Stupid parenting -- with audio, even!

I entered this anecdote in a contest sponsored by hilarious Let's Panic About Babies site, where they asked parents about an embarrassing parenting moment...

There was the cheery night after Sarah spent her first two days of life in the hospital gazing around beatifically before she came home and promptly got hungry as hell while my milk still hadn't come in. Of course I nursed her (though no more than every two hours as per the helpful schedule sheet provided by the hospital) so she couldn't POSSIBLY be hungry with all that delicious colostrum, but for some reason she still screamed like a banshee for hours on end. Ben and I were psychotic with anxiety and sleep deprivation. In yet another attempt to cure this baby of its mysterious caterwauling, Ben decided to change her again. And when the wet baby wipe hit her butt at 2 a.m... well, as we described it later, she bobcatted (actually it was a puma we were thinking of, sort of like this). Now the embarrassing part: in our psychosis, we immediately realized that Sarah's problem was... she was allergic to the baby wipes! Of course! And she needed a bath RIGHT NOW to wash off the HORRIBLE POISONS that were causing her to shriek uncontrollably! Oddly enough, the bath caused her to reach a new pitch we didn't think it was possible for a human larynx to produce. Finally in total despair and self-flagellation we reached for the bottle of sugar water that the pitying nurses had slipped into our bag. Well, talk about trying to suck a bowling ball through a garden hose... lo and behold, a few hours later my boobs were like Niagra Falls and she chowed down, I eventually learned how to feed her without excruciating physical pain on my part, and neither of us ever cried again. The end.

Giving NaBloPoMo a try

National Blog Posting Month just started and I'm already a day behind. Whatever. Saturday was Halloween. Weirdest weather ever -- about 90 degrees with a 90-mph breeze. Becky (dressed as a yummy hot dog) got scared after only a short while, so we repaired back to the home of a neighbor who hosts a really nice pre-trick-or-treating party every year. We chatted with other adults who had stayed behind to guard the wine while their spouses took the kids around. Then it was Sunday with an extra hour of sleep -- YES-S-S-S! Did I let that stop me from also taking an afternoon nap instead of going grocery shopping? HELL no! Then we had leftover pizza with our good friends in Natick (our daughters are best buds from Hebrew school) and discussed Sociopaths We Have Known. And there have been a few.

One more bite

We gather here today in memory of the departed innocents -- the kiwi and strawberries who gave their lives and were shamelessly mutilated and had their corpses displayed in vulgar fashion atop a burial mound made of Cool Whip. We will now pour cheap brandy over the whole mess and use the candles to set it on fire in the Hindu funereal tradition. As an added bonus, recently widowed Hindu women who make this dish may wish to participate more fully by committing sati. I myself might feel the urge after seeing my guests' faces after serving this vat of gooey white wonder.

Overengineering

Have you seen those commercials for twin recliners that also have cupholders, coolers and reading lights? We always joke that if they just came with a Foley catheter attachment, the lazy slob would never have to get up. Well, this guy did it one better -- a motorized recliner for zipping over to the local bar for a beer or nine. Except he got arrested for drunk driving.

* * *

A few weeks ago, we were tripping and sliding over all the acorns in our yard (apparently there's a bumper crop of them this year), and foolishly I told the kids within earshot of Ben that Native Americans used to somehow grind them up and make acorn flour. This sent Ben hustling to the Internets, where he actually found a website explaining at length just how to go about doing this. And he gathered a bunch of acorns. A-a-a-and... he made acorn flour. I didn't think this was possible, but it had an even higher ratio of required labor to outcome quality than the Indian cutlet fiasco.

In a nutshell (HA!) you gather a shitload of acorns, roast them to kill the bugs, crack them individually (dental tool required), boil it for several hours while frequently changing the water (this removes the bitter tannins and stinks up the house something fierce), dry the stuff on every baking sheet and other flat surface you own, then grind it up in a food processor. And THEN you can use the flour to make something like ginger molasses cookies. Which the recipe cheerfully notes will taste not much different from cookies made from regular flour (and the recipe also calls for regular flour, by the way), because the ginger and molasses flavor dominate the acorn flavor. Fortunately. All you notice is an odd mealiness since the flour is both coarser and greasier than wheat flour. This is what unemployed people do to fill the hours, I guess. At least he's not drinking beers in the recliner (we don't have one) while watching NASCAR or Regis & Kathy Lee all day.

Pulling the plug on Granny

...or maybe just letting her decide if there should be a plug or not. Terrific NY Times piece by Timothy Egan discussing the notion that hey, maybe we can talk about reducing the country's end-of-life care expenses without veering immediately into OMG-plug-pulling-Kevorkian-death-panels-black-helicopters paranoia and political cynicism. As Egan says, "how do we reform a system that lavishes most of its benefits on a cure for the 'disease' of aging" when many studies as well as common sense show that most people want to die at home, yet Medicare will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests but won't pay for non-hospice home caregivers.

And then I read about a guy who was basically lynched by a bunch of hillbillies in Kentucky. Not because he was black (he wasn't), but because he was... brace yourself... a FED! (a census worker, to be specific). And we know this was an issue in motivation for the murder because they painted his body with that three-letter word, just so the world would know what special brand of evil this guy was. What the fuck is wrong with these ignorant Americans that they HATE HATE HATE the meddling Big Brother federal government except when it's handing out Social Security/Medicare/food stamps? The ultimate absurdity, of course, was the frothing-at-the-mouth guy at one of the health care town meetings screaming "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" What am I missing here?