Mine mine mine, all mine

things that should be really easy but are made difficult by clueless "customer support" people

So I'm still trying to get Charles to put together the Exersaucer that we got as a gift before Drew was even born.

Charles, however, kept blowing smoke about not being able to put together, without directions, something that was invented by NASA scientists as a way to cause parents to commit themselves to a mental institution.

On a side note, I can't wait until somebody I know has a baby shower. I'm soooo going to give them an Exersaucer as a gift, but before I do, I'm going to remove the directions. HA! HAHAHAHAHA!

Anyway.

OK, so what we need is 1 (one) set of assembly directions for the Evenflo Exersaucer Ultra.

No problem. I'm a computer-savvy kind of go-to problem-solving gal. What I'll do is, I'll pop on over to the Evenflo website, where no doubt I will find a handy-dandy list of printable assembly instructions for all of their baby products.

Let's see. I guess I would find assembly instructions under...um....FAQs? No doubt people are frequently asking Evenflo, "How the *&^%^ do I put together this &*(*&^ing piece of %^$?"

Whoa. Their FAQ is divided into categories. Like, 400 categories. OK, I'm not a customer service specialist, but if people have that many questions about your product, maybe you're not explaining yourself clearly enough in the manuals.

OK, let's try Category: Playtime: Bouncers.

Huh.

Now I need to choose a subcategory. Exersaucer, exersaucer....

Wait. I thought the Exersaucer was a bouncer. Apparently it's not. Apparently it's some other type of Category: Playtime.

Ohhhh. It's a "Category: Playtime: Activity Centers." Gotcha.

OK. There's like five different kinds of Exersaucers and none of them say "Ultra." Let's just try the basic "Exersaucer."

Click.

"Matching FAQs for Activity Centers, Exersaucer:"

(a lot of blank space)

Huh.

If you don't have a FAQ for it, then WHY WHY WHY does it have its own FAQ category?

Maybe it's under "Category: Playtime: Activity Centers: Exersaucer Baby."

"Matching FAQs for Activity Centers, Exersaucer Baby:"

(more blank space)

Yay! Another useless FAQ category!

Obviously, assemblage of their insanely complicated baby toys is not one of their frequently asked questions. I bet one of their most frequently asked questions is, "Who the hell designed your website?"

So. Back to the beginning. Let's try...."Replacement Parts"? Are assembly instructions considered a "part"? If so, are they replaceable? Or if we lose them, are we banished to a locked room full of unassembled Category: Playtime: Activity Centers: Exersaucers and forced to put them together sans directions in order to get out?

Clicking on "Replacement Parts"...

"Please enter the model number and the manufacturing date from your product in the fields above. See the diagram below for help in determining your model number (in purple) and manufacturing date (in blue):

6161263 10 APR 2003 (USA)
6161263c 10 APR 2003  (CANADA)

This information can be found on the back or bottom of most our products."

Huh.

See. I'm at work. And I regret to say that I DIDN'T CARRY THE FREAKING EXERSAUCER PARTS TO WORK WITH ME.

What is this unholy mess? Why can't I just click on "Exersaucer: Ultra assembly instructions" and get access to a nice, orderly PDF document that I can print out and take home to my poor, embittered husband? Why do I have to jump through your model number/manufacturing date hoops in order to access this crucial information? Are there so many different varieties of the Exersaucer Ultra that you can't keep track of all of their assembly instructions without model numbers? If so, do you think maybe you should try FOCUSING a little bit and not being so ADHD and SCATTERBRAINED? Do you think maybe it wouldn't be too much to ask that we be able to find some damn assembly directions on your website without having to search every single one of the 435 Exersaucer Ultra parts to see if it might contain the secret and apparently vitally important MODEL NUMBER? These aren't national secrets here; they're ASSEMBLY INSTRUCTIONS for a BABY TOY.

And by the way, who the hell designed your website?

The worst mommy at daycare

All the other mommies at Drew's daycare seem so...together. They drive around in sporty minivans or SUVs that cost more than I make in a year, while I'm squeaking into the parking lot in my 1999 Dodge Neon that's held together with baling wire and duct tape.

They never seem to forget their babies' bottles, or vegetables, or change of clothing, or diapers - all of which I have forgotten at one point or another, although not all at the same time.

Yesterday, when I arrived to pick up Drew, one of the Daycare People reached into his diaper bag and pulled out a half-full bottle of formula that we'd forgotten and left in there from the weekend.

"This is sour; you may want to boil this bottle when you get home," she said, with that look on her face that as much as said, 'you are lucky I'm not calling social services on you.'

I bet none of the other mommies leave spoiled milk in their babies' diaper bags.

I think I'm just feeling a bit blah today. Drew couldn't sleep last night because he has a stuffy nose and a cough. And when Drew doesn't sleep, nobody sleeps.

Plus, I have to go car shopping this weekend, since the mechanic gave the Neon only about two more months to live.

I dislike car shopping. I wish that cars were like houses and would last forever with the proper maintenance, so I'd never have to buy a new one.

Barring that, I wish I had enough money to be able to buy a car outright, because I hate trying to borrow money. No matter how good of a person you are, if you don't look perfect on paper you might as well be a homeless, jobless crack addict.

I own my own home (well, OK, the bank owns it, but I'm paying them on time!), have two cars that are paid in full, have been working at the same job for eight years, am only about $100 in debt and I have only one credit card, but yes...I was three days late on a credit card payment a few weeks ago.

BURN ME AT THE STAKE.

Maybe it won't be as bad as I think it will be. Maybe I could get my dad to go buy it for me.

"Here, dad, here's my tax refund - go get the best car you can, OK, thank you."

Somehow, I don't think he'll go for it.

drool and spitup and carrots, oh my

Went to see my parents this weekend, and the middle sister and her fiance and the youngest sister and her boyfriend came over on Saturday for dinner.

Now, these are both pretty nice guys, but they are also...well...a bit neat-freaky. Think Monk, but slightly toned down.

So it was extremely amusing to see their various reactions to Drew's prodigious amounts of puke, slobber, drool and general messiness.
The boyfriend, to be fair, was in his mid-20s, which means, being a guy, he has not yet hit full emotional maturity. He responded to the puking with that face you see people make when they bite into something really sour, but he generally refrained from making any comments. He's new, though, and it was his first time meeting "The Family", so he was probably merely exercising restraint and was secretly hurling in the bathroom.
The fiance, though, has been around a bit longer. His response was to bring to my attention, in slightly hysterical tones, every instance that a tiny bit of liquid would creep from between my son's lips.
"Uhhh...he's throwing up again...uhhh...", said while walking backwards very slowly, like you would move away from a rabid dog or a coiled rattlesnake.

I don't think I made things any better when I responded, "That's not throw-up. You should have seen what came out of his mouth this morning. Now that was some throw-up. I swear, it was three different shades of orange." (we've been experimenting with carrots this week.)

What was really funny was seeing my sister, who just adores Drew, holding him just inches from her fiance's face, while a long string of drool depended from Drew's lower lip, and watching her fiance trying not to cringe while still making appropriately happy "yes-I-really-want-to-have-a-baby-with-you" sounds.

I think next time I see him we'll discuss what colors Drew's poop turned after we fed him spinach.

If he can handle that, then we all know he's good enough for my sister.

The great high chair experiment

Charles got the pictures uploaded, so now I can show off Drew's first evening using his new high chair.

The main issue with the high chair, which was given to us as a baby shower gift by our wonderful friends Jack and Liz Ross, (insert shameless plug for their business here) is that getting him into it too closely resembles getting him into his car seat.
He hates getting into his car seat.
Once he's in it, he's fine, but actually getting him into it is like trying to wrestle a cat into a burlap sack.

So, there was a lot of squirming and grunting and crying involved with strapping him into his high chair.
And that was just from his dad.

Once he was safely ensconced in the chair, strapped in with so many harnesses that he could probably be safely launched into orbit, he settled down as soon as he saw the reward for his participation in this unreasonable torture:

"Ohhh, I think I'll have me some of that."

Now the problem became establishing that I, being much more manually dexterous than he, was to be the feeder, while he was to be the feedee.

Here you see me wrestling with my child to free the spoon from his grasp, which, for a five-month-old, is positively Herculean.

As the spoon is currently covered in orange goo sweet potatoes, this makes it rather slippery, which doesn't seem to affect his grip in the least.

Drew is very insistent that, despite the fact that he has very little hand-eye coordination, next to no manual dexterity and less than full use of his fine motor skills, he is, in fact, perfectly capable of feeding himself, thank you very much.

At the end of the whole experiment, his father asks:

"Did he actually eat any of it, or just wear it?"

What I write about when I can't write about what I want to write about

I was going to write about Drew's experience in his new high chair, but the narrative requires pictures in order to truly show the magnificence of the occasion and somebody (*cough*Charles*cough*) didn't upload the digital pictures as he swore to do.

He did, however, put together the aforementioned high chair, after slogging his way through about 200 pages of instruction in an unrecognizable foreign language, so I suppose I owe him props for that.

I suppose I also could learn how to upload digital pictures myself, but really, is that asking too much of myself? Is that putting too much pressure on me as a woman?

I think so.

So instead of showing you pictures of His Royal Drooliness in all his sweet-potato-eating glory, I am forced to write about my recent bout with tardiness at work.

I'm supposed to be at work at 8:30 a.m. However, this week I have not managed to arrive at my desk any earlier than 8:40.

In the grand scheme of things, 10 minutes certainly isn't anything to cry about. This is what I told my boss. Fortunately, my boss is a woman, with children, so she sort of "gets it."
She's got the corporate-boss-accountability-I-have-to-answer-to-someone-too side of her that tells her to berate me for being late, but then she has that full-time-working mommy side that says, "I know what it's like to try to blow dry your hair with one hand, put on mascara with the other and use one leg to rock the bouncy seat in which your baby is currently fussing."

Compounding the problem is the dropping-off-at-daycare ritual, which I can't seem to shorten to under 5 minutes, no matter how hard I try. I get Drew out of his car seat and he's so warm and snuggly and smiley and I can't just plop him down in his crib and run out the door, I just can't.

I suggested to the Day Care People that they have a drive-through window for drop-offs and pick-ups, but they threatened to call social services on me, so I stopped bugging them about it.
With what I'm paying them, though, I think I should at least expect curb-side service. I want girls in smart uniforms running to my car in the parking lot, taking Drew out of the backseat, grabbing his diaper bag, picking up the cooler with his bottles and then washing my windshield and checking my tire pressure.
When I pick him up, I want to drive up to the curb, honk my horn and have them run out with him already in his car seat and put him in the back for me. This would really help my tardiness problem.

Or I guess I could just wake up 10 minutes earlier.

A book report!

Mindy made me do it:

Instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

The nearest book was the one I've been reading during my lunch break: The Autobiography of Henry VIII, by Margaret George. This damn book is 939 pages long, so needless to say I get a lot of comments from restaurant waiters and staff who see me lugging it around, much of them having to do with my choice of "light" reading. Shuuuuttt uuup.

It's a fantastic book, and it has the added attraction of being long enough to last me through many lunch breaks so I'm never stuck having to go to lunch without something to read.

Here's the excerpt as per the instructions:

"But even had I wished to (which I assuredly did not!), I could not dwell on More for long, as things of much greater importance were taking place.
The French continued their belligerent actions, straining the forbearance of both Maximilian and Ferdinand, who were still honourably bound by the treaty of Cambrai.
The Pope had denounced Louis and appealed to me, to Maximilian, and to Ferdinand in turn."

See? Isn't that interesting? Don't you want to run right out and buy this book?

Male bonding in the grocery store

I sent my husband to the grocery store last night. His task was to pick up the following items:

• spaghetti
• fruit
• low-fat snacks for me to take to work
• a jar of sweet potatoes for Drew

The first three items posed no problem for him, unlike when he first started grocery shopping a few months ago and would call me periodically from the depths of the produce department exclaiming "What the *&$( are artichoke hearts and where the *&^%^ in this godforsaken wilderness of a grocery store would I find them?"

But then, he entered the heretofore uncharted waters of....The Baby Food Aisle.

As he described it, he was met with a vast, floor-to-ceiling wall filled with every imaginable flavor, size and color of infant, baby and toddler fare.

There were 14 different varieties of sweet potatoes alone.

As he stood there, bewildered, he noticed another man, about his age, standing further down the aisle, with a similar expression of befuddlement on his face.

Looking dazed and shellshocked, the man turned to my husband and said, "So, um, what do the stages mean?"

Charles said, "I was just wondering that myself."

They both looked back at the shelves, as if the answer to the mysterious "stages" question was imprinted somewhere between the innumerable jars, bottles and cans.

Guy: "I mean, is it like the diapers, where "stage one" is for really young babies and then it goes up from there?"

Charles: "Or maybe it starts at stage three and moves from there to stage one?"

The guy, now looking, as Charles described it, "like a deer caught in headlights", said, "My wife sent me out for peas. Just a jar of peas for the baby, she said."

Charles nodded sagely. "Mine sent me for sweet potatoes."

Guy: "So, um. What are you going to get?"

Charles: "Well...um...I guess....stage one?"

Guy: "What if we're wrong? We'll have to come back out here."

Charles: "I know! I'll call my wife and just ask her!"

He whipped out his trusty cell phone, but alas, I had turned off the ringer on the phone was busy nursing Drew and couldn't answer.

Charles: "Damn."

Guy: "Yeah."

Charles: "*&^$ this. I'm buying stage one. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong."

Guy: "Yeah!"

Guy: "OK, so...we've agreed. Stage one?"

Charles: "Do you think that's right?"