he STILL doesn't know what hit him.

i've known IAlsoHaveADream for three or four years, but had never met him in person until last weekend. after years of playing scrabble ("funstain isn't a word?"), counselling each other through romantic lows ("oh god don't stick your penis in that.") and mocking each other (and everyone else, for that matter) on various message boards and blogs, we finally confirmed, in the flesh, that neither of us was really a 50-year-old 300-lb pedophile.

NurseSexy (the reason i no longer have to ask him not to stick his penis in someone), needing to top his birthday present to her - a weekend getaway and an engagement ring - contacted his out of town friends to have us secretly fly in on the weekend of his 30th birthday.

NS picked me and PositiveRoleModel up from the airport at noon. Since, as NS put it, he's as regular about coming home for lunch as he is about pooping, we couldn't go to their house between 12:10 and 12:50. so as we sat in a subway eating our soup and sandwiches, NS told PRM that he looked exactly like her ex-fiance, right down to his mannerisms, facial expression, posture, walk, and the way he positioned his feet while sitting. she was so in awe of the resemblance that PRM was apologizing to her for his looks. so when we rolled into the parking lot at their house at 1:00 PM, it was a bit surprising to find not only IAHAD's car parked in the lot, but what appeared to be IAHAD in the car, looking out the window in the direction of NS. with her ex-fiance's doppelgaenger in the front passenger seat. we ducked, though the possibility that PRM and IAHAD's first meeting would be a fistfight was pretty goddamned funny. (okay, at least i thought it was funny.) so while we waited for IAHAD to finish his first-ever late lunch, we went back to the airport to pick up SuperBestFriend and LiquidCourage. in the meantime, IAHAD eventually moseyed his lazy ass back to work, and we immediately started texting him at work - from his living room - to fuck with his head. i forget now what SBF and LC were texting him, thanks to all the pain-go-bye-bye juice we ingested a few hours later. i do remember that i had told him that we were taking a road trip to new glarus, WI for oktoberfest - totally believable, since we probably would have done exactly that had it not been for the birthday party.

pretending to be completely 'faced, i texted him:
Sausaeg eat comtes7t at 5pmd and fuck yeah0 acccordians polka0!

and received the response:
Grr argh ughh BEER!

confirmed! he had no clue. with that taken care of, the party was on. LC, SBF, PRM and i took NS's "decorations fund" to a couple of party stores. and by "a couple of party stores," i mean "a regular party store and a porn store." so, armed with a "create your own banner" letters set, a pack of penis-y balloons, a pack of regular round balloons, some penis-shaped drinking straws, a penis shotglass, a bucket o' show-us-your-boobies bead necklaces, some stick-on mustaches (for the balloons, duh), a male blow-up doll, and - our one and only tasteful purchase - a "happy 30th birthday" helium balloon, we headed to the reserved tables at the bar, ordered one of everything fried from the menu and many, many buckets of beer, and got to work:


2 ball balloons + 1 penis balloon + mustache and/or sharpied nonsense = comedy gold! seriously, at least half of the other patrons busted out laughing every single time we hung up yet another genetalia-themed decoration.



"HAPPY BIRTHDAY - U R TEH 5EXY BIZZATCH"


"30 JOHN IS A KOMMIE"
come on. there were red stars in the banner kit. you would have done the same thing in my place.


PUSSY COOKIE. always funny. especially when hung on the table bearing your mrs. fields birthday cookie cake.


yep, he's surprised. or retarded. take your pick!



from left to right (and with total disregard for rows, just to make it confusing): LiquidCourage, SuperBestFriend, NurseSexy, the blowup doll, IAlsoHaveADream, PartyGirl, WelfareLoser, BlackLikeMe, PositiveRoleModel, girl whose name i will never remember because i am bad with names and it wasn't on her t-shirt, SleepingBooty, BookHookup's significant other, and BookHookup. LC designed the t-shirts - dork awesomeness incarnate. humping cows from poorly drawn life and made-up name on the front, "where pretty goes to die" and the number 30 in humongoid sports-jersey-esque font on the back.


then LC bought a round of shots. birthday boy got the awesomest shotglass and sucked it dry...


...and as you can see from the fuzzy facial expressions in every subsequent picture, this is the point at which the "surprise birthday party" became the "orgy none of us will remember in its entirety saturday morning."





but i think the clear winner in the fun category was the blow-up doll. he got more lovin than anyone else.





now, besides the actual party, there are three other significant stories to tell from that night. to do it properly, they will each need their own post. you probably won't have to wait too long to hear them, since i'm racing to get my version of events published before IAHAD does. it's important to get there first, because the truth is irrelevant. whoever tells the story first, tells it loudest, and repeats it the most often controls the nature of the official history. if you don't believe me, just ask the republican party. palin TOTALLY didn't want that bridge to nowhere.

a bit of a sneak peek, though. the titles of the stories:

THE EPIC CUNTCAR TACKLE FAIL OF 2008

RICO FROM AFGHANISTAN FINDS HIMSELF UNABLE TO SHUT UP AS HE FILMS THE GOINGS ON IN THE NOW-UNISEX MEN'S ROOM (aka, "FUCK THE INTERNETS!")

PRM LEAVES HIS ASS UNATTENDED IN A STRIP CLUB ...AGAIN

the rest of the weekend was comparatively tame. played a lot of rockband (which led to me preordering rockband 2 the minute we got home... october 18, wooooo!), chased lizards, picked bananas, barbecued, took a walk on the beach,


where we got to crash both a wedding and a mass baptism,

watched a gators game at a bar literally on the water (which led to PRM putting florida high on his list of potential places to move to),

and ate out in downtown palm beach (which led to all of us making fun of legions of scary botox mommies,) ate some authentic mexican food in an authentic mexican restaurant,


it was so authentic that, in the airplane vacation-hype magazine that we perused on the flight home, it was named "most authentic mexican restaurant in west palm beach." also, it was so authentic that IAHAD was able to purchase a bag full of oddly-named mexican goodies to amuse my kids: bimbo cookies, demon nuts, bubbaloco (can't really read the label, but it seems to be chile-flavored bubbalicious), some stack o' something that appears to be a quintuple-decker mexican moonpie, and a chocolate bar called bubulubu.

oh, and also? we shared some of the most fucked-up things we've ever seen on the internet. NS had never seen goatse or tubgirl, so of course we had to start by devirginating her eyes on those counts. then, we all disagreed on the exact progression of events in 2girls1cup (probably because our brains blocked as much of it as humanly possible,) so we had to review that video (mostly in half-second glimpses through the fingers covering our eyes.) then came lemonparty (if you google it, don't say i didn't warn you) and... i don't know what the video is called, but it's that one movie of that one guy? in washington state? where his kind of lovin isn't illegal? you know, that guy who later died? doing that same thing he did on that one video? the video that prompted washington state to consider passing some bestiality laws? all i can say is, at least he died doing what he loved. we should all be so lucky. and, in the one non-brain-injuring bit of surfing, we checked out the lolcats at i can has cheezburger. somehow, i have managed to stay unaware of the existence of one the oldest, most venerated, most popular, and funniest blogs on teh interwebs. and now that prm and i have spent the last three nights laughing our butts off at teh kittehs, MonkeyBeef will never learn to speak english. because now when i talk to him, i say things like "you has no noms, behbeh!"

the prank files: victoria's secret

you know what the best part about those "free panty" coupons you get from victoria's secret 4-6 times a year is? it's not the panty itself, it's the fact that they give it to you in the cutesy little pink gift bag with pink tissue paper. classy! also, fun to save for future misuse. i generally use them for wrapping gifts to my most masculine friends, but i came up with an even better misuse this time!

so TexasRoadKill, like 95% of men that i know, is both clueless about women's clothing, and cheap. so when he bought a "one size fits all" sexy ensemble off the sale rack for MyEvilTwin, it was not surprising (to me or MET, anyway) that it was big enough to wrap around her a couple of times. even more amusing, the company that shipped it to them shipped it three times, meaning lady vagimort got one, and i got one. i ran the one they gave to me through the sewing machine, removed about 1/3 of the fabric, and regifted it to MET in a heavily vandalized victoria's secret gift bag.




note to the pandoras in the audience: if you type in the url i scrawled over the "victoriassecret.com" on the bag, you can't ever un-see it. funnels. pie plates. i'm just sayin.

the iowa driver improvement program

...or, as i like to call it, the "shitty driver brainwashing re-education torture camp."

in my first ten years of driving, i had not a single adverse incident: no accidents, no speeding tickets, no drug-induced police chases. then, in the last year, i got two speeding tickets. oops. i'm not a habitual speeder, so no big deal, i just needed to make sure i didn't speed again so i wouldn't get that third ticket that would put me in danger of losing my license.

and my brilliant plan would have worked perfectly were it not for the fact that, 8 months ago, when my dashboard "brakes!" light came on, i took my car in to get new shoes and pads from someone who apparently didn't feel like replacing what i later learned were badly worn rotors. turns out that new brake pads and shoes aren't worth a crap on worn out rotors. now, what with the speed limit in this town being 25 miles per hour - every street, throughout the town - i never noticed the brakes weren't that great. stopping from 25 miles an hour or less isn't terribly taxing on the brakes.

my luck ran out one day when i was the 4th car back, sitting in line at a stoplight. the first car started to roll forward. so did the rest of us. then the first car slammed on the brakes. so did the rest of us. and we all stopped. just not quite in the right order. i was the last one to stop. you'd think this wouldn't be a huge deal, since i hadn't even hit the gas yet and was stopping suddenly from about 4 miles per hour, but it was just enough that i smacked the ass of the car in front of me, which smacked the car in front of her, which smacked the car in front of her. it made a fairly spectacular series of crashing noises, prompting spazmonkey to ask if we had crashed, if any cars had rolled over, and if any were on fire. the answers being a fairly boring yes, no and no, he promptly fell asleep, sparing me the worry of what he might say when the cop showed up.

rather than try to fight the ticket on the slim chance that a judge would sympathize with a bad brake job that had happened almost a year earlier, i paid the ticket, and signed up for the iowa driver improvement program - 8 hours of my saturday vs. losing my license. no contest!

in, short, it could have been worse. the instructor let us know that she was legally required to keep us in the community college conference room from 8 AM until 4:30 PM, but, since the commnity college was conductiong interviews for a new president (the previous president having just been fired over some pictures of him pooring beer down the throats of some underage community college students on his private boat), we had to vacate the room we were in by 3:30 PM. yay!

what followed was a fairly excruciating 6-and-a-half hours. you might think that the official iowa driver improvement program would cover rules of the road. you'd be wrong, though! the entire course is dedicated to exploring your personality type, your feelings, and how they relate to your shitty driving. i entertained myself by sending text messages to PositiveRoleModel and IAlsoHaveADream, and vandalizing my workbook.

8:00 AM - class begins.

9:30 AM - text message to PRM & IAHAD.
We just got done with sharing our feelings. textbook has bad grammar. can't. find. teh lulz. need heroin.



10:31 AM - text message to PRM & IAHAD.
have now been given wrong definitions for 3 words. also, did you know that desperation and stupidity were "values?" now you do! send roofies.

11:48 AM - text message from PRM.
Sounds fun. ill go mow lawn so you dont get all teh luz.

12:12 PM - text message to PRM & IAHAD.
talkin bout some r e s p e c t! ow! i feel good! group hug!



1:17 PM - text message to PRM & IAHAD.
my personality type is blue! i crash cars when i cry! what i really need is to feel like you understand me! and cute new shoes! trying to get high by alternately hyperventilating and asphyxiating now.

1:22 PM - text message from IAHAD.
How was i not aware you had to take this awesome class? And where do i sign up?



2:11 PM - text message to IAHAD.
sign up by causing a 4car accident!

2:19 PM - text message from IAHAD.
Nice job, champ! You ok?

3:21 PM - text message to PRM & IAHAD.
getting diploma now

the day was salvaged by heading out on AccidentProne's boat for the remainder of the daylight hours. he only tried to kill PRM once and TexasRoadKill twice, which means it was a pretty tame outing, especially since he had a pimpy new motor on the boat (it was his gift to his girlfriend for her birthday. he's thoughtful like that.)

en garde!

martial arts are cool. when i started college, i joined the school's tae kwon do club. strangely enough, i actually got pretty good at it. i enjoyed it. unfortunately, my spine did not. around about the red and brown belts, when passing a belt test involved jump spin kicks to break stacks of boards, my vertebrae had a conversation that went something like this:


S1: ow.

L5: dude. this sucks.

S1: i have an idea. if we pop this disc out from between us, she'll give up this tae kwon do bullshit QUICK.

L5: uh, dude. if we get all up on each other like that, isn't that kind of gay?

S1: who the fuck cares, dude? i'd suck a cock right now if it'd end the pain.

L5: fair enough. okay, on the next axe kick. one, two, three, PUSH!


so, after two years of an uneasy truce with spinal alignment, i slipped a disc in my lower back, and i slipped it HARD. i've slipped that particular disc out once every couple of years or so since about age 16, and always managed to get it back into place in a few days, but not this particular time. after 6 months of limping on a partially numb foot, many appointments with internal medicine ("you don't need an xray. you need codeine!"), physical therapy ("oh, the situps HURT? uhhhh... lemme see... yeah, my book doesn't have a protocol for that.") and finally a single appointment with an orthopedist ("well, you're not a surgical case, so quit wasting my time.") i finally went to a chiropracter. and i don't swear by chiropracters, i know they can do more harm than good about half the time, but lord, did it ever work like a charm in that case. so then i spent another six months strengthening every muscle in my torso - to the point that i could do some completely impressive ironman tricks, like reverse situps with my torso hanging out off the edge of the bed - and went back to tae kwon do. only a year left to my black belt, but oh lord, it was not going to happen. within 6 weeks, my back started hurting again, my foot was tingling, and i decided there was nothing sexy about being a 21-year-old black belt in a wheelchair.

so i spent the next ten years gaining and losing 60 lbs at a time to crank out some shorties. these are not the best conditions for taking up a new sport. but with my last body-morphing experience nearly two years behind me, and every tube prm and i have between us tied, burned, scarred, or otherwise completely fucked up, it's (hopefully) safe to take up a new sport. and that sport is fencing!

i had wanted to try out fencing when i first went to college, but at the university of illinois, there was no fencing club, and the one class they offered in fencing was for theater majors only. there was a fencing club in ann arbor, but it was balls-out expensive. i finally lucked out: the university of iowa has a competitive fencing club, AND it's open to the public, AND it's affordable: $25 for the 12-week beginner's class, and $40 a year for "club dues" (ie, access to the armory. weapons, wooooooooooo!) so RadHippie, who discovered the existence of the club and got us signed up for it, and i are now members of the Hawkeye Fencing Club.

as we headed to the first session of the beginners' class, RadHippie wondered how many mockable sub-types of people would be present. i guessed "fat chicks who want to say they're doing something athletic so they can pretend they're really trying to lose weight, but secretly think that fencing will never actually cause them to break a sweat." RadHippie guessed "fat D&D dudes." both those subtypes were present. in abundance. (note to the dude in the "stonehenge rocks!" t-shirt: i stare because you're hot. really.) also, we were both expecting maybe 20 or so people, but there had to be at least 200 at that first class. and though the 6 instructors spent most of the first class talking and demonstrating the three sword styles, luckily, they did have us work on an opening stance for a full five minutes. the opening stance in fencing, "en garde," involves going into a bit of a squat. 5 minutes of standing with your knees slightly bent was enough to ensure that the second class had only around 100 people in it. most of the chub was gone, as were most of the 40-something-dorky-parents/gangly-preteens combos, of which there had been several.

i have to interrupt here to say this: i don't know what posesses some parents to join a sport with their children. family fun is one thing. there are lots of things you can do as a family. and when your children are adults, if you're not too bitched up and old, sports can be one of them. but i don't want to see your ass on any kind of competitive sports field with your non-adult children and their peers, okay? please. when i was in tae kwon do, my class was all college students, but the same academy also ran childrens, seniors, and family classes. when i went in for belt tests, i'd always see at least one 30-something mommy taking a yellow-belt test at the same time as her 7-year-old son. and lady, let me tell you, you falling on your ass in front of all the other 7-year-olds could not do more damage to YOUR 7-year-old than if you had showed up drunk to his grade school, lifted your hannah montana t-shirt, and announced that blowjobs were half-price for boys under age 10. cringe with me. i'm just sayin. don't join sports WITH your kids. okay? just don't.

in fact, it was a couple of weeks before any of the kids even caught me practicing the footwork - mostly because i haven't told them i'm doing something that, when explained to them, is going to sound an awful lot like "jedi lightsaber training," and not being invited is likely to really piss them off (when they see me walk out the door on tuesday nights and hop into RadHippie's car, i tell them we're going to go eat vegetables.) so SpazMonkey finally did see me advancing, retreating, and lunging across the living room floor. after making sure i hadn't simply dropped my wii controller, he happily joined in and has now added some fancy moves to his lightsaber repertoire, but he sure as hell will not be accompanying me to fencing club anytime in this life. (we'll just pretend this is because i'm worried about his rep with his peers, and not because i'm pretty sure he's about three years away from being able to legitimately kick my ass.)

so anyway, the second class was a bit more intense. we stayed in the squatty, straight-backed, pretend-there's-a-very-straight-glass-dildo-on-the-floor-that-you're-trying-to-sit-on-without-tearing-anything en garde stance for a damn-near non-stop 45 minutes, and for at least half of that we were advancing and retreating across the floor (or "piste," if you want to be all gay about it. which, in case you couldn't tell from my dildo analogy, i totally do.)

RadHippie, whose job does not involve constant squatting and running around, was a little sore the next day. my job, which involves lots of running up and down stairs, squatting, and standing up with 10-30 lbs in my arms, prepared me pretty well. i wasn't very sore... but when i tried to practice again the next day, i damn near fell over after 5 minutes worth. running around after a bunch of little turds keeps me n good enough shape that, on an 8-mile bike ride into and back out of waterton canyon in the rockies, i felt fine the next day (unlike some of my homies), so this was one HELL of a workout. RadHippie was sure the 3rd class would be down to about 20 participants; i figured there'd be at least 50. some of those chubby dudes are going to work through the pain once a week to get to the part where they finally put weapons in our hands, and won't give up until they realize that all that not practicing in between classes has made them really suck at fencing. i won that bet, and there were at least 50 people at our third class. (my final prediction is that sometime around midterms, christmas break at the latest, we'll hit that 20-or-so number as the last of the adhd crowd wanders off.)

it feels good to be in a sport again, doing something athletic where i'm not only working my ass off, but also learning, practicing, and improving skills. it's like playing the banjo, only with pain! it's competitive, it's fun, and it's even a martial art (i told this to JokerJitsu, the amateur world champion cruiser weight mixed martial artist, and got about the response i expected: "that's not a martial art. and it's also gay.")



okay. so he may be a foot and a half taller than me, outweigh me by nearly double, 3 times as fast and god knows how many times stronger. but i have a sword, bitch!

okay, not yet. but i will eventually! there are three swords, and associated fighting styles, to choose from: foil, epee, and saber. foil was described as being very strategic, like a game of chess. epee was described as being faster-paced, more of a balance between speed and strategy. saber was described as sort of a balls-out hack-and-slash with no time to think.

as you may have guessed, i'm gravitating toward the saber. i may be small, but i have years of mortal kombat button-mashing under my belt! i'll be unstoppable!

guess what your kids want for christmas!

bakugan.

one of the advantages to walking my kids to school is that i get to see what all the little kids are wearing and playing with. this way, i get a heads up on what's hot, and what needs to be on my kids' wishlists. also, i can gague how cool or uncool my kids are. (answer: not as dorky as they could be!)

when i say "walk my kids to school," i mean that my third grader plows ahead of me to play catch with a football with some friends. my kindergarteners will stay with me until they see one of their friends ahead or behind, and then tear off down the sidewalk to exchange high-fives and incoherent greetings. i'd feel bad, but i'm not alone. for example, PrincessNinja does the same thing to her mom, StyleQueen. fair enough, she's in second grade. but her younger sister, ScreamySpaz, just started doing the same thing last week. This is especially funny since ScreamySpaz is still in preschool, and is just walking her big sister to school with her mom. she runs ahead to get to the school first, and then has to wait for her mom to catch up to her (she's tried to hide behind SpazMonkey and DramaQueen in their kindergarten line, which would totally work if she wasn't a head taller than them). when her mom catches up, they turn around and ScreamySpaz runs ahead all the way back home. at this point, the whole "walking PrincessNinja to school" thing has pretty much been thwarted. in fact, i didn't see StyleQueen this morning. She may have given up entirely.

So, anyway. basically, i walk MonkeyBeef to school at roughly the same time his big brothers walk themselves to school.

yeah. bakugan. all the kids have them. i'm assuming there's a tv show associated with the toys. we haven't seen it. my kids haven't asked for the toys yet, but they're slow. i put it on their wishlists. just doing my part to keep my kids at 7 or lower on the 1-to-10-nerditude scale.

hmm. okay. so i'm looking at this stuff... i like. these little robot thingies that roll up into a ball, then pop open and transform when you throw them into battle. here's the cool part... they're magnetic. and some of the trading cards, which you lay out onto the field of battle, are magnetic, and the cards affect the motion of the figurines. cooooooooooooool shit.

and this is why my kids get awesome toys... because PositiveRoleModel and i love awesome toys. i got the "are those lobsters crawling out of your ears?!?" look from PewPewPew's mom just the other day when he ran up to me to tell me he had just bought the republic gunship lego set. so i got all excited with him. then he said, yeah, but we had to waste almost a hundred dollars on it. at which point i reassured him that, since the set came with both asajj ventress AND plo koon minifigures, it was most definitely NOT a waste of money.

and this is one of the top 3 reasons why i have so few female friends.

so my one, persistent thought tonight has been:

so what the hell do you get when you google "google"?

i was honestly expecting an easter egg. i'm quite nerdily disappointed, here.




yep! it's that kind of party tonight! i'm getting back to my nachos and oktoberfest tasting project... so many brands, so little fridge space.

once again, my children spoke in public. this time, it was on camera.

okay. let me preface this post by saying: i find it utterly distastful when people indoctrinate their children with their political views before the shorties are old enough to understand them. i get pissed when i see a little kid sitting on a parent's shoulders, wearing a besloganed t-shirt, shaking a little fist, face scrunched up while screaming "life begins at conception!" or "affirmitive action is reverse discrimination!" my kids have no idea that i have a negative opinion of one of the most terrifyingly stupid people on the planet, our current president (though EvilGremlin, now in third grade, has realized on his own that the guy is less than articulate. if he happens to hear W speak for more than 30 seconds, he usually peppers me with questions like "did he say that right?") call me old-fashioned, but i think they should believe in respect for the office of the presidency for at least as long as they believe in santa claus. they know there's a presedential election coming up, and they know i prefer obama over mccain. (i've explained that they both want to do a good job, but i think obama's ideas for how to fix some things will work better than mccain's, but nobody really knows for sure, so sometimes people wind up arguing about it.)

now, fast forward a bit. the boys have been asking for hawkeye paraphernalia for a while. and that shit's expensive! a single, 3-inch hawkeye sticker costs $2.99 at the grocery store. i scored a short stack of bumper stickers (for the swim and dive teams) at the student gym on my way out of tuesday night's fencing class, which they plastered on their t-shirts to wear to school yesterday. that's a little too ghetto even for me, so i took them downtown to the cheap-ass "buy one school shirt get two free" store downtown. i think it must be part of a chain, since the "hawkeye den" here bears an uncanny resemblance to the "discount den" in champaign, IL, right down to the selection of shitty candy in mexican retail wrappers.

we actually never made it to the den, because after stopping at the library to drop off a stack of books about tarantulas, books on cd, and 8 bajillion japanese pop music cds (seriously? endlessly fascinating, to the point that PositiveRoleModel needed to buy a copy of Puffy Ami Yumi's cartoon network cd, featuring the theme song to Teen Titans. like his children screeching along to kurt cobain, he can entertain himself for hours by putting that song on repeat and screaming in his best little-japanese-girl voice, "teen titaaaaaans!") we passed by the fountains on the ped mall. it was the warmest day in two weeks - high temperature of 70-something instead of 50-something - so the kids dived right in.






while they were running around screaming, i noticed a threesome of old people standing nearby, scanning the crowd and talking. one had a microphone, one had a television camera, and one had a stack of glossy 8-1/2x11 glamour shots of sarah palin. i couldn't quite hear what they were talking about (mostly because i had to keep chasing down MonkeyBeef to prevent his soggy little ass from hug-tackling any dog that walked by) but it seemed that they were looking for man-on-the-street interviewees for some sort of republican propaganda.

so when we left half an hour later, i spotted the crew again, now sitting at a sidewalk cafe. a man-on-the-street was leaning into the microphone, delivering a rambling monologue with furrowed brow and expansive, shakespearian-soliloquy hand gestures. important stuff, yo!

SM: HEY, I WANNA TALK AT THE CAMERA.

me: keep walking.

DQ: did he say obama?

EG: yep, they're talking about barack obama!

me: keep. walking.

SM: OBAMA'S GONNA BE A AAAAAAAAAAAWESOME PRESIDENT!

remember that SpazMonkey speaks in an earsplitting shriek even when he's calm, and he was EXCITED that he knew what these people were talking about in front of the big-ass tv camera. so let's just say he completely drowned out whatever the man-on-the-street was saying. then, as if by prior arrangement, the three older boys suddenly went into pep rally mode while MonkeyBeef sucked his thumb and added the occasional screech. so, somewhere, maybe on fox news, or maybe on a republican national committee promotional video, some poor backroom sound technician had to try to edit out the next 90 seconds or so of three soggy little boys jumping up and down as i ushered them past the interviewee, chanting "O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! woooooooooo!" they couldn't have done better had i actually put them up to it. i knew that watching the daily show with them all summer would pay off!

it's time to say goodbye...

...to MonkeyBeef's stroller. that thing has survived 8-1/2 years of carting two brother-butts around, as well as countless pukes and poops and food spills. i think it's finally about had it, though - and not just because i hit it with my car last week! he's just pretty much done sitting it. he'll probably use it every now and then for the next six months or so, to haul his butt back to the car after he's exhausted himself one way or another, but other than that, he's too old for it (which is good, since i think we'll get 8-12 more butthauling-hours out of it before the bent front axle breaks.) sitting in a stroller, which is massively entertaining to kids between 6 and 12 months of age, starts to lose its charm after the first birthday; by 18 months or so, about 90% of kids find it as charming as a 53-year-old prostitute passed out in her own vomit. other than getting picked up to cross the street, taking a walk with the boy now always involves him walking. still pitches a massive fit anytime i attempt to hold his hand, but he's learned to rein in the id a bit and now limits himself to the sidewalk, so outings can be almost civilized. ahhh, milestones.

he's hit a lot of milestones lately. and by "milestones," i mean "dirty tricks." he can hang like a spider monkey from the new, over-his-head candy drawer. he can rummage through the drawer of plastic cups until he comes up with one that's tall enough to reach the water dispenser on the refrigerator, fill the cup, take a drink, pour the rest of the cup out on the floor, then go slipping back and forth through it. he can quietly open the front door and then beat ass down the sidewalk. best of all, he can climb up into a kitchen chair, climb up onto the kitchen table, pour a soda out, and happily sit and suck soda out of his own pants while daddy's busy mopping up the table. and when we quickly instituted a PUSH YOUR CHAIR IN THE MINUTE YOU GET OUT OF IT rule, he immediately began exploiting its gaping loophole: all he has to do is bumrush a brother who's sitting in a (pre-pulled-out-from-the-table) chair. you'd think 26 lbs vs 37, 39 or 50 lbs wouldn't get very far, but he's been successful about 20% of the time. and, since we've made it very clear that he will not be getting away with beating up his brothers, he's already working on figuring out how to pull out a chair himself (i'm almost hoping he'll tip one over on himself and never try it again, btu he seems to understand that he needs to pull either at or below the center of the chair's gravity, so he may be pulling it off sooner rather than later.)

so, all of this is a bit advanced for a 19-month old. exactly how advanced? glad you asked! a social worker/ speech therapist team showed up last week to evaluate the Beef's "delayed language acquisition," (ie, his tendency to speak like R2D2.) as part of their assessment, they asked a series of questions about each of 6 different developmental areas, from language to fine motor to social skills. it was entertaining as hell to watch them try to figure out which box to check based on my answers.

Q: what does he do when he doesn't want the food he's offered?

A: stomps on it. or if he's really pissed, puts it in his mouth, runs to the garbage, and pretends to puke it up with lots of retching noises.

"that's... creative."

Q: how does he do with climbing?

A: (no sooner was the question out of her mouth than MonkeyBeef suddenly came plowing across the dining area, leaped face-first onto the back of one of the rocking recliners, yanking it back so far that it looked like it might fall over entirely; then as it rocked back forward, he somersaulted down the back of the chair to land squarely on his butt in the seat.)

"wow. that answers that one!"

et cetera. anyway, in every other area, his skills measured between 17-26 months of age, but his language skills are at 10-12 months. see? i TOLD you he was retarded!

anyway. the therapists were awesome, not at all perturbed by things that didn't go by the book, realistic, and reassuring. in short, they said if i was worried, they'd be happy to offer services right now ("services" being them coming once a month to teach me some ways to goad him into talking, rather than some shitty weekly clinic appointment full of structured boring bullshit), but they didn't really see any red flags; he's just a late talker. they said they'd call back to check on him around his second birthday, and i should feel free to call them any time if i was worried about him.

anyway. here's the retard's official 18-month portrait. and the nice lady at the sears portrait studio worked for every penny of that $9.95 sitting fee!

kids say the darndest things

EvilGremlin watching PewPewPew throw handfuls of legos about the toy room:

EG: wow, you sure can make a big mess.

PPP: yeah, and sometimes i stop up the toilet and the poop goes everywhere.




EvilGremlin and DayDreamer walking home from school, discussing the book Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the A.D. 2358 Voyage to Darwin IV:

EG: i just can't figure out how they figured out all this stuff that happened in the future.

DD: uuhhhh... really?

EG: do you know?

DD: yeah. it's fake.

EG: no it's not.

DD: think about it. it has to be.

EG: look, don't you think that's a question best left to the scientists to decide?

(and before you decide i'm just being sloppy in my recollections of how an 8-year-old talks, realize that eg also uses "nor" in conversation. because awkwardness should never deter you from useful words or phrases!)




Spazmonkey checking out all my straight pins in my sewing basket:

SM: CAN I TOUCH IT?

me: no.

SM: WHAT'S GONNA HAPPEN IF I DO?

me: you'll bleed.

SM: BUT IT'S SO SHINY AND BEAUUUUUUUUTIFUL! IT DOESN'T LOOK HURTY!

EG: yeah, but that's how it always is in nature. it's the beautiful things that'll hurt you.




walking to school with PewPewPew and his mom and his new pet cat:

PPP: and i named her Indiana Jones! That's short for Lego Indiana Jones!

Pmom: yyyyyyep. *i* call her Miss Kitty for short.

PPP: (thinks he's whispering) i'm not sure why she does that.

EG: yeah. it's not even really short for Lego Indiana Jones.




PewPewPew and EvilGremlin playing in the toy room:

EG: did you call your mom?

PPP: actually, i called my dad. my mom's not home.

EG: where is she?

PPP: i dunno. she just wandered off somewhere. she does that ALL THE TIME. just wanders off somewhere and doesn't come back until... well, i think she comes back when she gets hungry.

wicked little critta

so tonight's post was going to be about my first fencing class last night, but i just finished sewing the brown jedi costume, it's too late to whip up a massive post like that, so tonight, i bring you a quick update on what that little ratshit asshole turdbrain devilspawn toddler of ours has been up to.

like the pubic lice problem he will someday pick up in his transition from boy to man, he picked up an attitude problem in the transition from baby to toddler. i know i've mentioned this attitude problem a few times over the last six months or so. if you're just joining us, this post should give you a pretty good idea of where we are at 19 months of age.

he got two head wounds today - both from trying to get away with some sneaky bullshit.

this afternoon, i heard a sound that has become familiar since he learned second-most-awesome trick this week*: the sound of him belly-slamming the baby gate hard enough to pop it open. in case you were wondering, it sounds something like this: grunt-rattlerattlerattle ... grunt-rattlerattlerattle ... grunt-rattle-THUMP-oooof!-heh-heh-heh-GAH!pitterpatterpitterpatterpitterpatter...

of course i know where he's headed: straight for his favorite toy. magnetix! you know, the baby-killing toy made of super-strong magnets that gets recalled every six months or so? that one. we've got a couple bajillion of them. in the toy room. where MonkeyBeef isn't allowed. hence the baby gate. the one he just figured out how to open at will!

so i take off after him. he looks over his shoulder, snarls at me, and runs faster. he dives for the box of magnetix on the far side of the room and starts clicking them together as fast as he can, eyeing my approach. as i reach the side of the table where he stands, he goes utterly still, tracking my progress, and as i reach my hands out to grab him, he suddenly throws himself forward like he's going to slide into first. i assume his intent was to dive under the table. unfortunately, he suffers from a common ailment of toddlerhood, technically known as a "lack of situational awareness." anyway, his plan would have worked beautifully and bought him at least another 30 seconds of magnet-building fun were it not for his lack of awareness of the situation at hand - that situation being that his superpowers do not include the ability to pass his massive noggin through a hardwood tabletop. this may or may not have hurt like hell. he screeched bloody murder about it, but not until after i had successfully wrestled the last of the magnetix out of his hands a full minute later.

later today, the boy (now sporting a fat purple bruise over one eyebrow) found the new candy drawer. he discovered the original candy drawer a few months ago. proving he is related to my mother - who suffers under the delusion that circus peanuts are not only fit for consumption by mammals, but also tasty - he loves him some smarties. now, when his fascination with smarties started, he would bring me a roll once a day or so, hand it to me, give me a look full of naked hope, smacking his lips, drooling, and beeping and booping like r2d2 in a desperate attempt to convey his deep feelings about the smarties. if i refused to open it, he'd bitch a little, then promptly forget about it 30 seconds later. if i consented to open it, he would giggle, clap, sit and spend the next 20 minutes happily drooling his way through the package. and then throw the empty wrapper in the garbage! because he's awesome like that!

but like heroin, he joneses for ever larger quantities ever more frequently. last weekend, i caught him ass-up, feet dangling a few inches off the ground, head buried in the low file drawer in the laundry room that serves as our candy drawer. turns out, he had figured out how to unwrap them himself, and was quietly plowing his way through his 4th package of smarties. so during his nap, i moved the candy to a much higher drawer on the far side of the kitchen.

MonkeyBeef was not amused. when he went to the former candy drawer later that afternoon, he simply stood there for several long, quiet minutes, staring into the empty drawer. then he carefully pulled the drawer out all the way, climbed into it and sat down. and he sat there for a while, contemplatively sucking his thumb. no tantrum, just some silent meditation. eventually, he came to the conclusion that, though he didn't know what the hell had happened to the candy, he was pretty sure the shit didn't just grow legs and run off. it had to still be in the house somewhere, right?!?!?!

i'd catch him peering eagerly into drawers in the kitchen periodically over the next few days. and then i'd laugh at him! then, tonight, i turned around from making dinner to find him sitting at my feet, munching on smarties. he grinned at me, and held one up. this could have been a "mommy, i will share with you because i love you soooooooo much!" or it could have been a "that's right, lady, it was time to GET ME MINE! tadaow, tadaow, how you like me now?" hard telling, since his vocabulary hasn't quite caught up to his attitude.

so i headed to the new candy drawer. he couldn't have known that my intent was to tape it shut, but he knew damn well that i was, as usual, up to no good. so he jumped up, pausing only to stuff the last three smarties in his cakehole, and ran for the drawer. and he totally beat me to it! but who got there first was kind of a moot point, since his siuational awareness deficit reared its ugly head again, and he neglected to stop *near* the drawer, instead stopping *on* the drawer. as in, with his *face* on the drawer.

at least his forehead is now symmetrically bruised. the social worker and speech therapist who are showing up to evaluate genius-boy's "delayed language acquisition" (translation: showing up to evaluate our home for drugs, lead paint chips, coca-cola in baby bottles, and evidence of sober parents) on friday morning should be impressed!

*what, you might be asking, is his most-awesome-trick this week? why, sneaking up behind his brothers who are busily scribbling themselves gift certificates to the bookstore and carefully cutting them down to the size of credit cards, grabbing the paper from the nearest unsuspecting brother, and either crumpling it up, stuffing it in the garbage, ripping it up, or waving it in said brother's face. i'm waiting for him to just drop trou and pee on it, just to hear daddy cackle.