Motherhood is a marathon

Motherhood is a marathon.  When someone speaks of it with warm nostalgia, they're sharing a joy created since the particular event ended. Have you seen the faces of marathoners at mile five, when their feet already hurt but they know they're just getting started?  Have you seen the delirium of mile fifteen?  In the moment precious few of those people look thrilled to be there.  After it's over they'll be proud of the accomplishment.  The further they are from the day they did it the more fondly they remember the experience.  The crazy man screaming obscenities at mile three transforms into singing bluebirds.  They focus on the feeling of triumph at the top of Heart Attack Hill, not the pain of going up it. 

Motherhood is the same way.  No one loves changing the third leaky diaper of the day at the time they're doing it.  When they're looking back they don't remember the horror of holding the baby all night because he was feverish and they were terrified of convulsions.  They remember holding the baby, a precious life that is comforted beyond words by your mere presence.  It's OK not to love the individual moments and it's best to refocus some of the key scenes.

Jesus loves you

but even he thinks you're a bitch.

Strange and terrible things I did to my husband

Chocolate bacon, snail bread, meatcakes.  He's either crazy or he's got a great sense of humor.  Probably both.

Detergent Throwdown follow-up

Background:

I've been Cloth Diapering for just under two years.  I used to have two in fluff but now it's just my boy, age one as of yesterday.  I have a top loader, normal (not hard or soft) water, and a mix of pockets, fitteds and covers, AIOs and AI2s.  PUL, microfiber, hemp, bamboo, and cotton all have a place in my stash.  I have previously used Tide, All FC military, and Dawn.  Then I tried Rocking Green after hearing all the raves and my quest for a cheap, convenient, and effective CD detergent began.  I love RG but mail order is not convenient.  This test was to help me determine if it is the cheapest detergent that does all that it does. 

What's special about cloth diaper laundry:

Most big brand detergents do not rinse out fully.  That "fresh laundry smell" is actually leftover chemicals in your laundry.  Over time that can build up and make your diapers leak.

Additionally, CDs need to be cleaned more thoroughly than, for example, a shirt.  Biological waste can make you sick.  It needs to be fully removed from anything pressed against your baby 24 hours a day.   A half a dose of detergent in a load of laundry typically does effectively remove or kill bacteria from diapers. How to tell?  Leave your wet diapers in the washer for 48 hours.  The smell you get when you open the washer is bacteria by-product.  They were still living in your diapers.  Some count on the heat of the dryer to finish the sanitizing.  I'd rather just have them good and dead.  (BTW, that scent left in your laundry by most big label detergents is designed to mask any bacteria smells.) 


And so began my test. 

Crunchy Clean: Didn't.  Using the amount recommended gave me an outhouse scented house as soon as the diapers warmed up in the dryer.  Gag, hork, spew.  That let me know there was still human waste residue in my diapers.  An ineffective wash.  I tried using more per load as recommended by others on the cloth diaper board and wound up with a lot of residue in my diapers.  I didn't stick with it long enough to have to deal with build up leaks and I was lucky not to face rashes but there was a lot of it in the diapers.  It worked better than nothing on the rest of the laundry (towels, jeans, etc.) by doubling the amount but I won't buy any more.

Sudzy Baby:  I started cussing as soon as I opened it.  You can see the shaved bar soap in it.  This did not bode well for clean rinsing.  I also knew I wouldn't be buying any more.  If it worked it would show me that I could make my own detergent.  It worked for regular clothes.  For diapers it was a mess.  I didn't feel like it was clean rinsing but they smelled clean enough coming out of the wash.  Not "I want to take a big wiff of the freshness clean" but unsoiled.  Then came the day I changed Bubba's diaper and was hit in the face with a burst of lavender.  The only lavender in the house was in the Sudzy Baby.  Clearly it was NOT rinsing out.  He's also had a few rashes with it.  Had I kept using it on the diapers I feel confident my satisfaction would have continued to decline.  Instead I stripped and moved on to the next thing for the diapers.  I do look forward to making my own detergent for the rest of our clothes though. 


Rocking Green:  It rinses clean.  No build up, no smell, just nice soft fabric.  Easily my favorite detergent for diapers.  It also makes my husband's uniforms smell clean.  They hold the funk in a way that Tide and All have never been able to cut even with Oxyclean or color safe bleach.  Rocking Green also does a good enough job killing bacteria that if I forget a load in the wash for a day or even two it still smells OK when I get back to it. 
I HATE that it requires monogamy.  Rocking Green does not play well with other detergents.  If you switch to something else then when you switch back to Rocking Green you are supposed to "Rock the Soak", soak your laundry in Rocking Green and hot water for an hour.  This process allows Rocking Green to bond to the residue in your clothes and then rinse it out.  If you don't Rock the Soak well then buyer beware.  If it was a clean rinsing detergent you'll be fine.  If not then you may be rocking the funk.


Hard Rock:  I don't get it.  It's supposed to be a souped up version of Rocking Green but I guess I don't have whatever the problem is that it solves.  I told the maker of RG that I had regular water but she said I should try Hard Rock anyway.  I tried. It didn't seem to make any difference.  Since I don't have any complaints about RG I guess I wouldn't know what to look for in an improved version.

Tiny Bubbles:  What a crock.  4 Tablespoons for a top loader?!?  That's twice as much as recommended by any of the other CD detergents I tested.  It better be cheap.  Yeah, it's not.  It's not particularly clean rinsing or super active either.  It didn't even get all the washable fingerpaint out of a painting smock.

That's it for now.  I have a few more things in the basement to test but I like to give it several tries on the CDs (I wash every two or three days) and a few loads of regular laundry before I post about it.  To do that to a few detergents takes a month or more.  More reviews once I have more data. :)

Doner Time

So good my kid tried to suck the flavor out of the menu.

Chocolate Bacon Part Two

I already covered how such a thing would occur to me here.  Now on to the process because I know you are absolutely dying to make some yourself.  Actually you probably want to know how it tasted and how my unsuspecting husband responded but I've got photos to use so you're going to have to scroll a minute.

Hack bacon into bite size pieces and cook it.  When defining "bite size" remember bacon shrinks considerably when cooked.  I used kitchen shears to cut four slices at a time and then peeled them apart to cook.

Cook it as flat as possible.  I used a bacon press.  Flatness will cook off the fat for a longer shelf life and make it easier to candy coat.

Drain and blot.  Greasy bacon has it's place but under chocolate isn't it.

 Melt some candy coating according to package directions

Roll the bacon in the melted chocolate one piece at a time.  Place it on waxed paper to dry. Note the care and attention to detail I used.  Master craftsman I am not but it's still chocolate and bacon. 

So, how'd it taste?  When I fed it to the hubby I didn't tell him what it was.  He couldn't identify the bacon on his own.  He thought it was some sort of exotic nut.  The crunch was obvious but it was not excessively pork-like.  Once you know what it is it tastes like chocolate and bacon.  Sorry I can't be more descriptive but that really does cover it.  Both good.  Both still good together.  Not great enough to make again.  It's a major calorie bomb and for that kind of diet damage it needs to be at least as good as Ben and Jerry's.  Do they have a bacon flavor yet?

A lot of men would be a bit shaken to find their wives intently pureeing bacon fat.  Mine offered to go buy white flour if I'd keep the whole grain out of his biscuits.

Chocolate Bacon Part One

Parenting boards are really just a place to unleash your inner bitch.  It's a constant game of one-ups-manship, the only place you can say, "That's an OK carseat if you don't care about safety," and still be welcome the next day.  When the conversation turned to bacon I knew no good would come of it.  I was right.   

The bacon chocolate bar.  What the hell? 

I tried to deny it's existence but if it's on the internet it has to be true.  So I did the only thing I could.  I made some chocolate covered bacon.  For now you'll have to wonder how it went.  I'm going to bed.










Edit 6/7/10: I finally wrote part two.

Strawberries vs Puffed Sugar

You can learn a lot about a girl's home life by how she eats when she's not at home.  Among the choices tonight at Girl Scouts were strawberries and mini-boxes of cereal, the sugar coated cardboard kind your parents let you eat on vacation.

One girl's eyes grew wide with shock.  Was I really going to let them eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch as a side dish?  Yeah, actually, I was.  At least they put vitamins in the ground and puffed fiber sheets before they shatter the bits and spray them with sugar.  The tortilla chips the girls used as ranch dip spoons were untroubled by healthy additives.  She had a few grapes and strawberries too but it was the cereal that held her attention.  She nibbled like a rabbit, one quick bite at a time, ready to drop the box and run if her mother burst in. 

Some of the other girls were focused on the strawberries.  Quickly, greedily, sloppily, they dove in.  How many can I take?  Can I get more?  They ate as many as they could and asked to take the rest home.  They left exactly one.  No one took the last one, that would be rude, but they took every other one.

The strawberry girls were completely puzzled by the cereal.  Why was it there?  How could cereal be party food?  They didn't touch it.  With strawberries in both hands they'd have had a hard time picking it up if they wanted to.  The cereal girl knew the joy of a good strawberry but she also knew an opportunity when she saw one.

I have only mastered the fartsy portion of artsy fartsy. 

Nice

I'm not naturally a nice person.  If I didn't squeeze you out of my body or eat cake with you before I was old enough to know how to use a fork then I probably don't know when your birthday is.  If I do happen to have it written down I'm probably not going to send a card.  I just don't give a crap about birthdays.  I bother to celebrate them for the people I love because there's always a chance they do care but, seriously, your mom and her doctor deserve way more of the credit for your birthday than you do. 

I think there may have been a third day of puberty education when they taught sassy young girls how to become nice young women but I didn't go that day.  Day Two blew my mind.  How on earth do guys get a good night's sleep knowing they have a weapon that could go off at any moment?  It sounded like sleeping with a water balloon to me. Fascinating and terrifying but not nice.

Now that I'm older I'm working on niceness.  I don't want to be June Cleaver creepy nice, I just want to remember to use the word "Please" before "build a bridge and get over it."

You named your band what?

One day, after I learn to play an instrument, I will form a band.  I will not name it "Blistered Nutsack."  Why?  Consider the likelihood of ever hearing any of the following phrases:

You know what really kicks a party up a notch?  Blistered Nutsack.


What's fun for the whole family?  Blistered Nutsack.


I want a Blistered Nutsack for Christmas!

At my house we have recently heard, "Can you come take a look at this (blistered nutsack)?"  It's not fun for the looker or the lookee.


** Edited  5/21/10 to add - My husband requested that I tell you his nutsack is looking good and feeling fine.  (That is what you wanted me to say, right hon?)

Brilliant product #1

Who says Germans have no sense of humor?  It's an inflatable jetski.

Piping hot fun

Not infrequently while watching Iron Chef my husband will say, "Once the kids are a little bigger you should try doing some of this cool presentation stuff."  He's already content with the flavor but somehow he doesn't find a  puddle of it on a chipped plate visually appealing. You'd think after the meatcakes incident he'd never utter such insanity again but he did.  So I got out the mashed potatoes and gingered carrots and had a bit of fun. Be forewarned, I am not a master of the visual arts.  Hanging pictures is beyond my spacial and design skills.








It's eyes you perv.  Eyes.





Eyes and a nose.  It's a muppet.  Definitely not whatever it is you're thinking.  Some people are just so naughty.  Go stand in the corner and spank yourself.

Ripped veto

If you've crossed the line between toned and ripped you're spending too much time at the gym.  Why is it ripped anyway?  Ripped is not a good thing.  Ripped jeans are bad 80s.  Ripping a wave is surf goob. 

Lumpy is a more accurately descriptive term.  Can't you hear it in the bar?  "Oh yeah.  He's hot.  Totally lumpy."

Curious George's Man with the Yellow Hat reminds me of a guy I used to date.  I wonder if he'd have been a happier person if he'd spent more time on inter-species pseudo-familial relationships and less on Asian porn.

Have I become immortal or is this day dragging on forever?

Sayyay

Setting:  The bathroom

Mama:  Do you need to potty, honey?
Child:  Not now.  I want to sayyay.
Mama (puzzled):  Uh, OK.  I'll go first.

Cue sound effect.

Child:  Yay, Mama.  You did it.  Yay!

The office

Mr. Raisin and I are downsizing our life soon.  We've decided that a dramatic decrease in the amount of kevlar in our lives would lead to a similarly dramatic increase in our happiness.  I don't mean psychic kevlar; we aren't emotionally abusive or anything worthy of a Lifetime movie.  I mean I've been told, "It's unclear if I can tell you where I'm going but call USAA and tell them to enable my debit card for (redacted)."  I mean, "I can't tell you where I am but I can tell you our security guys are in a shit ton of trouble for not even noticing the film crew from Fox on that sand dune until they saw the building we're sitting in on TV."  I mean, "Remember when I said I'd be home Friday?  Well there's a one in seven chance I'll come home on a Friday but there's a zero  percent chance it will be this month." 

So, yeah, we're not doing that any more. 

In this economy his sparkly new civilian job will probably pay peanuts but peanuts are edible.  The question is how small our new home will be.  As the primary cleaner of our living space I'm pushing for pretty darn cozy.  Two adults and two kids could theoretically live with three bedrooms but Mr. Raisin needs an office.  He doesn't demand one but he does have a passionate love of crap.  Flea markets, thrift stores, dollar stores.  These are his other women.  Tiger Woods may have brought home crabs but my husband has brought home used taxidermy.  Twice.

Yeah, even if the kids have to share a room Mr. Raisin will definitely get an office.

I love you Mr. Raisin

My husband is the best guy in the world.  I have the data to back that up.  I was 13 when I went on my first date.  I was 30 when I got married.  From this we can infer that I spent 17 years kissing frogs to find my prince.  Damn that's a lot of frogs. 

I love you Mr. Raisin and apologize in advance for the ribbing I'm giving you tomorrow.

I read And Tango Makes Three to Froggy.  So far she's neither gay nor a penguin.

Songs of Germany #2: Summer Wine

You know how some songs dominate a summer?  This was it for Summer 2007.  We later found out it was part of Das wilde Leben, a movie about a groupie in the 60s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8VpOJeUBhY

Songs of Germany #1: Sexy Back

Oh, Justin Timberlake.  Oh, how you mocked me.  The year was 2006 and you were hot, hot, hot you little twat, twat, twat.  Do you know what an increasingly pregnant woman doesn't want to hear?  "I'm bringing sexy back" repeated 9 million times over three minutes, break for commercial and play it again. 

As I was driving the A6 back and forth from Schwetzingen to Mannheim and puking into my grocery sack you were bringing sexy back.  Months later my daughter kicked the hell out of my belly dancing along to your club mix.  You know what's not hot in the club?  A hugely pregnant woman. 

You slacker you still didn't have sexy back by the time I quit work in late June 2007 but you were still talking about it.  I couldn't type because my hands were too swollen.  A lack of air conditioning, an office downwind from the dump and fifty pregnancy pounds combined to make me leave a job I loved sooner that I would have liked.  I thought I was leaving you behind too but no, it was not to be.  My daughter adored you from the day she was born and occasionally I'd have to whip out the Timberlake to quiet the Froggy.

My son the tranny

It's May and in the 40s.  That's sick and wrong but we still need groceries. I got Froggy bundled up and ready to go without problem but I could not find a coat for Bubba.  Not wanting to waste the goodwill of my kids I gut checked my feminism (yep, still there), grabbed one of the girl's coats and put it on the boy.  Oh the horror!  He's 10 months old and wearing a pink sweater with a maribou edge on the hood!  Clearly his penis will crawl back inside his body now and form a vagina.

More likely he'll sue me when he's older.  I expect a class action suit from his entire generation.  They've lived out their lives online, Truman Show style, without payment.  Constitutional privacy violation, career mismanagement of a child star, emotional harm.  Can't wait to see this one play out in court.

Ah well.  If I'd had the boy first I wouldn't have thought twice about putting his coat on her.  Tough luck, Bubba.  At least I never gave into his father's plan to dress him all in pink, take him to the mall and tell old ladies goo-gooing at him, "He's not a girl.  My baby is gay."

Ha ha!

I'm cruising my old FB posts to see what's worth back-filling over here. Turns out you two were right. I am kind of funny. The funniest thing I've read though I can't claim credit for.

"Everybody loves me, babies, dogs, ya know, hot girls, cougers. I just have unbelievable mass appeal." - The Situation

I am way too excited about Jersey Shore 2.

Jersey Shore UNCENSORED: Season One (Amazon.com Exclusive)

Reactivation of the blog.

Rachel and Megan keep telling me I should blog. I do love spouting off and adoration so I guess I'll give this another go. Smart money is on this sucker being dead again before the end of May but I might stick with it. Far weirder things have happened. The meatcakes come to mind.

All but three posts before this one are back-filled. I wonder if you can spot the originals. Yeah. You can.

If your husband acted like your dog I'd have him arrested.

When is it OK to shove your nose into a strangers crotch and drool? When you're a dog. Feel like body slamming someone? Put on a fur coat. Have an abundance of drool but no napkin? Use a strangers' pants!

My uncle says he's going to start a retirement home for dogs. All they'll do all day is eat, poop, and sleep. I say he needs a couple of hookers too if he wants those dogs to be really happy.

I like some dogs but I probably don't like yours as much as you do.

All pollen is airborne sperm but not all airborne sperm is pollen.

Farewell my dear post-partum (aka fat) jeans. You've been reliable, comfortable and there when I needed you but you aren't flattering and you don't encourage me to better myself. I'll never forget you; you're in all the pictures of my kids' first years. I wish you much happiness in your new home but I'm ending our relationship.

Flip Cloth Diaper inserts

I almost fell over laughing when I opened the pack of Flip disposable inserts. If your school used antique sex ed materials you might too. Back in the 70's, before adhesive was added to menstral pads, you used to use a belt and suspenders to hold on your gigantic pads. The Flip disposables look just like an old maxi pad. I guess that is what they are but I seriously cracked up picturing my son in his menstral belt.

"We must, we must, we must increase our busts!" I understand the book has been updated to remove the pad belt since dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a child.

Meatcakes

I am not a person who should ever allow herself to become bored.  I used to be a bit wild but these days I just don't want to call the babysitter's mom to explain that she's going to be late because I'm in jail. I have a nice homelife I don't want to disrupt so my appetite for destruction has to be well directed.  I'm more blowtorch than flamethrower these days.

But alas a bit of boredom did hit and I unleashed the meatcakes.  I blame Cake Wrecks.   She did a bit on April Fool's jokes.  She linked to an entire meatcake gallery.  A gallery of meatcakes!  And like any crazy person all I could think was, "I can do better than that."  And frankly I did.

The original recipe is basically three layers of meatloaf covered in mashed potatoes all in the shape of a cake.  Meatloaf is disgusting.  Flour based foods are fine in loaf form.  Meat is not.  It also requires a ton of meat and I only wanted one meal's worth of meatcake so I decided to wing it.

Meatcakes recipe
Mix 1/2 pound ground beef with 1/2 pound hot Italian sausage.  Press into a 12 slot cupcake tin.  Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes.  I don't remember which and it depends on how well done you want your meat anyway.  Dump them out on papertowels to drain and blot a bit if your meat was fatty.

Meanwhile, make some mashed potatoes.  I used instant.  Yeah, I'm a slacker but my two year old helper can't be trusted with a masher or beaters.  She can stir the heck out of some potato powder though.  Mmmm.  Potato powder.  I used Betty Crocker Potato Buds.  They're non-dairy non-soy unlike most other instant potatoes.  I used also olive oil instead of butter, rice milk instead of regular milk, and garlic powder to give it a bit of zing.  Also, garlic icing gives me the giggles.  Put down the bucket, its not that gross.  Really quite tasty in fact.

    Mmmm.... Low chemical, dried, flaked, potatoes.

The mashed potatoes didn't quite look like frosting at this point.  They're a bit yellow to begin with and then the garlic was making it a bit spotty so I decided to dye the whole thing.  Search Amazon.com for gel icing color wilton I let Froggy pick the color and she chose green.  Frankly I expected pink but we were making cake for Daddy and I suppose in her mind he likes green.  He does wear it every day.  A bit of gel icing, a bit of stirring and ta-da a big bowl of green garlic mashed potatoes.  It was even more disturbing in person.

To assemble place a meatcake in a foil cupcake paper.  It needs to be foil or the weight of the mashed potatoes will knock over the paper.  Mine shrunk a bit with cooking but no worries when you're coating the whole thing in "frosting".   Put the mashed potatoes in a piping bag with a star tip and squeeze them on there.  This was my first experiment in piping and it wasn't visually distressing.  It wasn't attractive either but it definitely looked cupcake like.

I planned to tell my husband we were having dessert first when he came home for lunch but he seemed to sense something was up.  He saw the tray of cupcakes on the table and got out the camera.  Froggy immediately ratted me out.  "Daddy it's mashed potatoes!! Hahahahah!!!"

 

More mashed potato shenanigans in May.

Detergent Test Report: Crunchy Clean

Some of my reports on the detergent are kind of funny and I'll want to access the information later so I figured I'd pull them for the blog but without background it's a little bit confusing. Here it is incredibly simplified.

Cloth diapers require a detergent that cleans the hell out of them and then rinses out very well. Not enough cleaning and your baby is sitting in old poop. If soap is stuck in the diaper there's no room for pee and the clothes get wet.


Test round one is complete. Crunchy Clean rates about even with Tide and All on regular clothes and a bit worse on diapers.
Positives: It doesn't have the build up feel of the major brands. It gets out surface dirt. The gardenia scent is wonderful. The clothes are soft.
Cons: It doesn't get out the smells. Ug. I openned the door to the basement when the diapers were almost done in the dryer and it smelled like a port-a-potty on a hot day. DH's shirts were mostly clean but one armpit was somehow missed in the washing and when I sniffed it I gagged. This could be an unfortunate twist in the washer or a product problem.
Other issues: There was still a bit of gardenia scent on one load as it came out of the washer. Some say that means there's still residue on the diapers and some say it's a positive.
Test method: For regular laundry I followed the directions on the bag for regular / heavy soiling and used 2T. For diapers I ran a prewash without detergent on perm press (this gets off all solids all the time in my machine) and then a hot wash with the 2T suggested on the bag. I did not do an extra rinse. I never do. We can start another thread on water attitudes if you like. :)
My diapers in current rotation are a combo of bamboo and cotton fitteds and microfiber pockets and AI2s. I have a few bits of organic cotton, hemp, and wool backed doublers in there too.
Since my fluff is now funky smelling my next step is to decide if I'm going to strip or Rock the Soak. I've used Rocking Green before and it does at least as good a job as Dawn at taking out the funk and doesn't require 7,000 rinses.

I don't care if you call it aspic or a Pfalz specialty, it's still pork jello.

I can't think of anything I love doing so much that I'll crap my pants just to keep on doing it.

Crazy kid

Still feeling the Cartman's mom vibe. When your two year old goes from screaming for pizza to singing an I love you song to her peanut butter sandwich in 15 seconds, "OK. Eat up hon," is the only sanity preserving response.

According to Froggy chocolate tastes like gorilla because both are brown.

8AM and they're all still asleep. Wonderful but if it keeps up I'm going to start checking for a gas leak.

Portion control

"Feeds 16 when cut into 16 pieces". First response: Duh. Second response: You've underestimated me.

Nursing woes

Bubba needs to wake up before I explode. He's taking an extra long nap and my boobs are displeased with his decision. I grabbed the extra oval from my bamboo diaper to have some extra absorption in the bra.

Yesterday he was popping off to look around, leaned on one and shot himself in the eye.

12 months nursing Froggy, 9 months with Bubba and still nursing issues can command all my attention.

Jerks in Spain

Jerks #1, 2, and 3 - I'm thrilled your sports team won. Now STFU. I don't let my two year old chant at the top of her lungs in a closed environment so three men in their twenties should be able to handle the same limit for two hours on a plane.

Jerk #4 - There was no assigned seating on this trip and a dozen empty seats yet you sat down directly in front of the woman with a baby on her lap and reclined your chair all the way back. You're an asshole.

Jerks #5 - 3AM is not the time to show your traveling companion all the fun beeping features on your phone unless you are in a private automobile. In group transport with dim lighting it's considered quiet time.

Jerk #6 - Hey cabbie, just because we don't speak your language and aren't familiar with the town doesn't mean we can't read the map on your GPS and tell we're being driven in circles.

Jerk #7 - Really? Racing a toddler to the bathroom. Really?

And yet despite all of you cretins it was a pretty good trip.

Nine ten idiots. Nine tranquilizer darts. Decisions, decisions.

Nice call Groundhog. You surrendered just before I had to come over there and Yippee Ky Yay you.

If your excuse for picking your kid up 15 minutes late is, "I couldn't find a can opener," then I am giving you permission to lie to me. I deserve a better excuse or a better non-sequitur.

Detergent Test Report: Rocking Green

I got my Rockin' Green, rocked the soak, and thought, "Well duh they're clean. You had me soak them in boiling water for an hour." Honestly, the smell wasn't as strong or delightful as I'd heard and while the diapers were pleasantly clean they hadn't really been unpleasantly dirty before.

Then I tried it on my husband's Army shirts which always smell. The only thing that's cut the funk is stripping with Dawn and even that didn't completely clear it AND it ticked him off because I washed them in hot and they shrunk. I used Rocking Green in place of my regular detergent, basic warm wash, and WOW what a difference. They don't smell. I'm a convert.

Adios property manager

Most awkward conversation year to date:

Landlady: Juergen is no longer with my daughter so from now on you will contact me about the house. Tell me what he has been doing here.

Me: We really haven't seen him since the basement flooded six months ago.

Landlady: Ah. Then he said he was coming here when he went to ...see his girlfriend.

Long, long, long, long, long pause.

Unsolicited Advice: Swappers

Please join me in reality. When you list what you are in search of and what you have the two lists should have some similarities in value.

ISO Tiffany necklace, IHA Walmart watch is not a reasonable swap even if both are jewelry.

Also the words "custom made" may mean it cost you more but it doesn't mean it's worth more now. It was custom made to your specs, not mine.

"Limited edition" is meaningless when it comes to handmade goods. Everything is a limited edition unless the WAHM only has one product, one fabric, and no life.

Claiming apathy does not make you less of an ignorant twat.

Letters read by Congressmen on TV

I think if they're going to use Joe the Mechanic's expert advice on federal debt management they should also be required to present his PhD.

Also, why is it they never read the letters from the NAMBLA members or the "fine citizens of the state of Florida" calling them a bunch of dogfuckers?

Alligator Death Roll

My boy is driving me crazy! I can't even get the diaper off before he's spinning and trying to get away, much less get a diaper back on. I've tried special toys and he's basically told me they just aren't special enough to keep him still.

Quote of the day win goes to Rachel! "Bacon fat = sexy deliciousness."

You know it's been a hard winter when 37 degrees with no active precipitation means playground time.

I do what I can to increase my MILFabiity.

The mom uniform includes snot epaulets.

To Bubba Bear

You are seven months old. You cannot walk. For now, quit letting go, you'll quit bumping your head on the floor and everyone will be a lot happier. Love, Mama

FAIL: Trying to delay bedtime by screaming "mashed potatoes".

Flu

I refuse to accept this much puke in my life without an incredible story behind it. From now on when I remember these days Sam will be a midget ninja fireman who suddenly and repeatedly hosed me down. Emmy will be a vampire Maytag saleslady destroying sheet set after set all night long to convince me how great the ma...chine is. Not sure my role or Sean's yet. I think I'll sleep on it.

Leno-Conan

Enjoying the Leno-Conan thing. They're both over 30, fully dressed, sober, and alive. How often is that newsworthy?

Fear not my West Coast friends. 2010 holds many wonders. Babies who sleep through the night is the first miracle