Chics dig vamps

I watched Twilight last night. It wasn't spectacularly great, but it got me thinking. The popularity of twilight combined with my recent obsession with the Buffy/Angel franchise has lead me to the conclusion that women love vampires. What exactly is the allure of the undead? I have a few theories.

1. Vampires are old. Generally women aren't into naive men. We like men who are experienced, worldly and wise. Vampires, for the most part, have had time to travel, experience the world. Chances are good that you aren't going to have to deal with a vamp buying a red convertible trying to regain his youth. The clincher here is that unlike old living men, vampires remain crazy sexy.

2. The undead seem to mate for life ever. If Buffy and Twilight are any indication once you've snagged the unstaked heart of a vamp he's yours forever. They always seem to find their soulmate love of their life ummmmm.... Perfect partner. There is some sort of immediate connection that really takes the guesswork out of the whole dating thing. It also plays into my next point.

3. The tortured soul. Vampires always come off as having a tortured soul. No one understands them. No one except their chosen lady that is. She is the only one who really gets him. She's the only person he can open up to and be his charming self. It's cliched, but we like that. It makes us feel special...deal with it guys.

4. Vampires are romantic. It's like they've got a whole team of scriptwriters feeding them lines like "You're my life now" and "all I did was watch you sleep, but it was the best night of my life". I mean how is a regular unscripted guy supposed to compete with that?

5. Last, but not least is that vampires are dead sexy. So long as you don't need a guy with a tan, you can't get much hotter than the living dead.

The stupid psychic and why I don't go to McDonalds

I have amazing psychic powers. Unfortunatly, I am also amazingly stupid. I know full well that things I do will turn out badly, yet I still do them. I believe that that may be the definition of insanity.

Let me illustrate my point with the story of a recent road trip I took with my 3 boys.

This story actualyl takes place during the 5 hour drive home. It starts, as all good stories should, with a giant cup of coffee. When I purchased this enormous beverage I knew full well that consuming it would mean that I would need to pee as soon as the baby fell asleep. I still drank it. And, as predicted, the very moment my little one drifted peacefully to sleep I had to drag him (and my other two boys) into the joy that is a turnpike rest stop.

In order to stop the resulting whining, I agreed to allow each of them to pick out a bottle of pop. The both picked purple grape soda. Oh yes....the alarm bells went off in my head as well. But something, sleep deprivation, insanity, plain old stupidity, told me that it would be fine. Stop laughing..... Of course, I now have a big purple stain on the carpet in my car. Fortunatly the good people at Toyota are as smart as I am psychic and have made those carpets crazy stain resistant.

Roughly 47 seconds after leavin the rest stop, the 4 year old boy, who only 6 seconds ago refused to even consider going to the bathroom, had to go....NOW! I told him that he would have to hold it as the next rest stop about 30 minutes away. I knew that I should have stopped on the side of the road and let him go...I knew he wouldn't make it. Did I stop...nope. He was a trooper, he held on all the way to the rear stop but the combination of holding and walking proove to be too much for him. Poor kid peed his pants just outside the rest stop. The fact that he DIDN'T wet his carseat was an enormous blessing.

And then there was McDonald's. I am not a fan of McDonalds, but the kids needed a break and I was getting desperate. Frankly, I knew it was a bad idea. We pulled off the road and found McD's with a play area. My boys ran into the tunnel thing and immedietly ran out yelling "ewwww!".

What, you ask, could gross out a 7 year old boy? Poop. Right there in the play area. We immedietly vacated the area and I attempted to stearilize my children with purell. Being the good citizen that I am, I went back inside to inform the manager.

I pulled her aside, and said "I think that someone had an accident in the play area." She said "oh...okay".

Um....excuse me? No rush to shut the play area? No offer to comp my coffee? Not even an appology??? Flumoxed, I loaded my kids back into the car, applied another 3 gallons of purell and pulled out of the parking lot. As we were leaving, I looked in my rear view mirror only to see two unsuspecting children clammoring into the play area.

I vowed that we would not leave the car again until we arrived safely home...once again, I was, of course, correct.


- Posted by Krista from my iPhone

You gotta eat

Let's talk about boobs. Breasts. Knockers. Boobies. Tatas. You get the idea (and my hit count from search engines probably just increased 10 fold).

Disclaimer: I breastfed my kids, of you didn't I still think that you are a perfectly good mother who loves her children. I don't think that you are poisoning them by feeding them formula. This isn't that sort of breastfeeding post...just so you know.

My boobs have been professionally employed for the last 8 years. I have nursed two boy children well into toddlerhood and plan to do the same with the third. I have nursed them pretty much everywhere from the mall to The Mall. (Hee hee, see what I did there? The second Mall is the area of our nations capital.) Recently a facebook friend mentioned some of the rediclous things people have said to her while nursing. Here is a small collection of the bizarre things that I personally have heard.

"Breastfeeding is SO hard.". - This is SO not true. I'm not one to subject myself to extra work. If something is hard, I'm probably not going to do it. Breastfeeding is a little hard to get started with, but once you and your baby get the hang of it, you can do it in your sleep - literally. Breastfeeding is, quite frankly, ideal for lazy moms like me. There is no mixing of formula, nothing ever needs to be heated up and there are no bottles to wash.

"You'll have to stop once he gets teeth". - Not really. Babies learn pretty quickly not to bite the boob that feeds them. I'm pretty sure that the screaming is a big deterent.

"It must be hard to have to feed every two hours". - Mind you, someone said this when my son was 10 months old. Breastmilk isn't some magical elixier of youth (I'd be rich I'd it were!). Breastfed babies grow up and eat solid food just like formula fed babies. You don't have to formula feed every 2 hours, so why wpuld you have to breastfeeding every two hours?

"The nurse could tell just by looking at that I wouldn't be able to nurse". - Uhhhh. What? I don't even understand this one. Boobs aren't like a motor vehicle. You don't need to move from the two seater sports car to the minivan when you have kids.

I can't be the only person subjected to crazy, inane comments while nursing! Go on...post your favorite in the comments section! And I'm sure that it's not only nursing moms who get criticism. (Ever notice how EVERYONE knows how your baby should be raised and isn't afraid to tell you how wrong you are?) Post you favorite/most bizarre feeding comment!



- Posted by Krista from my iPhone

Flying solo

So we have all arrived back in NoVa and things are getting back to normal.

Haa haa haa... That is a blatant lie. My husband has embarked in a 30 day vacation business trip overseas. I am officially a solo parent of three boys for one month...and summer vacation is only 2 weeks away.

They say that you never really appreciate something until it's gone. Let me just say that my husband only had to be gone for about 8 hours before I began to do some major appreciating.

For example, we went to the pool on Monday night. My family Is KNOWN for being at the pool after dinner. It is totally our thing and I wasn't going to give it up just because 1/5 of us were gone. As it turns out that 1/5 is a vital component of successful pooling. One of my boys is a great swimmer and is fine in his own in the pool. The other two think that they are.

With two adults we can each take one kid. With only one adult, one kid is pretty much left to drown. Fortunatly the middle kid is a good enough swimmer not to actually drown...but not by very much.

Then there are the logistics of getting everything done. Who will hang up the wet towels while I get the kids out of their bathing suits? Who will mow the lawn? I'm going to need to hire a manservant for the next month. Either that or invite my in-laws down. *Shudder*


- Posted by Krista from my iPhone

Food is love?

Let me preface this post by saying that I come from a large Italian family, so the following may not be true for everyone.

Very shortly after my father died food began arriving at our home. First, 2 dozen bagles, a box of paistries and a bunch of cream cheese. Shortly after, an enormouse sub type sandwich with potato salad. I had just managed to jam it all in the fridge when my cousin arrived with an entire ham dinner, complete with three side dishes, a pecan pie and a loaf of rye bread.

I won't even go into the food left over after the post memorial service luncheon.

All this food presents a whole new opportunity for guilt. As you may have heard, wasting food is a sin. Oddly, providing 2 average sized women and a 4 year old kid with more perishable food than they can possibly manage to consume in a month is not only NOT a sin, but a blessing. Someone should rethink that. I'm just saying.

Over

Before the process of removing life support has actually begun the patient is given several drugs. Morphine, presumably for pain, something to dry up "secretions" (more on that later) and finally an anti-anxity drug. It's the final one that gives me pause.

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I associate anxiety with, I dunno, brain functioning.  Isn't the premise here that that sort of thing is no longer taking place?  Or is the anti-anxiety drug really to alleviate the anxiety that we may feel regarding any anxiety that HE may feel....It seems that some of these drugs are really more for the comfort of the family members than the patient. 

This brings me back to the "dry up" medication.  That is so that once the tubes are removed he doesn't have to breath through any sort of liquids, again....seems more for us than for him. 

Also, when you are discussing the removal of life support with the doctors and nurses they start to watch their words very carefully.  Noone says anything about removal or pulling plugs (by the way...all the machines have off switches, you don't need to actually pull the plugs out of the wall).  They says things like "Focusing on comfort" or "Easing the transition".  This is all well and good...I suppose I'm a little more direct than a lot of folks.

Finally, in my ongoing series "Life ain't like TV", once everything is removed things don't just gradually slow down.  You don't watch the heart rate monitor dip to 80 and then 64 and then 42 and then 12, followed by a long beep.  The doctors warn you that it may take "a while".  Well, let me tell you, "a while" is a relative term.  The nursing staff puts a laminated picture of a cartooney star on the door to the patient's room once the whole process has begin....that star sat on my dad's door for nearly 20 hours.  Fact is, eventually, it is a relief for it all to be over. 

So this is where we are now.  For me, it is really just the body that is gone now.  As far as I am concerned, as soon as his brain stopped working my dad was gone.  I'm a lot like my father that way....practical.  My mother is more spiritual and I'm pretty sure that she was holding out hope till close to the end. 

The memorial service is planned for Saturday, after which, I promise to be less morbid and disturbing.  Until then, thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. 

Neurotrauma

The first thing that you notice when you enter the neurotrauma ward is just how quiet it is. My only other experience in a hospital has been the three times that I gave birth to my kids. The labor and maternity wards are always pretty noisy. Be it babies crying, laboring women screaming for epidurals or proud fathers and siblings bringing flowers and balloons...there was always some sort of commotion. In the neurotrauma ward, nothing goes on. There are no balloons or flowers...there isn't even any meal service.

There are 12 rooms, each containing their own personal little tragidies. 12 ventilators hissing and the occasional mysterious clicking, but that is just about all.

While I can't speek to the 11 other tragidies on the ward, I know that ours will soon come to an end. As to my fathers wishes, we have decided to remove the hissing ventilator and the odd clicking machine and let nature take it's inevitable course.

It's not like in the movies where you tell the nurse that you are ready and it all happens. There is waiting...a lot of waiting.


We're still waiting.....


- Posted by Krista from my iPhone