Welfareloser's Blog

a brick SHIThouse, to be more precise. that is, if the bricks were made out of jello.

funny little baby waddle!

this is the name of a game the twits made up. it involves turning the family room into an obstacle course with sofa cushions and beanbag chairs. then there’s some bouncing from stripped sofa (“DON’T FALL IN THE CRACKER!”) to cushion path to beanbags (“WE’RE ON THE GAMEBAGS! BOSS LEVELLLLLLLLL!!) to piles of blankets. and shrieking. lots of shrieking.

it seems we’re on level nine, now. i’m blogging from the sidelines, because i’ve been barred from playing, apparently for life, if i’m interpreting the scowls correctly. seems i was cheating. something about being too tall.

..EVERYONE is going to hell.

REASON #237 PRM IS GOING TO HELL:

may 10th was “stamp out hunger” day. postal workers picked up bags of food left by mailboxes to donate to food pantries. i put our bag together the night before. PRM was rifling through our bag, cackling to himself.

me: what?
prm: wouldn’t it be funny if we took a sharpie…
me: no.
prm: …and changed the brand names on these?
me: i think that’s a great way to have the police come knock on our door to have a little chat.
prm: “get a job” brand chips! “fuckers say i don’t qualify for disability so i have to eat this shit” brand toaster pastries!
me: republican turd.
prm: “my back pain has nothing to do with the fact that i weigh 300 lbs, now get me a menthol” brand soup!

reason #532 EVILREDHEAD IS GOING TO HELL:

she laughed her ass off when i told her about prm’s renaming when i visited her the following friday. but we knew she would laugh; this is the woman who called me “pregasaurus rex” when i was at +60 lbs with baby #4. she accented this with reptilian screeching noises every time i approached food.

but backing up for a moment, the visit started with…

REASON #533 EVILREDHEAD IS GOING TO HELL:

she greeted me at the door with, “nice stripper boots! but i’m all out of ones.”

REASON #122 DRAMAQUEEN IS GOING TO HELL:

his penchant for playing backup chords on his guitar while i play the banjo almost makes up for this one… but when i play the fiddle, he likes to stand there quietly, listening. and when i make a mistake, he jumps, winces, snaps his fingers and yells “D’OH!”

REASON #12 MONKEYBEEF IS GOING TO HELL:

he cackles til he falls backwards out of the banjo case every time DramaQueen does it. during new, still-reading-off-the-sheet-music songs, this can happen pretty much continuously, with him not always having enough time to right himself before falling over again. turd.

reason #793 I’M GOING TO HELL:

me: we need paving stones.
prm: okay.
me: you know, let each kid put his handprint on one, shove in some marbles and pennies, write his name and shit.
prm: and spell r2d2. and c3po.
me: right. and so you’re walking down our little path, and the last stone is ours.
prm: right.
me: and it’ll be my buttprint, with your mushroom stamp headed right for it.
prm: hot.
me: and the neighbors will be too polite to comment… but they’ll stand and look at it for a reeeeeally long time.

so monday? shit day. but PRM managed to turn it into an awesome day when he got home, pretty much a christlike feat. so guess what made it all better? well, yeah, that too, of course, but you’re not getting pictures of it.

a little bit of this:



(you can’t quite see it, but the twits are chasing a pair of ducks that have taken up residence in some of the neighbors’ koi ponds.)

followed by a bit of this:


that’s daddy’s beer spilled down his leg. don’t worry; he didn’t try to drink it. he just poured it down his own leg because he’d never tried that before. he only attempts to drink daddy’s beer if it’s a chelada (that would be the budweiser and clamato abortion) because MonkeyBeef is every bit as big an asshole as his daddy.

and a little of MonkeyBeef’s new instrument, a steel drum:
movie 1 … movie 2.

notice how he throws the sticks over his shoulder? he does that because he throws EVERYTHING over his shoulder. never even looks around to check on the stuff he throws, he just does it and moves on. as PRM says, no need to teach the boy the meaning of the words “fuck it.” you can stop MonkeyBeef dead in his tracks with a pile of leaves… because he has to throw every. single. one. over his shoulder. now, i must admit, it is useful when he’s going through the bag of cans for recycling. he tosses coke zero, a&w, budweiser, club soda, etc, over his shoulder… to get to the chelada cans. those, he upends into his mouth. before tossing over his shoulder. yep.

now, SpazMonkey and DramaQueen noticed that there are never pictures of me. i explained that this is because i’m always behind the camera. so they decided to take pictures of me:

so i sat down…

(while they continued to take pictures)

…to explain that it’s kind of nice to have my face in the picture, too. so they took some more pictures:

and then i mentioned that it was even better if my WHOLE face was in the picture. so we finally got to this:

…before they ran off and took 300 pictures of their legos.

it’s official. as of monday night, monkeybeef is finally walking for real. 15-1/2 months old. yay, caution! he walks 5-10 steps, lands on his butt, then stands right back up and walks some more. also? he walks backwards as steadily and quickly as he walks forward. as you might imagine, a huge shit-eating grin accompanies that trick. this morning, 12 hours after he suddenly decided to start walking, i picked him up out of his crib, put him down on his feet, and he took off across the room skipping. seriously. hopping, jumping, skipping – and cackling – all the way down the long upstairs hallway, without falling once. then he walked down the stairs without holding onto anything. prm figures he’ll be sprinting and breakdancing by thursday or so.

A conversation with the twits as we drove across some gorgeous fishing water in northern IL last night:

spazmonkey: MOM I WANT TO GO FISHING!
dramaqueen: but i don’t!
me: it’s almost bedtime now, but we’re going fishing tomorrow.
SM: I WANT TO GO FISHING RIGHT THERE! THERE’S FISH IN THERE!
me: yeeeeeah, but this is kind of a long drive. i think tomorrow we’ll go fishing at a park next to our house that has a pond with fish AND ducks.
SM: YEAH I CATCH SOME FISH FOR YOU FOR MOTHERS DAY!
DQ: and i catch you some ducks.
me: well, ducks are pretty hard to catch.
SM: YEAH WE CHASE THEM AND CHASE THEM AND CHASE THEM IN OUR YARD AND FRECKLEFACE’S YARD AND ALL THE YARDS AND WE NEVER CATCH THEM!
DQ: i can catch them.
me: how are you going to catch them? nets?
DQ: no. i frow watermelons at them.

but for proof that god loves me so much more than any of you assholes, you have only to turn to page 52 of “the beautiful cookbook” series’ “mexican border flavors,” which i was flipping through for cinco de mayo recipes, and see the recipe for MEXICAN EGGNOG, which is the same as regular eggnog, but adds ground almonds, cinnamon sticks and cloves. and the best part is that you serve it chilled! it’s a summer drink! score! oh, lord was it good. and it marks the first time that i’ve successfully made a custard – don’t laugh unless you’ve tried it yourself, dammit. there’s a fine line between a smooth custard and a chunky egg drop soup, and across this line, you do not… dude, please.

so the mexican eggnog was actually the only recipe i followed. the margaritas were improvised (substituting half the tequila with passionfruit flavored rum gets four thumbs up… because of the double vision!) the rice was ro-tel, the beans were hy-vee brand, and the shredded chicken was “slow cooked in cider… with some spices thrown on… and some garlic… and some other stuff i found,” and the shredded pork was “hey, i don’t know what GrandpaMoose and PositiveRoleModel put on it before smoking it, but if i thaw it in the oven in a pan full of beer, shred it, and add cumin, we’re calling it mexican!” okay, i did actually follow a recipe for the tortillas. because it’s pretty hard to do something “fun” with the big, soft saltines.

RadHippie, ChristmasEveryday, DirtyMartini, FargoBlues and even FamilyGuy (who, as you might imagine, has obligations besides working out and drinking in his time off) stopped by to empty a few pitchers and squeeze a few lime wedges. dinner was late – darkness, sounds of nature (and the blender), a cool breeze, and happily sleeping children (and one up doing his homework) – since everyone had worked late for one reason or another. RadHippie had to brag that he worked late because he slept in til noon. bastard! enjoying that roofie-and-exlax margarita yet?

and a couple of movies of the kite-flying: movie 1 … movie 2
this was the first time i had met most of the kids that were out at this end of the neighborhood. there were a couple of 11-year-old girls who were SOOOO nice to the younger kids… climbing trees to retrieve stuck kites, and one even ran home to grab an extra kite string after her younger sister hopelessly tangled EvilGremlin’s string when he gave her a turn with his. if you remember anything about your middle-school years, you may remember being a complete asshole. i’m always surprised when a middle-schooler is not just not a turd, but actually a really incredibly conscientious and kind human being. like the time EG was 3, and i took him to a park, and he wanted to run off and play tag with a rowdy group of middle school boys, and i freaked and started to drag him away… but the boys were like, no, he can play! and they spent the next hour playing with him, picking him up to help him climb over things that were too tall for him… it’s the kind of thing that restores your faith in humanity.

there was some planting. and some un-planting. and some tulip-tasting. and dirt-tasting. and rock-tasting. because they can’t ALL taste like shit, right? PRM bought 3 small shovels and put the boys to “work.” (i think he did actually get some identifiable help out of them, too, though DramaQueen was more interested in digging a nest for the ducks that have been hanging out in our yard than in doing anything actually assigned to him.) he’s got a second raised bed built, and it’s now full of tomato plants. sweet! i *think* the last frost of the season was a week ago. TexasRoadKill lost his tomato plants to it. and if there’s a may frost, well, dammit, i might actually have to quit making fun of him for putting his shit out too early.

two movies of some crawling… i didn’t do the best job of capturing what i think is the funniest locomotion ever – even funnier than the frog-hop crawl – which is running on all fours. not hands and knees. hands and feet; ass up. there’s a little bit of it here, though. movie 3 … movie 4

and our backyard has started to bloom, so we have three separate vases of flowers on the table right now, which is kind of awesome!

okay, we actually only own 2 vases. so the small yellow tulips are in a hookah bowl. whatever!

so all that plus some grilling and picking pretty much sums up our sunday. we got all the kids bathed and in bed by 830… remembered to bring the guitars and fiddles and banjos back inside when it got dark… SpazMonkey only needed like 6 bandaids to get through the day… i think that qualifies the day as “a success.”

*as in:
You think you’ll be happy if granted one more wish
But the truth is you’ll never need more than this.

they’re song lyrics, damn you. keep up, now.

great song. great album. my current favorite album, actually. vanessa carlton is a genius. also? she sings in my vocal range, so i can sing along really, really loud to her albums without my voice doing a 13-year-old boy impersonation. track 4 will make you cry. and track 9. and track 10. the title track, though – track 7 – will probably do nothing for you, since it was specifically written to be my theme song.