Some old ass cemetery in Lancaster, PA

Chooch is already asking if we’re going to have our traditional Christmas picnic in the cemetery and I think that’s so awesome that it’s already become a “thing” for him. We didn’t get to do it last year because it rained pretty steadily on Christmas, but we had a little post-Christmas cupcake snack on a drier day.  The cemetery picnics were something that started in ’05 when I was pregnant and we had no where else to go on Christmas because my family was being a basket of dicks. It kind of just stuck after that, even after my family took me back. We grab some snacks, some plastic bottles of eggnog from the convenience store, a blanket if we remember, and eat while shivering amongst graves. I don’t think Henry enjoys it, but Chooch and I do and isn’t it really all about pleasing the children?

All my life, I’ve had encounters with people who think it’s “weird” or “unhealthy” to have a fascination of cemeteries. I’m sure Chooch will eventually run into these same types of people who will crinkle their noses and attempt to make him feel like there is something wrong with him for pointing out the car window and yelling, “Cemetery! Let’s go!” just like he did in Lancaster. But hopefully he will be able to brush that shit off like I do. It’s not like we’re digging up dead bodies, for Christ’s sake.

Christmas 2008

Someday I will make a photobook filled entirely with all of Chooch’s cemetery photos and then all his friends will be like, “Dude, you have the best baby pictures ever!” and I will sneer in the faces of their parents.

What kind of holiday traditions do you have?

The other day, one of my co-workers asked if we were taking Chooch to see Santa.

“Well,” I began hesitantly. “Since we’re so…’alternative,'” and if I had my quotation tattoos on my fingers like I want so badly, I wouldn’t have had to go through all the effort of BENDING them into air quotes, “we’re taking him to see Zombie Santa.”

She looked at me strangely for a split second, then threw her head back in laughter. Behind me, Barb wasn’t even fazed. She’s sat near me long enough now that nothing I say or do really shocks her. To Barb, this was just another family outing for the Kelly-Robbins clan.

And that is just what we did Saturday night at Monroeville Mall. My friend Kim was there with her boyfriend Chris, so that was cool because I don’t really see her very often. Kim got me into my first bar when I was 17, so she will always be special to me! I can remember sitting at the Blue Rock in Port Vue, being very obviously underage and getting trashed off of Seabreezes. Lisa (she’s the one who introduced me to Kim) kept taking the drinks away from me and every time she would look away, Kim would push another toward me.

Kim also tried to talk me out of getting my hair cut at some shitty Fantastic Sams or Bo-Rics when I was 18 but I wouldn’t listen to her and wound up walking out in tears and wearing a scarf around my head for weeks. In August.

I think we also ate donut holes that day at my house with Lisa?

It was nice to have them to talk to while Chooch ran around Time and Space Toys, yelling CAN I HAVE THIS I WANT THIS. I hope Kim knows I wasn’t joking when I said she can borrow him anytime she wants. ANYTIME.

Zombie Santa was finally ready so we all walked into the back where the zombie museum is set up and Chooch nervously sat down. He couldn’t even look at the scantily clad elves, let alone allow any of them to get in the picture with him. Apparently, zombie girls make Chooch very shy.

Hey Erin, try to remember to check the settings on the camera once in awhile. Christ.

There was a table of COOKIES set up that we got to enjoy while waiting for the Santa picture to be printed out for us. There was one particular powdered sugar cookie that I was really feeling. It wasn’t a Russian teacake, but nearly as wonderful. While we ate cookies and repeatedly said, “No,” to all of Chooch’s begging, Kim and Chris mentioned that they had been thinking about going roller skating and I nearly choked on my tongue that’s how fast I said I was up for it. Like I would ever say no to rollerskating. So Kim, if you’re reading this – set that shit up!

It’s always the same people playing zombies at these events so I’m beginning to recognize them now. Chooch’s girlfriend from the Zombie Car Wash was there as a (SUPER HOT) bloody elf, so we forced him to get his picture taken with her. He didn’t want to wait his turn so the security guard who was having his picture taken at the time eventually just called Chooch over to join him.

On the days he has school, it always works out that Chooch gets a seriously pernicious bug up his ass which conveniently coincides with Henry’s arrival home from work.

I don’t know what set him off this afternoon – he wanted a piece of tape and somehow Henry managed to succeed in fucking this up, and suddenly we had a riot on our hands.

Standing on the stairs, tears parachuting from his eyes and a demonic glower emanating from within, Chooch shouted in a voice that sounded nothing like his own, “You fucker! I’m going to tell Santa to stab you with a knife, Daddy, you fucker!” 

(At least Henry can take comfort in the fact that his son doesn’t want to have to kill him himself, right?)

I’m sure it’s in really bad form for the mother to laugh during an outburst like this, but my god. He was so seriously pissed, and have you ever seen a four-year-old seriously pissed? It’s fucking funny. So I laughed. Openly laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” Chooch snarled at me, his voice quaking with histrionics, and I prepared to clean up the split pea soup.

However, Chooch has never threatened to put out a hit on me, so that clearly means I’m the favorites parent here.

Even though I’m mad at him, here are some pictures of (an uncooperative) Chooch from last weekend.

Ugh, that dirty mouth. Always with the dirty mouth. In all aspects.

I had given Henry explicit instructions on what to get for the cupcakes while I was at work Thursday night. The plan was that he was going to bake them and then I would attempt to not look like an honorary member of The Dream Team while recreating what I saw in the last issue of Better Homes & Gardens (which somehow is delivered with my name on it, but Henry is always quick to whisk it from the mail slot before I throw it away).

When I came home from work, it was after 9pm and I quickly saw that Henry had not yet made the cupcakes.

“I’ll get to it,” he kept muttering.

I distracted myself by stuffing the treat bags with lame little Halloween party favors and candy. Then I panicked because I wasn’t sure if the game we had in mind was good enough, so I printed out Halloween mazes and stuffed those in the treat bags too. Goddamn children.

This took about fifteen minutes, start to finish. One could imagine how exhausted I was, having single-handedly carried this entire party on my back while Henry pranced around in his underwear.

Somewhere around 10:30pm, I found out that Henry had purchased red decorating gel instead of black. RED! I cornered him in the kitchen as he mixed the cupcake batter and laid into him for being so worthless, so stupid, so irresponsible, so UNRELIABLE.

We broke up for the second time that night, but he still put his big boy pants on and went back to the store in search of black decorating gel.

By the time he came back, I noticed that he also forgot the pretzel sticks/Frankenstein neck bolts.

“I just came back! I am not going to the store again!” Henry shouted.

I raised a knife.

We broke up again.

I know, I know: Erin, why didn’t you just go to the store yourself? And let that motherfucker win?! Never. Let me remind you that the fact I haven’t eaten meat since 1996 was born from my impenetrable stubbornness. My head, it is that of a bull. (And not just because I’m that ugly.)

“Just forget it!” I screamed. “Fuck the cupcakes! I just won’t take them!”

“Fine,” Henry mumbled, pushing past me and going to sit down on the couch.

“NO I’M JUST KIDDING WE NEED THE CUPCAKES OMG GET BACK IN THERE!” I yelled, heart rate up, left arm tingling. Ew I fucking hate parties. As Henry walked by to go back in the kitchen, I muttered, “But the cupcakes are going to look pathetic since you forgot the pretzels, good job.” I saw him tense up for a second, like he maybe was contemplating pushing me into the hot stove, but then he adjusted his Susie Homemaker ruffled apron and went back to ladling batter into the cupcake tray thing.

“Did you start cooking the spaghetti yet?” I asked. We needed a lot of spaghetti noodles for the stupid game that the other moms so thoughtfully left for me to come up with.

“Can I get through the cupcakes first?” he snipped, and we broke up again.

Around 11:30, the cupcakes were cooled off and it was time to start icing them. Henry mixed up a bowl of purple frosting while I struggled with the orange. I didn’t mix it well enough, so all the cupcakes I frosted had dark orange striations throughout them, and that’s on top of the sides I smashed in from gripping too hard.

“Look,” Henry instructed. “Turn the cupcake with your other hand so the frosting goes on easier.” But as usual, I ignored his tip and continued glooping on mounds of frosting before moving on to the frustrating task of smoothing that shit out.

I started to cry. Then I screamed, slammed down the cupcake I was working on, and marched out of the kitchen.

But not before breaking up again, followed by a death threat.

“You’re a fucking retard,” I heard Henry say as he examined the three cupcakes I managed to frost before having a full-blown temper seizure. I really believe that it takes a special kind of person to be able to work with sprinkles and frosting without winding with brain matter Pollacked across the kitchen wall.

I started to watch the Jersey Shore reunion show, mouth still molded into a scowl, until I realized that I couldn’t let Henry take all the credit for the cupcakes. And he would, too. I knew it. So I went back in the kitchen and pushed Henry out of the way. He had a plateful of large marshmallows which he had previously rolled through green glittery sprinkles. I picked one up and decided to start working on the Frankenstein heads, that maybe if I concentrated real hard on that, I could block out the fact that Henry was two feet away from me, making me hate life.

By then, it was midnight.

I did that high-pitched shriek that happens when something isn’t going my way.

“What?” Henry yelled.

“THIS BLACK GEL IS TOO THICK! THIS FRANKENSTEIN IS RUINED!” I hurled it into the garbage.

“Great,” Henry said sardonically. “Now we’re going to be short one marshmallow.” Turns out there was just enough green sprinkles for fourteen marshmallows, the exact number of kids in Chooch’s class. “If you weren’t being such a BITCH, I probably could have fixed that one,” Henry sneered and I wanted to skin him alive.

“Oh you think you’re so fucking perfect!” I spat. And we broke up so badly that I created a profile on Match.com.

Whoever lives in this house after us is going to be haunted by all the ire left clinging to the walls from our mutual belligerence. And that’s assuming we both make it out alive. Otherwise, someone might want to consider taking a wrecking ball to 3021 My Street.

Being short a marshmallow, I made the executive decision to only use half and do spiderwebs on the other cupcakes. Oh great idea, Erin Rachelle. Next time, maybe try to remember that you have an unsteady hand and SUCK at decorating.

How do you bitches make this look so easy?

I was standing over the oven, dragging a toothpick over these bastards, and GRUNTING. It was excruciating! You need precision for this shit. And precision and me? We’re not friends. We’re not even frenemies. In fact, if precision turned into a zombie, I’d push everyone out of the way so I could be the one to shoot it in the motherfucking head. Precision makes me cry, you guys. And I think I have arthritis now. I fucking hate you, too, spider webs.

I hate anything to do with baking! I hate frosting! I hate food coloring! I hate the kitchen! I hate Henry!

I do like licking the batter off that mixing contraption though.

The worst part is that I kept catching Henry trying not to laugh when my sanity was very clearly slipping through my fingers like sand through an hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Of course, they looked nothing like Frankenstein and I had a failure-induced panic attack. Then I realized that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have a variety.

“What if the kids start fighting because they all want one with a marshmallow head?” I freaked out.

“It’ll be a good lesson for them. You don’t always get what you want in life,” Henry said matter-of-factly. That’s great, but I didn’t want to be there when parts of Mr. Potato Head began flying as the kids fought each other with tinker toys and glue sticks and teachers staggered away with pencils jutting out from their femoral artery. You might be wondering what sort of impression I have in my mind of preschool classes. Obviously a very Mad Max, post-apocalyptic one.

It was nearly 1:00am by the time we finished decorating the fuckcakes. Henry and I slept in separate rooms.

FUCKERS!!!!

[Ed.Note: Henry can attest this is not an accurate account. It has been toned down. A lot.]

If every October is going to bring with it The Great Costume Conundrum of [Insert Year], then I’m about to peace out from this Halloween bullshit. I thought having children was supposed to exacerbate that childlike wonder of trick-or-treating, carving pumpkins and pushing friends into chainsaw guys? Because so far, all it has done for me is stack a metric ton of stress upon my chest. All over a goddamn costume! This shit started last year, when all of a sudden my little voiceless pet developed a mind of his own and just couldn’t decide on a costume and batted away all of my suggestions like so many filthy flies.

Immediately after his Halloween party on Friday (I will get to that tomorrow), he goes to us, “Yeah, so…I don’t want to be Ben 10 for trick or treating. I want a new costume.” OH WHAT A SURPRISE. And poor naive Chooch, he had hopeful dreams of us taking him to 12 different Spirit Halloweens while he vetoed every costume on the racks. I sat him down and explained to him that I already wasted on a piece of shit pelt of cheap fabric and he’d make due with what we already had in the house.

Which turned out to be a clown wig and bow tie.

“You can be a zombie clown,” I suggested, which was more of an order actually.

“No! I want to go get a new costume!” he stamped.

October brings out his rich kid silver spoon syndrome, I fucking swear to god. I have NO IDEA where there this comes from.

(I was more of a silver platter kind of kid.)

Halloween afternoon, it was getting down to the wire. He was still huffing about not wanting to be a zombie clown when a commercial came on for Creepy Crawlers. I wasn’t even aware that Creepy Crawlers still existed, and evidently they are a million times more disgusting than when my brother Ryan used to terrorize me with them.

“I want that,” Chooch said.

I seized the moment. “If you let me do your makeup for trick-or-treating, I will buy you that tomorrow, I freaking swear to god.” I am not ashamed of resorting to bribery. A little promise now and then can get you pretty far in life.  How do you think I get Henry to do everything I want? (I rarely pay up, though.)

We even pinkie-swore on it.

And that is how I was able to get my finicky child to sit in a chair while Henry and I tag-teamed him with costume makeup.

It’s a good thing Henry and I are makeup dunces, because we honestly were striving for a half-assed, disheveled, under-the-dock-all-night-with-a-bottle-of-Jack look. Chooch was absolutely  miserable through it all, but I kept whispering Creepy Crawlers in his ear.

Once we were done and he saw his face in the mirror (and also got Andrea‘s seal of approval), the day took a decidedly happier turn. He flew outside and readily posed for photos, while waiting anxiously for people to walk past and see him.

Some day, Chooch will realize that his mother is ALWAYS ON POINT and maybe we can eliminate all this wishy-washy, back-pedaling, mind-changing bullshit that is seriously the most miserable fucking game ever.

He hates the feel of fake blood on his face (as opposed to the real thing, which he’s been coated with way too frequently). So we tried to go easy on him.

Chooch’s cousins Zac and Steph came with us this year, which made it more fun. Trick-or-treating is meant to be done in groups! I felt bad for Chooch last year, being stuck with me and Henry. He looked so envious every time he saw flocks of children together.

Steph didn’t actually trick-or-treat, but came along as a bloodied escort. She volunteered all season at Hundred Acres Manor (where my friend Gina peed her pants) so her make-up is always disgustingly good.

Chooch and Zac got equal amounts of love from passers-by. Everyone loves a good Jason Voorhees! I noticed that most people were like, “Aw! Cute clown!” But then Chooch would get closer and they would notice the blood and his naturally sinister visage (sometimes he gets too into character and it scares me because I think it’s real), and their voices would kind of trail off.

Less than a block away from our house, some girl bit the pavement and began wailing. Henry, Steph and I just stood there, and I said, “Well, this is awkward.” And then I laughed and rolled my eyes because she barely fell that hard and it was a little excessive, this high extent of pain she was attempting to convey.

Fifteen minutes later, Chooch totally fell head first down someone’s front steps. He managed to NOT bust his front teeth through his bottom lip this time, and mostly just hurt his chest a little. It was a slow descent, and there were no wounds to show for it. But when he stood up, he looked at his hand and began sobbing. “I’m bleeding!” he cried.

It was just some of his makeup.

“I guess this is what I get for laughing when that little girl fell,” I joked inappropriately.

He cried for about thirty seconds while the residents of the houses near the scene of the accident offered encouraging and soothing words to him. Then Henry asked, “Do you want to go home?” and he sort of wiped his eyes and gave Henry this ‘hell no!’ look, then stomped off to the next house. Thank god. The tears did little to mar his painted face, which I was admittedly too preoccupied with.

After that, I practically life-flighted him down every set of steps.

And he still wiped out another three times. And the number of “close calls” was in the double digits.

“He needs a Hover-Round,” I mumbled.

“Or a Segway,” Steph added.

Chooch did much better this year than last. He actually remembered to say “trick-or-treat” at every house and didn’t get as distracted by all the Halloween yard decorations as he did last year, when we were forced to spend at least five minutes at every house while he inspected all the inflatables in the yard and dummies on the porch.

While waiting on the sidewalk in front of one of the houses, I saw their large black cat inflatable begin its slow tilt into the earth, but there were people in front of me so I couldn’t see the culprit. Once I saw it was Chooch whose ankle was caught in it, I murmured, “Of course it would be my son.”

And who knew Henry was the official coach of trick-or-treating? My god, was he bossy. “START OVER HERE AND CRISS-CROSS! NO ONE’S HOME, YOU’RE WASTING TIME! TURN DOWN THIS STREET NOW!” Jesus Christ, Henry, get a life.

Oh look, Chooch – Mommy was a clown one year too. YOU ARE SO MUCH LIKE ME.

***

This morning before school, Chooch was watching Spongebob. A commercial for Creepy Crawlers came on. “I’m getting that today, YOU SAID!” Chooch reminded me.

Fuck. I liked him better when my promises wafted away into the ether of his psychotically-whirring mind the moment they were uttered.

On his own accord, Chooch is eating apples (while taking in an early Sunday viewing of Halloween II) as a prelude to the pillow-sack he’s about to fill with snazzily-wrapped partially hydrogenated thunder-thigh oil, high fructose double-chin syrup, and all the sweet seductive promises of childhood obesity.

I’m hoping he doesn’t get any Whoppers; talk about the party foul of trick-or-treating. Well, that and getting hit by a car.

I think I’ve effectively convinced him to eschew his HORRIBLE Ben 10 costume (can’t take all the credit – I’m pretty sure the fact that 3/4 quarters of his school turned into undulating question marks when they saw his lame costume might have had something to do with it). We are going to attempt to turn him into a zombie clown, since we already have the wig, nose and bow-tie from one of my pathetic photo shoots with ex-Christina. I am trying very hard not to be an over-bearing Halloween pageant mom like my mom was to me. At least I haven’t tried to put him in a box yet.

Henry and I have about 4 hours to learn how not to suck at applying costume makeup. Wish us luck.

P.S. I will be posting pictures from his school Halloween party (which turned out fantastically once I successfully trumped the Gosselin mom – good call on that one, guys!), probably tomorrow. I haven’t been feeling well . Ask Henry – he was in the basement trying to fix the furnace when he overheard the dulcet notes of my vomiting as it traveled two floors through the vents. I’ve sort of been phoning it in the last few days.

P.P.S. Oh yeah, Happy Halloween!

When I picked Chooch up from school yesterday, all the kids were wearing these lame-ass spider headdresses.

Chooch was not pleased – not even a little.

I made him keep it on for the entire BLOCK we have to walk to get home and he bitched the whole time, like he was afraid some hot preschool broad was going to roll past on a squeaky tricycle and catch him looking decidedly non-bad ass for once.

So tomorrow is this fucking Halloween party at the school. Henry is my chaperone. Please pray for me, you guys.

Kevin Kreiss (the guy who organized the zombie car wash last month) orchestrated Zom-B-Rama, a zombie carnival on Saturday. It was located in an empty store front in Monroeville Mall and went on the entire day. Chooch had known about it for weeks and kept asking, “How many more sleeps until the zombie carnival? Is today the zombie carnival? When the hell are we going to the zombie carnival?”

He let us attempt to zombify him before we left the house on Saturday, which was no small wonder. Unfortunately, Henry and I are no masters at costume makeup and by the time we arrived at the mall, most of it had seemed to come off. We should have just used dirt – that seems to stick to his face like tongues to my frozen heart.

But before we left the house, he decided he was going to hang outside and wait for victims to walk by. As soon as he would see someone in the distance, he would run across the all the front yards until he was parallel to where they were on the sidewalk, stick out his arms, and commence zombie-stalking. Some people played along and pretended to be scared, but then there were some assholes who were too cool to be concerned with anything other than their awesome iPods, which were probably playing really lame shit. Fuckers.

The turn-out was pretty good when we arrived. There were zombie patrons milling around the mall near the Monroeville Zombies homebase, and several people stopped to comment on Chooch’s Jason shirt and his hat. He gets aggravated when this happens, so of course I laughed. He even had a slight brush with paparazzi as a few people (including a professional photographer) stopped to take his picture. Oh, to walk a day in Chooch’s shoes.

We were only at the carnival for about an hour. Chooch started out fine, things like this don’t scare him. But he doesn’t like loud noise, and God forbid there was some atmospheric music playing to enhance the mood of a post-apocalyptic carnival. It’s not like it was fucking Dimmu Borgir or something, but Chooch was still clamping his hands over his ears and being Mr. Miserable about it. He half-assedly played three of the games (they had a whole little midway set up with zombified fair games) before whining about wanting to leave. So Henry had to use up the rest of the game tickets while I kept Chooch in the (quieter) back room where the tickets could be traded in for prizes.

I’m starting to think Chooch will never go to Warped Tour with me.

Anyway, the carnival was hosted by Dawn of the Dead’s Ken Foree and I’d have liked to have been able to take a picture with him and Chooch, or maybe stick around for some of the other entertainment that was on slate, like the costume contests and RNR Freak Show, but Chooch was becoming increasingly overwhelmed as more people were stuffed inside the small space. This is often the downside of bringing a four-year-old companion to events.

By the end of it, so much of Chooch’s makeup had worn off that he just looked less like a zombie and more like the victim of a grandma’s overzealous affection. Not very ghoulish.

I’ll be so pissed if “Subtle Zombie” is big next year.

I hope Kevin Kreiss continues to offer such fun and zombiriffic options throughout the year. Maybe Chooch will be less surly next time.

Mrs. Evils always hooks my kid up!

Chooch got a fedora yesterday. He put it on and we took pictures. The end. (Wouldn’t it be nice if all my posts were this succinct?)

I was like, “Where the hell did you learn this pose?”

“Freddy,” he answered. And then when my face looked blank, he added, “From ‘iCarly’!

”

God, I am so out of touch. (Not really, because as soon as he said that, I immediately knew what episode he was talking about. I’m such a hussy for TeenNick.)

This one was from Friday, after the Harland picture-takin’ extravaganza. The downside is that since I asked him to sit on one stoop, he deemed it necessary to try out EVERY SINGLE STOOP we passed on our way back to Kara’s.

He had to get his school picture taken a few weeks ago.

He probably wondered why the photographer did it in one shot. “He didn’t even ask me to wear a pig mask!”

Aw, fuck. Here I go ruining a perfectly good blog post with WORDS again.

Chooch was taking a bath after a long day of running amok in the park and pigging out on pie. I was trying to coax him into speeding it up because I had a headache from maybe drinking too much wine and possibly eating too much pie.

“Hurry up, I want to go lay down,” I said.

“Just go lay down then. I’m not done playing in here,” Chooch countered.

“What kind of mother would I be if I just left you in the bath tub with no supervision?

”

With no hesitation, Chooch answered, “A mother without a headache.”

Touché, young one.

Screwing around with some old photos at work while I have a little bit of an unusual lull. 

Chooch zombified himself with my iPhone:

Some other things:

Hockey season has begun! The Pens game starts in 30 minutes, which means I will be acting all indignant and put-off every time an analyst brings work for me. Can’t they see I’m TRYING to listen to the goddamn game?

!

Of course everything would be doubled-over-in-hysteria funny tonight at work since I have chest pains. Ow.

I posted a review of the new Chiodos album last night. It was met with a very “Bueller?”-esque reception. Some random girl on Twitter read it and said it was well-done. That was good enough for me. Really fucking love Chiodos, in case you haven’t figured that out, considering I have an entire blog category devoted to them.

Kettelbell workouts are my jam.

Henry found this old video on his phone and sent it to me last night. It must be from about a year ago, when Chooch was three. I’m a little pissed that I never saw it until now! Thanks, Henry.

Anyway, this is Chooch impersonating the mechanical Jason Voorhees at the Halloween store.