Rubber babies.........not

We are preparing to send our oldest off to college. What an odd feeling it is, sitting in freshman orientation, realizing that I'm actually old enough to have a child in college. And what a disturbing feeling it is to think that I'm old enough to have a child who would DO some of the things I did in college.

::makes mental note to buy hair color::

Oye. Well, the boy is pretty laid back, and other than a couple of dates with an enigmatic girl named Nikki several years back, hasn't tested the water with the ladies lately. So imagine my surprise when the dd complained that she "didn't see a single hot college guy" when we went to freshman orientation. Of course, she happened to be in a snit that day, and spent most of the time in the car, fuming about being bored, so it's no surprise that she thought the pickins were slim. The hot college guys weren't in the parking lot, of course. They were in orientation, learning the ins and outs of higher learning, aka: the parties are at ISU.

I almost drove off the road when the ds said "well, I saw me some honeys." When I asked him if he had actually spoken to said honeys, he replied "a few," and I almost passed out at the wheel.

The kid never speaks. I guess he's been waiting for some honeys to come along.

So I mentioned in conversation at some point in his "you're going to college, don't get drunk and end up in a coma or I'll fill your iPod with 5,000 country music songs and tell the nurses to play it louder than the ventilator" speech, that he needs to be cautious and wear a raincoat if he decides to do anything crazy with the ladies.

So I thought I'd show off a few condom fashions, just to keep it light. The first one might not be made of condoms, I don't know, but it looks like it, and the other ones definitely are. Cause you always want to carry a spare.

Children of the Yarn

You know, we all wore things in childhood that we swore would scar us for life. Remember Ralphie, in A Christmas Story? He and his brother had to wear those huge snowsuits. They were so big that his little brothers arms stuck straight out from his body, because he didn't have room to bring them down.

I remember those snowsuits. We HATED those snowsuits. They were VERY warm, but man oh man.......you couldn't move in them. And what do you do in snow? You move: sledding, snowball fights, and snow angels all require movement. My kids never wore those huge snowsuits.

But the knitted outfits shown here, patterns from a 1960's McCalls magazine, are the stuff nightmares are made of. These children are in therapy now, I'm sure. They look like a cross between something from a Stephen King novel and a Freddy Krueger movie. Parents who actually knitted these disasters have some 'splainin to do.

I'll have nightmares tonight, just looking at them. But then again, putting a boy in that little cardigan sweater isn't a whole lot better.

NOT for sale on ebay, unless you did a lot of digging around to find it. After all, everything really can be found on ebay eventually, but if you spent the time required to actually find this godawful thing, call me. I have a good therapist's phone number that I'd love to share with you.

Doggie Bag

So, dh's play is this weekend. Studying for weeks, driving me nuts, but he's ready to roll. And so is the dog, who is the animal star.

The dog and his trainer, aka the dd, had to go to dress rehearsal tonight. DD had to work, so I put him in the car, and ran over to pick her up, then take her to practice. I pull into the parking lot, honk for her, and look down, only to find the idiot dog vomiting. Straight into my purse. All over my credit cards, wallet, money, and the Starbucks card that I'm charging up for ds to take to school next month.

Oh yeah, it was a really happy moment. I yelled at dd to come fast with towels, and she comes out with three paper towels. That was NOT gonna handle the fountain that came outta this animal, cause it was all over the car, too. Vesuvius, she should've named him, but no, she named him Peekaboo. That's a game I will never play with him, cause he'd probably be vomiting when I look at him.

We call him Boo, which is the mild version of what I shouted at him, or at dd, when I told her to go and get a REAL towel. I dropped them off at church, then went home and tried to clean up the credit cards -- the wallet and purse are history, cause I don't care how desperate I am, I'm not carrying around a purse that was once full of dog vomit.

And it's really hard for me to find a purse. Usually dh or ds finds one for me. DD laments the fact that I won't buy a "cute" purse. It's function I look for, and when that's how you fly, you have to take a man along to find the right one. DS has picked out two for me. The first time I had him help, he was about five. "Mommy, what do you want to get?" I told him what I wanted, and he came back with the perfect purse in about three minutes flat. "Wow, baby, that was fast. Why did you pick that one," I asked.

"It was the color of poop," said the boy.

So yeah, poop, vomit, whatever, that's what my doggie bags are made of. And now I'm gonna have to shop for another one, so of course, I went online. Found this lovely vintage beaded bag with jeweled frame, coming to you from rozjantiques, on ebay. Go grab it now. Since my purses have to be the color of bodily fluids, so this one isn't gonna work.

Travellin' on...............

I'm ready for a vacation. I had eight days off a week or two ago, but that didn't count. I work part time, and the way I did my schedule, I didn't have to use any vacation time, so by MY definition, it wasn't a vacation, it was just a bunch of days off strung up together.

Our vacations are never boring. Last year, dh and I went to Vegas for the weekend and got evacuated from Hoover Dam, taken down somewhere where the public isn't allowed. A mission trip that we took together several years ago meant that half the missionaries went down - hard - with the flu. Our Panama Canal cruise got waylaid by someone who was deathly ill, so they turned the ship around and went back to Panama to drop him off. Right at the dinner hour. We saw the whole thing from the window by our table.

Add to that that on the same cruise, ds17 ripped his knee out in Aruba, and yeah, we really can be disaster magnets. But we do love to travel.

On our first cruise together -- we won't count the VERY first one, when we were 24 or so, where the hubby and his friends tried to see how much stuff they could put in their room before the staff yelled at them. They ended up with plants from the hallway and all sorts of things, and nothing was ever said. That we remember. But that would require being sober, and I dont' think there was a lot of sobriety on that cruise...........anyway, our first cruise together was supposed to be to Cozumel. However, Hurricane Michelle had different plans for us, and we ended up not going to any of our ports, and went out in the Atlantic to just basically idle.

What the heck did I care? They made my bed. They fed me food that I didn't have to cook. I watched some really good movies --- including Moulin Rouge, which is one of my favorites now. Yeah, there was some rain and wind, but when you're on a huge ship with the man you love, no kids or work, and you're on a string of winning trivia contests, who the heck cares?

So yeah, we're heading off to Alaska in September -- no kids, no work, and hopefully no hurricane -- to belatedly celebrate our 20th anniversary. And as long as they are making my bed and cooking my food, that ship can go wherever it wants. On the 25th, we're going to Paris. You might want to warn the French that we're coming.

And so, in honor of our travel by plane, train, boat, or automobile, here's a cute novelty print travel themed hanky, from pinky-a-gogo, on ebay. I think next time we'll travel by ice cream truck!

The Urban Chicken

My dd is a modern Dr Doolittle. Animals just know to come here. I will go out for an hour, and come home to a dog sitting on the back porch, waiting expectantly for the dd to arrive and care for them. One time it was a little Shih Tzu from up the block. I didn't recognize him, but of course the dd did. His name was Amadeus, and when we called his owner, she said "thank God, I was sitting here saying the Hail Mary, hoping he'd come back."

So it should be of no surprise that now the birds know where we are. DD called me at work and said that she'd found a bird in the backyard. It was a pigeon with a broken wing, which she promptly called the Urban Chicken. Cornered it and got him to hop into a cat carrier, and when her brother tried to pet him, she said "don't touch him, you'll get the bird flu." Serious as a judge, she was. Oye.

Well, we have two dogs and two cats, so our house is not exactly a haven for birds, so she decided to take it to work, cause she works at the vet. Apparently, one of the girls there used to work on a chicken farm, so the dd figured if the vet wouldn't know how to fix an urban chicken, the co-worker would. Took it in, dropped it by the door, and told her co-worker, "go look, there's a chicken over there," to which the co-worker responded, "that's no chicken, that's a pigeon." "Nope," says the dd, "that's an Urban Chicken.

Well, they couldn't fix her, but they recommended a bird rescue who could. She called, and arranged for her to bring him up to For the Birds, a bird rescue run by a delightful couple from the UK. We drove up there and found a porch full of fledglings in cages, owls and hawks in large cages in the yard, and a kitchen literally full of birdlings of all sizes -- including some who didn't even have feathers. These people are truly bird angels. So the Urban Chicken was dropped off there, to be delivered later to a pigeon keeper nearby, should he not be able to go back to the wild.

Two weeks later, we come home to a tiny little robin, hopping around on the ground. After consulting with the bird rescue, we left well enough alone, made sure he got fed by his mama for a day or two, then off he flew, to wherever birds fly to. And so, in honor of the bird rescue, here's a wonderful Patriotic Bird Dress, from Dorothea's Closet, on ebay. Perfect for July, and for when the government arrives, to report the first case of bird flu ever gotten from an Urban Chicken.