1. individual who unfathomably enjoys rising early in the day

2. individual known for frustratingly sunny behavior and generally cheerful comportment at ungodly hours

3. NOT KATE

How do you people do this, you people with outside-the-home jobs and children other than mine? I mean, it wasn’t like I was sleeping all that late before Aura started kindergarten last week, but I sure wasn’t rolling out of bed at 6:30 a.m. and neither was my kid, since I raised her right and night-owlish like her mom and also I saved on breakfast costs that way, because “early lunch!” was invented for a reason, HEY-O.

The main issue with this early-rising thing? Going to bed at a decent enough hour to get up at the necessary, godawful time. Sure, I realize we’ve only been on this new schedule for a week, but that week of trying is making me irritable and possibly giving me moles, because I am 70% sure that this brown spot of pigmentation on my right cheekbone was not there when I was rising at a more genial hour. Next week, I’m running this by my dermatologist, who rather conveniently or inconveniently has office space next to a psychiatry practice.

Fun fact! When you’re lying in my bed, desperate to fall asleep, the clock at 10:45 p.m.

looks exactly like the clock at 11:31 p.m.

AND the clock at 12:19 a.m.!

I read. I adjust pillows. I try to relax, but still, all I can think of is “Holy hell, it’s only 10:45 and if I stare hard enough I swear there’s light sneaking under the shade from the house across the street where my 85-year-old neighbors are still awake and jolly and not in bed yet THOSE JOLLY ELDERLY BUGGERS.”

Anyway, I am assuming this will get better. Until then, I have made a silent announcement to the rest of the parents at kindergarten drop-off that pre-8:30 a.m. showers and personal hygiene in general are no longer a Sure Thing. As you can tell, I am already the popular mom.

P.S. In other news, Aura loves kindergarten. There are centers and lotsofbooks and mini-apple-pie-making. In fact, she has announced that kindergarten is so cool that it should be called “coolergarten.”

P.P.S. Around 12:31 a.m. last night, I decided that coolergarten is highly marketable. I’m registered-trademarking that sucker. Laugh now, but when you all find yourselves in Barnes & Noble purchasing book after book in the Coolergarten™ Guides to Fun Learning series, YOU’LL REMEMBER.

P.P.P.S. Or maybe it should be Coolergarten™ Fun Guides to Learning. Crap, this is tricky, you guys.

All day Friday, flushed with anticipation, I pore over the options, the paper menus fanned out on the kitchen counter like a particularly spectacular and fattening floral arrangement, the tendrils of notions like pizza and sushi and curry giving off a far better scent that any roses Adam could bring home but chooses not to because he is VERY BUSY carrying home armfuls of lemongrass for obscenely complicated soup recipes.

Regardless, Friday nights are mine. And I take my preparation to heart. To that end, I thought I would share with you some of my favorite local menus. Namely, the items we won’t be getting for take-out tonight.

1.

I picture the job listing going something like this:

Help Wanted: Chef.

Required: Experience in busy kitchen, demonstrated knowledge of complicated recipes, willingness to be made into sauce.

2.

Either this restaurant’s owner has been vastly overestimating the aphrodisiac effect of lettuce or I have been vastly underestimating it. (Cue a collective moan from the writers of the straight-to-DVD Sex and the City 3. “People! PEOPLE!” screams the lead writer. “Calm down! Just do a simple find-and-replace with little blue pill and raspberry vinaigrette!”)

3.

And if lettuce doesn’t take the erotica industry by storm, our local sushi place has other ideas. I tried calling the restaurant to ask them if the whole “soybean sheet” was a little, you know, wink-wink/nudge-nudge to hanky-panky, but Adam threw himself bodily over the phone. So.

4.

Meat: You’re looking fine today, Peanut Sauce.

Peanut Sauce: Why, thank you, Meat. I was just thinking how tender you yourself looked this evening.

Cucumber Salad: And your skewer, Meat! So flattering!

Meat: You two are too kind.

5.

I mean, yes, it was kind of a Big Deal when our fair state’s capital city forbade smoking in restaurants. But I had no idea it was a sandwich-naming kind of Big Deal. A kind-of-gross-sounding-sandwich-naming Big Deal, at that.

6.

I can’t be the only one who thinks giving any menu item a name beginning with “vag” is questionable. Or maybe I am. All I’m saying here is that any man foolhardy enough to eats “loads of pepperoni, sausage, ham, and beef” is probably not getting very close to a vaganzza anytime soon, if you catch my drift. This ain’t no Desire salad, you know.

7.

Perhaps mysterious is just one of those words that doesn’t translate well. Because if you’re thinking what I’m thinking, this chicken is actually going to taste precisely like baby corn, peppers, and vegetables in spicy sauce.

8.

Annnnd sometimes the perfect ending to a blog post just falls into your lap. Or in this case, your mailbox.

God bless those delivery drivers, every single piddle-scented one of them.

See, Aura, my mother, and I took this little vacation up to New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where the famed Story Land amusement park is located. (Cue cries of agony echoing across the blogosphere: “WHY, OH, WHY CAN’T IT BE I WHO GETS TO DRIVE FOR HOURS TO A NURSERY-RHYME-THEMED AMUSEMENT PARK WHERE THE MAIN ATTRACTION IS RUB A DUB DUB? WHYYYYY?”) And it was all fine and good right up until the morning after we arrived. It was about then that Aura began to feel a little warm and act a bit grumpy and scowl a tad much at my pep-rally-like exclamations of “CHIN UP!’ and “THESE PASSES ARE ALREADY PAID FOR! GRIN AND BEAR IT!”

Happily, the Power of Children’s Motrin should never be underestimated and we did spend a few hours in the park before calling it quits. To soothe any jealousy over the fact that we got to wait 45 minutes in line to drive cars around Humpty Dumpty’s Track for 30 seconds and you didn’t, I present The Photos. See if you can spot the kid with the eventually ebbing-and-flowing 103-degree body temperature.

Caption suggestion: [George, deep in thought] My, this grimacing child is warm. Or is it me? My lower right cheek does feel rather flush. God it’s hot here. So hot. Hothothot. In fact, it’s just like Africa, the place from which I was abducted for the sole purpose of starting a questionably ethical children’s literature series.

Explanation caption: The climbable, sit-in-able structure for “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” I think Aura was supposed to be one of the blackbirds baked in the pie. She was pleased with this assessment, as those delirious with fever so often are.

By that evening, all bets were off. There was a rather loud mewling scene at the Dairy Queen right around the time the Power of Children’s Motrin proved itself overestimated and the rest of the night was pretty bad, too. Poor Aura tossed and turned next to me from 8:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m., at which point she announced she was going to vomit. Since we were staying in a quaint little B&B (there was a sampler embroidered with a sheep and the words “Thank Ewe for Not Smoking!” ), I had approximately two seconds to decide whether to have her throw up on the pillow or the questionably expensive quilt on the bed. I went with the pillow at the last millisecond, though since the quilt was all patchworky and rustic and godawful ugly, I think a little vomit would have improved matters. The lady who owned the B&B did not find this observation amusing when I shared it the next morning, when two hours of sleep made it seem like an entirely appropriate thing to share. I got her back, though, because when we left early and she still made us pay for the remaining nights, I wrote THANK EWE in huge letters next to my signature on the credit card receipt.

One three-hour drive home, one wholly unsatisfying pediatrician’s appointment (the doctor got all narrow-eyed when he told me it wasn’t strep and I tried haggling for antibiotics anyway; Hippocratic Oath, my ass), and a few days later, Aura was fine. Fit as a fiddle. Happy as a clam. Shooting errant wasps with a water weapon that looks a little like bad parenting.

I used to make fun of the idea of a staycation. OH, HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN.

So! Let’s talk about that last blog post, shall we? The one in which I basically follow the tried-and-true Make Fun of Adam tradition, but this time tie it to how his daughter knows him so well that she tells her teacher that Daddy likes to “cook cocktails”?

Yeah, that one.

I’m not 100% sure of how it happened, but through what must have been an illustrious combination of generous retweets and Facebook and a bored mid-week blog audience, the post went kind of…viral. Or at least viral by andthenkate.com’s eensy weensy traffic standards.

Evidently, when your humor blog’s readership spikes, so do the number of instances where people’s sense of humor fails. I got some nasty comments accusing me of being a hypocrite and shameful and cruel to the teacher. I even got an overwhelmingly accusatory e-mail from someone I know and liked, who completely misinterpreted an old post.

And I am flabbergasted. How was I cruel? The only person who could possibly cry “Cruelty!” is Adam, and he knows by now what to expect, then makes himself, you know, a cocktail. As for the teacher, we loved her. She was patient, kind, and everything a preschool teacher should be. We feel fortunate that Aura had the opportunity to be in her classroom.

Sorry in advance to all my regular, cognizant-and-fond-of-humor readers, but indulge me this brief list of reminders:

1. This is a HUMOR BLOG. Basically, its sole purpose is to entertain and give me an opportunity to write typically ridiculous, heavily exaggerated posts.

2. Given that this is a HUMOR BLOG, I employ satire and sarcasm and probably many other literary vehicles beginning with sa- that currently elude my flabbergasted mind. When I make fun of myself, which is frequently, I don’t need much embellishment (sigh). But if I appear to be making fun of or criticizing others, you can bet there’s a whole lot of exaggeration and not a whole lot of truth there. (SEE: References to leprechauns, fairies, unicorns, aestheticians, other dancers in a recital, Dora the Explorer, several scientists, and humans in general.)

3. I’m kind of angry to have to even write this on my HUMOR BLOG. If I felt comfortable sharing the exact details behind the final straw that led to this post, I would. But I’m just too angry. Too respectful of people in my life. Also, the truth just isn’t that…funny.  And as we all know, this is a:

HUMOR BLOG

(Back to regularly scheduled/kind-of-regularly-scheduled/eh-who-are-we-kidding-scheduled programming soon. Promise. Mwah.)

</rant>

Failed Idea #1: The We-Discriminate-Against-the Vertically-Challenged Photo Booth

When you feed three hard-earned dollars into a photo booth at Bouncy Castle Kingdom,  you really do think that the camera will catch your daughter and her two equally diminutive friends posing. You believe, even. But no. The booth is apparently only for those 4’5″ and above. I’d write to the manufacturer to complain about the lack of proper warning signage, but when I looked for an address on the back of the machine all I could find was a label that said HAHAHA SUCKER I EAT PEOPLE AS GULLIBLE AS YOU FOR BREAKFAST.

Failed Idea #2: Mulch. A Big Pile of It.

You know that saying A picture is worth a thousand words? Well, in this case, I’m thinking I saved myself about 18 words. They go something like this: HELP HELP SAVE ME I’M STARTING TO ACT SUBURBAN KEEP ME AWAY FROM MINIVANS AND HYBRID DOG BREEDS.

Failed Idea #3: Bubble Guns and the Rage They Inspire

Oh, and by “rage,” I mean mine, not hers. She was fine with the fact that the bubble solution in the Fun Bubbles Gun! just pours onto the freshly hosed-down deck with abandon. And onto my shorts, the only pair that fit properly at the moment. And onto my soul, which may very well never be redeemed by a higher power because I said about five-and-a-half especially bad words in front of an impressionable child when the bubbles floated over to the grill and popped on the burgers. Turns out ketchup CANNOT cure all ills, after all. Effin’ ketchup.

—————————————-

So, you see. I am completely and devastatingly out of viable fodder. Will you help? Please? Ask questions and I shall answer! Suggest a topic and I will try to address it! IT WILL BE SO EXCITING. OR SOMETHING.

Those who participate might even get a little envelope of mulch sent to them. Or a three-year-old. No promises, though.