I know EXACTLY what a keyless chuck is.

Last night an incident occurred which made it necessary for me to disassemble the bed frame. (Just bear with me here.) Steven had assured me that he would fix the bed while I was at work today, but when I arrived home, lo and behold (ahem), the mattress was still leaning up against one wall of our hallway, and the box springs was sitting cockeyed, partially on the frame. There were various pieces of hardware strewn about the floor. As it turned out, he had very valiantly made a trip to the hardware store and attempted to fix the bed, only to be stymied by a stubborn piece of an old bolt that would NOT come out of its little hiding hole to be replaced.

So when I walked in the front door, I was met with the still inflated, queen sized, non-matrimonial (that's a whole other story) air mattress that we slept on last night. The still inflated, queen sized, non-matrimonial air mattress that was still occupying the entire expanse of the living room floor. We live in a very small, two bedroom apartment. A very small. Two bedroom. Apartment. Did I mention that it is small? So there is a fully inflated air mattress taking up residence in the living room, a full sized mattress leaning up against the wall of a very short, very narrow hallway, and in the cluttered master bedroom, there is a broken bed frame and a set of box springs.

I am about to have to go pick up my three-yr-old son at daycare. And bring him home to a living room with an inflatable air mattress occupying the entire floor space, a hallway partially blocked by a mattress, and a bedroom with...do I seriously have to explain this again? You get the point. I am not happy.

So, in a rare fit of taking-matters-into-my-own-hands-I-am-woman-hear-me-roar-watch-my-perfectly-efficient-use-of-power-tools fueled energy blast, I decided that rather than trying to fix the frame, I'm just going to take the whole thing apart, cart it out to the garage, and set the box springs and mattress directly on the floor. We're moving in two months anyway; I can deal with this arrangement for two months. Then maybe I'll buy a new and improved, bigger, less likely to break bed frame.  

So first things first, I need to deflate the air mattress and put it and all the extra bedding away. After approximately thirty minutes of wrestling around on the floor with the big hunk of velour-topped plastic, folding and rolling and mashing it this way and that in an attempt to makeitfit back in the stupid bag it came in, it is time for me to go pick up the little dude.

Once home, he immediately wants to play video games, so I figure I still have a chance to get the rest of this pesky problem under control and not have to sleep on the couch tonight. I grab my MY MY (yet another story) new cordless drill and stalk down the hallway to the bedroom. I'm barking like Tim Allen from Home Improvement and I'm ready to use a power tool! After I've removed the first couple of bolts, Eliot wanders down the hall, still partially in his Little Big Planet-induced coma, to see what's going on. Once he discovers what I'm doing in the bedroom, and that it involves tools, the PS3 controller is hastily set aside in favor of the cordless drill. I let him spin it around in the empty holes when I'm not using it.

To make a long story not all that much shorter, let's just say that the frame was successfully taken apart, amid much discussion/explanation of nuts and bolts and washers, and why we don't drill people or the apartment walls, only holes in furniture that are already there.

It was kind of a revelation, getting this task accomplished on my own, and letting Eliot "help." [It was like the antidote to the stunt I pulled last night, wherein I screamed "Girl! I'm a Girl! Giiiiiiiiiirlllll!" to explain to Panepinto why HE needed to be the one to take the trash out at midnight in the freezing cold.] All joking aside, it's important to me that Eliot grow up seeing me as a self-sufficient person, a woman who fixes her own problems rather than waiting for a man to fix them for her. It's important to me that I be that person, and important for me to show that person to my son. As these self-satisfied thoughts were dancing through my mind, I quickly came to the conclusion (and broadcast it as my latest Facebook status) that "I need to periodically use power tools to assemble/disassemble things around the house so that my son will grow up with a full appreciation of what a total badass his momma is."

I figure this tactic will be more suitable than explaining to him why the bed broke in the first place, which, basically, is also because Momma is AWESOME.


Flashback: "Why are you taking the bed apart, Mom?"
"Because it's broken."
"How did it get broken?"
"Well...I think...probably...it just was getting old...or something."

Not every Mommy does.

We've had a rough week here; with sickness and Snowmageddon 2011, Eliot and I have not left the house in three full days. I'm feeling better, but he is still coughing and streaming snot from out his nose. Last night he was up a half a billion times. He'd start talking nonsense, stringing random words together into unintelligible sentences until he'd wake up crying uncontrollably. I keenly remembered the way it was caring for him when he was a newborn infant, and by keenly remembered, I mean my body remembered the movements that it kept making even after I had passed the point of exhaustion. Sitting in the rocking chair, my arms wrapped around his little body, my face pressed into his sweet smelling hair, it's difficult to believe there will come a night when he doesn't call out for me.

At some point in the night, after hours of only fitful resting in my bed, Eliot looked up at me, his cheeks flushed pink with fever and said, "I think I'm ready to go back to my own bed. But if I go, Mom, will you turn on my fan and pull the cover up and tuck me?"

"Of course I will." I said, "That's what Mommies do."

Eliot frowned and shook his head. "Well, not ALL Mommies do."

I smiled at him as I lifted him out of bed and into my arms. "Well then," I told him, "You're just an especially lucky boy, because THIS Mommy always does."

Our conversation made me think of the children's book Love You Forever, where the mom drives across town and sneaks into his house to rock her grown son.

Someone bought this book for my youngest sister Libby when she was a baby, and Mom always thought it was kind of creepy. LOL.

"I'll love you forever
I'll like you for always
As long as I'm living
My baby you'll be."

Then when she is old and sick, he in turn rocks her:

I want to be rocked like that when I am an old woman. And I want my cover pulled up and tucked. But leave my fan off, if you please.

Setting sail and home defense.

"Why is there a broom sticking out of your couch?" you may ask. And I would answer, "What broom?" You may think you see a broom, but what you're really glimpsing is the forward cannon, and that isn't my couch: it's a brigantine. That smallish person perched atop the vessel is Pirate Captain Sharkhead, displaying his most furious scowl.

"Pirate Captain Sharkhead?" you ask.

Indeed. He's the scurviest rascal ever to sail the seven seas.

He never travels alone. Meet Captain Sharkhead's first mate, Monkeybrains:

 

 They're the most fearful twosome ever to command a brig.

They fear no sea creature, no matter how horrible.

When creatures attack, they are at the ready!

A smattering of Nerf bullets at short range will surely deter any foes. And if that doesn't work, Pirate Captain Sharkhead will not hesitate to fling his entire weapon at any dastardly creature foolish enough to advance!

I can rest easy at night knowing that I'm fully protected. Captain Sharkhead himself assured me last night, as I tucked him into bed, "Mommy, if any monsters or creatures try to get into our house at night, I will karate chop them. Or probably just shoot them."

Yep. Now that I've seen what the kid can do to an Imaginext lobster, I feel pretty secure.

 Don't let the adorable grin fool you. He's ruthless.

In other, not entirely unrelated news, I should probably spend some time with other adults soon.

Worth the read.

I just finished Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. Highly recommended! It's the story of Cal (born Calliope), a person who is a chromosomal male, but with indeterminate genitalia. Assumed to be a girl at her birth, Calliope is raised as a girl by her parents, but comes to realize the truth about his identity as a teenager and soon comes to live his life as the male Cal. It's a great family saga, spanning three generations of the Stephanides family. It begins "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And with that line, the reader is thrown into the confusion, the guilt, the shame, the secrets, and the insecurity that attend not only Cal but his parents and grandparents.

Cal is a great protagonist, and it felt like a privilege to be there, hearing him unravel the story of his and his family's past. It's as though the telling of his story is what allows Cal to make sense of the whole thing himself.

One of my favorite passages:

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar."

I also liked that the end of the novel is not perfectly resolved; everything isn't packaged in a perfect bow and made to feel nicey-nice. There is resolution, and a satisfying ending, but not at the expense of the integrity of the narrative.

Next up on my reading list? Possibly Lord of the Flies, which I've never read. It's been sitting on my shelf unopened for some time. Any other suggestions for me? What do I absolutely have to read this year?

Worth another watch.

"That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me 'Baby,' and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad."

Oh, you just have to love Dirty Dancing! I had a dream a few weeks ago with Patrick Swayze in it, and when I woke up I had the soundtrack to this movie playing uncontrollably through my mind. So many delicious scenes and fabulous quotes:

"Oh come on, ladies, God wouldn't have given you maracas if he didn't want you to shake 'em!"
"I carried a watermelon."
"Nobody puts Baby in a corner!"

Has there ever been a greater coming-of-age romance story? *sigh*

It's amazing I get ANYTHING done around here when the adorable quotient is so darn high.

I'm working on collecting my thoughts for a post about my work (the job that I actually get paid for, that is), but of course, it has to be perfect, so it hasn't materialized quite yet. While I'm crafting that piece, look how adorable my son is:

Eliot and Steven taking pictures of each other taking pictures...lol.

Mommy trying to stitch something up, but getting distracted by silly boys.

Our next door neighbor requests Eliot's assistance with plowing the snow...

...AND lets him work the control lever.

If I stick my tongue out long enough, I'm sure to taste a flake.

Etsy favorites.

I am completely enamored of everything handmade, so naturally, Etsy is like a drug to me. So much wonderful eye candy in one spot! I actually warned Steven the other day that I may need him to use parental controls to block the website from me because I can get in so much trouble browsing and finding things I can't possibly live without.

Lately I've been drawn to embroidery and other stitching type crafts, but I always love vintage, letterpress, scherenschnitte (paper cutting), pretty much any kind of paper craft. So today I'm sharing some of my most recent favorites. I love looking at them arranged together in a collage. I'm not sure how to describe my style. "Eclectic," maybe? But that's just a cop out. Anyway, here are some of the items I'm loving to look at. I might even have purchased a few of them. I couldn't resist. ;)