- I hate all of my underwear. None of it fits right anymore which makes me think my ass got bigger but only so that my undies don’t fit but my pants do. My knickers are literally twisted. I shopped for new undies but refuse to pay top dollar for them. Please send underwear testimonials stat.

Things that please me these days:

- Ms. Kitty is sleeping in the bed with us again every night. I do love that cat even though she’s surly to pretty much everyone else.

- Holy crap the weather this weekend! I just wanted to be outside all the time!

- I’ve been more adventurous in the kitchen lately. I’m also going to make a cookbook on how to cook ridiculously small portions of food for your baby (e.g. three baby carrots).

- The way the Hispanic day care ladies pronounce couscous (see above). Absolute riot.

- My hair is exactly the color and style I wanted and one third the price since I switched to my new stylist.

- I’ve caught up on my feed reader. It may have involved a lot of skimming but I’m caught up and that feels good.

- Rich and I went to see Scott Pilgrim on Sunday and then had lunch where we didn’t have to feed or entertain a baby. Ian was also a perfect child for my parents while we were gone.

- We’ve been watching a lot of Jeeves and Wooster together and it’s a good combo of campy shenanigans and clever dialogue.

- Ian is over the virus whatever he had last week and back to nursing with gusto. He’s pawing at my shirt saying “nananana” and I’m pleased as punch. I’d missed him.

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

Grace’s You won’t read this anywhere …
#5 made me laugh out loud. And I had to look up what za’tar was. So I think some new food experiments are in my future.

Rachel’s Aunt Rachel.
I admit to feeling in awe of your dedication to writing monthly. I suck at mailing letters. I’m lucky if I can mail the occasional bill that’s not able to be paid electronically.

Candice’s To My Dear Apartment
Ugh, the bottle washing! I sort of embraced it like a therapeutic time to just zen out and scrub baby bottles.

SuziCate’s When The Tables Turn
I’d say the ability of someone to handle camping says a lot about their tenacity in many things.

Peggy’s Living by the Rules
One of our neighbors used to make everyone go in the basement when there was a thunderstorm! My brother would go over to play and if it started thundering he’d get annoyed and walk home because he didn’t want to sit in the basement.

Erin’s Measure twice, cut once
I have a theory that there is a sewing muse and it’s dangerous to try to sew if you don’t feel her watching over you. I have sewing sleeves on upside down and dresses inside out without the muse’s help.

Megan’s The Tag on the Quilt
I think the reading is my favorite one. I don’t read enough. Then again I’m not sure if there is an “enough”.

Ruth’s Number your page from one to ten …
Wonderful list and many are ones I could have written myself. I’m impressed about the napkins (we always forget napkins and end up using paper towels in a pinch). And my father hates the “no problem” response too.

and my own Now I just need a megaphone …

So many of these entries pleased me this month it was hard to pick a winner! And even better I feel like I learned a lot more about what makes some of you “tick”. So that’s always great. But I decided that Erin should win this month. For one thing, I’m a sucker for new participants and she jumped in with both feet. And with only one rule she gave a great example of something that frustrated her as well as fodder for personal folklore. I can imagine many future projects where someone would say “this isn’t going to be like the t-shirt quilt is it?” At least that’s how our family works.

So congrats, Erin, and welcome to the esteemed ranks of LOLers. It’s a fun little project and we hope you stick around for future ones. Erin will receive a $25 gift certificate to Amazon as her prize.

Sometimes I let the “pressure” of LOL get to me. Picking a “good” topic, writing something and then doing the recap. But this month was super duper fun while still being a personal topic. Maybe it’s residual joy from BlogHer, but I’m feeling pretty stoked about LOL and look forward to posting the theme for volume 21 very soon!

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

There were four young white guys in jeans and t-shirts sharing the megaphone and clapping their hands in agreement with whomever was talking. I remarked to Rich that I couldn’t think of anything about the Lord I needed to share with others on this beautiful afternoon, particularly at that volume. But in light of this month’s Living Out Loud theme, I did realize there are lots of other things I’d be happy to share via megaphone with the general public.

So if you see me on a street corner in the near future, listen for some of these gems. I need to make a pamphlet to hand out with them.

Animals
Cats do not belong on any surface that serves food. Cats will most likely not agree to this rule, but tend to at least do it when you’re not around. Your job is to ignore any cat hairs you may see on the dining room table while they agree to run away feigning shame if you catch them in the act. This charade is a social contract between me and all cats.

Never break up a dog fight with your body because invariably you will end up the worst for wear.

Always try to space out your pets as much as possible in age. Sure they may play together great when they’re both 2, but they’re also going to become feeble and incontinent around the same time too.

Household
The vacuum cleaner cord should be wound in a figure 8 pattern. It may take up more space on the winders but will not be twisted when you remove it.

Top sheets get tucked in even though the first thing you’ll do is rip them loose once you’re in bed. They also go “pretty side down” so that when you fold the top sheet over it’s pretty.

Pillow cases go on pillows so that the tags are covered up. Pillows go on the bed so that the pillow opening faces outwards. No one should ever have to roll over in the night and be faced with open pillow mouth!

Food and Dining
Sugar free pancake syrup is not food. No one actually prefers it over real syrup and it’s just another tool for people to feel like they’re cheating the system versus just not drowning your food in syrup.

Always be kind to your waitstaff. They are alone with your food.

If your service is so bad that you consider leaving less than a 10% tip, you should have just left the restaurant. Shorting that server a tip is not going to teach anyone anything.

Cantaloupe, tomatoes, butter and jelly are always better at room temperature.

Human Nature
If you have a problem with everyone, it’s most likely not everyone. It’s you. (I learned this from my ex-mother-in-law.)

Lying puts a price on your character, generally one you’re not willing to spend. (I learned this from Mr. Laws in middle school.)

Somebody’s gotta go first. (This I borrowed from my old boss Harry at his retirement party.)

Anything worth having is a lot of trouble. (My grandmother said this about watermelon, but it stands true.)

Most people think they’re a good driver and have a good sense of humor.

“I’m sorry if you feel that way” is not an apology. Stop trying to be right and just apologize.

I really enjoyed making this list and these are just the ones I could think of in the last few days. Maybe I’ll post more rules as I think of them. That’s probably what Twitter was designed for anyways.

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

But it made me aware of how many great songs there are that feature curse words. So I started making a list. Fast forward a few months and Cee Lo Brown has made the F-bomb a household term (God, get that song out of my skull! So catchy!). I now present you with my completely not safe for work musical mix.

I had entirely too much fun making this. I must also thank my dear husband Rich for his assistance. He kept calling out songs for me all evening. Even after he left for his hockey game tonight he was texting me song titles. He’s a veritable encyclopedia of foul language (hooray four years in the Army!). I left out some of the more obvious ones like Nine Inch Nail’s Closer or N.W.A.’s classic about the police, but I’d love to hear any other suggestions for future volumes.

So enjoy the fact the kids are in bed or throw some headphones on if you’re at work and enjoy.

OpenTape – NSFW

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve also noticed a trend lately in truisms these days. There’s a very entertaining site called 1001 rules for my unborn son with such gems as “388. If you don’t know what a knob does, don’t fool with it.” and “311. Don’t date your bartender.” That combined with the Twitter turned book turned TV show with William Shatner called Sh*t My Dad Says made me realize that we all have rules or beliefs that we need to pass onto others.

My father is often known to start a sentence with “you won’t read this anywhere but …” He can’t actually say it now without grinning because it’s all just some inside joke. But the nugget of wisdom has to be shared!

So that’s what I want you to do for this month’s Living Out Loud project. Tell us some of your rules. Maybe it’s how the toilet paper goes on the roll. Maybe it’s something about finding the perfect mate. Maybe it’s some lesson that involves hiring J. Walter Weatherman to teach your children a lesson about leaving notes. It could be one really important rule or a list of guidelines for living. But the best part is they’re your rules.

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I’m just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don’t email me, I’m likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, September 5th (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

We’ll all just keep doing the things we shouldn’t do unless you give us a list of rules to not do them!

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

This last month has been complicated. Our pool has been various shades of green so that we haven’t been able to fully enjoy it, we left for our most recent trip only to discover the load of laundry with all of Ian’s clothes and my favorite pair of jeans had gone sour so we both stank and the car doesn’t know it uses synthetic oil so has prematurely started screaming that it needs an oil change with lights all over the dash making us nearly miss the notification that we were completely out of gas.

And did I mention our son screams every hour on the hour at night?

But last night was better. He only woke up twice to nurse and these were real wakings and not the stiff-armed screams. The second time at 5:47am he crawled up on me and nursed then snuggled up with me all on his own. I was like one of those swim up bars in Jamaica. Then he looked over at Rich who has been the neglected parent lately and crawled over to him to wake him up and request to sleep on his chest. It was very heart-warming and much preferable to our previous nights of sleep.

I’ve also found that whenever things start to feel rough if I just blurt out “it’s such a struggle!” in my best Heather’s Mom Voice it really does make things feel better.

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

Cue the whirlwind of taking the baby to three conferences in two weeks. He went up to Oswego to hang out with librarians for a few days then flew over to Manhattan to cavort with his toddler cousins and 2000 bloggers at BlogHer. And this week we went up to DC for an archivist conference and our company outing of a Nationals baseball game. He’s been a trooper through all of this but not without a few hiccups.

Yesterday, because of various circumstances, Ian only had two twenty minute naps all day. I tried nursing him and rocking him to sleep at the baseball game in an empty party suite but there was still too much going on. He went to sleep at 10:30 that night.

And woke up screaming at 11:55pm, 12:05am, 2am, 2:30am, 3:45am, 3:50am, 6am and 6:30am before actually getting up for the day at 7:30am.

I use the term “woke up” but that’s not quite accurate. He would get all stiff-armed and flail around the bed crying like you’d stabbed him, but not actually be awake. He would settle back down within a few minutes each time, sometimes after walking around with him, but each time Rich and I both were ripped out of sleep to “OMG THE BABY IS CRYING WHAT’S WRONG HOLY SHIT MAKE IT STOP”. Repeat each hour or so. One of my Google searches at 4am called them night terrors and I can see how they get the name because I can attest to waking up pretty terrified the first few times he did it. Ian, of course, wakes up perky and cheerful the next morning.

My father tells this joke about a pair of golfers betting on a game but one getting “two gotchas“. And much like that golfer waiting for the second gotcha, each time I fell back asleep I was just waiting for the next panicked scream to wake me up.

This week should be pretty low key for him and I’m hoping the return of routine will help him out of this screaming night terror phase. I can feel myself getting threadbare from this last week of sporadic sleep.

When he’s not screaming, he is pretty adorable when he sleeps.

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

So for now you can just watch this video of him learning how to “cluck” his “teeth” (gums) and us all joining in.

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

So this month, we had only a few LOLers but I enjoyed reading them all.

Rachel’s the Battle Scar
So many people struggle with their bodies but it sounds like you’ve got the right idea that you’re happy and alive.

Megan’s A Woman Made of Words
I would say you should be proud of your strength and your toughness. And your calves – you have great calves.

SuziCate’s Not Exactly Musical But I’ll Toot My Horn Anyway!
I would totally be full of pride about that. You’re a trent setter!

Ruth’s Pride Part One
I love your writing. But you don’t need me to say that. You already know it!

and my own Stick with me and you’ll be fine

It’s interesting to me that it was so hard for folks to find something to brag about when it came to themselves. Perhaps this tells us something about the whole Living Out Loud project on a larger scale. It really is easier for us to bare our shortcomings online than it is to pat ourselves on the proverbial back. We should work on that.

So this month, I’m being all crazy and naming myself the winner. Even when I asked Rich last weekend what I should write about he said I should be proud of this Living Out Loud project. He blurted out “you could do an LOL about LOL! That’s all meta and shit!” So indeed, while I wrote about the things I’m proud of about myself, I’m also very proud of this Living Out Loud project. But that means that in addition to taking pride in organizing it, I’m also very proud of all of you for participating.

Go us! We rock!

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

In contrast, my mother cut her pinky toe nearly off as a child and when asked to retrieve water for her, my grandmother returned with a pitcher of water and promptly poured it on Mom’s head. Grandma didn’t deal well with crises.

Our family was always raised that we were not allowed to panic. Daddy had watched a man die in Vietnam after stepping on a mine and only losing his foot. I can remember his ranting, “and it was a clean wound! He never should have died but he panicked!” So panicking was never an option for us.

It poured “like a motherfucker” as Rich would say Friday night and the restaurant we were in lost power for a few seconds. The hostess next to us literally told her friend she was terrified and that blew my mind. Her voice was shaking and all I could think was “it’s rain, not War of the Worlds.”

I was diagnosed with diabetes 25 years ago. The doctor told my mother there was no cure and that I’d die without injections for the rest of my life. But my strongest memories from the ordeal are being bored in the hospital room and using needles to suck the juice out of oranges with my roommate. I certainly don’t remember being terrified. And in the last 25 years, I’ve remained pretty optimistic about being diabetic.

When I was first asked about what I wanted from my birth, I told the doctor I wanted a healthy baby, I wanted a quick recovery and I wanted as little drama as possible. My “birth plan” equated to “don’t do anything you don’t have to and don’t do anything without explaining why to me first.” I’m pleased to say I got what I wanted in all those areas.

Each of these is a specific event but they combine some of my best traits. I’m unusually optimistic, I don’t give up easily and I never panic.

I got my optimism from Mom. She’s amazingly patient with so many things and able to find a reason to laugh or smile through nearly anything. When I got pregnant it never occurred to me I couldn’t have an unmedicated birth. I would have even stayed home if I thought Rich and any midwife would have stood for it. Some may call that naivety but I call it optimism and empowerment.

As we drove to the hospital at 3am I had no idea I’d still be pregnant 24 hours after that. But as the days of labor stretched on, I remember just rolling with it (quite literally with the aide of the birth ball). The game plan kept having to change and I admit to a fair amount of frustration, but I wasn’t going to surgery unless we literally had no other options. I still had fight in me.

I got my vaginal birth, I got my beautiful baby boy and when they needed to take him from me for monitoring, I happily let them. I’ve read birth stories of women yelling because their babies were taken from them for minutes. Ian was in the special care nursery attached to a CPAP machine and couldn’t nurse for the first day at all, but we did fine. I learned to nurse my son in the rolling office chair next to his bassinet and remember only joy and wonder at his tiny perfect little features.

Rich’s uncle Tommy is in very poor health. We thought we were driving to Richmond this weekend to say our goodbyes to him and have a memorial service Sunday. In an amazing turn of events, we just left his hospital bed where he joked with us, smiled and said he hoped to be out of the ICU soon. It’s been a whirlwind week of emotions for everyone, but I just did my thing. I remain optimistic about Tommy, I didn’t give up on him and no one was allowed to panic.

So if there is an alien invasion, come to our house. We’ll be the best prepared and no one will dump water on you.

©2010 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.