All this talk of blood and slaying has put me off my tea.

It has been 00:00:14:25 since my last shaving incident.

I like to kick of the warmer weather in style, like with an arterial bleed.  With all the hype around vampire media, blood is the new black right?  But shaving is not the biggest of my springtime worries.  Well, if my ankle doesn't stop gushing soon it might become a priority issue.  I mean that tissue isn't doing the trick and I can't find the bandaids!  What kind of mother doesn't know where the bandaids are in her own house? The kind that bleeds to death, that's what.

Really my concern lies with coloring.  Springtime in Louisiana is more like summer near the equator.  It gets spicier than flamin' hot cheetos and long pants are not an option unless you fancy yourself having a heatstroke by 9 a.m.  Unfortunately, my complexion is a half-tint above ghostly.

And before you get judgey and assume I'm just any other white-girl of Irish decent and lack the gene necessary for tanning, let me tell you that I could probably go outside for 15 minutes and come back a nice, roasty, goldenness.  But like all things in my life, karma is ready to kick me square in me Irish arse and my downfalls are two-fold:

1)  My tan will only last a matter of hours.  Seriously, a magic marker would stay on longer.  Unless I'm planning on standing outside all day in my skivvies, a long-lasting option it ain't.

2)  I had a scare with the big C regarding my skin about 2 years ago. It wasn't a major issue, but I do have a nasty scar on my back from where my dermatologist removed a chunk out of my back that was the size of a marble.  Even if I did keep a tan, it wouldn't be worth going through that again.

Bring on the SPF 1,000,000!  I don't really mind being a little pasty in exchange for not dying of cancer.  However, people tend to get a little unnerved when they can see the veins and inner workings of  my overly transparent legs.  Nobody wants to see skin reminiscent of a jellyfish.  Now I'm left with self tanners that make me break out or leave streaks and spots where the epidermis is too dry.

Case and point?  Back before I was so conscious about skin health, I was planning on tanning the crap out of my body for my wedding.  Unfortunately, I was also too ditzy and completely forgot until the week OF my big day to address the issue and had to resort to a Majestic Spray Tan.  Worst. Idea. Ever.

I woke up the next day looking African...like a cheetah.  There were spots all over my arms!  And when I called the salon for a refund, solution, or even advice, the manager tartly stated that I must not have followed the directions (of which I was terrified of not following for utter fear of exactly what happened to me) and that "Well, you're not going to look like the girl in the video."  How about not looking like something off a Discovery Channel special?  I think we could manage that, right? 

Luckily some lemon juice, my mom's Clinique self-tanning lotion, and a few showers got it all sorted out in time to walk down the aisle. 

Moral of my story?  Wear sunglasses in the next few months when you see me because I will freakin' blind you.

Today's subject line quote is Alice in Wonderland (2010)

I love babies. Babies rule. Pudgy arms and stuff. But, uh, they make you old.

Ever have one of those mornings...

When you do everything in your ability to look fashionable and not be fashionably late to fancy playdate at the McDonald's Playland, but 5 minutes into it you have baby poop smeared all over your skinny jeans and you're begging friends for cash for a Happy Meal?  I do.  All the time.

Nothing happens the way I assume it will, so I've just started assuming everything will go to hell and I'm no longer surprised.  It's only 10 til 2 and I'm already back in my jammies as I compose this half-conscious and still coasting on my dark roast, caffeine high.  I do at least 3 loads of laundry a day in order to not have clothes saturated with breast milk, regurgitated breast milk, and toddler boogers.  Just today I've managed to ruin 2 robes, the sheets I just washed yesterday, and the jeans I had planned to wear on our pseudo date tonight because they hold up my ever-sagging ass to acceptable social standards. 

Take Ivy's whole birth experience for example.  It was a scheduled, repeat c-section that should have taken all of 30 minutes in surgery, a few hours recovery time, and they'd hand me a screaming bundle of joy.  Instead, my OB was late because she was on the phone with Fisher-Price tech support and then my baby had to be in intensive care for 10 days because she forgot how to breathe.  It took over a week before I was able to hold her, and I got to be a visitor instead of her mother. 

The genetics were there; she has my nose and stubby legs.  But as a caregiver, I was useless for a week and a half.  So I got up every 2 hours to pump and deliver a few ounces of breast milk to the NICU freezer.  It was all I could do as a parent.  And it may be selfish, but even though my baby was the one hooked up to IVs and tubes out the wazoo,  I wanted to feel needed.  I needed to feel needed.  I had just spent the last 9 months incubating and growing my daughter, and suddenly my services were obsolete?

Now she's a perfectly healthy baby, with colic and all.  It's still hard to process.  At one point after her lung collapsed, we asked the neonatalogist if we had to worry about Ivy being in stable condition.  She answered, "If you're asking me if the baby will die?  I don't know." 

How do you go from that to complaining about leaky diapers and extended bedtimes?  Aren't I supposed to be grateful for every frustrating minute I have with my kids?  I suppose I just have to do what I can , when I can--whether sucking the juice out of my boobs at 3 a.m. or a load of onesies and pants covered in poo.

Todays' subject line quote is from How I Met Your Mother (2005).

Is it just me, or did the world just get blurry?

Since my absence, I've had several requests to revive the blog. Unfortunately, even though I've been feeling better physically, I just haven't necessary gusto to provide a decent entry...or decent thought... It's been a classic "life gets in the way" scenario.  Sharing my body with another person, even if she's only a 4 pound fetus currently, just makes it difficult to be myself.

But I'm now 34 weeks along in the pregnancy, and I am beginning to realize that I need to write to thrive. Also, I only have about a month before my entire existence is thwarted by a newborn and I'll never have the time or brain power to blog again.  Between sleep deprivation and being constantly covered in baby, bodily fluids, I'll be lucky to turn on the computer, much less type out a brilliant and hilarious entry for the masses.

So where do I begin--again? This blog rebirth has taken so long, I have literally tens of stories to relay. Dom and I finally took our European vacation, I may (or may not) have run over a pedestrian here in Slidouche, we hosted a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party for our now 3-year old, and am now blackmailing said child into brushing his teeth and not crapping his pants with the infamous Santa Claus fable. Today, however, I think I'll just fill you in on a few thoughts regarding the holidays.

I have finished my Christmas shopping in record time this year because we drew names out of a hat for both Dom's and my family. Since I don't have to waste all my precious brain cells coming up for with approximately 20 billion horrible gift ideas, it just happened that I purchased my last holiday obligation this morning.  Now if I can manage to avoid any public venues until January, I can rest easy knowing that I have successfully dodged the Christmas spirit being shoved in my ears and left to mix around my brain until it's a cheery, puree of holiday gray matter.

Want a fun fact?  I don't go out between the months of November through January without a charged iPod at the ready to drown out the ridiculous and incessant carols.  Nowhere is safe!  I can't get a sandwich at McAlister's Deli without hearing some tune about a fat man who's creepily watching me sleep--and probably pee.  So I just crank up my playlist and pretend the archaic language of these songs isn't being blasted around me on a P.A. system that's probably more than a decade old.  Because lets face it, gaily decking someone's halls sounds more like a hate crime than decorating a mantle with fake, evergreen leaves.

Today's subject line quote is from Dom, disembarking the plane in Ramstein, Germany (September 2010).

Find your own funny quote, I'm too lazy.

I halfheartedly apologize for neglecting this site for the past few months.  With the joy of a little one on the way, I have become an Olympic caliber athlete in the categories of toilet hugging and bitching.

But since the first trimester is coming to a close, I find myself slowly moving out of the worst of the pregnancy.  Now instead of doing the technicolor yawn every forty-five minutes, I've simply joined the ranks of the walking comatose.  Seems I'm unable to function by 2 p.m. these days.  I have to hope I sitting down by mid afternoon and not falling asleep during my 78th trip to the bathroom.

There are women who adore being knocked up; they're the ones who never get morning sickness, back aches, and sneeze out their kids in a 4 hour, natural labor.  I never got my invitation to the super-awesome-at-being-pregnant club!  I have to slave and toil, from the ralph-o-rama to 46 hours of labor.  Even then the kid had to be surgically removed from my uterus because I utterly fail at being a preggo.

So to all of you who had it easy and think I should embrace the "miracle of life", kiss my ever-growing ass.  My babies are smarter than yours.

Will you please shut up. You're grossing out my baby.

As a mommy blogger, I really do try hard not to dominate this site with kidisms. Even if they are REALLY funny, nobody wants to be bombarded with stories ending in my 2 1/2 year old yelling "penis" or the adventures in poop. Except today--today you literally get a shitty blog.

Michael is potty training. That loosely translates to "Michael often takes a dump wherever he feels like it while not wearing a diaper." He's been making tremendous success lately with the number ones; but I'd seriously take mopping up a pee spot any day over the fecal fest I had to clean up yesterday.

Basically, he was sitting in the office desk chair and decided that he was too engrossed in sesamestreet.com to be bothered with NOT taking a crap where he was sitting. So I scramble to get him scraped off and disinfect the office while still managing not to catch anything on fire while cooking a new meatball recipe. Then he crapped his underwear approximately 45 minutes later.

And all I could manage to think was, I'm going to have ANOTHER potential Diarrhea Monster?

Yep. That's the real content of this post. I found out last Friday and I wanted to keep it on the DL, family only. But thanks to Facebook and my relative's inability to be discreet about pretty much anything, I'm fending off congrats from obscure-non-blood-connections all over my wall. I might as well get some satisfaction in telling people myself. Spoiled secrets aside, we're thrilled!

So, I've pretty much got 8 more months to figure out where I'm going to put the thing. Really it boils down to which I want more...an office or a baby. Right now I have part of each.

Today's subject line quote is Quinn "Glee" (2010) {The Power of Madonna}.

Bees or monkeys, yes. Sociopaths, no.

Did I ever tell you about the time I got squirted in the face with crab-leg saliva at the Golden China Buffet? I never really thought of it as a mind-blowing story that I could spend a whole blog on, but it was an awkward Cassidy moment at it's finest.

We're sitting in a booth at the local Chinese buffet down the street from our house and Michael's being a holy terror. Imagine a monkey, like a small Capuchin or another species that is small and agile enough to leap across a six foot gap from tree to tree, jumping on the seat and climbing up Dom's shoulders to sit on his head. That's what we had, only we had a blonde monkey-child who also has two volumes of mute and earbleedingly loud. Guess which one he busted out for this occasion?

That's when the nostalgic, middle-aged, empty nester decided to come over and do us the favor of sitting behind our table and "entertaining" Michael. Zoos have cages for a reason, lady. They don't ask random onlookers to come and play ball with the apes every time one starts to throw poop and fondle it's junk...I think I can handle my own child at the buffet. And, of course, he just gets more rowdy from all the extra attention.

So in the rare moments when I was actually eating and not running to the potty for an emergency toddler poop break, I found myself in a bit of a cross mood. That's when I noticeably started wiping my forehead and looking around rather perturbed to see why the ceiling was dripping on me.

That's when I made eye contact with the man at the booth next to us who was about the same shade of red as the pair of crab legs he was digging into. He was nearly crying out of embarrassment and I'm trying to redeem myself from making it a "big deal" from my exaggerated facial expressions and hand gestures I had done not 30 seconds previously.

The worst part is that this couple had been really quiet and not making a big whoop over our son being released into the wild. They were minding their own business and just pretending he wasn't there. The least I could do is let him shoot me in the eye with crab-juice spit, right?

Today's subject line quote is "House, M.D." (2007) {Act your Age}.

Two small paragraphs where I whine about not having a real post

I know it's Thursday and I haven't posted yet this week. I've got plenty to say, but I just don't have the ability to do a full post right now. I promise I'll get you something good soon...

But seeing as I'm on prescription meds that make me feel more messed up than a drunk hobo on meth and just ordered Jehovah's Witnesses to chase after my escapee Beagle, I believe I need some time to get myself together enough to even write about how my life is ruled by chaos.