The Cost of Shit

The cost of shit is growing.

I take Fiber Choice, which costs about $0.12 per tablet. I take four tablets per day, which works out to about $0.48 (not including tax).

Zel takes Metamucil, which costs about $0.07 per dose. He Metas twice a day, which works out to about $0.14 (not including tax or water).

Then there’s the toilet paper and the cost of flushing, but I won’t get into that.

Baby Kaos is currently only taking breast milk. But, he poops like 6 times per day. Not kidding. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but he averages about 6 poops a day.

We get his diapers at Costco, so it works out to about $0.16 per diaper, which works out to be about $1.00 per day (again, not including tax). This is way less expensive than buying diapers at the Evil Empire, which would cost about $2.00 per day.

This only includes poopie diapers. It doesn’t include pee-pee diapers. Our cost is increased to about $1.50 per day if we include pee-pee diapers.
We put Baby Kaos’ poopie diapers into the Diaper Genie which helps to control the smell of the poopie diapers (pee-pee diapers go in the main trash in the kitchen cause they don’t smell, you guys). This, too, costs money because we have to buy refills for the Diaper Genie. The refills cost about $6.00 per container, and the container lasts about two weeks.

However, the Diaper Genie is holding fewer diapers now because Baby Kaos is in a bigger diaper. He weighs over 17 pounds, which is big for a 3-1/2 month old baby. Bigger baby = bigger poopie diapers = less space in the Diaper Genie.
And let’s talk for a second about the taxes that we pay on all of the shit we buy in order to shit. The only thing I’ll say about it is: If you think about it, the government is even taxing you to shit.

Honestly. Don’t they have enough of my money? And, isn’t this why we left England in the first place?

Let There Be Light

We have power again. It was off for 37.5 hours.

You read that correctly. Thirty-seven and one-half hours.

The power went out about 2:15 a.m. on Friday, 12/15. It came back on about 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, 12/16.

Melanie said, “That's a whole work week, and you guys didn't even get paid for that shit, you know what I’m sayin’????”

I know what she’s sayin’.

We had a wind storm that hit our area and wreaked havoc all over the place. There were about 25,000 people in my county alone without power. There were trees and power lines down all over the place. It was a fucking disaster.

My boss called me on Friday morning and basically said to not leave the house. But, I’d already left. She spoke with Zel and then he called me on the cell phone, but it was off and so he was upset (“Why the hell do we have a cell phone if you’re not going to turn it on?!?!”).

I couldn’t get into work even if I really wanted to because the road was blocked in both directions: a power pole to the north and a tree to the south. We were trapped. So I went home and Zel and I drank some hot chocolate. I had marshmallows in mine.

The upside is we still had heat because we have propane and have a gas heater for the primary heat source in our house. So, we didn’t freeze, which was good because Baby Kaos doesn’t need to freeze, you guys.

We were also still able to cook because we also have a gas stove. But, Zel didn’t make me cook. He took me out to dinner on Friday night (which is a normal thing for the past 10-1/2 years anyway) and then we went to breakfast on Saturday morning. We were going to go out on Saturday night, too, but the power came back on so we went to the grocery store and bought all the things we had to throw out that were in our fridge.

The checker at the grocery store said I should send the utility company my bill. Yeah. Perhaps Ma Nature will pick up the bill.

Oh well. At least we have light and can eat at home again.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Mary Cheney and Heather Poe, who are expecting their first baby in late spring!

What They Don’t Teach You About Childbirth

I paid close attention in our Childbirth Education classes when I was pregnant with Baby Kaos.

But, I never knew a couple of things about pregnancy and childbirth. Nobody ever said these things to me; I had to go through it to know.

After the baby is born, and the baby either ripped the vagina or there was an episiotomy, and the doc has to sew mom’s vagina back up, and after everything’s healed, a woman’s vulva will look very different. Shockingly so. I was shocked. I can count the people and instances that have shocked me in my life on one hand and not use all of my fingers.

I spoke with my doc about the fact that my vulva looks different. He said that it’s pretty common, and no, they don’t usually tell women that beforehand. He said that he’s known a lot of women who are very upset about the appearance of their vulvas after childbirth, and said it would be an interesting thing to study, from a psycho-social perspective.

Bladder lift surgery is done when a woman becomes incontinent. Women become incontinent because we carry children.

I spoke with my doc about this one, too. He said they usually don’t tell women before they get pregnant about this one either. He said that if we had to sign up for pregnancy and they told women what they were signing up for we wouldn’t have survived as a species.

But, is being a mom worth the things I've gone through so far?

Absolutely.