MFA Mama

is you is or is you ain't mah bunny? #Energizer #BlogHer10

• Must already be registered for BlogHer
• Must be a Facebook Fan of  Energizer PowerSource
• Spread the word about the contest by tweeting . . . Enter to win a $2000 #BlogHer10 #BlogHer sponsorship courtesy of #energizer & @kailani http://bit.ly/997lLl . . . (or something similar).
• Must not already have more than one other sponsor

Those are the criteria to be an Energizer Smart ChargHER and I'm not gonna lie, I am their perfect candidate.

I am registered for Blogher and crazy events!
I am a FB fan under my real name.
I am tweeting this and will be livetweeting BlogHer10 anyway. It should be bananas!
I have no other sponsors because I'm going for the art and peer interaction and refuse to ask my readers directly for help.

I'm also a mother of three children with special needs, a wife of a bionic man with more than one donor organ, and our new puppy is on three prescriptions that cost us what I planned to spend on new prescription lenses and an eye exam for myself. My old glasses are okay, but I have new frames and just need to update the prescription since it's been...four or five years. We have food to eat and a climate-controlled roof over our heads but we've been in and out of the hospital and are on a fixed income and yadda yadda yadda, I feel bad even going but my husband insists and our family on his side have helped us out. I write monthly for Hopeful Parents, a grassroots community blog for parents of children with special needs, review books, do giveaways, and by the way I have a terminal degree in creative writing and teach at the college level when I'm not wearing a tutu and running a 5k (would go great with y'all's t-shirt, just sayin). I am even willing to register my pedigreed pitbull as the Energizer Bunny, SRSLY.

I'd like to pay my in-laws back and keep the puppy in high-dollar chow and my husband in anti-rejection drug co-pays for while I'm gone and buy some fatpants for my foodbaby weight and maybe some hypoallergenic cheap sparklies and nice Moo cards. I plan to quote my current (pre-puppy-poopocalyse) ad on the Bloggess's sight, written by Jenny Lawson herself: "It stands for Mother-Fucking Awesome!" Which is literally what my generous mother-in-law said when she saw it. I'm waiting to order in case y'all want to be on the back :) Please? Cheers! MFA Mama

Figure One: If you sponsor me I will get "Energizer" vajazzled in matching swarovski crystals. I'm that kind of crazy! Whoo tits!

perky

*   MFA Puppy is muchmuch better. She improved by at least 150% from her "hunchbacks" (subcutaneous lactated ringers--puppies scruff is nice and loose and aww poor thing--when we got her home and took her collar off it left a dent in the stuff but immediately she was up and about. After a nap and an epic piddle she ate a bit of prescription food and took her Panacur and generic puppy-Flagyl and at her evening meal gulped a third of a can at a go and made scoopable poop. Yeah.

*   #Bewbfest10? Who knew? NOM. Hotter and I studied and commented on each and every one without reading the names because we're very happy pigs. The puppy sure did provide enough shit!

*   Yeah totes pottymouth but seriously, the dog coulda pooped her name in the snow. Just sayin'.

*   It was an utter poopocalypse and I credit my children with the dog's life. Pre-MFA Children I wouldn't have been down with catastrophic GI failure on that level but now? Awws, her had a sick!

*   Aaand bringing it full-circle writerskool-style, the running joke is that the seven pound, seven-ounce baby with GI-related special needs is our honeymoon child and I'm thisclose to lactating. *rimshot*

*   Thank you, thank you, here is your prize for reading!

*   Oh by the way no, I did not just become dog people. Not me!

Not Me Monday, the soft and hard

Two things that are utterly untrue, because no I di'int:

I.

   I was going to tell y'all how this morning I realized that oh my goodness, my husband and I have become pet people and I've gone all soft and zen-like.  I know this because I woke up to pee off some diuretic at about 6:00 a.m. and rather than go back to bed (the only way I am guaranteed to sleep enough to be functional before the alarm goes off two hours later) I turned the heat on.

   Our thermostat allows you to set a minimum temperature if the heat is on or a maximum temperature if the air conditioning is on, and the weather here is bipolar right now.  It'll be in the low fifties the night after a low-nineties day and Hotter is a Damn Yankee and of the constitution not to use climate control unless it's truly righteous (it's the Dutch/Lutheran in him, dang it) to do so.  This would aggravate me more were I not cheap/green and so the MFA Children all have robes or fuzzy blankets as is age- or developmentally-appropriate and I draw the line at leaving windows open even a crack due to security concerns but it can get a bit chilly of a morning. 

   Except as Hotter said when he welcomed me back to bed and let me warm my chilly haunches on his body "I'm glad you did that, the two cold-blooded animals and the tropical bird were probably not too happy" and I said "yep, probably they were out there going 'y'all can eat a BIG bag of dicks'" and we giggled a little.

II.

Representative from Hencefore-Unnamed major insurance company whose HMO subsidizes Medicare: Hello, wel--
Representative from other department of Henceforth "H.U.M.&etc.": I have MFA Mama here, she's Hotter Lastname's wife and apparently [truncated for brevity and anonymity]
MFA Mama: Yes but what I am needing YOU to hear is that someone at H.U.M.&etc. has got to take ownership of your collective errors, whether that is you or you have to escalate this further via another warm transfer RIGHT NOW I am going to have to spend two thousand dollars in the next twenty-four hours to either purchase out of pocket drugs H.U.M.&etc. is supposed to cover through a federally-funded healthcare program that my disabled husband needs to survive or else on suing y'all in small claims court, and I know that even an expedited emergency hearing in small claims court wouldn't fix this in time for it to not become a wrongful death suit but that's ten hours of attorney's fees I can spend for my guy to guarantee you reimburse those fees in addition to any eventual settlement because that's one of two prescriptions like that he's going to need and he'll die and I don't have four thousand dollars to save his life now but I do have ten hours of noise I can make if you and I don't rectify this TODAY in a manner so as to allow H.U.M.&etc. to deliver the care and coverage my husband deserves and that your company promises directly, me to save that two thousand dollars for feeding my family, and y'all to save yourselves the headache of letting an administrative foul-up kill my husband, because I will outlive this gaffe on your part and I am the one of us you have to be afraid of since I have a lot of years of anger issues still left in me! [pauses to inhale briefly]  Let's both let him live to play good cop another day, shall we?"

   So maybe not, maybe not.  Hotter and Mr. Family Therapist keep comparing me to Stalin and Mussolini lately and I'm not any happier so I don't know about this whole "embrace your war face and show people the crazy eye without smiling" thing.  So far I've gotten as far as the first part but I'm still smiling and probably sounded to that H.U.M.&etc. rep like a cheerleading coach and my husband is avoiding me after having heard the entire exchange.  Phooey.

Not Me Monday pt. II

   I most certainly did not forget until Christina's gentle reminder that today was my day to post over at Hopeful Parents.  I'll be writing there on the 4th of every month and I hope you'll come over and say hi!

Not Me Monday!

*   I did NOT ignore my ear/sinus/chest thingy to the point that the first round of antibiotics did very little toward resolving it.  I'm not that stubborn!

*   I also did not leave the scheduling of Big Child's appointment to check up on how he's doing with his "concentrating pills" until the very last minute when he is about to run out of them.  I'm way more prepared than that (if my ex-husband's lawyers are reading this, the child will not run out before his appointment).

*   Or do the same with the second H1N1 shots for everyone.  Nope.

*   I do NOT have to clean my entire house by Monday, because I'm totally not having people including clergy over for a very special occasion that day or anything (plus I never let it get any less than utterly spotless in here).

*   Even if I was having people over for a very special occasion, I certainly wouldn't be sitting here without the faintest clue what I'll be wearing on one of the biggest days of my life.  That would be ridiculous.

*   I am not considering just wearing jeans and a rude t-shirt.  Not me!

Not Me Monday!

*   That totally wasn't me in the grocery store yesterday, if you happened to see a haggard woman pushing a cart and grimly ignoring a tattling eight-year-old, a five-year-old making laps around the cart while spelling curse-words wrong out loud, and a four-year-old shrieking for a gingerbread man.  That was someone else, because my children are cheerful and obedient at all times.  And if one of my little angels was going to spell a word, they'd spell it right, even if it was one of the seven words forbidden on network television.

*   Even if that had been me, I wouldn't have gotten them to stop by whipping out my phone and threatening to text pictures to Santa.

*   I did not pretend to be asleep for an extra twenty minutes this morning.  If I had heard my older two children loudly shushing my youngest in the hallway and telling him to "be QUIET, we're gonna let Mommy SLEEP so she feels better, you saw how she looked last night!" I wouldn't have stayed in bed grinning for that extra twenty minutes because I always wake up ready to spring forth and greet the new day with vim and vigor, even when I'm sick.

*   I also didn't sit down to a breakfast of milk and the peanut-butter cookies we made last night with my children in celebration of having turned in final grades and officially begun my winter break.  I would never!

Not Me Monday!

*   I did not run out of Pull-ups and put my youngest child to bed in a Little Swimmer last night.  Nope nope nope.

*   I also didn't strip the child and the bed at 4 a.m. and then put another Little Swimmer on the poor kid (if my ex-husband and his lawyers are reading this, I could totally afford more Pull-ups in the first half of each month if you'd stop suing the crap out of me).

*   I am not bitter.

*   I have never, EVER put together an "eat the pantry" meal of hot dogs wrapped in bread instead of buns, clementines, and cucumber salad, much less done such a thing THIS VERY EVENING.

*   I would never let my children put yesterday's socks on in the mad rush to get to the school bus, because that would be gross.

*   And I most certainly don't stand in my driveway in my fluffy pink bathrobe like a crazy lady stalking my own children through the hedge out front to watch them get on the bus with my own eyes.  Sure, their friends' moms don't do that and the oldest is eight, and it's a very safe neighborhood and less than a block's walk, but...wait, why am I rationalizing this?  I don't do that anyway!

*   I also didn't go out there, um...commando under the robe this morning, and even if I had it wouldn't have been because I needed to do laundry.  Nope, not me!