In the Beginning There was a Really Big Belly Under a Christmas Tree

This is the story of my birth as I've always told it and I fully expect that my mom will read this and immediately be scandalized by my bastardization of the details in a story that is rightfully much more hers than mine. As a bonus I'm also going to throw in the story of my brother's birth because it's related and because it might further annoy my mom which will teach her for learning about the internet. (Private to AngryMom in CA: At least your daughter shares her blog with you, most moms aren't that lucky! Let her slide on the embellishments, after all she's been stuck in an entire year of writer's block, she needs this!).

I was born on January 5th 1978 (mark your calendars! shop post Christmas sales for presents!) which was about 2 weeks later than I was supposed to be born thus affording my mom and dad the luxury of taking a hilarious picture of her huge belly under the Christmas tree with a big bow wrapped around it -- to this day I'm sure my mom finds much irony in the thought that I would be a great gift and not just a never ending source of lost sleep and so much eye rolling (like all babies I'd like to thank Mother Nature for those awesome post pregnancy hormones that made me lovable despite not being very lovable -- I'm not sure who I should thank for giving mom the strength not to try literally slapping me out of my funk every day of my life from age 13 through 17).

I actually know very little of what happened between me playing the part of Christmas package and being born. I assume at some point on the 4th or 5th of January there was a rushed ride to the hospital and hours of screaming and you know, blood and doctors and such but mom was never one to regale me with "Do you know how much pain I went through to bring your sorry ass into the world?" I was born in the hospital where my mom worked as an ER nurse (and now works as the Nursing Supervisor) so the birth was well attended and mom claims much of it was broadcast over the nurses' walkie talkie system. This seems insanely cruel -- can you imagine all of your coworkers listening in on you giving birth to your first kid? Strangely mom never mentions killing whoever made this happen (I assume not talking about the murder is all part of the mass cover-up -- good job mom.).

And then, you know -- here I was (the sun came out from behind the clouds, the heavens smiled, the birds sang, national holiday, etc). But the real hilarious bit of this story starts when we get out of the hospital. I'm not sure how long my new family was actually home before my mom had to be returned the the hospital because there was a lot of blood not staying in her body where it belonged, but it wasn't long -- maybe a day or so. So back to the hospital where mom is admitted to the ICU (that's right folks, the hilarious part of the story is when my mom gets put into intensive care! good times!) and so they're wheeling her away and dad's standing there all "Hey, dudes, you forgot the baby! HAHA!" and the dudes (in this case doctors) are all, "No, it's cool the baby is FINE, take her on home!" And then dad is all "But! DUDES! Please god take the baby back! What the hell am I supposed to do with her when I don't have the magic milk producing body parts!?!?" And then I think his head explodes and he gets put in ICU too. No, just kidding, he goes home and calls my aunt all "Doctors are such bitches, please come help me before I kill your niece."

Let me pause here to say that my dad is super amazing and I'd hate for this story to make him sound incompetent but that's kind of what makes it a good story and my dad is hopefully so awesome that he doesn't mind being the butt of this particular joke. But just in case he's a little miffed I offer this proof of his awesomeness as a counterbalance: Because my mom worked nights growing up my dad was Mr. Mom every morning and he kicked major ass at everything from packing lunches to making a full breakfast (seriously people we had eggs and fruit and bacon or banana pancakes or french toast EVERY MORNING, dude was not fucking around). He was slightly less awesome at doing my hair as evidenced by my 3rd grade school picture where I appear to be rocking some sort of half crimped/half bed head combo do but I've mostly stopped blaming him for my "nerd table" lunch status that lasted through to high school (after all it wasn't him who forced me to join the math team, that was ALL ME). And also: I'm fine, he took me home as a newborn without my mom and totally didn't kill me so GOOD JOB DAD.

Now back to the story. Mom gets better, I learn to walk, everyone is happy.

So fast forward a couple of years and mom is rocking the bump again, my only real memory of her being pregnant with my brother is a conversation about baby names that took place in the car in which I refused to even discuss the possibility needing to consider boy names. I also seem to remember having strong feelings about naming my baby sister Michelle. So April 9th rolls around and again with the hospital and the pain and the breathing exercises. Only this time it sucks even more because my baby brother was born breach (As an older sister this was a god send -- oh the years of "born butt first like a real butt head!" jokes! HILARIOUS) and things really did not go well. Basically my mom died. She lost a ton of blood, she flat lined and while the doctors worked on bringing her back to life (note: successfully, thanks dudes!) she went on a little ride through the dark tunnel to meet with none other than Jesus Christ.

Mom and JC are up on a hill you know, chillin' when he brings up the awkward elephant in the room (er... the field...the heaven?). "So, Kay, umm you have a couple of kids back there in the world who kind of need a mom, you can't let Horst raise them alone, he can't handle it." That's right folks -- JESUS didn't believe in my dad's single parenting skills. And my mom is basically all, "no J-dawg, it's groovy, Horst has this shit! I'm gonna just chill here, lay back on a cloud, take some harp lessons, you know, angel stuff." Luckily our lord and savior is having none of it and basically pushes my mom back down the long dark tunnel and into her body. So big thanks to Jesus for giving me my mom back, I totally forgive you for misjudging my dad's parenting skills. And mom? I'm not even angry about you wanting to dessert me for heaven, I'm sure it would have totally beat changing Kurt's diapers and teaching my stubborn ass to tie my shoes.

Spreading the Geekiness this Holiday Season

Typically any walk I take with my father starts with a series of lies. The first is when he calls it a walk when in fact the proper term is hike or trek or, most accurately, death march. The walk is always “short” and has “hardly any uphill” and “will defiantly not make your legs fall off.” On the few occasions when I have pointed out that he lies about hikes and that I would rather spend my afternoon lounging in the sun with a book and a glass of spiked lemonade and (ideally) a laptop while someone paints my toenails and tells me how pretty I am dad has immediately turned to guilt. “Oh, right, you’re lazy. And you hate nature. And you want to be fat. And you don’t love me. Or the dog.” And then I’m hiking. On the trail (you know, assuming we’re not off-roading on our hike which is incredibly optimistic) the lies continue. “We’re almost there!” “This is hardly steep at all!” “It just seems like a long walk because you’re young, time is relative!”

So it should be seen as a testament to the holiday spirit and family togetherness and possibly my own fleeting sanity that on Monday I offered to go on a walk with my dad. Of course this was no ordinary walk. There was treasure to be had! Dad bought himself a GPS last spring when he found out that his friend Tyson had a gadget that he didn’t yet own and was forced to fork over $300 or be deemed totally uncool. Since then he has used the GPS to dress up jeans and tshirt for evening and as a mighty pretty dashboard decoration for his truck. I think he might have also carried it around in the woods a few times but the way I see it this is all months of wasted time that he could have spent geocaching! The fastest way to turn me from “lump” to “hiking aficionado” is to coat the trail with a thick layer of geekiness. What was once a walk is now an adventure. Trek? Now a scavenger hunt. Nature? Now realistic simulated arena for a battle of wits. Bring it on.

For our first foray into high tech geeky hiking Dad and I took on this challenge -- mostly because Dad knew the area and we thought that would make things easier. And it probably would have been easy – easy and boring. Don’t worry, I took care of that. One of the ways to make geocaching more challenging is to totally not read the GPS correctly. There are lots of ways to do this but I choose to turn on the “pan map” function which allows you to point at a location on the map and get that location’s coordinates and then accidentally start going towards this random point instead of the place where the geocache was placed. Because of this we ended up climbing an extra hill for no reason! I’m sure my dad enjoyed this mostly because the only things he loves more than watching me trudge up a sandy hill is forcing people to eat animal flesh of questionable nature (hey, have you ever had newt? Sure you have, I baked it into your dinner!”) and driving me crazy by implying that he totally loves George W Bush. Because of the holiday and because the extra hill was all my fault I suppressed my natural tendency to follow hill climbing with a heavy dose of whining. Merry Christmas Dad.

We finally righted ourselves and climbed back down the hill (Dad didn’t even mock me, which I considered his greatest gift to me.) and found the correct spot and began turning over rocks and glancing under bushes and eventually bemoaning the possibility that maybe the cache got stolen and we were screwed. But eventually I saw a beam of sunlight glint across a bush and thought “hey, bushes aren’t made of metal!” and low and behold like the star of Bethlehem the ammo case of treasure was revealed to me. The treasure inside might not save me from my sins (especially since it contained an unscratched lotto ticket and I think gambling is not so cool with the savior) but it did make my Christmas. Geocaching rules dictate that you take one prize and leave another we took a matchbox car (which we gave to a friend’s two year old.) and left a Christmas bow which, in retrospect makes us incredibly lame. See, when leaving the house we thought, “it’ll be cute, a bow because we found the cache on Christmas!” but now that I’m thinking more clearly (my mind finally out of the cookie/candy/pie induced coma) I realized that a bow is the lamest prize ever. Probably people in the hip geocaching community will now shun my dad and I. Probably “yeah he left a bow” will be the hip new way to say “What a loser.” Probably the next cache we find will contain a little note saying that if we so much as consider “bow-ing” this cache a stealth agent will be dispatched to take away our GPS forever. Probably our nerd credentials will be revoked.

The Best Email Ever

Yesterday I sent my dad this email:

So I read this blog called "cool hunting" they tell you about cool new products and events and today they featured solatubes! see here: http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2007/02/solatube.php thought you'd be amused.

My dad installs a lot of solatubes and they are indeed cool -- I figured he'd be happy that the world finally noticed. Instead he was just disappointed in his daughter:

saw the forward from "cool hunting". I was initially exciting, then dissappointed, thinking you'd finally come around and are checking out hunting sites on the web. Oh well!

Cool is obviously relative.

unrelated: happy 100th post to me!

Thank you USPS!

Gillian has already posted about her love for the US Postal Service and I have to belatedly back her up. I'm constantly amazed that the mail works at all and impressed at just how well it works. I stumbled upon this site a few years ago and have been amused and in awe ever since (the temptation for enacting my own experiments in postal tomfoolery is also increasingly hard to repress as I give this page a new read). My favorite highlights:

Rose. Postage and address were attached to a card that was tied to the stem. Delivery at doorstep, 3 days, beat up but the rose bud was still attached.

Molar tooth. Mailed in clear plastic box. Made a nice rattling sound. Repackaged in padded mailer by unknown individual; the postage and address had been transferred to the outside of the new packaging. A handwritten note in a woman's writing inside read, "Please be advised that human remains may not be transported through the mail, but we assumed this to be of sentimental value, and made an exception in your case." Days to delivery, 14.

Coconut. Fresh green coconut containing juice, mailed in Hawaii. Delivery at doorstep, 10 days.

It was a good day for mail at Random Access Babble HQ.

Firstly, a miracle occurred. Last night at 10:01pm EST I ordered these shoes from Zappos.com as a replacement for my Draven slip-ons which, despite an over abundance of cute did not hold up to the NYC lifestyle in the sole department. Anyway, Zappos offered me free 2 days shipping because they are awesome so I figured I'd have my shoes in time for the lazing around that I have penciled into my Sunday schedule. Today when I arrived home at 7:00pm a Zappos box was resting against my front door. I was sure that someone must have sent me a belated birthday gift of shoes (which would obviously be well received and result in a big sloppy thank you kiss) because it would be impossible for my order to be processed and my shoes shipped out and delivered in less than 24 hours. But I look down at my feet now and I see cute little hearts and so must start believing in miracles (or at least some sort of shoe Santa).

Update: Received an email from Zappos at 2:31am confirming that they had shipped my order... curiouser and curiouser....

My second pieces of mail was also something I was anticipating. Last night on the phone my dad said that he had sent me "an envelope" when I inquired about the contents he would only say that it was "something he found in an old house [he's] working on" (Dad owns a small construction company). I was excited enough about this surprise that the envelope was actually opened before the Zappos box (meaning Dad won out over shoes -- this must be one of his proudest moments). Inside was a small wooden ladybug magnet (no note, how very dad-like).

Long ago I went through that adolescent girl phase of defining ones self through collecting thematic junk. My theme of choice was ladybugs (it sounds ridiculously cliche until you consider that the other options were dolphins and unicorns). This relatively short lived phase was followed by at least 2 years of Christmas eye rolling and me begging my mother to quit with the ladybugs already. The message finally sunk in and today I rarely receive ladybug themed gifts but occasionally mom and dad revert and a ladybug token or card arrives on my doorstep and I can't say I mind anymore. The closer I get to full fledged adulthood (perhaps, some would argue that 29 is clearly 100% adult but I'm clinging to denial) the happier I am to be reminded that I am still someone's little girl. I cannot thank the USPS enough for bringing me this little souvenir to remind me that a few days ago 3000 miles away my Dad mentally sent a little unconditional love my way.