Lost in a cup of hot tea...

Sitting here as a sentient being, or at least I am during this cup of French Vanilla tea, reading MetroDad, and pondering about things that I feel are over-rated or under-rated.

I'm also thinking about the procedure my father-in-law is going for today, and readying myself to be able to leave at the drop of a hat to go to the VA to be there if he goes downhill. I think he is one person that I'd want to be there for in passing now. I don't think this is going to go well, and that's not a wish, that's just an observation, the man has been in dire straits for the last two years now. I'm hoping it turns around for him, he needs some more good things to happen to him. I love the man, he is a bright beacon of optimism in a world that has long gone dark. He's often said he won't go out without a fight, well, he's had one hell of a fight, and he's still here...my only hope however, is that he still has some fight left in him. So I'm a little preoccupied here, but oh well...onto the lists.

Over-rated:
Reality TV...Please, more whiny ass teens or young adults acting like teens! Really, you're going with that again? Oh spare me the agony and just kill me now! I believe there is a separate circle in the hell I don't believe in for the concept writers of these so-called reality shows. I'm tired of hearing about Jon & Kate, The Duggars, and anyone else who is a brood mare for the state multiple times over, like they're a freakin star because their uterus is a gumball machine. I'm not impressed, if you have all those kids naturally, and I don't mean by implanting 40 eggs in your uterus. I'm trying to find the word for 40 kids but I keep finding singles dating sites for "40-somethings" or solutions to math problems. It's too early! Don't even get me started on American Idol, we'll be here all day!

Flavored tea, or more specifically, Flavored tea with the lack of said flavor. If my tea is french vanilla, dammit, it'd better taste like french vanilla, not like vanilla scented potpourri in a cup. I'd like to submit to these companies, the idea of a high-flavor line, because I'm sorry, the older I get, the less sensitive my tongue is...hence why I over hot sauce my KFC until I get heartburn from it, and by the by, when the fuck did I start getting heartburn?! Am I falling apart!?

Ailments. Since when did it become the status quo to advertise so many drugs to cure so many ailments, I'm tired of seeing it, and I don't like hearing about your erectile dysfunction issue on TV. Isn't there someone you're supposed to talk to about this, that like, gets paid for doing such talking, and then he offers you something for it? Dealer...I mean doctor?

Country music. Since when did country music appear on Fuse?! Dammit, there needs to be another new music channel, and this one CAN'T fuck it up! We music fans need a damn good music channel, something we can watch music videos from the dawn of the music video, to the latest hard rock and metal stuff we can find. I'm sorry, MTV, MTV2, MTV Hits (which kicked fucking ass when it was MTV X but sucks now), VH1, VH1 Classic, and Fuse all dropped the ball when it came time to start putting music that was on the fringe into our minds. These stations have all but become irrelevant being as they only reflect the zeitgeist and not the desires and the new, fresh attitude I'm starting to hear on some of the fringe website radio shows. It's nice to hear something that isn't on 24/7. I'm starting to think, that just as 24/7 news networks destroyed media, 24/7 music networks destroyed music. Even these bands that are starting to break are just sounding like a tired-ass retread of the shit I heard six months ago. And speaking of which...

Now! that's what I call music...what are you, on #75 now? Hang that shit up, everyone downloaded those songs and subsequently deleted them several months ago. Should be renamed Now! That's What I Downloaded Six Months Ago #75.

24 hour news networks. I could see if you did 24 hours of newsworthy stuff, like I dunno, covering the war? I remember the first gulf war, the national networks broke into their daytime drama and went off for primetime and late night, but came back in the morning and did their thing, they reported as often as possible with new shit, they didn't retread the same blurb of news about some dog being lost in Alabama for 45 minutes. I'll watch some of the news programs on MSNBC or CNN, but other than that, I have better things to do with my DVR time, like record Jon Stewart or Bill Maher.

Well, I'm going to crash for a bit before the little one wakes up and needs my undying attention again today, we've had a clingy time lately.

Trials and Trepidation...

I awoke this morning at the ripe old hour of 3AM to the sound of my wife giving my daughter a tongue-lashing, because she woke her up for chocolate milk. My wife yelled and screamed at her.

It would have been okay except for the fact that we both were in a deep death of sleep. It was great, better than I could have imagined, and it would have been very refreshing aside for the interruption.

What propensity do children have to wake up at 3am and want chocolate milk all of the sudden? I'm failing to understand first-grader logic.

All I know is, I can't wait until she's back in school, where she'll be more than ready to crash and sleep all night at 8pm.

Thinking about things...

So I'm sitting here, and my soon-to-be six-year-old is acting up, throwing fits, and not wanting to try anything new, I'm getting tired of her attitude swings, and everything. I'm taking ANY ideas as to how to get her to stop acting up.

Happy Father's Day...20 Things I like about my daughters.

I was reading MetroDad today, and I have to say, that man has one of the funniest daughters I've ever read about, so in honor of a great idea, I'm going to write my 20 Things:

• Justeen loves to put her hands on her hips, shoot the LDS (Little Death Stare) at me, and say: "That's what you're going with?" She repeats me too well!
• Rory will not nap for hours on end, and when I try to put her down for one, she'll lay there crying for awhile, stop for a few minutes, and then start again. When I begrudgingly get her out of bed, she'll look at me as if to say "I can hang, I can hang!"
• Rory has mastered the power of concentration, she will let out these little grapes, but the smell is like someone painted the room in feces.
• When Justeen was about 18 months old, she figured out the last three numbers of mommy's bank account. So everytime for about three months when we'd go to her bank, she would always pipe up from the backseat in the cutest little voice saying: "2-2-9."
• I took Justeen to the Union picnic one year, and she looked at me drinking beer, and without missing a beat, says: "Daddy, are you drinking pee?!" With the other guys sitting around the keg right there laughing so hard, beer shot out their noses.
• Justeen's first dislike of food: We brought out some pureed green beans for her (Gerber rocks the nasty factor well!) and she turned them flat down the moment she caught a whiff of the scent of those things, and I don't blame her. We've since decided to MAKE baby food.
• Rory likes to mess with us, she will lay there and roll all over for us, but when the Building Healthy Families lady comes over, she won't move. Justeen was a showoff, but Rory is a sarcastic little wench, because this morning in bed, she flipped onto her tummy from her back and was crying about it.
• Justeen has always been a camera ham, Rory will just stare into the lens with this cute, dazed-yet-inquisitive look on her face.
• Teaching my daughters about all the great old actors, musicians, and artists. From the womb, both have been introduced to Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Cream, Queen, Creed (the My Own Prison album, screw the rest), Megadeth and many many more. Rory cues into Amy Brown artwork. We're going to take both of them to the Science and Art Center in Des Moines this or next summer.
• Sitting down thinking I had some shows to watch on the DVR and realizing that they got skipped in favor of some kids movie.
• Ripping said kids movies off of my DVR to burn to DVD for sake of watching later.
• Realizing I'm halfway through this list and I'm out of things to say about my kids right now, because one is asleep and the other is laying down in her room, and I need to clean up after last night's party for my wife.
• Bottle in hand, looking into Lorelei's bright blue eyes and seeing this unconditional, unbridled love...at 3am.
• Watching Justeen play dress-up, and come out with a tiara, a pajama top, jeans with a skirt over them, and no socks with high platform play shoes.
• Justeen being helpful with cleaning, baby sister or anything else I ask, she does it and tries so hard.
• Rory looking face-to-face with me, and then leaning in for a kiss, and instead frenching my nose.
• Justeen getting dressed for the day, and putting both legs in one leg of the pants.
• Rory can be screaming, crying so much that her face is bright red, and tearing all over the place, and just soaked in tears and spittle, and out of air. But I place her in the bath and instant calm!
• Justeen has the cutest voice, and to hear it is great, but to hear it often is bad. I enjoy watching her try to stumble over words she doesn't quite know or can read yet.
• Never underestimate the power of the word "poop" to a five-year-old. It's a noun, adjective, and verb.

It's great being a dad, and I can't complain about it. I have my days, but life goes on.

#32: Six months and what a world its been.

It's been a whole six months (and three days) since that cold, miserable, windy, freezing rain, snowy, shitty day. The day that my youngest daughter was induced into this world (damn modern medicine wanting to save the mother at all costs...I'll post about that sometime in the future) and joined a family in the middle of spiritual, financial, and employment hell.

She is a great looking child today, as she was when she came into the world; we've established a daily routine, which daddy still doesn't adhere to with much behest from the child, and the wifey; she has established a cute sense of humor reminiscent of her dad, she will lay there and my wife will flip her arms back and forth across her mouth, and she doesn't cry, she just sits there and makes noise and relishes the "bahbahbahbahbah" sound it makes (I have video, which I will post when it's on youtube.); she loves her baths. She's a Sagitarius which means she's a fire element, but water calms her. She has her own sense of humor, hilarity at its finest! The faces she gives me while I'm gagging changing diapers that even Justeen wouldn't top. She's too cute, and spiritually she's implanted herself in the family, she's great, funny, hilarious, cute, and she has such a GREAT time while she's in the bath, I can't emphasize that enough.

We're planning her baby blessing/Wiccaning for this Friday. I can't wait to bless her, she is already so great!

#31: The change begins, and already I don't want to write this post.

Ok, so let me introduce you to the other bundle of joy in my life, the one who still brings a smile and warm fuzzies to me when she smiles and/or plays. My oldest daughter, Justeen, is just two months from turning SIX. I still remember the first day bringing her home from the hospital in Ames, about an hour away, which that day it took us about an hour and half. Because I drove about 40mph most of the way home, because she started sleeping the moment we put her, in her car seat, into the Jeep. We took the old highway from Ames to State Center, and then stopped there, talked to her dad for awhile at his work, and then headed home. I'll never forget it, because it was my first child. Not to say I'll forget Rory's coming home either...-10 with -40 wind chills, what a week that was!

Justeen loves to play in the yard, plant flowers, (trying to) cook, draw on the sidewalk with her massive amounts of chalk she got two years ago and hasn't worn out of supply. Her aspirations this summer are to learn how to tie shoes, ride a bike, and how to use a hammer (she helped me with building a bird house last spring). She hates when I play with my band because we are "so loud for me!" as she puts it. She likes to play princess, and has so much Disney princess junk that there is no mistaking there is a little girl in that room. She painted her walls in cotton candy pink and purple, which she helped with and was SO proud! She also helped paint trim on the house when we moved in here two years ago.

My daughter lives in a world of fantasy and unfortunately has taken to my habits, and has hit friends of hers at school. She has also bit, said mean words to, pushed down, taken a ball that was being played with from, and pulled hair on her friends. She has subsided a bit since we have taken things away and let her earn them on a daily basis. She is also working on earning 50 stars for days with good behavior towards a Nintendo DS, of which she has earned five already.

I bring that up because of a transgression between my wife and the mother to one of Justeen's friends. I can't tell what all went on because the facebook status post the discussion was on is deleted now. But in the general realm, what happened is, the mother of her friend (A in further reference) told my wife that A's daughter (C) is not allowed to be around Justeen right now, because of some of the above listed actions. My sister-in-law (D) discussed this with my wife over the phone, and my wife said how she felt A was just holding this shit back, and just sprung it on us now, and we had no way to know what was going on, C told her that since we were family and she was a close friend, that she wasn't going to support either side in this, and that she might not even hang with either side until this blows over. Now A, and D, along with several other people had railed on my wife about this on facebook all day, and she was just holding onto it and did nothing to protect herself. I resigned from the argument, and I'll explain why after I get done with this section. Now E comes along and sees all of this and is talking to wifey on facebook chat, and then posts something to back her up, she says that we're good parents, despite what our kid does, because we try to parent her, we at least make an effort, and that anyone who is talking shit about us really needs to look at themselves first. A comes along and says that my daughter was cussing at her daughter at school, and then drags me into the argument, saying I'm a bad parent because I use cuss words in front of my daughter, also because I advocate some violence (or something other than a fucking lesson) in cartoons, kids go to school the majority of their waking day, they don't need to come home and watch lessons and school lessons for however long they watch TV.

Let me sidebar for a bit about this first: Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends just had it's series finale a couple weeks or so ago, we just watched it, and I'm sad, because I really loved that show, its been on as long as my daughter has been alive so far, and I've watched it with her in my arms and eating from a bottle, and now sitting next to her on the couch, or curling up under a blanket. I remember a day when I was going to head outside and do a lot of stuff, but none of it got done because there was a six hour Foster's marathon that day, and we watched. Every. Single. Episode. I love it because while the lesson is subversive (which is the way I think it should be) it's not omnipresent. They're not trying to teach you like Sesame Street or Dora, and I think that's what is wrong with kid's TV shows now. Too many are trying to be edutainment, and that is so wrong, kids need to unplug and enjoy flights of fancy every now and again. I know I daydreamed as a kid, I used to wonder what it would be like to live with the Smurfs, or Pippi Longstocking, or the Muppets. Hell, I even daydreamed and played with friends like we were Care Bears.

Another sidebar: What the fuck happened to Care Bears?! I watched a DVD with my daughter and they were all CGI, and damn these fuckers were whiny. There's a difference between showing emotion and being a whiny little fuck about it...

Now, I've mentioned those two points to get to this point. I feel this person is just nitpicking on us, because our daughter chose to react to teasing, she got teased all last year during kindergarten, my wife has told me she'd come off the bus crying because of what A's child did to her. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I've resigned myself from this argument, because I have WAY more important shit to deal with as opposed to her drama-stirring bullshit! I can easily list about ten things I'm trying to deal with that are way more important than her shit. Not to mention there are at least 20 more on that list that I'd have to sit down and think about. Oh, forgot where I was at for a bit, but after A says her shit, E comes back on Facebook and is like "Look, these two have shit going on, not only do they have a new child, but they have to try to keep the other one under control (like we've ever had that!), along with dealing with unemployment and looking for work and one is going back to school." She said something else as well, but I can't remember what it was but I was like "FUCK YEAH!"

At some point I hope this situation resolves itself in any way or form, but for right now, to all parties involved, sick my fucking duck! I'm tired of people stirring up drama and shit just to get my wife and I pissed at each other. I'm having a hard time dealing with my marriage as it is, and I'm trying to keep it together, because we've been through shit like this before, and we made it through, but now we're at each other all the time, like we just have a gun and waiting to draw on each other and trying to make the other feel pain first. We've got a lot of shit on our plate, and a lot more to work on between the two of us, but since having our second child, we haven't had much time to talk at all. We used to deal with stuff in a fairly rational manner, and now we just can't wait to bite the other person's head off! I often sit here wondering what the fuck happened, we were doing great, and all of the sudden the family dynamic changed and ever since that happened, the five months since have been sheer hell. I don't even want to list all of the shit that is going on here, because I don't want a pity party, I don't want sorrow, I need anything to get me out of this rut. Unfortunately for me, Publishers Clearinghouse hasn't showed up with the big check despite answering their emails for the big $10 million deadline since it passed over a year ago. I don't think anyone ever wins that shit, it would help to win it, but like that'll ever happen.

I've done so much good shit, I've been such a nice person, I've done everything I can for my family, I've fought tooth and nail for four years after we lost our apartment because we couldn't pay the rent, what with our NO jobs and all. I've fought so damn hard for everything I have, and I'm tired of fucking drama, I'm beyond needing it, I have enough, you can take yours back and kindly go fuck yourself!

But I guess I can't paint too good of a picture of my daughter, because it's really an objective issue, it depends on who views it. But I still see the smiley little chubby face that used to look back at me from a pile of blankets and just coo and giggle at me. I still remember the first time I ever got her to laugh by blowing raspberries on her tummy, I called EVERYONE who would listen over the phone to her giggling. She may be going through some shit of her own, and she may hit people, and do mean things, but I don't see where it is, I don't see the meanness in her. But you know what, I'm done with this argument. I figure I'm a good parent as long as she doesn't wind up killing anyone, or on the pole.

#30: The solid foods come into play tonight!

I'm stoked, ecstatic, enamored, and scared shitless at the same time. Little bit starts solid foods! We're going to give her some cereal tonight!

I'll keep you posted and put the pics up in the next posting on here. Also, I'm changing the main focus of this blog to be for the parenting of both of my daughters. I have so many tales to tell.

#29. Observations and Exasperations

So its been awhile since my last blog post, and since then I've discovered many things. My daughter, the new one, lil bit, of whatever I'm calling her this week, is impressive.

She has started off this week by proving to me how well she can vomit. All over the place. I had to not only change my daughter twice, but change myself twice as well. She got me so good that I had to change my underwear. It's freakin impressive, astounding, I really can't put it into words.

And while I'm not as impressively long winded of a blogger as some of my counterparts, but I've discovered a new blogger this week, and his name is MetroDad, a blogger from deep in the heart of Manhattan who knows his way around a sentence, can craft a yarn about many inane yet hilarious aspects of life with children, and here he is on his first time around. I'm on my second, and I'm astounded at this man. Check him out, read the exploits of MetroDad, The BossLady, Peanut and MetroDog, and tell him Jason sent ya!!!!

Sometime in this next week, I hope to sit down for awhile, and muse about things, and also I will post the link to Rory's photobucket.

#28. The birth!

Lorelai came over three weeks ago. It was a great thing! It started off rocky, cold as hell, and we got the most nastiest food from Hardee's we've ever had.

Got everything started, and rolling, about 1230, she was at 3cm and fully effaced, they called for the anesthesiologist, and by the time they got there, she was 10cm and ready to go! They couldn't even sit her up to do it. So she had to go natural, none of the other painkillers worked, and she had to do something I've only heard about. So she gets an award for that shit!

And then I saw her, and she's so cute, I have a link I'll post here soon of her picture album.

The only thing that sucked worse is when we brought her home, I was sicker than a dog, so in that nice crucial bonding time, I was too sick to hold her.

But she is sooooooo cute!

27: The last two weeks in a nutshell...

Lets start off with the Saturday night after wifey got off work. She was feeling really dizzy, so she went to the hospital and got checked out, full stress test, all that good shit. They want to give her an ultrasound and hook up another stress test. And after all of that, the stress test is over, and she asks the doc if she can still work. He just laughed at her.

So we go in again this monday for the ultrasound, and Rory shakes her head no when we try to look at her face, and we got a great moon shot! She mooned us, but we can definetly tell she's a girl.

Thursday I had to take her in for the appt and then get our daughter from school, I got to watch the ultrasound however. But she got good face pictures! Then I had to get my daughter. They found out she's two cm dialated now, and 50% effaced, so its go time! Monday at 7am we start the fun!

And then last night, her friend, or I should say heinous bitchbeast, sent a message in reply to one wifey sent out to her friends, people she thought cared about her, and got this back from the above in reply: "No offense but I really don't care" I'd have just shut the fuck up! You don't do shit like that to a friend. I'm about ready to choke a bitch!