Tillie would be so proud. We’d probably all go out for Mexican food and tell a waitress she’s fat, to celebrate.
Thank you, Antique Mommy. To see a list of the other January nominees, go to Petroville or Surbuban Turmoil.
Since becoming a mama, I have realized that very few things in life can lower your self esteem like being the mother of a toddler. Not only do you have those moments where you wonder if you have anything to talk about other than the horrendous stomach flu we had over the weekend, but you also have a three foot tall person living in your home who feels free to say whatever enters their mind.
Most of y’all know that I named this blog Big Mama due to the fact that Caroline began calling me “Big Mama” last spring. The thing is, her perception of my largeness continues to grow.
Or, in all fairness, I may have put some weight on over the Christmas holidays.
At least once a day, she’ll point to one of my body parts and say “Oh Mama, I can’t wait to have big, big hands like you” or “Mama, when will my nose get HUGE like yours?” or my personal favorite that never fails to make feel like I’m enveloped in a ray of sunlight, “Mama, I want a big, BIG booty just like yours”.
It’s starting to make me feel a little bit like some freak GIGANTOR woman.
Come on kids, gather round for a peek at GIGANTOR woman.
Combine all of this with the abomination, that some would call a wrinkle, that etches itself from my eyebrow to my hairline every morning, and it’s a enough to make a girl wonder if she’s still got it. At all.
A few days ago, P and Caroline took another trip to the ranch. All she has been talking about for the last week is how much she wants to “shoot a duck and eat it for dinner”. While she didn’t actually shoot or retrieve the duck, make no bones about it, this is her duck.
When I found out that I was expecting a baby girl almost four years ago, I went home and made myself a CD that included such songs as Sweet Caroline, Isn’t She Lovely, Daddy’s Little Girl, and Thank Heaven for Little Girls. I would listen, while my pregnancy hormones took over, and just cry at the sweetness of knowing that my daughter was on her way.
After looking at these pictures, I’m thinking maybe I should have been listening to The Bellamy Brothers singing Redneck Girl.
Nobody ever said it was easy “cruising in Daddy’s pickup truck”.
Yesterday, while I was reading different blogs, I discovered that Jeana over at Days to Come, had written about a dream she had about Dr. Phil, which was so weird because that same night I had a very real dream in which Boomama emailed me to let me know how to properly DVR the Montel show. It seems that I had been missing the first twenty minutes of Montel and she had the answer as to why.
I’m not sure anyone has the answer as to why Jeana and I are having dreams about third rate talk show hosts.
Let me state for the record, that in real life, I don’t actually watch the Montel show. I also feel fairly safe in saying that Boomama doesn’t either. That’s just a guess on my part, so if I’m wrong, she can let me know.
It amazes me how things like that creep into my subconcious. Okay, it makes sense that Boomama popped up in a dream because we do email back and forth on occasion, but Montel?
In all fairness, Montel and I do go way back because he spoke at an assembly at my high school during my junior year. They brought him in to ease tensions due to a “race riot” in my school cafeteria.
I attended high school in Beaumont, Texas, and due to the fact that Beaumont is a little behind the times by about thirty or forty years, the high schools had only been desegregated for about four years and this was in the late ’80’s. In truth, all of the students were fine with it and there weren’t any problems. However, the media (and I use that term loosely) in Beaumont was always looking for a good story about race relations.
At my high school, there were two different lines in the cafeteria; the hot lunch line and the a la carte line. The a la carte line was always the more popular choice because they served the best burritos ever. Seriously, they were these crunchy burritos with chili sauce and I’d eat one with a side of fries every day because I was sixteen and at a point in life where I was still acquainted with my metabolism.
The only problem with the burritos, other than an unbelievably high fat content that is probably affecting all of my classmates’ cholesterol levels to this day, is that they tended to run out of them. This meant that there was always a race to get to the a la carte line.
Well, one day, Antoine (who happened to be black) and Keith (who happened to be white) got into a fight over who was in line first. Due to the fact that they were high school boys overflowing with testosterone, the fight escalated and turned into pretty much a full blown cafeteria food fight. If memory serves, I think our vice-principal might have gotten pushed over a table. It was not a pretty scene, yet it was not a race riot, it was a burrito riot.
Word spread like wildfire and next thing we knew, all the media had shown up at the school to interview students about the “race riot” in the cafeteria. Of course, since we were teenagers and looking for any kind of fame, we lined up to talk about the incident. I’ll never forget our head cheerleader, Maggie, talking to Gail at Channel 4 news and saying, “I was like, so scared. Food was like, flying everywhere”.
Really, the only thing anyone was scared of was not getting a burrito for lunch.
One thing led to another and eventually the school administration decided to bring in Montel to ease the tensions caused by the burrito riot. Of course, the student body was totally fine, but the school officials were feeling the heat to do something, when really the best thing they could have done was up the order for burritos.
So, Montel came to the school and gave a speech that I can’t tell y’all anything about, except that he kept saying “MOUNTAIN, get out of my way” and none of us really knew what that had to do with anything, but from then on the lunchroom was filled with peace, harmony and plenty of burritos with chili sauce.
It’s no wonder he got his own talk show.
On Friday night, Caroline and I were on our way to eat Mexican food with Mimi and Bops when Mimi mentioned that her best friend, who lives out in California, had just gotten over a really bad stomach flu. And because I am an idiot who likes to spit in the face of fate, I remarked, “You know, I’ve been amazed that we haven’t had the stomach flu this year. So many people around us have had the stomach flu and we’ve avoided it.”
In all fairness, after I emitted that foolish statement, I did mention that I should probably knock on wood. However, since I was driving us to dinner in my Ford Escape, there wasn’t any wood or even faux wood grain, to knock on. The Escape, which we pronounce as Es-CAH-PAY in tribute to Dory’s pronounciation of “Escape” in Finding Nemo, ( if you have no idea what I’m talking about, then obviously you haven’t watched the movie 152 times and you have a life) is a company car and they don’t believe in splurging on extra features like real upholstery and the aforementioned wood grain details.
Later that night, after Caroline and I were back home, I put her to bed. I was catching up on all my DVRed shows ( Friday Night Lights, how I love thee) when I heard Caroline wake up crying. I could tell it was a serious cry, not the kind she uses when she just wants me to come in so that she can verify my existence and and ask if it’s morning yet, so I went in her room only to be overwhelmed at the horrendous smell.
I changed the foulness that was her diaper, tucked her back in, and went outside to throw the diaper away. I walked out on the back porch to discover the largest, black spider I have ever seen crawling across the porch. Honestly, it was so big that I didn’t even attempt to squash it with my shoe because I was afraid it would just pick me up and throw me off the porch. I searched for a suitable lethal weapon, decided on a large piece of firewood, and killed that spider dead. Then around midnight, Caroline woke up with another round of diarrhea and it was official that mine was a household cursed with both pestilence and the plague.
I put Caroline in bed with me and at 6:30 a.m., I woke up to the sounds of a gagging cough, which I realized was the sound of Caroline throwing up. I got her out of the bed before it joined with all the sand on my sheets (see, it totally paid off that I didn’t change those sheets) and she proceeded to throw up all over the hardwood floors.
To make the situation even better, I had hit the stomach flu trifecta. Home alone, throw up on everything, and completely out of laundry detergent. I’m telling y’all you can’t hit odds like that in Vegas.
Thankfully, it seems to be a short lived bug (much like that enormous spider on my porch) and she is doing better. As for me, let’s just say that if there is even the slightest chance you might acquire a stomach flu from your child, it really would be best to eat something for dinner other than chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes from Luby’s washed down with a Corona Light.
That may seem like common sense, but apparently for me, it’s not.
I finally made my way over to the Share the Love Blog awards to nominate my favorites, when I realized that I had been nominated in two categories: Best Humor and Best Site Design.
I can’t take any credit for the site design since the whole thing was done by Susie at Bluebird Blogs. So, thanks to Susie for making me look good and thanks to whoever nominated me.
As for the nomination for Best Humor, I truly appreciate it. The best part is that most of y’all make me laugh harder at your comments, than y’all probably do at what I write. Thanks for that, it always makes my day.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.
Select an online retailer below.