I thought giving this blog post a catchy, Nancy Drew-esque title might pique your interest.  Because – really – who wouldn’t be interested in reading…duhnt, duhnt, DUHHHN…THE CASE OF THE HOTDOG IN THE NIGHT.

It all started with a call from my son’s bedroom – oooooh say about 12:30 a.m. – “Mom!  I need you!!!”

What’s interesting about those calls-in-the-night is that you’re immediately up and running.  No thought needed.  It’s instinctive.  Or fear-driven, because you’re worried that an even bigger mess will result if you don’t get there in record time.

And as a side note, I may be on to something here.  I mean, if a burglar broke in to my house, but as he was doing so he shouted, “Mom!  I need you!!!”  I’d meet him at the door with a bucket, a cool cloth and a flat gingerale and then I’d go back to bed while he robbed us blind.  That initial adrenaline rush makes you really, really sleepy.

Anywhoooo.  Back to duhnt, duhnt, DUHHHN…THE CASE OF THE HOTDOG IN THE NIGHT.  What follows is an actual transcript of events after the initial “I need you” call:

SONNY (not actually named Sonny – just called Sonny for blog purposes so as to protect the innocent):  Mom!  I need a bucket!

ME:  Ok, Sweetheart.  I have a bucket; Here it is.  But really, if you’re feeling sick, let’s move this to the bathroom.

SONNY:  No, I just want to sit down for a second WITH the bucket.

ME:  Ok, I’ll sit down too.  [now dozing, slumped over in the chair in his room]

SONNY:  Gaack!!!  GAAAA AACCCCKKKKKKK KKKKKKKK!!!!!

ME:  [now fully awake again]  Oh.  Baby.  Do you think you can move this to the bathroom?!

SONNY:  Mmmffph.   MMMGGGPHHHHACCKK.  GAAAAA AAACKKKK KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!

ME:  Ok.  It’s ok.  You’re ok.  Just let it come up.  But get it in the bucket!  [now “gently” pressing his head-up-to-his-ears back into the bucket]

SONNY:  Mom!  Don’t push my head into the bucket or you’re gonna make me throw up!  GAAAAACCCCKKKKKK!!!!

ME: [in my head] Buddy, YOU ARE ALREADY THROWING UP!!!!

Rustle, rustle, rustle.  Hubby arrives on the scene.

ME [to Hubby]:  I told you, A HOTDOG AND A BLIZZARD AFTER THE WRESTLING MATCH WAS A BAAAAD IDEA!!!!!!!! [I can’t stress enough how shrill this ended up sounding.  Because it’s really, really hard to take someone to task while you, yourself, are trying not to puke.  Because let’s be honest.  Hotdogs smell slightly like vomit as they’re going DOWN!  When they come back UP?  Quintissential Puke.]

HUBBY:  No, it was that bowl of cereal you gave him right before bed.

SONNY:  GAAACK!  GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAACCCCCCC CCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK Kkkkkkkkk!!!

ME: Ok, Buddy.  You feel like you can move this to the bathroom now?

shuffle…shuffle…shuffle

ME:  [to husband who somehow is now IN the bathroom watching all of this with big, googly eyes] Don’t just stand there, LIFT UP THE TOILET SEAT!!!

Sonny says a fond farewell to his hotdog a few more times in the toilet and then it’s over.  

I hand the bucket of Quintissential Puke over to Hubby to handle (Hey! Don’t feed the kid rotten hotdogs and icecream at the end of the night or you WILL pay the price)   while Sonny is rinsing his mouth and brushing his teeth.  While this is going on, I head back into Sonny’s bedroom and…IT SMELLS LIKE QUINTISSENTIAL PUKE!  Gaack!!! So I go into bloodhound mode to see where the smell is coming from.  Did I not press Sonny’s head far enough into the bucket and as a result there’s a splatter pattern somewhere?  I sniff all over the bed (what the plan was I don’t know.  To mark the puke splatter with some of my own?!).  Nothing.  I sniff the floor AROUND the bed.  Nothing.  I write it off to the sheer olfactory power of the regurgitated hotdog.  Perhaps it’s just a neumonic smell because doesn’t everyone have a regurgitated hotdog experience somewhere in their youth?!  That puts them “off” of hotdogs for the next 20 years or so??  I’m sure my brother does and I’ll make sure he takes a look at this blog so he can remember the good times.

[Back in the bedroom.  Sonny is feeling FINE and is even “chatty” after some final nose-clearing sneezes.  I don’t want to even THINK about what splatter pattern happened with those.  I have this super power where I block my nose from the inside.  And block my mind from the horror.]

SONNY:  Mom, the thing that was really grossing me out was the CHUNKS of hotdog.

ME:  Yep…………………..yep……………….Mmmffph……….

The one thought that occurred to me as I was going back to bed – the ONE thing – was that if Sonny still wasn’t feeling well in the morning, that would be ok because I didn’t have anywhere else to be in the a.m. and we could both sleep late together.

Ahhhh!!!  The joys of stay at home motherhood!

Does anyone know an easy rule-of-thumb for baking at high altitude?  (more flour and more water?  or is it less sugar and less water??)  You’d think I know this by now but it seems to involve math and I’m not good at math.  Point in fact – it came to light over Christmas break when my parents were visiting that I was subjected to something called “new math” during my formative years.  Since I was the middle child, my older sisters escaped the new math debacle.  And since the new math proved to be an epic fail, by the time my younger brother and sister came along, they had moved on to different, awesome, easy, non-scarring-for-the-rest-of-your-life math.

My father – who is a Chemical Engineer (which is a fancy way of saying Math Man Extraordinaire) – tried to explain baking at high altitude once.  It was shortly after my grandmother (a lifelong hot tea drinker) complained to the waiter at the restaurant in the mountain town that her tea wasn’t hot enough.  He (the waiter, not my dad) tried to explain back that water boils at a lower temperature when you’re a mile plus above sea-level.  She wasn’t having any of it (which is your prerogative when you’re 90+, I suppose) and made him bring her a NEW cup of hot tea which turned out to be just as not-hot-enough as the first cup.

But I digress.  My father’s explanation of baking at altitude went something like this…P equals V times R over the sound of your brain imploding.  (please see comment above about how I’m not good at math).

So.  I’m back to looking for EASY rules-of-thumb (or should that be rule-of-thumbs?) for baking at high altitude that don’t involve math??

If so, send them my way.  What with all this TIME I have on my hands, I do quite a bit of baking.  But badly because I can’t adjust the recipes for high altitude.

A batch of brownies all sunken and liquidy in the middle is not a pretty sight!

Cereal overload.  We have no fewer than 12 boxes of cereal in the pantry.  Half of which have a cup or less of cereal in them.  In my youth, when the cereals got to the cup-or-less point, my mother would combine them all into one package.  But I found there was nothing MORE disappointing than thinking you were getting Captain Crunchberries and instead got some combination of cheerios, raisin bran and stale Lucky Charms.  Oh, there might have been three and a half crunchberries at the bottom of the morass which I suppose entitled the dry-as-death mixture to remain in the Captain Crunchberries box, but there wasn’t enough of the crunchberries to make up for all of the non-sugar cereal.  That was for darn sure!!

And there wasn’t enough of ANYTHING when you had to add milk my mother MADE to that horrific mixture!

Yes.  My mother “made” milk when I was little.  She made it out of water and a yellow container.  It tasted like water and yellow container.  And had a weird blue outline to it.

Should I also start doing this?  I’m all about economizing and saving money (please refer to my scintillating insights on how to do this through alphabetical-order spice management), but should I also employ the constantly-running-out-of-fresh-milk-and-being-forced-to-make-pretend-milk ploy??  Granted, my mother did have 5 kids under the age of 10 to feed so maybe that was partially responsible for the milk mis-planning that occurred in my childhood.  In which case maybe I won’t go that far.

But I can at least combine the cereals and see how it goes.  Now, should I put the resulting jumble in the Cheerios box to truly set expectations?  Or should I leave it in the Booberry box so as to peak interest??

Decisions, decisions.

It’s been a dozen plus years since I had today off.  Granted, this year I had today “off” just like I have every other day “off,” but since the kids and husband both had it off too, we put it to good use and went ice skating.

It’s been years since I went ice skating.  Just enough years that I forgot how much I hate ice skating.

But my kids love it!

My son, for example, ice skates the way he does everything else…full-on, balls-to-the-wall, no holds barred.  Slamming into walls and wiping out every which way, lathered with sweat and enjoying the heck out of it.

Then there’s my daughter.  Like a colt on skates.  Tentative at first with her long, long legs…but because she is such an inherent athlete, she’s skates as gracefully as a reed sways in the wind.  No wipe-outs for her…well, except for when that kid using a bucket (?) came diagonally across the ice and took her out.  Otherwise she was as lovely as a princess in a pink leopard sweatshirt on the ice can be.

The kids do three times around the rink for every one-time-around for me.  As my calves are seizing up in my hockey skates (no figure skates big enough for my size 10 boats) I decided it was bad timing on Tony Horton’s part to have this morning be “P90X-Legs and Back” workout morning.  Moron.

Anyway – is it possible to be totally jealous of a 10 and 8 year old?  I soooo want to be them when I grow up.  There’s just so much to admire there.

Which brings me to my husband.  I love the man.  But he is not one with the skating rink.  He hates ice skating more than I do (I think that’s proper English.  I was thinking of saying “He hates skating more than me,” but that would imply he hates skating slightly more than he hates me, right?  Which might actually be true in this instance because I’m the one who got him the iceskating outing as a Christmas present).

Lots of grumbling under his breath later and he’s finally out on the ice.  A quarter turn around the rink and….well….here’s how my daugther describes my husband’s Skating Clusterbomb 2013 to my son, “Mommy and I were looking at eachother.  Then we heard this BOOM!!!  You could also feel it through the ice and in your chest.  When we turned around we saw Daddy lying on his back trying to catch his glasses.  He said a lot of bad words.  And when he came to the door he got off the ice.”

Ahhhh……a day off well spent!

It’s not like I want “ripped” abs.  It’s just that I don’t want my abs to be convex.  So I’m hoping this P90X path I’m headed down will lead me to a nice in-between place where my abs are just plain ‘ol…flat.

But one thing I find puzzling about all of this P90X-ness is that Tony Horton STILL hasn’t mentioned anything about stretch marks.

I mean, he seems seriously committed to giving me a beach body.  And in fact, mentions this commitment several times during his workout dvd’s.  His website (which he also mentions several times in every dvd) is www.beachbody.com.  This all clearly adds up to: Tony Horton is dedicated to giving me a beach body [which I will then place in a bikini when my husband surprises me with a Spring Break trip to the white sand beaches in Mexico!]  I added that last part…but that’s what’s coming next.  It’s so obvious.  But we all know it’s gonna be a low-budget trip, of course, since I don’t have a job and we don’t have any “extra” money to spend on a trip.  So that’s why Tony has probably already contacted my husband to suss out the details of how to transfer his frequent flyer miles to us.

But yet Tony maintains radio silence about stretch marks.

Which is totally confusing because if he’s as dedicated to giving me a beach body as he says he is, then he should have mentioned how to work out the stretch marks by now!  (Or at least have something posted on his website about it…especially something about how to get rid of that weird stretch mark that comes straight out of my belly button and which was soooooo painful when I was pregnant with my children.  Too much information?)

Let’s see.  He’s got Ab Ripper X, Kenpo X, Yoga X and on and on and on.  Aha!  There is a Stretch X.  But don’t be misled!!  It has NOTHING to do with stretchmarks.  I checked.  There really needs to be a StretchMARKS X.

Tone-ster!  You hear me?!?  My rockin’ abs won’t do me any good at the beach if my skin still looks like I’ve been clawed by a tiger from the belly button down.

Send help soonest.  XOXO, Me.

I will bake all day long.  But I really, truly hate to cook.

Mostly because everything you need to cook (like the baked potato soup I made yesterday) starts with sauteeing onions in a pan and/or boiling them and/or letting them cook for HOURS in a crockpot.

This in turn makes the whole house smell like B.O.

And gets so deep into your clothes (and all of the coats hanging by the door) that when you go out somewhere, you smell like B.O.

Everyone looks at you out of the corner of their eye and you can tell they’re wondering how exactly you’re handling your new stay at home mom role, since – based on the smell alone – it doesn’t seem to be going so well.

My husband’s been in the spices again.  You know how I know?  I found “dill” situated between “orange peel” and “oregano.”  Dead giveaway.  “D” spices don’t belong in the “O” spice section.

No.  I’m not joking.  Why?  Did it seem like I was?!  How do you keep YOUR spices (if not in strict alphabetical order)??

The old (hut-hum…polite throat clearing), that is to say “former” working-woman me would have kept them in the cupboard above the stove just all thrown in there and jumbled.  Which meant that I was constantly buying more marjoram.  Now the new stay at home mom me has the spices alphabetized and organized on those two-tiered, lazy-susans.  All spices are available at the twirl of the wrist (just don’t get giddy from alphabetization and twirl too hard because that sends some of the lighter containers flying towards the back where they will languish in anonymity for the rest of their lives).

Granted my marjoram section is three containers deep but I don’t have to buy any more until 2029, so I’m saving money.

Organized spices means I know what spices I have at-a-glance.  As a result?  Less of the one-income goes to buying spices unnecessarily.  Brilliant!

This is one of the many fun, time-consuming ways we stay at homers save money.  We organize and thus economize on our spices.  Hopefully this neat little trick will save me from ever having to get a job again.

Like I said…brilliant!  Right?

Really…I can’t stress this enough…Tony Horton is full-on nuts!

Tone-ster, Dude!  You’re totally brilliant!  But there’s a light of insanity that burns in your eyes the likes of which I’ve only seen one other time.

Picture it.  July 1990.  I’m a newly minted college grad (double major – Business and French) searching for “international jobs” in New York City.  In the middle of a garbage strike.  In July.  In New York City.

But I’m feelin’ fly!  How fresh and shiny I am!!  Got my new interview suit on, complete with shoulder pads, contrasting pocket square and matching spectator pumps!  Rockin’ it!  In July.  In New York City.  In the middle of a garbage strike.

Garbage is piled higher than my head on every street corner.

A homeless man comes up to me and says “how you like the smell, Pretty Girl?  You got a dolla’ fuh me??”  Why yes, yes I do.  In fact, here’s $5 for your trouble.  Exit stage left.

And I started interviewing for Human Resources jobs in New Jersey the very next day.

But the look in that man’s eyes?!  That “do as I say; fall in line with me and we will see victory this day!” look?  Along with the “aren’t I funny and loony-tunes all at the same time” attitude??  That’s got Tony Horton written all over it!

And to answer your unspoken question, Tony?  Yes.  Yes, your Ab Ripper X is aptly named.  After one go, my abs are ripped.  Into little shreds.  And hanging outside my body and dripping blood all over the floor.  And I can actually feel them every time I blink my eyes.

Insane.

I have to do something about my hair!  I have several inches of orange hair starting at the roots (which fades to frizzy gray at the temples within three days of coloring) followed by glossy chestnut brown from the ears down.  Not quite the look I’m going for since it implies more cheap clown, less successful working woman.  And it can’t say anything good at all about me as a stay at home mom.

So…should I let it go totally gray?  In my mind there’s a fantasy wherein I go totally gray and people wonder how old I actually am because I have “old” hair but such a youthful face!

Not.

So, Plan B involves going to a salon to consult with a pro.  But when I was a working woman, dropping $150 every 6-8 weeks was an option…as a stay at home mom, not so much.

Plan C involves washing my hair THEN dyeing it.  Instead of doing things the usual way, which would be running on the treadmill for an hour, blow-drying my sweaty, salty head and THEN dyeing my hair.  I think the salt particles attached to the first 3 inches of my hair end up resisting the color?!

I implemented Plan C yesterday.  And I used a dark brown color (instead of my usual light brown – Go Lighter As You Get Older is a slogan I simply cannot adopt!  See references above to 3 inches of frizzy red hair).

I came out looking like Eddie Munster (minus the widow’s peak).  Which is to say I had this clearly-defined black line all around my hairline (minus the widow’s peak).

The worst part was that I had to attend a School Advisory Council meeting last night – complete with other parents, school principals and administrators, and the parish priest!  We discussed school safety and there was a Federal Agent/parent present to give his take on how we can improve the safety of the school.  I’m sure everyone was giving me the side-eye and thinking to themselves “we should eliminate the goth chick on the committee for starters.”

Sigh.

OWWWWwwwwwowowwowowowwwowowwwwoow    gasp!  GASP!!  oowwwowowowwwwwwfuhhhhfuuhhhhhhhhhuhhhh [just sitting down at the computer…and why is it harder to SIT than to stand?!]

ggggeeeeh!  ggggeeeeeeeehhhhh fuuuh gasp!  fuhhuhhuhiuhhhhh guuhhhhh gasp! [just bringing what feels like bloody arm stumps up to type]

Whyy does no one everr mention how “high-energy” Tony Horton iiis?!? (and whenn I say high-energyy I mean it in a manicc, Jack Nicholson-in-the-Shining “Here’s Johnny!” sortt of way.)

And whhy are my fingers not working?!  Did I literally work EVERY muscle (including my finger muscles) yesterday during my “Day 1” of P90X??

The finger muscle exercises may have happened during what I call the “Spider man scaling the wall vertically” move.  Tony calls them Calestanga Runs.  (Or something like that.  I couldn’t see what was actually listed on the t.v. screen through the film of stinging sweat in my eyes.)  And full-disclosure, we didn’t actually scale walls vertically but we might as well have because I wasn’t able to do it horizontally either.

But how can this be?  How can I have sooooo many sore, sore muscles.  (And internal organs.  We must have been working internal organs too.  Can internal organs actually hurt?  Why yes, yes they can.)  I run 6.2 miles every-other-day.  (that’s 10K for those of you who – in your youth – were also threatened with the possibility of the Metric System becoming the defacto measurement standard in the US.  Never did happen, did it?  But still, that’s the one metric-fun-fact I remember so I thought I’d trot it out!)  So it’s not like I don’t exercise!  I do!!!  And in fact I had this cockamamie plan in my head where I would alternate my every-other-day running with P90X.  Thus making it P180X.

Bad plan.  Bad, bad plan.

GUH!  GGgggggguuuuhhhhhuhuhhhhh.   FFFFFFffffrick!!!  fffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfrrrrrrrrr gasp!   (getting up from the computer and going to take a shower now)

eeeee   eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee  eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhh