Lots of cussing, or Ben told me so, or Fuck it! As long as we're bedraggled and bleeding at the mall in our PJs, let's take a picture with Santa

It's odd that I don't cuss on this blog because if you know me in real life, you know that I have a mouth like a sailor. I just kind of feel like not everyone who reads this blog like swearing. Also Ben told me not to because it sounds trashy.

But today, I say fuck that because my experience at Picture People yesterday? Holy shitballs, it was fucking terrible.

Gather round the interwebs, my lovelies, and I will make liberal use of the f word and tell you all about my Chrismukkah card experience, which should make the card more special when it arrives in your mailbox or when I scan it and post it when I have run out things to say this month.

So, we had two perfectly nice candidates for Chrismukkah card pictures. A really cute one of the boys sitting back-to-back that I fucking forgot to upload before I went to the office, so you won't be able to see it because my laziness is the reason for this whole damn mess that is about to unfold. And this one:

This picture is scanned and whenever I tried to drop it in a cute little card on Shutterfly, it looked like total shit because of all the dust on my scanner and because it is also blurry. Also? None of us looks like that anymore because we have all changed our hair. And Woody is not part of the family, even though he thinks he is.

So, we decided on the cute picture of Harry and Jack, and I jumped on the Picture People's website to make a card.

Only you can't make a card online at Picture People.

So I wrote down the photo number and called the store, thinking I could just order on the phone.

Except you can't order pictures on the phone at Picture People.

So I made an appointment for a time when Jamie would be watching Harry and Jack, so I could drive 35 minutes to the other side of town and view my old pictures at Picture People and make some Chrismukkah cards. I was really annoyed that you can't use any coupons on previous sittings, so I'd have to pay full price for my cards (paying full price for that shit really makes me mad-- part of the reason I even like Picture People is the silly amount of coupons they send to my email).

Only I forgot that Jamie had to take the GRE this week and wouldn't be baby sitting during the time I was supposed to be making my Chrismukkah card.

So I decided that since I had to take the boys with me, I should dress them in snowman jammies, bring along milk, cookies, and my adorable Crate and Barrel snowman plates and mugs, and stage a scene where they pretend to drink Santa's milk and cookies and come up with a delightfully smart ass caption for my card. I mean, as long as I had to drag them with me, why not make some special memories and an even better card??

Apparently, I forgot a few other things as well: my common sense, that it's not even Thanksgiving and there was no need to rush into making a card, that Harry and Jack apparently hate to have their pictures taken and freak the fuck out every time we try, that I would be wrangling them solo, that my Crate and Barrel winterware would definitely get broken, that chain store photographers are trained to catch only certain moments and would surely miss all the cutest smiles and silliest faces, that the old picture was actually perfect because getting 2 kids to smile at the camera at the same time is a bona fide Chrismukkah miracle.

Ben remembered all of those things, though. He even told me about them. The asshole.

Bu I would not be dissuaded and once I set out to check our card off my to-do list, it became an obsession, and I couldn't think of anything else until it was done. I didn't even enjoy the Biggest Loser-- that's how preoccupied I was.

Harry was stoked when I picked him up from school and changed him into his PJ's-- he even accosted his Spanish teacher in the hall to learn the spanish word for them and he delighted in how much his Uggs look like slippers. They both slept the whole way there and were delightful as we pulled into the parking lot and they serendipitously awoke. Harry even broke into an a cappella rendition of "Jingle Bells" on our way through the food court, and jack clapped his appreciation. The moment the double stroller wheels crossed the Picture People threshold, though, shit went down.

We waited for 20 minutes before the "photog" was ready even though we were the only people in the store.

Harry at 8 cookies at the very beginning of the shoot and spent the rest of the time twitching from the sugar rush and acting out some elaborate game where we has santa marching like a dinosaur.

Jack never once looked at the camera and broke a snowman plate right away.

The "photographer" missed about 64 awesome shots because they weren't Picture People approved poses.

Then we waited for another hour after the pictures while the women working at the store tried to upload them to the computer. An hour. During which time Jack popped a balloon with his sharp fingers and made every child in a 3 store radius cry.

The highlight of our wait was when a woman came in to view pictures of her 6 week old and 3 year old and burst into loud, hiccuping tears because there wasn't a good shot of her boys together. I totally judged her and thought "Dude, baby blues much?" until it was my turn and all of our pictures sucked.

I didn't cry, but when the girl helping me told me Chrismukkah was not an option, and I had to choose between Christmas and Holidays, I said, "I can't stand this another minute," and took my double stroller full of screaming kids to the rainy parking lot, where I struggled to push it in a straight line and called Ben to scream at him for being right.

He suggested that I go back inside. The asshole.

I did.

The girl was not surprised to see me, and she let me bypass the part of the sales pitch where they bring out all these silly framed pictures (which I usually TOTALLY buy but had no patience for yesterday). When I told her what I wanted the caption of the card to be, she looked at me blankly and then typed in a really lame and inappropriately capitalized greeting. I went with it because the kids were screaming so loudly and I looked at them to threaten their lives if they didn't shut the hell up (NICELY, though) and noticed Harry had blood all over his face.

The counter girl noticed, too, and said, "Do you want a bandaid?"

At the mention of the word bandaid (of which he is terrified because to him they connote grave injury), Harry burst into hysterical, inconsolable tears. So I just got the fuck out of the store and waited for the cards to print-- which is why the caption is so inane.

I tried to convince the kids to put their fucking clothes on-- you know, because we were at the MALL-- but they were just scratching and wailing, so I figured fuck it-- let's go see Santa and get some H1N1 from his filthy beard and suit.

The Big Guy made the afternoon merry in an instant:

I am sure in a few years, I will have forgotten the staged PJ picture and will wonder why my bloody preschooler and his smiling little brother were at the mall in their jammies and shoes. I'll tell you why-- because we are CLASSY.

Jack doesn't look dangerous, does he?

But he is! Look at Harry's face!!

I collapsed on the bed among the clean laundry and let the children run wild for a few hours when we got home. Clearly, they had a blast.

Flubber!

This is what greeted me in Harry's cubby when I came to pick him up at school the other day:

A sweater covered in flubber. Apparently, he leaned into it or something-- I didn't listen too closely to the teacher's explanation because I was amazed that she thought I cared about the state of his clothes. I mean, it's a last season Children's Place sweater-- last SEASON. As if I mind a little flubber! I am just happy that it still sort of covers his wrists.

And then I got all paranoid wondering if I am that pain-in-the-ass uptight mom. And I might be. I mean I don't have him wear his Uggs to school because I think the fur would feel yucky with sand in it. Sometimes he arrives with a bit of product in his hair. He wears skinny jeans.

The director of the school even made sure she found me on the playground to give me printed instructions about how to remove the flubber with a wincing, "I see you found THE SWEATER."

Flubber is dissolvable in vinegar, which also made my washer smell fresh, and the removable instructions had arecipe for more! flubber! which we are definitely going to make because Harry LOVED it, and it's right up Jack's messy little alley, too.

Many Faces

Thank you Ben for finding these Batman jammies (on clearance!) in the big boys' section of Target because if we left without Batman jammies, Harry's little super-hero-loving heart would have shattered into a million loud, tantrummy pieces.

The Batman mask was just randomly in his dress up box, but he wore it from the minute his bath ended until his head hit the pillow. It's a very abrupt mask, and I always startle a little when I enter a room and see him like this

As you can see, the big boys' extra small is still quite large, which is good because have you ventured outside the little kids' section at Target recently? The underwear selection is more varied but the clothes? UG. LEE. I guess it's Gap Kids or bust in a couple of sizes.

Jack could totally play "Weekend at Bernie's" in these glasses.

But he didn't wear them for long because they clearly belong to tiny Top Gun Harry

Who kicks some tiny ass in his tiny flight suit.

And here I thought that having boys, I'd miss out on playing dress up.

Little Gym ad infinitum

Duuuuuuude, you guys. We just signed up for our 7th consecutive semester of Little Gym, and I have to tell you, I am not as excited about it as I used to be. But don't tell this guy

because he stares in wonderment at the bubbles every week and pretty much has the best 45 minutes he can imagine

And seriously! Could he look any more like Ben? Cuh-razy. And pointing it out never gets old for me because I am so amazed at the complete inability of my genetic material to assert itself in any way during Jack's creation. WTF dominant traits? Where are you now? He doesn't even have my creepy, finger-sized second toe.

I really hope that santa brings me a new camera for Chrismukkah because ever since I dropped mine last week (really ever since I drove away with it on the trunk of my car) my camera has been taking blurry pictures and its purchase was, of course, the one time I didn't buy the freaking protection plan from Best Buy. Grrr.

But still. I don't need nothin fancy like focus or some crap to show you how much this guy likes the big! red! mat! and how intently he listens to Mr. Bob.

Look at those scarf trailin little zombies

His hair? On the top? It feels rough-- he's like a dog with an undercoat.

Kid-free!! For the first time since we had kids!!

THANK YOU a billion times to Ben's parents, who agreed to watch our special snowflakes overnight so Ben and I could attend the National Communication Association conference in Chicago last week.

Scheduling is always a random crapshoot at the conference-- which is really big-- and in years past, I have been stuck with a presentation on, like, Wednesday morning and anther one on Sunday afternoon or something terrible, making my attendance dodgy at best. This year, though, the scheduling gods smiled upon me, and my panels were only like 22 hours apart, making NCA an ideal kid-free getaway.

We stayed in my favorite hotel in the world, the Palmer House, and when we checked in, they offered us a suite instead of a regular room. We were like, eh, whatever, and we expected a typical hotel room with maybe an extra sink and a sitting area, but when we opened the door to our room, we found an 1100-square-foot, 2-bathroom sweet suite.

It was pretty cool.

We died laughing and took a million pictures of ourselves






The conference was spread between the Palmer House and the the Hilton on Michigan Avenue, so we did a lot of waling back and forth and still had time to hit State Street to look at the cute little Macy's windows.

Okay, seriously. WTF is up with my hair? Perfectly brown one minute and ridiculously red the next?

We got all dressed up and went to an adult dinner at a very civilized time of night (even though I wanted to curl up in a cozy hotel bathrobe -- probably FULL OF SCABIES-- and order pizza and a pitcher of martinis and watch a not-quite-out-on-DVD movie)

and then we invited some wonderful old friends back to our room and had a delightful time.

The next morning (and this sucks-- even though we had no kids and didn't go to bed until after 1, we still jerked awake at 6:40 on the head), we discovered the one and only downside to our hotel room-- NO COFFEE POT. And even though price was not a consideration the previous night when we were ordering up champagne (insert eye roll here), the $4 banana on the breakfast menu put us off room service entirely. SO we had to GO ALL THE WAY DOWNSTAIRS TO THE LOBBY STARBUCKS. It is sooooooo hard to be us.

Oh and the snowflakes? Had a fantastic time, too.

Finally a use for all those damn Build a Bears and how we spent a 50 degree WI November day

My morning got a rather abrasive start, or, as Harry said when he surveyed the pile of stuffed animals heaped upon me, "Wow! This is intents." He meant intense. And it was-- every time I thought I could almost be comfortable enough to drift back off to sleep, he'd clamber on top of me and smack another animal over my face

There's my face poking out to say helllllpppp meeeeee.

Ben took advantage of the rest of our lovely and creepily warm Saturday by hanging up our outdoor Chrismukkah decorations. Last year, it got too cold too quick, and Ben was unable to brandish his staple gun before the first snow. Harry has been complaining for a solid year about our lack of lights last December, and yesterday when he asked Ben, "Dada, are you going to climb on a ladder and string lights by the chimney with care?" Ben went straight to Wal-Mart to purchase strand after strand after box after box of outside lights. He even replaced the burned-out light bulb in the Harry-sized lawn Santa who has been dim for like 2 years. (and Harry immediately gave yard Santa a hug and a kiss and started rattling off his Christmas wish list. He looked up halfway through and said, "I don't think Santa understands me."

Ben brandishing his staple gun (for which he had to buy more staples mid decorating binge). This picture was taken BEFORE he fell off the ladder that he set up in the rocks next to the house and cut the hell out of his wrist.

The scare crow is a really nice touch. It really brings out our 4th of July flag, rotten pumpkins, and upside-down tomato growing thing.

Just think how flipping awesome everything's going to look come Easter.

Sloven

You may have noticed that I spend less and less time talking about what we're eating. That's because we have been enjoying such culinary delights as grilled cheese and tomato soup, frozen pizza, take out. Because the semester is finally starting to get the better of us.

Ya think it's time to take throw the pumpkins away?

We've been gone 2 weekends in a row; the kids have been sick. Ben has been sick; Jamie has been sick. I have not cleaned the slats of the blinds in 10 days and it's making me twitch.

This? This is what happens when we don't do laundry for a weekend.


This week, though. I have high hopes for this week. Scrubbing the bathroom grout with a toothbrush hopes. Fresh gingerbread baking in the oven hopes. Crockpot and Pledge duster hopes, people.