Killing Craigslist.

Aaaaaaaaand another two people blew me off.

On sale “A”  (as in *sshole), I was asking $12 for a case of $20 diapers.  Woman promised me THREE TIMES that she would be at my parents’ house before 6:00 to pick them up.  It’s now 7:30, and there’s no sign of her.

On sale “B” (as in *itch, I’m gonna kick your *ss), I was asking $25 for a booster seat thingie that was bought for $50 and used twice.  Again, she promised left and right that she would be there “right after work” to pick  up the seat and score some baby clothes, and she never showed.

What the frack is with these people?????  I’ve been around for 13,394 days, and I don’t think I’ve EVER set up an appointment & just not bothered to show up.

So, what’s the best way to get revenge on these people?  I have their e-mail addresses.  Should I take my laptop to Starbucks (or somewhere I can anonymously surf the web), and sign them up for every junk website under the sun?  There has to be some petty, stupid little way to repay their thoughtlessness, right?

Any better ideas?

Ebay(nkrupt).

Can someone please explain to me how in the name of spray cheese people make money by selling their crap on ebay?!?

I can’t wait for this rummage sale to be done.  I’ve spent the better part of the last 7 days sorting baby clothes into keep or sell piles, then sorting by size, then trying to determine prices.  I’ve torn so many little pieces of masking tape that my fingers are permanently curled.  And I still have to do the rest of the house and make signs and set the whole thing up at my parents’ house.  ACK!!!!!

Anyway, I stumbled across a buttload of brand new baby clothes that Mason never wore.  Some of it is brand name good stuff, like Calvin Klein and Elmo/Sesame Street and Carter’s.  Rather than selling it for pennies on the dollar at the garage sale, I thought I’d try & list some of it on ebay.  Until I looked at their fee schedule.

Let’s assume one of the $15.00 outfits sells for $4.99.
The insertion fee is $0.35.
The final value fee is $0.44.
The Buy it Now fee is $0.05.
Adding 2 pictures is $0.30.
And Paypal’s cut is $0.54.
Add it all up, and that’s $1.68 in fees.  I would only get $3.31, giving a whopping 34% of the sale price back to ebay/paypal.

Throw in the miscellaneous fees (a padded shipping envelope, packaging tape, a mailing label, etc), and I’m down to somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.00 – $2.50.

I think I’d rather take my chances with the rummage sale.  At least I’ll immediately have the cash in hand, and don’t have to screw around with taking/editing pictures and writing the listing.

Seriously, how do people become ebay millionaires?????  Do they sneak into unlocked garagesor unmanned construction sites & steal stuff?  Do they smuggle boxes of paperclips from their office supply closets & sell them?  Do they stuff extra taco shells in their purses at the AYCE buffet & sell them when they get home?

And don’t even get me started on Craigslist.  Craig can take his list and shove it where the bacon don’t fry, if you get my drift.  The first time I responded to an ad for baby clothes, the woman never got back to me.  On my 2nd attempt, the woman promised to mail me some Good Start formula coupons & she never did.  And yesterday’s experience takes the cake.

I listed a case of Enfamil AR formula, in the handy dandy little 2-ounce nurser bottles.  It’s pre-mixed, so you can just tuck a couple bottles in your diaper bag and go.  I paid $83.00 + shipping, and was asking $40.00; which I thought was a great deal, considering it doesn’t expire until September 1st.

2 days later, a woman sent me a response, and we agreed to meet up at a craft store at 9:30 Saturday morning.  It was 50 miles round trip for me, but I was happy to get rid of it and had some other errands to run.

I showed up at 9:15, and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Finally at 10:15, I left.  When we e-mailed, I gave her my cell number and told her to call me if she needed to tweak the time or anything.  But, oh, noooooooo.  B*tch just never showed up.

Why do people do that?  Why yank my fracking chain & make me waste my time and gas when she knew perfectly well she wasn’t going to buy it.  I sent her an e-mail, but she never bothered to respond.  I know I’m old and opinionated and generally cranky, but it makes me wonder if the next generation has lost all sense of kindness and courtesy.

Is this really what it’s coming to?  Punking people on Craigslist?  Seriously?

*mutter* *mumble* *damn kids* *mutter* *mumble*

Fun In The Sun!

A couple pictures from our first warm, sunny spring day.

My new favorite.  I swear, I fall a little more in love with this kid every day.

His first time at the park, in the little swings.  He was so happy – he giggled the entire time.

I can’t wait for summer.  Oh, the fun we will have together.

Turning on the Light.

Updates & comments are going to be infrequent until the end of next week.

My mother and I are having a garage sale at her house next week/end.  A bunch of people in her subdivision are having them, as are the neighboring subdivision.  Lord knows we could use the extra cash; but I ALWAYS forget what a pain in the butt it is to get everything cleaned & priced & ready to sell.

I can’t decide what to do with Mason’s baby clothes.  We’re thinking of trying for another baby later this year, but I can tell you right now, it damn well better be a girl.  A quiet one.  And if she has colic, she’s going back.

Actually, I want to save some of his clothes & attempt to make a quilt out of them.  In my buckets of free time.

Speaking of Mason, he’s cutting another tooth.  Number 3, if you’re keeping score.  God bless infant Tylenol.  He’s already starting to grind his top gum/incoming tooth against his bottom two teeth.  It’s like nails on a blackboard.  (Does anyone say “blackboard” anymore?  I feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder or something.  And if anyone leaves a comment along the lines of “Laura Ingalls WHO?”, I will personally come to your house and smother you in Preparation H ointment for being so young and daft.)

And speaking of Preparation H, how was your Easter?  Mine was a pain in the butt.  Get it?  Preparation H.  Pain in the butt.  Oh, I kill me!  Anyway, we had a big family gathering on Saturday to celebrate my niece’s first birthday, which left us with nothing to do on Sunday.  And what do you do when there’s nothing to do?  Order pizza and watch Marley & Me!

Have you guys discovered Redbox for DVD rentals yet?  The rental fee is only a dollar per night, and you get to keep the movie until 9:00 the following night. For a dollar!  And you can return the movie to any location (not just the one you picked it up at).  LOVE them!

And with that, the baby is awake and complaining.  Toodleooooooooooooo.

Heavy Hearted.

First, the loss of Maddie.

Then Thalon.

There are no words.

Night Terrors.

Last night, I woke up to find a strange man sitting in the chair next to my bed.

I had been in a deep sleep, which is pretty rare for me (I’ve always been an extremely light sleeper).  As I was waking, I realized the Husband’s bedside lamp was on, as was the TV.  For some reason, “Jack’s Big Music Show” was playing; but I had my back turned to the screen so I couldn’t see it.

As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw him sitting there.  Watching me.  Not hiding.  Not running away.  Just sitting and staring.

He looked like Dave.  Not too tall, sporting a belly from far too many backyard beer-be-cues.  He had on a maroon sweater and jeans, and he looked like he hadn’t shaved in a few days.  And he was wearing a long blond wig that came well below his elbows … it was like something you would see in the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog.

Then, he spoke.  And said the words that sent chills through my entire body.

“I’m here for your son.”

I threw the covers back and tried to jump out of bed, but he had a knife and slashed at me over and over and over again.  I was kicking him, hitting him, trying to knock him to the ground; but he just kept stabbing me.  Somewhere, I could hear someone calling my name; but the blood was pouring out of my wounds and I was rapidly losing consciousness.  Even as I fell to the ground, I kept yelling and punching, begging him not to hurt my baby boy.

And when I woke up, I was breathless and laying on the edge of the bed, crying and punching at the air and yelling at the strange man to please leave my baby alone.

But the strange man was gone.  The Husband was trying to talk to me, but I couldn’t hear him because the blood was pounding through my veins and into my head.  The lamp was on (as was the television), but he was gone.

I’m still not sure it was a dream.  I’m not sure where the dream ended and reality began.  It was so vivid.  I can still feel the pain of the knife slicing into my skin.  And hear the dead “thud” my fists made when they connected with his chest.

All day today, I was uneasy.  As if this hallucination that seemed so real to me was sent as some kind of a warning.

I can’t shake it, and I’m scared to leave Mason’s side.

You oughta be in pictures.

Rather than rambling about the events of the last few weeks, I decided to make this entry a little more visual.

The Husband’s latest purchase:

If his white tahoe and my white minivan are both clean and parked in the garage at the same time, you need to cover your eyes or risk temporary blindness from the glare.

As a result, our bank account balance bears a striking resemblance to this:

Which makes things just a little bit, um, tense around here!

Mason is doing really well, rolling around and getting into loads of trouble.  Last week, I walked out of the laundry room to find him laying in front of the fireplace, gnawing on The Husband’s shoe.  Apparently, Crocs are not only unfashionable, they’re also yummy!

As a result, we put him in baby jail.

It’s actually 2 Little Playzones hooked together, to make up one giant 8′ x 8′ playpen.  It’s extremely sturdy, and keeps him contained (and helps dodge the puppy kisses).  And I can sit or lay in there with him, and attempt to read books while he kicks me or gnaws on my fingers.

He’s so close to crawling.  He gets up on all fours and rocks back and forth, but he can’t quite get the alternating leg/arm movement figured out.  We’re getting together with my brother & SIL this weekend, and I think he’s going to watch their 1-year-old daughter and figure it out.  God help us if that happens.

Somewhere in this whirlwind of activity, tooth #2 also reared it’s jagged little head.

And he’s started to practice self-feeding!

The first few times, I tried giving him soft baby spoons to hold; but he’d jam them too far back in his throat & throw up.  Oh, yeah, bulimic baby thought he was hilllllarious.  The one pictured above is a Gerber toddler spoon, and he’s happy to sit in his booster seat & gnaw on the plastic coating.  In between shovelling in the pears & sneezing half of them back out, of course.

I’ve managed to stop obsessing about his weight.  We got a flyer in the mail from Gerber, and it said that most 8-month-old children weigh between 14 and 17.5 pounds.  Next time I take him to see the doctor, I’m bringing that article along and planting copies of it all over the office.  25th percentile, my arse.

He weighed 17.5 pounds and measured 29″ long on his 7-month birthday.  He’s not sickly looking by any means; but he’s definitely not a chubbalubba by any stretch of the imagination.  He’s healthy and happy and that’s enough for me.

But I can’t help but wonder……do the parents of overweight babies worry about their infant’s weight, too?  A woman in The Husband’s office has a little one who’s only 5 months old, and he’s over 22 pounds already.  Every time that kid makes a peep, they’re shoving a bottle into his mouth.  Do they stress over how roly-poly he is?

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s a reason why I’m so anxious about Mason’s weight.  A friend of mine’s nephew has been through medical hell.  At 10 months old, he started throwing up.  They increased his feedings and started an early intervention program for food aversion, but he kept losing weight.  Once he started walking, they boosted his feeding schedule to every 2 hours; but nothing helped.  He lost 2 pounds, and was admitted to the hospital for Failure to Thrive.

After more tests than I want to think about, everything came back negative and they diagnosed him with an oral motor aversion.  After 3 weeks in the hospital, they started feeding him with an NG tube while the doctors blamed it on family conflict.  Can you imagine?  Their son is going through hell.  Literally, hell.  And the doctors accuse them of being unfit parents because of their stressful living environment.

After all this, they released him from the hospital.  The family came up to Wisconsin to visit my friend, and the baby kept throwing up (even though the tube was depositing the formula directly into his stomach).  They took him to the emergency room, and after an MRI, they found he has an AT/RT brain tumor.

The survival rate is less than 20%.  My heart breaks at that statistic.

So please understand, even though I say I’m going to stop obsessing over his weight, I’ll probably still worry.

I think I’ll always worry.  Isn’t that the very definition of parenthood?

Too Much Information.

Dear Heather,

I’ve always suspected that our friendship was very one-sided.  In the beginning, I read about your struggles with postpartum depression and the overwhelming exhastion that seems to go with new motherhood and felt like I could relate.

But then, slowly but surely, something began to change.  Your monthly love letters to your daughter became borderline exploitave and oddly controversial.  It felt like you were using these sweet, charming letters to further your “brand” and shove your political views down your readers’ throats.

Or maybe it was the obnoxious ad placement (under the header AND all over the sidebar, detracting from your writing with the dayglo neon colors and the sparkly flashy things)?  Or maybe it was the Real Simple article?  I have to admit, I was a smidgen jealous of this one; but only because dude, you got PUBLISHED!  In a big, glossy, national magazine!  And more than anything else, I was excited for you and the future of your writing career.

I know people consider you to be a pioneer in the world of mommyblogging, even though I don’t agree.  There will always be writers.  Always has been, always will be.  But I do think you’ve inspired many people to start keeping their own journals, and for this, I applaud you.  The English language is falling apart and constantly being butchered thanks to Texting and IM Shorthand and LOLSpeak and Ebonics and ESL programs (while living in America, English should be your first language, people!).  And if you’ve encouraged even one person to write, I offer up my sincerest gratitude for helping to preserve our prose.

But back to your writing career.  I saw it start to take off with the release of “your” first book.  And yes, I intentionally put “your” in quotations, because you didn’t even write this book.  A collection of essays?  Come on, Heather, you did your loyal readers a big disservice with this one.  You could have done so much better than to hoard a bunch of short stories from other bloggers and stick your name on it as the editor.

And then, bit by bit, it started to feel like you were unravelling.  There were less stories about your daughter, and too many filler videos from YouTube.  And what, exactly, is the self-serving purpose of the Momversation videos?  Just another sellout dollar in the almighty bank account, eh?  Add it in with your latest book and subsequest whirlwind media tour, and you’ve left me feeling like a dejected, ousted member on the board of directors of your giant, greedy corporation.

When does it all end?  For this girl, it stops today.  The Oprah show was the last straw.  I tried to laugh when you said you could do without the plastic toys and and the arts and crafts and the pipe cleaners and the cotton balls.  Me?  I love the plastic toys, because they mean I will finally hear the sound of a child’s laughter in my house.

But the final nail in our shared coffin of blogging?  When Oprah herself referred to you as a moneymaking machine, based on your staggering $40,000 A MONTH in advertising revenue.  Holy effing mother of Christ, why did I ever think I could relate to you??????????  You are nothing like me!  I’m clipping coupons for $1.00 off a can of formula and $0.25 off six jars of baby food.  You’re raking in over a thousand dollars EVERY DAY.  In fact, you’ve made over $100 since I sat down at my computer to break up with you.

I even considered buying your book for a minute, to have a memento to remember you buy, whoops, I mean by.  But I changed my mind.  You obviously don’t need the income and I can use my $24 on two Papa Murphy’s pizzas and two liters of Diet Coke.  I want to read about other struggling mothers, not the pimping out of a parenthood corporation.

So it’s over.  We’re through.  I’m fat and happy and you’re wealthy and self-important.  Have fun sleeping on your mattress of cash while I go and scarf down a couple Girl Scout cookies and snuggle up to my chubby hubby.