Shop for your kiddo at A Toy Garden because it has all the neat Waldorf-y stuff like Stockmar crayons and beeswax and gorgeous wooden toys.

(I promise that if you shop there you sign no waiver promising not to learn yer kiddies to read before third grade.)

I got McP a set of 8 play silks for dress up for $35 and some Stockmar beeswax. I sent my mil to the site in hopes of increasing McPantses’ dress up wardrobe with items not of the Disney nature. There are a few hats that I’d like to have myself (I think that a true Superhero of the Mundane would get to wear that yellow felt crown, don’t you?).

I have heard good reviews of the site, the shipping time and their products. I will confirm this information myself after McP’s package arrives and I wrap myself in ginormous silk squares and am squishing beeswax in my grubby little paws.

(I promise not to play with McPantses’ Christmas gifts before she does. I promise. I think.)

If you are into Moleskine notebooks (and you should be), buy them from this ebay dude because his prices are outstanding and he’s a quick shipper. He also sells my all-time favorite sketchbooks, the Canson Montval Field Watercolor books, which retail for at least $18, if not more like $25 each, for less than half of retail. I’m currently waiting for my third package from Mr. P.

McPantses’ coolest Christmas present?

She’s getting a big tote bag that I’m going to ask my very enthusiastic friend to monogram with the word “nature” in all small letters in a typewriter-looking font in grass green. Per a wise suggestion, I’m filling the tote with nature books for kids, a bug box (yick), a magnifying glass, binoculars, and a butterfly net. We’ll have nature walks and she can start checking out the wee little birdies, which is something I used to love to do as a child.

This makes me happy.

I have finally found an appropriate title for myself.

Last night at dinner after the Hanging of the Greens service at church (wherein McPantses and her choir sang three quick songs–or, in reality, one very loud little girl sang at the top of her lungs while nearly 30 other little kids sang softly and stopped to gape, open-mouthed, at her, in a little-kid mixture of awe and horror), we headed for our fave restaurant.

The fave restaurant is a local joint and it’s where we go at least once a week (if not more, which is sad). It’s where we went the night before McP was born and it’s the first place we took her out to eat. I think she was three weeks old. She’s an old hand at dining out (because her mother is a lazy git who finds it challenging to get home from work and cook dinner every night), particularly at this restaurant and she is always treated very well. I’m not sure what adding another kid to the mix will do to the restaurant dynamic, but we will be finding out very soon after Third is born, I suspect.

We walked in at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday night and the place was packed and there was a thick haze of smoke befitting a 10 p.m. Friday night dinner, complete with live music. We hid in a corner away from the smog and McPantses proceeded to regale us with tales in her incredibly loud inside voice.

It seems like I spend a lot of time these days saying “inside voice, please … INSIDE VOICE!!!”*

And the whole fave restaurant vibe was totally thrown off by the smoke, the crowd, the loud toddler voice four inches from my ear and, shortly after we sat down, the strange, overly-affected snooty/intellectual voice behind me, also mere inches from my ear.

The strange lady’s date/companion finally showed up and the pair spent the rest of my dinner talking about their pets, including one portion of the conversation that involved cat mayhem and a “blood-soaked mattress.”

The husband couldn’t hear any of this and we agreed that I have a superhuman ability to eavesdrop on entire conversations and repeat them verbatim hours later.

Therein was born the Superhero of the Mundane, because what a stupid and wasted talent that is, no? It helps that I am wildly nosy, I guess.

In case you are wondering, the costume that a Superhero of the Mundane wears is a pair of decent-fitting pregnant pants (olive green twillish), regular long-sleeved black tee shirt, regular oatmeal cable-knit sweater. Loafers (black) work well. Lotioned face with mascara. No concealer covering black (matching the loafers!) undereye circles. Glasses optional, as is jewelry.

I’m thinking of getting a cape in, say, fake pashmina.

* A week or so ago, I pulled a stunt that I thought was cruel at the time–I told McP a wild tale about what would happen if she didn’t stop shouting in my ear when we were dining somewhere (probably the same restaurant here) and she repeated it to me last night when I told her she had to STOP. SHOUTING. IN. MY. EAR. I told her that if she didn’t stop, my head was going to explode off my neck and rocket into outer space and that would be the end of mommy. And I felt (a little) bad at the time, because I thought it might worry her, but last night she said, “Would your bones be sticking out? Because that might be gross. And would your head stay in the sky, or would it come back down and bounce on the ground?” Must work up gross story so horrific that it stuns her silent. May not be possible.

So, today’s the big day: the Salvation Army is set to stop by my house and fetch a cushy old chair (it rocks and squeaks!), two sacks of clothes, the Amityville Horror Bed from Hell, the antique bed rails that fit no bed in my house and the new set of metal full-sized bed rails.

The Husband and I got up five minutes early and I taped “SALVATION ARMY” signs on each item (because they won’t take it if it doesn’t have their name on it, but I brought McP’s wagon inside on the conflicting principle that I didn’t want them to take it–just in case) and the Husband hauled everything outside to rest safely (and dryly–it was pouring down rain this a.m.) under our brick carport.

And I am so excited to have this stuff out of Third’s room. So very excited.

So, who called five minutes ago?

The Salvation Army.**

They probably cannot come today because of the rain. But, lo and behold, they can come on Friday. So I (meaning the Husband) can drag all this shite back into the house for another two nights only to repeat the damned process all over again at the asscrack of dawn Friday morning.

Did I mention that getting tags on this stuff and getting it outside while still half-asleep caused the expected amount of arguing?* Because it did. So, we can both look forward to THAT again Friday morning, too.

Yippee!

McPantses, last night, after stern admonishment from both parents when she kicked the Husband in the family jewels (not that we’ll be needing his spectacular seed ever again, but still–a man cares about these things a whole whole lot, it appears) twice:

“You’re not my best friends.” (I suppressed laughter and said, “Okay.”)

“I don’t want to be in this family any more. I want to be in another family.” (Laughter. “Okay. Will you let me know which family, so I can send your things? I would hate for you to leave because we’d really miss you.”)

“I do not love you.” (Snorting while trying to suppress laughter because the laughter infuriates her. “Well, that’s okay, but your daddy and I will always love you more than anything in the world.”)

“I will never love you again and you will never be my best friends again.” (Giving up. “Okay. That’s fine. Have a good night’s sleep and sweet dreams.”)

She was so injured, so aggrieved, so very wounded. We went back into her room later on both wearing fake rabbit noses (trinkets from the zoo birthday party on Sunday) and made hoppy motions and said we were the rabbit family and asked if she wanted to be in the rabbit family instead and she smiled (she didn’t want to, but she couldn’t help it) and hugged her daddy and rubbed noses and then she motioned me close and had me put my face right up to hers, at which point I expected a lovely squeeze and a smooch, and she said, in the quietest and calmest of voices:

“You’ll still never be my best friend again and I will never love you again.”

That’s my girl!

* E-mail from the Husband upon being informed that he may have to do this again on Friday: “You mean slightly-hungover-me may have hauled furniture out at 6:42
while his wife threw tomatoes at him for no reason? Mmmmmmmmph.” To which I say, dude, you must have been slightly hungover because it was about 20 minutes earlier than that.

** Update: thank you, Salvation Army, for coming out in the afternoon sunshine in your bigass truck to haul away our refuse. May our trash be someone else’s treasure and if that someone rigs up the Amityville Bed, I sure would love to see it in use. The Husband is just glad he doesn’t have to haul all the cack back into the house and have to endure more tomato throwing Friday a.m.

McPantses turned four on Saturday and we started the day with breakfast out. She had, as she always does at this place, an m&m pancake (vile-sounding, no?) and I had a cardboard waffle.

And I was relaying a story from Friday at work where the coworker who always comments about pregnancy and how beautiful pregnant women are and my pregnant figger made a comment about my weight earlier in the week. I looked particularly dreadful on that day and she said, “Wow, your hips are really starting to spread!” She says these things with love and with humor, but I can’t imagine something like that coming out of my mouth, EVER, to another human being, especially one whose hormones are working double-time.*

And I told the Husband this and he said “We’ll work on conditioning after the baby comes.” He kept on shoveling in (non m&m) pancakes as I just sat there and looked at him and waited for him to realize what he said and after he missed it entirely, I finally said, “Are you sure that’s what you want to say?” He stopped, mid-mouthful and said, “A monkey just got kicked out of committee and the rest of the committee is going to vote on whether or not he’s allowed to come back.” We love the Monkey Parliament and it’s been a solid part of our lives for quite a while now. I told the Husband to tell that monkey to meet me out back because I was going to kick is a-s-s (curse words are so much less worth it when you have to spell them out) into next year.

Monkey Parliament vs. Monkey Jungle: the Monkey Parliament lives in the Husband’s head and has to work overtime to keep up with odd thoughts that fly out of his mouth sans warning or censorship. The Monkey Jungle is what we called the group of about 35 kids seated off to the side of the sanctuary two Sundays ago for over half the service before they sang in front of the church. The sanctuary is shaped like a cross and they sat up front on the far right. For the first three minutes, they were angelic. For the next 25 minutes, they were the Monkey Jungle. I’m not sure whose bright idea it was to corral all those little kids in one place for that long, but I can tell you that of all the kids who got hauled out of the sanctuary sobbing wildly, mine wasn’t one of them. Does it matter? Not really, but after her surprise monologue during a children’s minute a couple of months ago, I’m always secretly pleased when McPantses is silent in the sanctuary. (Seriously, we’re still recovering from the “My mommy and I plant flowers and my mommy says that you have to eat your fruits and vegetables if you want to grow up big and strong” moment and people are still approaching us every time we enter church property to comment on it. McP may well graduate from high school known as the “eat your fruits and veggies” girl, but I guess compared to the many, many icky things she could be known as, that’s a good thing.) Considering the huge number of wildly embarassing things she could have said (”My mommy wears hot pink panties that still show her bottom!”–was her take on my underpants from one day last week.), I was thrilled that the problem was the extended monologue and not the subject matter. “When my mommy spills stuff at home, she talks about God and then she says DAMMIT a whole lot…”

Birthday party at the zoo yesterday in the POURING RAIN. Grand fun for the kids and for the adults? It’s OVER. Yay!

McPantses woke up this morning and asked, “Am I still four today?”

Note to insomniac middle-of-the-night shoppers: if you are ordering something for a little-kid’s room from Pottery Barn Kids at about 2 a.m., be sure that you really want it because in all likelihood, three very large boxes will arrive at your door three days later. How in the samhill did it get there that fast? And, I hate myself for it, but it’s cute and it’s very nice and the kids (the Husband’s eyes get very wide and deer-in-headlights-looking when I say the plural of “kid”) will enjoy it for years to come.

*In case you hadn’t noticed, I am vain. Bite me. Read or don’t read. I gained 60 lbs with McPantses because I was an ice cream-snarfing, Godiva choc milkshake-guzzling couch potato. I worry about gaining 60 lbs and missing all the couch potato time this go-round and I’m trying to make sure that doesn’t happen. If vanity chaps your ass, then try this on for size: I have laughed at my spendy former neighbor for years because she goes to the dermatologist very regularly to have all strange red marks or tiny mole-like marks burned off her body. She will have two dozen burns at a time, occasionally. I have a broken capillary on the right side of my face, directly beneath my eye socket and a derm checked it out after McP was born and said to wait until I was finished breastfeeding to get it zapped, at which point I decided I didn’t care about it enough to bother with all that (I think it got a lot less red after I stopped bf.). Well, this pregnancy has brought two small friends to reside very close to the broken capillary (which looks a bit like a small, red pimple). Vomit action left me with two broken blood vessels in the same vicinity. I might zap them in a year or so if they don’t tone down a whole lot between now and then. So, currently, there’s a three-red mark beacon in the night on my face and just knowing it’s there bugs me (plus, my mother likes to rub at it and say, you have a zit on your face, which she has been saying for the past 10 years or so, which is how long I’ve had the original broken capillary.). And THAT, my friends, is vanity.

comes something nice.

I think.

Last week, McPantses woke up at 4 a.m. and called me to her room (she chooses when she calls and we never know who will receive a middle-o-the-night summons). She was in tears and was very, very sad because she’d had a dream that Baby Third was here already. The sad part, to her, was that when she woke up, he wasn’t here at all. I got in bed with her and wrapped my arms around her and we both went back to sleep for an hour or so, at which point she began the standard repetition of “Is it time to get up yet?”

(Once the standard repetition begins, yep, it’s pretty much time to get up, because there sure ain’t gonna be any more sleepin’…)

McPantses seems to be dreaming about the boychild on a nightly basis and if it weren’t so all-fired sweet and adorable, I’d be jealous. She’s so cute about it when she’s sleepy, but during the waking hours, she’s a smidge testy about having to wait until MARCH for him to get here.

We’ve started saying that he will be here after Valentine’s Day and we show her the months on the calendar and explain that, no, if he got here now, it wouldn’t be good because he’d be too little and he needs to stay inside and grow big and strong.

The nuances are lost on a little kid, tho.

I can understand that.

I wonder how long it’ll take after Third arrives before McPantses decides he can go back from whence he came?

And a funny from my aunt (the one the Husband calls Flo, after the waitress at Mel’s Diner) about having a boychild (versus having a girlchild): you can wipe in any direction you want. Yippee! (Seriously, who would ever think to comment on that?)

Would that either of us were handy enough to wield an axe without hurting ourselves, the Husband and I would have reduced the Amityville Horror Bed from Hell to smithereens in the front yard at about 12:30 today. Well, we don’t actually own an axe that I know of, so that might have been a problem.

Oddly enough, I didn’t spontaneously combust, but I was quite upset. The screws got screwed and the rails got put in and the bed, alas, is a queen-sized bed and not a full-sized one. So when we put in the mattress, it fell through to the middle support wire.

Why, you ask, reasonable reader, didn’t we measure the width ahead of time?

We did.

We both did.

And for some reason, as I have looked at that bed over the last couple of weeks and caressed it and sanded the rough spots and used fine-grade steel wool on the sanded places and waxed and buffed and polished the Amityville Horror Bed from Hell, I have thought, you know that bed looks like it might hold queen-sized mattresses.

No, no. No way, I said to myself. It was sold as full-sized. I purchased full-sized mattresses.

We tested a queen-sized mattress from our bed on the Amityville Horror Bed from Hell, and it fit, but queen is a bit longer than full, so our mattress popped the metal rail out of the side on one side. We’d have to swap mattress sets and start all over again with queen-sized rails, but there’s no place to drill holes for queen-sized rails because the original lengthwise “indentations” where the bed had boards a zillion years ago are exactly where the holes should be.

Either the Salvation Army or Goodwill will have to come fetch the bed because I’m having nothing else to do with it ever again. We have a chair, lamps and a couple of sacks of clothes for them to fetch at the same time, anyway. Oh, and we have a nice set of old bed rails and no bed to match them, hardeeharhar. We will take the tax write-off and are considering arguing for pain and suffering after this weekend, should we ever be audited over the amount we’re deducting for this fine, fine piece of wooden furniture.

I picked out a bed at a furniture store today that, for a mere $39 extra, can arrive on a truck on Wednesday complete with burly (they specifically promised the men would be burly) to assemble the bed right exactly where I want it. I could have them put it together on the roof just for kicks.

My lovely sister also offered a free old maple bed, complete with slats, side rails and tallish testers.

Free is a better price for us almost always, but I’m secretly wary. I don’t want to fetch it and I don’t want to have anything to do with putting it together.

I wonder if I can still pay $39 to the furniture store and make the burly men set up the free bed?

Actual conversation between the Husband and me from earlier today to follow. Please imagine gritted teeth, much cursing on my part, one instance of outright screaming (well, at least one) on my part and the fact that McPantses, dressed in finery from head to toe (minus a hairbow, to the horror of my mother, because McP has a new, big-girl, chin-length haircut and doesn’t need a hairbow), including new shoes and–egads–tights, had been packed off to the ballet with my mother…

Scene: two adults, over the age of 30, wielding Craftsman power drill of a vintage near or before my birth, attempting to screw metal side rails onto antique bed for nursery. It turns out that the gorgeous, heavy, dark wood side rails I snagged at the auction to go with the bed (which, along with the faboo price of $25 or $35, was one of the main attractions, besides the bed’s beauty–it was PERFECT for lazy, un-manual slobs like ourselves) go with, ahem, another bed altogether that doesn’t reside at my house.

Dammitalltohell.

Me: (at the beginning of this process, at which time I thought I could drill some holes, fix up the bed and then make plans to hang the necessary two doors on the nursery myself–HA!) What are the chances that I can get this done successfully? I say there is a 5 percent chance I can do it, no muss or fuss.

The Husband: I say there’s a 20 percent chance you ruin the entire bed altogether.

FOUR HOURS LATER, after McP is gone for the afternoon and after THREE TRIPS TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD HARDWARE STORE:

Me: (screaming at the top of my lungs) What do you MEAN you needed ANOTHER SIX SCREWS [three per leg/side of the bed, people–keep up)–WHEN I LEFT, YOU NEEDED THREEEEEEEEEE AND I ONLY BOUGHT FIVE TO BUY A COUPLE OF EXTRAS! WHYYYYYYYY DID YOU UNDO A WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING SIDE OF THE BED INSTEAD OF JUST ONE END? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

Me again: And let’s just fucking EAT NOW BECAUSE I AM STARVING.

The Husband: (not screaming because he doesn’t scream or even raise his voice ever, which is entirely to his credit, but I would like to take this moment to remind him that a good loud scream every once in a while is a marvelous tension breaker and overall relief, but I’m ever-so-glad he does not, would not and has never done it at me because it would surely be quite loud and it would surely frighten me, whereas I am expected–really–to be loud, cranky and hugely grumpy 99.7 percent of the time) I wanted you to wait five minutes before you went to the hardware store AND I WOULD HAVE BOUGHT DOZENS OF SCREWS JUST IN CASE! (caps for emphasis because it just seems like those words would have been yelled, but they weren’t)

And so we ate and so we gave up for the day. There are five screws waiting for tomorrow (I thought we needed three, but the Husband decided to redo an entire side, but we’ll make do with one of manymanymany stripped screws).

I have never been possessed of the nesting instinct. Ever.

But I am here to tell you that if that fucking bed isn’t put together soundly by tomorrow afternoon, my head will rocket off of my neck into outer space. I have mattresses (”matt-tre-chez” per McPantses) and a dust ruffle and a nice mattress pad (thanks mom) and the softest white sheets ever from overstock.com (which does sell, by the by, the softest white sheets ever) and I want to head to any random store of my choice to fetch a white coverlet and shams TOMORROW. I want to wash them (the mattress pad is washing right now and it’s 3:52 a.m.–a combo of BED ANXIETY and vomit-inducing heartburn does not make for peaceful sleep) and slap them on that fucking bed and then I want to do what any rational person does when she gets a new bed reasonably shipshape:

I want to wreck the sheets and snuggle up in it and try it out.

You might as well come peek in the windows tomorrow afternoon because I can guarandamnteeyou that when this doesn’t materialize, I will spontaneously combust.

I have much fabric to do “nursery” decorating and I’m going to make a big blanket/coverlet to go over the bed or folded at the foot of the bed and many decorative pillows, because in my family a bed ain’t a bed until it has more than one dozen pillows, but I want to wait until January to sew because it’s after the Christmas card rush, but it’s extremely likely that I’ll have the sewing machine out tomorrow afternoon if (IF IF IF OH GOD IF) the bed gets finished.

But I have a drawing/painting to complete for someone–I got a commissioned work!–and I should really get cracking on that.

Moral of this story?

I am counting the days until our beloved (at this point he is much-beloved) handydude can hang the doors. No way in hell will I attempt to make doors “plumb” (is it “plumb” or “plum?” because I have no idea) after the fresh hell we endured today. No way. Laugh all you want, but a week ago I was considering purchasing a power drill of my own so I could do all this crap around my house–because it’s so EASY, you know! I was so wrong. I forgot that we don’t do anything in our yard. We don’t make minor repairs to anything. We barely hang pictures (tho I will say that I have hung two mirrors and about six pictures in the last few weeks).

Yeah, NOW I’m sleepy. Maybe I’ll iron things.

She who bitches about being compared to a very large coworker is bound to wake up Tuesday morn only to find that one of her favorite new pairs of maternity pants (new meaning new to this pregnancy) is too tight not in the hips or the ass, but in the bellah.

Dammit.

I hope a quick stop at gap.com will remedy this situation, but I gotta wonder, what in the samhill am I going to be wearing in February? It’s not like I can run off to Lyford Cay with my bikinis stuffed in my Birkin bag and wear thousand dollar hand-embroidered caftans and saris, a la Vogue.*

Dammit.

Of course, the upside to this is that I finally actually look pregnant instead of just oddly fat. I sucked up some ego juice and wore fitted pants and a fitted sweater yesterday (I am not a fitted sweater/pants gal–I don’t like to accentuate the boobs too much) and I didn’t have to spend the day with my arms crossed over my chest out of mortification. When the bellah actually surpasses the boobs, I’ll be less embarassed, though.

Please vote today.

Thank you.

I’m tempted to haul McPantses to the polls with me, but I don’t know if I’m up to an hour-long conversation about the electoral college. I’m still recovering from the DNA conversation three weeks ago. And she’s still talking about it.

* Things I don’t own or wear: caftans, saris, Birkin bag, bikinis. Just in case you wondered. Things I do wear: suits, khaki pants, loafers, pearls, twin sets, white button-downs (almost 6 days a week, too). If Brooks Bros made maternity clothes, I would be totally set.