Some Pig

Coming Clean

After a winter of excessive eating and drinking and general slugitude all around, I have come to the realization that I look and feel awful.  Basically, I look like this guy, minus the moustache and happy expression (at least, I *think* my face is minus the moustache, although with my increasingly crappy eyesight, I could be sprouting a whole crop of middle-aged whiskers and never know it - which may be why Mother Nature gives us the gift of crappy eyesight in middle age, lest we have a clear view of the aging process).  So a friend and I have agreed to try the Dax Moy detox diet. 

Now, I can imagine there are those of you among my readership who think going on a detox diet is an unnecessarily radical step.  "Why not just cut back on certain foods and exercise a bit more," you may wonder, as you sip your tea in  your impeccably organized home office while your two-point-five perfectly behaved children quietly complete their homework at the specially designed homework station you pulled together in your spare time (wait... when did the imaginary reader in my head morph into Martha Stewart?  I dunno.).  Anywhat, the reason I don't take the moderation-in-all-things approach is because ... I can't.  It is just not in my nature.  For example, the first thing I like to do when I get up at oh-dark-thirty in the godforsaken morning is make me a big ole pot of nice, strong coffee.  And then I pour myself a big ole travel mug of coffee and fancy it up with dollop (read: glug)  of cream and a spoonful of sugar or two.  I drink that coffee while I strap on my armor and gird my loins get ready for my day, and then I refill my big ole travel mug with even more coffee and cream and sugar to start Caffeination:  The Sequel.  And I know me.  I've had a lotta years on this planet to get to know me (What?  Twenty seven is a lot!).  One thing I have learned about me in those twenty-seven years is that I don't do "cutting down."   What I do is start off by thinking I'm going to cut down, and then incrementally creep right back to where I was: "Well, if I just refill my mug halfway instead of all the way, then I'm really cutting back by at least a quarter of what I usually drink, but since I didn't fill my first cup all the way to the top that counts, so that means I can refill my mug a little bit over halfway..."  In other words, I am basically binary.  There's on, off, and no middle ground in between.

So the first stage of this detox program requires cutting out alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and chocolate - or as I like to call them, "reasons for living".  Warren has greeted these plans with equal parts concern ("Hm.  I feel guilty not doing this with you.") and alarm ("This doesn't mean I have to give up coffee, does it?"), but has promised his unwavering support (probably because he doesn't actually have to do anything differently).   My closest coworkers, on the other hand, could be problematic.  After I announced the no-caffeine component of this regime, one of them stood in my doorway and took a long drink from his coffee with an exaggerated ssssccchhhhluuuurp.  And if he does that to me at the same time tomorrow, I will not be responsible for my actions.  Now if you will excuse me, there is no point detoxifying if there aren't any toxins in your system, and I have some ground to cover before my forty days of deprivation and despair embracing a healthier lifestyle.  Hey, if Noah could live in an ark with a crowd of unhousebroken critters and his whole fam damily for forty days and nights, surely I can keep my mitts off the mini-Snickers for just as long.  Right?  RIGHT????

*sigh* At least there should be some good blog fodder in this.

Germ Warfare "R" Me

Today marks a first in our nation's history, oh readers of mine.  Today is the first day in the annals of recorded time that a human being has been declared an OSHA health hazard, that human being me and the health hazard being the cold I am harboring.  It is very aptly called a rhinovirus because that must be what stomped me into the ground while I was just standing around minding my own beeswax; it's the only explanation that makes any sense. 

This cold is completely messin' with my head.  Usually I can be found thinking lofty thoughts about reality TV and the Patriots' chances in the Super Bowl Schroedinger's cat and Occam's Razor and the Fibonacci sequence and suchlike, but right now, my thought process is pretty much limited to WHERE IS MY BOX OF PUFFS PLUS WITH LOTION??  WHO MOVED MY BOX OF PUFFS PLUS WITH LOTION??  WHY THE HELL CAN'T ANYONE IN THIS FAMILY LEAVE A GIRL'S BOX OF PUFFS PLUS WITH LOTION THE HELL ALONE AND GET THEIR OWN DAMN BOXES OF PUFFS PLUS WITH LOTION???  (obviously overlooking the fact that 50% of the family is unable to drive as of yet - Ed.) DON'T YOU PEOPLE KNOW MY NOSE IS ABOUT TO BE ABRADED OFF MY FACE AND I NEED MY PUFFS PLUS WITH LOTION!!!!  I'm a regular salonniere, me (sorry for the lack of the accent grave over the second to last 'e', my Francophone friends).  Also, everything I eat tastes like wet sand or cold medicine, a fact that I could be using to my benefit by not shoving food in my gob so frequently, except that I keep testing to see if my sense of taste has returned by eating things - things which I can't taste.  Go figure the logic behind that, Schroedinger!  Anywhoo, wish me a speedy return to health, then back away from the screen and wash your hands with bleach, 'cuz I'm pretty sure this virus can travel over the interwebs.

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Things I Never Not Ever Want To Have To Do Again:

1.  Give birth to a child without benefit of drugs.

2.  Give birth to a child, period.

3.  Take, and pass, a standardized test in MATH so I can be considered qualified to teach SOCIAL STUDIES.  (Why yes, State Formerly Known As Home, I still resent your making me take that stupid Praxis test so I could transfer my teaching certification, particularly since I am abysmal at geometry, which comprised approximately 983% of the test. ) (But at least I rocked the fractions and percentages!) (As you can see.)

4.  Relive any kind of freshman or novice year again.  I'm all for keeping on one's toes and challenge leading to growth and all that, but I don't want to be forced to learn everything all over again, all day, every day.

5. Find a roommate who is not crazy, messy, lazy, or stupid.  (This does not apply to cats.  I have had cats that were some or all of the above at one point, and I loved them regardless.  The same cannot be said to apply to humans, however.)

6.  Date.

7.  Eradicate the house of fleas.

If you just did a double-take at that last item, well, guess what I did with my weekend???

Yep, the stoopid cats dragged stoopid fleas into the house with them.  I took the younger hairball to the vet this past week, whereupon the vet tech saw a full-grown adult flea leap off his back.  And of course, for every one full-grown adult flea you see, that means you have x number of pupae and y number of larvae and x times y to the nth power of eggs and... arrgh, I guess I know now why they made me take that stoopid math test!!!  This is partly my fault, in that I got lackadaisical about applying Frontline over the summer - sometimes I'd let the cats go five weeks, then eight weeks, then back to four, then five before I'd apply it again - and some of it is not, in that apparently with all our monkeying around with the climate and all, we have managed to spur fleas into evolving into a kind of Superflea, capable of withstanding our newly-warmer average low temperatures and formerly lethal doses of pesticides.  Although now that I think about it, since I drive a car and got lazy about applying the Frontline, I guess I'm complicit in that case as well.

So after the veterinarian finished telling me a bunch of stuff (all of which registered as blah blah blah fleas blah blah blah fleas blah blah blah YOUR HOUSE HAS FLEAS), she handed me a bill for  $288 and a bag full of various potions, lotions, and sprays with which to wage chemical warfare on our house and every microscopic freeloader in it.  The instructions were deceptively short.  As the receptionist at the front desk said, "You are going to vacuum your house like you have never vacuumed before," (which, given my proclivity for lick-and-a-promise housekeeping, isn't hard to accomplish). Then, after hoovering every crack and crevice, I was to gas the little bastards mercilessly with the house spray and leave the house long enough for the poison to dry.  Armed with my marching orders, I returned home ready for World War III, or at least, Black Ops: Household Parasites. 

On Saturday, Warren took the girls and hied off to the library so I could launch the first assault.  I yard-saled all our throw rugs and loose cushions onto the front porch, sprayed them down, and left them there overnight, a move that I'm sure either completely baffled the neighbors or convinced them we're on the brink of divorce ("Hey, do you think they're giving away those little oriental rugs?").  Anything too delicate to wash or gas down with Siphotrol got put in a plastic bag and also was left outside in hopes that the combination of no oxygen and freezing temperatures would provide a one-two punch.  Then I vacuumed.  And vacuumed.  And vacuumed.  And vacuumed.  Do you know how many little, tiny, flea-hospitable places your house harbors?  No you don't.  Do you know why you don't know?  Because you have never looked at your house through the eyes of paranoia before.  If you ever feel like your life is going too smoothly and you have too much free time on your hands, imagine your house is infested with a parasite capable of jumping several feet in any direction, hiding in the pile of your carpet, and laying a gajillion eggs in its lifespan.  Then imagine yourself trying to guess where you should concentrate your efforts to get rid of it.   And then imagine you are consumed with a constant, droning fear that somehow you managed to overlook that one microscopic patch of carpet or teeny-tiny crevice that happens to harbor a bakers' dozen or so of the little hypergerminating bastards.  Just try not to bust out in a psychotic cleaning frenzy, I dare you.  My psychotic frenzy of yesterday was followed by a somewhat less frenzied but still fairly psychotic burst of follow-up cleaning today, along with washing every garment, blanket, bedspread and pillowcase that the two fleabags have frequented in the past six months, which is A LOT OF THEM.  

When I studied medieval history in college, one of the texts we read was this famous housekeeping guide written by a wealthy middle-aged burgher for his new 15-year-old (!) wife.  Quite an alarming amount of real estate in that book was given over to different tactics for detecting and eradicating fleas, as I remember.   Some of the suggestions included putting a white cloth on the floor, the better to see the fleas so you could catch and squish them individually; putting honey or another sticky substance on a piece of paper so the fleas would stick to them; and setting out a pan of wine for the fleas to jump into and drown themselves.  The overall tone of the flea chapter, however, seemed to be one of resignation:  "Fleas.  Can't live with 'em; can't gas 'em to death because we haven't invented that yet."  Now that I have lived through a round of flea eradication my own self, I am thinking of fine-tuning some of the good burgher's advice and applying a prescriptive dose of red wine to my interior organs, the better to facilitate the flea-eradication-forgetting process.  Meanwhile, I leave you with this list:

Things I Plan To Never Not Ever Do Again:

1.  Become lackadaisical about applying bug dope to the cats.

2.  Willfully ignore the mounting evidence that there is something untoward going on our house.  ("There's no way that's a flea bite," said I to my hubs when he showed me the small red welt on his hand about a week ago.  Famous last words.)

3.  Allow us to get down to using the last of the expensive, hard-to-find, impossible-to-substitute-with-a-generic-equivalent vacuum cleaner bags.  Because that was a fun chore to do on a Saturday night!

4.  Wish I could travel back in time to see what life was like at various interesting points in world and national history.  With my luck, I'd pick up another flea infestation and bring it home with me.

Letter From A Broad, Helpful Hints Edition

Dear Homeowner,

After driving by your house twice recently, I simply must compliment you for making the best of a tricky situation.  It is difficult to keep up appearances when one uses one's front lawn as a general storage facility.  However, I don't think that sticking a small table of rather fatigued looking knick-knacks outside as well and putting up a sign that says "yard sale" by the side of the road allows you to forgo the process of actually cleaning up your yard.  I'm just sayin'.

Sincerely,
Someone Who Was Not Put Up to This By Your Neighbors, Although They Have Every Right

Dear John Paul Jones,

"Caroline," Warren said to me as he watched you trying to launch the S.S. Minnow the other day, "I don't think he consulted the owner's manual."

I gave him the stink-eye, for my mate is not one to prate about having paranormal abilities. Suddenly he's claiming omniscience?  "Why is that, dear?" I replied.

"Because generally you need wind to go sailing," he responded.  And indeed, he was right.  Perhaps you should take that under advisement before you try to go sailing on a hazy, humid, and more to the point, perfectly breezeless August afternoon.  Otherwise you might wind up, oh, I don't know - drifting aimlessly around the boat launch in front of seventy-five people or so?  Getting the keel hung up on the buoy lines marking off the swim area, perhaps?  Whoever said, "don't give up the ship," I'm pretty sure was NOT talking to you.

Fair winds and following seas!

SP

Dear Canada,

Having spent a week vacationing in your friendly climes, I must admit I have found much to admire about our northerly neighbor.  The province of Quebec strikes a lovely balance between New World convenience and European culture... which is a fancy way of saying I can get behind a place where everyone speaks with a cool accent but they use English when I run out of my high school French.  Having availed myself of your hospitality several times, along with a few chocolate croissants and a crepe or two, I have often wondered why Canadians don't suffer from the same plague of obesity that we U.S. residents are so prone to.  I'm not saying you can't find a hefty critter or two north of the forty-eighth parallel, but it is proportionately much rarer.

Well, now I know why.

After spending the night in Vermont, we bundled the girls into the car at half-past early o'clock and started off for points north.  We figured we'd snack 'em up on cereal bars, which would last long enough to get us north of the border, then stop for a proper breakfast.  We went through Checkpoint Charlie without a hitch (except for the fact that we didn't know both our passports had expired, which is a sad commentary on how little exotic adventure yours truly enjoys these days).  Then we proceeded to look for a suitable breakfast place. 

And we looked.

And we looked.

And we looked.

WTF, Canada?  What do you have against people who want to eat food?  We drove for hours - literally HOURS - on a major highway, and could not find ANYPLACE to eat that was actually open and actively serving food.  We even detoured through a fairly sizeable town, and the only thing we could find was a Tim Horton's on the wrong side of the highway.  Out of sheer desperation we wound up stopping at a convenience store for granola bars and juice, which at least stopped the ceaseless chorus of "When are we going to eat, Mommy?  Mommy, I'm hungry," with accompanying percussion (i.e., kicking my seat back).  But still, one granola bar and some juice does not a breakfast make when you've got pancakes and eggs on the brain. 

So now I know why Canadians suffer less from obesity.  It's a big country, and I'm sure you have to truck around a fair bit to get from point A to point B - and there's nothing to eat along the way!  Sheesh, you can't go five minutes in any direction on a highway around here without finding half a dozen places to eat!  That may be a little excessive, granted, but could you maybe find a happy medium before we come up for our next visit?

Thanks,

Le Cochon

PS Notice how I refrained from saying, "eh?" anywhere in that letter?  I'm so proud of me!

Dear XM Satellite Radio,

For once in my life I have only good to say about something, as regards the trip mentioned above.  We took my husband's car, the one with the XM satellite radio and the kids' music channel.  Based on a strong desire to keep the smaller passengers happy and (relatively) easy to handle, we listened to kids' music for about 80% of the ride to and from our vacation.  Let me tell you, it was nothing short of a revelation!  I got to listen to songs I haven't heard twenty zillion times before, I didn't have to buy seventeen different CDs, and I didn't ONCE feel like stabbing anyone! AND... there was NO Wiggles.  Not One. Single. Song.  (And before my readership accuses me of hating on the Wiggles, rest assured, I loves me some antipodean vocalizing, but really - haven't we all heard "Get Ready to Wiggle" a million times or more already?)  I even found myself looking forward to certain songs, and hoping they'd be played again!  Truly the best $12.95 we spent this month.

Sincerely,

A Satisfied Consumer

My Chemical Romance

A student of mine was suspended today.  This is a good thing, considering I was moments away from bludgeoning him into submission with my grade book and tap dancing on his head.  Do you want to know why, even though research consistently proves students lose a significant amount of their learning during long breaks, schools still have summer vacation?  Because if we didn't have lengthy time-outs from students like "Tucker," there wouldn't be a public school teacher left in this country, that's why.  The kid isn't malicious, but he is seriously annoying.  World- and Olympic-record annoying.  Fingernails-on-the-blackboard annoying.  And like most students of his ilk, he is never ever ever absent.  Not a sniffle, not a virus, not so much as a mild flu ever befalls the Tuckers of the world.

A typical class period with Tucker looks like this:  Shortly after the bell rings, Tucker slides through the doorway in a parody of subtlety guaranteed to draw maximum attention to himself, just close enough to the bell that it's hard to count him tardy.  After several reminders to go to his assigned seat, which is not the seat next to his best friend (gee, is that a coincidence?), he finally moves, accidentally-on-purpose bumping into several other students along the way.  As I pass back papers, he "helps" me by looking over my shoulder and calling out the names a split second before I can, along with sotto voce commentary about their grades.  Upon being instructed not to utter a sound until I'm done, he turns around in his seat and mugs for the benefit of his friend. I glare at him, so he pantomimes zipping his mouth shut and mouthing, "I'm not talking." I give him the Cold Stare of Death until he faces forward, momentarily at least. I assign the day's work and turn around to find Tucker out of his seat and halfway across the room.  He claims he's going to the pencil sharpener, but as I point out, he's headed in the wrong direction.  After sharpening his pencil, accompanied by much squinting and frowning and blowing off pencil sawdust, he saunters back to his seat (which offers him the perfect opportunity to push his friends' papers off their desks, by the way), issues a couple of editorial comments meant to make the other students laugh, drops into his seat, and ostentatiously thumbs through his papers to find what he needs.  He finally settles down long enough to polish off the assignment before crowding around the door shortly before dismissal, usually interspersed with one or two attempts to take off early. 

Oh yeah, did I mention Tucker's a freshman?  Did I need to?

While the thought of just one class period free of his presence fills me with glee, at least I have Tucker in class, where he has something concrete to do that keeps him somewhat occupied.  My poor friend Kate has to supervise him in freshman study hall, where he never EVER has anything he needs to work on and thus has eighty minutes untrammeled by the constraints of work in which to showboat, act the noodge, be distracting, and otherwise make any sane adult wish that birth control could be applied retroactively.  Right before he got suspended, Tucker walked up and down the row of desks, stopped at each student, pointed at his/her head and said, "poop".  So next time you get all hot and bothered about how much time teachers have off, ask yourself, "Do I have to go to work every day and listen to talk about poop?"  (Okay, everyone other than Anonymous Coworker, ask yourself that.)  For that incident, and the unsanctioned attempts to leave my class early, and about three thousand other incidents, Tucker is going on a little enforced vacation.

The assistant principal suspended Tucker in part to light a fire under his parents' collective butt.  As she said, "I have never actually suggested that someone get their child evaluated [for ADHD], but now I have."  The parents are hugely offended by this notion.  They chalk up his errant ways to the idea that "boys will be boys".  They'll readily admit he's incredibly immature, even by the standards of other freshman boys, but they also claim that we teachers single him out and blame him unfairly for stuff that all kids do at some point or another.  Well, that's true; every kid acts silly and stupid and goofy once in a while, but Tucker does it nonstop.  When he walks in the room, I expect to hear the music from Ringling Bros. start up - doo do doo do do do doo do do doooo - because every classroom is his own personal three ring circus, and he's the ringmaster.  And he's starting to do stuff that's not just dumb and immature and irritating, it's downright dangerous.  Like throwing things at the bus driver as he's driving.  Like deliberately tripping a friend of his running full tilt around the gym during track practice.  This kid is less than a year away from driver's ed; isn't that a comforting thought?

I think the parents suffer from a case of "frog in the saucepan" syndrome.  If you try to put a  frog in a pan of boiling hot water, it's gonna object.  Put the frog in a pan of cold water and heat it up slowly, however, and it won't notice the water's uncomfortably hot until it's too late.  The parents have grown up with this kid, so his current behavior is the same behavior they've seen since infancy, just more of it.  Tucker's an only child, so his parents don't have a yardstick to measure his behaviors against.  If they were suddenly confronted with a kid as out of control as he is, the way we teachers are, they might notice the water's starting to bubble.  But, since they've lived with it so long, they think this is normal.

If the parents are resisting evaluation because they don't want to medicate their kid, hey, I'm down with that.  I'm the first person to agree that we overmedicate kids, in part because we just want the problem to go away instead of actually dealing with it.  If Tucker does have ADD or ADHD and they want to address it behaviorally first, I'll play along.  Shoot, I'll behavior modify the hell out of him (I'm thinking something along the lines of electrodes and battery packs) if they'd prefer that to taking the chemical route.  But what they need to understand, and don't (which is why I'm venting in this blog post), is that their son makes it impossible for others to learn.  Impossible.  He's not malicious.  He's not a "bad seed".  He's not a druggie, a thief, or a rotten human being.  But he IS terminally immature, impulsive, and distracting.  Literally, not five minutes goes by that he doesn't do or say something intended to draw attention to himself.  Is he the only kid who acts this way?  No.  Does he do the same things other kids do?  Yes.  But he does them to the nth degree, which is why he's a problem and the other kids aren't.  And as time goes by, he's not getting better - in fact, he's getting worse, as evidenced by the borderline to downright dangerous stuff he's doing to others.  Maybe that stuff flew in middle school - he attended a small neighborhood school, where a) his behavior was probably closer to the norm anyway, what with everyone else being terminally immature and wriggly too; and, b) he had a much smaller audience that hadn't changed much since kindergarten, so they were all sick of his antics and paid him less mind.  But now he's got a brand-new audience to entertain and a whole new arena to perform in, so he's going off the deep end.  What I'd like to ask the parents is, What if that was your kid in Tucker's class?  Yeah, a lot of the kids in my class enjoy his little sideshow, but I can tell there are a lot of kids who don't.  How would you feel if your kid came home every day talking about how their education is being disrupted over and over and over again by the same character?  How fast would you be on the phone to complain if you felt your kid wasn't learning, and in fact was being actively prevented from learning, because another student wanted to play the clown?  Why does your kid get a pass to behave like a two-year-old on speed and no one else's does? 

I have not given up hope yet.  Even the most complacent frog probably notices when the pot boils over ... right?

Crazy-Making: It's The Final Countdown

This cold is not going down without a fight.

After an week and a half of unwillingly hosting one of the worst colds I've ever had, I had finally gotten to the point where I could see that I was, in fact, getting better.  It seemed my head had become nothing more than the container for an enormous gland whose sole function was the production of mucous, but that represented progress.  I was actually thinking about life post-cold.

Then I blew my nose for the one millionth time - nothing new there - and one of my ears immediately plugged up.  It's clogged to the point where I can't hear anything out of that ear, it throbs when I move, and I hear ringing from time to time (tinnitus, I think it's called). I also have a cracking headache from the pressure building up in my middle ear.

Of course, I know exactly what's wrong.  My eustachian tube is clogged.  And if I weren't pregnant, and if I hadn't had an adverse reaction to some OTC medications already, I'd just take a bunch of cold meds or allergy meds and wait for this to go away.  But I can't, not really.  I took one Benadryl (because the Sudafed makes me crazy) and I've been paranoid about it ever since, wondering if it's going to set off some kind of reaction.  So now I'm left asking, how long is this fun and excitement going to last?  A day?  Two days?  All week?

I know this is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it falls into the category labeled "last straws".  I'm tired of being sick and I'm tired of being cranky.  I'm tired of fizzy vitamin C drinks and saline nasal spray and cough drops.  I'm tired of blowing my nose every five minutes and still not being able to breathe.  I'm tired of having dry chapped lips and a dry mouth and a dry throat.  I'm tired of menthol and camphor.  I'm tired of sleeping on the edge of the bed so I can catch the mist from the humidifier, which is getting my sheets and covers all damp.  I'm tired of sniffling and sneezing and being just not quiiiiite back on my game. 

Usually I take a lot of delight from being around my family, but because I don't feel well, I am crabby, and of course they catch the brunt of it.  I'm trapped in my own little world of bitchiness and I haven't been a fully functioning member of this family for the last ten days.  This means that Warren has had to pick up the parenting slack and be my parent, in a way, since I can't cope with India and I can't cope with not feeling well and I can't cope with being so uncomfortable all the time and I generally just can't cope right now.  This makes me feel guilty, so I try to get over myself, but then something stupid like this happens and I'm back at square one.  I know if I call my OB/GYN practice, the on-call doc will give me the same information the internet just gave me, and with the bad reactions to meds in the recent past, I know what my choices are - hot steamy showers, maybe some Tylenol, lots of water, blah blah blah.  My primary care practice hasn't seen me for the better part of two years, so there's no point calling them.  So I stomp around and snap at India and Warren and feel sorry for myself, none of which does any medical good whatsoever.

Believe it or not, I am actually working on a post that has nothing whatsoever to do with my upper respiratory system.  I was hoping to finish it today but am not in the mood.  Instead I am going to go make a pie by way of a nonverbal apology to my husband for my recent incarnation as a witch.  And if you have any home remedies for blocked ears (aside from chewing gum or holding my nose and blowing, neither of which has worked), please, comment away.

Non Compos Mentis

I learned today from listening to Says You that irony involves an outcome that reverses expectations.  Forthwith is a living example.

I am taking Clomid in an attempt to become pregnant.  The Clomid is making me irritable.  My husband is exacerbating these problems by persisting in such annoying idiosyncracies as breathing, chewing, and attempting to have civil conversations with me.  I respond in increasingly peevish tones as the Clomid therapy progresses.  Because our interactions consist mostly of surly comments, grouchy looks, and huffy responses, our desire to have sex is understandably not at its peak.  Therefore, my attempt to facilitate the process of becoming pregnant is, in the end, possibly diminishing the likelihood that I could become pregnant.

And that, my friends, is irony in action.

Ode to Clomid

Here's the BIG NEWS for this month (okay, January's been slow so far):  I'm trying Clomid again.  Yes, I know I *should,* in PC parlance, say WE are trying Clomid again, but I don't notice Warren bolting upright in bed and desperately trying to remember, "Did I take my Clomid or am I confusing it with the ibuprofen?  The megavitamin?  The extra vitamin C?  Did I remember to mark it down on the calendar?  How many pills do I have left?  Aieee!"  As soon as that happens, then fine, WE are trying Clomid again.

I think I need a theme song that will play every time I wash one of those little suckers down - a leitmotif kinda thing, something catchy I can hum as I swallow.  Setting the words to some old TV theme songs might work.  I've been noodling this over for a while, and here's what I've come up with so far:

(To the tune of It's Howdy Doody Time)*
It's happy Clomid time,
It's happy Clomid tiiiiiime

*Yes, I know the original show is so old that if I had actually been around to see it, I would be far too old for Clomid and we'd be looking at major hormone therapy.  I just know the song.  I don't know why, I just do.

The Batman theme song has definite advantages.  It's memorable and there aren't many lyrics, which is good, as thinking up things that scan with "Clomid" is difficult.  Easier than rhyming something with "orange," granted, but still it's no walk in the park.

nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh CLOOOOMIIIIIIID!

Then there's always the Mickey Mouse Club theme song:

C! L! O! - oh what fun!
M! I! D! - don't you want to be me?
Take your Clomid pill!

The current frontrunner in my mind is a little ditty that I sing to the tune of the "It's Log" commercials that used to run on the Ren and Stimpy Show, which in turn were bastardizations of the old Slinky commercial:

It's Clo-mid! It's Clo-mid!
It's small, it's white, it's a pill!
If you
Don't ov-u-late,
Just take this and you will!

Those jinglemeisters on Mad Ave got nothin' on me!

I tried Clomid for three cycles pre-India and none of them worked, but hope always springs eternal.  The doctor (not the terrifyingly competent Dr. A., but a very nice doctor nonetheless) asked if I had any side effects last time. I didn't except for one day of wild mood swings, but when you work with adolescents, being moody and surly one minute and ecstatically giggly the next isn't cause for alarm, it's going native.  I have noticed this time around that I have kept my slightly larger that-time-of-month boobs (yay!) but also my puffy that-time-of-month tummy (boo).  I also noticed, much to my chagrin, that I look like my turkey's done, and of course I wore a thin shirt to work today (this is another thing you have to be aware of when you work with adolescents).  So tomorrow it's double-thick-wool-sweater day for me!

I'd just like to digress here for a moment about breast size.  I have never had any appreciable amount of chest, so I was eagerly looking forward to a trial run with big boobs after the kid was born.  And what did I get?  Bupkes.  My meager A rose slightly to a B- is all.  I didn't even really need nursing bras, except that the snap-down fronts were more convenient than hauling my hooters out of the cups.  Oh yeah, and all my friends raved about how the weight just fell off, they didn't even notice where it went, because of the nursing.  False advertising, that's what that was!  I couldn't wait to try the dairy-fed-milkmaid look for awhile, and all I wound up looking like was me, with a mushier stomach and a one-size-larger ass.  Pffft.  Oh yeah, and on top of all that, NURSING SUCKED AND I HATED IT.  Let's see the La Leche Leaguesters leap all over THAT one! Heh heh heh.

Hmm, maybe there's something to this "Clomid makes you crazy" viewpoint. 

Regardless, wish me luck.  Wish US luck.  Because if this doesn't work after a few tries, the next step is IUI, which means Warren has to cough up (or otherwise produce) a sample.  And THAT, my friends, is going to go over like a lead balloon.