The other day I was on the prowl in Target’s Valentine’s Day clearance section, and I bought some heart-shaped balloons for the children. Um, may I suggest NOT buying them, if you have the opportunity? Because it turns out that if you tip the balloon and look at the top of it, it resembles something other than a heart. Something more like large, perky boobage. And in fact, as it deflates, it develops NIPPLEAGE.

In my household, the line between Noticing and Not Noticing is right between Rob (4th grade) and William (2nd grade). Rob took one look at a balloon and said, “Um, isn’t that kind of…inappropriate?” But William, even when the balloon was tipped toward him at a demonstrative angle at chest height, still didn’t know what Rob was talking about.

********

I hope I am not the only one (and in fact I KNOW I am not the only one, and am using this only as a convenient sentence-starter) who is visited by Conflicts of the Past. I can get all worked up about something that happened in SECOND GRADE. “That’s what I SHOULD have said to that bitch,” I think to myself, thinking bitterly of my 8-year-old opponent.

Useless. But I can’t help it. Some of us are living Banks of Old Fights and others of us are not—and just TRY tearing down that kind of edifice, if you have one. Those vaults are made to LAST.

Recently I’ve been stewing about something that happened more than a dozen years ago, so at least it’s within my adult life as opposed to when I was in my single digits. Still, this is a retro vent and I do hope you’ll bear with me.

Oh, this is so dumb. Well, no, it isn’t. It ISN’T dumb. I really am still very, very mad and hurt (but mostly mad) about it. I’ve told you a little about my first marriage, so you know it didn’t end well. He and I agreed to get a divorce, and we agreed on how all the stuff should be divided up, and we both helped each other find and move into our new places, and then he hired a mean lawyer and sued me for marital desertion (or was it abandonment?) so I received many unpleasant lawyer letters even though there was nothing about the divorce that needed to be disputed.

That’s not what bugs me, though: I wanted a divorce, so even though he went the Unpleasant Divorce Lawyer route instead of the $19.99 Do-It-Yourself Kit route I’d suggested, I got what I wanted and he had to pay for the unpleasantness he evidently wanted because I’m sure that lawyer wasn’t cheap.

What makes me SIMMER WITH RAGE is that my ex then got our marriage annulled. By the Catholic Church. When neither one of us was Catholic, nor was our marriage in the Catholic Church. And he was able to do this without my consent, and in fact against my STRENUOUS OBJECTIONS. I wrote many, many letters to the Catholic Church, insisting that my former marriage was REAL and VALID and did not meet the requirements for annulment.

Finally a secretary sent me a little note saying, basically, “Um, off the record for a moment—you realize that ‘annulment’ is just the way the Catholic Church gets around their ‘no divorce/remarriage’ rule?” Yes, I knew this. I DID NOT CARE. Even if it doesn’t actually mean the marriage is invalid and never happened, that’s what it SAYS IT MEANS. I’m not playing GAMES, even with my BAD MARRIAGE. Which DID HAPPEN and WAS VALID and did NOT meet the requirements for annulment. …Sorry, I don’t seem to be able to get out of this loop.

The annulment went through. According to the Catholic Church, which was not in any way involved with the marriage or its participants, the marriage was invalid and never happened. My ex is free to marry a Catholic girl as if he were a never-married man. This makes me so angry I can barely talk about it. It’s so stupid I can barely stand it.

But of course, it doesn’t REALLY matter that it was annulled. It’s not like we WANTED to be married to each other and some third party told us they had dissolved our marriage without our consent: we WANTED the marriage dissolved and so we voluntarily divorced, and I would LOVE IT if the marriage had never happened. I should be GLAD it was annulled. When it comes up in conversation that I was married before, I can lower my eyes and say, “It was a very brief marriage, back while I was still in school. It was annulled.” This sounds so much prettier than “We got a divorce.”

But I’m still so mad I could SPIT. Partly I’m angry at my ex, and I’m hurt by the way he wanted to make it that our marriage was NULL. Not “over” but “never started.” Partly I’m angry at the Catholic Church, for doing the annulment, and for thinking they had the right to do that.

All right, I’m done for now. You DO do this, right? You have old stuff you’re still not done being mad about?

So, what’s up? Having a good weekend? GUESS WHAT, WE BOUGHT A NEW COUCH!!! Do you know why this is so exciting to me? Because this is our old couch, which is actually not a couch but a loveseat:

This is a handmedown from my parents, and it’s been ours for 9 years. It has not always looked so terrible, of course. Well, sure, the upholstery has always been that ugly—and you don’t need to worry about hurting my parents’ feelings, because they thought it was ugly, too. They bought it because it is near-impossible to find high-backed couches with wings and buttons and slim arms, and so when they found one they didn’t really care what the upholstery looked like.

But although the upholstery has always been burgundy/camel/what-IS-that-shade-of-blue plaid, it has not always been QUICKSAND on one side, and it has not always been RIPPED in the front with stuffing and frame waving hello, and there have not always been TOWELS sticking out of it (a futile attempt to prop up the caving cushion), and there have not always been little rips under each button. That’s been more recent, like say for the last…er, three years? Maybe four?

And this is how we operate: after years of Meaning To, today we got into the car, drove to a furniture store, drove to another furniture store because the first one didn’t open until noon, made one lap around the floor, picked a couch, picked one of the two standard fabrics rather than going through the fabric samples, and went back home.

Whenever we do something like that, I wonder why we didn’t do it LONG AGO, but it’s as if it doesn’t WORK until we get to The Moment. We went couch-shopping a few years ago and just sort of dithered around the store making negative remarks and worrying about fabrics, then went home feeling discouraged and crabby.

This time, it was like looking for something to eat when you’re literally starving: you’re not picky, because the alternative is so much worse. The new couch is not The Couch of My Dreams. It was on clearance, so you know it wasn’t one that had won Popular Favor. The back is not as high as we’d like. It’s firmer than we’d like. It has visible legs instead of a skirt, which I guess means I’ll have to start cleaning under there more often than before each annual mother-in-law visit. It’s upholstered in a fabric that’s Okay, but not one I would have chosen if it hadn’t been one of the two choices that didn’t require additional dithering.

But sometimes that’s what I PREFER. While I was waiting for the salesguy to fill out the astonishing levels of paperwork (I am just BUYING A COUCH, not ADOPTING A CHILD), I was looking idly through the racks of fabric samples. I saw about a HUNDRED that made my heart pound with love. I can’t handle that kind of decision, especially when it involves taking into account elements such as durability, and price, and whether it would show grubbiness, and imagining what it would look like on an entire couch rather than on a small square of fabric, and how it would look to us in ten years when that shade of green is no longer in style and nobody likes birds anymore.

I get overwhelmed when I have too many choices, and furthermore I find it makes me a pickier person. Give me four choices and I’ll choose one easily and feel satisfied with my choice; give me two hundred choices and I’ll get all whiny about that not being the EXACT shade of blue-green I had in mind and shouldn’t that pattern be a TIDGE larger? When I look for what I Really Want, nothing is good enough so I give up and buy nothing—or I buy something and then fret endlessly that I should have chosen something else. When I try to buy a couch rather than Fulfill My Soul’s Upholstery Destiny, I get the job done.

Let’s take one more look at the old couch. Well, not just one more look, because it will be 4-6 weeks until the new couch arrives. But one more look HERE.

Ack

And here’s the new one, except you’ll have to imagine it in RED, which looks COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:

Also, the pillows will never be arranged tidily again.

You know what I had for breakfast this morning? Dill pickle cashews (thanks a lot, TESS, now I’m going to have a $5/day HABIT) and coffee with chocolate creamer in it. Set breath phasers to “stun.”

I sense you being TACTFUL about me planning to include a calendar towel in the Guess the Birthdate package. This is only because you have not SEEN this calendar towel. OMG it is so cute. Observe:

Speaking of so cute, yesterday I bought a mug as a gift for my sister-in-law, and I love it too much to give it to her so I’m keeping it myself. Before you judge me, look at the mug:

So pretty! It has dear little STRAWBERRIES all over it, and since “The Strawberry” is the nickname my sister-in-law and my brother use for their baby-to-be, this is now my AUNT mug! I found it at HomeGoods; if I go back there in time and they still have more of the mugs, I’ll get another one for my sister-in-law and maybe also get one to include with the Guess the Birthdate package. I can wrap it in the calendar towel!

Speaking of HomeGoods, I had a customer service experience there yesterday that BLEW MY MIND. I had a coupon for a dollar off a bag of Lindt truffles, so I got a bag of Lindt truffles and I handed over the coupon. And the clerk acted like she had never seen or used a coupon before. She called over the supervisor. The supervisor had never seen or used a coupon before, either. She looked at both sides of the coupon as if I’d handed her something in a foreign language. She read the “To the retailer” section aloud carefully: “Lindt will reimburse you the face value of this coupon…” and then she said, I am NOT KIDDING, “But we’re not Lindt!” OMG!

I gave up immediately, because there are certain situations that are just obviously not going to improve, and because I’d already been prepared for the idea that they might not take coupons. Plus, I’ve worked in retail, so I don’t get rude or huffy with clerks. I said oh, no biggie, that was fine, just take the truffles off the order. And the clerk acted as if I’d hit her in the face (stood stock-still, then with GREAT effort started taking the truffles off the order), and then she WOULD NOT LET IT GO. In the next few minutes she told me:

1) That never in her ten years working there had anyone ever tried to use a coupon.

2) That she didn’t even know what to DO with a coupon.

3) That they’d have to call the Home Office to find out what to do if this bizarre situation ever presented itself again.

4) That they were not a GROCERY store.

5) That maybe I could use it at a grocery store. She could give me directions to the nearest one.

6) That if I’d found the coupon AT HomeGoods, of course they’d have honored it. But I hadn’t, had I, I’d BROUGHT IT IN with me, right? (She said this like I was trying to get away with something, as opposed to following Standard Coupon Procedure.)

7) That she had worked at Macy’s before this job, and that Macy’s wouldn’t have taken a coupon either.

8) That they were not a GROCERY store.

9) That it wasn’t that they “didn’t take” coupons, but rather that they weren’t, you know, a GROCERY store.

So! PSA! HomeGoods is not a grocery store, despite what you may have believed! Also: they have cute strawberry mugs!

As of yesterday, we’re officially in my sister-in-law’s “due month” (38-42 weeks)—which is the term my first OB used in a futile attempt to keep her patients from focusing on the due date. All it does for me is give me up to TWENTY-EIGHT days to think “BABY? BABY? BABY? BABY? BABY? BABY?”

On one hand I don’t want to try your patience by having a contest so soon after all the giveaways. We are not some sort of daily sweepstakes blog. On the other hand, I’m jittery and I’m looking for distractions and I’m thinking a lot about the BABY? BABY? BABY? and it’s fun to make care packages, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to play a game I love, which is called “Guess the Birth Date.” (You may think you can also Guess the Rules, and you would be right.)

Guess the day my very first NIECE! will be born. If more than one person guesses correctly, I’ll pool the correct guesses and choose one randomly. The prize will be a Happy Niece Day Celebratory Swistle Care Package, contents as yet undetermined. A little spruce tree kit? An owl notebook? Lip balm? A monkey apron? Mint brownies? Goodness knows! But for sure it will include a small toy chicken for The Chicken Game, because Dr. Maureen introduced me to it (the game and also the chicken, whose name is Mr. Pickles), and you may want to play too. I also might send you the 2009 dishtowel calendar I just bought two of, because I love mine far more than I ever expected to love a dishtowel calendar, and perhaps you will feel the same way.

Here are some details you may find useful in coming up with your guess, now that you’re all hot to win that dishtowel:

1) The due date is February 24th.

2) This is my sister-in-law’s first baby.

3) Her OB has already warned her that she (the OB) doesn’t like to induce until 1 or even 2 weeks past the due date.

Okay, now guess! One guess per person. The deadline is the birthdate.

I had a surprisingly enjoyable trip yesterday morning to one of those places that sells bird feeders and small trees and potting soil and flower pots and big bags of powdered manure. It’s not one of my usual haunts, but you remember my little spruce sprouts (scroll way down on that one to see their baby picture) that were getting so big I was going to need to buy them their own pots soon? Well, the day had arrived. They’d ceased to thrive in their cramped little shared starter pot, and it was time for a transfer. So that’s what I was doing at the seed-soil-manure store: looking for spruce real estate.

One reason the errand was so enjoyable is that I was there without anyone else: my mom took the three littles for the morning, and the two bigs were at school. I just kind of BROWSED AROUND, without having to tell anyone not to eat the manure. I spent a long time considering various flower pot possibilities, and the only one making alarming ceramic-clinking sounds was ME.

I bought four cute little pots with attached saucers. It was difficult to choose the colors. There were three pink ones, one yellow, one blue, two light green, and three speckled yellow. I tried various combinations. I wanted BOTH yellows, but they clashed, and not in an ugly-chic way but in a way that made both colors look bad. There wasn’t four of anything, nor did “one each of four different colors” look good in ANY combination. Finally I got two speckled yellow and two light green and felt well-satisfied. —Ha ha! I’m totally lying. I’m second- and third- and FOURTH-guessing the decision, fretting about maybe making another trip to the store to reconsider options. I LOVE the two speckled ones: they look just like pear skin. But the light green ones, I’m not sure about, and I’m not sure how well they go with the pear-colored ones. I wish there’d been two blue ones, or four speckled ones.

You can see their old cramped apartment in crayon green on the left, and their new swanky digs on the right. Also, I hate to embarrass the plants, but look at the length of those ROOTS. I have a feeling the new homes will only be temporary. I wonder when baby spruce trees can be transplanted outside? Probably not when they’re still small enough for the lawnmower to run over them.

Oh hai! Remember the one last giveaway, for the Rachael Rossman painting? Me, too, suddenly! The winner is Erin of Mama Said No!. Yay, Erin! I’ll email this evening to put you in touch with Rachael!

A few people emailed me to find out how much the name paintings cost if you DON’T win a contest, and I emailed Rachael and she says they’re $5.00 per letter. You can email her at RachaelRossman at earthlink dot net for more info or to arrange an order.

OH HEY!! GUESS WHAT I AM DOING?? THAT’S RIGHT I AM DRINKING COFFEE!!

I am trying to learn to like it black, which—character-building, or exercise in futility? It’s not so much a NUTRITION thing, although my “coffees” were getting to be more and more like heated, melted, coffee-flavored ice cream, as it is a CONVENIENCE thing. It is a fair amount of fuss to mess around with….okay, fine, so it’s not all that much fuss to spoon in some flavored coffee creamer. But I was also adding about 1/3rd mug of milk, and I heated that separately in the microwave first, nice and hot but not so hot that it boiled and got an icky skin on it, and then I added the coffee, and then the flavored coffee creamer, repeat for each cup, TRUST ME IT WAS A LITTLE FUSSY.

Seems like we should make some small talk to catch up. Did you, uh, have a good weekend? I DID NOT. I was in a crappy mood for some reason NO NOT PMS, JUST BECAUSE I AM “EXPECTING A VISITOR” DOESN’T MEAN I “HAVE PMS,” and in fact finally I decided that if I was going to feel so foul anyway, I might as well get some HOUSEWORK done. So I…well, I MOPPED. The FLOORS. And I CLEANED THE TOILET.

And of course everything is already dirty again, which just proves my usual contention that cleaning only leads to more cleaning, and that not-cleaning makes more logical sense. But, fine, the top of the toilet tank is still clean, and that does look pretty and shiny I’ll admit. And the floors do FEEL a little nicer under the sock feet. And it was awesome that RIGHT AFTER the floors were dry, the cheese slid off an english muffin pizza onto the floor, and I just picked it up and put it back on the pizza. For about one full minute there, YOU COULD EAT OFF MY FLOORS. And one of us DID! (Not me, though. I gave it to one of the kids.)

Beth writes:

I’m particularly interested in your ongoing contemplation about family size/spacing. I have one perfect (I think) little girl and I think my husband and I feel DONE! I’ve never particularly wanted a big family, and now that she’s here. . . we just don’t feel like we’d like another. We feel complete and well balanced and happy.

Of course this solicits many negative comments from friends and strangers alike, and I wonder if you might ask your readers sometime how they feel if they either are only children or if they have only children. . .

I’d like to hear some positive stories about “only-ies”. . .we feel fine about our choice, but it’s tough sometimes to hear about her “need” for a sibling!

This is such a great idea. I, too, would love to hear Happy Only stories. I hear a lot of negative feedback on my end of the family size spectrum, and I know the only-child peeps get a lot of negative feedback on their end of the spectrum, too. Socially acceptable family size seems to be “No fewer than 2 children, no more than 3 children.”

So let’s hear some GOOD STUFF about having just one child, or about being the only child. And I’m hoping we can do it without it turning into a bashing of OTHER size families.

As promised yesterday, we’re having one more giveaway even though the CPSIA scare has been postponed. I was really glad that the donor was willing to still give this prize, because it’s such a fun one: the artist Rachael Rossman has offered one of her Name Paintings! If you read Dooce, you’ve seen Rachael’s work there.

I think this is a PRETTY SQUEEISH prize, and I don’t know WHY I even DO these giveaways when all they do is make me ENVIOUS of the winners. But your happiness is my happiness, etc., etc., so let’s do this thing!

The prize is one Name Painting, with, obv, your choice of name. (Tease: the real name of one of my kids is one of the samples.) She’ll paint it to match room decor and interests, too, so, like, you can do a kid’s name in pinks and princesses or in greens and sports or in pinks and sports, or whatever. You could also do it with a surname—it seems like that would make a good gift for parents or grandparents who are hard to buy for. Maybe not in the princess theme, then.

To enter, leave a comment on this post before Sunday, February 8th, at 4:00 p.m. U.S. Pacific time. (Need something to say? You could guess which name is the one that’s the name of one of my kids, but I’m not saying if you’re right or not so that’s kind of an over-tease and maybe you just want to say your favorite color instead.) I’ll choose one random winner to envy.

Oh, whoops, I forgot to draw winners for the second CPSIA giveaway! Part of the reason is that we got a Wii Fit, and I have been VERY BUSY voluntarily allowing a cyber-character to ask me passive-aggressively, “Doesn’t it feel good to use muscles you don’t usually use?” And I’ve been busy feeling crabby every time I look at the little Mii person representing me, which the game has kindly fattened up to my “real” proportions, as opposed to the proportions I gave it when I designed it, making as it did so a little sound effect like in old comedies when two fat men bounce tummies. Thanks, Wii Fit, for keeping me honest! Also: see you in hell!

And I’ve been a little distracted because of THIS: the whole CPSIA thing has been kicked a year into the future! And perhaps by then it will, you know, WORK RIGHT. Or else I’ll meet you back here and we’ll do some more indignantly supportive giveaways, how about that?

And now the third CPSIA giveaway has ALSO ended, so we have tons of winners to pick! Random number generator, TO MY SIDE!

The winner of the Amy Quarry giveaway is Cheryl! Cheryl, I’m emailing you and Amy to put you guys in touch.

Now we need THREE winners for the Charming Maeve contest. The three winners are:

1. Shannon of Living in the Grey!
2. Chez Bacon, of the January 29, 11:09 p.m. comment!
3. Becky, of Totally Serial!

Shannon and Becky, I yoinked your email addresses off your blogs already. Chez Bacon, email me (swistle at gmail dot com) and I’ll put you in touch with Charming Maeve.

Soon I will be posting one more contest for a giveaway I can’t resist doing even though the CPSIA crisis is temporarily averted, because I love the prize so much and the donor has agreed to give it away ANYWAY which is really nice of her. But this means doing more typing, and the kids will be up in MINUTES demanding cereal and clothes and combing and so forth, so that will have to wait for now.

In the meantime, Carrie at Barely Controlled Chaos is doing her own CPSIA giveaway for her Crafty Tuesday feature, and you should totally check it out because I saw her stuff and it is KEY-YOOT. She makes reusable shopping bags and kidlets (kid-sized reusable bags) that make you feel like getting all environmental so you can be cute too.