Sponge-worthiness

Still pregnant. Nothing new to report.

However, in keeping with the theme of posting about my marriage this week, I have yet another story to share about the joys of matrimony. I know, can you believe it? I mean Josh is perfect in every way so it is puzzling how these things keep cropping up.

I have a major major MAJOR pet peeve when it comes to the house. I can't stand sponges. They're unsanitary, they're disgusting when wet, they hold smells and the site of them makes me gag. As a general rule, I don't use them for anything. If I have to clean a pan, I grab some Barkeepers Friend and a rag and get it done. And on the bizarre and unlikely chance I do use one to shine the sink, I throw it away immediately. Out of sight, out of mind. Although I know in the back of my mind that its lurking in the garbage in all its slimy glory, so I quickly take the whole bag outside because my God, it could crawl out of the can and end up on my face in the middle of the night.

Despite my fear of zombie sponges, for some reason, we have a Costco-sized package under the sink. And Josh used one for God only knows what this morning before I got up. So when I came downstairs and grabbed a glass of water, I was greeted by a yellow and green damp piece of disgustingness on the bottom of the sink.

I told him the last time he did this (which was just last week) that it would be grounds for divorce if he did it again. Guess who was surprised when I served his ass the papers this morning? He can't say I didn't warn him. I believe I might have threatened to punch him in the face as well. Can't be sure on that, what with the pregnancy-induced amnesia, but it would be totally justified in any case.

Seriously. I am about to deliver his third child and he can't throw the damn sponge in the garbage? We have 11 billionty more under the sink, it's not like he needs to conserve. Plus, once you use a sponge, it gets all gross and nasty and germy, so why would you save it anyway? These are questions I do not have the answers to.

There is currently no task in this house I would consider "sponge-worthy" and I am thinking about blacklisting them completely. If nothing else, it could save my marriage. I don't want to have to raise three kids by myself because someone couldn't curb his sponge use. Really, you have to take a stand somewhere. This is mine.

You light up my life

Can someone please tell me what the purpose of putting our Christmas lights on a timer is if my husband is going to go outside and unplug them every night?

This weekend, my nearly-38-weeks-pregnant ass put up all the outdoor decorations BY MYSELF. Josh was inside on the computer. He did actually come outside for something when I was just about done and I asked him would he be a dear and throw the extension cord down over the porch so I could plug it in.

As I plugged it in, I looked up with excitement to see how very very pretty they were and instead saw Josh's smirk.

"Looks like they don't work," he said. "Did you test them?"

"No, I didn't test them," I hissed. "They worked just fine when I took them down last year. God damn it, now I have to go buy new ones and re-do them."

"Let me know how that works out for you," he said as he shut the door behind him.

One trip to CVS and four hours later, I was stringing the lights by myself again. This time in the dark. He's nothing if not consistent in his holiday decorating aversions. This time, I plugged the lights in first. And yes, they worked.

I proudly told him that I had plugged them into a timer. It was set to come on at 5 p.m. and shut off at 5 a.m. You know, the hours of darkness in Chicago.

Except Josh thinks the lights don't need to be on in the middle of the night. I disagree. I think if it's dark, they create a festive atmosphere. He thinks they ratchet up the electric bill. He has noooooo problem leaving his three laptops on all night, but two measly strings of Christmas lights and he's going all Al Gore on my ass.

Because he unplugs the lights every night, it means I have to go out and plug them IN every afternoon. And we all know how I loathe opening the front door to get the mail, so you can imagine how much I enjoy going outside to fish around for the end of the extension cord and reattach it to the lights.

This is what no one tells you about marriage. It's not for richer or for poorer, it's for annoying or more annoying. Now excuse me while I duct tape the extension cord to the lights so he can't possibly remove it.

The one where I am tired

First, look at all of you with your comments! I have some serious reading and commenting to commence. Which I will do some day this week when I am not so exhausted.

You might think I would be well-rested, what with only having one child around for the last week, but you would be wrong. The child I did have around was sick and clung to me like a life raft for four days. Unless he was sleeping in his own bed, Jack never. stopped. touching. me.

He laid next to me on the couch for eight hours each day watching kids TV and either had his head on my lap or was fidgeting his feet in some bizarre sort of kitten-pawing action on my thigh. I am pretty sure I have a bruise from his nonstop contact. And every time I would nicely ask him to please stop it for the love of God, he would tell me he didn't feeeeeel goooooood and give me a pitiful look. Do you know how hard it is to physically remove the foot of your ailing offspring?

And let's all remember that the sick child I had at home is the one who wakes up at 5:30 a.m. every day. So it's not like I was sleeping in and resting. Oh no, he still woke up early every damn day, so that pretty much sucked. When you're sick, you're supposed to sleep in. Someone needs to tutor him in the ways of the sick day.

And it's impossible for me to get any stretch of sleep longer than an hour these days, what with the shifting and the sighing and the snoring. No, not on my part, on Josh's. I even bought him some Breathe-Right strips to see if it would help and I think I can tell you, he is the only person on earth for whom Breathe-Right strips actually enabled him to snore more. It was like it opened his sinuses fully, thus allowing him to get even more power behind his breathing.

Oh yeah, and I have to pee like twice a night and I can't get comfortable and I keep waking up on my back, which makes me short of breath, so I have to turn over and that's like trying to roll a tractor-trailer back upright after it's spilled crates of live chickens all over the Interstate.

Hopefully I can get some sort of decent rest tonight and come back full recharged tomorrow, ready to show you pictures of the remodeling and the new bedroom configurations and share how I almost flooded the house with my crazy nesting.

Shock value

Recently, we had a ton of light bulbs all burn out in various parts of the house. The kitchen lost two, the dining room was down one, the living room had three of the six out, the hallway between Jack and Emnmie's room was completely dark, you get the idea.

I asked Josh to replace them because changing the bulbs requires someone to stand on a chair. And when I change them, I usually just drag the nearest kitchen stool around the room and climb up and down off of it. The stools are about four feet tall, have about a three-inch backrest on them and spin. So when I climb up, they tend to wobble and move in circles and pregnant ladies with cerclages probably shouldn't stand in that position.

So he said sure, he'd change them, and three weeks and mucho amount of nagging later, he finally got around to it. Except he replaced them with the eco-friendly bulbs. Those are nice and green and all, but they can't be used in dimmable light situatuons. All our lights on the first floor are dimmable. But Josh, in his quest to save more money the environment, said he was switching them. He did, however, leave the dimmable ones in the living room. I suspect that's only because he likes mood lighting when he plays XBox 360 at night, not because he cares about how I look in flattering light.

He also, in his infinite wisdom, didn't replace one of the bulbs in the dining room. His reasoning? It would save electricity to not have that bulb in there. Perhaps we could unplug one of his five laptops that he runs 24 hours per day. I imagine the cost savings might be a little more than one measly lightbulb in the dining room.

I lived with his decision for a few days, but yesterday I just couldn't take it anymore. Emmie is obsessed with turning the lights on when she gets into her highchair and every time they come on, she points at the dark one and says, "EH?" Which translates to "Why the hell didn't Daddy change that damn bulb?" Plus, every time I sat in the dining room, which is three times each day, it drove me to the brink of insanity. Call it nesting, but my GOD, I couldn't stand the sight of that dark little can light and I was going to do something about.

Last night, while the kids were eating dinner and Josh was out of town on a little business trip, I marched over to the utility closet and pulled out a bulb. It was dimmable. Look at me, just flaunting my lightbulb choices right in his face. My eight-months-pregnant ass climbed up on a dining room chair and replaced the bulb. Just like that! Done.

Jack was all kinds of horrified -- "Mommy! Do NOT stand on chairs. That is not nice!" -- but I assured him it was OK in this instance and only for grown-ups. Emmie thought it was the funniest thing she had ever seen and showed her appreciation for the new rays of light now streaming down upon her by throwing her half-chewed piece of cheese at me. Thanks for that. But because I fought the man and won, I didn't care.

When the kids went in to eat breakfast this morning, I heard the familiar "EH?" from Miss Emmie and Jack yelled, "Mommy! The light bulb is broken again!"

Son of a bitch. Darkness where once there was light. After I plunked down everyone's oatmeal, I climbed up on the chair again to investigate and found the glass of the bulb had broken off at the neck, leaving the inner workings of the bulb in the fixture. Huh. Weird.

I figured I must have gotten a bad bulb and decided to take it out and start again. But how to grab it without the glass surrounding it? Notice, at no time did I think, "Wow, that's live electricity just flowing right through there. Maybe I shouldn't grab it at all."

I reach up, bend the little metal thingies that are sticking out and proceed to shock the shit out of my fingers. I yelp, slam my hand on my leg and suppress the urge to drop the F-bomb. Jack looks up and says, "Mommy, what happened?" Oh nothing, Mommy just sent a kajillion jolts of electricty through her hand and straight into her uterus. I'm sure it's fine.

Because I am nothing if not resourceful, I immediately walked to the computer, where I googled "electrical shock pregnancy" and found many useful entries. Many of which contained the words "fetal distress" and "death." A few deep breaths later, after the realization that people on Yahoo Answers are complete idiots, I figured things were fine. It was a momentary buzz that didn't knock me unconscious and WeeBey was wiggling around just fine. Although that could have been spasms from the possible electrocution it just suffered. Hard to tell, but being my third pregnancy, I just told WeeBey to rub some dirt on it, it would be fine.

I then called Josh to inform him of my stupidity. After asking if I was all right, his next words were, "I told you we should have left it empty." Oh yeah? Well you can just be the next one to get shocked Mr. Energy Savings. You can deal with it tonight. He calmly told me he planned to turn the light switch OFF before touching it. Oh yeah? Well... well... whatever. You just wait until I dim the lights and burn all the bulbs out at once. Then we'll see who's happy.

Just call me MacGyver

Josh left for a weekend in New York this evening and I had to stay home in Chicago because I am pregnant and my OB said she wouldn't feel comfortable with me traveling at 30 weeks in a high-risk pregnancy.

I never get to do anything (says the woman who went to France the last time she was pregnant and to New York, Vegas, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Dubai, the Maldives and Florida in the last year). Boo hoo. I also had to cancel a trip to Florida at the end of the month because of this pesky pregnancy status. I never have any fun. (I can feel all your eyes rolling collectively to the backs of your heads.)

Technically, Josh is going to do some IT work for a friend's company. But this friend throws awesome parties for a living so I find it hard to believe when he tells me "we'll be working the whole weekend." Sure, sure. Working at Buddha Bar and Marquee til 3 a.m. is more like it.

He'll probably be rolling in around 5:30 a.m. just as I am rolling out of bed with the early-rising Jack. Except he'll have a few beers in him before he passes out and I'll just feel like passing out from exhaustion.

His leaving actually inspired the MacGyver in me because it meant I needed to figure out why the alarm system wasn't working for the last two weeks. Well, I actually know why it wasn't working -- we removed a sensor during the remodeling and that caused the whole system to freak out and randomly blink and beep at us until we broke down and paid the $145-per-hour fee to have some dude come out, put on those weird little shoe covers and hit the same buttons we could have hit ourselves.

I also may or may not have dropped the remote sensor on my key chain and watched as the little buttons flew all over the kitchen when it split open upon impact. Those little remotes are not cheap and when I saw what happened after dropping it a mere three feet, I might have cried a little. I also never did find one of the teeny blue buttons. I suspect Emmie ate it. Or it fell underneath the dishwasher where it will never be seen again. Either way, it's dead to me.

Not wanting anyone to break in and kill me while Josh is gone, or at least not break in and kill me without the alarm blaring, I decided to call and schedule a service appointment. Except the guy told me I would have to pay the $145 per hour, despite the fact we just signed up for a new service plan. Apparently they don't cover fixing the remote when you drop it and lose one of the keys. Which is bullshit. It also doesn't cover replacing a door sensor because you installed a whole new door. Again, bullshit.

The helpful dude on the phone told me he was all for saving me money, so he would walk me through the process of attempting to fix both things. The panel was easily fixed -- as I predicted, we only needed to push a few extra buttons -- and voila, a working alarm.

The remote involved a little more intricacy. The dude was trying to explain how the keys should be arranged, but he was talking about mirror images and how it would look if it was face-up, but it was really face-down so I should just mirror what he was saying and then I freaked out and felt like I was taking the ACT again and I suck at spatial relationships and I might have dropped the F-bomb on him under my breath and then threw the remote across the room.

But then I put on my big-girl pants and took charge of the remote and drew a little chart on a piece of scrap paper and successfully arranged the keys. They didn't work. I might have thrown it again.

The dude told me to just give it up already and I said I didn't need the service call ANYWAY and then I hung up. Because I am a mother, and I know everything, I decided maybe he told me the wrong configuration for the buttons. So I pried the remote open with a butter knife and rearranged them. AND IT WORKED!

How you like them remote buttons dude? I did it all by myself and didn't even need you or your stupid mirror-image remote configurating advice.

So in case anyone is thinking about coming to kill me this weekend, I fixed the alarm and you totally won't be able to do it in secret. I have thwarted you.

Oh yeah, him

I totally forgot to tell you all that Josh is on a new project at work now. One that is LOCAL. As in, not out of town. As in he is home for dinner, bath and bedtime at night. He started two weeks ago, on the same day that Jack started school, but he was a little pissy I didn't give him the same attention that I gave my precious little boy.

For the first time in eight years, Josh is not traveling. I am not sure what to make of it, either. He has never had a local project in the time I have known him. Sure, I spent two years living with him in Bloomington, but that was us splitting time someplace and not really living full-time together in our house in Chicago.

I mean it's awesome and I am so excited to have him around, but it's kind of weird to have him around. How the hell can I complain about having soooo muuuuuch toooooo doooooo if he's here observing me all night? Like he's right there on the couch when I am aimlessly reading blogs and Facebook. And now he actually wants to watch a bunch of DVR'd TV series. I can't watch TV and be on the Internet, I need to focus on one media at a time.

And now I have to cook dinner and clean up the house every day. The hell? This is making my life somewhat more difficult, to be honest. But never fear, I am still bitching and moaning about being pregnant and having to do way more than I should be doing in my delicate condition. There's no way he's getting off without listening to that for a few more weeks.

Conversations with a 3-year-old

Scene: Jack sitting on the potty, me sitting in the chair outside the bathroom in the hallway waiting for him before naptime. He is stalling for time to delay his nap, thus engaging me in conversation while he uses the facilities.

Jack: Mommy, my poop comes out of my tushie?
Me: Yep, it does.
Jack: It's in there with the food?
Me: Yep, it is.
Jack: It is squishing all the food?
Me: Well, no. Your tummy takes the parts of food that it can't use and turns it into poop. So your tummy turns the food into poop.
Jack: (silent for a second) Mommy, my poop talks!
Me: No it doesn't.
Jack: Yes! It does! It goes, "weeeee."
Me: (laughing) Well, sometimes poop makes noise when it comes out. That happens.
Jack: Mommy, sometimes it makes a BIG NOISE!

Seriously, I can't believe the thought process that went into that on his part. To actually wonder how his stomach works and think up explanations is pretty smart. And his eloquence in expressing it ... well he IS a boy.

No segue here whatsoever, but today is my fifth wedding anniversary. Five wonderful years. Two of the best years of my life.

No, really, I love this man and all he brings to my life. He's an amazing father, a perfect match for my sarcastic streak, a ridiculously smart businessman and a fixer of my computer. He helps around the house, lets me sleep in, gets my pregnant ass ice cream, plans ridiculously awesome vacations for us, doesn't yell when I go over budget every week, loves me unconditionally (which can be difficult at times), gets excited when I share breaking sports news with him, laughs at my jokes and always ALWAYS puts the toilet seat down. He's a prince among men. I make fun a lot on this blog, but I would be in big trouble without him. As I told him as part of my vows five years ago tonight, "You've taught me to reach for the stars, but still be aware of reality." Josh, I love you. Thanks for everything you bring to my life.

Happy birthday Josh!

Josh is 33 now. And I gave him a video game for his birthday. What's wrong with this picture?

He celebrated his big day with jury duty -- and of course, with his stellar luck, he was actually chosen to sit on a jury. I told him he should live blog it, but he thought they might frown upon that.

And of course, he can't tell me anything about his case. They must have known I have a big mouth and like to talk about crazy shit on my blog. That, or it's the standard procedure for sitting on a jury. I wonder if the judge is a longtime reader? Perhaps he came across it while searching for incompetent cervix or potty training conversation.

Undaunted by his silence on the matter, we celebrated the rest of his night with presents, cupcakes and an adults-only trip to Ravinia, an outdoor concert venue in the burbs. We had a picnic of sushi and beer and listened to a one-handed pianist. Seriously, he only played with his left hand. It was crazy. And then we were eaten alive by mosquitos who weren't fazed by our organic citronella bug spray.

Happy birthday to you, now put some calamine lotion on those bites.