Quick! The kid isn't home - let's DO this!!!

Rissa was going to be gone for three whole nights.  David and I begin sharing the the waggling eyebrow looks, the suggestive head tilts, the...

"YOU GUYS!  I CAN TOTALLY SEE YOU DOING THAT!!!!"

"What?  Doing what?!?"

Rissa rolls her eyes.  But then gives us the I'm watching you look.

Surreptitiously now, I am trying to communicate with David all the places we will have sex during our childless days:  All the kitchen counters, the living room sofa, ottoman, possibly the Laz-y-Boy, the family room sofa, the bed in our room, the blanket box in our room, against the wall in our room, the bathroom floor...

David whispers in my ear, "You can be as loud as you want."  I blush.  Rissa dramatically points to her eyes and then us.

Noisy sex - the thing you can't have when there's another person in your home.  Though you may experience an earth-shattering orgasm that makes you want to scream, possibly yodel, joyously into the abyss - you just don't.  When Rissa was little it was because the last thing I wanted was for our toddler to come into our room and holler, "DADDY YOU'RE SQUISHING MUMMY!!!"  Now that she's a teenager, and remembering myself as a teenager,  I basically don't want her to vomit when she thinks of what could be instigating the sounds from our bedroom.

We are going to have three nights.  And by nights, I really mean three late afternoons, evenings and nights of sex.  I'm hyrdating, stretching, epiladying.. I am ready... Let's DO this!!!  David comes home from work.  His laptop bag is flung from his shoulder, he struts into the kitchen...

I'm on the sofa in the family room.  My entire body is disappointment, I have a hot water bottle across my abdomen.  "Batten down the hatches...thar she blows..."

"No.  Really?"  He sits on the arm of the sofa.   He's thinking now, I can practically see the cogs turning in his brain.  "Yeah... Yeah... we should have known this.  You've been craving chocolate and pretty frisky..."

My shoulders slump.  "But we have three days!!!  We were going to have sex everywhere!!!"  I swallow my ibuprofen.

He sits beside me and drops a light kiss on my lips.  He smooths the hair off my face.  "I guess," he whispers, kissing me again, but not so lightly this time.  "I guess we're just going to have to get creative." His eyes meet mine and the bottom drops out of my stomach.

"Creative?" I gasp.  (After almost 19 years of sex with this man, he still makes me gasp.)

"VERY creative."  He cracks his knuckles, waggling his eyebrows.

I snort.  He kisses me again.

"Dinner now or later?" he asks.

"Later."

Welcome home my lovelies!

It took 15 years, but I have finally done it!  I have replenished the shoe cache that I had before Rissa was born.  Pre-Rissa I had a... I'm not going to call it a shoe fetish, 'cause it wasn't like I was humping them or anything...  instead I'll call it a shoe... fascination.

I had a good 75 pairs of shoes.  Every colour in the ROYGBIV spectrum, kitten heels, wedges, stillettos, boots, leather, suede, floral... I was a happily-shod girl.  Then, when I was dumb enough to gain 50 lbs while pregnant, my feet, the actual ligaments in my feet loosened and then SPREAD.  (Seriously, DON'T gain 50  lbs when you're pregnant - not even if your midwife says 'Some women need 15 lbs to grow a healthy baby and some women need 60." She is wrong - you don't need that much weight to grow a healthy baby - it will take you four years to lose it.)  All my lovely shoes no longer fit me.  There was no possible way that I could regain what was now lost to me.  After-pregnancy, I had to buy shoes at least a 1/2 size too large or specialty shoes in a D width.  The cost was going to be astronomical.  It could not be warranted. 

But now, after a decade and a half of shopping only when items were on sale, of scouring the Value Villages and thrift stores, I am finally back to where I have the perfect pair of shoes to go with those pants, or that skirt, or that dress.  I have the knee-high boots that make David salivate.  I have comfortable sneakers that fit the width of my post-pregnancy dew beaters.

These shoes will not bring about world peace, they will not help educate my daughter, they will not support my spirituality.  My plum, heeled Mary Janes have no greater purpose than making me happy when I see them and perhaps giving my stems a little shape.  I'm not saying it's the best $11.99 I've ever spent... but comes pretty close.   

Blackmailed into Good Health

WARNING: I USE BAD WORDS IN THIS POST

Fuck peri-menopause. FUCK IT!!!  I do my best, I really do, I try to find the silver fucking lining to pretty much everything, but COME ON!!!

I am sitting here drenched as I type.  Because why?  Because I had fucking Chinese food!  Apparently MSG can trigger hot flashes.  The same way that too much salt can trigger hot flashes. The same way that caffeine can trigger hot flashes.  The same way that alcohol can trigger hot flashes.

I have become a tea-fucking-totaler, a crunchy granola enthusiast, a purveyor of vegetables, not out of choice, not because it's the healthful thing to do, but rather because if I don't - IF I DON'T - I will spontaneously combust... sometimes several times in a night.  I feel like Fawkes, the fucking Phoenix!

"Just kill me," I beg Rissa and David

"Oh love, are you hot?" asks David.

"Am I hot?  AM I HOT?!?  Feel beneath my breasts!"  I lift up my tank top, exposing my unencumbered tatas.   "You could deep fry tempura under here!!!"

Rissa averts her gaze.  "Whoa!!  Boobs!!  Maternal boobs!!"

I do my best not to burst into tears.  I would punch at the air, but the ineffectual movement would just make me hotter.

"Would you like a cool drink?"

"I would love an ice-cold chocolate fucking martini, but I can't have one because if I do, my insides will turn molten and I will DIE!!!"

"How about an ice pack?" David suggests helpfully.

An ice pack!!!  Oh sweet Jesus, we have ice packs!!!  I stagger down the stairs to the deep freeze, David's voice calls out behind me "I would have gotten them for you love..."

An angels' chorus greets me as I open the deep freeze - I weep at the beauty I find therein.

I come back upstairs looking like the beginnings of a bad BDSM scene.  I have small packs around my ankles and wrists with a larger one strapped around my neck.  I place myself in front of the oscillating fan to dry off my hot flash sweat.

"Better?" asks David.

"I don't have adequate words.  I want to start a charity that will give these to my sisters throughout the world.  SISTERS!!! SISTERS I WILL HELP YOU ALL!!!"

David and Rissa exchange a look.  "It's possible she might be hallucinating right now."