The Tiny Terrorist Strikes Again

I've often referred to Alexis as the "Tiny Terrorist." There really is no one else on this Earth who has better mastered the art of torturing me until the point of submission, and who can strike fear in my heart with just a few words. It seems that in the past 24 hours, she has decided to demonstrate her mastery of the terroristic toddler act.

It started in the wee hours of last night, a few hours after she first wandered (as usual) into our bed. She couldn't sleep and lay awake tossing and turning, crying and whining, kicking and shoving, and generally making sure that if she wasn't going to sleep, NOBODY was going to sleep. Between blows to my gut and the fistfuls of hair she ripped out of my head, I became submissive. To someone less than 1/4 my size. Really. If she had told me that I could go to sleep just as soon as I made out with Dora, I absolutely would have done it.

Desperation, yo.

Her mind games continued a few hours later when it was time to get her ready for school. Instead of our usual 30-minute wardrobe battle, I was greeted with, "I want to wear brown bird dress, please." Which was clean. And readily accessible. And totally weather appropriate. I'm sure that seems like she was actually being cooperative for the first time in eons, but I was sure it was a trick. It's been a long time since she quickly made a decision that actually made sense, so I truly believed that the second I dug out that dress she was going to rip my head off.

The torture continued a few hours later. I received a call from daycare that the Tiny Terrorist was threatening pukage. Shortely thereafter, she delivered the goods. So I picked her up and prepared for a day at home with a kid who could potentially blow chunks all over my face at any moment.

Talk about leaving in fear.

We battled through requests for yogurt. I seriously felt like her asking to drink some yogurt smoothie crap a mere hour after blowing chunks was like a terrorist asking for a box of bullets. There was a great debate about whether or not I should allow her to fill her belly, and I was right to be scared. I got to hang out with that yogurt twice. The actual process wasn't really that bad, but the anticipation leading to the moment? SCARY.

And so it went all day long. She insisting that she felt fine and was good to eat, and me not really sure whether to believer her or not. By the time Mr. Husband walked in the door (late because of the BEAUTIOUS snow), I was balled up in a corner, gently rocking back and forth.

I have been beaten by a Tiny Terrorist.

I am not proud.

(BTW, the Haiku Master DjLunchbox was crazy enough to let me scribble a few really bad haiku over at his place, and he even used some of my photos. Check it out, if you are so inclined.)

I Hate New Jersey

It's true--I hate New Jersey. I have for years. Ironically, my hatred for the place became firmly cemented while I was living at The Happiest Place on Earth.

Way back when I was working at Walt Disney World as part of the College Program, I lived with a native New Jersey chick. She was the oldest of my six roommates, and, frankly, the scariest. There were six of us in all living in that really nice (but not $65/week each nice) apartment. The place had three bedrooms, no TV, a bare bones kitchen, and was part of a gated community with two pools. The furniture was your typical crappy rental furniture, but since we were all broke college students, it seemed a little like paradise.

From the outside, our apartment looked REALLY nice, but on the inside? TRASHED. New Jersey Beyotch seemed to think that the other five of us were her cleaning ladies. She would cook pound after pound of fried chicken and then leave the mess all over. There would be grease splatters on the ceiling, the floor, the counters, and she would leave them there right up until the next time she cooked. She left dirty clothes strewn all over the place, and the saying about being neat and cleaning the seat? Yeah, she had never heard it.

Sooooo gross.

As time went on, my roommates and I became divided into two groups. Myself, Shannon, and Kiki were the "good" kids and more than overjoyed just to be working at Disney World. The other three seemed to be a little bitter about something or other, and New Jersey Beyotch was a LOT bitter about something or other. Us Good Kids would debate how she managed to get past the interview process in the first place (grueling, and it included a personality test), and truly became confused one day after I picked up the mail.

We only had one mail key amongst the six of us, so it sat on the kitchen counter. As the awesome roommate that always worked nights at Mickey's Character Shop, I usually woke up around 10:00 and headed out to get the mail. The very second I saw the postcard confirming New Jersey Beyotch's reservation at a hotel that featured hourly rates, I called one of my roommates. Words cannot describe how over-the-top and nasty the information we found on the place was, in fact, heart-shaped beds is probably the only blog-friendly detail I can share.

I'm pretty sure Mickey would not have approved.

While she was far from a considerate roommate, or even someone we could "get," her most over-the-top rude thing was directed straight at me. I had traveled to Florida to work at Disney World knowing that at some point I would have to make a trek to North Dakota to say a final goodbye to my mom. Her breast cancer had returned, more aggressive than ever, and had evolved into bone cancer. The bones in her neck had been eaten away so badly that she wore a brace in order to stay alive, and it was really just a matter of time before her body completely gave up.

This knowledge in hand, I had carefully taped a note on the kitchen cabinet by the phone. It simply asked that if anybody from North Dakota called for me, that they please be given my work phone number. This was long before I gave in to the wonder that is cell phones, so I just needed the North Dakota caller to be able to reach me if I happened to not be at the apartment.

New Jersey Beyotch, upon seeing the note, ripped it off the wall, threw it at me, and told me she wasn't doing anybody any favors. There were some other words in there, but that's the crux of it. While I can certainly be pretty feisty and am more than able to defend myself, it was a VERY one-sided attack.

One of the Good Kid roommates, upon witnessing the display, immediately stormed to the main offices of the apartment complex and demanded that the roommate be removed from our apartment. Of course, the Disney Way is to try to work through problems, so the next day we all gathered together with a counselor to try to work things out.

It took 1.2 seconds of New Jersey Beyotch talking before the counselor made his decision. We were split up. The Good Kids (including me) went to one apartment, and the other three went into another.

While I was home attending my mom's funeral, New Jersey Beyotch was fired for speaking inappropriately to a Guest. One of the girls that had sided with her when the apartment split into cliques was fired for shoplifting while at work. The third decided she didn't want to switch apartments again (nobody got an apartment to themselves) and went home without completing the program. Karma, I guess.

Anyway, New Jersey Beyotch has forever tainted New Jersey for me. Forever.

Reminiscing

Pittsburgh is supposed to (finally) get what the Yinzers like to call some "weather." Lows are forecasted to hit zero later this week, and there's even a chance that there might finally be a little bit of snow in my yard. I'm all for the snow. If it's going to be cold, it might as well be snowing so that it's purdy, and if I want it to be hot all year round, I'll move to Mexico. GIVE ME SNOW AND COLD. I'll happily take ten feet of the fluffy stuff. (Snow loses it's magic slipper and becomes that nasty chick nobody wants on March 1st, just so we're clear. January? Snow is good. March? Snow is an ugly step-sister and needs to be banished to the cellar.)

Every time I say that I'll happily get ten feet of snow, somebody has to go and make the implication that I don't know how much of a pain ten feet of snow can be. Um, I grew up in North Dakota, yo. I know what snow looks like. Lots and lots of snow. The kind of snow that stays in twenty foot piles in a parking lot for months and months and months, until it's no longer purdy and white, but rather a dirty shade of black.

All this talk of potential snow got me thinking to the good ol' days (heh) . . . the days when school was never canceled, and as kids we used to PRAY that the school bus could plow through the drifts.

Seriously.

I went to a pretty rural school up until my sophomore year of high school, and we all rode the bus. Any time it would snow more than a couple of feet over night (anything less than that wasn't even worth acknowledging), all the kids in our neighborhood would suddenly unite into The Bus Team. We lived out in the sticks in a weird development smack dab in the middle of a wheat field, and our gravel road was shaped like a giant "P." The girl that lived at the bottom of the "P" was responsible for watching for the bus as it tried to make it from the highway to our 'hood, and then we would do the chain call thing to see just how far the bus would make it.

If it couldn't make it to the first girl's house, we were all PISSED. That meant we all had to walk, through the snow, all the way to the highway. We're talking a mile for me, and more for others. The bus driver would sit there and wait until everybody who called to say they were coming got there. (Now that I have a kid of my own, I TOTALLY understand why the parents were all "YOU ARE GOING TO SCHOOL" and didn't care that we had to walk through below zero wind chills to get there.)

If the bus made it to her house, but no further, we saved a good quarter mile of walking. It was good news.

If the bus made it to anything past her house, it was a win. With each twenty feet further along the "P" that bus managed to go, we all got a little happier. No matter how much we didn't like a kid who lived further up the road, we always hoped he or she would manage to avoid having to do the walk of horror through several feet of snow. It was weird how in the summer some of the boys would literally create a roadblock with their bikes and charge money to let us girls go down the road, but in the winter they would literally get out of the bus and push it so that it could get a little further up the same road.

So when Alexis one day whines that she can't go to school because there is an inch or so of white stuff on the ground, I won't be lying when I say I once pushed the school bus through four feet of fluff. It was uphill both ways, too.