My funny blogger friend Leslie did up a funny video post of how she came to have 17 cats… and now she needs to give them all away. So check out her post … and if you live in Ohio, maybe take a kitty or two off of her hands. Cuz’ she’s a busy lady even without taking care of 17 cats.

As a side note: if you live in Denver, my sister has 4 kittens she needs to give away before she moves out this way. Those tiny little furry faces are the one thing standing in the way of her move. So if you live in that vicinity, take one or two of hers.  Because I’d like to see my sister soon.

It’s a Cat-Stravaganza! All kitties must go!!

I’d been planning my HUGE post about me being pregnant, unveiling the AWESOME news of me being with child. The post was going to be fantastic and hilarious, and it was going to contain witty stick figure drawings and pie charts and several other ha-frickin-larious things.

I’d been planning it for weeks. Because, I mean, I found out about this baby over a month ago. But the hilariousness just isn’t coming to me. Along with everything else (like the birthday party planning and the cub scout planning) the Ultimate-Prego post is falling victim to my “pea soup brain”. It’s a real medical term, or at least it should be. I found out recently that I can’t crack jokes now that I’m pregnant. It saddened me to learn it. There I was, at my mom’s house, joking around with my brother (my family gets totally goofy and jokey when we all get together) and I can’t even remember what I was joking about (the memory also faileth) but the basic punchline was something about chainmail. You know, like, metal shirts. But I couldn’t think of the term “chainmail” so I was just saying “blah blah, haha, you know, like, that metal shirt thingy?…” and everyone was trying to figure out what I was talking about. And it totally made the joke not funny. So then I started crying and I screeched, “Damn it. I can’t crack jokes anymore.” And then everyone gave me a pity laugh, and assured me that I was still frickin hilarious, but I knew that they were all pity laughs just meant to apease the hormonal prego chick, so I stabbed them all, and then went to the kitchen and ate some pickles. *sigh* Just another thing that goes out the window when you’re baking a bun… And sadly the same is true in my writing. It’s not funny. I can’t think of what I’m trying to say. Or when I do know what I’m trying to say, I will almost definitely spell it wrong. Which also makes it not funny.

So because I have lost all humor mojo, you will just have to deal with a regular non-funny post describing the events surrounding my pregnancy. Wait, no… I don’t mean the sexy parts about getting pregnant (we all know how that’s done, right?)… I just mean how I found out that I’m pregnant. So sometime around the end-ish part of April, I got the flu. I was down for several days, like, the kind of sick where you seriously can’t get out of bed. Towards the end of my flu-week, I noticed that I was picking up on smells like I do when I’m pregnant. Like, I could smell the candle in the living room while I was still standing in my bedroom… and the candle wasn’t even burning. I have bionic nostrils when I’m pregnant. So that was my first clue. I went to Rite-Aid and bought a generic test, just to rule out being pregnant (since I had a doctor tell me a few months ago that I have bum ovaries). So I take the test, and it comes out negetive, but then I notice that the control line never actually showed up. Meaning that maybe the test didn’t work. But I think to myself: Suz, stop being so neurotic. It says no. So a few more days go by, and my bionic sense of smell gets stronger (I can smell french fries from the Burger King two miles down the street…) So one day after picking up Zoe from kindergarten I decide to go the my doctor’s office to do a real test. Once again, I’m thinking that it’s going to be negetive. I’m just ruling it out. So I go into the office with Zoe. Zoe sits in the little blood pressure chair while I go into the bathroom to tinkle in a cup. I put the cup in the little cubby thing and wash my hands. In the time it takes me to wash my hands and round the corner, the nurse says to me, “Well, it’s already positive.” I think I said, “What?!?” or something… maybe it was something in Yiddish. I don’t really remember what I said, but I started kind of crying because I was just shocked. Zoe, reading my face, looked at the nurse and said, “I. Am. Going. To. Die.” and fell out of the chair onto the floor. (I’m not kidding.) Then she started crying. But she was, like, sobbing and saying “I don’t want another baby! No! I don’t want a baby!” while the nurse told me my due date and tried to smile while my daughter was in the obvious throws of a panic attack. I drug Zoe to the desk to make my first appointment, and she was still begging me to not make her have a brother or sister. She was on the floor, sobbing, when a nurse asked her if she wanted a lollipop. She chose one from the basket while she wailed, “Pleeeeeease, mommmmmyy….” But let’s face it: a lollipop was not going to fix everything that was broken in her world now. Had I known the whole thing was going to be so traumatic for her, I wouldn’t have taken her with me. But again, I was honestly thinking it was going to be negetive. *sigh* The whole day was a blur of tears.

But we’ve had a month to get used to the idea. Zoe is okay now, because I told her that now she will get to be a little sister AND a big sister. For the moment, that seems pretty cool to her. Jachin is so excited he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s already a great big brother, we have no worries about how he’ll do.

I’m due December 20th, and both of my other kids were 5 days overdue. Do the math on that one, sparky. (Zoe was in tears again when she heard that, because what if she has to open presents Christmas day without me?? What if Santa misses me and I don’t get any presents?) I assured her that I’d already have the baby and be home by then. It’s all about being induced, baby. And all I want for Christmas is an epidural.

(ps- My apologies for the shifting tenses in this post. Grammar, along with humor and partying planning, goes right out the window.)

So it took me a week or so, but I finally realized that in my post about pets, I totally spelled Betta fish “Beta” fish… like beta testing. Which is pretty much what my hubby does for a living. Which is where my mind is. So our fish are not Chinese Fighting Fish, they are nerdy test fish. (And by the way, testing isn’t going so well, because they just all kind of die eventually.)

And more of the nerd-stink rubbing off on me? I’ve been walking around for days singing “Still Alive”, the end song to the sweet spacial intelligence challenging game Portal. If you have no idea what I’m talking about — if you’ve never heard that song or you’ve never heard of that game — it’s okay. It means you are not a nerd. I, on the other hand, am becoming a nerd via osmosis. I bump up against my husband and I get a little smarter (which is nice), but then I invariably start talking about nerd-ish stuff. Even if I don’t want to. Because I sort of hate that song!!

…but I 5-starred the vocals to it on Rock Band…

on Hard mode.

uber-Nerd.

In truth, though, the game came out last fall and I’m just now singing about it. Hard Core nerds were singing it at Thanksgiving. At least this is what I tell myself as comfort… while I practice my Rubik’s Cube algorithms.

My kids are currently obsessed with the show Unbeatable Banzuke. It’s a Japanese show that airs on the G4 network (by the by, it’s just about the ONLY show on G4 suitable for kids… even the commercials are unkid-ish). The Unbeatable Banzuke is a close cousin to the show Ninja Warrior, if you’ve ever seen that. The premise is a crazy array of obstacles, done in a variety of ways. There is a course for mountain bikes (a short video below).

I think it’s awesome that the word “mountain bike” in Japanese is “mountain bike”.

There is also a course for pojo sticks, a course for unicycles, a course for stilts, a course for walking on your hands, a course for skateboards, etc.,… and there’s a special course called Niko de Drive in which one person pushes around another person in a wheelbarrow painted like a cat. It’s fantastic fun.

So when I asked Jachin what kind of party he was thinking of for his birthday (which is in 4 days), it should have been zero surprise to me that he shouted out “Unbeatable Banzuke”!! I stared at him blank faced for a moment as he stared at me with is mouth still hanging open from shouting “Unbeatable Banzuke” in a Japanese accent, eyes wide, waiting to see what I would say. So I finally said this:

“How the crap would we do that?”

To which he said, “Just make some sweet obstacles in the backyard for me and my friends.”

“Well, okay, like what kinds of obstacles? Like, a balance beam?”

“Cooler and harder than a balance beam, mom,” he said, in the voice that always indicates that I’m a big nerd.

So I imagined painting up our rusty wheelbarrow to look like a big, pink cat. Then I said, “So, like, a rope climb?”

“No!” he shouted. “I can’t do a rope climb! I can’t have something at my party that I can’t even do!”

(At this point, Zoe ran off to fashion a pair of stilts from the take-out chop sticks in the kitchen drawer.)

So then I tried to think of something cool, awesome, creative, and harder than a balance beam but easier than a rope climb, which kids would find entertaining but which wouldn’t (knock on wood) cause any broken bones. And dude, I’ve got nothing. Have I mentioned that my brain has been pea soup as of late?

At this point I said, “So, like, Chuck E. Cheese?”

*a SIGH bigger than I knew his lungs could produce*

“Yeah, fine, Chuck E. Cheese…”

Tuesday, Zoe had her official Kindergarten Graduation Ceremony at her school. There was a lively music presentation, a slide show, and many, many pictures taken by all parents in attendence. Unfortunately for Zoe, her mom takes really crappy pictures. I’m going to call around to see if anyone else took any better shots of my kid. Ridiculous. Also… I never clean off my memory card in the camera. So when I get to a big event — like my daughter’s graduation — I always  encounter the “Memory Card Full” message flashing on the screen. And there I am clearing off pictures from our Disneyland vacation from 5 months ago, swearing under my breath, while she does cute stuff that I’m totally missing.

Here is a crappy shot of her in her mortarboard cap thingy.

Yeah, that’s where all of that tuition money goes. Caps and gowns for 6 year olds. But man, it’s stinkin cute. And where did the last year go? I wasn’t even finished being freaked out that my baby is IN kindergarten, and now she’s DONE with kindergarten. I can’t keep up. My brain is slow. I should probably start calling around for wedding venues now… just so this mental lag doesn’t screw things up 15 or 20 years from now.

But the ceremony was fabulous. School is finished. The graduate is doing well. She’s planning to do some backpacking through Europe this summer before starting first grade in the fall. Also, all kinds of shinanigans are planned for Cabo next month.  The bikinis and beer bongs are packed.

Mama ain’t ready.

Yesterday morning, Zoe’s Beta fish died. I’d known for several days that it was coming. The fish was all HUGE, like, it was not going to the fishy restroom like it was supposed to. Something was wrong with it. I warned Zoe that it just wasn’t looking so good, but she assured me that she had been feeding it daily — just the right amount of food — and she was changing it’s water every Saturday. And all of that was true. She took very good care of her fish. But it wasn’t in the cards for poor Annaliese (that was the Beta’s regal, girlie name… even though I think it was technically a boy). So when she woke up yesterday morning and saw Annaliese floating sideways and all discolored (I think there may have even been a tiny tongue hanging from it’s mouth), she started bawling. I assured her that it was nothing that she had done. She’d done well in her caring Beta stewardship. Fish just die. And the only thing that takes away the pain of losing a beloved pet is immediately replacing it with something cooler.

So last night we headed to PetSmart to get a new fish. A cooler fish. A brighter-colored fish. Oh, and it had to be a girl. So we found a pretty blue Beta marked “female” and picked it up. I got a new one for the bowl in my room (as my Beta, Spaz, has been gone for at least a good 8 months… it was time to move on) and Jachin got a new Beta for the bowl in his bedroom (since his last Beta, Cool Blue, had died of starvation and lack of attention nearly a year ago). The girl at the check out rang up our fish and then said to me, “Now, you know these all have to go in separate bowls, right?” And I said, “Oh, we like to put them all in one bowl and watch them fight it out to the death, betting on which one will be the last one swimming.” I didn’t really say  that. But I totally wanted to. I then noticed that I didn’t have my wedding ring on, and when I go anywhere with my children without sporting a wedding ring and make-up, I’ve realized that people think I’m the kids’ stupid 14  year old sister.  It’s irritating.

Here are the new fish, along with their new names:

Zoe’s new fish –a girl — to be named either Abby or Rozalina. Zoe can’t decide yet.

Jachin’s new fish (who will no doubt be subjected to the same neglect as the last fish) named Mario.

My new Beta (he looks totally mean, right?) named Rocky Razor.

Before we left the store, we meandered down the hamster/guinea pig/rat aisle. We found the freakin cutest dwarf hamsters you’ve ever seen. I really wanted to get one or two, but ultimately resisted. One of them was trying furiously to break out. The anxiety of living at the pet store was just more than his little two-inch body could bear. I so wanted to take him home. The kids did, too. I took a video documenting his cute neurotic nature.

You’ll hear Jachin listing his 10 reason’s to buy this sweet little hamster. I like number 7: his food tastes like cereal. Don’t ask me how my son knows that hamster food tastes like cereal. (And what kind of cereal do I make my kids eat?!)  The people walking down the aisle next to us thought that was an interesting observation as well. Stupid 14 year old sister, making her little brother eat hamster food!!