Mine mine mine, all mine

happy yule, ya'll

Things I am Thankful For Today:

1. Nyquil. Sure it tastes like black death, but ah, the sweet release of unconsciousness.
2. Goody's Headache Powders. I don't think I need to state a reason. If you've used it, you'll understand.
3. Coffee. For restoring consciousness after overdosing on Nyquil.
4. Mom and Dad. For helping me to keep my child flu-free. Among many other things.

Speaking of Mom and Dad - Drew has now been with them for about a week all told. I greatly appreciate the fact that they're watching him so I can recuperate from the Great Plague of 2005, although I do have a strong suspicion, based on nothing but pure speculation, that they are unravelling all the work we've put into him to this point.

The 8:30 bedtime, the sleeping-in-his-own-crib, the not-whining if we don't pick him up right away - all of these will be destroyed.

At Grandma's and Grandpa's, he will tell us, I got to go to bed whenever I felt like it, I got to sleep in the big-people bed whenever I felt like it, and if I whimpered, by God, somebody picked me up PRONTO and they held me until I decided it was time to get down.

That's OK. We'll whip him back into shape in, oh, about two, maybe three years.

I hope everybody reading this has a wonderfully fabulous Christmas, or Hanukkah, or Winter Solstice, or whatever else the rest of you heathens celebrate.

I'll wrap this up with one of my all-time favorite Christmas stories:

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O'Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

yee-hah

Are you a Yankee or a Rebel?

I'm 74 percent Dixie, ya'll.

Status report today: feeling 90 percent better.

Throat: very scratchy, as if lined with sandpaper or other abrasive material.
Head: Mild pounding and dizziness, as if recovering from minor drinking binge (no, I'm not. I've been sick. Don't you people listen?)
Nose: Clear for the first time in three days. No mouth-breathing means less soreness in throat. And I don't look like an idiot. Yay.
Temperature: A relatively sane and safe 99 degrees. Shows my body isn't slacking off at fighting unwanted flu-bug intruders, but also is not trying to kill me by alternately freezing and burning me.

I'm greatly enjoying getting uninterrupted sleep while Drew is visiting the grandfolks', but I have to admit, it's way weird coming home from work without him.

I've caught myself picking up his little toys and books and sighing wistfully, as if he were off at summer camp in Europe for three months instead of a two-hour-drive away for two more nights.

To wrap up my short post today, I would like to thank the creator of the gift bag, whoever that may be, without whom my Christmas presents would be stuffed unceremoniously into plastic grocery bags at the last minute.

when it rains...

Let's see, when last I posted, we were in the midst of a major ice storm and without power at home. Fortunately, (all praise to Blue Ridge Electric Coop) we were only without power for one night. So we just cranked up the gas fireplace and snoozed in comparative comfort in our downstairs guest room. Putting on makeup by candlelight the next morning was tons of joyous fun.

By a further stroke of luck, Drew was visiting my parents in Georgia at the time, and they had power overnight.

That's where all of the good news ends, though, because since Sunday I have come down with the most hideous, wretched, bone-cracking, fever-inducing, achy, coughing, sneezing flu bug that ever lived on the planet. Temperature ranging from 100 to 104, chills, aches and a headache so bad that I would gladly drill a hole in my skull just to relieve the pressure. I chewed Advil like they were M&Ms, drank Nyquil like it was bourbon and went through most of a bag of throat lozenges - all to no avail.

So, we shipped Drew back off to Grandma and Grandpa in Georgia (thank God for grandparents) in hopes that maybe he wouldn't catch it.

I'm back at work today, armed with TheraFlu (cherry-of-death-flavored), Triaminic sore throat spray and Halls throat drops. I'm dizzy and I can't see straight, but I'm here.

Come to think of it, last Christmas I had the flu as well. Maybe I should actually get off my butt and get a flu shot.

Charles, of course, has managed to avoid getting sick, as he usually does. He woke up this morning complaining of a "scratchy throat."

"Scratch this," I said, as I showed him the ear thermometer that read 102.4.

"Oh wow, you're really sick," he said. "Maybe you shouldn't go to work."

Bleh. I couldn't not go to work today. I missed yesterday, and my boss, as is typical of management anywhere, doesn't believe anybody is actually sick enough to miss two days in a row unless they're throwing up blood or in a coma.

Five days 'til Christmas. With enough Nyquil and TheraFlu, I think I can lick this by then.

this is just great news

It's going to be a long, cold night.

"A spokeswoman for Duke Power, the main supplier of electricity in the hard-hit stretches of the Carolinas, said crews were working to restore power, but added that it could be a long process."

Or maybe a long, cold week, even.

"Duke officials could offer no estimates of when customers can expect power to be restored."

Proof that God has a sense of humor: my house has no power, but my workplace does.

this is why i love the south

Driving in to work this morning was like running an obstacle course. The ice storm had knocked down trees all over, and of course, if there's a road nearby, a tree will invariably fall in the direction of the road and not in the direction of the unpopulated, roadless woods.

However, one great thing about the South is the high proportion of pickup-truck-driving-chainsaw-wielding-good-ol'-boys, who live for the two days out of the year when we have ice storms.

And they were out in force this morning - with their burly, supersized-wheeled, man-trucks and their rumbling, growling man-saws  - clearing the roads for the rest of us and no doubt grunting with delight as they did so.

Drew, meanwhile, is living the high life at Grandma and Grandpa's house in Georgia, where he is recovering from his recent bout with a double ear infection.

I called this morning for an update, and got my dad on the phone.

My dad is a wonderful man - he is caring in a gruff way, he is kind without sentimentalism, he is patient and teasing and likes to laugh. He is many very nice things, but descriptive is not one of them.

"He slept some and he woke up some," was his reply when I asked how Drew's night was.

"But how is he feeling?" I queried.

"Fine," said my dad, who knows of only two feelings - 'bad' being the other one.

"Does he seem to be getting better?"

"I told you, he's fine."

Pause.

"Let me speak to Mom."

I knew Mom would satisfy my obsessive-compulsivity and tell me how many hours he slept, when he woke up, how he acted when he woke up, what he'd eaten and how the ear infection seemed to be affecting him.

"She's feeding him right now, and I'm not going to let you interrupt her."

"Then you need to give me details."

"Amy, I'm not sure what else I can tell you. He's fine. We're fine. Everybody's fine."

"Nobody's bad?" I said, resorting to speaking his language in an effort to scrape out just maybe a tiny little fragment of detail.

"Everybody's fine."

I gave up.

"Just have Mom call me when she finishes feeding Drew, OK?"

--------------------------

And for fun, a couple of quizzes:

What is Your World View?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Sounds pretty close. I don't shy away from organized religion - I just have a hard time getting up on Sunday mornings.

What's your Personality Disorder?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Obsessive-Compulsive. Obsessive-Compulsive personality disorder is similar to obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorder. People with this disorder are overly focused on orderliness and perfection. Their need to do everything "right" often interferes with their productivity. They tend to get caught up in the details and miss the bigger picture. They set unreasonably high standards for themselves and others, and tend to be very critical of others when they do not live up to these high standards. They avoid working in teams, believing others to be too careless or incompetent. They avoid making decisions because they fear making mistakes and are rarely generous with their time or money. They often have difficulty expressing emotion.

i opened my big fat mouth

and just fell right in.

All that blather yesterday about a cold virus and my vehemence against torturing ourselves by making a visit to the pediatrician - yeah - guess where we spent our morning?

I had to take him. We spent the entire night trying everything except actual pagan animal sacrifice to get him to stop crying. I'm frankly just too tired to even try to find anything amusing to say about it.

Turns out he has a double ear infection. Another 10-day round of antibiotics...yay. Just in time for Christmas.

We sort of drew straws to see who would have to stay home with him today, and thank God I won. I may actually be able to catch a nap at work.

Charles called me just a few minutes ago.

"He hasn't stopped crying since we left the doctor's office. Those ear drops they gave him for pain are just water - I know it. They made us pay $20 for water drops."

You just don't realize what a soothing place work is until you have a sick baby.

ask me

if I got any painting done this weekend.

Ha! Ha ha ha!

It's kind of hard to paint when you're up to your elbows in baby poop! Go ahead, try it.

Whatever this virus is that every child in Greenville County under the age of three seems to be carting around - the one that gives them diarrhea, enough snot to fill a Mack truck and a raging fever - well, it needs to back off of my family.

No. I haven't taken Drew to the doctor. Nor do I plan to unless something starts bleeding. Yeah, it's only taken me 14 months, but I've learned that I can save a $20 co-pay and three hours of my life by simply telling myself to give him plenty of liquids and let him get lots of rest and call if his fever goes over 103. See? I did it again, and I didn't even charge myself any money, nor did I have to endure a waiting room filled with snot-covered children.

Because he loves me, Drew gave part of this joyous gift of himself to me - thank God and all the saints excluding the poopy part - and I have to say, as a weight-loss plan it's damn good. The nausea has prevented me from eating more than one small meal per day for the past three days.

Oh, and the virus has the added bonus of making us both reeeealllly sleeeepy. Not so great for me, but anything that makes Drew sleep a solid 10 hours per night simply can't be all that bad.

So, really, the only downside is the poopiness.

As Charles said, when I made him change the second one, "Holy mother of God, how does so much crap come out of something so small?"

Hehe. I'm saving posts like these for when he's a teenager and he drags home some totally unacceptable girlfriend.

heh

Thanks to Sacred Cow Burgers for the funny.

Well, it's coming down to the wire - only 17 more shopping days until Christmas.

However, since my husband and I both work full-time and have a very needy and high-maintenance youngling living with us, that cuts our shopping days down to weekends.

So, only five shopping days until Christmas.

Oh wait. But next weekend we have our extended family Christmas party on Sunday. So that brings us down to four shopping days until Christmas.

This Saturday we'll be spending all day painting the living room. No, I don't know why this had to be done this weekend. I just know that I'm tired of staring at white walls and I want to paint so by God we're painting.

Which brings us to three shopping days.

On Christmas Eve we're going to Charles' extended family Christmas party, and besides, how lame is it to shop for presents on Christmas Eve? (not that I've never done that before...)

Two shopping days.

Most stores around here aren't open for 24 hours - so that brings us to approximately 24 total hours of shopping time.

Of that, four hours occur before noon each day, so we won't be doing any shopping then since it takes us that long to get up and get going on Saturdays. (even though it only takes us an hour every other day of the week. There's something about Saturdays that makes us all sloooowww waaaaay down, and lose a lot of stuff like shoes and car keys.)

So that leaves about 16 hours of shopping time.

Drew turns into a pumpkin after 8 p.m., so there will be no shopping past then. Which cuts us back to about 14 hours total shopping time, or basically one full day.

I HAVE ONE DAY LEFT TO GET ALL MY CHRISTMAS SHOPPING DONE OH MY GOD.

wal-mart really may be the devil

Last year I spent more than a hundred dollars on Drew's Christmas pictures. That's understandable and forgivable, I believe, since it was his first-ever Christmas.

This year, I decided to be a little bit more thrifty. I mean, the second Christmas is very exciting, and perhaps even better than the first Christmas since he's much more mobile and communicative, but still...

Oh who am I trying to kid? If I had a hundred bucks to spend on pictures I would have done it. I didn't have a hundred bucks. There, now you have the whole truth. Now shut up. I'm trying to tell a story here.

OK. So, instead of going to the professional, trendy, made-just-for-kids, wonder-of-Christmas, spend-a-hundred-bucks photo studio, we went to Wal-Mart.

They had nice photo backdrops.

That's the only really nice thing I can say, unless I discuss the price, which was low, since obviously you get what you pay for. (when am I going to learn that?)

The girl who was taking the pictures (I wouldn't exactly call her a photographer - she was a girl with a camera and a squeaky toy) didn't appear to have developed the fine art of establishing rapport with young children.

Her sole plan for getting a smile out of my son was to wave some ratty toy in front of his face. When that didn't work, she was all out of ideas.

Drew, like most toddlers, does not appreciate being made to stay in one place for longer than, oh, about five seconds. When the five seconds were up and ratty-toy camera-lady had failed to amuse him, he became disgruntled.

He expressed his malcontent by sticking his thumb in his mouth and his index finger up his nose.

Yeah. Here's a picture of my son digging for boogers. Merry Christmas from the Brennans. Ho ho ho.

After approximately 10 minutes of my mom and I bouncing in circles around Drew, exhorting him to please-for-the-love-of-God-just-smile, trying to keep his finger out of his nose, his thumb out of his mouth and his butt on the seat, he finally graced us with a sort of semi-half-assed grin. It wasn't really a smile. It was more of a you-people-really-need-to-get-lives sneer.

Ratty-toy camera-lady snapped the shot and showed it to us on the digital screen.

Eh.

It was OK. But being rather obsessive-compulsive a person with slightly higher standards, I decided we could do better. We'll hold on to that one for now, but let's try for a better smile.

What I didn't realize was that, since Wal-Mart is the devil, once you nix a picture, it gets deleted. You don't get to set it aside as your backup in case your son then decides to break out in a fit of hysterical, splotchy-faced crying and you realize that your chances of getting a good picture out of him just dropped to zilch.

Once we finally did manage to get a good shot of him with a semi-smile (after walking him around the store to calm him down and then doing everything except actually pressing the camera button including frantically yelling at the camera-girl to "shoot it now! now! now!") we were told that we wouldn't get our pictures for another three weeks.

That was three weeks ago.

I waited until now to write about it because, well, I'm fantastically lazy. Plus I was just reminded of it since the pictures are supposed to be ready this week and even though they aren't the best Christmas pictures ever the subject matter is just wonderful and they'll still be beautiful and I only paid $14 for them so there.

This past weekend we took Drew to the Festival of Trees downtown, where he got to oogle at all the pretty lights. We got what I think are some great shots of that, but we took them with a regular camera instead of our digital camera, which hasn't worked quite right ever since I dropped it in cake icing at Drew's first birthday party, so we actually have to take them some place to get them developed which is just way too much work for me right now, not to mention it costs money, which, as I mentioned earlier, I have little of.

I said all that to say that, yes, I will be posting more pictures some day eventually and probably before Drew turns 18 and moves away to college. Maybe.

drew takes a trip

If you're wondering what to get Drew for Christmas, there's no need to spend a lot of money. Or any money, really. Just get him a few sturdy UPS or FedEx boxes and he'll be one pleased-as-punch baby.

Drew's latest accomplishment is mastering the ability to put items into containers. Give him an item, any item, and a container, any container, and within seconds, that item will be inside the container! It's like magic!

Last night, he decided to combine his using-a-walker-to-terrorize-the-cat and putting-items-into-containers skills and take a trip across the living room through the dining room and into the kitchen.

For this long and arduous trip, he carefully chose his mode of transportation:

The Fisher-Price Hungry Hungry Hippo obviously had the most carrying capacity as well as perk of being able to not only mow down cats but eat them as well.

Now that he had chosen his transport, he had to pack for the trip.

The first item into the vehicle was his sippy cup full of white grape juice. It was a long trip, and he obviously didn't want to get dehydrated, especially when traversing the hallway, which is miles from a watering hole.

The second item into the vehicle was a book.

Specifically, this book:

I figure, this is the manual. You don't want to take a long journey without the operator's manual. What if you break down?

The third and final item to get packed was a block. Trying to get into the mind of my toddler, I figure, OK, he's a Southern boy. If he does happen to break down, he can put the car on the block in the front yard and leave it there until it rots into rusty oblivion.

I watched his entire excursion through our downstairs.

My favorite leg of the jaunt was the part where he stopped the Hippo, toddled around to the side of it, pulled out his sippy cup, sat down and drank half of his juice. Then he stood up, replaced the cup in the Hippo, toddled around to the back and resumed pushing.

My son! He's already learned not to drink and drive...