Nerdy Suburban Mom

Fraternal, one boy one girl. Because I absolutely must dress them up in these.

I almost hate getting catalogs for companies like The Wooden Soldier, because I don’t really like the idea of spending hundreds on my children’s clothing, but it is just SOOOOO adorable! Argh!

(Of course, please feel free to buy Reuv & Lil things from there.  Things with bunnies are always good.)

Fleece hats are warm, and easy to make.  Cute fleece hats aren’t much harder.

My next attempt will be a polar bear (same but in white fleece) with a little nose and two eyes…

Lillian helped give Reuven a bath this evening.  We’ve discussed his “different body” before, since she wanted to know what that thing was.  However, this evening she came up with an extra part.

“Reuven has a penis and a poonis!”
“What?”
“A poonis!  In the back!”
“What?!?”
“The pee comes out the penis and the poo comes out the poonis!”

And you know, I really can’t fault her logic there…

As a breastfeeding mother, this is hilarious…

Remember the idiot golfer who threw pottery through our window?  The quest to sell the condo has hit an even bigger snag.

Yesterday morning our realtor (and also the condo association president) got in touch to let us know there was extensive water damage to the unit.  The downstairs ceiling had collapsed, and there was water in the master bedroom closet and bathroom (directly above the fallen ceiling).  The immediate conclusion was that there had been a frozen pipe in the interior wall, which thawed after the weather warmed up on Monday.  When the realtor and her handyman visited, though, it looked like it was leaking in through the roof-chimney joint (which is over the closet).

At this point we’re trying to get the insurance company involved so they can see the damage; that has to happen before repairs and cleanup can start.  Obviously this puts a bit of a damper on the potential for it to be sold soon.

I think the next incident will be either a furious elephant stampede through the front door, or perhaps a meteor strike.

On my out of the grocery store today, I passed a salesman for the city newspaper. He was offering free papers (presumably to then draw you into a newspaper subscription pitch) to everyone going by. As I was leaving with baby and groceries in cart, he asked, “Hello, ma’am. Can I interest you in a free newspaper today?” I smiled slightly, replied, “No thank you,” and continued walking.

At that point I had pretty much expected the whole encounter to be over. However, a good three seconds later, by which time I was at least fifteen feet past him, I heard, “How about one for your younger sister… or younger brother there?”

It took another few seconds before I realized this was probably still directed towards me. While the flattery technique is very well known in sales, there are typically limits to it, and this was way over those limits.

• You just offered a free newspaper to a six-month-old infant. He certainly can not read it, and I am not likely to want him to eat it. (I suppose this could have led into a conversation about the toxicity of the paper and inks in the paper, but is that really where a salesman wants to go?)
• I’m thirty. The child is six months. It is not impossible that he is my sibling, but damn, that’s the biggest stretch I’ve ever seen. Try again when he’s fifteen and I wish I looked thirty.

On the whole, though, this was a very benign sales idiot; he just made me shake my head and laugh, rather than become infuriated and belligerent. This contrasts with a call from a “technician” who asked if our DSL was working; when we confirmed it was, he asked if we wanted it to be faster. That guy just made us mad. (And so, the next three times the same sales company phoned us about increasing our DSL speed, I asked lots of obscure technical questions that they didn’t understand and wasted their time.)

When you rent a car, you have two choices: buy a tank of gas up-front at current average market prices, or pay a premium (usually almost twice average market price) for the fuel they need to refill the car with once it is returned.  The “game” to play when doing this is buy the full tank of gas up-front, then see just how empty you can get the car before returning it.

I hereby declare us to be the winners of that game.  We managed to run out of gas 0.2 miles from the rental agency, and had to push it in to return it completely empty of fuel.

Mind you, this is a very stupid game; if we had run out just 0.1 miles sooner, we would have been stuck on I-190 in heavy traffic. That’s 0.003 gallons of gas.  0.3% of a gallon.  That’s ridiculous, and it was a not-so-gentle hint that we probably shouldn’t play stupid games with gasoline levels with two small children in the car and a plane to catch. (Even at the intersection where the car died, we shouldn’t have been stopped; there was a PA system that kept saying, “Drivers please return to your vehicle.” I ignored it, because we had to push, and I figured the worst that would happen is the state police would show up and help us push.)

(All the same — we won, we won!)

Snow on Thanksgiving!

It was fairly thick for a while, but it did not last long enough to really chill the ground and stick. It was still very pretty, though, and I while I hope it isn’t the only snow we see this year, there’s not a lot of chance to get it in South Carolina…

This is a picture of Reuven (age 5 months) next to a photograph of Brett (age around 9 months).

Think they might be related? 🙂