She said “Donut.”

Um.

Now you know my dirty secret.

I am pregnant, allergic to spring, and  I have caught something with an explosive cough.  If you need to know what “explosive” means to a pregnant woman, I am not going to tell you.

I hope you didn’t read this while eating.

You could always check out the links on my shared items sidebar from people who are either not sick, or do not let disease stall their creativity.  The jerks.

See you when I feel better.

1. Cruises.  I never want to go on a cruise.  First, because they operate in international waters and have no publicly accountable police force.  Second, norovirus.  Enough said.

2.  Men who use hairspray.  I cannot explain why I find this creepy.  But I do.  I can get past it in performers, who have professional reasons, but the waiter at breakfast at that hotel?  Ewwww.

3.  Swimming in natural lakes, rivers, etc. I take my girls to the lake in the summer because I do not want to pass my unreasoning skeeves to them, but I only wade in up to my calves.  There are dead things in that water.  The fish that die don’t just evaporate into thin air.  They stay there and rot.

4.  Bikini jeans.

5.  Lipstick-stained cigarette butts.

Are you as neurotic as I am?  Feel free to try your own list.  I tag Melanie, Melanie, Melanie, Sherri and Jeana.  Tell me what makes your flesh crawl.

I hate cars. I hate repairing them, I hate paying for insurance and gas and registration and e-checks. I hate funding the wealth of one of the world’s most oppressive states, Saudi Arabia.  I hate the breakdowns and the unreliability of cars.  I would love to live without one, but I just don’t see how we could.

For eight months Az the Husband and I lived without a functioning car. We took the bus or walked wherever we needed to go. At the time, we lived in a small apartment in a neighborhood that included our church, our doctor, our school and a grocery store all withing two miles. Az took the bus the five miles to his workplace, and I took the bus for any specialized shopping.

When you depend on public transit, life is a little different. It wasn’t easy to go back home for something forgotten, so I had to plan for everything I needed before I left. I always carried a big bag with plenty of empty space. I shopped for groceries almost every day; carrying groceries 1.5 miles gets heavy, so I could only carry enough for one day. I stopped buying most liquids because they were too hard to carry. I could no longer comparison shop for groceries; the only option was the store within walking distance.

Because every bus trip requires lots of waiting at stops, and the bus is rarely going directly to your destination, every errand took at least twice as long as it would if I had a car. I planned as many errands as possible in one outing. I learned to be prepared for all kinds of weather. Just because it was sunny when I left, doesn’t mean it would be sunny later. I carried an umbrella and sunscreen.

We finally went back to car-driving before winter. I don’t know if I could have managed it during the snowy season, but I realize some people do. There were a lot of things I loved about taking the bus. It slowed down the pace of life, encouraged me to be more patient and easy-going. There was a kind of freedom to it.

People in big cities do this all the time, but they generally have a decent public transit system. In our little city, the bus system is awful. There aren’t enough routes. The payment system is outdated. In a large midwestern city like Chicago, a bus pass is credited with a given amount of money, and each fare is subtracted from the pass when you swipe it. In our little city, bus passes are bought with a flat fee, and are only good for a specific zone and on specific days. They are a worthless nightmare, deliberately (it seems) planned to lose the customer money.

Perhaps because of the inconvenience of the bus system in our small city, it is used almost exclusively by people who cannot afford to own a car. This means that the routes (and therefore the stops) are through some of the poorest and scariest sections of the city. If I travel downtown from my current neighborhood, I can get there directly without transferring. But when I want to come home, the same route takes a circuitous trip through one of the creepiest abandoned housing projects in the city. The trip home takes twice as long as the trip there. If Az were to take the bus to work, he would need to transfer in the dark in a very scary part of town, waiting for the last bus of the night. If he missed it, he would be stranded.

Before our first child was born, we moved. Though we chose a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, we are still more than four miles away from our doctor, our church, our favorite bakery, and Az’s workplace. I could walk the distance to most of those places, but our children could not.

Nor is the bus a safe alternative for four small children. My oldest daughter is only four. Bus passengers need to be able to hold on in case the bus stops suddenly. It happens. My two year old just couldn’t do it. I could not hold all the children I would need to hold on the bus. I could not be sure that there would even be seats available for us on the bus. On crowded routes, my kids could easily get lost in the shuffle, and you need to know exactly where the kids are when you get on and off a bus. A toddler was killed this year under the wheels of one of our city buses.

So it seems we are stuck with a car. If we switched to only one car, we would save money on insurance and registration and possibly repairs, but we would actually increase the amount of money we spent on gas. When we have only one car, that means that one of us has to drop the other off and then return to pick them up, doubling the actual number of miles to work driven. While Green SAHM points out that correctly that having only one car cuts down on needless driving or unnecessary shopping, I suspect the rising gas prices will do this for us anyway.

And then there is walking. The more children we have, the less possible this seems, at least while they are little. Last year I could push my two oldest in a stroller uphill to the nearest playground, which is two miles away. Now I have three and am pregnant with my fourth. My four-year-old cannot reliably walk four miles. My three-year-old definitely can’t. Even if my four-year-old could manage the distance, letting her walking along a major road where the traffic moves at 45 mph is too scary for me. She is an energetic little imp, and I might not be able to grab her quickly enough if she darted the wrong way and I had my hands full with a stroller.

So we are stuck with being a multi-car family.  When the new baby is born, we will no longer be able to fit all the kids in the back of the family sedan, and my parents are planning to give us their old van.  It is an ugly beast of a vehicle, and I plan to only drive it to church, except for the rare (very rare, hopefully) family outing.  Driving that behemoth will cost us a bundle.

But I remember the carless days we had, and I feel a little wistful.  Maybe someday when the kids are older, those days will come again.

So do you have any suggestions? I definitely don’t want to use a real picture of me. What kind of image would say “Toddled Dredge” to you?

“Mommy! You’re wearing a mask! Are you a superhero?”

According to him, when you are right, you don’t need people to agree with you.

I think that is when they started the butter wars.

My mother likes butter soft. She keeps it at room temperature so that it will spread easily on bread. Az the Husband likes butter cold and hard. He wants butter to be refrigerated at all times. If it were possible to keep a tiny fridge at the dinner table and slide the butter out for only the two seconds necessary to retrieve a pat, he would be quite content.

I suppose in a different family this would mean two plates of butter, one for inside the fridge, and one left on the counter. But that would not be the way Az and my mother do things.

Instead, they began a week long contest of wills over the proper placement of the butter. My mother would clear the table after dinner and leave the butter on the counter. Az would follow along after she was done, find the butter, and put it back in the fridge. Mother would say, “But I like my butter soft!” Az would say, “What you eat isn’t butter. It’s a biological experiment.”

My mother began to hide the butter.

No one hides like my mother. When we were children and summers rolled along, Mom, who was always offended by inactivity, would hide our small television. She did not want us wasting our summers in front of the tv. Sometimes it ended up in a closet. Once she found a place for it behind her pots and pans in the cupboard. Sometimes she simply placed it in the trunk of her car and drove it to work with her. We rarely found it.

Years later, when someone gave us a television that was too big to hide, she simply cut the plug off, and repaired it at the end of summer.

So I was not surprised when she began to hide the butter. It had been too long, I think, since she had had such opportunities. After every meal, she would find a new hiding place. After every meal, Az would look for the butter to put it back in the fridge. Sometimes he found it, and sometimes he didn’t. But the more she hid it, the more she giggled about it. The more he searched for it, the more that bulldog gleam of tenacity shone in his eyes. Both my mother and my husband are very stubborn people, and this was just the sort of harmless contest that I have gradually learned to accept as a necessary part of their domestic bliss.

Once she hid it by placing it on a dining room chair and sliding the chair back under the table. He didn’t find that one.

Eventually my mother returned home, and Az became sole master of his dairy products again. I visited mom about a year later, and she took me to the mall. She was grateful that Az had let me and the baby come for a visit, even though he had to stay in town and work. She wanted to buy him a present to thank him. We wandered around the mall, looking in various stores, until she stumbled upon just the right gift.

A butter slicer.

Because, of course, a butter slicer only works when the butter is cold and hard.

I wish my floors were self-cleaning.

I wish New Zealand were closer.

I wish I knew what a dodo sounded like.   And sometimes I kinda wish I knew what a dodo tasted like.

I wish arms were detachable.  But then I’d probably lose mine.

I rarely went out at night. I heard my older sister’s constant fights with my parents about curfews, and wanted no part of that. It did not occur to me that her choice of activity and mine might have different reactions from Mom and Dad. I asked meekly if I could go to the game, and was surprised at my mother’s instant “Yes.”

Basketball. The heart rises with the ball in the shot, and the breath stops when it rolls around the rim. The sounds of basketball are almost comically sharp and emotive: the squeak of rubber soles on the wood floor, the slap of the ball bounced hard against the floor or backboard, an echoing indoor court that broadcasts even the pants and groans of the players.

There were few adults there, and most were mothers of the players. The crowd on our side was almost all girls, cheering, hoping, rooting for our team. We gasped together and clapped together. I was so wrapped up in the game, I shivered.

We lost. In the final minute of the game, by a close score I can’t remember, we lost. At the final buzzer, we spectators - dozens of teenage girls - rushed onto the court, crying, heartbroken together.

We rushed onto the court together, and I was suddenly alone again. I was in the middle of a crowd, but the walls of the junior high caste system had reasserted themselves. The players looked past me. No one made eye contact. I was invisible again.

I don’t remember the bus ride home.