inbetween

Stop fucking complaining people don't read your book and just let their babies cry and then blame you. You know why no one reads your stupid book? It's 440 pages long. Without the index. You're marketing it toward exhausted burnt out parents and you write 440 freaking pages. Pamphlet next time.

Love,
tired mommy who is sick of her husband suggesting they read your lovely book. I look at it and get nauseated by its thickness. I hardly have the attention span to read a newspaper article. Your book? Are you kidding me?

if suddenly everything goes all "Life After People" this here is why we will be dead:

http://community.livejournal.com/montreal/3505579.html

Jesus murphy.

Pat and I were up late working on a couple projects. Because I fed him something nutritious and healthy for supper (seafood soup) he got hungry around midnight and we ordered some smoked meat and a poutine.

When he opened his smoked meat, we both looked at it. I blurted out "what the hell?!?!" Pat was speechless.

Finally I said "I need to get my camera."
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Me and the husband is expecting round about August 11. We're calling it Simba for now, being born in Leo and all.

And yes we're quite thrilled. :-) He was telling everyone and their dog (crowing to put it mildly) so I had to call the whole family and let them know as I was scared someone was going to blab on facebook soon enough!

So now you can all know too :-)

Can one of you locals direct me to this, or ask the Betty Crocker Crew over at montreal for me?

http://community.livejournal.com/montreal/3481081.html?thread=27185913#t27185913

A bunch of men arguing about the legal versus societal definition of rape and whether or not it's technically right to say someone wasn't raped if the person forcing unwanted sex on them was mentally retarded since according to the criminal code this means the person isn't responsible for their actions. Including use of the word feminazi.

Indeed.

asking questions and disagreeing with the premise of the "no bottled water" campaign and asking for clarification and engaging in discussion instead of just saying "WOW AWESOME!" is in fact enough to get banned from montreal WTFever. From now on I'll just smile.

Apparently, pointing out the several times Montreal has had water warnings is not appropriate either. Neither is pointing out how culturally insensitive an "our drinking water is totally awesome!" campaign can be for people who come from areas where drinking from the tap is akin to drinking toilet water. Neither is pointing out that some people's tap water may taste funny because of pipes which are often unable to be changed due to cost or the building being rented. Oh and pointing out that saying a place is "family friendly" is akin to saying "black people love us!" in a province where it's illegal to discriminate based on familial status is not cool at all either. Okay. Whatever. Let's hear it for PC cause promotion and lack of discussion.

Oh but apparently it is *totally* okay to harass me in the community for months. This behaviour allows continued posting privileges. montreal mods, go fuck yourselves indeed. I'd tell you in your community, but, well... if I could tell you there, I wouldn't! :-D

x-posted to montreal

Bunnies anyone?
The SPCA sent this out today (I am not Stephanie, I am forwarding it for her).

Hi everyone:

The SPCA is currently quite full of rabbits. As such, we would need your help to foster an animal or aid us in finding foster homes.
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ganked from grammarpolice

I am pretty sure I'd do it as long as we're talking egg or sperm donation here and not surrogacy. I'm not sure I'd be a good candidate for that after the difficult pregnancy I had with CJ. However, I'd only do it if it was handled somewhat like an open adoption. As in the child just grew up knowing they came from my egg or Pat's sperm or whatever, and we could see and interact with the kid like extended family. Favourite aunt and uncle or something like that. Interestingly, I do not think I could do it if it was my egg AND his sperm together. One of the parties would have to be a donor not in our couple.

My opinion has changed wildly on this over the years. Reason? I talked to a woman who was adopted and found her birth mother years later. She (adoptee) became an egg donor because she thought the idea of going through an entire pregnancy and then giving your baby up was just a horrible burden to place on a mother, and that as long as there were women wanting to be mothers, there would continue to be coercion on women in less-than-fabulous circumstances to give up their babies (like how her mom was coerced). So she felt with every egg she donated, that was one less mother coerced into giving a child up. For some reason, that made a lot of sense to me.

Edited to answer the last part of the Q: How it would affect the friendship/relationship would depend entirely on who was the recipient!

Went to Where the Wild Things Are, IMAX Experience tonight.

No spoilers, but, WOW. All I can say is I went into this terrified I would hate it and that it would suck, and I was extremely impressed. I was amazed at how good it was and how much emotion it evoked in me and the girls (I went with Kay and her best friend Gillian). We were wondering how they could do it, and well, we were... freaking amazed at what happened. Amazing. And it's not just love for the book making us say that. The movie is a stand alone masterpiece as well.

Just. WOW.

Someone you know MIGHT be HERE
http://communities.canada.com/montrealgazette/blogs/cityeye/archive/2009/10/09/the-gazette-s-election-panel-week-one.aspx

that I am all giddy I am now friends with Cyrus Frakes on facebook?

Also, how come I LOVE KotC but cannot even watch commercials for Toddlers and Tiaras?

sourdick, this one's for you:
http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/story.html%3Fid%3D2061726

In other "Keeping Up With the KHBs" news... We're playing NHL2K10, and the announcer speaks in French when you play in Montreal. I seriously thought my husband was going to pee his pants.

I did this tonight, just, out my backside, for fun.

You should know I am allergic to measures, so, well, improvise!
I would normally not share because of my allergies to measures, but this was so good, I cannot in good conscience deny you the pleasure.

1 pork roast
3 cinnamon sticks
4 apples cut in quarters, cored
1 white onion
a few sweet potatoes (yams)
some mushrooms
about 1/4 cup maple syrup
8 cubes of brown sugar (I had cubes laying about, you might well have granulated, whatever)
a smidgen of ground cloves
some chicken broth

Dump it all in your crock on low about oh, 4-6 hours.

Eat, cry. Please do share your improvisations!

can I lay out a whole room of toys and CJ makes a beeline for the laptop cord?

CJ needs a new car seat. We only drive with him once a week or so, and so I did not notice until this weekend that he is plain too tall for his infant seat.

When my other two were little, I was absolutely obsessive about car seats (two dead immediate family members from car wrecks does that to you). And, well, everything else. This time? Not so much. It's overwhelming me. So I come to y'all here. I can't figure out any advantage one has over the other and the whole process of choosing is overwhelming me.

It's going in a '94 Corolla. (Why yes, Toyotas do run forever!)

is there such a thing as a stylist trained in the last 10 years who will not use a razor to cut someone's hair?

It just leaves me looking full of split ends. And I do not dry my hair, and I never ever will unless for an extremely special occasion and maybe not even then, so I'm sick of cuts that only look good when using a blow dryer and round brush (aka -razor cuts).

Meh. My hair is almost long enough to start pulling back again. So not ever cutting it again.

I admit to being an avid reader at Gosselins Without Pity: gosselinswithoutpity.blogspot.com/

I admit to snarking along with them at nearly everything.

But there's one trend there that really irks me, and keep in mind how much it pains me to say anything nice about that wretched person Kate. I do appreciate her and her fame for one thing: Now when people ask me why I won't have a hospital birth, I can point directly to her and say "because every L&D nurse I have ever encountered has that nasty personality" and they basically shut up.

But the trend that irks me is the trend to rip on her appearance. There's just something so nasty about grown women ripping on one another's looks. Weren't we supposed to get over that in high school? Don't we get enough lookism from the media? Do we really need to weigh in on it with one another on top of it? Can't on this one little point we stick together?

Sometimes, the posters strike me as being from rural holes in the wall as they refer to her "hoochie mama" clothing choices. Maybe it's because I live in the Sin City of the North, but she looks like most any well put together 34 year old mom I know who has the body for what she wears. If I wore that here, no one would look twice. A few people might actually call me boring. And my 47 year old stepmother dresses rather similarly. If anyone dared call her a hoochie mama within my hearing range they'd have some explaining to do.

But they wouldn't.

See the internet affords that. I sincerely doubt anyone would flip and freak about "omg you look like a slut" to her face.

Recently, a poster shared this quote:
There comes a time when a woman needs to stop thinking about her looks and focus her energies on raising her children. This time comes at the moment of conception. A child needs a role model, not a supermodel. ~Astrid Alauda, on the "hot mom" trend

I don't know Astrid Alauda. I have never seen her. But the first thought that popped into my head reading that was "you sound fat." I have never see a woman rip on another woman's appearance who could in fact call herself attractive. Sorry, I just haven't. Women who are well put together and happy with their appearance (and I mean really are, not claim they feel fabulous and sexy in their 300 lb bodies with a hair cut from 1990 and land's end wardrobe circa 1998) don't slam other women for trying to look good. Now maybe my assumption can be construed as woman bashing too, fair enough. But I am trying to suggest one "consider the source." I think it speaks volumes more about how a woman feels about herself when she criticizes another woman for even trying to look good versus what it says about a woman trying to look good.

Now, maybe Alauda was trying to tell women to cut themselves some slack, don't feel so bad if you're not a size four. I have more than one friend who looks absolutely stunning for an adult mother closer to 50 than 22, but but spends most of her time whining and hating herself for not losing her last 15 lbs. It's unattractive to put it mildly, and someday she's going to look back and say "wow I was perfectly lovely, too bad I was too busy feeling insecure instead of getting over myself and having fun and appreciating myself." So yeah, that kind of advice is good for women like her. "Relax a little, this isn't America's Next Top Model." But taken out of context, that quote can have a snarky "well that's nice you look nice but it's really unnecessary" demeaning tone to it.

So on one hand, we have a society bemoaning the women who after childbirth turn into the lesbian soccer mom sloth creature, making herself unattractive to her husband and the world at large. We remind her that her husband would like sex sometime this decade and not with the androgynous beast she has become. It is implied if not outright stated that if her husband strays during this time, it's her fault for not going back to the lovely woman she was before kids. We pressure her to get in shape since then she'll have more energy and live longer "for the kids." Then, when she does look good, even with a bit of plastic surgery for help like with Kate's tummy tuck, we rip her to shreds for daring to look good or think about herself. Can't win for losing.

So fine, complain about the exploitation, the lack of privacy for the kids (did we really need to see poops in the toilet?) the idea that somehow paparazzi are invading her privacy while they shoot the exact same things TLC are, the whining about the paparazzi when they could just go in their back yard instead of right out front, the nasty, ugly, mean, vindictive way she speaks to... anyone, but let's lay off the appearance bashing. It's petty, juvenile, and makes the other claims suspect by the very nature of being so petty and juvenile. And in a world where women are constantly judged and evaluated on their appearance, by everyone from the grocer to their husbands to people on the street, can't we cut out just *one* element and refuse to participate in that kind of patriarchal induced misogyny?

12noon Saturday: Left for Kate's horseriding lessons in BFNowhere past west island practically Ontarioville. Dropped Junior and Pat off at Grandma's on the way (you know it's far when Vaudreuil is along the way).
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