I'm sorry, I didn't know

It has come to my attention that not everyone understands the subtle language of sarcasm. Having been fluent in sarcasm for as long as I can remember (thanks mom & dad), it never occurred to me what a gift it is to be bilingual and how difficult and unfunny life must be for those who aren't.

To my readers who think I'm not funny - I am funny.  To my readers who took me seriously when I wrote a post about possibly being Schizophrenic - I'm not.

Now that we've cleared that up I'll try offering a little tutorial on how to spot sarcasm. When I say something that you really can't believe a normal person would say, odds are I'm being sarcastic. When I say something that  just doesn't make sense no matter how you try, it's a safe bet it's sarcasm again.  If I were to say anything about loving "The View", Sasha Baron Cohen or the Academy Awards, it would be sarcasm.  So the following sentence should basically reek of sarcasm to you now: This morning on my favorite show, The View, Whoopie was interviewing Sasha Baron Cohen (my all time favorite actor, who doesn't love Bruno??) about his upcoming appearance on the Academy Awards ... Man I wish I could be there!!

It reeks. It stinks. It oozes. Sarcasm. It's gotten me far in life. I believe it's also referred to as a sharp tongue or a biting whit. I like these phrases as well. So study up friends and soon you'll see why my blog has the world craving more!

the schizophrenia of being a mother

I've been watching my behavior over the last several weeks and I've decided that I'm a walking contradiction.  On the one hand I'm obsessed with keeping the floors clean to the point where we've hired a service to come clean the house every other week (in addition to us vacuuming about every four days on our own). On the other hand, I'm somewhat okay with the box of random stuff to be sold/donated/tossed that has been sitting in our downstairs bathroom for a couple of months. Then there's the dog situation. On the one hand I absolutely cannot stand her hair getting all over my baby's clothes, hands and face when he crawls on top of her or attempts to chew/bite/suck/kiss her fur (it's so gross). But I'm perfectly at ease when he started chewing on her dog toys. I also found it cute and funny when the two of them took turns licking the graham cracker Asa was supposed to be eating as part of his dinner but I find it disgusting when the dog directly licks his face, ears, hands, etc.

So I think it's fair to say that when it comes to dirt, grime, fur and inter-species spit-swapping, I'm a bit schizo. Then there is daycare ...

Ahh, the daycare drop-off/pick-up: the greatest and worst part of my day.  Asa and I do the daycare maneuver four days a week. After the initial shock of the first week wore off (back when he was about 3 months old and I would sob uncontrollably after dropping him off), we found a very happy groove where I almost never felt bad leaving him at daycare so I could go to work. And then, about a month ago he started "crying" when I would go to leave. No actual tears, just a sad look of shock and dismay that would spread across his little face and break my big, soft heart. Now I find myself torn between lingering longer and longer to watch him play and wanting to rush out the door as quickly as possible because I know it's all a tease and that I really can't stay with him all day, everyday even if I wanted to. But that's not the schizophrenic part of my story.

What's so crazy is that a very big part of me wants to spend every single moment with him all day, everyday, 24 x 7 to the point where I sometimes wish he'd wake up at 9pm to just hang out with us until we go to bed at 10. And then there's an equally big part that prays he stays asleep until 7am so we can get a good nights rest and for once not have to wake up at 6am on a Sunday morning. And there's the part of me that sometimes dreads picking him up from daycare because I'm so exhausted I'd rather just nap in the car alone. And the part of me that can't wait to pick him up from daycare because I know seeing him will be the brightest part of my day since I gave him his last cuddle before going into daycare. Do you see where I'm headed with this?

To recap, the bottom line is, daycare is wonderful and Asa and I are both better people because of it but guilt is powerful and I can tell you Asa never had to make that sad little face at me to trigger the guilt, it was already there. I'm pretty sure it showed up around the day he was born and will stick around forever just to be sure I toe the line and keep my priorities straight. And dirt, well, dirt isn't going anywhere. Neither is Midnight: love the dog, deal with the fur ... And in the meantime I'll just have to come to terms with being a total schizo on the inside and try my best to project a calm exterior.

As an addendum I'd like to share this 15 second clip from Baby Momma, which I totally relate to now that I have a baby:

How much wine was in that alcohol?

That's a direct quote from last night. I want to personally thank the people at Trader Joe's for selling a pretty damn good bottle of red for the rock bottom price of $3.99. I'd also like to thank my husband Jeff, for encouraging me to drink cheap wine. If it weren't for this serendipitous aligning of the stars, last night might never have been as great as it was.

A warm spring evening, a stroll through the neighborhood, the scent of flowers on the air, Asa swinging his legs happily in the stroller ... Midnight frolicking with the other dogs in the big back yard, Asa giggling ... Jeff home from a good day at work, playing with the baby while I cook up what turned out to be a delicious (and visually very pretty) Chicken Biryani. Asa settles in to bed at 8pm, crack open the wine, eat some biryani, watch a little Burn Notice (gotta love it). And before we knew it, I'd had two glasses of smooth, rich and intoxicating Grenache blended unfiltered wine.

The cheeks get rosy, the attitude gets rosy, we're laughing our asses off at nothing and yawning like we haven't slept in 9 months (we haven't).  Before I know it it's 9:30 and Jeff is calling it quits for the night, still recovering from our 4:30am wake up call the day before. On the way up the stairs I realize just how tipsy (fine, drunk) I am and I ask Jeff, "How much wine was in that alcohol??".

Fits of giggles ensue and a classic Annaism is born.

My pregnant bootie

Don't let the subject line fool you, I am not currently pregnant. I am actually now 9 months out since I had the convenient excuse of pregnancy to account for my wide butt and unsatiable appetite. Throughout my life I have been cursed with being hungry all the time, getting full quickly, and then being hungry again within an hour or two. I have also been blessed with an incredible metabolism that probably irritated the hell out of a lot of women who watched me scarf down the cheeseburgers and then parade around in a bikini.

Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't like I had a perfect body or anything, but for someone who didn't exercise, I sure was in good shape. Then I got pregnant and the eating went off the charts. One plate. Two plates. Three plates of food for dinner. Even my husband who is 6'6" couldn't keep up (strangely though, my tiny little mom was able to eat as much as I was in my last weeks of pregnancy though she'll deny it). Alas, my metabolism was not able to keep pace with my appetite and my butt grew right along with my belly. I went from a cute size 4 to happy size 12 or 14 and my collection of underwear bare testament to this adventure.

All the original size smalls look sad and stretched. Then there are barely worn smalls of a different brand that I thought might do the trick. They lasted a week in my first trimester and were retired as utter failures. Then I went through a stage of washing laundry every four days so I could get by on the size mediums I already owned. By the second trimester the joke was on me, my mediums had totally caved in, and I had gone ahead and accepted that I needed a large to fit my bootie and I was alright with it.

The thing is, it never really occurred to me that it was my butt that was so big. I kept telling myself it was my hips widening as part of pregnancy, and no one really told me different (bless their hearts). Until one day during my third trimester we were in the kitchen and someone was trying to get around me and they commented about my big pregnant bootie and I realized, yes, it might be partly my hips widening, and yes, my belly was very large and round (the Big Round as it was lovingly called) but at the end of the day, I had eaten my way into the hugest ass I had ever had the pleasure of sitting on. And then, after the baby was born, I saw a couple photographs of my gigantic ass and I freaked out. I had no idea I had been carrying that much ass around for 40 weeks!

I guess this sort of loops back to an earlier post where I questioned whether ignorance is bliss ... in this case it was. But now, here I sit, 9 months later squeezed back into one of those size smalls that had been retired as a failure, waiting for the marks to show up from where the seams have dug into my doughy waistline and I wonder, should I throw in the towel, head over to the outlets and buy myself some cute mediums, or do I persevere, and torture myself with the smalls until they actually fit?

What's in a name?

I legally changed my name yesterday, for the second time in my life. It's not only a major pain in the ass dealing with social security, the DMV, insurance (car, medical, dental), and all the bills I have under my name (phone, electric, water, car loan, credit card ...) but it's also very stressful deciding on what the new name will be. Okay, so I guess obviously part of the new name is Jeff's last name, but what do I do with my maiden name? And what about my middle names? I agonized over this for a few months before striking proverbial gold and settling on a name the night before last.

The primary issue is that my parents gave me two middle names which makes my given name fairly long: Anna Mary Kathleen Lofgren. If you try and ad a hyphenated last name in there (which I did with my first marriage - Anna Mary Kathleen Lofgren Berry) you get something that is so ridiculously long that even the staff at the DMV do a double-take (and let's be honest, they see a lot of names from all sorts of backgrounds and with no offense intended, foreign names can get crazy long by Western standards and I think I had them all beat). Plus, when I did the double last name before I was intending to just go by one for day to day things (Berry).  I never ever wanted to be addressed as "Mrs. Lofgren Berry" and yet it happened all the time and people would stumble over the letters like they were just learning to read. Pharmacists would file my prescriptions under Lofgren half the time, Berry the other half, doctors would file me under the opposite of what I called myself and it was always a huge pain in the ass.

So you may be wondering why I don't just drop Lofgren and make life easy? If you are asking that you must not know me that well because I think most people would say I don't tend to do things the easy way. I like to do things the Anna way. It's a little wild, a little crazy, definitely unconventional and often illogical, but it works for me. Or I make it work for me and get frustrated with anyone or anything that stands in my way or questions my methods.

At any rate, Jeff was intent on my taking his name, and I liked the idea of the three of us sharing a common last name so I acquiesced. Thorner would be my last name. I refused to consider a hyphen after living with the annoyance it caused for too many years already. I didn't want to drop my middle names as they were given to honor important women in our family and it seemed disrespectful. I couldn't fit Anna Mary Kathleen Lofgren Thorner in the little spaces provided in the name change form from social security ... I was stuck in a quagmire. And then, as I said, I struck gold, sitting on the couch with Jeff bemoaning my quandary.

I filled in the form and headed out the door for my date with Destiny at the social security office (actually I forget her name but she was a real hard-ass). And now ladies and gentlemen, for the big unveil!! If you take a look at my ID you'll see a unique name that met all my criteria and fits into the provided spaces on legal forms:

Anna M.K. Lofgren Thorner.

Mrs. Thorner for short. Or hell, just call me Anna, it will be less confusing that way.

9 out of 10 opinions are wrong

Jeff told me that a couple of weeks ago and frankly it's as true today as it was then. Everyone has got an opinion and strangely, I seem to be pretty much the only person with the correct opinion. Shocking, isn't it?

I know what you're thinking: But Anna, how can you be sure your opinion is the 1 in 10 that is right? Well, for one thing I have this weird feeling in my gut that tells me I'm smarter than most people. For another thing, people often tell me how wise I am (okay they mostly just say it with their eyes - that's what it means when people roll their eyes at you, right?).

Mostly though the way I know I can trust my own opinion to be the right one is when it comes to my son. As I've mentioned in a previous blog, people try to advise me on raising Asa and I smile and nod, but really in my head I'm thinking "You haven't got a clue".  I hear ideas on getting Asa to sleep through the night (last time I checked I'm not really complaining about his sleep habits). Ideas on when and how to potty train, how not to spoil him, how to stop him from biting me (I have solicited advice on this and have yet to hear an answer that I intend to implement), why I shouldn't respond to his fake cries, why I shouldn't respond to his real cries at night, how often to bathe him, when to cut his hair ... Blah blah blah.

Pretty much the only opinion I habitually solicit is that of my daycare provider, Zory, and her daughters Mara and AnMary. They know my baby (and this makes me a little sad to be honest) as well as Jeff and I do, plus they must have raised at least 10 kids between all the tiny clients they've taken care of over the years. I guess if Michelle Duggar lived by I might ask her opinion too, but I definitely don't think I'd ever ask Jon or Kate Gosselin.  My point is, everyone has got an opinion, most of them I haven't asked for but all of which I will listen to and take under advisement and eventually determine that Jeff is right, 9 out of 10 opinions are wrong ... Is that irony? I'm not sure.

Dorothy's Wisdom

I'm a huge fan of the Golden Girls and I have been since they debuted in the 80's. I used to watch them with my grandma when I would stay over at her house and then somehow in college I picked it up again. In fact my roommate and I had "do you like Golden Girls" as one of our interview questions when looking for a third roommate. When we found a girl who answered yes we figured it was a match made in heaven (we were totally wrong on that count but whatever, the house burned down and we didn't have to live with her after that).

Anyway, these days I've got every episode on DVD and pretty much every line of every episode memorized. If it wasn't so nerdy I'd probably reference them in conversation far more often than I do but I like to at least attempt an air of coolness so I often hold my tongue. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a closet fan though. I did at one point own a Golden Girls tee, which was lost but I'd love to replace it and if they come up in conversation I'm quick to rush to their defense (not that they need any defense, their sublimeness should speak for itself).

My point is, right now Asa is upstairs crying himself to sleep for a very late afternoon nap. It breaks my heart and drives me nuts having to listen to his little cries even though I can tell by his tone that they are unsubstantiated and mostly just overly tired wails that will quickly wind down into a peaceful snooze. It also reminds of a line that Dorothy delivered to Blanche where she commented, "It isn't easy being a mother, if it were, fathers would do it.".

Hats off to all of my fellow mothers who know how true that statement is and to all the fathers, sisters, brothers, grandmothers and grandfathers who help us weather the hard times.