Day 8: Parent Fail

There are some areas in which my parenting falls woefully short. My kid is going on four years old, and he's still not potty trained. He is not even close, and I have no idea how to fix it. We ask him twenty times a day if he needs to go potty, and the answer is always no, even if he is visably in mid-poop. Also, I cannot get him to go to bed at night. We've tried everything. We've had to institute a policy of taking a toy away every time he gets up and putting it in a "naughty box." He has to earn his toys back from the naughty box by being extra-good.

So far, the goddamn naughty box is not working. Half his room is in the naughty box, and the little shit just got up for about the fifteenth time. I'm about to put his ass in the naughty box.

I have no idea if my parenting is to blame for any of this, but I am so tired of touching poop, I could just frickin' cry.

Day 7: Two Things

Yes, so I missed yesterday. I came home, laid down on the couch, and promptly fell asleep. I don't know what to tell you. Fatigue is kicking my ass this pregnancy, even more so than last time. I think it's because there's a 3-1/2-year-old already living here, which could make anyone tired.

So today, I will think of two random things about myself to make up for yesterday. As long as we're talking about it, I may even make them pregnancy-related.

1. When I was pregnant with Max, I craved chili-cheese dogs and graham crackers. I ate both a lot. With this one, whom we've nicknamed Ghostrider (yes, we have real names picked out, and I probably won't reveal them until Ghostrider makes an appearance, because otherwise, how will I get you to come back?), I am craving root vegetables in their least healthy forms: maple-brown sugar glazed carrots with pecans and bacon, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, beer-battered onion rings, raw radishes sprinkled with salt. Morning sickness also was a lot different with Max than it is with Ghostrider: with Max, I felt sick all day, every day, but just enough to make me feel terrible, not actually terrible enough to make me throw up. With Ghostrider, I feel terrible in the morning and the late afternoon, and I have actually been throwing up this time. Luckily, it's only been in the morning, when my stomach is empty. I hate to throw up.

2. I am one of the only people I know whose water actually broke without having to have it broken for them. I was in Sears at the time. We were coming back from my last doctor's appointment. It was two days before I was scheduled to be induced at 39 weeks, and we stopped to pick up Max's crib, which had been back-ordered. I was following Dan through the store, shuffling along, thinking about how uncomfortable I was, how tired of feeling uncomfortable I was, how I was tired of going to doctors and taking off my pants and having things put places where, frankly, things were already a little too crowded for my liking, and...you know, I really am uncomfortable, maybe more so than I was a minute ago, I just wish this would stop...and just like that, it stopped, and as it did, I felt a wet, hot explosion. That is exactly what it felt like, and I apologize for how graphic it sounds, but there is absolutely no other way to describe it, and I knew instantly what it was.

Day 5: Take Me Away

There are certain pieces of music I love for their ability to take me to a particular place and time in my own history. For example: the songs "Queen of the Slipstream" and "Days Like This" by Van Morrison always makes me think of driving home on Friday nights after the ski resort closed. I practically lived there my Senior year. I don't know why I always listened to Van Morrison on the way home, except that after the adreneline of racing for six hours, I needed to come down a little, and Van Morrison helped me turn down the volume in my brain.

Friday night after skiing was one of the only times of the week when I allowed myself to eat fast food or junk food, and I usually got Taco Bell and ate it in the car on the way home. Comfy shoes after six hours in ski boots was also a great visceral pleasure to me at that point. I associate Van Morrison with letting my body and brain both slow way, way down. Maybe that's why I have so much Van Morrison loaded into my ITunes "Vacation" playlist.

Day 4: Mortifying

I have had notable crushes on the following celebrities: Joe McIntyre (from New Kids on the Block), Kiefer Sutherland, Ricky Schroeder. Johnny Depp circa 1988, Tom Cruise circa 1987, Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, John Corbitt, Kyle McLachlan, Vince Vaughn, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Seth Rogan, Edward Norton, and Bradley Whitford.

It is my most fervent hope that my tastes continue to evolve.

Edited: Gahh! Sarah's right: I did forget Anthony Bourdain. Tony, I'm so sorry. Come 'ere, I'll make it up to you.

Day 3: Stimulus

I think the auto industry bailout is, overall, a good thing, as long as it's accompanied by real change in the leadership and their greed and their short-sightedness and their mismanagement. I also think that the banking bailout has proved to be a giant fucking hairshirt of the worst kind; it was a stupid idea to use tax dollars to subsidize the spa retreats and annual bonuses of a bunch of assholes who send email to each other for a living and are paid more for running their companies into the ground than for making a profit.

No, I don't think the two are the same thing.

Day 2: Chicken Fajitas

I love to cook for people and I have loved Mexican food for as long as I can remember, really good, spicy Mexican food. I would die happy, as long as I drowned in a bucket of guacamole. One of my favorite things ever is the chicken flautas meal from Mi Ranchito in Kalamazoo, Michigan--the one on Westnedge, which is now closed, was much better than the one in Oshtemo. I am firmly of the opinion that almost any food is made better when it's wrapped in a warm tortilla and dribbled with pico de gallo.

One of the first really great meals that I ever made for other people was chicken fajitas. I used a recipe from a cookbook called The Well-Filled Tortilla. I liberated that cookbook from my mother's house when I went to college. The recipe could not be more simple. Put a boneless, skinless chicken breast between two pieces of heavy-duty plastic wrap (a heavy-duty freezer bag works really well) and pound it with a meat mallet until it's thin--like 1/4 inch or thinner. Unwrap it and sprinkle it on both sides with salt and chili powder--just regular old chili powder from the grocery store. Heat a couple teaspoons of olive oil in a non-stick skillet over medium high heat for a few minutes, until the oil is shimmering, and then lay the chicken in the pan. Cook it on the first side for a couple of minutes, maybe three. Turn it over and cook it another couple of minutes. Pull it out of the pan and slice the chicken into thin slices, wrap it in a couple of warm flour tortillas with whatever toppings you happen to like, and eat it. I like mine with sour cream thinned with a tablespoon or so of lime juice stirred in, chopped cilantro, pico de gallo, and a little crumble of cheese.

You can make this for a huge crowd of people--just make more chicken and warm more tortillas and have lots of toppings to choose from; people will sit around making themselves fajitas all night. You can do the same basic thing with thinly sliced steak (bottom round works great, and is cheap), pork tenderloin (cut it into half-inch rounds and pound it), a mixture of portabello mushrooms, red onion and bell peppers (slice them before you cook them), or shrimp (don't slice them, just season them, saute them, and serve them). It's a simple way to cook for a crowd, and it's practically impossible to screw it up.

Day 1: A Month of Interesting

It's February and it's the shortest month and therefore I feel at least slightly justified in talking about myself. I recently did a "25 Random Things About Me" thing on Facebook and I was surprised at how much I liked doing it and how much I liked reading other people's 25 things. I like to talk about myself. It's one of those things that sort of adds to my social awkwardness.

So in a sort of socially awkward and all-by-myself-out-here spinoff of NaBloPoMo, I will attempt a February MoBloPoMo (that's Molly Blog Posting Month, FYI) of an additional 28 random things about me. I will now attempt to be interesting for an entire month, and hope that what comes out isn't just clever, which is just the idiot's version of being interesting.

My career aspirations have included the following: actress, lawyer, architect, wildlife photographer, commercial artist, fine art photographer, photojournalist, print journalist, writer, and mobility and rehabilitation instructor. I have discovered that my abilities and interests are best suited to a career in research and writing, which is, in essence, what I now do for a living.

Most of the careers aspirations I used to have were abandoned after I discovered how much education I would need to have (I like to learn, I just am not so interested in school, although I did the whole college thing) or that they involved a lot of skills that I never really acquired: math, for example, or being pleasant to extremely annoying people for long periods of time.