Today, my head is pounding. A comedian once joked that the crushing skull pain of a hangover is from all your neurons being off at the funeral for their comrades that you killed off in a blaze of tequila glory the night before. I consumed no alcohol, but I have a feeling that today’s agony is from my brain rebelling, most vociferously, against the depredations visited upon it yesterday.
Yesterday morning, baby fight club had a Christmas Cookie Swap here at the house, at which all and sundry could observe the massiveness of my spawn. Tuesday morning he got his flu shot, the first of two, though the likelihood there will be any vaccine stock left in January is about as infinitesimally small as the chances of me winning Miss America, and as an extra kick in the pants to the poor bebester, he cut a top incisor about 3 hours later. One is encouraged to drug one’s child with infant tylenol after the shot, but the amount depends on their age and weight, so after he was jabbed (and I have to say he was extremely good about it- one pitiful bleat and that was it. So good, in fact, I checked to make sure I hadn’t accidentally brought my A.I. Seanbot) we hustled him down to the scale. The nurse didn’t make me strip him down all the way, and so when she got the initial reading she delcared she must, strangely, be screwing things up and maybe he had a really big load in his diaper (of what? black dwarf stars?), and went and got another nurse, who declared that couldn’t be right, and marched us down to a different scale and had a third nurse weigh him. Sean, thrilled to be kickin it in just a diaper, squealed and cooed and sharmed all and sundry as his seven month old bod weighed in at 22 pounds, 15 ounces, thus making him bigger than not only our Thanksgiving turkey, but also my in-laws turkey and 99% of other 7 month olds. Suddenly it occured to dim little me that this might be why he’s fitting just fine in the 12 month clothes. So the other fight club moms, many of whom had not seen him in 3 weeks- and let me point out that Nov 12 he weighed in at 18 4, he’s putting on a pound a week- were stunned at the cookie exchange by his massive size. And he’s not even chubby, it’s not like he’s a Michelin baby. He’s…just…big. He slumbered through most of the cookie swap, losing his golden opportunity to careen through platters of cookies like Godzilla ravaging Tokyo.
And as if that wasn’t enough suburban wholesomeness, last night I had to go to a Pampered Chef party. You know, I thought I had seen into suburbia. I thought I knew how bad it was. But the fact is, the women of Baby Fight Club are pretty cool, by and large. There’s the organic and renewable resource touting chemical engineer, the Ph.D. economist, the hip woman who listens to alternarock and yells the lyrics to her daughter, and so on. Even the woman in the junior league can reveal herself to be pretty cool, as yesterday she listened to two of the women fretting about their kids not eating by the book. “You just have to trust your instincts. No one here is a poster child for state intervention, so obviously we’re all doing ok.”
The Pampered Chef party, though, wholly different story. I had heard of PC, but never been to one, and the woman who invited me is lovely and snarky and hilarious but apparently has fallen prey to the dark side of overpriced crappy kitchen implements, and ran an invite over the other night imploring me to just come and hang out. It turns out all of the attendees were not only familiar with the rituals of Pampered Chef (the cooking of product that even the judges of the Betty Crocker Bake-Off would declare to be overzealous in their use of prepared foods and too bland, the demonstration of the implements of food destruction by a ‘representative’, as opposed to the host), they are all major-league owners of PC items, going so far as to compare years, makes, and models of things such as the hand-e chop.
I walked in wearing all black and doc martens. Every other woman, except one , was wearing a festive appliqued holiday sweater. The one who wasn’t was wearing a festive appliqued fall sweater (Why fall, I don’t know. We had an asstacular rainstorm on Tuesday, the night I had to drive downtown with the baby to play Facuwife for my poor, overworked husband at the faculty/student Christmas dinner, and of course it all froze, and then it snowed a metric buttload for Kansas in December, and let me tell you, walking on rime ice in a parking lot was bad enough when pregnant, but doing it carrying a screeching wriggling Gojira is even worse). And they were all trading stories of what they’d gotten for their secret santa Needy Family from church, or their sons’ latest soccer escapades (because god forbid soccer season ever ends, we’ve now entered the indoor soccer season, where your game times are alloted based on a complex algorhythm taking into account team’s age, rank, wealth of parents, number of championships runs, and precisely how many favorite tv shows the start time would interfere with), and innumerable holiday recipes which used an astonishing amount of crescent roll dough, sour cream, freeze dried chives, and cream of chicken soup. Meanwhile, someone asked what you could use the gratin dish for, and I listened in growing horror as the following ideas were tossed around:
“Dip!”
“Chicken dip!” “Oooh, that chicken dip is fabulous!”
“Taco dip!”
“Cheese dip!”
“Spinach and artichoke dip!”
“Bean dip!”
“Fruit dip!”
“Vegetable dip!”
The Dip madness came to a screeching halt when I said, “Of course, you could just bake a *gratin* in it.” And then several women- who all OWN the gratin dish- squealed, “It’s oven proof?” And then the representative smiled wide and said:
“Yes… you can use it for baked dips!”
