It's Time for Panic. IT'S PANIC TIME.

AM COMPLETELY COMPLETELY PANICKING ABOUT MY CHILD TRICK-OR-TREATING IN A COUPLE HOURS


ALL THOSE LITTLE TINY GRUBBY HANDS IN ALL THOSE BUCKETS OF CANDY


SO MANY HANDS


COVERED WITH SO MANY BUM-BUM GERMS


OH GOD ALL THE BUM-BUM GERMS


ON ALL THE HANDS


THE SNEEZES


THE RUNNY NOSES


GERMS ALL OVER THE CANDY


ALL THE GERMS


ALL THE GERMS


SOMEONE TALK ME DOWN

/END TRANS

Monday Musings.

If the sun is a natural disinfectant, why does everything outside remain so full of germs?

Dammit, why did I Google-Image "dirty" without the safe-filter?

With the sun pounding down on it, why is everything still so...dirty? 

Like...dirt?

And...dog doo?

And...hot tin slides?

One wonders.

Fun Friendly Phobic Fact Friday!

Ah, the casual, comfortable flip-flop: A symbol of summertime, an emblem of relaxation — and a harbinger of death?

93% of flip-flops worn over the course of a summer will end up with fecal matter on them. 20% will have E. Coli. Staph was also found. And "feces, urine, spit, vomit, animal droppings were all present." Furthermore, the film of grime (you know, the "tan line of dirt") that coats your feet at the end of a day of flip-flopping around town is some dangerous stuff, and if you happen to have a cut or open sore on your foot, you could actually be in danger of getting a serious infection.

So if you flip-flop, consider washing your feet upon arriving home, or do like I do and take an all-purpose Sani-Kids wipe to your grimy piggies.

I Should Have Gone Dressed as Sad Panda.

So yesterday was Trick-or-Treat day at my husband's workplace. I got the kids all ready--Maya was a frog and Naomi was a kitty, and we were to go office to office to collect treats. Sounds simple, right?

My big girl, with her hair sprayed frog-green and wearing her frog-green Converse shoes.

My little girl, with her fivehead. Shit, that's a sixhead.

She got that sixhead from her daddy:

But I digress.

So, OK. You knew the second I started this entry that I would be talking about how this trick-or-treating event wound up being a stressful time for me. But the stress started long before the actual trick-or-treating.

• First, while we were still at home, Maya wouldn't shut up about OMG MOM WHEN ARE WE GOING TO TRICK OR TREAT? But I mean, I can't fault her for that. She's a kid. Still, having to say, "At three o'clock" or "in four hours" or "in two hours" or "IN TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES SHUT YOUR TRAP" gets old.

• Second, I couldn't find the black sweater that I wanted to put over Naomi's leotard. My Incredible Hulk of a seven-month-old is wearing a hand-me-down black leotard that we just inherited from an Incredible Hulk of a 5-year-old, and it fits her, so help me God it fits her. Must have been those 'roids I was on whilst pregnant. But the leotard is sleeveless, so I wanted to have her also wear Maya's tiny little half-sweater--you know, those dumb things that people wear that make you think, "Where's the rest of it" or "I hope you paid half price for that bitch"?

We have one of those in black, but we bought it size-wise to fit Maya like a regular sweater, just with the sleeves rolled up a bit, so it wasn't all, why does your sweater only cover your boobs?

Anyway, couldn't find it. Instead of thinking "Oh, I'll use the pink sweater" like many of you would think, I decide to full-on panic. Because I need the BLACK SWEATER. The black one. To match her black leotard. So I panic and race around the house and tear things apart to try to find the BLACK SWEATER. Still can't find it. Fuckballs.

Then I have a burst of inspiration and think, "Say, didn't my firstborn wear a black long-sleeved shirt for Halloween one time?"

Annswer: Yes, she did, two years in a row, actually.

Yes, I know she looks like Chris Farley there. Shut your face.

So Maya wore that fucker two years in a row, and I sorted all her clothes so that Naomi would have them at appropriate times and seasons. SO WHY COULDN'T I FUCKING FIND IT?! WHY JESUS HAROLD CHRIST WHY??

OK. I finally found that got-damn black Halloween shirt, and I put it under Noey's leotard. Crisis narrowly averted, stress mode still on high. Because you can't just turn that shit off.

• Then we load up the car with kids, clothes, bottles, hand sani, sani-hands, etc., and we're a goodly distance down the road when I think "FUUUUUUUUUCK! Did I remember Noey's kitty ears?!" I pull over and look through the stuff in the back. I did. I did remember Noey's kitty ears. See?

Noey's all, "I got Daddy's sixhead, but I got Mommy's deviousness...."

• OK then. We get back on the road. Then, THEN, 2/3 of the long-ass way there, suddenly Maya tells me she's about to throw up. I haul ass off the freeway, have nightmarish visions of the first time we did this (when Maya was two years old and actually did randomly vomit all over her giraffe suit 2/3 of the way to my husband's workplace and I had no working cellphone or towels or anything at all to remedy the situation), and this time, sweat pouring from my brow, I basically tell her, "If you're gonna spew, spew in this" and hand her the trick-or-treating bucket.

• After we get back on the freeway, we are almost to my husband's workplace when Maya once again is screaming in either agony or misery or nausea, and I yank my car off the side of the road, envisioning spewage from here to right over there, and once safely on the shoulder, I ask her to take one finger and point to exactly where it hurts. She is SCREAMING in pain and she points basically what amounts to her mother. fucking. appendix. Are you kidding me? Are you? Are you??

So we sit there awhile, I keep asking her how she's doing, and her story changes, and she's now not at death's door any longer, and finally I am confident that she's OK and doesn't need emergency surgery and we continue to my husband's workplace. The agreed-upon deal was, I will park and call him from the parking lot and he will come fetch us, since his workplace is a very secure situash and I cannot just enter, I will need to be escorted inside. So I circle the lot once or twice, and I see a few parking spots that you could park this in:

But nothing else. Certainly not my, ahem, SUV. (Sorry environment.) Because the parking spots are yay-big:

and the people parking are dicknuggets who take up 1.5 spots each. So I call my husband needing to ask, "Howdy pardner, where the fuck does one put their car when there's nowhere to go in this particular lot, see?" No answer. No answer on his cell, NATURALLY, because whenever I NEED him on the phone, there is NEVER an answer. Ever. Never.  Whenever I call him on his fucking motherfucking fucking fuckball of a fucking cellfuckingphone, he doesn't fucking answer. And it enrages me like flames. It-it- the f--it--flame--flames. Flames, on the side of my face, breathing-breathle--heaving breaths. Heaving breaths...Breathing...

FLAMES.

FUCK. So I circle the lot 283974893476034 more times, and call his cell 283974893476033 more times, and meanwhile my kid is once again telling me her "neck hurts and she's going to barf" and WHAT AM I GOING TO DO??!

Finally I get Child Alpha calmed down, load Child Beta into her stroller, collect everything I think I need (Sani-Kids, Purell, kitty ears, etc.), but naturally forget her bottles, which we'll need later but won't have, and walk into the reception area, hoping they know my husband's direct desk phone number because HE WON'T FUCKING ANSWER HIS CELL EVEN THOUGH HE'S EXPECTING OUR CALL AND WE ARE ON TIME DOWN TO THE MILISECOND (sorry, someone's still bitter), but luckily, as I am about to request he be paged, he sheepishly comes down a couple floors and greets us there.

OK. So from there, we start the actual trick-or-treating. And the real stress can begin. Up until now it was just shenanigans.

• You see, NOW, I have to meet my husband's coworkers (which means handshakes galore, OH MY FUCKING GOD, and one lady's hand was not only cold but WET).

• In particular, I have to meet my husband's directly-across-the-hall teammate, who happens to be fucking beautiful, a living version of Jasmine, but even more fair and more exotic, and who I know comes in to sink into his office couch and chat with him on the regular and ask his opinion on everything under the sun, which I find most inappropriate.

Oh and how glad I am that he gets to stare at her through their windows across the hallway all day long, every day, while I'm at home with two-day-old hair and wearing sweatpants and barfed-on shirts.

• Anyway. After the Jasmine encounter, which left me feeling oh-so confident and sexually desirable, then we trick-or-treat, going office-to-office.  I have to observe as my kid digs out candy from a thousand bowls throughout three floors of the enormous building (where every bowl has seen the likes of 59027592743 other kids' sticky nasty gross hands).

• And then I have to sit there silently while Maya makes projects (like decorating mini-pumpkins by using glue and pens and stickers and things that 239087325 other kids have touched).

• The baby by now is getting antsy and hungry, and I realize I've left her bottles in the car way the hell downstairs and outside in the lot. Great. More things to stress over. A grumpy baby and no bottles.

• And finally we all have to eat snacks like mini-wieners wrapped in puff pastry (served by using spoons and forks and tongs that 923839875 other people have spooned and forked and tonged with, in containers no doubt kept below the proper safe temperature, but who's counting).

It is at this point that my brain is in cold sweats and my underarms need pantyliners. My husband asks me if I am OK and I manage to shake my head and squeak, "No."

Why is this so hard for me? All it is is dressing my kids up (adorably so), driving 25 miles, going door-to-door at a large office, getting free candy (and who doesn't love free candy? except that I am thinking, "how am I going to disinfect every single piece of it?), making some pumpkin art, going "fishing" for some bracelets, and snacking on pigs in a blanket? This was just trick-or-treating. What is so hard about this?? I don't know, but I was freaking out. FREAKING OUT. 

This. Is. My. Life.

Speaking of Clean but Cluttered...

As an addendum to the post previous to this one...

As you know, I take a plethora of pills for my OCD, a veritable cornucopia if you will, and some make me sleep like the dead at night.

But apparently last night, at some point, while still sleeping like the dead, I sat up and wrote one single word on my hand:

"Clutter."

Why? Why did I write this? I have no idea. I do not know what I was thinking, what was going through my head, but I do know that when I write things on my hand at night, it's because I have just had a genius idea that must not be forgotten come morning time. 

But I forgot it.

And it couldn't have been the idea to write the previous post re clean but cluttered, because I actually wrote that one days ago but didn't publish it until now.

Any ideas?

There's Clean, and Then There's Clean-Clean.

Dear husband, my honey, my one, my only, you may want to skip this one.

And dear people who think I'm throwing my MIL under the bus: (1) You know you've wanted to do this at some point yourself; (2) this is my place to vent, after all; and (2) well, just pretend I'm not taking to someone whose family I married into. That should make it OK.

...

As I may have briefly mentioned, while I am a germaphobe in a hardcore way, I'm not so much a clutterphobe. I mean, don't get me wrong, clutter drives me apeshit. Apeshit I tell you.

I get near panic attacks when I look around and see how much goddamn junk, trinkets, decorations, accoutrement, and useless stuff on shelves we have in the house, or how dusty things might be, but while those drive me crazy, I don't seem to have the energy to be arsed to always deep clean those things, and my OCD level only gets to about blue, maybe yellow on a bad day.

So while out countertops are practically sterile in my home and you could eat of any surface of your choosing, the kitchen table is always piled high with my daughter's art projects, or the food pantry shelves are always shoved tightly and spilling over with bags and boxes and cans of food, and there may be a fine coating of dust over the harder-to-get to areas. My house, as mentioned, is not a Stepford home, not by a longshot. I have OCD, but I am a lazy fucker.

In stark comparison is my mother-in-law's house. Her house is pristine...to the naked eye. I mean, this woman cleans the base molding, the ceilings, the underside of cabinets, everything. She has boundless energy to keep things tidy, which is admirable. But I've seen her clean, and her cleaning method is thus: Take a white washcloth and "Wipe Things Down." Everything. With that same white washcloth. The result is stunning--a gleaming white, pristine abode.

Every nook and cranny wiped, wiped, wiped. With that trusty old white washcloth damp with plain old white water. So you will have a dust- and surface- dirt-free home...but you will have germs ga-fucking-lore. You will have floor germs on your counter, and you will have sink germs on your faucet handles, and you wll have bathroom germs on your kitchen table, and you will have a small black poodle named Argus sitting next to the sink, on the food-prep countertop, at any given time, next to the dinner and dessert she's making. You think I'm kidding? Take a peek at this, amigo:

So basically, you will have bum-bum germs on every other touchable in your entire homestead. Dog bum-bum germs and otherwise.

schooch scooch, anal worms, ain't no thang, where's my trusty white washcloth?

So while her home looks positively sterile, and I'm am jealous of that fact to some degree, it is probably one of those more unsterile places you can go. There is nothing clean about taking a damp, dank washcloth to every surface in your home just to get the visible dirt off, especially in a home where no one ever washes their hands and there is never even any usable handsoap in the bathroom. You'll find fancy lotions, and decorative, unwrapped Indian imported soaps, but nothing to actually clean your got-damn hands with. I've actually been known to go into her shower and dig out some Oil of Olay Body Wash and place it passively-aggressively next to the sink and then leave nonchalantly as if to say, "Uhhh, you FORGOT something here."

No, I'd rather live in my somewhat dusty, very kids'-toy-cluttered abode, but where all the touchable surfaces have been Cloroxed clean, than her immaculate-looking white, sparse, beautiful condo with bum-bum germs all about.

No offense, honey. And please never tell your mother about this blog.

I think I mentioned this before, but while I'm burning bridges and alienating those I love, let me add that this is a lady who I witnessed wipe down a toilet and then continue on wiping down everything else in the bathroom with that same rag, including countertops. She also one time flushed a paper towel down the toilet with her bare hands (lifted the toilet seat, flushed said offending paper towel, then closed the seat and lid), and then, without washing her hands, continued straightaway--we're talking IMMED.--to finish preparing our Thanksgiving meal. Wait, not quite immed.--in between, she wanted to hold our infant daughter. My husband and I were, awkwardy, like, "Oh, did you, um, want to wash first?" and she, offended and totally obliviously, said, "Why? I didn't use the bathroom. I didn't go potty." And we, dumbfounded and sputtering, were like, "But you...the flusher...you touched the flusher and...you...the...it....fuck. never mind." We just had to bite our tongues. Because she just didn't get that she touched one of the germiest places in the home, even though, no, she didn't USE the bathroom to, say, defecate. I mean, why does she think people do this:

She just doesn't get it. There was no getting through to her that the flusher itself was full of shit-germs that we didn't care to have, say, in our cranberry sauce or stuffing or mashers and gravy or on our firstborn.

But, her house always looks lovely. It is merely a horror house of cross-contamination. Bygones.

I wish there were a happy medium. I wish my house looked at nice as hers, but was freaking DEAD STERILE like mine is.

I wish I could find a nice happy mixture of this:

Still, I'd take true cleanliness with clutter, over the mere appearance of cleanliness, anyway. If, that is, you can forage a path through the kids' toys and ignore the dust on the baseboards and the junk up on the shelves.

Monday Musings.

Can drinkin' likker really disinfect a wound?

I don't mean, can consuming some alcohol clean a boo-boo. I mean, can the liquor that we drink, y'know, drinkin' likker, cleanse a wound, or maybe your hands, in a pinch?

 Should I be carrying around a flask of Absolut instead of a mini-Purell?

You know how in old movies you see a person dump a half a fifth of whiskey on some pour soul's leg before hacking it clean off at the knee, or some such bullshet like that? Is the alcohol that we drink really strong enough to cleanse a wound, or to disinfect the skin's surface before minor "surgery" like removing a limb or three in an emergency?

One wonders.

The American Journal of Surgery: Volume 29, published in 1915, thinks that you can.

But then again, they thought that the very best way to disinfect the area is with motherfucking gasohol.

All they are saying...is give booze a chance.

So I'm still left to wonder if drinkin' likker does anything to really clean an existing wound or disinfect the area before performing a bit of the old quack hack.

Not that I'm planning to slice anyone's leg off at the knee or anything. Not anytime soon. But I mean, don't piss me off, because I have plenty of drinkin' likker around.

"Here, bite down, this Crown Royal 

is going to sting a little..."

It's Her Birthday and I'll Have a Panic Attack If I Want To.

So today Maya had her 4th birthday party! It was crazy hectic, as usual, getting there on time to decorate and get it all together before guests arrived, putting up balloons and streamers and tablecloths and napkins and plates and cups and then later managing the ordering of pizzas and the feeding of the guests and the playing of kids' games and the eating of cake and the opening of soooo many gifts, but we pulled it off. Sigh. Pizza and gifts. First world problems.

Oh, and of course, there was the internally freaking out when anyone who hadn't Purelled in my direct line of vision was holding the baby and touching her hands. Grandma H I'm glaring looking at you.

Not to mention, one of my friends showed up and her first words to me about her daughter were, "Sorry, little S has a little cold." GREAT. Panic level orangish-red. Who am I kidding. Scarlet, blood red all the way.

Luckily my BFF and frequent bum-bum blog commenter chesea was there, and talking to her distracted me and calmed me down. :)

Here are some snapshots of the day. I simply have to include a bunch unrelated to my OCD, because they're so damn cute, but then I've included all the ones with Purell in the shots, kind of as your OCD-Where's-Waldo, to make it apropos to this blog.

My ridiculous attempt at a frog cake, which Maya insisted she wanted:

Frog cupcakes. I couldn't control the squirty frosting thing very well. The unevenness and asymmetry of this arrangement also triggers some form of OCD in me as well, let it be known.

My beauty doing the Pee-Pee Dance:

My beauty doing the Bum-Bum Dance:

My beauty standing still for a milisecond.

BAM! PURELL! Hint hint much??

Pin the tail on the donkey. Birthday girl goes first:

And she nails it (actually I think she hung it on Eeyore's ballsack. Bygones).

OK, now can you Spot the Purells?

And finally, shouldn't blowing out candles be outlawed about now? I mean come on. What an outdated, totally gross tradition. We're in Twenty-oh-eleven now. People should really come with their own thingymabob that douses candles, and there should be no huffing and effluvia involved.

Luckily my kid was healthy as a healthy horse, but I ca-RINGE at this part of every other birthday party. I MEAN GROSS.

Anyway. There you have it. Cute kids, frogs, FWPs, and Purell. It was a fun day, but when I got home I had to take five Xanax, 10,000 units of Vitamin D, and then disinfect all the toys she got with Clorox wipes.