Girl's childhoods and development. Also to keep in touch with a few of my far flung family... say that
five times real fast! Both of these things are good, and may be the survival of this blog in the end.

I am now 37 years old. Happy Birthday to me! I got a night out with my good friend Karen. We went to SLC and had some awesome Brazilian food... the churrasco (shoe-hoss-co) is the way to go, an all-you-can-eat carnivore festival. Then we had tickets to the INXS show... woo-HOO! Only too bad Mr. J-diddly-D Fortune had whonked up his knee the night before, and came out in a brace from hip to ankle. Also too bad he had dropped a hit or two of acid (according to reports) believing the junkie-lore that a lowlander who goes to a higher elevation will not be incapacitated by too trippy a trip. I wonder if he tried smoking banana peels as a younger man. It may be that he did do acid. It may be that he simply imbibed in some good old fashioned prescription pain pills in order to do the show. One way or the other I am afraid that I at least got a bit more of a show than I cared for as he got it on with the microphone stand for some extensive tongue action and humpage. Next time? Get a room, my friend. The music at least was grade-A fun and frolic.

The opening act was a surprising hit as Scott Stapp the former lead singer of Creed nailed the vocals on a few of my Creed favorites plus a couple of songs from off his new album, The Great Divide. Good stuff, and after the third or fourth song I was able to get past the repressed mental images called up by the news reports of his latest and greatest publicity gaff cum indiscretion with Kid Rock and a couple of... enthusiastic groupies. Ick. His ahem... performance was only half ruined by the resulting becreepification. No, I did NOT link to any of said news reports. If you want a full on gross out feel free to party-on and google. I take no responsibility.

The Dadguy got me this. I was so excited I'm afraid I may have peed the floor in Home Depot and blamed one of the girls. Kudos to the man, he knows his wife and he knows what makes her tick.


Yesterday my fabulous MIL brought me a full yard of pitch black mulch and we had an all-day yardparty unloading, spreading, weeding and shifting stuff about in the front yard. You know the uneasy wonder you feel when you realize that you are actually more than a little excited about your new refrigerator/vacuum/dishwasher etc...? That's how I feel about yardwork and gardening. It's a pretty big deal and it still kinda freaks me out that I get off on it. It helps that I have a mom, MIL, sister and two SIL's who share my love (and cuttings and seeds and advice) for gardening. It is also funny to me that I am considered a bit of a green thumb in this neighborhood because Oh My Crap! The poor house plants that have died under my lackluster ministrations!





The End

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Did I say...


... this wasn't a photoblog? Huh, I musta lied.

Well hello, you're back! No stories today, instead we are doing some "Reality Blogging." The show I'm hosting is called So You Want To Be an American Poop Star."

Let's just get started... does anyone know how to get this microphone turned on? Crappin' thing!


There we go! Check... check... testing, testing one, two, three... check... check!

Alrighty, we're a go then. I'd like to introduce you to our first contestant... ME! and our judge is...

OH MY HECK!!!! IT'S CHRIS DAUGHTRY I TOTALLY LOVE YOU AAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!


Does Seacrest have to put up with a crazy fan base like this too?


Thank You so much for joining us... tune in next week for another riviting episode of "So You Want To Be An American Poop Star," and maybe I'll actually get some singing in.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Nude Doggerel

It has been almost a week since my last post... I wanted to thank everyone for their kind advice on my Pearl's plumbing. Quick update? Let's just say that things are better, I am quite sure that's about all the more details you want. Two words....

prune juice.

Where the flying hoodie-doo have I been? I have been attempting the impossible, my friend. I have been valiantly engaged in stemming the tides of Chaos! A.K.A. housework. The wee Bob is now seven months (almost) and I was sick to death of squalor and disorganisation.

I labored, bustled,
hustled and flowed,
made lists and beds,
I washed the clothes.
I fed the kiddos
and wiped a nose,
a bummie, a table...
I scrubbed up some toes.
For all of my efforts
I get in return
a house slightly cleaner
and a candle that's burned
on two ends
right down to the nub.

...and then Pearl got another ear infection in her other ear. Sleep deprivation plus uber-housekeeping equals... well I guess we'll never know in this household, will we? Because the Mama and the lack of sleep? Not a friendly combo.









So in lieu of actual blogging literature you get some doggerel and a gratuitous picture of a chubby baby.















Some gratuitous nudity (brought to you by Birdie).