Where Are The Gypsies When You Need Them

So, here I am, busting butt on the 'puter, and thinking I am pretty damn uptown cause I finally got my business card program to work, with the graphic I wanted, without it looking all grainy and cheapo ~ and the font that I wanted, that I had to download from the site where I found it to begin with ~ and I got the text to fit properly, and I reset the printer to accommodate the card stock...and all the picayune-minuscule-detail-bullshit that comes with doing your own business cards. Needless to say, I'm pleased as punch. So pleased, in fact, that the thought briefly crosses my cranium to drive all the way to hubby's work, just to show him...

And then I made the mistake of getting up for more coffee...

That entails leaving the back room where the computer is, going through the living room, where my son is, and into the kitchen where the coffee pot is ( if I continue up the hall, I pass my bathroom on the right and the door to the back porch directly opposite it on the left and just past that, hubby & my bedroom ~ this knowledge will become important in a moment...). OK, so I go to get coffee, practically skipping cause I'm sooo impressed with my beautiful new business cards, right...

Walking into the living room was, to put it mildly, a bit of a shock to the system... Kinda like winning the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes, only to find out that the prize van ran over your 15 year old dog... The joyousness of the sitch totally gets buried by the WTF-are-you-serious-cause-this-totally-blows-big-chunks-if-it's-true feeling that overtakes your senses...

Kind of like walking in to find your almost-two-year-old has, stealthily as Tim Robbins' escape in Shawshank Redemption, and completely unheard by me, rocked his playpen ( from here out to be known as pen ) over to the bookcase, with all of the magazines, shells, and pictures from the top of the bookcase filling his pen, and strewn along the floor. The other table, which is on the other side of the door to the front porch, is completely naked of it's tablecloth, everything that was on top of it is M.I.A, and the curtain to that window is pulled out. The pen is cockeyed-landed between both bookcase and table, and has come to rest... Directly Against The Space Heater. Scared-shitless complete freak out ensues. Miraculously, I did not succumb to a massive coronary right then and there.

Realizing that I'm dangerously tripping over the whole pen against the heater thing even though moving him back to the original position in the middle of the living room was the very first thing I did... aaaannnnndddd here come the cramps to boot. So I head for the loo, and am taking my time-out, when I hear my son... not so silently this time, cause he's already been totally busted, and he knows it... scooting his pen back across the floor. People, we're in a trailer that is a total of 45 feet long. You can hear a mouse piss on cotton in the computer room from my bedroom, which is what made the silence of the original move so impressive. I give a, "You better knock it off, Mister!!!" shout from the bathroom, which does nothing, because I'm in the bathroom and my boy is too fucking smart. I come back out to him, again, against the heater.

This time I don't need the, "I'm going to fucking kill him induced Mama-Time-Out" and I chock the wheels with my tennies... Only to hear, less than 10 seconds later, PBS Kids getting louder and louder and louder... I whip around to find the remote being all mini-man-handled and a look of total satisfaction playing across the Turbo-Tot's face. The battery cover has been removed and he's mashing buttons like he's getting paid Bill Gates' salary to do so.

I recover and reassemble the remote, make sure he can not possibly rock the pen across the room, or reach anything else, even when he rolls up the pen mat, wedges it under one of the rails and proceeds to lean far enough over to reach things on the couch, or mess with the sound system and TV set... I walk over the magazines that are still on the floor but now removed from the potential burn radius of the space heater, on my way back to my computer, where I flop into the seat like a deflated beach-ball.

The business cards no longer hold the pride and joy they did only an hour ago, and I still don't have another cup of coffee. It's not even noon, and I'm worn out. These are the types of days that prompt parents to utter, if only in their heads, cause we really don't mean it, and don't want to scar the little *ahem* darlings for life...

"One more thing, and I'm selling you to the Gypsies... cheap! And I swear upon all that is holy, there will be a no return policy."

...honestly, sometimes... we mean it... a little... kind of.