The Queen's Rambles

I would really like to do something drastic. Shoot someone. Spit in someone’s face. That sort of thing.

Just to clarify this post is specifically about local fanatic abortion protesters who are specifically targeting a late term abortion doctor. This is not about abortion protesters in general.

Our town has recently become host to a late term abortion doctor. According to state laws late term abortions are only allowed in two cases: 1) The mother’s life is in danger or 2) The fetus has major fetal defects (and I’m not talking Downs Syndrome here. I’m talking the child will not likely live beyond a few hours or if the child does live it will have almost no quality of life.)

The doctor practices in the same complex that our ped is in.

The abortion protesters? They are the people I want to shoot.

Logically I understand how people can be anti-abortion. It comes down to a fundamental difference in the way we view a fetus. They see a baby and truly believe it is murder and that they should do something about it. I truly believe it is a lump of cells that has the potential of becoming a human life but is not yet a person. We could argue this day and night, but my mind will not be changed.

So these protesters? They are specifically protesting the late term abortion doc, which just pisses me off because DUH! They are fucking idiots. Sorry, but that’s the only word for it. If a woman has the choice of dying and having her babies die or just having her babies die, how is that even a choice? The woman is going to be in mourning for years, but at least she will be alive to care for her other children or try to have more kids.

Of course the case of fetal deformities is a little different. There is a choice, but it is so very, very personal. I’ve known a few people via the internet who chose to terminate rather than carry to term and I don’t blame them a bit. I probably would terminate as well if I were in that situation. I do not like pain, I do not like being pregnant. I do not think I could handle the prolonged emotional pain of carrying a child that I knew would either be stillborn or die shortly after birth. I just couldn’t do it. How dare anyone try to deny me that choice?

So these idiots are all over the place over at the complex with the most gruesome, disgusting, disturbing signs you’d ever care to see. I, of course, can look past them but my five year old son is being exposed to them. They are right by a pediatric office, so no telling how many children are looking at these horrible signs. I don’t understand how such signs are even legal. It surely doesn’t make me sympathetic to their cause. It just makes me angry. Beyond angry.

And their protest is just so damned ignorant. I don’t approve of abortion protesters just on principal. If they can go and protest in a way that doesn’t scare the hell out of the woman seeking services, then fine. I suppose this is a free country. I follow a couple of abortion rights blogs and the things certain fanatic protesters do would curl your toes. I sincerely doubt most anti-abortion folks would approve of their methods.

I almost want to change peds just to protect Erik, but in the end I think it is more important that these assholes not win. They want the businesses in the complex to be hurt, thus they might kick out the late term abortion doctor. We can’t let the bastards win. Maybe I can put a blindfold over Erik’s eyes tomorrow? I’ve already adjusted my driving route so we don’t go by there, which pisses me off.

And I just keep going back to calling them idiots. They don’t even understand what they are protesting! They seem to believe that women who are 30 weeks pregnant just suddenly decide they don’t want to have a baby and go in for an abortion like other women go in for a pedicure. They don’t understand anything about the laws or the process. How can they be so blindly, willfully ignorant and yet so very passionate?

Can you tell I want to scream? Loudly. If I didn’t have kids I would be over there in a heart beat, acting as an escort for the woman who use the services at the clinic. The women going into the clinic are not even the people having abortions. They are getting birth control and other health services.

December is just flying by. I know there are always the same number of days in a year, but a Saturday Christmas just seems to make everything go faster. It was Erik’s birthday yesterday and tomorrow its Christmas. How does that happen?

I discovered a big present for Elsa that I bought this summer off one of those deal a day sites. Whew! I’ll take Heather’s suggestion and shop my storage area for the rest of her gifts. Except a couple of small things. But really? Why spend the money when she’ll never know. I have to wrap up some stuff though, just to keep the magic alive for Erik.

Still don’t have Christmas cards out. I better get them out because I paid a pretty penny for them, but I can’t seem to get my act together. I really wanted to do a Christmas letter to relatives, but I think it is going to turn into more of a small Christmas note.

Erik and I went to see Voyage of the Dawn Treader today. What a fantastic series of movies, despite the heavy handed Aslan as Christ message. I’ve read the books so I know that is very true to the spirit of C. S. Lewis, but it still grates. Otherwise, fantastic. Erik was mesmerized, and so was I. The biggest mystery of the 21st century remains. How did Narnia cast total unknown children who all turned out to be wonderful actors and Harry Potter couldn’t get a single decent child actor (maybe Malfoy would count as decent?).

I was going to let Erik see HP1 last night and I started looking through our movies and realized we didn’t have 1 or 2 because I didn’t care for them. I should have taped them when they were having all those marathons.

Elsa, my sweet, is starting to eat! The doctor sort of thought I was full of shit when I said she wasn’t swallowing anything. How could I possibly know that? Ummmmm. . . her poop hadn’t changed and I had eyeballs that could see her spit it all out. She started eating Thursday and her poop has changed. I knew feeding Erik wasn’t as messy as feeding her, but now that she’s eating I can see why. The food is going into her tummy instead of everywhere else. She’s also sleeping better at night. I’m a happy mommy.

I can’t stand the thought of buying jarred baby food because I’m a cheapskate. I don’t have a lot of time to do the puree prep that I did with Erik. My problem was solved by a friendly neighbor I barely know. She dropped by with two huge bags of jarred baby food that they don’t need for their little guy. Score! I felt kind of guilty at first, thinking I should take it to the food bank. I’m not going to feel guilty any more. It’s being used. She gave it to me. If she wanted to give it to the food bank she could have.

Does anyone else have an overly sensitive five year old? If you’ve been reading long, you know Erik doesn’t have a sensitive bone in his body. Now? Oh. My. Lord. Will someone send me some heavy duty sponges to soak up the tears? If you look at him funny he starts crying. If I tell him anything he starts crying. If I tease, it’s tears. Who is this child?

I’ve found myself screaming at him way too much because he just doesn’t listen. He was telling me how scary I was and that he wished he didn’t have a mommy. Talk about breaking my heart in a million pieces.

I’ve been much better this week at staying calm and physically tapping his ear and asking him if he’s listening, then physically directing him up the stairs. Seems to have made things happier, and I guess calm begets calm because I’m becoming a lot calmer.

He got a preschool report card last week that blew my mind. Last year his teacher wrote a couple of sentences and called it good. This teacher wrote a full single spaced page about him (no surprises, except he’s making tremendous progress about keeping comments relevant to the class discussion) and then she graded the kids on 70 different items. Talk about detailed! He did extremely well, so we’re all pleased. Of course I’m not surprised. Sometimes I get my back up when I see what they are doing because it’s stuff we didn’t do until 2nd grade, but then I remember how boring school was for me and I see how successful Erik is and I talk myself down. A challenge is good! I don’t think I had a single challenge in school until I hit college level chemistry. I loved school, but didn’t have any trouble keeping up.

It just cracks me up that she thought it was worth noting that he enjoys math and would like to learn more. If she only knew what we do at home. Other kids color or read or what not. We sit and do addition and subtraction, or write really big numbers and name them. Believe me, none of that is my idea. I find it beyond boring, but if he’s interested the least I can do is support him.

The only area of concern is that he doesn’t understand how to blend th, ch and sh. I’m not at all surprised. He’s so literal that it makes no sense to him that two different sounds would make a totally different sound. He refuses to believe me or his teacher. I’m not even sure he can make the th sound. He always replaces it with f or d, which I assumed was because he knows Swedish and they don’t have that sound. But he hears English a whole lot more than Swedish so who knows.

How about an update on the plumbing? The plumber finally came back (he had to order a part) and fixed a couple of things, but is not convinced he solved the problem. He said to call back within 30 days if it didn’t solve the problem so we’ll still be covered under the home warranty thing as the same claim. He also looked at the other things the other plumbers said MUST be replaced immediately and scoffed. They don’t need to be replaced at all, and then he quoted us his price for replacing them. Literally half! And this guy isn’t working cheap, either. I really liked him, so if you are in the Germantown area (they are actually based out of Frederick) and need a plumber I’d highly recommend Willard Heating. They are professional, determined to get the job done right, won’t gouge you and will work with your schedule. It was really nice to have a two hour time window instead of a five hour time window like the other guys. And it was a time window we agreed on! Not one that was assigned and if I wasn’t there too bad, so sad, guess you’ll never see a plumber.

I feel like everything in my life is so far behind. We have a Christmas countdown on our mantle. Every day Erik pulls off a number and gets to see if we do something fun or yucky, in accordance with an elves evaluation of his behavior the day before. I’m surprised he ever gets to do anything fun, because he spends large parts of the day trying to kill the elf with his light saber.

Point being.

Oh my holy heck! Christmas is coming! I don’t even have my cards out!

I think I have most of my shopping taken care of, but still have to find a spinny scooter for Erik. I was going to order one off Amazon b/c we have a shitload of gift cards from them, but almost all the reviews said they received used obviously used scooters. I guess I need to make a trip to Toys R Us. Nooooo! It would be so much easier if Elsa’s nap time wasn’t smack dab in middle of preschool time.

I suppose I should buy the baby a few Christmas gifts as well, but I am so not motivated to throw my money away. Maybe I’ll buy her some cute outfits and call it good. I almost bought her a big Melissa and Doug princess castle off Zulily yesterday. I know she’s too young, but the price was unbeatable. They were sold out by the time I hit buy, so now I can pout. But not really. She’s too young for it.

We had a great plumber come out Tuesday. He really listened to me and spent a lot of time trying to solve my problem. He said there was no way our water heater needed to be replaced and that our home warranty company would pay for things the other company said wasn’t covered. Problem: he took the stem from the valve that tells the water to go up to the shower head or down to the tub. He was supposed to be back with a new one yesterday and never showed. I am getting quite perturbed. He better show up today or I don’t know what I’m going to do. We have another shower, but it is horrible. It’s tiny, there’s a big window so it’s freezing, and the shower head about blasts the skin off your face while pinning you to the wall. Mike and I can handle it, but we have no way to bathe the children. I don’t bathe them every day, but they’re both getting pretty ripe.

And now the boy is up, so I guess I better get him some breakfast. I forgot to write an activity for today but I did some fast thinking and told Erik that the elf used magic ink that only grown-ups can see. He believed me. Poor kid. What a lying mother he has!

I have many character flaws, as long time readers know. One character flaw that I can’t seem to get over is a certain uptight perfectionism that makes me a joy to reason with. If there is a right way to do something, I am damn well going to do it the right way come hell or high water.

Problem being, as I’m sure you all know, there is rarely a right way to do anything. There are better and worse ways, but right? Not so much.

Try telling that to my pregnant and postpartum self and that self will rip your soul out of your nostril, stomp it into the ground, then stuff it back in through your ear.

Or just ignore you while imagining the above.

That’s been my biggest problem with cloth diapers. I’ve done way too much research and wanted to make sure I washed them the “right” way and didn’t “ruin” them.

Now that I’m almost 8 months postpartum my sanity has returned and I’m realizing there isn’t a right way to do it. Unless I do something crazy like. . . I don’t know. . .pour boiling water over them, I doubt I’m going to ruin them to the point that they are unusable. They’re made out of fabric. There’s things that can be done to fix problems that come up.

Here’s the basic theory, if you care. If not, feel free to skip the rest of this post.

I use a type of diapers called pocket diapers. They have a fleece layer that goes against baby’s skin, a plastic layer that holds everything together and a pocket that I stuff with an insert to absorb the pee. With the wrong detergent, you get build-up, which blocks the microscopic holes on the fleece, causing the pee to repel instead of absorb. If this happens you can strip your diapers by washing them in Dawn dish detergent.

Somehow I equated this process of stripping your diapers with utter and total failure. If my diapers were at the point of stripping, clearly I was an idiot who knew nothing and my life was over, woe woe woe.

Don’t ask me how I arrived at that conclusion. That’s my character flaw. I get caught up in right and wrong and no amount of common sense can help me see I’m being an idiot.

I’ve tried different specialty detergents and not really been happy with any of them. I found Rockin’ Green to be adequate, but I didn’t really love it. They recommend using specialty detergent on all your clothes so you don’t get a build up of gunk in your washing machine and these specialty detergents just didn’t stand up to the dirty laundry of a preschool boy.

Rockin’ Green changed its formula in October and things quickly went down hill. You know you have a problem with your diapers when they smell like wet dog. The smell eventually turns into a horrid, burning ammonia smell that makes you almost pass out when you have to deal with your diapers.

Fun times!

I was doing everything right, doing all the steps to prevent this build up and gross stinkiness, but I failed. Failed horribly! My diapers have been ruined! Horrors!

A few days ago I flipped a switch in my brain (my other character flaw, closely related to the first, is my digital nature. I’m either on or off, in or out. There is no in between) and decided I was done having dirty clothes, stinky diapers and paying a hefty price for the privilege.

I stripped my diapers (a process that was no where near as dire as I thought it would be. Basically you just squirt some Dawn in your laundry, then run it through several rinses), bought some Tide Free and Gentle and have been enjoying clean laundry and non-stinky diapers. Real laundry detergent! What a luxury! All of our clothes are already looking much better, and a few of Erik’s shirts that I’d basically given up on are nice and clean. And my diapers don’t stink! So far they are not causing a horrid rash on Elsa’s tushie (as some people have experienced). I’ll have to test them out for build up in a couple of weeks, but now that I know how easy it is to strip them I’m not worried.

Don’t you hate it when someone is so set in their ways and refuses to listen to reason? Me too. Even more, I hate realizing that I am that person.

Overall I have really been happy with our choice to cloth diaper. This has been our only problem with the whole process.

Can you believe that in eight months we’ve had exactly two poop blow-outs? With Erik we probably had two a week, if not a day. The two we had with Elsa were caused by the diapers I hate (GoodMama Ones). I only had her in them because we were at the dregs of diapers before laundry day.

I also am more happy than I thought I would be about the environmental impact. It just feels good to be doing something so good. I don’t regret not cloth diapering Erik because I could not have handled one single more instant of stress, and it would have stressed me out, but I am so glad I am able to do it with Elsa.

I’m feeling traumatized. You know what sucks about being a woman? Men who think women are stupid.

To catch you up to speed, here’s a run down of our plumbing problems:

Several months ago: Turn hot water down to 120 as recommended. Replace hot water knob on shower. These items are unrelated.

Three weeks later: Have dishwasher covered in mold and learn the solution is to turn up hot water.

Eight weeks ago: Have the hot water start acting wobbly while we shower. It goes from cold to water again in really rapid pulses.

Four days ago: Have plumber come out and tell me nothing is wrong, the cold water is probably turning on by itself. By the way, it could be the pressure release valve, but your home warranty won’t cover that.

Three days ago: Notice a big leak under the water heater. Call home warranty place and am assured that someone else will come out and that I won’t have to pay another co-pay.

Today: A different guy from the same company came out. The first guy was your typical mid-west white farm boy. This guy was like something from Jerseylicious with his open shirt, gold chains, rank cologne smell and Napolean attitude.

He agreed there was a leak. Then he tried to get me to say that the leak wasn’t there when the other guy was here, then he tried to get me to pay the co-pay. Not gonna happen.

If I wouldn’t pay the co-pay? He would tell the home warranty company that the leak was my fault and I would have to pay the whole bill myself.

Yes, that’s a threat. I can’t believe I was threatened in my own home. He also said a bunch of other bullshit, like I had a really old water heater that must be replaced immediately but our home warranty company won’t replace it and even if they did we would still have to pay a lot to have it brought up to code. It was horrible. I was turning really red and starting to shake. I told him to leave, but then he suddenly said he would fix the problem. He called the home warranty place and tried to argue with them, but in the end he ended up fixing the leak and we didn’t pay a dime.

Thankfully I had arranged for Mike to come home and be with the plumber while I went to go pick Erik and the carpool kid up from school (we had a five hour window). The guy left to get a part and came back and did the work while Mike was home so I didn’t have to see him again.

I will never, never allow that company in my home again. I am calling the home warranty place to find out if they will cover the cost of the pressure relief valve (which I’m hearing from several people is the problem, thank you guys!) and if not, I will start calling around to plumbers and seeing if I can get some estimates. If our water heater really needs to be replaced (very doubtful, it is only 8 years old), I’ll get it replaced by someone else. I sure as hell won’t be giving that company any money (ARS Rescue Rooters if you are in the Germantown area).

I hate pig-men. I don’t run into it often because I am married to a man who would never treat a woman that way. Most of my friends are married to good guys. I don’t often have to deal with mechanical issues or other blue collar issues.

I grew up with the attitude, though. My dad’s a plumber and he and all his contractor buddies would sit around talking about “stupid bitches”, with bitches being any woman no matter who smart, stupid, nice, or bitchy she actual was. I can’t stand it. Why do men think women have no brain? The guy didn’t try to give Mike the run around. I’m very upset. I need to go see my chiropractor and his massage table (he doesn’t massage me, the table is electric).

Good: It was a horrible, rainy day. I stupidly forgot my wallet in the car. I had a cart full of stuff and two kids. What the hell was I going to do? I looked around Target, just wishing to see someone I knew who would be willing to watch the kids for 30 seconds while I ran to the car.

Person 1: A stay-at-home dad that I see at the gym every day. I know his name, but I’ve never talked to him. Does he know me? Would he stay with my kids? I’m not willing to ask.

Person 2: In walked a woman from my old moms group. I haven’t seen her in two-plus years. I always really liked her and was sad when things fell apart because of my stupid blog. She approached me. She was friendly. I bit the bullet and asked her to watch them, so she did. My life was made a lot better by random kindness!

Later, I saw three other people I knew. I suppose that’s Target in a small town.

Bad: Plumbing problems, how I loathe them. Our water has been doing a wobbly thing while we shower. It is hot, then it is cold, then it is hot, then it is warm, then it is cold. It’s a major PITA and seems to be getting worse. It started when my mom was here so we knew it was a new thing, not just a random bad thing about the house.

We have a home warranty, so we got someone out here and he treated me like I was the dumbest broad on the block planet. The cold water must just be turning itself on and off and I don’t know it. Or we’re taking back to back showers and the hot water is running out (Mike showers at 6 am, I shower around 10 am if I’m lucky). He did nothing but collect my co-pay.

Last night I opened up the water heater closet because I felt a wet spot on the carpet. It’s damp and there’s a water stain running up the wall. Mike said he checked two days ago and that wasn’t there, so obviously something is wrong.

There’s sending a different plumber out tomorrow. Yet another day that I am trapped at home when I have a ton of stuff I need to be doing.

Good: The chiropractor rocks! Or cracks. . .

I am not really a believer in chiropractor-y-ness, mainly because I used to hear my mom and grandma say they’d break off your calcium deposits and ruin your back. Uhhhhh. Yeah. I have no idea what that really means either, but when you grow up hearing something you internalize it.

My back has gotten so bad that I had to do something, so I bit the bullet and called. The man was amazing! I am not healed yet, but I am already on the path to recovery. He also did something to my pelvis, which made my leg “grow” 1/2″ and be normal. For years I’ve been dragging my leg around in an odd manner, but now it is fixed! But it is really awkward to suddenly have a “longer” leg! But it is fixed! This can only be for the good, right?

But now my back is starting to flare up, so I better end this. I’m looking forward to my adjustment later this afternoon. I hope it once again begins with a 20 minute massage and pain reducing electrodes. Heaven!