Category — Married life

I don’t know about you, but nothing puts me in a more festive mood than making some hot, thick bean soup in the middle of August in Florida.

I’ve been saving this recipe for a Spanish-style bean soup for a while. The craving finally hit and I made it, using Spanish chorizo instead of andouille sausage. But that’s beside the point.

The point is this:

I’ve never used great northern beans as called for in the recipe. Neither have I ever worked with kale, a collard-like green, leafy vegetable.

Turns out that these items are pretty potent. The soup was delicious. Deee-li-shus. But I’m estimating that, between the kale and beans, there were approximately 18 grams of fiber per spoonful of my soup.

We ate the soup on Sunday evening. Within a couple of hours, it hit us. A little cheek lift here. A walking rat-a-tat-tat fart there. A poof of wind on the way to the kitchen.

Soon, these innocent gastrointestinal gusts started getting more dangerous. Throughout the night, Chris and I lifted the bed sheets — and not in a kinky sort of way, either.

Monday morning, Chris emerged from his daily visit to the throne, complaining of some minor intestinal upset. Specifically, his insides had liquefied and he was concerned that he would die of dehydration or an evaporated bowel.

Lucky for me, I have a stronger stomach. Gas, yes. Pee shits, no. Monday afternoon, I dared to have a bowl of the tasty soup for lunch. Again, within an hour or so, I was doing the one-cheek salute to expel the increasingly toxic fumes.

The problem wasn’t the farting in itself. Around here, we enjoy, announce and even celebrate our gas. It was the intensity, the frequency and the duration of the gaseous episodes that ended up posing an issue.

Eight hours after consuming my bean soup for lunch, I was still farting like a geriatric. Even Elise and Althea were noticing, imitating a farting sound every time Chris or I would pass gas. At one point, I went to the bathroom and Althea pointed at the bathroom door and said, “Ama! PPBBBLBLLLBBBP!”

I knew things were out of control when I let a silent-but-deadly one fly and saw the cat lift his head, take a sniff and — I shit you not — move to the other couch.

If you’ve ever owned a cat, you know that it takes a lot for a sleeping cat to get up and move from a comfortable couch.

Monday night, I decided to freeze the remainder of the soup. Tasty as the soup was, Chris’ tender stomach and my sulfuric intestinal juices couldn’t handle any more.

We chuckled at the whole experience — haha, crazy pregnancy cravings; haha fiber soup; haha our colons are gone.

At about 6 o’clock this morning, I wasn’t laughing anymore. There was no mirth or merriment when Chris threw back the sheets, jumped out of bed and screamed “AWWWWWWWWW SHIT!”

I flailed awake in a panic. “What?? What the fuck is going on?”

“God damn that bean soup! I just shit the bed!”

“…….Are you serious?”

“I dreamt I was taking a shit and I shit the bed. Mark your calendar. I’m 36 years old and I just . . . Oh JESUS CHRIST!” he screamed, holding his butt cheeks together as he ran off to the bathroom.

From behind the closed bathroom door, sitting on the toilet, shitting his brains out at 6 a.m.: “GOD DAMN THAT BEAN SOUP!!”

I have a serious, non-ironic-about-gender-stereotypes-etc., question:

How do you run your household?

You give me a single project and tell me to own and love it, I can do it. But give me a department to run and it’s going under.

The problem here is that running an house is like managing a department of some sort. Maybe not anything super important, like IT or accounting. But something like …. human resources? Because we’re humans and we’re like resources?

I have no idea. But this department is definitely not meeting quotas and whatnot.

The main topic of this post is cooking. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? We blow a depressing amount of money on take-out food. The girls almost always eat at home, but by the time they’re in bed and the day is done, I’m beat. I go through fits and spurts, but for the past few months we’ve been eating out probably four to five times a week.

(And don’t tell me to eat with my kids. Who the hell over the age of eight eats dinner at 5 p.m.???)

Anyhow. That’s a lot of money. And money is something we definitely don’t have to burn. Especially since we’re planning to finally take our honeymoon in two years, and by golly, that’s one project I WILL manage to achieve.

Vacation. Vacation. Vacation.

Oh, and the whole short-selling-the-house and three-kids-on-one-income things. Those are a real financial drain, too.

I’m trying to say that I’ve rededicated myself to cooking at home again, and I didn’t set my sights low, either. I decided to plan out a month’s worth of meals.

Note the key words there: Plan. In advance. A month.

Naturally, I don’t expect myself to actually succeed at this for a full 30 days, but I’m going to try, by god.

Vacation. Vacation. Vacation.

So, back to my question: How the hell do you do this? I’ve planned four days so far and I’m exhausted. How do you do that whole thing where you buy your groceries once a week and know exactly what to buy and the chicken lasts three days for three different meals and there are coupons and stuff?

I go to the store as often as four days a week to buy food as needed and there’s never anything to eat here except 18 bags of chip crumbs, some dented cans of crushed pineapple and three gallons of olive oil.

If I can make dinner with these ingredients, let me know. Otherwise, share your household management tips. Please. Even if you don’t have any. A mutual lack of housewifery skills will at least make me feel better.

Maybe my expectations were too high.

A few days in a waterside cottage sounded perfect. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, pool, small beach. Close to a historic downtown area and a few minutes from other quaint beach towns. My girls. My man.

It should have been paradise.

Day One

We left on Saturday before noon. The girls had their swim lesson in the morning, then we all splurged on lunch at Five Guys. (Only the best burgers ever, in case you didn’t know.) The girls fell asleep in the car almost as soon as we hit the road. Everything was poised to be awesome.

The drive was pretty uneventful and we arrived at the Lovely Vacation Cottage several hours later. Exhausted, we decided to take it easy and stroll down to the small strip of beach on the Intracoastal.

Aside from a trashcan lid and miscellaneous beer cans and condoms littering the sand, it was pleasant, as evidence by the single photo we took the entire trip:

Then came dinner, which occurred to us 20 minutes too late. While we drove around frantically searching for something kid-friendly and semi-not-touristy, the girls mounted an ever-rising cacophony of hunger-induced screams, shrieks and wails. They threw their sippy cups and kicked the seats. They cursed our parents and damned us to hell.

Panicked, we ended up going to a fucking SMOOTHIE place NOT known for its food. The girls scoffed at our attempts to feed them, chucking bits of quesadilla on the floor and screaming for MORE SMOOTHIE MOTHER FUCKERS WAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Day Two

After our typical breakfast routine, we got the girls ready to go to the beach. Before we left the Lovely Vacation Cottage, I asked Chris where my camera was.

Him: “I don’t know where it is.”

Me: “Well, you packed it.”

Him: “I don’t know where I packed it.”

Me: “….YOU took it out of the drawer. YOU asked me if I wanted you to bring it. I said yes. YOU then PUT IT somewhere, supposedly IN something that would be coming with us on vacation. WHERE was that somewhere?”

Him: “I don’t know. It’s your camera.”

Me: “BUT I DIDN’T PACK THE FUCKING CAMERA.”

Him: “I don’t know what to tell you.”

Me: ‘TELL ME WHERE THE GODDAMN CAMERA IS, THAT’S WHAT YOU CAN TELL ME.”

He found the camera and off we went, seething and huffing, to the goddamned beach where we had a goddamned good time.

And didn’t take a single goddamned picture.

On the way back to the Lovely Fucking Vacation Cottage, Chris drove past some idiot doing an illegal three-point turn in the middle of downtown. Apparently, this pissed the guy off and he followed us down the road, cursing and spitting and shaking his fists at us, back to the cottages. I spent the rest of the vacation swearing there was someone outside the window plotting to shoot our family.

That night was also Father’s Day, so for dinner we headed to one of the nearby, so-called charming downtowns. Most everything was closed (Sunday), but one sports bar that was open was offering a free entree for dads. Obvious choice, right?

This was one of those situations where you get what you pay for.

The food? Awful. Service? Atrocious. Child behavior? Horrifying. The waitress left us waiting for so long that I had to, for the first time ever, extract a screaming child from a restaurant. And Chris, for probably the first time ever, told off the waitress.

And left her a $5 tip anyway.

He’s nice to a fault.

Day Three

Day Three was Pool Day.

Pool Day was Awful Day.

The pool at the cottages was NOT made for kids. The fact that it was small wasn’t a big deal. But the fact that its shallowest portion was four-feet deep WAS a big deal. And the fact that the concrete area around the pool was about eight inches wide and perfect for two toddlers to go streaking around, threatening to fall into the water and drown if we dared to blink, was definitely a big deal.

Oh, and the water was about 105 degrees. One hundred. And five. Degrees. Farenheit. It was 90 outside. We got OUT of the water to cool off.

After an hour and a half of sheer terror and panic, we took the girls back to the Son-of-a-Bitching Vacation Cottage and spent the rest of the morning letting them play in traffic. Seemed less dangerous than the pool.

When we went to the mall to waste some time that afternoon, I think Chris and I both knew our vacation had gone down the proverbial shitter.

That evening, after the girls went to bed, Chris looked at me and casually suggested, “Maybe we should leave a day early? You know, since the girls seem so exhausted and unhappy with the change in ….”

“GOOD GOD YES LET’S GO.”

Day Four

The morning of our early departure, we couldn’t get packed fast enough.

Of course, the girls had other plans.

They wanted to tear out of the cottage and play in piles of red ants. They wanted to throw the toys I JUST PACKED all over the floor. They wanted to trip and skin their knees and play with wasps.

Then there was the bar of soap.

After clearing out the bathroom, I let Chris know that I had packed all of our toiletries. Well, I guess I forgot to pack his beloved bar of soap because guess who comes stomping out of the bathroom with a bar of Lever 2000 held gingerly in his trembling hands?

That idiotic bar of soap launched a major standoff and several hours of clipped, terse, only-the-necessities conversation.

(Who travels with soap … and then takes it back home, anyway???)

Leaving before nap time also proved to be a mistake. I spent the first two-and-a-half hours of the drive wanting to jump out of the moving car with every scream and cry emanating from the backseat.

Instead, I climbed over the passenger seat to entertain my daughters.

Because I am a patient and loving mother, goddamn it.

There’s some really random shit that can set me off into giggle fits. Once upon a time, it was the words ‘desk,’ ‘slimy’ and ‘chicken.’

Desk and slimy just aren’t funny anymore, but chickens are ALWAYS funny.

Anyway. That tidbit is vaguely connected to the fact that, the longer I’m married to Chris, the funnier I find him — and not always in the ways he intends. He’s the master of awful puns and tasteless jokes, but those generally just make me groan.

It’s when he’s being totally serious that he says something unintentionally hilarious to set me off. Here is the latest comedy in the ongoing theater of our married life, as told in two parts:

Part I

Salad dressing. Not funny? Not normally. But sometimes, salad dressing is piss-in-my-pants hilarious.

Specifically, this incident:

My husband was getting amorous and I was feeling receptive. It was all sweet and romantic and junk. As I snuggled my face into his shirt, I smelled salad dressing. The smell made me wonder why the hell he would smell like a bottle of vinaigrette, and my God, when was the last time he showered?, and maybe we needed a stronger detergent, and you know, there’s always a kid in school that smells like glue so surely there’s  kid that always smells like spoiled salad dressing. And suddenly my husband was that kid. I pictured him sitting in the corner of a 1st-grade classroom with thick glasses and too-short shorts, reading a book about dinosaurs while intermittently sniffing a bottle of Elmer’s glue and obliviously passing gas, all while smelling like a bottle of expired Wish-Bone House Italian.

As he moved to feel me up, I collapsed into silent laughter on the floor, unable to express why I couldn’t go on with our romantic rendezvous. How could I possible have sex with a guy who farts alone in a corner and smells like salad dressing???

Now can you see why this is funny? My husband is the kid in school who smells like…..Oh Jesus H., whatever. It’s funny. This person would agree with me.

Part II

I think everyone who uses predictive text messaging can understand this one. You try to type “Be home soon,” but the auto-corrector changes it to “You’re a lazy piece of shit and I want a divorce.” Or something like that.

Anyway, I was waiting for a doctor’s appointment and texting with Chris to pass the time. The receptionist was being a bitch and asking for my confirmation number, which I didn’t have because who the fuck actually writes down confirmation numbers anyway, let alone keeps them on hand in case anyone should ever ask for it?

Since the receptionist was clearly incompetent, I texted Chris and asked him to check my email for the confirmation message so I could throw it in the receptionist’s face and be all “BOOYAH!!!”

Me: “are you able to get to a computer right now?”

Him: “Yes.”

Me: “nm. these idiots said i didn’t have an appt but they ‘found’ it. stupid.”

Me, two minutes later when it became apparent that they  had no intention of keeping to my appointment time: “okay, wtf. can you look on my screen and go to my gmail? one of the most recent msgs is a confirmation from the doc.”

Him: “I can’t. I’m sitting in the toilet.”

Him: “on, rather.”

I started snickering. Okay, not just snickering — I burst into hysterical, tear-inducing laughter. Because now my husband was not only the smelly salad dressing kid, but he was the smelly salad dressing kid who fell into the toilet at school and had to walk around with toilet-water-soaked pants the rest of the day while all the other kids made fun of him.

I literally could not control the laughter. I covered my mouth and tried to take deep breaths, but that just made me laugh harder. I started to perspire. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. Sweat dripped down my back and forehead. I could not stop.

People were starting to stare, so I got up and walked into the hallway, thinking a change of scenery would stop the laughter. But that just drew more attention to me. The nurses started asking, “Are you okay?” and “Are you laughing or crying?” I was laughing so hard that I just waved them away — I couldn’t even respond. Every time I tried to sit back down, it would start all over again. Finally, I had to shut myself into a bathroom to get the fit out of my system and wipe up the sweat and tears.

Chris will read this and shake his head. Whatever. It’s hilarious.

At least as hilarious as chickens. Or sharting. Or sharting chickens.

Oh Jesus, I think I need to change my pants.