The Queen's Rambles

Poor Elsa just can’t seem to catch a break. Once again she has a high fever and is feeling like crap. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with her, but it seems to have stomach type origins. Just when I got her rash cleared up.

Problem: girl refuses her meds. I thought I knew what a kid who hated meds was like, but I had No. Freakin. Clue.

She makes herself puke it up so there’s just no point. I’ve looked everywhere for suppositories, but am not having luck. I found them online but the reviews said it looked like the sellers made their own and put them in an old box and they wouldn’t use them on a baby. Sounded pretty sketchy to me.

She was so hot last night. So so hot. I couldn’t sleep because she was on me and I kept thinking about all those old school books like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables and Daddy Long Legs where kids die or go blind or become mentally disabled because of high fevers. Then I would think “Of course that won’t happen now. We have modern medicine.” Then I would think “but if she won’t TAKE the modern medicine, what’s going to stop a febrile seizure that ends in death????” Worry, worry, worry. Try to give meds. Get puked on. Worry worry worry. Fever. Meds. Puke. Around we go.

She’s a lot cooler today, but still feverish and cranky. I think a walk in the sunshine would have gone a long way to improving my mood, but that didn’t happen. So I’m cranky.

In other news, Mike and I need to work on our communication skills.

It’s no secret that I think most Swedish people are pretty crazy so I wasn’t shocked when we was explaining about his dad’s annual birthday party. He said all the family goes over early in the morning for breakfast, then they have a vasaloppet (a Swedish race that I’ve heard of) then they all have lunch.

The way he explained it, even after I asked questions, I thought that his family was actually running a race through the woods and they got to eat lunch when they finished. I was very grateful that I’ve never actually been there for the race because there’s no way I’m running and there’s no way I’m going in the woods, so basically there’s no way I’m celebrating his dad’s birthday with the rest of the family.

At dinner I asked him if his sister-in-law just snuck home during the race and the pretended to complete the race when everyone else got back. She does not strike me as the running type. The others? They like to do orienteering (running through the woods with a compass), which is why this whole thing made some kind of weird, Swedish sense.

Turns out the Swedes are not as crazy as I thought. They don’t actually run in a race. They watch a big national cross-country ski race on TV.

Ohhhhhhhhhhh, says the dumb American. That makes so much more sense.

We also had a good dinner conversation about crazy Americans and their fundamentalist ways. I was quoting some 80s hair band lyrics and referred to it as “devil’s music.” Mike was pretty shocked to learn that I had been to good ol’ Christian bonfires were we burned tapes of Poison, White Snake, Ozzy, etc. I never had any tapes to contribute, but I did throw in my whole Garbage Pail Kids collection.

My family was not into church at all and I don’t know if my mom realized this was the kind of thing that was going on. I spent years and years being wracked with guilt over the simplest of things. One guest speaker told us how our toothpaste was evil because the company logo had a moon in it and clearly that was a sign of the devil. You didn’t even want to get this guy started on the Care Bears.

Now I am an atheist and my drug addled sister spends all her Facebook time trying to show the world she is holy (except when she’s drunk and tells the world who she’s sleeping with [hint: not her husband]).

Thank you all so much for the goat ideas for Erik. Mainly he is upset that he doesn’t get to be a dog. Each child is assigned a barnyard animal. They have to make a paper bag puppet and recite several facts about their animal, then sing a little song. He has really been enjoying videos of fainting goats, giggling goats and headbutting goats. He refuses to listen to the Billy Goat Gruff story. When I try to tell it to him he puts his hands over his ears and starts shouting “NO THANK YOU NO THANK YOU NO THANK YOU NO THANK YOU” really loudly. At least he knows polite words, I guess.

They sell goat’s milk ice cream at Whole Foods. I might make a trek down there, but I’m not sure it is worth the money. I don’t think I can bring myself to eat it, even though I do enjoy goat cheese. Would it be wasted on him? He knows all his goat facts. I’m just afraid he is going to refuse to perform on the big day. And I care why, precisely? It’s a preschool play. But I do care. Am I turning into a stage mother? Horrors!

Gratuitous baby pic. You know you like it. If not, pretend. My baby is cuter than all other babies on the planet (except YOURS of course.)

I finally got some fabric to start this quilt I have needed to make for over six months. I was going to make a traditional quilt, but I really can not sit at the sewing machine for very long. I got a hare brained idea to make a modern baby quilt, so started looking at pictures on Flickr and other places. I didn’t see a quilt exactly like this, but I saw a few in the spirit of this quilt. I just hope it turns out cute. What can go wrong when you have little orange pill boxes on pink like that? I love that fabric. Ignore the bright pink on the sides. I am using another quilt as a template/design wall/roll up thingee-ma-jig and it is bound in that bright pink.

I just hope I am able to keep everything straight enough. It was easy to cut out the rectangles since I only had to measure width instead of length. I find I have a hard time sewing straight when I do things by row, though. I tend to prefer to do blocks of two then four then eight and so forth until I get a whole quilt. Less screw-uppy that way.

Great. I just heard a turd. I guess you know what I’m going to go do now. Bah-hum bug.

I think I have FINALLY cured Elsa’s never ending diaper rash. I slapped half a jar of Vaseline on her butt and stuck her in a disposable diaper last night. She’s looking much better today. If she’d just stop pooping she’d be fine. This child poops more than an elephant.

Does an elephant poop a lot?

Are we really talking about elephant poop?

We need to talk about goat poop.

Erik has been cast as a goat in his class puppet show and he is pissed. Beyond pissed. Sad, cranky, angry. Not happy.

I think we’re going to eat some goat cheese this weekend. Maybe I will even try to figure out if there is a way to make ice cream out of goat’s milk. It shouldn’t be that hard, right? We have an ice cream maker. It sucks and I hate using it, but if it meant he wasn’t going to have a melt-down during his performance I’d drag it out and fill it up with goat’s milk.

Oh dear.

I think Elsa just figured out how to change the outgoing message on our answering machine. Even I haven’t been able to figure that out. Maybe I better go parent instead of telling you about goat ice cream and elephant poop.

***Side Note: I just noticed WordPress didn’t e-mail me any comments from my last post. Booo! Hisss! Anyway, we have a Garmin and have been unable to figure out how to update the maps. What good is a GPS if you can’t update the maps? Sounds like we should have got a TomTom*****

I might have five minutes to myself, so I might get to post an update. If it is jumbled up. . . well. . I am the queen of rambles after all. Not the queen of coherency or theme or them thar fancy bloggin’.

And you wonder why I don’t have a loyal following of thousands.

You know what I wonder? Why do I have a mosquito bite? Is it time to buy my summer ticket to Oregon? Six weeks, please. I’ll take unstable, drug addled sociopaths over humidity, heat and insane amounts of bugs.

My mom finally figured out how to log on to Facebook again. I have been informed that Elsa has teeth and red hair. I already knew that.

The red hair isn’t a huge shock, more of a little surprise. My mom’s family has a lot of redheads of varying shades so a little strawberry Elsa fits right in. When I was in high school I often had strawberry blonde hair, but I can’t really say that has any influence on Elsa’s hair since mine was a result of over-processed, badly done home coloring. My mom was all about the blonde; still is. She’s convinced in her little mommy heart that I dye my hair dark brown to thwart her. I think she really thinks I’m lying when I tell her I don’t dye it at all.

That may change in the near future if I keep plucking out all these white hairs. I’m going to have a mid-life crisis in about 25 days. You’ve been warned.

I think my milk may be drying up, or at least becoming insufficient for supplying a 25 pound 10 month old picky eater with all her milk drinking needs. Do I supplement with formula? Goat’s milk? Sweetened condensed milk? Something? I don’t even know what to do. I thought I had such humongous boobs that I would never have to worry about insufficient milk supply (even though I know, logically, that boob size has nothing to do with milk supply). If my period will ever end that might help. I vaguely recall reading that milk supply can decrease during your period. I nursed Erik until he was almost three and never had this problem, but he ate a lot and was much smaller.

Speaking of babies and raising them, I watched Raising Hope on Hulu today. For some reason I didn’t want to watch “my shows” on the laptop (the basement flooded a bit this weekend and we are trying to de-mold down there and I don’t want to smell the mold and vinegar) so I tried out Raising Hope. I was laughing to hard I thought I was going to cry. The germ episode was the best, but I really enjoyed them all. I am so glad we are finally getting back to scripted television. I like a good reality show (Top Chef, old school Project Runway), but I also like well written shows.

Ok, looks like my five minutes of peace turned into fifteen minutes but now they are over.