it’s not about you

So it turns out that double dipping really IS kind of gross. And that the five-second rule isn’t really true.

That’s why when I double-dip (and I am totally a double dipper - proud of it, too), I employ this little trick, where I only double-dip if I turn the chip around and use the part I didn’t eat off of. If I can’t do that, I don’t re-dip.

Your safest bet? Put your own dip on your own plate. And as far as the five-second rule? It’s probably time to get a dog.

via the New York Times.

If you are not bleeding, dismembered, and if no body parts are broken, please:

DO NOT INTERRUPT MY MORNING COFFEE.

Be advised that if you do, consequences could include, but are not limited to, the following: bleeding, dismemberment, or broken bones.

You have been so warned.

Is that if we manage to be part of the group of people that are getting tax rebate checks from the guvmint, we sure as H-E-double-hockey-stick aren’t going to be spending it.

It’s going straight into a money market account.

That’s all I’m saying.

Stimulus plan, my ass.

We had big plans for this weekend, what with the extra day off and all. Everything started off with a bang on Friday night. I was reading a book to Judah and Joshua and Killian were chasing each other in the back. I heard Killian fall and then heard him scream. He apparently went face first onto the floor and busted his lip pretty bad. I got some ice for him and Joshua held him while I applied ice to his mouth. He didn’t like that at all.

After a few moments, I got a look inside his mouth and noticed that not only was he bleeding from the lip, but that he was bleeding from the gums right where one of his upper teeth was. I also noticed that it looked like the tooth had been pushed back - it wasn’t lined up with the other one - and I wiggled it. It felt loose.

I called the kids’ dentist, who’s a really nice man and as far as I can tell, a good dentist. He told me to take my thumb and push his tooth back into place for a good ten seconds, and that Killian wasn’t going to like it one bit. He said the tooth would either be fine or it could discolor and/or die and then we would have to take steps depending on the severity of the injury. We’re supposed to monitor his tooth over the next month to see it turns a brown or grey color and if it looks like there is any infection in the root. He told us what to look for. So that was that. Killian woke up Saturday morning, looking like he’d had a bout with Rocky around the mouth. Despite pushing on his tooth - and he wasn’t thrilled about that - it remains further back that the other one.

We also decided to switch rooms with the kids since we had the bigger room and they had the smaller one. We never use our room during the day, but I am constantly in the kids’ room all day, as that’s where they spend most of their time playing. Once a few buckets of toys are spilled out, it gets kind of cramped.

We had thought about using the whole three days to slowly transfer everything over, but once we got started, we had everything moved by the time the kids went to bed on Saturday. We’re still tweaking the arrangement of the furniture, but so far, this is going to work out much better.

Having all the major furniture switched on Saturday turned out to be a huge blessing, because Judah woke us up, and by “us” I mean Joshua, at 1:30 Sunday morning with a 102 degree fever and spent the rest of the night and the next day in our bed. She was feeling pretty wimpy. I stayed home from church and took care of her.

Joshua decided to sleep with Killian last night to give Judah and me more room in the bed. I wanted her close by in case she got sicker during the night. I was awakened at 2 a.m. by Joshua calling for help because Killian had thrown up all over himself, Joshua, and the bed. I sat with Killian in the bathroom, stripping him of his puke-covered clothes, while Joshua stripped and changed the bed and got himself new pajamas. No sooner than they got settled back down in bed together, than Killian threw up again, hitting not only the towel Joshua had laid down, but Joshua and the sheets and himself again. So we got up again and stripped everything and changed everything.

Judah decided to take that moment to fully wake up and say she was hungry. She kept puppy-dogging me and I had to keep sending her back to bed. I took her temperature, which was spiking, and gave her a dose of Tylenol. Everyone crawled back into their beds. There’s something about sleeping with a feverish preschooler - she wants to sleep ON TOP OF YOU. Then, when she rolls over, she takes all that great heat with her, so you’re left shivering from the difference. Judah didn’t sleep much after all of that, and about an hour later, woke up from a half-doze and suddenly popped off the bed, announcing, “I’m going to get some breakfast!” she was halfway out the bedroom door before I could get her to crawl back in bed.

Killian came toddling in at five a.m., and crawled in bed with me, laying his head down on my chest. I thought it was sweet, until he started lifting up my shirt, looking for a snack. I refused to nurse him, due to the vomiting, and he screamed bloody murder for a while as Joshua padded in and extracted him, taking him back to their room. Of course, Judah thought this meant she could get up and declared, “I want a hot dog for breakfast!” I made her lie back down.

We managed to keep the kids in their rooms until about 8:15 this morning, when I told Judah she could go play quietly in her room for a little while. Shortly after, Killian came toddling into our room again and I decided to see if he could nurse and keep it down. Joshua headed off to the kitchen to make some breakfast and to START THE COFFEE, and as soon as he turned the corner, I heard him holler.

Apparently, ants had found their way into the kitchen through a crack along the window and a thick black line of ants was snaking its way down the frame, across the backsplash and across the counter, and swarming all over the compost bowl, which we had forgotten to take out the night before.

While Joshua was wiping ants and trying to deal the with compost, I was standing next to him, holding Killian in my arms and watching, when - you guessed it - Killian hurled all over me. So there’s Joshua, his hands thick with ants, trying vainly to contain them as they are quickly spreading across the counter, and me, covered in vomit from shoulders to feet, trying vainly to catch everything with my hands.

After the ants had been vanquished and Killian had been bathed, and I had changed clothes and we both stood there with a cup of coffee in our hands and two full loads of vomit-soaked laundry in the hall, while Joshua made oatmeal, I asked him “Aren’t you glad you have this three day weekend, so you can kick back, take it easy, and just relax a little bit?”

Sometimes you just have to make a choice to laugh.

We often still get mail for the previous residents of our flat. We usually just stick it between the gate and the wall next to the mailbox and the postal worker takes it back. We’re pretty familiar with the names of previous residents, though occasionally, there is some junk mail for a name we don’t recognize, probably a long-lost resident of yesteryear.

Yesterday, we received a card AND a package for the same person, this time for a totally different name. What was strange is that we have (a) never received mail for this name before, (b) we have lived here for what? six months now? and are getting mail for a new person, (c) they were a package, and a personal greeting card, both handwritten, (d) they were from two different people.

I mean, the odds of someone sending a package to the wrong address, after we’ve been here for six months AND it’s not Christmas - isn’t that kind of weird? I wrote, “not at this address - return to sender” on both pieces and put them back out for the postal worker. They were picked up no problem.

Then, this afternoon, I saw a man in a minivan pull up into our driveway. Wondering who it was and why he was here, I watched, as he checked something on a clipboard, and then as he got out and walked around to the other side of the van to open the sliding door. He then proceeded to pull out this GINORMOUS balloon bouquet, with balloons reading, “Congratulations!” and “Get Well!” and “It’s A Girl!”

I knew it wasn’t for us - cause I have NOT just given birth - and I knew it wasn’t for our upstairs neighbor either. He saw me from the window and smiled and waved. I opened the window to say hello and asked him who it was for, and he gave me our address. I shook my head and said I didn’t think so, and then he recited and spelled out the same name of the person we got mail for yesterday! I told him no one by that name lived at this address, and he repeated it. I told him we got some mail for that person by mistake recently, but that it was the wrong address.

He looked very confused, but he dutifully got in his van and retreated to a parking spot on the street, where he pulled out a cell phone to double check. I saw him check his clipboard, then our house number, and look up at our windows again, and I’m sure he was wondering what was going on.

Yeah, me too. Someone gave out the wrong address. This is going to be, albeit a minor headache, a pain nonetheless. Maybe I should just start keeping the (obviously) baby gifts? I could use me some Target gift cards…

This is just creepy.

Meat and milk from cloned animals is as safe as that from their counterparts bred the old-fashioned way, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday — but sales still won’t begin right away.

The decision removes the last big U.S. regulatory hurdle to marketing products from cloned livestock, and puts the FDA in concert with recent safety assessments from European food regulators and several other nations.

“Meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones are as safe as food we eat every day,” said Dr. Stephen Sundloff, FDA’s food safety chief.

But the government has asked animal cloning companies to continue a voluntary moratorium on sales for a little longer — not for safety reasons, but marketing ones.

EEEEEW.

Judah slept in this morning and Joshua, after kissing her sleeping head goodbye on his way to work, told me I needed to go in and look at her. I did, and she was passed OUT, her mouth and eyes half-open, and sniffling slightly. I told Joshua she must be getting a cold or something and he nodded in sympathy with me.

Judah woke up a short time later and toddled into the kitchen in her bunny slippers to say good morning. I sent her to the bathroom to go pee-pee. After a few minutes I went to check on her. She was finished and was trying to clean out one of her nostrils with a square of toilet paper. I asked her if she was stuffy and sniffly this morning, and she said:

“No, I’m just trying to get the paper out of my nose.”

Oh, okay.

Wait.

What?

What paper?

I had her tilt her head back and I peeked up her nostril. Sure enough, there was a very soggy white thing stuck up her nose. She was trying to sniff it back and forth. I grabbed a tissue, closed her other nostril and told her to blow hard. Thankfully, the little puppy came right out. Apparently, she shoved that in there before she went to sleep last night.

We had a little discussion about how she shouldn’t put things up her nose and how dangerous it is to do so. I asked her if there was any more paper in her nose and she said no. We went into the kitchen to fix her breakfast and I called Joshua to tell him all about it. By the time we hung up the phone, Judah was messing with her nose again. I asked her what was going on, and she said there was paper in the OTHER nostril, too.

So we went back to the bathroom to blow that one out as well. Luckily, that one also came out easily.

I thought when my kids left toddlerhood, they would quit doing things to try to kill themselves. I suppose it just changes - from accidentals to doing things ON PURPOSE.

At the bottom of my daily New York Times e-mail, there is always an “On This Day” feature, outlining an important historical event. This was today’s:

On Jan. 12, 1915, the United States House of Representatives rejected a proposal to give women the right to vote.

Damn that House of Representatives!

I’m adding a “death wish” category. I figure Killian - and Judah, for that matter - is going to get into enough things and do enough things that this should warrant its own criteria.

For example, yesterday morning, I was sitting at my mom’s make-up table, getting ready, and Joshua was in our bathroom brushing his teeth, when we heard Judah yell from the dining room, “He’s sitting on the table!”

Joshua runs down the hall to see what’s going on, finds Killian, sitting on his knees, content as can be, in the exact middle of the dining room table, and quickly plucks him off.

Constant vigilance, my friends. Constant vigilance.

Simply sit down on the toilet. That’s guaranteed to get them to come running.