Time Flies When You're Busy Staring at Your Baby

I admit it: I'm one of those sappy, stares-at-my-babies kind of moms. Seriously, I make some REALLY good looking kids. It is physically impossible to NOT stare at them. Each one of 'em had/has one of those baby smiles that light up a room and I would and will do anything to see that smile. It just slays me!

My baby girl is officially two months old today. I don't know how that happened. I don't know how she got so big, so fast when, clearly, all I do is look at her.

At her first baseball game. Of COURSE she's rocking a Red Sox onesie.

Experiencing her very first photo bomb, courtesy her biggest brother.

She's knows she's adorable. Also, she hates dresses and will take any opportunity she can to poop on them.

Even her metal scream is adorable.

Seriously?! How can you NOT want to see that face EVERY SINGLE MINUTE?!

Happy birthday, Baby Girl! You light up my world, my heart and my soul. I am grateful for every single solitary second I have you.

I'm still not sure about all the comma rules, so probably shouldn't be lecturing about punctuation.

Saturday night I had the pleasure of seeing at least 15 minutes of The Fiancee's nephew in a high school stage production of "Oklahoma." I would've seen more, but The Lady Gray decided that she wanted to voice her opinion about the production, so I excused myself to allow her to rant all she wanted... in the car.

While pacing in the vestibule, waiting for the rest of our group to exit the auditorium, I happened to notice the signs for one of the bathrooms:

Girl's

Bathroom

(some [probably poorly punctuated] Braille)

Really! This is in a HIGH SCHOOL, y'all! Supposedly a place of learning -- even if not of the higher variety. How in the Hades could this have gone unnoticed? What one lucky girl gets to use this bathroom? Do they have a vote each day? Does the prom queen get to use this bathroom or does she need to find the one that is properly punctuated?

Apostrophe abuse makes me itchy in a big way.

But I probably shouldn't have expected anything less from a school that has intentional textese graffiti all over the entrance. 

Textese makes me break out in hives. Really is it SO difficult to put in the extra letters? We're not paying by the character anymore, People! You can spell the whole word!

This is what scares me about the world I'm leaving to my children. I remember when "ain't" wasn't actually a word. Now it's in the dictionary! We're deliberately dumbing down rather than holding our offspring to a higher standard. Instead of making our kids work their asses off for a trophy, we're handing them out like so much candy to soothe their little wounded egos. 

What. The. Fuck. Is. WRONG with us?!

Look. It's our job as parents to wound our children. No, seriously. It is. (Side note: my mother can now die happy that I admitted that). Because it's our job to teach our kids that the world is a tough motherfucker and she takes no prisoners. I would love nothing more than to save my kids from every heartbreak and hardship they'll encounter, but I would be doing them a disservice. Just like I'd be doing The Monkey a disservice for telling him that his crap-tastic, half-assed paper about the 1936 Olympics was good enough to hand in rather than making him re-write it (I let him off the hook when it would warrant a C. But only because I was tired of arguing with him about it). Or if I let The Nugget hand in his math homework with every answer wrong because "Mrs. Kling will go over it tomorrow in class". 

NO! It's my job to torture my kids and make them sit at the table 'til the job is done. It's my job to yell at them. It's my job to paint a bleak picture of the kind of future they can expect if they continue to accept mediocrity as the standard.

But I'm wicked hard-pressed to enforce these lessons when the schools around here allow apostrophe abuse to go unchecked and humor textese, because my kids will know I'm full of shit. They'll know that the world at large accepts half-assery and they will be able to out-argue me. And I won't have the safety net of the world giving them their comeuppance because the world is all, "Meh. I'm too busy watching Breaking Amish. Catch me at the commercial."

I'm the kind of exhausted that parents of a newborn are. Oh wait...

The Lady Gray decided to switch her schedule from nights to days, so was up a goodly portion of last night. Not to mention the fact that we're getting some stormy weather around here and, like my middle child, she's a baby barometer, too. Cranky and fussy, she is, and I just feel so badly for her.

She's down for a nap now and I'm hoping that it will last long enough for me to hop in the shower and then put my contacts in. Oh, glorious contact lenses! How I've missed you. While I do look pretty fancy in glasses, I can't help but reflect on Dorothy Parker's assessment of them:

"Boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses"

Which makes me feel decidedly un-sexy. Not that my usual uniform of a tank top and jammy bottoms helps matters much. Or the lack of make up, post-natal acne and hair tossed into a very unattractive pony tail. It's a wonder how The Fiance™ can even think of having another baby.

All of this rambling is to say that I have to leave in a couple of hours to go get The Nugget and take him to his orthodontist consultation. Yes, dear readers, it is possible that I will have another one in braces soon. But in the mean time, I'm enjoying to quiet of the house and doing my level best to ignore the pile of dishes that need doing and the laundry that needs folding. Because I'm tired and I'm supposed to be honoring that and sleeping when the baby does, instead of gulping down a cup of coffee (the one a day I'm allowed while nursing) and fighting the urge to sleep.

Because time moves too quickly these days and before I know it, I'll be returning to work full time and trusting my baby with someone else. Not an easy thing for this mama to wrap her head around, even if I am leaving her with an aunt and uncle her love her to the point of worship.



Edit: Guess who just woke up? I'll get to that shower later, I suppose.