Happy Holidays

Our holiday season was marked by pajama days and lots and lots of boxes from Amazon. Our families were generous beyond belief and we had a wonderful time honoring everyone's traditions and spending time together.

We ate copious amounts of peanut brittle in an effort to get the recipe just right, and had a wonderful pancake breakfast on Christmas day.

Somehow, we actually managed to treat Nick's birthday like it's own event instead of an extension of Christmas.

It was easily one of the most relaxing and fun holiday seasons I've ever known.

I'm looking forward to ringing in the new year with champagne and crab legs, a new Dugan family tradition!

Cheers to you and yours.

Drinking day old coffee

With cream.

That is NOT mine.

I have no way to justify or defend this very disgusting action. I'm tired. I need it. No time or money to bring my own coffee, so here we go.

I'm sorry.

It's your birthday

Your sticky fingers rummage through my desk drawers in search of treasures. A pen, and hot pink sticky-tabs are clutched tightly, proving your competence at office management. In the near future we'll apply for your work permit so that you can help me with data entry and answering phones, tasks you have already mastered. You've removed a lid to a pen and are taking notes on a piece of paper you stole from my filing cabinet.

Last week you tried to unlock my office's front door so you could run outside on the concrete, seeking freedom on the black asphalt of my parking lot. Two days ago you tried to "assist" your father by plugging in his laptop charger.

Today, for your birthday, you got you a flu shot, because we love you and we do not want you to keep getting sick. Sorry it hurt, but today was the only day they had an opening. We also got you some awesome hippy toys and a book.

I'll end with this quote by Steve Almond:

I walk her from room to room and whisper my secret vows of love, and Baby yells and weeps and chokes on her tears. Her face appears frozen in a gummy frown. Her ears are tiny red seashells. There is a hot momentum to her misery; she is speaking in tongues, an ecstatic. It is her right as a citizen of earth, this aria of sorrow, this abject declaration. She puts everything she is, every ounce of her, into each shriek. Her breath is so sweet I want to climb inside her mouth. I kiss her cheek and she cries harder.

It's been an amazing, wonderful, challenging year. I love that you are mine and I am yours.


Xoxo,

Mama

You know you're grown up when ...

The title, "Because I'm old," would be okay too.

Because I am old and have a kid and own a home, my priorities have changed. Now, instead of spending money on wine or martinis and male prostitutes, I horde my money for months, obsessively checking my ING balance, only to spend it on a water softener from Sears.

Being excited about this purchase says both something about my station in life as well as the quality of the water in Woodland. The water is so hard that the first few months we lived there my skin peeled relentlessly; I still have to apply a very thick layer of Cetaphil within minutes of showering otherwise my entire body itches and feels stripped of all oil. Our neighbors have had to replace valves in their brand new toilets because of calcification, and if you don't squeegee the shower immediately after using it, the glass doors are covered in scale to the point they are opaque. Hell, they're covered in scale even if you do squeegee, but it helps a little. Our coffee maker struggles to brew a pot of java in the time it takes me to get ready in the morning, and our brand new black refrigerator has a stream of white residue from the water/ice maker that needs to be scraped off with a metal file. Our brand new washer has gone from spewing forth hot water like a geyser in Yellowstone to having it trickle out ever so slowly, and lucky for us our white clothes are now a dingy shade of yellow.

This is my very long winded way of saying that I cannot wait for this salt bearing behemoth to make my skin feel slimy with soap residue, and that being old is very good indeed. Who needs martinis when you can shower and not be itchy?

Random Access Memory

I just installed 2 additional gigs of memory on my computer at work. It was awesomely fun. Woo me.