Decking the halls and then hitting the Bailey's

Just finished up my Christmas shopping today, woo hoo!!!

These are the little gems I procured while shopping with my tiny evil genius today.

At my hubby's work a well dressed and quite proper woman set my daughter up for her FIRST. AWESOME. JOKE! She has been trying joking lately but most of them have been pretty meh.
To be clear I am not sure how much the woman appreciated it but Sam and the staff at his workplace thought it was as golden, as did I.

The woman looked at Molly in her pigtails and cuteness and said "Wow, don't you have the most beautiful red hair!" to which Molly replied "Yep, I'm a redhead. Better than a redneck!" and then guffawed like a drunk maniac...I am so proud.

Next we popped by Santa's workshop at ye olde mall, where she proceeded to place an order with Santa for "a fish, a duck, a swan and a mermaid" A slightly older man overheard her request and asked if she wanted real animals which earned him a seriously scrunched up nose. "of course not! They would poop all over Santa's bag!" and then as we walked away she gave me a conspiratorial look and said "Mom, that guy doesn't know mermaids aren't real! Do you believe that?"

She was clearly filled with the spirit of the season, and I don't mean that of the psycho shoppers. She hugged EVERYONE we met up with today, invited the woman at the grocery store to come meet our chickens and eat some eggs and told her that the eggs "Just POP! Right out of the Chicken Buts! Can you believe it? It's CRAZY!"

She told me Jeff, our friend who prints my stickers and canvases, was "just wonderful" and on the drive over wondered aloud if she told him she loved him if he would say he loved her back. She told me he is such an amazing guy for "just printing all those stickers and having water and candy in his office." and when we arrived at Jeff's she shyly blurted out "Jeff! I just love you!" and thankfully she WAS rewarded with an "i love you" in return. In the truck on the way home she said, "I am so glad he loved me back, if he didn't I was going to hide in my own pants."

And then the piece de resistance was her "Christmas Song", a real gem. After a day of shopping on the drive home Molly asked me if she could sing me a Christmas song. And now I share it will all of you in all it's yuletide glory.

"Cats eat birds, and dogs eat birds.
They grab up the birds and they crunch, crunch crunch.
Kittens eat birds, yep bi-i-irds,
they all eat birds and they chew them all up.
They chew chew chew chew cheee--ee-ew
What comes next? Well they go outside
and of course they take a po-oo-ooop"

Merry Christmannukaholidaykwanzayule.

If your children are a reflection of you, I am a pantless smart ass

Evidence of my smartassery. I love to decorate my pets.

A few weeks ago Molly proved to me once again it is better for us to have dinner parties at home. We have only lived in the woods now for a few months, but already she is only a loincloth and some fuzzy cartoon singing friends away from being a vine-swinging, yodelling half monkey.

Admittedly dinner was a three meat carnivorous feast fit only for cave people, and so maybe she went meat stupid, I can only assume at this point. But immediately after dinner Molly asked politely to be excused, then proceeded to stand in front of the table, rip off her dinner cape - yes your read that right - then her shirt, then her everything else, and start mooning everyone and doing a little naked dance while yelling "Party Naked! Party Naked! Party Naked!"

Thankfully I wasn't hosting Martha Stewart and her entourage on this fine evening. I think they would have taken one look at the carelessly hung Christmas lights in the yard and hightailed it out before dinner - or I, or Molly's nude dancing - had a chance to offend.

So with that little performance as the beginning, we head into the dreaded Christmas season. Up until the ginger beast was born, Sam and I were unified by -among other things- a mutual distaste for all things Christmas. When Molly came into the world we have been slowly letting Christmas eek into our lives with every more consciously human year. But we try really really hard not to let her get all caught up in the consumer crapness after her her third Christmas, when I bought her a piano and Sam bought her a baby quad and her family members seemingly bought out a mall and she just drove the quad straight at the piano and played music in a catatonic state and refused to come down from her quad/piano hybrid vehicle to even look at the other presents. So after that we have put a bit of a simmer on Christmas psychosis.

As soon as the snow began to fall I slipped into one of those "I will never.." hypocrite things that a mom thinks she will never do. And then does. See what she didn't know until having a child is that using a mythical fat man that B&Es your house and steals your cookies as a pre-Christmas threat is actually brilliance. 

So as Molly and I travel around making merry and sampling way too much other people food she can tend to turn into a raging ginger psychopath and I've found myself telling her that I was going to tell Santa if she didn't stop being naughty. Once again she found a way to prove to me that it is only a matter of time - by which I mean 3-4 weeks - before she is smarter than me. 

It started when I decided to decorate the living shit out of our living room. First attempt, I was getting a little too merry with the rum and eggnog all by myself, got tired of decorating and just went with dancing around to Culture Club with a garland boa until I tripped over some ornaments. Second attempt I just decorated Kevin Costner to look like a garland lion, and he looked freaking amazing. And third time's a charm, I got my shit together, and accomplished some real decorating.

Isn't he Costneriffic?

I crept in after decorating to tell her to come see, and I found her watching a cartoon where a hippo was on fire,annoying the living shit out of my daughter who said plainly, "Idiot! Stop drop and roll!" and let out an exasperated sigh.

Then she came downstairs, held her hands close to her heart like some orphan in a made-for-tv movie, and yelled "Mom! It's SPLENDID! (Splendid? WTF?) Santa is going to LOVEITSOOOOMUCH!!" making all my failed attempts, and giving up my Christmas loathing, totally worth it.

The next morning I found her on her Kermit phone; "Sh, mom. I'm talking to Santa" and when she got off the phone she said in an oh-so-serious tone. "Mom, I have just been talking to Santa, and HE told ME I could be naughty OR nice this year." ...well then.

Apparently she gets an OK from the big guy

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Fantastic Kwanzaa or whatever floats your boat.

xoxo love,
Lucy D., Sam, Molly, KevinCostner, Oliver McPoot, Lubba Tub, Meuwford, MeowMeow and of course, Star Kitty.

6 reasons to seriously consider breeding with redheads

To whomever came up with the phrase "terrible twos"...
Since you are probably dead, I feel as though I owe it to new parents everywhere to bitchslap your descendents. The reason for this is that I coasted through those twos thinking "THIS is as bad as it gets? Wicked, this is a cakewalk!!" Molly at two was a redheaded angel, an absolute cherub of nicety. Three was a delightful preview of four to come. And as if she magically knew it was time for a change, on her fourth birthday Molly began to make the terrible twos seem like an instagrammed version of a sunny day with Winnie Cooper from the Wonder Years.

So here are 6 gems that only this week came out of the mouth of a girl who is obviously superfantastically adorable as a natural defence so I don't feel compelled to sell her.

1. Molly observes me struggling through the house with a giant load of wood while she is playing with her megablocks
"Molls could you please open the gate for mom?"
   "I'm super busy engineering right now mom, but you can do it yourself, I just know it!"

2. Molly is playing with the herd of six kittens before bed one night looking very very sweet until she throws down this creepy idea;
"hey kittens, do you want to play knife knife?"

3. Again with the kittens.
"Mom, I want to call this one TickleBum"
Me not exactly hearing her; "Sorry, you want to call a kitten TickleTrunk?"
"No, mom! TICKLEBUM! Tickletrunk, that's just stupid."

4. Picking up my little ginger spice from preschool;
"Hey kid, how was school?"
"So good mom! Nobody even got freaking mad at me today!"

5. Bringing a new friend over
"That's Meowmeow, she is really nice, that's Meuwford, he will try and kill you."
...resulting in a child who is now terrified of cats...great.

6. ...needs no intro
"Hey Molly, come eat dinner."
      "Dinner smells like ass mom." (with her thumb in the air, suggesting that this is something she heard but does not understand it to be very insulting.)

Poop is funny

I think I have covered my bases pretty well this far, but if you find poop offensive, or the word fuck, move on. There are really cute blogs about crafts and lovely children, and this is not one of those.

When I was younger I had dogs and cats and whatnot, and I was really the most squeamish of humans. If our super old and partially evil terrier happened to poop in the house and I happened to be the first one "on scene" I would clean it, but in the most dramatically disgusted manor, and with a LOT of gagging.

Parenthood, if you haven't had the chance to experience it, throws your squeamish and disgusted ways right out the door so very very fast. From the moment your child is born they begin to do pretty disgusting things, and you either sink or swim in all that puke and snot and poop. Honestly I think they make kids superduper adorable so you can forgive them for being so disgusting.

As my friend Al so poignantly explained it; "You will find yourself feeling pretty self-congratulatory, You're out of the house! You don't look like a fucking trainwreck! You've done it! Until some guy in the grocery store behind you taps you on the shoulder and says 'excuse me, but you have puke all down the back of your shirt.'" Parenthood is messy.

So things that i used to find not funny at all I suddenly find hysterical. And poop is most definitely one of those things.

Like the time Sam - who did not change a single diaper until forced to with his own child - screamed from the change table "Oh dear GOD! I have never seen a human shit before! Oh help me she is SHITTING, RIGHTTHISVERYMINUTE! Oh god make it stop!!" To some of you, not so funny perhaps, but to me this was parenthood gold.

When Molly had really and truly aced potty training she then became quite fascinated with poop. In a sciency way. I was sitting with her eating breakfast shortly after telling her how poop is made and in the most maniacally crazy of voices she blurted out; "Hey mom, wanna know something COOL??" If you would go get me an Xray machine, we could watch THIS piece of TOAST, (proudly waving toast in my face for the full effect) bounce bounce bounce down allll my bones and into my tummy and be turned into POOPS!! Isn't that just the coolest?"

She then took this bit of knowledge and used it to shame my friends' mother. I took her to a derby game  and the sweetest of grandmothers offered to look after her. When this lovely grandmother was sitting and chatting with her she once again shared in her usual enthusiastic voice, the story of how poops are made. When said grandma said something along the lines of "wow, I never knew that." She looked at her with utter distaste and said "REALLY? Your mother should have taught you that!"

A few months ago Sam asked me to leave - gasp - my computer for 24 hours. I reluctantly agreed to his spontaneous camping trip, and we ended up having a really great night. On the way home Sam said "so Molly, did you have fun camping?" and she said, "Of course! I pooped in the forest! It was AWESOME!" Nevermind that we spent a night by the lake playing with the dogs, seeing tadpoles and frogs, and swimming and having a great time, she got to shit in the forest! Epic!

And finally, my favourite poop story happened this week. I was talking to a banker - one of my least favourite of all the ways to pass valuable time - and we were working out a timetable. Said snooty banker was going back about 5 years, and as she hemmed and hawed at her screen while keeping me on the phone for a record time considering I have a four year old, she felt the need to ask, "So it seems like about 4 years ago you were both doing quite well with your incomes, and then yours took a serious dip. Is there some sort of reason that your income took such a terrible dip?' to which Molly, with comedic timing Steve Martin would have appreciated, hollered "OHMYGODMOM!! You REALLY need to come see this! I took a HUGE poop, no seriously, it's WEIRD, it's GIANT, it's CRAZY!"

Four

Warning: like most 3d objects I am unfortunately not an entirely one-sided only funny person. If you only wish to laugh, wait until next week, mmmk?

A little under five years ago two balls-to-the-walls nutjobs decided to procreate. Much like the completely insane blending of Jack Russell and Pitbull that made Kevin Costner into the brilliant dog he is today, but still doesn't sound like a great idea on paper, this was a dash of crazy mixed with a pinch of psychotic that made a beautiful redheaded mini-genius.

A few months into this I sat down with my midwife and she tried to figure out my due date. There was a lot of asking me about schedules and bullshit, to which i responded only in my head Who knows that shit? Really people know that?" Apparently a lot of you women do, and whoopity freaking do to you! Cheers you weirdos, way to pencil that shit in.

So we narrowed things down and she came to the due date of Sept.11.09. Well I spent the last 3 months of looking like a narwhal with a digestive problem talking to my little belly like a little league coach. I had no idea what he or she was going to be, because I elected to be surprised. As a side note, parenthood is pretty fucking shocking as is, so if you want to find out what sex your baby is don't worry, there will still be a shit-ton of other surprises waiting for you. So, since I had no idea who I was talking to, I settled on the name Cheeseborn of course, because really that could be a girls or boys name.

I pleaded with Cheeseborn to come early, two days early to be specific. Not only did I want my little human to come into the world on 09.09.09 but I just really really did not want her to come into the world on one of the most tragic days of my time here on earth. Now for all of you who want to mention that there are many more tragedies since, or that there were many before, I get it. I do. But this was a very in-my-face neighbourly tragedy.

I have definitely been accused of being too sensitive, too sad, to deep, thinking too much.  With good reason. It sucks honestly. I spend hours upon hours trying to rescue every dog, crying about people I don't know who suffer all over the world, reading about things that I honestly cannot change but sure as shit wish I could. Sam actually put a stop to me reading the obituaries about two years ago because he thought it was just ridiculous to find me weeping while reading the morning paper. Seriously. What a dork I am! A very cynical human with a very crusty outer shell, but inside a heart of very soft cheese.

So today as I read all the posts about people who are still trying to understand what happened on 9/11, or what is for that matter happening right now, I got up from my chair and I ran. I ran like hell. I have to share my little bit of wisdom that I found on my run this morning, in the hope that it will help you as it helped me.

Focus on what you can, instead of what you can't. If you can no longer stand that people are being cruel to one another in countries you can't help, focus on helping one person today where you live. If you hate that there is still animal poaching going on in countries you can't reach and nobody seems to give a shit, put your time into protecting the wildlife right in your own.

And if the weight of cruelty that people have inflicted in our lifetime on one another is too much to bear for you right now, then look at someone who has no cruelty in them at all and put all of your effort into making sure that they stay that way. Right now I have a human in my life who just turned four, and who makes every.single.person she meets -from the store clerk down the street to the 8 kids she goes to daycare with -into her best friend. If you are a parent make it your responsibility to make sure that your tiny humans grow up with this kind of easy open love, protected and encouraged. Maybe we can make sure the next generation of humans corrects the seriously large fuckups of the last. I know how bleak the planet, the world and human nature can seem but not if you look right in your own backyard.

I don't want to ignore those without kids, because I genuinely see them doing this very thing. Donating to projects that are being created to fix the mess we've made. Protesting resorts that are just more useless bullshit we are going to regret later. "Well, we don't have any bears anymore but look at this fantastic fucking hotel! I know it looks like every other hotel, but this one is great because we destroyed an amazing eco system for it!" If you are looking for the good in the sea of badness that is Syria, and 9/11 and etc etc, you only have to look as far as your beautiful friends. When my sister got cancer last year they came out of the woodwork in a way that changed me forever. It's not an entirely bad planet is the point to my very long-winded rant on this fine day in the woods. It is a beautiful place, and it needs to be taken over by acts of good instead of given up on in times of trial.

End rant. Funny next week, I promise.

You are a stinky bastard

I am going to try to add artwork to at least 50% of these. This particular bit of history needed it.

Once upon a time I bought a car. It was a magnificent and decrepit hunk of metal on it's way to car heaven with a brief stop with us, like many of our vehicles, but it was a steal of a deal and Sam can fix anything pre-2000, and he has a soft spot for Volvos. So I found this particular model in Vernon, a grey hatchback with burgundy interior. Apparently the previous owner was a metalsmith and used the car to transport metal. The end result being that the inside of my new car looked like it had been used to host a very long and painful badger fight. Maybe it had been a portable badger fighting arena.

So I picked some wicked zebra print fabric and we went to town on this car, transforming it instantly from a piece of shit with torn fabric everywhere, to a piece of shit that looked like a pimp owned it in any eighties movie. From then on it was called Ron Burgundy.

Our family is one of those stupid ones that owns not one or two but three dogs. They range from small to medium to large, and they wreak havoc on any furniture we own. Not this time I swore! This time I was going to keep the dogs in the hatchback. So I got one of those dog-jail devices and it worked for all of 12 minutes before our Jack Russell figured out he could dislocate all his bones and Houdini his ass out of there every time I went into a store. This would inspire the Swissy to use his massive girth to collapse the dog jail, leaving only one very pathetic Pitbull crying alone in the back of a hatchback with  disabled dog jail parts at his feet.

I gave this a real go for about 3 weeks before just giving up. Molly was clearly unaware of my decision to allow the dogs to begin re-wrecking my newly zebrafied car because as we were driving around one day I heard in a very loud and clear voice "Oliver! Mom says you are not allowed to sit here! Get back in the trunk!!" followed by, in a voice clearly only intended for her four legged audience; "And besides, you are a stinky bastard..."

If you're happy and you know it don't pet his dink.

Before Molly was born Sam and i rescued a half pit/jack russell. I can't even speculate on the biological weirdness of that, or why the hell anyone thought it would be a good idea to mix those two terriers but the result is pure greatness.

When we rescued him he had a very tough Harley Davidson collar on, and he was named Dodge and we were told he was a "very tough dog." But you could see in his eyes the heart of an elephant and the soul of a squirrel. Kevin would defend us to the death if need be, but he is not a very tough dog at all, and we like him that way.

We saved Kevin at the time because our Jack Rusell was in need of a friend, and we were in need of some home security. So it seemed obvious to me, being that he was hired as a bodyguard, that he should henceforth be named "Kevin Costner." For those of you who don't get the reference, you are much too young to read this, you lucky bastard.

Sam was instantly against this decision, stating that there was no way in hell he was going to be seen yelling "Kevin Costner!" at the dog park...nevermind that he named his dog Lub-A-Tub, apparently Kevin was the coolness line he was drawing. Weeks went by with him not coming up with a suitable name change, and with me saying things like "Kevin Costner ate my fucking COUCH today," or "Kevin Costner peed all over the floor" and eventually the humour of it all wore him down.

So today I am working away on some soul-sucking design work while Molly entertains her Grandma, who is visiting from Ontario. Kevin has become Molly's dog through and through, not by his choice in the slightest. But like most other things Molly sets her mind to, she wore him down until he just gave in. Redheads possess magical powers of stubbornness and manipulation.

There is one thing you would not know about my family unless you stayed long term enough with us that we somehow forgot you were there. Or unless I blabbered it all over the internet. But it helps the story, so I will tell you; we are singers. Not good singers, not talented in any way, but we do not let that stop us from singing pretty constantly about the random shit that is happening in our household. So Molly was born into a family that sings about what they are cooking, putting on shoes, cleaning and hating it, where are my fucking keys, has anyone seen my wallet etc etc. So she pretty much embraced this weirdly way of life to its fullest extent, and has quickly become good at rhyming, changing songs to suit her needs, and unlike the rest of us she possesses a very good little voice. One out of three is not bad!

My favourite adaptation when she was little was
Twinkle twinkle little star,
how I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
Like a bathroom for the sky.

So back to today I am working away and listening to Molly teaching Grandma how to sing "If you're happy and you know it." and coming up with her own awesome and bossy verses.

It started innocently enough with "If you're happy and you know it move your head," and as she ordered her grandma around the room doing new things to prove said happiness it eventually moved to Kevin. Poor Kevin. Being Molly's best friend does not come without a price, she is affectionate to the point of scary, her love can be scary as shit sometimes, and she has had to learn a lesson or two in dog etiquette in her day.

Well if Grandma didn't know dog etiquette before she certainly does now. "If you're happy and you know it pet the Kevin" then a moment of silence where I can only assume grandma is petting Kevin, and here's where it gets all serious and rulesy; "but if you're happy and you know it don't pet his dink!" was abruptly followed by Grandma nearly falling to the floor laughing.

There's something wrong with my vagina!

Rightio, where were we? Once in a while Sam and I have been subject to Molly's newest and weirdest affectations. Like the whole week that she took on a fully Bostonian accent. She would yell things like "Ma!" and drop all her R's and generally just sound as though she had been taken over by an old Bostonian poltergeist. She was also a little more saucy that week.

We never found out where she learned to speak Bostonian, but great things came from it. For example the time I was trying to have a rare adult conversation - by which I only mean without a child, not a particularly racy one - with my friend Jo and I could not stop laughing. Finally I had to explain that Molly had decided that she was not going to nap today, and instead of snuggling down with her cute teddy bear like most people's cherubs do, she was going to lay in her bed and yell at the top of her lungs, many many times; "Mah! Thehs soooooommmthing wrong with mah vaginaaaaaa!!!" so that surely the neighbours must also agree that I need to take my child to a doctor and fast, because her Bostonian vagina must be on fire! The best part of the fallback from this phase is that Jo and I ended up making each other oddly similar Christmas decorations adorned with a redhead yelling "there's something wrong with my vagina!" Bet your Christmas ornaments aren't that funny. If they are, please share.

A few weeks ago she started calling her little Tinkerbell suitcase "my leetle friend" and pretty menacingly reciting "Say hello to my leetle friend" to everyone while displaying her suitcase proudly. She also took up wiping out displays of toys in her room just after saying that creepy sentence in her new Italian accent. So where the hell did my three year old learn SCARFACE?? We don't really watch a lot of TV so Italian week and the Scarface reference is a puzzle we haven't solved just yet. Which brings me to Japanese week.

This week Molly started doing what in my opinion seemed like a decent impression of speaking fluent Japanese. I would ask her what she wanted for breakfast and she would answer sushi, and then she would happily eat her rice cereal while reciting what I could only guess was a three year old's version of Haiku. But the icing on the Japanese cake came when she got home from daycare and started staring intently in my eyes while saying "Arigatooooo" and seemingly trying to hypnotize me. So "Arigato" I replied, things got a bit more intense. "Mom! Arigato!"  "okay honey, Arigato!" this is when she looked like she might karate kick my ass across the kitchen floor, she stomped out of the room yelling "Arigato is Japanese for thank you. So you say you're Welcome' dammit!"

First Japanese lesson, over.

Let's get this shit started!!

So I figure with my first post I am going to cover all my bases. This blog is about me and my daughter, and how I thought that popping out a human would turn me into Martha Stewart and I would instantly start knowing how to work with glitter, and stop swearing and sounding like a complete asshole. Apparently there is no magical mom switch, you are still the exact same tactless asshole you were before kids, and now you just have a tiny human to teach and mold and then unleash on the unsuspecting world.

Picture if you will a human raised by wolves, but the wolves are rednecks too. This will give you a much foreshortened version of me, and make this whole "I can't believe she just said that," thing make sense a lot faster. This blog contains mature content, written by a less mature narrator.

Read if you want to. If you find me offensive, think I am a terrible influence on my child, and generally can't believe the shit that comes out of my mouth, either stop reading and look elsewhere for your wholesome family entertainment, or write a blog about how people like me are ruining the fabric of society. it sounds really boring, but give 'er shit.

I was pushed into writing a blog because I have already been sharing Molly stories with the world of facebook, and they make people laugh. Life since 9.9.9 for me has been a whole lot funnier. I went to the hospital to deliver a baby and instead came home with a sarcastic, witty, far too intelligent fucking unicorn of a human being. She will take over the world one day, so I am guessing this will make her "I dominate you, find out how I did it." autobiography even more colorful and awesomely awesome.

Lucy D