When yoga pants go bad

Dear Dad: I love you. Do not read this post. 'kay, thanks.

Oooh, I got new workout clothes! For the first time since before I was pregnant with Caleb. This is exciting in my sad little world.

So exciting that last night I carefully laid out my new workout clothes before bed. So exciting that this morning I popped right out of bed in anticipation of putting on the new workout clothes.

So exciting that I checked myself out in the mirror before I left. And from the front, I looked pretty good. From the side, I noticed my trunk looked a bit, um, lumpy. From the back, it was tragic.

I had four butt cheeks. Like this:


Turns out yoga pants are entirely incompatible with my undies of choice:


Plain ol' hiphugger bikinis. Totally comfy, no creeping, minimal panty lines. Perfect under my jeans (which are not mom jeans, I swear). But it turns out yoga pants do not camouflage how the elastic in the undies dissects my aging, post-three-babies derriere in half perfectly. Horizontally. Like my ass has an equator or something.

Four butt cheeks on one person is not good.

This led to an emergency phone call to my sister. What should I do?!

Try a thong! she said.

Oh, okay. Seriously, I'm not even going to give you much of a visual on this one. Remember: three babies. If you've birthed babies, you know why I don't wear a thong. If you haven't had them, you don't want to know. Trust me.

I'm not at all opposed to some sexy lingerie. But, um, these would kill me. I would die from wearing ill-advised undies to the gym. Not the way I want to go out.

So after I vetoed that, she suggested a boy short. Like this:

This makes me laugh out loud. I don't know if I've ever, in my life, worn anything less flattering than boy short undies. These are not only incompatible with yoga pants, they are incompatible with the human body. Nobody looks like this photo. I could put them on in a pitch-black closet with no mirror in sight and still know that I look like a complete jack-ass. Nope.

She was out of suggestions. So I explained my quandry to my ever-stylish husband, and asked: what kind of undies should I wear under my pretty new yoga pants?

He evidently agreed that the panty lines were problematic, and helpfully suggested Spanx. (I do not want to know why my husband knows what Spanx are.) Yes, he really said that. So I was supposed to wear these under my low-rise yoga pants:

They come up to your navel, people. And then all the jiggly parts just squeeze out over and under the Spanx.

No.

So, in the end, I just recognized that I have no pride. I arranged the hiphuggers and the rear end as carefully as possible and went to the gym.

And worked out really, really hard.

Having four butt cheeks is kind of motivating like that.

Update (because this post definitely deserves an update): my brilliant and bored sister has decided that yoga pants need built-in undies, like running shorts have. No creep, no show. So, Makers of Yoga Pants: get on it.

Weekly Winners: Very cool

A quick note on my stunning slackeratiousness: these photos are two weeks old. It has taken me that long to remember to post them. But they are too cool not to share. Sorry for the delay.


Jeff brought home a huge cooler full of dry ice from work one evening.
You know what's fun? To put a piece of dry ice into a glass of water:

You know what's even more fun? To dump the entire cooler full of dry ice into the bathtub:

For more amazing photos from some really great blogs, head over here to check out Lotus's Weekly Winners.

The Big Blue Box: A Rant

Dear WalMart,

I quit you.

You suck my soul dry.

On an average trip: I have to park in the very back of the parking lot because everybody always wants to go to your stupid store. I have to dodge two or three cars in your parking lot driven by people who don't feel they need to actually obey the stop sign and wait for a woman and her three children. The greeter accosts my children and slaps stickers all over them-- even the baby, even when I say, "No, thank you" because he just eats them, and even my almost eight-year-old, even when he shies away and shakes his head suspiciously. You are always sold out of at least one basic staple on my list and I can never find anyone to help me when I have a question. I can never find green onions. I have to wait multiple times for people who think it is their God-given right to block an entire aisle while they take 15 minutes to select hair dye in the perfect shade of "cheap" or adult diapers or processed cheese food or just the right monster-truck-emblazoned t-shirt. I then wait another 15 minutes in line to check out. (You have 32 check-out aisles. At any given time, four are open. At the most.) I wait for this long in an aisle lined with candy and soda and disposable lighters and disgusting fruit-flavored chewing gum and celebrity gossip magazines and beef jerky and car "fresheners" which my children know they can't have but after waiting that long they get just a bit restless. And when I am finally able to check out, the checker is invariably sullen and wears enormous amounts of black eyeliner and says nothing to me except the dollar amount that I owe (which is always too high, because somewhere along the line I lose all focus and just start throwing random things in the cart that aren't on my list and which I later regret purchasing but it seems like a major hassle to return them). By the time we actually get to leave your God-forsaken store my children are starving and beg for Subway which is conveniently placed by the front door, just before the 10,000 slot machines with candy and toys in them. When we actually make it through that pediatric and economic minefield, it's back out to brave the terrifying parking lot again.

Also: your shopping carts are repulsive (although Caleb really likes to suck on the cart handles). You try to sell cheap worthless plastic crap to my children who are futile against your least-common-denominator marketing. ("Live better! Buy more sh*t you don't need!") You sell ammunition and cold, cheap beer and 17 flavors of PopTarts but no decent fresh produce. The fluorescent lights make my kids look like they're in liver failure.

By the time I'm done, it is difficult to think about anything but escape.

And then, yesterday. As usual, I was stressed out and zoned out and crabby as I left. The kids were tired and bored and whiney. We all just wanted to go home. In the parking lot I realized I forgot to buy diapers. Somebody was waiting for my parking place.

And then. Then I slammed Evan's hand in the van door. His entire hand. The door latched. His hand bruised and swelled immediately and he had a big ugly red line across it.

It was sickening.

This is not your fault, WalMart. I know that you did not make me do this. But it made me realize how miserable you make me. When I leave you I am defensive and irritable and distracted and hating. Every time.

We've all heard the arguments about whether WalMart is a good corporate citizen, about what WalMart does to local economies, about what WalMart has done to the face of America (and now the world). I don't know about these things. I don't know whether the anti-WalMart rhetoric is holding true, or whether it's just theory. What I do know is that it's tempting, the thought that I can buy toilet paper and bananas and diapers and socks and pregnancy tests and Christmas decor under one roof. Especially when you are the closest store to me. Especially when it's all less expensive at your store. What else I know is how ugly I feel every single time I visit you.

It isn't worth it, on a personal scale or from a more global perspective.

So I am declaring here and now that I will be taking my business elsewhere. Somewhere slightly less ugly, somewhere that makes the world slightly less ugly, somewhere that makes me feel slightly less ugly. This isn't a naive call to action (I don't have that in me). Me versus the WalMart Industrial Complex? Hardly. I'm just telling you what I'm doing.

You can take your dietary supplements and Rubbermaid bins and ugly baby clothes and store-brand white bread and 823 brands of frozen pizza and "Proud to Be An American" cd's and particle board furniture and everything that contains high-fructose corn syrup and all the other stuff I might actually buy there, and you can shove it, WalMart.

Ciao.



(PS-- Evan's hand is fine. It only took a two-hour field trip to the doctor's office to determine this, but he is fine.)

The Sound of Silence

Last night the boys listened to the radio. A Rock And Roll Song came on, with a great big Guitar Solo. Evan stopped dead in his tracks and said, "Hey! He's playing the air guitar!!!"

Jeff cocked his head, raised his eyebrow. "Um, Evan, you know the air guitar doesn't make any sound, right?"

Evan shot Jeff a withering look. "Yes it does! Listen to this," he said.

He then grabbed his air guitar and ripped off an impressive solo that would have made Eddie Van Halen proud.

"Didja hear that? That," he pronounced smugly, "is what the air guitar sounds like."

Having obviously schooled his father, he carefully put down his instrument, turned his back, and walked away.

I'm wondering if we can teach him to have an air tantrum. Or slam an air door. The possibilities with a four-year-old are almost endless, no?

First steps

Ten Ways I Know I Am Not A Toddler

I need some help.

I realized today that I live like a toddler. Seriously, my daily routine is almost indistinguishable from that of my kids. I eat on their schedules, I listen to their damn music (I still love you, Dan Zanes, but I think we need some time apart), I spend a good portion of every day picking up (or tripping over or swearing at) brightly colored plastic toys. If it weren't for the Diet Coke and random, lame attempts at housekeeping, I'd swear I was, like, two years old.

It’s time to step back and inventory my life, to reassure myself that I am indeed an adult. Time for a list.

How I Know That I Am Not A Toddler, by Me

1. I drink my beer from the bottle, not from a sippy cup. And I don't cut it with whole milk.
2. Graham crackers and/or vanilla wafers are not the high point of my day (unless it's been a really crappy day).
3. I understand that Elmo is make-believe.
4. When I drool it's because I'm tired as hell, not because I'm teething.
5. I try to remember to refer to my husband as "Jeff" and not as "Daddy," but sometimes I slip and this troubles me.
6. When life throws me a curveball and naptime is delayed by 20 minutes, I can adapt without having a complete meltdown. Unless it's been a really crappy day.
7. Nobody has ever once told me that my fat dimpled thighs are “cute.”
8. Diapers. Enough said.
9. I am smarter than a dog. (But toddlers are cuter.)
10. Generally speaking, gravity does not kick my ass several times a day.

Okay.

I'm good.

Not about the shoes

I told a lie last week. But some are forgivable, right? Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, claiming to not know what happened to the rest of the Junior Mints…. Sometimes being a grown-up means you have to not tell the truth. It’s a complicated world. (I will hunt you down and do terrible things to you if you tell my children I said that, by the way.)

Anyway, my birthday was Saturday, and I desperately wanted two things: Madden ’09 (shut up) and a pair of faux-fur leopard-print clogs. I don’t know what it says about me that those were the two things I wanted most in the world; you can judge that for yourselves.

Jeff took the boys shopping while I was freezing my ass off (aka "vacationing") in Minnesota last week. We talked on Skype (is there a verb form of Skype? “We Skyped”?) on Tuesday morning. Evan’s getting better, but he’s not a real pro at the whole secret-keeping bit yet. So he promptly blurted out, “We went shopping yesterday and got you Madden ’09!” Which promptly inspired Jensen to attempt to clobber Evan. Which promptly inspired Evan to cry hysterically.

Which promptly inspired me to lie. I knew exactly what Evan had said. But without missing a beat I lied. “I didn’t understand you Evan. The sound wasn’t very good. Jensen, why are you so mad? I didn’t hear what Evan said.” It worked: Jensen was placated and Evan’s tears dried and Jeff tried not to laugh.

So Evan spilled the Madden beans. Jeff spilled the clog beans. These shoes were driving me nuts, and I was on the verge of just buying them. “Operation Leopard Print is complete,” he told me, afraid that I would get them myself. (Very tricky little code he used, eh? He’s clever like that.)

On Saturday morning, my gifts were on the table. Jensen had wrapped them himself (in carefully-chosen Christmas paper) with his brand-new Swiss army knife. Visions of arterial lacerations aside, I was very proud of him. He was proud of him.

Both boys jumped and danced and could not wait for me to open my gifts. Their excitement was bubbling over, and I couldn’t resist whipping them into a frenzy. “I wonder what’s in those boxes?” I asked. “What did you guys get me?” And every time I asked they collapsed in giggles.

I tortured them for as long as I thought advisable. (I didn't want anyone to either wet his pants or start crying or both.) Then I opened my gifts.

Guess what I got? Madden ’09 and a very cool pair of Danish leopard-print clogs. Great gifts. No surprises.

Saturday may have been the official Best Birthday Ever, and not because I got what I asked for. The boys’ happiness was better than any surprise they could have purchased. And I’m not lying at all.