Keeping it clean.

John's Uncle Jim asked the girls if they'd like to walk with him in a small town parade wearing his campaign t-shirts.  "Us?!  In a ...PARADE?!"  Of course they were more than happy to oblige.  They've already been helping out by putting together more than 600 yard signs for him.  Good kids, they are.  They probably would have done it even if he hadn't paid them.  But this...was a PARADE.  That's like Super-neatoriffic!  Hells, yes they'll do it!


Their job was simple:  Look adorable.

As their mother, my job was also simple:  Keep them clean until Jim got here to take them off my hands. 

Keep them clean until Jim gets here...  Keep them clean until Jim gets here...
*thinking*
How can we kill ten minutes and still keep them clean?
Hey, I know!  Let's take a few dozen pictures of them in the yard.  Where the dirt lives!  That's a recipe for success!

Line up, girls! 

What's got six thumbs and just made it into an embarrassingly picture-heavy blog entry?

These guys.

Me: What other picture should we take?   Want to make a pyramid?
Lily:  Mom, that will get our shirts dirty.
Me:  Ooh, good call, Lily.  You're right.  Let's do something else.

Madison:  No, wait.  Let's do it this way.  Here, Sam.  Give me your foot...Lily, take the other one!  Now stand up, Sam...

"I can't stand up, you're gonna drop me!"

"I changed my mind. I wanna get down."

And then there was some discussion about Madison's belly button...

"It's an innie AND an outie, see?"

So the other two had to check theirs out as well. 

But Lily was distracted...

Uh...Lily?   Did you find something shiny?

 

She's busy.  We'll come back later.

What were we doing?  Oh, right.  Keeping the kids clean until Jim gets here.

Wait a second.  Where did Madison go?   She's in the Strawberry patch!  Why is she there?  Because nothing makes you hungry for red berries quite like a nice white shirt.   IT'S BERRY-PICKIN' TIME! WOOT!

After addressing Jesus by his full name, I asked if it was too much trouble for the girls to at least TRY to avoid All Things That Could Stain for the remaining eight and a half minutes until Jim arrived.

"I'm being careful, Mom.  Sheesh."
"I hope so, Maddie."
"Don't call me Maddie."
"Shut up and eat your berries, Kitten."
"Ha." *eyeroll*

"Madison!  Don't wipe strawberry juice on your pants!"
"What!  It's not on my shirt!"
"True enough.  Carry on."

They picked this one for me.  Um...thanks?

"Like my earrings?  They're real."

I'm gonna eat you!!

  

Get in mah belleh!

Then Madison got a hold of the camera...

...while Sam did a little pool maintenance.  The Starlings thought our pool was a giant birdbath last week.  Oh, and did you know that mulberries are in season?  Even if you suck at math, you'll know that equals, "Sam! Watch out for the bird poop!"

Against all odds, they managed to stay clean until Uncle Jim arrived.  I have no idea how.  Really.  None.

 

 It's up to you now, Jim.  Good luck, man.

How would you have made sure they stayed clean in those sparkling white shirts?  Tell me.  I can take it.

Are you SURE that's a vagina?

For those of you who are teaching your kids the generic "girls have a vagina" lesson, you ARE teaching them that the proper term for the entire outer package is vulva and not vagina, right? I mean, you know that the words are not synonymous, don't you?  

Just in case, let me give you a quick anatomy lesson. 

Vagina and vulva are not the same thing.  They are not interchangeable physiological terms.

The vagina is part of the inner workings, not the outer.


I asked this question on a social networking forum and got a variety of responses including this one:

"My child is too young to know the technical terms for her body parts." (Ignore the fact that the pet name we have created for her genitalia is four syllables long and she's already made up a song about it.)

And this one:
"Vulva is just a gross word."   (Vulva is not a gross word.  "MOIST" is a gross word.)  
  
And also this one: "It all means the same thing."

(To say that it's all the same thing is as inaccurate as saying that your hand is a finger and your finger is a hand and that's just plain silly.)

You know what this post needs?  Venn Diagrams!  (I know they look like crazy cartoon breasts.  Shut up.)

It's true that all rectangles are parallelograms, but not all parallelograms are rectangles.  
Likewise, all vulvae contain vaginas (or rather, the vaginal opening), but all vaginas don't contain the vulvae.

Yes, there is a difference and the difference is huge.  Vulva = clitoris, labia (2 sets) urethra, vaginal opening.  Vagina = the canal that leads from the vaginal opening to the cervix.   

Do you need another diagram?  Okay, here:  

So if you choose to shave your vulva, that's cool.  Get creative. Have fun with it.  However, if you choose to shave your vagina, it's not going to end well.  Don't use the good towels. 


Now, I know there will be someone who will get all worked up about this. Calm down. You can teach your kids whatever you want.  Don't sweat it because some stranger on the internet told you that it's the wrong word.   You're not breaking any law of child rearing.  No member of the Vulva Brigade will show up and ticket you for referring to your lady bits as your bajingo and hand you some reading material about the inaccurately named Vagina Monologues. I'm not going to take away your euphemisms.  Hell, euphemisms are fun!  Tell them it's a Harvey Wallbanger or a FlufferNutter if you like.   


I'm just saying that technically, it's incorrect.  


To recap:

The vulva is the correct term for the outside parts as a collective whole.

The vagina is the correct term for the "collective hole".  

What's your favorite euphemism for the VULVA?

  

  

Double Coupon Day Comes for Jose and the Prophylactics.

It was a Friday night, the young'uns were at a sleepover and The Man and I had the house all to ourselves. I got a phone call on the way home. It was The Man. He asked me to pick up a few things for our evening without the kids. No problem, said I. I'm a grown-up-type person. I can buy stuff.

I normally don't get embarrassed about buying the more personal items. I buy maxi-pads and toilet paper all the time and I'll bet a million dollars that the ladies behind the cash registers have used both at least once. (I can't speak for the gentlemen.) 

It's easy when these products are put on the conveyor belt with a few friends to keep them company. I tend to have about a dozen other things on the belt that help draw the attention away from the economy sized package of birth control. "Let's see, I need eggs...milk...flour...new socks...(this giant box of rubbers)...and Pez! Yep, that's all for today."

It works for me. The box doesn't call attention to itself and practically sing to the rest of the store, "Guess who's getting lucky tonight?!"
However...

When you show up with Trojans, K-Y, and a big bottle of Jose Cuervo, at the checkout, everyone KNOWS what you're doing with your Friday night. Of course, when you make this purchase at the express lane, the question that begs to be asked is "Will you be able to wait until you get to the car?" 

The Barely Legal To Drink kid standing next to me with his OWN prophylactic/alcohol power duo in hand, caught my eye for an instant before he resumed his intense study of the floor tiles. I wish I could say I was cool enough to at least wink at him and tell him to have a great night. 
Alas, I was not. I merely turned six shades of red as I made my purchase, remembering my frequent shopper card and a "$5 off a $25 purchase" coupon. (Score!) 


That's dead sexy.

This post originally appeared two years ago today, but it's one of my favorites.  Happy Anniversary, Jose and the Prophylactics.

 

She did it again!

Our winter holidays started out as normally as they could have, considering who we are.  We had our annual dinner and gift exchange at the in-laws' after church on Christmas Eve, which is always a great time; dinner was wonderful, conversation was even better and there was wine.  Yay, MOSCATO!

It seems like every holiday, something happens that I simply MUST write about because...(because I'm an obsessive over-sharing maniac) because I'm a blogger.  Sharing the mundane stuff like this is my life, my passion. 

This year, Christmas was full of blog-worthy stuffs to relay to you, gentle reader.  Sadly, the majority of it was lost on Christmas morning because that is when tragedy struck.

I'm getting ahead of myself (again).


A Holiday On Hold
The girls each got a new pair of warm, fuzzy, stay-at-home-socks in their Christmas stockings from jolly old Saint Nicholas.  They love All Things Soft and Fluffy, so of course they put them on immediately.   This is important.  Trust me.

After the last present was opened, the plan was for the kids and The Man to clean up the mess from Unwrapaganza while I started a lovely Christmas breakfast for everyone. That plan was rudely interrupted when I heard Lily yell something that derailed our lazy Christmas morning and sent it careening off into a ditch:

"MOM!  SAM GOT A SPLINTER!!"

Sam ran through the dining room in the slippery wood-collecting-socks that evil bastard brought for her and when she skidded to a stop, yes indeed, Sam...got a splinter.  

If you are a regular reader of my family's tales, you will remember that this has happened before.  Many of you are already aware that I have a child who is a magnet for splinters and when she gets one, she doesn't mess around with the tiny stuff that can be gotten out with a simple tweezers or the aid of a needle.  No way, no how!  When Samantha does it, she goes all out - sliding across the hard-wood floors, yards at a stretch, to see just how much flooring she can strip off in one go.  "FIND ALL THE SPLINTERS!" she cries.  She also gets these enormous planks embedded so deeply and so securely into her skin that it requires medical attention to retrieve them.  THIS was one of those times. 

Yeah, that's not gonna cut it.

After last year's ordeal (which I will link again, because it's just that incredible), we knew not to waste any time waiting for an army of white corpuscles to stop what they were doing and meander over to the foreign body that had taken refuge in the sole of her foot, for she was likely to lose the entire appendage by the time they cooperated enough to force the splinter out.  It was time to get dressed and head to the Convenient Care Clinic.  *nodding*  No Post-Gift Exchange Nap for you, Johnny-Boy.  No waking up to the smell of maple bacon crisping in the oven.  Coats on, everybody!  Let's move out!

The Waiting is the hardest part

We got to the Convenient Care Clinic, checked Samantha in and began to wait.

And wait...


And wait...

Three bored children, two parents, one large plank of wood didn't make for a very merry Christmas.  At least we were all together...irritated, but together.

Soon...(what am I saying? Strike that...) After waiting roughly the same amount of time it takes to cook a 20 pound turkey, we were shown to a room where a nurse got the skinny on Sam's allergies (or lack thereof), and a brief run-down of how she came to have a hunk of petrified oak jammed inside her person.  When she had enough information, we were then told to follow her to the next room and you'll never guess what happened there!

Aw, you guessed it: more waiting.


So we snapped a picture of the adorable six-year-old's foot to kill some time:

*pffft* Well, that took all of thirty seconds.  What do we do now?

As if sensing my boredom...irritability...and general impatience that this was taking SO LONG, the more mobile members of Sam's entourage began to play a nifty little game called "TOUCH EVERYTHING!!!"  Fun stuff, that game.   It's guaranteed to make your mother go abso-fricking-lutely insane in a matter of minutes. 

Just when we were sure they had forgotten about us (I have no idea how that was possible, as we are noisy and were cordoned off from the rest of the office by only a curtain), in walked the doctor who would surely save Sam from the stabbing pain of Pinocchio Syndrome and us from the agonizing wait. 

He took one look at it and said, sounding much like Gary Cole in Office Space: "Mm...yeah, I think we're going to have to go ahead and, uh...numb that."  Well, gee, Bill, do you think so?  I mean, look at it.  There's nothing to grab on to.  Any fool can see that we're going to have to go in after it and one of us may not come out alive.  If you want to try that on a frightened six-year-old without Novocaine, be my guest.  Just use your Jedi mind trick and we'll be on our way.  Moron.

Instead of using The Force, we (Dr. Bill and I) opted to put a topical numbing agent on it so the needle wouldn't be as traumatizing to my six-year-old.  Add fifteen more minutes of waiting, this time with Mommy sporting a pair of purple surgical gloves to apply some jelly textured numb-making stuffs to Sam's foot with "gentle PRESSURE" (*sigh*  Poor Sam), follow that with Dr. Bill shooting Novocaine into the entry point, and we were ready to begin. ("BEGIN?!" WTH?!)   He made a few futile attempts to grab the splinter, but found he was unable to get a good grip on it with the smallest hemostat he had, so after all this time, Good Doctor Nimble Fingers couldn't get the splinter out and he sent us to the hospital emergency room.
Damn.  This rivaled last year's splinterectomy debacle in a big, sad way.

At the ER
I am happy to report that after another hour of waiting , an ultrasound on Samantha's foot, two near-fistfights between the Tired and the Hungry, and about a thousand mobile status updates to Facebook, Sam was once again, splinter free.   HALLELUJAH!  

Holy crap!

By this time, we were an hour late for dinner at my mother's house, so we gathered up Sam, the splinter and the rest of our clan and headed for Nana and Poppa's house, stopping ever-so-briefly at home to grab the presents and the makings of my contribution to our meal (thank God I didn't have to make anything more complex than green bean casserole).

We'll call this next part "Splinter At Large"
When we finally got to my parents' house, Sam immediately wanted to show the splinter to her cousins.  Now, after the morning's ordeal, we didn't expect her to actually take the splinter OUT  to show it off and we sure as hell didn't expect the splinter to make a break for it, but that's what happened.  When she opened the container, it fell.   It fell near(?)...under(?)...IN(?)...the cushions of the couch.  It was lost.  Oh, damn.  That's at least a hundred dollar splinter (and probably more, as we have yet to receive the bill from the ER).  We wanted to keep it and put it in our shadow box of "Stuff that got stuck in our kids".  Shoot.  Now it's gone.  Bummer.

Was Lost But Now Am Found
I went to my parent's house the day after Christmas to have coffee and in a last-ditch effort, searched the couch cushions once more, to see if I could find that blasted splinter.  I picked up a cushion and clapped it once and the splinter fell onto the couch.
*THUD*
Me:  No. Freaking. Way.  I FOUND IT!  QUICK!  DAD, GET THE BOTTLE!  GET THE BOTTLE!  
My Father: Where is it?
Me:  It's still in my purse!
My Father:  Don't move!  I'm on it!

And so we wrangled that splinter into the bottle and closed it up tight. REALLY TIGHT.

That oughta hold it.

 Once again, the world is safe for Samantha's tender feet.  Sort of. 


We're getting carpet this spring.