My mother has never passed gas. Not in my, or anyone else’s presence, that is. Maybe you’re thinking that it’s an odd observation for one to make. Well, it takes an odd person to make an odd observation and my auntie (my dad’s aunt, to be more specific) never let an opportunity pass (no pun intended!) to bring it up. When I was younger, she would bring it up every single time we saw her. Later, when she had lost her husband and moved in with her sister (my gramma), we saw her much more frequently and, blessedly, she stopped bringing it up at every meeting. Once or twice a week seemed to suffice. Maybe she was just getting bored with the whole idea – try as she might, she could never convince my poor mother that it would be funny to just let one go.

My auntie used to treat my mom like she was the star sideshow freak at the circus, always trying to get her to perform some crazy antic or other. Over time, my mom had amassed quite an arsenal of regular bits. She had also mastered the art of silent frustration, subtle sarcasm and infinite patience with her husband’s crazy aunt.

Auntie:  Do that puppy ear scratch thing! (wherein my mom bats at her hair like a dog would scratch it’s ear solely because my aunt thought it was funny and not because my mother actually wanted to do such a thing).

(Have I mentioned that my auntie was a wee bit insane?)

Mom:  No.

Auntie:  Come on! Do it for me.

Mom:  No, I would really rather not.

Auntie:  Just once. One little scratch!

Mom: Sigh. Fine.

Auntie: Gales of laughter. Oh my, you are too funny.

Mom:  Right.

Auntie:  Now do the chicken impression.

Mom:  No!

Auntie:  Don’t make me beg.

Mom: (under her breath)  Oh for the love of … Fine.

Auntie: More gales of laughter.  You are SO funny!

Mom:  Yeah. Thanks.

Meanwhile, my brother and I would hide off to one side, rolling on the floor with laughter over the lengths my poor mother had to go to in order to keep my auntie pacified. She never complained to my auntie over her bizarre requests. She did have her limits, though.

Auntie:  I believe I have never heard you break wind, dear!

Mom: …………. (At this point, my mother was always near the end of her rope. The exasperation was showing on her face and it was hysterically obvious to my brother and me that she was hanging on by a thread.)

Auntie:  Kids! Have you ever heard your mother fart?

My brother and me: Uhhhh… Uncomfortable giggle. (We absolutely knew better than to encourage my auntie or the wrath of mom would come down upon us with a furious vengeance.)

(Ok, not really. We just felt sorry for our mom, who was too kind to tell my aunt to kindly shut it.)

Auntie:  Tell us! Have you ever passed gas? Why don’t you fart in public? You must have remarkable control.

Mom: …………………

(At this point, my mom was usually a veritable mass of uncontrolled ticks and shimmies. She usually had the sigh, the eye roll, the crossed and uncrossed arms and the tight-mouthed grimace going on by now. She was just waiting for it.)

Auntie:  Give us a little toot.

Mom: Exasperated giggle of barely repressed rage and embarrassment. NO!

Auntie:  Just a little one. You’re too proper.

Mom: (with a note of warning in her voice.)  No, I will not.

(At this point, any normal person would have realized that my mom’s patience had worn through and enough was enough. Not my auntie, though.)

Auntie:  I’ll never ask you again if you do it just this once!

Mom: ………………… Retreats to kitchen.

_____________________

Later, when I had been seeing my now-husband for a few months and had begun bringing him home, my auntie decided to lay some of her eccentricities on him. For reasons I still can’t understand, she had it in her head that his name was Lloyd.

She only ever had one question of burning importance for poor Lloyd, and she asked him every time she saw him. Usually at the dinner table.

Auntie:  Lloyd, do you have hair on your chest?

Lucky: (fork frozen halfway to his mouth).  Excuse me?

Auntie:  Hair. Do you have hair on your chest?

Lucky:  Um, I don’t think I want to answer that question.

Auntie:  Lift up your shirt. Let’s see if you have a hairy chest!

Lucky:  Uh, no thanks.

At this point, someone usually interjected on my husband’s behalf  (never me, you understand. I was too busy laughing my ass off) and he would be saved from having to perform a strip tease for my family.

Despite being known in our family as “Lloyd with the possibly hairy chest”, Lucky still married into the craziness.  I’m not entirely sure what that says about him, but I’m happy about it nonetheless!

____________________

Sometimes I really miss my crazy auntie! Life was never boring with her around.

I still haven’t heard my mother pass gas. Personally, I think she should have done it at my auntie’s funeral, just as an inside nod to her. You know, to let auntie know that she loved her enough to let out “just a little one” in a public place and all. Somehow, my mother just seemed to know that farting at a funeral would be somehow inappropriate though, so kudos to her.

As for the chest hair? Wouldn’t you like to know…

* I should probably mention here that this was originally posted by me in my old, now defunct blog. I don’t plan to upload all of my old posts to the archives here, but I will occasionally grab my favourites and post them. Would it be better if I mentioned that they were old, or just repost them without that mention, considering that they’re all new here? Discuss in the comments, if you please!

Filed under: Keepin' it Real, Random by WWS (Lynn) - 2 Comments →

After my diagnosis of PCOS in April (and in hopes of beating the sucktastic odds of turning into a rounder, flabbier version of myself), I have made some pretty positive lifestyle changes. First off, I made the commitment to go walking with a good friend 5 nights a week. Generally, we go walking through our neighborhood Sunday-Thursday evenings for an hour. We keep a quick, steady pace. Not speed-walker fast, because even the promise of being svelte and toned isn’t enough to make me want to go out in public looking like this guy:

It’s quick enough to keep us breathing heavily, though.

(Hey, I just thought of a way to make extra cash. I’ll just bring a phone along and let horny, lonely losers listen to me gasping away into the receiver for an hour. Throw in a few, “Oh, my God’s” and I’ll be rich!)

Ahem.

On top of the walking, I’ve tried to be more active in general, spending time outside with the kids going for bike rides, playing catch and kicking the soccer ball around.

And. And! The biggie: I am on day 12 of no chocolate. That’s right. No chocolate. I decided to cut it completely out of my diet for one month because it’s my single biggest temptation. My diet is otherwise very good, so I figured I’d start noticing some big changes right away.

And, boy, let me tell you. I have noticed some changes. When I stepped on the scale yesterday to see how I’ve progressed, I was rewarded with a magnificent five pound weight GAIN. Because my body obviously hates me.

I forgot that I’m dealing with the fat disease. And let me tell you, this thing has jumped in and fucked with my hormones in a huge way. (Pun intended.) Also, extra weight in the midsection is really hard on a back that’s weak to begin with. I’m hobbling around like a 90 year old man. It’s not pretty, folks.

(If you want to read about my feminine woes, start here and continue on here, here, here, here, here, and here. (Or, you can click the fancy PCOS category title on the left sidebar. ) (I’m all about providing options here.)

I can barely look at myself in the mirror. I hate what I see. After I got off the scale yesterday, I was torn between screaming and throwing things and melting down into a flabby puddle of goo on the floor and crying. Because really, body, what the fuck?! I might as well lay on the couch eating cake for all the good my healthy lifestyle has been doing me.

You know it’s bad when you’ve considered bulimia as a possible weight-loss solution…

I’ve had a look at several PCOS websites and the general consensus seems to be, “have fun being fat from now on, chubby!”  I don’t want to accept that. I can’t. My self-esteem is taking a massive beat down. I have clothes in my closet that should still fit me, based on how I live, yet they don’t. At all. I have until October until my next appointment with the endocrinologist. I plan on talking to her about a different solution, since I highly doubt that my once-every-three-months dose of progesterone is going to do me any good. There are still two options (that I know of) left: birth control pills and Metformin. I think I’m going to ask to skip straight to the diabetic medication so I can force my body to bend to my will and obey me. (I have to keep the hope alive somehow!)

In the meantime, I am really struggling not to just give up on all of my efforts. I kind of just want to lay down and take one long, continuous nap. I’m just so very tired.

Filed under: Just My Luck, Keepin' it Real, Me, PCOS, Pity Party by WWS (Lynn) - 6 Comments →

A couple of weeks before Logan’s birthday, I ventured into the party store to see about finding a “theme” for him. He had mentioned Superman, so I kept that in mind as I searched through the available cake pans. The Superman pan? Looked like this:

I looked at Superman’s realistic facial features and had a flashback to the Cinderella cake incident of 2007. Superman-themed party? Out.

After searching through the remaining pans, I narrowed it down to two options: a baseball pan or a guitar pan. I reserved the guitar one and later confirmed with Logan that Guitar Hero was the way he wanted to go for his birthday this year.

(Logan is remarkably easy-going about this type of thing. I honestly don’t think he cared if he even had a theme. Clearly, I am the one with issues…)

The day before the party, I picked up the pan and (because I apparently work best under pressure) perused the internet for ideas on how to decorate it. At 3:00 that afternoon, after viewing several scarily awful Guitar Hero cakes made with “regular” icing, I made the snap decision to try using fondant for the first time ever.

(Because I’m all about trying new, unfamiliar things when under a strict time deadline.)

I dragged the extremely unwilling birthday boy (“but I don’t caaaare what the cake looks like, Mama!“) and his shopaholic sister with me to Michaels after school so I could pick up some ready-made fondant.

Once the kids were in bed for the night, I iced the guitar cake in good, old-fashioned Betty Crocker icing (because anyone who has ever actually tasted fondant definitely does not want to have to do so ever, ever again) before getting the fondant ready to lay over top.

Tip: When attempting to take a picture of a white cake late into the evening, turn the flash off.

My crumb coat was extra crummy crumby.

Next, I read the instructions on the fondant expertly got to work on my masterpiece. By some miracle of God, I realized that fondant is amazingly easy to work with. I rolled it to a thin, smooth layer and placed it on top of the cake.

Then, I realized I had no black food colouring sent my husband on a mission to get black food colouring added black food colouring to some of the fondant and worked it together to create, ta da!, black fondant, which I then placed on the cake.

A strip of black fondant around the perimeter of the cake, to match the Wii Guitar I was copying, and I was ready to start on the details.

I fashioned all the little knobs and buttons out of fondant and got them to stick to the top of the guitar with just a little dab of water on each.

I know, it looks tedious. Well, I’m not going to lie – it was. But, it was a fun kind of tedious. (Hello, oxymoron!) This cake is living proof that even 32 year olds can have fun with playdoughesque materials…

I then wrote out a birthday greeting to Logan (on an extra piece of fondant, in case I screwed up the lettering…) and stuck that to the cake.

Not including the time it took to bake the cake (or the time it took Lucky to locate some black food colouring for me), the decorating process took about 90 minutes or so. (And, if you think that’s long, I won’t even tell you how long it took me to decorate the Satan Cinderella cake…)

When the time of the party rolled around, I had several very impressed little boys crowding around the cake. Logan proudly exclaimed that he loved his cake and that I was the best cake baker in the world.

Looking back on the whole Guitar Hero cake making business, I have to say that my cake is to the actual Guitar Hero guitar what the Spider-Man and Friends Spidey is to the actual Spidey. Check it:

Logan’s guitar…

Actual guitar…

Spider-Man and Friends Spidey…

Real Spidey…

If I had it to do over again, I would have shaped the guitar myself to make it look more realistic. Because some of the cakes I found on the internet were really something. Wow.

Upon seeing the pictures of my cake, a friend said to me, “All that work for what… a picture?” to which I immediately responded, “pretty much, yeah!“. Seeing the excitement on Logan’s face when he saw the cake make it all worthwhile.

It definitely beat the look I got when he saw his present:

Somebody tell me he’ll learn to ride (and enjoy) this thing by the time he turns 40. Please?

Filed under: Keepin' it Real, Me, Offspring, Out of the Mouths of Babes by WWS (Lynn) - 3 Comments →

Please to be forgiving the craptacular quality of this post. I’m trying to shake out of a post-progesterone fog of epic proportions…

Logan is turning seven. Seven!

Excuse me while I go sob uncontrollably into one of his baby quilts…

Just talk amongst yourselves…

Sorry about that. I’m back.

So, along with the birthday comes the birthday party.

(You can just call me Captain Obvious. I won’t mind.)

I don’t like planning birthday parties. At all. They stress me right the eff out. It’s ridiculous, I know. But, well, I’ve always been a little “off”, so this type of reaction is actually quite normal for me.

Logan has decided on a Guitar Hero themed party. It’s set for next weekend. So far, I’ve managed to:

1. Make up the invitations (which my dad graciously printed out and laminated for me.) (Thanks, Dad!)

2. Reserve a guitar-shaped cake pan.

So, as you can see, this party is shaping up to be all kinds of awesome.

(I’m too frozen with anxiety to actually plan anything.)

(Although, with Guitar Hero being the theme, I think it stands to reason that playing the Guitar Hero game for awhile might be a good activity…)

(Captain Obvious saves the day again!)

Next week, the party planning begins in earnest! Anyone know a cheap place to buy rockstar-related paraphenalia for cheap? Did I mention cheap? And, preferrably cheap…

_______________

And, in completely unrelated news, ever wonder what a sleep-deprived four year old looks like after waking up at 3:20 in the morning for a middle-of-the-night party?

Behold:

She’s been an absolute joy today. I know you wish you were me. You can admit it. The first step to beating the green-eyed monster is admitting your jealousy…

Filed under: Keepin' it Real, Me, Offspring, Phoning it in by WWS (Lynn) - 4 Comments →