Diary of a MILF in Progress

Summer, it turns me upside down

How the hell did it get to be June, y'all?!  Seriously.  So, I pretty much lost a month along the line there, but I'm trying to be back amongst the posting population.  I have a big meeting this weekend, but I am actually on track for it (materials sent slightly behind schedule, but not because of any fuckup on my part.  Not that anyone cares that it wasn't my fault, I'll get blamed anyway, but as long as my boss doens't ding me, life it OK).  School ends in 17 days (but who's counting?!), which puts The Husband on the hook for child care.  Ah, it's nice to be married to a teacher sometimes!  While I am "working hard" in the office every day (read: taking long lunches whenever possible and eating in the courtyard), he's on dad duty with three under-12 munchkins.  Heh.  Paybacks are hell, since having a 'desk job' means that I am the one who answers the emergency phone calls from the kids' schools all year long.

One part of summer that is not making me happy is that I've fallen off the Weight Watchers wagon.  My at-work session ended a month ago because we couldn't maintain the minimum number of participants, and I haven't hauled my (ever expanding) ass to a meeting at a center.  But it's almost time to put a bathing suit back on, so that 5 pounds that creeped back on because I stopped paying attention is being given its eviction notice.  I also need to make a spray tan appointment, stat, because the whiteness of my legs is blinding my co-workers.

So, thanks for stopping by, and I promise to attempt cuteness for the upcoming summer months!

Breathtaking boringness, and....scene

So I went through some shit with my son about six weeks ago, culminating in him needing to be admitted to a psych hospital.  And I'm not going to go into it all, but suffice to say, he's being treated and life is better than it was, and we are going to be constantly "on the road to recovery" as opposed to "recovered," but it OK.  Then it was time for my husband to be really busy at work, and for my daughter to decide that it was a good time to try out the tween angst and rebellion (in the form of lying about her homework and not studying for test and the petulant frenzy trifecta of eyeroll/foot stomp/hand on hip whenever speaking to me).  And playoff hockey started, which means that I need to be a total superstitious goofball (no, I don't really believe that making macaroni and cheese or wearing a red shirt or knitting a specific pair of socks will mean that my team is going to win, but since they won when I made that particular dinner and knitting those particular socks, who am I to mess with the mojo?!)  And it's Spring, which for some folks means pretty flowers and sunlight, but for me means pollen counts through the roof and the need to make my annual skin cancer screening appointment with my dermatolgist.  Unfortunatly, one of my allergy symptoms is a cough and sore throat, which has most of my office mates convinced that I am spreading swine flu to the masses.  Which, bitch please, if I could spread some deadly disease and close our office for a week, wouldn't I have tried to do so a long time ago so I could stay home and sleep?!  For real.

Seriously, I just need a bottle of wine and a few days with no deadlines or appointments.  Is that so much to ask?

My poor parenting habits, on display

This commercial has been pulled from the airwaves because a parenting group strongly objected to the alleged sexualizing of a beloved cartoon character.

How bad is is that my kids and I thought the commercial was really funny, and that they recognized the original song as being on my iPod?

It's scary how our minds work

Transcript of an actual exchange between my sister and myself:

To: Sis
From: Dana
This is fangirly, but I think it's kind of cool that Ralph Fiennes' nephew is playing young Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter movie.

To: Dana
From: Sis
Did Ralph Fiennes play Voldemort?

To: Sis
From: Dana
are you messing with me or do you really not know that Ralph Fiennes played Voldemort?

To: Dana
From: Sis
I assumed he did, since you said that about his nephew, because that's why it makes sense for him nephew to play Tom, but I can't pick Ralph Fiennes out of a lineup. I really only know a few Harry Potter actors- Richard Harrison, Alan Rickman, Dame Maggie Smith

To: Dana
From: Sis
Harris, I mean. See? I'm hopeless

To: Sis
From: Dana
Richard Harris hasn't been Dumbledore since Chamber of Secrets, since he's, y'know, dead and all. But seriously? You can't recognize Daniel Radcliffe? Emma Thompson?

To: Dana
From: Sis
I recongize him, but if someone says "Who plays Harry Potter?" I can't answer. Same thing with the red haired guy who plays Ron. I've heard of Emma Thompson, but I don't know who she is, in HP or in real life. I know Gary Oldman, but only because I saw "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," which is pretty much a three man cast. Please, are you surprised? I'm the queen of "that guy who was in that show with the rother guy and that woman."

[Dana's phone rings; caller ID indicates Sis' extension]
Dana: Yeees?
Sis: Was she the one married to Kenneth Branagh?
Dana:Yeah, but not when he was in Harry Potter. And they weren't in that one together anyway, since she didn't come until the third one.
Sis: Oh. I didn't realize he was in Harry Potter; I was thinking of the Shakespeare movies.
Dana: They were in Much Ado together.
Sis: I never saw Much Ado. I saw Henry V. Weren't they in all of them together?
Dana: I don't know, I only saw Much Ado About Nothing. Which, as Shakespeare movies goes, was kinda...well, it had Keanu Reaves, so...But it had that guy from House, too. Except back then, he was "that guy from Dead Poets' Society," the one who killed himself. In any case, Robert Sean Leonard was in Much Ado.
Sis: I don't watch House, but I know it. Roommate used to watch it, but it made him start getting all paranoid when he got weird symptoms, so he stopped. He's the British guy.
Dana: Well, that's Hugh Laurie. I'm not talking about the guy who plays House, I'm talking about the guy who plays Wilson, and the actor was the kid in Dead Poets' Society who killed himself. I mean, that's not the plot of the movie, but he was that guy. Honestly, I am constantly seeing people on, like, CSI or Law and Order or whatever and being all "Wait! That's Little Girl God! She can't be a teenaged killer!"
Sis: Everyone is in Law and Order. Whenever we go and see a show, we have a contest to see if anyone can find someone in the Playbill who wasn't in Law and Order.
Dana: Heh. When I saw Chicago, last month, Tom Wopat was Billy Flynn. Luke Duke can sing, y'all!
Sis: When I saw it, that other guy was playing him. The one who's dead.
Dana: Robert Urich. Wasn't Bebe Neuwirth playing Velma?
Sis: Maaaybe.
Dana: You don't know who Bebe Neuwirth is, do you?
Sis: No, not really.
Dana: Lillith, from Cheers.
Sis: Oh, OK. Yeah, I think that was her.

The part that is somewhat disturbing is that the only reason I couldn't identify who 'the guy in that show with the other guy and that woman' was, is because she didn't really have an actual person in mind. Personally, I plan to curl up on my couch at home tonight to watch that show with the guy from Dead Poets' Society (not Robert Sean Leonard, the other one), the guy who later did Six Feet Under, Benson and the woman from Desperate Housewives.

Sumbuddy thinks I'm dumb

I  just got one of those spammy emails with the link to an intelligence test.  The body of the email said "Someone thinks you're dumb!  Thier score was 127!  What's yours?  Click here [link]"

I suppose it's too much to hope for that the use of the plural possessive pronoun (spelled incorrectly) when referring to a single person was an intentional, tongue in cheek joke.

Dana Downer

I've been facing a family crisis in the past 8 or 10 days, one about which I choose not to go into great detail here.  Suffice to say, it's big and we're handling it, and it will be a long road to "OK," but we will get there.  It's got to do with my son, and we've got lots of support from extended family and the school and all, so it's much less awful than it's got potential to have been.

I got a flirty email and text message one day last week from one of the tech guys from my fall conference, from whom I haven't heard in awhile.  The text was of the "hey what're you wearing?" variety and the email was the slightly more innocuous "hey, just wanted to see how things are going!" sort.  I threw all caution social propriety to the wind.

Having a bit of a tough time lately, actually.  Yesterday we had to [insert brief, matter of fact description of medical issue].   I'll get back with you when I can be cute again ;-)

Not surprisingly, his response was (not in so many words, I'm paraphrasing madly) "Wow, look at the time!  Gotta go, and, uh good luck with that!"

Heh.

Six

Six years ago, right now, I was lying in the recovery room waiting for my spinal to wear off.  The baby had been weighed and examined and cleaned.  Vital stats had been called in to various family members.  My only job at that moment was to heal myself and care for him.

Right now, that boy is curled up on bed.  He has a fever of 101.7* at the moment, and just wants to rest his aching head.  I brought him water, and offered him applesauce.  I kissed his hot little head while he slept, and tucked his blankets around him.

Six years ago, I was his nursing mother.  Today I am his mommy the nurse.

Happy birthday, little man.  Tomorrow we can try for cake and celebrations.

Some things just get scary

The Elder Son has always been a stubborn, challenging type.  He was sitting breech for the final couple months of my pregnancy, despite many attempts on my part to get him to flip over.  In the weeks leading up to my due date, we scheduled an ECV to try to get him properly situated.  Even with much pushing from the doctor, he who was said to be the best in the area for the baby flippin' deed, Elder Son would not budge.  So, we did a c-section, and he was not pleased at being yanked from the womb.

Fast forward a few year, to kindergarten.  Many calls from the school when he decided that his desires did not match up with the instructions in the classroom.  Angst galore, culiminating in some testing last year to make a diagnosis of ADHD-hyperactive type (with inklings of ODD and some anxiety).  But we started on meds, and things got better.

Until a couple weeks ago, when Elder Son's disagreements with the aftercare staff caused him to run away, off school grounds.  There are few things that hang in your head more ominously than having "We've just called the police.  Get here as soon as you can," be the last things you hear in a phone call.  And last week, when the school called to say that his anger at another student, because of a disagreement over the rules of the chess game, if some accounts are to be believed, he lashed out to the point that one of the teachers had to visit the doctor to have the scratches and bites examined.  Five day suspension.

The last week has been a whirlwind of medication adjustments and conversations in which we try to figure out what is going on in that little eight-year-old brain.  And the next few days of the suspension  will be spent trying new medicine and calling more doctors.  Words like "neurologist" and "bipolar disorder" and "intensive outpatient program" and "antipsychotic prescription" can be unnerving.  Even more so when the word "pediatric" gets added to the mix.

Very busy and important...

Sorry for the cobwebs.  Big meeting next weekend, and I've been madly preparing for it.  The worst is over- my briefing materials were bound and sent today, and I've got a few days set aside early next week for slide presentation editing.

But first! I'm going to NY this weekend.  Tim, he of the stolen show, needed a female chaperone for the theater trip, and I was happy to oblige.  So, I get to test out my own acting skillz (see how I did that?  Talkin' like the kids do so as to seem relatable to my charges?) by pretending to be a responsible adult for a few days.  More importantly, I get to see a show without paying for it out of pocket (if I end up watching over any kids who want to see a second show, I'll have to pay for that one, but the show that we all go to on Saturday night is my 'pay' for being on chaperone duty), I get to visit the Met, I'm going to stroll through Strawberry Fields, and I get to eat breakfast at Tom's Diner before we come home (cue the Suzanne Vega).

Later, taters.  Maybe I'll have pictures when I get back.

This is better than cable

There's a lot of shit coming dangerously close to hitting the fan lately, but I'm not gonna bore you with it.  Instead, I'm going to relay to you the assorted pieces of Drah-Mah that I get to watch from the outskirts.  Watching it all is so much more entertaining than living it, don'tcha know.

The Husband works at a private school in DC, and the various fine arts folks at both his school and the assorted other private high schools in the DC metropolitan area interact sporadically throughout the year.  The theater director at Husband's school, we'll call him "Tim" (mostly because that's really his name), in his various professional interactions with his peers around the Beltway, shared his intentions for the show schedule for the year, culminating in the Spring performance of [Dana cringes in horror] "High School Musical 2."  HSM2 is a good money maker.  Yes, it's an insipid piece of dreck to theatrically and musically inclined adults, but the kids love it.  When the school did HSM a few years ago, they sold out every night and got rave reviews from the under-18 crowd.  Doing a popular show like HSM2 allowed that Tim could do some meatier, but less well known, shows earlier in the year.  He got a chance to choose some straight plays that gave his older students a chance to really showcase their talents, even though the shows themselves might not have been bringing droves of people to the audience each night. 

Imagine Tim's surprise when he finds out that he hasn't gotten the rights to HSM2.  Why didn't he get the rights?  Because the young upstart director at the school a few exits up the highway liked the idea of doing HSM2 so much that she applied for the rights, and her show would take place first (late April instead of early May), so she got the rights for the geographical area.  Despite the fact that she'd been talking about doing "Man of La Mancha," and Tim was actually being very helpful in offering to help with customes and set pieces and such (since their school did that show a few years back) to save her some work and money.  Bitch stole our show. 

"But, wait," you might be saying.  "Doesn't this give Tim the chance to do a show in which the songs and dialog don't make him want to poke hot needles in his ears?"  Yes, perhaps, except that it's late enough in the game that a lot of rights have already been spoken for, and we are down to two choices- an affordable show (non-period costumes, small band for the music) for which the talent pool of students doesn't really support him getting the female lead he needs OR a classic show for which he's got what he needs acting/vocally, but will be much more difficult to pay for in terms of costumes, sets, possibly having to hire some musicians... 

Personally, I'm on board with either show they do, theater snob that I am, and was not looking forward to HSM2.  But I'm making a voodoo doll of Miss Chippy Director, and I might just be hoping that her Troy and her Gabby take "break a leg" literally right before opening night. 

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So, we got this new VP a couple months ago, and for some reason, they did not hire or appoint an assistant for him.  Instead, they tapped one of the exisiting senior support people. one who has a full time job supporting a senior executive, and added the new VP's support stuff to what she's already got going on. Now, the new VP is heading a new division, made up of groups that used to be under the umbrella of the senior executive that this woman supports.  So, in essence, she's supporting pretty much the same big-old group she used to, just with an added boss.  And she's done the work for the past two months, but takes whatever opportunity she can find to remind the masses that she has two bosses, and essentially two jobs (since every other VP in the company has his or her own assistant).  She's Jewish and has kids, and let me say that she's got the Jewish mother martyrdom down to a science.

Well, this week, the new VP decided that he would have one of the lower level admins in his division take over the day to day support.  High level assistant is free to focus on her original boss and her orignial division and is back to only have to do one job for the paycheck she gets.   Good for her, right?  Oh, no.  Now she's passive-aggressively speculating as to whether the lower level admin is going to be able to keep up with all that is required to properly support the VP, and lamenting how difficult the transition will be because so many meetings and projects are already underway.  She's worried about being shut out of the professional relationships she's developed in the past few months.  She's insulted that folks think that she needed to have her responsibilities stripped away.

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It's fun to laugh at other people's angst, ain't it?