Of Tampons and Toilet Paper

Ryan Jr

Now first I need to say that I am not one of those Nazi toilet paper moms who like goes into hysterics every time one of my children goes near the toilet paper roll, but because of how expensive things are now a days I don’t make it easy for them to get at either.  Both of my children are immensely fascinated by the toilet paper, with Casey she would pile it on the floor outside the bathroom and jump in it.  When I brought home a new package she would take the package and push it around, and sit on it to pretend that it was a car.

Ryan on the other hand takes it and rips the squares off one by one, then when he has done that to his satisfaction he then rips all the squares apart into itty bitty pieces.  This effect is intensified when Barkley becomes his partner in crime…Barkley eats the toilet paper pieces.  I am pretty sure that this is only a shadow of what I have to look forward to in years to come.  Anyway, like I said before I don’t make it easy for him to get to the stuff, but when you have to spend some time on the throne he likes to make visits.  We keep our door to our “water closet” closed so that he can’t get in there, as not only is the toilet paper fascinating, so is the toilet brush and plunger and tampons. 

 Casey

He has not been feeling well lately, so when he made his visit to me the other day…I gave him what was left on the roll…not really the best idea.  He was completely mystified by it and didn’t stop until I had quite a mess outside my bathroom.  I was overjoyed by the fact that he wasn’t clinging to me as he had done for the previous 4 days, and I loved the look on his face when I gave it to him.  After so many days of sickness it touched this weary mom’s heart…right up until Ryane came home from work and asked why there was toilet paper pieces all over the bedroom.  I smiled and said I gave the little man what was left on the roll, the look on my husband’s face was priceless…something like concern mixed with confusion.  I just know he was thinking “holy crap, my poor wife has lost her mind because of lack of sleep”.  I looked at him and said…”don’t you know that toilet paper is magical?!”…because it is!  Ever since then he hasn’t been so clingy, and his fever hasn’t been so high.

I have become a firm believer lately that toilet paper IS magical.  Hell, it sure brings me joy when I buy the huge package at Target and bring it home…something about having that much toilet paper in the house makes me feel wealthy.  Toilet paper, or even paper towels for that matter, can preoccupy my children for hours…not worth what you pay for it, but occasionally worth the clean up to see them wrap that stuff all over the house and run with smiles on their little faces as they chase each other with the dog bounding along behind.

 Casey

The other thing that is truly fascinating to children is tampons…what are these individually packaged tubular things that mom keeps next to the toilet?  They are hand size and make a most wonderful crinkling sound, and the best thing is that there are oodles of them in that box!  This is their mind set, I just know it, as he runs away with the box chucking them all over the upstairs.  I was foolish recently and didn’t pick them up before I left with the kids, and Barkley got to them…this is disastrous as he eats them.  I came home to find tampon bits scattered all over…thankfully he only managed to chew up 3 of them.  The box took the majority of his attention, so I have 2 handfuls of tampons and no box…all in all not a very expensive mistake. 

Casey also had this same fascination when she was around Ryan’s age…but there was no dog to be her cohort in crime.  She just loved to take them out of the box and examine each one, toss it aside, while sitting in the pile of them. 

 Ryan Jr

It is days like this that I wonder why we as parents spend so much money on toys when the children always end up playing with boxes, toilet paper, tampons, and cups.  It must be for the momentary distraction it takes for us to push them out the bathroom door after we rip the toilet paper out of their hands…this way the screaming doesn’t last as long.  So here’s to the silence, however fleeting, that the insanity of giving our children toilet paper brings in our lives!  Silence is golden and toilet paper is magical!

 Barkley

My Angie

In honor of the fact that my Angie is going to be leaving us by the end of the year, I have decided that I need to write about our time together.  That; and I recently received a correspondence from her fiancé concerning their relationship.  He was kind enough to try and explain some things to me when he didn’t have to, so I feel that our relationship should be talked about.  Some of you will understand this while others won’t; in the end Angie and I are as close as any 2 women can be.

We each moved to Orange County within 6 months of each other, we didn’t know each other because Angie went to the “preppy” Jr High, while I went to the “ghetto” one…at least as ghetto as you can get in the O.C.  Then we lived in the same apartment complex, and met at the pool as we had some mutual friends there.  In the summer of 1992 we talked in our apartment until her mother came and retrieved her, and since then we have been best friends.  We discovered that we were going to the same high school and became inseparable.  I introduced her to my friends who also would be attending the same school in the fall, and we all spent a great deal of time together.  A week or so before school was to start we decided to ride our bikes to somewhere and less than a block from the apartment complex I was hit by a small pick-up truck.  Our friend was in front and Angie was behind me…I apparently flew over the truck after hitting the hood with my head while Angie watched the whole thing.  When I wasn’t moving after landing on the road Angie ran back to the apartment to get my mother.  I was duct taped to a board and taken to the hospital, where they took a lot of x-rays and discovered that I almost shattered my heel.  They taped the corner of my eye that had split open, gave me a tetanus shot and sent me home.  I didn’t walk too well for a few weeks, but recovered fine.  That one incident seemed to cement a relationship between us that has never been broken.

I was somewhat of an outcast in Young Women there, as I was from a very rural area in North Idaho.  I wanted someone to talk to at church, so I would bring Angie with me…never really thinking that she would join the church someday.  She stood by me through our freshman year, despite my idiotic behavior, and that meant more to both of us than either of us really understood.  She moved back to Colorado with her mom shortly after the beginning of our sophomore year.  We cried a lot, but wrote and talked to each other weekly.  She begged her mom to let her come and stay with us the following summer, and she let her.  She went back at the end of the summer with the promise that the next year she would come back for good so that she could be in California for her senior year.  For various reasons, her mom brought her back half way through our junior year to live with us.  My parents had guardianship of her from that point on, and she has never left me since then.  We dealt with so much during those years, and that made us sisters.

We graduated together, we worked together, and we started Jr College together.  We finished our general education together and transferred together to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.  We lived in a variety of places during that time, but always together and always a support to each other.  We ate ketchup together when we had nothing else to eat, rode the bus to school together when the car broke down, and held each other when the pain of life got the better of us.  We came back to California after we both graduated from college.  We supported each other when jobs didn’t come and we were living in a 5^th wheel in a terrifying part of town.  We were all we had for so long, and so we learned to rely on none but each other. 

Many people don’t know, but Angie dated Ryane before I did…but when we did begin dating she was supportive and loved me despite everything.  She was my Maid of Honor at my wedding.  She made me go buy the first pregnancy test I took because she was sure I was pregnant.  Of course she was right, and she helped me during the morning sickness and all the other difficulties that came with that pregnancy.  She held me when they took my Casey bug away and wouldn’t let me have her back, she held me while I cried when they took her to Loma Linda, and she came to visit her every time she could while she was there.  She held me while I cried when I had to give my newborn medication.  She cried with me when I had a miscarriage.  She cried with me when I got pregnant with Ryan after a year of trying.  She has watched my kids when my husband wants to take me on adventures.  She helped me pick out my house, and sleeps across the hall from my 4 year old who calls her “my Angie”.  She helps me put my kids in bed when my husband has to work, and she keeps me company when my kids are driving me crazy.

 
We go on adventures together…we have been to Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Sea World, The San Diego Zoo, LEGOLAND, and countless other places…and there is always a story to tell afterwards.  We quote from rarely seen movies and laugh at each other knowingly, like there is some huge long story to tell when there isn’t.  We watch the same tv shows together, and play games together, and do crafts together.  We took classes together, and there was rarely a moment when we were seen apart.  We have always been a support to one another, through the good times and bad, even when people told her to leave me, she stayed.  So here I am, always the one out in front blazing the trail, watching her begin to blaze her own trail on her own adventure.  I will admit that I am somewhat saddened by the loss that I will feel when that room down the hall is empty, and she won’t always be here to talk to and take comfort in.  But I am so proud of my Angie, she is brave and strong in ways that I never have been, and she has always supported me in everything I have chosen.  I will be supporting her in this great new adventure.  I will stand by her as her maid of honor, I will cry during her sealing, and I will help her move on into a new life with her husband.  Here’s to MY Angie, the best friend and sister a woman could ever have!  I love you, and wish to you happy times and noodle salad for all eternity!

I can't like it Polly Pockets

Around Christmas time a lady with 3 boys gave to me a gallon sized bag of Polly Pockets that someone had given to her…No, I don’t understand why someone gave a woman with 3 boys Polly Pockets.  Anyway I was keeping them to give to Casey at some point, and that point came the other day and she has been playing with them.  This morning I sat down to play with her and her Polly Pockets…and after about 5 minutes of serious consternation Angie came and I looked at her and said in a very firm voice, “I can’t like it these Polly Pockets!”…But let me tell you why!

Have you ever tried to play with these heinously small and frustrating toys?  Holy Crap!!!  I seriously have questions for the makers of these.  Starting with why in the name of Zeus’ butt-hole did you include hats in the wardrobe when their hair is all formed into pony tails?!?  The hats don’t fit on any of them except the boy that resembles that Justin Beaver kid.  And if you are going to make these massive amounts of clothes for these dolls, shouldn’t they all be the same size?  Here I am trying to put what must have been girly pants (they were blue) on the Beaver kid doll…they didn’t fit right at all!  Then there was this girl doll that was smaller than the other girl dolls…what the CRAP was that about?  Then I am checking this little chickie out, given that there was just something not right about her, only to discover that her arms were on the wrong sides, so her arms were bass-ackwards while her body was all facing the right way.  Then just try and put those stupid clothes on!!  They are very small and made of rubber, and you are supposed to stretch them over the bodies that are also small and made of rubber too!  Rubbing rubber on more rubber when all the rubber is tiny makes for a very frustrated mommy!  Here I am sitting on the floor of the living room trying to dress these little naked dolls trying really hard not to curse in front of my parrot of a daughter…HOLY CRAP!!!  I was almost happy to go upstairs and clean just to get away from those stupid things! 

As I am cleaning and vacuuming upstairs very forcefully in order to work out the aggression that I have going on inside me, I was thinking about these things.  How do they expect little girlies to be able to work these things?  No wonder we got them and they were all naked.  I am glad that someone gave these to me, because if I had paid money for them this rant would be in an email to whoever makes those things.  I would demand my money back because they are really not well designed, and I wonder if they brought some girlies in to try and play with them before they put them on the market.  And if they did, were they children from a Western culture…because we are way not as detail oriented as those from the Eastern countries, especially when it comes to patience for these itty bitty toys.  I also made the decision that at my first opportunity I am going to be pawning those puppies off on some other unsuspecting mother with a young daughter, as they are bound to continue to irritate me when she asks me to play with her. 

So, in conclusion…I CAN’T LIKE IT POLLY POCKETS!!!

The Dog Door

We have a dog and by logical deduction you must realize that we have a dog door.  Our dog is in the category of medium sized dogs, not large and not small either.  My 15 month old son has been toying with this door for months now, on the evening of my birthday he finally made it through.  We discovered this as we were eating cake and he started banging on the door…from the outside. 

Our yard is completely fenced in, after all the dog is allowed free access to the back yard.  The yard, however, is not really a yard in the sense that there is grass and plants and happy looking.  We have no grass, only weeds…we have plants, in the beds along the fence line…we have trees, fruit trees that are producing small fruits that fall upon the ground that are easily picked up by small hands.  I did mention the dog that poops outside…on the concrete…also easily picked up by little hands.  Did I also mention that my son puts EVERYTHING in his mouth?  Yeah, now you are beginning to understand my distress at the thought that he can go freely out into the back yard!  I was doing dishes one evening after dinner and Gramma-Chele took the boy out into the back, and before she closed the screen I told her to “make sure he doesn’t eat any poop”, she turned around with the most disgusted look on her face and said “will he do that?!”.   I have already dealt with rocks in the mouth, little plums in the mouth, chalk in the mouth, and toys in the mouth…I am not ready to fish poop out of his mouth!  He already tries to eat the dog’s food, I am just not ready for the day that he puts a poop log in his mouth.

With this new discovery that he has made, I have discovered that what was a blessing 6 months ago is now the bane of my existence.  Here is my dilemma:  1^st, I can’t get rid of the dog door as the dog uses it in the middle of the night.  2^nd, my son is constantly climbing out the dog door, which Barkley just loves and encourages, but is causing me large amounts of distress.  This morning we also discovered that he can now open and close the screen door…so really there is no way in keeping him in, short of putting the cover on the dog door and closing the glass door.  He usually goes out with grandpa in the morning while he waters…of course preparations have to be made before this can happen, like shoes and sweeping the poop into the weed area.  My mother tells me that I worry too much…I have thought about this, and my conclusion is that I don’t worry enough!  I am pretty sure that the back yard is a death trap and it is out to eat my son!  I don’t worry about Casey as I have had a devil of a time getting her to eat food, I know she won’t put any ick in her mouth.  She comes to me when her hands are dirty and insists that I wash them, she has done this since she could walk.

So there it is, my next great stressor…here’s to dog doors and nervous breakdowns!