Tuesday, November 27, 2012

The Poopy Little Puppy

I always think there is a book by that title, but then I realize it was instead, The Poky Little Puppy. It's a Little Golden Book. I read it as a child and I loved the book. Years ago, I entertained the thought of writing children's books. Why not, right? Therefore, I have an announcement. In light of my experience with dogs, I'm writing a new book entitled The Poopy Little Puppy and submitting it for certain rejection.

I'm totally kidding. Hmmm, perhaps I should create a tongue-in-cheek satire piece based on each Little Golden Book. Maybe there's a market. Maybe they'd sue me. I'll have to think about that. Sigh... I digress.

What I really want to talk about today is cuticle scissors and playing mind games with my children. What does that have to do with The Poopy Little Puppy? These things are all related, I promise. Don't be confused. Here, I'll tie the threads together for you.

We raise and sell Great Pyrenees puppies. Yes, you've seen the pictures of my fur-babies. The other day, we had to do a little... shall we say... delicate fur maintenance in the buttocks region of a puppy. You see, our puppies have very fluffy, fine, white hair. The puppies also have a little bit of  a case of the goopy poops when they're weaning.



One of the puppies apparently managed to sit on his goopy poop and then fall fast asleep, or some horrid scenario like that, and his fur-mommy did not get it cleaned up. This meant that human-mommy (that would be me) got the privilege of butt maintenance. I know 'tis the season, but I can't very well sell a puppy with a chunk of poop dangling about like a Christmas ornament from the poop-a-doodle orifice.

My plan was to bring the puppy in, put it in the tub, and take care of it with some paper towels. Plan A did not work. The poo was stuck like glue. It soon became apparent that I was going to have to cut the tainted chunk of fur from my wriggling poopy little puppy.

I needed help.

I summoned both children and grabbed the cuticle scissors. Not only did they not want to help and were properly grossed out, man, but they both almost simultaneously exclaimed, "Ewwww, you're using those scissors? I'm never using those again!" I almost crapped in my own fur at that moment. I had an epiphany. Brilliant!

All I have to do to keep the children from running off with my things is to do something disgusting with whatever item they would normally "borrow," then disinfect it. They will never touch it again! I grinned from ear to ear. An evil smile of realization crept across my face. Brilliant, I tell you. Brilliant!

My mind raced. What could I do with the hair brush? My makeup? My stapler! Oh, the possibilities... Why, I think I'll drop something in the toilet right in front of them next week. "Oh no, I dropped my hair brush in the toilet and I just peed. So gross! Oh well. I'll just wash that off and it'll be fine." Hee hee hee. They'll never touch my stuff again.

Felix sure has a pretty butt, though, thanks to my now thoroughly bleached, scrubbed and sanitized cuticle scissors. Brilliant, I tell you. Simply brilliant.


If you enjoy my humor, please click on the Circle of Moms badge on the right to vote me into the top 25 Book Author Moms. You can vote once a day through December 7, 2012 with no obligation. I am currently at #26 and every vote counts. I appreciate each and every one!

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Sunday, November 11, 2012

The Hair of My Chinny Chin Chin

One night, I was watching TV while mindlessly checking the landscape of my chin. I felt something. I assumed it was a blemish, but it wasn't. A trip to the mirror revealed the ugly truth. This was worse than a blemish.

This sinister demon keeping residence on my face... was chin hair!
 
Eeks! What is that?
Bad enough, chin hair on a woman, but this was a chin hair on steroids. I couldn't believe it. The thing was a quarter inch long, at least. It had hidden itself so well, curled under the curvature of my jaw line so tightly that I hadn't noticed it for how long? I have no idea!

I'm no stranger to facial hair. I sport what's referred to as peach fuzz and it's not uncommon for me to have a wiry hair occasionally. Pluck! Be gone! I banish you from the kingdom of Faceopotamia! Perhaps it's a genetic gift from my father. He did, in fact, sport a beard of his own.

Very fine blond hair blankets my face if I let it do its thing. However, I'm not a very good sport about this facial hair thing and therefore, I get rid of it with a dainty little battery operated personal shaver that makes my lady beard experience seem more feminine. It's a cute little shaver. I appreciate that. I'd be horrified to have to use a Mach 20 - or however many blades Gillette has come up with for men to shear themselves with these days.

As a teen, I worked for a time in a nursing home in the developmentally disabled wing. There was a woman who didn't speak, didn't walk on her own, and family didn't visit her. She seemed happy, however. She had very long chin hairs and I always wondered why nobody plucked them for her. Was it because she didn't go out in public? Was it "not my job" for any employee of the nursing home? Were they afraid she'd punch them if they messed with her facial hair? Perhaps they had tried. I do not know.

The burning question in my mind is this: Who will pluck my chin hairs and shave my peach fuzz when I'm old? Who, I ask you... WHO? Whoooooooo.........?

And who will pluck yours?

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

A Year in the Making

I know, I know, I just posted yesterday. But truly, today is a special day and special days are worth noting. It was exactly one year ago today that I started my blog. It was my little experiment. What would happen? Would anyone care? Would anyone relate? Would I fade into the sunset, laptop in hand, tail dragging on the ground behind me as I retreated from my writing dream?

Heck to the N-O! I consider my first year of blogging a smashing success. I've gotten my feet wet, gotten paid for blogging, made wonderful friends and connections, and have been proud of what I have done here. Also, it is an excellent day to announce my book! Well, I say "my book," but it belongs to many.

It's a humor anthology called My Funny Major Medical and I have two blog pieces in it - the ones about my mammograms this year. If you are a long-time faithful Everyday Underwear follower, you'll remember The Ma'ams-o-gram and Ma'ams-o-gram: Take Two, with a Twist in which I talk about my boobs, the pain, and Jesus holding my boob (in prayer!) to the end of chuckle-worthy results. All came out fine with my mammos, and thanks to a thread on LinkedIn which I just happened to comment on and mentioned my boob work (LOL! - snort), I got the opportunity to submit the pieces and they were accepted.

I am so proud to say that I am now a published author and my own Amazon Author Page and I downloaded the book (with me in it) onto my Kindle Fire! I read it first to make sure it didn't suck before I told anyone I was in it. It doesn't suck! It does have some cursing in it, so if you are extremely prim and proper (and if so, why are you reading this blog?) you may not want to read it. Other than that, I actually found myself chuckling many times throughout the book, and not just when reading my own stories!

I am in the company of some wonderful humorists, such as 2010 Erma Bombeck Global Humor Winner, Barb Best and award winning and Nationally Syndicated Columnist, Saralee Perel plus many other talented folks, both male and female, telling their medical funny bone breaking tales.

I'm happy to have this blog, the relationships I've come to have with all of you, and the ability to write despite my recent challenges. I'm even taking steps to plan attendance at my very first writer's conference. I'm so excited, I could pee my pants! I won't, since I'm not wearing a diaper, but you get what I mean.

I thank all of you for coming along on this ride with me this past year - the making of Everyday Underwear. I will continue to do my best to entertain you further! Remember, no thongs allowed.

Monday, November 5, 2012

R.S.V.Peeve

We threw a party last week. It was an early birthday/Halloween party for my daughter, the tween. My two daughters, ages 11 and 14, agreed to do all the planning, shopping, purchasing, inviting, cleaning, etc. They know I'm sick. They know I'm tired. Yes, I'm literally sick and tired, thanks to my newly diagnosed Lyme Disease. So I let them do it all. Yeah, right! In my dreams...

There was even a full moon for the "haunted trail!" Perfect!  

We always give them a budget. They get X amount for their birthday and they can do whatever they want with X. They can use it for a present, for food for the party, decorations for the party, etc. I feel it's a pretty fair deal. They usually opt for spending all of X on the party. This year was no Xception. Nearly the entire amount was spent online at Party City on decorations. They would buy the food themselves out of the money they made working at our food stand on the weekends.

Several days before the party, while I did my Wal-Mart shopping, they filled their own cart with food and met me at the checkout. Their budget was $60, the money they would make helping us at the food stand if they worked really hard that weekend. The grand total at the register? $137. I was nice and agreed to let them owe me. Truth be told, I was too tired to argue. That happens a lot. Anybody else out there with a horrible disease let their children take advantage of them inadvertently because you're too tired to fight about it? I didn't think I was the only one!

They promised to hand over their last weekend's pay, work really hard for us at the food stand all weekend, AND my oldest daughter even cooked up a bake sale idea to raise money at the flea market to pay us back. Fine. I'm down with that. Add another $37 for bake sale supplies and yet another Wal-Mart trip.

Fast-forward to reality. My oldest daughter cooked all night Saturday night for the bake sale on Sunday. I was so proud of her! They spent all day Sunday selling their wares and eating their wares. They ignored the food stand all day Sunday for the bake sale and made a whopping $33, not even enough to pay us back for supplies. Also, the pay they would have made on Sunday (which was to be put toward what they owed us) was practically nothing since they vacated the food stand and sat up at the main building at the flea market all day.

I reasoned that they were making oodles (my daughter had projected $117 from her venture) and they were out of our hair, so I let them stay at their post. At the end of the day, they managed to lose the money - all of it - plus the change I'd given them to use. It was the end of the season for the food stand and we'd decided not to continue with it next year, so we decided to cut our losses. Their lost money, however, was later recovered.

Seems that grandma (flea market owner and sitting mere feet away in her office, observing the bake sale all day) had made it a point to teach them a lesson by taking their money box when all FIVE children (my two kids, two friends, and a cousin) left it unattended. She did a convincing job of pretending to know nothing and an intense search for a mystery man with a food stand to-go box full of money became the afternoon delight of the children.

The party was on Monday. After working the food stand all weekend, I dragged my weary butt out of bed, prepared to clean my butt off on Monday for the party. Somehow, that hadn't gotten done by the children. What, really? Yeah, really (apply heavy sarcasm here). I entered the laundry room to look for something and there on the counter was all of the food for the party. A gajillion hot dogs and four frozen pizzas had been sitting on the counter in the laundry room with the s'mores and buns all weekend. The food was ruined. I'd have to make another trip to Hell-Mart Wal-Mart to replace the food - on my own dime.

My kids did this. They brought in all the groceries and were supposed to put them away. I wasn't supposed to have to do anything for this party, right? Ha! What I did in response to finding the expired food cannot be repeated, but it involved throwing packages of hot dogs and cursing, let's just leave it at that. Outbursts of rage are a symptom of Lyme, I swear to God. Look it up.

We had put an R.S.V.P. on the invitations and my daughter had handed out 30 of them to her friends at school. I happened to run into two parents who told me their children would attend, so I knew two people were coming, but besides that, I got no response whatsoever. Have people forgotten what an R.S.V.P. means? It means that you are supposed to call and tell me whether or not you're coming so I can know how many people will be here. Some family had agreed to attend, so I knew there would be at least two friends and some family, but there could have been anwhere between 10-40 people as far as I knew. I figured it would be closer to ten.

Twenty children showed up at my house that night. TWENTY! From 4:00 - 8:30 (several came home on the bus with my daughter), they came in droves, multiples crammed into minivans and SUV's. I thought I would die, but I did in fact live. The kids had a blast and I wore myself out.

I guess you only turn twelve once. In a mere six years, my party throwing days will be over, so I bucked up and weathered the storm. Those children whipped past me faster than 75 mph winds!

My daughter forgot to put that it was also a birthday party on her invitations (despite my example, which included that fact) and so she got no presents, but a good time was had by all. I ended the night by stating that, "We'll never do that again," but we love our kids and so.... I bet we will do it again... and again... and again. I'm still making them pay us back, though. I have a chart and everything.

How do you handle birthdays for your children? Little parties? Big? Do you plan it or do they?