Cheerleading

I have officially turned into my mother. I enjoy Lily's basketball games more than is probably appropriate, but there is something about sitting on the sidelines, clutching my industrial-sized travel mug of FREE coffee (thanks, YMCA!) with the other mothers, watching our kids run around and bang into each other during what is maybe the most entertaining 45 minutes of controlled chaos I have ever seen, that makes me really happy. Lily stands off to the side with her hands up, not really sure why, hopping from one foot to the other, scratching her legs, fixing her socks, wiping her chapped lips with the bottom of her shirt, and flinching when the ball comes near her (awww, just like mama), and I hear myself going, "GOOD TRY, LILY!!!" just like my own mom did so many years ago when I slouched on the soccer field, checking my watch, picking underneath my nails and trying hard as I could to avoid the ball.

Still, Mom was at every single game, the loudest voice of everyone, cheering me on. "Go, Krissy! Almost, almost!! Nice try! Get in there! GOOD FOOT!!!"

I knew she was bullshitting, and I loved her even more for it. Because I knew she got a big charge out of bringing her portable chair and pack of smokes (or 2 lb bag of sunflower seeds, after she quit), and just watching her daughter be a part of the game. And lets face it, there are some talented kids out there. I love watching the little guy who looks like a pint-sized John Starks literally smack the ball out of the opponents hands and shoot a basket from half court. I swear, this kid is 3 and a half feet tall and very possibly will grow up to be a midget, but he's a powerhouse.

And there's an excitement in hoping that one day, just maybe, Lily might actually get a breakaway and shoot that one-in-a-million shot for the team. Most likely not. I mean, really, yeah...no. But she's having fun either way. And a mother can dream.

Oh, and PS...to avoid ball-busting from my dad who inevitably will read this post and leave me a voice mail on my cell: "Ah, Kristin..." (professional-sounding throat-clearing), "I, too was at all of your games...what a selective memory my older daughter has..." it's true, he was. So there. Kisses.

Wow! Nice cover, SI!

I didn't know 'women on skis' was code for 'women getting fucked up the hiney'.

Did you?

Why, it's 100 Days Day!

Wasn't sure what to do to celebrate Lily's 100 Days of School Day on Friday, as parents were instructed to glue 100 things of the same kind to the top of a shoe box and attach strings so that they could pull them like mardi gras floats in the "100 Day" parade. At first I was thinking 100 bottle caps, because we have a 10 gallon pickle tub's worth of discarded caps that Jeremy is saving for a project (not this project, I can assure you), but I didn't wanna nick them while he was away on a crappy business trip, that seemed doubly cruel. Also, though I could give a swollen rats ass how my family and I are perceived by strangers, there is a certain stigma attached to being that kid that brought in all the Sam Adams caps.

100 qtips seemed gross. 100 rubber bands was trite. So we opted for 100 pennies. And omg, my hands smell like a freakin' homeless shelter now.

Feels like the first time...

I love books on tape. Well, books on CD. Because my car has a CD player, which is AWESOME. I just finished listening to Augusten Burroughs' Magical Thinking for like the 20th time, and then started listening to something kind of lame and forgetable by Elizabeth Berg. Anyway, its a collection of stories. And in one of them, an 80 yr. old woman locks herself in the bathroom because she wants some 'alone time', and reminisces about when she and her husband first had sex. Gross. The story even describes how he slid her garters down and everything. Too much information, Elizabeth Berg.

So of course this got me thinking about my own first experience with sex. Because, you know, everything that happens to everyone else in the world has to lead back to me somehow. Or it just wouldn't be right.

Well, my first time wasn't that romantic, really. I mean, it was sweet in that the boy I did it with was my first boyfriend, my first love, my first experience with throbbing-hot-dry-humping-through-the-jeans-till-the-thighs-are-bleeding, and he was a virgin like me, so the fact that we lost our innocence to each other was sort of nice.

The experience itself was not quite as nice. Of course we'd been dancing around the idea of having sex for months. And by dancing I mean rubbing against each other in every room of my parents house, in the garage, the backyard (yes, mom. I'm sorry to say we were not looking at constellations; we were drinking Bartles and Jaymes stolen from 7-11 and outercoursing up against the fence). When it finally happened it was wickedly underwhelming. I'd gotten hooked on "Beverly Hills, 90210", and had smoldered with jealousy and longing at the way Brenda and Dylan first did it in a 5 star hotel during a high school dance. Siiiiigh. Does it get any better than that?! Afterwards they put their expensive prom clothes back on and went downstairs, smirking and giggling and everybody was like, "Awww right!"

I wanted this. I wanted a romantic first time, with candles, chocolate, and rose petals scattered on my twin bed. Buuuut, it didn't exactly happen like that. At all. It actually kind of happened by accident, really. My parents were out to dinner and we were fooling around on the living room floor, and it just, well, happened. It was quick and a little shocking but nothing like what I'd expected. What happened next, though, really sucked.

I looked down and his face was twisted into a mask of utter horror, like he'd just seen a puppy get clubbed in the head with an aluminum bat. "I...I..." he stuttered.

"You... didn't." I said, shaking my head. I narrowed my eyes. Oh, sweet Jesus. Didn't they tell us about this in health class? I remembered a pamphlet with a hippie type girl on a swing, looking forlorn and confused and sad..."You can get pregnant the first time..."

So I hauled ass upstairs and turned on the shower and jumped in, trying in vain to wash myself or something, while he ran, naked, into my bedroom and knelt at the foot of my bed and started praying. "That's not gonna help us now, fucker!!!" I yelled. "Get dressed! We're going to the Emergency Room!!!"

And that's what we did. We really did. We drove to the local hospital and I stayed in the car biting my nails and muttering to myself and trying not to picture how I would look walking down the halls of my all-girls Catholic school with a giant stomach (would they fit me with a special uniform? Would I have to wear...gasp...SWEAT PANTS?!). He asked the lady at the front desk if perhaps the 'morning after pill' might be available and could we, two dumb teenagers who had just made a fatal mistake, procure it? Just this once?

The woman behind the desk, as was told to me later, was kind and soothing, but explained that no, that particular pharmaceutical was not yet available in the United States (this was 1991 or something). She advised us to go home and relax and take a pregnancy test in a few weeks if we really got worried.

And, as it turned out, there was nothing to worry about. We still swore off sex for the rest of our lives (which lasted about a week and a half), and tried to do things safely from that moment on. But wow, that was a bummer of a first time.

How about y'all? What was your first time like?

Spill it!!!

Just call me Lady Petrol

I did something retardedly retarded today, even for me.

I was pumping gas, and I flicked that little metal lever thingy where you can set the nozzle to auto and actually walk away whilst your gas is pumping. Got distracted when Lily came out of the car and started talking about something totally inane and random, like how she pronounced the word 'potato' when she was a baby or something, and then I heard the little 'click' that told me the tank was all full.

So then I did this.

Wait for it...

I yanked the nozzle out of the hole (thatswutshesaid) but the gas was still flowing, right? So out it came squirting like a hose on a 4-alarm fire, spraying my whole car door, all the cement near us, and both Lily's and my boots.

So, I went to work smelling like a concentration camp. Good thing my office mate is staunchly Christian (as I've inferred by the giant wooden cross on his desk and neatly framed scripture quotes), so I don't think I offended anyone. Except me.

I might even be high right now. Clearly I must be, if I thought this was worth blogging about.

Happy Tuesday, Lovies!

I am a shitty tooth fairy.

So Lily lost her second front top tooth last night. Its partner fell out on Christmas (we whooped it up and made a mad fuss about Santa AND the tooth fairy visiting our house in 24 hours!!! Fuck, lying to children is expensive), and since then she's been wiggling and twisting the other one like a chronic masturbator.

By last night though the tooth was so ready to drop, it was basically hanging off her gums like a busted shutter on a post-Katrina Bayou home. (For those of you not living in LA, that was a little 'insider' reference...I've noticed that Louisianians refer to almost everything in life as 'pre-Katrina' and 'post-Katrina'. Like NY'ers do with 9/11. Or Christians do with the coming of Christ).

The tooth finally came out after I'd put her to bed, and she came tearing into the living room with blood running down her chin and a little white(ish...I am not nazi enough about brushing) nub in her palm. We rejoiced, stuck it in her little tooth tin and shoved it under the pillow, and marched her gap-toothed ass back to bed.

Jeremy and I then relished in our kid-free two hours (it's such a frigging scam that by the time you finally get away from your child, you're too tired to do much else besides Keep up with the Kardashians and maybe slurp on a tequila shot), and went to bed.

I was woken up at 4 am by a very distressed Lily perched at the foot of my bed, poking me in the foot. "I had a nightmare. AND the tooth fairy didn't come!"

Fuck, fuck, fuck. How could I have forgotten?

I spent the next half hour orchestrating a carefully-choreographed dance of deceit with the stealth of a ninja. An exhausted, self-flagellating ninja. I popped Lily back into bed and said I would be right back to check on her, that I had to 'check something'. I then snuck into the kitchen and blindly pawed at my purse, finding my wallet that actually had a dollar in it (who knew?). I put the dollar in my bathrobe pocket and then went into Lil's room and sat with her until she drifted back to sleep. This took almost a goddamned hour. Then I found the tin, grabbed the tooth, replaced it with the dollar, and went back to my own bed.

She woke again at 7 am and came running into our room, waving the dollar and talking about all the great shit she was gonna buy.

My god, sometimes I HATE being a parent.

I'm Baaaaack

Oh, my. I'm still writing /09 on everything I sign. (Because I'm always signing official documents and shit.) I find it takes about a month to get into the swing of writing the new year on stuff, don't you? And there isn't a natural progression from /09 to /10 as there would be, say, from /08 to /09. Oh, who cares. Do you care? Shut up, Kristin.

Hi, y'all!!! I'm back. New York was a whirlwind of ice, snow, my mom's red sauce, wine, manicotti, family, good friends, NYC pubs, too much cheesecake, and no alarm clocks (this is one of the wonderful things about staying with parents in another part of the country: they are so excited to have their grandchild waking up in the same house as them, they get up with her and go downstairs and have her full up with mini pancakes, Sponge Bob, and juice boxes galore before you've even cracked open one eye for the day. Praise yahweh, all is right with the world).

As nice as it was to be away, I was delighted to come back. Truth: As our plane descended over Lake Ponchartrain and came swooping down over the soft green ground of New Orleans, I smiled all big-like, totally involuntarily. I was home.

Though I've always loved the feeling of landing in Louisiana, mostly because I knew that always waiting at the gate for me would be my beloved, red-headed, dirty-Knicks-cap-wearin' Jeremy, and he'd fold me into his arms and not let go for the duration of our weekend rendezvous, this was the first time I was actually coming home here. And it felt...well, right. I don't know how else to describe it. I couldn't wait to get in my little car and zip home with the window down, passing saggy cypress trees whispering into the bayou. We lost count of the armadillos we passed, backs all glinty-silver in the sun, digging in the grass on the side of the road. When I was little, we used to look for dirt-colored bunnies hopping in the grass along the highway at sunset. My kid looks for nutria rats and armadillos. As Mr. Miyagi says, 'Different, but Same".

The pudgy little New York girl, hunting voraciously for brown bunnies from the back seat of her parents' Buick on the Long Island Expressway so many years ago never could have imagined a future life in South Louisiana. But hey, here I am.

And here we go...2010, bitches.

I didn't really make any resolutions, except to try and live in the present, have gratitude for the wonderful things in my life, and stop engaging in fucked-up retard dramatics from the past. I think if I can do this, then there's a good chance it'll be a fantastic year.

Also, I am gonna write a book.

What are your resolutions?