Poppy Mom

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me. -Woody Guthrie

When I learned “This Land is Your Land” in elementary school music class, the last three verses were omitted. I heard them for the first time when I was in eighth grade, thanks to my beloved Mr. Springsteen. I didn’t know their significance until well into adulthood, when I started taking an interest in Woody Guthrie. Since he inspired so many of the musicians I love - particularly Bruce Springsteen and Jeff Tweedy - it seemed like I should understand more about Woody than the few verses I’d learned in Miss Ray’s second grade music class.

My primary education in the meaning of “This Land is Your Land” came from the version on Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live: 1975-85 (3CD) in which Bruce discussed the song as a rebel song for the people, essentially Guthrie giving the finger to Capitalism run amok. I’ve been engrossed in this article today, which expounds on those ideas. I mean, they’re pretty obvious, when you consider the last verses that are so often ignored.

These ideas have been at the forefront of my thoughts about this country for the past year for a lot of reasons. It’s no secret that I’m a liberal with a rebellious streak when it comes to government, and I’ve always believed America to be a country founded by rebels who created a system that encourages citizens to rebel when the government oversteps its bounds.

I’m a fan of the signs that say nothing.

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Wasn’t I just here? Geez.

I’m off my feed. Which is ridiculous, because shouldn’t humans simply eat when they’re hungry with a focus on balanced nutrition? Seems that’s not enough for some of us.

I’ve said it before - I should weight 98 pounds because of the bird-like eating spells I experience. I’ve been so run-down of late; yesterday it was to the point of bad parenting. I let Clara Jane watch TV while I half-dozed on the couch, and then I let her play video games while I half-dozed on the bed beside her. In other words, she spent most of the day with half a parent.

This probably had something to do with the fact that the sum total of my food from the time I woke up until I had dinner at 6 PM was coffee and a bowl of black beans.

I still have my blood glucose meter from the diabetes/hypoglycemia scare I had last year. Perhaps I should bust it out again and see if I’m giving myself a disease. Again. (She says as she takes a sip from her third cup of coffee with Splenda and skim milk.)

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Wow. I’m off to another stellar start on NaBloPoMo. It’s 11:49 and I’m sliding so close to the wire I’m in danger of getting clotheslined. What can I say? Wednesday is knit night, which means I don’t come home until Sbucks closes. Because they love us, our knitting locale has recently started staying open an extra hour, which means nothing but knitting madness for close to five hours.

Tonight, as I pulled into the parking lot, I saw the familiar Jeep of a friend of mine who works at this locale. A friend I haven’t seen in months. It’s been so long I was unsure at first if it was her. But it was. Remember Raquel, who celebrated last year’s Independence Day by making blonde bombshells?  And who set up a fully-functioning coffee bar in our new house the day we moved in? After months of being incommunicado because of life intervening as it often does, there she was! She had come in for a post-nap caffeine boost and wound up hanging with us for a few hours, even joining our Christmas in August name-drawing.

I had a feeling Raquel was one of those friends who can pick up where things were left off. I’m thrilled that I was right.  It was also delightful that she became a member of the Dog Balls Knit Club by telling a story about a customer whose dog recently obtained a pair of Neuticles. That thrills me, too. It’s good when people find their tribe.

I’m off to a great start, what with a crappy cliche of a pun for the title of my first daily post. These 31 days are going to float by like marshmallows in cocoa, I tell ya!

I do love that the NaBloPoMo topic this month is food, considering I “write” for several food blogs that I’ve sorely neglected for weeks. Actually, “sorely” isn’t appropriate. It hasn’t hurt at all.

Worst-case scenario: if I have a day without a worthwhile blog topic, I’ll simply list what I’ve eaten. Ha! Beating the system!

Uhhhhh … I’m at St. Louis Bread Co. in lovely downtown Prettytown, where I have just consumed an everything bagel with plain cream cheese, a fruit cup and my first cup of coffee in-store. Since I’m a mucus monster, I’m opting for coffee with Splenda (so as to not feed my germs) and skim. I feel empty inside.

And as an aside to my East Coast pal Maggie, St. Louis Bread Co. isn’t Panera. Panera is St. Louis Bread Co. It’s complicated, but trust me on this. I think they changed the name to Panera for the stores outside the St. Louis area because potential customers saw the words “St. Louis” and assumed they’d be injured in a shooting incident if they hung around.

I shouldn’t eat my leftover cream cheese with a knife. Really. Knives are for fighting at STL Bread Co. I might have to take down the septuagenarian biker who’s here every day. A plastic knife with a thin layer of soft cheese should do it.

And I’ve drifted into stream-of-conscious already. That didn’t take long.

If you’re having problems with the new layout, it’s most likely because you’re using Internet Explorer, which hates the world. Brian said he can alter the layout so it works in Explorer. I think that, if you’re using Explorer, you should just change browsers. A copy of Mosaic from 1995 would probably work better than Explorer.

Stream-of-conscious? Check. Prettytown reference? Check. Food reference? Check. Alienating part of my readership? Check. Looks like I’m successful completed Day One.

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I figured that, since tomorrow begins a month of daily blogging, it was time for a new look. I likey.

Can’t say more. Must bogart material for the long month of July. Must knit while I can.

• Before embarking on a month of daily blogging, I’m always torn on whether I should get a head start by blogging every day before the month officially begins, or go on strike.
• Clara Jane returned from my parents’ yesterday, a day later than planned. Why a day later? Because she didn’t want to come on. On Wednesday night Brian had to talk to her on the phone and tell her that she had to come home on Thursday. She was not amused.
• I’m not sure why she had to come home on Thursday. Maybe because our living room has been too clean for too long.
• We tried to catch “Wall-E” at the Lincoln this afternoon. Minutes before the previews started, this happened. The film ground to a halt, the emergency lights came on, and we were sent home with refunds in the form of movie passes. While we tried to convince Clara Jane that this was making the best of a bad situation, she insisted on frowning and repeatedly pointing out that she was frowning. Like we could miss it.
• Brian bought our anniversary present this morning - really good Springsteen tickets!
• I’m making beet pickles tomorrow. Stop making that horrible face.
• I can’t find the sweater I was knitting for a child who’s due in one month.
• Tomorrow night’s Parents Night Out through the Y. Clara Jane can’t wait for us to ditch her. I don’t know what, exactly, has made her decide it’s time to cut the cord but I’m not complaining. Maybe we’ll use her “Wall-E” pass to see something else while she’s out.
• I can’t think of a pithy way to work in the word “shuffle”.

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If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you know all about my dear friend Sally from London. We met on a message board nearly a decade ago, met in person six years ago, blah blah blah, one of my favorite people in the world. Her sister lives in the Detroit area, so when Sally visits her every year or so, I go to Detroit, which means I spend a lot of time traveling between two of America’s most dangerous cities.

Last time I saw my dear friend Sal, we converged on Detroit with our then-two-year-olds two years ago. What the hell were we thinking? While it was wonderful to spend time with Sally, my main memory of that trip involves chasing toddlers and having panic attacks.

This time, the kids stayed home. This is also the first time in many years that Sally and I have gotten to see each other without one of us being knocked up. We can drink together! Get dressed up, go to grown-up places, and stay out as late as we want! We can go to nice shops, or hang out at coffeehouses and talk for hours! Sweet, blissful grown-up time - how we’ve missed you!

The thing is, when you get two exhausted moms together (including a mom of two - Sally was pregnant with her second boy last time we saw each other), they may talk a good game, but there’s a good chance they’re going to wind up spending those days barefoot on a couch.

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I’m extraordinarily proud of my teeth. I mean, have you seen them? They’re awesome. I don’t feel like digging through Flickr to find one. I could take one with my Mac Photo Booth, but I’m eating pizza and I have a rogue chin hair. So you can dig through Flickr yourself if you require proof. Or just take my word - I have great teeth. For one thing, I have all of them, except for my wisdom teeth. Never had a cavity, never required any orthodontia. Despite my coffee consumption they remain mostly-white for a 35-year-old.My dad’s nearly 59 years old and he has similar teeth. Well, except for a large gap where he was kicked by a horse a long time ago. My mom, on the other hand, has such a mouthful of terror that she’s been begging her dentist to just pull the all and get it over with. He won’t, because he knows a gold mine when he sees one. Brian’s mouth is so squirrely that his dentist once broke his jaw. I’ve never known for sure if he broke it in order to fix something or out of sheer frustration.

Obviously, we were hoping that Clara Jane would inherit my dad and my dental genetic code. And while I can’t complain much because we have such a healthy kid, it looks like in the chopper department, she’s on her way to a life of tooth-yanking and jaw-breaking.

She had her first dental appointment today, and it wasn’t good. She has a cavity in her upper left molar.

While I was sitting there, attempting to process this news, the hygienist who discovered the foul hole started on the “When kids drink a lot of sugary drinks…”

WHOA! Back up the Coke truck, Missy. You’re talking to a borderline sugar nazi mom. She drinks water. She drinks milk. About once or twice a week, she drinks a no-nothing-added juice box. Soda? Forget it. On the rare occasions it’s been offered to her, she’s turned her nose up at it. Faux juice drinks? Never.

Sure, every now and then we take her to a parade where she gets a giant shopping bag filled with candy, and we allow her to stick her head in the bag and eat the candy as fast as she can without the use of her hands. But still.

(Okay, we don’t really do it. The majority of the candy from last month’s parade is still in the bag. She gets the occasional candy treat.)

No sugary cereals. No sugary yogurt. Dried fruit? I read the label before I buy it to make sure no one’s sneaking in extra sugar because it’s concentrated fruit for Christ’s sake!

They hygienist got the picture, and assured me that this probably isn’t something I did, that there was probably something wrong with the enamel on the tooth from the get-go. Still, I’m sure it was something I did. I mean, she threw such a fit on Wednesday because I gave her the wrong toothbrush. Perhaps she was trying to tell me something.

I’ll bet because I ate deli turkey when I was pregnant, I canceled out my good dental genes, allowing the bad genes to take over.

(I’m joking.)

Clara Jane hates loud noses and was terrified of the electric toothbrush and suction wand during her cleaning. Facing a drill? Holy shit, her head’s going to explode. And mine will, too. We’ll be going to a pediatric dentist so that she can have all sorts of lovely, innocent things associated with childhood forever linked to THE MOST TERRIFYING MOMENT OF HER YOUNG LIFE. Nevermind that it seems somewhat ridiculous to drill and fill a tooth that she’s going to lose in a few years. Can’t we just knock her out, pull it, and speed up that first visit from the tooth fairy.

Hell, why don’t we just pull them all and save any future cavities until she’s old enough to get her own insurance and deal with it on her own, when I’m she’s reached a level of emotional maturity that will allow her to cope.

Oh, and I have two tiny wee almost-cavities that required a laser to be detected, but I’ll be getting them drilled and filled. And Brian? Don’t even get me started. His 25-year-old silver fillings are disintegrating and they all need to be replaced. And periodontal disease! A broken jaw will probably be involved, too.

Maybe we should all just beg the dentist to yank them all and we’ll shuffle around like the toothless hillbillies were bound to become.

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Forgive me Readers, for I have sinned. It’s been months since I blogged on a regular basis.I can offer a list of excuses. Busy. Life filled with non-bloggable stuff. Brain not working. Prefer sleep to writing. All the usual stuff. But I hate excuses, so pay no mind to them.

Even though there’s still 11 days until the end of the month, I’m going to commit now to NaBloPoMo. Although the site’s down for maintenance, which doesn’t bode well for my commitment, but I’m making the commitment anyway. So in July - a month with 31 days in which I have only two things on my calendar - I’m going to make a blog post every day. What with so much going on, the posts should just fly from my fingertips, right? I figure I can squeeze 15 days out of the Apples in Stereo show I’m attending, and another 16 days out of the Nels Cline Singers show in Columbia, Missouri. My goal is to dwindle my readership to three people by the end of the month. I think I can do it!

Without segue at all, Clara Jane and I went to the zoo yesterday. It’s a horrifying place.

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I intended to write this over the weekend but the fact is, I’ve been a bit brain-dead and in a foul mood. Which is ridiculous because I was just beating my husband about the head the other day regarding negativity and how we should recognize just how damn lucky we are.

Which, really, lends itself to what I wanted to write about on Saturday, which was the one-year anniversary of our move to Prettytown. For weeks I’ve been thinking about what to say on this occasion. This move was a life-changing event. I have never felt more at-home and comfortable as I do in this town. My anxiety levels have plummeted since the move. Oh, they’re still there, but not having to put up with the stress of hating where I lived and dealing with complete idiots for neighbors has made such a difference.

For the past few weeks I’ve been making a mental list of all the things I love about this town and our life here. It’s long enough to require numbers.

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