There are no words for this.

If you're friends with my mom on Facebook, you already know.

We're having McDonald #6 at the end of May.

It was SO not in my plans right now. I had successfully lost weight, to only two pounds more than what I weighed before I started having kids. I was over my bout of postpartum depression. Loch is in a trying and sickly phase. We now have three kids in school, and they have to be there EVERY DAY, preferably on time and dressed and prepared.

Our business is...busy-ness defined. Also, May? Along with October, it is the very craziest month for a Renaissance costumer. As in, I just shot my whole month of working a Renaissance festival with Michelle in the foot.

I've been pretty adamant with everyone that asks when we're planning for another one. NOT ANYTIME SOON. I delayed the announcement for two reasons: One, so as not to feel like such a dope that I was saying that so recently. Two, in hopes that I will be in less denial later. Not so much.

Seriously?

Anyway.

This past month has been horrible. Halloween customers wait for no sickness or fatigue. I have been one miffed zombie seamstress. Not sick enough to throw up, just ICKY all the time. This is definitely the worst pregnancy nausea I've experienced.

List of things that smell bad:

Kids
Perfume
Deodorant
Tide
Fabric Softener
Lotion
Shampoo
Ketchup
School Cafeteria
Cooking Chicken
Preheating the Oven (okay, we might need to clean it)
Farm debris
Our Van (a veritable encyclopedia of smells)
The Whole House
My Pillowcase
Dogs

The only thing that sounds good to me is comforting carb-based foods. Macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, bagels.... Heaven forbid we make something that has any sort of lingering funk to it. I actually tried to do a search on the internet for "foods that don't smell bad." Unsuccessfully, I might add.

Anyway, I don't want to spend the next several months feeling sorry for myself. So there's the whining portion finished.

Next week, we go to listen to the little interloper's heartbeat. He/She already has a nickname: Ender.

I know it's October when....

Toby and I brush the debris out of our bed at night before sleeping, since we haven't changed them in WAY too long.

There are piles of dirty dishes and laundry everywhere.

The kids watch too much TV.

We eat fast food. A lot.

I spend two hours lying in bed awake in the middle of the night, panicked that we didn't put the shoulder grommets in a pirate coat we shipped that day. (I asked Toby first thing this morning, we did put the grommets in, HURRAY!)

I close my eyes, and I see fabric going through my sewing machine.

The kids STILL don't remember that we NEVER bug mom when she's printing postage
labels. They have to learn the hard way.

I realize I haven't done more appearance-wise than brush my hair and teeth. Lucky to have done that, actually.

I find myself planning what I'm going to do in November, when I'll have a life again.

I will go into a thirty minute rant about how people should just PAY for things when they commit to buy, so we don't have to check it every day. Or they wait a week to pay for it, and can't understand why they don't have the item when they wanted it. It's because we don't ship until the item is paid. EASY!

Also, customers. We spend four hours a day answering your questions about when you'll get your items. That is four hours a day that could be spent getting them to you on time. You do the math.

We take piles of boxes taller than the kids to the post office.

I lust after having a secretary. I just need to sew, not know all the gory details. It's much less stressful that way.

I just ate two chocolate chip cookies for breakfast, with milk, so it's okay. Toby just informed me that he ate barbecue beef that sat out all night. MMMMMmmmm.... We are fancy this month.

In case you think I exaggerate, I assure you, my readers, that we are in fact more gross than this.

To October:

Warning: there are some scantily-clad military women gyrating at the end. But kudos for the Dr. Strangelove inspiration.




You will be the death of me.
Time is running out.
You will suck the life out of me.

That's how October feels to a professional costumer.


Muse: It's not just for baseball-playing vampires.

I Think That's a Good Thing....

On Sunday afternoon, I left Toby and the kids at his parents' house so I could spend the evening with my cousin Shannon and her new baby.

As I walked to the car, I noticed Ivy playing outside with the other kids. She was wearing only a very baggy pair of training pants, inside out, of course. What was that on her shoulder? Oh, a toad. On her shoulder, like a parrot. As I watched with horrified fascination, she plucked the amphibian from her shoulder, gazed lovingly into its beady little eyes, and KISSED IT.

It DID NOT turn into a prince. Before we could get to her and have a little talk about hygiene, she also attempted to breastfeed it.

Yes, we did have that talk, and we did wash her hands and face. That was one very well-loved baby toad.

Ivy has become obsessed with little stuffed animals. She calls them her babies and carries them around everywhere with her. The animals are always odd choices, though. Her favorites: two stuffed ostriches, a kiwi bird, and a very ugly lizard. She calls all the birds "my baby ducks." The lizard is "my baby yizzard." Oh, and she also has a plastic snake that is her baby snake.

Maybe she wants to make sure the ugly babies get love, too?

Brimstone and Derivatives

For some reason, fall always makes me feel like a bit of a loser. It's back to school time, and I miss going to school. I would have been a fairly happy lifetime student. I love books with a passion that should make Toby nervous.

Let's put it this way: when I have dreams at night about living in a big city, I dream of three things in particular: a huge library, many food wagons with street food, and junk stores full of low-priced awesome clothes and shoes in my size. Is that too much to ask? It's kind of my holy trinity of material wants.

On the flip side, I was a fairly lazy and procrastination-prone student, even in the subjects I loved most. I also have dreams that it's halfway through the semester, and I panic, realizing that there is a class that I haven't attended even one time. It's usually a math class.

Now, I was a physics major, with emphasis in Astronomy. I dearly love astrophysics, plus telling someone you're a physics student is a surefire way to intimidate them. The problem is, with professional physics comes insane math. I always loved science as a kid, but somehow managed to not pay much attention in math until high school. Not that I was a bad student, but I don't think that I had a rock-solid foundation of instinctual mathematics at my disposal.

If you ever want to meet some interesting people, hang out with physics or math professors. I had a Calculus teacher in Springfield who was also a preacher. The funny thing was, his lecture style was much like his sermon style must have been, just with different information being imparted to the listener. Have you ever imagined a sort of hellfire and damnation description of taking a derivative? I think I got saved during that class.

One physics professor had his office deep in the recesses of the science building, near his materials science laboratory. To get help with my classwork one day, I walked past about fifteen "NO SMOKING" signs and knocked on his door. As he was chainsmoking, and helping me with a velocity problem, I noticed a stack of about fifteen laptops in the corner. According to physics-student lounge legend, he just bought a new one each time his cigarette smoke clogged the old to death. We also speculated about how many gray pullover sweater vests he might own, since he wore one every single day. We always hoped it was more than one...

Another favorite calculus professor was of latin descent. Have you ever seen the Muppet movies? You know the shrimp who refers to himself as a king prawn? That is the exact same accent this math professor had. Now, complicated math has a whole language of its own, with terms like integration, sigma, derivative, tangent, asymptote, upper limit, and infinity. Many times, I glanced at another student and saw the expression that was surely on my own face: "What did he just say?" It was like hearing a text translated into French, and then into Hebrew.

Maybe I'll wait a few years before I think about going back. I bet I could borrow Livvie's notes.