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.

As angsty as I was about my blogs being brokenBrokenBROKEN, in the end, I was pretty pleased with myself.

That planted a seed of thought for what kinds of things give us a sense of accomplishment or make us happy. And it reminded me of the “ice-breaker” I’d heard of that asked everyone in the room to name something they were proud of.

So let’s try this for our next Living Out Loud. Tell us something that you’re proud of. Ideally, it would be something about yourself that you’re proud of and not that you’re proud of Alberto Contador’s performance in the Tour de France. It could be a specific accomplishment or a particular character trait of yours. It could be one thing for a combination of events/factors that make up the magic of you. I recently read an article about someone saying he wasn’t brave for writing about one of his shortcomings on the Internet because he got plenty of the expected sympathy and hugs but that it took more courage for him to brag about himself online. (Ironically, he took the bragging post down or I’d link to it.)

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, August 1st (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.

So let’s hear it. Pat yourself on the back. Toot your own horn and tell it like it is.

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

Long story short, as we were eating dinner at 10pm that night, Rich told me “tomorrow you’re going to take your laptop to Panera and write and I’ll wrangle the boy.” I made a face and said, “no, I’m going to invite a bunch of friends over to the backyard and we’re all going to do some fun activity that you’re not interested in until all hours of the night while the dog and baby whine at the back door to participate.” And then I agreed to spend the evening at Panera.

Until this afternoon when I realized my blog was broken. My blog was broken, Ian’s blog was broken, Rich’s blog was broken and even my brother’s experimental blog was broken. They were broken and I didn’t know why and I didn’t know how to fix them and how was I going to write anything with them all broken?!?!

While I wanted to call up my server host provider and be all “FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT!” I wasn’t sure if I had caused it. I felt stupid and betrayed and angry and … ugh!

But then I found the solution! And I fixed it all by myself! And then I went through all the blogs and changed the passwords for every user and updated the database passwords and my system admin password. (I may never be able to get into any of this stuff again since I won’t remember any of these passwords but at least no one else will hopefully.)

Now to try updating my theme before BlogHer – I have a whole 10 days before I have to leave. What could go wrong?

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

As I was sorting through songs to make a mix, Rich asked if a particular song was a cover. He swore I had made him a mix with the song on it but it was a woman singing. After a bit he laughed and realized that the only time he’s heard the song is when I’m singing it to Ian and this was the first he’d heard of the original.

That inspired me to share some of the gems I’ve been digging up. These are all songs I use to sing babies to sleep. Very few are actual children’s songs but most of them can be sung in a soothing manner.

Let me know which songs are your favorite or if you have other atypical lullabies in your own repertoire.

The first song, Trouble, is the song Rich didn’t recognize. I’ve sung that to babies for almost a decade now. Babies can be “so fat their shoes don’t fit on [their] feet” so I figure it’s appropriate. Here’s the list of songs below, but you can click on the link to listen to the complete mix.

Hush Little Baby

1. Trouble (Little Feat)
2. Bird On The Wire (Leonard Cohen)
3. Everybody’s Missing the Sun (The Gourds)
4. House at Pooh Corner (Maria Sangiolo)
5. Hi-Lilli, Hi-Lo (Leslie Caron)
6. Tennessee Waltz (Hem)
7. Love At The Five And Dime (Nanci Griffith)
8. All Of Me (Willie Nelson)
9. Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What a Wonderful World (Israel Kamakawiwo’ole)
10. Love Will Come To You (Indigo Girls)

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