Welfareloser's Blog

…the swiss colony’s macadamia nut chocolates. i’d rather have that shit than just about any other one kind of candy out there (“one,” because it just can’t compete with a box of a variety of handmade chocolates.) and this is why you will never get a box of chocolates from me at christmas.

every year i buy several boxes and tins of chocolate this and that from various mail-order companies, planning to give them to this or that friend… and every year, i happily eat them all by myself over the course of the next couple of months. anyway, back to my original point: those “free with your first order” swiss colony macadamia nut chocolates that i get every year? fucking-a.

is it obvious that i’ve had all of about 300 calories today, mostly from coffee products, and at this point, i’m freaking starving? i’ve had bites taken OUT of me today, more than i’ve gotten a bite of anything. it’s been that kind of day.

okay. i figure i’d better do this before you REALLY don’t care anymore. so, first we were in kentucky with nodamnsense’s family for a week. nodamnsense wasn’t actually there, since he was on call for christmas weekend. yep, even dermatologists have to take call sometimes because, apparently, there really is such a thing as a dermatological emergency. itchy balls can’t always wait until monday morning. so, while it might sound silly to go visit my best friend’s family when my best friend isn’t even there, you have to realize that his family is every bit as awesome as he is. also, they love me like one of their own. okay. really, the best reason to go while he’s not there is so i can rifle through his comic books and star wars toys when he’s not looking.

first, here’s one of the most in-love couples i’ve ever seen, nodamnsense’s sister and brother-in-law, smitingthewicked and hissingninja:

seriously, aren’t they like kittens and rainbows, i-just-threw-up-a-little-in-my-mouth cute? note the knee brace on hissingninja – oh how the mighty have fallen. he had a bit of a motorcycle incident last summer, an incident STW refers to as “that time he kicked his own ass.” and if you weren’t convinced of her sense of humor already, you should note that she transcribed all the word salad that came out of his mouth while he was still in the hospital on the fun drugs, just so she’d have plenty to make fun of him for later when he was more with it. i’ll refrain from changing his name to something like “gimpingninja.” i figure trogdor crawling around trying to swipe his cane out from under him at every opportunity was more than enough in the making-fun-of-the-cripple family fun.

one of the toys cutebutevil got for christmas was a toddler-size barbie doll. proving that he has junk and knows how to think with it in a totally heterosexual way, trogdor waddled straight over to the blonde slut, ripped down her bodice, grabbed a hard plastic boobie in each hand, took her ass down, and drooled all over her face. yep… he’s as ready for prom night as any red-blooded american male!

trogdor gets a sink bath from ra-ra and pa-pa:

trogdor sits around looking like his pa-pa:

trogdor sits around looking like his opa:

for those of you who are confused, we just made the transition from nodamnsense’s family to my family. the guy who looks weathered and wise, like he has stories to tell? that’s pa-pa, nodamnsense’s father. the guy who looks unhinged and goofy, like he has bad jokes to tell? that’s my dad, opa. unfortunately for trogdor… he’s doing a better a job of looking like his opa.

after two years of looking at the ads inside the metroid prime game case for metroid fusion and metroid zero mission, and wondering sadly why we don’t own them… dramaqueen finally owns metroid fusion and metroid zero mission. thanks, ebay! that $30 for video games that have been out of production for ten years was totally worth the slack-jawed wonder of a little boy in footie pajamas under the christmas tree.

he spent five minutes playing it, and then the next 4 hours pretending to be samus aran, lighting up his brothers’ asses with their gifts from nodamnsense and smallandquiet, nerf weaponry, complete with dorky foam outfits, modeled here by evilgremlin:

just like i do every year… everybody else is playing with toys. i’m reading a new book. nerd on!

the hoberman sphere. it’s like a slinky: useless, yet endlessly fascinating.

my dad’s sister has 4 boys. i now relate to her more than ever before. her four boys are all slightly older than me, and at least a foot taller. seriously. the shortest is 6’2. the tallest is 6’7. despite this, everybody swears we are actually genetically related.

one of my cousins and his wife have four kids – all girls. i keep offering to trade, but we haven’t quite worked out the terms of the deal yet. anyway, thanks to them, we now know what i look like holding a baby girl:

now, the three older boys have all seen girls here and there, but it was a new thing for trogdor, who was fascinated:

so, every year one of my cousins, who lives near a chocolate factory, gives each of us a 3-lb box of chocolates. 3 lbs is a big damned box of chocolates. at least, i thought it was, until i opened mine for the 8 kids that were tearing around the tree. have you ever watched the discovery channel, and seen footage of a swarm of ants crawling over a dead bird, and there’s a cloud of black in the shape of a dead bird for about 3.7 seconds, and then the cloud dissipates, and all that’s left are the shiny bones? that’s pretty much what happened to the box of chocolates.

then it was new years eve. our friends talkytalky and pillpusher and their son talkyjunior came over. talkytalky gets his name from his superpower, which is: hand him a beer. turn on the tv to any random station. hit the mute button. he will then proceed to fill the void with extemporaneous nonsense, pulling dialogue directly out of his ass to put in the mouths of the silent tv characters. he can do this on any station, any time, for HOURS, and it’s consistently the funniest shit you’ve heard all day. period. after years of practice, positiverolemodel and i can each do it to a certain extent, but our talents are truly no more than a sad little shadow of talkytalky’s comedic majesty.

so. here’s positiverolemodel with talkytalky in my winter cloche hat, spazmonkey’s nerf eyewear, and opa’s summer sausage:

don’t ask why PRM is menacing the sausage with the can opener. you don’t want to go there. it’s like 2 girls 1 cup… once you go there, you can never go back.

my sister evilbigmouth, her husband (crap, have i given him a name yet? i haven’t, have i? i should really get around to that. suggestions welcome!), my husband, and evilgremlin, beating the poop out of each other on wii boxing:

talkyjunior, pillpusher and the twits keeping it real with the star wars toys that my mom refused to buy me when i was a kid, but then spent 10x the money on ebay for them for her grandchildren, not that i’m bitter:

because hey, the absence of that 2-foot-tall AT-AT is what truly built my character, allowing me to be the well-adjusted adult i am today.

then the kids went to bed, and we drank.

the end!

i was just commenting to ialsohaveadream**, as trogdor alternately bit my leg and banged his head mercilessly on the table leg to prove he was really, REALLY pissed at me, that toddlerhood might be a loooooooong row to hoe with this one, when my friend biblethumpstress* re-forwarded me an email from when then twits were 17 months old. all i can say is… there’s only one of trogdor, so it’s going to be okay, right? i mean, RIGHT?!?!?!?

From: “Bible Thumpstress” ***
To: “Welfare Loser”
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 5:42 PM
Subject: Re: i hate toddlers…

By the way, I was just cleaning out my inbox and this is the funniest thing ever. you should really get paid for this!
>
— Welfare Loser wrote:
>
this is just one day’s worth of why…
>>
so today spazmonkey decided that the appropriate response to me telling him no! is to head-butt me. and the little fucker holds a grudge, too… he’ll head-butt me a few times, i’ll move out of the way, he’ll stand there and smile winningly until i’m lulled into complacency and come back down to play again, and the second i’m close enough, the smile disappears, he’s growling like a pissed-off junkyard dog and WHAM! i’m seeing stars because apparently his skull is waaay harder than mine.
>>
the twins have started demanding that all meals come with spoons, which is fine for the first few bites, but then they get used to fling food, to hit each other, to reach things on the countertops (no, my kids haven’t sat in high chairs since 11 months of age, at which point anything restraining free movement became an instrument of evil) … then one steals the other’s spoon, the other one steals both spoons back, at which point they’re screaming and choking each other. (whoever said that identical twins are more cooperative than fraternal twins must have been talking about girls.) instead of making any attempt at instilling a sense of fair-play in a couple of pre-verbal dickheads, i get out two more spoons so they each have two… at which point the jedi lightsaber wars begin. i’m waiting for the day i have to take a kid to the emergency room to get a gerber safety spoon removed from his ear. anyway, today’s foodfest started with a bowl of ravioli and two spoons, and ended five minutes later with tomato sauce fingerpainting on the fridge, a bowl-kicking contest (i don’t know who won, but the walls lost) and everyone pissed off at me when i took the spoons away.
>>
so they haven’t bothered much with the whole talking thing… their vocabulary consists entirely of no (“na-na!”), uh-oh, dog (“daaaaaaooowwww”) (which includes everything from penguins to fish), ball (“baaaaaaaoooooow”) and up. they’re diversifying a bit, too, spazmonkey can say cow, dramaqueen can say down… spazmonkey called a cup a ball today. i said no, it’s a cup. he shakes his head and says “baaaaoooowwww!” i say, “no, cup!” he screams “BAAAAAOOOOOWWWWWW!” and proceeds to cold-cock me with the damned cup. and then head-butts me for good measure. while evilgremlin helpfully explains that i shouldn’t piss them off so much. (i really don’t know which is worse, the kids that can’t talk at all or the one that can’t shut up for his own safety…)
>>
so the final straw today was trying to have an argument with a pissed-off 17-month-old about the wisdom of riding a baby scooter off the edge of the porch. apparently, i’m stupid and it’s a perfectly good idea… i guess nobody remembers yesterday when evilgremlin rode it backwards off the porch and came up crying… as i took him inside to comfort him, apparently that was the perfect opportunity for dramaqueen to grab it and do the exact same thing less than 60 seconds later… i guess spazmonkey was pissed that he hadn’t gotten a chance to try it, because that was who i had to wrestle the goddamned thing away from today. so, i drag the kids inside. spazmonkey is pissed. and telling me about it. he has screams that you wouldn’t believe. (when he gets shots at the doctor, people come running from other wings of the building to see who has released the nazgul. i’ve actually heard more than one nurse yell “holy shit!” because the noise is so un-babylike, inhuman and utterly terrifying.)
>>
now is probably the time to mention that, if spazmonkey is the rottenest little spaz on the planet, dramaqueen is the biggest wuss on the planet. he gets scared and cries at sock puppet shows, dogs barking, and friendly games of peekaboo. i’m not exaggerating. so, spazmonkey’s unholy yowling – even though it happens several times a day and he ought to be used to it by now – has scared the poop out of dramaqueen and made him cry. spazmonkey, offended by dramaqueen’s offense, grabs the heaviest thing he can find (full can of diet coke) and proceeds to try to bash dramaqueen in the face with it. i manage to grab the coke can just before he makes contact, which pisses spazmonkey off so badly that he starts shaking his head, gnashing his teeth, and grabbing for something to bite. i’ve been bitten before, see it coming, and dodge out of the way… pull dramaqueen out of the way… but spazmonkey is so pissed and so hell-bent on biting something that, if the only thing he can get a hold of is his own leg, by god, that’s what’s getting bit… and as he’s crying about the big red bite mark on his leg that has to hurt like hell, he’s giving me an accusing look, because of course it’s my fault… so at this point, evilgremlin – who generally tries to help them do whatever stupid dangerous stuff they want, wonders aloud why i’m stopping them from having fun, and thinks anything they do is funny – says that they’re hurting his ears and he’s going to go play nintendo now. i wish i could do that. “you guys suck… i’m going to go play podracer.”
>>
thank christ they’re in bed now. if i ever complained about evilgremlin being a knot-headed toddler, o lord do i apologize. he was an angel.
>>
>> *—*—* Loser Brewing Company *—*—*—*
>> Founder and CEO: PositiveRoleModel
>> Vice President: WelfareLoser
>> Systems Engineer: EvilGremlin
>> Quality Control: SpazMonkey & DramaQueen
>> *—*—*—*—*—* —*—*—*—*—*—*—*

*okay, she’s not a bible-thumper, per se, but she did actually get to edit the bible once at her totally awesome job. that had to be alluded to in her name.

**if you, like my husband, think ialsohaveadream is an odd and incomprehensible name, you should take a look at the onion article that he found so funny he had to use it as shorthand for his whole sense of humor, and all shall be made clear.

***emails are as fake as the names around here, to protect the innocent. fuck you, evil spam lords!

that was my first thought. my second thought was “put my damn banjo down! mine!”

then again, maybe i hang out with the under-4-feet-tall set too much.

i was telling accidentprone about how positiverolemodel, genius with the md and phd, managed to forget that the curbs on the pretty brick streets of our historic mississippi riverbend hometown were concrete, sharp-cornered, and at least a foot tall in any given spot… he managed to pop two of the tires on his car while we were there… and then drive it home, because hey, it was only two blocks. yep. we’re still waiting on the total bill for that lapse of genius. so accidentprone – after suggesting that i had perhaps named the wrong guy “accidentprone” – was asking me “how the fuck” he got the name “positiverolemodel” anyway… and i could only shake my head and say that i bestowed it upon him long, long ago.

i’m thinking “residentasshole.” or maybe my sister’s pet name for him, “j-hole.” witness the following conversation between prm and evilgremlin, who was reading to us from his library book of riddles:

EG: what has a mouth but never speaks/ has a bed but never sleeps?

PRM: i don’t know, but i like it already!

come to think of it, the name ol’ dirty bastard is now up for grabs, isn’t it?

presents were opened. children were amazingly well-behaved. pictures and stories to follow, whenever i’m no longer ass-deep is trying to get things back under control after two weeks away from home. i’m thinking this might occur around the twelfth of never. especially since i keep coming up with other stuff to do besides fill up some free time for you bitches. like catering the inaugural “you assholes need to pass your boards the FIRST time” mandatory biweekly study class for the first year radiology residents with a loaf of coconut banana bread, a pile of empanadas, and a pitcher of hot sauce. and no drinks! i’m told the ball sweat was rolling down the chair legs in the conference room. also, i’ve been trying to learn some fiddle tunes on the banjo… and until you’ve tried it, i swear, you cannot possibly understand how difficult it is. banjos, with their strings tuned to steadily diminishing intervals, are remarkably ill-suited to play tunes designed for an instrument tuned to even intervals. the banjo players – they’re not retarded! really! the tongues hang out of their mouths for good reason! but mostly, i’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time alternately walking with and dodging 11-month-old trogdor. when he isn’t busy skittering balls across the floor to chase, pushing buttons on anything that has them, pulling stacks of anything he can reach to the floor, and stuffing small nooks full of anything he can get his hands on, he wants to WALK. now, to his credit, he knows his head is heavy and the floor is hard. the boy has some damn sense. however, his determination generally wins out over his caution – all he needs is me, hunched over, 24/7 (okay, more like 2-4/7, but still!), one of my forefingers clutched in each chubby little hand, so he can GO, his feet pounding under his waddly little butt, his face lit up with a slightly terrified smile, screeching in triumph as he takes himself wherever he wants to be.

until, that is, mommy needs to stop for a moment to make a peanut butter sandwich, move a load of laundry, move a load of something else (yeah. i went there. you know it’s totally adorable when i do that.) when i try to plunk him on his butt, he first tries to pretend his hips are not jointed. when he finally ahs to give up on all the tensing and grunting, he grudgingly allows me to seat him, only to immediately flip around onto his knees and one hand, making a swift grab for my legs with the other hand so he can pull himself back to his feet before i dodge him. should i manage to elude him (and i don’t always, taking us back to step 1), he charges after me, head down, eyebrows knitted, screeching “NANANANANANANA NOOOO!” and that little bugger is fast. if i go to do something beyond the baby gates, he smacks his forehead on the gate a few times to make sure i know he’s pissed, then heads off to burble happily at his toys or his brothers for a few minutes until i return. but if i put him down to do something in the kitchen or living room, he keeps on me, and if i stop for a second, he’s right there, pissed as hell until the second he makes it to his feet, when his expression abruptly goes from storm clouds to droolly grin of adoration as he looks up at me from knee height. anything i do from then on is slowed by alternately tricking him into leaning his weight on some furniture or helping him to walk with me.

so. my point? progress these days is mighty damn slow

so, until i take a moment to write some witty captions for some of my favorite christmas photos, i give you a few christmas videos:

the twits stomped on graham crackers to make the crust of a totally kickass coconut-peanut-butter-chocolate candy. i made a ton of the shit. and ate most of it myself. these were probably the 5th and 6th bags they had stomped, so between the stomping, stirring, egg-smashing and whatnot, they were really winding down by the time i busted out the camera.

then it was on to kentucky, where cutebutevil, deep in a mommy-won’t-let-me-run-naked-so-i’ll-dress-up-in-anything-i-can-get-my-hands-on phase, gets her groove on.

and all the kids played.

then trogdor went smashing through his ra-ra’s card game. this is a case of “awww, he’s doing something cute, run and get the camera!” by the time i got the camera, he had finished the adorable smashing and swirling of playing cards, and had settled into looking back and forth from ra-ra to the cards, wondering what the hell to do to next.

after a week in kentucky, it was on to illinois, where i again mostly neglected the camera in favor of actually participating in the moment. (see? doesn’t that sound so much better than “i forgot?” yay, euphemisms!) so, again, you get random glimpses of fairly unremarkable occurences. in fact, skip the next two entirely if you’re not related to trogdor, because that’s about the only thing that would make you find them adorable instead of boring.

trogdor tries to steal my belt buckle.

trogdor tries to steal my camera.

and, finally… the new years eve mosh pit, where a dozen or so friends and family between the ages of 1 and 40 took turns beating the crap out of each other on the wii, beating the crap out of each other with the new nerf weaponry, and, in the case of positiverolemodel and spazmonkey, beating the crap out of each other bare handed/footed… just because.

mine? chocolate. always. because hell yeah.