Category Archives: The Dummening

>Dummening to the Nth Degree

>I’ll just present the dummening in list form.
1.) I forgot all the pump accessories on Tuesday.
2.) I borrowed a co-worker’s car (since I had biked to work) to run home for the pump parts, but before I drove away I sat in the car for a full 3 minutes reminding myself how to drive a stick shift. (I could have made a whole post out of this one, but when I told the story to Dave he said I should just keep it to myself.)
3.) I wistfully remembered owning C3PO underoos, only to find out that my sister was the one with the lame underwear and I probably had nothing!
4.) After all the tornadoes, and even calling the daycare to make sure everyone was safe after their field trip, and reading about the devastation, and worrying about the people affected, I got on my bike to ride home and thought, “Ugh, it’s so windy.” Long pause. Oh yeah.
5.) Lastly, Day 6 of Jack on solid food – we went out to dinner and I didn’t pack any food for him to eat. Poor little guy. He didn’t seem to mind though.
6.) Just edited this post to correct my spelling of (w)hole.

We are camping this weekend so stay tuned for cute camping pictures, and to find out what we forgot to pack, etc.

>Prospecting for Liquid Gold

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I may be about to jinx myself into writers block, but events transpired today to assure me that I will not soon run out of material for this blog. Earlier today, my friend said, “i just picked up a piece of garbage flying around the yard that says our block party is saturday.” And I said, “Can I pretend it happened to me? I don’t have a blog post for tomorrow yet. ” But then an exciting thing happened. Wine was delivered to me at work! I drunkenly joined a wine club in Napa 2 years ago to get 20% off all my purchases that day. The plan was to quit when I got home. Woo hoo, 20% off! Then I thought, why not just get one shipment and then cancel? So four times a year I get wine shipped to me at work (can’t be shipped at home because an adult has to sign for it.) I always think, “Yea! wine! I’ll plan a special meal and drink delicious wine with it! Then I make my usual weekly menu of pizza, spaghetti, tofu stir fry, chicken something, leftovers, burritos, and The Southern Sun. I did recently make risotto and had to use some good wine and it was soooo good. But mostly, I am accidentally building up a collection of wine by not canceling my wine club membership, not drinking the good wine because I never plan a good meal, and then buying Red Truck whenever it’s on sale and drinking it with pizza.

ANYWAY, my wine arrived today, and I picked it up on the way back from the lactation room. I always mean to bring some sort of milk satchel, with which to conceal the expressed breast milk, but it’s not that hard to conceal 3 ounces in the palm of your hand. Unless you are carrying a box of wine. So I picked up the wine, and laid the ziplock bag of milk across the top of the box and went on my merry way across the parking lot back to my office, contemplating the blood of life, and mothers milk. It was sunny, and I was smiling. I smiled at the VP in the suit when I walked in, and he even seemed about to smile back at me when I tripped and the bag of milk went flying and landed at his feet.

“Ahhhh!”

“Aaaah!”

That was the conversation we had instead. Very professional. I snatched up the milk and ran away. Stopped at my bosses office and had this conversation:

“I just tripped right in front of [VP] while carrying milk and a box of wine.”
“I hope you saved the wine.”
“I did save the wine, but the milk is more valuable!”
“Is it? You can always make more milk.”

Fortunately the milk survived too. My dignity on the other hand? Not so much.

(Photo Credit to either Melanie or Jill who took this picture after we were bullied into a tour at Gundlach Bundschu)

>Shaking My Fists at the Heavens Part 2

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I had to shake my fists at the Gods on Wednesday, not once, not twice, but thrice.
Wednesday had been proclaimed “Picnic at the Park Day” so I packed a picnic and Jack and I headed to the Southern Sun for a growler of beer. I felt sort of weird carrying out a jug of beer in one arm and a baby in the other, but why? Jack and I headed to daycare to get Luke and then straight to the park. And I brought other parents along with me, “Come to the park! I have a growler of beer!” (Aside, what is the law in this case? Having a beer with your picnic at the park? Legal? Illegal? Legal but sort of unseemly? I consulted two experts and these were the answers I got:

1.) Who cares?
2.) Of course it’s legal. That’s why we always see homeless people there.

But back to the story of my wholesome family picnic. We got to the park and Luke took off to play with friends. I put Jack in the stroller with the sling, some blankets, fleece jackets and sweatshirts. (It was raining and cold.) And I carried my awesome new picnic basket (Thanks Aunt Nancy!) over my arm and then I think I grabbed the cooler with that same arm and made one trip with all my stuff. I met up with friends and excitedly removed the lid from the cooler and said, “Oh no! Noooooooooooo!” while shaking my fist at the heavens because the cooler was filled to the brim with foam. If I was as good a housekeeper as my picnicking friend, I suppose we could have just dipped our cups in, but as it was, I accepted an offer of babysitting and went back to the bar. Short story long, they refilled the growler, but the service was less friendly than at the grocery store earlier that day. And I spend the same amount of money in both places each week! (Kidding.)

The third time I had to shake my fist at the heavens was later when I was telling Dave the story.

And then a fourth time yesterday when I discovered my mothers day gift orders appear to be lost. But I’ll spare you that boring story!

I didn’t take any pictures at the picnic, so this one is from a few days ago.

>Self Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

>On Monday I ordered some mothers day stuff online and then left my credit card on my desk. Then on the way home I stopped at the bank and put my bank card and cash in the pocket of my jeans as I left. Tuesday I noticed my credit card on my desk and thought, “What a terrible place for my credit card!” So I put it in the pocket of my (different pair) of jeans.

This morning Jack and I headed to the grocery store and as I was getting in the car I hit my head. Hard. Why were we going to the grocery on Wednesday when Wednesday is clearly laundry day and not grocery day? Well because I needed stain stick, because the stain stick I have fell behind the dryer, and when I asked Dave to get it for me, he suggested that I add stain stick to my grocery list. I also needed some yummy bread for our picnic at the park this evening. And yes, I know it is raining, but I have picnic on the park on the agenda for this evening and the agenda cannot be changed.

I think I was still a little woozy from my head injury when we arrived at the grocery store, and I decided that I couldn’t bear to lug the car seat around with me so I should just put Jack in the sling. But the sling was at home, so I decided to carry him, as that would prevent me from getting anything that wasn’t on the list. Like a donut. Minutes later, in the self checkout, with a baby on my hip, wallet in hand, stain stick in Jack’s hands and a loaf of bread balanced on my knee, I remembered that my credit card, bank card, and cash were in the other two pairs of jeans that I own. I did the only thing that was really possible in that sort of situation. I leaned my head back to look up at the heavens and said, “Oh Nooooo! NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” As I remember it, I may have even shaken a fist at the Gods, but that doesn’t really seem possible because my hands were sort of full. A nice King Soopers self checkout clerk came over to see what the problem was. I explained that I didn’t have any money. Then I looked in my wallet, “Oh! I have 2 dollars!” He said, “Let me have those two dollars and we’ll see how far that gets you and then I’ll see what I can do.” I needed another $2.5o or so and then I remembered that I had gotten a roll of quarters for the campground showers at Fruita, and then took only one shower, so I had a 16 quarters too. I just shook a bunch of change into his hand and he fed it all into the self checkout until the bill was paid.

And then he put the stain stick and bread into a bag and I said, “Thanks so much! But I don’t need a bag, I gave up grocery store bags as a new years resolution. It’s one of the many ways I like to make my life complicated. But thanks so much.” And then I made Jack carry the stain stick to the car.

(In retrospect, I now wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t come up with the money. An I.O.U? Free stain stick? Would I have had to bag groceries for 10 minutes until I worked off the cost?)

>Don’t Quote Me On This

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“Bean” was a pleasure to have. That is what it said on the note from the kennel. Dave wondered about the use of quotes around his name. I suggested that maybe the kennel thinks “Bean” is Bean’s nickname. But I really shouldn’t make fun of them for two reasons.

1.) I started to look up proper and improper uses of quotation marks to research this blog “article” that I am writing here. But then I got sort of lazy and decided to “give up”.
2.) I should probably have put quotes around the first sentence since I am quoting a line from the note from the kennel. Is that right? I don’t know – see point 1.

I should also not be making fun of the kennel because they let me take Bean without paying since I forgot my wallet. “Oh, we trust you! We’ll see you soon.”

Regardless, I think that a more accurate sentence would have been, Bean was a “pleasure” to have. Just “kidding” Bean!

In other Bean news:

Today I brushed Bean’s hair and got such a big pile of hair that I was thinking of taking it to someone I know who spins fiber into yarn and then weaves things out of the yarn and asking her to make Bean a dog hair sweater. I wish I could take credit for this fabulous “idea” but Dave and I have been joking about the “dog hair sweater” ever since I overheard that same person accepting a zip lock bag of dog hair and saying, “I can’t wait to work with this and see what kind of yarn I can make.”

Lastly, I thought a “funny” blog sidebar to have would be something along the lines of “Bean has gone N days without an accident in the house.” Where N=number of days. But then I realized that it would just be so depressing to keep resetting that number back to zero. On the other hand, I guess the number would go up more often than it would go down. And today we could be celebrating “1” day without an accident. Yea “Bean”!

Update: While I was dropping Luke off at daycare this morning, Bean ate a granola bar and a mocha clif shot (contains 50mg of caffeine). Dave is out of town, so if history tells me anything, I should be rolling up the rug and covering the floors and walls with plastic. (If I had been blogging at the time, I could now link to the “eating everything out of the refrigerator incident”, the “eating the care package from Beth incident”, the “eating a bag of chocolate chips and jumping out of the window and running away incident”, the “eating a bag of whole wheat flour incident”, the “eating a bag of brown sugar incident” and everyone’s favorite, the “eating a box of Malley’s Chocolate and you don’t even want to know the rest of the story incident”.)

>There’s a Lemon in My Jewelry Box

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There. I said it. Not much more to say, the title says it all. But since I can’t stop myself, I’ll explain. On Sunday we had dinner at our friends’ house and I thought they needed a lemon so I brought one. Turns out they didn’t need it. So I guess when I got home, I took the lemon out of my pocket before hanging up my coat in my closet. It appears that I put it in my jewelry box. That was two days ago. So when I noticed the lemon, I took a picture of it, wrote a blog post, but did not move the lemon. Stay tuned for “My Closet Smells Like Rotten Lemons.”

>The Dummening

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In an episode of The Simpsons, one thing after another causes Lisa to fear she is losing her intelligence. She keeps a journal of the process, which she refers to as The Dummening. In our house we use that term to describe the slow decline into madness caused by pregnancy, lack of sleep, and breast feeding. Without further ado, I give you some examples from this week:

1.) I took my pump to work, but none of the pump accessories.
2.) I spilled a bunch of breast milk
3.) While deeply engrossed in a newspaper article about sharks, Dave asked me what the weather was going to be. We had this conversation:

Me: Sharky with a chance of sharks.
Dave: What?
Me: (A little louder.) Sharky with a chance of sharks!
Dave: It’s not that I couldn’t hear you, it’s that you aren’t making any sense.
Me: Ooooooohhhhhhhh.
4.) At work I repeatedly referred to a symbolic link as a database link. Except for the word “link” they are completely different. I said, “Oh. Ha ha. I am just saying the wrong words today! Here, I have everything you need to know in this email from a month ago, I’ll forward it.” And yes, in the email I had written database link instead of symbolic link.
5.) I took a picture of Jack playing so hard in his exersaucer that his arms were blurry. I tried to send it to 3 family members with the title, “So busy!” But all they got from me was the text, no picture. Yes, family, I am so busy! Just wanted to text that to you in case you were wondering how I am doing. I’m really busy.