One-item lists, Vol. 3

Most inconvenient things about my wife getting a Caesarean section
1. I wasn't allowed to make her laugh for several weeks. I really have no idea how else to interact with her.

Reasons I don't want my wife using my side of the bed as a storage area when I'm not there
1. Because I get to find in it lovely treasures like, say, the shriveled stump of an infant's umbilical cord lying next to the used tissue in which it was allegedly once loosely contained.*

The kinds of ways I count my blessings
1. The snow didn't blow around and drift waist-high like usual during a recent windstorm here... thanks to the preceding hours of heavy rain freezing everything solid.

Proof that "ladylike" tendencies don't kick in until after age 6
1. (Female classmate of my son's, apropos of nothing in the hallway one morning during a schoolwide Norovirus epidemic): Destiny, I wasn't in school yesterday! ...Yeah, I pooped in the car, so...

How I can tell my daughter may be the ultimate Anti-Vegetarian
1. Nothing has changed since I posted this. My 4-year-old daughter M- recently smiled between mouthfuls of ham roll-ups and said, "Since I watched Babe today, I was in the mood for ham! ...Because pigs make ham."

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* And let me tell you, the only thing more shocking than finding such an item is realizing that you were able to identify it, completely out of context, in under 10 seconds.

Macaroni-and-Death in the Garden of Good and Edam

As those of you outside what I'll call The Snow Belt may have heard, the rest of us are currently dealing with the kind of snow that builds you a fort all by itself, and the kind of cold that freezes your tongue to your coat zipper the second your foot hits the front porch.

Sharp cold wave shocks upper Midwest, temps to -36

In times like these, disaster is rarely located anywhere but Right Around the Corner:

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"Indiana police reported numerous crashes on slippery highways, including a truck that overturned and spilled 43,000 pounds of cheese, closing a busy highway ramp during the night in the Gary area."

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Far be it from me to provoke an intra-national incident or incite legendary food-fight-related violence, but I think I speak for all of us when I say it should be clear to the people of Wisconsin that this willful distribution of copious amounts of free cheese to the public by the people of Indiana constitutes an act of war.

I believe I'll munch on some gravel-laced Gouda while I mull the implications of this tragic, region-shaping attack.

The weather inside is spiteful

It was raining all last night here in Chicagoland, which makes me mad. It's supposed to be winter, a time of cold, fluffy snow, not balmy rain and lethal ice.

I think it's quite possible that Hell is actually a frigid ice fortress full of horrifically pointy icicles in every direction and black ice the only floor covering.

I have a feeling this warm-up indicates we'll miss a white Christmas yet again in my lifetime, which happens so often I'm never surprised, even though Christmas occurs at the end of December in Chicago. Two and two equal five here, it seems.

All of our beautiful, hard-fought snow from earlier this week (whose sudden arrival during rush hour caused me to park the car and walk with D- to Target rather than endure another half hour trying to drive a mere mile and a half), will be iced over and ruined, like a jilted lover left to rot at the altar.

This perfect snowball powder I didn't even get to roll in once got Havishamed in one long, bitter night, and what I'll be walking out into, whenever it is I choose to exit our icy cocoon, will be a shadow of its former self. I'm almost too upset to even picture it. Breaking through the icy crust over the yard (with the back of my skull, no doubt) to find the soft insides dried-out and useless for anything but metaphors...

I'm too digusted to even crack a simile.

Shovel 16 sidewalks and whaddya get?

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, so I've always been more than familiar with snow, and I even made a fair amount of money in those years shoveling driveways, but I wouldn't say I became obsessed until after I was married and living in Northern Maine. (Refer to the picture above for an idea of what Northern Maine looks like much of the year-- that's my good old Dodge Spirit [RIP] under there.)

Once, when she was very pregnant with D-, J- slipped on a chronically icy stair, injuring her tailbone and causing an odd muscle tightness in her abdomen (which is bad). After suggesting once again to our landlord that he should fix the leaky gutter over the stairs, I began religiously clearing every speck of snow and ice everywhere on the property, at all hours of the day and night. I just fell into a routine, which was aided by the fact that it snows 8 months of the year in Maine. It didn't hurt that this was pretty much my only regular exercise at the time, so I allowed my OCD demons to firmly take hold, and now I just about cannot stop myself whenever I have access to a shovel and uncleared snow.

Though there are worse obsessions, I still don't wish this one on D-, but I feel it may be inevitable, as he already can't even stop at shoveling the sidewalk and my parents' deck. He frequently takes to clearing as much of the yard as he can before being convinced to take a break, and even then you can catch him all but twitching to get ahold of the shovel once again.

Unfortunately, most of the shoveling at our house involves the three flights of stairs up to our back door, so I can't put him to work too much here. It really is a loss-- you'd be surprised by how effective he is at his age!

Frosty's premies

A pair of these noble warriors stood guard at my parents' house until recently, when they finally met their match in a bout of slightly mild weather. But until then, they amused me each time I saw them (in amounts far exceeding their stature), due to the fact that they were as unaware of the uniqueness of their size as was their creator.

Despite the fact that we used to live in Northern Maine, D- doesn't have much experience with making snowmen, because when he was much younger, he hated wind in all its forms, and when he got older, he was more interested in throwing snowballs and stomping snow. He could stomp snow for hours, likely driven by a budding obsessive-compulsive disorder that is not yet powerful enough to drive him to tear down a ridiculously-proportioned snowman like this shortly after starting it. God bless him for that.

I'll admit that I can't remember even starting to make more than maybe two snowmen in my life, which I know may seem to some a tragedy. I just found the idea of snowmen boring as a kid, versus forts and snowballs. However, a parent's boredom doesn't matter much for activities with children, because many, many of those activities are mind-numbingly boring and/or exceedingly annoying. Mostly it's the repetition, I suppose, but then that's the only way kids learn. Sigh...

Anyway, I'm sure this plays a big role in his inexperience, but I'd be more than willing to help him make one if he wanted. I wasn't there the day he made these particular snowmen with my sister, but she found them as funny as I did. She was able to stoically refrain from laughing too hard while overseeing D- due to her ongoing training as an early childhood education major in college.

I honestly think that if I suggested making a snowman any bigger than these, though, we might get as far as constructing the regulation-sized base before D- would request permission to get a snow shovel so he could get back to clearing all snow from every horizontal surface to which he is allowed access. He presumably developed his slavish devotion to snow removal from watching me head outside each time a flake hits the ground, driven by a force I only slightly understand, but it may just be a coincidence... I'll post my thoughts about this tomorrow.

To offer a little perspective on just how tiny these things are, here's a picture with D- for reference:
I think we'll be making these guys and their baby-carrot noses into a family tradition.