Baby I like it

Marriage is hard. Being with someone for seven years is difficult. Raising a child with someone is exhausting, and for all these reasons you end up kind of hating your spouse most of the time.

Here's my theory on why: when you are young and going through adolescents and even young adulthood, you go through many fazes of hating yourself. Then one day you get older and you stop hating yourself because you think "Hey, I'm kinda cool, I like me, scratch that -I LOVE ME!" For me this happened at around age 27. What usually follows this discovery that you are indeed not only a worthy human being, but even perhaps quite lovable is that you suddenly meet someone who also thinks this about you. Which is exactly what happened to me with Husband. Within a month of saying out loud to myself "Wow I'm pretty great, I can be single forever, cause I know how awesome I am and won't settle for some lame ass guy that doesn't see that" that's when Husband appeared literally on my door step. But Let's face it, we all need someone to hate, that's why we have George Bush and the Ku Klux Klan: focal points that we can hate on-you've got to hate someone. Therefore after seven years instead of hating myself, since I am too old and smart for that now, all my hate has transferred onto Husband.

Like any transferred self hatred it comes and goes. I don't always hate Husband, in fact sometimes I think to myself "huh, I really like him-weird". There are days though, where I really hate him. I'm not too big a person to admit this, in fact I think its normal in any good marriage or union of two people after 7 years. Hate is kind of a safety net in marriage, it gives you a place to go when everything else in your life is running smoothly. Things wouldn't feel right in the world if I didn't most of the time hate Husband for something or other.

So that being said there are also days when I forget that Husband used to be 25 and that I used to be 27 and that we used to have the most fun anyone could ever have together. I forget this, especially during the week days when I am tired, and Husband is tired, and I would rather sit in the living room and watch The Vampire Diaries on the Big TV then listen to him tell me about his day, and then one day something changes....

In the New Year Husband and I implemented 'Date Night' every other weekend. We decided it didn't matter what we did-even if we just went to dinner- we would be guaranteed a babysitter for that night for at least a couple hours to go out and enjoy the awesomeness of being adults without a child in tow. This is new for us, usually Date Nights were few and far between and would get lost in the shuffle of life and never really happen that often, but not this year! This was scheduled, and on the calendar- come hell or high water there would be a date every other Saturday God Damn it!

Our first date night I figured we would just go to dinner, it would be mellow, our usual stand by for going out. However this time, Husband surprised me by planning a night at a piano bar with his work friends. At first I was hesitant "eh it'll be lame" then I became non committal "whatever, at least I'm going out". As the night got closer and closer I felt more and more like I didn't really feel like going. I just wanted to maybe go to a nice dinner, but to bar with people I didn't know? Yuck! It sounded exhausting.

The night arrived and Husband had a whole plan laid out: we would drive to his friends house (a couple I actually know and quite enjoy) then we would take a cab together to first have dinner and then meet the rest of the group at the bar. Alright, Husband gets points for the fact that its all planned and I get to just go along, maybe this could be alright after all. Nanny showed up at the appointed time Husband had requested, and then, we were off!

Husband was in a great mood, cheerful, pleasant- the work week safely behind him. I thought: Huh, this is kinda fun"...still hesitant, I wasn't going to count my chickens before they hatched and get excited. Then Husband pumped up the radio to this cheesy music station that plays all top 40- which is very unlike him and began singing along to all the songs. "I love this station!" he called over the music smiling at me. "You do?" I asked confused, this was shocking to me. Husband normally only likes indie rock and kind of stick closer to his favorite bands. I on the other hand not only love our indie music that we share in common, but have an almost obsessive love for crappy pop music too. So I was shocked to find out that Husband would even know to listen to this radio station. "yeah its great!" Husband exclaimed. Then without warning 'Baby I like it' by Enrique Iglesias came on. Even with my intense crappy pop obsession I am waaaaay too cool to like Enrique Iglesias, however this last summer he had come on to my morning show that I watch every day and I found myself dancing along to this stupid song. I had it stuck in my head for the rest of the day and found when I heard it again that I really liked it despite myself. Embarrassed about this discovery I kept my love to myself not even buying the song to work out to. To my great surprise, Husband turned the volume up and started singing along in a loud falsetto. I laughed shocked Husband seemed to know all the words and said sheepishly "I kind of like this song". "Are you kidding?" Husband exclaimed "This song is awesome!" and continues to sing all the words loudly as we pull into our friends driveway. He turns it up again and we both sing in high pitched whines "Baaaaaaby I liiiiike it!"

Its hard to explain the feeling when you rediscover that the person you are with at the moment is a kindred spirit, especially someone you spend most of time slogging through the difficult patches of life with. There is a certain point when you go through enough of the daily grind with someone that you wonder: is there any fun left to be had here? and then.... 'Baby I like it' comes on and you begin a whole new romance with the person you have spent the last year of your life changing diapers and chasing down a screaming toddler with.

Suffice it to say, we spent the rest of the evening drunk, happy and dancing with friends to all the music that we love, and love to hate. At the end of the night we went home, sent Nanny on her way and crept into our office where we shut the door and pumped up "Baby I like it" on the computer, where we danced wildly around the room one last time before crashing into bed.

Death by Mothball

Hello New Year! I'm back! I'm here. It was almost like I died I have been blog-less for so long, except not like that at all, but you know what I mean. I started the new year with work , exercise and diet. As you may know this deadly combination will suck all the joy from your life and what you are left with is sleep, work and household chores because you are too tired to even care about anything else. However, I am starting to get used to my 5 day a week work outs during my lunch hour and I am now resurfacing mentally once more.

so we didn't go to Oregon. That's it. That's all I will say about that as of now, because at this point in time the reasons are not funny enough yet to go into detail about, but with some time and space there may be some funny yet to discuss at a later date.

So, back to the important stuff. Two days ago there was a Great Smell in our hallway. When I say 'Great' I don't mean awesome, I mean large. The Great smell was difficult to diagnose. If you know me at all, you know that I have a major smell situation happening in my life. I can smell everything in intense waves and can easily tell you what the source of the smell is immediately, I am 98% accurate most times. This smell was hard for me to decipher, it smelled chemical, oily, deathly and yet, familiar- hard to put my finger on. I also cannot tolerate a bad smell, it needs to be figured out and dealt with immediately. Therefore when The Great Smell happened I was obviously irked.

Husband could also not identify The Great Smell, and being Husband with smells didn't seem to care one way or the other, which I find mind boggling! Smells OFFEND me. How could he be so blaze?! I made sure that the smell was not penetrating Babies room, or our bedroom as we slept, because this is the type of thing that will keep me up at night, literally worrying about what it could be. Will it kill us? Will it make us retarded? will the house explode? vaguely in the back of mind I recall telling signs of toxicity levels that will indicate onset sudden death, things like: blue fingernails! coughing blood! feeling dizzy or faint! I creep into babies room and made sure that he was still breathing. For the first time I was grateful that our bedroom is so drafty and thanked our crappy louver windows for letting in so much fresh outside air! Husband was clearly un-alarmed by The Great Smell lurking in the hallway and went to bed as usual.

Meanwhile I lay in bed that night wondering what it could be. I got up and creep around the house which I am prone to do at night if I hear a weird noise, and realized The Great Smell was coming from our creepy basement door-the smell seems to be hallway and basement door centric to which I deduce that obviously something has died in the basement, or the dead body I have always imagined down there has been uprooted by the recent rains and we will soon realize that we are living in a real life poltergeist house. I retreat back to the bedroom trying to formulate a plan. Husband snores idly in bed next to me and all I can think is how can he just lay there when we have a smell crisis on our hands!

Lets be clear: the source of many smells in our house come from the basement, or as I fondly refer to it "a place where child molesters might go to die". Our creepy basement smells like death on a good day. It consists of old wooden steps that go down into a dark dirt hole where we keep things we don't want but can't throw away. I am so fearful of this place, that when I have to go down there I leave the door wide open and turn all the lights on. I do a safe jog quickly up and down the steps for fear I will accidentally be trapped in this tomb if I linger too long. we actually keep the door locked with a special key that's how serious the basement is. Nanny won't even go in there at all. We had thoughtfully suggested that we keep the mop at the top of the stairs as a convenient place to be able to retrieve it. Nanny silently refused this placement by shaking her head and frowning and then in broken English explained "I no like, I put mop outside" where the mop now lives next to the house ever since.

Day 2 of The Great Smell started to make me mad. If Nanny wasn't such a Nazi about cleanliness and so sensitive herself to smell, I might not have even gone to work due to the fear of Baby being subjected to The Great Smell all day. Luckily for me the first thing Nanny did upon entering the house was squinch up her nose and announce that she would be opening all the windows immediately. I knew Baby would be safe on The Sarges watch. By the time I had gotten home from work that night the house reeked and I had had it! It was time to take back my house from the looming enemy of The Great Smell. With Baby on my hip I marched over to Husband and declared that I would be calling Landlord! "oh Jesus" Husband said rolling his eyes, "well I'm not dealing with him". He then took his dinner plate and went into the bedroom and closed the door. I yelled through the door self importantly after him: "I will be dealing with this!" Baby and I were on a mission. "for Gods sake" Husband adds through the door "Don't tell him you think something died down there, then he'll never come over". Good point. it happens to be a fact that our basement is a place where animals go to die. It may even be used in our neighborhood as a formal animal morgue for all we know. Husbands right, its not breaking news if something "died" down there, Landlord will just say in his casual Texas drawl"yeh, I guess you'll just have to wait it out".

I knew Baby and I needed to be smart about this, we couldn't just say 'anything' to get this problem solved, we had to be clever. While Baby negotiated how my chandelier earring worked by tugging harder every minute on my ear, I texted Landlord. I wrote that there was a "strange smell" in the house, that I was "concerned" about. He swiftly texted back asking "does it smell like gas?". It was obviously not gas, I'm not an idiot, but I also knew that my lackadaisical charming Landlord would call it an evening if I didn't put some merrit behind the issue, so I wrote: "I don't thiiiink so, but maybe??" . I hate to admit it, but I will use the dumb blonde approach when I need to, to get what I want from time to time. It worked because immediately Landlord responded "be right over!"

Baby and I stood watch and awaited Landlords arrival. When Landlord showed up two minutes later to survey the situation, it was clear that he could smell The Great Smell however, similar to Husband he seemed un-alarmed by this clearly hazardous situation. His first question was "where's Husband?". Translation: "you have a Husband why don't you make him go down to the basement and figure out what is causing the death scent?" again I played dumb, as if the question was merely factual and not intended to question the validity of my predicament: "he's getting ready for bed" I lied. With this Landlord made the executive decision that he would need to go into the basement to investigate further. I helped promote this idea by throwing out "maybe its something coming from the heater??" knowing this would concern a Landlord. He took the bait and asked for the basement key. I quickly busied myself with walking to and fro with baby acting as if there was important work to be done, and therefore I would not be able to perch at the top of the basement steps or worse have to go down into basement with Landlord.

After about 7 minutes, which seemed like a million years Landlord emerged "well.." He stated factually "its what I thought..." A dead body! I almost exclaimed, "there's a box of Moth balls that someone has torn open next to the water heater and the smell is coming up through the stairs". Huh? Then with his usual 'come what may' disinterest he shrugged, as if to say "someone should really clean that up". As if we had gone down there and opened the fresh box for kicks and it all just got out of hand. Then he helpfully added "you should probably crack a window in here". and that was that. problem solved. Its only a-toxic-bug -killing-banned from use- hazardous to your health- emitting unexplained from your basement poisonous gas that you have lived with for two days-nothing to worry about!

In all honesty, knowing for me is 90 percent of any solution, so I was actually mildly calmed by this information. However, doing research today at work one of the first things it says is "do not have fumes around infants- could be fatal!". While I flaffed about afterward, putting baby to bed consumed with thoughts that clearly we would have to put Baby in a special needs class when he reached school age now since all his brain cells were obviously destroyed by the killer moth balls Husband was going up and down the basement stairs cleaning and getting rid of the death balls without even being asked.

The bigger question is: how did they get down there? and who mysteriously opened this box obviously trying to kill us? it will unfortunately remain a mystery for now...