Sundays with Stretchy Pants

I found this blog personality type analysis thingy at Wonkette, which is where I find everything of questionable value in my life. And since it must be your lucky day, I’m posting my results here for you along with the results for Kids Know Stuff.

The analysis indicates that the author of http://sundayswithstretchypants.com is of the type:

ESFP - The Performers

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.

In case you’re wondering, and you don’t know me in real life, that is an actual picture of me. If you do know me in real life, it’s still an actual picture of me, it’s just the one that Bryan keeps in his head. For special occasions. And obviously, none of that analysis is true except for the part about it being hard for me to be in management positions. I’m extremely coachable, but I’m a horrible coach. Uh, so good thing I homeschool? Shit.

Anyway, here’s Kids Know Stuff:

ISFP - The Artists

The gentle and compassionate type. They are especially attuned their inner values and what other people need. They are not friends of many words and tend to take the worries of the world on their shoulders. They tend to follow the path of least resistance and have to look out not to be taken advantage of.

They often prefer working quietly, behind the scene as a part of a team. They tend to value their friends and family above what they do for a living.

No, that’s not an actual picture of any of the children. And, I think, not even a picture anybody would ever have in their heads. Of anybody. Ever. However, the analysis is definitely true. My babies are precious little sweety punkins. They’re vulnerable and quiet and they definitely wouldn’t think it was funny to burp on camera or anything like that.

Speaking of artists, I know some. My friend Kristen Marra Marek has some photographs in the C-note Art Show. (There isn’t a search form on the site and there are a lot of artists, so do ctrl-f and then type her name in if you want see her stuff.) And maybe vote for her stuff because it’s good. I wouldn’t try to make you vote my way, though. No, I would never do that. I think voting should be private and not talked about at all.

*cough*

I know another awesome artist in that show, too: Sharon H. Bell. You could vote for her too if you wanted to. I know it says one vote/IP address, but sometimes that’s a lie. Sometimes it’s not, but you should try to vote twice like I did in the presidential election.

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My name is Abby and that makes me first in a lot of cell phone contacts lists. Unless you have an Aaron in there, I’m first. Or unless you mess with it like Kristen does and put AAAJoe so her husband is first. Or if you put ZZZAbby so I’m last. Anyway, if you don’t mess with it, I’m usually first.

Because of this alphabeticality (it could be a word) of my name, I get butt-dialed a lot and it’s kind of creepy sometimes. I mean, somebody calls me and doesn’t say anything, but I can hear background stuff? It’s weird. My nephew does it pretty frequently and I always think it’s an emergency. Like maybe his leg is trapped under a tree and his cell phone is just out of reach so he threw a rock at it just to get it dialing and he can’t tell that it called me and before he figured it out, he passed out from the pain. I always debate calling 911. One of these days I’m going to do it. Maybe.

The other night, Kristen’s husband was working through the night at his dangerous lighting job and he butt-dialed us 7 times and left 5 messages. We turned our ringer off, but the first time he butt-dialed us, Bryan answered and we were both a little worried that it was an emergency. I heard Bryan answer the phone and then I heard him say, “I can’t hear you! Joe? JOE!” Bryan swears he heard him say, “Dude!” which we thought meant he was probably trying to say, “Dude, I’m trapped in a puddle of water and there’s a live wire swinging around wildly! It’s just a matter of time before I’m toasted! Dude, help!” We were going to call 911, but then we remembered that we didn’t know exactly where Joe was working and we felt it would be rude to send the rescue workers on a wild goose chase, so we just turned the ringer off and went back to sleep. He was alright, though. In the morning there were 5 messages that all had Joe’s far-away voice talking about lighting and prices and what goes where. It was boring and the only emergency was that I could have died from boredom. But I listened because what if he said something interesting? What if there really was an emergency?

Really, I think I’m getting desensitized to the feeling that there’s an emergency when somebody calls and doesn’t say anything. So if there is an emergency which doesn’t prohibit your cell phone from calling me, but does prohibit your speech, you should not call me. I’ll totally hang up on you. And then I’ll make fun of you for butt-dialing me and you won’t get rescued. And that would be embarassing for me.

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1. Electricity. I got some, bitches!

2. Dawn. She works my blogs and she invites me to free spaghetti dinners. And she makes me laugh.

3. Kristen. She makes her husband deliver coffee to me and she sets up free coffee for her neighbors because she has a generator. And she makes me laugh.

4. My other friends here and in Chesaning, and my extended family. They invite me to do laundry at their house and they invite me to stay with them and use up their electricity in order to get me to shut up with the whining. They remind me that I’m very lucky to have several places to which I could flee if I really needed to. And they make me laugh.

5. My husband and children. They’re just awesome. Bryan’s awesome because he puts up with me for-evah! And he’s cute. And the kids are awesome because, well, they’re 50% me. I’m kidding! They’re their own little bundles of funny electricity-addicted awesomeness. And they make me laugh.

6. Margaret Cho. Thanks to Dawny for this link because I couldn’t have said it better myself. And it makes me laugh: I’m Christian You Fuckers

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We went to the Obama/Biden thingy in Dublin on Saturday with Kristen and Dawn and their tweens. Yes, we wore matching homemade t-shirts. No, it’s not lame. It’s cool! The kids were bored, but they were so, so good and I know someday they’ll thank us for dragging them there. Lena already told me she wanted to show her future children the “on the road to change” sign that she was able to wave. Awwwwwwwww!

Our t-shirts were cool, thanks to Kristen, but this guy’s t-shirt was the best:

Of course I had to get a picture! I don’t even care that I look like a dumbass in this photo (I am a dumbass, so I should look like one). I’m posting it because the t-shirt says, “Michelle for first lady.” Word.

Dawn has a full report here. Kristen has a bunch of pictures here.

My report is that it was awesome. That’s all. Sixty-five days, people. Get your people to the polls.

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We’re taking off for a night in Cleveland with the Pepper Paints family. In my absence, please enjoy this video. It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

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1. It’s Thursday. Park, peeps and potluck day.

1(a). Homeschooling. Lots of times it’s stressful and worrisome for me, and I don’t like to recommend it to people, but I really, really like it. And it’s not just because I get high on homeschooling when it’s Thursday, either. Even in my darkest times of homeschool doubt, I like it and I know it’s all going to turn out just fine. There, I said it.

2. Seeing Lena and Liberty type with their fingers on the right keys. I don’t know why it tickles me so. Just watching Liberty, I think she can type, like, 50 wpm. Lena ain’t no slouch, but she doesn’t like to have to go back to fix mistakes, so she types extra very carefully. Liberty just types the shit, hits spell-check and deals with it. No surprises there.

3. Our new kitty. She’s sweet and cuddly and she poops in the right spot. And she hardly ever jumps on my head when I’m sleeping. And when she does, it’s very cute because she’s just a sweet little baby kitty. And when she lounges on Maya, it makes my heart bleed with ooey-gooey lovey juice.

4. Bryan’s new-to-us old lady car. I call her Mrs. Merriweather because she’s a Buick and she is silvery blue. We don’t do the new-car thing and we drive our cars until they’re almost dead. In fact, this purchase marks the first time ever we’ve owned a car that was made in the same decade as we were living. It’s a 2000. In the late 90s, our newest cars were 1989 models. We bought our minivan (the only car we have ever financed, which we’ll never do again) in 2003, but it was a 1999 model. The car Bryan just got rid of was a 1991 Bonneville, which was given to us in 2001 by a lady who was either a) my mentor or b) somebody who had an affair with my dad in the 70s and never got over him. It depends on who you ask, but either way, that worked out really well for us.

5. The fact that I still have beer leftover from Kristen’s 4th of July party.

6. The fact that all that beer will be gone tonight. Because it’s Thursday. And we homeschool. And have potlucks. THURSDAY!

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I have a lot of weird dreams. I used to keep a dream journal in order to try to interpret them. The more I wrote them down, the more vivid they became. I’m a lucid dreamer, though, so I’m not sure interpretation works when you’re going around changing things in the dream.

Last night I had a dream I was at Kristen’s house for a little party before park day. I wasn’t exactly sure how to get to the park, so I had to use her computer to mapquest it. So I’m using the computer and this jack-ass dude, dressed all businessy and acting all superior (the type Joe and Kristen would never be friends with; I’m sure he wasn’t even invited) just walked up and grabbed the mouse out of my hand because he had some “business” to look up. I was pissed and oh-so-ballsy as I ripped the mouse out of his hand and went on a rant about his business isn’t any more important than my business, just like a good stay-at-home mom who is not at all insecure about her choice. And then Steve Carell showed up and I went off on him: “I know everybody loves you and thinks you’re great, but I know you’re a smarmy bastard and I’m gonna tell the world!” And then my lucid-dreaming self was like, “You idiot! That’s Steve Carell. You will not find any smarminess about him and if you do, you will not tell the world.” In my dream I said, “Wait, you’re not who I thought you were. You’re awesome. I thought you were somebody else.” I don’t know what any of that means. I blame the jack-ass dude on a conversation I had with Dawn yesterday about her and her husband’s choice to have him be the stay-at-home parent and how jack-asses are weird about that, just like jack-asses are weird about stay-at-home moms. Jack-asses suck.

Anyway, we have homeschool park day today, and my sister TracEy (not to be confused with Tracy, my sister-in-law) and my other niece are coming to visit for the holiday weekend (can I get a “woohoo”?). TracEy , if you’re reading this, I’m not cleaning the house for you. I washed the sheets on the guest bed, but I am not doing anything else. It’s Thursday. After that, it’s a holiday weekend. I can’t be expected to clean stuff during a Thursday/holiday weekend combo. I will share my beers with you, unless I feel you’re bogarting them, in which case I will point you toward the liquor store to go buy me us some more. Don’t worry, we found one in a nice part of town, so it’s not across the street from the plasma bank. Nobody will ask you for money at the nice liquor store. You have nothing to fear from the rich drunks except roofies and date rape, so just don’t accept any drinks from anybody and you’ll be fine.

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Like most of the other Columbus bloggers I know (and some I don’t know), I spent part of my weekend at Comfest listening to good music, admiring painted breasts, and drinking giant cups of beer. I had a moms-only night on Friday with Dawn and Kristen, and every time a young lady walked by with pair of uncovered breasts that were sitting up high where God put them, without the aid of any industrial-strength materials, the 3 of us couldn’t help but shake our heads and say, “Enjoy them while you can! They won’t always be like that,” and then we’d lament the fact that we didn’t appreciate our bodies back when we were young and perky, and now we’re stuck having to appreciate them for stupid reasons, like creating life and sustaining life and all that bullshit. Bitter.

We also found a perfect spot to sit and eat, and then we just couldn’t bring ourselves to leave the table because it was such a great spot for people watching. It was fun for me to see people that we see at the library, the pool, the grocery store, the farmer’s market, and everywhere else we go around here. It made this big (to me) city feel like such a small town. That might be why I like the Clintonville area of Columbus so much. It has big-city convenience with a small-town feel. A small town where people don’t freak out if you carry your baby in a sling or homeschool or homebirth or breastfeed a toddler. I love that about this place.

On Saturday, we went back to Comfest as a family just in time to see Kristen’s kids do their Grimaldi circus performance for 2 minutes until it got cut short because of the major thunderstorm that was on its way. It wasn’t raining when we took off, but by the time we were about 300 yards away from our van, the downpour was heavy, the wind was pushing us around and we dove for cover in a food tent near the North Market. The wind was rocking that tent back and forth in a very menacing way. I realized then that I only think thunderstorms are cool when I’m safely indoors. I was extremely uncomfortable with the amount of lightening, rain, and wind. My kids and my niece were all scared shitless, but they were playing it cool in front of each other. I was grateful for that because the cherry on top would have been desperate, “I wanna go hooome!” whining and that would have sent me over the edge. Bryan kept saying, “Let’s just run for the van!” But I wasn’t about to listen to him because he drove through Chesaning’s great tornado of ‘98 (Or was it ‘97?) all the while thinking, “Hm, that’s quite a lot of horizontal rain.” He didn’t know there was a tornado going on, but he was about a mile away from a barn that got destroyed by it. I didn’t think he could get that lucky twice, so we stayed put. Until the short man in the official uniform poked his head in the tent and told us there was now a tornado warning and that we all needed to find a building to get into. At that point, I looked at the kids with an isn’t-this-quite-an-adventure smile plastered across my face and told them, “Don’t worry, the North Market is right there and it’s a huge brick building. We’ll be fine. Isn’t this exciting? RUN!!!!” We ran into the North Market (It’s important to note here that Riley and Liberty almost got backed over by a police cruiser during this run. I had to verbally assault the cop. It’s not like he had his sirens on. I totally would have sued.) So we ran again with Bryan still saying, “I think we should just drive home,” and me saying, “You are a retard and if you keep it up I’m going to get all hysterical in front of the children. I’m trying to act like it’s an adventure, but I’ve already peed my pants from fear. You don’t know that, though, because we’re in the middle of a raining-ass tornado that has washed my pee away so shut up about driving home. We’re never going to get home. We’re all going to die and our home has probably already been destroyed by the tornado anyway!”

We waited inside the North Market for a bit and then people were saying, “I didn’t hear the sirens,” but my niece and I thought we did hear the sirens. I didn’t care one way or another because those stupid sirens were broken last week and they wouldn’t shut off after our tornado warnings were over, so how did I know they weren’t broken and wouldn’t turn on this week? You can’t trust technology! Except when it’s Dawn using her handy-dandy computer to tell us the weather. Yes, it finally occurred to us that we could call Dawn and she would tell us what to do. She told us that Short Guy was lying to us and told us we were safe to get the f*ck out of there, so we did. And then it turned out to be fun. We had our own little community festival with cozy, dry jammies, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, candy, chips, and card games. Best. Comfest. Ever.

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Today was Thursday pretty much all day and it was my turn to host the Thursday potluck. Now I’m riding high on caffeine and socializing, and instead of cleaning my house I’m blogging. Yay.

As sometimes happens on Thursdays, we did a lot of talking about parenting and how we suck at it. I’ve been thinking about something in particular that I struggle with and I’ve decided to turn over a new leaf. I have a serious problem with regard to how I react to the children when they’re having difficulty with a craft or math or rollerblading or opening a cereal box or a new DS game or a maze or whatever. It’s not the fact that they struggle, it’s the fact that they have to whine about the struggling that just sends me over the edge every time. It finally occurred to me that I have an extremely unreasonable expectation that when they have some kind of difficulty, that they’ll say in a normal tone of voice, “Mother, I am having trouble and I would be ever so grateful if you would assist me.” Instead, they usually use their whiniest voice to say, “I caaan’t doooo iiiiitttt!” and then they stomp and flail. I don’t like that. If I were a mature adult I would hear that and calmly reply, “There, there, let me see if I can help you.” Instead, I have an extremely immature nervous system which reacts with a fight-or-flight response when faced with super-deadly whining. I usually say, “Stop whining and I can help you,” which looks fine in print, but if you heard the tone of my voice and you were a very sensitive lass, you might pee your pants from the fear that my words were actually going to choke you. This is my least favorite thing about myself. First of all, it just escalates the problem and, most importantly, it goes against everything I believe in as far as emotional health. I would never tell them to stop feeling mad or sad or anything like that. In this house, we share our feelings and our feelings are respected. But when it comes to their whining because of having difficulty with something, I feel like they should understand that it’s ok to struggle and they should have an attitude of, “Huh. This is hard. I guess I’ll have to ask for help.” When in reality, nobody acts like that when they’re having a problem. We all whine and stomp in our own way. My asking them to stop whining doesn’t work because then they think I’m mad at them and that freaks them out and then they can’t relax and then they cry and whine more. It’s really quite the opposite of helpful. So I’m turning over a new leaf and I think it’s going to be life-changing. You know, like Jesus and The Secret. Only with less bloodshed. Hopefully.

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Yeah, yeah, I know you all read Pepper Paints and she already blogged about Thursday’s fun. Too bad. Read about it again.

I missed last Thursday’s homeschool park day because I was in Michigan. The potluck was canceled (obviously, what fun would it have been without me?) Or maybe it was because Dawn has a job or something lame like that. Anyway, we’re on for today and I have an extra kid with me so it will be extra fun. My 10-year-old niece is visiting us for a bit and she’s really sweet so she gets along nicely with my kids and my kids’ friends. The pool even gave her a free membership for us so we wouldn’t have to try to sneak her in. Nice of them. Bryan and I were actually planning to just pay an extra 10 bucks to get a pass for a family of 6 instead of 5, but Bryan didn’t know if she had to be immediate family or what so I guess he stammered around saying, “I forgot, our step-daughter will be with us a lot this summer, so I need a pass for 6, blah, blah, blah.” The kid at the desk was like, “Whatever, geezer, have a free pass.” Yay!

I didn’t say anything to Bryan, but it’s funny that his choice of the word “our” really stood out to me when he was relaying the story. Poor little bunny from a two-parent home doesn’t understand that there is no “our” when you’re talking about step-daughters. Unfortunately, I’m quite in-the-know on all matters of step-crap. For the lie to work really well, he should have said my step-daughter. Right? It’s the little things that make a lie believable.

Speaking of step-crap, I’m making a new rule and I think all children of divorce will get behind me on this one: I decree that our parents only get one shot at “blending” families. Got that? My dad is now going through his 2nd divorce, so I will have an ex-step-mother and 2 ex-step-brothers and 1 ex-step-sister to go along with my ex-step-father whom my mom divorced several years ago. I’m not having anymore steps.  My dad’s next wife will be “my dad’s wife” and my children will call her by her first name or Mrs. Clement, but not grandma. Same goes for my mother’s next husband. If they don’t like that, I will go to plan B, which is to refer to the new spouse as “my dad’s current wife” or “my dad’s next ex-wife” or some such other equally degrading term. I think that’s fair.

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